He understood that and that’s why he wouldn’t let you debut.
It’s clear to anyone who looks that Fumiharu Amano’s author isn’t you; it’s me. He’s eaten in front of me. You’re not the only one who’s special. His author is me.
You could never be an author. Your stories are inane, dreamy fantasies.
So you told me that you have poison.
“What would it do to Fumiharu if I poisoned myself? Do you think it would kill him?”
What were you trying to ask me? Was that supposed to be a threat?
I know where you’re hiding the poison, you know. You always put the things you care about there. And when I opened it up to see, it was exactly as I’d guessed.
Once you’ve killed him, are you going to kill me, too? Are you going to poison my food with a smile on your face?
It’s pointless. I won’t die. I’m going to survive. I’m not stupid enough to get killed by you.
I will never forgive you or your daughter for spoiling the “supremacy” he and I were going to share.
By the time I’d finished reading, my body and fingertips were completely frozen.
My head throbbed and I couldn’t tear my eyes from the page. The date written at the very end was three days before the Amanos would die.
Kanako had written a letter berating Yui. Yui had turned a jealous gaze on Kanako. Both those facts brought on a shock that stabbed into my chest. But what was even more shocking was that Kanako had mentioned that Yui had poison.
In The Immoral Passage, it was Arisa who had poisoned the food.
But if Yui was the one who’d actually possessed the poison—
Had Kanako found it, like it said in her letter, and killed Yui and her husband before Yui could do it? Or… had Yui…?
The line “What would it do to Fumiharu if I poisoned myself?” rose up vividly in my mind. A shiver went up my spine and it became even harder to breathe.
The police hadn’t been able to uncover any evidence that Kanako had poisoned the Amanos. Kanako hadn’t poisoned them. In which case, Yui must have.
When Kanako guessed where Yui was hiding the poison, if Yui had felt cornered and had poisoned her and her husband’s food—
If she had chosen to die together rather than hand her husband over to Kanako—
The way Yui smiled in the photos, she definitely didn’t seem like the type of person who would do something like that. She seemed like a cute, composed, generous person. But if Yui had actually held dark sentiments toward Kanako, like it said in the letter—but it couldn’t be possible!
My hands were shaking.
I put the letter back in the album, then put the album back into the box and shut it in the closet. Even after I slid the door closed, the chills wouldn’t stop.
I spread the blanket over Tohko, then huddled in a ball in a corner of her room, pulled my jacket over my head, and shut my eyes tightly.
I wanted to forget everything from the letter I’d just seen.
Just moments ago I’d been unspeakably sleepy, but now my heart was racing, my brain was aching and on fire. How could I possibly sleep?!
Had Yui poisoned them?
Tohko was breathing peacefully in her sleep. What had Tohko hoped to accomplish by keeping that letter?
The darkness closed in on me leadenly. My throat ached.
Don’t waste time thinking about it. You have to sleep now.
I chanted, Sleep, sleep! as if it were a spell to drive away my demons, and finally I fell into a stinging slumber.
I must have been tired. When I woke up, it was after four in the afternoon.
Before I’d gone to sleep, I hadn’t had more than my jacket around me, but now I was wrapped up in a heavy quilt. Tohko must have done that.
When I twisted around and looked toward where Tohko had been sleeping, she was sitting up in bed with her knees drawn up to her chest under the blankets, reading Alt Heidelberg.
She noticed I was awake and her eyes softened and she smiled.
“Thank you, Konoha. I’m much better now.”
The smile I’d seen on Yui’s face in the photos overlaid itself on Tohko’s and my blood froze.
To hide it, I stood up and put a hand on Tohko’s forehead.
“You still have a fever. You need to rest.”
I thought if I slept I’d be able to forget. But it hadn’t worked. I couldn’t forget a letter like that.
Tohko giggled, looking like Yui again.
“… You’re like a mom, Konoha.”
I flinched and with a rattling, dry voice I asked, “Your mom… and Ryuto’s mom… were friends, right?”
Tohko nodded, looking pleased.
“Yup. They were in the same class in their second year of middle school, and that’s how they started talking. I heard a bunch of stories about Aunt Kanako from my mom. When she started telling them, she couldn’t stop. She was incredibly proud of Aunt Kanako. She really liked her.”
A black whirlpool grew inside my chest.
Had Yui truly “really liked” Kanako? Hadn’t her true feelings been something different?
Tohko went on telling me about them with an openhearted smile.
“I like Aunt Kanako, too. She looks unfriendly, but she’s actually a nice person. She let me live here. She’s really a good person.”
Beaming though she was, when she repeated, “She’s… a good person,” so often, it seemed like she was trying to force herself to believe it.
The pitch-black whirlpool grew steadily larger as it swirled around.
“Shouldn’t you have let Kanako know you were so sick?”
Tohko shook her head, keeping her smile in place.
“If I told her, she would worry so much. I don’t want to worry her or make her sad. She doesn’t say what she’s thinking, so I always try to smile in front of her.”
Wasn’t there something messed up about that? It was bizarre to live in the same house and not be able to tell someone that you’re sick.
The words got as far as my throat before they got caught.
But the look on Tohko’s face and her tone of voice were sunny—not the slightest cloud obscured them—and I couldn’t help but stay silent.
After that, Tohko got a sad look on her face and murmured haltingly, “I wish… my mother were alive… to write me stories… If she were…”
I was just about to ask her another question, but she was already smiling brightly.
“I’m hungry, Konoha. Let’s get something to eat.”
Soon after, I was having a cup of instant noodles. Tohko was having a short story collection by Kunikida Doppo.
“ ‘Sorrows of Youth’—I love this short story. Where the man who narrates it exchanges words only once with an unhappy woman he meets in his youth, and then they part ways—that’s all that happens in the brief space of the story, but… it’s pure… and poignant… like plain soup stock with clams and parsley in it, flavored with soy sauce… redolent of a beachside at night…”
I recalled a time when Tohko and I had read a Kunikida short story together and my heart filled with melancholy.
“In fact, this story has an incredibly beautiful opening line. ‘If the joys of youth are a poem, the sorrows of youth must be, as well.’ ”
Just like that other time, Tohko smiled and asked, “Isn’t that wonderful?”
“… Yeah.”
Was the pain I felt now, that threatened to tear open my heart, the sorrow of youth? Would it fade when I became an adult?
Or would it never stop bleeding? Would I still hate someone and curse their name even after I was an adult, like in that letter from Kanako?
After we’d finished our late lunch—“I’m fine now, Konoha. Go home.”—Tohko told me kindly, and so I went back home.
“You don’t have to walk me out. You should go back to bed.”
“I’ll just see you to the front door. It’s fine. I have to lock the door anyway.”
“It wasn’t loc
ked when I came over.”
“What? That’s odd…”
As we chatted like always, my heart ached impossibly and a sense of poignancy welled up inside me.
When would we see each other next?
We might not ever again.
I hunkered down at the front door, sluggishly tying my shoelaces, when the door slid open and a woman wearing a bright blue coat came in.
I gasped in surprise.
She knit her brows as well.
This was the woman who had written the novel. The one where she poisoned a couple she was friends with and strangled their daughter—
The letter stuck in the photo album, the things Ryuto had told me, and Tohko’s words poured through my mind in a stream and a seething rage bubbled up in me—I glared at her instinctively.
She had her cold, beautiful eyes fixed fully on me, too.
It was Tohko’s voice that shattered the tense atmosphere.
“Welcome home, Aunt Kanako!”
She greeted her with a brilliant smile, as if she was ecstatic beyond words.
“Konoha came to see how I was doing. But I just caught a little cold, and I was totally fine. Are you done with work, Aunt Kanako? Oh, a package came for you from the publisher’s. I put it in the living room, so you can take a look at it. Oh, and Aunt Kanako—”
Her face icy and expressionless, Kanako removed her slender high heels and came into the house, passing right by me.
She went right past Tohko, who was still babbling, too, then slid open a door and disappeared into another room.
The door closed with a sharp clack.
Tohko was still smiling.
“She hasn’t been able to come home for so long because of work. She looks tired. Don’t let it bother you, Konoha.”
I looked at Tohko with thoughts that chilled the blood in my heart.
“Thank you so much, though, for taking care of me today and yesterday. I’ll see you, Konoha.”
Tohko waved at me happily, to which I was finally able to wring out my voice, “… Take care.” Then I left through the front door.
Why did Tohko have to smile like that?!
A cold wind blew outside.
As I moved through the yard, growing dim as the sun set, toward the front gate, I bit back a directionless anger.
Had she spent her entire life like that? Being ignored?
So then how could she say Kanako was “a good person”?!
I couldn’t help getting so upset, but I hadn’t been able to say anything to Tohko or to Kanako. I had just turned my back on the house where they lived and left—
I mean, I didn’t have the right.
I couldn’t understand Tohko’s feelings, or Kanako’s—not me, who wasn’t capable of living as an author—
My chest felt like it would snap with pain.
When I noticed Ryuto standing in front of the persimmon tree right next to the gate, my heart stopped.
“Did you run into Kanako?”
His voice was low.
In his grimly tense face, his eyes alone glinted sharply.
“Those two… are always like that. Tohko says somethin’ and Kanako ignores her. It’s been that way ever since… Tohko came to stay at our house. I can’t stand to watch it.”
He bit down on his lip in apparent pain, then went on.
“Back when Tohko was livin’ with her family, she’d start bawlin’ at the littlest things. She’d come home from school cryin’ and Aunt Yui would make her feel better. But she’d act tough in front of me and pout and say, ‘I wasn’t crying!’ Her eyes were red, though, so it was pretty obvious.
“I think she’s just got too strong of an imagination, ’cos she was real shy around people, and she’d get scared and go hide when someone she didn’t know came over. And she hated ghosts and scary stories, too. But ever since Tohko came to our house, I never once saw her cry ’cos she was sad. And she’ll go up to anyone and talk to them now. She might be scared to go into a house where someone got dismembered, but she won’t admit it. Plus, she always smiles for Kanako. Do you know why that is?”
Ryuto’s eyes, his voice, were colored by fiery anger and pain.
“Tohko tried to become Aunt Yui.”
To become Yui?!
The smile that was so identical to Tohko’s rose again in my mind.
Had Tohko kept smiling by constantly recalling the image of her dead mother?
Had she been doing her best to act cheerful so that her spirit wouldn’t break? Why? Why go that far?
“But no matter how hard she tries to get close to her aunt, there’s one thing Tohko can’t do.”
Ryuto fixed his eyes on me.
“And that’s write Aunt Yui’s stories. That’s the one thing only the real Aunt Yui could do.”
With his penetrating gaze turned on me, a chill went down my spine.
What—?
What was he trying to say?
“It’s impossible—I would have thought,” Ryuto stated flatly. “But she found you. You, who has the capacity to complete the story Aunt Yui could never write.”
Kanako had told me, “I know someone who writes novels very similar to yours,” and Tohko had said her mother always talked about wanting to write “a story like manna.” Recalling the way she had told me, on the verge of tears, “I want my mom’s food…,” my brain boiled and my body shook.
So Tohko was hoping I would write the novel her mother should have written! That’s what she’d been praying I would write!
“If you wrote it, it would save us all… that’s what we thought… me and Tohko both.”
I groaned.
“It’s not possible! I’m not Tohko’s mother, am I?! I’m a different person. Even if you expect that from me, I can’t do anything about it!”
“But all we’re doin’ right now is waitin’ for destruction.”
Such a stormy expression came over Ryuto’s face that it made me shudder.
“I know that… for a fact.
“Everyone’s carryin’ a time bomb inside their hearts and they’re walkin’ on a tightrope right up until they can’t anymore. Exactly like they did nine years ago. Things aren’t gonna settle down unless someone disappears, just like back then.”
The darkness increased its hold and loomed over me. Picked out by the faint light of the moon, a brutal smile came over Ryuto’s face.
“I know that… ’cos I’m the reincarnation of Takumi Suwa.”
I felt a jolt.
What was with Ryuto? He wasn’t acting normal.
“Do you know who that is? Takumi Suwa? He was a blow-off womanizer, and he was my dad. But when I was still inside Kanako’s belly, he jumped into a road and died. I’m his reincarnation.”
My voice was thick with fear.
“That’s—”
“Crazy? But I have memories from my previous life. How Kanako rejected me, her cold looks, and the moment I jumped at the cars, and how Kanako didn’t come to the hospital, and how I gave that nice lady Yui the poison—I remember all of it.”
A chill shot through my spine.
Did he say he gave her the poison?!
“That’s right, I gave Yui the poison. It was in a little violet-colored bottle the shape of a heart. ’Cos she was always nice to me and I really liked her. I couldn’t just watch her sufferin’. I wanted to help her go to sleep peacefully…”
I stood frozen as Ryuto continued his incredible story, the smile still on his face.
“Yui’s hands were so pale—they were refined and soft and smooth as a child’s. When I pressed the violet heart into her hands, Yui smiled. To thank me. She was happy. And then she used it. After all, the only way you can hold on to the person you love forever is to either kill yourself or kill them, right?”
A knifelike wind stabbed at my face and throat.
The things Ryuto had always said—
That he was looking for someone who would love him enough to kill him.
That he wanted t
o be loved and despised by a woman like that.
Because hatred lasted longer than love—
So Yui really had been the one who poisoned them!
I couldn’t tell where the boundary between reality and deceit lay, and I braced my feet desperately against the sense that I was being dragged into a dysfunctional space.
“You’re just imagining that! How would Takumi ever know whether or not Kanako came to the hospital when he was dying?”
“That’s true. But I’ve seen it a bunch of times in my dreams. I see myself dyin’ alone in the hospital… as if my soul had slipped out of my body and I was lookin’ down from the ceilin’. I remember everythin’ from that moment—the panic, the frustration, the despair, the love. I took a perfect image of that stuff with me when I got reborn from Kanako’s belly. I know it’s so that we don’t repeat the same tragedy again.”
Ryuto stared at me with a penetrating look, then spoke in a powerful tone of voice.
“Please write, Konoha. Before I give Tohko Ole Lukøje’s little violet bottle. You’re the only one who can save us.”
He said it almost like it was a curse.
“No way. I can’t write.”
I spat the words out pointedly, and then I started running. I went through the gate and ran as hard as I could, almost falling over, down the frigid night-bound road.
No way!
No way!
No way!
A story like the downy white manna God rained down on his people.
Like sustenance from heaven, shining nobly.
I wasn’t capable of writing a novel like that.
I couldn’t do something as important as save someone by writing.
It hurt to breathe! My head hurt as if I’d been punched. My throat was searing hot, and it felt like my beating heart would shred itself!
Why did I have to write?!
Why were they forcing that role on me?!
“Please write, Konoha.”
“I wish… my mother were alive… to write me stories.”
“You’ve gotta write, Konoha.”
“Konoha… you should write a novel someday.”
“You’re the only one who can save us.”
“When you write your novel, let me read it, okay?”
Book Girl and the Scribe Who Faced God, Part 1 Page 18