by Kōji Suzuki
Bells rang and both trains pulled away at the same time, like sliding doors opening, revealing a clear view of the opposite platform. In the sudden stillness his eyes met hers again. His hunch had been right. She stood in exactly the same place as before, fixing him with the same steady gaze. Ando returned her gaze and nodded. He was signaling an intention to comply with her instructions.
Ando slowly began to walk toward the gate. Matching his movements, she went down the stairs on her side. They met at the ticket gate.
"We meet again," she said, as if this were coincidence. Ando didn't think so. He felt that she'd somehow known he'd pass through Sangubashi Station on that train. She'd been lying in wait for him. But it was no use resisting her charms now that she stood before him. Together they went through the ticket gate and turned into the little store-lined street beyond.
4
When he awoke the next morning, the woman lying next to him immediately asked him to take her to a movie that had just opened. It was the weekend, but as they went to the first showing, the theater wasn't too crowded.
The woman sat down leaving an open seat between her and Ando. Until they'd entered the theater, she'd been practically hanging from his arm, but now she suddenly wanted to keep her distance. The seats themselves were luxuriously large, so it wasn't a question of feeling cramped. Ando couldn't figure it out. But if he started listing everything she'd done that struck him as strange, it'd take him all day. All he knew was that she was Mai's sister and that her name was Masako.
He stared at the screen, but he couldn't follow the story. It was partly because he was still sleepy, but more than that, Masako's presence was distracting him. He remembered meeting her at Sangubashi Station the night before, but he couldn't quite reconstruct how he'd ended up taking her back to his apartment. He'd invited her to a bar in front of the station, where, over beers, he'd asked her name.
Masako Takano. I'm Mai's older sister.
Just as he'd guessed. She said she was two years older than Mai; she worked at a securities firm which she'd joined after graduating from a women's college. Everything after that point was hazy for Ando. He hadn't drunk that much, but he could only recall fragments. He couldn't recall who had suggested it, but one way or another, they'd ended up in Ando's apartment.
In the next scene he could recall, there was running water. In this fragment the context was clear. Masako was in the shower, and Ando was sitting on the bed waiting for her to come out.
The water stopped, and then Masako emerged from the hallway. She turned out the lights without even asking him; that moment, when everything went dark, left a strong impression. A second later, Masako pressed her naked upper body against him. Her wet hair was wrapped in a towel, which she held together with her left hand, and with her right, she grabbed Ando's head and pressed his face against her flesh. He felt sucked into her fine skin; his nose and mouth were covered, and he was starting to smother. It was all he could do to push her away enough for him to breathe. Then he filled his lungs with her fresh scent and put his arms around her…
The movie was unremarkable, so Ando spent the time dredging up bits and pieces of the previous night's weirdness. He hadn't been flesh to flesh with a woman for a year and a half. He'd ejaculated three times that he could remember. Not that it gave him any particular pride about his virility. He was about to turn thirty-five, and his managing to do it three times, at least, in one night said more about her beauty than his stamina. Only, now that he thought about it, he realized that everything that had happened in bed last night took place in complete darkness. It didn't matter how pretty Masako was, or how provocative she may have looked; Ando hadn't feasted on her with his eyes. Not only had she turned off the lights, but she'd covered the clock on the bedside table with a towel. She'd made the room truly dark, unwilling even to tolerate the faint trace of light coming from behind the face of the clock. Every one of her movements had betrayed an intense attachment to darkness.
Ando was pretending to watch the movie screen, but all the while he was secretly watching Masako. The darkness of the theater set off her beauty even more. Darkness became this woman.
She closed her eyes several times while watching the movie. She wasn't dozing off; her lips were moving. She appeared to be saying something, but Ando couldn't make out what. He leaned forward and to the left, resting his elbow on his knee.
Finally, by looking back and forth between her lips and the screen, Ando figured out what she was doing. Masako was repeating the characters' lines under her breath.
On screen, a bad street girl who had been transformed into a killing machine by a government agency was being sent out on her first mission. In this scene she wore a black dress and carried a huge pistol hidden in her handbag. She was entering a classy restaurant. It was a very tense moment in the film, with lots of rapid-fire dialogue.
Utterly indifferent to the movie, Ando watched Masako as she repeated the heroine's lines. Then, for a moment, Masako's voice and the heroine's overlapped. The movie was in French, with Japanese subtitles, but Masako's Japanese was perfectly in sync with the heroine's French. It was like a well-done choral recitation. Ando was shocked to see that sometimes Masako's mouth opened even before the subtitles appeared. She couldn't pull off such a feat unless she'd seen the movie enough times to memorize the dialogue.
For a while Masako lost herself in the heroine with a look of happiness on her face that Ando found amusing. But she seemed to feel his eyes upon her and abruptly shut her mouth. She didn't open it again, just staring at the screen thereafter.
As they left the theater, Masako squinted, stifled a yawn, and took Ando's arm. The winter sun shone softly, and Ando decided he'd rather touch Masako's skin directly than link arms with her. He separated his arm from hers and then held her hand. For a moment he felt a chill, but then their skin temperatures evened out, and Masako's hand relaxed in Ando's long fingers.
It was Coming of Age Day, and everywhere they looked there were young women dressed up in kimonos. Ando and Masako followed the crowd from Yurakucho toward Ginza. He intended to take her out to lunch, but had no particular place in mind. He planned to choose some likely-looking restaurant as they strolled along.
Masako kept looking around with evident curiosity at the Ginza streetcorners, and now and then she'd let slip a sigh. She didn't offer much in the way of conversation, but Ando didn't feel ill-at-ease with her. In fact, he felt a surge of satisfaction at being able to quietly stroll around Ginza on a sunny holiday.
Masako stopped in front of a hamburger joint on a corner and stared at its sign on the sidewalk. There was something of the innocence of a teenager in her earnest gaze.
"You want to eat here?" Ando asked.
"Uh-huh," she said, nodding vigorously. Ando went inside, glad he was getting off so cheaply.
Masako's appetite was simply astounding. In the blink of an eye she'd consumed two hamburgers and an order of fries, and was eyeing the counter again greedily.
It turned out to be ice cream she wanted now, so he ordered one and gave it to her. This time she ate slowly, as if she dreaded coming to the last bite. She carried each spoonful to her mouth with great care, but even so, she ended up dripping melted ice cream on her lap. Her stockings were flecked with drops of milky white mixed with bits of strawberry. She scooped up a drop with her index finger and licked it, then grew impatient. She clutched her shin with both hands, brought her mouth to her knee, and ran the tip of her tongue over it. Still in her curled-up position, she rolled her eyes and shot Ando a suggestive glance. There was provocation in her eyes, and Ando couldn't look away. She finished licking up the ice cream and lowered her leg again. There was a run in her new stockings. She must have snagged them with a canine tooth.
Ando had bought her those stockings that morning at a convenience store by the station. She didn't seem to own any; after all, she'd been walking around with bare legs in the middle of winter. Ando felt cold just looking at her, so he bought a pair
of stockings without even checking with her. When he handed them to her she ran straight into a restroom to put them on, and she was still wearing them.
The run seemed to bother Masako, because she kept rubbing her knee.
Ando felt he'd never get tired of watching her every move. She came out of nowhere, and now I'm falling for her.
He wondered if he really was. Maybe he was just becoming desperate, dissolute. If he'd become a carrier of the ring virus as a result of having read that strange report, if his body was being eaten away by the hour, then his nascent pleasure was something he couldn't afford to lose.
Back in college, he'd read a novel set in a little mountain village that featured a female character who was rather like the woman he was confronted with now. The fictional woman is possessed of above-average looks, but because she doesn't speak and act like others, the villagers have branded her as crazy. She ends up providing comfort to men who have no fixed companions. The image of a woman without a home wandering the woods in a disheveled state, accepting the local men one and all without discrimination, embodied a certain high Eros, aided by the exotic setting. The mountain village gave the story a perfect harmony of character and setting, and at the time Ando had felt that if the author had placed such a woman in the city, the novel wouldn't have acquired the right atmosphere.
Well, he was in Ginza now, smack in the middle of Tokyo, not some alpine hamlet. But Masako had the same aura as the heroine of that book, and her modern beauty didn't seem at all out of place on a stool in a fast-food joint.
Ando suddenly remembered how the novel ended. Alone in the mountains, the woman gives birth to a child, having no idea who the father is. The story closes with that baby's first cries piercing the forest and echoing across the mountainside.
I can't let that happen.
Ando admonished himself. He had to take precautions to protect Masako's body. He recalled that the night before he'd been so overjoyed at the prospect of coupling that he'd forgotten himself and neglected to use birth control.
Masako was running her fingers in a circle over her kneecap, gradually making the hole bigger. The skin of her leg showed white where it peeked through the rent, so white as to make it a shame to cover it up with stockings.
The hole got bigger. Ando stopped her by laying his hand on top of hers.
He asked her, "What were you saying back there in the theater?" He meant to ask why she was repeating the characters' lines.
Masako's reply was: "Take me to a bookstore."
She liked to deflect his questions that way. She asked Ando to do things far more often than she answered his queries. But of course, Ando was incapable of saying no to her.
He took her to the biggest bookstore in Ginza. Masako flitted from shelf to shelf, in the end spending over an hour in the bookstore reading on her feet. Ando, who didn't share that habit, ended up wandering around aimlessly until he discovered, next to the registers, a stack of pamphlets from Shotoku, the publisher. Since he'd visited their offices only the other day, and the pamphlets were free, he picked one up.
The pamphlet included a short essay but consisted mainly of ads for future Shotoku releases.
I wonder if Ryuji's in here? Ando flipped through the pamphlet expectantly. The other day, Ryuji's editor Kimura had told Ando that Ryuji's collection of philosophical essays was just about to be published. Ando was hoping to see a friend's name in print.
But before he could find it, he was dragged out of the bookstore by Masako. "How about another movie?"
Her plea was a mild one, but the way she gripped his arm and pulled him along suggested she wouldn't take no for an answer. Maybe, while reading in the bookstore, she'd found out about another movie and decided she had to see it. Ando slipped the pamphlet into his coat pocket and asked, "What do you want to see?"
She didn't answer, but simply squeezed his hand and tugged him forward.
He hung back a bit, saying, "Pushy, aren't you?" Then he noticed that she was still clutching an event-guide magazine and came to a full stop. Masako hadn't spent a single yen since the night before. She hadn't made a move to pay for anything, always leaving it to Ando to pick up the tab. He didn't imagine for a moment that she'd purchased the magazine with her own money. Indeed, it wasn't in a bag, and she held it bare rolled up in her hand.
She lifted it.
Ando looked back toward the bookstore. Nobody was coming after them. She'd managed to elude the sharp eyes of the clerks. It was only a three-hundred yen magazine; even if she'd been caught, it wouldn't have been a big deal. As he let Masako pull him along, Ando was beginning to feel bolder than ever before.
5
When he put the key in the lock he could hear the phone in his apartment ringing. Figuring he wouldn't make it in time anyway, Ando decided not to hurry. He turned the knob. When friends called, they usually only let the phone ring five or six times, because they knew how small his apartment was. Hence he could usually guess the caller by how long it took him or her to give up. As he'd expected, by the time he got the door open the ringing had stopped, a sure sign of someone who knew him and how he lived. There weren't too many people who had visited him. It was probably Miyashita, Ando figured, looking at his watch. It was just past eight o'clock in the evening.
He opened the door wider and beckoned Masako inside, then turned on the lights and the heat. Clothing was scattered about exactly as they'd left it that morning. Masako had left her belongings there, seemingly having decided to spend another night with Ando.
Ando's shoulders and back were stiff from watching movies in the morning and afternoon. He wanted a soak in the tub.
Starting to take off his coat, he found the publisher's pamphlet in his pocket. He took it out and placed it on the bedside table, thinking to examine it at leisure after a bath. He'd decided to buy Ryuji's book, and he needed to look up the title and publication date.
He stripped down to his shirt and rolled up his cuffs. He gave the tub a quick rinse and then adjusted the water temperature and started to fill it. It wasn't a large tub, so it wasn't long before it was ready. The bathroom was full of steam, and turning on the fan didn't do much good. He thought he'd have Masako bathe first, so he stuck his head into the other room. She was sitting on the edge of the bed taking off her stockings.
"Would you like to take a bath?"
She stood up. At the same time, the phone rang.
As Ando walked to the telephone, Masako took his place in the bathroom, disappearing behind the accordion-style shower curtain.
It was Miyashita, as he'd expected. As soon as Ando had the receiver to his ear, his friend yelled, "Where the hell have you been all day?"
"At the movies."
Miyashita obviously hadn't expected that answer. "At the movies?" he blurted.
"Two of them, in fact."
"Must be nice not to have a care in the world," Miyashita sneered in heartfelt disgust. Then he continued with his harangue. "I don't know how many times I tried to call you."
"I do go out, you know."
"Well, whatever. Do you know where I am now?"
Where was Miyashita calling from? It didn't sound like he was at home. Ando could hear cars. He must have been in a roadside phone booth somewhere.
"Please don't tell me you're in the neighborhood and you want to come up?"
Now was a bad time. Masako was in the bath. Ando was prepared to refuse if that was Miyashita's plan.
"Don't be an idiot. Think theater, man, the stage."
"What are you talking about?"
Now it was Ando's turn to be annoyed. What right did Miyashita have to criticize him for watching movies when he was going to plays? But that wasn't what Miyashita was up to.
"I'm at the offices of Theater Group Soaring."
The name rang a bell. Where had he seen it before? He remembered-in Ring. It was the name of the troupe Sadako Yamamura had belonged to prior to her death.
"What the hell are you doing there?"
"Yesterday I realized that the descriptions in Ring were so precise and objective that it was like they'd been observed through the viewfinder of a video camera."
"Me, too."
Why were they going through all that again? Ando spotted the Shotoku pamphlet on the table and pulled it over next him so he could take notes on it. It was a habit of his to take notes while he was on the phone; it calmed him down. His customary phone-conversation posture was receiver wedged between his ear and left shoulder, ballpoint pen in right hand.
"Well, I realized today that there was one more thing to check on. I mean, if we wanted to look at faces, we didn't need to go all the way to Atami, did we?"
Ando was getting impatient. He couldn't see where Miyashita was going. "Just tell me already."
Miyashita finally came out with it. "I'm talking about Sadako Yamamura."
"Come on, she died in 1966." But wait… Ando suddenly realized why Miyashita had visited the theater group. "The photograph."
He remembered reading in Ring that Asakawa's colleague Yoshino had visited the troupe's rehearsal space and seen Sadako's portfolio. This was something she'd submitted when she'd joined the troupe, and included two photos, a full-length one and one from the chest up. Yoshino had made copies of them.
"Finally got it, huh? All along, it was easy as pie to feast our eyes on Sadako."
Ando summoned up his mental image of Sadako. Thanks to Ring, he had quite a strong impression stored away in his brain. Tall and slender, with only a modest bustline but perfectly balanced in her proportions. Her facial features were somewhat androgynous, but she had perfect eyes and a perfect nose, with nothing about them he would change if he could. He imagined her as an unapproachable beauty.
Ando whipped up some courage and asked, "And how about it? Have you gotten them to show you the photos?"
Miyashita had probably seen them, and the face in the photos and the one in his mind had probably been identical. That was the reply Ando expected.
