20



Nutmeg's Story

*



Nutmeg Akasaka took several months to tell me the story of her life. It was a long,
long story, with many detours, so that what I am recording here is a very simplified
(though not necessarily short) summary of the whole. I cannot honestly claim with
confidence that it contains the essence of her story, but it should at least convey the
outline of important events that occurred at crucial points in her life.



Nutmeg and her mother escaped from Manchuria to Japan, their only valuables the
jewelry they were able to wear on their bodies. They traveled up from the port of Sasebo
to Yokohama, to stay with the mother's family, which had long owned an import- export
business primarily fo cused on Taiwan. Prosperous before the war, they had lost most of
their business when Japan lost Taiwan. The father died of heart disease, and the family's
second son, who had been second in command, was killed in an air raid just before the
war ended. The eldest son left his teaching post to carry on the family business, but never
temperamentally suited to a life of commerce, he was unable to recoup the family
fortunes. They still had their comfortable house and land, but it was not a pleasant place
for Nutmeg and her mother to live as extra mouths to feed during those straitened
postwar years. They were always at pains to keep their presence as unobtrusive as
possible, taking less than the others at mealtimes, waking earlier than the others each
morning, taking on an outsize share of the household chores. Every piece of clothing the
young Nutmeg wore was a hand -me -down from her older co usins-gloves, socks, even
underwear. For pencils, she collected the others' cast-off stubs. Just waking up in the
morning was painful to her. The thought that a new day was starting was enough to make
her chest hurt.
She wanted to get out of this house, to live alone with her mother someplace where
they didn't always have to feel so constrained, even if it meant living in poverty. But her
mother never tried to leave. "My mother had always been an active person," said
Nutmeg, "but after we escaped from Manchuria, she was like an empty shell. It was as if
the very strength to go on living had evaporated from inside her." She could no longer
rouse herself for anything. All she could do was tell Nutmeg over and over about the
happy times they used to have. This left to Nutmeg the task of finding for herself the
resources to go on living.
Nutmeg did not dislike studying as such, but she had almost no in terest in the courses
they offered in high school. She couldn't believe that it would do her any good to stuff
her head full of historical dates or the rules of English grammar or geometric formulas.
What she wanted more than anything was to learn a useful skill and make herself
independent as soon as possible. She was in a place far away from her classmates and
their comfortable enjoyment of high school life.
The only thing she cared about was fashion. Her mind was filled with thoughts of
clothing from morning to night. Not that she had the where withal to dress in style: she
could only read and reread the fashion magazines she managed to find, and to fill
notebooks with drawings of dresses in imitation of those she found in the magazines or
clothes she had dreamed up herself. She had no idea what it was about the fancy dresses

that so captivated her imagination. Perhaps, she said, it came from her habit of always
playing with the huge wardrobe that her mother had in Manchuria. Her mother was a
genuine clotheshorse. She had had more kimonos and dresses than room in their chests to
store them, and the young Nutmeg would always pull them out and touch them whenever
she had a chance. Most of those dresses and kimonos had had to remain in Manchuria
when the two of them left, and whatever they had been able to stuff into rucksacks they
had had to exchange along the way for food. Her mother would spread out the next dress
to be traded, and sigh over it before letting it go.
"Designing clothes was my secret little door to a different world," said Nutmeg, "a
world that belonged only to me. In that world, imagination was everything. The better
you were able to imagine what you wanted to imagine, the farther you could flee from
reality. And what I really liked about it was that it was free. It didn't cost a thing. It was
wonderful! Imagining beautiful clothes in my mind and transferring the images to paper
was not just a way for me to leave reality behind and steep myself in dreams, though. I
needed it to go on living. It was as natural and ob vious to me as breathing. So I assumed
that everyone else was doing it too. When I realized that everyone else was not doing it-
that they couldn't do it even if they tried- I told myself, 'I'm different from other people,
so the life I live will have to be different from theirs.' "
Nutmeg quit high school and transferred to a school of dressmaking. To raise the
money for her tuition, she begged her mother to sell one of her last remaining pieces of
jewelry. With that, she was able to study sewing and cutting and designing and other such
useful skills for two years. When she graduated, she to ok an apartment and started living
alone. She put herself through a professional fashion design school by waiting on tables
and taking odd jobs sewing and knitting. And when she had finally graduated from this
school, she went to work for a manufac turer o f quality ladies' garments, where she
succeeded in having herself assigned to the design department.
There was no question but that she had an original talent. Not only could she draw
well, but her ideas and her point of view were different from those of other people. She
had a clear image of precisely what she wanted to make, and it was not something she
had borrowed from anyone else: it was always her own, and it always came out of her
quite naturally. She pursued the tiny details of her image with all the intensity of a
salmon swimming upstream through a great river to its source. She had no time for sleep.
She loved her work and dreamed only of the day she could become an independent
designer. She never thought about having fun outside of work: in fact, she didn't know
how to do any of the things people did to have fun.
Before long, her bosses came to recognize the quality of her work and took an interest
in her extravagant, free- flowing lines. Her years of apprenticeship thus came to an end,
and she was given full discretion as the head of her own small section-a most unusual
promotion.
Nutmeg went on to compile a magnificent record of accomplishment year after year.
Her talent and energy caught the interest of people not only within the company but
th roughout the industry. The world of fashion design was a closed world, but at the same
time it was a fair one, a society ruled by competition. A designer's power was determined
by one thing alone: the number of advance orders that came in for the clothing that he or
she had designed. There was never any doubt about who had won and who had lost: the
figures told the whole story. Nutmeg never felt that she was competing with anyone, but

her record could not be denied.
She worked with total dedication until her late twenties. She met many people
through her work, and several men showed interest in her, but their relationships proved
short and shallow. Nutmeg could never take a deep interest in living human beings. Her
mind was filled with images of clothing, and a man's designs had a far more visceral
impact on her than the man himself ever could.
When she turned twenty- seven, though, Nutmeg was introduced to a strange- looking
man at an industry New Year's party. The man's features were regular enough, but his
hair was a wild mass, and his nose and chin had the hard sharpness of stone tools. He
looked more like some phony preacher than a designer of women's clothing. He was a
year younger than Nutmeg, as thin as a wire, and had eyes of bottomless depth, from
which he looked at people with an aggressive stare that seemed deliber ately designed to
make them feel uncomfortable. In his eyes, though, Nutmeg was able to see her own
reflection. At the time, he was an unknown but up - and - coming designer, and the two
were meeting for the first time. She had, of course, heard people talking about him. He
had a unique talent, they said, but he was arrogant and egotistical and argumentative,
liked by almost no one.
"We were two of a kind," she said. "Both born on the contin ent. He had also been
shipped back after the war, in his case from Korea, stripped of possessions. His father had
been a professional soldier, and they experienced serious poverty in the postwar years.
His mother had died of typhus when he was very small, and I suppose that's what led to
his strong interest in women's clothing. He did have talent, but he had no idea how to
deal with people. Here he was, a designer of women's clothing, but when he came into a
woman's presence, he would turn red and act crazy. In other words, we were both strays
who had become separated from the herd."
They married the following year, 1963, and the child they gave birth to in the spring
of the year after that (the year of the Tokyo Olympics), was Cinnamon. "His name was
Cinnamon, wasn't it?" No sooner was Cinnamon born than Nutmeg brought her mother
into the house to take care of him. She herself had to work nonstop from morning to night
and had no time to be caring for infants. Thus Cinnamon was more or less raised by his
grandmother.



It was never clear to Nutmeg whether she had ever truly loved her hus band as a man.
She lacked any criterion by which to make such a judgment, and this was true for her
husband also. What had brought them together was the power of a chance meeting and
their shared passion for fashion design. Still, their first ten years together was a fruitful
time for both. As soon as they were married, they quit their respective companies and set
up their own independent design studio in a small apartment in a small, west- facing
building just behind Aoyama Avenue. Poorly ventilated and lacking air- conditioning, the
place was so hot in summer that the sweat would make their pencils slip from their
grasps. The business did not go smoothly at first. Nutmeg and her husband were both
almost shockingly lacking in practical business sense, as a result of which they were
easily duped by unscrupulous members of the industry, or they would fail to secure
orders because they were ignorant of standard practice or would make unimaginably

simple mistakes that kept them from getting on track. Their debts mounted up so greatly
that at one point it seemed the only solution would be to abscond. The breakthrough came
when Nutmeg happened to meet a capable business manager who recognized their talent
and could serve them with integrity. From that point on, the company developed so well
that all their previous troubles began to seem like a bad dream. Their sales doubled each
year until, by 1970, the little company they had started on a shoestring had become a
mirac ulous success- so much so that it surprised even the arrogant, aloof young couple
who had started it. They increased their staff, moved to a big building on the avenue, and
opened their own shops in such fashionable neighborhoods as the Ginza, Aoyama, and
Shinjuku. Their original line of designer clothes figured often in the mass media and
became widely known.



Once the company had reached a certain size, the nature of the work they divided
between themselves began to change. While designing and manufacturing clothes might
be a creative process, it was also, unlike sculpting or novel writing, a business upon
which the fortunes of many people depended. One could not simply stay at home and
create whatever one liked. Someone would have to go out and present the company's
"face" to the world. This need only increased as the size of the company's trans actions
continued to grow. One of them would have to appear at parties and fashion shows to
give little speeches and hobnob with the guests, and to be interviewed by the media.
Nutmeg had absolutely no intention of taking on that role, and so her husband became the
one to step for ward. Just as poor at socializing as she was, he found the whole thing
excr uciating at first. He was unable to speak well in front of a lot of strangers, and so he
would come home from each such event exhausted. After six months of this, however, he
noticed that he was finding it less painful. He was still not much of a speaker, but people
did not react to his brusque and awkward manner the way they had when he was young;
now they seemed to be drawn to him. They took his curt style (which derived from his
naturally introverted personality) as evidence not of arrogant aloofness but rather of a
charming artistic temperament. He actually began to enjoy this new position in which he
found himself, and before long he was being celebrated as a cultural hero of his time.
"You've probably heard his name," Nutmeg said. "But in fact, by then I was doing
two- thirds of the design work myself. His bold, original ideas had taken off
commercially, and he had already come up with more than enough of them to keep us
going. It was my job to develop and expand them and give them form. No matter how
large the company grew, we never hired other designers. Our support staff expanded, but
the crucial part we did ourselves. All we wanted was to make the clothing we wanted to
make, not worry about the class of people who would buy it. We did absolutely no
market research or cost calculations or strategy planning. If we decided we wanted to
make something a certain way, we designed it that way, used the best materials we could
find, and took all the time we needed to make it. What other houses could do in two
steps, we did in four. Where they used three yards of cloth, we used four. We personally
inspected and passed every piece that left our shop. What didn't sell we disposed of. We
sold nothing at discount. Our prices were on the high side, of course. Industr y people
thought we were crazy, but our clothing became a symbol of the era, right along with

Peter Max, Woodstock, Twiggy, Easy Rider, and all that. We had so much fun designing
clothes back then! We could do the wildest things, and our clients were right there with
us. It was as if we had sprouted great big wings and could fly anywhere we liked."
Just as their business was hitting its stride, however, Nutmeg and her husband began
to grow more distant. Even as they worked side by side, she would sense now and then
that his heart was wandering somewhere far away. His eyes seemed to have lost that
hungry gleam they once had. The violent streak that used to make him throw things now
almost never surfaced. Instead, she would often find him staring off into space as if deep
in thought. The two of them hardly ever talked outside the workplace, and the nights
when he did not come home at all grew in number. Nutmeg sensed that he had several
women in his life now, but this was not a source of pain for her. She thought of it as
inevitable, because they had long since ceased having physical relations (mainly because
Nutmeg had lost the desire for sex).



It was late in 1975, when Nutmeg was forty and Cinnamon eleven, that her husband
was killed. His body was found in an Akasaka hotel room, slashed to bits. The maid
found him when she used her passkey to enter the room for cleaning at eleven in the
morning. The lavatory looked as if it had been the site of a blood bath. The body itself
had been virtually drained dry, and it was missing its heart and stomach and liver and
both kidneys and pancreas, as if whoever had killed him had cut those organs out and
taken them somewhere in plastic bags or some such containers. The head had been
severed from the torso and set on the lid of the toilet, facing outward, the face chopped to
mincemeat. The killer had apparently cut and chopped the head first, then set about
collecting the organs.
To cut the organs out of a human being must have taken some exceptionally sharp
implements and considerable technical skill. Several ribs had had to be cut out with a
saw-a time-consuming and bloody operation. Nor was it clear why anyone would have
gone to so much trouble.
Taken up with the holiday rush, the clerk at the front desk recalled only that
Nutmeg's husband had checked into his twelfth-floor room at ten o'clock the previous
night with a woman-a pretty woman perhaps thirty years of age, wearing a red overcoat
and not particularly tall. She had been carrying nothing more than a small purse. The bed
showed signs of sexual activity. The hair and fluid recovered from the sheets were his
pubic hair and semen. The room was full of fingerprints, but too many to be of use in the
investigation. His small leather suitcase held only a change of underwear, a few toilet
articles, a folder holding some work-related documents, and one magazine. More than
one hundred thousand yen in cash and several credit cards remained in his wallet, but a
notebook that he should have had was missing. There were no sig ns of struggle in the
room.
The police investigated all his known associates but could not come up with a woman
who fit the hotel clerk's description. The few women they did find had no causes for
deep- seated hatred or jealousy, and all had solid alibis. There were a good number of
people who disliked him in the fashion world (not a world known for its warm, friendly
atmosphere, in any case), but none who seemed to have hated him enough to kill him,

and no one who would have had the technical training to cut six organs out of his body.
The murder of a well-known fashion designer was of course widely re ported in the
press, and with some sensationalism, but the police used a number of technicalities to
suppress the information about the taking of the organs, in order to avoid the glare of
publicity that would surround such a bizarre murder case. The prestigious hotel seems
also to have exerted some pressure to keep its association with the affair to a minimum.
Little more was released than the fact that he had been stabbed to death in one of their
rooms. Rumors circulated for a while that there had been "something abnormal"
involved, but nothing more specific ever emerged. The police conducted a massive
investigation, but the killer was never caught, nor was a motive established.
"That hotel room is probably still sealed," said Nutmeg.



The spring of the year after her husband was killed, Nutmeg sold the company-
complete with retail stores, inventory, and brand name- to a major fashion manufacturer.
When the lawyer who had conducted the negotiations for her brought the contract,
Nutmeg set her seal to it without a word and with hardly a glance at the sale price.
Once she had let the company go, Nutmeg discovered that all trace of her passion for
the designing of clothes had evaporated. The intense stream of desire had dried up, where
once it had been the mea ning of her life. She would accept an occasional assignment and
carry it off with all the skill of a first- rate professional, but without a trace of joy. It was
like eating food that had no taste. She felt as if "they" had plucked out her own innards.
Those who knew her former energy and skill remembered Nutmeg as a kind of legendary
presence, and requests never ceased to come from such people, but aside from the very
few that she could not refuse, she turned them all down. Following the advice of her
accountant, she invested her money in stocks and real estate, and her property expanded
in those years of growth.
Not long after she sold the company, her mother died of heart disease. She was
wetting down the pavement out front on a hot August afternoon, when suddenly she
complained she "felt bad." She lay down and slept, her snoring disturbingly loud, and
soon she was dead. Nutmeg and Cin namon were left alone in the world. Nutmeg closed
herself up in the house for over a year, spending each day on the sofa, looking at the gar-
den, as if trying to recoup all the peace and quiet that she had missed in her life thus far.
Hardly eating, she would sleep ten hours a day. Cinnamon, who would normally have
begun middle school, took care of the house in his mother's stead, playing Mozart and
Haydn sonatas between chores and studying several languages.
This nearly blank, quiet space in her life had gone on for one year when Nutmeg
happened by chance to discover that she possessed a certain special "power," a strange
ab ility of which she had had no awareness. She imagined that it might have welled up
inside her to replace the in tense passion for design that had so wholly evaporated. And
indeed, this power became her new profession, though it was not something she herself
had sought out.




The first beneficiary of her strange power was the wife of a department store owner, a
bright, energetic woman who had been an opera singer in her youth. She had recognized
Nutmeg's talent long before she became a famous designer, and she had watched over
her career. Without this woman's support, Nutmeg's company might have failed in its
infancy. Because of their special relationship, Nutmeg agreed to help the woman and her
daughter choose and coordinate their outfits for the daughter's wedding, a task that she
did not find taxing.
Nutmeg and the woman were chatting as they waited for the daughter to be fitted
when, without warning, the woman suddenly pressed her hands to her head and knelt
down on the floor unsteadily. Nutmeg, horrified, grabbed her to keep her from falling and
began stroking the woman's right temple. She did this by reflex, without thought, but no
sooner had her palm started moving than she felt "a certain something" there, as if she
were feeling an object inside a cloth bag.
Confused, Nutmeg closed her eyes and tried to think about something else. What
came to her then was the zoo in Hsin-ching - the zoo on a day when it was closed and she
was there all by herself, something only she was permitted as the chief veterinarian's
daughter. That had been the happiest time of her life, when she was protected and loved
and reassured. It was her earliest memory. The empty zoo. She thought of the smells and
the brilliant light, and the shape of each cloud floating in the sky. She walked alone from
cage to cage. The season was autumn, the sky high and clear, and flocks of Manchurian
birds were winging from tree to tree. That had been her original world, a world that, in
many senses, had been lost forever. She did not know how much time passed like this,
but eventually the woman raised herself to her full height and apologized to Nutmeg. She
was still disoriented, but her headache seemed to be gone, she said. Some days later,
Nutmeg was amazed to receive a far larger payment tha n she had anticipated for the job
she had done.
The department store owner's wife called Nutmeg about a month after the event,
inviting her out to lunch. After they had finished eating, she suggested that they go to her
home, where she said to Nutmeg, "I wonder if you would mind putting your hand on my
head the way you did before. There's something I want to check." Nutmeg had no
particular reason to refuse. She sat next to the woman and placed her palm on the
woman's temple. She could feel that same "something" she had felt before. Now she
concentrated all her attention on it to get a better sense of its shape, but the shape began
to twist and change. It's alive! Nutmeg felt a twinge of fear. She closed her eyes and
thought about the Hsin-ching zoo. This was not hard for her. All she had to do was bring
back the story she had told Cinnamon and the scenes she had described for him. Her
consciousness left her body, wandered for a while in the spaces between memory and
story, then came back. When she regained consciousness, the woman took her hand and
thanked her. Nutmeg asked nothing about what had just happened, and the woman
offered no explanations. As before, Nutmeg felt a mild fatigue, and a light film of sweat
clung to her forehead. When she left, the wo man thanked her for taking the time and
trouble to visit and tried to hand her an envelope containing money, but Nutmeg refused
to take it- politely, but firmly. "This is not my job," she said, "and besides, you paid me
too much last time." The woman did no t insist.
Some weeks later, the woman introduced Nutmeg to yet another woman. This one
was in her mid-forties. She was small and had sharp, sunken eyes. The clothing she wore

was of exceptionally high quality, but aside from a silver wedding band, she used no
accessories. It was clear from the atmosphere she projected that she was no ordinary
person. The department store owner's wife had told Nutmeg, "She wants you to do for
her the same thing you did for me. Now, please don't refuse, and when she gives you
money, don't say anything, just take it. In the long run, it will be an important thing for
you- and for me."
Nutmeg went to an inner room with the woman and placed her palm on the woman's
temple as she had done before. There was a different "something" inside this woman. It
was stronger than the one inside the department store owner's wife, and its movements
were more rapid. Nutmeg closed her eyes, held her breath, and tried to quell the move-
ment. She concentrated more strongly and pursued her memories more vividly.
Burrowing into the tiniest folds she found there, she sent the warmth of her memories
into the "something."
"And before I knew it, that had become my work," said Nutmeg. She realized that she
had been enfolded by a great flow. And when he grew up, Cinnamon became his
mother's assistant.