Next, she took me to a unisex hair salon. The place was like a dance studio, with shiny wooden floors, and mirrors covering the walls. There were fifteen chairs, and everywhere technicians were coming and going with shears and hairbrushes and whatnot in their hands. Potted plants stood at various points on the floor, and from two black Bose speakers on the ceiling came the faint sounds of one of those wandering Keith Jarrett piano solos. I was shown to a chair immediately. The woman must have set up an appointment for me from one of the stores we had visited. She gave detailed instructions to the thin man who would be cutting my hair. They obviously knew each other. As he responded to each of her instructions, he kept his eyes on my face in the mirror with an expression he might have worn studying a bowlful of celery fibers he was expected to eat. He had a face like the young Solzhenitsyn. The woman said to him, “I’ll be back when you’re through,” and left the salon with quick steps.
The man said very little as he cut my hair—“This way, please,” when it was time for my shampoo, “Excuse me,” when he brushed off clippings. At times when he moved away, I would reach out from under the barber cloth and touch the mark on my right cheek. This was the first time I had ever seen it in mirrors other than my own at home. The wall-sized mirrors reflected the images of many people, my image among them. And on my face shone this bright blue mark. It didn’t seem ugly or unclean to me. It was simply part of me, something I would have to accept. I could feel people looking at it now and then—looking at its reflection in the mirror. But there were too many images in the mirror for me to be able to tell who. I just felt their eyes trained on the mark.
My haircut ended in half an hour. My hair, which had been growing longer and longer since I left my job, was short once again. I moved to one of the chairs along the wall and sat there listening to music and reading a magazine in which I had no interest until the woman came back. She seemed pleased with my new hairstyle. She took a ten-thousand-yen note from her purse, paid the bill, and led me outside. There she came to a stop and studied me from head to toe, exactly the same way I always examined the cat, as if to see whether there was something she had forgotten to do. Apparently, there was not. Then she glanced at her gold watch and released a kind of sigh. It was nearly seven o’clock.
“Let’s have dinner,” she said. “Can you eat?”
I had had one slice of toast for breakfast and one doughnut for lunch. “Probably,” I said.
She took me to a nearby Italian restaurant. They seemed to know her there. Without a word, we were shown to a quiet table in the back. As soon as I sat down across from her, she ordered me to put the entire contents of my pants pockets on the table. I did as I was told, saying nothing. My reality seemed to have left me and was now wandering around nearby. I hope it can find me, I thought. There was nothing special in my pockets: keys, handkerchief, wallet. She observed them with no show of interest, then picked up the wallet and looked inside. It contained about fifty-five hundred yen in cash, a telephone card, an ATM card, and my ward pool ID, nothing else. Nothing unusual. Nothing to prompt anyone to smell it or measure it or shake it or dip it in water or hold it up to the light. She handed it back to me with no change of expression.
“I want you to go out tomorrow and buy a dozen handkerchiefs, a new wallet and key holder,” she said. “That much you can pick out yourself, I’m sure. And when was the last time you bought yourself new underwear?”
I thought about it for a moment but couldn’t remember. “I can’t remember,” I said. “It’s been a while, I think, but I’m a little clean-crazy, and for a man living alone, I’m good about doing my laund—”
“Never mind. I want you to buy a dozen tops and bottoms.”
I nodded without speaking.
“Just bring me a receipt. I’ll pay for them. And make sure you buy the best they have. I’ll pay your cleaning bills too. Don’t wear a shirt more than once without sending it to the cleaner’s. All right?”
I nodded again. The cleaner by the station would be happy to hear this. But, I thought to myself, proceeding to extend this one, concise conjunction, clinging to the window by surface tension, into a proper, full-length sentence: “But why are you doing all this—buying me a whole new wardrobe, paying for my haircuts and cleaning?”
She did not answer me. Instead, she took a Virginia Slim from her pocketbook and put it in her mouth. A tall waiter with regular features appeared from nowhere and, with practiced movements, lit her cigarette with a match. He struck the match with a clean, dry sound—the kind of sound that could stimulate a person’s appetite. When he was through, he presented us with menus. She did not bother to look, however, and she told the waiter not to bother with the day’s specials. “Bring me a salad and a dinner roll, and some kind of fish with white meat. Just a few drops of dressing on the salad, and a dash of pepper. And a glass of sparkling water, no ice.” I didn’t want to bother looking at the menu. “I’ll have the same,” I said. The waiter bowed and withdrew. My reality was still having trouble locating me, it seemed.
“I’m asking purely out of curiosity,” I said, trying once more to elicit an explanation from her. “I’m not turning critical after you’ve bought me all these things, but is it really worth all the time and trouble and money?”
Still she would not answer.
“I’m just curious,” I said again.
Again no answer. She was too busy looking at the oil painting on the wall to answer my question. It was a picture of what I assumed was an Italian landscape, with a well-pruned pine tree, and several reddish farmhouses lining the hills. The houses were all somewhat small but pleasant. I wondered what kind of people might live in such houses: probably normal people living normal lives. None of them had inscrutable women coming out of nowhere to buy them suits and shoes and watches. None of them had to calculate the huge funds they would need to get possession of some dried-up well. I felt a stab of envy for people living in such a normal world. Envy is not an emotion I feel very often, but the scene in the painting aroused that sense in me to an almost amazing degree. If only I could have entered the picture right then and there! If only I could have walked into one of those farmhouses, enjoyed a glass of wine, then crawled under the covers and gone to sleep without a thought in my head!
The waiter came before long and placed glasses of sparkling water in front of the woman and me. She crushed out her cigarette in an ashtray.
“Why don’t you ask me something else?” she said.
While I was thinking about something else to ask, she took a sip of her sparkling water.
“Was that young man in the office in Akasaka your son?” I asked.
“Of course,” she answered without hesitation.
“Is he unable to speak?”
The woman nodded. “He never spoke much to begin with, but all of a sudden, at the age of six, he stopped speaking entirely. He stopped using his voice in any way.”
“Was there some kind of reason for that?”
She ignored this question. I tried to think of another. “If he doesn’t talk, how does he manage to take care of business?”
She wrinkled her brow just the slightest bit. She had not ignored my question, but she obviously had no intention of answering it.
“I’ll bet you picked out everything he was wearing, from head to foot. The way you did with me.”
“I do not like it when people wear the wrong thing. That is all. It is something I simply cannot—cannot—abide. I at least want the people around me to dress as well as possible. I want everything about them to look right, whether or not it can actually be seen.”
“I guess you don’t like my appendix, then,” I said, trying to make a joke.
“Do you have some problem with the shape of your appendix?” she asked, looking straight at me with an utterly serious expression. I regretted the joke.
“Nothing at the moment,” I said. “I didn’t really mean anything by it. It was just a kind of ‘for instance.’ ”
She
kept her questioning stare fixed on me a while longer—she was probably thinking about my appendix.
“So anyhow, I want the people around me to look right, even if I have to pay for it myself. That is all there is to it. So don’t let it worry you. I am doing this entirely for myself. I feel a personal, almost physical, revulsion for messy clothing.”
“The way a musician can’t stand hearing music played off key?”
“Something like that.”
“So do you buy clothing this way for all the people around you?”
“I guess I do. Not that I have so many people around me, to begin with. I mean, I may not like what they wear, but I can’t exactly buy clothing for all the people in the world now, can I?”
“Everything has its limits,” I said.
“Exactly.”
•
Soon our salads came to the table, and we ate them. As the woman had specified, each salad had no more than a few drops of dressing—so few you could have counted them on one hand.
“Do you have anything else you want to ask me?” she asked.
“I’d like to know your name,” I said. “I mean, it would be helpful if you had a name or something I could use.”
She said nothing for a few moments, as she crunched on a radish. Then she formed a deep wrinkle between her eyebrows, as if she had just found something bitter in her mouth by mistake. “Why would you have to use my name? You won’t be writing me any letters, I’m sure. Names are, if anything, irrelevant.”
“But what if I have to call you from behind, for example? I’d need your name for that.”
She laid her fork in her plate and dabbed at her mouth with her napkin. “I see what you mean,” she said. “That never crossed my mind. You’re right, though. You might very well need my name in a situation like that.”
She sat there thinking for a long time. While she was thinking, I ate my salad.
“Let’s see, now: you need a suitable name you can use for things like calling me from behind, correct?”
“That’s pretty much it.”
“So it doesn’t have to be my real name, correct?”
I nodded.
“A name, a name … what kind of name would be best?”
“Something simple, something easy to call out, I would think. If possible, something concrete, something real, some thing you can really touch and see. That way, it would be easy to remember.”
“For example?”
“For example, I call my cat Mackerel. In fact, I just named him yesterday.”
“Mackerel,” she said aloud, as if to confirm the sound of the word. Then she stared at the salt and pepper shakers on the table for a while, raised her face to me, and said, “Nutmeg.”
“Nutmeg?”
“It just popped into my head. You can call me that, if you don’t mind.”
“No, I don’t mind at all. So what should I call your son?”
“Cinnamon.”
“Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme,” I said, with a hint of melody.
“Nutmeg Akasaka and Cinnamon Akasaka. Not bad, don’t you think?”
Nutmeg Akasaka and Cinnamon Akasaka: Wouldn’t May Kasahara have been shocked if she knew that I had made the acquaintance of such people! “For heaven’s sake, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, why can’t you ever get involved with people who are a little more normal?” Indeed, why not, May Kasahara? It was a question I could never have answered.
“Come to think of it,” I said, “last year I met two women named Malta Kano and Creta Kano. As a result of which, all kinds of things happened to me. Neither of them is around anymore, though.”
Nutmeg gave a little nod but offered no opinion in response.
“They just disappeared somewhere,” I added feebly. “Like the dew on a summer morning.” Or like a star at daybreak.
She brought a forkful of something that looked like chicory to her mouth. Then, as if suddenly recalling a promise made long before, she shot her hand out and took a drink of water.
“Don’t you want to know about that money? The money you got the day before yesterday? Am I wrong?”
“No, you are not wrong. I would very much like to know about that.”
“I don’t mind telling you, but it could be a very long story.”
“One that would end by dessert?”
“Probably not,” said Nutmeg Akasaka.
The Mystery of the Hanging House
•
SETAGAYA, TOKYO: THE MYSTERY OF THE HANGING HOUSE
Who Bought Jinxed Land After Family Suicide?
What’s Going On in Posh Neighborhood?
[From The ——— Weekly, October 7]
————
Locals call this plot in ——— 2-chome, Setagaya, the “hanging house.” Located in a quiet residential neighborhood, this 3,500-square-foot piece of prime real estate with fine southern exposure is a virtually ideal location for a home, but those in the know agree on one thing: they wouldn’t take it if you gave it to them. And the reason for this is simple: every known owner of this property, without exception, has met with a terrible fate. Our investigations have revealed that, since the start of the Showa Period, in 1926, no fewer than seven owner occupants of this property have ended their lives in suicide, the majority by hanging or asphyxiation.
[Details on suicides omitted here]
————
Bogus Firm Buys Jinxed Land
The most recent in what can hardly be considered a coincidental string of tragedies is the murder-suicide of the family of Kojiro Miyawaki [photo], owner of the long-established Rooftop Grill restaurant chain, headquartered in the Ginza. Miyawaki sold all his restaurants and declared bankruptcy two years ago in the face of massive debt, but thereafter he was pursued by several nonbank lenders with ties to organized crime. Finally, in January of this year, Miyawaki used his belt to strangle his fourteen-year-old daughter, Yukie, in her sleep at an inn in Takamatsu City, after which he and his wife, Natsuko, hanged themselves with ropes they had brought with them for that purpose. The Miyawakis’ eldest daughter, a college student at the time, is still missing.
When he bought the property in April 1972, Miyawaki knew of the ominous rumors surrounding the place, but he laughed them off, declaring, “Those were just coincidences.” After purchasing the land, he had the long-vacant house demolished and the lot graded. To be on the safe side, he called in a Shinto priest to exorcise any evil spirits that might still be lurking there, and only then did he have his new, two-story home built. Things went well after that. The family led a tranquil life. Neighbors agree that the Miyawaki home appeared to be harmonious, the daughters bright and happy. But after ten years, the family fortunes took that sudden, disastrous turn.
Miyawaki lost the house, which he had put up as collateral, in the fall of 1983, but squabbling among his creditors with regard to the order of reimbursement kept final disposal of it in abeyance until a court-mediated settlement last summer, which opened the way for sale of the land. It was purchased initially by a major Tokyo real estate firm, ——— Land and Buildings, at a price far below current market value. The company proceeded to demolish the Miyawakis’ house and tried to sell it as an empty lot. A prime piece of Setagaya property, it attracted much interest, but every deal fell through when buyers heard about the jinx attached to the land. According to Mr. M, head of ——— Land and Buildings’ sales division:
“Yes, of course we had heard some of the bad stories connected with the property, but finally it’s a great location, and everybody’s so desperate for prime real estate these days, we figured if we set the price low enough somebody was bound to buy it. We were being optimistic. It hasn’t budged since we put it on the market. People don’t care about the price—they back out as soon as they hear the stories. And talk about bad timing! The poor Miyawakis committed suicide in January, and all the news reports mentioned the land. Quite frankly, we didn’t know what to do with it.”
The lot finally sold in April of
this year. “Please don’t ask me the buyer or the price,” says Mr. M, so details are hard to come by, but according to the real estate grapevine, ——— Land and Buildings had to let it go for something far below the asking price. Better to take a fair-sized loss than continue paying the bank interest on a property that would never sell. “The purchasers knew exactly what they were getting into, of course,” says Mr. M. “We are not in the habit of deceiving our customers. We explained everything beforehand. They bought it knowing the entire history of the place.”
Which leads us to the question of who would choose to buy such a jinxed piece of land. Our investigation has been far more difficult than we had imagined. According to the ward office registry, the purchaser is a company with offices in Minato Ward known as Akasaka Research, which claims to be involved in “economic research and consulting,” their purpose in buying the land being listed as “construction of corporate residence.” The “corporate residence” was, in fact, built this spring, but the firm itself is a typical “paper company.” We visited the Akasaka 2-chome address listed in the documents but found only a small plaque, “Akasaka Research,” on the door of one apartment in a small condominium building, and no one answered when we rang the bell.
————
Tight Security and Secrecy
The present “former Miyawaki residence” is surrounded by a wall far higher than any other in the neighborhood. It has a huge, solid, black iron fence built to discourage peeping (see photo) and a video camera atop the gate pillar. We tried ringing the bell, but there was no response. Neighbors have seen the electric gate open and a black Mercedes 500SEL with tinted windows go in and out several times a day, but there has been no other sign of entry or egress, and no sounds are ever heard from the place.