Grotesque (2 page)

You probably know this already, but Yuriko died about two years ago.

She was murdered. Her body was found half naked in some cheap apartment in the Shinjuku area of Tokyo. They didn’t know who the murderer was at first. My father did not get upset when he heard the news, and he didn’t return from Switzerland either—not even once. I’m ashamed to say that as his dear beautiful Yuriko grew older, she degraded herself with prostitution. She became a cheap whore.

You imagine Yuriko’s death shocked me, but it didn’t. Did I hate her 7

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murderer? No. Like my father, I really didn’t care about learning the truth. Yuriko had been a monster all her life; it was only natural that her death would be unusual. I, on the other hand, am perfectly ordinary. The path she followed was clearly different from mine.

I suppose you find my attitude chilling. But didn’t I just explain? She was a child who was fated from the beginning to be different. Fortune may shine brightly on a woman like that, but the shadow cast is long and dark. It was inevitable that misfortune would come eventually.

My former classmate Kazue Sato was murdered less than a year after Yuriko died. The way she died was exactly the same. She’d been left in a firstfloor apartment in the Maruyama-cho neighborhood in Shibuya, her clothes in disarray. They said that in both cases more than ten days had elapsed before the bodies were discovered. I don’t even want to imagine the condition they were in by then.

I’d heard that Kazue worked for a legitimate company by day, but by night she was a prostitute. Gossip and innuendo swirled for weeks after the incident. Was I horrified when the police announced that the culprit was the same in both murders? Well, to be honest, Kazue s death was far more shocking to me than Yuriko’s. She and I had been classmates. Also, Kazue was not pretty. She wasn’t beautiful, and yet she died exactly the same way Yuriko did. It was unforgivable.

I suppose you could say that I was the conduit who led Kazue to Yuriko and to their lengthy acquaintance, so in the long run I contributed to her death. Maybe Yuriko’s bad luck somehow crept over into Kazue s life. Why do I believe that? I don’t know. I just do.

I knew a bit about Kazue. We were classmates at the same prestigious private high school for girls. Back in those days Kazue was so skinny it seemed her bones would grate together, and she was known for the ungainly way she carried herself. She wasn’t at all attractive. But she was smart and she made good grades. She was the kind of person who would spout off in front of everyone and make a show of how intelligent she was because she wanted to attract attention. She was proud and had to be the best at everything she did. She was perfectly aware that she wasn’t attractive, so I suppose that is why she wanted to be fussed over for other things. I got a dark feeling from her—a negative energy so palpable I felt I could take it in my hand. It was this sensitivity of mine that attracted Kazue to me. She trusted me and began going out of her way to talk to me. She even invited me over to her house.

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After we both advanced to the university affiliated with our high school, Kazue s father died unexpectedly and Kazue changed. She devoted herself to her studies and began to pull away from me. Now when I think about it, I realize that it was probably because she was more interested in Yuriko. My beautiful sister, one year younger than I, had been the talk of the school.

At any rate, it seems that something happened with those two. Two people who were such complete opposites in looks, intelligence, and circumstances end up as prostitutes and then get killed and abandoned by the same man? The more you think about it, the less likely it seems that you could find an account more bizarre. The incidents with Yuriko and Kazue irrevocably changed my life. People I’d never seen before would catch wind of the gossip and poke their noses into my business, bombarding me with all kinds of intrusive questions about those two. Disgusted, I clammed up and refused to speak to anyone at all. But now my personal life has finally settled down. I’ve started a new job, and all of a sudden I want to talk about Yuriko and Kazue so badly I can hardly stand it. I’ll probably keep on talking even if you try to interrupt me; with my father in Switzerland and Yuriko dead I’m completely on my own. I feel I need someone to talk to—or maybe I just need to think about this weird incident myself.

I have Kazue’s old letters and things that I can refer to, and even though it’ll probably take some time to tell the whole story, I plan to keep going until I’ve unloaded it all—every detail.

• 2 •

Let me fast-forward for a minute. For the last year I’ve been working parttime for the P Ward Office in Tokyo. P Ward is located in the eastern part of the city. Chiba Prefecture lies just across the wide river.

There are forty-eight licensed daycare facilities in P Ward, and since most are operating at full capacity they maintain waiting lists for admis-9

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sion. My job with the Day Care Section of the Welfare Division is to help investigate wait-listed applicants. “Does this family really need to send its child to nursery school?” That’s the kind of question I have to answer with my investigations.

There are any number of unbelievable mothers in this world of ours.

If there are those who feel no qualms about putting their children in day care just because they want to go out and have fun, there are also those who are so used to relying on others they have no confidence in their own ability to be good mothers. This kind of mother would prefer asking a daycare center to raise her child. There are also stingy families who won’t pay for nursery schools—even though they’ll pay the regular school fees—because they insist it’s the responsibility of the public welfare system. How is it that mothers today have grown so depraved? The question has caused me considerable distress.

“Why is someone as striking as you involved in such mundane work?”

I’m asked this time and again. But I’m not really that beautiful. As I’ve pointed out more than once, I’m half European and half Asian, but even so, my face is far more Asian than European and so less intimidating as a result. I don’t have the model-like features that Yuriko had, nor am I as statuesque. And now I’m just a pudgy middleaged woman. At work I even have to wear one of those less-than-nattering navy-blue uniforms!

But even so, I’ve got someone interested in me, it seems, which has become a nuisance.

It was about a week ago that a man named Nonaka said something to me. Mr. Nonaka is around fifty, and he works in the Sanitation Division.

Normally he’s in Government Building Number One. But from time to time he’ll make up an excuse to come by the daycare section in the Annex—which everyone refers to as the Outpost Office—and he and the section chief in my department will share a laugh or two. Whenever he stops by, he uses the opportunity to cast furtive glances in my direction.

I believe that he and the chief are on the same baseball team. The chief plays shortstop and Mr. Nonaka plays second base, or something like that. I don’t much care what they do, it just makes me angry to see someone from a completely unrelated office coming over here during office hours for no better reason than to chat. “Mr. Nonaka’s got his eye on you!” says my colleague, Ms. Mizusawa, who’s eight years younger 1 0

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than I am. She’s started teasing me, and this has made me even more disgusted.

Mr. Nonaka always wears a gray windbreaker, and his complexion is brown and his skin dry, probably from all the cigarettes he smokes. He has a greasy glint in his eye, and whenever he stares at me, I can feel his black eyes scorching holes in me, just as if someone had pressed a hot brand against my skin. It makes me feel queasy. And then Mr. Nonaka said, “When you talk, your voice is high-pitched, but when you laugh it’s low. Eee-hee-hee-hee. That’s how you laugh.” And then he went on to say things like, “You may be polished and proper on the outside, but inside you’re downright dirty, aren’t you?” I was completely caught off guard. What would give this complete stranger the right to come and say something like that to me? I’m sure my dismay showed on my face.

Mr. Nonaka looked over at the chief with some confusion, and then they went out somewhere together.

“What Mr. Nonaka said sounded like sexual harassment to me,” I complained later to my section chief, and a look of embarrassment washed over his face. Oh, I see what’s going on here! I thought. Just because I’ve got foreign blood in my veins, you think I’m more argumentative than a normal Japanese! Leave it to the Westerner to file a lawsuit, right?

“I agree that it wasn’t appropriate to say what he did to a coworker,”

the section chief said, after some deliberation, making it sound as if it wasn’t cause for concern. And then he started shuffling the papers on his desk, trying to look like he was putting them in order. I didn’t want to start an argument, so I didn’t say anything more. If I had, it would have just made him angry with me.

I hadn’t brought a lunch with me, so I decided to go to the cafeteria in Building Number One, which was only a short walk away. I don’t like being where people gather, so I seldom go there. But the building is new and has a very nice food hall for employees. A bowl of ramen is only ¥240, and you can get the lunch special for ¥480. The food was supposed to be good too.

I was shaking pepper over the bowl of ramen on my tray when my section chief came up behind me.

“You’ll make it too spicy with all that pepper!” He had the lunch special on his tray: fried fish and cooked cabbage. The dried bonito flakes sprinkled atop the cabbage looked like metal shavings, and the cabbage i 1

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reminded me of bigos. Scenes from my childhood played across my memory: the dinner table in our mountain cabin—silent as death, my mother looking miserable and my father eating with wordless gusto.

Caught up in my memories, I must have spaced out for a minute, but the section chief didn’t seem to notice. “Shall we sit over there?” he asked, smiling.

The section chief is forty-two, and because he plays catch during his lunch break he comes to work every day in his sports gear and pads up and down the hall the rest of the day in sneakers that squish when he walks. He’s the kind of guy who is constantly concerned with his physique, is perpetually tanned, and is so full of vigor it’s depressing. I usually don’t get on well with men like that, but I found myself slipping into my usual habit. What would our child look like, if we were to have one?

If the child were a girl, she would have my fair skin. Her face, a melding of the section chief’s square-cut chin with my oval face, would be attractively round. She would have the chief s slightly upturned nose and my brown eyes, and she would inherit his sloping shoulders. Her arms and legs would be sturdy for a girl, but given her vitality they’d be fairly charming. I was pleased.

I followed the chief to the table. The enormous cafeteria was filled with the chatter of employees and the clatter of cafeteria workers bustling in and out with trays and other utensils, but I felt they were all watching me. Ever since the incidents with Yuriko and Kazue, everyone knows everything. I couldn’t stand thinking that they were staring at me.

The chief peered into my face. “About what happened earlier,” he began. “Mr. Nonaka didn’t mean anything by it. He was just trying to be friendly, I suppose. If that’s sex-harass”—he used an abbreviation—”then half of what any man says would qualify, right? Don’t you think so?”

He was grinning at me. His teeth were short, like those of plant-eating dinosaurs, or so I thought as I gazed at his mouth. I was reminded of the illustration of the Cretaceous Period. Our child would probably have a row of teeth like that. If she did, the shape of her mouth would be inelegant.

Her fingers and her knuckles would be conspicuously stubby and, on her large hands, would be too angular for a girl. The child that the section chief and I would have had been cute earlier, but now she had transformed into something else completely. And I was growing angrier by the minute.

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“Sexual harassment, I’ll have you know, also includes assassinating another person’s character in that way.”

My protest was delivered rapidfire, but the section chief countered in measured tones. “Mr. Nonaka was not assassinating your character.

He simply stated his observation that your spoken voice and your laughing voice are different, that’s all. Now clearly it’s not appropriate to tease someone that way, so let me apologize for him. Will you let it go? Please?”

“All right.”

I acquiesced. I didn’t think there was any point in continuing the discussion.

There are perceptive people and there are dimwits. The section chief fell into the latter category.

He chewed his fried fish with his short little teeth, the thick coating of batter scattering over his plate with a dull rustling sound. He asked some harmless noninvasive questions about my workload as a parttimer. I answered perfunctorily. And then suddenly he lowered his voice.

“I heard about your younger sister. That must have been awful.”

This is what he said, but what he meant was that, on account of Yuriko, I must be particularly sensitive to what others say and do. I’ve met his type any number of times—the kind of man who thinks he can get away with pretending to know how I feel. I pushed the white onions that were floating on top of my ramen aside with my chopsticks and said nothing. Onions smell, so I hate them.

“I didn’t know a thing about it; boy, was I shocked! Wasn’t her killer the same man who was arrested in that Office Lady Murder last year?”

I glared at the section chiefs face. The corners of his eyes were turned down and virtually dripped with curiosity. The child that I would have with the section chief had now become crude and hideously ugly.

“It’s still under investigation. They can’t say anything conclusive.”

“I heard she was your friend. Is that right?”

“She was a classmate.” Had Kazue and I ever been friends? I would have to give that idea further consideration.