Another Episode S / 0

by Yukito Ayatsuji

  “Rather than Sou fulfilling his own desires, the ‘ghost of Teruya Sakaki’ might have kept at it for the sake of his own/Teruya Sakaki’s death. If he could find his body and make it public, and get his proper ‘death’ to take him, then he/Teruya Sakaki would be able to connect with ‘everyone.’ Mr. Sakaki had always wanted that…And that’s why.”

  5

  “What do you think?”

  I finished my crass analysis, feeling immensely nervous, and tried to gauge Mei’s reaction.

  Mei’s arms were folded over her chest gravely.

  “It’s good enough, I suppose,” she answered. An image of Mr. Chibiki in a pose I had often seen him adopt seemed to superimpose itself on her. “It’s not really an issue where you can point to one right answer…It’s just…”

  “What?”

  “I feel kind of awful making this analogy, but maybe that ghost was kind of like a mirage?”

  “A mirage?”

  Now that she mentioned it, there had been a quick scene in her story about a mirage you could see in the ocean at Hinami.

  “Yes,” Mei replied, shutting her right eye. “An illusory scene, appearing and then disappearing. Light gets bent by temperature differences in the air, and the original scene appears in a different place, stretched out or compressed or turned upside down…a twisted, false image.”

  “Right.”

  “What everyone around him saw was the true image of the boy Sou Hiratsuka. But what the boy himself saw was like that, a false image of himself twisted like a mirage. That was the ‘ghost of Mr. Sakaki.’”

  “Yeah…”

  “The temperature difference in the air is, in other words, the difference in momentum of the particles in the air. You could also say it’s the difference in density per unit time.”

  “Sure, I guess.”

  “In Sou’s case, the cause of the bending was a difference in temperature in his heart. Or the density of sorrow in his heart. It got to be too much and his true form twisted into that false image…That’s what I think.”

  Mei let out a sigh, and I nodded, thinking it over.

  It began to occur to me that, oddly, this analogy fit much more perfectly than my strained, pedantic explanation—

  “Speaking of awful,” I said. “I thought up a rule.”

  “A rule?”

  “More like a pattern to recognize the ‘ghost of Teruya Sakaki.’”

  “Oh?”

  Mei looked at me with intense interest.

  Even as I was seized again by nerves, I tried to describe the problem that I had been thinking about for some time and had tried to summarize in my head.

  “While Sou was appearing as a ghost, how was Sou himself being perceived? It couldn’t possibly have been the same in every situation. So I think it probably broke down into patterns like this…”

  Then I showed her the following three “patterns”:

  1. When he was the only person there. The “ghost of Teruya Sakaki” would perceive the physical form of Sou Hiratsuka as “not there.” Therefore, even if he were to look in a mirror, he wouldn’t see himself (i.e., Sou).

  2. When he was with other people, one or more of whom were acknowledging Sou’s presence. In such situations, the ghost would also recognize that Sou was there. The ghost would construct a perspective of a “soul” having an out-of-body experience and would be aware of his own (i.e., Sou’s) appearance, words, and actions.

  3. Cases where he was with other people, but those people could see the ghost (as understood by the ghost himself). In cases where the ghost was alone with one such person, he would perceive Sou as “not there,” just as in case one.

  “The only person fitting the third pattern was Mei Misaki,” I continued, recalling the minor details of the story she had told me. “For example, when the ghost appeared at the afternoon tea at your family’s vacation house. You went out onto the terrace by yourself in a way that seemed to be an invitation, and Sou followed you out, right? So then, when the two of you were alone, he started talking to you as the ghost. But then, in that situation, Sou himself became ‘not there’…

  “And then your father came outside. Since he acted like Sou was there with you, the ghost’s perception had to change, too, so he couldn’t talk to you directly anymore and started to disappear…”

  After a few moments, Mei nodded. “You’re right. I think that’s how it went.”

  “And then—” I pressed on. “The part that bothered me most was why would Sou have misunderstood in the first place? About your left eye being able to see him as a ghost? That you could see him?”

  I wanted to set this part straight.

  Thinking back over Mei’s story, the reason for this was still a mystery to me. Because when the two had run into each other for the first time over the summer in the library of Lakeshore Manor, that had struck me as a situation where “as soon as she took the eye patch off her left eye, she was able to see the ghost who had until then been invisible to her.”

  “That was—” Resting her fingers on the edge of her eye patch, Mei replied in a detached tone, “That was actually helped by chance a little bit, too, to turn out the way it did.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I went over to Lakeshore Manor that day, and when I accidentally knocked that bike over, I thought I saw someone on the second floor. So I was sure someone—at least Sou—was inside the house, so I rang the doorbell, but no one came to the door. And so I went around to the back door.

  “That door was open, and when I went inside, I saw someone’s shoes. A pair of dirty sneakers smaller than mine…”

  Mei had gone up to the second floor. She’d had the impression that she’d seen a person in the window of the library, so she’d headed straight there and—

  “At exactly that second, the owl clock on the opposite wall rang and distracted me. And while my attention was focused on one of Kirika’s dolls on a display shelf, I walked into the room…”

  At that point, Sou was standing in front of the desk by the left wall, which was in Mei’s blind spot since she could only see out of her right eye—

  “It was really as simple as I couldn’t physically see him.” Mei pointed at her eye patch. “But right after that—”

  “You took your eye patch off.”

  “It was dirty and felt gross, so I took it off. Almost at the same second, a bunch of crows flew past the window…”

  Crows? Oh right—maybe I did remember her saying that.

  “It surprised me, and I looked over at the window. Even though it was cloudy that day, the window was bright and it was dim inside the room, but since the crows were going past the window, it made it darker outside. In that moment, the intensity of light and dark flipped and the inside of the room was reflected on the window glass. That’s how—”

  “Ah…I see.”

  The situation drew itself as a picture in my mind, and finally I realized and could understand.

  Mei said, “I saw the outline of Sou standing right there. Obviously in my right eye, not my left. It surprised me, and when I spun around to look at him, he was standing in front of the desk, so I…”

  “Why?”

  Mei had whispered reflexively.

  “Why…are you in a place like that?”

  “Can you really see me?” Sou had asked, startled and caught off guard.

  “Yes…I can…,” Mei had replied frankly.

  “When Sou and I talked after that, we were out of step with each other at first, but he was so serious about it when he told me, ‘Mr. Sakaki is dead’ and ‘I’m his ghost’…In the end, I got into the habit of following his lead. I asked him about the details of what had happened up to that point…and while I was listening, I started to understand what was going on in Sou’s mind. Once I did, somehow I understood that pointing out to him ‘but you’re Sou’ right then and there would have been bad…”

  “And then two days later you decided to look into it. You asked Kirika t
o invite the Hiratsuka family over to your house.”

  “That’s right.”

  Mei ran the middle finger of her left hand down across her eye patch.

  “I wanted to find out, first of all, what had actually happened to Mr. Sakaki. In other words, how much of Sou’s story was true. I wanted to see how he acted when he was with Tsukiho and his family…”

  Instead of nodding, I let out a long sigh.

  I thought I was used to this by now, but I was starting to feel myself being swallowed up in the atmosphere of this basement room so dominated by the “emptiness” of the dolls. And so somehow, despite our discussion of the “underlying truth,” I was starting to feel as if we were the ones who were really the “mirage”…

  Maybe she guessed what was happening—

  “You want to go somewhere else?” Mei suggested. “Let’s go to the sofas upstairs. We’re mostly done with the story anyway.”

  6

  Thinking about it, I was pretty sure this was the first time I had been in the first-floor gallery without Grandma Amane being there. The gallery was closed, so the string music that always played was also missing. The air-conditioning wasn’t on, either, and it felt a little muggy compared to the basement—

  When we sat down on the sofas that faced each other at an angle, I felt as if I could hear, unpleasantly clearly, Mei’s breathing and all its subtle changes…And even at this late point, I felt a little fidgety. My heart was racing.

  Mei had brought her sketchbook upstairs with her and started to set it down on the armrest of the sofa, but before she did, she murmured to herself, “Oh right,” and instead placed the sketchbook on her lap. I wondered what that had been about but pressed ahead.

  “So hey, that reminds me.

  “What was going on with that friend Arai who called Mr. Sakaki? Did you not ever figure it out?”

  “No.”

  As Mei shook her head very slightly, she opened the sketchbook. But the picture of Lakeshore Manor she’d drawn last summer…was not what she now showed me.

  She opened the sketchbook up to just before the back cover. I could see a light blue envelope slipped between two pages.

  “I tried to check that,” Mei said offhandedly. “It bothered me, too, so that night—while I was looking for Sou, I got the idea to try calling.”

  “Oh?”

  “Because the message and caller’s phone number were both still on the base set of the phone in the hall. So I tried calling that number. I asked, ‘Is this Arai’s house?’”

  Ah. No deep thought required—that was the fastest way to check certainly.

  “—And?”

  “A really old man came onto the phone. It wasn’t him, but when I asked if it was Arai’s house, he told me it wasn’t. So I changed my question and asked, ‘Okay, is Arai there?’ and he said, ‘There’s no one here by that name,’ in a really harsh way.”

  I was just wondering what that could mean, when Mei picked up the envelope that had been stuck into her sketchbook and pulled something out of it.

  “Here, look at this.”

  She held out a photograph. When I looked at it, a small noise escaped me. “Oh…Is this it?”

  “Mr. Sakaki’s ‘photo that brings back so many memories’ from summer vacation eleven years ago.”

  “This is…”

  I studied the photo intently.

  The date the picture was taken, “8/3/1987,” was indeed printed in the lower right of the image.

  A mixed group of five girls and boys lined up with a lake behind them. So the boy on the far right was Teruya Sakaki. He was a different age than in the photo Mei had first shown me from last year, but it was definitely the same person. The other four had been students in third-year Class 3 at North Yomi…

  “And the notes are here.”

  She next held out the notepaper, which I took to read the figures’ names.

  In order from the right, they were “Sakaki,” “Yagisawa,” “Higuchi,” “Mitarai,” and “Arai.”

  Just like Mei had said in her story, below “Yagisawa” and “Arai” was written an “X” and the word “dead.”

  “I tried to play it innocent on the phone. I said, ‘I’m sorry, whose house is this, then?’ And then the answer was—”

  Mei cast her eyes down to the photo I held in my hands.

  “They said, ‘This is the Mitarai house.’”

  “Mitarai?”

  “The second from the left in the picture. The chubby kid with the glasses and blue T-shirt. Apparently it was his house. Mitarai.”

  “But the message on the answering machine was from Arai…,” I started to protest, then realized: “But maybe Arai was something else.”

  “It could have been Mitarai’s nickname or what his friends called him. Just taking the last part of his name and calling him Arai instead.”

  “But what about this person with the ‘X’?”

  “If that person’s name were Arai, too, it would be confusing, right? So I think it’s a different reading of the characters. Like Nii instead of Arai.”

  “—Oh yeah.”

  “It was Nii who died all those years ago. Mitarai is alive and had been keeping in touch with Mr. Sakaki. He just happened to call him up…Probably he needed something, like he was going to ask him to lend him some money or something.”

  Looking at it this way, the truth was almost humorous. For the “ghost of Sakaki” (i.e., Sou), who lacked the knowledge that Arai was Mitarai, it definitely would have been shocking and confused him.

  —But even so.

  What was this photo doing here? Had Mei taken it from the library in Lakeshore Manor? Or maybe…

  I glanced at Mei’s hands.

  The light blue envelope, just big enough to hold a photograph. I spotted something written on the face of the envelope and a stamp.

  Had someone mailed it to her? If so, who?

  Before I could ask, Mei said, “By the way…Sakakibara.

  “When you look at that photo, do you sense anything?”

  7

  “Like what?”

  My eyes fell once again to the photograph from eleven years ago.

  The students of the 1987 third-year Class 3 at Yomiyama North Middle. Who had been invited by Teruya Sakaki to share a peaceful moment over summer break at Lakeshore Manor in Hinami, unaffected by the “disasters.” But afterward, of the four who had returned to Yomiyama, Yagisawa and Nii had lost their lives…

  “…I’m not sure.”

  I looked into Mei’s face. At that, her right eye narrowed slyly.

  “You don’t feel like the spacing is unnatural?”

  “Huh?”

  I looked back at the photo.

  An unnatural space? An unnatural…

  “…Oh!”

  Here?

  Teruya Sakaki on the far right and to his left the girl called Yagisawa. Here, between the two of them…

  “They’re standing apart from each other. Mr. Sakaki and Yagisawa,” Mei said. “Don’t you think it’s weird how far apart they are from each other? Almost like…”

  “Yeah. It’s almost like…”

  As I was responding, I was remembering something. The two photos we had taken in front of the gate to Sakitani Memorial Hall on the class trip in August.

  Both showed five people.

  The first one was me, Mei, Kazami, Teshigawara, and Ms. Mikami in that order. In the second one, Teshigawara had been replaced by Mochizuki, who was pressed right up against “his beloved Ms. Mikami”…

  …Vmm…vmmmmm…

  A low-frequency noise started up somewhere in my head.

  If I were to look at those photos five or ten years from now, how would they appear to me? That was the question. As time passed, my memories of the “extra person”/“the casualty” from this year would fade and disappear…Vmm…vmmmmm…and she would vanish from the photos. And then an unnatural space where a picture of someone had originally been but no longer appeared would de
velop in her place…

  “…This is…,” I said, my eyes still fixed on the photo in my hand. Without realizing it, my empty hand had been pressed over my chest. My voice was panting and short of breath. “Could it be that originally there was—that this picture used to show someone beside Mr. Sakaki?”

  “You get that feeling, right?”

  “Y…yeah.”

  “That’s what I think. Someone used to be in this picture. That it must have been ‘the casualty’ who’d infiltrated third-year Class 3 eleven years ago. And—”

  Mei cut herself off suggestively and ran her slender fingers down the white of her eye patch. She seemed to be saying, “You know what I’m going to say next,” but I had no idea at all.

  “And well,” Mei continued. “I was thinking maybe that someone was Mr. Sakaki’s first love.”

  “Wha—?”

  “Because apparently, in all the different conversations he had with Sou, Mr. Sakaki said something like this…”

  So, have you? Ever been in love? Who was your first love?

  ……

  You didn’t have one?

  No…I suppose I did.

  What does it feel like to be in love? Is it fun? Does it hurt?

  It’s…Oh, I don’t know. I’m not sure I’m qualified to answer these questions.

  Why not?

  …Because I can’t remember.

  Caring so much…Yeah, that’s definitely true. I remember that. I think I cared…a lot. But…

  But what?

  I just can’t remember. No matter how hard I try, I can’t remember who that person was.

  “I told you how there was an ‘archive of the disasters’ on the second floor of Lakeshore Manor, right? These words were written on the wall of that room: ‘Who are you? Who were you?’”

  “Yeah…you did.”

  “At the point this photo was taken, during summer break, of course Mr. Sakaki didn’t know who the casualty was for that year, and neither did anyone else. There’s no way they could have known. So maybe during that time, Mr. Sakaki started to like her. Never knowing that she was the casualty…”