Bonus Novelette: Morino's Souvenir Photo
0
The prohibition of graven images in the Old Testament is more accurately a prohibition against the worship of idols. To avoid this criticism, those who champion the use of icons draw a line between “worship” and “veneration.”
Icon venerators declare that icons are not used with the intent to worship the image itself, but rather to call to mind that which the image expresses. The thinking is this: Though the image is to be treated with respect, this respect does not make it the object of worship. In discussion, proponents frequently liken the icon to the image of a loved one. A drawing or a photo of a loved one is not the actual loved one, but the person enduring a separation from their beloved cherishes the image. The assertion is that the sacred icon similarly causes the bearer to recall the existence of God or the saint—or the vestiges thereof—through the image.
1
When I look at photographs for work, I analyze the various bits of information shown in them. I think about composition, shadows, the lens, the way in which these elements are combined, the chemical reaction that occurs, and the deeper impression the photo makes on the viewer. I can’t help but be conscious of the idea of the “symbol.”
The act of taking a photo is one of positioning a symbol into a square frame or one of finding it there. The person with the camera may press the shutter with some vague intention, but in most cases, what they capture is nothing more than a scene of high entropy. Given all the information scattered about in the image, viewers don’t know where to rest their eyes. Thus, the photographer makes sure to control the many disparate elements. They make the illumination brighter or the shadows darker, or they fiddle with the lens and the aperture to blur the background, in line with their own style. Cutting out and framing a piece of the natural world in this way creates all sorts of symbols, symbols which helpfully and clearly tell the viewer what kind of photo they are looking at.
I imagine that words are symbols. As long as a person is alive, they have no choice but to use words to infer the intentions of others. And when a person is producing some kind of work, they have no choice but to rely on these same words.
There is something that must not be forgotten: the fact that the symbol itself has no intrinsic meaning. It is not the circle or the square that moves people. These objects are only symbols and have no greater meaning in and of themselves. To have faith in the object is the same as worshipping the image.
In many religions, the worship of images is forbidden. People likely learned this from years of experience. God cannot be drawn or sculpted. The moment it is drawn, it is no longer God; the moment it is sculpted, God becomes a fake. The moment it is expressed, its divinity peels away and recedes from its true nature. Which is why all personages drawn in pictures are a compromise between God and human, like Christ or Mary—you rarely see God, the father of Christ himself, depicted in icons. The sole reason for this is that the expressive possibility for Christ and Mary is as symbols indicating that they themselves are in the presence of God.
A symbol is a fixed concept. However, its true weight is in the context hidden in the gap between symbol and object, the world on the other side of the symbol. Emotion, the ability to move someone, is not a part of the symbol itself. Which is why when I take photos, I do everything I can to eliminate symbolic elements. But there are limits to what I can control, and nothing ever goes the way I expect. What troubles me most is the subject of the photo.
On December 6, I killed a girl.
Hark, the glad sound! the Savior comes,
the Savior promised long;
let every heart prepare a throne,
and every voice a song.
He comes the prisoners to release,
in Satan’s bondage held;
the gates of brass before him burst,
the iron fetters yield.
A hymn, the saintly voices of boys and girls, was playing in the convenience store. Today’s background music appeared to be Christmas songs. I bought some hot coffee and a bottle of water and went back to the car. After starting the engine, I looked out the windshield. Rows of apartment buildings stood in a line, separated by small patches of green. Although it was the middle of the day, there wasn’t a soul around. The steam of the coffee and the breath coming out of my own mouth clouded the glass.
I pulled out of the parking lot. The houses dotting the sides of the road grew gradually sparser as I drove out toward the suburbs. When I crossed the river, the outline of the mountains in the distance ahead of me snapped into focus. I turned onto the mountain path, and the road narrowed and began to snake. Weeds tangled themselves around rust-covered guardrails. The car shuddered, and I heard the clatter of the camera, tripod, and other things I had packed into the trunk. Any time I traveled any distance, I made sure to bring all the equipment I needed to take photos, just in case. I also had photographic chemicals in the glove box.
I had been on a break recently. I was struggling with whether I should keep going the way I had been or if it was time for me to stop for good. I would look at the photos I had taken and try to remember how fresh and genuine it had all felt at the time, but a whole day would go by without the urge arising in me. What point was there in continuing with it? I could have a richer, perfectly tranquil life if I wanted it. But I had unfinished business. Which was why I was on my way to the suburbs today.
Along the way, the road intersected with some railway tracks. Lately, whenever I looked up the name of this place online, I got a lot of hits for ghost stories. At some point, this mountain road had become haunted.
People believed it. They believed these stories about the ghost of a female high school student murdered seven years ago. They wrote firsthand accounts about their experiences with ghosts on online forums, and the town hall got call after call from people looking for information about the incident. The neighborhood elementary school had a staff meeting about how these stories were scaring the children.
All this had nothing to do with me.
No, it didn’t have quite nothing to do with me.
It was 2:30 p.m. Before I knew it, I was very near the pass. There was also a bus stop up here, although I couldn’t imagine what a person would have to have in mind to get off in a place like this.
I stopped the car in a clearing. I got out of the driver’s seat, pulling my head in at the chill of the wind. The area was mostly deciduous forest. At a certain point in winter, the trees scattered their leaves and revealed their twisted, almost entangled, branches. The fallen dry leaves covered the ground, where they would eventually turn to mulch.
A space of about a meter interrupted the thick growth of dead trees along the road, a path that went deeper into the deciduous forest. Given that the ground there was left to nature, the path was impossible to traverse by car. A nostalgic fondness welled up inside me. One point, however, was different from the vision of the place in my memory. Barbed wire had been strung across the entrance to the path, with a sign that read PLANNED SITE FOR WASTE DISPOSAL FACILITY dangling from it.
But the barbed wire was only strung across the entrance, so it was simply ornamental. From the road, I slipped through the dead trees to make my way onto the path. I walked deeper into the forest. If it had been warmer, the area would have made for a perfect hike. But in the cold, it felt savage. The thin branches, which threatened to snap with the lightest of touches, overlapped like the brushstrokes in the shadows of a pen-and-ink drawing, covering the area above my head on all sides.
Finally, I came out into a clearing about as large as the playing field at an elementary school. Dead grass covered the field. There was nothing special here. It was simply a wasteland, soon to be home to waste disposal. This was my destination.
But I had no plans to meet anyone here.
I stopped, wary. A human form stood in the midst of the sea of dry grass. I might have to run. It depended on who it was. Anyone who would come here on this particular day was probably with the police. Or a relative of the girl who had died seven years ago.
Sensing my presence, the figure turned. Long hair, school uniform, coat over that, everything black. A bag hung from her right hand, while the left was shoved into the pocket of her coat. The outline of the person standing there held a physical pressure, carving itself into my brain.
Our eyes met. And locked for what felt like hours, despite the fact that it could only have been a moment at most. I became flustered. The girl approached me; there was no fear in her posture. She pulled her left hand out of her coat pocket, clutching a small digital camera.
“Would you take a picture for me?”
This request would have made all the sense in the world if this place had, for instance, been a tourist destination and if she had had a smile on her face. But this was a dreary empty clearing with nothing in particular to recommend it.
“A picture?”
The girl stopped a few steps away from me. “I’m taking some photos as souvenirs.”
Now that she was quite close to me, any sense of her reality grew even more distant. She had that kind of look.
“Photos? Here?”
She nodded silently.
“Do you know what this place is?”
She nodded again and turned her back to me. This place, surrounded by a deciduous forest, held only dead trees and dry grass; nothing lived here. White breath expelled from the gap in the girl’s lips and melted into the air. I was surprised. She knew. She knew that this was the spot where the corpse had been left.
The body of a high school girl had been discovered here seven years earlier in December. A middle-aged couple came to illegally dump their own garbage and found her. If they hadn’t, it likely would have been spring by the time anyone else did. The girl was identified from her belongings. She had gone missing the night of December 6, a week before the body was discovered.
An autopsy found that it was not suicide, but murder. The cause of death was heart failure due to an injection of highly concentrated potassium chloride. She was found in her school uniform; there were no signs of a struggle, or violation, found. She had apparently just been lying in the shade of a tree, as though she were simply resting. A fact that drew further attention was that marks—a group of three indentations in the ground—were found next to her body, as if a tripod had been set up there. Fortunately, this cluster of depressions was found in several other places as well. From the depth of and the distance between the three points, they were judged to indeed have been made by a camera tripod, and the assumption was that the murderer had photographed the girl’s body.
“Umm, you …”
“Morino,” the girl said, and held out the camera. Still bewildered, I took it from her.
“Why would you want a commemorative photo here?”
Without replying, Morino started walking toward the lone tree in the empty clearing to stand beside it. “Right around here, please,” she said, in a melancholic tone that brought to mind returning home from a wake. She was standing right next to the place where the girl’s body had lain seven years earlier. She had apparently done her homework.
Was this real? Was someone trying to catch me in a trap? I turned the camera on her. Rather than flashing her fingers in a peace sign or smiling, the girl Morino simply stood stiffly, expressionless. I pressed the shutter. The picture was displayed in the LCD. I was surprised. It was like a photo of a ghost. Her mien combined with and was augmented by the dead trees in the background, making the rigid girl standing there almost a sharply defined phantom. Should I retake it? I thought.
“I see. It looks good,” Morino said as she checked out the photo I had taken. Apparently, she was somehow happy with it. “It’s a good souvenir.” This was in a monotone, as if she had prepared the line in advance.
“While you’re here, could I ask you to take a few more?” she said, and lied down on the roots of the tree. Her hair fanned out on the ground, and her coat opened up.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m being a corpse.”
I waited a few seconds, but there was no further explanation. My imagination took over, and I finally understood. Morino wanted to pretend to be the girl killed seven years ago and have me take pictures of it?
While I stood there bewildered, the girl lying at my feet turned toward the tiny lens of the digital camera.
“A little more to the left,” I instructed her. The girl Morino slid her body a bit to the left. Perfect. She was lying on the exact spot where the girl seven years ago had lain.
2
I had photographed three subjects up to that point. The first was the girl seven years ago. I left her where I had photographed her, which is why she drew such attention. After that, I was careful to hide my second and third subjects and strike the set, as it were. And so, even now, there are still no signs that they’ve been found. You could look up the places where those second and third subjects were buried, but you wouldn’t find any news about the discovery of unidentified bodies or rumors about ghosts haunting the area. I had no doubt that the girls had been filed away as missing persons and forgotten by everyone other than their families and friends.
I had a certain talent: I knew when someone was lying to me. Nothing beyond human understanding like a superpower or anything like that—my powers of observation were simply sharper than most. Looking at the way a person’s eyes moved, the state of the muscles in their face, the position of their hands, and the curve of their body, among other things, I could determine with a fair degree of accuracy whether or not they were telling me the truth. I won game after game when I played cards with friends. And it was very obvious who hated me and who liked me.
In my photography courses at university, I ran into problems when we had to photograph other people. The broad smiles and composed faces of my subjects simply looked fake. The so-called expression of the subject was comprised of a pack of lies. I tried talking to them to make them look natural, but that never went very well. What was strange about all this, however, was that the photos I produced of these people got me excellent marks. Perhaps this was the result of my efforts to eliminate the lie of the subject. At any rate, when my work was viewed through other eyes, they apparently saw something true to life. I began working as a photographer specializing in portraits and got a fair bit of good press. But with each photo I took, the despair inside me grew.
When a lens is turned on a person, that person will try to perform themselves. There’s no way around this. You could perhaps call it a defensive instinct. The party taking the picture and the party having it taken are closely related to the party pointing a gun and the party with a gun pointed at them. There isn’t a person alive who could sit and do nothing faced with the dark barrel of a gun. In the case of the photo, this manifests in the form of performing the self. The subject is defensive because their very emotions are quite clearly being transcribed onto the image. The subject’s self-awareness and the sensation of being watched make them this way. Just having the camera lens before them causes the subject to unconsciously fabricate an expression. The facial expression and physical mannerisms the subject creates in this situation are symbolic. It is a performance planned to make me—the photographer—and the viewers of the photo accept them.
A symbol has no value beyond that. It exists to call to mind the essential nature of that which is depicted. This “summoning,” the fact that those who come into contact with the work will call to mind the object depicted, is the truly critical part of a work of art. There must be an empty space from which to evoke the thought itself. However, when the awareness of the subject begins to perform the self before the lens, the photo becomes less natural and grows faded. The symbols that should be there to spur the recollection are bloated and crushed into the empty space. This act means that the symbol of the cross is praised, and God is ignored.
When taking photos, I had to fight back against the self-awareness of the subject. I would find a crack in the wall of that self-awareness and then snap the shutter like I was firing a gun. But despite this, I was never once satisfied with the photo I captured.
How could I get the photo I wanted? People were my subjects, but the performance of these subjects was an obstacle to taking the photo I desired.
The answer was suggested to me by a picture I happened to find online.
It showed a lone girl.
A subject without self-awareness, not performing even though the lens was turned on her.
The empty space to stir the imagination.
And then I realized.
I could make one myself.
A subject just like this one.
†
Another girl was lying in the spot where I had laid the body down seven years earlier. This girl, who called herself Morino, seemed unconcerned that she was getting dirt in her hair and on her clothes. I readied the tiny digital camera I’d been handed and moved within the range of her sight. The surfaces of her eyes reflected my shadow, but her pupils, turned up to the sky, didn’t so much as flicker. Her gaze did not follow the camera lens. I pressed the shutter down over and over. The girl’s skin was so pale that the blue of her veins was clear underneath. She had a small mole under her left eye, almost like a mark from a tear that had flowed there once. She had scars on her wrists from a history of cutting, it seemed. A red ribbon was tied around the collar of her black sailor-style school uniform with its embroidered school crest. I peered at her eyes; her pupils were tightly constricted. Proof she was alive. That said, she didn’t shake or blink or pull her face back even when I brought my own face in closer to look into those eyes. This girl’s mind was fascinating.
Once I had taken ten or so of the “souvenir photos” she had insisted on, the session ended. The girl got up and silently brushed away the bits of dead leaves stuck in her hair. I felt a sense of regret. I had only taken the warm-up shots. An interest in this subject rose up in me. I wanted to capture her on film. And not with a little digital camera. I wanted to shoot her with the equipment in my car. I wanted to take a photo of the dead face of this beautiful girl and carry it around with me. How incredible it would be to stare at that photo while drinking coffee at Starbucks.
“These are pretty good.” Morino nodded crisply as she checked the pictures I had taken on the digital camera LCD. No light lived in her eyes in the photos; they were simply dark holes. I had captured a corpse. She seemed to like that.
The girl tucked the digital camera away in her bag. Something red flashed in the corner of my eye. She had scratched the back of her right hand, and a red welt sat there now. Looking carefully at the place where she had been lying, I saw that it was scattered with pointed rocks. Blood began to ooze out from the cut before my eyes.
“Are you okay?”
No answer. She stared at the back of her hand, expressionless. I imagined that she would remain expressionless even at the moment a knife was slid into her stomach. She pulled a gauze bandage out of her bag. I was surprised she would always keep something like that in there. She began to wind it around her wound awkwardly with one hand.
“Can I help?”
No answer. Her right hand was now covered in white, but the bandage looked as though it would pull off quite easily. Even allowing for the fact that she had done it with one hand, she could hardly be said to have done a good job.
“So kids these days walk around with bandages now?”
“I like wrapping bandages around things.”
Then you should be able to do it better than that. You were pretty awkward there.
The girl Morino took her bag in her left hand and shoved her thickly bandaged right into the pocket of her coat. Her hair hung down her back, flowing past slender shoulders. Without looking at me, she shifted her gaze toward the place where she had lain. For a short while, I too stared at the place silently.
“Well then, I’ll be on my way.” Leaving a puff of white breath hanging in the air, Morino turned around and started walking toward the small path that led to the road.
My feet automatically started moving as well. “How are you getting home from here?”
“I’ll take the bus.”
So here was someone who used that bus stop. I still thought it was strange, though, that anyone would get off the bus on a mountain pass.
We stepped onto the path, her in front and me following behind. The path was too narrow to allow us to walk side by side. With every step, I heard the crunching of the dead leaves. The roots of trees erupted here and there out of the unpaved surface, but they were hard to see, hidden as they were by the fallen leaves. I worried that she might catch a small black shoe on one and fall.
The sun was setting, and the hue of the cold December sky gradually shifted to that of evening. Morino glanced back at me out of the corner of one eye. The fair-skinned, well-formed bridge of her nose was fascinating, like looking at a rib in an X-ray.
“Now that I’m thinking of it, it’s quite the coincidence you came along when you did.”
“What?”
“Well, that is a dead end, after all.” She seemed to have jumped to the conclusion that I had just happened to pass by.
“It’s more than a coincidence.”
“So then why did you come along?”
“Preliminary inspection of the building site.” I hated lies, but I lied. The girl nodded, as if accepting it.
The announcement that a waste disposal plant would be built on the empty land had come six months earlier. Within a few months at most, the clearing encircled by dead trees would be dug up, and concrete would be poured; the scene would change completely. Many people were against the planned facility. Perhaps the opposition had deliberately circulated the rumors about the ghost that had made this area a recent topic of conversation. A sort of pushback: You’ll be cursed if you build a thing like that where a dead body was discovered. Naturally, I had no proof to support this theory.
“That reminds me—today’s the anniversary. The last anniversary before the place where the body was found is irrevocably changed forever.”
Seven years ago today, on December 6, a girl had died. In my arms. Why had Morino visited that place on today of all days? Why had I gone there myself on today of all days? Assuming there was a reason, it had to have been that today was December 6.
“The photos before, they were like Rosalia Lombardo,” I said, and the girl Morino glanced back at me as she walked. What kinds of thoughts were happening inside that well-formed skull? The answer came from her lips.
“You have a similar air about you as a friend of mine. Maybe that’s why it’s easy to talk to you.”
I had no recollection of the conversation getting that involved, but apparently today was a chatty day for her.
“How am I like this friend of yours?”
“You know Rosalia.”
Rosalia. When I murmured that name in my heart, I grew serious, an emotion similar to what I experienced when I came into contact with true art. She was not a work of art, however. She was a corpse.
The path ended, and we exited onto the road, avoiding the barbed wire. The paved asphalt surface cut across in front of us. I suddenly had the strong sensation that we had come back out into the world of the living. From where we stood in front of the PLANNED SITE FOR WASTE DISPOSAL FACILITY sign, you could see my vehicle parked in the empty space on the side of the road.
“Thank you for taking the photos.” Morino started to walk off. It was a simple, easy farewell. But she stopped as if she had remembered some forgotten thing and looked back at me. “You know, you weren’t surprised when you saw me there.”
“What?”
“Several cars passed me while I was coming here from the bus stop, and the drivers all turned pale when they saw me.”
I almost laughed. “Maybe they all thought you were a ghost.”
Now that she mentioned it, the girl did look exactly like the rumored ghost. Long black hair, black sailor-style uniform.
“You weren’t surprised when you saw me.”
“I’m an atheist.”
“That means there’s no God, right?”
“Right. There’s not.”
The girl Morino took her eyes off me and stared at her shoes for about five seconds. I couldn’t quite understand what this gesture meant. Turning her back to me, she pulled her cell phone out of her bag and started to make a call, walking in the direction of the bus stop as she did.
I opened the trunk of my car and checked that all my photography equipment was there. Camera, tripod, reflectors, knife, rope, handcuffs. I got into the driver’s seat and opened the glove box. Small bottle of potassium chloride, prescription sleeping pills, syringes.
I started the engine. The car began moving and reached the rust-covered bus stop after about three hundred meters. The black outline of the girl stood there, bag hanging from her hand. I stopped the car in front of her and opened the driver’s side window. “How long do you have to wait until the next bus?”
She glanced at me. “Ninety minutes.”
“Well, do you want a ride?”
Morino shook her head. Her eyes were wary.
“The sun’s setting soon; this area will be pitch-black. There are no streetlamps.”
“I’m okay with the dark.” A note of displeasure crept into her voice. She appeared to have misinterpreted my goal in talking to her. She thought I wanted to pick her up. All I really wanted to do was kill her and take her picture.
“But there might be bears.”
“There aren’t.”
“You’ll get bitten by bugs.”
“I won’t.”
“A murderer could be hiding over there.”
“That would be a remarkable coincidence.”
She was no longer looking at me. Negotiations were over. Her whole body radiated annoyance. She hated me. I couldn’t come up with anything other than forcing her into the car. I would have to be careful not to hurt her and damage her face. If that happened, it would spoil my photos. Moving to put this plan into action, I opened the driver’s side door.
At that moment, I heard a dog barking somewhere off in the distance.
“Maybe a stray,” I muttered, looking far back. You didn’t see them too much in the city these days, but apparently they were still living out here.
I heard the sound of the back door opening.
Morino wordlessly got in and closed the door.
Okay, please go then. She sent me the signal with her eyes in the rearview mirror.
3
Some people feel pleasure at killing another person. I am most definitely not of that persuasion. I’m not like those deviants. If I could, I’d never kill anyone. I would even go so far as to say it’s repulsive to me. But the fact is, I need a subject who will not put on some contrived expression when the lens is turned on her.
The sixth of December, seven years ago. I started talking to a young woman on a street corner. At first, I thought she was in university; she had an adult face, she was tall, and she was in street clothes. But she was an eighteen-year-old high school student. She had changed out of her uniform after school so she could hang out in town. I asked what she had done with her uniform and learned she had stuffed it into her bag. We hung out at the video arcade and then had dinner once she had shed her reserve. I crushed up a prescription sleeping pill, dissolved it in an alcoholic beverage, and gave it to her to drink. She fell asleep in the car while listening to a boring story I crafted. I pulled over onto the shoulder of the road and got the syringe and bottle of potassium chloride from the glove box. I stabbed the needle into the girl’s vein and shot the liquid into her. She woke up then, tried to fight back. But she was intoxicated by the pill, her brain was cloudy; she didn’t fight for long. It was a lucky thing, however, that the needle of the syringe didn’t break. I held her body close. Her heart soon stopped.
I set her down in the empty field circled by the dead trees of winter and changed the clothing my subject was wearing. Blood from my nosebleed had gotten onto her street clothes. Opening her bag, I saw her uniform packed in there, just as she had said when she was alive.
After the incident came to light, I checked the news and learned that the police knew everything—the fact that I had taken pictures, that I had changed her clothing and taken her street clothes away, everything. I had left footprints at the scene, and they had a witness testifying that a car had been parked very near the scene of the crime late one night. I braced myself to be arrested at some point in the days that followed. I don’t know what sort of good luck was at work on my behalf, but I was not arrested, and so I was able to photograph the second and third subjects.
I always kept the photos of the girls with me, no matter where I went; I would pass the time at my workplace or in the park or on some street corner staring at them. Whenever I was abruptly overcome by loneliness and almost unable to breathe because of it, I had only to look at the photos to feel at ease again. And when the tears welled up and I wanted to cower in a corner in the dark, then too the photos of the girls saved me. The developed images of their dead faces evoked the unfathomable universe on the other side. They were myth itself; they were love itself. Cheeks devoid of all color shone with a saintly glow, and eyes that could see nothing somehow seemed to see everything.
I always saw the lies and deceit on people’s faces. I knew instantly if the person before me was putting on an act. I could see the secrets in their hearts, no matter how they snuggled up to me with doe eyes and warm smiles. People performed themselves. Lies ran rampant among parents, friends, lovers, no matter how great the love for each other might be. They were a plague, eating into the space around them, only to pass on by with an innocent look. They were inescapable. I myself lied. I gave voice to things I didn’t believe so as not to be hated. Fearing that someone would pull away from me, I smiled ingratiatingly. I was scared of being disconnected from society, and so I became a deceiver myself.
In general, people didn’t look back on every interaction to pick out each of these little distortions. For some reason, it seemed that I alone, my eyes alone, reacted to all these performances on the faces of other people. My mind was given no chance to rest. Each time I read a lie on the face of a loved one, my heart sank. The lone beings I could count on in a world like this. The ones who would face me honestly. The ones who would accept my gaze when I turned it upon them without putting up those walls. The ones who made me think it would be okay to give myself over and lean on them. That was precisely what these girls were to me, on the other side of my square frame, their faces devoid of pretense.
†
I snaked my way down the mountain road, turning the steering wheel back and forth. The sun was approaching the ground in the west, the sky dyed red. It was a clear red, as though the sky itself was radiating the color. As I went around a bend, the light pouring into the car changed, flowed like water. The shadows cast on the face of the girl in the backseat also shifted like a soft-bodied sea creature. In contrast with the burning sky, darkness began to permeate the withered trees. The spindly branches were a woman’s hair standing on end, painted in a shadow so black it was hard to make out the details. FM radio played inside the car. I couldn’t decide whether to put a CD on, and so I just left the radio murmuring its songs. I turned on my headlights to banish the gloom before the car.
I could see her in the rearview mirror. The girl with the name Morino took a sip of bottled water, put the cap back on, and turned her eyes wordlessly out the window. It was the water I had bought along the way. I had handed it to her when I started the car, with the remark that she was probably thirsty. After carefully checking there was no sign of it having been opened, she brought the lip of the bottle to her own lips. If there had been a vending machine on the mountain pass and thus another way for her to replenish her water levels, she likely wouldn’t have touched my offering.
I was unable to relax, imagining her face in death. My heart pounded like a schoolgirl in the presence of her first crush. Once I excised this girl from the land of the living and the heat of her body faded, leaving nothing but a soulless shell, a beautiful blank space—too beautiful for mere words to capture—would suddenly appear before me.
The girl had at some point started fiddling with her cell phone, her profile colored by the sunset. She was typing out an email with her unbandaged hand.
“You emailing a friend? Family?” I asked. Morino stayed silent. “A boyfriend then?”
“It’s a friend.” Her response came with a startled look.
“You have a lot of friends?”
“Only him.”
Her words contained no lie. Now that I was thinking of it, I still hadn’t gotten the feeling she was presenting lies or any sort of performance to me—talking to this girl had not made me unhappy. She did seem to be on guard, but she wasn’t doing those things that made me sick, like putting a hand to her mouth and laughing even though nothing was funny. Perhaps she was the type who didn’t hang out with friends simply to hang out or to keep the harmony in her relationships. I imagined she lived alone and didn’t talk with anyone in class. And she was very good at acting like a corpse. Maybe with her, I could find love. No, that was ridiculous. Rather than give myself up to love and its ilk, I had to capture her in a photo to live on forever. If I were going to make her my lover, it would be as a corpse.
At any rate, she had referred to the person she was emailing as “him.” The friend was a boy. Maybe someone in her grade? Or someone older, a university student? The two of us weren’t dating, but an interest rose up in me nonetheless at her relationship with this “friend.”
“Is this the same person you called before?”
No answer. Morino pinched her lips shut tightly and looked outside. Apparently, she wasn’t interested in continuing this conversation. I supposed I had pressed her too hard and made her angry. I knew it wasn’t good to ask too many questions. But once she was dead, she wouldn’t be able to give me any more answers. I simply had to ask now while I could.
The flowing silhouettes of the trees intermittently interrupted the mass of boiling blood that was the sunset and flickered inside the car where we sat. The road was a gentle downhill slope. Perhaps because of this, it seemed as though the car was diving into the darkness.
The Christmas song special on the radio continued with “Silent Night.”
“When I saw a picture of Rosalia Lombardo …” I began, and the girl cocked her head in the rearview mirror, turning her dark eyes on me. “You know those bisque dolls? I guess you’d call them ball-jointed dolls. I had the thought that maybe all those dolls are modeled after Rosalia.”
The most adorable corpse in the world. That was Rosalia Lombardo. She breathed her last a mere two years after she had breathed her first. Her grieving father asked a doctor to do something to preserve the girl’s body. For a long time, no one knew just what this doctor had actually done. Because he kept his methods to himself, right up to the end.
At a glance, you can see there is a strangeness to Rosalia’s corpse. Vibrant and fresh, it has not decayed. People are surprised and frightened by this. Perhaps they feel there might be an air of magic to it. Or the hand of God. Even now, more than ninety years after her death, the girl sleeps peacefully. She was enshrined by the Order of Capuchin Friars Minor in Italy, and a great number of people go there to see her. A modern investigation revealed that the reason she does not decay is because her body has, in fact, turned to grave wax. However, knowing the scientific principle behind it doesn’t change the solemn feeling that comes from seeing her restful face. The glossy hair tied with a ribbon. The cheek nestled into the blanket wrapping her body, as though she were testing its softness. She makes you imagine she might open her eyes even now and peek out with a sweet look. You expect her to perhaps open those tiny lips and start speaking the words she’s only just learned. Rosalia is alive. She is alive as a corpse.
“When I look at her sleeping face, I get the feeling I can almost see the dream she’s having.”
I waited a little, but Morino gave me no response. It seemed she wasn’t interested in talking, after all. The girl in the rearview mirror dropped her gaze to the cell phone in her hand. Maybe the answer to her email had arrived.
I was at the point where I wanted to hurry up and shoot her veins full of potassium chloride. However, before I got my needle out, I would have to give her the other medication to intoxicate her, just like always. Weakened like that, she wouldn’t fight back, and she wouldn’t be scared, either. If I was lucky, she might go to sleep for me. I had prescription sleeping pills in the car’s glove compartment. All I had to do was crush them up and put them into that bottle of water. Given that she had opened it herself, I was certain she would continue to drink from it unguardedly.
The bottle was sitting to the left of her in the backseat. I had to get the drugs in there without her noticing. It was a difficult task.
“You really are alike,” the girl said.
“What’s that?”
“Your eyes are like my friend’s.”
“My eyes?”
Morino dipped her head in the rearview mirror.
“Hmm. Well, anyway, I’m glad you’re in a better mood now.”
“Mood?” Morino cocked her head to the side.
“You weren’t mad before?”
“Not really. I was fine.”
“When I started talking to you, you didn’t answer, so …”
“It takes time for me to think of what to say. And by the time I thought of something, the moment had passed, so I just stayed quiet.”
Her face was almost entirely expressionless, but she didn’t appear to be lying. In fact, she seemed relieved she’d been able to say that much without stumbling at the length of it. The look that had seemed discouraging was not one of anger; rather, it was, apparently, her official uniform.
“Do our faces really look that much alike? Mine and your friend’s?”
“Your faces don’t look alike, but you have the same air about you.”
“What’s his name?”
“My friend’s?”
“Yes.”
“His name …”
The girl shifted her gaze onto the passing trees. I took in her profile in the mirror. A change in emotion appeared on her face, like water rippling. Sadness, a smile, and other feelings overlapped momentarily, and even now, I think she might have been about to cry. Or maybe her expression didn’t actually change that much at all, maybe I simply perceived it like that.
Ahead, I could see the train tracks and the crossing. The gates were just coming down. Warning bells clanged as red lights flashed. I stepped on the brakes to bring the car to a halt. There was no sign yet of the coming train.
“I’m going to get out and make a phone call,” Morino said, and with her cell phone in one hand, she opened the door and stepped out of the car. She probably didn’t want me to hear the conversation. I didn’t stop her. This was the chance I had been hoping for. In the backseat was her bag and the open bottle of water.
I checked on her in the rearview mirror. From where she was standing, she wouldn’t be able to see what I was doing even if she did turn around. The evening sun had sunk almost entirely out of sight. The interior of the car was dark, colored intermittently red with the flashing of the crossing lights.
I took the sleeping pills out of the glove compartment, dumped them out onto a landscape photo that was as good as garbage, and smashed them up with the pill bottle. I reached an arm back into the rear seat and grabbed the plastic water bottle. I took the cap off and dumped the pills in.
A train with few cars came clattering along on the tracks, about as loud as a bus passing before us. I put the water bottle back in the rear seat and turned to face forward again. The clanging of the bells stopped, and the area returned to its earlier dusk. The sky was no longer the least bit red. Rather, it was a blue as dark as the depths of the ocean.
I waited for Morino to get into the car. And I waited for her to put the water bottle to her lips.
But she didn’t come back.
I got out to look for her, but I could find no sign of that beautiful silhouette. The sun had already set. I used a flashlight from the trunk to shine a light on the area. Something white flashed in the bushes a little ways off on the side of the road. I parted them and turned the lamp that way, and the outline of light caught a bandage stuck on a branch at about chest height. The sparkling-white, brand-new bandage danced in the darkness. Evening ended, night began, and she was gone.
4
Hark, the glad sound! the Savior comes,
the Savior promised long;
let every heart prepare a throne,
and every voice a song.
He comes the prisoners to release,
in Satan’s bondage held;
the gates of brass before him burst,
the iron fetters yield.
I could hear the voices in song leaking out from the open driver’s side door. It was the Christmas music special on the radio. The saintly voices of boys and girls spoke to me as I gripped my flashlight.
The awaited savior has returned.
So let’s give him a big welcome.
I was fairly certain that’s what the lyrics meant. I felt a chill. Now that the sun had gone down, the temperature was dropping. Maybe I should go back to the car. I could look all I wanted to, but I wasn’t likely to find the girl. The trunks and branches of dead trees jumped to life in the illumination of the flashlight, gray like rocks. The car headlights shone into the space dead ahead. I should move the car to the shoulder of the road before another vehicle came along.
I regretted letting my subject get away. The girl had seen through to my real intentions, and so she had disappeared into the deciduous tree forest. She had run off, not paying any notice when the bandage she had so awkwardly wound around her hand got caught on a branch and was pulled off. The words I had spoken perhaps contained something to heighten her awareness of the danger I presented. Maybe it was the talk about Rosalia? At any rate, I had definitely failed somehow.
But I realized there was no need to be so defeatist. For two reasons. The first was that her bag was still there in the backseat. I opened the rear door and picked it up. An utterly ordinary black school bag. There might be something inside to tell me who she was. I checked the interior with excitement. There was almost nothing in it. A single paperback of Night on the Galactic Railroad. Perhaps right from the start, she had left the bag as camouflage. A little tool to make me think she wasn’t going to run off or anything—she had left her bag, she’d come back once the train passed. As proof of this hypothesis, I couldn’t find any sign of the digital camera that would have been tucked in there. It was clear she had taken the important items from the bag.
But that was fine. There was one more good reason not to lose heart. The black sailor-style uniform she wore. I had a clear memory of the school crest embroidered on it. I would find out what school she went to. As long as Morino wasn’t a fake name, finding her would be easy. And even if it was a fake name, if I knew the school she attended at least, I’d be able to find her someday.
This wasn’t the end yet. My tie with this girl Morino hadn’t been completely severed. I wanted the look on her face when she was dead. I didn’t need anything else. What experience could be more incredible than turning the lens on her deceased face and pressing the shutter? I would love this subject body and soul. My thirst had returned. A thirst that could only be quenched by a face in death, just like seven years earlier. A longing for water in the burning desert. Surprisingly, this feeling was not unpleasant.
I returned the girl’s bag to the backseat and went to slide into the driver’s seat. At that moment, I heard the vibration of a cell phone from somewhere. It wasn’t my phone. I pricked up my ears and sought out the origin of the sound. In the woods, not that far from the car. I found it soon enough when I went to look. Morino’s cell phone had fallen atop the dried leaves. A light-emitting diode flashed as the device vibrated.
Had she dropped it? I picked it up and peered at the LCD screen. A message indicating an incoming call. The caller was apparently set not to display, however; no name was shown. Someone was calling Morino. Maybe her family? Or that friend?
Phone in hand, I waited for the caller to hang up. But the vibration showed no sign of stopping.
I went back to the side of the car, leaned against it, and took several deep breaths. I felt like the temperature had dropped radically. I focused on moving my finger, sluggish because of the cold, and pressed the Accept Call button. I held my breath and put the cell phone to my ear.
“Hello?” A boy’s voice came through the receiver to me. It wasn’t as low as an adult’s, but it wasn’t high like a child either. Most likely, he was also in high school, like Morino.
“Who are you?”
“A friend of Morino’s.” His voice was calm. It didn’t waver at all, even when he heard my voice coming through the connection instead of the girl’s. The hand I gripped the phone with started to sweat.
“Morino? I just found this phone. I guess Morino would be its owner then?”
“Yes, that’s right. Earlier, I advised Morino to run away.”
“Run away?” My heart beat faster.
“I was the one who suggested she leave her cell phone.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to speak with you.”
I felt as though the breath expelled by the boy was hitting my ear through the phone. Disturbed, I hung up.
I got into the driver’s seat and closed the door. Turning off the radio left only the sound of the engine. Darkness hung around the car, a gloom so black that one could be forgiven for wondering if someone had simply pasted drawing paper colored completely with black crayon over the windows. I was desperately thirsty. My mouth was sticky with thick saliva as though I had just woken up. I was assaulted by the absurd sensation that I was being swallowed up by some unknown something. My body was frozen from venturing out into the cold night.
I fiddled with Morino’s cell phone, opening up any number of menus. She might have information about the boy in her phone. Before I learned more about Morino, I first wanted to know about this boy. To get rid of this unfamiliar eeriness that had been planted in me when I spoke with him. I didn’t believe Morino had had enough time when she ran off to delete her messages. I poked around and there was the email, just as I expected.
Sent 16:20, December 6
I ended up getting a ride from that person before! (^_^;)
The time was immediately before sunset. This had to be the email she had written in the car. So she used emoji. Unexpected. The emoji was about a hundred times more emotionally expressive than her face.
Email received three minutes later: When the car stops, get out and call me. When you run, go in the direction of the setting sun. I checked a map. There should be houses that way.
That had probably been sent by the boy. The sender’s name and email were displayed. And these were the only email exchanges today. I checked her email from other days as well, but they were all one line, business-y. This one boy was the only person she emailed. The received call history was nothing but private numbers. Supposing that these originated from the boy’s cell phone, then this phone in my hand was essentially a completely private communication line for one individual.
Why had the boy told the girl to run? I tossed the cell phone into the passenger seat, leaned forward so that my body was up against the steering wheel, and glared out ahead of the car. The railroad tracks cut through the space illuminated by the headlights. The warning bells were silent; there was no sign of a train. I adjusted the heater temperature to warm the inside of the car. My fingers were still cold, but sensation was returning to the tips. My respiration rate and my pulse had also returned to normal.
The cell phone rang. The display said PRIVATE NUMBER. I braced myself and accepted the call. I heard the voice of the boy.
“Hello?”
“Why did you tell her to run?” I asked, omitting the usual courtesies.
“Just in case. You could be a deviant, a bloodthirsty murderer.”
“Me? Don’t be stupid!” I had committed several murders, but I was no deviant.
“That’s good then. My worry was unnecessary.”
“Why were you so worried?”
“Because she’s been in danger before. Maybe she was born under an unlucky star. Anyway, did you take the pictures of the corpse?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Strange. On the phone, Morino said that she pretended to be a corpse and took souvenir photos.”
Although the word “strange” did come out of his mouth, the boy didn’t seem troubled in the least. That said, he didn’t seem to be toying with me either, even as I hesitated and mumbled. He was simply speaking dispassionately. His voice was even—were I to describe it in one word, that word would be “empty.” Was this cell phone in my hand connected to a dark hole? Maybe this voice wasn’t something originating from a human being, but echoing up from a deep, pitch-black hole.
“Who exactly are you?”
But the boy did not respond to my question. “Is it all right if I ask for your license plate number?”
“There’s no reason I’d tell you that.”
“Then I’ll say the number myself. Please confirm.” Having said that, the boy recited several digits. It was indeed my license plate number.
“That’s not it.”
“You’re lying, hm?”
“Don’t ask then.”
“When I told you to confirm, I wanted to confirm with you that I know your license plate number.”
“When did you find that out?”
“Earlier, on the phone with Morino.”
“I was going to drive her to the station. The way she up and disappeared like that puts me in a bit of a bind, doesn’t it? What if she gets lost and gets in some kind of trouble?”
“Please don’t go anywhere for a while.”
“Let me guess. You’ve got the wrong idea. You think I’m the murderer from the case seven years ago.”
“If that’s the stance you’d like to take, we can set aside the question of whether or not you’re the criminal.”
“That’s not enough for me. You suspect me. I want to hear why.”
“But telling you wouldn’t be any fun.” The boy sighed. Apparently, talking to me was bothersome. As before, I found him unsettling, but this sigh meant he did have an actual body. In this instant, the owner of the voice turned into a silhouette in my mind, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
“This isn’t about fun. I want to know why you suspect me.”
“Please don’t be disappointed now that you’ve asked. I warned Morino to run from you because I received a phone call.”
A phone call?
“Just as I mentioned before, she called me, so I told her to run from you.”
I didn’t understand what he was talking about.
“Today, December 6, is the anniversary of the death of the girl killed seven years ago.”
That was correct.
“For the last six months or maybe even longer, Morino has been planning to go to the site where the body was discovered. Since they announced the plan for the waste disposal plant. She said that in that case, she was going to go and take a souvenir photo on the anniversary.”
I had gone there for the same reason, that feeling that I had to make sure to go now before I lost that place.
“I was planning to go too, but something came up, and she ended up going by herself. So I gave Morino instructions.”
Call if you meet someone who’s not surprised to see you.
Because that person is not normal.
“Why?” I asked into the cell phone.
“They say that the ghost of the murdered high school girl appears there,” the boy calmly explained.
“You’re talking about those rumors?”
“Morino always goes out in her school uniform. Although there is the occasional exception, she said she was going to slip out of school at lunch and take the bus there, so I knew she had to be in her uniform today. Incidentally, the rumored ghost also wears a black sailor-style uniform.”
I recalled my conversation with Morino.
Several cars passed me while I was coming here from the bus stop, and the drivers all turned pale when they saw me.
Maybe they all thought you were a ghost.
You weren’t surprised when you saw me.
I had known right away that Morino wasn’t a ghost. To begin with, I didn’t believe in ghosts. I even scorned the people who were misled by them. If they had looked into the incident seven years ago, they would’ve soon learned the name of the high school the victim attended. And that school’s uniform was not a black sailor-style outfit. I remember that uniform well because I dressed her corpse seven years ago. It was a plaid skirt with a navy blue blazer that she had put in her bag that evening.
If they had been able to take a look at the weekly magazines of the time, they would have also known the victim’s hairstyle. In articles about the case back then, they had printed a photo of the girl’s face taken when she was still alive. Instead of being long and black, her hair was shoulder length and a color close to blonde. And to go even further, the girl was in street clothes when I killed her. If the ghost had been in street clothes splattered with droplets of blood from my nose, I would have joined the world in being afraid of these stories. But the truth was that the ghost and the girl who became my subject looked nothing like the so-called ghost.
The boy had perhaps realized this. That the criminal would have faced Morino squarely, without being influenced by rumors of a ghost.
“So from a random thing like that, you decide that I’m the one who killed that girl seven years ago.”
“I don’t know whether you did it or not.”
“But that’s what you’re implying.”
“Given Morino’s poor luck, it wouldn’t be at all strange for her to run into a murderer.”
The girl was apparently famous for her bad luck. I became curious about the experiences she’d had thus far. Since I knew that I myself was a murderer, I could sense the truth of his words. However, at that moment, I would only say, “Could your reasoning be more ridiculous?”
A criminal feigning innocence is an ugly sight.
“I don’t care if you’re the one who did it seven years ago, if you’re a homicidal murderer, if you’re a serial killer.”
“Is there a difference?”
“I warned Morino. Not to get close to you. I don’t know who you really are, but if she had never gotten close to you, then this whole thing would have ended without incident. It should have. But then after she called me, she got into your car. It’s beyond my understanding. I don’t know what kind of tricks you used to get the Morino I know to obediently hop into your car.”
I could have asked him the same question.
“At any rate, how about making a deal with me?”
“A deal?”
“Something simple. As long as you don’t try to have anything to do with Morino or myself, we won’t concern ourselves with you.”
I stared silently at the railroad crossing on the other side of the windshield. The tracks led into darkness. I ruminated on the boy’s words. Ridiculous. What kind of validity would a deal like this have? What the boy was saying, in effect, was “How about we have nothing to do with each other?” What was in it for me? I would ignore his request. I would find Morino and make her my subject.
No, I couldn’t. The boy knew my license plate number. That changed the situation. And this girl Morino knew what I looked like, as well as the make of my car. I thought again about the boy’s deal. Now, I could hear another meaning to his words: “If you try to lay a hand on us, I’ll report your license plate number to the police.” The police would be able to find out who I was from that and possibly search my home. In which case, I wouldn’t be able to talk my way out of it.
I didn’t seem to be in a position to promptly reject this deal. I even got the impression that I was the one at a disadvantage. I had already broken the law, after all. It didn’t matter if the boy called the police right after this phone call. The issue if he did wouldn’t be whether or not he had proof that I was the murderer. All the police would have to do was take an interest in what the boy said and focus their attention on me. Eventually, I would be destroyed.
What was the best option? Find and kill the boy before he could call the police, and then find the girl Morino and make her my subject? If I was going to do that, it would be best to do it tonight. But maybe that was impossible? And even if it was possible, there were serious risks involved. I also couldn’t say I would be completely happy once I’d succeeded. I didn’t like killing people. I thought it was repulsive. Would I actually carry out the ugly deed of killing a normal human being, someone who would never be my subject, in the name of self-preservation?
How could I bring the situation back to normal with the least fuss?
Make the deal with the boy. Keep the agreement; don’t break it. Live without interfering with each other; don’t try to remove the other. Tolerate the existence of the other; live life without taking any hostile action. I would lose my subject Morino. There was no way around it. But I would avoid having my life destroyed.
How much could I trust this boy and his deal?
Human beings are liars. I knew that. Which is why I sought the face in death. The face with no forced smile, no performance, no deliberately composed expression. I had never thought about it before, but had I ever truly trusted anyone from the heart? At some point, I had started to feel that it was obvious that the look on a person’s face was contrived and in no way reflected their actual feelings. I had lived my life, giving up on people, fully expecting them to betray me one day. When a person proposed something to me, I didn’t even think about trusting them. But now, what was required in this situation was faith. In a person.
“Why did you choose December 6 seven years ago?” the boy asked.
“I didn’t do it, so I don’t know.”
“Why do you suppose the person who did it chose today seven years ago?”
“I could make a guess. Maybe—”
“It’s the day Rosalia Lombardo died?”
Was Rosalia Lombardo special to the boy like she was for me?
“Right. She died on December 6, 1920. She passed away when she was two and still looks the same now as she did then. The expression on her face is so lively you could almost believe she’s asleep.”
“You know quite a bit about her.” I could almost hear a trust me in the boy’s stream of words. I had to trust him. Otherwise, we’d both be at a disadvantage. I knew this in my head. But in my heart, I was afraid. I was overcome with paranoia. Suspicion that he would betray me and break our agreement, while I naïvely felt secure in my trust. Wasn’t that how it would turn out in the end? Those who trusted the words of others never got ahead in this world; the deceivers were life’s winners. I had witnessed it myself. I had seen people trick and exploit others for their own gain.
My fear was actually the cause of my inability to trust people. Fear of being deceived. Fear of being lied to. My fear of people was stealing from me the freedom of thought.
Could I live my whole life like this? Or would something change if I could trust the boy right here and now? As I cradled my head in the driver’s seat and curled into myself, I heard the boy’s voice almost in a whisper.
“I know Rosalia too.” His voice was very gentle. “The most adorable corpse in history.” There was even an intimacy to it, as though he was speaking to family.
How far can I trust you?
I knew what I had to say. I had to trust a living person.
I’ll make this deal with you, so let’s not have anything to do with each other.
I just had to say it.
But.
“I’ve always wanted to trust people. But I’m scared. I can’t help it.” I didn’t really know what I was saying. But I wanted to confess, like I was seeking salvation from him.
The boy had a response. “That’s fine, no need to change. You don’t have to trust these creatures, these people. They only lie—it’s smarter not to trust them. So then, let’s do this. You can just think of me as not being a person. I’m not human, so you don’t need to be afraid of trusting me.”
“Absurd.”
“I warned Morino and had her leave her cell phone there so we could make this deal. So that you wouldn’t come after her anymore.”
When I hung up, the only sound inside the car was the vibration of the engine. No train crossed the tracks before me. No other cars came along to pass me. It was simply dark outside the car. The deeply suffocating, cavernous darkness of night. I imagined that eventually this darkness would smash through the front windshield and even compress me to the size of a milk bottle, just like the water pressure of the deep ocean crushed everything. What exactly was this boy? Morino said that he and I had the same air. I peeked in the rearview mirror and stared at my own face, but I couldn’t see it. Soon, I became afraid that the amorphous, concentrated darkness outside the car was perhaps the boy himself, and I suddenly wanted to hear a human voice. I turned the radio back on.
Before I started the car, I remembered something. Opening the driver’s side door, I shone my flashlight on the darkness. I collected the snowy-white bandage from the branch where it was still caught and stared at it. The tiniest bit of blood had soaked into it. I held it to my chest and wept.
I started driving and soon entered the town in the foothills. I slid through the flat band of fields and came out into an area with plenty of oncoming traffic. I passed by several signs for 24-hour convenience stores. The sound of the radio didn’t make it into my brain. As I drove, I remembered the exchange with the boy.
†
“Right from the start, I didn’t believe in the rumors. The ghost didn’t even remotely look like the victim reported seven years ago, or her clothes. I knew that. That’s why I wasn’t surprised when I saw that girl Morino.” Right until I hung up, I denied having committed the act.
“If that’s true, then I must apologize for keeping you so long on the phone with me.” The voice betrayed no information.
“I’m more annoyed by everyone else.”
“What do you mean?”
“If they hadn’t all believed in these ghost stories, you wouldn’t be suspecting me right now.”
Seven years earlier, the body of a high school girl had been discovered on the mountain pass. Now, a ghost appears in that spot. The ghost wears a black sailor-style uniform and has long hair.
“All of them neglected to check the facts. The people of the world, the person who started the rumor. It’s so obvious that someone who doesn’t want that waste disposal facility to go up planted the rumor.” They had no doubt been trying to tap human emotion—which logic can’t touch—to stoke the desire to fight the government.
“Oh no, that’s not it.” The boy curtly rejected my suppositions.
“How would you know?”
“I’m the one who started the rumor. I started posting it online, regularly, about six months ago. I made up all the stories about seeing a ghost. I was preparing for when Morino and I went to the place where the body was discovered. I was supposed to go too. I thought I might get lucky and see the person who did it, maybe.”
I needed time to digest what I had just heard. Did this mean that the boy had circulated false information and set a trap to find the murderer? Even the fact that the rumored ghost looked exactly like the girl Morino was part of the boy’s plan?
“I don’t know about lucky. But why would you want to see the murderer?”
“The same mentality that makes us go to the zoo to see the lions.”
“How much did that Morino girl know about this? Did she know that you were the one who started the rumors about the ghost?”
“She knows nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“She probably thinks you just happened by and were trying to pick her up.”
“So she knew nothing, but still called you and ran away when you told her to?”
“Exactly. Because we’re friends.”
Friends. The instant I heard the word, a shiver went up my spine, and I broke out in goose bumps. Because the boy’s voice held no emotion at all. He spoke as though he didn’t recognize the existence of even the concept of friendship. So why try to protect that girl then? Maybe he had romantic feelings for her?
“And, for the sake of argument, had I been the murderer and had I killed Morino and taken her picture, what would you do?”
“I would find you.”
“You’d get revenge?”
“No, I’d probably ask you to show me the photos.”
“And after that?”
“Nothing.”
I couldn’t see a shred of this thing human beings define as love in this boy. I remembered the look I saw on Morino’s face in the car. That sad air—there was something quite human about it—in contrast with the way this boy talked.
I hung up the phone and didn’t talk to the boy again.
†
Giving up on the girl Morino broke my heart. But if I went to look for her, I would end up meeting the boy somewhere along the way. I got the impression that nothing good would come of tangling with him. The more time passed from the moment I hung up the phone, the more this vague feeling turned into a certainty. I would have to give up on that mysterious girl, reminiscent of a wood at night just as the characters that made up her name suggested. But the longing for her face in death was as strong in me as it had been before, perhaps stronger now, seeking the ineffable feeling that Rosalia Lombardo provoked in me. The deal with the boy was that he and the girl would not concern themselves with me as long as I didn’t get involved with them. In other words, the boy had been telling me to find some subject other than Morino if I wanted to take my pictures.
That night, I didn’t go back to my apartment. I drove to a shopping district, started talking to a bored girl in the lobby of a bowling alley, and invited her out. We played a claw crane game, I treated her to a juice from the vending machine, and I got her into my car. The photo shoot was finished that night. The fact that this girl had black hair was not unrelated to my meeting Morino.
A week went by, and the police still hadn’t forced their way into my apartment. For my part, I had also not attempted to look into the identities of Morino or the boy. I turned the power off on the cell phone and kept it, together with the bandage.
Moreover, when I photographed the other girl, I came full circle to being glad I hadn’t been able to make Morino my subject that day. If I had photographed her face in death, my oeuvre would have, at that moment, been complete, and I would have spent the rest of my life simply admiring those photos. I chose to be more positive, taking the attitude that this sense of loss, my dissatisfaction no matter how many photos I took, could be transformed into my passion.
That said, I did wonder if Morino had made it home safely that day. When I had free time, I would remember her as I looked through my album of dead faces.
When you run, go in the direction of the setting sun. I checked a map. There should be houses that way.
That’s what the boy’s email said, but the sun was already starting to set then, wasn’t it? The temperature had also dropped significantly. But it would have been on the news if she had gotten lost and frozen to death in the mountains. The fact that it hadn’t meant that she’d managed to get out safely.
Although even if she had managed to make it to the nearby houses without incident, she could have been mistaken for a ghost because of the rumor the boy had started; she might have had a fair bit of trouble getting help. Had she tried to hail a passing car, the driver might have screamed and driven right past her. I suddenly saw her clucking her tongue at ending up in such an absurd situation.
She knew nothing.
Not that she might have died that day.
Not that the person walking with her on that path in the woods was a murderer.
Born in 1978 in Fukuoka, Otsuichi won the Sixth Jump Short Fiction/Nonfiction Prize when he was seventeen with his debut story “Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse.” Now recognized as one of the most talented young fantasy/horror writers in Japan, his other English-language works include the short story collections Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse/Black Fairy Tale and ZOO (Haikasoru). GOTH won the Honkaku Mystery Award and was adapted into a feature film starring Rin Takanashi. The English-language edition of ZOO was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award.
HAIKASORU
THE FUTURE IS JAPANESE
THE OTSUICHI LIBRARY
ZOO
A man receives a photo of his girlfriend every day in the mail … so that he can keep track of her decomposition. A deathtrap that takes a week to kill its victims. Haunted parks and airplanes held in the sky by the power of belief. These are just a few of the stories by Otsuichi, Japan’s master of dark fantasy.
SUMMER, FIREWORKS, AND MY CORPSE
Two short novels, including the title story and Black Fairy Tale, plus a bonus short story. Summer is a simple story of a nine-year-old girl who dies while on summer vacation. While her youthful killers try to hide her body, she tells us the story—from the point of view of her dead body—of the children’s attempt to get away with murder.
Black Fairy Tale is classic J-horror: a young girl loses an eye in an accident, but receives a transplant. Now she can see again, but what she sees out of her new left eye is the experiences and memories of its previous owner. Its previous deceased owner.
ALSO CREEPY:
APPARITIONS—MIYUKI MIYABE
In old Edo, the past was never forgotten. It lived alongside the present in dark corners and in the shadows. In these tales, award-winning author Miyuki Miyabe explores the ghosts of early modern Japan and the spaces of the living world—workplaces, families, and the human soul—that they inhabit. Written with a journalistic eye and a fantasist’s heart, Apparitions brings the restless dead, and those who encounter them, to life.
