Another Episode S / 0

by Yukito Ayatsuji

  “Right. That’s a spring-type superior mirage.”

  I recited this knowledge that came so easily to me.

  “The winter type is the opposite, where the air close to the water is warmer and the air higher up is cooler, so you see the false image below the actual object. Which is an inferior mirage. I have photos of both kinds of mirage at my house.”

  “—I saw. You actually told me this same stuff last year.”

  “Oh. Did I?”

  “By the way—”

  Mei Misaki turned to look back at me once again.

  “I feel like we didn’t talk about why I was at Lakeshore Manor two days ago.”

  “Oh yes. I suppose that’s true…”

  Because I had been busy enough talking about my own situation.

  “The fact is,” Mei said, then closed both her eyes before slowly opening them again. “I wanted to ask you more details about the accident you’d been in when you were younger. Eleven years ago, in 1987, when you were in middle school.”

  “…”

  “You told me the other day that you were in Class 3 at North Yomi through the first semester of your third year in middle school. You said the bus accident that hurt your left leg so badly happened on the class trip…and a lot of people died in it.”

  “—That’s right.”

  “After that, your mother also died and you moved here from Yomiyama and transferred schools before summer break. So you managed to escape from the disasters.”

  “Disasters…that’s right. All of that is exactly like I told you before.”

  I nodded dutifully. After returning my nod in the same spirit, Mei started to speak.

  “Actually, I—”

  I cut her off.

  “You’re in third-year Class 3 at North Yomi yourself now. Is that it?” I suggested, anticipating where this was going.

  I had thought about the possibility when I read the newspaper article about a student’s accidental death…“It’s not impossible.”

  Mei nodded silently, seeming to tremble.

  I said, “I happened to see something in the paper at the end of May. Yukari Sakuragi, I think it was. The article said she was a third-year at North Yomi who had died at the school and that her mother had died the same day…Then my imagination just started running wild. Including the possibility that you were in the same class…”

  Mei nodded, again seeming to tremble.

  “Is this an on year?” I asked. “With an extra person slipped into your class…What about the disasters?”

  “—They’ve begun,” Mei replied, her voice subdued. “A couple people have already died. Even the head teacher before summer break.”

  “Oh…”

  “…That’s why.”

  “Why what?”

  “If you had lived through 1987, I thought I could ask you for information that might, in some small way, be useful…So that’s why I went to your house, I guess.”

  “And then you found out I had already died and become this ghost…I see. Were you surprised? Or disappointed?”

  Mei didn’t reply, and instead only leaned her head slightly to one side.

  Creee! Creee! a bird called out in the sky overhead. Looking up, I saw several seagulls circling low in the sky.

  “Even if I had been alive, I don’t think I would have been able to give you any useful information.”

  Her head still cocked to one side, Mei asked, “No?”

  “If anything, I think all I could have told you is ‘All you can do is run.’ Like we did all those years ago.”

  “Run…”

  “Because at least that saved us. And my classmates who came here for refuge over summer break were safe while they were here.”

  “Those people in the photo?”

  “Yes, them.”

  Yagisawa. Higuchi. Mitarai. Arai. As I answered, the faces of the four people who’d been in the photo with me rose in my mind, one after the other, when—

  I heard the sound of some sort of commotion.

  A sound quite unlike the various noises that had pervaded the air to that point; a sound that stirred up a powerful, instinctive unease…

  …The shrill sound of a siren. Probably a police car. Several of them.

  They came closer and closer and finally stopped. On the road running alongside the sea, visible from where we stood.

  “I wonder what it is.”

  In the same moment Mei spoke, I murmured unconsciously, “What could that be? An accident maybe…”

  “Hmm. If it had been a car accident, we would have heard a crash or something loud like that. It isn’t that far away really.”

  “Then what…?”

  “Maybe someone drowned. They’re close to a swimming spot.”

  As she spoke, Mei stretched to a fuller height and looked down at where the police cars had stopped. Squinting my eyes to focus, I tried to make out what was happening as best I could.

  “Oh…look at all the people they have down there. The police are all heading to the shore…”

  The sea breeze carried the sound of people’s voices. I couldn’t make out what they were saying clearly, but the air felt charged with tension.

  “Maybe something did happen in the water?”

  “Maybe not a crash, but some kind of incident.”

  Mei turned back to me.

  “Maybe there was some kind of scuffle between people on the beach and they had to call the police, or maybe—”

  She trailed off suggestively.

  “Maybe what?” I prodded.

  And after pausing a bit longer, she responded with this:

  “Maybe a dead body washed up on the shore or something. It’s not totally impossible that’s what happened, right?”

  “Er…”

  The words dead body naturally elicited a strong reaction in me.

  A body washed up on the beach. A body that, until it washed up, had been floating in the ocean or sunk below the water. It could be—

  It—that dead body…was it mine?

  The thought made my vision lurch.

  …My body.

  Had it been tossed into the ocean after I’d died? And only now…

  My body over there. Soaking in the water for so long, it would certainly have gotten bloated. The flesh picked at by fish, it would have been reduced to tatters…

  “If it’s bothering you, I can go find out?” Mei offered, as if seeing through to my turbulent thoughts within. “Though I think the information will come in before too long, even if we don’t rush down there.”

  “Yes…you’re right.”

  I nodded, but I felt too unnerved to stand still and I staggered, as if hypnotized by the distant sight of the spinning lights of the police cars. Just then—

  “What’s all this noise about?” Mr. Misaki asked as he came out onto the terrace. “Hmm? What are the police doing in a place like that…? I wonder what happened.”

  It was at that precise moment—

  I don’t know why, but I could feel my presence fading. If this continued, I would soon be dragged into the “hollow darkness.” I would disappear, in the opposite sense of how I appeared. Such was the sense of foreboding I experienced.

  “…I don’t think we should talk,” Mei Misaki said in a whisper. “I’ll see you later, when no one else is around, Mr. Ghost.”

  4

  Afterward, I only barely managed to stay in that place, but with an entirely unprecedented lack of stability. I suppose the word sporadic applies best. Over a short span of time, I appeared and nearly disappeared, then actually did disappear before reappearing…repeating over and over.

  I don’t know what I looked like to the left eye of Mei Misaki.

  The commotion of the apparent emergency on the beach went on for a bit, but in the end we never “went to find out” what was going on…We heard the information from Mr. Misaki about twenty minutes later. I don’t know how he obtained the information. He seemed to have gone to another room and
made a phone call to someone or other, so perhaps he had a connection with the police. Regardless—

  When he returned from the other room, Mr. Misaki informed everyone that “it seems they’ve found someone’s corpse on the beach.” I had started to disappear yet again, but then he said that. It felt as if his words riveted me to the spot momentarily.

  Everyone’s reactions were very different.

  Kirika murmured, “Oh my,” and put a hand to her mouth. Despite her furrowed brow, her face was nevertheless majestic as she turned it to look out the window.

  Tsukiho gave tiny cry of “What!” and then bowed her head, looking somewhat agitated. The color seemed to be draining ever so slightly from her face.

  Mirei tilted her head to one side, then turned to her mother and asked, “What’s a corpse?”

  Distracted by this, Tsukiho told her, “Uh…it’s nothing,” and hugged her daughter close. “You don’t need to worry about it, Mirei.”

  Sou stood up, swaying, from the sofa where he had been sitting away from his mother and little sister. His eyes still as expressionless as ever, he looked around the room and abruptly murmured in a low voice, “…I don’t know,” then lowered himself back onto on the sofa.

  “What did they say about the corpse?”

  Mei was the one who had asked this question. Mr. Misaki stroked his mustache with a slightly uncomfortable look, evidently regretting how inappropriate the information was for his audience.

  “They said it was a missing couple. They took a boat out from a beach on the other side of Raimizaki and never came back…And I didn’t know this, but apparently there’s been quite a flap about it the past few days. The body they just found was probably one of the two of them.”

  “—That’s awful.”

  “They said it was the drowned body of a woman. They still haven’t found the man.”

  “So it was a woman.”

  “Yes. That’s what I was told, at least.”

  …The drowned body of a woman.

  As my presence began once again to gradually fade away, I listened intently to this conversation between the two of them, and I understood.

  The drowned body of a woman had washed up on the beach.

  A woman…Meaning it wasn’t my body.

  When I realized that, I noticed that I felt relieved. It was a bizarre feeling.

  Why should I be relieved?

  Why would that make me feel better?

  At this very moment, I still didn’t know where my body was or what had become of it. I would have to keep looking for it, and yet…Why?

  Perhaps I didn’t actually want to acknowledge my death. Could thoughts like that still be inside me, after all this time? I doubted it.

  It couldn’t be that. This was nothing more than a trick of my mind…Or rather, perhaps, something instinctive deriving from sensations experienced when I was alive.

  5

  When the day’s social call broke up, I was again barely holding on to the place, appearing and disappearing, beginning to disappear…going through that cycle.

  While I was in this state, Mei Misaki spoke to me, seizing a moment when no one else was nearby.

  “I’m thinking of going back to Lakeshore Manor tomorrow.”

  She presented the information matter-of-factly in a low voice.

  “In the afternoon, say around two o’clock.”

  “Huh?”

  Surprised, I equivocated. She fixed her eyes on me and smiled.

  “Can we talk some more there?”

  “—It doesn’t do much good asking me.”

  It wasn’t as if I could say, Oh yes, I see, and promise to appear there. That was the reality of being a ghost.

  “You can’t make it tomorrow?”

  “Well…it’s not really a question of whether or not it’s convenient for me.”

  “Hmmm. I guess I get that.”

  Mei Misaki pulled a bit of a face, twisting one cheek, but quickly regained her neutrality.

  “Well, whatever. I’ll still try going.”

  Then suddenly Mei raised her right hand and covered her right eye with her palm. One end of the bandage wrapped around her elbow came loose and swayed.

  “There are a bunch of things I’ve been thinking about.”

  “Oh…um.”

  I was at a loss for how to respond, and she turned her blue eye directly onto me. Then she said: “I think I understand the situation, but…That place was your home, so please put a little effort into appearing there. All right, Mr. Ghost?”

  Sketch 6

  Do some people turn into ghosts when they die, and other people don’t?

  They say people who die with grudges or regrets in this life become ghosts.

  What if something horrible happens to you and you die? Like Oiwa-san?

  That’s turning into a vengeful spirit and taking revenge on the person who did the horrible thing to you. There are also times when someone dies without being able to tell someone important how they feel about them or when someone doesn’t get a proper burial…Anyway, they’re all just stories dreamed up by different people.

  So if you get rid of all your grudges and regrets, then you stop being a ghost?

  It’s called attaining Buddhahood. That’s how Buddhism thinks of it, anyway.

  Is it different in Christianity?

  Y’know, I don’t know.

  Is “death” different for all the different religions?

  The true nature of death is only one thing. But yeah, different religions have different ways of dealing with it.

  …

  Except.

  …Except what?

  Aside from all this talk about religion and whatever a ghost is, I…

  1

  Even though I wanted to appear at the agreed-upon time and place, that was no guarantee that I would be able to. Of course, that was the reality of being a ghost as I understood it. But in the end, I appeared at Lakeshore Manor just past two o’clock in the afternoon the next day, August 1. Whether this was the payoff of actually putting in an effort, as Mei Misaki had told me to do, I don’t know.

  It was in the backyard of the house that I spotted her.

  She had on a black T-shirt with medium-length denim shorts. She wore a lemon-yellow lightweight cardigan over this and a white cap and had a small red backpack slung over her shoulders…At that moment, Mei Misaki stood in one corner of the yard, beside the line of grave markers for all the animals. She was gazing down at the shoddy crosses that had been crafted from scraps of wood, her fingertips touching the narrow sweep of her chin.

  “Hey there,” I called out to her.

  Turning around, her eyes locked onto me. She had left her eye patch off today.

  “Mr. Sakaki?” she asked.

  “That’s right,” I replied.

  Mei Misaki pursed her lips, though a faint smile tugged at her cheeks. “So you showed up for me after all.”

  “Yes, well…Somehow I managed.”

  I moved forward smoothly to stand beside Mei, who returned her gaze to the grave markers.

  “Is this the grave of the crow you were telling me about before?”

  “Yes.” I nodded, looking down at the line of crosses. “The one on the far left is the crow. The rest are other animals.”

  “Huh.”

  Mei stepped over to stand before the far left grave marker and stared down at it, then took one step at a time to the right, looking at each of the crosses in turn, some bigger than others, some smaller. She soon reached the last of them on the far right and stopped there.

  “It’s like Jeux Interdits,” she murmured.

  I could manage no reply, and she glanced over at me.

  “It’s…a really old French movie?”

  “Oh, that…”

  I hurriedly searched through my memory, but only portions of it stirred even slightly, withered. The feeling was disappointing, frustrating, unbearable.

  “So then maybe—” Mei took another step
to the right and looked down at the ground. “Your body could be buried here, next in line?”

  “What?”

  Taken aback, my eyes shot to where she was looking. The ground looked hard, covered in thick vegetation.

  There?

  Could my body be down there?

  No, it couldn’t—I changed my mind at once.

  “I don’t think it could,” I answered. “If someone had dug out a hole big enough for a human body and filled it back in, there would still be signs of something like that, wouldn’t there? But the ground here doesn’t look any different from the rest.”

  I also suspected that I had already thought of the possibility that I was buried somewhere in the yard and taken a look around.

  “That’s true. And the ground looks the same everywhere, not just here,” Mei said, lifting her eyes. “Let’s look somewhere else, then. Will you lead the way, Mr. Ghost?”

  2

  “When I came here last summer break, you remember I was sketching the building here in this spot? Not knowing it was your house. Sou found me and went to the lakeshore, where you were…”

  Mei Misaki walked through the yard in the opposite direction from where the animals’ grave markers stood—eastward on a compass—into the shade of trees a fair distance from the house, then stopped.

  “I brought the sketch I was working on that day.”

  She turned back toward me. Then she lowered the bag from her back and pulled a sketchbook out of it. It was octavo sized with a faded olive cover.

  “I forgot this at our vacation house last year. And never had a chance to come back and get it. If I hadn’t forgotten it, I would only have my new one—for this year—with me. So I guess that was a lucky break.”

  What was she getting at?

  Unable to guess her intentions, I stood there ineffectually.

  A clammy breeze blew past us, rustling the leaves over Mei’s head. The sunlight dappling the ground through the leaves danced in time, making it look as if the girl herself were flickering subtly as she stood there.

  The blue midsummer sky above was unmarred.