Piercing Read online

  Piercing

  Ryu Murakami

  Ryu Murakami

  PIERCING

  1

  A SMALL LIVING CREATURE asleep in its crib. Like a laboratory animal in a cage, thought Kawashima Masayuki. He used the palm of his hand to shade the penlight so that it illuminated only the baby’s form, leaving the rest of the bedroom in darkness. Leaning in closer, he silently mouthed the words Fast asleep. As Yoko’s pregnancy had progressed and the fact that he was actually going to be a father began to sink in, he’d worried that the baby might have difficulty sleeping. Kawashima had suffered from insomnia since elementary school, and, after all, his blood would run in this child’s veins. He’d heard it was normal for newborns to sleep virtually around the clock; in fact, he seemed to recall some child-rearing expert describing sleep as an infant’s ‘job’. What could be more tragic, then, than a baby insomniac?

  He turned softly to check on Yoko in the double bed behind him. Her regular breathing assured him she was still asleep.

  Kawashima had been doing this every night lately, standing there gazing down at the baby while his wife slept. Ten nights in a row now, to be exact. It was well after midnight, and since Yoko rose early each morning to prepare for work, she wasn’t likely to awaken. A wholesome and healthy twenty-nine-year-old cooking expert, Yoko was a stranger to things like insomnia. She’d quit her job with a major manufacturer of baked goods when they married and begun giving lessons to people from the neighbourhood, right here in their one-bedroom apartment. Yoko’s bread and pastry classes proved astonishingly popular, and now she had dozens of students — from housewives and middle-school girls to elderly widowers and even middle-aged men. She taught classes almost every day, taking only two fixed holidays a month, and the entire apartment, including this bedroom, was permeated with the buttery smell that for Kawashima had come to symbolise happiness. Little Rie (the name suggested by Yoko’s mother) was now four months old, and Yoko somehow managed to look after her and still maintain a full teaching schedule. Of course, it didn’t hurt that most of her students were female and always eager to help out with the baby.

  He switched off the penlight for a moment and examined the pale moonbeam that sliced through a gap between the curtains. The narrow strip of light reached to the middle of the crib, slashing across the baby’s pink blanket and the pocket of Kawashima’s corduroy slacks. As a little boy he’d often sat in his room, with the moon his only source of light, drawing pictures of a long, narrow road that vanished in the distance. Remembering those times, and taking care not to prick his finger, he lifted the ice pick from his pocket. He closed his right hand around the handle and gently drew back the baby’s blanket with his left. This exposed her neck and upper chest, whiter and softer even than the bread Yoko baked. He switched the penlight back on and shone it upon her cheeks and neck. It seemed to him that the fragrance of fresh bread grew suddenly more pronounced, mixed with another scent he didn’t recognise. He wasn’t aware of the beads of perspiration on his forehead and temples until he saw one drip on to the baby’s blanket. The panel heater against the wall had warmed the room somewhat, but it was far from hot in here. The tip of the ice-pick was quivering slightly. Another bead rolled down Kawashima’s saturated eyebrow and into the corner of his eye.

  That’s sickening, he thought, and squeezed his eyes shut. Didn’t even know I was sweating. Couldn’t even feel it. Like it isn’t me the sweat’s pouring down but a wax figure of me, or some stranger who looks just like me. Damn.

  As he opened his eyes he found that his senses of sight and sound and smell were getting entangled with one another, and now came a snapping, crackling sensation and a pungent whiff of something organic burning. Yarn or fingernails, something like that.

  He moaned beneath his breath: Not again.

  It always started with the sweating, followed by this smell of charred tissue. Then a sudden sense of utter exhaustion, and finally that indescribable pain. As if the particles of air were turning to needles and piercing him all over. A prickling pain that spread like goose bumps over his skin until he wanted to scream. Sometimes a white mist clouded his vision and he could actually see the air particles turning into needles.

  Calm down, he told himself. Relax, you’re all right, you’ve already made up your mind you’ll never stab her. Everything’s going to be all right.

  Gripping the ice pick lightly to minimise trembling, he placed the point of it next to the baby’s cheek. Every time he studied this instrument, with its slender, gleaming steel rod that tapered down to such needle-like sharpness, he wondered why it was necessary to have things like this in the world. If it were truly only for chopping ice, you’d think a completely different design might do. The people who produce and sell things like this don’t understand, he thought. They don’t realise that some of us break out in a cold sweat at just a glimpse of that shiny, pointed tip.

  The baby’s lips moved almost imperceptibly. Lips so small they didn’t even look like lips. More like larvae, or a chrysalis that might unfold into an insect with beautiful wings. Vanishingly tiny red blood vessels coloured the skin of her cheeks beneath the peachfuzz. Kawashima stroked the surface of that fine layer of fuzz, first with a fingertip and then with the tip of the instrument.

  It really is all right, I’m not going to stab the baby.

  Just as he was thinking this, Yoko’s soft voice shattered the silence.

  ‘What’re you doing?’

  His entire body clenched, and the tip of the ice pick grazed the baby’s cheek. He switched off the penlight and slowly exhaled. As he turned to face his wife, he palmed the ice pick and slipped it handle first into his pocket. She was sitting halfway up in bed, her weight on one elbow.

  ‘Did I wake you? Sorry.’

  He tiptoed to her side and leaned over to kiss her cheek.

  ‘What time is it?’ she said.

  ‘A little past one.’

  ‘You were looking at Rie?’

  ‘Yeah. I didn’t mean to wake you. You’re tired — go back to sleep.’

  ‘Are you still working?’

  ‘Most of the layout is finished. I just have to choose the slides. It’ll make the presentation a lot easier.’

  Yoko lay back down and was asleep again before he’d even finished whispering this. Thank goodness. It would have been bad if she’d turned on the light to go to the toilet or get a drink of water. She’d have seen he was sweating, and she might have noticed the tip of the ice pick protruding from his pocket.

  2

  KAWASHIMA PUT THE ICE PICK away in a kitchen drawer, washed his face in the bathroom sink, and walked into the living-room. He sat at his desk and waited in vain for his heartbeat to slow down. His throat was parched with tension, and he thought about having a drink but immediately rejected the idea. He didn’t allow himself alcohol at times like this, because he knew he’d just end up tossing back belts of something strong — a procedure that would help him relax only very briefly, after which he’d lose all control. He’d drink until he blacked out, and remember virtually nothing the following day.

  He looked around the room, trying to breathe deeply and deliberately. They still called it the living-room but had transformed it into a work space for both of them. There were no sofas or easy chairs, but a heavy, L-shaped table of unfinished wood dominated more than half of the floor area. This monster, imported from Sweden and big enough to accommodate eight or ten dough-kneading students at once, was Yoko’s most prized possession. It had been Kawashima’s wedding present to her, and he’d cleaned out his bank account to pay for it.

  He still felt the same about Yoko as he had back then: he couldn’t believe he’d managed to meet, fall in love with, and actually marry a woman like this.

  He and she were
the same age. They’d met six years ago, in early summer, at an art gallery in Ginza. It was the opening of an exhibition of works by a Russian-born French artist named Nicolas de Staël, a painter of sombre abstracts. He wasn’t well-known in Japan and, although it was Saturday afternoon, the two of them were the only visitors. Yoko was the first to speak.

  ‘Are you an artist?’ she said.

  Kawashima was carrying a sketchbook under his arm.

  ‘I do some drawing, yes,’ he told her.

  She was wearing glasses with cream-coloured frames, and they looked good on her, but he couldn’t help thinking she’d be even prettier without them. They left the gallery together and went to a coffee shop with glass walls overlooking the Ginza crossing. He ordered a double espresso and she the shop’s famous cheesecake and a cup of apple tea. The sun of early summer slanted gently through the blinds, and on each table was a glass bud-vase with a single orchid. Yoko smelled good. Mixed with her perfume Kawashima thought he detected another fragrance, though he didn’t yet recognise it as the smell of freshly baked bread. He only knew he found it pleasant, presumably because he really liked this person and felt so relaxed around her. (Conversely, whenever he was stressed out or stuck in the company of someone he didn’t care for, even ambient smells tended to strike him as repulsive.) Yoko ate her cheesecake slowly as she pored over the pages of his sketchbook. At one point a tiny crumb fell on one of the drawings, and she very carefully removed it with the corner of her napkin. Something about the way she did that made him very happy.

  They began meeting about once a week to have dinner or visit a museum or see a movie together. Kawashima was working for a graphic design firm and drawing in his spare time. His drawings were all of narrow roads in the moonlight; no other subjects had ever interested him. But one day near the end of summer he drew from memory a pencil sketch of Yoko’s face. When he presented the sketch to her on their next date, she invited him to her apartment for the first time. And there she made a halting and clearly painful confession. Until about a year before, she’d been dating an older man from her company, and on the day they broke up she’d swallowed a handful of sleeping pills and been rushed to the hospital. What did he think of a woman who’d do something like that? Kawashima said he didn’t think it was any big deal, and he meant it.

  ‘Who hasn’t wanted to die at one time or another?’ he said.

  Not long afterwards, they moved in together. They’d been sharing a place for about six months when, late on a freezing winter’s night, Kawashima awoke and leaped out of bed drenched in a sweat that had soaked all the way through the covers. Startled from sleep, Yoko frantically asked what was wrong, but all he would say was that he needed to take a little walk. He threw on some clothes and left the apartment. When he returned, some two hours later, he told her something he’d never told anyone before.

  ‘I get like that sometimes,’ he said. ‘It’s happened to me ever since I was a little kid, but I never had a name for it until I got older and found it in a psychology book. They call it pavor nocturnus — night terrors. It was even worse when I was little. I’d wake up in a panic and jump out of bed, like I did tonight, only I’d be screaming at the top of my lungs. Sometimes I’d run in circles around the room for, I don’t know, two or three minutes. Afterwards I could never remember anything, only that something had terrified me so badly that I didn’t know who I was and couldn’t even recognise the people around me. It was like they’d melted into my dream, become characters in this nightmare. It was so scary. So scary. Now that I’m grown up, it’s not quite as bad. I mean, I don’t forget who I am anymore, and like, tonight, I knew that was you speaking to me, asking me what was wrong.’

  ‘So why,’ Yoko asked, ‘did you dash out all alone? Why didn’t you let me hold you?’

  Kawashima shook his head.

  ‘I’ve just always thought it best, when I lose control like that, not to be around anybody else. Better to go somewhere by myself and walk it off, do some deep breathing to calm myself down.’

  He decided, then and there, to tell Yoko everything he’d been keeping secret for so long — with the single exception of the time, at nineteen, that he’d stabbed a certain woman with an ice pick. He didn’t want to get into that, partly because the event was so vague and uncertain in his memory, and partly because he feared it might scare her away. He didn’t want to lose her.

  ‘I think what’s behind them, behind the night terrors, is that after my father died, when I was four, my mother started hitting me. She’d beat the hell out of me. I don’t remember my father at all, except for this vague sense that he used to take us out for drives in a car. And I know he had one, for a while at least, because my mother always used to describe him as the sort of fool who’d put a down payment on a car he couldn’t afford. I haven’t seen my mother for years, but the last time we met, at my high-school graduation, she said she’d treated me the way she did because I reminded her of him — meaning my father the fool. I was afraid of the beatings, because they really hurt, but I always just assumed she must be doing it because I was such a bad kid. The weird thing is, it’s something you can learn to endure, that kind of abuse. You just tell yourself it’s not really you who’s getting beaten. If you concentrate really hard, you can actually get to a place where it doesn’t hurt any more. A lot of times she’d beat me with no warning, and that was especially scary, so I used to try to stay prepared all the time. I’d keep reminding myself: Mother’s going to hit me, Mother’s going to hit me. .

  ‘What bothered me most, though, was that I was the only one she hit. She never laid a finger on my little brother. As you know, we lived in this little town in the sticks, and the nearest city of any size was Odawara. In Odawara they had a department store with a Playland for little kids on the roof level. The three of us went there together a few times, but when I was about five or six my mother started locking me in the house and taking only my little brother. One time I climbed out the window and ran down the road chasing after them, and she dragged me back to the house and tied me to the water pipes in the bathroom. I remember that so clearly, like it was yesterday. I fell asleep right there on the tile floor, and when I woke up it was dark outside, and all I could see was that empty, narrow little road outside the window. .

  ‘Not long after that, a middle-school teacher of mine got me placed in a home for abused kids, and that’s when I started drawing. Right from the beginning I drew nothing but pictures of narrow roads at night.’ Kawashima bowed his head. ‘I’ve never told anyone about this before,’ he said, and Yoko took his hand and squeezed it.

  They were married a year and eight months after meeting in Ginza. Yoko told her parents that in accordance with the values she and her fiancé shared she didn’t want a wedding ceremony, and they reluctantly agreed. But in fact it wasn’t really about values. She knew Kawashima hadn’t forgiven his mother and younger brother and didn’t want to put him in an awkward position.

  ‘I was in the Home for a little over two years,’ he’d told her, ‘and then I went to live with my grand-mother, on my father’s side. At my high-school graduation, I don’t know why but my mother apologised to me. It was a pretty self-serving apology but, still, it was an apology. Then, at the end, she said, “You forgive me, don’t you? You forgive your mother?” I nodded without even thinking, but then something in me snapped and I slapped her face, hard. It was the only time I ever hit her.’

  Kawashima hadn’t opposed Yoko’s decision to quit her job. He’d made up his mind right from the beginning to support her in anything she chose to do. Nor did he express any reservations when she said she wanted to have a baby. The other guys in the office often teased him about how much he’d changed since his marriage, how much more cheerful he was. ‘What exactly is Yoko-chan putting in that bread of hers?’ — that sort of thing. He himself wasn’t really sure if he’d changed or not. But ever since he’d met Yoko, and especially since the day they’d decided, at her suggestion, to marry, his bo
uts of self-loathing had all but ceased. Not once had he been overwhelmed by the old panic and terror, not even when Rie was born and he first held her in his arms. Not, in fact, until ten nights ago.

  The mental and emotional torment of the old cycle of anxiety — unable to bear being alone, wanting someone always near but growing anxious when someone does get close, fearing that if they get any closer there’s no telling what might happen, until the fear itself becomes unbearable and solitude seems the only solution — had seemed to be fast becoming a thing of the past.

  Until ten nights ago, Kawashima muttered to himself, flicking the switch on the lightbox atop his desk. On its glass lid he arranged several of the thirty-five-millimetre slides he’d taken from the company archives. They were photos he was considering for a poster advertising the Yokohama Jazz Festival, though none of them had anything to do with jazz. Choosing graphics that had no direct connection to the product was something of a speciality of his. When the first indoor ski-slopes were about to open in Kyushu, his presentation — with copy that read THERE’S A FIRST TIME FOR EVERYTHING splashed across a photo of a little Caucasian boy and girl kissing — had won out over all the other agencies and made him a minor hero at the office. The photos he’d assembled for the jazz festival were black-and-whites of fashion models from the 1940s. The girls were all healthy specimens with generous smiles, lying on sandy beaches or about to dive into pools or strolling beneath parasols or drinking cocktails on a terrace. .

  But it was impossible to care about any of this right now.

  Ten nights ago. He was in the bathtub with the baby, having just finished washing her. He handed her over to Yoko, who was waiting with a fluffy bath towel, and then he leaned back in the tub, leaving the pebbled-glass shower door partially open. Yoko was murmuring to the baby as she dried her, and he was aware of himself smiling at them. And then, with no prelude or warning, a thought came percolating up into his brain and he felt the muscles of his cheeks twitch and freeze.