by Otsuichi
Then Saeki realized … If the boy was going home alone, then where was the boyfriend, who Saeki had assumed was lying down in the house somewhere?
He stood up.
He had a hunch.
Staggering, he crossed the garden, barefoot, his breath turning white in the cold morning air.
The bamboo poles at the end of the garden were standing perfectly upright under the brightening sky. The coffin the boy had buried again was under these poles.
Saeki put his ear to the top of the nearest pole.
He could hear a voice inside, muffled as it echoed across the coffin walls. Inside the coffin, a male voice was calling the name of his lover over and over again. A quiet voice, choked with sobs, it echoed the girl’s name again and again.
prologue
Recently, my sister had begun waking up, washing her face, and immediately taking the dog for a walk. It was the end of November and quite chilly out, so she always left the house looking cold.
That morning, she headed for the door, shivering as usual. I was eating breakfast at the table, scanning the obituaries.
There was a kerosene heater in the corner of the room, which my mother had just lit, so the room stank of oil. It was the smell of brain cells dying. I had just that moment found an article about a child dying of carbon monoxide poisoning from a heater.
I opened the window to air the room out, and a wave of cold morning air came in, sweeping away the stench. The windows were fogged up, and there were traces of mist in the garden.
My sister was standing outside the window, wrapped in a sweater and scarf.
When I opened the window, her eyes met mine, and she waved. The dog was next to her, a leash running from its collar to her hand.
“I can’t get her to leave. Something in the yard has all her attention,” she said, pointing at the dog. The dog was next to the wall between our yard and the house next door. It was sniffing the ground, pawing at the ground as if getting ready to dig.
“Come on! We don’t have time for that,” she said, yanking the leash. She had to get ready for school after the walk. The dog seemed to understand her, and it followed her out of sight, their breath visible in the air.
My mother told me to close the window. I did as I was told, and then I went outside.
There was a large stone at the edge of the garden. I moved it to the spot where the dog had been trying to dig; that would stop it from trying again. I didn’t want it digging there—a few more minutes, and my sister would’ve found the human hands I’d buried there earlier that year. When I got home, I’d have to move them somewhere safer. I had just caught another glimpse of my sister’s strange ability to stumble upon the unusual.
I went back inside and finished reading the paper. My mother asked if there were any interesting stories, and I shook my head—once again, there was no new information about Kitazawa Hiroko.
Seven weeks earlier, Kitazawa Hiroko’s body had been found in an abandoned building not far from where I lived, within the city limits. The abandoned building had once been a hospital. It was in a deserted area, away from the city center and toward the mountains, at the end of a gravel path leading from the road. The building was surrounded by rusty chain-link fences and had been left there without being demolished. All year long, there was nothing around it but dried grass, no other buildings at all.
Three elementary school children had been exploring the building when they’d found Kitazawa Hiroko’s corpse. All three were now in counseling.
When the body had first been discovered, the case was all over the papers and the news. But now they were mentioning Kitazawa Hiroko less and less frequently.
There was no way to tell what was going on with the investigation.
The articles I had found about her contained nothing but the story of how her body was found, along with a photo of her. I had cut these out of the paper as I found them.
The photo had been taken while she was alive. She was smiling, flashing white teeth, and she had straight black hair down to her shoulders. No other photographs of her had been released.
Did the police have any idea who had killed her?
By the time classes ended that evening, it was already dark. The florescent lights were on, and the windows reflected the classroom like a mirror. When the last class ended, the other students surged out of the room. In the windows, I could see one immobile figure in the middle of this raucous flood. She had long black hair, and her skin was so pale it was like she was made of snow. Morino Yoru.
Only the two of us remained.
“You want to show me something?” I asked. She had whispered as much to me in the hall after lunch, telling me to stick around after classes.
“I have obtained a photo of a dead body.”
Everyone goes through life in his or her own way. You take a hundred people, you get one hundred ways of life, and all of them find it hard to understand any way of life but their own.
Morino and I had a unique way of life that was well beyond the ordinary. Exchanging pictures of corpses was simply part of this.
She produced a letter-sized piece of paper from her bag. There was a glossy look to the page; it was specialty paper, designed for printing photographs.
Printed on it was a bare concrete room—but the first thing I noticed was how red everything was.
In the center of the photo was an oblong table, the surface of which was red—as was the floor around it, and the ceiling, and the walls … not bright red, but dark red, the kind that wells up in the dark corner of your room after you turn out the lights.
She was placed on top of the central table. “Kitazawa Hiroko?” I asked.
Morino raised her eyebrows marginally. It was easy to overlook, but this was how she expressed surprise.
“I’m impressed you could tell.”
“You got this off the Internet?”
“Someone gave it to me. I was cutting out newspaper articles concerning her in the public library when someone passing by gave it to me. Apparently, it’s a picture of her—but I never would’ve guessed.”
Morino Yoru was a beautiful girl, so boys from other schools would occasionally try to strike up a conversation with her. No-body in our school ever went near her, though; they were all well aware that she had absolutely no interest.
Apparently, someone had seen her gathering strange articles in an unusual place like the library and had used that as an excuse.
She took the printed photo from my hand, looked at it closely, and narrowed her eyes. “How could you know it was her at first glance like that?”
“The girl in the photo … is barely recognizable as human.” Morino whispered this, and I explained that I had simply guessed. Kitazawa Hiroko’s head was on the table in the picture. I had made an educated guess based on the hairstyle and profile.
“Oh,” she said, nodding.
I asked about the person who had given her the photo, but Morino didn’t answer.
I would search for it online when I got home.
I looked away, out the window. There was nothing out there but darkness—deep, never-ending darkness. The classroom was bathed in white light, and the reflected rows of desks floated in the air outside.
“There are two kinds of humans: those who kill and those who are killed.”
“Abrupt. What do you mean?”
It was clear enough that some humans killed other people or wanted to kill people for no reason at all. I didn’t know if they became that way as they grew up or if they were simply born that way. The problem was, these people hid their true nature and lived ordinary lives. They were hidden in the world, appearing no different from ordinary humans.
But one day, they would have no choice but to kill. They would have to leave their acceptable lives and go hunting.
I was one of these people.
I had looked into the eyes of a number of killers. Those eyes would, on occasion, look something other than human. It was a subtle difference, barely no
ticeable, but in the depths of their eyes lurked something alien.
For example, when normal humans spoke to me, they would believe I was human and treat me accordingly.
But the killers I had met were different. When I looked into their eyes, I felt like they saw me as just another object, not a living human.
“So …”
I looked over at Morino’s reflection.
“You didn’t kill her, did you … ? The girl in the photo has her hair curled and dyed—she looks nothing like the photo in the papers, so how did you recognize her?”
As I listened to Morino, I thought to myself that she was very sharp today.
In her eyes, there was no sign of that alien tinge I had seen in those of the killers I had met. She viewed humans as humans. She would probably never kill anyone. She might have unusual interests compared with other humans, but she was still normal.
Morino and I had many things in common—but on this, we differed. This difference was a fundamental one, the difference between humanity … and otherwise.
She was human, the side that always got killed. I was not.
“There was another picture, after she’d had her hair done. It was used without the permission of her family, so it wasn’t widely circulated. I recognized her from that one.”
“I see,” she said, accepting this.
I went home and turned on the computer in my bedroom. I searched all corners of the net, looking for pictures of Kitazawa Hiroko’s corpse. The air in the room grew stale and stuffy. I found nothing.
I took out the knives I had hidden behind my bookcase. I looked at the reflection of my face in the blade. I could hear the sound of the wind outside, and it sounded like the screams of the people these knives had killed.
It was like the knives had a will of their own and were calling to me. Or perhaps something in the depths of my heart was simply reflected in the mirror of the blade. I looked out the window, at the lights of the city in the darkness mingled with the pale lights of the sky above.
I heard a sound from the knife in my hand that it couldn’t possibly have made. I felt sure it was the sound of the knife growing parched.
I had lied to Morino. There had not been any photographs circulated of Kitazawa Hiroko’s new hairstyle.
i
Every now and then, members of my family had temporarily left the house, such as when my father had gone on a business trip or my mother had gone traveling with a friend; each time, the house seemed strangely emptier than it did when all four of us were living there. When I was away on a field trip, my parents and older sister might well have felt the same way, as if there was something missing, as if I should have been there. When the missing family member returned home, everything would be back to normal, and the four of us could see one another again. The house was the size we were used to, comfortably cramped in a way that allowed me to trip over my sister’s outstretched legs when I passed in front of the TV.
There had been four of us … but now my sister was never coming back, and when we sat at the table together, there would always be an extra chair.
Nobody knew why my sister had been murdered, but my older sister, Kitazawa Hiroko, had died seven weeks ago. Someone had killed her twelve hours after we’d last seen her, and the body had been found in an abandoned hospital on the edge of the city.
I’d never actually been inside that hospital, but I had once looked at it from the outside, after my sister had been discovered. It was a cold place, nothing there but dry grass. The ground was gravel, and the wind turned my shoes white with sand. The hospital was a big, derelict concrete square, looming like a massive cast-off shell. All the glass in the windows was broken, and it was dark inside.
It hadn’t been long after my sister had been found inside that I’d seen the place, so the entrance was sealed with tape, and there were police going in and out.
My sister had been found in there by some children. The police had not released any information, but the room where she’d been found had once been an operating chamber.
The body had been badly damaged, and it had not been easy to identify, but they contacted us when they found her bag nearby. My mother had answered the phone.
It was around noon, less than a day since we’d last seen my sister, and my mother had assumed the call was a prank.
But the body was definitely my sister’s. This was not determined by having those of us who knew her—me, my parents, and my sister’s boyfriend, Akagi—identify her. Instead, they used medical charts and several complicated forensics tests.
The police didn’t release many details about her condition when she was found or how she had been killed. The world only knew that she had been strangled and cut up with a knife of some kind. That was horrible enough for the news to make a fuss about it, but the truth was far worse.
The police apparently decided that the truth about what had happened to her would have a detrimental effect on society, and so they kept everything secret. Even the kids who had found her were ordered to keep silent.
My parents had demanded that the police and doctors show them her body. The authorities were reluctant. It was impossible to make her presentable, and they had decided we were better off not seeing her.
I don’t believe my parents had ever doted on my sister excessively while she was alive. Their relationship with her had been an ordinary one: chatting about TV commercials, arguing about where the newspaper had wandered off to … We were that kind of family. They had never bragged about her, and I had never known how much they loved her until I saw their faces covered in tears when they learned of her death.
“Let us see her!” my father begged, desperate. His face was bright red, and he looked positively furious. When the doctors and police realized that he wouldn’t back down, they reluctantly allowed my parents to enter the room where the body lay.
I watched them vanishing through the double doors from the hall. I was too terrified; I couldn’t understand how anyone could be brave enough to look at her.
I could hear a doctor and a police detective talking. They didn’t know I was standing in the shadow of the stairs.
The detective said it had taken ages to pick up all the pieces.
My shoes squeaked on the floor, and he turned around and saw me. He bit his lip, wincing at his mistake.
The pieces of my sister’s body. I stood there, letting the meaning of those words sink in.
When my parents came out of the morgue, I asked about her body. But they were completely stunned. They’d been crying so hard before, but after they went in that room, neither one of them ever cried again. They stared silently at the floor, not making eye contact with anybody. It was like they had left their emotions in that room. Their faces looked oddly yellow, like unmoving masks.
The police would say nothing about the body, and everything about it remained inside a black box as far as the world was concerned. Because of that, the initial flurry of news reports soon died down. Seven weeks after she was murdered, both the police and the press stopped coming to our house.
†
My sister was two years older than me, merely twenty when she died. It was just the two of us, so I spent my whole life looking up to her.
When I was in the fifth grade, my sister started junior high, wearing her new uniform. When I was in eighth grade, she was talking about the whole new world that had opened up for her in high school. I could always see the life that lay in store for me two years later in my sister. My sister was like a ship forging ahead of me through the dark ocean.
There were two years between us, but we were almost the same height, which meant people often told us we looked alike. One year when we were kids, we’d gone to relatives’ homes for New Year’s, and everyone we met said the same thing.
“We do not!” my sister had said, looking as baffled as I was.
As far as we were concerned, our faces were totally different. Where was the resemblance? It always puzzled me. Yet on that trip,
when I’d been playing with some kids my age on the opposite side of the house from my sister, a passing aunt had looked surprised, saying she was sure she’d just seen me playing somewhere else.
When we were kids, my sister and I had gotten along well, and we’d always played together. She would take my hand and take me along with her to the homes of friends her age.
When had that changed? I couldn’t even remember when I’d last chatted and laughed with my sister.
A few years earlier, a tiny rift had opened between us. It wasn’t anything obvious enough for anyone around us to notice. It might not have even really been big enough to call a rift. But when my sister was talking to me, she often looked slightly annoyed.
One time, I was on the living room sofa, and I pointed at the magazine I was reading, talking about the interesting article I’d just read. That was all I did, but my sister glanced at the magazine, frowned, said something vague, and then left the room. I felt like she was irritated with me and was trying to hide it, but I couldn’t be sure.
Perhaps I had done something that rubbed her the wrong way, or she’d been in the middle of something when I’d spoken up. In this manner, I tried to convince myself that her behavior didn’t have any real reason behind it.
Her irritation that time may have been my imagination, but that wasn’t the only time this kind of behavior had occurred.
For example, another day, when I’d come home from school, she was talking to a friend on the phone, laughing into the cordless receiver. I sat on the sofa, watching TV quietly so as not to disrupt her conversation.
When she finally hung up, the room was suddenly quiet. We were each sitting on different sofas, facing each other, watching TV in silence. I wanted to say something to her, but there was something about her expression that made me hesitate. She had been having so much fun a moment before on the phone, but now that she was alone with me, she was suddenly sullen. The warmth had vanished from her, and invisible walls had gone up between us.
If I approached her and tried to talk to her, she would shut me out, looking angry. Whenever we did speak, her answers were curt, as if she was deliberately trying to end the conversations quickly, far faster than she would conversations with our mother.