Evil and the Mask by Fuminori Nakamura Read Free Book Online Page A

fourteenth birthday will be just around the corner.”
    He stopped speaking, gestured for me to go. I left the roomwith my head in a whirl. At any rate, I thought, Kaori was safe for the next two months. But time was running out. To murder him I would have to overcome an even greater fear than that I had just experienced.
    When I went back to my room, Kaori was waiting for me. As soon as I saw her I began to cry. I asked for a kiss and she gave me one. We remained locked in each other’s arms for a long time. She started to say something, faltered, tried again and then closed her mouth.
    Three days later, in the middle of the night, my father left his bedroom. Clutching my backpack, I crept silently after him towards the underground chamber.



THE WHITE LIGHT was hazy. I was lying face up on a soft bed. My head was still fuzzy, probably because the anesthetic hadn’t worn off yet. A faint smir of rain was hitting the window. It occurred to me that the same cold rain was also soaking the expressway away in the distance. Inside the room, however, it was warm. I realized I still had no feeling in my face.
    “I’ve got a daughter,” the doctor said as soon as I opened my eyes. “Now she’s old enough to understand what I do, and she keeps pestering me to fix her too.”
    He laughed softly.
    “That’s tricky,” I replied, but my mouth wouldn’t move and my words didn’t come out properly.
    “You still won’t be able to talk very well. I’d like you to stay here for a bit longer.”
    He was looking out the window. On the cabinet beside my bed was a peculiar doll, its arms and legs too long for its body. I noticed vaguely that it was wearing a white dress. The green outlines of the potted plants shimmered in the light. I spoke to his back.
    “I remembered some things from a long time ago.”
    “Yes?”
    “More than ten years ago. My first love, this gloomy mansion I was living in, different stuff.”
    He turned around slowly.
    “That often happens to people who’ve had major facial reconstruction, before they wake up. They’re trying to remember details of things they’ve lost from their past.”
    The rain kept falling.
    “It was a time when I was still happy, happier than I am now. A time when I had everything, when joy and despair were strangely mixed up. It’s like the other me was working its way through my memories to tell me the story.”
    “But here you’ve gained a new life.”
    I smiled faintly. Or more precisely, I tried to. My cheeks and lips were numb.
    “An unorthodox plastic surgeon like you must be able to tell that’s not why I changed my face.”
    “It’s not so you can make a fresh start?”
    “Nothing’s going to start. There’s nothing to start.”
    I took a deep breath.
    “How long before I can see my face?”
    “Two or three days. It’s going to be fine. It looks exactly like Koichi Shintani’s. You’ve taken on a dead man’s identity.”
    THE HOSPITAL WAS in an ordinary residential area in the suburbs of Tokyo.
    At first glance it looked like a private house, but the inside was a clinic for illegal plastic surgery, used by people who wanted to change their faces for nefarious reasons. Mobsters and the like came here, but the doctor didn’t have the air of desperation of other social outcasts. The interior was clean and quiet.
    On the day the bandages were removed, the doctor watched with a smile. In the silver-framed mirror was another face. Confused, I moved my right arm in a meaningless gesture. When I opened my mouth, the man in the mirror opened his.
    “You might be a little uncomfortable for a while,” said the doctor. “Your brain is disoriented. It’ll take some time before it accepts the face it’s seeing as normal.”
    “I guess so.”
    He returned to his chair and drank his tea.
    “But it’s made you a little older. You were in your twenties, but now you’re thirty. If you’re going to use this Shintani’s identity unchanged …”
    I