Ryu Murakami - Piercing

Chiaki beamed contentedly at the empty soup bowl and carried it to the sink. She turned on the hot water and took a moment to check the contents of the McCormick’s spice bottle in the cupboard. It was still about half-full. The label said THYME, but inside the dark glass was a light-blue powder made of crushed Halcion tablets. The dealer near Shibuya Station had suggested this method of hiding the stuff. She’d mixed the equivalent of about two tablets into the man’s soup. The reason she’d added extra curry powder was of course so he wouldn’t notice, but Halcion was so bitter that she’d worried he might taste it anyway. The man had wolfed it all down, however, along with two buttered rolls, and never suspected anything. He must’ve been awfully hungry. He’d eaten in silence, sweat forming on the bridge of his nose.

She had slipped half a teaspoon — about three tablets — into Kazuki’s food that other time, but Kazuki used Halcion regularly. She couldn’t imagine this man being a regular user, though. He’d feel the effect of two tablets within thirty minutes and drop like a tranquillised elephant, dead to the world, within an hour. One tablet would’ve been enough, really, but a lot of times Halcion stimulated a man’s sex drive before knocking him out. She’d imagined the man getting all goopy-eyed and horny on her and thought: If he tried to jump me right now, it would only bring back those awful memories. Once he fell asleep, though, he was all hers. He wouldn’t wake up even if you cut off his finger.

Kawashima was tired. Gazing at the girl’s back as she washed the bowl, he wondered why her attitude had changed so suddenly. Would she try to entice him again after washing up? Or had the idea of being stabbed to death begun to scare her? She’d really given him the evil eye before getting up to make the soup, though. What had brought that on?

He was tired of racking his brains like this and thought longingly of the bed back in his hotel room in Akasaka. He could call the late-thirties erotic masseuse and put all this behind him. It was one a.m. According to the plan, he should have finished disposing of all the evidence and been back in that room by now. He wondered how it would have felt, and wished he could read through the notes. They were in the bottom of his bag.

The girl was washing the bowl meticulously, using only very hot water — no soap — to scrub off the grease and residue. She’d hold the bowl up to the light as if peering through it, and when she spotted the slightest blemish she’d start all over again. When she finally finished with the bowl, she began the same procedure with the enamel soup pan. Kawashima surveyed the room and noticed that there wasn’t so much as a stray scrap of paper lying about. No half-read magazines or newspapers, no open bags of chips or boxes of chocolates, no crumpled-up tissues, no fruit peels. The cosmetics on the dressing table were arranged as precisely as pieces on a chessboard, the little jars and bottles all grouped according to size and shape. The L-shaped sofa and the audio rack were equidistant — to within a centimetre, he would have wagered — from the coffee table that separated them, and neither the audio rack nor the bookcase held anything unrelated to their functions. The shelves weren’t cluttered with letters or postcards or pills or wallets or memo pads or business cards or paperclips or coins. All such odds and ends were stashed just outside the kitchenette, in a stack of translucent storage cases. He was seated at the two-person dining table, the blond wood of which was polished to such a shine that he could see himself in its surface. The place was like a real-estate agent’s model apartment, he was thinking. Immaculate and lifeless. The only exception was the corner of the bed where they’d been sitting. The duvet was turned back, exposing the wrinkled sheets, and the shadows of the wrinkles formed a pattern of irregular, curving stripes on the lustrous silk. Like the rolling hills of some undiscovered country, or scars of violence on smooth shoulders or breasts. Kawashima recalled the suffocating anxiety he’d experienced sitting there next to the girl and looked away, thinking: It must take a lot of work to keep a room this clean, though.

He was imagining the girl labouring for hours at a time to eradicate every last speck of dust when, suddenly, the room shook with such force that he had to grab the edge of the dining table. He looked around frantically, only to see that nothing had fallen or tipped over and that the girl, drying the soup pan in the kitchenette, seemed to have noticed nothing. Not an earthquake, then, he thought anxiously, rubbing his eyes and shaking his head. He sat still, waiting to see if anything else happened, but nothing did. He was just tired, that was all.

His thoughts drifted back to the notes. If only he could lie in bed and read through them! It occurred to him that he’d already forgotten a lot of what he’d written down, probably because things had taken so many unexpected turns. He knew he’d filled seven pages with small, dense writing, but couldn’t remember, for example, what it was he’d written first. He thought it concerned either which type of prostitute he should choose or which hotel, but he wasn’t sure. He’d scribbled in a sort of stream of consciousness, without any outline or organisation. If only the girl would go to sleep, he thought. He could read the notes right here.

She’d finished cleaning up and was standing in the kitchenette with her arms crossed, watching him. He noticed her checking the clock and glanced at his wristwatch. Twenty-five minutes had passed since she’d carried his empty bowl away. Watching her silently eyeing him from the kitchenette, he began to wonder how she’d managed to figure out his plan. Which part of the notes had she read? He’d been away from the hotel room for no more than a few minutes — maybe only two or three. How much of his crabbed handwriting could she have deciphered in that time? It would be impossible to understand what the whole thing was about just by reading a page at random. Wouldn’t it? And she hadn’t exactly been in a lucid state of mind. But somehow she’d figured it all out. She knows things she couldn’t have known without reading the notes, he thought. The fact that I was staying at a different hotel. The fact that I hadn’t called her for the purpose of S&M play. What else?

There was something else, he was thinking, when another tremor shook the room. Again he grabbed hold of the table. The girl was still standing there with her arms crossed, watching him. She seemed to be smiling. The room trembled once more. Then again. Gravity doubled, or tripled, and he had to hang on to the table or risk collapsing to the floor. What is this? he wondered, and was horrified to find himself being sucked inside something dark and enormous. It was as if a huge, diaphragm-shaped iron shutter were closing before his eyes. If I don’t get out of here, he thought, I’ll be trapped inside. His mother materialised, smiling, in the shrinking window of light. Or was it the suicide girl? Her voice rang in his ears:

I told you so! Look at you — locked inside a narrow cell with no windows!

‘Stop it!’ he shouted and tried to stand up, but it was as if he’d been turned to stone.

Didn’t I tell you you’d end up sitting all day long with your ear pressed against a wall, listening to some voice only you can hear? With your neck permanently twisted to one side? I always said this would happen to you when you grew up! I told you you’d go insane!

It was Mother, all right. The opening continued to shrink. Soon all the light would be gone. Someone was laughing. No. Not someone. Everyone. A vast sea of people laughing. Or cheering. The roar of a crowd in some great colosseum. Beneath the colosseum, in a windowless little dungeon cell, a thick iron shutter was about to seal him in.