Confessions (10 page)

I waited for a few minutes and then Werther came back in the room.

“You have nothing to worry about, Mizuho,” he said, putting his hands on my shoulders and looking me in the eye. “No matter what they ask, just tell the truth.” I looked back at him, holding really still.

“Can I ask you something?” I said at last. He nodded. “But before I do, would you put this on?” He looked skeptical but I told him that it was a good luck charm—that all the kids were wearing them. Then I handed him the lie detector watch that 
Sh
ū
ya
 had slipped me before he left and watched as he strapped it on. “So, were you going to Naoki’s house every week because you were really concerned about him? Or were you just going because it made you feel good about yourself?”

“What are you talking about? That’s ridiculous, Mizuho! You were there—you know perfectly well! I was doing it for Naoki!”

Beep, beep, beep, beep…Werther looked down at the flashing face of the watch as the awful sound filled the room.

“What is this thing?” he snarled.

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “It’s just the Last Judgment.”

I followed Werther to the school office. The principal was waiting for us, along with the lead teacher for our grade and two police officers. Werther and I sat side by side, and they asked us to tell them everything we could about Naoki—though they still hadn’t told us anything more about what had happened. I just told them my story, as Werther had suggested.

“I’ve been going every Friday with Yoshiteru-sensei to deliver copies of our class notes to Naoki’s house. His mother always comes out to meet us, but we haven’t seen Naoki once in all the time we’ve been going. At first, she seemed pretty happy to see us, but lately I’ve been getting the feeling we’re bothering her. Even when it’s hot, she’s always wearing long sleeves, and sometimes I can tell she has bruises on her face under her makeup. I thought she might be getting them from Naoki—maybe because she tried to get him to go to school every time we showed up at the house.

“She never said anything, but I could tell that our visits themselves were beginning to stress Naoki. He isn’t the kind of kid to get angry or hurt anybody, but I suppose he felt backed into a corner when he heard us coming, and he had nowhere else to let off steam. His mother had spoiled him pretty bad, and I guess he tried to hurt her when he couldn’t figure out what else to do. I suppose you’d say that he’s a little weak. But I think all his other teachers realized that. The only one who didn’t was Yoshiteru-sensei—who was convinced he could solve Naoki’s problems all by himself. But the more we went, the more Naoki felt trapped and the more he lashed out at his mother. That’s why I told Yoshiteru-sensei I thought we should take a break from the visits, but he didn’t care what I thought. Instead, he made everything worse the other day when he started yelling up at Naoki’s window, so loud that everybody in the neighborhood could hear. It was like he wanted to turn Naoki into a freak or something. I think Naoki thought of his house as a kind of sanctuary, since he couldn’t face school. But Yoshiteru-sensei wanted to smoke him out of that one safe place.

“It was almost like Yoshiteru-sensei was hunting him. But he isn’t ever thinking about what’s best for us anyway. We’re just a mirror he uses to stare at his own reflection. None of this would have happened if he wasn’t so self-absorbed.”

I know it’s hard to believe, but all of this has happened in one term—in the four months since you left us. It’s summer vacation now, and I’m wondering whether Werther will be coming back for the start of the new term. If he is shameless enough to show up, then I’ve got some things to figure out.

Since last summer, I’ve been collecting all kinds of chemicals. If things get too awful, I’m planning to use them as my way out. But I’ve started thinking that I should test them on someone else first to see if they work. What I really want is some potassium cyanide, and now might be the best time to get it since the teachers are all much more worried about the scandal and their reputations than about the keys to their storage lockers. I bet if I ask Tadao-sensei for his, he’d give it to me, no questions asked.

It should be easy to slip something to Werther if he comes back in the fall. He’s the only one who drinks the milk, and I guess I wouldn’t care anyway if somebody else got some.…

But I suppose you may be wondering why I hate Werther so much. It’s because I’ve been in love with Naoki ever since the first grade. He’s my first and only love. I guess it started when that idiot Ayako began calling me Mizuho. She was jealous because she’s so dumb and I always knew all the answers—so she made up that stupid nickname and the others joined in. After that I was Mizuho to everybody—except to Naoki, who kept on calling me Mizuki. I’m not even sure why he refused to go along with Ayako—maybe he was just used to Mizuki—but it was enough to convince me that he was my only friend in the world.

One of Naoki’s sisters told me that when she asked him why he had killed their mother, he said it was because he wanted the police to arrest him.

Moriguchi-sensei, do you mind if I ask you one last question?

What do you think of your revenge now?

It was early morning on July 20, a few days before I was due to go home for summer vacation during my second year of college, when I suddenly had a call from my father.

He had two pieces of news: one, that my mother had been murdered; and two, that the murderer was my little brother, Naoki.

That made things a little complicated. If your mother is murdered, as a relative of the victim you should hate the murderer; but if the murderer is your brother, then you have to face the criticism that goes along with being a relative of a criminal while worrying about the chances for your brother’s rehabilitation and apologizing to the victims—of which you happen to be one!

How do you do all this at once?

One thing’s for sure: The press and the hangers-on aren’t going to leave you alone just because it’s a private family matter. In no time at all our house was surrounded, and the looks in people’s eyes weren’t sympathetic, or even particularly mean—just blatantly curious.

Murders aren’t as rare in Japan as they used to be. In fact, they’re so common that most people just yawn when they hear about one on the TV news. But they can still stir up interest when they offer a look inside the workings of a dysfunctional family—let you see how badly things can go wrong.

Dysfunctional love, dysfunctional discipline, dysfunctional education, dysfunctional human relations. At first, everybody wonders how something like that could happen to such a nice family; but when you poke around a bit the dysfunction comes out, and then you see that it was bound to happen, that it was only a matter of time.

I imagine there are people who see this kind of thing on TV and worry about their own family. But I never really did. It always seemed like it could never happen to us. The Shitamuras were normal—the most “average” family you could imagine. But it did happen: We had our own murder right in the family. So, what made us dysfunctional?

The last time I was home was at New Year’s.

On January 1, my mother and father and Naoki and I went to the neighborhood shrine for the ceremonial first visit of the year. Then we came home and sat around eating the traditional food Mother had made while we watched TV. I told my mother about friends I’d made in Tennis Club while we worked in the kitchen, and Naoki talked about this comedian who had come to perform at the school festival.

The next day our older sister came to visit with her new husband, and we all went to the mall to check out the New Year’s sales. Naoki’s grades had gone up a lot during the second term, so Mom and Dad bought him the laptop he’d been wanting, and I managed to guilt-trip them into getting me a new purse.

It was the same as every other New Year: an average celebration for an average family. I’ve been over everything we did and said a hundred times and I can’t think of anything that might have been a clue to what was coming.

What could have happened in the six months since then that made everything go so wrong?

Mother’s body had a single stab wound to the belly and a contusion on the back of the head. They said that she was stabbed with a kitchen knife and then thrown down the stairs. They say.… It all seemed so unreal, and even after I saw her in the morgue, I couldn’t really believe she was dead—or that Naoki was the one who had done that to her.

Why did this happen? If I can’t figure that out, I won’t be able to accept my mother’s death. If I can’t figure it out, I won’t be able to accept my brother’s guilt. If I can’t figure it out, my father and sister and I won’t be able to go on as a family.

I began to learn about my family’s dysfunction two days after my mother’s death—and it was the police who first started to explain. It seems that Naoki had never been to school after the start of eighth grade. Actually, it’s not that rare now for kids to refuse to go to school or even leave the house, but the truly disturbing thing about Naoki’s behavior is that my mother was the only one who knew about it. It might be understandable that I didn’t know what was going on, since I was living far away, or even that my sister didn’t know—she’s pregnant and lives in another town—but it’s incredible my father knew nothing when he was right there with them in the same house. I understand he had a long commute and worked late most nights, but how could you miss the fact that your son wasn’t going to school—for four whole months?

When the police asked him about it, he said he supposed it had something to do with an incident that had occurred during the third term of the previous year. My father is usually pretty quiet, but after all this he seemed like a different person. During the police interview, he rattled on and on in answer to their questions. I won’t repeat everything he said, but here’s a quick summary.

The daughter of Naoki’s homeroom teacher fell in the school pool and drowned. Naoki happened to be there when it happened, but he wasn’t able to save her. The teacher felt that Naoki was somehow responsible for her daughter’s death, that upset Naoki terribly, and though the teacher resigned, Naoki was unable to bring himself to go to school after that.

Now, I have no doubt that a child as emotionally fragile as Naoki would have trouble coping with something like this. I even believe he might have shut himself away from the world as a result. But I’m not sure I see how this would end with the murder of my mother.

Once he’d stopped going to school or leaving the house, what did he do all day at home? How did he interact with my mother? Now that she’s gone, he’s the only one who knows. But I’m not allowed to see him yet. So how was I supposed to find out?

But then I remembered what my mother had said when she bought me a diary as I was first setting off to live alone in Tokyo. “Whenever you’re worried or sad about something, I want you to know you can talk to me. But when you can’t or don’t want to, you should try writing in here. Just imagine you’re talking to the person you trust most in the whole world. It’s amazing how much the human brain is able to remember, how much you hold onto in life, but when you write something down, you can forget about it—you no longer have to hold it inside. Remember the good things; write the bad ones down in here and forget about them.”

Apparently her favorite teacher in middle school had given her a diary and told her pretty much the same thing—as a way of comforting a student who had lost both her parents one right after the other.

So I searched the house and found my mother’s diary.

Y
ū
ko Moriguchi, Naoki’s homeroom teacher, came to visit yesterday.

I disliked the woman the first time I met her. I even wrote to the principal to say I disapproved of having a single mother in charge of a class of impressionable adolescents—for all the good it did me. A mother’s opinion doesn’t count for much at a public school. But I was right about her, and the proof came in January of this year when Naoki got into a fight with some high school boys and the police took him into protective custody. The homeroom teacher is responsible in that kind of situation. She
should
have gone down to the station to help him. But this Moriguchi was too busy with her own child and sent another teacher instead. If the principal had moved Naoki to a different homeroom at that point, none of this would have happened.

There was an article in the local paper about how Moriguchi’s daughter had drowned in the school swimming pool. I’m sorry, of course, that she lost her little girl, but I have to say I found it odd that she was bringing her to the school in the first place. I doubt that would have been tolerated had she been working anywhere else but a school. You might even say that it was the loose regulations for public employees and her spoiled attitude that caused her daughter’s death.

But as if that weren’t enough, she suddenly showed up here and started asking Naoki all sorts of questions and making all kinds of insinuations. First she asked him about how he had been getting along at school, and even though she must have known most of it, Naoki told her again. How he’d joined the Tennis Club but had to quit because he couldn’t stand the coach, how he’d started going to cram school after that, and how he’d got mixed up with those high school boys at the video-game center and had been punished by the school even though he was the victim.

You could tell from the way he told all this that he’d been excited and happy to start middle school but that things had turned out badly. None of it was his fault, but he was still miserable. As I listened to him, I got madder and madder at Moriguchi. Why was she here? Just to stir up all these bad memories for Naoki? But still this wasn’t enough for her. She started asking him what he knew about her daughter’s death.

Finally I couldn’t help myself. “Why are you asking all this?” I practically screamed at her. “This has nothing to do with Naoki!” But almost before I was done, Naoki said something that nearly made me faint.

“It wasn’t my fault,” he murmured.

Naoki had become friendly with a classmate named Sh
ū
ya Watanabe at the beginning of the third term. I had read about him in the paper when he won a prize for a theft-prevention purse he had invented, and at the time I was happy that Naoki was making the right kind of friends. But this Sh
ū
ya turned out to be a horrible boy.

He decided he wanted to try out his invention on someone, see how they reacted to the electric shock he had rigged up in the zipper, and he forced Naoki to pick the victim. Naoki’s too kindhearted to have named any of their classmates, so he suggested one or two of the teachers. But the Watanabe boy wasn’t interested in any of them, so Naoki finally mentioned Moriguchi’s daughter. I’m sure Naoki thought it was a safe suggestion—that Sh
ū
ya would never do anything like that to a little girl.

But we weren’t dealing with a normal boy—this Watanabe is a real bad seed. He jumped at Naoki’s suggestion and immediately started working on a plan. Finally, that afternoon, he dragged Naoki along and they waited for the girl at the pool.

It almost makes me faint when I imagine what it must have been like for Naoki. Apparently he was the one who spoke to the girl when she came to feed the dog—Watanabe was counting on Naoki’s wonderful way with people to lure her in. Once the little girl had begun to trust them, Watanabe gave her the pouch in the shape of that rabbit character. He put the cord around her neck and told her to open it.

To tell the truth, I’d seen the pouch myself: Naoki and I had come upon them at the mall just as the little girl was begging Moriguchi for it. I suppose she thought she was teaching her daughter a lesson, but if she had just bought the thing for the child that day, she could have avoided the scene at the store and deprived Watanabe of his bait. Heaven knows she could have afforded it on her salary, even as a single mother.

The girl touched the zipper and collapsed—and Naoki was forced to witness her death. I can’t imagine how frightened he must have been. But I think it must have been even more frightening to realize that Watanabe had been intending to kill her all along.

As soon as it was over, he told Naoki that he was free to tell anyone he wanted to, and then he turned around and left. But did Naoki run and tell on him? No, he was too loyal a friend. He decided to cover for Watanabe by trying to make it look like an accident—and so he threw the girl’s body in the pool. He told Moriguchi that he was so upset that he really didn’t remember much more than that.

“Well,” she said, in that condescending tone of hers, “since the police have ruled it an accident, I don’t intend to stir up trouble.” Stir up trouble? For whom? It was all Watanabe’s fault. He planned the whole thing—Naoki was nothing but his unwitting accomplice, as much a victim as anybody. She may have decided not to tell anyone, but I was so mad I was almost ready to go to the police myself and tell them the whole story.

But Naoki did drop the body in the pool. Would that make him an accessory of some sort? He’d been trying to cover up somebody else’s crime—which might be a crime, too. Naoki has so much to look forward to. I couldn’t let him get mixed up in something like this and end up charged as an accomplice to murder. So, much as I hated to, I had to pretend to be grateful to Moriguchi, but I was staring daggers at her as she left that day—just under my relieved little smile.

I had no intention of telling my husband anything about this, but that afternoon I began to think it might be a good idea to offer Moriguchi some kind of compensation, a solatium payment of sorts. I wanted the whole thing over and done with, and didn’t want her coming back with her hand out later on.

But if it was going to involve a substantial sum of money, that meant I’d have to get my husband involved. So when he got home from work I told him the gist of what had happened and had him call Moriguchi. But as it turned out, she refused the money—which leaves me wondering why she came here in the first place.

My husband said we should report the whole thing to the police. Is he out of his mind? I told him Naoki would be charged as an accomplice, but he said it was still the right thing to do—even for Naoki. I suppose that’s the best you can expect from a man—a father—in this kind of situation, but by this point I was feeling sorry I’d ever told him anything. As usual, it’s up to me to protect Naoki.

From the beginning I’ve had trouble believing what Naoki said about all this. It seems more likely that poor Naoki just happened to be there and that horrid Watanabe forced him to go along and to say that he’d been in it from the start. Or maybe it was Moriguchi. Maybe she made the whole thing up. Maybe her daughter really did slip and fall into the pool, and she’s the real criminal for bringing her to school in the first place. But because she didn’t want to face the truth, she latched on to Naoki and Watanabe, who just happened to be there, and forced them to tell this lie. I bet that’s closer to the truth.

How could he have been involved? I would have realized something was wrong…and I know he would have told me the truth without Moriguchi having to force it out of him.