Tangerines in winter—
like holding the sun
in my hand.
---Yureiko Tsuruta Crane
I was not in any mood to go furniture shopping as I left the Gernsbach Center, but as I crossed the green to the library, my ire fuming, the part of me that was closest to 'me', the part which was neither Dr. Crane nor the Scarecrow, asked, but what about Lupoff and Mitsuoko Harris? They seemed to like you well enough. That gave me pause. Suzume was so otherworldly that she occupied a category all her own, but Saxton Lupoff and Ms. Harris were firmly of this world, and both of them seemed to like me—at least a little. One could argue that their friendliness was all part of doing business, but both of them had gone to some trouble on my account beyond what the motivation of profit could explain. What made them so different from everyone else? I mounted the library steps and went in.
Intelligence, for one thing. I got the sense that they and I were intellectual equals. Their knowledge of, and passion for, what they did was there in every statement. They were good at listening. I respected them—ah, that might be part of it. If I were being honest, I did not respect Eagleton and perhaps I did not do a good enough job of hiding it. I would have to think about this...
Finding Ran on the DVD rack, I checked it out and headed off campus to buy some furniture. My first idea had been to find used but still good pieces at a secondhand store, but I had not taken this into consideration: that in the area around the campus, people used their furniture until there was no useful life in it any more. Unsuccessfully, I went to two places and found nothing better than what I already owned, which was curb salvage.
That was how I wound up at Dock Five International, a moderately priced chain which offered rather stylish imports, and more importantly, they had them in stock. Going through, I spent about forty-five minutes choosing and another forty-five minutes waiting for stock people to get my items. As the store's truck was already out making deliveries, I went three blocks and rented a truck of my own for the day, and before long I was pulling up in front of the house.
Suzume met me at the door, and she was radiant. I had never seen her look so happy and excited before, and Suzume, when radiant, was at her most beautiful. "Good afternoon, Jun-san. I am very glad you are—you have returned home." I will not attempt to reproduce her accent in dialog because it could sound as though I were making fun of her, which is far from my intent. I will only say her pronunciation was a little odd, her 'L's sounding like 'r's and her 'v's sounding like something between a 'b' and an 'f'.
However, it was perfectly intelligible English and I was extremely surprised. She had even corrected herself in a minor mistake. "You did study hard today!" I exclaimed. Mind you, I thought she had only memorized certain phrases from the translator and was reciting them, knowing but not truly understanding what she said.
"Not as hard as my progress might lead you to believe," she replied. "because no one could learn as much as I have in one day. Miyabe Naomi-san was very—fluent? Yes, fluent in English and she made me a gift of her knowledge. Not just of English, but of other things. I know that that—," she pointed to the instrument on the table by the stairs, "is a telephone, and that it allows people to talk to each other from anywhere in the world, and that vehicle you drove here is a lorry, only since this is America, it's called a truck, and I can read English, too. I sat and read a lot of Romeo and Juliet, and some other things as well, like parts of the newspaper. Best of all, I can now speak to you properly and help you in achieving Naomi-san's revenge against Kemp and—."
"You really are speaking English!" I jerked back in astonishment.
"Yes, yes, I am. Naomi-san was studying English Literature, in English, and in England, so she was greatly proficient. Is it not wonderful? There are still many things of which I have no knowledge, of course, but now at least I have the basis of understanding, and--."
"One moment! This is amazing and wonderful, and I want to hear everything you have to say, but..." I sought about for a way to end the sentence, as the situation was a trifle overwhelming, "first things first. Try to sort your thoughts into order. How did Naomi make you a gift of her knowledge?"
She calmed down a little, "Yes, of course you are right. I am sorry. Kemp returned here. First he tried to get in, knocking on the door and calling 'Hello', but I did not let him. He did not know that I was there. I followed him invisibly to the garden, where he—You must come to the kitchen so I can explain better."
"All right," I followed her to the counter, where she had several items laid out on a sheet of paper. There was a broken and partly burned stick of incense, a tangerine, a small cake, smashed and covered in dirt, with a red pasty filling, and a small container made of either white glass or white stone, carved like a hollow section of bamboo. "What's all this?"
"This is what remains of a spirit offering Kemp made to me. He took the rest away with him, but he was so frightened that it made him clumsy."
"What is a spirit offering?" I asked.
"It is like...putting flowers on someone's grave as a remembrance. That is what you do here in America, is it not?"
"Some people do," I agreed. "You say he made it to you? Murasaki O-Suzume-sama, that is, not Shoko Kuwano?"
"Yes. He made it to my true name. Oh, Jun-san, the things he said—he worships me as a goddess, but his devotion made me feel—like the last person to take a bath. Here there is endless clean hot water, so you don't know what I mean. Everyone uses the same tub of water in a Japanese household, so the water starts out hot and clean and ends up cold and dirty even though they scrub and rinse before they get in. The last person sometimes feels dirtier afterward than when they started. That was how I felt, cold and scummy. But I am not staying with the thread of the tale, am I? As little as I liked what he said of me—I would not have liked it even if he were young and handsome like you and not a blotched pile of dog's vomit—his words were true and sincerely felt. I nearly felt pity for him, and that was when Naomi-san's spirit communed with mine. I saw what she saw, I knew what she knew. He pursued her without mercy through the last months of her life."
Suzume went on to describe those months, her face growing somber. The account was close to that which Ms. Harris had speculated, with one deviation: "He undressed her and dressed her again, " Suzume said, tears in her voice, "as if she were an Empress doll on the Girls' Festival Day. When he had done that, he took pictures of her. And I think—I think that she was not—was not completely clothed, or else that her garments were disarranged to reveal her. She woke up for a moment, and then he forced her to drink a milkshake with more drugs in it. Her next memory is of looking down on him and seeing her own dead body.
"He is loathsome and vile. If this were the Japan that I lived in, I would know what should be done, but I am sure you will tell me it is not legal or proper here."
"What would one do in a case like this?" I was curious.
"We should kill him and cut his head off, wash it and pack it in salt or ice, then travel to Naomi-san's grave and place it there. It would not be difficult; I have my naginata here and my daggers. I am quite practiced in their use. I trained first in my father's house, and then among the ladies of the Inner Household."
"Ah. No, you're right, that would be neither legal nor proper. Nor possible. Customs would object to our transporting a severed human head, no matter how it was packed." My mind was racing, and I picked up the small stone container. The scent of something alcoholic clung to it. Before I could ask about it, Suzume anticipated me.
"That is another crime, this time against my family. I know that piece; it was the water container—."
"—from your ancestor Shikibu Murasaki's writing set."
"Yes!" She was astonished that I should know it.
"Your family donated it to the Museum of The Tale of Genji," I told her, not knowing if that was the exact truth. It was close enough. "Do you know what a museum is?"
"Yes, now I do. It is an institution where objects of artistic, historical, or scientific importance and value are kept, studied, and put on display for the benefit of all." she said, proudly.
"He has stolen small items from museums all over the world. Those pieces must be recovered." I turned the water container over in my fingers. "He brought this with him...despite the fact that he meant to acquire your dowry chest. As what? A trophy? No..."
"He said he had sought me out but found only traces of me in materiel things." Suzume offered.
"So these are mementos of a love affair that never was. Or else—," I thought of the blank books I had bought for her, the pleasure I anticipated in seeing her pleasure at receiving them, of a few things I had purchased that day not because they were necessary, but because she might like them. A large mirror with a carved and painted frame, for example. " they're presents, love-gifts. He may have brought other stolen items with him. And I'm sure he brought those photographs."
"The ones he took of Naomi-san? How do you know?" Suzume sounded appalled.
"I'm not only a teacher, I am a doctor, and a doctor of psychology at that. I know how people think." And psychopathology had always been more interesting to me than studying the minds of purely ordinary people and their problems.
"Psychology," Suzume repeated. "The study of the mind."
"The photos excite him. He may revere you, but he degraded her. A woman who is accessible to him, willing or not, is inferior to the untouchable ideal, and therefore he can do as he pleases with her. She can be the object of his baser fantasies, from which you are excluded. Those photographs are evidence. He may be tried for her murder after all. You said he ran off because he was afraid. Why was he afraid?" Fear is fascinating, in all its manifestations. How many of them might I visit upon Kemp. The plan I began the night before was growing ever clearer and more detailed in my mind.
"I spoke to him, to upbraid him for what he had done. He was not expecting it, although he was importuning me to haunt him in whatever form I chose."
"So he believes in ghosts. He believes in your ghost, especially. Suzume, it is important that the stolen pieces be recovered and returned to the museums he took them from, and important that the photos and whatever other evidence he has of Naomi Miyabe's murder be found, whether before or after he dies. Preferably before, as then I can earn your papers from Interpol, and so he can suffer the knowledge that he has lost all--his reputation, his job, and all that goes with it--and that he has forever made himself hateful to the one thing he loved in this world--you. Wouldn't that be a better revenge?"
"I—I had not given a thought to it."
"And when he dies--and he will die--it should look like suicide. Or be suicide, which is tidier. I think I can see a way to bring it about—with your cooperation. In fact, you are vital to it."
" I will do whatever I can to help Naomi-san find peace. What are we going to do?" Suzume asked.
"To begin with, there's a truckload of furniture out there, all of which needs to be brought in and some of which has to be assembled. That's a start. The house should be set up properly before anything else happens..."
A/N: Well, my house did not burn down, and I got a new surge protector. I also added an explanation of milk-names at the end of the last chapter. Plus, if you have any idea about going to see that new movie Paranormal Activity, I can tell you this: DON'T BOTHER! It's an hour and a half long and consists of over an hour of intense boredom punctuated by fifteen minutes worth of scares which are not very scary or original. I'm very discerning when it comes to scary movies.
