Book Girl and the Captive Fool (12 page)

Something about her reminded me of Sarashina. Her hairstyle or her demeanor or…

And that wasn’t all. There was a familiar-looking rabbit doll dangling from the bag she carried.

A pale pink rabbit.

It looked like the rabbit lying on the floor of Akutagawa’s room with its head and limbs cut off. No—I was sure I’d seen it somewhere before that…

“My rabbit is missing.”

“What?”

“The one I bought when we all went to that store with Tohko. Oh no. Did I lose it somewhere?”

Right! It was the rabbit Kotobuki had on her bag!

As soon as I realized that, a new question chilled my heart. Could the rabbit in Akutagawa’s room have belonged to Kotobuki?!

If that was true, maybe he’d picked it up somewhere and taken it home, not realizing it was hers.

Still looking at the photograph, Tohko placed a white finger on a girl standing at the rightmost edge.

“Who is this?”

I almost shouted again.

It was a girl with short hair and a cold expression. Her lips pressed together irritably, the girl had a bag slung over her shoulder, and dangling from it was the same pink rabbit as Kanomata’s.

Cold sweat rolled down my back. Could this really be a coincidence?

Mrs. Yamamura’s face tensed instantly at Tohko’s question.

She seemed to find it difficult to tell us the short-haired girl’s name.

“… That’s Konishi. Has she done something?”

“No. She has the same rabbit doll as Kanomata, so I thought maybe they were friends.”

“Well, they may have been. Though Kanomata didn’t seem to have any friends other than Akutagawa. Maybe this rabbit was simply popular among the girls,” she offered evasively, then closed the paper.

“What do you think, Konoha?” Tohko whispered as we walked to the school gate. “I wonder if it’s just a coincidence that
Kanomata and Konishi had the same rabbit doll. And Mrs. Yamamura was acting a little strangely. She didn’t seem to want to tell us about Konishi.”

“I got that feeling, too.”

Tohko stopped in her tracks and looked at me with her clear, black eyes.

“I think Konishi might have been the one who was bullying Kanomata.”

Were you the one who said that it was a mistake to have met then? Or did I say it first?

In any case, we felt the same way about that at least, and we had the same regrets and the same pain.

When we were little, the things we promised each other were nothing but vague phantoms, and it was a foolish delusion to think that when our eyes met our hearts were linked.

What we were looking at was only ourselves in the end, and we didn’t have the slightest understanding about who the other person was—about what secrets they hid inside themselves. Nor…

The truth about the monsters hidden inside us.

Even now we carry the same suffering.

That is the one thing that brings us together.

But your dark desires drive me away.

Mother, I want to be at peace.

I spent Sunday at home playing with Maika.

“Again, Konoha!” she pleaded, so we kept playing the fighting
game on the TV. Watching Maika as her big, unsullied eyes darted around and she cheered or laughed, I felt strange. Had I been this innocent when I was a child?

Would I have been able to go on having a strong, pure heart, never doubting or fearing others, if I hadn’t met Miu?

I felt like each time people failed, they became cowards and grew dirtier.

And in elementary school, Akutagawa had failed spectacularly. He was still suffering from those memories.

I was unable to breathe whenever I remembered Miu, and he still felt remorse about Kanomata. He and I were a lot alike, I thought bitterly.

“See you tonight.”

The next morning—Monday—I was supposed to meet up with Tohko in the club room, so I left home early.

On the way home from visiting Akutagawa’s old school, Tohko had been pretty hung up on the rabbit dolls that Kanomata and Konishi had on their bags.

When I told her about Kotobuki’s rabbit, her eyes had grown thoughtful.

“I see… Nanase’s rabbit disappeared?”

“There was a cut up rabbit doll lying in Akutagawa’s room, remember.”

“You’re right…”

After a brief silence, Tohko had pressed a finger to her lip and said, still deep in thought,
“That bunny is from a popular line of products, and the different colors have different meanings.”

“Different meanings?”

“As in, red is for good grades, yellow is for luck with money, blue is for luck with friends.”

“What’s pink?”

“Luck in love. They say if you keep the rabbit nearby, the person you like will start to feel the same way. So pink is the most popular color.”

I was shocked that Kotobuki was worried about luck in love. She usually acted like she couldn’t care less about boys.

On the other hand, the fact that Kanomata and Konishi had the same good luck charm only deepened the mystery.

Tohko had talked about the possibility that Konishi was the one who had bullied Kanomata.

If so, wouldn’t the relationships between Akutagawa, Kanomata, and Konishi involve even more pain?

Why had Konishi bullied Kanomata? The root cause of that would—

“I still don’t think Akutagawa was the one who cut up the library books or the one who hurt Igarashi. But if that’s true…”

Tohko fell utterly silent. I could tell what she was thinking, and I felt anxious, as if I was standing in murky darkness.

When we parted ways, Tohko said,
“On Monday morning before homeroom starts, come to the book club room. I’ll look into the things that are still bothering me before that.”

As I walked along my usual route to school, a late autumn breeze pricked at my skin. I was drinking in the clear sunlight when I spotted Akutagawa standing in front of a mailbox.

He was wearing his school uniform. His bike was parked beside him, and he stood with his back straight, looking down at a long white envelope in his hands.

Angst clouded his strong, handsome profile, and the gaze he fixed on the envelope was so bereft and sad that it pained me.

Don’t go over there.

Don’t call out to him.

I told myself desperately, my jaw tight, biting down on my lip.

But my feet carried me toward him, as if drawn there.

I knew it was because I’d listened to Ayame and Mrs. Yamamura.

“Akutagawa?” I whispered almost inaudibly, and he started and looked at me, still holding the envelope.

“… Inoue.”

I couldn’t manage a smile. Looking uncomfortable, I asked, “They let you come back to school, huh?”

Akutagawa’s face was hard, too.

“Yeah… for now.”

“That’s good.”

The silence drew out. Hesitantly, Akutagawa opened his mouth to speak.

“Sorry about before. It’s too bad you and Amano had to come all that way.”

“That’s okay. How’s your arm?”

“Almost healed. I can even get in the tub, as long as I keep my arm out.”

“Yeah?”

Silence again.

This time I was the one to break it.

“Um…”

Akutagawa watched me morosely.

“Those letters—” I forced my voice out, though it caught in my throat. “I see you mailing them a lot. Who are you sending them to?”

Akutagawa’s gaze shifted slightly away.

Pain shot through my belly as the silence drew out.

“Did your family ask you to send something again?” I asked feebly, but then Akutagawa let out a sigh.

“No, they’re my letters. That other one was, too.”

He turned his broad back to me and quietly dropped the envelope into the mailbox.

Then he turned back around, and his face calm but somehow morose, he said, “Would you walk with me for a little bit, Inoue?”

He took me to the general hospital where Kotobuki had stayed that summer.

Akutagawa walked slowly down the white hallways that smelled of medicine.

So far, he had barely said a word. I’d stayed silent as well.

We went into a private room, where a petite woman, who looked to be in her midthirties, lay in a bed.

Her mouth and body were hooked up to several machines via tubes. Her eyes stayed closed, and she didn’t move.

Akutagawa looked down at the woman, then let out a breath and said, “This is my mom. She’s been in the hospital like this ever since I was eleven.”

A shock stabbed my heart.

She’d been like this ever since Akutagawa was eleven?! Without ever waking up?

I remembered how difficult it had been for Ayame to talk about.

“And then right after all that happened, our mother was hospitalized. Her health had been in decline for a while, and she’d been in and out of hospitals, but this time they didn’t know when she’d be able to go home, and…”

They didn’t know when she would be released… I had no idea that this is what she’d meant.

There was a basket filled with oranges and grapefruits on the table beside her bed, which gave off a tangy fragrance.

Beside that was a stack of unopened long white envelopes. At a quick glance, I counted more than ten.

They were addressed to Yoshiko Akutagawa, care of the hospital. When I saw that, I realized who Akutagawa had been sending his letters to, and I felt my throat quivering. I thought I might cry.

Akutagawa picked up one of the envelopes. His downcast eyes fell sadly on the recipient’s name.

“I knew she would never read these letters, no matter how many I sent… but that just meant that when I couldn’t control my feelings anymore, I could purge them into a letter. Then I felt compelled to send it. That made me feel like she had accepted the burden for me, and I could relax again.”

He sounded detached, speaking almost in a whisper, and the very calmness of his voice filled it with sorrow.

“Giving birth to me wrecked my mom’s health, but she never blamed me for it. She always smiled at me.”

Ayame told us that Akutagawa had always done everything for himself ever since he was little. She said he’d been that way so that he wouldn’t cause his mother any trouble.

Akutagawa put the letter back on the table and turned his gaze to his mother once more.

He had a faintly despondent look, his profile charged with sorrow.

“Of all the people in the world, my mother would probably be the only one to forgive me, no matter how despicable the feelings in my heart. So she’s the one person I can’t lie to. I’ve always written down how I truly felt in these letters.”

“But all of us had our hands full with Mom and our own lives, so we didn’t have time to worry about Kazushi.”

“He was very mature back then, but he was still only an eleven-year-old boy in fifth grade.”

Had Akutagawa written a letter about the incident six years ago?

And what about this latest incident?

Akutagawa picked up one of the oranges from the basket and offered it to me.

“Let’s go outside.”

“Okay.”

I accepted the orange and nodded awkwardly.

We sat side by side on a bench in the hospital’s garden, and while we ate the slightly bitter oranges, I revealed that Tohko and I had gone to his elementary school.

“I’m sorry. I know you told us not to get involved.”

Akutagawa wasn’t very surprised. He bit into an orange segment before quietly saying, “It’s fine… There was something wrong with me when I cut my arm. I couldn’t fight the impulse to cut everything apart and put an end to it.”

“Why did you say ‘Kanomata still hasn’t forgiven me’?” I asked timidly.

Akutagawa’s face went dark as he answered, his thick fingers peeling the skin from a second orange.

“After what happened, Kanomata started to take on a new life inside me. She’s still the same age, and sometimes she’ll talk to me. ‘Why did you break your promise? If you hadn’t betrayed me, things never would have gotten so bad. No one would have suffered. My pain is going to last forever.’ ”

I felt as if I could hear Kanomata’s voice in my ears, though I had never met her, and a shudder ran down my spine.

“What did you promise her? What…
happened
six years ago? Why did you think Kanomata was getting bullied?”

“Because her textbooks and notes were being cut to shreds. All the time.”

He stopped peeling the orange and started to tell me about what had happened six years earlier.

How his desk ended up next to hers when they changed the seating arrangement in the second term; how he had glanced over at her desk during language arts class, and Kanomata was on the verge of tears looking down at her textbook, its pages sliced up in every direction.

She noticed him looking and quickly closed her book, and during the break, she told him over and over, “Don’t tell anyone about this. I don’t want the teacher to know, either.”

But after that, her things kept getting cut up.

The slash of a box cutter running across her pen case, the number cut off her gym clothes, her pencil board with the picture of a cute character on it; a light blue hand towel—every time Akutagawa discovered something, Kanomata’s face twisted with tears and he would push it back into secrecy out of embarrassment.

She had pleaded to Akutagawa, “Don’t tell anyone. I want to keep it a secret.”

Akutagawa was torn over whether he should protect Kanomata’s secret or whether he should get help from the teacher. But
Kanomata had begged him so frantically that he’d been unable to break his promise. Instead, he worried for her and told her to keep her things in his locker and brought her his sister’s old textbook.

Kanomata grew to rely on Akutagawa, and the two wound up becoming friends.

“I think Kanomata didn’t get along very well with her parents. Her father was a stern professional, and she talked all the time about how he would scold her pretty badly if her grades dropped and how stifling it was. She hated her name, too. It was Emi, as in ‘smile.’ ”

“They told me that when I was born, the mountains were smiling. I never understand what my dad is talking about. I hate the name Emi. I can’t even smile in front of my parents.”

Kanomata would occasionally give voice to startling opinions like that. She was a girl with a strong heart in contrast to her quiet exterior. After school, she and Akutagawa would pass the time doing homework in the library or reading books.

“My favorite story in the textbook is Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s story ‘Tangerines.’ I mean, his name is Akutagawa!”

“Hey—you’re on my side, right, Akutagawa? We’ll be friends forever, right?”

“In fact, I remember now that I ate oranges with Kanomata like this, too. I think it was during a field trip.”

Akutagawa’s eyes grew distant.

“She was a very important friend to me even though she was a girl.”

The conflict over whether he should tell the teacher or protect his promise to his friend raged on all that time inside him.

And then one day, Akutagawa saw his classmate Konishi yelling at Kanomata. Kanomata had tears in her eyes, but she was taking it. Konishi had often glared at the two of them, so Akutagawa wondered if maybe Konishi was the one who’d been bothering Kanomata.

When he asked Kanomata if she was fighting with Konishi, Kanomata’s face tensed with fear and she didn’t say anything, so his suspicion of Konishi only deepened.

Around that time, Kanomata kept her books and notes in Akutagawa’s desk, but one day as Akutagawa was handing her the old textbook, they saw that the cover had been all cut up. Kanomata couldn’t take it any longer.

Tears rolled down her cheeks, and she hugged the book to her chest. “I’m sorry… You gave me this and everything. I’m really sorry. Really.”

After seeing that, Akutagawa told their teacher Ms. Momoki that Kanomata was the victim of anonymous bullying.

Ms. Momoki called Konishi in and asked her what was going on. Konishi stayed ruefully quiet, and when the teacher told her, “You can be friends with Kanomata, can’t you?” Konishi nodded, but she had begun to tremble. Then the teacher said, “Now things will be better.”

“Konishi hadn’t been bullying Kanomata at all. No one in the class had.”

Akutagawa hung his head bitterly.

“Kanomata was the one cutting up her own books.”

I gasped.

“Why would she do that?”

“All I can do is guess, but maybe it was her form of rebellion against her parents. Or it might have been a silent SOS. to them. A cry for help. Otherwise, it could be like me, and she couldn’t control her impulse to cut something apart…

“The one thing I’m sure of is that Kanomata started to get bullied for real, because I broke my promise to her, and one day she slashed Konishi with a chisel. The incident became public, and Kanomata’s father had problems at his job because of it, so she switched schools. Ms. Momoki stopped teaching, too. Everyone’s lives were destroyed by my rash actions.”

“It’s your fault!”

I imagined how he must have felt when the teacher berated him in class, and I thought my chest might rip open. All Akutagawa had done was to be unable to turn his back on Kanomata when she cried. But instead that had driven her away.

Kanomata still lived on in Akutagawa’s heart unchanged, and she still blamed him.

The orange he had been eating lay forgotten in his hand. Akutagawa bit down on his lip with a hard expression.

I gently asked, “This might sound strange, but you know that pink rabbit in your room? What was that?”

“That rabbit,” Akutagawa murmured, sounding exhausted, “was a birthday gift. I was too self-conscious to go into a girlie store by myself, so I went with Kanomata and she picked it out. She said she liked that one… But after she transferred, she sent it back to me, along with ‘Tangerines.’ ”

“Tangerines?”

He looked up at my question and smiled sadly.

“ ’Tangerines’ by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, the story from the textbook. She cut it out of the book and sent it to me with the
rabbit, whose head she’d cut off. She probably couldn’t stand to see the name Akutagawa anymore.”

“That’s—”

My throat tightened and choked off my voice.

It was too awful. Akutagawa hadn’t done anything wrong.

His eyes were still cast down.

“After that, my mom got the way she is now, and I felt like I was being punished. Ever since then, I’ve tried to act cautiously, to be an honorable, intelligent person so that I would never hurt anyone again. But then I got involved in a love triangle and hurt Igarashi. I really am an awful person.”

That’s not true. You’re not an awful person. It’s not your fault.
I wanted to tell him all that.

But I couldn’t say it.

I was scared—

Just scared.

If I said something halfhearted just to temporarily placate him, I felt like he would yell at me again. I was so afraid of that I was practically shaking.

“Tohko says it was probably someone else who hurt Igarashi. That you’re covering for them.”

I was a coward. Since I couldn’t say what I was feeling, I told him what Tohko had said. Even that took everything I had.

Surprise flashed over Akutagawa’s features, and they finally settled into a look of powerful suffering and sadness. He clenched his fists in an effort to stop himself from trembling and said, “I was definitely the one who stabbed Igarashi. The chisel belonged to me. I did everything—all of it.”

Who was he protecting? I had guessed, too, now. There weren’t that many choices, and the answer had been there the whole time.