Another, Volume 1

by Yukito Ayatsuji

  “I ran into her outside Building Zero during lunch.”

  Just then, far off in the distance, we heard a deep, reverberating rrrmmmble. Was a plane taking off? No, it didn’t sound like that. Could it be thunder?

  I craned my head back to look at the sky.

  From what I could see here in the shade of the tree, it was the same, clear May day it had been before. So I thought, but when I scanned around, I saw that ominous clouds were gathering slightly to the north. So it really was thunder from over there that we’d heard?

  As the thought occurred to me, the same rmrmbmrmmmble sound came again from far off.

  So it is that. Distant spring thunder.

  Must be in for a little rain after sunset.

  I ventured this prediction to myself, casting my eyes over the northern sky.

  “Huh?”

  I spotted something in a place I hadn’t expected, and the question slipped out of me.

  “What’s someone doing up there?”

  Building C, the three-story school building that stood on the north side of the field. There, on the roof—

  Someone was standing just inside the railing that circled the roof. Was that—?

  It was her. Mei Misaki.

  The realization came suddenly. Even though there was no way I could have clearly seen her face, or even her clothes.

  And in the next moment I had left Yukari Sakuragi behind, still wearing her perplexed expression, and started running toward Building C.

  10

  While I was running up the stairs, the shortness of breath finally hit me. The X-ray image of my collapsed lung flickered through my mind, but I was more focused on the figure I’d seen from the field.

  I found the door to the roof easily.

  It was a cream-colored steel door. A cardboard sign was taped to the door, which read NO UNNECESSARY ACCESS in red ink.

  I decided in less than a second to ignore such an inexplicably ambiguous prohibition. The door wasn’t locked. I pushed it open and burst outside.

  My instinct had been right. The identity of the figure was, indeed, Mei Misaki.

  On the roof of the iron-ribbed school building, a grimy concrete wasteland. Alone in the center of it all—

  She stood right against the railing that faced the field. She was facing this way, so she must have noticed me right away. But without a word, she spun her back on me.

  Bringing my ragged breathing under control, I walked over to stand beside her.

  “Hey…Misaki…” I called weakly to her. “Uh…so you’re sitting out of gym class, too, huh?”

  …No response.

  I closed the distance one step, then two. “Is this okay? I mean, are you allowed to be up here?”

  Her back was still turned when a voice came back to me, “So? Watching up close hardly has more meaning.”

  “The teachers aren’t going to yell at you?”

  “…Doubt it.”

  Her reply was a whisper as she finally turned around to face me. I saw then that she was holding an octavo-sized sketchbook tightly against her chest.

  “You’re up here, too.”

  She turned the question back on me.

  “So?” I said, copying her earlier response. “It’s true there’s not much point in just watching gym classes. Do you draw?”

  Without answering, she hid the sketchbook behind her.

  “I mentioned this when I ran into you at lunch but, um…I transferred today, into Class 3…”

  “You’re Sakakibara.”

  “Uh, yeah. And you’re Misaki, right? Mei Misaki?” I glanced down at the name tag pinned to her chest. “How do you write Mei?”

  “Same way you write ‘howl.’”

  “Howl?”

  “Or ‘sound.’ Like in ‘resonance.’ Or ‘scream.’”

  Howl, huh? Howling on a cliff…

  “Um, do you remember? We met at the municipal hospital recently.”

  I was finally able to ask her the question, but my heart was still utterly unable to find an even beat—basically, it was halfway to overdrive. Thmp…thmp…I could hear the beats strong in my ears.

  “It was Monday last week. I happened to get on the same elevator as you in the inpatient ward, then you got off at the second basement level. You told me your name when I asked you. You don’t remember?”

  “Last week, Monday…” Mei Misaki murmured, her right eye, not hidden by the patch, slowly closing. “That…might have happened.”

  “That’s what I thought. It’s been on my mind…ever since. Then when you were in class today, I was shocked.”

  “Oh.”

  It was a curt reply, but her small, thin lips looked as though they held the phantom of a smile.

  “Why were you going to the second basement level that day?” I pressed. “You said you were dropping something off or something like that, right? For who? You were carrying a white doll, it looked like. Was that what you were dropping off?”

  “I hate the way you’re interrogating me.”

  She spoke in the same curt voice and turned her eyes away.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I apologized quickly. “I wasn’t trying to force you to answer or anything. It’s just…”

  “Something sad happened that day.”

  Half my body is waiting there, the poor thing.

  Hadn’t she said something like that in the elevator that day?

  Half my body…the poor thing.

  It had been weighing on my mind, but obviously I wouldn’t be able to ask her anything else. And she wasn’t sharing anything more.

  The distant thunder rolled again. The wind blowing over the roof felt a touch colder than before.

  “You…”

  I heard Mei Misaki’s voice.

  “Your name is Koichi Sakakibara. Is that right?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “That must bother you.”

  “Th—…What?”

  Hold on a second. Was she about to bring that up? Now?

  “Wh-why do you say that?”

  I hurried to regain my composure. Mei fixed me with a silent look.

  “I mean, wasn’t it around this time last year? The whole country was panicking. It hasn’t even been a year since it happened.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Sakakibara. It’s a good thing you’re not named Seito.”

  When she said that, another whisper of a smile crossed her lips.

  I was really in for it.

  It had been so long since anyone had alluded to that—and it hadn’t happened yet at school today. And now, of all things, to hear it from her—from the lips of Mei Misaki.

  “What’s wrong?” Mei tilted her head curiously. “Did you not want me to mention that?”

  I tried to reply “Who cares?” and look as if it didn’t bother me, but I really didn’t pull it off. Before I could even begin to think over what to do now—“It brings up bad memories.”

  I had started confessing, straight-faced.

  “At my old school, last year—when the attack in Kobe happened, and everyone started talking about Sakakibara Seito, another fourteen-year-old middle schooler got sucked in, too…”

  “Did they bully you?”

  “Nobody ever did anything serious enough to call it bullying, but…”

  No…it hadn’t been anything that bad. There hadn’t been any intentional or underhanded malice in it at all. Everyone just kind of thought it was funny…

  They would write my name with the same characters he used, or call me Seito. Childish joking around that was harmless enough. But…

  I let it roll off of me with an easy laugh in the heat of the moment, but sometimes I hated it more than I could stand, more than I even realized. In other words, the building blocks of stress. And then…

  Last year in the fall, when I had been carrying the burden of this stress every day. That was when I had my first spontaneous pneumothorax. Maybe one of the reasons it happened goes back to all that stuff a
bout Sakakibara. Remembering everything that happened, it doesn’t seem like such a forced theory anymore.

  And the reason I’ve been packed off to be taken in by my grandparents in Yomiyama while my dad is out of Japan for a year is because he found out about what was going on and had a rare moment of parental concern for me. He probably decided that it would be best if I could change up my daily environment and push the reset button on my interactions with the people at school, where things kept getting more and more strained.

  Even after I’d told her the broad outlines of what had happened, Mei Misaki didn’t backpedal and sympathize with me, or act embarrassed about what she’d done.

  She asked, “Has anyone done it to you here yet?”

  “You’re the first,” I answered with a bitter smile. Oddly, I had relaxed slightly.

  All this morning, every time someone had spoken my name, I had tensed up, expecting this. And all for such a small thing. Ugh. When I put it all into words to tell her about it, it seemed stupid somehow.

  “They’re probably just being polite,” Mei said.

  “…Maybe.”

  “I find it hard to believe they’d be worried about your feelings.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Because Sakakibara is a name inextricably associated with death. And not just any death, at that: a cruel, senseless death that plays itself out at school.”

  “Associated with death…”

  “Yeah.”

  Mei nodded quietly and held her hair down as the wind tossed it.

  “That bothers everyone. So…maybe they’re not aware of it. Like a wound they’re protecting.”

  “…What does that mean?”

  What was she talking about?

  I understood that the word “death” and the concepts it implied were ominous and had always upset people. That was obvious. But…

  “You know, at this school…” Mei’s tone was as cool and detached as ever. “Here, third-year Class 3 is the closest to death of all the classes. More than any other class at any other school. Much more.”

  “Close to death? What does that…?”

  I couldn’t process what she meant by that at all, and I pressed a hand to my forehead. Mei’s right eye, fixed on me, narrowed until it was only a slit.

  “You don’t know anything, do you, Sakakibara?”

  Then she spun back around to look at the field. She rested her chest against the brown railing and angled forward over it, then bent her head back. Standing behind her, I looked up at the sky, too. The cloud cover had increased substantially from earlier.

  I could hear the distant thunder again. Frightened by the sound, crows were cawing, and I saw several pairs of coal-black wings beat their way into the sky from trees in the schoolyard.

  “You don’t know, do you, Sakakibara?”

  Still staring up the sky, Mei Misaki repeated herself.

  “No one’s told you yet.”

  “…Told me what?”

  “You’ll find out soon.”

  There was nothing I could say to that.

  “Also, you’re better off not coming near me.”

  When she said that, I understood even less.

  “You should stop talking to me like this, too.”

  “Why? Why can’t I?”

  “I said you’ll find out soon.”

  “Come on…”

  That didn’t really help. In fact, it didn’t help at all.

  While I was searching for something to say, not sure how to respond to that, Mei Misaki turned her body in silence. Hugging the sketchbook to her chest, she passed by me and headed for the door.

  “I’ll see you, Sa-ka-ki-ba-ra.”

  My body froze instantly, as if she’d cast some repugnant spell on me. But I shook it off quickly and went after her. As I did, another crow cawed in the schoolyard.

  One of the “fundamentals” Reiko had told me the night before came to mind all on its own.

  If you hear the cawing of a crow when you leave the roof, you go back inside by…

  Was it the right leg? Or the left leg?

  Which one was it? Pretty sure it’s the left leg…As I worked through all this, Mei briskly opened the door and disappeared beyond it.

  She’d gone in with her right foot.

  11

  The rain finally started to fall after the end of sixth period. It was a hard rain, like a sudden evening shower out of season.

  As I was getting my things together to go home, worrying about not having an umbrella, my cell phone started to vibrate inside my bag. I had set it on silent. It was a call from my grandmother.

  “I’m leaving right now to come get you. I want you to wait for me at the front gate.”

  It was a welcome message, but my reply was instantly “It’s okay, Grandma. It’ll probably just be sprinkling by the time you get here.”

  “That’s no way for a recovering boy to talk. And what if you got soaked and caught a cold?”

  “But…”

  “No buts, Koichi. All right? You wait until I get there.”

  She hung up then, and I looked around me blankly and sighed.

  “Hey, Sakakibara! You’ve got a cell phone, huh?”

  Right then, someone spoke to me. It was Teshigawara. He rummaged in the inside pocket of his uniform and then pulled out a white phone with a flashy strap tied to it.

  “We’ll be phone buddies. What’s your number?”

  It was still a small selection of middle school students who had their own cell phones. Even at schools in Tokyo, they were about as common as PHS phones. Maybe one in three kids at the most.

  As we traded numbers, I glanced over at the bank of windows. There, all the way at the back, Mei Misaki had already gone.

  I waited till Teshigawara put his phone back in his pocket, then said, “You mind if I ask you something?”

  “Hm?”

  “About that girl Misaki who sits at that desk.”

  “Hm-m-m?”

  “She’s pretty weird. What’s her deal?”

  “You feeling all right, Sakakibara?”

  Teshigawara angled his head with an expression that looked completely serious.

  “Get it together, man.”

  He slapped me on the back heavily and then quickly departed the scene.

  I left the classroom and, as I was heading toward Building A and the front gate, I ran into Ms. Mikami, the assistant teacher, in the hall.

  “How did it go today, Sakakibara? What do you think of your new school?”

  Her questions came with a natural smile. Utterly discombobulated, I replied, “Uh, I think I’ll manage.”

  Ms. Mikami nodded mechanically. “Do you have an umbrella? It’s raining.”

  “Um, Grandma’s—I mean, my grandmother said she’s coming to get me with the car. She called me on my cell phone a minute ago.”

  “You’ll be all right, then. Take care.”

  It was only fifteen minutes later that my grandmother’s black Cedric pulled up to the driveway by the entrance, coming through the rain, the ferocity of which had slackened somewhat.

  There were a couple of students near the entrance who hadn’t been able to leave yet because of the unexpected rain. I quickly climbed into the passenger seat of the car, as if fleeing from their looks.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting, Koichi,” my grandmother greeted me, adjusting her hands on the wheel. “You don’t feel any worse, do you?”

  “Oh, no, I’m fine.”

  “Do you think you’ll get along with your classmates?”

  “I guess…”

  We drove away from the school building and headed slowly over the slick road to the front gate. And on our way out—

  I was leaning against the door, gazing outside, when my eyes fell on her. The rain had slacked off a lot, but it was still more than a drizzle, and she was walking through it without an umbrella, alone.

  Mei Misaki.

  “What’s wrong?” my grandmother asked, j
ust before pulling the car onto the road outside. Something in my reaction must have tipped her off. I hadn’t even made a noise or opened the window or anything.

  “…Nothing. Don’t worry about it,” I answered, then twisted my body around to look back. And yet…

  Mei was already gone. As if she had melted away into the falling rain. That’s how it seemed to me that day.

  Chapter 3

  May II

  1

  “What’s this?”

  I heard Ms. Mikami’s voice. She had posed the question to a boy to my left named Mochizuki. Yuya Mochizuki.

  He was on the small side, pale, and though plain, he was fine-featured. If he really went for it and walked around Shibuya dressed in drag, he could get mistaken for a pretty young thing and get picked up by someone. However, I had yet to speak a word to him since transferring in yesterday. I tried to say hi, but he would instantly look away from me. It was hard to tell if he was just shy or if he had a dark, misanthropic personality.

  Ms. Mikami’s question caused Mochizuki’s cheeks to flush slightly, and he fumbled for a response. “Um…I was trying to make a lemon…”

  “A lemon? This?”

  Darting a glance up at the teacher, who was twisting her head to weird angles, Mochizuki replied in a low voice, “Yes. It’s the scream in a lemon.”

  It was Thursday, my second day at school. We were in fifth period, art class.

  The class, on the first floor of that old school building—Building Zero—was split into six groups, each sitting around their own large worktables. A variety of objects were lined up at the center of each table, like an onion, a lemon, a mug, and so on. The purpose of today’s class was to sketch a still life of these things.

  I’d selected a mug set beside an onion and begun drawing in pencil on the drawing paper we’d been given. Apparently Mochizuki had chosen a lemon, but I dunno…

  Craning my neck, I snuck a look at the paper in front of him. I got a glimpse of it and—

  Yeah, I get it now. There was plenty of reason for Ms. Mikami to be asking questions.

  He had drawn some grotesque thing, shaped nothing like any of the subjects on the table.

  When he said it was a lemon, okay, I could just barely make it out. But it was more than twice as stretched out as the lemon in front of me, tall and spindly, plus the outline was all wavy in uneven bumps. On top of that, he’d drawn the same kind of wavy, bumpy lines (they looked like special-effect lines to me) all around it…