Mr. Tachibana and I had known each other for about a decade. We first became acquainted when Mr. Tachibana stopped by my exhibition and bought one of my paintings. Although we were far apart in age, we got along well. As well as being a politician, he was also a gastronomist, and he would often take me out to meals and treat me to many different kinds of food. He was so eager to eat everything he could get his hands on in Kyoto, from the finest ingredients to the most exquisite delicacies. Did you know that there is a restaurant in Kita Shirakawa that serves fried salamander? I would enjoy delicious cuisine and sake almost every night, and say to myself, "The only thing I haven't eaten yet is human beings." To which Mr. Tachibana would always reply, "I eat people, as well." Since he was a fairly eccentric politician, I thought it was just a joke about himself.
It was two summers ago when I was first invited to the Club. The venue I was escorted to was in the basement of a multi-tenant building, but that tatami-covered room was so spacious that I couldn't believe it was in such a place. I still can't believe it. Outside the fusuma doors was a garden surrounded by bamboo groves, and there was even a small waterfall in a pond. The room was dimly lit by candles on lacquered candleholders and the fireflies flying around. There were eight people besides myself and Mr. Tachibana in the room. Seven men and one woman. It was a meeting of the Sekiryu Club. They said they were a time-honored secret society that had been around since the end of the Edo period. Their purpose was to eat people. Not figuratively speaking. In the literal sense, the Sekiryu Club was a social group for cannibalistic gourmets.
The Club is limited to only ten members, and I became an official part of the Club by filling a vacancy. The members called each other by aliases. Mr. Tachibana used the name Usuki, and I called myself Hayase. They were not afraid to claim that their preference was a sophisticated interest, but they also understood that it was something they could not talk about openly. The venue was always in a dim light, making it difficult to see even other participants' faces. The only things we knew about each other were our physiques, genders, aliases, and professions.
Just like people use cryptic terms to refer to deer meat as MapleMomiji and horse meat as CherrySakura, they referred to human meat as PomegranateZakuro. Our meetings were held roughly once a month, but not every time we ate pomegranates. It's not so easy to get. One of the members was a man who called himself Hashizume, apparently a doctor, and sometimes he would bring in a fresh corpse from somewhere. When I asked, he told me that these were body donors who had been dead for only a few days.
Using the bodies they obtained, they cooked a variety of dishes. The cooking was handled by a man named Akitsu, who was an itamae by profession. They ate the prepared dishes, and so did I. Honestly speaking, they were not that delicious, but the excitement of eating human meat was irreplaceable for me.
Then I met Ms. Shiina. It was of course an alias, I don't know her real name. She was the only woman in the Sekiryu Club. She was a quiet person and looked like she was far away from such activities as cannibalism. Well, that could be said of the other members as well. There was no one in the Club who was so blatantly deranged that you could see it from the outside. Anyway, I was intrigued by Ms. Shiina. She was clearly different from the rest of us. Partly because she was the only woman, I suppose, but not only that. The Sekiryu Club was, in essence, a nefarious pastime for the rich, and she was the only member who didn't seem to be in it for the sake of pleasure.
Ms. Shiina ate people because of her slightly odd philosophy. She believed that a person's life should end with being eaten by others. You know what they call sky burial, where corpses are fed to vultures. In analogy to that, she believed in what you might call human burial. Human dead bodies would eventually return to nature in one way or another, and she believed that humans should always return to humans. When I asked her if she herself would like to be eaten by humans in her last moment, she smiled and answered, "Yes, I would. You will have to eat me when the time comes." I was fascinated by her modest smile, but also somewhat uneasy about it. The way Ms. Shiina spoke sounded as if she was going to die tomorrow.
Ms. Shiina and I began to often meet outside of the Club. My curiosity and uneasiness about her soon turned to affection. She was an elusive lady. I developed a desire to be close to her as much as possible. I couldn't shake this irrational fear that if I didn't, she would disappear, and would be a meat dish the next time I saw her.
Ms. Shiina always carried a single knife with her. Occasionally she would take it out and make a tiny stab wound on her skin. Then she would give me her usual icy smile and let me lick the flowing blood off her skin. It made me feel helplessly uneasy. One day I made up my mind and said that we had to stop doing this. Ms. Shiina looked puzzled and asked me if I didn't like it, to which I replied that I did not. She handed me the knife and left it with me. I shoved it into the bottom of my bag. Since then, her self-injurious behavior ceased.
The days I spent with Ms. Shiina were truly fulfilling. She and I went to various places together, and we had very ordinary meals together. She gradually began to show me a cheerful smile. The knife she handed me had remained in my bag the whole time, and I thought that no one would ever have the chance to use it again.
Ms. Shiina did not come to our gathering that day. It was the first time she had missed a meeting and I was really worried about her. At the beginning of the meeting, Mr. Tachibana stood up and said that he just obtained "the thing" and wanted to show it to us. I had no idea what he was talking about. He took out a porcelain vessel in a paulownia wood box. It was a lidded flat bowl, and when he removed the lid, we found a large hunk of meat inside. It was obviously a pomegranate. Mr. Tachibana explained that this bowl was a wonder of the world, as pomegranates would come out of it endlessly.
The guys of the Club were delighted. If what he said was true, they would no longer have to steal donated corpses from the hospital to eat pomegranates. They promptly roasted the pomegranate in the bowl and ate it. Everyone praised how delicious it was, but somehow I struggled to finish it. I didn't even feel any immoral excitement as I had in the past. The meat in my mouth felt awfully warm. It was roasted meat, so it should be natural to be warm. Yet for some reason, the temperature of that meat was as if clinging to my tongue and throat.
After the gathering broke up, Mr. Tachibana offered to take me home, so we left the venue together. As we walked down the street at night, I asked him if he knew the reason for Ms. Shiina's absence. "Did I not tell you," he said. "Shiina will never come again." I asked him back if she had left the Club. Instead of answering my question, he gestured to the paulownia box he was carrying beside him and said, "The pomegranate you ate today, whose meat do you think it was?"
I couldn't understand it. No, rather, I understood completely. I understood what his words meant. The reason for the strange warmth I felt in the meat I had just eaten. I think I was terribly dismayed. I didn't know what to do, I just reached into my bag and found the knife. I grabbed it and the rest is as you may have guessed.
While we were scuffling, Mr. Tachibana was saying something to me the whole time. Something about how this was what she desired, and that he was just an intermediary. But I ignored it all. Because, it didn't make any sense, did it? The last time I saw her, she was standing right next to me, smiling and looking happier than anyone else.
