Nan-Core (3 page)

I walked closer and immediately noticed a small girl inside one of the glass showcases. She was blond and staring at me with a look that was something like surprise or resignation. In the moment our eyes met all the floods of color and attacking noises were washed away by silence, as if by magic. I knew then and there that she was my Nan-Core. It was there, in such a place. Something I had never expected to find.

I knew it was going to be okay.

After a while my mother came looking for me. I had camped down in front of the showcase and wouldn’t budge even when she pulled my hand.

“What? You want a doll?” mother asked. I think she was surprised, because that was the first time I’d ever refused to listen or acted like I wanted something. She eyed the price tag and muttered to the seller about how it looked old and worn, seemingly unconvinced as she considered it, but she ended up buying Nana (as I was already calling her in my mind; the name felt natural) for me. Perhaps she bought the doll because the doctor had told her each time we visited the hospital that the best thing was to let me do what I wanted.

As an aside: When my mother was pregnant with me she once slipped getting onto the bus and fell, hitting her abdomen hard on the edge of one of the steps. As a result, she was convinced it was her fault that I didn’t speak.

The package that came with Nana contained a few different outfits and a miniature baby bottle. Nana was an old resin doll, designed to drink milk. Her eyelashes were long and grouped in bunches, planted around blue eyes that clicked shut when she lay flat. Her tiny lips were painted with red enamel and had a short round tube for drinking milk embedded in the center. I couldn’t help but think the tube made her expression look a little startled, like she was caught in the moment before a scream.

When we got home, and as soon as it was just Nana and me in the space between the bed and the wall, I just had to pry off her frilly clothes, made of dark red velvet, and pull down her rough cotton underwear to see below. Her underbelly was gently swollen and had the same thin tube as the one in her mouth sticking through the middle. It felt incredibly lewd. Not that I understood such concepts at the time, of course. I brought my face up to the pipe and peered into her, but the only thing I could make out through the narrow opening was a gloomy darkness.

Even so I knew that, at her core, Nana was my Nan-Core.

That I was saved.

I played with her every day. I remember all the details vividly, like something from a morbid dream. I would stand her up, naked, as I used the baby bottle to pour water through the tube in her mouth. Her eyes would stay wide open as the liquid dripped from her underbelly, and the whole time she maintained a befuddled expression. After this I would turn her rosy, chubby figure upside down. Her legs would spin down from the crotch and catch at an impossible angle, fully exposing the tiny secret between them. The end of the tube inside her protruded a bit at the end. I would carefully attach the bottle to this, and pour more water in.

I was Nana. I was an empty vessel. I was unable to close off the pipe that was open inside me. I had no means to stop the things that flowed into or out of me. Nana’s fears were my own, and my fears were hers. When upside down, her eyes would clamp shut as the water flowed relentlessly, out from her little bird-like mouth, soaking her hair.

My mother watched me with a discomfited look as I did little besides play with the doll. But I never got bored. The doll’s blond hair was always soaking wet. Eventually, after a while of repeating the game over and over, I sensed a small change occurring within me. It felt as though I was gradually building up an immunity against both the outside world and myself.

I realized I probably wouldn’t fall to pieces if I spoke a little.

Despite my mother’s misgivings, I was admitted to regular classes in elementary school. I had learned to give simple, short verbal responses barely moving my lips at all. The lump at the nape of my neck no longer stood out.

Even so, I still went through my days feeling like half my brain was unconscious. I stared vacantly with wide-open eyes as I took in the world around me. I was still just like Nana. I can see it even now. Since I could first remember, I had always lived with my own peculiar sense of discomfort. It’s hard to put into words. The feeling was like licking sandpaper or wearing a terribly itchy, wooly sweater on bare skin … I don’t know. Everything around me was frizzled and sharp-edged, hostile in some unidentifiable way.

Amongst all this the adults were the most overpowering. Their physical size, their smells, their words, facial expressions, the way they laughed—it all pressed down on me with particular force. My classmates seemed distant and incomprehensible, too, in the way they would chat so effortlessly with these terrifying grown-ups.

When I was in second grade there was a girl in my class called Michiru, and she was really bright. She was pretty and from a well-off home; she was the Queen Bee, the sort found in every classroom.

I don’t know why, but she alone became very special to me.

The kids from our class always used to go over to her house to play. Michiru’s inner circle was made up of the same three girls, and beyond that was a group of hangers-on of about a dozen girls and boys.

I could only watch on from the periphery, of course, but Michiru was magnanimous enough not to mind when I mixed in and tagged along with the others to her house. Even better, when our eyes met every now and again, she would go so far as to flash a smile or give me a nod.

Although they weren’t quite the same as Nana’s, Michiru had wonderfully long eyelashes. Her house had once belonged to the old village headman and the old-fashioned, single-story wooden
structure was surrounded by a large, tree-filled garden. There was a pond ringed with stones beside which stood a wisteria trellis, under which was a ceramic table surrounded by several stools. That area formed the mainstay for games of make-believe or hide and seek. When Michiru and the three girls of her entourage sat there a couple of the stools would still be free, and there were always small fights over who would join them.

I never considered sitting there myself. I was never given a role to play during make-believe games and no one tried to find me when we played hide and seek. But no one really bullied me either. I didn’t feel much of anything either way.

One day when the others were passing around comics I was crouched a short distance away, watching a snail that had attached itself to an azalea leaf. The snails in the expansive grounds of Michiru’s large home were big enough to be creepy, almost as fat as a loquat fruit. Next to me was an old, abandoned well, plugged with a round, wooden lid. I found a small gap where part of the rim had rotted away, just small enough that a clenched fist wouldn’t fit through. I was afraid something like a snake might crawl out, but I couldn’t resist the urge to get in closer and take a peek. I felt a compulsion to look. It was as if the gap had found me and not the other way around.

I stepped closer and a musty, dark scent wafted up. I sucked in the dank smell on an inhalation. The moment I pressed my face to the gap, darkness clung to my eyes. I couldn’t tell where my eyes ended and the dark began. It was just endlessly, totally dark.

I forgot I was in a garden in the middle of the day. There were beads of sweat on my back.

“Death.” I don’t remember if the word actually came into my head right then, but it was apparent to me that the darkness
stretching out into the depths of that well was boundless compared to the bright outside world.

I felt like I would be sucked in headfirst if I didn’t do something. I doubted anyone would notice if I went missing. I finally managed to peel my face away and rushed over to where I had been watching the snail. It was gross but I made myself pull at the shell until the creature came off the leaf and rolled into my palm.

I dropped the snail through the gap.

Without a sound the whirlpool-patterned shell and its contents were immediately swallowed by the darkness. It was as though it had become a part of the abyss.

I felt a little calmer. Because, for that day at least, I felt that I had managed to avoid being sucked through the hole.

From that day onwards, it became my secret task to drop bugs through the hole whenever I went to Michiru’s place. It felt like a duty I was obliged to perform, or even a mission from God (all children have a part of them that instinctively believes in such things). Snails were easy to catch, but it didn’t really matter what I used. Earwigs, worms, even cicada that were too weak to move. When everyone else was raising hell playing statues, I would be off to the side, crawling through the garden searching for tiny creatures.

The more I dropped into the darkness, the more addicted I became, a slave to the mysterious delight the act elicited. Kindness welled up inside me, and even though I really knew that dropping the bugs down the hole meant they would die, it felt rather like I was helping the snails and worms get back to where they belonged. Because there was nothing glaring or sharp in the dark world beyond the hole, only silence.

I felt a peace of mind, knowing I was doing something that
needed to be done. All I had to do was send through enough lives, and a safe balance could be maintained.

It was the first time I had started something of my own accord, with a clear sense of purpose. I also felt a strong sense of superiority over the other kids, who were ignorant, lost in child-like games.

I was in the garden as usual one day—the wisteria petals had fallen to the ground around the trellis, so I think it was early summer—when suddenly the sky turned dark and it began to drizzle. Michiru suggested that everyone go indoors for some snacks, but I didn’t budge from the garden even as everyone else raised a clamor as they headed to the house. For some reason I had yet to catch a single bug that day and hadn’t sent a single offering through the hole. It had never happened before and I was worried that something bad would happen if I didn’t fix the situation quickly.

I had just found a small tree frog and was in the middle of chasing it when it started to rain. It was hopping about frantically and when I finally managed to grab it I caught sight of a red polka-dot umbrella just past a low fence.

It was Michiru. She was walking right towards me. I jumped to my feet.

“Oh, you’re still out here?” she asked, without any apparent surprise. “Hey, I left my hat somewhere around here. I’d hate for it to get wet. Have you seen it?” she asked mildly, tilting her head. It was as though the fact that I couldn’t speak like a normal kid didn’t bother her at all.

I froze in terror. All I could do was shake my head violently. I had never been alone with her before.

“What’s that?” She drew even closer. I shaped my hands into a bowl to hold the frog in. “A … fr … frog,” I said through clenched
teeth. So long as my teeth were shut tight I was okay.

“What? A frog? You’re okay with touching something like that? Wow!” She sounded genuinely impressed. “Did you catch it yourself? What kind is it? Let me see. C’mon, let me see. I know! Let’s let it swim in the pond,” Michiru said breezily as she skipped over the low flat stones that lined the pond.

I jerked my way over to her, as requested, then slightly pulled back my hand that had been acting as a lid covering the frog. As I did so, the frog, which had been docile until then, perhaps startled by the sudden light, sprang towards Michiru’s shoulder.

A short shriek and a splash sounded out in unison as Michiru lurched backwards and tumbled into the pond. The red umbrella flew all the way to the middle and flipped upside-down, floating on the surface.

It wasn’t a deep pond. I don’t really know how, but one of Michiru’s socks got caught up in the branches of a bush at the edge of the pond, and due to this she was unable to get up from the position she landed in—facing the sky with her head below the rest of her. With just one leg sticking out from the water, she could do nothing but writhe.

I could tell she was screaming under the water. I couldn’t hear a thing, but there were lots of bubbles. I just stood there as the water churned, my mind devoid of any thoughts, eyes wide open.

Michiru’s thin leg was right there before me, and I could see the pointed branch poking through the white fabric of her sock. If I took off her sneaker and her sock, she could have escaped from the pond in no time. In some remote part of my mind, I was aware of this. And yet I stayed as I was, just watching as Michiru thrashed in the water. It might have been that I was simply overwhelmed by the sheer abnormality of the scene. I had no ill will towards her.

The water suddenly went still, as though the frantic splashing hadn’t actually happened. When the bubbles cleared I saw Michiru, her hair swaying within the greenish water.

I felt a surge of relief, and smiled at Michiru. This was because she looked relieved, too. Her eyes and mouth were open beneath the water.

I thought that she had gone through the hole in place of the frog she had let escape, that her soul had left her body and gone on by itself to dissolve into the darkness on the other side. Then I left through the back gate I often used and went home.

The adults and the other kids all cried over Michiru’s death, thinking it an unfortunate accident.

I retraced it all in my mind, again and again. In the short moments that led up to her death, my usual sense of discomfort melted away, and everything seemed pure and bright, all the trees and stones in the garden, the sky and the whole world beyond it. Mysteriously, I could sense that that was the true form of the world. It felt like a miracle to be standing there, right in the center of the world as it really was. The sensation lasted only until the pond grew quiet.

After the funeral, everyone stopped going to Michiru’s house to play. Sometime later I hugged Nana, the first time I had done so in a while. She had become an elderly woman even though she was still a girl. The red enamel on her lips was faded and patches of her blond hair had come out, revealing her scalp and the pimple-like holes where the bunches had been inserted.