Grotesque

by Natsuo Kirino

Fortune may shine brightly on a woman like that, but the shadow cast is long and dark. It was inevitable that misfortune would come eventually.

Brains and talent will never stand up against a girl who is clearly physically attractive.

Mitsuru was no bonsai. Her beauty was not like that of a bonsai, which achieves its charm by asserting its own will in defiance of the careful bindings that lash and restrict it. How, I wondered, would my grandfather describe Mitsuru’s beauty?

My father made his excuses. His words spilled out in tangled disarray. I couldn’t imagine my father ever really talking to my mother. Probably she’d been lonely, but I didn’t think anything of it. If people can’t stand being alone, they have no choice but to die.

“Be sure to tell your grandpa to come by the bar next time he’s out. I’ll give him a good deal. It’s the Blue River, right in front of the station.” I didn’t know for sure, but I suspected the bar was some kind of cabaret chain. “Are there any bonsai there?” “Why?” “Grandpa prefers bonsai to women, that’s why.” Mitsuru’s mother didn’t know quite what to make of my joke and craned her neck around to say something to me, but whatever it was I didn’t hear, because by then Mitsuru had already slammed the door shut. She held her umbrella over me while I unfolded my own.

Children do not get to choose their mothers.

“Hey, you have bonsai too!” I blurted out without thinking. But upon closer inspection I saw that what I had taken for bonsai were nothing more than “poor man’s planters,” as my grandfather called them, just small potted marigolds, forget-me-nots, daisies, and other flowers you see lining the front of any old flower shop.

My mother: sitting with her eyes wide open in the dark, shut up in a room without lights. Her fragile nerves—I wonder if I’d inherited them. It would have been a blessing if they’d gone to Yuriko, but compared to me Yuriko was uncomplicated and overly forthright in her own desires. I was the one who took after Mother.

And her name had changed from Masami Johnson to Masami Bhasami.

So that was it. She’d come to get the money! I lowered my head in confusion, trying to avoid her eyes. “I’m terribly sorry.” “Forget it! There’s nothing you could have done about it. You and Yuriko were never close anyway. I guess you were the clever one. You saw through her all along.”

That was the first time I noticed that the men who embrace me, every single one of them, end up with an expression of emptiness when they are done, as if they have lost something. Maybe that is why I am always in search of a new man. Maybe that is why I am now a prostitute.

“Boy, you really are an idiot. So do you think if you took up tennis and trained like crazy you could go to Wimbledon? Or if you decided to be beautiful and worked at it like nothing else you’d win the Miss Universe Pageant? Or maybe you think if you study like there’s no tomorrow you’ll be top in the class by the end of the year? You think you can beat Mitsuru? She’s been at the top of the class since she was a first-year student in junior high and has never once had to give up her spot. You know why? Because she’s a genius. You think all you have to do is try your best? You can try until you’ve worn yourself away to nothing, but there’s a limit, you know. You can spend your whole life trying—hell, you can try until there’s nothing left of you but a little stump—and you’ll still never be a genius.”

She turned to me and said condescendingly, “I have sat here and listened patiently to you, and I think you’ve got the attitude of a loser. You talk like someone who has never even tried to succeed at anything. I for one am going to keep on trying my best. Sure, it’s probably foolish to think about entering the Olympics or Wimbledon, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to try to be first in the class by the end of the year. You may think Mitsuru’s a genius, but I don’t. She just tries really hard.”

“Yeah, a person who’s not human.” “Are you talking about geniuses?” I paused for a minute. Genius doesn’t quite cover it. A monster is a person with something twisted inside, something that grows and grows until it looms all out of proportion. I pointed silently toward Mitsuru. A few minutes ago she’d been laughing with her friends but now she had returned to her desk in order to get ready for the next class. She was wrapped in a strange aura of solitude. There was something about Mitsuru once she knew class was ready to get under way.

It wasn’t a question of my permission; that was even worse. It was just that I hated people in love because people in love betray me.

A woman who does not know herself has no choice other than to live with other people’s evaluations. But no one can adapt perfectly to public opinion. And herein lies the source of their destruction.

For the event at the courthouse I borrowed a book on physiognomy and took it with me. I planned to study Zhang’s features. A round face indicates a carnal personality: someone who is easily contented, does not fuss over details, but is indecisive and promptly loses interest in things. An angular face indicates someone who has a calculating personality, is physically robust, hates to lose, and possesses a stubbornness that makes it difficult to get along with others. On the other hand, those with triangular faces are delicate and sensitive; they are physically fragile and tend to be artistic. These categories are then further divided into three positions—upper, middle, and lower—starting from the top of the face and working toward the sides. By reading these various positions, you can determine someone’s fortune. For example, I suppose I would conform to the “sensitive personality.” I am physically delicate, drawn to beauty, and fit the artistic type. But the part about not being sociable is me in a nutshell.

If it is possible to predict someone’s character and fate by observing their face and physical attributes, how is it that the beautiful Yuriko met such a tragic end? Beautiful, brainless Yuriko! There must have been an imperfection in her face that brought her to this fate. Perhaps it was her perfect beauty?

“Right. I remember. How I wish I could go back in time! If only I could return to the days when I was able to live without knowing any of what I know now. If I could, I wouldn’t spend all my time studying like a maniac. I would fool around like the other girls and have fun dressing in the latest fashions. I would join the cheerleading squad or the golf team or the ice-skating club. And I would hang out with boys and go to parties. I just wish I’d lived the life of a normal happy teenager. You probably feel the same way, don’t you?”

It seems in the final analysis that people who get involved in religion are only after their own personal happiness. Am I wrong?

We at Q High School for Young Women espoused an educational tenet that advocated self-sufficiency and a strong sense of self-awareness in our students. And yet, among the girls who have graduated from Q High School for Young Women, there are data to prove that the rate for divorce, failure to marry, and suicide is much higher than that in other schools.Why is it that girls who come from such privileged backgrounds, who are so proud of their academic accomplishments, and who are such excellent students must meet so much more unhappiness than students elsewhere? Rather than suggesting it is because the real world is crueler for them, I think it more accurate to suggest that we allowed the creation of an environment that was too much of a utopia. Or, to put it another way, we failed to teach our girls the strategies that would enable them to cope with the frustrations of the real world. It is this realization that continues to haunt me, and the other teachers feel the same. We realize now that it was our arrogance that prevented us from coming to grips with the real world.

Human beings are not subjects in biological experiments.

When population figures are low, individual life-forms learn to survive independently in isolation. When individuation intensifies, life-forms develop group survival strategies, changing in size and structure as they do. But girl students can’t help but feel that they can’t survive in isolation. The competition among them is severe. The basis for this competition is grounded in scholastic performance, personality, and financial security, but the greatest of these is physical beauty, which is determined entirely by birth. And here’s where things get very complicated. Some girls may be more beautiful than others when it comes to one aspect of their looks but will not pass muster when a different aspect is compared. The competition between them thus intensifies.

I do not think even a brilliant student such as yourself escaped this battle. Perhaps you managed to stay on top because of a fierce effort. You were very pretty, and your grades excelled all others. But on the dark side of that bright offense, I know you were working tirelessly, weren’t you? And the power that urged you on was born of your fear of losing, was it not? The minute you forgot this fear, that was the minute you would fail to attain your goal. I ignored this as well. And I call myself an educator! How I regret that I failed to offer anyone the kind of education that might have saved them from this “failure.” But it is all in the distant past. So many lives have been lost.

Mitsuru and Yuriko and Kazue didn’t mutate; they simply decayed.

In order to induce the process of decay, water is necessary. I think that, in the case of women, men are the water.

I haven’t yet had an experience like that, but you never know when you’re going to end up with some weirdo. It’s scary, but I almost want to have something like that happen, as long as I don’t die. Being scared out of your wits helps affirm that you are alive.

“Okay, out of all the women here, which one would you pick for a trip to the beach?” A male employee five years ahead of me started it off. The section head and the office manager both started to applaud when it came time to vote for their favorite. In the end an assistant in the design section was selected for the beach. Then the situation was changed. Who would you want to take to a concert? Who for a walk in the park? And so on. Finally they asked, “Who would you most want to marry?” And the bistro erupted in unanimous applause for a sweet modest girl who worked as one of the operations assistants. “Just look at them all.” The Tokyo University graduate turned to me. I didn’t answer. I just sat there stiffly on my cracker-thin floor cushion. My dream was falling apart. Men who were competent at work were carousing around and getting drunk.

But it did seem that the thing we are most proud of and the thing we are most ashamed of are but the front and back of the same coin. They torture and thrill all at once.

Once while I was in the elevator I overheard a woman whisper behind me, “I hear she’s known as the office ghost.” But I really didn’t care what anyone else thought of me. I was only real at night. The hope of achieving a balance was now just a farce.

“I don’t think my attitude is negative.” Yuriko shook her head in denial. “After whoring for twenty years, I’ve come to know men for what they really are. Or wait. Perhaps I should say I know who we really are. At heart, a man truly hates a woman who sells her body. And any woman who sells her body hates the men who pay her for it. You get two people together with all that hate, somebody’s going to kill someone before too long. I’m just waiting for my day to come. When it does, I don’t plan to fight. I’m just going to let myself be killed.”

“I hate men, but I love sex. It’s the opposite for you, isn’t it, Kazue?” I wonder. Do I love men and hate sex? Do I walk the streets just so I can get close to men? That’s the wrong way of going about it. Yuriko’s question shocked me. “If you and I became one, we’d be perfect. We’d be able to live the ultimate life. But on the other hand, if it’s the perfect life you want, best not to be born a woman.”

Who would I like to see dead? My mother, Kamei, the office manager—lots and lots of people, I thought. So many I can’t even remember their faces now, let alone their names. I don’t really like anyone. And I’ve never been loved by anyone, I suddenly realized. I simply ply the waters of the night on my own. I could well imagine the way Zhang’s younger sister looked as she lifted her hand above the surface of the dark sea. Stretching, stretching for help. I wasn’t like Zhang’s sister. I wasn’t asking for help. I would tread the frozen waters of this sealike city until my hands and feet were too numb to move. Drifting down, down, until my lungs collapsed under the pressure of the water, I would let the waves carry me away. There was no better sensation than this! Feeling liberated, I gave a big stretch. Zhang flicked his cigarette butt away.

“A prostitute? Let him kill all the prostitutes he wants. They’re easily replaced. But money, that’s different!”

Money was definitely more valuable than life. But then, when I died, my money would be meaningless.

Still, if sex is the only way to dissolve these feelings, then men and women really are pathetic. I will launch my boat on a sea of hatred, my eye on the far shore, wondering when I might make land. Ahead I hear the roar of water. Might my boat be headed for a waterfall? Perhaps I must first plunge into the falls before I can set out upon the sea of hatred. Niagara? Yguazu? Victoria? My body trembles. But if I can make the first descent, the path that opens from there will be surprisingly pleasant, won’t it? That’s what Kazue expressed in her journals. So let me shoulder my baggage of hatred and confusion and set sail undaunted. In honor of my courage, there on the other shore, Yuriko and Kazue are waving to me, urging me on, applauding my gallant determination. Hurry up! they seem to say. I recall what Kazue recorded in her journal, and I too want to enfold myself in a man’s embrace.