Penance

by Kanae Minato

  “This country’s about to collapse!” Sekiguchi yelled, and charged at the children. “Choose to die a manly death over being taken prisoner!”

  I raced toward them. I ran around half the pool but saw nothing I could use as a weapon. All I had on was my swimsuit. Sekiguchi grabbed the child in front of the line for lane six, Ikeda, by the arm and brandished his knife. Still blowing my whistle like mad, I leaped at him. Like I was rolling on the court in volleyball to receive a serve, I leaped at Sekiguchi and grabbed him by the legs. The momentum threw him sideways and he knifed himself in the thigh. He grabbed at the wound with both hands, and tumbled one complete turn and fell into the pool.

  Maybe because of the pain, or because he couldn’t swim, or because he was so overweight, Sekiguchi shouted “Help!” and started struggling in the water like he was drowning.

  The children still in the pool hurriedly scrambled out. I told them to run away to the playground, and I used the phone in the boys’ changing room to contact the office and have them call for an ambulance.

  Ikeda had been stabbed in the left side.

  There were towel racks in the changing room, so I grabbed some towels hanging there and pressed them on Ikeda’s wound to stop the bleeding. As I was doing this Ms. Okui, the school nurse, came running up, and she took over. Just then I spotted Sekiguchi, hands on the side of the pool, trying to clamber out.

  I ran over to him and took a running kick at his face. After this, other teachers and the ambulance showed up.

  That’s what happened at the time.

  Fortunately—I’m not sure fortunately is at all the best way to say it since he was hurt so badly—Ikeda, though still in the hospital with a severe injury that will keep him there for a good month, will recover. There were a couple of children who fell and scraped their knees while running away, but no other children were hurt by Sekiguchi.

  Parents and people in town here learned what happened from their children, of course, and then the media got the story out via newspapers, TV, and the Internet, and the whole country soon heard about it.

  I did my very best at the time. I feel very sorry for Ikeda, but I think my actions kept his injuries to a minimum. Despite this, the school’s been denounced, not just by all of you, but by people living far away, people I’ve never laid eyes on.

  The first target of the attacks was Mr. Tanabe.

  After he was shoved into the pool by Sekiguchi, he stayed there, mostly underwater, until the police arrived, even though this elementary school pool is only one meter deep. Ikeda, who was stabbed, was in Mr. Tanabe’s class, and when one child’s father asked him what Mr. Tanabe was doing while all this was going on, the child responded, “Ms. Shinohara pushed the bad guy and helped us, but Mr. Tanabe was hiding in the pool the whole time.” The same sort of conversation took place in many of the children’s families, apparently.

  The children weren’t lying. Mr. Tanabe really was hiding. I can’t understand it—a male teacher like him, abandoning his kids to hide by himself. Because of his actions Mr. Tanabe became known all over Japan as a weak, cowardly teacher.

  You might think Mr. Tanabe, tall, with an athletic build that took him all the way to the nationals in tennis, wouldn’t have been afraid enough of that slender man in the photograph to hide. Do you understand now why I started by describing Sekiguchi to you? Do you still think Mr. Tanabe was a weakling and a coward?

  What would all of you have done if you’d been in his position?

  Human beings have very selfish ways of thinking.

  Take the movie Titanic. Didn’t you project yourself into that scene, imagining yourself on that luxury liner as it went down? Didn’t you imagine that you alone were rescued? Didn’t you picture yourself calmly finding a board, climbing onto it, uninjured, and waiting for help?

  When you watch TV news scenes of an earthquake or fire, don’t you imagine yourself as the only one adroitly dodging the collapsing buildings and running to safety? When you hear news about some random knife attack on the streets, don’t you imagine yourself narrowly escaping? When you heard about a suspicious character breaking into school grounds, didn’t you picture yourself taking quick-witted action and driving the person away?

  Didn’t you lash out, asking what this incompetent teacher thought he was doing, because you were so positive that you would have reacted differently? But make no mistake about it—it’s precisely people who are convinced they could actually put these self-serving scenarios into practice who, when push comes to shove, aren’t able to do a thing.

  “Okay, then what about you?” people ask. “Do you think you’re braver than most because you charged right at Sekiguchi?”…A lot of people must think that. Actually, after the incident, when reports came out talking about me as the courageous female teacher, I received countless emails sent to the address we use in the class communications tree telling me to stop being so full of myself.

  But the issue goes back further than that. I am not at all what you’d call courageous.

  The way I see it, people who are able to take the appropriate actions in an emergency either have had a lot of training to do so, or have experienced something similar in the past.

  For me, it’s the latter.

  This happened fifteen years ago, in the summer when I was in fourth grade.

  I went to college in the prefecture we’re in now, took the prefectural certification test to be a teacher, and was hired as a teacher here in this small seaside town at the Wakaba Third Public Elementary School. But the town I was born and raised in was completely different.

  —— Town. Do any of you know it?

  It’s a small town in a mountain valley, the size and population about the same as our town here. And economically, too, the two towns are similar, with our town here relying on a factory run by a shipbuilding corporation. Because the towns are so alike, then, when I was assigned to what was seen as an out-of-the-way part of the prefecture, I felt as if I belonged.

  When I ask the children to describe their town they say things like “The sea is beautiful,” or “There’s a lot of natural beauty.” Both correct. But aren’t they just repeating what they were taught in class in the lower grades? I think you can’t really appreciate the town you live in until you’ve left it.

  In the town I grew up in we were taught in elementary school that our town had very clean, pure air.

  We were taught that because, at the end of third grade, the Adachi Manufacturing Company built a factory there to manufacture precision instruments. But when I lived there I never really appreciated it.

  The air here, too, is wonderful, the smell of the tide when you take a deep breath. But when I was assigned here I bought a small car to commute to school. Early in the second year the rim of the metal parts had already started to rust out. When I saw that, I realized all over again how clean and pure the air was back in my hometown.

  And it was in an elementary school back in that little town that a murder took place.

  The incident that happened here recently was heavily reported on for the first three days, but after a month it seems like everyone had completely forgotten about it, except those in town. A murder takes place somewhere in Japan nearly every other day, so it’s hard to get people to remember one for very long. And there’s no need to, unless it directly affects you.

  In the same way, the murder that happened in my hometown, since it took place at an elementary school, was widely reported at first, but now I doubt anyone here remembers it.

  It happened on August fourteenth.

  As I said, the towns are about the same size, so picture your own town fifteen years ago and I think you can understand what I’m saying. Back then, for country children with their grandparents under the same roof, the Obon holiday was nothing special. It was actually kind of a boring day. With relatives visiting from the big cities, we were in the way at home and our parents yelled at us to “go outside and play.” But the pool at school was closed, and if we went to
the riverside to play our parents would get upset at us, telling us how the spirits of the dead would come out of the water and grab our legs.

  There were no recreational facilities in town, not even any mini-mart. In the morning I visited the family grave site with my immediate family and other relatives, had an early lunch, and then, until the sun set, had to wander about this boring town aimlessly, like a refugee.

  But there were lots of kids in the same boat. Not just me, but the girls in the West District I always played with, my classmates Sae, Akiko, and Yuka, were at loose ends just like me. Fortunately there was the elementary school in our district and, as we often did, we gathered to play at the school grounds.

  There was a girl named Emily with us then. She wasn’t born in the town.

  From the time we entered elementary school it was always my job to decide what kind of games we would play. Probably because I was so tall, even with my classmates I was always treated like an older student.

  For instance, when we were playing by the river once and one of the children’s shoes was washed away, it was me they looked to for help. Not that they asked me directly to fetch it. It was more like “Maki, what do we do?” Then of course I had to go retrieve it. I ran downstream, gingerly stepped into the river in my bare feet, lay in wait for the shoe as it floated toward me, and then somehow grabbed it. “We knew you’d get it, Maki!” they cried out, making me feel as if I were their older sister or something.

  It wasn’t just the kids who treated me like that. Once when we were walking home from school as a group and one of the children fell down and started to cry, an adult passing by scolded me: “You’re older so you’ve got to keep an eye on them.” The same thing at school. If one of the other kids was left out, it was always me the teacher came to, to make sure the child was invited to join in.

  My parents had always acted that way toward me too. I was the older of two sisters so it was natural to be treated that way at home, but whenever there was an event, like a festival, they always made me take on some major role in any activity where the kids were the focus. The school had a local volunteer corps, and when I didn’t participate and my mother found out the other neighborhood kids had, she poked me angrily in the head and back, and after that, unless I had some other important thing going on I always took part.

  Because of this, people in town always said I was mature and reliable. And after I heard this enough times I started to believe them, to see myself as exactly that. So I thought it only natural that I take control of any situation. If anything, I thought I had to. When we were playing, too, I always wracked my brain to figure out what would be most fun.

  You might be wondering why I’m bringing this up. But it’s connected to the attack at the pool, so I’d appreciate it if you would be patient with me a little longer.

  Everything changed in fourth grade, however. With the new plant built by Adachi Manufacturing in our town, we suddenly had lots of transfer students in school. A girl named Emily joined my class. Emily’s father was an executive with Adachi and she was really good at school and knew all kinds of things about politics and economics that we country kids had no idea about. She could, for instance, explain what a strong exchange rate for the yen meant, and what effect this would have domestically.

  One day our social studies teacher told us that the town we lived in had particularly clean air. None of us were really convinced, but after class someone asked Emily and because she confirmed it, then most of the kids believed it was true.

  Because whatever Emily said was correct.

  After that, whenever kids in the class were trying to decide something, they always asked Emily’s opinion. Even for activities that being from the city didn’t help with—like deciding who should be assigned the various chores in the classroom, or what we would do at various events. That had all been my role, but no more.

  I had mixed feelings about this, but everything Emily said really was correct, and the ideas she had were always fresh and intriguing and, unable to object, I went along. But I’ll admit that being told that the kinds of games my friends and I were involved in were silly wasn’t much fun.

  Just before Emily moved into town, it was popular among the girls I knew to visit others’ houses to see the French dolls on display. Naturally, I was the one who first proposed it. All of us were really into it until the time Emily joined us and said, flatly, that she preferred Barbie dolls. From the next day on, our French doll obsession was over.

  Before Emily could take the lead I proposed a new game for us to play—Explorers.

  A little outside of town, in a valley, there was an abandoned house. It was a modern-looking Western-style house that apparently hadn’t been used for many years. A rich CEO of a company in Tokyo had built it as a summer house for his daughter, who was sickly, but when it was nearly completed his daughter passed away and they left it as is without ever using it. That was the rumor among us kids at the time, and we took it at face value, but the truth was it built as a model house by a resort development company that wanted to sell lots for summer houses in town, but before it was completed the company went bankrupt and the house was left as is. It was only much later, though, that we learned this.

  Adults had warned us not to go near the house, and the windows and doors were all boarded up so people couldn’t get inside, so up till then we hadn’t gone near the place. But one day Yuka, whose family had a grape orchard next door, told us that the board on the back door of the place had come off and that it was easy to pick the lock with a hairpin, so I invited my usual group of friends, plus Emily, to go there.

  Playing Explorers was so much fun we forgot all about French dolls. We were the only ones who knew you could get into the house. Inside there were just a few built-in pieces of furniture, but with its faux fireplace and canopied bed it felt like being in a castle. The fun we had there, though—eating sweets and having a party, each of us hiding some treasure of ours inside the fireplace—lasted less than half a month.

  One day Emily suddenly told us she didn’t want to go there anymore. On top of this she said, “I told Papa about going into the abandoned house.” We asked why she’d do something like that, but she wouldn’t tell us the reason. I don’t know if it was her father who did this, but when we went back later the door had a stronger lock on it so no one could get in.

  But I kept on playing with Emily because the next thing she proposed we do was practice volleyball. I’d already decided to join the volleyball club when I got into fifth grade and had pestered my parents over and over to buy me a volleyball, but they kept telling me they wouldn’t until I was in the club. Emily, though, owned a ball. Not only that, it was a famous-brand volleyball, the kind used in national tournaments. I think I tried to be friends with her just so I’d get the chance to use the same ball that the Japanese national team used on TV.

  On the day of the murder, too, we were playing volleyball.

  I’d said to my friends, “Hey, let’s go play volleyball at the school playground,” and asked Emily to bring her ball from home.

  It was sunny that day. You might picture a town in a valley as cool, but the sun was so hot that day it was hard to believe it was getting toward the end of summer. So hot your exposed arms and legs started to sting, even if you were just outside a little while. Emily had said, “It’s too hot, so why don’t we go to my house and watch Disney videos?” but we’d all been strongly warned not to visit other people’s homes during Obon because we’d be in the way during this busy time, so my idea won out.

  The other thing was that I didn’t really like Emily’s house. There were just so many beautiful things there that it made me feel sorry for myself. I think the other kids felt the same way.

  Complaining about the heat, we went over next to the gym, in the shade, and began playing. We formed a circle and passed the ball, and we got the idea of trying to pass it a hundred times in a row. Emily was the one who suggested it. “If we’re going to play we might as well h
ave a goal,” she said. “That way we’ll feel happy about accomplishing something.” We followed her suggestion, and when we had passed eighty times in a row, all of us were pretty worked up, shouting encouragement to each other.

  That’s the kind of child Emily was.

  We’d just reached ninety times in a row for the first time when a man in work clothes came up to us. He didn’t have a survival knife in his hand and didn’t yell. He just strolled over to us, came to a halt, and said this, smiling:

  “I came to check the ventilation fans in the pool changing rooms, but I forgot to bring a stepladder. I just have to tighten some screws so I was wondering if one of you could get on my shoulders and help out.”

  That’s my role, I thought, and told him I’d help. The other kids all volunteered too, but the man said I was too tall, one of the others was too short, one had glasses, one looked too heavy, and in the end he chose Emily. Always Emily, I thought.

  I was so disappointed and said, “Let’s all help out!” Everyone agreed, but the man said, “No, it’s too dangerous,” and rejected the idea. “If you all wait here I’ll buy you ice cream,” he said. And he took Emily by the hand and led her off toward the pool.

  I wonder how all you parents here today teach your children about staying safe. I hope nobody here expects that that’s entirely the job of the school.

  “My child holds his chopsticks in a funny way. What are you teaching them there in school?” The other day I had a phone call like this. The child was also a fourth grader. What had his parents been doing up till now? Maybe his family had the same idea, that the school is entirely responsible for training children.

  Of course we teach the children how to respond. If a suspicious person tries to talk to them on the way home from school they know they’re supposed to yell for help, or push the alarm button on their backpack and run away. We make it clear they should never, ever get into a stranger’s car. That they should run into a nearby store or house and seek help. That they should avoid deserted streets. That if something happens, they should report it to an adult right away.