Book Girl and the Scribe Who Faced God, Part 1

by Mizuki Nomura

  Filled with that wish.

  But even after I read the last words, Tohko didn’t turn around.

  I tore off a small piece of the notebook paper, then stretched out my hand and brought it to Tohko’s mouth.

  “You can stay that way as long as you eat.”

  There was a silence in which she seemed to be holding her breath; then her soft lips touched my fingertips.

  Flp, mnch… the secretive sound of her chewing on paper…

  Tohko rolled onto her back. With a hesitant face that looked like she was sobbing—“… more,” she murmured.

  “Here you go.”

  I nodded with a smile, then tore off pieces and brought them to Tohko’s lips.

  Like a baby bird being fed by its mother, Tohko ate the scraps of the story out of my hand.

  Occasionally her lips or tongue would touch my fingers.

  When they did, my fingertips felt hot.

  When her teeth hit my fingers, I warned her, “Please don’t bite.”

  Embarrassed, she apologized. “… I’m sorry.”

  After that, she took the paper timidly in her lips, and staring at me with teary eyes, her jaw bobbed as she chewed.

  When I slipped the last scrap in through her parted lips, Tohko gulped it down, and then her face turned sad.

  “Let’s get you your medicine. I’ll bring some water.”

  “… Konoha.”

  I had stood up and was about to go to the kitchen when Tohko stopped me.

  I turned back around, and with an expression still melancholy, she murmured, “Thank you. It was… very sweet. It tasted nice.”

  I smiled.

  “I’m glad.”

  Tohko watched me, her eyes near to bawling.

  I spent that entire night at Tohko’s side.

  I texted my mom to tell her I was staying the night at Ryuto’s house. Her reply asked, Are you sure it’s not an imposition? I’d like to thank them. Can you send me their name and number? but I didn’t respond to that.

  Tohko slept soundly, so maybe the medicine was working.

  I took Strait Is the Gate down from the bookcase and spent the whole night reading it.

  “I only want you to remember that I loved you more than any other…”

  “I was thinking that the day will come when your child will wear this tiny crucifix you so loved about her neck, in memory of me. Without ever knowing who it came from…”

  “And I wonder whether you will give her… my name…”

  Alissa says that she wants Jerome to have the amethyst crucifix, a token of their memories together.

  She says that if Jerome ever gets married and has a daughter, she wants him to pass it on to her. That she wants him to name the child Alissa.

  Filled with the purity of an angel.

  Jerome becomes angry, asking why she’s thinking about him marrying another woman and having children, and Alissa hugs him and begs him to change his mind.

  But even as Alissa keeps her sorrow hidden, she coolly declares:

  “Oh, don’t let’s dredge up the past.

  “The page has already been turned.”

  “Good-bye, beloved friend. Now—I begin ‘that which is superior.’ ”

  What was the thing Alissa believed was superior even to love?

  What sort of life did Juliette’s daughter, who received Alissa’s name, go on to lead?

  I was hesitating over whether or not to call Fumiharu because I thought he might be with you.

  Unable to sleep, I sat in bed with the little violet bottle Takumi had given me resting on my palm. I was staring at it when Tohko came in, rubbing her eyes, from the room next to mine where she’d been sleeping.

  “Mommy… I want something to eat.”

  “It’s not time to eat yet; you know that. Let’s get you back in bed.”

  “Mmm… what’s that, Mommy?”

  I realized Tohko was looking at the bottle and my heart skipped.

  “This is the sleeping powder of Ole Lukøje. But not the big brother. This is the little brother’s. You know the story of Ole Lukøje, don’t you, Tohko? That the little Ole Lukøje is Death who rides on a horse. So if you touch even a little bit of this powder, he’ll make you get on his horse and take you away to the land of dreams, and you won’t be able to come back. So you absolutely cannot touch this, Tohko.”

  Tohko had been trying to touch the heart-shaped bottle, but she quickly pulled her hand back.

  She looked like she was half-asleep, so I’m sure she’ll forget all about this bottle in the morning.

  Once I took her to bed and kissed her on her cheeks and her eyelids, Tohko fell right asleep.

  Beside her, Ryu was snoring.

  The two of them are like angels.

  I’m truly glad I have Tohko. I can’t say how happy I am.

  I’ll hide the key to my jewelry box in the very top drawer. A child won’t be able to reach it there.

  Chapter 7—The Girl with the Violet Barrette

  The next morning, when blinding light streamed through the gap in the curtains, Tohko woke up.

  “You still have a fever. I wrote a little story for your breakfast, so have that, take your medicine, and take things easy.”

  As I spoke, I put a hand to her forehead to check her temperature, which made Tohko’s cheeks flush slightly.

  “… Did you stay the night, Konoha?”

  “I couldn’t leave someone that sick by themselves, could I?”

  Tohko looked like there was something she wanted to say, but she seemed strangely unable to find the words. After dropping her eyes and pressing her lips together or half opening them, she whispered simply, “… Thank you.”

  “Wh-what’s done is done. Also, if you can move, you should change clothes. You sweated a lot.”

  “Mmr… I will,” she answered in embarrassment, then shuffled to get up. She took a change of clothes out of a drawer, and then, hugging them in her arms, she staggered out of the room.

  “Are you all right?”

  I started to lend a hand, but her head bowed as her cheeks flushed again.

  “I’m fine.”

  After that, changed into new light blue pajamas and with neatly rebraided hair, Tohko sat down in her bed, then tore up the breakfast I’d written and ate it on her own.

  “… It tastes great. It’s warm and… gentle, and… it’s like a cabbage, bacon, and mushroom soup,” she whispered, smiling slightly. “And the story you wrote me yesterday was very sweet, like rice porridge boiled in milk… It was delicious. It tasted like my mother’s.”

  “I want my mom’s food…”

  Pain shot through my chest.

  Did Tohko remember her tearful plea?

  Her placid gaze turned melancholy.

  As she nibbled appreciatively on my story, Tohko murmured tenderly, “My mom’s food was sweet and warm, and even if I was sad about something, I could forget about it when I ate her food. It was like she cast a spell on it. She always used to tell me that she wanted to write a story like manna.”

  “Manna?”

  “It’s a kind of food mentioned in the Bible, in the story of Moses. His people were hungry and wandering through the wilderness, and God rained pure white manna down on them. It was as thin as a layer of frost and as sweet as honey. And God kept showering His people with manna until they reached the promised land of Canaan.”

  A gentle light touched her clear eyes.

  As if she were picturing the scene in her mind’s eye…

  Heavenly nourishment raining down on a wasteland.

  God’s infinite, pure, warm manna—His love.

  “A story of manna that fills an empty stomach… It was my mother’s dream… to write a story like that someday.”

  I’d heard that Tohko’s mother wanted to be an author.

  She had probably whispered again and again to her young daughter in a kind voice.

  “I want to write a story like manna someday.”

  T
ohko had been telling me about it so excitedly, but her eyes dropped and she fell abruptly silent.

  The story like manna would never be written now… She must have remembered that.

  “It was very good,” she murmured quietly.

  “Take your medicine, too, okay?”

  “I will.”

  “You should sleep a little more.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Tohko looked at me anxiously.

  “I’ll be here until you wake up.”

  “What about school?”

  “I already told the teacher I was going to be out.”

  “… You didn’t sleep last night, did you?”

  “I’m not sleepy. Don’t worry about me. You just take it easy and get better soon. You still have the test for your top school left, right?”

  Tohko’s eyes looked tearful and a little troubled. Then she said in spurts, “There’s a futon in the closet… you can use it if you get sleepy. And you can eat whatever’s in the kitchen.” Then she went back to sleep.

  Which reminded me, I hadn’t had anything to eat since yesterday. I hadn’t been hungry at all, so I’d forgotten. I was resistant to rooting through someone else’s kitchen, but when I actually went there and opened the fridge, it was remarkably barren.

  There was one egg left, still in the pack, whose expiration date was blurred. Other than that, there was only cheese, salami, mayonnaise, mineral water, and canned beer.

  If Tohko ate books, then what kind of eating habits did Ryuto and Kanako have?

  I glanced down and saw some instant ramen, some instant fried noodles, and a huge number of disposable chopsticks in a cardboard box.

  I helped myself to a cup of miso-flavored ramen, filled it with hot water, then ate it.

  As soon as my stomach was full, I was assaulted by drowsiness. My eyelids felt like they were dropping, but I fought it off and headed back to Tohko’s room. Her eyes were still closed, and she was clinging tightly to the half-eaten copy of Alt Heidelberg in one hand.

  Something burned inside my nose.

  Tohko shivered with cold. Her arm was poking out from under the comforter, still clinging to the book, so I knelt down and gently slipped it back under the blankets.

  Maybe… I should put one more blanket on her.

  With that thought, I started to open the closet when a chill suddenly went down my back.

  I’d remembered the scene from Kanako’s novel.

  After the couple’s funeral, she’d gone to their empty apartment and opened the closet, where she found the rotting body of a baby.

  What was I thinking?!

  That was fiction. Tohko was alive, sleeping behind me right now.

  And yet the chills wouldn’t stop, as if I had been caught in a cold spot; my throat grew dry, and my hand twitched in front of the sliding door.

  Imagining there was something horrible that I shouldn’t see on the other side of the thin, faded paper door, that as soon as I opened the door it would come out and attack me… Imagining a pale hand would reach out of the muddy darkness, grab my arm, and drag me in…

  Get a grip. Why are you letting your paranoia get to you?

  I held my breath, focused my eyes, and pulled the closet door open.

  Cool air whooshed out and my heart quailed, my skin prickling instantly.

  The top shelf was piled with blankets and the futon. Boxes full of books were packed off to one side of those and on the lower shelves.

  It was a totally ordinary closet.

  And yet the sensation, stroking electrically inside my chest, didn’t go away. I tried to just pull out a blanket and close the door as fast as I could.

  As it happened, one corner of the blanket caught under some boxes beside it, and when I pulled on it, the boxes came crashing down.

  “Ack!”

  I hurried to push them back with my hands, but I couldn’t manage to catch the topmost box and it scattered its contents over the floor.

  I looked back over my shoulder in a panic, but Tohko was still asleep. She hadn’t noticed.

  I let out a sigh and set the blanket on the floor, then started picking up everything that had fallen.

  There were things like a drawing of her parents that Tohko must have made when she was little, erasers shaped like animals, a violet marble, and a musical telegram for her birthday that had been sent from a hospital. All of them seemed to be mementos.

  There was also a photo album.

  It had fallen open on the floor. When I picked it up and started to close it, my eyes caught a girl with braids wearing a sailor uniform.

  She… must have been in middle school. The girl was smiling happily in front of an art museum surrounded by woods. A travel thermos hung across the front of her sailor suit, and she carried a bunch of bags from a souvenir shop in her arms. She had a hair accessory in the shape of a violet over her ear.

  Was this Yui?

  Beside her stood a girl with a spare frame. With cold, doll-like eyes, a blue glass pendant hung over her chest, her black hair cut evenly above her shoulders—

  Could this be Kanako…?

  I turned to other pages.

  Almost all of them were plastered with pictures of the two young girls.

  An old school building, a soccer net, chin-up bars, cherry trees. The girls existed against that backdrop that could be found anywhere, a gymnasium, in sailor uniforms, P.E. uniforms, sweat suits. In every one of the pictures, the girl with the braids was smiling as if she couldn’t help being happy. In contrast, the other girl’s expression was always hard and cold.

  And yet the girl with the braids didn’t seem bothered by that fact in the slightest. She wound her arm through her friend’s and wore a smile like a flower opening.

  As I continued paging through the album, I found pictures showing the two of them grown up slightly and wearing two different uniforms.

  The girl with the braids wore a blazer with a checked, pleated skirt and socks, and the girl with the cold eyes wore a gray dress with a bolero jacket and black tights.

  Apparently they’d still gotten together all the time, even after they moved on to separate schools.

  The girl with the braids was as sunny as ever, the other girl dark and cold.

  Turning further, I found a college campus, a cramped room that looked like a clubroom, and the two girls as college students.

  Just as you’d expect, the one girl didn’t have braids now but instead hair that cascaded past her shoulders in loose waves; but her smile hadn’t changed. Similar to how the girl beside her had grown up to be more and more beautiful while her eyes held the same frigidity of her girlhood.

  On the last page, there was a photo of Yui smiling, wearing a pure white wedding dress and handing her bouquet to Kanako, who wore a blue dress.

  Kanako’s face was a blank, not even smiling. I wondered if royal blue was Kanako’s favorite color. She’d been wearing a dress this color at the party, too…

  “Kanako and Tohko’s mother, Yui, were dear friends.”

  Mr. Sasaki’s words surfaced as a troubled, bitter expression came over my face.

  Had the two of them truly been best friends? Certainly Yui was always at Kanako’s side, but—it felt off. Because there wasn’t even one photo where Kanako was smiling—

  I started to close the album when I noticed a thin sheet of paper between the last page and the cover and that something was stuck in underneath it.

  It was several sheets of lined paper that looked like a letter.

  My eyes ran over them unsuspectingly and I felt a shock.

  “I wonder if you think things would be better if I were dead.”

  What the—this was…!

  I gazed at the candid words written in beautifully prim handwriting, holding my breath. Other words chained together, sharp as arrows.

  When I debuted, you berated me mercilessly. That I’d used you to get close to him. That I’d used my body to seduce him into reading my book. That i
t was a betrayal to write a book without telling you.

  That ugliness is what you’re really like.

  And yet in front of him, you want to look like you’re a good little girl. Pretending to be worried about me. You’re a truly despicable person. How dare you suggest that I might get hurt if that book gets published. Even though in your heart you were jealous and bitter and couldn’t stand the fact that I was publishing. You wanted to do whatever you could to beat me down.

  My throat felt dry and sweat beaded on my forehead.

  Was this… a letter Kanako had sent Yui? But this wasn’t the kind of thing you’d send to a dear friend.

  You always change your stories around to suit yourself.

  You’ve been that way since middle school. You didn’t care that you were bothering me when you latched on to me and played it up to everyone as if we were best friends. The truth was that you just wanted to bathe yourself in the sense of superiority you got from being the only one who could talk freely to the girl who was always alone.

  It was the same when we were in high school, when my parents died.

  I didn’t ask you to, but you came to the cremation. Did you think I didn’t notice that the whole time you were hugging me and crying, your lips were curved with joy? You were drunk on giving your grieving friend courage even then.

  It’s the same now.

  While you act gentle, like some holy mother, you’re always afraid that I might steal your husband from you and you turn spiteful eyes on me from the shadows, making blatant calls to his office or trying to keep him at home using your child as an excuse. You’re so desperate it makes me laugh.

  “I’m his author.”

  “Fumiharu told me he wants me to be his author. Just his.”

  “I can’t put out books like you do, Kanako, but I’m happy anyway.”

  You talked endlessly, as if to flaunt your happiness. You sent me postcards with family pictures on them. But you need to take a good look at reality.

  You never had talent.

  The stories you wrote were just like the dreams Ole Lukøje gave to children with his painted umbrella. Insubstantial and ambiguous, leaving no impression, they disappear the moment morning comes.