Beautiful star, p.12
Beautiful Star, page 12
‘That should be fine.’ Haguro’s response was immediate. ‘Just make sure you don’t change your mind before the final day of destruction.’
‘Oh, thank you so much.’ The barber was beside himself with gratitude.
It was now a year after those events, and at today’s get-together, which Haguro later dubbed the ‘Rose Garden Meeting’, the group discussed various ways to terminate the activities of the extraterrestrial family in Hannō. After that, they went back into town and went Dutch on dinner. Haguro had some entrance examination papers to finish marking, so he returned rather early to his home in the area around Sendai Castle where the American troops had been based. Crossing Ōhashi Bridge over the upper reaches of the Hirose River, home was on the right-hand side of the broad, paved road that led up to the castle. After the army withdrew, the collection of plain, Western-style dwellings had been reassigned as housing for public servants such as judges, public prosecutors and university professors.
The homes were either symmetrically built semi-detached bungalows, or two-storey tenement blocks divided into four. They were set among lawns, flower beds and American-style laundry-drying spaces, but the land had been rolled flat and was charmless, lacking any view. In the summer, however, children just needed to cross the bridge over the river in order to reach the new municipal swimming pool in Nishi Park.
Haguro lived in one of the tenements where, being single, he employed an old housemaid. He had turned his ten-mat upstairs room into a study, while the four-and-a-half-mat room served as his bedroom. The maid had a six-mat-room downstairs. No matter how late he returned home, his neatly attired maid would always be there to greet him when he rang the doorbell. Haguro offered a few words of appreciation, and shut himself away upstairs.
Once alone, he looked keenly into the wall mirror. The face of a scrawny, forty-five-year-old intellectual. It never changed, no matter what angle he looked from. He breathed onto the mirror. The fog erased his face. At the same time, faint traces of the halitosis he had been unable to shake off for decades stung his nostrils. He was rather attached to his own bad breath by now. The nauseating smell was totally unconnected to any vital life force, and might be more closely described as the rotten stench of academia.
Unlike other single people his age, Haguro did not keep a dog, or cat or small bird. He was his own unkempt dog, his own cunning cat. His life consisted simply of keeping himself entertained, and taking care that he had enough food to eat …
From the semi-detached bungalow opposite, which was occupied by an engineering professor and his family, came the sound of the daughter doing her regular evening piano practice. Haguro pushed the curtain aside a little and peeped at the bright light shining from the house. It spilled onto the parched lawn as the piano notes, which seemed to have been designed especially to convey utter simplicity, artlessly scattered happiness all around.
‘That’s humans for you, spattering their grubby happiness all around. What a pain! Like a car on a rainy day drenching the clothes of an innocent passer-by.’
But Haguro believed that humans were locked in eternal suffering, so he did not hold too much ill will against what happiness they had.
There were many possible thrillingly childish pleasures, but only one thing occupied his mind. And it was something he mulled over every night.
‘Who would ever guess that I’m an extraterrestrial, of all things! Would anyone at university possibly suspect that I’m not human!’
He sat down in the old easy chair in a corner of his study with some nail clippers in his hands, and started to cut and file his nails carefully, as if he were a gigolo. He would often waste time in such trivial sensual activities before getting down to work. He was determined never to forget the physical aspect of being human.
His nails cut easily, like paper, but they tended to break under the file. Haguro paid increasingly careful attention to his pale fingertips as he lost himself in memories of the time when he was still human. His loveless adolescence. His loveless childhood. No matter how far he thought back, there was no love to remember.
He glanced over to the exam scripts piled up on the table. He had not even read them yet, but he was already bored. All those scripts squeezed out from the worthless, unoriginal minds of a new generation of ‘youth’. The greasy, finger-stained papers were always poorly written and riddled with the pretensions and lack of self-awareness of the young.
Haguro himself had examined common rights with the intention of doing a doctorate at some point. His bookshelves were full of old documents. Though he had been studying for twenty years, he was yet to produce a book. He had, however, written a couple of papers for a quarterly journal called Legal History Essays … He should have just stuck with Japanese issues, but he developed an interest in comparative jurisprudence, and once he engaged with the ideas of Josef Kohler he was lost. Starting from a study of ‘commonality’, through which popular common law was most abundantly preserved in Japan, he buried himself in the dark recesses of ancient folklore related to common law in each country. At university, he gave a perfunctory introductory lecture on legal history every year, while the wheels of his own research got stuck in the mud, leaving him unable to advance or retreat.
He had been a pale child, full of himself and argumentative. At school, his nickname was Brussel Sprout. His mother once dreamed that countless stars sprang from his head. He stubbornly believed he was incompetent, but everyone regarded him as a malicious genius. In his mind he would soar, as he gazed at the night sky, fantasizing about the day he would change into a star. Every star struck him as a frozen, sparkling brain. The insides of his geta sandals were painted silver. There was no significance in this, but his mother took it as an unlucky omen. They lived in an old, dark, multi-roomed house in the Kita-Rokubancho district. His cousins considered him a useless relative. When they came to play, they would tie him to the phoenix tree in the back garden. They would spit in his face, laughing with delight and dance rings around him. His mother was dead now …
Haguro once again pushed the curtain aside a little and peered out. The light from the professor’s house was already extinguished and the piano sound was no more. Frail moonlight fell onto the parched lawn.
He finally turned to his desk, but he did not reach for the exam scripts. Instead, he reread the express mail which had arrived that morning. It was a private message from a member of the Universal Friendship Association. This young and enthusiastic member always filled him in with the latest information, having no idea that Haguro and his two companions had joined the association merely to spy on them. The association bulletin was published irregularly, so private mail was a way for news to reach them about a month earlier.
Dear Professor,
I am writing to you, so far away, to keep you as up to date as possible about the splendid developments of our association here in Tokyo.
The lectures of our chairman, Jūichirō Ōsugi, have been a resounding success. When I went to hear him, I was deeply impressed. His message appears to have been picked up by several magazines, and it would be fair to say that it has advanced our association towards a new stage of development.
An outline of the chairman’s talks will eventually appear in the bulletin, but he spoke eloquently about peace for mankind and the salvation of the world on the verge of destruction. His tone was dispassionate even as he depicted with breathtaking force the catastrophe that humanity would encounter in the event of World War Three. As he expounded upon the supreme bliss when mankind establishes true peace and becomes one with cosmic harmony, his pale features flushed, and his audience was caught in a reverie as if that supreme bliss had already materialized before them.
Our leader is peerless in his ability to demonstrate conclusively that ‘flying saucers’ are emissaries of peace, friends who have come to warn us. The first thing we must do is learn to be brave, and discover a peace within ourselves that does not cower before mankind, the world and the Universe. The fearful and suspicious heart that trembles before the Universe, before the world and before humanity is the source of all wars.
The slides of flying saucers that Chairman Ōsugi showed were all taken from highly credible photographs. The photographs authorized by the Brazilian Navy Ministry were exceptional. The images of pure, white flying saucers hovering above the azure South Atlantic next to a cliff in some South American location elevated our hearts away from everyday matters and the world’s conflicts to the distant heavens …
‘The idiot doesn’t know what’s going to hit him!’ Haguro spat out the words in contempt.
The next day was a Sunday, and Kurita remained cooped up all day at home, lost in melancholic thoughts. It all began two years previously when Fumiko Takarabe was killed. Whenever he got into this state, others family members could only watch over him anxiously from a distance. It was early spring, a particularly tough season of the year. Fumiko’s death had taken place exactly this time two years earlier.
Fumiko Takarabe was a beautiful twenty-eight-year-old divorcee, who had returned to her family home in Gojūnin-machi, close to Kurita’s place. She was living with her elderly mother, and she earned a livelihood teaching doll-making. Kurita could recite from memory the exact words inscribed on the plate next to the sliding door of their modest gate:
TAKARABE DOLL SCHOOL
PURE JAPANESE DOLLS HANDICRAFT LESSONS
YOU CAN DO IT
CLASSES: TUESDAYS, THURSDAYS AND SATURDAYS, UNTIL 4 P.M.
Fumiko was such a renowned beauty in the neighbourhood that even some men expressed an interest in taking up doll-making, but Fumiko only accepted female students. Nevertheless, she had a reputation for being a loose woman. It was true that she had several male friends, but whether it really went any further, or whether jealous people were just spreading rumours about her, was not clear.
Kurita flipped through his diary from the year before last.
For the second Sunday of March, today’s date, there was an entry describing the time when Fumiko asked him to go with her to buy a flowerpot.
Fumiko was waiting at ten in the morning at the bus stop in the triangular park in front of Hoshunin Temple. What possessed Fumiko always to choose the most conspicuous places to meet her man? She was comfortably draped in a black velvet coat that set off the collar of her white kimono, with its navy-blue-and-olive chintz pattern. Her small, pale face, almost entirely taken up by large, almond-shaped eyes as she looked around restlessly under a dusty evergreen plane tree, emerged vividly from the lines of his old diary.
Kurita closed his eyes, unable to contain his shame. The moment they met, the talk had turned to children. Whenever she dragged along this lumbering, ugly university student, Fumiko would end up going on about how she wanted to see the child she had left with her estranged husband. And when the two were alone together and Kurita made a move, Fumiko always said the same thing:
‘I have a child, so it’s not going to work. That’s why it’s so hard-going for me and for the kid. There’s no way I can stop seeing the child. Actually, I shouldn’t have had a child, but I did.’
Fumiko would always voice this mood of rejection in a dull, sing-song tone.
And then Kurita discovered that he was not human. Which meant that the melancholy he was experiencing even now was a hangover from the past. He was an extraterrestrial indulging himself by playing the role of a suffering human. Two years earlier, however, he definitely had been human.
And yet, he constantly dreamed of finding himself in a position that would afford him a bird’s-eye view of human suffering. It was a double structure that he fantasized about. Evil glittered nobly in the heavens like the sun, while another version of himself, smeared in filth, was tucked away in a human body. At some point, his murderous impulse would purify the stench that clung to his body. But what a distance there was between the negativity of his own mind and the actual desire to kill!
No matter how negative his thoughts, they never bore fruit. Only slaughter would produce a result.
The two entered the gate of the nursery garden, along with the rest of the Sunday crowd, on the other side of the railway bridge, diagonally opposite Hoshunin. Its original name was the Date Clan Nursery Garden. It had been established by Kunimune Date in 1900 in order to improve and advance agricultural produce in the Tōhoku region around Sendai. Later, it came into the possession of Sendai City, which turned it into a teaching farm for the local agricultural industry. Most people would visit during this season in search of a bargain. Potted flowers, grown in the greenhouses, were sold at cost price.
The garden stretched all along the railway embankment to the point where the track sloped down to ground level. Dotted with dreary orchards, lifeless vegetable plots and little patches of parched lawn, it bore the brunt of a cold early spring wind blowing in from the plains. Kurita suggested that they take a walk before buying some flowers. He could not think of anything else to suggest.
She kept up her usual conversation about the child. Her estranged husband gave the child a good telling-off whenever it mentioned its mother’s name. The child tended to call the television, ‘tevelision’. It was convinced its mother had turned into a terrifying monster.
Fumiko constantly ignored Kurita. She did it by never for a moment forgetting to press her own concerns right into his face. It was freezing on the walk, and Kurita regretted not having worn an overcoat over his student uniform. Bracing himself against the cold, only the opportunity to walk alongside Fumiko steeled Kurita against one unbearably frozen second to the next.
It was not raining, but the wide sky was full of clouds. The Chinese palm trees in the little park were wrapped in woven straw matting, and ripples flitted across the tiny round pond in the park’s centre like goosebumps over skin. Fruit trees, yet to bud, crouched above furrows of dry earth. The pair were walking directly into the powerful wind as it rolled in from the plains. They eventually reached the embankment planted with a row of cherry trees and a wooden bridge that crossed the river. Bamboo grasses rustling on the riverbank were reflected on the greenish-brown river surface.
Fumiko came to a halt on the bridge. And then, curling her lips, she addressed Kurita with no particular intent other than to impose her will upon him:
‘I’ve had enough of walking.’
Kurita had a clear recollection of Fumiko’s face at that time, chilled in the cold. The pale sun filtering through the clouds had cast a faint shadow of her hair, fraying in the wind, across her forehead. Her eyes had become a little bloodshot in the teeth of the wind, and the corners of her eyes were smeared with tears. At the moment she was murdered, she must have looked up at her killer with the same look.
The words that came out of Kurita’s mouth at that time were, as ever, weak and ingratiating.
‘OK. Let’s go back, then. To the greenhouse.’
He really despised Fumiko at that moment, but it was not he who murdered her. The vexations of human life were engraved on his forehead like a gaudy coat of arms. If he had already ceased being human back then, he would have viewed things from the perspective of the icy clouds, far above the withered cherry branches on the river embankment. In that scenario, Fumiko’s refusal to walk any further written on her face would have looked very cute, as if it belonged to a starving doe. And he could have played the role of hunter, shooting an arrow into her breast without the slightest hesitation.
The greenhouse was located close to the nursery garden gate, where crowds of people came and went, each holding their favourite potted flowers in their arms.
FLOWERPOT PRICES: CYCLAMENS (150 YEN), TULIPS (120 YEN), HYACINTHS (100 YEN), CROCUSES (60 YEN), SWEET PEAS (150 YEN), BEGONIAS (80 YEN), PRIMULAS (100 YEN). PLEASE SELECT A POT AND PAY AT OFFICE.
Shrinking pansies were in bloom around this poster erected in the sunny lane outside the entrance. Compared to the path they had just walked, even in the amount of sunshine it received this spot felt richer.
The greenhouse was flooded with steam, and it was mercifully warm inside. Fumiko was making her selection of flowers. A bee rested its wings on a purple hyacinth. In contrast to the desolate outdoors, it was a riot of colour inside the greenhouse. Snapdragons, yellow-and-red Venus flytraps, blue watering cans, scarlet tulips just come into flower.
Fumiko finally held high a pot of cyclamens with their crimson velvet petals and strongly gradated leaves.
‘I’ll have this one! I’ve decided!’
That was the moment she selected flowers that would match the colour of her own blood, a perfect bedside companion for her death. Kurita watched Fumiko utter a cry of delight as she raised the 150-yen pot in her hands. The quagmire of love in human life, the struggle to make a living, coquettish purity and brutish maternal love. All these experiences came together in that instant when she lifted a cheap pot of cyclamens to the heavens. It served as a full-throated defence of herself and as a beautiful crystallization of everything phoney in the world. How much more appropriate it would have been if those flowers had been artificial!
‘I hate this woman. I really hate her. How happy I’d be to return to the past and make her barren. If the child she left with her estranged husband were a fiction, if everything she told me were a lie, then her rejection of me would be an act of utter purity. If I knew that all the human shackles Fumiko used to protect her body with were built on lies, I could kill her without any qualms. But Fumiko has a human scent about her that makes me hold back.’
Such were Kurita’s thoughts. Fumiko’s spiteful cry of delight. The exaggerated way she pressed her cheek against the flowers. He was offended by the small-minded way she adhered to these acts of human life. The vivid earth-red of the unglazed flowerpot rang out its clear song of life like a polished brass trumpet, and he was tossed aside as if he did not exist. Fumiko’s small, almost expressionless face said only one thing:
