Another, Novel 02

by Yukito Ayatsuji

  My grandmother hurried to his side. She rubbed his back and placated him as if he were a child throwing a tantrum.

  “You mustn’t start thinking like that. There, there. Go over there and have a rest now, Grandpa.”

  I felt as though I could hear the shrill voice of the myna bird Ray overlapping with my grandmother’s voice. “Cheer…Cheer up!”

  My grandmother took my grandfather’s hand and helped him stand up. They eventually made their way out of the room, at which point—

  “…About that year,” Reiko said at last. “I honestly don’t know about what happened to Ritsuko. But…I dunno, I feel like it stopped partway through that year.”

  “It stopped?” Surprised, I repeated what she’d said. “You mean, the ‘disasters’ for that year?”

  “Yeah…”

  She nodded feebly and then thumped herself on the head again.

  There were almost no cases where the “disasters” had stopped once they had begun. This was the question I’d had when Mr. Chibiki had said that. If “almost none” meant the same thing as “we can’t say it’s never happened,” then that would mean there had to be “a case where they stopped partway through,” meaning—

  Had that rare case been the year that Reiko was in third year, fifteen years ago?

  “Why is that?” Unable to contain my excitement, my words came out forcefully. “What made the ‘disasters’ stop that year, Reiko?”

  But her reply was evasive: “…It’s no use. It’s all fuzzy. I can’t really remember.”

  She thumped herself on the head a few more times, and languidly shook her head.

  “Oh…But you know what? Something definitely happened that summer…”

  In the end, that was all I got out of Reiko that night.

  3

  During what remained of June, I’d had two other opportunities to make my way to the town of Misaki, to “Blue Eyes Empty to All, in the Twilight of Yomi.”

  Once, I swung by first thing after going to the municipal hospital for a prognosis on my collapsed lung.

  I paid the fee, looked at the dolls, and went down, alone, into the basement display room, but I didn’t encounter Mei that day. I hadn’t told her I was coming, so I don’t even know if she was at home. I didn’t venture to ask the old woman—“Grandma Amane”—to have Mei come down. I contented myself with viewing several new creations by Kirika, then left a little less than an hour later.

  It feels weird coming here and not running into Mei…The thought went through my mind that day.

  The other time was the last day of June—the evening of Tuesday, the 30th. I’d wound up going because Mei invited me over on the way home from school.

  I didn’t go up to their home on the third floor that day. And I didn’t see Kirika, either. We passed the time on the sofas on the first floor of the gallery, still empty of customers.

  That was the first time I accepted the tea that Grandma Amane made for us. It was far, far tastier than canned iced tea at least, that’s for sure.

  “July starts tomorrow.” Mei was the one who spoke first. I think it’s fair to say those words implied something like “At last, after tomorrow, we’ll get the moment of truth.”

  I was all too aware of that myself, but right then I deliberately dodged the issue. “The end-of-semester exams are starting next week already…Will you be okay?”

  Mei pursed her lips a little petulantly. “That’s not really something someone who’s ‘not there’ needs to worry about, is it?”

  “I guess that’s true, but…”

  “I wish I could see your house sometime, Sakakibara.”

  I faltered for a snappy response to the next of her out-of-the-blue observations.

  “Uh, you mean—wait—my house in Tokyo?”

  “No, here in Yomiyama.” Mei shook her head slightly and narrowed her right eye coolly. “The house where your mom grew up, in Furuchi.”

  “Huh…Why?”

  “…Just because.”

  A short while later, Mei led me down to the basement. A gloomy string melody was playing in the gallery. I thought it might even be the same music that had been playing the first time I’d come here in May.

  The space was crypt-like and sunken in chill, as always. The dolls were set out here, there, and everywhere, with all their various parts. I didn’t feel quite as captive to the sensation that I needed to breathe for all of them that day. Maybe I really was getting used to it.

  Straight ahead, all the way at the back of the room, with a deep red curtain at its back, stood a black hexagonal coffin. We headed over to it; then Mei turned silently back to look at me. She stood in such a way that her body hid from my view the doll shut up in the coffin, the doll that looked exactly like her—

  She touched her fingers to the eye patch over her left eye.

  “I took this off for you once before down here, didn’t I?”

  “Uh…yeah.”

  The left eye beneath her eye patch, that I’d seen that day…Of course I remembered it vividly.

  A blue eye, empty to all.

  She had revealed a blue eye with an artificial spark, exactly like the eyes sunken in the eye sockets of the dolls…

  …Why?

  And now again, out of nowhere, why…?

  Undeterred by my bewilderment, Mei took her eye patch off and then placed her right palm over the right half of her face, covering her right eye for once. The exposed blue eye on her left was all that looked, unswervingly, at me.

  “I was four when I lost my left eye.” Mei’s lips trembled, a pale ghost of her voice filling the room. “I barely remember it. A malignant tumor formed in the eyeball and I had to get it surgically removed…When I woke up one day, my left eye was gone.”

  Unable to say anything, all I could do was stand there and watch her face closely.

  “At first, they tried a bunch of regular artificial eyes to fill the hole. But my mother said none of them were cute enough…So she made a special eye for me. My special ‘doll’s eye.’”

  …A blue eye, empty to all.

  “You don’t have to hide it, you know.”

  Without my meaning to say them, the words came just then and escaped my mouth.

  “Even without the eye patch, I think your eye is pretty.”

  I startled myself and got flustered saying it, and my heart started to pound almost immediately. I couldn’t really read Mei’s expression as she stood there looking at me, probably because her right hand was covering her right eye.

  My left eye is a doll’s eye.

  The words Mei had spoken the first time I’d run into her here echoed again in my ears.

  It can see things better not seen, so I usually keep it hidden.

  All at once, a mysterious foreboding took hold of me.

  What does that even mean? At the time, I’d been thrown for a total loop. But what about now? Things were a little different. That thought occurred to me, too.

  She could see things better not seen.

  Things better not seen…

  I wanted to ask exactly what it was that she saw, but I set those feelings aside for the moment. I had a vague premonition all the while that a day would probably come when I would have to ask her that question.

  “I found out later on that when I had the surgery on my eye, I nearly died.” Mei’s palm still covered her right eye. “The truth is, what happened back then left a mark on me. Do you believe me?”

  “Uh, you mean like memories of a near-death experience?”

  “Just nightmares of a four-year-old kid sick in bed. It’s good enough if you think of them like that.”

  Despite what she said, I noticed how serious Mei’s tone had become.

  “I don’t think death is very gentle. People talk about ‘easy deaths’ all the time, but it’s not like that. It’s dark—darker and lonelier than anything else in the world.”

  “Dark and lonely…”

  “Yeah. But living is exactly the same, right?
Don’t you think?”

  “…Maybe so.”

  “Ultimately, I’m all I have. Doesn’t matter how things were when I was born…I’m talking about the life I’m living and dying every day. You know what I mean?”

  What could I say?

  “No matter how closely linked people appear to be, we are in fact all alone. Me, my mother…And you, too, Sakakibara.”

  Then Mei concluded with one last comment: “And her, too—Misaki was the same.”

  Misaki? Did she mean Misaki Fujioka?

  That was the name of Mei’s cousin, who’d died at the municipal hospital at the end of April.

  The image of my first encounter with Mei in the elevator of the inpatient ward flowed through my mind with a strange immediacy. As if it had happened only yesterday.

  4

  Thus June ended and July came upon us.

  Thankfully, the result was not a fresh calamity befalling the class as soon as the new month began. But I thought the level of tension permeating the air in the classroom had ramped way up—which was only natural, I suppose.

  Two people linked to the class—namely Ms. Mizuno and Takabayashi—had already lost their lives in June. Would there be new deaths now that a new month had begun? That would be the crucial test to divine whether this unprecedented “strategy” of increasing the number of students “not there” to two would be effective.

  And yet—

  The strange life I shared with Mei at school went on just the same, showing no change on the surface, at least.

  In peace and tranquillity that carried with them the threat of never knowing when it might all come crumbling down. But even so, it was all we could have wished for. The solitude, and also the freedom, rested on the cold palm of that peace, reserved for the two of us alone—

  In the second week of July, they set the schedule for the end-of-semester exams.

  All nine subjects over three days, from the 6th to the 8th. It was a regularly scheduled ritual for ranking the achievements (or lack thereof) of the students in a simple way. Boring, and also depressing.

  But finding it—deep down—“depressing” was a first for me, I suspected. And this despite the fact that as one of the students who was “not there,” I should have been openly rebelling in this situation, or I could have been all set to go into it totally relaxed. And yet I wasn’t.

  I knew the reason for it.

  I was remembering what had happened during the midterms in May, more than I wanted to. That tragic accident that had befallen Yukari Sakuragi on the last day of exams. The terrible scene I had been unlucky enough to witness that day.

  The horrible memories were probably dragging Mei down, too, to some degree or another. This time around, she pretty much never pulled her move of handing in her answer sheet early and leaving the room. I didn’t, either.

  Is the new “strategy” working or not?

  With that thought in our minds, we couldn’t help acting a little more serious than before at school. We were as careful as we could be and worked hard to erase our presence from the class, and everyone else in class continued to collectively ignore us as though we were “not there,” even more thoroughly than before.

  During July, the enormity of our uneasiness became utterly incomparable with what it had been in June. And the greater our uneasiness became, the harder we prayed for the month to pass us by in peace. I’m convinced that these were thoughts everyone in the class shared.

  However, when repeated long enough, a “prayer” also tends to shift and change into a baseless “ritual of the faithful”…

  I felt uneasiness, urgency, and also frustration, swelling bigger and bigger as day after day rolled by. And even in the midst of it—no, maybe because I was in the midst of it—every so often I would feel inexplicably lighthearted.

  This peace and tranquillity.

  The solitude and freedom that only the two of us shared.

  That if I only wished for this to continue, things would keep on going exactly the same. Of course they would. Exactly the same…Yeah. For nine more months, right up until it’s time for graduation in March next year, just like this, never changing.

  …However.

  The reality of the “world” we’d all been sucked into was not so indulgent as to grant that idle fantasy so easily.

  The end-of-semester exams concluded without incident and we plowed through the calendar until there was only about a week left before summer break, that day in the third week of July—

  The day the peace in the class, which had been so narrowly preserved for a little over a month, ever since Takabayashi’s death on June 6, shattered like glass.

  5

  July 13. Monday.

  Ever since I’d become “not there,” I’d been absent at about nine out of ten of the short homeroom periods in the morning. Usually I would slip in right before the start of first period, and Mei did the same.

  But that morning, even though we hadn’t arranged to, the two of us somehow happened to both be in the classroom early. Though of course without talking to anyone or meeting anyone’s eyes.

  For the first time in a while, I’d felt up to starting one of my paperbacks, which was open in my lap. It was a collection of Stephen King short stories that I’d never read (for the record, the story I was reading right then was “The Mangler”). More than a month had passed since my up-close experience with a graphic death, and I’d gotten back a tiny bit of my capacity to separate that kind of novel from reality and enjoy it. That made me feel like a real tough guy, let me tell you…

  The end of the rainy season for the region had just been announced the day before.

  The weather was beautiful, with not a wisp of cloud in the sky even early in the morning. Fierce sunlight seemed to plead for the true advent of summer. The breeze that blew in through the open windows of the classroom was crisper than the week before and felt much nicer.

  Whenever I glanced over to check on Mei, sitting in that same seat all the way at the back next to the windows that faced the schoolyard, she looked like an “apparition” whose outline was smudged by all the light shining in from outside. Just like when I’d first come to this classroom in May…But no: she wasn’t an apparition. She was actually, physically there. Had that really been two months ago already?

  Slightly after the bell to begin class, the door at the front of the classroom opened and the head teacher, Mr. Kubodera, came in.

  He was dressed in the same boring white dress shirt as always. His posture made him seem, like always, somehow ineffectual. Just like always…I thought, watching him lazily, when a strange feeling came over me.

  A couple of things weren’t like always.

  Mr. Kubodera always wore a neatly knotted necktie, but not today. For the short homeroom period, he always brought a single attendance list in with him, but today he had come in protectively clutching a black overnight bag in his arms. Plus, his hair was always neatly parted on one side and gelled, but today it was wild and disheveled…

  When I looked at Mr. Kubodera—standing on the teacher’s platform and facing us—with these suspicions in mind, something did indeed seem strange. His expression was vacant, somehow. As if he weren’t seeing anything, even the things right in front of him. On top of that—

  Even from my seat I could see a delicate, intermittent movement on one half of his face.

  Twitch…twitch…twitching. As if the muscles were spasming. Did he have a tic? Just from looking, the movement seemed to be of a psychotic, twisted nature.

  I don’t know how many people besides me had noticed the state their head teacher was in or whether it made them suspicious. We were all sitting at our desks, but a whisper of the previous commotion still lingered in the classroom.

  “Everyone—”

  Placing both hands on the lectern, Mr. Kubodera began to speak. “Good morning.”

  His greeting, too, felt odd as soon as I heard it. His voice was strangely tense, just like his face.
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br />   Ms. Mikami wasn’t with him. I didn’t think she was out today, but she didn’t show up for every single short homeroom either, so…

  “Everyone,” Mr. Kubodera said again. “Today, I need to apologize to all of you. This morning, here where I stand, I owe you all…”

  At that, the buzzing in the room faded to silence.

  “I’ve asked you all to work hard to make it to graduation in good health next March. I, too, have tried to give my best effort. Unhappy events began occurring in May, but even so I told myself that somehow we would begin again.”

  Even as he recited this speech, Mr. Kubodera’s gaze never engaged with his students. His vacant eyes seemed to simply hover in empty space.

  He had set the overnight bag he’d brought with him on his desk. As he went on speaking, Mr. Kubodera opened the bag and reached his right hand inside.

  “Whatever the future brings is your problem.”

  The same tone as if he were reading an example sentence from a textbook. In itself, that wasn’t very different from usual. And yet…

  “Is it impossible to stop once it’s begun, no matter what lengths we go to? Or is there a way to put an end to it? I don’t know. I don’t. How am I supposed to know? And actually, what do I care? Ah, I mean, as the head teacher of this class, I am after all obligated to work with you all to overcome these trials without ever bending, to reach graduation next March unharmed. Even at this late date, still I…I still…I…”

  A tone not so different from usual.

  At that point it began to get more unsettling and his voice became hard to make out. But the very moment I had the thought, an abrupt change went through him. All of a sudden, the words coming out of Mr. Kubodera’s mouth broke down. They shattered. That’s the only way to express it.

  “Angh” and “Ggheh” and “Nkhee” and I don’t know what…When I try to transcribe it, it comes out looking like a comic book. But all of a sudden he started making these strange sounds that didn’t seem as though they could have come from a healthy human being. All while everyone watched, stupefied, not even trying to decode whatever meaning was in the sounds.