Nan-Core

by Mahokaru Numata

  While I spent all of my time concentrating on keeping myself from standing out, a chance encounter led me to be on speaking terms with one particular girl. Our eyes first met when she was stealing something from a market near school.

  Let’s say her name was Mitsuko.

  I was walking towards the back to get a bottled drink when I saw her shoving a bag of candy up the sleeve of her sweater from the overloaded shopping basket on her arm. This girl had made a bit of a name for herself in school because she was so thin she looked like she was recovering from some illness, and because she wore makeup so thick it made everyone do a double-take. She was always alone and never spoke to anyone, and whatever she did, whether it was just walking or sitting down, she did it so awkwardly that it seemed like she suffered from tunnel vision.

  She didn’t seem to panic when she saw me; she even gave me a little grin. I found myself grinning back, and pointed out a security mirror in the corner of the ceiling. She was clearly standing in full view of the register.

  With sluggish movements, she pulled out several bags of candy, aside from the one she’d just been squirreling up her sleeve, and put them back into her overflowing basket.

  “You getting something? A drink?” Her voice was surprisingly limpid. She could speak just like anyone else.

  I nodded, taking a plastic bottle from the shelf.

  “Just that? Come on, then. This one’s on me.”

  There was an apathetic youth manning the register, and I suspected he would have turned a blind eye even if he had caught her shoplifting.

  I hadn’t really been interested in her before, but I had for a while felt that Mitsuko and I were something like kindred spirits. I wondered if the theatrical, mask-like coating of makeup she wore was the flip side of whatever force it was that compelled me to remain hidden. The familiarity she had just displayed might, I mused, be because she sensed the same about me. For some reason, the thought made my pulse race.

  I stopped for a moment, having sped through the text up to that point.

  The thought made my pulse race.

  I wondered, given the context, whether this was a sign that the author was male. Or was it possible that someone who’d had nothing that could be considered proper relationships with other people might become nervous, or find their heart racing, when meeting someone of the same sex? Was the author purposefully trying to obscure his or her gender? Or was that just me making assumptions as I read the text? I felt an impatient urge to read more, but this had the reverse effect of making me feel stupefied and absent-minded. I rested my elbows on the window frame and shifted my gaze outdoors.

  Is this girl, Mitsuko, going to be the next one to die?

  The window afforded a partial view of the road between our house and the one opposite, and as I watched, someone was walking down that narrow bit of road, folding up an umbrella. I stood bolt upright. I couldn’t be totally sure, but it looked like Dad.

  There wasn’t any time to think. I gathered the scattered notebooks and slid them back into the manila envelope. I put the envelope into the cardboard box, then pushed the handbag with the bundle of hair still inside and shoved the old clothes haphazardly on top. I shut the closet, closed the study door, and launched myself down the stairs. When I got to the kitchen I could already hear the jangle of keys in the front door.

  “Ah, I thought something was off. The door was already unlocked,” Dad said, looking up at me as he pulled the door open.

  “Yeah, sorry, welcome back. No one wants to bring their dog in when the weather’s like this and I had nothing else to do, so I figured I’d stop by.” I wiped the sweat from my forehead, trying to make it look like I was brushing away my hair. Something in me had changed definitively since I’d walked into the house a mere hour earlier. But I had to make sure Dad didn’t notice. “Is it still raining?”

  “It’s not that bad, the wind’s the problem. You been here long?”

  “Around fifteen minutes. I was lying down in the living room, just about to doze off.” We walked into the kitchen and I opened the fridge. “Want a drink?”

  “A beer would be nice.”

  I pulled out two cans and handed one to Dad, who was sitting down. “How do you feel?”

  “Quit asking that every time. I’m just the same as before—nothing wrong in particular, except that I can’t get to sleep.”

  I felt a sudden burning thirst as soon as I lifted the can to my mouth, and almost drained the whole thing in one gulp while still on my feet.

  I had just wiped my hand over my mouth when Dad looked at me. “Well, take a load off.”

  “Sure.” Sitting with him before me, I suddenly felt anxious about not being able to recall the kinds of things we usually discussed. The atmosphere was heavy. In any case, I thought it would seem odd if I didn’t ask why he had been out. “So where were you?”

  “Just pachinko. I was up, then pushed my luck and lost it all.”

  “Pachinko? But … why …” In all the years I’d known Dad, I had never once heard of him going to play pachinko. I couldn’t picture him sitting there, patient among the noise and the throngs of people.

  “What? I’m not averse to a bit of pachinko. The place behind the station, ‘New Eden,’ pays out pretty good when you win. Say, if the shop doesn’t need you, will you stay for some food?”

  “Ah, I was actually thinking I should go to the dentist. I’ve had a toothache for a while, kept putting it off and now it’s really starting to kill me. I haven’t made an appointment so I guess I’ll have to wait there for a while, but I’d hate it to get any worse overnight. I’ll swing by another time for dinner.”

  Even I thought it sounded like a shoddy excuse, but Dad just nodded and said, “I see.” He suggested I take an umbrella so I grabbed a random one from the stand on my way out.

  I looked at my watch and saw that it was 4:30. I rushed towards the station, putting in a call to my brother Yohei on the way. I used the lure of a steak dinner to convince him to meet me outside Kyoto Station at six. He was a university student and rented an apartment in the city. I called work next and when Ms. Hosoya answered I explained that something had come up; I told her I wouldn’t be back before closing and asked if everything was okay. Now that Chie was gone, Ms. Hosoya was the only full-time staff. She was middle-aged and soft-spoken, yet very capable, and I had a tendency to always ask a little too much of her.

  “With weather like this there aren’t any dogs out in the field. We’ve got people at four tables inside. It’s quiet, the dogs are all well-behaved, so not much barking. And we just had two new members join.”

  As this meant cash, a part of me that had become brutal was slightly mollified. With business as it was, even a single change in membership had a significant effect.

  “That’s good to hear, especially as we just lost someone.”

  “They were moving away, remember, there was nothing we could have done about that.”

  “What kind of dogs do they have? The new members.”

  “One is an elderly Beagle, the other’s a large Bernese Mountain Dog.”

  I couldn’t help grinning. I almost asked which was bigger, Cujo or the new dog. The week before, Ms. Hosoya had been crouched down in the field when a male Bernese named Cujo knocked her over. For a good ten seconds, everyone, including myself, had just stood dumbstruck and watched. She struggled wordlessly on the ground as the dog slobbered its heavy, oversized tongue over her face and glasses until the owner rushed from the bathroom and pulled the dog away.

  She had been pale when I helped her to her feet. As her arms went frantically around my neck, the momentum carried her forward and her lips pressed against my cheek. To make matters worse, some of the buttons on her blouse had come undone, giving me a clear view of her white bra. The skin of her chest was alluring, nearly as white as her bra, and for a moment I felt a brief thrill while the fact that she was as old as my late mother blinked out of my mind.

  She didn’t emerge from th
e bathroom for a long while after that.

  She was regularly overworked and her pay was modest, so I worried she might use the occasion as an excuse to quit. Luckily she had chosen to stay on, but it became taboo to mention the subject at work. The following day Nachi, a part-timer, brought in a particular book by Stephen King, thinking it a kindness, and said he would lend it to her. I confiscated it on the spot. I was constantly finding myself surprised by his actions, and to top that off, just a few days later I discovered he’d snapped a photo with his phone of Ms. Hosoya trapped beneath the dog. I only found this out because he’d shown it to me, practically boasting about it.

  “Did you laugh just now, boss?” She caught me off guard, sounding like she could see right through me from the other end of the line.

  “No, I …”

  “Anyway, the new members. I charged double the enrollment and membership fees for the Bernese. Those large dogs can be dangerous, as I’m sure you know. I think we should make this a new policy from now on.”

  “Ah, but, uhm … I think, first we should …”

  There was an awkward pause. Then she calmly added, “Just kidding.”

  4

  “If it was me I’d ask, before getting upset over it. I’d just tell him I found some notebooks and ask what they were,” Yohei said, washing down a mouthful of food with a swig of beer.

  In all but an emergency, my kid brother would drop whatever he was doing and travel anywhere, at any time of day, for a free steak. He would order it bloody rare and devour it like a dog.

  “You could try to savor that a little more, since I’m spending so much on this meal.”

  “Yeah right, this place is barely a step up from a diner. This meat wouldn’t go down if I tried to enjoy it.”

  Every now and then I felt like I wanted to throw Yohei into the dog run to let him run around with the other mutts for a day. Knowing him, he’d climb through the ranks and become their leader, then try to rape one of the female bulldogs.

  I had relayed the story in as much detail as possible, but Yohei hadn’t been taking it seriously. If anything, he looked clearly incredulous. I supposed that as he hadn’t actually read the notebooks, it was perhaps unavoidable that it didn’t sink in immediately.

  “Look, Ryo, I’m not saying I won’t help out if you insist.

  But I’m pretty sure you’ll find it’s nothing at all if you read to the end.” Yohei nodded at me, making it seem like he was the older brother and not the other way around.

  I had chosen to confide in my cheeky kid brother because, if I wanted to keep reading the notebooks without Dad finding out, I had no other choice than to work with an accomplice I could trust.

  I had a plan. Every Sunday evening, without fail, Dad went to visit Gran at her nursing home near Yamato Koriyama. I had to use that opportunity to sneak into the house and continue reading. Yohei would meet up with Dad and delay him as much as possible. Then, when they parted ways at the train station on the way home, Yohei would phone me. That was all I needed.

  The next Sunday was in two days. It was the busiest day for the cafe, and as the field got crowded the dogs had a tendency to fight. But now wasn’t the time to be worrying about that. And Yohei happened to have time on his hands that day, so I decided to move the plan into action.

  “Sorry to get you involved in this weirdness at a time like this,” I said, avoiding looking at his face.

  “No problem, we’ll just play it like we always do.”

  I think he was trying to act cool, but his tone was stilted, which made him sound a little angry. When Mom died Yohei had cried his eyes out, and ever since he made a point of never saying anything even vaguely sad in front of me. Even when it came to Dad’s condition we had developed an unspoken rule between us: we would pretend it didn’t exist. It was the best we could do in the absence of any practical way to help, and there was also the childish hope that ignoring the illness might bring about a miracle. While we would sometimes come apart at the seams, we always made sure to act carefree and smile when we ate steak together.

  “I need to find out who wrote them, at least. It’s got to be either Mom or Dad, though, based on where I found them.”

  “What about the penmanship?”

  “Hmm, it wasn’t like either of theirs. The characters were uneven, like a grade school kid’s.”

  “Hmm.”

  Having finished eating, Yohei started to eye my plate, so I cut him a big portion of my steak even though I’d eaten less than half. I started to eat faster so he wouldn’t pinch any more.

  “You think it’s Dad, don’t you. You’re wondering if he’s actually a psychotic serial killer, if he murdered your real mother before she was substituted with someone else or whatever? Whoa, dude, that’s scary.”

  “No, that’s not what I …” I gulped down some of the now-flat beer in an attempt to hide the fact that I couldn’t deny it outright. Truth be told, those exact thoughts had flitted in and out of my mind the whole time I had been reading the notebooks. I’d even had the absurd suspicion pop into my mind that Dad had been the real cause of Mom’s crosswalk accident two months earlier. And the childhood memory that my mother had been replaced felt increasingly real, lodged in my gut ever since it first came back to me. I had even considered the possibility that Dad had killed both my first and second mothers with his own hands.

  “Come to think of it, there was something strange about the way Granddad died. If what you’re saying is right, Ryo, maybe that was Dad’s doing, too …”

  The measured timing of the odd remark made my mind go momentarily blank. It felt like some bizarre darkness was trying to swallow me whole.

  Granddad had passed away when I was still in my freshman year of high school. It had happened without warning. The doctors said it was acute heart failure, even though he had no chronic illness. He had been dozing under a kotatsu warmer and had already stopped breathing when Dad tried to wake him. It was a Sunday, and Dad had been the only other person in the house. Mom and Gran had taken Yohei and myself out shopping when it happened.

  “Oh? Come on, don’t get angry. Sorry, that was shitty, even for a joke,” Yohei, stunned at my sudden pallor, offered a genuine apology, then tried a subtle change of subject. “Think about it though, this theory you have of Mom being replaced by someone else—that makes us half-brothers.” He winked, jabbing his fork in my direction. “That’s kind of cool, you know, dramatic, or something.”

  I had, of course, already thought about this. With him sitting in front of me it was hard to imagine it was true, but I wasn’t ready to joke about it either.

  I hadn’t taken after either of my parents, but Yohei’s eyes and facial features had clearly come from Mom. They also shared a number of traits beyond their looks—slight far-sightedness, dog- and cat-hair allergies. It felt stupid, but those kind of things had begun to weigh on my mind.

  “Let me ask you then. Who else could have written it if it wasn’t Dad? Don’t tell me you think it was Mom.”

  “Why not? She could totally have written such stuff.”

  I was stunned into silence.

  “She could have written it when she was young, maybe she wanted to submit it to some magazine. She loved books, and she used to read loads of novels … Y’know, she had that daydreamer side to her, and she was quite the romantic.”

  Daydreamer? Romantic? Was it possible that, as younger and elder sons, we had wildly different impressions of Mom? She used to bring books home from the library, I knew that, but she was plain and mild-mannered, the very model of a housewife. There was no way I could believe a love of books made her a romantic, much less the kind of person to do something like write a novel.

  I wanted to push Yohei on the subject, but he’d turned his face down while he was talking about Mom and now he was blinking rapidly. The steak was gone. I looked away and mumbled something vague.

  “Hey, calling Mom a bit of a daydreamer made me remember this weird thing,” he said, keeping hi
s voice flat to mask the embarrassment of me seeing him with damp eyes.

  “What is it?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Hey, come on, stop acting like a brat. You’ve already started to say something, so out with it.”

  “It’s just … I don’t like it when you twist my words, Ryo. You already have.”

  I was well aware of how antagonistic he could get if I was too direct, so I retrieved a menu and made him choose something for dessert in the hope that we might start again. Once we placed our orders I put the question to him, trying to sound casual. “Hey, Yohei, did Mom seem a little strange to you towards the end?”

  “Strange? In what way?” His voice was tight when he threw the question back at me. He’d probably noticed something odd about her behavior, too.

  I said nothing and waited.

  “I suppose, now that you mention it, she did seem a little gloomy. Like bursting into tears in the middle of watching TV. And she’d give a jolt, sometimes, when I called to her.”

  “Do you think she …”

  “She what?”

  “Was she scared of something?”

  “Like what?”

  “Ah, I really don’t know, but … Say for example she found the notebooks and read them.”

  “And back to the notebooks! Why do you keep bringing them up? What, you’re saying she read them, found out her husband was a murderer, and got freaked out?”

  “You can’t say that that’s a hundred percent impossible, can you?”

  “There’s something wrong with you, Ryo. Of course she was afraid. She knew Dad was going to … pass away soon. It would’ve been weird if she hadn’t been afraid.”

  I found myself with nothing to say in response. He was exactly right. Not to mention, that was probably what I had thought at the time. If I had let something like that slip from my mind, I was forced to wonder if there was something drastically wrong in the way I was looking at things. Perhaps it was all some kind of wild delusion I’d cooked up.