Maki Kashimada - Touring the Land of the Dead - Two Novellas

“This woman, right, she’s just so stupid. Like, really stupid. I’m not even kidding.”

The two hostesses laughed. Professionals in dealing with even the worst of clients, they smiled calmly without any sign of surprise. They had no doubt come across a great many men who would start to behave strangely after a couple of drinks.

“And this woman, right, she’s into other women. I’ll bet you she’s done it with one. You think she’d be willing to show her face here if she hadn’t? Huh? That’s what you’re all thinking, right?”

Natsuko said nothing to contradict him. She merely drank her water in silence. She was so used to this kind of treatment that she felt neither anger nor agitation, only languor and drowsiness.

She suppressed a yawn.

“Don’t! Don’t you dare fall asleep! The night’s only just started!” Her brother slapped her. She let him do as he pleased.

The hostesses feigned composure.

Well, I guess women don’t normally come here, one of them said to her brother with perfect timing.

“Right? That’s right, right? Why don’t you tell her what kind of place women normally go to?”

That would be a host club, of course. That psychic on the TV, she makes a fortune. She’s always going to host clubs, the hostess said, pointing to one of the overhead screens.

“Oh? That show there? So that’s what she does with all that dough, huh?”

With the conversation shifting to TV personalities, her brother’s interest finally turned to the hostesses. If not for that, there would have been no way of getting him to leave her alone.

When she got home, she fell asleep without even changing out of her clothes.

After two years, her brother eventually racked up an impossible debt on his credit card, and then went crying to their mother. “They won’t leave me alone! I’m losing my mind!” Faced with no other options, their mother had to let go of her apartment to settle his accounts.

With his debts taken care of, her brother began to refer to that time as his “age of madness.” He could give it some grand name, something like his “golden age”—he could call it whatever he liked, Natsuko thought, she didn’t care. She was just so tired. He would talk like a French poet looking back on his days of abusing absinthe. But he was just a small-town alcoholic, and an unemployed one at that, someone who could afford nothing but the cheapest liquor.

Natsuko, unable to stay there even a moment longer, turned her back on the dresses hanging in the darkness. As if to flee from those reeking costumes, already completely faded.

For that matter, back then her mother had been incessantly going on about the film. “I want it colored. But the 8 mm makes the movements look weird, don’t you think? I don’t like it at all. Why can’t it look more like it’s happening right before my eyes? I’d watch it with my brother and his wife, and with my sister and her husband—we’d all watch it together. We’d have a screening at the hotel and reminisce on it all over a full course meal.” Or she would start recounting its contents to her yet again. “I want to get the 8 mm film colored, that one from when we all stayed with your grandfather in the suite, the most expensive set of rooms in the hotel. Your grandmother was holding the camera. She introduced the huge living room first, then that huge bathtub, like something from overseas, and the toilet. Then there was a counter with a bunch of glasses all in a line, every single one of them completely spotless, and a mountain of fruit. And then it was us children, rushing up to that huge bed in the deepest room in the suite, right? We’d watch that film, watch ourselves jumping up and down on that huge bed, with my brother and sister, we’d all watch it, talking all about it.” Had she been reminiscing about those past events in the hope that she could experience them all once more?

Natsuko watched as the sea drew ever nearer. There was a notice on the window: Do not open . There was no doubt about it: in the early afternoon light of summer, the sea would be an incredibly deep and beautiful shade of blue. But now, the sky was cold, and nothing but black waves and white foam stood out in the late winter evening. That was it: the white foam looked just like the foam that dripped from her husband’s mouth whenever he had his attacks.

To Natsuko, Taichi’s attacks were something that she could happily call convulsions in the fabric of life itself. The first one came quite as if it was aiming for that very moment. After all, even if he did work, her family would deprive him of everything that he earned, so it would be better for him not to work at all, she had thought.

The operation was a major one and involved embedding an electrode into his skull. At the time, he couldn’t control the tremors in his limbs and tongue at all. The doctor told them that they could be treated by passing an electric current through his brain.

First, he explained the operation to them. It involved going under general anesthesia, so there were some patients who decided not to go through with it. No matter how good their luck, if she lost Taichi, she would be left with neither principle nor interest. She steeled herself against the worst.

They were shown a video. The patient’s tremors weren’t so strong as Taichi’s, and he wasn’t under general anesthesia. Still, it was a daring surgery. The patient’s head was cut open, with his brain lying there exposed. Finally, the patient, with the electrode embedded in his brain, wrote the word “nerves.” The trembling of the hand that until now had been uncontrollable was brought to heel, and the characters stood out vividly.

The surgery seemed to be quite dangerous, and so Natsuko would have liked to have had more time to think about it. But the doctor told them that someone else who had been scheduled to undergo the operation early the following week had suddenly cancelled, so they should decide as soon as possible if they wanted to secure the place. There was a long waiting list for the surgery, so if they put it off, they might have to wait over five years.

And so Taichi, his tongue trembling, said slowly: I’ll have the surgery. I’ll have the surgery.

Hey, they would be putting you under general anesthesia, and putting an electrode in your brain. Let’s think about it a little more, Natsuko suggested. But Taichi said again: I’ll have… the surgery. His body might have been weak, but his resolve was strong.

She could hear the sound of the waves breaking. It seemed to grow louder each time the water crashed against the shore. First, her wealthy grandfather passed away. Then, her father died from some mysterious brain disease. It had all started around that time, the weariness that struck at them all, until at last they found themselves living in poverty, and in the end, the heart of this creature that was her family began to whither. Little by little. Like the speed at which the waves were beating against the shore. If she could look at that life directly, surely she would be able to shed at least one tear? That way, maybe even she, who had completely given up on both family and future, would be able to cry. Even if she was the only one who actually believed it, didn’t she want to think that she herself was worth crying over? Finally, those emotions grew louder even than cymbals, and at the moment she turned her ears away from it all, she heard a voice calling out her name. Out of the mist tottered her husband like a steamed bun. Regaining her footing in the present, she went to help him.

No sooner had Natsuko rushed her husband back to their room than the phone rang. It was dinnertime. They could choose among a Japanese-style meal, a Western-style meal, and a buffet. Taichi, without the slightest hesitation, chose the buffet.