Fuminori Nakamura - Last Winter We Parted

Reluctantly, I accompanied this man back into the coffee shop where I had just been with Akari. The coffee that he ordered arrived, and as soon as the waitress walked away, he slid aside the gaudy wristwatch he was wearing. Underneath was a large gash. A suicide scar.

“You should stay away from her. You’ll end up like me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Please excuse me … You are contemplating avenging the death of Ms. Yoshimoto. But right now you’re worried about the best way to do so. Am I wrong?”

“How do you …?”

He was a lawyer. Long ago, he said, his life had been destroyed by Akari Kiharazaka. He seemed like a creepy guy. I even resented him for trying to help me. When it comes to love, there’s no such thing as fair. Akari had told me herself that she had a number of enemies. That she was apt to be misunderstood. There had been times, it was true, when I had detected a creepy quality in her laugh, as it rose to an almost unconscious cackle. But she wasn’t the ruthless woman the lawyer made her out to be. He was probably stalking her. I managed to get out of there without antagonizing him. I didn’t know what he might do to me if he thought I was her boyfriend.

After that I met up with Akari in coffee shops a number of times. When I saw the lawyer from afar, we’d switch locations. Then I went to her apartment and … I slept with her. I was reassuring her as she cried inconsolably, only to find that I myself was also in need of comforting. The world without you can be a harsh place — it’s unbearable to live on, just going through the motions. I felt guilty about sleeping with someone I didn’t even love, but the two of us each needed the other to lick our wounds. At least, that’s what I told myself.

But I was in for a surprise. I guess I still didn’t realize people could be so unpredictable. After I came inside her, I pulled away and, in the afterglow, I was stroking her hair when she ducked her head and began to quiver. Wondering what was wrong, I tried to peer at her face and was shocked to see that she was laughing. Convulsively. Her face turning painfully red.

“Oh, it’s too much, I can’t take it … I mean, you took such a long time before you fucked me.”

After sex, the expression of her face seemed like it was shifting, little by little. Her attitude toward me, even the way she talked — everything was different.

“I’ve never been with a guy who pays so much attention when he’s fucking a woman. Ah, but what does it matter. Since I set you up like that.”

She said this and once again burst into silent mirth.

Everyone lies. But amid the overwhelming monotony of the everyday, it’s the rare individual who enjoys lying, who indulges and revels in it, who relishes treating others with malice.

“Oh, how strange. Seriously, you really are a simpleton. When I see a guy like you, it makes my skin crawl.”

I looked at her, stunned.

“I’ll tell you something. That girl, Akiko Yoshimoto … I’m the one who kidnapped her.”

“… What?”

“Do you think a woman who’s that cautious would give in to a man’s advances? I snatched her away in a car. At my brother’s request.”

She was still laughing.

“Do you know Greek mythology? Just as Oedipus unknowingly kills his own father, just as Thyestes is unwittingly tricked into eating the flesh of his own sons, you have just slept with the woman who entrapped your lover. Even being so kind as to stroke her hair afterward!”

My heart was now racing. Up until a moment ago, I had been trying to console her, making gentle love to her.

“… So, who killed Akiko?”

“Hm? Oh, your hypothesis was right. My brother wouldn’t kill anyone. But when the accident happened, he took the photos — he said he thought it was a lucky coincidence . But apparently the photos were failures. He said the model was no good. It’s not surprising, with a girl like her.”

My vision had narrowed, just like when I found out about your death. But now her body was moving in close to mine again.

“Listen, I’ll tell you something else … You know how you worried too much about Akiko Yoshimoto? That was your obsession. Your own pathological urge. Okay? Get this: the reason you fell in love with her was so that you could worry about her . Something in you needed to suffer through the pain.”

At that moment, a tender part of me broke into tattered little pieces.

“But that’s all over now. You pity-fucked the person who entrapped the woman you loved. You are no longer yourself. Now fuck me with your intense hatred. Let’s see which lasts longer. Fuck me. Hard. Fuck the shit out of me. You hate me, don’t you? That’s the kind of guy I like. Come on, you hate me, right? I want you to fuck the shit out of me.”

As she said this, there was a strange dark glimmer in her eyes. With her lips parted, she smiled, still looking me in the eyes defiantly. As if she was lit from somewhere overhead, I was flooded with the feeling that she seemed to be floating before me. She pressed her lips to mine. And then I fucked her hard. At first, it felt like I was moving involuntarily; I was trembling so badly I though I might collapse. But, inside my head, I was very calm and composed. That was the moment when the plan I’ve had in mind all along began to take shape within my consciousness. In that instant, I became a monster. It almost felt as though my body were remotely detached from my self. Like I was quietly slipping away. The moment I had felt that vague fear, my body trembled as if denying it, but by the time I had the awareness to say to myself, Right now I am trembling , my consciousness had already cooled, like it was already falling away. I felt only a momentary fear toward the version of myself that would be left behind. I could no longer sense any sort of braking mechanism that would help me to maintain balance in my awareness. I must have altered something in me so that I might pit myself against this monstrous brother and sister, so that I might outrival them. Despite the steady calming of my consciousness, a smile remained pasted on my lips. Without any brakes, a person’s consciousness was likely capable of transforming into anything. As if circuits had been formed, where they had previously not existed, and were transmitting a strange heat within me. I had sex with her over and over again that night. With intense single-mindedness, and without any hesitation, yet all the while maintaining a strangely cool composure.

The following day, I went to see that lawyer. His sole purpose in life had been vengeance against Akari. He both loved and hated her, and could think of nothing but murdering her. I continued to have sex with Akari regularly while I stayed in contact with the lawyer. In what seemed like a symbolic gesture, he had surveilled me from afar when I first met Akari, but then gradually, almost as if he were tracing a circle, he seemed to have closed the distance as he watched us. Like in Goethe’s Faust , the way the demon Mephistopheles draws ever closer to Faust … He was crazy in that particular way that stalkers are. Together we worked out our plan. Incidentally, Akari had never lost anyone whom she loved. There were only the two men who had been dumped by her and had then killed themselves.

The lawyer guy had found a woman. She worked in the sex trade, and was drowning in debt. Yuriko Kurihara. Apparently she had graduated from a prestigious high school in Tokyo; goes to show you never really know how life is going to turn out. She might have been able to work out some kind of arrangement with her debts, but she had borrowed the money from someone she had a personal relationship with, and this person was connected to gangsters, and so there was no way for her escape unless she paid it back. There were several reasons why the lawyer had taken pains to select her from among the countless unhappy women here in Japan who are buried in debt. She had no relatives, she was similar in height and body type to Akari Kiharazaka, and somewhat resembled her, too.