Life Ceremony, page 2
I stood up and went over to a nearby bookcase. The dividers were made of bone, probably shoulder blades, given their size. There were several real books placed on the shelves to model what it would look like in the home. Naoki liked books, and I thought how perfect his study would be with such a splendid bookcase in it. I picked up a small dictionary that was leaning against the divider and looked up the word barbaric, which had been niggling me for a while.
Ruthless, merciless, savage, heinous.
But I could only think that this applied more to Naoki’s idea of burning people’s bodies when they died. He was such a gentle person and I still couldn’t believe he could be so harsh and cruel as to say that we should discard the entire body even though so much could be reused.
But I loved him. For his sake, I was resolved to spend the rest of my life without wearing or using human material, without touching the people who, after their deaths, continued to surround us with their warmth as material and furnishings.
The following Sunday, Naoki and I went to visit his family in Yokohama.
We had already completed the formalities for our engagement, and now there were all kinds of matters to discuss, like what time to hold the ceremony, whom to invite, and so forth. Naoki’s little sister was going to be in charge of receiving guests on the groom’s side, so we had to talk about that, too.
Naoki’s father had died five years previously. His mother and sister welcomed us cheerfully.
“Come on in! Sorry to take up your time when you’re so busy.”
“Not at all! Lovely to see you.”
Naoki’s sister Mami was a graduate student some years younger than him, and had treated me affectionately ever since he and I had started dating.
“I’m so happy you’re going to be my elder sister, Nana,” she said delightedly as she served us homemade brownies.
Their mother poured tea to go with Mami’s treats, and we chatted while enjoying them.
“Naoki, why don’t you play the trumpet at the wedding? Wouldn’t it be a great way to show your love for Nana?” Mami asked.
“No way! It’s years since I’ve played any music, and I’d be far too self-conscious now. Out of the question.”
Naoki looked really cute with his embarrassed smile, and I snuggled up to him happily, feeling that it had been ages since I’d seen him looking so calm and relaxed.
After we’d been talking for a while, Naoki’s mother stood up, saying, “I’ve got something for the two of you.”
She went into another room and came back with a long, thin wooden box. She put it on the table and gently opened the lid. Wondering what it was, I peered inside to see what looked like some thin washi paper.
“What is it?” We both looked at her questioningly.
“It’s a veil made from your father,” she informed us in hushed voice, gazing at it as she took the diaphanous fabric out of the box. It was indeed a billowy, floaty veil made from human skin.
“Five years ago, when your father got cancer, it was his dying wish to be made into a veil. It must have been just around the time you started dating Nana, Naoki. He always was too strict with you, so it was hardly surprising that you rebelled against him. You never did make up after that quarrel ended in fisticuffs when he tried to force you into medical college. He used to say he’d as good as disowned you, and he refused to talk about you. But then, right at the end, he said, ‘The boy’s a fool, but he’s got taste in women,’ and he told me he wanted to be made into a veil for the wedding ceremony.”
“Ah . . .”
I sneaked a quick look at Naoki. He was staring at the veil, his face utterly expressionless.
“You didn’t come to the funeral, so I never had the chance to tell you about it, but I always believed this day would come. Naoki, please forgive your father. Use this veil for your wedding.
“Nana, why don’t you try it on?” Mami begged me, her eyes red and filled with tears. “Isn’t it magnificent?”
Gingerly I reached out and touched the veil. Human skin was generally considered too flimsy and delicate for garments. It looked like rough Japanese washi paper, but it was supersoft to the touch.
“Nana, look this way.”
My mother-in-law gently lifted the veil and put it over my head, fixing it with a small comb, so that my upper body was enveloped in its lightness.
The veil reached down to my lower back, covering my ears, cheeks, and shoulders in my father-in-law’s soft skin. It was plain and extremely simple, but if I looked closely, I could see the fine lines of the distinctive mesh of his skin, like delicate lacework. I felt as though I were swathed in an infinite number of particles of light residing in each individual cell.
“It looks amazing on you, Nana!”
My mother-in-law and Mami both looked enthralled.
Faint spots and moles left on my father-in-law’s skin formed an intricate pattern, and here and there in the light, the white and yellowish-brown blended to give a bluish tinge, complex hues intertwining in a way that could never be manufactured artificially. The rays of sun shining in through the window were softened by the veil as they gently filtered through and coalesced on my skin.
With my whole body swathed in the skin-tinged glow, I felt as though I were standing in the most sacred church in the world.
I looked at Naoki through the delicate, beautiful veil. Still looking down, he slowly raised his arm and lifted the hem. I half expected him to rip it off, but he murmured in a low voice, “This scar . . . That was the one from junior high . . .”
Next to his hand, I saw a small mark in the lacy hem.
“That’s right. It’s from that time you hit him,” his mother said. “It left a scar on his back, you know. I don’t suppose you ever knew it, but whenever he went to a hot spring, he would proudly show it off and say, ‘The boy had backbone after all.’”
Naoki stared at the veil, his expression unreadable. I watched him with bated breath, thinking he might suddenly blow up, the way he did that time he threw away his tiepin. But he kept staring at the veil, saying nothing.
After a while his pale face moved slowly toward me, as though he were falling into my father-in-law’s skin.
“Dad . . .” he muttered hoarsely, burying his face in the veil.
“Naoki!” Mami exclaimed tearfully.
“Son, you forgive him, don’t you?” his mother said, her voice full of emotion.
“Yes . . . of course. We’ll use the veil at our wedding. Won’t we, Nana?”
I wasn’t sure whether I should smile or not, and just managed a weak nod. The veil trembled and softly tickled my cheeks and back with the movement. The membrane of light passing through my father-in-law’s skin shimmered over my body.
In the car on the way home, I drove while Naoki slumped vacantly in the passenger seat. Despite the cold, he had the window wide open and was gazing outside.
“Hey, are we really going to use that veil?” I asked him as the box rattled on the back seat.
Naoki didn’t answer, but leaned on the open window and lightly shut his eyes, snuggling in the breeze like a child who’d fallen asleep in bed.
“If you really don’t want to use it,” I went on patiently, choosing my words carefully, “we can always find an excuse, like the wedding planner objected to it, or it didn’t go with the dress.”
Naoki still didn’t respond, but just sat there as the breeze messed up his hair and clothes. Irritated, I said more forcefully, “Come on, Naoki, answer me! Which is it? Were you being honest or lying for the sake of your family? Look, if you really do feel moved by your father’s wishes, then we’ll use it, but if you feel using human skin is too barbaric, we won’t. I don’t mind either way, so it’s up to you to say how you feel . . .
“Which is it? Come on, tell me. Are you moved, or not? Do you think it’s barbaric or not?” I demanded, raising my voice.
“I just don’t know what to think anymore,” he finally said. “Maybe everyone’s right, and making things out of people after they die really is a wonderful, moving thing to do . . .”
I frowned, and put my foot down on the accelerator, speeding up. “Look, only you can decide whether you’re moved by the idea or not, Naoki. I’m sure I don’t know.”
“I can’t . . . I don’t . . . I really don’t know what to think anymore. Until this morning I was confident about how to use words like barbaric and moved, but now it all feels so groundless,” he muttered vacantly. He looked like a half-wit, with his mouth hanging stupidly open, almost as if he were drooling.
“That word barbaric has been standing in judgment over us, though, hasn’t it? Where has its power gone?”
“I don’t know how I could have been so confident of myself . . . but one thing I can say is that the veil did look lovely on you. And that’s because it’s someone’s skin. Human skin really does suit people.”
Naoki shut his mouth and said no more.
The only sounds in the car were from the breeze and the veil’s box rattling on the back seat.
A hundred years later, what would our bodies be used for? Would we be chair legs or sweaters or clock hands? Would we be used for a longer time after our deaths than the time we’d been alive?
Naoki was leaning back in the seat, his arms hanging limply, as if he’d become a material object. The breeze was ruffling his hair and eyelashes. Beneath his sideburns, there was a slight scar where he’d once cut himself shaving. That scar would probably still be there if he ever became a lampshade or a book cover one day, I mused.
Quietly taking one hand off the steering wheel, I took his hand, which was lying there, abandoned. It was warm, and he squeezed mine back. The sensation of his skin against mine was similar to the way I’d felt earlier, enveloped in the veil. The faint wriggle of finger bones and the pulsing of veins beneath his skin were conveyed through my fingertips.
Right now the live Naoki, not yet converted into a material, was holding my hand. We were spending our very short time as living beings sharing our body heat. Feeling this life was a precious momentary illusion, I squeezed his slim fingers even tighter.
A Magnificent Spread
It was Sunday morning, and my husband and I were having breakfast.
We bought all our meals via the online store Happy Future Foods, which sold everything from soup with cubed frozen vegetables to Future Oatmeal and freeze-dried bread and salad. Facing each other across the table, we put a variety of products reminiscent of space food into our mouths.
Happy Future Foods had the slogan “We deliver food for the next generation to your dining table” and was touted as being popular with celebrities in other countries. My husband was completely sold on the store, and nowadays practically all the food on our table came from there.
Most of it was either frozen or freeze-dried, which saved us the trouble of cooking it, but it was expensive, so we ended up spending a lot. As I put the green-colored Future Oatmeal into my mouth, I thought I’d better brush my teeth with whitening powder straight after eating.
My smartphone rang, and I peered at the screen to see that it was my little sister. I answered the call and went to sit on the sofa.
“What’s up, Kumi? It’s not like you to call so early.”
“Are you free on the first Sunday of next month?” she asked, speaking unusually fast. “My fiancé’s parents are coming over for lunch that day.”
“What?” I was speechless. I hadn’t even known that she had a boyfriend!
“It’s the first time I’m meeting them, and I’m supposed to be cooking some dishes from home for them.”
“Eh? You don’t mean . . .”
“So I want you to come and help me. Please?”
“When you say dishes from home, Kumi, do you mean—”
“We’ll do lunch with my parents another time, so this time it’ll be just my boyfriend and his parents, you and me, and I want to prepare food for the five of us. You’ll help, won’t you? Please? I’ll be back in touch when the details are settled,” she said, and hung up.
“Was that Kumi?” asked my husband, who was sitting at the table eating his Future Oatmeal. “What was she saying?”
“She says she’s going to meet her fiancé’s parents.”
“Wow! Big news!”
He was drinking a Happy Future diet drink with his meal. It was all the rage lately, a complete health drink that meant you didn’t need to take any other supplements. It consisted of a pale blue powder that you mixed into carbonated water, and contained a bacterium developed by NASA that would supposedly rejuvenate you and give you a muscular body.
“So Kumi’s getting married! Well, she is almost thirty, after all, just about the right age.” He looked really happy.
I put my phone down on the table and told him, “And she says she is going to cook some dishes from home for them.”
“What? No way!!” My husband’s face turned white, and he shot to his feet, still holding his drink. “No, no, she mustn’t do that. This is a serious occasion!”
“That’s what she said, and you know she won’t budge an inch if she’s made a decision.”
“Yes, I know, but her whole life could be affected by this meeting!”
He looked so furious that I sighed and said, “I guess . . . well, we’ll just have to try to change her mind before then, won’t we . . .”
Kumi was three years younger than me, and she’d been in junior high when she suddenly announced, “In my previous life, I was a kind of warrior in the magical city of Dundilas.”
“You were?” I was in senior high school by then, and I just listened quietly without contradicting her.
“Now I’m living in Japan as the child of ordinary parents,” she said, “but in the magical city of Dundilas I had supernatural powers, which I used on missions fighting enemies. I’ve been reborn temporarily in this body. I’m just borrowing it for now, and once it comes to the end of its life, I intend to go back home.”
“Is that so?”
She apparently had quite a complex setup in her mind, and every now and then she would tell me all kinds of things about her previous life. I didn’t actually dislike hearing her talk about it.
“I am grateful to this family for caring for me, but sometimes I really miss the world of my former life,” she would occasionally say, her voice sad. At those times, she looked like she might actually go back to wherever Dundilas was. From her perspective, the people of her former life were her real family, and my parents and I were probably more like strangers to her.
“I suppose you do.”
I always listened to her sympathetically.
“You should have stopped her right there,” my mother grumbled. By then Kumi had already started telling some of her close friends at school about her previous life, and rumors about her had spread throughout the school.
I thought she’d probably get over it when she went to senior high school, but lots of her friends from junior high went on to the same school and she’d been in too deep to back out. Her graduation album was full of messages saying things like, “Take me with you to the magical city sometime, okay?” and “Keep fighting those enemies!”
She’ll have to stop when she goes to university, my mother said, but I wasn’t so sure. And as I’d thought, when some friends from her club came over, I overheard them in her room talking about her magical world.
“Kumi, you’re a master of the dark forces, after all.”
“Yep. Don’t tell anyone, though.”
Around that time, a friend told me about “adolescent delusion syndrome.” I was impressed that there was a name for my sister’s phenomenon, but it was only a slang term and not an officially recognized illness.
And so Kumi entered adulthood still behaving like someone with superpowers.
Watching her as she grew up, never giving an inch about her other life, I couldn’t help feeling some kind of respect for her. I began to think that the coarse slang term didn’t apply to her after all. She was more serious than that, and it wasn’t just a passing phase.
She went to work for a company where she was the only new graduate among middle-aged men, and they indulged her strange pronouncements with affectionate comments—“You’re a funny one, Kumi-chan.” Normally someone like her would be made fun of or ostracized, but somehow she was blessed with people who understood her. She didn’t have many friends, but there were always some at her side who listened to her stories about the magical city of Dundilas without ever making fun of her.
My mother didn’t understand her at all and tried to make her stop fantasizing by yelling at her, and I often had to intervene to protect my sister. They didn’t get on at all well, and after graduating from university, Kumi left home and started living alone.
It was around that time when she started eating weird things. She began cooking for herself, saying she was making food from the magical city of Dundilas. Whenever she went out, she would eat normal things, such as curry or steak, but at home she apparently always ate her special food.
Kumi and I were both born and bred in the humdrum suburbs of Saitama, and I don’t know why she turned out this way. Still, as long as she was happy, I didn’t have any problem with it.
I had never eaten her food from the magical city of Dundilas, though. I liked hearing her stories, but I found the food she was eating downright scary. I couldn’t summon the courage to put such weird-looking food into my body. And if I, who understood my sister’s world quite well, couldn’t eat it, then the idea of serving this food to her fiancé’s parents was hardly advisable. As my husband had made clear, we had to stop Kumi from carrying out this plan.
