Book Girl and the Scribe Who Faced God, Part 2

by Mizuki Nomura

Kanako banged both hands down on the desk.

  “Get out of here! You’re wasting my time forcing me to listen to your ridiculous theories!”

  “Theories! No, this is only what I imagine. But it’s affecting you. You can’t answer why you kept such precious hold on a keepsake of Yui when you’re supposed to hate her! Making something that touched another person’s hair into a spoon rest isn’t normal! You’d have to have some especially strong feelings for that person!”

  “Get out!”

  “No! You loved Yui more than as a best friend. The one you were in a chaste union with was Yui, not Fumiharu! The way Gide loved Madeleine! Yui was someone you absolutely couldn’t do without in your life! And Yui was—”

  “Yui hated me!!”

  Kanako stood up with a clatter and shouted, as if beating us with her naked emotions. The eyes glaring at me were less like ice and more a fiercely burning fire. Flames scattering bright red sparks and spreading out endlessly!

  Hidden beneath a mask of ice, her true nature, its intensity—its insanity—was overwhelming.

  “That’s right! Yui was jealous of me! She was always watching me, nervous that I might take Amano from her! In the end, she took poison and killed herself!!”

  How much pain, screaming, hatred, love, and despair had this woman kept locked in her heart?

  Ryuto had spoken painfully of how his first love was someone who couldn’t be happy.

  “She got betrayed in a way that could never be taken back, by someone she trusted. She fell into a black, lonely darkness… and it ate away at her heart.”

  The greatest betrayal for Kanako was that Yui chose death.

  Even now, Kanako thought Yui was the one who had used the poison.

  But it was—

  I started to open my mouth, but then Tohko shouted beside me.

  “You’re wrong! You’re wrong, Aunt Kanako! My mom didn’t use the sleeping powder of Ole Lukøje!”

  Tohko was shaking. She shouted, her hands balled up, her eyes narrowed in pain, her face pale, as if she was speaking words that tortured her.

  “—My mom would never use it… She didn’t use it! She wasn’t the one who added the poison. She wasn’t capable of that. And anyway, the one who made the coffee was—that morning, the one who added the poison was—”

  “The one who put the poison in the coffee was Ryuto.”

  Tohko looked up at me as if she’d been shot. Kanako was gaping, too.

  No wonder. These last nine years, the two of them had each thought someone different added the poison, and they’d suffered because of it.

  “… Everything was an unfortunate misunderstanding.”

  The act on that morning nine years ago—feeling a pain in my chest that almost seared the flesh, I began to tell the story.

  “The morning the accident happened, apparently Tohko and Fumiharu ate a story that Yui wrote for them. You’re aware that Fumiharu ate books and that his daughter, Tohko, inherited that trait from him. That day, Fumiharu didn’t eat any normal food, but he shared some coffee with Yui. Fumiharu had brewed it.”

  Kanako took a breath. She had probably realized that no one but Fumiharu could have added the poison in that situation.

  I’d thought so, too, at first. I’m sure Tohko had as well—

  “… You said Ryuto added the poison, Inoue,” Kanako murmured in a puzzled voice.

  “Yes, I did. Ryuto was the one who mixed the poison into the coffee Fumiharu brewed.”

  “Why, Konoha? Why do you think that?”

  “… Because I’ve heard Ryuto talk about his memories from his previous life.”

  Even more intense confusion came over both of their faces.

  I told them how Ryuto had said he was the reincarnation of Takumi Suwa.

  Why had Ryuto convinced himself of that?

  Because he had “memories of his past life.”

  Memories of getting hit by a car to protect a cat, being taken to the hospital, and dying alone.

  Memories of giving Yui, who’d always been kind to him, the purple vial that held the sleeping powder of Ole Lukøje. Memories of Yui pouring it into the coffee.

  Ryuto “remembered” things that he should have had no way of knowing, as if his soul could traverse time and place freely.

  “But were those things that Ryuto had truly experienced as Takumi Suwa?

  “Maybe it was only that his memories of the accident were things he heard from the people around him when he was little and they stuck in his mind and felt like memories from his past life.

  “You could also imagine that the reason he called Tohko’s mother ‘Yui’ was because Yui told him, ‘Your dad used to call me Yui.’

  “So then what about his memories of the violet heart-shaped bottle?

  “Is it possible that Ryuto might have actually seen it? And then with a child’s curiosity, he might have picked it up—”

  Tohko suddenly put both hands to her mouth, and in a quavering voice, she whispered, “I-I told him about it! How I saw my mom resting a violet heart-shaped bottle in her palm late at night and staring at it. How I told her it was pretty, and she said it was the sleeping powder of Ole Lukøje, but that if little girls had any of it, they would get carried away to the land of eternal sleep, so I should never touch it…”

  Tohko was utterly pale and looked as if she might collapse at any moment. A profound despair was in her eyes.

  “I-I told him. I was trying to act like a big sister… I told him about how mom had the sleeping powder of Ole Lukøje and how the key to the jewelry box with the bottle in it was hidden on the top shelf of her bookcase. I was scared, so all I did was look up at the shelves, but Ryuto—maybe he got a chair and peeked at it—he might have gotten the key and opened the jewelry box—”

  “Someone points at a shelf—and they tell me.”

  “The sleepin’ powder of Ole Lukøje is up there—”

  The voice Ryuto had heard. It had belonged to Tohko. The finger pointing at the shelf had been hers, too.

  “I-I told him, which means…”

  It was painfully clear just how much Tohko blamed herself. I felt as if my chest would tear open also. But for Ryuto’s sake, I had to reveal the truth.

  “Ryuto was wearing a red sweater the morning of the accident, right?”

  Tohko replied, forcing her voice out, “… Yes.”

  I thought so—a breath like a sigh escaped my lips.

  “Ryuto told me that when Yui poured the poison out, her hand was white and silky, the sleeve of her sweater was dyed red like blood, and the poison cascaded down from it. That was Ryuto’s own hand. I know that because Yui and Fumiharu had both dressed up to go to the wedding. Neither of them would be wearing a sweater.”

  The Christmas photo had probably shown Ryuto in a red sweater. When he saw that, Ryuto had realized, too.

  That the hand pouring out the poison had been his own—

  “He must have gotten up on a chair or something in the moment that Fumiharu took his eyes off him and put the poison into their coffee. The night before, Yui had had a fight with Fumiharu, and she’d seemed tired the next morning. If she had a fun dream, maybe she would cheer up. Maybe that’s how he thought of it.”

  And then that memory had turned into a memory from Takumi Suwa, and the one who brewed the coffee changed from Fumiharu to Yui, and Ryuto convinced himself that Yui was the one who’d added the poison. That Takumi had given her the poison in order to save her from her suffering.

  And yet after he’d seen the photo album and learned that wasn’t true, he searched the drawers and found the empty bottle—

  And then he’d been so crushed that he tried walking into death.

  Maybe the reason Ryuto believed he was a reincarnation was so that he could transfer the crime he’d committed onto Takumi and try to forget about it. That unconscious panic might have provoked him into all the violent acts he’d committed up till now.

  Kanako, too, wore a flabbergasted look as sh
e murmured, “Yui talked about Ole Lukøje’s poison. At the time it sounded like a snide remark directed at me, but… when I heard that they’d been in an accident under unusual circumstances, I thought Yui really had had poison and that she really had used it. I never thought Ryuto…”

  Her hands still firmly clasped together, Tohko’s head drooped. Kanako’s expression was bleak and heavy, too.

  “Yui didn’t commit suicide because she was afraid you were going to steal Fumiharu from her. And she didn’t do it because she hated you, either.”

  Kanako looked at me. The transformation of her rage filled her eyes with sorrow that had no outlet, and she murmured, reproachful, “How do you know that?”

  “Because Tohko told me about the story like manna that Yui dreamed of writing someday.”

  Tohko looked at me frailly.

  “She said that Yui always talked about it… a sweet, pure story that would fill an empty stomach like the white sustenance God rained down from heaven. Tohko and Fumiharu were both filled up by the meals Yui wrote for them. The empty one was you, Kanako. Yui wished she could write a story for you.”

  Kanako moaned.

  “That’s just some imagination you’re trotting out.”

  “Yes, that’s true. But Tohko and Ryuto both tried to make me write that novel. Since something I wrote was like Yui’s stories, they tried to make me write in Yui’s place. Ryuto wasn’t choosy about his methods. He even tried to commit a crime. For your sake, he was desperate.”

  I remembered Ryuto crying outside the gate of my house and a digging pain ran through me. I couldn’t forgive Ryuto for his actions. But he’d been suffering, too. He’d wanted to rescue someone important to him.

  Kanako let out a mournful scream.

  “But you won’t write ever again! You quit being an author! Yui did, too; once she married Amano, she threw away her dream of being an author! She never showed me anything ever again. Everything Yui wrote belonged to Amano after that! I was Yui’s reader until she met Amano! She found a new reader, and she didn’t need me anymore!”

  The cascade of feelings that had lost any other outlet came at me with a groan.

  The walls had broken down; the penned-in emotions surged up and raged.

  At last Kanako was speaking fragments of truth.

  For nine whole years—no, ever since Yui and Fumiharu met, Kanako had held the pain of being betrayed in her heart.

  Her face twisted fiercely and she cried out unselfconsciously. It mirrored the way I’d acted when I learned of Tohko’s lies and mirrored the way Miu had reproached me in the blizzard on the roof. At last, I understood.

  Kanako was a reader betrayed by her author.

  That’s why she’d become an author and taken her revenge. No story would ever be told for her again. All she could do was tell it herself. All she could do was continue writing to assuage her hunger—

  “I never liked the novels Yui wrote in the first place. She started clinging to me obnoxiously in middle school and posing as my best friend—saying things like she wished we could be together forever, without even a hint of shame. Making me read the sloppy stories she’d written—

  “She’d told me that she loved me more than anyone, and yet the day when she first brought a manuscript to Amano, she purposely came to my house, her face bright red, and exhausted me with stories of how great he was. After that, every time she saw me all she talked about was Amano!

  “She used the excuse of having him look at a manuscript, but all she wanted was to see him.

  “He was the same way! There was no commercial value whatsoever in the fluffy fairy tales Yui wrote, and yet he kept seeing her. Yui was his goal all along!”

  Kanako’s eyes flashed with hatred. The rawness of it took my voice away. It was like a storm howling in the room.

  “He told Yui he wanted her to become his author exclusively, and yet I would be writing something while beside me that man would kick back and eat Ogai Mori or Tolstoy. He didn’t tell Yui that he was seeing me. And yet she married him and even got pregnant. She told me about it ecstatically. She was flaunting her happiness at me!”

  “… And because you couldn’t forgive her for that, you committed an indiscretion with Fumiharu.”

  Kanako’s lips twisted into a smirk.

  The way they had when she told me the address of the temple where Yui’s grave was.

  The way they had when she’d muttered that she wished Tohko would never come back.

  With a look that held intense hatred.

  “No. I wanted to teach Yui a lesson. That the happiness she treasured so much was just like the stories she wrote—nothing more than a phantom. That her husband was the worst kind of man, one who’d had an affair with another woman while his wife was pregnant.”

  Tohko lowered her eyes, looking like she was on the verge of tears.

  I recalled how she had told stories about her parents with a smile, and I, too, felt it grow difficult to breathe.

  In the picture, Fumiharu and Yui had looked so happy together, though. Why had Fumiharu transgressed with Kanako?

  “I was at the Kanazawa Hotel to get material, and when I called Amano there, he left Yui and came running.

  “I asked him, am I your author or is Yui?

  “I told him that if he went back to Yui that night, I would never write again.”

  Was Kanako the author for Fumiharu Amano, or was it Yui?

  One was Fumiharu’s embodiment of the ideal; the other was indispensable everyday life.

  Which of the two opposite women did Fumiharu love more deeply?

  “Amano didn’t go home. ‘If it will feed your writing…’ He smiled and then betrayed Yui.”

  What kind of smile had Fumiharu worn that night?

  A bitter smile? A gentle smile? A melancholy smile? A smile of resolve? A smile of despair?

  Then Kanako’s voice grew slightly quieter, and I saw her eyes were lowered. I thought revenge might not be the only reason Kanako had had a romantic relationship with Fumiharu.

  I didn’t know if it was what you would call love between most men and women. I was pretty sure it wasn’t.

  Even so, hadn’t there been a bond between Kanako the author and Fumiharu the editor that couldn’t be measured by sensibility? Fumiharu was the man she loathed who’d taken her beloved best friend from her, but at the same time he understood her better than anyone.

  “If it will feed your writing…”

  With what emotions had Fumiharu said those words?

  With what emotions had Kanako heard him?

  And with what thoughts had Yui waited for Fumiharu to return?

  The hatred faded from Kanako’s eyes and a heartbreaking sorrow came into them.

  “… That was the night Yui miscarried. And she fled into an imaginary world.

  “She was convinced the child she’d lost was still inside her. She would say such things… ‘If we have a girl, we’re going to name her Tohko after The Legends of Tono… Oh, why can’t she be born soon?’ All while stroking her belly joyously.”

  Yui, her heart broken by the loss of the baby she should have had.

  How deeply had Kanako tasted of despair and regret, seeing her best friend talking so happily?

  Tohko looked closer to tears than ever and clutched at her skirt.

  Ironically, in place of the life that was lost, Kanako had fostered a new life inside her.

  “I had no need of a child. Something like that would only get in the way. So I foisted it off on Yui. Yui believed she’d given birth to it herself.”

  The words she spat out were colored by a pinching sadness.

  Kanako turned her eyes away, as if afraid of letting us see into her heart. It made her look small and frail.

  “Yui’s spirit was weak. She couldn’t deal with the harshness of reality. She rewrote reality and went on with her life in a happy dream world. Fearing meanwhile that her dream would shatter…

  “The books she wrote were like tha
t, too, that child. Sweet and pretty, overflowing with a sense of goodness, with only good people in them and not at all realistic.”

  As Kanako continued whispering brokenly, like cold rain falling, Tohko watched her without a sound.

  The person who was her birth mother and also the best friend of the mother who raised her—

  Aunt Kanako is a good, kind person. Tohko had said that to me cheerfully, and now—

  Her eyes were wet, as if she was more concerned about Kanako’s pain than her own.

  And so I spoke up.

  “But you loved those stories of Yui’s, didn’t you? That’s why you couldn’t forgive her for not letting you read them anymore and why you felt betrayed.”

  Love and hatred were separated by the space of a single sheet of paper.

  Ryuto had said it all the time, too: you can hate someone because you love them.

  You can keep loving someone because you hate them.

  Because hatred lasts longer and more powerfully than love.

  All along Ryuto’s eyes had been on Kanako, who loved Yui despite her hatred.

  Burning for that almost crazed obsession to be directed onto him.

  “I won’t be confused by your lies anymore,” I told Kanako with feelings that made my heart tremble. “You’re the one who never tried to see the truth and rewrote reality, Kanako.”

  Kanako fixed her gaze on me with irritation. I looked right back into it.

  “If you’re saying you didn’t want a child and that’s why you pushed her off on Yui, then why did you bother giving birth with Yui’s name? Even now you’re pretending that you don’t still love Yui. The way you wrote in The Immoral Passage, where there was nothing but hatred between Arisa and Yuiko.

  “And that’s not all. You even forged a letter to make people think that Yui was a two-faced, mean-spirited woman that was jealous of you.”

  Tohko caught her breath with a gasp. “Konoha, you… read that letter?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  When I’d apologized for looking at the photos in the album, Tohko must have suspected as much. An ambiguous expression came over her face—not terribly surprised, just troubled.