Yoru had hidden in the bushes, waiting for someone to come by and scream. When children saw them, they wouldn’t be surprised the way the grown-ups were—they’d come over assuming it was some sort of game.
“Even the people who screamed soon realized it was just meat sauce, and then they laughed. We had done this kind of thing before, and our neighbors knew all about it.”
“No cars went past?”
If there had been a traffic accident there, then cars must have gone by there sometimes. And Yuu was lying in the street; she might’ve been in danger.
When I asked this, Morino explained without expression, “A car did come. Yuu had her eyes closed and didn’t notice. It slammed on the brakes, stopping right in front of her. The noise made Yuu sit up, wipe the meat sauce off her face, and turn around—only to find the bumper right in front of her. The bumper was polished silver, and her face was reflected in it …”
“You didn’t call out and warn her?”
“No. I watched in silence. I wanted to see what would happen.”
I searched her voice for any trace of guilt, but there was none. It must not be a quality she possessed. In this sense, she was a lot like me.
“We were twins, so we looked the same. We thought alike too. But our personalities were a little different. My sister was weak.”
A bus passed in front of the bench where we were sitting. It stopped and waited for us to get on, but Morino didn’t move, so it pulled away, leaving the stench of its exhaust behind.
The sun had reached the horizon, and the sky in the east was dark. A wind was blowing, shaking the dry grass beyond the guardrail.
Morino sat low on the bench, her hands clasped tightly together on her knees.
“We spent a lot of time thinking about death. Where would we go when we died? What would happen to us? We found these ideas fascinating. But I think I knew more about death than Yuu, and I was a much crueler child.”
With no expression, Morino told me how she’d ordered Yuu to do all kinds of things.
“At the time, we kept an animal in the shed. It had four legs, drooled a lot, and stank—you know the type I mean.”
Presumably, it had been a dog. I was surprised to hear she had once had a pet dog.
“I ordered Yuu to mix bleach into its food. I wasn’t trying to make it turn white or anything dumb like that. I just wanted to see it suffer.”
Yuu had begged Yoru to stop.
“But I didn’t listen, and I forced her to put the bleach in the dog’s food. She didn’t want to, but I didn’t let her stop.”
Eating bleach didn’t kill the dog, but it was very sick for two days. Morino’s parents and grandparents had nursed the dog, looking worried. It had convulsed and moaned in pain all day and all night, its howls echoing across the mountain sky.
Yoru observed it all, but Yuu had been too scared; she’d stayed in the house, her hands over her ears.
“Yuu cried a lot.”
Yoru had observed her sister just as she had the dog. Rather than give the dog the bleach herself, she’d placed all the guilt squarely on Yuu. Yoru’s experiment had allowed her to observe both the dog and her sister suffering.
Yoru and Yuu had played at hanging themselves too, but only once.
“To be more accurate, our game stopped one step short of hanging ourselves. It was raining out. We couldn’t go outside, so we were playing in the shed. This was a month or two before Yuu died.”
The sisters each had placed a wooden box on the floor of the shed, piling a second box on top of the first. They’d stood on top of the boxes, placing their necks in a loop of rope hanging from the beam overhead. All they had to do next was jump off the boxes and die.
“I said we would jump on the count of three—but I was lying: I wasn’t going to jump. I was going to watch Yuu as she was strangled to death.”
One … two … three. On the count of three, neither one did anything. Neither girl jumped, and there was a long silence.
“Yuu had guessed what I was thinking, so she didn’t jump. When I asked her why she hadn’t jumped, she just stood there looking terrified.”
Yuu couldn’t point out how unfair it was, so she stood and took Yoru’s flood of insults.
“You bullied Yuu?”
“You could call it that. But I wasn’t conscious of it at the time. Most of the time, we got along fine. And Yuu did her own share of awful things. She was better at pretending to be dead and scaring people than I was.”
“Did your family know what your relationship was like?”
“No.”
Morino fell silent, staring at the road in front of her. A car passed by. It was getting dark around us, so the car had its lights on. For a moment, her profile was caught in the light. The wind was blowing her hair around, and several strands were stuck to her cheek.
“Yuu died during summer vacation when we were in second grade. It was sunny that morning, but it got cloudy quickly, and by noon it had begun to rain …”
Shortly after noon, their mother had gone shopping. Their father was not at home, and their grandparents were out as well. Only the twins were home.
At first, the rain was barely more than a mist, tiny drops on the window, but it gradually grew stronger, and the drops on the window swelled and began trickling down the pane.
“At about twelve thirty, I saw Yuu go into the shed. She didn’t say anything to me, so I assumed she wanted to do something alone, and I didn’t follow.”
Yoru sat reading alone.
About an hour later, she heard the front door open. When she went to see who it was, Yoru found her grandmother with a bag of pears.
As her grandmother closed her umbrella, she explained, “Our neighbor gave me these. Shall I peel one for you?”
“I said I would go call Yuu, leaving my grandmother in the entrance and running to the shed.”
Yoru opened the shed door—and saw it. She screamed at once.
“Yuu was hanging from the ceiling, a rope around her neck. I went back to the front door, where my grandmother was standing with the pears in her arms, surprised to see me panic-stricken.”
She told her grandmother that Yuu was dead.
Yuu had hanged herself. lt was a suicide, but an accident. The rope around her neck was not the only one; around her chest, just under her arms, there was a second rope—a rough, heavy rope, the kind used in farming. One end was tied around Yuu’s body, and the other end was hanging behind her like a tail. The same kind of rope was hanging from the ceiling beam. It had all been part of one rope originally—but it had broken.
“My sister hadn’t meant to die. She’d meant to hang from the rope around her chest and pretend she’d hanged herself, to scare everyone else. But the moment she jumped, her weight had been too much, and the rope broke.”
Yuu’s funeral had been a quiet one. And that was the end of the story.
I had one more question, but I didn’t ask it. I just watched Morino’s tired face, listening to her sigh.
The sun had set by now. The lamps along the side of the road were on, and a light in the side of the bus stop illuminated the time schedule. We sat on the bench, bathed in the glow of white light around the bus stop.
In the distance, I could see a pair of headlights. The big square shadow behind them must be a bus. Soon I could hear the engine, and then it stopped in front of us.
Morino stood up and stepped through the open door. I left the bench as well.
We didn’t say goodbye; we didn’t even look at each other.
✦ ✦ ✦
iii