The ferocity of Hatori’s—of Miu’s—hatred came through in the words and sentences that had been written with such pressure that it deformed the page.
The bright red letters seemed like they would rise up off the computer screen any second and bite into my eyes and throat.
But I had to read it. I had to discover how Miu had felt being with me.
Outside my window, the snow was falling incessantly, and it was still dim.
My mother came to tell me that school was canceled because of the snow.
I told her I didn’t need breakfast and read on.
From time to time, there were scribbles labeled as notes in the corners.
The phone again.
That’s the thirtieth time today. They know I hate the phone, and they call me anyway.
Even though I tell them to text me, they don’t listen. They’re smiling repulsively on the other end of the phone. They’ll keep calling and calling and calling until I answer.
I got a call. It’s awful. I hate you, B!!
Dirty things are gradually filling up the trash can.
I just couldn’t allow it, just couldn’t stand it, and I made the call. I hung up in the middle of it. Phones are so useless.
Phones make me sick! Don’t call me!
Shut your mouth, B! I’m not looking for your opinion!
Don’t give me orders! Get out!
Stop calling!
Miu got annoyed at frequent phone calls. It scared her.
Was the B who appeared so often Akutagawa?
Was this Bulcanillo a name?
And there was more.
There were also sentences in the notes that made me think that she had swiped Akutagawa’s cell phone and e-mailed Kotobuki.
I got hold of the same model and switched them. The next day he came in looking pale and was in my face, asking if I’d looked at his phone and telling me not to do anything stupid, so I scratched him. He’s so useless and yet so preachy. I hate it!
I sent an e-mail to that hussy thief.
I got a reply.
She’s trying hard to hide it, but she’s pretty scared. I didn’t know she was so weak.
She’ll be easy.
B’s plan is a pretty good one. I’m positive Konoha will come see me.
So the cuts Akutagawa said he’d gotten from a cat scratching him were actually from Miu!
And now that I thought about it, around that time he’d been asking me constantly if I’d gotten any weird phone calls or messages.
And Kotobuki had gotten scared by texts on her phone around the same time.
My chest constricted sharply at my own idiocy and weakness in coasting through without noticing any of it.
The alternate story from Hatori’s perspective went on.
Haraguchi slapped you? And said she hated you?
I’m sure she does.
That’s because I told her you belong to me. I said, “We even did it. Do you mind my leftovers? He told me that you were into him even though you’re all misshapen and you wouldn’t leave him alone, and he laughed about you in front of me.”
Haraguchi’s face when I said that—oh, man. It turned bright red, there were tears in her eyes, and she was shaking; she was a total mess.
In middle school, out of nowhere a girl in my class had slapped me and screamed, “I hate you!”
What had been inexplicable then was, like fallen leaves being swept away by a gust of wind to reveal the road beneath, now clear to me.
You don’t go play with Mine much anymore, do you?
What happened? I thought you two were best friends?
But still he’s so distant and selfish with you. What an awful person.
It’s got to be because you broke so many promises to him. Oh well. After all, he did say I couldn’t come.
How things had soured with a boy who was my friend.
How Miu had comforted me by saying, “You have me, though, Konoha, and that’s enough, isn’t it?”
That’s how you came to be all alone.
You lost everyone around you except for me.
Ahhhhh, that felt so good. It was amazing.
When had she realized?
Giovanni losing his friends was Campanella’s plan—
You need to be even more alone.
You need to be cut to shreds, dragged through the mud, so you come apart in tatters.
You need to feel such despair that you lament and can’t stand back up.
The pain that pierced my beating heart made me dizzy.
Miu, Miu, did you despise me that much?
Since I had kept clicking through with my mouse without ever turning on my heater, my body was frozen solid, and my hands were completely numb. I couldn’t feel anything.
Even so, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the red letters on the screen.
How much time had passed?
In the cold room where all I could hear was my own breathing, a music box started playing.
I jumped in surprise and looked at the cell phone I’d tossed aside on my desk.
The gentle, clear melody was the theme song from Beauty and the Beast.
It was Kotobuki!
I’d thought Miu had thrown Kotobuki’s cell phone out her window, but maybe she’d had it repaired? Or maybe she’d bought a new one?
In either case, this ring tone was set up for only Kotobuki’s phone number or e-mail address.
I grabbed my phone, opened it up, and pressed it to my ear.
“Hello—Kotobuki?”
A hoarse voice came leaping through the thin piece of metal.
“I-Inoue!”
“What’s up? Is something wrong?”
“She…”
Kotobuki was forcing the words out.
“Asakura disappeared somewhere! It’s snowing so hard—but she’s not at the hospital. And I heard she left a note in her room that said, ‘I’m going to space.’”
Chapter 7—Journey in Dark of Night
Outside the snow was blowing about wildly, driven sideways.
Even with an umbrella, I got beaten by the wind and covered in snow in no time, so it was pointless. I closed my umbrella partway there, and tripping over the snow that had deepened halfway up to my shins, I pushed ahead.
After I’d gotten the phone call from Kotobuki, I had quickly changed into street clothes, put on a coat, and rushed out of the house.
Right before I left, I’d also received a call from Akutagawa. He said Kotobuki had called him. He told me he was going to the hospital.
“After Asakura let out her hatred and beat you, she got even more unstable. When I visited her over the weekend, she was screaming, ‘Nobody but Konoha can come in here!’ and threw stuff from her room at me. She said, ‘The only one who’s allowed to touch me or talk to me is Konoha!’ She was waiting for you to come.”
In a tortured voice, Akutagawa asked me to save her.
Why had Miu suddenly disappeared?
Why had she tried to keep hold of me while screaming that she hated me?
Why did she continue telling lies to my face?
Pushing furiously through the heavily falling snow, Hatori’s confessions came to mind one after another, tinged with a different import than when I’d first read them.
I wonder what true happiness is.
I’m pretty sure, at least, that it’s not having a lot of money or succeeding at work or marrying the right kind of guy.
I wonder what happiness is.
I wonder where I would have to go to find it.
When I think about stuff like that, my heart goes pitch-black all of a sudden, and I get so scared I start shaking, and it feels like my head is going to crack open.
What had Campanella wished for?
What had happiness been to Campanella?
Hadn’t the strong and solitary Campanella—Miu—himself been the one seeking it?
I had never expected that she would someday climb aboard the Milky Way Railroad and
go off into space just like Campanella.
If Miu would tell that story, then hadn’t she been tortured, unable to find a place for herself on Earth?
And so wasn’t that why she’d wished to take a journey on a train to the stars?
The imagination that would allow her to freely traverse the sea of stars was Miu’s only weapon, her only comfort, her only salvation.
Yes, until I appeared before her—
Miu, who had spun her stories alone, got her first reader in me, and through Miu, I shared her world.
I was overjoyed about that, I enjoyed it, and I was happy.
And Miu—hadn’t she been, too?
Hadn’t she wanted me by her side, even as she hated me and found me repugnant, even as she tormented me from the shadows?
Hadn’t she wanted me to hear her stories?
But at some point something had drifted apart, little by little, and gotten out of sync.
What have I done!
Strange, this is a first. Again and again and again I did it. But still nothing happens. Nobody comes. I can’t hear them! I can’t see them! I can’t feel them!
Whenever I do that, the trash that they’ve tossed aside is supposed to be expelled from my body and disappear.
But still, nothing. No matter how much I do it, nothing changes. The black, sticky, reeking stuff continues to collect inside me.
The confusion and fear that Miu felt.
I imagined what it must have been like, and it became difficult to breathe.
Even though I did it!
Even though I did it over and over!
It’s still not enough? Do I have to keep doing it?
Miu opening her sky-blue binder and joyously writing out a story on her loose-leaf paper.
The flood of vivid words. The beautiful world spilling over with transparency.
Every single day I do it, feeling like my stomach is twisting into knots. And before long, just the thought of doing it makes my head start to hurt, and I feel a wave of nausea.
But still, when I do it, everything gets better. I believed that the dirty stuff collecting in my chest, that the trembling anxiety, fear, rage, despair, all went away.
And if—if Miu were to lose that world—
If the stories that had surrounded Miu up till now were to suddenly go away—
But no!
Even when I do it, the trash can doesn’t empty.
It’s your fault!
You messed me up!
Miu staring at me with an irritated look when I tried to take a Kenji Miyazawa book out of the library.
Me timidly returning the book to the shelf.
So the only thing of Kenji Miyazawa’s I know is Night of the Milky Way Railroad that I read in a picture book.
Even so—
Whenever Tohko tells me about Kenji Miyazawa’s stories, I get a nostalgic feeling.
That familiarity wasn’t something that called up warmth or ease.
On the contrary, I felt anxiety and fear that seemed to crush my chest.
Why was that?
Why was I so scared of Kenji Miyazawa?
Was it because when I heard his stories, I felt like I was doing something bad, and that made it harder for me to breathe?
I know the story Miyazawa had painted of the brief meeting between a female singer and a girl who admires her.
I know the story of the bunny that saves a lark and recovers a treasure.
The flashy onomatopoeia echoed through my mind over and over and over.
“Clang, clang, clangerang, clabang-clabang-ang.”
“Vereeen-zan, ch-ring, vereeen.”
“Pla-pla-pum, pum, pummm, shhh.”
“Tanpararata, tanpararata, plonk, plonk, plonk.”
“Bom, bom, bom, bom, bom.”
That voice I was hearing—high, then low—wasn’t Tohko’s.
It was Miu’s voice!
Miu had told it to me.
Almost as if Kenji Miyazawa’s story were her own story—!
A cold shock pierced my brain.
A doubt that I had denied several times in my mind, had tricked myself about, hidden, and tried to forget about.
But I was sure it was true.
Miu had plagiarized!
When Miu wasn’t able to make up her stories anymore, she had told me Kenji Miyazawa’s stories as if they were something she’d thought up herself.
That was why she’d given me such a terrifying look and tried to stop me when I’d wanted to borrow a collection of his stories.
My throat squeezed shut hotly. Snow struck my cheeks, my forehead, and my eyes like needles.
Why? Why did you have to go that far to keep telling stories?
Knowing that they were someone else’s stories and not your own.
Fearing that you might be exposed eventually.
I pictured the reason, and it made me dizzy.
Because I’d wanted it—!
Because I’d begged Miu for stories.
Because that was the tie that bound us more strongly than anything else.
And so in order for the two of us to be together forever, Miu had to keep on making stories, even if she stole them from other people.
Everything! You took everything! All of it! You stole it!
And yet you followed me around, smiling, without the least sense of guilt.
And you’re looking for more?
Are you going to carve it out of my body? My heart?
I have nothing left!
My cell phone suddenly rang inside my coat pocket. I came to a stop in surprise and checked the screen.
Takeda?
Had something happened? Or was it just her usual gossip?
After some hesitation, I returned the phone to my pocket.
Sorry, I’ll call you back later.
When my head and shoulders were white with snow, I arrived at the middle school where Miu and I had gone to school.
In the map we’d drawn as children, our Milky Way Railroad flew off into space from the roof of this building.
I turned my face to the sky, but the snow only cascaded like scattering feathers and I couldn’t see the roof or if anyone was there.
But I was convinced that Miu was here.
Because the two of us had made that map so that we could find each other even if we were separated across space—
When I’d come here before with Tohko, my chest had grown more pained with each step forward I took, my eyes had spun at the spasms that felt like my skull was cracking, and I hadn’t even been able to reach the school building from the gate.
Now my face was awash in a headwind, and when I passed through the gates, my stomach twisted up. The wind felt like it would stop my breath.
Despite that, I dropped my body forward, and stomping furiously through the snow, I reached the entrance.
Inside the building, it was perfectly silent, perhaps because school was out for the snow.
I thought a few of the teachers would have come to work, but I took my shoes off, unconcerned, and climbed unerringly up the stairs to the roof, carrying them in my hand.
I was in my socks, so I was slipping a lot, which made it hard to run. Halfway there, I took those off, too, and stuffed them in my pockets.
One floor—two floors—as I drew closer to the roof, my breathing grew more and more strained, my vision clouded, and my head started to hurt as if it were being beaten with a hammer.
The same thing had happened before.
On a clear day in May, it had been Takeda on the roof. I had climbed up to the roof in a frenzy in order to stop her from committing suicide.
That day, tortured by the pain crushing my chest and squeezing my throat relentlessly, the image that had come to my mind was Miu.
Somehow, I had to make it this time. So that Takeda wouldn’t throw herself off the roof like Miu had.
I had overlaid Miu’s image on Takeda. I prayed fierce and hard, to the point that it threatened to break my hear
t, as I ran up and up as hard as I could.
But now the one at my destination was Miu herself!
The instant I opened the heavy door to the roof, it was ripped outward by the wind, and I toppled forward with it.
Snow the size of pebbles swirled around me in a sheet, and I couldn’t see the entire roof at one glance.
But when I looked down at my feet, small footprints and the dragging marks of a crutch remained in the deeply drifted snow just like the track of a train, marking out a path.
I pulled on the shoes I carried over my bare feet; held my breath; and with my nerves strained to their limit, I followed the track.
When I spotted Miu leaning back on the railing that stood at the edge of the roof, I thought my heart would stop.
Book Girl and the Wayfarer's Lamentation Page 15
