Instead, when she raised her eyes to me, when she asked me, “Is it bad, what I’m doing, Misaka?” I threw myself on her but I didn’t stop her. I told her that whoever wants to do that has the right to do it, and I told her she must never feel guilty nor be ashamed nor ever think that in punishing her body she was damaging someone else’s property. I embraced her, I enfolded her in my arms, and I let her bleed onto my clothes before disinfecting her wound and dressing it with gauze. After, I stood up before her, I slowly took off my clothes, and I showed her, among the scars left on my body by my wanderings and by men, the marks of all those wounds I’d inflicted on myself.
Reiko says:
Misaka was my father, my mother, my governess, my mistress, my doomed soul, and my initiator. That was no news to anyone, but what I want to say is that she was also, often, like my little girl, like a child who trembled and sobbed in my arms, because where pain was concerned I was better than her, in pain I was greater than her.
In the beginning, Misaka didn’t even know what jigai meant.
I’m the one who told her that spouses once committed ritual suicide by cutting the jugular vein, seated, legs tucked under their buttocks. Enemy soldiers found the villages they invaded emptied of all life, houses deserted, furnished only with low tables and dead women, upright and noble, their ankles bound tightly so that no soldier might be tempted to wrest from their dead bodies what, living, they could have taken from them by force. I’m the one who decided that together we would honour no tradition. It was I who resolved that we would not mutilate ourselves to deny ourselves to all, but to offer ourselves to each other. We would mutilate ourselves without dying, without ceremony, our legs spread wide.
Oh, you have every right to say it’s all false, that I couldn’t know all that, and that I ought not to be there to tell my story because I’m dead. As for me, I’ve every right to tell you that it’s you who knows nothing, you who are aware of nothing.
The men say:
We have a good idea of what happened down there, all that time, and we all know how it ended, but no one knows how it began. At first we didn’t notice anything. Reiko’s prolonged absence from among the children eventually caught the attention of the wives. It also became clear that Misaka-sensei and the little Inoué had not left the property for more than a year. Some men who had arrived at dawn one day sometimes opened the gates and came to buy provisions for them in the village.
While we were wondering, sitting at Akira Gengei’s one noon-hour, whether we ought to send someone to check things out, a child came in and said:
“Come see.”
Two women were crossing the village, limping, one supporting the other, swathed in large purple capes, their faces masked by hoods. They walked to the stream, then went back to the property without saying anything to anyone. The frightened children said that when they passed in front of them they saw their faces from underneath, and swore that they had no more noses nor lips nor eyelids, and that their faces were like those of yˉurei, like those of the dead. We would have liked to contradict them, but we’d all noticed that only three naked feet protruded from under their capes, and that on each, several toes had been chiselled off.
3
The men say:
There was already nothing that could be done to protect them from themselves and the madness that had seized hold of their minds. During their progress they were surrounded by two bands of five bodyguards that they had chosen and paid, as we later learned, with money belonging to Sapporo’s uncle. The first was from here, the second were gaijin.
The first were bad men, consumed with a dark nostalgia for the licence their ancestors enjoyed under the ancient shogunates. The second were not much better. The Great War had horrified the entire world. These men had built their nests and grown to maturity there less like birds of prey than like reptiles, whose pale eyes and chill blood they shared. In their barracks they had been told, “You’ll see, when you have to kill a Boche with no bullets in your gun, you’ll see, when you throw yourself on him screaming over his screams and stick your bayonet in his gut not knowing if he’s found a way to thrust his into yours, and you watch his gaze go dim not knowing if you’re guttering out as well, then you’ll see what that does to you.” They went off, they saw what there was to see, they didn’t die, and they felt nothing. Not fear, not disgust, not pleasure, not anything. Their comrades in the regiment had gone back to their villages where they tried not to think of the war, tried to hide their mangled or absent limbs in the sleeves of their shirts and their pant legs, tried to forget the great swathes of their souls that had collapsed within them and now surfaced only in nocturnal outbursts of terror loosed from the depths of a nightmare. Meanwhile the soldiers of fortune roamed the world and reaped the benefits of this monstrous void in themselves as though it were a gift.
The children trained their narrowed eyes through the cracks in the palisade and reported that these men were abandoning themselves to barbaric jousts, taking turns doing tricks like little kittens, some learning to wield the katana, and others to action the breech of the assault rifles, all fighting bare-handed under the afternoon sun, and sometimes, haloed by lanterns, into the night, to the immense delight of Misaka and Reiko, who were much entertained by these games, and applauded them wildly from the veranda with their bound hands.
We wrote a letter to the uncle in Sapporo to inform him of the situation. He arrived in a car, had the doors to his own house thrown open with great difficulty, and came out a half-hour later, white-faced and hollow-eyed. He spoke with the mayor, told him that he was cutting off support for Reiko, that that was all he could do, and that with a bit of luck the renegades would disappear when they ran out of money.
“Do you want to be informed when that happens?” asked the mayor.
The uncle from Sapporo got into his car and said that we would have to exercise our own good judgment and deal with his niece and his other possessions in the village as we thought best, because he would never return to Rausu, and would never open a letter sent from here.
We realized too late that the renegades had found more in Rausu than a good income. After a few months, as we awaited their imminent departure, the mercenaries began to descend on the town every week to extort money from the businessmen and citizens and bring back supplies to their new mistresses.
Reiko says:
I breathed deeply so my uncle would hear the whistling Misaka and I made since we’d slashed away our lips, the sucking noise every breath required to return to our mouths the naked drool flowing onto our gums. I breathed like that for a long moment, then, in one flourish, I spread the wings of my cape while lifting my arms as though to fly away. I wanted him to see below, where I was unclad. I wanted him to see all the marks, the old ones that wouldn’t have had time to heal even if I’d lived a thousand years, and the new ones, unsettling, hideous, because Misaka and I always waited a day or two before disinfecting the wounds, to feel the pus clinging claw-like to our flesh, like an animal holding to its lair. I wanted him to see that I could not promenade on his arm in a ball dress in Rio or New York, nor sunbathe in Monte Carlo. I wanted him to see my flat, blank breast that would never suckle a child. I wanted him to know that Misaka and I had together determined the definitive length and form of my cleft.
Oh, you may believe if you like that I had no say in all that, and that all the dissipation you find so horrible was forced on me by Misaka, but you will not talk about it because on this subject you never dare speak a word, and there is nothing that has been forced into my mouth, into my cleft, between my buttocks or into my flesh that I have despised as much as your silence, that silence sour as milk that Misaka the accursed never made me drink.