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 signs of struggle in the room.
The police investigated all his known associates but could not come up with a woman who fit the hotel clerks 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 reported 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 meaning 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 Cinnamon 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 garden, 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 mothers 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 ability of which she had had no awareness. She imagined that it might have welled up inside her to replace the intense 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 womans 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 daughters 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 womans 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 Hsinching - the zoo on a day when it was closed and she was there all by herself, something only she was permitted as the chief veterinarians 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 than she had anticipated for the job she had done.