Another Episode S / 0
Page 18
After the graduation ceremony in 1987, when the phenomenon for that year ended and the casualty disappeared, all the various records that had been altered to make things consistent would return to normal. It would turn out that she had never existed in that year, and eventually she would disappear from the memories of the people involved and over a long enough time, she would vanish.
Even the memories of Teruya Sakaki, who had loved her, could not escape this rule.
Maybe Sakaki had even found out that she had been that year’s casualty from his North Yomi classmate Mitarai after the graduation ceremony. His memories of being in love with her, of liking her so much—that impression on his heart had lasted inside him even after she had disappeared. But the girl’s name, face, voice, the words they had spoken to each other, the time they had spent together…all those memories had inevitably faded as time went on and disappeared. And then after however many years, he was no longer able to remember all the things he had shared with her. That’s why—
That’s why he…
8
“That might be the biggest reason Mr. Sakaki was entranced by death.”
After a few seconds of silence, I spoke the thought as it occurred to me.
“If he died, he could connect with everyone who had died before. But maybe it was her he wanted to connect with more than ‘everyone.’”
“—Could be,” Mei responded, her gaze cast downward. “Although…that’s a feeling I don’t really understand.”
“Really…?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever cared about someone that much.”
“You don’t think?”
“Yeah. I’m not sure.”
Letting out a quiet sigh, I took another look at the photo that brought back so many memories of eleven years ago.
The unnatural space between Teruya Sakaki and Whoever Yagisawa. No—no matter how hard I squinted, I couldn’t see anybody there.
A fifteen-year-old Teruya Sakaki holding a brown cane in his left hand and resting his right hand on his hip, smiling. The sheer happiness in his smile left me feeling incredibly sad.
“Have you figured out the last puzzle left?” Mei’s voice broke in on my thoughts.
“What puzzle?” I lifted my eyes from the photo.
“Of Mr. Sakaki’s last words.”
“Oh…that ‘tsu’ and ‘ki’ stuff?”
“Yeah.”
“Well…”
I had been thinking he really was saying the “tsuki” in Tsukiho.
Like maybe he wanted to say something to her at the very, very end, since she had tried to stop him from committing suicide. Or maybe—
“We can drill even deeper into it. Look at it as the ‘dying message’ someone speaks in a mystery novel.”
“Oh yeah?” Mei narrowed her right eye dubiously. I outlined my thought.
“Say Tsukiho had actually pushed Mr. Sakaki over the railing deliberately. When Mr. Sakaki finally fell from the second-floor corridor, he picked up on the murderous intent directed at him, and…”
“He wanted to tell someone that Tsukiho was the culprit?”
“Well, from his perspective anyway.”
At that, Mei pursed her lips a little and looked at me, almost scowling.
“Overruled,” she said. “If that were the case, wouldn’t the expression on Mr. Sakaki’s face right before he died, which Sou saw, be strange? He said his expression was oddly peaceful…as if he’d been freed from suffering, and fear, and anxiety. Because ‘tsu…ki’ is what he said in that moment.”
“Hmmm. When you put it that way, you’re right. So then…”
So then what could it have been? I cocked my head in thought.
What had he been saying at the very end…?
“I stopped by the secondary library recently, actually. To see Mr. Chibiki,” Mei said. I was caught a little flat-footed.
“Why’d you go back?”
“I wanted to see that file.”
What file?…The one Mr. Chibiki kept? That folder with the pitch-black cover where he kept copies of the class lists for the last twenty-seven years, from the year it started twenty-six years ago up to this year?
“For whatever reason, while all kinds of records are compromised by the ‘phenomenon’ and go back to normal, that file is apparently the only thing that is partially overlooked. Notes on the name of the casualty for an on year especially. So I wanted to check it and see.”
When she said that, I was finally able to guess.
“To see who was the casualty in 1987?”
“Mr. Sakaki didn’t know about this, remember. If he had, he might have been able to go and check it himself.”
Since he had changed schools early on, he probably hadn’t had a chance to come into contact with Mr. Chibiki. So he wouldn’t have had any way of learning that the file existed—
“And I found out her name. The casualty in 1987.”
“The girl who was Mr. Sakaki’s first love?”
Mei nodded silently.
“It was Satsuki.”
She spoke her name.
“Satsuki Shinomiya.”
With “Shinomiya” written with the characters for four halls and “Satsuki” written with characters that could read hope on a sandy shore.
“See? So…”
So…of course.
“You mean ‘tsu…ki’ was him saying ‘Satsuki’?”
“Staring death in the face, maybe Mr. Sakaki remembered. That her name was Satsuki. And that’s why his expression was so peaceful…”
He hadn’t spoken the “sa” aloud and had barely managed the “tsu” and “ki.” So the round shape of his mouth afterward—what had looked like the vowel O—had simply been him trying to breathe out in relief. Or perhaps after saying her name, he had started to say something like “You…”
“That’s just me conjecturing, though,” Mei added, and she let out a short sigh.
9
Sakaki and Satsuki, eleven years ago…
Looking at the photo I held, my mind turned over the coincidence.
Satsuki could be written with the characters for fifth month. In other words, May. Like Mei…
Oh, whatever, it’s not even anything…
…Vmm…vmmmmm…
Wanting to shake off the faint, low frequency that had once again started up, I sluggishly shook my head.
“This came yesterday,” Mei said just then. A light blue envelope had been tucked into her sketchbook. She had now laid the envelope on the table and was pointing at it.
“From who?” I asked. “Who sent you that?”
“Sou,” Mei replied. Then, she picked the envelope up again. “He sent me that photo and the note and also this letter.”
She pulled out a letter, folded in half, on paper the same color as the envelope and held it out to me.
“Is it okay if I read it, too?”
“Sure.”
This is what was written in the letter. In an extremely skilled adult hand—
I am doing well now.
I hope you will accept this photograph.
If you do not want it, please feel free to throw it out.
I, too, will be in middle school next spring.
I hope to see you again sometime.
Without a word, I handed the photo, note, and letter all back to Mei. She put them back into the envelope; then, though she said nothing, she turned the envelope facedown and rested it on top of her sketchbook—
That was when the name and address of the sender, written on the back of the envelope, came to my attention. I didn’t grasp the meaning of it all at once. “No—” I heard myself say, and turned to ask Mei, “How…When?”
“I don’t know the details…but he didn’t want to stay with his family in Hinami anymore.”
“But this address—”
“Maybe it’s a relative or someone he knows. They’ve taken him into their house for the time being.”
“Oh…but…”
/> For a short time, I was unable to tear my eyes from the letters that marched across the envelope. I was totally incapable of calming the spread of an unsettling apprehension, but I had the strong impression that it would be wrong to voice it here.
I felt a faint breeze then, even though the air conditioner was off.
The air rustled chill.
The address read: “Akazawa home, 6-6 Tobii District, Yomiyama.”
And below that, the name—
Not “Sou Hiratsuka,” but simply “Sou.”
The End
Afterword
While writing, I had imagined Another as a long-form one-off.
At the very least, I had thought that the story of Koichi Sakakibara and Mei Misaki against the backdrop of Yomiyama in the year 1998 would end there—but then the magazine serialization ended and the story was put out in paperback. Out of nowhere, I watched a multimedia empire develop around it, and my thinking started to change. I wouldn’t mind writing a little more about Mei Misaki, still at age fifteen in 1998, I thought.
At that point, my mind hit on the “blank space of over a week” when Mei left Yomiyama and went with her family to their seaside vacation home, before the class trip over the summer. I could tell a story where she actually got involved in some sort of incident during that time that Koichi doesn’t know about…
Playing with various ideas along these lines, I started to see what I was going to do.
The title was the first thing I decided on: Another Episode S.
The S of Episode S is for “summer,” for “seaside,” for “secret,” for the character who becomes the narrator, “the other person named Sakaki”…I could go even further and mention the S of “shitai” (corpse) and “shinkirou” (mirage), too.
Still, this started out positioned as a side story or a spin-off of Another, but I started to feel like it couldn’t really be a spin-off when Mei Misaki is the heroine. Not only that, but the present day where Mei is telling Koichi the details of the incident is after the final scene of the original Another books—at the end of September 1998. From a timeline perspective, I came to believe it might not be entirely unreasonable to call this a sequel.
This novel has rather a different flavor from the original Another, though it keeps the aforementioned troubling phenomenon that occurs in third-year Class 3 at Yomiyama North Middle as a shared dominant note. It might have something of a perplexing bent, but now that the story is complete, I can’t help but feel it might have been necessary to position a story like this here. And once it was done, it also struck me that, in some sense, it turned out to be quite an Ayatsuji-esque novel.
I hope you’ll enjoy it.
I have a few other ideas (delusions?) for sequels to Another.
I can’t know for sure which of these will ever be written, but presumably much depends on the desires of you, the readers. The rest is just a question of my mental and physical resources. In any event, I’m going to take a little while to recharge and let the fantasies run wild.
During my run through ten total issues in the Syousetsuya Sari-sari magazine, my editor Ms. Akiko Kanako was always an incredible help. I give her my gratitude for every last bit of it. Thanks also go to Mr. Shinichiro Inoue, who gave me many insightful suggestions during the idea phase. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the cover artist Ms. Shiho Toda and the formatter Ms. Kumi Suzuki, as well as Ms. Akiko Fukazawa, Ms. Kaori Ichiji, Mr. Ryo Nakamura, and all the people at Kadokawa Shoten who were such a great help to me.
Early Summer 2013
Yukito Ayatsuji
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Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Cover art by Shiho Touda
Another Episode S
Yukito Ayatsuji
Translation by Karen McGillicuddy
© Yukito AYATSUJI 2013
Illustration by Shiho ENTA. Edited by KADOKAWA SHOTEN. First published in Japan in 2013 by KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo.
English translation rights arranged with KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo, through TUTTLE-MORI AGENCY, INC., Tokyo
Another 0
Original Story: Yukito Ayatsuji
Manga: Hiro Kiyohara
Translation by Karen McGillicuddy
Lettering by Katie Blakeslee, Lys Blakeslee
© Yukito AYATSUJI 2012
© Hiro KIYOHARA 2012
Edited by KADOKAWA SHOTEN. First published in Japan in 2012 by KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo.
English translation rights arranged with KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo, through TUTTLE-MORI AGENCY, INC., Tokyo
English translation © 2016 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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First eBook Edition: May 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-39415-4
E3-20160503-JV-PC