Book Girl and the Captive Fool

by Mizuki Nomura

I gently asked, “This might sound strange, but you know that pink rabbit in your room? What was that?”

  “That rabbit,” Akutagawa murmured, sounding exhausted, “was a birthday gift. I was too self-conscious to go into a girlie store by myself, so I went with Kanomata and she picked it out. She said she liked that one… But after she transferred, she sent it back to me, along with ‘Tangerines.’ ”

  “Tangerines?”

  He looked up at my question and smiled sadly.

  “ ’Tangerines’ by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, the story from the textbook. She cut it out of the book and sent it to me with the rabbit, whose head she’d cut off. She probably couldn’t stand to see the name Akutagawa anymore.”

  “That’s—”

  My throat tightened and choked off my voice.

  It was too awful. Akutagawa hadn’t done anything wrong.

  His eyes were still cast down.

  “After that, my mom got the way she is now, and I felt like I was being punished. Ever since then, I’ve tried to act cautiously, to be an honorable, intelligent person so that I would never hurt anyone again. But then I got involved in a love triangle and hurt Igarashi. I really am an awful person.”

  That’s not true. You’re not an awful person. It’s not your fault. I wanted to tell him all that.

  But I couldn’t say it.

  I was scared—

  Just scared.

  If I said something halfhearted just to temporarily placate him, I felt like he would yell at me again. I was so afraid of that I was practically shaking.

  “Tohko says it was probably someone else who hurt Igarashi. That you’re covering for them.”

  I was a coward. Since I couldn’t say what I was feeling, I told him what Tohko had said. Even that took everything I had.

  Surprise flashed over Akutagawa’s features, and they finally settled into a look of powerful suffering and sadness. He clenched his fists in an effort to stop himself from trembling and said, “I was definitely the one who stabbed Igarashi. The chisel belonged to me. I did everything—all of it.”

  Who was he protecting? I had guessed, too, now. There weren’t that many choices, and the answer had been there the whole time.

  But I couldn’t guess his reasons. Why was Akutagawa forced to martyr himself to this extent? Because of guilt about the past? Or…?

  “Akutagawa—did Sarashina used to be—?”

  Akutagawa tensed his jaw fiercely. He stood up, interrupting my question, and with a harsh look, he told me, “I’m tied to the past. I can’t cut that bond. I intend to take full responsibility for what I did.”

  Then he handed me the orange he’d started eating.

  “Sorry, can you finish this? I’m going to school.”

  Then straightening his back, he started walking.

  I quickly asked, “Just let me ask one more thing, Akutagawa. Did you go out with Sarashina because you liked her? Do you like her now?”

  Akutagawa turned around, and his eyes were clear and sad.

  “I used to. But now, there’s someone I wish I could see. And it’s not her.”

  After he left, I sat on the bench alone and ate the rest of the orange.

  I peeled the tough skin off with my fingers, took one of the segments, and put it in my mouth.

  The bitter acidity prickled in my nose.

  “Ahchoo!”

  I heard the sneeze behind me and turned, and there was Tohko hunkered down behind a tree, hugging her knees.

  “What are you doing here?!” I asked, my eyes bugging out. She stood up, picking off the grass stuck to her skirt with a reddened face; then shyly and feebly, she said, “I saw you and Akutagawa on my way to school, so… I followed you.”

  “Have you been eavesdropping this whole time?”

  “… Sorry.”

  She sat down next to me and rested her hands in her lap guiltily.

  “Are you angry?”

  “What’s done is done. I give up,” I murmured quietly, peeling the skin from another orange. The truth was, I was a little relieved to see her.

  “Can I… have some, too?”

  “You won’t be able to taste it.”

  “That’s okay. Gimme.”

  I peeled off all the skin and split the last orange in halves, then gave one of them to Tohko.

  “Thanks.”

  She broke off one segment and ate it in silence.

  I ate my orange, too.

  “How did that story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa go again?” I asked.

  “The first-person narrator paints a beautiful, gentle, vibrant scene that he glimpses for only a moment from the train. In elementary school textbooks, all the big words are simplified.

  “The narrator feels horribly irritated by an imbecilic, shabbily dressed farm girl who gets into the same compartment as him. The girl opened the window before they went into a tunnel, so the seats fill with soot and the narrator’s rage reaches its peak. But once they pass through the tunnel, several little boys come to see the girl off, as she’s presumably going to their master’s house, and the girl tosses tangerines to them through the window, one after another.

  “The tangerines bob vividly in the balmy light of the setting sun. When he sees that, the narrator feels suddenly cheerful.

  “It tastes so sweet and tart and happy, it makes my chest squeeze tight. It tastes like this orange. Tart, but… it touches your heart deeply.”

  “Aren’t oranges sweet?”

  “Nope. They’re sour.”

  She added quietly, “I think.” Then her face reddened, and she ate another segment.

  “You’re right,” I murmured back. “They are sour.”

  As we ate the sour orange, Tohko mumbled, “Um, remember how I said I would look into Sarashina? In fifth grade, Sarashina’s parents divorced, and she switched schools. Sarashina is her mother’s maiden name.”

  I stopped eating and hung on her words.

  Sounding a little sad, Tohko said, “Sarashina’s name used to be…”

  I fell in love when I saw you crying and alone.

  As the sun was setting, I saw a girl arguing with her mother on the other side of some orange bushes. Her mother went into the house without paying the slightest attention to what the girl said, leaving her alone in the yard. The girl hugged her knees and curled up into a ball. Her shoulders were shaking.

  She was so fragile, stifling her sobs—so different from the girl I knew that my heart ached even through my surprise. I could feel the sweet fragrance of oranges making me light-headed.

  All despite the fact that I was incapable of caring for anyone the way that I was.

  I want to see you.

  Very much.

  More than I can bear.

  Though I fiercely command them not to, my feet try to go to you. I want to trust everything to you. I want to grant your every wish, to be suffused by the darkness. I would fall to any depths.

  If only to feel your presence.

  Only to hear your voice.

  I want to see you.

  I do.

  But I can’t see you as I am now.

  When we got back to school, it was lunchtime.

  I had just quietly opened the door at the back of the bustling classroom and stepped inside when I heard a prickly voice behind me.

  “Keeping CEO’s hours? Must be nice.”

  When I turned around, Kotobuki was glowering at me, her arms folded over her chest and her lips pursed.

  “Ack!”

  “What’s that for?” she asked.

  “You just scared me, talking to me out of nowhere like that. Good morning, Kotobuki.”

  “It’s not morning anymore,” she snapped; then she lowered her voice.

  “Akutagawa came today. He missed the first two periods, though.”

  “Oh? Well that’s something,” I murmured, pretending not to know anything.

  “He’s in the teacher’s office right now, but he was real calm and said hi to everyone. He seemed like he was
in a good mood.”

  Her tone was brusque, but I knew Kotobuki must have been worried about Akutagawa.

  She’d kept her face turned firmly away but suddenly looked at me, her expression growing uneasy. “Sarashina came back to school today, too. She came by here earlier. But Akutagawa wasn’t here, so she left again. She said she was bringing him something he’d forgotten, and she was at his desk…”

  At that point, Akutagawa came back.

  He came through the door at the opposite end of the class from where we stood and went to his desk. When girls called out to him, he smiled softly and spoke a word or two in response. Then he sat down and started to pull his textbook and notes out to get ready for the next class when…

  His face tensed immediately.

  His eyes widened, his gaze fixed on his paralyzed hands. What did he see? I walked over to him.

  Once I was beside Akutagawa, I discovered what it was that had surprised him so badly, and I shuddered, as if I had been splashed with cold water.

  It was a fifth-grade language arts textbook.

  Several cuts ran across the book’s cover. His hands shaking, Akutagawa turned the book over. Written along the bottom in Magic Marker was the name Ayame Akutagawa, and beside it was a sticker on which another name had been written.

  Emi Kanomata.

  Akutagawa stared at the book in shock.

  There was no mistaking it: It was the book he had given to Kanomata, which had once belonged to his older sister; the one from which Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s story “Tangerines” had been cut and sent to his house after the incident.

  Sarashina had come to drop off something Akutagawa had forgotten. That’s what Kotobuki had said.

  Sarashina had left the book Akutagawa had given to Kanomata inside his desk!

  As he looked down at the cut-up textbook, Akutagawa didn’t so much as blink. He seemed to have forgotten that he was in a classroom.

  I left the room quickly.

  When I heard Kotobuki gasp, I was running down the hall.

  I wasn’t Akutagawa’s friend.

  I had known not to get involved in his problems. I had already trespassed on so many boundaries. I couldn’t do it again!

  But Akutagawa was hurt pretty badly, and he was suffering.

  Hadn’t he suffered enough?

  Just free him already, Konoha.

  I went to class three’s room, but Sarashina wasn’t there.

  My rising fever didn’t break, and I didn’t go back to my class. I ran down the stairs and cut through the school yard to look in the animal shed where the rabbits were kept. But Sarashina wasn’t there, either.

  Next, I went to the library. The end of lunchtime was approaching, so students were lined up in front of the checkout counter, and the one girl staffing it was working in a frenzy.

  Going against the flow of the crowd, I moved deeper inside the library.

  When I got to the area with the Japanese literature books, I saw Sarashina standing in front of the shelf where Akutagawa had been cutting up a book before.

  Her head was bent, and she looked like she was typing out a message on her cell phone. A hardcover book—a collection of stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa—and two pages that had been cut out of it lay on the floor. She was completely absorbed in typing her message and never made a move to pick them up.

  She stared at the cell phone’s screen with bloodshot eyes, panting unevenly as her fingers continued leaping around. She looked possessed. I felt cold sweat run down my back.

  The bell rang announcing the end of the break, and I heard the voices and footsteps of people hurrying out of the library. The sounds moved off into the distance.

  But Sarashina acted as if she hadn’t heard a thing, her fingers still moving.

  The area around us grew utterly silent.

  In a trembling voice, I asked, “Are you texting Akutagawa?”

  Sarashina jerked her head up in surprise.

  “Are you going to get him to come and cover for you again?”

  After a moment of hesitation, a pretty smile unbecoming to this scene came over her face.

  “Kazushi is on my side, you know. He comes running whenever I’m in trouble. He’s my own personal knight. Kazushi and I are bound by fate.”

  Her relaxed tone and happy smile gave me goose bumps. What was she saying?

  “The person who stole the rabbits from the biology club and the person who cut Igarashi with the chisel… was that you, too?”

  Sarashina’s face wrinkled in displeasure.

  “Yes. I hate rabbits. And Igarashi was getting in my way. He was punching Kazushi and kicking him… I couldn’t forgive him for that. So I cut him with this.”

  She slipped her cell phone into the pocket of her skirt and drew out in its place something long and thin. When I registered that it was a chisel with a notched tip, I gulped.

  “Swish—” Sarashina made a diagonal sweep through the air with the chisel, and her lips stretched into a grin. “Igarashi was so surprised. Before he fell down, his face was in total disbelief and he was blubbering. It felt great.”

  I felt my throat fluttering with fear. How could she say such terrible things so calmly with such unclouded, joyful eyes? Hadn’t she been screaming and in tears when it happened? Had it been an act? Or did she not know what she was saying and doing?

  Standing there in front of me, she looked like a dangerous, unstable creature. It was impossible to tell what she might do.

  The library was blanketed in silence. Everyone must have left.

  “You were… going out with Igarashi… weren’t you?” I asked in a broken whisper. A look of violent rage suddenly came over Sarashina’s face.

  “He just decided that! No one asked me! I hate him! He’s just a huge meathead, and he’s shallow and self-entitled and talks in a really loud voice no matter where he is! He grins like an idiot! He jokes around! The movies we’d go see, the restaurants we went to, the food—he decided everything without asking me, and he tried to make disgusting moves on me! Every time he brazenly tried to touch my shoulder or my hand, I wanted to slice his hand up like a carrot! I don’t even want to breathe the same air as him!!!”

  Her voice was wild, as if every word were a stone with which she could pelt the object of her hatred. I was frozen in terror, intimidated by her glinting eyes and the chisel she still held in her hand.

  “I hate him! Hate him! Hate him! I never want to lay eyes on him again! He bullied Kazushi! He did horrible things to him! And then he said we should go out again anyway—it made me sick! What does he mean again? I was never your girlfriend! Don’t you get that? Idiot! I hope you die!”

  Loathing, pain, suffering, rage—Sarashina’s expressions changed with dizzying speed, her body trembling.

  Suddenly, Akutagawa’s voice sounded behind her.

  “Cut it out! Don’t say another word about Igarashi! Don’t slander him!”

  “I knew you’d come, Kazushi.”

  Sarashina smiled at him as if they were meeting up for a date. Akutagawa stood before her, out of breath, his face twisted with pain. Then he forced out a pleading voice, saying, “Igarashi was a great guy. He was cheerful, and he looked out for me, and everyone on the team adored him. Even when I was the only first-year chosen to be a full member of the team and the rest of the upperclassmen didn’t look very happy about it, Igarashi was the only one who was truly glad for me. He patted me on the back and told me to do my best.”

  Akutagawa’s voice was hoarse.

  “He really was a great person. So when he said he wanted me to introduce you to him, I did it. I thought you wouldn’t mind him. You always smiled so happily when you were with him. Don’t deny it.”

  The smile slid off Sarashina’s face.

  Akutagawa continued talking, his face fighting back pain.

  “I—I thought you two were getting along. I was relieved. But then you lied and told me he’d hit you and was stalking you… You tricked me.”

&nbs
p; “You tricked me first!” Sarashina shouted, her eyes timid now. “When you asked me to come watch a match, I was so happy. I went to watch lots of matches after that, and you came to talk to me every time. Igarashi was always with you, but I only cared about you, so I was okay with that.

  “I thought we were getting closer, and I was so happy, and then when you invited me to an amusement park, I was overjoyed! Igarashi was with us, but I was happier than I’d ever been because it was the weekend, and I was going out with you.

  “So whenever you invited me somewhere, I dressed up supernice and would go to the place we were supposed to meet ten minutes early, my heart pounding the whole time. But then in the middle of it, you would say that something urgent had come up or that you’d caught a cold, and you’d cancel at the last minute, and somehow that made me Igarashi’s girlfriend!”

  Akutagawa didn’t answer. He let Sarashina talk, his lips pressed tightly together and his brow knit.

  I felt as if my heart was on fire. Akutagawa hadn’t meant to deceive her. He had probably just fixed up a girl from his class with the upperclassman he respected so much as a favor to the guy.

  The way Omiya had supported the match between Sugiko and his best friend Nojima.

  But just as Sugiko had preferred Omiya, Sarashina’s heart was not with Igarashi: It had fixed instead on Akutagawa.

  “I knew you were friends with Igarashi, so I put up with him that whole time because I didn’t want you to hate me. But going out to eat or see movies alone with him was pure torture for me. Gradually, just the sound of his laughter set my teeth on edge, and when I couldn’t stand it any longer, I told you so. Sure, Igarashi never hit me or anything, but he might as well have!”

  Sarashina gripped the chisel in both hands, then pulled it close to her own chest and retreated a step, a look of heartrending sorrow on her face.

  “I managed to break up with Igarashi, and you became my boyfriend, and we were finally happy. So why did you say we should break up, Kazushi? Because I stabbed Igarashi? Kanomata made me do that. She was threatening to take you away if I didn’t. I didn’t want to do anything that would make you hate me. But—but—I hated Igarashi, and Kanomata… that day she… When the blood splattered on me, she laughed that she had gotten her revenge… that she wanted me to get hurt, too, so… so it’s not my fault!”