Book Girl and the Captive Fool (11 page)

His detachment felt like an oblique rejection.

Surprisingly, Tohko withdrew quietly.

She looked up at Akutagawa and smiled coolly.

“All right. But if anything’s bothering you or has you feeling cornered, you’ll say so, right? Konoha and I both want to help you.”

It was impossible for me to chime in, so I turned my gaze down subtly and said nothing.

When we left the hospital, it was completely dark outside and a cool breeze blew, stabbing at the skin.

We stood together at a bus stop and waited for the bus.

After the silence had gone on for a minute or two, Tohko said, “I want to investigate what happened with Kanomata. What drove Akutagawa to this point, what it is that’s bothering him, and the library books being cut up and Akutagawa cutting Igarashi with a chisel—I get the feeling it’s all tied to that event.”

“I’m against it. You would just be meddling. We don’t have any right to dig up other people’s secrets.”

Tohko looked a little sad.

“You’re always like that, Konoha. But Akutagawa isn’t ‘other people’; he’s your friend.”

Suddenly she seemed on the verge of yelling at me.

But that was just her opinion! Akutagawa wasn’t my friend! I would never make another friend ever again!

But if I said that, I knew Tohko would look at me even more sadly. When I’d first joined the book club in first year, she would occasionally look at me like that, and I just couldn’t handle it.

Faced with my silence, her expression turned resolute.

“We’ve come too far to turn back now, so it’s too late for regrets. If you don’t want to do it, then I’ll go to Akutagawa’s old elementary school by myself.”

This letter is my warning to you.

You have to get away, please.

Every time you rest your sweet, poison-laden hands on my heart, you send it reeling and my spirit thrums crazily. I can’t control the destructive impulses that surge through me.

I tremble with a desire to cut you apart. When I close my eyes, all I see—night or day—is you.

I yearn to cut your spiteful gaze apart—that pale, dignified face you turn on me, your slender, arrogant throat—to carve away your ears and nose, to dig your eyeballs out of your head. My heart cries out to etch a crucifix into your supple chest and to paint your entire body in fountains of warm blood.

You have to get away.

I know I’ll cut you apart.

In the end, I was close behind Tohko when she went to Akutagawa’s old school after classes on Friday.

When Tohko said, “I’ll go by myself,” it was as good as a threat. I could hardly let a reckless person like her go off alone.

At the reception desk, Tohko declared with an easy smile, “I’m a graduate. I’d like to look around.” We changed into slippers and walked right in.

It looked like the students were in the middle of a drawing contest for autumn or something, the walls all decorated with drawings by them. The winning pictures had gold bits of paper stuck on them.

“Let’s go to the teacher’s lounge first. There should still be some teachers around from back then,” said Tohko.

“Do you think they’ll talk about bullying to outsiders?”

“That’s where you have to be totally sincere and knock them off their feet.”

Tohko made a fist.

Then she saw the drawings on the wall, and her expression softened instantly.

“Isn’t this nostalgic? Now I want to go back to my old elementary school. Hey Konoha, what were you like in elementary school?”

“Normal. I played very seriously with clay during art class and cut up drawing paper and fed the goldfish our class kept when I was in charge of the animals.”

I remembered that I’d also met Miu in elementary school.

Miu had transferred into my class in third grade.

“I hate the way the teachers say my name. Just call me Miu. And I’ll just call you Konoha.”

“But everyone will make fun of us.”

“Are you afraid of them? You’re such a scaredy cat. Don’t call me that then if you don’t wanna.”

“No, I will. I’ll call you Miu.”

The image of Miu and I when we were little, running down the hall hand in hand, rose like a mirage, and I felt dizzy.

Hiding how disturbed I felt, I asked in return, “I bet you were totally rambunctious and gave your parents and teachers all kinds of trouble, right, Tohko?”

She gave me an unexpectedly serious answer.

“Until about third grade, I was a shy, quiet little girl. It’s true. Lunchtime was so depressing. I hated it. Even now when I think about going to school and having to eat lunch, my stomach starts to hurt.”

My mouth eagerly awaited the opportunity to put in a dig, but I closed it again without a word.

Tohko couldn’t experience the taste of the food you and I normally eat.

Even the flavors of the books that she relates so rapturously are nothing but Tohko’s imagination, switched out for the flavors we know.

I wasn’t sure a girl in elementary school would be able to deal with that.

She wouldn’t pick up on the taste of the stew or the pudding that everyone said was so delicious. It would have no taste at all. I wondered how Tohko had felt when she discovered that.

Tohko smiled gently.

“But when I went home, my mother was waiting for me at the door. She would ask me, ‘Did you eat all your lunch? Good job! What a good girl!’ and she would stroke my hair and write me sweet treats. Her treats were… so good. My father and I loved the meals she wrote for us.”

Tohko was staying with friends of her family. Where were her
mom and dad? And from what she’d just said, it sounded like her dad also ate paper like she did. What must their family be like?

Then Tohko’s eyes suddenly began glinting, and she went into a second-grade classroom.

I went after her, wondering what she was doing, then saw the children’s books lined up on the small wooden bookshelf. She was rejoicing.

“Look at this, Konoha! They’re readers! Oh, I used to love these. They have a digest version of
Les Misérables.
This one ends when Valjean and Cosette start living happily ever after. When I read the complete version, I was blown away when that happened to Valjean. Ohhh, and they have
Little Women.
I love the scene where they deliver treats on Christmas. I read it so many times. Oh, and
My Father’s Dragon
and
The Haveybavey Tree,
too! I
loved
those! I
wish
I could eat them!”

“You
do
remember why we came here, right?!”

My voice was more aggressive than I meant it to be.

Tohko was still hugging the class’s copy of
The Haveybavey Tree,
but she half hid her face behind it and quieted down.

“I’m sorry. I got carried away,” she said, slumping and looking vulnerably up at me. Then she pulled the book away from her face and shouted, her eyes wide, “I got it, Konoha!”

“Got what?”

“All the books that were cut up! I think they might have all been stories from textbooks!”

With that, she lost herself in the explanation.

“There was
Owl Moon
by Jane Yolen, right? I read Ju Mukuhato’s ‘Old Daizo and the Gun,’ Sakyo Komatsu’s ‘Alien Homework,’ and Hakushū Kitahara’s ‘Ancient Murrelet’ in my elementary school language arts book, and Takeo Arishima’s ‘A Bunch of Grapes’ and Sachio Ito’s
Tomb of the Wild Chrysanthemum
were assigned reading over the summer. Yeah, I’m sure it was for fifth grade.”

When she listed off the titles like that, they sounded familiar to me, too. Wasn’t
Owl Moon
the story of a girl who goes searching for an owl with her father on a winter night?

“You mean the books at the library weren’t being cut up at random?”

“That’s what that would mean. But why cut up the books?”

Tohko pressed a finger to her lip and was just sinking into thought when—

“What are you two doing?”

I jumped.

A woman of around fifty held a binder to her chest, looking at us suspiciously.

“S-sorry. Um, we’re… well—”

Tohko swept in front of me as I grew flustered.

Her expression was the very image of seriousness, and the teacher gasped. Tohko took another step toward her, then suddenly launched into her eloquent explanation.

“We are the classmates and mentors of Kazushi Akutagawa, who used to go to school here. We came to ask something very important about Kazushi. Please, it’s very urgent! Could you help us out?”

Whether it was Tohko’s fervent appeal that moved the heart of the woman who was dedicated to education, or whether her honor student–like conduct had a greater effect…

We were taken through the teachers’ offices and into a small room with a nameplate on it, where we were seated on a sofa and allowed to hear the story.

Mrs. Yamamura, who Tohko inspired to talk without restraint, had been Akutagawa’s teacher twice, and she remembered the incident clearly.

“His teacher at the time was Yuka Momoki. She was an intense young teacher, but that meant she had excessive expectations of
her students. I don’t think she could accept that a child in her class was being bullied or that she would stab one of her classmates with a chisel. No matter what reason Ms. Momoki had for saying such a thing to Akutagawa at the time, it was an awful thing for a teacher to do. Ms. Momoki realized that and deeply regretted it… Apparently she tried to apologize to him later on, but once she’d said it, it couldn’t be taken back. She must have felt that she had failed as a teacher. She left the school soon after.”

“Why did Ms. Momoki blame Akutagawa? What had he done?” Tohko asked.

Her face dark, Mrs. Yamamura whispered, “He told Ms. Momoki that a classmate was being bullied.

“It was the natural thing for him to do since he was the class monitor. He hadn’t done anything worthy of blame. But in fact there was no bullying. The child who was suspected of bullying got angry anyway, and then the bullying truly started. That child led the rest until half the class was ignoring that one girl or hiding her things or deliberately tripping her.”

Mrs. Yamamura’s every word landed heavily on my heart.

Akutagawa wasn’t at fault.

But if I had been in his place—if because of something I had said, someone started getting picked on and the teacher blamed me for it—I would probably feel like I was being cut apart by icy blades. This would probably deepen into a wound I would remember forever.

Tohko looked sad as well.

Mrs. Yamamura sighed.

“Kanomata, the girl who was being bullied, and Akutagawa were good friends, and they often studied together in the library. Kanomata was a child who was often alone, but I remember that Akutagawa was the only one with whom she seemed to enjoy talking. So he must have had an extra hard time of it.”

“Kanomata still hasn’t forgiven me!”
I remembered Akutagawa shouting, his face twisted and covered in blood. My throat tightened.

“That’s all I can tell you about it. I hope it’s at least some help to Akutagawa.”

“Thank you very much. Do you happen to have any pictures of their class that we could look at?” asked Tohko.

Mrs. Yamamura seemed to hesitate, but then she whispered, “Just a moment,” and stood up. She brought back a bundle of newspapers tied up with string from a shelf at the back of the room.

They looked like monthly papers printed by the school and were about half the size of normal newspapers. She flipped through them, then stopped.

“This is a picture of fifth-grade class three.”

It looked like a group photo from a field trip with all the children lined up in front of a tour bus holding their bags. It looked to be roughly the same time of year as right now. Everyone had a knitted vest or a cardigan over their long-sleeved shirts.

“This is Akutagawa.”

She pointed out a tall, handsome boy on the leftmost edge of the picture.

She slid her finger to the next child over.

“And this is Kanomata.”

When I saw the quiet-looking girl with long hair, I started.