Grotesque Read online

  I can still remember that rainy night very clearly. Miss Hirata was holding an umbrella, and the black hair that hung down her back, nearly to her waist, looked exactly like Mei-kun’s. My heart began to pound. Her profile, too, was the spitting image of Mei-kun’s. That was the main reason I was attracted to her. I had been searching for Mei-kun. The men around me would always say, “Your sister’s dead. Get over it!” But I couldn’t help fantasize that she was still in this world and that I would run into her again someday.

  There can be no doubt that she disappeared that night in the sea. But what if a fishing boat passing by had rescued her? She could still be alive. Or maybe she swam to a nearby island. I thrived on such hope. Mei-kun had been brought up in the mountains, just like me. She wasn’t able to swim. But she was a strong-willed, talented woman. I can still remember running into her again at the pool in Guangzhou. “Zhe-zhong!” she’d called out to me then, her eyes filling with tears. And so I walked the streets around me, hoping—expecting—to see her again.

  Miss Hirata complimented me the first time she saw me. “You have a nice face.” And I had said to her in return, “You look exactly like my younger sister. You’re both beautiful.”

  “How old is your younger sister?” Miss Hirata asked, as she walked along beside me. She threw the cigarette she’d been smoking into a puddle and turned to look at me. I gazed into her face head on. No, she wasn’t Mei-kun after all. I was disappointed.

  “She’s dead.”

  “She died?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. She looked so sad I found myself being drawn to her. She seemed like the kind of person to whom I could unburden myself. And then Miss Hirata said, “I’d like to hear about it. My place is nearby. Why don’t we go there and share some beers?”

  Detective Takahashi said that’s just the kind of thing prostitutes say. He does not believe my testimony. But when I met Miss Hirata, I was not encountering a prostitute; rather, I was meeting someone whose hair and profile looked just like my little sister’s. I think the fact that Miss Hirata bought the beer and the bean-jam buns with her own money when we stopped at the convenience store is all the proof I need to support my testimony, don’t you? I think Miss Hirata was interested in me. Of course, we did negotiate a price, that much is true. But that she went from ¥30,000 down to ¥15,000 should prove that she was fond of me.

  As soon as Miss Hirata got to her apartment in kubo, she turned to me and asked, “So what would you like to do? We’ll do whatever you want; just tell me.”

  I told her exactly what I’d been repeating to myself in my heart over and over. “I want you to look at me with tears in your eyes and call out ‘Brother!’”

  Miss Hirata did as I asked. Without thinking, I reached over and embraced her.

  “Mei-kun! How I’ve wanted to see you!”

  While Miss Hirata and I were having sex I was beside myself with excitement. I suppose it was wrong. But it confirmed everything. I did not love my sister as a sister. I loved her as a woman. And I realized that when she was alive this is exactly what we had wanted to do. Miss Hirata was very sensitive. She looked up at me and asked, “What would you like me to do next?” It drove me wild.

  “Say ‘That was awful’ and look at me.”

  I taught her the words in Chinese. Her pronunciation was perfect. But what really surprised me was that real tears began to form in her eyes. I realized that the word awful resonated with something in Miss Hirata’s own heart. We cried together in her bed, holding each other. Naturally, I had no desire to kill her, far from it. Even though we were racially different and from different cultures, I felt we understood each other. Things I could not communicate to the woman from Taiwan I was able to communicate to Miss Hirata, even though I had only just met her. It was amazing. Miss Hirata seemed to share my feelings, for the tears rolled down her cheeks as I held her in my arms. Then she took the gold necklace off her neck and hooked it around my own. I don’t know why she did such a thing.

  So why did I kill her? you ask. I don’t even understand it myself. Perhaps it was because she pulled the wig off her head as easily as if she were doffing a hat. The hair that emerged from beneath the wig was light brown flecked with white. Miss Hirata was some kind of foreigner who looked nothing like my Mei-kun!

  “Okay, the game’s over.”

  She suddenly grew cold. I was shocked.

  “Was it all just a game?”

  “Well, what did you think? That’s the way I earn my living. It’s time for you to settle up.”

  I felt a chill creep down my spine as I pulled the money out of my pocket. That’s when the trouble started. Miss Hirata told me to hand it all over, all the ¥22,000. When I asked why the price had changed, she said with disgust, “Playing incest games costs more. Fifteen thousand yen is not enough.”

  Incest? The word made me furious. I shoved Miss Hirata down on the futon.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  She scrambled to her feet and rushed at me, as mad as a demon. We began to push and shove each other violently.

  “You cheap bastard! God, I wish I hadn’t fucked a Chinaman.”

  I wasn’t angry about the money. I was angry because I felt Mei-kun had been tarnished. My precious Mei-kun. I suppose this is what we had been heading toward all along, from the minute we ran away from home; tragedy was all that awaited us. Our unattainable dream. Our impossible dream so easily transformed into a nightmare. The Japan that Mei-kun had longed to see. How cruel. I had to survive. I had to continue living in the country that Mei-kun never lived to set foot in. And I had to endure all of its ugliness. What kept me going was the hope of finding a woman like Mei-kun. And when I finally did, all she wanted was to play games for money. How stupid I was not to see it coming. I felt as though I were being swept along by a rapid current, unable to understand what was happening. When I came to my senses, I saw that I had strangled Miss Hirata. I did not kill her because I wanted to steal her money. But I made a mistake I can never undo. I would like to dedicate the rest of my life to praying for the repose of Miss Hirata’s soul.

  Zhang Zhe-zhong

  SIX • FERMENTATION AND DECAY

  • 1 •

  I was so determined to attend the first public hearing in the Apartment Serial Murders trial that I asked to take a leave from my job at the ward office. Do you find that surprising? The courtroom looked like any other courtroom, but it was the largest one in the courthouse, and I was astounded to learn that they had had to dispense spectator tickets by lottery to those who wanted to view the proceedings. Nearly two hundred people lined up for a chance at a ticket. That just goes to show you how fascinated people were with Yuriko and Kazue. A lot of reporters and people from the media came to cover the case, but I heard they wouldn’t let the cameras in. When I asked my boss to let me have the time off, his lips twitched. I knew he was dying to ask me about it.

  Earlier, I noted that I had absolutely no interest in whether or not that Chinese man named Zhang had actually murdered Yuriko and Kazue. I still feel the same way. I mean, those two were streetwalkers. They met freaks and perverts all the time. They had to know they might be killed if they weren’t lucky; it was precisely because they knew this, I assume, that they found what they did so thrilling. Moving from customer to customer, never knowing if this day might be their last; when they left home, they couldn’t be sure that they’d ever return. And then when the night was done and they did make it home in one piece, they must have felt such relief as they counted the money they’d earned. Whatever danger they might have faced, that night and others, they stored away in their memory to draw on again and again as they learned to survive by their wits.

  The reason I went to court in the first place was because I had read the copy of Zhang’s deposition that Detective Takahashi gave me. “My Crimes,” he titled it. What a ridiculously long and tedious piece of work. Zhang goes on and on about completely irrelevant matters: the hardships he faced in China, all the thi