by Kanae Minato
If you took a snack or lunch and ate it underneath the large white birch next to the cottage, wouldn’t you feel as if you were a girl from a foreign land having a tea party? It was my sister who came up with this idea. My sister, three years older than me, was good at thinking of ways to have a good time. I really loved my sister back then.
“We should take food that suits that cottage,” my sister said, and she baked cookies and made some fancy sandwiches the night before we went to work in the fields. I say fancy, but they were actually quite ordinary. Supermarkets in the sticks don’t sell any kinds of unusual hams or cheeses, so the sandwiches just had boiled eggs, roasted ham, cucumbers, and the like.…But she wrapped them up like candy in cute wrapping paper, and made them heart-shaped. Then she placed them in a hamper lined with a strawberry-print handkerchief.
What with her bad asthma my sister seldom was asked to help out in the fields, so she made all this just for me. That’s right, asthma. People who get it get it, even if they live in the town with the cleanest air in Japan.
One day at the beginning of June, during a break from farmwork, I headed to the cottage with some cookies she’d baked. The fields face the rear of the cottage, but on this day I noticed that something was a little different. The rear door, usually covered with a large board nailed over it, was now exposed. It was dark brown, with a gold-colored doorknob.
Maybe it’s open, I thought excitedly, and turned the knob, but it was locked. Disappointed, I looked at the keyhole-shaped hole below the knob and remembered a TV drama where someone used a hairpin to unlock a door. I took the hairpin I’d used to pin back my bangs and inserted it into the keyhole. I wasn’t expecting it to work but enjoyed how excited it made me feel. I moved the pin around inside the keyhole, felt it snag on something, then slowly turned it and heard a click as the lock opened. It didn’t even take a minute.
I slowly pushed open the heavy door and inside was the kitchen. There were a few built-in shelves, but no plates or pots and pans. In back was a bar counter, and I felt as if I’d suddenly wandered into a house in a foreign land.
I wasn’t brave enough to actually go inside. I’ll tell my sister about it was my first thought, but I hesitated to bring her to such a dusty place. When her symptoms got worse it was a real pain. So instead, the next day I told Maki about it. Maki always had great ideas about how to have fun—not as many good ideas as my sister, though.
Sometimes when we played there were lots of kids with us, but we’d get in trouble if the older kids at school or parents found out we’d snuck into the cottage, so we decided to keep the number low and invite only our classmates from the West District of town. The same girls who were there on the day of the murder.
As soon as I unlocked the door and the five of us, with bated breath, slipped inside, each of us started to frolic around the place. It was the first time I’d ever laid eyes on a real fireplace, a canopied bed, and a claw-footed bathtub. There were lots of things at Emily’s house, too, I’d never seen before then, but nothing feels as empty as wonderful things you know belong to someone else. That cottage wasn’t mine, of course, but it also didn’t belong to any of the five of us. And besides that, even Emily was amazed, never having seen a fireplace before. The cottage was our shared castle, our secret hideout.
Emily had an interesting proposal now that we had this secret hideout. “Let’s hide treasures inside the fireplace,” she said. “Not simply treasures, but make them keepsakes of someone, and write a letter addressed to that person with each treasure we hide.” We were the age when it’s easy to make up things, and we got totally engrossed in this game, brought our treasures and stationery from home, and plunked down in the living room to write our letters. I addressed mine to my sister, who, I pretended, had died.
Dear sister, thank you for always being so kind to me. I’ll do my best so Mom and Dad won’t get too sad, so please have a good long rest in heaven.
That’s what I wrote, as I recall. As I wrote it, it really did feel as if my sister had died, and I teared up a little. I put the letter, along with a pressed-flower bookmark she’d bought me on a school trip, into a pretty tin that Emily brought from home that she said had originally had cookies in it.
Each of us sealed our letter without showing it to the others, but we did show our treasures to each other. Sae put in a handkerchief, Maki a mechanical pencil, Akiko a key holder. Typical kidlike items. But Emily’s was different. Her treasure was a silver ring with a red stone in it. Even country kids like us could tell it wasn’t a toy. By then we should have been used to all the expensive things Emily owned, but that ring really captivated us.
“Can I try it on?” I asked casually, holding out my hand, but Emily said, “No one but me is ever allowed to wear this ring.” It sounded like something a princess in a fairy tale would say. She carefully put it away in its case.
“Well then, you shouldn’t have brought it,” I muttered, half annoyed, as Emily was bent over hiding the cookie tin with all our treasures inside the fireplace. She seemed to have heard me.
It was a week after this that Emily came to my house.
It was Sunday afternoon and it had been raining since morning and I was lying around my room reading comic books, bemoaning the fact that we weren’t going to be playing in the cottage today, when Emily appeared. We weren’t particularly close so I was surprised that she would visit me by herself. I went to the front door and Emily said in a low but agitated voice, “Mama’s looking for the ring. Yuka, help me go get it from the cottage.”
She meant her treasure. “Did you take it without asking your mother?” I asked.
“It was in my mother’s closet, but it’s my ring,” she said. I found that hard to grasp. In our house my mother often said she’d give us rings when we got bigger—her own engagement ring to my sister and a ring she got from Grandmother to me. Probably Emily meant something like that.
I soon understood why she’d come to see me. I was the only one who could use a hairpin to unlock the cottage door. When the other kids saw me take out the hairpin from my bangs and unlock the door, they all said they wanted to try it, and they each took turns. But for some reason no one else could manage it. Their hairpins were the same. You just had to snag it onto the hollow at the back of the hole and turn it, but no matter how much I explained it to them no one could find that spot. I didn’t expect Akiko to, but Maki and Emily never had any trouble solving any problems at school and I was surprised they couldn’t get it.
“Yuka, you’re really clever,” Sae told me then.
I was always so-so when it came to most things and I’d never thought of myself as clever, though I was always pretty good with my hands. I didn’t have a strong grip but was able to open bottle tops that were on really tight, could untie rope that had gotten all knotted, and was always good at putting together the little do-it-yourself projects that came with manga magazines.
Emily and I headed to the cottage, were able to open the rear door with no problem, and went to the living room, where the fireplace was. “Thank you, Yuka. Just wait a second,” Emily said, and stuck her face inside the fireplace. After a moment she turned around. “It’s gone,” she said.
We’d set the cookie tin in the right-hand corner in front, but when I looked in I couldn’t find it. “You’re right. It’s gone,” I said. I looked out from the fireplace to find Emily glaring at me.
“It’s you, Yuka, isn’t it!”
At first I couldn’t figure out what she meant. Seeing Emily’s cold eyes, though, I understood she was accusing me. I couldn’t understand why, and I insisted, loudly, “It wasn’t me!”
But Emily yelled right back. “It had to be you, Yuka! You’re the only one who can unlock the door. You were angry I didn’t let you wear the ring, that’s why you took it. That’s stealing. And I know you’ve stolen other things. You stole Sae’s eraser. I saw you secretly using the eraser she thought she lost. If you don’t give me back the ring I’m going to tell Papa.”
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Emily started crying loudly. “Give me back the ring. You thief—you thief…” There were a lot of things I felt like saying to her, but I figured none of them would do any good.
What kinds of things? The eraser that Sae lost was the same kind that all the girls from the West District had. At a Christmas party for kids the year before we’d all gotten them as presents. After Emily heard that Sae had lost her eraser she just happened to see me using an identical one, that’s all. And I wasn’t using it in secret or anything.
Now I wonder if Emily would have had the same thoughts about Maki or Akiko if one of them had been using the eraser.
What sort of eyes are covetous eyes, do you think? My mother has often told me, since I was a child, that that’s the kind of eyes I have. My sister and I have the same single-lidded type of eyes, but I was the only one she said that to.
We were walking down the street once, my mother and I, and we passed a classmate with an ice cream cone. I just waved at my classmate the way you’d expect, but my mother scolded me. “Stop staring at what other people have,” she said. “That’s acting very greedy.” She seemed disgusted. I mean, it was a hot day and I did think it would be nice to have some ice cream myself. But it wasn’t as if I were dying to get some.
If you feel that way, I thought, you should have given me better vision. When I was in third and fourth grade my vision got really bad, and the glasses I wore didn’t really correct it well, so I was always squinting at things. So that must be why she thought that.
Sorry, I’ve gotten sidetracked. I was talking about Emily’s accusation.
Emily wouldn’t stop crying and it made me upset, so I said, “I’ve had enough,” left the cottage, and went home.
It was the evening of the same day that Emily came to our house along with her father. My mother showed them in. I was so worried they’d accused me of stealing that I hid out in the bathroom, but then my mother called to me in a very gentle voice to coax me out.
I went into the living room and my eyes met that goggle-eyed alien. Your husband. That’s what kids in town used to secretly call him. You’re laughing, but they used to call you that, too.… I’m sorry, let me continue.
The two of them were there to give me back my treasure, they said. When Emily was left behind at the cottage she didn’t know what to do, because she couldn’t lock it up by herself. She couldn’t tell her mother about it since then she’d know that Emily had taken the ring and would be angry at her, so she used a pay phone near the cottage to call Adachi Manufacturing and ask her father to come help her. He was at work even though it was his day off.
Her father hurried right over from work and, as they stood in front of the cottage, Emily was telling him the whole story when a real estate agent from the next town over drove up. The real estate agent had earlier brought a client from Tokyo who wanted to start a free school here to see the cottage, and after he showed it to him in the morning the man had another appointment elsewhere in the afternoon, so the agent drove him to the station and was stopping by here one more time afterward. He was going to put in a more secure lock on the rear door to keep out intruders.
The client had apparently found the tin with our treasures. “You shouldn’t go in like that anymore,” the real estate agent said, and gave her back the tin. Emily held out my bookmark that had been in the tin, as well as a large box of sweets from a well-known store in Tokyo, and said, “These are really good, I hope you enjoy them.” She was smiling at me but she didn’t apologize for treating me like a thief. She thought she was the one who suffered the most, and that people would forgive whatever she said—that over time they would completely forget it. She was just like you.
I never told anybody about this, because I figured that the sweets she gave me were a bribe to keep my mouth shut about being treated as a thief. At first I refused to take them. “No thanks, I don’t need those,” I told her. The sweets were wrapped up beautifully, and I really did want to try them, but I planned to refuse until Emily apologized. But my mother butted in and accepted them.
“Emily and her father have come out of their way to see us, so you shouldn’t act like that,” my mother scolded me. “I’m sorry she’s so unfriendly,” she said, bowing her head. “I hope you’ll still be friends.” Emily and her father went home satisfied, but I was left feeling it was all so unfair. And Mother scolded me even more after they left.
Not because the fact that we’d snuck into the cottage came to light because of Emily. It was because my sister said, “I wanted to go into that cottage too. Why didn’t you tell me about it?” And I said, “I figured it was too dusty.” “Well, sorry I have asthma!” she said sarcastically, and then burst out crying.
“Why do you have to act so proud in front of your sister?” my mother said, upset with me, but I wasn’t acting proud at all. After Emily and her father had left, my sister had come downstairs, wondering what was going on, and my mother had told her, “Yuka and those girls snuck into an abandoned house behind our field.”
I was about to defend myself, but my sister got the first word in.
“It’s not Yuka’s fault,” she said. “I should have been more patient.”
Hearing this, Mother said, “It’s not your fault, Mayu,” and she let my sister choose first from the sweets Emily had brought.
My mother had always felt really bad about Mayu being born so sickly, and apparently felt bad, too, about never having given my father a son. But having given birth to a nearsighted girl like me? That never seemed to faze her.
Nearsightedness is from my father’s side of the family, but neither my sister’s condition nor Father’s was Mother’s fault. I never heard either of them blame her. I think she just liked to blame herself. Masochism, maybe? Something like that.
Still, don’t you think it’s awful that when her daughter got caught up in a murder she didn’t run right over to her to be with her?…
We’ve finally worked our way back to the murder.
But before I go on, could you wait another five minutes?
After Akiko and I split up that day at the rear entrance to the school, I ran straight to the police station. The policeman in charge of the small substation changed every two or three years, but at this time it was a young man named Mr. Ando, a huge slab of a man who would look good in a judo gi. I’d been ordered to tell him about the murder, but I was scared, afraid he might get mad about a child like me coming inside alone. Mr. Ando was talking with an old lady who’d come in to tell him something, and when I saw how kind he was to her I breathed a sigh of relief.
I’d come to report a murder and I had to tell him right away, so I should have interrupted them, but it was my first time in a police station, and I studiously stood off in a corner, waiting my turn as if I were in a hospital waiting room. Mr. Ando must have thought I didn’t have anything very important to tell him. In a gentle voice not at all in keeping with his appearance he said, “Please take a seat over here,” motioning to me to sit in a folding chair next to the old lady.
The old lady was talking about the theft of the French dolls. The person who stole them had to be from Tokyo, she was saying in an older dialect that only old folks used, and I was hoping she’d finish soon. I suddenly remembered who she was, and recalled that the grandchild in her house had been bragging how she was going to Disneyland with her family over the Obon holiday. The old lady must feel lonely with everyone gone, I thought, and I felt a little sorry for her.
This was right after Emily was killed, of course. Are you disappointed I didn’t feel scared because of the murder like the other kids? Truthfully I didn’t feel scared yet. It wasn’t that I was unfeeling or anything, or because Emily had accused me of being a thief. It was simply because I hadn’t gotten a good look at what had happened.
Two days before the murder I had been cleaning house before our relatives came to visit and had stepped on the glasses I normally wore. So I was wearing an older pair of glasses and couldn’t see very wel
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So all I could make out in the dim changing room was that Emily was lying on the floor, and that wasn’t enough to terrify me. It was only after I went back to the pool that I realized that something terrible had taken place.
The old lady left and the policeman turned to me. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said kindly. “So, what’s the matter?”
“My friend collapsed at the school pool,” I said, describing to him what I’d seen.
“You should have told me that right away,” the policeman said, and made a call for an ambulance. He may have thought it was a drowning. Right after that, he put me in his patrol car and we headed to the school.
The policeman finally understood that something alarming had happened when we arrived at the pool and he saw you. You were sitting there in the boys’ changing room, holding Emily to you, calling her name out over and over. When I saw this it hit me, too, that Emily was actually dead.
It was probably better, in order to preserve the crime scene, not to hold the body like that, something the policeman gently hinted at, but I doubt his voice got through to you.
There was one more person there, Sae, but she was crouched down outside the changing room, eyes shut, hands held tight over her ears, and she didn’t respond when we called her. So it was up to me to explain what had led up to this.