The next thing she was aware of was the smell of alcohol. Not liquor, but the sharp stink of disinfectant that stung the back of the nose.
Her eyelids rose, slow and heavy, revealing a white ceiling. The white wall to her side wavered. The wallpaper bulged and flowed, as though carried on the breeze. After a moment, she recognized that it was a cloth curtain.
A white screen. The kind found in…
A hospital.
Mio blinked twice. At some point, she’d fallen asleep in a bed somewhere. She sat up and looked down at herself. She still had the same clothes on.
“You’re awake?” The curtains parted with the question. Kaname Shiraishi’s face appeared. She was relieved to see him, even more so because he was acting as he usually did.
“Kaname…”
Why was she here? What happened? The answers wouldn’t come for a moment, but the sight of his face brought them back.
The tea party with all the housewives. Hatch rushing to the woman writhing in agony. The visit to the other apartment, Unit 302. What they saw behind the sliding door.
Hanaka on the bed, her eyes blank.
“I’m sorry, I—”
She paused to gasp. Behind Kaname, who’d pulled open the curtains to peer at her, beyond the bright fluorescent light, was another bed. When she saw its occupant, she sprang to her feet.
“Hanaka!”
It was Hanaka.
Mio only felt able to rush to her friend because Hanaka was sleeping peacefully now, quite unlike how she appeared in the apartment. Her abnormally long hair was still unkempt, and she looked gaunt, but her pale cheeks held a bit of color. She felt alive, much closer to the Hanaka Mio remembered. She wasn’t wearing those pajamas anymore. They’d been traded for a hospital gown.
Mio looked to Kaname. He pointed under the bed she’d been sleeping in.
“Your shoes.”
He was pointing at her sneakers. Mio suddenly realized she was barefoot. She put the sneakers on, thanked Kaname, and inspected their surroundings.
It was dark beyond the window. Night had come already.
An ambulance siren echoed in the distance.
“Where are we? The hospital?”
“Yeah. Katagiri General Hospital’s helping us this time.”
“You brought me here?”
“Yeah.”
“Sorry. I guess I didn’t help very much after all…”
“Nah, it’s fine,” he grunted.
Mio made up her mind to tell him. She gazed at the sleeping Hanaka, so much more peaceful than before, and said, “Thank you.”
“Huh?”
“You helped me see Hanaka again, like you promised. You saved her.”
“Nah,” Kaname grunted again evasively. He didn’t seem bashful or embarrassed, just unsure of how to have an actual conversation.
“Is Hanaka going to be all right?”
“She is. I know so.”
“Have you contacted her parents?”
“I did. But I’m having them wait a bit before they see her. There’s still something left to do tonight.”
“‘Left to do’?” Mio repeated. That was quite vague, but Kaname didn’t elaborate.
Hanaka’s parents undoubtedly wished to see their daughter as soon as possible. Mio felt bad for them, knowing Hanaka’s condition and how worried they were for her. However, they had to do as Kaname said for now.
I knew it would end up like this. I’ve already seen several unthinkable things happen today.
From the window, Mio saw the lights of the city. She examined the neon signs and the other sights viewable from the hospital room and realized she didn’t know where they were.
Was it close to the complex where they’d found Hanaka? Or was it by Sawatari Apartments? Mio wasn’t familiar with the name Katagiri General Hospital.
The room had two beds: one by the window, where Hanaka slept, and the one where Mio had awoken.
She looked down at Hanaka’s face, and sadness built in her chest.
“When she wakes up, will I be able to talk with her like before?”
“Yeah. Maybe not right away.”
“Will she remember everything? Like, what she was doing?” Mio asked. Her breaths turned short. “What was she doing there?”
“I can only imagine, but I believe she was doing that the whole time.”
Mio’s eyes widened. That, meaning sitting in the dark room smelling of rain and mold and a whiff of sugar, all alone, peering into empty space without moving…
“She was inside like that, all alone? For almost two years?”
“Probably.”
“But that’s just…” Mio paused to collect herself. “That’s just awful. In the last two years, I graduated high school and started college. And Hanaka’s done nothing but stay locked in that room, wasting away? It’s just horrible. There’s no way to make that better.”
“You sure about that?”
Mio eyed Kaname with surprise. As usual, it was very hard to read the look in his eyes.
“She can make up for two or three years, can’t she?” he asked.
“‘Make up for’…?”
Mio thought it ghastly that he could talk about this stuff right in front of the victim. Maybe that was just the way of things. Nothing would come of arguing with him. He was always out of step with the rest of the world anyway.
But Mio couldn’t let this be the end. It wasn’t someone else’s problem to deal with. If not for her good fortune, she could’ve easily been the one in Hanaka’s position. Itta Kanbara had first set his sights on her. She’d made it out fine because Kaname had saved her, and if not for that, she would have suffered Hanaka’s fate.
“Why did Kanbara-senpai take Hanaka there?”
“I think Hanaka was the replacement Itta Kanbara.”
“‘Replacement’?”
“Remember what I said? The family replenishes its lost members. They turned Ritsu Mikishima into Kaori Kanbara to make her the new wife and mother. So, being the closest in age, I’m guessing they turned Hanaka into the family’s new ‘eldest son.’”
“‘Eldest son’…?”
There were two children in the family. An older son about college age, and a young son in elementary school…
“This is only conjecture, but I believe that Hanaka may have been a kind of emergency replacement for the Kanbara family. I inflicted too much damage, and they lost their older son earlier than expected, so they had to take her instead. They wanted a son, but because this one was of a different gender, she was unable to adequately fill the role of Itta Kanbara. So there was no choice but to let her become a shut-in and stay inside.”
“All of this stuff about taking over and replacing family members. What does it mean?”
“Ah…”
Kaname inhaled. His answers were always a bit short and gruff, but if you asked, he would tell you. Mio just had to wait a little longer than expected.
“Do you remember the old Itta Kanbara? The one who died in the mountains of Mie Prefecture?”
“You mean my senpai from the track team?”
“Yes.”
He’d treated Mio terribly, and she’d escaped only because Kaname saved her in the nick of time. Still, hearing him say “died” left a terrible weight in Mio’s chest. She didn’t care for him anymore, yet hearing his name and remembering his face brought the feeling to mind whether she liked it or not.
“I failed,” Kaname stated. “I wanted to start with Itta Kanbara and track down the whole family to wipe them out, but I wounded him more than was necessary. On top of that, I didn’t foresee the family fleeing so quickly. I was naive, and that made things worse for you and Hanaka.”
He approached Hanaka’s bed and gazed at her sleeping face. The siren still wailed outside.
“I didn’t notice that Kanbara went after someone besides you, Miss Harano. I suspect Itta Kanbara perished while on the run after I wounded him. He took Hanaka when he realized his death was close at hand, to make her his replacement.”
“What was the cause of Senpai’s death?” Mio questioned, her pulse hastening. She’d only heard that he’d died in Mie. Even hearing “perished” from Kaname’s lips didn’t make it seem any more real.
Kaname stared at her without saying anything, then took out his smartphone. After a few taps, he showed her a news article on the screen.
Victim of suicide by hanging found in Mie mountains identified.
Mio gasped.
“He killed himself?”
“Yep.”
Mio skimmed the article. It was dated about a month after the body was found.
On the seventh of last month, the body located in the mountains of Mie Prefecture was identified as Yukiya Yasuda, who went missing in Hokkaido seven years ago as an elementary school student…
Her eyes locked on the unfamiliar name: Yukiya Yasuda.
There was no photo of him in the article. But Mio could easily imagine a younger version of the senpai she had known. It was difficult to breathe.
“This is Senpai? This person named Yukiya Yasuda?”
“Yes. The nth-generation Itta Kanbara, older son of the Kanbara family.”
“But why suicide?”
“Being part of that family, going outside your original humanity and spreading death and darkness around you, can be very tiring,” Kaname explained, his eyes fixed on Hanaka’s face. His words seemed to echo the gauntness of Hanaka’s cheeks. “The closer you drag others to death, the closer to death you become. So even as they pull others down into darkness, they are always on the hunt for those who can become them.”
“Why?”
“I can’t really answer that, other than to say it’s just how they are,” Kaname replied uncertainly. He shook his head. “That’s how exhausting it is to be a member of the Kanbara family, and maybe it’s an indication of how badly they wish to escape it. You may not want to hear this after everything Itta Kanbara did to you, but the way he cornered you, spread his darkness around you, and insulted you wasn’t something he could control. It wasn’t his own will. As they are forced to play the family role, they get closer to their own deaths.”
Kaname looked at the bag of IV fluid strung up over Hanaka’s bed. “Take Kaori Kanbara, for example. I banished the darkness from Ritsu Mikishima today. Before her, Keiko Kashiwazaki was Kaori Kanbara, until she fell from the hallway at Sawatari Apartments. She probably jumped on her own, and did so to make Ritsu her replacement.”
“So the people who become a part of the family were originally just ordinary people?” Mio stared at the name Yukiya Yasuda on the phone screen. She chose the words ordinary people very carefully.
After a short, hesitant silence, Kaname admitted, “I think the Itta Kanbara you met was originally a normal boy. From what I heard, the Itta Kanbara before him joined the baseball team near his home in Hokkaido, and that was how he worked his way in. Yasuda was the team captain, a very bright and sociable boy. However, he began to set harsher rules for the team, steadily worsening things. A year later, over a dozen people involved with the team were dead, including coaches and former members. Ultimately, Yukiya Yasuda vanished.”
Mio recalled the desolate apartment where they’d found Hanaka. It was impossible to imagine a family spending time together and chatting there. What kind of life did he and his family have in such a place?
And that gave Mio another thought.