Another, Vol. 1 (7 page)

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I apologized quickly. “I wasn’t trying to force you to answer or anything. It’s just…”

“Something sad happened that day.”

Half my body is waiting there, the poor thing.

Hadn’t she said something like that in the elevator that day?

Half my body…the poor thing.

It had been weighing on my mind, but obviously I wouldn’t be able to ask her anything else. And she wasn’t sharing anything more.

The distant thunder rolled again. The wind blowing over the roof felt a touch colder than before.

“You…”

I heard Mei Misaki’s voice.

“Your name is Koichi Sakakibara. Is that right?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“That must bother you.”

“Th—…What?”

Hold on a second. Was she about to bring
that
up? Now?

“Wh-why do you say that?”

I hurried to regain my composure. Mei fixed me with a silent look.

“I mean, wasn’t it around this time last year? The whole country was panicking. It hasn’t even been a year since it happened.”

I didn’t answer.

“Sakakibara. It’s a good thing you’re not named Seito.”

When she said that, another whisper of a smile crossed her lips.

I was really in for it.

It had been so long since anyone had alluded to that—and it hadn’t happened
yet
at school today. And now, of all things, to hear it from her—from the lips of Mei Misaki.

“What’s wrong?” Mei tilted her head curiously. “Did you not want me to mention that?”

I tried to reply “Who cares?” and look as if it didn’t bother me, but I really didn’t pull it off. Before I could even begin to think over what to do now—“It brings up bad memories.”

I had started confessing, straight-faced.

“At my old school, last year—when the attack in Kobe happened, and everyone started talking about Sakakibara Seito, another fourteen-year-old middle schooler got sucked in, too…”

“Did they bully you?”

“Nobody ever did anything serious enough to call it
bullying
, but…”

No…it hadn’t been anything that bad. There hadn’t been any intentional or underhanded malice in it at all. Everyone just kind of thought it was funny…

They would write my name with the same characters he used, or call me Seito. Childish joking around that was harmless enough. But…

I let it roll off of me with an easy laugh in the heat of the moment, but sometimes I hated it more than I could stand, more than I even realized. In other words, the building blocks of stress. And then…

Last year in the fall, when I had been carrying the burden of this stress every day. That was when I had my first spontaneous pneumothorax. Maybe one of the reasons it happened goes back to all that stuff about Sakakibara. Remembering everything that happened, it doesn’t seem like such a forced theory anymore.

And the reason I’ve been packed off to be taken in by my grandparents in Yomiyama while my dad is out of Japan for a year is because he found out about what was going on and had a rare moment of parental concern for me. He probably decided that it would be best if I could change up my daily environment and push the reset button on my interactions with the people at school, where things kept getting more and more strained.

Even after I’d told her the broad outlines of what had happened, Mei Misaki didn’t backpedal and sympathize with me, or act embarrassed about what she’d done.

She asked, “Has anyone done it to you here yet?”

“You’re the first,” I answered with a bitter smile. Oddly, I had relaxed slightly.

All this morning, every time someone had spoken my name, I had tensed up, expecting this. And all for such a small thing. Ugh. When I put it all into words to tell her about it, it seemed stupid somehow.

“They’re probably just being polite,” Mei said.

“…Maybe.”

“I find it hard to believe they’d be worried about your feelings.”

“What do you mean?”

“Because Sakakibara is a name inextricably associated with death. And not just any death, at that: a cruel, senseless death that plays itself out at school.”

“Associated with death…”

“Yeah.”

Mei nodded quietly and held her hair down as the wind tossed it.

“That bothers everyone. So…maybe they’re not aware of it. Like a wound they’re protecting.”

“…What does that mean?”

What was she talking about?

I understood that the word “death” and the concepts it implied were ominous and had always upset people. That was obvious. But…

“You know, at this school…” Mei’s tone was as cool and detached as ever. “Here, third-year Class 3 is the closest to death of all the classes. More than any other class at any other school. Much more.”

“Close to death? What does that…?”

I couldn’t process what she meant by that at all, and I pressed a hand to my forehead. Mei’s right eye, fixed on me, narrowed until it was only a slit.

“You don’t know anything, do you, Sakakibara?”

Then she spun back around to look at the field. She rested her chest against the brown railing and angled forward over it, then bent her head back. Standing behind her, I looked up at the sky, too. The cloud cover had increased substantially from earlier.

I could hear the distant thunder again. Frightened by the sound, crows were cawing, and I saw several pairs of coal-black wings beat their way into the sky from trees in the schoolyard.

“You don’t know, do you, Sakakibara?”

Still staring up the sky, Mei Misaki repeated herself.

“No one’s told you yet.”

“…Told me what?”

“You’ll find out soon.”

There was nothing I could say to that.

“Also, you’re better off not coming near me.”

When she said that, I understood even less.

“You should stop talking to me like this, too.”

“Why? Why can’t I?”

“I said you’ll find out soon.”

“Come on…”

That didn’t really help. In fact, it didn’t help at all.

While I was searching for something to say, not sure how to respond to that, Mei Misaki turned her body in silence. Hugging the sketchbook to her chest, she passed by me and headed for the door.

“I’ll see you,
Sa-ka-ki-ba-ra
.”

My body froze instantly, as if she’d cast some repugnant spell on me. But I shook it off quickly and went after her. As I did, another crow cawed in the schoolyard.

One of the “fundamentals” Reiko had told me the night before came to mind all on its own.

If you hear the cawing of a crow when you leave the roof, you go back inside by…

Was it the right leg? Or the left leg?

Which one was it?
Pretty sure it’s the left leg…
As I worked through all this, Mei briskly opened the door and disappeared beyond it.

She’d gone in with her right foot.

The rain finally started to fall after the end of sixth period. It was a hard rain, like a sudden evening shower out of season.

As I was getting my things together to go home, worrying about not having an umbrella, my cell phone started to vibrate inside my bag. I had set it on silent. It was a call from my grandmother.

“I’m leaving right now to come get you. I want you to wait for me at the front gate.”

It was a welcome message, but my reply was instantly “It’s okay, Grandma. It’ll probably just be sprinkling by the time you get here.”

“That’s no way for a recovering boy to talk. And what if you got soaked and caught a cold?”

“But…”

“No buts, Koichi. All right? You wait until I get there.”

She hung up then, and I looked around me blankly and sighed.

“Hey, Sakakibara! You’ve got a cell phone, huh?”

Right then, someone spoke to me. It was Teshigawara. He rummaged in the inside pocket of his uniform and then pulled out a white phone with a flashy strap tied to it.

“We’ll be phone buddies. What’s your number?”

It was still a small selection of middle school students who had their own cell phones. Even at schools in Tokyo, they were about as common as PHS phones. Maybe one in three kids at the most.

As we traded numbers, I glanced over at the bank of windows. There, all the way at the back, Mei Misaki had already gone.

I waited till Teshigawara put his phone back in his pocket, then said, “You mind if I ask you something?”

“Hm?”

“About that girl Misaki who sits at that desk.”

“Hm-m-m?”

“She’s pretty weird. What’s her deal?”

“You feeling all right, Sakakibara?”

Teshigawara angled his head with an expression that looked completely serious.

“Get it together, man.”

He slapped me on the back heavily and then quickly departed the scene.

I left the classroom and, as I was heading toward Building A and the front gate, I ran into Ms. Mikami, the assistant teacher, in the hall.

“How did it go today, Sakakibara? What do you think of your new school?”

Her questions came with a natural smile. Utterly discombobulated, I replied, “Uh, I think I’ll manage.”

Ms. Mikami nodded mechanically. “Do you have an umbrella? It’s raining.”

“Um, Grandma’s—I mean, my grandmother said she’s coming to get me with the car. She called me on my cell phone a minute ago.”

“You’ll be all right, then. Take care.”

It was only fifteen minutes later that my grandmother’s black Cedric pulled up to the driveway by the entrance, coming through the rain, the ferocity of which had slackened somewhat.

There were a couple of students near the entrance who hadn’t been able to leave yet because of the unexpected rain. I quickly climbed into the passenger seat of the car, as if fleeing from their looks.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Koichi,” my grandmother greeted me, adjusting her hands on the wheel. “You don’t feel any worse, do you?”

“Oh, no, I’m fine.”

“Do you think you’ll get along with your classmates?”

“I guess…”

We drove away from the school building and headed slowly over the slick road to the front gate. And on our way out—

I was leaning against the door, gazing outside, when my eyes fell on
her
. The rain had slacked off a lot, but it was still more than a drizzle, and she was walking through it without an umbrella, alone.

Mei Misaki.

“What’s wrong?” my grandmother asked, just before pulling the car onto the road outside. Something in my reaction must have tipped her off. I hadn’t even made a noise or opened the window or anything.

“…Nothing. Don’t worry about it,” I answered, then twisted my body around to look back. And yet…

Mei was already gone. As if she had melted away into the falling rain. That’s how it seemed to me that day.

“What’s this?”

I heard Ms. Mikami’s voice. She had posed the question to a boy to my left named Mochizuki. Yuya Mochizuki.

He was on the small side, pale, and though plain, he was fine-featured. If he really went for it and walked around Shibuya dressed in drag, he could get mistaken for a pretty young thing and get picked up by someone. However, I had yet to speak a word to him since transferring in yesterday. I tried to say hi, but he would instantly look away from me. It was hard to tell if he was just shy or if he had a dark, misanthropic personality.

Ms. Mikami’s question caused Mochizuki’s cheeks to flush slightly, and he fumbled for a response. “Um…I was trying to make a lemon…”

“A lemon? This?”

Darting a glance up at the teacher, who was twisting her head to weird angles, Mochizuki replied in a low voice, “Yes. It’s the scream in a lemon.”

It was Thursday, my second day at school. We were in fifth period, art class.

The class, on the first floor of that old school building—Building Zero—was split into six groups, each sitting around their own large worktables. A variety of objects were lined up at the center of each table, like an onion, a lemon, a mug, and so on. The purpose of today’s class was to sketch a still life of these things.

I’d selected a mug set beside an onion and begun drawing in pencil on the drawing paper we’d been given. Apparently Mochizuki had chosen a lemon, but I dunno…

Craning my neck, I snuck a look at the paper in front of him. I got a glimpse of it and—

Yeah, I get it now. There was plenty of reason for Ms. Mikami to be asking questions.

He had drawn some grotesque
thing
, shaped nothing like any of the subjects on the table.

When he said it was a lemon, okay, I could just barely make it out. But it was more than twice as stretched out as the lemon in front of me, tall and spindly, plus the outline was all wavy in uneven bumps. On top of that, he’d drawn the same kind of wavy, bumpy lines (they looked like special-effect lines to me) all around it…

What
was
this?

Suddenly, I had the same thought. But then if I extrapolated from “the scream in a lemon” like Mochizuki had said, I realized,
It could be…

When you hear the word “scream,” even a grade school kid knows—that greatest masterpiece by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. The figure of a man on a bridge covering his ears, drawn with a bizarre composition and palette in fluctuating lines. This wobbly drawing of a lemon seemed to share something with that painting…

“Do you think this is acceptable, Mochizuki?”

Stealing another glance up at her, Mochizuki hesitantly replied, “Yes…I mean, this is how the lemon looks to me right now…”

“I see.”

Ms. Mikami drew her lips tight and harrumphed. “It isn’t really in the spirit of today’s class, but…I suppose it’s all right.” A rueful smile edged onto her face, as if she had thrown her hands up in defeat, and she said, “I’d prefer it if you only experiment like this in art club, however.”

“Oh. Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry.”

“There’s no need to apologize. Go ahead and finish this up the way you have it.”

With that indifferent admonition, Ms. Mikami moved away from us. Then—

“Do you like Munch?”

I peeked again at Mochizuki’s drawing and gingerly tried to engage him.

“Uh…yeah, I guess,” he replied without looking at me and then picked up his pencil again. But I didn’t sense a strong blockade being thrown up, so I pressed on.

“But why did the lemon come out like that?”

He pinched his lips together and harrumphed like Ms. Mikami had just done.

“That’s how I see it, so that’s how I drew it. That’s all.”

“You mean objects have screams, too?”

“That’s not what’s going on. People misinterpret Munch’s painting all the time. It isn’t the man that’s screaming in that painting. It’s the world around him. The scream is making him shudder, so he’s covering his ears.”

“So then it’s not the lemon screaming, either.”

“Right.”

“Is the lemon covering its ears?”

“I don’t think you’re getting it yet…”

“Hm-m-m. Well, whatever. So you’re in the art club?”

“Oh—yeah. I rejoined in third year.”

Which reminded me of what Teshigawara had told me yesterday, about the art club being suspended last year. But starting in April this year, the “lovely Ms. Mikami” had become the sponsor…

“What about you?”

Then, for the first time, Mochizuki looked at me. He cocked his head to one side like a puppy.

“Are you gonna join?”

“Wh-why would I do that?”

“Well…”

“Sure, I’m kind of interested in it…but I don’t know. I’m not that good at drawing.”

“It doesn’t really matter how good you are,” Mochizuki told me in an extremely serious tone. “You draw pictures by seeing with the eyes in your heart. That’s what makes it fun.”

“The eyes in your heart?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s what this is?”

I glanced at his “scream in lemon,” and Mochizuki nodded saying, “Sure,” without a hint of guilt, rubbing a finger under his nose.

I guess he was petrified of strangers; still, once I started talking to him, he seemed pretty interesting. That thought helped me relax a lot, but at the same time—

Something flashed through my mind at the mention of the art club.

When we’d talked on the roof of Building C during gym class yesterday, she—Mei Misaki—had carried a sketchbook. Could she be in the art club, too?

The art room in Building Zero was twice as big as a normal classroom. The construction and equipment in the room was getting old, and the amount of light it got left the place somehow dreary, but thanks to the high ceiling, the room didn’t feel too oppressive. It made it feel even bigger than it already was.

My eyes wandered around the room, as if for the first time. However—

I didn’t see Mei Misaki anywhere, after all.

But she was in morning classes…
I couldn’t help feeling suspicious.

There hadn’t been time for a leisurely chat, but I’d succeeded in catching her during one of the breaks between classes and shared a few words with her. I mentioned how she’d gone home alone in the rain yesterday, and other trifling things.

“I don’t hate the rain.”

That’s what she’d told me then.

“My favorite is the cold rain in the middle of winter. The moment it changes to snow.”

I wanted to catch her at lunch and talk some more, but just like yesterday, she had disappeared from the classroom before I’d noticed. And even now that fifth period had begun, she had yet to appear.

“Hey, Sakakibara.”

Mochizuki was the one trying to start conversations now. I put my thoughts about Mei on hold. “What?”

“What do you think…about Ms. Mikami?”

“Out of the blue, I mean, I don’t know.”

“Oh, I see. Yeah, okay…” Mochizuki nodded several times, murmuring in a low voice, and his cheeks tinted slightly red again.

What’s with this guy? Secretly, he’d knocked me off balance a little.

Does he have a crush on his art teacher? This kid? How does that work? She’s more than ten years older than you, dude.

“Munch made four copies of
The Scream
in all.”

“I’d heard that.”

“I like the one at the Oslo National Museum of Art. The red color of the sky is the most intimidating. It looks like blood is going to come pouring out of it any second.”

“Huh. But doesn’t that start to scare you, the more you look at it? Or make you feel incredibly uneasy? How can you like that?”

You could say it’s an easy painting to understand. The visual impact is so intense, the underlying subject matter gets ignored and funny or interesting parodies are everywhere you look. So I suppose in that sense it’s a popular work. But of course, when Mochizuki said he liked it, he didn’t seem to be talking on that level.

“Uneasy…I suppose so. It’s a picture that drags those feelings out for me, that there’s anxiety in everything and that’s just the way it is. That’s why I like it.”

“You like it because it makes you uneasy?”

“It’s not like it goes away if you pretend you don’t feel it. You’re the same way, aren’t you, Sakakibara? I’m positive it’s the same for everyone.”

“Even lemons and onions?”

I said it jokingly, and Mochizuki smiled a little shyly.

“Drawings are a projection of the imagination.”

“Sure, but come on…”

After art class ended, I wound up getting up and walking out with Yuya Mochizuki. And, as we wound up continuing our conversation, we walked down a dimly lit hall of Building Zero.

“Yo, Sakaki!”

Someone behind me tapped me on the shoulder. Before I even turned around, I knew it was Teshigawara. Apparently he’d decided to start abbreviating my name to “Sakaki” today.

“You guys whispering about Ms. Mikami? I want in.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, but we’re talking about something a little bit darker than that,” I replied.

“What is it? What’re you talking about?”

“The anxiety that cloaks the world.”

“Wha-a-a?”

“Do you ever feel uneasy, Teshigawara?” I asked, despite my opinion that he seemed to lack any connection to emotions like that. It had already become natural to talk plainly to him.

The bleached goofball beat my expectations, though, when he said, “What do you think!”

He nodded grandly, I wasn’t sure exactly how seriously, and then replied, “After all, when I went up a grade, I wound up getting stuck with the ‘curse of Class 3’!”

“Wha?”

The sound slipped out of me. At the same time, I saw Mochizuki’s reaction: As his gaze fell silently to his feet, his expression seemed melancholy and somehow tense. The scene had crystallized in the space of a moment. That’s what it felt like.

“So-o-o, Sakaki,” Teshigawara said. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this since yesterday…”

“Hold on, Teshigawara,” Mochizuki spoke up. “I don’t think you can do that anymore.”

Can’t do that? Do what? Why not?

“‘Anymore’ is assuming we ever…”

This was Teshigawara, who was having trouble continuing. Totally in the dark, I cried, “What are you guys talking about?” then caught myself with a gasp.

We’d been walking down a hall in Building Zero and were just coming up on the secondary library. Hardly anyone seemed to use the old library, but now the sliding door leading into it was open a few centimeters. And through the gap, I could see into the room…

…She was there.

Mei Misaki was in there.

“What’s wrong?”

Teshigawara’s question was dubious.

“Hold on a second,” I replied ambiguously and slid the library door open. Mei turned to look at us.

Mei was sitting at a large desk in the totally empty room. I raised my hand to wave, “Hey,” but she gave no response whatsoever and returned her eyes to the desk.

“H-hey, Sakaki. You’re not really…”

“S-Sakakibara? What are you…?”

More or less ignoring Teshigawara and Mochizuki’s chatter, I stepped into the secondary library.

The walls were obscured behind bookshelves that went all the way to the ceiling, packed full of books. Even that wasn’t enough, though, and more than half the floor space in the room was a forest of tall shelves.

The room looked to be about the same size as the art classroom, but the style was completely different. There wasn’t even a hint of openness in here. The weight of all the books being stored here imparted a heavy oppressiveness to the room. The amount of light made this place seem all the gloomier, and looking around I saw that several of the fluorescent lights were out.

There was only one large table intended for readers, where Mei sat. Not even ten chairs were placed around it. There was a small counter in a back corner to the left, in a valley between the shelves. I couldn’t see anyone there right now, but I assumed that was where the librarian usually was.

In this space suffused with the unique smell of old books, where time seemed to have come to rest…that’s where she was.

Mei Misaki was in here, all by herself.

Even as I approached, she never so much as glanced at me. Lying open before her on the desk was, not a book, but her large octavo sketchbook.

Had she…skipped art class to come here and draw by herself?

“Do you think you should have come in here?”

Mei spoke without shifting her gaze.

“Why not?” I retorted.

“Your two friends didn’t stop you?”

“Guess not.”

There was something strange in how everyone else in class acted when it came to her. Although I had started, ever so vaguely, to guess why that might be.

“What are you drawing?” I asked, dropping my eyes to her sketchbook.

It was a sketch of a beautiful young girl, done in pencil. It didn’t have the style of an anime or manga drawing. It was a more realistic, naturalistic line drawing.

The body shape was delicate, its sex barely distinguishable. The limbs were slender. The hair long. The eyes, nose, and mouth hadn’t been drawn in yet, but still it conveyed the image of a beautiful young girl.

“Is this…a doll?”

I had a reason for asking that.

The shoulders, elbows, wrists, hip joints, knees, and ankles…at each of these joints, I could see in the drawing the characteristic form that certain types of dolls have: the signature structure in what’s called a “ball-jointed doll,” shaped exactly as the name implies.

Without answering, Mei disinterestedly dropped the pencil she’d been holding on top of the drawing.

“Do you have a model? Or is it all from your imagination?”

I piled up the questions even as I prepared to hear
I hate the way you’re interrogating me.
Finally, Mei turned her face toward me.

“I can’t say which it is. Maybe both.”

“Both?”

“I’m going to give this girl huge wings, last of all.”

“Wings…So she’s an angel?”

“I dunno. Could be.”

It could be a devil—a comment like that seemed ready to follow, and my breath caught for a second. But Mei didn’t elaborate. A faint smile was all that touched her lips.