by Otsuichi
Morino rarely exchanges words with anyone else. She has nothing fundamentally in common with our healthy, overenergetic classmates. If classmates smile and speak to her, Morino will simply stare back at them, her blank expression never crumbling—and she’ll say, “Oh.” Even if classmates wait for her to say something else, nothing will happen: Morino will react no further.
Most people who speak to her end up feeling ignored. The girls in class have said as much. Ever since, they have begun looking down on her.
This attitude only helps complete the barrier around her that keeps everyone else away. While everyone else is laughing and talking, Morino alone remains utterly silent, as though she is in some other dimension, as if there is a shadow cast on the spot where she sits.
But Morino doesn’t intend to ignore anyone. After talking with her awhile myself, I became convinced of this. It isn’t out of spite that she doesn’t happily respond; rather, it is simply because she is that kind of person. She has nothing against the others, and she is equally distant with everyone.
After carefully observing such interactions, what I sensed was confusion. When someone spoke to Morino, she couldn’t figure out how to respond, and she was unable to think of anything to say. But this was all speculation on my part, as I didn’t know what she was actually thinking. Most of the time, her emotions didn’t register outwardly, and it was hard to tell what she felt.
For a while after we first spoke, I thought she was like some sort of doll. The impression she gave off was one more like an object than something animate.
†
One Wednesday in October, just after the leaves were changing from green to red, Morino came into the classroom with her head down, and everyone fell silent. Her long black hair was hanging down, obscuring her face, and she was walking slowly, dragging her feet in a very creepy fashion. Most of the students must have thought she looked like a ghost—but her air was much more dangerous, like some sort of wild animal.
The barrier around her had transformed from its usual transparent sphere into something covered in spikes; she seemed like she might attack anyone who got too close to her. She was silent, as always—and nobody ever spoke to her, anyway—but you could see just how different her mood was by the tension on the faces of those sitting near her.
I was not all that intrigued. I simply assumed she was in a bad mood. That day, we didn’t have a moment to speak, so I didn’t learn the reason why. (Morino would never approach me to speak when I was talking to any of our other classmates.) I learned the reason the next day, though, after school.
When homeroom ended, the other students stood up and left the room. Eventually, the class was empty—and so quiet that it was hard to imagine how noisy it had been a few minutes earlier. Only the rows of empty desks, Morino, and I remained.
A pleasantly cold breeze drifted in through the windows. The class next door had not been dismissed yet, and I could hear the teacher’s voice from down the hall.
Morino was sitting low in her seat. Both her hands hung listlessly at her sides, and she looked exhausted.
“I’m not sleeping much,” she said, yawning. There were shadows under her eyes. Her eyelids were half-closed, and she stared past them into the distance.
I was in my seat, preparing to head home. Her seat was over on the other side of the room. There was no one else there, so I could hear her well enough, and it didn’t occur to me to move closer to her to talk.
“Is that why you were so strange yesterday?”
“I get like this sometimes. No matter how hard I try to sleep, I can’t. Insomnia, I guess.”
She stood up. Still looking very sleepy, she staggered toward the chalkboard.
There was an outlet at the front of the room, and an extension cord plugged into it, which was connected to the eraser cleaner. Morino unplugged the cord, which was a good sixteen feet long. Leaving the other end connected to the eraser cleaner, she wrapped the cord around her neck. She stood there that way, motionless.
“No, doesn’t feel right,” she said, shaking her head and dropping the cord. “When I can’t sleep, I always wrap something around my neck, close my eyes, and imagine myself being strangled to death. Then I can fall asleep—it feels like sinking deep underwater.”
I was disappointed: she hadn’t yet gone mad from lack of sleep. “If that helps, you should try it before you’re this far-gone.”
“Not just any bit of rope will do.”
Morino was after a certain type of rope, and the extension cord had not proved an effective substitute.
“I’ve lost the one I used the last time. I’m trying to find a new one, but …” She yawned, looking around blearily. “I don’t really know what I’m looking for. If I could figure that out, goodbye insomnia.”
“What did you use last time?”
“No clue. It was just something I found, and I tossed it out as soon as I could sleep without it.”
She closed her eyes, fingering her throat. “I just remember how it felt …” She opened her eyes, as if she’d just had an idea. “Right, let’s go rope shopping. You should buy some rope or cord yourself; it might come in handy. You might need it when you kill yourself.”
The class next door had finished, and I could hear the sound of all those chairs being pushed back at once.
†
We left school and headed for a large general store on the edge of town. It was a fair distance, but it was on a big road with a lot of buses, so it didn’t take us long to get there. The bus was about half-full, so Morino sat down while I stood looking down at her, hanging on to a strap above me. She put her head down and tried to sleep, but even the bus’s comfortable sway was not enough, and we arrived without her having slept a wink.
The large store was filled with wood and metal for construction, as well as any number of tools. We wandered through the aisles, looking for anything like a rope. AV cables for connecting TVs and video players, clothesline, kite string … they had everything.
Morino picked up each one, feeling it with her fingers—carefully, as if she were choosing what to wear.
She seemed to have fairly strong opinions about what sort of rope should be used to hang oneself, and she explained them, looking haggard. “First, thin string would just snap. Electric cords are strong, but they lack in beauty.”
“What about plastic?” There was a big ball of plastic string on the bottom shelf, and I only asked because I happened to see it.
She shook her head, expressionless. “lt stretches. Ruins everything. I’m done here.”
We found a number of different chains in another section of the store. From two-centimeter-thick heavy chains to delicate chains only a millimeter or two across. They were on the shelves in rolls, like toilet paper. There was a machine nearby that allowed you to cut the chain to the length you needed.
“Look at this—so thin, but it says it can hold up to a hundred pounds,” she said, holding a thin silver chain between her fingers. She pulled it out, pressing it to her neck. The chain in her hand caught the light, glittering. “Nice color—would make even a dead body look beautiful … but when you hanged yourself, the links would probably bite into your skin.”
She let it drop. It wasn’t a match for her ideals.
She’d spent a lot of time thinking about what kind of rope she’d want to kill her.
If I were going to strangle somebody, what kind of rope would I use? I pondered this as we wandered the store.
“I don’t want it to tickle my neck,” she said, when I pointed to a rough woven rope. “Old-fashioned rope like that was all over the house in the country where I used to live. They use it on the farm a lot.”
She had lived somewhere else until the fourth grade—in the mountains, a two-hour drive from here.
“Where my mother was born and raised, my grandparents have a little farm. My father used to drive two hours to and from work every day.”
But they had eventually moved to spare him that drive. All
this was news to me.
“I always thought that when it came time to kill yourself, you’d slit your wrists, not hang yourself,” I said.
She held our her wrist. “You mean this?”
On her wrist was a thick white line, like a welt. The skin was slightly raised, and it was clearly a scar left from a slashed wrist. I’d never asked about it, so I didn’t know why she’d cut her wrist.
“That’s not a result of trying to kill myself—it was just a sudden impulse.”
She went through her life without expressions, but she apparently did have emotions strong enough to produce that kind of reaction. Her lack of outward expression was similar to the way a thermos is never hot on the outside: No matter what was going on inside, it never affected the surface.
But when emotions get too strong, humans have to do something. Some people encase their emotions by playing or exercising, whereas others calm their emotions by breaking things. People in the latter group could let their feelings out just by breaking furniture or the like. But Morino was unable to direct those feelings outward, so she’d directed them at herself.
Suddenly, a familiar voice called out to me.
I turned around to find my sister, Sakura, standing a short distance away and looking at us in surprise. There was a big bag of dog food in her arms. She’d just happened to be here shopping.
Morino looked over sleepily. She saw the picture of the dog printed on the bag, and her cheek twitched.
Sakura remarked on how surprised she was to see me there, and then she regarded Morino.
Morino looked away, not because she was avoiding Sakura’s gaze but because she was avoiding the picture of the dog. She would never even go near a shelf with the word “dog” on it.
“And your pretty friend?” Sakura asked, curious. I explained politely that this was probably not the kind of person Sakura imagined her to be. She didn’t appear to believe me.
“Okay. Mom sent me out here. I have to get the dog food and pick up some clothes at the dry cleaner’s.”
Sakura pulled a note out of her pocket and read it. Her character was a lot better than mine. She was supposed to be busy studying for exams, but she still couldn’t refuse a request to do someone else’s work.
“Then I have to pick up some tofu and tangerines from the woman next door and walk the dog when I get home.”
She waved at Morino, grinning.
Morino was too busy not looking at the dog food to notice. She had one hand on a shelf for support, denying the existence of the picture on the dog food with all her might.
When I was sure Sakura was gone, I said, “You can look up now.”
Morino straightened up, turned toward the shelves as if nothing had happened, and began examining a roll of wire on the shelf.
“Was that your sister?” I nodded.
“I had a sister—a twin sister. She died a long time ago.” I had not known this.
“Her name was Yuu. Yuu …”
As she explained this, she ran her fingers along the long silvery wire, white teeth showing between her bluish lips and her quiet voice emerging through both.
Yuu had hanged herself and died, Morino Yoru told me.
She had wrapped any number of ropes around her neck today, but Morino had not found anything that would solve her sleeping problems. I left without buying anything, either.
We crossed the parking lot, heading for the road. With the heavy lines under her eyes, Morino looked as if a strong burst of wind would be enough to knock her over.
There was almost nothing around there except the massive general store: fields and vacant lots covered in dry grass and the newly paved asphalt road running through them. The area would be developed in time, though.
On the side of the road, there was a bus stop with a bench, where Morino sat down. One of the buses that stopped there must go to her house.
The sun was getting low in the sky. The sky was still blue, but the undersides of the clouds were turning pink.
“May I ask about your sister?” I said, glancing at her. She sat in silence, not answering.
There weren’t a lot of cars on the road in front of us. One would pass every now and then, but for the most part, there was only the wide expanse of asphalt, along with the empty plane of dried grass beyond the guardrail. In the distance, there was a single iron tower, like a speck on the horizon.
“Go ahead,” she said eventually.
ii
“Yuu died when we were in the second grade, so I only remember her as a child, not even eight years old … At the time, we lived in the country—nothing but farms all around.”
Her house had been on the slope of a mountain. There was a forest behind it, and they could constantly hear the sound of bird wings flapping.
“Yuu and I slept next to each other in the same room. When it got dark and we tried to go to sleep, we could hear owls in the darkness outside.”
It was an old wooden house, with floors and pillars that gleamed darkly. There was green moss growing on the roof tiles, and there were a number of broken tile fragments on the ground around the house. It was a comfortably large house, and all the rooms had tatami floors—except for the kitchen, which had been added later. The twin girls, Yoru and Yuu, lived in that house with their parents, grandmother, and grandfather.
Morino’s father drove two hours into town to work every day. Her grandparents were often out, checking the water in the rice fields or carrying different farming tools from the shed. The fields and paddies were a five-minute walk from the house. All the daikon and cabbage they ate came from those fields.
“But the daikon we grew were not shaped as nice as the ones in shops, and they were a little bit yellow.”
There were a number of trees in the yard. The ground was bare earth, and it would turn to mud when it rained, forming pools of muddy water. If you went outside after it rained, the ground would stick to your feet and try to trip you.
There was a shed on the left side of the house—a small one built right up against the side of the house. They kept the farming tools in there. The roof had been broken during a typhoon, but rather than fix it, they had just spread a blue tarp over the top. It leaked a little, but there was nothing more than tools inside, so it wasn’t really a problem.
“I played with my sister all the time.”
When they entered elementary school, they walked hand in hand to the school in the valley. The road was thin and winding. On one side, the mountain sloped sharply upward, and it was covered in trees. The other side also had trees, but it was possible to glimpse the view below through the leaves. Piles of brown leaves would gather on either side, and the path got slippery in the rain. The branches on the tall trees blocked the sun, and the road was always gloomy and damp.
“It was downhill all the way to school, and easy. But it was uphill all the way home, and exhausting.”
Yoru and Yuu had identical faces, down to the location of their moles. And they both had long hair down to their waists. They always chose similar clothing. I could easily imagine the two identical girls running down the tree-covered mountain road.
“We looked the same. Even our mother couldn’t tell us apart. Sometimes, before we took a bath, we would both take off our clothes and stand there silently.”
When that happened, their mother could not begin to guess which was the elder sister and which was the younger.
“But our expressions and behavior were different, so if we started talking, everyone knew who was who.”
Even as a tiny child, Yuu always found it funny when their mother stared at them in confusion. And the moment it struck Yuu as funny, their mother could point right at them and say, “This is Yoru, and that’s Yuu.”
Yuu had always shown her emotions more easily than her older sister. When she was talking with her parents, she always smiled.
“At the time, our favorite games were drawing pictures and pretending to be dead.”
During summer vacation, the el
ementary school pool was open, and they could swim all they wanted.
“It was a small school, and there were only about a hundred students. There were fewer than twenty students per grade, but the pool was packed every day, all summer long.”
Under the blinding white sunlight, the children splashed around. If you were to lie on your back in the pool, your ears underwater, the cicadas in the mountains would sound like walls tumbling down.
“There were always a few adults around the pool, making sure the children didn’t do anything dangerous. Sometimes they were teachers, sometimes students’ parents. Most of the time nothing happened, and they would sit on a bench in the shade, gossiping.”
One day, the twins decided to surprise the adults watching by pretending they had drowned. They floated facedown in the water, lying limp, competing to see which of them could hold out longer and look most like a corpse.
They must have made an eerie contrast with the children playing noisily all around them, the two girls floating quietly in the water, their hair spread out like seaweed, only their backs above water, immobile as long as they could hold their breath. When they could no longer stand it, they would lift their heads slightly, take a breath, and then die again.
“The reaction was bigger than Yuu or I had anticipated.”
The women watching the pool were two of their classmates’ mothers. When they saw the girls lying motionless, one of them jumped up on the bench and screamed. All the children in the pool turned toward the bench. The little kids splashing around, the older kids practicing swimming—everyone knew something had happened. The mother who had not screamed stood up and ran to try to save the drowning girls … but running next to a pool is very dangerous.
“She tripped and hit her head, knocking herself unconscious. The mother who had screamed saw that, and she went to call an ambulance. Yuu and I got out of breath and stood up, only to find everyone around us in a state of panic. It was like hell on earth. The younger kids were crying, scared and confused. There was a boy next to the unconscious woman, shaking her shoulder and shouting, ‘Mommy!’ He was one of our classmates.”
