“Did you bring the tape?” I asked Mochizuki once we’d put our bags in our room and relaxed a little. His expression went instantly hard, and he nodded solemnly.
“Yeah. I brought a small tape player, too. All we had at my house was a tape deck, but Tomoka lent me this one.”
“Did you tell her what it’s for?”
“I didn’t really explain what’s on the tape. She asked me about it, but I didn’t feel like I could talk about it.”
“Oh.”
I lay down on a bed, then crossed my arms and put them behind my head. I thought back to four days ago when, on the afternoon of August 4, Teshigawara and I had gone over to Mochizuki’s house.
Mochizuki had called the night before to say, “I fixed the tape.” And so the next day, we’d quickly gotten together to listen to it.
Remembering my promise to Mei, I tried calling the cell phone number she’d given me, but no matter how many times I tried the number, she never picked up. She told me later that she’d still been at the vacation house by the beach that day, which was outside the service area, and reception was pretty bad there.
And so the three of us had listened to the tape on a stereo with a tape player that Mochizuki had in his room.
There was a ton of background noise, and the recording quality was not what I would call great. We were reluctant to turn the volume up very high, too, so we put our ears right up next to the speakers and focused all our attention on the voice coming out of them…
“Um, my name…My name is Katsumi Matsunaga.”
The voice on the tape began with an introduction, then told the story of going up Yomiyama on the camping trip fifteen years ago and how there had been two accidents on the trip back down the mountain. After that, there was a long pause before he continued.
“…And then. The most important part happened after that.
“Right after we all got down the mountain at last, it happened.
“It being that…that I…”
What he—Katsumi Matsunaga from fifteen years ago—told us next was most definitely the “confession of a crime” he’d committed, as well as a “warning” and “advice” for us, who were following in his footsteps fifteen years later.
“We came down the mountain and went back to the lodge to call for help…And in the middle of all that confusion—I’ll be honest—there was a little flare-up.”
Matsunaga’s story continued thus:
“Honestly, I don’t remember what set it off. I was pretty badly shaken up, like all the rest of them…So I don’t remember the details of what might have caused something like that to happen.
“But anyway.
“We were outside the lodge, out in the woods. One of the other boys and I were yelling at each other, and it escalated until we were wrestling.
“Thinking back on it now, I never could stand that guy. I don’t know what it was. I guess he was just so blasé about stuff, no matter what happened. I guess it just kept wearing down my nerves until finally I got angry at him…I mean, that’s the kind of guy he was.
“After both of those accidents and the terrible things that had happened to those two people that day, there he was, as laid-back as ever, like it didn’t matter to him at all, and I think that just enraged me…I think I was probably the one who grabbed him first, and then we got into a fight out there.
“He was…”
And then Matsunaga said the name of the “other boy” / “that guy.” I think. But just at that part, the noise on the tape got a lot worse and I couldn’t make out anything he said. It was the same for the rest of the recording, too: Whenever he said “that guy’s” name, it would get covered up by really bad static. We never managed to find out his name.
So now that I’m writing down what Matsunaga said on the tape, I guess all I can do is put “——” for the boy’s name.
“Anyway, we sort of had a fight out there…And when I came back to my senses, he wasn’t moving.”
His voice at this part was lower than before. It sounded as if it was shaking, though maybe I was just imagining that.
“We started wrestling, and I think maybe I shoved him as hard as I could, but…I just can’t remember the details.
“He stopped moving.
“He’d fallen down next to a huge tree in the middle of the woods. I shouted at him, but he didn’t answer. When I went over to him, I found a branch rammed deep into the back of his head, and blood was gushing everywhere.
“When I shoved him and he fell back against the tree, a branch must have been sticking out right in that spot and stabbed him in the head…That’s what I figured. It’s the only thing I could imagine, given the situation.
“——…died.
“I tried taking his pulse. I even put my head on his chest to check for a heartbeat…But he was definitely dead. I…I’d killed him.
“That was when I got really scared and I ran back to my room in the lodge.
“I’d killed ——…and I couldn’t tell anyone. I’m going to be honest and admit that I was thinking that if someone found him, it might get brushed aside as an accident.