by Otsuichi
There was the sound of a bird flapping its wings. It was dark so I couldn’t see for sure, but a bird that looked like a raven was flying near the tops of the conifers.
I thought back to my first conversation with Saori in Melancholy Grove.
“Kazuya isn’t here,” she had said. For a moment those words had felt strange to me. They gave the impression that her brother had just stepped outside for a moment. Her voice was flat, with only a faint tinge of sadness.
“I know about the traffic accident.”
“Oh . . .” Her eyes lowered.
“Please, could you tell me what happened after he died?”
And that was how I learned how his death had been handled.
Two months ago Kazuya had been struck by a car on the road. The driver had called for an ambulance, but Kazuya had died by the time it arrived. Saori had seen his body in the hospital. It hurt to try to imagine what that moment must have been like. After their parents had died, Kazuya had been Saori’s only family.
I asked her what day it had happened. It was right before I underwent the transplant surgery. The accident took place on a mountain road about a ten-minute drive away from Kaede.
The blue house of Hitomi Aizawa’s kidnapper wasn’t far from the site of the accident. If anyone was to blame for Kazuya’s death, it was that kidnapper.
I had to go to the scene of the accident and I had to find the kidnapper. Since only two months had passed, I thought that Hitomi might still be alive. According to the newspaper, she had been kidnapped a year earlier, but Kazuya had seen her two months ago. This I knew from the date of his death. If the kidnapper hadn’t taken her life in ten months, I could assume she still lived.
I composed myself. To save Hitomi I needed to find the house and I needed to obtain evidence; then I could just report it to the police.
As I walked alongside Saori I decided that the very next day, I would take real steps to find the kidnapper. I was afraid. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to do it.
Soon I saw Saori’s house.
My left eye had shown me the day Saori and Kazuya had moved into their uncle’s place. A sign reading ishino was next to the front door. That was their uncle’s last name.
Kazuya’s viewpoint had been low to the ground, so he must have still been a child. Saori pulled him by the hand into the house. His feeling of helplessness was conveyed through my left eye. Desperately gripping his sister’s hand, Kazuya turned his eyes upon unfamiliar walls and furnishings.
Saori looked into my—that is to say, Kazuya’s—eyes and smiled. Everything’s fine, don’t be afraid. Saori was a young child too—she had to be afraid herself. But still she lent her brother courage.
Their new life with the Ishinos had just begun. Mr. Ishino was indifferent to the children. I saw him driving a truck and assumed he was a truck driver. But Kazuya’s eye held no memories of him smiling and talking with Saori and Kazuya. It was Mrs. Ishino who looked after the two.
Saori said, “This is my uncle’s home. Where Kazuya lived.”
She entered ahead of me, probably to explain to Mr. Ishino.
I waited at the entryway. I wasn’t bored.
I walked back to the front gate and looked at the house. I felt excited. The newspaper box. The small gate. It was a typical house.
I don’t remember much from when I awoke in the hospital and returned to my own home. I don’t think I felt much. But standing at the front of the house where Kazuya had lived, I was so overwhelmed with nostalgia I could hardly breathe. Even though it was my first time there, it was as if I’d known it forever.
I had many memories of the front of the house. I’d experienced them through my eye.
Kazuya walked past here on his way to grade school. On his way back from high school, he’d stopped in an arcade and come home late at night. His sister had stood angry at the front door.
“Nami, you can come on in,” Saori said from the doorway. The memory of her scolding her little brother with her hands on her hips overlapped with the real her waving me inside. “Is there something funny?” she asked.
I thought I’d be nervous going into someone else’s home, but oddly enough, I wasn’t. For the first time, I felt in my heart the comfort of being in a familiar place. I went through the small entryway and down a hall. There was a fairly steep staircase—above it, I knew, was Kazuya’s room.
The living room was a modest-sized Japanese-style room, with straw tatami-mat flooring. A kotatsu table was in the center of the room; scattered magazines, satsuma mandarins, and a TV remote formed a mess across it.
A gray-haired man in a tracksuit looked at me and bowed his head. He sure looked like an uncle.
“Hello.” His voice was higher than I’d imagined it. He was probably around sixty years old. Before I actually met him I had perceived him as a frightening man. In Kazuya’s memories he was always yelling at his wife.
But the man bowing his head before me was smaller than I’d expected. His hair had turned gray and his smile seemed weak. How old were the memories of him in my left eye? He was different now—not just older, but drained of spirit and left dry.
It seemed like he still worked regularly and took care of Saori every day. He had even prepared some rice for her.
“I apologize for the mess. Nami, you haven’t eaten yet, have you?”
He invited me to sit at the kotatsu and I did.
Usually I felt that wherever I was, I was an inconvenience; whenever I did anything I felt vaguely ashamed of it. Maybe it was because I thought I was inferior to Nami. Here that feeling was faint. My eyes would land on something I’d seen before—on a shelf or in a cabinet—and I’d be struck with an impulse to brazenly pick it up and examine it from all sides.
At Saori’s insistence I ate dinner with them. While she was preparing the meal, I talked with her uncle.
“Did you come here to visit Kazuya’s grave?” he asked.
“Yes, I know I’m late, but . . .”
I had thought up the reason before I’d left on the trip.
“Saori can take you there.”
From the kitchen, separated from the living room by a sliding door, came the sound of Saori getting out the dishes.
“You know,” I said, “I’ve heard a lot about you and Saori from Kazuya.”
“You have? Kazuya never said a word about being friends with someone like you.”
“Well, that’s . . .” I trailed off.
“I’m glad you came,” he said and lowered his head. I thought it odd. In the memories of my left eye, I’d never seen him give Kazuya a single smile. But his words sounded like they came from the bottom of his heart.
I never imagined I’d be sitting around a dinner table with Saori and her uncle. I didn’t know if I should feel moved or just plain confused.
I wondered what they thought of me. Do they think it was rude of me to show up all of a sudden?
If they did, they didn’t show it. They didn’t talk much over dinner. It was almost as if they weren’t even aware of each other’s presence. Even with the three of us, I still felt alone.
In my memories dinnertime had been merrier. Maybe it had just felt that way because Mrs. Ishino had still been in good health and all four of them had been around the table.
The remaining two now seemed tired and worn out. I was nervous and could hardly taste the food, and as I watched them silently eat their meals, I grew sad.
Within the thick silence I found the courage to ask what kind of person Kazuya had been.
“He was a coward,” Saori said, “and he was lazy. He was bad at school, and he wasn’t athletic. There really wasn’t anything good about him.”
After Kazuya graduated from high school, he had enrolled at a college. But the courses were too difficult for him, and he had dropped out. He had spent the year leading up to the accident in Kaede doing nothing.
“But,” she added, “he was a kind boy.”
I nodded, but I realized that I di
dn’t really know anything about him. In the visions of my left eye, the eye was his own. I had only seen his face when by chance it had been reflected in a mirror or glass. But I did know from the fragments of his memories that Kazuya hadn’t been an exceptional student. And I knew that he’d never had enough friends for the eye to have recorded him in the midst of a group of people. I had the vague impression that as a child he’d been the exact opposite of who I had been when I had my own memory—when I had been Nami.
Besides, couldn’t you get a good idea of who most people are based on what they look at? Even when a number of people took pictures of the same scenery, their photos would be different from one another’s.
What did Kazuya choose to look at? I didn’t have an immediate answer.
I went to the bathroom. While I was there, I washed my face and looked into the mirror above the sink. Did Kazuya’s eye, having somehow escaped the grave, feel any nostalgia for being back in his home? Kazuya’s toothbrush was next to the sink, where it had probably remained for the past two months. I hadn’t seen any memories of such trivial details, but for some reason I thought the toothbrush had been his.
When I returned to the living room the two watched me with curious expressions.
“Nice job finding the bathroom,” Saori said. “Most people who come over end up getting lost.”
*
They let me stay in the guest room, Saori bringing me a futon from the closet. But before I went to sleep there was something I had to do. When I had trouble finding the right words, Saori asked me what was wrong.
I decided just to say it.
“I want to see Kazuya’s room.”
Saori stared at me for a moment, then smiled.
Kazuya’s room had been preserved just as I had seen it in the visions of my left eye.
“I still clean it,” Saori said as I looked around the room. “I know there’s no reason to, but I still air out his futon.”
There was a large jigsaw puzzle. The picture on it was of a boy sitting on a motorcycle holding a stuffed sheep. My left eye suddenly grew warm. The box of memories opened and what Kazuya had seen came back to life.
“This puzzle . . .” It took me a moment to realize I had spoken.
“A piece of it was missing and there was a huge fight . . .”
Saori nodded. “I found it in the vacuum cleaner. I’d gone into his room to clean without telling him.”
So that’s why they’re fighting, I thought. In my left eye I was in the middle of an argument with a still youthful Saori. I couldn’t hear our voices, so I hadn’t known what the fight was about.
Saori took a tissue from a box in the room and blew her nose. She looked lonely.
“My brother told you all kinds of things, didn’t he?”
As the memory of the puzzle ended, another vision began to play in my left eye. An uncontrollable succession of memories came to life. The many objects in his room—his desk, his books—became keys to unlock the visions. His experiences, both happy and sad, took root deep within me.
The visions were not fleeting flashbulb illuminations—they played at the same speed as real life. I watched time go by in the past just as time passed by in the present. In my left eye, I saw a young Saori smiling; in my right, she looked lonely.
Saori sat on Kazuya’s bed.
“Who told you my brother had died?”
I was at a loss for words. Who should I say? As I searched for an answer that would sound natural, she continued:
“The police think it could have been suicide.”
Did I hear her right? I had assumed it had been treated as a traffic accident, but I hadn’t thought it through any further.
“The driver who hit him said that my brother had suddenly leapt out into the road. And Kazuya had been acting strangely since a little before the accident. Something was weighing on his mind—he kept getting lost in thought. He seemed unwell.” Saori gave me a beseeching look. “I thought that maybe you knew something about what was bothering him . . . ?”
My heart ached for her. I did know something about what was bothering him. He had seen the kidnapped girl.
Kazuya’s eye had shown me his memory of Hitomi Aizawa. He had fled and been struck by a car. In the days leading up to his death he must have been thinking about the girl held captive in that house.
Apparently he hadn’t told anyone about Hitomi. Maybe he, like me, had wanted to find solid evidence that Hitomi was here before going to the police. And that was why he had been acting strangely.
I told her plainly, “It wasn’t suicide.”
She looked into my eyes. For a moment she appeared startled, but that quickly vanished.
Saori let out a deep breath. She lowered her gaze and said, almost in a whisper. “Of course it wasn’t. I . . . I don’t know why, but when Kazuya died, I didn’t cry. And even now, I’m not sad. When everyone else is crying, why am I—his own sister—fine? Why?”
Saori had started to play with something in her hands. I looked to see what it was—it was Kazuya’s precious wristwatch. It was gold-colored, with a broken strap.
Saori, noticing that I was looking at the watch, said, “I gave this to him on his twentieth birthday.”
I hadn’t known that, but I did know the watch was important to him. Even after the strap tore he had still carried it with him in his pocket.
“It broke in the accident, stopped at the time he died.” She held it out to me. “Will you take it?”
I shook my head. “He’d want you to keep it.”
I knew that was what he’d think—it was what I thought. Besides, I already had an important keepsake of his.
Saori stood.
“Shall we go visit his grave tomorrow?”
I nodded. I wanted to see it.
We left Kazuya’s room and went back downstairs. On the way she said, “Something surprised me when I looked at your eyes earlier. They look just like his.”
*
Kazuya was buried next to his parents in a graveyard outside of town, an hour’s walk from the house.
“If you’d rather take a car there,” Saori offered, “I can ask a friend of mine who has a driver’s license.”
She didn’t have one herself. I told her I wanted to walk.
Countless rows of gravestones rested at the base of a mountain with a magnificent view. There were so many markers that I couldn’t tell where Kazuya’s was at first.
Gravel paths passed between the evenly spaced gravestones. Without hesitation, Saori chose one of the paths and started down. Though there were no signs, she knew the way. I followed after her, not wanting to get left behind.
The Fuyutsuki family grave was at the edge of the graveyard. Saori cleaned it up and brushed off the fallen leaves.
We put our hands together and offered a prayer. I gave Kazuya my heartfelt thanks. Thank you for giving me your eye.
I couldn’t comprehend how completely his memories had redeemed me. I had had almost nothing; they were nearly the entire world to me now.
I thought back to the tragic memory I’d seen in the home improvement store, the memory of their parents’ death.
On the way back from the graveyard, Saori blew her nose and said, “Mom and Dad were unlucky. The rope holding the logs on the truck just snapped.”
We were heading to Melancholy Grove. On the way, we cut across the highway that passed through the center of town. We went by many places from Kazuya’s memories.
“I heard that Kazuya saw the accident happen,” I said.
Saori halted and looked at me in shock.
“Did Kazuya tell you that?”
I didn’t understand her reaction, but I nodded.
“That’s what the other people who were there said. But he didn’t remember it. He insisted that he never witnessed it. I think it was just such a horrible memory, he forgot it to protect himself.”
I thought her reasoning made unusually perfect sense. After all, it had happened to me too.
> But even if his mind had forgotten what happened, the images had remained seared into his retina.
“The accident was apparently caused by a boy who had just started working at the lumber mill that season.”
“A boy?”
“He was barely out of high school, and he tied the rope. But he didn’t know the proper knots . . .”
No resentment colored Saori’s voice. If anything, I’d have said she pitied the boy.
The walk from the graveyard to Melancholy Grove took about an hour.
I remembered the rows of stores and houses, even though I’d never been there before. The storefronts of the stationery store and the rice shop were unchanged from Kazuya’s memories.
We found a candy shop. The inside was quite dark and I wondered if they were open. Bags of candy lined the shelves in the window, so I knew it hadn’t gone out of business, but I thought I could see a thin layer of dust on top of the bags.
“Do you want to go inside?” Saori asked. “Kazuya used to come here all the time, back in the day.”
When we stepped through the door, an old woman emerged from the rear. She had been watching TV in the back room.
“You haven’t changed a bit,” Saori said with a contented smile. When she smiled like that she looked just like a cat.
The old woman’s face hadn’t aged a year from when Kazuya was a little boy.
I bought a lollipop and licked it while we walked.
Saori blew her nose, her shoulders shaking. She tossed her used tissue onto the ground.
“Is it okay to just throw it away like that?” I asked.
“I believe it’s all dust in the end.”
I tried to make sense of her words but eventually realized that it was just too much of an inconvenience for her to carry the tissue home.
I gazed out to where utility poles made a line through the dead grass. Occasionally we passed people on the road, and as we did Saori would bow her head to them. They all looked at me with eyes that said, “Who the hell is that?”