14
Creta Kano's New Departure

Creta Kano went on with her story.
"For some days after that, I lived with the feeling that my body had fallen apart. Walking,
I had no sense that my feet were actually touching the ground. Eating, I had no sense that I
was actually chewing on anything. Sitting still, I had the terrifying feeling that my body was
either endlessly falling or endlessly floating up beneath a big balloon kind of thing, through
infinite space. I could no longer connect my body's movements or sensations with my own
self. They were functioning as they wished, without reference to my will, without order or
direction. And yet I knew no way to bring calm to this intense chaos. All I could do was wait
for things to settle down in their own good time. I locked myself in my room from morning to
night, hardly eating a thing, and telling my family only that I was not feeling well.
"Some days went by like this-three or four days, I would say. And then, all of a sudden,
everything quieted down, as if a wild wind had blown through and gone on its way. I looked
around, and I examined myself, and I realized that I had become a new person, entirely
different from what I had been until then. This was my third self. My first self had been the
one that lived in the endless anguish of pain. My second self had been the one that lived in a
state of pain-free numbness. The first one had been me in my original state, unable to release
the heavy yoke of pain from my neck. And when I did attempt to release it-which is to say,
when I tried to kill myself and failed-I became my second self: an interim me. True, the
physical pain that had tortured me until then had disappeared, but all other sensations had
retreated with it into the haze. My will to live, my physical vitality, my mental powers of
concentration: all these had disappeared along with the pain. After I passed through that
strange period of transition, what emerged was a brand-new me. Whether this was the me that
should have been there all along I could not yet tell. But I did have the sense, however vague
and undefined it might be, that I was at least heading in the right direction."
Creta Kano raised her eyes and looked directly at me, as if she wanted to hear my
impressions of her story. Her hands still rested on the table. "So, then," I said, "what you're
saying is that the man gave you a new self, am I right?"
"Perhaps he did," said Creta Kano, nodding. Her face was as expressionless as the bottom
of a dried-up pond. "Being caressed by that man, and held by him, and made to feel such
impossibly intense sexual pleasure for the first time in my life, I experienced some kind of
gigantic physical change. Why it happened, and why, of all people, it had to be that man who
made it happen, I have no idea. Whatever the process may have been, the fact remains that at
the end of it, I found myself in a whole new container. And once I had passed through the
deep confusion I mentioned earlier, I sought to accept this new self as something truer-if for
no other reason than that I had been enabled to escape from my profound numbness, which
had been such a suffocating prison to me.
"Still, the bad aftertaste remained with me for a long time, like a dark shadow. Each time I
recalled those ten fingers of his, each time I recalled that thing he put inside me, each time I
recalled that slimy, lumpish thing that came (or felt as if it came) out of me, I felt terribly
uneasy. I felt a sense of anger-and despair-that I had no way to deal with. I tried to erase that
day from my memory, but this I was unable to do, because the man had pried open something
inside my body. The sensation of having been pried open stayed with me, inseparably bonded
to the memory of that man, along with an unmistakable sense of defilement. It was a con-
tradictory feeling. Do you see what I mean? The transformation that I had experienced was
undoubtedly something right and true, but the transformation had been caused by something


filthy, something wrong and false. This contradiction-this split-would torment me for a very
long time."
Again Creta Kano stared at her hands atop the table.
"After that, I stopped selling my body. There was no longer any point to it." Creta Kano's
face remained expressionless.
"You could quit just like that?" I asked.
She nodded. "Just like that," she said. "I didn't say anything to anybody, just stopped
selling myself, but this caused no problem. It was almost disappointingly easy. I had thought
they would at least call me, and I was bracing myself for the day, but it never came. They
never said a thing to me. They knew my address. They knew my phone number. They could
have threatened me. But nothing happened.
"And so, on the surface at least, I had become an ordinary girl again. By that time, I had
repaid my parents everything I owed them, and I had put away a good deal of money. With
what I gave him, my brother had bought another new car to waste his time driving around in,
but he could never have imagined what I had done to pay him back.
"I needed time to get used to my new self. What kind of a being was this self of mine?
How did it function? What did it feel-and how? I had to grasp each of these things through
experience, to memorize and stockpile them. Do you see what I am saying? Virtually
everything inside me had spilled out and been lost. At the same time that I was entirely new, I
was almost entirely empty. I had to fill in that blank, little by little. One by one, with my own
hands, I had to make this thing I called "I"-or, rather, make the things that constituted me.
"I was still officially a student, but I had no intention of returning to the university. I
would leave the house in the morning, go to a park, and sit by myself on a bench all day,
doing nothing. Or I would wander up and down the paths in the park. When it rained, I would
go to the library, put a book on the table in front of me, and pretend to be reading. I
sometimes spent the whole day in a movie theater or riding round and round the city on the
Yamanote Circle Line. I felt as if I were floating in a pitch-dark space, all by myself. There
was no one I could go to for advice. If my sister Malta had been there, I could have shared
everything with her, but at that time, of course, she was in seclusion far away on the island of
Malta, performing her austerities. I did not know her address. I had no way of contacting her.
And so I had to solve these problems entirely by myself. No book explained the kind of thing
that I had experienced. Still, although I was lonely, I was not unhappy. I was able to cling to
myself. At least now I had a self to cling to.
"My new self was able to feel pain, though not with that earlier intensity. I could feel it,
but at the same time I had learned a method to escape from it. Which is to say, I was able to
separate from the physical self that was feeling the pain. Do you see what I am saying? I was
able to divide myself into a physical self and a nonphysical self. It may sound difficult when I
describe it like this, but once you learn the method, it is not difficult at all. When pain comes
to me, I leave my physical self. It's just like quietly slipping into the next room when
someone you don't want to meet comes along. I can do it very naturally. I recognize that pain
has come to my body; I feel the existence of the pain; but I am not there. I am in the next
room. And so the yoke of the pain is not able to capture me."
"And you can separate from yourself like that anytime you please?"
"No," said Creta Kano, after thinking about it for a moment. "At first I could do it only
when my body was experiencing physical pain. Pain was the key to the splitting off of my
consciousness. Later, with Malta Kano's help, I learned to do it at will to some extent. But
that was much later.
"Before long, a letter arrived from Malta Kano. She told me that she had finally finished
three years of a kind of training she had been doing on Malta and within the week would be
returning to Japan. She planned to live in Japan permanently from then on. I was thrilled at
the prospect of seeing her again. We had been apart for nearly eight years. And as I mentioned


earlier, Malta was the only person in the world to whom I could freely tell everything that was
in my heart.
"On the day she came back to Japan, I told Malta everything that had happened to me. She
listened to my long, strange story to the very end without comment, without asking a single
question. And when I was finished, she heaved a deep sigh and said to me, 'I know I should
have been with you, I should have been watching over you all this time. For some reason, I
never realized that you had such profound problems. Perhaps it was because you were simply
too close to me. But in any case, there were things I had to do. There were places I had to go,
alone. I had no choice in the matter.'
"I told her that she should not let it bother her. These were my problems, after all, and I
was improving little by little. She thought about this for a while, saying nothing, and then she
said, 'All the things you have been through ever since I left Japan have been painful and bitter
for you, but as you say, you have been moving toward the proper state, step by step. The
worst is over for you, and it will never come back. Such things will never happen to you
again. It will not be easy, but you will be able to forget many things once a certain amount of
time has passed. Without a true self, though, a person can not go on living. It is like the
ground we stand on. Without the ground, we can build nothing.
" There is one thing, however, which you must never forget, and that is that your body has
been defiled by that man. It is a thing that should never have happened. You could have been
lost forever; you might have had to wander forever through genuine nothingness. Fortunately,
the state of your being just happened not to be the real, original you, and so it had the reverse
effect. Instead of trapping you, it liberated you from your transitory state. This happened
through sheer good luck. The defilement, however, remains inside you, and at some point you
will have to rid yourself of it. This is something that I cannot do for you. I cannot even tell
you how to do it. You will have to discover the method for yourself, and do it by yourself.'
"My sister then gave me my new name: Creta Kano. Newly reborn, I needed a new name,
she said. I liked it from the start. Malta Kano then began to use me as a spiritual medium.
Under her guidance, I learned more and more how to control my new self and how to divide
the flesh from the spirit. Finally, for the first time in my life, I became capable of living with a
sense of peace. Of course, my true self was still something that lay beyond my grasp. I was
still lacking too much for that to happen. But now, in Malta Kano, I had a companion by my
side, someone I could depend upon, someone who understood me and accepted me. She be-
came my guide and my protector."
"But then you met Noboru Wataya again, didn't you?"
Creta Kano nodded. "That is true," she said. "I did meet Noboru Wataya again. It
happened early in March of this year. More than five years had passed since I had been taken
by him and undergone my transformation and begun to work with Malta Kano. We came
face-to-face again when he visited our home to see Malta. We did not speak to each other. I
merely caught a glimpse of him in the entryway, but one glimpse was all it took to freeze me
in place as if I had been struck by lightning. It was that man- the last man to buy me.
"I called Malta Kano aside and told her that he was the man who had defiled me. 'Fine,'
she said. 'Just leave everything to me. Don't worry. You keep out of sight. Make sure he
doesn't see you.' I did as I was told. Which is why I do not know what he and Malta Kano
discussed at that point."
"What could Noboru Wataya have possibly wanted from Malta Kano?" Creta Kano
shook her head. "I am sorry, Mr. Okada, I have no idea."
"People come to your house because they want something, isn't that usually the case?"
"Yes, it is."
"What kinds of things do they come for?"
"All kinds of things."
"But what kinds of things? Can you give me an example?"


Creta Kano bit her lip for a moment. "Lost things. Their destinies. The future.
Everything."
"And you two know about those things?"
"We do. Not absolutely everything, but most of the answers are in here," said Creta Kano,
pointing at her temple. "You just have to go inside."
"Like going down into a well?"
"Yes, like that."
I put my elbows on the table and took a long, deep breath. "Now, if you don't mind,
there's something I'd like you to tell me. You showed up in my dreams a few times. You did
this consciously. You willed it to happen. Am I right?"
"Yes, you are right," said Creta Kano. "It was an act of will. I entered your consciousness
and joined my body with yours."
"You can do things like that?"
"Yes, I can. That is one of my functions."
"You and I joined our bodies together in my mind." When I heard myself actually
speaking these words, I felt as if I had just hung a bold surrealistic painting on a white wall.
And then, as if looking at the painting from a distance to make sure it was not hanging
crooked, I said the words again: "You and I joined our bodies together in my mind. But I
never asked you two for anything. It never even crossed my mind to find out anything from
you. Right? So why did you take it upon yourself to do such a thing?"
"Because I was ordered to by Malta Kano."
"Meaning that Malta Kano used you as a medium to hunt around inside my mind. What
was she looking for? Answers for Noboru Wataya? Or for Kumiko?"
Creta Kano said nothing for a time. She seemed confused. "I don't really know," she said.
"I was not given detailed information. That way, I can function more spontaneously as a
medium. My only job is to have people's minds pass through me. It is Malta Kano's job to
assign meaning to what I find there. But please understand, Mr. Okada: Malta Kano is
fundamentally on your side. I hate Noboru Wataya, you see, and Malta Kano's first concern is
for me. She did this for your sake, Mr. Okada. That is what I believe."
Creta Kano went out to shop at the neighborhood supermarket. I gave her money and
suggested that as long as she was going out, she should change into more respectable
clothing. She nodded and went to Kumiko's room, where she put on a white cotton blouse and
a floral-pattern skirt. "It doesn't bother you, Mr. Okada, for me to put on your wife's
clothing?"
I shook my head. "Her letter told me to get rid of it all. No one's going to be bothered if
you wear her things."
Just as I expected, everything fit her perfectly-almost weirdly so. Even her shoe size was
the same. Creta Kano left the house wearing a pair of Kumiko's sandals. The sight of Creta
Kano in Kumiko's clothing made me feel once again that reality was changing its direction
somewhat, the way a huge passenger ship lumbers into a new course.
After Creta Kano went out, I lay on the sofa staring at the garden, my mind a blank. She
came back by taxi thirty minutes later, holding three large bags stuffed with groceries. Then
she made me ham and eggs and a sardine salad.
"Tell me, Mr. Okada, do you have any interest in Crete?" Creta Kano asked without
warning after we had eaten.
"Crete?" I said. "You mean the island of Crete, in the Mediterranean?"
"Yes."
I shook my head. "I don't know," I said. "I'm not uninterested, I suppose. I've never much
thought about it." "Would you like to go to Crete with me?"
"Go to Crete with you?" I echoed.
"Well, actually, I would like to get away from Japan for a while. That is what I was


thinking about the whole time I was in the well after you left. Ever since Malta gave me the
name , I have felt that I would like to go to Crete someday. To prepare, I read many books
about the island. I even studied Greek by myself, so that I would be able to live there when
the time came. I have some fairly substantial savings put away, enough so that we could live
there for a good length of time without difficulty. You would not have to worry about
money."
"Does Malta Kano know you're planning to go to Crete?"
"No. I haven't said anything to her about it, but I am sure she would not be opposed. She
would probably think it was a good thing for me. She has been using me as a medium during
the past five years, but it is not as if she has merely been exploiting me as some kind of tool.
She has been doing it to aid in my recovery as well. She believes that by passing the minds or
egos of a variety of people through me, she will make it possible for me to obtain a firm grasp
on my own self. Do you see what I mean? It works for me as a kind of vicarious experience of
what it feels like to have an ego.
"Come to think of it, I have never once in my life said unambiguously to anybody, 'I want
to do this.' In fact, I have never thought to myself, 'I want to do this.' From the moment of
my birth, I lived with pain at the center of my life. My only purpose in life was to find a way
to coexist with intense pain. And after I turned twenty and the pain disappeared when I
attempted to kill myself, a deep, deep numbness came to replace the pain. I was like a walking
corpse. A thick veil of unfeeling was draped over me. I had nothing-not a sliver-of what could
be called my own will. And then, when I had my flesh violated and my mind pried open by
Noboru Wataya, I obtained my third self. Even so, I was still not myself. All I had managed to
do was get a grasp on the minimum necessary container for a self-a mere container. And as a
container, under the guidance of Malta Kano, I passed many egos through myself.
"This, then, is how I have spent the twenty-six years of my life. Just imagine if you will:
for twenty-six years, I was nothing. This is the thought that struck me with such force when I
was alone in the well, thinking. During all this long time, the person called 'me' was in fact
nothing at all, I realized. I was nothing but a prostitute. A prostitute of the flesh. A prostitute
of the mind.
"Now, however, I am trying to get a grasp on my new self. I am neither a container nor a
medium of passage. I am trying to establish myself here on the face of the earth."
"I do understand what you are saying to me, but still, why do you want to go to Crete with
me?"
"Because it would probably be a good thing for both of us: for you, Mr. Okada, and for
me," said Creta Kano. "For the time being, there is no need for either of us to be here. And if
that is the case, I feel, it would be better for us not to be here. Tell me, Mr. Okada, do you
have some course of action you must follow-some plan for what you are going to do from this
point on?"
"The one thing I need to do is talk to Kumiko. Until we meet face-to-face and she tells me
that our life together is finished, I can't do anything else. How I'm going to go about finding
her, though, I have no idea."
"But if you do find her and your marriage is, as you say, 'finished,' would you consider
coming to Crete with me? Both of us would have to begin something new at some point,"
said Creta Kano, looking into my eyes. "It seems to me that going to the island of Crete would
not be a bad beginning."
"Not bad at all," I said. "Kind of sudden, maybe, but not a bad beginning."
Creta Kano smiled at me. When I thought about it, I realized this was the first time she
had ever done so. It made me feel that, to some extent, history was beginning to head in the
right direction. "We still have time," she said. "Even if I hurry, it will take me at least two
weeks to get ready. Please use the time to think it over, Mr. Okada. I don't know if there is
anything I can give you. It seems to me that I don't have anything to give at this point in time.


I am quite literally empty. I am just getting started, putting some contents into this empty
container little by little. I can give you myself, Mr. Okada, if you say that is good enough for
you. I believe we can help each other."
I nodded. "I'll think about it," I said. "I'm very pleased that you made me this offer, and I
think it would be great if we could go together. I really do. But I've got a lot of things I have
to think about and a lot of things I have to straighten out."
"And if, in the end, you say you don't want to go to Crete, don't worry. I won't be hurt. I
will be sorry, but I want your honest answer."



Creta Kano stayed in my house again that night. As the sun was going down, she invited
me out for a stroll in the neighborhood park. I decided to forget about my bruise and leave the
house. What was the point of worrying about such things? We walked for an hour in the
pleasant summer evening, then came home and ate.
After our supper, Creta Kano said she wanted to sleep with me. She wanted to have
physical sex with me, she said. This was so sudden, I didn't know what to do, which is
exactly what I said to her: "This is so sudden. I don't know what to do."
Looking directly at me, Creta Kano said, "Whether or not you go with me to Crete, Mr.
Okada, entirely separately from that, I want you to take me one time-just one time-as a
prostitute. I want you to buy my flesh. Here. Tonight. It will be my last time. I will cease to be
a prostitute, whether of the flesh or of the mind. I will abandon the name of Creta Kano as
well. In order to do that, however, I want to have a clearly visible point of demarcation,
something that says, 'It ends here.' "
"I understand your wanting a point of demarcation, but why do you have to sleep with
me?"
"Don't you see, Mr. Okada? By sleeping with the real you, by joining my body with yours
in reality, I want to pass through you, this person called Mr. Okada. By doing that, I want to
be liberated from this defilement-like something inside me. That will be the point of
demarcation." "Well, I'm sorry, but I don't buy people's flesh." Creta Kano bit her lip. "How
about this, then? Instead of money, give me some of your wife's clothing. And shoes. We'll
make that the pro forma price of my flesh. That should be all right, don't you think? Then I
will be saved."
"Saved. By which you mean that you will be liberated from the defilement that Noboru
Wataya left inside you?"
"Yes, that is exactly what I mean," said Creta Kano. I stared at her. Without false
eyelashes, Creta Kano's face had a much more childish look. "Tell me," I said, "who is this
Noboru Wataya guy, really? He's my wife's brother, but I hardly know him. What is he
thinking? What does he want? All I know for sure is that he and I hate each other."
"Noboru Wataya is a person who belongs to a world that is the exact opposite of yours,"
said Creta Kano. Then she seemed to be searching for the words she needed to continue. "In a
world where you are losing everything, Mr. Okada, Noboru Wataya is gaining everything. In
a world where you are rejected, he is accepted. And the opposite is just as true. Which is why
he hates you so intensely."
"I don't get it. Why would he even notice that I'm alive? He's famous, he's powerful.
Compared to him, I'm an absolute zero. Why does he have to take the time and trouble to
bother hating me?"
Creta Kano shook her head. "Hatred is like a long, dark shadow. Not even the person it
falls upon knows where it comes from, in most cases. It is like a two-edged sword. When you
cut the other person, you cut yourself. The more violently you hack at the other person, the
more violently you hack at yourself. It can often be fatal. But it is not easy to dispose of.


Please be careful, Mr. Okada. It is very dangerous. Once it has taken root in your heart, hatred
is the most difficult thing in the world to shake off."
"And you were able to feel it, weren't you?-the root of the hatred that was in Noboru
Wataya's heart."
"Yes, I was. I am," said Creta Kano. "That is the thing that split my flesh in two, that
defiled me, Mr. Okada. Which is why I do not want him to be my last customer as a
prostitute. Do you understand?"
That night I went to bed with Creta Kano. I took off what she was wearing of Kumiko's
and joined my body with hers. Quietly and gently. It felt like an extension of my dream, as if I
were re-creating exactly, in reality, the very acts I had performed with Creta Kano in my
dream. Her body was real and alive. But there was something missing: the clear sense that this
was actually happening. Several times the illusion overtook me that I was doing this with
Kumiko, not Creta Kano. I was sure I would wake up the moment I came. But I did not wake
up. I came inside her. It was reality. True reality. But each time I recognized that fact, reality
felt a little less real. Reality was coming undone and moving away from reality, one small
step at a time. But still, it was reality.
"Mr. Okada," said Creta Kano, with her arms wrapped around my back, "let's go to Crete
together. This is not the place for us anymore: not for you and not for me. We have to go to
Crete. If you stay here, something bad is going to happen to you. I know it. I am sure of it."
"Something bad?"
"Something very, very bad," Creta Kano prophesied-in a small but penetrating voice, like
the prophet bird that lived in the forest.