by Ryu Murakami
I wouldn’t ever stab that baby with an ice pick, would I?
For a moment, he wasn’t certain who was sitting there in that steam-filled tub. Yoko opened the bathroom door to leave, then looked back and said something to him, but it wasn’t registering. Masayuki? Masayuki, what’s wrong? What’s the matter? She called to him several times before he snapped out of it.
‘Oh, still there? Guess I was daydreaming,’ he said, and by the time his eyes were refocused on her and the baby, his skin — in spite of the very warm water — had turned to gooseflesh.
The sharp, gleaming point of an ice-pick: from that moment on, he couldn’t get the image out of his head. You wouldn’t do something like that, you would never stab the baby, he told himself hundreds of times, but the voice inside him never stopped replying: I just might. And each night from then on he’d found himself unable to go to bed until he stood over the crib, ice pick in hand, to confirm to himself that it was all right, he wasn’t going to stab her.
Kawashima turned off the lightbox. He got his leather jacket from the closet, put it on over his sweater, and headed for the door.
3
THEIR APARTMENT WAS ON the second floor of a four-storey building. He closed the door noiselessly behind him, checked several times to make sure it was locked and made his way down the stairs. There was no guard or watchman in the lobby: to enter through the glass doors you had to either punch in a code or have someone buzz you in over the intercom. To exit, of course, you simply touched the sensor plate marked OPEN, but the landlord had stressed the importance of taking precautions to prevent strangers slipping inside as you walked out. Not long before, someone apparently disguised as a delivery man had burgled one of the apartments; kids had been known to spray-paint graffiti on the lobby walls; and some jerk had once melted the intercom’s plastic number pad with a lighter.
Outside, Kawashima zipped up his jacket and raised its fluff-lined collar, reflecting that he rather enjoyed the cold. In heated rooms, he often felt the outlines of his body, the border between him and the external world, grow disturbingly fuzzy.
Yoko had awakened but hadn’t seemed to notice anything, and for the moment, standing on the empty street of their neighbourhood in Kokubunji, away from the room with the sleeping baby, he felt a certain degree of relief.
It’s just my neurosis, he reasoned with himself. I just get freaked out imagining I might stab the baby. It’s not as if I actually want to stab her. Who doesn’t imagine things that make them anxious? Maybe nothing this extreme, but, like, having to give a speech at a wedding, for example — a lot of people are terrified of screwing up and being ridiculed or laughed at. Or you can accidentally make eye contact with some psycho on the train and think, What if he gets off behind me and follows me home? Thanks to the imagination, there’s no end to things in this world that can trigger anxiety. Normally, of course, you can free yourself from fears like that just by facing them, or telling someone about them.
Normally.
On the ground floor of the building next door was a video shop. At the end of a long day, after dinner and a bath, Yoko liked to sit with a glass of wine or beer and watch a movie. One night in the last month of her pregnancy, the two of them had watched Basic Instinct together. Kawashima wanted to flee the room as soon as he saw the first scene, which depicted a murder by ice pick, but Yoko said, ‘I’m not sure this is good for the baby, but it’s an interesting story, isn’t it?’ It was that attitude of hers, that detached amusement, that helped him calm down and sit all the way through the film.
Often during the past ten days he’d wondered why his fear was of stabbing only the baby and not Yoko. Remembering the time they’d watched Basic Instinct together gave him the answer: because Yoko could talk to him. Talking with someone helped neutralise the power of the imagination. And Yoko had a delicate but skilful way of dealing with the wounds he carried inside. Her attitude was neither insensitive nor indulgent — neither, Why don’t you just get over it? nor, Oh, you poor thing! She never went out of her way to avoid the subject, and when it came up her comments were always both clear-eyed and supportive.
‘When you have a chronic illness,’ she’d tell him, ‘getting frustrated or impatient with it just makes things worse, right?’ Isn’t that what they say? That you have to live in harmony with an illness? To think of it as an old friend?’
Or: ‘Why is it that when people grow up they totally forget how vulnerable and helpless they were as children?’
Or: ‘Until Rie was born, I never knew how stressful having children can be. I’m sure even your mother must wonder what she could have been thinking back then.’
The way she’d say these things never failed to soothe and comfort him. The first scene of Basic Instinct was a jolt to his system, but by the time the ice pick reappeared later in the film he was thoroughly enjoying the story.
In the next building past the video shop was a bookstore. Something moved in the gap between the two buildings, and he stopped to see what it was. The gap, just wide enough for a grown man to walk through, dead-ended at another building. It was very dark in there, but he was sure he’d seen two or three small figures moving. Small enough that they had to be children, no more than nine or ten years old. They weren’t moving now, probably because Kawashima had stopped and was looking their way, but he wasn’t about to call out to them or step over and peer into the gap. He knew that even a ten-year-old child could be dangerous. Just before walking on, he spotted a little red point of light. It might have been a burning cigarette, except for the fact that he neither saw nor smelled smoke. The eye of a small animal, maybe, reflecting the streetlight. Between the two buildings, he remembered, were garbage cans and waste water puddled around a drain. The kids were probably killing rats for kicks in that narrow darkness.
Back in the Home for at-risk children, Kawashima had had a friend his age named Taku-chan. At some point the Home acquired a pair of pet rabbits, and one of their offspring was placed in Taku-chan’s care. Taku-chan loved his little pet more than anything, and even insisted on sleeping with it in his arms. But one day, right before Kawashima’s eyes and for no apparent reason, he grabbed the animal by its still-undeveloped ears, stood up, and slammed it down against the concrete floor. It made a sound like delicate porcelain breaking, but the bunny wasn’t dead and tried to crawl away with spastic movements, like a wind-up toy winding down. Taku-chan, wearing the same dull expression he’d often worn when stroking his pet’s soft fur, stomped several times on its head with the heel of his shoe. Then, ignoring its crushed, lifeless body, he went off to get another one to take its place.
Kawashima and Taku-chan sometimes drew pictures together, and Taku-chan’s were always the same. He’d smear the whole sheet of paper with black or dark blue or purple, and in the middle he’d paint a naked little boy whose body was pierced from head to foot with arrows — dozens of them protruding in every direction, like quills. ‘Who’s that?’ a counsellor once asked him, and Taku-chan said, ‘Me.’ The counsellor said, ‘Well, if it wasn’t you, Taku-chan, who would it be?’ ‘If it’s not me,’ said Taku-chan, ‘I don’t care who it is.’
Kawashima decided he might as well head for the all-night convenience store down the street. He was walking slowly to calm himself, but his heartbeat still wasn’t back to normal. The cold seeped up through the soles of his shoes, and each exhalation was a small white cloud, a visible reminder of how fast and irregular his breathing was. Across the street was an apartment building of reinforced concrete, and at the window of a corner room on the third floor a woman with short hair was smoking a cigarette. She used her sleeve to wipe a circular clear spot on the misty glass and looked down at the street. That building, Kawashima recalled, consisted entirely of studio apartments for single women. The light was behind her and he couldn’t see her face, but judging by her hair-style and the way she smoked the cigarette he could tell she was no longer young. Late thirties, maybe.
The image of a hand with d
ry skin and wrinkles and prominent veins formed in his mind. A woman in her late thirties, holding a thin black menthol cigarette in a hand like an autumn leaf.
He’d met her when he was seventeen and lived with her for nearly two years. She was nineteen years older, and they were often mistaken for mother and son. Whenever this happened, the woman would force a smile and maintain a veneer of cool indifference; but afterwards, when she and Kawashima were alone, she’d rail bitterly against the person who’d committed the faux pas, sometimes for hours at a time. She was a stripper working in Gotanda when he met her, though in the two years they were together she must have changed clubs a dozen times.
The woman frequently brought men she’d met at her strip club back to the apartment and fooled around with them, right in front of Kawashima. If they asked, she’d tell them in a drunken mumble that he was her little brother. And yet invariably, after the men left, she’d go ballistic on Kawashima, attacking him with her fists and shrieking: ‘If you really loved me! You wouldn’t just sit there! And let another man! Make me do those things! You’d beat the hell out of him! Or kill him!’ Eventually he did rough some of them up, after which she’d start pounding him anyway, screaming that he was going to make her lose her job. The hysteria wouldn’t stop until she ran completely out of steam and passed out. What a hateful bitch, Kawashima used to think — how does a person ever get to be this despicable? He was sure he was the only one in the world who could ever care about her. Which was why he believed she would never leave him.
The night he stabbed her with an ice pick had always been somewhat unclear in his memory. He’d returned to the apartment late that night after sniffing thinner with a friend, so he wasn’t exactly in a lucid state of mind to begin with. A kerosene space heater burned in the middle of the room, and a pot of water sat simmering on top of it. The woman had just got back from work and was sitting before the mirror, removing her make-up. He tried to hug her from behind, and she wouldn’t let him. All she said was, ‘Don’t touch me,’ but her manner was so cold and harsh that it terrified him. He put his arms around her again, and again she spurned him, prising his fingers loose this time and shaking him off. ‘Stop breathing your fucking thinner fumes on me!’ she snarled. Kawashima was devastated. All he could think was: I need to be punished. She’s mad at me. She’s mad at me, but she won’t hit me, so I’ve got to punish myself. If I don’t, she might leave. He walked to the heater and shoved his right hand into the pot of boiling water.
When he lifted the red, scalded hand from the pot to show her, the woman called him a moron and walked into the bathroom, peeling off her clothing as she went. He was convinced that after her shower she’d leave the apartment. And wouldn’t come back. How long would he have to sit there, scared half to death, waiting for her return? He mustn’t let her go. He was racking his brain, thinking he had to do something before she finished showering, when suddenly there was a crackling of little explosions where his senses of sight and smell and hearing collided. Something like the odour of burning yarn or scorched fingernails filled his nostrils, and the next thing he knew he’d flung open the shower curtain and the tip of the ice pick in his hand was soundlessly piercing her stomach. The ice pick met no more resistance than would a safety pin sinking into a sponge. It slid effortlessly into her sagging white belly, and when he pulled it out he saw thick, dark-red blood ooze from the round little hole it had made.
The ice pick may have dropped from his scalded hand then, but his memory was pretty much a blank from this point on. He couldn’t even remember if the police had shown up or not. Hundreds of times, in dreams, he’d seen the ice pick hit the tile of the bathroom floor and roll under the tub. In the dreams he’d get down on his elbows and knees and reach for it, only to burn his hand again on the pilot light for the water heater. Sometimes he’d wake up from this nightmare convinced that his right hand really was on fire. If the cops had come, the woman must not have told them the truth, because Kawashima was never taken in for questioning. Nor did she ever mention the incident to him, even after coming home from the hospital. He moved out without being asked. Although he returned to the apartment a number of times in the weeks that followed, the woman always refused to see him, and eventually she moved away. Kawashima believed the ice pick was probably still in that apartment, lying underneath the tub. And he somehow felt that the day would come when he’d go back there to see.
He’d reached the door to the convenience store when he noticed something curious. His heart rate had returned to normal. Wondering if this was somehow related to his reminiscences about the stripper, he stepped inside the store, where he was enveloped by the warm air and felt the outlines of his body begin to blur. He walked to the stack of shopping baskets and had just grabbed one when the clerk behind the counter to his right, silent till now, shouted, ‘Irasshaimase!’ to the customers entering behind him — a young couple huddling together and gasping from the cold. The couple drifted off towards the magazine racks, and the clerk turned his gaze from them back to the register. That was all, but it was enough to trigger in Kawashima the familiar but dreadful sensation that he himself wasn’t really here. Not as if he were dead or a ghost or spirit or something, but as if he’d separated from his own body and was waiting a short distance away.
As a boy, he’d escaped the pain and terror of his mother’s beatings by concentrating on the thought that the one who was being hit wasn’t really him. He’d consistently, methodically trained himself to think that way. His mother, enraged at the child who wouldn’t cry or even cry out, only hit him all the harder; but the more she hit him, the more he concentrated on telling himself that it wasn’t him she was hitting, until he actually succeeded in separating himself from the pain. Fearing, however, that if he pushed himself too far away he might not be able to find his way back, he made himself promise to wait nearby and return as soon as circumstances permitted.
What I’m feeling now, he told himself, is just a remnant of those times, just an echo from the past. He looked up at the packages of disposable diapers on a top shelf against the far wall and remembered Yoko saying that no matter how many diapers she bought it never seemed to be enough. He decided to buy some, and it was at that moment that he was suddenly convinced that he really had separated and was waiting for himself there among the diapers.
Damn, he muttered and tried to force a wry smile but failed as fear squeezed his heart. What the hell’s going on?
He could actually see his other self standing before the shelves two or three paces ahead of him now, holding a package of disposable diapers. This other self pointed to the picture of a baby on the package and grinned at Kawashima, then beckoned to him.
Come here, there’s something really important I need to tell you.
Kawashima moved towards the shelves as if being reeled in.
Think about it, the other said. Why do you really think you were able to watch Basic Instinct so calmly? That’s what you were wondering on the way here, right? You remembered Taku-chan too, didn’t you? Taku-chan saying, ‘If it’s not me, I don’t care who it is.’ And then you remembered stabbing the woman — which calmed your heartbeat right down. It dispelled your anxiety about stabbing this one, right? The other tapped on the picture, then nodded and pinched the vinyl to distort the baby’s face into a grotesque mask. Hurry up, come over here and join me. Kawashima tried to say, Please don’t do this, but his throat was so dry he couldn’t speak. Just before the two of them merged, the other said, in a clear and distinct voice: There’s only one way to overcome the fear.
Kawashima stood in a sort of stupor, like someone receiving a revelation from God. Even after he’d merged with his other self, the voice continued to reverberate inside him. There’s only one way to overcome the fear: you’ve got to stab someone else with an ice pick.
4
‘MASAYUKI,’ YOKO SAID THE next morning as she bustled about preparing for her classes. ‘Did you win the lottery or something? You’re positively glowing.
’
Between bites of a croissant, Kawashima explained that he’d slept like a dead man. This was true, and his appetite was back as well, much to his own surprise.
There was no way to be one hundred per cent sure of not getting caught — this had been his first thought on waking — but merely wounding some woman was out of the question. If she lived, she’d surely go to the police, and that would be it for him. He’d mulled over such problems while brushing his teeth and washing his face.
‘You know,’ he told Yoko as he dressed for work, ‘our company has adopted the mandatory vacation system, like a lot of the bigger firms have?’
‘You mean where you have to take time off whether you want to or not?’
‘Exactly. At some of the big agencies it’s for a whole month, or even two, but for us it’s more like a week or ten days.’
It was a fact that Kawashima’s firm had such a system — mandatory vacation for all employees once every three to five years. A fund had been set aside for that purpose, and a certain amount of cash was available for expenses, depending upon how you planned to spend your vacation.
‘I’ve got an idea I want to work on,’ he said, ‘so I was thinking about taking mine soon.’
‘When?’
‘Like, beginning the day after tomorrow or so.’
‘That is soon. But you’re not supposed to just lie around the house, right?’
‘No, and you’re not to show up at the office either. You have to come up with some sort of goal, something you’re going to do with your time. Not that it has to be anything that serious. One guy travelled to India, and another went to New York to check out the musicals. One of the girls flew down to Okinawa to get her scuba-diving licence.’
