“The head teacher, who’d been riding with them, and six of the students in Class 3 died in that tragic accident. A total of seven people. The bus behind theirs was involved in the accident as well, which resulted in a few collateral deaths outside of Class 3.”
“So then…That’s why the next year they started having the class trip during second-year?”
“That’s right.” Mr. Chibiki nodded, his brow still furrowed. “And not just the class trip, either. They won’t even go on field trips. Ever since that tragedy, third-years as a unit no longer have any activities in which the students get on buses and leave the school.”
Just then, the crackling bell announcing the end of sixth period began to ring.
Mr. Chibiki glanced at the clock on the wall and then slumped into the chair on the other side of the counter. He removed his glasses and once again began to polish them with his handkerchief.
“Let’s leave it at that for today. I warmed to my topic and talked much too long, I think.”
“No, thank you. Do you mind talking just a little bit longer?”
“What about?”
“Well, I’d like to hear about the effectiveness of the ‘strategy,’ if you don’t mind.”
I rested my elbows on the counter and fixed my gaze on the librarian’s wan face.
“You said this ‘strategy’ of making someone in the class ‘not there’ started ten years ago. What has the success rate been since then?”
“I see. That’s an issue that cuts close to home.” Mr. Chibiki leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes, then took a single, deep breath. Without shifting his position, keeping his eyes closed, he replied, “In ’88—the first year—it was a success. Apparently there was no doubt that ‘the casualty’ had infiltrated the class in April, but no one ever died. The ‘tragedy of ’87’ had happened only the year before, so I suppose people were desperate to try anything when they worked out this new idea. Whatever the case, it was the beginning of the tradition that this ‘strategy’ must be implemented in an ‘on year.’
“And from the following year on up to today, not including the current year, there have been five ‘on years’ in total. As I mentioned, in the year before last, the ‘strategy’ failed partway through the year. Of the other four, I believe it succeeded twice and failed twice.”
“When you say it failed, you mean that the student who was chosen to be ‘not there’ abandoned that role, right?”
“No, not necessarily,” Mr. Chibiki replied, opening his eyes. “This ‘strategy’ involves a great many regulations, or guidelines, I suppose you could say. For example, you only need to treat the one selected like they’re ‘not there’ at school, but it’s fine to interact with them outside of school. But you can’t do it even outside of school during school activities. Things like that. Distressingly, it seems that none of these guidelines are absolute. Meaning that there’s no way to be sure what people did wrong to trigger the failure…”
“…That’s awful.”
“That’s how it is, as far as we know,” Mr. Chibiki said glumly, and pushed the bridge of his glasses up. “I’ve tried thinking up all sorts of analogies over the years. First of all, I don’t believe this is what you might call a ‘curse.’ To be sure, the incident with Misaki twenty-six years ago set the whole thing off in the first place, but these calamities are not raining down on us because of the workings of his angry spirit or a grudge he bore. And people don’t die because ‘the casualty’ hiding in the class has lifted a hand against them or somehow willed it to happen.
“No one’s malice or desire to hurt people is behind this. Not in the slightest. I suppose you could argue that there’s the malice of an invisible force befalling us. People sense that sort of thing in disasters. But that’s the same way people feel about any natural disaster.
“This is simply happening. That’s why it’s not a ‘curse,’ it’s a ‘phenomenon.’ A natural phenomenon like a typhoon or an earthquake, though a supernatural one.”
“A supernatural natural phenomenon?”
“I hope you understand my aversion to calling this a ‘supernatural phenomenon.’ I suspect that the logic behind the ‘strategy’ to prevent it is similar. For example—” Mr. Chibiki looked over at the window. “It’s raining. In order to prevent the rain from getting us wet, the best thing we can do is not go outside. If we wind up going outside anyway, our strategy is to use an umbrella. But it’s difficult to entirely prevent the rain from getting us wet, even using an umbrella. Even when the rain is falling in a predictable way, the angle you hold your umbrella at or the way you walk can cause you to get soaking wet. And yet, using the umbrella is far better than not using one at all.”
Mr. Chibiki turned his eyes back to us, as if asking, How’s that?
I struggled to find a response, but Mei spoke up quietly beside me. “You could also compare it to drought and rain dances.”
“Oh?”
“We’re suffering from a drought. Dancing to bring the rain is pointless, but if you were to light a fire and send smoke up into the sky, in principle that would work. But there are times when that has an effect on the atmosphere and makes the rain fall, and times when it doesn’t.”
“Huh. Not bad.”
“Uh, so then, Mr. Chibiki?”
I was pretty much done hearing comparisons, so I cut in.
“What’s going to happen this year? Are the ‘disasters’ going to stop now that two of us are ‘not there’?”
“I told you, I can’t honestly say. But”—Mr. Chibiki pushed the bridge of his glasses up again—“the ‘disasters’ have almost never stopped partway through a year once they’ve started. So…”
“‘Almost never’?” I tried to cling to the strictest meaning of his words. “Meaning that it has stopped before. That’s—”
Brr-r-r-r-ring-g-g-g. Just then, something that sounded like an old-timey telephone started ringing. Ignoring my question, Mr. Chibiki extracted a black device from a pocket of his jacket. So it was the ring tone on his cell phone.
“I apologize. Just a moment…”
Mr. Chibiki put the phone to his ear. He exchanged a few words with someone in a low voice that I couldn’t make out, and then put the phone back in his pocket.
“That’s it for today. You can come back another time.”
“Oh, all right.”
“Although I’ll be out, starting tomorrow. I have a bit of mundane business to take care of, so I’ll be out of town for a few days. I’m planning to be back at the beginning of next month at the latest.”
Mr. Chibiki’s face looked incredibly fatigued when he said that.
He rose unhurriedly from his chair and extended a hand for the black binder I held…But just then, I recalled something.
“Um, actually”—I spoke up quickly—“there’s one other thing I’d like to check with you today.”
“Mm-hm?”
“It’s about what happened fifteen years ago. Was 1983 an ‘on year’ or was it an ‘off year’?”
“Eighty-three?”
“You have the class list for that year in here, too, don’t you? So then…”
I started to flip through the pages in the binder, but Mr. Chibiki raised one hand slightly and stopped me.
“No, Sakakibara, there’s no need to check. I remember it. The fourth year after I’d fled into my role as the librarian…’83 was an ‘on year.’ That year, third-year Class 3 had…”
“Yeah?” I bleated, impatient. “It was? I thought maybe it hadn’t been, but I…Yeah.”
“Why do you ask? Did something happen that year that you…? Oh. I see.”
At that point, Mr. Chibiki seemed to have realized as well. “I see. Reiko’s year.”
“…Yes.”
That was the year Reiko, now twenty-nine, had been in her third year of middle school—1983. The year she’d been a member of third-year Class 3 at North Yomi. And also…
“That was the year Ritsuko—the year your m
other passed away.”
A new cloud darkened Mr. Chibiki’s expression.
“Did that happen…in this town, by any chance?”
“She came back to her parents’ house in Yomiyama in order to give birth, and she stayed at their house for a little while after I was born, too. So…”
“So she died in this town,” Mr. Chibiki murmured ruefully. “I never realized it at the time. I see. So that’s what happened.”
I see. So that’s what happened.
The death of my mother Ritsuko fifteen years ago.
She was doing poorly after the birth, and then she’d caught a summer cold that had taken a turn for the worse…That was what I’d always heard about her death, up until now. But maybe it had actually been one of the “disasters” brought about by the “phenomenon” involving third-year Class 3 at North Yomi…No, there was no “maybe” about it. That must have been what happened.
A simple turn in luck…Of course, there was a possibility that was all it was. But given the position I was in right now, I could hardly bring myself to believe that.
Chapter 11
July I
1
The rest of June passed uneventfully and rolled into July.
A fresh disaster that befell the class as soon as the new month began was, thankfully, not a result of the changing month. So Mei and I continued our strange life at school basically unchanged, as the two students who were “not there.” For my part, it went by in the midst of peace and tranquillity, not as uncomfortable as it had felt at the beginning but still holding the threat that we would never know when the peace would shatter.
Mr. Chibiki, true to his word, was briefly gone from school the very next day, and I never laid eyes on him for the remainder of June. The secondary library in Building Zero stayed closed the whole time, I guess because they didn’t have the staff to replace him.
I had a chance to learn what sort of “mundane business” Mr. Chibiki had left town for later on. Apparently he had a wife and kids who had lived away from him for a long time, staying in Sapporo, where his wife had been born. She had called him, so he’d gone to Hokkaido.
I never found out more details than that, but I could imagine. It could be that the reason his family lived somewhere else was because of this “phenomenon” that Mr. Chibiki had entrenched himself at North Yomi to “observe.” Maybe it wasn’t because the couple didn’t get along, but instead because he’d sent his wife and kids to live far away “out of range” so that, remote as the chance might be, they wouldn’t be caught up in the “disasters.” Or something like that.
And then there was a separate issue.
Recently, one fact at least had become unexpectedly clear. I found out about it in the form of an announcement from Mei.
“Yesterday, one of my senpai came to the gallery. A girl named Tachibana that I know from the art club. She graduated two years ago. And she used to be in third-year Class 3. She likes dolls, so she’s come by the gallery occasionally for a while now. But I hadn’t seen her in a long time.”
This was the first I’d ever heard of her having a senpai like that. Ignoring my slight surprise, Mei went on: “I guess she heard some rumors about what’s going on this year, so…”
“You mean she came to see you because she was worried?”
Mei inclined her head ambiguously at my question. “More like she didn’t want to get involved, but it kept bothering her, so she ended up coming by…I guess.”
She gave me her detached read on it.
“I think Mochizuki might be the source of the rumors. She acted like she knew I was the one who’s ‘not there’ this year. But she didn’t really give me any advice or anything. And talking about stuff, she looked really jumpy…So I made the first move and brought up a couple questions I had.”
The first had been a question about the “extra person” (“the casualty”) who’d infiltrated third-year Class 3 two years ago.
Mei asked Tachibana about her, mentioning the name “Mami Asakura” that she’d gotten from Mr. Chibiki’s binder. “Do you remember someone with that name being in your class?”
The result was, basically, exactly as Mr. Chibiki had told us: “No, I don’t,” she’d answered. Then she’d added uncertainly, “But after everything was over, I heard stories that there was a girl with that name…” Meaning that the loss of memories involving the identity of “the casualty” had in fact happened to her, the former member of third-year Class 3.
The other question was about the student who’d been made “not there” in third-year Class 3 two years ago.
“What was he like?” Mei had asked, cutting straight to the point. “The ‘disasters’ started because he violated the class’s ‘decision’ partway through the year, right? What happened to him after that?”
“She said it was a boy named Sakuma two years ago. Apparently he was always a quiet, unobtrusive kid.”
As detached as always, Mei related the facts that she’d extracted from the girl Tachibana.
“It was a little after the start of second semester when Sakuma abandoned his role as ‘not there.’ Then the ‘disasters’ started at the beginning of October, apparently. People died in November and December, and then…after New Year’s, Sakuma killed himself.”
“Oh. Suicide, huh?”
“I didn’t get a chance to ask what happened after that, but he might have been the ‘death for January’ in ’96.”
It was afternoon, during a break in the perpetual rain. We’d gone down to the bank of the Yomiyama River and were watching the cool water flow by as we talked. We had cut afternoon classes, and without either of us making the suggestion outright, we’d left the school grounds.
We returned to school through the back gate around the time sixth period would be ending. When we came back in, someone shouted at us, “Hey! What do you think you’re doing?”
Must be the gym teacher, Mr. Miyamoto, I guessed immediately. I suppose he’d spotted us from far away and mistaken us for regular students who’d cut out of school. He came running up to us.
“Hold it right there! Where were you two off to at this time of…”
That was as far as he got before he came to a halt and took another look at us, the words Wait a second— clear on his face. Then he swallowed the rest of his lecture.
I gave a slight, silent dip of my head and Mr. Miyamoto kind of awkwardly turned his eyes in some other direction. With a sigh he said, “This must be tough on you two. Still, I can’t really condone you leaving school. You need to cut back on that.”
2
With all this going on, I made up my mind to ask Reiko about it again. After much tortured thought with no results, I just couldn’t stay quiet any longer.
That was—yes—the night of the last Saturday in June.
“Um, I heard something from Mr. Chibiki, the librarian, the other day.”
I spoke up, unprompted, to stop Reiko as she was getting ready to withdraw in silence to the side house after dinner. Right then, I couldn’t worry about my grandparents’ eyes being on us.
“Uh, I heard that…in your last year of middle school, when you were in third-year Class 3, that was actually an ‘on year.’”
“…An ‘on year’?”
Reiko’s face had until then worn a dreamy, zoned-out look, but now wariness flashed across it…Or so it seemed.
“A year when an unidentified ‘extra person’ joins the class and ‘disasters’ befall people. Meaning that every month, people linked to the class lose their lives in one way or another. That’s what they call ‘the curse of Class 3.’ Of course you know that, right, Reiko?”
“Oh…Yeah, you’re right,” Reiko replied, her voice husky. Then she curled her right hand into a fist and thumped herself on the head. “Right. That’s what that means.”
It had been a long time since I’d talked to Reiko like this…Naturally, I was incredibly nervous, and she definitely felt the same.
“I’m sorry, Koich
i. Really sorry.” Reiko swung her head slowly back and forth. “I’m useless…”
I couldn’t help seeing my mother’s face from the yearbook overlay itself on Reiko’s ashen features. Struggling to quiet the fevered ache in the sinews of my heart, I said, “I want to ask you something about fifteen years ago. When my mom had me and then died in this town…Was that one of the ‘disasters’ for that year?”
Without confirming or denying it, Reiko only repeated herself: “I’m sorry, Koichi.”
I’d tried to talk to Reiko about what happened fifteen years ago once before. That was when I’d learned that she, like my mother, had been in Class 3 her third year.
Did they say “the curse of Class 3” about your class or anything like that back then?
Reiko had shrugged off my question by saying, “That was fifteen years ago. I forget.”
Had she been playing dumb? Or had her memories of something that happened fifteen years ago truly become hazy? Normally, I would say it was the former, but the latter was hardly impossible. As Mr. Chibiki had explained to us, people’s retention of memories concerning this “phenomenon” for the most part could definitely not be called good. Plus it seemed to vary between people.
“Well, Reiko?”
Still, I had to ask.
“What do you think it was?”
“…I don’t know.”
“Now hold on, Koichi. Why are you bringing this up all of a sudden?”
My grandmother had been listening to our conversation as she cleared the table, but now she paused and her eyes widened.
Grandma probably doesn’t know, I thought to myself then. Even on the outside chance that she had been told something of the situation in the past, her memories of it would certainly have gotten hazy by now…
“It’s so sad…”
Suddenly, my grandfather broke his long silence. His emaciated shoulders trembled and his voice caught in his throat, as if he were choking on tears.
“Poor, poor Ritsuko. It’s so sad, Ritsuko and Reiko both…”
“That’s enough, now, Grandpa.”
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