Fuminori Nakamura - Last Winter We Parted

THIN THREADS OF rain are soaking the ground, as though it doesn’t really matter if it falls or not.

Usually I don’t care if I get wet but I put up my umbrella. I am on my way to meet someone. It makes people uncomfortable when you show up sopping wet.

I had fled back home from Akari Kiharazaka’s apartment. I had left her like that, halfway out of her bathrobe. I am a mess. In a bad way. My head is throbbing, and I futilely clench my molars together. It isn’t as if that is going to make my headache go away.

Sensing something, I turn around to see a cat behind me. The cat is black, the area around its belly helplessly white. For some reason the cat has been following close behind me. Like it is checking to see what my fate is. As I hold up my umbrella, my bag feels heavy. I am aware of the recorder and notebook and stationery I am carrying. I still cannot bring myself to write a single letter to Yudai Kiharazaka. He seems to expect me to open up to him in a letter, but I can’t figure out how to write to him. I even have envelopes with me. And of course pens too. Maybe, once I start writing, the words will come to me. I have still only met him twice.

I can see a concrete wall. The high enclosure conceals an old mansion. There are numerous trees. Inside the grounds, the house surrounded by that wall seems familiar for some reason.

I ring the doorbell. I hear a woman’s voice, and a moment later the door opens. A still youthful woman comes to greet me. Smiling, she guides me through a large garden.

“We’ve been expecting you.”

These words are spoken by a man who has been crouching in the garden. He is the doll creator, Suzuki. He is wearing the white sweat suit that is his work clothes. The color is different, but it resembles the outfit that I had seen Yudai Kiharazaka wearing.

“I thought it was about time you came around. You’re writing a book about Kiharazaka, are you?”

He smiles as he speaks. The woman is also smiling as she looks at me. I sense something behind me, and turn around to see the same cat from before. It approaches the doll creator and then rolls over on the ground. It must be Suzuki’s cat. As I look closer, I see it is wearing a collar.

“… Yes. I’m a mess. I, uh …”

“You’re in over your head?”

“I am.”

“… I see,” he says with concern in his amiable voice. I wonder how old he is. I had thought he was in his forties, but he had looked younger when I saw him outside of his home.

“Please come inside. I’m not working today.”

The woman opens the front door and leads me inside. We walk down a hallway and come into a familiar spacious tatami room. My breath catches. There are countless dolls, all wearing different clothes. They seem utterly alive. Of course, I know very well that they aren’t alive but, I can’t help thinking, they are by no means dead either. Although my brain registers them as human, a part of me still seems aware that they definitely are not. The vivid gazes of the various dolls are looking in every direction. My eyes lock with one of them. My heart starts to race a little. If I look at them from even a slightly different angle, each of the dolls’ expressions seems completely changed.

“… Lately, I haven’t been able to make any for pleasure. I’ve been too busy.”

“You have many commissions?”

“Yes. Maybe it’s the times we live in. There are a lot of requests for ones modeled on living people.”

The doll creator smiles when he says this. His eyes are extremely narrow, his skin pale. His long hair has a gentle wave and is neatly arranged.

“I heard that used to be taboo.”

“Yes. But if they keep asking for it …”

“I also heard that one doll told the guy to kill the real woman she was based on.”

Suzuki looks at me with pity when I say this. Even though he is the one who has created such a doll.

“What a shame. Really, such a shame. But I am simply the doll maker. All I’m doing is actualizing people’s desires. Once actualized, certain things also become apparent.”

I drink the tea that the woman has prepared and brought out. The doll creator is sitting directly on the tatami, so I sit down myself. Right in front of the dolls. At some point the woman has disappeared.

“Is she …?”

“Oh, she’s a doll.”

“… What?”

“Ha ha ha, it’s a joke.” The doll creator laughs with real delight. “No, she is a sort of apprentice. She came to me so that I could make one of her husband who passed away. She sleeps with me regularly but her heart still completely belongs to her husband.”

“… And what about your heart?”

“My heart?”

Suzuki looks at me.

“… I have no such thing.”

The cat from earlier comes into the room. It prowls around us, then seems to lose interest and vanishes again. I sip the tea that the woman has made, and Suzuki does the same. After a while, he smiles.

“That’s a lie. I was joking with you again. She’s only sleeping with me so that I’ll make her a doll. A doll has to be a copied after a person. It shouldn’t be copied after a doll. That’s why I need to have contact with people.”

“You …”

“Ha ha ha, you’re not here to talk about me, are you? But rather about Kiharazaka.”

He looks at me through his narrow eyes.

“He was a top-notch photographer. But unfortunately … he tried to go beyond that. Perhaps what he sought to be doesn’t even exist. Take a look over there.”

I let my gaze follow Suzuki’s hand. At one side of the room, past all the other dolls, there is one that appears to be in the process of being made. It has no hair, its flesh-colored body is exposed, it isn’t wearing any clothes. Neither the face nor the body have the texture of real skin.

“That doll does not yet have any life in her. The doll does not resemble anyone, or have any distinctive characteristics. That’s the one — the one that appears in the background of his photo, Butterflies .”

“… What?”

“His desires were all imitations of someone else. That is to say, there was nothing inside him.”

The doll creator is still looking at me.

“We did an experiment, when it was just me and him. He asked me to create what would be his ideal woman, so I picked up a pencil and sketched it out. But no matter what, the face of the woman he described always resembled someone else. His sister or his mother, a celebrity, the waitress he had just seen … Our predilections — what we call our desires — I guess that’s just how they work. But then, seeing what I had inadvertently drawn, I decided to test him. I said, ‘I prefer this kind of woman.’ And then he too gradually took a liking to the same things. After a while he started saying, with considerable enthusiasm, Make me a doll like this … Then, in the midst of it all, he realized what had happened and he went quiet.”

Suzuki draws in a quick breath, and calmly continues.

“What first got him interested in cameras was a commercial he saw with a friend. In the commercial, a cool-looking guy was using a camera in a cool way. As they were watching, Kiharazaka’s friend beside him said, ‘Sure would be nice.’ With a look of envy, he had said, ‘It sure would be nice to have that.’ At that moment, Kiharazaka felt just the slightest desire for the camera. And from then on, he told me, his desire for the camera grew stronger and stronger.”

“That’s just …”

“There is nothing inside him. He fell in love with his sister because he saw a movie about incest. And because the woman who starred in it was very beautiful and sexy. What’s more, he told me, the guy he saw the movie with had joked about how nice it would be to have a gorgeous sister like that. So even though it got started that way — or no, precisely because it started that way — from then on, little by little, his desire was heightened, until he was pathologically obsessed. It’s his attempt to turn his own desire, which is an imitation of someone else’s desire, into the real thing.”