A Japanese Schoolgirl

by Kajihara, Yoko

  Suddenly the face of Maya flashes and burns my visual cortex.

  It would be dangerous for drivers to put on the break even when something has hit against their windshields, for the road bends to the left in a tight curve soon after it goes under that pedestrian bridge.

  I lean back in my seat as if in a state of total exhaustion. I am afraid that Maya might have had something to do with this multiple pileup.

  I start calling Maya as soon as I step off the train at the station of my hometown. On the platform there are five people, all male in dark business suits, waiting for the next train to catch. The night breeze smells of something sweet and fresh. The winter seems to be receding.

  Maya doesn’t answer my call, nor do I hear the familiar melody for incoming call. Her Mobile is in dead silence.

  Perhaps she has shut off the power of her Mobile itself.

  Instead of leaving a voice memo, I send an e-mail to her while walking through a street of stores that have already pulled down their shutters tight.

  There is a half moon floating on the eerily clear night sky.

  Before long the familiar row of vending machines comes into sight.

  I carefully look around to see if Yukio the ghost might be lurking in the dark.

  *

  The next day Maya was absent from school and cherry trees started flowering on both sides of the entrance to the gymnasium.

  According to the Web News, the police had been after the suspect who might have caused the crash involving six cars.

  The same day Reiko left school early without giving the reason even to her homeroom teacher. Later Takeshi asked me to have lunch together but we talked nothing. The usual green matcha pudding tasted decadently good and it started to drizzle around four o’clock in the afternoon.

  Incidentally, Mr. Buddha’s dark-brown-leather-shoe affair began to subside at last, for a newly-appointed female teacher was called to substitute for him as an ethics teacher.

  Because of the scandal, our school lost five female students. I heard that their parents had made their daughters transfer to another private high school.

  The drizzle became a heavy rain as the sky darkened.

  After dinner my mother patted me on the shoulder, saying: ‘Five girls have gone. Isn’t that wonderful? Now the number of your rivals has fallen to a certain extent. Of course, the game continues, but, this time, it will probably start from the easy level, don’t you think?’

  Storeroom

  It was three days ago that I received an envelope from the sender named Hanako Yamada. There was a plastic card key in it. It was the key for rental storeroom and the name of the company was Kojima Rental Service Incorporated. I felt a rapid increase in my heart rate, not only because of the key but definitely because the name Hanako Yamada in Japanese is employed usually in the same way as Jane Doe in English. It suggested that the name itself would never lead me to the sender, for it was a mere pseudonym. And it also hinted that the sender would be the same person as the one who had sent me Cahier de Secret few weeks earlier under the pseudonym of Taro Yamada.

  I wondered if this plastic card key was another clue that would take me to the person who had killed Yukio.

  Around eleven o’clock my mother brought me the Two Sacred Treasures for my late-night ritual. I was startled to see her wearing a silvery blue nightgown. She didn’t look like my mother at all.

  ‘Stop staring at me as if I were an exotic animal in a zoo.’

  ‘You look different, mother.’

  ‘Because a woman can take the shape of anything and you’ll have to learn how to do this in time.’

  Then she put a classic glass bottle of Coca-Cola and an original Cup-Noodle and the usual Thermos on my desk and left. I knew that I would be able to maintain my optimal level for hours if I could finish the ritual.

  The rain sounded like white noise from radio. When I started searching for Kojima Rental Service Incorporated on the Net, however, the sound of rain rapidly died away in the distance.

  *

  It was Saturday but my father wasn’t home. Two days ago he had gone on a four-day business trip around the Tohoku region, the northern part of Japan. Last night my mother came to my room and said that she seemed to have caught a cold, showing me the display of a clinical thermometer.

  Then I started worrying that I might not be able to execute my plan because of this unexpected turn of events. I needed to go out early on Saturday morning so that I asked her if she would be fine without me.

  ‘Do whatever you think you have to do. I won’t bother you as long as you’re confident that you’ll get good grade.’

  I went out with a sailor middy top and a short pleated skirt on and let my Mobile navigate the route. In order to make an exploration of an unknown country, you have to be in full armor.

  After a spring haze had been blown away, a clear blue sky appeared right overhead with its surface that looks as smooth as a touchscreen.

  I took a train and dozed off over the mobile. When I woke up, a little girl was shaking my leg and her mother about to pick up my mobile from the floor. I thanked them both repeatedly.

  Having dropped into a cafe at a transfer station, I had a cheeseburger and a glass of Coca-Cola. Then I got on the next train and looked out of the window like a girl in a kindergarten. As the familiar skyline of Tokyo faded away, the sky began to occupy the two third of the field of my vision. There were a lot of newly-rising small towns with rows of new houses and stores and fresh fields that filled up the rest of the space. I could spot an advertising airship floating effortlessly above a bamboo grove. It was for a newly opened megamall.

  I arrived at the station of my destination ten past eleven in the morning. The air tasted fresh and it was easy to find the signboard of Kojima Rental Service Inc., which was located right across the main street from the station square.

  I stepped in its office and talked to a young male receptionist that I had completely forgotten where my storeroom was.

  ‘I have a poor sense of direction.’

  ‘Can I see your card?’

  He told me that those numbers on my card key was pointing out that my storeroom would be the number 7 in the section five and then showed me the spot in the map displayed in a wide monitor screen on the reception counter.

  ‘I have some questions.’

  ‘Sure. Go ahead,’ said the receptionist with a smirk.

  Then I was shocked to have been informed that the name of the renter was Yukio Misawa and that he had a sponsor.

  The receptionist wore a puzzled frown.

  ‘And…I don’t think you’re Yukio Misawa.’

  ‘No, of course, I am not.’

  ‘Well then, I’m wondering…’

  ‘Actually, Yukio Misawa is my older brother. He’s been suffering from the flu since last night, so I’m only a stand-in.’

  ‘Oh, okay.’

  ‘I didn’t know he had a sponsor.’

  ‘Because of your brother being a minor, a sponsor was required to complete this contract.’

  ‘I’m a minor too.’

  ‘Yes, I can tell,’ he said studying my school uniform.

  ‘I heard nothing about the sponsor from my brother. Could you tell me his name?’

  ‘Well, that will be her name.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Remember that your card will have become automatically unusable when the term of the contract is expired unless it’s renewed.’

  Then the receptionist tapped the keyboard to show me the name of the sponsor.

  It was my mother’s.

  *

  A dry wind was blowing from the northwest. It was said to be a sign of spring and I had no idea what my mother had had something to do with Yukio.

  There was no sign of life around. Instead there were twelve storerooms in the section five that seemingly used to be a parking lot. You could still see some white lines and numbers, although they had been grazed and blurred. Suddenly I realized that my mother
might have been Hanako Yamada herself.

  Standing in the middle of this former parking lot, I was seized with terror. Like a meerkat, I took a glance around and then tried to take a deep breath. Storerooms looked like a row of plaster blocks with the number painted blue on each door. Fortunately it wasn’t so difficult to spot the storeroom number 7.

  I opened the door by placing the card key on the reader and entered the white room.

  It smelled of paint and plastics inside. There was this small yellow folding table of two-foot square by the wall directly opposite to the entrance. On the table I found a thick blue file folder with about thirty punched transparent pockets bound together between its hard plastic covers. You could see a sheet of paper being inserted in each pocket.

  I let my eyes through the first page and realized in a flash that it was another Cahier de Secret I had never even imagined of its existence. It could be written as a diary, but it was indeed the Cahier de Secret of Yukio, by Yukio, and for Yukio himself. I became so absorbed in reading I had been sitting erect with my legs folded under mine in Japanese fashion on that hard plastic floor.

  It was about the relationship between Yukio and a woman named Lady V, which had lasted for about a year and a half.

  He had written that Lady V was in his mother’s age group and had a daughter about his age. She seemed to be witty, intellectual, affectionate, and, at times, highly sensual. Yukio wrote: ‘I have found this familiar truism being indeed true, that is, you can never judge a person by appearances alone, especially if the person is a woman. Lady V is simply irresistible in the same way as an elaborate labyrinth or a sophisticated machinery might fascinate you.’

  I have no idea what V stands for. There is no Japanese name, which begins with the sound of V, for either male or female.

  Does V stand for Virtue in English? Or V for Vice? Maybe V for Vengeance.

  According to Yukio, they had a chat over lunch and coffee many times. They went shopping in Ginza and Shibuya. They went to the movie theater, an aquarium in a high rise, and to a planetarium in an amusement park. Once in a while they spent a lazy afternoon in a Love Hotel. Yukio described in detail how he had lost his virginity in a rainy day on October.

  According to his own words: ‘She has magic fingers and lips. I felt no performance anxiety. It was like going back into the womb of my mother who had been long dead.’

  But Lady V became increasingly capricious, officious, and malicious after she had had sexual relations with Yukio.

  ‘Sometimes she teasingly pushed me on the back toward a road with heavy traffic when we were waiting for the traffic light to change. I laughed a frightened laughter. On another occasion, she shoved me toward the edge of the platform as if to push me off. I was particularly scared when I turned around and found her smiling a feigned smile.’

  As I approached the last page, I began wheezing and felt the deficiency of oxygen in the air. I called out Yukio’s name repeatedly and waited for that monstrously handicapped ghost to appear. But nothing happened. I dashed out of the storeroom number 7 and vomited up gastric juices on the asphalt under a painfully picturesque sunset.

  *

  Seated in the rear of a bus, I am in a state of heavy mental exhaustion. I knew that it would take at least two hours to go home from here. As the night crept up to this suburban town, you could feel the light coming out of the window of a house intimate. I leaned against a window of the bus. Seemingly this strange town appeared to bear a certain resemblance to my hometown. But once you looked around at close range, the town became all unfamiliar.

  We arrived at the next bus stop where there was no one to be seen around. I was afraid if we were left alone behind this whole reality.

  Soon the traffic lights turned red. I saw a family of four getting out of a dark green sedan parked in front of a fast-food restaurant and the scene made me feel relieved. They were a couple in their thirties, a boy of about ten, and a girl of about four or five. I vacantly watched the couple exchanging words with an angry look. I had no idea over what they were quarreling with one another but was certain that their son and daughter were very much concerned about the development. The little girl seemed to be on the verge of tears, grabbing the little boy tightly by the sleeve. They both appeared like deserted children.

  Suddenly, the scene reminded me of a distant childhood memory. It felt as if I were struck by an epiphany. I finally understood the reason why I seemed to have been crushed so hard by something I could barely point at that I came to be no longer able to believe what I used to think who I was. I found the answer. No, the answer found me.

  After the bus had started, I turned round and kept watching the family until they were lost to sight.

  At the station square, I sipped a can of Coca-Cola. There was a police station diagonally across a crossing. You could see a slogan printed on a gigantic drop curtain vertically hung from the roof of the police station. It said: ‘Harmony in family is the cradle of good citizen.’

  I dropped the can of Coca-Cola into a trashcan.

  *

  I went upstairs to see my mother. Knocking on the door, I called her and said that I had bought a box of assorted sushi to her.

  ‘You may come in.’

  My mother was lying on her side on a twin bed. Her face was flushed with fever and her hair moistened with sweat.

  She had everything available including medicines, a clinical thermometer, a pot of water, a stainless bowl, fresh towels, spare underwear, and her Mobile. But I still felt that something seemed to be missing. There was no single photograph of Naomi to be found in this room but an empty bed next to hers.

  ‘What have you been doing until this time of night?’

  ‘As I have said this morning, mother, I’ve been studying in the city library. Would you care for some sushi?’

  ‘No, thank you. I have no appetite for anything now.’

  ‘Mother?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I have something to talk about with you.’

  ‘I don’t feel like talking.’

  ‘But this is very important. I need to talk to you. I have to.’

  ‘I’ll talk to you later.’

  ‘Mother, but this is truly really especially crucial to both of us.’

  ‘I’m busy being sick, you know.’

  ‘But I have some very important questions to ask.’

  ‘I’m having a fever now. Why don’t you show me some tenderness as the same way as I have been always giving it to you?’

  ‘Still, I desperately need to have a talk with you.’

  ‘I just would like you to have at least a little consideration for me.’

  ‘But, mother…’

  ‘Please let me have some sleep.’

  Lovers

  Maya and I are in a tearoom where we can take a view of a traditional Japanese landscape garden through a large window right beside us. The garden is laid out by tastefully placing rocks, stones, sands, and several dwarfed ‘bonsai’ trees in a way an island-studded sea might look like.

  Maya says, “I find bonsais unnecessary. And I think indirect lighting here is too obvious as well.”

  “I have no objection. You are the artist.”

  “You found out a secret of my family,” says Maya, staring at a rock in the garden.

  “But that’s not what I was looking for.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m not interested in your family tree.”

  “I’m ashamed of my family blood but I’m proud of being born a member of the outcast. I’m ashamed of my ancestors but love my parents being rich and intellectual. I’m ashamed of my uncle’s becoming rich by doing recycling job. He is a ragman but I adore his Mercedes. Everything hurts so nice. And I don’t know what I’m talking about and why I have had you hear all these things.”

  “Maya, listen.”

  “Because of you, I came to feel as if I could free myself from the tower prison of a sandcastle.”

  “A sandcastle?�
�

  “My parents tried to make me believe that I was living in a real castle. But I never forget what my uncle Hirose told me: We etta the untouchable had been confined in certain specific quarters in a village or a city. There have been, of course, no actual walls built for us like the ghetto in Warsaw where Jewish people were confined, but we have been surrounded by eyes and mouths and ears of people who have strong prejudice against us. They are just as hard and thick as walls.”

  “I see.”

  “You’re not listening.”

  “No, you’re not listening to me, Maya. Tell me what has happened on that pedestrian bridge. I’ve heard about that incident from several Web News.”

  “Look at me.”

  Maya takes a snapshot of me with her Mobile and says, “I did nothing wrong.”

  “You didn’t drop a bag full of glass beads, did you?”

  “How could you say that to me? You have to be ashamed even to think of such a thing. I have common sense. Though I’m an artist.”

  “That’s wonderful. That’s exactly what I expected you to tell me.”

  “You’re very good at deceiving yourself, Luna.”

  “Oh, really? How is your green Iguana by the way?”

  “Mr. Komodo? He’s fine. He loves me and likes to eat shredded lettuce. He’s always calm and cute.”

  “Mr. Komodo the Don Juan.” I smile at Maya.

  “But there is a little problem.”

  Then she again averts her eyes away from me.

  “A problem? That’s no problem. You can talk to me anything, Maya.”

  “Actually I know who has done it.”

  “Done what?”

  “I think I know the ones who dropped the bag full of glass beads.”

  “Seriously? Did you actually eyewitness the scene of the crime?”

  “No, not exactly. But I can tell who has done it. They seemed to be so-called ‘inspired’ by me.”