We left school and headed for a large general store on the edge of town. It was a fair distance, but it was on a big road with a lot of buses, so it didn’t take us long to get there. The bus was about half-full, so Morino sat down while I stood looking down at her, hanging on to a strap above me. She put her head down and tried to sleep, but even the bus’s comfortable sway was not enough, and we arrived without her having slept a wink.
The large store was filled with wood and metal for construction, as well as any number of tools. We wandered through the aisles, looking for anything like a rope. AV cables for connecting TVs and video players, clothesline, kite string … they had everything.
Morino picked up each one, feeling it with her fingers—carefully, as if she were choosing what to wear.
She seemed to have fairly strong opinions about what sort of rope should be used to hang oneself, and she explained them, looking haggard. “First, thin string would just snap. Electric cords are strong, but they lack in beauty.”
“What about plastic?” There was a big ball of plastic string on the bottom shelf, and I only asked because I happened to see it.
She shook her head, expressionless. “lt stretches. Ruins everything. I’m done here.”
We found a number of different chains in another section of the store. From two-centimeter-thick heavy chains to delicate chains only a millimeter or two across. They were on the shelves in rolls, like toilet paper. There was a machine nearby that allowed you to cut the chain to the length you needed.
“Look at this—so thin, but it says it can hold up to a hundred pounds,” she said, holding a thin silver chain between her fingers. She pulled it out, pressing it to her neck. The chain in her hand caught the light, glittering. “Nice color—would make even a dead body look beautiful … but when you hanged yourself, the links would probably bite into your skin.”
She let it drop. It wasn’t a match for her ideals.
She’d spent a lot of time thinking about what kind of rope she’d want to kill her.
If I were going to strangle somebody, what kind of rope would I use? I pondered this as we wandered the store.
“I don’t want it to tickle my neck,” she said, when I pointed to a rough woven rope. “Old-fashioned rope like that was all over the house in the country where I used to live. They use it on the farm a lot.”
She had lived somewhere else until the fourth grade—in the mountains, a two-hour drive from here.
“Where my mother was born and raised, my grandparents have a little farm. My father used to drive two hours to and from work every day.”
But they had eventually moved to spare him that drive. All this was news to me.
“I always thought that when it came time to kill yourself, you’d slit your wrists, not hang yourself,” I said.
She held our her wrist. “You mean this?”
On her wrist was a thick white line, like a welt. The skin was slightly raised, and it was clearly a scar left from a slashed wrist. I’d never asked about it, so I didn’t know why she’d cut her wrist.
“That’s not a result of trying to kill myself—it was just a sudden impulse.”
She went through her life without expressions, but she apparently did have emotions strong enough to produce that kind of reaction. Her lack of outward expression was similar to the way a thermos is never hot on the outside: No matter what was going on inside, it never affected the surface.
But when emotions get too strong, humans have to do something. Some people encase their emotions by playing or exercising, whereas others calm their emotions by breaking things. People in the latter group could let their feelings out just by breaking furniture or the like. But Morino was unable to direct those feelings outward, so she’d directed them at herself.
Suddenly, a familiar voice called out to me.
I turned around to find my sister, Sakura, standing a short distance away and looking at us in surprise. There was a big bag of dog food in her arms. She’d just happened to be here shopping.
Morino looked over sleepily. She saw the picture of the dog printed on the bag, and her cheek twitched.
Sakura remarked on how surprised she was to see me there, and then she regarded Morino.
Morino looked away, not because she was avoiding Sakura’s gaze but because she was avoiding the picture of the dog. She would never even go near a shelf with the word “dog” on it.
“And your pretty friend?” Sakura asked, curious. I explained politely that this was probably not the kind of person Sakura imagined her to be. She didn’t appear to believe me.
“Okay. Mom sent me out here. I have to get the dog food and pick up some clothes at the dry cleaner’s.”
Sakura pulled a note out of her pocket and read it. Her character was a lot better than mine. She was supposed to be busy studying for exams, but she still couldn’t refuse a request to do someone else’s work.
“Then I have to pick up some tofu and tangerines from the woman next door and walk the dog when I get home.”
She waved at Morino, grinning.
Morino was too busy not looking at the dog food to notice. She had one hand on a shelf for support, denying the existence of the picture on the dog food with all her might.
When I was sure Sakura was gone, I said, “You can look up now.”
Morino straightened up, turned toward the shelves as if nothing had happened, and began examining a roll of wire on the shelf.
“Was that your sister?” I nodded.
“I had a sister—a twin sister. She died a long time ago.” I had not known this.
“Her name was Yuu. Yuu …”
As she explained this, she ran her fingers along the long silvery wire, white teeth showing between her bluish lips and her quiet voice emerging through both.
Yuu had hanged herself and died, Morino Yoru told me.
She had wrapped any number of ropes around her neck today, but Morino had not found anything that would solve her sleeping problems. I left without buying anything, either.
We crossed the parking lot, heading for the road. With the heavy lines under her eyes, Morino looked as if a strong burst of wind would be enough to knock her over.
There was almost nothing around there except the massive general store: fields and vacant lots covered in dry grass and the newly paved asphalt road running through them. The area would be developed in time, though.
On the side of the road, there was a bus stop with a bench, where Morino sat down. One of the buses that stopped there must go to her house.
The sun was getting low in the sky. The sky was still blue, but the undersides of the clouds were turning pink.
“May I ask about your sister?” I said, glancing at her. She sat in silence, not answering.
There weren’t a lot of cars on the road in front of us. One would pass every now and then, but for the most part, there was only the wide expanse of asphalt, along with the empty plane of dried grass beyond the guardrail. In the distance, there was a single iron tower, like a speck on the horizon.
“Go ahead,” she said eventually.
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ii