Nan-Core (13 page)

After the baby was born the ghosts that haunted me seemed to fall away. I felt empty for a while, as though everything that had been inside me until that point, even Mitsuko and Michiru, had exited me. I was amazed at how easy it was to breathe when I found myself so empty.

Being a prostitute hadn’t been too bad, but it was easier to be a mother. It suited me. I didn’t have anything specific to do except wait for you to come home, so I spent whole days just watching the baby. I had never observed anything with such enthusiasm. It was something that had come from inside of me, so I wanted to discern whether it was a part of me or an extension of myself.

If I noted any changes I informed you when you returned in the evening from work. When the baby had puckered his lips during a bath, or kicked at his sheets, or when the tip of a small tooth had become visible, for example.

I liked the look on your face when you listened to these reports. Come dinner you took a sip of beer and said things like, “The leaves are all gone from the row of gingko trees, it really is winter already.”

I liked the way you looked those times. I liked the way you looked when you opened your eyes in bed at night to whisper, “Listen, it’s started to rain,” despite the loneliness that seeped through your expression. Whenever words like “gingko” or “winter” or “rain” crossed your lips, I felt like I was getting closer to understanding their true forms which I didn’t know.

We slept in one bed and made as little physical contact as possible, but sometimes we woke to find our hands or legs entangled of their own accord. The baby’s cot was in the same room, and he wriggled and cried and moaned throughout the night, but before we knew it, your insomnia had gone away.

I can’t say if the same could be said of your guilt.

Of course, you never should have had to bear that guilt in the first place. I was the one who took the boy’s life. I was the one who tricked you, who led you to wrongfully conclude it was your fault. Because of the guilt I had planted inside of you, you gave me money, took me to your little diner, even married me so we could stay together. Our life was built on mistaken guilt, and so long as that remained the case, everything about it was wrong.

I knew that something needed to be done, but each time I tried to think it through I only got confused.

I couldn’t figure it out, so I stopped thinking about it.

Our baby began to make noises like “Waah” and “Mmama”
and learned how to crawl around the room. You brought a never-ending stream of toys home. One night you gave him a small tambourine with a picture on it. He absolutely loved it and started to bang it into whatever was around, filling the room with the lively noise.

When he finally tried whacking it on his own face, you laughed out loud. “I never get tired of watching this little guy,” you said.

Having banged the tambourine into his face a few times it apparently started to hurt, and when he opened his mouth to cry you quickly scooped him up and shook the instrument in a steady rhythm.

“Right, how about we sing along with Daddy. Okay? Waaa, waaa, waaah …”

It was the middle of dinner but you cuddled him close as you paced around the room. You rocked his little frame up and down, occasionally kissing him on the forehead, and each time you did so I felt my own forehead tingle.

By the time you got back to the table with the baby, mood restored, on your knee, you were short of breath. You scraped a spoonful of fish from your plate and tried to put it in his mouth, but he was full and turned his face away in a sulk. When you tried to eat it instead his elbow bumped into you, like he’d done it on purpose, sending the contents of the spoon all over your nose.

“Oof! Argh, you little critter.”

The baby cackled with laughter. You blinked a few times, as some of the food had gotten into your eyes, then burst into laughter right along with him. I hurriedly held out a box of tissues.

“Y-You got me good, little scallywag.” You wiped a little dribble from the baby’s mouth. “Ah, this is so much fun,” you mumbled.

Then your hand stopped moving and you stared at me with
those mysterious hazel eyes. I think I’d been sitting with my mouth hanging open like a fool. I’d just had the sudden realization that the pleasant sensation I’d been feeling, like my heart was expanding outwards in all directions, was what it felt like to have fun. I felt like I was inflating, ready to bounce into the air like a hot-air balloon, and the sensation was tinged with a hint of anxiety that I might expand too far and burst open. I had of course heard the word “fun” before, but I had never once experienced it for myself. It felt like everything in the room was covered in a glowing aura, making everything appear brand-new.

“Fun” felt a little bit like Nan-Core.

I’ll never forget the beggarweed, either. That happened when we went out on a walk—a little farther than usual to visit a shrine—with you pushing the baby buggy along. We had just completed a lap of the narrow paths that circled the grounds and were about to head back home. Then we noticed all the dry, brown, triangular pods stuck to our sweaters.

“Beggarweed seeds. Damn, these things are a pain,” you said, starting to pull at the seeds covering your arm. I was pulling some from my skirt when I glanced at the baby, asleep inside the buggy, and saw that some had gotten into his hair. I pulled some out then went back to work on myself, but it was never-ending.

“Quite a job, isn’t it?” Your hand popped up and picked some seeds off the back of my shoulder. When you finished there you moved on to my back, my hair, to my side. You said, “Here they are, and here,” never noticing the way my body was tensing up.

Your cuff brushed into me and I picked a seed from there, too. It was stuck in the little fibers of your flannel shirt, and it refused to come out easily. I carried on trying, feeling a rush of determination, and picked off even more of the seeds, another, and another. There
was an infinite number of seeds.

We stood there for a long time, engrossed in the task of picking seeds off each other, and as we did, we began to gradually dissolve and become one, my hand becoming your hand, your body becoming my body. After we’d picked off the last seeds and started to walk again, you joked that the beggarweed would be bursting with blossoms next fall right there along the path and that we’d probably get covered with seeds all over again.

One night about a year later, you embraced me in bed. I felt like I’d turned into a baby, probably because of the many times I’d held ours, keeping still just as you were then.

Enclosed in the warmth of your body I closed my eyes, feeling completely protected in your arms—my crossing gates. The truth is I wanted us to stay like that forever, but after a while you began to undo the buttons along my collar, whispering, “It’s gonna be all right.” I wasn’t sure if you were talking about your impotency. I had told myself that there wasn’t a single reason for you to feel attracted to my body, so your impotency would never be cured.

You were trembling. Or maybe I was the one who was trembling.

I was afraid. I knew that what was about to happen would be totally different from the disassembly that I knew so well, yet I was afraid all the same. Or maybe that was exactly why I was afraid.

There was a strange magnetism passing between my skin and your hands before you even touched me. It was like they were calling out to each other. Your hand touched my chest first. When you touched me, all the parts of my body you weren’t touching began to call out, too. I became full of calling voices, my fear quickly ebbing away.

When I took off my clothes my body was teeming with tiny beggarweed seeds. The countless seeds itched against my skin all over, waiting to be picked off by your fingers. No matter how many you picked off, a ceaseless stream of new seeds appeared in their place. If you hadn’t touched me that wouldn’t have happened. You needed to pick me apart and pick me apart until none of me remained.

Gradually I weakened, reaching a point where I could no longer prevent my body from opening up. Before I knew it I had transformed into Mitsuko, and I held my arm out to you. I held out every possible thing to you.
Come on. Cut me. Please … Come on
.

My wish was granted. You were mercilessly kind. You made a deep incision and my body gushed out from within itself. I was dying, endlessly. As you killed me, a pure rush of life-force burst into flames. The higher the flames rose, the more we became fused together.

Oh, it was so pleasurable. How wonderful it would have been for Mitsuko to have experienced it, too.

I begged to be kept frozen in that moment forever, but time restarted all the same. I opened my eyes. It felt strange to come back to it all within your arms. Even though Mitsuko was still dead.

“Don’t cry,” you said.

I hadn’t been crying, but when I touched my face I was stunned to find it wet.

“When he’s a little bigger, let’s give him a brother or a sister. I think he’d like that.”

We didn’t talk about what had just happened. I didn’t know how to express the fact that you’d become even more you than before. Here and there my body still tingled. A long breath escaped
from between your teeth and after a little while you were asleep, still holding me in your arms.

You insisted that we should visit my parents. You’d said as much when we registered our marriage, but I hadn’t been able to bring myself to want to go.

“I don’t know what happened between you and them, but they’ll understand if we explain everything properly.”

“Nothing happened, not really.”

“Then why not? I’d imagined you’d had some terrible experience with your family or something like that.” It was the first time you’d asked about my past.

“I just don’t want to see them.”

“Okay, but why not?”

It was only when you asked me that I realized I didn’t know the answer myself. I’d left home when I had started my corporate job, then moved a couple of times since then and hadn’t given them my latest address. That was all it was. It had felt safer to keep my distance from my parents, from my younger sister, from all sorts of things. I’d never even considered the idea that they might be worried about me.

One Sunday, after you finally won me over, we took our one-year-old child to visit my old home. My parents met us at the front door, neither saying a word as they stared at me and you and the baby. My mother’s eyes went wide and began to spill tears. Already regretting my decision to visit, I felt myself tense up, and I went to hide in your shadow so she wouldn’t hug me. I didn’t have to see my sister, as she was apparently renting an apartment close to where she worked.

“We’re so glad she met a nice man, and now she’s blessed with
a child, too. I could tell she’s happy the moment I saw her. It’s like a dream. Isn’t it, honey?”

“Yes … It’s … quite a surprise.”

“Thank you. I’m so happy to hear that you feel that way. Before we arrived I was prepared to be yelled at,” you said with an earnest voice, lowering your head in a deep bow.

My mother had latched onto the baby and was showing no signs of letting go. I wondered to myself whether they’d act the same if they discovered we didn’t know who his real father was.

Before long we were all drinking beer around a large box of delivered sushi, and I didn’t really suffer the stabbing feeling I’d always felt in that kind of setting at home, the sense of feeling out of place, as though the air had turned into sandpaper. Maybe it was because of the toddler moving around among the adults.

“That went well, right? They’re really nice people,” you said on the train home, giving me a wistful smile. You were probably remembering what my Dad had said earlier: “We have a grandchild now, and a son at that. Isn’t that great, honey? Finally another male!” He’d said this as you poured him a beer. You’d lost your own parents when you were young, so the words etched themselves into your heart.

After that day you would sometimes ask that we visit them again. On our second trip my parents called my younger sister and her fiancé to join us. My sister, always fickle in love since her youth, split up with that mild-mannered man, then brought along a new fiancé soon after that only to break it off with him as well just a few months later. It worried my mother.

When we visited my folks I would think of everyone as your family and just tell myself I was there with you. It was easier on me that way, allowing me to act more naturally. And the truth was that
when you were there, sharing a lively dinner with my parents and sister, you blended in like you’d been doing it your whole life. Anyone would have thought that you were all actually related. I’d find myself smiling as I watched you enjoy yourself, and it wasn’t too horrible even when the others poured me beer or expressed an interest in helping with the baby.

After several visits where we stayed over after drinking into the night, we got into the habit of visiting twice a month on a Saturday and staying the night.

And so several years passed.

After that, everything began to fall apart.

I’d reached the end of the third notebook. The writing filled the book to the last page, leaving hardly any blank space. I felt like I’d been left suspended, a side-effect of having read it all in one sitting. I pressed my elbows into the cover of the closed notebook and raked my fingers through my hair. I downed the last of my coffee, disregarding the fact that it was cold and streaked with cream.

The question had continuously haunted my thoughts the whole time I’d been reading: Was the baby me? My real mother was a serial killer, my real father a passerby that had paid her for sex … The thought made me feel like goosebumps were breaking out all over my skin.

I had no real proof, of course. It was just the thought that came to me based on the story so far. It was possible I was completely off the mark. Perhaps the child had somehow been disposed of long ago, as had been implied in the lines I’d skimmed at the very end.

Having read that far, however, I had grown even more confident that the man she called “you” was Dad. His close relationship with the author’s parents matched that between Dad and my maternal grandparents. Having lost his own parents when he was young, the bond between Dad and my mother’s parents were stronger than if they were blood relations. I didn’t remember anything about my grandparents’ place in Maebashi, but it seemed likely that this was the “home” the narrator referred to in the story.