Black Fairy Tale

by Otsuichi

  The hallways twisted like a digestive tract through the spacious house. They hadn’t been designed to be complicated—at least I thought they hadn’t—and yet at each intersection I found myself losing track of where I was. As I walked along the black floorboards, I started to feel the illusion of the halls languidly moving like the peristalsis of the intestines.

  Hitomi may be somewhere inside this house. When the thought came to me, I found it hard to breathe. Even though she’s so close I still can’t save her. Damn it!

  Near the center of the house was a stairway. The ceiling opened up into a stairwell, and I could see the handrails of the second floor hallway. What’s up there? Of course, I hadn’t the courage to go up and see. If I were caught upstairs he’d be suspicious of me for sure.

  I opened the door to another room. There’s not much time. I have to get back to the two of them and I have to do it fast.

  Inside the room, there it was:

  Women’s clothing, hanging on the wall—a plain green blouse and a black skirt. But whose were they?

  As I asked myself that question, I sensed someone standing behind me. I turned to look. Shiozaki.

  “I left my wife’s things in here.”

  He explained that even though she had died, he still couldn’t bring himself to throw them away.

  Through my panic, I managed to apologize. “I’m sorry, I got lost . . .” I was too frightened to look him in the eye.

  “Nami,” called Sumida, “let’s go back.”

  Shiozaki saw us out and we drove away in Sumida’s car. We left the blue house and started down the slope lined with cedar trees.

  “Oh,” I said in a half whisper, “he said he was going to repair a broken wall. He bought the supplies to do it, but . . .”

  That was how he’d explained it to me at least.

  “Repair? What?” Sumida asked, his hands at the wheel.

  I asked him if there really had been an earthquake.

  “I guess you could call it that, but it was actually just a small tremor.”

  We were in agreement—there was no reason for any broken walls in that house.

  3

  —An Author Of Fairy Tale

  Miki watched the car drive away. He closed the front door, turned the lock, and went upstairs to the study.

  “I heard talking,” said Hitomi from the couch. “Was it that visitor who’s been snooping around the house lately?”

  Miki shrugged.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  Miki started to explain, but it was more trouble than it was worth so he stopped.

  “I kept quiet and didn’t cry out for help, but it wasn’t to protect you, you know. So don’t get the wrong idea. If I’d said something, you would have had to kill somebody, wouldn’t you?”

  She corrected herself. “Sorry, not kill. It’s hard for you to kill anything.”

  He told the girl that he could certainly kill someone if he wanted. All he had to do was sever the head.

  “But if somebody found a corpse in that shape, there’d be trouble, right?”

  In that case, he’d make it look like an accident, he explained.

  Say he needed to kill a man. Miki couldn’t kill the guy by pushing him from a height or using a machine to cut him up. Miki’s victims wouldn’t die from anything done directly by Miki’s own hands. Running down the man with a car wouldn’t work either.

  But Miki could, for example, get him drunk or make him take sleeping pills, and then push him in front of a car or make him walk along a cliffside and wait for him to fall on his own. In the case of the former, Miki wouldn’t have killed him, the driver would have. And with the latter, it would be suicide. As long as Miki didn’t do it himself his mysterious power wouldn’t interfere.

  “Do you know that for sure? Have you tried it?”

  When Miki didn’t answer, Hitomi looked as if that was answer enough.

  Miki thought back to the conversation he’d had downstairs. Was the visitor in my house just now? We had a perfectly ordinary chat . . . He couldn’t tell if he had been suspected.

  If things go the wrong way, I might have to abandon this place and move somewhere else.

  But first I need to locate—and silence—the visitor. If I do it right, I won’t need to find a new home.

  4

  I went back home once. My father had been telling me to go to my doctor’s exam and I felt the longer I put it off, the harder it would be to go back.

  To be honest, I wasn’t looking forward to it. I had few memories from the time I awoke in the hospital and went to live in that house, and fewer still that I could call fun. My head was occupied with the things Kazuya had seen—the landscapes, Saori, and Kaede’s past.

  When I told Saori I was going home, she nodded, looking sad.

  “That’s good. You should get back to your own parents.”

  “Can I come back?”

  “When?”

  “In four days.”

  She made a surprised face. “Do you dislike your family that much?”

  I solemnly intended to return to Kaede right away. I still have an important job to do. I have to save Hitomi. I had lost sight of the solution and was still trying to devise a way to find proof that Shiozaki was the kidnapper.

  “Nami . . .” said Saori, her tone serious. “You’ve never told me about your family. I know it’s not my business, but I’ve been worrying about how you get along with them. About how maybe you ran away and came here. It isn’t right.”

  After a moment, I fearfully asked, “Do you not want me to come back here?”

  “Of course I want you to come back. I just want you to have a talk with your parents—a real talk—and then I want you to come back.”

  I had Sumida drive me to the train station. Just as when I’d first come to Kaede, I watched the town from the passenger-side window. The cedar trees, the utility poles, and the bridges that spanned the valleys all passed by my window, until finally we emerged into the open space before the station. Nearby was a college, the municipal hospital, and a row of businesses.

  Sumida stopped the car in front of the station and asked, “Nami, you’re coming back, right? Give me a call when you do and I’ll come get you. Saori will be lonely with you gone. When you’re at the café everything goes smoothly, just like when Kazuya was alive.”

  “Everything goes smoothly?”

  “Well, what I mean is, it’s like you fit perfectly into his place.”

  I asked him about Kazuya, and he told me that they had been friends for just about the last year of Kazuya’s life.

  “One night, exactly one year before the accident, I carried him back to the café. He was completely drunk.”

  “I heard about that. That was the day you met him and Saori.”

  “Yeah. But when he came to, he had forgotten who I was.”

  He chuckled. “After that we’d come out here, around the train station, and we went to see movies together—stuff like that.”

  He told me how on one hot, humid summer day, they had gone to a hill covered in fresh green grass. Sumida had skipped his college classes, and Kazuya had already dropped out of school entirely and was spending his aimless days wandering around town. With nothing much else to do, they had tried knocking over some empty cans by throwing rocks at them.

  “Now that I mention it,” Sumida said softly, as if in shock, “we never really did anything. Just threw rocks. What a couple of losers we were.”

  “That’s not true. I’m jealous of you.”

  What Sumida had described—the time they had spent idly together—sounded lovely to me. I thought it would be nice to just be in the summer sunlight, to let the days just pass by.

  “Thank you for being his friend,” I said.

  I got out of the car, waved goodbye to Sumida, and went into the station.

  The raven key chain hanging inside Sumida’s car suddenly reminded me of the fairy tale book at the café. The drawing of the raven pecking h
is beak at the child’s eye must have left a strong impression on me. I decided I would read the story when I returned.

  *

  It was a few hours by bullet train.

  When I arrived at the station nearest my house, it was already evening. I passed through the turnstile and emerged onto the road in front of the station. The western sky shone red. In the twilight, the rows of stores around the station looked as though they were lit by colored lights.

  With a reluctant heart, I walked the distance to the front of my house. Saori had said what she had said, but I still didn’t know what to tell my parents. Several times I stopped to decide if I should go home or if I should just turn around and return to Kaede.

  But I had already told my father I’d be coming home that day.

  I didn’t want to change the plan.

  I arrived at the house with SHIRAKI written on the nameplate. It looked unfamiliar, just another white house like you’d see in any neighborhood.

  I rang the doorbell and my mother opened the front door. When she saw my face her smile disappeared, replaced by a mixed expression.

  After a moment I said, “I’m home.” She looked away and nodded, and I came inside.

  I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to say. Fighting back the urge to cry, I followed my mother down the hall.

  I didn’t hate my mother, but I knew she hated me. I have to say something. We have to talk. And yet I was too scared, and I couldn’t find the words. It was so bad that I wondered, Would she just ignore me and pretend she hadn’t heard?

  My father in the living room said, “Welcome home.”

  “I’m sorry I left like that.”

  Complex emotions flickered across his face, but he said that what was done was done.

  The three of us ate dinner. At first my mother and I were silent.

  To ease the tension my father talked, and every once in a while I threw in a Yeah? or an Uh-huh. I felt bad for him.

  “Where have you been?” he asked. I hadn’t told him my exact whereabouts over the phone.

  “I was at a friend’s house. In the mountains.”

  I told them about Saori and Melancholy Grove, about Kimura and Sumida.

  I talked about how I played cards with Saori, about how Kimura was always whacking Sumida on the head with a tray. As I spoke I started to enjoy it and I couldn’t keep the smile from my face. I couldn’t explain why, but when I described these people and all that I’d felt, I thought I could go on talking forever.

  After a while I noticed that my father had set his elbow on the table and, with his chin resting in his hand, was staring at me.

  “That’s good,” he said. “It’s a relief to see you so excited. You’re not who you used to be, but I’m glad to see your old smile back again.”

  My mother’s irritation was plain as she stood and began to clear the dishes.

  That night I walked out of my room and heard my parents arguing downstairs. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I sensed the argument was about me. Now and then I was able to make out the words “Nami” and “that girl.”

  I sat on the steps and listened to their fight from the shadows. The argument ended before I could grasp what it had been about and the lights downstairs went out. Total darkness and quiet reigned over the house.

  The stairway was cold, but I remained sitting there. I thought about a concept that should have been obvious—I have parents.

  Until that very moment I had felt like the mother and father in this house were not my real parents. Maybe, having lost my memory, it was only natural to feel that way. When Saori told me to talk with my parents, I had wondered if a mom and a dad were really so important.

  But they had been arguing about me. They each had their own thoughts about me. I didn’t know if what they had said about me had been positive or negative. But they had argued—that was what mattered. Before, I’d imagined that they were worried about me, but I thought of their worry as if it weren’t connected to me. Even though I had lost all my memories, in the end I was still their child.

  *

  The doctor said that memory was a mysterious thing.

  I had come to the hospital—the one where my grandfather had had me undergo the illegal operation—to have my eye examined. With a feeling of nostalgia, I sat before the mustached, just-pastmiddle- age doctor.

  He pressed his thumb below my left eye to the point where I was making the akanbe face and told me to look up and down, then left and right. He put my eye under more strain than I tended to, but it held up fine.

  He asked me some questions, like, “Do you ever feel any sudden pain in the eye?” and I shook my head no.

  “How about your memory?”

  “It still hasn’t come back.”

  “I see. Well, it could come back at any time, or you may start to remember things bit by bit.”

  I was surprised. I had almost entirely stopped thinking about the possibility of my memory returning.

  “The brain is a fickle thing,” said the doctor. He went on to tell me about the patient of a brain surgeon acquaintance of his.

  This patient had lost his memory in a motorcycle accident. He had forgotten everything that had happened to him over the previous ten years. He started a new life for himself and then, two years later, his forgotten memories had slowly come back.

  “Sometimes it all comes back at once. Other times people regain their memories slowly, bit by bit. Of course, some never do get their memory back. And there are cases where they’ve forgotten their sweetheart and in the end they break up. But you’re still young. You may yet remember your past.”

  I thought again about what it would be like for that to happen. I’d go back to being Nami. I couldn’t imagine it.

  I recalled the me I’d seen in the videotape who still had her memories. Me, confidently playing the piano. My fingers caressing the keys, the sound flooding out. I couldn’t believe that my awkward self could ever be like that.

  I became uneasy. If that happened what would become of the current me? I asked the doctor about it.

  “I couldn’t say.”

  He touched his mustache, looking a bit uncomfortable.

  He told me that, as my memories came back, I would slowly return to my old self. But I would still remember everything that had happened during the time I had been without memory. I was a little relieved to hear it. As my memories came back, I wouldn’t forget Saori and Kazuya.

  “What would happen if I were in a situation where the me with my memories and the me without them would have completely different thoughts about something?”

  “I’ve heard something about that.”

  The doctor told me about a man with a positive attitude who had lost his memory and then become a negative person. But eventually his memory came back and he was reborn a positive man. About the time he spent without his memories he said, “It was like I was dreaming.”

  The man completely remembered—and understood—his negativity. And yet he felt like it had all been a dream.

  “The amount of time amnesiacs tend to go without their memories is trifling compared to the amount of time that has passed from their birth to the moment they lost their memory. It’s like a scab atop a vast number of memories. And when the scab peels off, everything you are thinking now may seem like a long dream.”

  All the way home from the hospital, I thought only of that.

  When my memory comes back, what will happen to me? When I return to the me everyone likes, the me that is good at school and can play the piano, what will happen to this insecure me?

  Had the previous me been the kind of girl to feel the loneliness of say, walking alone, head lowered, through the cold wind? Had she ever hated herself and wanted to die because she wasn’t able to do anything right? Had she ever been envious—or resentful—of the people who everyone seemed to love?

  That Nami had seventeen years of history. I had only two months. If my memory were to come back, would I thi
nk of the me who’s having these thoughts right now as little and naive, just a leading role within a dream?

  At first, I hadn’t dreamt when I was asleep. But lately I’d been having dreams about Saori and Sumida and the rest. And once I’d had a dream in which I was hit by a car. I opened my eyes in the darkness to find myself suddenly rolling down a slope and tumbling onto the road. The nightmare was terrifyingly real. The dream of being struck by that dark blue car burned into my eyelids and for days it was all I could think about.

  But most dreams I forgot after waking up. If my memories were to return, would I also forget who I am now? Would the awareness of my present distress fade away?

  I felt like Nami was a stranger to me. But deep down I knew that wasn’t true at all.

  *

  I spent the next two days with an uneasy feeling.

  During that time I thought back over all the things I’d experienced.

  I remembered how sad I had been when I couldn’t play the piano—that had been the most painful experience. I sighed just thinking of it.

  Oh yeah, I wonder how that Yuri girl who sat in front of me is doing? She had talked of nothing but who I had been when I still had my memory, and every time she’d done so I’d felt a little sad.

  I remembered when my left eye had suddenly heated up and what Kazuya had seen.

  Of all the things I remembered, the majority had been given to me by Kazuya. I loved everything he had seen in his life. I loved his past and I loved Kazuya who had seen it all.

  Into his eyes he had burned the moment of a bird flapping its wings. When a fish opened its mouth at the surface of the water to beg for food, he had observed it. He saw leaves falling and milk spilling. I felt closer to Kazuya than anyone else.

  Whenever I recalled all I’d seen and everything I’d thought during these last two and a half months, I was sad. No matter how happy the memory my chest felt heavy with the thought of it.