Book Girl and the Scribe Who Faced God, Part 1

by Mizuki Nomura

  I’d thought that the next time I met Miu would be a time for beginnings and a time for endings.

  I’d been hearing about Miu’s situation the whole time from Akutagawa, but actually seeing her, I got the powerful impression that she was different, not the Miu I’d known since we were children and not the Miu who’d hurled her hatred at me through tears on the roof as snow fell around us. She was a new, matured Miu.

  “Was Ryuto the one who called you here?”

  “Yup.”

  Of course. The thought made my breathing strained.

  Akutagawa had told me about it before with a grumpy look, how Ryuto was still visiting her.

  “Why would Ryuto want to make you come see me?”

  “I think he wants me to get you to write another novel.”

  A sharp pain ran through my chest.

  Miu’s eyes grew steely and her face stiffened.

  “He told me I had to be the one to convince you. Because what happened to me was the reason you stopped writing.”

  The novel I’d written had hurt Miu.

  I remembered Miu wailing torturously in the middle of a snowstorm, “I’m not clean and honest the way you wrote Hatori in your book,” and it felt as if my throat would tear itself apart. My heart was crushed.

  A scream, a confession, that practically brought up blood.

  A hopeless pilgrim who’d had their slumber stolen from them.

  My novel had destroyed Miu’s entire world.

  While I was criticizing Kanako for writing about the deaths of the Amanos and her own parents, I had done the very same thing, though there was a difference in our subject matter.

  Through my writing, I had shredded another person’s heart.

  “Don’t get me wrong, I don’t resent the fact that you modeled your novel on us anymore. Or the fact that you won the prize and debuted with the pen name Miu Inoue—I mean, I would be lying if I said it didn’t bug me at all… but I don’t care if you write a new novel. It’s just—”

  Miu’s eyes turned steely again.

  “I hate going along with Sakurai’s plots,” she declared fiercely.

  The drinks we’d ordered arrived.

  Miu took a swig of her caffe latte with cream and scrunched her face up at how hot it was, then put the cup back down. She took a quick sip of water from a glass with ice in it, set that on the table too, then looked squarely back at me.

  “I’m not going to fall into line for Ryuto Sakurai ever again. But Kazushi told me you were acting weird, and I was worried that Sakurai was doing something to you. So I came to see you because it’s what I wanted to do. Sakurai said he would bring you to the hospital, but I told him I would go see you myself so he didn’t need to bother.”

  She announced this crisply, then took a slow, cautious drink of her slightly cooler caffe latte.

  Despite the situation, I thought, Oh, right… Miu’s tongue burns easily…

  “What do you want to do, Konoha?”

  I couldn’t answer right away.

  “I… don’t want to write another novel.”

  The words that finally emerged from my mouth shook slightly and sounded pitifully frail.

  “I see…”

  A shadow fell over Miu’s face.

  “That’s… for the best.”

  It was the same thing Kanako had told me. It was just that Kanako’s words had been as cold as ice, whereas Miu’s had a hint of warmth in them.

  Still holding the cup in both hands, her look dark, Miu whispered, “I… think it’s best that you don’t go back to being Miu Inoue, too. After all, if you became Miu Inoue, you’d get hurt. Everyone would be focused on you and say whatever they wanted about you—people you don’t even know would hate you. You’d get kicked around, you’d get scorned, and they’d cut you to shreds with their words.

  “Of course, I’m sure there would be tons of people who would love another book by Miu. There are people waiting for the next book even now—but you know what, Konoha?”

  Miu’s expression was grim.

  “Readers betray authors.”

  Her words shot into my chest like arrows, digging into my flesh.

  “You may write because you want to see people smiling, but all they do is make selfish demands. You don’t communicate your own thoughts. They selfishly adore you, selfishly get disappointed, and selfishly hate you. One day, all of a sudden, without giving it a second thought, they become indifferent toward you. And soon they forget. Then they find a different author.”

  I was desperately fighting back the pain as sharp as arrowheads scraping around inside my body.

  What Miu said was true.

  I knew that because I was a reader who had betrayed an author—an author named Miu.

  I’d felt a selfish admiration for her, hadn’t noticed how she truly felt when she put those feelings in her stories, had constantly demanded that she write the next story even after she’d lost her ability to write.

  Back then, I’d done exactly what Tohko was doing now.

  “Why aren’t you writing?” “C’mon, write what happens next.” “I love your stories, Miu. You have to let me read more, Miu. Write!”

  The innocent, selfish, pitiless reader—so then was Tohko the reader who had betrayed me?

  “Readers don’t realize that authors suffer. If you look at it from their perspective, reading the book, that suffering doesn’t matter. Just like authors write without worrying about their readers’ individual situations…”

  After that burst of words, she dropped her eyes.

  “ ‘Being an author is a line of work in which you pass through a narrow gate alone’… Sakurai’s mother wrote that in her afterword. Kanako Sakurai—you know about her, right? She wrote The Immoral Passage.”

  Hearing Miu speak Kanako’s name and the title of her book made me jump.

  Her eyes still lowered, Miu whispered, “I’ve read a lot of her books. I’ve written about my hatred for you, too, but… it was different from Kanako Sakurai’s novels. I don’t know how she can write such raw, murky stories in that cold, transparent way. There’s a little girl named Toco in the book. It’s…”

  Miu trailed off.

  She was, after all, probably hesitant to say what happened in the novel to the girl who shared Tohko’s name.

  She bit her lip slightly, then murmured in a voice touched with pain.

  “I think… Kanako Sakurai is a true author. But I think it would be tough on you to try and approach the same gate as her. That severe lifestyle, throwing everything away like she did to chase a single supreme achievement…”

  She gazed at me consolingly.

  “You’re not like me, Konoha,” she whispered. “You didn’t start out wanting to be an author…”

  Her face was somehow bitter and sad.

  We went our separate ways from the café.

  Miu went out leaning on Akutagawa.

  “I told you how I feel. If you want to write, go ahead,” she declared, casting the words at me pointedly, her face open to the end.

  Akutagawa, who had kept his silence at Miu’s side, turned earnest eyes on me just as we were parting and said, “Inoue, no matter how much you run around, you can’t go down two paths at the same time. You should stop here and think about which path is the most rewarding one for you until you can accept it. I’ll help you whenever I can.”

  “Thanks.”

  I watched the two of them leave.

  My mood was still bleak. I sat on a couch in the café and reflected on what Miu had told me.

  “… If you became Miu Inoue again, you’d get hurt.”

  “Readers betray authors.”

  It wasn’t just readers who betrayed people. Authors betrayed readers, too. One day, all of a sudden, they would just stop writing.

  Readers and authors—the thread that tied them together was extremely tenuous and could be snapped instantly. There was no such thing as a sure connection.

  I knew that. And yet. When
I remembered the sight of Tohko, enveloped in the golden light of sunset in the tiny book club room, tearing the stories I’d written into little pieces and bringing them reverently to her mouth, my throat burned and my chest fluttered.

  “Yummmm! Today’s snack is a winner!”

  Tohko smiling contentedly.

  Every single day I had written improv stories as snacks for her. No matter how unappetizing the story was, Tohko had finished it. Even if we didn’t say anything to each other, I would turn to my paper and write, and beside me Tohko would thumb through a book—just that, somehow warm, easing my tension, as if we were linked by something invisible; that’s how I felt.

  But maybe it had all been a one-sided delusion.

  Just then, a voice spoke from the seat behind me.

  “You shouldn’t write because you’ll get hurt. Miu’s gotten pretty sappy, huh? I’m disappointed.”

  Behind the vivid green upholstery, I saw Ryuto and every hair on my body stood on end.

  I’d been hearing his voice over the phone this whole time, but I hadn’t seen him since the Sunday Kotobuki came over to my house.

  The sunniness that usually surrounded him and the carefree nature that was impossible to hate had vanished. He gave off an unsettling authority that glinted with danger and chilled me to the bone as he slid into the seat where Miu had so recently been.

  From there, he fixed his eyes on me, his gaze that of a vicious, predatory animal.

  I couldn’t move, as if his eyes had pinned me to the spot. I couldn’t so much as close my eyes or break his gaze.

  “That’d be a problem for me. There’s someone who’s gonna get hurt if you don’t write. Someone who’s gonna be disappointed. Are you gonna turn your back on a reader like that, Konoha? Miu Inoue wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Tohko Amano. You’re Tohko Amano’s author an’ everythin’.”

  “What do you mean, Miu Inoue wouldn’t exist?”

  There was a lump in my throat that made it hard to talk.

  The corners of Ryuto’s mouth hitched up slightly. That made him look even more threatening.

  “Why don’t you ask her yourself? She’s at home right now.”

  He saw my hesitation and murmured, “You should go soon. ’Cos I think she got poisoned, and she’s gonna die soon.”

  Ole Lukøje has a little brother, you know.

  His name is Ole Lukøje, just like his big brother, but he comes to a person only once in their life.

  He wears a silver embroidered coat and a black velvet cape, and he rides a horse. Then he takes you onto his horse and tells you a story.

  He has only two stories. The first is a story more beautiful than any other, that none in the world could imagine. The second is a disturbing story that makes you shudder.

  Every living person taken onto his horse slips into eternal slumber as they listen to one of these stories.

  Kana, which of Ole Lukøje’s two stories is the supreme story you aspire to, I wonder?

  I put the sleeping powder of Ole Lukøje that the little violet bottle held within it into a locked jewelry box. Sometimes I take it out and hold it in the light and gaze at it.

  I stare through the translucent violet glass, entranced by the tenderly rolling silver dust. I press it to my flushed cheek, and the cool sensation heals me.

  As long as I have this vial, I can change my destiny.

  Surely I could even pass through the gates of heaven that tower so high and far away.

  To whom does this heart in my hand now belong?

  To me? To him? To you, Kana?

  When I reached the Sakurai home, I was coated with sweat beneath my jacket and my head was cold and soaked with melted snow.

  Obviously he was lying when he said Tohko had been poisoned and was going to die. But I recalled the Amanos who had died in a car accident and the novel Kanako had written, and a string of anxieties bubbled up in my mind. I thought I was going to give myself indigestion. I couldn’t focus.

  If things were the way Kanako’s debut novel said, the old-fashioned, Japanese-style, one-story house was also the house where her own father had strangled and dismembered her mother, then hung himself beside her.

  I felt as if someone was watching me, and a chill I hadn’t felt when I’d come here before shook my entire body.

  I rang the bell persistently, but there was no answer. The chill seemed to be crawling up my spine, and it continued the entire time I waited.

  Was Tohko not here? If she’d gone out, fine, but—but if by some chance she was dying like Ryuto had said—

  I continued to push the bell, lost in my thoughts.

  She wasn’t coming!

  I threw the sliding front door to one side, and it opened easily since it wasn’t locked.

  “Hello? It’s me, Inoue!”

  I shouted loudly, ignoring manners.

  “I’m coming in!”

  I pulled off my shoes and hurried over the squeaky boards of the hallway. Even though it was the middle of the day, the weather was bad, so it was dim inside and almost painfully cold.

  Just then, I heard something crash over.

  I pulled open a sliding door and headed intently in the direction from which the sound had come. There I found a girl with long braids lying on her face on the floor.

  She was wearing pale violet pajamas! It was Tohko!

  “Tohko! It’s me! Wake up!”

  When I picked her up in my arms, I could feel how shockingly hot her skin was through her thin cotton pajamas.

  Her eyes were squeezed shut, and she looked like she was having trouble breathing. She looked like she could die any second!

  Had she really been poisoned? Had someone fed it to her? What should I do? They say when someone has food poisoning to make them drink lots of water to dilute whatever is in their stomach, but would that work on Tohko? Should I give her medicine? Or call an ambulance or something?

  As I struggled over these questions, Tohko’s eyelashes fluttered and her eyes opened faintly.

  “… Konoha.”

  “You’re awake! What kind of poison did she give you?! What should I do?!”

  I was shouting in her face, but Tohko spoke in a weak voice, breathing painfully.

  “Poison… whaddaya mean…? I just… caught a cold…”

  “A cold?!”

  My eyes popped open.

  “This is just a little cold?!”

  “Nngh. It’s not a little cold, it’s… a huge one.”

  She had deliberately corrected me, and I got fed up.

  “Then why aren’t you asleep in bed, like you should be?! Why are you lying on the floor?!”

  “Because… the bell kept ringing. It wouldn’t stop, so I tried to go to the door, but then my fever made me faint and I tripped on something and I fell over…”

  Since I’d been the one pressing the bell so persistently, ignorant of what was happening, my voice choked off.

  “I… I’m sorry.”

  Normally she would have puffed her chest up importantly and said, “You should have known,” but today she was lying limply against my shoulder.

  “Ack! Tohko!”

  Her body was so hot. I had to put her in bed at least.

  I circled Tohko’s arm around my neck and stood her up, half dragging her along.

  There was a carpet laid out on the woven mat flooring in her room. She had pale violet curtains on the window and a huge number of books on the large bookshelves, and her futon was spread out on top of the carpet. Tohko must have been sleeping there until a few minutes ago. The sheets were tangled up, and the blanket and comforter were thrown to one side.

  I laid Tohko down in her bed and pulled the blankets over her.

  When I put a hand to her forehead, it was burning hot.

  “Do you need medicine, Tohko?”

  “… I took some a couple minutes ago.”

  What kind of medicine? Would it actually help? Doubts crossed my mind one after another, but I decided not to t
hink about it too deeply for now. I had witnessed plenty enough of irrationality when it came to Tohko over the last two years. Even a goat or a parrot would get better with medicine or a vaccine if you took them to the hospital. It was the same thing.

  I went to the bathroom and found a towel and a basin, filled the basin with water, then got ice out of the freezer and made ice water. Then I went back to Tohko’s room.

  I dipped the towel in the basin, wrung it out firmly, then rested it on her forehead. With a different towel, I wiped the sweat from Tohko’s face and neck, trying to keep it from coating her skin again.

  No matter how I daubed at her, the sweat kept coming. And the towel on her forehead warmed up so quickly that I had to change it several times.

  I recalled that when Tohko had returned my scarf to me yesterday morning, my hand had brushed hers. It had been as cold as ice.

  How long had she been standing there?

  In that freezing cold, alone, waiting for me to come.

  Could that be the reason she’d gotten sick?

  A long time ago, when I was still a first-year, Tohko had caught a cold and missed a couple days of school.

  It was right around the beginning of the third term, I think.

  Tohko had been acting strange a little before it happened. Not that she had swooned from a fever or anything, but the way she talked and acted toward me…

  She would look away suddenly, or her face would turn bright red, or she would throw a childish temper tantrum saying, “Don’t come any closer! Don’t come near me!” and start acting standoffish.

  “Did I do something wrong?”

  “Just don’t! I mean…”

  Never giving a concrete explanation, she would drag her chair a distance away, as if to keep an eye on me. But really, the room was so cramped that distance wasn’t worth much.

  “Would you rather I stopped coming?”

  “Y-you can’t do that!”

  “Then what should I do?”

  “This is all your fault.”

  “What is?”

  “No!”

  Last of all, her face would crumple, and she’d look like she was about to cry. She would spin around on her fold-up chair to turn her back on me and hug her knees to her chest.