Given that my mother had always been a staunch atheist, I found it rather shocking in retrospect that she ever entertained the idea of being joined in holy matrimony with him, even if it had ultimately been short-lived. But even so, there was a time when the two of them were deeply in love, which I assumed made the prospect of marriage seem rather enticing despite their wildly different beliefs. Not to imply that my mother ever openly criticized him for his faith, to my knowledge—obviously, she knew better than to do that in a country that guaranteed religious freedom to all. The only thing she did do, as far as I could recall, was forbid him from taking me along to church on Sundays. She apparently felt quite strongly that it was not his right to indoctrinate me into Christianity, especially when I was far too young to make that decision for myself.
And so my father lived his life guided by God, and my mother lived hers guided by science—and for the initial honeymoon period of their marriage, they apparently did make a concerted effort to accept each other’s beliefs. But it didn’t last for long.
I distinctly remembered one instance toward the end of their marriage when my father wasn’t around, and my mother let her true feelings show.
“Surely, he can’t actually believe in any of that nonsense…” she had sneered. “Some divine, benevolent deity, just floating up there in the sky? Ridiculous…”
After the divorce papers were signed and it was decided that my father would have to move out, my mother wasted no time at all in disposing of his remaining effects, including the various religious ornaments he’d left sitting around the apartment. There was a small statue of the Virgin Mary he received from a member of his congregation, a decorative angel he brought back as a souvenir from one of his trips abroad… There had been so many colors, so many things in this apartment back when my father still lived here—and she got rid of every single one. Now this place was little more than a sterile, lifeless cage for the two of us to exist in together—a space for eating, sleeping, and nothing more.
Like my mother, I was also nonreligious. I never once entertained the notion of there being an almighty being. And even if I had been a believer at one point, the fact that I was now contemplating suicide should be proof enough that I wasn’t anymore. Taking one’s own life was considered a major taboo, not just in Christianity, but in all the world’s major religions. To my knowledge, the act was generally considered to put an irremovable taint on one’s soul in the next life. One of the fundamental tenets of Christianity, for example, was that life was a divine gift bestowed upon us by God, and to take one’s own was to willfully squander that gift, thereby spitting in the face of God. The relatively high proportion of nonreligious people amongst the Japanese population was often cited as a major contributor to Japan’s high suicide rate compared to the rest of the world.
Surely, if I held even the slightest hint of faith in my heart, then the mere thought of suicide would send shivers of fear and shame down my spine. If I believed that I owed my life to my creator like my father did, then I wouldn’t even be considering this.
Owing my life to my creator… Gee, where have I heard that one before?
Indeed, that train of thought was almost eerily reminiscent of one of my mother’s favorite stock comebacks, which she loved to whip out anytime she felt I was being too obstinate, or ungrateful, or combative.
“If I hadn’t brought you into this world, you wouldn’t even be here right now. Show a little gratitude, why don’t you?”
That line of logic always struck me as a bit funny, because while I admittedly had no recollection of being born, I was fairly certain I had little say in the matter. But if I had my way, I’d at least make sure that when I died, it would be on my own terms. Not anyone else’s.
During one of my break periods at cram school, I pulled out my smartphone and started a new group DM with Aoi and Ryo. We talked for a while about the surreal experience we all shared the other day.
“Guess ghosts really are real, huh,” wrote Aoi. “Kinda spooky to think about it now that I had time to dwell on it.”
Apparently, her fear of the supernatural had only gotten worse—which seemed odd to me initially, given how well she and Ayane had hit it off. However, it seemed to be more the thought of less-friendly ghosts that could hypothetically be lurking in any random dark corridor that was giving her anxiety as of late.
Ryo, on the other hand, seemed to have achieved a whole new level of inner peace. “Me? I couldn’t be less afraid after meeting her. Hell, I’m grateful. Now I’m not so afraid of dying anymore,” he wrote. “What’s your take on it, Tomoya?”
“Don’t really have one, honestly,” I replied. “If anything, I just wish we could’ve had more time to talk with her. Wanted to know more about what comes after death—though I guess she did say she doesn’t know a whole lot about it herself.”
She led us to believe that she’d been in a sort of purgatory state, wandering aimlessly around this general area as a ghost ever since she died. She also claimed that she had yet to encounter even a single other dead person, and that she figured they’d all been sent on to the next life without her. If we assumed that this world and the next one really did exist on two totally separate “layers” of existence, then it stood to reason that perhaps she had been left behind somewhere in between—which would explain why she only became visible to us while the two layers briefly overlapped each other, thereby bridging it.
After talking about the Summer Ghost for a while, the three of us switched over to more mundane conversation topics. Aoi had apparently been spending her summer break cooped up in her bedroom doing nothing but playing video games all day. Ryo had been going back and forth from the hospital pretty much nonstop. He had a whole cocktail of drugs he needed to take each day. It sounded really rough.
“What about you, Tomoya-kun? What have you been up to lately?” asked Aoi.
“Cram school,” I replied. “All day, every day. Those entrance exams aren’t gonna study for themselves.”
During this time of year, when most college hopefuls were on summer vacation, most cram schools ran special, extra-hardcore short courses for people like me. They ran from morning to night, and you studied until your eyes started to bleed from staring at workbook problems all day.
“What’s even the point, dude?” Ryo asked bluntly. “I mean, you’re just gonna off yourself anyway, right? Why go through the stress of studying for exams?”
“For real!” Aoi agreed. “If I were you, I’d totally ditch. I mean, who needs studying where we’re going? Screw that noise!”