Below a leaden sky. The ends of her short-cut hair, her red scarf, her long skirt, and the hem of her jacket were flapping about in the fiercely blowing wind. She stared at me, fixated, with her huge eyes that showed a confused mixture of hatred and sadness.
Her skin was blue and transparent like ice, and her lips and body were trembling slightly from the cold.
Her silver crutch was lying at her feet, and her hands gripped the rail tightly. Her stance was incredibly tense, but at the same time, it seemed fragile.
If Miu were to jump again right at this second—
I was sure my heart would shatter like ice.
Miu was staring at me in silence.
And staring back at her, I drew closer.
The snow that stuck to my cheek melted with my breath.
In the steadily shrinking space between us, snow poured down like pure white feathers.
I had approached to within six feet.
“Miu…”
My chest swelled—swelled so it felt like it would burst painfully—so I thought I might start crying. I called out to her, “I read your novel, Miu.”
Miu’s shoulders twitched as she glared at me, and she gripped the railing even harder. A tearful light shone in Miu’s eyes as well.
“I’m sorry, Miu. I hurt you a lot. I didn’t take the time to notice that you were suffering, and I’m sorry.”
“Why are you apologizing?”
Miu looked even closer to tears.
“I don’t want you to apologize! That doesn’t serve any purpose. It just eases your guilt, and you only make yourself feel better! I’m still in pain!”
The words that she hurled at me in the wildly swirling snow stabbed into my chest.
“You never understood, Konoha. How much I hated you or your family or your house…how much I despised it all…
“How it felt like you were showing off when you smiled and hugged the zebra pillow your mom had made for you by hand, or how much it hurt me. Or that I stomped on your pillow so many times when you weren’t around!”
“I didn’t know that. Or about your family or your mom…or your dad…”
Miu’s face flushed, and she screamed as if beating at me.
“How was I supposed to tell you?! That my mom and dad hated each other and did nothing but fight! That even their daughter got completely swept up in their abuse when she was still in elementary school. But if they got divorced, it would negatively affect Dad’s job and it would look bad, so they’re living separately! And that’s why I was switching schools!”
Miu spewed her untenable anger, her pain.
“Even my mom taking me back was a jab at my grandma—Dad’s mom.
“’Cos Grandma lived in the house next door and would come to our house all the time, and she would just harangue my mom. Mom hated Grandma even more than she hated Dad. Grandma told her I was going to stay with Dad, so she got annoyed and said, ‘I’m taking Miu with me,’ and that’s all. It’s not like she loves me!
“Even after we started living together, I had to hear her bad-mouth my dad and grandma.
“Your father’s awful. Your grandmother’s like a demon. I’m so unlucky. It’s tough, it’s frustrating, it’s torture! I can’t take it! Everything is your father and grandmother’s fault.
“I was the one who couldn’t take it, having to hear stuff like that every day!
“When my mother wasn’t around, my grandma would call. She said she was worried about me, but all she ever did was bad-mouth my mom.
“‘Miu, your mother is a truly terrible woman. It’s because he married a woman like her that your father became unhappy. Your mother has no love for you, she neglects you, and she just enjoys herself. The reason she took you away is because she wanted to get child support from your father to make her life easier.’
“The worst times, I would have to listen to Grandma’s endless screeds on the phone with my mother right beside me, glaring at me nastily!
“That happened all the time! That was normal in my family!
“I was the trash can where those people tossed their filthy emotions!”
“Don’t make Konoha your trash can, too!”
I remembered Miu screaming that at her mother in the hospital, and I felt as if my chest would rip apart.
That day, her mother had suddenly cornered me and glared at me with flashing eyes. She’d hurled words filled with loathing at me, and I hadn’t known what to do.
My body had stiffened at the poison being spewed at me, and it was as if dozens of needles were poking into my heart.
“My mother-in-law berated me mercilessly for taking Miu away. She said it was wrong, that Miu should have been raised by her side of the family from the very beginning, that I’d ruined her precious granddaughter.”
Her mother’s face as she declared Miu’s father an absolute scumbag, her twisted face came to mind accompanied by her clinging voice, and I shuddered.
Miu had been exposed to that gaze, to that voice, ever since she was little.
“And that’s not all! Dad’s girlfriend has called me a ton of times, too!”
Miu went on with a mocking expression.
That she had guessed the times when his daughter Miu and not her mother—his wife—would be there and then deliberately called her. That it was Miu’s fault her father had to get away from her mother. The girlfriend would tell her in a low, detached voice that even though the two of them were living a life without hardship, she didn’t have any money.
That these calls had continued even after her mother took her away and they came to this area—
How Miu hated phones.
How she had made absolutely sure I wouldn’t call her on the phone.
These cutthroat circumstances had been behind that.
That her parents didn’t get along, that her mother and grandmother were at each other’s throats, that her father had a girlfriend—these might all have been run-of-the-mill unhappiness. There are all kinds of cases like that in the world.
But to the person involved—especially to a girl in elementary school—every day must have been hell.
Every time the phone rang, she must have trembled and felt like her heart was being churned up into mush with a knife.
Miu had tried to change that bleak, inescapable world by imagining things.
In the fierce snow, her blue lips trembling, Miu told me, “I didn’t want to hear another dirty word, one more ugly word! So I only thought about pretty things or warm things or fun things.
“The world my mother and the rest of them inhabited was dark and cold and dirty, but mine was totally bright and clean. There wasn’t a single person who tossed their dirty garbage around.”
That was how she’d created so many stories.
When the trash can inside her heart had gotten full and it became suffocating and she didn’t know what to do, she’d shoplifted.
When she reached out a hand to some merchandise, when she put it in a bag or a pocket, she broke out sweating, there was a throbbing pain in her temples, and her chest felt like it was being crushed. But when she went back home and took out the spoils of war to gaze at them, her heart and her head both lightened, and she started to feel like she’d won against something big.
Miu’s face twisted wildly in pain.
“But! No matter how clean a story I made, it was all lies. So when I was telling stories, I was a flawed and dirty creature! I’m not clean like you are, Konoha! I hated you. Just seeing you smile annoyed me, and it felt like my heart was gonna rip apart, and I thought, I’ll take away everything Konoha has. I’ll hurt Konoha like crazy, break him, and make him cry—and I did a lot of terrible stuff!
“But still you didn’t notice at all, and you came and smiled innocently at me. You trusted me completely, you tagged along after me, and obeyed anything I told you to do!”
Her cracked scream echoed wildly in the blizzard.
“Why! Why is it?! Why don’t you notice when you’re bein
g tormented?! Why are you that blind and stupid?! Why did you look so thrilled when I spoke to you even though I hated you and even though I detested you?! Why’d you run up to me wagging your tail like a puppy?! Why’d you look at me with those rapturous, totally trusting eyes?!
“When I was with you, the hazy, dirty things collected in my chest, and if you so much as talked to someone else, my skin prickled, my head got hot, and I wished they were dead! If you so much as looked at a girl, I wanted to burn her face! It was your fault I stained myself black like that!! Why did you stay clean and pure?!”
The wind blew into my face fiercely. My body was chilled to the core in the bone-piercing gale until even my sense of cold grew numbed.
Even so, my heart was shredded by the blades of Miu’s words, and my blood continued flowing, bringing pain.
How I had worshipped Miu. How I had trusted her completely.
And now to hear that it had caused almost unbearable pain for Miu—!
The shock, revealed by her own lips, caused my knees to buckle and my heart to practically rip apart, but Miu told me even more.
“You took everything from me, Konoha!! When I couldn’t think up stories anymore, it was like being dunked upside down in cold water! I thought, This can’t happen! There’s some mistake! I tried as hard as I could to imagine something! But—but—a black mist just spread through my mind, and not a single clean thing could be born from it! No words would come to me!
“I was so, so scared. It felt like I was going crazy. I thought if I did it, I would go back to the way I used to be. I did it a bunch of times, but it didn’t work!
“When I tried to create clean stories, I heard voices telling me, ‘That’s a lie,’ ‘The real world isn’t like that,’ ‘Don’t you laugh when you lie and trick people?’ ‘Aren’t you hiding a spirit as dirty as gutter water?!’
“But if I stopped making stories, my world would get dirty and ugly and fall into ruin. And you, Konoha—if I couldn’t make stories anymore, you would start to like some other girl. You would leave me behind to go play with the boys. You were all I had, Konoha, but there were tons of people who liked you!
“No! No way! I won’t let that happen! You’re my dog! You have to stay at my side!!
“So I had to keep feeding you. But I couldn’t think of any stories, no matter what I did—I copied parts from books at my house, and I—showed those to you!!”
Miu squeezed her eyes tightly shut.
Her despair and pain dyed my heart black, too.
The snow was eddying more ferociously than ever.
That she had copied stories like that bunches and bunches of times—
That she had shown them to me—
Miu continued in a scream, her face twisting, her voice trembling, that I had read them without the slightest suspicion and had praised her, that I had pushed her to write more.
That she had become an even uglier person because of me.
“Okay, Konoha, this is a secret. I’m gonna be a writer.”
“Tons of people are going to read my books. It would be awesome if that made them happy.”
When she’d revealed that to me, had Miu truly dreamed that for herself?
It would be great if she could change the world into something more beautiful with the stories she created.
Great if everyone felt kinder and stopped hating others and bad-mouthing them.
Miu glared at me with strained eyes, and in a taut voice, she said, “When I declared that I would participate in the Summer’s Breeze publishing new author contest, it was so that I would write my own stories again. If I were chosen for the prize, all of these painful situations would be overturned, and I would get back at all the people who’d made a fool of me. If I became a real author, you would never have left me. My stomach was practically twisting into knots with anxiety over whether I had that kind of power. But in order to reclaim my world, I had no other choice.
“It was fine. I managed to create stories so easily before. I was sure I’d be able to craft my own stories again. You were in love with my stories, and you told me I had talent and I could be an author if anyone could.
“So it’ll be fine, perfectly fine; I should be able to win the prize.
“I told myself that so many times.
“But I couldn’t write anything after all!”
Her face contorting, Miu screamed in a voice that seemed to rend her throat. Her red scarf was lifted in the wind, and it danced wildly.
“Every day, every single day, I sat down at my desk at night and gripped my pen—but I couldn’t write a single line! Time was the only thing that moved steadily on, and I couldn’t even sleep. When it got light outside my window and dawn came, I was filled with a sense of defeat, and my head felt like it was going to split in half.
“Even so, I thought, I have to write, I have to write. I already told Konoha I would enter the contest, so I have to write! But no matter how often I greeted the morning, my paper stayed unblemished, I felt a lump in my chest, and I couldn’t write, no matter what I did.”
Miu’s face fell. She looked straight at me with an exhausted expression that threatened tears, and in a hoarse voice, she whispered, “I…I put a stack of blank paper in an envelope…and I dropped it in the mailbox so you could watch.”
I felt my body wheel, as if I’d been punched in the head. Accompanying it, I had the feeling that the world around us had swayed grandly.
That day after she’d dropped her application materials in the brown envelope into a mailbox near school, Miu had turned around casually, swinging her ponytail, and given me a sunny smile.
“Heh-heh. I did it.”
Her cheeks flushed adorably, she twined her arm through mine and said something in a slightly excited attitude.
“They announce the winners in May. I can’t wait.”
How could the envelope have held only blank paper?!
So Miu knew right then that she couldn’t win the prize!
At my shock, Miu whispered indifferently, her expression frail and ephemeral, “I didn’t know what I’d do if you found out. I felt less alive than ever before. So I laughed and was more upbeat than usual. And when you asked what pen name I’d applied with, I told you it was a secret.
“Because you believed anything I told you.
“When the winning novel was announced, I had planned to laugh for you and look like it didn’t bother me at all and say, ‘Aw, I didn’t get it. The real world’s not so easy, I guess.’
“I’m still fourteen. I’ll have a ton more opportunities. It was crazy to think a fourteen-year-old would win in the first place. That kind of thing usually doesn’t happen…’
“You were going to let me fool you again…”
Deep despair came into Miu’s face. Her face fell, her eyes filled with tears, and she forced her voice out to speak.
“But the person who won the prize was a fourteen-year-old girl named Miu Inoue…”
I clenched my jaw against the sharp pain stabbing into my chest.
Miu’s red scarf blew around her as she stood on the verge of tears.
Miu Inoue—
How bad of a shock had it been for Miu when she saw the name Miu Inoue?
That a girl with the same name and the same age as her had been chosen for the grand prize.
“The girls in class spread rumors that I must have been Miu Inoue. It was like a bad dream.”
I imagined Miu’s shock, Miu’s despair, the pain Miu felt when I confessed, and a gloom fell over me.
The fear of losing her footing as the world collapsed.
It was then that Miu learned that it was the boy in front of her with the timid look on his face who had cornered her and brought about her destruction.
“When I read Miu Inoue’s book, I saw immediately that Hatori and Itsuki were supposed to be you and me. The way Itsuki saw Hatori as strong and clean and bent on his own dreams—totally different from how I really am. When I thought about the fact that yo
u saw me that way—that the way I looked to you was this kind of clean, angelic girl, my heart almost stopped. I had no power to hold you back anymore.
“The story you’d written was much more beautiful than the things I’d thought up. I wasn’t a pure, upstanding kid like the Hatori that Itsuki loved. I was uglier and dirtier!”
Miu’s despair stabbed into my chest.
I had—I had driven Miu into a corner!
“Everything would have been better if you’d just stayed my dog forever!”
Miu screamed in the hard-falling snow.
“Why did you write a whole novel and keep it a secret from me?! You applied to the same contest as me! You won the grand prize and put out a book under the name Miu Inoue and became an author!! When you went so far away from me like that, you see that the only thing left for me was to jump off the roof right in front of you! To hurt you and make you suffer and make it so you would never be able to forget me for the rest of your life!
“You would never understand those feelings, Konoha! You wouldn’t! You wouldn’t!!”
The noise of the wind scattered Miu’s scream.
The snow blowing at me, alongside her voice, stabbed into my eyes, then melted into water and ran down my cheeks.
That clear day in early summer.
The thing Campanella wished for, turning around with a smile under a transparent blue sky.
Burning the image of himself leaving on a trip into Giovanni’s eyes.
He had taken on an eternal position for Giovanni.
Just like the last time, a sad-looking smile came over Miu’s lips.
“Y’know, there’s something Kenji Miyazawa wrote…a poem called ‘Song of the Defeated Youth.’
Book Girl and the Wayfarer's Lamentation Page 16
