Grotesque (19 page)

Maybe that is why I am always in search of a new man. Maybe that is why I am now a prostitute.

After that, I met Karl on the sly any number of times. One time, I can’t remember when, he picked me up in his Renault on my way home from school and drove, with me in the backseat, without looking at me once. We went to a cabin owned by a friend of his at the foot of a mountain.

It was off season and no one was around. The cabin was dark and the water had been turned off. Careful not to get the carpet dirty, we spread out newspapers and had ourselves a little picnic of wine and salami slices between pieces of bread. Karl undressed me and arranged me in various poses on the white bedspread of the double bed. He took pictures with a single-lens reflex camera. By the time he finally came to join me on the bed, my passion was as chilled as my body.

“Uncle Karl, I’m cold.”

“Just put up with it.”

Before we started having sex, I knew it was inappropriate behavior for blood relatives. And we were blood relatives. The one person we could absolutely not let find out about our relationship was Karl’s older brother, my father. We feared his reaction. Inevitably, after Karl had finished, he would mumble nervously, “If my brother knew about this he’d kill me.”

Men live by rules they’ve made for themselves. And among those rules is the one specifying that women are merely commodities for men to possess. A daughter belongs to her father, a wife to her husband. A woman’s own desires present obstacles for men and are best ignored.

Besides, desire is always for the man. It’s his role to make advances on women and to protect his women from the advances of others. I was a woman who was seduced by a member of her own family. Among the rules in a man’s world, this was a big taboo. And for that reason, Karl was terrified.

1 1 5

N A T S U O K I R I NO

I didn’t want to be anyone’s possession. In the first place, my desire was not some paltry affair that could easily be protected by some man.

But that day Karl was different. He bad-mouthed my father.

“My brother isn’t what he says he is. He’s lousy at keeping the accounts. When I pointed this out he got angry. To make it worse, the way he treats his wife is unforgivable. He acts like she’s just his housekeeper.”

Karl wouldn’t understand if I explained that it was Mother who wanted to be a maid. After Mother came to Switzerland, she became self-conscious about being Japanese. Every day she made Japanese dishes out of really expensive foods, and when no one could eat all she’d made she’d stash it away in the freezer. It wasn’t long before the freezer was crammed with Tupperware containers filled with boiled hijiki or nikujaga stew or sliced burdock root. Those containers spoke to me of my mothers gloom and left me with an ominous feeling.

“Uncle Karl, do you hate my father?”

“I despise him. You mustn’t tell anyone else, but he has a Turkish mistress.

I know all about it, you see. He has a soft spot for black hair and dark eyes.”

The woman was an immigrant laborer who’d come over from Germany.

Unable to keep their passion for each other a secret, my father and his mistress spent their days exchanging warm glances.

“What do you suppose Mother would do if she found out?”

Karl looked pained by my question. Undoubtedly he was equally concerned with what she’d do if she found out about us. Karl and me; my father and his Turkish mistress… . It seemed we had a lot of secrets to hide from Mother. But there was no one here who would tell her. She’d lost all her friends when she came to Switzerland, and she was unable to learn the new language. So she retreated deeper and deeper into her shell, refusing to come out.

“I certainly don’t want her to know,” Karl said.

“But it’s okay for me to know?”

Karl looked at me in surprise. I averted my eyes and gazed up at the dark ceiling of the mountain cabin.

My mother hated me. Giving birth to a child who looked so unlike herself threw my mother into a tailspin from which she never recovered.

She was still living in shock. After I reached maturity it became worse, and when it was decided that we would move to Switzerland, my mother 1 1 6

G R O T E S Q U E

became the only Asian person in the family. As a consequence, my mother began to feel closer to my older sister, who was still in Japan and who was more Asian than I was, or so my mother thought. My sister’s well-being weighed on my mother. She was constantly saying over and again, “I worry about that child. Do you suppose she thinks I abandoned her?”

My sister did not think anything of the sort. If my mother had abandoned anyone, it was me. I didn’t look like anyone in the family. I’d been left to my own devices. The only people who paid me any attention were the men who desired me. As a child I first became aware that my existence had a purpose when I realized men lusted after me. And that’s why I will lust forever after men. Before I even began to worry about homework or any of those school things, I began having secret liaisons with men. And it is men who give me the proof I need now to feel I’m alive.

One night I was late coming home. Karl had dropped me off in the back streets, afraid he’d be spotted if he stopped the car in front of our apartment building. I trudged home alone in the darkness. When I got to our apartment, I opened the door and went straight to my room. It was already after ten but the apartment was pitchblack, which I found very strange. When I peered in the kitchen, I saw no evidence of any meal. Not a day had gone by that Mother didn’t make some kind of Japanese food. Thinking it odd, I went to her room and peeked in through the door. I could see Mother in the dim light. She looked like she was sleeping, so I quietly pulled the door closed without calling out to her.

Thirty minutes later when my father returned, I was in the bath, scrubbing myself clean from my evening with Karl. There was a fierce knocking on the bathroom door. Karl and I had been found out! That was the first thought that shot through my head. But that wasn’t it.

Father had come to tell me that Mother looked strange. He was terribly upset. As I ran to the bedroom, I already knew in my heart that Mother was dead.

When we lived in Japan, Mother had never once allied herself with my sister against our father’s bad moods. But once we got to Switzerland, she thought only of my sister. I despised my mother’s spinelessness. I hated her negligence.

This is what happened once. I invited a number of my classmates over to our apartment to hang out. My mother refused to leave the kitchen.

1 1 7

N A T S U O K I R I NO

“I’d like to introduce you,” I pleaded, as I pulled her out by the hand.

But she shook me off and turned her back on me.

“Just tell them I’m the maid. I don’t look like you, and trying to explain will be a hassle.”

A hassle. That was Mother’s favorite word. Trying to learn German was a hassle. Doing something new was a hassle. My mother remained so unaccustomed to Bern that she easily got turned around whenever she ventured out into the city. It was not long, therefore, until her personality began to undergo some kind of collapse. But I still do not understand what drove her to want to die. By then she was in such a desperate state that even a tiny event would have been enough to push her over the edge. Was it the steamed rice that she didn’t prepare well the other day?

The high cost of natto, fermented soybeans? Or was it my father’s Turkish mistress? Perhaps my affair with Karl? I really didn’t care. By then my curiosity about my own mother had already dwindled.

But this much is certain. Both Father and Karl experienced a brief moment of relief with Mother’s death. And then they each began to worry that perhaps it was knowledge of their crime that led her to her suicide. They had to live out the rest of their lives in a battle with their own feelings of guilt.

That wasn’t the case for me. What her death brought me was a clear understanding of the consequences of adult selfishness. It wasn’t my fault that my mother and father had produced such a beautiful child, such a miracle as myself. And yet I was the one who was forced to shoulder the burden. I’d had just about enough of it. I certainly did not want to get saddled with the responsibility for my mother s death. So when my father brought his Turkish mistress into the apartment, I was relieved because it gave me an excuse to demand that I be allowed to return to Japan. I didn’t care if I didn’t see my elder sister. She hated me anyway.

Besides, Johnson had finished his business in Hong Kong and he was waiting for me. Why couldn’t I stay with him? I was no longer a virgin, and I wanted to see what sex would be like with Johnson. I wanted it so badly I could hardly stand it.

1 1 8

G R O T E S Q U E

• 3 •

For a nymphomaniac like myself, I suppose there could be no job more suitable than prostitution; it is my God-given destiny. No matter how violent a man might be, or how ugly, at the moment we’re in the act I cannot help but love him. And what’s more I’ll grant his every wish, no matter how shameful. In fact, the more twisted my partner is, the more attracted I will be to him, because my ability to meet my lover’s demands is the one way I can feel alive.

That is my virtue. It is also my biggest flaw. I can’t deny a man. I’m like a vagina incarnate—female essence embodied. If I ever were to deny a man, I would stop being me.

I have tried to imagine any number of times what might, in the end, ruin me. Will I collapse of heart failure? Will I suffer an agonizing illness?

Will a man kill me? It had to be one of the three. I’m not saying I’m not afraid. But because I can’t quit, I suppose I’m the one responsible for destroying myself.

When I finally came to this realization, I decided from then on to keep a journal. It’s neither a diary nor a list of appointments but a record just for me. Not one page that I’ve written here is fiction. I don’t even know how to write fiction—it’s beyond my creative abilities. I don’t know who’ll read my record, but I think I’ll leave it open on my desk with a note attached that reads For Johnson. He’s the only one who has a key to my apartment.

Johnson comes to my apartment four or five times a month. He’s the only man I will see for free. And he’s the only man with whom I’ve had a long-standing relationship. If someone were to ask me if I loved Johnson, I could easily answer yes. Or just as easily no. In fact, I myself don’t know. What is certain is that Johnson somehow sustains me. It is perhaps a longing for a father figure? Maybe. Johnson is unable to stop loving me, 1 1 9

N A T S U O K I R I NO

so in a way he is like a father. My own father, of course, did not love me.

Or at least his love for me was thwarted.

I remember when I asked my father to let me return to Japan. It was late one night about a week after Mother had died. I could hear the water dripping from the kitchen faucet, drop after drop. I don’t know if the faucet started leaking right around the time Mother died or whether it had always leaked and she just made certain to twist the knob tightly whenever she turned it off. But it seemed all of a sudden that the faucet was always dripping. It terrified me—as if Mother were trying to tell us, I’m still here. No matter how many times I called, I couldn’t get a plumber to come out to fix it. They were all too busy. Each time a drop of water hit the sink, both my father and I would turn and look toward the kitchen.

“Do you want to return to Japan because of me?” My father asked me this without looking me in the eye. It was clear he felt a bit guilty for having brought home his Turkish girlfriend, Ursula—don’t ask me why she had a German-sounding name! But on the other hand, he was angry with me for reporting him to the police.

I called the police solely out of anger. My mother was lying there dead in her casket, and my father had to drag his pregnant girlfriend into Mother’s home. I questioned his callousness, but I never once doubted his innocence. My father wasn’t strong enough to dirty his hands with such a crime. He didn’t possess a desire great enough to commit murder.

So it came as no surprise that he stood on the sidelines and watched while my mother slowly collapsed. And when he could bear it no longer, he ran away. When the woman to whom he escaped got pregnant, he had no choice but to accept this burden. My father was a coward.

“It’s got less to do with you than with me,” I told him.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” My father looked at me in confusion.

His pale-blue eyes were drained of life.

“I don’t want to be here.”

“Because Ursula is here?” My father lowered his voice. Ursula was sleeping in the guest bedroom. Any kind of tension could bring on a miscarriage, and we were ordered to keep her quiet. Ursula had come by herself from Bremen on a work visa, and my father didn’t have the kind of money it would take to hospitalize her for a long period.

“It’s not because of Ursula.”

Ursula was even more frightened by Mother s death than Father was, 1 2 0

G R O T E S Q U E

and she was suffering for it. She believed it was her fault that Mother committed suicide. She was just seventeen. Whenever I spoke to her, I sensed her childlike honesty and simplicity. I was not angry at Ursula. All I had to do was tell her that she had nothing to do with my mothers death and she was beside herself with joy. My father sighed with relief when he heard my answer. But he still couldn’t look me in the eye.

“That’s good. I was afraid you’d think my guilt was too great to forgive.”

Well, he wasn’t the only one with great guilt. Between Karl’s infidelity and my mother’s death, I grew up quickly.

“It’s not a question of forgiveness. It’s just that I want to return to Japan.”

“Why?”

It wasn’t only because I wanted to see Johnson again. I had loved Mother. And now that she was gone, why stay in Switzerland.

“With Mother dead there’s really no reason for me to be here.”

“I see. So, you’ve decided to live as a Japanese, then?” my father mumbled, with no attempt to hide his hurt. “You may have a hard time of it with your Western looks.”