My twentieth birthday came soon after that. For twenty long years I had endured the pain, hoping there would be some bright turning point, but it had never happened. I felt utterly defeated. I wished I had died sooner. My long detour had only stretched out the pain.
At this point, Creta Kano took a single deep breath. On the table in front of her sat the dish with eggshells and her empty coffee cup. On her lap lay the handkerchief that she had folded with such care. As if recalling the time, she glanced at the clock on the shelf. I'm very sorry, she said in a dry little voice. I hadn't intended to talk so long. I've taken far too much of your time as it is. I wont impose on you any longer. I don't know how to apologize for having bored you at such length.
She grasped the strap of her white patent-leather bag and stood up from the sofa.
This took me off guard. Just a minute, please, I said, flustered. I didn't want her to end her story in the middle. If you're worried about taking my time, then don't worry. I'm free all afternoon. As long as you've told me this much, why not go to the end? Theres more to your story, I'm sure.
Of course there is, she said, looking down at me, both hands in a tight grip on the strap of her bag. What I've told you so far is more like an introduction.
I asked her to wait a moment and went to the kitchen. Standing in front of the sink, I gave myself time for two deep breaths. Then I took two glasses from the cabinet, put ice in them, and filled them with orange juice from the refrigerator. Placing the glasses on a small tray, I brought them into the living room. I had gone through these motions with deliberate slowness, but I found her standing as I had left her. When I set the glasses of juice on the table, though, she seemed to have second thoughts. She settled onto the sofa again and placed her bag at her side.
You want me to tell my story to the very end? she asked. Are you sure? Quite sure, I said. She drank half her orange juice and went on with her story. I failed to kill myself, of course. If I had succeeded, I wouldn't be here now, drinking orange juice with you, Mr. Okada. She looked into my eyes, and I gave her a little smile of agreement. If I had died according to plan, it would have been the final solution for me. Dying would have meant the end of consciousness, and I would never have had to feel pain again. Which is exactly what I wanted. Unfortunately, however, I chose the wrong method to die.
At nine o'clock on the night of May twenty-ninth, I went to my brothers room and asked to borrow his car. It was a shiny new Toyota MR2, and the thought of letting me take it made him look very unhappy. But I didn't care. He couldn't refuse, because I had lent him money to help him buy it. I took the key and drove it for half an hour. The car still had barely a thousand miles on it. A touch of the gas pedal could make it fly. It was the perfect car for my purposes. I drove as far as the Tama River on the outskirts of the city, and there I found a massive stone wall of the kind I had in mind. It was the outer wall of a big condominium building, and it stood at the far end of a dead-end street. I gave myself plenty of room to accelerate, and then I pressed the accelerator to the floor. I must have been doing close to a hundred miles an hour when I slammed into the wall and lost consciousness.
Unfortunately for me, however, the wall turned out to be far less solid than it had appeared. To save money, they had not anchored it properly. The wall simply crumbled, and the front end of the car was crushed flat. That's all that happened. Because it was so soft, the wall absorbed the impact. As if that weren't bad enough, in my confusion I had forgotten to undo my seat belt.
And so I escaped death. I was hardly even injured. And strangest of all, I felt almost no pain. It was the weirdest thing. They took me to the hospital and patched up my one broken rib. The police came to investigate, but I told them I didn't remember a thing. I said I had probably mixed up the gas and the brake. And they believed me. I had just turned twenty, and it had been only six months since I got my license. Besides, I just didn't look like the suicidal type. Who would try to kill herself with her seat belt fastened?
Once I was out of the hospital, I had several difficult problems to face. First I had to pay off the outstanding loan on the MR2 that I had turned into scrap metal. Through some error with the insurance company, the car had not been covered.
Now that it was too late, I realized that to do myself in, I should have rented a car with the proper insurance. At the time, of course, insurance was the last thing on my mind. It never occurred to me that my brothers car wouldn't have enough insurance on it or that I would fail to kill myself. I ran into a stone wall at a hundred miles an hour: it was amazing that I survived.
A short time later, I received a bill from the condominium association for repair of the wall. They were demanding 1,364,294 yen from me. Immediately. In cash. All I could do was borrow it from my father. He was willing to give it to me in the form of a loan, but he insisted that I pay him back. My father was very proper when it came to matters of money. He said it was my responsibility for having caused the accident, and he expected me to pay him back in full and on schedule. In fact, at the time, he had very little money to spare. He was in the process of expanding his clinic and was having trouble raising the money for the project.
I thought again about killing myself. This time I would do a proper job. I would jump from the fifteenth floor of the university administration building. There would be no slip-ups that way. I would die for sure. I made several trial runs. I picked the best window for the job. I was on the verge of jumping.
But something held me back. There was something wrong, something nagging at me. At the last second, that something almost literally pulled me back from the edge. A good deal of time went by, though, before I realized what that something was. I didn't have any pain. I had felt hardly any pain since the accident. What with one thing coming up after another, I hadn't had a moment to notice, but pain had disappeared from my body. My bowel movements were normal. My menstrual cramps were gone. No more headaches or stomachaches. Even my broken rib caused me hardly any pain. I had no idea why such a thing had happened. But suddenly I was free of pain.
I decided to go on living for the time being. If only for a little while, I wanted to find out what it meant to live life without pain. I could die whenever I wanted to.
But to go on living meant for me to pay back my debt. Altogether, I owed more than three million yen. In order to pay it back, I became a prostitute.
A prostitute?!
That's right, said Kano, as if it were nothing at all. I needed money over the short term. I wanted to pay off my debts as quickly as possible, and that was the only way I knew of to raise the money. I didn't have the slightest hesitation. I had seriously intended to die. And I still intended to die, sooner or later. The curiosity I felt about a life without pain was keeping me alive, but strictly on a temporary basis. And compared with death, it would be nothing at all for me to sell my body.
sip.
I see what you mean, I said. The ice in her orange juice had melted, and Kano stirred it with her straw before taking a Do you mind if I ask you a question? I asked. No, not at all. Please. Didn't you consult with your sister about this? She was practicing her austerities on Malta at the time. As long as that went on, she refused to send me her address. She didn't want me to disrupt her concentration. It was virtually impossible for me to write to her during the entire three years she lived on Malta.
I see, I said. Would you like some more coffee? Yes, please, said Kano. I went to the kitchen and warmed the coffee. While I waited, I stared at the exhaust fan and took several deep breaths. When it was ready, I poured the coffee into fresh cups and brought it to the living room on a tray, together with a plate of chocolate cookies. We ate and drank for a while.