Fuminori Nakamura - Evil and the Mask

It was not just me and Father that she seemed to find strange, but everything around her. The room, spacious and unheated. The deer’s head mounted on the wall, antlers spread wide on either side, its coat covered in dust as if it had turned to stone. The enormous black desk, the sofa where my father was sitting, the countless books and earthenware pots placed carelessly on the ancient shelves.

“First, you need to become competent.”

My father’s lecture was not finished.

“In this world, you must be powerful, because when an able person becomes a cancer, he is formidable. I hear you are highly intelligent. That, however, is thanks to your education thus far. The differences between people are not as great as the differences between humans and apes. Talent is simply the ability to work harder than other people. At present, you have the habit of diligence — in other words, perseverance and willpower. From now on you must also form the habit of resisting the temptation towards inertia or resignation. To purge from your soul any tendency to give up. You must also form the ability to communicate, to manage human relationships shrewdly. Last week a young man was going around assaulting people at random in the streets, but I don’t want you to limit yourself to trivial crimes like that. Under my tutelage, you will become a brilliant man. Intellectually you will be greatly in advance of your years, and then when you turn fourteen, I am going to show you hell.”

Still he did not move a muscle. He must have been well into his seventies, and his legs were spindly. The girl continued to stand beside me, forgetting even to put her bag on the floor.

“A hell which will make you want to reject the world. A cruel, devastating hell. This girl will play an important part in that torment. At that time, as you are entering adolescence, under the surface your psychological balance will be upset, causing major neurological disturbances. You will be engulfed by that evil, and you will feel a need to use it to influence the people around you. That is just the beginning, however. When you turn fifteen I will show you hell once more, and twice when you turn sixteen. Then at eighteen you will learn another truth about your life. All this has already been determined. It cannot be altered.”

My father shifted position slightly, and for a moment his head moved out of the shadow. I caught a brief glimpse of his face, still completely without expression, and then it was hidden again.

“You will become part of the nerve center of this country, or else the nerve center of some organization that is fighting against this country, and you will foment evil. I will leave you a greater share of my wealth than my other children, so that ideally this world may be brought to an end.”

He sighed heavily. The girl’s frightened eyes were still illuminated by the glow of the setting sun.

“Why am I telling you this now? There are three reasons. One is that I am exceedingly drunk. The second is that you are still young and will not remember this conversation for long, because you are still in short pants and holding a toy car in your hand.”

I thought he might laugh at this, but he didn’t.

“And the third reason is that your mother was a good woman. She spent nights with an old man like me and gave birth to you. She waited patiently for a chance to bring out the goodness that I rejected my entire life — no, which I couldn’t even comprehend. I respect that. But you will soon forget this talk. Probably you don’t even understand a word of it. It will be like a tale heard in a dream.”

My father stood. With the light behind him, his body looked like a black void that had appeared in the air.

“This girl will live here with you. From now on the two of you must become close. For the hell that you will see in the future, so that you will become a cancer. However, you and this girl will not live happily ever after. Never. Now got to bed. You are still a child, and there is nothing so foolish as a child.”

Father turned his back and took a book from the shelf as though he had already forgotten us. Then he went through the door to the adjoining room at the rear. Whenever he opened a door, it never made a sound. The girl in the white dress was staring intently at the stuffed deer’s head.

But my father was wrong. I was already a cancer. The only reason I was carrying a radio-controlled car was to deceive him. I was always thinking of ways of exterminating him, and I had been fantasizing about those plans for a long time, every day it seemed.

AT THAT TIME I did not know how many rooms there were in the mansion.

The hill behind the house was like a forest, and in the garden were two ponds surrounded by stones. The hill was untended and wild, but the ponds were stocked with carp. Usually carp live to a ripe old age, but for some unknown reason on our estate they never lasted long.

Apart from the young servant girls, there was also a quiet, middle-aged woman called Tanabe who was in charge of all the domestic staff. At first I thought she was my mother, but that wasn’t the case. I had no idea where my mother was. No one had even told me if she was alive or dead.

The girl in the white dress was named Kaori. Not even she knew her original last name. She was adopted into the family from a children’s home and given the same surname as me, Kuki. Our gloomy house was on the outskirts of Nagoya in Aichi Prefecture. The building is still standing, but no Kukis live there anymore.

Kaori and I went to the local public elementary school. Normally I would have expected to attend a private school like my older siblings, but my father wouldn’t hear of it. He thought that a public school was better for coming in contact with people from all levels of society. To make me a cancer I had to learn to mix with a wide range of people. That was probably what he had in mind.

Most of my schooling was done by three home tutors. I’ve largely forgotten what they were like. There is only one, a young man, I remember well. Although he was only there for a short time, he became a bright spot in my joyless daily routine.

He was very muscular, and behind his back the servants and I called him the Muscleman. When he heard this nickname he took a fancy to it and started using it himself. Physically, however, he was so weak that it made me wonder what those big muscles were for, and he moved ponderously. He also had a tendency to say tactless things — for example, he once told a servant whose eyes were too far apart that she was lucky to have 180-degree vision. Usually I laughed at his jokes just because that’s what children were supposed to do, but sometimes my laughter was genuine. For some reason, at those times I would feel sorry for myself.

My school life was uneventful. All I had to do was make some effort to hide my depression from those around me. I couldn’t afford to let them discover that I was the kind of boy who regularly threw lizards and other small creatures off the cliff on the hill out the back. Nor that I used to pick up hair and fingernail clippings that had been dropped around the house and store them in a box, on the theory that at least some of them must be my mother’s. Even without those eccentricities, a boy who lived in an obscenely big house and was good at nothing but studying was unlikely to fit in at school. I decided to trick them by concealing myself in a cloak of laughter. I think the other kids were more at ease with me that way. He might be a Kuki brat, they’d think, but he likes a joke as much as the rest of us, and he’s more frivolous than serious.