Goth

by Otsuichi

  I had no idea what was behind this, which scared me. My skin sensed my sister’s foul temper before she even said anything, and I could no longer bear to be around her. Eventually, just passing in front of her or being in the same room became stressful, and I was tense all the time.

  “Natsumi, you shouldn’t wear that anymore,” she said abruptly one day six months ago, as I was on my way out the door to buy some study guides at the bookstore. She pointed at the white wool cardigan I often wore when I went out. I’d been wearing it for years—and looking closely at it, there were a number of balls on it. It was getting pretty ragged.

  “But I like it,” I said.

  She scowled at me. “Fine,” she said, like she didn’t give a damn about me anyway, and then she turned her back on me. I stood there feeling like all the light in the world was suddenly fading away.

  The two of us might’ve looked a lot alike like people said, but our interests and personalities were polar opposites.

  My sister was outgoing, had a boyfriend, and was always smiling. Her friends adored her, and when the phone rang, it was always for her. She was active, involved in any number of things, and barely ever just sat quietly around the house. Even in my eyes, she sparkled.

  On the other hand, I was studying for exams. I spent all my time at my desk, and it felt like I had heard nothing for ages but the sound of the tip of my pencil wearing away. When I did have some free time, I just read historical novels.

  Once my sister had started junior high and began leaving the house, spending her time in places I had never been to, with people I had never met, I began spending more and more time alone at home, reading. I had only ever left the house when she’d dragged me, anyway. But that change was only natural, as far as I was concerned, and I still loved my beautiful, outgoing sister.

  I often compared my sister dashing around outside with myself sitting in the house like a rock. I didn’t have much of an inferiority complex, though; I was proud to have such a great sister.

  However, as far as she was concerned, I may have been an embarrassment. Without my realizing it, the way I lived may have been an issue for her.

  She was nice. She never expressed her disappointment in me openly, and I’m sure all her behavior was to avoid doing just that. She never once said she didn’t like me, and she seemed to be trying to disguise her irritation. That might have been why it took me so long to figure it out.

  Maybe my sister didn’t love me the way I thought she had …

  I had no way of telling if that thought was true, but this depressing explanation was the only one I could think of.

  Why? That one word was all I had to ask, but it was too late now. Why had I not worked up the courage to ask her while she was still alive? I might have regretted the answer I’d gotten, but it would have been better than this.

  But my sister had lost the chance to speak forever. I was stuck with my question, and it would be with me every time I thought of her.

  With my sister gone, the house was quiet, like night waiting for a dawn that never came. It was so different that you could hardly believe it was the same place it had been two months before.

  My parents talked less since they had seen my sister’s body. Their faces lacked emotion, and they spent a lot of time watching TV in stony silence. Even if the screen was displaying a comedy, they wouldn’t laugh, wouldn’t even smile happily—they’d just watch quietly. My parents might be like this for the rest of their lives; I thought that every time I looked at them.

  They had the faces of people struggling under a burden so great that they would never truly be able to enjoy anything, no matter what happened to them.

  My mother still made dinner. She cooked out of habit, as part of her routine, working mechanically.

  But when I saw the piles of dust in the corners, it made me want to cry. I felt so sorry for them. My mother had kept the house spick-and-span while my sister was here. But now everything was covered in dust. They never even noticed. They must have been too busy remembering how my sister smiled when she was a child, remembering when they’d first held her in their arms, felt her weight.

  In that house of silence, my presence went unnoticed. If I spoke to my father, he would nod absently, meaninglessly. But to anyone else, I must have looked just like my parents. My friends told me I never smiled anymore either.

  At night, I sometimes went into my sister’s room, sat on her chair, and thought about things. Her room was next to mine. If I had gone in there without permission when she was alive, she would have been furious.

  But now no one used the room, and it was going to seed fast. If I put my hand down on her desk, it came away covered in grime.

  When she was alive and sitting here, what had she thought about? I sat on her chair, knees against my chest, looking around at the furniture, wondering. The curtains were open, and the darkness of the night lay beyond.

  I could see my sister’s face in the window. For a moment, I thought it was her, but then I realized it was just my reflection. We really must have looked alike if I was mistaking myself for her.

  There was a mirror on the shelf. I reached for it to study my face, but I saw a little cylinder lying next to it that looked like lipstick; I picked that up instead of the mirror.

  It was red, like blood. There were any number of lipsticks lying around in different shades of pink, but the bloodred one absorbed me.

  I didn’t need to look at the mirror. The very act of owning a lipstick like that defined the difference between us. I left the room, clutching the lipstick tightly.

  I didn’t know how I would live the rest of my life. And it was in that frame of mind that, one evening in late November, I heard my sister’s voice again.

  ii

  It was November 30. On the way home from school, I’d stopped by a big bookstore in town, as I needed to buy a book of problems related to college entrance exams. I had no great desire to go to college now. There were loads of things I’d wanted to learn when my sister was alive, but not anymore. I simply kept on studying for lack of anything else to do, going on just as I had been before.

  The shelf with the workbooks was at the back of the store. I stood in front of it, gazing up at the top shelf and reading the spines in order from the left. When I got to the right end of the shelf, I dropped my eyes a shelf, looking for one that seemed like what I needed.

  I didn’t see any good matches, though, so I bent down, searching the bottom shelf. I checked each spine in turn, gradually moving my eyes from left to right … until they rested on a pair of shoes at the edge of my vision.

  They were black shoes, pointed at me, standing with me in front of them. When I looked up, the shoes quickly moved away, vanishing into the rows of shelves.

  I felt like someone had been staring at me. Feeling suddenly nervous, I looked back at the shelf.

  This time, I felt someone standing behind me. The fluorescent lights were casting my fuzzy shadow on the shelves in front of me, and that shadow had just grown larger.

  I hadn’t heard any footsteps, yet someone was standing right behind me, close enough to touch. I could hear him breathing.

  I knew he was going to try to grope me. I had heard from someone else that it had happened in this store before. But I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t run away either. My legs wouldn’t move. I was too scared to even turn around. My body was petrified, turned to stone.

  “Excuse me,” someone said suddenly, on my right. It was a young man’s voice. “You would be a groper then? I saw you in the mirror—see the one fixed near the ceiling? Most interesting. But I need to get through here, so do you mind moving to one side?”

  Relief that someone else had come worked like magic, freeing my body. When I turned toward the voice, I saw a boy in a black uniform standing between the shelves.

  The person behind me quickly ran away, moving away from the boy. I saw his back. He looked like an ordinary man in a suit jacket, and he looked so comically flustered as he ran
that all my fear quickly melted away.

  “Thank you,” I said, turning back toward the boy.

  He was taller than me, and thin. There was something about him that made him look rather frail. I recognized the black uniform he wore; I knew a boy who went to that same school.

  “No need. I wasn’t actually trying to help you,” he said flatly, his expression never changing.

  “You mean you really just wanted to get past?”

  “I wanted to speak to you, actually. You’re Kitazawa Natsumi, aren’t you? You look a lot like your sister. I recognized you immediately.”

  This was so out of the blue that I couldn’t form a response. Before I could say anything, the boy was already talking again.

  “I met Hiroko before she died. She told me about you.”

  “Wait a second … Who are you?” That was all I could manage.

  The boy didn’t answer me. Instead, he took something from his uniform pocket—a plain brown envelope, the kind you could find anywhere. There was a bulge in the corner, something inside.

  “This is for you,” he said, holding it out. Confused, I took the envelope. I opened the flap and looked inside. There was a cassette tape in a clear case.

  “Sorry, but could you remove the contents and give the envelope back to me?” I did as he asked, removing the tape and handing the empty envelope back to the boy. He folded it up and put it back in his pocket.

  It was an ordinary cassette tape, the kind you could buy at any convenience store. There was a sticker on it that read, “Voice 1: Kitazawa Hiroko.” It wasn’t handwritten but had been printed.

  “What is this? Why does it have my sister’s name on it?”

  “You’ll understand when you listen to it. Kitazawa Hiroko gave that to me when she was still alive. I wanted you to hear it, so I kept it. There are two other tapes. I’m saving those for another time. If you tell anyone about me, that time will never come to pass.”

  The boy turned to leave.

  “Wait …” I said, and I tried to follow him. But I couldn’t do it. My legs wouldn’t move; they were frozen, like they’d been when that groper had been standing behind me. I didn’t know why I was responding this way; the boy hadn’t threatened me—in fact, he’d rescued me. But without being consciously aware of it, my whole body had tensed up. I was sweating all over.

  A moment later, the boy had turned the corner and was out of sight. I was left standing alone, holding the tape.

  On the train back home, I sat down in my seat, staring at the tape he’d passed to me. The sun had already set, and it was dark outside. The windows were pitch-black, as if charcoal had been rubbed all over them, and I could see almost nothing through them. It felt like the train wasn’t moving. The sun had already moved on to its winter schedule. When my sister was killed, it had still been light out in the evenings.

  Who was that boy? He’d been wearing a high school uniform, so he must be my age, or a year or two younger. He’d claimed to know my sister, but she’d never mentioned him to me.

  If he’d first met her only shortly before she died, then it was more than likely she hadn’t had time to mention him, though.

  He said she’d given him the tape. Did he mean my sister wanted me to hear what was on the tape? What did “Voice 1: Kitazawa Hiroko” mean?

  The train slowed, and my body moved out of habit. I stood up and got off the train.

  There were a lot of people around the station, but once I stepped onto the residential side street, there was nothing more than the asphalt road, shrouded in darkness. Shivering in the cold wind, I walked toward home. The only light in the darkness came from the houses on either side of the street. There was a family in each of them, seated at the dinner table, going about their lives—a notion that suddenly struck me as amazing.

  The windows of my house were dark. However, this didn’t mean that no one was home. I opened the front door and went into the living room, calling out to let my parents know I had returned.

  They were sitting on the sofa, watching TV, not talking, not bothering to turn on the lights. The light from the screen was the only light in the room. I flipped the switch, and they looked toward me, listlessly welcoming me home.

  “You forgot to lock the front door again,” I said. My mother nodded absently before returning her gaze to the TV. There was no life in her at all; it was as if she no longer cared about anything.

  They were not actually watching TV. Nothing shown on that screen reached their eyes. I turned my eyes away from the wrinkled clothes on their backs and went upstairs to my room.

  Without changing out of my uniform, I dropped the bag on my bed and put the tape into my stereo. It was a small stereo, and a slightly bluish silver. It was on the second shelf from the top. I stood in front of it and took a deep breath to calm myself.

  I remembered my sister’s face—not how she’d looked at me around the time just before she died, annoyed, but how she’d looked when we were younger and she’d grinned at me as we’d walked hand in hand.

  I pressed Play. There was a whir as the motors began to move, and the tape began to play. I stared at the speakers.

  The first few seconds were silent, and then came a hiss, like wind. My heart was beating quickly, betraying my nervousness.

  What I had thought was the wind was not—it was someone breathing into the microphone.

  Natsumi …

  Suddenly, I heard my sister’s voice. She sounded very weak, exhausted—but it was definitely her voice. It must have been her breathing. The boy had not been lying. My sister really had left the tape for me.

  Natsumi, will you ever hear this? Right now I’m talking into a microphone in front me, but I have no way of knowing if this message will ever reach you.

  Where and when had she recorded this? Her voice was so thin that it almost vanished. She spoke slowly, haltingly, as if she was suffering, as if in desperation, leaving long silences between her words. But that made it sound all the more genuine—this was no scripted speech but an attempt to put her thoughts into words.

  Listen, I’ve been allowed to leave you a message … told to say anything I want into the microphone, anything at all … but I can only speak to one person.

  I thought of you instantly—I realized I have so much I need to tell you. I know it seems strange that I need to speak to you and not Akagi . . .

  He’s holding the microphone out toward me … I can’t talk about him—he won’t let me. Sorry. He said he would deliver this message to you. He wants to enjoy seeing how you react to my words. I think that’s a really nasty thing to take pleasure from, but if my voice reaches you, I don’t really care …

  I couldn’t move. A horrible suspicion was welling up inside me. A voice echoed through my head, warning me not to listen to any more of this. Terror awaited, and if I listened to that, I could never go back. So certain of this was I that I could barely stand it, and my breath came out like sobs.

  I was not going to stop the tape. I stood perfectly still, listening to my sister’s voice.

  Natsumi, I’m in a dark room. I can’t move. Concrete all around … It’s cold … I’m on a table.

  I slapped my hands over my mouth, fighting back a scream. I knew exactly where my sister had been when she’d spoken into this microphone.

  My sister was speaking through her tears now, sniffling.

  This is … some sort of abandoned building …

  There was a mournful echo as her quiet voice bounced off the cold, dark concrete walls around her. Her pain pierced my heart.

  Without realizing it, I had reached out toward the tape deck speakers, touching the mesh that covered them with trembling fingers as if trying to capture my sister’s voice.

  I’m sorry, Natsumi.

  Her words passed through my fingertips and vanished. My fingers sensed the slightest of vibrations, like I had snared a slight portion of her voice. The sound of my sister’s breathing vanished, and all sound faded from the speakers. The recordi
ng was finished.

  I turned the tape over and listened to the other side, but there was nothing recorded on it.

  I was sure this tape had been recorded just before my sister died. I remembered receiving the tape from the boy in the bookshop: the tape had been inside an envelope, and he’d made me take it out and give the envelope back.

  He hadn’t touched the tape, not even once. The entire exchange had been designed to avoid his leaving fingerprints. Had he been holding the microphone? Had he killed my sister?

  I should give this to the police; that was the right thing to do. But I had no intention of doing so. As the boy had left, he’d told me not to tell the police if I wanted to hear the other tapes.

  There was more to the message. I wanted to hear the rest.

  †

  Shortly after I heard the tape, I skipped school and went to where I could see the gates of M**** High School.

  M**** High School was a public high school, and only two stations from mine. The gates faced onto a busy road, but a tall, dark green hedge surrounded the school itself. The hedge was neatly trimmed, and it looked like a flat green wall. Above it, I could only make out the white roof of the school.

  There was a convenience store across the street from the school entrance, and I stood at its magazine rack, watching the gates through the window. I spent about an hour pretending to stand and read, until classes had finally ended, and students began pouring out. The sun was already low in the sky.

  As the students left through the gates, almost all of them crossed the street, passing in front of me. The station was on this side, and the sidewalk was much wider. I was able to check their faces, one by one.

  Watching the flood of students pass in front of me, I remembered my sister’s voice.

  I had listened to the tape again and again, and it had hit me just as hard each time. I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking, but my thoughts took me nowhere.

  My whole body felt woozy—from lack of sleep? As I turned the pages of the magazine, I glanced at the clerk, worried that he might be angry with me for standing here this long. Perhaps he even thought I was suspicious. I was scared he would say something.