Outroduction

1

The display room in the basement of “Blue Eyes Empty to All, in the Twilight of Yomi.” In the same old gloominess reminiscent of dusk, in one corner of the cellar-like room—

When Mei Misaki had finished telling her story about another Sakaki she met this summer, I took a series of deep breaths.

I thought I had grown accustomed to the air in this basement room, but once the story reached the final stages, a weird sensation had slowly begun to take hold of me. Each word Mei spoke amplified the “emptiness” of the battalions of dolls, and I felt as if I would be sucked into it…

Unquestionably influenced by an impulse to resist this, I gave voice to a comment with an especially flippant tone.

“So your story didn’t actually have a real ghost in it after all.”

It sounded so blunt…But no, I had dimly detected a hint of the truth partway through the story.

Why?

Because of what Mei had said the night of our class trip in August.

That time when, in one of the rooms of the Sakitani Memorial Hall, she had told me the secret of her doll’s eye. When she answered my question of whether she had ever seen any ghosts.

“No…Never,” she had said.

She had told me “I have no idea” whether ghosts existed. And that “I think, fundamentally, they probably don’t.”

What Mei’s doll’s eye showed her was only the color of death.

It was in a different class from seeing spirits and being able to predict deaths and stuff like that…That was my understanding.

“So essentially, it was a kid playacting.”

I continued to unintentially phrase things very callously. Analogizing to the Kabuki and classical Japanese dance technique of “puppet miming,” where an actor imitates a puppet, an image had come into my mind of the kid doing “grown-up miming” and “ghost miming.” But Mei grunted and tilted her head slightly to one side.

“I don’t like that much as a summary.”

“Huh?…Oh.”

“Sure, the truth is that it was a delusion Sou was having, so I understand why you want to say that…But still.”

She stopped talking and I saw her narrow her right eye coldly. That rattled me. I sat up straighter and took another deep breath, preparing to meekly guess at what might come after “but still”—

“From his perspective, it must have been a monumentally important issue.”

“Yeah.” I nodded, showing an earnest face.

“I get that, but…I don’t know, it’s so complicated and nuanced, I guess. It seems so hard to explain it just right. I wonder what was really going on in Sou’s mind.”

“…Yeah.”

Drawing her lips tight, Mei nodded.

“I managed to get the overall story from him, and I checked what I could of the facts…but still, the stuff beyond that, you know? No matter how thoroughly he wants to explain it, he can’t do it justice.”

“I wonder if it gets into stuff like split personalities or being possessed or something.”

Sou Hiratsuka, so firmly convinced that he was “the ghost of Teruya Sakaki,” who when he appeared had felt things, thought, and behaved to the utmost as that. These were the words and concepts that bubbled to the surface all on their own when I thought about his state of mind. However.

“I don’t think it was quite like that.”

I had put the thought out there, then immediately wished I could take it back.

Because a flicker of doubt crossed my mind: Was it really enough just to apply some trendy label to this? Apparently Mei had the same feeling.

“Treating Sou’s behavior like an ‘emotional illness’ and getting a specialist to analyze him and fit him into some ‘-osis’ would be so empty, I think. Though I suppose there are plenty of people who would be happy to do it,” she said, drawing her lips still tighter.

“Sakakibara, you said a little while ago that it’s ‘so complicated and nuanced.’”

“Yeah…I did.”

“I agree it’s nuanced. But what looks complicated is actually just a lot of simple bits of naïveté all coming together and getting tangled up with each other. You could think of it that way.”

“What kind of simple things?”

“Let’s try listing off some key words.”

Mei slowly closed her right eye, then opened it.

“Child. Adult. Death. Ghost. Sadness…And maybe connected.”

“Er, that’s…”

“Each word is simple by itself, right? But they mingle together little by little while holding onto their individual meanings and get distorted…And the end result was Mr. Sakaki’s ghost appearing inside Sou.”

“Umm…could you explain that?”

“Wouldn’t it be crass to go into any more detail?”

With those words, I couldn’t tell whether purposely or not, a slightly sadistic smile crept over Mei Misaki’s face. “It’s not like this is a question on a language arts test…Right?”

I muttered, unsatisfied, and leaned back in the armchair.

“All the same, though—” Mei said, her smile vanishing. “I’ll try and straighten out what happened at Lakeshore Manor on May 3, at least. Because I think it’s best to leave it at that.”

2

She said that Teruya Sakaki must have been living in sorrow for a long time.

The sorrow of losing so many of his friends in the tragedy of ’87 eleven years earlier. Then, the sorrow of losing his mother—

Well, enough for him that he and his family fled from Yomiyama in order to escape the disasters, but people he knew in class and had left behind in the city continued to lose their lives to the unrelenting misfortune. There was no question he had also felt guilt that he alone had fled and been spared. That guilt that the passage of years couldn’t erase…And still the sorrow.

At some point in the midst of it all, Sakaki had begun to be fascinated by death, even as he feared it.

Perhaps dropping out of college and traveling all over the place had, from his perspective, been similar to caring for the animals and putting a row of grave markers for them in the garden: a ritual to explore the meaning of death.

In the end, his thoughts had settled in a single direction.

It would be much better for him to die, too, rather than to continue living like this, carrying his indelible sorrow. Then, he would be liberated from it. Then, he might be able to connect to everyone who had died before him.

And so he had reached the certainty that it was time. He had forsaken his own life, thinking that there was nothing else he wished for. And then—

Sakaki had decided to go through with it on the night of May 3, which was also his twenty-sixth birthday. He had written some words in Memories 1998, reminiscent of a suicide note, and then he had set up a rope to hang himself and taken sleeping pills with alcohol…And at the moment he had thought it was done, unexpectedly Tsukiho had come over with Sou.

It probably made sense for Sou to believe that the subsequent events, of Sakaki having the misfortune to fall from the corridor on the second floor and die, were facts remembered as “the ghost of Teruya Sakaki.” Although in reality, they were based on the memories of events Sou himself had witnessed when he followed Tsukiho up to the second floor, which he had reconstructed from the perspective of “Sakaki’s ghost.”

Witnessing the life slipping out of Sakaki’s body, the man he had adored like a father or big brother, the shock had put Sou into a vacant-eyed stupor, from which he had tumbled into an almost insensate trance. Meanwhile, Tsukiho’s first response had been to run over to where Sakaki had fallen, where she saw that he had already stopped breathing. The decisions and choices she made at that point determined how things developed.

She had put Sou, still half-senseless, to bed in a decent location and then made a phone call. Before calling an ambulance or the police, she first called her husband Shuji Hiratsuka.

“Something terrible has happened. Something awful…”

Hearing Tsukiho’s voice in snatches—Sou would tell Mei that memory later.

“…What?”

Tsukiho’s voice sounding surprised.

“But…but that’s…”

She was talking to someone on the phone. Probably Shuji. Sou said he guessed it from the way she talked.

“Right…a-all right. I…understand. Just please hurry…All right…Yes, please. I’ll be here.”

A short while later, Shuji Hiratsuka rushed into the house. He had a doctor’s license and confirmed Sakaki’s death, and Tsukiho told him the details of what had happened…At this point, Sou’s memories became patchier and patchier, more like guesses.

Should they inform the police of what happened or not?

Teruya Sakaki had absolutely intended to kill himself that night, but in the end the one who had caused him to fall was Tsukiho. The reality was that it was an unfortunate accident, but she was afraid that she would be investigated for her role in involuntary manslaughter. And that the police might wrongly suspect her of even worse.

In any event, the fact that a family member—a brother-in-law, from Shuji’s perspective—had attempted suicide would be an immense scandal for a distinguished local family like the Hiratsukas that they wouldn’t want to be widely known. And when Tsukiho had a connection like that to the event, they wanted even less for it to become public. There was going to be an election in the fall…After talking it over, the two came to a decision.

Namely, the cover-up.

To erase the fact that Teruya Sakaki had died there that night. To say instead that he had gone on a long trip somewhere by himself. He really did have a streak of wanderlust like that, so it wasn’t a far-fetched scenario. He had few close friends, so Shuji and Tsukiho were probably also planning to wrap it all up in the end by saying he had disappeared on his trip.

In that case, they would have to dispose of the body. They would have to dump it or hide it somewhere that no third party would find it.

“At least…do it here.”

At that point, Sou thought, Tsukiho had probably spoken up. This, too, was a fragment of conversation that Sou had heard in his flickers of awareness and remembered.

“…In this house.”

They probably had a lot of options for hiding the body: burying it in the forest or sinking it in the ocean or the lake…But on that one point, she would not budge.

The Lakeshore Manor her deceased father had so loved, and for which Sakaki had also held a fierce attachment, was a special house. Tsukiho knew that well. So even though they were covering up his death to serve their own purposes, she begged that his body be buried there, at the very least.

At least…do it here.

In this house.

Somewhere inside the house—

In the end, Shuji relented to her request. In the future, when the time came that Teruya Sakaki was declared missing and presumed dead, Lakeshore Manor would pass to his natural-born sister, Tsukiho. There would be no problems taking possession of it. Perhaps his decision had been made with that expectation. And then—

The place they selected for hiding the body was that room in the basement that had gone totally unused for so many years that very few people even knew existed.

The two carried the body down there and decided to make the room itself disappear. They likely decided to have Shuji himself do the construction work to seal up the door and outside windows or to make secret arrangements to have it done. Since he also had his hand in construction-related businesses, it wouldn’t have been very difficult to arrange…

When they sealed up the body, they brought Sakaki’s single-lens reflex camera and set it beside him, which had no doubt been at Tsukiho’s behest. One could imagine with the same intention as placing a favorite object of the deceased with them in the coffin…

As for the diary that had been placed with him, that had probably been to hide evidence. They thought it was a bad idea to leave something that could be read as a suicide note lying around to be found in the bedroom or library. In which case, it might have been better to tear it up and throw it out or burn it. But perhaps they hadn’t done so in order to use it as “insurance” in the worst-case scenario.

If by some small chance the existence of the disappeared basement room were revealed and the body were to be discovered, the “suicide note” in the diary would be important. It could be powerful evidence to make the excuse that Sakaki’s death had originally been suicide. Done with that in mind…

3

“Apparently that room in the basement was originally built as a stove room.”

Appending that explanation, Mei glanced at the round tabletop. Her eyes had landed on the sketchbook she had closed and set down there.

“They would light a big coal stove in there, and chimneys to let the smoke out ran to all the important parts of the house to heat the house in the winter. They stopped using that a really long time ago, so after Mr. Sakaki’s dad got the house they just ignored that room.”

“So that little black rock Sou was holding really was coal?”

Mei nodded. “Yeah. I think it was a piece of coal someone dropped a long, long time ago, and he picked it up while he was groping around in that pitch-dark room.”

…But still.

How had Sou Hiratsuka managed to get into that room the night of August 2? The door and outside windows were all sealed up, and there shouldn’t have been any gaps big enough for him to get in through.

When I voiced this question, Mei answered casually.

“Purely by luck, apparently.”

“By luck?”

“Given what that room was originally used for, there would have been a chute or hole or something for throwing coal in there directly from outside. Like a tunnel slanting down from above-ground into the room.”

You could probably imagine it like a trash chute in a building.

“People forgot it even existed a long time ago, and Tsukiho and her husband didn’t know about it, either. And nobody noticed it when they did the work to seal up the door and windows. From inside the room, the hole the coal fell out of probably just looked like it was half blocked with junk or something anyway.”

“And Sou found that?”

“It looks like it really was purely by chance. Sure, he noticed there were fewer skylights to the basement that day, but he couldn’t possibly have phased through the wall or anything since he’s not a real ghost. So while he was wandering around near there in a stupor, he just happened to find an old iron lid in the ground, and when he opened it up…”

“That’s how he got in.”

“I don’t think he really understood what happened. It probably felt like falling down a hole. He even said he felt an unexpected impact. And he was covered in cuts that he probably got from that…”

On the night of August 2, Mei had rescued Sou from the basement room. Apparently there was a lot of trouble afterward. All I could think was, I imagine there would be, yeah.

“I wasn’t sure what to do, but obviously I had to call Kirika first. I gave her a rundown of the situation and asked her to tell my father, too, and then come over as soon as she could.”

“What about the Hiratsukas? Weren’t they panicking because Sou wasn’t there?”

“Apparently they hadn’t noticed,” Mei replied. Her voice a touch glum. “After the incident in May, when Sou was at home, he started staying in his room. And I don’t think Tsukiho knew that Sou had gone out after the sun went down that night.”

“Hmm. When you say that, it makes me think of…”

I felt like the isolation Sou experienced in the Hiratsuka house was being shoved into my face. I was sure his home environment had been basically the same even before what happened in May.

“After that, all kinds of stuff happened…In the end, the police came. Sou went to the hospital. And one of the police officers asked me a ton of questions, but…”

There were a lot of questions about how the incident was handled after that. The fact that a body had been discovered in the basement was never announced publicly, and for some reason, neither of the Hiratsukas wound up being arrested for suspicion of illegally disposing of a body or anything else.

The only change was that Shuji Hiratsuka withdrew from the election he had planned to join for the fall. I don’t know what grown-up dynamics were at work there. Even when Mei asked Kirika what was going on, she only got fake-sounding answers.

4

How had Sou Hiratsuka become convinced that he was the ghost of Teruya Sakaki?

I know it makes me look crass, but I attempted to work out an explanation for it afterward. I couldn’t stop myself. Using the key words Mei pointed out earlier as clues—

“Sou cared a lot about Mr. Sakaki. Because to Sou, Mr. Sakaki played a role more like a father or an older brother…”

“On the other hand, Sou hated adults. I imagine he probably disliked most adults who weren’t Mr. Sakaki. Including Mr. Hiratsuka, who was Tsukiho’s second husband, and Tsukiho who poured all her affection onto little Mirei, her child with Mr. Hiratsuka, and probably the teachers at his school, too…And that’s why.

“That’s why Sou thought that.

“That if he could be a grown-up he liked, he’d want to grow up right away. In other words, if he could be like Mr. Sakaki, he would want to grow up as fast as he could…”

Do ghosts exist? If a soul stays in “the world of the living,” does it become a ghost?

“And Mr. Sakaki, who he idolized so much, died right in front of Sou.

“The person he loved most and who was most important to him in that moment. The only adult he wanted to grow up to be…That’s who died.

“Sou didn’t want to accept the reality that Mr. Sakaki was gone. But the dead didn’t come back to life for him.

“Sou had lost the ideal adult he wanted to grow up to be. If he couldn’t be like him, he’d rather stay a child, without any freedom. But even if he didn’t want to, he would still grow up…”

Do some people turn into ghosts when they die and other people don’t?

“Maybe if Tsukiho and her husband had called an ambulance or the police that night. If Mr. Sakaki’s death had become public and they had held a proper funeral and burial—

“Then maybe Sou wouldn’t have become a ‘ghost.’

“But the reality turned out different.

“When Tsukiho ordered Sou to forget what had happened that night and it became subliminal…and combined with the major shock he had undergone, he really did seal away his memories of that night and shut down emotionally. Mr. Sakaki’s death was covered up and he couldn’t be properly mourned by everyone…And then ‘the ghost of Teruya Sakaki’ awoke inside Sou and started to appear occasionally. But from Sou’s perspective, that was also linked to granting his own desire under a different guise.

“In one sense, there was his desire for Mr. Sakaki to stay among the living. For him to turn into a ghost and be by Sou’s side, even if he was dead.

“In another sense, there was Sou’s desire to not become one of the grown-ups he hates, but instead to become the grown-up he likes best of all, as fast as he could. If he was going to turn into a grown-up he hates, then he preferred to stay a kid. But he was going to grow up whether he liked it or not. So given that, he would want to become the ‘adult’ who was ‘the ghost of Teruya Sakaki, who he liked best.’ Maybe he also wanted to, in some sense, stop time for himself by doing that…”

“The fact that Sou woke up as ‘the ghost of Teruya Sakaki’ and started to search for Mr. Sakaki’s missing body, while occasionally popping up here and there to go through his memories as a ‘ghost’…that might have been an act on Mr. Sakaki’s behalf.

“Rather than Sou fulfilling his own desires, the ‘ghost of Teruya Sakaki’ might have kept at it for the sake of his own/Teruya Sakaki’s death. If he could find his body and make it public, and get his proper ‘death’ to take him, then he/Teruya Sakaki would be able to connect with ‘everyone.’ Mr. Sakaki had always wanted that…And that’s why.”

5

“What do you think?”

I finished my crass analysis, feeling immensely nervous, and tried to gauge Mei’s reaction.

Mei’s arms were folded over her chest gravely.

“It’s good enough, I suppose,” she answered. An image of Mr. Chibiki in a pose I had often seen him adopt seemed to superimpose itself on her. “It’s not really an issue where you can point to one right answer…It’s just…”

“What?”

“I feel kind of awful making this analogy, but maybe that ghost was kind of like a mirage?”

“A mirage?”

Now that she mentioned it, there had been a quick scene in her story about a mirage you could see in the ocean at Hinami.

“Yes,” Mei replied, shutting her right eye. “An illusory scene, appearing and then disappearing. Light gets bent by temperature differences in the air, and the original scene appears in a different place, stretched out or compressed or turned upside down…a twisted, false image.”

“Right.”

“What everyone around him saw was the true image of the boy Sou Hiratsuka. But what the boy himself saw was like that, a false image of himself twisted like a mirage. That was the ‘ghost of Mr. Sakaki.’”

“Yeah…”

“The temperature difference in the air is, in other words, the difference in momentum of the particles in the air. You could also say it’s the difference in density per unit time.”

“Sure, I guess.”

“In Sou’s case, the cause of the bending was a difference in temperature in his heart. Or the density of sorrow in his heart. It got to be too much and his true form twisted into that false image…That’s what I think.”

Mei let out a sigh, and I nodded, thinking it over.

It began to occur to me that, oddly, this analogy fit much more perfectly than my strained, pedantic explanation—

“Speaking of awful,” I said. “I thought up a rule.”

“A rule?”

“More like a pattern to recognize the ‘ghost of Teruya Sakaki.’”

“Oh?”

Mei looked at me with intense interest.

Even as I was seized again by nerves, I tried to describe the problem that I had been thinking about for some time and had tried to summarize in my head.

“While Sou was appearing as a ghost, how was Sou himself being perceived? It couldn’t possibly have been the same in every situation. So I think it probably broke down into patterns like this…”

Then I showed her the following three “patterns”:

“The only person fitting the third pattern was Mei Misaki,” I continued, recalling the minor details of the story she had told me. “For example, when the ghost appeared at the afternoon tea at your family’s vacation house. You went out onto the terrace by yourself in a way that seemed to be an invitation, and Sou followed you out, right? So then, when the two of you were alone, he started talking to you as the ghost. But then, in that situation, Sou himself became ‘not there’…

“And then your father came outside. Since he acted like Sou was there with you, the ghost’s perception had to change, too, so he couldn’t talk to you directly anymore and started to disappear…”

After a few moments, Mei nodded. “You’re right. I think that’s how it went.”

“And then—” I pressed on. “The part that bothered me most was why would Sou have misunderstood in the first place? About your left eye being able to see him as a ghost? That you could see him?”

I wanted to set this part straight.

Thinking back over Mei’s story, the reason for this was still a mystery to me. Because when the two had run into each other for the first time over the summer in the library of Lakeshore Manor, that had struck me as a situation where “as soon as she took the eye patch off her left eye, she was able to see the ghost who had until then been invisible to her.”

“That was—” Resting her fingers on the edge of her eye patch, Mei replied in a detached tone, “That was actually helped by chance a little bit, too, to turn out the way it did.”

“What does that mean?”

“I went over to Lakeshore Manor that day, and when I accidentally knocked that bike over, I thought I saw someone on the second floor. So I was sure someone—at least Sou—was inside the house, so I rang the doorbell, but no one came to the door. And so I went around to the back door.

“That door was open, and when I went inside, I saw someone’s shoes. A pair of dirty sneakers smaller than mine…”

Mei had gone up to the second floor. She’d had the impression that she’d seen a person in the window of the library, so she’d headed straight there and—

“At exactly that second, the owl clock on the opposite wall rang and distracted me. And while my attention was focused on one of Kirika’s dolls on a display shelf, I walked into the room…”

At that point, Sou was standing in front of the desk by the left wall, which was in Mei’s blind spot since she could only see out of her right eye—

“It was really as simple as I couldn’t physically see him.” Mei pointed at her eye patch. “But right after that—”

“You took your eye patch off.”

“It was dirty and felt gross, so I took it off. Almost at the same second, a bunch of crows flew past the window…”

Crows? Oh right—maybe I did remember her saying that.

“It surprised me, and I looked over at the window. Even though it was cloudy that day, the window was bright and it was dim inside the room, but since the crows were going past the window, it made it darker outside. In that moment, the intensity of light and dark flipped and the inside of the room was reflected on the window glass. That’s how—”

“Ah…I see.”

The situation drew itself as a picture in my mind, and finally I realized and could understand.

Mei said, “I saw the outline of Sou standing right there. Obviously in my right eye, not my left. It surprised me, and when I spun around to look at him, he was standing in front of the desk, so I…”

“Why?”

Mei had whispered reflexively.

“Why…are you in a place like that?”

“Can you really see me?” Sou had asked, startled and caught off guard.

“Yes…I can…,” Mei had replied frankly.

“When Sou and I talked after that, we were out of step with each other at first, but he was so serious about it when he told me, ‘Mr. Sakaki is dead’ and ‘I’m his ghost’…In the end, I got into the habit of following his lead. I asked him about the details of what had happened up to that point…and while I was listening, I started to understand what was going on in Sou’s mind. Once I did, somehow I understood that pointing out to him ‘but you’re Sou’ right then and there would have been bad…”

“And then two days later you decided to look into it. You asked Kirika to invite the Hiratsuka family over to your house.”

“That’s right.”

Mei ran the middle finger of her left hand down across her eye patch.

“I wanted to find out, first of all, what had actually happened to Mr. Sakaki. In other words, how much of Sou’s story was true. I wanted to see how he acted when he was with Tsukiho and his family…”

Instead of nodding, I let out a long sigh.

I thought I was used to this by now, but I was starting to feel myself being swallowed up in the atmosphere of this basement room so dominated by the “emptiness” of the dolls. And so somehow, despite our discussion of the “underlying truth,” I was starting to feel as if we were the ones who were really the “mirage”…

Maybe she guessed what was happening—

“You want to go somewhere else?” Mei suggested. “Let’s go to the sofas upstairs. We’re mostly done with the story anyway.”

6

Thinking about it, I was pretty sure this was the first time I had been in the first-floor gallery without Grandma Amane being there. The gallery was closed, so the string music that always played was also missing. The air-conditioning wasn’t on, either, and it felt a little muggy compared to the basement—

When we sat down on the sofas that faced each other at an angle, I felt as if I could hear, unpleasantly clearly, Mei’s breathing and all its subtle changes…And even at this late point, I felt a little fidgety. My heart was racing.

Mei had brought her sketchbook upstairs with her and started to set it down on the armrest of the sofa, but before she did, she murmured to herself, “Oh right,” and instead placed the sketchbook on her lap. I wondered what that had been about but pressed ahead.

“So hey, that reminds me.

“What was going on with that friend Arai who called Mr. Sakaki? Did you not ever figure it out?”

“No.”

As Mei shook her head very slightly, she opened the sketchbook. But the picture of Lakeshore Manor she’d drawn last summer…was not what she now showed me.

She opened the sketchbook up to just before the back cover. I could see a light blue envelope slipped between two pages.

“I tried to check that,” Mei said offhandedly. “It bothered me, too, so that night—while I was looking for Sou, I got the idea to try calling.”

“Oh?”

“Because the message and caller’s phone number were both still on the base set of the phone in the hall. So I tried calling that number. I asked, ‘Is this Arai’s house?’”

Ah. No deep thought required—that was the fastest way to check certainly.

“—And?”

“A really old man came onto the phone. It wasn’t him, but when I asked if it was Arai’s house, he told me it wasn’t. So I changed my question and asked, ‘Okay, is Arai there?’ and he said, ‘There’s no one here by that name,’ in a really harsh way.”

I was just wondering what that could mean, when Mei picked up the envelope that had been stuck into her sketchbook and pulled something out of it.

“Here, look at this.”

She held out a photograph. When I looked at it, a small noise escaped me. “Oh…Is this it?”

“Mr. Sakaki’s ‘photo that brings back so many memories’ from summer vacation eleven years ago.”

“This is…”

I studied the photo intently.

The date the picture was taken, “8/3/1987,” was indeed printed in the lower right of the image.

A mixed group of five girls and boys lined up with a lake behind them. So the boy on the far right was Teruya Sakaki. He was a different age than in the photo Mei had first shown me from last year, but it was definitely the same person. The other four had been students in third-year Class 3 at North Yomi…

“And the notes are here.”

She next held out the notepaper, which I took to read the figures’ names.

In order from the right, they were “Sakaki,” “Yagisawa,” “Higuchi,” “Mitarai,” and “Arai.”

Just like Mei had said in her story, below “Yagisawa” and “Arai” was written an “X” and the word “dead.”

“I tried to play it innocent on the phone. I said, ‘I’m sorry, whose house is this, then?’ And then the answer was—”

Mei cast her eyes down to the photo I held in my hands.

“They said, ‘This is the Mitarai house.’”

“Mitarai?”

“The second from the left in the picture. The chubby kid with the glasses and blue T-shirt. Apparently it was his house. Mitarai.”

“But the message on the answering machine was from Arai…,” I started to protest, then realized: “But maybe Arai was something else.”

“It could have been Mitarai’s nickname or what his friends called him. Just taking the last part of his name and calling him Arai instead.”

“But what about this person with the ‘X’?”

“If that person’s name were Arai, too, it would be confusing, right? So I think it’s a different reading of the characters. Like Nii instead of Arai.”

“—Oh yeah.”

“It was Nii who died all those years ago. Mitarai is alive and had been keeping in touch with Mr. Sakaki. He just happened to call him up…Probably he needed something, like he was going to ask him to lend him some money or something.”

Looking at it this way, the truth was almost humorous. For the “ghost of Sakaki” (i.e., Sou), who lacked the knowledge that Arai was Mitarai, it definitely would have been shocking and confused him.

—But even so.

What was this photo doing here? Had Mei taken it from the library in Lakeshore Manor? Or maybe…

I glanced at Mei’s hands.

The light blue envelope, just big enough to hold a photograph. I spotted something written on the face of the envelope and a stamp.

Had someone mailed it to her? If so, who?

Before I could ask, Mei said, “By the way…Sakakibara.

“When you look at that photo, do you sense anything?”

7

“Like what?”

My eyes fell once again to the photograph from eleven years ago.

The students of the 1987 third-year Class 3 at Yomiyama North Middle. Who had been invited by Teruya Sakaki to share a peaceful moment over summer break at Lakeshore Manor in Hinami, unaffected by the “disasters.” But afterward, of the four who had returned to Yomiyama, Yagisawa and Nii had lost their lives…

“…I’m not sure.”

I looked into Mei’s face. At that, her right eye narrowed slyly.

“You don’t feel like the spacing is unnatural?”

“Huh?”

I looked back at the photo.

An unnatural space? An unnatural…

“…Oh!”

Here?

Teruya Sakaki on the far right and to his left the girl called Yagisawa. Here, between the two of them…

“They’re standing apart from each other. Mr. Sakaki and Yagisawa,” Mei said. “Don’t you think it’s weird how far apart they are from each other? Almost like…”

“Yeah. It’s almost like…”

As I was responding, I was remembering something. The two photos we had taken in front of the gate to Sakitani Memorial Hall on the class trip in August.

Both showed five people.

The first one was me, Mei, Kazami, Teshigawara, and Ms. Mikami in that order. In the second one, Teshigawara had been replaced by Mochizuki, who was pressed right up against “his beloved Ms. Mikami”…

…Vmm…vmmmmm…

A low-frequency noise started up somewhere in my head.

If I were to look at those photos five or ten years from now, how would they appear to me? That was the question. As time passed, my memories of the “extra person”/“the casualty” from this year would fade and disappear…Vmm…vmmmmm…and she would vanish from the photos. And then an unnatural space where a picture of someone had originally been but no longer appeared would develop in her place…

“…This is…,” I said, my eyes still fixed on the photo in my hand. Without realizing it, my empty hand had been pressed over my chest. My voice was panting and short of breath. “Could it be that originally there was—that this picture used to show someone beside Mr. Sakaki?”

“You get that feeling, right?”

“Y…yeah.”

“That’s what I think. Someone used to be in this picture. That it must have been ‘the casualty’ who’d infiltrated third-year Class 3 eleven years ago. And—”

Mei cut herself off suggestively and ran her slender fingers down the white of her eye patch. She seemed to be saying, “You know what I’m going to say next,” but I had no idea at all.

“And well,” Mei continued. “I was thinking maybe that someone was Mr. Sakaki’s first love.”

“Wha—?”

“Because apparently, in all the different conversations he had with Sou, Mr. Sakaki said something like this…”

“I told you how there was an ‘archive of the disasters’ on the second floor of Lakeshore Manor, right? These words were written on the wall of that room: ‘Who are you? Who were you?’”

“Yeah…you did.”

“At the point this photo was taken, during summer break, of course Mr. Sakaki didn’t know who the casualty was for that year, and neither did anyone else. There’s no way they could have known. So maybe during that time, Mr. Sakaki started to like her. Never knowing that she was the casualty…”

After the graduation ceremony in 1987, when the phenomenon for that year ended and the casualty disappeared, all the various records that had been altered to make things consistent would return to normal. It would turn out that she had never existed in that year, and eventually she would disappear from the memories of the people involved and over a long enough time, she would vanish.

Even the memories of Teruya Sakaki, who had loved her, could not escape this rule.

Maybe Sakaki had even found out that she had been that year’s casualty from his North Yomi classmate Mitarai after the graduation ceremony. His memories of being in love with her, of liking her so much—that impression on his heart had lasted inside him even after she had disappeared. But the girl’s name, face, voice, the words they had spoken to each other, the time they had spent together…all those memories had inevitably faded as time went on and disappeared. And then after however many years, he was no longer able to remember all the things he had shared with her. That’s why—

That’s why he…

8

“That might be the biggest reason Mr. Sakaki was entranced by death.”

After a few seconds of silence, I spoke the thought as it occurred to me.

“If he died, he could connect with everyone who had died before. But maybe it was her he wanted to connect with more than ‘everyone.’”

“—Could be,” Mei responded, her gaze cast downward. “Although…that’s a feeling I don’t really understand.”

“Really…?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever cared about someone that much.”

“You don’t think?”

“Yeah. I’m not sure.”

Letting out a quiet sigh, I took another look at the photo that brought back so many memories of eleven years ago.

The unnatural space between Teruya Sakaki and Whoever Yagisawa. No—no matter how hard I squinted, I couldn’t see anybody there.

A fifteen-year-old Teruya Sakaki holding a brown cane in his left hand and resting his right hand on his hip, smiling. The sheer happiness in his smile left me feeling incredibly sad.

“Have you figured out the last puzzle left?” Mei’s voice broke in on my thoughts.

“What puzzle?” I lifted my eyes from the photo.

“Of Mr. Sakaki’s last words.”

“Oh…that ‘tsu’ and ‘ki’ stuff?”

“Yeah.”

“Well…”

I had been thinking he really was saying the “tsuki” in Tsukiho.

Like maybe he wanted to say something to her at the very, very end, since she had tried to stop him from committing suicide. Or maybe—

“We can drill even deeper into it. Look at it as the ‘dying message’ someone speaks in a mystery novel.”

“Oh yeah?” Mei narrowed her right eye dubiously. I outlined my thought.

“Say Tsukiho had actually pushed Mr. Sakaki over the railing deliberately. When Mr. Sakaki finally fell from the second-floor corridor, he picked up on the murderous intent directed at him, and…”

“He wanted to tell someone that Tsukiho was the culprit?”

“Well, from his perspective anyway.”

At that, Mei pursed her lips a little and looked at me, almost scowling.

“Overruled,” she said. “If that were the case, wouldn’t the expression on Mr. Sakaki’s face right before he died, which Sou saw, be strange? He said his expression was oddly peaceful…as if he’d been freed from suffering, and fear, and anxiety. Because ‘tsu…ki’ is what he said in that moment.”

“Hmmm. When you put it that way, you’re right. So then…”

So then what could it have been? I cocked my head in thought.

What had he been saying at the very end…?

“I stopped by the secondary library recently, actually. To see Mr. Chibiki,” Mei said. I was caught a little flat-footed.

“Why’d you go back?”

“I wanted to see that file.”

What file?…The one Mr. Chibiki kept? That folder with the pitch-black cover where he kept copies of the class lists for the last twenty-seven years, from the year it started twenty-six years ago up to this year?

“For whatever reason, while all kinds of records are compromised by the ‘phenomenon’ and go back to normal, that file is apparently the only thing that is partially overlooked. Notes on the name of the casualty for an on year especially. So I wanted to check it and see.”

When she said that, I was finally able to guess.

“To see who was the casualty in 1987?”

“Mr. Sakaki didn’t know about this, remember. If he had, he might have been able to go and check it himself.”

Since he had changed schools early on, he probably hadn’t had a chance to come into contact with Mr. Chibiki. So he wouldn’t have had any way of learning that the file existed—

“And I found out her name. The casualty in 1987.”

“The girl who was Mr. Sakaki’s first love?”

Mei nodded silently.

“It was Satsuki.”

She spoke her name.

“Satsuki Shinomiya.”

With “Shinomiya” written with the characters for four halls and “Satsuki” written with characters that could read hope on a sandy shore.

“See? So…”

So…of course.

“You mean ‘tsu…ki’ was him saying ‘Satsuki’?”

“Staring death in the face, maybe Mr. Sakaki remembered. That her name was Satsuki. And that’s why his expression was so peaceful…”

He hadn’t spoken the “sa” aloud and had barely managed the “tsu” and “ki.” So the round shape of his mouth afterward—what had looked like the vowel O—had simply been him trying to breathe out in relief. Or perhaps after saying her name, he had started to say something like “You…”

“That’s just me conjecturing, though,” Mei added, and she let out a short sigh.

9

Sakaki and Satsuki, eleven years ago…

Looking at the photo I held, my mind turned over the coincidence.

Satsuki could be written with the characters for fifth month. In other words, May. Like Mei…

Oh, whatever, it’s not even anything…

…Vmm…vmmmmm…

Wanting to shake off the faint, low frequency that had once again started up, I sluggishly shook my head.

“This came yesterday,” Mei said just then. A light blue envelope had been tucked into her sketchbook. She had now laid the envelope on the table and was pointing at it.

“From who?” I asked. “Who sent you that?”

“Sou,” Mei replied. Then, she picked the envelope up again. “He sent me that photo and the note and also this letter.”

She pulled out a letter, folded in half, on paper the same color as the envelope and held it out to me.

“Is it okay if I read it, too?”

“Sure.”

This is what was written in the letter. In an extremely skilled adult hand—

Without a word, I handed the photo, note, and letter all back to Mei. She put them back into the envelope; then, though she said nothing, she turned the envelope facedown and rested it on top of her sketchbook—

That was when the name and address of the sender, written on the back of the envelope, came to my attention. I didn’t grasp the meaning of it all at once. “No—” I heard myself say, and turned to ask Mei, “How…When?”

“I don’t know the details…but he didn’t want to stay with his family in Hinami anymore.”

“But this address—”

“Maybe it’s a relative or someone he knows. They’ve taken him into their house for the time being.”

“Oh…but…”

For a short time, I was unable to tear my eyes from the letters that marched across the envelope. I was totally incapable of calming the spread of an unsettling apprehension, but I had the strong impression that it would be wrong to voice it here.

I felt a faint breeze then, even though the air conditioner was off.

The air rustled chill.

The address read: “Akazawa home, 6-6 Tobii District, Yomiyama.”

And below that, the name—

Not “Sou Hiratsuka,” but simply “Sou.”

The End