The Kingdom

by Fuminori Nakamura

  “Hey, do you remember that time we kissed in the storage closet?” I asked.

  He stared at me kindly, and said, “When I think about it now, it’s kind of embarrassing.”

  What was he saying? We never did that. My heart beat even faster.

  He said he would see me to the station, and I couldn’t refuse. I began to lose confidence in my own memories. Hasegawa and I were often together at the orphanage, but when I tried to remember his face, the details were hazy. I couldn’t remember clearly what he looked like. This must have been Hasegawa, but if he hadn’t told me his name, would I have recognized him? I tried to remember the other kids from the orphanage. I could remember their faces, but I had a hard time imagining what they’d look like grown up. And why had he played along with my lie? Did he do it to hide the fact that he’d forgotten? If he wasn’t Hasegawa, why would he invite me out like this? I didn’t get it. My head began to hurt. I was questioning too much. I’ve always been like this. Thinking this much is practically the same as being crazy. I let out a small sigh. Something wasn’t exactly right, but this man definitely had Hasegawa’s face.

  I waved back at Hasegawa, and joined the crowd in the station. I wondered if he thought it was strange that I was going home even though it was only ten. I wanted to avoid crowded trains as much as possible. I continued to think about Hasegawa as I moved through the crowd. When I turned toward the taxi stand, someone tapped my shoulder. Startled, I turned around and a man was holding my lucky knife. I couldn’t breathe, and pain shot through my chest.

  “Why are you carrying this kind of thing around?”

  He was wearing a black coat. He had a handsome face, but it was a bit too skinny. Why was he holding the knife I had in my bag?

  “Excuse me?”

  “Well, never mind.”

  The man returned the knife to me. At some point, my bag must have been opened.

  “Why did you meet with that man in the brown jacket?”

  “Huh?”

  “Why did you meet with Kizaki?”

  What was he talking about?

  “Kizaki? The man I met was named Kondo. What is this about?”

  “His name’s not Kondo.”

  I realized the man was wearing expensive clothes. He didn’t look suspicious. His fingers were kind of long, and his eyes were dark. For some reason, he seemed a bit irritated at himself for talking to me.

  “Let me tell you one thing. You shouldn’t get involved with that man.”

  “What?”

  “How should I put it? He’s a monster,” he said. “Well, then.” He tried to step away into the crowd. I stopped him.

  “My knife. I didn’t drop it, did I? Did you take it out of my bag?”

  All the people around us were moving in every direction. The man looked at me silently.

  “That’s a strange way to communicate,” I said.

  His expression changed for just a second. But he disappeared into the movement of the crowd. I didn’t understand what he was doing. He must have confused me for someone else.

  3.

  I was leaning on the wall in the hallway of the sixth floor of the Imperial Hotel.

  The elevator door opened, and an upset woman got off. She had a young face. She looked like she was still in college. She was wearing black stockings under blue denim shorts. I thought this must have been her, so I called out, “Kobayashi.” Before selling her body, a woman worries about all the different looks she’s getting. Even ones that don’t exist. Either she listens to music to isolate herself, or she stares at the screen of her cell phone. But this woman just walked, upset. She was surprised, and turned to face me.

  I was right—it was Kobayashi. I told her just what I was told to say.

  “We don’t need you anymore. Miyawaki told me to take care of this customer.”

  “What?”

  “Sorry. Here’s your cab fare. Aren’t you lucky!”

  She belonged to a prostitution ring. I had to secretly trade places with her, pretend to be a woman from this ring, and do my usual work. I wasn’t sure, but Miyawaki was probably the ring’s manager or something.

  I could see the tension in the girl’s face fade. She probably still wasn’t used to this. Why was she doing this kind of work? She was probably looking at me, thinking the same thing.

  I took off my sunglasses and pressed the room’s buzzer. A man wearing a nightgown opened the door. It was the man from the picture I’d been given. I didn’t know anything about him, except that he was the director of an independent administrative corporation. His lips were too thick, his nose was big, and he was terribly fat. This would be a challenge. It wouldn’t be like with the TV anchor.

  Seeing the coldness in his eyes, I knew he had sadistic tendencies.

  “Hey,” he said, watching me as I entered the room. He seemed unsatisfied. “Aren’t you going to get on your knees and bow? Isn’t that the rule where you work? When you come in, first you get on your knees, bow, and then say, ‘I look forward to serving you.’”

  I smiled a little to keep from showing my displeasure.

  “I’m sorry. I’m still new, so I didn’t know.”

  I noticed him react to what I said. Why do men prefer amateur prostitutes? I kept talking.

  “So please, teach me. This is from my company.”

  I took out a bottle. The label was that of some luxury health drink you could find in a drug store, but the contents were something else.

  “I always say I don’t need those. I can’t trust ’em.”

  “But . . .” I made an embarrassed face and moistened my eyes. “It works pretty well. I don’t know much about this work, and I want to enjoy myself, too. I want you to dominate me. I mean, I want to be treated like . . . Oh, this is embarrassing.”

  He looked at me with lustful eyes. There’s nothing but unhappiness in being wanted by an ugly man.

  “Please drink this . . . You’ll be stronger.”

  This wasn’t that other love hotel, so if I got myself into trouble, I wouldn’t be able to get help from Saito at the front desk. I gripped the stun gun in my bag. If he approached me, I’d have no other choice but to wrap my arms around him and turn it on. But he drank the health drink like an idiot. He put the drink on the table, his lips wet. He smiled and tried to get closer to me. But the drug in that bottle was quick-acting. He lost his balance. I pushed him lightly over onto the bed, and sat on the sofa some ways away. He struggled to get up, but he didn’t have the strength. That arrogant man looked like a bug to me. I lit a cigarette. The lights in the room shone orange. They illuminated this bug, about to fall asleep, and they illuminated unhappy me.

  As I smoked my cigarette, I thought about the word “monster.” For some reason the man who took my knife called Kondo a monster. I’d heard the same word a long time ago from Eri. She was my only friend, and that kid Shota’s mother. Both she and that kid died, leaving me all alone again.

  Eri and I had worked together at an exclusive club in Tokyo. Before that, in a distant time I didn’t know much about, she did something at a big food company in Nagoya.

  “It was awful working there. It was a super male-centric company. I didn’t go to a great college, but I’m tenacious, so I did my best and made something of a name for myself. But I wasn’t married, and already over thirty. So they started spreading stupid rumors.”

  Eri had told me about it late at night in her apartment. It was an unpretentious, one-room apartment in Meguro. In the ashtray were the thin menthol cigarettes she always used to smoke, and in the bed in the corner slept Shota. At the time, she was thirty-eight and I was just over twenty.

  “And then, I met a guy. He was young. Still in his twenties. I had dated a lot when I was younger, but for a while I had been avoiding men. I’d had some bad experiences . . . But that man was different. He’s Shota’s father.”


  Eri fell for him right away, but at first she couldn’t accept him as her lover. It may have been because she was considerably older. Maybe making him wait was her way of trying to make up for that handicap and put herself in a superior position in their relationship. It also might have been fear, or because of the little pride she had. After being wooed at length, she gave in. She let herself surrender to his passion, and they became lovers. After they’d had sex only two or three times, Eri had already become his woman. She forgot about her pride and gave herself entirely to him. She depended on him, and she felt no discomfort in needing him for even little things.

  “And then, he said, ‘Let’s get married.’ Just when I was trying to convince myself it was the right time. I was scared by how happy I’d feel, fulfilling our relationship . . . I’ve never been as happy as I was in that moment.”

  He worked in Tokyo at a mid-level advertising agency. It wasn’t a big company, but he had been given an important post even though he was still young. He was tall, and his eyes were big, but sometimes he’d squint like a child. He didn’t dress up much, but he always looked clean, and he liked cars. The long-distance relationship was hard on Eri, but he came to Nagoya frequently. And now he wanted to get married and live in Tokyo.

  Eri felt her current career path where she worked was hopeless, and she was tired. She was happy to quit her job. She wondered what kind of faces her disgusting bosses and the other female employees would make when she told them she was getting married. Eri immediately agreed to the man’s suggestion. The man pulled her close and said, “You should tell all those bastards who’ve spread strange rumors about you, and all the younger girls that work there. Tell them you’re going to quit because you’re getting married.”

  He smiled. Eri was in a state of bliss. She quit the job that she’d been working for more than ten years, packed up her things, got rid of her furniture, and took her bag to the man’s apartment in Tokyo. He said he would pay for the wedding, so Eri covered the honeymoon. Overjoyed, she made reservations for an expensive tour overseas. But it turned out the man actually had no job, had already been married for some time, and even had a kid. The room Eri arrived at was a weekly rental he had booked especially for that day.

  “I didn’t know what was happening. There, in that room, with him in front of me, I was dumbfounded. Wouldn’t you be? I’d given up my job and career, gotten rid of all of my furniture, and come to Tokyo with nothing but this body of mine . . . I was way past thirty, and I thought I was going to get married.”

  If it had been a case of the man’s not having the courage to leave his wife, if, when Eri finally came to Tokyo, he could only look at her with eyes full of despair, she would probably have been mad at his worthlessness, and feel angry at herself for being tricked. Or if he had been mocking her, if when she appeared naively he had laughed at her, she would have gotten mad at his cruel thoughtlessness, and been mad at herself for getting so obsessed. But what he did was different.

  “He had this serious look on his face. I had never seen him look so serious before. I had lost everything. There was nothing more ridiculous or pathetic than me. He looked at me and sympathized. He cried.”

  Eri didn’t understand what was happening. She couldn’t understand because the man crying was the one who brought her there.

  “And then his whole body started shaking . . . While he was staring at me . . . When I realized he was getting off, I was so scared I couldn’t move. I had been tricked. I was pathetic. I had been completely ruined. And when he looked at me, at how hopeless I was, he got off. He even said, ‘This is the most beautiful you’ve ever been.’ He covered me with his body. He was so excited he ripped at my clothes, and fucked me violently.”

  When Eri said that, she looked off into the distance as though she were telling me about something that happened long ago. The white smoke from Eri’s cigarette melted into the air as if it had given up.

  “Sex with him had never been that violent. It was like he couldn’t feel real desire except for a woman tortured to that extreme. He twisted my arms and pushed them over my head, and choked me over and over again, so hard. When I writhed in pain, he’d look at me with these sympathetic eyes, but still, he’d hurt me more. The more he sympathized with me, the more I thought myself pathetic, and the more he got off . . . He’d always been indifferent to sex, and never wanted to do it that much. But that was probably to save the novelty for that day. This had been his aim all along. In other words . . . What can I say? He was a monster. There are very few real monsters, and most people live their lives without ever meeting one. He was one. I was so scared I couldn’t move. It was so scary. More than anything, the scariest part was . . . I felt it.”

  Eri was not drunk when she told this to me. She looked at me, her eyes earnest.

  “I had never had sex that I felt so much. Until then, I had only had normal sex. If I got hurt, I’d stop being into it, and I hated fetishists. If I wasn’t in the mood, I wouldn’t do anything sexual. But even though I was crying, I came again and again. It was pathetic. It was the worst. But still, amidst all that, it was like someone lit a fire inside me. I thought that if he continued to abuse me . . . I don’t know. Like I’d arrive at something. This white and hazy place, somewhere nearby where the essence of all humanity was waiting to get me. At some point, this keychain on my bag fell on the floor. I bought it on a trip with him. It was some small town’s mascot I had bought to remember the trip. That bright but plain keychain looked extremely strange. For some reason, I stared at the glass of water he had been drinking the whole time. It was on the table, lit up by the lights in the room. The tremors from the bed shook the water. And while he was holding me down, he said, ‘Your personality, the life you lived, not ever wanting to lose to anyone, everything you’ve ever done since you were born, it’s like it was all just so someone could do this to you, isn’t it?’ He was on top of me, moving, and I was underneath him, crying. I thought I would go mad from how heartless he was. ‘ The moment I saw you, I imagined it ending like this. I’d been so excited for this moment.’ I didn’t understand. He didn’t smile. He looked so serious. It was like he wanted to savor everything he was feeling during sex.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “When the sex was over, he looked at me strangely. It was like he was trying to tell why a hopeless woman who had just been raped still keeps breathing, still keeps existing. And then, when he looked at me, worn ragged, he felt my pain and started crying again. And then, gradually, he started to get excited. While he looked at me, I watched helplessly as his breathing grew wild again, right in front of my eyes. If he was still excited after sex, I had already guessed what he’d do to me next. I was so scared, I left the room. To be honest, I ran away.”

  She smiled slightly.

  “That’s why my life still isn’t over. Didn’t I make it through over ten years of working in some chauvinist company, out in the country? I found another job and I work in the afternoons. I will never feel that kind of sex again . . . But the wounds from having experienced that will never go away. There’s a permanent dent inside me. He carved away something very important. Not my job or my hope or my happiness. No. Something more fundamental. He took that fundamental thing from me, savored it, and then threw it away. I may never be able to return to who I was. The wound of getting pleasure from what he did to me, pleasure so intense I didn’t know what to do, that will never disappear. That’s what it means to come into contact with a monster.”

  She looked at Shota, sleeping at the edge of the room.

  “I don’t know what happened to him after that, or what he’s doing now. And I don’t know if Shota was conceived that day in Tokyo, but he’s his child. Time just passed and I didn’t know what to do. Being the age I was, I felt a lot of pressure with that baby in my stomach. So I decided to have him. I had a C-section, so I don’t really know if it hurt to give birth. But he’s cute.
I don’t regret it. He’s a good kid, don’t you think?”

  I nodded. Why had Eri told me all that? Maybe she trusted me. Maybe the wall that closed off her insides, that strength, had grown a little weak. Eri’s body was worn down from alcohol. No one around her noticed her decline. Even though I was by her side, I couldn’t do anything to help. One night when it was snowing, Eri left her room alone, as if something was calling her. She was drunk, and got hit by a car.

  That night, I watched from my window as it snowed in Tokyo for the first time in ages. For some reason, the moon shone uncomfortably bright. Thin clouds stretched across the sky, but behind them, the moon gave off enough light to fill the sky.

  •••

  The insect of a man in front of me was asleep, his chest rising and falling. In the garbage can was a balled-up magazine, and on the table, a can of beer and a tube of some kind of ointment. This was a stranger’s hotel room. I put out my cigarette and took off the man’s gown. I was lucky that he had taken off his clothes for me. I stripped him completely naked, flipped him facedown like a dog, and raised his hips. I tied his hands behind his back. I scattered the hotel’s snacks around his face. Next I ripped a page out of the hotel notepad, wrote i love renho, and stuck it on the man’s naked back. I giggled while I took pictures of him. I didn’t feel any heat in my body, but still I thought this was even better than the time with the anchor. Eri would probably have laughed if she saw this guy. Eri was always calm and cool, but she probably would have laughed. Shota would have laughed, too. I couldn’t see the moon through the window, but I wished the moon could have seen, too. If the cruel moon had seen this, even it probably would have laughed a little.

  4.

  It was a weekend night in Ikebukuro.

  Every street was overflowing with people. The hanging neon words shone with purpose. All those lights collided, illuminating the city. I tried to use my whole body to feel the city at night as I walked down an alley on the west side of the station. There was a fire in the distance. A fire truck slipped by easily, its red ripping open even the clashing neon and stopping all the pedestrians and vehicles along its path. I could see gray smoke rising in the distance. Fires cause anxiety. The ensuing bustle, like a festival, raises the temperature of the night. The moon was in the sky. An ancient name for the moon is Luna, which is the origin of the English word “lunacy.” In Japanese, the word for possession, “tsuki,” is also said to have originated from “tsuki,” the Japanese word for moon. The human’s internal clock runs at twenty-five-hour intervals, and thus one of our days is closer to the 24.8 hours it takes the moon to revolve around the earth than the twenty-four hours it takes the earth to go around the sun. The revolution of the moon is always deviating from the earth’s trek around sun. Humans are drawn less to the sun than the moon. They are drawn less to the day than the night. Less to the everyday than to quiet lunacy.