Last Winter We Parted (8 page)

“Please come inside. I’m not working today.”

The woman opens the front door and leads me inside. We walk down a hallway and come into a familiar spacious tatami room. My breath catches. There are countless dolls, all wearing different clothes. They seem utterly alive. Of course, I know very well that they aren’t alive but, I can’t help thinking, they are by no means dead either. Although my brain registers them as human, a part of me still seems aware that they definitely are not. The vivid gazes of the various
dolls are looking in every direction. My eyes lock with one of them. My heart starts to race a little. If I look at them from even a slightly different angle, each of the dolls’ expressions seems completely changed.

“… Lately, I haven’t been able to make any for pleasure. I’ve been too busy.”

“You have many commissions?”

“Yes. Maybe it’s the times we live in. There are a lot of requests for ones modeled on living people.”

The doll creator smiles when he says this. His eyes are extremely narrow, his skin pale. His long hair has a gentle wave and is neatly arranged.

“I heard that used to be taboo.”

“Yes. But if they keep asking for it …”

“I also heard that one doll told the guy to kill the real woman she was based on.”

Suzuki looks at me with pity when I say this. Even though he is the one who has created such a doll.

“What a shame. Really, such a shame. But I am simply the doll maker. All I’m doing is actualizing people’s desires. Once actualized, certain things also become apparent.”

I drink the tea that the woman has prepared and brought out. The doll creator is sitting directly on the tatami, so I sit down myself. Right in front of the dolls. At some point the woman has disappeared.

“Is she …?”

“Oh, she’s a doll.”

“… What?”

“Ha ha ha, it’s a joke.” The doll creator laughs with real delight. “No, she is a sort of apprentice. She came to me so that I could make one of her husband who passed away. She sleeps with me regularly but her heart still completely belongs to her husband.”

“… And what about your heart?”

“My heart?”

Suzuki looks at me.

“… I have no such thing.”

The cat from earlier comes into the room. It prowls around us, then seems to lose interest and vanishes again. I sip the tea that the woman has made, and Suzuki does the same. After a while, he smiles.

“That’s a lie. I was joking with you again. She’s only sleeping with me so that I’ll make her a doll. A doll has to be a copied after a person. It shouldn’t be copied after a doll. That’s why I need to have contact with people.”

“You …”

“Ha ha ha, you’re not here to talk about me, are you? But rather about Kiharazaka.”

He looks at me through his narrow eyes.

“He was a top-notch photographer. But unfortunately … he
tried to go beyond that. Perhaps what he sought to be doesn’t even exist. Take a look over there.”

I let my gaze follow Suzuki’s hand. At one side of the room, past all the other dolls, there is one that appears to be in the process of being made. It has no hair, its flesh-colored body is exposed, it isn’t wearing any clothes. Neither the face nor the body have the texture of real skin.

“That doll does not yet have any life in her. The doll does not resemble anyone, or have any distinctive characteristics. That’s the one—the one that appears in the background of his photo,
Butterflies
.”

“… What?”

“His desires were all imitations of someone else. That is to say, there was nothing inside him.”

The doll creator is still looking at me.

“We did an experiment, when it was just me and him. He asked me to create what would be his ideal woman, so I picked up a pencil and sketched it out. But no matter what, the face of the woman he described always resembled someone else. His sister or his mother, a celebrity, the waitress he had just seen … Our predilections—what we call our desires—I guess that’s just how they work. But then, seeing what I had inadvertently drawn, I decided to test him. I said, ‘I prefer this kind of woman.’ And then he too gradually took a liking to the same things. After a while he started saying,
with considerable enthusiasm, Make me a doll like this … Then, in the midst of it all, he realized what had happened and he went quiet.”

Suzuki draws in a quick breath, and calmly continues.

“What first got him interested in cameras was a commercial he saw with a friend. In the commercial, a cool-looking guy was using a camera in a cool way. As they were watching, Kiharazaka’s friend beside him said, ‘Sure would be nice.’ With a look of envy, he had said, ‘It sure would be nice to have that.’ At that moment, Kiharazaka felt just the slightest desire for the camera. And from then on, he told me, his desire for the camera grew stronger and stronger.”

“That’s just …”

“There is nothing inside him. He fell in love with his sister because he saw a movie about incest. And because the woman who starred in it was very beautiful and sexy. What’s more, he told me, the guy he saw the movie with had joked about how nice it would be to have a gorgeous sister like that. So even though it got started that way—or no, precisely because it started that way—from then on, little by little, his desire was heightened, until he was pathologically obsessed. It’s his attempt to turn his own desire, which is an imitation of someone else’s desire, into the real thing.”

The doll creator looks down for a moment, then back at me.

“Then, he killed two women. I bear some of the responsibility for that … Because of a conversation we had.”

“… A conversation?”

“A conversation about another doll maker I admire. Today, I will tell you everything I know.”

The rain is falling outside.

“Are you familiar with the conflict known as the Onin War, which occurred during the last years of the Muromachi shogunate? It was a terrible period, a time when the shogunate lost its ability to function, causing samurai throughout the various regions to form their own armies, and the entire country devolved into an internecine war. No one knew who they were battling against or even for what purpose, different conflicts broke out simultaneously—it was an era of unprecedented madness in Japan’s history. Afterward we entered into what’s known as the Warring States Period, but what I want to talk about now is a gifted creator of wind-up dolls who lived during the era of that Onin War. That is to say … This is a story about how, in a time of great confusion, one man transcended death.”

He smiles.

“This doll maker was known—even more than for his art—for the skill with which he used the color red. Every wind-up doll that he had made up to that point had worn a magnificent vermilion kimono. The doll maker’s wife was in
poor health. She was bedridden practically all the time, and the doll maker had always taken care of her. He loved his wife very much. But his love for her was intense. And in his passion for her, well, their sex practically destroyed his frail wife. The doll maker had an idea. Could he make a doll of his wife? But if he made a doll of a living person, that person would die. That’s what he believed. However, one day, his wife asked him to make a doll of herself. I’m going to die soon, she said. I will only become frailer. I want you to make a doll of me while I’m still pretty. Hearing her words, the doll maker started to produce a wife doll.”

It is still raining outside. I am listening closely to his story, to his soft voice.

“That alone makes this a sad and touching story. Most people can only tolerate it up to this point … You probably already know what happens. Before long, as the doll maker immersed himself in the production of his wife doll, he started to lose his mind. The doll’s beauty began to exceed that of his wife. As the doll neared completion, his wife’s physical condition deteriorated. It was like the doll was extracting her life force. What’s more, his chisel had slipped several times during the frequent earthquakes, or the edge of the plane had happened to shave marks into the wood, but these mistakes had, on the contrary, brought out the doll’s unexpected beauty. Rather, through a series
of unintended coincidences, the doll had exceeded the doll creator’s abilities, as if it were using a divine power—no, the power of the earth, the earth that was soaked with the blood of so many killed in the war—and had become something that transcended human understanding … The wife was jealous. That is, the wife was jealous of herself—she experienced jealousy of her own more beautiful self. The doll maker devoted himself to the production of the doll and stopped paying attention to his wife. Early in the morning, all day long, and into the night, the sound of his chisel carving away at the doll echoed from his house … Later, the doll maker was discovered to be living with both the red wife doll and the skeletal corpse of his actual wife, months after her death.”

Little by little, the temperature in the room was growing chilly.

“But there was one thing that the wife managed to do before she died. Abandoning the effort to tear her husband away from the doll, the wife could only pray for his future destruction, now that he had become the object of her inevitable enmity. On the verge of death, she suddenly found the strength to stand up. She pulled herself up behind her husband, who would no longer have anything to do with her, immersed as he was in the creation of the doll. And she put a curse on her husband: ‘You will never again be able to live with anyone except this doll.’ The wife coughed up blood on
the doll. This cough was fatal, her last. The doll maker stared at the blood-stained doll. At its overwhelming beauty. This was exactly the shade of red that he had been seeking—the red that a person spews out as they are dying. The doll, her skin stained blood red, had taken on a maddening beauty. From that day forward, the doll maker became oblivious to all other women. Even if he attempted to demonstrate some kind of interest, he was simply unable to. As for flesh-and-blood humans, no one existed in this world beside the doll. And that was not all. The doll maker was no longer able to produce any other work, either. Because he could never attain that same shade of red. He would never again have access to the blood coughed up by his beloved wife. The doll maker had been drawn in by the totality of the doll’s beauty, born of a series of coincidences and further enhanced by his wife’s crimson blood. The doll maker finally died of madness. These were his last words, and herein lies the problem: ‘Once my wife died the doll grew even more beautiful.’ ”

Suzuki suddenly stands up and approaches his own doll creations. He strokes their hair impassively.

“The doll was kept at a temple for a while, but ultimately it was disposed of. Because
it should never have existed
in the first place. Not only the doll’s creator, but any man who took one look at the doll was rendered impotent. Whenever they tried to make love to a woman, that red doll would appear before
them as a vision. And the doll’s expression … she seemed to be faintly smiling. But none of them could tell just what kind of smile it was—or what kind of smile it wasn’t. Just like the Mona Lisa’s smile. Except where the Mona Lisa’s smile conveys the beauty of art to those who view it, this doll’s smile gave rise to nothing but madness. Forever bewildered by what was behind her smile, these men were filled with agony and vertigo. In both cases, the painting and the doll, the smile appears to be that of a real person. It’s a kind of artifice; nevertheless, human perception recognizes it as a ‘smile.’ Why does that happen, when it comes to perception? In any case, unable to determine just what kind of smile it was, the men’s confusion deepened until it seemed to drive them crazy … Does this sort of thing happen to other creatures? If you were to show a dog a painting of a dog, I wonder by just which qualities in the painting would the dog recognize another dog?”

Suzuki looks at me pensively.

“Well, I … I wanted to make a doll like the one that doll creator had made. Something that shouldn’t be made. Something that shouldn’t exist … You must think I’m mad. It doesn’t matter. My life is already over, to a certain extent. But I told Kiharazaka about all of this. I can’t help thinking that the two murders were the results of that conversation.”

“But … he also talked to Saito.”

“Saito? You mean that stalker guy?”

“Yes. So …”

“That’s interesting. So I wasn’t the only one who talked to him about things they shouldn’t have. Wouldn’t two conversations be enough to have an impact on him? And also, I’m the one who made Saito’s doll in the first place. That makes me the root of all his evils.”

“Do you really think so?”

“What?”

“I mean …”

I hold my tongue. I want to say something, but I can’t find the words.

It is raining heavily now. The doll maker parts the curtain slightly and is facing outside but his eyes don’t seem focused on anything. I reach for my cup only to realize that it is empty. The doll maker looks at me again pensively.

“Well, the first victim, Akiko Yoshimoto, burned to death. It was deemed an accidental fire, because Kiharazaka suffered major burns as well, and his studio was completely destroyed. But, I knew it then. That it hadn’t actually been an accident.”

“… What do you mean?”

“I saw the photographs he took.”

Suzuki looks directly at me with his narrow eyes. My heart starts to race.

“Photographs of Akiko Yoshimoto, in the raging fire. Are you familiar with the story, ‘Hell Screen’?”

“… Yes. By Ryunosuke Akutagawa.”

“That’s right. Kiharazaka was morbidly fascinated by that story. There must have been somebody who had casually recommended it to him … He set fire to his lover, and then took photographs of her. But he didn’t show them to anyone. Of course not. If such photos existed, they would find out what he had done. After all.”

The doll maker draws in a quick breath.

“
He thought they would become more beautiful—the photos he took of her—if she were to die
. Once the real her was dead. Like Saito’s doll. Like that doll made by the doll maker during the Onin War. Kiharazaka tried to create art that he shouldn’t have. Just like me. He ventured into territory where he didn’t belong. Akiko was visually impaired. To do such a thing to a woman like that. And in imitation of someone else.”