Struck momentarily dumb, I chased after Mei, into the park.
Leaning back on the bar and arching her back, she let out an “Ah-h-h.” It was a fed-up sigh unlike anything I’d heard from her up till now. That’s how it sounded.
I walked up to the other bar without a word, and matched Mei’s pose. She seemed to have been waiting for that.
“By the way, Sakakibara—”
The gaze of her right eye, unobscured by her eye patch, arrested me.
“There’s still something important we haven’t talked about.”
“Yeah?”
“Come on. How you’ve become the same as me now.”
“Oh…”
Right. There was that.
The things that had happened at school today, that had given me a personal experience of the decision that the class had enacted on Mei. From my perspective, of course, it was a huge issue.
“You can probably pretty much imagine why they did it.”
Even so…
Not to sound craven, but I could honestly say that I hadn’t gotten my thoughts that far ordered yet. Maybe she guessed that, because Mei started to tell a story, her attitude like someone lecturing a thickheaded student.
“Mizuno’s sister died and Takabayashi died, so there are already two ‘deaths of June.’ So there’s no more doubting that this is an ‘on year.’ I’m sure everyone came to the natural conclusion that the talisman wasn’t working because you talked to me. Even the people who only half-believed it before couldn’t half-believe it anymore.”
I couldn’t answer.
“So then, what should they do? If they let it go on, the ‘disasters’ might keep on coming. More people would die. They say that once it starts, it won’t stop. But there must be some way to stop it. Even if it can’t be stopped, maybe there’s a way the ‘disasters’ can be weakened. That’s how people normally think.”
I spread both my arms out to grip the bar I was leaning back against. My palms were pretty sweaty and they slipped against the metal. Mei went on talking.
“They probably considered two strategies there.”
“Two?”
“Yeah. One would be to pull you into line now, at least, and do everything they could to keep treating me like I’m ‘not there.’ But that might be too weak. Even if it had some effect, you could hardly call it a decisive blow.”
I see—at last, I was getting the idea.
The moment Ms. Mizuno’s death had become known, the kind of discussion Mei was talking about had been held. That had been last Thursday. After I’d been released by the detectives from the Yomiyama P.D., I’d gone back to the classroom, but there’d been no one there. It was the period for our extended homeroom. In order to have the discussion without my finding out, they’d gone to a conference room in Building S, like Mochizuki had told me.
“Then the other of the two methods was…”
When I said that, Mei nodded quietly and picked up where I’d left off. “Raise the number of people who are ‘not there’ to two.”
“…Huh.”
“They figured that by doing that, maybe they’d be able to strengthen the effect of the talisman. As for who suggested it…Maybe it was the tactical officer, Akazawa. From the very beginning, she’s seemed like—how should I put it?—a hard-liner about this issue.”
I could believe that Izumi Akazawa’s being chosen as the new class representative for the girls that day might have had an effect on other developments in the class.
“At any rate, they talked about the ‘strategy’ going forward and decided to do that. And then today, you became the same as me.”
That gathering this morning had been held to confirm the “additional countermeasures” they were going to carry out starting today, and it had been held in secret from me. When he’d gotten news of Ikuo Takabayashi’s death over the weekend—
“But look.”
Even so, I still couldn’t completely accept it.
“That kind of thing…There’s no guarantee it’ll have any effect. And yet they’d go that far anyway?”
“I told you, everyone is desperate.”
Mei’s words were forceful.
“In May and June, four people actually died. If things go on like that, they could be next, or their parents or siblings. If you think about it in concrete terms, it’s not so crazy.”
“Yeah…”
…That was true.
If you supposed that every month a “sacrifice” would be taken at random from the people related to third-year Class 3, it could even be Mei next, or me. It could be Kirika—Mei’s mother, whom I’d just met—or it could be my grandparents. It didn’t seem possible, but could it even get my dad, away in India? I could picture it in my mind, but I still just didn’t have the sense of immediacy that Mei was talking about.
“Do you think it’s illogical?” she asked me.
Instantly, I replied, “Yeah, I do.”
“How about if you think about it like this?”
Mei leaned her back away from the bar and turned to face me. Without so much as holding down her hair as the wind scattered it, she said, “There may not be any guarantee…But if there’s even the slightest chance that this strategy will put a stop to the ‘disasters,’ isn’t that good enough? I always thought so, and that’s why I agreed to be the one who’s ‘not there.’”
I couldn’t say anything.
“It’s not like there’s anyone in the class who’s my ‘best friend,’ as everyone likes to call them. What Mr. Kubodera said about ‘needing to overcome the suffering together’ and ‘graduating as a class’ feels totally creepy and totally fake, it’s true…But it’s sad when people die. Even if I won’t feel the sadness directly, there are plenty of other people who will.”
Incapable of responding, I fixed my eyes on the movement of Mei’s lips.
“We don’t know yet if these ‘additional countermeasures’ will be effective. But if the two of us stop existing, maybe that’ll put a stop to any further calamities. Maybe nobody will have to be sad because someone died. If there’s even a whisper of a chance that’s true, I think it’s all right.”
As I listened to Mei talk, the words Mochizuki had spoken to me on Saturday came to mind.
Just tell yourself that it’s for everyone’s benefit. Please.
But I couldn’t care less about pretty ideals like that. Even the way Mei was explaining it now, the phrase “for everyone’s benefit” carried still another nuance. I could sense that, and plus—
If I were to roll over now and accept that I would be treated as if I were “not there”…
If I did that, how would that affect our—my and Mei’s—relationship, I wondered.
We’d be able to interact without having to worry about what anyone else thought, as the two fellow “non-existers” in the class.
At any rate, we would have to be completely “nonexistent” to everyone. Which meant, from our perspective, that everyone else in the class besides us would become “not there”…
And right then, I thought maybe that would be okay, too.
It came alongside a faint bewilderment, a faint regret, and a faint fidgetiness whose true shape not even I could really grasp.
We left the park and went up the road along the levee on the Yomiyama River, the round moon in the night sky tingeing the spaces between the clouds…Finally, at the foot of the bridge that crossed the river, we parted ways.
“Thanks. Take care going home,” I told her. “If you believe the stuff you told me today, you’re just as close to ‘death’ as Sakuragi and Ms. Mizuno were. So…”
“You’re the one who needs to be careful, Sakakibara,” she answered unflappably, then stroked the tip of her right middle finger diagonally across the eye patch that covered her left eye. “I’ll be fine.”
How could she say that with such certainty? Something about it seemed odd, and I narrowed my eyes. As I did so, Mei dropped her hand from her eye patch and reached it ou
t to me.
“I look forward to not existing with you tomorrow. Sa. Ka. Ki. Ba. Ra.”
She shook my hand lightly. Her hand felt surprisingly cold…But my own body felt a growing heat, as if fired up by the sensation.
She spun around and walked off down the street we’d come by. I could only see her from the back so I can’t say for certain, but I thought I saw her hands pull the eye patch from her left eye then.
7
I had at some point sunk into sleep, but I was jerked out of it.
The cell phone I had tossed to one side of my bed was vibrating, flashing a tiny green light. Who could that be? It was pretty late at night. Could Teshigawara want something? Or maybe…
I sprawled on my stomach and stretched a hand out for the phone.
“Heya.”
At the very first word, I knew who my caller was. I absently muttered “What do you want?” which he heard.
“Now, now, I shouldn’t need a reason!”
My father, Yosuke, was calling from his scorching foreign land. It had been a long time since he’d last called, I thought, but what timing…
“I bet India is hot. Is it night there?”
“I just had curry for dinner. How are you doing?”
“Physically, I’m fine.”
My father probably didn’t know yet about the string of deaths among my classmates and their families. I probably ought to tell him. But then I’d have to mention the things I’d heard from Mei today, too, and…
After some thought, I decided not to.
Even if I told him a simplified version, it probably wouldn’t come across very well, and if I wanted to give him the full explanation, that would take too much time. And besides, supposedly there was that rule that “you can’t even tell your family.”
Then maybe you’re not actually supposed to know.
The last time I’d run into Mei in the basement display room of “Twilight of Yomi,” she’d told me something similar.
If you found out, then maybe…
What had she meant by that?
That if “I never found out about it,” the “risk of death” was ever so slightly lower or something? That was something to consider, too.
I decided to avoid any very complex topics on this international phone call and tried approaching my father from a different angle.
“Hey, this might sound strange.”
“What’s that? You in love?”
“Cut it out. It’s nothing that stupid.”
“Oho. So sorry.”
“Did Mom ever tell you any memories she had from middle school?”
“Say what?”
I got the impression that my dad was pretty gobsmacked on the other end of the call.
“Why’re you asking that again, out of the blue?”
“Mom went to the same middle school I’m going to here. North Yomi Middle School. Do the words ‘third-year Class 3’ mean anything to you?”
“Uh-h-h…” My dad mumbled frowningly, then was silent for several seconds. However, the answer he gave me after all that came down to one word: “Nope.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Well, I mean, she probably did tell me stories about middle school, but then if you’re asking me to retell them now…Was Ritsuko in third-year Class 3, then?”
Hm-m-m…I guess this was the memory power of a man over fifty.
“By the way, Koichi.”
This time my dad asked me the question.
“It’s two months you’ve been there now, so how does Yomiyama seem, a year and a half later? Not much different?”
“Mrrm…” I cocked my head, the phone still pressed to my ear. “A year and a half later? But this is the first time I’ve been here since starting middle school.”
“Eh? That doesn’t seem right…”
There was a kksh of interference and my father’s voice crackled.
I held the phone away from my ear for a second. Oh right, I recalled, this room’s got terrible reception. I checked the bars on the edge of the screen. There was just barely one bar, but the interference was getting worse and worse. Ksshkksh, kkkshkshkkssh…
“…Hm-m?”
I made out my father’s voice through the snapping interference.
“Oh, right. You’re right. I must be remembering wrong about…”
His tone sounded as if he had just then remembered something. But the rest was obscured by interference and grew increasingly unclear. In the end, the call dropped completely.
I gazed down at the zero bars on the LCD screen for a little bit, then lazily set the phone down beside my pillow.
All at once, brrr, a shudder ran through me like a powerful chill. My whole body…no, not just my physical body. The same shudder went through my mind, too.
…I’m scared.
One beat later, the words came.
I’m scared. Terrified. It was these feelings that had made me shudder.
The saga concerning third-year Class 3 that I had heard from Mei Misaki today—it was because of that. It hadn’t been so bad as I was listening or for a little while after, but now, all of a sudden…There was a time lag, like the sore muscles that came after exercise.
I felt as if the translucent gauze that had been obscuring the reality of events behind a kind of tenuousness had abruptly disappeared. Laid bare, touched by shades of the utmost reality, terror assaulted me…
Third-year Class 3 is the closest to death.
We’ve drawn nearer to “death.”
If they let it go on, the ‘disasters’ might keep on coming.
They say that once it starts, it won’t stop…
If everything Mei said was true and, on top of that, if the “additional countermeasures” that had begun today weren’t effective…
That meant someone else would get dragged to their death.
It could be me—there was that chance, of course. (God, it’s a little late for that…)
There were thirty students in third-year Class 3. Twenty-eight, minus Sakuragi and Takabayashi. For convenience’s sake, say the targets were limited only to the students in the class. Then there was, simplistically speaking, a one-in-twenty-eight chance that this very night, I could…
The tragedy of Yukari Sakuragi that I had witnessed and Ms. Mizuno’s elevator accident that I had heard over the phone as it was happening…They tangled and melted into one another and became a somber, crookedly shaped net spreading over my heart like a spiderweb.
There in the middle of it…
The scratches on Mei’s desk in the classroom flitted suddenly, in tight close-up, through my brain.
Who is “the casualty”—?
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ANOTHER, Volume 1
YUKITO AYATSUJI
Translation: Karen McGillicuddy
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.
Another ©Yukito Ayatsuji 2009.
First published in Japan in 2009 by KADOKAWA SHOTEN Co., Ltd., Tokyo.
English translation rights arranged with KADOKAWA SHOTEN Co., Ltd., Tokyo through TUTTLE-MORI AGENCY, INC., Tokyo.
English translation © 2013 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected].
Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Yen Press
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The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
First eBook edition: March 2013
ISBN: 978-0-316-25275-1
Contents
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Part 1: What?…………Why?
Introduction
Chapter 1: April
Chapter 2: May I
Chapter 3: May II
Chapter 4: May III
Chapter 5: May IV
Interlude I
Chapter 6: June I
Chapter 7: June II
Chapter 8: June III
Interlude II
Chapter 9: June IV
Newsletters
Copyright
Another, Volume 1 Page 24