Real World by Natsuo Kirino Read Free Book Online Page B

rough and squared her shoulders she’d look like a guy. Her dream was to make a living as a transvestite in the infamous Kabuki-cho district. She made it was obvious she was looking for a rich older woman. But really, age didn’t matter—she’d have taken an elderly woman, someone middle-aged, or even a young hooker. Boku-chan had the simple fixed idea that, since she liked women, she wanted to become a nice man; and that in order to become one, she needed to act manly. Which to her meant frowning as you held your cigarette between thumb and forefinger, putting your arm around a girl’s shoulder and lifting her chin with your finger, speaking in a deep, threatening voice, adopting all the poses and actions of hunky actors in movies. She was tall, had studied karate, and was muscular, so she had the mannerisms down, but somehow when she did it, it all came off as a joke. On top of that, she wasn’t the brightest bulb in the box. Dahmer and I talked once about how if she actually did become a transvestite she’d run out of topics to talk about and customers would find her boring.

Boku-chan didn’t have any money, so she slept on the street or hung out at Dahmer’s, spending most nights during summer vacation in the 2-chome district before she went home to Tosa Yamada in Kochi. My dad wouldn’t allow her to stay in our house but that never seemed to bother her. Even now I get e-mails from her sometimes. Her e-mails are full of happy-go-lucky stuff like, I just bought a purple suit in the shopping district. They had only a double-breasted one so I bought that, but I think single-breasted looks better on me.

Dahmer, on the other hand, was a more complicated character, like me. She took her nickname from the serial killer in America. She was interested in cruel murders and dead bodies—kind of a death obsession. Since my mother died in the fall of my last year in junior high, I hate that kind of thing. I told Dahmer how I felt once, that people who are afraid of death and are the farthest from it are the most obsessed by it. She just shrugged. I think Dahmer felt the same kind of alienation from me that Toshi did when I told her about helping Worm. That was the only time we talked about death, and I never mentioned my mom again. I’ve packed away the pain so deep inside me that I can’t even draw it out myself, and my body just continues to function like nothing had ever happened.

Dahmer’s parents had gotten divorced and, like me, she was an only child. It was just her mom and her now, and her mom, she said, did all kinds of jobs and wasn’t home very much. That person —that’s how she referred to her mother. That person’s fairly good-looking, she’d say. That person’s a slacker. That person’s got her own life to live. There was something similar about my mother’s death and the way Dahmer referred to her mother. With both there’s a sense of distance from the reality we live in. Like they’re people who live in some far-off other country. No matter whether they’re dead or alive.

Dahmer was in love with her female math teacher in high school. The woman was twenty-six, a graduate of a scientific university, a smart aleck who made fun of anyone who was less than a mathematical genius. Dahmer liked the woman’s arrogance. She was always saying she wanted to be better than that woman, so she wouldn’t be made fun of, otherwise she’d die. Once, when her grades fell below the class average, she got drunk and felt so humiliated she slashed her wrist with a knife. I saw it once, that thin scar on her arm. She was always lugging around a math textbook, but with Boku-chan hanging out at her place, she moaned and groaned about not being able to get much studying done. She loaned Boku-chan money, even let her borrow her T-shirts and shorts. If Boku-chan was too much for her, I figured she should just kick her out, but Dahmer was the type who couldn’t say no. An idiot like Boku-chan was too much for her,