Book Girl and the Suicidal Mime

by Mizuki Nomura

  The only difference between Tohko and me was that I was naïve enough to look for an answer.

  Tohko wasn’t a fortune-teller or a counselor or a psychologist.

  She was a goblin who ate the written word, but that was the only thing that separated us. Because she was just a regular high school girl, just a regular book girl.

  Tohko didn’t say anything more.

  She stayed with me in the nurse’s office as the sun fell below the horizon and the room became cool and dark, until I stopped crying.

  Chapter 6–The Book Girl’s Allegation

  Several days went by.

  After the incident on the roof, I never once spoke to Takeda, and she never came looking for me.

  The day before, Kotobuki had said, “I haven’t seen your girl lately. Did you two break up?”

  I saw a little red along the tops of her cheeks, and she hung her head, fidgeting. Her voice almost sounded concerned.

  “We were never going out in the first place. And she doesn’t need my help anymore, so I don’t think she’s coming back.”

  “I—I didn’t, I mean, it’s not a big deal, I just thought… maybe I’d gone too far before. I mean… um…”

  She looked up and as soon as our eyes met, she flushed an even darker red.

  “N-never mind!”

  She whirled around and walked away.

  But just when I’d thought she was gone, she stopped in her tracks and circled back around, extremely agitated.

  “That is, I—um… er… no, it’s really nothing!” she stammered loudly, then hurried away.

  She was probably trying to apologize. She could be harsh, but I guess she wasn’t a bad person.

  I went to book club every day and passed the time politely listening to Tohko as she expounded on her criticism of books while I wrote her improv stories.

  “Today’s topics are stapler, amusement park, and mutton hot pot. You have exactly fifty minutes. Okay, go!”

  Bang!

  Tohko started her silver stopwatch. She propped her elbows on the back of her fold-up chair and leaned forward. She kicked off her shoes and kneeled on the chair. Her manners were as bad as ever.

  “What’s mutton hot pot?”

  “You haven’t heard of it? It’s mutton—so lamb would be okay, too—cut up into slices and then cooked really fast in soup. They did a story on a restaurant in Ginza on the news last night. They had such un-believ-ably thin cuts of meat for the soup. They said it didn’t smell at all, and you could eat it raw and it would still melt on your tongue. The grape sherbet they had for dessert looked so yummy, too. After a hot meal, a cold dessert is really the only way to go. So I’d like a story that melts like lamb fillets for mutton hot pot and is chilly and sweet like ice cream.”

  “You need to stop ordering all this bizarre stuff. I mean, how can you be so easily influenced by TV and magazines and whatever else? How am I supposed to tie together a stapler, an amusement park, and lamb filets?”

  “That is how the chef shows his skill. Heh-heh. I’m looking forward to this.”

  “Why don’t you write something yourself for once?”

  Tohko’s index finger popped up immediately and her face turned serious. “Konoha, as your mentor, allow me to teach you something about life.”

  “That being?”

  “Food that someone else makes for you tastes ten times better than your own cooking.”

  “You’re avoiding the question.”

  “And also? Food cooked with affection is a hundred times better. That’s also a fact.”

  She rested her chin on her hand, leaning on the back of her chair, and beamed at me as if she could compel me to write this story with a huge helping of affection.

  I got it: a sheep with staplers sticking out of it like a hedgehog gets lost in an amusement park and gets tricked by a witch, who makes him into a mutton hot pot.

  Tohko watched me idly as my pen raced across the pages of the notebook.

  “It’s hard to write with you watching me. Could you read a book or something?”

  “Sure thing, chef.”

  She spun around in her chair and started reading one of the old books in the room, dangling her legs over the edge of the chair.

  After a while, the only noises in the cramped room were the scratching of my pen on the paper and the rustling of pages being turned in Tohko’s book, mingling with the dust motes suspended in the air.

  Without warning, her back still turned to me, Tohko murmured, “Hey, Konoha. How do you think little Chia is doing?”

  My pen paused momentarily.

  I didn’t want Tohko to think I was shaken, so I quickly resumed writing.

  “I dunno… does it matter anymore?”

  “But she still hasn’t turned in her report.”

  Tohko turned back around to look at me. “Konoha, would you go and talk to her and get the report?”

  I gaped. “Do you hear yourself talking? No. I don’t want to.”

  “But, but, but, but—she promised she would write a report for me when the contract was finished.”

  “You’d be sick for a week if you ate a report about what happened. I won’t do it! Absolutely not! If you want to eat weird stuff like that, why don’t you go and get it yourself?”

  Tohko looked sad.

  Uh-oh. Had I gone too far?

  “Konoha, little Chia may have lied to you, but wasn’t there some truth to what she said after all?

  “You haven’t asked her why she did it. Are you going to let it end without knowing? You wrote all those love letters because you wanted to help Chia out, right?”

  I said nothing, just pressed on with the story.

  “Done.”

  I tore three sheets of paper out of the packet and handed them to Tohko.

  “Be sure to clean your plate.”

  My story about the sheep covered in staplers who gets filleted must have tasted pretty unusual. Tohko struggled to choke down the three sheets of paper, and there were tears in her eyes.

  “Urf, gross… no I mean, that really spoke to me. The taste is v-very unique and th-this part… it’s so gross… n-no, delicious. It’s delicious… really. Urg… if I tell myself it’s good, it’ll taste good… bleh.”

  She was such a lost cause.

  She’d eaten entire stories as nonsensical as that and with worse editing before.

  She’d done the same thing when I had first joined the book club last year.

  She would try her very best to eat the grotesque stories that I wrote badly on purpose, without a single punctuation mark and my subjects and objects every which way. Then she would correct my errors with ridiculous gravity.

  “That was good, but… I like punctuation because it shows you when to take a breath when you’re telling a story. If there’s too much of it, that can mess up the flow, too, but for now why don’t you try it out? And maybe you shouldn’t use the exact same sentence structure quite so much.”

  No matter how often I slapped together something weird to be mean, Tohko would eat it all, and the next day she would come pick me up with a smile and say, “Time for the club meeting, Konoha!”

  Maybe it was because I was still inside my shell back then and avoided interacting with people, so she didn’t feel like she could just abandon me.

  She often struck me as unfiltered and self-absorbed, an utterly carefree book girl living in her own world who cared not at all about the world around her. But Tohko could also be a busybody.

  Maybe being with Tohko for a whole year had had an effect on me.

  The next day I headed to the library to see Takeda.

  “I don’t care what her reasons were for tricking me. Tohko is a pig, and now she wants to eat Takeda’s report, so I’m just here to collect it,” I reminded myself as I spiraled down the rusty staircase to the basement storage room.

  Clang-clang-clang.

  The noise of my footsteps was swallowed up in the underground stillness.

  De
scending the final step, I went to the door at the end of the corridor and knocked. A cautious voice responded, “Er, yes?”

  “It’s Inoue, from the literature club.”

  “Konoha! J-just a second!”

  Beyond the door, I heard the sound of books toppling over and being tossed aside, a mouse squeaking, a voice saying, “Shh! Go away!” to chase it off, then a brief silence before the door opened and Takeda appeared, looking sheepish. “Um… c-come in. The mice are gone so… it’s safe.”

  “… Thanks.”

  The storage room was the same as the last time I’d been there, with the sweet smell of old paper in the air, dingy with dust.

  The lamp that stood on the school desk gave off a faint illumination, like a streetlight casting its isolated glow into the darkness. An orange thermos sat on top of the desk alongside a box of cookies and a mug with a drawing of a duck on it.

  “Tohko told me to come and ask you when your report is going to be ready.”

  Takeda lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry. I made a draft, but then I reread it and… it was totally unusable… I guess I have no writing ability after all.”

  Not knowing how to respond, I said nothing. Takeda kept her face down and made herself even smaller.

  “I really am sorry that I lied to you and Tohko. I—I wanted to be a detective. My life was so ordinary and boring. I thought it might make it more interesting if I had a boyfriend, so I started dating Hiro, and I really liked him a lot so I tried to be satisfied with that, but… the duck never changed into a princess. It was fun at first, but after I got used to it, I felt like, oh… this is all it is.

  “That’s when I found Shuji’s letter.

  “My heart ached so badly while I was reading it, I just started to cry.

  “It was like the world had changed color.

  “I wanted to find out more about him.

  “I wanted to get closer to him.

  “I thought I might be able to become someone different than who I’d always been. Maybe even a girl like me could be part of a wonderful story that was full of thrills and excitement.

  “That’s… what I thought.”

  “You’re the one who cut his picture out of the yearbook, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. While I was researching Shuji, it started getting more and more important to me to know whether or not he’d really committed suicide…

  “I would hole up in this room after school and make up all kinds of theories. It was a lot of fun. I felt like I’d become a detective for real.

  “I should have left it at that.

  “When I saw you handing out flyers at the school entrance, I—you looked so much like Shuji that I almost forgot to breathe.

  “That’s when I realized that if I could have you meet the old archery club members, I’d be able to tell who S was and then I could learn the truth about Shuji’s death.”

  So Takeda had used the relationship advice box that Tohko set up as an excuse to get close to me so she could achieve her own goals.

  Shuji does too exist! Really!

  Takeda had sworn it to me again and again.

  For her, Shuji Kataoka was not merely a phantom known only through his letters: he was a real flesh-and-blood human being.

  She’d wanted to believe that.

  That was how powerful a role Shuji had played for her.

  But now Takeda seemed bereft.

  “My stupid ideas put you through a lot of trouble, and I’m sorry. Even now that I know the truth, my heart still hurts and nothing’s changed.”

  Takeda picked up her mug with the drawing of the duck on it. “My best friend, the one who gave me this cup, died two years ago in an accident. She was hit by a car, just like Sakiko.”

  So that’s what it was.

  Maybe the reason Takeda had been so obsessed with Shuji was because, like him, she’d lost someone she cared about in a traffic accident. I felt like I could understand that a little better, and my heart ached for her.

  “She was strong and smart and optimistic, and she was our class monitor. She would have lived a much more spectacular life than someone like me will,” Takeda murmured, her voice cracking.

  Sorrow colored her eyes as she gazed at the mug.

  “Takeda… I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being ordinary. I, at least, prefer it that way.”

  “I suppose…”

  Takeda smiled sadly.

  Then she looked up and said in a suddenly cheerful tone, “Did you know that today is the tenth anniversary of Shuji’s death? So I’ve just been… enjoying a few last memories of him. But I have to get going. I’m meeting up with Hiro.”

  Takeda started gathering up the things on the desk.

  She was smiling brightly, but there were tears rising in her eyes. She kept her eyes open as wide as possible to stop the tears from falling, and occasionally she would blink rapidly.

  When she’d gotten her things together, Takeda smiled at me.

  “I’m going to go. I’m really glad I got to talk to you, Konoha. Thank you for coming to see me.”

  “Takeda… you don’t need to force yourself to write that report. I’m sure it’s not very pleasant work, and I don’t think writing it down will change anything.”

  A frail look passed over Takeda’s face for a moment, then she blinked again and tilted her head back slightly. When she looked back at me, the corners of her mouth were pulled up.

  “You’re right. I’ll only feel miserable if I write about it. It’s not going to change anything.”

  Even though I’d spoken the words myself, they cut into my heart when she repeated them.

  No, writing doesn’t change anything.

  Writing won’t save anybody.

  Takeda murmured a good-bye, and the last smile she gave me was radiant.

  Clang-clang-clang-clang…

  I lingered in the sweet-smelling storage room and listened as Takeda’s footsteps on the spiral staircase grew distant.

  I remembered how she’d cried, clinging to me in the rain.

  And I remembered her smile as she ate lunch with her boyfriend in the school yard.

  Soeda and Rihoko had chosen to go on living together, never forgetting Shuji Kataoka.

  But maybe Takeda had moved on.

  Maybe she would spend her days in ordinary tranquillity with Hiro.

  I believed she’d be happy that way.

  All things pass.

  Even Dazai said so in No Longer Human. Perhaps the passage of time is a kind of healing, or a kind of salvation granted equally to all people.

  Feeling somewhat melancholy, I walked among the bookshelves, reading the titles of the volumes they contained.

  Some titles I knew, some titles I didn’t, some titles too worn to read: they all slipped by in the dim light of the room.

  “Oh—”

  But when I saw that title, I stopped. “No Longer Human…”

  This might’ve been the book that Shuji put his letter in.

  I hooked it with my finger and pulled it off the shelf. The book was inside a slipcover that had turned yellow, speckled with brown stains.

  “Hm—it’s stuck.”

  I couldn’t get the book out.

  “Maybe it’s caught on something? Ack!”

  I tugged harder and the book flew out of its case, along with a little notebook. They both landed on the floor and fell open.

  When I bent over to pick them up, my heart skipped a beat.

  There was a tiny photo on the floor that looked like it had been cut out of a larger picture. The boy in the picture looked back at me with my face.

  A small notebook with a duck printed on the cover had fallen beside the photo.

  This picture… was it from the yearbook? And wasn’t this the notebook that Takeda was always carrying?

  Why had she hidden it in a place like this? And why inside a copy of No Longer Human?

  It was almost like—

  I felt a terrible sense of foreb
oding.

  I picked up the notebook and urgently scanned the narrow letters that packed each page.

  As soon as I read the first line, I felt as if a pit were yawning open at my feet and I was going to topple headlong into it.

  I read a bit more and then, unable to contain myself, flipped ahead to the last page. Cursing my stupidity, I shut the notebook and ran out of the room.

  Mine has been a life of shame.

  My grandmother’s death was the first incident that showed me I was out of step with the rest of the world.

  She’d been very fond of me. Even after an illness in her chest meant that she did little other than sleep, she wanted me by her side. She stroked my hair and called me “such a good girl, such a nice girl,” her eyes crinkling with happiness.

  But I wasn’t the simple child my grandmother wished me to be. Her emaciated hands, her face guttered by wrinkles, her white, whispering husks of hair, her breath that reeked of medicine; all of it repelled and frightened me.

  “You’re a good girl, a nice girl.”

  Each time her croaking voice whispered in my ear, I felt as if she were putting a curse on me. My neck stiffened and goose bumps prickled my skin.

  I was terrified that she would discover that I was not in fact a good girl; that as soon as my grandmother saw that in my heart I despised her, she would become a demon, her white hair bristling and her eyes burning red, and she would devour me. I would break into a cold, heavy sweat and some nights I found sleep impossible.

  As I grew older, my impression that there was a significant disconnect between the way that I and other people experienced things only grew stronger. It took all the energy I had to summon even the slightest sympathy for things that made other people happy or sad.

  Why does that make them happy?

  Why does that make them sad?

  When everyone was excited, cheering for their friends in sports competitions, when they were depressed at losing a friend who transferred to another school, I felt as uncomfortable as if I were in a room full of foreigners with whom I shared no common language. I flinched away from them and felt sharp pains in my stomach. The crushing din of words that everyone spoke around me was utterly incomprehensible.