by Otsuichi
We sat next to each other, listening to the cicadas all around us.
Beads of sweat accumulated on Morino’s forehead.
At last, she stood up, wiping the sweat away. She began looking for Mizuguchi Nanami’s body.
“The killer and Mizuguchi Nanami walked this way together,” she said, as we began walking side by side.
We entered the woods behind the shrine. We didn’t know how far or in which direction they had walked, so we could only search at random.
For the better part of an hour, we looked—with nothing to show for it.
“Maybe that way,” Morino said, moving away from me.
A few minutes later, I heard her call my name. I went in the direction of her voice and found her standing at the base of a cliff, her back to me, both hands dangling at her sides, her back stiff. I stood next to her and saw for myself what she had been gazing at: it was Mizuguchi Nanami.
Between the forest and the cliff, in the shadow of a very large tree, the girl sat naked in the dim summer light. Mizuguchi Nanami sat on the ground, her back leaning against the tree, her legs and arms flung out listlessly—nothing above her neck. Her head was inside her split-open belly.
Her eyes had been gouged out, and one was resting in each hand.
The empty eye sockets had been filled up again with mud, and rotting leaves had been stuffed into her mouth.
Something had been wound around the tree behind her … everything that had been inside Mizuguchi Nanami’s abdomen.
There were dark patches of dried blood on the ground, and her clothes lay nearby.
We stood facing her in silence. Neither of us able to say anything, we simply stared silently at the corpse.
†
The next day, Morino sent a message to my cell phone from hers: “Return the notebook.”
Her messages were always short and simple, nothing unnecessary. Likewise, Morino had no detestable clattery key holders or straps attached to her phone.
I had taken the notebook home with me. After we left Mizuguchi Nanami, I hadn’t given it back to Morino.
On the train home Morino had stared into the distance, not yet recovered from the shock.
Before we left, she had picked up Mizuguchi Nanami’s clothing off the ground, stuffing it into her pack. The clothes had been cut to pieces, but the girl’s hat and bag—and everything inside—remained untouched.
Inside Mizuguchi Nanami’s bag were her makeup, her wallet, and her handkerchief, all of which we looked over on the train coming home.
From the student ID in her wallet, we learned that Mizuguchi Nanami had been a high school student in the prefecture next to ours. In the bag, there was a small book designed to hold purikura; in those pictures and in the one on her ID, we could see what she had looked like while alive. Mizuguchi Nanami and an impressive number of friends smiled at us from the tiny purikura stickers.
I met Morino in the McDonald’s near the station in the afternoon, after having received her message.
Morino was not wearing her customary dark clothes. At first I didn’t even recognize her. The hat she was wearing was the same as the one we’d found lying next to Mizuguchi Nanami’s body, though, so I was able to work out that she was dressed like the dead girl.
Her hair and makeup were the same as Mizuguchi Nanami’s had been in the purikura. The girl’s clothes had been cut to pieces, so Morino must have gone shopping for look-alikes.
As she took the notebook, she appeared to be enjoying herself immensely.
“Should we tell Mizuguchi Nanami’s family that her body is in the woods?” I asked.
Morino thought about this for a moment, but then she shook her head. “The police will find her eventually.” Morino spoke about Mizuguchi Nanami’s death dressed exactly as the girl had been until a few minutes before she died.
What was Mizuguchi Nanami’s family doing now? Were they worried because she was missing? Did she have a boyfriend? What had her grades been like?
Morino seemed a little different. As we talked, the way she spoke and gestured moved gradually away from her usual behavior. She worried about where her bangs were, and she mentioned how the couple at the booth across from ours looked very much in love—neither was the kind of thing that Morino had ever done before.
I had never met Mizuguchi Nanami—but now, watching Morino, I imagined that this was what Mizuguchi Nanami had been like.
Morino had her elbows on the table, and she looked happy. Next to her was the bag that had once belonged to Mizuguchi Nanami—on the clasp of the bag, a key holder with an anime character on it.
“You plan to dress like that for a while?”
“Yeah. Fun, isn’t it?”
It let Morino pretend. But the way she smiled or looked in a mirror, examining her eyebrows, was not a copy of an ordinary high school girl—it felt as if Mizuguchi Nanami had slipped inside Morino.
As we left McDonald’s, Morino very naturally took my hand, not even realizing she had done so until I pointed it out. Mizuguchi Nanami was dead, but I was sure it was her who had taken my hand.
We split up at the station.
When I got home, I turned on the TV. The news was talking about the serial killings, the first and second victims—the same information that had been covered countless times, nothing new at all. No mention of Mizuguchi Nanami.
There were images of the victims’ friends and family looking sad. Pictures of the victims enlarged to fill the screen …
I remembered Morino and worried—but that kind of thing almost never happened. I dismissed my own concerns.
The victims in the photographs had hair and clothes like Mizuguchi Nanami’s—which meant Morino was now the killer’s type.
iii
Three days after we had met at McDonald’s, my phone rang in the afternoon, indicating that I had received a message from someone … from Morino.
“Help.”
That was it, just that one word.
I quickly tapped out a reply: “Something happen?”
I waited awhile, but she didn’t respond, so I called her. I couldn’t reach her phone—it was either off or broken.
In the evening I called Morino’s house. She had given me the number once before—not because she thought I might ever need to call, but because the letters standing for the numbers coincidentally formed a deranged sentence, making the number easy to remember.
Her mother answered; she had a high voice and spoke very quickly.
I said I was a classmate and that I needed to talk with Morino about some class business.
She had not come home.
I had dismissed the idea that she would be attacked. Yet the contents of that notebook had been accurate, so it was probably also true that the killer had been in the same café as Morino. There was a chance that he had happened to see her in town dressed like Mizuguchi Nanami. The killer might have been surprised to see someone dressed just like the girl he had recently killed, and it might have tempted him … but the odds of his actually targeting her were very low. After all, any number of girls dressed that way.
The biggest reason to suspect that the killer might’ve captured Morino was the possibility that they lived near each other. They had been in the same coffee shop. Unless the killer had been far from home that day, his path might well cross Morino’s regularly. The chances of his seeing her were high.
I thought about it that night. It seemed likely that Morino had been killed by then. Her body was probably scattered on some mountain.
I fell asleep imagining it.
†
The next day, I called her house again.
Morino still wasn’t home. According to her mother, this was the first time she had ever stayed out all night without calling. Her mother was worried.
“So are you her boyfriend?” Morino’s mother asked.
“No, not at all.”
“You don’t need to deny it so firmly. I know all about it.”
Morino’s mother
had absolutely no doubt that her daughter had a boyfriend. Her daughter had never had any friends, and this was the first time anyone had called for her since she was in elementary school.
“Recently, she’s been dressing in brighter colors, and I knew a boy was involved.”
I began to worry about the cost of the call.
“Is there a small brown notebook in her room?”
The mother went and checked, putting the phone down. There was a short silence. Then her voice came on the line again. “There was something like that on her desk … I hope it’s the one you meant.”
It seemed Morino hadn’t been carrying the notebook around. If she had, I’d been considering the possibility that the killer had seen her reading the notebook and had attacked her to keep her silent.
I told Morino’s mother that I would come get the notebook, asking for the address.
After I hung up, I headed for Morino’s house. I had known she lived not far from the station, but I had never been there before.
She lived on the third floor of an apartment complex behind the station.
I rang the bell and heard the voice from the phone call out as the door opened. Undoubtedly, it was Morino’s mother.
“Come in, come in, come in.”
Morino’s mother was wearing an apron; she was a very domestic-looking, ordinary housewife—completely different from Morino. I wondered how a mother like this had produced a girl like Morino.
She invited me in, but I refused. What I was here for could be handled in the doorway.
I mentioned the notebook, and she had it ready. I took it, asking if she had read the contents.
She shook her head. “I can’t be bothered to read such tiny handwriting.”
She seemed much more interested in me than in the notebook.
“When second year started, that girl suddenly started going to school all the time. Now I know why!”
The year before, Morino had said school was boring and rarely went. I had not known that. Her interests were unusual, but more than that, she was awkward, unable to blend in. It was only natural she had ended up the way she was.
I asked her mother when she had last seen Morino.
“Yesterday, just past noon, I think. I saw her leaving the house.”
“Did she say where she was going?”
Morino’s mother shook her head. “Will you look for her?” she asked, as I turned to leave.
I nodded. “If she’s still alive,” I added. Her mother thought I was joking and laughed.
†
As I walked back to the station, I folded back the fake leather cover, opening the notebook to the page filled with mountain names—the list of mountains the killer had been considering as places to dispose of the bodies. It was clear that mountains marked with ⌾ were mountains the killer considered ideal for that. There were only four of them, and so far all the bodies had been found on one of those four.
Of the four ⌾ mountains, three of them already had bodies—which meant he would probably take Morino to the fourth mountain, N** Mountain.
I asked the man at the station ticket window which train I should take to get there, and then I bought a ticket.
I got off the train at the station nearest the mountain, but I had to take a bus from there. There were vineyards around the base of N** Mountain, and from the bus window I saw a number of signs advertising grape picking.
The killer would have come here in a car. Where would he have left the body? He must have carried out his ritual deep in the mountain, where nobody would hear her screams. I couldn’t figure out where that might be.
The driver and I were the only people on the bus. I looked at the road map plastered on the side of the bus and talked to the driver, trying to figure out where the killer might have gone.
He said that people visiting N** Mountain from the direction Morino and I lived would almost always take the prefectural road, which crossed the east side of the mountain. There were few roads over it, and that was the only one that went in the direction we lived.
If the killer had driven Morino to N** Mountain, it seemed clear that he would have taken that road. According to the bus driver, it was the road the bus was on now.
I got off the bus at a stop near a fairly wide road that led all the way to the top of the mountain. If a car were headed down the mountain, then it would take this road.
I walked up the road. Although it was asphalt, there was no traffic.
There were several side roads branching off it into the woods on either side. I thought the killer and Morino might have taken any one of those.
The farther I walked, the steeper the road became. I could see the village through the trees, but in miniature.
I was close to the top soon enough. There was a small parking lot there and a building that appeared to be an observatory. Cars could go no farther. I hadn’t been walking long, so I wasn’t tired.
I was looking for Morino’s body.
I walked along the path between the trees, taking branching paths as I found them.
It was cloudy, and the woods were dark. Between the interlocking branches, I observed trees stretching as far as I could see. There was no wind, and cicadas provided the only sound.
N** Mountain was much too large to find a single dismembered corpse on. I eventually decided my search was futile. I returned to the bus stop, covered in sweat and exhausted.
There weren’t a lot of homes along the road the bus took, but there were a few. There had been one on the road toward the top, and I had asked the old man in the garden if any cars had gone up that road the day before. But he shook his head. He even called his family and repeated my question, but none of them had seen a car.
What had made Morino send that message? Had the killer forcibly taken her with him? She wasn’t stupid and wouldn’t be tricked easily.
Was I overthinking things? Had she not been captured at all?
I sat down next to the bus stop and read the notebook again. I was not skilled enough at profiling to glean anything about the killer from the descriptions of the murders.
My sweat dripped onto the pages, and the ink smeared, making bits of it unreadable. Apparently, the killer had been using a water-based ink.
Where had the killer written in this notebook? At home, after he returned from the killings? I doubted he’d written it during the crime. He had written it from his memory, colored by his imagination.
The bus arrived, and I stood up. Looking at my watch, I saw that it was after three. I was leaving the mountain.
iv
The coffee shop Morino always went to was in the middle of the arcade near the station. She had given me directions earlier, but I had never actually been there.
As she had said, the lighting was low, wrapping me in comfortable darkness. Quiet music was playing, melting into the air without drawing attention to itself.
I sat down at the counter.
There was a sign for the bathrooms in back. I glanced at the floor in front of them, where Morino had found the notebook.
There was only one other customer: a young woman in a suit. She was by the windows, reading a magazine as she sipped her coffee.
The shop master came to take my order, and I asked, “Does that woman come here a lot?”
He nodded, and then he frowned, wondering what of it.
“Not important. First, do you mind if I shake your hand?”
“Shake my … ? Why?”
“To mark the occasion.”
The shop master had a very sincere face. He wasn’t young, nor was he old enough to be called middle-aged. He had pale skin and wore a plain black T-shirt, the kind sold anywhere. His hair was neatly buzzed.
At first, he seemed to think I was just a strange customer—probably because I was staring too much.
He brought my coffee quickly.
“I’m friends with a girl named Morino. Do you know her?”
“She’s a regular.”
I asked i
f she was still alive.
He stopped moving.
He slowly put down the cup that had been in his hand, and then he turned to face me. His eyes were clouded, like two black holes bereft of light.
I thought the odds of this man being the killer were significantly higher than those of the other customers from that evening—and now I knew I had been right.
“What do you mean?” he asked, playing dumb.
I held out the notebook. When he saw it, he smiled, flashing dull white canines.
“Morino found this the other day.”
He took the notebook and flipped through it.
“I’m impressed that you knew it was mine.”
“At least half of it was nothing more than a gamble.” I explained how I had gone to N** Mountain to look for her body and what line of thought had brought me here.
†
What had the killer been thinking?
I’d begun by imagining the killer after he’d dropped the notebook.
Why had he written the notebook? To help him remember? To keep a record? I was sure he had read it over and over and that he attached great value to it, so he must’ve noticed that the notebook was missing.
Where had he kept the notebook? Either in his pocket or in his bag. Considering he had dropped it, probably in his pocket. Maybe he had washed his hands in the bathroom and dropped the notebook as he pulled out his handkerchief.
So when had he noticed it was missing? Ten minutes later? A few hours after? I was sure he had noticed it before the day was out.
He would have tried to figure out when he had last read it, the last time he was sure he had it. Then he would have retraced his steps, figuring out where he was most likely to have dropped it.
And I was willing to bet he had narrowed it down pretty well—mostly because I imagined he looked at it quite often. Every time he felt his thoughts growing dark, he would calm himself by reading the notebook. And if he read it that often, he would be able to pinpoint a narrow range of places and times he could have dropped it.
Then the killer must have looked for it, staring at the ground trying to find it.
But he would not have found it there. So the killer must have thought that someone picked it up. If someone were to read the book, he was finished—the police would search for the third victim and find the body. That wasn’t a problem in itself; the problem came if they managed to lift his prints from the notebook or match his handwriting.