Reiko

by James Avonleigh

  Aya did some more sterling diplomatic work, starting to explain some of the delicacies to us. She pointed to the natou fermented soy bean dish, explaining that foreigners had trouble with it. Mrs Azuma had given it to us on the first night and we had indeed had trouble with it, but we played along and gave it another try, hoping to lighten the atmosphere. Shirakami-san mustered a smile, but Odagiri-san wasn’t so easily won over.

  We continued in this vein through a variety of dishes, keeping the focus firmly on the food. Aya led the charge, Sarah and I came up with appropriate responses and the other two sat there looking subdued. Eventually Mrs Azuma finished in the kitchen and came to sit down and, before she’d even tasted the food, she brought the forbidden subject up. It seemed as if this had been the plan all along.

  ‘James is studying ghosts,’ she said to the three teachers. ‘He’s interested to know if there are any ghosts at the high school.’

  I was mortified that she had introduced the subject so bluntly. I could see Shirakami-san and Odagiri-san looking at me sternly.

  At first no one said anything. Aya looked down at the table. Shirakami-san and Odagiri-san continued to look impassive. Surprisingly, it was Shirakami-san who spoke first. His voice wavered slightly, but his English was precise.

  ‘Why are you studying ghosts?’

  ‘Well, I’m not studying ghosts in particular. I’m studying the difference between Eastern and Western attitudes to the supernatural. Izumi has a long history of hauntings, so I’m interested in everything. Obviously I’ve heard about what happened at the high school.’

  Mrs Azuma immediately began to clarify what I was saying in Japanese. It was too fast for me to understand properly, but I distinctly heard the word ‘yurei’ come up.

  Whatever she said didn’t seem to appease them and I saw that Aya looked especially uncomfortable.

  I felt I needed to explain myself. ‘I didn’t have any plan to research what happened at the school. I just wanted to research people’s attitudes. I don’t mean any disrespect.’

  For a while, that was the end of that. Mrs Azuma left the room and came back with more food, this time some large platters of different meats, some cooked and some raw. I politely enquired if horse meat was on the menu and Mrs Azuma laughed and said it certainly was. Aya, like Sarah, found the idea disgusting and declined to try any, but both Shirakami-san and Odagiri-san tucked in without hesitation.

  ‘Do you like raw horse now?’ Mrs Azuma asked.

  ‘It’s a bit chewy, but I like it,’ I said, trying to sound enthusiastic. Truth was, I didn’t like it and I didn’t want to eat it. I only wanted the dinner party to be over.

  Then, just as I thought we were safely back to talking about food, Mrs Azuma waded in again. ‘Have you found any clues about the ghosts you were searching for?’

  It was abundantly clear she had only convened the little gathering in order to help me prise some information from the teachers. Perhaps she thought I should be doing more to push my agenda.

  ‘No, not really,’ I lied. ‘I haven’t heard any stories. But I know it’s a sensitive subject and, as I said, I don’t want to be disrespectful.’

  Mrs Azuma looked disappointed. She turned to Shirakami-san and Odagiri-san, asking them in Japanese if they had anything to contribute. Again the word ‘yurei’ came up, followed by Reiko’s name. I was no expert in Japanese etiquette, but judging by their outward demeanour, she wasn’t being very tactful.

  Odagiri-san looked at Mrs Azuma so long and hard that I was worried we were in a stand-off situation. Finally he put his chopsticks down and spoke in English for the first time. I had assumed that it would be basic at best, but it turned out to be as accomplished as Mrs Azuma’s.

  ‘Reiko had no peace in life. Now she has no peace in death.’

  He said it so eloquently and with such feeling that both Sarah and I were stunned into silence.

  But he hadn’t finished and he now directed what he said at me, as though it were I who had brought the subject up. I guessed he hadn’t forgotten seeing me emerging from the woods together with Aya and Sarah. ‘Someone hated her, so they killed her. That is all.’

  ‘Maybe it wasn’t hate. Maybe it was love,’ Sarah said a little unexpectedly.

  Odagiri-san looked at her for a long time, weighing his response. ‘People don’t murder for love. They murder for hate.’

  I was intrigued to know what he meant by this, but I didn’t have the courage to ask. Instead it was Sarah who ventured a question.

  ‘Do you have any suspicions about what happened to her?’

  Odagiri-san stared into the distance, leaving the question hanging in the air, unanswered. It wasn’t clear whether he was considering the question, or simply ignoring it. None of us moved a muscle for those few moments. We just sat there watching Odagiri-san, who sat as motionless as the dolls in their glass cases, staring at us from across the room.

  Even as the three teachers were preparing to leave, I was still wondering why they’d been invited and why they’d agreed to come. They didn’t seem particularly close either to Mrs Azuma or to one another. Both Shirakami-san and Odagiri-san had begun to open up a bit more towards the end of the meal, helped perhaps by the beer, or the arrival of Mr Azuma, who at least wanted to speak to them in Japanese. They both seemed to be there out of a sense of obligation. Was an invitation to one of Mrs Azuma’s dinner parties something no self-respecting villager could refuse? Shirakami-san had said her cooking was famous in Izumi, but there had to be more to it than that.

  To their credit, both Shirakami-san and Odagiri-san had dealt well with the delicate subject of the school’s past. They had maintained their composure in the face of Mrs Azuma’s persistent probing and I didn’t feel they had acted at all suspiciously.

  As Odagiri-san was getting up from the table to leave, he leant close to me. ‘Leave Reiko. She’s dead now. Let her have peace.’

  There was nothing I could say. After all that had happened there was nothing I wished more than to let her have peace.

  ‘I will.’

  Looking round, I saw Shirakami-san watching the exchange. He nodded at me, as though acknowledging my response. I felt I could see into his eyes and into his tortured soul. Here was someone who had loved Reiko, spiritually if not physically. With no family of his own, he had put Reiko on a pedestal and now spent the days sitting in her classroom, pining.

  Odagiri-san and Shirakami-san went out into the hall, put on their shoes, gave thanks to Mrs Azuma for the meal and left without another word.

  Aya was the last to leave, pausing to kiss me on both cheeks by the door, ‘continental style’ as she termed it. She looked as though she had something to say to me but wasn’t sure how to say it. At last she lifted her head and looked me in the eye.

  ‘Be careful.’

  She turned briskly and disappeared into the night.

  22. A DISCOVERY

  A hush descended on the house after the teachers had left. Sarah and I lounged on the sitting room floor, nursing our heavy stomachs and listening to Mrs Azuma crashing about in the kitchen, clearing up after an evening’s entertaining. We’d pleaded with her to let us help, but she’d given us short shrift. As distinguished guests we had no business in the kitchen and she was adamant that I, in particular, needed to rest my feet before my long journey home in the morning. Anyone would have thought I’d be walking back to Osaka.

  Neither Sarah nor I felt much like talking. We had the taciturn company of Mr Azuma, sipping an afterdinner sake, but our attempts at conversation soon petered out. The entire evening had left me drained. The two teachers had responded to Mrs Azuma’s probing with a mixture of calm and disapproval. They’d come across as defensive, but ultimately harmless and, after all our analysis and speculation, there was a feeling of anti-climax. They’d simply told us to let the matter rest, which was the sensible and appropriate thing to say.

  The dishes all safely loaded into the dishwasher, Mrs Azuma came out rubbing h
er hands and asking us how we felt. I told her I was pleasantly full and Sarah patted her stomach with a satisfied smile.

  ‘Are you ready for your bath?’

  The idea of having a bath after such a heavy meal seemed ludicrous to me, but Mrs Azuma explained that it was traditional in Japan. In fact, it was strange to get into bed without first washing and bathing. Strange to carry the dust and grime of the day to bed with you. Sarah nudged me and told me it was actually rather relaxing, so I agreed.

  ‘First, let me show you my house.’

  With some effort we got up and followed Mrs Azuma into the kitchen, which was large, modern and spotlessly clean. This was clearly her domain and she gave us a whistle-stop tour of her white goods: top-of-the-range fridge, dishwasher, microwave and even a talking toaster, which she kindly demonstrated for us.

  Next, she led us through to a series of utility rooms, one with an exercise bike and treadmill, another with a washing machine and tumble dryer. Then, along a dark corridor we came to what she announced was her pride and joy: the freezer room. It was a cavernous storage room with an obscene number of chest freezers, two or three on either wall. She opened one up to reveal more frozen products than your average supermarket. She stood there proudly for a moment, looking for some sort of reaction from us. I had never been asked to admire a chest freezer before, but I tried my best to look impressed.

  ‘I do a lot of entertaining,’ she said by way of justification.

  I was glad to leave the freezer room and move on to the comparative warmth of the garage, where we admired Mr Azuma’s people-carrier for a few minutes. From there we went on upstairs and looked in on the master bedroom, a sterile Western en-suite which resembled an upmarket hotel room. Then we were shown to the boy’s rooms, where Mrs Azuma announced we would be sleeping.

  ‘Kenji’s room. You can sleep here,’ she said, addressing me. It was a large room, fairly typical for a boy in his late teens, with posters of rock bands, baseball stars and a map of the world. With a feeling of dismay I saw that the wardrobe boasted full-length mirrors on both its doors. Having avoided reflections all day, it wasn’t what I needed.

  Osamu’s room across the hall would be Sarah’s for the night. It was almost identical to Kenji’s both in size and furnishings and like Kenji’s room it was meticulously clean.

  The one comfort I derived from the tour was that though Sarah and I were in different rooms, she was only a short distance across the hall. There might yet be some hope for us.

  The bath was every bit as good as Sarah had predicted. I sat for over half an hour up to my neck in the self-heating tub, letting the strains of the day gradually leave my body. On reflection, the day hadn’t been quite as harrowing as I’d anticipated. I’d expected stress levels to rise to some kind of crescendo, but it hadn’t happened. So far my ghostly stalker had kept quiet. Either she had let me off the hook or was fattening me up for the kill. Allow me to relax completely, lull me into a false sense of security, then strike when I least expected.

  I wasn’t wrong.

  Returning to Kenji’s room, bathed and buffed and looking forward to sinking into soft linen sheets, I did what I’d managed to avoid doing prior to my bath. I looked up at the mirrors on the wardrobe doors.

  She was there.

  She was there standing on the other side of the bed next to the desk, wearing her uniform. Her face was turned down, her features in shadow, and her left hand was touching the desk, as though marking it for attention.

  Light-headed from the bath, I sank to my knees, clasping my hands together in an attitude of prayer. She didn’t look at me, just continued staring at the desk.

  I closed my eyes and, when I opened them again, she had gone.

  I sat on the floor by the door for several moments, my heart beating a hole in my chest, trying to bring some order to my emotions. There had been something about her posture that was different this time. The first times I’d seen her, in the graveyard and in the mirror in Sarah’s apartment, she hadn’t been looking at me, but she had been facing towards me. Then, in the convenience store, she had both been looking at me and facing towards me. The same could be said of her appearance in Sarah’s bed. But this time was different. She was both looking away and facing away: she was looking at the desk.

  It seemed idiotic, but I’d seen too many horror films not to think that she was trying to show me something. Equally idiotic was my next thought – that this wasn’t a defining trait of Japanese ghosts. It was at odds with the single-minded revenge she was supposed to be plotting.

  Pulling myself together, I opened the door and tiptoed across the dark hall to Sarah’s door and rapped on it lightly. She’d had her bath before me and I prayed that she was not only awake, but inclined to see me. I was relieved to hear her voice from the other side of the door, inviting me to come in. I knew she wouldn’t desert me in my hour of need.

  She was sitting cross-legged on the bed, attempting to dry her hair by running her fingers through it. ‘Did you have a nice bath?’

  ‘Yes, thanks. You?’

  She pointed to her hair. ‘I forgot my brush. I should have asked Mrs Azuma, but I didn’t really want to go knocking on her door.’

  I sat down on the bed next to her with a weary sigh. She immediately read my expression.

  ‘It’s those mirrors on the wardrobe, isn’t it?’ She motioned to a carbon copy wardrobe in her room.

  ‘I was caught off my guard. I relaxed too much.’

  She stopped brushing her hair and got up. ‘Would you feel more comfortable kipping down on my floor?’

  It was an offer I would certainly be taking up. But sleep was far from my mind.

  ‘Actually, I wanted to ask your opinion about something.’

  There was nothing on Kenji’s desk except for a neat pile of stationery in one corner. There were three drawers underneath, all of them locked. We briefly considered forcing the lock, but decided it would be uncharitable considering all Mrs Azuma had done for us. That left us to search for a key, which we set about doing methodically, Sarah taking one side of the room and I taking the other. She asked me where a young man might hide something important and the only thing I could think of saying was ‘under something’. This turned out to be unexpectedly good advice. Within a few minutes of lifting everything in sight, she found a key on the young scholar’s shelf, underneath a stack of encyclopaedias.

  But standing in front of the desk holding the key, I suddenly felt unsure. I took a step back and thought about the young man who we’d never met and whose life we were prying into. What did we have to go on? Just a vision, a trick of the light, the product of an overwrought brain. What were we expecting to find?

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I think I might be going mad,’ I said.

  Sarah smiled. ‘Maybe you are. Maybe you were already mad before you got here. Maybe you’ll end up strapped to a bed getting electric shock treatment three times a day. We just don’t know.’ She pressed the key into my hand. ‘Remember, you’re not the first one to see her.’

  ‘I know. And they’re all dead now.’

  Sarah looked at me sternly. ‘Whatever you saw or think you saw, it can’t hurt you. It could drive you mad, but it can’t hurt you. If you can believe that, then you’ll be okay. You’re not the same as Charlie. I’ve seen his file and you’re not the same. He was vulnerable.’

  ‘He didn’t have you to protect him.’

  ‘Exactly. You really think I’d let something happen to you? You think I’d let some miserable spirit touch you? I’d like to see them try.’

  The way she was standing there, in her white silken dressing gown, arms akimbo, I would have laid down my life for her. I took the key and it turned immediately. Pulling open the first drawer we found nothing but loose stationery items and other odds and ends, thrown in willy-nilly. It was probably the one place where Kenji could be untidy, where he wasn’t subject to his mother’s obsessive cleanliness.

  The secon
d drawer contained bits of paper – probably fragments of schoolwork – thrown in without order. The third drawer was more of the same, but fishing beneath reams of white paper a flash of red caught my eye. Reaching in, I pulled out a bright red folder, tied with a black ribbon.

  I carried the folder over to the bed and slowly untied the ribbon. Sarah watched in silence by my side. I paused before opening the file, dimly aware that we were not alone in this, that there was another presence in the room, peering from the shadows, watching our progress.

  I did the deed, letting the contents spill out onto the bed – the private possessions of Mrs Azuma’s absentee son. For a while neither of us spoke as we realized what we had found. A secret treasure chest, testament to Kenji’s adolescent infatuation. There were photographs, drawings, newspaper cuttings and they all had one subject: Reiko. There were photos of Reiko in her sailor uniform at school, unaware that she was being photographed; pictures of her in her tracksuit playing volleyball; pictures of her in plain clothes, walking down the street with friends. All the pictures seemed to have been taken without her knowledge. The sketches were mostly pencil drawings, some of her profile, but mainly of her head bent in thought. The artist had paid particular attention to the contours of her face, with delicate shading to bring out the high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes. Kenji had been in love with Reiko and, judging from the photographs, the love had not been reciprocated. The newspaper cuttings were all taken after her disappearance and most of them displayed the same school portrait I’d first seen in Charlie’s file. The cuttings had been dated, but otherwise were in no particular order. In fact this whole stash of Reiko memorabilia had been thrown in without any care.

  ‘My God,’ Sarah said finally. ‘He really was obsessed.’

  ‘You’re right, but like you said before, half the boys in her class felt the same.’

  ‘This stuff is pretty sick.’

  I had to admit that the hidden camera was creepy. But there was nothing unusual about the sketches. In fact, they showed a touching sensitivity and I was sure some girls would have been flattered by them.