by Otsuichi
At first, Saeki believed he was digging holes to plant trees. But along the way, he realized he was planting trees to justify the holes he dug. Eventually, he starred digging holes only to fill them in again. The garden was covered with trees, so close together they could barely grow branches, and there was no more room to plant, yet Saeki kept on digging, because that was the only thing that seemed to clear away the fog of his fantasies, his desire to bury someone—in the ground. When he was digging, Saeki forgot everything else—but only for that brief moment when the tip of his trowel bit into the earth.
Digging holes only to fill them in again had begun to feel empty and meaningless. Digging the hole cleared away the fog—but when he was done, the fog came back, stronger than ever. Saeki had to keep digging anyway, though; that was why there had been a hole ready for Kousuke the night before.
His neighbors didn’t seem to find his activities sinister, even when they heard him digging late at night. Everyone bowed when they saw him, and they asked him for advice on their own gardens. Everyone knew he liked to garden, and no one thought it was odd. They all sympathized with him; he had lost his family, and only his hobbies remained.
He had grown friendly with Kousuke two years after his family had died, a year ago now. The boy had gotten lost in Saeki’s garden, and they had soon become very friendly. Saeki had even gone on picnics with Kousuke’s family.
When he’d known Kousuke for nine or ten months, Saeki had run across some wood just about Kousuke’s height in his garage. He instantly thought it would be ideal for coffin making.
Saeki had shaken off the thought, even becoming furious with himself—but the next day, he’d started making the coffin, all the while grimacing at how stupid he was being. He would never actually use it, he told himself. Yet his hands hammered nails into the wood without his conscious guidance, working almost automatically, turning the wood into a box.
“l want to go home! Let me out!” Kousuke was crying now. Saeki could hear the boy’s sobs from the bamboo pole. The inside of the hole was dark. The childish voice echoed inside it, the sound muffled.
Saeki didn’t know what else to say to Kousuke. He felt so sorry for the boy, so very sorry. Although he pitied him, there was nothing else he could say.
Saeki’s hands were holding a hose now. It was attached to the faucet on the side of the house.
The summer heat was getting stronger, and the sound of cicadas came from all around him. The heat spread from his back down, until it embraced his whole body.
A trickle of water lapped against the tip of Saeki’s sandals; it was coming from the place where Kousuke was buried. Water was gushing out of one of the bamboo poles, dripping down the morning glories and forming a puddle on the ground. It was coming from the pole that had been an air hole.
The hose was sticking in the other pole. When Saeki’s gaze rested there, only then did he clearly understand what he had done. However, that did not mean he had been acting unconsciously.
He had knowingly turned the valve on the end of the hose, filling the box in the ground with water. He had just felt like he was dreaming the whole while. The conscience that would have bothered anyone else didn’t seem to function in him.
Water had filled the coffin—and with no other place to go, it had come back up the ocher bamboo pole. The summer sun glittered on the water pouring out of the pole. Saeki thought it was beautiful. The cicadas’ song was joined by the sound of the children returning from their exercises. They came from the opposite direction this time, passing along the length of his wall. He couldn’t hear Kousuke’s voice anymore. And the morning glories were wrinkling, starting to fade.
†
Before he knew it, three years had passed.
The police had not come to arrest him. Kousuke’s parents had moved away, looking very sad, and Saeki was the only person who had seen them off. Nobody imagined that Saeki had killed Kousuke; indeed, they all thought the boy’s disappearance had left him stricken with grief.
He hadn’t done any acting; he really did mourn the boy. But pangs of conscience left him unable to look directly at the boy’s parents as they shed tears for their lost child. The purity of their tears only drove home the sheer horror of what he had done.
For three years, Saeki had been terrified that someone would find out what he had done. In all that time, Saeki had never once gone near the patch of land where Kousuke was buried. It was covered in weeds now. The morning glories had faded away, scattered seeds, and grown again, mingled among the weeds. A new family had moved into the house where Kousuke had lived.
At the beginning of summer, a housewife brought the neighborhood newsletter around to Saeki’s house. At the door, she spoke about the serial killer targeting girls, a story that was all over the talk shows. Eventually, the conversation touched on Kousuke’s disappearance.
“Three years since Kousuke vanished … You were friendly, weren’t you? You must miss him.”
Saeki tensed, but then he remembered Kousuke’s little face smiling, and he felt a wave of sadness. He had drowned the boy underground with his own hands, but his twisted mind still had the nerve to feel grief over the loss. How horrifying.
Saeki nodded gravely. But when he looked up and saw the woman’s face, he noticed something strange: she didn’t seem at all sad, and she had already moved on to talking about how loud the cicadas were getting as the days grew hotter. The world already considered Kousuke part of the past.
A few days later, Saeki found himself buying new wood and nails and making another coffin. He had to make the coffin inside, so that no one would see him working over the wall. As he sawed the boards down to size, tiny bits of wood littered the tatami floors of the room.
The summer flew by. Saeki could feel his conscience trying to stop him from doing something horrible again, could feel it battling a crazed darkness inside him that was searching for new prey. But this inner struggle never showed outwardly, and the world around him seemed to think Saeki was just like he’d always been. Like a machine functioning automatically, he went about his daily life without any trouble at all.
Then, one Friday late in October, Saeki left work, got into his car in the parking lot, and started driving home. It was already dark out. As he joined the rows of cars with headlights on, his eyes naturally glanced sideways at someone walking by the side of the road. A moment later, he was shaken by the realization that he had looked at the person with an evaluating eye. He could not make out any expression on his face as he peered at its reflection in the rearview mirror; it was like the dark parts of his eyes had turned into little holes.
At work, he had always been taken for a very quiet man. He brought in flowers from home to decorate with, and he did the work he was assigned without complaint. People thought well of him, and he was trusted. None of them knew that Saeki had murdered a child.
As he neared home, he turned left onto a street with little traffic.
And there, Saeki saw the girl.
She was walking by the side of the road. He could see her back in the glare of his headlights. She wore a black uniform, and she had long black hair hanging down her back.
As he passed her, Saeki unconsciously slowed down. The girl’s hair burned into his eyes. It was like her long black hair was drawing him in.
He looked up through the windshield and saw the full moon hanging in the night sky. There were no clouds, and the area was faintly lit by quiet moonlight. It was a residential area, in front of a park. The trees around them had lost half their leaves already.
Saeki turned right at the next intersection and stopped his car. He turned out the headlights, checked his mirrors, and waited for the girl.
If the girl went straight or turned left, he would drive home. He had the day off tomorrow. He could spend his time relaxing around the house.
But if the girl turned toward him …
A single dry leaf drifted down, tapping against his window and landing on the pavement below. He rememb
ered the neighborhood newsletter he’d read the day before. There had been an article about cleaning up the leaves on the roads, and they were to have cleaned this evening. There were a few leaves on the road now, but it had been covered in them that morning, so he supposed they’d already finished work here. Another leaf drifted silently down, settling against his windshield wipers.
There was no sound at all. Saeki sat in the car, his knuckles clenching the steering wheel tightly. In the mirror, he could see the corner he had just turned. Finally, the girl appeared in the pale light of the moon.
ii
Saeki parked in his garage and quickly closed the large metal door, which shut with a loud screech that echoed through the quiet residential streets. He stood outside the garage, staring down at the piles of dry leaves. The trees he had planted grew right up next to the garage, and they were wrapped in branches, so when their leaves fell, they nearly buried his garage. He would have to rake away the leaves soon.
Since his parents and grandmother had died, Saeki was alone in the house. He had to do all the cleaning and laundry himself. And every time he did so, it reminded him how alone he was.
His recently married colleague showed up at work wearing starched shirts now, and Saeki’s boss had pictures of his children on his desk.
“Will you ever get married, Saeki?” a female coworker had asked once.
That would never happen, Saeki thought. Lovers, friends, family … all those things seemed very far away, out of reach. Saeki could manage casual conversation at work, but he didn’t feel comfortable forming any deeper bonds.
The secrets and anxieties he harbored had built an unconscious wall between him and other people. There was no one he could ever confess these horrors to.
A chilly breeze brushed against his neck. It was colder than the day before, and Saeki shivered as he watched the leaves blow across the ground. But the chill he felt was not entirely the fault of the coming winter. Saeki realized he was standing outside without his suit jacket on. His white dress shirt was covered in wrinkles, which reminded him of his newlywed colleague’s marital bliss. That man’s shirts were always ironed.
He shook his head. This was no time to be thinking of other people. He stepped inside the garage. There was a door on the side of the garage, and he walked through it, making his way over to the car and opening the back door. As he picked up his suit jacket, he noticed the stain on the back of the cloth. It must be blood. Saeki looked down at the girl lying on the backseat, bleeding from her mouth and nose. He hadn’t wanted anyone he might pass as he approached his home to see the girl lying back there, so he’d covered her with his jacket, hiding her.
The girl was still unconscious and didn’t move. She was curled up, her long hair falling over her face like a veil. If she hadn’t resisted, he wouldn’t have had to hurt her, Saeki thought, rubbing the back of his hand, a red line marking where the girl’s nail had broken the skin.
She had screamed as they grappled, her voice shaking the silent night air. Everyone around must have heard it.
He didn’t clearly remember what had happened after that. Before he knew it, he’d hit the girl in the face several times. She had slumped over and was no longer moving, but his hands were still flying, pounding into her cheek. He’d shoved her into his backseat, thrown his jacket over her, started the car, and sped away.
Saeki had almost never done anything violent, not even as a child. When he saw news reports on child abuse, his head was filled with loathing. But now he had punched a girl in the face. He could still feel the impact on his hand, which tingled as if insects were crawling all over his fist. He shook his hand in terror, trying to get them off, but the sensation wouldn’t go away.
He picked up the girl, carrying her out of the car and into the room at the back of the house. He left the lights off so that their shadows wouldn’t show on the window or shoji screens. In the moonlight, the girl’s arms and hair hung down, swaying as he walked. In the makeshift workroom, he laid her down in the freshly made coffin.
It fit her perfectly. It was like he had made the box specifically for her. But Saeki couldn’t look at her face, not with the blood running from her nose and lips, not with the skin changing color where he’d hit her. The darkness inside him was branded onto her features, and he could not face up to it. He quickly put a lid on the coffin, nailing it closed. There were two small holes in the lid where the breathing holes would go.
There was an open hole next to Kousuke’s grave, waiting for the girl. He had guessed that the events of the day would happen, and the hole lay waiting in the moonlight. The dirt taken from the hole formed a small hill next to it.
Saeki pulled the coffin out of the house, moving it directly from the porch to the ground below. An occupied coffin was very heavy.
He placed the coffin in the hole, fitting the pair of bamboo breathing poles into the holes on the lid. Then he filled the hole, scooping dirt onto the coffin. At first, there was a wooden tapping sound as the dry earth hit the coffin lid—but soon the lid was covered, and the task was silent. It took longer than Saeki expected to fill the hole. He was covered in sweat, and since he hadn’t changed after arriving home, he had dirt all over the legs of his work suit. At last the grave was full, and he patted the earth flat with his trowel.
He had buried Kousuke in summer, placing morning glories on the bamboo poles. Bur that was impossible at this time of year. Morning glories were originally tropical flowers, and they didn’t take well to cold. That left several unused brown bamboo poles in the weeds along the wall, but that would not arouse any suspicions. All he had to do was explain that he grew morning glories there in the summer, and all doubts would vanish.
So the freshly dug soil wouldn’t stand out, he brought some straw he had laid on the flower beds and scattered it around the bamboo poles. When he was done, it looked like the ground had never been disturbed at all.
Saeki put his trowel away and sat down on the edge of the porch. For a long while, he stared at the bamboo poles along the wall. The girl was buried there.
The area between the porch and the wall was the only part of the garden not covered by trees. There were several flower beds, a line for hanging laundry, and the bamboo poles. But on either side of the porch, the trees crowded close, looming like black walls in the night. When the wind blew, the looming shadows shifted. Saeki rubbed the spot on his hand where the girl had scratched him as he’d shoved her into his car. The numbness left over from having hit her had almost vanished. When Saeki touched his face, he found himself grinning broadly.
He went into the house and looked through the girl’s bag. There, he found a can of pepper spray and a student ID. There was a picture on the ID: a girl with a beautiful face.
Below her picture was a grade and class, a seat number, and the name Morino Yoru. Saeki stood on the porch again, gazing at the bamboo poles by the wall and whispering that name to himself.
The person he had just buried had a name—such an ordinary thing to just now realize. The girl in the ground had parents, who had given her a name and raised her with love. And he had just buried alive the target of that love.
Sweet intoxication filled Saeki’s mind, like sugar water seeping into a cotton ball. Aboveground, the girl he had beaten was terrifying—but underground, out of sight, he felt his fear changing to bliss.
Then Saeki heard a voice, faintly—the wind almost drowned it out, it was so small.
Saeki looked at the bamboo poles again. The pale moonlight picked them out of the shadows around them, sending black lines across the garden to the porch where Saeki was sitting. Four of the bamboo poles were thicker than the others.
The tiny voice he had heard came from two of those thicker poles. Saeki stood up, slipped on his shoes, and stepped directly from the porch into the garden. He walked across the garden, feeling like he wasn’t moving at all, like he was a sleepwalker drifting through an unreal world. There was no light save that of the moon, and the trees around his
garden loomed like dark shadows on either side, staring down at him.
He stepped onto the scattered straw, approaching the bamboo poles, which came up to his chest, and peering down into them. There was nothing inside but darkness, darkness like his hollow heart, across a diameter as wide as his thumb. He could just make out the girl’s trembling voice, carried up the pole to the world aboveground. Her voice was very weak, and the wind snatched it from the end of the poles, scattering it like smoke.
One of the poles was louder than the other. There were two poles in the coffin, but one was at her feet. The other was near her face, and when she spoke inside the coffin, the pole near her face carried her voice better.
“Hello?” she said feebly. Her cut lip must’ve made it hard to speak loudly. “Let me out …”
Saeki went down on his knees, his palms against the earth between the bamboo poles. He had just buried her, and the earth under the straw was still soft.
The girl’s voice was coming from under his hands. He knew it was just his imagination, but the ground felt warm, as if he were feeling the body heat of the girl buried there.
Poor thing. How helpless she was, trapped down below his soles, breathing through a pole in the ground. He pitied her. Knowing she was buried beneath him, unable to do a thing, he felt so superior. He felt the same as he did when looking at a puppy or a kitten.
“Can you hear me?” he asked, standing up. His voice traveled through the darkness inside the poles, reaching the girl.
“Who … who’s there?” he heard her say. Saeki said nothing, and her voice rose up again. “You shut me in here, didn’t you? Then you buried me underground.”
“You know you’ve been buried?” Saeki asked, taken aback. If she had just now woken up inside the coffin, there was no way she should know anything but the fact that she was trapped in a small, enclosed, dark place.
