Ryu Murakami - Piercing

He really did wait for me, Chiaki thought when she saw the man running to her out of the frozen darkness. She thought he looked like a steam locomotive in an old cartoon, lugging those two big bags and expelling clouds of white smoke. And it was comical the way he dangled her Lancel bag from the crook of his left arm, like a lady. Of course he can’t hold it in his hand because of his finger, she thought — but just look at him, running like that for all he’s worth. How cute can you get?

Not wanting to wait a single extra second to feel his arm around her shoulder, supporting her, Chiaki started towards the man, dragging her numb, anaesthetised right leg.

‘Come to my place,’ she said as they settled into a taxi. ‘You’ll come and stay with me, won’t you?’

Kawashima’s lips and cheeks were stiff with the cold, and he merely nodded rather than trying to speak. Her place would certainly work for him. He couldn’t take her to the hotel in Akasaka, where he was registered under his real name, and had been thinking he might have to make do with a love hotel after all.

Chiaki never thought to question the man’s motivation for accompanying her to the hospital — or for waiting outside, for that matter. She had long since lost sight of the fact that he was merely a client who’d happened to call her club and ask for a girl to be sent to his hotel room. All she could see were his selfless efforts on her behalf, which, in her mind at least, were beginning to take on epic proportions.

He stood out there in this freezing weather waiting for me, she thought. His arm felt like ice — I never even knew a body could get that cold. I was afraid he wouldn’t really wait for me, and when he wasn’t right outside the door I almost fainted, but then there he was, humping it across the street as fast as he could go, huffing and puffing clouds of steam. It was like being in a movie, like being lead actress in some big romantic scene.

It was warm inside the taxi, but the man was still shivering. His face, just above and to the right of hers, looked distorted, the features out of balance. It was as if only some of his facial muscles had thawed while the rest remained frozen solid. His hair, exposed all that time to the cold wind, was dry and mussed, his teeth were chattering, and his nose was runny. His eyes were watering, too, and he kept blinking. His face was a complete mess, in fact, and yet it was also the most adorable thing she’d ever seen. She had a sudden urge to hit that face. Not just give him a little slap on the cheek but slug him as hard as she could, with her fist or a bottle or a wrench or something, right in the eye. He’d be bleeding and begging her to stop, and she’d just laugh. He’d be even cuter weeping and asking for forgiveness, she thought. And after that he’d stay by her side for ever, no matter what.

Chiaki wanted to communicate these feelings to him. How nice it would be if she could tell him everything, even all the bad stuff. She could see herself tugging on his sleeve, going: Listen, listen, I know you probably don’t like to hear about things like this? But I really really hate my father. I do. Everybody thinks he’s a good man, a nice, respectable gentleman, and he was head accountant for the biggest company in our home town and didn’t even have any interests or hobbies outside of work except for spending like an hour every day feeding the goldfish, but from about the time I started elementary school, whenever my mother was away or after she’d gone to sleep, he’d do nasty things to me. He really did. That’s why I’ve always just wished he would hurry up and die, and he’s told me to drop dead too, lots of times. I really and truly wish he would die, but when I was in middle school my tonsils kept getting inflamed and finally I got a really bad fever and they decided to take them out? And we lived in this small town outside Nagoya that didn’t even have a real hospital, so our local doctor was going to perform the operation, and at the dinner table my mother was worrying about that, saying she wondered if the doctor really knew what he was doing, and my father said, ‘If anything happens to Chiaki I’ll kill that son of a bitch,’ and then he burst into tears. I mean, I was amazed. At the time our family was a shambles because I’d finally told my mother what he was doing to me, and after that he turned into this really mean and angry person who was always yelling, but him saying that about the doctor and crying, that’s the thing I remember most. You don’t see a grown man cry very often, right? I changed my personality too, right after I entered junior college, except I did it on purpose, and after that boys started liking me more, and I have three boyfriends right now, sort of, but don’t be jealous, OK? You don’t have anything to be jealous about. They’re all losers, really. One’s named Kazuki; he’s a college student, but in high school he crashed his motorcycle, and his shoulder and knee are messed up, and he’s always saying he wants to die. I like to watch boys when they’re sleeping really soundly? So about six months ago I crushed up three Halcion tablets and mixed them in Kazuki’s Campari and orange, and ever since then he won’t eat or drink anything I give him. They’re all like that. Yoshiaki’s this guy who when I tried to stab myself in the leg he got all hysterical, and then when I pricked him just a little with the knife he ran away. He’s twenty-eight now but he’s still just a clerk in a video store. Atsushi is young, the same age as me, and he just became a hairdresser, and he’s half-white but near-sighted and doesn’t have any parents. He’s an orphan. He’s always going on and on about his childhood, and when he gets drunk he might tell me he’s going to kill me or he might start bawling like a baby, and sometimes he calls me Mommy. Atsushi’s the one who taught me about piercings. He’s got five rings in his ear, eighteen gauge to ten gauge, but when I told him to get one in his nipple to match mine, and to get a Sailor Moon tattoo — because I like Sailor Moon? — or if not that, a skull, he stopped calling me. I was eighteen when I changed my personality, and in the three years since then I’ve had about twenty boyfriends, but they were all more or less like that. So you can understand how happy I am to finally meet someone like you!

‘Are you hungry?’ she said.

The man nodded without taking his eyes off the road ahead and without any change of expression. High-rise buildings loomed on all sides, and the lights from the windows — so many different colours and shades — seemed to swirl around them, enveloping the two of them in a warm cocoon.

I can’t communicate the way I feel to him, she thought, but I probably don’t need to anyway. He’s not going to ask me a lot of questions, and he’s not going to tell me about himself. You can tell he doesn’t like hearing or making confessions. Who knew there were still people like that in this world, though? Everybody wants to talk about themselves, and everybody wants to hear everybody else’s story, so we take turns playing reporter and celebrity. It must have made you very sad when your own father raped you — can you describe some of your feelings at the time? Yes, I wept and wept, wondering why something like this had to happen to me. It’s like that. Everyone’s running around comparing wounds, like bodybuilders showing off their muscles. And what’s really unbelievable is that they really believe they can heal the wounds like that, just by putting them on display.

This man was different. But she had to ask herself: Was he really the one she’d been waiting for? And her various selves — the self whose father licks her down there, the self who whispers I love you to him as he laps at her private parts, the self who watches from the corner of the ceiling, the self who commands her to die, the self who unfolds the scissors from the handle of the Swiss Army knife — all gave her the same reply: Who knows? How could anyone know what sort of man she was really waiting for? Up until now, she’d simply accepted whoever showed interest in her and put up with her and sacrificed for her and wanted her body.