Another, Vol. 2 (10 page)

Teshigawara called to summon me—“We need to talk. Can you come meet me in a few minutes?”—early the next week. On the afternoon of the anniversary of my mother’s death, of all things.

I was kind of reluctant to agree right away, which made Teshigawara toss off a flip comment. “What, you got a date with Mei?”
What an airhead—or maybe just a flip-flopper…
But I guess by now I totally understood his reasons, and I couldn’t really work up the energy to gripe about it.

The place he’d told me to meet him was a café near school called “Inoya.” It was over in the Tobii area. I don’t know why, but he said Mochizuki was with him.

He wanted to talk to me in person about whatever this issue was. If I actually did have a date, I should bring her along, since this was something that concerned everyone in the class…That was as much as he told me, so how could I not go?

I got directions to the place and left the house without any further ado.

Under the blazing sun of true summer, I made my way to Tobii on the bus. Then, dripping in sweat, I followed the directions Teshigawara had given me. It probably took me close to an hour to get there. And then, on the first floor of a building that stood facing a road running alongside the Yomiyama River, looking a little too fashionable for the area, was “Inoya.” Apparently the place was a café by day and sold alcohol at night.

Desperate to escape the heat, I rushed inside. As soon as the relief of the moderate air-conditioning hit me—

“’Sup. We’ve been waiting for you, Sakaki.”

Teshigawara lifted a hand and waved me over to the table where the two sat. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt with a garish pineapple motif. Let me be clear: it was tacky.

Mochizuki, who was sitting in the seat across from Teshigawara, looked up at me as I walked over, then quickly dropped his eyes again, seemingly embarrassed. He was wearing a white T-shirt. It had a big picture on the front of it, so for a second I thought,
A Scream T-shirt?
but the picture was of a mustachioed man’s face, which I felt like I’d seen somewhere before.

Before I even had time to think,
Man, who is that?
I made out the letters running diagonally below, brushing the mustachioed man’s chin.

Salvador Dalí

Hm-m. He’s less obsessive than I thought.

I lowered myself into a chair next to Mochizuki and took a quick look around the room. Contrary to the building’s exterior, the decor was plain. I guess kind of a retro feel. The music they had playing was some jazzlike, slow, instrumental song that, as usual, I was utterly unable to place. Yeah—I didn’t mind this place at all.

“Welcome to Inoya.”

A girl in her mid-twenties came over immediately to take my order. Her bartender’s clothes and her long, straight hair seemed to blend seamlessly into the look of the café.

“You’re one of Yuya’s friends, too, huh?” She gave a smooth bow. “I’m sure you’re keeping my little brother out of trouble.”

“Huh?!”

“I’m his big sister. Nice to meet you.”

“Oh, right. Uh, I’m…”

“Sakakibara, right? Yuya’s told me about you. What can I get you?”

“An iced tea, I guess. Made with lemon tea, please.”

“Got it. Make yourself at home.”

According to the explanation I got later, she and Mochizuki really were siblings, with more than ten years’ difference in their ages, but they had different mothers. His sister, named Tomoka, was the daughter of Mochizuki’s father’s previous wife, who had passed away. A couple years ago, Tomoka had gotten married and changed her name to Inose.

So “Inoya” was the shop run by the man she’d married. Tomoka mainly ran things during the day and Mr. Inose ran things at night, and this broad division was how they were making things work.

“Plus it’s close to school and they give Mochizuki’s friends special treatment. That’s why I come here sometimes. And when I do, there’s a pretty good chance I’m gonna see Mochizuki. Isn’t that right?”

Mochizuki answered Teshigawara with a quiet “Yeah.”

“So, anyway: the reason you’re here.” Teshigawara straightened his hunched posture. “You tell him, Mochizuki.”

“Oh…okay.”

Mochizuki wet his lips with his glass of water, then—“Whew…”—let out a long breath. “Me and Tomoka—even though we have different mothers, we’re still related by blood…So, you know, there’s a chance that she might get pulled into our problems.”

“When you say ‘our problems,’ you mean the ‘disasters’ this year for third-year Class 3?”

Mochizuki gave a firm nod at my clarification, then continued. “So I…I couldn’t keep it a secret from her.”

“You told her what’s going on?”

“…Yeah.”

“All the details, right?”

That was Teshigawara.

“Yeah. Most of them.”

“Tomoka was…” Teshigawara shot a sideways look at the counter where she stood. “She came out of North Yomi for middle school, too. She said she wasn’t in Class 3, but she still heard some disturbing rumors about it. That’s why when Mochizuki told her the situation, she took him seriously right from the start.”

“A couple people really did wind up dying, too. She’s worried about me and everyone else in class.”

As he spoke, Mochizuki’s cheeks flushed a faint pink.
So that’s it, huh, kid? That’s where your taste for older women comes from, eh?

“But it’s not like this problem is going to go away just because she’s worrying. The ‘disaster’ doesn’t stop once it’s begun. No matter what we do, it’s…”

“So Mochizuki told his sis about our situation and the camping trip next month.”

“…Okay.”

“It was during that conversation.” Teshigawara straightened his posture again. “
Some new information
has recently come out. Via Tomoka.”

Katsumi Matsunaga.

That was the person who had brought the “new information.”

He’d graduated from Yomiyama North Middle in 1983. Meaning he’d been there at the same time as Reiko. And to top it off, he’d been in the same class as her during their third year: he’d been a part of Class 3.

After graduating from a local high school, he’d gone to college in Tokyo. After his college graduation, he’d worked at some midsized bank, but then gave it up after a couple years. After that, he’d come back to his parents’ home in Yomiyama and had stayed to help out with the family business.

This person just happened to be a frequent customer at Inoya.

“He comes a couple times a week. I knew he’d gone to North Yomi, but I only found out he’d been in third-year Class 3 at the start of this month.”

At this point, Tomoka told the story to me firsthand, since I’d just gotten there.

“I’ve heard all sorts of stuff from Yuya, so I decided I would just ask about it myself. I asked Mr. Matsunaga if there was an ‘extra person’ hiding in his class during his year. He’d had a lot to drink by that point. He acted kind of startled, and then…”

He’d sat at the bar drinking, never answering Tomoka’s question either “yes” or “no,” until suddenly he cradled his head in his hands. Then at last, in a halting stutter, the story started to pour out of him without any further prompting. It went like this:

“The ‘curse’ that year…It was because…

“It…wasn’t my fault.

“I didn’t do anything wrong…

“Because of me, everyone…

“…I saved them. I
saved
them!

“I wanted to tell someone.

“I felt obligated…

“…I left it there.

“I hid it…

“I hid it, in the classroom…”

His tongue thick in his mouth and his voice a groan…

After that, he got so thoroughly drunk that he fell into a stupor, and he left the shop without another word.

“I don’t get it. What does that mean?” I asked, the words coming unbidden.

Tomoka angled her head to one side, looking troubled. “I’m not really sure.

“What I just told you happened one night last week, and Mr. Matsunaga’s been back here a couple of times since then. Whenever he comes in, I try to bring it up with him, but he doesn’t remember it at all.”

“What he said, you mean?”

“Right. No matter how many times I ask, he just gets this blank look on his face and tells me he doesn’t know.”

We were silent.

“I get the impression that he remembers the fact that ‘disasters’ brought about by a ‘curse’ kept happening fifteen years ago in third-year Class 3. But of course the essential questions, like who the ‘extra person’ was for his year or why the ‘disasters’ stopped that year, he doesn’t remember at all.”

“Do you think he might know and he’s just hiding it?”

“It doesn’t look that way.”

Tomoka cocked her head once again.

“He was so drunk that night, maybe he just happened to recall a shadowy memory of
something
. That’s more the feeling that I get.”

After a certain point, the victims’ memories involving “the casualty” for that year grow faint and disappear. Almost certainly, that’s what had happened to this former student, Mr. Matsunaga.

Now, fifteen years after the fact, perhaps a fragment of memory had reawoken at a random moment in his drunken mind. And that? No one could definitively state that it was impossible. That was my opinion.

“There’s something about this story, right?” Teshigawara asked, looking into my face.

“It totally gets into your head, right?” he asked, turning next to look at Mochizuki’s face.

Mochizuki lowered his eyes and I, biting down on the straw in my glass of iced tea, replied, “Definitely.”

That made Teshigawara nod solemnly and say, “I don’t mind going on this camping trip and asking the gods for help, but I dunno about just hiding in a corner until then, you know?”

“…Meaning what?”

“Doesn’t Tomoka’s story kind of give you an idea? What was that guy Matsunaga trying to tell her?”

“So what’s your idea?”

“I’m saying, he told her ‘I saved them,’ right? He said he saved everybody. But in order to pass that information on, he left ‘it’ behind.”

“He hid it in the classroom?”

“Right. He left it behind secretly—meaning no one knows where it is. I have no idea what ‘it’ is, but you gotta know it’s
something
tied to the ‘curse’…It really gets into your head, right?”

“When you put it like that, sure.”

“See? See?” Then, his face earnest, Teshigawara said, “We should go look for it.”

I let out a loud “We should
what?
” and looked over to see Mochizuki’s reaction. His head was bowed, his body hunched and small. I looked back at Teshigawara and mildly asked, “When you say ‘we,’ who are you talking about?”

“I mean us,” Teshigawara said. His expression suggested the answer was obvious. Though it wasn’t entirely clear just how deeply he’d thought out this suggestion. “You, me, and Mochizuki. After all, he got the info out of Tomoka in the first place.”

Still curled into a tight ball, Mochizuki gave a grandiose sigh.

“I want to get Kazami in on this, too, but as serious as he looks, it’s all an act. He’d be a quivering baby about something like this. Hey, Sakaki, why don’t you invite Mei?”

I pursed my lips indignantly and glowered at Teshigawara. “Would you give it a rest already?”

That’s what I said, but…

Just over an hour later, I found myself at the doll gallery “Blue Eyes Empty to All, in the Twilight of Yomi” in the town of Misaki. I’d called Mei’s house after leaving “Inoya” and parting ways with Teshigawara and Mochizuki. I’d gotten into a frame of mind that made it impossible not to.

Kirika was the one who answered. Just like that first time I’d called a month and a half ago, her voice sounded slightly surprised—or uneasy—but when I told her my name, she acknowledged me right away—“Oh, it’s you, Sakakibara”—and handed the phone to her daughter.

“I’m out near the school,” I told Mei, donning as casual an attitude as I could manage. “Do you mind if I come by your house?”

Without even asking why I wanted to come over, she replied, “Sure. Let’s meet in the basement of the gallery again. There probably won’t be any customers.”

“Sounds good.”

The old woman, Amane, waived the entry fee for me, and I headed straight for the display room in the basement. Mei had already come down. She was standing next to the black coffin that sat in the back of the room, lined up next to the doll inside that looked exactly like her.

Her outfit was spartan: skinny jeans and a plain T-shirt. But her shirt was an ashen color, as if it had been coordinated with the dress on the doll inside the coffin…

“Heya,” I said with a wave. I walked up to her and asked a question. It had been nagging at me for a long time, but I still hadn’t worked out the answer. The words came out inadvertently.

“Hey, about that doll—” I pointed at the doll in the coffin. “It was modeled on you, right? The first time I saw you down here, you told me something…That it was only half of you? But what does that mean?”

“Maybe not even half.”

That was Mei’s response. Right—she’d said something similar that other time, too.

But she’s only half of what I am. Maybe not even that.

“She’s—”

Mei’s eyes slipped over to the coffin.

“This girl is the child my mother bore thirteen years ago.”

“Kirika? So then she’s your little sister?”

But didn’t Mei say she didn’t have any sisters?

“This is the child that woman bore thirteen years ago, who died before she was ever born. Before Kirika even had a name picked out for her.”

“Wh—”

Do you…have an older sister, or a younger sister maybe?

But when I’d asked her that before, Mei had shaken her head in silence. Why was that? If I were to ask her that now, I imagined I would get an answer like,
Because your question was in the present tense.

“It’s true that she used me as a model, but Kirika made the doll with her thoughts on her own child. The child she was unable to bring into the world. That’s why I’m only half of it. Maybe even less.”