Confessions (17 page)

When I was done with my hair, I cut my fingernails. Then I took a shower and washed away all the dirt. I lathered the soap into the washcloth and scrubbed over and over, and I could see the dirt falling off in flakes like the dust from an eraser. The proof of life went spinning down the drain.

So why was I still alive?

I couldn’t understand. I’d scrubbed away every last shred of evidence—proof of my existence—and yet I was still breathing. Then I remembered a video I’d seen a few months ago.

Now I understood. I’d turned into a zombie. You could kill me again and again, but I didn’t die. But it got better: My blood was actually a biological weapon. Maybe it would be fun to turn everyone else in town into zombies, too.

I decided to go out and touch everything on the shelf at the store—and thanks to the razor in my pocket, everything I touched would have a smear of sticky red blood.

Mission accomplished! The biological weapon has been detonated.

I went around and brushed my hand over every bento and rice ball and juice bottle like I was putting my stamp on them.

I wanted everybody to feel the same fear I did.

Somebody tapped me on the shoulder—a kid with bleached blond hair who probably worked here part-time. He’s staring at my hand and he’s got this really grossed-out look on his face. Blood’s dripping from my palm where I cut it…drip, drip, drip, running nice and red…

It didn’t really hurt before, but now that I’m staring at it I can feel it pulsing and throbbing. So I grab a box of bandages off the shelf and wrap it up.

My mother came to get me. She did a lot of bowing and apologizing to the manager and the clerk. Then she bought all the stuff I got bloody.

The sun was still low in the sky as we walked home, but it was strong, like it was piercing right into me. As I walked along, squinting and wiping the sweat out of my eyes, I somehow stopped caring anymore about the fear of death or the proof of life. My hand was throbbing, and I was hungry.

And really, really tired.…

I looked over at my mother, who was walking next to me. She hadn’t put on her makeup, and she was wearing the same clothes she had on last night. When she came to Parents’ Day at school, she was always worried that she was older than the other moms, but that never bothered me. She was prettier than all of them. But this was the first time I’d ever seen her out without any makeup, and she couldn’t even wipe away the drop of sweat running down her nose because she was holding the bags full of stuff I’d touched in the store. I had to squint hard to keep from crying.

I guess I’ve been misjudging her. I thought she wouldn’t be able to love a kid who didn’t live up to her expectations, her high ideals. But I was wrong. She’s still here for me, even now that I’m a zombie.

I decided to tell her everything—and then get her to take me to the police. If she’d be waiting for me when I got out, I was pretty sure I could put up with my punishment. If she could accept me even though I’m a murderer, then maybe I’d be able to start over again.

But I didn’t know how to say any of this to her. I knew I should just tell the truth, but somehow I was still just a tiny bit scared she would give up on me if she knew.

But who am I kidding?

When it came right down to it, I just wanted to leave myself an escape route—which is why I decided to tell her what I’d done, but at the same time to keep pretending to be a zombie while I was telling her.

It was while I was explaining to her about what Moriguchi had done to me, about the AIDS milk, that I suddenly realized something really important: I didn’t know whether I was infected or not. Or, if I was infected, whether I actually had the disease. What exactly had I been scared of all this time?

I could see the water in the swamp clearing up right in front of my eyes.

I suddenly felt free, and maybe that’s why I could tell my mother that I’d killed Moriguchi’s little girl—that I’d meant to do it. The way I’d felt that day by the pool—that feeling that I was better than Watanabe, better than anybody—came back to me as I was talking.

When I finished my confession, I could tell she was pretty shocked. I was hoping she’d agree that I needed to go turn myself in, but she just sat there. On the other hand, she didn’t scream and push me away, either. She didn’t give up on me, and that made me happier than just about anything.

But then she started asking me why I threw the girl in the pool even after she opened her eyes. “It was because you were frightened, wasn’t it?” She must have said that ten times. I wanted to tell her it was because
I
was doing what Watanabe—the kind of kid she’d wanted all along—couldn’t do.
I
was succeeding where he had failed. But I couldn’t say it.

I didn’t want to upset her anymore, so I just kept telling her I was ready to go to the police.

They showed up again. Terada and Mizuki. But they don’t scare me anymore. Let them come.

But then Terada started yelling outside the door. “Naoki! If you’re in there, listen to me!” So I sat down next to my window to listen. At that point, I didn’t care what he said.

“You’re not the only one who had a hard time this term! Some of your classmates have been bullying Sh
ū
ya! It’s been pretty bad!” What? Watanabe has been going to school all this time? And he was still alive? Terada was saying that the kids had been punishing him, but they’d stopped.

I didn’t listen after that. Instead, I remembered what Watanabe had told me by the pool.

We’ve never been friends. I can’t stand kids like you anyway—completely worthless but full of yourself. Compared to a genius like me, you’re pretty much a complete failure.

And I could just hear him laughing at me now, knowing I’m a
hikikomori
.

I had burrowed into my bed. The room was dark and I was grinding my teeth. I knew I was really angry, but I didn’t know what to do about it. All this was Watanabe’s fault, but he’s been going to school like nothing happened. I felt like the world’s biggest loser.

Even if Mother won’t go with me, tomorrow I’m going to the police to confess. Everything. He may get off easier than me, but at least he’ll know that I was the one who killed her—of my own free will. That’ll get him. I’d like to see the look on his face when he finds out. I’d like to be there to have a good laugh.

I could hear somebody coming up the stairs. Must be my mother, and she must be coming to tell me she was ready to go to the police tomorrow. I was so happy, I went out to the hallway to wait for her. But.…

As she got to the top of the steps I could see what she had in her hand. A kitchen knife.

What did she want?

“What are you doing?” I asked her. “Aren’t we going to the police?”

“No, Naoki,” she said. “That wouldn’t change anything. That wouldn’t bring back my sweet Naoki.” She was crying hard.

“Are you going to kill me?”

“I want you to go with me, to see Grandma and Grandpa.”

“You want to send me alone.”

“No, I’m going, too.”

She hugged me, and I realized for the first time that I was taller than she was. I suddenly felt really peaceful, and I knew it would be okay to die if she would come along with me.

Mother was the only one who ever understood.

“Naoki, my sweet boy. Forgive me. It’s my fault you’re this way. I’m sorry I wasn’t a better mother. I’m sorry I failed you.”

Sorry I failed you. Failed you. Failed. Failure! Fail, fail, fail, fail, fail fail fail fail fail fail.…

She let go of me and rubbed my head. She had always been so good to me, petting me and spoiling me. There was a look of pity on her face.

“I’m sorry I failed you,” she said.

Stop, stop, stop! I am
not
a failure! I did
not
fail!

Something hot splashed on my face.

Blood, blood, blood. Mother’s blood.… Did I stab her?

Her body looked skinny and fragile as she fell down the stairs.

Mother, wait! Don’t leave me! Mother! Mother! Mother!

…Take me with you.

That’s where the images playing on the wall always end. But who’s the stupid kid who keeps showing up here? And why do I know exactly what he’s thinking?

And then there’s that girl who says she’s my sister. She was calling to me from outside the door.

“Naoki, you didn’t do anything. It’s all a bad dream,” she said.

She called me “Naoki.” I don’t like being called by the same name as that idiot kid in the film on the wall. But if I actually am that kid, then the “bad dream” is that film itself.

And if that was a dream, what’s this?

If only I could just wake up, have some of Mother’s scrambled eggs with bacon, and go to school.

I know this is probably a creepy way to start an eighth grader’s will, but happiness is as fragile and fleeting as a bubble of soap.

The one person I loved in the whole world died, and then that night when I got in the bath there was no more shampoo. Life is pretty much like that. But when I put a little water in the empty bottle and shook it, it filled up with these tiny bubbles.

That’s when it hit me: That was me. Water down the last dregs of happiness and turn them into bubbles to fill the void. It may be nothing more than an illusion, but it was still better than the emptiness.

I planted a bomb at school today, the thirty-first of August.

It’s rigged to go off when I push the Send button on my phone. I got another phone with a different number and built it into the bomb as the trigger. When it rings, the vibration sets off the blast. So actually you could set it off from any phone, if you knew the number—or even if you got a wrong number, you’d have about five seconds and then…KABOOM!

The bomb is under the podium on the stage in the gym.

There’s an all-school assembly tomorrow to mark the end of the second term, and they’re going to announce that an essay I wrote won top prize in a prefectural competition. My homeroom teacher, Terada, told me yesterday how the program was supposed to go.

I’ll go up on the stage to receive a certificate, and then I’ll go to the podium and read the essay. But they’re in for a surprise. Instead of the essay, I’m going to give them some parting words and then detonate the bomb.…

I’ll be blown to tiny bits, and I’ll take all those worthless idiots with me.

There’s never been a child crime like this before, and I bet the TV and the newspapers will eat it up. I wonder what they’ll say about me? I suppose they’ll talk about my “inner demons” and use all the usual clichés; but even if the descriptions in the media are totally unrealistic, I hope this website, what I’m writing here, gets out just as it is. My one regret is that the newspapers won’t use my real name because I’m a minor.

But I wonder what it is that the public really wants to know about a criminal. His background or his hidden psychological problems? Or maybe his motive for committing the crime? Well, if that’s what they want, I’ll start with that here.

I understand why murder is considered a crime. But I don’t necessarily understand why it’s evil per se. Human beings are just one among an infinite number of entities, living or otherwise, that exist on the earth. If obtaining some sort of benefit for one being necessitates the elimination of another, then so be it.

But that belief didn’t prevent me from writing an essay on the meaning of life that was better than anyone else’s in the class—better than any other middle school kid’s in the prefecture. I began by quoting Dostoevsky’s
Crime and Punishment
:
“Extraordinary people have the right to violate conventional morals in order to bring something new into the world.” But I argued against that idea, saying that life is precious and that under no circumstances could murder be justified. I even dumbed it down enough to sound like a middle school kid. The whole thing took less than a half hour to crank out.

But what’s the point? That kind of conventional morality is nothing more than a lesson in school.

I suppose there are some people who have an instinctive aversion to murder. But in a country like Japan, where religion doesn’t count for much, I suspect most people have been taught to value life above all else. And yet those same people also support the death penalty in the case of particularly brutal crimes—without seeing the inconsistency in their own position.

However, on a few rare occasions someone will come forward to counter this logic and argue that a murderer’s life is just as valuable as one’s own, regardless of status or station. But what kind of upbringing results in that sort of sensibility? I suppose it would come from a childhood where someone whispered fairy tales about the “precious value of life” in your ear every night before bed (if there are any such fairy tales). And if that were the case, I suppose I could understand ending up with that kind of attitude—even though it couldn’t be further from my own feelings.

Because, you see, my own mother never once in my life told me a fairy tale. She did put me to bed at night, but instead of telling me stories, she talked about electrical engineering. Current, voltage, Ohm’s Law, Kirchhoff’s Law, Thevenin’s Theorem, Norton’s Theorem.… My dream was to become an inventor, to create a machine that did something new—extracted cancer cells, anything at all. That’s how the stories my mother told always ended.

Our values are determined by the environment we grow up in; and we learn to judge other people based on a standard that’s set for us by the first person we come in contact with—which in most cases is our mother. So, for example, a person who has been raised by a cruel mother might find another person—let’s call him A—might find A to be a kind person; but another person who was raised by a very kind mother might find A to be cruel.

At any rate, my mother has always served as my basis for judging other people, and I have never yet met anyone who was as extraordinary as she is. Which means that I would have no regrets about the death of any of the other people around me. Unfortunately, that even includes my father. He’s nice and cheerful—fine for the owner of a small-town electronics store—but that’s about it. I don’t hate him, but I don’t think it matters whether he lives or dies.

Even the smartest person can go through a bad period in her life, a time when, through no fault of her own, she has the bad luck to be taken in by someone else. My mother was in the middle of such a period of weakness when she met my father.

She had been living overseas and came back to do a doctorate in electrical engineering at a top-ranked university, but she had run into a snag in her research just as it was reaching the final stages. Right around the same time, she was in an accident.

She was taking an overnight bus on her way home from a conference at our local university when the driver fell asleep at the wheel and crashed into an embankment. There were a dozen or so fatalities and many more injuries. My mother was thrown from the bus and suffered a major head contusion. She was loaded onto the first ambulance to arrive at the scene, and the patient on the other stretcher turned out to be my father. He had been on his way to the wedding of a college friend.

They were married soon afterward, and had me. Or perhaps it was the reverse. Having finished her doctoral studies, my mother abandoned her research, ignored her genius, and came here to live in this dead-end town.

You could think of the time she spent here as a form of rehabilitation. She spent her days in a corner of my father’s electronics store—in a tired shopping district at the edge of town—finding ways to explain just a tiny bit of what she knew to her little boy. One day she might take the back off of an alarm clock; the next, she would take apart a TV—all the while telling me that there was no limit to the things that might be discovered in the future.

“You’re a very smart boy, Sh
ū
ya. I’m counting on you to accomplish the things I was never able to.” She would often tell me this as she looked for ways to explain her abandoned research project to a child who was barely in elementary school—and perhaps she had a flash of inspiration while she was repeating the details. At any rate, she wrote a new academic paper without telling my father and submitted it to a conference in the United States. That was when I was nine years old.

Not long afterward, a professor from her old research lab came to persuade her to return to the university. I overhead their conversation from the next room, and I remember being so happy that someone who understood and valued my mother had come that I wasn’t even particularly worried about her going away.

But she turned him down. She said she would have gone if she’d been single, but that she was a mother now and couldn’t leave her child to go back to her research.

It was a shock to realize I was the reason she had to refuse. I was holding her back. It wasn’t just that I was a worthless kid; I was actually denying worth to the person I loved most.

When people talk about “overwhelming regret,” it’s usually just a figure of speech, but I believe that my mother experienced exactly that. All the feelings that she had suppressed came out, and they were directed solely at me.

“If it weren’t for you,” she would say as she began to beat me almost every day. She hardly needed an excuse—I hadn’t eaten all my vegetables, I’d missed one problem on a test, I had slammed the door.… In the end, it was the very fact of my existence that she couldn’t stand. But every time she hit me, I could feel a void opening wider and wider inside.

It never occurred to me to tell my father what she was doing. As I’ve said, I didn’t hate him, but I had resigned myself to my mother’s decision, and the longer I went on fooling him and pretending nothing was happening, the more I came to feel superior to him.

On the other hand, no matter how swollen my cheeks got or how many bruises I had on my arms and legs, I never felt any hatred for my mother. If she’d had a particularly violent outburst during the day, she would always come to my room at night and stroke my head while I pretended to be asleep. There were tears in her eyes as she whispered how sorry she was. How could I have hated her?

After she left my room, I would cry myself to sleep, my face pressed into the pillow to stifle my sobs. It was too painful to realize that the one person in the world I loved was suffering by the very fact of my existence.

It was during that period that I first started thinking about death.

If I were dead, my mother would be able to fully demonstrate her genius and finally fulfill her dream. Every suicide scenario I could think of began running through my head. Jumping in front of a truck out on the highway. Throwing myself off the roof of the elementary school. Stabbing myself in the heart. But all of them seemed ugly and unappealing. I remembered how my grandmother had died the year before at the hospital, almost as if she’d just gone to sleep, and I began to wish I could contract some disease.

While I was desperately trying to come up with a way to die, my parents finalized their divorce. I was ten years old. My father had at last realized that my mother was abusing me. It seemed that one of the other shop owners had told him. My mother put up no defense, saying she would move out as soon as the divorce came through. I understood that I couldn’t go with her, but nevertheless I cried as if my body were being ripped apart, and when I was done, I was finally completely empty inside.

After my parents decided to divorce, my mother never hit me again. On the contrary, she took to gently stroking my cheek or forehead at random moments throughout the day. She made all my favorite foods—cabbage rolls, potatoes au gratin, rice omelettes—and her genius showed in the kitchen, too. Her versions were better than any restaurant’s.

The day before she left, we went out together for the last time. She asked me where I wanted to go, but a flood of tears prevented me from answering. In the end, we went to a new shopping center called Happy Town that had just opened out by the highway.

She bought me several dozen books and the latest game player. She had me pick out all the games for the player I wanted, perhaps hoping that these would help me through the lonely days ahead. But she chose the books herself.

“These are probably a bit old for you now, but I want you to read them when you get to middle school. Each one of them had a big effect on me when I was growing up. With my blood flowing in your veins, I’m sure they’ll be important for my Sh
ū
ya, too.” Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Camus…none of them looked very interesting at the time, but I didn’t care. It was enough that I had her blood “flowing in my veins.”

For our final dinner together, we ate hamburgers at a fast food place. She had suggested going to a nice restaurant, but I thought somewhere more starkly lit and unbearably loud might help me to keep me from crying.

We had a delivery service ship the things she’d bought and decided to walk home despite the distance. She held my hand in hers: the hand that could do such amazing work with a screwdriver, or make delicious hamburgers, or slap my face ruthlessly—and then pet me just as gently. I had never known until that moment how much could be communicated through the hands. But I had reached my limit. My tears flowed harder with every step we took, as I used my free hand to wipe them away.

“Sh
ū
ya, you know I’ve had to promise that I won’t come see you, or call, or even write to you. But I’ll be thinking about you all the time. Even though we’re going to be apart, you will still be my one and only child. If anything should happen to you, I’ll forget about the promise and come running to find you. And Sh
ū
ya, I’m hoping you won’t forget about me.…” She was crying, too.

“Will you really come?”

Instead of answering, she stopped and folded me in her arms. That was the last moment of happiness for her empty boy.

My father remarried the following year. I had turned eleven.

His new wife, someone he had known in middle school, was pretty enough but she was also impossibly dumb. Here she was marrying the owner of an electronics store, and she couldn’t even tell the difference between AA and AAA batteries.

Still, I found I didn’t really hate her. Mostly because she didn’t pretend: She was fully aware how stupid she was. When she didn’t know something, she just said so. If a customer asked her a difficult question, she would make a careful note of it and then ask my father before calling back with the answer. There was something admirable in this kind of stupidity. I took to calling her Miyuki-san, and the respect was genuine. I never once talked back to her or treated her like an evil stepmother, the way kids on those cheesy TV shows do. On the contrary, I was the model stepchild, finding a designer bag for her cheap on the Internet or going along with her to carry the grocery bags when she went shopping for dinner.