I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like (28 page)

—
Hey. I think we have to go.

He tapped her shoulder. After a moment she stirred and sat up.

—
Uh?

—
It’s closing. I think your last train comes soon.

She got off the seat. He waited while she put on her coat, and then they left the bar and walked along the path, past the shops, back to the station. The waterfront was almost empty; only a few couples in winter coats and long scarves lingered by the beach. When they got to the station she bought a ticket and he loaned her a hundred yen coin — all she had left was a thousand yen note. As they approached the gate she turned to him.

—
Thanks for staying with me, she said. I had a really good time today.

Before he could say anything she took a thin silver cell phone from her coat.

—
I’ll give you my number, okay? We should be friends.

Tatsuya took out his own phone, one he’d bought two years ago. It was a clunky black model from Vodaphone with no internet or camera. The only names in the address book were Masa and his family.

—
Here, I’ll put it in.

She took the phone and typed in a number. For a moment they stood in silence.

—
Well, I’ll see you later, she said, turning at last to the gate. Tatsuya waved as she moved towards the platform. Then he turned and went to catch his train.

He only had to wait a few minutes. The train was almost empty; he took a seat by the door and rested against the railing. He would have to keep himself awake, he thought; if he slept and missed his stop, the taxi fare would empty his wallet. So he looked out the opposite window as the lights of Odaiba rushed by. Past the glow of the buildings, he could see the dark curve of the ferris wheel, and further out, the faint shimmer of the bay. Against the horizon Odaiba seemed like a different world, a tiny kingdom of its own; and as the train moved further away it all seemed to be fading, vanishing into the night.

By the time he reached Shimbashi it was already early morning. He caught the local line to his station, and as he walked home he wondered whether his mother had left his dinner out for him. He’d eaten a lot at the Chinese restaurant, but that had been hours ago, and now he was hungry again. He supposed it was the hour: usually he went to sleep at eleven and woke up early.

At home he knocked once, and receiving no response, took out his key and opened the door. Inside, the lights were out. He went to the kitchen, found a plate of pasta and ate it sitting at the table. The latest volume of the treatise was still where he’d left it in the morning. He thought about writing some more, but decided against it. He was too tired.

He opened the door to his room and looked in. He would have to clean it soon, he thought: to get to the bed he needed to navigate through a sprawl of books, papers, magazines; in one corner, close to the closet, was an enormous heap of clothes. The closet itself was close to overflowing, and it had been weeks since he’d vacuumed. Stepping over the garbage on the floor, he made it to the bed and smoothed out his pillow. Then he took out his phone and looked down at it for a while, flipping it open and closed, turning it over in his hands.

A patch of wall close to the door caught his eye. It was lighter than the space surrounding it, and he saw that a photograph he’d taped to the wall had fallen down. He would begin there, he thought: in the morning he would retape the photograph, and then he would clean the entire room. But even as the thought entered his mind, he knew it would never happen. At the most he would clear off the top of the desk and give up when it became too much. In truth he didn’t know where to start. And the more he put it off, the more difficult it became.

In his hand the phone’s cover was flipped up, the screen open to the main menu. He stared at it for a long time. Then he scrolled through to the address book and deleted her number from the registry.

•

Masa caught the last train home and stopped at McDonald’s for his dinner. He bought two cheeseburgers and a Coke and walked back to the apartment he shared with his brother. As he stepped inside he saw a note lying on the table: his brother was out. He was alone.

He started up his computer and turned on his music. The last few hours were dissolving in his mind, his memories curling into vague clouds, all soon to evaporate. His attention had already turned back to the report, and while he hadn’t decided where he would post it yet, fragments of it were assembling themselves in his mind. He jotted down a brief outline, beginning with the discovery of the photographer. He had been, he thought, almost like a detective. He smiled.

He checked his e-mail, browsed the forums, and started a number of new downloads. A friend messaged him on MSN:

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Did you get the new Ayaya?

—
No.

He remembered. Ayaya — Aya Matsuura — had just released a new single a few days ago. He’d meant to download it, but the scandal had distracted him.

—
It’s called “Suna wo Kamu You ni... NAMIDA”. I can send you it, it’s pretty good.

He clicked the link, and was soon listening to a morose ballad about lost love and “tears just like rain.” It was not an especially distinguished song, he decided, but as he looked at the album art he found himself moved. Matsuura’s face called up a memory from some years ago, one of his favorite memories, well-tended and almost caricatured through constant replaying. He did not always think of it when he looked at her, but the angle of her face in the photograph brought back the day when he had gone to the handshake event in Shibuya.

This was a routine event, arranged for the promotion of a new album: Matsuura would appear in a record store for an hour to meet and shake hands with fans. Masa had arranged the trip days in advance, arriving early to get as close to the stage as possible. Even so, he was surprised at the turnout — although he should have expected it, he told himself. Matsuura was one of the most popular idols in Japan; he saw her face constantly on posters, signs, advertisements; she was less a person than an element of design. Her other aspects came after her, as if trailing from a distance: her voice, played constantly in malls, arcades, shopping centers; her body, framed in magazines and music specials; and then her own thoughts, serene and unknowable, like a flower folded in on itself. She was at once idol, voice and concept, a beauty existing in every dimension while still remaining whole.

He moved forward as the line grew behind him. The floor had opened, and as Matsuura walked out amidst the clicking of camera shutters, Masa pressed ahead to the foot of the stage. At first he was surprised at her height; he had not expected to be taller than her. He was afraid he would be disappointed — that the reality of Ayaya would not match his ideal. He had been to these events before and had learned to relax his expectations. Most models, most idols, had contrived faces with fixed smiles and eyes like opaque glass. A kind of muted hysteria seemed frozen in their features as they greeted all alike: insistent children with pawing hands, bored businessmen seeking souvenirs, pock-faced fans with enormous cameras. All too often the event, intended to provide closeness, only reinforced the distance, the idol growing ever more remote, more unknowable, masked by her own practiced civility. And so it didn’t do to hope for too much: sometimes the poster was better.

The line began to move. He studied her face as the session started. Seen in the flesh, it seemed to cast off its old associations, to be born again, the face of a young girl: beautiful, but then there was nothing extraordinary about that. What made her stand out, he thought, was that standing before him she seemed utterly ordinary, and yet alive, present, and so young. 1986 — that was her birth-year. He remembered 1986. What had he been doing when she was born? Sitting in class, perhaps, staring out the window. Looking at her and thinking of the past, he fell into a kind of trance. But then the line pushed him up the stairs, and he stepped onto the stage.

Probably Aya Matsuura had never known any real suffering; probably no one in her life had humiliated her, spat on her, told her she was ugly. Loved by millions from a young age, she would always have friends, lovers, money. There were people like that too, he thought. So there was no reason for her to be genuine, no reason for her to care apart from formality. But he saw nothing insincere in her eyes as he walked towards her. She took his hand calmly, smiled, and then turned to the side as a photograph was taken. Through it all he kept his attention focused on her smile, which was not the plastic grin he had come to expect, but a restrained smile, calm and gracious. Then it was over: he stepped down from the stage: she waved again to the crowd as the line moved forward.

He waited a while in the store, pretending to browse, staring back at the stage. Being in the same room with her made him feel at peace — and she had acted just as an idol should, he thought. She had allowed her existence to intersect with his, briefly, and had not overplayed her persona. That was all that mattered.

The crowd moved forward and blocked the stage. He craned for a last glimpse and caught only the edge of her hand as she waved again. Satisfied, he took the stairs up to the third floor, to the toilets. Before going inside he bought an ice-cold bottle of green tea from a vending machine and drank it in long swallows. He looked through the nearest window at the sunlight pouring across the rows of buildings. It was a clear, bright day, just the start of summer. He turned and went inside, throwing the empty bottle at a bin by the opposite wall.

The stalls were all empty. He locked himself in, pulled off his pants. Then her face rose in his mind like a new moon, pale and resplendent. He moved his hand down and felt again her hand on his; and as his hand moved he thought of her smile, the row of straight white teeth merging with his memories, the thousand signs and posters only shadows of that brief flash of white; he thought of her body as he stepped away from her, the white curve of her arm fixed in space; and he thought of the last movement of her hand as she waved to the crowd, the image fading to warm darkness as his semen spattered across the toilet seat and the cold, filthy floor.

He sat for a while, his mind calm and empty.

When he came out of the stall he saw a middle-aged businessman washing his hands, his rolled-up shirt-sleeves displaying his wrinkled wrists. As he watched the man adjusting his hair he felt an unfamiliar emotion, a kind of distancing, not really hate, more a remote contempt. He felt as if he were staring down at the man from a great height, considering his existence. And although he knew nothing of his life, he was certain that he had never felt, had never really felt or known anything.

He left the bathroom and went to the window, looked down at the streets below. Hundreds of people were walking somewhere, for some reason, rushing to shops and trains and offices, like puppets pulled by strings. And what did any of them know of his happiness?

At that moment he was certain no one felt as he did, that entire lives were lived below him without a single moment of love.

He walked down the stairs and every time he passed someone he felt he could see through them. An absurd confidence filled him. He felt he had to do something: he didn’t know what it would be, when he would do it, but something had been appointed, something he alone could do. Because of his love.

Five years later he sat in front of the computer, his pants unzipped, a half-eaten cheeseburger resting on the desk. He knew what would happen: he would write a few more paragraphs, leaving the rest for tomorrow. Then he would search online for new scanned photobooks: another Ran Monbu was due soon. He would listen to his music and fall asleep in the chair, and when he awoke the next morning he wouldn’t bother to change his clothes. He would go out for lunch at noon and browse in the stores without buying anything, would come home again to find everything the same.

He tried to remember the feel of Ayaya’s hand, and realized he could not. The memory had become like a dream. But he smiled as he thought of that day, of the view from the open window. At that time, he had held the entire world in contempt.

A Thread from Heaven

There were airships in Park’s dream: that he remembered. He’d followed his father down to the pier, past the shells of bombed-out buildings, to the stripped stretch of land jutting into the sea. In that ruined city foxes nested in sunken basements; starlings darted from under the eaves. Sometimes he passed a bathtub, overturned in the street. There were scavengers hiding under the tubs, their greasy heads emerging at dusk like starved snails — but the birds controlled everything.

As he walked along the pier Park’s father stared at the sky, dressed in his old suit, his collar smoothed down with the same persistent neatness Park had seen in his photographs. The case he carried in his left hand swung in step, its gold latch glinting in the light cast up by the waves. He raised his hand to the horizon and Park saw, past the promontory of stars, a fleet of black ships massed in the distant night. There were no windows on their hulls, no openings of any kind, only the polished curves of their decks sloping past sight. Park watched them drifting out of view, trailing the last remnants of cloud down through the line of the sky.

—
How can you sleep with them being this loud? Tomo asked.

—
I can sleep through anything.

He opened his eyes and breathed in smoke. In the haze of the adjacent table, a group of company workers eased into their third round as the waitress carried over a plate of pickled cabbage. Near the door, under the lights, a woman with heavy shoes and limp hair reached for a bottle of Kirin. Three seats down, an old man sat up straight, awaiting his dinner — a picture of diligent shabbiness. Park looked at the group next to them, tried to guess their ages. Only a few looked to be recent graduates. Everyone in the bar was old.