Hell

by Yasutaka Tsutsui

  Daté continued walking from one backstreet to another, his face contorted into a demented expression. He no longer tried to avoid the other pedestrians, even if they were walking directly towards him. If they didn’t get out of his way, he ploughed right into them. He was stumbling away from one such collision when he happened to hear the song ‘Tokyo Dodonpa Girl’ playing in a store, and from that point on hummed the song under his breath. His feet also succumbed to the rhythm of the song, tracing out the steps of the dodonpa as he walked, his eyes gazing fixedly up at the sky.

  Dodonpa! Dodonpa! Dodonpa!

  It’s lit a fire in my heart

  That nothing can put out!

  Customers had not yet arrived at the small basement bar where Hattori was being tortured. Asahina had removed Hattori’s trousers and ripped off his underwear, which was filthy from Hattori’s repeated shitting and pissing his pants. The burly mama-san grew more and more willing to be of assistance as the torture went on. When asked for a carving knife, she was quite happy to hand one over; when asked for a chopping board, she merrily fetched that as well. When Asahina ordered her to make Hattori’s shrivelled penis erect, she complied, diligently kneading, squeezing and stroking his member.

  Hattori was a mess. He had been crying from the cigarette burns all over his naked body and from the hot needles inserted under his fingernails, and now, his mind clouded with pain, he began to babble at the top of his lungs, his words approaching a bestial scream that even he didn’t understand.

  “It stings it stings the black black pain in my fingers it burns! But I gotta hold on gotta hold on don’t put anything in my cigarette holes don’t put anything in me! I’m gonna die gonna die gonna die my head’s so hot I feel like I’m goin’ crazy yes yes yes crazy crazy what am I gonna do what am I gonna do stop please stop. ”

  The bar was filled with the smell of Hattori’s shit and piss and blood and the sweat of the men torturing him. Tired from their exertions, the three gangsters had been resting on the couch, but Asahina roused himself when he saw that Hattori’s penis had become fully erect. He slid the cutting board under Hattori’s member and pressed it down on the board. He held the carving knife in his other hand and made as if he was about to slice Hattori’s penis off at the base. Seeing this, Hattori howled desperately, pissing himself all over again.

  “No! Anything but that! I know what you’re gonna do I know I know I gotta be strong be strong but I can’t take it any more I can’t take it can’t take it can’t take it I’m gonna die! Is this goodbye is it really goodbye please I can’t say goodbye to my little friend not him don’t don’t please no! Tell me how you want me to cry I’ll cry I’ll cry good any way you want!”

  Asahina’s underlings felt a stirring in their own crotches as they watched Hattori babble like a baby. They got up slowly from the couch and threw the whisky in their glasses onto Hattori’s naked bleeding body. Hattori screamed and writhed some more.

  “Hot hot hot hothothot! Blood whirlpools in my cigarette burns! I’m gonna die die die my fingertips are gone gone gone can I go crazy now? Is that all right? My head feels so strange…”

  The mama-san was entranced. Her eyes began to sparkle, and then she cried out, having come to a decision. She twirled the dangling sleeves of her kimono around her forearms and went behind the counter to write something on a piece of paper. She went up the stairs to the ground floor and pasted the paper on the glass door with a smack. The sign read:

  CLOSED – PRIVATE PARTY TONIGHT

  Daté was asleep. Exhausted from all the running and strutting around, he lay in a narrow dead-end alley, arms curled around a large black dog. He would have nowhere to run if the Ikaruga gang found him there. He had fallen to the ground as soon as he ran into the alley and saw that it was a dead end. Some time afterwards, a black creature came up to him and licked his cheek. Daté embraced the creature passionately, as if it were his last chance to touch another living thing, and soon drifted into a sweet deep sleep.

  He was dreaming. Dreaming of Yuzo. Yuzo was sitting across from him at their usual coffee shop. No, the coffee shop didn’t really exist. It was just their “usual coffee shop” in Daté’s dreams.

  “Oh, that’s right,” he thought in the dream. “Yuzo’s been killed. Does that mean that I’m dead too? Is that why I’m here with him now? Or are my dreams connected to the afterlife? I was so tired that I just dropped off to sleep, and now I’m having my favourite dream about being here with Yuzo in our usual coffee shop. I love this dream. I might not mind dying if it could be like this. I might even be dead already, but that’s okay with me. If I’m alive, all I have to look forward to is people hurting me and then dying anyway. Yeah, I hope I am dead.” Yuzo smiled at Daté as if he could hear what he’d been thinking.

  “Hey, Weasel. You’re not gunnin’ for my job, are you?”

  “Who, me? I’m just a weasel.”

  Yuzo laughed and gave Daté an apple. Daté picked up a knife and began to peel the apple clumsily, but the white of the apple’s flesh did not appear. Did this apple have especially thick skin? He made a deeper incision into the apple, but it was still red. Finally he understood. Yuzo had given him an apple that was red to the core. He cut it in two. Just as he thought, the apple was a dark red throughout, almost as if it were made of nothing but skin. Daté complained to Yuzo, a note of entreaty in his voice:

  “Hey, what’s the big idea? Why did you give me an apple like this?”

  Yuzo gave him an innocent look and turned away. He was staring out the window with an expression that seemed to say, “Don’t bother me with the petty details of the real world.”

  “He really is dead,” thought Daté.

  He spoke to Yuzo tearfully. “Yuzo, I bet it hurt. When you were killed, I mean. I bet it hurt. Huh, Yuzo?”

  Getting stabbed in the stomach brought back familiar feelings for Yuzo. He had often experienced pain as a boy, but it was always nothing more than a brief acrid taste in his mouth that soon faded. This time the bitterness lingered, spreading throughout his entire mouth. Yuzo finally recognized it as the taste of death. He had been tasting death little by little ever since he was a child. He slumped forwards and fell to his knees at the feet of the man who stabbed him, angrier at this humiliating position than at his killer. He tried to bite the man’s ankles, but only managed to open his eyes. His body would not obey.

  Suddenly the pain was gone and Yuzo was standing in the street once again. Everyone else had vanished and the gash in his stomach was gone, but the stores lining the street looked just the same. Their lights were on and their signs were lit, and yet it was so quiet that Yuzo thought he had been struck deaf. There was no hint of the commotion of moments before. He was dead; that much was clear. Otherwise how could all his anger and hate have disappeared? But where was he? Surely he would understand everything once he turned the corner onto the main street. He began to walk in that direction, taking long purposeful strides.

  He left the alley and walked for a few moments before finding himself in a building of cold concrete. He was on the second floor of Yomogawa Primary School, which he attended until his parents died. Was he a spirit or a ghost? Was he now haunting the places that were important to him in life?

  He walked towards the stairway and was about to descend, when he froze in his tracks. A man about the same age as Yuzo was standing on the landing looking up at him.

  “We used to play here all the time, didn’t we?” he said, smiling openly.

  The man had no crutches. Was it Nobuteru? No, he was sure it was Takeshi. But how did Yuzo know this? Was that the way things worked in this world? And what was this world anyway? Hell? If so, then Takeshi must have died before him. But didn’t he need his crutches?

  As Takeshi slowly climbed the stairs towards him, Yuzo realized that Takeshi had in fact died much later than him and only appeared to be Yuzo’s age. And he realized that he no longer had any need for crutches there. He didn’t understand how he knew this – he j
ust did. His legs were weak as he faced the friend whom he had hurt so badly. He hoped Takeshi had forgotten his grudges from his previous life, just as he had. Standing in his business suit in front of Yuzo, Takeshi appeared businesslike almost to the point of ostentation. A faint, refined-looking smile came over his handsome features.

  “I got bullied terribly in junior high, you know.”

  Could it be that life and death weren’t cut off from each other after all, but were in fact connected in the smoothest, most natural way imaginable? Nobuteru had begun to think so. This had probably been true throughout history, but the closer one got to the present day, the easier it seemed to be to cross over this line without even realizing it. It almost seemed possible to travel between the world of the dead and that of the living.

  How else could he explain what had been happening to him? Because Nobuteru had been associated with several different industries, he received many party invitations, even in his retirement. He would be talking to an acquaintance in a noisy banquet hall when he’d spot someone he was certain was long dead. Whenever this happened he would stop and stare dumbly at them – or, as a younger man might say, “freeze up”.

  There were any number of reasons why he had thought the other person was dead, or there could be no reason at all. Sometimes it was due to an offhand comment he’d heard, like “Who knows? He may have already passed on.” Still, sometimes he was positive that he had read the person’s obituary.

  Nobuteru had often been on the receiving end of this look as well. He would see someone staring at him and think, “Ah, I’ve been mistaken for someone who’s dead.” Or maybe the person had thought Nobuteru himself was dead. It didn’t matter. Industries once dominated by young people grew old too, and in a rapidly greying society it was hard to keep track of who was living and who was dead.

  The world seemed obsessed with health, with living longer. “Smoking can be hazardous to your health,” they said, and so people stopped smoking. But what were they to do with their longer lives? Play croquet? Go into nursing homes? Keep on living until they grew feeble and stinking of old age? And then what?

  At these parties sometimes Nobuteru would run into a girl from one of the clubs he had frequented. He’d always find himself thinking: “She’s got so old.” And as she rubbed up against him, squealing with delight at seeing him after such a long time, she was probably thinking, “Oh, he’s turned into such an old man.”

  At one party a man just collapsed and died. A crowd of greying heads peered down at the pale man lying on the floor. It was clear from the looks on their faces that they were all imagining themselves in his position.

  Dead people were all that Nobuteru dreamt about. Maybe it was because most of the people he really cared about were dead. Of course in his dreams they usually were still alive, but sometimes they were dead, and sometimes he couldn’t tell one way or the other. He was always confused when he awoke from these dreams, unsure if he himself were still alive.

  Once Nobuteru fell into the river near his apartment. He had been in a crowd watching a thrashing school of mullet that had appeared out of the blue. A group of primary-school students pushed from the rear, trying to get a better look, knocking Nobuteru into the river six feet below.

  He ended up in the middle of the teeming fish. For a moment he was terrified they would eat him, but then he remembered that mullet eat only plankton. And in any case he knew how to swim. But as he tried to get back to the river bank, the fish bumped up against him, keeping him from making any progress.

  He was carried ten yards downstream before he grabbed hold of the concrete embankment and climbed out. A disgusting slime covered his body. He laughed to himself at the absurdity of the situation. Everyone on shore was laughing too, and yet the experience was precious to him. Even after returning to his apartment looking like a drowned rat, he felt an odd satisfaction. If he hadn’t known how to swim, he might have drowned. In the end, all he lost were his sandals.

  Nobuteru had always thought that, of all the ways to die, drowning was among the most unpleasant, but now he wondered if drowning didn’t allow people just to go beneath the surface and slip calmly into death. Maybe people who longed for death would experience such relief that their brain emitted a natural anaesthetic, letting death come quickly and painlessly. There were worse ways to go.

  Which magazine had he read it in? Sasaki couldn’t remember the magazine, much less the title of the short story or the name of the author. Nevertheless, he would find himself remembering the story from time to time. For some reason it stuck with him, and he thought of it again as he sat on the train looking out at the passing suburban scenery. The protagonist was a man who had thrown an appliance into the bathtub and electrocuted his wife. When the man himself died, he went to Hell, and of course it was the proverbial burning inferno. As the man walked the hot and humid streets of Hell, he began to sweat and his throat grew parched. Ahead of him he spotted a bar. He went inside, but it was just as hot and humid in the bar as it had been outdoors. He ordered a beer from the bartender. The beer was warm.

  “I’d like a colder beer, if you don’t mind,” said the man.

  “That’s the only kind of beer we’ve got,” replied the bartender.

  Drinking the beer just made the man’s discomfort worse. Sweat began to pour out of his body. Desperate, the man begged the bartender, “Please, don’t you have any beer that’s cold?”

  But the bartender smiled toothily and said, “We only have warm beer.”

  That was all there was to the story, but it had a profound effect on Sasaki. It could have been the hot summer day when he first read the story, but he recalled how he himself was sweating profusely, unable to stand the heat. As he sat on the train, he couldn’t help but think of similarities between his Hell and the one described in the story.

  Every seat of the train was taken, and the aisles were full. Sasaki was lucky to have a seat. When the man standing in front of him left to claim an empty seat, he discovered that his wife was sitting directly across the aisle from him. She was dressed in the same plain clothes she had worn in life, and she seemed to be drowsing. Sasaki was taken aback. His wife had done nothing wrong. What was she doing in Hell? But of course the woman whom he had frozen to death with had never been far from his mind. He timidly called out her name:

  “Jitsuko.”

  Sasaki’s wife opened her eyes sleepily and looked at him. She smiled faintly as if she had known he was there all along, and then closed her eyes and went back to sleep. It was just as it had always been when they had ridden the train together in life. Sasaki was disappointed that she didn’t seem happier to see him, but at the same time he felt relief. At least she was here with him, even if it didn’t change anything. And he supposed her reaction was understandable – no one, including Sasaki himself, felt the kind of strong emotions that they might have felt in the real world.

  He sat absorbed in thought, staring at his wife’s sleeping face until the train pulled into the station. Jitsuko raised her head drowsily, looked out the window, then slowly stood up and walked towards the door without a glance in Sasaki’s direction. Had she forgotten that he was sitting across from her? Sasaki got up to follow her, but the passengers boarding the train came between them and he momentarily lost sight of her. Then the doors shut, leaving him still inside the train. Had she got off? He couldn’t see her on the platform.

  Standing near the doors of the train was a high-school girl in a navy-blue uniform with a short, tartan-checked skirt. She was looking out the window. Sasaki couldn’t see her face, but her standing there stirred a memory in him. He remembered how he used to stand close to girls like this on the train, rub against them and fondle them, snaking his hand up their skirts. He had molested countless girls just like this girl on trains just like this train. He had done it again and again and again, completely unable to control himself. Thinking back, he was surprised that he was never arrested. He thought of the pain he had caused those girls, and
he was suddenly filled with regret. Maybe the girl in front of him was actually his wife. Maybe she was there to remind him of what he had done. It didn’t matter. What was important was that he was sorry for what he had done. He began to walk slowly down the centre of the train, looking for an empty seat. It was lucky he hadn’t gone any further. He had certainly daydreamed about doing worse things.

  Past crimes. Cravings long forgotten. Repressed appetites that had never found their way to the surface. Dark desires he had been unaware of. Sasaki began to think that Hell existed to remind him of these malevolent tendencies. If that were the case, then Hell was a world that surpassed the conscious mind, a world where elements of the psyche took on physical form. But apart from that, it really seemed no different from life.

  There weren’t many young people in Hell, but occasionally Takeshi would encounter young boys. Most seemed innocent and incapable of any real sin, and when he talked to them, he would find that they were guilty of nothing more than a childish prank. How were people chosen to go to Hell? The three intelligent-looking boys he saw skipping stones on the river bank hardly seemed the type to have committed a serious crime. He climbed down to the river bank and called out to them.

  “You’re so young. How did you die? I haven’t seen many boys your age around here.”

  The boys calmly turned towards him and smiled good-naturedly. They began to speak in turn.

  “We’re playing in the mountains—”

  “On a torokko we found on the train tracks.”