After that, Rukana went to school as little as possible. She spent the rest of her time in elementary school taking tests and meeting with her homeroom teacher in the nurse’s office, and she was ultimately allowed to graduate as scheduled. Needless to say, she didn’t go to her graduation ceremony.
A little while after the ceremony took place, Rukana received an e-mail from Kogarezawa. He’d written to tell her that his father was being transferred and that their family would be moving to Tokyo. Rukana’s parents weren’t at home when she read the e-mail, so she was free to scream as loudly as she wanted to.
“As if I care, asshole!”
Rukana didn’t attend her middle school entrance ceremony, either. She did put on her uniform to show her parents, though. She was hoping to convince her father to buy her a new computer and needed to be on his good side. Her mother wanted to take pictures, but Rukana refused.
When she learned that Itoha Hiiragi was once again in her class in middle school, Rukana wondered if fate was conspiring against her. When she flipped through her new textbooks, she found nothing written in them but basic, uninteresting drivel. Rukana knew that she was smart enough to get through school with only a little self-study, and after doing some searching around online, she managed to get her hands on materials used by high-level cram schools. She could even watch video lectures from top-level overseas universities. What was the point of going to middle school anyway?
Despite this, Rukana’s school requested that she at least try to attend school in the nurse’s office whenever she could manage it. Asking if they were joking or flatly refusing the offer would have felt childish, so she ended up accepting, though she made a show of how hard it was on her and how brave she was being.
And so began the life of Rukana Shizukudani the delicate, emotionally vulnerable middle school first-year. She usually started her day at around ten or eleven in the morning and stayed up until three or four AM, earning her six to eight hours of sleep a night. Her father worked on weekdays, and her mother had a part-time job three or four days a week. Even when she wasn’t working, Rukana’s mother often went out to shop or do chores. Rukana loved it when her parents weren’t around.
Rukana started her days off with a shower, then checked the refrigerator for something to eat and drink, grabbing some snacks for the day as well. Then she’d head back to her room and power on her computer. Once it was turned on, all she had to do to operate it was think—her four-legged thing would do the rest for her. Rukana would put on her headphones, then start by watching the exact same video every single day: the music video for a song titled “Composition #1” by someone who went by the single letter S. A jumbled mixture of images would begin to play along to electronic music and the sound of a synthetic voice.
I know no compassion / I know no sorrow
The path I walk / Is rough and unclear / Has no one walked it before?
I was there with eight others / No chair for me to sit in
Feel no joy / No sense of delight
Your mind is empty / Opened without a sound / A void left within
No one knows me / Today you’ll know why
Never stopped to smell the flowers / Your heart hidden in your spine
Windswept wastelands / I’ll race through them / And take your mind
Never-ending feelings gone / The needless never known
The path I walk / Is never returning / Do I play, be played, and throw it all away?
Every boat is doomed to sink / But I’ll cross no bridges
Do you have no talent? / You stood on missing legs / No choice but to drown in the rapids?
No one knows me / Can’t stand up ten times in one day
Never stopped to smell the flowers / Your heart hidden in your spine
Windswept wastelands / I’ll race through them and take your mind
You’ve set a path for spring / Your heart hidden in your spine
I’ll shut my ears to all your songs and fly from the brink to take your mind
Don’t find me / Or you’ll be claimed / But first let me dwell / In a brand-new today
Take your mind / If only I can / Take your mind / Take your mind
S had written other songs as well. Every one of their titles was simply “Composition,” followed by a numeral. Those songs and the music videos associated with them had been uploaded to video-sharing sites where anyone could watch them. Rukana had first discovered them on one such site herself. The song’s composition was eccentric and gloomy, and its lyrics were almost nonsensically obtuse, but Rukana found herself strangely drawn to it. Then, when she looked into the song’s background, everything suddenly made a lot more sense.
About seven or eight years before, a man named Yoshiki Ueyama had died in the Hachioji Ward of Tokyo under suspicious circumstances. His cause of death was determined to be heart failure, but something very notable was missing from his corpse: the brain. Despite a total lack of external injuries, Ueyama’s brain was mysteriously absent.
Corpses in much the same state soon turned up in two of the prefectures surrounding Tokyo: Saitama and Chiba. The crimes were seen as linked, but at the time, none of the major media outlets reporting on the cases mentioned the victims’ missing brains. That detail was only covered by a few less-reputable weekly magazines but spread like wildfire once it reached the internet.
S uploaded “Composition #1” immediately after the seventh brainless body was discovered in Kasukabe, a city in Saitama. It wasn’t long before theories began to spread online that the song and the incidents might be linked—and not long after, an eighth victim was found in the Setagaya Ward of Tokyo. Speculation ran rampant: Could the song have been a way for the perpetrator to announce their crimes ahead of time?
According to the prevailing theory, the first line of the song, “I know no compassion / I know no sorrow,” expressed the killer’s unfeeling, merciless attitude. The second line, “The path I walk / Is rough and unclear / Has no one walked it before?” was the killer extolling the unprecedented nature of their crimes, and the line after, “I was there with eight others / No chair for me to sit in,” alluded to the location of the first body, since the first character in Hachioji means “eight.” The second body was alluded to in much the same way in the line “Today you’ll know why”—it was found in Toda City, Saitama, and “Today” with no y makes “Toda.” The third body, found in Nagatsuka, Chiba, was alluded to by the line “Never-ending feelings gone / The needless never known,” on account of the first and last words in each section coming together to form NGTK—the first letter of each syllable in Nagatsuka.
The state of the bodies, meanwhile, was referenced in a number of lines. They “Feel no joy / No sense of delight,” on account of the fact that their “mind is empty,” with only “A void left within.” These segments were supposed to refer to the victims’ extracted brains.