Dear Mr Kuroki,
My name is Nozomi Iwata. I’m 26 years of age, a graduate of Sophia University, currently working as a waitress. Please forgive my presumptuousness but enclosed you will find the first few pages of my novel in progress, The Mannequins. I know your highly successful weekly magazines serialize genre novellas and I believe my own sits within the horror fiction you have published recently. My sincere thanks for your time, I can only imagine how many submissions an esteemed editor such as yourself must receive.
Once again, please forgive the trouble.
Yoko Maeda was twenty-one years old. People said she was very beautiful and she was fine with that. Being so attractive wasn’t always a picnic but, undoubtedly, it had some benefits. It certainly hadn’t hurt her chances when applying for the job at Department Store Q; the manager was salivating as he listened to her answers.
She had been at Q for a month now, in ladies’ fashion, and she excelled in her work. It wasn’t rocket science, murmuring approval when women tried on blouses or silk scarves they couldn’t afford. But even so, Yoko had a talent for making people feel good about themselves. This was no simple task, given her beauty. Most people felt threatened by it, so immediately she adopted her silly-girl routine, pretending to forget her train of thought, or that the customer had illuminated her with some perfunctory statement. This way she invited them to judge her for being an idiot. And an idiot who told you that the scarf suited you was probably telling the truth. After all, idiots tended to be guileless.
The manager let Yoko keep her commission on the designer items, which, at the brand-new Department Store Q, housed in Osaka’s premier shopping complex, accounted for most things on sale. She worked on the sixth floor, a clean, windowless expanse of fabrics, heels and curvy white mannequins. Tinny music played discreetly over the speakers, and the mirrors, which gleamed, were everywhere, making it seem like there were more people present than there actually were.
Yoko worked with a team of eight girls, though she hadn’t made any friends. That suited her fine; they seemed boring in any case, spending most of their time in the back room, whispering amongst themselves. Yoko didn’t feel left out at all. If anything, it boosted her ability to rake in commission.
No, nothing bothered her at Q. Well, except for the one small, trivial matter. It would have been invisible to anyone passing through, but after a few weeks Yoko had caught glimpses of prayer beads being worn by the girls. Here and there around the store, almost hidden, she had come across yakuyoke talismans to ward away evil. When she asked the security guard about it, he just laughed it off.
‘Those girls are all as superstitious as each other.’
But it wasn’t long afterwards that she noticed he too wore the prayer beads. Yoko didn’t care if her foolish colleagues wanted to waste their money on trinkets. She put it to the back of her mind and went about her work.
Yoko was in charge of four mannequins at the back of the floor. They were very tall, practically six feet, and a pure, eggshell-white colour. Though they had no hair and no eyes, their full lips came together in a slight smile.
It was Yoko’s responsibility to ensure that the mannequins were the very embodiment of elegance and she took it seriously. She changed their clothes every other day and slowly developed what she supposed one could call a fondness for them.
Sometimes she even got the funny feeling they were smiling at her, as if they enjoyed her fussing. Frankly, Yoko quite enjoyed this part of her job. It reminded her of being a little girl – posing and dressing them. She didn’t care if her colleagues called her ‘The Puppet Master’.
After all, it was an almost daily occurrence that a customer would ask her where they could find the exact outfit that mannequin was wearing. More often than not, that meant raking in commission.
People could say what they wanted, Yoko didn’t mind. It wouldn’t be long until her credit-card debt was completely paid off. At least, that’s what she told herself. She often told herself this, though deep down she knew it was untrue.
She was not the sort of person to change her spending habits. No, what she bought was an expression of her desires. Suppressing them was out of the question. Besides, Yoko loved to look good. What was so terrible about that? Not to mention the fact that she had an in-store discount.
On her free days, it was her favourite thing to sit outside the cafés of Ginza wearing the latest French label, just smoking and watching the people pass, rebuffing men loudly if they dared to approach. They mostly stared at her from a distance, though. And this, for much of her life, was the only kind of relationship Yoko had been comfortable with.
It was true that she could turn on the charm to make a sale: she was an expert in that sort of interaction, one with a clear narrative and outcome. But when it came to the freehand of socializing, she often felt lost and irritated. All through university she had tried, but it had been exhausting. Vagueness and subtlety drained her. Men never said what they meant, and women could do nothing else.
Afterwards Yoko groped around for purpose like a child reaching for a medicine they do not particularly want to take. Though they said nothing, she knew her parents had expected her to take a job more deserving of her expensive education. But Yoko had no real drive, no genuine ambition.
Sometimes she daydreamed about being noticed by a talent scout or a famous photographer, but even then she had no desire for fame. No, Yoko just liked to be looked at from afar. That was probably the reason why a job in a department store appealed to her so much. She was an ambassador for the things that would turn heads. A peacock to sell peacock feathers. Yes, Yoko would work extra hard, clear her debt and live out the next decade experiencing only simple, empty pleasures. What else were her twenties for?
*
Yoko had been working at Q for four months when her manager asked her to dinner. She knew he was married and she had no intention of it going anywhere, but she also happened to love grilled eel and this is precisely what the manager was offering – dinner at the best eel spot in Osaka. When he suggested sake, Yoko agreed. What he didn’t know was that her family was in the sake trade and she could handle her drink better than most. But Yoko had not just agreed to dinner for the free food.
After she had had her fill of eel and once her manager was slurring his words, she seized her opportunity.
‘Sir …’ She looked at the floor. ‘I was wondering something.’
‘Anything, Yoko,’ he purred. ‘You just have to ask.’
‘I hope you know how much I think of my colleagues. You should be praised for your acumen in selecting such fine employees.’
‘Thank you, dear.’ He took a languid sip. ‘I hope you include yourself in that.’
‘You flatter me!’
‘But what did you want to know? Don’t be shy. I’m your manager, you should trust me. I have your best interests at heart, Yoko.’
‘Well …’ She bit her lip and glanced out of the window. ‘I don’t mean to pry. But do you know why all the girls wear prayer beads? Even the security guard wears them.’
The manager lost his smile.
Undeterred, Yoko kept on driving at her point. ‘It just seems so odd for a group of such smart girls to act so skittishly.’
He licked his lips before answering. ‘Yoko, there are certain things which happen in life … And people don’t always respond logically.’
‘I’m not sure I follow.’
‘I suppose you have a right to know.’
Yoko wondered if he was realizing now that it was not he who had lured her here under false pretences. Perhaps he was accepting the fact that there was no way someone like Yoko would ever do anything more than drink his sake and eat his unagi.
He sighed. ‘Years ago, before the renovation, there was an incident on the sixth floor.’
‘Incident?’
‘There was an employee, Kameko. Now, she was a plain-looking girl, maybe even ugly. Even so, she worked in fashion, just like you. She was, by all accounts, gifted in sales. She would take little extra steps to ensure the customer would feel valued, wrap the purchases beautifully, even trivial items, offer refreshments, that sort of thing.
‘Anyway, the story goes that there was one particular customer. He came in one day looking for a gift for his wife. He seemed the wealthy type so, of course, Kameko pounced on him. He obviously liked the service he received because he came back the next day. And the day after. After a while he started pestering the girl to come out with him. Nobody could understand it; the man was, apparently, quite handsome and clearly rich. Why was he so taken with plain old Kameko?
‘Even so, it got to the point where he would buy things he didn’t need, just so the security guard couldn’t say anything to him. You know, sunglasses in December. Or an atlas of the world. Anyway, eventually Kameko requested a transfer to another store, but her boss was loath to lose her. Instead, he proposed a holiday. She hadn’t taken any in three years and he thought it might convince her admirer to fixate on someone else.’
The manager ordered more sake, as if he required Dutch courage to continue. Yoko was enraptured by the story; she realized her back was arched and her toes were curled in her shoes. She exhaled, trying to disguise the shuddering in her breath. ‘Did the man come back?’
‘Kameko took the time off and after that the man stayed away for a month or two. She thought things had gone back to normal and she was beginning to flourish again. Now, as you know, winter is a fruitful season, given the demand for good jackets. She was doing very well, always ready to take a second shift straight after her first if someone was sick. It so happened that this is what she did on the night in question.’
‘What happened?’ Yoko could barely breathe.
‘The man came back, of course. He waited until closing time and must have slipped into the bathrooms to hide. The security guard had left early that day. Kameko was alone and tidying up when the man attacked her.’
‘What did he do?’ she whispered.
‘He dragged her into the changing room, raped her and beat her to death. Her colleagues found her the next morning with her neck broken. Well, some say it was a broken neck, others say she was stabbed.
‘Now this alone, though obviously deeply unpleasant, wasn’t enough to make people say the sixth floor was haunted. But a few weeks after the murder the boss who had convinced Kameko to stay on died in a traffic accident. A little later the security guard who forgot to check the toilets died of a heart attack. He wasn’t that old. After that, some odd things were apparently seen around the store.’
‘Like what?’
The manager finished his sake and considered the empty cup. ‘It’s just stupid talk, Yoko. People say the sixth floor is haunted by Kameko’s ghost, angry that she was talked into staying and ultimately murdered. But it’s just a silly story. A girl did die in the store, it’s true. Honestly, I’m not even sure if she was called Kameko. Then again, it was just as likely that she had an aneurysm as that she was murdered. Before the renovation, all the old staff were laid off, so nobody can corroborate. And, of course, people prefer to cling to the ridiculous than hear the truth. Reality is boring.’
‘I’m not sure there ever was any man, Yoko. And if there was, they probably caught him. Who knows? Who cares?’ He seemed to get an optimistic second wind. ‘Come on, let’s discuss something nicer over a nightcap. I happen to know a little –’
Yoko thanked him and rushed out of the restaurant. She was so taken with the story, ridiculous though it was, that she took a taxi home, not trusting herself to navigate the multiple changeovers on the subway.
Back in her shoebox apartment she found several final demands from her creditors in the mailbox. They agitated her even more. She spent all night worrying about her debt and thinking about the ghost of the murdered girl.
Normally, Yoko would sleep like a log. But she woke in the middle of the night when she heard a loud thud. Sitting up, she saw it was just a book that had fallen from the shelf. It was normal for things to fall over in her little apartment overlooking the railway. Or perhaps it had just been a baby earthquake.
In the morning Yoko picked up the book and put it back on the shelf. She did not notice it was an atlas.