Goth (5 page)

When I left the room, I took the set of knives and the paper on the desk—as mementos. When the police figured everything out and searched this room, the lack of weapons might cause problems, but I didn’t care.

I went to the first floor and looked inside. Quiet music was playing in the empty shop.

I flipped the sign on the door, turning it to
CLOSED
.

Morino stood behind me, watching and rubbing her wrists—the rope marks were still there.

“It was horrible,” she said. “I’m never coming here again.”

“It wasn’t all bad. You got to meet him.”

Morino frowned. “Got to meet who? Why did the shop master do this to me, anyway?”

She had not realized that the shop master was a serial killer.

I looked down, staring at the tiny crosses on the piece of paper in my hand.

prologue

As I was preparing to go home after school, I sensed someone standing behind me in the increasingly empty classroom. When I turned around, I saw it was Morino.

“Something I wanted to say to you before you left,” she explained. We had not spoken all day, so it had been nearly twenty-four hours since I’d heard her voice. “I rented a strange movie yesterday …”

Apparently, Morino had been absolutely dying to talk about this movie with somebody, but I was the only person in the class she ever talked to—and she would only do that when I was alone, not when I was talking to any of our other classmates. Therefore, she’d been unable to speak to me until just before I went home.

A few girls to the side of the room noticed us and began whispering. I could tell they were talking about us. At first, people had wondered if we were a couple, but our body language was never at all intimate, our expressions remaining sullen throughout each conversation. So just how close we were remained a mystery to our classmates. But as far as they were concerned, Morino talking to anybody was remarkable in itself. She hid herself in the class, vanishing the moment school ended—she lived like a submarine, hugging the sea floor.

Unless wearing the summer version of her uniform, she always wore black—black from her long hair down to her shoes—as if she was doing her best to melt into the darkness, fleeing detestable light.

I once asked Morino
shibou douki
, or why she’d chosen this school to attend.

“The uniforms are black and very plain. That’s the only reason … When you first said ‘shibou douki,’ I understood a very different meaning.”

She wrote the homonym on the blackboard in white chalk: the kanji for “death wish.” As she did, her thin wrist emerged from inside her uniform sleeve. Her skin was very pale, as if it had never been exposed to sunlight.

She had a pretty face, so a few boys had tried to chat her up—until something had happened to change everything: one of the teachers had done something to her that amounted to sexual harassment, and she’d produced an aerosol can filled with pepper spray, calmly attacking him with it before picking up her desk chair and beating him to the ground. I had been watching in hiding. After that, no boys dared approach her.

†

The story I am about to tell is not the story of how Morino and I made each other’s acquaintance; it is the story I remember every time my eyes happen upon her pale wrists.

In spring of that year, the news shows were all excited about a case involving a number of severed wrists—a case I had secretly become involved in.

This was at the end of May, before I had ever spoken to Morino …

i

As he stared at his own hands, Shinohara thought: Hands, obviously, were the ends of vertebrates’ forelimbs. His own hands had developed to grasp objects, with five fingers that could type on a computer keyboard or tilt a cup of coffee. It seemed self-evident that hands were the essence of humanity. That was why there were palm readers; palm readers said the lines on a person’s palms allowed them to determine an individual’s personality and destiny. Hands were a mirror that reflected the person’s past and future.

Shinohara had liked hands even as a child—he had been so obsessed with hands that when his parents had taken him outside, he hadn’t seen the crowds of people, only their hands. But the way hands moved was unfalteringly true. The tendons flexing on the back of the hands, the five fingers, the nails at the tips of those fingers, and the white crescents at the tips of them … Fingerprints, in particular, were critical to defining the individual.

In the lower years of elementary school, Shinohara had cut off the hands of a doll his sister had thrown away, making sure nobody noticed. The tiny doll hands had rolled around in the palms of Shinohara’s own hands. He put them in his pocket, throwing away the handless doll. Whenever he could, he would rub those tiny hard hands with his thumb. The tiny grooves on the plastic hands told Shinohara so much more than the words his mother and teachers said to him.

He had cut the front paws off cats and dogs with pruning shears, as well. Pruning shears were very good for cutting through tiny wrists. Shinohara liked the hands of dogs and cats. Human hands did not have pads, which always struck him as funny—if you pushed the pads, claws came out, and there was hair growing between them. Paws could not grasp objects like human hands, but they’d evolved in their own unique fashion.

Shinohara was well aware that most people could not accept his belief that the essence of humans lay in their hands; he had observed the people around him enough to understand that the world was controlled by the empty words emerging from heads and mouths. When he grew older and started working, he knew to hide his ideas—but every now and then, he found himself thinking about hands again … that five-fingered design that only God could have created. Shinohara could not keep them out of his head.

Then one spring, he had severed his first human hand—a baby’s hand. He’d found the baby sitting in a stroller, and he’d cut off its hand with pruning shears when the mother had left it alone briefly.

The baby’s tiny hand was warm and soft. When Shinohara severed it, the baby had woken up and stared crying, and the warmth of its hand in his had begun to fade. Shinohara shoved the baby’s hand in his pocket and took it home, where he kept it in the refrigerator.

The baby’s hand was not the only one. Shinohara knocked out a child, cutting off its hand under cover of darkness. He cut hands off high school kids and adults, as well. Fully grown human hands were too thick to cut off with pruning shears, but a saw left the cut much too ragged for Shinohara’s aesthetic sensibilities to accept. He could hardly carry around an ax with him, though—so in the end, Shinohara settled on a meat cleaver. Once his victims were unconscious, a single strong blow would cut right through the bone for a nice clean cut.

Shinohara had not killed anyone—he only wanted the hands, not to kill anyone. It mattered nothing to him whether the non-hand parts lived or died, as long as nobody saw him, so he simply abandoned the unconscious bodies.

The newspapers and TV news all said that none of the victims could identify who had attacked them once they’d woken up in the hospital, which was always a relief to Shinohara. He had worked carefully and in the dark, but he was still afraid of being caught.

Shinohara liked hands, and he enjoyed cutting them off. He felt a great sense of release when the hands were separated from the rest of the body—in his twisted view of the world, releasing those hands was actually heroic.

Even once at work he had cut the hands off a doll—a hand-sized, cheap cloth thing stuffed with cotton. It was so small that the hands were not very detailed—they had no fingers, simply a round part at the end of the arm. But they were hands nevertheless. This was simply how hands had evolved in the manufacturing of dolls—evolved beyond fingers. Cutting those off had helped Shinohara ease the tension between the world and himself. He put all the hands he had cut off in his refrigerator, including those of the cloth doll and the dog and cat paws. He never threw away any of them.

Shinohara lived alone, but his house felt full of life. Every time he opened the fridge, he saw the rows of hands inside. When he touched them, he felt like he knew the original owners’ pasts, what they had lived through, and also what the future had in store for them. What he sensed by touching them became words speaking to him and telling him of the love the hands’ parents had given them, as well as the pain the world had inflicted on them.

The news and the papers talked about Shinohara’s crimes every day. They were calling it the Wrist-Cut Case now. Shinohara didn’t care what they named it—but he didn’t enjoy being hated, treated like a criminal. He didn’t like having their value system forced on him.

As he watched the evening news, Shinohara explained his feelings to a child’s hand, which he had taken out of the refrigerator and was holding in his own hand.

“Yes, exactly as you say,” the child’s hand’s curves, indentations, and elasticity told him through Shinohara’s palm.

Shinohara’s anxiety and anger melted away. He could feel courage rising up within him once more.

ii

In his morning class, the chemistry teacher had said, “During lunch, I’m going to reorganize the chemistry office. If anyone can spare the time, I’d appreciate the help.”

The teacher didn’t seem like he actually expected anyone to do so, and most of the students completely ignored him—so when I showed up in the office at lunch, he appeared surprised.

It was a sunny day, and warm spring light poured down outside the windows, but the chemistry office was comparatively dark and a little chilly. In the distance, I could hear students laughing and playing.

The chemistry office was cramped and lined with cases, which were filled with chemicals and models of molecules and even a few organs preserved in formaldehyde. There were wooden desks by the windows, and these were covered in scientific books and papers about plants and space. There was also an old computer—and on the next desk, beneath a pile of books, a printer was hidden. Light filtered through the blinds, picking out clouds of dust in the air.

“Erm, then start by carrying the garbage into the lecture hall,” the chemistry teacher instructed, as he pointed at a blue plastic wastebasket filled with balled-up pieces of paper. I nodded, picked up the trash, and headed for the lecture hall.

†

“Who the hell would waste his lunch on
that
?” someone next to me had muttered when the teacher had solicited help. I’d already forgotten what I'd said in response, but the other student had laughed, so I must’ve said something dull.

It was easy to act like my cheerier classmates. If I kept up with the most popular TV shows and variety programs and responded with the right words and expressions, it was easy to seem like I was following along. Everyone believed me to be an outgoing boy, and I was able to avoid any unnecessary trouble.

What kind of trouble? In kindergarten, I had once become obsessed with the idea of coloring in a doll’s face with black marker and cutting off its arms and legs—and had done just that, which caused a great deal of concern from those around me. I could clearly remember the worried looks my mother and teachers gave me.

After that, I became good at lying. Like with the crayons we used for drawing. Until then, the black one had always been much shorter, but after that I was careful to wear all the colors down evenly. I don’t remember drawing much of interest afterward, but the subject matter must have involved a number of rainbows or flowers or the like. This seemed to put the adults around me at ease.

By understanding the value system the world preferred, remembering and feigning it, I was able to convince others that I was free of problems. I simply had to participate enthusiastically in the boring conversations my classmates were having.

I didn’t tell my classmates that I was helping to clean the chemistry office that day. The character I played in class would never do that sort of thing, and I wanted to avoid the impression that I was doing it to score points. Besides, I wasn’t helping out of the goodness of my heart—I had a plan.

Rumor had it that the chemistry teacher for my class made the tests at his desk in the chemistry office. There was a chance his notes were in the garbage, and I was hoping to get my hands on those while I was helping out.

In my first year, I had randomly found myself helping this teacher to clean his office, so I knew where he would start: He would begin by having me carry the trash into the lecture hall next door. Then we would organize the office, and he would accompany me to take out the garbage. (The trash generated while cleaning took two to carry.) That was what had happened last year.

Herein lay the problem: there was no time to pick through the contents of the trash. I needed a plan. So I borrowed a wastebin from another classroom before I went to help the chemistry teacher, hiding it in the chemistry lecture hall. Then I went to the chemistry office and offered to help.

If things played out like last year, the first thing he would do was instruct me to carry the garbage into the lecture hall. If he did not, I would have to carry it out when he wasn’t looking.