Fuminori Nakamura - Evil and the Mask

“Fumihiro!”

I had intended to spy on her in secret, but I’d forgotten to make my escape and she’d spotted me. I have no recollection of what happened to her friends. I simply looked at Kaori as she approached. She was gorgeous. Far too good for someone like me.

“I haven’t seen you for ages,” she said with a smile, seeming untroubled by my sinister ambush.

“Yeah. I was in the area.”

“I’m glad.”

She started walking. I realized that I was walking with her.

“How’s school?” I think she asked.

If I swallow my pride and admit honestly the ugliness that passed through my mind, I was thinking about attacking her. About touching the most beautiful, most precious girl in the world once more. After that, I thought, I would kill myself. That would be the end of my miserable life. If I could hold Kaori in my arms one more time, I didn’t give a damn what happened to everything else. I opened my mouth.

“It’s just before exams, so there are no classes.”

I had no idea what I was saying.

“Everyone at your school must be really brainy,” she said.

“No, there are some weirdos too.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. It’s fun. How about yours?”

“I like it.”

As I walked, I said the first things that came into my head.

“So you don’t need to worry about me, or the old place, or anything.”

She was silent.

“It can’t be helped. Just forget all about my father. You’ll be fine. You can make a fresh start. First love often doesn’t work out. We’re like brother and sister.”

She started to speak. I didn’t think I wanted to hear it. I also suspected that my previous speech had been a waste of breath.

“Can I ask you something?” she asked nervously.

“What?”

“Your father, has he come back?”

“No.”

“I thought maybe you …”

It’s odd, but it was the first time in months that I’d remembered that I’d killed him. I imagined telling her. I killed him to protect you, so there’s no reason for us to be apart. Even if you don’t like me, even if I disgust you, you should be always by my side, because Father’s death means we’ll always be joined. Because you’re everything to me. Because if you’re not going to be mine, I could drag you down here with me. Into my world, where we’re both stained by that dark secret .

“I’m not brave enough for that,” I said, laughing.

I still hardly knew what I was saying.

“This is hard to talk about, but I can tell you because you won’t tell anyone else.”

I lowered my voice.

“My father’s mixed up with a whole bunch of people, yakuza and some really scary foreigners. So they’re saying he might have been murdered by them.”

The sunlight was dazzling.

“That’s why they can’t go public with it. You’d better forget about it. It sounds like my brothers are handling it on the quiet.”

This was just like my clowning around to hide my depression before I met her. I thought she looked slightly relieved. Still acting casually, I told her I had to catch a train and made my farewells. My malice hadn’t grown so bad that I could hurt Kaori. The sun was slowly sinking, shooting powerful beams between the apartment buildings. I could hear the sounds of insects, and a faint breeze brushed indifferently against my cheek. I thought that something important in my life had ended. People would probably tell me that I still had a lot to look forward to. Maybe some would even say that killing my father had been a form of self-defense, that I had no choice. But my youthful heart, which had experienced great joy and the torments of hell, couldn’t untangle those events and order them neatly. They had settled inside me, and as I grew old they would warp me even more. As long as I lived, I would continue to harm everyone who was important to me. I felt, however, that I was unnaturally calm. My mind was completely detached from my body. I was aware of the movement of my feet as I walked, and I spoke out loud on purpose. I just said something, I thought to myself. I wondered how people around me would react if I raised my voice and shouted.

ON THE SCREEN Kaori was moving. The projector, the latest model, was showing images of the recording the detective had handed me. It had been taken at night, but was very clear. She was beautiful. She was looking down as she opened the door of a convenience store, holding her plastic bag of purchases and her purse in her left hand and putting the receipt away with her right. I smiled, thinking how like her it was to keep her receipts tidy.

I rewound I don’t know how many times to see what she’d bought, freezing the frame and zooming in. In the white bag I could see a pack of Morinaga 100 % apple juice. A small brown box might have been chocolate. A packet that looked like supplements, I couldn’t tell what kind. Her black hair grew to her shoulders, and under a white half coat I could see a cream sweater and a dark skirt. She climbed into a blue Stepwagon, a courtesy car for the women at the club. The driver was a young man, and the other women in the vehicle were about the same age as Kaori. The vehicle backed up a bit and then turned out of the parking lot. At that moment her profile was visible through the window, head down. The car drove off and the recording ended.

I lit a cigarette and played it again. Kaori opened the door of the shop, put the receipt in her purse. My heart rate quickened. Above her sweater, the skin around her throat was pale. Since she was on her way home from work, she was still heavily made up. I watched it again, lit another cigarette, watched it once more. Without my noticing it, the piano tune flowing over the stereo had finished.

MY LIFE SINCE I separated from Kaori had passed uneventfully. I dropped out of high school, took the university entrance exam and went to a college in Tohoku. Perhaps I realized that I could never get on with my life unless I left the estate. Every day I continued to wound the people I met and to harm myself. When I dated girls, Kaori’s shadow was simply overpowering. Towards my friends, too, I couldn’t keep up the pretence for long. Everything was distorted — those past events, which I had made no effort to come to terms with, and my existence since then. I was trapped in my memories of the time I spent with Kaori. After that my life passed as a series of meaningless images. No matter how much I tried to like other women, I just couldn’t do it. Twice I made halfhearted suicide attempts. On the third time, when I climbed to the roof of my condo, I realized that I wanted to see her one last time. I knew that Yoshigaki, one of the servants Kaori had been on fairly good terms with, kept in touch with her from time to time. I got her to email me a photo of Kaori at the women’s university she was attending in Tokyo. She was lovely. I made up my mind to become a statistic, one of the thirty thousand suicides in Japan each year. But then I heard from Yoshigaki that Kaori was having trouble with her boyfriend, and my feelings became confused. It was actually a common enough problem — he was two-timing her. My heart was empty enough to be relieved that she had found a new lover. Then when I heard that she’d finally been dumped, I headed for Tokyo, my mind all mixed up.

I hired a private eye out of the phone book and got him to approach the guy who broke up with Kaori. He succeeded in getting friendly with him and found out what sort of person he was — one of those guys you find everywhere, who seduce women and then treat them like dirt. I met him several times, posing as the detective’s friend. He was a coward at heart, but that made no difference to me. I set fire to his apartment. I can clearly remember how quiet it was when I lit the match. He wasn’t killed, but suffered burns to the chest. When I heard that he’d quit university I left Tokyo. It wasn’t revenge. I simply wanted to set him on fire. Air, that was the word that came to mind. I felt as little emotion as air. And maybe I thought I was dead already. I went back up on the roof of my building, but then realized I could jump any time I wanted, it didn’t have to be then. After I graduated my eldest brother contacted me about finding a job. I ignored him and stayed in my apartment in Tohoku. Occasionally I’d pick up a hooker, get her to put on a white dress and have sex with her. Lust was depressing, but so was its release. Father had intended me to be a cancer, and I’d ended up this melancholy creature who couldn’t make anyone happy.