Book Girl and the Wayfarer's Lamentation

by Mizuki Nomura

  I thought I’d turned off the sound, but every time the phone vibrated, the ring tone filled my brain.

  Even if I moved the phone somewhere I couldn’t see it, it would keep on ringing forever.

  Just stop already! Just stop! The trash can is full, and it’s already overflowing! Don’t throw any more trash in it!

  I hate you, B! Traitor! Demon!

  A call from Mom, too. She’s mad because she says I asked her to come. Dad is coming next week. Shut up!

  Stop ringing, phone!

  Just shut up, every one of you!

  I’m tired of it!

  * * *

  The weekend of the National Center Test, it rained both days.

  As I listened to the cold sound of sleet mixed with the rain in my heated room, I wondered to myself whether Tohko was filling in the answer sheet with my mechanical pencil right now.

  And then I thought about Kotobuki.

  About Akutagawa.

  About Miu…

  Miu shouting at me with pained eyes when I asked her what I could do to make her forgive me; that if I wanted that, I had to grant Campanella’s wish.

  I wanted to reach an answer.

  I spread open the map we’d made together on my desk and looked it over again.

  That day, when we’d promised to go to the ends of the universe together, our spirits had definitely been nestled together. I wanted to be able to face Miu’s true self without looking or running away like I had up until now, so I didn’t want to deny the fact that we had spent peaceful, easy days together, too.

  While I was still gazing at the universe drawn in a rainbow of colored pencils, my mother came into my room.

  “Konoha, I made steamed bread. Let’s have some tea. Oh…that’s—”

  She saw the map on top of my desk, and her face clouded over.

  “I found it in the back of a drawer.”

  “Oh.”

  My mother faltered, then lowered her eyes and fell silent. Then she raised her gaze again slightly and hesitantly asked, “Konoha…you seem to be getting hurt a lot these last few days. Did something happen?”

  She broke off, then pushed forward.

  “Does it…have something to do with Miu?”

  When Akutagawa had come over and when I’d come home with a bruise on my face, I’d told my mother, “It’s nothing,” and she hadn’t pursued it any further.

  But she’d probably been worried the whole time.

  I turned my chair around to face her.

  “…Yeah, I’ve been seeing Miu recently. She came back to the hospital she was at before, and that’s where I saw her.”

  Surprise showed in my mother’s eyes. I looked up at her, and with all my heart, I said, “Miu’s still doing physical therapy. She’s been through a lot…and she looks like she’s having a tough time, so I wanted to do what I could for her.”

  It appeared that my mother was doing her best to suppress her reaction. She was staring straight into my eyes, and in a voice that sounded melancholy, she whispered, “I see…Miu’s come back…”

  “Mom, you told me before that you thought I should play with other kids besides Miu, remember? Why did you say that?”

  My mother bowed her head again in hesitation.

  But when all I did was wait, her eyes looked sad, and she told me.

  “Because I saw Miu do something bad…”

  “Something bad?”

  “I was at the supermarket…and Miu put an electric razor into her pocket…and left the store without paying for it.”

  I gasped.

  Miu had shoplifted?!

  “It was so sudden, I didn’t have a chance to say anything…She looked very comfortable doing it. And I was so very surprised that my feet wouldn’t budge.”

  Now that she mentioned it, I recalled that there had been an electric razor among Miu’s treasures.

  And there were weird things mixed in besides, like toothpaste, a shovel, canned cat food.

  And then there was the time I’d seen Miu at the discount shop—

  Why had Miu been fixated on the shelf of men’s hair care products back then?

  When she’d turned her back on me with a swirl of her skirt, hadn’t it looked like she’d had a small bottle or something in her hand that seemed to flash in the light, and then it had disappeared into her skirt?

  What—what if Miu’s collection were the spoils of her shoplifting?

  Sweat slicked my palms, and I held my breath. But then my mother informed me of something even more shocking.

  “That’s not all. When Maika was a baby, Miu tried to make her eat soap.”

  My mother dropped her eyes in pain.

  “Maika was in the living room that day, and I was taking in laundry in the yard. When I came back, Miu had pried Maika’s mouth open with one hand, and she was trying to push a piece of soap about the size of her thumb into it.

  “She came to a stop in a daze. She said that she’d come down to use the bathroom. And that when she came down, Maika looked like she wanted to play, so she played with her. She said she thought it would be okay if Maika ate the soap because it smelled good. She was dejected.

  “But after that, I was afraid of Miu…

  “And when the Java finch you loved so much died, I wondered if…maybe Miu had done it.

  “I thought it was wrong to suspect her, but for it to die so suddenly on a day that she came over to play…the timing felt too perfect. Remember how the blood stained Kiss-Kiss’s throat? No matter how I looked at it, it didn’t look like he’d died of an illness. It looked like he’d been stabbed in the throat with a needle or a tack. And you loved Kiss-Kiss too much to have ever done something like that to him. In which case, Miu was the only one I could think of…”

  The image of my small white bird grown cold and unmoving came into my mind.

  “Why? Why did Kiss-Kiss die? Why is his neck all red?”

  Faced with my tearful entreaties, my mother had groped for something to say, her face ashen.

  And then Miu had smiled gently and said that he’d gone into space. Then she told me the story of Kiss-Kiss to comfort me.

  Miu’s smile that day was cloaked in a totally different implication now.

  A smile with poison in it, hiding dark emotions behind it—

  A chill coursed down my spine.

  Another different scene was trying to rise from the depths of my memories.

  Fluttering white curtains, a blackboard, a fish tank, desks.

  I was in elementary school.

  Miu was in elementary school.

  Alone together in the classroom in the morning.

  My head hurt so badly it felt like it would split, and my throat squeezed instantly, sharply tight.

  “Are you all right, Konoha?”

  My mother frantically touched her hand to my shoulder.

  “…I’m fine. I just felt disoriented for a second, that’s all.”

  My mother’s face drooped.

  “I’m sorry. It’s because I told you all these wild stories.”

  “No, thank you for telling me.”

  My mother looked a little closer to tears again.

  From the foot of the stairs, we heard Maika’s voice calling for us.

  “It sounds like Maika’s tired of waiting. Let’s go downstairs, Mom.”

  As I stood up from my chair, my mother looked sad and said, “Konoha, I was scared of Miu and tried to keep her away from you. But when she jumped off the roof, I regretted it very much.

  “I should have acted like an adult and sat her down and scolded her when she was still a child, for her own good. If I’d done that and been able to teach her the proper path, maybe she wouldn’t have jumped.”

  Something grated along the inside of my chest, and I made a small noise.

  My mother had been suffering these last two and a half years, too.

  It wasn’t just children who lost their way on the path at night. Even adults got lost and could make mis
takes.

  Her eyes still lowered, her voice small, my mother whispered, “Konoha, you…gave Miu strength.”

  I grunted, “…I guess,” in response, and then Maika came pounding up the stairs.

  “Mommy, Konoha, the bread will get cooold. Daddy’s waiting, toooo!”

  She peeked her tiny face in past the door to nag us.

  “Okay, we’re coming.”

  My mother took Maika’s hand with a kind look on her face.

  I followed them down the stairs.

  That night, I had a dream.

  On a morning of bright sunlight, I opened the door to the classroom, panting.

  What kind of story will Miu tell me today? I can’t wait. But before that, I have to feed the goldfish and clean their tank.

  The white curtains were lifted in a billow.

  Behind them stood Miu as she was in elementary school.

  She was looking down at the fish tank with cold eyes.

  A slight smile curved her lips.

  A school of goldfish bobbing in the tank, showing their bellies.

  “The goldfish…all died.”

  Miu’s covert whisper in my ear after I’d run over to the tank, gaping.

  The faintly perfumed scent of soap.

  The frothy white water in the tank.

  White-and-blue pellets that stuck to Miu’s fingers, which brushed mine.

  That had been detergent, hadn’t it?

  Miu had sprinkled detergent in the fish tank, hadn’t she?

  But Miu was smiling that day!

  Ice-cold terror shot through my spine.

  From behind the rippling white curtains, I could hear Miu’s whisper.

  “Oh, how woeful.

  “So woeful.

  “The goldfish did such a woeful thing.

  “Kiss-Kiss did such a truly woeful thing, too.”

  “You and me and all living things are so woeful.”

  I sat up in bed, a knifelike chill stabbing into my entire body.

  When I looked at the clock, I saw it was already morning.

  Still, my room was dim, and it was so quiet it seemed like all the creatures beyond my window had died off.

  “Was that…a dream?”

  Sweat plastered my forehead and neck.

  I had gripped the edge of my blanket tightly.

  No, it was different!

  It was a dream, but it had really happened.

  The meaning behind Miu’s smile that day, the fragrance of soap coming from her, the pellets of detergent stuck to her fingers—I’d tried not to think about them, and I’d forgotten.

  Likewise spotting Miu in the discount shop and all of the suspicious things Miu had done; I’d locked them away deep in my heart.

  Cradling my head, which ached like it would split in half, I gritted my teeth.

  I had decided to overlook a lot of things about Miu up till now.

  How should I move forward? Would I manage to reach a conclusion about what I could do to help Miu?

  I experienced a suffocating feeling, as if the darkness was weighing down on me, but I got out of my bed and parted the curtains.

  Snow was swirling fiercely outside, and a gray world of watered ink opened before me. The ashen snow was piling up on roofs and roads.

  It was unusual to get this much snow in the city.

  I started up my computer and connected to the Internet to check the weather when I noticed that I’d received an e-mail.

  The sender’s name was spelled out in English letters, and there was a file attached. Could it be a virus?

  Just as I was about to delete it, my hand stopped.

  The sender’s name was “hatori.”

  The subject line was “sky.”

  The name of the attachment was “itsuki.”

  Hatori.

  Sky.

  Itsuki.

  I had a flashback to those three words.

  Miu Inoue’s prize-winning story, Like the Open Sky.

  Itsuki, the girl who was its main character.

  And her childhood friend, the boy that Itsuki loved, was called Hatori!

  I opened the e-mail without any further hesitation.

  Will you grant Hatori’s wish?

  This was the brief message it contained with no signature.

  The attachment was compressed.

  Did this mean that if the answer was yes, I had to open the file? I moved the arrow and double-clicked, then chose “open in current window.”

  The file was huge, so it was slow to download. I watched every twitch in the blue bar showing the progress of the extraction software.

  Finally it showed the image of the file. When I opened it up, lots of tiny images spread out to fill the screen.

  Were these…photos?

  There were nearly two hundred of the images sprinkled with red and black spots.

  I selected one that looked good and enlarged it. The instant I saw the letters printed on the yellowed paper, I knew it was a sentence I had written.

  The picture was of one page from Miu Inoue’s novel.

  But that wasn’t all.

  The book’s layout had always been pretty laid-back, and it left a lot of empty space around the text. There was a lot of space between lines, too. And in that empty space, other sentences had been densely written in red pen.

  There were red lines drawn through my words.

  As if to say that these sentences were wrong and the ones written in red were the correct ones!

  You’re really dangerous and arrogant and selfish, and I hate you and detest you.

  How could you act so cruelly and hurt me like that?

  You watched, laughing, as my heart was slashed to ribbons by a glinting, transparent blade, and I screamed and spilled stinking blood and writhed in pain.

  Sloppy letters like an elementary school student would write.

  I recalled that Miu had clutched my book in her hospital bed. The memory was like a thunderclap, and my heartbeat quickened.

  That swollen book with the faded cover, the tattered and rippling pages—

  Had Miu written these red letters?!

  You always, always saw me suffering and laughed in pleasure.

  Then you would cuddle up next to me, steal all sorts of things from me, and destroy me.

  So you’ll forgive me if I take my revenge on you, right?

  Miu was the model for the young boy Hatori, who’d dreamed of being an author in Like the Open Sky.

  And the young girl Itsuki who narrates was like my alter ego.

  I was too shy to leave Itsuki as a boy and Hatori as a girl, so I switched their genders.

  The story is told from Itsuki’s first-person perspective.

  But the story in red pen was told from Hatori’s perspective.

  Whenever I see your moronic face, there are times I get so annoyed it kills me.

  At those times or when I get a phone call or when the trash can gets full, I always do it.

  I feel like the dizziness is gradually getting worse, but why should I care?

  If I don’t do it, I won’t be me anymore.

  I clicked on the image at one edge of the screen, and forgetting even to breathe, I was transfixed by the confessions of a dangerous boy with dark flames simmering inside his chest—totally different from the Hatori that Itsuki talks about.

  About how Hatori was a habitual shoplifter.

  About how he used his imagination on the things he stole to give them stories.

  Everyone says I’m a liar.

  They shut me out from their groups and look at me coldly or whisper dirty things or laugh cruelly.

  “That kid’s a liar. Don’t talk to him.”

  But I was the one who didn’t want to say a thing to them.

  I did things they couldn’t do, and I saw things they couldn’t see. I was able to hear things that they couldn’t hear.

  My world was always spilling over with new stories, and I was the king of my world.

  So
I never wanted to put myself into their cramped, boring worlds, and I was just peachy all on my own!

  Hatori said pridefully how wondrous the world that surrounded him was.

  Stories always fell, shining, into his lap. He was happy just to pick up the stories raining down from the sky.

  That was when Itsuki appeared before Hatori.

  One day you came into my world.

  You approached me with an unwary, innocent smile and begged me for stories. You started to share the stories that only I had seen, the stories that were mine alone.

  By the time I realized I’d made a mistake, my world had fallen into brutal ruin and lay destroyed in tatters.

  My hand trembled in the cold as I moved the mouse.

  For Itsuki, meeting Hatori had been a joyful experience. Itsuki’s world had been broadened by Hatori and glittered brightly in every corner.

  But had it not been that way for Hatori?

  Had Itsuki’s existence been nothing but repugnant to him?

  When school ended, I went to your house every single day, remember? Every single day.

  But really, I didn’t want to go there.

  Your house was like a pretty birdcage. I felt as if my wings had been clipped and I was locked up like that little white bird. It was gut-wrenching.

  I hated your house.

  I hated your family so much it made me sick.

  But you—I hated you most of all.

  A pang like someone had punched me in the head, like my limbs were being cut away, coursed through my whole body.