Last Winter We Parted

by Fuminori Nakamura

  But there would be major discrepancies between the diary Yuriko Kobayashi left behind and Yudai Kiharazaka’s testimony. That’s why we decided to have her ask him to kill her.

  “Even just sometimes, I want to die. Maybe when I die, I’ll think of you. Then take a picture of the place where I die.” “I’m kidding—what I said before was a joke. I don’t want to die yet.” “… I don’t know why, I just want to give it all up.” “I feel like I’m being held prisoner by you … I’m kidding, it’s a joke—what am I talking about?” “… I’m running out of pills. I need more.” “You want me to die? But wait. I’ll write a suicide note, that way it won’t cause any trouble for you.” “I hate you. I’m kidding, I love you.”

  Looking back on it now, it seems like she was protecting herself by being the one to bring up “death” herself. Because in Yudai Kiharazaka’s mind, her murder—and his retaking of the photographs he had failed at—was clearly supposed to happen. But, if she were going to write a suicide note, then it was best to wait until then. Looking at it from Kiharazaka’s perspective, she must have seemed like an emotionally unstable woman. She took a lot of pills in front of him. But they were just vitamins.

  We also prepared the notes for her to throw out the window because her legs were tied and she was being held captive. We cut locks of hair. Akari’s hair. Naturally, this hair would be identical to the DNA of the dead body.

  While Akari Kiharazaka was abusing and heaping invective upon me, at her core, she was falling for me. Of course, the feelings that she had for me were nothing more than her own particular kind of sentimentality. She came to me for sex repeatedly. You probably think that I would have been disgusted to be with a woman like her. But, well, I wasn’t. To be honest, I enjoyed it—sleeping with a woman that I knew was going to die soon. I enjoyed it even as I pitied her. It was as if my feelings of pity spiced up the sex. Giving sexual pleasure to someone whom I would soon kill, I had the feeling of having control over this woman, of being able to do whatever I liked. I was no longer the person I had been. I needed to become even more monstrous than this brother and sister. I was forcing myself to become accustomed to this version of me.

  Even when you told me that you were leaving me, I still didn’t feel like we had parted. Not even when you died, strange as it may sound. That’s why I thought I could live with your doll … It wasn’t until last winter that I finally felt apart from you. That night when I first slept with Akari Kiharazaka. The night when I resolved to become a monster. Someone who is your boyfriend should not be a monster. Isn’t that right? Last winter, we parted, and I decided to become a monster. I ceased being the person I was. I destroyed myself, so that I could take revenge on them.

  … I’ll tell you about the night when we put Akari Kiharazaka to sleep. I wrapped a towel around her face, blindfolding her. That kind of thing excited her. Then, while we were having sex, I switched places. With the lawyer. The lawyer got undressed and approached Akari, who had no idea.

  Had she realized that I had switched with someone else, she probably would have enjoyed it. That’s the kind of woman she was. But surely she never would have thought that the guy she was screwing was the guy she had oppressed and treated like an insect.

  I smoked a cigarette in the next room, thinking about how strange it was that I didn’t feel anything.

  When I went back into the room, the lawyer was already wearing his suit and waiting for me. She was knocked out and her hands and feet were tied up. After that, we held her captive for a few days. I couldn’t decide whether or not to send the video we had shot to Yudai Kiharazaka. If I sent it to him, despite his suspicions, he might still be aroused by the film, even without knowing that the man her sister was screwing in the film was the lawyer she had made to suffer.

  The day of the crime. Strangely, I was not nervous. Based on my long hours of observation, I had a good grasp on Yudai Kiharazaka’s behavioral patterns. Since he wasn’t actually holding Yuriko Kobayashi captive, while he was out, we went into his studio and made sure that everything was progressing according to plan. We had made sure to have a duplicate key. Our crime took place on the day after Yuriko Kobayashi had mentioned in her diary how lately Yudai Kiharazaka had gotten bored with her, and she had the definite sense that he intended to kill her. We would set fire to his sister just as Kiharazaka was returning home and then leave through a window. It was simple. I had the lawyer film it all. Like I said before, as a precaution for any unexpected situations, he carried a pistol.

  I didn’t think that what we were doing was all that strange. Within the monster I had become, the part of me that retained a trace of humanity may have dimmed any memory as a means of protecting myself. Then again, I may just be maintaining a certain outward appearance. But, you know, that’s a lie. I remember everything clearly. I remember joking with Yuriko Kobayashi, peering at her through the camera lens and shouting at her to hurry up and get Akari ready. I remember, over the course of a few days, whenever Akari would wake up from the slumber we had put her in, knocking her out again until it was time, to the point where she was almost anesthetized, almost like she was dead inside that huge trunk. I remember how I didn’t feel the least hesitation at the moment when we set the flames on her. I remember my hand moving as if I were just setting fire to some pieces of cardboard that had been lying around. Striking the match, slowly bringing my arm up from below, and then releasing it from my fingers. Watching the flame as it was about to descend on her, I was thinking to myself: This is what I did it for. I changed who I was so that I could raise my arm this effortlessly and toss the flame just so. I felt like I could do it again, even another time after that. I even vaguely remembered what had happened during the countless times we had experimented. First to burn was the surface of the cloth doused in kerosene. The cloth was flame resistant. But, of course, only to an extent—the material caught fire and when the flames reached Akari and the sofa cushions on which she was lying, which had been doused with even more kerosene, everything ignited fiercely in an instant. We had used ignit-able liquid as well as accelerant. The entire sofa was feverishly engulfed in intense flames.

  Later when I saw the film, I thought it still seemed a little dangerous. Because when he came into the room, the fire had yet to grow as big as we thought it would. No matter how many times we rehearsed, the perfect timing was quite difficult to achieve. Seeing it from his shaken perspective, with the entire back of the sofa consumed in flames and her arm flung out, it must have looked like her body was already on fire. But in fact the fire had yet to spread to Akari’s body under the cloth that we had laid over her. If at that point he had pulled on the arm that was poking out, even though they both would have sustained burns, I bet he could have easily saved his own sister. But, sure enough, he took photographs instead. I felt as though I was watching the same scene as when you had died. Except, of course, this film had transformed it into an act of revenge. The lawyer had the pistol and had been watching closely from outside, but by taking his photos, Kiharazaka narrowly escaped death, even if only for a little while.

  After it was all finished, we had Yuriko Kobayashi undergo minor plastic surgery. We fixed the parts of her face that had always bothered her, making them look just right. We didn’t try to make her look exactly like Akari Kiharazaka. That would have been impossible, plus I had confirmed with Akari numerous times that she had made her brother destroy all the photos of herself, and she hadn’t let him take any photos of her since they had grown up. She said that she hated the way it seemed to capture her true nature. Since from then on she had avoided having any photographs taken; if we were to destroy the few photos that she herself still had, then basically the only quasi-available photographs by which to confirm what she looked like would be her school yearbooks. And those were from quite a while ago.

  The problem would be when the police tried to contact Yudai Kiharazaka’s sister to speak to her about her younger brother, that kind of thing. At that point, she shouldn’t look
like Yukiko Kobayashi, whom Yudai Kiharazaka had photographed and was presumed dead. We cut her hair and dyed it black, and as for the minor plastic surgery, we just had her eyes made bigger and had a mole removed. Then, the only time she met with the police, we had her wear glasses without any makeup. Akari had always been the kind of woman who wore heavy makeup. Naturally, it would have been preferable to have more extensive surgery, but what we did was easily manageable and, when the lawyer and I saw her, we both felt like this was sufficient. The young detective who met with her may have thought that there was a vague resemblance between this “sister” and the photo of Yuriko Kobayashi, and may have thought that was the reason Kobayashi was targeted by this photographer. The police weren’t going to haul out an old yearbook to confirm what the “sister” looked like; being neither a victim nor a suspect, this “sister” was nothing more than the sibling of the perpetrator.

  After Yudai Kiharazaka was arrested, he said that she set herself on fire. That she had been suicidal and, without waiting for his agreement, had done it herself. However, as a man who had previously had a similar “accident,” there was no credibility to what he said. When they showed him the diary Yuriko Kobayashi left behind, he said that she must have even been afraid of him. He ended up testifying that she was emotionally unstable and had accused him of holding her captive. Nobody believed him. The fact that he suffered from manic-depression also worked against him. To top it off, he had hired a lawyer at the request of his “sister.” Presumed to be an ally, this lawyer was in fact one of the guys who had framed him for everything. Everything at the trial worked against him.

  It was not good that, after setting fire to “Yuriko Kobayashi,” he had tried to destroy the evidence. The truth was, after seeing the photographs, he was stunned he had failed yet again. But he still couldn’t bring himself to throw away his work, and just like before, he had simply sent the film to the doll creator. Among those photos, there were more composites. This time they were from before the incident. Composite study photographs, almost like practice shots for the kind of photographs he wanted to create if there were a next time, when Yuriko Kobayashi would be on fire. He did that kind of thing, preparatory composites before a shoot, a lot. But his fatal move was not contacting the police or the fire department right away.

  His “sister” didn’t come to see him; she was admitted into a psychiatric hospital. The only ones left who would know she wasn’t Akari when they saw her were her brother and the guys whom she had dumped, but just to be on the safe side, it was better not to let anyone see her. She wrote a letter, the contents imitating what Akari would write. Of course, she couldn’t write exactly the same way. A specialist would have seen through it right away. But who’s going to avidly remember such details about their own sibling’s exact handwriting in this age of email? If she made the appropriate effort in her mimicry, no one would notice.

  This is something I found out later, but apparently he wanted to die. He may have even attempted suicide. When the incident with you occurred, despite the fact that it was an accident, even though he was saved, I bet a part of him felt like he had “murdered” you. He said as much to his sister, that afterward it was just as if he had killed you himself. And then he did it again. The exact same thing. He didn’t have the courage to actually die, so they were going to kill him. That must have been the way he thought about his death sentence.

  I think that the real reason for his death wish was probably because of his slump. At the time, he couldn’t seem to take any more decent photographs. Butterflies was his last one. The photography that drove him mad was his whole life. And then, he had failed at capturing someone’s death in a photograph. Even when faced with such brutally compelling “raw material,” he managed to take only mediocre photos.

  He would never be like the painter he so admired in “Hell Screen.”

  In the end, he would never ultimately become “authentic.”

  In other words, this “incident” has revisited upon the brother and sister the same acts that they did to us. I had slept with his sister, not knowing that she had collaborated in the death of my beloved. Blindfolded, the sister had gasped and panted with the guy she herself had oppressed. We did the exact same thing to the dear sister of the brother that he had done to you, Akiko. And then, by this very act, boldly confronted with the drying up of his own talent and awash in the public’s hatred, the brother was sentenced to be executed, without having actually killed a single person.

  I thought, when this was all over, I would experience some kind of revelation about good and evil, but it’s strange … I don’t feel anything at all.

  It’s funny, even though I’m sure I’ve become a monster … I still love you, even now.

  11

  THE HUGE CLOCK hanging on the wall seems to have stopped moving.

  “I think I want to quit working on this project.”

  The moment I say it, I feel a small pang of regret, along with a calm sense of release. My editor gazes across at me, looking slightly dazed.

  “Why …?”

  “… It’s too much for me. I’m sorry.”

  “I want you to explain to me, specifically. What happened?”

  We are at my editor’s apartment. I stare at the glass of whiskey on the table. My editor is staring at the same thing. He lights a cigarette. I remain silent.

  “… You mean, you’re in over your head?”

  I look at the unmoving clock on the wall. It seems disproportionately large for the room. He opens his mouth to speak.

  “Have you read Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood?”

  “… I have.”

  “After he completed his nonfiction novel, he couldn’t write another decent piece of work. His spirit was broken. Then again, at least he did finish that book.”

  Yudai Kiharazaka’s sister had said something very similar to me. My heart starts to race. My editor raises his voice slightly.

  “Sure, the way that I do things may be relentless. Some have even called me pathological because I always push a writer beyond the limits of his abilities. And as a result, some writers’ spirits have broken. But I just want to make a good book. That’s all. It may sound callous, but I’m not thinking about the writer. The only thing I care about it is the work.”

  “I understand that.”

  “Really?”

  The editor looks me straight in the eyes.

  “Capote managed to write his all. He put his heart and soul into it. And you—you’re going to give up at this point?”

  He still isn’t finished with what he has to say.

  “Well, this is frustrating. I’m disappointed to hear your position. It sounds like you’re putting your personal life above your own work. Get out of here.”

  He takes another drag from his cigarette.

  “Don’t bother sending me your expenses. This will be a major loss for us. And I don’t want to deal with you anymore.”

  “I might have walked away, pretending that I didn’t know anything …”

  Despite what I say, the editor is still puffing on his cigarette. I take a deep breath in order to calm my growing nervousness.

  “Akari Kiharazaka showed me the photograph.”

  My throat feels dry as I speak.

  “The photo of her from long ago, the only one that Yudai Kiharazaka had kept … It was of a girl I didn’t recognize. It was completely different from the photo of her and her brother that Akari Kiharazaka had shown me previously. That is to say … the first photo was a composite. To make it seem like she was Yudai Kiharazaka’s sister. To fool me.”

  The editor is looking me in the face.

  “That’s not all. The photos that you first showed me of Akari Kiharazaka were of her passing herself off as the ‘sister.’ You made sure to make them seem like they had been supplied by the Kiharazakas. Actual photographs that show what Akari Kiharazaka really looks like probably don’t exist anymore. Except for elementary or junior high school yearbooks and that one
photo of her when she was a girl that she still has, the one that her brother saved. And so I had no reason not to believe, as I was told, that she was Akari Kiharazaka … Also there were no photos of Yuriko Kobayashi released to the public. The media withheld them due to the strongly expressed wishes of the ‘bereaved family.’ And in the archives I received from you, the one person there weren’t any photos of was Yuriko Kobayashi. And even the photos of her after she had become Akari—you only showed me those briefly, you didn’t hand them over.”