Nan-Core (2 page)

One time I caught sight of her when I was on my way home from the train station. I had happened to glance back and seen her walking towards me, coming home with some shopping. I will never forget her face—she had looked terrified, like an empty shell. Mom was only a few years into her fifties but that time she had looked gray and worn out, like an old woman. I instinctively turned my gaze away, feeling as though I’d witnessed something forbidden. It had seemed like the face of another side of her, a side she would never have willingly revealed to Dad or me. When she noticed me she seemed to panic momentarily, but then her usual smile quickly returned and she called out, sounding happy: “Oh hello, Ryo dear!”

When I reached out to relieve her of the supermarket bags she carried in both hands I looked down and noticed she was shuffling along in Dad’s sandals. They were too big for her feet and her socks stuck out, blackened from dirt where the tips touched the ground. At the time I read nothing more into it, telling myself it was all due to Dad’s illness, that she was just upset because of it. And, perhaps, that was actually all it was.

Two months ago Mom and Dad had been on their way back from seeing Gran. Dad said they’d been standing side by side at a red light at a crosswalk when Mom stepped out into the road without warning.

“By the time I managed to shout out she was already gone, nowhere to be seen. I couldn’t even grasp what just happened. I don’t remember hearing any of it, not the collision, not the squeal of brakes, not the noise of people around us. I just stood there, watching everyone running about in confusion around the truck right in front of me like I was watching a silent movie.”

On the night of the funeral the two of us sat in the kitchen when Dad told me this, and it was as if he was mostly talking to himself. Our unspoken mutual understanding was that he would be dead too, before long. My brother fell into a drunken sleep after reaching that dazed, cried-out place. But Dad did not weep or abandon himself to heartrending grief, not for the accident that had taken his wife, not for his own impending death. Instead his eyes contained something elusive, not sadness or fear but something pale and dry. I could only describe it as an emptiness.

As we sat facing each other, unable to find words to share, I began to suspect it had been nesting inside him from before I could remember, that I had been dimly aware of it the whole time. I recalled Dad sitting hunched over the low table in his study, lost as always in page after page of the scrapbooks he had filled with so many photographs. Children with sarcomas dotting their faces, ravaged by AIDS; emaciated kids, the shape of their bones visible through their skin; small, naked corpses, abused and discarded … Maybe it’s strange for me, his own son, to say, but there was always something a little eccentric about Dad.

I gazed at the bundle of black hair in my hand for a few more moments, then wrapped it back up in the paper. I didn’t
know what else to do.

I had just popped the clasp shut, having put the parcel back into the handbag, when a memory sprang into my mind like a jack-in-the-box bursting open. It came rushing back, something that had for some reason been absent from my memories for a very long time. Yet it was crystal clear, as though it had never slipped from my mind at all.

I was four at the time, so this had happened over twenty years ago. I had spent a long while in hospital with pneumonia or something like that and when I finally got home after being discharged I had become convinced that my mother had been replaced by someone else.

If not for seeing the bundle of hair, I doubt the memory would have ever resurfaced for the rest of my life. Of course, it was absurd to have thought that someone had taken Mom’s place, so this curious memory would have most likely remained dormant, existing as nothing more than a child’s illusion, consigned to the dark recesses of my mind along with so many other recollections.

I was told that, during my stay in the hospital, there had been a small fire at our rented apartment. That incident had spurred my parents to move from Tokyo to Komagawa in Nara, where they bought a house to share with my grandparents who were going to move in from Maebashi.

On the day of my discharge I rode the bullet train back with Dad, switching partway to the Kintetsu Line, and by the time we finally pulled into Komagawa I was exhausted, feeling like I’d traveled all the way to the edge of the world. I became utterly bewildered when I walked into the recently-constructed and unfamiliar house and saw Mom run up to
the entryway and call out, “Ryo, you’re back!”

No
, I thought,
you’re not my Mom
.

“You’re such a strong boy, Ryo! Mommy’s so sorry she couldn’t come to visit you,” she said, hugging me close, her eyes wet with tears. I stiffened, feeling awkward in the embrace.

Of course I tried to explain this to Dad and my grandparents, even to Mom herself. “What happened to my Mom?” I would ask. But the adults only laughed. They wouldn’t take me seriously, teasing that I’d forgotten what she looked like after not seeing her during the months in hospital.

I had a feeling that Mom might have visited once, not too long after my admission to the hospital, but I couldn’t be sure. Coming to visit was solely Dad’s job. Even after the move he had stayed back in Tokyo, living out of a business hotel not far from the hospital and his work. He’d quit the job once I was out of the hospital.

I have a vague memory of him explaining how it was difficult for Mom to visit me at the hospital—I had probably been complaining about wanting to see her—explaining it was because we had moved far away, and since Gran was in bad health she had to look after her.

So it was true that I hadn’t seen her for a while. In addition, I had come home to a strange place that wasn’t the home I’d known before the hospital, to a town and a house I’d never seen before and where my grandparents who had until then lived on their own had moved in as well. Thinking back, it was probably enough to wreak havoc with a child’s perceptions, and it wasn’t surprising for me to think Mom looked like someone else.

Yet that sense of wrongness was deep-rooted, like something that went beyond simple reasoning. And even when the casual dismissal of the adults had begun to convince me that maybe they were right, that maybe she was Mom after all, all the while the sense of something being out of place continued to throb, like a milk tooth that was loose but wouldn’t quite come out.

I had a hard time calling her “Mom,” this person that should have been my mother. There was nothing different about the way she acted around me. She would hug me tenderly when I wanted her to, and throw a fit when I did something very bad. I still couldn’t call her “Mom,” but it didn’t take long to grow attached, either.

I have a few fragmented memories from that time. One time, my mother took me to a bookstore and found a picture book which she bought for me. It was one of my favorites before I was admitted to the hospital—the story was about a terrifying, man-eating dragon—but it had burned in the fire along with my other books and toys. She called out in surprise and picked up the book with an air of nostalgia and smiled at me, and I happily noted a sudden surge in the conviction that she might really be my mother after all. When I got home I was disappointed to page through the book and find that the man-eating dragon that had been so terrifying to look at before was actually not scary at all. If anything, it looked comical. When I told as much to my mother she patted me on the head and said, “You poor thing, Ryo. All sorts of things must seem different to you now after being in hospital for so long and putting up with so many ouchie needles.”

Another time, my mother licked free some grit that had
got stuck in my eye. She assured me it would be fine and, although my eyelid was jammed shut from the pain, it relaxed naturally when she placed her tongue over it. I remember the sensation even now, of her tongue being neither hot nor cold, just soft. She took my head in her hands and directly licked my eyeball with her tongue. The relief stopped my tears, and I remembered then how she had used the same technique to clean dirt from my eyes when I had been smaller. When she was done I asked her how it tasted and she said, “Ryo, your tears are very salty.”

I wondered what else I could have done, during those days filled with such tiny moments.

At some point—at least, this is what seems likely—the discomfort I felt towards my mother came to be replaced by guilt for still feeling that way. And you don’t need much effort to forget guilt, especially when you’re a child. By the time my brother Yohei was born a year later, I had completely forgotten about the doubts I had had regarding my mother. Back then her hair had been black and glossy, without as much as a single strand of white …

I let my eyes fall once more to the handbag still in my hands.

A vague image floated to mind: a woman in a sleeveless dress printed with large flowers, and this handbag resting on her arm. I couldn’t decide whether the image was of my mother before she was replaced or simply a fictitious picture that I had invented.

I didn’t even know whether it was true or not that she had been replaced.

I sat cross-legged on the tatami flooring, lost for a while
in a daze. Eventually I pulled myself together and dug further into the box I’d pulled the handbag from. It wasn’t clear if it had been there from the outset, or if Dad had pulled something else out to hide it, but right at the bottom I found a manila envelope stuffed with papers of some sort, or documents. I opened it to find a collection of notebooks. There were four in total, each a different thickness and design. Each had a number written in the bottom-right corner of the cover, one through four.

I chose one and flipped through it. The pages were crammed full of text, leaving hardly any blank spaces. The sentences were written in heavy pencil, with occasional scuffs where an eraser had been used. The characters were artlessly scrawled across the page, but there was no way to tell if the style was put on or just the author’s natural hand.

I took out the notepad marked One and began to read. Nan-Core was written in as the title. I didn’t know what it meant. My hand was throwing shadows onto the page so I moved closer to the window. Before long the text sucked me in, and I forgot everything else around me.

Nan-Core

Is it an abnormality in my brain structure that allows people like me to kill so easily?

I heard that there is a complex interaction between the many hormones in the brain, that even a small change in that balance can have a large effect on mood and personality. That was when the idea occurred to me that, if medical research in the field continued to progress, perhaps there might one day be a drug that could cure the urge to kill.

If a medicine like that existed, I think I would try taking it.

I kill people because I want to. I’ve never felt anything like guilt. But if something came along that was able to stop me from doing it I think I’d try it regardless. I don’t know why. It’s strange, even to me.

I don’t know where to start. Maybe the warning signs, the trigger that made me the way I am … I hope I’ll be able to explain them properly. When I was around four or five, my mother began taking me on regular visits to the hospital. The doctor would always press his fingers over the small lump on the back of my head, then he would take out picture cards and watch as he slowly repeated
words like “apple, apple, apple.” It was only much later that I realized he had wanted me to say “apple,” too. I don’t know if it was somehow related to the lump on my head, but while I could more or less understand what people were saying to me, back then I never tried to say anything in response.

My examination was always over quickly, but once it was done my mother would spend a long time talking to the doctor about what I was like at home. The bespectacled doctor always spoke in a hushed tone. My mother would talk, sometimes through tears, and he would listen and nod patiently, rejoindering with a muttered explanation when necessary.

One of the things he said quite often in an apologetic tone was something like, “Your child doesn’t have … Nan-Core, so I’m afraid it can’t be helped.” The “…” part of his explanation would sometimes change and I don’t remember all the variations, but his point was that there were many types of Nan-Core and that I had none of them.

Other times the doctor would say things like, “Not having Nan-Core is a big problem,” or “It’d be great if we could find a suitable type of Nan-Core for your child.” I was just a kid, but it felt unfair all the same. Why did I have to be missing something everyone else had? There was always a vague thought in my mind that I somehow had to get myself a Nan-Core.

On our way back from the hospital my mother would take me to various places on her errands, and this would cause me unbearable pain. I was used to the hospital, but each time I went somewhere for the first time it felt like all the new things were stabbing me with a mass of invisible thorns.

The place I felt most relaxed was in my room at home, wedged into the gap between my bed and the wall. I would sleep there each
time I had a fit, and my mother would bring my food up to me.

One day after an examination, my mother took me to a bargain hall inside a department store. Immediately the hustle and bustle, the colors and smells bore down on me. I followed in silence wherever she led me by the hand, and I don’t think she or anyone else could have realized that I was completely terrified and had almost wet myself (I had in fact wet myself a few times before). If my doctor had touched the lump at the back of my head during times like this, I think that instead of finding it soft as usual he would have found it swollen and hard.

At first my mother kept a tight grip on my hand, then she let go for a moment to spread out some clothes she had picked from the mountain of items on special sale and from then onwards kept taking my hand then letting go again. After she did this a few times I stole away and left the jam-packed bargain hall behind me.

Along the wall past the escalators was an area with only a few people milling about among displays of upright clocks, vases, and various metal fixtures whose uses I couldn’t begin to understand. Looking back now I suppose it was an antique fair.