Grotesque (8 page)

When I create my imaginary children, do I sometimes have them entering Q Elementary School? Is that your question? Absolutely not.

Never. My children merely swim in an imaginary sea. The water is a per-4 4

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feet blue, just as those hypothetical illustrations based on Cambrian fossils.

There on the sand of the ocean floor, amid rocky crags, everything engages in a survival of the fittest and all living creatures exist just to procreate.

It’s a very simple world.

When I first started living with my grandfather, I would dream about what my life would be like as a student at the coveted Q High School for Young Women. My imagination ran rampant, one scene unfolding after another. It gave me a great deal of pleasure, as I have already said, to indulge in these fantasies. I would join clubs, make friends, and live an ordinary life like any other ordinary person. But reality tore these dreams to shreds. Basically, cliques were my undoing. You couldn’t make friends with just anyone, you see. Even the club activities were ranked and ordered into hierarchies of their own, very clearly delineated between the coveted and the peripheral. The basis for all the ranking was of course this sense of elitism.

Reflecting back on those days from my present age and perspective, it’s obvious to me now. Sometimes at night while I’m lying awake in bed, I’ll be reminded of Kazue for some reason and I’ll suddenly be struck with a eureka-like insight, while remembering the things she once did. It may seem a bit of a distraction, but I feel I should tell you more about my experiences in high school.

Let’s start with the matriculation ceremonies. I can still remember the mute amazement I felt at seeing all the new students standing petrified in the lecture hall where the ceremony was to be held. The high school freshmen were divided into two distinct groups: those who were continuing on from within the Q school system and those who had entered that year. At a glance it was easy to discern which group was which. The length of our school uniform skirts set us apart.

Those of us who were entering for the first time—each and every one of us—having successfully passed the entrance exams, had skirts that fell just to the center of our knees, in exact accordance with official school regulations. However, the half who had been in the system since elementary or middle school had skirts that rode up high on their thighs.

Now, I’m not talking about the kind of skirts that the girls wear today, skirts that are so skimpy they’re hardly there at all. No, these skirts were just the right length to provide a perfect balance with the girls’ highquality navy-blue knee socks. Their legs were long and slender, their hair the color of chestnuts. Delicate gold pierced earrings glistened in their 4 5

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ears. Their hair accessories, and their bags and scarves, were very tasteful, and they all had expensive brandname items that I’d never before actually seen up close. Their elegant sophistication overwhelmed the newly arrived students.

The difference was not something that would softly fade away with the passage of time. There is no other way to explain it but to say that we new girls lacked what the others girls possessed seemingly by birth: beauty and affluence. We new girls were betrayed by our long skirts and our cropped, lusterless, jet-black hair. Many of us wore thick, unflattering glasses. In a word, the incoming students were uncool.

No matter how a girl might excel in her studies or sports, there was nothing she could do to redeem herself once she was labeled uncool. For a student like myself, the question of being cool or uncool was irrelevant from the beginning. But there were others for whom the term provoked considerable anxiety. I’d say over half the students who entered the program as high school students found themselves teetering dangerously close to the border of being uncool. And so each and every one of them worked as hard as she could to avoid the label and tried to blend in with the continuing students.

The matriculation ceremony began. We outsiders paid serious attention to all that was said. But in comparison, the students who had come up from the elementary levels only pretended to listen. They chewed gum, whispered among themselves, and acted as though they weren’t even remotely concerned with what was going on. Far from being serious, they behaved like frisky kittens, impossibly precious. And they never once so much as glanced in our direction.

In contrast, the newcomers, watching the way the insiders behaved, felt all the more anxious. They began to think of the difficult life that stretched ahead of them. Faces froze and expressions grew darker and darker. Confused, they began to suspect that the rules they had followed up to the present were no longer valid. They would have to learn a whole new set.

Perhaps you believe I am exaggerating. If so, then you are mistaken.

For a girl, appearance can be a powerful form of oppression. No matter how intelligent a girl may be, no matter her many talents, these attributes are not easily discerned. Brains and talent will never stand up against a girl who is clearly physically attractive.

I knew I was by far more intelligent than Yuriko, and it irked me no 4 6

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end that I could never impress anyone with my brains. Yuriko, who had nothing going for her but her hauntingly beautiful face, nevertheless made a terrific impression on everyone who came in contact with her.

Thanks to Yuriko, I too had been blessed with a certain talent. My talent was the uncompromising ability to feel spite. And whereas my talent far exceeded those of others, it was a talent that impressed no one but myself. I fawned over my talent. I polished it diligently every day. And because I lived with my grandfather and had the opportunity to help him on occasion with his handyman jobs, I was decidedly unlike all the other students who commuted to high school from perfectly normal families.

Precisely for this reason, I was able to enjoy myself as a spectator on the sidelines, even amid the cruelty of my high school classmates.

• 2 •

In the days following the matriculation ceremony, more and more girls began to show up at school in short skirts.

Kazue was one of the first. But her shoes and her book bag were completely out of keeping with her skirt length and marked her as an outsider.

The insider students, you see, did not carry the standard-issue student satchels. They came to school with fight nylon sacks slung over their shoulders, or else they carried those chic overnight bags that were still unusual at the time. Some carted along American-made day packs, while others toted heavy-looking Boston bags. Were they Louis Vuitton?

Regardless, the girls who carried them looked every bit like college students en route to classes. To complete the look, they wore brown loafers and navy-blue Ralph Lauren knee socks. Some students wore a different wristwatch every day. Others let silver bracelets—undoubtedly received from boyfriends—slip out from under the sleeves of their school uniforms.

Then there were those who stuck little ornamented pins as sharp as needles in their perm-curled hair or wore diamond rings as big and clear as glass beads. Even though students weren’t supposed to acces-4 7

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sorize as freely as they do today, these girls managed to compete with one another over who could be the most fashionable.

But Kazue always carried a black satchel and wore black slip-ons. Her navy-blue knee socks were most definitely standard student issue. Her red train-pass case was extremely childish, and with her black hair clips she was—in a word—uncool. She shuffled through the halls trying to hide the ungainly thin legs jutting out from under her short skirt, along with her standard-issue satchel.

Her looks were average at best. Her thick black hair hung oppressively over her head like a heavy black helmet. It was cropped so short her ears were exposed, and the coarse hair at the nape of her neck stuck out in a way that made me think of the immature feathers on a newly hatched chick. She didn’t appear to be particularly dull. Her forehead was broad, her face intelligent, and her eyes brimmed with the kind of confidence you would expect from an honor-roll student raised in an affluent home. So when was it, I wondered, that she had developed the habit of glancing timidly at those around her?

I saw a photograph of Kazue in one of those weekly magazines shortly after she was murdered. It was a picture of her at a love hotel with a man, clearly a photograph with a story behind it. Kazue s skinny naked body was exposed to the viewer s scrutiny, her large mouth opened in a laugh.

I stared intently at the photograph, trying to find traces of the Kazue I had once known, but all I could find was an image of her lewdness—not the kind of lewdness that erupts from excessive luxury or even from sex.

It was the licentiousness of a monster.

When we first began attending Q High School for Young Women, I did not know Kazue s name and I had no interest in finding it out. At the time, all the outsiders huddled together and looked so withered and dull it was impossible to tell one from another. For a student who had worked hard to get into Q High School for Young Women, hoping all the while to be recognized for her intelligence, this must have been particularly deflating. I feel I can now understand how Kazue must have felt. She had come of age amid humiliation. She must have been in turmoil.

You want to know about my interaction with Kazue? Well, all right then. I learned about Kazue thanks to a certain incident. It was a rainy day in May. We were in gym class at the time. We were supposed to play tennis that day, but because of the rain we had to stay in the gymnasium and practice dance. We were changing clothes in the locker room when 4 8

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one student held up a single sock and called out, “Whose is this? Who lost a sock?”

It was the kind of navy-blue knee sock most everyone wore. Only this one had a red Ralph Lauren logo on the top.

Everyone was completely nonchalant. No one seemed to care if they’d lost something because, unlike me, they could always go out and buy another one. That’s why I found it odd that this girl was making such a fuss over a lousy sock. She held it out to show her friends.

“Well, just look at it! Look!”

Laughter filled the room. Other girls drew near to see, forming a circle around the sock holder.

“Why it’s practically been embroidered!”

“What a masterpiece!”

The owner of the sock had taken an ordinary navy-blue knee sock and embroidered the upper edge with red thread to make it look like the Ralph Lauren logo.

The girl who found the sock was not seeking the owner out of some charitable effort to reunite her with her lost property. She simply wanted to know who it belonged to. That’s why she’d called out like that. No one came forward to claim it. All the outsiders changed their clothes in silence, and the insiders didn’t speak either. But even so their faces revealed the joy they felt as they anticipated the scene that was sure to unfold when the next class period started.

English class was to follow gym. Most of the students changed back into their uniforms hurriedly and rushed to the classroom in a buoyant mood. At that moment there was no division between insider and outsider.

When it came to bullying, everyone was in it together.

Only three students remained behind in the locker room, a petite insider, Kazue, and myself. Kazue was dawdling—even more so than usual. That is when I realized that she was the one who had embroidered the logo on the sock. At that moment, the insider handed Kazue a pair of socks. “Here, you’ll need these,” she said. The socks were brand new navy-blue knee socks. Kazue chewed her lip and looked worried. I suppose she realized she had no choice.

“Thanks.” Her reply was barely audible.

When the three of us entered the classroom, our classmates acted as if nothing were amiss. The true identity of the sock embroiderer might never be known. But it had been fun. And there would be more fun 4 9

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to come. Even a minor moment of maliciousness swelled and spread throughout the school, growing into subsequent incidents until it became utter and uncontrollable nastiness.

Having escaped her predicament, Kazue wore an indifferent expression.

On that day, as usual, her hand shot up and she was called on to stand and read aloud from the textbook. There were those who’d lived abroad and numerous students in the class who were good in English.

But that didn’t stop Kazue. Confident, she’d raise her hand without a second thought. I looked over at the girl who’d lent her the socks. She was looking drowsily at her textbook, her chin in her hand. I didn’t know her name but she was a cute girl with front teeth that protruded slightly.

Why had she helped Kazue? It disconcerted me. It’s not that I particularly approve of cruelty or bullying. And it’s not that I hated Kazue. It’s just that I found Kazue annoying. She’d gone and done something shamelessly stupid, and yet there she sat as if nothing had happened.

She was acting so audacious. Was she being shrewd? Conniving? Even I couldn’t tell.

After class, as I was pulling my classical literature textbook out, Kazue came up to me.

“About what happened earlier.”

“What do you mean?”

When I acted like I didn’t know what she was referring to, Kazue s face flashed red with anger. You know exactly what I mean, she must have been thinking.

“You probably think my family’s hard up.”

“I don’t really care.”

“I doubt that. But it’s just that I hate having to listen to all that crap about whether or not you’ve got a stupid little logo on your sock.”

I understood Kazue had embroidered her knee socks not because her family was too poor to afford to buy the real thing but out of a sense of rationalism. But I thought Kazue’s brand of rationalism, which tried to accommodate itself to the wealth of the school, was ridiculous. Kazue had smallness of character ingrained within her. That was why nobody liked her.

“That’s all.”

Kazue went back to her seat. All I could see were the brand-new socks encasing her skinny calves. This was the mark of wealth, the symbol of 5 0