Nails and Eyes E-Book

Kaori Fujino

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 153

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Tense, subtly disturbing literary horror from a prize-winning Japanese writer - part of Pushkin's second Japanese Novella seriesA young girl loses her mother, and her father blindly invites his secret lover into the family home to care for her. As she obsessively tries to curate a pristine life, this new interloper remains indifferent to the girl, who seems to record her every move - and she realises only too late all that she has failed to see.With masterful narrative control, Nails and Eyes builds to a conclusion of disturbing power. Paired with two additional stories of unsettled minds and creeping tension, it introduces a daring new voice in Japanese literature.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title PageNails and EyesWhat Shoko ForgetsMinute FearsAbout the AuthorsJapanese Fiction Available and Coming Soon From Pushkin PressCopyright

Nails and Eyes

“I can’t marry you.” That’s what my father told you on the first day of his affair with you. You were so surprised all you could say was, “Oh.” My father went on, with what seemed to be genuine regret, that he had a wife and child. “Oh,” you replied again. You didn’t really care one way or the other. At just that moment, a fleck of mascara had dislodged from your eyelash, slipped into your right eye and got under your contact lens. You squeezed your eyes shut, then opened them wide, then bent forward, blinking repeatedly. But it still stung, so there was nothing to do but remove the contact lens from your eye. You had worn hard lenses since junior high. During the time it took you to hold the lens up to the light, give it a quick lick and get it back into your eye—all with a practised hand—my father kept on talking. “I have a child,” he repeated. “She’s still a little girl.”

“OK, I understand,” you said. You said it to let him off the hook, because my father clearly wanted to stop talking about it. But what you really wanted to say was, It’s none of my business whether you have a child or not.

But a year and a half later, after everything had changed and my father broached the subject of marriage, you warmed to the fact that he had a little girl, because you had kind of started to want one. You were in your mid-twenties at this point, and your friends had started to have babies. But pregnancy seemed like a total burden to you. One of your friends was deemed to be high risk for a miscarriage and spent three months confined to a hospital bed. When you went to visit her, she was lying flat on the bed. She wasn’t allowed even to sit up, apparently. You looked down at her face stripped of its make-up, her scraggly eyebrows. Her arm with the IV drip was so puffy it looked like it would burst.

“It’s so itchy I can hardly stand it,” your friend said, laughing through her ordeal.

You stood there and imagined how you were going to suffer when you got pregnant. You didn’t know when your turn would come, but this is the way pregnancy has ravaged women since the dawn of time. And still does. And always will. And unless you made up your mind to refuse all of this, your body would be ravaged, too. But you didn’t actually think this, of course. It was so plainly obvious that there was really no need for anyone to consciously think it. What you really thought was how uninterested you were in getting pregnant at this point, and how convenient it was that someone else had given birth to the child. Meaning me. I was three years old. Which pleased you, bringing back memories of when you were little and how you had wanted a dog, or a cat, or a bird. Your parents had no interest in animals and held firm, but they weakened when you begged for a hamster. “Hamsters don’t make too much noise,” your parents had reasoned.

You were small at the time, but the hamster was smaller. So small it was hard for you to believe a pet could be that small. You would pinch its twitchy hind feet together, and lift them up to see if those little pink pads really did belong to a living creature and the whole thing wasn’t just some mechanical wind-up toy. The hamster died after four months. You had never cleaned its cage. Your parents offered to buy you a new hamster.

“Naw, that’s all right,” you said.

“Really?”

“Really.”

One of your parents, you can’t remember which, placed a hand on your head and said that you should just let them know if you change your mind. Lying on your stomach on the floor, you peered into the cage. The hamster wasn’t there any more, so the exercise wheel and tunnel and water bottle all belonged to you. When you tired of imagining yourself having shrunk down to hamster size and playing on all the fun things and curling up to sleep in the hamster hideaway, the cage became just a place to stack your notebooks and textbooks. It took a full year for your mother to realize that you hadn’t kept the cage out of fondness for the hamster, but simply because no one had bothered to throw it out. After she got rid of it, you were pleased. “Oh, my room is so much bigger now,” you said, letting your backpack slide from your shoulders to the floor.

When my father said to you, “She’s really a sweet-tempered, quiet girl,” your fingertips were tracing the stem of the teacup. It reminded you of the supple curve of the hamster’s twiggy legs. “Hina’s not fussy—she’ll eat anything—and she doesn’t have any allergies,” my father went on, referring to me, his only child, and in that brief flicker of time, all your memories of the hamster disappeared.

“I sound like a father, I know, but, honestly, she has very good manners for her age. She’s just such a good girl. She’s a little confused about everything right now, all that’s happened. But, you know, give it a little time and…”

My father wanted you to just move in, take it day by day—no need to overthink anything. Of course he was thinking he wanted to marry you somewhere along the line, but for now you could just move in, and then you could decide whether or not it was working out. True, if you waited too long to figure it out, he said, that might be a problem, “If you consider how tough it would be for a little girl.”

My father was in his late thirties at the time, so there was an age gap between the two of you, but nothing that anyone would gawk at. And he had a good job at a company that was quite well known to people who knew the industry. What he wanted was someone to take care of things at home and to take charge of his little girl. Meaning, if you moved in, you wouldn’t need to work.

You were a temp at this point. You didn’t love your job, but you didn’t hate it, either. The ups and downs of the job weren’t big enough to make you love it or hate it. You went to work every day because there had never been an option not to go to work, but it wasn’t that painful. Or if it was, it was a pain that you just had to get used to, like the one that came from sticking hard contact lenses into your dry eyes every day.

But the moment the actual possibility of not having to work was dangled right in front of you, the thought of going in the next day suddenly seemed like a very dreary prospect. Going to the office had always been a drag, but never to this extent. A tingling started in your legs, and soon your whole body wanted out of this job. The vibe at work had not been good lately, but you weren’t one to do anything to make it better. You knew from experience things were only going to get worse. The teacup in your hand was almost empty, but it suddenly felt heavy. When you set it down, it clanged into the saucer.

“How about six months?” you said. “Let’s try living together for six months. And then I’ll decide.”

My father nodded. He was smiling.

And with that, going to work was no longer the slightest burden. No, now you thought it was wonderful. Because work was now in the past. Even the things that technically belonged to the future—giving notice, clocking in until your last day—all of that was in “the past”.

What you really looked forward to, more than living with my father, was living with me. You have a younger brother, but when he was a child, so were you. Since you became an adult, you had not had a single child anywhere near your orbit. A few times, my father brought me along to get to know you, and each time I was quiet and well behaved—exactly as my father had promised. I didn’t speak unless I was spoken to. I replied to questions in my tiny, clear voice. You gazed at my spindly neck and wrists. You thought of me as something of an animal.

Yes, I am an animal—the same as you.

You thought that raising my father’s child would be valuable practice for raising your own child someday. You stopped by your parents’ house on your day off to tell your mother what you had decided to do.

“But don’t tell Dad anything just yet,” you said to her.

“Well, I suppose that’s OK, but…” There was dread in your mother’s response.

“I mean, this might not lead anywhere. If we decide to get married, we can tell him then.”

“Yes, but…”

Your mother didn’t approve, but she knew that you weren’t the type of daughter to care what her parents thought about anything. The days when they could say no to you and expect you to cry and scream and then comply had come to an end when you were in junior high. Your mother called your brother, who was going to college in another prefecture.

“Your sister says that we should keep it a secret from your father.”

“Aw, just let her do things the way she wants to,” he said.

Your mother gave up the fight soon enough. She knew from the start that she wouldn’t get anywhere with you. She was intimidated by her own daughter. But when she heard that my father had asked for your help raising me less than two months after my mother’s death, it dawned on her: “You were having an affair!”

“If you want to put it that way, yeah. But I didn’t plan to steal him away from his wife. We were just dating,” you said, laughing with embarrassment.

My mother died in an accident. At least, it was an accident from all appearances. Not even my father knew what really happened. My father’s work had posted him in a different city, two hours away by bullet train. Every two weeks he’d return to the apartment where my mother and I had stayed behind. But then he met you in the city where he worked, and in order to spend more time with you, often he did not come home as planned. He would make excuses that seemed plausible enough: I have to work straight through my days off, or I have to go drinking with the guys from the office, or I think I’m coming down with something, so I’d better stay here and sleep it off. You never knew what my mother thought when that happened. My father never said anything to you about it, and it never occurred to you to ask. You were indifferent to whoever my father’s wife happened to be. You never dreamed you would come into possession of me, so you were indifferent to his child as well. Sometimes you would forget whether I was a girl or a boy. None of this is to say that you weren’t indifferent to my father too. You showed no interest in learning about his work, or which teams he rooted for, or what movies or music he liked, or what he had been like as a boy. Not that you were against knowing about these things. If my father started talking about something, you would listen, use the appropriate cues to show you were listening and ask the appropriate questions for him to continue his story. But if my father didn’t initiate the conversation, you didn’t bother to start one.

My father was the same way. The two of you had a lot in common.

You met my father at an eye clinic where you were both patients. You had done damage to your corneas by wearing your contact lenses for too many hours a day. My father didn’t have any problems with his vision, but he had a case of allergic conjunctivitis, brought on by hay fever. It was just the two of you in the reception room, but you found yourselves waiting a long time. You were wearing a pair of ridiculously large black-framed glasses that didn’t suit your face at all, and you were passing the time flipping through a fashion magazine. My father’s eyes were bloodshot, and he was pulling tissue after tissue out of the box on the low-slung table and wiping his nose. You were called into the examination room first. When my father was called in, you were seated in a chair wearing a pair of those clunky optical trial frames they use to determine your prescription. The nurse was in front of you, leaning slightly in and switching lenses in and out of the slots. The trial frames were perfectly round and even less flattering than the glasses you had been wearing earlier. At a moment when the nurse was sliding a different lens into the slot, you looked out of the corner of your eye at my father and flashed a smile, just a slight curl upward at the corners of your mouth. And seeing your smile, my father realized that he had been staring at you with a dumb smile on his own face.

“You can have a seat over there,” the nurse said to my father, nodding to the other examination chair. Your face disappeared from view behind the nurse’s back. My father sat down, and idly looked straight ahead at the eye chart’s rows of diminishing rings with notches randomly cut out of them. Even without the light behind the translucent panel turned on, he was able to identify the direction of the gaps in the rings pretty deep into the chart. I can do that, too, actually. My eyesight is fantastic. It’s probably my father’s genes. I wouldn’t know what my mother’s eyesight was like.

My father went back to the eye clinic the following week. It was a suite in a commercial building. You happened to be in the lift when he stepped into it—again wearing those giant black-framed glasses, but with your shoulder-length hair cinched in back and a light pink cardigan draped over your shoulders. You were clutching your wallet and your mobile phone between your hands. You were much shorter than my father initially thought. And yet, the neck that you were showing off was more stocky than slender. My father got off on the eye-clinic floor. You did not. Just before the door closed, you smiled and bowed, slightly, without looking directly at him. Once again my father realized that you were simply responding to him, because he had turned back to smile at you.

You were working for a mail-order company located in the same building. The third time my father visited the clinic, his symptoms had nearly cleared up, and you were no longer wearing your glasses when he stepped into the lift. It was going down, crammed with people. You raised your eyes, coyly, without lifting your head, to look up at my father, when he realized who you were. He also realized, when your eyes met, that he had been staring at your ears, peeking out from your long hair.

You weren’t a beauty queen, you were moderately attractive, but you had the kind of allure that men responded to—and you knew you had it. Your sexual antennae were fine-tuned to detect the slightest interest from a man. And from there you never missed your mark. It was as easy as smushing bugs on a potted plant with your fingertips. You weren’t the type to feel a burning desire for something you didn’t have, and whenever something did land in your clutches, you took what you could get from it and let it go. No need for anything that cramped your style, and no need for anything unreasonably passionate. That was love to you.

During college and the not-quite-two years that you were a full-time company employee, you acquired something of a sordid reputation. At the mail-order company where you were worked as a temp, you once again started tongues wagging. To the other women in the office, it was outrageous—incomprehensible, that both a married man in his mid-thirties and a college part-timer in his early twenties would invent reasons to linger longingly at your desk and try to impress you, of all people. You were a little less obvious than the men, but it was clear to the women that you simply couldn’t decide which one to choose. Or rather, which one you should choose first. Based on the blowback you got from that entanglement, you weren’t about to let word get out when things started up with my father.

You were breezing your way through life, with no sense of the toll of time. There were always going to be people who loved you and people who hated you, no matter what you did, so why let anything trouble you? You felt that your life would always be this way. Not as one day going by, and then another, but life as an ever-expanding single day. And yet, time did go by. You extended your temp contract. There was a natural disaster that consumed the entire country. You learned about it from a news bulletin on television. Your co-workers were shaken, horrified by the tragedy, and when you were among them, you were shaken and horrified too. But when you were alone, the emotions vanished. You weren’t particularly fearful for yourself. You supposed that at some point—maybe not now, but at some point—the same kind of calamity might happen to you. But actually, even that wasn’t your own thought. A co-worker had come up with it. You had just agreed with it. “That’s right,” you said. “So scary,” you said. Because you were expected to. Fear rolled right off of you. Fear was like a pet to you: something you picked up to get a better look at, but that you soon tired of.