by Otsuichi
The road widened near the mountain’s peak, providing space for cars to pull over. There were even a couple of vending machines.
As Miki approached the parking area, he noticed there weren’t any cars around. He stopped his bike and went to look at the view of the mountainside below. The edge of the overlook dropped steeply into an exposed rock face, almost a cliff. A gap in the guardrail opened to a path of stairs leading down the cliffside.
He stood there for a while, gazing at the autumn view. The clouds tinted everything gray, and even the vibrant colors of the fall leaves seemed dull. Miki turned at the sound of a car pulling into the lookout. A young woman stepped out of the driver’s side of the car. She was alone. She wore a business suit and was holding a map. She was walking toward Miki.
Her shoulders bunched up as if she were cold, she said, “I’m sorry, I’m trying to get to the city. Do you know the fastest way?”
She looked at his motorcycle.
“That’s a cool bike you’ve got there. But isn’t it too cold to ride this time of year? Maybe it’s just me—I’ve never been very good with the cold, you know.” She touched her hand to the guardrail, then drew it back with a shiver.
Miki pushed her from behind. She toppled over the rail and down the side of the cliff. He looked around—only after he had done it, not before—to see if anyone had been there to witness it.
He looked to see where she had landed and saw her long hair in the shadow of a tree quite far down the rocks. He took the cliffside stairway down to her.
Even after hitting the ground, she still lived. Her limbs were twisted in unnatural directions. Blood seeped out from her eyes and her mouth. The woman, unaware of what had happened, stared up at him with a dumbstruck expression. Her map had fallen to the ground at her side. Miki picked it up.
He looked at the nearly vertical cliffside. He saw the exposed rocks she had slammed against in her fall and, small in the distance above them, the silver glimmer of the guardrail.
Miki dragged the woman deeper into the woods, where she wouldn’t be seen from above. The whole time her mouth moved feebly, but a large tree branch had pierced her chest in the fall and she could no longer speak. He withdrew the branch, leaving a large hole in her body. Broken ribs and shriveled, airless lungs peeked out from the edges of the cavity. Miki could see her red, beating heart.
She didn’t look to be in any pain, and her face was without even a frown. But it seemed that she wasn’t able to move her body. The impact of the fall must have broken nearly everything inside her. Her eyes and her mouth were all that moved.
Miki instructed her to blink twice for yes and once for no. He asked her if she understood.
Two blinks. That meant her ears worked too.
He asked if she was in pain. One blink. No.
He asked if she was frightened. She made an odd face and her eyes went to the map in his hands.
Miki spread the map open in front of her and showed her the fastest route to the city. Then he asked if that was all she wanted. She blinked twice.
Miki said goodbye, and as he started to leave, she looked at him with a question in her eyes. She seemed to be asking, What should I do now?
Miki ignored her, went back up the stairway, and climbed onto his bike. The woman’s car was still running. He opened the passenger-side window, turned off the ignition, and wiped the fingerprints off everything he’d touched.
The next day he returned to the lookout. The woman’s car was still there, just as he had left it. He descended the Cliffside stairway and went to see how she was.
She was still alive. When she saw Miki, she gave him a relieved smile.
He asked if she was all right—telling her one blink for no, two for yes. She blinked twice.
He looked at the cavity in her chest the branch had made. Her heart was still beating. There was very little bleeding—some, but hardly any at all.
Miki noticed something strange. It wasn’t cold enough yet to call it winter, but the temperature was lower than it had been the day before. But the woman didn’t show any signs of feeling it. Her lips and her face had gone pale, yes, but they didn’t look cold.
He asked her if she was cold. She thought it over, then blinked once.
He took the wallet from her pocket and found her name and address.
The next three days he came and spoke to her. Each day as he left her expression turned lonely. On the third day, her car was gone.
Some of the people in the area had been concerned over her disappearance, and the search party had discovered her car at the overlook.
When she saw him come on the fourth day, her eyes fixed intently upon him. Then, as if to say she had something to show him, they turned down. Miki followed her gaze down to the hole in her chest. When he looked closer, he thought he noticed something concealed inside and almost immediately saw it was a snake. It was coiled around her broken ribs. The snake stared up at Miki, flicking out its red tongue. Her body must have still been warm. The snake had nestled its scaly body up against her beating heart and was settled in for its winter slumber.
Miki pulled out the snake. He told her goodbye, and then he stabbed the knife he had brought through the hole in her chest and into her heart. As if drifting to sleep, the woman closed her eyes, and her breath stopped.
Some time later, he read an article in the newspaper about the discovery of her body. Her bones had been found under the melting snow.
Miki never thought much about why he pushed the woman from the top of the cliff. He had done it for the same reason he’d stuck pins into those insects. He had done it because he could.
That and because he’d wanted to see what would happen.
*
The girl had fallen asleep listening to Miki talk.
A bell sounded in the study. The phone on his desk was ringing. He lifted the receiver and heard the voice of his editor.
“I’m looking forward to your next story.”
Miki considered it less a demand for a manuscript and more a check to see if he was still alive. In the first place, Miki wasn’t exactly the fastest pencil around. Being an author wasn’t really his job—his fairy tales were only products of his spare time. And he didn’t keep up a diligent correspondence with his editor, instead remaining mostly silent. Whenever he happened to finish another manuscript, he’d send it in and that was it.
Miki had written an award-winning fairy tale when he was in twelfth grade. He had simply transcribed one of the tales he’d told, back when he was a child, to his friend with the arms that ended at the elbow.
His first work was the story of a raven who gathered eyeballs from people and flew off with them.
His second tale was about a doctor who put a zipper in his patient’s back to make it easier to perform surgery. The doctor was able to open the zipper to get at the organs inside without having to make an incision every time. But when a nurse forgot to zip the patient back up, all of the organs spilled out and only a husk of skin was left.
His third work was a book entitled The Collected Black Fairy Tales and had been well received by the reading public. He’d never intended to become a writer, and he’d assumed that once he’d exhausted the stories he’d told as a child, the writing would stop. But the stories never ceased to pour out from within him.
“Could we meet and talk in person next time?”
Miki replied to his editor’s words with silence. He rarely met with anyone associated with his publishers. Nor did he give interviews or attend parties. He wrote fairy tales and sent them away. On the other end they were accepted and published, with money deposited into his bank account. That was the extent of it.
He had even heard that some doubted a fairy-tale author named Shun Miki even existed. That was fine by him.
He hung up the phone, took the girl on the couch into his arms, and left the study. Her body was light—around twenty pounds. He had met her in the city. She was distraught, separated from her friends, and he had taken he
r with him. She said her name was Hitomi Aizawa.
Miki still remembered when he had removed the blindfold from her eyes in the cellar.
She’d tilted her head and asked, “What are those mannequin arms and legs over there?” She was looking over at the scattered appendages in the corner of the room. It didn’t take long for her to notice that the limbs that should have been attached to her shoulders and hips no longer were.
“Are those . . . mine?”
He had used a handsaw for the amputation. There hadn’t been an anesthetic, but no signs of pain had shown on her blindfolded face. He hadn’t applied any tourniquets either, but there hadn’t been much blood. And her wounds still hadn’t healed; the stumps remained a fresh red color.
Hitomi couldn’t wear normal clothing anymore. Miki made a sack to fit her body and put her torso into it. He made other sacks, with flower prints and checkered-patterned fabric, but she didn’t like them.
“I don’t like how the top scratches my neck,” she said.
Finally she picked one he’d made from pale blue cloth. It opened right at her neck, and he tied it shut with a red necktie.
He carried the sleeping child downstairs. Her cheek was damp against his chest. Sometimes she thought of her parents and cried.
The entrance to the cellar was behind the staircase at the rear of the first floor. The doorway was the same color as the wall, and it was hard to notice from only a glance. Miki had rented the Western-style home in the mountains because he liked the cellar.
He flipped the light switch on and went down the stairs. The underground space was made of exposed brick. It was cold—cold enough that Miki’s breath steamed white. The ceiling was low, but not too low to walk upright.
The cellar formed a large rectangular space. The lightbulb was weak for the size of the room, and the corners of the cellar were deep in shadow. There were several freestanding shelves, left in the cellar by the home’s previous tenant. Boxes of tools and old clothes lined the shelves.
Hitomi’s bed sat in front of the small forest of shelving units. He rested her inside it.
From behind one of the shelves came Shinichi Hisamoto’s voice. “Hey . . .” he said.
Miki looked up from Hitomi in the direction of the voice. In the tiny gap between two boxes on the shelf was Shinichi’s eye. It was looking at Hitomi.
From the dark space on the other side of the shelves came the sound of a massive body moving. Shinichi’s eye vanished from the tiny gap, only to be replaced by another one. It belonged to Yukie Mochinaga.
“Something’s wrong with the Old Man,” she said. “Take a look at him.”
The Old Man was a nickname for one of the people who lived in the cellar. His real name was Tadashi Kaneda. Miki nodded, and Yukie’s eye disappeared from the gap. He heard her let out a deep breath.
From the darkness behind the shelves she said, “It’s hard work, lifting my face up to that crack.”
Miki covered Hitomi with a blanket. He was aware that the people he injured didn’t feel much warmth or cold, but he covered her anyway.
It wasn’t only that they became insensitive to changes in temperature—their bodies were unaffected by it altogether. They wouldn’t freeze to death. They were also freed from hunger and disease. The people he injured lived on, as if the flow of time toward death had ceased.
It was the power to sustain life. It was a pair of scissors that severed the magnetic force of death. He understood. This was his gift.
Yukie Mochinaga started to sing in the darkness. It was a sorrowful song, its lyrics English. She had been an English teacher and her pronunciation was beautiful. The cellar filled with her delicate, wavering voice.
Hitomi moaned, troubled by something in her dream. Her lips moved, forming the shapes of words. Miki lowered his ear to her mouth.
Her sleep-talk was unintelligible, except for two words.
“The raven . . .”
2
The raven swayed. The key chain with its cutesy black-feathered bird hung from the car’s rearview mirror; it swayed in front of my eyes to the motions of the car.
“Do you know somebody who lives here?” asked the young man in the driver’s seat.
I nervously shook my head. It had taken a lot of courage to climb into the car of someone I knew absolutely nothing about. But there were only two buses a day that went near my destination— the town of Kaede—and even though it was still early in the evening the second bus had already left. So I’d resolved to find a ride from somebody headed that way.
I moved my eyes from the raven on the key chain and looked out the window at the expanse of gray sky. The mountains were close, the road winding alongside. Seeing the slopes covered with a blanket of dead white grass made me feel gloomy.
We stopped once at a place surrounded by cedar trees. The black and yellow arm of a crossing gate lowered before my eyes, and the continuous ringing of a bell drilled through my ears. There was a crossing in the road in front of the car, and after a moment, a single red railroad car passed by. The driver said it was a municipal train.
He was making an effort to talk to me, but I was afraid. I didn’t know how to interact with strangers.
But because he was letting me ride in his car, I thought it would be ungracious of me to hurt his feelings. I scrambled to think of something to talk about. But I didn’t have any stories to tell. Having lost my memory, I was without a past and without experiences. I didn’t have a life worth talking about, and if he were to ask me about my past, I wouldn’t have an answer. If I could avoid it, I didn’t want to tell anyone that I had lost my memory.
Anybody I met wouldn’t know anything about me, so I figured I could just make up whatever lie popped into my head. But I wasn’t able to come up with one on the spot. Under the oppressive strain of anxiety and worry, my words faltered until I could hardly speak. Whenever the man driving said something to me, I responded with simple nods.
My high school was on spring vacation—not that school was relevant to me anymore. I had been skipping class since well before the ceremony that marked the end of the school year. Still, I did feel guilty whenever I skipped.
On days that I legitimately had off I felt a little more at ease. And somehow, when I told myself that I too had the right to be a bother to others, I’d been able to make the leap and run away from home.
I left a letter for my parents. In it I wrote that I would be leaving the house for a while and I would call them once a day to tell them I was all right.
A few days before I had withdrawn Nami’s entire savings from her bank account. On that weekday afternoon I’d gone to the bank with the bankbook that had my own name written on it.
It had been hidden in the back of my desk drawer. Before I lost my memories, I had been steadily saving my money.
I didn’t know my PIN. Everyone forgets their PIN sometimes, but I really had forgotten mine. I thought about speaking with one of the bank clerks to explain the situation. I had my student ID and my bank seal, which was certainly enough to prove I was myself.
But I felt like Nami’s bankbook wasn’t mine to have, and I would be taking money that belonged to somebody else. I didn’t want to attract any attention.
I decided to see if I could withdraw the money by entering some possible PIN codes into the ATM. I started with my birthday. My parents had told me what it was and I remembered it:
1021.
No good. I started to worry that the security guard was going to question me.
I tried another number.
Yon-ichi-go-roku. 4156. Like Yoikoro, the stuffed animal I’d stuck in the closet.
That did it.
With a vaguely apologetic feeling, I withdrew all the money that Nami must have saved so carefully before the memory loss. Somehow I just couldn’t rationalize it as money that had been mine in the first place.
I got dressed and waited for my resolve to come. I studied maps of the area and of railroad lines and tried to figure out
what route I should take.
Kaede, where Kazuya grew up, was nestled in the mountains at the edge of the prefecture. I doubted very many people lived there. The name of the town was written so small on the map it could easily be overlooked.
As I’d made my preparations to leave, the visions had continued to come to life inside my left eye, and in them I saw Kazuya’s childhood. But ever since I’d witnessed his death in the library, no matter how happy the memory, as soon as the fever in my eye subsided I wanted to cry.
“Why do you want to go to that hick town?” the driver asked with interest.
I hesitated, then said, “Someone important to me is there.”
“Didn’t you say that you didn’t know anybody in Kaede?”
“Well, that’s . . .” Unable to think of a good answer, I let the sentence trail off.
The landscape outside the car window gradually became more like what I had seen in the images of my left eye. I felt myself drawing nearer to where Kazuya and Saori had lived.
The conifer trees and the transmission towers that now pierced the sky had appeared in my eye’s memories from time to time. My skin crackled as if charged with static electricity. I was on edge. It was spring, but the landscape was the dead of winter. I saw not the vivid green of plant life but only barren trees, dead grass, and the nearly black needles of the conifers. Cold air leaked through the cracks around the glass of the windows—cold enough that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see snow falling.
The car stopped at a light. I didn’t see any other cars around. On the left-hand side of the road stood an open space of dried white earth where rusted semi-trailers and old tires had been left to sit. Beyond the clearing was thick forest. Next to the traffic signal, a giant sign towered over the road.
My left eye began to warm. Oh, this is . . .
I found the courage to say, “Could you please stop the car here for a minute?”
A look of suspicion came to his face. The light turned green. I saw it with my right eye.
“What’s wrong?” asked the driver. “Is it allergies?”