Zoo Read online

  Contents

  ZOO

  In a Falling Airplane

  The White House in the Cold Forest

  Find the Blood!

  In a Park at Twilight, a Long Time Ago

  Wardrobe

  Song Of the Sunny Spot

  Kazari and Yoko

  SO-far

  Words of God

  Seven Rooms

  Glossary

  “Between Horror and Laughter: The Stories of Otsuichi” By Amelia Beamer

  About the Author

  About the Cover Artist

  ZOO

  by Otsuichi

  Published by Shueisha, Inc.

  Shueisha, Inc.

  2-5-10 Hitotsubashi

  Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo

  101-8050, Japan

  http://www.shueisha.co.jp/english/

  All Rights Reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, events, or places is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright 2006 by Otsuichi

  Translated by Terry Gallagher

  English Translation Copyright 2013 by VIZ Media, LLC

  Afterword by Amelia Beamer

  Cover Image by Shin’ichiro Yano

  Cover Design by Claudia Noble

  Originally published in Japanese in 2006 by Shueisha, Inc.

  This English edition was originally published in slightly different form in printed book format by Haikasoru/VIZ Media, LLC in 2009. The new expanded e-book edition is published by Shueisha, Inc. in August, 2013.

  E-Book ISBN: 978-4-08-960004-7

  Otsuichi (1978- )

  Fiction (General)/ Fiction (Horror)/ Fiction (Japanese)

  Visit the author’s website: http://otsuichi.com

  ZOO

  by Otsuichi

  ZOO

  1

  The difference between photographs and movies is similar to the difference between haiku and prose.

  Not only haiku, but short verse and longer poems as well. Ordinarily these things are much shorter than works of prose. That is the defining characteristic of poetry. In these short chains of words an instant’s movement of the heart is clipped and pasted. The writer sees and hears the world, and describes the emotions he feels in his heart. And he does it in a burst of short phrases.

  In prose these things are strung together. The heart’s descriptions are continuous, and as the number of lines grows, the form changes. Through the many events that take place in a piece of prose, the hearts of various characters are not always the same. But abstracting the essentials from these sentences adds up to a complete description. To make it all hang together, we need to portray “change.” Between the first page and the last page, the hearts of the characters have to change into something different.

  This process of change emerges as a wave, and that is the form of a story. This is simple mathematics. If you take prose and break it down into fragments, it turns into haiku or poetry. If you take a story and break it down into fragments, it turns into description.

  Photographs are also descriptive. With a camera a landscape can be captured forever and framed. A photograph can describe a child’s crying face. This is close to what happens in haiku or poetry. There is a difference between words and pictures of course, but both select important moments in time and stop them forever.

  So let’s say we take a few dozen, or a few hundred, photographs. Not just the same image multiplied over and over again—and not completely different subjects either. Each photograph represents an instant immediately after the previous photograph; one picture after the other, all in a row. And if we flip from one to the next rapidly, the phenomenon known as “persistence of vision” gives birth to time itself.

  Let’s take that crying child for example: the crying jag may turn into a fit of laughter. Unlike static individual photographs, these form a continuum. The entire intervening process from crying to smiling is there. In this way we are able to witness the changes in the heart. It becomes obvious that “time” is the product of interconnected “instants,” and from this we are able to describe “change.” In other words, we are able to spin a yarn. And that’s what a movie is. That’s what I think.

  *

  Again this morning there was a photograph in the mailbox. How many times now? This has been going on for at least a hundred days or more. I still haven’t gotten used to it and I can’t stop thinking about it. Every day I go out in the early morning cold and find a photo in my rusty old mailbox. This gives me simultaneous feelings of dizziness, light-headedness, abhorrence, and despair. I stand absolutely still, gripping the photograph tightly in my hand. Every morning it’s the same thing.

  The photographs aren’t in an envelope or anything, and they haven’t come in the mail. They’re just there in the mailbox. The photographs are of a dead person. My ex-girlfriend. She appears to be lying in a hole someplace. The photographs show her dead body from the chest up. Her face is decomposing and there is no glimmer of her former self.

  In each day’s ghastly photograph, the process of decomposition seems to have progressed just a little bit from the one found in my mailbox the day before. It’s gotten to the point where I can track the movement of bugs crawling across her face. As she rots, the bugs migrate to other patches of skin.

  Clutching the photograph, I return to my room. I scan it into the computer. All the images I have received of her are now in the computer. I have numbered them in sequential order, and she exists as a large volume of graphic data.

  In the very first photograph she looks like a human being. In the second photograph—which I received the very next day—the only conspicuous change was a faint darkness in her face. With each passing day the girl in the photographs grew further and further from a recognizable living creature.

  I haven’t said anything about these photos to anyone. I am the only person who knows my girlfriend was killed. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, she remains an unsolved missing persons case. I confess, I loved her dearly. I can still remember when we went to see the movie Zoo together. It was an arty kind of picture and we both had trouble understanding what was going on.

  On the screen were lots of rapidly changing images of rotting vegetables and animals. Apples and shrimp turning black and deforming. Attacked by bacteria, they must have smelled pretty bad. Backed by an inexplicably cheerful Michael Nyman soundtrack, the dead bodies of the animals crumpled in seconds. The decomposition of flesh unfurled like a giant wave striking and receding from the shoreline. The whole point of the film, apparently, was to show the process of decay.

  When we left the movie theater she and I decided to visit the local zoo. I was driving and she was sitting beside me reading the road signs. “Look,” she said, pointing excitedly out the car window. “Isn’t that a coincidence?!”

  “ZOO. Left turn. 200 meters ahead.”

  That’s what the sign said. Japanese on top, English on the bottom. I distinctly remember the English letters spelled Z-O-O.

  I turned the steering wheel to the left and drove off the main road and into the parking lot. Hardly anybody was there. It was the middle of winter and no one goes to the zoo at that time of the year. It wasn’t snowing, but there were thick clouds in the sky, and it was kind of dark. Everything smelled of animals and wet straw—not the most inviting of smells I must admit. My girlfriend and I walked side by side holding hands. I could tell she was shivering the entire time we were there.

  “There’s nobody here,” she said. “I heard something about this. Zoos and amusement parks all over the country are going broke because nobody cares about them anymore.”

  As we walked through the circuitous pa
thways of the zoo, our breath turned to white puffs that dispersed into the air. We passed in front of iron-barred cages. The animals huddled in their cages without moving, their dull eyes gazing off into the distance. One monkey, however, a real ugly one, restlessly paced back and forth in its cage. We stood and looked at it for a while. The monkey was kind of scruffy and was missing big chunks of fur. It was alone in the cage with nothing better to do than walk around and around the narrow concrete space.

  Having a girlfriend was the best thing to happen to me in a long time. It was the autumn when she disappeared; it seems like such a long time ago.

  I told a lot of people about my suspicions that she might have become involved in some sort of weird incident. But the police never really took me seriously, and they treated her disappearance as a simple runaway case. Her family thought the same thing. It was almost like people expected her to run away eventually. Nobody seemed surprised that it finally happened.

  After inputting the image files into my computer, I would carelessly throw the original photographs of her rotting corpse in a drawer. By now the drawer was stuffed with more than a hundred of these pictures.

  I move the computer’s cursor and click on the proper software to play a well-known movie. This software can also be used to edit video. I select the “open image sequence” function and select the very first stored image of her. I select “set image sequence,” and then I select “twelve frames per second.”

  The photos are now ready to be viewed as a video, with each one in sequential order. The photographs of her flit past at a speed of twelve frames per second. This process was originally designed for the purpose of producing animation.

  In playback mode I watch her decay. The bugs swarm all over her face, eating her flesh and then moving on. It is like an ocean wave made up of insects.

  Each morning when I go to the mailbox to discover another photograph there, the length of the process increases by another one-twelfth of a second. “I will find this criminal,” I grumbled to myself.

  The person taking these photographs was the person responsible for killing her. I was sure of it.

  “I’ll make him pay for this,” I vowed when the police wrapped up their investigation.

  But I had a problem. This problem was absolute, and it had the potential to destroy my very being. And so I was avoiding even acknowledging the problem.

  “Shit, where could this criminal be?!”

  My words were just lines in a script. Mere theatrics. In my heart I knew something completely different. But if I did not stay in character in this drama, the harshness of reality would come down and crush me.

  In other words, I was pretending not to know myself. That’s what allowed me to convince myself that I would find her killer. In reality, there was no way I could find her killer.

  I had killed her myself.

  2

  Since losing her, I continued to live my life as normally as possible. But it was difficult. Looking at my own face in the mirror I could see that my cheeks were sunken, my eyes hollow.

  I knew that I had killed her. And I was aware of the contradiction between this knowledge and my passion to find her killer. But I swear to God I did not have a split personality.

  I loved her from the very depths of my heart. I did not want to think that I murdered her with my own two hands. I made a decision not to dwell on such disturbing thoughts.

  Somewhere in the world there was a murderer who was not me, and if I could make it look like that person had killed my girlfriend, I would feel so much better. I would be liberated from this guilty conscience of mine.

  “Who has been putting these photographs in the mailbox?!”

  “Why are you showing these photographs to me?!”

  “Just tell me . . . who it was who murdered her?!”

  The whole thing was a one-man skit. I pretended not to know anything, to detest the murderer with all my heart, and I played the part of myself in the grip of a murderous rage.

  My failure show the photographs to the police was an act of self-preservation. In my mind I convinced myself that I was working with the police to find my girlfriend’s killer. That was my reasoning for keeping the photographs to myself. The police, of course, didn’t know any of this. They still thought of her as a missing person. I was intoxicated by the image of myself as someone who could take revenge on his lover’s assailant without the aid of the police.

  As I continued to play out this little script, I found myself at times thinking that in fact I was not the person who had murdered my girlfriend. Someone else had done it. I was innocent, wasn’t I?

  Unfortunately for me, the photographs that kept arriving in my mailbox every morning prevented me from escaping completely into this world of delusion. Of course I was the one who had killed her. The photographs kept telling me so.

  It was one month after she disappeared, in the first few days of November, that the police ended their investigation. After that I quit my job to devote myself full-time to my own search for her killer. Of course, I was doing nothing more than being true to my role as the lover of a murdered woman. I had cast myself as the tragic hero, loathing the criminal and rising up to avenge his lover’s death.

  I started by questioning her friends and acquaintances. I met with anyone who ever knew her—her colleagues at work, her family, the clerks at the convenience store she frequented.

  “Yeah, she still hasn’t been found. The police think she ran away from home, but I don’t believe it. That would be ridiculous, her running away . . . So I’m going around like this, asking questions of people who knew her. Will you please help me? Thank you. When did you last see her? Was there anything odd about her behavior? For example, was there anyone who had anything against her? Were any suspicious people seen walking around in her neighborhood? Did she ever say anything like that to you? . . . She never said anything like that to me . . . What about that ring she always wore? That’s right, it was an engagement ring I gave to her . . . Hey, don’t look at me like that. I don’t need your pity . . .”

  Not one person suspected I was the one who killed her. They just thought I was some confused, pitiful guy whose girlfriend had suddenly packed up and left. My acting skills were pretty good, I guess. Some people even shed tears, not for her but for me. The world is kind of crazy. Why didn’t anyone realize I’m the one who killed her? Because I am unable to admit this to myself, I have been counting on other people to figure it out for me.

  That is really what I want. I am waiting. I want someone to accuse me, to say, “You! You are the criminal!” Even the police—isn’t this supposed to be their job?—have failed to uncover my crime.

  But now . . . I’ve been thinking. I want to be free of this guilt. I want to confess everything, to acknowledge my crime. If I don’t, I will have to just keep on playing this part forever. I am unable to work up the nerve to turn myself in. The whole thing is too terrifying. Unable to wrench my eyes from this problem, I opt to go on with my deception.

  After one week of going through the motions of conducting my own investigation, I ran out of people to interview. At that point I was like a rat in a dead-end maze.

  “I have no leads on this criminal! Doesn’t anyone have any information?” I found myself grumbling to myself alone in my room sitting in front of the computer.

  Once again I played the video of her decomposing corpse. By the end she had completely rotted away, turning into something that was no longer even germ fodder, no longer human, something indescribable.

  In all honesty it made me want to puke. I had no wish to watch someone rot away to nothing, much less someone I had once loved. But I had to watch it. Only by watching could I convince myself that I was the one who had killed her. I begged myself to go to the police and make a clean slate of it. But my pleas fell on my own deaf ears.

  “You can’t just sit there! Go get some new information! On your feet! Investigate!”

  I managed to get up and tear my eyes away fr
om the computer screen and the vision of her rotting corpse. I grabbed a picture of her and went out. I walked around town pretending to search for the criminal.

  The photograph I took with me was not one of her decomposing body. It was a picture from when she was alive and beautiful. Behind her you could see zebras in their fenced-in area at the zoo. On impulse she had bought one of those disposable cameras. We walked around taking pictures of the smelly, hollow-eyed animals. For the last few snapshots I turned the camera on her. Now, preserved for posterity, I had this picture of her. She was scowling slightly.

  I walked around showing this photo to random people on the street, asking if they knew anything about her. These people must have thought I was a nut, or at least some kind of nuisance. I realized this but I couldn’t help myself. I had to do it. I wasn’t able to sit around doing nothing.

  I had no work and no interest in living, and my meager savings were running out. Before long I would be kicked out of my apartment. No problem, I could sleep in my car. If I ran out of things to eat, I could steal some money from somebody. I didn’t mind getting my hands dirty. As long as I could find the person who had killed her, or at least act like that’s what I was doing.

  All morning long I walked around town, asking people questions.

  “Do you know this woman? Have you seen her? Please . . . please.”

  One time a local shop owner reported me to the police. After that experience I learned not to hang around any one neighborhood too long. More than once I attracted the attention of local gangs. Things even got violent. I tried to resist, but a guy pulled a knife on me in a back alley. I wanted him to stab me, one stroke to the heart. Then it would end. Everything would end. I would be able to die, never having admitted that I had killed her. I would end my life not as a murderer but as a victim. That would have been something to preserve my dignity. It was the only escape route that would totally exonerate me from my crime. I could finally stop carrying her photograph, hanging around town asking for nonexistent information, and searching for some nonexistent criminal.