I returned to school and my classmates welcomed me back. Laughing, they said, “You’re really skinny,” and “God, you look like a thug!” but I was unable to laugh with them. Kaori was watching me from a distance. Our eyes met and she smiled, but I could see the fear in her face.
As always, though, she was constantly at my side. We talked together, and in the evenings we’d go for walks, but I never touched her and she never touched me. I could see the horror in her eyes when she looked at me. Then I’d tell myself that I’d imagined it, but it was definitely there. I would stare at my face in the mirror, not knowing what to do.
One day when it was raining heavily Kaori’s practice was cancelled and we walked home from school together. She was the same as ever, smiling and chattering about her club and her friends. Suddenly I couldn’t stand it any longer, and took her hand. Then I moved my face close to hers and kissed her. She let me do it, but her expression was tense.
“I’m nervous because it’s been such a long time,” she said with a laugh, but gradually she spoke less and less.
When I told her that I’d like her to come to my room, she nodded. That night she slipped in softly. Sometime the rain had stopped and a bright moonlight was peeping through a gap in the curtains. She was wearing a pair of white cotton pajamas. I touched her soft skin, gently started to put my arms around her, but she was trembling faintly. Again she said she was nervous because it had been a while, but when I undid her buttons and embraced her I could feel the goosebumps on her back. Her body froze, even as she told me everything was fine. When I realized that she was simply trying to endure it, I stopped.
“Kaori …”
“No, it’s not like that. I wonder what’s wrong, it’s odd.”
She wrapped her arms around my neck, but her goosebumps became even more noticeable.
“Kaori?”
“No, it’s not what you’re thinking. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not that at all.”
I tried to hide how upset I was, but I didn’t succeed.
“Maybe, it’s because I look like …?” My voice shook. Her body was tense.
“No. You’re not him.”
“He didn’t just look at you, did he?” I asked quietly.
She flinched slightly.
“Kaori?”
“It wasn’t sex, but he touched me, licked me, I don’t know how many times.”
She started to weep. What she didn’t say was that when I approached her with lust in my eyes, I was the spitting image of my father.
“So … us. It’s all over?” I said, half to myself, my throat tight. “I get the feeling I’m gradually going to look more and more like him. I saw some photos the other day. It happened to all my brothers and sisters. I guess I’m no exception. Kaori, from now on are you going to look at me like you looked at him? Are you going to see him inside me? In this horrible face?”
Suddenly she kissed me and tried to throw me down on the bed.
“No,” she repeated. “It’s all right. You’re completely different.”
But it was obvious that she was gritting her teeth and forcing herself to do it—or rather, that she was flustered by the change in herself, by her own body’s instinctive rejection of me.
“So that means that you can’t love me anymore? This me who’s starting to look like him?”
Tears were streaming down her face.
“It’s okay. You don’t have to. It just means I’m no good for you, right? I’m my father’s son, after all. What … what a fucking mess.”
After that I went quietly insane.
I TRIED TO keep away from Kaori but I couldn’t. So I tried to get close to her instead. I knew that I mustn’t touch her, but I couldn’t help myself. If just once I could have sex with her the way we used to, I thought, everything would go back to the way it was. I went to her room and climbed into her bed as gently as possible, but though she whispered that it was all right, her body tensed, she closed her eyes tightly and tears rolled down her cheeks. No matter how tenderly I held her, her reaction made me feel like my father, who had violated her. For me, the situation was a form of hell.
In an old photo album I found some pictures of my brothers and sisters. As they approached adolescence, every single one of them started to resemble him. His blood ran strong in our veins. My third brother looked a bit different, but you could tell at a glance they were all my father’s children. I told Kaori that we should spend some time apart. Things were a bit strange at the moment, I said, but it’s only temporary. Time heals all wounds, I said. I couldn’t help noticing, however, that the face I saw in the mirror was becoming more and more like his, as though I’d been cursed.
I stopped going to school. I spent most of my days in bed. I dreamed my father lay naked beside me, and I’d wake pummeling his scrawny body. Kaori came to my room and informed me that she was pregnant. I was in a panic, but she was even worse. She went in secret to a doctor, who told her that it was a false alarm. Despite that, she still insisted she was, and that this meant we could be together. She went back to the clinic and got the same result. I tried to hold her but her body went rigid with fright. Even as she told me she loved me, she was trying to get away. Then she just wept silently.
Kaori started complaining of headaches and skipping school, and in the end they took her to hospital. Seeing her condition, I told her once more that we’re better off apart. We were about to finish junior high, and it was decided that when she started senior high she would leave the estate. The doctor who was treating her had advised a change of scene. That was the only thing that could save her.
There’s not much to say about my high school life. I passed among the new students, with all their hopes and fears, like a dried-up insect. I sat vacant at my desk in a corner of the classroom, and the teachers often scolded me. My classmates were kind enough to worry about me, but I asked them seriously why they had such stupid faces. And when the girl at the next desk spoke to me, I demanded if she liked sex. I think I went as far as saying that even though she looked so prim and proper, I bet she loved masturbating and fucking. I couldn’t stay at school, so I started staying in bed again, just trying to get through one day at a time. From the moment I woke until I went to sleep at night, I just tried to survive without sinking into a deep depression, simply enduring one day after another. Everything seemed worthless and irritating. I played video games for hours, and when I got bored I threw them across the room and broke them. I read hundreds of comic books, then flung them aside. I listened to music, took sleeping pills, then repeated the cycle. The air was thick and heavy, pressing down on me. When one day finished, I knew that tomorrow I would have to face another one. My future was a daunting, unbroken succession of days as far as I could see. From time to time I’d get a letter from Kaori describing her life, but it was usually a week or so before I could open it, and when I finally did I could only manage a brief reply.
One day when I was seventeen or eighteen I went to see her. I showered for the first time in ages, changed my clothes and left the house. The unfamiliar sunshine was too bright, so I pulled my cap down tightly over my eyes. I thought that everyone I met was looking at me, did my best to control the fierce beating of my heart. I went to a hairdresser and asked for a trim, I didn’t care what style. The hairdresser chattered away, but I couldn’t get myself together enough to answer properly. The guy was kind, though, and eventually I stuttered out a few suitable remarks.
I left the salon, walking deliberately. For some reason I’d got into the habit of treading carefully. A woman in red was walking along the street perpendicular to mine on the other side of a high fence, moving smoothly past the black palings. I watched absently as the black overlaid the red, as the red was hidden by a series of black stripes, until finally we met at the corner. She was quite a bit older than me, but I thought she was beautiful, so I stopped. She passed by quickly, giving me a funny look. She didn’t seem suspicious, but I guess I must have looked pretty strange. I too
k a deep breath and made my way cautiously forward once more.
Kaori’s school was in Nakamura in Nagoya. I waited for her in a small park a short distance from the gate. She’d been set up in an apartment on her own, and she’d have to pass this way to get home. I remember vividly how beautiful she was then. She was walking with three boys and two girls, laughing at something one of them had said. She screwed up her eyes and pushed the girl beside her playfully on the arm. Her expression held no shadow of the troubles of a few years earlier. She was free of us. I stood dazed, looking at her loveliness and glow. She was beyond my reach. Once we had been able to be together and happy, but it was like she had entered my life as some kind of mistake, as a brief fantasy. The loss of this blissful hallucination, combined with the confusion of being a teenager, rooted me to the spot.
“Fumihiro!”
I had intended to spy on her in secret, but I’d forgotten to make my escape and she’d spotted me. I have no recollection of what happened to her friends. I simply looked at Kaori as she approached. She was gorgeous. Far too good for someone like me.
“I haven’t seen you for ages,” she said with a smile, seeming untroubled by my sinister ambush.
“Yeah. I was in the area.”
“I’m glad.”
She started walking. I realized that I was walking with her.
“How’s school?” I think she asked.
If I swallow my pride and admit honestly the ugliness that passed through my mind, I was thinking about attacking her. About touching the most beautiful, most precious girl in the world once more. After that, I thought, I would kill myself. That would be the end of my miserable life. If I could hold Kaori in my arms one more time, I didn’t give a damn what happened to everything else. I opened my mouth.
“It’s just before exams, so there are no classes.”
I had no idea what I was saying.
“Everyone at your school must be really brainy,” she said.
“No, there are some weirdos too.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. It’s fun. How about yours?”
“I like it.”
As I walked, I said the first things that came into my head.
“So you don’t need to worry about me, or the old place, or anything.”
She was silent.
“It can’t be helped. Just forget all about my father. You’ll be fine. You can make a fresh start. First love often doesn’t work out. We’re like brother and sister.”
She started to speak. I didn’t think I wanted to hear it. I also suspected that my previous speech had been a waste of breath.
“Can I ask you something?” she asked nervously.
“What?”
“Your father, has he come back?”
“No.”
“I thought maybe you …”
It’s odd, but it was the first time in months that I’d remembered that I’d killed him. I imagined telling her. I killed him to protect you, so there’s no reason for us to be apart. Even if you don’t like me, even if I disgust you, you should be always by my side, because Father’s death means we’ll always be joined. Because you’re everything to me. Because if you’re not going to be mine, I could drag you down here with me. Into my world, where we’re both stained by that dark secret.
“I’m not brave enough for that,” I said, laughing.
I still hardly knew what I was saying.
“This is hard to talk about, but I can tell you because you won’t tell anyone else.”
I lowered my voice.
“My father’s mixed up with a whole bunch of people, yakuza and some really scary foreigners. So they’re saying he might have been murdered by them.”
The sunlight was dazzling.
“That’s why they can’t go public with it. You’d better forget about it. It sounds like my brothers are handling it on the quiet.”
This was just like my clowning around to hide my depression before I met her. I thought she looked slightly relieved. Still acting casually, I told her I had to catch a train and made my farewells. My malice hadn’t grown so bad that I could hurt Kaori. The sun was slowly sinking, shooting powerful beams between the apartment buildings. I could hear the sounds of insects, and a faint breeze brushed indifferently against my cheek. I thought that something important in my life had ended. People would probably tell me that I still had a lot to look forward to. Maybe some would even say that killing my father had been a form of self-defense, that I had no choice. But my youthful heart, which had experienced great joy and the torments of hell, couldn’t untangle those events and order them neatly. They had settled inside me, and as I grew old they would warp me even more. As long as I lived, I would continue to harm everyone who was important to me. I felt, however, that I was unnaturally calm. My mind was completely detached from my body. I was aware of the movement of my feet as I walked, and I spoke out loud on purpose. I just said something, I thought to myself. I wondered how people around me would react if I raised my voice and shouted.
ON THE SCREEN Kaori was moving. The projector, the latest model, was showing images of the recording the detective had handed me. It had been taken at night, but was very clear. She was beautiful. She was looking down as she opened the door of a convenience store, holding her plastic bag of purchases and her purse in her left hand and putting the receipt away with her right. I smiled, thinking how like her it was to keep her receipts tidy.
I rewound I don’t know how many times to see what she’d bought, freezing the frame and zooming in. In the white bag I could see a pack of Morinaga 100% apple juice. A small brown box might have been chocolate. A packet that looked like supplements, I couldn’t tell what kind. Her black hair grew to her shoulders, and under a white half coat I could see a cream sweater and a dark skirt. She climbed into a blue Stepwagon, a courtesy car for the women at the club. The driver was a young man, and the other women in the vehicle were about the same age as Kaori. The vehicle backed up a bit and then turned out of the parking lot. At that moment her profile was visible through the window, head down. The car drove off and the recording ended.
I lit a cigarette and played it again. Kaori opened the door of the shop, put the receipt in her purse. My heart rate quickened. Above her sweater, the skin around her throat was pale. Since she was on her way home from work, she was still heavily made up. I watched it again, lit another cigarette, watched it once more. Without my noticing it, the piano tune flowing over the stereo had finished.
MY LIFE SINCE I separated from Kaori had passed uneventfully. I dropped out of high school, took the university entrance exam and went to a college in Tohoku. Perhaps I realized that I could never get on with my life unless I left the estate. Every day I continued to wound the people I met and to harm myself. When I dated girls, Kaori’s shadow was simply overpowering. Towards my friends, too, I couldn’t keep up the pretence for long. Everything was distorted—those past events, which I had made no effort to come to terms with, and my existence since then. I was trapped in my memories of the time I spent with Kaori. After that my life passed as a series of meaningless images. No matter how much I tried to like other women, I just couldn’t do it. Twice I made halfhearted suicide attempts. On the third time, when I climbed to the roof of my condo, I realized that I wanted to see her one last time. I knew that Yoshigaki, one of the servants Kaori had been on fairly good terms with, kept in touch with her from time to time. I got her to email me a photo of Kaori at the women’s university she was attending in Tokyo. She was lovely. I made up my mind to become a statistic, one of the thirty thousand suicides in Japan each year. But then I heard from Yoshigaki that Kaori was having trouble with her boyfriend, and my feelings became confused. It was actually a common enough problem—he was two-timing her. My heart was empty enough to be relieved that she had found a new lover. Then when I heard that she’d finally been dumped, I headed for Tokyo, my mind all mixed up.
I hired a private eye out of the phone book and got him to approa
ch the guy who broke up with Kaori. He succeeded in getting friendly with him and found out what sort of person he was—one of those guys you find everywhere, who seduce women and then treat them like dirt. I met him several times, posing as the detective’s friend. He was a coward at heart, but that made no difference to me. I set fire to his apartment. I can clearly remember how quiet it was when I lit the match. He wasn’t killed, but suffered burns to the chest. When I heard that he’d quit university I left Tokyo. It wasn’t revenge. I simply wanted to set him on fire. Air, that was the word that came to mind. I felt as little emotion as air. And maybe I thought I was dead already. I went back up on the roof of my building, but then realized I could jump any time I wanted, it didn’t have to be then. After I graduated my eldest brother contacted me about finding a job. I ignored him and stayed in my apartment in Tohoku. Occasionally I’d pick up a hooker, get her to put on a white dress and have sex with her. Lust was depressing, but so was its release. Father had intended me to be a cancer, and I’d ended up this melancholy creature who couldn’t make anyone happy.
Several years went by, and finally I started thinking about becoming a different person, not so much to start a new life as to make my old self disappear. To extinguish myself, to vanish, to become a bystander in life. The messages I received at infrequent intervals from Yoshigaki told me that Kaori’s life wasn’t going all that smoothly either. Idly I imagined myself as the air that hung around her.
Everyone plays the lead role in their own life. The world progresses through gathering all these leads, through the jumble of different ideas and values. But I planned to drop out of my own play, to expunge myself, to drift into the cracks between the actors who make the world go round. When stagecraft or dramatic tricks were required, I wanted to work in the background, quietly and unobtrusively. I wondered if there were others besides me who had disappeared while they were still alive. Somewhere there must be, I thought vaguely.