by Kei Oishi
Why are you naked?
Who shut you in the closet?
How long were you in there?
When did your mom and dad leave?
When are they coming back?
She had tons of questions she wanted to ask the boy. But, she didn’t ask them. He likely had a very good reason for not wanting to talk about it.
Just great…
As Rika muttered to herself, the boy with the cat suddenly thrust what looked like a brown folder out to her.
“What’s that?”
Rika instinctively took the brown folder that was handed to her. It was an old raggedy scrapbook. It looked like it had been opened
and closed countless times. The corners were all rounded and the cover was dirty with oil from someone’s hands.
“Can I look at this?”
When the boy, still holding his kitten, nodded silently, Rika began flipping through the pages of the scrapbook.
It appeared to be a woman’s diary, started during the spring fourteen long years ago.
Rika ran her eyes over the sloppy handwriting on the page.
“… Today in the crowded train, my hand brushed Kobayashi-kun’s hand. His hand was warm, and slightly sweaty. He didn’t notice, but I was happy all day, just remembering the warmth of his hand … My gaze locked with that of Kobayashi-kun from across the classroom today. That was all that happened, but my heart pounded in my chest and I couldn’t think of anything … Manami Midorikawa came into class late and although there were many empty seats, she sat right next to Kobayashi-kun. Then she said she forgot her textbook, and was looking at Kobayashi-kun’s text… Today after class, Manami Midorikawa asked Kobayashi-kun out to the coffee shop. He said that he had to go to work and declined her offer, but I was surprised at Manami Midorikawa’s aggressiveness. No doubt about it. She likes Kobayashi-kun too, just like me … “
As she read the journal, Rika remembered that she herself had the same experience. At the same time, she recalled Yuji Toyoshima’s face for the first time in a while.
I wonder what Toyoshima-kun is up to these days? Has he already found a job?
Yes. Until not too long ago, Rika had a crush on a boy named Yuji Toyoshima, a member of the same club in college, much like the woman in that scrapbook.
In those days, she could only think about Yuji Toyoshima twenty-four hours a day. She liked him so much she couldn’t stand it. She felt happy just to be in the same classroom with him. Although they were in different faculties, Rika attended all of the same classes she could with him. She talked to him a little bit on a couple of occasions. They even went to the coffee shop, just the two of them, once. Even though she did not believe in any god, she prayed every night before she went to sleep.
“Please God, let me go out with Toyoshima-kun. Please, let me marry Toyoshima-kun some day. Please, God, please.”
But, Rika’s feelings toward Yuji Toyoshima did not reach him. Before Rika could profess her love for him, he began dating another, younger girl from the same club. Rika would never forget the terrible shock she felt then. She didn’t go to class for two weeks, and locked herself in her room, crying.
“Hey, Toshio-kun, whose diary is this?” she asked the boy, still slouched down on the floor holding his cat. But he did not answer.
She did not make a habit out of reading other people’s diaries, but she could not control the overwhelming desire to continue reading.
Rika looked back to the scrapbook. There, in the scrapbook, were several photos of a tall, thin young man who was presumably Kobayashi. Next to each of these were a photo o{ a young woman. Her hair was long, and she looked shy and a bit on the dark side. In all oi the photos she was wearing white.
Rika recognized this woman from somewhere. She was sure of it.
Ah.
Rika looked up. Yes, it was the same woman in that family photo she found in the kitchen. If that was true, then she was most likely Toshio’s mother. But, these pictures of Kobayashi-kun were clearly
not the same man in that family photo.
“Hey Toshio-kun, isn’t this your mother’s diary? Won’t she get mad at you for letting other people read it?” Rika asked the boy. But again, he did not answer. He just stared at Rika as if to order her to keep reading.
Rika returned her gaze to the scrapbook.
“… I finally got my hands on a key to Kobayashi-kun’s apartment. It was on the floor under the chair he was sitting in. After looking around, I picked it up and put it in my bag … Today, I used the key and snuck into Kobayashi-kun’s apartment for the first time … I opened the shoe box at the entrance. Inside were female shoes, pumps and boots. They were likely Manami Midorikawa’s shoes … I snuck into Kobayashi-kun’s apartment again and slept on his bed for the first time. I was so happy, surrounded by his smell. I was happier than I ever remembered being … I was waiting under Kobayashi-kun’s bed as usual, when he came home with Manami Midorikawa. They did not notice me under the bed, and they made love above me … I lay back on Kobayashi-kun’s bed and masturbated for the very first time in my life, for hours on end, fantasizing about Kobayashi-kun’s nakedness on top of my own nude body … I masturbated in Kobayashi-kun’s bed again today. I lost all track of time … I lay back naked on Kobayashi-kun’s bed again today. It was light outside when I began, but when I came to my senses, night had already fallen … I imagined being taken savagely by Kobayashi-kun … I massaged my own breasts and my vagina gently … Kobayashi-kun forced his thing into my mouth … Kobayashi-kun groped my breasts while thrusting deep from behind … I gargled the liquid that Kobayashi-kun shot into my mouth in the back o( my throat…”
Crazy … This woman is crazy, thought Rika. Clearly, even though she herself had been in love with Toyoshima-kun, she never did anything as crazy as this. She had never even imagined it.
Rika closed the scrapbook. Now was not the time to be reading other people’s erotic fantasies. She remembered she’d left the old lady downstairs.
“Toshio-kun, I’m going downstairs to check on the lady there. Is she your grandma?”
Again, silence from the boy. He just kept staring at Rika with his blank eyes opened wide.
Rika was about to hand the scrapbook back to the boy when she got the urge to check the most recent entry. She felt compelled to do so.
“… Today, a girl named Rika Nishina, a college student studying social care, came to my house …”
“Huh?”
Rika’s muscles all went tense.
Why is my name written in this diary?
“… Today, a girl named Rika Nishina, a college student studying social care, came to my house. I had planned to kill Rika Nishina, as I have all the others, but then thought of something, and decided not to kill her yet. Just killing her is no fun. Instead of killing her, I will live inside of her body … .”
How does she know about my lost love?
Instinctively, Rika looked at the date of the entry.
Today.
Her mind went blank for an instant. Then her body started shuddering.
Why? Why? Why? Why?
She dropped the scrapbook to her feet. The boy sitting at her feet looked up at her, and smiled, his face contorting terribly. The cat in the boy’s arms cried.
Meeoowl
Why? Why? Why? Why?
Rika had trouble breathing. Panting, Rika backed away. Like a sleepwalker, she headed down the stairs, toward the front door.
[You cant be herel]
[Get out of this house now!]
[Get out now!]
[Now!]
[Now!]
[Now!]
[Now!]
Rika’s defensive instincts were screaming at her again.
She didn’t know what was going on. The only thing she knew was that she could not stay in this house.
She reached the entrance and put on her shoes. She reached for the doorknob, when—
“Aaaah…uughhh!”
She heard the old woman
moan from behind her.
She wanted to ignore it, just forget about it and get out of this house now. But she couldn’t.
Turning on her heels, she took off the shoes she had just put on, and ran down the hall, not thinking about anything. She burst into the Japanese room where the old woman was.
The old woman was lying on her back on the futon, her eyes open wide, staring upward.
“Sachie-san! Sachie-san,” screamed Rika, as she shook the old woman’s shoulders. “Wake up! Sachie-san! Sachie-san!”
The woman’s body was still warm. But, she was already dead. Rika had never touched a dead body before in her life, but she knew that Sachie was no longer alive.
Terror ran through Rika’s body.
[Getoutl]
[Get out I]
[Getoutl]
[Getoutl]
Her instincts were still screaming at her.
She stood up to flee, when she felt someone tap her shoulder from behind.
“Ah.”
She knew she should not turn around. She knew that it was there, waiting for her to turn around.
“Ahhh,” Rika’s voice spilled wordlessly from her mouth, as she froze in place. She felt another tap on her shoulder.
Rika turned around. She saw it, standing there. Rika fainted on the spot, without a sound.
Hitomi
Hitomi Tokunaga locked her door and fastened the chain. Turning on the light with the switch near the door, she walked over to her refrigerator in the kitchen, took out a bottle of mineral water, and drank it.
Calming her breath, she placed her Louis Vuitton purse on the table. She noticed the silver-colored chain, which her little teddy bear had been attached to. In that instant, an image of that long-haired woman in white on every floor flashed in Hitomi Tokunaga’s
mind. Frantically, she shook her head side to side, as if to shake the image from her mind.
Come on, Hitomi. It was a hallucination. Something like that isnt even possible. You were seeing things, that’s all
She wiped the lipstick from the mouth of the bottle of water with a tissue before returning it to the refrigerator. Just then, the phone on the kitchen table rang. After hesitating for a second, she reached for the phone. She whispered, “Yes?” into the phone.
“Hello, Hitomi-san? It’s me, Kazumi,” her brother’s wife said.
“Oh, Kazumi-san,” Hitomi said, sounding relieved. Her muscles relaxed, and she felt tears well up in her eyes.
Tm in front of your apartment building now. Can I come up?”
“Of course. Please hurry, Kazumi’san!”
“Urn, what was your room number again?”
“1002, on the tenth floor. Kazumi-san, please hurry!”
“1002, right? I’ll be right there.”
Hitomi’s sister-in-law laughed as if something was funny.
Kazumi had been to Hitomi’s apartment numerous times, but it was the first time she’d ever asked which room it was. But… Hitomi, in her panicked state, did not notice this.
Finally, the doorbell rang.
Ding dong.
Hitomi ran over to the door, the cordless phone still in her hand. Out of habit, she looked through the peephole in the door. She saw her sister-in-law on the other side of the door, made-up and smiling.
Unlocking the door and unfastening the chain, she threw the door open, crying out, “Kazumi-san!”
But… no one was there.
Huh? Why? Why?
The blood drained from her face and all strength drained from her body. Just then, she heard something from the cordless phone still in her hand. She brought the phone to her ear.
What she heard, coming from the earpiece, was that sound, that terrible, croaking voice.
Hitomi threw the phone out the door into the hallway. She shut the door, locked it, and fastened the door chain. She ran through the short hallway and small kitchen, and ran into the room she used as a living room and bedroom. She looked around the room before unplugging the phone next to the head of her bed. She jumped into the bed and pulled the covers up over her head, leaving all the lights in the apartment on.
It was quiet. The only sound was the sound of her own panting. She could not stand the silence, so she carefully reached her arm out of the bed to grab the remote control on the sideboard. She turned on the television. A female news reporter came onto the screen.
The report was about some crime. The woman, in her short, bright skirt-suit, was holding the microphone with her manicured fingers, a serious look on her heavily made-up face as she reported the details.
“… The scene ended on the worst possible note, as the suspect took the life of the eight-year-old girl he was holding hostage. Why couldn’t the police have acted sooner? We expect the police’s reaction to this case to come under close scrutiny …”
The content of the report didn’t matter at all to Hitomi. She only wanted to hear someone’s voice. She popped her head out
from under the covers, like a turtle, and turned her attention to the TV screen.
Hitomi, calm down, she told herself. Just then—
The image on the TV began to distort. The sounds became hard to hear, and a static noise came through the speaker. The reporter’s heavily made-up, serious face began to stretch sideways.
“… The father of Yumika Tamura, the little girl who was killed …SSKKKK SSSKKKK … had no comment… SSKKKK SSSKKKK…”
The static noises persisted as the picture continued distorting. Finally, both the static and the reporter’s voice were gone, replaced with that voice, that awful croak.
Hitomi screamed and frantically pressed the power button on the remote control, trying to turn the TV off. But the TV would not turn off. The reporter’s face filled the screen, first stretching left and right, and finally stopping, stretched terribly on the diagonal, like Munch’s The Scream.
That voice continued to emanate from the TV for a few more seconds, then suddenly the TV went off.
“Iyaa!Iyaaa!”
Hitomi screamed as she buried her head under the covers. Her arm brushed something.
She picked the object up, and slowly brought it into view. It was her little teddy bear, the one she had attached to her purse. The one she left on the floor of the restroom at the office …
Why …? Why is this here?
“Aaah, Iyaa!”
Hitomi threw the bear to the floor and pulled the blankets back over her head. She trembled uncontrollably in the dark.
She began remembering things from her past, for no particular reason: her first day of preschool that her mother Sachie took her to; her preschool graduation and first day of elementary school; the family camping trip on a beach in Niigata, and her brother Katsuya swimming in the ocean; a boy that she used to like, named Yoshida-kun; her first time stepping on the balance beam at gymnastics class; the time she embraced one of her seniors, Sayama, in an empty room, but getting scared and running from the room before anything else happened; getting accepted at the high school she really wanted to go to, and the rice with sweet red soybeans that her mother cooked for her that day; starting to learn rhythmic sportive gymnastics in high school, and dropping the ball in the team qualifiers for the inter-high school champion-ships; being told by her classmate Ishida-kun that he liked her and starting to date him; losing her virginity to him at his house; being scared that her period was two weeks late; being accepted at a college in Tokyo, and her high school graduation; her mother seeing her off at the train station; her first apartment in Tokyo, life at college, school events, drinking parties and club activities; her boyfriend at the time, Atsushi Sugita; frantically looking for a job to stay in Tokyo after graduation; busy days at the office; breaking up with Atsushi Sugita because he slept with another girl; her father’s death and her mother’s dementia; her brother’s face a few days
ago …
It was perhaps only one or two minutes, but these memories flooded Hitomi’s mind one after the other.
And then … Hitomi knew.
Ym going to die … Katsuya and Mom are probably already dead.
Tears flowed unbidden from her eyes.
Just then, something crawled on top of her bed.
CHAPTER SIX
One day, a man decided to get rid of his cat. He had the cat for several years, and he and his wife loved the cat as if it were their own child. However, his wife became pregnant and when their child was born, their love for the cat suddenly disappeared.
The man put the cat into a cage and walked to a park not far from his home. There were many other cats in the park, and cat lovers nearby always fed them, so he was sure his cat would not starve to death.
u Take care,” the man said, as he took the cat out of the cage and left it beside a bench.
The man walked back home, but when he arrived, the cat that he had just left in the park was there in his living room. The cat had come back home before the man did.
The mans wife, holding their baby, laughed.
“You left him too close to home, ” she said.
The next day, the man put the cat into the cage again, and this time, he strapped the cage to his bicycle and left home again. He pedaled for half an hour, before coming to a river that was much further from his home than the park, and left the cat on the riverbank: He believed that the cat would not be able to walk back home from this far away.
The man pedaled the half hour back home. But when he got there, the cat was in the living room, relaxing, just like the previous day.
“He just arrived. It’s creepy how he got back here quicker than you on your bicycle,” said his wife, this time looking distraught as she was nursing the baby.
“Damn it. What a persistent cat.”
The man ground his teeth as he stared at the cat in hatred.
The next day, the man put the cat back in the cage, and told his wife he would get rid of the cat somewhere where the animal would never find its way back home, and climbed into his car.
To this day, no one knows where the man headed to get rid of his cat.