Real World (16 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

NINNA HORI, PART 2

D
ear Ninna Hori,
Or maybe I should say “Dear Miss Toshiko Yamanaka”? Or maybe “Dear Toshi-chan—I love you”?
I’m writing to you, Toshi, because you’re the only one I can tell this to. I know you might get mad and say, “What a thing to say!” But I know you’ll also sympathize with me and say that Terauchi must be a pretty lonely person. And that’s fine. Both are true, so please listen to me.
By the time this letter gets to you tomorrow morning, I won’t be here in the world anymore. I know starting out the letter like this makes it sound like some dark manga or dumb novel, and I bet it’ll disappoint you. But it’s true. As soon as I mail the letter I’m planning to die. I’m going to die right away because I think it would be a lousy thing if you heard about my death before you got this letter, and I want to avoid that at all costs. By the way, I actually did try writing a dumb novel like this with a similar opening line, but the thing turned out to be the pits, so I crumpled it all up, ripped it into a million pieces, and flushed it down the toilet along with my pee.
This is the first and last serious letter I’ll ever write to you, Toshi, and I wish I could stop hiding, but it’s like that’s all I can do anymore. Still, I feel sorry for myself and feel awful about vanishing from this life, and I’m writing this as a kind of pep talk to tell myself I’ve got to have the guts to do it, and I’m having this dilemma about how I can possibly convey to you the struggle I’m going through. Words are such a pain, so sluggish I feel like ripping my tongue right out. But if you think about it, writing this puts it into words, but since I’m not telling you directly, in person, my struggle is not so much about words as it is about
me.
That’s right—I’m still afraid of being totally honest. I’m more afraid of this than dying. So what am I doing getting all shy about something like writing, huh?
Okay, I’ve finally calmed down a bit. If you say I hide things because I’m shy, that can’t be right. I’ve finally realized it’s for a different reason—that I don’t want to see the darkness that lies in my heart. And this agony I’ve been going through as I try to figure out what I want to tell you in this letter, Toshi—I finally understand the reason I’m writing. I’m really a dismal excuse for a person. But I’m so tense and nervous, hoping I can somehow communicate to you, Toshi, about the kind of person I am.
I know this is a roundabout way of talking, but that’s the way my thoughts work, spiraling round and round. My mind works like that, too, but the conclusion is surprisingly simple. All I want is for someone to understand me before I die. With death staring me in the face, I finally understand the reason novelists write books: before they die they want somebody, somewhere, to understand them. In my case this isn’t my mother, or father, or Yukinari, or Yuzan. It’s just you, Toshi-chan.
I know you may find this a pain, but I want to wipe the slate clean before I die, so please read this. If you don’t want to, could you just stop here? Even if you don’t want to read it yourself, that’s cool, but whatever you do, don’t show it to my mother, okay? Just keep what you’ve read so far in your heart and throw it away.
I’m sorry if this is a burden for you. But I’m so happy I met you, Toshi. If I hadn’t, I’d have died without revealing to anyone the darkness inside of me. This might sound all pure and righteous, but it isn’t. The reason is that I need to die, but only after really taking a good hard look at myself and seeing what kind of person I am. Do you see what I mean? And to do that, you need somebody else’s eyes to look at you. So please, Toshi, see through to the
real me,
be brave, and laugh. Say, “What a jerk she was, that Terauchi! A girl like her leaving the world? Well, I say good riddance!” Is that asking too much?
If our positions were reversed and you were in my shoes, I would definitely do that. I promise you I would. You might think that’s kind of a sneaky thing to say, to talk about something impossible like making a promise to you even though I’m dying first. But there’s nothing sneaky about it. Because I’m exposing things I’ve dragged out while you weren’t aware of it. You’ve changed me, little by little, Toshi. So we’re in the same boat. What I mean is, you have to deal with my death.
I don’t think you understand at all why I’m going to die, so let me explain a little. That’s only fair. There are a couple of reasons why I can’t go on living anymore.
One is my difficult personality. I think you know about that. I’m this superphilosophical kind of person. Stuck in a prison of abstract ideas and overpowering emotions, I have this personality that makes it really hard to survive. Plus, I’m living in the middle of a familiar transformation, I guess you’d call it, something mankind’s never experienced before, with the role of the family getting more messed up than anybody imagines, changing day by day, growing more and more complicated and individualistic, something nobody can really comprehend, and I have to pretend to fill all these roles every day. Otherwise I can’t survive. That totally wears me out. In the reality of everyday occurrences I’ve had to submit to people in order not to lose them.
It’s less the submission that bothers me, I guess, than how it makes my life miserable. And what happens if I can’t forgive myself for making that choice? And what if, in order to keep on living, I have to continue to accept myself? What am I supposed to do? Conclusion: It’d be best if I’m destroyed. The best thing is for me to just vanish.
By the way, the person who’s caused me so much grief is someone you’ve met before, Toshi—my mother. A mother complex? Sorry, that’s not it. I’ve already gone beyond that. Still, as a person, I like her. I don’t want to make her suffer, yet I’ve turned into this old person who shouldn’t outlive her.
There’s one more major reason that I don’t want to—can’t—go on living. There’s something I have to take responsibility for. Kirarin’s accident. The accident in which Kirarin and that taxi driver from Nagano died, and in which Worm was critically injured. It’s all my fault.
After I die, nobody will be able to discover the truth, so I want to set it down clearly here. The night Worm and Kirarin phoned me I told the police where they were. I made an anonymous call from a public phone at a convenience store in front of the station and told the police that they were in a vacant cottage in Karuizawa. That’s why Worm and Kirarin tried to escape the police dragnet by robbing a taxi, which led to the accident. So something that never should have happened did, all because of my thoughts and actions. A clear-cut cause-and-effect relationship. I was the one who caused it, and I should probably get the death penalty. Or maybe what I should say is I’m the one who pronounced the death sentence on
myself.
I can hear you saying, Toshi, that I shouldn’t feel responsible. But, like some criminal who’s convinced that what he’s doing is right, I ran Kirarin and Worm into a corner and tried to punish them. That’s a fact. I despised Worm because he ran away from something that
can’t be undone
and chose the easy way out of something that
can
be. Which for him was killing his mother. He chose the easy path and then ran away, and I despised him for it.
I love my mother too much and so I forgave her, but I hated myself for forgiving her, and started to hate myself so much that I didn’t want to be in this world anymore. At the same time I burned with hatred for Worm, for the hostility he had toward his mother. ’Cause what he did didn’t involve my kind of roundabout thinking. It evaded thinking, actually. It was just too simple. I was angry because he boiled down his trouble into a very simplistic response. I think I started to apply this weird logic to Kirarin, too. Needless to say, I was also angry at you, Toshi, for hesitating to report Worm to the police, and at Yuzan for lending him her bike. Still I pretended as always to be casually helping out Worm and Kirarin. I wonder why. Maybe I’m evil, after all.
After I phoned the police I felt awful, like I had something bitter in my mouth that I couldn’t get rid of, no matter how much I swallowed. Now I realize that taste came to me the instant I crossed the line. That night I tried to avoid the whole thing, got into bed, and forced myself to shut my eyes, but then had lots of weird dreams. In one dream, Kirarin was riding in the back of a truck, going off to be sold somewhere. In another one, I reported my mother to the police. Wonder what Freud would say about that?
Then early the next morning I got a phone call from you. As soon as I heard you scream through the cell phone that Kirarin had died, I knew it. That what I had done had brought on a tragedy that could never be undone. For me the idea of something that can’t be undone seemed an internal emotion, etched in the hearts of the living. But when I realized I’d lost Kirarin, that this was something
real
that truly was irreparable, I got goose bumps all over. I was terrified. Terror is more dangerous than the prospect of self-exposure; I could see my whole philosophy of life falling apart. The world I’d thought was real collapsed, and out of it another reality appeared. A meta-reality. I’d been pondering for a long time who I was and had almost reached a conclusion, but now I had to start again from scratch. I wonder if I was wrong.
I was acting strangely, so my mom asked me what was wrong. “Kirarin died in Karuizawa,” I told her, “in an accident.” My mother was shocked and said, “How could that happen? Her poor mother.” What do you think I said back to her then, Toshi? A line that even now makes me blush. Something so dumb that would make this hyperphilosophical girl a complete laughingstock. No matter that this letter is my suicide note, it’s too embarrassing to write down what I said to my mom. Out of consideration for our friendship, I hope you’ll forgive me.
Anyhow, I’m ashamed of myself. And very, very tired. It seems like I’ve reached the right moment to die. I feel sorry for my mother, but she has someone more important in her life than me, so I’m sure she’ll survive. Sorry, but I’m not thinking about my father and brother, either. I’m sure that for you, Toshi, getting this letter knowing I’ve died will be really tough. But you’re a good person, with a strong, honest soul, and I know you’ll be okay. Not me, though—I’m done for. I want to say good-bye to everybody. Hmm—sounds like something from Dazai Osamu, doesn’t it? How pointless was that, writing reports for school? Bye-bye. I’m off on a journey to the real world. ’Cause within this meta-reality what’s
real
is this—my death. You hang in there, now, okay? Later, dude.
Kazuko Terauchi
No doubt about it, this was a suicide note. I’d never held a suicide note, or read one, in my life. When I thought that these were Terauchi’s last words, somehow I couldn’t fathom what they all meant.
She ended up not actually mailing the letter. It was sealed, with my name on it, on top of her desk. It didn’t have a stamp on it, so she must not have wanted to take the trouble to buy one. Instead she jumped off the roof of a nearby apartment building. Even though she’d made such a big deal about how she wanted the letter to arrive before the news of her death. Such impatience. Just that fact alone revealed how confused Terauchi had been. It made me want to laugh, but instead my face was all scrunched up in pain.
Come on, you dummy!
I wanted to say.
Get it right!
Worm’s mother’s death, Kirarin’s death, the death of that taxi driver, Worm’s injury, Terauchi’s suicide. Too many shocking things had happened one after another, and tears wouldn’t come. I couldn’t think about it deeply. Like an empty shell, I opened up Terauchi’s last letter and had to read it with Terauchi’s parents and my mother looking over my shoulder.
“What did she say?”
Terauchi’s mother asked this the second I finished reading. In just half a day her face had turned dry and listless, drained of life. She looked desperate to know the reason why her daughter killed herself. Only Terauchi’s father was sobbing—her mother was toughing it out. Yukinari, her younger brother, had shut himself in his room and refused to come out.
My mother rested her hand on my shoulder as if to protect me, and it felt heavy. Terauchi’s mother had phoned us, saying, “There’s a letter left behind addressed to Toshiko, so I’d like you to come over and open it.” As soon as we heard this, we dropped everything and raced over.
I’d never imagined that I’d be hearing about Terauchi’s death, and it was all so sudden and crazy that it was almost funny. That’s why I couldn’t cry. My heart just felt empty. To begin with, early that morning we’d gotten the shocking news of Kirarin’s death and that turned into a huge uproar, not just in my house or the neighborhood, but with calls coming from school, too.
The female detective who’d questioned me before was the one who told me the news about Kirarin’s death in the accident. And then, half a day later, this phone call telling us Terauchi had killed herself. So as I started to read her letter, I had no clue at all what it was all about. I was totally confused and tried my best to be calm.
This is how it all took place:
Early on the morning of August tenth, our home phone rang. It had to be either a salesman or a relative. Other people would just call each of our cell phones, which made a phone call coming in the morning all the more ominous. Nobody else was up yet, and I counted the rings as the phone echoed in the quiet house—one…two…Six thirty by my clock. It’s got to be bad news, I thought, and tugged my blanket up to my chest. At the fifth ring it sounded like Dad answered it downstairs. No way. No way! The extension in my room rang, and it was Dad’s voice.
“It’s from the police. They want to talk to you.”
I was pretty depressed, figuring they’d finally caught Worm and had learned how we’d helped him get away. I guess
depressed
isn’t the right word. It was more like
Darn it all!
Racing to think up some excuses, I reluctantly came on the phone.
“Good morning. My apologies for calling so early.” It was the female detective from before, and she was so polite it made me even more confused for a second.
“Toshiko? I apologize if you were sleeping,” the woman went on. “But something terrible has happened and I thought I should let you know. It will shock you, but please try to remain calm. It’s hard for me to make this call. The Nagano Prefectural Police contacted us and informed us that a high school student named Miss Kirari Higashiyama passed away a short time ago in a hospital in Karuizawa. She was with the boy who lives next door to you, and I was really surprised, wondering how this happened. She goes to the same high school as you, so is she a friend of yours? I wonder if she had been seeing the boy next door before this. I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me whatever you know.”