by Kanae Minato
For these reasons, as I’m sure you’re aware, Mr. Tanabe is not in a condition, emotionally, to stand before all of you today.
What in the world did Mr. Tanabe do wrong? If you’re angry because your children were put in a terrifying situation, why don’t you denounce the man who actually attacked them? Do you refrain from doing that because he was an out-of-work thirty-five-year-old who had been seen at a psychiatric hospital? Or is it because he’s the son of a Diet member, the most powerful person in this district?
Or—was it just easier to blame Mr. Tanabe?
I was just his work colleague, but even I felt sympathy for him. Can you imagine how his girlfriend, a girlfriend he’s promised to marry, must have felt?
As you’re all aware, Mr. Tanabe is tall and good-looking, quite athletic, graduated from a national university, and was very popular with his pupils as well as their parents. When I would visit some of my pupils’ homes, some of the mothers even made their preference abundantly clear, telling me they wished it had been Mr. Tanabe who’d stopped by. You can imagine how popular he was among the women teachers. At a conference with other schools once, one of the teachers there even asked me if Mr. Tanabe was seeing anyone.
I can imagine people wanting to ask me, “Don’t you like him too?” Actually, I found him a little hard to get along with. When I was first hired at the school Mr. Tanabe came up and said, “Whenever you have anything you want to ask about, feel free to ask me.” This was the first time in my life anybody had ever said something like that, and I was overjoyed. But I really don’t know how to depend on other people. I know I should have relied on him for help for anything I couldn’t do, but the fact is there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do.
As I got to know him better as a colleague, I started to think I actually disliked him. Mr. Tanabe was a lot like me. And I hated myself.
Being good at academics and sports is not, necessarily, a clear gauge of the caliber of a person. A person’s physical size has nothing to do with it. But if you’re physically big and can handle things fairly well, people do start to see you as capable and reliable.
Mr. Tanabe must have been told since he was a child, too, that he was very capable. Being a boy, maybe he heard this even more than I did.
I think he became overly conscious of this—that he was a capable person. When a problem occurred in his class, instead of consulting with other teachers in the same grade, he struggled to solve it on his own. And he’d even poke his nose into other classes’ problems, trying to give them advice.
I have similar tendencies. So I imagine Mr. Tanabe found it hard to get along with me, too.
The woman Mr. Tanabe went out with was a short, slender, fragile, doll-like woman. She was so good with computers she once joked that she’d infected the police with a virus, yet when Mr. Tanabe was passing by once she asked him to show her how to use the printer. All he did was print up a few pages for her, but on her next day off she showed up at his dorm room with some homemade sweets she’d made to thank him for his help. When I saw Mr. Tanabe happily inviting her in, it was the first time I ever realized that relying on others wasn’t so hard after all.
I wasn’t jealous of her, but she reminded me of one of my friends who’d been with me the day of the murder, and I knew she was the type that I wasn’t all that fond of. This woman was Ms. Okui, the school nurse.
Right after Sekiguchi fell into the pool I used the extension phone to call the teachers’ office. I told them, “An intruder snuck into the pool area and someone’s gotten hurt. Call an ambulance.” When I did, the first one to rush to the pool wasn’t some sturdy male teacher but the doll-like Ms. Okui. She must have reacted more to the news that someone was injured, rather than to the idea that an intruder was there. Maybe all the male teachers were too busy finding something to use as a weapon.
The day after Mr. Tanabe took an overdose of sleeping pills and was rushed to the hospital, Ms. Okui phoned a publisher and told them she thought I overreacted. Later the same day the following article was posted on a weekly magazine’s online site. Don’t claim you never saw it.
This female teacher is seen as a hero for boldly leaping at the intruder to protect her pupils, but did she really need to go so far as to take a man’s life? The children had all run to safety, yet each time the man, wounded badly in the thigh, raised his face out of the water she kicked it like it was a soccer ball, sending him sinking to the bottom of the pool, until he no longer raised his face anymore. The male teacher at the scene, so in pain from the blows he’d received he couldn’t get out of the pool, came face-to-face with a living hell as the pool became a sea of blood. Who, indeed, was the one who snatched away from this male teacher the will to ever return to teaching?
I was supposed to be a hero, but after that article came out I was suddenly viewed as a murderer.
Pretty amazing to see how the power of love can move public opinion.
I’m thinking you all must have been happy about that, for now you had a new object of scorn. You were the ones who had driven Mr. Tanabe to the wall, but now you felt sorry for him, making it seem like I was the one who’d done that. And you blamed me now for all the incompetence your children had displayed before the incident, claiming it was my fault they hardly talked and were having trouble concentrating. I think it was an escape valve for you all, a way to relieve your own day-to-day stress. When someone demanded that I pay them to replace the blood-soaked towel, I couldn’t believe my ears.
Fire the murderer teacher! Get down on your hands and knees and apologize! Take responsibility for what you did!
Which explains why we’re holding this unscheduled PTA meeting today, and why I’m standing here before you. But I wonder if the reason I have to be attacked like this is because none of the children died.
Do you think I pointlessly kicked to death a poor, feeble, ill young man?
Would it have been better for me to wait until he’d killed four or five people? Should I have followed the lead of my cowardly colleague, pretended to be pushed into the pool, and hid there silently as he attacked the children?
Or would it have satisfied you if I had died along with the man?
I wish I had never saved your children.
Right after the attack started, the man stabbed himself and fell into the pool, so there’s an issue here that precedes any talk of legitimate self-defense. But as luck would have it, the man’s father is an influential person in this area, so it would appear an arrest warrant for me is about to be issued.
Perhaps a kindly detective is among you, giving me a chance to finish speaking first. If that’s the case, there’s one more thing I’d like to say.
On the weekly magazine website it said each time the man lifted his face from the water, but to be precise, I kicked him only once. So if it comes to trial the question will be whether or not, in that one kick, I had murderous intent. When I think that the jurors might come from among you all, it makes me shudder.
I am not going to reveal any more facts to you all. That would be pointless. What I’m about to say now is directed at only one particular person among you.
I would like to thank you again for coming from so far away to be here today.
Asako.
To me, the penance you laid on us meant I should grow up to be a good person, the kind Emily would be proud of. I knew I wasn’t really reliable, wasn’t capable, yet as penance I served in student government in junior high, became class president in high school, was captain of the volleyball team too, studied hard, and went to college.
I went to a college in this part of the country because I wanted to live near the ocean. I felt that a town next to the ocean, where you could see the Pacific Ocean, would have a much more open, free feeling to it than the cramped little valley town I’d called home. I was quite mistaken about that, but I never thought of returning to my hometown.
After graduating from college, I got a position as an elementary school teacher.
To te
ll the truth, I’m not all that fond of children. But if I liked my job that wouldn’t constitute penance. I felt that I had to put myself in the kind of place where I had failed, and do my very best there.
It’s only been a little over two years since I started the job, but I’ve always come to work before anyone else, have always made it a point to listen to all the silly things the children had to say, have always responded properly to the useless complaints the parents might have, and I have always made sure to take care of any office-type work I needed to do that day, even if it meant staying late.
And I’d had enough, quite enough of it. I couldn’t stand it anymore and felt like crying. I could barely keep myself from running away. I wasn’t without friends I could commiserate with. I did talk to and email some people from my college volleyball team, spilling my complaints about work to them. But all they did was share similar gripes.
“That’s not like you, Maki, to complain like that. Hang in there!”
But what does that mean, anyway, to be like me? Does it mean I seem to have it together, when in fact I don’t? The only people who know the real me are the three girls at the time of the murder. They and no one else. When I realized that, I started to miss them terribly.
I have nothing to do with the three of them directly anymore, but my younger sister, who went to a nearby vocational school and remained in our hometown, does give me reports of what the other girls are doing.
Sae got married and was going to live abroad, I heard. Her fiancé was some elite man, apparently. Akiko is, as before, pretty much a shut-in, but according to my sister she saw her taking her older brother’s child out shopping and she seemed to be enjoying herself. Yuka is back home now, expecting a baby soon.
This is what I heard about them at the beginning of last month. It made me suddenly feel stupid, suffering as I am to do my penance. Everyone else seems to have completely forgotten the murder, and the promise they made to you.
If you think about it calmly, though, it seems unlikely that you would actually take revenge on us if we didn’t keep our promise. You must have told us that in order to boost our level of resolve.
I’m the only one who remained obsessed about the murder. The only one who stupidly took you at your word and lived out my penance. At least it seemed that way to me.
It struck me as silly to keep working as hard as I had been, and I started to slack off at work. When some parents don’t pay the school lunch fee, we’re supposed to pay them a visit, but now I just ignored it. I mean, it wasn’t going to come out of my salary, was it? When I got calls in the morning about children staying home because they weren’t feeling well, I didn’t pursue the matter and see whether it was a real illness or if they were faking it. I just marked them down as absent. When the kids got into some silly argument and called each other names, I’d just let them keep at it until they settled down. That’s how I started to think.
Once I adopted that stance, things got so much easier. And the children seemed to like me better. Perhaps being so hard on myself had made them, too, uncomfortable, and stifled people around me.
Just around that time the name of one of the girls—Sae—was on the news on TV. They said that soon after she married she’d killed her husband, who was some kind of sexual pervert. Not long after this I got a letter from you, which was sent to my parents’ place. You didn’t include a message, just a copy of a letter Sae had written to you.
For the first time I learned how Sae had felt these past fifteen years. My thoughtless order to her to guard Emily’s dead body had produced a life of fear I could never have imagined. If only I had gone back to the pool after finding the teachers’ office deserted…
In her own way, Sae had kept her promise to do penance. She loved those French dolls so much, and of the four of us was herself most like one of them, so quiet, so mild-mannered. But still, she was much braver than I ever was.
Even after fifteen years I was still the biggest coward of all.
And then that intruder broke into our school. As I said, it was a beautiful, sunny summer day at the school pool. And the ones who were about to be assaulted right before my eyes were fourth graders. So many of the conditions were the same as fifteen years ago that it made me think that maybe you had planned it all, that you were lying in wait, watching it unfold.
Running away meant that I’d never be able to escape that murder, even after the statute of limitations ran out. This time I didn’t hesitate. It would be better to end up stabbed, I decided, than living the rest of my life as a coward.
By the time these thoughts came, I was already dashing toward Sekiguchi.
I knew in an instant now why I had become an elementary school teacher. The intense training I endured on the volleyball team—it had all led up to this day. Now was my only chance to regain what I had lost. That’s what I was thinking as I leaped at Sekiguchi’s legs.
It never entered my mind to strike Sekiguchi down or to kill him. All I was thinking was: I can’t let the children with me get killed. I have to protect them at all costs. This time I have to do what needs to be done.
There’s one point about Ms. Okui’s testimony that I need to correct. She said the children had all run to safety, but when the man was trying to climb out of the pool there was still one child beside the pool. Ikeda, the boy who’d been stabbed. And with him was Ms. Okui. I didn’t think she was capable of protecting Ikeda. Nor did I want her to. There was only one who could handle it. Me.
I think I finally understand Mr. Tanabe’s feelings. Perhaps it really was my fault that he took those sleeping pills.
Ikeda was screaming out, “It hurts! It hurts!” The towel pressed against his wound had turned red. A sudden thought hit me: Hadn’t Emily, too, when she was attacked by that man, yelled out? Ever since the murder I’d been obsessed by my own cowardice, and had imagined the fear the other three girls must have had, in order to measure it against my own fear.
But I’d never thought about Emily. And how she must have felt.
She must have felt the greatest terror of all. She must have cried out for help, over and over. And yet we never went to see how she was doing. Emily—I am so very sorry. This was the first time I thought this.
At the same moment, I was not about to let some pervert, an adult, attack weak, defenseless children. Our lives had been ruined by an idiot adult, and there was no way I was going to let it happen again.
The man had already swung his uninjured leg up onto the poolside deck. The thought that such an adult existed had me so upset I dashed straight toward him.
Sekiguchi’s expressionless, wet face overlapped in my mind with that of the man from fifteen years ago. I kicked that face as hard as I could, and in that instant I felt my penance was complete. That I’d kept my promise.
But that wasn’t what I really had to do to keep my promise. A coward’s penance is completed only by stepping up and confessing.
The instant I kicked Sekiguchi’s face, the face of the man from fifteen years ago rose up clearly in my mind.
Over the last few years I’ve had a sense that Emily’s murderer, with his almond eyes and lucid face, was good-looking. Back when the police asked me whether the man reminded me of any celebrities, I couldn’t think of a single one. Now, though, I could list a few. That costar on the Thursday-night TV drama, or that Prince Somebody who’s a jazz pianist, or that kyogen actor…All of them young men.
As Sae said in her letter, the man wasn’t all that old at the time—not the type we’d call “uncle.”
But when I consider what that face must look like fifteen years on, I’m not reminded of any celebrities as much as of Hiroaki Nanjo, the man who operates that free school for dropouts. The one in the news when there was an arson incident at his school last summer. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not accusing Mr. Nanjo of being the murderer.
There’s someone else the murderer resembles even more. But saying the name out loud is insensitive, I think. That person isn’t aliv
e anymore, so I won’t.
I am hoping with all my heart that this may be a clue that will help catch the murderer.
But is that what you really want?
I truly feel awful that you lost your precious daughter, your only child. I know that fifteen years ago, and even today, you’re the one who’s praying most that the murderer is finally caught. But wasn’t it a mistake to make those girls who were playing with your daughter take on all the sorrow you felt at losing her? And take on your anxiety, your feelings of impotence, that the murderer was still at large?
Sae and I remained in the clutches of that murder all these years not because of the murderer, but because of you, Asako-san. Wouldn’t you agree? Isn’t that why you’ve come all the way here to witness the penance of one of those children from years ago?
There are two more of us. My hope is that the mistaken acts of penance stop here. Though there’s nothing I can do about that.
Nothing I can do.…I like the sound of that.
That’s all I’ll say here. Do not take it the wrong way, but I won’t be answering any questions.…
The Bear Siblings
I really loved my older brother.
He’s the one who taught me how to do flips on the horizontal bar, how to jump rope, and how to ride a bike. I’m pretty coordinated, but it takes me time to grasp things, yet my brother never got upset. He was always patient, coaching me until I got it right, until it got dark.
“Hang in there! Just a little more! I know you can do it, Akiko!” That’s how he encouraged me.
Even now when I gaze at the sunset I can hear my brother’s voice encouraging me. And on that day it was my brother, too, who came to get me.