Yoko Ogawa - Revenge

“The pain inflicted resembles that of the funnel we’ve just seen, but of a coarser variety. These were used to extract the hair from the victim’s head, one strand at a time.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” I said.

“I suppose it does seem a bit strange,” he said, nodding and touching his tie again. “The hairs are extracted one at a time, a procedure requiring infinite patience and perseverance. Until the scalp is completely exposed.

“It’s horrible to lose one’s hair. When the Nazis brought prisoners to a concentration camp, the first thing they did was to shave their heads in order to strip them of their humanity. In reality, it does no physical harm, but we seem convinced that our very existence is somehow bound up in our hair.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I’m a beautician. I should know.”

“Then you’ll understand the nature of the torture. It is conducted in a room lined with mirrors. Thus, no matter how hard the victim tries to avert his eyes, he is forced to watch himself becoming bald. The process is time-consuming, but it’s important that the hairs be removed one at a time. If you rip out several at once, the effect is lost. The suffering comes from the slow but steady sense of loss—along with the tiny pain the victim experiences each time a hair is plucked. It’s nothing at first, but as it’s repeated a thousand times, ten thousand times, a hundred thousand times, it becomes the most exquisite agony imaginable.”

The rich colors of the sunset were cast down on us through the skylight. The breeze had died and the leaves of the oak tree were still. The evening shadows collected under the old man’s eyes, making his smile seem a bit spooky.

The next time my boyfriend comes over, I’ll give him a haircut on the balcony. I’ll cover him with a plastic cape and put a towel around his neck. And then I’ll tie his arms and legs to the chair. Maybe this old man will lend me some straps. They’ve got plenty to spare. The ones with the fingernail tweezers would do.

And then I’ll pluck out his hair. It probably doesn’t matter where you start—behind the ears, or maybe on the top of the head. They’ll flutter down like insects with long wings. I’ll enjoy that tiny bit of resistance each time I pluck a hair, the feeling of the skin ripping, of fat popping to the surface.

Before long his scalp will appear, soft and white and delicate. Like the skin of the hamster I found in the trash can. The hair will pile up until the breeze sends it swirling around his legs. If a strand sticks to his face, he won’t be able to brush it away. He won’t be able to do anything but groan. He won’t be able to stop me doing just what I choose.

“I hope you enjoyed your visit.”

“I certainly did. Thank you for the tour,” I said, bowing. “Would you mind if I asked one last question?” He nodded. “Do you ever get the urge to try out some of the things you’ve got here?”

He put his hand to his temple and stood looking at the light in the lobby.

“Of course I do,” he said at last. His smile had disappeared. “In fact, I don’t exhibit an object unless I have the desire to use it.” He ran his hand through his hair.

“Would you mind if I came back sometime?” I asked.

“By all means,” he said, smiling once more. “Whenever you feel the need, please come to see us. We’ll be expecting you.”

Everything my uncle touched seemed to fall apart in the end. The plastic model airplanes he helped me build when I was a boy, the braces he sold through the mail that were supposed to make you taller, and even the fur coat he left me when he died.

He was the sort of man who changed professions like other men change their socks. He worked for a while at a hat factory, and then became a photographer’s assistant. Next were the braces, followed by a stint teaching table manners. He was a butler for a while, and finally a curator at a museum—though I may have mixed up the order somewhere. In the midst of all this, he was married three times, with several affairs in between. The women came and went, but in his later years he lived alone with no one to look after him. In other words, my uncle never seemed to think twice about abandoning a job or a woman to start over from square one.

If he had one admirable quality (and I’m not sure you could call it that), it was his ability to look dispassionately at the thing that lay broken in his hands, the thing he was about to lose or discard. He never seemed glum or sulky over his losses. He just watched calmly as his treasure, whatever it might have been, vanished from sight—and in many cases there was even the hint of a smile on his face as he watched it go.

I got a call from the police telling me my uncle had died and I should come to claim the body. He had no acquaintances among his neighbors and only a very few relatives, and the police had apparently gone to some trouble to locate me. I had just got back to my dormitory and was preparing for my French class when the phone rang.

“How did he die?” I asked.

“Strangulation,” the person on the other end of the line said.

“You mean he was murdered?”

“No, I’m afraid he was crushed under the garbage that had accumulated in his apartment, the poor soul.” I took some comfort in the sympathetic tone of this unseen caller.

My uncle and I were not in fact blood relatives. We thought of him as my mother’s older brother, but he came into the family at the time of my grandmother’s second marriage and was actually the eldest son of her new husband and another woman. There was also a large age difference between my uncle and my mother, and they had apparently never lived under the same roof. This relationship was explained to me any number of times when I was a child, but I had never understood it very well.

In any event, my uncle was a frequent visitor at our house. He would appear without warning, stay a few days, and then disappear again to parts unknown.

Even as a child, I sensed that he was not a particularly welcome guest. My mother would be nervous the whole time he was there, and my father was noticeably irritable. But my uncle seemed oblivious to all this: he was quite cheerful and ate and drank with great appetite.

I, too, was largely unaffected by my parents’ attitude toward him and looked forward to my uncle’s visits with impatience—primarily because he never failed to bring me some rare and unusual present.

“Now where could it be hiding?” he would say, picking me up in his arms and rubbing his cheek against mine. “Do you think you can find it?” If I squirmed away from his prickly beard, he would rub even harder. Eventually I would manage to get free and search him for my present—a procedure that was also my opportunity to tickle him.

One time I found a bar of imported chocolate in his hat; on another occasion it was a miniature model car up the sleeve of his jacket, or a jackknife tucked in his sock. When I was very young, I believed he produced all these things by magic.

The sheath for the knife was inlaid with semiprecious stones. It was solid and heavy in my hand, and just looking at it sent shivers down my spine. But when my mother found it, she took it away from me.

“What could he have been thinking, giving a dangerous thing like that to a child? He has no common sense at all.” That was what she always said about him.

Even if he wasn’t always welcome, the menu at dinner was a bit fancier when my uncle was visiting. I would crawl into his lap as he sat cross-legged at the table and pretend not to hear when my mother scolded me for it. His legs were quite boney, but for some reason I felt comfortable seated there.