Goth (2 page)

i

It had been about three weeks since I last saw Morino. It was summer vacation, but we had to attend school that day.

She arrived well before homeroom began and immediately threaded her way through the classroom bustle over to my desk.

We had never bothered with greetings. Morino stopped in front of me, pulled out a notebook from her pocket, and placed it on my desk. I had never seen it before.

It was small enough to rest on my palm, with a cover of brown synthetic leather—the kind of thing you see all the time in stationery stores.

“I found it,” she said.

“It isn’t mine.”

“I know.”

She seemed to be enjoying this.

I picked up the notebook, feeling the smooth fake leather against my skin. I flipped through it, skimming the contents; the first half of it was filled with tiny writing, the latter half was blank.

“Read from the beginning.”

I did as she said, moving my eyes along letters written by an unknown hand. There were a lot of paragraphs; it was almost like an itemized list.

†

May 10

Met a girl named Kusuda Mitsue in front of the station.

She was sixteen.

I spoke to her and she got in my car shortly after.

I took her to T***** Mountain.

As she gazed out the window, she told me her mother was obsessed with the letters to the editor column in the newspaper.

I stopped the car at the top of T***** Mountain.

I took the bag containing knives, nails, etc. out of the trunk, and she laughed, asking what was inside.

†

It went on like that.

I had seen the name Kusuda Mitsue before … Three months before, a family had been hiking on T***** Mountain, a married couple and their son. The father had not had a day off in a long time, and he had lain down to rest when they reached the mountain. The boy had tried to get his father to play, but the man had not budged. So after lunch, the boy went to explore the woods alone.

The mother realized her son was missing. Then she heard a scream from the forest.

The couple went into the woods and found their son: he was standing still, looking at something just above his eyeline.

When the parents followed his gaze, they saw some reddish-black dirt on the trunk of the tree—something small and sinister was nailed to it at eye level. They gazed around them and found that all the trees nearby had something nailed to them …

Bits of Kusuda Mitsue. Someone had taken apart her body in the forest. Her eyes, tongue, ears, thumbs, organs—each was nailed to a tree.

One tree had, from top to bottom, the left big toe, the upper lip, the nose, and the stomach. Another had other bits of her arranged like Christmas tree decorations.

The murder was soon the talk of the nation.

The notebook Morino had found contained a detailed description of how Kusuda Mitsue had been killed, which bits of her were nailed to which tree, and what kind of nails had been used—but it contained no mention of the writer’s emotions.

I had been following the case on TV, in the papers and magazines, and on the Internet, and so I knew a lot about it. But this notebook contained minute details that none of those reports had revealed.

“I believe this notebook belonged to the man who killed her.”

Kusuda Mitsue was a high school girl from the next prefecture over. She had last been seen saying goodbye to friends in front of the station. And she was only the first victim in the gruesome murders that had caused a stir all across Japan. There had been another case, with strong similarities, and it was believed to be the work of a serial killer.

“He wrote about the second victim too.”

†

June 21

I spoke to a woman waiting for the bus with some shopping bags on her arm. She said her name was Nakanishi Kasumi.

I suggested I give her a lift home.

On the way to H*** Mountain, she noticed that we were headed away from her home, and she began to make noise.

I stopped the car and hit her with a hammer until she was quiet.

I placed her in a small hut on H*** Mountain.

†

The nation had learned the name of vocational school student Nakanishi Kasumi a month earlier. The news and the papers had snatched it up instantly, and I had known there was a second victim before I even got home from school that day.

She had been found in a small hut on H*** Mountain. The building had been left abandoned for some time, its owner a mystery. It had been badly damaged by rain and was filled with mold and stains. It was about ten feet wide, and the walls and floor were planks.

An old man who had come up the mountain to collect food noticed that the door to the hut, which had always been closed, was now open. Surprised, he came closer—and noticed the stench.

He looked inside. It seems certain he could not tell what he saw at first. Nakanishi Kasumi was laid out in rows on the floor of the hut. Like the first victim, her body had been cut into pieces, and these had been placed carefully within a ten by ten grid on the floor, each bit about ten centimeters away from the next. She had been turned into a hundred small lumps.

The notebook described the process in detail.

There were no witnesses to either case, and the person who had killed them had not been arrested. The media were still talking about the two murders, calling them the gruesome work of a serial killer.

“I like watching news about this case.”

“Why?”

“It’s a strange case,” Morino said flatly.

I had been watching for the same reason, so I understood what she was trying to say.

People had been killed—torn to pieces. People who had had that done to them and people who had done that actually existed.

Morino and I had a unique interest in this kind of awful event. We were always looking for stories that were so tragic that they made you want to hang yourself. We had never spoken about this strange inclination directly, but we both sensed it in the other without saying anything.

I imagine normal people would have been appalled. Our sense of these things was abnormal, so whenever we discussed torture implements or methods of execution, we always kept our voices low.

When I looked up from the notebook, Morino was staring out the window. I could tell she was imagining all Nakanishi Kasumi’s parts laid out on the floor.

“Where’d you find this?” I asked, and she explained.

Yesterday evening, she had been sitting in a coffee shop she liked—a dark, quiet place with a shop master who never spoke.

As she drank the coffee he’d made, she flipped through the pages of
Cruel Tales of the World.
She heard the sound of rain, and when she glanced out the window, she saw it coming down really hard.

A few customers had been getting ready to leave, but Morino saw them sitting down again. They must have decided to wait out the evening showers. There were five customers there, not including her.

She stood up to go to the bathroom. As she walked, she felt something strange underfoot: she had stepped on a notebook lying there on the shop’s floor, which was made of black wooded planks. She picked up the notebook and put it in her pocket, apparently never once considering trying to figure out to whom it belonged.

When she got back from the bathroom, the other customers were watching it rain. None of them had left.

She could tell just how hard it was raining from looking at the shop master, who had ducked outside for a minute and come back in soaking wet.

Morino forgot about the notebook and went back to her book.

When it stopped raining, the sun came out again. Several customers stood up and left, and the rays of the summer sun soon dried the roads.

It wasn’t until Morino arrived home that she remembered the notebook and began to read it.

“I went to the bathroom twice. The first time, the notebook wasn’t there. It began raining immediately afterward, trapping the customers there. When I stood up again, the notebook was lying there. The killer was in that shop, and the killer lives near here.” She clasped her hands in front of her chest.

The two bodies had been found two or three hours away from where we lived, so it was not impossible for the killer to live there— but it didn’t feel real.

This case would be talked about for years. It was still unsolved, but the sheer gruesomeness of it was enough to make that clear. Everyone in the country was talking about it—even children knew about it. It was too famous—making it hard for us to believe the killer was that close.

“There’s a chance that this is only what the writer imagined, based on the news.”

“Read more,” Morino said, confident.

†

August 5

I gave a ride to a girl named Mizuguchi Nanami. I met her in a soba shop near S**** Mountain.

We went to the shrine in the woods on the south side of the mountain. She went into the woods with me.

†

In the woods, the notebook’s owner had stabbed Mizuguchi Nanami in the stomach with a knife.

In the notebook, the killer broke down her body. In cramped handwriting, he described how he had gouged out her eyes and what color the inside of her womb was.

He had left Mizuguchi Nanami in the woods.

“Have you heard the name Mizuguchi Nanami?” Morino asked.

I shook my head.

There had not yet been any reports of her corpse being discovered.

ii

I became aware of Morino when second year began and we found ourselves in the same class. At first, I thought she was like me, living her life without getting involved with anyone around her. Even during break periods or when she was walking through the halls, she always avoided other people, never joining the herd.

We were the only two people like that in our class. That is not to say that I gazed coldly at my classmates’ excitement the way she did, though. I would answer if someone spoke to me, and I joked around enough to keep things friendly. I did the bare minimum to lead a normal life. But these were surface relationships, and all the smiles I produced were lies.

The first time we spoke, Morino saw right through that part of me.

“Will you teach me how to smile like that?” she’d said, standing directly in front of me after school, no expression on her face at all. She must have scorned me for it privately.

That was at the end of May. Since then, we had begun to speak occasionally.

Morino only ever wore black clothes—dark colors, from her long, straight black hair to the tips of her shoes. In contrast to that, her skin was paler than anyone else’s I’d ever seen, her hands like ceramic. There was a small mole under her left eye, like the pattern on a clown’s face, and it gave her a slightly magical aura.

Her expression changed significantly less than that of most people, but it did change. For example, when she was reading a book about a killer who had murdered fifty-two women and children in Russia, Morino was clearly enjoying herself. It was not the same as the suicidally gloomy look she wore when she was in a crowd of our classmates; no, her eyes were glittering.