Goth (3 page)

The only time I didn’t feign expressions was when talking to Morino. If I’d been speaking to anyone else, they would wonder why my face was so blank, why I never flashed a smile. But when I was speaking to her, none of that mattered. I imagine she chose to speak to me for much the same reason.

Neither of us liked to attract attention. We lived quiet lives in the shadow of our livelier classmates.

And then came summer vacation—and the notebook.

†

The day after she showed me the notebook, we met at the station and boarded the train for S**** Mountain.

We’d never met outside of school, so it was the first time I’d ever seen Morino out of uniform. She was still wearing dark colors, nevertheless. So was I—and from her expression, she noticed.

The train was quiet and deserted. We didn’t talk, keeping our noses in our books. She was reading a book about child abuse, and I was reading a book written by the family of a famous child criminal.

When we dismounted, we asked an old woman in a decrepit tobacco shop near the station how many soba shops there were near S**** Mountain. We learned that there was only one, and it was not far from where we were.

It was then that Morino said something very poignant. “Tobacco kills a lot of people, but cigarette vending machines are killing that woman by stealing her job.”

She didn’t particularly seem to be looking for a clever response, so I let it pass.

We walked along the side of the road toward the soba shop. The road led uphill, curving along the slope of the mountain.

The soba shop was at the base of S**** Mountain, in a row of bars and restaurants. It was not at all crowded, with few cars or people around. There were no cars at all in the soba shop’s parking lot, but apparently they weren’t closed; the sign said
OPEN
, so we went in.

“The killer met Mizuguchi Nanami here,” Morino said, looking around the shop as if we were in a popular tourist spot. “Pardon me—that’s still just a possibility.
May
have met her here. We are here to determine whether that’s true.”

I ignored her and read the notebook, which was written in with blue ballpoint pen. The story of the third woman’s death was not the only other thing in the book; there were a number of other mountain names as well. They were on the first page, before the accounts of the murders.

There were marks in front of the mountain names: ⌾,○, △, and X. The mountains where the three bodies had been left were all marked with ⌾, so this was probably a list of which mountains looked good for killing.

There was nothing that could identify who had written it. And neither of us ever considered giving it to the police. They would catch him eventually without our doing anything. If we gave them the notebook, they might arrest him faster, and there might be fewer victims—so it probably should have been our duty to turn it in. Sadly, though, neither of us had the kind of conscience that was bothered by keeping it to ourselves. We were cruel, reptilian high school kids.

“If a fourth victim were found, then it would be like we killed her.”

“How awful.”

That’s all we said while we slurped up our soba. Morino didn’t seem to think this was especially awful: her tone was disinterested, all her attention focused on the soba in front of her.

We asked the shop owner for directions to the shrine.

Morino kept her eyes on the notebook as we walked, stroking the cover with her fingers, touching it where the killer had touched it. Judging from that gesture, she had a fair amount of reverence for the killer.

I had a trace of that myself. I knew that was hardly appropriate. The killer was someone who deserved to be punished. He should not be looked at the way you would a revolutionary or an artist. At the same time, I knew that some unusual people worshipped famous murderers—and I knew that becoming like them was a bad thing.

We were captivated by the horror of what the notebook’s owner had done, though. The killer had stepped over the line of ordinary life to destroy people physically, trampling their identity and dignity. Like inside a nightmare, we could not look away.

To get to the shrine from the soba shop, we went up the hill some more and then up a long staircase.

Both of us felt an entirely irrational anger at the idea of any form of exercise. We enjoyed neither slope nor stairs. And by the time we reached the shrine, we were both exhausted.

We sat down on the statues in the shrine and rested for a while. There were trees all around, their branches stretched out above us—and when we looked up, we could see the summer sun peeking through the leaves.

We sat next to each other, listening to the cicadas all around us.

Beads of sweat accumulated on Morino’s forehead.

At last, she stood up, wiping the sweat away. She began looking for Mizuguchi Nanami’s body.

“The killer and Mizuguchi Nanami walked this way together,” she said, as we began walking side by side.

We entered the woods behind the shrine. We didn’t know how far or in which direction they had walked, so we could only search at random.

For the better part of an hour, we looked—with nothing to show for it.

“Maybe that way,” Morino said, moving away from me.

A few minutes later, I heard her call my name. I went in the direction of her voice and found her standing at the base of a cliff, her back to me, both hands dangling at her sides, her back stiff. I stood next to her and saw for myself what she had been gazing at: it was Mizuguchi Nanami.

Between the forest and the cliff, in the shadow of a very large tree, the girl sat naked in the dim summer light. Mizuguchi Nanami sat on the ground, her back leaning against the tree, her legs and arms flung out listlessly—nothing above her neck. Her head was inside her split-open belly.

Her eyes had been gouged out, and one was resting in each hand.

The empty eye sockets had been filled up again with mud, and rotting leaves had been stuffed into her mouth.

Something had been wound around the tree behind her … everything that had been inside Mizuguchi Nanami’s abdomen.

There were dark patches of dried blood on the ground, and her clothes lay nearby.

We stood facing her in silence. Neither of us able to say anything, we simply stared silently at the corpse.

†

The next day, Morino sent a message to my cell phone from hers: “Return the notebook.”

Her messages were always short and simple, nothing unnecessary. Likewise, Morino had no detestable clattery key holders or straps attached to her phone.

I had taken the notebook home with me. After we left Mizuguchi Nanami, I hadn’t given it back to Morino.

On the train home Morino had stared into the distance, not yet recovered from the shock.

Before we left, she had picked up Mizuguchi Nanami’s clothing off the ground, stuffing it into her pack. The clothes had been cut to pieces, but the girl’s hat and bag—and everything inside—remained untouched.

Inside Mizuguchi Nanami’s bag were her makeup, her wallet, and her handkerchief, all of which we looked over on the train coming home.

From the student ID in her wallet, we learned that Mizuguchi Nanami had been a high school student in the prefecture next to ours. In the bag, there was a small book designed to hold
purikura
;
in those pictures and in the one on her ID, we could see what she had looked like while alive. Mizuguchi Nanami and an impressive number of friends smiled at us from the tiny purikura stickers.

I met Morino in the McDonald’s near the station in the afternoon, after having received her message.

Morino was not wearing her customary dark clothes. At first I didn’t even recognize her. The hat she was wearing was the same as the one we’d found lying next to Mizuguchi Nanami’s body, though, so I was able to work out that she was dressed like the dead girl.

Her hair and makeup were the same as Mizuguchi Nanami’s had been in the purikura. The girl’s clothes had been cut to pieces, so Morino must have gone shopping for look-alikes.

As she took the notebook, she appeared to be enjoying herself immensely.

“Should we tell Mizuguchi Nanami’s family that her body is in the woods?” I asked.

Morino thought about this for a moment, but then she shook her head. “The police will find her eventually.” Morino spoke about Mizuguchi Nanami’s death dressed exactly as the girl had been until a few minutes before she died.

What was Mizuguchi Nanami’s family doing now? Were they worried because she was missing? Did she have a boyfriend? What had her grades been like?

Morino seemed a little different. As we talked, the way she spoke and gestured moved gradually away from her usual behavior. She worried about where her bangs were, and she mentioned how the couple at the booth across from ours looked very much in love—neither was the kind of thing that Morino had ever done before.

I had never met Mizuguchi Nanami—but now, watching Morino, I imagined that this was what Mizuguchi Nanami had been like.

Morino had her elbows on the table, and she looked happy. Next to her was the bag that had once belonged to Mizuguchi Nanami—on the clasp of the bag, a key holder with an anime character on it.

“You plan to dress like that for a while?”

“Yeah. Fun, isn’t it?”

It let Morino pretend. But the way she smiled or looked in a mirror, examining her eyebrows, was not a copy of an ordinary high school girl—it felt as if Mizuguchi Nanami had slipped inside Morino.

As we left McDonald’s, Morino very naturally took my hand, not even realizing she had done so until I pointed it out. Mizuguchi Nanami was dead, but I was sure it was her who had taken my hand.

We split up at the station.

When I got home, I turned on the TV. The news was talking about the serial killings, the first and second victims—the same information that had been covered countless times, nothing new at all. No mention of Mizuguchi Nanami.

There were images of the victims’ friends and family looking sad. Pictures of the victims enlarged to fill the screen …

I remembered Morino and worried—but that kind of thing almost never happened. I dismissed my own concerns.

The victims in the photographs had hair and clothes like Mizuguchi Nanami’s—which meant Morino was now the killer’s type.

iii

Three days after we had met at McDonald’s, my phone rang in the afternoon, indicating that I had received a message from someone … from Morino.

“Help.”

That was it, just that one word.

I quickly tapped out a reply: “Something happen?”

I waited awhile, but she didn’t respond, so I called her. I couldn’t reach her phone—it was either off or broken.

In the evening I called Morino’s house. She had given me the number once before—not because she thought I might ever need to call, but because the letters standing for the numbers coincidentally formed a deranged sentence, making the number easy to remember.

Her mother answered; she had a high voice and spoke very quickly.

I said I was a classmate and that I needed to talk with Morino about some class business.

She had not come home.

I had dismissed the idea that she would be attacked. Yet the contents of that notebook had been accurate, so it was probably also true that the killer had been in the same café as Morino. There was a chance that he had happened to see her in town dressed like Mizuguchi Nanami. The killer might have been surprised to see someone dressed just like the girl he had recently killed, and it might have tempted him … but the odds of his actually targeting her were very low. After all, any number of girls dressed that way.

The biggest reason to suspect that the killer might’ve captured Morino was the possibility that they lived near each other. They had been in the same coffee shop. Unless the killer had been far from home that day, his path might well cross Morino’s regularly. The chances of his seeing her were high.

I thought about it that night. It seemed likely that Morino had been killed by then. Her body was probably scattered on some mountain.

I fell asleep imagining it.

†

The next day, I called her house again.

Morino still wasn’t home. According to her mother, this was the first time she had ever stayed out all night without calling. Her mother was worried.

“So are you her boyfriend?” Morino’s mother asked.

“No, not at all.”

“You don’t need to deny it so firmly. I know all about it.”

Morino’s mother had absolutely no doubt that her daughter had a boyfriend. Her daughter had never had any friends, and this was the first time anyone had called for her since she was in elementary school.

“Recently, she’s been dressing in brighter colors, and I knew a boy was involved.”

I began to worry about the cost of the call.

“Is there a small brown notebook in her room?”

The mother went and checked, putting the phone down. There was a short silence. Then her voice came on the line again. “There was something like that on her desk … I hope it’s the one you meant.”

It seemed Morino hadn’t been carrying the notebook around. If she had, I’d been considering the possibility that the killer had seen her reading the notebook and had attacked her to keep her silent.

I told Morino’s mother that I would come get the notebook, asking for the address.

After I hung up, I headed for Morino’s house. I had known she lived not far from the station, but I had never been there before.

She lived on the third floor of an apartment complex behind the station.

I rang the bell and heard the voice from the phone call out as the door opened. Undoubtedly, it was Morino’s mother.

“Come in, come in, come in.”

Morino’s mother was wearing an apron; she was a very domestic-looking, ordinary housewife—completely different from Morino. I wondered how a mother like this had produced a girl like Morino.

She invited me in, but I refused. What I was here for could be handled in the doorway.

I mentioned the notebook, and she had it ready. I took it, asking if she had read the contents.