Sketch 7 But aside from all this talk about religion and whatever a ghost is, I… What? I…When a person dies, they can connect in some way with everyone. I get that feeling. Who is “everyone”? I mean everyone who died before them. They die and then connect? By going to heaven or hell? No, that’s not what I mean. … Do you know about the collective unconscious? Ummm…what is that? Some psychologist came up with it, but it’s a concept saying that the unconscious in the deepest parts of a person’s spirit might be linked in something like a “sea of the unconscious” shared by all peoples. Wow. I don’t think that’s correct in those terms, but…I somehow feel like when people die, they all melt into this “sea” kind of thing. And maybe in there, everyone is connected. So then, when I die, I’ll be able to see my dad there? You won’t see him, you’ll connect with him. You’ll connect and, how should I put it? Your souls will become one… 1 We went around to the back entrance and entered the house, then headed for the grand entry. It was the middle of the day, but due to its large size and lack of windows, the whole foyer was dim. After sweeping her eyes around the room, Mei Misaki took quiet steps up to the mirror that hung on the wall. Tilting her head slightly to one side, she stared at the mirror, then turned around to look at me and asked, “Where did you fall?” “There.” I pointed at the floor. Not quite six feet in front of the mirror. “I was lying on my back and turned my face toward the mirror…” My limbs bent at bizarre angles. My forehead and cheeks covered with the blood streaming from somewhere on my head. A pool of blood gradually spreading over the floor…The horror of that night came vividly back to me. Mei nodded cursorily and took a deliberate step toward the spot I’d indicated. Then she looked up. “So around there in the second-floor corridor. Where the railing was broken.” “Right.” “It really is pretty high up. You really could die from that if you weren’t lucky.” She gave another cursory nod, then continued. “Also—according to the story you told me the other day, you were trying to say something right before you died. Do you remember what it might have been?” I told her the unadorned facts. The movements of my own lips that I had seen at the time. My own voice that I had heard at the time. As well as my thoughts from earlier on the shore as to what it might have meant. “What you said was ‘tsu’ and ‘ki’…” Mei folded her arms gravely. “I think it’s a stretch that you were saying ‘Lake Minazuki.’” “…Yeah. In which case, I suppose I was saying ‘Tsukiho’ after all.” But…why? “I don’t know…,” Mei murmured. She looked like she was going to say something else, but then changed her mind and once again transitioned: “Also—that clock over there…” She looked over at the hall clock. “It struck eight thirty, and then you said you heard someone’s voice, right? A voice calling your name, saying ‘Teruya’?” Yes. Someone calling my name in a soft cry (…Stop it). “Do you know whose voice it was?” Mei Misaki asked. “Like, was it Tsukiho’s voice?” “No.” I shook my head. “No, I don’t think it was her.” “So then…” On that night three months ago— The sight of myself in the mirror, edging toward death. Seeing the shape of the “someone” who had spoken reflected in one corner. It was… “It was Sou,” I answered. “Sou was at the bottom of the stairs that night…His eyes open wide, staring vacantly. And he said my name, ‘Teru…ya’…” Yes. That night, it wasn’t just Tsukiho who had come to the mansion. Sou was there, too. He must have witnessed my death. So maybe that was why one of the times I had appeared at the Hiratsuka house, I had talked to Sou in my thoughts as he lay on the sofa. It wasn’t just Tsukiho. Sou—you were there, too, that night… “Sou’s forgotten.” Mei seemed almost to be speaking to herself. “Because what he saw and heard here was such a shock.” 2 We went up to the second floor. After checking the railing where it showed signs of repair, Mei said, “I’d like to take a look in the library one more time,” and I assented. My mind flashed back to the scene on the afternoon three days ago when I had unexpectedly encountered her and I rested a hand on my chest. I was arrested by a strange feeling, as if in this body that was no more than a relic of life, the beating of a heart that was itself no more than a relic of life was thudding through my palm. Lost in this sensation, I preceded Mei into the room, then waved her in. That afternoon three days ago— It shouldn’t have been possible to see me, but she had; it shouldn’t have been possible to hear me, but she had. When I understood that she had this power, I was shocked. Utterly shocked and utterly confused…but I think at the same time, I was as happy as anything else. Joy, as if I had been rescued, if only for an instant, from the isolation that seemed likely to continue into eternity…Yes. That was how I had felt. And so— No doubt that was why I had gone on to tell her everything about myself, without the slightest hesitation. This girl a full ten years younger than me. Just at that moment, the owl clock above the decorative shelf announced the time. Four in the afternoon. After sweeping her gaze around the room in the same way she had in the grand entry, Mei Misaki took several quiet steps up to stand before the desk. Her eyes went to the computer on the desk; then, after tilting her head slightly, she reached out to the framed photo. “A photo that brings back lots of memories, hm?” she murmured, then her eyes fell on the slip of paper resting beside the frame. “That’s you…and Yagisawa, Higuchi, Mitarai, and Arai. And of them, Yagisawa and Arai are dead, right?” “Yes,” I answered solemnly. Mei looked at me. “And yet you got a phone call from Arai, who’s supposed to be dead?” “Yes…I did.” “That’s odd.” Mei put the frame back on the desk and puffed out one of her cheeks. “Is this Arai person a ghost, too? One of your peers maybe?” Next, Mei’s eyes stopped on the low chest of drawers arranged next to the desk. A handset for a cordless telephone was lying on top of it. It was part of a set with a charging stand. Without a word, she picked the handset up. As I was thinking, What is she doing? Is she going to make a call? she nodded and made a satisfied noise and put the handset back on its stand. “So that’s what it is.” “—Meaning what?” Completely ignoring my question, Mei asked me, “You said there are a couple rooms here on the second floor that are locked, right? I’d like to take a look inside them. Since I still have my physical body, do you think I’ll be able to?” “Well…um, sure.” I pointed at the shelf at the back of the room. “There’s a box over there with a couple keys inside. You should be able to open the doors with those.” 3 There were two locked rooms. Both were at the very back of the second floor. After taking a quick look around the other rooms—the bedroom and closet I used, several long unused spare bedrooms, a “hobby room” with audio equipment and cameras in it—I led Mei to those two rooms. Using one of the keys she’d brought from the box in the library, Mei opened the door. We could tell at a glance that the first was simply a storage room. Various cabinets and dressers were lined up against the wall, and several large boxes like hope chests were arranged in the remaining space. “This room…” Mei cocked her head, so I explained. “I kept my parents’ old things here.” “Your mother’s and father’s?” “My mother died eleven years ago. In Yomiyama in 1987 as part of the disasters. When we evacuated from Yomiyama before summer break, my father put her things in this room…” I told her the story, tracing out my memories of the past, the outlines of which had no lack of indistinct patches. “After that, we moved to a different house, but my father left this room the way it was. Then, when my father died and I came to live here six years ago, I put his things in here. I thought it would be nice to put them together.” “I see,” Mei Misaki responded shortly, her right eye crinkling. “Your mother and father were close, huh, Mr. Sakaki?” “…” “You loved them.” She let out a gloomy sigh, then asked, “Your body isn’t in here, is it?” “No.” I shook my head limply. “At least, it wasn’t. I looked inside the cabinets and the boxes, but I couldn’t find my body anywhere.” The next room Mei Misaki unlocked was also a room from the past, in a different sense from the first one. As soon as we stepped in and saw the interior of the room— “Oh…” A voice that could have been surprise or a groan slipped from her mouth. “…This is—” I already knew what I would see, but even looking around again, the sight was bizarre in a way. The room wasn’t all that big, but other than the one wall with the windows, every wall was covered in newspaper and magazine clippings or photocopies, photos, large pieces of simili paper covered in handwriting, and more. At the center of the room stood a long, narrow desk on which a jumble of newspapers, magazines, notebooks, and binders rested. “This…” Mei stepped gingerly over to a wall and leaned her face in close to one of the clippings hanging there. “‘Violent Death of Middle School Boy at School. A Tragic Accident Amid Preparations for Culture Festival?’…Did this happen at North Yomi? October 1985…So thirteen years ago. “This one’s even older.” She turned her gaze to another article. “December 1979. ‘Christmas Eve Tragedy. Home Destroyed by Fire, One Dead.’…The fire was caused by the candles on a Christmas cake? And it looks like the person who died was a student at North Yomi. In 1979, that might be one of the years that Mr. Chibiki was the head teacher for Class 3.” “Who’s that?” “He’s a librarian now, but at the time he taught social studies. You never heard of him?” “—I don’t remember.” “Oh.” “The article about the bus accident in 1987 is over there.” I pointed at where the article hung. “The other articles are all about past incidents that happened in Yomiyama, too. There are also some from after 1987. The handwritten stuff is a bunch of tables I wrote to summarize each year. I could only get my hands on so much information out here, so I doubt they’re complete.” “And the photos? Did you take them?” “Oh yes. Sometimes I went to the site of the accidents or nearby to see it with my own eyes…That’s when I took them.” “Ah…,” Mei murmured again, and wrapping her arms around her thin shoulders, she shuddered. After that, she walked along the wall for a while, her eyes running over each item hanging there, but in the end she let out a deep sigh, as if trying to calm herself. “You collected all of this, Mr. Sakaki?” she said by way of acknowledgment. “You were gathering information and documents about the disasters at North Yomi.” “Something like that, yes,” I agreed, but I didn’t feel any visceral reaction to it. You could almost say the sensation had withered away. Surely this was an aftereffect of my postmortem memory loss. “I think I mentioned this before, but I suppose I’ve been dragging out my experiences in Yomiyama from eleven years ago ever since. Still, that doesn’t mean that I was trying to somehow stop the disasters that kept happening at North Yomi after that or that I felt like I should or anything…I’m not sure how to put it. I felt like it had nothing to do with me anymore, but I still couldn’t forget about it, couldn’t get it out of my mind…so…” —I couldn’t forget about it, couldn’t get it out of my mind…so… “Like you were trapped by it?” Mei’s words had a sharpness to them. I lowered my gaze. “Trapped…Maybe that’s it.” “By the disaster that befell you eleven years ago. The death you witnessed back then.” —Trapped…Yes. Maybe that’s it. “Then your focus broadened from there, to the entirety of the disasters that have been going on at North Yomi since twenty-five years ago…” —Yes…That might be it exactly. “You were trapped the whole time. Still held prisoner.” “—Maybe so.” After a little while, we left this archive of the disasters, but as we did, Mei Misaki turned her eyes to the wall beside the door and came to an abrupt stop. There, in black oil-based ink, written directly on the drab, cream-colored wallpaper— Who are you? Who were you? Unmistakably written in my/Teruya Sakaki’s hand. 4 “When you died on the night in question three months ago, on May 3,” Mei began as we headed downstairs. “You’re sure that Tsukiho was here?” “Well…Yeah. I was having a conversation with her…I can still sometimes hear our voices. They sounded heated for some reason. I’m positive it’s from that night…” “I wonder why she came to see you.” “I think because it was my birthday.” I voiced the first thought that came to me when asked. “That day was my birthday…So I figure that she brought Sou and some sort of present over. And then, Sou was with her when…” The sight of Sou reflected in the mirror… The boy’s voice calling my name, “Teru…ya,” calling softly. His face horribly surprised, horribly frightened…his eyes wide and glassy. “So the two of them came over. Where were you and what were you doing when they came inside the house, Mr. Sakaki? Just what happened there?” Her tone suggesting she was half speaking to herself, Mei watched for my reaction. “So you still don’t remember?” “…” I remained silent, neither nodding nor shaking my head… (…What are you doing?) (What are you doing…? Teruya?) (…Stop it.) (…Don’t worry about it.) (You can’t…Don’t do it!) (Don’t worry about it…) (It’s…too late for me.) I purposefully dredged up the words Tsukiho and I had exchanged that night and tried to grasp the meaning behind them. Considering it anew in a calm light, there was one thing meaningful about it. That being— But wait. That was nothing more than a conjecture, a guess. I couldn’t manage to get the feedback/realization that “I remember that.” “Is there anything else missing besides that diary?” Mei Misaki asked after alighting in the grand entry. “I’m not sure…” I stumbled over my answer, and she fixed her eyes on me. “Like maybe a camera? “There were a bunch of cameras in the hobby room on the second floor, but they looked more like a collection of antiques, right?” “Oh, that could be.” “Last summer, when I met you on the beach, you had a single-lens reflex camera, right? It looked like it got a lot of use, like it was your favorite one. I don’t think I saw it up there. And I didn’t notice it in the library or any of the other rooms…” In all honesty, I didn’t really know. Because it was an issue I had never really thought about in that way till now. When I remained unable to answer, Mei cut across the room with a movement that seemed to say, “Fine. Whatever. “The library’s that way?” She pointed deeper into the house. “I’d like to take a look…Then the basement after that. Please stick with me a little longer, Mr. Ghost.” 5 “…Wow. This is like the school library. You have so many different books.” As she walked around the towering built-in bookshelves, Mei Misaki now spoke like the fifteen-year-old girl she was, voicing her thoughts with artless innocence. “My father had a sizable collection to get me started.” “There are lots of hard books here, too. Did you ever feel like just by being in here, you could understand all the world’s secrets?” “I’m not sure,” I replied, following along after Mei. “It would be impossible to understand them all. But…yes, I felt something sort of like that now and again.” “Whoaaa.” Mei turned around, and inclining her head slightly to one side, she looked straight at me. For some reason, that flustered me. “Uh, I mean…Is that weird?” “Not really,” she said, blinking her right eye. Then a faint smile crept over her lips. “I’ve experienced things like that myself.” After a bit more time, we left the library and— “This way.” We returned to the grand entry and entered a hallway connecting to the rear entrance. Despite being the middle of the day, when no lights should have been needed, due to the dimness of the hall, we almost didn’t see a dark brown door that stood partway down the hall. “Here,” I called Mei over. “This is the way down to the basement…” When I turned the antique-looking knob and opened the door, at first glance it looked like an empty closet, but at the back was a flight of stairs leading down to the basement. I turned on the lights for Mei and took the lead to descend the stairs. Still limping slightly on my left leg, the relic of life. There was another door at the bottom of the stairs, which opened onto a short hallway. The floor, walls, and ceiling were all coated with hard gray mortar, giving the space a rather bleak appearance. Two doors stood slightly apart from each other on one side. A jumble of old furniture was heaped at the end of the hall. “It looks like you’d stopped using this place very often,” Mei Misaki said. “It’s cold, and there’s so much dust…” She pulled a handkerchief out of a pocket in her shorts and held it to her nose and mouth. She put her cap back on her head, pulled it low over her eyes. Then we opened each of the two doors in turn and looked inside. “This looks like a storage spot for total junk.” The room before us was just that. Light from outside streamed in through a row of skylights opened in the back wall near the ceiling, so the room was dimly lit even without turning on any lights. Just as I had said, the floor was littered with the very definition of junk…dirty buckets, a washtub, a hose, scrap lumber, bits of rope, and for some reason pebbles and bricks. Mei only peered in from the hall and didn’t venture into the room. “Your body wasn’t here, either, right?” Once that was confirmed, we left the door to the room open. “What about this other room?” “Probably about the same, I’d guess,” I replied and opened the second door. Like the room beside it, it was dimly lit thanks to the light outside streaming in. But unlike the room next door, I could see evidence on the line of skylights near the ceiling that this room had once been used for a specific purpose. There was a curtain rod above the windows. And heavy black curtains at both ends of the rod. “A dark room…,” Mei whispered. “Did you develop photos in here?” “A long time ago,” I answered and stepped forward. “Photography was a hobby I inherited from my father originally. My father turned this basement into a darkroom a long time ago, and he would develop and print his own film…” “Did you use it, too, after your father died?” Mei asked, moving into the room. “Only for a little while right after I first moved into the house,” I answered. “At the time, I was still taking mostly monochromatic photos. So I developed them here. But I moved on to taking color photos exclusively.” “So you didn’t develop color photos yourself?” “Monochrome and color are totally different, and I didn’t have any idea what I was doing.” “Oh, I didn’t know that.” “So this darkroom has been abandoned ever since then.” “…I see” There was a large table covered in dust in the very center of the room, a box-shaped safelight…as well as a lot of other development equipment and tools I had once used that had been left uncared for. Actually, this room felt like more of an abandoned ruin than the storage room next door. “Of course, I searched every corner of this room, too,” I said with a sigh. “But my body isn’t here. I couldn’t find it.” “…Ah.” Mei nodded, then walked around the room for a bit before finally looking up at the skylights with the blackout shades once more and crossing her arms. “So we have that other room, and this former darkroom…Hmmm.” Unfolding her arms, she cast a glance back at me. “There isn’t, say…a floor plan of this mansion, is there?” “I don’t think so.” I dipped my head to the side, my face serious. “At least, I’ve never seen one.” 6 When we left the second room and came back into the hallway, Mei peeked once more into the room next door, and this time went in and picked her way around the junk. When she finally came back out, she crossed her arms again and held her head cocked to one side in silence for a bit. At this point, I, too, had begun to feel, tickling at the edges of my brain, that something somewhere was off. But after a little while, Mei said, “Well, let’s go,” and turned on her heel back toward the stairs. “There’s nothing more we can do here, anyway…,” I heard her murmur, but I didn’t follow her meaning— We went back to the grand entry. It was already past five thirty. The sun would be setting soon. 7 “I have to head home soon,” Mei Misaki had said, but I held her back for a few more moments. “Listen. I’m going to ask you something kind of strange.” Once we had returned to the grand entry, standing beside the hall clock that had stopped at 6:06…I looked at her. “Have you ever been in love?” “Wha—?” Caught off guard, Mei blinked both her differently colored eyes. “Love? You mean…” I suppose it would be surprising to be asked something like that out of the blue. I was surprised, too, and I was the one who had asked the question…Or rather, I was terribly perplexed. Even I didn’t have a clear idea of why I had asked a question like that. “…You know, I’m not sure. Ummm.” Mei Misaki cocked her head quite introspectively. “Er…well.” I was a bit flustered, but while I failed to find the words to smooth the situation over, a different question occurred to me, and before I had thought it through, I had given it “voice.” “Do you…want to grow up and be an adult right away? Or would you rather not?” Mei blinked again, and this time she inclined her head slightly, murmuring, “Mmm…” Finally— “Either way, I guess,” she answered quietly. “It doesn’t really matter what I want, after all, since I’m going to grow up either way. If I live, of course.” “…” “What about you?” When she turned the question back on me, I was at a loss for a quick answer. “Did you want to grow up? Or not?” “Well…” —But you know, it isn’t that great being grown-up. “I…” —I wish I could go back. To being a kid. “…I wish I could go back to being a kid.” “Huh. Why is that?” “Oh, I…” —Because I want to remember it, I suppose. “So what about love?” “Huh?” “Have you ever been in love?” “Oh, er…Well…” I floundered about for a response, and Mei Misaki kept her gaze fixed on me, her right eye crinkling coolly. “No?” At her prodding, I answered with what rose in my mind. “No, I…I have, I think. “But…” —I’m not sure I’m qualified to answer these questions. “…I can’t really remember.” —I can’t really remember. That’s why… Her right eye still narrowed, Mei Misaki cocked her head to one side, regarding me curiously. 8 “Say, did you…?” After a space of a few seconds, I started to speak again, but I realized that Mei’s eyes were fixed not on me, but on the telephone stand resting next to the wall. The base unit of the cordless phone was on it. Mei walked over to stand before the phone. She looked down at the black telephone in silence, then lifted her eyes toward me and asked, “This is the phone you heard Arai’s message on, right?” “Uh, yes,” I answered, unable to guess her reason for asking. She nodded, an expression of some sort of acceptance on her face. “The handset in the library was out of battery power.” “Oh…was it?” “Yeah. So it wouldn’t be able to ring when there’s a call…” An old friend, what’s-his-name Arai, who’s supposed to be dead. Why, despite that, had I gotten a phone call from a man with that name? Did she have an idea about this mystery? Before I could ask— “Here’s what I think about the Arai issue.” I tried to pluck one thought from my mind, which was, as always, full of indistinct patches and impossible to grasp in full. “When a person—” I said. “When a person dies, they can connect in some way with everyone…” “When they die, they’re connected?” Mei Misaki twisted her head in intense interest again, just like before. “Is that true?” “I get that feeling.” “And…when did you start thinking that?” “Before I died…A long time before, I think.” “…” “I really did die and became this ghost…But—I think I’ve said this before—I really don’t think what I am right now is the actual state of death. Not this halfway, unnatural, unstable condition.” “So in any case, that’s why you’re looking for your missing body. That’s what you’re getting at, right?” “Right. And then…If I find my body and Teruya Sakaki is properly mourned and recognized as deceased, then I’ll finally be able to die right. I’ll go to my rightful death. That’s how I feel.” “Hmm. I get the feeling we’ll find out at least that much somehow.” Mei moved away from the telephone stand and also put some distance between us as she stood in the center of the grand entry. Just then, in the sunset light that had dimmed the space considerably, the figure of the girl looked somehow like a “gray shade,” lacking a physical body just as I did. “When a person dies, they can connect in some way with everyone,” I repeated. “Who is ‘everyone’?” Mei asked. “I mean everyone who died before them,” I replied. “When a person dies, they melt into something like a sea of the unconscious shared by all peoples. And maybe in there, everyone becomes connected. “What do you think of that?” The gray shade didn’t move in the slightest, and the girl said nothing in reply. I went on. “I died three months ago, but since I’m still like this, I haven’t been able to melt into the sea. Although since I definitely did die, maybe an incomplete link forms sometimes. Namely, that—” “I see.” Mei glanced back at the telephone stand. “That call from Arai?” “Yeah.” I nodded. Although I wasn’t fully convinced myself yet. “The Arai who called me was indeed someone who had already died. Probably in the disasters eleven years ago. My death formed a link between us since we were both dead, and then…” “You got a phone call.” “Which didn’t sound much like a message from a dead person somehow…But well, that’s at least one hypothesis.” “It’s a pretty bold hypothesis,” Mei Misaki said, folding her arms again, but the girl had transformed back into that shade of gray and I couldn’t make out the expression on her face. 9 “I really have to go home now,” Mei had said, walking briskly toward the rear entrance. I had chased after her, outside the house. “Can I see you again tomorrow?” This is the opposite of yesterday— I thought, as I hesitantly made my request. Mei stopped in her tracks, turned back to look at me, and in that moment, I thought I saw a faint smile cross her lips. “Tomorrow…I’ll meet you here.” It was a mystery even to me why I had suggested it. Did I want to get together with her and conduct a search for the body like we’d done today? Or perhaps…Well, no, the reason didn’t matter. I decided to stop thinking so hard and asked, “You can come?” watching her reaction. “Hmm…tomorrow…” Mei pulled her cap down low over her eyes. “I have some stuff I need to do during the day…I’m not sure. Late afternoon should be fine. Maybe four thirty.” “Oh…okay.” “How about you and your ghost stuff?” she asked teasingly. “Will you be able to appear at that time? It won’t be too much trouble?” “Um, well…” Even if I wanted to appear at a set time and place, that wasn’t any guarantee that I would be able to do it. But hadn’t I managed to appear exactly how I wanted to today? So yes, if I made an effort, surely I could do it again tomorrow… “I’ll try and put in some effort.” When I gave this answer, Mei’s eye (not her doll’s eye) grew a little round. “Oh,” she whispered. “Okay. Well…see you tomorrow at four thirty, then.” “I’ll be in the hall like I was today. Go ahead and come in.” “—I will.” With that, Mei spun around. As I watched the girl walk away under the deep purple of the evening sky, I rested a hand on my chest. I felt the tiny rhythm of that relic of life. For some reason it beat a little wildly, th-thmp, as if it would begin racing, but just as quickly it disappeared…The hollow darkness opened its mouth. I was swallowed up helplessly.
Chapter 128
26 min read