“Not just any old ghost, you know. Hina-chan’s smart, and she’s incredibly sexy. She’s amazing.”
I puffed myself up as if to say, I’m not to be made fun of. Then I picked up my mug of chūhai and downed it. He who speaks of love must do so with courage. My attitude had to say, If you’re not going to believe me, then begone!
“Well, it sounds like you’ve found yourself quite the girlfriend.”
Maybe Yoshi was too drunk to care about the truth of my claims, or maybe he never had any intention of believing me, but in any case, he didn’t challenge a single thing I said. He simply went along with it.
“Yep, she’s really something.” I felt immensely proud. It was all true, after all. Hina-chan really was incredible.
“I wish I could find myself a woman like that.” Saying that, Yoshi slumped his head on the table.
He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes with the moist hand towel. Without his glasses, Yoshi immediately became more anonymous-looking. He kind of reminded me of the noppera-bō, the faceless ghost from old stories. Each time I saw this faceless face of his, I felt a twinge of guilt, as if I’d glimpsed something I shouldn’t have. Here was a man born to wear glasses if anyone was. He’d once confided to me that when he took his glasses off to have sex, the other person would look at him suspiciously as if to say, Who the hell is this guy? I could imagine that to be the case. Not that it really mattered to me one way or another.
“Well then, maybe you should try fishing too!” I said. “Although I mean, what happened with me and Hina-chan was pure fate. I really can’t imagine that happening very often.”
“So you see, I was boasting about you,” I tell Hina-chan now. “But imagine if Yoshi has actually taken up fishing after that! That would make him a prize idiot.”
Hina-chan smirks and nods, then makes a start on my left foot. She’s humming what sounds like Beyoncé—who knows where she picked that one up. She has quite a sense of rhythm! Hina-chan has smashed all the preconceptions I ever had about ghosts. In fact, she somehow manages to surprise me every single day.
“If your life story was made into a book, it’d be a hard-boiled detective novel, don’t you think?” I say to her. “It’s got elements of science fiction, too. And horror, come to think of it, and fantasy . . . It’s like the best story ever.”
“Whereas yours would be like the biography of a withered old carrot. Yawns from beginning to end.”
“Hahaha.”
“Hehehehe.”
Our laughs echo around the bathroom, wrapping around us and turning the bathroom into a surround-sound amphitheater.
“Okay, that’s your massage done.”
Hina-chan claps her hands together. We press our noses together and smile at each other.
Fresh out of the bath, dressed in an Adidas tracksuit, Hina-chan smells amazing. I’ve lectured her so many times by now that she has started to apply toner and lotion to her skin of her own accord. The look of intense concentration on her face as she dabs them on is pretty amusing. I think of it as my duty to ensure that Hina-chan’s skin stays beautiful and pristine. Although having said that, the only time Hina-chan can move about at the moment is at night, so the chance of her suffering any kind of sun damage is pretty slim.
“I’m genuinely happy to wash you every day, you know?”
“Thanks, Shigemi-chan. I’m really sorry to be like this.”
For some reason, Hina-chan’s body is rebooted to its original form every day, so when she turns up at night, she’s covered in muck again. Of late, she’s taken to occasionally making her entrance with her arms dangling in front of her in a ghostly way, moaning, “I’ve come for youuuuuu!” I’ve no idea where she picked up that trick. When she sees me falling about laughing, though, Hina-chan looks very pleased with herself, and flashes me a grin.
My project at the moment is to somehow find a way of breaking into that vault in the research institute nobody’s heard of, and smuggling out Hina-chan’s skeleton so we can give it a proper memorial service. Hina-chan says that it doesn’t bother her and I shouldn’t worry about it, but it’s something I’d really like to do for her. When I think about Hina-chan’s skeleton cooped up all alone in some dark vault, I feel awful. I do worry that if I give the skeleton a proper memorial service, then Hina-chan will end up resting in peace forever and never visit again, but I guess if that happens, I can always just dig her up. There’s no way I’d escape a haunting then. Hina-chan is totally cool with that plan too. “Lying there in the ground is too tedious,” she says. “That’s not my style.”
At this moment, Hina-chan is lying on the sofa, her head resting on my knees and her eyes glued to the TV, munching away mindlessly at a bowl of avocado-flavored tortilla chips. I stroke her fine, silken hair, and think how deeply I adore her.
The Jealous Type
You are what they call “the possessive type.” You’re jealous in the extreme. The moment you sense something the slightest bit off in your husband’s behavior, jealousy takes hold of you. When those green flames rage through your body, no one in this world can hold you back.
Your go-to strategy when seized by the feeling is to throw things. For the objects in your vicinity, it’s an unmitigated disaster. You throw, and you throw, and you keep throwing.
If jealousy happens to strike in the bedroom, then you start with the pillows. First, your husband’s. As you pick it up and cradle it in your arms, you find your chest flooded unexpectedly with a sweet memory from many moons ago: a school trip—you must have been fifteen or so, and you and the other girls in your class shared a big room at an inn, and when night fell, the great pillow fight got under way . . .
You lob your husband’s pillow. That bedroom of yours has little space in it for anything other than the double bed, but still you swing your arm back and hurl it. It sails into the side of your husband’s face, then plummets to the carpet. He doesn’t retaliate like the girls at school. It’s no fun for you at all. You try again with your own pillow, but your husband doesn’t even attempt to catch it as it strikes his midsection, and then it, too, falls forsakenly to the floor.
The sight of those two pillows lying there on the carpet prompts you to the painful realization that the best years of your life were decades ago. Stuffed full with azuki beans, the pillows back at that inn had real heft to them and commanded quite some destructive force when thrown. You and the other girls had picked up those bean-filled pillows, their cases trimmed with lace and covered in little flowers, and hurled them at one another like bombs. You had rolled across the futons that covered the room’s entire floor space with barely a crack in between, laughing until you had difficulty breathing. Strands of your hair found their way into your mouth, and your PE outfit got in a terrible tangle. Someone landed a direct hit to your face with a pillow, and you toppled over backward as the blood streamed from your nose, staining the offending pillowcase a vivid red.
These two pillows, though, utterly stationary on the floor, seem fundamentally different to those pillows of your adolescence. These two, stuffed with the perfect quantity of top-quality goose down, are as soft and fluffy as heaven itself. They were given to you as wedding presents and have your and your husband’s initials embroidered in red and blue thread. When you throw them, they feel light and airy, as if they might just spread their wings and take off into the skies. In other words, you realize, they are no good for throwing at all!