“Yuu died when we were in the second grade, so I only remember her as a child, not even eight years old … At the time, we lived in the country—nothing but farms all around.”
Her house had been on the slope of a mountain. There was a forest behind it, and they could constantly hear the sound of bird wings flapping.
“Yuu and I slept next to each other in the same room. When it got dark and we tried to go to sleep, we could hear owls in the darkness outside.”
It was an old wooden house, with floors and pillars that gleamed darkly. There was green moss growing on the roof tiles, and there were a number of broken tile fragments on the ground around the house. It was a comfortably large house, and all the rooms had tatami floors—except for the kitchen, which had been added later. The twin girls, Yoru and Yuu, lived in that house with their parents, grandmother, and grandfather.
Morino’s father drove two hours into town to work every day. Her grandparents were often out, checking the water in the rice fields or carrying different farming tools from the shed. The fields and paddies were a five-minute walk from the house. All the daikon and cabbage they ate came from those fields.
“But the daikon we grew were not shaped as nice as the ones in shops, and they were a little bit yellow.”
There were a number of trees in the yard. The ground was bare earth, and it would turn to mud when it rained, forming pools of muddy water. If you went outside after it rained, the ground would stick to your feet and try to trip you.
There was a shed on the left side of the house—a small one built right up against the side of the house. They kept the farming tools in there. The roof had been broken during a typhoon, but rather than fix it, they had just spread a blue tarp over the top. It leaked a little, but there was nothing more than tools inside, so it wasn’t really a problem.
“I played with my sister all the time.”
When they entered elementary school, they walked hand in hand to the school in the valley. The road was thin and winding. On one side, the mountain sloped sharply upward, and it was covered in trees. The other side also had trees, but it was possible to glimpse the view below through the leaves. Piles of brown leaves would gather on either side, and the path got slippery in the rain. The branches on the tall trees blocked the sun, and the road was always gloomy and damp.
“It was downhill all the way to school, and easy. But it was uphill all the way home, and exhausting.”
Yoru and Yuu had identical faces, down to the location of their moles. And they both had long hair down to their waists. They always chose similar clothing. I could easily imagine the two identical girls running down the tree-covered mountain road.
“We looked the same. Even our mother couldn’t tell us apart. Sometimes, before we took a bath, we would both take off our clothes and stand there silently.”
When that happened, their mother could not begin to guess which was the elder sister and which was the younger.
“But our expressions and behavior were different, so if we started talking, everyone knew who was who.”
Even as a tiny child, Yuu always found it funny when their mother stared at them in confusion. And the moment it struck Yuu as funny, their mother could point right at them and say, “This is Yoru, and that’s Yuu.”
Yuu had always shown her emotions more easily than her older sister. When she was talking with her parents, she always smiled.
“At the time, our favorite games were drawing pictures and pretending to be dead.”
During summer vacation, the elementary school pool was open, and they could swim all they wanted.
“It was a small school, and there were only about a hundred students. There were fewer than twenty students per grade, but the pool was packed every day, all summer long.”
Under the blinding white sunlight, the children splashed around. If you were to lie on your back in the pool, your ears underwater, the cicadas in the mountains would sound like walls tumbling down.
“There were always a few adults around the pool, making sure the children didn’t do anything dangerous. Sometimes they were teachers, sometimes students’ parents. Most of the time nothing happened, and they would sit on a bench in the shade, gossiping.”
One day, the twins decided to surprise the adults watching by pretending they had drowned. They floated facedown in the water, lying limp, competing to see which of them could hold out longer and look most like a corpse.
They must have made an eerie contrast with the children playing noisily all around them, the two girls floating quietly in the water, their hair spread out like seaweed, only their backs above water, immobile as long as they could hold their breath. When they could no longer stand it, they would lift their heads slightly, take a breath, and then die again.
“The reaction was bigger than Yuu or I had anticipated.”
The women watching the pool were two of their classmates’ mothers. When they saw the girls lying motionless, one of them jumped up on the bench and screamed. All the children in the pool turned toward the bench. The little kids splashing around, the older kids practicing swimming—everyone knew something had happened. The mother who had not screamed stood up and ran to try to save the drowning girls … but running next to a pool is very dangerous.
“She tripped and hit her head, knocking herself unconscious. The mother who had screamed saw that, and she went to call an ambulance. Yuu and I got out of breath and stood up, only to find everyone around us in a state of panic. It was like hell on earth. The younger kids were crying, scared and confused. There was a boy next to the unconscious woman, shaking her shoulder and shouting, ‘Mommy!’ He was one of our classmates.”
The twins had looked at each other and, without another word, they’d quickly gotten out of the pool and fled, without even changing clothes.
“We went out the back gate, each with a bag holding our clothes and towels in one hand and our shoes in the other. As we ran along the path through the rice paddies in our swimsuits, ambulance after ambulance screamed along the distant road toward the pool. How many bodies had that women seen? There were at least five ambulances.”
The school was at the bottom of the mountain, and rice paddies stretched as far as the eye could see on the side away from the mountain. Green rice stalks covered the ground, making the world appear completely flat. The girls walked along the path among the paddies.
“The grass pricked our feet.”
They didn’t know what had happened after the ambulances reached the school. They didn’t think about it much—just went home, ate some shaved ice, and went to sleep.
“That wasn’t the only time we played dead. We also spread ketchup on each other’s faces and pretended it was blood.”
They stood in front of the refrigerator, squeezing ketchup on their fingers and dabbing it on each other’s faces. Their pale skin was soon red.
“The ketchup started dripping down, and we had to lick it off. Eventually, we got bored with the taste of ketchup, so we wiped it off with sausages and ate those.”
Another time, they had left the house with a can of meat sauce.
At a corner not far from their house, there had once been a traffic accident. A kindergarten boy had been hit by a car and had died. Yuu laid down in the same place and closed her eyes.
“ ‘Go ahead,’ she said, and I emptied the can of meat sauce on her face. It looked just like her brains were coming out. I told Yuu not to move, no matter what happened. She kept her eyes closed so the sauce wouldn’t get in them, and she nodded.”