by Otsuichi
Was this real? Was someone trying to catch me in a trap? I turned the camera on her. Rather than flashing her fingers in a peace sign or smiling, the girl Morino simply stood stiffly, expressionless. I pressed the shutter. The picture was displayed in the LCD. I was surprised. It was like a photo of a ghost. Her mien combined with and was augmented by the dead trees in the background, making the rigid girl standing there almost a sharply defined phantom. Should I retake it? I thought.
“I see. It looks good,” Morino said as she checked out the photo I had taken. Apparently, she was somehow happy with it. “It’s a good souvenir.” This was in a monotone, as if she had prepared the line in advance.
“While you’re here, could I ask you to take a few more?” she said, and lied down on the roots of the tree. Her hair fanned out on the ground, and her coat opened up.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m being a corpse.”
I waited a few seconds, but there was no further explanation. My imagination took over, and I finally understood. Morino wanted to pretend to be the girl killed seven years ago and have me take pictures of it?
While I stood there bewildered, the girl lying at my feet turned toward the tiny lens of the digital camera.
“A little more to the left,” I instructed her. The girl Morino slid her body a bit to the left. Perfect. She was lying on the exact spot where the girl seven years ago had lain.
2
I had photographed three subjects up to that point. The first was the girl seven years ago. I left her where I had photographed her, which is why she drew such attention. After that, I was careful to hide my second and third subjects and strike the set, as it were. And so, even now, there are still no signs that they’ve been found. You could look up the places where those second and third subjects were buried, but you wouldn’t find any news about the discovery of unidentified bodies or rumors about ghosts haunting the area. I had no doubt that the girls had been filed away as missing persons and forgotten by everyone other than their families and friends.
I had a certain talent: I knew when someone was lying to me. Nothing beyond human understanding like a superpower or anything like that—my powers of observation were simply sharper than most. Looking at the way a person’s eyes moved, the state of the muscles in their face, the position of their hands, and the curve of their body, among other things, I could determine with a fair degree of accuracy whether or not they were telling me the truth. I won game after game when I played cards with friends. And it was very obvious who hated me and who liked me.
In my photography courses at university, I ran into problems when we had to photograph other people. The broad smiles and composed faces of my subjects simply looked fake. The so-called expression of the subject was comprised of a pack of lies. I tried talking to them to make them look natural, but that never went very well. What was strange about all this, however, was that the photos I produced of these people got me excellent marks. Perhaps this was the result of my efforts to eliminate the lie of the subject. At any rate, when my work was viewed through other eyes, they apparently saw something true to life. I began working as a photographer specializing in portraits and got a fair bit of good press. But with each photo I took, the despair inside me grew.
When a lens is turned on a person, that person will try to perform themselves. There’s no way around this. You could perhaps call it a defensive instinct. The party taking the picture and the party having it taken are closely related to the party pointing a gun and the party with a gun pointed at them. There isn’t a person alive who could sit and do nothing faced with the dark barrel of a gun. In the case of the photo, this manifests in the form of performing the self. The subject is defensive because their very emotions are quite clearly being transcribed onto the image. The subject’s self-awareness and the sensation of being watched make them this way. Just having the camera lens before them causes the subject to unconsciously fabricate an expression. The facial expression and physical mannerisms the subject creates in this situation are symbolic. It is a performance planned to make me—the photographer—and the viewers of the photo accept them.
A symbol has no value beyond that. It exists to call to mind the essential nature of that which is depicted. This “summoning,” the fact that those who come into contact with the work will call to mind the object depicted, is the truly critical part of a work of art. There must be an empty space from which to evoke the thought itself. However, when the awareness of the subject begins to perform the self before the lens, the photo becomes less natural and grows faded. The symbols that should be there to spur the recollection are bloated and crushed into the empty space. This act means that the symbol of the cross is praised, and God is ignored.
When taking photos, I had to fight back against the self-awareness of the subject. I would find a crack in the wall of that self-awareness and then snap the shutter like I was firing a gun. But despite this, I was never once satisfied with the photo I captured.
How could I get the photo I wanted? People were my subjects, but the performance of these subjects was an obstacle to taking the photo I desired.
The answer was suggested to me by a picture I happened to find online.
It showed a lone girl.
A subject without self-awareness, not performing even though the lens was turned on her.
The empty space to stir the imagination.
And then I realized.
I could make one myself.
A subject just like this one.
†
Another girl was lying in the spot where I had laid the body down seven years earlier. This girl, who called herself Morino, seemed unconcerned that she was getting dirt in her hair and on her clothes. I readied the tiny digital camera I’d been handed and moved within the range of her sight. The surfaces of her eyes reflected my shadow, but her pupils, turned up to the sky, didn’t so much as flicker. Her gaze did not follow the camera lens. I pressed the shutter down over and over. The girl’s skin was so pale that the blue of her veins was clear underneath. She had a small mole under her left eye, almost like a mark from a tear that had flowed there once. She had scars on her wrists from a history of cutting, it seemed. A red ribbon was tied around the collar of her black sailor-style school uniform with its embroidered school crest. I peered at her eyes; her pupils were tightly constricted. Proof she was alive. That said, she didn’t shake or blink or pull her face back even when I brought my own face in closer to look into those eyes. This girl’s mind was fascinating.
Once I had taken ten or so of the “souvenir photos” she had insisted on, the session ended. The girl got up and silently brushed away the bits of dead leaves stuck in her hair. I felt a sense of regret. I had only taken the warm-up shots. An interest in this subject rose up in me. I wanted to capture her on film. And not with a little digital camera. I wanted to shoot her with the equipment in my car. I wanted to take a photo of the dead face of this beautiful girl and carry it around with me. How incredible it would be to stare at that photo while drinking coffee at Starbucks.
“These are pretty good.” Morino nodded crisply as she checked the pictures I had taken on the digital camera LCD. No light lived in her eyes in the photos; they were simply dark holes. I had captured a corpse. She seemed to like that.
The girl tucked the digital camera away in her bag. Something red flashed in the corner of my eye. She had scratched the back of her right hand, and a red welt sat there now. Looking carefully at the place where she had been lying, I saw that it was scattered with pointed rocks. Blood began to ooze out from the cut before my eyes.
“Are you okay?”
No answer. She stared at the back of her hand, expressionless. I imagined that she would remain expressionless even at the moment a knife was slid into her stomach. She pulled a gauze bandage out of her bag. I was surprised she would always keep something like that in there. She began to wind it around her wound awkwardly with one hand.
“Can I help?
”
No answer. Her right hand was now covered in white, but the bandage looked as though it would pull off quite easily. Even allowing for the fact that she had done it with one hand, she could hardly be said to have done a good job.
“So kids these days walk around with bandages now?”
“I like wrapping bandages around things.”
Then you should be able to do it better than that. You were pretty awkward there.
The girl Morino took her bag in her left hand and shoved her thickly bandaged right into the pocket of her coat. Her hair hung down her back, flowing past slender shoulders. Without looking at me, she shifted her gaze toward the place where she had lain. For a short while, I too stared at the place silently.
“Well then, I’ll be on my way.” Leaving a puff of white breath hanging in the air, Morino turned around and started walking toward the small path that led to the road.
My feet automatically started moving as well. “How are you getting home from here?”
“I’ll take the bus.”
So here was someone who used that bus stop. I still thought it was strange, though, that anyone would get off the bus on a mountain pass.
We stepped onto the path, her in front and me following behind. The path was too narrow to allow us to walk side by side. With every step, I heard the crunching of the dead leaves. The roots of trees erupted here and there out of the unpaved surface, but they were hard to see, hidden as they were by the fallen leaves. I worried that she might catch a small black shoe on one and fall.
The sun was setting, and the hue of the cold December sky gradually shifted to that of evening. Morino glanced back at me out of the corner of one eye. The fair-skinned, well-formed bridge of her nose was fascinating, like looking at a rib in an X-ray.
“Now that I’m thinking of it, it’s quite the coincidence you came along when you did.”
“What?”
“Well, that is a dead end, after all.” She seemed to have jumped to the conclusion that I had just happened to pass by.
“It’s more than a coincidence.”
“So then why did you come along?”
“Preliminary inspection of the building site.” I hated lies, but I lied. The girl nodded, as if accepting it.
The announcement that a waste disposal plant would be built on the empty land had come six months earlier. Within a few months at most, the clearing encircled by dead trees would be dug up, and concrete would be poured; the scene would change completely. Many people were against the planned facility. Perhaps the opposition had deliberately circulated the rumors about the ghost that had made this area a recent topic of conversation. A sort of pushback: You’ll be cursed if you build a thing like that where a dead body was discovered. Naturally, I had no proof to support this theory.
“That reminds me—today’s the anniversary. The last anniversary before the place where the body was found is irrevocably changed forever.”
Seven years ago today, on December 6, a girl had died. In my arms. Why had Morino visited that place on today of all days? Why had I gone there myself on today of all days? Assuming there was a reason, it had to have been that today was December 6.
“The photos before, they were like Rosalia Lombardo,” I said, and the girl Morino glanced back at me as she walked. What kinds of thoughts were happening inside that well-formed skull? The answer came from her lips.
“You have a similar air about you as a friend of mine. Maybe that’s why it’s easy to talk to you.”
I had no recollection of the conversation getting that involved, but apparently today was a chatty day for her.
“How am I like this friend of yours?”
“You know Rosalia.”
Rosalia. When I murmured that name in my heart, I grew serious, an emotion similar to what I experienced when I came into contact with true art. She was not a work of art, however. She was a corpse.
The path ended, and we exited onto the road, avoiding the barbed wire. The paved asphalt surface cut across in front of us. I suddenly had the strong sensation that we had come back out into the world of the living. From where we stood in front of the PLANNED SITE FOR WASTE DISPOSAL FACILITY sign, you could see my vehicle parked in the empty space on the side of the road.
“Thank you for taking the photos.” Morino started to walk off. It was a simple, easy farewell. But she stopped as if she had remembered some forgotten thing and looked back at me. “You know, you weren’t surprised when you saw me there.”
“What?”
“Several cars passed me while I was coming here from the bus stop, and the drivers all turned pale when they saw me.”
I almost laughed. “Maybe they all thought you were a ghost.”
Now that she mentioned it, the girl did look exactly like the rumored ghost. Long black hair, black sailor-style uniform.
“You weren’t surprised when you saw me.”
“I’m an atheist.”
“That means there’s no God, right?”
“Right. There’s not.”
The girl Morino took her eyes off me and stared at her shoes for about five seconds. I couldn’t quite understand what this gesture meant. Turning her back to me, she pulled her cell phone out of her bag and started to make a call, walking in the direction of the bus stop as she did.
I opened the trunk of my car and checked that all my photography equipment was there. Camera, tripod, reflectors, knife, rope, handcuffs. I got into the driver’s seat and opened the glove box. Small bottle of potassium chloride, prescription sleeping pills, syringes.
I started the engine. The car began moving and reached the rust-covered bus stop after about three hundred meters. The black outline of the girl stood there, bag hanging from her hand. I stopped the car in front of her and opened the driver’s side window. “How long do you have to wait until the next bus?”
She glanced at me. “Ninety minutes.”
“Well, do you want a ride?”
Morino shook her head. Her eyes were wary.
“The sun’s setting soon; this area will be pitch-black. There are no streetlamps.”
“I’m okay with the dark.” A note of displeasure crept into her voice. She appeared to have misinterpreted my goal in talking to her. She thought I wanted to pick her up. All I really wanted to do was kill her and take her picture.
“But there might be bears.”
“There aren’t.”
“You’ll get bitten by bugs.”
“I won’t.”
“A murderer could be hiding over there.”
“That would be a remarkable coincidence.”
She was no longer looking at me. Negotiations were over. Her whole body radiated annoyance. She hated me. I couldn’t come up with anything other than forcing her into the car. I would have to be careful not to hurt her and damage her face. If that happened, it would spoil my photos. Moving to put this plan into action, I opened the driver’s side door.
At that moment, I heard a dog barking somewhere off in the distance.
“Maybe a stray,” I muttered, looking far back. You didn’t see them too much in the city these days, but apparently they were still living out here.
I heard the sound of the back door opening.
Morino wordlessly got in and closed the door.
Okay, please go then. She sent me the signal with her eyes in the rearview mirror.
3
Some people feel pleasure at killing another person. I am most definitely not of that persuasion. I’m not like those deviants. If I could, I’d never kill anyone. I would even go so far as to say it’s repulsive to me. But the fact is, I need a subject who will not put on some contrived expression when the lens is turned on her.
The sixth of December, seven years ago. I started talking to a young woman on a street corner. At first, I thought she was in university; she had an adult face, she was tall, and she was in street clothes. But she was an eighteen-year-old high school student. She had changed out of her unif
orm after school so she could hang out in town. I asked what she had done with her uniform and learned she had stuffed it into her bag. We hung out at the video arcade and then had dinner once she had shed her reserve. I crushed up a prescription sleeping pill, dissolved it in an alcoholic beverage, and gave it to her to drink. She fell asleep in the car while listening to a boring story I crafted. I pulled over onto the shoulder of the road and got the syringe and bottle of potassium chloride from the glove box. I stabbed the needle into the girl’s vein and shot the liquid into her. She woke up then, tried to fight back. But she was intoxicated by the pill, her brain was cloudy; she didn’t fight for long. It was a lucky thing, however, that the needle of the syringe didn’t break. I held her body close. Her heart soon stopped.
I set her down in the empty field circled by the dead trees of winter and changed the clothing my subject was wearing. Blood from my nosebleed had gotten onto her street clothes. Opening her bag, I saw her uniform packed in there, just as she had said when she was alive.
After the incident came to light, I checked the news and learned that the police knew everything—the fact that I had taken pictures, that I had changed her clothing and taken her street clothes away, everything. I had left footprints at the scene, and they had a witness testifying that a car had been parked very near the scene of the crime late one night. I braced myself to be arrested at some point in the days that followed. I don’t know what sort of good luck was at work on my behalf, but I was not arrested, and so I was able to photograph the second and third subjects.
I always kept the photos of the girls with me, no matter where I went; I would pass the time at my workplace or in the park or on some street corner staring at them. Whenever I was abruptly overcome by loneliness and almost unable to breathe because of it, I had only to look at the photos to feel at ease again. And when the tears welled up and I wanted to cower in a corner in the dark, then too the photos of the girls saved me. The developed images of their dead faces evoked the unfathomable universe on the other side. They were myth itself; they were love itself. Cheeks devoid of all color shone with a saintly glow, and eyes that could see nothing somehow seemed to see everything.