by Otsuichi
He told me the man’s name was Kaneda. Kaneda had lived near town, but no one had seen him for some time.
“People didn’t like him much,” Kimura explained, “and he owed some folks money, so my guess? I think he ran off to somewhere far away.”
It didn’t seem like Kaneda had anything to do with me.
“All right, well, do you know of any brick houses around here?”
“That Kyoko, who you were talking to before? If you’re looking for a brick house, she lives in one.”
“I’m talking about a blue brick house.”
“Blue, huh . . .” He gave a thoughtful nod. “Yeah, I might know something about that.”
I was shocked. I hadn’t expected he might. “Really? Please tell me!” I leapt from my stool. He tried to calm me down.
“What’s so special about that house?”
I thought for a moment and decided there wasn’t an easy way to say there was a chance a little girl was being held captive there. “I heard about it from somebody. It sounds like an unusual building and I’d like to see it for myself.”
“Shiozaki should be here soon. He always has lunch here. He knows about the place, so you should be able to get him to take you there.”
I looked over at the painting of the lake on the wall that was Shiozaki’s work. In it the forest reflected across the still surface of the water.
I never thought I’d find the blue brick house this way. Shiozaki will take me there, but then what?
No, it would be too dangerous for him to take me all the way to the house. I have to go around it, where I won’t be seen, and then I’ll get photographic proof. If we drive up to the house, the kidnapper will realize that I’m after him. I can’t let that happen.
What would the kidnapper do if he knew someone suspected him? If Hitomi is still alive it could put her in danger.
The door opened and Shiozaki came in. He went straight to the back of the room and sat at his table in the dark corner. He moved like he didn’t even notice any other table in the place.
The manager brought over his food. I’d heard that Shiozaki always came to the café at the same freakishly precise time and always ordered the same meal. Kimura specially prepared his meal without meat. The painter had said that meat tasted of blood; he was a vegetarian.
I became aware that Kimura was talking to Shiozaki about me. I had been watching them when Shiozaki looked over at me. Our eyes met. His gaze was sharp and I grew nervous and lowered my head.
Kimura turned to me. “He says he’ll drive you there after he’s done eating.”
I guessed it would take about an hour for Shiozaki to finish his meal, so I decided to read some of the café’s magazines in the meantime.
I had read several novels since losing my memory. After I stopped going to school the printed word and I had become close friends in various cafés. I read indiscriminately, and not just novels but manga and magazines too. Of course, everything I read was new to me.
What kinds of books had I read before I’d lost my memory? Had I read exquisite novels that made me cry? Had I memorized poetry well enough to recite it?
I felt guilty for casting aside those beautiful memories. I knew that it wasn’t my fault, knew I didn’t need to feel guilty. And yet, when I’d rearranged my room and parted with Nami I had betrayed and abandoned that past.
With these thoughts in my head, I looked through a number of magazines. I decided to try reading a new book. When I rummaged through the bookcase, I found a mysterious-looking one. It was thin and small. It felt new in my hand. I noticed it was a fairy tale book.
The title read The Eye’s Memory. Smaller and above the title were the words The Collected Black Fairy Tales, Volume I.
I flipped through the book and saw there were illustrations every few pages. The pictures were drawn with thin, pitch-black lines and had an eerie feel.
In one of the pictures a raven was using its beak to pluck an eyeball from a child’s face. An ominous feeling came over me, making me want to put the book right back on the shelf. And yet I couldn’t take my eyes off it; it was as if it had cast a spell over me, drawing me in.
Just as I decided to read it from the beginning, Shiozaki finished his lunch. I returned the book to the shelf.
“Shall we?” he said brusquely as he put on his black coat.
I stepped nervously into his car. I sat in the front passenger seat. Kimura stood outside the café, sending me off with a wave. For some reason he was smiling. I didn’t know why he was, but I returned the smile and the wave.
The car started quietly. It was a black car, and while I didn’t know much about cars, the seats were spotless and of good quality. A pleasant scent tinged the air.
“Do you mind if I stop to buy something in town first? It won’t take long.”
I shook my head.
“So you came here to visit Kazuya’s grave?”
“Did you know him?”
“I’d seen him a few times.”
“You moved here recently?”
“Last year.”
He talked to me about art. I knew as much about paintings as I knew about cars. Was he famous?
Apparently he’d painted the piece on display in the café when he had been overseas. Gripping the wheel he said, “I don’t know, I just felt like giving it as a present to that café.”
How much was that painting worth? And why had Shiozaki decided to move to Kaede? I wanted to ask him, but I kept quiet. He wasn’t much of a talker and I worried I would annoy him.
The car stopped in the parking lot of a farm supply store.
He told me he wouldn’t take long, so I stayed in the passenger seat. I rested my head in my hands and absentmindedly stared out the window at the side mirror. In it Shiozaki was loading his purchases into the trunk of the car.
He returned to the driver’s seat. “We’ll go to the house from here.”
I nodded nervously.
The kidnapper and Hitomi are there. As soon as I see the house, I’ll ask to be let out of the car. As long as I know where I am and what road leads there, it should be enough.
After a short drive we were on the highway that cut through the town, and a little while later we turned onto a side road and headed for the mountains.
“What did you buy?”
His eyes still on the road, he replied, “After that last earthquake, I noticed a crack in one of the walls of my house. So I bought some things to try to repair it.”
I hadn’t heard of an earthquake. He said it had happened the day before I’d come to Kaede. Now that I thought about it, I hadn’t felt anything that could be considered a real earthquake since I had awoken in the hospital.
Staring absentmindedly out the window and watching the scenery pass by, I suddenly saw something I had seen before.
“Stop the car!”
Shiozaki hit the brakes, giving me an inquisitive look.
“There was a park!” I ran from the car. Half buried in the center of a small grove was a clearing. A rusted chain crossed the entrance to this park and from the chain hung a sign reading no trespassing. The park seemed to have fallen into disuse for whatever reason. Weeds were growing wild. But the slide and jungle gym remained. And though all traces of its original color had rusted away, so did the swing.
I knew immediately that it was the same swing as the one in the calendar picture—the key to the first memory after my eye transplant.
I stood in front of the swing. Shiozaki came up to me.
“A long time ago,” I explained, “Saori and Kazuya played together here.” I looked at the swing from every angle. “No doubt about it.”
Happiness bubbled up inside me. Since I had come to Kaede I had discovered any number of places I had seen in the memories of my left eye. But when I found that swing where Saori had sat smiling, I was especially happy.
I jumped up on the rusted swing. It was only after I’d done so that I realized Shiozaki was watching me. Feeling more than
a little undignified, I became embarrassed. I told myself to behave in a more ladylike fashion.
“You’ve been acting strange all day,” Shiozaki said. “At least it’s interesting.”
He looked into my eyes. At first he did so casually, but then he seemed to notice something and froze.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“So I haven’t just been imagining it. I’d thought your eyes were two different colors. Although it’s a subtle difference, barely perceptible . . .”
I brushed it aside with a laugh. If he found out that I’d had surgery—that one of my eyes had once belonged to someone else—it would be too much trouble to explain. We got back into the car and drove away. Even then I could tell that Shiozaki was still thinking about my eye. I’m sure it’s an artist thing. They’re bound to be interested in unusual appearances. I dismissed it and relaxed.
After a time we came upon a road I had seen before. With its cedar trees lining both sides the area was dark even in the afternoon.
“Is this where Kazuya . . .”
Shiozaki nodded, his hands on the wheel. We were on the road where Kazuya’s accident had been.
I was relieved to find that the blue brick house was down this street after all. The visions of my left eye hadn’t been that far from reality—there were only a few trivial differences.
We drove past the site of Kazuya’s accident. It wasn’t a nice feeling, being in a car and passing over the spot where another car had hit him. The moment we did so I closed my eyes. I felt a shiver run down my back.
As we drove farther the road curved to the left, and soon we were facing the opposite direction we had been going before.
On the left-hand side of the car was a guardrail. The concrete dropped off on the other side and I couldn’t see the ground, only cedar trees poking up from below. That was where I had come the day before.
I asked Shiozaki the same question I had asked Kimura. “When was this road built?”
“I don’t know, but it was here when I moved here.”
We passed a side street.
“Kyoko Kurozuka lives down that way,” said Shiozaki.
This time the road curved to the right.
After a while, Shiozaki stopped the car and instructed me to look outside.
I was positioned just perfectly to look up the slope. I put my face to the window and looked up the mountain from below.
The forest of cedar trees crowded my view, but between the trees’ vertical trunks I saw the color.
Blue. But not the bright blue of the sky. A deep blue that looked almost black.
At the other edge of the cedar forest stood the house I’d been searching for. My skin tingled with apprehension. As far away from the house as I was, I couldn’t tell for sure if it had been built from brick. But the blue color was the same as I remembered it from the vision.
The kidnapper is there. And he’s hiding Hitomi. I wondered what kind of person the kidnapper was.
Although I had been trying to keep her image out of my mind, I thought again about the figure of the girl I had seen in the memory of my left eye. Maybe I had seen it wrong, but it had looked like she didn’t have any limbs.
What had happened to them? If that was the kidnapper’s doing, then how dreadfully cruel he must be.
I asked Shiozaki, “Do you know much about that house?”
He told me what he knew and I got out of the car.
“I’m just satisfied knowing that the house actually exists,” I said. “I’d made a bet with Kazuya. I didn’t believe him when he said it was real.”
“If you’re going home, I can take you back to the café.”
I declined the offer. “Thank you very much, but I remember the way, and I’d like to walk back.”
I bowed to him. He gave me a skeptical look and drove off. Did he notice the trembling in my voice? I’d acted as naturally as I could.
He had told me about the house:
“Kimura said you wanted to see it, so how about coming up for some tea?”
Then he had looked me in the eye and said, “There’s no need to be polite. I live there.”
*
Shiozaki’s car drove away and I went into the conifer forest alongside the road to wait awhile. I thought it would be best not to go up to the house immediately. I wanted to get there after he had already gotten home and was settled inside.
He’s the one who lives in the blue house. He’s the kidnapper. I sat in his car, not knowing anything. We talked! I couldn’t believe it.
I thought about the smile on Kimura’s face when we had left the café. He’d been hiding the fact that Shiozaki lived in the house. I was enraged by his prank even though I knew I was being unreasonable.
After a half hour had passed I headed for the house. I had spent the time mentally preparing myself for what was to come.
Cars passed rarely along the road—there was one maybe every ten minutes or so. Farther down the road had been the site of Kazuya’s accident. For him, at the end of the chase, to be struck by a car that just happened to be passing by—that had to be some really lousy luck.
I had trouble deciding whether to approach the house from the street or from within the trees. In the end I figured that if I were to take the road and Shiozaki were to happen to drive back down it, it would be too much trouble to come up with an explanation for why I was walking up the street. So I went with the forest.
As at the scene of Kazuya’s accident, the cedar trees along the road were on a sharp incline. All the roads passing through the mountains seemed to be similar—on one side a steep slope, on the other a guardrail and a small drop.
Taking care not to slip, I climbed up the slope. The layer of dead leaves on the ground made it easy to fall. As I continued up, the incline started to level out.
The closer I got to the blue house, the more a different type of tree joined with the cedar. Their leaves had fallen and their limbs seemed to reach out like feelers. I had seen them in my left eye’s memory: as Kazuya fled into the forest he had struggled against their branches.
The cold was fierce. My breath exhaled white and vanished among the trees. I counted each tree I passed by and slapped its trunk with my gloved hand. By the time the count reached fifty, I had grown tired of the game.
Before much longer the blue house towered before me. It was two stories tall and, as I’d expected, was made of brick. The building seemed like a giant curled-up monster clutching on to darkness. It lurked at the back of the forest, gazing through gaps between trees at the humans in the world below, an ominous creature inspecting the world with narrowed eyes. Seeing the house close up, I felt like I was being watched with grim intentions.
Frozen on the spot, I stared up at the walls of the house. They seemed to breathe. Like an animal about to swell its lungs to take in air, the brick walls gave the illusion of smooth contraction.
My legs wouldn’t move. I had become aware of the danger I was in. If I’m discovered, what will happen to me? I imagined the worst and found myself unable to draw any nearer to the house.
Closing my eyes, I waited for courage to come. I thought about Kazuya, and I thought about Hitomi.
I pulled the camera from my pocket. Barely hidden among the trees, I looked for signs that anyone else was around, satisfying myself that Shiozaki was nowhere near.
I moved through the shadows of the trees to emerge from the forest. I pushed my body snug against the wall of the building.
Touching my hand to the wall, I knew I hadn’t been wrong—it was the same wall I had seen in my left eye’s vision. Even through my glove, its surface felt cold enough to freeze my soul.
I looked up. The house rose high into the gray clouds.
I moved along the wall of the house, looking at the ground as I walked. The cellar window had to be somewhere.
The house was surrounded by woods. But between the wall and the trees was a gap just wide enough for a person to pass through. The ground was bare earth, i
ts surface smooth. The wall and the earth met at a right angle and at their intersection sat a number of planters of the same blue brick as the house, but nothing grew in them except dead grass.
Only the front side of the house was not fringed by the forest. But I didn’t want to be anywhere I might easily be seen, so I stayed away from that side of the building.
I thought back to the vision of my left eye. The cellar window wasn’t at the front of the house. Also, Kazuya had used a corner of the building to hide himself. The window must be near a corner. And where Kazuya ran into the forest, the ground sloped down. He had to have been at one of the corners at the back of the house.
Soon I found a place that closely matched what I had seen in my left eye. It was the southwest corner.
The surroundings were almost the same. But maybe because some time had passed, the shape and the shadows of the nearby plants felt slightly different.
But I still couldn’t find the cellar window. There was nothing like it in the wall. The spot where I thought Kazuya had found the window was only a brick planter filled with thick dead grass at the base of the wall.
Maybe Shiozaki had constructed the planter there to hide the window. It wasn’t a stretch to believe that it could have been built in the two months that had passed since Kazuya’s death.
If I broke through the planter, it might reveal the window on the other side. But the bricks looked sturdy.
The window had been covered up. I wouldn’t be able to find any evidence to take a picture of.
It was frustrating, but in the end I decided to withdraw for the day. I would need stronger nerves before I could go walking around the house in search of evidence.
I looked around the rear of the building. Attached to the wall was an old wooden shed. Now that I thought about it, Shiozaki had bought some things from the farm supply store that day. Something to repair a wall, he’d said. They might be inside the shed.
I decided to look inside the shed before I left and walked toward it.
From the second floor came the sound of a window opening.
Immediately I froze, and then, pressed up against the wall and careful not to make any sound, I moved away. I thought Shiozaki might poke his head out the window at any moment.
