Izumi’s cemetery was tucked just out of sight behind a bend in the hill, and could not be seen from the village. Accessible enough to be part of the community, but not so obvious as to provide a constant reminder of human mortality. Not being a local girl, it was Aya’s first visit to the place. I asked her how often people came to visit the graves of their friends and relatives and she told me that New Year’s Day was the traditional time for paying a visit. She added plaintively that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d visited her own relatives’ graves. I assured her that neither could I.
Aya stopped the car at the foot of the hill and we gazed up at an entire area of hillside covered with identical grey stone slabs. Given that cremation was the norm, the grave plots were small, only a few square feet each, just enough space for an urn of ashes, a wire grille for the flowers and a headstone. The hillside was arranged in tiers to allow visitors access to the graves further up, giving the effect of a terrace at a sports stadium. It was a strange experience seeing the graves sandwiched so close together. Whereas the Christian dead could usually look forward to a little space, at least enough to stretch their legs, as well as an ample blanket of moss or grass for warmth, there was no such luxury here. Your ashes sat snug against the next person’s.
We sat in the car for a while, while Aya gave us some handy tips on graveyard etiquette. None of us really felt the need to get out of the car and walk among the graves. Though my parents had dragged me round many a country churchyard in my youth, enthusiastically reading the headstones, I’d always considered it a morbid pastime. We could see all we needed to without opening a car door.
The place was completely deserted except for one middle aged man, making his way down the steps in the centre.
It was Aya who reacted first, with a sharp intake of breath. I was about to ask what it was when I heard the exact same sound from Sarah in the back seat. The man was balding and paunchy and appeared preoccupied as he reached the bottom of the steps. He turned away quickly, not once looking towards us, and made his way to a car parked nearby. We watched him in silence.
‘Who is it?’ I whispered.
‘Odagiri-san,’ Aya said.
‘What’s he doing here?’ Sarah asked. ‘Visiting relatives?’
‘He’s from Tokyo,’ Aya replied in a low voice. ‘He has no relatives here.’
We watched as Odagiri-san’s car pulled away and drove off. Aya opened the door and got out, visibly upset by this chance sighting, and Sarah and I followed suit.
‘So whose grave was he visiting?’ Sarah asked.
Without responding, Aya started off towards the central steps, on a mission. She trotted up, taking two steps at a time, the first time all day I’d seen her in a hurry.
‘Do you think we should follow?’ Sarah asked.
I couldn’t honestly answer, but curiosity got the better of us and we took off in pursuit.
I saw Aya reach a tier half way up the hillside and make her way along the row of headstones, examining them as she passed. Halfway along, she found the stone she was looking for and stopped, staring down at it with folded arms.
We caught up with her and looked down at the simple grey slab, bearing a short inscription in Japanese characters. In front of the slab was a fresh bouquet of white flowers.
We stood there in silence for several moments, unsure whether to disturb Aya’s thoughts.
‘Chrysanthemums,’ Aya said at last, pointing at the bouquet. ‘Chrysanthemums are said to ward off evil spirits.’
‘Whose grave is this?’ I asked, although I was sure I already knew the answer.
‘It’s not a grave. It’s a commemorative stone. After all, she was never found,’ she said in a deadpan voice. ‘Shimura Reiko’s stone,’ she whispered, giving the family name first in the Japanese fashion.
‘Are we sure this was the one he was visiting?’ Sarah asked.
Aya knelt down and lifted the flower to show their stems still moist. It was obvious they’d just been placed there. ‘As we drove up I saw him standing up here.’
Both Aya and Sarah were silent as we walked back towards the car. Now we knew that Odagiri-san, the teacher who had allegedly had a crush on Reiko and had even been taken in for questioning over her disappearance, was also leaving flowers at her grave. It was hard to know what to make of it. On the one hand there was nothing wrong with a teacher visiting the grave of a student he had been close to. But given the circumstances of her disappearance and the suspicions levelled against him, it did seem an odd thing to do. Of course, bringing flowers to a grave in full daylight was not the action of a guilty man and I said as much to Aya and Sarah. In any case, since her body had never been discovered, it was hardly a grave at all.
Back at the car Aya and Sarah began to discuss what we should do next. I was about to say something when my blood turned to ice.
As I glanced casually at the car window I saw reflected there, standing amidst the graves on the hill, the figure of a schoolgirl.
For a few seconds I didn’t move. There it was, as clear to me as the sky above: the figure of a schoolgirl, dressed in a sailor uniform, with a crimson ribbon tied in the middle, her face turned down and in shadow.
I spun round to look, but she was gone. The hillside was empty.
I reached for the bonnet of the car, unsteady on my feet. I knew what I’d just seen. It hadn’t been a trick of the light. Had it come to this already, that I was hallucinating in broad daylight?
‘What’s the matter?’ Sarah asked, coming over. ‘You’re white as a sheet.’
It took me a moment to regain my balance. Both Sarah and Aya were looking at me with concern, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the spot where I had seen the figure.
Finally, with trembling voice, I said: ‘I think it’s something I ate.’
‘Do you need anything?’ Aya asked.
I shook my head. I didn’t know what I needed. I just wanted to know what it was I’d seen. I lent on the bonnet and took a few deep breaths, trying to pull myself together, if only for the sake of my companions. The last thing I wanted was for them to think I was a head-case.
I tried to banish the image from my mind, but it was there, scratched onto my retina in indelible ink.
And there was no doubt in my mind that the apparition I had seen was Reiko.
14. DO YOU BELIEVE?
‘Will you tell me what it is?’
I was sitting with Sarah on the floor of her room, watching the last embers of the sun dissipate over the hills. She had lit some scented candles and put her Gregorian chant on to create a relaxed ambience. Feeling the cool evening air on my skin and hearing the twilight chorus of cicadas, I felt my strength returning.
‘It’s nothing.’
I knew my answer lacked conviction. I’d never been good at hiding my feelings. The incident in the graveyard had hit me hard and left me nervous, jumpy and irritable. Ever since we’d left Aya at the Seven-Eleven with muted goodbyes, I knew I’d been moody and uncommunicative. It wasn’t fair to take my feelings out on Sarah after all the generosity she’d shown me, but I couldn’t help myself. A part of me wanted to tell her what I’d seen and a part of me was anxious not to appear insane.
Perhaps she sensed that I was wrestling with something or other and changed the subject. ‘One thing I haven’t got straight in my head – why did you agree to investigate supernatural phenomena?’
‘I’m sure I told you. I got the funding to do it.’
‘Is that really the only reason?’
‘Pretty much. Honestly, I never had any interest in that kind of stuff. But then I’ve never had much passion in anything I’ve studied. I think I’m probably just avoiding real life.’
‘Are you religious?’
The question took me by surprise. She had turned to the window and her face was in shadow. I felt twelve years old again, sitting in the cold confessional after church, reluctantly listing my bad deeds for the day to my disapproving priest. ‘No,’ I sa
id, after some consideration. ‘My parents are religious and the idea was that I should be too. It just didn’t work out for me.’
‘You never felt guilty about that? About abandoning the faith?’
‘I guess I never really had it in the first place. I was only ever going through the motions.’
‘A bit like your thesis, then?’ She turned her face towards me with a mischievous smile.
‘Yes, if you like.’
‘So, if you don’t believe in God, do you believe in ghosts?’
A few days before, I would have answered the question without a moment’s hesitation. Now, I didn’t know what to say.
She was quick to sense my unease. ‘You saw something, didn’t you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘At the cemetery. I saw your face change. Either you saw something, or you thought you saw something. And ever since then you’ve been acting weird.’
My first instinct was to deny everything, but what she said was absolutely true. What was the point in lying to her? She deserved better than that. ‘I don’t know,’ I said finally, passing my hand over my face. ‘I don’t know anymore.’
‘I’d rather you talked to me about it. I’m not going to judge you.’
And so I told her. I described exactly what I’d seen reflected in the window of Aya’s Nissan Micra, down to the crimson ribbon round the neck and the number of stripes on the collar of the sailor uniform. I told her I was convinced it was Reiko I’d seen, how I’d seen her photograph amongst Charlie’s notes and how her eyes had burned a hole in my soul. I told her I thought Reiko still exerted the same power in death as she had done in life.
Sarah listened quietly to everything I said, not commenting, not reacting.
Emboldened, I went on to tell her about my dream of the previous night, how I’d returned to the corridors of the high school leaving a trail of bloodstained footprints on my way to the third floor, how I’d seen the two doomed lovers lying dead on the school forecourt amid a shower of cherry blossoms. I included every detail I could recall, relieved to get this weight off my chest.
Then, as the light over the hills faded to black, I began to tell her about Charlie’s file, about the transformation in his handwriting from measured copperplate to messy scrawl, about the paranoid detail with which he’d recorded every aspect of the village’s history, about his last days when he’d written nothing but gibberish.
And finally I told her about Yoshi, about our brief conversation by the drinks machine, the journey up in the lift. I dredged up every detail of our brief encounter. I told her how I’d turned to look casually out of the window and seen him fall. A flash of white and a human life extinguished. The first time in my short life that I’d seen tragedy up close.
Sarah listened carefully to everything I had to say, respectful of my need to unload a heavy burden. Now I’d finally confessed all and laid myself bare, I felt something I’d never felt in the mildewed confessional box all those years before: a sense of relief. For a while, she didn’t speak and I began to fear that I’d said too much, that she’d declare me insane and dangerous and pack me off to the nearest guesthouse with immediate effect. I only hoped she could appreciate my honesty. After all, I was a certified ghost-hunter.
‘I’d like to see his file.’ Her voice was calm, as though she were only asking for a cup of tea.
‘It’s quite distressing.’
‘I’d still like to see it.’
Sarah sat very still while she read, occasionally pausing to refill her glass with ulon wheat tea. Though she had a desk lamp, she preferred to read by candlelight – maybe she felt it better befitted the material and, of course, she kept the Gregorian chant on auto-repeat. I sat on the other side of the room leafing through a pile of women’s magazines, all the while looking at her for a reaction.
For the most part she didn’t react at all. Once or twice I saw the trace of a grimace, a nod of the head or a furrowed brow. Fully aware that she was reading the private notes of a suicide, she was treating them with due respect. She read, with only a short break to replenish her tea, for a couple of hours. But it was not until she got to the last pages – the Izumi pages, the ones that scared the life out of me – that I finally saw her flinch. She looked up and met my gaze. Then, without reading further, she shut the file with a deep sigh.
‘I can’t read any more.’
‘You got to those pages?’
She nodded. ‘What happened to him? Have you read them?’
‘I’ve looked at them. I thought of burning them. Actually, I should’ve done that. We’ve no business looking at them.’
Sarah winced. ‘Something happened to him, didn’t it. You can tell he was a bit uptight from the handwriting and the style and the attention to detail. But something happened to him while he was here.’
‘I know.’
I looked out at the dark hills silhouetted against the night sky and tried to imagine what Charlie’s state of mind had been as he faced his last few days of life. Then I thought about my own state of mind, my feeling of anxiety after the experience in the graveyard, the disturbed dreams, the memory of Yoshi, and it reminded me how much I had in common with Charlie.
Sarah interrupted my morbid train of thought. ‘So, Japanese ghosts have certain characteristics then?’
‘So it seems. They tend to be young, female and out for revenge. Don’t ask me why.’
‘Ah, Charlie wrote about that.’ Sarah said. ‘It goes back a long way, to outdated Buddhist ideas of the spiritual inferiority of women. And Taoist ideas of yin and yang.’ She opened the file and leafed through to the relevant section. ‘Yin represents female, darkness, passiveness, cold and moon. Yang on the other hand represents male, light, activeness, fire and sun. So, whichever way you look at it, women get the raw deal.’
This was another area I knew I would have to research some more, but for the moment I was too distracted to think about it.
‘So what’s your thesis then?’ she asked.
I felt I was no longer sure what I believed, that my convictions had been dented. ‘I believe that when people claim to see ghosts, they see only what they think they should see. In other words, what they see is culture-specific. An English person or a Western person will see an amalgam of all the ghosts they’ve seen over the years on TV or in movies or in stories they’ve heard. That’s all.’
She wasn’t satisfied. ‘So if different cultures see ghosts in different ways, does that prove to you that what they see is a product of their imagination, that they’re all making it up?’
‘Basically, yeah.’
‘Couldn’t it be that a ghost appears to the viewer in a guise that the viewer recognizes?’
I wasn’t sure how serious Sarah was being, but I decided to play it straight. ‘I honestly don’t know. My guess is that the undead don’t consult their wardrobe before making an appearance.’
Sarah lowered her eyes. ‘I’ve read what Charlie had to say about ghosts. He seems to accept that there are a lot of differences between different cultures. And he notes that in Japan vengeful female ghosts seem to get the most press. But he also said that there are a lot of similarities and sometimes the differences are just differences of emphasis.’
I lent my head back against the wall, growing weary of the subject. ‘I don’t know Sarah.’
‘I was thinking about this. Say you saw something. How are you going to describe it to people? You’re going to do it in ways you think they’ll understand. You’re going to adjust what you see to conform to the accepted view of these things.’
She seemed satisfied with her thesis and as I had nothing to counter with, I just nodded my head. I had felt okay while she was reading the file quietly, but all this theorizing was making me dizzy.
‘What did you see today?’ she asked suddenly. ‘In the graveyard, what did you see?’
‘I told you.’
‘She was young, female, dressed in a school uniform?’
‘
Yes.’
‘If that was a ghost, then it’s not the traditional Japanese view. According to Charlie, ghosts here tend to wear long white dresses and have long, dishevelled hair covering their faces. So your ghost didn’t quite conform. She appeared to you exactly as she appeared in life.’
I felt annoyed that what I’d told Sarah in strictest confidence was being used to illustrate a point. I tried to look pained, but Sarah wasn’t paying attention.
‘She was young and female. She ticked some of the boxes,’ she said.
‘Look, let’s assume it wasn’t a ghost. I’ve been under emotional strain. There’s been the jet-lag, the culture shock, the suicide, the bad dreams. I’ve been immersing myself in this whole business about the high school deaths and it’s all got a bit much. That’s all. It was a hallucination. Just my mind playing tricks on me.’
Sarah wasn’t ready to let it go just yet. ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve read this damn file and I need to talk about it. I accept your mind was playing tricks, but I want to know what you saw. Just for argument’s sake. For instance, was she floating?’
‘I couldn’t see. It was a reflection in a car window. I saw it for a split second. I don’t know if she was floating.’
‘It’s another thing Charlie put down about Japanese ghosts. They float. Being ethereal beings, they don’t make any contact with the ground.’
I began pulling at my hair, wishing to God I’d never brought up the subject of Charlie’s file.
‘Okay, here’s another question: let’s assume Japanese people see Japanese ghosts according to their cultural standard. What if a Western person, with all their cultural baggage, sees that same ghost? Do they see the same thing?’
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