Authors: Natsuo Kirino
Yes!
I did a quick fist pump, and at that exact moment somebody grabbed me by the hair from behind.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
It was my mom, keeping her voice down. Both hands clutching my hair, she dragged me back into the old man’s study, trying not to make any noise. And then back into my own room.
“Nothing special,” I said.
“You were peeking into their house! That’s disgusting. You’re scum, you know. Human scum.”
The old lady had taken off her makeup and was in her pj’s, light blue pj’s she’d bought at Peacock. Without her penciled eyebrows she looked homely and weird, plus her stomach was sticking out. You’re the one who’s disgusting scum, I wanted to tell her, and besides, why do I have to be yelled at by somebody like you?
“Sorry that I’m scum.”
“You should be. This is all you do instead of studying. What in the world are you thinking? What about college entrance exams? You’re a criminal, you know that? Why are you doing this?”
“A criminal?”
“That’s right,” she said. “A peeping Tom. You did the same thing in our old place and that’s why we had to move. We had to get out of there before people found out about you, and it was very hard for Father and me.”
“You just moved because you wanted to build a single-family home.”
The old lady’s face stiffened.
“How can you say that? People were about to find out about what you were up to, so we had to take off. Father and I were worried sick because we didn’t want anything to hurt your future. It wasn’t because of me. Something’s
wrong
with you. What should we do? What could you possibly be thinking? What should we do?”
What should we do? What should we do? What should we do? The old lady glared at me, demanding a reply. Behind her silver-framed glasses, her eyes were bulged and burned with anger and contempt. It shocked me to think that a moron like this had contempt for me. Her anger was really jealousy, I suddenly realized. I mean, she was so totally angry. Shut up, old bag!
Maybe I should just kill her.
The thought sprang up in my mind. If she was out of the way, imagine how free I’d be. As long as she’s around I’ll never be free. She’ll decide which university I should go to, pick out who I should marry, and wind up bossing my kids around. You can count on it.
“I’m going to tell Father what happened here,” she said, and left the room. Not that the old man could say anything. He doesn’t scare me. I’m taller than him, and stronger. Predictably, after a while the old man lumbered upstairs and without a word shut himself in his study. Tomorrow, I decided, after the old man’s gone to work, I’m going to murder my old lady. With the metal bat in the corner of my room. Then I’ll really be a criminal. Excellent. The Triple Crown: a criminal, a pervert, and a mother-killer. Imagining the bat humming down on the old lady’s head, I took a couple of practice swings. But what she’d just said was still floating around in my mind.
People were about to find out what you were up to, so we had to take off.
Here’s what happened. Before we came to Suginami-ku, until I was a freshman in high school, we lived in a suburban town with a population of about 150,000. In this huge housing project with about two hundred other families. The kind of huge apartment building you see everywhere, with long open hallways and tricycles and co-op boxes outside every door.
But that’s where I was brought up, so I liked that town and our building. There were still fields around our apartment, and my friends and I played baseball there until it got dark. On rainy days we’d chase each other around the building. Most of my friends lived in the building, so we were all pretty much from the same sort of background.
Mom, though, hated the apartment. She said it was constructed shabbily, that you could hear people talking through the walls and sounds from above and below. Her real complaint, though, was that this apartment didn’t measure up to her idea of the good life. Which to her meant a single-family home within the Tokyo city limits. You’re a doctor, she told Dad, but look at us, living in the same sort of place as people who just work down the street. Dad just gave a contented laugh. What a stupid couple. After I passed the exam to get into K High, the old lady complained about this more and more. “I hate this place, I hate it!” she said.
Since I was happy living there, I didn’t want her to get her way. Plus, a young couple moved in next door, which suddenly made me oppose moving even more. Because every single night I could hear them groaning and sighing.
My room and their bedroom were right next door to each other. In most of the apartments, the six-mat room was the children’s room and the Japanese-style room, the same size next to it, was the parents’ bedroom. Which meant that in your typical three-bedroom apartment the kids’ room was separated from the neighbor adults’ bedroom by just a wall. Talk about racy. As soon as I heard them start to groan I’d clap my ear to the wall. The young woman next door was very friendly, with a cute face like a charming little kitten. Her hair hung down straight, like a junior high girl’s, exactly the way I like it. To imagine that young woman giving off groans like that!
Hearing them wasn’t enough. I wanted to see them in the act. So I quietly opened the door to the veranda and leaned out. There was only a plywood partition separating our veranda from theirs, a board that was flimsy, so in case of a fire it could be easily broken through. All I had to do was get around that and I could spy into the couple’s bedroom where they were going at it. Damn, I thought, what I’d give to be the Invisible Man.
Pretty soon I was getting all hot and bothered not just by the nighttime goings-on but thinking about what the woman next door was doing during the day, when her husband was gone and she was alone. Maybe she was getting off by herself? I’d love to see that, I thought. One day I skipped out on school and while Mom was out shopping I went out on the veranda and peeked around the partition. The curtains were closed, though, and I couldn’t see anything. I was disappointed, but just then I noticed that she’d hung out her laundry to dry. Her tiny panties were all hanging from a round little dryer hanger. They were so pretty I reached out to try to touch them. I couldn’t quite reach them, so I went back inside and brought out a dust mop. But I still couldn’t get them. My arms got tired, and just when I was taking a break, a piece of thread wafted down from above. I looked up and two floors above us a lady was airing out her futons. She was a friend of my old lady’s, I’m sure, someone she got to know through the co-op. Unconcerned, the woman went on beating her futon. Damn. I went back inside.
That night my old lady came up to me with this scary look on her face.
“What in the world were you up to during the day? Tell me.”
“Nothing,” I said.
“You were trying to get something from next door, weren’t you?”
“No, I wasn’t. I dropped an exam answer sheet and was just trying to pick it up.”
My mom thought about this for a minute. I thought I’d conned her, but she shook her head.
“You should have just knocked on their door. I’ll do that right now.”
“No way!” I yelled, but off she went. I waited thirty minutes, then an hour, and she didn’t come back. I was getting worried. Finally she came back, her eyes all red and puffy from crying.
“We can’t live here anymore,” she said.
What was going on? I didn’t do anything
that
bad. I stayed silent, while Mom made a big show of crying.
“Maybe I’ve been a bad mother. I can’t believe you’d do something like this.”
“What did they say?”
“The husband answered the door and said there wasn’t any exam paper around. He said that he didn’t have any proof, but it looked like you were trying to steal his wife’s panties. He said one pair was lying on the ground and it looked suspicious. What if your school found out about this? What then? The husband said they wouldn’t make a big deal out of it or anything because of your age, but I can’t stand living here anymore!
“I can’t believe it, can’t believe it, we can’t stay here anymore,” she kept repeating, crying hysterically. The upshot was we left there soon after and moved here. In the beginning, after we moved, Mom seemed to have forgotten all that had happened and was happy. The nearby supermarket made her ecstatic: “They have my favorite salad dressing there!” she’d say. “And can you believe it—they carry pie sheets! It’s a much higher class of customers here.” When she found out that Toshi lived next door, though, she gradually grew more cautious.
“You can’t see her room from yours, can you, Ryo?” she asked. How stupid can you get, I thought.
You’re
the one who decided this would be my room! I didn’t bother answering. And then there was this whole new incident with Toshi in the bath. You understand how disgusted I was with my mom? She was constantly smothering me. When I was in the bath myself, for instance, she’d be hovering outside next to the sink and I couldn’t even come out when I finished. God, I hate her!
* * *
On the fateful day, I slept until eleven, with the AC on full blast. Just about the time when my old lady would come and try to get me up. But I was ready for her. The desire to kill her hadn’t wavered since the day before. I got out of bed and grabbed my aluminum bat. I had on an old T-shirt instead of pajamas, in case there was a lot of blood. And a pair of boxers. I thought about doing it naked, but that would look stupid. I heard someone coming upstairs, noisier than usual. The old lady must be pissed about something again. Excellent. She knocked on my door and opened it.
“Are you going to sleep all day?” she complained.
She stopped, surprised at how chilly my room was. As I raised the bat I shouted out and she looked up at my hands. She shouted, too—“Stop it!” she yelled.
I swung the bat down and she leaped back out the door.
Strike one
. The bat slammed against the top of my bookshelf, banging off the pile of manga on top and shattering the lightbulb in the lamp next to my desk. The old lady scrambled down the stairs. Hey—you’re not bad, I thought. She was pretty damn fast. I slowly came out of my room and came down after her. When she saw that I still had the bat in my hands, she dropped the phone she was holding. I placed it neatly back where it belonged and grabbed her hair. She struggled and finally broke free. I slammed the bat against the back of her head. It made a solid crunch but wasn’t a direct hit.
Foul ball.
Blood dripping down her head, she staggered over to the bathroom. Probably thought she could lock herself inside. I raced after her and whacked her again on the back of her head. Smush! Sounded good, but it was still a bit off center. Another foul ball. Blood splattered out on my face. The old lady fell forward, head over heels, and collapsed, shattering the glass door to the bathroom. She was still alive. Her hair was matted with blood as she crawled toward the kitchen.
“You’ll…be a criminal…” she moaned.
“I know. And I don’t give a shit.”
She nodded, but I could see the blood drain out of her face. It looked like she was dead. So the last one wasn’t a foul ball after all, but a clean hit. Finally, the woman who gave birth to me, raised me, ordered me around, yelled at me, turned me into a sex maniac, who complained all the time, was dead. And I’m the one who killed her. I suddenly felt light and airy, like a balloon. Puffy. Swollen. I tossed the bat aside and sank down, exhausted, to the floor.
* * *
From the grass I could hear the low electric buzzing of some insects. Something must be up with my brain, I thought. Maybe something’s seriously wrong with me. I don’t feel even a bit of guilt. Holding my head, I stood up. The handles of the bike must be burning hot ’cause of the sun. This random thought was cruising through my head when the cell phone rang. It had to be Toshi.
“Yeah?”
“Hi, my name’s Kirari Higashiyama. We talked before.”
She had a high, clear voice. Different from Toshi’s calm voice, or Yuzan’s attempts to talk like a guy. Or that girl Terauchi with her gloomy voice. It made me happy.
“Yeah, I remember.”
“Yuzan told me the number. So what are you doing now?”
“Just thinking, I guess. Or daydreaming. About all kinds of things.”
“Really? Hey, are the police after you, or can we talk for a while?”
She sounded sympathetic. This girl didn’t seem like she’d be much of a bother. An image came to me of the woman who lived next door in our old apartment building. If this girl was like her, that’d be cool.
“I don’t know. Hey, babe, how ’bout we—?”
“Everybody calls me Kirarin.”
Kirarin. I was too embarrassed to call her that silly name.
“Could we meet?” I asked.
“Are you sure?”
She hesitated, but I could tell she was curious. Maybe I really had become these girls’ hero. Happy and excited, I wiped the sweat off my forehead.
CHAPTER FOUR
KIRARIN
C
ould we meet?”
Worm sounded just like the guys I meet through text messaging when they phone me. Kind of fawning and brazen, like they know exactly what I want. Like all they’re thinking about is getting it on.
“Are you sure?” I asked him hesitantly, but I was disappointed as usual. Hmm…so even a pumped-up young mother-killer like Worm wants to hit on girls. I’d been hoping he’d have a bit more backbone than that. Yet unconsciously my fingers started moving like I was typing out a text message.
Sure, I want to meet you, too. I’m all by myself today and kind of lonely.
A total lie.
I’ve only recently started playing around on chat-room sites. I’d type in a message like,
I’m hoping to hook up with someone right away. I’m sixteen, and going to a private high school.
In a flash I’d get nearly a hundred replies. From guys who are pretty sure this wasn’t really a high school girl, but who are still dying to hook up. Idiotic.
I’d like to meet you. I’m eighteen, six-foot-one, and am into karate
—sometimes you get those types. And then I type back:
You’re really tall. That’s cool. I’m only four-ten. Do you like small girls?
It’s a game of mutual lies flying back and forth. I wondered if Worm wanted to play this game with me. If he does, I thought, he’s a total idiot. I decided I’d tease him a bit.
“Where can I meet you?”
Worm hesitated. “It’s not like I don’t trust you or anything, but you won’t tell the cops, will you?”
“Sounds like you don’t trust me.”
I said this in an intentionally high, weak voice like he really had hurt me. I’ve gotten pretty good at using my voice like this. It’s a phone call, after all, so you can’t see the other person’s face. Guys are all suckers for a sweet, high-pitched voice. And Worm was typical. He started to get a bit flustered.
“No, I trust you,” he said. “It’s just that I have to be careful. They’re after me.”
They’re after me
—he sounded almost proud. You don’t have any guts at all, I wanted to tell him. You killed your own mother, didn’t you? What do you expect? Of
course
they’re going to be after you. You’re a criminal!
“Well—okay, then.”
In situations like this I always act a little disappointed but keep it short and sweet. I don’t pursue it any further because girls have guys after them all the time, so I know how it feels to be pursued. If you play too easy to get, you’ll regret it. The kind of guys I’m attracted to are the ones who don’t dig too far either.
“Kumagaya. Do you know it?”
“How come you went that far away?”
“It’s superhot.” Worm sighed. “I’d like to lug around an air conditioner with me.”
Well, you’re the one who ran away, I felt like saying. I started to feel a little cold and cruel. Give me a break—you murdered your own mom. So don’t complain about a little heat!
“Come to the station,” he said. “I’m on a bike, so I can’t go too far in this heat.”
Well, Worm, you’ve got a bit of an ego, don’t you think? Asking a girl you’re meeting for the first time to go all the way out to Kumagaya? Can’t be many guys who’d do that. I gave him one of my patented lies.
“I’ll come over right now. I’ll call you when I get to the station.”
“Cool. I’ll be waiting.”
Go all the way to Kumagaya when it’s ninety-five degrees out? Not in this heat. Still, you don’t get many opportunities to talk with a mother-murderer. This might be my only chance. Plus, Worm doesn’t seem to like Toshi or Yuzan that much. I guess I should consider this a kind of honor, if I’m the only one he’s asked to meet. I suddenly got all excited at the chance, and decided I’d better ask Teru for advice before I did anything.
Teru’s a good friend of mine. A different kind of friend from Toshi, Terauchi, or Yuzan. We always have a lot to talk about, so it’s fun to be with him. So much fun I’ve even thought we should do a make-believe marriage. Teru’s gay. He’s twenty-one and a freelancer. Until a while ago he drove a delivery truck, but then he landed a job creating Web sites. I knew he was in the middle of work, but I went ahead and called anyway.
“Hey, Teru, what’s up?”
“I’m making a home page for this artist who makes these strange dyed fabrics. Soybean-flour and squid-ink colored fabrics. I saw some of the actual works and they were a really sickening color.”
“But you’re lucky you have work,” I said.
“You’re on summer vacation, right? You’re the lucky one.”
I loved Teru’s sort of helpless, slow yet gentle way of talking. I first met him one day when I was wandering around Shibuya. He’s the one who stopped me, and I was sure he was going to proposition me.
“I want to be a girl just like you,” he told me. “You’re beautiful. Could we be friends?” I guess it was a kind of proposition after all.
Teru seemed to have some time on his hands, so I brought him up to speed with what’d been going on. Was he surprised! I could imagine his eyes, with their green contact lenses he’s so into now, wide open. I love his eyes. They’re different from most Japanese eyes, or men’s or young people’s eyes. More like the weird eyes of some alien from outer space. Like on that commercial, you know? I think it was for ACOM?
So, anyway, I didn’t like Teru as a guy, but I still wanted to watch him all the time. It’s like when I see him I feel calm, unafraid. Most guys want to get it on—you don’t know what they’re going to do to you and deep down that scares me. Maybe I don’t really trust them. But Teru is kind, more fragile than Toshi and the others, and a very good guy. His kind of hurt-by-the-world look is cute. Teru’s into role-playing, and I love that part of him, too. I don’t think he’s been doing it lately—it’s too hot—but this spring he was always dressed up like characters from
Battle Royale.
He’d wear a school uniform with one of those high, round collars.
“Kirarin, do you mean that murder that was in all the papers yesterday? Is this the same guy who beat his mother to death and ran away?”
Teru seemed worried about being overheard and kept his voice down.
“That’s the one. He lives next door to Toshi. At first he stole Toshi’s cell phone and bicycle and took off. He’s a weird guy, and started calling all the girls listed in her contacts. Yuzan seemed to like him so she helped him, gave him a bike and new cell phone. He called me, too. When I dialed the number the guy was so happy and said he’d like to meet up with me.”
“But why would Yuzan help him out?”
“I think because her mother is dead, too. It made her sympathize with him. He called me, too, but I just led him on.”
“That’s pretty risky, Kirarin,” Teru said, sounding worried. “That kid must be pretty desperate by now.”
But would a desperate guy sound like one of those horny guys who e-mail me?
“I don’t think so,” I said. “It’s more like he feels free and ready to get it on.”
“What are you thinking? It’s
terrible.
” Teru sounded more like a girl than me. “And why does he want to meet you? Why not Toshi, Yuzan, or Terauchi?”
Teru’d never met any of them, but I’d told him all about them.
“Maybe ’cause I used my cute voice. Like always.”
Teru didn’t like it that I played around in online chat rooms. Everybody just tells lies on those sites, he said, all serious, so what’s the fun in that? I knew that but still held out the slim hope that I might actually hook up with some hot guy. That slim hope always drove me to the sites. Maybe I’m boy crazy or something.
“This is sounding worse and worse.”
“But how many chances do you get to meet an actual murderer?”
“Mmm,” Teru said, thinking it over.
“Yeah, I suppose,” he said. “Let me think about this and get back to you during lunch. See ya.”
I was thinking about getting Toshi’s advice, too, and was about to press the speed dial, but decided against it. I could always depend on her, but I knew she’d get all serious on me. She didn’t really understand me that well.