One after another, the little boxes where my memories had been stored had their lids flipped open, and the memories came together to form a black, hazy mass.
I’m coming, the black mass told me, as it swelled larger and larger. I opened more boxes. I kept on opening them, but there were always more. Still more. I groped around blindly, feeling every last one. I’m coming, I’m coming, I’m on my way, the black mass kept telling me. Not many left to go now; I had nearly unearthed them all. I could hear the blackness clamoring, the blackness I knew to be the accumulation of all the sadness and rage and frustration and emptiness and idiocy I’d been storing up inside my body. Just three left to go, no, four, now three, two, and this, this is the last box right here. I’m coming, announced the mass, right underneath my skin, so close that its voice struck me right between the shoulders. I’m coming, and then the black force overtook me, propelling itself out of my body.
Feeling a strange sensation beneath my palms, I opened my eyes and looked down. My thighs were black. Through the steam on the surface of the mirror opposite me, I could make out something that looked like a black demon. I touched my face. It felt no different from the hair on my head. My limbs, my torso, every single part of my body was covered with hair, from head to toe. Glossy, pitch-black hair, not a single split end or damaged strand. There was no trace left of my perm, either.
Before I knew it, I was standing with my arms stretched out in front of me, staring at myself in rapture. To know that all along my body had contained hair this strong, this black, this magnificent was an amazing thing—I was an amazing thing!
Glancing around, I discovered that the women in the bathhouse were staring at me with a mixture of alarm and curiosity. And with good reason: it must have seemed to them like a hairy monster of unknown origin had materialized out of nowhere.
Uh-oh, I thought. I stood up quickly and ran to the door. The stool I’d been sitting on clattered onto its side behind me. In the changing room, as the women around me screamed and whimpered, I retrieved my bag from my locker as casually as I could. I left the bathhouse quietly and turned down a deserted shopping street, running as fast as my legs would carry me. My steady pace and the night breeze worked together like a hair dryer, draining the moisture from the hair that covered my body. It felt good. Really good.
When I got back home, I stood in front of my full-length mirror, staring at the mystery creature in front of me: neither bear nor ape, but some other being entirely, covered head to toe in glossy, slightly damp hair. The hair looked a bit like that of Sadako from The Ring, although it was only about half the length of hers. Actually, when I thought about it, I came to the realization that Sadako was a pretty impressive character. Not only could she emerge from wells, she could also come out of the TV set. Now, that was a special trick! And the same went for Okiku, Oiwa, and all the other famous ghosts I could think of. They all deserved credit. The ability to appear as a ghost was proof of an iron will.
Something terrible startled me out of my reverie. On both my arms, just where I’d had the permanent hair removal done, was a patch of hair much thinner than the rest and clearly much weaker. In terms of strength, shine, body—it was inferior in every way. What had I gone and done? Another anxious thought followed. Transforming into a monster was all very well, but what on earth was I supposed to do now?
My program of hair fortification began the following morning.
I have started eating as much liver and seaweed as I can. Beans and eggs are supposed to be good, too. As I massage horse oil over the damaged patches on my arms, I repeatedly apologize to the follicles. Naturally, I apply the oil to other parts of my body, too.
Now that I’ve developed an understanding with the black mass inside me, I can retract it at will, so it doesn’t interfere with my work. Just like my colleagues who spend their free time taking courses or pursuing various leisure activities, I pour my energy into fostering the power of my hair.
Every day before bed, I transform in order to assess how my hair is coming along. Then I brush it thoroughly, using a luxury boar-bristle brush. I don’t know how much of it is the work of the horse oil, but the weak patches on my arms are now almost indistinguishable from the rest of me, so I’ve started pondering what my next move should be. I haven’t reached any conclusions.
I’m going to keep mulling it over until I land on a way to put my hair to good use—until I can devise my own unique trick. In the meantime, I intend to keep taking good care of it. That way, when the opportunity arises for me to unleash my power in a dramatic fashion like Kiyohime, I’ll be able to rise to the occasion. Kiyohime was free of hair and I am full of it, but I think our ambitions are the same. I want a skill, a special power into which I can throw my whole self. As to the question of what kind of creature I am, I really couldn’t care less. It doesn’t bother me if I stay a nameless monster.
My aunt hasn’t shown up to see me yet, so I guess she hasn’t managed to perfect her special trick. I’m sure that whatever she comes up with will be unspeakably brilliant. I really hope she comes back soon. Until then, I’ll keep working on myself, always holding at the forefront of my mind the image of my aunt and myself, dancing together, kimonos twinkling.
The Peony Lanterns
“Good evening to you, sir!”
He’d ignored the doorbell three times already when he heard the woman’s voice carrying through the thick steel door. Sitting on his sofa, Shinzaburō froze in alarm, hardly breathing. His body felt terribly heavy, and the thought of getting up was unbearable. Usually in this situation, Shinzaburō would have relied on his wife to answer the door, but with it being Obon, she was away visiting her parents. Besides, it was ten o’clock at night. Shinzaburō had no idea who his visitor was, but he believed that ringing people’s doorbells at this hour was unreasonable behavior—and Shinzaburō disliked people who behaved unreasonably. From a young age, he had been instilled with a firm grasp on what was and wasn’t reasonable. In his adult life, throughout his career as a salesperson, his professional conduct had always been eminently reasonable. Even when he’d been laid off as part of the company’s post-recession restructure, he had retained his sense of reason and walked away without a fuss.
That had been more than six months ago. Shinzaburō’s wife had begun dropping gentle hints that he should find himself another job. He knew she was right—but somehow he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Both his mind and body felt leaden. Whenever he browsed job listings online he was hit by the unshakable sense that he was being made a fool of, and he couldn’t stand the idea of visiting the employment bureau either. Had he really become the sort of man who had to rely on an employment bureau? The very idea seemed too wretched to bear. And there he’d been believing that he was talented and had something to offer the world. He’d gone about his life not being a nuisance to anyone, playing by the rules, acting reasonably at all times. How had it come to this?
While his wife was at work, Shinzaburō would do a bit of housework, but a token offering was as far as it went. The truth of the matter was this: spending all his time in his marl-gray tracksuit, shabby from constant wear, Shinzaburō had morphed into a big gray sloth. In the afternoon, he would lounge about on the sofa, watching reruns of period dramas and mulling over questions of no particular significance, like whether, back in the Edo period, his lack of fixed employment would have made him a rōnin. How much better that sounded than simply unemployed.