Free The Thief by Fuminori Nakamura

pickpocket laugh at a hooker? Look, I—”
    She was staring at me in amazement. I realized I was acting a bit strangely, so I lit a cigarette and tried to calm down.
    “I really am a pickpocket, so I know what I’m talkingabout. If the kid carries on shoplifting like that, he’ll get arrested. If that happens the cops will be knocking at your door. Then you’ll be in trouble too. So don’t make him do it any more.”
    “But….”
    “If you need money, I’ll give you what I’ve got here. About two hundred thousand yen. If I’m lucky, I can get that in one day. So don’t make him.”
    “Really?”
    Her tired eyes shone and she turned slowly to stare at the money as if I wasn’t even there. At that moment she seemed to be lit by an overhead spotlight. Looking at her narrow shoulders, the curve of her body, the gentle gleam of her eyes, I felt a sense of panic.
    “Take your clothes off. I’ve changed my mind. As payment.”
    She smiled faintly in satisfaction. Then she looked at my face.
    “Okay, I won’t make him steal anymore. And I’ll make sure he eats properly.”
    Without hesitation she moved closer, taking off her sweater and undoing the hook of her skirt. Then she reached into her bag and took out some pills.
    “These are great.”
    I held up my hand in refusal. She looked like she was about to say something so I lied again.
    “Pickpockets can’t do drugs.”
    AS I PUSHED her down on the bed I was thinking of Saeko. I’d spent a lot of time with her until four years ago. Even though she had a husband and a child, she frequently came to my place. She often told me she should never have gotten married. When we had sex Saeko used to cry.
    Sobbing, panting, shaking, grabbing my hair, repeatedly sticking her tongue in my mouth. Thin but beautiful, her body would catch the light, seeming to pulsate all over. Her mouth opened in a swallowing motion as she cried, and then unexpectedly she would laugh fit to burst, as if she was expelling some unspecified emotion.
    “Sometimes I want to destroy everything around me that has any value. I wonder why. I know it doesn’t do me any good. Sometimes I don’t understand what I’m trying to do. Is there anything you wish for?”
    Saeko never looked at me when she spoke.
    “You’re a pickpocket, right? That’s cool. But you don’t do it for the money, do you?”
    “Maybe the end,” I said abruptly.
    “The end?”
    “What will happen to me in the end. What happens to people who live the way I do? That’s what I’d like to know.”
    That time Saeko didn’t laugh. For some reason she climbed on top of me without a word and starting making love to me again.
    “I HAVE THIS dream. Even when I’m daydreaming, it’s always the same.”
    Saeko told me this one month before she left me. We were lying on a bed under the red lamp of a hotel room, too lazy to get dressed, looking up at the walls and ceiling.
    “It’s somewhere way, way underground. I’m surrounded by old rotting walls and it’s unbelievably damp. I’m falling, deeper and deeper, and at the very bottom there’s a bed. A bed with no one in it. Since someone’s put a bed there I know there’s nothing beneath, that it really is the bottom. The bed has a hollow, and my body fits that hollowperfectly. As I lie there the hollow slowly starts to squeeze me, like you guys wrap me in your arms. As the hollow in the bed squeezes me, like it’s comforting me, how can I put it, I get incredibly turned on. All sorts of conventional values are trampled and my body grows hot, like a flame, and I come again and again. I’m crying, laughing, smashing things, sticking out my tongue, and even though my body won’t stop spasming it’s like I’m still not forgiven. I pass out, then wake up again straight away. My outline becomes vague. I’m like gray smoke. But even in that state I’m still conscious. I can still feel every single one of those tiny gray particles and even beyond them so intensely that