Hell Read online

  “So it’s almost like going back to buy a decent meal for yourself when you were starving as a boy,” said the second man.

  “I suppose you could say that.” The two men exchanged smiles.

  Could this man really have brought Yuzo to Hell from the real world? At first, Takeshi thought that his childhood memories had given Yuzo his youthful appearance. But no, it was clear he wasn’t an adult who had died and come to Hell. He had to be Yuzo as a boy, somehow plucked from the real world’s past. Were such things possible in Hell?

  Takeshi was perplexed. If Hell was a place without God, then who was in charge of it? The Devil? He refused to believe that. Both God and the Devil were creations of the human mind. But couldn’t that also be true of Hell itself? Couldn’t Hell just exist in Takeshi’s mind? If that were the case, the possibilities were endless: Takeshi’s organs might have been crushed in the accident, but his brain preserved. His broken body could be in some kind of sterile life-support capsule. He could be dreaming all of this. Or he could even be in an artificial world – a computer-generated meta-reality that someone had created.

  The waiter arrived and took the orders of the two men. He did it very naturally; he had probably been a waiter in life as well. Takeshi wondered if there was anywhere in Hell that would suit him as well as this restaurant seemed to suit the waiter. Perhaps Takeshi was best suited to wandering from place to place, as he had been doing since coming here.

  Yuzo squirmed in his chair as the men spoke to the waiter. He seemed to have no idea what they were ordering, but when he heard words like “chicken” and “duck” mentioned, he would look imploringly at the men, as if saying, “Please order one of those for me!” When the men were done ordering and the waiter was about to leave, Yuzo, his eyes open wide, shouted in a panic:

  “Meat! Meat! Meat! Meat!”

  “Don’t shout,” said the first man, making a face.

  “I will be bringing meat, sir,” said the waiter expressionlessly before retreating towards the kitchen.

  “A ‘sirloin’ is a cut of beef,” said the second man to Yuzo. He turned to the first man and went on, “Come to think of it, all we said was ‘beef’ back then. We never used words like ‘sirloin’ or ‘roast’, did we?”

  “All we had was ground beef that could’ve come from any part of the cow. And we were lucky to get even that.”

  Takeshi himself had never eaten meat as a child. His family had been well off by the standards of the time, but even they had been close to starvation. People thought it lavish to have an actual bowl of rice instead of a watery broth with a few grains of rice at the bottom of the bowl. If you poured soy sauce over a bowl of hot rice and stirred it around, you could almost believe you were having the impossible treat of rice mixed with a raw egg. As a war orphan, Yuzo would have been lucky to eat a crust of bread a day.

  The waiter brought out the appetizer. It was fish carpaccio. Yuzo put his mouth to the edge of the plate and began to shovel the fish into his mouth.

  “What are you doing?” said the first man. “Eat your food this way.”

  Yuzo paid no attention. He picked up the plate and stuffed the rest of the fish into his mouth, then he licked the dressing from the plate.

  “What atrocious manners,” said the second man with a smile. “If you like the dressing so much, break off a piece of bread and – say, that’s odd. What happened to the bread?”

  All of the bread in the basket had disappeared. Yuzo had stuffed it into his pockets.

  “You mustn’t do that,” said the first man, beginning to look annoyed. “Put the bread back in the basket.”

  Yuzo ignored him. He grabbed the uneaten watercress and radish sprouts off the men’s plates and stuffed them into his mouth. Then he picked up their plates and licked them clean.

  “If you’re going to behave like that, I won’t be taking you out to dinner again,” said the first man sternly. “So what will it be? Is it all right if you never get to come here again? Or do you want to learn some manners?”

  Yuzo wept as he silently removed a piece of bread from his pocket and began to wolf it down. The expression on his face seemed to say, “I can’t help myself. Can’t you see I’m starving?”

  The waiter appeared. “Shall I bring another basket of bread, sir?”

  “Ah, yes please. Wait, on second thought, he’ll just take it all again. Just put some on our plates when you bring our main courses.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  “He’ll still take it, you know,” said the second man.

  “The little brat,” spat the first man. “When I was his age, I was starving too, but I’d like to think I still had manners and exercised self-control.”

  There was no change in young Yuzo’s behaviour after the soup arrived. With his eyes wide open, he picked up his bowl with both hands, brought it to his mouth, and drank the soup down in a few short gulps, paying no attention to how hot it was. When he was done, he licked the bowl. He reached out for the men’s bowls, but the second man smacked the back of his hand with the flat of his knife. Yuzo glared at him as if he wanted to bite him.

  Yes, this was Hell. That Yuzo would join a gang after being subjected to such cruelty seemed hardly surprising. He would almost certainly never be brought to a restaurant like this again. He probably knew that too, which was why he saw no point in trying to improve his manners. What would happen when the waiter brought their steaks? In his current state, Yuzo might try to eat the leftovers off Takeshi’s plate as well. Takeshi didn’t think he could bear to watch that. He summoned the waiter for his bill. There was always the same amount of money in his wallet, even after he spent some.

  But these worldly gentlemen here with Yuzo – what was their story? Why were they in Hell? As Takeshi left the restaurant, he peeked into their minds. They were members of the board of directors of a bank, and had got rich by padding their pensions just before retiring.

  Takeshi suddenly found himself longing to see Izumi again. With Izumi, he might at least be able to have a moderately intelligent conversation and forget his current mood. But where could Izumi be? Takeshi started walking in the direction of some high-rise buildings that resembled offices. Yes, they were office buildings. Perhaps Izumi was there.

  But at that moment Izumi was riding the train. He was one of a number of passengers sitting on a train very similar to the ones that he had once ridden to work. As he was boarding the train, he noticed Sasaki getting into the same car, so he quickly retreated to the adjacent car. He saw in Sasaki’s mind that his demand for a kickback had got Sasaki fired, and he saw how Sasaki died. It was a grim way to go, but Izumi felt no guilt or sympathy for the man. If he met Sasaki face to face, he would have to say how terrible he felt and how sorry he was, but of course that wasn’t true at all. He had lost all such feelings since coming to Hell. And Sasaki was unlikely to confront Izumi anyway. They were in Hell. What good would it do to bring up resentments from life?

  Sasaki seemed terribly run-down, but then Izumi realized that Sasaki was wearing the same drab business suit he had always worn. The only difference was that he wasn’t wearing a tie. Izumi could have said something to Sasaki, but the truth was he didn’t care one way or the other about him. Izumi had other things on his mind; he was lost in memories and he wanted to stay lost. That was the real reason he had stayed away from Sasaki. In his mind, Izumi was back at the Night Walker.

  Yumiko Hanawa, the host of the television variety show Premiere 21, was arriving at the Night Walker as she did every Wednesday night after filming was over. She was accompanied by her producer Nishizawa, the guests of the show that night and various others – about ten people in all. She led the way across the club’s dance floor, drawing stares from customers sitting at the tables. Trailing her was her entourage, some wearing flashy stage costumes, others in trendy casual wear, and others, like her manager and the TV-station staff, in business suits. Izumi had been at the club, waiting. He had got a table next to a section of booths
that had remained empty all night, hoping that they were reserved for Yumiko and her group. He wasn’t disappointed.

  “You see that businessman sitting next to us?” Konzo Ichikawa, a young kabuki actor, whispered to Yumiko once they were seated. Konzo didn’t have a distinguished kabuki family pedigree, but he was a rising star of the theatre and his sense of humour had landed him guest spots on Premiere 21 several times. “I’ve seen him here a lot. He’s always alone.”

  “Him? Oh, he’s one of my fans. The manager says he’s here every Wednesday.”

  “I knew it.” A mischievous gleam entered Konzo’s eyes. “He can’t take his eyes off you.”

  “Why don’t you take pity on the poor guy?” chuckled Mamoru Kashiwazaki, one of the show’s regular guests. He was a singer and a well-known practical joker. “Sleep with him, and he’ll lose his mind trying to satisfy your every whim. I know the type.”

  “That would be a hoot,” said Osanai, Kashiwazaki’s manager. He quite liked the idea. “Why don’t you talk to him? I want to see him squirm.”

  “Men!” Yumiko replied, looking up at the ceiling with false exasperation. There was a sparkle in her eyes; she was not uninterested.

  “I’d like to see how he acts myself!” Kashiwazaki said, tapping Mayumi Shibata, the assistant host, on her back. “Come on. You want to see it too, don’t you?”

  “Oh, sure,” said Shibata unenthusiastically. “Definitely.”

  “I’d sleep with him if I was a woman,” said Konzo. “I’d love to watch him fall to pieces. I could use it as inspiration for my art.”

  In the next booth, the novelist Yoshio Torikai was grumbling to Nishizawa, the producer of the show, about a certain critic. Nishizawa had no connection to the literary world and was the only one whom Torikai could complain to. “He trashed every one of my books. So when I met him at a party, I confronted him about it. And you know what he said? He said, ‘Why don’t you write a rebuttal? That way you’ll get paid something and I’ll get paid to respond. So we both win, right?’ That’s all it was. These guys are hacks. They write this rubbish for the money.”

  “Mind if I join you?”

  Izumi looked up to find Yumiko standing in front of his table in her beige dress. The blood in his body started to fizz like soda pop. He had noticed Yumiko and her friends peering at him from the next table, whispering among themselves, but he never dreamt that Yumiko would actually come over and talk to him. He was speechless. He wanted to say “of course” as he made a place for her to sit, but the words stuck in his throat and he succeeded only in knocking over his whisky-and-water. He smiled and nodded eagerly as he wiped the table with his handkerchief. Yumiko sat down beside him, paying no attention to the damp patch on the sofa. The breeze caused by her movement touched Izumi’s face. It smelt of the perfume Poison. He felt the sofa give slightly under the weight of her body.

  “You come here often, don’t you?”

  “Yes, every Wednesday.”

  “You wouldn’t be coming to see me, would you?”

  “You might say that. Uh… ha ha ha.” Izumi motioned for the waiter and knocked over his glass again.

  Izumi could see the group at the next table looking down at their hands, their shoulders shaking with laughter. But he couldn’t worry about them – the waiter had just arrived and he wanted to order a drink for Yumiko. To do that, he would have to ask her what she wanted. And then he would tell her how he had longed for her. And then he would tell her how this was like a dream come true. And then he would somehow have to survive the pain in his chest. And… And… And…

  After a bit, the conversation between Izumi and Yumiko relaxed, and her friends lost interest in them. Izumi had said how he had first seen Yumiko when she had played the lead in the travelling production of The Diary of Anne Frank and that he had been a devoted fan of hers ever since. Yumiko was telling him what a hellish experience it was.

  “I’ve got a long nose like a Jew, don’t you think? I suppose that’s why they picked me for the part, but I wish I never auditioned for it. I really do. We played our first month in Tokyo and it was a big success. And sure, I was happy about that. But then we went on tour. We played prefectural halls, cultural centres, community centres, even school auditoriums. I think we must have played every prefecture in the country. Everyone wanted to see a play based on such a famous story. And of course junior-high and high-school groups came, too, so it was a full house everywhere we went. I don’t remember how many places we played, but we were on the road for three years. Three years! You can’t imagine how terrible it was! Day after day, the same lines, the same stage directions. Oh, they’d have to make a few changes depending on the size and shape of the stage, but that was it. I thought I’d go out of my mind with boredom!”

  Yumiko could not stop talking about how the experience had scarred her so deeply. Even in her hotel room later, as she was taking off her clothes, she kept telling Izumi about it. “Perform, travel, perform, travel, perform, travel, rest, perform, perform, travel, rest. That’s what our schedule was like. And of course, we were out in the middle of nowhere, so there was nothing we could do even on our days off. Come on, get your clothes off. Quite a few cast members quit, but I was the lead. They couldn’t find a replacement for me so easily, and there were people coming just to see me play Anne, or at least that’s what they told me. I did that for three years! Can you imagine? I enjoyed the audience’s applause for the first three months or so, but that was it. After that, no excitement, nothing. I was just going through the motions like a machine, day after day. Hurry up, get your clothes off, we don’t have all night.”

  Izumi was sitting on the bed, entranced. Yumiko had said she was bored always being with the same crowd, so why didn’t they go back to her hotel? She said goodbye to group, and they had left, just like that. Her friends stared blankly at her as she walked out of the club; they hadn’t expected her to go through with it. And now she stood nude in front of the adoring Izumi. She walked around the room, still talking, and then stopped when she caught a glimpse of herself in the full-length mirror.

  “Ah, eternal beauty,” she smiled.

  Yumiko struck a few poses before the mirror, started to talk again, then walked over to Izumi and lay down on the bed. She prompted him to take off his clothes again, and Izumi at last began to undress. His heart was racing. He had no idea what Yumiko was saying any more. His eyes were consuming her body. She had lain down on top of the sheets, giving Izumi a full view of the black of her pubic hair and the pink of her genitals. He kneeled on the bed and began to inch his way up her body. They began to make love. But Yumiko would not stop talking.

  “I can’t bear to think about it any more. Always the same faces. Always the same sets. Even the audiences were always the same. It was a nightmare. Please, Mister… Izumi – that is your name, yes? – make me forget! Make me forget everything!”

  Despite the dreariness of the moment, Izumi ejaculated within five seconds.

  “Well, well, well. Did we have a little problem there?” said the chubby woman sitting across from Izumi on the train. She looked about sixty years old. He didn’t know how long she had been there.

  “Mind your own business,” Izumi said angrily. He glared at her. But he wasn’t particularly angry or embarrassed. He was just surprised how, even in Hell, this woman could spy on a total stranger’s private reminiscences.

  The woman actually seemed quite amiable. She tried to placate him, the smile never leaving her face. “I’m sorry. I used to be a psychic, you see. And ever since I came here, my powers have got much stronger. Sometimes I get a bit carried away.”

  “You were a psychic?” said Izumi, his interest piqued as he looked into her own past. “And you were murdered? Who killed you?”

  “A murderer.”

  “Well, that goes without saying. If he killed you, then he’s a murderer, isn’t he?”

  “No, that’s not what I mean.” The old woman’s slightly flaccid jowls jiggled as s
he shook her head. She seemed annoyed by Izumi’s inferior powers of intuition.

  “Let me start at the beginning,” she said. “I was living in Sendai, where I was famous for finding lost objects, and one day the police came to me for help. They were sure that a missing woman had been murdered, but they had no body and no leads and didn’t know what to do. So they asked me to help them, and I did. They found her body buried way up in the mountains, just as I told them. The police hunted for her killer, but they didn’t have any luck. They must have felt they would lose face if they didn’t arrest somebody, so they decided that I was the killer! Can you believe that? They said that only the killer could have known where the body was buried. They questioned me for days and days. I just about lost my mind. They told me that if I was innocent, I should use my powers to help them find the real killer. But my speciality is finding lost things. I’m no good at finding murderers. Luckily, they caught the killer just then. A policeman had been going door to door asking about a completely unrelated case, and when he got to the killer’s house, the guy panicked and ran.

  “That was twenty years ago. By that I mean twenty years before my death. The next part happened just a little while ago – about a week before I died. A detective came to see me, wanting help finding the body of a murder victim – again. The detective was young and didn’t know my history with the police. I said that I was fed up with helping the police and told him my story. ‘Nothing like that will happen this time,’ he said. ‘I promise you.’

  “The media found out about this, and television cameras showed up, so I figured it would be all right. But there was no way I was going to help the police until they apologized for what happened before. So I turned him down. They showed that part on television, and even had a voice-over talking about my experience with the police. The next night I was killed. The murderer was afraid I was going to expose him. He came to my house and beat me to death. It’s a shame that psychics can never tell what’s going to happen to themselves, isn’t it? But the police were able to get a lead on the murderer because of what happened to me, and they finally caught him. The media had a field day with that, let me tell you.” Having finished her story, the woman laughed as if she had been talking about someone else the whole time.