Free Last Winter We Parted by Fuminori Nakamura Page A

doll echoed from his house … Later, the doll maker was discovered to be living with both the red wife doll and the skeletal corpse of his actual wife, months after her death.”
    Little by little, the temperature in the room was growing chilly.
    “But there was one thing that the wife managed to do before she died. Abandoning the effort to tear her husband away from the doll, the wife could only pray for his future destruction, now that he had become the object of her inevitable enmity. On the verge of death, she suddenly found the strength to stand up. She pulled herself up behind her husband, who would no longer have anything to do with her, immersed as he was in the creation of the doll. And she put a curse on her husband: ‘You will never again be able to live with anyone except this doll.’ The wife coughed up blood onthe doll. This cough was fatal, her last. The doll maker stared at the blood-stained doll. At its overwhelming beauty. This was exactly the shade of red that he had been seeking—the red that a person spews out as they are dying. The doll, her skin stained blood red, had taken on a maddening beauty. From that day forward, the doll maker became oblivious to all other women. Even if he attempted to demonstrate some kind of interest, he was simply unable to. As for flesh-and-blood humans, no one existed in this world beside the doll. And that was not all. The doll maker was no longer able to produce any other work, either. Because he could never attain that same shade of red. He would never again have access to the blood coughed up by his beloved wife. The doll maker had been drawn in by the totality of the doll’s beauty, born of a series of coincidences and further enhanced by his wife’s crimson blood. The doll maker finally died of madness. These were his last words, and herein lies the problem: ‘Once my wife died the doll grew even more beautiful.’ ”
    Suzuki suddenly stands up and approaches his own doll creations. He strokes their hair impassively.
    “The doll was kept at a temple for a while, but ultimately it was disposed of. Because
it should never have existed
in the first place. Not only the doll’s creator, but any man who took one look at the doll was rendered impotent. Whenever they tried to make love to a woman, that red doll would appear beforethem as a vision. And the doll’s expression … she seemed to be faintly smiling. But none of them could tell just what kind of smile it was—or what kind of smile it wasn’t. Just like the Mona Lisa’s smile. Except where the Mona Lisa’s smile conveys the beauty of art to those who view it, this doll’s smile gave rise to nothing but madness. Forever bewildered by what was behind her smile, these men were filled with agony and vertigo. In both cases, the painting and the doll, the smile appears to be that of a real person. It’s a kind of artifice; nevertheless, human perception recognizes it as a ‘smile.’ Why does that happen, when it comes to perception? In any case, unable to determine just what kind of smile it was, the men’s confusion deepened until it seemed to drive them crazy … Does this sort of thing happen to other creatures? If you were to show a dog a painting of a dog, I wonder by just which qualities in the painting would the dog recognize another dog?”
    Suzuki looks at me pensively.
    “Well, I … I wanted to make a doll like the one that doll creator had made. Something that shouldn’t be made. Something that shouldn’t exist … You must think I’m mad. It doesn’t matter. My life is already over, to a certain extent. But I told Kiharazaka about all of this. I can’t help thinking that the two murders were the results of that conversation.”
    “But … he also talked to Saito.”
    “Saito? You mean that stalker guy?”
    “Yes. So …”
    “That’s interesting. So I wasn’t the only one who talked to him about things they shouldn’t have. Wouldn’t two conversations be enough