The core of my brain grew searingly hot, and I couldn’t tell if the scream rising up in my throat with that intense pain was because of pain or regret.
But I knew that I had to act somehow.
Why did Tohko want me to write?
What had she been thinking, spending two years at my side?
I had to find out about Tohko, about the Amanos, and about that author with the cold eyes that commanded the heavens—Kanako Sakurai.
Even if it was a development that was in line with the script that someone had written for me.
When I got back to the classroom, Kotobuki ran up to me.
“Inoue! Where have you been?”
Her face was holding up against tears, her forehead tight and her mouth pulled into a frown.
“I was looking for something at the library.”
“You were looking for something?!”
She was probably shocked that I would skip class for a reason like that. Her voice was thick and her eyes widened.
“And it looks like it’s going to take a lot of time, so I thought I’d leave early today.”
“What are you looking for?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t talk about it yet.”
Her mouth bent into a frown again, and she looked at me worriedly, to which I declared, “I’ll definitely be at school tomorrow, and I’ll leave my afternoon free, too, so don’t worry,” in as cheerful a tone as I could.
“I… promise.”
“Okay.”
When I went back to my seat and packed my schoolbooks up, Akutagawa came over.
“Are you going home?”
“Something urgent came up.”
“You still don’t need my help, Inoue?” Akutagawa asked with an earnest look.
Akutagawa was worrying about me, too…
My chest was punctured by his forthright gaze.
“Thanks. When I absolutely need you, I’ll ask.”
“Just let me know anytime.”
“I will.”
I forced a smile, picked up my coat and bag, and left the classroom.
Then my feet carried me to the school’s music hall.
It had been built by alumni of the orchestra. On the top floor was the workroom of Maki, the girl we called Princess.
The third-years were on voluntary attendance, but Maki had been recommended to a school, so she didn’t have to take exams. She might have come to draw.
She was the school director’s granddaughter and the heir to the Himekura Group, so Maki was known as a font of information. She would always demand “compensation” as collateral, but I was in a place right now where I would do anything, including modeling. I wondered if I could get Maki to investigate the accident that had killed Tohko’s parents.
But it wasn’t Maki in the workroom; it was her personal assistant, Takamizawa.
“I apologize, when you’ve come all this way. It seems that Miss Maki wasn’t feeling well and so she returned home early.”
“I see…”
“If you have a message, I can see that she gets it.”
“No, it’s fine. I hope she feels better.”
How could Maki have gotten sick? Even she could catch a cold or get an upset stomach?
I’d been relying on her, but oh well. I had no choice but to try investigating the incident myself as best I could.
Kana, Tohko snuck Gide’s Strait Is the Gate out of Fumiharu’s bookcase and ate it.
It was an old book, so it gave Tohko a stomachache. Fumiharu had kept it with him and treasured it ever since he was a student and had pored over it again and again.
She was sobbing in bed and Fumiharu reminded her in a calm voice, “You can’t eat Daddy’s books without asking. Plus, old books are just like food that’s past its expiration date. It’s okay to read them, but if you eat them, they’ll give you a stomachache. I’ve told you that.”
Tohko blubbered, “I’m sorry, Daddy. I won’t do it again.” Then she pleaded, “But you were reading it with such a nice look on your face that made my heart squeeeeze tight, and I wanted to see what it tasted like.”
Fumiharu’s eyes softened, and as a smile came over his face, he asked, “And did Strait Is the Gate taste good?”
Hiccuping, Tohko answered, “I couldn’t really tell. It was like I was zoning out and munching on clear bean thread noodles instead of just slurping them up. I chewed and chewed, but there wasn’t any taste. The noodles ran away from me. Daddy, why didn’t Alissa marry Jerome? She loved him, didn’t she? So then why did she go to God all by herself?”
“It might be a little hard for you to understand yet, Tohko. When you grow up and find someone you love, maybe then you’ll understand how Alissa felt.
“You should try tasting Strait Is the Gate again when that happens. I promise it’ll taste different.”
“What will it taste like?”
“In his diary, the author Gide wrote that it was like nougat. That there are delicious almonds inside a sticky candy. He said that’s what Alissa’s letters were.
“But I think it tastes like consommé.”
“Con… sommé?”
“That’s right. A beautiful amber color—like the golden sparkle before night comes.
“Consommé could be considered simplistic, but a lot of different ingredients are mixed up and melted together in the clear liquid. It’s very hard to name what each of them is. Even though it’s transparent, you can’t tell what ingredients are in it.
“I think that’s a lot like the human heart. You can almost see it, but not quite.
“There are times when you have feelings that even you can’t explain.
“Maybe that’s why I treasure it so much.”
The whole time Fumiharu was talking, he brushed aside the bangs that hung over Tohko’s forehead with his slender fingers.
With a smile in his eyes and a very kind, tender, but also slightly sad look…
I wonder what Fumiharu was thinking about while he told her about Strait Is the Gate.
I wonder whom he was thinking of…
When I left school, the place I headed to was the biggest library in the neighborhood.
They’d made it so you could read the back issues of newspapers and magazines on the library computers, so I searched them for articles on the Amanos’ accident, reading a string of articles.
The accident had been in March, nine years ago.
The Amanos had left their child at a friend’s house in order to attend a wedding and had headed toward the event in Chiba in their car.
Fumiharu had been driving. On the way there, he’d failed to turn the wheel, and the car had gone through a guardrail and tumbled over a cliff. Neither of them could be saved.
That was all that was written in the article.
The Immoral Passage was published half a year after the accident.
The author, Kanako Sakurai, seemed to be the model for the main character, who confesses to murder, and the shocking story made the news. It was widely reported in the weeklies that there had been models for the couple in the book, too, and that they had really died in a car crash, and that caused a stir.
There was a scandalous article from one of the weeklies that said the circumstances of the accident had been unnatural.
Apparently the police had taken notice of the commotion and begun an investigation.
But they’d found no evidence that Kanako Sakurai had poisoned the Amanos.
In the end, even as the article suggested that the book was a product of her imagination, it ended by bringing up the implication that it may have been more than that.
After that, Kanako Sakurai got fiercely bashed as a shameless author who would even use the deaths of her friends as material to sell books.
It wouldn’t have been unusual for her to have a nervous breakdown. But she brushed off the attacks and was still writing even now.
I recalled the almost ominously beautiful and cold figure of Kanako standing onstage, and my throat
squeezed tight and a shudder ran down my back.
Why had she written that novel?
The question rose again, accompanied by murky black emotions.
The Amanos were supposed to be her friends. So then why?
Imagining her state of mind was like holding your breath and peering into a limitless, absolute darkness.
It contained only a deeper darkness. Only an empty night opened up behind the depths of her cold eyes. The idea scared me so much that my body stiffened and a cold sweat coated me. The more I thought about her, the more it seemed I was being swallowed up in deep shadows, sinking away forever…
I was afraid of her.
By the time I shut down the library computer, my head throbbed and it was hard to breathe, as if I’d just done intense exercise.
I didn’t understand Kanako’s true feelings.
I could find out the circumstances with the newspaper and magazine articles. But I couldn’t deduce what was in a person’s heart. I didn’t have enough material yet for that.
I stared at the computer until my eyes started to hurt, and the memory of the business card I’d thrown away came back to me.
I looked up the main phone number for the publisher on the Internet and called it. When I told them a name and department, I was connected to Mr. Sasaki more easily than I’d expected.
On the other end of the thin cell phone, Mr. Sasaki sounded surprised.
When I told him I wanted to see him, he told me about a café three subway stops from where I was and told me he’d be waiting there.
“I see… so you read Kanako’s book.”
Mr. Sasaki sighed in the seat across from me an hour later.
In a dark voice I asked, “How much of what she wrote in The Immoral Passage is true?”
Mr. Sasaki looked troubled. He grunted several times, wiped away the sweat beading on his forehead, and shifted his gaze around restlessly; then he looked at me with a bitter face.
“To be honest, I don’t really know, either. Kanako isn’t the sort of person to reveal her feelings to others. She didn’t say anything when the accident happened, either.
“Other than writing that lone book, she’s preserved her silence.”
Her cold, regal gaze that had transcended pain and suffering.
Had she looked down with those frigid, arrogant eyes on the people stirring things up against her, even when she’d been right in the middle of their attacks?
“As far as I saw, Kanako and Tohko’s mother, Yui, were dear friends. Kanako often left Ryuto in Yui’s care, and Yui seemed happy to look after him. Kanako focused so much on her work that Yui worried she had no time with Ryuto and that she would damage her health.”
The words she’d directed to me in the lobby of the hotel had been cold enough to freeze, too.
“You could never be an author,” she’d declared, as if brushing me aside.
A rasping voice escaped my dry lips.
“How could she write… like that… about the deaths of people she cared about?”
Mr. Sasaki murmured in response, his eyes pained, “It’s an author’s karma, I suppose…”
An author’s karma?
Something cold stabbed into my chest.
Had she, too, been absorbed by it, cast off every sentimental attachment, overcome ordinary life, and tossed aside even ethics, like Arisa in The Immoral Passage, seeking the path that led to the supremacy known as God?
Was he saying that because she was an author, she wrote about her friends’ deaths and murdered their daughter in her book?
It was so hard to fathom, so monstrous, it gave me a chill. At the same time, I was filled with such rage that it turned the insides of my eyes red.
Was the death of her friends nothing more than material for a novel to her?!
Was that what an author was?
That cold, selfish, arrogant, terrible human being—was that the sort of creature an author was? Did they not care when they hurt people with the stories they wrote?
If I were in Kanako’s position, I never could have written that! I wouldn’t have done it!
Because I’m not an author.
“You could never be an author.”
Her words resurfaced again, making my chest ache and my breathing grow strained.
“You told me that… Kanako debuted under Fumiharu…”
Mr. Sasaki nodded.
“That part’s just like in the novel. Kanako enrolled in the college literary circle that Yui belonged to and when he read their magazine, Amano was intrigued by Kanako’s essay and invited her to write a novel.”
Breathing became more and more difficult, and a chill was crawling up through me with a shudder. The same as in the novel? So that had really happened?
“Did Kanako keep it a secret from Yui? The fact that she was writing a novel and that Fumiharu was publishing it?”
“I don’t know about that…,” Mr. Sasaki murmured ambiguously. “But after the book was published, Yui was very worried about Kanako. About whether it was really a good thing that she’d been published.”
I was sure that was also exactly the same as in The Immoral Passage.
Kanako Sakurai’s debut work was released while she was still in college.
The story was sensational, the murder-suicide of a married couple described from the point of view of their sixteen-year-old daughter.
Unable to tolerate his habitually cheating wife, the husband strangles her in the kitchen of their home, then cuts off her head and arms. He then commits suicide by hanging himself at the side of her bloodstained corpse.
With a clear gaze, the young girl detachedly relates the tale of madness between a man and woman.
That event was something that had actually befallen the writer, Kanako Sakurai.
A bestial murder had occurred six years earlier.
The girl who was the child of the assailant and victim grew up and wrote about the event.
To this very day, she still lived in the house where her parents died.
The weeklies wrote it up and the book quickly became a best seller. But the author herself became the object of attention beyond even that.
“But as an editor, there’s no way you don’t publish a book like that. If I were Amano, I would have done the same thing absolutely. He couldn’t help but do it—there was genius in that novel, and it sinks its talons into your heart the instant you read it. When I read the manuscript, I thought, Amano’s found a genuine author!”
I wasn’t capable of that.
I almost groaned with the pain that steadily twisted my chest.
If something like that had happened at my house—I could never write about it in a novel.
But Kanako had.
And she had kept on writing after that.
She hadn’t been crushed by the sensationalist media or the background noise. She had continued writing without letting any of it affect her, and Fumiharu had supported her as her editor.
“In a certain sense, Kanako may have had a closer relationship with Amano than even Yui, his wife,” Mr. Sasaki murmured in a leaden tone. “Kanako often called her relationship with Amano a ‘chaste union.’ ”
“A… chaste union?”
“That’s what you call a marriage where the man and woman don’t associate with each other. It’s actually a phrase that means a husband and wife who don’t have matrimonial relations… but Kanako was probably referring to her spiritual bond with Amano. They weren’t married, but they were connected by a powerful bond, like a husband and wife who had made a promise in the eyes of God. Amano may have been the only person who was truly able to understand Kanako. Kanako probably knew that, too.”
Slender fingers reached out from the past and scraped at my chest.
“Do you think Kanako loved Amano? Not just as an editor, but as a man?”
Mr. Sasaki pinched his face up, troubled.
“Well… I wonder. It may be that Kanako simply had a sense of competition with Yui. On day
s off, she would call Amano at home and summon him to the office out of nowhere or make ridiculous demands and put him in difficult positions. Maybe that was because she wanted to show Yui that he cared more about her as an author than about Yui, who was his wife.
“After Amano and Yui died, maybe those complex feelings forced Kanako to write The Immoral Passage. I was surprised when Kanako took Tohko in, but…”
There was silence again and Mr. Sasaki shook his head.
“The two of them probably were best friends after all. Even if they had their share of jealousy and misunderstandings, I think the bond was strong.”
The workings of Kanako’s heart were utterly dark and inscrutable.
Mr. Sasaki also told me about Ryuto’s father.
That he had been a boy, a teenager who hadn’t yet reached his majority, named Takumi Suwa.
“In The Immoral Passage, Arisa is written as a woman who’ll casually sleep with anyone, but Kanako thoroughly rejected that sort of thing and didn’t get close to men.
“As far as I know, the only one Kanako actually dated was Takumi. But…”
Mr. Sasaki’s words became evasive.
“Takumi had a lot of problems.”
“Because of his age?”
At the time Takumi Suwa had been nineteen, six years younger than Kanako.
“Well, there was that… but he was flagrant in his relationships with women, and he was seeing a lot of girls besides Kanako. He wasn’t going to school—he had a part-time job as a scout for adult entertainment bars and cabarets. His job was to talk to girls on the street and persuade them to work in the bars. And I heard he was doing a lot of suspicious work besides that.”
“Why would Kanako be with a person like that?”
“It was a mystery to me, too. Obviously he was a terribly charming young man, aside from his conduct, but… Outwardly, Ryuto is exactly like him. He takes after his father in the way he seduces women, too. Though Ryuto would be better off not taking after him.”
I watched him murmur worriedly. I could imagine that Ryuto resembled his father more than just outwardly; his personality and the impression he gave off were probably the same, too.
There’s a youth in The Immoral Passage whom Kanako has a relationship with, too.
She didn’t name him, but he is described as a shallow young man who called out to Arisa on the street, “Hey, lady, you want a job?”
Book Girl and the Scribe Who Faced God, Part 1 Page 11