Evil and the Mask (19 page)

I WENT INTO a run-down bar with blue lighting and asked for whiskey. Parking myself on a stool with uneven legs, I rested my elbows on the counter. I’m not sure why but I got drunk quickly. Faint jazz was playing on the sound system. I couldn’t make out a melody.

I wondered what Shintani thought of his own life when he was alive, before I took his identity, turning the question over idly in my head. Had he really killed Sae Suzuki? If he had, I’d end up being hunted by the police for something I hadn’t done. I had a vision of Aida’s slit-like eyes and remembered that he was involved in the Yajima investigation too. As my PI had said, if the police found out that I really did have a connection to Yajima, I’d be in trouble. If Aida worked out that I was Fumihiro and that I was keeping an eye on Kaori, he’d immediately draw a line from me to Yajima, with Kaori right in the middle. So together with Sae’s death, Aida might end up hounding me either way, if stopped being Shintani or if I stayed as I was.

I had murdered my father, who had fully intended to make me experience hell, and taken another person’s face and identity. You could say that everything had become weirdly distorted because I’d broken the rules so many times. I hadn’t expected
to meet someone from the cancer line like that. Ito had said that he’d sometimes come to spy on the estate. He’d seen me when Kaori and I were living in peace, and also when, as he put it, “Something bad had happened to me.” I thought about what kind of life he must have led. Before my father had died at my hands he had talked about “an even greater evil.” Certainly I was surprised that Ito was a member of JL, but given his background, perhaps it wasn’t so odd after all. For one thing, his father was a leader of Rahmla. And he’d asked me to team up. I wasn’t sure what to do about him. Plus I was watching over Kaori, and I didn’t know what I was going to do there either. I had no idea why I was doing all this stuff when I was trying not to exist. Nor did I understand why I’d ended up crying in my sleep for murdering Yajima, as that woman had told me.

The plastic surgeon claimed that fate was driven by the combination of people’s character, heredity and environment, and those of the people around them. I didn’t know where those threads would lead, or how much they knew, but I thought that over time they must lead somewhere. What would happen in the future? What would I do? What would happen to me? I was raised by my father to be a cancer, so Kaori and I should have been doomed from the start. We’d dodged that, but I’d paid a price for it. However, in the perverted life caused by my violations of society’s rules, I’d committed more violations, so presumably in the future I’d grow even more perverted. Did I break the rules deliberately? Was that my tendency?

As my vision blurred with drunkenness, I phoned the
woman I’d picked up in the d’Alfaro. After six rings she answered in a quiet voice. The background was raucous, and I figured she was in a bar somewhere.

“Um, it’s me. I mean, we met the other day …”

“Ah.”

The noise died away.

“Look, I was wondering if we could meet now? Of course I’ll pay you.”

“That’s okay … hey.”

She must have moved somewhere because there was no sound at all.

“The other day you didn’t tell me your number, but now I can see it clear as day.”

“Ah.” I snickered. I figured that letting her see my number was just an aberration, not deliberate. “Yeah, I guess I slipped up.”

“Are you drunk? Where are you?”

“Ikebukuro, but I’ll come to you. You in a bar?”

“Yeah, but I’m just leaving. I’m in Shibuya.”

“Okay, in front of the station. Thirty minutes.”

I hung up and tried to stand. I was definitely a bit drunk. I paid my bill and as I headed through the low doorway my cell phone rang again. I thought she was calling me back to tell me that something had come up, but it was the detective.

“I’ve found out who it is, the person investigating Ms. Kaori.”

“What?”

“I couldn’t tell by looking at the company’s list of board members, but the principal shareholder is Mikihiko Kuki.”

My older brother, the second son.

“He doesn’t have a good reputation. Not at all.”

I realized that I’d half expected this, but my pulse still started to beat faster. So it was the Kukis after all, I thought. Everyone dancing in the shadows around Kaori was connected to the Kuki family.

“Can you find out more about this Mikihiko?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me if you need any extra expenses. I don’t care how much it costs.”

“Understood. And about the missing cell phone—I think he was following me because he recognized me from somewhere. He found out about Azusa Konishi as well.”

“No, that was someone else.”

“Someone else?”

“Yes. I’ll take care of that, so you please concentrate on Mikihiko. I want you to find out all about him.”

“Got it.”

I ended the call and left the bar. My head was killing me.

THE FUZZY GREEN light gradually resolved itself into trees, and a narrow street of damp terra-cotta bricks stretched lazily into the distance. Curled up in the darkness, she was tinged with that green and russet glow. The gentle tones shone only on the spot where she was sitting, casting deeper shadows in the gloom behind her. It took me a moment or two to work out that she was watching a movie on TV. Kyoko Yoshioka, that was her name.

A slender foreign woman appeared on the screen. She stared out at us expressionlessly, not with a Mona Lisa smile encompassing everything, but with a blank face that rejected all meaning.

“Oh, you’re awake.”

“Yeah.”

The woman on the television was still looking at me. I didn’t know what to make of her. I felt a shiver of fear, and then realized that the picture had changed back to the wet street scene some time ago. Or perhaps she had never been there in the first place. My head was still thick with sleep.

“Hey, you should put some clothes on,” I said. “Aren’t you cold?”

“I like not wearing any clothes.”

The pale skin of her back seemed to float in the darkness.

“This movie, it’s nice to look at but it’s very slow.”

I chuckled. “Yeah, maybe.”

She scratched her neck lightly as if she were thinking.

“I tend to watch stuff like this using my own frame of reference,” she said. “Anything outside that I don’t like.”

“Mm.”

“But someone told me I’d never broaden my horizons like that, that it was a waste, that I’d miss out on the small details. It would be nice if I could expand my horizons a little bit at a time, though.”

“But just realizing that is pretty impressive.”

“This man told me, in an institution I was in a long time ago. He was nice. He showed me lots of stuff. Books and movies and music.”

“Well, it’s a little surprising.”

She was smiling. I could still feel the alcohol in my system from the night before and my temples ached.

“So you watch this kind of stuff?” she asked.

“Yeah, recently. A little bit at a time.”

Lately I’d been working my way through Shintani’s movies.

“And those books?”

She pointed at the bookcase.

“Yeah, those are new too, so I’ve only read a few of them.”

They were mostly foreign classics.

“Until now,” I continued, “I’ve been completely wrapped up inside my head. We use words to think, don’t we? The people who wrote those, they’re thinking about nothing but words. While everyone else is doing all sorts of different things, those writers are just thinking about life, about words. When I read their words, I don’t know how to explain it, I thought I wanted to expand my own thoughts. I’ve been too narrow-minded.”

“Hmm. Have you read anything that really inspired you?”

“I’ve only just started. But before I get enlightened, I feel like the world is rapidly becoming more complicated. I don’t know if I can catch up.”

For some reason her face softened.

“But books like that must be difficult.”

“They sure are. And they’re pretty old. But I think they’re still relevant to today’s society.”

The movie ended and the credits began to roll.

“I am cold after all,” she said, and came back to bed. “But hey, you realize that you let me see where you live?”

“Yeah, I did, didn’t I?”

“I thought you were hiding something, but … are you all right? Don’t you think you’ve been careless?”

Certainly I’d been getting lax lately.

“I bet you’ve always been really careful, haven’t you? You’ve got to keep on being careful.”

“Maybe it’s because I’m getting tired. Bad, eh?”

The room was slowly cooling down. When I thought about it, the only people who’d been in this apartment were the cop, Aida, and her. My exposed skin felt dry. Suddenly I remembered the dream I’d been having. I was outside, somewhere with no sign of people. No towns, no buildings, no evidence of humans at all, dark and barren as far as the eye could see. It had been cold there too, cold enough for me to start worrying about what would happen if the temperature dropped any further. Gray clouds hung low in the sky, so dense I could feel their weight. As I stood in that desolate place, I thought it could have been anywhere.

“It’s because you’re different. I tell you stuff.”

“If you like me, why don’t you let me be your girlfriend?”

“I told you, I changed my face. I’m actually ugly.”

“That doesn’t matter, does it? After all, it was your choice.”

“And because I killed someone.”

She looked at me blankly. “Hang on. You spring that on me out of the blue like that?”

“What?”

I was watching her face, wondering what I was saying. My pulse, however, didn’t waver.

“Is that your ego talking? Does it turn you on?”

I noticed that she’d snuggled a little closer to me in the bed.

“I wonder. I don’t know.”

I stared at the ceiling, puzzling over why I was so calm.

“When I was I kid, I thought I’d do whatever it took to protect the most important thing in the world to me.”

I breathed in slowly.

“I was still just a child, but even then I knew that doing so would ruin my life. But I did it anyway, because that thing meant everything to me. Even if I weighed everything else in my life against it, I was dazzled. And in fact I did become twisted. I could never be at peace. It was obvious that would happen, but at the time I couldn’t think of any alternative.”

“Was this to do with someone called Kaori?”

“What? I did it again?”

“Yes, you were talking in your sleep again. This time it was just her name.”

I turned on the heater. She moved even closer to me.

“After I changed my face, it was a weird feeling. I felt like I was already dead. I thought I’d become one of the thirty thousand people who kill themselves every year in this country, that I was a living corpse. I felt so detached, from myself and from my life so far. Everything seemed so clear. Looking back, perhaps I enjoyed it. Losing all my hopes and desires, just being an observer, it gave me a strange sense of relief. But then I went and did the same thing all over again.”

I could feel her eyes on me.

“It turns out I’m still alive after all. I get hungry, I sweat, I still like feeling a woman’s touch, like this. My bodily functions and desires, they were distasteful, but I can’t help them. They make me aware of my own life. It feels like life is forcing itself on me, lifting me up. But I ruined the lives of people who were just like me. Whenever I feel life stirring inside me,
I remember that I killed others who felt the same stirrings. This contradiction, I think it’s twisting me even more. It doesn’t matter what kind of people I harmed, it makes no difference. You said I was talking in my sleep. That’s one of the consequences. That brief feeling I had of being an observer faded rapidly, and what I did festers inside me. Every day I grow wearier and wearier. Like you said, I have nightmares and I get careless. The human mind is weak—they often say that the conscious is the slave of the subconscious. So in the long run I’m slowly growing distorted from the inside out, from my subconscious. Maybe I’m rejecting myself as someone who’s killed another human being, I don’t know. But at the same time I think this feeling is important. If you watch the news, you see people who are killed wantonly, people who kill wantonly, don’t you? War is the same. Somehow I get the feeling that this sense of distortion is important for us. It’s something fundamental about this world.”

I could feel the warmth of her body next to mine.

“But what puzzles me is why you aren’t running away as fast as you can.”

She looked at me in surprise. “Why would I do that?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“My life hasn’t been so sheltered that I’ll suddenly get scared by a story like that.” Casually she took hold of my fingers.

“In costume dramas and cartoons,” I continued slowly, “when the bad guy gets killed everybody cheers. In real life it seems like it’s not that easy. I don’t know why, but Japan seems to be full of stories and games and stuff where people
get killed and no one seems upset, even though they teach that killing people is wrong. But in real life …”