by Otsuichi
He stopped and thought a while. There’s no need to give it back.
But a few minutes later he was opening the door to the café.
The woman clasped her hands around the watch more emotionally than he had expected. “Thank you for coming all the way back. This watch is very important to him.” Warmly she asked, “What’s your name?”
She looks just like her.
Miki gave his real name.
“Nice to meet you, Sumida.” She set the watch on the counter. The metal clunked against the surface.
As Miki turned to leave again, the woman grabbed his arm.
“Please, have some coffee before you go.”
She flashed her white teeth at him and seated him at the counter, halfway by force.
The secondhand of the watch was moving at a steady pace.
Part 5
1
Three days after I was taken to the hospital, I was allowed visitors.
That day, I lay in bed thinking absently about the past. Well, I say the past, but even my oldest memories were only two and a half months old.
After I had lost both my left eye and my memories, I’d awoken in a white hospital room just like this one. At the time, I hadn’t known anything. I still didn’t know what I spent my time thinking about then. I suspected I didn’t think anything at all—I wasn’t sure I’d had the means to, that I even knew how.
I only remembered one thing—how terribly anxious I had felt.
The door to my hospital room opened. So far the only people who had come were doctors, nurses, and policemen. This time it was different. The ban on seeing me had been lifted and someone had come.
At the door to the room was a face I knew.
Still lying on the bed, I asked, “You came all the way here?”
My mother nodded. Her eyes were puffy and red.
*
The day before my mother visited, some policemen had come to talk to me—three of them, all in black suits.
I invited them to sit, but none of them even considered it. They looked down at me lying in bed, not even allowed to sit up because the movement might reopen my stomach wound. When they spoke it was all business. They informed me that they did not want me to speak publicly about my encounter with Sumida. Because it was such a bizarre incident, the newspapers and TV would make a big fuss, which wouldn’t be good.
Don’t talk to anyone about the incident. I promised them I wouldn’t.
In the end, I never did tell them about my left eye.
What I had experienced in that house was highly unusual. At least, that’s what all the many examinations of my body indicated. The doctors were still mystified as to how I had been able to move given my injuries. I’d explained to them that there hadn’t been any pain, but all the doctors could do was tilt their heads and test me further.
Hitomi and the others had probably had to undergo even more tests than I. But I hadn’t seen any of them since the police had taken us from the house.
After the three policemen had finished their duties, they prepared to leave. I stopped them. “Where’s Hitomi?”
One answered me.
He explained that she was being examined in another hospital and that after she recovered, she would return to her parents.
“And Shiozaki?”
After a silence, he told me Shiozaki had died. In the middle of his examination he had stopped breathing—peacefully, as if he were drifting off to sleep. One of the stakes had scratched his heart.
I have no way of knowing if the officer was telling the truth or not.
“Thank you for the information,” I said.
He started to walk away but stopped. He asked me the question I had already been asked many times before.
In the cellar they’d found signs that someone other than the victims they had rescued had been injured. He asked me if there had been anyone else down there.
Each time I was asked that question my answer was the same: I shook my head and said, “I don’t know. The only ones I found down there were Hitomi Aizawa and Mr. Shiozaki.”
*
Back then . . .
After I’d made sure Sumida was dead, I gathered up the long thing that hung from my stomach. I didn’t even scream. I was singularly focused on stuffing the dirt-covered thing back into my wound. Thinking back on it now, I wasn’t acting normally, but at the time I earnestly believed that was the best solution.
There was no pain. My stomach, my left hand, and my contorted right leg were enveloped in a blissful warmth, and the sensation left my head in a haze.
My body felt heavy, sluggish. I was terribly exhausted, but leaning against the wall for support, I was able to stand. Somehow I used my left leg to drag myself back to the window I had jumped from; here I returned inside. The front door wouldn’t have opened due to the extension cord, and there was a strong chance the same had been done to the back door. I was only able to lift myself up and through the window through sheer force of will—I knew I had to call for help.
After I contacted the police and an ambulance I returned to the cellar. Forgetting that my right leg didn’t work, I tried to walk on both legs.
Even with Sumida gone the darkness in the cellar was thick. I announced to Hitomi and the wriggling bodies in the back that Sumida was dead.
“I thought so.” Hitomi’s whisper came from the carriage.
“Please take me to him.”
I wasn’t sure if that was a good idea, but I decided to carry her back to Sumida’s body. The fingers on my left hand wouldn’t move, but that didn’t prevent me from being able to hold her. Hitomi was light and small and warm. She felt like little more than a ball of body heat.
With the girl in my arms, I slowly climbed the stairs—a difficult task with only one working leg. I unwrapped the extension cord from the front door and went around the house toward the southwest corner. The effort used up nearly the last of my strength.
Sumida lay still on the ground, the screwdriver stuck in his eyeball. Although I didn’t have any medical knowledge, I was pretty sure it had passed into his brain.
Hitomi gazed at him from my arms and quietly cried. Even thinking back on it now, her tears didn’t seem like those for a person who had done her harm. I still don’t know exactly how she felt toward him.
Knowing I hadn’t the strength to make it back to the cellar, I waited at the front door for the police to arrive.
I sat, leaning my back against a beam at the side of the doorway and hugging Hitomi’s small body against my chest.
“Thank you for coming to save me,” she said. “I’ll be able to go home now, won’t I?”
I nodded. My consciousness was starting to fade, although not due to any pain—my exhaustion was a warm blanket wrapping around my mind.
“Is it okay for me to sleep?” I asked. Before she could answer my eyes had closed.
The patrol car’s siren woke me from my dream. A policeman came running up, saw Hitomi, and recoiled.
“There are three more in the cellar,” I said.
The cop’s face paled, but he entered the house. After a while he returned and with his hand over his mouth told me there was only one person inside.
“That’s okay,” Hitomi said. “I’m sure she must be remembering it wrong.”
The policeman’s eyes, filled with dread, moved back and forth from Hitomi to me. Then he ran back to his car to call for backup.
“It’s fine this way.” Hitomi looked at me and winked.
I realized that what I had seen after I dozed off had not been a dream.
There had been the sound of the front door opening, and then I had sensed something large pass right by me. I felt the pressure of the air against my cheek.
I lifted my eyelids a crack to see. The thing was a bizarre mass of body parts. Its two heads were exchanging goodbyes with Hitomi. They extended one of their many arms to lovingly pat the girl. The arm was slender, like that of a child.
Then, wriggling th
eir limbs like the legs of a spider, they disappeared into the forest.
“Let’s keep those two a secret,” said Hitomi.
I winked at her, closing my left eye as if to say, I’ll forget all about them.
2
The incident was handled as a case of abduction and false imprisonment. The kidnapper was Michio Sumida. From a newspaper article I learned he had been a college student who wrote fairy tales on the side.
Saori came to visit me often. The hospital was in a prosperous part of the city. She, unable to drive, had Kimura or Kyoko drive her there.
She brought me all kinds of manga and books to keep me from getting too bored.
She never asked me about what had happened inside the house. She must have sensed it had been a nightmare and was considerate enough not to bring it up.
The newspapers Saori brought me reported the incident pretty much as it had happened, with only a few small distortions. They said that Sumida, the previous tenant of the house, had been hiding Hitomi Aizawa in the cellar. When Shiozaki found out, Sumida took action against him too. I’d gotten involved and been injured.
No magazine or newspaper article I read mentioned anything about Hitomi’s limbs or how Sumida had kept her alive for a whole year. But one of the magazines did have a feature about Sumida as a person and the stories he’d written under the name Shun Miki.
He was born an only child and grew up in a hospital. In high school he made his debut as an author of fairy tales and moved into his own apartment near his school.
After he graduated from high school he went to college. While he attended classes he supported himself by writing fairy tales. The house he had rented was the blue house in Kaede, where he lived for two years. After that—a year ago—he had moved to a newly built apartment building near his school.
When he moved out of the house, Shiozaki had moved in.
No one had learned of Shinichi and Yukie. The police might have had their suspicions, but nothing about the two had been published in the magazines. When had they become residents of the cellar?
Hitomi was kidnapped a year before, and Kazuya must have gone to the house soon after. Shinichi and Yukie were probably already in the cellar by then.
Sumida had told me that Kazuya had come to the house. Why then didn’t my left eye show me any memories of it when I set foot inside? Why had it not seen any keys to open the box of those particular memories? What bad luck. If only some vision had played from when Kazuya visited the house, I might have realized Sumida was the kidnapper.
Then I remembered something. That’s right. A year ago, Kazuya had a bandage over his eye. His left eye. If that was when he went to the house, the eye wouldn’t have seen a thing.
In the weekly magazines and on the news shows, many theorized about why Sumida had injured and killed people.
There were a lot of theories—he had a sadistic personality, he held a deep hatred for his fellow man, he was copying criminals from other countries. But I felt like all of them were wrong.
The Sumida I saw was calmer than that—like a scientist. I remembered how he had quietly looked down at me as I lay flat on the ground, my guts trailing from my body. Somehow, in that dreadful memory I envisioned him dressed in a doctor’s white lab coat. That wasn’t how it had really been, but something made me picture him that way. He hadn’t wanted to kill people. Maybe he had just wanted to take them apart to see what life was.
Whether it was a blessing from God or the devil’s curse I couldn’t say, but his scalpel had held a mysterious power. I think I could wonder about the nature of his power forever and still never find a satisfactory explanation. That blissful feeling as my innards had dragged along through the dirt, that feeling of gentle light enveloping the world, of my body turning into feathers—that hadn’t been some kind of telepathic mind trick or drug-induced hallucination. If this existence were just a motion picture projected onto a thin, fragile screen, I believe his power was a darkness that crawled through a tiny hole in the screen to slowly blot out the picture.
I read in the weekly magazines that, according to evidence found near his high school apartment, Sumida had likely committed many other crimes over a period of time. I don’t know if that was true or not.
Once, Saori saw me reading one of those articles and her face grew sad. She didn’t say anything, but I wondered if she was thinking about Sumida. After that I made sure I never read about the incident in front of her.
In the end I never told anyone that Sumida had taken Kazuya’s life. I felt it would hurt Saori more than if she thought it had just been an accident.
Once when Saori was sitting with me, peeling an apple, I asked her, “Hey, what were you doing at Kyoko’s house?”
“Nothing in particular,” she said. Then she told me about a time she went there on a delivery.
“I just happened to see it there—a photograph of Kyoko and this kid . . .”
She had seen the kid somewhere before. The boy’s young face hadn’t yet matured, but she was certain.
I didn’t expect what came next.
“He was the boy who came to apologize to Kazuya and me at our parents’ funeral.”
“The one who worked at the lumber mill?”
She nodded.
That young man had caused the accident that took away their parents. Overcome with guilt, he had killed himself in Kaede.
After that, Saori had asked her parents’ coworkers for the boy’s name.
“Kyoko’s husband had died too.”
The name the coworkers gave her had been the same as Kyoko’s before her husband’s death.
Kyoko had probably moved to Kaede because of the boy.
“I wasn’t able to bring it up with her right away. But after a few days I went back to her house to ask.”
At first Kyoko had denied it. But Saori kept coming by her house to talk, and eventually she admitted that what Saori believed was true.
When Saori finished talking, she gazed into my eyes. The wound in my stomach had started to close, but I still couldn’t sit up. Lying there, I took in her stare.
She put a piece of apple in my mouth even though I hadn’t asked her to, and I had to work my jaw up and down. As the sun shone in through the window, I chewed the apple—its crunching sound broke the silence in the room.
“Sis, there’s something I haven’t told you . . .” When the words came out of my mouth, nothing about them felt unnatural. Saori seemed to feel the same way. “I never knew Kazuya.”
“Yeah?”
I didn’t know if she would believe me, but I began to tell her the strange story of my left eye. The parts about Kazuya’s accident and the things related to the incident—those I would keep secret.
3
Until the wound in my stomach healed and the bones in my arms and my legs stitched themselves back together, my body felt strange and distant. Any feelings of pain were dulled and I could barely sense changes of temperature. I had no appetite—I felt like I didn’t even need to eat to stay alive.
Hitomi, her arms and legs removed by Sumida, had lived in that cellar for one year. Everyone said she had survived on canned food.
I couldn’t quite explain why, but I thought they were wrong. I think a power, like the one I felt in my body, had disconnected her from the natural cycle of life and death.
When my injuries had completely healed my body returned to normal.
After I was released from the hospital, I returned to my life at home. To be honest, I hadn’t wanted to go back to school, but Saori and my mother wanted me to, so I did. I still did poorly in academics and in sports.
But in my own way—I don’t know how—I managed to make friends who would talk to me. After that school gradually grew more fun.
Whenever school was on break I returned to Kaede. I was worried I might become a nuisance, but Saori’s uncle gladly allowed me to stay. Because Saori hadn’t told anyone about my eye, he still misunderstood my relationship with Kazuya.
/> I could remember how lonely it had felt the very first time the three of us ate dinner together, with each of us feeling as if the other two didn’t exist. But that had changed. It wasn’t exactly a dramatic change, but there was a warmth and a happiness around the dinner table. I supposed it was because Saori and her uncle were being gradually released from the spell in which the dead had held them. It was what I had hoped for them.
I visited Kazuya’s grave. Because I went alone, without telling Saori, I had a lot of trouble finding the place where he rested. Finally, after I had worn out my tired and stumbling feet so much I thought I might die, I found the Fuyutsuki family grave.
I told Kazuya everything, though I was sure he already knew. After all, his eye had been there through the final moments.
A layer of thin clouds covered the sky, and the sun shone behind them. Standing between the rows of gravestones, I closed my eyes, and inside myself, I thanked him.
Thank you. Thank you for showing me your memories. Because you were always with me, I never gave up. Because of you, I could fight till the end.
I was choked up by the love inside me, and my salty tears spilled to the ground.
*
I visited Kimura and Kyoko at Melancholy Grove. They had become accustomed to my presence at the café, and whenever I didn’t show up for a while, they couldn’t help but worry about me.
I sat in Kazuya’s seat at the counter, and when Kimura brought me a café au lait, I thought back—as was my habit—to the first time I had come to the café. I looked around the interior, and everything I saw had a memory.
My eyes turned to Shiozaki’s painting.
“I guess they discovered it among his belongings, but . . .” According to Kimura Shiozaki’s wife had been born in Kaede.
“You mean the woman in the painting?” I asked.
He nodded.
I walked over to the painting and focused my eyes on it—otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to see the tiny figure dressed in red standing on the shore of the lake.
