Another, Volume 1

by Yukito Ayatsuji

  Since she’d asked, I answered honestly.

  “I was in the culinary arts club.”

  I’d joined it with a touch of sarcasm intended for my father, who was happy to foist all the housework off on his only son. My cooking skill had gone up a couple levels thanks to that, but my father never showed any sign of noticing the results.

  “I-I-I don’t think North Yomi has anything like that,” Reiko answered, her eyes softening in a smile.

  “It’s only one year anyway. I don’t need to force myself to join something. Oh, but today someone asked me if I wanted to join the art club.”

  “Oh really?”

  “But I dunno after all…”

  “That’s just like you, Koichi.”

  Draining what remained of her beer, Reiko rested both of her elbows on the table and put both hands to her cheeks. Then she looked straight into my face and asked, “Do you like art?”

  “I dunno about like. I think it’s kind of interesting…”

  Reiko’s gaze felt like a blinding light. Unconsciously, I dipped my head slightly as I replied with exactly the feelings that came bubbling out of my heart.

  “But I’m not very good at drawing. More like just plain bad at it.”

  “Hm-m-m.”

  “But despite that I, uh—this is a secret, okay? No one knows yet. But I kind of want to go to college for something related to art, if I can.”

  “Wow, you do? That’s the first I’ve heard of it!”

  “I want to try sculpture or plastic arts or something along those lines.”

  My glass was filled with my grandmother’s specialty vegetable juice, which she had made for me. I took a timid sip of it, trying to be strong about the celery (which I despise) that she had mixed into it.

  “What do you think? Pretty harebrained, right?”

  I steeled myself. Reiko folded her arms over her chest and murmured again. “Hm-m-m.”

  Finally she said, “Some advice. First: Speaking from experience, parents usually refuse out of hand when their kids say they want to go to art school or a fine arts academy.”

  “…Not a surprise.”

  “I don’t know what your dad would do. Maybe he’s the type to tear into you if he finds out.”

  “I wouldn’t expect that, but he might.”

  “Second,” Reiko went on. “Even assuming you get into an art school or fine arts academy like you wanted, after you graduate you have shockingly few marketable job skills. Obviously some of that depends on how much talent you have, but the most important thing is luck, I think.”

  So that’s what it was. Already with the realism…

  “Third.”

  All right, already—I was ready to call it quits then and there. But Reiko’s last piece of advice was a tiny bit of salvation, offered with kindness softening her eyes again.

  “Despite that, if you really want to go for it, there’s no reason to be afraid. I think it’s very unbecoming to give up before you even try, whatever it is you’re doing.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah. That’s important to you, right? Whether you’re cool or not?”

  Reiko slowly rubbed her cheeks, which had flushed slightly with the effects of the alcohol, with both hands.

  “Of course, the issue is whether or not you think you’re cool.”

  6

  The next day—Friday, May 8—I didn’t see Mei Misaki all morning.

  I thought maybe she was out sick, but she hadn’t looked it yesterday at all…

  Could it be…? My mind had hit on one possibility.

  After we’d talked on the roof during gym class on Wednesday…

  If you’re on the roof and you hear the cawing of a crow, when you go back inside, you must enter with your left foot.

  That was the first of the “North Yomi fundamentals” that Reiko had taught me. If you disobeyed and went in with the wrong foot, you’d get hurt within a month.

  Whether or not Mei had heard the repeated cawing of the crows, she had gone in by her right foot. So…could it be that she’d been badly hurt because of that? Get real.

  The fact that I was thinking these things half seriously, honestly worried, seemed utterly laughable when I stopped and took a levelheaded look at myself.

  No way, I thought. There was no way. And yet, in the end, I couldn’t bring myself to ask anyone why she was absent, either.

  7

  I never experienced this at the private K*** Middle School, but in public school, the second and fourth Saturdays were basically days off. There were apparently places where they allotted “hands-on studies” outside school to those days, but North Yomi didn’t massage the system like that at all. It was up to the students how they would spend their increased free time.

  And so the Saturday of the 9th, there was no school. I didn’t need to get up early, either—or I wouldn’t have, except I had to go to Yumigaoka Municipal Hospital today. I’d made a morning appointment for a checkup to see how my condition was progressing.

  Of course, my grandmother had volunteered to go with me to the hospital; but when the time came, she wound up backing out. My grandfather, Ryohei, had developed a sudden fever that morning and had to stay in bed.

  It didn’t sound like anything terribly serious, but he was an old man whose behavior showed more than a little cause for day-to-day concern anyway. I realized that he probably couldn’t be left alone in the house, and I reassured my grandmother, “Don’t worry about it, I’ll be fine.”

  “You will? Well, thank you, then.”

  Just as I’d thought, she didn’t fight it this time.

  “You be careful and come straight home. If you start to feel bad, you go right ahead and take a taxi home.”

  “Okay, Grandma, I got it.”

  “I don’t want you pushing yourself.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Do you have enough money?”

  “Yes, Grandma, right here.”

  We happened to be having this conversation near the porch on the first floor, so Ray the mynah bird overheard and cried out cheerily, “Why? Why?” in her shrill voice, ushering me out of the house.

  “Why?…Cheer up. Cheer.”

  8

  “Good, good,” the lead physician murmured, nodding, after he’d scrutinized the images of my lungs lined up on the X-ray illuminator. He was a man just beginning to enter old age, and he issued his opinion with a breezy tone. “Everything looks clear. Excellent. No issues at all.

  “Even so, exerting yourself is still out of the question. I’d say, let’s take another look in one or two weeks and if there are no changes, you should be okay for gym class.”

  “Thank you.”

  I bowed humbly, but I couldn’t help feeling a slight anxiety inside. Last fall, I’d had an outpatient checkup like this shortly after I was released from the hospital. I’d gotten the same go-ahead then, too…

  But of course, no matter how much I worried about stuff like that going forward, it wouldn’t change anything. “You should be out of the woods now, too.” I should just go ahead and trust the optimistic view of a survivor…Yeah. That was best.

  The outpatient ward at municipal hospitals is always horribly crowded, no matter where it is. By the time my checkup was over and I’d finished paying at the window, lunchtime was already long gone. As a now–mostly healthy fifteen-year-old boy, I felt my hunger begin to torment me, but I wasn’t thrilled at the idea of the hospital cafeteria. I’ll just find a hamburger place or some doughnuts on my way home. I had left the hospital and was heading for the bus stop when all at once I reconsidered.

  I was visiting the hospital for the first time in ten days, and thankfully (though she’d probably get mad at me for saying it) my grandmother wasn’t with me. I had nothing better to do, so it would be stupid not to act somehow, even in the smallest way. This was a far more important issue than my current hunger, wasn’t it? Yes, it was.

  I decided to go back into the hospital. And I headed f
or the place that had served as the main stage for my life at the end of last month: the inpatient ward.

  “What’s this? How’s it going, Horror Boy?”

  I’d taken the elevator up to the fourth floor and was just swinging by the window at the nurse’s station when I ran into a nurse I recognized, just then coming out into the hall. Skinny and tall, her large, bugging eyes giving her an unbalanced look…It was Ms. Mizuno.

  She had told me that she’d just gotten her full qualifications as a nurse last year. It hadn’t been long since she started working there, but she was probably the hospital worker I’d talked to the most during my ten days there. Ms. Sanae Mizuno.

  “Oh, hello.”

  Ask and you shall receive—it wasn’t quite as grand as all that, but this chance encounter right at this moment was something I had hoped and prayed for.

  “What’s wrong? It’s Sakakibara…Koichi, right? Your chest didn’t get messed up again, did it?”

  “No, no, it’s nothing like that.” I quickly shook my head. “I came for an outpatient checkup today. No issues, they said.”

  “Oh. But then what are you doing up here?”

  “Because, um, I wanted to see you.”

  I realized that sounded kind of inappropriate even as I said it.

  Ms. Mizuno instantly came back with a theatrical reaction. “Well, I’m flattered! I thought maybe you’d be lonely at your new school if you didn’t find some cronies to talk horror with…but you’re not, are you? How is it?”

  “It’s…Well, the truth is, I wanted to ask you something.”

  The thing that had first brought us to such friendly terms was the Stephen King novel I’d been reading while I was hospitalized. Her eyes had landed on the title.

  “Is this all you read?” she’d asked me.

  “Not all, no.”

  Her expression was that of a person witnessing something abnormal, so I was going to respond even more curtly, but then—

  “So what else do you read then?” she asked next.

  I blurted out, “Uh…Koontz, I guess.”

  That made her chortle and fold her arms over her chest like an old man. She looked as though she was holding back a fit of laughter. That was when she’d given me the nickname “Horror Boy.”

  “It’s pretty unusual for someone who’s hospitalized to read things like that.”

  “Is it?”

  “After all, people usually want to avoid being scared or in pain, no? And when they’re sick or hurt, they actually are scared and in pain.”

  “I guess. But I mean, it’s only a story in a book, so I don’t really…”

  “Yup. You’re totally right. I’m impressed, Horror Boy.”

  What became clear almost instantly was that she, too, was actually pretty into “things like that” herself. Asian or Western, modern or classic, she would read the novels and watch the movies. Apparently she was feeling pretty lonely herself since she didn’t have any “cronies to talk horror with” at her job. And so up until the day I was discharged, she would tell me the works she recommended by authors I had never read, like John Saul and Michael Slade.

  But I digress.

  I had told Ms. Mizuno, “I wanted to ask you something,” promising myself I would have some other chance to discuss our common interest.

  “On April twenty-seventh—that was Monday of last week. Did a girl die at this hospital that day?”

  9

  “On April twenty-seventh?”

  She obviously thought it was a strange question. Ms. Mizuno blinked her goggling eyes.

  “Last week, Monday, eh? You were still here then, weren’t you?”

  “Yeah. That was the day they took the drain out.”

  “And what’s this about, all of a sudden?”

  It was a natural question to turn back on me. But I wasn’t confident that I could explain the situation in detail without trampling on the nuances.

  “I just…something’s been nagging at me.”

  So I offered an ambiguous response.

  That day—around noon last Monday, chance brought me to my first encounter with Mei Misaki in the hospital elevator. She’d gotten off at the second basement level. Where there are no patient rooms or exam rooms. The only thing down there besides storage rooms and the machine room is the memorial chapel.

  …The memorial chapel.

  I think the distinctive image of that place had kept nagging at me ever since. So, extrapolating from what I knew, I had asked Ms. Mizuno the question I did.

  Let’s assume the memorial chapel is where Mei was going that day. People usually don’t go to an empty memorial chapel. Rationally, the body of someone who’d died in the hospital that day must have been resting there. Wasn’t that the explanation?

  Why did I think it was a girl who’d died?

  This, too, was a grasping extrapolation, based on the riddle Mei had spoken that day (half my body, the poor thing…).

  “Sounds like there’s something complicated going on.”

  Ms. Mizuno puffed out one of her cheeks and squinted into my face.

  “I’m not going to order you to give me the details, but…let me think.”

  “Do you have any ideas?”

  “As far as the patients I’m in charge of, anyway, there weren’t any girls who died. But I don’t know about in the whole ward.”

  “Well, there’s something else, too…”

  I decided to change my question.

  “Did you see a girl wearing a school uniform in the inpatient ward that day?”

  “Wha-a-at? Another girl?”

  “It would be a middle school uniform. A navy blue blazer. She has short hair and an eye patch over her left eye.”

  “An eye patch?” Ms. Mizuno cocked her head. “An ophthalmology patient? Oh, wait. Hold on a second.”

  “Did you see her?”

  “Not that. The thing about any girls passing away that day.”

  “Yeah?!”

  “Hm-m-m. Let me see-e-e…” As she murmured, Ms. Mizuno began tapping the middle finger of her right hand against her temple. “…I think there might have been one.”

  “Really?”

  “I think so, but I only heard about it in passing.”

  She moved us to the sparsely populated lounge, rather than standing in the hallway of the ward with all its traffic from patients and their families and doctors and nurses. She was probably making the point that if we kept standing around talking out in the hall, there might be problems.

  “I’m not totally sure, but you said it was last Monday…I think it was around then,” Ms. Mizuno said, keeping her voice pretty low. “Was it a girl? I remember some talk about a young patient who’d been hospitalized here for a while who suddenly passed away.”

  “Do you know the person’s name?”

  My heart was pounding harder than I liked. At the same time, I don’t know why, but I couldn’t keep a shudder from running through my whole body.

  “Do you know their name, or what they were sick with, or any details?”

  After hesitating for a moment, Ms. Mizuno stole a glance around and then lowered her voice even more. “Why don’t I see what I can find out?”

  “You won’t get in trouble?”

  “If I just ask around, it shouldn’t be too hard. You had a cell phone, didn’t you?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Give me the number.”

  She gave the order briskly, pulling her own phone out of a pocket in her smock.

  “I’ll let you know when I find out anything.”

  “Really? You won’t get in trouble?”

  “For an old horror buddy. You came all the way up here; you must have some reason for it,” the novice nurse who liked horror novels said, a teasing look in her bulging eyes. “In exchange, you have to tell me why you want to know sometime. Okay, Horror Boy?”

  10

  BLUE EYES EMPTY TO ALL,

  IN THE TWILIGHT OF YOMI.

  It was we
ll before twilight began to fall in the city of Yomiyama when I found this eccentric sign board.

  I was on my way home from Yumigaoka.

  I’d gotten off the bus at a place called Akatsuki, located at the halfway point between the hospital and my grandparents’ house (as I figured it, using the half-formed map in my mind). I had addressed my hunger at a fast-food place I saw there, then walked around the modest downtown nearby. Despite it being a Saturday afternoon, the town was almost empty and, as I wandered the streets, I recognized the faces of none of the people I passed, naturally enough. No one spoke to me and I spoke to no one, and nothing particularly drew my interest. I moved away from the downtown, and away from the bus route, down a narrow alleyway, and came upon an area with a bunch of really nice houses, then came out the other side of that, too, in the end…I didn’t have a particular motivation in mind. I was just walking wherever the spirit took me.

  And if I got lost, well, things would work themselves out.

  That’s the spirit I’d gone into my excursion with. Such is the strength of a boy who’d lived for fifteen years in Tokyo without a mother, perhaps.

  I realized that today was the third week since I’d come to Yomiyama and it was the first time I’d spent any time with this much freedom—unconcerned about the looks of others. If I didn’t get back home before nightfall, I knew my grandmother would be incredibly worried, but she would probably call my cell phone when that happened.

  Freedom was finally mine to savor!

  —is not how I felt, at all. Truly, all I wanted was to go aimlessly around the town on foot, by myself. That was it.

  It was just past three in the afternoon…and yet the world seemed strangely washed out. I felt no sign that it was about to start raining, and yet unseasonably dark clouds were piled high overhead. All at once, I got the idea that they were a reflection of my own state of mind…

  Only moments before, I had seen a sign with the town’s name, “Misaki,” on a utility pole.

  Another “Misaki,” huh? Different characters, but…