Sketch 1

1

It was around the end of July last year when I ran into that girl at the shore, where the Raimizaki lighthouse is visible. I can’t remember the exact date.

Her name was Mei; she was a girl in middle school. I seem to recall that it was the second time I’d met her.

We’d first met a year earlier. The year before last in the early part of August. It was at the dinner party at the Misaki family’s vacation home. My sister Tsukiho had invited me.

She spoke barely a word at the party, limiting herself mostly to mouthing formalities. She was such a fair-skinned girl with a slight build. Quiet and seeming a little sad, she didn’t look like she was enjoying the get-together that night much at all. That’s what I remembered about her.

The most noticeable thing about her at the time was that her left eye was blue. I had heard that her mother, the doll maker, had made a special false eye for her.

That’s why.

The color of her eye, the almost fairy blue, had lingered vividly in my mind…

When we saw each other again last summer, I noticed the patch over her left eye and spoke without thinking.

“Oh-ho. She’s wearing an eye patch now, eh?” I even went so far as to thoughtlessly add, “Why would she cover up such lovely mismatched eyes?”

My nephew Sou, who’d come to visit, asked me, “What does ‘mismatched eyes’ mean?”

The same tone he always used, in the pure alto of a little boy, before the voice changed.

“It means her eyes are different colors.”

After giving my answer, I walked over to the girl.

“You’re Mei, if I recall? We met last year at Mr. Misaki’s house.”

“…Hello.”

She responded in a voice so quiet it was almost swallowed up by the sound of the waves and turned her right eye to look down at my feet.

“Are you hurt?” she asked.

“Oh, you mean…,” I began, then looked down at my left leg and nodded slightly. “I was in an accident a long time ago,” I replied. “Did you not notice it last year?”

“Er…no.”

“My injury never fully healed, so unfortunately I have a slight limp in my left leg now. Not that it hurts, though.”

As I spoke, I tapped my left leg just above the knee to demonstrate.

“It was a terrible accident, actually. I was in middle school. The bus my class was on got hit by a truck…”

The girl angled her head slightly, saying nothing.

“Several of my friends died. So did the head teacher. I was one of the survivors,” I continued.

Again nothing.

“I’m Teruya Sakaki. Nice to meet you again.”

“…Likewise.”

“This is my nephew, Sou…But you knew that. He’s my sister’s—That is, Tsukiho Hiratsuka’s son, but when he’s on vacation, he often comes to visit me…I’m glad we’re so close, but you know, Sou, you need to make some friends at school, too.”

Sou didn’t react to this, but timidly came out from behind me and greeted the girl. “Hello.” Just like the girl, his voice was almost lost in the sound of waves.

A short time later, I felt as if I were rambling endlessly at the girl. About my hobby of taking photos, about the mirages you could see in the ocean here from time to time…

I had a few more opportunities to see and talk to her after that also, but I can’t remember the details. I might be able to bring it back in snatches, but maybe not. Nevertheless—

I do remember making a comment along these lines to her at some point: “Your eye. That blue eye.”

I said it, knowing full well that it was an artificial eye inserted in place of her natural eye.

“With that eye of yours, you might be seeing the same things I am…looking in the same direction.”

At that, she looked back at my face, somewhat startled. “Why?” she whispered. “Why would you…?”

“You know, I’m not sure,” I answered, perplexed, unable to formulate anything more than that ambiguous response—that’s how it seemed. “I wonder why I said that.”

The girl’s name is Mei. Mei Misaki.

I had heard that Mei was written with the character for howl.

The rumble of a mountain. The boom of a thunderclap. Mei Misaki.

It was about nine months after this that I, Teruya Sakaki, died.

2

I don’t mean that I “died” metaphorically. Not “as good as dead” and not “dead at heart.”

I died.

I am no longer alive; I am dead. That much is not in question.

Indisputably, I died this spring—one day at the start of May.

I stopped breathing, my heart stopped beating, and my brain activity stopped for all eternity…and I became what I am now. An existence without the physical body of a living man, and only the consciousness (…soul?) deemed “I.” What you might call a ghost.

I died.

At the beginning of May, getting close to the end of Golden Week. The date was May 3, a Sunday. My twenty-sixth birthday.

It was after eight thirty that night. I believe there was a hazy half-moon blurred into the sky.

I died.

I clearly remember the scene—the sight before me in the very moment that I lost my life, or perhaps just before it slipped away. It forms a vivid picture, complete with a mix of sounds and voices.

I was inside my house. In the spacious foyer with stairs up to the second floor…

I was in the hall of Lakeshore Manor, where I had lived for many years alone. Tsukiho and I had long called this place, doubling as a spacious stairwell, located at the center of the building near the entrance hall, the “grand entry.”

I had collapsed on the hard black floor of the grand entry. I wore black pants and a white, long-sleeved shirt. An ensemble not unlike that of a middle school or high school student.

My body lay faceup. My arms and legs were splayed out, bent at jarring angles. I tried to move but failed completely.

My face was turned sideways. As with my arms and legs, I was totally unable to move it. Something must have happened to the bones in my neck…And then there was the blood.

Some part of my head had split open, and red blood smeared my forehead and cheek. A pool of blood was gradually spreading over the floor. It was a terrible scene.

On the threshold of death, my eyes open wide and glassy—one might say I saw this picture.

Thinking reasonably, you would never expect to be able to see yourself in such a state with your own eyes. There was a simple trick to it.

What I had looked at that day was a mirror hanging on the wall of the room.

A large rectangular mirror taller than a person.

The mirror showed that picture—showed me—as I looked in the moments when my life slipped away. As I lay on the brink of death, my eyes were inadvertently locked on it.

The reflection of my bloody face suddenly transformed.

The contorted, taut expression slackened into an oddly peaceful look, as if freed from pain, fear, and uncertainty…And then.

A faint movement on my lips.

Trembling ever so slightly. It was—

Was I saying something?

Yes. I was…But—

I don’t now know what I might have been trying to say at that moment, or whether I did, in fact, say anything. I also don’t know what I felt or thought at that time. I can’t remember it.

I could hear a sound.

An antique grandfather clock stood in the hall. Its bell chimed once.

It was eight thirty. And as if overlaying that solemn echo—

I could hear a voice.

Someone’s voice shouting faintly.

Calling my name (“…Teruya…”). Ah. I know this voice.

All at once, I noticed.

The sight of myself in the mirror, slipping away. In one corner of the mirror, I could see the reflected form of the “someone” whose voice I heard. It was…

…

…

…And this is where my living awareness cuts off. It wasn’t an out-of-body experience like people talk about so often, but I do believe this was the moment of my death.

Even now, this memory of death lingers so vividly in my mind, but everything before and after is a sprawling blank, as if obscured by a thick fog. The answers to “Why did I die?” or “What happened after I died?” aren’t clear. The “after” part of the “before and after” is more than merely blank…it’s an unfathomable darkness.

Bottomless, empty…the darkness that follows death.

This is how I, Teruya Sakaki, died.

And why afterward, I began this existence—what you might think of as a ghost.

3

When you think about it, it seems obvious, but being a ghost is an extremely unsettling state of being. I’ve learned this from experience.

Ever since my death that night, I’ve had an imperfect sense of time.

And of course, since I don’t have a flesh body, I have imperfect somatic senses.

I can have thoughts, but the supporting memories are extremely vague…Perhaps it would be more correct to say that they’re choppy and vary greatly in intensity.

Nonconsecutive rather than continuous.

Fragmentary rather than complete.

—I suppose that might describe it.

Same with time.

Same with knowledge.

Same with memories. And same with my consciousness.

As if I’m preserving “myself,” barely keeping my balance, while I do my best to string together the nonconsecutive, the fragmentary. As if it could scatter in all directions at any moment, all of it truly eradicated…

I feel this threat keenly, but agonizing over it serves no purpose. All I can do is accept things the way they are now.

Because in any event, I’m still dead.

4

I woke up two weeks after my death.

Which of course is not to say that I came back to life. I noticed that I had suddenly been freed from the darkness that had sucked me in immediately after I died and that there was a “me” here. That’s what I mean by “woke up.”

At first I didn’t know what was going on.

When I woke up, the first thing I became aware of was a certain large, familiar-looking mirror.

The big rectangular mirror hanging in the grand entry. The mirror that had dispassionately shown me drawing my last breath.

All of a sudden, I could see it. Only one or two meters away. Meaning—

I was in front of the mirror. I felt myself “standing” there. And yet—

The mirror in front of my eyes showed not the slightest reflection of me standing there. Even though it showed everything else around me exactly as it was.

I could sense my body.

I felt that I had arms and legs, my chest, my neck, my head, my face—all there like usual. I could even see and touch them with my own eyes and hands. I was wearing clothes, too. Black pants with a white, long-sleeved shirt. The same clothes I’d worn the night I’d died in this spot…

…That’s how I am present in this place.

I could be self-aware.

Regardless, the mirror reflected none of this.

What was going on?

Through intense bewilderment and confusion, I finally achieved a proper understanding of the situation.

That I am present in this place.

But not as one of the living with a physical body. I am one of the dead and have lost my body of flesh.

The body I now felt as “being here” did not actually exist. Neither did the clothes. Surely they were all afterimages of life that only I could sense…And that was why. In other words—for some reason, it seemed that I had woken up here as what people would call a ghost.

I turned my eyes away from the mirror.

There were no longer any traces of the blood from my death on the floor before me. I suppose someone had wiped it up afterward.

I looked slowly around at my surroundings.

The large antique grandfather clock standing to one side of the door leading to the entranceway, the clock that had sounded its bell right before my death—its hands were now stopped at 6:06. They didn’t move. Perhaps there was no one to wind it now that I was dead.

I went up to the second floor.

When I made this movement, I intended to walk up the stairs, but this was presumably also an afterimage of life. As, I’m sure, was the fact that I had a slight limp in my left leg when “walking,” just as I had in life.

When I reached the second floor, a gallery-like path ran almost halfway around the open hall of the foyer.

My library, bedroom, and other rooms were on the second floor. There were also several empty rooms I had almost never used in the many years I’d lived here…so it seemed that the general information about this manor had stayed with me despite my shift to being a ghost.

Suddenly, partway down the second-floor hallway—

My eyes stopped on the wooden banister running along the side facing the open space of the foyer.

It had been repaired, new wood fitted into it, as if it had broken or cracked. It looked very much as if it had been an emergency repair.

I looked over the banister and down to the first floor.

So it had happened right down there. The place I had crumpled to on the verge of death that night. Meaning—

Had I fallen from this spot just moments earlier? And I had hit my head hard, maybe snapped my vertebrae, too…

I groped fearfully through the blank space in my memory where the thick fog gathered. And then…

…A voice (What are you doing…? Teruya?).

Someone’s voice (…Stop it).

Several voices (…Don’t worry about it) (You can’t…Don’t do it!).

It seemed on the verge of coming back to me (…Don’t worry about it), and then slipped away.

I moved down the second-floor hallway. I went into one of the rooms.

It was a bedroom.

Moss-colored curtains were drawn over the window, but the light outside shone through a gap between them, dimly lighting the room.

There was a small double bed. The covers were pulled neatly over it. It looked as if no one had used it in a long time.

There was a small clock on the bedside table.

It was a battery-powered digital clock, and unlike the clock in the grand entry, this one was working normally…2:25 P.M. It showed the date, too. Sunday, May 17.

It was while looking at this display that I finally understood that two weeks of time had passed since my death on the night of May 3.

What had happened in this house that night two weeks ago?

Why and what series of events had led me to a death like that?

The thick fog showed no signs of receding.

I remembered that I had died. But I couldn’t really remember what had happened before or after that. Even I had to admit that an “amnesiac ghost” was pretty funny, but—

Why had I died?

That was when I decided I would answer this critical question.

My vision crackled apart, like a TV screen with a bad signal. Several images floated before me in that moment.

On the bedside table.

A bottle of something and a glass, and also…

Near the center of the room.

Something white hanging there, swaying…

…What?!

What is this?—by the time the question entered my mind, the images had already vanished.

Confused, I murmured, “What on earth…?”

My ears, nothing more than relics themselves, picked up the “voice” issuing from my throat, nothing more than an afterimage of life. In life, my voice had been a rich baritone; hearing the cracking, papery sound that echoed now without any similarity startled me.

Instinctively, both hands went to my throat.

My fingers, only an afterimage, touched my skin, itself an afterimage— Oh. This sensation won’t tell me anything. But…

“My throat,” I tried whispering once again.

My voice was indeed hoarse.

My throat must have been crushed when I’d died two weeks earlier. I’d fallen from the second-floor hallway, may have broken my neck…So, even as a ghost, my voice wouldn’t…

I lingered there gloomily, and the hollow darkness crept back in.

5

Ghosts are said to “appear.”

At graves, for example.

At ruins and abandoned houses, for example.

At intersections and tunnels, the frequent subject of rumors…They appear.

From the perspective of the people to whom a ghost appears, anything these people lack the basic ability to see or feel normally must be a ghost. When they can see or feel them for some spontaneous reason, people are surprised and say the ghost “appeared,” and they’re frightened.

People usually can’t correctly predict when a ghost will appear. Even when they try, they’re often wrong. So most times people are caught unawares. And so they’re scared. I suppose that’s how it works.

However, now that I’d become a ghost, I believed the situation was pretty much the same for the one doing the appearing, too. Meaning that…

A dead person’s spirit (their…soul?) lingering in this world after death is actually an extremely unnatural and unsettling state of being.

It is not continuous.

It is not a definitive ending, but rather a gathering together of fragments, struggling to preserve some sameness.

So—

“I,” as a ghost, will not “exist” perpetually at every hour of the day. I don’t “exist”; I do in fact “appear.”

Absent even this degree of overriding law, without purpose or meaning (so it seemed), from time to time I appear and then disappear. I don’t know how it is for ghosts generally, and there’s no way I could find out, but that’s how it was for me, at least.

I feel like it’s not a very apt metaphor, but it can also be understood using the terms sleep and waking.

When I died and became a ghost, I was usually in the hollow darkness I mentioned before, asleep. I suppose the darkness might have been a threshold between this world and the next. And every now and again, I would wake up and wander through this world. In other words, I would “appear.”

While I was appearing, all I ever thought about was my own death.

Why did I die?

What happened after I died?

I…

The numerous pressing questions of the amnesiac ghost. In addition to which—

A feeling of deep sadness, as if enveloping me entirely…

What was I so sad about?

That was another big question.

What did I have to be sad about anymore?

The fact that I had died?

The twenty-six years of life before my death?

Or maybe…

6

After I woke up on May 17, I’ve occasionally appeared at Lakeshore Manor.

In such times, I wandered alone through a house now devoid of occupants, and while doing so, I firmed my grip on the gradually fading outlines of “myself from life”…

Teruya Sakaki.

I was born May 3, 1972, in the town of Yomiyama.

Male. Single. Twenty-six years old at death.

Yes. That is me.

My father’s name was Shotaro. Shotaro Sakaki.

He was a talented doctor, but six years ago he suffered a severe illness and passed away. It was an unfortunate thing to happen right before I turned twenty. He was sixty when he died.

My mother’s name was Hinako.

She had died suddenly in her mid-forties, much earlier than my father, still young. That happened eleven years ago, during my time in middle school…

My sister Tsukiho was eight years older than me.

Her first husband died quite soon after they were married, and she brought her young son Sou, still one year old, back with her to the family home. That was eleven years ago, too. And then with my mother’s death coming so soon after that…As a result, our family decided to leave Yomiyama.

The first place we moved was Lakeshore Manor.

This mansion, built near Lake Minazuki in the small town of Hinami, was originally a vacation home belonging to my father, Shotaro. So you might say our move here eleven years ago was like an emergency evacuation. In fact, we secured a new house in another area the following year and the family moved there.

It was a short while after my father’s death that I inherited the house and decided to live here. At the time, I was enrolled at a private university in the prefecture, but I decided to use that opportunity to take a break from school. After two years, I finally dropped out.

After that, I continued living here by myself. I never once held a proper job. It was selfishness enabled by the significant inheritance I received from my father.

“I’ve been fond of this place for a long time,” I remember telling someone. Who was I talking to and when was it?

“Dad liked it here, too. It felt like he would take the slightest excuse to come here by himself and stay for a couple days.”

I’d heard that going back decades ago, a wealthy foreigner had built the house in the architectural style of his homeland. My father had just happened to see it and like it, and so he’d decided to buy it.

There was a spacious library in the heart of the first floor, as well, separate from the library on the second floor. Of the thousands of books cluttering the bookshelves (which maybe I should feel bad about), the majority belonged to my deceased father’s collection.

When I was brought to this house as a child, I would always spend many long hours in these rooms of books. While they were packed full of “grown-up books” in every type of field, they also contained many comics and novels that a kid could enjoy, too.

After I became the master of the house, my nephew Sou came to visit often, and just as I used to, he treated this collection of books as his own private library. Even though I would have thought it was tough to come over since it took close to thirty minutes to reach here from the Hiratsuka house by bicycle.

Tsukiho fell in love with her current husband Shuji at first sight and married him the year before my father’s death. She had just become pregnant with Mirei when I started to live here.

Sou…I appreciated his attachment to me, like I was an older brother, but sometimes it worried me a bit, too. I knew he must have some complex feelings about Tsukiho getting remarried and having a little sister with a different father. He was well behaved and introverted but very smart. That alone was reason enough…

“Will you always live here by yourself, Teruya?” Sou asked me once, though I actually can’t remember when. “Aren’t you ever going to get married?”

“Well, I don’t have anyone to marry,” I remember answering, half-joking. “Plus, it’s a lot easier living by yourself. I like this house, and I…”

I…I remember not knowing where to go from there and closing my mouth. Sou was nodding and looking up at my face the whole time.

7

I wonder how the world reacted to my death. Actually, I wonder if my death on the night of May 3 was made public at all.

These were questions I had begun to ask around the latter part of May.

Already half a month after my death, and here was this house believed to have no occupants. And yet the house itself hadn’t died, still felt alive…Perhaps that captures the feeling.

I could hear the sound of the refrigerator running in the kitchen, and once when I appeared, I even heard the telephone ringing.

When I heard the telephone in the grand entry ring, I was in the library on the second floor. It weighed on my mind and so I went downstairs, but of course as a ghost, I couldn’t have answered the phone.

It was the dock for the cordless phone. It had an answering machine built into it, and after the automated message and the beep, the caller’s voice played on the speaker.

“Hey, Sakaki? It’s been a while, just wondering how things are goin’. It’s me, Arai.”

Arai…Would that be with the characters for new well? Or for rough-hewn well?

Groping through my patchy recollections, I teased out a memory. I was sure I’d had a classmate by that name, a long time ago…

Even though I told Sou, “You have to make other friends,” when I was alive—and especially the last few years—I’d had almost no one I would have called a friend.

I don’t think I was a radical misanthrope or anything. I was just somehow terrible at keeping a conversation going to match the other person’s interest or ease their tension, and I never kept relationships going for long…

“I’ll try calling you back later.”

Arai went on. I couldn’t remember what he looked like at all.

“I bet you’re living the easy life, like always. Still, there’s somethin’ I’d like to talk to you about…Anyway, if you feel like it, give me a call. Okay?”

I’m sure that when I was alive, I was seen in the world as “doing whatever he wants, not even holding down a job like a responsible adult.” It sounds different when you say “educated man of leisure” instead, but even setting aside the “leisure” part, I myself wondered about the “educated” part.

Sometimes I would take my hobbyist camera and go on aimless expeditions in the car. When I was taking a break from college, I even wandered all the way to the ocean by myself. And to India in Southeast Asia, and I think somewhere in South America, too, once…But…

But they all felt like distant dreams now, all sense of reality diluted out of them.

What had I been seeking on those trips? The feelings I’d had at the time were totally obscure to me now.

Photos I’d taken decorated the mansion here and there. There were photos of the places I’d traveled to, but there were also more than a few taken nearby. There was also a photo where I managed to catch a great photo opportunity at the ocean of a strange mirage.

8

While sitting (or perhaps “with the conviction that I sat” would be a more accurate phrasing) in the chair at the desk in the second-floor library, I would, among other things, run through my memories of when I was alive.

In one area of the large desk sat an old-style dedicated word processor. But in my present state, I lacked the power to start it up and use it.

For a ghost with no corporeal body, flipping a power switch on machines like this and using them…It seemed I was fundamentally incapable of such actions. Not to say that it was totally impossible for me to touch or move things: I could open a book or notebook, for example, move a door…Those things weren’t beyond me.

I wasn’t sure where the line was drawn, but the latter class of physical actions would probably look to the living like a spiritual manifestation like a poltergeist. That’s the explanation I dreamed up.

“What is this a photo of?” I remembered being asked.

Who had asked me that question? And when?

“On the right there, is that you when you were younger, Mr. Sakaki?”

I at least knew that the other person wasn’t Sou. Sou wouldn’t call me Mr. Sakaki.

A simple, plain wooden picture frame that stood on the desk in the library. The question was about an old color photo inside the frame.

The picture was still on the desk now.

It showed five young people.

Three boys and two girls. The boy on the right in the picture was definitely me. I was wearing a navy blue polo shirt and had my right hand propped on my hip, smiling. I was holding a brown cane in my left hand, but…

It looked like the picture had been taken somewhere near here. There was a lake in the background. Maybe a commemorative photo taken on the shore of Lake Minazuki?

The date the photo was taken was printed in the lower right corner: “8/3/1987.” On the border of the picture frame, someone had handwritten, “Last summer vacation of middle school.”

It was true—1987 had been eleven years earlier. The year my mother suddenly passed away and my family left Yomiyama, and this had been the summer vacation of that year…

Third year in middle school. A fifteen-year-old me/Teruya Sakaki.

The other four people…Yes, they were friends from my class and—

“It’s a photo that brings back a lot of memories,” I think I replied to the question. “Of that memorable summer vacation.”

“Oh yeah?” the other person responded offhandedly. “You look like you’re having a lot of fun, the way you’re smiling in this picture. You look like a totally different person…”

…After playing the memory back to this point, I finally remembered.

That’s right. It was that girl.

The girl with mismatched eyes I’d run into again on the seashore at the end of July last year. When she had come over to this house…

The girl’s name was Mei. Mei Misaki.

She said Mei was written with the character for howling. Mei Misaki—