by Otsuichi
That night, I didn’t go back to my apartment. I drove to a shopping district, started talking to a bored girl in the lobby of a bowling alley, and invited her out. We played a claw crane game, I treated her to a juice from the vending machine, and I got her into my car. The photo shoot was finished that night. The fact that this girl had black hair was not unrelated to my meeting Morino.
A week went by, and the police still hadn’t forced their way into my apartment. For my part, I had also not attempted to look into the identities of Morino or the boy. I turned the power off on the cell phone and kept it, together with the bandage.
Moreover, when I photographed the other girl, I came full circle to being glad I hadn’t been able to make Morino my subject that day. If I had photographed her face in death, my oeuvre would have, at that moment, been complete, and I would have spent the rest of my life simply admiring those photos. I chose to be more positive, taking the attitude that this sense of loss, my dissatisfaction no matter how many photos I took, could be transformed into my passion.
That said, I did wonder if Morino had made it home safely that day. When I had free time, I would remember her as I looked through my album of dead faces.
When you run, go in the direction of the setting sun. I checked a map. There should be houses that way.
That’s what the boy’s email said, but the sun was already starting to set then, wasn’t it? The temperature had also dropped significantly. But it would have been on the news if she had gotten lost and frozen to death in the mountains. The fact that it hadn’t meant that she’d managed to get out safely.
Although even if she had managed to make it to the nearby houses without incident, she could have been mistaken for a ghost because of the rumor the boy had started; she might have had a fair bit of trouble getting help. Had she tried to hail a passing car, the driver might have screamed and driven right past her. I suddenly saw her clucking her tongue at ending up in such an absurd situation.
She knew nothing.
Not that she might have died that day.
Not that the person walking with her on that path in the woods was a murderer.
Born in 1978 in Fukuoka, Otsuichi won the Sixth Jump Short Fiction/Nonfiction Prize when he was seventeen with his debut story “Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse.” Now recognized as one of the most talented young fantasy/horror writers in Japan, his other English-language works include the short story collections Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse/Black Fairy Tale and ZOO (Haikasoru). GOTH won the Honkaku Mystery Award and was adapted into a feature film starring Rin Takanashi. The English-language edition of ZOO was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award.
HAIKASORU
THE FUTURE IS JAPANESE
THE OTSUICHI LIBRARY
ZOO
A man receives a photo of his girlfriend every day in the mail … so that he can keep track of her decomposition. A deathtrap that takes a week to kill its victims. Haunted parks and airplanes held in the sky by the power of belief. These are just a few of the stories by Otsuichi, Japan’s master of dark fantasy.
SUMMER, FIREWORKS, AND MY CORPSE
Two short novels, including the title story and Black Fairy Tale, plus a bonus short story. Summer is a simple story of a nine-year-old girl who dies while on summer vacation. While her youthful killers try to hide her body, she tells us the story—from the point of view of her dead body—of the children’s attempt to get away with murder.
Black Fairy Tale is classic J-horror: a young girl loses an eye in an accident, but receives a transplant. Now she can see again, but what she sees out of her new left eye is the experiences and memories of its previous owner. Its previous deceased owner.
ALSO CREEPY:
APPARITIONS—MIYUKI MIYABE
In old Edo, the past was never forgotten. It lived alongside the present in dark corners and in the shadows. In these tales, award-winning author Miyuki Miyabe explores the ghosts of early modern Japan and the spaces of the living world—workplaces, families, and the human soul—that they inhabit. Written with a journalistic eye and a fantasist’s heart, Apparitions brings the restless dead, and those who encounter them, to life.
WWW.HAIKASORU.COM
