Confessions (13 page)

I didn’t know what to say to him, but he spoke up first.

“I’m sorry about all this,” he said, his voice as flat as his expression. “I’m going to the store for a minute.”

Not only had he taken a bath, he was ready to leave the house? I blurted out that I would go with him, but he said he wanted to go alone. Of course, my first instinct was to follow him, but I worried he might spot me and that might undo everything I’d worked for since last night, so I forced myself to sit down and wait for him to come back.

As I watched him head down the street, I realized for the first time the seasons had changed—spring is long over and summer is here.

What I’m going to write about here—Naoki’s trip to the store—happened just a half hour or so after the events in my last entry. But several days have passed and I’ve been too upset to get to my diary.

After he left, it occurred to me he’d want breakfast when he got back, so I went to the kitchen and started making scrambled eggs with bacon, one of his favorites. Then my cell phone started ringing—as I said before, it almost never does.

I had a bad feeling about the call, and I was right. It was the manager of the convenience store down the street calling to say that he was holding Naoki and I should come right away.

I’d been worried he might do something reckless—shoplifting, for example—so I’d given him plenty of money before he left, but I knew he was still upset and thought he might have taken something on impulse.

But it was nothing as simple as shoplifting. According to the manager, Naoki had come into the store and wandered around the aisles for a while. The manager had seen him putting his hand in his pocket and had assumed he might be stealing, but then he took his hand out of his pocket and walked back through the store, rubbing his palms on the drinks and food on the shelves. It was odd behavior, to be sure, but not in itself cause for detaining a child—except that Naoki had been smearing the store’s wares with the blood dripping from his hand. His right hand was wrapped in a bandage—which the manager said Naoki had taken from the shelf and applied by himself after they had stopped him. They had found a razor blade—stolen from our bathroom—in his pocket.

The manager said nothing like this had ever happened before and he wasn’t sure what to do, so he’d decided to call the first number in the contact list on Naoki’s phone—mine. Naoki refused to say anything to the manager or anyone else in the store, but since no actual crime had been committed, they decided not to call the police, and I was able to make the whole thing go away by buying everything in the store that he had touched.

He was quiet on the way home, too. Since I’d been making breakfast, I went back to the kitchen. Naoki followed and sat down at the table. Perhaps he didn’t want to go back to his room now that it was in shambles. I was carrying bags filled with all the bloody things I’d bought. Setting them on the table, I sat down across from him.

Then I asked him why he’d done such a terrible thing. I didn’t really expect an answer, but I couldn’t keep myself from asking. But he did have an answer.

“I wanted to get arrested,” he said, his voice totally empty of emotion.

“Arrested? Why? What do you mean? Are you still thinking about what happened with Moriguchi-sensei’s daughter? You didn’t do anything wrong! You’ve got to stop worrying about this.”

He didn’t answer, but I realized this was the first time we’d actually even mentioned the whole thing. I wanted to be as positive and cheerful as possible, realizing that this might be his one chance to turn the corner and get back on track. “I’m starving!” I said. “And you know what, I’ve never had a convenience store rice ball. I might as well try one, since we’ve got so many.”

I took a rice ball out of one of the bags. The label identified the flavor as tuna and mayonnaise, but the wrapper was covered in brown streaks of Naoki’s blood.

“You probably shouldn’t eat that. You might catch AIDS.” So saying, Naoki took it from me, peeled off the wrapping, and began to eat it himself. I had no idea why he’d done that—or why he’d mentioned AIDS—and told him so.

“Moriguchi-sensei gave me milk infected with the AIDS virus.” Somehow, his tone and expression remained absolutely neutral even as he was telling me this horrible news. As the words ran around in my head, I could feel goose bumps form all over my body.

“That can’t be true,” I said.

“But it is. She told us what she’d done on the last day of school. That crusading teacher, Sakuranomi-sensei, was actually her daughter’s father. You remember him—you said you liked his books. They said he was dying of cancer, but it was actually AIDS, and it was his blood that Moriguchi-sensei put in our milk, Sh
ū
ya’s and mine.”

Throughout this gruesome confession, his expression had been flat and empty, but as he finished a look that seemed almost cheerful crept over his face. Unable to sit still any longer, I hopped up, went to the sink—and vomited again and again.

Moriguchi had to be nothing less than a monster to have infected my dear sweet Naoki with HIV, the AIDS virus. And he’d had to bear this awful secret all by himself, without telling anyone—not even me. His obsessive behavior and his self-neglect, his tears when he ate the bean sweets…it all made sense now. I found myself overwhelmed with gratitude that he was still alive.

“I want you to go to the hospital with me,” I told him. “I’ll explain everything to them.”

I wanted them to do something immediately, perhaps even drain all Naoki’s old blood and replace it. I was getting more and more worked up, but Naoki was utterly calm. Perhaps because he wasn’t finished. The next words out of his mouth were an even worse nightmare and sent me to even lower depths of the hell I’d already fallen into. I don’t think I can summarize, so I’ll try to write it down just as it was.

“I don’t need a hospital,” he said. “We should go to the police.”

“The police? Of course, we need to have them arrest Moriguchi.”

“Not her. I want them to arrest me.”

“What do you mean? Why should they arrest you?”

“Because I’m a murderer,” he said.

“Don’t be ridiculous! You didn’t kill anyone. I’m not even sure I believe what you said about dropping the body in the pool, but even if you did, that’s not murder.”

“Moriguchi-sensei said she was only unconscious, that she died because I dropped her in the water.”

“That’s absurd! But even if she did, you didn’t know, so it’s still an accident.”

“No,” he said. “You’re wrong.” A smile spread over his face. “She opened her eyes while I was standing there holding her. And then I dropped her in and let her drown.”

I can’t write anything more today.

That idiot Terada was just here again, and he behaved even more terribly than usual. He stood outside our door and yelled about Naoki staying home from school in a voice so loud the whole neighborhood must have heard. And he even had the nerve to bring along a big card that Naoki’s classmates had made for him—with a perfectly ghastly message picked out in bright red marker.

They must have thought they’d created a marvelous code—one that Terada was apparently too stupid to figure out—but I saw it almost immediately. The first letters spelled out “Die! Murderer!” Naoki is a murderer…a murderer who has to put up with this terrible abuse from stupid children who have nothing better to do to amuse themselves.

But they did help me make up my mind.

Before this, I had decided that Naoki had dropped Moriguchi’s daughter in the pool after Watanabe killed her—and nothing more. I’d been convinced that Moriguchi had made up even that part. The truth was considerably more horrible. He had dropped her in the pool after she’d regained consciousness. In other words, the murder had been intentional.

When Moriguchi came and questioned Naoki until he confessed, I had been convinced he was lying and that it was Moriguchi herself who had forced the lie out of him. That’s why I was sure he was innocent. But now I see that he was lying even then, quite intentionally.

I didn’t want to hear the terrible truth he had finally told me, but I no longer thought he was lying. I am Naoki’s mother, and a mother can tell when her own son is telling the truth.

“But I’m sure it was because you were frightened. You threw her in the pool after she opened her eyes because you were afraid.” I repeated this over and over to Naoki. I knew how foolish I sounded, like a mother blinded by love for her child, but once I’d been forced to admit that Naoki had committed murder, I was looking for one last shred of hope—that he’d done this horrible thing because he was terrified.

But he refused me even this.

“If that’s what you want to believe,” he said. He had no intention even now of telling me why he had killed that little girl. Yet he seemed relieved, as though he had done just that—had gotten everything off his chest—and when I asked him again and again whether he’d been afraid, he just said we should “go tell the police,” as though he was humoring a crazy woman.

When he washed away the filth he was using as a shield, I think he must have also washed away the sweetness he’d had since he was a baby. He is no longer the Naoki I love. He has lost all trace of human kindness and become a murderer and a defiant son—and there is just one thing a mother must do in that case.

Yoshihiko, I’m grateful to you for all these years we’ve spent together.

Mariko, I’m sorry I never got the chance to see your baby. Take good care of my grandchild.

Kiyomi, stay strong and follow your dreams.

I’m going to join my dear mother and father and take Naoki with me.

I thought that if I was willing to root around in the darkness, I might discover the truth, and that might help me find a tiny crack of light, the beginning of a way out. But now that I’ve finished reading my mother’s diary I don’t see anything like that—I can’t even see my own way forward.

My mother had tried to kill my brother before she took her own life. When I first heard that he’d become a
hikikomori
,
that’s what I’d assumed. Mother had been so obsessed with her ideal family life. That had been her one source of happiness. So much so that killing Naoki to avoid having to face the destruction of that ideal might have made sense to her.

But the truth wasn’t quite so simple. She had actually been willing to let Naoki stay home, having convinced herself that he needed a kind of “time out” from life. She was a woman who couldn’t sit still—always fussing over this or that—so it must have taken a great deal of willpower just to watch and wait while my brother sat up in his room.

I don’t think it was the sleeping pills and the haircut that sent my brother over the edge. He was already at the breaking point, and it was just a matter of time before he had to confess what he’d done.

Still, things might have ended differently. If they’d been able to hold out just a few more weeks, I’d have come home from school. Now that I’ve read the diary, I’m not sure what I’d have done, how I could have helped with Naoki, but at least there would have been two of us in the house. We might have figured out something.

Two in the house.… I still wonder how my father could have missed the whole thing. Or whether he actually knew what was going on and just pretended he didn’t.

I know Mother would have been furious with me for thinking this, but I suspect that Father was pretending to be mildly depressed as a way to avoid dealing with Naoki’s troubles—or maybe he really was depressed because of Naoki’s troubles. But then Naoki’s trouble—his fundamental weakness—was probably something he got from Father in the first place.…

I suppose our real family could never have lived up to the ideal—and it was always only an ideal—that Mother had in her head. But looking back on it now, I realize that we really were a normal, happy family…until all of this happened.

The shock caused my sister to have a miscarriage, and she’s still hospitalized. The reporters and photographers have been poking around—even following her to the clinic—and I suppose it’s just a matter of time before they connect the dots and figure out that Naoki was involved in the incident at school. Probably not much longer now.

They’ve tried to question Naoki, but he says nothing.

I’ll probably have to give Mother’s diary to the authorities, and when they realize that she was intending to kill Naoki—and that he’d already been treated by a psychologist—he’ll probably be found innocent.

Which is what we all want. For Mother’s sake, for Mariko’s and mine, and even for Father’s, I want them to find Naoki innocent.

But that can only happen once they find out what he was really thinking.

A white wall in front of me. Another in back. To the right and left, above and below, white walls.

How long have I been here? Alone in this small, white room. No matter which way I turn, the same scene plays endlessly on the wall.

How many times have I seen it? It seems to be starting again.…

I’m walking along, back hunched against the cold wind, when the tennis team, in shorts and t-shirts, runs past me. Then some kids sprinting to the station to get to cram school. I haven’t done anything wrong—I’m just headed home—but somehow I feel guilty and hunch my back even more, look down to avoid meeting their eyes, pick up my pace. Even though there’s nothing to do when I get home.…

I just didn’t connect. Ever since starting middle school, I just didn’t connect. With what? With other people—with the teachers especially. The tennis coach, the cram school staff, my homeroom teacher—they were all hard on me, harder than they were on anybody else. And the kids noticed, and they’re all making fun of me now, too.

I eat lunch with the two biggest dorks in the class—a train fanatic and a kid who spends all his time playing porno video games. I don’t have much choice: After I got in trouble in class the first time, they were the only ones who would even talk to me. But it doesn’t mean we’re friends, or that they treat me well. They’re not really interested in anything except trains and porn. They talk to me, so I answer. That’s all. I suppose it’s better than being alone. But I don’t like to be seen with them, especially by the girls in our class.

I don’t want to go to school. But I can’t really tell my mom why. She’d be too disappointed. The truth is, everything about me must disappoint her. She wants me to be the best at everything—like her brother, Uncle K
ō
ji.

So she tells all her relatives and the neighbors that I’m a really “nice” boy. Nice? What does that even mean? I can’t remember ever having done
anything
that could be called nice—I’ve never once done volunteer work or anything like that. She’s got nothing to brag about when it comes to me, so she says I’m “nice.” But if that’s the best she can do, she shouldn’t bother. I don’t want to be the worst, but I don’t have a complex about not being exceptional.

I grew up thinking I was really smart and really good at sports—because my mother was always telling me I was, from the time I was little. But by third grade I knew that what she was telling me was just her hope, the way she wanted me to be. If I tried really hard, I might end up being a little above average, but I’d never be anywhere near the best at anything.

She kept this up all the way through elementary school. For example, she framed a certificate for the only award I ever received and put it in the living room to show visitors. It wasn’t much of an award—third place in a calligraphy contest. I remember I wrote the word
election
in cursive, and the teacher said it looked really “natural.”

Once I got to middle school, she didn’t even have that kind of stuff to brag about, so she started saying how “nice” I was. But that wasn’t enough; then she started writing these letters to the school. I realized what she was doing after midterm exams.

Moriguchi-sensei told us in homeroom who’d gotten the top three total scores. You could tell by looking at these kids that they were all really smart, and I clapped for them along with everybody else. It didn’t much bother me that I couldn’t get grades like that. I knew I wasn’t at that level. Mizuki, who lives in our neighborhood, was the second best, but when I told my mother at dinner that night, she just looked bored. “You don’t say?” she said, but I could tell she didn’t care.

A few days ago I found a copy of a letter she’d been writing in the wastebasket in the living room. She must have made a mistake and started over.

I knew right away that she was writing to complain about Moriguchi, so I took the letter and went to find her in the kitchen.

“You can’t send this,” I told her. “You’ll make it look like I’ve got some sort of complex because I’m a lousy student.”

“Now, Naoki,” she said, in her sweetest voice, “that’s not it at all. It has nothing to do with you. I just don’t like all this attention paid to grades. I’m objecting because that’s the only thing she talks about. Is that all that matters? What about being a good
person
?
She doesn’t seem to care about that. She’s not announcing the names of the three nicest children in class, is she? Or the names of the three hardest workers when it comes to cleaning up after school? I just want her to be fair, to balance things out.”

I felt like puking. What she was saying sounded reasonable, but if I’d been one of the three with the top grades, she would never have written a letter like this. Bottom line: She was just disappointed in me.

Since then, every time she says how nice I am, it makes me feel more and more miserable. More and more.

A bicycle bell rang behind me and I turned around to see a girl from my class coming up to pass me. She’d been friendly enough until recently—she might have called out as she rode by on her bike. Not now. I pulled out my perpetually silent cell phone and pretended to check my texts, sniffing as if I had a cold. Then I started walking again.

Until somebody hit me pretty hard on the back.

Watanabe. Another kid from the class.

“Hey, Shitamura,” he said. “You busy? I’ve got this awesome video, and I was wondering whether you wanted to watch it with me.”

What the…? When we’d switched our desks around in February, we’d ended up next to each other, but we’d hardly ever talked. We hadn’t gone to the same elementary school, and we’d never had cleanup duty together after class.

Besides that, he kind of bugged me. I guess we were just too different when it came to schoolwork. He didn’t even go to cram school, but his scores were practically perfect in every subject; and over the summer he’d won some sort of prize in a national science contest. But that wasn’t even what bothered me most.

Watanabe was usually alone. Before class in the morning or when we had a break, he would be reading some thick book, and after school he would disappear right away. Since I was usually alone, too, I guess you could say we were a lot alike, but what I hated was the fact that being alone obviously didn’t bother him.

It wasn’t that he didn’t have any friends—he avoided people because he didn’t want to be with them. Like he couldn’t be bothered hanging out with a bunch of idiots. That’s what I couldn’t take about him. He reminded me of Uncle K
ō
ji.

Still, most of the guys in class looked up to Watanabe, and in a weird way, some of them even tried to suck up to him. But it wasn’t because he was smarter than they were—that doesn’t get you much respect in middle school—it was because he’d used his smarts to figure out how to almost completely eliminate the blurring the censors put on porn videos and get a clear image. That’s what they said, anyway.

I’d heard these rumors and I was as interested as anybody else in getting my hands on the videos, but it wasn’t like I was going to ask him out of the blue to lend me one—after all, we’d hardly said a word to each other.

But then
he
came up and started talking to
me
. What the…?

“Why are you asking me?” I said.

I thought he might just be jerking me around. Maybe some of the other guys in class were hiding somewhere nearby to see how I’d react. I looked around, but there was no sign of anyone.

“I’ve been wanting to talk to you for a while now,” he said. “But I could never find the right time. I could tell, though, that you’re different from the rest of them. You’ve got a lot going for you—I’m even a little jealous.”

He laughed, sounding almost embarrassed. He had this kind of awkward look on his face. It was the first time I’d seen him smile.

But it still didn’t make sense. Jealous? Of me? I might be jealous of him, but the opposite was hard to imagine.

“Why?” I said.

“Everybody thinks I’m an egghead. They think I’m going all out—I’d do anything to get good grades. It’s kind of embarrassing to be seen that way.”

“You think so? I don’t see you like that.”

“Well, everybody else does. I feel like kind of a loser. But you take everything at your own pace. You looked around first term and sized everybody up, and then second term your grades went way up.”

“Maybe a little,” I said. “But they’re still nowhere near as good as yours.”

“But you’re still on cruise control—you’ve got a whole other gear. That’s pretty cool.”

Cool? Me? No one, not another boy or girl, not even my mother, had ever told me I was cool before. I could feel my heart racing, my cheeks getting hot.

It was true that my grades had gone up after summer vacation, when I’d started going to cram school, but they’d long since leveled off. The cram school teacher got on my case and figured out all sorts of ways to make my life miserable—in fact, when I realized that no matter how hard I worked I would never be much better than average, I’d quit cram school last month.

But hearing this now from Watanabe, I began to feel he might be right, that I might actually be coasting. I could probably kick up my game if I wanted to. Maybe I had qualities I’d never recognized myself—ones that only Watanabe could see.

I suddenly wanted to be his friend. More than just about anything.

The next time I saw him we met at his laboratory—a room in an old house by the river. I brought some carrot cookies my mother had made. On a new widescreen TV, zombie doom-bots were swarming through a city at night. As for the porn, he said he’d been interested in figuring out how to get rid of the blurred section on the screen but didn’t care about what was behind the blur. In fact, he said it pretty much disgusted him. He let me watch a little, but instead of the normal stuff, it turned out to be all these naked blonde women fighting each other in a regular pro wrestling ring. We turned it off when they started getting really rough.

We decided to watch something else, so we went to the video shop by the station and got an American action-horror movie. Mom doesn’t let me watch stuff with guns and lots of violence, so I was pretty into it. The hero was this cool woman who blasted a whole army of zombies with this awesome machine gun, which would be totally fun to do.

In fact, I must have muttered something about “wanting to do that, too,” because at some point when I looked over at Watanabe, he was looking back at me.

“Okay,” he said. “Is there anybody in particular you want to do it
to
?
”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Wait till it’s over,” he said, turning back to the movie. I guess I thought he meant “if you were the woman in the movie” or something like that. I went back to watching. The zombies that the woman had just blasted were staggering back to their feet like in some really bad nightmare, and at the end of the whole thing she still hadn’t been able to get rid of all of them. I guess there was going to be a sequel.

“What would you do if the whole town was crawling with zombies?” I asked Watanabe, as we ate my mother’s cookies. Instead of answering, he stood up, went to a desk, and took something out of a drawer. A black coin purse.

“Is that the Shocking Purse?” I asked him.

“That’s right, and I’ve managed to increase the voltage. I just haven’t found anybody to try it out on yet. You want to be the first?” I shook my head and put my hands behind my back. “Just kidding!” he said. “No, I made it to deal with all the people I can’t stand. It needs to be tested on one of them.”

Then he set the purse down in front of me. It looked like any other change purse with a zipper.

“Does it really work?” I asked.

“If you touch the zipper, you get a pretty good shock—enough to knock you on your ass. Not you—I mean somebody we don’t like. How’d you like to see that?”

“You bet I would. But who are you going to use it on?”

“That’s the point. I’ve been so busy inventing this thing and getting good grades, I can’t tell people apart—you know, I hate all of them. That’s why I was hoping you’d choose.”

“Me?” I said, nearly choking. But I was also really excited. We were going to use his invention to get back at someone evil, and I was going to decide who! I felt like I was suddenly in a movie—Watanabe was the mad scientist and I was his assistant.

But who to pick? I racked my brain. Not
my
enemy—
our
enemy. Which meant it had to be a teacher. One of the more self-satisfied bastards.

“What about Tokura?” I said.

“Not bad…but I don’t think I want to mess with him.”

Okay, someone else. How about Moriguchi, who was always worrying about her own kid more than her students?

“Moriguchi?” I said aloud.

“Actually, I already tried it on her.… I don’t think she’d fall for it again.”

Strike two. Watanabe sighed and began fooling around with the tools on his desk like he was getting bored. Maybe he was starting to regret he’d asked me to come. If he didn’t like my next suggestion, he might even call off the whole plan. Or he might get somebody else to help him—and they’d choose
me
. I could almost hear them talking…“Him? Worthless. A total waste!”

What could be worse? Nothing…except maybe being forced to clean a dirty old pool in winter all by yourself, even though I hadn’t even done anything wrong. It wasn’t so much the cleaning. I hated having anybody see me being punished like that. So when I heard someone coming, I ducked in the locker room. But it turned out to be—

That’s it! What about her?

“What about Moriguchi’s little girl?” I said. “She doesn’t care about us, just about that brat, so what better way to get to her?”