Book Girl and the Famished Spirit (7 page)

“Everything he does is flashy, though, so maybe he just makes a lot of enemies. The rumor that he killed the last boss has been going around ever since the day he took over, and none of us would be surprised if the cops came one day and took him away. I think we might be expecting it.”

What terrible things to say about a person. Amemiya’s guardian was sounding like a very shady man.

“Oh! But lately Mr. Kurosaki has been acting weird.”

“Weird how?” Ryuto leaned forward.

“I talked to his secretary, and she said he’s barely been eating for the last month or so. He’s been so busy with work that he’s been staying at a condo near the office, so maybe he just doesn’t have time for a leisurely meal. But he has to eat with clients for work, right? Well, when that happens, she told me that he goes to the
bathroom after he eats and throws up. She said she saw a sore on his finger from throwing up so much.”

Ryuto and I exchanged shocked glances.

Throwing up like that sounded a lot like an eating disorder. What did it mean if Amemiya and her uncle had the same affliction?

Saeko crinkled her beautifully shaped eyebrows.

“Also… I guess it was at the beginning of this year? He got a call from the hospital and got
really
worked up, just screaming at them: ‘Run the tests again!’ ‘That’s impossible!’ Stuff like that. Mr. Kurosaki is usually pretty calm, and he’s one of those people who doesn’t show his emotions. But that day, he was howling. I heard it was incredible.

“That and you remember that day last month when it rained real hard? The gusts of wind were so strong that the trains stopped running, and it was a huge mess. That day, this secretary went to Mr. Kurosaki’s office, and she told me he had his windows wide open and was staring outside. The rain and wind were blowing in, and the room was a disaster. He was soaked to the skin, but his eyes were flashing, and she said he was muttering ‘There’s no more time’ and cursing. He was totally gone. I guess it must have been pretty terrifying. She thought he was going to jump out the window any second. She was so scared she couldn’t call out to him. She panicked.

“Maybe he’s sick. But it must be serious, like he doesn’t know whether the day ahead will be his last. Maybe before the police can arrest him, he’ll cough up blood and keel over.”

Saeko sounded like she was joking, but neither Ryuto nor I could laugh.

After we had thanked the girls and seen them out of the restaurant, Ryuto leaned back in his chair and folded his arms, looking grim.

“So the guy trailin’ me was Hotaru’s guardian, Kurosaki, right? Light hair, light sunglasses—his build and features all match up. When I went to Hotaru’s house, it seemed totally deserted, and I
got scared thinkin’ she lived all alone in this massive house. I didn’t even know she lived with her uncle until a couple days ago. Hotaru doesn’t like to talk about it.”

“Why would her uncle follow you around?”

Was he worried about her? If so, following someone around on all of her dates was going way too far. Was hiring mobsters to threaten Ryuto and hurting Amemiya’s ex-boyfriends all his doing, too?

Amemiya’s old friend Segawa had told us that ever since she’d started living with her uncle, Amemiya had stopped eating. And was it only coincidence that her aunt had been in an accident and died two weeks after her father?

Saeko’s story about how her boss could be seriously ill was also troubling. If “there’s no more time” meant what it seemed to, then we didn’t know what he was going to try to do in the time he had left.

And then there was the matter of the mansion where Amemiya lived. Kurosaki had sold her old home, but there must have been a reason that he had another house ready. I could understand if they had started living in a condo since it was just the two of them, but according to Ryuto, the new house was pretty extravagant, too.

The more I thought about it, the more nervous I got, as if murky water were lapping at the edges of my mind.

“Still, I wonder who Kayano is.”

Ryuto had knit his brows together and sunk into thought, but he looked up at that.

“Oh, I didn’t tell you. I found out when I checked into Hotaru’s family. Kayano Kujo was her mother. Kujo was her maiden name.”

There was no time.

As he pressed his face into the toilet and spit up the bitter stomach fluid, he groaned.

He threw up and threw up again, and it was not enough. He was seized by a desire to tear out everything inside his stomach and expel it, and he shoved his index finger into his mouth.

He pushed his finger deep into his throat, scraping his nail along the tender flesh he found there and digging at it.

His empty stomach convulsed, and he gagged, yellow fluid and saliva spilling from his mouth. He saw bright red blood mixed in with it, and violent rage and hatred crashed into his chest like a wave swelling in the darkness.

The end was coming, as though sand was pouring out of an hourglass.

He wanted more time.

He would give his position, his wealth, anything. Time—time was the only thing that was lacking.

An urge to vomit rose up in him again. His stomach rejected everything. How long would this go on, this hunger and pain that seemed to sear through his body? He was never free of the sound of falling sand—!

Beyond the door, he heard his secretary calling to him.

She feared the insanity she had seen. But still she tried to faithfully execute her duties. Her quavering voice told him that Dr. Sakata from the university was there to see him.

He shouted from inside the room.

“Send him away!”

Then he fell to his knees on the floor and hugged his head, spitting out curses.

Dammit—dammit… How could he ever forgive her? Dammit—traitor, whore, sow… I hope they all die.

I spent that Saturday at home relaxing.

“Konoha, Mommy baked some sweet potatoes, and she said come get you.”

It was late in the afternoon and quiet. I was reading a book at my desk during a break from studying when my little sister came toddling into my room.

“Okay, be right there.”

“What are you reading, Konoha?”

She stretched up under my arm to peek at the book, but she could only blink slowly at the sight of all the unfamiliar words.

“Nothing you would care about, Maika. I’ll give you a different book later.”

I closed the book, open to a page titled “Eating Disorders—Anorexia and Binging,” and put it away on a high shelf.

The book was called
Diseases of the Spirit.
I had read it at the end of middle school when I had shut myself up in my room, but back then I had been more interested in the topics like “panic disorders,” “hyperventilation syndrome,” and “obsessive-compulsive disorders.”

The spirit is linked to the body. If the spirit weakens, the body breaks down as well. I knew that from experience.

Amemiya’s spirit was refusing to eat—life’s most fundamental necessity. What had weakened it? How could it recuperate?

And then there was Kurosaki, who threw up whatever was in his stomach. It might not be his body that was damaged, but his spirit.

I had a very ominous image of Tamotsu Kurosaki, a man whom I had never met.

What was he trying to accomplish?

“I want a story with animals in it,” Maika said, beaming at me.

“Then we’ll have to find one as soon as we eat our snacks.”

“ ’Kay!” Maika agreed happily.

I took her hand, and we went downstairs. When I caught the scent of sweet potatoes, my stomach rumbled softly and my mouth watered.

I had a normal appetite now.

My spirit had been damaged once, but now it could function properly despite the occasional glitch.

The thing about my recovery that made my throat close up in pain and despair, though, was that it made me feel as if Miu’s presence was moving farther and farther away from me.

I knew I was being contradictory. Even though I usually throw a veil over my memories and try desperately not to look at them, I didn’t want to forget her.

After dinner, I rode my bike to a dollar store to buy more lead for my pencil. My mother had asked me to get some food and a few small items, and I was on my way home. But something was nagging at me, and I swung by the school.

It was probably the brief rain shower that had made the air so
cool. Moonlight glinted where it struck the wet ground. The school building loomed pale in the humid darkness.

Tohko would never go so far as to stake out the mailbox on a Saturday—would she?

I wasn’t sure about that. I stood astride my bike and gazed at the school building.

Just then, a black luxury car stopped outside the gates.

The door opened and a willowy woman got out.

That’s—

My heart almost leaped out of my chest. I was positive it was Amemiya, carrying a black bag in one hand and wearing the old-fashioned sailor uniform. She took fluttering steps into the building.

The car smoothly pulled away from the gate. I couldn’t see the driver’s face all that well in the darkness, but he looked like a tall, slender man.

Could it have been Kurosaki? But why would he bring Amemiya to school? Did he know about her eccentric behavior and leave her to it?

I pedaled hard to circle around to the back gate and park my bike at the bike racks; then I ran to the courtyard.

Amemiya was plunked down on the wet grass, writing in a notebook, then tearing up what she had written and putting it into the mailbox. Her frail back and twig of a neck were exactly as I had first seen them.

What should I do? Should I call out to her?

While I debated with myself, Amemiya put her notebook back into her bag, then stood up and walked off.

She did not go toward the gates, but instead headed down the walkway and went into the school building.

Huh?
Shouldn’t it have been locked? I wondered why it wasn’t.

At this rate, I was going to lose track of Amemiya. I hurried after her.

Bathed in moonlight, the hallway was like a dark canal. Amemiya moved through it, bobbing like a gondola on the waves.

She climbed the stairs and moved down another hallway until she came to the chemistry lab. There she turned to the door and passed inside.

The lights snapped on in the room.

Pressed against the wall, swallowing nervously more times than I could count, I held my breath and listened. I heard a clattering and then a clang.

Was that… the sound of metal? A locker opening? And something being taken out of it? Then the sound of running water and a chair being moved…

Huh?
Everything got quiet all of a sudden.

Worried, I opened the door a crack and peered inside, but Amemiya wasn’t there.

Sweat coated my body instantly.

How could she—Where did she go? We were on the third floor. She couldn’t have jumped out the window!

I opened the door and went into the room. The lights were on, and the windows and curtains were all closed. I caught the bitter smell of chemicals; there was a blackboard at the front of the room and shelves full of beakers and equipment at the back. In between were neat lines of black heat-resistant desks and chairs.

She wasn’t there!

She couldn’t be a real ghost…

Although I felt such fear that I was shaking, I started walking between the black desks.

Then I felt something warm against my shin.

My throat tensed and a scream slipped out. At the same moment, I heard a girl cry out at my feet.

Dropping my gaze, I saw a girl wearing an old-style sailor suit hunched on the ground.

“A-Amemiya!”

She hadn’t disappeared. She held a rag in one hand and a spray bottle full of cleaner in the other, and she had pushed half her body under the desk to wipe off the wall behind it.

“Wh-what are you doing? Amemiya?” I asked, wide-eyed. I was so surprised that I forgot to explain my own presence.

She pursed her lips and glared at me.

“My name’s not Amemiya. It’s Kayano. Kayano Kujo. I already told you that, didn’t I?”

Your mom’s name, maybe.
But now was not the time to argue.

“I’m sorry. What are you doing here this late on a Saturday, Kujo?”

“I was erasing my letters.”

Amemiya—no, Kayano—turned back to look at the desk darkly. I could see a faint string of numbers that she had started to erase.

“I thought they’d all been erased. I thought they were all gone. But these were hidden by a desk, and they survived… I don’t need things like this anymore…”

She mumbled in a subdued voice, scrubbing at the numbers with her cloth.

“Why don’t you need them?”

“Because he and I are both dead now.”

“You don’t look like a ghost to me.”

Once she was done erasing the numbers, Kayano popped her head out from under the desk and grinned up at me, still on her hands and knees.

“Oh? You looked rather pale when you saw me before. Your legs were all wobbly because you thought I was a ghost, no?”

“Well, that was…”

I trailed off and she stood up, chuckling. It was an innocent, bright laugh unlike the morbid, shrieking peal I’d heard in the school yard. Her eyes were teasing as they surveyed me. They greatly resembled the eyes of a girl I kept in my heart who I missed.

Come on. I’ll know if you’re lying. Fess up, Konoha.

It pops right onto your face. But I like that you listen when I ask for stuff and that you don’t know how to lie.

I was seized by an uncanny feeling that I was seeing a vision of the past, and my chest constricted sweetly.

Miu had often teased me like this, too.

She had looked at me and laughed brilliantly.

Obviously, the girl before me wasn’t Miu. I would never see Miu again.

But I didn’t care if the vision was a delusion. I wanted to let these waves of nostalgia wash over me.

Even though it could never be real.

But what if…?

“So why are you leaving notes in the book club’s mailbox? What do those numbers mean? Who’s the guy you keep mentioning?”

Kayano put her cloth and bottle away in a locker with a clatter. She rummaged furtively with her white hands and then spoke in an ambiguous tone that revealed nothing of her true thoughts.

“If you want to know, then come here again tomorrow. Then I’ll at least give you a hint.”

The corners of her mouth curved in a slight smile, and she gazed at me invitingly, her eyes the color of strong tea.

I still felt disconnected and dreamy as I watched her leave the room.

Her fluttering steps.

The skirt of her uniform, rippling below her knees.

Did she just make me a promise?

The next day—Sunday—I spent the entire day thinking about Kayano.

Would she really be there tonight?

I kept thinking about it until night fell, and then I headed to the school, feeling uneasy. I went down the hall just as I had the day before, climbed the stairs, and went to the chemistry lab.

When I opened the door, Kayano was standing at the window, bathed in the moonlight. The lights were still off, but the curtains and windows were thrown open, filling the room with the cold silver light of the moon.

When she saw that I had come, Kayano smiled prettily.

“Hello, Konoha.”

Even the way she said my name reminded me of Miu.

A sweet voice, tickling at my ears.

She was not Miu. Even worse, she didn’t even belong to the world of the living anymore, but still I couldn’t stop my heart from trembling.

“You made a promise. Tell me. What do those numbers that you leave in our mailbox mean?”

“Now, now, I only said I would give you a hint.”

“Then would you give it to me?”

Kayano spread out the hem of her skirt and sat down on one of the black desks.

“The hint is my name. K-a-y-a-n-o.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Hee-hee. Think a little harder, detective.”

“I’m just a high school student. I can’t figure anything out from such a small clue. Can you give me another hint?”

“In that case, I’ll tell you about him,” she whispered, a tender warmth flickering to life in her eyes as she looked at me. “He was closer to me than anyone. He was a part of my soul and my other half. Everywhere we went and everything we did, it was together…”

The pristine moonlight shining through the window carried with it memories of the distant past.

The fragments of time became white feathers, which fluttered slowly down around me with the light of the moon.

It had been the same for us…

Wherever we went, whatever we did, it was together. Miu had been the other half of my soul. Or at least that’s how I had felt about her.

“He and I had a lot of fun together. But”—Kayano’s lashes drooped sadly—“he got angry at me and went away. We never saw each other again.”

I pressed down on my chest as pain seared through my heart.

I would never see her again, either.

Miu had rejected me, her eyes filled with such loathing.

I had loved her so much, but I would never see her again…

“Say, Konoha—do you know how you can get back the things you’ve lost?” Kayano asked soberly, looking straight at me.

I bunched the front of my shirt in my fist and answered, my voice shaking, “That’s impossible. You can’t get something back once it’s gone.”

Kayano lowered her eyes ever so slightly and declared with perfect detachment, “No, it’s actually very easy. You just have to reverse time. Then you won’t make the same mistakes you did before.”

It was like a devil was whispering in my ear.

If I could reverse time… if I could go back to that day…

How often had I wished to do exactly that during that interminable winter I spent in bed, the covers pulled over my head?

If I could go back to how things were before I wrote the novel, could go back to that day Miu threw herself off the roof…

Please, God—grant me this wish. Please let me go back.

I didn’t need anything else as long as I didn’t have to lose Miu.

Please, God.

But time didn’t reverse itself.

I was here alone.

“That’s impossible. Nobody can go back in time.”

Kayano saw how badly I shook, and her face suddenly saddened. She murmured very quietly, “I see… so you’ve wanted to go back before, too.”

She slid off the desk and walked toward me. She reached out both arms and gently wrapped them around my head, pulling me to her frail chest.

I had no idea what emotions inspired that act.

She only seemed to be very sad, and she was trembling a little. Her thin body was as cool as snow and had a clean scent I’d smelled somewhere before.

I relinquished myself to the phantom embrace, feeling a faint relief and also a deep ache.

I wouldn’t have minded if time had frozen forever in that moment.