Evil and the Mask (4 page)

It was filled to the brim. The tangled old hair was bone-dry and the nails were shriveled and curled. Their color had changed to a dark red as they dried, as if to show that they once were human. Even from where I was standing in the doorway it was obvious that it wasn’t all old stuff, that some of it had been harvested recently.

I was surprised how shocked I was. It was only natural that I was upset that my secret was revealed, and by Kaori of all people, but I didn’t know what to say or do. More than feeling humiliation, more than wanting to hide my shame, all I could do was wish that it had never happened. I snatched the box from her and went to throw it in the trash, but I couldn’t. That disturbed me more than anything. I had no idea where to look. Kaori was right in front of me, and at that moment our eyes met.

“It’s nothing,” I said when I came to my senses.

But I didn’t know what to say next. Kaori was wearing a white sweater and white jeans. I closed the lid of the box and put it back in the drawer. I was thinking that I’d just have to walk out when she spoke in a soft voice.

“What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“But …”

No matter what Kaori thought, for the moment I just wanted to get away from her. I needed time to come up with a plausible explanation, but she didn’t look like she was going anywhere. She just sat there, gazing up at me.

“It’s none of your business, is it?”

“That’s true, but what is it?”

She wouldn’t leave me alone. She was determined to find out what it was.

“My mom.”

Once I started, I knew I’d end up telling her the whole story.

“I pick them up because I think some of them might be my mother’s. I know they can’t be, but I collect them anyway.”

My throat was tight.

“Even now. Of course I know that there won’t be anything of Mom’s in what I’m picking up now, but I still can’t help myself. If I don’t, I feel like they’ll be gone forever.”

Kaori looked away.

“I even end up picking up the servants’ stuff too. If I don’t do it I get scared. Really scared. That might sound gross to you, but to me it isn’t at all. The servants kind of know about my habit. It’s embarrassing, so they clean the house every day.”

I couldn’t look her in the face. At the back of my mind I saw the mass of dried, discolored hair and the purple shreds of nail she’d just been looking at.

“You must have some,” she said suddenly. “There must be
some of your mother’s in there. Definitely. So you must never throw them away.”

She spoke seriously, with a childish expression, but I was still a child myself. Her long hair was tied back, and her large eyes looked straight into mine as I stood there. That was probably the moment I started to fall in love with her. It was only some time later that I remembered she was an orphan.

AFTER WE FINISHED elementary school, Kaori and I were enrolled in the local junior high. Once again we were in the same class, but this time I thought Father might have had a hand in it. By the time we started, Kaori was only slightly taller than average, while I had shot up.

She was still a bit better at sports than the other girls, but no longer stood out as much as she had when she was younger. Since she was cheerful she had plenty of friends, but she wasn’t the center of the class. As always, schoolwork was the only thing I was good at, so I wrapped myself in jokes and frivolity. At the time, that was pretty close to my true personality. I hadn’t discarded my box of hair and fingernails, but I’d gradually stopped picking up new ones, and I’d also given up throwing living creatures off the cliff behind the house. I also liked telling jokes, and the lessons, mere repetition of what had already been drummed into me by my tutors, were simply boring. During classes I mucked around with the kids sitting near me, so the teachers often told me off.

I thought only of Kaori, fantasizing every day about our future. Marrying her, finding a job, I didn’t care what. If she wanted to work she could, and if she wanted to stay home
that was all right too. If we had children, perhaps I’d be able to give them what had been missing in my life. To make her happy, I’d be a thoroughly decent person, and the malevolent strain that ran in my family’s blood would stop with me. I’d work hard and buy a house with a nice view, by the sea, maybe. It wouldn’t matter if it was small. In the evenings we’d go for walks along the beach. When we quarreled I’d always apologize, and if I thought she was in the wrong, I’d just keep my mouth shut. Maybe even then I’d be the one to say sorry. For me to marry Kaori, however, I’d have to be good enough for her. I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but for the time being I persevered with my tedious, day-to-day studies. I took pains with my appearance, and thought up stories to make her laugh. I squeezed my darkness into this tiny piece buried deep inside me. All my pent-up energy, which had been trapped by my depression, burst forth directly, even obsessively, towards Kaori.

Almost every night I imagined having sex with her. If I could do it for real, I thought, that would be the happiest thing in the world. Seeing Kaori’s body, touching her all over, entering her. It seemed like a miracle, and it never occurred to me that most adults were enjoying the same pleasure. I thought it was only for me, in love with Kaori. Just as she had been in elementary school, she was listed as my relative, but for some reason walking home together had started to feel awkward. She joined the volleyball club, so we left school at different times and went home separately, but she still came to my room every day.

My entire happiness was right there in front of me, and I
couldn’t touch it. Still, at least it was close by. While it was trying at times, all in all it was a good thing. It was enough to fill the mind of a junior high school boy like me. Gazing at her body as it grew soft and round, at the swelling of her breasts, was painful, but at the same time I was happy. My thoughts were fixed solely on her, to the almost total exclusion of everything else.

Kaori teasing me by hunting for my adult magazine became a regular game. I hid it in the bookshelf. I took volume Sa-Su of my encyclopedia out of its case and put the magazine in the box in its place, so she never found it. But I hardly needed it any more. My youthful sexual desires were fixated entirely on her.

“I know you’ve still got it, and I’m going to find it,” she said as she opened the closet, still in her school uniform.

“I don’t.”

“Aren’t you interested in girls anymore?”

“That’s not what I mean, but it isn’t here.”

That’s how we spent the year before I turned fourteen. Before Father was going to show me hell.

“YOU DON’T LOOK much like your father, Fumihiro.”

I don’t remember exactly when she told me that. She was staring at me intently, and I felt quite uncomfortable.

“Maybe not. His face is horrible.” I turned away, unable to look her in the eye.

“Yeah, you could say that.”

We were walking along a dirt road one evening, just after the rain had stopped.

“Somehow I feel like his face isn’t his alone.”

She was beautiful when she was thinking.

“It’s like there’s a whole lot of history and other people’s faces piled one on top of another. Sometimes I get really scared when he just looks at me. Like all this stuff, Kukis from the past, ancient events, come floating to the surface, all mixed up. It’s so freaky. I’m sorry, it’s just really scary somehow.”

She suddenly lowered her eyes, as if she was afraid. I noticed again how long her lashes were. If I was her boyfriend, I thought, at times like these I could put my arm around her. In reality, though, I couldn’t even touch the tips of her fingers.

“YOU’RE ALWAYS STARING at Ms. Yoshimi,” said Kaori, just before the summer holidays in our first year of junior high. “You like her, don’t you?”

Ms. Yoshimi was our music teacher. She always wore tight-fitting clothes, so all the boys liked her. Based solely on her dress, we’d already decided that she was a slut.

“I don’t stare. Why’d you suddenly bring that up?”

I was tall by then, and I had to look down slightly to see Kaori’s face.

“Mari is sad. She can’t compete with Ms. Yoshimi, and she looked like she was going to cry.”

She was watching me with a grin.

“What are you on about?”

“Well, it looks like Mari’s going to tell you she’s got a crush on you, so you should go out with her.”

Mari was a quiet girl who was always drawing. Once when we were cleaning the classroom after school, the bucket she was carrying was about to tip over, so I carried it for her.

“No, I won’t. Sorry, but …”

“What? Do you like someone else?”

Still smiling, Kaori was looking right into my eyes. Her face, bathed in orange sunlight, was lovely. I was still too young to be able to face her directly.

I was in a turmoil. I remembered the girls’ comics Kaori read, TV dramas. Couples were always breaking up because of misunderstandings, or missing each other through bad timing, or going at it all wrong. I hated them. Before I knew it, my body went rigid.

“I can’t go out with her because I like you.”

In those days I was probably a little odd. Kaori was startled. I was also taken aback by my own words, but I couldn’t unsay them.

“I don’t mean I want to go out with you or anything. What I mean is, I planned to tell you when we were older, so I hope we can put it on hold till then, carry on the same way we’ve always been.”

“Carry on the same? That’s impossible. But you’re so brave.”

She sighed admiringly. Then she said that if I liked her I should kiss her. Noting my surprise, she corrected herself, telling me that she liked me too, so I should kiss her, please.

We walked to a nearby shrine, hand in hand and staring at the ground. After waiting patiently for a drunk lying on a bench to leave, we kissed, just a little. I felt like I was entering an
unknown world. As we walked back we kept holding sweaty hands until we saw the gates of the estate. It was six months until my fourteenth birthday, when my father had promised to introduce me to hell.

AFTER THAT SEVERAL things happened far, far away from me.

In line with the Western powers’ hidden agenda, the civil war ended in the small African country where my father’s second son—my brother, in other words—had been working to make money through reconstruction. The Japanese government announced a large aid budget. The surviving members of the religious cult that had occupied the nuclear power plant and then committed mass suicide appealed against their sentence. A shadowy citizens’ group was holding demonstrations outside the courthouse, calling for the death penalty for those involved in planning and preparation. These events sailed quietly over
my head. Father had gone to Tokyo and wouldn’t be back for quite a while. Kaori and I passed the time lost in our own little world.

Every day after school she came to my room. We turned on some music so that people wouldn’t wonder why it was so quiet, and then we’d kiss. We spent hours in each other’s arms, tongues locked together, me touching the bulge of her breasts, though without removing her clothes. I felt that maybe we were still too young to be doing this, but I didn’t care what anyone else thought.

Before long I managed to undress her and kissed her nipples. Then she started sneaking to my room every night. Naked under the bedclothes, we explored each other’s bodies with our fingers and tongues, full of curiosity and desire. The only reason we didn’t go all the way was that Kaori was scared to, but for me it was more than enough. To my immature mind, the reality of sex was overwhelming. While the news was causing a stir in the rest of the world, we were alone in my tiny room. I came many times in Kaori’s hand, and I often kissed her and licked her private parts. We smothered our cries, soaked with sweat in my little bed. Over and over she told me that it felt good, as though I was filling a gap in her life, and I told her the same. Until then she had been moved from one institution to the next and had endured many things, wearing a mask of cheerfulness. Her urgent fingers and tongue touched me delightfully all over and, copying what she must have seen or heard somewhere, she took my penis in her mouth.

Several of the girls a couple of years older than her in the
volleyball club, and one girl who was only one year ahead, had already had sex with their high school boyfriends. With them as her guide, Kaori told me that we could do it the following year. But for me, I didn’t care if we actually had sex or not. What we were doing was the height of happiness.

Kaori wanted me with her whole body.

“I’m only happy when you’re here,” she said, touching me with her hands as though checking my shape. “When you breathe like that, when you’re thinking, just because you’re there.”

For the first time I felt that I was allowed to exist without excuse or darkness or distortion. Apart from the hours I spent with her, everything was a waste of time. The TV news, lessons, my classmates’ conversations, all forms of entertainment, they all seemed dull and didn’t touch me. But as long as Kaori was there, as long as she was in the world, that was all right. If I had her glossy, black hair, her small face with large eyes and narrow lips, her budding breasts, her slender legs and ankles, her voice, our idle chatter, that was all I needed.