“But we don’t get any friendlier with him than that.
“The priest at this shrine is a relative of Nobu’s, but whenever we have business with him we just smile back and forth—we never have meals, or go out together. It’s extremely rare for Chii and I to really grow close to someone. People are afraid of us, because we have a different sort of smell. And people scare us, too. But we’re living our lives, just like everyone. We live in this place. Our lives may be warped, but we live them all the same. One day to the next.”
“I know,” I said. “And I’m sure that someday Nakajima will realize that, too. That you’re not just a part of his past. He was desperate to see you, even though it hurt him, even though it made him sick just thinking about coming here—but he had to find a way, right? That’s how badly he wanted to see you. And he’ll realize that if he feels that way, it’s okay, he can come. I think he’ll come visit more often now. Now that he’s done it once, he’ll be okay. You’ll see more of Nakajima. All the time, again and again.”
Mino nodded without speaking.
Then he said, “I couldn’t say it well earlier when you showed me the pictures, but … thank you. Thanks for painting us. Thanks so much for seeing, the first time you met us, that even though we’re like ghosts, the two of us, even though we’re not supposed to exist, we are alive.”
I had seen Mino and Chii’s mother on TV ages ago. She looked just like them.
She was notorious. People knew her as a terrible mother. She had joined a group that had done horrible things, and she had taken her children with her.
I don’t remember them having a father. They had been born out of wedlock. Maybe their mother didn’t know who the father was. The news was full of all kinds of scandalous reports about her back then. And if Mino and Chii’s mother was presented as an incarnation of evil, Nakajima’s mother was the incarnation of everything good.
Things are never that simple, and I don’t see why it had to be reported that way.
I must have been in elementary school at the time.
If Nakajima had shown me a photograph of his mother instead of that wire rack, I’m sure I would have recognized her immediately. He probably knew that, and so he didn’t.
Nakajima’s mother was always pleading.
“Please return my son to me! I know he’s alive. I’m his mother, I can tell!”
Every chance she had, she would be on TV, in magazines, on the radio, at rallies. She was always there, telling the same story. Telling people about the day her son was kidnapped.
Nakajima was a very bright child—too bright, in fact. He was a little different from other children. And so he would go and spend time at a special school. The school had a summer camp in Izu, and he had been going there, and then one evening he didn’t come back. Until then, his mother explained, again and again, their family had been perfectly happy, and there was nothing at all unusual in their lives, nothing that wasn’t as it should be.
Not long after that, the group began turning up in the news. It wasn’t quite a religion: their goal was to live in accordance with certain principles, and create a new, ideal humanity. Naturally there was a sort of leader, and people gathered to listen to him preach, and then they established a commune deep in the mountains that was very nearly self-sufficient. That’s the kind of group it was.
Reports about this organization circulated so widely that even someone like me, who never watched the news, knew its name, if little else. That’s how notorious it was. After the kidnappings came to light, the group may have disbanded, or maybe it still lives on secretly in some form.
The truth is that in this world, things like that happen all the time. I heard all sorts of wild tales from all kinds of customers at my mom’s club. Many were almost beyond belief; many had to do with what was, in essence, kidnapping.
Of course, on some level I’m hardly one to be held up as a paragon of normalcy. After all, before I turned ten, I started going to my mom’s club and doing some of the stuff a hostess does, so I was raised in a pretty unconventional way. Sure, I was protected by my mom and dad, since their influence kept customers from trying anything funny with me, but if I’d wanted to explore different avenues, my environment would have made anything possible. No matter how high-class you aspire to be, in the entertainment business you’re always trying to create a space where people can unload their irritations and frustrations, and I’m sure I must have been influenced by that in some ways. That shadowy something is here inside me, just a little. The whiff of something purple in the night, the sweet taste of darkness … it’s rubbed off on me, on my body. Things were relatively okay at my mom’s club because her customers weren’t too bad, but even so I know just how slimy people can be, and how people like that are during the daytime. They don’t get slimy at night because they’re drunk, they get slimy because they’re already slimy to begin with.
I remembered hearing people chatting at the club about that incident, and watching reports on the TV there. Only it had gotten all mixed up in my mind with other similar stories, and I couldn’t pick out any episodes in my memory that related specifically to Nakajima.
Nakajima’s mother never, ever gave up. She would go on every TV show and make herself available to every magazine, doing missing-person shows and having psychics look for her son, doing news programs, special features … it’s not an exaggeration to say that there was never a day when you didn’t see her somewhere. She went on putting herself out there on a regular basis, refusing to let people forget.
More than the event itself, she was what made the most powerful impression. She always spoke extremely calmly, only said what she was certain of, hardly ever shed a tear, and always looked straight ahead.
I could tell that until she found her son, nothing she ate would ever taste good, when she slept her dreams would always be nightmares, never light and easy, and no scenery would ever move her—she would just keep staring ahead into the distance, at her absent son. She would go on trying to connect.
Her endurance was astonishing. It was like she was reeling in a tiny, tiny thread, slender as a cobweb, which only occasionally caught the light, and she would never miss it when it did—that’s how focused she was. It was love, and willpower. You could see it in her expression, as if it were painted there. She had this look on her face that told you all she could do was keep gazing at that one point, holding on to her faith, because if she ever so much as wondered if her son might be dead, then he really would die. Her face could have been the model for every mother in this world, or the face of a bodhisattva.
Then, finally, they found Nakajima. All the energy his mother had devoted to the search, distributing flyers all across the country, putting up photographs, going on TV until she was completely worn out—it had paid off.
A boy who had escaped from the group was picked up in a village at the foothills of a mountain. Someone who had seen Nakajima’s mother on TV wondered if maybe this might be her son, and called the police.
It was such major news at the time, I can’t understand why I didn’t remember it, even just a little. I guess I never imagined it could have anything to do with my future.
Wow, that’s awful, how terrible, I wonder what I’d do if it were me? I must have entertained these thoughts for about a second, and then they vanished. After all, I had a mom and dad, and my life was just beginning. It’s amazing to realize how ignorant I was. And how innocent.
Things keep coming around and around in this world, it’s all crammed violently together, two parts of the same skin. But I didn’t realize that.
I doubt I’ll ever understand how the three of them feel, no matter how long I live.
And ironically, it’s that inability that puts them at ease.
So there’s actually a reason for someone like me to exist in this world. Even before I start thinking about stuff like that, whether there is or isn’t a reason, in some place that exists prior to such thoughts, an enormous wheel is spinning, and I’m caug
ht up inescapably in its motion.
I’m its slave, almost. I’m free to think what I like, but it’s all settled in advance.
Ever perceptive, Nakajima knew it as soon as he saw me that evening.
“Ah.”
He must have sensed the turmoil in my heart as I stepped through the door.
Because that’s what he said, the second I took my shoes off and looked up.
And then he tried to act like he didn’t know, going on with his cleaning.
Nakajima was extraordinarily finicky what it came to keeping things neat, and he cleaned the apartment so frequently it made me feel kind of guilty. When I came home, everything would seem weirdly sterile—even the edges of the books were aligned. I couldn’t help feeling that I’d drawn the winning number in this relationship. What’s more, once he had started cleaning, he seemed unable to stop. Maybe that’s what kept him going on this occasion, too. Either way, he went on quietly cleaning.
By then, I no longer felt like I could go on interacting with him the same way.
As long as it had remained a mystery, I could have dealt with it—no matter how enormous a mystery it became. Now that matters had gotten more specific, my imagination began supplying smells and textures.
There’s a huge difference between “Something really, really terrible happened to me once” and “There was a period in my life when I was kidnapped and brainwashed.”
Everything fell into place. The terror that physical contact inspired in him, his fear of seeing his friends from those days, his mother’s seemingly unreasonable concern for him, his ability to cut his mind off from his body when he studied—all the delicious uncertainty was gone now, and in its place was a dank, oppressive weight.
You know, I told myself, I’m not sure I can bear to hear the details—what his life there was actually like, why sex became so frightening to him. And maybe I’ll never get over that.
After a long time, I asked him, “Why did you say ‘Ah’ before?”
He stopped his cleaning, surprisingly, and looked at me.
And after that he was the same old Nakajima I knew and was crazy about, just as pathetic and as cool as always. The curly hair at the back of his neck, his slightly stooped posture, the way he went around the house so quietly—it was him, the same as ever. His palms, too, felt just as dry as they always had.
That set me at ease. We had a history here, together, in this apartment. That history was short, but it had nothing to do with his past.
It was so flimsy, a puff of air would send it flying, but it was real.
“I thought you’d figured something out,” Nakajima said honestly. “Something about my past, I mean.”
“How did you know?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s happened with lots of people before—I can see it in people’s eyes,” Nakajima said. “And I was always on pins and needles about that, wondering when you’d realize. Of course, part of me wanted you to find out.… Do I disgust you now? Do you want to break up?”
I took Nakajima’s hand in mine and pressed it so hard, so hard against my heart that I was probably about to break his bones.
“Don’t say that,” I said.
I used the sort of tone I might have used with a son.
And like a child Nakajima mumbled, “I’m sorry,” and we went back to our lives.
I cooked dinner, and Nakajima continued cleaning. We worked in silence, like people the night before a move. Like we were starting life over again. Or like we had been doing this for a century already. Setting all kinds of things aside, willing to go back to the first days, if that’s what it took, like Adam and Eve.
Nakajima’s past would always be there, so the foundation could crumble at any moment. That’s what happens, I realized, when people destroy other people.
We had finished eating when Nakajima spoke.
“Can we go see your mural?”
“If you want to. But I don’t know—it’s night. Wouldn’t it be better to go in the daytime, when you can see better?”
“I’ll go during the day, too, of course. I just thought we could go now, take a walk. I’m assuming it’s finished, right?”
I figured we could go to see it whenever, so I hadn’t actually told him it was done.
“All right, let’s go,” I said. “It’s still early enough that the guard will let us in if I tell him I forgot something. He knows me by now. There’s a street light near the wall, so I doubt it will be too dark to see anyway, but just in case we can take that giant flashlight.”
The scents of spring hung over the dark street; the stars seemed hazy.
As we walked, Nakajima started talking.
“I was going to a summer camp run by this school I was going to, and somehow I got lost, I ended up deep in the mountains, wandering along the highway, and these people picked me up in their car, and that was it, I’d been kidnapped. This was long before cell phones, of course.”
The story had begun.
The words kept coming, like water overflowing, refusing to stop.
He’s like a broken machine, I thought.
Walking on, talking on, his arms folded over his chest.
All I could do was nod.
“Can you imagine what it’s like to be kidnapped? Did it ever occur to you that you’d have to learn to like your kidnappers? Because that’s the only way you can survive.
“Do you understand what that means?
“First, they erased my memory. With hypnotism and drugs. And they made me believe that the place we were in wasn’t in Japan.
“I was a smart kid, so I knew how to resist the hypnotism. I had a vague memory of this technique I’d read about in a book, and I figured I’d try whatever I could, and somehow I managed to make it work.
“What you had to do was practice a kind of autosuggestion, you make yourself remember a given person whenever you see a particular object, and since I was in Izu I knew the ocean had to be somewhere nearby, so I hypnotized myself into remembering my mother whenever I saw the ocean or if I found myself standing on the shore. After that I just let them do what they wanted with me. It was scary, but in the end it worked.
“Several months later, when we went down to the beach one very cold night for meditation practice, I remembered my mom. It took a few days after that for me to recall that we were in Japan, and to think I might have been kidnapped. There were a number of families in the group, parents and children both, like Mino and Chii and their mother, and I had gotten so used to it being that way that I almost took it for granted. Their mother wasn’t living in the same room as them—the group had some ideological reason for that—but they put us together, and we all slept in a row. Holding hands, like the three strokes of the character for ‘river.’
“During the daytime, teachers in different fields would come and lead discussions and study groups and stuff. For kids and adults both.
“At first after I remembered I got so confused I thought I was going crazy, but I waited a few days without letting on about anything, and little by little I started analyzing the situation I was in. I came up with a hypothesis about what must have happened, the thing that seemed closest to the truth, and in the end I made up my mind to escape.
“It wouldn’t have been a surprise if I’d gone crazy then.
“I had to go wild inside myself, fighting to keep my sanity.
“People try instinctively to take the easy route, right? We shy away from pain.
“So I didn’t want to believe that the people I was living with then, day after day, were bad, and my mind would drift off on its own, trying to think that the things I had remembered were fake, that they were the lie. I hated the thought of leaving Mino and Chii, there was no ambiguity in that, and it frightened me to think of what might happen to them if I escaped and the police came. At times like that, your thoughts are inevitably drawn to the worst-case scenario.
“Is this really a foreign country? No, it has to be Japan. But I was born here, I grew up in this
place. No, that’s not true. I was kidnapped. Kidnapping is bad—I’ve got to do something. But they’re all such good people, how could I accuse them of something like that? How long have I been here? Has it been a really long time? I wonder if Mom is still alive … I was bewildered. Is this woman I keep remembering my mom? No, I know she isn’t, she’s just a vision I created because I want a mom so badly … Everything got tangled up like that, the thoughts kept hounding me. I don’t say that lightly: my mind was really being torn to pieces, stripped of everything inside it, and I started getting very unstable.
“So finally I got up the courage to talk with Mino and Chii.
“And this is what Mino said, late at night, in a whisper:
“ ‘I think you’re probably right, Nobu. I’ve been living here with everyone ever since I was a baby, so I don’t really know about certain things, but I think you were probably stolen. I mean, it’s odd that your mom isn’t here. And this is Japan. That’s for sure. Even though everyone says it isn’t.’
“He had no idea how it might affect him and his sister, but still he told me his opinion. In a sense, he was risking his life, and I can’t ever be grateful enough to him for that, as long as I live. Even though it is so hard for me to go and see them.
“The reason Chii is bedridden, and the reason I get so exhausted sometimes—it’s not just a matter of emotional trauma. All the drugs they gave us destroyed our livers. Mino has gotten a lot better, but I don’t think he’s completely recovered, either.
“Not long after the group disbanded, Mino and Chii’s mother died of liver cancer.
“The house they live in now was originally used as a kind of combined storage and meeting room for the shrine, and that’s why my mother and I were able to live there a while, and when Mino and Chii’s mother died we decided to invite them to live there, without paying any rent or anything. We wanted them to feel free to stay there forever. After all, part of me still isn’t sure whether what I did was really best for them. Maybe they would have been better off if I hadn’t informed on the group when I escaped, and they could have just stayed there like that for the rest of their lives. Sometimes I wonder. So I wanted to find a way to help them out with their new lives, and to protect them from society. My mom felt exactly the same way.”