Grotesque Read online

  We moved to the coffee shop in the basement and sat around a table. But the only one I paid attention to was Yurio. He sat in a chair some distance from us, his posture straight and erect. Yuriko’s beautiful son. No matter how adoringly I gazed at his face, he had no idea that my eyes were on him. I could stare to my heart’s content. The waitresses, the waiters, even the middle-aged man who looked like the manager shot self-conscious glances at Yurio from time to time. Did he make them restless too? The coffeehouse—such a shabby little place—suddenly seemed to sparkle. To see all these people admiring Yurio only increased my pleasure. I took delight in feeling so much more superior than they.

  Seating Yurio at some remove from our table was Mitsuru’s idea. She had some things related to Takashi Kijima and Yuriko she wanted to talk about and she didn’t want Yurio to hear.

  “What did you and Yuriko-san do after you left high school?” she asked Takashi.

  Takashi Kijima looked at me as I gazed over at Yurio.

  “Do you know?” Mitsuru asked me.

  “No. Once Yuriko left the Johnsons and started living on her own, we never communicated. I didn’t know what to do. My father would call from Switzerland all the time, worrying about her. And then my grandfather went crazy over your mother; keeping up with Yuriko was the last thing on my mind.”

  “There was talk among the other students,” Mitsuru said. “They said Yuriko became a model for the magazine an-an. I was amazed. I went to the bookstore and thumbed through the copy they had on the shelf. I can remember it even now. She was modeling the latest surfer fashion, so the lines of her body were exposed but they were absolutely perfect. And the makeup she had on was so stunning it just took my breath away. But I didn’t see any more pictures of her after that.”

  Mitsuru tried to draw me in but the smile soon vanished from her face. Yes, it was unlikely that I would have followed her career.

  “Yuriko-san appeared in all kinds of magazines,” she said. “So why did she disappear so suddenly? She didn’t specialize in a particular look, and she never appeared in the same magazine twice.”

  She was known as the phantom model. I can imagine what happened. More than likely Yuriko, with her lust for men, had affairs with either the photographer or the art director or one of the men around her. She got a reputation for being an easy lay, the people at the magazine lost respect for her, and then she didn’t get any more work there.

  Kijima’s fat ugly face broke into a smile; it was clear he was recalling those days from the past. “That’s right. Yuriko was just too gorgeous, her face too perfect to appeal to the needs of the magazines of the time. And she exuded too much sexuality. If she’d still been a junior high student they might have been able to use her. But once she turned eighteen, she became such a stunning beauty she even outdid Farrah Fawcett. At the time there just wasn’t much one could do with a woman like that. It’s different, now that we have models like Norika Fujiwara.”

  Kijima spoke like a true professional. He took a cigarette out of his purse and lit it.

  “She was only about five feet seven inches tall, which doesn’t quite cut it as a runway model, and she was too Western-looking to make a good actress. There weren’t any other opportunities. Nothing else but to go after men who were rolling in dough. It was during the height of the Bubble Economy. I had men who were making a killing in real estate come up to me—since I was her agent—and fan a whole handful of ten-thousand-yen notes under my nose. All that for one or two hours with Yuriko. They’d pay three hundred thousand yen.”

  Mitsuru glanced in my direction. “Kijima, do you have to talk like that? It’s not appropriate.”

  “Oh, sorry.” Kijima apologized.

  “You made a killing too, didn’t you?” I asked.

  Kijima, lost in dreams of his days of wine and roses, avoided looking at me. He scratched his saggy jowls with a fat finger.

  “Well, yes. I did make some mistakes in my youth. But after all, I was thrown out of school very suddenly—thanks to your betrayal.”

  “It wasn’t a betrayal. Professor Kijima wrote in his letters that she came seeking advice,” I said.

  Kijima shrugged it off.

  “It was a betrayal. Your friend here had long nurtured a violent jealousy of Yuriko. It was her nature.”

  “You’re wrong. She was worried about Yuriko,” Mitsuru said.

  “Is that what you think? Well, I suppose we should just let bygones be bygones, but I have a whole host of things I’d like to get off my chest.” Takashi Kijima spoke sarcastically. “I was going into my senior year of high school, you know. I was eighteen. When I got home my old lady was crying and my little brother just stared at me angrily and refused to speak. As soon as my old man got home, he started smacking me on the side of the face. Ever since then, I’ve had trouble hearing out of my right ear. My old man was a southpaw, and when he struck you he packed a bigger wallop than expected. I didn’t cry, but it stung like hell. My dad yelled, ‘I don’t want to have to look at you. Don’t ever show your face to me again!’ My mother tried her best to smooth things over, but it was hopeless. My old man was stubborn. So I told him, ‘You wanted to do her too. Yuriko told me. You threw us out of school because you couldn’t have her!’ As soon as I said that he popped me again in the ear, right in the same place, with even more force. Then I yelled, ‘You idiot! I’ll see you at my hearing!’ He said, ‘I’ve tolerated quite enough. Just put yourself in Yuriko’s place.’ But the truth was, Yuriko enjoyed doing what she did. When I think of it now, I realize I should have just agreed with whatever he said. I guess that’s why I cried when I read the old man’s letters. He’s getting along in years. And I suppose I’m still haunted by the past.”

  “Come on, get to the point,” I said. “What became of you and Yuriko?”

  “Oh, once we both got thrown out of our homes we decided to live together, so we went out to find a condominium. We needed about three million yen, but between the two of us we had a lot of money stashed away. We rented a high-class apartment in Aoyama. We wanted a place in Azabu, but it was too close to the school, so we let it go. The place we got was a two-bedroom apartment; we each had our own room. The next day, I took Yuriko out with me and got to work. I took her first to modeling agencies and got her set up with jobs there. But the modeling work never lasted long; I already told you why that was. Sooner or later Yuriko started picking up her own customers, dragging them back to her room in our apartment. No, it’s not a lie. Yuriko was a natural slut.”

  I nodded with an exaggerated gesture. That’s it. Yuriko was the kind of woman who couldn’t live without “water.” She needed water to promote her decay.

  “Around that time a man turned up asking to be her patron. He’d made an instant killing in real estate. I thought I would have to find another apartment, but I ended up not having to move out because he took Yuriko off with him to Daikanyama. He put out the capital and kept Yuriko for a mistress. Soon, Yuriko had no use for a manager. I was left with the apartment in Aoyama; after a while the rent got too much for me, so I had to move out. Thus began my fall. Quite a story, huh?”

  Mitsuru, who had been listening silently, pursed her lips and said, “What I don’t understand is, if you and Yuriko were living together, why’d you let her go into prostitution? What was it between you two?”

  “What was it, I wonder?” Kijima gazed up at the ceiling. “To be perfectly blunt, the two of us had a business arrangement, and our only concern was making a profit.”

  “You weren’t romantically involved, even with Yuriko as beautiful as she was?”

  “Not a chance. I’m homosexual.”

  I gasped. How reprehensible! How could Yurio have been left in the hands of such a monster? I looked instinctively toward the boy. At some point Yurio had put on a set of headphones and was nodding lightly in time to the music, his eyes closed. Mitsuru started tapping her front teeth with her fingernail: tap, tap, tap.

  “Have you been that way sin