by Kei Oishi
“Iyaa, iyaaa!”
Kyoko’s body tumbled down the steep staircase, with a crash.
First she felt the pain in her lower back, then the middle of her spine, then the back of her head, and finally, darkness.
“Hey, wake up! I said wake up, damn it!”
Kyoko awoke to the sound of a man s voice and the sensation that her hair was being pulled. She opened her eyes and saw before her a man whom she only knew from photographs.
Her entire body was sore, and her head throbbed. Kyoko tried to bring her hands to her aching head, but couldn’t move them. She realized that her hands had been tied behind her back. The taste of blood filled her mouth.
She looked around frantically.
Kyoko noticed that she was now wearing a white, sleeveless dress. The once-white dress was stained black-red with blood from the chest to the stomach. The knee-length hem of her dress was hiked up around her upper thighs, and her right knee was skinned and bloodied. Her left leg was twisted at an unnatural angle, and her shiny stockings were torn. The liquid that ran into her eyes and stung them was most likely her own blood.
Where am I?! Who are you?!
She tried to scream out, but her voice wouldn’t work.
Kyoko, completely confused, looked around once more. Her rear end was flat on the floor with her upper body leaning on the bed behind her. Her hands seemed to be twisted and tied with a rope or something to one of the legs of the bed. She pulled with all her might, but only succeeded in dragging the heavy bed on the floor.
“So, Kayako, are you going to tell me?” said the man, still standing in front of her and staring into her eyes.
Kayako?
Kyoko looked around the room again. But, the only ones in the room were herself and the man. If that was the case—
Me? Vm Kayako?
“Tell me whose kid Toshio is,” said the man, his voice menacing. “I’m asking who Toshio’s father is, you bitch!”
The mans right hand slapped Kyoko’s face, hard.
Her face was turned completely to the side from the force of the blow, and the blood that had been flowing down her forehead spattered. Next, the man’s right fist smashed into her left eye. She heard a sickening crunch as her bones were mashed, and things went black, but mercy was not on her side. Kyoko didn’t pass out. Her face was slapped from both sides again, and Kyoko opened her dull eyes.
“How long did you think you could keep this hidden from me?!”
The man kept yelling. Kyoko realized that this balding man was Kayako’s husband, Takeo Saeki.
Yes. This is Takeo Saeki. That day, Takeo had tied Kayako to the bed and tortured her before finally killing her.
Kyoko’s body writhed in fear. The heavy bed, to which her hands were tied, dragged on the floor again.
Stop it! Vm not Kayako! Dont kill me!
The man growled as his right fist dug into her abdomen.
Kyoko felt the blow all the way through to her spine, and her slender body bent in half. In addition to the great suffering, she also tasted her bitter stomach bile in her mouth.
“Do you really think Fm that stupid?! Kayako, Toshio’s real father is that Kobayashi guy, isn’t he! Isn’t he!”
The man’s shouts reverberated from above her head. At the same time, a woman’s voice echoed in her head.
It was Kayako’s voice.
Kyoko opened her eyes. Everything was blurry from her tears.
<1 suffered like this ever since 1 was born. I was ignored by everyone, forgotten, told I was not needed … I lived like the bugs underneath a rock … Know! Know my pain! >
“You had me going for years, there,” she heard the man’s voice again. “Shit. I was so stupid!”
This time, the man’s right fist cracked across Kyoko’s jaw. She bit her tongue, and blood flowed into her mouth. She felt her consciousness slipping again.
Takeo grabbed a handful of Kyoko’s hair and forced her to face him. He picked up the box cutter that was lying on the floor, and clicked the blade out.
“Kayako! Tell me the truth! Whose kid is Toshio … ?1f you tell me the truth, I won’t kill you. What’s it going to be?” His voice was eerily quiet. “Come on, tell me. Toshio’s the child you had with that Kobayashi guy, isn’t he?”
Don’t kill me! Ym not Kayako! Don’t kill me! Stop!
In the next instant, Kyoko saw the box cutter in the man’s hand descending on her. Then, fresh blood spurted. In that instant, she heard Kayako’s voice again.
Kayako’s voice echoed in her head. But Kyoko could not open her eyes. She had trouble breathing. She felt her life seeping out of her body along with her blood.
She still heard Kayako’s voice.
Kyoko exhaled weakly. But she never inhaled again.
The next day, the bodies of Kyoko Toyama and Daisuke Igarashi were found in the attic of the Tokunaga house. Kyoko Toyama’s body was sliced up by what appeared to be a box cutter. Daisuke Igarashi was stabbed through the back with a knife, so deeply that the tip of the blade was sticking out through his stomach.
Strangely enough, the closet doors were sealed with tape, but no fingerprints were found on that tape.
What the hell happened here?
Gasoline had been poured out all over the first floor. Kyoko Toyama’s footprints on the stairs were also wet with gasoline.
The weapon that killed Kyoko Toyama was never recovered. But the fingerprints on the handle of the knife stuck into Daisuke Igarashi’s body matched those of a woman who’d been killed five years before— Kayako Saeki.
Two days later, Kenichi Nakagawa resigned from the police force. The reason for his resignation: “Personal.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Do you remember the story of the doctor who had measured the decrease in weight of dying patients in order to figure out the mass of the human soul?
Just as many doctors test new treatments on animals before using them on humans, so too did this doctor perform his experiments on rats and rabbits, and sometimes dogs and cats, before he tried them on human subjects.
Of course, he did not wait for these animals to die of natural causes. He killed them by injecting a potent poison into their bodies.
He carried out nearly fifty of his animal experiments. However, he did not get the results he had expected. He came to the conclusion that animals do not have souls like humans, or that their souls were so small that his equipment could not effectively measure the weight loss.
The doctor concluded that he needed to use humans, and he commenced his experiments. His first subject was an old woman, eighty years of age, with no living relatives.
Given a bleak outlook for her survival, the old woman was laid on the bed with the doctor s special scale. The doctor instructed his assistant and nurses that they were in no way to try and extend the woman’s life.
The doctor predicted that the woman had one day, or two at the most, before she would pass away. But three days, four days, a week passed, but she did not die. On the contrary, she seemed to be getting better a little bit at a time.
The doctor, irritated, wondered how long she planned on living.
The next morning, when the doctor’s assistant reported for work, the doctor greeted him with a smile on his face, telling his assistant that his prediction was correct, that the old lady’s body weight dropped at the exact moment of her death.
It seemed that the old w
oman, who had appeared to be making a recovery, passed away late in the night, after the nurses and the assistant had gone home. The only one in the office at the time was the doctor, who had not left the woman s side.
If she was making a recovery, why did she die suddenly in the night? the assistant thought, suspicious. Upon checking the office, he noticed that one of the bottles of poison had less inside it than the day before.
The assistant, incredulous, felt his hair stand on end.
The experiments in measuring the decrease in body weight at the moment of death continued. However, most of the patients died when the assistant and the nurses were not present. And each time, the poison in the bottle decreased.
The assistant was sure that the doctor was killing them.
But, no one knows whether or not the assistant had told the doctor that he knew what was going on, for several days later, he himself passed away on that special bed.
The cause of death was said to be a heart attack. At the moment of his death, the assistant’s weight dropped by 168 grams. It was a new record for the doctor.
And thus the experiments carried on for several more years.
Rika
It was six o’clock. Rika Nishina awoke to the ringing of her alarm clock. Stifling a yawn, she stretched up toward the ceiling as she got
out of bed. Finishing in the toilet, she headed toward the bathroom, like she did every morning. Taking off her white negligee and white cotton panties, she opened the frosted glass door of the bathroom.
She saw a naked woman reflected in the large mirror.
Huh? Who is that… ?
She shuddered.
The longhaired woman was skinny and pale.
She didn’t have to think about it. The reflection had to be her own.
What am I thinking?
Laughing bitterly at herself, she turned the shower tap.
She lathered the shampoo into her hair. She gently scrubbed and massaged her entire scalp with the soft skin of her fingertips. She remembered how she looked in the mirror.
This morning was not the first time she had experienced that. Recently, she caught sight of her own reflection in train windows, shop windows, or the mirrors of cars parked on the edge of the road, and had wondered momentarily who it was. Looking carefully, she realized it was her, but for an instant, it almost looked like a different person.
That was probably because she had dyed her hair back to black and let it grow long. Maybe she overdid it on her diet, as well. That was probably why her facial color also didn’t look very good these days.
Thinking about this, she continued to wash her hair. Suddenly, her fingertips touched … someone else’s hand.
Eh?
Her body stiffened and she held her breath.
Slowly, she turned around.
But no one was there.
As soon as she finished applying her makeup at her mirror, the phone rang. It was her best friend, Mariko Nakata.
“Oh, hey, Mariko! Good morning! What’s up, calling me this early. Did something come up?”
“Not really. I just wondered if you want to go out to dinner tonight, what with tomorrow being a holiday and all. Or, are you busy tonight?”
“No, I’m free. But what about you? Aren’t you busy yourself?”
“Yeah, I am, day in and day out. But I got some free time tonight, and I don’t have to work tomorrow, so I wanted to get together and talk!”
“Okay! Where do you want to meet?”
“There’s a restaurant I’ve been wanting to try out for a while.”
Mariko, with whom Rika had been friends since high school, had become a teacher at a nearby elementary school this spring. When she called Rika about a month ago, she said that she had been given her own class to be in charge of, and that it was hard work. Although they had kept in touch by phone, it was the first time to get together since graduating from college. Rika was excited.
“What kind of restaurant is it?”
“It’s your favorite, Korean barbecue. Yumie told me it was so good she almost fainted!”
“Korean barbecue?”
“Yeah, that was your favorite, wasn’t it?”
“Urn, actually …”
“What is it? Don’t tell me you’re on a diet, Rika!”
“No … it’s just that recently, I can’t seem to eat meat…”
“No way! Rika the Carnivore can’t eat meat? Really?”
“Sorry, Mariko, I just can’t …”
“Okay, I’ll just find another restaurant.” “Sorry …”
“Don’t worry about it. I just really wanted to see you.” “Okay!”
After hanging up, Rika looked at herself in the mirror. She tried to remember when she’d stopped eating meat.
When Rika opened her door to leave for work, she noticed a dirty, brown scrapbook on the hallway floor.
What’s this? she thought as she picked it up. She flipped through the pages, their corners rounded from use. The brown pages were filled with childlike handwriting, badly drawn illustrations, and small, cut-out photos …
“… In the middle of the night, I suddenly wanted to hear Kobayashi-kun’s voice, and I called his apartment from a nearby pay phone. After his phone rang about five times, he answered, ‘Yes, this is Kobayashi.’ I was elated, and hung up … “
In that instant, the terror she had almost forgotten came crashing back.
“Iyaaa!”
Rika threw the scrapbook down.
Who! Who left this here? she screamed in her mind. That thing that she had buried deep in her mind stuck its head up through the layers of her memory, and she felt her lips tremble.
She could not remember that. She just couldn’t.
Leaving the scrapbook in the hallway, Rika ran out o{ the building toward the train station.
The early summer sun made everything shine brightly. Under that sun, Rika walked slowly, pushing an elderly patient in his wheelchair. Every once in a while she would talk to him.
“Saito-san, I hear you’re about to be a great-grandfather. You must be excited,” she smiled. “Is there anywhere you want me to take you now?”
But, today, the elderly Saito was out of it, not like his usual self. He was talking, almost as if someone was standing beside his wheelchair.
“Hey boy, what’s your name? How old are you? Are you here alone?” His senility was probably getting worse than before.
“Saito-san, who are you talking to?” Rika smiled, as she turned his wheelchair to head back to the care center.
The dry May breeze caressed her freshly blow-dried hair. Her hair, which she had cut short a year ago, had grown quite long in the interim. Although she liked her short hair, she thought that she looked better, more feminine, with long hair. Now, she didn’t even entertain thoughts of getting it cut again.
“Saito-san, why don’t we head back and have some tea?”
Rika, who had graduated from college in March, was hired as a full-time employee of the care center in April. Even so, she had been volunteering at the center for two years, so she didn’t really feel anything different now that she was an official employee. In fact, when the younger volunteers asked her for help, she felt like she needed to learn more about the job.
If only Hirohashi-san were here, she thought as she pushed the wheelchair.
It had been almost a whole year since Hirohashi had been found in the restroom of the center, dead of a heart attack.
He had been so full of life …
Just then, she suddenly remembered the brown scrapbook that she’d found that morning, in front of her apartment door.
Who in the world left that there?
Rika stopped walking and looked up to the clear blue sky. Old memories that she didn’t need threatened to spill out into the open, and she quickly shook her head from side to side. She took a deep breath, and continued pushing the wheelchair.
It had to be a hallucination. What’s happening to me? There was just no way
that scrapbook could have been there, was there?
Her elderly charge was still talking to the imaginary child next to his wheelchair.
“Toshio? Your name is Toshio-kun? What a nice name. Oh, Toshio’kun, I’ve got some good crackers back in my room. Why don’t you stop by later?”
When Rika got back to the entrance of the care center, the clean glass automatic door reflected Rika in her sleeveless white dress and the old man in his wheelchair. And, next to the wheelchair … a little boy, his skin unnaturally pale.
But, Rika did not notice.
“Rika? Is that you?”
Mariko Nakata was ten minutes late. She was dressed in a pink, knitted, tank top, a matching cardigan sweater, and gray pants.
“Mariko! You’re late!”
“Sorry! My meeting ran over,” Mariko said, waving a large, brown envelope. It was probably full of tests she had to grade.
“Rika, something’s …” Mariko looked at her friend oddly, while trying to catch her breath.
“What? Is my makeup strange?”
“No, it’s just…”
“Just what?”
“No, you’ve just changed so much, Rika.”
“Changed?”
“Yeah, you look like a completely different person.”
“Maybe it’s because I grew my hair long and dyed it back to black. I can’t wear much makeup for work, either. Maybe that’s why?”
As she said this, Rika ran her hand through her long hair. Just then, she remembered what had happened that morning in the shower, the sensation she had of touching someone else’s hand, and she shuddered involuntarily.
“It’s not only your hair, but your facial color doesn’t look too good … and your clothes, too.”
“You mean this dress? I’m into white clothes these days.”
“I see … “
Even without Mariko pointing it out, Rika found herself buying only white clothes recently. She didn’t know why … somewhere in the back of her mind, she felt like she remembered being told by a man that she looked good in white.
“Sorry about the Korean place. Weren’t you really looking forward to it?”
“Look, don’t worry. There are plenty of places to choose from.”