Ryu Murakami - Piercing

In the next building past the video shop was a bookstore. Something moved in the gap between the two buildings, and he stopped to see what it was. The gap, just wide enough for a grown man to walk through, dead-ended at another building. It was very dark in there, but he was sure he’d seen two or three small figures moving. Small enough that they had to be children, no more than nine or ten years old. They weren’t moving now, probably because Kawashima had stopped and was looking their way, but he wasn’t about to call out to them or step over and peer into the gap. He knew that even a ten-year-old child could be dangerous. Just before walking on, he spotted a little red point of light. It might have been a burning cigarette, except for the fact that he neither saw nor smelled smoke. The eye of a small animal, maybe, reflecting the streetlight. Between the two buildings, he remembered, were garbage cans and waste water puddled around a drain. The kids were probably killing rats for kicks in that narrow darkness.

Back in the Home for at-risk children, Kawashima had had a friend his age named Taku-chan. At some point the Home acquired a pair of pet rabbits, and one of their offspring was placed in Taku-chan’s care. Taku-chan loved his little pet more than anything, and even insisted on sleeping with it in his arms. But one day, right before Kawashima’s eyes and for no apparent reason, he grabbed the animal by its still-undeveloped ears, stood up, and slammed it down against the concrete floor. It made a sound like delicate porcelain breaking, but the bunny wasn’t dead and tried to crawl away with spastic movements, like a wind-up toy winding down. Taku-chan, wearing the same dull expression he’d often worn when stroking his pet’s soft fur, stomped several times on its head with the heel of his shoe. Then, ignoring its crushed, lifeless body, he went off to get another one to take its place.

Kawashima and Taku-chan sometimes drew pictures together, and Taku-chan’s were always the same. He’d smear the whole sheet of paper with black or dark blue or purple, and in the middle he’d paint a naked little boy whose body was pierced from head to foot with arrows — dozens of them protruding in every direction, like quills. ‘Who’s that?’ a counsellor once asked him, and Taku-chan said, ‘Me.’ The counsellor said, ‘Well, if it wasn’t you, Taku-chan, who would it be?’ ‘If it’s not me,’ said Taku-chan, ‘I don’t care who it is.’

Kawashima decided he might as well head for the all-night convenience store down the street. He was walking slowly to calm himself, but his heartbeat still wasn’t back to normal. The cold seeped up through the soles of his shoes, and each exhalation was a small white cloud, a visible reminder of how fast and irregular his breathing was. Across the street was an apartment building of reinforced concrete, and at the window of a corner room on the third floor a woman with short hair was smoking a cigarette. She used her sleeve to wipe a circular clear spot on the misty glass and looked down at the street. That building, Kawashima recalled, consisted entirely of studio apartments for single women. The light was behind her and he couldn’t see her face, but judging by her hair-style and the way she smoked the cigarette he could tell she was no longer young. Late thirties, maybe.

The image of a hand with dry skin and wrinkles and prominent veins formed in his mind. A woman in her late thirties, holding a thin black menthol cigarette in a hand like an autumn leaf.

He’d met her when he was seventeen and lived with her for nearly two years. She was nineteen years older, and they were often mistaken for mother and son. Whenever this happened, the woman would force a smile and maintain a veneer of cool indifference; but afterwards, when she and Kawashima were alone, she’d rail bitterly against the person who’d committed the faux pas, sometimes for hours at a time. She was a stripper working in Gotanda when he met her, though in the two years they were together she must have changed clubs a dozen times.

The woman frequently brought men she’d met at her strip club back to the apartment and fooled around with them, right in front of Kawashima. If they asked, she’d tell them in a drunken mumble that he was her little brother. And yet invariably, after the men left, she’d go ballistic on Kawashima, attacking him with her fists and shrieking: ‘If you really loved me! You wouldn’t just sit there! And let another man! Make me do those things! You’d beat the hell out of him! Or kill him!’ Eventually he did rough some of them up, after which she’d start pounding him anyway, screaming that he was going to make her lose her job. The hysteria wouldn’t stop until she ran completely out of steam and passed out. What a hateful bitch, Kawashima used to think — how does a person ever get to be this despicable? He was sure he was the only one in the world who could ever care about her. Which was why he believed she would never leave him.

The night he stabbed her with an ice pick had always been somewhat unclear in his memory. He’d returned to the apartment late that night after sniffing thinner with a friend, so he wasn’t exactly in a lucid state of mind to begin with. A kerosene space heater burned in the middle of the room, and a pot of water sat simmering on top of it. The woman had just got back from work and was sitting before the mirror, removing her make-up. He tried to hug her from behind, and she wouldn’t let him. All she said was, ‘Don’t touch me,’ but her manner was so cold and harsh that it terrified him. He put his arms around her again, and again she spurned him, prising his fingers loose this time and shaking him off. ‘Stop breathing your fucking thinner fumes on me!’ she snarled. Kawashima was devastated. All he could think was: I need to be punished. She’s mad at me. She’s mad at me, but she won’t hit me, so I’ve got to punish myself. If I don’t, she might leave. He walked to the heater and shoved his right hand into the pot of boiling water.

When he lifted the red, scalded hand from the pot to show her, the woman called him a moron and walked into the bathroom, peeling off her clothing as she went. He was convinced that after her shower she’d leave the apartment. And wouldn’t come back. How long would he have to sit there, scared half to death, waiting for her return? He mustn’t let her go. He was racking his brain, thinking he had to do something before she finished showering, when suddenly there was a crackling of little explosions where his senses of sight and smell and hearing collided. Something like the odour of burning yarn or scorched fingernails filled his nostrils, and the next thing he knew he’d flung open the shower curtain and the tip of the ice pick in his hand was soundlessly piercing her stomach. The ice pick met no more resistance than would a safety pin sinking into a sponge. It slid effortlessly into her sagging white belly, and when he pulled it out he saw thick, dark-red blood ooze from the round little hole it had made.

The ice pick may have dropped from his scalded hand then, but his memory was pretty much a blank from this point on. He couldn’t even remember if the police had shown up or not. Hundreds of times, in dreams, he’d seen the ice pick hit the tile of the bathroom floor and roll under the tub. In the dreams he’d get down on his elbows and knees and reach for it, only to burn his hand again on the pilot light for the water heater. Sometimes he’d wake up from this nightmare convinced that his right hand really was on fire. If the cops had come, the woman must not have told them the truth, because Kawashima was never taken in for questioning. Nor did she ever mention the incident to him, even after coming home from the hospital. He moved out without being asked. Although he returned to the apartment a number of times in the weeks that followed, the woman always refused to see him, and eventually she moved away. Kawashima believed the ice pick was probably still in that apartment, lying underneath the tub. And he somehow felt that the day would come when he’d go back there to see.