Book Girl and the Famished Spirit (9 page)

On her sixteenth birthday, she met someone she had not seen for a long time.

Someone kind who had showered her unstintingly with love when she had been living in paradise. That person gave her an old book.

Written inside it were secret words.

Cursed words that stole from her the future that she had dreamed of maybe someday, and cast her even deeper into the depths of comfortless night.

There was no hope for salvation. She could not allow herself to hope for it. Sin encrusted her.

Alone in the classroom, gazing at a world that melted into the darkness that spread over it like black ink, she whispered, “I wish that I could open the door and go to some other world. There, I could live a completely different story than this one.”

If she could have met the day boy, she might have been able to go back to that warm place from her past.

“Konoha!”

Tohko appeared so suddenly that I almost fell over in terror. She had a sulky look on her face and a mop in her hands.

It was cleanup time after classes. I had gone out to the balcony to wipe the windows with a cloth.

“What are you doing in my class? And why do you have that mop?” I asked, terrified. Tohko shoved the window open with one hand, her face the very picture of rage.

“I snuck out in the middle of cleanup because you keep running away from me, Konoha. Why were you picking up girls in the library during lunch?”

“What are you talking about?”

My eyes popped. Did she mean when I was talking to Amemiya? I couldn’t think of anything but that. But how did Tohko find out about that?

“Don’t pretend like you don’t know. Nanase told me.”

“What?!”

Kotobuki appeared next to Tohko, her arms crossed and lips pursed.

“I’m sure of it, Tohko. I saw Inoue with my own eyes. I
ab-so-lutely
saw him chatting up a girl with a smarmy smile on his face.”

Whoa—Kotobuki had told on me to Tohko? But
why
? And when did they start calling each other by their first names?

“That’s not all. Inoue has gone off surrounded by girls before, too.”

“Oh, is that so? So while I’ve been worrying about the future of the book club and waiting around for him, Konoha has been prancing off on dates with girls. That’s the kind of boy Konoha is. It doesn’t hurt him even a tiny bit if the book club gets attacked by a herd of pigs or if the walls get painted in blood.”

I interjected quickly.

“Hold on, you’re making way too many leaps here! Please step out of your fantasy. You’re wrong anyway. I wasn’t fooling around or going on dates.”

“Then what were you doing?”

Tohko’s frown deepened even further, and she looked at me petulantly.

“W-well…”

“The fact that he’s stuttering proves that he has a guilty conscience, Tohko.”

“Hey!”

“You’re right, Nanase.”

I couldn’t bear their combined recrimination, so I decided to run.

“Sorry, I… have something I need to go do.”

I shoved the cloth into Kotobuki’s hands and ran into the classroom, grabbed my book bag from its hook on the side of my desk, and burst out into the hall.

“Hey! Konoha!”

“Coward!”

I heard their accusatory shouts behind me, but I turned tail and ran.

I didn’t care how much Kotobuki disliked me, there was no excuse for her to go out of her way to rat me out to Tohko.
Man, I bet Tohko’s furious.

I was waiting for Ryuto in our usual restaurant, feeling depressed, when he walked in escorting a plump little woman in her seventies. Ryuto held the door open for her, and she looked so thrilled and embarrassed that I felt a spasm of horror.

He couldn’t have picked
her
up, too!

My eyes were bugging out as Ryuto introduced the woman glibly.

“ ’Sup, Konoha. This is Yoshie Wada. She used to be the ultrahousekeeper at Hotaru’s place.”

She could not fight it any longer.

That was why she wrote the letters.

To him and to the other girl and to whatever grand being controlled people’s destinies.

She wrote the secret letters down in a notebook, then tore them up and dropped them into the mailbox.

Please understand how I feel.

Hear my voice.

Grant this wish.

When I opened the door to the chemistry lab, Kayano was sitting at one of the desks, staring out the window at the scenery, which was sinking into shadow.

Her downcast eyes looked desolate and made me think of how Amemiya had looked when I’d seen her in the library at lunchtime.

“I saw someone you know today.”

She turned when I spoke and gazed at me tranquilly.

“I heard a lot about
you two
from your housekeeper, Ms. Wada.”

Yoshie Wada, whom Ryuto kindly introduced to me, had been a longtime housekeeper at the Amemiya household. She had been working at the mansion since Amemiya’s father was a child.

“I see… I suppose she didn’t have anything good to say about
me,” Kayano said disinterestedly. “That I left all the work to her or that I was never home… that I was willful and selfish, that I would throw tantrums all the time, or that I would break dishes on the floor and scream at people… You don’t have to say a word. I know. The servants often whispered that ‘the missus is in another stormy mood.’ Takashi was a gentleman and kind, and his younger sister Reiko was adorable and proper, and they were both very nice to me. The house was magnificent as well and the food delicious. It was like being in heaven… I shouldn’t have had any reason to be unhappy. So why, I wonder, did I feel the need to kick up such tempests?”

Takashi was Kayano’s husband, and Reiko was his younger sister. They were Amemiya’s father and aunt respectively.

Ms. Wada had told us that her master’s heart was a little weak, but that he was a kind, placid man. He fell so deeply in love that he practically worshipped the ground on which his wife walked, and he cherished his daughter Hotaru as well.

“And Hotaru was the only one to whom the missus would not raise her voice. She would often take Hotaru with her to visit her own family estate. Although the missus’s parents died quite early on, so there was no one living there. The master would grumble about how dangerous it was for two women to stay at the house alone.

“She must have been very attached to the home she had grown up in. Before her illness took her, she whined that she wanted to go home. It caused the master a good deal of consternation.”

When we’d asked what had become of that estate now, Ms. Wada had lowered her voice as if speaking of something cursed.

“Mr. Kurosaki and Hotaru are living at the missus’s home now.

“After the missus died, the house was completely remodeled and rented out. Mr. Kurosaki drove the tenants out and began living there himself, though it must be inconvenient for the two of them to live in such a large mansion on top of a hill. I wonder what he intends.”

Ms. Wada frowned disapprovingly.

I had my own questions. Like why Kurosaki had sold the house Amemiya was living in and deliberately moved them to such a big house, which was Kayano’s old home. Could that be an accident?

“I have never trusted Mr. Kurosaki. Ever since Miss Reiko brought that man to the house, I had a bad feeling about him. Of course, he acted the part of the upstanding gentleman, but his table manners were a bit strange. When eating pork sauté, he would simply bite into the lemon provided rather than squeeze it over the meat and then lick his fingers clean. You would never mistake him for a gentleman who had been raised in a proper household.

“He wore lightly tinted sunglasses, I suppose, because his eyes were bad. But from time to time, you know, I caught the gaze he hid behind those sunglasses, and it would send a chill down my spine. You might say that though he smiled with his lips, his eyes never smiled. Like a hungry wolf lying in wait for his prey… That was the sort of ominous feel his eyes gave you.

“The master was dead set against her marriage to Mr. Kurosaki. But Miss Reiko was utterly infatuated with him. She went so far as to say that she would elope if the master wouldn’t give his blessing, so he was forced to acknowledge them. And as a result, all those awful things…

“It’s very sad… That man has seized all of Hotaru’s property and taken her away from her family, who ought to have been there to protect her, and she’s been left all by herself.”

“Wada was very fond of Hotaru. She took care of her as if she were her own granddaughter. And she continued to do so
even after I died,
” Kayano murmured, her gaze dropping to her feet.

“That’s how it sounded. Ms. Wada was worried about Amemiya. Last year, she saw Amemiya for her sixteenth birthday, and she
said that Amemiya had gotten so skinny and as unresponsive as a doll.”

Kayano listened in silence.

“But she told us that she gave Amemiya something she had received from you.”

“It was wrapped so I don’t know what was inside, but it was a box about this big.”

Ms. Wada indicated a box about the size of a college notebook.

“Before the missus passed, she asked me to give it to Hotaru on her sixteenth birthday. I had kept it all that time.”

“What was it that you gave her?”

Kayano’s thin shoulders trembled, as if she was struggling with something, and she circled her arms around herself, hugging her body tightly.

“That’s… secret.” Her voice shook uncharacteristically. “I can’t tell anyone that.”

The way she was carrying herself, her expression, her slender fingers, her white legs—it all seemed so ephemeral, as if she would disappear at any moment… I called out to her without thinking, “Amemiya?”

She started and looked up. Then she smiled at me with Kayano’s face.

A proud, arrogant smile.

“No. I am Kayano. After all, Hotaru doesn’t matter to anyone. But that’s not important anymore. Hotaru and Kayano will both disappear very soon…”

“What do you mean?”

Her face looked suddenly sad again; then she dropped her feet heavily to the floor and murmured, “
We are finally leaving the world of the living behind.
If half of your soul has committed a sin
and been cast into hell, isn’t that the duty of the half that’s left behind? It would be wrong for only one part to be saved and go to heaven.”

I had no idea what she meant. Everything she’d told me tumbled through my mind, confusing me terribly.

I needed to walk up to her and ask my questions this time.

What’s making you suffer? What is it you truly hope for? Why did you pray to go back to the past? Why did Hotaru Amemiya have to become Kayano Kujo?