On the other hand, Kanako had apparently also figured out which letter I’d read. Her gaze became that much harsher.
“The date on the letter was three days before the accident. But that was a lie you created. You wrote that letter after Yui and Fumiharu had died.”
“What proof do you have for saying something like that? I can tell you Yui sent me that letter before she died. Because I couldn’t stand her hiding her jealousy of me and smiling so congenially at me.”
“Are you lying again? In the letter, you mentioned that Yui secretly had poison. As if you had found out where it was hidden and seen it for yourself. As if you were using it to threaten Yui. ‘Are you going to put it in my food?’ you’d ask smirkingly. But!” I shouted sharply.
The scene Ryuto had described rose into my mind accompanied by a smoldering heat. The black coffee swirling in a vortex. The silver grains pouring in smoothly.
“You might have known that Yui had the poison. But you didn’t know what form it was in. Isn’t that right? Otherwise you never would have written that she was going to ‘poison my food.’ People usually use liquids for that.”
Kanako’s face tensed.
“The fairy of sleep, old man Ole Lukøje who drips milk into children’s eyes to make them sleep. You heard Yui talk about Ole Lukøje and got the impression that the poison was a liquid. But it was actually powder! Tohko talked about how her mother had sleeping powder. Why would you go to the trouble of writing in the letter about poison you had never seen, but pretend that you had seen it? Don’t you think that’s strange?”
As Kanako glowered at me with flashing eyes, her lips trembled ever so slightly. But they produced no response.
I turned to Tohko and asked, “Where was the letter, Tohko?”
Tohko probably knew, too. She answered quietly, her face sad, “It was stuck inside my mom’s photo album.”
“How old were you when you read it?”
“… After they died, we were going through their things. I read it then…”
I turned back to Kanako.
“You put it into the photo album on purpose to make Tohko read it.
“When Madeleine burned all of Gide’s letters and threw them out, Gide despaired that he’d lost the best parts of himself, but for you it was the opposite. You hid the best parts and put the worst parts into a letter and exposed them!”
“That’s enough!” Kanako shouted. “What possible benefit would there be in me doing something like that?!”
“You had to do it in order to protect your heart. Because you’d committed a sin against your beloved best friend.”
“A sin?”
“Yes, because you’re the one who killed Yui—”
At that, Kanako sucked in a breath. Her eyes opened wide and she looked astounded.
“At least, that’s what you thought. That you had cornered Yui and driven her to her death. Every time Yui turned an uneasy look on you, you couldn’t help but remember your sin—the sin of your indiscretion with Yui’s husband, Fumiharu—the sin of causing Yui’s child to die.”
Maybe she’d been with Takumi Suwa and had Ryuto in order to reassure Yui.
I have no intention of stealing your husband or child.
Maybe she wanted to show Yui that she had a lover and a child of her own. The young man who consorted with countless women, the plaything, had been to cover her tracks, a convenient match for Kanako.
When I thought of how Ryuto must have felt, still caring for Kanako as he did, it was as if my chest were being carved out.
But when I considered that Kanako could have atoned for her sin in no other way, my heart hurt even more.
What a lonely, awkward woman she was. Kanako was lacking somehow as a person. I was sure Yui was the one who had filled in that empty spot.
“Immoral Passage was the confession of your sin and the short story sequel was your wish. The doll Toco grows up and kills Arisa. You thought Toco had to hate her, didn’t you?”
Kanako fixed flaming eyes on me. Tohko was watching over us worriedly. I continued speaking.
“There was no way you could have loved Tohko! Because she was the proof that you had betrayed your best friend—your beloved Madeleine. So you ignored her, kept her at a distance, and wrote that letter trying to make her hate you! You treated Tohko like a nonexistent child! And then you kept yourself alone and went through the narrow gate! Yui wasn’t the weak-spirited one—it was you!”
Kanako was shaking with anger. Her eyes were bloodshot, she was grinding her teeth, and her shoulders were rising and falling as if she had trouble breathing.
Her face was crumbling bit by bit. She began to look crestfallen, her eyes tearing up, transforming into a picture of sorrow.
I was sure that what I had said wasn’t the whole story.
People’s hearts were complex and chaotic, and love and hatred got muddled together and there was no showing the shape of it clearly.
Why had Kanako kept Tohko close at hand? Why had she ignored her? Because she loved her or because she hated her? Kanako herself probably didn’t even know the truth.
If she was nearby, even if it was more painful than words could say, at least she wouldn’t be able to go away. So Kanako tried to hate her. Tried to be hated. Hating, hating, being hated, being hated—even so, their tie by blood was one thing she couldn’t deny.
The same blood as hers was unquestionably flowing inside the young girl in front of her. Her eyes, her lips, the lines of her face proved that.
And yet her smile and mannerisms were exactly like those of the person she loved, whom she had no hope of ever seeing again. She spoke to her with the same inflections and gave her the same smile.
No matter how she pushed and pushed at her, her eyes were fixed on Kanako unflaggingly and she brought her love.
Exactly the way she was when I met her—
For Kanako, it had been the torment of hell.
Being loved by a person she couldn’t be allowed to love and trying never to love her.
Kanako had been suffering so much since losing Yui that she couldn’t stop herself from rewriting reality completely. She had been crushed, like Gide when he lost Madeleine.
“Everything has faded and lost its luster.”
“I no longer know for what reason I would go on living…”
Kanako’s irreplaceable Madeleine.
Something joyous and torturous.
She had loved her, had hated her that much.
Kanako dug the fingers of one hand into her bangs and whispered in a ragged, exhausted voice, “Get out of here! Let me be alone! Get away from me.”
“… Are you running away?” I asked quietly, and she looked at me with a faintly bitter face.
“Are you saying you didn’t run away, Miss Miu Inoue?”
A sharp shot went through my chest.
“Your writing… is very similar to Yui’s. You only see nice things. You’re blind to people’s evil intentions and only believe in good. You love superficial words like dreams and hope and trust and thoughtfulness, and you write endlessly about things that make you feel good, and that’s it. The only reason you won the prize is because your fourteen-year-old feelings and writing style just happened to match the theme and it gave a better effect than we’d anticipated. That story… was like a miracle. But even if you could win the prize, you’re not the type that could be an author. Just like Yui. Quivering in the face of ugly reality, unable to look at the darkness in the soul, you break. You flee into a happy dream.”
“You could never be an author.”
I remembered being told that frigidly in the hotel lobby.
I have no intention of being an author. I’m not going to be an author!
The way I’d desperately defended myself in my heart while standing perfectly still and silent.
How I had felt an almost dizzying sense of dread for her, whom everyone acknowledged as an author.
I was no match for her. Before this person, I coul
d only lower my head and shrink in on myself.
But it was different now.
“Like you said, I’ve done nothing but run this whole time. From becoming an author and from other people.”
I’d tortured Miu, not realizing her true feelings. After Miu jumped off the roof, I secluded myself in my room and swore, weeping, that I would never write another novel.
Even after starting high school, I’d been a cowardly child who had thought only of crafting an exterior and living in peace.
“But now there’s something I want to tell you, the author, and I’m not going to run.
“The novel you wrote is so perfected that my novel doesn’t even compare to it. The style and composition were both incredible. But I can’t sympathize with the main character Arisa. It’s the same with you.”
I looked Kanako in the eyes and told her my honest feelings. I could feel Tohko’s gaze on my cheek.
“You’re like Alissa when she left Jerome, thinking that there’s only one path.
“Nothing but the path that leads to supremacy means anything, and naive authors who rely on family or friends can’t survive. Isn’t that a narrow view? Alissa’s noble self-seclusion was haughty and pure. But it was also something selfish that didn’t consider Jerome’s feelings. Do you intend to cast aside your family and the people who care about you and go through the narrow gate all alone?”
Kanako answered coldly, “I can’t change the way I live. I’ve walked alone this far.”
“Alone? That’s exactly how you’ve always rewritten the story! To suit yourself! You wrote in your novel that you were the one who killed Fumiharu, who killed Yui, who killed the baby Toco, and you wrote a story where the doll Toco hated you and killed you. You put a letter that made it seem like you and Yui hated each other into Yui’s photo album in order to make Tohko read it.”
Kanako was silent, wearing a stubborn expression. A steely light was in her eyes.
I wanted to get it across to this woman.
What I had seen in my despair. The truth I had grasped there.
“I suppose that for you, the act of writing a novel means telling the ugly truth exactly as it happened.
“But if there’s an ugly truth, a beautiful truth must exist, too. Stories aren’t purely ugly. They’re not purely tragic or sad, either. There are tender things and beautiful things in there. The way I turned away from pain and ugliness, you, Kanako, didn’t try to see kindness or hope. You denied it and rewrote it. I’m a coward, but you’re arrogant!”
“What would a child like you know?”
Her cold voice struck my ears.
“Yes, I’m a child. But I won’t be a child forever! Someone educated me. They taught me a way to shine the light of imagination on dark reality and change the world—”
My heart was thrumming and my head was getting hot.
Yes, the person at my side, who was watching me with a prayer in her eyes—Tohko had taught me that.
Each time I’d been hit squarely by a blow and struck down, the book girl had held my hand and helped me to stand. She had changed the hope hiding in the dark world into shining words and told them to me.
On the roof at the beginning of summer, at the church in the middle of the night, at the shadowy estate, on the stage being watched by spectators, in the moonlit factory, below the starry sky glinting in the ceiling!
“What is true happiness?”
“So perhaps the truly important thing is not that you get hold of something, but that you keep searching for it.”
If you open the cover of a book, you’ll encounter someone’s imagination there.
“Lift your head and try looking at the sky! In this world, there are as many books and as much imagination as there are stars in the sky!”
“An author doesn’t simply present you with reality. They should be able to light a spark in it and imagine a new story! In Strait Is the Gate, Alissa is torn between Jerome and God. God is the ideal she must pursue, the thing she cannot touch in a high, faraway place. In order to behold it, she must go on alone—
“The same way that you said an author must be someone that goes through the narrow gate alone, Alissa cast everything aside and passed from the narrow gate. But does Strait Is the Gate make us cast everything aside to enter?”
I stood taller and declared, “I don’t think so!”
Tohko’s eyes widened.
“If you enter it with lots of things you’ve gained over time in your heart, there will be no reason to fear even a dark, narrow path. With the power of imagination, you can illuminate the dark path.
“Maybe that’s just me being seventeen and not understanding anything. Maybe what you said was right. Maybe the pitch-dark path goes on interminably beyond the gate and a despair you can’t possibly imagine lies in wait for you there.
“But I’m seventeen and I read Strait Is the Gate, and that’s how I felt.
“This is the truth for me right now that I thought about and took hold of at seventeen!”
A smile like violets was spreading across Tohko’s lips and eyes.
The warm smile that had always shone a light on my heart—
“Are you saying you’re going to write a novel just to show me? In Yui’s place?” Kanako asked me, getting annoyed.
I smiled abruptly.
“No.”
I had finally reached it.
I had finally gotten here.
With that soft, satisfied feeling, I said, “I’m not the one who’s going to write Yui’s story. That’s you, Kanako.”
Surprise came over Kanako’s face.
“What are you talking about?”
“Yui already left behind a story for you. You just haven’t realized it.”
Kanako’s eyebrows hiked up, and in a stringent voice she said, “There wasn’t even a diary in Yui’s things, let alone a story. If you’re talking about the letters you saw, you’ve guessed wrong. Yui isn’t the one who wrote those.”
Tohko’s expression wilted.
The letters that had fallen from the pale violet box and scattered—who had written those? Who had torn them up? I had a realization.
The one who’d written them was Tohko.
She must have been calling out to Kanako with her mother’s feelings.
After I’d left the condo, Kanako had gone back to the house and checked what the letters said. She realized that it wasn’t something Yui had written, and she must have been in transports of rage and torn them up.
That night, how had Tohko felt when she got home and had to pick up the fragments of the letters scattered around the room? When I thought about it, it made my chest squeeze tight.
“Those false letters?! Are you trying to trick me, telling me that’s Yui’s story?”
“I’m not. Yui’s story isn’t something written down in a letter. It’s something that’s been at your side this whole time.”
Kanako knit her brows.
“It’s right in front of you, right now. It’s worried about you. It’s wishing it could talk with you.”
Kanako’s gaze turned slowly toward Tohko, who stood beside me.
She fixed her eyes on the book girl with her braids, standing there desolately, and she gasped as if she’d been shot through the heart.
Her face still tense as she looked at Tohko, I told her, “The story Yui left for you is Tohko.”
A fresh surprise came over Kanako’s face.
“Tohko would tell me exuberantly that you’re a good, kind person. No matter how harsh the treatment she got from you, she adored you.
“Those feelings are something she inherited from Yui. Yui loved you and always talked about you, so Tohko inevitably started to love you, too. Yui gave her love for you to Tohko. The story like manna that Yui spent her entire life writing was inside Tohko.”
The white, pure sustenance fluttering down from God in heaven.
A sweet miracle gently filling an empty spirit.
It was the stories without c
ount that Tohko had poured into our hearts until now.
With a sunny, kind voice, with clear, intelligent eyes—
Tohko had been hurt, too, in fact. She’d spent her days not being loved by someone she loved in a wish that might never be granted.
But in the midst of it, Tohko hadn’t stopped turning the pages. She trusted in hope, trusted in the future, and kept turning to the next page.
She had gently taken the hands of people curled up in despair and what the book girl with her braids told them wasn’t a Pollyanna dream. They were the heartwarming, encouraging words of a girl who knew of darkness and knew of pain, and who was trying to overcome them.
“Try imagining something happy, that the future is bright and wonderful!”
“After you wake up from a beautiful dream, the story stays in your heart.”
Surely that was something that her mother Yui had entrusted to her.
Something that Tohko was trying to pass on to Kanako.
Kanako was looking at her with a rigid expression. Conflict and thirst came into her eyes.
Tohko was looking back at Kanako with an earnest gaze.
After the passage of long years, the mother and daughter linked by blood were finally looking at each other. Now was the moment to pass on her mother’s story, the story Tohko held in her heart.
“Kanako, I’m not the one who’s going to complete Yui’s story; you are. Please accept the story that was prepared for you.”
That night in the planetarium, Tohko had passed the baton to me.
She had looked at me and smiled, as if to say, “From now on, it’s on your turn,” and then she’d turned me toward Miu and let me give an important confession.
This time I would give the baton to Tohko—
When I squeezed her hand, Tohko flinched terribly and looked over at me.
She was confused, and still holding her hand, filling my words with my wish, I said sunnily, “All right, Kanako. If anyone can interpret the story Yui entrusted to Tohko, picture it, and write it down, it’s you. Because you’re an author.”
Kanako’s shoulders shook feebly. The hunger and thirst that had come into her eyes had grown so great she couldn’t hide them anymore.
Book Girl and the Scribe Who Faced God, Part 2 Page 16
