Book Girl and the Scribe Who Faced God, Part 2

by Mizuki Nomura

  The blood boiled in my body and rose to my head all at once. In the midst of violent dizziness and confusion, the scattered pieces all came together, as if blown into place by a sudden wind.

  I advanced to stand beside Tohko.

  “What Tohko’s saying is true. Ryuto loved you more than anyone. He told me that. He said that Tohko’s mother was his first love.”

  “He meant Yui obviously,” Kanako muttered in exasperation.

  “No, it was you. You’re Tohko’s real mother!”

  Kanako looked at me in surprise. Tohko gasped, too.

  Even I was flabbergasted and confused, and I was the one who’d said it.

  How could Yui and Tohko not really be mother and child?

  So then had Tohko received such cruel treatment from her real mother? Had this woman ignored her real daughter? Had Ryuto continued to love her even so? While burning with twisted hatred, obsession, and love?

  The air became harsh and taut. Fired by a hot wind whirling inside my body, I pressed her.

  “We visited the hospital in Iwate where Tohko was born. The nurse who saw her said she looked just like her mother.

  “But Tohko and Yui’s features aren’t that much alike. Even Mr. Sasaki told me that the way they laughed and the impressions they gave off were identical, but he never said a word about them resembling each other physically. The one who resembles Tohko more than Yui is you, Kanako!”

  Their hairstyles and the vibes they gave off were totally different, so I’d never noticed.

  But seeing them both up close like this and comparing them—their eyes, their noses, their lips, the whiteness of their skin, and their slender builds were so like the other’s that it would be unnatural for them not to be related.

  I’d seen in photos that in middle school, Kanako’s black hair had been straight and cut short above her shoulders. If she grew her hair out and put it in braids, she would look even more like Tohko.

  Kanako was glaring at me with glacial eyes. They made me think I could hear the moan of a blizzard in my ears.

  “I heard Fumiharu would go home early to take care of Yui before Tohko was born. But the nurse said Yui gave birth alone! So then where was Fumiharu going after work?

  “He was spending his time at home with Yui after all. You were the one in the hospital!” I declared unequivocally. “You gave birth to Tohko as Yui. There’d been a romantic relationship between you and Fumiharu. Tohko is your and Fumiharu’s daughter! Ryuto realized it, too, seeing your and Tohko’s faces in the same house all the time. He realized that you were Tohko’s mother and Tohko was his sister by blood—”

  That was all the more reason that Tohko was “special” to Ryuto.

  Tohko must have known, too. That’s why she’d gone to the hospital to confirm it. No matter how she was treated, she couldn’t hate Kanako.

  Tohko listened to me speak with a frail look on her face.

  How must it have felt to be continually treated as a “nonexistent child” by her real mother? How had she dealt with that despair? Just imagining it made my chest constrict.

  Kanako spoke in a sharp voice.

  “You think I took on the part of Yui to give birth? Why would I need to do something so convoluted as that?”

  Her gaze as she stared at me was like needles of ice. They lanced into me. My mind was taken up by the transformation in Kanako’s expression.

  “… The fact that Yui was pregnant is established from Mr. Sasaki’s statements. So then where did Yui’s baby disappear to? In The Immoral Passage, your counterpart Arisa strangles the baby Toco. After Haru and Yuiko’s deaths, Arisa finds only a doll and Toco’s corpse at their apartment—

  “But you can’t actually hide a baby’s body. So then maybe the baby was never born? Maybe Yui had a miscarriage.”

  Kanako’s face was taut. I fixed my gaze even more directly on her.

  “The child who should have been named Tohko no longer existed. That’s why you gave your child the name Tohko and gave her to Yui. In order to save Yui—”

  Kanako gritted her teeth and I saw her eyes flash with loathing, and I felt sure that what I was imagining was right.

  The reason Fumiharu had hurried home was not to care for his wife who was close to giving birth, but instead because he couldn’t leave his wife’s side after her miscarriage. Yui had probably been in no condition to be left unsupervised.

  And perhaps Kanako had also been the cause of Yui’s miscarriage—

  “Ridiculous. I hated Yui!” Kanako shouted, spitting the words out.

  Tohko’s face crumpled as if she’d been hurt by that, and she clutched her skirt tightly in both hands.

  My spirit wavered for a moment, too.

  The wall that stood in front of Kanako was high and forbidding, and it wasn’t going to be broken down easily. I could see the answer, but I couldn’t communicate it to her. Everything was rejected. Even the words I unleashed were repelled by a cold blade.

  But seeing Tohko with her head bowed, looking on the verge of tears, I thought, I’ve got to do this. Tohko had experienced this pain for a long time. I had to break her chains of sorrow here and now. I would drag the truth out of Kanako.

  I cut into Kanako straight on.

  “That’s a lie. You’re a liar, Kanako!”

  Tohko’s shoulders quivered, and she looked up at me.

  Kanako’s gaze burned with rage. If I was the way I used to be, I would have quailed at such harsh eyes and faltered. But the fear I’d felt toward her up until now had blown away in that instant.

  My brain burned. The inside of my chest was thrumming.

  “Since it looks like you can’t talk to Tohko, I’ll make you talk to me instead.”

  My words were nothing more than the playacting of a child. Even so, I had to get it across.

  To this author of ice. Right now, me, with my words!

  “I read your book. It was a story I never could have written.

  “They say you and the Amanos were the models for it. But you mixed in some author’s liberties and completely altered the truth. In the story, Arisa feels that Yuiko’s husband, Haru, has a kindred consciousness, and she becomes obsessed. Saying they share the goal of the supreme novel. Because of that, she thinks Yuiko and Toco are obstacles and she hates them. Yuiko is jealous of Arisa, too. But the reality was different.”

  Kanako’s expression changed from fire to ice. Her eyes were bitingly cold and their pupils were vacant.

  “No, it wasn’t. She would be beaming on the surface anytime at all, but underneath that she was ugly and jealous. And yet she pretended to be a good girl and clung to me and it was miserable.”

  I asked her, “Really?”

  Though I donned a calm air, my heart was uneasy and my gut hurt, as if it was twisting into knots.

  How could I knock the walls down? Could I expose the truth within?

  Could I change the dark, sad story into a story of love and kindness the way the clear-eyed book girl had shown me up till now?

  Tohko stared at me with an intense gaze, as if she was praying for something.

  Tohko had told the stories for me on a sunny day at the beginning of summer, in a church in the middle of the night, at a shadowy estate, on a stage with crowds of people watching, on the floor of a moonlit factory, below a starry sky twinkling with stars.

  Her long braids swaying, gazing at whomever she faced without fear, a smile on her face—

  The sight of her came up vividly on the insides of my eyelids.

  I sucked in a breath and calmed my heart.

  All right. It was going to start here.

  “In Immoral Passage you have Arisa say that Yuiko is Juliette married to Jerome. Haru is Jerome and she’s Alissa.

  “Gide’s Strait Is the Gate is the story of Jerome dedicating his heart to Alissa and of Alissa, who rejects his love and passes through the gate that leads to God. Juliette has love for Jerome, but her feelings aren’t reciprocated. In Jerome’s story, Juliet
te is nothing more than a supporting character. Jerome’s gaze is turned exclusively on Alissa. But what were things like from Alissa’s perspective?”

  It was what Tohko always said.

  There isn’t one way to read a story. As many characters as there are, there are that many different stories.

  “That’s why I try to read stories over again with the feelings of different characters. Because when I do that, it gives birth to new stories.”

  “When I notice something I never noticed before, it feels like discovering treasure.”

  In the soft, golden light, Tohko, sitting on a fold-up chair with her feet pulled up, turning the pages of a book propped on her knees, telling a story in a clear voice.

  No, the story I was about to tell wasn’t Jerome’s story.

  It was the story of Alissa and Juliette.

  “—Alissa and Juliette were sisters, but they were total opposites. Quiet, devout Alissa and cheerful, flippant Juliette. If Alissa was holiness, Juliette was worldliness—but actually, Juliette was also a wise girl deeply intimate with poetry and music. Juliette withdrew from Jerome for Alissa’s sake and became the wife of a man who asked for her hand. Meanwhile, Alissa knew how Juliette felt and she, too, refused Jerome’s proposal. The two of them were sisters who were dear friends and considerate of each other that way.”

  Tohko had told me that Kanako and Yui had been best friends since middle school.

  There had been photos of the two of them in that album that had fallen out of the closet, too.

  They were constantly together. Yui smiling, Kanako with a cold gaze—

  Kanako had said that Yui was an annoyance.

  That she’d hated Yui.

  But then why had she stayed with her?

  Why, even after they went on to separate high schools and then out into the world, had she continued to be at her side? Shouldn’t Kanako have been able to cut her ties with Yui, since she didn’t fear being alone? So then why didn’t she?

  “The sisters’ relationship starts to change with Juliette’s wedding. At first it was a loveless marriage. But over the years, she becomes attached to her husband, adapted to her husband, and stops playing piano and reading. Alissa disapproves of that and writes a letter to Jerome. She suggests that Juliette is only putting on a play of being happy and asks whether in doing so she might have started to honestly feel that way—”

  “As it happens, the thing making my little sister happy is something very different from what she once thought about and different again from what we thought her happiness would attach to.”

  “… Ah, why does the thing we call ‘happiness’ have such a deep link to the soul? And how valueless are the many things which seem from without to give it shape?”

  “When Juliette was nearly ready to give birth and Alissa went to visit her, Alissa was overtaken by an inscrutable gloom and she couldn’t be at ease. Could it be that Alissa was saddened at how her little sister had been changed by marriage? Feeling as if the sister who’d been in the same world as her had gone off to another realm?

  “In Jerome’s perspective, not much is written about the details of Alissa and Juliette’s day-to-day lives. But we can imagine that for the shy Alissa, Juliette, the sister who shared her blood and was always nearby, was someone that she could allow into her heart. Reading books and sharing their impressions of them, Alissa listening to Juliette playing the piano, exchanging gifts on Christmas or birthdays, occasionally talking about the future—they might have spent their time like close friends.”

  Kanako was looking at her computer screen with a gaze as silent and frozen as the midwinter sky. Not even her eyelashes or fingertips made the slightest movement.

  I wove my words together.

  “They say the inspiration for Alissa was Gide’s wife, Madeleine. She was his cousin, two years older than him, and she resembles Alissa in a lot of respects, but she was a woman who was not exactly Alissa. Are you familiar with the diary Gide wrote about his married life with her, Kanako?”

  Her face still turned away in a profile as beautiful and sculpted as a statue, I posed this question to her.

  Gide’s hidden diary, which I’d read at the library.

  What was written in it was the thorny conflict of Gide’s soul over the fact that he loved Madeleine but couldn’t be one with her physically.

  “Gide was gay and he couldn’t love his wife physically, so their marriage was a ‘chaste union.’ While Gide was on a trip with someone he was having an affair with, Madeleine burned all his letters and they had a misunderstanding. Even so, even after her death, Gide continued his pursuit to understand Madeleine.

  “Women who resemble her appear repeatedly in his writings. Madeleine is the wellspring of Gide’s creativity. She was an irreplaceable presence.”

  Kanako maintained her silence, her lips pressed together, and so I crisply declared, “You and Yui were Alissa and Juliette! And at the same time, you were Gide and Madeleine!”

  Kanako still didn’t move. Her heart was shut tight, sealing her words in. That was how she waited for her opponents to wear themselves out, to lose heart and go away.

  Did she think I was going to give up?

  “Kanako, you felt as if Juliette pulled away from you when she got married, and it made you feel lonely, didn’t it?

  “I heard that you would constantly summon Fumiharu to your office on days off. They said your relationship with him was a ‘chaste union.’ I’m sure there was a powerful bond between you, the author, and Fumiharu, the editor. Fumiharu was also the one who discovered you and sent your maiden novel out into the world.

  “But the one you truly loved wasn’t Fumiharu; it was Yui, wasn’t it? And you called Fumiharu to your office in order to make him jealous, not Yui, and to pull the two of them apart.”

  Why had she stayed at her side even after their schools and positions had changed?

  Had she been that obsessed?

  The suffocating atmosphere drew out for a long time. Kanako still wasn’t breaking.

  My hands were sweaty.

  “When I came here the other day, you had a lot of photos on your desk. There was also a flower-patterned teacup, a strawberry tart, purple spoon rests…

  “Somehow, it didn’t fit your image and it stuck with me.”

  I stole a glance at the simple black mug on her desk.

  “You’re not using that cup today?”

  Kanako, who’d kept her mouth pressed shut, finally said something.

  “… People can change what cups they use depending on their moods. They can also get a sudden craving for something sweet.”

  “The photos on your desk that day were all of scenery—where were they taken?”

  “… They’re just background material that editing put together for me.”

  “But I felt like I’d seen that scenery somewhere before. Especially that art museum surrounded by woods.”

  I said it slowly.

  “That’s somewhere you and Yui visited on your middle school trip, right?”

  Kanako didn’t answer.

  “The other pictures of schools and streets probably have some link to Yui, too. I saw the same buildings and scenery in Yui’s photo album, so that’s why I had a feeling I’d seen them before.”

  Surprised, Tohko asked, “How do you know about my mom’s photo album, Konoha?”

  Starting to feel awkward, I apologized. “I’m sorry. When I took a blanket out of the closet, the album fell out. I didn’t mean to look at it, but… I just happened to see it.”

  “… I didn’t know that,” Tohko murmured, her eyes swimming around as if there was still something on her mind.

  Just then, Kanako’s voice overlaid itself on ours coldly.

  “All schools look alike. Besides, what’s so strange about having photos of famous tourist spots as background material?”

  My face tensed.

  “That’s true. If it was just the fact that you had those photos, there wouldn’t
be anything strange about it. But there’s something else I noticed.”

  Kanako glared at me penetratingly as I stepped closer to her. I stopped right in front of her desk and tapped my finger lightly on it, right next to the black mug.

  It made a hollow sound.

  “You had a spoon here before, right?”

  A slight crimson was coursing through her cheeks, which had been as pale as ice. I didn’t turn my gaze from it.

  “You had a silver teaspoon and a purple spoon rest shaped like a heart.”

  Kanako pressed her lips together firmly and looked away.

  “In the picture at the art museum, you were wearing a blue glass pendant. And Yui had a barrette shaped like a violet in her hair. Its petals had the same shape as your spoon rest. Did that used to be Yui’s barrette?”

  “Mom’s… barrette!” Tohko shrieked quietly. Then she began talking in a daze. “I knew it! Mom had a barrette shaped like a violet. Aunt Kanako gave it to her, and it was really important to her!”

  Fierce irritation and panic came into Kanako’s eyes. Though my chest burned at the reaction I’d finally managed to drag out, I pursued her even further.

  “Maybe I’m mistaken. Could you show me that spoon rest again? We can have Tohko confirm whether or not it’s her mom’s barrette, too.”

  “Why is there any reason for me to do that?!”

  Kanako’s voice was wild at last, and she fixed a glare on me. I raised my voice, too.

  “If you can’t show us, that’s the same as admitting it’s Yui’s barrette! You went out of your way to make it into a memento of Yui and kept it all this time! You took it out on the anniversary of Yui’s death and with photos of your memories with Yui—maybe even the cup and cake Yui used to like—you grieved Yui’s death! You were wearing black that day! You meant it to be for mourning!”