13



C r e t a K a n o' s Story C o n t i n u e d



Creta Kano was stark naked. Facing toward my side of the bed, she lay there asleep, with
nothing on, not even a cover, revealing two well-shaped breasts, two small pink nipples, and,
below a perfectly flat stomach, a black triangle of pubic hair, looking like a shaded area in a
drawing. Her skin was very white, with a newly minted glow. At a loss to explain her
presence here, I nevertheless went on staring at her beautiful body. She had her knees closed
tightly together and slightly bent, her legs in perfect alignment. Her hair fell forward, covering
half her face, which made it impossible for me to see her eyes, but she was obviously in a
deep sleep: my turning on the bedside lamp had caused not the slightest tremble, and her
breathing was quiet and regular. I myself, though, was now wide awake. I took a thin summer
comforter from the closet and spread it over her. Then I turned out the lamp and, still in my
pajamas, went to the kitchen to sit at the table for a while.
I recalled my mark. That patch on my cheek was still slightly warm to the touch. It was
still there, all right-I had no need to look in the mirror. It wasn't the kind of little nothing that
just disappears by itself overnight. I thought about looking up a nearby dermatologist in the
phone book when it got light out, but how could I answer if a doctor asked me what I thought


the cause might be? I was in a well for two or three days. No, it had nothing to do with work
or anything; I was just there to do a little thinking. I figured the bottom of a well would be a
good place for that. No, I didn't take any food with me. No, it wasn't on my property; it
belonged to another house. A vacant house in the neighborhood. I went in without permission.
I sighed. I could never say these things to anyone, of course.
I set my elbows on the table and, without really intending to, found myself thinking in
strangely vivid detail about Creta Kano's naked body. She was sound asleep in my bed. I
thought about the time in my dream when I joined my body with hers as she wore Kumiko's
dress. I still had a clear impression of the touch of her skin, the weight of her flesh. Without a
step-by-step investigation of that event, I would not be able to distinguish the point at which
the real ended and the unreal took over. The wall separating the two regions had begun to
melt. In my memory, at least, the real and the unreal seemed to be residing together with
equal weight and vividness. I had joined my body with Creta Kano's, and at the same time, I
had not.
To clear my head of these jumbled sexual images, I had to go to the washbasin and splash
my face with cold water. A little while later, I looked in on Creta Kano. She was still sound
asleep. She had pushed the cover down to her waist. From where I stood, I could see only her
back. It reminded me of my last view of Kumiko's back. Now that I thought about it, Creta
Kano's figure was amazingly like Kumiko's. I had failed to notice the resemblance until now
because their hair and their taste in clothes and their makeup were so utterly different. They
were the same height and appeared to be about the same weight. They probably wore the
same dress size.
I carried my own summer comforter to the living room, stretched out on the sofa, and
opened my book. I had been reading a history book from the library. It was all about Japanese
management of Manchuria before the war and the battle with the Soviets in Nomonhan.
Lieutenant Mamiya's story had aroused my interest in continental affairs of the period, and I
had borrowed several books on the subject. Now, however, less than ten minutes into the
finely detailed historical narrative, I was falling asleep. I laid the book on the floor, intending
to rest my eyes for a few moments, but I fell into a deep sleep, with the lights still on.
A sound from the kitchen woke me up. When I went to investigate, Creta Kano was there,
making breakfast, wearing a white T-shirt and blue shorts, both of which belonged to
Kumiko.
"Where are your clothes?" I demanded, standing in the kitchen door.
"Oh, I'm sorry. You were asleep, so I took the liberty of borrowing some of your wife's
clothing. I knew it was terribly forward of me, but I didn't have a thing to wear," said Creta
Kano, turning just her head to look at me. At some point since I last saw her, she had reverted
to her usual sixties style of hair and makeup, lacking only the fake eyelashes.
"No, that's no problem," I said. "What I want to know is what happened to your clothes."
"I lost them," she said simply.
"Lost them?"
"Yes. I lost them somewhere."
I stepped into the kitchen and watched, leaning against the table, as Creta Kano made an
omelette. With deft movements, she cracked the eggs, added seasoning, and beat the mixture.
"Meaning you came here naked?"
"Yes, that is correct," said Creta Kano, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. "I
was completely naked. You know that, Mr. Okada. You put the cover on me."
"Well, true enough," I mumbled. "But what I'd like to know is, where and how did you
lose your clothing, and how did you manage to get here with nothing on?"
"I don't know that any better than you do," said Creta Kano, while shaking the frying pan
to fold the omelette over on itself.
"You don't know that any better than I do," I said. Creta Kano slipped the omelette onto a


plate and garnished it with a few stalks of freshly steamed broccoli. She had also made toast,
which she set on the table, along with coffee. I put out the butter and salt and pepper. Then,
like a newly married couple, we sat down to breakfast, facing each other.
It was then that I recalled my mark. Creta Kano had shown no surprise when she looked at
me, and she asked me nothing about it. I reached up to touch the spot and found it slightly
warm, as before. "Does that hurt, Mr. Okada?" "No, not at all," I said.
Creta Kano stared at my face for a time. "It looks like a mark," she said.
"It looks like a mark to me too," I said. "I'm wondering whether I should show it to a
doctor or not."
"It strikes me as something that a doctor would not be able to handle."
"You may be right," I said. "But I can't just ignore it."
Fork in hand, Creta Kano thought for a moment. "If you have shopping or other business,
I could do it for you. You can stay inside as long as you like, if you would rather not go out."
"I'm grateful for the offer, but you must have your own things to do, and I can't just stay
holed up in here forever."
Creta Kano thought about that for a while too. "Malta Kano would probably know how to
deal with this."
"Would you mind getting in touch with her for me, then?"
"Malta Kano gets in touch with other people, but she does not allow other people to get in
touch with her." Creta Kano bit into a piece of broccoli.
"But_you can get in touch with her, I'm sure?"
"Of course. We're sisters."
"Well, next time you talk to her, why don't you ask her about my mark? Or you could ask
her to get in touch with me."
"I am sorry, but that is something I cannot do. I am not allowed to approach my sister on
someone else's behalf. It's a sort of rule we have."
Buttering my toast, I let out a sigh. "You mean to say, if I have something I need to talk to
Malta Kano about, all I can do is wait for her to get in touch with me?"
"That is exactly what I mean," said Creta Kano. Then she nodded. "But about that mark.
Unless it hurts or itches, I suggest that you forget about it for a while. I never let things like
that bother me. And you should not let it bother you, either, Mr. Okada. People just get these
things sometimes."
"I wonder," I said.
For several minutes after that, we went on eating our breakfast in silence. I hadn't eaten
breakfast with another person for quite a while now, and this one was particularly delicious.
Creta Kano seemed pleased when I told her this.
"Anyhow," I said, "about your clothes ..."
"Does it bother you that I put on your wife's clothing without permission?" she asked,
with obvious concern.
"No, not at all. I don't care what you wear of Kumiko's. She left them here, after all. What
I'm concerned about is how you lost your own clothes."
"And not just my clothes. My shoes too."
"So how did it happen?"
"I can't remember," said Creta Kano. "All I know is I woke up in your bed with nothing
on. I can't remember what happened before that."
"You did go down into the well, didn't you-after I left?"
"That I do remember. And I fell asleep down there. But I can't remember anything after
that."
"Which means you don't have any recollection of how you got out of the well?"
"None at all. There is a gap in my memory." Creta Kano held up both index fingers, about
eight inches apart. How much time that was supposed to represent I had no idea.


"I don't suppose you remember what you did with the rope ladder, either. It's gone, you
know."
"I don't know anything about the ladder. I don't even remember if I climbed it to get out
of the well."
I glared at the coffee cup in my hand for a time. "Do you mind showing me the bottoms of
your feet?" I asked.
"No, not at all," said Creta Kano. She sat down in the chair next to mine and stretched her
legs out in my direction so that I could see the soles of her feet. I took her ankles in my hands
and examined her soles. They were perfectly clean. Beautifully formed, the soles had not a
mark on them- no cuts, no mud, nothing at all.
"No mud, no cuts," I said.
"I see," said Creta Kano.
"It was raining all day yesterday. If you lost your shoes somewhere and walked here from
there, you should have some mud on your feet. And you must have come in through the
garden. But your feet are clean, and there's no mud anywhere."
"I see."
"Which means you didn't walk here barefoot from anywhere."
Creta Kano inclined her head slightly to one side as if impressed. "This is all logically
consistent," she said.
"It may be logically consistent, but it's not getting us anywhere," I said. "Where did you
lose your shoes and clothes, and how did you walk here from there?"
Creta Kano shook her head. "I have no idea," she said.



While she stood at the sink, intently washing the dishes, I stayed at the kitchen table,
thinking about these things. Of course, I had no idea, either.
"Do these things happen to you often-that you can't remember where you've been?" I
asked.
"This is not the first time that something like this has happened to me, when I can't recall
where I have been or what I was doing. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen to me now
and then. I once lost some clothes, too. But this is the first time I lost all my clothes and my
shoes and everything."
Creta Kano turned off the water and wiped the table with a dish towel.
"You know, Creta Kano," I said, "you haven't told me your whole story. Last time, you
were partway through when you disappeared. Remember? If you don't mind, I'd like to hear
the rest. You told me how the mob got hold of you and made you work as one of their
prostitutes, but you didn't tell me what happened after you met Noboru Wataya and slept with
him."
Creta Kano leaned against the kitchen sink and looked at me. Drops of water on her hands
ran down her fingers and fell to the floor. The shape of her nipples showed clearly through the
white T-shirt, a vivid reminder to me of the naked body I had seen the night before.
"All right, then. I will tell you everything that happened after that. Right now."
Creta Kano sat down once again in the seat opposite mine.
"The reason I left that day when I was in the middle of my story, Mr. Okada, is that I was
not fully prepared to tell it all. I had started my story precisely because I felt I ought to tell
you, as honestly as possible, what really happened to me. But I found I could not go all the
way to the end. You must have been shocked when I disappeared so suddenly."
Creta Kano put her hands on the table and looked straight at me as she spoke.
"Well, yes, I was shocked, though it was not the most shocking thing that's happened to
me lately."





"As I told you before, the very last customer I had as a prostitute of the flesh was Noboru
Wataya. The second time I met him, as a client of Malta Kano's, I recognized him
immediately. It would have been impossible for me to forget him. Whether he remembered
me or not I cannot be certain. Mr. Wataya is not a person who shows his feelings.
"But let me go back and put things in order. First I will tell you about the time I had
Noboru Wataya as a customer. That would be six years ago.
"As I told you before, I was in a state at that time in which I had absolutely no perception
of pain. And not only pain: I had no sensations of any kind. I lived in a bottomless numbness.
Of course, I don't mean to say that I was unable to feel any sensations at all-I knew when
something was hot or cold or painful. But these sensations came to me as if from a distance,
from a world that had nothing to do with me. Which is why I felt no resistance to the idea of
having sexual relations with men for money. No matter what anyone did to me, the sensations
I felt did not belong to me. My unfeeling flesh was not my flesh.
"Now, let's see, I told you about how I had been recruited by the mob's prostitution ring.
When they told me to sleep with men I did it, and when they paid me I took it. I left off at that
point." I nodded to her.
"That day they told me to go to a room on the sixteenth floor of a downtown hotel. The
client had the unusual name of Wataya. I knocked on the door and went in, to find the man
sitting on the sofa. He had apparently been drinking room-service coffee while reading a
book. He wore a green polo shirt and brown cotton pants. His hair was short, and he wore
brown-framed glasses. On the coffee table in front of him were his cup and a coffeepot and
the book. He seemed to have been deeply absorbed in his reading: there was a kind of
excitement still in his eyes. His features were in no way remarkable, but those eyes of his had
an energy about them that was almost weird. When I first saw them, I thought for a moment
that I was in the wrong room. But it was not the wrong room. The man told me to come inside
and lock the door.
"Still seated on the sofa, without saying a word, he ran his eyes over my body. From head
to foot. That was what usually happened when I entered a client's room. Most men would
look me over. Excuse me for asking, Mr. Okada, but have you ever bought a prostitute?" I
said that I had not.
"It's as if they were looking over merchandise. It doesn't take long to get used to being
looked at like that. They are paying money for flesh, after all; it makes sense for them to
examine the goods. But the way that man looked at me was different. He seemed to be
looking through my flesh to something on the other side. His eyes made me feel uneasy, as if
I had become a half-transparent human being.
"I was a little confused, I suppose: I dropped my handbag on the floor. It made a small
sound, but I was in such an abstracted state that, for a time, I was almost unaware of what I
had done. Then I stooped down to pick up the bag. The clasp had opened when it hit the floor,
and some of my cosmetics had fallen out. I picked up my eyebrow pencil and lip cream and a
small bottle of eau de cologne, returning each of them to my bag. He kept those eyes of his
trained on me the whole time.
"When I had finished gathering up my things from the floor and putting them back in the
bag, he told me to undress. I asked him if it would be all right for me to take a shower first,
because I had been perspiring quite a bit. The weather was hot that day, and I had been sweat-
ing on the subway. He didn't care about that, he said. He didn't have much time. He wanted
me to undress right away.
"Once I was naked, he told me to lie on the bed facedown, which I did. He ordered me to
stay still, to keep my eyes closed, and not to speak until I was spoken to.


"He sat down next to me with his clothes on. That was all he did: sit down. He did not lay
a finger on me. He just sat and looked down at my naked body. He kept this up for some ten
minutes, while I lay there, un-moving, facedown. I could feel his eyes boring into the nape of
my neck, my back, my buttocks, and my legs, with almost painful intensity. It occurred to me
that he might be impotent. Customers like that turn up now and then. They buy a prostitute,
have her undress, and they look at her. Some will undress the woman and finish themselves
off in her presence. All kinds of men buy prostitutes, for all kinds of reasons. I just assumed
he was one of those.
"After a while, though, he reached out and began to touch me. His ten fingers moved
down my body, from my shoulders to my back, from my back to my buttocks, in search of
something. This was not foreplay. Neither, of course, was it a massage. His fingers moved
over my body with the utmost care, as if tracing a route on a map. And all the while he
touched my flesh, he seemed to be thinking-not in any ordinary sense of the word, but
seriously thinking about something with the utmost concentration.
"One minute his fingers would seem to be wandering here and there at random, and the
next they would come to a stop and remain for a long time in the one place. It felt as if the
fingers themselves were going from confusion to certainty. Am I making myself clear? Each
finger seemed to be alive and thinking, with a will of its own. It was a very strange sensation.
Strange and disturbing.
"And yet the touch of his fingers aroused me sexually. For the first time in my life. Sex
had been nothing but a source of pain for me until I became a prostitute. The mere thought of
it had filled me with fear-fear of the pain I knew I would have to endure. Just the opposite
happened after I became a prostitute: I felt nothing. I no longer felt pain, but I felt no other
sensations, either. I would sigh and pretend to be aroused for the pleasure of the customer, but
it was all fake, a professional act. When he touched me, though, my sighs were real. They
came out of my body's innermost depths. I knew that something inside me had begun to
move, as if my center of gravity were changing locations in my body, first to one place and
then to another.
"Eventually, the man stopped moving his fingers. With his hands on my waist, he seemed
to be thinking. Through his fingertips, I could tell that he was steadying himself, quietly
regularizing his breathing. Then he began to remove his clothing. I kept my eyes closed and
my face buried in the pillow, waiting for what would come next. Once he was naked, he
spread my arms and legs open wide.
"The room was almost frighteningly quiet. The only sound was the soft rush of the air
conditioner. The man himself made almost no perceptible sounds. I couldn't even hear him
breathing. He placed his palms on my back. I went limp. His penis touched my buttocks, but
it was still soft.
"Just then the phone on the night table began to ring. I opened my eyes and turned my
head to look at the man's face, but he seemed unaware that the phone was ringing. It rang
eight or nine times and then stopped. Again the room became silent."
Creta Kano paused at that point for a few measured breaths. She remained silent, looking
at her own hands. "I'm sorry," she said, "but do you mind if I take a short break?"
"Not at all," I said. I refilled my coffee cup and took a sip. She drank her cold water. We
sat there without speaking for a good ten minutes.
"His fingers began to move again, touching every part of my body," Creta Kano
continued, "every part without exception. I lost the power to think. My ears were filled with
the sound of my own heart, pounding but with strange slowness. I could no longer control
myself. I cried out aloud again and again as he caressed me. I tried to keep my voice in check,
but another someone was using my voice to moan and shout. I felt as if every screw in my
body had come loose. Then, after a very long time, and with me still lying facedown, he put
something inside me from behind. What it was, I still have no idea. It was huge and hard, but


it was not his penis. I am certain of that. I remember thinking that I had been right: he was
impotent, after all.
"Whatever it was that he put inside me, it made me feel pain for the first time since my
failed suicide attempt-real, intense pain that belonged to me and to no one else. How can I put
this? The pain was almost impossibly intense, as if my physical self were splitting in two
from the inside out. And yet, as terrible as it felt, I was writhing as much in pleasure as in
pain. The pleasure and pain were one. Do you see what I mean? The pain was founded on
pleasure, and the pleasure on pain. I had to swallow the two as a single entity. In the midst of
this pain and pleasure, my flesh went on splitting in two. There was no way for me to prevent
it from happening. Then something very weird occurred. Out from between the two cleanly
split halves of my physical self came crawling a thing that I had never seen or touched before.
How large it was I could not tell, but it was as wet and slippery as a newborn baby. I had
absolutely no idea what it was. It had always been inside me, and yet it was something of
which I had no knowledge. This man had drawn it out of me.
"I wanted to know what it was. I wanted to see it with my own eyes. It was a part of me,
after all, I had a right to see it. But this was impossible. I was caught in the torrent of pleasure
and pain. An entirely physical being, I could only cry out, and drool, and churn my hips. The
mere act of opening my eyes was an impossibility.
"I then reached the sexual peak-although, rather than a peak, it felt more as if I were being
thrown down from a high cliff. I screamed, and I felt as if every piece of glass in the room had
shattered. I not only felt it: I actually saw and heard the windows and drinking glasses
shattering into powdered fragments and felt them raining down on me. I then felt horribly sick
to my stomach. My consciousness began to slip away, and my body turned cold. I know this
will sound strange, but I felt as if I had turned into a bowl of cold porridge-all sticky and
lumpy, and the lumps were throbbing, slowly and hugely, with each beat of my heart. I recog-
nized this throbbing: it had happened to me before. Nor did it take very long for me to recall
what it was. I knew it as that dull, fatal, never-ending pain that I had experienced before my
failed suicide attempt. And, like a crowbar, the pain was prying open the lid of my
consciousness-prying it open with an irresistible force and dragging out the jellied contents of
my memory without reference to my will. Strange as it may sound, this was like a dead
person watching her own autopsy. Do you see what I mean? I felt as if I were watching from
some vantage point as my body was being cut open and one slimy organ after another was
being pulled out of me.
"I continued to lie there, drooling on the pillow, my body racked with convulsions, and
incontinent. I knew that I should try to control myself, but I had lost the power for such
control. Every screw in my body had net only come loose but had fallen out. In my clouded
brain, I felt with incredible intensity exactly how alone and how powerless I was. Everything
came gushing out of me. Things both tangible and intangible turned to liquid and flowed out
through my flesh like saliva or urine. I knew that I should not let this happen, that I should not
allow my very self to spill out this way and be lost forever, but there was nothing I could do
to stanch the flow. I could only watch it happen. How long this continued, I have no idea. It
seemed as if all my memories, all my consciousness, had just slipped away. Everything that
had been inside me was outside now. Eventually, like a heavy curtain falling, darkness
enveloped me in an instant.
"And when I regained consciousness, I was a different person." Creta Kano stopped
speaking at that point and looked at me. "That is what happened then," she said softly. I said
nothing but waited instead for the rest of her story.