This knocked me back a bit. Having scrupulously avoided any mention of the high school tragedy all evening, here she was handing over video footage of the victims. It was unsettling.
‘Why would she give us that?’ I said as we made our way through the front gate.
‘I suppose you were asking about it last night. It’s not unreasonable to think you’re interested.’
‘You don’t think it’s weird?’
‘A bit. But she does that kind of stuff. She just wanted to show us some footage of her son. I’ve seen some of their home videos before. She probably thought that you’d only sit down to watch it if you knew there were dead people in it.’
‘I hope she doesn’t think that of me.’
Sarah unlocked the car and flashed me a smile over the bonnet. ‘It’s true though, isn’t it? Admit it.’
She was right. Against my better judgement I couldn’t wait to get back and put the disc in the machine.
On the way back Sarah pulled in at the Seven-Eleven to pick up some groceries.
In contrast to the previous day, the shop was completely deserted except for a bored-looking young man behind the till who regaled us with a formulaic greeting as we entered. Sarah picked up a basket and wandered off to look for some food staples while I set up next to the magazine stand and started to flick through some of the wares on offer. There were several categories of manga, from the overtly childlike to the overtly adult. I picked up one of the latter to see a double spread of a woman trussed up in leather bondage being straddled by a drooling businessman wearing shirt and tie. I glanced over my shoulder to check that Sarah hadn’t noticed my choice of reading matter, but she was at a safe distance. I flicked through a few more pages and saw more sado-masochistic images. In some the man was the aggressor and in the others the woman held sway. There was a whole other thesis hidden in those pages – a whole bizarre world I knew nothing about. I put the magazine down quickly and moved away.
I watched Sarah in the reflection of the window make her way round the shop and I felt a rush of sadness at the thought that I would soon be leaving Izumi. I hadn’t left her side in days and it was the kind of constant companionship I hadn’t known in a long time. I wondered how I would adjust to being on my own again, with only Josh to keep me company until the new term started. I thought of my Spartan room in the dormitory, a far cry from Sarah’s candlelit sanctuary with hot mugs of cocoa and Gregorian chant. Then I thought of Yoshi, of his body laid out on the asphalt covered in a bloodstained sheet. And I thought of Charlie all those years ago, making the long trip back from Izumi and deciding that, on balance, he didn’t want to live.
‘What are you thinking about?’
Sarah had appeared at my side.
‘Nothing,’ I mumbled. ‘Away with the fairies.’
We wandered over to the counter and Sarah handed the basket to the bored cashier.
‘Oh, can you get some beer,’ she said, pointing to the fridge on the far wall.
I walked over, opened the glass door and bent down to grab some cans.
I don’t know what made me glance up at that precise moment. Maybe the devils on my shoulder, a slight tingling at the back of my neck, a primeval intuition. But even before I looked, I knew she was there.
Reflected in the glass door of the fridge, she was standing in front of the magazine rack wearing her school uniform tied with a blood-red ribbon. Whereas before her eyes had been downturned, now her head was raised and she looked straight at me. And for the first time I saw her from head to toe, down to her pleated skirt and knee length white socks.
I looked straight at her and she looked straight at me and I knew beyond all doubt that it was Reiko.
The beer cans dropped to the floor with a clatter and the door swung shut. I turned to look, but she was gone.
I sank down onto the cold tiles and leant back against the fridge door as the room spun around me. My stomach churned, my sight grew dim and, in a daze, I saw Sarah lurching towards me with arms outstretched. I saw the cashier emerge from behind the counter, alarmed. And I saw the beer cans roll slowly across the floor.
The next thing I knew, I was sitting on a bench outside the shop with Sarah’s comforting arm on my shoulder. It was good to feel the cool evening air in my lungs.
‘You saw her, didn’t you?’
I nodded wearily. Compared with the two previous occasions, I felt more numb than afraid. This time she had been more distinct, more rounded, the outlines clearer and the colours stronger.
And then there were her eyes. Those same eyes I had seen in a photograph in Charlie’s file one night in Osaka. Those eyes which had peered into the black depths of my soul.
It was eleven o’clock by the time we got back to Sarah’s apartment. We had sat outside the shop for a long time, talking about what had happened, sifting the clues and evidence, agreeing to take whatever came without passion or prejudice. The main crumb of comfort that Sarah continued to offer me was that I would be leaving Izumi within thirty-six hours and that I need never return again. I told her that I would be sad if I couldn’t see her again and she told me she only had another three months before she herself would be leaving forever. She went on to remind me of the universal law that ghosts do not travel. I’d told her myself that ghosts were absolutely location-specific. They might be able to follow you around within a limited radius, but once you got on a train and travelled halfway across the country, they had no way of following. I said I only hoped there were no exceptions to this rule.
We were neither of us particularly tired, despite the full and hearty meal Mrs Azuma had given us, so we decided to make a cup of hot cocoa, settle down on the mattress and watch a bit of the footage she had sent us off with. It probably wasn’t the ideal way to relax after seeing what I’d seen in the Seven-Eleven, but with three sightings under the belt, they were beginning to seem commonplace. And, as Sarah pointed out, with only thirty-six hours before I left, we didn’t have much time if we were going to solve the mystery of these ghostly apparitions.
Sarah wasn’t much into audio-visual entertainment and both TV and DVD player had to be dragged out of the cupboard and wired up from scratch. While I did this Sarah told me she’d spent her first week desperately looking for something to watch. TV shows in Japan, she said, seemed to fall into three categories: live baseball, bizarre variety shows featuring wacky male presenters and women in bikinis laughing at their jokes, and Samurai dramas. The rest of the time there were adverts. I asked if she had any better opinion of British TV and she said ‘no’, but that she still lived in hope of finding a tele-visual nirvana somewhere in the world.
The DVD player hooked up and the television turned on, we settled down side by side to watch Azuma Junior’s school trip diary. Seeing myself and Sarah reflected in the blank screen immediately set my nerves on edge. What would I do if I suddenly saw a dim figure standing at my shoulder or a ghostly white face peering through the window behind us?
I fumbled for the remote control and started the disc. I don’t know if I was still suffering the after-effects of the Seven-Eleven experience, but the mere sight of static at the beginning of the disc seemed to ratchet the tension up another notch. I shifted to get a little closer to Sarah, then waited.
The footage started with a grainy shot of a school bus waiting in the forecourt of Izumi high school. It appeared to be early morning and the students were gathered around in groups, chatting excitedly about the trip ahead. Everyone was wearing school uniforms, except for the teachers who were busy doing a headcount. It was impossible to make out any of the students from the opening shot. It seemed the camera operator, who I took to be young Kenji, was still grappling with the zoom and focus functions. I did, however, identify both Odagiri-san and Shirakami-san among the teachers.
The footage cut to a shot taken inside the bus, after they’d set off. Kenji seemed to have mastered the camera now and offered a slow sweeping shot from the front of the bus, taking in all the students.
They were seated in orderly fashion and I spotted Kanae Kubota and Jun Takada, the doomed lovers, side by side and smiling happily. I thought I also spotted Saori and Hideki, sitting near the back, but I was less sure. The only one I couldn’t see was the one I most wanted to see: Reiko. I was going to suggest that we play the disc back to get a better look, but I didn’t have to bother.
The very next shot was a full close-up of Reiko herself, sitting in the seat at the front, face turned to the window, ignoring the camera. In the seat next to her with arms folded and a serious expression was the increasingly suspicious Odagiri-san.
Sarah and I exchanged looks. I felt as though we were part of a jury assigned to investigate a series of suspicious deaths and here we’d been granted access to a confidential piece of evidence. I wondered if that had been Mrs Azuma’s intention all along. Had she wanted us to see these images and draw our own conclusions? It seemed a far-fetched idea, but I’d seen enough of the far-fetched over the past week to believe anything.
Seeing Reiko like this was almost more than I could bear. Only months or even weeks before her disappearance she was there, in the pride of youth, displaying an almost unearthly beauty. No wonder the camera lingered on her. It was equally disturbing to see the dubious figure of Odagiri-san next to her, positioned like a sentry between her and the rest of the bus, warning all who approached to keep their distance. In fact, it was he who eventually looked up at the camera and said something in Japanese that I couldn’t understand. From the tone we guessed he was telling Kenji that he had filmed enough.
The scene changed and Kenji was getting down from the coach with his classmates and heading towards a grand temple complex in the hills. We surmised this from the few flashes of scenery we were granted as Kenji was having difficulty pointing the camera and walking at the same time. One minute we were looking at the shoes of the person in front and the next minute we were seeing leafy hills and the cloudless sky above. We went on to a series of exterior shots of the temple, which Sarah guessed was the shrine at Nikko, a popular attraction for high school excursions and one of the few major tourist spots within striking distance of Izumi.
We cut to inside the grounds of the temple with a series of shots of students standing around chatting noisily, enjoying their freedom. For the next ten minutes we followed this cast of characters, Kenji’s intrepid camera guiding us in and out of the temple and its various outbuildings. But there was one constant in all of it. Wherever he went, whatever he was focusing on, Reiko was never far away. Others came and went, flashed the two-fingered peace sign in the camera’s direction, pulled funny faces, or ducked out of view. But Reiko neither acknowledged the camera nor avoided it. She seemed to hover around the edges of the shots, either chatting quietly to her friends – mainly the four ill-fated students we already knew about – or to the teachers. Odagiri-san certainly seemed to spend a lot of time standing next to her, making jokes and observations, pointing to the architecture. Shirakami-san, the shyer of the two, also made a number of cameo appearances at her side. And there were other boys too, coming and going, happy to occupy her personal space.
Throughout the whole thing, my eyes never left her for a second and nor, it seemed, did the cameraman’s. At one point, there was a shot of a carving of three monkeys, illustrating the motto ‘hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil’. One monkey had its paws clamped over its ears, another had its paws over its eyes, and the third had them over its mouth. The camera moved down to catch Reiko, face upturned, looking with a mixture of soulful reflection and amusement. The camera lingered there, until she moved away and the moment was gone.
There was then a poignant shot. Kenji had chanced upon the five friends in a group together, talking together happily. Jun turned to see the camera on them and flashed a broad smile in its direction. Kanae turned and did likewise, brandishing the peace sign – the standard Japanese student’s response to a photo opportunity. Then they all turned and struck poses for the camera – even Reiko, who seemed to acknowledge it for the first time. Kenji framed them perfectly underneath a glorious red arch. And then they turned, as though with one mind and began to walk through the arch, casting glances over their shoulders and laughing.
Kenji tracked them all the way, using the zoom to keep up with them, until they were no more than grainy blobs on the screen. Then the scene cut to a tranquil shot of a tree. The students were gone.
Sarah reached for the remote control and paused the disc.
‘What do you think?’ I said.
‘I think he was in love with her.’
I was in complete agreement. ‘He never let her out of his sight.’
‘He was following her like an obsessive. No wonder she wouldn’t look at the camera. He was stalking her and she knew it.’
I felt I had to stick up for the guy. ‘You don’t think that’s a bit harsh? The guy had a crush. It’s what teenage boys do when they like a girl. They follow her around, while she ignores them. Of course you try not to do it as an adult, because by then it’s weird. But didn’t you ever have a crush on someone, then constantly obsess about them? Didn’t your hormones ever go haywire?’
I was surprised by how reasonable I was sounding. Maybe it was because I recognized the impulse so well. I identified with teenagers, identified with their problems, with their insecurities and roller-coaster emotions. I used to think I would never leave my teenage years behind. But what I didn’t like to admit to Sarah as the images unfolded was that I shared Kenji’s fascination with Reiko. Ever since seeing her photo in Charlie’s file that night in Osaka, I hadn’t been able to get her out of my mind. Little wonder that I was seeing her everywhere, standing as she was in life, like an avenging angel.
Sarah lay back on the mattress and sighed heavily, staring up at the ceiling.
‘It’s not so much Kenji I’m worried about,’ I said. ‘He’s just a horny teenager. It’s those teachers, clamping themselves on to Reiko, like they own her.’
‘Agreed. They’re fucking creepy.’ She bit her nails irritably. ‘I can’t ever look at them in the same way.’
‘So what made her give us the disc?’ I asked.
‘That’s what I don’t get. She must have seen it. She must have noticed that her son spent most of the time following Reiko about. And she must have known that we’d notice, after all our questions.’
‘Maybe she didn’t look at it that way. We’d asked her a load of questions about the case, so she gave us some footage to see. Her son shot it, so she probably thought we’d admire his technical skill as a film director or something. I don’t think there was any other motive.’
Sarah yawned and pulled the duvet over her legs. ‘I’m pretty tired. Are you going to watch any more of this?’
I wanted to say ‘no’, but the attraction of the disc was too great. I needed to satisfy myself that there was nothing more to see. ‘Do you mind if I continue?’
‘No, just prod me if anything interesting happens.’
Sarah settled in under the duvet and I moved across and propped myself against the wall to catch some more of the show. I knew I would have been better off getting some kip, but I needed to go the distance on this one.
I pressed ‘play’ on the disc and watched as Kenji took some more footage of trees. I guessed Reiko must have given him the slip and he was filling in time with some nature shots.
Sure enough, within a few minutes she was back, the camera caressing her fine-boned features once more. Maybe Sarah had been right. Maybe the kid’s obsession was unnatural. I tried to remember if I’d ever done anything of the sort myself. I’d never taken video footage of a girl I liked, so I couldn’t make an exact comparison. I recalled sending tremulous love poems to a girl in my class for several weeks, before she told me she hated poetry and that I should stop. I guessed that if I’d had the guts I would have happily spent all day filming her.
After a while my eyes began to droop. It was more of the same stuff: students standing around talking and
Reiko somewhere in the margins of the shot. The images on the screen soon merged into a continuous blur of school uniforms and shaky camerawork. Once or twice my head nodded and I lifted it with a start. The candles were burning low and Sarah was sleeping peacefully by my side. I resolved to turn in, but I’d somehow managed to mislay the remote. Not wanting to disturb Sarah rooting around for it, I decided to let the disc run on.
My head nodded again and when I lifted it, the footage had ended and the screen was blank, even though the disc still seemed to be running. I knew I should turn it off, but Sarah was lying right up against me and I didn’t want her to move.
I let my head drop and this time it didn’t come up. Sitting upright against the wall, my head down on my chest, I dozed to the faint hum of the disc, while the candles went out one by one around me, leaving the room in darkness.
A sudden noise broke the silence and I lifted my head with a start.
At first I didn’t know what was happening. Sarah stirred from sleep and sat up. The television was showing grainy footage of a news presenter reading a story.
It took me a moment to realize that the disc was still playing.
‘What’s this?’ Sarah asked, her voice sleepy.
‘I don’t know.’ I found the remote control where Sarah had been lying and pressed the ‘pause’ button.
‘Is this the same disc?’
‘Someone must have taped this on the end. Sorry, I would’ve turned it off, but I couldn’t find the remote.’
I was about to press the ‘off’ button, but Sarah stopped me. ‘Let’s see what it is.’
‘It looks like the news.’ I pressed ‘play’ and we watched a po-faced newsreader addressing the camera. By his demeanour, I guessed it wasn’t happy news, but I couldn’t make out the details. The only word I heard with any certainty was ‘Izumi’.
Suddenly the scene cut to an exterior shot of Izumi high school with dramatic titles running along the bottom of the screen and a monotone commentary. Then there was another cut, and this time it was Reiko’s high school portrait, the same one that had been in Charlie’s file.
Reiko Page 15