DEEP RED by Hisashi Nozawa
© 2004 by Yukiko Nozawa
All rights reserved.
First published in Japan in 2000 by Kodansha, Ltd., Tokyo. English translation rights arranged with Yukiko Nozawa. English translation copyright © 2016 by Vertical, Inc.
Published by Vertical, Inc., New York, 2016
Originally published in Japanese as Shinku in 2000 and reissued in paperback in 2003
Ebook ISBN 9781945054778
First Edition
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
About the Author
CHAPTER ONE
1
The hallway’s incandescent lighting streamed into a darkness the color of pale ink.
Kanako and the seven other sixth graders noticed the presence the moment they heard the sound of slippers, and hid under the covers. If their teacher Mr. Ihara discovered that they had been up past eleven, they would have to endure his shrill scolding. Despite his youthful and polite appearance, he could be scary when angered.
Before the teacher had butted in, a pocket light that someone had bought at the souvenir store by the lake had been put to good use. No one remembered who started it, but they had all gathered in a circle at the center of their common room and passed the light around shining it on their own faces and recounting something scary that had happened recently.
Seven classmates had already fallen asleep, tired from their daytime athletic activities. The remaining eight including Kanako had pulled their blankets over themselves like turtle shells with only their heads peeking out. Shoko had put the light beneath her chin to illuminate her face and cast creepy shadows, while the others alternated between giggling and pretending to give exaggerated screams as they listened to her performance.
A man wearing only baggy briefs and socks, practically naked, had suddenly invaded their school’s track field, bathed in the setting sun’s glare. He had quickly sped past the club members practicing hurdles.
The man, having reached the goal before anyone else, started cheering with joy as though he had just set the new world record at the Olympics. He sought hugs from Shoko and the rest of the track club and chased a few of the girls a couple dozen feet. He was quickly caught and held down by Mr. Shibata, the advisor, and reported to the police. They later found out that the man was a student from a nearby college.
Please, clap for me, congratulate me. The student, pressed face down to the ground with his arms twisted behind him by Mr. Shibata, apparently screamed those words repeatedly until the police arrived.
Rumors spread, but only the few children who had remained on the schoolyard tracks until the end of club activities knew the truth. No wonder Shoko had barely been able to contain her anticipation on the bus, having saved her special eyewitness account to share on the first night of their school trip.
The girls laughed, but also shuddered in fear. Scary, scary, Yumi said, clutching her stomach in mirth. Shh, the teacher’s coming, warned the class president, Maiko. Everyone did their best to talk in hushed voices.
It was really swollen.
Huh, what was?
You know, that thing, in his underwear.
Stop, stop! Eww!
They heard footsteps, and the eight girls with their faces inched together broke their circle and dove beneath their blankets.
From between her pillow and blanket, Kanako watched through half-opened eyes as the sliding door opened and light entered the room. Perhaps because her pupils had adjusted to darkness, even the forty-watt bulb in the hallway felt like a flood of light.
A short, stout upper body. The person wore glasses. As expected, it was their teacher Mr. Ihara. Who’s still awake?! The eight in their blankets froze, preparing themselves for the scolding to come.
“Akiba…Akiba, where are you?” the voice called, cautious.
For a moment, Kanako wondered if she was going to get yelled at on behalf of everyone, but the tone of her teacher’s voice told her otherwise.
“Akiba, please answer.” Some dire confusion that he hadn’t shaken off seemed to be coating his throat.
“Yes.” Kanako poked her head out.
Just as before, Mr. Ihara remained a silhouette looming at the entrance with the light of the hallway at his back. “Gather your things to go home right away.”
She couldn’t immediately grasp what he meant. Had their school trip been canceled before even the first night was through? But he hadn’t ordered anyone else to “get their things together.”
The other seven who had also stayed up cautiously peered out.
“The rest of you, go back to sleep. Akiba, get dressed right away. I’ll be waiting in the hall.”
Mr. Ihara brushed a switch on the wall. Fluorescent illumination poured down, violently, and Kanako scrunched her face. Their teacher stepped back out and closed the door, but not before she caught a glimpse of his profile, frozen as though painted in wax.
As Maiko, Yumi, Shoko, and the others looked on with worried faces, Kanako did as she was told and pulled her change of clothes for tomorrow out of her backpack. Stripping her pajamas, she put on the short sleeve polo jacket and trainers. Slipped her legs into the Levi’s that her mother had bought her for the school trip. Put on her socks. Her friends watched silently as Kanako moved as if on autopilot.
Something had happened at home. At Kanako’s home. To her family. Her classmates’ stares as they exchanged the same premonition and sounded out reactions hurt.
Without another glance at them, she picked up her unzipped backpack, stepped over the futon of someone who was sound asleep, arrived at the entrance, and slid open the door. Seeing that Kanako was prepared, Mr. Ihara gave one nod and hit the switch to plunge the room into darkness once again.
Come along, his expression said. Kanako stayed close behind as her teacher hastily made his way down the thinly carpeted hallway and the stairs, to the area lined with the teachers’ rooms.
Upon spotting Kanako, Mr. Matsunami, the teacher in charge of her grade, crushed his cigarette into the lobby’s ash tray. The hair at the back of his head was still disheveled from sleep. He had probably been woken up shortly after going to bed and had changed into his day clothes in a hurry.
Ms. Taeko Itagaki, the teacher in charge of Class 2, was wearing no makeup, a rare sight. Her cheeks sagged unhealthily. Kanako averted her gaze as though she’d just glimpsed something she shouldn’t have.
Mr. Takabayashi, the P.E. teacher with a buzz cut in charge of Class 3, was whispering into the lobby payphone. “Right, her teacher Mr. Ihara will accompany her to Tokyo right away…Right, there are no more trains running, so by taxi.”
It seemed he was speaking with either the principal or headmaster in Tokyo.
Brows creased in frowns everywhere—tension chained together the teachers.
Mr. Maruoka, in charge of Class 4, came running into the lobby from outdoors, his large stomach swaying, and announced, “The taxi just arrived.”
“Miss Akiba.”
Mr. Matsunami must have called her “Miss” because he’d connected her name to her face only now. As the teacher overseeing all four classes of sixth graders, he didn’t have every student’s name memorized.
“Please stay calm as you listen.”
Kanako was calm.
“Your family in Tokyo was in an accident. Please head to the hospital immediately. It’s lat
e, so it will probably only take three hours for you to arrive. Mr. Ihara will stay with you, so there’s no need to worry,” he conveyed only the barest minimum of info with muted emotions.
An accident? What kind of accident? Her whole family in an accident?
She wasn’t even given a chance to respond. Mr. Ihara nudged her lightly in the back, guiding her to the entrance. The other teachers trailed after them.
Kanako retrieved her sneakers from the Class 1 Girls Group B shoebox. She tried to put them on at the center of all their attention, but her shoelaces were tied and she struggled to get her heels in. Feeling vexed, she finally managed by tapping her toes on the floor. The sound echoed in the silence that permeated the entryway, and like the ringing of a tuning fork, it reverberated in her nerves for some time.
Mr. Maruoka grabbed her backpack and carried it to the trunk of the taxi that was waiting with its door open.
Kanako wasn’t sure what to say to the teachers who had gathered to see her off so she simply bobbed down in a polite bow before heading to the cab.
It was a night in May, and the highland air was sharp with cold. Their bus had pulled up in the tourist hotel’s front roundabout at five in the evening. It felt so long ago that the boys from Class 1 Group A, their kneecaps dirty from the lakeshore athletic course, had piled out of the bus chanting, “Hungry, hungry, we’re hungry!” One of them had swung around his socks, soggy from stepping in puddles, and skimmed Kanako’s face. “Go do it somewhere else, idiot,” she’d told him and shoved him away.
She was ushered into the back seat. Mr. Ihara followed her in, and the door shut. “We’ll leave the rest to you,” Mr. Matsunami called out to Mr. Ihara. The teachers seeing them off were standing in a cluster.
“The Aisei Hospital in Tokyo, yes?” the driver confirmed and got going.
Shinshu Asahi Transportation, Eiichi Ikeda. A name and ID photo were fixed on a plate. Permed curly hair and hollowed cheeks. This driver knew what was going on too, Kanako sensed.
I need to take this girl to her wounded family, and how fast she gets there depends on my driving—his voice had been marked by such a sense of purpose.
They left the hotel roundabout and entered the street of the inn district. Kanako looked back at the hotel where her friends were still asleep. No lights were lit in any of the rooms. All one hundred fifty sixth graders were sleeping in unison. The gathered teachers would no doubt remain standing there until the taxi was out of sight.
It was 11:15 p.m., according to the dashboard clock. Gotta remember the hour and minute, Kanako told herself for some reason.
A few tourists wandering back and forth in yukata with hanten overcoats were the only people out this late. The taxi would get on the national highway, then the freeway, then arrive in Tokyo. It felt as though the vehicle were being sucked from a capillary into a larger artery. Kanako wasn’t sure why that image passed through her mind.
An accident. Her family injured. Blood spilled on the surface of the road. Herself, traveling those roads via the shortest route. The thought must have been conjured by these associations.
“You must be shocked.” Mr. Ihara was the first to break the silence in the car.
“An accident. Was it a traffic accident?” Kanako heard her own voice from far away. It was her first question since Mr. Ihara had woken her.
“I don’t know the details myself. We were just told that everyone in your family was hurt.”
He’s lying, she thought. Her father, her mother, her two younger brothers. Mr. Ihara probably even knew which one of them had spilled the most blood.
When had the accident occurred? Her family rarely all got in the car together at night on a weekday. Plus, they didn’t even have a car at home right now. It was out getting inspected, and yesterday morning her father had been cursing the inconvenience of it. From their house, it took fifteen minutes to walk to their nearest station, Asagaya. Kanako’s mother usually drove her father there every morning.
The illustration in the logo of her father’s company flitted through her head. An autumn leaf. The company was called “Autumn Leaf,” a direct translation of their family name, Akiba, into English. It had been Kanako’s idea to use a scarlet leaf in the design.
There were fifteen employees, and the company operated out of one floor of a mixed-occupancy building in Takadanobaba. Businesses will try to whistle and skimp on investing in office automation to get over the recession, so leasing firms will be cracking bamboo, their father, cheerful after a single can of beer, rehearsed with Kanako and her two younger brothers the speech he’d be giving to his staff the following day.
“Cracking bamboo” meant having that much force. Talking with her father taught Kanako many idioms.
Under their dining table, Tomoki, about to turn five, and four-year-old Naoki had their feet stretched out and were kicking each other. Their mother slapped the two of them on their thighs.
Kanako’s two little brothers, born within a year of each other, often fought over simple things: the corner of a magical monster card getting bent, a lego car ring stolen, being called stupid or shorty. How they came up with topics to argue over was almost impressive.
But she loved their smooth thighs, the skin taut to the point of bursting, the downy surface hair that gleamed golden in the sun. She sometimes laid down where her brothers were sitting reading to use their laps as a pillow. Then she’d slide her cheek against their thighs.
This time, I’m the pillow.
No, I’m still the pillow!
They instantly got in a fight over where their older sister’s head should rest.
Kanako wondered if the four of them had gone out to get something good to eat while she was away on her school trip. Next week was Tomoki’s birthday and they were planning to go to their favorite sushi restaurant, so she doubted it was anywhere fancy. Perhaps the Denny’s nearby. It was quite a distance to walk, so perhaps they’d taken a cab.
Had the accident happened on their way back from dinner? Tonight too, her mother must have forced herself to eat her sons’ leftovers, saying it was “wasteful.” She could never stand to leave any food when they ate out, partly because her family ran a Chinese restaurant in Kobe. She often said that carrying out garbage bags bulging with the guests’ leftovers was the worst part.
It explained why she was on the plumper side. My waist used to be so thin it looked like it was carved with a knife, she liked to brag. You could still see vestiges of it. Even though her breasts now sagged, they must have jutted out proudly when she had been younger. You might become busty too, Kanako, she sometimes comforted her late-blooming daughter.
Kanako could almost hear her father slur, You’ve got kindergarten tomorrow too, so it’s off to take a bath then straight to bed for you. All four of them having stuffed themselves at Denny’s, he had taken his sons under each arm as they prepared to start another squabble in the taxi on their way back home. She pictured her mother in the back seat, too.
If the car had been the same size as this one, it would have been a tight fit with all of them in the back. Maybe one of them had decided to sit in front. Had a truck driven off the opposite lane to crash into them head-on? She’d heard that a passenger riding shotgun suffered the greatest risk. Had her mother been there, or her father?
Her imagination broke off. The taxi, which had been driving smoothly along a road, crossed a bridge. The torrent below sounded like Earth’s own troubled murmurs.
According to the schedule, they were building a campfire on this riverbed tomorrow. They would make curry rice with an outdoor cooker and, later, hold hands with the boys from Class 1 Group B in a folk dance. She remembered Yohei Murakami’s sweaty hands. They had practiced together during gym class before the trip.
Because her family was in an accident, Kanako Akiba had to immediately return to Tokyo last night. Would Yohei worry about her after their teachers gave him the news? Would he find the folk dance boring without her?
Yohei of the s
occer club. His number tag had peeled off in the middle of a match. As he ran in the fields, the fluttering cloth on his back looked decidedly uncool. Kanako, who went with her classmates to cheer them, had a sewing kit on her thanks to Home Ec course that day. She had him take off his jersey during halftime and quickly sewed the number 7 back on.
Hey, you’re good at this. Do you sew at home too? He probably meant that as a compliment.
Well, I guess? she replied casually, but with her heart hammering. She remembered how hot her cheeks had felt then.
The taxi arrived at a T-junction and turned onto the national highway.
“If you’re feeling sleepy, go ahead and get some shut-eye.”
“I’m all right.”
There was no way she could sleep. Mr. Ihara realized his mistake right away, but his awkward attempt at kindness made her feel bad.
She felt like she should chat with him, to ease his nerves. Kanako stuck her hand in her pot of topics and groped around.
“That college student from before that the police arrested on the school grounds…” It was the only one that she could come up with. “Why was he running around naked?”
“He apparently has a medical history.”
“A ‘medical’ history?”
“I heard that he used to see a psychiatrist. Maybe he did what he did because he came out from the countryside by himself and couldn’t make friends in the city and felt lonely and wanted to cry. He probably wanted to be the center of attention.”
“What do psychiatrists do?”
“Well, first, they listen carefully to what their patients have to say. They go all the way back to when the patients were kids and talk about how they grew up, and then the doctor analyzes what goes on inside their heads.”
“Do people grow up weird if something happens when they’re kids?”
“There are…cases like that.”
Mr. Ihara’s words started to sound muddled. He must have feared that their conversation was entering dangerous territory. Even so, Kanako still wanted an answer to her question.
“Do kids who lose their families in traffic accidents also grow up to be weird?”
Deep Red Page 1