by Yoko Ogawa
“You do all this at the Iris, you must be used to it.”
The chair on my back knocked into the walls and furniture, tightening the knots. I used every part of my body that remained free, my chin and mouth, my sides and legs, to turn the lock, carry the cups, fold the quilt. He followed me around, snapping pictures the whole time. My face contorted with pain, my breasts dripping with spilled tea, my body staggering through the bedroom.
When I finished my chores, he bound my feet to the legs of the chair so I couldn’t move at all. My joints were bent at unnatural angles, and my hands and feet were numb and cold. I felt as though I had become a chair, my skin the leather, my fat the cushion, my bones the wood. A chair from the tips of my fingers to the tips of my toes.
The translator sat down in the chair. He smiled happily, rested his elbows on the arms, crossed his legs. My body supported his whole weight.
“Heavy?” he asked, looking back at me. I couldn’t answer, not even a nod. “What a comfortable chair,” he said, slowly stroking the armrests and the back. I had no idea whether he was rubbing the chair or me.
I became other things as well. A table, a shoe cupboard, a clock, a sink, a garbage can. He used the cord to twist my body into these shapes, tying my arms and legs, my hips, my chest, my neck. He worked quickly, binding wrists to drawer pulls, hips to doors, fingers to knobs. The cord obeyed him, and he used it to bend and tie me into whatever shape was in his head.
My whole body was red with rope burns. The skin wasn’t broken, but there was a great deal of pain. It spread across my skin, and as it dissolved into a single, sharp agony, I was overcome with pleasure. I went happily to fetch his shoes in the hall. In the bathroom, I gratefully received the saliva he spat into my mouth.
When he opened the door at the back of the kitchen, I had no idea what was waiting for me. I found myself in a small, dark, windowless room. All four walls were lined to the ceiling with shelves. The air was stale and dry, with a powdery smell of soap and flour and dust.
It was the pantry. The shelves were stocked with food of all sorts, and what didn’t fit had been piled on the floor: canned goods, rice, spaghetti, chocolate, mineral water, wine. … I wondered how many years it would take him to eat all of this by himself. The shelves sagged under the weight of his provisions and seemed on the verge of collapsing.
“Go on,” he said, his voice filling the little room. Once we were both inside, there was no space. He took down a bunch of onions suspended from a hook on the ceiling. The onions looked delicious, with pale, papery skin.
“Get down on the floor,” he said. The orders came one after the other. He passed a chain through the cord binding my wrists and pulled it up on the hook. Suddenly, he seemed extraordinarily strong. He had no idea how to swim and could not even properly hold an ice cream cone, but he could hang a body from the ceiling with total ease.
The flashbulbs blinded me. The wind seemed more remote now, but it continued to howl. The rattling of the doors and windows reached deep into the pantry. The lens came peering in at the bulging muscles on my neck, my exposed sex, the sweaty backs of my legs. I could not see his face behind the camera, but I could tell from the way he grasped it with his fingers that his contempt for me was absolute. My body revolved imperceptibly in space. The chain grated against the hook, making a noise that only heightened the pain.
Suspended above the floor, I suddenly knew I could no longer escape. My wrists seemed about to rip from my arms, and I pictured the scene to myself. My skin would peel away, the flesh would tear, and finally the chain would break the bones. I would fall to the floor with a sharp snap, then hold my arms in front of my eyes, only to discover that there was nothing left below the wrists. Thick drops fall from above, and when I look up, the head of the translator’s wife is hanging from the hook—with the scarf still wrapped around her neck.
His back was illuminated by the thin strip of light coming from the kitchen. I could sense moisture in the wind— perhaps the rain had started at last.
He changed the film again, pulling roll after roll from the pocket of his jacket. Suddenly, there was a sound of movement in a corner. The translator kicked aside a bag of rice to reveal a small cage trap. Inside was a young mouse.
“Poor thing,” he said. The mouse’s tail was caught, and it squealed and dragged the cage behind it, trying to escape. “It has to be punished.”
The struggling and writhing must have caused the mouse great pain. If the tail ripped from the body, it would certainly bleed. What color was mouse blood?
The translator pulled a riding crop from between two jars. I hadn’t noticed it concealed on the dark shelves.
It was long and flexible. The velvet handle glistened with sweat. It must have been much like the one that Marie’s beloved riding master had carried. He brought it down against my thigh and then flicked it back in a lovely arc through the air—so lovely I almost forgot that it was meant to hurt me. He changed the angle ever so slightly with each stroke, so it never left the same mark twice. He whipped my flesh in the crowded pantry, never striking the shelves or the wall or the chain, but always finding me.
More than the pain, it was the sound that captivated me. It was high and pure, like a stringed instrument. The whip played these notes on my body, contracting the organs or bones concealed beneath the skin. I would never have believed that I could make such fascinating sounds, as though the whip were releasing wells of music from the deepest cavities in my body.
The mouse was still trying to escape, but the more it struggled, the tighter the trap held its tail. It was slumped over on its side now, its eyes dark and damp. It ground its tiny teeth and squealed incessantly.
The whip snapped again, sending pain from my shoulder down my side. I cried in ecstasy, drowning out the squeaking of the mouse.
T H I R T E E N
The storm had broken over the island by the time we emerged from the pantry. Rain beat against the windows, the wind swirled, and the surf washed deep into the cove. Waves crashed on the rocks below, shooting white spray in the dark. The roar of the sea and the howling of the wind shook the whole island. The translator turned on the light in the room.
The mouse was dead, drowned in a bucket of water. It floated on the surface, curled in a ball. The front legs were limp and its mouth half open. When the translator had picked it up by the tail and plunged it in the water, it had thrashed about for a moment. But it had stopped very quickly and lay still with its eyes wide open, as though considering some important problem. It had not suffered terribly. When he let go of the tail, it had bobbed to the surface.
I looked at the translator, and he was staring at the floor where he had thrown my skirt. He walked over, picked it up, reached in the pocket, and in his hand he held the slips of paper.
“Did you see him in town?” he asked. I flinched. “Did you meet?” I realized he was talking about his nephew.
“Yes,” I said, unable to keep from looking at them. The pages were wrinkled from my pocket.
“When?”
“The day before he left.” “He didn’t tell me. …”
“I just happened to see him painting on the rocks near the bus stop.”
“I didn’t know you’d met without me.”
“It was only for a few minutes.”
“Yet he wrote all these notes?” He frowned and thought for a moment, as he always did when digesting some news. The notes slipped one by one from his hand. I glimpsed the nephew’s familiar handwriting, but I couldn’t remember clearly what he had written.
“I’m sure he didn’t think it was worth mentioning. We just chatted for a moment while he was drawing and I was waiting for the bus. That’s all.”
“He wrote about my wife. About her death.”
“I asked him to tell me.”
“But why didn’t you mention it?”
“I didn’t think it was important.”
“There’s only one reason to have kept it secret—you didn’t want me
to know what happened between the two of you.”
“But he’s gone. And nothing happened!”
“Liar!” I’d heard this tone countless times since that first night at the Iris. It always paralyzed me. A violent gust of wind swept across the island, and we could hear something splintering and blown away, a pine tree on the cliff or the rail on the deck. “I can see it in his handwriting. He wrote all this as you talked, and I can tell how he felt, what you were doing, I can almost hear it.”
The wind and the rain swirled together outside the window. The last note fell from his hand.
“I betrayed you,” I said, so quietly that I hardly knew it was my own voice. It felt like a lie even though I told the truth. He stood perfectly still. A siren sounded, long and low.
“You can’t get home. They’ve stopped the boat,” he said.
Strangely, I did not think about Mother, or what I would tell her tomorrow. It seemed that tomorrow would never come, that the storm would never stop and we would be trapped on the island forever. This thought made me all the more excited.
The translator devised a punishment for me, a superb penalty that would never have occurred to anyone else. He dragged me into the bathroom and cut off my hair.
It was terribly cold. The ventilator fan whirred. Though the room itself was small, the ceiling was very high and the sound of the scissors echoed overhead. Several tiles had come off the walls and floor, and the bathtub was badly cracked.
“What did you do?” he said, brandishing the scissors he had once used to cut away my slip. As he had done that day, he snapped them above me again and again. The sound rang in my ears.
I didn’t know what sort of damage the scissors could do to my body, but I remembered that my slip had fallen to pieces at the slightest touch, and with no effort at all he had rendered me naked.
“How could you have seduced someone so dear to me?” Somehow my hair had retained much of its shape until that moment; then he grabbed it and let it fall in front of my face. “I’m going to teach you a lesson. Just like this!” He grabbed it again and pulled my head in circles.
“Stop,” I screamed, kicking the sink and falling against the tub. I felt as though my scalp would tear from my skull. “Please stop! You’re hurting me!” The cold blades touched my head, and the knot of hair he had gathered in his hand fell to the floor. The camellia oil had evaporated, and the hair was stiff and dry. The scissors slashed over my head again and again, and long after I thought there could be nothing left, he kept on, unwilling to forgive me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, again and again. “It’s over!” But he paid no attention. I wanted him to punish me. Perhaps that was why I had invited the boy to the Iris in the first place.
There was hair everywhere, on my lips, my breasts, my sex. I tried to brush it off, but it clung fast. It covered his hands, and his normally immaculate suit. Outside the window, it was pitch black. Raindrops slithered down the pane.
The scissors fell from his fingers and clattered on the tile. He bent over, coughing and gasping for breath. Then we stood frozen for a long time. I wanted to reach up to feel my head, but my hand was trembling.
He turned the knob on the shower, releasing a cascade of hot water. Hair swirled toward the drain, eddying around the edges of the tiles and the soap dish, as if it were reluctant to go. I found it hard to believe that this tangle of thin black hair had been on my head like some parasite just a moment ago. The strands twisted and squirmed, trying to find an escape, but in the end they all went resolutely down the drain.
Then he turned the shower on me. I retreated into the corner and tried to cover my face, but he came after me with the nozzle. The stream of water was so powerful, I could barely open my eyes and mouth. It flooded my nose and ears and made it hard to breathe.
“How’s that?” he asked, turning the knob again. “Shall we make it hotter?” A snarl of hair blocked the drain. I couldn’t breathe—I was drowning.
Later that night, the electricity failed. Without light, the wind seemed even closer. The rain showed no sign of ending. The translator changed out of his wet clothes, but it was too dark to tell which suit and tie he had chosen. I was still naked.
He set out candles, one each on his desk and the coffee table and the dining table. Then made dinner—something orange and soupy. Ladling it into a shallow bowl, he set it on the floor, and I got down on my hands and knees to lap it up. I was clumsy, and the liquid spilled from the corners of my mouth, staining my neck orange. He said nothing—ate nothing, drank nothing—but just sat on the couch watching me.
I looked over at the bookcase as discreetly as I could, studying my reflection in the glass. My head, floating there in the pale, milky light, was both pathetic and laughable— like a chick with bedraggled feathers. The hair was a tangled mess, hacked unevenly across my scalp, shooting out at all angles. I blinked to be sure I was looking at my own reflection. I licked my lips, and the ruffled chick licked hers.
“Eat!” he said. The candles flickered. Mother would no longer be able to gather my hair in a bun, or smooth it with camellia oil. Stray clippings rained down on the dish, making delicate patterns in the orange pool. I lapped them up on my tongue.
The long night wore on. It seemed like an age ago that I had stood on the deck of the boat and looked out at the clouds. Everything outside the house had been blown away by the storm—the sea, the town, the flower clock, even the Iris.
He had inflicted every sort of misery and humiliation on me, and every sort of pleasure, there in the pale light of the candles. The mouse was the only witness, floating in the bucket.
We were the only passengers on the first boat in the morning. The storm had passed, but the sea was still rough. Rays of sunlight found their way through breaks in the clouds.
I had tied a scarf—the one that had strangled his wife— over my head. The translator’s handkerchiefs were all too small and the towels in the bathroom too ugly. There was nothing else in the house.
I had told him it didn’t matter, that I could go as I was, but he had brought me the scarf. When I hesitated, he wrapped it around my head. He hid the frayed edge behind my neck, and from a distance the bloodstains seemed to be part of the pattern.
“It looks wonderful on you,” he said.
The deck was wet, so we held hands to keep from slipping. The marks on my wrists were faintly visible. The cocoa he bought me at the coffee stand was lukewarm and very sweet. Behind the stand was the same man who had been smoking at the bow the day before. He seemed surly, and his puffy eyes never looked up as the translator handed him the money. Only when I thanked him did he glance up, his eyes lingering on the scarf.
The sea was gray and dotted with bits of garbage that had washed out from the river. Clouds streamed across the sky, but there were no shorebirds in sight.
“The rail is wet,” he said, wiping it with his handkerchief.
“What should I tell Mother?”
“Tell her you went out to the island and couldn’t get back. That’s the truth, isn’t it? Just say they let you stay the night at the sanatarium.”
“But what will I tell her about my hair?”
“Leave the scarf on. It’s lovely, and I’m sure your mother will like it.”
I put my hand to my head. The material was stiff where the bloodstains remained. A gust of wind tugged at the scarf, and the translator reached out to tie the knot more tightly.
The town was coming into view. First the church steeple and the tower on the town hall, and then the seawall, which seemed to float above the sea. The boat slowed and blew its horn, making a lazy turn to the right. I squeezed his hand. The man at the coffee stand was washing my cocoa cup.
We could see a crowd gathered on the pier, as though the tourists had been waiting all this time for the boat to arrive. We made a quarter-turn and approached from the stern, the horn blowing a deeper note this time.
“We can say good-bye here,” I said.
“No, I’ll se
e you as far as the clock.”
“But I’ve got to run home. The guests will be checking out.”
“I’ll write you then.”
“I’ll be waiting.” He touched my cheek and then closed his hand carefully, as if to preserve the sensation. There was a buzzing in the distance, and I thought I heard someone calling my name.
“Mari! Mari!” The people on the dock were looking up at us, and they were not tourists. There was a waiter in an apron, a taxi driver, a middle-aged woman in her bathrobe— all whispering to one another. A police car and an ambulance were parked in front of the waiting room. I recognized the young musician from the plaza at the back of the crowd. His accordion was around his neck as usual, but he was not playing.
“Mari! I’m here! Mari!”
It was Mother. She was screaming from the dock. But why was she calling my name over and over? It struck me as very strange.
The engine rattled to a stop. Two young men came running up on deck and shouted something at us. They were yelling, but I couldn’t understand a word. One would shout a few words, and then the other, but in my ears there was nothing but silence. No sound reached me, as though my eardrums had suddenly evaporated.
The translator let go of my hand and stumbled away, fleeing across the deck. One of the men ran after him while the other came and put his arms around me. He was still talking, but I heard nothing.
The translator tripped over an ashtray. The man from the coffee stand caught him, pinning his arms in back, but he managed to shake free and ran toward the bow of the boat. The scene played out in silence.
Just as they were about to catch him, he leapt into the sea. Without a word of farewell or even a smile in my direction, he threw his leg over the rail, curled in a ball, and fell. There was a splash, and at that instant my hearing returned.
“Are you hurt?” The young man peered into my eyes. His tone was gentle.
