David Mitchell: What You Do Not Know You Want

Wei was drawing her self-portrait from a mirror and munching coffee-crusted macadamia nuts. “No, you can’t have the picture,” she said, handing me a piece of paper with a string of digits on it. “A woman called. Five minutes ago.” The number was unfamiliar. “Not your Nightingale who sings every evening,” Wei said, making me wonder if she listened in, “another.” Hadn’t the caller left a name? Wei shook her head. “Didn’t you ask what she wanted?” Wei snorted like a sly pony and for one second I wanted to crack all her bony bones like biscuits in bags and see her sly smile then. Back outside, I tapped in the mystery number. Grace answered. She’d made me look pretty stupid in Runaway Horses, I told her. “You recover okay. Listen, I made one-two phone calls. If you still want that knife, I know someone can maybe help.” Of course I still wanted that knife. Grace was coming to Hotel Aloha now. Through the glass, Wei watched me, fingers twizzling her braided hairband. I knew that look. Female jealousy is rich cream.

“Quicker to walk than to find cab.” Grace led me at a brisk clip down poorly lit backstreets. She swatted away my requests for information, saying only that I was free to turn back anytime I wanted. None of the weak stars were familiar from my childhood astronomy. Was I being led into a trap like that time in Cambodia’ Perhaps, perhaps. Through a doorway half-blocked with rusting junk we climbed five concrete flights, lit by lamps swarming with black moths. No view but other housing blocks and washing strung across balconies. Grace stopped before a nameless door. Monkeywrench marks scarred the frame. To my astonishment she kissed me on the lips. Not erotically, not brashly, not shyly. Surely not pityingly? “What was that for?” Grace pressed the bell and ran back down the stairwell. Jesus Bodysnatched Christ—but before I could call out, a Japanese guy had stepped through into the milked moonlight, uttering my name, with your crucifix—it had to be, there’s only one—on his hairless torso. Was I in room 404, dreaming this, or stuck in one of Dwight’s fag-queen home movies? Certainly the youth was coffee-advert handsome, ponytailed, judo trousers, but he was stitched and patched from a very recent, pretty serious beating. “So you’re here.” His English was as American as it was Japanese. “Shingo told me you’d been into Runaway Horses. I, like… meant to call you”—he gingerly indicated his bruises—“but my creditors, like… changed the terms of repayment.” His name came to me and I said it: Nozomu. Nozomu asked how I’d found him. Police sirens wailed from the dark mass under Diamond Head. Grace showed me here, I answered, gesturing at the stairwell, but even her footsteps had vanished. Nozomu frowned. “What Grace?” Grace the Filipina, Grace from Bar Wardrobe and Runaway Horses. Nozomu spat over the railing. “Shingo better not be giving my address to, like… no one. But you better come in, now you’re here.” I followed him into a poky apartment smelling of men, soy sauce and local marijuana. “I’ve only got, like… cold beer, but sit down anyway. I know what it is you come for. Don’t worry. You’re welcome to it.”

Nozomu dug out a battered flute case from a closet of ratty towels, then shoved the moraine of surfing magazines and fast-food wreckage off the coffee table with his foot. “Vulture went to your seller’s hotel, the Holiday Inn or somewhere. He brought it to my bar after closing. Never seen him so, like… high. Not even when he was high. When Vulture told me what it was, I was like… ‘Yukio Mishima’s suicide knife? Like, sure .’ But Vulture showed me the Kakutani mark and I was like… ‘ Whaah.’ Hou awesome!”’ Nozomu unclipped the case and I assumed my professional calm. Twelve inches of gunmetal gray, blade tapering to a fang, shaft housed in an age-yellowed ivory handle. Just a piece of pre-Meiji ironmongery, but not. Events—grandiosely, “History”—imbue objects with a frequency just beyond the human ear, just. This frequency is our livelihood. The sunglasses shading Oppenheimer’s eyes from the first H-bomb test in 1944; the shiny 3mm bullet that liberated Ernest Hemingway from Ernest Hemingway; and yes, Yukio Mishima’s knife, radioactive with what it had done. I picked the weapon up—its lightness surprised me—and checked for the tiny characters “Kakutani” inscribed on its nub. There, the real thing, just as its certificate of authenticity promised. I very nearly laughed. “Vulture went back to his hotel to get some Big Island weed to, like… celebrate. But morning came and still no Vulture. I was like… ‘He’ll be back in day or two. For this little beaut at least.”’ Nozomu meant the knife. “But I tell you, since he left it with me I got, like… an evil streak of luck. Every table I sat at, every game, every casino, hands of cards, good cards, strong cards, turned to shit. King Midas in reverse, right? My creditors cut my, like… lifeline, I lost my bar, oh, yeah, my motorbike got stolen the day after my insurance is finish. My fortune-teller, like, a guru really, told me today, like… ‘an impure metal’ in my life was, like, the source. Pretty, like… obvious, huh’” I grunted in sympathy. Your beautiful fool—still ignorant of why you never returned?—had no idea that he was about to hand me enough impure metal to buy his bar, everything in it and everyone in it. “So it’s no, like… bullshit? This dagger really killed Yukio Mishima?” The icy beer burned my fingers. “Well,” I began, “Mishima did open up his abdomen with this blade, yes, but it takes hours to die from a single cut. To force one’s innards out, a further cut is required, from crotch up to sternum. You’ll appreciate, the subject rarely has the strength for this jumonji-giri, so tradition dictates that he—or she—appoint a kaishakunin to cut off the subject’s head with a full-length samurai sword after the first cut. Mishima’s appointee was a kid of twenty-five, Hissho Morita, a colonel in his private army of adoring boys. But with jieitai troops kicking down the door, helicopters thundering overhead and a tied-up general having a pulmonary seizure in the corner, Morita blew it and hacked at Mishima’s shoulder blade instead. Morita missed three times, before a third compatriot, Furukoga, grubbed the sword and beheaded Mishima with one clean blow. So strictly,” I finished up, “this knife is the shorter accomplice in Mishima’s death, but the one with brains.” TV laughter broke through the mosquito screen. I wanted to leave. There was no point giving Nozomu a sales pitch or the Mishima myth. “Why did Mishima do it? I heard it was, like… ’cos he didn’t like how Japan was, like… Americanizing. But what difference could he make if he was, like… dead?” Millions of words have been shoveled into the grave of that very question, I replied, before parroting your theory: Yukio Mishima feared senility more than dying. By 1970 he felt his literary and physical prowess was sliding, so he exchanged his life for a piece of theater shocking enough, entertaining enough, to guarantee an immortality his literary canon could not. “Must have hurt like fuck,” Nozomu muttered. “At least his death was for something,” I said, replacing the knife in the flute case and getting to my feet. Nozomu asked where you are now. Werewolf did hush you up welt. El Salvador, I lied to your last boyfriend. I’d seen you off from the airport here in Honolulu on Sunday. Nozomu repeated, “El Salvador,” like an orphan sighing, “When my father was alive…”

Is language erased, Vulture? Are quotations and word pyramids the last toys of literacy to go? You, who had a word—dozens, puns, similes—for everything, are you now struck dumb, Zachary Tanaka? Is this why you didn’t warn me? Is this I heard only my own echoes? My key was in room 404 when I noticed, down the corridor, the PRIVATEdoor was ajar. Gone midnight. An invitation? You’ll understand, I was jubilant with the promise of wealth. As you had been. Yukio Mishima’s knife, in this flute case, under my arm, had sought me out, cutting me free of dependency on Nightingale, on orthodoxy. Come now, I assured myself, where’s the harm in it little entertainment? One last time before a fling becomes adultery? Remembering the jealousy in Wei’s face as Grace had led me to Nozomu’s, I knocked on Wei’s door. No answer, so I half peered in. Spray from a just-cut lime scented the air. Her room was identical to 404, even down to the print of the ukulele-strumming hula girl. “Wei?” Was she sulking? Putter patter patter a poodle ran by, lead trailing from its collar. Rumors might scamper to Uncle if I dithered on the threshold, so in I slipped and closed the door. “Wei? It’s me.” A spine-cracked Chinese-English dictionary lay splayed. Clothes lay slumped on the armchair. Look. Wei’s braided hairband. I picked it up and ran it between my nose and lip. “What do you think you’re doing?” asked Wei. Jesus Cardiac Christ! The clothes on the chair were Wei, who now sat up like a big cat. “It says ‘Private’ on my door.” Sex, or anything like it, was not going to happen. “Um, just making sure you’re okay, Wei. You seemed upset earlier. But you’re okay now. So. Off to bed. Early flight tomorrow. Ciao.”