It was the day a suspect was first apprehended in what everyone was calling the Tokyo Ripper case. Yukari’s family members were all away on a camping excursion for the elementary schoolers, so I was at Yukari’s house, planning to spend the night. We slept over at each other’s houses pretty often, but my place had a noisy dojo attached to it: hers had two loud little kids who wouldn’t leave their big sister alone. I was looking forward to having some quiet time alone with her, but when I arrived around noon, she seemed on edge. She stayed that way.
The Tokyo Ripper arrest was in the morning paper and on the midday news. Yukari was glued to the TV. She barely replied when I talked to her. When the news wrapped up, she changed the channel to see if another station was covering the case. Once she’d confirmed the TV news reports had finished their coverage, Yukari spread out the newspaper and practically bored a hole through the picture of the suspect. She seemed so distraught over it. I didn’t ask her about it, though. I just watched.
Then she told me, “Excuse me for a second,” got a look of determination, and started placing a call. She walked out into the yard with the portable receiver, like she didn’t want me to hear her conversation. I lay down on the veranda, observing the plastic model robots in front of me while passively catching some of what Yukari was saying.
“Hello… Yes, this is Marii. Well… Yes, I saw it in the paper, but…he doesn’t look like the culprit in my eyes.”
I jolted upright and looked at Yukari.
Yukari had already hung up. She caught my gaze and smiled weakly at me. “Sorry, Gaku-chan. Ah, some people are going to be coming tonight.”
They arrived earlier, actually—they reached her house in the evening. There were two of them, a middle-aged man perfectly decked out in a suit and a somewhat younger man who gave off a vague sense of unreliability. Somehow I knew they were with the police before they even introduced themselves.
The two men came from the yard up by the veranda. They were surprised and hesitant when they noticed me. The young guy with the briefcase started saying something with a scary expression, but the older guy stopped him. He probably noticed how Yukari had grabbed my elbow with her fingers, consciously or unconsciously trying to hide behind me.
The middle-aged guy asked, “Is everything okay?”
Yukari jumped away from me. Before she answered, I nodded to her and linked my arm with hers to show I wasn’t going anywhere.
The older guy fell quiet for a bit before he was ready to continue. With a single nod, standing in front of the veranda and making no move to come inside, he said, “All right, Marii-san, let’s get this over and done with. I’m sorry for everything, but…let’s begin.”
He turned to the young guy, who handed Yukari an envelope from his briefcase, while saying to me, “I advise you not to look.”
From the corner of my eyes, I could see a large number of predominantly red photographs emerge from the envelope.
Red blood.
Red, red severed flesh.
All kinds of red. Deep red, pale red, all shades decorating discolored skin. It only took a glance for me to realize these were shots of a murder scene, probably from the Tokyo Ripper case—not movie props.
It was all very real.
I hurried to look away. My consciousness was getting fuzzy around the edges. I would have fainted right then and there were it not for Yukari’s warmth. She took my arm, not so much hooking it in hers as squeezing it, as she looked at the pictures in her hands. Her body trembled, but her purple eyes stayed steady. I made up my mind then that if I couldn’t stand to look straight at the photos, I had to do what I could to support Yukari.
I don’t know how much time passed, but after a while, Yukari said, “I’m finished studying these.”
She handed off the pictures, and the young man said, “Have a look at these,” as he handed her a binder.
I braced myself for more horrors, but it turned out to be a scrapbook of photos of several different people. Were these dossiers or something? There were profiles of five people who each had something that looked like résumés with photos showing them from the chest up. There was no pattern among them: a middle-aged woman, an aging man, a girl in a sailor-style school uniform, just to name a few. They must not have been the original copies, because everything except the photos had been crossed out so you couldn’t read their name or address. Each of the documents had a few photos from different angles attached.
Yukari examined the photos and, staring intently at each one again and again. At last she pointed to one. “This is it,” she said.
The young man said incredulously, “Th-this girl?”
It was the sailor-style uniform girl, who had to be a minor—a high school girl at the oldest. The older officer didn’t flinch, but the young guy was obviously flustered by Yukari’s declaration.
But Yukari wasn’t shaken. She said, “Yes. I think it must be her. Of these people, she is the only one I can imagine causing this kind of destruction.” Then she shook her head with a panicked “Oh!” and added, “Um, that’s…just the way it looks to me. I can’t really say—”
“We know. We’re only using your opinion as a reference, Marii-san. Whatever happens, you don’t need to trouble yourself over it.” The man hesitated. “But I am sorry to involve you, a minor—”
“No. Don’t worry about it. After all, I’m the one who called you about this.”
✦ ✦ ✦
The two men took their leave from there. They never did leave the yard to come fully inside. And actually, Yukari’s parents called her from their campsite just as the pair was leaving, so I ended up being the one seeing the guys off. It was already nighttime. The sun had gone to sleep when I wasn’t looking.
Just as the older guy was about to get into the car waiting in front, he turned to me and mumbled, “Do you…well, know about Marii-san?”
“Yes. I know.”
He shrugged my words off with a “Hmm,” took a cigarette from his shirt pocket, and lit it. The lit end was so red against the dark night. The older guy took a long drag, let out the smoke, and then for some reason, abandoned the cigarette into a portable ashtray he took out from his pocket. He made eye contact with me again and said, “Marii-san’s eyes are a gift that’s hard to come by.”
“I suppose so, yeah,” I said.
“I hope…you can support her properly.”
“I will, definitely.”
The man nodded, smiled in a way that looked self-deprecating, got in the car, and left.
I watched the taillights until they disappeared. Then I went back to where Yukari was waiting for me.
One week later, the newspaper reported that the suspect in the Tokyo Ripper case had been released.
✦ ✦ ✦
Yukari might have been a goddess at assembling model kits and home appliances, but she had other more important skills. Her ability to see living things as robots was, in itself, her true talent—the heavenly blessing that made her who she was, and also a curse. She had no option to reject it or turn her back on it. All of her happiness and misery depended on this talent of hers, so she had no choice but to accept it unconditionally. To reject fully it would be to reject Marii Yukari as a whole.
So I won’t reject it. I’ll accept it.
I’ll never reject her purple eyes.