Book Girl and the Famished Spirit (22 page)

She rolled her eyes up and stared at Kurosaki. He was pale.

“You knew… didn’t you? That’s why you tried to strangle me that night six months ago. I didn’t know yet that I was going to die. But you—you were so angry with me, so despondent that I could tell, and I knew you were really trying to kill me.”

Amemiya’s face twisted.

“While you squeezed my throat, I thought,
I wouldn’t mind dying this way.
I thought because I didn’t act like my mother very well, you could tell that we were different people and that you
hated me for that and didn’t need me. If so, then I wouldn’t have minded dying right then. But—”

Her frown deepened and a powerful grief appeared in her eyes, but it quickly transformed into a fiery hatred.

“While you were strangling me, I heard you say, ‘Good-bye, Kayano, my betrayer.’ ”

Kurosaki looked as if he had been stabbed through the heart.

“You just couldn’t forgive
Kayano
for dying—for getting herself sick and dying before you did. You were distraught with
Kayano
for leaving you behind again, and you were only brooding over whether or not to kill her yourself.

“You never saw anything but my mother!
Hotaru
didn’t exist!

“So I cried because I didn’t want to die as Kayano. But then your hands loosened. I told you, ‘I’m not my mother,’ and you looked taken aback and let go of my neck. Then you left the house, and you
never
came back again! You didn’t see any value in killing me since I wasn’t
her
! You cast me aside and ran away!”

The storm—it had raged on.

A fierce gale that snapped trees and sheared stone.

“When you left, I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t eat. You did this to me!

“One month ago, I overheard Takamizawa talking to my doctor at the hospital. When I realized that I was going to die, I finally understood why you had tried to kill me. I went to your office to know for sure, but you refused to see me. I laughed as I rode the swing in the middle of the night. Laughed at what a coward you were.

“I look too much like my mother, and you were afraid to watch me die so you fled. But as soon as I started dating someone, you tried to pull them away from me. But still you didn’t come back to the house. If I approached, you fled. I laughed as the rain pelted me at what a coward you were, what a weakling you were, what a
pathetic man! I decided right then to get revenge on you. Before I died, I would take everything from you; I would drive a nail into your heart that would ache for the rest of your life!”

The words she threw at him through her tears sounded like a confession of love.

As she screamed out her revenge, Amemiya’s eyes told of exactly the opposite emotion as they looked up at Kurosaki.

Why hadn’t she told him about Kayano’s message?

Why had she denied so adamantly that she was his daughter?

Ryuto had explained it: The strongest human emotion is hatred, that hatred would last much longer than love, that hatred could continue because of love, and that love could continue because of hatred.

On a stormy night, Amemiya had glared into the darkness as she rode alone on the swings.

Ryuto had fallen in love with her then.

Leaning on a pew, Ryuto watched Amemiya in agony as she told of her hatred for another man, throwing her life away to tell it.

And Tohko—

You two can start over again from here.

Tohko must have realized now that those words were nothing but an impossible wish.

Tohko’s imagination had exposed the storm hidden inside Amemiya.

She had brought the truth of Amemiya and Kurosaki and Kayano to light and had proved that there was no reason for any of them to deprive themselves, that if they walked the right path from then on, it was entirely possible for them to fill their empty bellies.

In order to correct past mistakes, you had to turn back time—that was a simplistic, easy answer.

But time
can’t go backward!

It wasn’t easy at all!

In my third year of middle school, no matter how I wished for it, it never happened.

Human beings aren’t capable of going back to the way things used to be: Time won’t simply run back like a tape to the point where things went wrong.

And even Tohko, who ate stories and talked of her limitless imagination, was not all-powerful.

She was nothing more than a high school student like the rest of us, an ordinary book girl, a reader of stories.

Truly impossible things—truly insatiable hungers—do exist in our world.

Tohko’s black eyes glittered sadly as she stood and watched ineffectually.

Continuing to spew the love she called hatred, Amemiya reached out to Kurosaki with her thin arms like dried twigs. Her rumpled face contained a hopeless grief.

“There are feelings inside me that hold you dear—they’re my mother’s curse. My mother… lives on inside me. These aren’t my emotions.”

Though she denied it, her white hands, her desperate gaze, all moved toward him.

Amemiya seemed to fall onto Kurosaki, clinging to his body and burying her face in his chest as she wept.

“But… without you, I don’t exist. Wherever I go, my spirit returns to that gray room in the basement.”

Rejecting food, rejecting reality, Amemiya had prayed for a life imprisoned underground.

That was the only truth about Amemiya.

She had provoked Kurosaki and tried to lure him back to their dollhouse in order to accomplish that.

Kurosaki wasn’t the only one who had tried to reverse the flow of time.

Amemiya had done the same thing.

Was it love or hatred? It was obvious that Amemiya herself no longer knew. Even so, she wanted to spend the last of the time remaining to her with Kurosaki. She wanted him to see her for herself, not her mother.

All the nights that she had roamed about as Kayano, Amemiya had been searching for Kurosaki.

Nestled together, Amemiya and Kurosaki resembled each other and there was no awkwardness, as if they had always been meant to be together.

Of course—they were father and daughter.

But that would not save them and especially not Amemiya.

Though he held Amemiya up, Kurosaki seemed hesitant to embrace her. His face twisted with pain, and in a muffled voice he murmured, “I… don’t want to let anyone have you. You’re right; I left because I was afraid to watch you die, but… I couldn’t forget about you. Wherever I went, whatever I did, I… would think about you. When I tried to eat, it made me sick… I couldn’t eat anything.”

He started to touch Amemiya’s hair with his emaciated fingers but hesitated and stopped his hand just before he touched her. He balled his hand into a fist.

“Every time I saw you walking with some boy, I felt sick… and my mind burned… I was overcome by the impulse to kill him. When I read your letter about getting married… I felt like I saw the world… falling apart around me.”

Words of torment and remorse slipped through his parched lips.

“… If only… I had known you… as a daughter.”

Tohko’s face fell further. She looked ready to burst into tears at any moment.

Ryuto, too, was gripping the edge of the pew, biting down on his lip.

I felt as if my heart had been wrenched from my body.

That was because what Kurosaki said was the single cruelest thing Amemiya could hear.

She couldn’t help but realize that the person he loved best, for ever and all time, was Kayano.

His words may have been the truth, devoid of any fabrication, but they could hardly be what Amemiya had craved with everything that she was.

Amemiya raised her bandaged hands and pounded against Kurosaki’s chest.

With the last of her remaining strength, her head still buried in his chest, she silently beat against him—again and again, as if it were too, too hateful, too, too bitter to bear.

Accepting her blows with gritted teeth, Kurosaki groaned.

In the end, her breathing labored, Amemiya circled her arms around Kurosaki.

Surprise showed in his face.

“I… I hated you… I never loved you. But I dreamed that I became a character in some other story and met you as your daughter. I wished that I could have had a normal, happy family with you and with my mother. Then no one would have been unhappy. My father and Aunt Reiko and me… and you… None of us would have suffered.”

Amemiya raised her face, and I was taken aback.

Her face smeared with tears, Amemiya looked up at Kurosaki in anguish. She seemed ready to collapse from a pain that tortured her body and spirit, but once her eyes met his, his sepia-colored
eyes welled with heartrending emotion and slowly he smiled.

Tears spilled from the corners of his eyes.

Though the person she loved most of all had rejected her feelings, though she knew it was a passion that would never be united, at the very end her face was clear and unsullied.

Kurosaki’s eyes widened in surprise.

As she gazed back at him whom she had loved as much as she had hated, her eyes crinkled serenely. Amemiya whispered in a soft, ephemeral voice, “Father…”

Then a shock that was almost crazed in its intensity came over Kurosaki’s face.

I would never forget Amemiya’s clear, silent eyes as she watched or the tears that coursed down her cheeks.

Amemiya rested her cheek against Kurosaki’s chest and closed her eyes.

Then, without ever reopening them, she drew her last breath in her hospital bed a week later.

The story was too similar to their own, and she was unable to finish it. She smiled faintly and returned the book.

“I don’t think Catherine had to marry Edgar. She should have been with Heathcliff, even if they were poor. Then no one would have been unhappy.”

She rarely expressed herself. She was a kind girl who smiled elusively and kept a dreamlike secret locked in her heart.

“If I were Catherine, I would stay by Heathcliff’s side to the very end. I would never abandon him. But Heathcliff still loved Catherine, even though she betrayed him. So much so that even after she died, he violated her grave and begged her to come back as a ghost. He didn’t care how any other woman felt about him; Catherine was the only person Heathcliff could love eternally.”

She was already afflicted by her illness at this time, and her doctor had predicted that she would not live much longer. When had she become aware of that?

When I found out that she would soon be departing the world of the living, I decided to write down her story. That was
my first test. Actually, I am very bad at composition. I feel unparalleled joy whenever I draw pictures, but writing is torture.

Nevertheless, I started writing down their story.

I do not know whether I wanted to leave behind some evidence of her life or whether I needed to work through everything I had seen in my own heart by writing about the miracle they had achieved.

When I am drawing, I feel very free, as if I can pierce the veil laid over anything and control it all; but writing makes me anxious, and I was unable to anticipate where this story would end up.

I first met her in middle school.

I was in second year and she was in first, and we both belonged to the school’s art club.

Back then, my father and grandfather were not yet concerned by my art and had said nothing about me drawing. I am positive they thought it was a fine hobby for me to have.

My grandfather brags that we can trace our family back to the tenth century. My grandfather directs the school, but he also has several other companies and his network spans every field. I am very often shocked to discover just how far his reach extends.

When I was little, my grandfather decided everything for me—my pastimes, what I studied, what I wore, who I was friends with—I could only accept whatever my grandfather had arranged for me. He would not allow me to refuse it.

The world in which I found myself was gorgeous and highly formalized, but it was terribly stifling. My mother must have hated it because she and my father divorced during my second year of elementary school, and she left our house.

My mother was a foreigner from Ireland. My mother was
uninhibited and strong willed, and she voiced her displeasure, so it amazes me that she married into such a suffocatingly stodgy family and that she was able to stand it for seven years. Of course, my grandfather hated her impudence and the fact that she came from a foreign family of commoners. After the divorce, I was forbidden to ever see her.

As I grew up, I began to resemble my mother more and more in personality and appearance, which must have frustrated my grandfather. In my third year of middle school, when we were asked to write an essay titled “Dreams for My Future” for homework, I wrote that I wanted to paint while traveling the world. My grandfather was enraged when he read that, and he lectured that he would never allow me to be a painter because my role was to someday get married and continue the family line. My grandfather had the image of my mother, who had left the family, in his mind, and he was probably concerned that I might leave, too.

When I finished middle school and started at the school my grandfather directs, this time I was not allowed to join the art club. He made some incomprehensible argument that our family had for generations belonged to the prestigious orchestra and served as its conductors, so I had to do it, too.

I knew opposing my grandfather was futile, so I offered him a condition.

In exchange for joining the orchestra, I would receive a workroom that I could use as I saw fit, that I would be allowed to paint whenever I wanted there, and that I would not paint anywhere except there.

My grandfather reluctantly accepted my condition, and I acquired my own private workroom.

He was angry that it was inside the music building, but… so what?

If I got good grades and waved the conductor’s baton around for the orchestra, he did not pester me about everything nearly as much as he had in middle school. He must have thought that if I was pushed too hard, I might leave home and then where would he be? As long as I was in my grandfather’s grasp, I was allowed all sorts of special privileges and I knew how to use them. My grandfather seemed pleased that I was good at using people. But though I could inspire others, I could not inspire myself.

I should go back to her story.

She had a modest and bashful personality, so while we were in the art club together in middle school, she almost never spoke to me since I was an upperclassman. Most of the time she drew quietly by herself in a corner of the room while people I did not even know thronged around me.

By some chance, that day I was not mobbed—she and I were alone in the room. She did not hear me come in and continued painting with watercolors in her sketchbook, which was balanced on her knees. She looked very pretty and content. A small smile rested in the corners of her mouth. I was transfixed.

Filled with curiosity, I peeked surreptitiously over her shoulder and saw that she had drawn the picture of a boy about her own age.

His hair was painted a pale brown, and his eyes had a faint blue cast. It was a beautiful, unambiguous image. Despite that, the boy’s expression was gloomy and a lonely pall hung over him.

“Is that your boyfriend?” I asked, and she whirled around in surprise, flushing to the tips of her ears.

“No… um… I’ve never met him.”

Her mother had shown her pictures of the boy, she stammered. She was so flustered it made me smile, so I pursued the subject even further. She hugged her sketchbook tightly to her and shyly said, “I feel like I’m going to meet him someday… That would be nice.”

Her expression made it immediately obvious that she had fallen in love with a boy she knew only through photographs. This starry-eyed little girl struck me as so pure and adorable that I found myself liking her very much. But at the same time I envied her, my heart throbbing painfully.

Probably because I was unlikely to be allowed freedom in my romances.

Also, I had by that time realized that there was something inside me that was cold and cruel, and so it was impossible to imagine myself being in love as intently as she was. And so I envied her for experiencing those feelings naturally.

“Um… Please don’t tell anyone.”

She looked up at me anxiously, and I promised to keep it a secret.

I never talked to her again after that.

Her father and aunt died suddenly, and she stopped coming to the art club, severing our connection.

I wondered about her in the back of my mind, but I never went to see her and never asked her friends or class monitor about her. We had not been on such close terms.

Six months later, I spotted her at a party. I was a third-year in middle school, and she was in second year.

She was with a man who had light brown hair and lightly tinted sunglasses. I asked around and was told that he was her guardian, a shady guy with no end of dark rumors about him.

I felt as if I had seen him somewhere before and stared at him
surreptitiously. When he took off his sunglasses in order to wipe the sweat from his forehead, I saw his brown eyes with their blue cast and I knew that he was the boy in the sketchbook all grown up.

So she had met the boy she had dreamed of.

She was standing, her arm in his grasp. She was terribly thin, her vacant eyes as blank as a doll’s. It was only when he spoke to her that she jumped slightly, which made it seem like she was scared of him. Despite that, her thin fingers clung tightly to his arm, as if she might die if she knocked his hand away. He never left her side for a moment.

I didn’t know what their relationship actually was, but I supposed she must have been happy.

She had received what she wished for most, no matter what form it took.

Huddled together, the two of them resembled a pair of unicorns, frail and fantastic, and with her absent gaze, she looked like someone dreaming.

A few days later, I saw her in the hallway at school.

I called her over and asked, “So you met your prince, hmm?”

After a brief silence, she took a quick breath and answered, “Yes.”

There was determination and power in her voice.

It was beautiful.

My heart fluttered, and I felt my knees wobble.

She must have been facing his cruel treatment at that point, but she seemed admirably optimistic that the day would come when things would be kinder between them. She did not yet know that he was her father, so she must have been hoping that someday he would see her and not her mother.

I never stopped watching them after that.

I was never a confidante of hers, but I had one of my
grandfather’s underlings investigate the man, and I learned that he had been an orphan living in her mother’s house and how he had reached his present position and taken possession of her and how he ruled over her. I thought it was very reminiscent of a book I had just read.

That book was
Wuthering Heights.

Six months ago, at the beginning of this year, I stopped being simply a reader and became a participant in the story. I could not bear to see her grown so thin and anemic, so I urged her to be examined by a doctor. I never imagined that the results would be what they were, that she would have only a little more time before her life ended
…

Apparently the hospital contacted the man since he was her family.

In utter despair, he tried to kill her, but he left the house without finishing the act.

Left on her own, she was overcome by a powerful sense of loss and she could no longer eat anything. She called herself Kayano and put on her mother’s old uniform and began to wander about at night.

Around this time, I began visiting her house frequently and started to learn her story.

It was also at this time that I began writing down their story.

In doing so, I became the tale’s author and was gripped by an odd mania that even I could not explain, compelling me to craft their story.

I wouldn’t let their story end that way.

I would give it a conclusion!

But apparently I have no talent as a writer. First my heroine started running wild. Then the man who was supposed to be
the hero would not do what I wanted him to. Then unexpected characters kept popping up one after another and breaking into the story, and I got fed up.

Tohko Amano, who calls herself a “book girl,” was the object of many years of my unrequited love. From the first moment I saw her, I was fascinated by her immaculate, mellow, uncanny air, and I pestered her to model nude for me, but even now my desire has not been realized.

I never thought Tohko would get involved in the story and certainly never thought the boy Ryuto Sakurai, whose family she boarded with, would start dating Hotaru.

I created a stir about a ghost to scare Tohko off and then gave her information that would not cause any trouble and tried to draw her away from Hotaru.

Tohko is scared of ghosts. She thought it was a secret, but it was obvious in the way she acted. At summer school in our first year, I had tested her courage. Though she said that shrieking about things like ghosts was childish, she gripped the salt shaker on our table much too tightly and never let go of it until I was done.

As things went on, I found Tohko’s fright simply adorable. Provoking her gave me pleasure, and I wound up going too far. But I achieved my goal in any case.

In the meantime, the troublemaker Ryuto Sakurai started hanging around Tohko’s little friend, and they began to investigate Hotaru from every angle.