by Otsuichi
The twins had looked at each other and, without another word, they’d quickly gotten out of the pool and fled, without even changing clothes.
“We went out the back gate, each with a bag holding our clothes and towels in one hand and our shoes in the other. As we ran along the path through the rice paddies in our swimsuits, ambulance after ambulance screamed along the distant road toward the pool. How many bodies had that women seen? There were at least five ambulances.”
The school was at the bottom of the mountain, and rice paddies stretched as far as the eye could see on the side away from the mountain. Green rice stalks covered the ground, making the world appear completely flat. The girls walked along the path among the paddies.
“The grass pricked our feet.”
They didn’t know what had happened after the ambulances reached the school. They didn’t think about it much—just went home, ate some shaved ice, and went to sleep.
“That wasn’t the only time we played dead. We also spread ketchup on each other’s faces and pretended it was blood.”
They stood in front of the refrigerator, squeezing ketchup on their fingers and dabbing it on each other’s faces. Their pale skin was soon red.
“The ketchup started dripping down, and we had to lick it off. Eventually, we got bored with the taste of ketchup, so we wiped it off with sausages and ate those.”
Another time, they had left the house with a can of meat sauce.
At a corner not far from their house, there had once been a traffic accident. A kindergarten boy had been hit by a car and had died. Yuu laid down in the same place and closed her eyes.
“ ‘Go ahead,’ she said, and I emptied the can of meat sauce on her face. It looked just like her brains were coming out. I told Yuu not to move, no matter what happened. She kept her eyes closed so the sauce wouldn’t get in them, and she nodded.”
Yoru had hidden in the bushes, waiting for someone to come by and scream. When children saw them, they wouldn’t be surprised the way the grown-ups were—they’d come over assuming it was some sort of game.
“Even the people who screamed soon realized it was just meat sauce, and then they laughed. We had done this kind of thing before, and our neighbors knew all about it.”
“No cars went past?”
If there had been a traffic accident there, then cars must have gone by there sometimes. And Yuu was lying in the street; she might’ve been in danger.
When I asked this, Morino explained without expression, “A car did come. Yuu had her eyes closed and didn’t notice. It slammed on the brakes, stopping right in front of her. The noise made Yuu sit up, wipe the meat sauce off her face, and turn around—only to find the bumper right in front of her. The bumper was polished silver, and her face was reflected in it …”
“You didn’t call out and warn her?”
“No. I watched in silence. I wanted to see what would happen.”
I searched her voice for any trace of guilt, but there was none. It must not be a quality she possessed. In this sense, she was a lot like me.
“We were twins, so we looked the same. We thought alike too. But our personalities were a little different. My sister was weak.”
A bus passed in front of the bench where we were sitting. It stopped and waited for us to get on, but Morino didn’t move, so it pulled away, leaving the stench of its exhaust behind.
The sun had reached the horizon, and the sky in the east was dark. A wind was blowing, shaking the dry grass beyond the guardrail.
Morino sat low on the bench, her hands clasped tightly together on her knees.
“We spent a lot of time thinking about death. Where would we go when we died? What would happen to us? We found these ideas fascinating. But I think I knew more about death than Yuu, and I was a much crueler child.”
With no expression, Morino told me how she’d ordered Yuu to do all kinds of things.
“At the time, we kept an animal in the shed. It had four legs, drooled a lot, and stank—you know the type I mean.”
Presumably, it had been a dog. I was surprised to hear she had once had a pet dog.
“I ordered Yuu to mix bleach into its food. I wasn’t trying to make it turn white or anything dumb like that. I just wanted to see it suffer.”
Yuu had begged Yoru to stop.
“But I didn’t listen, and I forced her to put the bleach in the dog’s food. She didn’t want to, but I didn’t let her stop.”
Eating bleach didn’t kill the dog, but it was very sick for two days. Morino’s parents and grandparents had nursed the dog, looking worried. It had convulsed and moaned in pain all day and all night, its howls echoing across the mountain sky.
Yoru observed it all, but Yuu had been too scared; she’d stayed in the house, her hands over her ears.
“Yuu cried a lot.”
Yoru had observed her sister just as she had the dog. Rather than give the dog the bleach herself, she’d placed all the guilt squarely on Yuu. Yoru’s experiment had allowed her to observe both the dog and her sister suffering.
Yoru and Yuu had played at hanging themselves too, but only once.
“To be more accurate, our game stopped one step short of hanging ourselves. It was raining out. We couldn’t go outside, so we were playing in the shed. This was a month or two before Yuu died.”
The sisters each had placed a wooden box on the floor of the shed, piling a second box on top of the first. They’d stood on top of the boxes, placing their necks in a loop of rope hanging from the beam overhead. All they had to do next was jump off the boxes and die.
“I said we would jump on the count of three—but I was lying: I wasn’t going to jump. I was going to watch Yuu as she was strangled to death.”
One … two … three. On the count of three, neither one did anything. Neither girl jumped, and there was a long silence.
“Yuu had guessed what I was thinking, so she didn’t jump. When I asked her why she hadn’t jumped, she just stood there looking terrified.”
Yuu couldn’t point out how unfair it was, so she stood and took Yoru’s flood of insults.
“You bullied Yuu?”
“You could call it that. But I wasn’t conscious of it at the time. Most of the time, we got along fine. And Yuu did her own share of awful things. She was better at pretending to be dead and scaring people than I was.”
“Did your family know what your relationship was like?”
“No.”
Morino fell silent, staring at the road in front of her. A car passed by. It was getting dark around us, so the car had its lights on. For a moment, her profile was caught in the light. The wind was blowing her hair around, and several strands were stuck to her cheek.
“Yuu died during summer vacation when we were in second grade. It was sunny that morning, but it got cloudy quickly, and by noon it had begun to rain …”
Shortly after noon, their mother had gone shopping. Their father was not at home, and their grandparents were out as well. Only the twins were home.
At first, the rain was barely more than a mist, tiny drops on the window, but it gradually grew stronger, and the drops on the window swelled and began trickling down the pane.
“At about twelve thirty, I saw Yuu go into the shed. She didn’t say anything to me, so I assumed she wanted to do something alone, and I didn’t follow.”
Yoru sat reading alone.
About an hour later, she heard the front door open. When she went to see who it was, Yoru found her grandmother with a bag of pears.
As her grandmother closed her umbrella, she explained, “Our neighbor gave me these. Shall I peel one for you?”
“I said I would go call Yuu, leaving my grandmother in the entrance and running to the shed.”
Yoru opened the shed door—and saw it. She screamed at once.
“Yuu was hanging from the ceiling, a rope around her neck. I went back to the front door, where my grandmother was standing with the pears in her arms, surprised to see me panic
-stricken.”
She told her grandmother that Yuu was dead.
Yuu had hanged herself. lt was a suicide, but an accident. The rope around her neck was not the only one; around her chest, just under her arms, there was a second rope—a rough, heavy rope, the kind used in farming. One end was tied around Yuu’s body, and the other end was hanging behind her like a tail. The same kind of rope was hanging from the ceiling beam. It had all been part of one rope originally—but it had broken.
“My sister hadn’t meant to die. She’d meant to hang from the rope around her chest and pretend she’d hanged herself, to scare everyone else. But the moment she jumped, her weight had been too much, and the rope broke.”
Yuu’s funeral had been a quiet one. And that was the end of the story.
I had one more question, but I didn’t ask it. I just watched Morino’s tired face, listening to her sigh.
The sun had set by now. The lamps along the side of the road were on, and a light in the side of the bus stop illuminated the time schedule. We sat on the bench, bathed in the glow of white light around the bus stop.
In the distance, I could see a pair of headlights. The big square shadow behind them must be a bus. Soon I could hear the engine, and then it stopped in front of us.
Morino stood up and stepped through the open door. I left the bench as well.
We didn’t say goodbye; we didn’t even look at each other.
iii
lt was a Saturday, two days after Morino Yoru had told me about her sister’s death. It dawned cloudy.
There was no school, so I boarded a train early in the morning. The train took me away from the city, into more and more remote areas. As we swayed from side to side, the crowd of passengers got off one by one, until only I was left. I looked out the window, watching the sunless, dark-green farms slide past me.
I got off the train at a station near a few remote farmhouses. I got on the bus outside the station, riding it for a while, until it started up a slope and the trees began to thicken. We were high enough to look down on the village now. The road was thin, barely wide enough for the bus to pass. On both sides of the road, the trees were growing over the guardrails and tapping on the bus windows.
I got off at a stop in the forest. When the bus had driven away, there were no vehicles on the road. I checked the schedule. There was only one bus an hour. There were no buses going back in the evening, so I would have to leave before then. There was nothing around me but trees, but I walked awhile, and it soon opened up so that I could see a few houses ahead.
This was where Morino had been born, where she had lived as a child.
Once, I stopped and looked around me. When it was sunny, the autumn leaves must’ve made the mountains look red. But under these clouds, everything looked drab.
I began walking toward the house where Morino had lived. As my feet carried me forward, I remembered the conversation I’d had with her the day before, at school.
Friday at lunch, the library had been almost empty. There were bookshelves lining the walls, and the rest of the space was filled with desks and chairs for reading. Morino was sitting in the back, the most deserted part of the room. When I found her, I went over and spoke.
“I want to see the house where you used to live.”
She looked up from the book she was reading and frowned. “Why?”
“Have you forgotten that I like to visit places where people died?”
Morino looked away from me and back to the book in front of her. As I stood next to her, I could only see the curve of her neck. She was attempting to ignore me, focusing on the book.
I looked down at the book she was reading. On the corner of the page, it said, “Chapter Three: You Are Not Alone … How to Live Positively.” This came as something of a shock to me.
Her head still down, Morino corrected my assumption. “I thought this book might put me to sleep.”
There was a long, uncertain silence, until finally she looked up. “I regret ever telling you about Yuu. If you’re going, go alone.”
The house and shed were still standing. Her grandparents lived there, farming.
I asked why she didn’t want to go, and she said lack of sleep meant she was just too tired.
The next day was Saturday, and there was no school, so I decided to go to the country then. I had Morino give me the address and directions. It looked like I could make it out there and back in the same day. I gave Morino a notebook to have her draw a map.
“They’ll be surprised if a strange high school boy shows up out of the blue,” I said. She nodded, and she promised to call them and tell them I was coming. We decided to say I was going to take some photographs of the country.
“Is that all?” Morino asked, as expressionless as always.
I looked at the map she had drawn. “Your maps always give me goose bumps,” I said, and then I turned my back on her. I could feel her staring at me all the way to the library doors. It was as if she wanted to say something, but the words were caught in her throat.
Blackbirds flew against the low, ashen clouds. I looked down at the notebook in my hand and the map Morino had drawn. According to the map, the road went through the middle of a kindergarten. I found it hard to believe any parent would send their children to a school like that.
Deciphering the map, I headed in the direction of Morino’s old home. I had the house number and several landmarks, so I was sure I could get there even if the map proved unhelpful.
As I walked, I ran over the story Morino had told me on the bus bench again, the story of a girl with a cruel mind and her twin sister.
Yuu had been found hanging from a rope.
But there was one thing that didn’t make sense about Morino’s story—namely, the part where she found her sister’s dead body.
Yoru had opened the door to the shed and screamed at once. Then she had run to her grandmother and told her that Yuu was dead.
Why had Morino known instantly that Yuu was dead? They were always pretending to be dead and surprising people, so why didn’t she assume her sister was simply faking it?
Shrieking in surprise when you saw something like that was only natural, and a real corpse probably looked much more horrible than someone pretending … but the fact that she had never even considered the idea that it was a prank, instead instantly running to tell her grandmother … that seemed very unnatural to me.
I compared the map and the road again. There was a deep river valley in front of me. According to the map, this was a dry cleaner’s. The clothes would get wet as soon as they were cleaned, I thought.
As I crossed the bridge, I looked up at the sky. The clouds were hanging low around the mountaintop, and the trees up there looked very dark.
After walking awhile longer, I found the house where Morino had once lived. Built in the mountain’s embrace was an old building, the roof covered in moss, just as she had said. There was nothing around but trees and fields, and it must have been pitch-black at night. No gates or walls—I simply followed the road until I found myself in their yard.
As I headed toward the front door, I noticed the shed on the left. This must be the shed where Yuu’s body had been found. The walls were of dry, white wood. There was a blue tarp over the top, tied in place with plastic string. It was very old and leaning to one side.
Glancing sidelong at the shed, I stood at the entrance. The door was made of glass set in a wooden frame, and it slid open to one side. I rang the doorbell, and someone called my name from behind.
When I turned around, an old woman was standing there, a hoe in one hand.
Her back was curved, and she was wearing loose work trousers, with a towel around her neck. I decided she must be Morino’s grandmother.
The hoe in her hand had dirt stuck to it. She was standing a fair distance away, but I could smell the earth on her.
“Yoru called last night. I was worried you weren’t coming!” she said. The grin on her wrinkled face made it hard to see any
resemblance to Morino, who always seemed as if she had already died, sharing nothing of the vitality and sunny disposition her grandmother radiated.
I bowed my head and explained that I would leave as soon as I had a few good pictures. But Morino’s grandmother ignored me, hustling me into the house.
There was a shoe box inside the door and a number of what looked like souvenirs placed on top of it. The hall led away into the house, which smelled of air freshener and strangers.
“You must be hungry!”
“Not really.”
She ignored me, sitting me down at the dining room table and placing a dish laden with food in front of me. Eventually, Morino’s grandfather appeared. He was a tall old man with white hair.
The two of them seemed to think I was engaged to Morino.
“You must marry Yoru someday,” her grandfather said suddenly, bowing his head as I reluctantly ate. I glanced out the window, wondering if I would be able to see the shed and get back before it started raining and the final bus left.
There was a picture on the side of the kitchen cabinets. In the picture were a pair of doll-like little girls. They both had long black hair, and they were staring directly at the camera, not smiling at all. They were dressed all in black, and they were holding hands. It looked like the picture had been taken out front. I could see the door to the house behind them.
“Yoru and Yuu,” the grandmother said, catching my gaze. “You heard about her twin sister?”
I nodded.
“That was when they were six,” the grandfather said. Neither one of them had anything else to say about the picture.
After I had eaten, I was allowed to clasp my hands in front of the shrine. I knew that showing my manners like this allowed a number of other things to move forward smoothly.
Looking at the photograph of Yuu in the shrine, I imagined that her death must seem like only yesterday to her grandparents. It had been nine years ago. Nine years to Morino or me was more than half our lives—but to people her grandparents’ age, nine years was probably not much different than one or two to us.
