Book Girl and the Famished Spirit

by Mizuki Nomura

  Takamizawa, who had helped to rescue us, brought us tea in thin, white porcelain cups. He was tall without a hair out of place, and he wore a well-tailored suit. Apparently he worked for Maki’s grandfather. He had also been the one to bring a first aid kit from the first floor and treat Tohko’s burnt hands.

  He gave a crisp bow and left the room, leaving only Tohko, Maki, and myself.

  Tohko was hugging the sketchbook she’d brought from Amemiya’s house to her chest, sitting in a metal folding chair, looking down at the ground with a tight-lipped expression on her face. Her right hand was bandaged.

  Tohko had been like this the entire time in the car, her face tense as she took the student handbook out of her bag and looked through it, then furrowing her brow even more, all in total silence.

  In contrast, Maki was in a buoyant mood.

  “The tea he makes is top-notch. You need to try it. What’s wrong? You’re so sullen. Well, I suppose you must be in shock. You were almost roasted like a Christmas goose.”

  Without lifting her head, Tohko murmured, “Hey, Maki… How come you were at Hotaru’s house?”

  Holding her cup of tea in one hand, Maki leaned back against a windowsill and smiled faintly.

  “I told you in the car. Since you two were running all over the place about this thing with Hotaru Amemiya, it made me wonder. I decided to do some investigating of my own. When I got to Amemiya’s house, I saw a window was broken and the room was in total chaos and there was smoke billowing up from the basement, which caught me by surprise. I’m just glad I got there in time.”

  “… Is that really all?”

  Tohko set the sketchbook on the table and rose to her feet.

  “A girl in Hotaru’s class said that Hotaru had stolen your boyfriend. I had no idea you and she were in a love triangle.”

  “Seriously. This is the first I’ve heard of it myself.” Maki shrugged it off with a strange expression. “I wonder how these crazy rumors get started.”

  “You said that in middle school you and Hotaru were in the art club together, but you didn’t know each other very well. But you actually knew about Hotaru and Kayano and who Kurosaki really is, didn’t you?”

  Tohko’s and Maki’s eyes locked.

  Tohko’s clear, intelligent black eyes and Maki’s brown eyes, usually sparkling with superiority, stabbed at each other.

  I gulped and watched their confrontation.

  “I don’t know what you mean, Tohko,” Maki replied, her lips carved into a smile. The haughty, formidable look on her face was exactly the same as the one she’d used on me the day before. It was no easy task to get the truth out of this girl. Did Tohko have any chance against her?

  After staring at Maki for a few moments, Tohko started walking.

  Her shoes clicking on the floor and her braids swinging, she stopped in front of a bookshelf. She pulled a book out with long, slender fingers and read the title in a strong voice.

  “Wuthering Heights—Emily Brontë’s problematic work of the nineteenth century, right in the middle of the Victorian era. Wuthering refers to the violence of a storm blowing across hills that can offer nothing to oppose the passing rain and wind, as well as to the sound they make as they rage over the land.”

  I was confused. What was the connection between Maki and that book?

  With the book still in hand, Tohko began to talk, her words like a river overrunning its dam.

  “The story begins in 1801 with a misanthropic gentleman named Lockwood who has grown weary of life in the city and is visiting a stout manor on a windblown hill. Lockwood listens to his cook Nelly tell the story of a man and woman from Wuthering Heights and the oppressive history of love and hatred between the people around him.

  “In the summer of 1771, at the beginning of the harvest, the master of the house, named Earnshaw, has just come back from business in Liverpool, where he picked up a small boy. Dirty and dressed in rags, the boy is given the name of Earnshaw’s oldest son who has passed away—Heathcliff—and he begins living at the mansion at Wuthering Heights.

  “Earnshaw also had a daughter, Catherine, and his younger son and heir, Hindley. Hindley is jealous of Heathcliff, who has become the chief object of his father’s affection, and he begins to hold darkly warped feelings toward him. But Catherine befriended Heathcliff immediately. The two would go out to the moors surrounding the house nearly every day to play. It was as if one soul were shared between two people; they were utterly inseparable.

  “But six years later, Earnshaw died and Hindley took everything from Heathcliff. He thoroughly scorned him, despised him, abused him, and treated him like a slave.

  “A large gulf developed between Catherine and Heathcliff’s stations, one a fine lady and the other a servant.

  “During all this, Catherine makes the acquaintance of Edgar, the heir to the Linton family, which lives in Thrushcross Grange at the foot of Wuthering Heights. The son of a good family and indulgently educated, Edgar is transfixed by Catherine’s beauty, and Catherine accepts his advances and decides to marry him. When he finds out about it, Heathcliff experiences such despair that he disappears from Wuthering Heights.”

  As I listened to Tohko, the rhythm of her voice like the moaning wind gusting over the moors, I thought of Kayano and Aoi.

  The young boy acquired on a trip, the manor on a windswept hill, the strong-minded little girl who lived there—the boy and girl uniting their souls and spending all their time together, but the little girl’s father who had watched over them dies and everything changes.

  The boy becomes a servant, and because she is a fine lady, the girl can no longer speak to him casually. Then the little girl grows up to be beautiful and betrays the boy, becoming the wife of a rich young man.

  The story Tohko told of Heathcliff and Catherine was exactly like Aoi and Kayano’s story!

  “Three years later in the autumn of 1783, Heathcliff has acquired property and tidied himself up and he returns to Wuthering Heights. He pretends to be a placid gentleman on the surface, but he has begun his revenge and first drives Catherine’s brother Hindley into a trap, snatching the estate of Wuthering Heights and all his property from him. Then he seduces Edgar’s younger sister Isabella, Catherine’s sister-in-law, and elopes with her.

  “Catherine begins to lose her mind, and after refusing to eat, she falls ill and dies giving birth to a baby girl. In losing Catherine, who was the other half of his soul, Heathcliff is cast down even further into a pit of raging solitude and despair: He is transformed into a demon bent on revenge.

  “After Hindley’s death, Heathcliff takes over the house at Wuthering Heights and treats Hindley’s son Hareton like a servant, never teaching him to read or write. Then he plots to marry the son his wife, Isabella, bears, Linton, to Catherine’s daughter, who is given the same name as her mother.

  “Swept up in Heathcliff’s evil schemes and lured to Wuthering Heights, the younger Catherine is imprisoned in the manor and forced to marry Linton. While she’s trapped there, her father, Edgar, breathes his last after an illness and Catherine’s husband, Linton, inherits all of her property. However, Linton is sickly and soon dies, and his father, Heathcliff, gains control of the manors and property of both the Earnshaw and Linton families, and the younger Catherine, now a widow, lives with him in the house at Wuthering Heights.”

  The story of people complexly intertwined, entangled, hurting one another, and seizing whatever they can from each other—Tohko related this daunting story with such rawness and heart-wrenching pain that I felt as if it had actually happened. Then the figures of the people I knew overshadowed the story one after another, fitting together like puzzle pieces.

  Kurosaki had married Amemiya’s aunt.

  After Amemiya’s aunt and father died, he became her guardian and took control of her father’s company. Then he got rid of the house Amemiya had grown up in and moved to Kayano’s old house on the hill to live there with Amemiya. He had prevented anyone from getting clos
e to her, using every conceivable means.

  Why had Kurosaki done such things?

  What was his goal?

  “This story is very similar to the situation in which Hotaru finds herself. At first, I didn’t pick up on it, either. I needed a Heathcliff in order to declare that her story was Wuthering Heights. Someone seeking revenge with that same unflagging energy, like an evil spirit of old—someone who radiated with intensity, like the raging winds gusting over Wuthering Heights.

  “Hotaru was nothing more than an anorexic girl living with her uncle who was deeply troubled by something. Even after I met with the housekeeper and found out about Aoi, I couldn’t be certain. Aoi had left the story early on, and I thought he was dead.

  “But if Aoi was still alive—if he changed his name, changed his position, and came back for revenge…”

  Tohko paused and let out a breath and then started up again.

  “According to what Konoha heard from the woman who works at Kurosaki’s company, Kurosaki’s eyes are weak and so he always wears lightly tinted sunglasses, and his hair is dyed light brown. She said he had black hair before he took over, but he bleached his hair right as he assumed control, and the board members disapproved. But was Kurosaki’s hair black originally? Maybe his real hair color is brown, and he just stopped dying it black. And he might wear sunglasses because he doesn’t want people to see the color of his eyes.”

  Tohko wasn’t a detective. She was a book girl who simply read and used her imagination.

  So this wasn’t a deduction; it was a fantasy.

  But the sound of Tohko’s voice and her ideas gripped my heart and were pulling me along in their wake.

  “Aoi was of mixed parentage, and I heard that his hair and eye color was lighter. You know his name means ‘blue’? Apparently Kayano named him that because from a certain angle, she could see a hint of blue in his brown eyes.

  “If Kurosaki is in fact Aoi, then he might try to change his appearance by dyeing his hair and wearing sunglasses so people who knew him wouldn’t recognize him.

  “And if my guess is right and Kurosaki is Aoi, that makes him Heathcliff and Hotaru is Catherine Earnshaw’s daughter, Catherine Linton, and the setup of Wuthering Heights is complete!”

  She fixed her clear black eyes on Maki.

  Her voice still echoing in the workroom, Tohko pressed Maki further. “The reason I didn’t recognize the plot was because you, Maki, already knew about it. Konoha told me that when I went to see the housekeeper, you told him that I’d gone to see Ellen Dean. In Wuthering Heights, Ellen Dean is the housekeeper who worked for both the Earnshaws and the Lintons, but everyone calls her Nelly.

  “She’s also the narrator who observed the entire story and untangled the complex drama of Heathcliff and Catherine’s love-hate relationship and explained it for Lockwood!

  “When Konoha told me you called the housekeeper Ellen Dean, I started to understand a lot of things. The burned notes and the notes with splatters of blood on them—you were the one who put them into our mailbox, weren’t you? Maki?”

  Tohko opened the hardcover book in her hands and started turning the pages quickly, as if she was speed-reading.

  “All the words in those notes appear in Wuthering Heights. ‘The herd of possessed swine’—that’s something Lockwood yells at Heathcliff during a visit to Wuthering Heights when he’s set upon by the dogs they kept in the house. ‘The herd of possessed swine could have had no worse spirits in them than those animals of yours.’ It’s a reference to a parable in the Bible, and there are many other words and phrases in Wuthering Heights that trace back to the Bible.

  “ ‘I shall make you swallow the carving-knife’—that’s a line Hindley directs at Nelly when he comes home drunk. ‘A bird of bad omen’ is something Nelly tells Isabella when she confesses that she’s fallen in love with Heathcliff, and Heathcliff tells Nelly he’ll be painting the walls with Hindley’s blood after he’s taken some abuse from Hindley. ‘Its nest in the winter, full of little skeletons’ is something Catherine says after she’s descended into madness and pulls the feathers out of her pillow and starts arranging them on her bed.

  “And ‘I’m come home’—those are the words of Catherine’s ghost tapping on the wall with her tiny hand, begging to be let inside on stormy nights. After that, Heathcliff opens the windows and bellows into the darkness that swirls with wind and snow, ‘Come in! Come in!’ ”

  Tohko snapped the book shut.

  Maki had a smile on her face. There was dark amusement in it, as if she had been waiting for the moment when Tohko would denounce her, and as she surrendered, it seemed a devilish joy glinted in her eyes.

  “You would have easily been able to pull off the business with the ghost in the book club. You were the one who first revealed that Hotaru was cursed. Remember? And you told me where the housekeeper worked, because you thought that if you had me investigating Kayano, I wouldn’t think about Hotaru, right?

  “But then when you rescued us from the basement, you told Takamizawa to go get the first aid kit and towels. Not go and look for, but go and get. Isn’t that a strange way to ask for something in a house you’ve never been to before? I assumed you had them in your car, but Takamizawa got a first aid kit and towels from a room on the first floor and started treating me too quickly for that. It seemed like you had a pretty good idea where you could find everything in the house.

  “The girl in Hotaru’s class said that a tall man in a suit picked her up in a car. And that people had seen you riding in that man’s car, too, Maki.”

  “Was that Takamizawa by any chance? Those crazy rumors about you and Hotaru being rivals started because you were in contact with Hotaru through him, right? You’ve been to that mansion on the hill before, haven’t you?

  Tohko peppered her with questions.

  “You know, there’s a theory that Nelly skillfully manipulated Heathcliff and Catherine and that it was she who wove together the tragedy in Wuthering Heights. That it was all some scheme of hers. If you read Wuthering Heights from that perspective, everything takes on a new form. Nelly criticizes Heathcliff to Isabella by asking, ‘Is Mr. Heathcliff a man?… And if not, is he a devil?’ but even he is nothing more than a puppet she manipulated. Nelly watched everything, knew everything, and even occasionally changed the course of the story without anyone realizing it. You were Hotaru’s Ellen Dean, weren’t you, Maki?”

  “What if I said I didn’t know?”

  Maki looked at Tohko, the smile still on her face.

  The wind and rain had abated and the workroom, lit by the fading light of sunset, was filled with a sacred silence. As she stood against the windowsill, Maki’s hair sparkled gold, illuminated by a pure light from outside.

  Tohko frowned ever so slightly.

  “I wouldn’t believe you. You gave this book girl too many hints, Maki.”

  Then Tohko’s face became serenely dignified again, and she returned the book to the shelf. She approached the covered canvases and whisked away the sheet that covered one of them.

  Drawn on the long rectangular canvas was the picture I had seen the other day.

  It was a hilly landscape at night, slathered in blacks and blues, looking like a foreign country, like another world. Heavy clouds loomed in the sky, and a harsh wind gusted over the grass and trees, bending them in its wake. I could hear the raging wind and the pounding of the falling rain, stirring my heart up wildly; it was a crazed landscape, heavy and dark, that seemed to bellow.

  Tohko stood beside the painting and crisply declared, “This is Wuthering Heights.”

  Maki closed her eyes in apparent resignation.

  “That’s right. I didn’t think you had read Wuthering Heights… In any case, that ghost you’re so afraid of originated in that story.”

  Tohko had fixed a stern gaze on Maki, but that made her jump and threw her into a panic.

  “How did you know I was afraid?”

  Maki gave Tohko a look and then winked.
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  “Because I love you.”

  Tohko’s eyes bugged out and she turned red. Then she pouted and looked a little sulky before smoothing her face into something more serious.

  “I’m a book girl—I love all the stories the world has to offer. No matter the book, I will taste it and drink it down.”

  Maki probably didn’t realize that Tohko wasn’t speaking metaphorically, but in fact meant exactly what she’d said. Maki’s lips twitched into a small smile. It wasn’t her usual haughty smile: This one was kinder and almost lonely.

  “I suppose that’s it, then. I underestimated you, book girl.”

  Tohko’s face grew gloomy. She scrunched her eyebrows together and her eyes clouded, as if she was suppressing some kind of pain. She moved closer to Maki and asked, “What is Hotaru trying to do? You know, don’t you, Maki? And where is Ryuto?”

  Maki replied, “That all-too-feisty boy is being treated at the hospital of one of my grandfather’s friends. He was stabbed nine times in the stomach, but he’s still alive at least.”

  When she was small, her mother would often take her by the hand, and they would set out for the mansion on the hill.

  The wind never stopped buffeting the house, and the trees surrounding it leaned in odd directions. Whenever she opened her window, the blast of air made her curtains leap up and tore around the room like an unbroken horse in the field, fluttering the pages of a book left on a table.

  “The wind is too strong here. Let’s go to the room downstairs,” her mother would say and lead her to the gray room in the basement.

  “This is a secret room, but I’ll tell you about it.”

  A secret she would share with her mother—her mother’s innocent smile and the sweet, somehow immoral promise in her offer stirred the girl’s heart and made her feel slightly uneasy, as if she was standing on an inescapable precipice.

  “I can’t tell Daddy, either?”

  “That’s right.”

  Her mother rested a thin white finger on her lips.

  “A long time ago, Mommy was friends with a little boy, and we used to play in here. We read books and talked to each other and wrote each other letters.”