Book Girl and the Wayfarer's Lamentation

by Mizuki Nomura

  The convenience store.

  The bookstore.

  And actually…when the deadline for the new author prize was approaching at the close of my second year in middle school, I spotted Miu at a discount store near my house.

  For some reason, she was staring at the shelves of men’s hair care products with a cold look on her face.

  What was she doing over there? Was it for someone in her family?

  I started to call out to her, but she spun around and walked farther inside.

  When I asked her about it the next day, she looked shaken, and her face twisted before she laughed and answered, “I dunno. Maybe you mistook someone else for me.”

  When I said it wasn’t a mistake, that it was her, she glared at me in irritation and harshly asked, “Can’t you tell the difference between me and other girls, Konoha?” so I’d hastily apologized.

  Hadn’t Miu been acting strangely ever since then?

  It became common for her to say, “I want to focus on my entry,” and get up from her seat early, when until then, we had stayed at the library until it closed.

  Deep in my heart, I had felt terribly sad about that, but since the deadline for the prize was the beginning of the new year, I gave into it as inevitable. I’d thought that Miu zoning out in class and her bloodshot eyes were because she was staying up late every night working on her story.

  The day before the deadline, when she’d dropped a brown envelope with her application materials into the mail, Miu finally turned around with a sunny smile.

  Thinking about it now, those really were subtle changes, and after she finished her entry, Miu smiled a lot and liked to tease me, and we stayed late at the library every day until spring came, just like before.

  But if I thought about it carefully, something had already changed.

  And so had I—

  It was early April when I received the phone call from the publisher that my story had been chosen for the grand prize.

  In the midst of my anxiety over the crazy situation and feeling disoriented, sure that there must have been some mistake, I started the work of revising for publication, as directed by my editor. I was told not to write by hand, but to use a word processor instead, and every day I typed the manuscript I’d written into the computer.

  The plans for publication were already set, and there were announcements in magazines saying “History-Making Prizewinner on Sale!” while the name and title were still totally under wraps.

  About the time I learned how to touch-type, we were changing from winter to summer uniforms.

  Then at the end of May, it was announced everywhere that the winner of the grand prize was a fourteen-year-old middle schooler, and two weeks later, Miu Inoue’s debut work went on sale.

  For two months, it was all I could do to handle the problems before me, and I had no time to worry about how Miu was changing. Plus, since I was keeping it a secret from Miu, I was actually grateful that she was busy, and we had less time to spend together.

  During the space of those two months that we’d distanced ourselves from each other—no, maybe even before that—while I was writing my entry, maybe something had happened to Miu.

  What was it about Miu that I had overlooked?

  Would I be able to figure out what Campanella wished for—?

  When it seemed like I would be swallowed up in a muddy anxiety, there was the soft sound of a footstep on the other side of the door.

  Tohko hadn’t actually come to school, had she? If so, I was in trouble!

  I didn’t want her to see my puffy face and didn’t want to reveal any more wretchedness than I already had, so I did something stupid and impulsively hid myself behind the curtains.

  I was so rushed that I didn’t think of the fact that I wouldn’t be able to hide there forever. My chest burned, my mind was in chaos, and I grew more cowardly.

  I held my breath and listened intently to the sounds coming from the other side of the door.

  The door opened quietly, and I sensed someone come in.

  The sound of a chair being pulled out, the softer sound of the edge of the chair hitting a desk.

  As I felt sweat beading up on the palms of my hands I slyly peeked out at the room through a gap in the curtains.

  It wasn’t Tohko who sat beside the desk in a fold-up chair with her back turned to me; it was a petite girl with billowing hair cut straight across, just above her shoulders.

  Takeda…?

  Had she come to see Tohko? Or was she waiting for me?

  Takeda held her bag on her lap, never budging.

  Her slight back faced me and was held rigid.

  She’s acting weird, no…?

  Just as I thought that, Takeda opened her bag and pulled something out of it.

  I realized the glinting object was a box cutter, and a chill rose up my spine all at once.

  Takeda! What are you planning to do?!

  She pushed the blade out farther, cla-click, and the sound made the air tremble. I threw the curtains open in a daze.

  “Takeda!!”

  Only Takeda’s upper body twisted around. Her expression was not that of an innocent puppy.

  It was the vacant expression of a doll, all emotion fallen away from it.

  The real Chia Takeda, usually hidden beneath a mask, was staring at me with eyes like glass beads.

  “Konoha.”

  A low, detached voice.

  “That’s cheating…to come bursting out of hiding like that,” she said.

  I saw a red line running across the palm of her left hand, the blood swelling up in it, and my voice shook.

  “What are you doing, Takeda? Did you…cut your hand? Why?”

  “I was checking…how much it would hurt to die. Whether I would feel pain like I’m supposed to…”

  A jolt went through my entire body, as if cold water had been dumped over my head.

  Takeda looked down at the blood flowing from her palm with vacant eyes. Then she slowly looked back up, and she resumed the innocent and cheerful mask of Chia Takeda and smiled.

  “It’s fine. I won’t actually die or anything.”

  The combination of those words with her perfect, unmarred smile sent another chill running down my spine.

  “I mean, I could never die here. It would cause so many problems for all of you. So when I get the urge to die, I come here and see what it’s like to commit suicide. When I do that, I think, Not here. You can’t die. No…No…, and I can stop myself.”

  “This isn’t the first time?! You’ve done this before…?”

  Her fresh smile locked in place, Takeda answered, “I’m a repeat offender.”

  “I’m not having fun.”

  The words Takeda had once murmured when we were alone played again in my ears; the lifeless expression like a doll’s that had come over her face then was overlaid on the girl smiling in front of me now.

  “I’m only pretending to. Because I don’t want to destroy the mood.”

  I felt as if my beating heart had been pierced.

  The smile disappeared from Takeda’s face like a wave pulling inexorably away from shore.

  “…Lately, I’ve…been playing around a little too much.

  “Someone asked me to go out with them.

  “I was sure they were joking, so I went ahead with something that was a lot like a date…and I laughed like I was enjoying myself in order to follow their lead.

  “While I was doing that…I managed to think, Maybe this is okay…

  “Maybe I’ll be able to keep pretending that I’m an ordinary girl…

  “But when I was alone, I became empty like a pitch-black hole suddenly opened inside my heart, and I started to feel like I was totally alone.

  “I thought, Ah…nothing’s really changed after all…This is how it’s going to be…

  “I might feel this way again tens of thousands of times…

  “It might be better to just die…”

  “You can’t thin
k like that!”

  I ran over to Takeda and gripped the hand holding the box cutter in both of my own.

  I bent my head, tensed my trembling fingers, and murmured, “Please…don’t say such sad things.”

  I could feel my chest being crushed.

  Takeda’s hand was cold and stiff. It trembled almost imperceptibly.

  “But, Konoha…I’ve been trying to hide the part of myself that shames me and put on the face of a normal girl. I’ve been smiling as hard as I can, despite the shaking. I’ve tried to be able to smile. Even so—yesterday that boy told me something.”

  Takeda’s voice was calmed by a fierce terror, as if she were forcing herself not to scream.

  “He said, ‘You’re a great actress.’ And, ‘How long are you going to keep up that fake smile?’”

  The shock Takeda had felt came through in her trembling voice and fingers.

  When I looked up, Takeda’s face was as white as a sheet of paper. Her eyes were wide with despair, and her lips quivered.

  “Who said those things to you?”

  Painfully, as if forcing it out, Takeda murmured, “Tohko’s…little brother.”

  Ryuto?!

  “Yeah, I said that. That we should go out. I mean, she was totally my type and all,” Ryuto said, the straw for his soda hanging in his mouth and a blasé look on his face.

  After I’d taken Takeda home, I called Ryuto on my cell phone and told him I wanted to see him right away.

  “Sure thing. Where’re you at?” Ryuto replied easily, and he’d come to the fast-food restaurant where we had agreed to meet.

  As soon as he saw me, Ryuto said, “What’s that bruise? Makes you look so manly.”

  I deflected just enough to ask about Takeda, and he readily confirmed it.

  “When you came over to my house before, I came to talk to you ’cos there was a girl I wanted to dump.”

  He had done that. But there was no way I could have known that he was talking about Takeda. On the surface, Takeda was cheerful and healthy and pretty far removed from what Ryuto liked.

  But still he’d seen through to her hidden face? Through the mask that Takeda worked so hard to create in order to hide her true nature?

  Ryuto took the straw out of his mouth and grinned.

  “You know what I like. I love the ones who are totally broken somehow and dangerous.”

  Amemiya, a girl Ryuto had dated before, was like that.

  She, too, had stood precariously on the boundary between normal and abnormal; unable to eat anything, she’d wandered through the school at night with a starved spirit.

  “At the Christmas party, Chee was supersmiley and opened up to people she’d just met and was runnin’ all over the place, all high energy, remember? But there was somethin’ off there, and I realized she was pretendin’ to have fun to be like everyone else.

  “There’s tons of people doin’ the same thing Chee does. You put on a smile out of social convention, too, right, Konoha? And even if I thought she was actin’, we don’t usually point that stuff out. We usually let it slide. But in Chee’s case, the disguise she wore was so extraordinary and practiced—I was impressed. So just as she was leavin’, I struck up a conversation, and we went to look at the ocean together.”

  “…You had so many girlfriends at that party, they were fighting over who was going home with you, as I recall.”

  My voice had grown harsh all on its own.

  Ryuto paid no attention and went on with his story.

  “Well, I’m used to that. I gave ’em some good lines. But then, even at the ocean, Chee kept on wearin’ her mask and actin’ excitable. When dawn came and the sun started to rise over the horizon or whatever, we were watchin’ it, sittin’ next to each other in the perfect position—she let her guard down, I guess. I glanced over at her, and she was lookin’ out at the water with no expression on her face, like a Noh mask.”

  There was a fire in Ryuto’s eyes, and an innocent excitement mixed into his voice.

  “Her emotionless eyes—they sent a thrill through me! I’ve got a good one here, I thought.”

  My head was burning with rage.

  “And so you asked Takeda out on a date? Even though you were going out with other people? I know you might enjoy it when girls hate you or get jealous of you, and you’ll cheat on as many girls as you can for fun. But Takeda’s not a girl you can casually go out with as a joke.”

  Ryuto fixed me with a firm gaze, and the corners of his mouth lifted slightly.

  “I got that. That’s why I asked how long she was gonna keep up that fake smile. I want her to show me that face I saw at the ocean even more.”

  “But it upset Takeda pretty badly when you said that to her.”

  The corners of his mouth went up even farther.

  “I bet. ’Cos her mask got knocked off, and she had a face as cold as ice. But right after that, she threw her mask back on, smiled as hard as she ever had, puffed out her chest, and said, ‘Good job noticin’. ’ That made me fall for her even worse.”

  I couldn’t believe how irritated I was at the shallow tone he used to play things up with.

  “She tried to slit her wrists, you know!” I said, leaning forward, and Ryuto’s face became a little more serious, and he shrugged.

  “Chee is…nervous. About givin’ the perfect performance and foolin’ the world. And to make things worse, she feels a huge sense of guilt about it. She’s scared stiff about what’ll happen if people find out. But even so she’s constantly conflicted about whether people will forgive her for keepin’ up the lie of who she is, and it wipes her out. So she’s probably leanin’ toward wantin’ to die, wantin’ to end it all, wantin’ to be at peace.”

  So saying, he joined his hands under his chin and fixed a peaceful gaze on me.

  “But y’know, Konoha, that’s why a blow-off guy like me is great for Chee.”

  “What do you mean?”

  For just a moment, Ryuto’s eyes revealed a pitying bitterness.

  I couldn’t tell whether it was intended for Takeda, himself, or perhaps for me in my ignorance. But for whatever reason, the look hit a sore spot in my chest.

  “Because she doesn’t need to feel guilty about being a two-faced liar with me.

  “’Cos if the other person is a good-for-nothing fraud, she can feel like there’s somethin’ mutual even if she’s trickin’ them.

  “If I were a beautiful, pure person and I love-love-loved Chee and only Chee and saw her as the most absolutely precious thing in the world—Chee wouldn’t be able to face the shame, and she’d be forced to commit suicide for real.”

  My throat squeezed tight. Even though Ryuto was talking about Takeda, a thick, mucky black vortex was spreading through my chest.

  “Chee’s old boyfriend played basketball or somethin’ like that, and he was apparently a good guy, fresh faced and kind. But he had no clue who Chee really was, and since he honestly loved the good, adorable, uncomplicated, good-hearted Chia Takeda, Chee had no choice but to break up with him.”

  Ryuto’s words dug into my chest. My throat grew hot, and it became hard to breathe. If my emotions were stirred up any more than this, I was gonna have an attack.

  I closed my hand tightly around the paper cup holding my iced tea. The cool cup with crushed ice inside it grew gradually tepid.

  “But I don’t deify her like you do, and I don’t believe everything she says! I don’t deny who she really is!”

  Akutagawa’s criticisms reawakened in my ears, and my breathing grew even more strained. It felt like my chest was being crushed.

  “Maybe that’s just your own misconception. I don’t believe that going out with you is good for Takeda. Not the way you are right now.”

  “You’re such a stickler.” Ryuto smirked. “And you say that, but I heard you got into some trouble at the hospital.”

  I twitched, and he gave me a devious look.

  “Didn’t I tell you that I know a girl at that hospital?” />
  “…Yes, you did. And Takeda said she ran into you at the hospital. That you had flowers for someone,” I murmured in a trembling voice, but then something stuck out at me.

  Flowers for someone…

  Before that smoky impression could take shape in my heart, Ryuto added meanly, “That mark on your face has somethin’ to do with the dustup at the hospital, too, doesn’t it? Oh right, Tohko got a call from Kotobuki. I passed the phone to her, but Kotobuki was seriously touchy. I tried to shoot the breeze with her, but she got angry and told me to hurry up and put Tohko on. She sounded like she was about to cry.”

  My heart stopped, and I started to stand up reflexively. My chair clattered and tilted back.

  Kotobuki had called Tohko?!

  What had she talked to Tohko about? What had Tohko thought when she heard it? The sight of Kotobuki running from the hospital room in tears came to my mind, and it felt like my chest was ripping apart.

  “Your old girlfriend…her name’s Miu, right? That’s a cute name.”

  How did he know Miu’s name?! Stop—I don’t want to talk about this! I started to tell him that, but Ryuto murmured meaningfully, “That’s the same name as that author, Miu Inoue.”

  My throat clamped shut, and I lost my voice. Had he heard that from Tohko? Or was he trying to trick me into revealing something?

  Sweat broke out on my palm around the paper cup, and it grew sticky and gross. After a long time I whispered, “That’s true.”

  Looking at me with a gaze stuck fast like glue, Ryuto went on talking about Miu Inoue.

  “I just happened to read her book recently, y’know. At the end of the book, there’re reviews from the judges, and they were layin’ it on thick. Stuff like ‘This is the birth of a new generation of writers with lush sensibility’ and ‘a world you can’t help but love, overflowing with clarity’ and, well, they also had judges who said harsh stuff like ‘I wonder whether this writer is capable of producing other works, too.’