by Otsuichi
The girl said nothing for a moment. Then, “I heard the dirt hitting the lid.”
“You were pretending to be unconscious?”
He had thought she’d been sleeping since he’d knocked her out. When had she woken up? He had never tied her up. If she had been awake before he put her in the box, she would’ve tried to run.
“Are your legs injured? Is that why you didn’t run?” he asked. The girl said nothing. Maybe his guess was right.
“Let me out!” she said angrily.
Her sudden anger took Saeki by surprise. She didn’t cry and plead—she was giving orders. He couldn’t see her underground, but he could sense how strong she was. But even in her strength, she was powerless.
“No, I’m afraid not. I really am sorry,” he said, shaking his head, even though the buried girl couldn’t see him. “If I let you out, you’d tell everyone what I did to you. I can’t let that happen.”
“Wh-who are you? Why are you doing this?” Her questions echoed in his heart.
Why had he buried her? He could find no exit from that question. It led him directly into a dead end. But he decided there was no reason to be polite and answer her, so he stopped thinking about it.
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Where am I? The mountains?”
“No, you’re in my garden. This is your grave.”
The girl fell quiet. He tried to imagine what her face must look like in that tiny, dark space.
“Grave? You’ve got to be kidding. I’m still alive.”
“Burying dead people isn’t as much fun,” Saeki said, feeling like that was extremely obvious.
It seemed to leave the girl speechless for a moment. Then she growled, “If you don’t let me out, you’ll be in trouble.”
“You think someone’s coming to save you?”
“I know someone who will find me!” she suddenly roared. Then she yelped in pain and fell silent again. He could hear her breathing heavily. Maybe her ribs were injured and they hurt every time she spoke. Saeki thought there was a surprising passion in her words.
“This friend you trust so much … a boy?”
“Yes,” she said, but with a confidence that made it clear she was talking about her boyfriend.
“May I ask his name?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Curiosity.”
There was a long silence, and then the girl said the boy’s name. Saeki branded that name into his memories but privately wondered if she was lying. There was a possibility that no such person existed, but Saeki had no way of verifying the truth.
“I’m going to have to buy some binoculars.”
The night sky was filling with clouds drifting across the face of the moon. Tomorrow it might well be overcast.
“Do you know why?” Saeki asked. The girl remained silent. “To watch him mourn your loss from a distance.”
He was sure his voice had reached the girl’s ears, yet she said nothing at all. Saeki said a few more things, trying to draw a response, but she reacted to nothing. She just lay there silently in the dark.
Assuming he had made her mad, Saeki left the garden. Her mood would change in the morning.
He went to the garage and cleaned the backseat of the car. He could leave no trace of her presence there. In the car, he always kept a small pillow, which he’d placed under her head when he’d laid her down. All her blood had soaked into it, so there were no stains on the seat. Saeki took the pillow out of the car and gathered up all the long black hairs from the floor.
When he was done cleaning, he went inside, checked the clock on the wall, and discovered that it was already past two. He went up to his room, laid down on his futon, and tried to sleep. He lay there with his eyes closed, searching for the entrance to the land of dreams, his thoughts on the girl locked in tiny, isolated darkness.
†
The next day, it was almost noon by the time Saeki woke up. It was Saturday, but where he worked, weekends meant little; he often had to work on Saturday and Sunday. But this week, he’d been lucky: Saturday was his day off.
He opened his window and looked outside. When he was a child, he’d been able to see the city from there, but now the trees were in the way. Above the treetops, he could see a gray sky. A cold wind shook the trees, brushing past Saeki’s cheeks.
Wondering if the girl had simply been a dream, Saeki went downstairs and out onto the porch. He looked toward the wall, and only then was he sure that it had really happened.
There were four thick bamboo poles among the thinner rods. Four poles meant two coffins. He had buried a girl last night, next to Kousuke. Confirming this came as a relief.
What was going on next to the park, where he had pushed the girl into the car?
She had screamed. Had someone reported it? Had the buried girl’s parents grown worried about their missing daughter and called the police? The police might’ve been able to use those two pieces of information to figure out that the girl had been kidnapped on the road next to the park.
Saeki put on his sandals and stepped down into the garden. He was hungry, but he wanted to chat with the girl a little before he ate. In unusual circumstances like this, he usually wasn’t able to eat—but for some reason, he felt very hungry and alive.
He stood next to the bamboo poles. He didn’t speak immediately but listened, trying to hear if any sounds were coming from belowground. There were none, so he said, “It’s morning. Are you awake?”
The night before, she’d refused to answer him. He’d been worried she would keep that up this morning—but after a moment, he heard her voice again.
“I know it’s morning. It’s dark in here, but …”
The pole the voice was coming from shook slightly, despite the earth packed around it. She must have touched the end of it, which ran through the hole in the lid of the coffin.
“There’s this pole sticking in next to my face. I was feeling around and found it. This is so I can breathe? I looked inside, and I could see white light on the far end—which means daylight?”
The poles were not fixed in place—they simply passed through holes in the lid. If Saeki wanted to remove them, he could do so easily. Likewise, if she grabbed the end inside the coffin and shook it, it would wave back and forth merrily.
“Let go of that. Those poles should never move. Someone might see and think it looks suspicious. If you move that again, I’ll pull them out. And then you won’t be able to breathe.”
The pole stopped moving.
“What’s your name?” the girl asked.
“Saeki. And you are Morino, yes?”
There was a long, thoughtful silence, and then the girl whispered, her voice full of disgust, “Saeki, I don’t know why you’ve shut me in here, but this is evil. You should let me out—or the black bird of misfortune will settle on your shoulder.”
Not only was this girl not afraid of him, she was casting some sort of curse on him. Did she fully understand her predicament? Saeki felt himself growing a little angry.
“What can you do down there? I could drown you at any moment.”
“Drown … ?”
He explained in as much detail as possible how he could kill her using a hose to pump water into the coffin, making it very clear that there was no hope of her surviving, trying to break her will.
The girl wasn’t able to turn her eyes away from the black pit of despair before her. Or perhaps she was simply too tired to maintain her anger. Either way, her voice trembled. “I will end my own life before you have a chance to kill me. You didn’t check my pockets—a fatal mistake. I’m sure you’ll realize just how careless you were in time. I have a mechanical pencil in my pocket, and I’ll stab that into my jugular.”
“Perhaps you think committing suicide before I kill you would protect your pride, but that isn’t true. It’s all the same. Once you kill yourself, your body will rot away down there. No one will ever find it. You’ll remain alone, isolated underground forever.
”
“No, I will not. I will not go undiscovered forever. The police aren’t stupid, and they’ll catch you one day. It may be a few days from now, or it may be a few years from now. And I know one thing for sure: I will not die alone.”
“You won’t?”
“My death will not be ‘isolated’!”
“You mean someone will die with you? The boy you spoke of yesterday?”
“He won’t let me die alone.”
Was she crying in her grave? Her voice sounded a little moist, but there was still an absolute sense of conviction behind it.
Saeki had asked about her boyfriend, intending to scoff. They were high school kids, and it was only puppy love. But now he found himself getting nervous. There was a black cloud in his head, heavily laden with rain.
“I can’t understand … how you can talk like that, in these circumstances. “Morino … you will die there and rot away underground, lonely … and alone. No other fate is possible,” Saeki said, and then he left her.
When he heard her words, he’d remembered the question the young woman at work had asked him—if he would ever marry.
He was cut off from any deep bonds, the kind family and close friends shared.
He had to remain that way to survive. He could smile at other people and engage in shallow conversations, but his soul must never touch theirs. The girl’s words had driven that home, unsettling him.
He decided to eat something and calm himself. He had lost his appetite, but if he ate, he would feel better.
He decided to eat out. He pulled his wallet out of his suit pocket and put on a jacket. Then, as he slipped on his shoes at the door, he noticed something odd.
Saeki had a work badge that he always kept on him. The ID card was held in a brown leather case, and it was always in the same pocket as his wallet. He never went anywhere without it. But he hadn’t seen it since the night before.
Saeki took off the one shoe he’d managed to get on and went back into the house, where his suit jacket was hanging. He reached into the pocket where his wallet had been. There was nothing inside, so he checked the other pockets. No sign of his badge. He looked around, making sure it wasn’t on the floor somewhere. He picked up all the magazines on the table, even lifting up the futon covering his kotatsu to look for it. Nothing.
When had he last seen it? He knew he’d had it at work. Had he dropped it somewhere?
Saeki soon arrived at the answer, an answer that made him rather dizzy. The more he tried to dismiss the idea, the more certain he was.
If he had dropped the badge, it would’ve been when he’d fought with the girl … last night, next to the park, when the girl’s scream had shattered the night, and the girl’s elbow had struck him in the ribs—knocking the badge out of his pocket.
He could hear bird’s wings flapping in the garden. The trees around his house drew a lot of birds. He could hear them singing in the morning, and when he walked through the garden, they would fly away in panic. But today the sound of their wings felt ominous, like a harbinger of destruction.
They had cleaned the leaves on that road yesterday. The badge hadn’t been there when they cleaned, but if it were found today … then they’d know the owner of the badge had passed that way that morning or the evening before.
It would be easy to determine to whom the badge belonged. Saeki’s name was written inside. He had no way of telling how many people would connect the fact that he had been there with the girl’s scream and her disappearance, but it seemed like a good idea to go out and find the badge before anyone else did.
Saeki hurriedly put his shoes back on and went outside. He would run to the park—it was too close to bother driving.
Before he went out, Saeki decided to say something to the girl. He walked around from the entrance through the trees on the side of the house to reach the garden by the porch. As he neared the bamboo poles along the wall, he stopped dead in his tracks.
From the bamboo poles, he could hear the girl laughing like a broken record.
In all their conversations, the girl had never let herself get carried away. She had never screamed, instead speaking calmly to him, in firm control of her emotions.
But now she was laughing. The pain occasionally caused the laughter to give way to groans, but she couldn’t stop herself from laughing anyway.
In the box underground, had her fear driven her to madness? She had been so quiet all this time that the laughter was all the more unsettling. In the end, Saeki went back the way he had come without daring to say a word.
iii
When he reached the road by the park, it was already noon. If it had been a clear day, the sun would’ve been high overhead, but today a layer of thick clouds covered it, and a cold wind was blowing.
The park was a cozy little number, nestled in the middle of a residential area.
There was a chain-link fence around it, to keep children from running out into the road. As Saeki walked along the sidewalk, he glanced through the fence into the park. There was a playground in a clearing.
Someone was sitting on a swing. He was facing the other side of the park, his back to Saeki, so all Saeki could make out were his black clothes.
Certain there was no one else around, Saeki relaxed. He had been worried that the police would already be there investigating, but apparently that was not the case. More than anything else, he’d been afraid that someone else would find the badge before he did.
Trees were placed at intervals along the sidewalk. There were no cars on the street; it was just the quiet, empty road.
With every breeze, dry leaves fell—not dancing on the breeze, but falling straight down, like dry rain. They’d just cleaned there the day before, but the sidewalk already was covered in leaves. There were fewer on the road, because the wind from passing cars kept that area relatively clear, but there were big piles against the curbs.
Saeki looked around the ground where he’d stopped his car the night before, where he’d grappled with the girl. But he didn’t find his badge. There wasn’t anything but leaves, which blanketed the ground. Perhaps the leaves had covered his badge, hiding it from the eyes of people passing by.
Saeki got down on his knees and began pushing around leaves. There was no need to search the entire sidewalk; he knew the badge would be where he had grappled with the girl. He was sure he would find it quickly.
As he gently turned over the fallen leaves, the wind caught them, carrying them away. Saeki watched them, thinking about the girl.
It was dark where she was, in that box. If she peered through the pole stuck into the lid, she could see the light of the world outside as a tiny dot, but that was the only light she had. In that tiny, dark space, she had no choice but to gaze directly on her own death. Yet still she claimed her boyfriend would not let her die alone.
Finding that out had shaken Saeki. He couldn’t understand it, and that made him anxious. How could you believe in someone when you were trapped in a box underground, with the promise of eternal isolation hovering over you?
There had been a comfortable fog over his mind all night; as he’d thought about how powerless the girl he had buried was, it had given him ripples of pleasure, like honey on his tongue. But when he’d heard those words, it was like being dragged from his slumber by someone slapping his cheek.
He knew exactly what he had done to the girl now. He remembered every horrifying word he had said to her.
Feeling dizzy, Saeki fell to his knees in the leaves. His vision blurred, and the layers of leaves seemed to ripple like the surface of the sea. He could barely breathe, his lungs gasping for air.
When had he begun to relish such sadistic actions like he was eating candy?
Once, he had been a good citizen. He had worked hard, and he had been nice to those around him, greeting people he knew as he walked around, always stopping to chat.
Every time the notion of burying someone alive had floated into his mind, he’d struggled to banish the thou
ght. He’d told himself that no one should ever do such a thing and that he should be satisfied with digging holes in his garden. He was a human being. He could never do anything as diabolical as enjoying burying someone alive …
But ever since he’d buried Kousuke and killed him, a vital gear inside him had gone out of whack. In a terrifying way, his feelings of superiority over the helpless girl in the ground had made him feel like he was finally alive … Could he still call himself human?
Despite his dizzy spell, Saeki never once stopped pushing the leaves around as he continued looking for his badge. Sweat rolled down his nose, falling onto the dry leaves.
No matter how hard he looked for it, there was no sign of his badge. He had even checked the leaves well away from where he had struggled with the girl, just in case, but it was nowhere to be found. Saeki was starting to panic.
A newspaper swept up against his legs, carried by the wind. When he stood up, kicking it away, he realized someone was standing against the fence, looking at him through it. He’d been so preoccupied with his search that he hadn’t seen the figure approaching.
The swing was swaying empty in the distance. The person sitting there must have come over to him.
Standing on the other side of the fence was a boy who looked like a high school student. He wore a black uniform, and he stood staring at Saeki with both hands in his pockets. Saeki assumed today had been a half day at school, so the boy had come from school directly to the park.
Saeki met the boy’s eye, and there was an awkward silence. The boy broke it first, bowing his head. “Sorry, I just … wondered what you were doing.”
He must’ve been a sight to behold.
“Did you lose something?” the boy asked.
“Erm,” Saeki stammered, not sure how to answer. He wanted the boy to go away, but it seemed too strange to come right out and say so. Perhaps he should leave himself, coming back to look some more when the boy was gone.
“You live around here?” the boy asked, when Saeki failed to respond.