Book Girl and the Captive Fool

by Mizuki Nomura

  It was so sudden, I couldn’t stop her. Akutagawa looked up at her in confusion.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Because you’re making your friends worry.”

  His grip slackened in surprise, and she took the blade from him.

  “Hold onto that, Konoha.”

  She stretched an arm out to give it to me, and I hastily accepted it.

  “Ayame, bring a bowl of water and some towels! And Konoha, you call a taxi!”

  Why did the two of us meet?

  When I was little in that small classroom.

  What I really wanted to cut apart was myself, was you, as we used to be.

  You for ordering me to do things that were wrong.

  You for never opening your heart to me.

  You for continuing to deny me.

  I want to cut you into ribbons with a knife.

  I want to cut at you until your white face is bloody, until marks are carved all over your skin, until the flesh beneath is weeping pulp.

  I want to cut off your legs, your arms, your hands, your fingers. I want to peel off your skin.

  Then maybe I would be at peace at last.

  Can I go to where you are, Mother?

  While Akutagawa was being treated in the hospital, Tohko and I waited with Ayame on a sofa in the lobby.

  “Thank you. I’m so glad you two were there.”

  Ayame’s face was pale.

  All I’d done was call the taxi; Tohko had been the one to wrap Akutagawa’s arm in a towel and stop the bleeding and to force him into the car.

  “I wonder what’s wrong with Kazushi. I wonder what’s happened to him—,” Ayame whispered hoarsely. “He’s always been a good student and always been much more serious than we were. He never argued with our parents, and we never argued among ourselves. But now he’s…”

  Tohko gently asked, “Something seems to be bothering Akutagawa. Do any of you have any idea what?”

  Ayame’s pretty face, which so resembled Akutagawa’s, twisted up, and she looked like she was about to cry.

  “If anything was bothering him, Kazushi never… told us or asked us for help.”

  Her voice was sad. Tohko’s face fell, too.

  “Do you know who this Kanomata he mentioned is?”

  Ayame’s shoulders trembled at that question. Her dewy eyes became unsettled.

  “If you don’t mind, could you tell us about it?” Tohko urged, and Ayame began whispering in a small voice.

  “Kanomata was a girl in Kazushi’s fifth-grade class. But in the second term, something happened and she changed schools.”

  “What happened?”

  Ayame searched for the words, seeming to find it difficult to speak about.

  “She was bullied terribly by her classmates. They would cut up her textbooks or her gym clothes… and then during art class, she cut one of the kids who was bullying her with a chisel.”

  A chisel?!

  I gasped. Tohko’s eyes widened, too.

  Ayame bent her head and tensed her hands, which she kept folded in her lap, with the pain of the memory.

  “Kanomata changed schools right after that, but… that day the teacher told Kazushi in front of everyone, ‘It’s your fault this happened.’ He didn’t tell any of us about it, so when we heard it from someone else much later, we were shocked. That person’s little brother had been in Kazushi’s class.”

  “What did the teacher mean, it was all Akutagawa’s fault?”

  “… I don’t know.” Ayame shook her head. “I heard that Kanomata started getting bullied because Kazushi lied to the teacher, but… it was more than six months after it happened, and I’ve never been able to ask Kazushi about it. And then right after all that happened, our mother was hospitalized. Her health had been in decline for a while, and she’d been in and out of hospitals, but this time they didn’t know when she’d be able to go home, and…”

  Ayame’s voice grew fainter and fainter.

  “I guess Kazushi thought it was his fault that mom was so sick. Because her health started to deteriorate after she gave birth to him. He tried not to cause any problems for her, and he learned to do everything on his own and never revealed his problems to anyone.”

  My chest… It felt so tight.

  The Akutagawa I knew was a top student, serious, always serene, and a great guy that everyone trusted. Had Akutagawa made himself that way on purpose for his mother?

  “So after the teacher said that to him, and then Mom went into the hospital for so long, I think Kazushi had a really hard time with it. But all of us had our hands full with Mom and our own lives, so we didn’t have time to worry about Kazushi. He was very mature back then, but he was still only an eleven-year-old boy in fifth grade.”

  I could see in Ayame’s drooping expression how sorry she felt for what had happened to her little brother. My chest hurt even more, and my throat tightened.

  I couldn’t hear any more of this.

  An insidious anxiety spread through my heart.

  Once I heard the story, I could never pretend that I hadn’t.

  “When I heard that Kazushi had slashed someone with a chisel, it reminded me of the incident in elementary school. And when Kazushi said Kanomata’s name today, I felt like I was being hit over the head… It’s been affecting him this whole time, I just know it.”

  Tohko drooped. She heard Ayame out with a pained look on her face.

  Just then, Akutagawa returned, a bandage wrapped around his arm.

  “Kazushi!”

  Ayame ran over to him.

  Akutagawa’s face was unnaturally still.

  “Sorry to worry you. The cuts weren’t serious. They said they’d heal soon.”

  Ayame’s voice broke at how calm he was. “I can’t believe you—you’re supposed to be an honor student. How can you just say sorry for that? I just—I can’t—”

  As Ayame started crying, Akutagawa put an arm around her gently. Even though Akutagawa had been the one to cause all the commotion and had been taken to the hospital, it was as if their positions were reversed. His arm still around Ayame’s shoulders, he bowed his head to us.

  “I put you two to a lot of trouble, as well. The school still hasn’t decided what they want to do, and things are kind of hectic right now. Could we talk again some other time?”

  His detachment felt like an oblique rejection.

  Surprisingly, Tohko withdrew quietly.

  She looked up at Akutagawa and smiled coolly.

  “All right. But if anything’s bothering you or has you feeling cornered, you’ll say so, right? Konoha and I both want to help you.”

  It was impossible for me to chime in, so I turned my gaze down subtly and said nothing.

  When we left the hospital, it was completely dark outside and a cool breeze blew, stabbing at the skin.

  We stood together at a bus stop and waited for the bus.

  After the silence had gone on for a minute or two, Tohko said, “I want to investigate what happened with Kanomata. What drove Akutagawa to this point, what it is that’s bothering him, and the library books being cut up and Akutagawa cutting Igarashi with a chisel—I get the feeling it’s all tied to that event.”

  “I’m against it. You would just be meddling. We don’t have any right to dig up other people’s secrets.”

  Tohko looked a little sad.

  “You’re always like that, Konoha. But Akutagawa isn’t ‘other people’; he’s your friend.”

  Suddenly she seemed on the verge of yelling at me.

  But that was just her opinion! Akutagawa wasn’t my friend! I would never make another friend ever again!

  But if I said that, I knew Tohko would look at me even more sadly. When I’d first joined the book club in first year, she would occasionally look at me like that, and I just couldn’t handle it.

  Faced with my silence, her expression turned resolute.

  “We’ve come too far to turn back now, so it’s too late for regr
ets. If you don’t want to do it, then I’ll go to Akutagawa’s old elementary school by myself.”

  This letter is my warning to you.

  You have to get away, please.

  Every time you rest your sweet, poison-laden hands on my heart, you send it reeling and my spirit thrums crazily. I can’t control the destructive impulses that surge through me.

  I tremble with a desire to cut you apart. When I close my eyes, all I see—night or day—is you.

  I yearn to cut your spiteful gaze apart—that pale, dignified face you turn on me, your slender, arrogant throat—to carve away your ears and nose, to dig your eyeballs out of your head. My heart cries out to etch a crucifix into your supple chest and to paint your entire body in fountains of warm blood.

  You have to get away.

  I know I’ll cut you apart.

  In the end, I was close behind Tohko when she went to Akutagawa’s old school after classes on Friday.

  When Tohko said, “I’ll go by myself,” it was as good as a threat. I could hardly let a reckless person like her go off alone.

  At the reception desk, Tohko declared with an easy smile, “I’m a graduate. I’d like to look around.” We changed into slippers and walked right in.

  It looked like the students were in the middle of a drawing contest for autumn or something, the walls all decorated with drawings by them. The winning pictures had gold bits of paper stuck on them.

  “Let’s go to the teacher’s lounge first. There should still be some teachers around from back then,” said Tohko.

  “Do you think they’ll talk about bullying to outsiders?”

  “That’s where you have to be totally sincere and knock them off their feet.”

  Tohko made a fist.

  Then she saw the drawings on the wall, and her expression softened instantly.

  “Isn’t this nostalgic? Now I want to go back to my old elementary school. Hey Konoha, what were you like in elementary school?”

  “Normal. I played very seriously with clay during art class and cut up drawing paper and fed the goldfish our class kept when I was in charge of the animals.”

  I remembered that I’d also met Miu in elementary school.

  Miu had transferred into my class in third grade.

  “I hate the way the teachers say my name. Just call me Miu. And I’ll just call you Konoha.”

  “But everyone will make fun of us.”

  “Are you afraid of them? You’re such a scaredy cat. Don’t call me that then if you don’t wanna.”

  “No, I will. I’ll call you Miu.”

  The image of Miu and I when we were little, running down the hall hand in hand, rose like a mirage, and I felt dizzy.

  Hiding how disturbed I felt, I asked in return, “I bet you were totally rambunctious and gave your parents and teachers all kinds of trouble, right, Tohko?”

  She gave me an unexpectedly serious answer.

  “Until about third grade, I was a shy, quiet little girl. It’s true. Lunchtime was so depressing. I hated it. Even now when I think about going to school and having to eat lunch, my stomach starts to hurt.”

  My mouth eagerly awaited the opportunity to put in a dig, but I closed it again without a word.

  Tohko couldn’t experience the taste of the food you and I normally eat.

  Even the flavors of the books that she relates so rapturously are nothing but Tohko’s imagination, switched out for the flavors we know.

  I wasn’t sure a girl in elementary school would be able to deal with that.

  She wouldn’t pick up on the taste of the stew or the pudding that everyone said was so delicious. It would have no taste at all. I wondered how Tohko had felt when she discovered that.

  Tohko smiled gently.

  “But when I went home, my mother was waiting for me at the door. She would ask me, ‘Did you eat all your lunch? Good job! What a good girl!’ and she would stroke my hair and write me sweet treats. Her treats were… so good. My father and I loved the meals she wrote for us.”

  Tohko was staying with friends of her family. Where were her mom and dad? And from what she’d just said, it sounded like her dad also ate paper like she did. What must their family be like?

  Then Tohko’s eyes suddenly began glinting, and she went into a second-grade classroom.

  I went after her, wondering what she was doing, then saw the children’s books lined up on the small wooden bookshelf. She was rejoicing.

  “Look at this, Konoha! They’re readers! Oh, I used to love these. They have a digest version of Les Misérables. This one ends when Valjean and Cosette start living happily ever after. When I read the complete version, I was blown away when that happened to Valjean. Ohhh, and they have Little Women. I love the scene where they deliver treats on Christmas. I read it so many times. Oh, and My Father’s Dragon and The Haveybavey Tree, too! I loved those! I wish I could eat them!”

  “You do remember why we came here, right?!”

  My voice was more aggressive than I meant it to be.

  Tohko was still hugging the class’s copy of The Haveybavey Tree, but she half hid her face behind it and quieted down.

  “I’m sorry. I got carried away,” she said, slumping and looking vulnerably up at me. Then she pulled the book away from her face and shouted, her eyes wide, “I got it, Konoha!”

  “Got what?”

  “All the books that were cut up! I think they might have all been stories from textbooks!”

  With that, she lost herself in the explanation.

  “There was Owl Moon by Jane Yolen, right? I read Ju Mukuhato’s ‘Old Daizo and the Gun,’ Sakyo Komatsu’s ‘Alien Homework,’ and Hakushū Kitahara’s ‘Ancient Murrelet’ in my elementary school language arts book, and Takeo Arishima’s ‘A Bunch of Grapes’ and Sachio Ito’s Tomb of the Wild Chrysanthemum were assigned reading over the summer. Yeah, I’m sure it was for fifth grade.”

  When she listed off the titles like that, they sounded familiar to me, too. Wasn’t Owl Moon the story of a girl who goes searching for an owl with her father on a winter night?

  “You mean the books at the library weren’t being cut up at random?”

  “That’s what that would mean. But why cut up the books?”

  Tohko pressed a finger to her lip and was just sinking into thought when—

  “What are you two doing?”

  I jumped.

  A woman of around fifty held a binder to her chest, looking at us suspiciously.

  “S-sorry. Um, we’re… well—”

  Tohko swept in front of me as I grew flustered.

  Her expression was the very image of seriousness, and the teacher gasped. Tohko took another step toward her, then suddenly launched into her eloquent explanation.

  “We are the classmates and mentors of Kazushi Akutagawa, who used to go to school here. We came to ask something very important about Kazushi. Please, it’s very urgent! Could you help us out?”

  Whether it was Tohko’s fervent appeal that moved the heart of the woman who was dedicated to education, or whether her honor student–like conduct had a greater effect…

  We were taken through the teachers’ offices and into a small room with a nameplate on it, where we were seated on a sofa and allowed to hear the story.

  Mrs. Yamamura, who Tohko inspired to talk without restraint, had been Akutagawa’s teacher twice, and she remembered the incident clearly.

  “His teacher at the time was Yuka Momoki. She was an intense young teacher, but that meant she had excessive expectations of her students. I don’t think she could accept that a child in her class was being bullied or that she would stab one of her classmates with a chisel. No matter what reason Ms. Momoki had for saying such a thing to Akutagawa at the time, it was an awful thing for a teacher to do. Ms. Momoki realized that and deeply regretted it… Apparently she tried to apologize to him later on, but once she’d said it, it couldn’t be taken back. She must have felt that she had failed as a teacher. She left the school soon a
fter.”

  “Why did Ms. Momoki blame Akutagawa? What had he done?” Tohko asked.

  Her face dark, Mrs. Yamamura whispered, “He told Ms. Momoki that a classmate was being bullied.

  “It was the natural thing for him to do since he was the class monitor. He hadn’t done anything worthy of blame. But in fact there was no bullying. The child who was suspected of bullying got angry anyway, and then the bullying truly started. That child led the rest until half the class was ignoring that one girl or hiding her things or deliberately tripping her.”

  Mrs. Yamamura’s every word landed heavily on my heart.

  Akutagawa wasn’t at fault.

  But if I had been in his place—if because of something I had said, someone started getting picked on and the teacher blamed me for it—I would probably feel like I was being cut apart by icy blades. This would probably deepen into a wound I would remember forever.

  Tohko looked sad as well.

  Mrs. Yamamura sighed.

  “Kanomata, the girl who was being bullied, and Akutagawa were good friends, and they often studied together in the library. Kanomata was a child who was often alone, but I remember that Akutagawa was the only one with whom she seemed to enjoy talking. So he must have had an extra hard time of it.”

  “Kanomata still hasn’t forgiven me!” I remembered Akutagawa shouting, his face twisted and covered in blood. My throat tightened.

  “That’s all I can tell you about it. I hope it’s at least some help to Akutagawa.”

  “Thank you very much. Do you happen to have any pictures of their class that we could look at?” asked Tohko.

  Mrs. Yamamura seemed to hesitate, but then she whispered, “Just a moment,” and stood up. She brought back a bundle of newspapers tied up with string from a shelf at the back of the room.

  They looked like monthly papers printed by the school and were about half the size of normal newspapers. She flipped through them, then stopped.

  “This is a picture of fifth-grade class three.”

  It looked like a group photo from a field trip with all the children lined up in front of a tour bus holding their bags. It looked to be roughly the same time of year as right now. Everyone had a knitted vest or a cardigan over their long-sleeved shirts.