“No,” I answered. “I’m not interested.”
“Just a bit of gloss won’t hurt, right?” Meiko said. “Hey, Yo¯ko. Why don’t you help her out?”
“Good idea,” Yo¯ko said, taking some gloss onto a brush.
Meiko and Moeko held me down. Yo¯ko started to paint the gloss on my lips. They felt sticky. But what my sisters were doing to me was almost like the kind of sensual doctor–patient games that young kids play. My chest felt like it might explode.
“Take a look, Nanako,” Moeko said, passing me the hand mirror. “See how beautiful you are?”
I looked timidly into my reflection, but there was no change.
Once the three of them had gone back to their rooms, I took another look in the hand mirror. I picked up a tissue, thinking to wipe away the gloss—but before I could raise it to my lips, I hesitated. These lips. They were Yo¯ko’s lips. And I realized then that the reason why she doesn’t leave any lipstick on her cigarettes was because she only wears gloss.
I was fascinated by those lips. I touched them gently with my finger. They were moist with the gloss, and surprisingly comfortable. I would probably never forget this moment, I thought. I had learned today that I was just like Yo¯ko. Soon, I would become a woman, like her, filled with contradiction and stubbornness.
I stared into the mirror. I looked a lot like her after all. From here on out, I would almost certainly take on the features of my other sisters too. This town, its face comprised of both glitzy Yamanote and earthy Shitamachi, was exactly the same as the pure yet dissolute faces of us sisters. And those faces, those two parts, would never be lost. Not even in the arms of some good-for-nothing man who might one day show up from somewhere far away.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maki Kashimada’s first novel Two won the 1998 Bungei Prize. Since then, she has established herself as a writer of literary fiction and become known for her avant-garde style. In 2005 she received the Mishima Yukio Prize for Love at 6,000 Degrees Celsius, a novel set in Nagasaki and based on Hiroshima mon amour by Marguerite Duras, and in 2007 she took the Noma Prize for New Writers for Picardy Third. She was nominated three times for the Akutagawa Prize before ultimately winning the award in 2012 with Touring the Land of the Dead. One of her best-known works is The Kingdom of Zero (2009), which reworks Dostoevsky’s The Idiot into the tale of a saintly idiot in Japan. She has been a follower of the Japanese Orthodox Church since high school.
Table of Contents
TOURING THE LAND OF THE DEAD
TOURING THE LAND OF THE DEAD
NINETY-NINE KISSES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Touring the Land of the Dead (and Ninety-Nine Kisses) Page 12
