Ice pick

The Ice pick is an ordinary tool whose sharp, narrow form becomes central to Kawashima Masayuki’s recurring fear that he may harm his infant daughter. It also recalls an earlier act of violence and becomes part of a later, deliberate plan, tying together episodes in which Kawashima confronts the possibility of using it.

Appearance and First Association

Kawashima carries the Ice pick in his pocket and studies its slender steel point. During a nighttime visit to his four-month-old daughter Rie’s crib, he takes it out while a penlight illuminates the child. He draws back her blanket, then brings the tool close to her face. The scene ends without him stabbing her, but the proximity of the Ice pick makes his fear concrete: he must reassure himself that he will not use it.

The object’s pointed design troubles him beyond this immediate encounter. He questions why an implement intended for chopping ice needs such a sharp form, and thinks that its makers and sellers do not understand the fear it can provoke. In this way, an object with an ordinary practical purpose becomes conspicuous to him as a source of danger, rather than remaining a neutral tool.

Earlier Violence and Its Aftermath

Before the nightly vigil at Rie’s crib, the Ice pick had already been involved in violence in Kawashima Masayuki’s relationship with the stripper he lived with. The episode remained unclear in his memory: after returning home while under the influence of thinner, he experienced her rejection as a threat that she would leave him. In a distressed, confused state, he took the Ice pick into the bathroom and used it against her. She survived and went to the hospital; Kawashima could not remember what happened immediately afterward or whether the police came.

The woman never discussed the incident with him after returning from the hospital. Kawashima moved out, and although he went back to the apartment several times, she refused to see him; eventually she moved away. He believed the Ice pick might still be under the bathtub, and imagined that one day he would return to look for it. The object thus remains attached not only to an act he barely remembers, but also to an unresolved place and a relationship that ended without an explanation between them.

Afterward, the incident returned in recurring nightmares. In them, the Ice pick fell onto the bathroom floor and rolled beneath the tub, while Kawashima tried to retrieve it. The dreams turned the object’s imagined location into a persistent scene of return, linking his incomplete memory of the assault to the fear that the past could not simply be left behind.

From Intrusive Fear to Deliberate Planning

The Ice pick’s role changes when Kawashima moves from fearing that he might use it to planning an attack. After reading a magazine article about a woman murdered in a hotel, he decided to buy a knife as well as an Ice pick and considered using both in a planned killing. His attention to the implement’s length and sharpness was no longer confined to anxious scrutiny: he selected the longest one he could find, with a metal point about fifteen or sixteen centimetres long, and imagined how it might be used. The contrast is stark. At home, he repeatedly sought reassurance that he would not harm Rie; away from home, he could think about an intended victim with what he experienced as the calm of working through a creative problem.

Kawashima prepared the Ice pick as part of a wider, carefully organized scheme. He planned to buy it and the knife at separate suburban supermarkets during busy weekend hours, and considered whether to practise the process beforehand. At the hotel, he had arranged the implements for his planned ritual and repeatedly cleaned a Cola can to remove fingerprints. While the woman he had hired was in the bathroom, he put on leather gloves, unwrapped the Ice pick and knife, and continued revising his plan. These preparations make the object more than a threatening presence in his thoughts: it is a chosen instrument in an operation he has deliberately assembled.

The plan abruptly becomes immediate when Kawashima notices that his overnight bag is on its side and his notebook is open. Suspecting that the woman has read his notes, he concludes that he must kill her to prevent her from telling anyone. He is relieved that he has not disposed of the Ice pick and knife. The suspicion, rather than any confirmed disclosure by the woman, turns his written scheme into an imminent decision; the section ends with Kawashima walking beside her through the cold city streets.

Recurrence and Narrative Significance

The nightly vigil gives the Ice pick a repeated place in Kawashima Masayuki’s life: for ten consecutive nights, he stood over Rie’s crib with it, testing the fear against his assurance that he would not act. His alarm came with physical symptoms, and the ritual did not resolve the danger so much as bring him back to the object and the same question. The Ice pick therefore marks a cycle of fear and self-reassurance, not a single isolated encounter.

Across these episodes, its ordinary purpose is repeatedly displaced by what it has come to mean for Kawashima. He sees a tool whose design seems inexplicably threatening; remembers it in an incomplete account of past violence; and later incorporates it into a plan he considers with deliberate calm. The contrast does not make the object itself a source of intention: rather, its recurring presence exposes the unstable distance between Kawashima’s fear of what he might do and his capacity to plan an act of violence. Its significance lies in carrying that contradiction from one part of his life to another.