by Otsuichi
He continued, “We can just leave Satsuki here for now. Nobody bothers with the fields when they’re dry.”
During field-drying time, no one came to tend the fields. The flow of the water wasn’t restricted at the site of each field, but rather controlled at one location higher upstream. That way the water could be stopped for all of the fields simultaneously.
“So let’s just go home,” Ken said. “We’ll come get her after the fireworks are done tomorrow. Or maybe even the day after. We’ll have plenty of time.”
They moved me even deeper into the field where I would be less likely to be seen and started to walk back home. They didn’t have a light, and Yayoi had to struggle to make the long walk back in the darkness.
But soon, from the east, the sky began to slowly brighten. The light looked like it was shining into a deep blue sea and lighting the way back to their home.
“Wow . . .” Yayoi said with heartfelt awe. It was the first time in her life she had seen a sunrise.
Not two hours had passed since they had left their house with me. As the sun reddened the morning sky, the path they had left to walk grew shorter and shorter.
DAY FOUR
The next morning passed uneventfully, as if the events of the past few days had never happened.
Ken and Yayoi had gone back to their room to get what little sleep they could before their mother came to wake them. Then, just like any other day, the two children left for the morning exercises. They walked along the road they had carried me down hours before, passing by the field I was hidden in with feigned indifference. The funny thing about Ken was that when he pretended not to care about something, he started to actually feel apathetic toward it. Yayoi was gripping his shirt as she walked alongside him.
After the radio exercises, Ken said to his sister, “You can go on home. You won’t have anything to do here, anyway.”
On a normal day, they would get their booklets stamped and go home together, but today was different. The older boys were to stay at the shrine to get ready for that night’s fireworks show. The preparations were fairly simple—taking the wooden benches and the collection box from their resting places in the storeroom and making sure all the fireworks they had bought were in order.
“No, I’ll stay here,” Yayoi said, smiling at her brother. “It shouldn’t take very long, and I can wait.”
She followed her brother as he walked around the shrine looking for the storeroom key. Two radio exercise attendance booklets dangled from a string around her neck.
Ken approached a group of the elderly gateball players who had gathered by a corner of the shrine. Yayoi stood behind him, hiding herself.
“Excuse me,” Ken said in a raised voice. “Could I borrow the key to the storeroom?”
“For the fireworks show, is it?” a relatively athletic senior replied. “I had almost forgotten.”
He nodded to Ken and said to the man standing beside him, “You’ve got the key, Tanaka, don’t you? Give it to the kid.”
Yayoi peeked out from behind Ken. When she saw the face of Mr. Tanaka, she snapped back behind her brother and buried her face in his back.
The man named Tanaka, with gray hair and thick eyebrows, had almost seen the two kids early that morning. It was Old Man Thunder. But the old man showed no sign of recognition.
“Yeah, yeah, I’ve got the key,” he said. “We might as well put away the gateball equipment while we’re at it. Help me out, Kobayashi, will ya?”
“Sure,” the able-bodied senior replied. “That’s it for today, everyone.”
The rest of the elderly left with their gateball sticks, while Old Man Thunder and Kobayashi, carrying the U-shaped gates for the gateball game, went with the children. The seniors kept the gates in the storeroom, taking them out each morning for their practice games.
Ken hadn’t reacted when confronted with Old Man Thunder, but Yayoi was visibly nervous. She clutched at the back of her brother’s shirt and kept him directly between her and the old man as they walked.
“Aren’t you the Tachibana boy?” Old Man Thunder asked. “I forgot your name.”
“Ken. And this is Yayoi. Say hello, Yayoi.”
At her brother’s insistence, Yayoi bowed to the two men, her eyes pressed shut as if she expected her head to be bitten off.
The two older men smiled at her, but quickly their faces darkened.
Kobayashi looked at Yayoi and asked, “Were you friends with the girl who went missing the other day?”
She shrank inward and nodded dejectedly. Her reaction was that of fear and unease, but the two men didn’t read it that way.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Kobayashi apologized. “I shouldn’t have brought it up. But you need to be careful now, we wouldn’t want you to be kidnapped yourself.” He looked at Ken. “Take care of your sister, young man.”
“Yes, sir!” Ken answered boldly, and the two men nodded in approval. Yayoi knew he was putting on a show for the seniors, but that didn’t stop her from feeling a little happy to hear the words. Neither did it stop her cheeks from turning a bright red.
The four of them stood in front of the storeroom door, which looked to be the only sturdy part of the structure. The door was made of metal and looked extremely heavy. Old Man Thunder set his armful of gates on the ground and removed the key ring from his waist. He inserted a key marked STOREROOM into the lock and turned it.
“There, the lock’s open,” he said.
Ken tried to move the door with all his strength, but it wouldn’t budge.
“What’s wrong?” Ken asked the two men. “I can’t get it to move.”
Kobayashi answered, “Sometimes this door can be a bit stubborn. It worked fine when we got everything out this morning, though. The pulley might be jammed. I told them to come take a look at it, you know.”
Kobayashi set down the gates he had been holding and joined Ken at the door. Yayoi and Old Man Thunder stepped up to help too. But even with all four of them pulling together the door only jiggled in place. It looked like they’d need a little more strength to open the door.
A voice called out to the struggling, red-faced foursome. “Hey, there! What’s wrong? You guys seem to be having trouble!”
It was Midori. She was in jeans, strolling over to them a little more leisurely than they would have liked.
“Help us out,” Ken said to Midori, who had stopped to watch. “You’re right, we are having trouble here.”
“You’re getting ready for the fireworks show, are you? Keep up the good work, and all that.” She laughed. “Since you’re trying so hard, I suppose I can help you out. You’d better thank me.”
She joined them at the door, and with her added strength, the gate screeched its way open.
Ken whispered. “You’re crazy strong, Midori.”
She gave him a pat on the head and strutted into the storeroom. The others followed.
The room was dark and humid and reeked of straw. Haphazardly piled inside the large room were farming implements including hoes and spades, cardboard boxes with contents unknown, bits of lumber, and countless other objects. Motes of dust drifted through the sunlight shining in through the open door like microbes floating in the deep sea.
“There’s all kinds of things in here,” Yayoi whispered with genuine interest, looking all around the room.
Kobayashi set down his pile of gates, their blue paint peeling here and there, in a corner of the room and said to Old Man Thunder, “Tanaka, while we’re in here, we might as well replace that old pulley on the door.”
Without waiting for a response, he pulled a wooden box down from the top of one of the piles of stuff.
Inside the box were several unused, shiny dark gray pulleys. They were very large, each with a hole near the top for metal fittings to pass through. The two men gathered the box of pulleys and a selection of tools and went to the door to take it down and repair the pulley.
Ken, leaving them to their work, went to retrieve the wooden colle
ction box from the rear of the storeroom. The box was small and used only during public events such as the fireworks show that evening, but it was still too heavy for Ken to lift by himself.
“I’ll help you,” Midori offered. “Really, whatever would you do without me?”
Midori and Ken dragged the box to the middle of the room. They stood at opposite ends of the box and lifted it up to carry it outside. Since there wasn’t enough room for Yayoi to help carry it, she just walked alongside her brother, watching him and Midori with an uneasy boredom.
As the three passed through the storeroom door, they thanked Old Man Thunder for his help. He responded with a yell, “Hey! Careful, we’re taking the door down here!”
The kids carried the box over toward the wooden shrine. Setting it in place was Ken’s only task for the morning. After that he’d say goodbye to the older boys and would be free to go home.
“So when are you two coming to the fireworks?” Midori asked. “You are coming, right?”
They both nodded. They intended to forget about me during the fireworks show. Besides, they certainly couldn’t move me to the stone foundation during the event. It would be too risky with all the potential witnesses around. I was safely hidden in the rice fields, and they could take one evening and not think of me.
“Well, then I guess I’ll come too,” Midori said. “Did you hear? The other kids are doing something interesting this year.”
Yayoi asked, “What do you mean, interesting?”
“They’re taking some string, and they’re running it all along some of the fireworks they bought, so they’ll all light up at once. They’re calling it Niagara Falls.” Midori laughed. Her face was radiant, like a sunflower in the morning light.
Yayoi’s eyes lit up. “Really? Really?” She pictured it in her mind. All the beautiful sparkling flower petals of light bursting into bloom in unison, then the dazzling waterfall cascading back down, powerful, fantastic, and fleeting.
“Really,” Midori said. “So don’t be late.”
Yayoi gave several enthusiastic nods.
Midori said, “You’d better stop that before you make your eyes spin!”
Yayoi was elated. She had been so depressed lately that I’d forgotten what she looked like happy. If I were to compare her expression to a season, it would be summer.
Midori looked down at Yayoi, her eyes a mixture of happiness and pity.
Ken, still carrying one end of the collection box, was listening to their conversation, prepared to answer Midori quickly if she asked him a question, but his thoughts were elsewhere.
And as they set the box down on the wooden steps of the shrine, he thought, How are we going to lift Satsuki up to the top of the old foundation?
“Ken, you should come too,” Midori said. “It’s not summer without fireworks. And you might even get to see me wearing a yukata.”
He gave her a bashful smile as he gazed over at the stone foundation across the shrine grounds.
Ken had been putting the problem off until later, but looking at the old foundation again, he realized it was a long way up to carry my body.
But he had no other choice. He couldn’t think of a safer place to hide a corpse.
Having completed his duty, Ken climbed the stones of the old foundation to report to the older boys. One of the boys gave him permission to go home, adding, “Don’t be late. We’re not going to wait for you.”
Ken took a moment to look around before going home with Yayoi. On top of the structure was a wooden board the boys used to cover up the hole and keep anyone from falling in. One of the boys shifted it aside and tossed in a candy wrapper with the words BIG KATSU written on it. I wondered if I would soon be thrown in there the same way.
Ken looked up. A wide tree branch jutted out above the stones, blocking the sunlight and keeping the top in cool shade.
*
Ken walked in the front door. His mother was lying on the floor of the living room watching TV.
“Mother, you’ve been saving all that string, haven’t you? Where do you keep it?”
“The string? What on earth do you need string for?”
“That string on the light in our bedroom broke. I need a new one, so where is it?”
His mother, somewhat irritated at the disturbance, stood up and walked into the storage room. After a short time she returned, holding a round metal cookie tin with the word Tyrolean written in cursive lettering across the top. In the Tachibana household, the cookie tins of that brand were well known as Mother’s sewing boxes. One time, Midori brought over a box of Tyroleans, and Yayoi took one look at it and said dejectedly, “What, another sewing box?”
“Here, you can pick one of these,” said Mrs. Tachibana, proudly displaying the tin. “Just leave the box here when you’re done. See, I told you these would come in handy one day.”
“Yeah, one day in how many years? That’s some ratio.”
Ken’s mother, appalled, said flatly, “You’re still in fifth grade, right? And you’ve already learned ratios?”
“Well, I’d better take this up to our room. If I chose one without Yayoi, she’d get mad at me.”
Without waiting for a reply, Ken took the tin and started walking back to his room. Judging from its weight, there must have been quite a lot of string inside. He opened it and took out a handful of the sturdy string, used at stores to bundle up purchases, that had been sitting unused for years. As he walked, he idly played with the string in his hand, and thought.
With all this string, I should be able to lift Satsuki up somehow . . .
He would move me the next day. That would give him plenty of time to test out his rig.
Ken’s grandmother and grandfather waved at him from their room. He stopped and asked what they wanted.
“Ken,” said his grandfather, “the fireworks are tonight, aren’t they?”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe we should go.” He turned to his wife. “Don’t you think, dear?”
That seemed to be all they wanted to ask of him, so Ken said, “Yeah, you should both come. It’ll be fun,” and headed for his room.
Behind him, Ken heard them talking.
“That’s right,” his grandmother said. “It’s tonight, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. We’ll check on it in the morning.”
“Okay, dear.”
“It’s always right around the fireworks show when they turn on the water. It’ll take a while for it to reach our fields though.”
Ken pondered the new dilemma as he walked into his room. It seemed like he wouldn’t be able to relax and enjoy the fireworks this year.
Our time together was almost over. Just one more night.
*
As the world turned the color of night, Ken held Yayoi’s hand and ran down the gravel road toward the field where they had left me early that morning.
The fireworks show was about to start, and there was little time left before the fields would fill with water. Once they collected my body and took it to the hole in the old foundation, it would all be over.
“Hurry, Yayoi!” Ken yelled. A black backpack hung from his back, jolting from side to side with each step. Yayoi didn’t know what all was inside the bag, aside from the pieces of string tied into a decent length. The two had spent the afternoon in their room tying all of the string in the cookie tin into one long piece. The work had taken a long time—too long, perhaps—and now the kids had to rush.
The water coming into the fields and soaking me wouldn’t be fatal to Ken’s plan, but they did have reason to keep me from being submerged in the water.
Fireworks sounded from the shrine in the distance and burst high above in the sky.
“Brother, it was around here. Satsuki has to be around here somewhere.”
“Yeah . . .”
Ken and Yayoi stood on the gravel road, looking in my direction. But they couldn’t remember exactly where they had left me.
The two children were holding flashlights.
Yayoi had been worried about running into trouble as they had so early that morning, but Ken told her it would be fine. Even if somebody spotted them, they would just say they were on their way to see the fireworks, and nobody would doubt them.
Yayoi said to herself, distressed, “Maybe it was a little up ahead.”
Ken, appearing similarly agitated, surveyed the field. “I forgot where we left her.”
Neither one was looking my way.
Above the shrine, the sky shone in faint colors as fireworks began to spray fountains of light.
“Come on, Yayoi,” Ken said, walking into the field. “We need to go look for Satsuki.”
She followed after him.
The field was quite large, and even more so for two children. They split up and moved methodically through the area, keeping their flashlights pointed down at the ground as they pushed through the green rice.
But it wasn’t easy to find me. Several times they unknowingly walked right past my corpse.
Yayoi’s panicked voice cried out to her brother. “Ken! The water’s coming!”
Her shoes were wet and half covered with mud. The ground beneath me was still dry, but the water was spreading.
“We have to find her, Yayoi!” he called back to her. “If we start getting bogged down in the mud, it’ll only be harder!”
The night was filled with darkness, and the deep green fields were thick with rice plants fed by the summer sun, plenty tall enough to hide a child. The rice blocked Yayoi’s view and encircled her as if preventing her escape.
Between that oppressive feeling and the sensation of her feet sinking into the wet earth, the girl was terrified. With a trembling, almost wailing voice, she cried out.
“Brother!”
She sprinted to Ken to embrace him, if only to keep herself from shaking.
Water spread underneath my cold back. In minutes I would be half buried in mud.
Yayoi ran like she was fleeing from a wild beast. Deep in her heart, she felt she could see the shadow of the monster that chased her.
Ken had aimed his flashlight at her and watched her run, unsure of how to react.
