My program of hair fortification began the following morning.
I have started eating as much liver and seaweed as I can. Beans and eggs are supposed to be good, too. As I massage horse oil over the damaged patches on my arms, I repeatedly apologize to the follicles. Naturally, I apply the oil to other parts of my body, too.
Now that I’ve developed an understanding with the black mass inside me, I can retract it at will, so it doesn’t interfere with my work. Just like my colleagues who spend their free time taking courses or pursuing various leisure activities, I pour my energy into fostering the power of my hair.
Every day before bed, I transform in order to assess how my hair is coming along. Then I brush it thoroughly, using a luxury boar-bristle brush. I don’t know how much of it is the work of the horse oil, but the weak patches on my arms are now almost indistinguishable from the rest of me, so I’ve started pondering what my next move should be. I haven’t reached any conclusions.
I’m going to keep mulling it over until I land on a way to put my hair to good use—until I can devise my own unique trick. In the meantime, I intend to keep taking good care of it. That way, when the opportunity arises for me to unleash my power in a dramatic fashion like Kiyohime, I’ll be able to rise to the occasion. Kiyohime was free of hair and I am full of it, but I think our ambitions are the same. I want a skill, a special power into which I can throw my whole self. As to the question of what kind of creature I am, I really couldn’t care less. It doesn’t bother me if I stay a nameless monster.
My aunt hasn’t shown up to see me yet, so I guess she hasn’t managed to perfect her special trick. I’m sure that whatever she comes up with will be unspeakably brilliant. I really hope she comes back soon. Until then, I’ll keep working on myself, always holding at the forefront of my mind the image of my aunt and myself, dancing together, kimonos twinkling.
The Peony Lanterns
“Good evening to you, sir!”
He’d ignored the doorbell three times already when he heard the woman’s voice carrying through the thick steel door. Sitting on his sofa, Shinzaburō froze in alarm, hardly breathing. His body felt terribly heavy, and the thought of getting up was unbearable. Usually in this situation, Shinzaburō would have relied on his wife to answer the door, but with it being Obon, she was away visiting her parents. Besides, it was ten o’clock at night. Shinzaburō had no idea who his visitor was, but he believed that ringing people’s doorbells at this hour was unreasonable behavior—and Shinzaburō disliked people who behaved unreasonably. From a young age, he had been instilled with a firm grasp on what was and wasn’t reasonable. In his adult life, throughout his career as a salesperson, his professional conduct had always been eminently reasonable. Even when he’d been laid off as part of the company’s post-recession restructure, he had retained his sense of reason and walked away without a fuss.
That had been more than six months ago. Shinzaburō’s wife had begun dropping gentle hints that he should find himself another job. He knew she was right—but somehow he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Both his mind and body felt leaden. Whenever he browsed job listings online he was hit by the unshakable sense that he was being made a fool of, and he couldn’t stand the idea of visiting the employment bureau either. Had he really become the sort of man who had to rely on an employment bureau? The very idea seemed too wretched to bear. And there he’d been believing that he was talented and had something to offer the world. He’d gone about his life not being a nuisance to anyone, playing by the rules, acting reasonably at all times. How had it come to this?
While his wife was at work, Shinzaburō would do a bit of housework, but a token offering was as far as it went. The truth of the matter was this: spending all his time in his marl-gray tracksuit, shabby from constant wear, Shinzaburō had morphed into a big gray sloth. In the afternoon, he would lounge about on the sofa, watching reruns of period dramas and mulling over questions of no particular significance, like whether, back in the Edo period, his lack of fixed employment would have made him a rōnin. How much better that sounded than simply unemployed.
“Good evening to you, sir!”
The same voice again. From the light filtering through the living room curtain, it must have been obvious to whoever was outside that there was someone at home.
“Oh, damn it all!”
Shinzaburō got up from the sofa, slowly crept toward the door to avoid his presence being discovered—though he knew from long years of experience that such a thing was impossible—and peered through the peephole.
Outside the gate stood two women. They were dressed in practically identical outfits: black suits, white shirts, sheer tights, and black pumps. One was somewhere between forty and fifty, and the other looked to be in her early thirties. The elder was staring with terrifying intensity at the peephole, while the younger was shyly inspecting her feet. They made for an altogether peculiar pair. Immediately, alarm bells went off in Shinzaburō’s head. No one in his right mind would involve himself in a situation he knew would be troublesome from the outset. In this particular period of his life, Shinzaburō did not have the mental energy to spare on that kind of nonsense.
The women seemed to sense Shinzaburō’s presence in his cramped entranceway, and the elder
