Grotesque Read online

  It was about a week ago that a man named Nonaka said something to me. Mr. Nonaka is around fifty, and he works in the Sanitation Division. Normally he’s in Government Building Number One. But from time to time he’ll make up an excuse to come by the day-care section in the Annex—which everyone refers to as the Outpost Office—and he and the section chief in my department will share a laugh or two. Whenever he stops by, he uses the opportunity to cast furtive glances in my direction.

  I believe that he and the chief are on the same baseball team. The chief plays shortstop and Mr. Nonaka plays second base, or something like that. I don’t much care what they do, it just makes me angry to see someone from a completely unrelated office coming over here during office hours for no better reason than to chat. “Mr. Nonaka’s got his eye on you!” says my colleague, Ms. Mizusawa, who’s eight years younger than I am. She’s started teasing me, and this has made me even more disgusted.

  Mr. Nonaka always wears a gray windbreaker, and his complexion is brown and his skin dry, probably from all the cigarettes he smokes. He has a greasy glint in his eye, and whenever he stares at me, I can feel his black eyes scorching holes in me, just as if someone had pressed a hot brand against my skin. It makes me feel queasy. And then Mr. Nonaka said, “When you talk, your voice is high-pitched, but when you laugh it’s low. Eee-hee-hee-hee. That’s how you laugh.” And then he went on to say things like, “You may be polished and proper on the outside, but inside you’re downright dirty, aren’t you?” I was completely caught off guard. What would give this complete stranger the right to come and say something like that to me? I’m sure my dismay showed on my face. Mr. Nonaka looked over at the chief with some confusion, and then they went out somewhere together.

  “What Mr. Nonaka said sounded like sexual harassment to me,” I complained later to my section chief, and a look of embarrassment washed over his face. Oh, I see what’s going on here! I thought. Just because I’ve got foreign blood in my veins, you think I’m more argumentative than a normal Japanese! Leave it to the Westerner to file a lawsuit, right?

  “I agree that it wasn’t appropriate to say what he did to a coworker,” the section chief said, after some deliberation, making it sound as if it wasn’t cause for concern. And then he started shuffling the papers on his desk, trying to look like he was putting them in order. I didn’t want to start an argument, so I didn’t say anything more. If I had, it would have just made him angry with me.

  I hadn’t brought a lunch with me, so I decided to go to the cafeteria in Building Number One, which was only a short walk away. I don’t like being where people gather, so I seldom go there. But the building is new and has a very nice food hall for employees. A bowl of ramen is only ¥240, and you can get the lunch special for ¥480. The food was supposed to be good too.

  I was shaking pepper over the bowl of ramen on my tray when my section chief came up behind me.

  “You’ll make it too spicy with all that pepper!” He had the lunch special on his tray: fried fish and cooked cabbage. The dried bonito flakes sprinkled atop the cabbage looked like metal shavings, and the cabbage reminded me of bigos. Scenes from my childhood played across my memory: the dinner table in our mountain cabin—silent as death, my mother looking miserable and my father eating with wordless gusto. Caught up in my memories, I must have spaced out for a minute, but the section chief didn’t seem to notice. “Shall we sit over there?” he asked, smiling.

  The section chief is forty-two, and because he plays catch during his lunch break he comes to work every day in his sports gear and pads up and down the hall the rest of the day in sneakers that squish when he walks. He’s the kind of guy who is constantly concerned with his physique, is perpetually tanned, and is so full of vigor it’s depressing. I usually don’t get on well with men like that, but I found myself slipping into my usual habit. What would our child look like, if we were to have one?

  If the child were a girl, she would have my fair skin. Her face, a melding of the section chief’s square-cut chin with my oval face, would be attractively round. She would have the chief’s slightly upturned nose and my brown eyes, and she would inherit his sloping shoulders. Her arms and legs would be sturdy for a girl, but given her vitality they’d be fairly charming. I was pleased.

  I followed the chief to the table. The enormous cafeteria was filled with the chatter of employees and the clatter of cafeteria workers bustling in and out with trays and other utensils, but I felt they were all watching me. Ever since the incidents with Yuriko and Kazue, everyone knows everything. I couldn’t stand thinking that they were staring at me.

  The chief peered into my face. “About what happened earlier,” he began. “Mr. Nonaka didn’t mean anything by it. He was just trying to be friendly, I suppose. If that’s sex-harass”—he used an abbreviation—“then half of what any man says would qualify, right? Don’t you think so?”

  He was grinning at me. His teeth were short, like those of plant-eating dinosaurs, or so I thought as I gazed at his mouth. I was reminded of the illustration of the Cretaceous Period. Our child would probably have a row of teeth like that. If she did, the shape of her mouth would be inelegant. Her fingers and her knuckles would be conspicuously stubby and, on her large hands, would be too angular for a girl. The child that the section chief and I would have had been cute earlier, but now she had transformed into something else completely. And I was growing angrier by the minute.

  “Sexual harassment, I’ll have you know, also includes assassinating another person’s character in that way.”

  My protest was delivered rapid-fire, but the section chief countered in measured tones. “Mr. Nonaka was not assassinating your character. He simply stated his observation that your spoken voice and your laughing voice are different, that’s all. Now clearly it’s not appropriate to tease someone that way, so let me apologize for him. Will you let it go? Please?”

  “All right.”

  I acquiesced. I didn’t think there was any point in continuing the discussion. There are perceptive people and there are dimwits. The section chief fell into the latter category.

  He chewed his fried fish with his short little teeth, the thick coating of batter scattering over his plate with a dull rustling sound. He asked some harmless noninvasive questions about my workload as a part-timer. I answered perfunctorily. And then suddenly he lowered his voice.

  “I heard about your younger sister. That must have been awful.”

  This is what he said, but what he meant was that, on account of Yuriko, I must be particularly sensitive to what others say and do. I’ve met his type any number of times—the kind of man who thinks he can get away with pretending to know how I feel. I pushed the white onions that were floating on top of my ramen aside with my chopsticks and said nothing. Onions smell, so I hate them.

  “I didn’t know a thing about it; boy, was I shocked! Wasn’t her killer the same man who was arrested in that Office Lady Murder last year?”

  I glared at the section chief’s face. The corners of his eyes were turned down and virtually dripped with curiosity. The child that I would have with the section chief had now become crude and hideously ugly.

  “It’s still under investigation. They can’t say anything conclusive.”

  “I heard she was your friend. Is that right?”

  “She was a classmate.” Had Kazue and I ever been friends? I would have to give that idea further consideration.

  “I’m really interested in the O.L. Murder, as they call it. I suspect you hear that from a lot of people. It just boggles the mind. What would drive her to do something so shocking? How could she have had such dark impulses? I mean, wasn’t she a career woman employed by some construction-firm think tank in Otemachi? And a graduate of Q University on top of it. Why would such an elite professional become caught up in prostitution? You must know something about it.”

  So there it was! Yuriko had already been forgotten. If a woman who is beautiful but has no other redeeming value turns