Reiko

by James Avonleigh

  If I’d had any doubts before, now I had none. Something was terribly wrong in Izumi.

  17. WHAT CHARLIE WROTE

  I slept the sleep of the condemned.

  Lying on Sarah’s mattress in the heat of the afternoon, I slept a deep and dreamless sleep. Emotionally and physically drained, I was asleep the moment my head hit the pillow and, according to Sarah, didn’t move a muscle for several hours.

  In the moments before I opened my eyes, I imagined I was back in my bedroom at home, that I hadn’t come to Japan, that nothing had changed. But that was another life and I was a different person then. I would never again have that simple, undemanding view of the world.

  Somehow I had to come to terms with what I’d seen in the woods and I knew I had to take things as slowly and as calmly as I could.

  Sarah, to her eternal credit, had continued her Florence Nightingale job from the moment I collapsed by the clearing. She and Aya had helped me through the trees and back to the school, where I’d finally begun to compose myself. Things hadn’t been helped by the sight of Odagiri-san watching us as we approached the school across the playing fields. He’d been leaning against the wall, casually smoking a cigarette, and must have seen us emerge from the woods on the other side. He’d given us a deeply suspicious look before stamping out his cigarette and disappearing into the building with nothing by way of greeting. Then as we’d approached the staffroom, we startled Shirakami-san as he was descending the steps. He’d stared at us the whole time we were sat in the staffroom, then, when we left, I saw him standing at the staffroom window watching us go.

  I didn’t know what to think about the teachers at the school. I desperately wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. I knew how hard it would be to live with the constant whispers and rumours and questions. In England, anyone even remotely connected to such a heinous incident would have packed up and left long ago. But I’d already perceived a resilience among the Japanese when it came to work, a doggedness to persevere no matter what the personal cost.

  Sarah had brought me back to her house and ordered me to get some rest. She made me have a sandwich and a cup of hot cocoa, then pulled down the blinds in her room and ordered me not to come out until I was thoroughly refreshed. If it hadn’t been for her, I suspected I would have still been grovelling on the ground in the woods, rapidly losing my grip on reality.

  ‘James?’

  There was a soft knock on the sliding screen.

  I cleared my throat and looked about me, wondering what time it was. ‘Yes.’

  The screen slid open and Sarah entered, carrying a mug. ‘I thought you could do with a drink.’

  I smiled and sat up. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘About five. You’ve had a good sleep.’

  ‘I didn’t even dream.’

  She laughed. ‘Well, things are looking up then, aren’t they?’

  I took the mug and held it to my face, enjoying the aroma of green tea. As far as I was concerned, Sarah was an angel. She could pillage and murder for the next fifty years and it wouldn’t change my view. She had no peer.

  ‘I’m sorry about what happened,’ she said. Plainly the events of the day were weighing heavily on her mind.

  ‘There’s no way of explaining this one away.’

  ‘Actually, I want to show you something,’ she said. ‘It might explain what you saw.’

  I frowned. What could possibly explain it? It was fundamentally inexplicable. I’d told her about the dream before we went into the woods. The chances of finding the exact same spot were a million to one.

  She got up and left the room, returning a moment later carrying Charlie’s file. ‘How much of this did you read?’ she asked.

  ‘Bits and pieces. Why?’

  ‘How about the last part? The part where he loses the thread?’

  ‘I saw a bit of it, yeah. It didn’t make a lot of sense.’

  ‘Do you remember reading this?’ She handed me the file, marking the relevant passage with her finger.

  I began to read with a growing sense of astonishment. Written in broken sentences and chequered with words scribbled out and blotches of ink, the passage described a dream of being pursued through the high school corridor at night, of a flight across the playing fields under a full moon, of escaping through a hole in the fence and plunging into the dark woods. Then in clear unambiguous prose Charlie had written: ‘I lost my footing and fell to the ground with a shooting pain in my leg. I saw ahead a moonlit clearing, covered in moss, marked by an old, weather-beaten rock. That was the last thing I saw before I died’.

  I put the file down, aware that Sarah was watching my reactions carefully. Truth was, I didn’t know how to react.

  ‘This can’t be,’ I said, fumbling for something coherent to say.

  ‘You must’ve read this. Before your dream, you must’ve read it.’

  I shook my head. It seemed like the obvious explanation, if only I could remember. I’d certainly looked at Charlie’s file that sleepless night in Osaka. I’d even read bits of the Izumi section. But for the life of me, I couldn’t recall seeing the sentences I’d just read. In fact I was certain I hadn’t.

  ‘Even if you don’t remember it, even if you took it in subconsciously, maybe your brain reconstructed it for your own dream.’

  ‘I just can’t remember it.’

  ‘You said yourself that you’ve been under a lot of emotional strain. You’ve not been yourself. You’ve been forgetful. Isn’t it possible that you simply forgot that you’d read it?’

  It was ironic that now Sarah was the one trying to rationalize, and it was I who needed convincing. I should have been delighted that here was a perfectly rational explanation for something that had challenged everything I believed in. But I wasn’t happy. Even if my brain had managed to reconstruct events from Charlie’s description, the clearing I’d seen in the woods was just as it had been in my dream. There was no way I could have constructed such a precise image from Charlie’s brief description. He mentioned a moonlit clearing, moss, an old stone, but that was all. I shook my head, despondent.

  ‘It’s the only explanation,’ she pleaded. ‘You can’t both have had exactly the same dream.’

  I looked up at her, dismayed by the suggestion. A week ago, I would have said the same thing. But too many things had happened in the intervening period. This matter had only reinforced the growing fear that Charlie and I shared some common destiny. I still didn’t know how or why this could be, but the evidence was slowly starting to mount.

  She opted to change her line of argument. ‘Okay. Supposing the dream means something. Leaving aside whether you had the dream independently, or whether you picked up on Charlie’s description, the fact is you both had the same dream and it was pretty explicit. What do you think it means?’

  I looked back down at Charlie’s file to see if there was anything in the preceding or following passages to suggest a theory, but without success. There were what looked like descriptions of his breakfast and accounts of conversations about the weather. The man’s mind had been wandering far and wide. Or maybe those were just his attempts to escape the encroaching darkness by focusing on the mundane.

  I closed the file. I didn’t need Charlie to tell me anything. I already knew the answer. And I also knew that I was throwing all rational thinking to hell by saying so.

  ‘It’s about Reiko,’ I said and lowered my eyes to avoid Sarah’s reaction.

  ‘I think so too.’

  I looked up. ‘She was murdered in the woods.’

  Sarah nodded gravely.

  ‘She was at school. Whether at night or not, I don’t know. She tried to escape by losing her pursuer in the woods. But they caught up with her by the clearing. And they killed her.’

  A sudden wind rattled the blind, startling us both. Sarah got up to close the window.

  I realized there was no longer any point trying to avoid dealing with the topic straight on. I had come too far now. ‘They say in
Japan that when you talk about the unquiet dead, they will hear you. That’s why people are afraid to talk about ghosts.’

  ‘Do you think she’s here now?’ At least Sarah seemed strong enough to accept the idea.

  ‘I don’t know. I’m not supposed to believe in ghosts, so I guess I’m not qualified to say.’

  ‘What would convince you, other than reflections in mirrors and dreams?’

  All of a sudden I felt strangely calm, as though I really was coming to terms with the possibility that there was something out there. Maybe if I accepted the idea, it would no longer seem so terrible.

  ‘I’ve always worked on the assumption that ghosts – at least the popular perception of ghosts – do things according to a prescribed set of rules. They appear at the scene of their death, or where they lived, or where they were happy. They don’t have any business with the living. They just appear, mope around and then go away. My plan was to show that ghosts in Japan have a different rulebook.’

  The wind rose up again outside the window and we listened to it for a moment in silence. Even if there was nothing ghostly about it, it was adding to the atmosphere.

  ‘The thing that always bothered me about ghosts in general is their lack of purpose. They kind of just appear, give people the willies and then nothing. They’re so passive. Then I found out that the traditional Japanese ghost seems to have a purpose. There’s a dynamism that traditional ghosts in the West don’t have. Japanese ghosts want something…’

  ‘And that is?’

  ‘Revenge.’

  The word hung in the air for a moment, buffeted by the wind. Sarah struck a match and lit a candle, relieving us from the encroaching gloom.

  ‘Let’s say for the sake of argument that Reiko is appearing to you. Then what I don’t understand is, why? Why you? There’s a village full of people here. Does she appear to them as well? Is it because you’re a ghost-hunter, she thinks you might understand?’

  I shook my head, equally at a loss. ‘That’s what frightens me. There’s nothing special about me at all. There’s no reason to appear to me.’

  Again I thought about parallels with Charlie. She had appeared to him and the consequences were tragic. But was that the intended effect? Were her intentions evil? Did she mean for him to die or was it a terrible mistake? I thought again about Japanese ghosts having a purpose and another question occurred to me. Did they act intentionally? Or were they completely blind? Did a ghost choose who to reveal itself to or was it dictated by some other force? Suddenly these abstract questions had assumed a critical importance. Suddenly they were a matter of life and death.

  18. THE VIDEO FOOTAGE

  We continued talking for a long time, until the sun had dipped below the hills and Sarah had lit a full compliment of candles. I was in surprisingly good spirits considering my experience in the woods earlier. Talking to Sarah had restored a sense of normality. I vowed that for the rest of my time in Izumi I would keep my head, no matter what dreams or visitations came my way. I owed it to Sarah.

  It being my penultimate night in Izumi, she wryly predicted I would probably make it back to Osaka in one piece. She went on to reassure me that there was no possible comparison with Charlie’s case. Having read his ramblings, she was certain the guy’s state of mind had been questionable from the outset. I replied that the only real difference was that Charlie hadn’t had a companion like her to keep him on the straight and narrow.

  Sarah had accepted an invitation to have dinner with the amazing Mrs Azuma, host mum and master chef. We both admitted to a sense of trepidation as we made our way over, the memory of the last banquet still fresh in our minds and stomachs. Apparently Mrs Azuma had apologized in advance, saying she hadn’t had time to prepare anything special and she hoped we wouldn’t mind eating something very simple. For our part, we prayed this wasn’t false modesty.

  She greeted us at the door with the same frenetic energy that had swept me off my feet a couple of days earlier. She gave us kisses on both cheeks, helped us out of our shoes, took our jackets, then frog-marched us through to the sitting room, with its inimitable blend of the sublime and the hideous. She left us sitting there side by side and darted off to attend to the kitchen production line.

  I took the opportunity to reacquaint myself with the bizarre décor: the beautiful wall-hangings depicting scenes of nature and the changing seasons; the macabre French dolls, watching me from their glass cases with dull lifeless eyes; the small ancestral shrine where the incense was ever-burning. I also saw the row of framed certificates on the wall, a constant reminder that her sons had achieved something in life, even if one had amassed a lot more frames than the other. I couldn’t imagine my own parents hanging a certificate of mine on the wall, even if I ever managed to earn one.

  Mrs Azuma returned with a saucer of rice crackers and sat down next to us.

  ‘Are you enjoying Izumi?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said after a brief hesitation. I wasn’t about to weigh in with an account of my experiences to date.

  ‘What have you been doing?’

  Again a tricky question, and I found myself looking to Sarah for assistance.

  ‘We’ve seen all the sights of Izumi, like the castle and the burial mounds,’ she said.

  ‘And have you found any ghosts?’ Mrs Azuma asked, getting to the crux of the matter.

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  Mrs Azuma looked disappointed, as though she’d been hoping for something spicy. After all, Charlie had sat in the very same room telling tales of ghosts. But I had no stomach to talk about the things I’d seen both in full consciousness and in the shady realm of sleep. Sarah had already warned me that, good-natured though Mrs Azuma was, she could gossip for the Olympic team.

  A part of me wondered what she’d actually say if I did decide to tell all. Would she smile politely if I said that I’d seen Reiko at the graveyard, standing as she was in life, reflected in the window of the car; that I’d seen her in the bathroom mirror in Sarah’s apartment, her head bowed in sadness; that I’d been pursued in a dream to a clearing in the woods, which I was convinced had been Reiko’s last resting place?

  ‘No, no ghosts.’

  Mrs Azuma sighed. I was clearly a lot less psychic than the unfortunate Charlie.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said with a smile of encouragement, ‘you still have some time in Izumi. When are you leaving?’

  ‘The day after tomorrow, I’m afraid. It’s not long.’

  ‘That’s a pity,’ she cried and drummed on the table with her hands. ‘Now, it’s time to eat.’

  Without wasting a breath, she jumped up and whizzed back to the kitchen to continue her preparations, leaving Sarah and I to prepare our stomachs.

  In the event, Mrs Azuma did exercise restraint, perhaps understanding that two banquets in a week were too much of a good thing, even for strapping foreigners like us. She warmed us up with a bowl of traditional miso soup with succulent shreds of wakame seaweed and tofu mixed in. Then she treated us to a shabu-shabu main course, which involved boiling various shreds of meat and vegetables in a central pot of boiling water. There were plenty of complimentary dipping sauces and the idea was to eat as much or as little as we wanted. Naturally, as the beer flowed and the conversation got going, the temptation was to eat more rather than less. With communal plates to choose from and a never ending supply of meats, cabbage, shiitake mushrooms and other things to boil, there was no logical place to stop.

  The conversation was much lighter than the previous evening and my decision to lay off the subject of ghosts seemed to pay off. I felt better for it and I expected that Mrs Azuma did too. She spent some more time explaining what her sons had done to merit the certificates on the wall, then gave a detailed account of her future aspirations for them. The elder was studying medicine and looked certain to become a doctor within the next few years. The younger was a little less focused about where his law degree was going. It was very hard, she said plaintively, to become a la
wyer in Japan. She didn’t feel that poor Kenji had a chance. If her elder son had wanted to be a lawyer, then he would surely have succeeded, but not Kenji. I knew she only wanted the best for her children, but I couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for the lad, sadly unable to live up to his mother’s expectations.

  It was the way a dinner date should go. Plenty of beer, aimless conversation and compliments to the chef. In fact, it was getting towards ten o’clock when Mrs Azuma suddenly announced we should see some video footage of her sons. Sarah looked at her watch, I looked at mine, and we both made it clear that we were tired and, appealing though the proposal was, it would be better to leave it for another time. Mrs Azuma didn’t seem to mind, then suggested we take a disc with us to watch at home.

  It seemed odd to send us home with some of her son’s home video footage, but we had no special reason to refuse. Mrs Azuma selected a disc from the cabinet and Sarah slipped it into her bag, promising to watch it when we got home.

  ‘So, you’re leaving on Monday?’ Mrs Azuma asked.

  ‘Yes. Monday morning.’

  ‘It’s a pity. You should stay longer in Izumi.’

  ‘I’d love to. But I have to get back to Osaka. I need to do some research before the start of term.’

  ‘Then, you must come and spend the night with us before you go. Sarah often spends the night. You should both come.’

  Sarah nodded, amenable to the suggestion, though I guessed she had learnt from experience that it was easier to agree with everything. Mrs Azuma had a persuasive manner about her. If she wanted you to take a disc home, you went ahead and took it. If she wanted you to stay the night, you said ‘yes’. My only reservation was the prospect of some kind of ‘farewell’ banquet. I didn’t want her pulling out all the stops again.

  As we stepped out of the door, saying our ‘goodnights’, Mrs Azuma seemed to remember something.

  ‘That disc,’ she said, gesturing towards Sarah’s bag, ‘contains film that Kenji took on his school-trip. But there are also pictures of the students we were talking about. The ones who died.’