“Eh?” he said. He turned and saw that she’d leaned her seat back down and was lying there face up beside him.
“I’ll let you touch, just once.”
Kita’s heart thundered in his chest. The valley between her breasts, that object of lust for men all over Japan, was peeping from her gaping neckline. The breasts beneath her crimson dress glowed a faint white in the dim light, and a scent of tulips wafted up from them. With the fingertips of his trembling right hand, he touched her, whereupon she took his hand and slid them into the valley. It was a moment of pure bliss. His fingertips ran over her nipple, brushing the faint tulip scent.
“Thank you. Really. Thank you,” said Kita, his expression grave, as he bowed his head over and over, until Shinobu giggled.
Chancing to glance at the dashboard, Kita suddenly noticed the Bible Shinobu had shown him in the bar. Wherever she went, it obviously went with her.
“The Bible must serve as a charm against traffic accidents,” he said.
“It’s a kind of Linus blanket,” she said with a laugh.
“I’ve got one more request.” Kita turned meekly to face her again.
“What? What is it?” asked Shinobu, intrigued, as she raised her seat back to sitting position again.
“Could you read me something from the Bible?”
Shinobu didn’t speak for a few seconds, then she reached for the book. “Sure,” she said in a singsong voice, and began to turn the pages.
I’m moving to some town or village in the next world soon, Kita said inside himself, so I guess I should take this opportunity to repent my sins.
“Got it. Here it is, OK, I’ll read to you from the Gospel of Saint John.”
There was a man named Lazarus who had fallen ill. His home was at Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha.
Kita listened, his eyes on the light coordinates shining across the bay.
The sisters sent a message to him: “Sir, you should know that your friend lies ill.” When Jesus heard this he said, “This illness is not to end in death: through it God’s glory is to be revealed and the Son of God glorified.”
“It’s a bit dark,” she added. “Let’s turn on the light,” and she flicked the switch. The reading continued in the glow of the orange light.
On his arrival Jesus found that Lazarus had already been four days in the tomb.
Jesus said, “Your brother will rise again.” “I know that he will rise again,” said Martha, “at the resurrection on the last day.” Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever has faith in me shall live, even though he dies; and no one who lives and has faith in me shall ever die. Do you believe this?”
Shinobu seemed to be asking him the question directly. Kita spluttered. If you believed that, you’d never manage to die. For a man like him, about to die by self-execution, the words had a certain encouraging ring to them.
Having told Jesus she believed in him, Martha returned to the village and called her sister Mary. The Jews of the village followed her. Now wherever he went, Jesus was persecuted by the Jews, driven out and half killed. He was proposing a new interpretation of their laws, which they completely misunderstood. So Jesus entered the tomb of Lazarus, in front of his disciples, Lazarus’ sisters, and the village Jews.
Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the dead man’s sister, said to him, “Sir, by now there will be a stench; he has been there four days.” Jesus said, “Did I not tell you that if you have faith you will see the glory of God?”
Then they removed the stone.
Jesus looked upwards and said, “Father, I thank you for hearing me. I know that you always hear me, but I have spoken for the sake of the people standing round, that they may believe it was you who sent me.”
Then he raised his voice in a great cry: “Lazarus, come out.” The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with linen bandages, his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said, “Loose him; let him go.”
Many of the Jews who had come to visit Mary, and had seen what Jesus did, put their faith in him.
Shinobu snapped the Bible shut. “That’s all,” she said. Embarrassed to look at each other, they sat together in silence for a while, staring at the lights on the water. Here they were, two people who in different ways had sold off their bodies, snuggled together in an Italian sports car reading the world’s bestseller. And it wasn’t in nineteenth century Petersburg, but at the end of the twentieth century in Tokyo. Was it his decision to carry out self-execution that brought about these strange twists of fate, Kita wondered?
“How could he have been resurrected after being dead for four days?” Kita turned over in his mind this old question that no one any longer seriously pondered.
“It’s impossible in terms of modern medical science, isn’t it? But dead people might have quite often been resurrected like that at the time.”
“Maybe the dead back then were in really good shape.”
“Still alive even when they were riddled with worms.”
Simultaneously they both began to snicker, and soon the little car was filled to bursting with an explosion of laughter.
As the laughter wound down, Kita asked, “So was there any special reason why you purposely chose that bit to read?”
“Yes. I told you in the bar, didn’t I? I used to contemplate suicide every night.”
“Yes, you did say that.”
“I decided to give up the idea when I read about Lazarus being brought back from the dead.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
Shinobu massaged her temples, struggling for words. “I can’t really express it,” she began. “I decided to give up the idea because if I committed suicide now I wouldn’t be resurrected. Lazarus was raised from the dead because he was loved by his sisters and the villagers and Jesus, wasn’t he? But in Japan, when you die of course it’s sad at the time, but after the prescribed forty-nine days are up everyone forgets about you. The only people who can be resurrected are the ones who live on in people’s memories forever.”
“You believe in the resurrection of the dead?”
Shinobu nodded hard, her eyes alight with firm conviction.
“It’s essential to believe. I mean, if you doubt, you’ll never be resurrected, will you?”
“You won’t have any fleshly body to return to if you’re cremated, you know.”
“It’s true. But the soul doesn’t burn.”
“I guess. The soul’s not flesh, after all. But if only the soul is resurrected, it’s not visible, is it? It’s scary to think of coming back to life as a half-rotted body, mind you. I think what you’re really talking about is memories of the dead.”
Kita was just trying to help her express things, but Shinobu shook her head stubbornly. “No, it’s not,” she declared. “The dead really communicate with us. They appear in dreams. They speak. They grow, they progress, they love and hate. I think the souls of the dead are maybe like the trees in a forest or water in a river or air in a city. They’re a part of nature. A dead soul might come creeping into this car here. If you turn on the radio you’ll hear Mozart or John Lennon. Or think of our own dead, pop stars like Yukiko Okada or Yutaka Ozaki. Their voices are still echoing somewhere. Now isn’t that some sign of the dead? Lazarus threw off his rotted body after his resurrection, and became a follower of Jesus, you know. Even if you die, you don’t disappear. You just turn into something different. The voice of them, the sense of them, their thoughts and form when they were in the world – it’s all put back together at random and something else is born from it. That’s resurrection. A resurrected person doesn’t have a name or a job or a self. They just are. People get resurrected only among folks who have the ability to feel that. But everyone believes it’s the end when you die, so the poor resurrected dead get ignored. You have to have a really strong soul to be resurrected in our world.”