Shinobu ran on. Kita had disappeared into the anonymous crowd. Still she ran. Her nipples rubbed painfully against her blouse. Her throat was so dry she felt it would split. She paused to buy a grapefruit juice from a drinks machine, tossed it down, then wiped her sweat with her sleeve and plumped herself down on a bench in front of a convenience store.
Three young men stood around her, eyeing her from a distance. They’d been on the lookout for a woman to chat up when they spotted her sitting there. A discussion followed. Now they stared blatantly, whispering her name among themselves, and to escape them Shinobu set off at a run once more. The men followed. As she ran, Shinobu remembered that she’d left her Bible in the hotel room. How could she have forgotten her protective talisman? She had to go back and get it! But she’d turned right and left and run up and down so many slopes in pursuit of Kita that she no longer had any idea where she was.
She dashed into a department store. The eyes of the girls at the cosmetics counter bored into her. Gasping for breath, she went up in the elevator. Now at last the effects of the vodka were beginning to hit her.
“Where do you sell Bibles?” she asked a lady shop assistant in the uniforms section.
“Bibles? You’ll find them in the bookstore on the fifth floor. Excuse me, er, are you the one who was kidna—”
“No. I’m free again.” Shinobu pushed the middle-aged woman out of the way and raced to the fifth floor. The sales floor heaved like a ship in a high sea. They were all looking. Gazes pierced her from everywhere, and she felt pursued by the whisper of her name. That’s Shinobu Yoimachi running past! She’s alive! What’s she doing in Shibuya? Is the kidnapper somewhere nearby? She should go straight to the police – was she raped by the kidnapper? Was she really abducted? Let’s save Shinobu Yoimachi! Chase her! What fun… Inaudible words echoed around her head. Help me, Kita! They’re trying to kidnap me!
“A Bible, please,” she said to the shop assistant.
“You want the New Testament? The Old Testament?”
“The one that has Jesus’ words in it,” Shinobu retorted irritably.
“They’re both on the Religion shelf,” the shop assistant said in a stupid voice.
Maybe, just maybe, she’d find Kita there browsing the Bible, she thought. But instead she found a close-cropped young man, turning the pages of a book with the ridiculous title Ten Steps to Happiness. Shinobu picked up a Bible with a yellow cover, and hurried back to the counter. Once more, everyone was looking at her. She had the urge to vomit. Bible clutched to her side, she fled to the toilet, rushed into the large Disabled Toilet, turned the lock, and vomited up a bitter black fluid.
If Kita were here he’d rub her back for her, he’d read the Bible to her, she thought. But here she was, alone once more. And all she had was a Bible. She idly opened it, and voicelessly spoke the words that met her eyes. These were the words from The Revelation of John that she read:
Written on her forehead was a name with a secret meaning: “Babylon the great, the mother of whores and of every obscenity on earth.”
Well if Tokyo was Babylon it could go up in flames for all she cared, thought Shinobu. Along with me, and all the men I’ve slept with. It wasn’t Tokyo’s fault, but that of its tainted people. No one spoke the truth. All were equally dyed deep with evil and corruption. That was why we needed God; a God who could make us all humble and ashamed of our sinfulness. But such a God could never appear on Earth in human form. If He did, all our envy and hatred would be hurled at Him.
Ah, she thought, I wish I could see Kita again. I don’t want to let him die. Even if we can’t meet again in this life, I just want to believe that there can exist on this Earth a man free of envy and hatred, like Jesus in the Bible.
A sudden thought flashed into her mind. That killer – she still had his cell phone number! She rushed out of the toilet and straight to a public telephone box. He answered on the fourth ring.
“Hi, it’s Shinobu. I’ve got something to ask of you. You can save people’s lives too, can’t you? If so, please stop Kita from killing himself. He absolutely mustn’t be allowed to die. I’ll pay you a million yen.”
“Right.”
“You can?”
“I’ll see what I can do. I was just about to come and get my fee for killing Yashiro, actually. Is Kita still with you? Oh, he’s escaped, has he? I see. But no need to worry. I’ll find him, have no fear. I put a transmitter in his backpack, see, so I can tell pretty much exactly where he is.”
And so Yoshio Kita was once again a followed man.
Frankenstein from Middle School
Kita intended to quit the capital again. He hadn’t fixed on where he should kill himself, but he could see that it would be useless to hang around the city with its high ratio of police.
Hot on Kita’s trail aided by the transmitter in his backpack, the doctor caught sight of him going into Tower Records. The doctor stood just beyond the periphery of Kita’s vision, watching his feet to see where they’d take him next. Kita walked past the Opera section three times and finally left without buying anything. Outside, he hailed a taxi.
His destination was the airport out on reclaimed land in the bay. With what must be close to the last of his money, Kita bought a ticket at the counter, and proceeded to check in for the flight to Sapporo. The doctor followed suit, allowing a two-minute interval. There were still forty minutes before boarding. Still wearing his backpack, Kita went into the bathroom, and didn’t emerge for some time. Maybe he was having trouble getting rid of the pistol, mused the doctor. Or busy plastering down his hair. Or did he want to be alone for a bit? Then the worrying thought flashed through his mind that Kita might actually commit suicide in there behind closed doors. He was just setting off to check when Kita emerged, looking cheerful. He went straight to the hand luggage inspection point, and passed through without any check being made of his backpack. Evidently he was no longer carrying the pistol. Well, that meant that at least he wouldn’t be able to shoot himself, and also that the doctor needn’t worry about being kidnapped again.
The doctor let five others pass ahead of him before he went through the hand luggage check. But then he was taken aside while his bag was inspected, and had to explain the presence of the syringes, medicine, and clinical examination equipment. In the end his bag was handed to one of the stewardesses to carry on board. The reputation of doctors must have taken a dive in recent times.
Kita wandered about the shops, but didn’t buy anything. Then he went in a snack bar and ordered a curry rice. Watching at a distance, the doctor tutted at the sight of Kita standing there at the counter hunched over his food. If his planned suicide was pointless, eating curry was even more horribly pointless. No man about to die should be eating curry, and no man eating curry should be set on suicide. The doctor felt he was spying on some illicit scene. For some reason, he was suddenly consumed with anger. Nevertheless, he continued to stare until Kita had run his spoon around the edge of the plate and licked up the last morsel, like some starving student. The fellow was still brimming with life, it seemed. Perhaps there was one more thing he was planning to do. Still, this kind of energy wasn’t necessarily just self-sustaining. It could easily shift to something destructive – of himself, or of others as well.
The doctor boarded ahead of Kita and settled down to doze as soon as he was seated. But his nerves were still tingling from all the running around of the last couple of days, and he was in no fit state to sleep. Before long, a recording of the three o’clock news began on the screen in front of him. The newscaster announced that at two that afternoon Shinobu Yoimachi had been found alive and well in a Shibuya department store. Her abductor was still on the run, and the police were on his trail. Shinobu was refusing to give any information about him, either his name or distinguishing features. In an interview with the press, she had said, “The man who kidnapped me is not a bad person. I want to save him. He’s taken our illness upon himself.”
What would the viewer
s make of this? Not knowing what had actually happened, and seeing her looking as fervent as her words, at best they’d probably assume she’d fallen in love with her kidnapper, or even that the whole story had been a fiction. But perhaps there’d be a tendency to try to see some logic in what she said after all. It was true, the kidnapper wasn’t a bad person. That in itself would probably elicit some public sympathy. Personally, the doctor was unmoved by Kita’s apparent goodness, but somehow he felt a tremendous pity for him nevertheless. He was surely wasting his time by shadowing Kita all the way to Hokkaido like this, but he had an urge to meddle in his fate.
Once the plane was airborne, the doctor suddenly recalled someone who somehow reminded him of Kita. He’d forgotten the guy’s name, but he’d known him at middle school. They’d been in the same class in the second grade for a mere three months. Rumour had it that the boy had lost his parents in an accident, and his grandparents were taking care of him. He had a hook-shaped scar on his head, and in class he was constantly either snivelling like something coming to the boil, or chuckling to himself. In the first week everyone avoided him and kept their distance. In the second week, someone came up with the nickname “Frankenstein,” and from that moment on he’d been tormented. He was the perfect target for the violence of his fellow students. He made no effort to resist, so even people who were physically weaker felt safe to hurl the name at him. He also had a habit that the others couldn’t understand. As he lay there snivelling while he was beaten and kicked, he would murmur to himself, a little smile on his face. You could never really catch what he was saying. When a bully asked him to say it again, he’d simply turn away with a little chuckle. This would incense the bully, of course. He’d register a momentary unease at not knowing what his victim was thinking, and he’d have to inflict a bit more pain on Frankenstein to dispel it.
The doctor had wanted to stay out of the gang who made this boy a scapegoat, but one day he began to feel he’d like to see the guy dead. The boy was silent in class, but all the time he spent alone seemed to have induced him to think things through and develop his own philosophy, which he seemed to long to share with someone. On the way home from school one day, the boy stopped him and told him something like, “The world’s forsaken me. But what this means is that I’ve been chosen by God. I must battle alone against the world. I’ll probably be defeated. In order to win, I must become the incarnation of the world’s evils. When I do this, the world will find it needs me.”
The doctor had forgotten his name, but he clearly remembered these words. It could just be that the guy had been a genius – there are countless unlucky geniuses like that in the world. But hearing these words back then by the bridge in middle school, the doctor had been just one more of those with common sense who side with the world.
About a month after he’d begun to wish this incomprehensible possible genius dead, the guy was transferred to another school. If he was still alive today, what would he be doing? There was no way to know whether he’d died or possibly even been killed in his teens. This was why the boy haunted him. Even all these years later, that face would pop into his head several times a year, and always it would leave him brooding over whether he should have just killed him back then, or become his friend, or whether he should employ a detective and search him out, or whether the fellow still hated him. He even dreamed sometimes that the guy could now be a doctor with a side job in killing. Every time he recalled him in the past twenty years or so, the doctor thought to himself now, he’d talked himself into believing he had nothing in common with the guy.
But now that he’d come across the peculiar make-up of this fellow Yoshio Kita, it struck the doctor that the middle-aged Frankenstein would undoubtedly decide to condemn himself to death, just like Kita. The point is, the doctor tried telling himself, these folk who wage a losing battle with the world set up some grand suicidal scheme really for the sake of their own little egos. Nevertheless, he still felt disturbed.
His brain was spinning along at terrific speed, but his tired eyes and body couldn’t keep up, and he felt oppressed by dizziness. The doctor closed his eyes and attempted to simply wait quietly for the plane to land. It was smoothly losing momentum now, but his dizziness made it feel as if it was going into a tail spin. He felt ill. It was always at such moments that images of bloody human organs came floating past under his closed lids. If only the damn plane would just go down, he thought, bury its nose in the middle of some hapless town below and burst into flames – anything rather than this.
Kita disembarked ahead of him. The doctor retrieved his bag from the stewardess and stepped briskly after him. He gained ground on the departing backpack, thinking that he could safely hail Kita now without risking him running off. Just then Kita turned suddenly right and ran into the toilet. The doctor was obliged to follow him, and he placed himself at the next urinal. Even this failed to alert Kita, however.
“I’d ask you not to go eating curry at airports,” the doctor said.
Kita turned to look at him with an expression of distaste, and heaved a deep sigh. “God, how unlucky can I get!”
In a few more hours, Friday would begin. Why should a guy who was due to die tomorrow have any need for luck?
“No need to worry. I’m not planning to get in your way.” The doctor smiled at him in friendly fashion, but Kita frowned.
“So what the hell’re you up to then?” he demanded fiercely, and turned to wash his hands.
The doctor held out his handkerchief for Kita to wipe his hands on. “I have something I’d like to discuss, you see.”
“How did you know I was going to Hokkaido?”
“Oh, sheer coincidence. I was after a holiday in Hokkaido myself.”
“That’s a lie.”
“You’re right, it is.”
“You’ve been asked to follow me, haven’t you?”
“No. I’m accompanying you out of mere personal curiosity.”
“I’m not some kind of exhibit, you know.”
“And I’m not here as audience, I assure you. If there’s anything I can do, I’d be glad to help.”
Kita drew a deep breath, then suddenly took off at a run. The doctor ran beside him. At the taxi stand, Kita turned to face him. “Stop meddling in other people’s business! Get lost!” he gasped desperately.
“I understand,” the doctor nodded expressionlessly.
“You! I’m talking about YOU!” yelled Kita, leaning threateningly over the doctor, but the doctor merely continued talking in a soothing tone.
“I’ve followed your instructions, and dispatched that man who tried to take advantage of you. You’re now quite free to be your own man. I won’t meddle, don’t you worry. But you know the saying, ‘Companions on the road.’ Just allow me to have dinner with you, that’s all I ask. I was wanting to discuss methods of payment with you. You’ll be setting off on a long journey tomorrow, Kita. Tonight’s the last time you’ll have a business conversation, you know.”
“Oh yeah, I forgot. I’m so sorry.”
“You’re headed for the city centre? I don’t know when you plan to die tomorrow, of course, but tonight’s your last night, isn’t it? I was wondering if you’d care to have a sympathetic ear for any last words you may have.”
The doctor was clever not only with his hands but with his tongue. Kita couldn’t very well turn him down, since he’d come for his promised payment, so he meekly followed the doctor’s beckoning hand and got into the taxi with him.
This last week felt like an endless series of changing vehicles. How many taxis had he taken by now, he wondered? Looked like it took a lot of changes to get you to the next world. Maybe in New York or Rio de Janeiro you could get a taxi that would take you straight there.
“So what are your plans for tonight? You must be rather weary,” the doctor said.
“Kidnapping’s an exhausting business. Is it all sorted now?”
“I’d guess Shinobu is being mobbed by the press right about now. It’s
the rebirth of a star.”
“Did I do the right thing, then?”
“You did, I’m sure. And you got away without being caught, what’s more.”
“True. By the way, Mr Killer, you mentioned back there that you’d dispatched Yashiro. You actually killed him?”
“He’s still alive. But I’ve shortened his life considerably. He’ll go another three years at the outside, could be six months, then he’ll die.”
“What did you do?”
“I stole a kidney. You can’t sell a life if you steal it, after all, but you can get some money for a kidney.”
“And how is he?”
“I couldn’t really say. We exchanged greetings after the surgery, that’s all. I imagine he’s probably in hospital by now. I had to perform the surgery in that filthy office of his, so I’d guess quite a few bacteria got in. How he gets along will rather depend on how good his immune system is, but you can be sure he’ll be befriended by quite a variety of illnesses from now on, and forced to spend his days contemplating approaching death.” The doctor sounded positively gleeful.
“Does this count as murder?”
“I wonder. I could maybe be convicted of robbery and grievous bodily harm. Maybe negligence leading to death. Although it wasn’t negligence, it was intentional. The question comes down to whether there was any intent to kill. You ordered me to kill him, so I guess the answer is yes, but I didn’t in fact kill him at the time, so it would be hard to prove intent to kill. You’re going to die tomorrow, so you won’t be in a position to bear witness. Therefore, I can only conclude it can’t count as murder.”
“So what did you really want to do?”
“I couldn’t say. I simply chose the most rational approach.”
“You weren’t sure whether to kill him or save him, so you stole his kidney, is that it?”
“That’s what it amounts to, yes.”
Death By Choice Page 21
