Still nothing.
“Come on, Misaki…”
“Fine.” Her voice was thin when she answered. “Where are you right now?”
“Still at school. I’m just about to leave.”
“Then why don’t you come here? You know how to get here, right?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Okay. In about thirty minutes, then, I’d say. In the room in the basement. All right?”
“Perfect. I’m leaving now.”
“I’ll tell Grandma Amane you’re coming. I’ll be waiting.”
“Amane” was written with the characters for “at the root of heaven”—that was something I found out later. The word “Grandma” reminded me immediately of the old woman greeting visitors at the table next to the entrance.
6
And so it was that I visited “Blue Eyes Empty to All, in the Twilight of Yomi” for the third time.
The doorbell ringing dully. The voice of the white-haired old woman greeting me. The twilight dimness within the gallery at the cusp of sunset…
“Mei is downstairs,” the old woman said when she saw my face. “You go on in. No need to pay the fee.”
There were no visitors in the gallery on the first floor.
There aren’t any other customers right now, anyway…
Right. The old woman had twice told me that, the two times I’d been here before. That there weren’t any other customers…and yet.
When I’d gone down to the basement, Mei had been there both times.
I had felt a slight nagging in my mind about why that could be, and I’d found it strange…and because of that my mind had been inclined, however slightly, toward the “nonexistence of Mei Misaki.”
But the answer had been the simplest thing imaginable.
Now that I knew, there was nothing strange about it at all. There hadn’t been any secret meaning in the old woman’s words; she had simply given me the bare facts at the time.
There aren’t any other customers anyway…
She’d been exactly right.
Because Mei wasn’t a customer. This building, including this gallery—this was her home.
I slipped between the ranks of dolls on quiet steps, heading for the back staircase. Once again consciously taking deep breaths for the lifeless dolls.
The music playing in the museum today was not string music: it was a haunting female vocalist. The lyrics, backed by an equally haunting melody, weren’t in English or Japanese. It might have been French.
It was a little before four in the afternoon. And in the display room in the crypt-like basement, sunk in a greater chill than the first floor, in the very center of the room—
Mei stood, alone. Wearing a thick, black long-sleeved shirt and black jeans, this was the first time I’d seen her dressed in anything other than her school uniform.
Fighting back the tension rising uncontrollably within me, I raised a hand in a casual wave. “Hey.”
“Well?” she asked me with the faintest of smiles. “How does it feel to not exist?”
“It doesn’t feel great,” I replied, deliberately pursing my lips at her. “But…even so, I kind of feel like a weight is lifted.”
“Oh? And why’s that?”
“Because now I know that Mei Misaki exists.”
However…
Even so, it could be that the girl who’s here in front of me really truly isn’t there…The doubt flitted through my mind, whisper though it was.
I blinked harshly to banish the thought, then fixed my eyes squarely on Mei and took a step closer.
“The first time I met you here—” I spoke the words just so I could hear myself say them. “You told me, ‘I come down here sometimes. Since I don’t hate it in here.’ That day, you didn’t have your bag with you, even though you had just come from school…which tells me that ordinarily you live on the upper floors of this building and ‘come down here sometimes.’ That day, you came home and put down your bag, and then, because you were in the mood, you came down here.”
“Obviously.”
Another faint smile touched Mei’s face as she nodded. I went on. “When I asked you if you lived nearby, you told me, ‘Well, yeah.’ That was…”
“Look, we use the third floor of this building as our house. There’s nothing wrong with saying that’s ‘nearby,’ is there?”
Yeah, so that was what she’d meant.
“That old woman who’s always next to the door—you called her ‘Grandma Amane’?”
“She’s my mom’s aunt. Which makes her my great-aunt. My mom’s mom died young, so as far as I’m concerned, she’s like my grandma.”
Mei spoke diffidently, and without faltering.
“Bright lights aren’t good for her eyes, so she started wearing those glasses all the time. She says she can tell people apart just fine, so I guess it doesn’t affect her work.”
“Was that your mom on the phone?”
“You surprised her. I never get phone calls from kids at school.”
“Oh. Um, maybe I’m just imagining things, but is your mom, uh…”
“Is she what?”
“I mean, is your mom the one who made the dolls here? That Kirika person?”
“Yeah.” Mei nodded without apology. “Kirika is her stage name, I guess you could say. Her real name is a lot more common. She spends most of the day holed up in that workshop on the second floor, making dolls and painting pictures and whatever else. She’s a weirdo.”
“Does the ‘M’ in ‘Studio M’ stand for Misaki?”
“Not so complicated, huh?”
That middle-aged woman in the marigold-colored clothes who’d been on the landing of the outside stairs the second time I’d come here. I had already figured she was involved with the doll studio, but could that have been Mei’s mother—the doll maker Kirika herself?
“What about your dad?”
Mei’s eyes slipped away. “Same as yours,” she replied.
“You mean…he’s overseas?”
“I think he’s in Germany right now. He’s out of Japan more than half the year, and then he’s in Tokyo for more than half of what’s left.”
“Does he work in trade or something?”
“I dunno. I’m not really clear on what his job is. But I guess he’s got tons of money, because he built this place and lets my mom do whatever she wants.”
“Wow.”
“You could call us a family, but it doesn’t feel very connected. Which is fine.”
The fog, like watery ink, that had always surrounded the character of Mei Misaki. For some reason I felt faintly confused at the realization that it was lifting slightly.
“You want to go to the third floor?” Mei asked. “Or did you want to keep talking here?”
“Uh, that’s okay.”
“You can’t really handle this place, can you, Sakakibara?”
“It’s not that I can’t handle it—”
“But you’re not used to it yet, are you? To the air in a place packed with the emptiness of the dolls? You must have a lot more questions.”
“Um, yeah, I do.”
“Then…”
Mei turned silently on her heel. She started to walk off toward the back of the room. She went to one side of the black coffin that held the doll of the young girl that looked so like her; then she disappeared. Lagging by several beats, I hurried after her.
Behind the coffin, the deep red curtain hanging over the wall was swaying slightly again today, in the breeze from the air-conditioning.
Mei glanced back at me, then pulled the curtain open without a word. And there—
A cream-colored steel door.
There was a rectangular plastic button on the wall beside the door.
“Did you know this was here?” Mei asked as she pushed the button.
I nodded to her, my face scrunched up. “When I came over before, you disappeared back here. So I checked behind the curtain that day.”
With the low
whir of a motor, the iron doors opened to either side. It was the door to an elevator that linked the basement with the upper floors.
“Come along, Sakakibara.” Mei got into the elevator, then gestured for me to join her. “We can talk things over upstairs.”
7
Three black leather sofas were set around a low glass-topped table. There was one two-seater and two single-seaters. After plopping into one of the single-seaters, Mei gave a short sigh and then looked at me.
“Go ahead. Sit down, at least.”
“Oh…right.”
“Do you want anything to drink?”
“Uh, no…I’m fine.”
“I’m thirsty. Do you want lemon tea? Tea with milk?”
“Um, whichever.”
We’d come up to the third floor on the elevator, to the Misaki family home. My first impression was how the place seemed barely lived in, if at all.
We’d moved to the spacious living/dining room. The furniture was unpleasantly sparse for the amount of space they had and, to top it off, every detail of the room was too precisely arranged. Even the carelessness of the TV remote being tossed into the center of the table seemed unnatural.
The windows were all closed and the air-conditioning was on. It was still only early June, but the air-conditioning was running surprisingly hard.
Mei stood up from the sofa and went into the kitchen, then immediately returned with two cans of black tea. “Here.” She set one can in front of me. Then, pulling the tab off her own can, she plopped back down on the sofa.
“So?” Mei took a swig of the tea, then looked at me with a cool gaze. “What do you want to talk about first?”
“Uh…well.”
“Why don’t you ask me questions? Maybe that’ll be easier.”
“I thought you hated being interrogated.”
“I do hate it. But today, I’ll allow it.”
Mei spoke in a teacherly tone, then smiled in amusement. Drawn in, my tension was easing, but I quickly got on the ball and straightened my posture.
“All right. Let me just confirm something again,” I said. “Mei Misaki—you’re alive, right?”
“Did you think maybe I was a ghost?”
“I’m not going to say I didn’t have doubts sometimes, to be honest.”
“I guess I can’t blame you.” Mei smiled in amusement again. “But now all your doubts are gone, I hope. If we’re talking on the level of whether or not I exist, then absolutely, I’m alive. A real, flesh-and-blood human being. The only people who think I’m ‘not there’ are the ones in third-year Class 3 at North Yomi. Though actually, that was supposed to have included you, too, Sakakibara.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. But that failed pretty early on. Now you’re like me and…It’s hard to explain.”
I noted down the words that stuck out to me—“failed,” “like me”—in a corner of my mind and asked Mei another question. “When did it start? When did everyone in class start pretending that no student named Mei Misaki existed? Has it always been that way?”
“What do you mean, always?”
“Like, as soon as you started third year? Or before that?”
“Once we joined third-year Class 3, of course. But it wasn’t right away.”
There was no longer a smile on Mei’s face as she answered.
“When the new semester had just started, we thought this year was going to be an ‘off year.’ But then we found out it probably wasn’t going to be, and the discussions wrapped up in April…So, to be accurate, it started on May first.”
“May first?”
“You got out of the hospital and first came to North Yomi on the sixth, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Friday the week before that was the first day. There was a three-day weekend after that, so effectively, that was the third day.”
It had started that recently? That threw me for quite a loop. I had gotten the idea somehow that this had been going on longer—at least before I came to this town—and in a sustained way.
“A lot of stuff must have seemed strange to you after that first day.”
“Well, that’s true.” I nodded deeply to underscore her comment. “Every time I talked to you or said your name, Kazami and Teshigawara…everyone around me would react so weirdly. It looked like they wanted to say something, but nobody ever did.”
“They wanted to tell you, but they just couldn’t do it. I think that’s how it turned out. They wound up cutting their own throats. They should have told you everything before you came to school. They’re paying for it now.”
“What do you mean?”
“You should have done like everyone else and treated me like I’m ‘not there.’ It doesn’t work otherwise…but up till then, I don’t think any of them were taking it that seriously. Remember what I told you? How even I only half-believed it, deep down. How…I didn’t buy into it a hundred percent.”
She was right; I did remember her saying those words, but…
“It’s not just ‘bullying,’ is it?”
I pushed on with my questions.
“No. I don’t think anyone is thinking of it like that.”
“…So then why are you the target?”
Mei cocked her head slightly. “Who knows? It’s kind of just the way things worked out. But I never interacted much with anyone anyway, and plus my name just happens to be Misaki, too…So maybe it seemed perfect. In a way, it almost makes things easier for me, too.”
“Easier? You can’t—”
“I can’t mean that?”
“That’s right, you can’t. There’s no way it’s a good thing that the kids in class, and even the teachers, are ganging up and ignoring a single student.”
My voice grew rougher as I spoke, but Mei let it wash past her.
“I’m pretty sure that the teachers who deal with Class 3 spread the word through different channels than the students.”
Her tone was stubbornly detached.
“For example, not taking class attendance by roll call. There are teachers who do roll call in other classes. But they don’t do it in Class 3. You know, so they don’t have to call my name. Class 3 is the only one that doesn’t have to ‘stand’ and ‘greet,’ too. It’s the same reason the teachers never go down the rows and call on us in order, no matter what class we’re in. I will never be called on, and if I’m absent or I leave halfway through the class, no one’s going to say a word about it. And I’m excused from all cleaning rotations and everything else. The teachers reached that understanding amongst themselves. And when the midterms rolled around, I guess they weren’t allowed to excuse me from that, but they didn’t care how lazy I was when I filled out answer sheets just to get out of there, did they? Just like everything else…”
“So gym class, too, then?”
“Gym class what?”
“Since they split gym class into boys and girls, I heard that Class 1 and 2 have gym together and Class 4 and 5 have their gym together, but Class 3 is the only one by itself. I thought that was kind of weird. You could argue that one class has to be the odd one out since there’s an uneven number, but why would it be Class 3?”
“So other classes don’t get pulled in. So the number of students affected doesn’t go up. Maybe they do it out of some kind of concern like that. Although there’s always been an ‘arrangement’ for gym class that the person who’s ‘not there’ doesn’t participate and sits out whenever they can.”
“An arrangement, huh?”
That word called up a memory.
Obey whatever the class decides.
The third “North Yomi fundamental” that Reiko had taught me. And then last week, Thursday, when the classroom was empty, Mr. Kubodera had said…
We need to obey whatever the class decides, without fail. All right?
I let out a deep sigh, feeling overwhelmed, and reached for the can of tea Mei had brought me. It was bitingly cold lemon tea. I pulled the tab off the top and drank hal
f the can in one go.
“If we go through listing every single thing, I don’t think we’re ever going to finish.”
I looked back at Mei’s face.
“Basically, the same thing that’s been happening to you since the beginning of May started happening to me this morning. So with everything I went through today, I felt like I had a pretty good idea of what was going on. But the thing I still don’t understand is why are they doing it?”
Yes. The question was “why?”
It wasn’t simple “bullying.” Mei, the one going through it, had even said so. And I agreed. But on the other hand…
The students and the teachers had agreed to treat one particular student as if they’re “not there.” In a normal context, no, that wasn’t “simple” bullying. It was heinous, over-the-top bullying. That was why my voice had gotten so raw before when I said, “There’s no way doing something like that is a good thing.” But…
Thinking about this by forcing the word or the concept of “bullying” onto it, at least, was wrong; it didn’t make sense. That fact was inescapable.
There was probably no malice in what they were doing, whether student or teacher, like in so-called bullying. If there was no contempt or mockery of their target, then there was also no intent to try and strengthen their group ties by singling her out…That’s how I thought of it.
What they had instead was fear and dread…That’s also how I saw it.
Before, I’d thought they were afraid of Mei, but it wasn’t that. Rather, it was like fear and dread not of Mei herself, but of something they couldn’t see…
“Everyone’s desperate now,” Mei said.
“Desperate?”
“Sakuragi and her mother died in those accidents in May, so they couldn’t say they only half-believed it anymore. And then once June started, there were two more. It’s begun, for sure.”
…Which didn’t explain much.
“So then…I mean, why is that?” I asked, each word a gasp for oxygen to my depleted lungs. “How is any of that related to anything else? Why would that make everyone gang up on someone and act like they’re ‘not there’? It’s so pointless.”
“Why? You really think that, don’t you?”
Another, Volume 1 Page 20