Another, Vol. 2 (2 page)

“At least they didn’t throw it out, I guess,” Mei murmured. “If someone like Akazawa were in the art club instead of Mochizuki…”

She might have destroyed it on the rationale that the painting of someone who’s “not there” can’t be allowed to exist. That’s probably what Mei was implying.

“You’re going to take it home?” I asked.

“…No.” Mei gave a slight shake of her head and turned the canvas back around. She wrapped the cloth around the easel and returned it to the shadow of the lockers.

Right as we came out of the art club room and back into the hall, we ran into Ms. Mikami.

Naturally, we had to ignore her. And she had to ignore us. I understood that, but my steps stuttered to an inadvertent stop for just one moment.

Maybe that was why Ms. Mikami came to a stop, too, then turned her eyes away from us uncomfortably. I thought I saw her lips tremble as if to say something…But it might have been my imagination. It all happened in the brief span of a few seconds in the dimly lit hall, after all.

On Thursdays, fifth period (our next class) was art with Ms. Mikami, but we weren’t planning to go. Due to the nature of the class, the teacher and the rest of the class obviously had it easier when the two “non-existers” were absent. Same with the extended homeroom in sixth period.

“What are we doing for next period?” I asked Mei in a low voice as we walked side by side down the hall.

“Let’s go to the library,” she answered. “The secondary library, obviously. We might as well eat lunch there, too.”

Thus, when the bell to start fifth period rang, we were in the secondary library. When we arrived, there was no one else there and no sign of the librarian, Mr. Chibiki.

Mei sat down in one of the chairs that circled the large table and started reading a book she’d brought with her. I’d caught a glimpse of the title when she took it out of her bag:
The Lonely Crowd
.
What kind of book is that?
I wondered. It seemed completely alien to the genre Ms. Mizuno and I had specialized in, at least.

“I borrowed it from the main library,” Mei said, her eyes cast down on the open book. “The title kind of spoke to me.”

“
The Lonely Crowd
?”

“It’s written by a man named Riesman. David Riesman. Heard of him?”

“Nope.”

“It seems like something your dad would have in his library.”

Ah. That kind of book, huh?

“Is it interesting?”

“Mrm…I guess.”

I went over to stand before the same bookshelf Mr. Chibiki had pointed out to me the last time I’d been here, by myself. In exactly the same spot I remembered, I found the item I sought—the yearbook for 1972. I took it down from the shelf and went back to the big table.

I chose a spot two seats down from Mei and sat down, then opened the yearbook. It wasn’t because I wanted to see how my mother had looked in middle school again. I’d remembered something
I wanted to check.

I found the page for third-year Class 3 and scrutinized the group photo on the left-hand page.

Fifth from the right in the second row was my mother as a third-year middle-schooler, smiling a little tensely. Diagonally in front of her—standing a slight distance from the rows of students, all the way to the right side—was a man. Wearing a pale blouson on his willowy frame. One hand resting on his hip, giving a cheerier smile than any of the students, it was…
Yeah, that’s what I thought.

“Which one’s your mom?”

Mei’s voice came from behind me, surprising me so badly I almost shouted. For crying out loud…We were barely three meters apart. How had I not noticed her standing up?

Getting my nerves under control, I pointed at the photo. “…Her.”

“Hm-m-m.”

Mei peered at the yearbook over my shoulder, staring intently at the image of my mother’s face.

“Ritsuko, huh?” she murmured. “Hm-m-m…I can see it.”

Finally she nodded, apparently satisfied. Then she pulled out the chair to my right, sat down on the edge of it, and asked me this: “What did your mom die from?”

“Oh…”

Unconsciously, I let out a sigh.

“She gave birth to me here, and then that summer—it was July. She wasn’t doing too well afterward and she caught a cold that turned into something worse.”

“…Oh.”

That had been fifteen years ago. I guess more accurately, it had been fourteen years and eleven months ago, doing the math.

“Anyway, did you know this?”

I asked the question this time. I surreptitiously watched Mei’s face in profile. I thought the eye patch over her left eye looked dirtier than usual today.

“Look at the head teacher for that year’s third-year Class 3.”

The man in the pale blouson on the right edge of the group photo.

“He comes off totally different now, huh?” Mei replied. “This is the first time I’ve ever seen a photo from back then.”

Oh, yes. The head teacher for her class was a handsome young man…He taught social studies and supervised the theater club or something along those lines. He was quite the fired-up educator. I believe the students thought well of him.

Yeah, that’s what my grandmother had said as she worked back through her memories of long ago. She’d been talking about the man in this picture.

Even if he was only in his mid-twenties twenty-six years ago, he would be over fifty now.

The ages matched up. But when I’d looked at this yearbook last time and
noticed him
, just like Mei I’d thought how much he’d changed in twenty-six years.

I checked the name of the teacher printed below the photo, just to be sure. And I was right. It said:

Mr. Tatsuji Chibiki

“Can I check something else?” I asked, lifting my eyes from the yearbook and turning them on Mei. “Last week at your house, when you explained all the stuff that’s going on, you kept saying you heard it from ‘
someone
.’ Was that…?”

“Right you are.” Mei nodded, an amused smile on her face. “I was talking about Mr. Chibiki.”

Soon after that, Mr. Chibiki, the “master” of the secondary library, appeared. Right after I had returned the 1972 yearbook to the shelf.

“Oho. Two of you today, eh?” he called over to us after realizing we were there, then went immediately behind his counter. That was all he said. He was dressed in his usual all-black clothes and black-rimmed glasses, and his salt-and-pepper straw-like hair complemented his pale, skinny face. He really was a far cry from the “fired-up educator” my grandmother recalled.

“We’re up to two people being ‘not there,’” Mei answered, getting up from her chair.

Resting both elbows on the counter, Mr. Chibiki said, “So it would seem. I heard something about it.”

“Do you think it’s going to work?”

“Well, now.” His expression hardened ever so slightly before he answered. “I can’t say, to be honest. It’s never been attempted before.”

Then his eyes shifted to me.

“You understand the situation now, Sakakibara, is that right?”

“Yes, but…”

“But? You don’t believe it?”

“That’s not it…Well, yes it is. Part of me still can’t believe in it completely, I guess.”

“I see-e-e.”

His elbows resting on the counter, the all-in-black librarian dug his fingers into his hair.

“I suppose I can’t blame you. If I were in your position and I heard a story like that out of the blue…Absolutely.”

His hand paused, his hair still caught in its grip, and his eyebrows pinched together sharply.

“However,” he continued, “this is true. This is a phenomenon that is actually taking place in our school, in our town of Yomiyama.”

A phenomenon, huh?

The words Mei had spoken last week, crediting the explanation to “someone,” rose from memory.

It isn’t anything a person could have done.
That’s the kind of “phenomenon” it is.

She’d used a similar term. She had also told me,
That’s why this is different from what you’d call a curse.

When I realized that “someone” was the person standing in front of me now, all sorts of details seemed to come together. As I tried to imagine the fact that this man who had been the head teacher for third-year Class 3 twenty-six years ago had now, twenty-six years later, switched roles to become a librarian and was still at the school—as I tried to imagine how that had happened…

“Um…”

I stood up and walked over to stand before the counter next to Mei.

“So you were a social studies teacher and you sponsored the theater club. And twenty-six years ago you were in charge of third-year Class 3, so you knew my mother…”

“That’s right. I suppose you realized that when you came here last time and looked at that yearbook.”

“Um, yeah…But how did you wind up here?”

“That’s a difficult question to answer.”

“I’m sorry.”

“There’s no need to apologize. Misaki didn’t tell you about it?”

I glanced over at Mei. “No, she didn’t.”

“I see-e-e.”

Mr. Chibiki looked up at the clock on the wall. A little more than thirty minutes had passed since the start of fifth period.

“You have art this period on Thursdays, don’t you? I suppose you’ll both be missing the extended homeroom next period, too?”

Mei and I exchanged a quick look, and then we both nodded.

“We thought everyone would feel better if we weren’t there.”

“No doubt. You made the right decision.”

“Um, sir?” I decided to pose a question that had just occurred to me. “Is it all right that you’re not ignoring us?”

“Could you stop calling me ‘sir’? ‘Mr. Chibiki’ is fine.”

“Oh…all right.”

“It’s because I don’t have any ties to your class, you see. Those with no direct link to third-year Class 3 are what you might call safe. So even if I interact with you two normally, it shouldn’t have any effect.”

Yes, of course. Obviously that’s why Mei had been able to come in here now and then and get all that information out of him.

“Now, as for your previous question,” Mr. Chibiki continued, lowering himself into the chair on the other side of the counter. “Why don’t I take this opportunity to tell you a story? Misaki here has only heard fragments of it so far.”

“To be honest, I don’t like to speak too much about what happened twenty-six years ago. Though I may be the last person at this school who directly experienced the event.”

Third-year Class 3, twenty-six years ago. The death of Misaki, who was popular with everyone. And then…

“Nobody had any ill intentions,” Mr. Chibiki said in a low, pinched voice. “I was still young and clung to certain ideals as an educator…I behaved as I thought right. The students did the same. Though now I find it a frivolous way of thinking. As a result,
that
became the trigger and, in a manner of speaking, ‘the doors to death’ swung open at this school.

“I bear the responsibility for that. I also feel responsible for being unable to stop the ‘disasters’ that began the following year. That’s why I’ve stayed at this school. I quit being a teacher and became the librarian—which was in part
running away
.”

“Running away?” I cut in inadvertently. “How is that running away?”

“Half the reason I stopped being a teacher was a guilty conscience. That I had no right to be a teacher. But the other half was stark fear that if I became the head teacher for third-year Class 3 again, I might be the one dragged to my ‘death’ next. So I ran away.”

“Do teachers die too?”

“If they’re the head teacher or the assistant teacher, yes.
Because they’re members of third-year Class 3.
The teachers who merely supervise classes are
out of range
.”

Oh, so then…
I realized something then.

The way Yuya Mochizuki had been constantly obsessing over how much Ms. Mikami had been out lately. So that hadn’t just been him worrying about the health of the teacher he was crushing on. He’d truly been concerned that the next of the calamities might have befallen her, since she was the assistant teacher for our class.

“That’s why I ran away,” Mr. Chibiki repeated. “But I didn’t want to run away from the school entirely. By a lucky chance, the position here in the library became available, so I decided to hunker down
right here
. To always be
right here
to watch how things unfold…Ah, but now I’ve gotten ahead of myself.”

Mr. Chibiki’s lips curved with a fair amount of self-deprecation and he shook his head slowly back and forth. That was the point at which I asked, “The Misaki from twenty-six years ago—was it a boy or a girl?”

“He was a boy.”

I got my answer as if it were nothing.

“Misaki was his first name. Written with the character for ‘cape’ as in ‘Cape Cod.’”

“What was his last name?”

“Yomiyama.”

“Excuse me?”

“It was Yomiyama. The same as the name of this town. His full name was Misaki Yomiyama.”

His last name was Yomiyama? Well…I guess. Like Mr. Adachi living in the Adachi ward or Ms. Musashino from Musashino City.

I looked over at Mei. Mei looked over at me, too, then shook her head slightly. She probably meant
I didn’t know that until he said it just now, either.

“So Misaki was in a plane crash or something?” I asked, checking the story with him.

“It was a fire.”

The answer was just as easy to get as the last one.

“A story like this typically changes and gets embellished as it passes from person to person. For some reason a version involving a plane crash seems to have caught on, but it was actually a house fire. One night in May, Misaki Yomiyama’s house was completely destroyed in a fire. And his entire family died. His parents as well as his little brother, who was one year younger than him.”

“What caused it?”

“No one knows. They decided, at least, that it hadn’t been a crime. Though there’s a version of the story that says it was a meteorite.”