by Kanae Minato
I was sure they’d catch him soon. There were, after all, at least four eyewitnesses.
But all of you said the same thing: “We don’t remember his face.” I felt like slapping each one of you hard, one after the other. If you truly couldn’t remember, there wasn’t much we could do about it. But you didn’t even seem to be trying hard to recall. And it wasn’t just his face. You watched silently as Emily was led away by a strange man, then didn’t go to check on her for over an hour. And not one of you seemed to regret that as you made your statements. Your friend died, yet not one of you cried.
Was it because you weren’t sad?
As I looked at you I thought: These girls realize something terrible’s happened, but they don’t feel sorry for Emily. If it had been one of the other girls, not Emily, who’d been taken away they might not have let her go off by herself. Or else might have gotten worried and gone off earlier to check on her. You would have been sadder, would have done your utmost, for that girl’s sake, to remember the murderer’s face.
It wasn’t just those girls, but their parents, too. My husband and I visited each family to ask them more about what had happened that day, but one of the parents, I can’t recall which, muttered, “Who do you think you are, the police?” And one other parent yelled at us, “My child’s been through enough already! Don’t hurt her anymore.” If we’d been a couple they knew from long ago and asked the same things, would they have reacted this way? I seriously doubt it.
Actually, everyone in town was the same. Onlookers from all over town gathered at the school that day, yet hardly any useful information came to light. Housewives I’d never seen before knew all about my asking for Camembert cheese at the supermarket, so how could there be not a speck of information, or any leads, about the murderer? If it had been a local girl who’d been killed, there would have been a flood of leads about various unsavory types.
On top of that were the public-address announcements blaring over the loudspeaker. For a while after the murder, at times when children were going to and from school they’d have announcements like: “Good children never do things alone, but always do things with someone from their family or a friend.” “If a stranger talks to you do not go with him.” But why didn’t they also announce something like “If anyone has any information that could help in the crime that took place recently, no matter how small, please contact the police”?
No one—no one—mourns Emily’s death. No one understands the pain I felt at having my child killed.
There were so few leads about the man who murdered her that for a time I even suspected that the four of you had killed her. You all killed her and all agreed on a story you made up about a criminal who didn’t exist. You didn’t want to be caught up in a lie so you said you couldn’t remember what he looked like. And everyone in town knew this and was protecting you. I was the only one who didn’t know what was going on. Me, the one left all alone.
You appeared to me in my dreams, as every night a different one of you strangled Emily. Murdered her while you let out a hideous laugh. And turning your malicious face to me, you said, over and over in chorus, I don’t remember his face.
Before I realized what I was doing, I had run out of the house, barefoot, clutching a knife.
My husband chased after me. “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked, and I said, “I’m getting revenge for Emily.” “But they haven’t found the murderer yet,” he said. “Those children—they’re the ones who killed her!” I screamed back. “It can’t be them. I mean, look…,” my husband countered but faltered, not wanting to say aloud that Emily had been sexually assaulted.
I didn’t care. It was them—those girls who did it!
I screamed and screamed…but don’t remember anything after that. I might have fainted, might have been held down by other residents of the company apartment, might have been given a sedative. It’s all a blur.
Afterward I couldn’t get by without sedatives, and my husband said it would be best if I went back to my parents’ place and rested for a time. But I refused. If we hadn’t come to this town, Emily wouldn’t have been killed. It was this town that had killed her. I loathed the town but didn’t leave it because if I did everyone would forget all about the murder. And the murderer would never be caught.
And I hadn’t lost all hope in you girls. As I gradually recovered I remembered you were just ten-year-old girls after all. Pushing children that young—driving them to remember! remember!—wouldn’t help. Those girls themselves, I thought, had not fully recovered. Once they were back to normal they might remember something. And might finally mourn Emily. Maybe one of them would even show up for a memorial service for her, to light incense and pray.
Still, three years passed and you all just kept repeating the same thing. I was sure now that you four had killed her. That’s why I said what I did.
“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.”
Maybe I’m the worst adult imaginable for saying something like this to young girls, girls barely in junior high. But unless I said something shocking like that, I thought, you would forget all about Emily. And you four were the only eyewitnesses.
And I was sure that even though I’d said that to you, the day after I left town you’d forget all about the murder.
That’s why—though I haven’t forgotten Emily for a second—I decided to wipe that town totally out of my mind.
In Tokyo I had family and friends who consoled me. And there were lots of places I could go to take my mind off my sorrow. But the one who comforted me the most might have been Takahiro. Other than Sae, you probably don’t know who I’m talking about.
When he lived in that town, he was the only child who was concerned about me.
My husband’s cousin and his wife came to town at the same time we did to work at the Adachi Manufacturing plant. They might be relatives, but the wife also worked, and the couple didn’t seem to get along well, so we didn’t see them much. As for Takahiro, I heard he was a bright little boy, but there was a cold look in his eyes and he was the kind of child who, even if you happened to run across him in the hallway of the apartment building, wouldn’t say hello.
Yet after the incident he came by himself to my place.
“I am truly sorry that I couldn’t do anything to help after that awful thing happened. I was back in Tokyo when it all took place,” he said. “I’m thinking I’ll ask the kids at school to see if they know anything that might be a lead, so I was wondering if you could tell me about the day it happened. Just what you feel comfortable talking about.”
Before this, though, he went over to the tablet set up to memorialize Emily, lit a stick of incense, and said a silent prayer for her. He was the only one ever to do that, and it made me very happy. He asked about the connection with the French Doll Robbery incident, but we had nothing to do with French dolls—the townspeople had seemed to have jumped the gun in linking the crimes, but no evidence had surfaced proving they were committed by the same person. That’s what I told him.
After this he stopped by our house occasionally. He never had any important information to share, but I was happy that he showed concern about the murder, and about how I was doing.
Both our families returned to Tokyo at the same time, and back home he continued to stop by every once in a while.
“Your house is on the way back from school and I just thought I’d drop by. I know you’ll always treat me to something good to eat. I’m sorry.”
He sounded quite apologetic, but I enjoyed having Takahiro over. All he did was tell me about things happening at his school, but somehow it cheered me up.
Before Emily had even entered elementary school I had a discussion once with one of the other mothers I had gotten to know at the private
cram school Emily attended. We were talking about which we found more adorable—boys or girls. Naturally I said girls. “You can dress them up in cute clothes, talk with them like your friends, go out shopping together.” The other mother said, “I used to think so too. But now I’m not so sure.”
She had two children, an older girl and a boy Emily’s age. This is what she told me:
“Before I had children I thought I wanted a girl. I figured even after she grew up, we could be friends. So when I had a girl I was overjoyed. But it was after I had a boy that I understood. A girl is, after all, a friend. That’s fun, but girls compete with each other. When I see her whispering some secret to my husband, it upsets me. A boy, though, is more like a lover than a friend. Even though it’s your own child, it’s still the opposite sex. So you don’t compete with each other. You want to do whatever you can for him, unconditionally. And all it takes to cheer you up is having him say a few kind words to you. I’m looking forward to hearing from my daughter about boyfriends someday, but I imagine I’ll have mixed feelings when my son grows up and tells me about his girlfriend.”
Hearing this, I imagined if Emily had been a boy. When she was born I thought she looked just like me, but as she grew older I was startled sometimes at how much she resembled her father. If she’d been a boy I probably would have given her a hug because of that. And I might have felt even more strongly that I had to take very, very good care of her.
But none of that matters now. Boy or girl, as long as they lived that would be enough for me.
I’ve gotten off topic, but I started to feel as if Takahiro were my own son. I asked him if he had a girlfriend, and he laughed and said a couple, but nothing serious, deflecting the question. But it was enough to give me mixed feelings.
Sometimes he visited friends in that town, and through that caught an occasional kernel of news about you four. You were all living ordinary lives, he said, nothing special to report. Just as I suspected, I thought at first, and this made me angry. But gradually I came to accept that this was okay.
The one I should be angry at is the murderer. Those girls have their own lives to live.
If Emily had been in your situation I’m sure I would have told her to forget all about the murder. How many years did it take for me to finally arrive at this realization? I wonder. I truly came to believe it was good that you could live normal lives again.
Takahiro stopped going back to that town and I heard no more news about you and stopped thinking about you. That’s how you forget about things, I thought.
It was the beginning of spring this year when Takahiro came to our home and said there was a girl he wanted to seriously go out with, and asked us to act as go-betweens and set up the omiai meeting with her. It made me a little sad to think of him getting married, but I was overjoyed that he would ask me and my husband to take on such an important task. My husband liked Takahiro, and when he heard that the girl worked in a company that was a client of his company, he eagerly accepted, saying he would get in touch with her superiors in her workplace.
But when I heard the girl’s name I was shocked. One of those four girls? I couldn’t believe my ears.
At first Takahiro apologized for it and explained that when he visited the town he started to get interested in Sae, that at the end of the year he’d happened to see her again in Tokyo with her work colleagues and felt as if it was fate that he ran into her again. Before he left he apologized again. “I’m very sorry if I’ve stirred up painful memories for you, Auntie, and for Uncle,” he said.
Painful? I didn’t feel that way. So Takahiro is that age now, is he, I thought, and was surprised to think that the girls the same age as Emily were now old enough to get married. I couldn’t believe that that much time had passed.
If only Emily had lived…She’s the one I should have brought together with the person she loved. I should have protected her until that day.
“There’s no need to apologize,” I told Takahiro. “When you love a person you don’t need someone else’s permission to be with them.”
The two of them had their omiai, began seeing each other regularly, and then decided to marry. Since the girl was one of you four, I was half resigned to not being invited to the wedding, but my husband and I were the first ones Takahiro invited. “Sae really hopes you’ll attend,” he told me.
Sae had grown so pretty it was hard to believe she was once a child from that rustic little town. Dressed in a white wedding gown, surrounded by friends from work wishing her well, she had a radiant smile.
But the instant she saw me, her smile vanished and she looked at me fearfully. A natural response, I guess, when suddenly confronted on the happiest day of your life with someone who reminds you of a past tragedy.
“Forget about what happened,” I told her, “and be happy.”
“Thank you,” she said, tears running down her cheeks. I felt a weight lifted off my shoulders too. Though I couldn’t say this to all of you—these words I should have said a long time ago—I was so glad I was able to say it to her then.
And yet, Sae went on to murder Takahiro.
A terrible series of crimes had begun.
When my husband first told me about the murder, I knew there had to be some mistake. Less than a month after being so happy at her wedding ceremony, the bride—Sae—killed Takahiro? Wasn’t it an accident? A burglar broke in, perhaps, and Takahiro was killed trying to protect Sae? And she said, “I’m the one who killed him”?
It happened in a far-off country so I wasn’t able to see Takahiro’s body, just to hear, indirectly, that Sae had confessed to the police to murdering her husband. I couldn’t accept that he was dead.
Takahiro, who was like a son to me…Takahiro, the only one who ever consoled me after Emily was murdered…
If I could have seen the body with my own eyes, I might have been able to truly despise Sae for snatching away my beloved son. But before that could happen, I received a letter.
As I read the long letter I realized I’d been wrong all this time. I couldn’t believe that Emily’s murder would weigh so heavily on her. For a while afterward she couldn’t help but feel fear, compounded by the fact that the murderer was still on the loose. But normally as time passed you should be able to forget that. Yet Sae couldn’t, and the murder held her prisoner to a fear so great it affected her health. I’m sure she felt a gaze on her at times.
It was hard to believe that Takahiro had gone to that town in order to keep watch over Sae. And that he was the one who stole the French dolls. I didn’t want to believe it, yet I don’t think Sae was lying in her letter. Still, I don’t want you to label Takahiro as a pervert so quickly. I understand his feelings very well.
Like me, he was very lonely in that town. You have to realize that, because of problems in his family, he no longer knew how to form relationships with people, and that would include the children in town. So he fell in love with dolls and had his eye constantly on a girl who resembled them. Don’t condemn him for this. No matter the motivation for wanting her to be his, I know he wanted to treasure Sae for the rest of his life.
And Sae, too, tried to understand and accept the way he was. Which is why she decided it was all right for her body to become fully a woman’s. But at that very moment a tragedy occurred.
Was it all my fault?
Sae took the words I told you all that day as a firm promise. That’s why she couldn’t forget the murder, why her mind and body both were held in thrall to it. And as she tried to forget the promise and everything that went with it, suddenly there I was, at her wedding, the happiest day of her life, to remind her of it all over again.
I told her to forget the murder, but for her that may have been, conversely, the trigger that made her realize that the murder was fading from her memory.
Am I to blame for Takahiro’s death? Was I the one who bound her to Emily’s death?
That’s what I wanted to know. No, that’s not it, really. What I wanted was for her to d
eny it. To tell me “No, it’s not because of you.” That’s what I wanted to hear. If the other three girls had moved on from the murder and were living normal lives now, I could put Sae down as a special case, the one exception.
Apart from this, I felt I had to tell all of you, since I suspected, at least from what she said in the letter, that you didn’t know how Sae felt after the murder. So I made copies of her letter without her permission and sent them to you. Was that wrong? I don’t know. But I thought that you three—of all people—you who had all been part of the same murder, would forgive me.
No, it’s that I simply couldn’t bear the guilt alone for what happened to her. That’s the real reason I sent you all the letter I received from Sae. Why not append a message from me, too? It’s because I had no idea what to say.
The three of you are all okay, I assume? I couldn’t write something like that.
Don’t do anything stupid. Even less could I have written something like that.
But I should have. Because I didn’t write anything and just forwarded the letter without comment, Maki, too, was driven into a corner. By me.
I first heard about the incident with Maki on the TV news. I couldn’t imagine that she had been part of it. I mean, it took place in a far-off seaside town, and even though it involved, shockingly, a man breaking into an elementary school, only one child was hurt badly so it wasn’t covered all that extensively. But the fact that it took place at an elementary school swimming pool spurred me on to learn more.
It might not have been big news on TV, but it was all over the Internet and weekly news magazines. One teacher stood up to the intruder while the second ran away, and the former was a female teacher while the latter was an athletic male teacher. Perfect fodder for a splashy story for the Internet to play up.