by Ryu Murakami
“All right, Kenji,” Frank said, “you don’t have to have sex with her. But how about picking up that ear and sticking it in her pussy? You can do that much, can’t you?”
He said this quietly, sounding almost despondent now. “Ever crammed an ear into a pussy before?” he asked me. I didn’t answer. His face was expressionless as he put the knife down on the sofa, plucked the dust-covered ear off the floor, folded it, and tried to insert it in Lady #5’s vagina. He didn’t seem to realize she was wearing a tampon. He had about half of the ear buried inside her but was meeting resistance. I called to him. He pushed harder.
“Frank. Hey, Frank.” I rose to a crouch. “It was that time of the month for her. She’s wearing a tampon.”
Frank peered at me, then nodded and removed the ear. He curled the string around one finger and tugged. When the little cylinder, swollen and pink, slid out to dangle at the end of the string, a thick ooze of blood followed and soaked darkly into the sofa between her legs. Frank stared at that little pool of blood for a long time, as though mesmerized by it. While he was doing this, Mr. Children went Oooh and made as if to stand up. He wasn’t trying to escape—it was more like he’d suddenly reawakened to the pain where his ears and nose had been. Frank snapped out of his reverie and turned to him. Still dangling the tampon from his right hand and holding the ear in his left, he took the man in his arms as if embracing a lover and broke his neck. I heard a dry crack, like a dead branch breaking, and with his head twisted at the now-familiar angle, Mr. Children plopped back down on the sofa. It was murder with all the drama of picking up a fallen hat and replacing it on a rack. Frank looked at me, dropped the tampon, and retrieved the knife. He wore a petulant expression as he stepped toward me, like a small child who’s tired of playing. The pointed end of the knife was closing in on my throat when my mobile phone rang. I scrambled to push the blinking green button. Frank hesitated for a moment, then brought the knife closer to my throat.
“Jun? Yeah, it’s Kenji, I’m in Kabuki-cho, with Frank!”
I rattled this off in English, in a loud voice, and Frank retracted the knife a centimeter or so. I kept talking, raising my voice even more.
“Try me again in an hour, and if I don’t answer, call the police!”
Before shutting off the phone I heard Jun shout: “Kenji, wait a minute!” I didn’t have a minute, though—the blade was nearly touching my throat.
This was the first time I’d taken a good, close look at the knife that had just killed four women. The blade was only about two centimeters wide, but maybe twenty centimeters long. I remember thinking that it was longer than my penis when erect—but I can’t tell you why I had such an idiotic thought at a moment like this. The base of the blade was engraved with the mark of some sort of fish. Maybe it was the type of knife fishermen use to clean their catch. The handle was cream-colored, like ivory, with wavy grooves on the bottom to fit your fingers. Incredibly, Frank’s fingers and hands hadn’t so much as a drop of blood on them, despite the used tampon and the severed ear and all the rest. Now that I thought about it, it seemed he’d taken special care not to muss himself, handling the ear, for example, as if it were something breakable as he tried to insert it in the woman’s vagina. I saw no blood on his clothes or face, either. Obviously Frank had mastered a technique for cutting throats without spraying blood. Not even the slash straight across #5’s larynx had caused anything like the crimson geyser you see in movies. The tip of the knife began to waver slightly. Frank was muttering something under his breath, and I closed my eyes. For the first time I became aware of the smell of blood all around me, so strong that I could hardly breathe. It was like the smell in a metal shop—that metallic dust in the air. I remembered the warehouse I went to with Dad, and its rows of giant machines. I saw Mom’s face, too. The thought of how sad she’d be when she heard I was dead made tears well up in my eyes, but I instinctively felt I mustn’t cry. There are bastards in this world evil enough to commit murder just to watch others weep. For Frank it clearly wasn’t only that, but I wasn’t about to risk inciting him by whimpering and wailing. I crouched there with my eyes closed, not daring to move a muscle. I felt a light tap on my shoulder.
“All right, Kenji. Let’s go.”
Frank said this softly in my ear. Like somebody who’d had a pleasant enough time and was now ready to move on to the next diversion. For a moment I thought that when I opened my eyes I’d find that nothing had really happened, that I’d imagined or dreamed it all. Maki would be blathering about super-exclusive clubs and liquours, Mr. Children would be hitting on Lady #5, Lady #3 would be singing her Amuro song, the waiter’s lip ring would be jiggling, and the manager would be adding up the tab and looking grumpy. I heard Frank say: “Kenji, wake up, let’s get out of here.” I turned my head to one side to avoid seeing his face and opened my eyes. It wasn’t a dream. Right in front of me were Lady #5’s gaping wound and Mr. Children’s broken, twisted neck.
Frank raised the steel shutter to let us out, then pulled it down again behind us and said: “Did that scare you?” As if we’d just ridden the new roller coaster at Magic Mountain or something. My answer—and even I couldn’t believe I was saying it—was: “A little.” I think my body, and my nervous system, were trying to get back to normal. They wanted me to let it go, forget about it—what was done was done. Frank didn’t have the long, thin knife in his hand anymore. Had I seen him slip it into an ankle-sheath? I seemed to remember that, but the memory was as vague as something from a dream.
“Well, shall we?” said Frank, hooking his arm around my shoulder and stepping out onto the street. I might have shaken him off and run away shouting MURDERER!—but I didn’t. I couldn’t. It was as if my nerves were still curled up in a ball. My knees and hips throbbed with a dull pain, like you get when you lie in bed all day, my pulse felt weak, and my vision was still messed up. Everything was blurry, and the familiar blinking neon lights of the sex clubs seemed to stab at my retinas. I found myself keeping an eye out for Noriko. Would she snap out of her trance at some point? Even if she remembered all about meeting me and Frank, and discovered what had happened in the pub, I was fairly sure she’d vanish rather than cooperate with the police. Noriko was probably on probation and not allowed to work in the sex industry.
“Kenji.” Frank pointed at the police box near the corner. “Why don’t you run over there and tell the cops what happened?”
To have him more or less confirm in words what he’d just done put a tremendous amount of stress on me somehow, and I was suddenly trembling all over.
“Kenji, you know, I’ve told you nothing but lies so far. I hope you won’t hold it against me, because the truth is I can’t help it. My brain doesn’t work right and I can’t connect the memories in my head very well. And it’s not just memories, either, it’s me myself. There are several me’s inside this body, not just one, and I can’t get them to connect, or merge. But I’m pretty sure the me I am right now is the real me, and you may not believe this but the me I am now can’t understand the me who was inside that pub a while ago. You’re probably thinking, where does he get the gall to make excuses like this, but I honestly feel it wasn’t me doing those things, it was somebody else who looks exactly like me. It’s not the first time he’s done that, either. I’ve been trying to make sure it didn’t happen again, though the only strategy I could come up with was to not lose my temper. When they cut out part of my brain, like I told you yesterday, that’s what started it all, according to the doctor the police sent me to. The police, yes. I’ve been caught before, and sometimes that’s part of the punishment, being put in a psych ward. But believe me, I’ve been punished in plenty of ways, by both God and society.”
He kept his eyes on the police box as he spoke. We were both leaning against a cinderblock wall between two buildings, and the police box was about twenty meters away, next to a pharmacy with a garish neon sign flashing DRUGS DRUGS DRUGS. At a glance you might not have recognized it as a police box. It
was a new structure, and so much bigger than most police boxes that it could have passed for the entrance to a small hotel or recital hall. But a number of policemen were milling around inside it, and now and then a cop passed through wearing a bulletproof vest. The rumor was that even the big windows were bulletproof. Only in Kabuki-cho.
“I’m going to buy myself a hooker now.” Frank looked over at the few scattered ladies standing in the shadows of buildings across the street. “My last sex,” he added, contorting his face into a lonesome-looking smile.
He took the snakeskin wallet from his jacket pocket and handed me most of the ¥10,000 bills inside. Ten or twelve of them, judging from the thickness, but I stuffed them in my pocket without counting.
“That leaves me ¥40,000,” he said, shifting his gaze between me and one of the streetwalkers. “Is that enough?”
“Should be,” I said. “The going price is ¥30,000, plus the cost of the room.”
Frank headed across the street, and I followed, not knowing what else to do. I’ll translate for you, I told him, and Frank said: You don’t get it, do you.
“You don’t get it, Kenji. I’m not your client anymore. You’re free, go ahead and go to the police, tell them I’m a criminal. I’m tired, Kenji. So tired. I came to Japan looking for peace. Peace of a sort I thought I could find only here. But now I’ve gone and done something really out of line. What’s to become of me? I want to leave it all up to you, Kenji. I’m entrusting my fate to you, my only Japanese friend. That is, of course, if you still think of me as a friend.”
The word “peace” had a compelling reality coming from Frank’s lips. I could feel the weariness and pain behind it. And call me a fool, but I believed him. I don’t think my brain was functioning properly yet.
“You understand now?” Frank said, and I mumbled, “Yeah.”
He left me there and moved toward the hooker. Most of the women on this street were Asians who for one reason or another weren’t able to work at the Korean and Chinese clubs that specialized in organized prostitution. Some of them were shockingly old, but all of them, it was safe to say, had been cut loose by the yakuza who’d arranged for their visas and employment. A few were from South or Central America and had probably ended up here after being ostracized by their colleagues down the road in Okubo, where many of the hookers were from places like Colombia and Peru. The woman Frank was now negotiating with looked to be one of these, but apparently they were managing to communicate. I heard snippets of his broken Spanish—tres and cuatro and bien and so on. The woman smiled at him shyly from time to time. A woman like her, I thought . . .
A woman like her turns to prostitution because she has no other means of making money. Which isn’t the case with high-school girls involved in compensated dating, for example, or the ladies in the omiai pub. Most Japanese girls sell it, not because they need money, but as a way of escaping loneliness. That seems particularly unnatural and perverse to me, compared to the situation of all the women I know who made it here from mainland China only by having relatives pool their resources to come up with the price of an airplane ticket. What’s even more perverse is that nobody seems to acknowledge how out of whack this state of affairs is. Whenever the “experts” talk about compensated dating their main concern is to put the blame somewhere else. They pretend it has nothing to do with themselves. The Latin American woman Frank was negotiating with wasn’t even wearing a coat in this freezing weather. No stockings, either, just a scarf over her head, like the Little Match Girl, and she was carrying only a vinyl tote bag, something you’d take to the beach. Women like her were selling the one marketable thing they had, simply to secure the bare minimum their families needed to survive. It’s not a good thing, but it’s not unnatural or perverse.
I was getting back some feeling in my body and turned up my collar against the cold. I could feel the icy, late December air on my skin, and this sensation marked a border between me and the outside world that I was glad to have back. Not that I’d fully recovered, of course, but as I watched Frank and the woman talking, one of the many filmy layers covering Kabuki-cho fell away, and I seemed to regain the ability to focus my eyes. Frank had told me to go to the police. My memory still wasn’t working very well, but I was sure that’s what he’d said. Why would he say that, though? I was leaning against the cinderblock wall again, between a love hotel and a stray girlie bar. Few people were on the streets tonight, what with the cold and the fact that tomorrow was New Year’s Eve, and even the touts were relatively inactive. A noodle shop famous for its incredibly spicy ramen, which people actually queued up for in summertime, was closed, and a mangy, skinny dog lay huddled against the darkened glass door. In front of a sushi bar, with its metal shutter pulled halfway down, an apprentice chef was hosing vomit off the sidewalk. And the sputtering neon sign of a love hotel slashed pink and yellow wounds across the shiny body of a Mercedes, the only car in the parking lot.
No sooner had I regained my ability to feel the cold than I noticed how incredibly thirsty I was. I crossed the street and bought a can of Java Tea at a vending machine. From there I had a good view of the pharmacy and the police box. Frank and the woman were some distance down the street in the opposite direction, near the entrance to a love hotel. How come I wasn’t running over to the cops and reporting what had happened? Somehow that course of action didn’t seem to have any reality for me, and as I wondered why, I glanced back toward the hotel and saw that Frank and the Latin American woman were gone.
It made me uneasy to lose sight of Frank. I even thought about going to look for him, then thought again: He was a fucking murderer. The police box was still no more than thirty meters away. I could be on the other side of that bulletproof glass in twenty seconds—much less if I sprinted. I heard my own voice say: What are you waiting for? He’s a murderer, a brutal, merciless mass murderer, an evil man. . . . Evil? Well, wasn’t he? What was I waiting for? I took two steps toward the police box. I’d once read an article about a little girl in England who’d grown so attached to her kidnapper that after she’d been rescued she claimed to like him more than her mummy and daddy, and a bank teller in Sweden who fell in love with the man who robbed the bank and took her hostage. The article said that in extreme situations like this, when a criminal literally controls whether you live or die, you can develop a feeling of intimacy with him that’s very much like love. Frank hadn’t hurt me. He’d grabbed me by the hair and collar and thrown me to the floor, but he didn’t break my neck or cut off my ears. Still, that was no reason not to go to the police. Murder isn’t something you can just turn a blind eye to. I took three more steps, and my feet stopped again. I hadn’t decided to stop, my feet just took it upon themselves to do so. They didn’t seem to want to go to the cops. I drained the rest of my Java Tea. Do you have a problem with Frank being arrested? I asked myself. The answer came back loud and clear. Hell, no, a voice said. Wouldn’t bother me at all.
Whose voice is that? I muttered, and lifted the can of tea to my lips again, though it was empty. Not a drop was left, but I did this two or three more times before noticing. Maybe I should telephone someone. But who? Who? said the voice. I took out my mobile, and a picture of Jun’s face formed in my mind. Not Jun, not now. Yokoyama-san? What would I say to him? Yokoyama-san, the guy turned out to be a murderer after all, and now I’m thinking about going to the police. Do you think I should? I should, right? I looked up and down the street. Frank was nowhere to be seen. The cityscape around me didn’t seem real. It couldn’t have been a more familiar place—one of the streets off Kuyakusho Avenue in good old Kabuki-cho—but I felt as if I was adrift in a strange town in some foreign country. It was like losing my way in a dream. I reminded myself I was still in shock, still not completely in control of myself. A uniformed cop came out of the police box, climbed on a bicycle, and pedaled this way.
I was sure he was staring at me as he approached. He was the only thing alive and moving in the universe. My legs had seized up again. It fel
t as if the circulation was cut off down there and the blood wasn’t getting to them. As if they weren’t even my legs. I was freezing from the waist down, but the cold wasn’t the problem. I lifted the can of tea to my lips again but tasted only metal. I remembered the intense smell of blood in the omiai pub, and suddenly felt dizzy. The policeman reached the intersection, and without thinking about it I raised the mobile to my ear. Pretending I was on the phone. Instead of turning right, toward me, the cop hung a left and pedaled off down Love Hotel Lane. I watched him go, still mashing my ear with the mobile. The bicycle seemed to take forever to make the left turn but then sailed past another girlie bar at the corner and vanished. And once he’d disappeared from sight, I found I wasn’t quite certain I’d actually seen the cop ride by in the first place. In a while my ear began to hurt and I realized I was crushing it with the phone. I had the phone in my right hand, the Java Tea can in my left. The can was moist and clammy. My palms were sweating, and the mobile too was wet when I finally pried it away from my ear. I hadn’t realized I was sweating, and wondered if the tea had seeped straight out through my pores. That’s when it dawned on me that I wasn’t going to the police box. I don’t have to report to the stinking cops— it was incredible what a relief this thought was.
Explaining the situation to the cops would have been a pain in the ass of epic proportions. A pain in the ass, I muttered to myself, and heard myself chuckle. How many hours—no, days—would the police grill me? It wouldn’t escape their notice that I was a tourist guide without a license. That would probably spell trouble for Yokoyama-san, too. And when the whole story came out it would destroy my mother. Not only would the police forbid me to work, they’d now be keeping an eye me. I know how they operate. I’d be treated from the start as a probable accomplice. It would destroy Mom, I thought again . . . and then I thought of Lady #3. Naturally she and Mr. Children and the others had families too. I remembered their corpses, and their final moments. The images flickered through my mind like drug flashbacks, but unaccompanied by any real sense of revulsion or outrage. I remembered the sound of the guy’s neck bones cracking, but all I could think was: So that’s what it’s like when you break somebody in two. Maybe my nerves still hadn’t thawed out. I tried to feel sorry for the people who’d been killed but found, to my horror, that I couldn’t. I couldn’t feel any sympathy for them at all.
