Piercing by Ryu Murakami

need time just to get her blood circulating again. She’d been gradually increasing the dosage recently and knew she’d have to watch that. The pills weren’t cheap, and someone had said that the shop in Shibuya where she bought them was under investigation.
    She rolled on to her side and reached for the CD player remote. She hit POWER, saw the little green light come on, and pressed PLAY. It wasn’t the CD she was expecting. She liked to listen to strings first thing on awaking and could have sworn she’d put in a Mozart disc before going to sleep, but oozing out of the speakers now was the theme song from Wild at Heart , with a tenor sax that dripped like molasses over her nerve endings. It was music she liked to listen to when masturbating. It’s weird I don’t remember, she thought as she turned off the music - and what if it’s not just because of the sleeping pills? The thought triggered a wave of anxiety, and she decided to try to recall exactly what she’d done before going to sleep. According to the clock it was Friday, which meant she’d been asleep for about fifty hours straight. She’d taken the Halcion late Wednesday morning, after an all-night job for which she’d received 150,000 yen. She hadn’t taken the money to the office yet, either, which explained why the manager was so insistent about her calling in.
    The client had been a mild, middle-aged man who after half-heartedly tying her up and poking her with the vibrator had taken her hand and asked her to sleep next to him. She wasn’t sleepy, and because she was concerned about her libido having gone missing the past month or so, and because he wasn’t a type she found repulsive, she’d been prepared to have normal sex with him, as long as he used a condom. So naturally this was the one time the client just wanted to sleep by her side. He fell asleep right away, with his mouth open, and she couldn’t bear even to look at him. He wasn’t a smoker, but his breath was bad and smelled faintly of alcohol, and soon he was snoring loudly without loosening the tight grip he had on her hand. He hadn’t paid her yet, so she couldn’t have left anyway, but her muscles tensed up when she tried to lie still, and the more she told herself she had to sleep, the more it felt as if someone had turned a spotlight on her brain.
    Don’t tell me it’s starting up again , she remembered thinking, and the thought had terrified her and made her think it really was starting up. Any minute now she’d become aware of What’s-her-name lurking up there at the corner of the ceiling, staring down at the man and her.
    What’s-her-name had first appeared when Chiaki was in middle school. In the beginning, she’d begged her not to look, but What’s-her-name would just snicker, in a voice that apparently only Chiaki could hear.
    This time, as it turned out, What’s-her-name never did materialise, but because her handbag was out of reach Chiaki couldn’t get to the Halcion and had to lie there until dawn, wide awake. By then her muscles were so rigid it hurt, and she was scared. But what really tormented her was the fact that she couldn’t detect so much as zero point one milligram of sexual desire anywhere in her body. If this had happened in the old days, before she’d changed her personality, she probably would have shaken the man awake and demanded sex.
    She wasn’t like that any more, though. She’d revamped her personality on the hundred and twenty-fourth day after her eighteenth birthday, the year she graduated high school and entered junior college. In junior college she’d had just one friend with whom she’d go out for tea and share lecture notes and so on, and when she told her about it this girl had said, ‘No way! Is it even possible to change your personality overnight?’
    I did, Chiaki told herself. I changed my personality just like that. I became modest and reserved, even a little withdrawn, and after that there were lots of people who