What lies beneath our daily life is this omen of disaster. No one is able to tell when the moment comes until it comes.
But what would then happen if I were killed by such a mega-earthquake tonight?
I am wondering if my mother would weep over my dead body.
After this usual earth tremor subsides, I pour a classic glass bottle of Coca Cola into a tumbler filled with ice cubes. I have already poured hot water into an original Cup-Noodle. It would be ready after few minutes.
Fact One: Yukio said that he felt he was in danger.
Fact Two: Yukio has also said that the one who was making him feel that way is someone I am supposed to have known already.
Fact Three: Yukio was killed by a rapid-service train on a platform in Shinjuku railroad station on a cold, wet, and slippery day.
Fact Four: The case was closed as a suicide.
Fact Five: Maya said she was anxious about if the secret she had shared with Yukio might be brought to light. It seems that the secret becomes almost like a golden life-size statue of Buddha wrapped in some waterproof covers and hidden in the tiny pond of a Buddhist temple for evading a tax.
Fact Six: Maya said that Reiko and Takeshi were worried about it too.
Fact Seven: That morning, Maya, Reiko, and Takeshi were also standing in the same waiting line of which Yukio was in the front.
Fact Eight: Behind Yukio stood Takeshi. Behind Takeshi stood Maya. And behind Maya stood Reiko. According to Maya, however, there might have been someone else standing between Yukio and Takeshi.
Fact Nine: No surveillance cameras captured anyone who might have had pushed Yukio over the platform.
Fact Ten: The disfigured ghost of Yukio has visited me few times and I am uncertain whether I am seeing things or not.
In addition to these facts, Maya seems to doubt whether it was a suicide. Maya told me that testimonies of eyewitnesses differed slightly from one another, but also said that, at least in her eyes, Yukio seemed as if he were making a frantic effort to clamber up onto the platform for his life. She added Yukio appeared to be staring at the incoming rapid-service train in extreme terror with his eyes wide open.
I take a sip of Coca-Cola.
On my desk there are two newspaper clippings Yukio collected: One deals with a father who murdered all three children of his own with a hatchet and another with fourteen-year-old girl who killed her own parents with various toxic substances.
Both cases of murder occurred last year.
On the back of each clippings are written ‘Are they Oni?’ and ‘Too much insight goes with blindness’ with a ballpoint. And there is no doubt that they are both Yukio’s handwriting.
What calls my attention here is the question mark he put after the word Oni. It appears to pose a question about reporter’s choice of words, especially of such adjectives as ‘cruel,’ ‘cold-blooded,’ and ‘merciless’ since they are each neatly underlined. Of the line ‘Too much insight goes with blindness’ I have no idea.
I start searching on Web for more detailed accounts of both cases.
*
According to the father, the motive for murder was that he came to feel pity for his children after they had lost their mother in a fire.
The fire started in the sixty-second floor of a slick high-rise office building in the west part of Shinjuku and the flame wrapped all four floors above. It was a gigantic torch at a cloudy night in Tokyo and the fire lightened the belly of the thick cloud as if a meteor had plunged into the atmosphere right above. His wife was working overtime as a web designer in an advertising agency on the sixty-third floor where the fire ran through every floor, every wall, and every ceiling.
The next morning she was laid in a morgue side by side with other indistinguishably charred bodies.
Four months after the fire, the father quit his personnel management job and sold his house. Then he withdrew all of his savings and took all three children off the school. The oldest son was twelve, the second son eight, and his first daughter five. This motherless family began to travel all over Japan with a Toyota hybrid car. From a saw-toothed coastline to a cattle farm, from a serene marsh to a volcanic hot-springs, from the bamboo grove of an ancient capital to the limestone cavern underneath a karst tableland, from Tokyo Disneyland to Osaka Universal Studio. They visited more than thirty amusement parks and twenty zoos including three safari parks. National parks were also their favorite.
When the first anniversary of their mother’s death arrived, the father gave sleeping pills to three children and carried one by one into a dark wood at approximately two o’clock in the morning to chop off the head of each with the hatchet.
Soaked in fresh blood, the father was later found wandering in the primeval forest covering at the foot of Mt. Fuji.
According to the Web News, he tried to kill himself several times but did not have enough courage to carry it out after all.
He confessed he ‘was afraid that he might never be able to reunite with his family in the next world if he had committed suicide.’ The father also told the police that using the hatchet seemed to be ‘the most reliable and painless method’ to take the lives of his beloved children. ‘I could do anything to ensure us our blessed time and its blessed ending,’ he said, ‘if only it wasn’t too hard to find how to kill myself by the hatchet.’
Now, I turn my eyes to another case while slurping the original Cup-Noodle.
The fourteen-year-old girl who killed her mother was the best student in a public high school in Osaka. She was not only talented but so hardworking that she could skip grades and became a first-year student in high school at fourteen. It was quite an exceptional achievement in Japan. According to the Web News, she was particularly excellent at mathematics and chemistry. She was good at cooking as well. That might be why she taught herself how to make her mother’s favorite drinks, dishes, and desserts, all of which, however, contained toxins such as liquid fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides, cleansers, or antifreeze.
In the end several neighbors’ reports to the police led to the arrest. Before the final decision was made, the police asked the girl if she could come to the police station to talk what she knew about her mother’s death from arsenic poisoning. In an interrogation room she confessed everything fluently as if she were reading an assignment for a chemistry class. She also stated that she was responsible for the death of her father who had been diagnosed liver failure three years earlier. The girl told the police rather proudly: ‘I tried various organic solvents and often blended them with two kinds of fertilizers to gain a satisfying outcome. It signifies that I succeeded in putting my subject to sleep beautifully.’ Until she started poisoning her parents, she had been conducting a lot of experiments on, for a start, her neighbors’ pets with various toxins since she was nine. There were plenty of test subjects for her; from three hamsters, two mini-rabbits, a ferret, a Siamese cat, two Japanese bobtails, a Chihuahua, a Japanese Shiba dog, to a Retriever.
According to the girl, the motive for killing was that she ‘wanted to examine what would happen to my subjects if poisoned.’ Soon the police found in her room seven diaries with each of the seven autumn flowers printed on each front cover. The girl chronicled everything in longhand including some chemical formulas and graphs and tables of toxins and, of course, the detailed physical conditions of her subjects. Nonetheless the girl allegedly appeared to be unconcerned about how to support herself after she had killed her parents.
In the realm of the Net, she was given the name ‘Virgin Venom.’
I am curious why Yukio put such the question mark after the word ‘Oni.’ I wonder if he considered neither of murder cases to be cruel and cold-blooded.
Oni the Japanese devil is, according to Buddhist belief, a ferocious creature with horns and fangs. Oni is not just the gatekeeper for the various portals of the Buddhist hells but also the executor of tortures that have been carried out in each hell. It is also believed that Oni, which is responsible for plague and di
saster, hunts for sinners and then takes them by chariot to Yama the King of Hell.
Suddenly the image of Yukio struggling to climb up the platform crosses my mind.
His fingers must have been curved like claws.
Out in the street a dog is yelping at someone or something.
Probably it is a small dog. The dog seems to be yelping by the row of bending machines. Before long the yelp turns desperate and I recall what my grandfather said: ‘Do you know why a dog makes a noise at night? A dog, any dog, starts barking or howling when it sees a departed soul. Other animals can see it too. How about you?’
What kind of secret is burned in Yukio’s DVD?
I gently insert the disc into my Notebook.
Commuters
I keep watching the back of a little girl who is about to be lost in a crowd.
“Move on, girl,” a male commuter yells at me in a loud voice, shoving me aside.
It is half past seven in the morning. People are flooding over every platform your eyes can reach. This is Shinjuku railroad station. I feel a chilly morning breeze blended with the smell of exhaust fumes. I rush in stairs to go down and hustle through a crowded underground passage and then run up a wide stairs onto another platform to transfer. Kiosks are all open. Mobiles are vibrating here and there. You can see a large crowd hurrying down wide stairs and another emerging out of labyrinthine subway stations down below. The station staffs are busy pushing the back of passengers to cram them into the car. All trains are packed so tight that the faces of passengers are being pressed to car windows like those of clay dolls.
We are in a battle zone. A shared sense of patience is in the air. In order to survive the rush hours in Tokyo, you have to be either a masochist or a meditator. And I am the latter.
Pigeons fly away from the window frames of a slim high-rise office building, while a railroad track glares under the morning sun as menacingly as a naked Japanese sword.
I spot Maya and Reiko among the crowd. They are running down the stairs as a pre-recorded announcement from the public-address system echoes through the station.
‘The next train is coming in. For your safety, please stand behind the yellow line.’
It is a synthesized female voice, which sounds so plastic that it feels like an order.
I take a side-glance at two bright headlights approaching this way. The nape of my neck is beginning to get wet with a cold sweat even though I am not standing at the head of this waiting line. I am standing about five steps from the spot where the body of Yukio was severed in half.
On my right there is the rectangular mirror fixed on the post in which I am almost able to see his blood-soaked fingers crawling up toward my feet.
Suddenly someone shoves me forward from behind, but the very moment I have cried in fright, two strong hands grab me by the arm and quickly pull me back from stumbling.
They are the same hands that have pushed me forward a moment ago.
I turn my head to see who has done it. It is Takeshi.
“Don’t get offended, Luna,” he says. ” I only did it for fun.”
“I know. That’s exactly what makes who you are.”
“That’s correct.”
“That’s how you did it to Yukio, right?”
“Are you crazy? Come on, Luna. Wake up. It’s morning.”
Takeshi pats me on the shoulder with a smirk. He is baby-faced, tall, well-knit, and popular among girls including those who are in a neighboring girls’ high school. He is a fourth generation Korean Japanese whose last-midterm result has ranked him the twelfth out of one hundred and seventy-five freshmen. Takeshi is an all-rounder who holds a shodan in Kendo the Japanese fencing. It is a black belt and quite an achievement for a sixteen-year-old boy, according to my father who used to be the captain of the Kendo club in a public high school.
Takeshi belongs to the field and track club as well. He runs fast, jumps both high and long, shots and throws a weight, a discus, or a javelin impressively far. I am also a member of the field and track club but have never seen his face while running around the track. All I can see is his back that always runs away from me to the distance at terrific speed.
‘You ran fairly good as a girl.’ He shrugs.
Takeshi doesn’t seem to be good at speaking words of comfort.
In an e-mail Yukio described Takeshi like this:
In Japanese high school, teachers tend to judge the personality of a student exclusively by grade point and school record. For instance, Takeshi is a person who is able to obtain 92 point out of 100 in math exam, 94 point out of 100 in English exam, and usually comes the eleventh or twelfth out of one hundred and seventy-five in the midterm exam but always fails to keep the position in the final.
For teachers, that explains what Takeshi is all about. If you were a teacher, you would have no time to acquaint yourself with Takeshi. What he eats, sees, and listens has nothing to do with mathematics, English, history, or chemistry.
Personality is revealed in average grade point just as that of an employee in a corporation comes in sight only through one’s business performance illustrated by weekly charts and graphs.
Everyone is a cog in a huge invisible machine.
Efficiency is everything.
Basically the evaluation by numbers can be simple, pure, and clean. There is no space for favoritism or sectionalism or seniority or sexism or racism to creep into the system. As far as our present school system is concerned, what you get is purely based on how much efforts you made for that particular exam. The grade carries ontological significance. The grade is you. And Takeshi is the one whose grade always tapers off to a point. It tells us all about his personality.
Say sayonara with a sneer.
*
The public-address system again starts warning us not to step over the yellow line. Soon a rapid-service train has arrived and Takeshi gets on the train after me. I take a glance at Maya and Reiko stepping in the same car from the door next to ours. Four of us are now all squashed into the train that is filled to bursting and stuffy with windows being all fogged. It jolts for few seconds and shakes a little and then begins to accelerate as if to make up for lost time.
No one talks. This apathetic silence permeates in every corner of the car.
Maya watches me, standing on tiptoe, from behind the shoulder of a middle-aged man while Reiko throws an unconcerned gaze at me from a space under the elbow of an elderly woman holding on to a strap.
Don’t look at me with such frosty eyes, Reiko. I know what you want to whisper in my ears: ‘There might be nothing in something. And there might be something in nothing. Do you know what will leap out from inside the last smallest doll of a Russian Matryoshka? It might not be hope. It could be Oni.’
*
We had rain on Tuesday. It was a winter rain with all those droplets that felt as cold and heavy as drips of mercury.
On Wednesday the usual commuter train came to a sudden stop just before arriving Shinjuku railroad station. It was midway between two stations. All doors remained close.
‘Attention, please. It is reported that, at Shinjuku railroad station an accident resulting in injury or death occurred about three minutes ago. Due to this accident, all up and down trains on Chuo-line are expected to be delayed by at least an hour or so. We are very sorry to cause you this inconvenience.’
I sighed and dropped my eyes on a textbook to memorize some differential equations just when several men with a respectable company badge in each lapel started grumbling.
‘What a loser.’
‘Whenever Nikkei average falls three points, somebody always throws oneself under a train.’
‘That’s quite an accurate equation. I’ve encountered the same stupid accident twice in the last week alone.’
‘Losers must die alone, quietly, don’t you think?’
Because of the incident I was late for school and missed an ethics class entirely. But later I was able to have lunch with Maya in the school cafete
ria. She was taking some close-up photos of a cup of green tea bavarois. I watched Reiko and Takeshi chatting over bottles of Tangerine juice several feet away from us. One of classmates patted me on the shoulder from behind and said that Mr. Buddha the ethics teacher asked Reiko to read the textbook and openly praised her voice as sweet as peach juice.
‘I could actually see her having gooseflesh over the nape of the neck.’
Another classmate made a gesture of vomiting with her forefinger put into her mouth.
Maya started talking about the green iguana Yukio had been taking care of.
‘The animal looks charmingly thoughtful. I think it could be the incarnation of Yukio.’
According to her, Yukio’s grandmother had been taking care of the iguana after the incident despite her being ill in bed most of the day.
I finally realized that it was the reason why the creature couldn’t be found in Yukio’s room.
Maya added, ‘I think I’m beginning to recover from the incident. Look at me,’ and took few snapshots of me with her Mobile. When we finished our lunch, Reiko and Takeshi called us to their table.
They didn’t act distant or strained even when I brought up the topic of Yukio’s death. They treated it as if the topic itself had already become out-of-date. I noticed that several boys in my class accusingly glanced back at me each time I mentioned Yukio’s name. There were also three girls at a table by the window, who kept glancing at me while shouting in whispers.
Only the sun in a winter sky looked friendly.
Takeshi
The Kendo clubroom smells of sweat and damp hay. I talk to a slender student who is about to take off his hakama, which is a skirt-like kimono for formal Kendo wear. Facing his locker, he replies that Takeshi is still in the gymnasium.
You can see a bruise on his left upper arm and another on the right shoulder. This slender student must have been struck by a bamboo sword called shinai considerably hard.
A Japanese Schoolgirl Page 6