i
✦ ✦ ✦
Every now and then, members of my family had temporarily left the house, such as when my father had gone on a business trip or my mother had gone traveling with a friend; each time, the house seemed strangely emptier than it did when all four of us were living there. When I was away on a field trip, my parents and older sister might well have felt the same way, as if there was something missing, as if I should have been there. When the missing family member returned home, everything would be back to normal, and the four of us could see one another again. The house was the size we were used to, comfortably cramped in a way that allowed me to trip over my sister’s outstretched legs when I passed in front of the TV.
There had been four of us … but now my sister was never coming back, and when we sat at the table together, there would always be an extra chair.
Nobody knew why my sister had been murdered, but my older sister, Kitazawa Hiroko, had died seven weeks ago. Someone had killed her twelve hours after we’d last seen her, and the body had been found in an abandoned hospital on the edge of the city.
I’d never actually been inside that hospital, but I had once looked at it from the outside, after my sister had been discovered. It was a cold place, nothing there but dry grass. The ground was gravel, and the wind turned my shoes white with sand. The hospital was a big, derelict concrete square, looming like a massive cast-off shell. All the glass in the windows was broken, and it was dark inside.
It hadn’t been long after my sister had been found inside that I’d seen the place, so the entrance was sealed with tape, and there were police going in and out.
My sister had been found in there by some children. The police had not released any information, but the room where she’d been found had once been an operating chamber.
The body had been badly damaged, and it had not been easy to identify, but they contacted us when they found her bag nearby. My mother had answered the phone.
It was around noon, less than a day since we’d last seen my sister, and my mother had assumed the call was a prank.
But the body was definitely my sister’s. This was not determined by having those of us who knew her—me, my parents, and my sister’s boyfriend, Akagi—identify her. Instead, they used medical charts and several complicated forensics tests.
The police didn’t release many details about her condition when she was found or how she had been killed. The world only knew that she had been strangled and cut up with a knife of some kind. That was horrible enough for the news to make a fuss about it, but the truth was far worse.
The police apparently decided that the truth about what had happened to her would have a detrimental effect on society, and so they kept everything secret. Even the kids who had found her were ordered to keep silent.
My parents had demanded that the police and doctors show them her body. The authorities were reluctant. It was impossible to make her presentable, and they had decided we were better off not seeing her.
I don’t believe my parents had ever doted on my sister excessively while she was alive. Their relationship with her had been an ordinary one: chatting about TV commercials, arguing about where the newspaper had wandered off to … We were that kind of family. They had never bragged about her, and I had never known how much they loved her until I saw their faces covered in tears when they learned of her death.
“Let us see her!” my father begged, desperate. His face was bright red, and he looked positively furious. When the doctors and police realized that he wouldn’t back down, they reluctantly allowed my parents to enter the room where the body lay.
I watched them vanishing through the double doors from the hall. I was too terrified; I couldn’t understand how anyone could be brave enough to look at her.
I could hear a doctor and a police detective talking. They didn’t know I was standing in the shadow of the stairs.
The detective said it had taken ages to pick up all the pieces.
My shoes squeaked on the floor, and he turned around and saw me. He bit his lip, wincing at his mistake.
The pieces of my sister’s body. I stood there, letting the meaning of those words sink in.
When my parents came out of the morgue, I asked about her body. But they were completely stunned. They’d been crying so hard before, but after they went in that room, neither one of them ever cried again. They stared silently at the floor, not making eye contact with anybody. It was like they had left their emotions in that room. Their faces looked oddly yellow, like unmoving masks.
The police would say nothing about the body, and everything about it remained inside a black box as far as the world was concerned. Because of that, the initial flurry of news reports soon died down. Seven weeks after she was murdered, both the police and the press stopped coming to our house.
✦ ✦ ✦
†