2

Here am I, a lifetime away from you
The blood of Christ, or the beat of my heart
My love wears forbidden colors
My life believes

—

Each year when spring comes we celebrate the blooming of the cherry trees. How ironic it is—the eating and drinking and song-singing under their blossom-laden boughs—that we admire and look forward to the return of life on this particular tree. In all of Japan's rich history, their blossoms have come to represent the springtime of youth and at the same time the glorious and heartbreaking brevity of life. They have moved the hearts of poets frozen by winter, and knotted the stomachs of students returning to school. And they have been unwitting conspirators in the Meiji philosophy of Japan's exceptionalism, and consequently the war mentality that followed it.

They hide their identity from us well. It is only in the dark of night that they reveal themselves to be monsters.

There are corpses buried under the cherry trees. Ever since I heard that as a boy I have found myself regarding them with suspicion. No, perhaps a better way to put it is that I feel like I know their secret, that they know I know, and that it is something we share between us. With a morbid fascination I imagined their roots wrapped around decomposing bodies, soaking up the blood from those shriveled veins, that that was what tinged the base of the petals vibrant pink when they were ready to fall. I imagined their twisted trunks that were each one unique to be the reincarnated souls of Daphnes and Myrrhas, twisting in that prison in the agony of their sins, for plants do not attain enlightenment. Because of this, it is a strange relationship I have with these trees.

And now they have returned to haunt me again, bursting white like the breakers of waves outside my office window. Watching the petals rise from their highest boughs in a sudden gust of wind against the blue sky, I am moved by a sensation of loftiness that is no less than cliche, and already I mourn the blossoms that will soon be scattered and gone. However, walking under those trees as I return at night, the stillness of that air taunts me, teasing a memory from my mind. In that vacuum of stillness, where mist begins to gather, the black trunks that stand vigil whisper to me and embrace me as one of their own, destined to share the same fate. And thus every year, I find those words returning to my mind without fail:

It was a night like this, wasn't it?

The night I killed that boy?

—

What was it that made me what I am, I cannot say. Though I am not so delusional as to deny to myself the causes of my illness—I know those all too well, for it is a masochistic habit of mine to over-analyze myself—I can never make the impulse to hurt and kill that resides inside me conform to any of the logic I so crave. Is it in mankind's nature to murder? Is violence the inevitable way of things? We are all selfish and depraved creatures from birth, conceived in violence, and in the end we all return to whence we came in the abrupt rending of breath from the flesh. Even though in my youth my aversion to pain and death was strong, I know I was only repressing the beast that had been inside me all along, pacing and waiting for the bars of its cage to collapse and let it free if only for a little while.

Who should I thank for setting it free, I wonder. That is another question entirely.

The first time I killed a woman it could be said I did not know what I was doing. Which is not to say it was accidental. I was afraid for myself then, and called it an accident, a mistake; but after I kept making the same mistake time and time again, could I really continue to call it that? In any case, mistakes are a thing to be abhorred, and even though I disgusted myself—that is to say, the women disgusted me, and the act disgusted me, and my impulse—I could not deny and do not deny now the thrill this mistake brought me each time. As I felt the life leave those women, the act of destruction was so complete as to be almost its exact opposite: an act of creation. It is something beautiful, if you know from which angle to look at it, the truth that nothing lasts forever but all falls into corruption, and is not something to be feared as I had once thought. We are taught that once the mind has awakened to this truth that all existence is suffering and transient, only then can it truly find peace.

But where is my peace? The more I am awakened to the pain of my own existence, the more its insignificance is rubbed in my face like a dog's nose in his own feces. I am allowed neither death nor peace. I am only allowed to observe, and to facilitate. This is my punishment and my blessing.

There was a total lunar eclipse that night in Kamakura. For a few hours the moon shone red, bathing that ancient landscape in crimson like light shining through a red paper lantern. It was that kind of unreal atmosphere that stirs the blood and passions. Murderous passions. And desires for something feminine, whose color it is.

I had been in town for research and met a woman, who I guessed to be a good five years older than I was, alone in a bar. Alone and drunk, but not so drunk as to be deceived by something imaginary. She approached after watching me from afar, I lit her cigarette, and as we made small talk she praised me as I had so often been praised before. It was clear it was I she had become drunk on, and that she wanted. I in turn was fascinated by her painted lips, whose familiar shape in the poor lighting shone dully as though she had merely bit them too hard and they had bled. The flash of her white teeth behind them as she laughed hollowly against the backdrop of an old, sultry record created such an arousing and dangerous contrast.

After learning I was a doctor she expressed herself as a woman of science. In philosophy rather than profession, she said. And though I did not accord such a profession of motive the seriousness it did not deserve, I allowed her her morbid fantasy. Our relationship seemed to be evolving quickly toward one of doctor and patient. She called me "Sensei" around her exhaled cigarette smoke, and asked unflinchingly as she leaned forward over her crossed legs in fascination about surgical procedures and medical oddities.

We took our coats and left together. From there we took a leisurely walk in the woods, never minding that we were no doubt trespassing on someone's property. The cherry blossoms were in bloom, so we went searching for some, and found a lovely grove that shone lavender in the strange moonlight.

As we stood among them, she confessed her masochistic fantasies. Like a protagonist ripped from a Kono Taeko story, she admitted to wanting me to make love to her right there. Violently, like she was an innocent schoolgirl or a vampire's victim. Naively, she believed handing over that kind of power would turn me on.

What was effective, however, was her complete trust. Perhaps she was truly drunk on her lips, either on the alcohol or her vision of myself, but rather than impair her judgment it brought her true desires repressed by a prudish society to the surface. She was curious about what it was like to die. She was not afraid of it, but was of the type who lived passionately in anticipation of its coming on sudden wings. It must be like sex, she said; if an orgasm can be called a little death, couldn't death be called the biggest orgasm? I admired her logic.

So I helped her on her way. As she leaned back in my arms, exposing her breast and throat to the ultimate vulnerability the seed of mother nature inside us resists—like a sacrificial victim draped willfully over my altar—I took her in that way from which there is no return. I took her life.

She gasped as my knife penetrated her breast. A gasp of ecstasy or pain, or perhaps shock that I had held her to her fantasies—it made no difference to me. That gasp, the startled emotion on her lips and knitted brow, purified her body of its filthy, animalistic lusts, and redeemed her womanhood in those last few seconds of her life. In the blood that poured thick and brown and clean from her wounds, I received her release as though osmotically in my own body. I lowered hers to the grass and its dusting of cherry petals, and I had the distinct feeling that the act I had committed was just as much for the trees' benefit and pleasure as for my own. They would have a new corpse to feed on, and another mind driven to the brink of its ego by their lustiness.

Only then, when I looked up from her body, did I realize I was not alone in the grove. A teenage boy stood there in a thin robe, no older than thirteen or fourteen. I would learn later that this was the one night he had worked up the courage to stage his escape, but for the time being that irony was lost on me.

For the time being his beautiful young face, which still possessed a stirringly androgynous quality, stared at me in horror and defiance. It must have been how the youth Atsumori looked at Kumagae no Naozane when his helmet was finally knocked off, his tender age revealed, and he urged Kumagae to kill him quickly. Had he perhaps realized, as well, how appealing a figure he might cut to the hardened warrior, arousing incestuous thoughts that stayed the sword as long as it did? On one level, this boy who stood staring at me was a witness that I would have been justified in silencing for my self-preservation. However, it was something stronger, some visceral reaction that arose without any prodding, that led me to go after him the way I did.

He shrank from me, but did not run. Why is one question that I continue to ponder even now, without success. Though he fought, understandably, through what followed, and though I admit my presumption is based on personal bias, on some unconscious level he seemed to accept what happened as though he deserved it. A necessary evil.

I removed my bloodstained coat, forced him to the dew-dampened ground, and pulled open his robe. His naked body still possessed the somewhat feminine softness of youth, though he seemed under-nourished, and was pale like a porcelain doll—like a child of some ancient court, kept out of the sun's harmful rays. The way his full lips opened without a sound seemed almost coy to my depraved mind. And as I felt the lust that had been sparked by the woman's blood growing within me, I suddenly hated the boy and his purity that stoked that lust, and I longed to hurt him for it.

I pinned him there and ran my hands over his face and over his body, relishing the shivers of disgust that ran through him as I did so. Every curve of his body and each involuntary flex of muscle returned a memory to me that was strikingly vivid in its familiarity. I stroked his sex and it responded in spite of his mind's will. The struggle was evident in the furrowing of his brows and how he closed his eyes tight, and chewed his lovely lips, even then not able to completely stifle his whimpers and gasps. For a little while I was blinded by his reaction, and could have sworn I knew the boy below me, who had reacted in just the same way once, nearly a decade and a half ago.

I yearned to taste him. His fear, his revulsion, his pure, involuntary desire that could not be repressed once aroused. Shocked gasps fell from his perfect lips as I fellated him. He must not have experienced even on his own the pleasure of sex, he seemed taken so completely unawares. I reached between his legs and gave him the first sensation of penetration.

Like suddenly waking from a dream, he started to resist then. Verbally, mostly, for his body seemed as though frozen by, again, I know not what emotion. I felt a spark of anger grow within me. He was stunning as he struggled and the raw emotions were displayed so intimately on his face, but I could not help resenting his natural aversion. Could he not appreciate what I was doing for him?

To say that, it sounds as though I believed I was doing the boy a favor, but in truth my motives were selfish. They were ruled by a desire to see him suffer, to see him ruined just as that other boy's innocence had been ripped from his body and ruined so many years ago. It was that as much as his spoiled beauty that prompted me to fuck him in that grove, in that humiliating manner. I wanted him to suffer as much as I had. I wanted his appearance to become as much an evil to him as mine had become to me. To die young and violently at the peak of his beauty, like the Atsumori of legend, like a young cherry tree cut down in full bloom, and to know nothing more, that was the only fitting existence for such a rare person as he, and yet I begrudged him even that luxury. I too would have met such an end if fate had not intervened, and condemned me to a life of endless ennui and emptiness, a slow rotting away. If I could not be granted freedom from my memories, why would I allow this boy that?

My malice toward him blurred together in my mind with the deep-seated malice I had carried with me since my adolescence, my lust for him with the lusts of my youth. In his tortured face I saw my own naive teenage self disgusted at the pleasure. I saw Saki startled and betrayed. I saw grandfather's patient writhing in his exquisite agony. And somehow through all these thoughts that gave me such pleasure I found the boy himself, the hollow subject of my cruel projections. My experiment. My doll. Shattering exponentially. Responding obediently to the strings I pulled.

Everything I longed to do to those phantoms of my mind I did to that boy. In the afterglow I murmured words of ancient texts that rose up faithfully from my memory, and with my fingertips wrote the jagged characters of their curses into his skin. Under my nails the letters rose to the surface in thin red welts, but that alone could not have caused him any more pain than the damage I had already done his fragile body. And still he screamed. My precious cicada out of season, mourning this cast-off shell of a world, he cried and filled the still air of the cherry grove with that pure, overwhelming drone.

How I wished I could prolong his ecstasy forever, and witness that descent into insanity that ensues when the mind reaches its breaking point—to know that I was the author of this creation, the sower of a seed that caused his very cells to burn with a fire that could not be put out except by my word alone.

His already fragile body could not stand that strain for long, however, and eventually consciousness left him. Then I left him as well—there beneath the cherries for his parents or some lowly groundskeeper to find, broken and humiliated.

—

Perhaps out of a sense of guilt, or again perhaps out of a sense of pride—I cannot be sure which—I pursued the boy the next morning as well. After I left him that night, I began to regret that my actions might make front-page news. Reality was quite to the contrary. The only word of the incident in the local paper was a small blurb under the police reports. It mentioned no names, only that the police were looking for the person who had murdered a woman visiting from out of town and raped a teenage boy. There were no suspects.

I was fortunate when I arrived at the hospital, thinking I might see if the boy had been taken there, to overhear a conversation at the front desk between a receptionist and a nurse who had tended to the boy personally. She felt sorry for him, the latter said, for being forced upon at his tender age, and worried that the doctor could not find the source of the pain that seemed to seize his entire body even now. She had heard of post-traumatic stress, but this was different, and very much physiological.

I stepped in, apologizing for eavesdropping, and told them their conversation had piqued my interest. My line of research was not exactly orthodox, so I was not unqualified to examine the patient, and in any case a second opinion could do no harm. But I do think it was rather my looks and manner that ultimately persuaded them to ask the doctor permission, which he granted having exhausted other possibilities himself.

When I stepped into the room, with its sterile palette of whites, the boy was asleep, his face turned away from me toward the sunlight coming through the window as though tracking it like an opened flower. When the fits seized him, the doctor explained, he would usually soon pass out, unable to bear the stress for long. There was a faint sheen of sweat on his brow indicating his last fit may have been very recent, or perhaps it was an indication of pneumonia from being left out in the dank spring night air. In any case, they had him on painkillers as well, for the physical trauma, and a cotton ball was taped to his arm where an IV had been inserted and removed some time ago. He was out like a light, in some dreamless place.

The doctor trusted me, as a fellow man of medical science, enough to leave me alone with the boy for a few minutes. I suppose I could have killed the boy, put him out of his misery right then and there, but that had never been my intention. They say that most criminals are braggarts, flaunting their crimes in the face of authority. If that is true, than maybe that was what drove me to visit him like that—to see my handiwork again, in better light. I could not harm my perfect creation any more than I already had. He had become a part of me.

I learned his name, scrawled on a medical chart, but that knowledge did nothing for me. I bent over him and untied the top tie of his hospital gown, then pulled it gently back to look at the top of his chest. His sternum rose normally with each breath, but underneath that otherwise smooth skin were malevolent words no ordinary person would see, that no x-ray or MRI would pick up. Under my touch they showed themselves vaguely and briefly, like welts forming in the skin. The boy stirred at the discomfort this caused, but did not awaken. The doctor would never learn what afflicted him so long as he couldn't see, so long as he relied on technology and the skeptical, quantified science that had been hammered into him. When the boy finally wasted away, after years of futile testing and excruciating pain, they still would not know the cause. Just as grandfather had never known what ailed and sustained his mysterious patient.

A man's voice came from the door, different from before: "Is he lucid?"

"No," the doctor said. "He passed out again, I'm afraid."

"Good," a woman sighed in such a diminutive voice it was difficult to tell what she meant by her comment.

I replaced the fold of the gown, and stood and turned around to excuse my presence.

As soon as I saw the couple that had entered with the doctor, I knew they had to be the parents. The man had the same fine, light hair and expression of constant inner anguish that I remembered seeing on the boy's face. He wore a suit that from just one glance was obviously expensive, yet he wore it awkwardly and uncomfortably as though he reviled it. The woman, in contrast, was wearing a splendid kimono, her hair was dark and pulled back in a conservative manner, and her face still held a naivety of youth in the smile that would not disappear even in the presence of her ill son. No one had to tell me: I knew instinctively that they were a very old family, and very wealthy.

As I went forward to introduce myself, the father asked who I was and what I was doing there with his son.

"This is Dr Muraki, Mr Kurosaki," the doctor said for me.

"I was in the area, and became curious when I heard about your son's mysterious condition. I thought I might examine him myself," I explained, bowing. I did not think they were the types to shake hands. "My research takes me down some rather unusual paths, you see. I thought I might be able to shed new light here."

"And?" said the father. "Do you know what's wrong with him?"

"It appears to be pneumonia."

The doctor seemed startled and began to say something about how I had not been here earlier, when the boy was brought in, but the father cut him off. "Pneumonia." He turned the word over on his tongue, nodding. "That seems about right."

"With all due respect, Mr Kurosaki," the doctor said, "but from the perspective of a trained medical professional—"

"Thank you for your concern," the father said to him, "but you've done all you can for the boy already. I would like to speak to Dr Muraki alone."

The doctor caught the hint, but looked rather reluctant as he left us to attend to a passing nurse's question. "I'll stay here with him," the mother said, and went to sit by her son's bed.

"Your name sounds very familiar," the father said to me at one point in our conversation, as we sat on a veranda in the cold sunlight, beside plum saplings in the last of their bloom. "I think my father mentioned a Dr Muraki."

"That was probably my grandfather." He was famous in the medical community—infamous, to many—mostly for his research during the war. It did not strike me as strange he might have had some connection to this ancient family.

"A dynasty of doctors, is it? How can I not take your advice, then, Sensei? Especially when you seem to understand my position so well, and I haven't told you anything about my family."

"A doctor's intuition. Discretion is our first commandment."

"Indeed." He leaned back and lowered his voice. "It isn't pneumonia, is it?"

"No. The child is suffering a kind of post-traumatic stress. He will continue to relive the experience in his waking mind. The severity of his reaction would indicate to me it might have been compounded by some kind of previous trauma, or another mental disorder that might have remained latent until now." I did not mind feeding this man the first lies that occurred to me—his emotional welfare was no concern of mine—but he did not ask for a solution either.

He simply nodded. I had not expected an affirmation.

"I thought as much. In fact, we were thinking of moving him to a mental health facility."

I could understand his reasons. The son of a respected member of the community was raped. Such a place would afford his family more privacy than this hospital ever could. They were better equipped to handle a patient who would suffer frequent fits of delirium as well. But Mr Kurosaki's manner of speaking surprised me, indicating he had been giving the notion some thought for quite some time before my run-in with the boy. Besides that there was the finality of it, like he knew, as I already did, that his son would not pull out of his current condition. I asked him about it, and he had the following to say, begging my discretion.

"We've been having . . . problems with the boy for quite some time now."

"Behavioral or mental?"

He seemed loath to answer. "Well, you could call it a bit of both. We have had to confine him to the household because of it for a few years; last night was the first time he's sneaked out in several months. Perhaps it's only natural for a boy his age, but he doesn't seem to realize that what we do is for his own good. We tried hiring someone to treat him at home when it became too much of a struggle for the entire household, for his mother especially. This is the most peaceful I've seen her in years. She hasn't the stamina to deal with him; and now, to see the boy in such pain, I don't think she would be able to bear it."

I wanted desperately to ask what was wrong with the boy. I was burning with curiosity just knowing there could be something even more unique than I could have imagined about this person I had run into by chance. However, I thought it wiser to keep the question to myself for the time being, and keep Mr Kurosaki's trust. I said instead, "I understand your concerns. Those facilities do carry a certain stigma, but then, so do the conditions they treat. Submitting him may indeed be the best decision for everyone. Either way, your son's case does fascinate me very much. Will you keep in touch regarding his progress?"

I gave him my card and we parted ways.

It turned out that the more I observed them and the way they worried over the boy—not as a son, a living individual, but like their own future slipping away—the more I actually found myself feeling sorry for the boy. The notion touched me on second thought that, although the curse I had placed on him would eventually kill him, perhaps I should have done it outright: his sheltered life was not of the voluntary manner I had imagined. In either case, I could see now I had done him a favor. How fortunate it was we had met each other at such a time, and a pity it had not been sooner. Judging by the way those around the boy treated him, I must have been the only one in years to have shown him affection, even if only in my selfish, twisted way.

Somehow Oriya found out about the case and called me. He had put two and two together and figured I was the one behind the killing.

"It's deplorable, what you've done," he said after my confirmation.

"To the boy? Yes."

"To that woman. But since you've brought it up, yes, to the boy too. And on top of it all to visit him like that—to fool his folks into believing you actually want to help him. . . . The way you flaunt your actions in front of a police investigation like they were some sort of conquest, you must be damn proud of yourself."

"Just confident is all."

There was silence on the other end.

"You must think I'm some sort of monster."

He chose not to answer that, which I took as a positive response. An admission of his failure. His own human weakness. His inability to turn me in. To give up on me. "I hope that boy comes back to haunt you—for your own sake."

"I hope you're right."

I wanted to see him again. I could not help sympathizing with the boy. Despite the hatred I felt for him still, he became quite an irresistible figure in my mind after the fact, occupying a place almost as prominent as grandfather's patient. But unlike that man, whose life and death represented a tragedy so beautiful I could only dream of emulating it, the boy's situation was real and immediate. His life was, in so many ways, my own.

Is it not one's natural right to want to eradicate something like that?

—

I too come from a dynasty. However, instead of being descended from samurai or royalty I am the last in a short line of respected medical doctors. The importance of this was impressed on me from an early age, just as if it were some noble title that would be passed down from father to son. As a result, I was spoiled. I was surrounded by comfort and intelligence, and in that setting I resolved that I did not want to be a doctor. I was a frail child who felt faint watching his own blood being drawn. Watching the seasons pass in relative comfort from the veranda, I dreamed the idle dreams of childhood of becoming a naturalist. Math and science were simple subjects for me, but I would much rather have read novels and poetry and compose verses in my head than study formulas.

Fate had a different plan for me. Perhaps I knew it all along, in the dark recesses of my conscious mind. Just as though it were an inherited biological trait, even more dominant in my cells' nuclei than my own personality, I ended up becoming a doctor of medicine. Was it inevitable? Who can say such things with any certainty.

It seemed my family had always had money and connections, and my father bought a large house when he married. At that time, it was a sign of wealth and prestige to have a house in the traditional style, the larger the grounds and number of servants the better. A gravel driveway went through a wide gate at the entrance, and the gardens had been designed with careful thought to bring about the most auspicious balance of energies. Rhododendrons and maples, bamboo, quince, huge stones that in the early morning seemed possessed of a life of their own, delicately sculpted juniper and pine, irises that opened like nuns' habits in the summer around a koi pond—everything had its place. I could hear the wind rustling the bamboo leaves outside the shoji in the mid-afternoon when the house was still a peaceful place, and rainwater trickling into the pond. I spent summer days lulled by the drone of the cicadas on the wide teak veranda, which was swept every morning so only the freshest fallen leaves littered its planks in sparse elegance.

The indoors were filled with all the conveniences of the west, and treasures from my father's travels to China in his youth. Sumi-e scrolls hung on the walls of the study, where I could often find him working behind his monstrous cherry desk, sitting in a dark leather chair. I remember days I would sit in it before he came home, hoping my mother wouldn't catch me while I imagined what it would be like to be an esteemed doctor like him and his father before him, the one time I indulged myself in my father's fantasy. I would make sure everything was as he had left it before returning to my room with its full-size, western-style bed to study.

I grew up without any siblings with which to compete, and the help—a small staff that included a butler and a few maids—looked after my needs. Our meals were lavish, our clothing well-tailored, the public school I attended the highest class the best in the area, and I did not want for much. To me, it seemed this was how all children were raised. Of course, I knew that was not true, but at the same time I could not believe in poverty or strife, just as some say with conviction there is a God but cannot fathom Him.

That is not to say that I did not experience hunger in my young life, but it was not for anything material. And like physical hunger, I grew used to it, to the point the nagging feeling of emptiness was simply the background of day to day existence.

In my childhood, I was able to delude myself and pretend I had a normal family who loved one another, if in their unique ways. My father was at the office until late most days, and spent much of his time at home in his study. My mother spent the daylight hours in her own quarters, among her dolls and her embroidery and her God. They never showed any affection toward each other around me, but I figured this was only proper and typical. They must have truly loved each other once, even if they did not now; after all, theirs had not been an arranged marriage.

Perhaps I was too young, too full of optimism to notice the shadow that loomed over everything—or perhaps I saw it and wanted to wipe its presence from my mind, escaping into a fantasy so I did not have to accept the truth. It is difficult to say now. What I do know is that my mother's slip into psychosis was not as recent as I had once believed it to be, as something that came into being in only the last few years of her life. It was a gradual downward spiral, so gradual that at times she seemed as normal and sane as any other woman her age. It was only when her eyes fell into shadow a certain way that one could catch a glimpse of the personal demons that troubled her inside. It is possible she had even started to show signs of her illness during my parents' courtship.

Would my father—if it is his analytical mind I inherited—have seen her in all her faults as a welcome challenge for his real love? His science? Was it because she, a Christian, was a slap in the face to my grandparents, who had no real religion but adhered to the observances of the Japanese mish-mash of Shinto and Buddhism, that he married her? Or did she only convert after their marriage, out of the proverbial need for a meaning and comfort my father could not fill?

Whatever the case, my parents' relationship was a tenuous thing because of it. As if to compensate, she doted on her only son, and gave me everything she was capable of giving. It was not much. It was more akin to the kind of affection one gives a pet or a beloved stuffed animal—or in her case her dolls. But it was the most I could expect to receive from that tortured woman.

There were good days, when my mother behaved as a mother should, and as a proper housewife, busying herself with small work around the place, rearranging the kitchen or tending to her flowers. Other days she would spend in a heavy fog that neither her naps nor the radio could lift. On those days she spent among the dolls I would sometimes hear her singing to them—folksongs and psalms, never anything popular, melodies she used to sing to me when I was a baby—and those were the days I had to resist the visceral urge to hide from her the most.

My mother often frightened me. I cannot say why precisely even now, but I do think I was terrified of displeasing her and losing what little affection she did show me. In the meantime, I developed something of an obsession with her collection of dolls. They lined the wall of her sewing room, sitting on shelves and behind glass in cabinets, row upon row of chubby, perfect porcelain faces, imported and domestic, and most of them fairly expensive. It was a small price, however, for father to pay if it helped keep her mania at bay and he was glad to pay it, awarding her with a new one when he chanced to feel romantic, or apologetic, or when her depression became particularly bad. I still think she loved them more than she loved me. I do not think it was any fault of mine—it could not have been—though I cannot help feeling responsible nonetheless. I do believe it was simply her inability to connect with another human being, even—perhaps especially—one who was her own child.

I do not know if I have the right to blame her for that. I do, but whether she deserves my blame is another matter entirely. What I do know without a doubt is that my relationship with my mother is directly responsible for so much of who and what I have become. The single most important relationship in a primate's existence is the relationship between mother and child. Research has shown how monkeys raised in captivity without a mother's constant influence grow up to become outsiders, social pariahs, keeping to themselves because they truly do not know how to interact with others.

I am not a monkey, however. I can adapt by the example of others. I learned early on how to take care of myself. But as a human, I have the option of becoming an actor.

—

I hated mother's dolls. I was jealous of them as well. They were a constant barrier between her affection and me, soaking it up so there would be nothing left for the son. Walking into their room on a dim day, it seemed as though they knew it, as well. To my childish eyes that were always looking up at them, their perfect, cherubic faces seemed smug at having defeated me in the contest for my mother's love. I thought they must have noticed how much I wanted to hurt them, to dash them to the floor and see their innocent china faces shatter into pieces around me like brain matter across the carpet. I wondered in passing if it was not mother who put them on such high shelves but a conscious decision of their own, to keep themselves safe from me.

And at the same time I was desperate for their company. We were the same, the dolls and I—both of us fragile things to be dressed up and caressed and appreciated from afar, but never truly loved. Like the cherries, I developed a strange relationship with those dolls, one in which each party was wary of its dependency on the other.

Mother forbade me to touch her dolls. Boys could not be trusted with fragile things, she said. They break them. Never mind that my heart was a fragile thing as well, and she could break that without exerting any effort. Every now and then she would take down a doll she found unremarkable, or that could not be broken or ruined as easily as the others, and under her careful supervision I would be allowed to hold it in my hands. As she watched my face for my reaction, she seemed to think that she was doing me some great favor, allowing me to hold, if only for a short while, a treasure. It was as though she wanted me to understand what fascination they held for her, that if I were to awaken to some great truth about the nature of dolls I would understand why she was the way she was and forgive her her deficiencies.

That was one thing I could not do. But as a result I fell in love with the dolls. They had become, ironically, my forbidden fruit. Like a charm, the harsher my mother's insistence I must not, the more I longed to touch and hold them. Perhaps at first I believed by doing so I could absorb some of her affection for them through my skin. After a while it seemed I began to love them as I wished to be loved, and resent them as I resented myself. We were kindred spirits. Their white, round faces with the faintest blossoming of translucent pink held an innocence and purity I was drawn to because in some ways it mirrored my own, just as the perpetual frowns on their tiny lips materialized my loneliness. My wardrobe was carefully laid out for me according to her design, just as theirs were. It was a person like my mother who would do them harm, I came to feel, not me. My mother with her sometimes violent mood swings, her spiteful personality, and her cruelty—how she could love someone one day and the next betray that love for someone better with no more deliberation than one picks a grape from the vine.

In the back of my young mind I feared that same darkness might be lurking in my own heart. I hated her a little for that, because I feared the possibility that I had inherited that trait.

It was only when my mother was away from her quarters that I ventured to visit her collection. My greatest fear, and my greatest excitement, was that she would catch me at it. As though I were touching myself, I felt I would die of shame if that happened, which also had the effect of filling those sessions with a sense of guilt. It was one nutcracker doll in particular called Veronica that had captured my attention. She was dressed for winter in a dark red, ruffled Victorian dress, and a large bonnet covered her brown ringlets. The lines that descended from the corners of her lips made her expression seem one of perpetual sorrow. Mother kept her in an esteemed place, so I began to think that she loved Veronica the most. Whether it was because of this or to spite her, I took to Veronica above all the rest. That doll alone surely understood me.

It must have been inevitable that someday mother would catch me. I was perhaps ten years old. Entering that room looking for Veronica, when I noticed she was gone from her usual place I grew careless. I did not leave the room when I should have.

At first mother flew into a panic, worried for the welfare of her dolls, and drove me away. I was frightened not so much by her outburst, the likes of which I was used to, but by her concern—the mother instinct that she had for these lifeless dolls, but was lacking when it came to her only son—which made me feel as though she had stabbed me in the chest. As though a rope had been cut and I was left floating in the middle of the ocean alone. When she had calmed herself and called for me again, no doubt due to a reprimand from father, I had nothing to do but run back to her and beg her forgiveness. As I said before, I could not bear to lose what little and paltry affection for me she was able to hold in her heart.

Still I wanted to accuse her. I knew she had done something to Veronica, that she had broken or thrown out the doll, even though it was her favorite, because she had found out it had become my favorite as well. How, I do not know, but it must have been something akin to a mother's intuition. I knew the doll's absence was only to spite me, a punishment for my betrayal, for giving my love as she had with me to something besides her.

Though my vision seemed to waver before me through my tears, I asked her what she had done with Veronica, but she did not answer. I was surprised when instead she praised me, and touched my face and coddled me like one of her dolls—as if she had never seen me before. It was not uncommon for her to act so inconsistently, as though a veil had been lifted from before her eyes for the first time. But the sheer wickedness of the smile that accompanied it chilled me as few of her violent fits had before.

Even now I remember vividly the movement of those lips reddened with lipstick behind her wild, wavy hair. As she held my face firmly in her hands like the jaws of a trap and crooned, "Such a good child," she compared my hair to the moon, and my eyes to the surface of a lake that reflects it, and my skin. . . . Of course, she compared my skin to that of her porcelain dolls. I could not tear my gaze away from that terrible smile that seemed to be battling with her mind and holding back the less proper thoughts that were in it. I could see in that smile that she wanted to hurt me. My own mother, overcome by the sudden realization of my beauty, knowing no other outlet to express it, wanted to hurt me.

Suddenly the way she stroked my hair and my shoulders and kissed my face repulsed me. Even then I felt something wrong in it, something incestuous. I pushed away from her and stumbled back. Hardly aware I was doing it, as if in denial of these frightening new sensations, I continued to accuse her of taking Veronica away, but she did not hear me. I was the best of her collection, she said, and spoke my name like it was a praiseworthy doll's. At those words, such a horror came over me that my legs refused to move and I could do nothing but entreat her, Why had she taken Veronica away?

Why had she betrayed me?

Because that was what it was really about. Betrayal. That doll was only one aspect of it. One manifestation to which my young mind forced itself to relate, out of abject fear of confronting the alternative.

No one spoke of that incident. To no one but myself was it anything out of the ordinary where my mother was concerned. But I could not trust her after that—after being touched in that manner, and hearing the words directly from her lips: I was her most prized doll. I could not allow her to do such things that once seemed commonplace as picking out my clothes, or bringing me a refreshment as I sat on the veranda, nor could I even at that tender age change without feeling a need to look over my shoulder. My baths were taken in a constant state of alert as I feared she might take as much interest in the rest of my body that was just beginning to develop. Can you imagine what torment that is, to be unable to trust the very person who gave you life?

—

Grandfather passed away the year I entered middle school, and the old files from his decades of practice were handed down to my father. He stored them in a corner of his office in piles of boxes until he would be able to go through them one by one and decide which to destroy and a suitable place for those to keep. Unlike my mother, who scolded me, Father took a certain amount of pleasure in it when I showed interest in his line of work and offered to help. In fact, at that time it was nothing more than a curiosity, but even that allowed him to boast to his colleagues that medicine ran in our family's veins, and to believe the tradition would be carried at least into the next generation. And so he did not forbid me from looking by myself through old files that were no longer sensitive, whose patients had died decades before: cases from the thirties and forties, from the war and what followed. Some even went back as far as the Taisho period, when grandfather had still been in medical school, working as an assistant.

The oldest files were what interested me most, just as grainy silent films hold a mysterious appeal, as though they were something from a far more distant time than they actually are. The yellowed papers and photographs had a certain gritty feel to them, from dust or their own deterioration, the boxes and folders a certain musty smell like that of a museum. I could not read the more complex and technical character combinations then, which lent the experience of studying the old charts a surreal flavor. They were sacred texts to me, whose cryptic language had been lost in the sands of time.

And who were the strangers in the photographs, I wondered. Souls staring with blank eyes from the realm of hungry ghosts where they might now wander restless, some of them with sinister maladies that malformed their body parts in ghastly ways. The twisted spines of scoliosis patients that reminded me of the tortured cherry trunks. Skin diseases that made the flesh turn hard and white, or decay in raw patches. Tumors that distended their stomachs unnaturally, their necks, their skulls and genitals. After those curiosities came the victims of the war whose injuries, that should have proved fatal, healed in monstrous ways, and of the bombing of Tokyo, missing eyes and limbs, and of Nagasaki, who looked like the Hedora glimpsed on a movie house poster, their skin charred and slick and hanging off the muscle.

Some part of me was thrilled by a morbid curiosity deep inside even at the most gruesome pictures. The suffering, so distant from my own experience, was somehow beautiful in its ugliness, as though nature had chosen those individuals as its canvasses for its Cubist phase. Imagining the pain their diseases and injuries must have inflicted pulled at a corner of my heart, and sometimes at my stomach, in the form of a strangely pleasant nausea, and at other parts of my body not yet fully awakened.

There was one photograph that did this better than all the rest, whose subject was not ugly at all and yet not beautiful either. On the contrary, he was far beyond any mundane notion of beauty. The photograph seemed to have lain in wait like a snare for me to step carelessly into. I must admit I was given a start when I opened one of these old folders, one older than the rest, a portfolio in fact that lay flattened and forgotten in the bottom of a bin as though purposefully buried, and came face to face with its patient. I do believe my heart stopped in my chest for a few seconds, and I could not breathe. Nor could I tear my eyes from those that held mine out of time unwittingly, and so strongly. The photograph was of the most striking person I had ever seen.

The patient was a man in his mid-twenties with dark hair cut for the slicked-back style of those days and well-formed features. He was on the thin side and pale, which I took to be the result of some wasting illness. His collarbone and the hollow of his throat—a perfectly formed neck I could almost see moving as he swallowed dryly—stood out in relief where his robe lay loosened to expose them. One eye was curiously bandaged; I grew excited as I imagined what the reason for that could be. The other. . . .

There was something strange about it I could not put my finger on, something about the tone in the black and white photograph that seemed wrong to the subconscious. Grandfather's notes said the patient had purple eyes, an impossible color, but even with that knowledge it was difficult for me to picture. It was pleasing, anyway, with its frame of dark lashes and heavy lids. Taken together with his parted lips, which had a classical shape, he seemed to be in the throes of ecstasy. Or else just spent, stretched out beneath some invisible lover. The way his hair lay against the pillow, the angle of his pose. . . .

There was something extremely seductive in his manner, and I knew it to be what it was: sheer agony. I marveled at him, because while the attraction of others was hidden in their monstrosities and the revulsion they induced, here was one whose beauty and sadness could not possibly be diminished. A cut to his pale skin would only increase the pathos he aroused. As Seneca once wrote, "Here is a thing which is too great, too sublime for anyone to regard it as being in the same category as that puny body it inhabits." Yet, I worshiped that puny body as well. I was filled with awe, and a strange desire for him, but I did not know the nature of that desire. His pain, physical and emotional, must have been so great to drive him to the trance-like state he possessed in the picture, reminding me of the ecstasy of saints whose images were to be found in every coffee table art book. He was Sebastian bound by invisible restraints and pierced by a thousand microscopic arrows.

Gazing at his image, I too felt like I had been pierced. There was a tremendous pain in my chest that quickly spread to my groin, and in between gave me such a queer sensation I doubled over with a combination of fear and excitement. I did not know what was wrong with me then. My breath came short, and my blood vessels opened and I felt warm in my limbs. I felt as though I would explode. With admiration, and desire, and envy and shame and love—but how could I have known that then?

I experienced my first orgasm gazing at his picture. At the time I did not know exactly what it was. We were at an age when the boys at school had begun to obsess over those kinds of bodily functions, but not one of them could give you a good explanation of what they were if you were to ask him. What I did know was that it felt immeasurably good, and that I wanted to feel it again. And even then I knew guilt.

I saved the file and the journal that had also been inside the portfolio. No one would have noticed if it was disposed of forever with the other files that had become irrelevant. I could not allow that to happen, for this strange and beautiful man's memory to be lost forever. So it faded into obscurity in my bedroom, wedged between books on the shelf I thought no one would think of reading. And at night, when that same curiosity came to gnaw at me again, in dark and silence, I would take down that file and open it clandestinely. I cannot be sure if it was that I was afraid that someone would catch me that I hesitated, or whether in my young mind the act felt akin to sacrilege. I would spend long stretches of time simply staring at that picture and memorizing his features, his expression, until I could swear he breathed in my thoughts. Then I would return the file to its place on the bookshelf and climb into bed.

However, his image would not leave the darkness behind my eyelids, and I could not sleep with the erection it had produced. Innocent as I was, I touched myself beneath my bed clothes and learned to bring myself to climax. Even though I say I was innocent, I must have recognized something sinful in my behavior, for I guarded the secret of those late nights as though my life depended on it.

This act I came to associate with the man in the photograph. However, it was not a homosexual act. To me at that time it was hardly a sexual act at all. At first I resisted when his image came to my mind as I masturbated. I felt guilty for polluting him somehow, as though my lonely act could harm a person who had been dead for several decades. That guilt faded as I slowly became accustomed to the two occurring together. One might have christened it a conditioned response. When I first saw his picture and became aroused, a connection was forever formed in my mind. But no matter what one wishes to call it, all I knew was that it felt only natural deep within my heart.

—

That was the summer of my life. It was like a dream of sunshine, as short as a summer night, those few years between the naivety of childhood and the disillusionment of adulthood that I tried unsuccessfully to recapture throughout the rest of my life. I only catch a glimpse, in the changing of the seasons that pass too quickly, of a time I lived in blissful ignorance of myself and the world around me, and thought I knew everything.

The realization of everything's transience brings such pain, even to my thirteen-year-old mind. Standing beside my grandfather's grave with its headstone still shiny and new, and watching the incense smoke curl up into the air and dissipate, I was first struck by this eternal truth.

Likewise, a flower arrangement in early summer causes the heart to ache for its beauty, because one knows that it is only temporary and will soon wilt. Outside, the opened irises are pounded by the rains and droop on their slender stalks under the onslaught. Inside, the cut buds are thrown out before they can open their petals.

They fascinated me then, as though grandfather's death and my discoveries among his files had caused the proverbial scales to fall from my eyes. They fascinated me so much so that I've looked forward to the irises' first arrival every May, just as faithfully as I am surprised by the cherries' blooming every March. They are most inspiring in the bud stage, the irises, right before opening. The black and white and violet petals, veined and twisted together into a long, perfect cone, are rather suggestive of a phallus in the way they overlap the calyx slightly. The ruffle at the top on which a bead of dew seems to levitate promises something wonderful when it finally opens, as though the door that leads to wisdom has been left cracked.

It grated on my nerves, the impatience that came with waiting to see what would be revealed in the exact moment of unfolding. And I almost think the irises knew it, for they always chose the most unlikely time to open, always a moment when I chanced to turn away, so that I was never able to see it happening.

However, when they had finally bloomed, it was a disappointment every time. The colors that were now brilliant like jewels and the delicately balanced shape were splendid for but a moment. Then, as though they were simply too much, the eye got used to their pretentiousness and had enough. Better was the tightly wrapped bud with all its secrecy still intact, for only when it was no more did I understand how gladly I would rather throw those blossoms out unrealized than see that pure state tarnished and ended in such a flagrant manner.

Is it wrong for something to die so early in its life, before it can even reach its full potential? At the height of its beauty, although it tries so hard for some insignificant, impossible goal? Grandfather's patient whose eyes must have been the color of those iris buds passed away when he was twenty-six, at his physical peak and at the peak of his suffering. It was pitiful that he had to leave the world without his visage with nothing to commemorate his existence but an old black and white photograph, but at the same time, was his departure not, in its own way, perfect?

This would become the theme of my life, though I could not have realized then how central it would prove to all my relationships. As my summer declined, one by one I felt the things I had never known how to appreciate slip away from me. First my innocence, then my freedom, and finally my own family.

—

I shall never forget the day a devil's child came to shatter our already fragile lives.

Of course, that revelation came only in hindsight. For the time being I knew not how to begin to feel. He was the half-brother I had never known until that day when he was brought into my home.

Growing up, I had long thought my father to be the moral anchor of our household—a rational patriarch who governed everything by the scientific method. As it turned out, I really did not know my father at all. For the first fifteen years of my life I never suspected that he might have been supporting another child on the side. Looking back, however, I wonder if my mother did. I do not remember any fits of outrage regarding the affair, but I do remember the look on her face when she heard we would have a new addition to the household. "So, the witch has finally died," she said, and grinned as though in triumph. This statement was a mystery to me at the time. I thought she might be referring to an aunt or distant cousin. My father pretended not to hear.

I saw the black town car pull up to our drive, and though no one had told me what to expect, I had a sinking feeling of dread in my gut. It was not the last time I would feel something to that effect. We seemed to have a mental connection, my half-brother and I, as though we were actually twins from the same womb.

For that reason I wanted to avoid seeing him and making his presence here real. I did not see him get out of the car. The advantage of this neutral first impression was lost to me forever. Yet my feet carried me against my will to the foyer where I saw my father standing on the flagstone with his arm around a boy my age in a cold, uncomfortable embrace. Behind them, the driver was removing luggage from the trunk of the car. I remember focusing on that, and the bright green immature maple leaves in the background, until my father's voice broke my stare and forced me to face the present.

"Kazutaka," he said, "this is your older brother, Shido Saki. He'll be living with us from now on."

That was all. No one could say the old man was sensitive to the feelings of others. (I wonder if his kind of bedside manner was actually appreciated among his patients, or was it just his family he treated this way?) This was the first I had heard of the matter, and there had been no warning to soften the blow to my young and selfish pride that had been content to believe I was unique.

Looking at this boy now completely deflated my ego: it was like looking at my reflection in a mirror. Perhaps it is more accurate to say it was like gazing into the mirrors at fairs that twist one's features out of perspective, turning them into something grotesque. But he was not grotesque. He was rather handsome. His hair was an ashy brown, his eyes a deep, muddy blue color like the impenetrable surface of a lake, and his features gave the impression of a person who was always charming, and yet always false—so much the opposite of my meek and fair appearance.

Yet something about him was familiar. Something besides the ubiquitous black school uniform we both wore. I could read nothing from this boy my father called Saki, my older brother. I had only the feeling of being small as he looked down at me—even though it was I who stood on the landing.

He chuckled rather amiably, and said simply, with none of my awkwardness, "A pleasure, Kazutaka."

My conditioning caused me to treat him politely, but meanwhile anger was burning deep inside me. Who was he to invade my home, indeed my life, and regard me so casually, I thought. How could he, this bastard child, allow himself to act with such disrespect toward me, my father's legitimate heir?

If I were honest, however, I would have seen that what I resented most was not Saki but his existence, which was not in his control. I resented what, at the time, was the greatest betrayal I could possibly imagine. I resented that on the same day I was conceived, mere hours before the gametes that would become myself could meet, my father had impregnated his own patient who was then undergoing treatment for a mental disorder. For that I could never forgive him. It was not even that he had breached the ethics of his profession, for which I could care less in those days. Indeed, I realized, everything he had been to me had been a lie. He had betrayed me, his loyal and true son, who had only done the best in his power to honor him, with this souvenir of his adultery by inviting it into our home so matter-of-factly, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to do. He had made a fool of my mother, and he made a fool of me.

The thought filled me with such an overwhelming sense of shame, I felt the heat rise to my cheeks and was afraid that Saki would see my discomfort. Somehow I managed to keep my composure in front of him.

Though everything I was resisted, I resolved to treat Saki with the respect that was expected of me to give my brother, older if only by a handful of hours. As the days passed and I grew used to his presence, I tried to speak easily with him. I tried to think of him as my own flesh and blood, however much I was repulsed by the fact. And, in fact, it was a difficult thing to will myself to do, having believed myself an only child for so long. Every now and then I would be consumed by an irrational fear when the notion that he could take the place allotted me when father died hit me with all its reality, but I pushed it from my mind and told myself that was decades in the future: we would be grown men before then. I thought that reason would triumph unquestionably, my father's duties to me would not be surpassed by some senseless, guilty sense of obligation, and that life would go on in our household as it always had.

And instead of hating Saki, who, I eventually convinced myself, was an innocent by-product of the affair, I turned my blame on my father and his philanderous impulses.

May God forgive me my stupidity.

—

The year was 1979. We were first-years in high school, Saki and I. And, during that year at least, against my initial resolve, we became close. We behaved toward one another more like friends than brothers, but can we be blamed for the lost first fifteen years of our relationship?

We walked to school together, and walked home separately. I had always kept to myself when it came to my academic life and that did not change when I entered high school. I had a few friends to whom I did not feel particularly close nor felt any particular need to grow closer. Saki, on the other hand, soon drew a following, and often went out after class with the boys and girls who were branded delinquents by our professors for smoking and listening to punk music. It seemed quite incongruous to see him, always so polished and proper, commanding their attention. In a way I cannot explain except to say it may have been something like envy, it broke my heart.

He always made it up to me, though. He brought home records from his ritual weekly treks to the record store, eccentricities among rock and rhythm-and-blues, with suggestive covers and androgynous players layered with dyed hair and make-up. Father forbade almost anything that was not classical or enka, as much for mother's sensibilities as for his own personal tastes; so when he was out of the house and mother was shut up in her room, we pulled the records out from under Saki's bed, put them on the turntable and listened to them through one at a time, the volume low and our ears to the speakers, or sharing one pair of headphones, our eyes on the lyrics in the liner notes—often English that we could not understand well but found brilliant nonetheless.

Those were the days, stretched out on the living room rug, that I completely forgot the animosity toward Saki I once thought I would hold in my heart forever. Though at school we acted as though we hardly knew each other, shrugging nonchalantly as someone reacted with surprise to learn we were brothers, at home our camaraderie blossomed despite all expectations. The one school activity we both had an avid interest in was kendo, so when I joined the high school's club, so did he. Though he won our bouts more often than not, our competitive spirit was rarely dampened by hostility or resentment, and this carried over into other aspects of our life as well. Cooking somehow became a competition. Walks turned into races. Our daily activities were ruled by a good-natured one-up-manship.

In our social life, he was a bad influence. Always one to behave with the utmost respect among father's visiting colleagues, even to the point of being taken by one for an agoraphobic, with Saki's tacit goading I became an intellectual smart-ass, rolling my extensive reserve vocabulary in sarcasm and capping his cleverly opaque antisocial charm with what was in Saki's words, exquisite crass. Surprisingly, guests took this change in my behavior as a change for the better. Another sign that deep down I did have the family knack for medicine.

We would laugh about it afterward.

Then he would turn to me and say without a trace of that good humor, "Don't believe a word of that crap," and suddenly I no longer felt like laughing. "They want you to think it would be good for you, following in father's footsteps. But that's the biggest lie of all—to make you sign your soul away to the social beast. Like going to university. Sit down and take this exam, pay your dues, and just like that—" He snapped his fingers. "Kazutaka's gone. You'll never see him again. Just another ubiquitous 'sensei' to take his place. Hunch-backed, balding, and chronically bored."

But I planned on attending university. If not to become a doctor, then because that was simply what I must do. What other option was there, for someone of my upbringing? And who did he think he was fooling, if he thought he wouldn't go himself?

He shook his head slowly. I wasn't getting it. "The world wasn't made for people like us, Kazutaka. Some day you'll wake up and understand that. And when you do, who is going to have your back?"

The answer was he. Because it would be us against the world. Saki never said it in so many words, of course, but we were different from the other boys and girls our age. Once they realized that they would never let us back in their fold, so therefore we had to stick together. We had no other choice.

Yet although Saki opened me up, I still felt incompetent next to him among our classmates, both male and female. The one time I repeated one of his typical observations to Ukyo, my ego was inflated knowing she would think I had come up with something so brilliant myself, she would not speak to me for days and regarded me some time after with wariness.

She was not the only one revolted by the changes. "That devil is corrupting our child," I overheard mother complaining to father one evening after supper. Then she adjusted her thoughts to specify: "My child. He fills his head with morbid and improper thoughts."

Surely you're over-reacting, father said. Mother had two strikes against her credibility as it was, the way he saw it: her psychosis, and her womanhood.

"But you see it, don't you? When you have those men from the university over for dinner, you must see it! The way he talks back . . . oh, the things that come out of his mouth. . . . My Kazutaka would never act like that. Like he was some savage's child. I know my boy. That is not how I raised him. That is not my Kazutaka. He has been . . ." Her sophisticated features twisted up at the thought of that word, that hurt her to say more than anything else: "Damaged.

"I want that monster out of my house!"

I turned to Saki then. There struck me as being something dangerous about the situation, being there with Saki as he heard those words issue from my mother's mouth. I thought for sure he must hate her as much as she hated him. That thought did not settle well with me, although rationally I could not blame him if he did. Mother never apologized for her feelings.

Instead, however, Saki just grinned, as though what she had said were a compliment, and seemed completely amused.

"Don't you resent it?" he said to me one day. I did not catch his meaning, so I asked him what I was supposed to resent.

"The way she treats you. Like you were some fragile doll or something I'm gonna break and lower the value of."

I wondered at his choice of words, and whether he knew how close to the mark they were. I remembered the looks he shot my mother, when father was out of the room and she would caress my hair in that possessive way, at once shaming me and seeming to warn Saki.

"It doesn't matter," he said when I could not give him a satisfactory answer. "Forget I said it. Look. That bird's been making a ruckus all afternoon." He nodded to indicate something further back in the garden that I did not see. "It's really beginning to annoy me. What kind do you suppose it is?"

"I don't know."

"Well, how about that bird book I always see in your room? It must be in there," Saki said and pushed himself to his feet.

I was ambivalent for a moment, then a sense of panic struck me as I remembered. "Don't," I said, and recognizing the desperation in my voice, quickly revised: "Don't bother. It probably won't be in there."

He stopped and stared at me as though I were daft. Then, slowly, the amused smile I had grown used to that seemed to know my deepest secrets returned to his features with what I could only term a malicious twist. "That's okay," he said in a lower voice. "I'll just check anyway." And he turned to go toward my room.

I hurried up and ran to stop him, but somehow he beat me there. My protests fell on his deaf ears—no, on second thought, they must have only encouraged him as he reached for the book on the shelf, all the while assuring me it would be no trouble at all.

I watched with the detached sense of clarity of a condemned man as he pulled the book down from the shelf. Just as I had predicted, the folder which held the file on grandfather's patient was dragged along with it, and fell to the floor, spilling its contents like an opening fan. Embarrassed, my mind swimming as the blood rushed hot to my face and armpits, I dove for the contents; but as he bent down in his calm and unhurried way, Saki beat me to even that. Taking the photograph in his free hand and examining it closely, he asked no one in particular, "Oh, what's this?"

"It's nothing. Give it back." I made a grab for the picture.

He moved it out of my reach so that I would have had to lean over him to retrieve it. "It can't be just anyone, to be wedged in a such an inconspicuous place. Is this why you didn't want me to get the book?"

Ashamed, I said nothing. His expression, which had turned serious with the discovery of the photograph, was cruel as he turned his scrutinizing eyes upon me. I did not have to answer. He could read my soul.

"Oh, so that's it. That's why you didn't want me to find out. You're in love with this person, aren't you? With this man." He laughed at me, with the same insolent chuckle as when we first met. "Is that why you keep it there? So no one will find out what kind of person you really are? My, Kazutaka . . . I had no idea you were like that. But don't worry. I won't tell anyone. It'll be our secret and ours alone. Okay?"

I felt the first seeds of what would become a frightfully deep sense of mistrust then. Selfishly, I feared he would tell someone of this and my comfortable life as I had carefully built it would end. I feared that I would become even more of a pariah at school because of it. Worse yet, I feared that mother, so disgusted with my sinful thoughts, and with my longing for that nameless person, would take the photograph away and destroy it, just as she had Veronica. Then the vital presence of grandfather's patient would be lost to me forever. It would be as if he had never existed, and eventually the memory of his image I held in my mind would also fade. And I feared that Saki's knowledge would taint the purity of that person and of my thoughts toward him.

Saki must have seen the displeasure on my face for he quickly said, in a manner much more amiable than that he had used just moments before: "Gee, Kazutaka, you don't have to look so upset. I didn't mean it. I was only giving you a bad time. Why would someone like you have those kind of sick thoughts anyway?"

He handed the photograph back to me, aggravating me once more by faking to tear it away from me again before finally placing the folder with its contents restored in my hand.

I was startled by the change I had witnessed come over him. In those few minutes, Saki seemed like two completely different people. Yet, wanting to cling to the good standing we had with one another, as though if I did not some terrible imbalance would befall our household, I dismissed his behavior as a temporary lapse into the resentment that it must have been only natural for him to harbor toward me, our father's legitimate son, and I told myself to think nothing more of it.

Because of that, I cannot say when exactly the change occurred. Like my mother's psychosis, it too must have increased gradually until I arrived at a time I could no longer imagine that such idyllic days as I first described ever existed in waking reality. I grew more skeptical of Saki with each passing day. Like scales being slowly peeled from my eyes, I began to have serious doubts about the sincerity of his geniality toward me. Whether there had been something truly sarcastic in his eyes all along, or whether that was something new or entirely my own creation, I cannot say. I only knew that once the feeling of unease crept into my heart it stayed put and would not budge except to make me feel ashamed for regarding my own half-brother, whom everyone in my father's circle believed to be an angel, with suspicion.

I tried to like Saki. As I said before, I felt it was my duty as a brother, if only by one parent, and an unfaithful one at that. However, the better I got to know Saki, the harder I found that to do.

—

As a young boy, I was fascinated by how living things worked. How I could have denied my destiny to become a doctor for so long remains a mystery to me. Ever since when I was six or seven my aging grandfather helped me mount my first butterfly, and showed me how to capture a bee inside a glass with sealing paper so that it droned like a pipe organ, that seed of interest had been gestating within me, waiting for the right conditions to make it sprout. Watching spiders fall haplessly into the pond in the backyard and struggle to free themselves from the water, I was reminded of the part chance played in the fragility of life, how one small, seemingly insignificant misstep could spell one's demise. It took a long time for the spiders to drown. Even to the last they clung to some false hope they might escape. Still, nature ran its course. It never occurred to me I might have been just as responsible for their deaths by failing to help them.

One morning in the careless days of summer, I spied a lizard warming itself on a flagstone in the garden. I wondered if it were dead, the way it just sat there seeming not to move, or if it would run away if I startled it. If I threw a rock at it perhaps. And I wondered if I would actually be able to hit it from where I sat. I didn't think so. But spurred by my curiosity, I took a shot anyway. As though outside myself I saw the rock hit, and blood spurt up from a head wound. It was an incredibly lucky shot. The lizard must have died instantly. I was stunned that I could have taken its life on such a childish whim, and yet at the same time, its crumpled corpse fascinated me.

Now I shared my home and my class with Saki. As the months dragged on, I began to see a side of him that was new to me. Boys who had survived on cheap, harmless thrills in middle school now had a new direction for their violence. Setting fire to cats' whiskers or shooting tacks through straws at stray dogs. How barbaric, Saki would remark to the air before us as he caught sight of them in the schoolyard, but the same cruel fascination would be shining clearly in his eyes as he said it.

It was present in biology as well, as he watched single-celled organisms burst and leak out their organelles under a microscope, or created his macabre works of art. Even the professor could not turn away from the frog that lay crucified on its platter, its skin pinned back in flaps, intestines carefully pulled out and lined up beside its body as though in accordance with some dark ritual of mummification. Its tiny heart was too far up in the chest to see, but by the slow inflation of the throat we were sure that if it were visible, we would see it beating. With an intense expression on his brow, Saki took down the measurements of its vitals although it was beyond the scope of the assignment, removed one by one until the specimen gave up its life. For this they said surely he was his father's son.

Our professors must have known what anguish it caused me to hear those words uttered in my presence. They must have said it with just that purpose. His father's son. . . . Saki may have been my father's son, and he may have been conceived and delivered before I could be, but then perhaps it was even true that his morbid fascinations were cut from the same cloth as father's adulterous behavior. If he were that man's son, what did that make me? It was at times such as those I would recall the stirrings the photographs of grandfather's patients caused in myself years ago, and fear that we were not so different as I had wanted to believe—that our father's genetic material remained an inescapable bond between us that could neither be denied nor altered, even should he die.

I caught Saki one late-winter morning in '80 as I arrived early to school, before the freshly fallen snow could be disturbed by students' tracks, holding a small bird that had fallen from its nest cradled in his gloved hands. "She's beautiful, isn't she?" he said to me. "I can feel her heart beating against my hands. It's so warm."

His voice, as always, was painstakingly soft. Looking at his hands wrapped tenderly around it, his thumb caressing its wings every now and then, one might have thought Saki was a boy of infinite compassion. The bird, however, was shaking violently. Its black, bead-like eyes were glazed over and blinked frequently in pain. That would have been understandable from a fall, but the more I stared into them the more I saw a gut-wrenching fear and desperation that could not have been explained so simply.

Until then I had been more concerned with how he had beat me to school. The purity of the white landscape around us became suddenly too much to bear and seemed to tilt around me. I asked him, "What are you doing to it?"

"She was lying on the ground when I found her. Must have flown into a window or something."

"Let it go. You're hurting it."

"What do you mean?" He looked hurt at my accusation, yet the longer I stood there the more I became convinced he was the reason behind the bird's pain. Saki's brows furrowed and his gaze dropped to the bird, and I saw it struggle in his grasp. "You don't like it, Kazutaka?"

I understood then he was not trying to help the poor animal. He would not have known how. He was offering its life to me. As though to say, You're the doctor's son: you save it. His disappointment was more satisfaction than anything else, seeming to hide an almost sexual longing to prove me incompitent. He was waiting for me to decide whether it would live or die. Nor was it just the bird to which he seemed to be referring when he said, "It should probably be put out of its misery."

I told him to give the bird to me, which he did gladly. But I had not seen where it had come from, and I was forced to leave it in a sheltered place outside when it was time for class to begin. When we left to go home that day, the other boys pointed out a dead bird lying on the pavement. It had frozen to death, even as the blossoms were on the plums. It had frozen to death because I could not help it. Its pitch black eyes were half open, staring at nothing, but I felt its hopelessness bore into me like a failed warning. I could not meet Saki's eyes as we walked home together, knowing I would find them taunting me. Even his words of comfort—"It couldn't be helped. It had a broken wing"—sounded condemning to my ears.

Before Saki came I had been involved in a small literature club after school. Recently it had lost interest for me. But more than that, I hated to arrive home after him, when I would be forced to pass by his room on the way to my own. I relished the days he stayed out late into the afternoon, and I had peace until his knock came outside my door announcing his return. On those other days, if he saw me sneaking by, he would ask pointlessly, "Did you just get back?" and give me that knowing look I had come to dread and loath so deeply. If I tried to walk by without greeting him, he would point out my rudeness: "What, too busy to say hello to your brother?" "Brother," naturally, would be emphasized; he would never let me forget it, what my father had done. What I had become consequently.

When I arrived in my room at last, I shut the door and breathed a sigh of relief. There, in all the house, when I could no longer stand being friendly with him, I could believe I was safe from Saki. I could believe this was still my home, and that I was not some unwanted guest in it, my every move scrutinized by that bastard child who slept down the hall. Of course, as I said, I tried to love him, and back then I even did, but I could not help hating him as well simply for what he was.

I spread out my school books and promptly lost myself in my studies. When I finished a subject, I felt drowsy and lay down on my back on the bed and closed my eyes. As though in a dream I heard the sliding of the door on its track, and a fragrance drifted toward me not unlike lilac blossoms out of season. I breathed it in. It contented me. Then the mattress shifted beneath me as it depressed by my side. My curiosity quickly grew to alarm, and I opened my eyes just as a hand clamped over my mouth. Above, I found those muddy blue eyes boring into me, mocking me.

"Shh. . . . Kazutaka. . . ." Saki's voice was gentle, reassuring, but those eyes were anything but. His grip was strong and his arm across my chest pinned me down as well, but his skin and his breath were soft and warm, alluring. His nose nearly brushed against mine, he was so close. I froze. I was too stunned by his proximity to know what else to do. One of his knees was between my legs, a fact I realized reluctantly. Later I asked myself why I did not simply push him away, or knee him in the groin, and saved myself the anguish of what was to come. The way he was, he would have left me alone after that. But I did nothing.

"Don't be afraid," he whispered. "I wouldn't hurt my own brother." If he sincerely hoped his words would comfort me in the slightest, however, he was delusional. Even as he said them, I felt his other hand caressing my body, first over, and then under my uniform. He unzipped my trousers, and slid his hand inside. He began to stroke me. He was cruel enough to ask, "You like this, don't you?"

The sensation was overwhelming, the combination of disgust and visceral pleasure more than I could bear, compounded by the knowledge that he was my own flesh and blood. I shut my eyes tight. Still I saw him smiling at me victoriously, the image as though burned onto my retinas. Knowing I was the subject of his experiment, the object of his curiosity, I yearned to retreat inside myself and pretend his touch did not affect me like it did. But it was too late. He held me down harder as I shuddered, perhaps afraid I would cry out and one of the maids would hear. He shushed me like one does an infant. I could hear the panting of my own breath against his hand. He wiped the ejaculate from the other on the bedspread, clucking his tongue as though he pitied me. "Poor Kazutaka." He grinned. "You're not going to cry, are you? No, of course not. You're such a good boy."

He sounded like my mother, and he must have known it, as he said softly to me, mockingly: "Such a lovely doll."

He replaced the hand over my mouth with his lips, and suddenly I had the strange feeling that he was sucking the breath from my lungs. When he pushed his tongue into my mouth, I bit down. He jerked back, and the coppery taste of blood filled my mouth. As he jumped up from the bed, I was struck by how ordinary he looked in that moment, and shocked, as if I were the one who had attacked him. He covered his mouth as he tore open the door, and his footsteps thumped down the hall to the bathroom.

I remember wishing he had bled to death, although that was never what I truly intended. If I had, I would have bitten him harder, and been alone again thereafter.

The odd thing is nothing changed between us after that. He treated me with the same condescending amiability he always had, and I played along like a fool, too cowardly to do otherwise. It was to us as though that episode had never happened.

Then came the reoccurring dreams that visited me after the incident, involving Saki and myself in various sexual situations, as though to remind me we had not finished what he had started. They were never very clear, typically shrouded in darkness, but still vivid enough sensation-wise so that I would often wake up with an erection, or even during or shortly after ejaculation, leading me to worry that I might also have cried out as I sometimes did in the dream. It was difficult to tell what was real and what was my imagination while the mind still clung to its dream state, in the early hours of morning; and if I weren't fully clothed and alone in my room when I was awakened, I would have thought they were real.

Those episodes would fill me with shame, for they left me lusting after Saki against my will. The feelings experienced in the dream would resurface at the most inappropriate times: on the train to school, in the classroom, at a meaningful look across the dinner table. The way he looked at me now frightened me to my very soul, because he knew my secret—not just what we had shared, what he had done to me, but my private thoughts and dreams. He knew about my innermost carnal desires for my half-brother, just as he seemed to know without my telling how I regarded grandfather's patient, and he knew how much said desires tortured and disgusted me. I feared every day he would confront me about them—that he would try to act them out once more. I feared that I half wished he would. And I feared he might try to hurt me, though that fear was only a looming pretense of real fear, merely a hunch, not grounded in reality and, in fact, unattached to any future occurrence.

—

Then father's health began to decline. It was in the fall of that year, the second year of Saki's stay with us. Like the sense of foreboding that had penetrated the eaves of the house of late, it was gradual—so gradual none of us saw it until it was too late. As though it were the way of doctors to do so, he hid his illness from us well, while continuing to treat the ails of others. He never complained of any pain or hesitated in his movements. Perhaps he truly felt no change in his condition at all. What was evident, however, was the loss of weight, and the tiredness that he chocked up to work, which he seemed to occupy himself with more of late. They were the kind of symptoms that, had we been born in the distant past, a monk would have diagnosed as demonic influence—some hungry ghost with a vendetta sucking out his life's energy. But we were born in the twentieth century, and he was a man of science. None of us even noticed, until on a hot and humid day in late August he collapsed.

That was the first time a doctor outside our family stepped foot in our household on business. After he spoke with father privately for a while, we were told heatstroke exacerbated by stress from the office was to blame, and that father needed to drink more water, eat better, and take things a little easier from now on to prevent it from happening again. Though it was obvious to anyone with eyes to see, the doctor said nothing about the fact father appeared to be slowly wasting away.

But, reassured by the doctor's words, mother and I pushed the truth that was in front of us from our minds and urged father to eat such and such as the doctor had suggested while we enjoyed normal dinners, and to drink a glass of water for his health whenever we suspected he had forgotten, as he was wont to do, claiming the entire matter was nothing. At those times, Saki remained silent, and smiled fondly to himself as he sat at the table, as though at some joke none of the rest of us could hear.

Thanks to our pestering, father's condition began to improve and he even gained back some weight. A month passed, and then before long it was the middle of October. Then one Sunday he complained of a shortness of breath, in a sudden outburst charged mother with keeping a stuffy house, and went out to the veranda for some fresh air. The next thing we knew, he had fallen with a crash into the garden, landing hard on a patch of gravel. We rushed him to the hospital, where the same doctor at last noted father's weakened state and bound his chest for cracked ribs. He would have to stay in bed for several weeks, we were told, and going to the office for work was out of the question.

However, aside from the injury from the fall, the doctor could find nothing wrong with him. Suspicious, he ran various tests, examining father thoroughly, but to no avail. His lungs were clear, his liver and kidneys functioning normally, and there was no sign of heart disease. Nor was there any sign of cancer the doctor could detect, which came as a relief to my father, who had watched his own father slowly eaten up by the disease. He was, we were assured, in good health. There was no reason to keep him for observation. The doctor said father was merely exhausted and sent us all home; but though we said nothing aloud to one another, I could tell neither mother nor Saki believed that diagnosis any more than I did. Keep him on his strict diet and have him get plenty of rest. That was the solution on which we would have to rely.

Though he had seemed ambivalent before, it came as a surprise to me when it was Saki who constantly volunteered to tend to father's needs—making sure father was comfortable, that he was not straining himself physically, and that he had the patient files sent over by his colleagues when he asked for them. He made sure that father kept hydrated, and was taking the medications that the doctor suggested at the assigned times. While the rest of the household began to worry, when the healing process did not seem to be taking the expected length of time, about its financial well-being, Saki seemed more carefree than ever. Either he had remarkable faith that father would fully recover, or the prospect of losing the large house and our extravagant way of living—hypothetical at this point though it was—simply did not concern him.

I could not but suspect what motives might be behind the care Saki suddenly showed father, after all his talk about he and I being alone in this world, unable to trust any adult. Could it have been a sense of guilt that guided him, I wondered. Was this to make up for the small bit of gratitude father had shown him as a child, sending regular checks to his mother? Or was there some more spiteful motive? During those times he spent alone with father, was he secretly scheming for a larger inheritance, hoping father would remember Saki's attentiveness during his moment of need once he had recovered—even going so far as to turn father's heart against me, the second-born son?

Though I worried about this, I certainly never expected father to die. No one did.

I stepped out of my room one morning and knew instantly that things would never go back to the way they were. Everyone had gathered in the hallway that led to father's room, yet the house was strangely quiet, as though by a conscious effort of those standing there not to make a sound. The maids spoke in hushed tones to one another so that I could not hear what they said. Our butler, Sakaki, had a hand on the shoulder of my mother, who clutched an embroidered handkerchief to the breast of her housecoat but otherwise looked completely numb, like when she was having one of her deeper fits of depression. None of them noticed my presence.

I went to Saki instead, who glanced up at me out of the corner of his eye as he sat at the table and solemnly ate the breakfast prepared by the maids—apparently before they had been distracted. "What happened?" I asked him.

"Father's gone," he said simply—so simply I could not comprehend the meaning of what he had said.

"What do you mean, gone?"

"He passed away in his sleep."

Passed away. . . . Those simple words pierced me like a bullet. I felt paralyzed and numb even as my mind grasped the gravity of the situation, as though half of me were convinced it had to be some kind of nightmare. Otherwise someone would have told me right away, instead of letting me sleep ignorantly on. Otherwise Saki's revelation would not have been so indifferent and matter-of-fact, so devoid of emotion. I could not speak. It had to be a lie, I told myself; I had just spoken with father the night before, and he had seemed perfectly well, lucid and eager to get out of bed.

When I said nothing, Saki let out a slight sigh. "Sakaki's called the doctor over, but it's not like he'll be able to do any good. It's just to pronounce his death."

"Death?" I found myself backing up a step. "Come on. . . . Saki, this isn't something to joke about—"

"Would I joke about that?" He shrugged. "You needn't act so surprised. It was only a matter of time, the way he was going."

Mother seemed to snap out of her own numbness when she heard him say this. Her mouth fell open in a silent gasp and she glared at Saki. Her knuckles went white as she squeezed the handkerchief tighter in one hand and approached us.

Saki lowered his voice as he said to me, "I'm sorry you had to find out this way, Kazutaka."

Mother slapped him hard across the face. Saki did not flinch—in fact, a small smile moved his lips for a brief moment—but the abruptness and the sheer malice in that small act of violence startled the rest of us. We were used to her biting words, but never had my mother raised a hand against me, let alone against Saki, who was some other woman's child, and furthermore whom she had always seemed afraid to touch, as though to do so would have the same effect as touching a corrosive acid.

She must have been a little stunned by her action herself, for it was a moment before she could recover herself. Her hand remained poised in the air like a videotape on pause.

When she did recover she grabbed Saki by the shirt and shook him, her clutching hands moving gradually up toward his throat as she yelled: "You dare say you're sorry? This is all your fault! You did this to him, you demon spawn! You devil! You murdered my husband! After all he did for you—"

I thought for sure she would try to throttle him. Apparently Sakaki did too. He rushed forward and grabbed mother by the arms, physically lifting her off of Saki. He wrapped his arms around her in an attempt to calm and restrain her as she screamed for someone to kill my half-brother. As our butler gently whispered in her ear, her strength eventually failed her and she collapsed in his arms, moaning for her God. The tears ran down her cheeks in rivers then, and as she sobbed she called out father's name over and over again, begging him not to leave her alone with Saki, as though by doing so she might actually call father's spirit back to his corpse. She was in such pain in her grief and her anger that it hurt me to watch, and startled the maids who still kept their distance. With this sudden, desperate swelling of devotion to my late father, I felt I hardly knew her.

I turned to Saki, who was watching her avidly, but without the hate I had expected to find. Like I had with the bird, I found myself asking him, "What did you do?"

He looked surprised as he turned to face me. "You don't believe what she says, do you, Kazutaka? Look at her." He nodded toward my mother, a disheveled and pitiable mess in our butler's arms. "She's obviously hysterical."

"Father's dead!" I reminded him. How was mother supposed to react?

He turned an accusing eye toward me. And you're a man, aren't you? his expression seemed to say.

"You haven't turned against me too, have you?"

"No." I lowered my gaze. "It's just . . . It's only natural she feels overwhelmed."

"She hasn't been taking her medication."

So he said as though that would explain everything. And for a brief moment, he sounded like our father. In other words, I was to believe, my mother's emotional wreckage was not due to grief but to her psychosis. It was because she was a nut job. A part of me resisted swallowing the logic of that simplistic argument, and yet I did swallow it, like a bitter pill. Mother was in hysterics, after all, and she had always hated Saki. She never had a problem before making sure everyone knew that. Why wouldn't she accuse him of such a thing, hoping to make sense of this senseless loss?

"In any case, there isn't anything anyone can do," Saki added not without some disdain. "She might as well just accept he's dead."

—

But mother would not accept it. In the days that followed, the responsibilities of running the household fell to us boys or Sakaki. Mother was too distraught to make even simple decisions, let alone plan a funeral. Compounding that, her distrust of everyone swelled into an all-out paranoia, which made all our lives more difficult. Father's sister came to stay with us for the funeral, and even her efforts at consolation were suspect in mother's eyes. She must have wanted something from father, mother said. Just like Saki, and the maids who seemed only good for standing around gawking these days. It was all a conspiracy against her. Everyone wanted something from father, and wanted her out of the way.

I could not bear to see mother like that. And yet I could not find it in me to feel sorry for her either. I could not force myself to believe, as I had pretended to as a child, that my mother really loved father so much, or that her show of grief was not actually the selfish fear of not knowing what the future would spell for her well-being. It led me to wonder how she would have reacted had I passed away. Surely if she grieved at all, if she did not replace me with some other object, it would be with the passing sense of loss one feels toward a broken toy.

That was why I could not stand the constant moaning coming from her room as I tried to get to sleep, or her amnesiac-like helplessness around the house during the daylight hours. She was a grown woman, not some infant to be coddled, I thought; but I never told this to Saki, though he would have agreed. It was not the right sort of thought for a grieving son to have.

Still, he must have noticed how impatient my attitude toward her had become. He seemed to take pleasure in the sight of mother's anguish, in some cruel, indifferent way, like a student marveling at a Dali and making light of the pain behind its creation. When she lost her appetite and sat at the dinner table just staring at the closed shutters, or when she bemoaned that no one was listening to her, even though she had all our attention, it seemed to take a conscious effort to keep the smile off of Saki's face.

Noticing my frustration one evening as I sat in front of the television, trying desperately to escape into its cacophony and my school work, he asked out of the blue if it was time for mother's tea. I was only too happy to acquiesce when he offered to take it to her himself, his voice small as he passed quickly through the room so that I hardly registered it.

A few minutes later, there rose a scream from the direction of her room. I rushed to see what was the matter, and found my mother holding a crystal vase in both hands like a baseball bat, its contents poured out on the floor. Apparently she meant to use it as a cudgel should Saki, who had merely set down the tray with its cup of tea, try anything against her. She explained this to me when I asked her what she planned on doing, and her words fell out like the rantings of a lunatic.

"He killed your father and now he wants to kill me, too!" she was shouting. By the look on her face, it was as though she were seeing something other than Saki before her—something far more sinister. "He'd kill us all if he had the chance! That monster would do away with us all!"

"I merely brought her her tea," said Saki, a bastion of calm by comparison. "I don't know what set her off."

"Mother, stop," I entreated her. "What makes you think Saki wants to kill you?"

"He said it himself! He wants to get rid of all of us!"

"Come, now. Why would he do that?"

"He hates us all, can't you see? He's not . . . not . . ." She shook, stuck on one word that terrified her to say and never came out. "He's trying to poison me with that tea, make it look like heart failure or a stroke. Just like he did to your father. I don't know how he did it—"

"How, then, mother? With black magic?"

She had not been able to believe the doctor when he said father's death might have been caused by a blood clot that stopped his heart. Might have been wasn't enough, she had said, and refused to believe Saki had not been the one responsible no matter what the evidence showed—or rather, what it did not.

"She's delusional," Saki said and shook his head. "You can't believe a word she says as long as she refuses to take her meds. Look," he said to her and drank down half the cup of tea he had brought himself. "Would I do that if it were poisoned?"

"I'll make you another pot myself," I offered to reassure her.

"I don't want another pot!" she said. "I don't want any tea! I want that bastard out of my house! I want him dead! Kill him before he can do any more damage, Kazutaka! Now, while he's just standing there!"

I sighed. I understood then that Saki had been right. The frustration that had been building up inside me over the last few days surfaced again, and resentment overcame the pity I had initially felt for my mother.

"Mother, have you been taking your medication?"

As soon as those words left my lips, I must have known somewhere deep in my heart that I had as good as betrayed her. Her eyes flew open. Gathering herself together in a defensive posture, she backed away from me, watching me warily the entire time. "No . . . no, not my Kazutaka. Not my Kazutaka, too," she muttered. "He got to you, too, didn't he? He turned you against me!"

"Don't be ridiculous, mother."

"Shall I call a doctor?" Saki offered.

"No!" Mother looked between us now, unsure which was the less trustworthy. "Can't you see, Kazutaka? He's trying to take you away from me with his lies!"

"What lies, mother? Answer me truthfully. Have you or have you not been taking your medication?"

"Yes, mother, tell him the truth," said Saki.

She stared at him wildly, her eyes wide like an animal caught in a trap when the hunter returns.

"I won't take those pills! You just want me drugged so you can murder me more easily!"

"Stop that nonsense. The medication is for your own good," I told her. "We can't reach you when you get like this. Why can't you understand that?"

I grabbed her around the middle abruptly, managing to wrench the vase from her grip before she could hurt one of us. She lashed out violently, instinctively, as though I were suffocating her. That was when my aunt stepped into the room, and, asking what was going on, went quickly to mother's side upon seeing her distress. Mother stopped her in her tracks with an abrupt, "Stay away from me, backstabbing whore!" and I saw my aunt's face pale and freeze in shock. In my own surprise that mother would say such a thing, I released my hold.

"Sakaki! Sakaki!" she cried again like a banshee. Tears streaked her cheeks.

I could have reached out to her again. Even if mother only shrugged me off, I could have at least made an effort to console her. However, with the memory of how she had touched me fondly in the past only to lay me aside at the next suitable moment rising to my consciousness . . . I found it impossible to sympathize with her.

When our butler failed to come to her rescue, mother fell to her knees, putting her hands over her ears and chanting over and over, "Go away, go away," as though the three of us were mere illusions caused by a trick of light at night to be wished away.

"Do as she says," I told the other two. "Leave her." If that's what she wants, to be left alone, I said to myself, then I would let her have her way.

I hardly glanced behind me as we stepped out of the room.

Saki said quietly in my ear as I was closing the door after us: "She's a mess. Now you see how much misery she's in."

I ignored the shadow of a smile that graced one corner of his lips. "I know."

"So?" he said. "What are you going to do about it, Kazutaka?"

What could I do? Was there even such a thing as a merciful solution? I went to bed that night with that question repeating in my head like a broken record. Sometime during the early hours of morning, I dreamed of mother rasping my name. The syllables were choked out as she pleaded and begged me to stop. Her breaths came like gasps from between her lips, from which the lipstick had been sloppily wiped, keeping a staccato rhythm that was sexual in its desperation. I did not know why she was acting that way; but there was something about it that thrilled and frightened me with a satisfaction that was completely new.

It was so vivid, I did not think I was dreaming. Until a woman screamed and I awoke.

It was my aunt. I found her in mother's room, kneeling beside her body and looking pale and sick to her stomach. She had opened the door to wake my mother, she managed to sob in explanation, but instead had found her collapsed on the floor still in her housecoat from the evening before, her skin white and cold to the touch, her limbs sprawled out and eyes wide open. Motionless, just like one of her dolls. She was dead.

Not that it had ever been a subject of contemplation, but I came to a realization then that I had expected mother's death—whenever it came—would be a frantic, violent one, just as she had lived her life, in that darkness that none of us could ever comprehend. There was something wrong about the reality of it. There was something about her position that morning and her behavior the night before that did not fit in my mind. But I could not say what it was.

There were no wounds on the body. The doctor could find no cause of death in a preliminary examination, and because it happened so soon after father's death there was never an autopsy. Perhaps she died of a broken heart, it was suggested. Either that, or she committed suicide on an overdose of anti-psychotics. She was under an extraordinary amount of stress, after all, and her mental state—the only significant problem with her health—could have compounded it, making her feel as though she were trapped with no other way out. Yes—my aunt agreed with the same strange eagerness as the father of that boy in the grove, some thirteen years later—mother had expressed just those sorts of feelings in her recent outbursts.

At the time, I was too numb from having lost both parents in such a short amount of time to question the sheer ludicrousness of this assumption. My mother would have sooner betrayed her husband than betray God by taking her own life. As for the anti-psychotics, she had not trusted them. But I was stunned by her loss, and in that state it was easier to simply believe what others told me.

Among them was Saki and his conviction it was out of pure selfishness that mother abandoned us to make our own way in the world following father's death. Somehow, I came to take stock in this belief as though it were my own, nourishing the familiar feeling of resentment that arose beside it, losing myself as it fed like a leach off my sadness, holding my head beneath the torrent.

—

I did not cry for my parents. I was too numb, my mind thickened by a fog through which I could understand the gravity of my situation but was prevented from acting accordingly. I felt horrible for it. For the first time in a long time I recognized the calling of the filial obligations I had, with Saki as co-conspirator, rejected, and yet I no longer knew how to answer it again. They were my parents, my conscience said, and they had given me life; but I could not help asking what had ever possessed them to do it when they handled me with such cold, scientific care. Did they really deserve this guilt, this remorse of mine, I wondered, my heart as stagnantly cold as the November air.

The funeral was a Buddhist one, despite mother's Christian aspirations. She would never have been allowed a Catholic burial anyway with what uncertainties surrounded the manner of her death. The black cars carrying their ashes crawled through the autumn haze and the streets that wound to the cemetery where the Muraki headstone stood. Behind them, distant relations, colleagues of father's, and anyone else who had come to pay respects walked with the proscribed solemnity like corpses themselves.

We went through the rituals, Saki and I, wordlessly. In our identical black school uniforms, white bands around our arms, we walked in the procession with our heads bowed, pacing ourselves to the chanting of a temple priest up ahead and the rhythmic clatter of metal rings hitting together at the top of a standard that bobbed like a buoy, its red banners fluttering occasionally in the breeze. Inhaling the incense smoke that drifted back through the crowds toward us. For all those who looked upon us with pitying eyes, our heads were bowed in sorrow, but I very much doubt that Saki felt the same hollowness inside that I did, and the immense weight of guilt that came with it. I would glance at him occasionally, waiting for him to speak to me, to say something vaguely reassuring as he had so often done in the past, but for once he was silent.

There were two women about my mother's age walking behind us. Thinking it improper to look back, I did not see their faces, nor did I recognize them by voice, so I could not know for whom or what reason they had joined the funeral procession. When they began to speak in low, hushed voices, I wished they would shut up—even the effort of listening felt like a cruel and unnecessary bother to my bereaved self. However, I could not help straining an ear once I gathered I was the subject of their conversation. It was in my own self-interest to do so.

"How sad. Can you even imagine? First the father, then the mother, so close together. . . ."

"I hear they don't even know the cause of death."

"It's downright eerie, isn't it?"

Hearing those words, I thought of the doctor's uneasy rationalizations for my parents' deaths, and of my relatives' only too eager acceptance of them. How quickly the fear of the unknown beings out the scientific in even the most religious of characters—and the superstition in the scientist.

I turned my gaze toward Saki as he walked beside me. I do not know what I was looking for in doing so, only what I found. He was smiling. It was the same nonchalant, slow-to-form smile he had displayed at my confusion over the injured bird, when I had faltered and shown him in brilliant clarity my own fatal weakness.

After all the chances I had already been given to identify it, I finally recognized the monster that stirred beneath his surface then—the monster that only my mother had seen, and which the rest of us had dismissed as another of her paranoid delusions. In that moment I finally understood that it had been I who was mistaken all along, and I who had been deluded. Bewitched by Saki's charm—by his aura of innocence that I knew at first glance could not be trusted, and yet had ended up convincing myself to trust nonetheless, even sinking so far as to be prepared and willing to deny my own family for his transient promises. How naive I was, what an utter fool, not to see them for the lies they were! The confession could not have been clearer on Saki's face, in that victorious smile.

That afternoon, after we had returned home and the guests had all gone, I confronted Saki with my suspicions. We were in the sitting room where father kept two old swords on display. Their presence there did not even cross my mind as we entered that room, our uniforms damp from the autumn cold. My thoughts were elsewhere. Outside, in the fading light, it began to drizzle.

"Why did you smile?" I asked him. Foolishly and impulsively, for I had planned out none of my confrontation, only let the outrage of being deceived for the past year and a half lead me where it may.

His response was suspiciously lacking in any consciousness of the gravity of that day, as though it had all been a piece of fiction, and we merely the actors whose time on the stage was now finished.

"What are you talking about, Kazutaka?"

"When those two women behind us were talking. You heard what they said, how it was strange how mother and father died so suddenly. I know you did. I saw you smile."

As though to say, Is this the smile you mean? it appeared on his lips again. "What about it?"

"Well, it just felt like there was something . . . wrong about the whole thing. Something unnatural. Those women felt something was off about what happened to mother and father. I felt it. I thought maybe you, with that smile . . . It looked like you knew something I didn't."

Likewise, Saki seemed to know better than I where I was going as he watched me like a hawk.

"They were in good health, Saki—"

"Not from where I could see. One had a body that was breaking down before our eyes, the other a mental defect and suicidal tendencies—"

"Mother would never have taken her own life," I told him, and my hands shook so hard with my conviction I clenched them at my sides. "She was unstable, yes, but not like that. Not even off the meds. You were with her that night. . . . And what about father saying he was starting to feel better? You were the last one to speak to him. . . ."

I stopped, unable to go on as the pieces fell into place.

Saki chuckled. "My, Kazutaka, you seem to have it all figured out. You really are your father's son, you know, a regular detective of the medical field. So, if the doctor had it all wrong . . ." He shrugged and looked up at me. "What's the answer?"

"The answer to what?"

"What killed them, Kazutaka, since you seem so sure? Or, perhaps I should be asking, who. . . ."

Without thinking of the consequences, without even knowing what I would do next, I grabbed one of the swords from its display rack and unsheathed it. The dull sound of the lacquer case hitting the floorboards seemed to echo in the room like a gunshot. I cannot say whether I wanted to kill Saki at that particular moment, as I aimed the point of the blade in his direction, though undoubtedly I felt the hunger pains for revenge growing inside of me the more certain I was of his guilt. I gripped the handle with both hands with a sudden and irrational sense of desperation, as though at any moment he might transform before my eyes into the monster mother had seen in him.

As was Saki's way, he appeared to be genuinely startled by my reaction.

"Kazutaka. What are you doing?" That knowing look of his wavered, clouded by disbelief.

I could not trust it for a moment.

"It was you, wasn't it?"

"Stop joking around. That's dangerous."

"Don't change the subject. You know what you did."

"What I did. . . ."

"You killed mother and father, didn't you? Didn't you, Saki?"

My words struck him dumb for all of a moment. In his silence, my hand shook and my jaw trembled, but I steadied both. Then the smile slowly crept back onto his lips, more wicked than I had seen it in many months. "Are you going to kill me, Kazutaka?" he said in a low voice. "You wouldn't kill your own brother."

"Half-brother," I corrected.

"It doesn't matter. You won't do it. You can't. You and I are the same, Kazutaka. You'd have to be willing to kill yourself first. And you don't have that in you, do you?"

Again his smooth logic invaded me: we were the same. The truth of that clicked something into place, some crucial connection my mind had been unwittingly trying to form for the last two years but had been unable to until now. I did not want to believe it. With all my soul I wanted what he said to be a lie. We were not the same. I did not have that same darkness within me. That was what I told myself. But that same feeling that had nagged at me since the day we first met returned: that feeling like I was looking in a mirror when I looked at Saki.

I could not stand it a moment longer.

I rushed at him. And as I did so, he grabbed for the other sword on the stand, bringing it between us still sheathed as I swung my blade to cut him down. I was foolish to attack him like that, acting purely on my visceral emotion, my instinctual abhorrence to all he was and all he said I was. He could have easily sliced me in two when he shoved me off and unsheathed his own sword—had he wanted to.

Instead he batted the sword from my hand. I was not used to the balance of a steel blade and it took little effort on his part. The ring it made as it clattered against the wooden floor pierced my eardrums like a premonition. The edge of his own blade grazed my left cheek, but the momentary sting of it aroused no survival instinct in me. I could focus on nothing else but Saki. Never had his efforts been so calculated in our practice bouts. Never had his gaze as it fixed on me then exhibited such a perversely callous pleasure—like the gaze of an errant angel about to deliver the final blow.

Realizing then what my rashness had cost me, I tripped as I backed away from him and lost my balance, landing hard on my backside. I hardly noticed the pain. As I gazed up at Saki, as he lowered his blade so that the tip of it hovered just inches before my face, I knew he would kill me. I only hoped he would make faster work of me than he did his classroom vivisections.

"It was you!" I shouted. "You killed them!"

He grinned.

"Why do you care about the particulars so much? I thought you'd be grateful, Kazutaka."

Grateful? I gaped. "What?"

"Don't delude yourself, Kazutaka. You know they didn't love you. That selfish bastard we had to call father in front of his sniveling colleagues. . . . That crazy bitch who treated you like some inanimate object. . . . None of them could love you half as much as I do."

I could only stare at him then, unable to comprehend what he was telling me. My hardwiring would not allow it. What a sin it was, that twisted love he spoke of, a sin of such perfect and natural symmetry. . . .

"Don't you understand?" he said. "If I did kill them, it would only have been because I love you. It would only be to set you free from this prison you call a home."

"Saki . . ."

"I thought you'd be pleased, Kazutaka. To be free of them at last . . . no attachments in this world to cause us pain, just the two of us. . . ."

He forced a breathy laugh, but his mood had darkened. His fingers tightened on the grip of the sword, the motion making my heart flutter even as I defiantly met his stare.

"Guess I misjudged you, huh? What a waste. . . . Why couldn't you have just accepted it?"

A shot rang out through the hall with a deafening crack. For a moment, it was as though there was a delay between that sound and Saki's reaction. His body jerked slightly and his eyes flew wide open in surprise.

Then he pitched forward and collapsed on top of me. His body was heavy, forcing the air from my lungs. The grip of the sword fell out of his hand as the point of the blade hit the floor. Instinct would have been to put my arms around him, to catch his fall, but I could not move for shock. Nor would it have done any good. Saki was dead. I did not have to see the bloody holes in his back left by the buckshot, or check for a pulse at his throat to confirm it. I knew it within me, like a wire stretched taut between us had been severed, and my end had whipped back to sting me with a snap. In the instant that he touched me, he was gone.

Over his body I saw our butler aiming father's hunting rifle at the space where Saki had been only a moment ago. His figure, dressed in a black suit, was lit brilliantly by the last of the sun's light breaking through the window, but his face was in shadow so that for a moment I mistook him for my grandfather. The telltale trail of smoke floated up from the end of the muzzle. The rifle did not shake in his hands one bit as he said to me in a voice filled at once with relief and concern, "Young master. . . ."

These details remain sharp in my memory. It is the sharpness that comes when one's life flashes before his eyes, and the brain increases its functioning to stay alive if even a moment more. I remember the feel of the hardwood beneath me, and of Saki's dead weight on top. The thick, rough weave of the black school uniform jackets we both wore, and the scent that lingered about him like lilacs out of season, mingling with the acridity of gunsmoke and the mustiness of the autumn rain. I remember gazing stunned at Sakaki and silently imploring him, needing a reason, an explanation where I could find none. Saki was my Nero, and I could not believe that he could have caused such destruction all by himself, and then so suddenly ceased to be.

When I rolled him over, his face was locked in a peaceful expression, his eyes closed and lips slightly parted, as though—aside from the trickle of blood that ran from a corner of his mouth—he were only sleeping.

Once again, the incongruity, the conundrum of his person seized me and would not let go. For a moment, when he had been prepared to run me through, there had truly been something of a devil behind Saki's muddy blue eyes. Now all I could see was the face of a seventeen-year-old boy who had been my half-brother, no more than a day older than I.

My deepest regret was that I had not been the one to kill him. For what he did to me, he should have suffered.

—