Penance

by Kanae Minato

  Yuka, you have such beautiful hands it’s a shame to let them go. Have you ever been to a nail salon? I’d love to give you a ring as a present, but I suspect you wouldn’t be that happy to get it from me.

  And while I’m saying all this, Emily interrupts. “Stop it, Mama. You always act like this when my friends are over. You’re such a busybody. And we’ve had enough tea and cakes, so leave us alone for a while.”

  And she’d shoo me out of the room.…

  Come to think of it, you did all come over to my place once, other than when the murder occurred. Just that one time, but I remember it well. None of you could even use a cake fork well, and I was wondering whether it was okay that Emily had friends like this. That evening, though, I got a phone call from Maki’s mother, who said, “Thank you so much for inviting Maki over. And she was so happy to have that delicious cake.” When I ran across the other three mothers in the supermarket they also thanked me and told me how happy their girls had been to visit, so I rethought my first impression. Maybe these girls were better brought up than I’d imagined.

  But truthfully you didn’t enjoy yourselves, I know. The same was true for Akie.

  Akie would always go with me wherever I invited her and did what she could to dress her best, but her shoes were still worn out. “Wouldn’t you like to buy the boots I thought you should get?” I asked her, and she said, “They’re wonderful, but kind of expensive. When I get paid for my part-time job, I’ll buy some like them, ones I can afford.” I hadn’t known till then that she worked part-time at a restaurant.

  “My parents back home are paying my tuition, which isn’t cheap,” she said, “so the least I can do is earn my own spending money.”

  I’d never once thought about tuition myself, and truthfully had no idea how much college cost. But my friends had always been that way. None of the girls I knew had part-time jobs. The only ones who did were poor girls we felt sorry for.

  I felt sorry for Akie because she had to work. So I bought the boots for her. It wasn’t her birthday or Christmas, but I felt that friends should simply want to make each other happy like that, regardless of whether it was for a special event. I attached a ribbon and a card that said A sign of our friendship and sent it to her apartment.

  I couldn’t wait to go to school. Would she have them on? I wondered. What outfit would she wear them with? And what would she say to me? But she wasn’t wearing them. Maybe they hadn’t arrived yet? I wondered. Or maybe she was saving them for a special occasion? As I was pondering this, she handed the boots back to me, still in the box. “I can’t accept this kind of expensive shoes for no reason,” she said. I couldn’t believe it. I’d been positive she’d be overjoyed. “There’s no need to hesitate,” I told her, and she said she wasn’t hesitating.

  I gradually got more upset with her. “Why can’t you understand my feelings?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t make sense for you to just refuse the boots,” I told her. “I mean, I paid for meals for you, introduced you to my friends. If you’re going to turn down the boots, then I want you to invite me out to eat, and introduce me to your friends. The food has to be something really good. And by friends, I mean boys. I introduced you to five boys, so you should do the same for me.”

  I wasn’t really expecting she’d take me out to dinner or introduce me to some new boys. By insisting she do things I knew she couldn’t, I was hoping to put her on the spot, hoping that would force her to back down and accept the gift.

  But the next week she actually did invite me out to dinner. At a table in the back of an unappealing little izakaya restaurant, five boys were seated, waiting for me. And one of them was him.

  He was a college student, two years older than Akie. He worked part-time in the kitchen at the same restaurant, and the other four boys were classmates of his in the education department.

  “Akie told me she was having dinner with an amazing girl, so I hope you don’t mind but I invited this lot over to join us.”

  He said this facetiously, but all of them struck me as earnest, formal types. The food was surprisingly good, and as we ate we began by asking each other where we were all from, those kinds of topics, but before thirty minutes were up I’d grown bored. I couldn’t follow their conversation.

  These education majors were pretty intense when it came to education in Japan. This was back in the days before anyone imagined the notion of “pressure-free” education. As they were talking they mentioned a friend who had failed the entrance exam, had a nervous breakdown, and almost tried to kill himself, and they discussed the need for a place where dropouts could get back on their feet.

  Akie didn’t venture an opinion but closely followed their conversation. The only one bored by it all was me. I mean, no one I knew ever had trouble with entrance exams or anything. They had a perfunctory test and interview before they entered elementary school, but after that it was smooth sailing through the system all the way into college, the so-called escalator system. None of my friends were especially remarkable students, but there weren’t any dropouts, either.

  The more heated the discussion got, the more it upset me. My boyfriends always talked about interesting topics so I wouldn’t get bored, and I couldn’t believe how inconsiderate these boys were. They said they were all from the countryside, and it made me wonder whether rural people were incapable of sophisticated conversation.

  And as I sat there, bored, he was the one who spoke to me.

  “All any of us know are rural public schools, but what kind of curriculum do they have at private girls’ schools? Any unusual kinds of courses, or amusing teachers? Anything like that?”

  Now, those were questions I could answer. I told him about a science teacher I had in middle school who was crazy about taking walks, who on sunny days liked to hold class outside. He taught us about the different plants and flowers in the four seasons, the names of various insects, why leaves turn red, when you could expect to see rainbows, how the walls of the school buildings seemed white but really weren’t.…What surprised me was that it wasn’t just this boy who’d asked me who listened intently to my story, but every one of his friends.

  Kids from the countryside shouldn’t find anything in nature so unusual, so what did they find so interesting? It was my turn to be surprised. As I expected, they all went on to reminisce about times back when they were children. All the things rural kids did—Kick the Can, Red Light Green Light, catching dragonflies and crayfish in rice fields, building secret forts in fields…

  All kinds of games that I knew nothing about, though Emily played those games with the four of you.

  I wanted to do the very best job I could of raising Emily. I felt it was my duty. So even before she could speak properly, I took her to supplementary after-school lessons and English conversation practice, plus piano and ballet. You might think I was some silly pushy parent, but Emily was very bright and sharp and learned everything quickly. She easily passed to get into a highly selective elementary school.

  What would she become in the future? I wondered. I was sure Emily would be able to make anything come true—even things you could only dream about.

  And then came the transfer to that rural town. My parents urged me to stay with Emily back in Tokyo. My husband wasn’t opposed to the idea, but I decided we should go with him. This was a critical period in my husband’s career—building this new factory meant a change in his position in the company—and I wanted to do what I could to support him. But even more important than that were Emily’s feelings, since she said she wanted to go with her father. Emily really loved her papa.

  My husband’s assignment at the new factory was from three to five years, and I figured we could enjoy that time living in this country town with its pure air. So I didn’t move there grudgingly, though things ended up as I wrote to you earlier.

  After the move I regretted it every single day, but when I saw how Emily adapted I began to think that maybe it wasn’t a bad decision.

 
My expectations of what I’d find in that town were way too optimistic. Even if there weren’t any special or unusual programs for children, I was sure that at least there would be the same type of cram schools and other after-school programs that Emily had been attending in Tokyo. But all they had was a piano school. And the level of instruction there was so low—the teacher had graduated from some no-name music college and had no experience performing in competitions—I might as well have taught Emily piano myself. The local cram school allowed students starting in fifth and sixth grades and had classes in English and math, and was run by one teacher who, again, had only graduated from a second-rate school.

  Any child raised in this kind of environment would have to be innately bright to be able to go on to a decent college. But more than that, I thought, it would take an inordinate amount of effort. It might lead to a nervous breakdown or, if one failed to get in, even to suicide. Some of the other mothers in our company housing early on sensed an impending crisis if they didn’t take action and started taking their children to cram school in a larger city, a two-hour trip each way. They grumbled that the transportation expenses cost more than the tuition.

  I felt as if I finally could understand what I’d heard over ten years before in that little izakaya about the pressures on children. So I decided not to push Emily too hard. We’d come out all this way to the country to live, so she should take advantage of it and do things she couldn’t do back in the city. And Emily seemed to really enjoy life there.

  She’d come home from school, drop off her backpack, then go right out to play until it got dark. After she came home, all she could talk about was the fun you’d all had together. How she’d seen some crayfish, played Kick the Can in the school grounds, and gone off into the hills, though what she did there was always secret.

  She talked about all of you girls, too. Sae, she said, was quiet but reliable, Maki the hardest worker of all of you, Akiko was good at sports, and Yuka was skilled at handicrafts. Pretty amazing, isn’t it, how closely Emily observed you all?

  Quickly assimilating into life in the country, watching her new friends closely—she was the exact opposite of me. I’d always thought of her as my child alone, but now I began to see how his blood too ran through her.

  The day after we went out to the izakaya Akie told me she would accept the boots.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “I was just being stubborn. I’d like to wear these, if it’s okay, as a sign of our friendship.”

  Ah, I thought, so she really did want them after all. Occasionally we went out together after that, but I no longer had the same desire to make her happy. And strangely enough, I no longer liked it when my boyfriends were nice to her. Akie was really popular among them, perhaps because she was the type of girl they’d never known before. One boy I was sure was head over heels just for me, it turned out, had asked Akie out behind my back.

  But conversely, the boys Akie introduced me to started being very nice to me. At first it seemed they had me mistakenly pegged as an unapproachable rich girl. But once we’d started talking, they’d found me sociable and fun and said they’d like the same group to get together again. And we did, about once a week. One time we all went to one boy’s hometown to swim at the seaside, and while we were there, too, they were very solicitous of me, making sure I wasn’t bored or thirsty or anything.

  Gradually I found it was more fun being with them than with my own boyfriends. It wasn’t just because of how they treated me. It was more the vitality they had, how heatedly they debated education theory at every opportunity, that attracted me to them. And the one I was most attracted to was the boy who’d first spoken to me back at the izakaya.

  At first he was the most considerate one toward me, but as all of them began to treat me kindly, he started to keep his distance. I realized that he was the one I most agreed with when they all debated, and that I was always watching him, and him alone. These education department students discussed education so intensely I was sure all of them wanted to become teachers, but he was the only one planning to. The others all wanted to become civil servants and change education policy that way. “But if you don’t have experience in the classroom,” he always countered, “how can you ever bring about a revolution in education?” The way he stood up to them made him even more manly and attractive in my eyes.

  I liked him a lot but had no idea what to do about it. I was the type who always spoke my mind, but I’d never confessed my feelings for a man before. It had always been the man who told me his feelings, and up till then I’d never liked someone as much as I liked him.

  If I had been certain he liked me, I might have been able to confess my feelings. But I wasn’t sure if he did. So I enlisted Akie to help out. They worked at the same restaurant, so I asked her, when the two of them were alone, to sound him out about his feelings toward me.

  To my great surprise, in a roundabout way she turned me down. “I’m just not sure about that—” she told me.

  That upset me at first, but then I realized that if our positions were reversed and the answer came back negative, I would regret having accepted the request. If things were reversed…A thought struck me. First I’d get Akie and one of my boyfriends to fall for each other, then have her—as a way of thanking me—sound out the boy I was interested in about his feelings. I knew how conscientious she was and couldn’t imagine her so absorbed in her own happiness that she’d turn me down if I asked for her help.

  I asked one of the boys I knew to come see me, one I knew was interested in Akie. I didn’t beat around the bush.

  “You like Akie, right? No need to hesitate around me. Go for it. I’m sure Akie thinks you’re nice. For one thing, you look like that singer she likes. The only reason she turned you down when you invited her out was because she’s shy. She has a tendency to get more obstinate the happier she becomes. So just go for it. You know she can’t hold her liquor. Tell her there’s something about me that you want to talk with her about, and go out drinking, just the two of you. Once you get her drunk the rest should be easy.”

  My strategy paid off, and the man I had my eyes on and I became a couple. Or at least it seemed that way. It turned out I was the only one who was under that impression. It’s always like that with me.

  I was happy that you all became friends with Emily, and I was hoping that through you I would have a better relationship with all your mothers, and with others in town. But you never, ever accepted Emily.

  And when she was murdered the reality of that became painfully clear.

  The day we arrived in the town and I heard “Greensleeves” playing in the distance, I wondered what it was for. Was there some special event going on? The sad melody seemed to perfectly express how I was feeling. The woman from the factory office who was showing us around town explained that it was the time signal. At noon “Edelweiss,” and at 6 p.m. “Greensleeves” played from the community center speakers. “When there are warnings issued,” she went on, “or when there’s some emergency, they’ll broadcast the same way, so please listen to them carefully. Just that one little speaker is how they contact everyone in town.” That’s how small the town is, I thought, and felt miserable.

  Still, the musical signal was convenient. I imagined that children, even if they had a watch on, might not look at it when they were having fun playing, but they’d hear the music. I used to tell Emily every time she went out to play, “When the music plays, come back home.”

  That day, too, as I was getting dinner ready I heard “Greensleeves.” The factory was partly open, even during Obon, and my husband was at work, so I was alone at home. Just then the door intercom rang. It must be Emily, I thought, and opened the door, but there stood Akiko.

  “Emily’s dead!”

  I thought it was some mean trick. From about two months before this, Emily had been occasionally asking me things like “What would you do if I died?” or “If something painful happens is it okay to die and then be reborn?” So my first thought
was that she and her friends were trying to trick me, and that Emily was hiding behind the door waiting to see how I’d react. “Don’t talk about dying, even as a joke,” I’d told her several times. I was kind of upset.

  But Emily wasn’t hiding. Was she in an accident? I thought. Where? At the school swimming pool? She knows how to swim, so how could that happen? Why Emily?

  My mind went blank. And right then what came to me was Akie’s face.…I raced out of my house. Don’t take Emily away!

  When I got to the pool I heard a child crying or yelling, I wasn’t sure which. It was Sae. She was crouched outside the changing rooms, head in her hands. “Where’s Emily?” I asked, and she pointed behind her without looking up.

  The changing room? Hadn’t she fallen into the pool? I looked inside the dimly lit room and found Emily lying there, faceup on the drainboards, her head toward the door. She wasn’t wet and didn’t look hurt. Over her face was a handkerchief with a cute cat character on it. Ah—so it is a trick, after all. My legs felt about to give out.

  Drained of the energy to get angry, I tugged off the handkerchief and found Emily’s eyes open. “Just how long are you going to keep this up?” I asked, poking the tip of her nose. It felt cold. I held my palm out in front of her nose and mouth but felt no breath. I lifted her up and yelled her name again and again, in her ear but she didn’t blink once. I shook her shoulders and screamed at her, but Emily never woke up.

  I was in a state of disbelief. Even after the funeral I didn’t want to accept that she was gone. This wasn’t happening to us. I wished it were me who was dead.

  A long time passed—I had no idea if it was day or night—and I asked my husband again and again, “Where is Emily?” I don’t know how many times he answered in a quiet voice, “Emily is no longer with us.” I’d never seen my husband cry before, but now when I saw the tears falling from his eyes it finally hit me that Emily was truly gone. “Why?” I repeated this question over and over. Why did Emily have to die? Why did she have to be strangled? Why did she have to be murdered? I wanted to hear this directly from the murderer himself. The murderer had to be caught and there wasn’t a minute to spare.