Black Fairy Tale

by Otsuichi

  In a seat in the dark corner sat Shiozaki. He didn’t notice the existence or the comings and goings of any of the other customers—at least that was the impression I got from how he sat staring, elbows on the table, fingers interlocked.

  I was nervous. I wished I could turn around and get out of there as quickly as I could, but that would have looked abnormal given that I had just come inside. Quietly, I sat at the counter.

  “Nami?”

  It was a moment before I noticed that Saori was calling my name. As she tied the strings on her apron she asked, “Have you had lunch? Do you want something?”

  I said I wanted to eat.

  I told myself not to look over at Shiozaki, but my eyes went in his direction.

  Just as I finished eating my lunch he stood. I noticed it out of the corner of my eye. His footsteps sounded on the wooden floorboards. As he approached my breath caught.

  Just after he had passed me, the footsteps stopped.

  “I haven’t seen you in a while, Shiraki.”

  I made a desperate nod. Thoughts of the kidnapped Hitomi and the dead Kazuya appeared in my mind. I felt rage, yes, but inside the terror was beating it out. I felt like a tiny animal, unable to do anything but close my eyes and wait quietly until the monster had passed.

  When he left I exhaled, disheartened by my cowardice.

  Kyoko passed Shiozaki on her way in. She was holding a hardcover book in one hand and when she saw me she waved.

  She sat in her usual seat and said to Saori, “House blend, please.”

  “Sure . . .”

  Saori’s response seemed halfhearted.

  At the window next to the table Kyoko opened her book.

  *

  When Saori was quiet she was contemplating the dead. She never came out and told me so, but that’s what I thought anyway.

  I can explain. Say she was gazing out the window of the living room. Her uncle’s house was built on a slope and looked down upon the road that passed it. Even if there weren’t anyone walking along the road, Saori would be seeing Kazuya on his way to school or her father heading to work.

  I’d also seen her staring at the washing machine as it hummed. Her thoughts were on the other side of the washer—watching her mother, no doubt. Her uncle’s house wasn’t where she had grown up with her parents, but from the look in her eyes I knew she was seeing her mother.

  Times like that, I could never get myself to speak to her. From behind she looked so tired and thin. I pitied her.

  I saw the past inside my left eye. For Saori the picture films of the past were inside her head. Just as I longed for Kazuya’s visions, Saori too turned her thoughts to those who were no longer with us.

  After dinner back at her house, she said, “It’s been two months now, but it still doesn’t feel like Kazuya is really gone. Why is that? Maybe it’s because it just wasn’t that sad for me.”

  Saori’s uncle was late getting home from work, so we ate together, just the two of us. The television was off and the evening quiet, and I could hear her every word, her every sniffle.

  We were gazing at a cup on top of the kotatsu. Kazuya had used it often when he was alive.

  “You’ve got it backwards. Couldn’t it be that you haven’t felt the sadness yet because it still doesn’t feel like he’s gone?”

  “You’re strange, Nami.”

  I tilted my head.

  “With you it’s like my brother is still here with me.” She waved it off. “By the way, did you know? Kazuya’s left eye was transplanted into someone else’s body.”

  That was a subject I was very interested in hearing about.

  “One of his eyes was removed after the accident and was taken away. It’s what he wanted.”

  “He wanted it?”

  “This all happened about a year ago. He had a sty on his eyelid and had to go to an eye doctor, and for a little while he had to have a bandage over his eye. Maybe about three days.”

  She told me that at the hospital Kazuya had read a pamphlet about eye transplants and had decided to become a donor.

  “Kazuya had beautiful eyes. He had large pupils and a steady gaze.” Saori’s voice was soft, like she was remembering. “What had that boy seen during the course of his life?”

  She was ever chasing after the shadows of the dead.

  Whenever Sumida gave her a sunny greeting as she entered the café, Saori would return it with a smile. And that was all I saw at first. But as I watched her I started to sense that somewhere inside her heart, Saori was focused on the dead. Sometimes, in the middle of their conversations, she would glance over at the seat where Kazuya used to sit.

  The past flows on. You die and fade away. Like streets and railroads vanish from a town, so too do people become no more. And the world becomes a little different. But Saori kept thinking of those who had left the world as if time had stopped.

  Saori’s world, frozen in time, reminded me of her keepsake of her brother—the broken gold watch.

  Her uncle was the same way.

  There was a Buddhist altar in the room on the other side of the sliding paper door of the room where I slept, and on the altar rested photos for Kazuya and their parents and their uncle’s wife.

  One cold morning I had been savoring the warmth inside my futon when I heard a noise in the next room. I got up. Disheveled, I moved on all fours to the sliding door and opened it to see Saori’s uncle tidying the shrine. Then he pressed his hands together.

  He looked at me and said, “Did I wake you?”

  I shook my head, then slowly moved next to him. I sat in the formal seiza position, joining my hands together. He seemed to think I was sleepwalking.

  “When my wife was alive,” he said weakly, “I hit her once. I don’t remember why. I don’t know why I was always so short-tempered.”

  I looked at the photograph of his wife. She had died from pneumonia.

  Every now and then I’d see him attending to the altar. It was hard to say anything to him, so I just watched his back.

  He was deeply remorseful.

  One day I helped at the café. Saori had gone somewhere and I had been recruited by Kimura to fill her place. Not that I did much helping—there were few customers that day. My only tasks were to listen to Kimura complain and to keep him from picking on Sumida.

  After a time Kimura disappeared.

  “Sumida, take over for me, will you?”

  I handed him my apron and headed outside to look for Kimura.

  Sumida’s eyes widened. Flustered, he said, “What, wait. What am I supposed to do?”

  Kimura was behind the café. It took me a moment to realize what he was doing. He was setting out a great many shoes in the sun. He’d made a line of shoes—there were maybe thirty of them, well worn. There were all kinds of shoes, some small enough for a young child, all the way to large ones.

  “What are these?”

  “They’re shoes my friend left. He had this strange habit of saving all his shoes and never throwing them out. He died and these shoes are all that he left behind.”

  Apparently whenever Kimura had some spare time, he lined the shoes up on the ground and dried them in the sun. Even if he is as large as a bear, he’s still a sensitive guy.

  “I’m lining them up in the order he wore them. The ones on left end he wore as a child. The ones on the right he wore just before he died. See these guys here, the leather ones?” He pointed at a pair of small shoes near the left end of the row. “He was wearing those when we first met.”

  He pointed at another pair on the right. “He was wearing these when the café first opened, although I wasn’t the owner yet. One of my uncles opened it.”

  History lived in that row of shoes. They were like a timeline.

  Kimura pointed at the pair of new-looking shoes on the far right. “He took these shoes off before jumping to his death from a railway bridge. They were still at the entryway of his house. The night he killed himself he walked through the cold barefoot,
all the way from his house to the bridge.”

  When he’d finished talking, I went inside to my backpack and pulled out the binder. Kimura’s story had made me remember a strange vision I’d seen in my left eye.

  “What are you doing?” asked Sumida, the apron wrapped around his skinny frame. He was looking at me with deep interest. The getup suited him more than I’d have thought. He would have made a good stay-at-home dad.

  “This is my secret book and I can’t show you.”

  Hiding the binder from him, I glanced over the pages.

  I thought I might have been mistaken, but I wasn’t: Kazuya’s eye had seen that night.

  He had been walking the dark road home from middle school, pushing his bicycle up the hill. I knew it had to have been middle school, because that was when he rode his bike to school.

  Beneath the streetlamps he passed a man walking the opposite way. The man was looking up at the sky as he walked and hadn’t seemed to notice Kazuya or much of anything else.

  The peculiar thing was, the man was barefoot.

  *

  I’m not sure whether I should call it the beginning or what led to the beginning, but whatever it was that came to Kazuya—I saw it.

  It happened when I was having trouble deciding if I should go back to Shiozaki’s house and try the search again. I was walking the serpentine slopes toward the house. Passing by the place Kazuya had lost his life, I noticed the side road leading to where Kyoko lived. It was lined with peaceful cedars, and the endless row of trees seemed to swallow all noise.

  A car was coming up the road behind me. Worried that it might be Shiozaki, I stiffened, but thankfully it was a compact car I didn’t recognize.

  The car stopped in front of me and a man’s face leaned out the driver’s-side window.

  “Excuse me, I seem to be lost. Could you help me out?”

  When I started to walk toward the car my left eye suddenly grew warm. The sight of the car stopped beside the cedar trees matched a vision tucked away inside my eye.

  I’d experienced so many visions of the left eye’s memories since coming to that town that, paying no mind to the abrupt playback, I walked up to the driver.

  To the man in my right eye I said, “Um . . . I’m not really familiar with the roads around here. I’m sorry.”

  In my left eye Kazuya was walking down a road fenced by cedar trees. It could very well have been the same road I was standing on at that moment. A car was parked in front of him, just like the scene before me. He approached the car and started to walk past.

  Whenever I saw something in my right eye that didn’t match what I saw in my left, I lost my equilibrium and my legs became unsteady. To prevent that from happening, I usually shut both my eyes during my visions. This time, because there was another person in front of me, I didn’t.

  “Oh . . . Well, if I keep going along this road, I’ll get to the next prefecture, right?”

  As I nodded in answer to his question a feeling came over me that could have stopped my heart.

  Kazuya passed alongside the car and happened to glance in the rear window. In the back seat a girl had been left sleeping. Her eyes were closed, but I had seen her picture so many times her face had been burned into my head. It was Hitomi.

  Kazuya didn’t seem to have thought anything of it; he looked away from the window and back at the road before him. He hadn’t seen the driver’s seat or the license plate of the car.

  There the memory ended.

  I had stopped hearing what the man who needed directions was saying. In my shock my mind had blanked and I could no longer understand the words he was speaking. Eventually he gave up and drove off.

  By chance Kazuya had witnessed the car Hitomi had ridden in. He might not have known about her yet. In that vision, how were her arms and legs? I hadn’t been able to tell for sure.

  Kazuya must have seen Hitomi’s picture later, on the news or in the paper. Whether it was soon after her kidnapping or just two months ago, I couldn’t know. But whenever it was, he had remembered seeing her lying in the back seat of that car.

  Had Kazuya known the car belonged to Shiozaki? The car in the vision didn’t look like the one he drove now. Had he bought a new one or did he perhaps have two cars?

  Or maybe Kazuya had seen the car on the road that led to Shiozaki’s house? If so, that could be how he learned that the blue brick house was where the kidnapper lived.

  I decided to investigate the road that led to Shiozaki’s house. I thought I might find the location I’d just seen in the vision. But all of the roads in this area were lined with cedar trees like that one was, making it difficult to pinpoint the right place. In the end, without finding anything, I headed back toward Melancholy Grove.

  On the way back, Saori appeared from the side road that connected to Kyoko’s house. I called out to her, and she looked at me with a surprised expression.

  “Today’s delivery day,” she said.

  *

  One day Shiozaki forgot his coat inside the café. Kimura found it still draped over the back of his seat.

  After a moment of hesitation I found the courage to declare, “I’ll take it to his house.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Kimura said. “He’ll just come back tomorrow.”

  But I wasn’t about to let the opportunity escape. Only rarely would I have a legitimate excuse to visit his house. If I brought him something he’d lost, I might be able to look around inside his home without drawing suspicion.

  Finally Kimura decided I could go.

  Sumida, who had heard most of the conversation, gave me a ride to the blue house. He drove the car through the gate and onto Shiozaki’s property. There wasn’t any reason to worry that our presence would be suspect, but as we approached the house I couldn’t help feeling afraid.

  At the front of the house was a wide graveled drive. Shiozaki’s black car was there, alone. Sumida parked next to it.

  I climbed out of the passenger seat and looked up at the front of the building. It wasn’t tall like a castle or anything like that. The withered trees crowding around the house might have even been taller, their slender, leafless limbs outstretched like hair standing on end. The house was surrounded.

  The angle of the sun cast shadows over the front of the house. Its blue bricks shrouded in black, the building had become the embodiment of shadow itself, a cavern that had opened up in space. If a rift were ever to open in our world, that house revealed how dark the hollow, bottomless blackness on the other side would be.

  Hitomi Aizawa is there, in the cellar. As the thought came over me a tremor ran through my body.

  “This won’t take long, right?” said Sumida, who hadn’t gotten out of the car. I got the very strong impression that he didn’t want to spend a single moment outside the car’s heated interior.

  Thinking I’d feel more safe with him along, I said, “Come with me, Sumida.”

  He pretended not to hear me.

  Left with no other option, I held the coat to my chest and walked to the house. Earlier, when no one was looking, I had searched the pockets but found nothing inside.

  Fearfully I stood at the front door. It was made from black wood and had a gold-colored doorknob.

  I rang the doorbell. From my place outside the front door I could hear the clear chime sounding inside.

  After a short time Shiozaki appeared. His sharp eyes peered down at me from behind a pair of thin-framed glasses.

  My heart raced and my words tumbled together. With my dry mouth I somehow managed to communicate that I had come to return his coat to him.

  He said, “Thanks,” and looked at the car behind me. “That’s Sumida’s car, isn’t it? So he came too.”

  Never have I felt so relieved to have another person with me as I did at that moment. There’s nothing this man can do to me.

  “Since you came all the way out here, why don’t you come in for some coffee?”

  I nodded at the suggestion.

 
I went back to the car and reported Shiozaki’s offer to Sumida. With sleepiness in his eyes, he got out of the car.

  We went inside. It was a Western-style home; he didn’t even have us take our shoes off.

  The walls and floors were simple. There weren’t any chandeliers or red carpet. The house had the cool reserve of a monastery or a historic school building.

  The age of the building gave it a gloomy air. The rooms were illuminated not with pure white fluorescent light, but with old, dim lightbulbs. Everything about the house plucked at the thread of anxiety deep in my heart.

  Sumida and I were led into the parlor. In the center of the room was a sofa and a coffee table. A short bookcase sat along one of the walls, its shelves jammed full with foreign editions.

  A painting in a black frame hung on the wall, and when I asked about it Shiozaki said he had painted it. It depicted an elderly woman holding a sack of apples in her arms.

  Shiozaki brought us coffee.

  I looked around the room to see if anything might trigger heat in my left eye. But the box of memories stayed shut. Had Kazuya never stepped inside this room?

  “This is all antique,” said Sumida, patting at the sofa. It was one of those you sink right into. “I don’t think I could even fit this couch into the room I live in.”

  “Almost all the furniture was left here by a previous tenant.”

  I asked, “Do you think that person inherited it from the one before?”

  Shiozaki tilted his head. “I wouldn’t know. I never met him.”

  He had moved to the house almost half a year before. Hitomi had disappeared a year ago—had he brought her here?

  While Sumida and Shiozaki were talking, I stood and nonchalantly asked if I could use the bathroom. Shiozaki told me where it was and I left the parlor.

  It would be simple, I thought, to intentionally forget the directions to the bathroom. Then it wouldn’t appear unnatural for me to open the door to the wrong room.

  I walked down the hallway, and making sure that nobody was around, I opened the doors to the other rooms. I wanted to make a detailed search, but fearful that Shiozaki would find me, I couldn’t make myself step into any of the rooms. As I went by each room, I peeked inside, and when I saw nothing there, I quickly shut the door again. Some rooms looked like studios, others hadn’t any furniture at all.