Ryu Murakami - Piercing

Sanada Chiaki poured two centimetres of isopropyl alcohol into one of the Wedgwood soup bowls and submerged the fourteen-gauge needle and the ball-closure ring. She washed her left nipple thoroughly with antibacterial soap and snapped her hands into a pair of surgical gloves.

It was while thinking about what would happen when the man awoke that she’d decided to pierce her other nipple. She was sure he’d go back to where the woman with the glasses was waiting. You could hit him with a can opener again or threaten to report him to the police, she thought, but if this man decides he wants to go home he’ll go home.

Chiaki believed that if you chose something painful, accepted the pain and left something beautiful behind on your body as a result, you got stronger. She had to get at least a little stronger than she was right now, or she wouldn’t be able to bear the loneliness she’d feel when Kawashima Masayuki left. Sitting at her dressing table, she shook drops of undiluted medicinal mouthwash into a ball of absorbent cotton, and used it to sterilise her nipple. She made two small marks on either side of the nipple with a felt-tip pen, checking in the mirror to make sure the line between them was perfectly horizontal. She walked back to the sofa and sat down, then took the needle from the soup bowl and gazed at the tip of it. It was shaped exactly like a hypodermic, only this needle didn’t go down into you but through you, opening a tiny tunnel between the cells. She picked up the small tube of teramycin ointment and squeezed about four centimetres on to the rim of the soup bowl. She was coating the tip of the needle with the ointment, when she noticed that the man had sat up and was watching her.

Kawashima had awoken feeling as if the left half of his face were on fire, and for a while he was unable to see anything at all. As his vision and mind gradually cleared, he remembered little by little the events of the night before. He sat up slowly just as the girl, naked from the waist up and wearing surgical gloves, was settling back down on the sofa. Now her attention was riveted on her own nipple. She pinched it between the fingertips of her left hand, holding a sharp and very slender metallic object in her right. Images from the night before were still flashing through his mind. So I didn’t stab her after all, he thought. His bag was right next to the sofa, where he’d left it. His coat lay folded on top of it, and on top of the coat were the ice pick, the knife, and his wallet. As soon as I get out of here, he thought, I’ll throw the knife and ice pick away. No need to dispose of the notes. Writing them had been exciting. There was something in those notes, something mysterious and vital. Which was why he’d been so obsessed with the question of whether or not she’d read them.

After meeting Kawashima Masayuki’s gaze for some moments, Chiaki looked back down at her nipple. She held it steady with her gloved left thumb and slowly eased the needle through. When she pulled her thumb away, it looked as if the nipple had sprouted a silver thorn on either side.

‘What are you doing?’ Kawashima asked quietly.

‘Piercing,’ she replied without taking her eyes off her work.

Rennaissance man for the modern age, Ryu Murakami has played drums for a rock group, made movies and hosted a TV talk show. His first novel, Almost Transparent Blue , written while he was still a student, was awarded Japan’s most coveted literary prize and went to sell over a million copies. His most recent novel to appear in English was In the Miso Soup , published by Bloomsbury in 2005.

A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATOR

Ralph McCarthy is the translator of 69 and In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami, and two collections of stories by Osamu Dazzai.