Yet something was different. He felt as if his self had been put into a new container. He knew that he was still not fully accustomed to this new body of his. There was something about this one, he felt, that just didn’t match his original self. A sudden feeling of helplessness overtook him, and he tried to call for his mother, but the word would not emerge from his throat. His vocal cords were unable to stir the air, as if the very word “mother” had disappeared from the world. Before long, the boy realized that the word was not what had disappeared.
M’s Secret Cure
•
SHOW BUSINESS WORLD TAINTED BY OCCULT
[From The ——— Monthly, November]
————
… These occult cures, which have become a kind of craze among members of the entertainment world, are spread primarily by word of mouth, but in some cases they bear the mark of certain secret organizations.
Take, for example, “M”: 33, debuted ten years ago as supporting actress in a television dramatic series, well received, leading roles ever since in TV and films, six years ago married “boy wonder” real estate developer, no problems in first two years of marriage. His business did well, and she recorded some fine performances on film. But then the sideline dinner club and boutique he opened in her name ran into trouble and he started bouncing checks, for which she became liable. Never eager to go into business to begin with, M had more or less had her arm twisted by her husband, who wanted to expand. One view has it that the husband was taken in by a kind of scam. In addition, there had always been a serious rift between M and her in-laws.
Soon the gossip spread about the trouble M was having with her husband, and before long the two were living separately. They concluded formal divorce proceedings two years ago after an arbitrator helped them settle their debts, but after that M started showing signs of depression, and the need for therapy put her into virtual retirement. According to one source at the studio she worked for, M was regularly plagued by serious delusions after the divorce. She ruined her health with antidepressants, and it got to the point where people were saying, “She’s had it as an actress.” Our source observed, “She had lost the powers of concentration you need to act, and it was shocking what happened to her looks. It didn’t help, either, that she was basically a serious person who would dwell on things to the point where it would affect her mentally. At least her financial settlement had left her in pretty good shape, so she could make it for a while without working.”
One distant relative of M’s was the wife of a famous politician and former cabinet minister. M was practically a daughter to this person, who introduced her to a woman who practiced a form of spiritual healing for a very limited, upper-class clientele. M went to her for a year on a regular basis for treatment of her depression, but exactly what this treatment consisted of, no one knows. M herself kept it absolutely secret. Whatever it was, it seems to have worked. It wasn’t long before M was able to stop taking antidepressants, as a result of which she lost the strange puffiness the medicine had caused, her hair regained its fullness, and her beauty returned. She recovered mentally, as well, and gradually began acting again. At that point, she stopped the treatments.
In October of this year, however, just as the memory of her nightmare was beginning to fade, M had one episode during which, for no apparent reason, her symptoms flared up again. The timing couldn’t have been worse: she had a major acting job just a few days ahead of her, something she could not have carried off in her present state. M contacted the woman and requested the usual treatment, but the woman told her that she was no longer in practice. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I can’t do anything for you. I’m not qualified anymore. I’ve lost my powers. There is someone I can introduce you to, but you’ll have to swear absolute secrecy. If you say one word about it to anyone, you’ll be sorry. Is that clear?”
M was supposedly instructed to go to a certain place, where she was brought into the presence of a man with a bluish mark on his face. The man, around thirty, never spoke while she was there, but his treatment was “incredibly effective.” M refused to divulge what she paid for the session, but we can imagine that the “consultation fee” was quite substantial.
This is what we know about the mysterious treatment, as told by M to a trusted “very close” friend. She first had to go to “a certain downtown hotel,” where she met a young man whose job it was to guide her to the healer. They left from a special underground VIP parking lot in “a big black car” and went to the place where the treatment was performed. As far as the treatment itself is concerned, however, we have been able to learn nothing. M is said to have told her friend, “Those people have awesome powers. Something terrible could happen to me if I broke my promise.”
M paid only one visit to the place, and she has not since suffered any seizures. We tried approaching M directly for more information on the treatment and the mysterious woman, but as expected, she refused to see us. According to one well-informed source, this “organization” generally avoids contacts with the entertainment world and concentrates on the more secretive worlds of politics and finance. Our contacts in the performing arts have, so far, yielded no more information.…
The Waiting Man
•
What Couldn’t Be Shaken Off
•
No Man Is an Island
Eight o’clock went by and everything was dark when I opened the back gate and stepped out into the alley. I had to squeeze through sideways. Less than three feet high, the gate had been cleverly camouflaged in the corner of the fence so as to be undetectable from the outside. The alley emerged from the night, illuminated as always by the cold white light of the mercury lamp in the garden of May Kasahara’s house.
I clicked the gate shut and slipped down the alley. Through one fence after another, I caught glimpses of people in their dining rooms and living rooms, eating and watching TV dramas. Food smells drifted into the alley through kitchen windows and exhaust fans. One teenage boy was practicing a fast passage on his electric guitar, with the volume turned down. In a second-floor window, a tiny girl was studying at her desk, an earnest expression on her face. A married couple in a heated argument sent their voices out to the alley. A baby was screaming. A telephone rang. Reality spilled out into the alley like water from an overfilled bowl—as sound, as smell, as image, as plea, as response.
I wore my usual tennis shoes to keep my steps silent. My pace could be neither too fast nor too slow. The important thing was not to attract people’s attention, not to let that “reality” pick up on my passing presence. I knew all the corners, all the obstructions. Even in the dark I could slip down the alley without bumping into anything. When I finally reached the back of my house, I stopped, looked around, and climbed over the low wall.
The house crouched silently in the darkness like the shell of a giant animal. I unlocked the kitchen door, turned on the light, and changed the cat’s water. I took a can of cat food from the cabinet and opened it. Mackerel heard the sound and appeared from nowhere. He rubbed his head against my leg a few times, then started to tear into his food. While he was eating, I took a cold beer from the refrigerator. I always had supper in the “residence”—something that Cinnamon had prepared for me—and so the most I ever had here was a salad or a slice of cheese. Drinking my beer, I took the cat on my knees and confirmed his warmth and softness with my hands. Having spent the day in separate places, we both confirmed the fact that we were home.
•
Tonight, however, when I slipped my shoes off and reached out to turn the kitchen light on, I felt a presence. I stopped my hand in the darkness and listened, inhaling quietly. I heard nothing, but I caught the faint scent of tobacco. There was someone in the house, someone waiting for me to come home, someone who, a few moments earlier, had probably given up the struggle and lit a cigarette, taking no more than a few puffs and opening a window to let the smoke out, but still the smell remained. This could not be a person I knew. T
he house was still locked up, and I didn’t know anyone who smoked, aside from Nutmeg Akasaka, who would hardly be waiting in the dark if she wanted to see me.
Instinctively, my hand reached out in the darkness, feeling for the bat. But it was no longer there. It was at the bottom of the well now. The sound my heart had started making was almost unreal, as if the heart itself had escaped from my chest and was beating beside my ear. I tried to keep my breathing regular. I probably didn’t need the bat. If someone was here to hurt me, he wouldn’t be sitting around inside. Still, my palms were itching with anticipation. My hands were seeking the touch of the bat. Mackerel came from somewhere in the darkness and, as usual, started meowing and rubbing his head against my leg. But he was not as hungry as always. I could tell from the sounds he made. I reached out and turned on the kitchen light.
“Sorry, but I went ahead and gave the cat his supper,” said the man on the living room sofa, with an easy lilt to his voice. “I’ve been waiting a very long time for you, Mr. Okada, and the cat was all over my feet and meowing, so—hope you don’t mind—I found a can of cat food in the cabinet and gave it to him. Tell you the truth, I’m not very good with cats.”
He showed no sign of standing up. I watched him sitting there and said nothing.
“I’m sure this was quite a shock to you—finding somebody in your house, waiting for you in the dark. I’m sorry. Really. But if I had turned the light on, you might not have come in. I’m not here to do you any harm, believe me, so you don’t have to look at me that way. I just need to have a little talk with you.”
He was a short man, dressed in a suit. It was hard to guess his height with him seated, but he couldn’t have been five feet tall. Somewhere between forty-five and fifty years old, he looked like a chubby little frog with a bald head—a definite A in May Kasahara’s classification system. He did have a few clumps of hair clinging to his scalp over his ears, but their oddly shaped black presence made the bare area stand out all the more. He had a large nose, which may have been somewhat blocked, judging from the way it expanded and contracted like a bellows with each noisy breath he took. Atop that nose sat a pair of thick-looking wire-rim glasses. He had a way of pronouncing certain words so that his upper lip would curl, revealing a mouthful of crooked, tobacco-stained teeth. He was, without question, one of the ugliest human beings I had ever encountered. And not just physically ugly: there was a certain clammy weirdness about him that I could not put into words—the sort of feeling you get when your hand brushes against some big, strange bug in the darkness. He looked less like an actual human being than like something from a long-forgotten nightmare.
“Do you mind if I have a smoke?” he asked. “I was trying not to before, but sitting and waiting without a cigarette is like torture. It’s a very bad habit.”
Finding it difficult to speak, I simply nodded. The strange-looking man took an unfiltered Peace from his jacket pocket, put it between his lips, and made a loud, dry scratching sound as he lit it with a match. Then he picked up the empty cat food can at his feet and dropped the match into it. So he had been using the can as an ashtray. He sucked the smoke into his lungs with obvious pleasure, drawing his thick eyebrows into one shaggy line and letting out little moans. Each long puff made the end of the cigarette glow bright red like burning coal. I opened the patio door and let the outside air in. A light rain was falling. I couldn’t see it or hear it, but I knew it was raining from the smell.
The man had on a brown suit, white shirt, and red tie, all of the same degree of cheapness, and all worn out to the same degree. The color of the suit was reminiscent of an amateur paint job on an old jalopy. The deep wrinkles in the pants and jacket looked as permanent as valleys in an aerial photograph. The white shirt had taken on a yellow tinge, and one button on the chest was ready to fall off. It also looked one or two sizes too small, with its top button open and the collar crooked. The tie, with its strange pattern of ill-formed ectoplasm, looked as if it had been left in place since the days of the Osmond Brothers. Anyone looking at him would have seen immediately that this was a man who paid absolutely no attention to the phenomenon of clothing. He wore what he wore strictly because he had no choice but to put something on when dealing with other people, as if he were hostile to the idea of wearing clothes at all. He might have been planning to wear these things the same way every day until they fell apart—like a highland farmer driving his donkey from morning to night until he kills it.
Once he had sucked all the nicotine he needed into his lungs, he gave a sigh of relief and produced a strange look on his face that hovered somewhere midway between a smile and a smirk. Then he opened his mouth.
“Well, now, let me not forget to introduce myself. I am not usually so rude. The name is Ushikawa. That’s ushi for ‘bull’ and kawa for ‘river.’ Easy enough to remember, don’t you think? Everybody calls me Ushi. Funny: the more I hear that, the more I feel like a real bull. I even feel a kind of closeness whenever I happen to see a bull out in a field somewhere. Names are funny things, don’t you think, Mr. Okada? Take Okada, for example. Now, there’s a nice, clean name: ‘hill-field.’ I sometimes wish I had a normal name like that, but unfortunately, a surname is not something you’re free to pick. Once you’re born into this world as Ushikawa, you’re Ushikawa for life, like it or not. They’ve been calling me Ushi since the day I started kindergarten. There’s no way around it. You get a guy named Ushikawa, and people are bound to call him Ushi, right? They say a name expresses the thing it stands for, but I wonder if it isn’t the other way around—the thing gets more and more like its name. Anyhow, just think of me as Ushikawa, and if you feel like it, call me Ushi. I don’t mind.”
I went to the kitchen and brought back a can of beer from the refrigerator. I did not offer any to Ushikawa. I hadn’t invited him here, after all. I said nothing and drank my beer, and Ushikawa said nothing and drew deeply on his cigarette. I did not sit in the chair across from him but rather stood leaning against a pillar, looking down at him. Finally, he crushed his butt out in the empty cat food can and looked up at me.
“I’m sure you’re wondering how I got in here, Mr. Okada. True? You’re sure you locked the door. And in fact, it was locked. But I have a key. A real key. Look, here it is.”
He thrust his hand into his jacket pocket, pulled out a key ring with one key attached, and held it up for me to see. It certainly did look like the key to this house. But what attracted my attention was the key holder. It was just like Kumiko’s—a simple-styled green leather key holder with a ring that opened in an unusual way.
“It’s the real thing,” said Ushikawa. “As you can see. And the holder belongs to your wife. Let me say this to avoid any misunderstanding: This was given to me by your wife, Kumiko. I did not steal it or take it by force.”
“Where is Kumiko?” I asked, my voice sounding somewhat mangled.
Ushikawa took his glasses off, seemed to check on the cloudiness of the lenses, then put them back on. “I know exactly where she is,” he said. “In fact, I am taking care of her.”
“Taking care of her’?”
“Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean it that way. Don’t worry,” Ushikawa said, with a smile. When he smiled, his face broke up asymmetrically from side to side, and his glasses went up at an angle. “Please don’t glare at me like that. I’m just sort of helping her as part of my work—running errands, doing odd jobs. I’m a gofer, that’s all. You know how she can’t go outside.”
“ ‘Can’t go outside’?” I parroted his words again.
He hesitated a moment, his tongue flicking across his lips. “Well, maybe you don’t know. That’s all right. I can’t really say whether she can’t go out or doesn’t want to go out. I’m sure you would like to know, Mr. Okada, but please don’t ask me. Not even I know all the details. But there’s nothing for you to worry about. She is not being held against her will. I mean, this is not a movie or a novel. We can’t really do that sort of thing.”
; I set my beer can down carefully at my feet. “So anyway, tell me, what did you come here for?”
After patting his knees several times with outstretched palms, Ushikawa gave one deep, sharp nod. “Ah, yes. I forgot to mention that, didn’t I? I go to all the trouble of introducing myself, and then I forget to tell you what I’m here for! That has been one of my most consistent flaws over the years: to go on and on about foolish things and leave out the main point. No wonder I’m always doing the wrong thing! Well, then, belated though it may be, here it is: I work for your wife Kumiko’s elder brother. Ushikawa’s the name—but I already told you that, about the Ushi and everything. I work for Dr. Noboru Wataya as a kind of private secretary—though not the usual ‘private secretary’ that a member of the Diet might have. Only a certain kind of person, a superior kind of person, can be a real ‘private secretary.’ The term covers a wide range of types. I mean, there are private secretaries, and then there are private secretaries, and I’m as close to the second kind as you can get. I’m down there—I mean, way, way down there. If there are spirits lurking everywhere, I’m one of the dirty little ones down in the corner of a bathroom or a closet. But I can’t complain. If somebody this messy came right out in the open, think of what it could do to Dr. Wataya’s clean-cut image! No, the ones who face the cameras have to be slick, intelligent-looking types, not bald midgets. ‘How-dee-doo, folks, it’s me, Dr. Wataya’s private sec-ruh-tehree.’ What a laugh! Right, Mr. Okada?”
I kept silent as he prattled on.
“So what I do for the Doctor are the unseen jobs, the ‘shadow’ jobs, so to speak, the ones that aren’t out in the open. I’m the fiddler under the porch. Jobs like that are my specialty. Like this business with Ms. Kumiko. Now, don’t get me wrong, though: don’t think that taking care of her is just some busywork for a lowly hack. If what I’ve said has given you that impression, it couldn’t be further from the truth. I mean, Ms. Kumiko is the Doctor’s one and only dear little sister, after all. I consider it a consummate honor to have been allowed to take on such an important task, believe me!