MASAYUKI

My name is Masayuki. I am Japanese. Perhaps that is important. You don’t know me. I don’t live in your world. I used to. It had no place for me. You can understand that, can’t you? Mother and Father couldn’t can’t won’t. They try to write my story for me. Try to imagine how I feel. Their solutions are not places I can visit. Such things I never wanted to do. None of this is my fault. This is important: it is his. He’s the person they want me to be. The more presentable son they dreamed of. They dream for me when I am awake. I cannot when I sleep. Relentless and unyielding; their wishes and my darkness. I fight them because I have to. They have never asked me what my dreams are. I dream of so many things. None can be realised in their grounded world. That is why I left it. No safety in the land they stand on. They pin their fading faith to its permanence. But the earthquake has been coming for decades. Kobe was just a warning. I will live in the cracks. I can survive in the fissures. Below the sightlines, after the big one hits. I am special because I am invisible. You can only be seen if you are someone. Someone must be part of a society. Must share its beliefs and follow its rules. No society equals no body and leaves one. I share their glue-strength blood, but not that. The unspoken, involuntary oath to live for others. Commercial success breeds interpersonal charity. Don’t give money, just your thoughts. Is it so bad to live for yourself?

You can call me Masa. Most people do. It doesn’t really matter anyway.

I watch myself wake. Sometimes I wander; others I wonder. Why can I never see me watching me? My face floating in the weak light of morning. Tea leaves floating in still water. Suspended and untouchable, drugged by life’s serenity. Heat evaporating the space between them and you. Would the shock be too much to stand? No-one ever sees unfiltered images of themselves. I don’t think they want to. Truths must rest on truths. Foundations can only be built on solid ground. No one ever questions this. I doubt those questions would be welcomed. We are fluid creatures at and around hearts. Life flows in our blood. You must remember the blood. You don’t realise how important it is. Promise me you’ll try. Our bodies, limbs, organs move. They pulsate with finite rhythms. Always moving, scratching, eking, itching. When we move, we live. As soon as we stop, we die. But in that stillness is our only certainty. We grasp at the permanent to reassure us. To give ourselves a context, faces in crowds. Have you ever thought about describing yourself? Painting yourself in words on a blank canvas. The audience won’t be art lovers. What if they have never seen you before? How can they appreciate without comparing? How can they compare without appreciating either?

I can try to tell you about my face. My body is more difficult but not impossible. It doesn’t matter anyway. You will someone else anyway. A mental picture from memory. Memories you have never had of me. You can’t see me. No chance your eyes recording me for later. There will be no referral. No scanning of data banks for matches. No facial recognition software to tie me down. It wouldn’t matter even if you could. No-one knows me anyway. I scan like a defective supermarket item. Please re-scan or type numbers by hand. Enter digits with yours.

If only my life were manga. I could be drawn in several ways. Stretched over the paper. Filling frames like a colossus. Stuffed beneath a voice box as an afterthought. I am not the star baseballer. I can’t be the fashionable pack leader. Not secretly an android. No boy gifted with mystical powers. I don’t have scars or hawkish eyes. I lack any kind of strange magnetism. I can’t make girls want to giggle nervously. Boys don’t resent me inwardly while smiling outwardly. I just don’t register anymore. No-one wants a comic full of blank squares.

I thought about giving myself a scar once. Starting just above the hairline of my temple, Curving down past my eye to my ear lobe. On the left side; nothing too ridiculous. Just a few millimetres wide: a single cut. It would have scabbed over nicely. I could have invented some gripping back-story. Explain why it appeared during the school holidays. How the cut had just missed my eye. How I could very easily have been blinded. Maybe I had tried to rescue a beautiful girl. Attacked by a Chinese man. Make that a Brazilian gangster. In the street one night. One dark dangerous night in Tokyo. Maybe Shibuya, where the bad women dance. He had a knife. Was much bigger than me. He smelled terrible. Kim chi beer and Mild Seven smoke. She was an office lady. Too old for a sixteen year-old saviour? Hold that thought—pick another stereotype. Junior college student returning from late classes. Her attacker was scared away by my confidence. Was I shouting at him? Is that heroic? Before he ran off, he lashed out. His knife would have killed most people. Blinded them at the very least. But I have trained all my life. I managed to sway out of the way. He only grazed me. The blade nibbling instead of eating my flesh. ‘But that’s a big scar’, enthralled schoolmates say. ‘What? This is nothing!’ I will reply dismissively. ‘And the girl was ever so grateful. You know what I mean?’ They wouldn’t really know what I meant. I don’t either, but will never say so. I know what men and women do. Doesn’t everyone? But I have never felt it. Not at skin level. Only through my eyes and ears. Two dimensional aspiring to three dimensional. So many pictures. I’m not in any of them.

I select a fresh nail from the packet. Number sixty. Not as important as the others. This one is an indulgence. I grip the nail tightly in blooded fingertips. Time to write with this permanent marker. Lift mop of black hair concealing left temple. Dig the point a centimetre into the undergrowth. Begin my story.

There isn’t much blood. It is disappointing. I wonder if I am gouging deeply enough. I see my face screwed up in pain. The agony or the ecstasy? Is this is how I am supposed to look? It is how other people would look. There is no consolation in this knowledge. It’s a habit I am trying to break. Give me time; I am still young. I imagine someone else’s hand gripping the nail. It wavers and the cut begins to follow. I take over. Cross tip of eyebrow. Skirt the eye socket. I need to be careful here. One slip and I could hurt myself badly. I think it should hurt more than this. They can’t find out it didn’t hurt too much. It won’t be as effective then. They might think I had invented it all. Stories convince with telling, not with facts. There are no facts, just things told.

I look in the mirror after I finish. My eyes are startled for a moment. Seeing their new frame for the first time. Thin columns of blood march down my cheek. The highest ones matt in my eyelashes. Smearing my vision pink. A rose-coloured view of the future. Everything is upside down. I try to blink it away. I must clear them, but the blood clings. My blood, sticking to me; refusing to leave. I pour some water onto a cloth. Wanting to wipe away the stain. It stings when I wipe across the cut. I dab down it instead. Lift the cloth from the skin. Attack the escaping columns, erasing from the canvas. I leave the gouge gaping on the surface. I can see myself inside it. There is blood in there, will always be. Blood inside, red and strong. Blood alive, but for how long?

Search the corner of your mind’s eye. Look at me again. Have you forgotten? You should be imagining my face. Can you see anything but that scar? Fill in the other details from generic stocks. Straight black hair. Tear-shaped brown eyes. Squashed flat nose. Round face. Bad teeth if you know us well enough. I could be anyone before. Someone who is anyone becomes no-one. I am someone with the scar. Imagine life in an alternate world. We meet and I attack you. I don’t know why. You could, if you lived, help the police. Give them an excellent description of my scar. But not the face behind it. But the scar is part of me now. You will remember my face. But none of that will ever happen. We will never meet.

My name is Masayuki. You can call me what you like. I will never hear you speak.

I cut the hole with steak knives. It took five of them. The lightweight wooden door resisted my efforts stubbornly. It took two hours and eleven minutes. Mother was having her hair fixed. Father was at work. Predictability offers certainty. Certainty promises safety but delivers unease. I sawed at the bottom of the door. No rush of adrenalin to distract me. No fear of discovery until much later. I would not be disturbed. Never again. Shavings, sawdust and splinters floating and drifting. Spearing down onto the tatami mats. Dust stuck to sweat on my bare feet. The first four knives attacked with great vigour. They rasped through the wood. Wicked metal teeth hungry for more. It seemed an unequal battle. So many tiny warriors assailing a towering foe. But my needs are small. A hole as wide as my favourite manga. Even so, the first four knives failed me. Teeth worn down to nothing by cloying wood fibres. I began to despair. Panic rising with passing minutes. The last blade overcame the final resistance. My trembling fingers were bent into claws. Sinews strained as bone talons command weak flesh. I hooked them under. I wrenched the cut section away. My fingers throbbed, their knuckles bloodied and pale. There was no time for indecision. I had decided this months before. Doubts, like choice, were far behind me. All I wanted was some control. There was no other way, not for me.

Father’s hammer and a packet of shiny nails. From the hundred yen shop thirteen stories below. The packet said they were made in China. That wasn’t their fault. I used fifty-nine, imprisoning them in the wood. Condemning them to make me free. The gravestones of battered metal crowned my liberty. They closed my bedroom door forever. I ran a fingertip over the studded line. The certainty of permanence comforting my torn flesh. It reassures me still. This is not the same permanence they worship. I made mine for myself.

Back then I knew Father. Before we came to live in different places. He used to take me to the beach. I always wanted to swim. There was never anyone else in the water. That seemed reason enough. Father never let me, for the same reason. He didn’t want to be that one parent. The one on the beach without a child. Others might notice him. That was not acceptable. I didn’t care about being noticed. Maybe I wanted to be too much. Father never understood that.

His dreams never progressed past cautious optimism. The very model of the responsible salaryman, sacrificing emotions for overtime, and freedom for security. Even at the beach he would be impeccably dressed in the prescribed weekend outfit: pressed chinos, leather sandals, and a sleeveless vest over a short-sleeved shirt. His metal-framed glasses would catch the salt in the air and he would often take them off to wipe them clean with the hem of the vest, his eyes squinting while he rubbed an appropriate number of circles on the lenses. He kept his hair short and manageable like his son, parting it whichever way his boss did. The only thing interesting about his face was his nose.
“You are lucky you don’t have your Father’s nose, Masayuki.”
“Why can’t I have a nose like yours, Father?”
“Yours is much better, Masa, nice and flat. You should be glad of that.”
A slight twitch in this end of his more prominent nose, always the signifier of a finished discussion. His words enough to finish them every time. His nose had a higher bridge than most, and didn’t flare quite as much at the nostrils. When I was small, I wondered why he wasn’t proud of this regal nose in the middle of his face. Now that I am older, I know that it offers the faintest suggestion that his blood may not be as pure as he wishes. He told me once that his ancestors came from the Nagasaki area, far away at the bottom of Shikoku, the port town where the first white foreigners landed in Japan centuries ago.

Drowning concrete bollards lined the beach. I don’t know why. They were salt-crusted and rose to my waist. Father said they were there from the war. Made it harder for the Americans to land. They didn’t work, obviously. There aren’t enough concrete bollards in the world. Not to keep them out. I never really believed him. How could a concrete post stop an American? Father always challenged me to move one. A bollard, that is, not an American. If I could, he would buy me ice-cream. I always tried, but could never move them. Not even an inch. An inch is important to a small boy. Concrete has no feelings; no tears or joy. They didn’t stop the Americans. They made a nine year-old Japanese boy cry. Lucky I never needed to invade that beach. The tears brought their own reward. He always bought me ice-cream anyway. The pattern was set. It became routine, then a fact of life. I walk back to him after my struggles. Salt stinging my eyes, bleaching my hair. I can still taste it in my mouth. I still imagine its smell. When the wind is right and the factories silent. Then the sea returns to me. Memories can nourish but not sustain.

We always had melon soft-cream in a waffle cone. I haven’t wrestled a bollard in eleven years. Haven’t eaten melon soft-cream with Father for nine. Now I have my own defence line. It is his turn to wrestle. I built it myself with blood. And fifty-nine steel nails from China.

That was four years, eight months, twelve days and six hours ago.