Ryu Murakami - Piercing

He’d reached the door to the convenience store when he noticed something curious. His heart rate had returned to normal. Wondering if this was somehow related to his reminiscences about the stripper, he stepped inside the store, where he was enveloped by the warm air and felt the outlines of his body begin to blur. He walked to the stack of shopping baskets and had just grabbed one when the clerk behind the counter to his right, silent till now, shouted, ‘ Irasshaimase! ’ to the customers entering behind him — a young couple huddling together and gasping from the cold. The couple drifted off towards the magazine racks, and the clerk turned his gaze from them back to the register. That was all, but it was enough to trigger in Kawashima the familiar but dreadful sensation that he himself wasn’t really here. Not as if he were dead or a ghost or spirit or something, but as if he’d separated from his own body and was waiting a short distance away.

As a boy, he’d escaped the pain and terror of his mother’s beatings by concentrating on the thought that the one who was being hit wasn’t really him. He’d consistently, methodically trained himself to think that way. His mother, enraged at the child who wouldn’t cry or even cry out, only hit him all the harder; but the more she hit him, the more he concentrated on telling himself that it wasn’t him she was hitting, until he actually succeeded in separating himself from the pain. Fearing, however, that if he pushed himself too far away he might not be able to find his way back, he made himself promise to wait nearby and return as soon as circumstances permitted.

What I’m feeling now, he told himself, is just a remnant of those times, just an echo from the past. He looked up at the packages of disposable diapers on a top shelf against the far wall and remembered Yoko saying that no matter how many diapers she bought it never seemed to be enough. He decided to buy some, and it was at that moment that he was suddenly convinced that he really had separated and was waiting for himself there among the diapers.

Damn , he muttered and tried to force a wry smile but failed as fear squeezed his heart. What the hell’s going on?

He could actually see his other self standing before the shelves two or three paces ahead of him now, holding a package of disposable diapers. This other self pointed to the picture of a baby on the package and grinned at Kawashima, then beckoned to him.

Come here, there’s something really important I need to tell you.

Kawashima moved towards the shelves as if being reeled in.

Think about it , the other said. Why do you really think you were able to watch Basic Instinct so calmly? That’s what you were wondering on the way here, right? You remembered Taku-chan too, didn’t you? Taku-chan saying, ‘If it’s not me, I don’t care who it is.’ And then you remembered stabbing the woman — which calmed your heartbeat right down. It dispelled your anxiety about stabbing this one, right? The other tapped on the picture, then nodded and pinched the vinyl to distort the baby’s face into a grotesque mask. Hurry up, come over here and join me . Kawashima tried to say, Please don’t do this , but his throat was so dry he couldn’t speak. Just before the two of them merged, the other said, in a clear and distinct voice: There’s only one way to overcome the fear .

Kawashima stood in a sort of stupor, like someone receiving a revelation from God. Even after he’d merged with his other self, the voice continued to reverberate inside him. There’s only one way to overcome the fear: you’ve got to stab someone else with an ice pick.

‘MASAYUKI,’ YOKO SAID THE next morning as she bustled about preparing for her classes. ‘Did you win the lottery or something? You’re positively glowing.’

Between bites of a croissant, Kawashima explained that he’d slept like a dead man. This was true, and his appetite was back as well, much to his own surprise.

There was no way to be one hundred per cent sure of not getting caught — this had been his first thought on waking — but merely wounding some woman was out of the question. If she lived, she’d surely go to the police, and that would be it for him. He’d mulled over such problems while brushing his teeth and washing his face.

‘You know,’ he told Yoko as he dressed for work, ‘our company has adopted the mandatory vacation system, like a lot of the bigger firms have?’

‘You mean where you have to take time off whether you want to or not?’

‘Exactly. At some of the big agencies it’s for a whole month, or even two, but for us it’s more like a week or ten days.’

It was a fact that Kawashima’s firm had such a system — mandatory vacation for all employees once every three to five years. A fund had been set aside for that purpose, and a certain amount of cash was available for expenses, depending upon how you planned to spend your vacation.

‘I’ve got an idea I want to work on,’ he said, ‘so I was thinking about taking mine soon.’

‘When?’

‘Like, beginning the day after tomorrow or so.’

‘That is soon. But you’re not supposed to just lie around the house, right?’

‘No, and you’re not to show up at the office either. You have to come up with some sort of goal, something you’re going to do with your time. Not that it has to be anything that serious. One guy travelled to India, and another went to New York to check out the musicals. One of the girls flew down to Okinawa to get her scuba-diving licence.’

‘Are you going overseas?’

‘Here’s what I was thinking. I’d like to stay in one of the major hotels downtown. You don’t get a chance to do that when you live in the city, right? I’d like to stay in the sort of place where your average salarymen from smaller cities stay when they come to Tokyo.’

‘What are you going to do in a place like that?’

‘This might sound silly, but I want to get a better understanding of the true salaryman. Like, when I have a meeting in a coffee shop or bar in one of those hotels? I’m always fascinated by what the salarymen around me are talking about. You’d be surprised — a lot of times you hear some pretty poignant, heartfelt stuff. I’d like to make, you know, a serious study of that sort of thing, because beginning the year after next we’re going to be in charge of all the graphics on a new campaign. It’s for an imported car, a new model targeting salarymen in their thirties. And the fact is, I don’t really know that much about your average salaryman.’

He needed a solid chunk of time in order to hone and execute his plan. But if he made up some story about having to stay near the office for days at a time to meet a deadline, for example, one phone call from Yoko to the office and he’d be busted. It was unlikely that anyone might connect that lie with a crime that took place somewhere across town, but he didn’t need to complicate things by giving Yoko or the company any reason to think he was up to something fishy. Of course, staying a week at a hotel in the city for ‘research’ would normally be read as an affair, or a gambling problem. But he knew that Yoko would never doubt him. She wasn’t the jealous or suspicious type in the first place, and in the six years they’d known each other, though he may have kept certain things from her, he’d never told her a lie. Not because he was adhering to some abstract moral principle, but simply because he didn’t want to be dishonest with someone who meant so much to him. Besides, if she should suspect him of having an affair — well, so what?