Nan-Core

by Mahokaru Numata

  When we visited my folks I would think of everyone as your family and just tell myself I was there with you. It was easier on me that way, allowing me to act more naturally. And the truth was that when you were there, sharing a lively dinner with my parents and sister, you blended in like you’d been doing it your whole life. Anyone would have thought that you were all actually related. I’d find myself smiling as I watched you enjoy yourself, and it wasn’t too horrible even when the others poured me beer or expressed an interest in helping with the baby.

  After several visits where we stayed over after drinking into the night, we got into the habit of visiting twice a month on a Saturday and staying the night.

  And so several years passed.

  After that, everything began to fall apart.

  I’d reached the end of the third notebook. The writing filled the book to the last page, leaving hardly any blank space. I felt like I’d been left suspended, a side-effect of having read it all in one sitting. I pressed my elbows into the cover of the closed notebook and raked my fingers through my hair. I downed the last of my coffee, disregarding the fact that it was cold and streaked with cream.

  The question had continuously haunted my thoughts the whole time I’d been reading: Was the baby me? My real mother was a serial killer, my real father a passerby that had paid her for sex … The thought made me feel like goosebumps were breaking out all over my skin.

  I had no real proof, of course. It was just the thought that came to me based on the story so far. It was possible I was completely off the mark. Perhaps the child had somehow been disposed of long ago, as had been implied in the lines I’d skimmed at the very end.

  Having read that far, however, I had grown even more confident that the man she called “you” was Dad. His close relationship with the author’s parents matched that between Dad and my maternal grandparents. Having lost his own parents when he was young, the bond between Dad and my mother’s parents were stronger than if they were blood relations. I didn’t remember anything about my grandparents’ place in Maebashi, but it seemed likely that this was the “home” the narrator referred to in the story.

  Whatever the case, I knew I’d never last a week without reading the rest. I tried to come up with a way to sneak into Dad’s study mid-week, but I couldn’t think of a workable scheme. I’d need Yohei’s help, even if only for an excuse to lure Dad from the house.

  That thought caused me to start and I glanced at my watch. I realized I was already running late for meeting up with Yohei. I hurriedly thrust the notebook into my bag and rushed out of the coffee shop.

  I hadn’t even realized that it was long past sunset. I sprinted down the interchange station escalators and slipped between the closing doors of the Kyoto-bound train just fifteen minutes before eight o’clock, our appointed meeting time. I emailed Yohei to tell him I’d be twenty minutes late. As I stood there holding onto a hanging strap and gazing out at the twinkling city lights, rambling thoughts of the notebooks flooded my mind once more. Unable to arrive at a logical deduction, my thoughts went in circles, asking the question I’d already asked myself hundreds of times: Which of my two mothers was the author?

  The author had written about a younger sister, but Mom was an only child. Considered on its own, that point meant she couldn’t be the author. That thought provided little comfort, though. I wondered if I was just too scared to come to terms with the idea that my real mother had killed people before having me and writing the notebooks.

  The train was fairly crowded. Groups of housewives lost in gossip, a toddler sucking lollipops leaving a mess around her mouth, a young couple still at the awkward stage—it all felt diluted, like everyone was buzzing away as though they were in some separate, distant world.

  An image like a scene from an old film came to mind: a woman, one of my two mothers (I couldn’t tell which), living a strangely solitary life with the man in the notebooks, with Dad. Their life was quiet but their days were highly charged with powerful emotions that spiked with each shared glance …

  I felt suddenly uncomfortable, realizing I had at some point begun to overlap their experiences with my own with Chie. The picking off of the beggarweed seeds, the timorous first consummation of love—my chest tightened as the events in the notebooks started to feel like something that had occurred between Chie and myself. I had no idea why it was happening, but I was appalled at myself.

  And so several years passed.

  After that, everything began to fall apart.

  Those last two lines of the third notebook. I wondered how on earth their life together had gone to pieces. And I wondered whether they (and whether Chie and I) had only been so purely happy because our relationships were fated to collapse someday.

  9

  Yohei was angry, despite the email I’d sent telling him I would be late. It was the same barely-a-grade-up-from-a-diner steakhouse we’d visited a couple of days earlier, and it wasn’t until Yohei had polished off all the meat on his plate, plus half of mine, and finally a black fig tart that he finally smiled, belching as he patted his stomach.

  “Y’know, it’s hard for anyone to stay grumpy on a full stomach.”

  A little alcohol had helped put me at ease as well. I ordered two coffees to stop us getting any tipsier, then handed Yohei the notebook I’d taken from the house. He spent a little while reading bits of text here and there.

  “It’s gotta be a novel, right?” he said, giving it back.

  I felt completely deflated by how easily he’d dismissed it. “Hey, at least give it a little more serious consideration, as a favor to me if nothing else.”

  “Huh? I just read it. It’s basically a love story about a prostitute.”

  “All right, then show me proof it’s fictional. Proof.”

  “There isn’t any proof. It’s just obvious when you read it.”

  “Read it? All you did was glance at a few pages. I read three of these notebooks, cover to cover, and I checked to see how the last one ends. That’s how I’m able to tell you it’s real.”

  “Wow. So what did it say at the end?”

  I recited the lines from memory, but they didn’t seem to pique Yohei’s interest.

  “The way I see it, if you’d read them in a restaurant like this, tipsy and having eaten your fill of steak, you wouldn’t have thought the contents real either.”

  I was about to object, but Yohei cut in with an “Anyways” and continued. He could be a real pain in the ass when he wanted. “Look at what actually happened. You’re alone in an empty house, you find a closet door, usually shut, left slightly ajar. We’re already in horror-movie territory. Then you go and find a cardboard box in the closet that’s full of old stuff, including a women’s handbag that looks like it might be meaningful, and a bundle of hair, then these notebooks at the very bottom. So yeah, in a situation like that, I’m pretty sure I’d have concluded they were a serial killer’s confession, just like you did.”

  He had a point, but it was too late to agree and back down. “So what are you getting at? If different situations make us reach different conclusions, how can we know which is right?”

  “I’m just saying that conclusions made in strange situations are usually wrong.”

  I knew his point wouldn’t hold up against a logical argument, but I still found myself lost for an answer. Feeling increasingly agitated, I clammed up.

  “Oh come on, Ryo, no need to pull that face. Geez, you’re impossible. Here I was enjoying myself, but man, you really sober a guy up. All right, fine, I’ll take it seriously from now on, we’ll hypothesize that everything in those notebooks is actually fact. Okay?”

  He looked at me and nodded a few times, making himself look like he was the elder brother. Knowing I’d need his help again I quelled my misgivings and outlined the contents of the three notebooks in as much detail as possible. Our waitress had an air of reprimand when she came over to refill our coffees, clearly annoyed at how long we’d been lingering, but I ignored
her and carried on.

  “Hmm,” Yohei said after I’d finished and rubbed his chin, pulling on a beard he didn’t have. “While we’re doing this, I’ll go ahead and assume your other theory that Mom was replaced by someone else is also true.”

  “Okay.”

  “We’ll need to make a distinction. The one before you went into the hospital is Mom X. We’ll get mixed up otherwise.”

  I nodded. Yohei had said it lightly but I knew it hurt him to talk about our Mom in this way, while he was still grieving for her. I was inwardly sorry for making him do so.

  “From what you’re saying, it sounds like you’re pretty certain about two things: that the narrator is either Mom or Mom X, and that the man she talks about is Dad.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, let’s suppose those things are also true.”

  “Everything’s a supposition with you.”

  “Well, it has to be. We can’t move forwards otherwise, can we?”

  “Fine, fine.”

  “So based on these assumptions, broadly speaking, we need to work out whether or not you’re the baby and which of the two Moms wrote the notebooks. Correct?”

  “Well, pretty much.”

  “And just to double check, we’re not fully certain the narrator really was 22 years old when the two of them met?”

  “That’s right. She wasn’t sure of her age, so she used the year she was born when she answered him.”

  “Right, well, I guess that happens to me sometimes, like I’ll just blank out for a second and forget how old I am. You said they had five years between them?”

  “That’s what the man said in the text, so it’s probably correct.”

  “A five-year age gap fits with Mom and Dad in reality. Let’s see … Mom got married when she was 24, and you were born a half-year later.”

  “Yeah, a textbook shotgun wedding.”

  Running it all through his mind, Yohei rubbed his chin some more. Then he slowly opened his mouth. “Well, okay, I think Mom was probably the one who wrote the notebooks.”

  “Wh-What? Where’d that come from?”

  “That’s the result of my analysis based on the information you gave me.”

  “What analysis?”

  “All right. Dad was 29 when he married Mom. That was recorded in the family register, and it’s something we both know. Now, the notebooks mention Dad registering his marriage to this woman. If the narrator had been Mom X, that would mean Dad registered two marriages in the space of just two or three years, first to Mom X, then to Mom. Plus, both would be shotgun weddings. That seems pretty tough to believe, although I can’t be certain without going through the details of the old family register from before the move.”

  “Hmm.”

  “It’s more likely that the reference in the notebook is the only time Dad registered a marriage. Working from that it follows that it’s Mom who wrote them, because we know she married Dad. So I think she was probably wrong about being 22 when they met. She was either 24 or just about to turn 24 when they got married.”

  It was so simple, yet I’d missed it. Yohei had spent a year retaking his university entrance exams, and now he was repeating a year of school. There was no guarantee he’d even graduate, but he was still an engineering major and had the mind of a scientist.

  “Following that line of thought the logical conclusion is that you were the baby, Ryo. Again, this is something to check in the old family register. If by chance there was another baby apart from you, the birth registration would be recorded there, even if the kid had died.”

  As his older brother I was rendered speechless. Yohei tilted his head and squinted a little.

  “Of course, if Mom wrote it, the bit about her having a little sister doesn’t fit because Mom was an only child.”

  As much as that made him look dejected, I felt myself revive. “R-Right? See, it’s not as simple as you were saying. Besides, if Mom is the author, how do you explain the fact that she was switched with someone else?”

  “Aah, right, that.” His listless tone was getting on my nerves. “Well, I do have a hypothesis on that, and I think there’s a good chance it’s on the mark.”

  “Out with it, then. What’s your hypothesis?”

  “It’s just a theory, so try not to get too worked up when you hear it.”

  “Enough melodrama, just say it.”

  “Well, you insist the switch actually happened, so the only way to deal with that is to say Mom X was your mother before you were hospitalized. But that was only for a short period. So basically, there were in fact two switches. Mom X switched places with Mom and pretended to be her for a few months or at most a year up until your hospitalization. You were so young that you didn’t remember the first switch.”

  “Wait. Hang on. So you’re saying that Mom wrote the notebooks? That she disappeared a few months before I turned four and that Mom X came to live with us instead? That I then went into the hospital, and by the time I was out, Mom X was gone and Mom was back again?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  “So who the hell was Mom X, this person who was only there for a few months?”

  “Must have been Dad’s mistress. ‘And so several years passed. After that, everything began to fall apart.’ That’s what it said, right? Everything ‘fell apart’ because a mistress appeared. You can imagine the tragic scene, Mom thinking her life was over, like you saw when you skimmed through the final passage. Mom ran away, heartbroken, leaving only the notebooks behind.”

  “I wonder …”

  “Then you got ill and some other stuff happened and Dad’s relationship with this other woman broke down. He thought he’d driven Mom away for good, but they rekindled their romance. That sort of thing happens all the time.”

  I desperately looked for any chinks in Yohei’s theory. Everything slotted together so neatly that, on the contrary, it rang false.

  “What about the hair? It looked like something taken from a corpse.”

  “Probably Mom’s from when she was younger. Maybe she’d left it with the notebooks, so Dad still had it when she went away. Maybe she was going to kill herself. Didn’t it say, ‘You won’t let me live, you will kill me’ at the end? Basically she was saying, ‘I will die by my own hand, but you were the one who actually killed me.’ ”

  I had to admit it was consistent. Too consistent.

  “What about the time Mom was holding the pillow, watching me sleep?”

  “Maybe she couldn’t forgive you for growing attached to Dad’s mistress, even if it was only temporary. When you got back from the hospital and saw her you blurted out something like, ‘You’re not my Mom,’ right?”

  “But the pillow incident was ten years later.”

  “She’d probably forgotten it for the most part, but it’s possible she had occasional fits of anger that were directed at Dad and you. The bitterness would have been made all the worse, a hundred times worse, by how much she loved you. Since she was already a killer, maybe she couldn’t stop her blood boiling, from wanting to just send you into the afterlife …”

  My younger brother peered up at me through the shadow of his overgrown bangs, regarding me like he might a stuffed coelacanth specimen.

  “And you’re okay with this, Yohei? You can accept the idea that Mom killed so many people.”

  Yohei cackled loudly, exposing his canines and causing creases under his eyes despite his youth. “Come off it, Ryo. They’re just theories, like I said. And all the presuppositions for said theories just a bunch of totally unrealistic theories themselves. Still, what do you think? It takes each premise you stated and seamlessly brings them all together. Hell, it’s even pretty realistic. Impressive, even if I do say so myself.”

  “Yeah, except the glaring inconsistency about Mom having a sister,” I said, trying to throw cold water on his self-satisfaction, but he seemed unfazed.

  “Well, Ryo, maybe she really did have a sister.”

 
“Mom did?”

  “The notebooks say her sister had a fiancé, right?”

  “Not just one, a good number of them. Seems she was a bit fickle.”

  “So maybe she went and did something that disgraced the family, and her father disowned her before she married.”

  “That’s just another hypothesis.”

  “I do have a basis for this one, sort of.”

  “What is it?”

  “Well, it’s actually to do with Gran …”

  “Oh, speaking of, how was she today?” I should have asked the moment I saw him, but it had completely slipped my mind, despite how kind she’d been to me back when she was in better health. I felt ashamed for having become so cold-hearted and selfish.

  “Lost some more weight, I think. But she’s doing better than I expected. And she got through most of dinner.”

  “You did good. I’ll make sure to visit her soon.”

  “Me, too. Best to go as many times as possible, while we still can. So, back to what I was saying. Do you remember Gran ever calling Mom by a strange name?”

  I was momentarily lost as to what he was asking, but I soon remembered something that had happened a year earlier.

  “Actually, I do. Something like that happened one time I was visiting her with Mom. I think it was … Emiko? Gran was crying and then she said, ‘Emiko, is that you? Emiko, are you here?’ ”

  “Right, that’s it, just the same as when I was there. Mom looked really bothered and she tried to tell Gran her name was Misako, but Gran clung to her hand, crying and saying ‘Emiko’ over and over. There were other times like that.”

  “So, what you’re saying is …”

  “That Emiko might be the name of Mom’s sister.”

  It seemed highly probable. Gran was always getting me and Yohei mixed up. Once again I found myself in awe of my brother’s perceptiveness.