Kojo Suzuki - Spiral

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.