It was the late showing, and on a weekday too, so the cinema wasn’t all that crowded. We’d seen a badly-made detective movie, and today, once again, the woman died. She was the main guy’s wife. Heard that one before? Yep, we have, as it happens. Though we all sat there facing the screen, all of us soon found ourselves pretty bored, and our minds moved on to various other things.
Of all of us, Kimiko was watching the most avidly, and not because she especially liked it, but because she writes a film blog. In other words, she was watching it with a mission: she had to find something – anything – to write about.
Yumi and Akira, both first-year university students, were happy as long as they could kiss and touch while the film played. For these young lovebirds, who’d only just got together, that was the main reason to go to the cinema.
Kenichi, whose well-hewn physique made him easy to identify as a construction worker, was fast asleep. Even he couldn’t remember why he’d thought to see a film this late in the day. On the big screen, a man-turned-vengeful-demon was speeding underneath an elevated railroad track, causing all kinds of problems for the vehicles around him.
Hiroshi, who had a regular office job, was absent-mindedly imagining things. He was imagining what it would be like if, after the man rushed out of his flat in a righteous fury, the woman who had just died got to her feet, clothes torn and hair bedraggled, and heated up some frozen lasagna in the microwave. How she would then take it out and eat it on the sofa. The gaping holes in her chest rimmed in dark red. This was what Hiroshi always did without intending to. As he followed the story on screen, there was always one corner of his mind picturing the continuation of the scene that had just ended, as if it was a gateway to a parallel world. (...)
And thus the crappy film came to an end, and we all left the cinema. We didn’t know one another, so we walked at our own pace along the street that led in the opposite direction from the station. A cold wind was blowing, the residential area was quiet, and when we turned the corner, we found the dead woman. As we rounded the bend one by one, we each came to a sudden halt like a row of dominoes, almost tripping over our own feet.
The woman was lying face up on the ground. Much of her head was hidden by shoulder-length brown hair, but we could see enough of it to place her somewhere in her forties. Underneath her body was a great pool of blood. It was too small to call a sea of blood – it was more like a small pond. Which, going by what we’d picked up from films and TV programmes, was not a good sign.
‘Call the police,’ Yumi said to nobody in particular. She was pulling out her smartphone when the woman’s hand twitched.
‘She’s still alive,’ Kenichi said, and, as if his voice had woken us from a trance, we all swarmed up to the woman, kneeling in a circle around her like vassals in a period drama. Yumi summoned an ambulance while Hiroshi called the police.
The woman looked as though she could die at any minute. Thus we learned that dying women really do look as though they are about to die. She had a death-like look on her face – an actual death-like look. It was just like what we’d seen in the film an hour ago. In fact it was as if the woman who’d just died in the film had changed her mind, and decided to die out here on the street instead.
Come to think of it, this woman was not unlike the woman in the film. They had similar hair, and they were both wearing the kind of baggy T-shirt and sweatpants people usually wear around the house. This woman had apparently popped out to the convenience store. Close beside her body was a plastic bag containing a crème caramel and a toothbrush. Was the ice-cream container lying at the base of the utility pole anything to do with her? If it was, then the forensic team might be able to calculate the time of the incident by how much ice cream had melted. Akira thought about going over and touching the lid of the container to check the texture of the ice cream inside, but he didn’t want Yuki to think him a fool, so in the end he stayed put.
The woman was looking more death-like by the second. It was hard to say what it was about her that gave that impression, but all of us there felt it. We said nothing, but we were all thinking the same thing: at this rate, the ambulance wasn’t going to make it in time.
Before he could second-guess himself, Hiroshi found himself saying, ‘Do you have any last words – anything you want to say?’
We all felt that what he’d said was a bit impolite, but we could understand what he was trying to do. Taking our cue from him, we all started speaking to her.
‘What happened to you?’
‘Do you remember the face of the person that did this?’
‘Is there something you want to tell your family? We’ll pass on a message.’
We couldn’t stop the woman from dying, but we could memorize her final words and pass them on to her loved ones, or do something to help solve the crime. Just that thought made us feel rather excited, in spite of ourselves.
‘. . . something I want to say?’
The woman squeezed the words out, then suddenly opened her eyes very wide and stared at us. We were scared shitless. We wondered for a second if she’d become a zombie even before she actually died. Her fingers might have been trembling, but still Kimiko remembered to turn on the voice recorder of her smartphone. The last words of the deceased. The woman’s family would no doubt thank her, tears streaming down their cheeks.
The woman inhaled. Her breath made a horrible wheezing sound in her throat.
‘The thing I want to say is this.’
We all gulped.
‘I wish I’d had the opportunity to deconstruct the vagina, at least once.’
The woman said this in a single spurt, then closed her eyes again. Her hands fell to her sides, hitting the asphalt. We were totally mystified.
‘Huh? Her VA-GINA?’
‘Um, sorry, could you just repeat that? Did you say “deconstruct”?’
The woman opened her eyes a crack, and looked at us as if we were a great nuisance.
‘Um, excuse me, but were you raped?’ Yumi said, as if inspiration had suddenly hit her. Her eyes ran the length of the woman’s body. Then we all started looking at her, trying to check, but her thick gray sweatpants didn’t show any signs of disarray. As we watched the woman looking at Yumi as though she took her for an utter fool, we sensed that the pond of blood beneath her was getting bigger. This person was almost definitely going to die.
‘No! I just wanted to talk about the vagina, that’s all . . . Okay, look, it seems like I’ve still got some time left, so I’ll talk about it now.’
‘O – Okay.’
We felt pretty bowled over by her energy – the energy of this woman who could well be dead in a few minutes. Kimiko thought about turning off the voice recorder but decided to keep it on, at least for the moment. From where she was lying, stretched out on the pavement, the woman began to speak.
‘I’ve always found it so weird, how people make such a big deal about vaginas, you know? In the old days, of course, there was a great taboo around them, and women had to wear metal chastity belts and so on. Did you know that? Metal? Anyway, now it’s all about liberation, so people go around saying that vaginas are beautiful and stuff like that, but the point is, who really cares if they’re beautiful or ugly or what? Unless you do some crazy gymnastic moves with a mirror, you can never even really know what your own looks like. Talk about a design flaw! Seriously, though. Even if you look at your own face in the mirror every day, there’s still no telling if you really know yourself, right? If looking at your face brought true self-knowledge, then nobody would need therapy, would they? I don’t hate vaginas, and I don’t particularly love them either. I think all this stuff about vaginaphobia is just stupid. Do people really believe all that? I’m sure they just come up with these big concepts to give themselves something to say – to feel important in some way. Vaginas are just vaginas. What’s wrong with just admitting that? Don’t you think?’
How could we possibly reply? We didn’t have a clue what she was on about. Akira had still never seen a real vagina, and when he watched porn that part was always blurred out. Kenichi and Hiroshi had never properly looked at them either, just stuck in their fingers or tongues or penises as appropriate. Fingers were generally a safe bet to start off with – poke a finger or two in to begin with, and things mostly went off alright. Yumi vaguely conceptualized that part of her anatomy as a beautiful flower garden. As for Kimiko, if she had free time to think about her vagina, she’d rather put it to use watching films. And then writing up her impressions of those films on her blog.
We darted looks at one another. Isn’t this woman kind of perky for a dying person? we were all thinking. Her voice sounded a bit too full of life for someone eking out the last of their strength.
Of all of us, Kimiko was watching the most avidly, and not because she especially liked it, but because she writes a film blog. In other words, she was watching it with a mission: she had to find something – anything – to write about.
Yumi and Akira, both first-year university students, were happy as long as they could kiss and touch while the film played. For these young lovebirds, who’d only just got together, that was the main reason to go to the cinema.
Kenichi, whose well-hewn physique made him easy to identify as a construction worker, was fast asleep. Even he couldn’t remember why he’d thought to see a film this late in the day. On the big screen, a man-turned-vengeful-demon was speeding underneath an elevated railroad track, causing all kinds of problems for the vehicles around him.Hiroshi, who had a regular office job, was absent-mindedly imagining things. He was imagining what it would be like if, after the man rushed out of his flat in a righteous fury, the woman who had just died got to her feet, clothes torn and hair bedraggled, and heated up some frozen lasagna in the microwave. How she would then take it out and eat it on the sofa. The gaping holes in her chest rimmed in dark red. This was what Hiroshi always did without intending to. As he followed the story on screen, there was always one corner of his mind picturing the continuation of the scene that had just ended, as if it was a gateway to a parallel world. (...)
And thus the crappy film came to an end, and we all left the cinema. We didn’t know one another, so we walked at our own pace along the street that led in the opposite direction from the station. A cold wind was blowing, the residential area was quiet, and when we turned the corner, we found the dead woman. As we rounded the bend one by one, we each came to a sudden halt like a row of dominoes, almost tripping over our own feet.
The woman was lying face up on the ground. Much of her head was hidden by shoulder-length brown hair, but we could see enough of it to place her somewhere in her forties. Underneath her body was a great pool of blood. It was too small to call a sea of blood – it was more like a small pond. Which, going by what we’d picked up from films and TV programmes, was not a good sign.
‘Call the police,’ Yumi said to nobody in particular. She was pulling out her smartphone when the woman’s hand twitched.
‘She’s still alive,’ Kenichi said, and, as if his voice had woken us from a trance, we all swarmed up to the woman, kneeling in a circle around her like vassals in a period drama. Yumi summoned an ambulance while Hiroshi called the police.
The woman looked as though she could die at any minute. Thus we learned that dying women really do look as though they are about to die. She had a death-like look on her face – an actual death-like look. It was just like what we’d seen in the film an hour ago. In fact it was as if the woman who’d just died in the film had changed her mind, and decided to die out here on the street instead.
Come to think of it, this woman was not unlike the woman in the film. They had similar hair, and they were both wearing the kind of baggy T-shirt and sweatpants people usually wear around the house. This woman had apparently popped out to the convenience store. Close beside her body was a plastic bag containing a crème caramel and a toothbrush. Was the ice-cream container lying at the base of the utility pole anything to do with her? If it was, then the forensic team might be able to calculate the time of the incident by how much ice cream had melted. Akira thought about going over and touching the lid of the container to check the texture of the ice cream inside, but he didn’t want Yuki to think him a fool, so in the end he stayed put.
The woman was looking more death-like by the second. It was hard to say what it was about her that gave that impression, but all of us there felt it. We said nothing, but we were all thinking the same thing: at this rate, the ambulance wasn’t going to make it in time.
Before he could second-guess himself, Hiroshi found himself saying, ‘Do you have any last words – anything you want to say?’
We all felt that what he’d said was a bit impolite, but we could understand what he was trying to do. Taking our cue from him, we all started speaking to her.
‘What happened to you?’
‘Do you remember the face of the person that did this?’
‘Is there something you want to tell your family? We’ll pass on a message.’
We couldn’t stop the woman from dying, but we could memorize her final words and pass them on to her loved ones, or do something to help solve the crime. Just that thought made us feel rather excited, in spite of ourselves.
‘. . . something I want to say?’
The woman squeezed the words out, then suddenly opened her eyes very wide and stared at us. We were scared shitless. We wondered for a second if she’d become a zombie even before she actually died. Her fingers might have been trembling, but still Kimiko remembered to turn on the voice recorder of her smartphone. The last words of the deceased. The woman’s family would no doubt thank her, tears streaming down their cheeks.
The woman inhaled. Her breath made a horrible wheezing sound in her throat.
‘The thing I want to say is this.’
We all gulped.
‘I wish I’d had the opportunity to deconstruct the vagina, at least once.’
The woman said this in a single spurt, then closed her eyes again. Her hands fell to her sides, hitting the asphalt. We were totally mystified.
‘Huh? Her VA-GINA?’
‘Um, sorry, could you just repeat that? Did you say “deconstruct”?’
The woman opened her eyes a crack, and looked at us as if we were a great nuisance.
‘Um, excuse me, but were you raped?’ Yumi said, as if inspiration had suddenly hit her. Her eyes ran the length of the woman’s body. Then we all started looking at her, trying to check, but her thick gray sweatpants didn’t show any signs of disarray. As we watched the woman looking at Yumi as though she took her for an utter fool, we sensed that the pond of blood beneath her was getting bigger. This person was almost definitely going to die.
‘No! I just wanted to talk about the vagina, that’s all . . . Okay, look, it seems like I’ve still got some time left, so I’ll talk about it now.’
‘O – Okay.’
We felt pretty bowled over by her energy – the energy of this woman who could well be dead in a few minutes. Kimiko thought about turning off the voice recorder but decided to keep it on, at least for the moment. From where she was lying, stretched out on the pavement, the woman began to speak.
‘I’ve always found it so weird, how people make such a big deal about vaginas, you know? In the old days, of course, there was a great taboo around them, and women had to wear metal chastity belts and so on. Did you know that? Metal? Anyway, now it’s all about liberation, so people go around saying that vaginas are beautiful and stuff like that, but the point is, who really cares if they’re beautiful or ugly or what? Unless you do some crazy gymnastic moves with a mirror, you can never even really know what your own looks like. Talk about a design flaw! Seriously, though. Even if you look at your own face in the mirror every day, there’s still no telling if you really know yourself, right? If looking at your face brought true self-knowledge, then nobody would need therapy, would they? I don’t hate vaginas, and I don’t particularly love them either. I think all this stuff about vaginaphobia is just stupid. Do people really believe all that? I’m sure they just come up with these big concepts to give themselves something to say – to feel important in some way. Vaginas are just vaginas. What’s wrong with just admitting that? Don’t you think?’
How could we possibly reply? We didn’t have a clue what she was on about. Akira had still never seen a real vagina, and when he watched porn that part was always blurred out. Kenichi and Hiroshi had never properly looked at them either, just stuck in their fingers or tongues or penises as appropriate. Fingers were generally a safe bet to start off with – poke a finger or two in to begin with, and things mostly went off alright. Yumi vaguely conceptualized that part of her anatomy as a beautiful flower garden. As for Kimiko, if she had free time to think about her vagina, she’d rather put it to use watching films. And then writing up her impressions of those films on her blog.
We darted looks at one another. Isn’t this woman kind of perky for a dying person? we were all thinking. Her voice sounded a bit too full of life for someone eking out the last of their strength.
by Aoko Matsuda, Granta | Read more:
Image: uncredited
