Grotesque (45 page)

The next day the ship finally sailed out of Taiwan. It slowly plied the rough winter seas on its way to Japan. Mei-kun lay just where she was, a semi-invalid, neither eating nor speaking. On the sixth day they finally opened the container. The air off the seas was cold, nearly freezing. But after being closed up in the dank stench of the container, it felt clean and exhilarating. I gulped in giant breaths of the air. Mei-kun managed to stand up on her own, feeble though she was. She looked at me and smiled weakly.

“That was awful.”

I would not have believed in a million years that those would be Meikun’s last words, but less than twenty minutes later, as we boarded a small boat that would carry us through the darkness to the Japanese shores, 2 8 2

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the accident occurred. For some reason, the second Mei-kun set foot on the boat, the sea, which had up to that moment been placid, surged mysteriously into a huge wave. Mei-kun tumbled into the water before anyone could catch hold of her. I had boarded the boat ahead of her and tried to grasp her hand but it all happened too quickly. When I reached out to her, my hand clutched nothing but air. As she slipped into the sea, Mei-kun looked up at me with an expression of utter shock. And then she disappeared beneath the waves. Her hand moved back and forth for a second—as if she were waving good-bye—and all I could do was stare after it in a daze. Even if I had tried to help her, I couldn’t swim. I screamed her name. But there was nothing anyone could do. We just stared at the dark water. My darling little sister died in the cold midwinter seas, the Japan she had so longed for drifting just before her eyes.

I am now nearly finished with my long and rambling tale. Detective Takahashi, Your Honor, please indulge me and read on to the end.

Detective Takahashi titled this account “My Crimes” and instructed me to reflect on my wrongful behavior by writing about my upbringing and all my past mistakes. Now, as so many different memories come to mind, I am choked by tears of regret. Truly I am a despicable man. I was unable to rescue Mei-kun, I murdered Yuriko Hirata, and I have continued to live comfortably. How I wish I could go back in time and start all over. Once again I could become the boy I was when I left home with my little sister. How bright the future looked to me then, how full of promise!

And yet all I have to show for it now is this crime. A horrible crime only a reprehensible creature could have committed. I killed the first woman I met in this foreign country. I believe I ended up becoming this evil person because I lost Mei-kun, my very soul.

An illegal alien in Japan, I lived like a stray cat, dodging here and there, constantly afraid of inviting the attention of others. Chinese people are accustomed to close-knit communities, never living far from home and depending on the support and guidance of family members. But here I was many miles from home and family. I had no one to help me find a job 2 8 3

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or a place to live; I had to do that all by myself. And when I lost my sister, I had no one to console me. After three years of hard work, I was finally able to pay off the snakehead for the money he’d fronted in getting my sister and me to Japan. But after that I had very little else to aim for, and I lost even the will to save money. Most of the other men I knew in Japan had wives and children back in China and were working to send money to them. I envied them.

Around that time I met a Taiwanese woman who was working in Kabuki-cho. I just wrote that Hirata was the first woman I met in Japan, but actually I went with this Taiwanese woman to see the movie Yellow Earth. She was ten years older than I and had two children she’d left in Kaohiung. While she was working as the mama of a club, she attended a Japanese-language school and saved her money to send back to her children.

She was a very gentle person and took great care of me when I was feeling desperate.

But no matter how gentle a person is, if the upbringing is different, that person cannot know how you truly feel. She could not really understand what it was like to be brought up in such an impoverished village and then to have suffered the hardships of migrant labor and the agony of losing a sister. This annoyed me, and eventually I separated from her.

It was at that point that I decided to set my sights on traveling by myself to America.

A stray has no choice but to live like a stray. Even though I shared lodgings with several others in the apartment at Shinsen, we were all, each in our own way, loners. I didn’t even know that Chen-yi and Huang were fugitives until I heard it from Detective Takahashi. If I’d known they were criminals, I certainly would have had nothing to do with them.

The reason I started to fall out with the other men I lived with was because I was secretly planning my trip to New York. It wasn’t simply a disagreement over money.

Detective Takahashi has criticized me for extorting the apartment rent from my companions. I was responsible for renting the apartment from Chen. I had to make sure the apartment was clean and in order and I had to cover the cost of the utilities. So it only made sense that they paid more. Who do you think cleaned the toilet? Who took out the trash?

I did all that, and I made sure the bedding was hung out to dry.

To have been betrayed by the men I lived with wounded me deeply, especially Huang. Everything he said was a lie. That I’d known Kazue 2 8 4

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Sato for a long time; that the three of us had relations. Those were nothing but bald-faced lies. He must have had his own reasons for trying to pin the blame on me. Please think about it, Detective Takahashi, Your Honor. I beg of you. I know I’ve said this already many, many times, but I never met Kazue Sato. That charge against me is false.

When I met Yuriko Hirata, it spelled misfortune for us both. I heard from Detective Takahashi that Ms. Hirata had once been beautiful and had worked as a model. Detective Takahashi went on to say that “as she grew old and ugly she became a cheap streetwalker.” But I thought she was still beautiful.

When I first saw her in Kabuki-cho I was attracted to her beauty and youthfulness. I didn’t care how late it was, I made a point of taking the route through Kabuki-cho on my way home from Futamomokko that night. When I saw that Miss Hirata was standing there in the rain waiting for me, I was filled with joy. She looked at me and smiled faintly. Then she said, “I’m about to freeze standing here waiting for you!”

I can still remember that rainy night very clearly. Miss Hirata was holding an umbrella, and the black hair that hung down her back, nearly to her waist, looked exactly like Mei-kun’s. My heart began to pound.

Her profile, too, was the spitting image of Mei-kun’s. That was the main reason I was attracted to her. I had been searching for Mei-kun. The men around me would always say, “Your sister’s dead. Get over it!” But I couldn’t help fantasize that she was still in this world and that I would run into her again someday.

There can be no doubt that she disappeared that night in the sea. But what if a fishing boat passing by had rescued her? She could still be alive.

Or maybe she swam to a nearby island. I thrived on such hope. Mei-kun had been brought up in the mountains, just like me. She wasn’t able to swim. But she was a strongwilled, talented woman. I can still remember running into her again at the pool in Guangzhou. “Zhezhong!” she’d called out to me then, her eyes filling with tears. And so I walked the streets around me, hoping—expecting—to see her again.

Miss Hirata complimented me the first time she saw me. “You have a nice face.” And I had said to her in return, “You look exactly like my younger sister. You’re both beautiful.”

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“How old is your younger sister?” Miss Hirata asked, as she walked along beside me. She threw the cigarette she’d been smoking into a puddle and turned to look at me. I gazed into her face head on. No, she wasn’t Mei-kun after all. I was disappointed.

“She’s dead.”

“She died?”

She shrugged her shoulders. She looked so sad I found myself being drawn to her. She seemed like the kind of person to whom I could unburden myself. And then Miss Hirata said, “I’d like to hear about it.

My place is nearby. Why don’t we go there and share some beers?”

Detective Takahashi said that’s just the kind of thing prostitutes say.

He does not believe my testimony. But when I met Miss Hirata, I was not encountering a prostitute; rather, I was meeting someone whose hair and profile looked just like my little sister’s. I think the fact that Miss Hirata bought the beer and the bean-jam buns with her own money when we stopped at the convenience store is all the proof I need to support my testimony, don’t you? I think Miss Hirata was interested in me.

Of course, we did negotiate a price, that much is true. But that she went from ¥30,000 down to ¥15,000 should prove that she was fond of me.

As soon as Miss Hirata got to her apartment in Okubo, she turned to me and asked, “So what would you like to do? We’ll do whatever you want; just tell me.”

I told her exactly what I’d been repeating to myself in my heart over and over. “I want you to look at me with tears in your eyes and call out ‘Brother!’”

Miss Hirata did as I asked. Without thinking, I reached over and embraced her.

“Mei-kun! How I’ve wanted to see you!”

While Miss Hirata and I were having sex I was beside myself with excitement. I suppose it was wrong. But it confirmed everything. I did not love my sister as a sister. I loved her as a woman. And I realized that when she was alive this is exactly what we had wanted to do. Miss Hirata was very sensitive. She looked up at me and asked, “What would you like me to do next?” It drove me wild.

“Say ‘That was awful’ and look at me.”

I taught her the words in Chinese. Her pronunciation was perfect.

But what really surprised me was that real tears began to form in her eyes. I realized that the word awful resonated with something in Miss 2 8 6

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Hirata’s own heart. We cried together in her bed, holding each other.

Naturally, I had no desire to kill her, far from it. Even though we were racially different and from different cultures, I felt we understood each other. Things I could not communicate to the woman from Taiwan I was able to communicate to Miss Hirata, even though I had only just met her. It was amazing. Miss Hirata seemed to share my feelings, for the tears rolled down her cheeks as I held her in my arms. Then she took the gold necklace off her neck and hooked it around my own. I don’t know why she did such a thing.

So why did I kill her? you ask. I don’t even understand it myself. Perhaps it was because she pulled the wig off her head as easily as if she were doffing a hat. The hair that emerged from beneath the wig was light brown flecked with white. Miss Hirata was some kind of foreigner who looked nothing like my Mei-kun!

“Okay, the game’s over.”

She suddenly grew cold. I was shocked.

“Was it all just a game?”

“Well, what did you think? That’s the way I earn my living. It’s time for you to settle up.”

I felt a chill creep down my spine as I pulled the money out of my pocket. That’s when the trouble started. Miss Hirata told me to hand it all over, all the ¥22,000. When I asked why the price had changed, she said with disgust, “Playing incest games costs more. Fifteen thousand yen is not enough.”

Incest? The word made me furious. I shoved Miss Hirata down on the futon.

“What the hell are you doing?”

She scrambled to her feet and rushed at me, as mad as a demon. We began to push and shove each other violently.

“You cheap bastard! God, I wish I hadn’t fucked a Chinaman.”

I wasn’t angry about the money. I was angry because I felt Mei-kun had been tarnished. My precious Mei-kun. I suppose this is what we had been heading toward all along, from the minute we ran away from home; tragedy was all that awaited us. Our unattainable dream. Our impossible dream so easily transformed into a nightmare. The Japan that Mei-kun had longed to see. How cruel. I had to survive. I had to continue living in the country that Mei-kun never lived to set foot in. And I had to endure all of its ugliness. What kept me going was the hope of finding a woman 2 8 7

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like Mei-kun. And when I finally did, all she wanted was to play games for money. How stupid I was not to see it coming. I felt as though I were being swept along by a rapid current, unable to understand what was happening. When I came to my senses, I saw that I had strangled Miss Hirata. I did not kill her because I wanted to steal her money. But I made a mistake I can never undo. I would like to dedicate the rest of my life to praying for the repose of Miss Hirata s soul.

Zhang Zhezhong

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S I X • F E R M E N T A T I O N A N D D E C AY

• 1 •

was so determined to attend the first public hearing in the Apartment Serial Murders trial that I asked to take a leave from my job at the ward office. Do you find that surprising? The courtroom looked like any other courtroom, but it was the largest one in the courthouse, and I was astounded to learn that they had had to dispense spectator tickets by lottery to those who wanted to view the proceedings. Nearly two hundred people lined up for a chance at a ticket. That just goes to show you how fascinated people were with Yuriko and Kazue. A lot of reporters and people from the media came to cover the case, but I heard they wouldn’t let the cameras in. When I asked my boss to let me have the time off, his lips twitched. I knew he was dying to ask me about it.

Earlier, I noted that I had absolutely no interest in whether or not that Chinese man named Zhang had actually murdered Yuriko and Kazue. I still feel the same way. I mean, those two were streetwalkers. They met freaks and perverts all the time. They had to know they might be killed if they weren’t lucky; it was precisely because they knew this, I assume, that they found what they did so thrilling. Moving from customer to customer, never knowing if this day might be their last; when they left 2 8 9