Book Girl and the Scribe Who Faced God, Part 1

by Mizuki Nomura

  A sign was hung on the library door reading CLOSED.

  I wondered if the librarian was there.

  I turned the doorknob and the door opened easily.

  The curtains in the deserted room were thrown open and the morning light streamed in blindingly. A lone girl wearing a school uniform was sitting at a desk in the reading room.

  Takeda turned her entire chair around toward me and smiled guilelessly at me.

  “Good morning, Konoha. Did you come looking for this book?”

  I saw that the hardcover book in her outstretched hand was titled The Immoral Passage, and I felt as if I’d toppled from the brilliance of the ordinary to the utter darkness of the extraordinary.

  “Did Ryuto tell you I would come?”

  Still grinning as if to say, “Wouldn’t you like to know?” Takeda handed me the dark blue book.

  “The librarian is out today. Why not stay here and read?”

  I descended the rusty spiral staircase with clang-clang-clanging steps.

  We came to a gray door and Takeda opened it.

  “Go ahead.”

  I had been to this room before. It had a sweet smell to it, just like then. The smell of old books with yellowing pages. It was darker than the last time and so cold it made my bones creak.

  The underground storage room that even the library workers got creeped out by and refused to enter was Takeda’s secret room.

  There were several bookcases in it, and in the handful of empty spots were old school desks and chairs. The walls and even the floor in the cramped “book graveyard” were packed with old books.

  Takeda turned on a lamp on one of the desks. When she did, the room became slightly brighter.

  “Here are some provisions from me.”

  With that, she set an orange water bottle and a disposable hand warmer on the desk.

  “There’s peach oolong tea in the bottle. Okay, I’m going to go to class now. Enjoy yourself.”

  “… Thanks for the supplies.”

  “Heh-heh-heh. Nooo problem.”

  Takeda inclined her head childishly and made a show of bashfulness; then she shut the door and left.

  The clang-clang-clang of her steps grew distant.

  Why had I come down here and not gone back to class? I would make Kotobuki worry again.

  I didn’t understand it myself. But when I got this book from Takeda, I was seized by some dark, indescribable thing.

  It resembled the sensation I’d had when I first looked up at Kanako Sakurai, the author, onstage.

  That despite my fear, I couldn’t help staring at the woman shrouded in a coldly noble air who seemed to reject everything.

  That strange sensation that made my spine tremble and my head feel numb—

  I sat in the creaky chair, ripped open the packaging on the disposable hand warmer that Takeda had given me, and set it in my lap.

  I opened the lid of the orange water bottle and poured the warm peach-scented tea into the cap. Once I had drunk that and warmed myself up, I opened the book and began to read.

  The first few lines—

  That alone overwhelmed me with the clarity the writing exuded.

  The words polished like crystals, without the slightest waste, had been exactingly selected and logically organized.

  There was no superfluous ornamentation. And yet the sentences she’d assembled were beautifully transparent, beyond compare, and the situations and emotions communicated themselves realistically, as if they were happening right in front of me.

  As I progressed through the story, my throat grew sticky and dry, and the dimness and the cold of the room stopped bothering me. More oppressive instead was the heavy darkness and the frigidity that bubbled up in my mind.

  The story was told with words of beautiful clarity. It was an account of the love and hatred between one woman and a married couple.

  The narrator was an author named Arisa. A talented editor with the pet name of Haru appears. His wife is named Yuiko—a book girl who dreamed of becoming an author.

  Arisa and Yuiko were friends who belonged to a literary society in college. The two are depicted as polar opposites: the aloof Arisa who has trouble interacting with people and the adorable Yuiko who is kind to everyone.

  Through the offices of an upperclassman, Yuiko submits her manuscript to Haru, who’s an alumni of the club.

  In the end, Yuiko and Haru become lovers and get married. But the thing that attracted Haru as an editor was not the manuscript Yuiko submitted, but rather a short essay Arisa wrote for the club magazine.

  Without telling Yuiko, Haru meets with Arisa and convinces her to write a novel.

  “You are someone who should write. Have you ever read Strait Is the Gate? You remind me of the character Alissa who pursues celestial love. The way you stubbornly go after the things you believe in and nothing else—But that means you might be able to pass through the narrow gate someday and reach ‘supremacy.’ ”

  Haru praises the novel she writes based on her own experiences.

  “I want you to let me handle this novel! You could be an author. No, you’ve already discovered the narrow gate that allows only a handful to see it! All that’s left is to pass through it.”

  Haru and Yuiko marry, and Arisa’s novel is published and becomes widely discussed.

  Yuiko takes Haru and Arisa to task over it.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that Arisa wrote a novel? What were you two doing when I wasn’t around?”

  Arisa tells Yuiko, “Haru and I are Alissa and Jerome from Strait Is the Gate. So we could never be wed. Alissa doesn’t want that. And you’re a Juliette who was able to wed Jerome, Yuiko.”

  Haru and Arisa were bound by the powerful ties of an author and her editor. None of the sexual desire between a man and a woman existed between them. The two of them had no need for something so foolish, so uncertain, so problematic.

  Each of them simply hoped to be an indispensable partner in order to reach the ideal called God—the supreme novel.

  Arisa casually sleeps with passing men and dangerous younger boys.

  But Haru is the only one she didn’t think of as an object for that sort of thing.

  The very act of having such an idea would have been profanity against Haru and herself. Their relationship was something purer and more certain than that.

  Arisa was Kanako.

  Haru was Fumiharu.

  Yuiko was Yui. Even without knowing the three of them that well, that much was obvious when I read the book.

  Their background and situations overlapped too much.

  It wouldn’t be unreasonable for someone reading this story to suppose that Kanako had written about the three of them exactly the way they were.

  Just how much of it was true and where did the lies begin? Or was everything written here a creation of the author Kanako Sakurai? I couldn’t be sure.

  I was simply pulled along by the intelligent writing and the unpredictable progression of the story.

  I continued to turn the pages, warming my fingers on the hand warmer when they grew numb.

  Once Yuiko has become Haru’s wife, she suspects that he and Arisa are having an affair, and the flames of jealousy smolder in her heart.

  Haru is late getting home due to his editing work and often spends the night elsewhere, but all Yuiko can imagine is that it’s an excuse for secret meetings with Arisa and it torments her. She would often go to Haru’s office to check on him under the pretense of bringing him a change of clothes.

  “I want children.” Yuiko begins to fixate on this.

  If they had children, she would be able to pull Haru back to her side.

  She would manage to keep Arisa from stealing him.

  Yuiko seduces Haru without any concern for how it makes her look, and they couple like animals in the apartment Arisa uses as an office.

  Arisa watches the scene coldly from the next room.

  In the end, Yuiko becomes pregnant and gives birth to a ba
by girl.

  Her name is Toco.

  I stopped flipping through the pages and froze.

  Toco?

  This was about Tohko!

  If the models for Haru and Yuiko were Tohko’s parents, then it wouldn’t be so strange if their daughter, Tohko, made an appearance, too.

  But it gave me a weird feeling to see the name of someone I was close to in the novel. And if the events overlapped to this extent…

  Haru is over the moon about his daughter’s birth, and he starts to wrap up his work early and go home often in order to see her.

  Arisa feels as if she’s been betrayed by Haru.

  Wasn’t Haru a kindred spirit? Weren’t they partners, aiming for supremacy together? Had Haru been sullied by the vulgar world and corrupted?

  Alissa was supposed to be the only one for Jerome, whether or not he was married to Juliette!

  Yuiko was flaunting her happiness to Arisa, who was faltering.

  How adorable Toco is, how much Haru loves his daughter, how he cherishes her and looks after her, never taking his eyes from her for a moment. How he thinks of her as a treasure.

  How fulfilled and happy the family is.

  She told Arisa at every opportunity, she wrote Arisa letters, she sent her photos, she invited her to the house, she showed her how adorable Toco was and how madly in love with her Haru was.

  Yuiko and Arisa’s positions were flipped, and Arisa’s irritation grew.

  If only Toco had never come.

  Arisa turned her murderous rage on the innocent baby who had planted herself in front of the shining ideal she and Haru had pursued.

  She hated Toco.

  If only she would disappear!

  One day, no longer able to control the dark impulse, Arisa wraps her hands around Toco’s throat when Yuiko is out of the house.

  Toco thrashes her little limbs and struggles, fighting back desperately, but Arisa ignores it, putting one hand over Toco’s mouth and continuing to squeeze her weak, slender neck with the other. Finally Toco stops crying and doesn’t move anymore. She isn’t breathing.

  Arisa puts her ear over Toco’s heart to make sure there’s no heartbeat; then she goes home with a feeling of dark glee.

  This would snap Haru out of it.

  This would cast Yuiko into the depths of despair.

  But Yuiko’s behavior doesn’t change at all, even after that.

  She talks to Arisa about Toco and flaunts her happiness even more than before.

  Had Toco not died? Had she botched the job?

  Seeing Yuiko continue to talk contentedly about Toco threatened to rip her heart open. She couldn’t bear it!

  Her hatred fostered madness and Arisa fed Yuiko poison to try and kill her.

  The poison was mixed into Yuiko’s morning soup and Haru accidentally ate some, too. The two then went out for a drive and were killed in a car accident.

  After that, their daughter, Toco, was orphaned.

  It was a doll, and in a drawer was the corpse of the girl Arisa had killed.

  The child Toco had already departed this life.

  For a little while, I couldn’t take my eyes from the last page.

  It was a shock, as if the world as it currently existed had been turned utterly on end—

  That was how Mr. Sasaki had described the feeling of finishing Kanako Sakurai’s book.

  You were drawn too far in and were unable to return to the real world from the world of the novel.

  You even got the feeling that your own life had ended.

  But what made my body feel even colder was that Arisa had murdered Toco in the story.

  “Do you know what happened to… Juliette’s daughter, Alissa?”

  Ryuto’s words echoed in my mind and a shudder went through my spine.

  “Her existence was erased.”

  Just as he’d said, Kanako Sakurai had erased the existence of Tohko Amano. By strangling the baby Toco in the book she’d written—

  Everything written here was fiction.

  Tohko was still alive. She still existed.

  But was Kanako capable of so cruelly murdering, even inside a novel, a living person—in fact, the girl who was her friend’s daughter and whom she shared her life with? Someone she let board in her house?

  That wasn’t all.

  Killing the couple who were her friends by poisoning them—

  Haru and Yuiko had died in a car accident. The poison had coursed through Haru’s body while he drove, and he failed to turn the steering wheel, so they crashed into a guardrail and tumbled off a cliff, inside their car.

  Mr. Sasaki had told me that Tohko’s parents had died in a car crash, too. He had been evasive about it at the time.

  If what was written in the novel were true—

  If Kanako was the one who had fed the Amanos poison and arranged it so that they had an accident—

  No, that couldn’t have happened! It was crazy to confess that you’d killed someone in a novel. First off, if it was true, the police would never leave you alone.

  “I’ve got to calm down,” I muttered in the book graveyard, which was lit dimly by only the table lamp.

  I couldn’t tell what was fantasy and what was reality.

  “Get a grip. Don’t let it turn you around.”

  Something was certain—Tohko was alive in this world right now. Kanako Sakurai had written a novel that could be seen as using herself, the Amanos, and their daughter as inspiration. The couple and their daughter were killed in the book. The Amanos had actually died in a car crash. Their daughter, Tohko, was boarding at the Sakurai house.

  The more I thought about it, the creepier this woman Kanako Sakurai seemed. Along with the fact that she had written a novel that seemed to confess she’d committed murder and she was letting the girl she’d killed in the book stay at her house.

  Why had she written a novel like that?

  Had Tohko read this?

  If so, how had she felt?

  If someone wrote a novel where they killed me and I read it, I would probably feel like my heart were being shredded with knives, like I’d been tossed into a dark sea and was sinking.

  I would be so shocked by it, I would probably stop trusting people. And then to have to live under the same roof with the person who’d written something like that—that would probably be a terror like being swallowed up in utter darkness.

  Maybe this person really does hate me so much that they want to kill me. Maybe they really will kill me someday. I would get seized by that kind of paranoia, and since I would never have space to let my emotions relax, I might start to go crazy.

  How had it been for Tohko?

  Mr. Sasaki told me that Tohko had been only eight years old when her parents died.

  Had she been at the Sakurai house ever since?

  When I’d run into Kanako outside her house that one time, Tohko had spoken to her in a friendly way and told her with a bright smile that she was only seeing me off.

  I couldn’t detect a hint of uncertainty or fear toward Kanako from Tohko’s behavior that day.

  But—

  I recalled how Kanako had stared hard at me for a moment, then slid her eyes away and passed us by.

  Kanako hadn’t spoken a word to Tohko that day. She hadn’t even looked her in the face; she’d acted as if Tohko Amano didn’t even exist.

  All the hair on my body stood on end.

  If that was how every day was for Tohko—

  I felt oppressed by the cold darkness of the underground room, and I closed the book and left the place behind.

  When I climbed the spiral staircase and opened the heavy door, there was no one in the reading room.

  I looked at the clock on the wall. Third period was almost over.

  I’d been down there for three hours…

  I had to get back to class. Kotobuki would be worried about me.

  Just then, my cell phone vibrated in my pocket.

  As if he’d been watching for the hou
r when I would finish reading the book.

  As if everything was going according to his script—

  I held my breath and put the phone to my ear.

  “Hello?”

  “What did you think of Kanako’s novel?”

  A dark voice that seemed to echo up from the depths of the earth came through the earpiece and crept into my ear.

  I gripped the phone with a sweaty hand and said in a harsh voice, “… When you said Jerome married Juliette, you meant Tohko’s parents, didn’t you? But wasn’t that the story in the book? Mr. Sasaki told me that Tohko’s parents were very close.”

  “Is that what you’re gonna tell yourself so you can run away again? That nothin’ written in there is real? It’s just an author lyin’?”

  Ryuto’s irritation came through and dug at my chest.

  “Have you ever imagined how it feels to be treated like you don’t exist? You’re right there, but you get treated like you’re not. You’re denied everything—every day your heart gets carved up and you experience disappointment again and again, but you have to smile anyway. Do you know how that feels?”

  His voice was getting louder. Ryuto shouted as though he were hurling his raw emotions through the phone.

  “You gave someone like that a dream! That if you wrote, maybe something would change! That maybe you had the power to change the future!”

  “Why me? There are plenty of other authors! Why do I have to write?!”

  My emotions were wavering, keyed up like a wave shattering on a cliff face.

  “You should learn who Tohko Amano is, Konoha.”

  Ryuto’s words cut forcefully into my chest and I gasped.

  “Why Tohko tried to make you write a novel. Why it had to be you. You gotta wake up already and see how Tohko feels. See the truth.”

  The call cut off and I was left standing there.

  “You should learn who Tohko Amano is…”

  I’d thought I understood Tohko pretty well before.

  But that was only Tohko at school; I didn’t have a clue about Tohko anywhere else.

  Not even that Tohko’s family was dead.