Sometimes it’s a relief to have Kinoko-san nearby, and other times her presence is oppressive. When Kinoko-san coughs, all sorts of strange thoughts run one after the other through my head. When at last they subside, Kinoko-san turns over in her sleep. Then I start to hear her voice saying urgently over and over, “Please, I want you to surrender your ears.” I wish I could make her stop. What would make her stop? I get as far as deciding I could fit the palm of my hand exactly over Kinoko-san’s mouth and hold it there to keep her voice in, and then I fall asleep.
Rather than trying to correct Kinoko-san’s pronunciation of the word “misheard,” I decided to insert all sorts of other expressions into her ear, things like “didn’t quite catch that” and “thought I heard when actually she said” and “in one ear and out the other.” Perhaps Kinoko-san would abandon her fixation on the one single expression and open her ears to others. This might be enough to make my murderous intentions, which have been provoked by the constant irritation of a single nerve, vanish in the wind.
“Kinoko-san, there’s this woman who never says anything interesting, so whatever she says to me goes in one ear and out the other, but the other day I didn’t hear what she said just when it was actually important, and now I’m regretting it. You remember that tall high school student who is always coming by, what was his name again? He mentioned his name but I didn’t quite catch it, and the question is, is he her grandson or not? Apparently she doesn’t have any children. Is it possible for a person to have grandchildren without having any children?” Kinoko-san gave me a sympathetic look and said smoothly, “Oh, certainly.” At the time, a deep skepticism rose within me and I began to wonder whether Kinoko-san’s sense of reason hadn’t finally been warped, but when I thought it over the next day, I realized that one can indeed have grandchildren without first having children. Perhaps it was not Kinoko-san who was warped, but my own brain that was beginning to soften.
Sometimes Kinoko-san would wake up in the middle of the night and say, “Surrend me your ear.” The odd thing is that I would wake up not from hearing her voice, but a few seconds before she began to speak. It’s coming, I have a feeling it’s coming, I know it’s coming, I would think, holding my breath, and sure enough she’d say it. There was never anyone around to save me. All alone, I would lie grieving over the fate of the ear I would have to surrender. To add insult to injury, there wasn’t anything in particular Kinoko-san wanted to say. Once she came out with “render me your ear now,” she would just look at me without saying anything, the smell of disinfectant would rise in the darkness, everything so quiet we could hardly breathe. Distressed, I would seek out other topics, start talking about anyone who came to mind. For instance, that person whose name I could never remember. “That person, you know, the one whose name I flailed to catch, now what was she called?” I tried saying. Even in the dark I could feel Kinoko-san bristle with excitement at the word “flailed.”
The next morning, Kinoko-san, her face striped in the light coming in through the blinds, opened the large smile in the middle of her face, and murmured, “Well, I do believe I’ve finally afflailed.”
It seemed as if I had finally afflailed, too. In the old days when I went into town, all sorts of delightful things to buy would leap into my field of vision. I rarely came home empty-handed. Now if I went, I found nothing I wanted to buy, nothing I wanted to eat. I didn’t even really know what they were selling. I could see they were making all sorts of shapes out of translucent plastic. Sometimes I found them pretty, but I couldn’t get a sense of what they were for. I thought I might understand if I deciphered the tiny letters covering the instruction booklets like ants, but I couldn’t get myself in the mood to read. I didn’t feel like eating either. Everything I ate was soft and smelled of monosodium glutamate, and I couldn’t say whether it tasted good or bad. To tell the truth, I wasn’t even in the mood to leave the house, but I didn’t want to admit it, so I would go out, swinging my arms. I would say, “I’m going out for a bit. I mustn’t just sit at home afflailing away the day.” And Kinoko-san would narrow her eyes in a smile and say, “Have a nice time now.” She didn’t look envious. Probably it wasn’t so much that she couldn’t go out, but that she’d graduated from doing so. Out near the row of stores in front of the train station, hundreds of tin monkeys were smashing cymbals together. But it appeared that sounds were unable to penetrate within ten centimeters of my ears, so I didn’t hear a thing. I said to my ear, nose and throat doctor, “Cities are so annoising, it’s just as well my ears are getting hard of hearing.”
Once I’d let myself say so, I suddenly couldn’t remember whether there really was such an expression. Surely one’s ears could not be hard. Ears are soft. If they are hard, they must have been cut off and given away, then must have hardened in their severed state. It was really too generous of me, giving away ears. Of course I only meant to lend them out, but apparently my intentions were misunderstood. My gestures are always too lavish and so this sort of thing is always happening. Or perhaps at the moment I really meant to sacrifice them, I can’t remember.
I remember Kinoko-san saying once, “In my day, I too sacrificed my ears for another person, as one does in this world. But that person went far away.” Far away might mean hell. One feels sorry for such people, but what can one do? A person who flees with another’s ear ought simply to go to ear hell and turn into earwax. That’s fate, and there’s nothing one can do about it. One may wish to save such people, but what can one do about earwax?
The ear, nose and throat doctor, whatever he was thinking, suddenly said, “There isn’t much we can do about minor hearing loss. If it gets too bad, you can wear whatever’s needed.”
I wondered where it was that the entrance to hell lay gaping open like an ear. I tried going out inside my head. On one side of the train station, a narrow road ran parallel to the tracks. There were stalls for ramen noodles and for pots of soup. There was an old bookstore and a record library. As I continued to walk, I began to feel as if hell had opened up in the shape of my ear. From a short distance away, it looked like a rain puddle that was starting to dry up, but when I got close, the dips and hollows of the green mud took on the shape of an earlobe.
I began to feel as if I wouldn’t mind lending out just an earlobe. The inner ear I really didn’t want to lend, but the outer part would be fine. I tried saying out loud, “A lobe? Certainly. My pleasure.” At the time there was no one else in the room with me, but the flower wilting in its vase beside the window lifted its head to look at me, the curtain rose and fell and played against my cheek, and the ceiling began to perspire. I wondered whether I really was alone. Kinoko-san had said she was going to the hospital for an operation, which was apparently happening this very moment. If they didn’t manage the operation properly and cut off some necessary part of her, she would not be coming back. If it came to that, I would donate a body part of my own. I could give at least one. Many of the body’s organs come in twos. I have two ears. Two lungs. I think there might even be two of the uterus, I don’t remember now. “There is the intestine, too. It’s twelve fingers long. Surely you can spare one,” I could hear the staff saying. “There is your twelve-layered court dress. Surely you can spare one, and you’ll still be warm.” I was cold. The windows were shut tight and the heater hummed, but the cold came creeping up from the floor into my bed.
Late that night Kinoko-san came home. She was lying upon a pedestal made of silver and covered with a pure white tablecloth. I pretended to be asleep and watched the whole thing. Kinoko-san seemed to have lost consciousness. The tablecloth was stained with strawberry jam.