by Kanae Minato
There are a lot of parents who take this seriously. There’s an online crime prevention service now that sends out alerts whenever there’s a report of a suspicious person lurking about, and I think many people must be registered for that service.
Just the other day in my class, one of the girls told me that on the way to school that day at the crosswalk a “weird old guy” had been staring at her. I ran out to check and discovered it was one of the male homeroom teachers for another grade whose turn it was to supervise the school crosswalk. If back in my day we had been as cautious as this girl was, maybe we would have been able to avoid that awful incident.
But there weren’t any adults then who reminded children, including us, to be so cautious. To say nothing of the fact that this took place at a school, and the man had on work clothes, and had what seemed like a plausible reason for being there.
After Emily left we went on passing the ball, finally reaching our goal of a hundred times, and then we sat down on the steps of the gym to chat. But still Emily hadn’t returned. Before long it started getting dark and the signal for six o’clock started playing. In this town it’s the melody “Seven Children,” but in the town I grew up in it was “Greensleeves.”
We were getting a little concerned about Emily so we went over to the pool to check on her. The location of the school pool there was very similar to the one here. The gate was unlocked the whole summer, so we went right in, walked around the pool, and headed toward the changing rooms. The only sound was that of some cicadas far away.
The changing rooms were unlocked, too. I was in the lead and opened the door to the girls’ changing room but neither Emily nor the man was inside. I was a little upset, thinking maybe she’d gone home without saying anything to us, so we went over to the boys’ changing room, just to double-check. Akiko was the one who opened it. She slid it open, looking away from the door, and at that instant a horrendous scene leaped out at us.
Emily lay on the floor. Her head was toward the door so we could clearly see her face—the eyes wide open, liquid dripping from her mouth and nose. We called her name over and over but there was no response.
She’s dead, I thought. Something awful’s happened. I think it was a conditioned reflex, but I quickly instructed the other girls what to do.
I told Akiko and Yuka, both fast runners, to go to, respectively, Emily’s house and the local police station. Sae, who was the quietest among us, I had stay with the body. And I told them I’d try to find a teacher and tell them what had happened. None of them had any objections, so, leaving Sae behind to keep watch, the three of us dashed off.
Don’t you think we were brave? We were only ten years old and had just discovered our friend’s dead body, but each of us played our part without any crying or screaming.
At least the other three girls really were brave.
It was closer for the two who were going to Emily’s house and the police station to leave by the rear entrance to the school, so once out of the pool area they cut across the playground and ran toward the gate behind the gym. I headed for the school building alone. There were two school buildings side by side. The one facing the playground was Building Number 2, the one facing the main entrance was Number 1. The teachers’ office was on the first floor in Number 1.
People often mistakenly think that teachers have summer break off, but that’s not true. While the children are on summer vacation the teachers all come to work as usual, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Like in regular companies, they have some paid leave during that time, and get time off for the Obon holiday.
So even during summer vacation there should be some teachers in the teachers’ office, at least on a weekday. But as I said, the murder took place on August fourteenth, the middle day of the three-day Obon holiday. The teachers were all on holiday. If it had been morning, there might have been at least one teacher in the school who’d stopped by to take care of something. But it was already past 6 p.m.
I ran over to Building Number 1, but all five doors, including the main entrance into the building, were locked. So I went over to the courtyard between the two buildings to the windows of the teachers’ office. Even without standing on tiptoes I could see into the office through a gap in the shut white curtains, but didn’t see anyone inside.
Terror suddenly grabbed me. The man who killed Emily and I might be all alone in the school.…Was he hiding nearby, waiting to grab me and make me his next victim?…Before I knew it, I was running full speed. I ran out of the courtyard, out the main gate, and flew back home without stopping once. Even when I arrived back home I barely slowed down, kicked aside my shoes, ran to my room, slammed the door, and drew the curtains. I scrambled into bed, pulled the covers up, and lay there trembling. I’m scared—scared, scared. That’s all I could think about.
After a while my mother ran into my room. “Oh, there you are!” she said, and pulled the covers off me. “What in the world happened?” she asked. My mother had been out shopping when I came home and had heard that something terrible had happened at the elementary school and had run right over. In the midst of the uproar there, she looked for me, but not finding me, went home, thinking she needed to tell my father. When she saw my shoes tossed aside at the entrance she hurried to my room.
Through tears I told her what had happened. That Emily was dead inside the changing room at the pool. “Why didn’t you tell anyone, and hide under the covers like that?” she said accusingly. “Because I was terrified,” I was about to say, when I suddenly wondered about the other children.
I was supposed to be the steady, reliable one, and if I had fled in fright the others must have too. But my mother told me she’d heard from Akiko’s mother.
Akiko, accompanied by her older brother, her head bleeding, had come home and reported to her mother, “Something terrible happened to Emily at the pool,” and as her mother was about to go check it out, she ran across my mother and they went together to the school. Along the way they passed Sae, being carried on her mother’s back as they headed home.
According to my mother, when they got to the pool they found Emily’s mother and the local patrolman, along with Yuka, who, though always a bit of a wallflower, clearly related what had taken place.
“What were you doing?” my mother asked me. “You’re the one everyone counts on, especially at a time like this. What do you think you were doing, hiding here? It’s shameful!
“It’s shameful, shameful.…” As she repeated this, she smacked me over and over on my head and back. “I’m so sorry,” I repeated, blubbering, though I didn’t really understand who I was apologizing to, or for what.
I think you get the picture. I was the only one who ran away, while the other three girls did exactly what they were supposed to do. It must have been very frightening to tell Emily’s mother she was dead. And to explain everything to the patrolman, a taciturn man with a frightening expression. But staying with the dead body—that must have been the most terrifying of all.
I knew now I was a complete coward. Not only that, but the murder had taken something else—something very important—away from me.
My very reason to exist.
The police questioned me alone about Emily’s murder, but more often the four of us were questioned together, or with our parents and teachers along. Which direction did the man come from? What did he say when he first spoke to you? What about his clothes, his build, his facial features? Did he remind you of anybody, any famous entertainers?
I tried my hardest to remember the day of the murder and set the example in responding to their questions, to make up for the feeling of guilt I had for being the only one who ran away. My mother, who’d come with me, kept poking me surreptitiously in the back, urging me to “Speak up for the other girls.”
But I was shocked by what I heard. When the other girls answered the questions they all contradicted what I’d said.
“The man had on gray work clothes.”
“No, they weren’t gray so muc
h as kind of greenish.”
“I think he had sort of narrow eyes.”
“Hmm, I didn’t feel they were so narrow.”
“He had a kind expression.”
“No way. He looked that way to you just because he promised to buy us ice cream.”
That’s how it went. Even after Emily became the leader of our group, the other three had never contradicted any of my opinions. But now they glared at me with this What are you talking about? look on their faces and denied everything I said. What’s more, though they contradicted what I said, all three of them insisted they couldn’t remember the man’s face. They couldn’t remember his face, yet were positive my memories were all wrong.
They must have all known I was the only one who’d run away. None of them directly criticized me for it, but I know that in their hearts they were angry, and despised me.
You’re always acting so big, they were thinking, but you turn out to be the biggest coward of all. So don’t show off.
If that was all, I shouldn’t have had such a guilty conscience, though I did feel ashamed. I mean, I had tried to go to the teachers’ office. My greatest sin in this whole affair wasn’t that I had run away.
I had committed an even greater sin. And today is the first time I’ve ever confessed it.
I remembered the criminal’s face but said I didn’t.
When I saw how the other three girls—though they claimed to remember clearly everything from the time the man called out to us to the time we discovered the body—shook their heads and said they couldn’t recall the most important thing of all, the man’s face, I was stunned. How could you remember everything except the man’s face? I couldn’t accept that. It made me angry, them contradicting my opinions, since I was telling the truth. And I was thinking of telling them that. Of the four, I thought I was the best student, and in my mind I mocked them as a bunch of witless idiots.
But to think I was a bigger coward than any of them…When I thought of this, a certain idea came to me. Each of the other three had carried out her assigned task alone. That must have been far more frightening than when the four of us found the body. And maybe that terror had obliterated any memory of the man’s face from their minds.
I remember his face because, after we found the body, I’m the one who didn’t do a thing.
We were asked what each of us did after we discovered the body, and I responded that since there was no one in the teachers’ office I decided to go home to tell an adult what had happened. There were a lot of houses between the school and my house. One was even one of the houses where they’d shown us their French doll. But I passed those places by, went straight home, and even though my father and other relatives were there, didn’t say a word to anyone.
If I had told someone, they might have been able to gather more eyewitness information about the man. Only recently did this thought occur to me.
I concluded then that it would be worse to say I remembered the man’s face. If I was the only one who answered accurately, the police and my teachers would realize I was the one who didn’t do anything, and attack me for it.
Still, I didn’t regret saying I couldn’t recall his face. In fact, soon afterward I was glad that I had.
That’s because they didn’t catch the murderer. If, say, I alone said I remembered what he looked like, and the murderer learned of this, I was sure I’d be the next one he killed. By saying I didn’t remember, I was protected.
Perhaps this was the period in our lives when we went from being friends with other children just because they were the same age and lived nearby, to finding friends on our own who shared similar interests and ideas. Or maybe it was just because we didn’t want to be reminded of the murder. But afterward the four of didn’t play together much.
When I went into fifth grade I joined the volleyball club, and in sixth grade ran for vice-president of the student council and was elected. Since a boy always was the president, my mother urged me to run for vice-president. I made new friends, found new areas to be active in, and worked hard to clear my name. In junior high, too, I took the lead in being in student government, and was very active in local volunteer activities.
Even more than before, people said I was a steady, reliable girl.
I didn’t recognize my behavior as an escape response, and watching the other three girls from afar—Sae, always trembling in fear; Akiko, who kept refusing to go to school; and Yuka, who became a delinquent, going out at night and shoplifting—I was convinced that of all of us I was the one who’d recovered best after the murder. I’d convinced myself I’d done everything I could have after the murder.
That is, until that day.
Three years after Emily’s murder, her parents moved back to Tokyo. Her mother said she wouldn’t leave town until the murder was solved, but her husband was reassigned to Tokyo and she didn’t have a choice. Emily’s mother had been so devastated by her daughter’s death that she fell ill for a time, and she was, of course, the one who most hoped that the case would be solved. But staying behind and searching for the murderer all by herself was beyond her.
It was in the summer of our first year in junior high when Emily’s mother—tall and slender and as beautiful as an actress—called us all to her home. Before she moved away she wanted, one more time, to ask us about what had happened on that terrible day. “This will be the last time,” she said. We couldn’t refuse.
Her husband’s driver came to each of our houses in turn in a huge car to pick us up, and we set off for Emily’s home in the Adachi company apartment building, a place the four of us had only visited together once, that one time before. This was the first time since the murder that the four of us had done anything together, but in the car we never spoke of the murder at all. What clubs are you in? we asked each other. How did your final exams go? Harmless topics.
Emily’s mother was alone in her home.
It was a sunny Saturday afternoon. The room we were in was like a luxury hotel in Tokyo, with a view of the entire town, and she served us tea, and cakes ordered from Tokyo that had all kinds of fruits on them I’d never heard of before. If only Emily had been there it would have been a very elegant little farewell party. But Emily had been murdered, and a heavy, oppressive feeling that didn’t match the sunny weather hung over our gathering.
After we finished the cakes Emily’s mother asked us to tell her about the murder. I did most of the talking, but after all four of us had briefly spoken about that day, Emily’s mother suddenly burst out in a loud, hysterical voice.
“Enough already! You keep repeating the same stupid thing over and over: I can’t remember his face, I can’t remember his face. Because you’re such idiots, three years have passed and they haven’t arrested the murderer. Emily was killed because she played with idiots like you. It’s your fault. You’re all murderers!”
Murderers—in an instant the world changed. We’d suffered in the years since the murder, but not only hadn’t we been rewarded for getting through all that, now we were being told that it was our fault that Emily had been killed.
Her mother went on. “I will never forgive you, unless you find the murderer before the statute of limitations is up. If you can’t do that, then atone for what you’ve done, in a way I’ll accept. If you don’t do either one, I’m telling you here and now—I will have revenge on each and every one of you. I have far more money and power than your parents, and I’ll make you suffer far worse than Emily ever did. I’m her parent, and I’m the only one who has that right.”
Emily’s mother was, at that moment, far more frightening than the man who had murdered her.
I’m so sorry, but I do remember the man’s face.
If only I had said that then, I might not be standing here before you today. But sadly, by that point I really had forgotten the man’s face. It wasn’t a very memorable face to begin with, and I had told myself over and over that I didn’t remember it. Three years was more than enough time for his features to van
ish from my mind.
The next day, Emily’s mother left town, leaving behind that terrible promise she had made to the four of us children. I don’t know what the other girls thought, but I was desperate to think of a way to avoid her retribution.
Catching the criminal seemed impossible. So I chose the latter, performing an act of penance that would satisfy Emily’s mother.
I hope you can understand now why I was able to leap at an intruder brandishing a knife, despite being such a coward. It’s only because of these experiences I had in the past.
Mr. Tanabe never had those experiences. That’s the only thing that separates us. I was treated as a hero, while he was condemned.
So, was Mr. Tanabe to blame for the incident?
The intruder got inside by climbing over the fence separating the pool and the tangerine orchard. People talk over and over about crime prevention measures, but where is there a school surrounded by high fences like a prison? Is this country rich enough to set up surveillance cameras that cover every inch of every public school? Or to put it another way, before the attack, was anybody here conscious that security had gotten bad enough to require those kind of measures?
I don’t think anyone on our citizens’ watch patrols who’s ever skipped their turn, pretending to be sick, has the right to criticize Mr. Tanabe. Yet all the frustrations that had built up over time led people to lash out at him. I’ve answered complaining phone calls at school, and since I live in the same dorm for single teachers, I’ve seen the slanderous notes pasted to his door. The language on some of them is so awful you can hardly stand to look, and it makes me wonder whether whoever wrote them would ever let their children read them. Mr. Tanabe’s phone and cell phone ring late at night, and I’ve even heard what sounds like him throwing the phone against the wall. Someone smashed the windshield of his car, too, in the parking lot.