by Otsuichi
I felt like I had lived here for the longest time. Everywhere I looked, I saw places I recognized. But when the people made those faces at me, it made me realize that to the town I was only a visitor.
Visitor. The word sank deep into my heart. I felt like a traveler who had come to this world by mistake. I was Nami and yet I wasn’t. So what am I? Where did I come from? Those were the thoughts that came to me at times.
Through some working of fate, I’d arrived in this world and now was in the town of Kaede. I was a visitor. The sky was cloudy and the sun’s light weak. It was dark for afternoon. I thought it might start to snow at any moment.
The whole town was quiet. The air hung cold over the dried-up streets. A thin wind blew through the wire fencing and shook the limbs of the lifeless trees. Few people were out and fewer still were smiling.
It felt like the town was dying. Its vitality gone, it slowly marched to death, a gray town on the verge of oblivion.
Five minutes away from Melancholy Grove, Saori stopped.
“Let’s take a detour,” she said.
We took a side road toward the mountains. The road sloped gently, and as we went up it the city appeared lower and lower below us. On one side of the road was the edge of the cedar forest. On the other side was a guardrail and beyond that more trees. The scent of the trees was rich in the air. When I looked up, the cedars on each side of the road were pointing straight up at the gray sky.
After we had walked a little while, Saori stopped. She looked down at the asphalt pavement, silent.
I understood. This was where Kazuya’s life had ended.
Saori was expressionless. I couldn’t tell where on the road her eyes were fixed. I thought back to when she’d told me that she hadn’t cried, not even when she saw his body. Although everyone around her was sad, she was the only one who couldn’t cry.
To me, her heart was like a vast hole—a dark, bottomless void where nothing remained. Maybe she hadn’t recovered from the shock of her brother’s death.
She seemed weak, like she might just disappear into nothingness on the spot. I squeezed her hand, and she looked at me in surprise.
I didn’t know what about it was making me sad. Whether it was Kazuya’s death or Saori, I couldn’t say. But my heart hurt so badly I could barely stand it.
I looked up toward the mountains. Somewhere up the slope from where I stood would be the blue brick house. That was where it had been in the memories of my left eye.
We stood quietly next to each other, neither of us saying a word. The oppressive presence of the cedar trees enveloped the place where Kazuya had lost his life.
*
When we opened the door to the café, a bell inside rang. To our relief, the warm air of the space heater was waiting for us.
Saori bowed to the owner and said, “Suddenly coming into a warm place from the cold really melts my sinuses.”
“Sinuses can melt?”
“Well, it all comes out like water.”
Saori blew her nose. In the café at least she threw her refuse into the wastebasket.
Sitting at the counter was the man who had given me the ride the day before. When we first came in he was slumped over his coffee, but when he saw Saori he quickly sat up straight.
“Saori!” He waved at her, his face beaming.
“Oh, welcome back,” she replied.
Later I learned his name was Sumida. He had been friends with Kazuya.
Because they’d been friends for only a year, there were few visions of Sumida burned into my eye. A little later I did see a memory of them hanging out.
They had met the year before. Sumida had carried Kazuya—who’d passed out drunk in front of the train station—into the coffee shop. Apparently they’d met at a pub earlier that same day and really hit it off.
And even after Kazuya’s death, Sumida kept going to the coffee shop.
“How’s college?” Saori asked him.
“Well, good now that I’m on break.”
His face turned bright red. He was easy to read.
“Thanks for yesterday,” I said. Now that I knew he had been friends with Kazuya, I felt closer to him.
He turned an affable smile my way. “Kimura told me all about you.”
I sat at a table and watched Sumida and Saori talk across the counter.
The bearlike Kimura brought a glass of warm milk over to my table. As I drank it, I felt the chill from the long walk leave my body.
Saori, talking with Sumida, seemed like a different person from when we’d stood by the road together. Her voice was bright, as though she’d completely forgotten about her brother. I sensed it was a little more complicated than that, but maybe it was a good thing.
Shiozaki, the man who’d sat in the back of the café the day before, wasn’t around, but Kyoko was in the same seat as before. Our eyes met and she smiled and motioned me over.
“Were you Saori’s brother’s girlfriend?”
“What?”
“That’s what Kimura said.”
Oh. So that’s who people think I am.
“I just said that I was his friend . . .”
I couldn’t look her in the eye. I could feel my cheeks blushing and I didn’t want anyone to see.
“I just moved to Kaede,” she said. “I only started coming in here a few months back. So I never got the chance to talk with Kazuya much.”
I wondered if she had been in any of my left eye’s memories. I couldn’t remember the faces of each and every one of the vast number of people Kazuya had met in his lifetime. The only ones I could recall without much effort were the people close to him, like his uncle and the owner of the café.
Kyoko took my hand. The skin of her fingers was tough and wrinkled. “Poor thing. Keep your spirits high. I had a child your age once too.”
I stayed inside the café for a while, drinking my milk. When I had finished, I went to pay.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Kimura. “It’s on the house.”
“Nami,” asked Saori, “where are you going?”
“Just on a walk.”
“Don’t get lost.”
She was truly worried for me. I smiled and nodded in response. She had told me I could stay at her uncle’s house as long as I wished.
I went outside. The warmth the heater had provided me began to fade.
I headed for the site of Kazuya’s accident.
On the way I thought about him. I had a memory of him, alone in the large playground of his grade school, crying. The sight of the beautiful skies and flora he had seen replayed in my mind.
I loved Kazuya. All of the light he had seen streamed into my heart. How many things are burned into a person’s eyes over the course of a life?
I must find the kidnapper. I want to teach him. I want to show him the value of the life he stole.
The air where Kazuya had died felt colder than everywhere else. The sky was cloudy and the shadows of the cedar trees reduced the world to silhouettes. The sound of flapping wings came intermittently from deep within the forest.
I felt my body begin to tremble. Two months ago, Kazuya fell to the road where I stood. And I’d seen the moment of his death. I’d seen the kidnapper hide himself in the shadow of a tree, where he watched Kazuya get struck and die.
I was afraid, but I gathered my courage. I took a right angle from the road and stepped onto the slope of the cedar forest. I headed up the mountainside. The ground was soft with a layer of fallen cedar leaves. In his memory, Kazuya had fallen down the slope and onto the road. I followed the reverse of the path he had likely taken.
I searched in front of me but couldn’t see the blue brick house. The view ahead was obstructed by countless cedar trees. The trees seemed like row upon row of pillars. I walked between them.
I had expected my body to warm, for the freezing cold to fade, but it didn’t. With each step I took, the cold air snatched away more of my warmth. The noiseless cedar forest seemed to swallow my body heat
.
I stuffed my gloved hands into my coat pockets, my fingers finding the disposable camera that was in one of them. I planned to use it to get photographic proof I could take to the police. Maybe Hitomi Aizawa was still visible through that cellar window.
But just then, I was struck by disbelief.
I had expected to find the kidnapper’s house straight up the mountain from the site of the accident. But ahead of me stood a ten-foot-high concrete wall. I could see a guardrail atop it. There seemed to be a road up there. I looked left, and then right, but the wall continued far in each direction.
I was confused. What had happened in Kazuya’s memory? He’d entered the forest at the house, and as he was trying to flee he fell down the slope and emerged at the road. Had he crossed another road somewhere in between? Had he jumped over a guardrail and down the side of a concrete wall? No, neither of those things were in his memory.
Where am I?
Mystified, I walked along the concrete wall, searching for a place I could climb.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. I was gripped with frustration. The house was gone and in its place was a concrete wall. I couldn’t think of an explanation.
After I had walked for another ten minutes, the wall began to shrink as the road atop it approached the ground.
The road snaked through the woods. Had I kept following the road from the site of the accident, I would have ended up on the road above the concrete wall.
When the wall had lowered to my hips, I jumped over it and landed on the asphalt. I slipped under the guardrail.
I had lost the kidnapper’s house. As time passed, I became more and more aware of how grave the situation had become. Unless something changed, I would never reach Hitomi.
Finding the site of Kazuya’s death and backtracking along the path he had taken to get there had been my only plan for locating the house. That should have led me straight to it.
But that wasn’t what happened. I was confused. With no other plan, I walked back down the road toward the town.
I decided to wander around. I thought that maybe I could discover the blue brick house purely by chance.
I strolled around town until nightfall. Several times, such as when I saw an old, broken-down vending machine, my left eye grew warm, and visions of Kazuya’s childhood came to life. But I didn’t come any closer to finding the kidnapper’s house, and I still hadn’t found any believable explanation for why reality didn’t match Kazuya’s memory.
One thing—a rumor I overheard from a group of elementary school students in the candy aisle of the supermarket—stuck with me. It was a strange rumor.
“I swear!” said one boy, clutching a bag of candy. “A long time ago, my cousin really did see it!”
The disbelief of his friends was obvious.
I had been trying to decide what kind of chocolate to buy when I happened to hear his energetic voice.
“Even though the back half of its body had been crushed by a car, it still kept on living!”
“You’re full of it,” one of the other kids said. “There’s no way.”
“But he told me he saw it. He said the dog’s face looked like nothing was wrong, and it walked with only its two front legs. Its insides spilled out in a straight line on the road, but even with only a head and a heart, it lived for two whole hours. But then a motorcycle came along and ran over its heart and it finally died.”
4
I awoke to footsteps in the hallway. I crawled out of my futon. The only things in the empty tatami-floor room were the futon and the backpack I’d brought.
I wiped my eyes and went into the living room. Saori’s uncle was there.
“Good morning, Mr. Ishino,” I said and then felt vaguely embarrassed. I had come to think of him as my own family.
For an instant wrinkles of surprise formed on a face that looked like it was permeated with cigarette smoke.
“I thought you were Kazuya, wearing that thing.” He pointed at my jacket. It was Kazuya’s jacket from seventh grade. Saori had given it to me to wear.
We ate the breakfast prepared by Saori, and the old man left for work.
He worked hauling felled cedar trees from the mountains down to the lumber mill. Each morning he put on his work clothes, worn soft from long use, and drove a minicar to work.
As he was getting in his car I called out to him.
“There’s something I want you to look at for me.”
I took out Hitomi’s photograph and showed it to him. I’d cut it out (without permission) from the library’s copy of the newspaper.
“Have you ever seen this girl around here?”
He pulled his eyes from the picture to look at me. “Are you looking for her?”
“Yes.”
He scratched his head, shaking it from side to side. “No, I haven’t seen her.”
Saori’s response was the same. She had left the TV on in the living room as she cleaned up after breakfast. She didn’t remember ever seeing Hitomi’s face before.
“What are you doing today?” she asked.
“I’m going to visit all the places Kazuya told me about.”
“Well, you can stay here as long as you want. You know, you don’t feel like a stranger. It’s like Kazuya is here. Even the way you walk and how you eat your rice, it’s like him.”
“Are you working at the café today?”
She nodded and turned on the kitchen faucet.
“Ever since Kazuya died, I’ve done nothing but go between this house and the café every day. Nothing else. Once a week I deliver coffee beans to the houses that order it, but I never leave Kaede.”
She stopped her work and stared at the flow of water from the tap. A morning show played on the TV in the other room. When the show’s horoscope segment came on she turned off the water and hurried to the TV.
She blew her nose. “Oh no, it’s a bad day for Virgos.”
She gave me a copy of the house key and left for the coffee shop.
“Do you really trust me with this?” I asked as she handed me the key.
“If you steal something, I won’t allow it.”
I watched her leave, wondering what the heck she was talking about. Probably some quote, not that I’d know it. I sat myself under the kotatsu and thought about why I hadn’t been able to find the house from the scene of the accident.
Again I tried to recall the vision I’d seen in my left eye at the library. It had started when I saw the picture of Hitomi Aizawa’s face and it had ended when Kazuya was struck down by the car. Already ten days had passed. I took my binder from my backpack and rechecked my notes on the vision.
It began with Kazuya looking through the ground-level window into the cellar. That was when he saw Hitomi. He looked around, and I’d seen that the house was built of blue bricks.
I never saw the entire shape of the house—I didn’t know what the roof or the front entrance looked like.
Kazuya had attempted to open the window with a screwdriver but realized that somebody was approaching. Knowing that he had been discovered, he ran into the forest next to the house.
That was where the account got problematic. Had he jumped over that concrete barrier that stopped me yesterday? There wasn’t any record of it in my notes.
He’d gone straight from the house into the woods, and as he ran through the forest he’d fallen down a hill, finally emerging where the car had run him down.
I thought it over for a while before realizing another possibility. Maybe the kidnapper, for whatever reason, had moved the body. If so then the place I saw in my left eye would be different from what I’d been told was the site of the accident.
No, that wasn’t it. I was disgusted by my own stupidity. The driver of the car that had hit Kazuya stayed there to call the ambulance. Surely he would have noticed something like that. I couldn’t believe that the kidnapper would have been able to emerge from the shadows and move the body.
So had the concrete wall not been there be
fore? Had it been a plain slope two months ago when Kazuya had died? That way he would have been able to run straight through the woods . . . Then, after his death, first the road was built and then, where the asphalt and the guardrail passed through the cedar forest, the concrete wall.
I could find out quickly enough if my theory was correct just by asking around. All I had to do was ask if the road had been there two months before.
Gathering my thoughts, I headed for the café to find my answer. The only people around town that I knew were there.
I looked at the clock and saw that more time had passed than I’d thought and it was already almost noon.
I went to Melancholy Grove, thinking I might as well get lunch.
Inside I found the café as warm as ever. I felt happy and just for a moment my thoughts of the kidnapper and all the rest of my worries vanished. With a smile, I sat at the counter.
Kimura was alone. “Saori’s out on an errand right now,” he said.
I ordered lunch. As I waited for my meal to come I looked at the countless tea sets decorating the room. None had any dust that I could see. Was someone meticulously cleaning them? Kimura had thick fingers, so I got the impression that Saori had to be the one doing it.
“I do all the cleaning myself,” Kimura said, watching my face. His tone accused me of being rude. He must have read my mind.
When he brought the tray with my lunch, I asked my question.
“That road where Kazuya was in that accident—it snakes up the mountains farther up. When was that part of it built?”
He hummed in thought, trying to remember. His answer was unexpected:
“A long time back. I can’t remember. But before I was in my twenties, that’s for sure.”
Feeling slightly dejected, I showed him Hitomi’s photograph.
“Have you ever seen this girl?”
He looked at me and said, “What are you, a cop now?” He shook his head. “I don’t know her.”
“I see . . . Well, has anyone gone missing around here?”
“Well, I heard about this one guy, an older man who suddenly disappeared. No relatives.”