Real World

by Natsuo Kirino

  “Toshi, are you okay?”

  Yuzan’s worried voice called out from the cell phone that I was still clutching. I nodded again and again but couldn’t stop the tears. I suddenly noticed that my door was open and that my mother was standing there, looking pale.

  “Don’t you think you should go to Miss Higashiyama’s house?”

  “I’ll call you back,” I told Yuzan, and hung up. She was in tears, too, and couldn’t reply.

  I called Kirarin’s house but all I got was some woman who just kept gloomily repeating that she didn’t know anything, that the day for the funeral hadn’t been set. I didn’t know what to do and paced back and forth in my room.

  Reporters started calling us around ten a.m., and I shut my curtain tight. Next, Worm’s father stopped by. He said that before he went to see his son in the hospital in Nagano, he wanted to find out from me what had been going on between Worm and Kirarin. He was gaunt, like a sad old man—so much for the former dandy with his ascot. The arrogant face he used to make as he walked past our house was nowhere to be seen.

  “What sort of relationship did my son and Miss Higashiyama have?” he asked.

  “I really don’t know,” I lied.

  “Is that so,” he muttered back, then suddenly fell to his knees on the floor of our dirty entrance.

  “I am truly, truly sorry for all the trouble we’ve caused you. I don’t know where to begin to apologize for the death of your friend. Please forgive us. I know my son will spend the rest of his life trying to redeem himself for what he’s done to all of you. I should have supervised him more carefully, and since I didn’t, this horrible tragedy has taken place, and now I can only hand my son over to the courts. I feel so sorry I don’t want to go on living.”

  This middle-aged man was apologizing to me, a high school girl, for his son. You got it wrong, I wanted to tell him. It was like a game we were playing with Worm. And your wife’s murder was part of the game we were enjoying. I stood there, silent, with no idea how I should act. None of this, though, meant very much after I learned that Terauchi had died.

  “Why don’t you have a bite to eat? You haven’t touched anything since this morning.” It was almost evening when my mother came up to see me as I lay on my bed, weeping. Just when I started downstairs the phone rang. I motioned to my mother that I’d take it. I had a hunch it was for me. The phone rang on, like it was specifically waiting until I got downstairs.

  “Toshiko? I’m afraid I have some terrible news. Kazuko just killed herself. She left a letter addressed to you. Can you come over right away and open it?”

  My brain just went totally blank. I’d heard people say this before, and that’s exactly what happened. A total whiteout. I was so shocked it was like I forgot how to move my arms and legs.

  * * *

  The undertaker, with this pained expression, set down the tray used to offer incense. After a quick autopsy, Terauchi’s body was back home. And there she was, lying in a coffin. Her face was covered with a white cloth. I just kept staring at her fingers, the blackish fingertips clasped at her chest. When she fell she must have hemorrhaged inside. Maybe they weren’t showing her face because it’d been injured. Her beautiful face—what had happened to it now? You dummy, jumping off a building like that! Now we can’t see you. How am I supposed to say good-bye if I can’t see your face?

  * * *

  “What did she say in her letter?” Terauchi’s mother asked me again.

  “She said not to show it to anybody else, so I don’t think I should,” I was finally able to reply. Next to me, my mother stirred, like she was bothered by this. I knew exactly what she wanted to say to me: You know that’s not right, Toshiko. This is Terauchi’s mother we’re talking about. Show it to her. Tell her what she wants to know.

  “I understand. It’s just that I’m her parent and would like to know what she wrote.”

  Terauchi’s mother’s shoulders slumped as she muttered this. I thought maybe it would be okay to tell her the main points of the letter, so I scanned it again, but I’m lousy at summarizing things and nothing of the contents stayed with me. If it were Terauchi doing the summarizing, she’d do a great job, explaining things by emphasizing exactly what mattered. Still, you know something, Terauchi, I wanted to tell her—this is really poorly written. You always were a lousy writer. To really understand this, a person would have to read it a hundred times. Despite all this, I went ahead and tried to explain what was in the letter.

  “Mainly what she says is that she’s a very philosophical type of person and living exhausted her. There were things that make her and the world incompatible. And she said that as her friend I’m the only one who can understand this, so I shouldn’t show it to anybody else.”

  “Was it studying for entrance exams that did it?” Terauchi’s mother asked.

  “Maybe. I’m not really sure.”

  “I understand. This must come as such a shock to you, too, Toshiko. Asking you this must upset you.”

  Terauchi’s mother gave a quick smile. I couldn’t imagine what the problems between her and Terauchi had been, but the smile told me that she understood her daughter’s feelings.

  “Kazuko said this to me,” her mother said. “When she heard about Miss Higashiyama’s accident she said, ‘It’s all your fault.’ I don’t know what she meant by that.”

  I found that part of Terauchi’s letter. It’s too embarrassing to write down. So you were too embarrassed to even tell me. My mother shook my shoulder.

  “Please show her the letter, Toshiko. Kazuko asked you not to, but her parents have the right to see it. It might be addressed to you, but I don’t see how you can keep it to yourself.”

  The right. I wonder about that. It’s addressed to me, so doesn’t that mean it’s just mine? My brain wouldn’t function and I just stood there, my mother shaking me. No matter how much she shook me, I still clung tightly to Terauchi’s letter. She’d said things about her mother and how turning in Worm and Kirarin to the police made her want to die. The last thing I wanted was for anybody to learn about that. Especially her mother.

  “It’s okay,” Terauchi’s father said, interrupting. “No need to force yourself to show it to us. If those were Kazuko’s final wishes then we should respect them. Because I think she’s still out there, watching us.”

  At this we all turned to look at the white wood coffin. She’s definitely smiling inside there, I thought, her shattered face grinning. I thought of her pleasant features. When I thought that I’d never see that face again, talking to her just this morning seemed like an illusion. Reality started to fade away.

  “Terauchi!! You idiot!!”

  A voice shouted from behind us. It was Yuzan, shoulders squared, dressed in her usual T-shirt and work pants. The instant she saw the coffin, she collapsed on the floor in tears.

  “How could this happen? Tell me! They said Kirarin’s dead, too. What am I going to do?”

  You got that right, I thought. What am I going to do, too? I’d never been so confused in my life. I noticed that Yuzan, who usually referred to herself by the rough masculine word ore, had switched now to the feminine atashi. It was weird, but a strangely calm part of me could notice something like that. Next I had to go over to Kirarin’s house in Chofu. I was sure I couldn’t see her face either. The two of them had both been crushed. Completely disintegrated, the two of them. Why? I still couldn’t comprehend that all these things had happened. Am I to blame for all this? Did it all happen because I didn’t report Worm to the police? Thoughts kept swirling round and round in my head. Worm used my cell phone to call the three of us, Yuzan lent him a bike, Kirarin thought it’d be fun, so she went to see him, and Terauchi reported them to the police. This is crazy. Wasn’t there an anime movie like this? Rinbu/Rondo or something? Kind of out-of-date, I guess. I started to feel faint, but unlike in a movie, I didn’t lose consciousness. My head was, in a strange way, totally clear.

  * * *

  Everything about the
second semester of my senior year in high school felt cold and distant. I hadn’t seen my classmates since the summer break began and they were all too busy to sit down and talk about my two friends that had died. My class was clearly divided into all sorts of cliques. The bookworms were the most numerous, then came the jocks, the Shibuya clubbers, the Barbie Girls, the nerds, and others, and the deaths of these two girls—Kirarin and Terauchi, who belonged to the one group hardest to fathom—didn’t seem to really hit home with anybody else. Kirarin’s death had been covered in weekly magazines and on TV talk shows, so girls who were into gossipy stuff like that sometimes checked me out like they wanted to ask me about it, but I pretended not to know anything. Compared with the splashy affair of Worm and Kirarin, Terauchi’s suicide didn’t stand out much, although one of those dry weekly newsmagazines did have an article once about a classmate of Kirarin’s having followed her in death by taking her own life.

  “Toshi-chan, you’re all skin and bones.”

  Haru, her hair bobbed now, stood blocking my way. Her new boyfriend had apparently told her he didn’t like her Yamamba style, so she’d done a total makeover into a Mod. But because of all the makeup she’d worn, her eyebrows and eyelashes had gotten pretty sparse, and this new style didn’t suit her.

  “Really?” I touched my cheek. “I didn’t notice.”

  “It’s no wonder, though. When I heard about Kirarin and Terauchi I was, like, totally shocked. Which is why I thought I’d change my look and cut my hair. My boyfriend had nothing to do with it. I just thought I’d become the kind of shabby person I’d always made fun of.”

  “The world’s changed for you then?” I asked.

  “It has. Or at least the kind of guys who try to pick me up.” Haru raised her thin eyebrows as she smiled. “Guys who think I’m some weird creature are always trying to pick me up. At cram school it’s nuts. But it doesn’t matter—none of them are worth the time, anyway. Toshi, you haven’t been to cram school at all. Did you apply for the winter session?”

  Not sure how to respond, I stared off into space. Cram school. Entrance exams. Before all this happened those were all I could think about, worrying about how the exams were right around the corner. But now it seemed so far away.

  “I don’t know yet,” I replied.

  “Yeah, I hear you. You were pretty close to Kirarin and Terauchi, so it must have been a shock. Y’know, I never really liked Kirarin that much, to tell you the truth. She was kind of a Goody Two-shoes. She went out partying all the time, yet when she was with you guys she pretended to be all serious. I know I shouldn’t say this now that she’s dead, but her death didn’t hit me the way Terauchi’s did.”

  People’s deaths really do carry different importance for different people. Everybody pretty much had forgotten all about Worm’s mother, and for me, Kirarin’s death just made me sad. Sure, it hurt when I thought I wouldn’t ever see her again, when I remembered all the times she’d been nice to me, when she’d said something funny. Crying for her was like a conditioned reflex. But Terauchi’s death was totally different. Her suicide had a powerful effect on me—it hardened everything in my heart, and drained me. Left me dazed and confused. And I still haven’t figured out how to deal with it. It’s sad, for sure, but I don’t feel like I’m totally empty or anything, more like my mind’s a blank still trying to figure out what happened. It was like that hollow feeling had turned me dull. People were always giving me these weird looks and unwanted sympathy.

  “What’s happened to Yuzan?” Haru asked.

  After Terauchi’s funeral, Yuzan fell off the grid. Once she called from a bar in Shinjuku 2-chome and said she had a new girlfriend and wouldn’t be coming home anytime soon, and I wasn’t to worry if I didn’t see her for a while. She was apparently going to lean on her new lover and heal that way. It was also clear that Yuzan had decided to come out of the closet. After Terauchi’s funeral it became clear how much it had hurt Yuzan to learn that Terauchi’s final letter was written just to me.

  * * *

  “Toshi, is it true that Terauchi left a final letter?”

  Right after the funeral, Yuzan came over to me. She had on her school uniform skirt, which she wasn’t used to wearing. It was tucked up a bit. She looked bewildered. I was sure Yuzan liked Terauchi a lot, and the fact that Terauchi had died without saying a word to her clearly had shaken her. I couldn’t lie. You understand why, right? If I did lie, I’d have to make up some other plausible story, and the last thing I needed was another burden to carry around. Keeping Terauchi’s secret was enough of a burden, and it made me feel like I was going to collapse.

  “It’s true,” I said.

  I stared down at the floor of the funeral parlor, which reflected the bright light of the chandelier overhead. Kirarin’s funeral had been a private affair, but Terauchi’s was open and held at a brand-new funeral parlor. All of us—her parents’ relatives and in-laws, people from school, classmates—stood out in the courtyard, noisy with the shrill cry of cicadas, to see off her casket. I overheard one middle-aged lady complain that with suicides they usually held private, low-key funerals, but to me this kind of funeral fit Terauchi perfectly. An unexpected ending. If Terauchi were here she might have said this and laughed.

  “What did she write?” Yuzan asked.

  I quickly gave her the kind of perfunctory answer I’d given Terauchi’s mother. Yuzan bit her lip in frustration.

  “Really. So she didn’t say a thing about me?”

  “She didn’t write about anybody else. Just about her own personality.”

  “Then why’d she address it to you? And not her old lady?”

  Yuzan looked blank. I shook my head.

  “I have no idea. Nobody ever knew what was in Terauchi’s head.”

  “I wonder,” Yuzan said, and then was silent.

  But I think I understood her, Yuzan probably wanted to add. If Kirarin had lived she probably would have said the same thing as Yuzan. Terauchi might have tried to deceive us, but sometimes we liked her warped attitude and offbeat sense of humor. And sometimes we almost painfully felt these were our own.

  “Ah—this is so, so hard. Man—everybody’s gone.”

  Yuzan wiped her tears away with her palm like guys do. I’m still here, I wanted to say, but couldn’t. It was like Yuzan and I were saying good-bye, each of us on opposite shores with Terauchi’s letter standing between us.

  “I feel so lonely,” I said.

  “You shouldn’t, Toshi. You should be happy ’cause you still have your whole family and everything.”

  I felt pushed even further away from Yuzan. Was I really happy? I asked myself. This person to whom Terauchi’s final letter was entrusted? She’d written that she’d uncovered the darkness that lay within her. Terauchi should have uncovered the real me, too. But instead she said farewell. As I stood there vacantly, Yuzan tapped my shoulder.

  “About the cell phone, don’t worry about it. It was in my name, so you have nothing to do with it. I doubt the cops’ll ask you about it.”

  It was kind of strange. According to Worm’s dad, when he talked to us three days after Terauchi’s and Kirarin’s deaths, miraculously Worm had only external injuries, nothing internal. He could talk and was being interviewed by the police. Still, I’d heard nothing from them yet.

  “Well, see ya.”

  Yuzan duckwalked away, her summer school uniform looking uncomfortable on her. She had her usual backpack slung across her shoulder and I noticed a key holder attached to a zipper as I watched her walk away. The key holder had a purikura instant photo the four of us had taken when we were fooling around back in the holidays at the beginning of May.

  “Miss Yamanaka, I wonder if I could have a word with you.”

  In the shadows at the entrance to the funeral home the female detective was waiting for me. A little ways off to the side was her partner, the middle-aged man. The woman had on a wide-brimmed white hat and a scarf around her neck, perhaps to keep from getting sunb
urned. She’s just like Candy, I thought, and came to a halt, awaiting judgment.

  “I’m so sorry for all these shocking events that have happened to you, one after another. My apologizes for coming to see you at the funeral. Why don’t we go over there where it’s a bit cooler?”

  The two of them motioned me over to the shade beneath some trees in a small park next to the funeral home. The people who’d attended Terauchi’s funeral slipped past us, heads drooping.

  “I still can’t figure out what led to your neighbor and Miss Higashiyama getting together. Her parents said they have no idea, and the boy’s father said the same. Miss Higashiyama’s contact list didn’t contain your neighbor’s number at all.”