The Lonesome Bodybuilder

by Yukiko Motoya

  A shiver went down my spine. Like this. What was he trying to say?

  “These past four years, did you ever once say you wanted to go out and find work?” my husband said in a syrupy voice, still gazing into the foaming pan.

  A quail egg plopped its way into the oil.

  “What did you think when you found out I already owned an apartment?”

  Another egg went in.

  “I knew from the start you’d never leave this place.”

  His voice wasn’t my husband’s. But I could no longer recall how my husband’s voice sounded.

  “I think you understand it all, San. Why you married me, and why I married you.”

  I felt the hairs on my body stand on end.

  As I opened my mouth to scream, I felt something hot fall into it.

  “They’re best eaten hot.”

  It was hot. So hot I thought I was about to burn myself. But the more I told myself I had to spit the fritter out right away, the more my mouth huffed and my tongue moved to taste it. The delicate aroma of in-season gingerroot rose to my palate.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay. It’ll start to taste good soon.”

  My husband looked at me.

  His face, which I hadn’t seen in a long while, was a perfect half-and-half mixture of my husband and me.

  My husband continued throwing ginger shoots and quail eggs into my mouth, one after the other. It was horrifying, but also delicious. As I moved my mouth to keep up with the onslaught, the taste started to change into something I knew well.

  “You thought you were the only one feeding yourself to me?” he said, twisting his body into a coil and smiling thinly. I cried out and tried to peel him off me, but it was too late.

  I couldn’t breathe. But the sense of revulsion gradually lessened, and soon enough, with tears in my eyes, I was filling my mouth with the familiar substance. “It’s good, it tastes so good,” I said, coiling, and breathlessly continued to revel in the taste of the thing I knew so well.

  We ran into Mr. Arai just once after that, at the entrance to the apartment complex.

  Mr. Arai, who was collecting his mail from the mailroom, stopped as soon as he spotted me and my husband, and said, “Oh!”

  “It’s been a while,” I said, and bowed lightly.

  “I see,” Mr. Arai said, looking at the two of us in turn. “You decided against placing something between you.”

  “Yes. I felt that we could make it work without that.”

  “You weren’t so averse to it, then.”

  “I guess not.”

  “I see. I see.” Mr. Arai nodded again, and looked up at my husband, who was listening to our exchange suspiciously. “Well, there are plenty of very similar married couples out there. You’re right. Perhaps it does work,” he said, and walked off briskly toward the east wing.

  I wanted to ask him what we looked like to him, but I watched him go in silence. Not long after that, Kitae told me that the two of them had decided to move back to San Francisco.

  It was October, and several out-of-season typhoons made landfall in quick succession. People were saying it was because there had been so few during September that we were getting them now.

  My husband had gotten a doctor’s note and taken paid leave from work, and, providing me with the couch and highballs and the TV, took on the housework with a kind of relish.

  That day, the biggest typhoon of the year was forecast to approach. Drops in air pressure triggered my migraines, so I’d been in an especially bad mood since morning. I started drinking earlier than usual to compensate.

  “I went shopping on the main street today,” my husband said after dinner.

  “Uh-huh,” I said from the couch, not really listening. Thanks to the painkillers I’d taken for the migraine, on top of the fritters I’d stuffed myself with yet again, my head felt even fuzzier than normal. Watching from behind as he eagerly folded the laundry, I thought, He’s finally progressed to shopping at the local shops.

  “The butcher’s was closed. Apparently the owner fell sick last week? The old greengrocer said so.”

  “Hmm,” I said. I’d heard about that only the day before yesterday myself.

  “And our dry cleaner’s going to be changing hands soon.”

  I knew that too. My husband noticed that my glass was empty, and got up smoothly and brought me a refill. What an attentive wife he was.

  He waited quietly until I’d taken my first sip, and then continued. “Zoromi’s cat food’s going up next month. By sixty yen!” he said triumphantly.

  But this was information I’d told him yesterday. Caught you out, I thought uncharitably, and looked at my husband, who had sat back down in front of the laundry. “Eighty yen, not sixty.”

  When I corrected him, my husband simply repeated himself. “Zoromi’s cat food’s going up next month. By eighty yen!”

  He has no shame. “Only housewives understand what it’s like to run a household,” I said, taking a big swig of my highball. But my husband was pretending not to have heard. He was spreading a bath towel and demurely folding one corner to another. Utterly shameless, I thought again.

  “You wouldn’t know anything about being a housewife,” I said, raising my voice without meaning to. My husband, who was sitting flat on the wood floor, kept his hands moving, folding the laundry assiduously.

  “There’s no point in clinging to me like this,” I said to my husband’s back. “It only relieves the suffering a tiny bit. It doesn’t get rid of the temptation. I think you may as well give into it already, actually. What’s the point of killing yourself trying to keep up the appearance of being human?” Letting the headache and the alcohol loosen my tongue, I hurled my real feelings at him. The words seemed to spew out of me in a torrent, in exact proportion to the amount of fritters he’d forced me to eat.

  “You only say that to try to trick Husband!” My husband, who still had his back to me, suddenly emitted a screeching, high-pitched voice I’d never heard before from somewhere around the nape of his neck.

  I was speechless with shock.

  “I can tell. You’re going to leave me because you’ve gotten tired of me, aren’t you?” He was speaking in a peculiar tone, and I wondered whether he was trying to sound like me. His back started to quiver, and then the back of his head moved strangely, and, as though I were watching fast-forwarded footage, his short hair started to grow, furling and unfurling. Like inchworms crawling, the squirming tips moved as one mass toward his shoulders, copying the length of my hair.

  “Why do you want to be the wife that badly?” I said. “Don’t turn into me. Be something better!”

  My husband finally stopped folding laundry. I saw his ears twitch like the ears of some wild animal.

  “Husband! Go be a creature of the mountain!” I commanded.

  His body started to shake violently, as though it had completely lost its shape. Its outline blurred, and his back ballooned up to double its size and then shrank down until it was much smaller, over and over. But he still refused to turn around so that I could see his face, and, struck with terror, I decided I had nothing to lose. I shouted, “You can stop being husband-shaped now. Take whatever form you want to be!”

  The distending body of my husband exploded with a loud pop. It settled to the floor in countless small clumps.

  I switched off the TV and gingerly peered over toward the laundry, where the clumps had fallen.

  “Oh!” I cried out.

  A single mountain peony was blooming behind a stack of bath towels. It had translucently fine white petals, and looked nothing at all like my husband.

  I never knew he wanted to be such a dainty creature. My eyes were wide with surprise at its delicateness.

  As the only proof that it had once been my husband, the mountain peony’s stem was growing straight out of a pair of his underwear.

  A married couple was a strange thing. Although we’d lived in such clos
e proximity and spent our days and nights together, I hadn’t had the faintest inkling that my husband’s desire had been to be a single bloom of a mountain peony.

  After daybreak, I took the mountain peony back to the mountain.

  I planted him in a quiet, sunny spot near the rocky clearing where we’d set Sansho free, next to a purple gentian that was in bloom, so he wouldn’t be lonely.

  Back at the apartment, I made myself breakfast, washed a single set of dishes, did one person’s worth of laundry, ran a bath for one, and got into bed.

  When I closed my eyes, I sensed my fuzzy contour clamoring to reconstitute itself. This is all mine? I touched my still-humming body and felt amazed.

  The following year, in late spring, I went to see my husband, who had turned into a mountain peony.

  My husband was in bloom, vivaciously displaying a white flower, as pretty and unafraid as a paper lantern. Moved nearly to tears, I gazed for a while at his beautiful form. The gentian at his side, not to be outdone, was also flowering elegantly.

  I lingered there, contented, until I felt ready to leave. I got up slowly and noticed that the two flowers looked very much like each other. As I examined them more closely I started to feel a chill, and I fled from the rocky clearing and left the mountain without looking back.

  Paprika Jiro

  The first time paprika jiro saw it happen, he was ten years old, helping his grandpa with his greengrocer’s stall in the market. Jiro worked hard, calling out to customers to buy their fruits and vegetables, so that he could contribute to his family’s meager income. When he made a sale, he had to step on a wooden crate to reach the hanging basket where they deposited their earnings.

  Grandpa’s knees and hips weren’t what they used to be, and he rarely got up from his barrel these days, but Jiro was the apple of his eye, and customers never failed to compliment him on what a fine grandson he had.

  Other stalls in the market kept animals in cages to draw in customers, so Paprika Jiro did his best to compete by singing out the names of the fruits and vegetables in his clear boy soprano. His voice made people stop and listen, and brought a smile to their faces. He was going to inherit the stall one day. It should have been his dad, but he was a ne’er-do-well who drank.

  It was the end of another day. Grandpa laid a gentle hand on Paprika Jiro’s head.

  “Time to be getting home?”

  “Yes, Grandpa.”

  That was when they turned up.

  Jiro heard a woman scream, and looked up and saw something approaching from the other end of the market, setting off what looked like fireworks of fish and meat and flowers, destroying stalls left and right.

  Jiro gaped at the sight until he was startled into action by the cries of confusion and panic from the people around him. They’re here! They’re back!

  “Come on, Grandpa, let’s go!”

  Jiro tugged at Grandpa’s sleeve, but Grandpa didn’t budge. Jiro brought him his cane, but Grandpa wouldn’t take it. The ground rumbled as the thing approached, blowing up stalls and gathering speed. There were distant sounds of gunfire.

  Jiro asked Grandpa why he wouldn’t move. Grandpa smoothed his frantic grandson’s head again, and said, “Getting chased on purpose, those folks, just to wreck our stalls.”

  Jiro didn’t understand. An Asian man making kung-fu-type movements and a pretty white woman hurtled past in a tangle of legs. The man lost his balance and barreled headfirst into Grandpa’s stall. All too easily, the wheels came off, and with a loud noise the stall fell on its side. The basketful of coins they’d worked all day to collect spilled and rolled away.

  The man leapt neatly to his feet, and he and the woman ran off, neither of them showing a speck of interest in the destruction of the stall. But Paprika Jiro had noticed how the man had lost his balance on purpose, even though there’d been nothing at his feet to trip over. The man and the woman had made sure there were vegetables flying into the air and then had exchanged a satisfied smile. Soon men in black suits came running after the two of them, shooting guns, and razed anything that was still standing, like a pair of clippers buzzing the hair off someone’s head.

  Once they were gone, the market people went about quietly picking up the debris scattered all over the street. No one uttered a word of complaint. It was as though they’d been hit by a tornado or some other natural phenomenon.

  “Just another part of being a market trader,” Grandpa said placidly.

  In the years that followed, Jiro saw them come back, time after time, with no warning, to destroy the stalls and disappear. Grandpa was killed by a stray bullet from a man in black. When Jiro first took over the stall, he tried to improve it by borrowing a tarp from a friend to make a roof, but no sooner had he installed it than they began to fall from the sky. They bounced once off the tarp and then fell straight through it, reducing the stall to splinters. No matter where he moved the stall, they kept coming. As long as he continued to trade in open air, they found him. They were like an infestation of bugs crawling out of the woodwork.

  Just once, Paprika Jiro managed to grab on to the hem of the trouser leg of the very last suited man just as he hit the ground.

  “Why do you do this? . . . Who are you? . . . What did we ever do to you?” Jiro shouted, in English that he had memorized specially.

  The man, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses, stood Jiro upright with surprising gentleness and rubbed away a streak of dirt from his face. Jiro felt his hopes rise—he would finally get some answers!—but the man just quirked both ends of his mouth up and then made a beeline for the big metal gong that hung from the ironmonger’s stall.

  When Jiro quit the vegetable stall to become the market’s pigeon seller, they returned immediately and liberated every last one of his pigeons before he could say a word.

  The whole market accepted them as a fact of life. No one else wondered where they came from or where they were going. But Paprika Jiro wanted to know the truth. One night, he filled a big pot with glue and placed it in front of the stall. A few days later, when he heard a woman scream at the entrance to the market, he stripped naked and jumped inside.

  Jiro waited inside the slimy pot of glue, pinching his nose and holding his breath. The sounds of chaos gradually got louder, until he heard something break nearby. One of them thundered toward the pot where Jiro was hiding and smashed straight into it.

  Covered head to toe in glue, Paprika Jiro stuck to the back of one man in a suit and watched the market grow smaller and smaller behind him. Once they had cleared the village and entered the desert, the man gave a strange cry—Er-hai!—and ran as fast as the wind. Jiro discovered that what he had assumed to be a dark business suit was actually just skin that looked like a suit. Even the sunglasses were part of the man’s body.

  Gradually, a group of large-breasted women and well-muscled men gathered behind Jiro, in a line that trailed into the distance. Their numbers swelled and swelled. They fired their guns wildly as they ran, and retrieved and ate fruits and vegetables they had somehow taken from the market from the inside pockets of their skins. When night fell, they ran even faster.

  Eventually the glue peeled, and Paprika Jiro fell off into the desert. It took him seven days and seven nights to get back to his village.

  Paprika Jiro remains a market trader today. These days he sees them less and less often.

  “Because no one really believes in them anymore,” says the ironmonger.

  Once in a while, they still come through. Just like old times: in high style, in a cloud of dust and mayhem. As a mark of utmost respect, Paprika Jiro does his best to react in exaggerated astonishment as they careen through, fearlessly confronting obstacles head-on.

  How to Burden the Girl

  What was i thinking, getting involved with a girl like her? The only reason I was interested in the first place was that I thought she was an innocent young thing standing up to an evil gang all on her own. I had no intention of getting
mixed up in such a violent love affair.

  “You said you’d do anything to get to know me,” she said, inching closer again.

  I’d said that, sure. But I was thirty-four. I was dubious about my chances of understanding someone so much younger than I was, and anyway I know nothing about women. I’d just thought she must be lonely, what with her entire family having been killed by an evil gang, so the words had just slipped out. There was no need for her to take them seriously.

  She moved slowly toward me. She’d just blown the heads off nineteen evil henchmen. I watched her closely while I retreated. I looked at the tears of blood she was crying because her beloved father had just become the last of her family to die, killed in a manner so diabolically cruel as to seem beyond human imagining. The special tears were the whole reason the gang was after her. I didn’t know the details. I’d simply been taken by the way the girl’s thighs looked, sticking out of her skirt. The pink hair, the emerald-green eyes—those were a little freakish, admittedly, but they didn’t bother me. I’d thought some of them must just come like that. My old man would cry and sigh and call me a hopeless ignoramus if he knew. My mother walked out on the two of us a long time ago, so he’s all the family I’ve got.

  I kept creeping backward, and before I knew it, I’d left the living room. My foot came up against the staircase in the hall. Her house was enormous. She, her father, and her five brothers had moved here sometime last year, settling into a quiet life next door to the house I’ve always lived in. It looked like the girl’s father took care of all the errands and things in the huge house behind the high wall, so at first I was simply excited to know there was someone next door in the same situation as I was. I rarely feel any curiosity toward other people, but I took to watching her through the windows occasionally, and would see her taking really good care of her five little brothers. This made me feel pretty inadequate. I leave all my cleaning and laundry to my old man. His stuff I leave up to him too.

  At some point, I started to find it strange that she never left the house. What’s more, the five little brothers, who looked so alike they could have been quintuplets, seemed to be disappearing one by one. I mean, one day there were only four boys playing in the garden; then there were three; then two. The little brothers carried on tumbling around the garden looking carefree, but on the days just after one had vanished, the father would usually come out and hold the girl’s hand as she sat in a chair on the deck. On those days she’d forgo her usual bare legs and cover up in a dark outfit, looking glum. But why no funeral? Why no police?