by Eto Mori
“Just one last thing.”
“What the fuck do you want?”
“Really?”
“What?”
“Could it really have been a monkey?”
His pencil stopped. The sloping shoulders that so resembled Makoto’s, the whorl of hair in the same position on the back of his head as Makoto’s, all of it stopped moving for a moment.
“Think for two seconds, idiot!” Mitsuru whirled around, his chair creaking, and the look on his face was so scary that I unconsciously shrank back.
“Think,” he said again, glaring at me like he was trying to dig a hole in my head with his eyes. “The little brother who’s been with me ever since I can remember, the weak, ugly, stupid, cowardly, deviant braggart who can’t make friends so he follows me around everywhere I go, who needs to be rescued constantly, the kid I can’t take my eyes off of, who I literally haven’t been able to take my eyes off for fourteen years. For fourteen years. One morning, this kid, one totally normal and regular morning, he’s suddenly dying right there in his bed. And he did it to himself. He made himself die. Think about what that would feel like!”
Once he’d said his piece, he lowered his voice abruptly and muttered, “The end,” before turning back to his desk. He didn’t look at me again, and the mechanical pencil racing across the pages of his workbook didn’t stop again, either.
I stood there for a while like a batter who’s struck out, until finally, at last, I turned on my heel and trudged back to my room.
I couldn’t get to sleep that night.
The father’s story. Mitsuru’s story. There were more and more things I couldn’t take back, things I couldn’t undo, and suddenly, I felt so guilty about lying to my host family. It all tormented me. This day, today, the burden I was supposed to carry on Makoto’s behalf was just too much. I was filled with such regret I could hardly stand it. The real Makoto should’ve heard the father’s story today. I wanted the dead Makoto to hear Mitsuru’s words.
I pressed my face into his pillow, and while I lay there wrapped in this regret that only I could understand, the inside of my nose twitched, and I felt something warm on my cheek.
It was then that a familiar voice came down from the ceiling. “Are you crying?”
Prapura. For the first time in ages. But right now, I just wanted him to leave me alone.
“It’s not me,” I said, muffled by the blankets. “These are Makoto’s tears.”
12
The idea of the Kobayashi family I’d had in my head gradually began to change color. It wasn’t some simple change, like things that I thought were black were actually white. It was more like when I looked closely, things I thought were a single, uniform color were really made up of a bunch of different colors. That’s maybe the best way to describe it.
Where there was black, there was also white.
Red and blue and yellow.
Bright colors, dark colors.
Beautiful ones and plain ones.
Depending on how you looked at it, you could see pretty much every color in there.
After we took our little trip to the river, I stopped avoiding the father. We had never been particularly close, so it wasn’t like we were suddenly talking to each other nonstop. But we did manage to have the normal sort of conversation when our paths crossed. Mitsuru and I still fought all the time—no change there—but the way he talked to me so condescendingly didn’t make me angry the way it used to. And when I thought about it, our fights were actually a pretty good way of blowing off some steam.
I was steadily finding my place in my host family, step by step. But my almost physical disgust with the mother’s infidelity remained in my heart, an obstacle I just couldn’t seem to clear.
I mean, everyone makes mistakes. After all, I’m only here myself because of a mistake in my past life. Getting all hung up what’s already over and done is just stupid, to be honest.
I knew all that in my head, but I always got tense when I was actually face to face with the mother, strained. I felt like the father was honestly a really good guy and pretty gullible to boot, and lying to him was more than just uninspired, it was plain mean. And after swinging and missing with her infamous letter, the mom seemed like she had no other cards to play, so she quietly watched over me from a distance.
But the really annoying thing was while I was tied up with these feelings, I actually needed to talk to her about something sooner rather than later: the high school entrance exams.
The day of the exams was closing in, and yet we still hadn’t made a final decision about my school of choice. I kept insisting that I was only going to sit for the public school exam, and Makoto’s parents kept pushing private school exams as a fallback plan. Mitsuru jumped in with his whole plan to get a scholarship to go to medical school so I should just apply for a single private school and not stress about the whole endeavor. We were never going to settle the matter like this.
I guess it was no wonder that everyone was worried, given my grades, and no one would want to have a kid doing a high school gap year in their family. But from my perspective, it was ludicrous to pay such a huge sum of money for a private school that I was only going to go to for five months.
The situation was just too complicated, and I’d been refusing to discuss this with the parents, but it was getting to the point where I was really going to have to just suck it up and talk to them.
Teacher, parents, student. The day was approaching when this dreadful combination was going to have to sit down and agree on the schools I was going to try for.
“Err, it’s a bit late, but I’ve figured out the schedule for the parent-teacher conferences next week. Laugh, cry, whatever you want, but this is the last one of your junior high careers. So make sure your parents come.”
Sawada announced the schedule during last homeroom on December 14, a Monday with the term-end exams in three days and winter break in ten.
“Each student gets fifteen minutes of interview time. Whether that’s long or short depends on you yourselves. I put together the schedule using your student numbers, basically, but we have three days for this, so let me know if the time’s bad for your parents. Okay, I’ll call you up one by one now, so come and get your time slot.”
He looked around the classroom as he read out names in a loud voice.
The printout I got just had “Day Two, 5:30 to 5:45” scrawled on it in Sawada’s handwriting. It was sure to be a tough fifteen minutes, but, well, whatever. What concerned me more were Sawada’s strange words when he handed me the paper.
“Well, I’ve already talked plenty with your mom, though, Kobayashi.”
That was pretty much exactly what he said, one corner of his mouth turning up in a smile. And then he saw the baffled look I gave him and quickly changed the subject.
“Oh. Reminds me. Got a message for you from Mr. Amano.”
“Mr. Amano?” I frowned.
Sawada shrugged. “Said to show your face after school. He’s got something for you.”
“Okay.” I cocked my head to one side, wondering what the something could have been.
Mr. Amano was the art club advisor, a quiet old guy who preferred to communicate with his brushes and storyboards rather than his mouth. But the advice he occasionally gave was spot on, and I secretly trusted him. I hadn’t seen him since I stopped going to art club, though. What could he possibly have had to give me?
Puzzled, I stopped in at the prep room next to art club after school. Mr. Amano was basically always there. But that day, I knocked and knocked and still I got no answer. I couldn’t hear anything inside, either. He’s probably in the teachers’ room, then . . .
I gave up and turned around. But I just couldn’t. I didn’t want to leave. I turned around again. I came full circle. My toes were once again pointed in the direction of the art room.
The scent of oil paints tickling my nose made me itchy. Like a man possessed, I passed the prep room and stood in front of the old famili
ar art room. I couldn’t see any hint of a club member in the gloom beyond the frosted glass. Now that I was thinking about it, the school expressly prohibited students from attending club or sports practice in the period before exams. My heart suddenly got a whole lot lighter, and I opened the door to the art room in high spirits.
The moment I entered, I saw a strange sight in the supposedly empty room. I gasped in surprise.
The thick curtains kept the brick-red sunlight from shining in. A single easel, just one wooden easel, stood in the center of this deserted, cold room. There was a canvas sitting on it. As soon as I saw its blue surface, I knew it was my painting, the painting Makoto had started and I’d inherited. I was planning to take my time to finish it once the high school entrance exams were over.
A small silhouette stood motionless in front of it. A dark malice radiated from the silhouette, a tube of oil paint gripped in its right hand.
A tube without a cap, glistening inky black peeking out over the tip. The hand that held it slowly reached toward the canvas as if preparing to destroy this painting of ours with that black ink, and the face I could see in profile . . .
“Hiroka?” I called to her. It can’t be.
The silhouette twitched and looked back at me.
It was Hiroka. Tube of paint still aimed squarely at the canvas, she looked at me, her eyes filled with a faint hatred.
“Why . . .”
Why would you do this to my painting?
I wanted to ask, but I couldn’t actually speak. Her eyes were just so grim that I felt so incredibly sad.
In the evening gloom that blanketed the art room, Hiroka was scared. In that moment, she was actually scared of her own self, radiating animosity and anger, toward what she didn’t even know.
“It’s okay.” I was speaking before I even knew what I was going to say. “You can have the painting, Hiroka. You can do whatever you want with it.”
In that moment, the seductive creature that had so bewitched me suddenly transformed into a little girl who was more fragile than anything else.
Hiroka dropped her eyes, all the fight running out of her. And then, without any warning, large tears were spilling out of those eyes. A glob of paint fell from the tube she clutched tightly and landed on the floor with a splat.
“It’s weird. I’m weird. I’m losing my mind.” She set the tube of paint on the easel and began crying, like a switch had been flipped. “I love beautiful things, I really do. But sometimes I just want to destroy them. I’m weird. I’m so weird.”
I walked over to her and put my hands on her shaking shoulders. “That kind of stuff happens. It’s not just you, Hiroka.”
“I’m all messed up. My head’s not on straight. I’m out of my mind. Everyone says so.” She pressed her tearful face up against my chest.
“Everyone’s messed up,” I said, the truth I’d been through these last few months. “In this world, in the afterlife, whether you’re a person or an angel or whoever, that’s the norm. We’re all normal and messed up.”
“It’s not just me?”
“It’s not just you.”
“It’s not just me who gets mean?”
“It’s not just you.”
“It’s not just me who wants to hurt someone?”
“It’s not just you.”
“There’s this very nice Hiroka and then this very cruel Hiroka.”
“Everyone’s like that,” I told her. “Everyone’s got their own box of paints, and some of the colors are pretty and some are ugly.”
Your bright colors always lit up Makoto’s dark days, you know. It’s too bad I wasn’t able to tell her that.
Without realizing it, we’re constantly saving someone and hurting someone else.
This world of ours is just so colorful that we can never decide on the right one, we never know which colors are real, which colors are our own.
“I want to have sex every three days, but then once a week, I want to join a convent. I want to buy new clothes once every ten days, an’ I want new jewelry once every twenty days. I want to eat Kobe beef every day, an’ I want to live a long time, but every other day I wish I could die. Am I really not messed up?” she asked, anxiously.
“Totally normal. Almost too ordinary,” I said firmly, and added in a small voice, “But you should quit with the dying part.”
Hiroka cried herself out—or at least that’s what it seemed like to me—and was suddenly back to her usual baby-voiced self. She said something about how she was going to be late for a date and was about to leave the art room, but then stopped and turned around again.
“I can’t take your painting. I just know I’ll trash it one of these days. But you better finish it, every last bit of it. And then you have to take very good care of it forever, pinky promise?” she said with a smile, and then this time, she did leave.
She was a dizzyingly kaleidoscopic girl, so many colors in her, crying, laughing, suffering, tormenting. My interest in her only grew, not as a girl, but as this mysterious creature, and I felt a pang of regret that I only had this limited amount of time to watch over her.
I finally made it to the teachers’ room after this lengthy detour and found Mr. Amano there.
“Oh, Kobayashi. Took you long enough,” he said, his voice husky as ever, and held a large manila envelope out at me. “Here. What your mother asked me for.”
Huh?
“I was going to ask Mr. Sawada to give it to you at the parent-teacher conference, but, well, I figured the sooner, the better with this sort of thing.”
This sort of thing?
I accepted the envelope, with absolutely no clue to this “thing” he was talking about. It was thin and flopped over when I held it in one hand.
“I suppose you’re having a tough go of it right now with all the studying, but once the entrance exams are over, come see us again. It just doesn’t feel like art club when you’re not there,” he said, lowering his eyes, sheepishly.
I nodded, feeling sheepish myself, said my thanks, and left the teachers’ room. I headed back to class on quick feet and opened the envelope the second I was back at my desk.
The “thing” that was inside was not a thing I ever expected to find.
13
When I came downstairs that night for supper with the envelope in question in one hand, the whole family was already sitting at the dining table, a rare evening when everyone was home. Father. Mother. Mitsuru. There was an unusual note of tension in each of their faces. They all turned as one to look at me.
“We have something serious to talk to you about, Makoto,” the mother said, as if speaking for all of them.
“Yeah, I wanted to talk to you, too.” I slowly held out the envelope. “This is from the art club advisor.”
The expression on her face changed. The father and Mitsuru exchanged a meaningful look. So then, everyone besides me did know.
I handed the envelope to the mother and sat down next to Mitsuru. The smell of the cabbage rolls steaming before me on the table wafted up into my nose. They were gradually getting cold, and yet no one so much as picked up their chopsticks.
“I’m sorry if we crossed a line with this one.” It was the mother who broke the silence. “Your dad and I are going to leave the decision about high school up to you, Makoto. We just thought that before you make up your mind, you should know this is also an option you have. Of course, we want you to find a school where you can pass the exam, but we’ve also been wondering if there isn’t a school you’d actually enjoy going to once you got in.”
“I know,” I said. “I get that much at least.” The moment I opened the envelope, I knew she had only the best of intentions.
The few pages inside the envelope were copies of articles and documents about a particular high school. I’d heard of the place, too—an alternative school with special courses for art and music that used a credit selection system for the regular academic subjects. I’d greedily devoured the information on those pages and
learned that I could choose a maximum of sixteen hours of art lessons a week if I went into the art program.
Of course, the school facilities were also something out of a dream. The art room in the photos was as big as a football field, and plaster busts for sketching were jammed in toward the back, like a herd of goats. The teachers were all famous, too, poached away from art universities, or else people who had taught in places like Paris and New York. On top of that, once a week, they invited practicing artists to speak in the lecture hall. They had really considered every last detail. A high percentage of their students went on to prestigious art schools or liberal arts universities, and as a result, the entrance and tuition fees were appropriately and absurdly high.
“It was Mitsuru who told us about this high school. We thought you might be happy if you could go to this kind of school.”
I met Mitsuru’s eyes, and he turned away silently.
“I had no idea about any of this,” the mother confessed. “But from what I’ve heard, I feel like it would be just perfect for you, Makoto. So I gave Mr. Sawada a call.”
Sawada had apparently explained to her that while the school itself was very competitive, its national academic T-score was not so high as all that. And for students applying to the art program, there was a practical exam in addition to the academic exam. This practical exam was considered the more important of the two, so Sawada said that I actually had a chance of getting in.
“And so then, the day before yesterday, your mom went out there and took a tour of the school,” the father interjected, and the mother looked down, bashful.
“It’s out on the outskirts of the city, but it is still in Tokyo,” she said. “I wanted to check if it would even be possible for you to commute from our house. I didn’t want to give you false hope, Makoto. And it was a little far, but not so far that you couldn’t commute. It’s about an hour by bus and train. And then you have to walk a little from the station to the school, but the area’s so quiet and green. Just lovely.”
The mother stood up and left for a moment before coming back with the thick school brochure in one hand and offering it to me. A gorgeous booklet, filled with colorful photographs. The cover showed the modern, silver-gray school.