III. Dog

i

Dripping blood, my opponent attempted to flee into the grass—but it was easy for me to circle around in front of it. The four-legged animal was covered in wounds, and it was already too exhausted to move quickly.

I thought it was time to put it out of its misery. It no longer possessed the will to fight back.

I took the animal’s throat between my upper and lower jaw. I felt its neck bones break in my mouth. The sound and sensation traveled up my jawbone. The animal slumped, hanging limp in my mouth.

I showed no mercy. I didn’t want to do this, not really—but Yuka wanted me to, so I killed my opponent.

I opened my jaw, and the animal’s dead body fell from my mouth, slumping limply to the ground. There was no light in its eyes, and it had gone completely quiet.

I howled.

Yuka and I had brought the four-legged animal here, under the bridge. Yuka had stopped in front of a house as we’d passed, gazing through the gate and sizing the animal up. When I followed her gaze, I’d seen the animal looking back at us.

Yuka had looked at me and said, “This is tonight’s prey.”

It was not as if I understood the words Yuka spoke—yet I knew what she was saying.

This ritual happened occasionally at night. I’d lost track of how many times. We would find our prey in town, taking it to the secret place under the bridge that only Yuka and I knew about. And then Yuka would make me fight.

I obeyed her orders. I ran across the ground as she commanded. I leapt on my opponents, knocking them down. The four-legged animals I fought were all smaller than me, so if I slammed into them, they would fall over, hurt. Blood would splatter their fur, and their bones would break.

When I won, Yuka would smile, looking very happy. We couldn’t communicate with words, but her feelings flowed through me like river water, so I always knew when she was happy.

Yuka had been my friend since I was very small. When I first met her, I was with my brothers, who had been born with me. I was sleeping nestled up against my mother, and Yuka peered down at me with interest. I can still remember that now.

Half my howl vanished into the night sky. The other half echoed low under the bridge. The bridge was right overhead, blocking most of the sky—and when I looked up, I could see nothing but inky darkness.

The river was wide and the bridge large. On the riverbank around the bridge, there was a sea of tall grass, which you had to push your way through to get anywhere. But below the bridge, there was a small clearing without grass. The sunlight didn’t reach here, which left a circular clearing—where we were.

Yuka and I had found it one summer day, discovering that you could stand in the middle and be surrounded by walls of grass. It had been our secret place to play ever since.

But now it was where Yuka made me fight.

I didn’t want to bite and kill the animals, but Yuka wanted me to. When she gave me those orders, her eyes were dark as night, with no light at all.

Yuka had been sitting at the edge of the circle, watching me fight. Now she stood up.

It was time to go home. I knew what she was thinking. We had a connection that was beyond words.

I picked up the corpse in my mouth and went to toss it in the hole that was in the grass a little way from the clearing. When I dropped it in, the tiny body tumbled down along the edge of the pit. It wasn’t that deep a hole, but the bottom was dark and hard to see. I could hear the body hit bottom.

The hole had been there when we found this place. Someone might have dug it, planning to bury something. It was too dark to see, but the bottom of the hole was now filled with the corpses of animals Yuka had made me kill. If you stood near it, there was a horrible stench.

The first time we carried out this ritual under the bridge, Yuka had ordered me to throw the body in the hole after. I hadn’t yet learned to fight, and I was almost as badly hurt as my opponent in the end. When I’d faced my opponent, my mind went blank, and I had no idea what to do. But now I was good at fighting. I could kill my opponents calmly. Yuka was satisfied with how strong I had become.

The hair that had been ripped out when I bit my opponent filled my mouth. I swallowed it and then headed for the water, pushing my way through the grass until it opened up before me.

The forest of grass abruptly gave way to a vast expanse of running water. The water was so black that it looked less like a river than a giant pool of darkness. The lights on the bridge above cast reflections in the water from there to the opposite bank.

I washed the blood off my mouth in the river, and then I returned to where Yuka was waiting.

“Time to go.” Yuka uttered speech that held that meaning as she headed for the stairs.

The stairs led diagonally up the bank to the bridge. To get to the stairs from the clearing, we had to push our way through grass. I ran to her side, and we walked together.

As we neared the stairs, I saw some grass move—the tips of the long grass stalks swayed slightly. For a moment, I thought someone was standing there, and tensed. I listened closely, but it seemed it was just the wind.

Yuka had already reached the top of the stairs, where she was waiting for me. I bounded up the stairs after her, leaving our secret place behind.

†

When school let out for the day, I met my classmate Morino in front of the station. There was a big bus terminal nearby and a square with fountains and flower beds. There were also a number of benches and a number of people sitting on them, killing time.

Morino was sitting on one of those benches, away from the road, in the shade of some bushes. She would always read when she had time—but not today. Her book lay closed next to her on the bench.

Morino was leaning forward, her head down and her face hidden behind her hair, which acted like a veil.

As I approached, she raised her head and gazed at me. Her skin was pale as porcelain, untouched by the sun. There was a small mole just under her left eye. Her features were as lifeless as a doll’s. All she had to do was stop moving, and she could easily work as a mannequin.

She pointed silently at the ground. There was some dirt at her feet, on the white paving stones. When I looked closer, I saw that it was moving.

Ants were taking apart a butterfly and carrying it away. In the ants’ jaws, a butterfly wing stood up like a yacht sail, casting a shadow on the stones. Morino had been staring fixedly at that.

There was no particular reason why we arranged to meet here. It would have been equally convenient to leave school together, but Morino was a little too well-known. The way she looked and acted, and the rumors that swirled around her, meant that people often turned to look as she went past. She stood out, and I didn’t want to be seen in her company too often.

But Morino never worried about anyone around her, treating everyone like so much static. It was as if her nerves that were responsible for worrying about what people thought had burned out long ago. Or perhaps Morino simply didn’t notice how much attention she attracted. She could be a little oblivious sometimes.

“Let’s go,” she said, standing up and walking away.

I headed in the same direction. She had promised to guide me to a used bookshop she frequented.

“It’s a very small shop. I’m the only customer.”

When I’d asked the name, she’d told me—but I’d never heard of it. She had given a general description of the shop’s location, but that had not helped much either. So I had had her draw a map on the board—but the lines she had drawn resembled no place on Earth and were impossible to parse. And as she’d added yet another line of chalk, she’d been at a loss to explain how the bookstore had come to be constructed in the middle of a river. Therefore, we’d agreed that she would take me there directly.

As we walked, the shops gave way to rows of houses. The sky above was clear, and the sun beat down on our backs. The road ran straight ahead of us, middle-class homes on either side of us. Morino strode forward unwaveringly; she must’ve walked this way often.

“Have you heard about the pet kidnappings?” I asked.

“Pet kidnappings?” she echoed. Apparently she had not.

As we walked, I explained. Neighbors of ours had noticed their pet dog was missing that morning, and I’d heard my parents talking about it at breakfast.

“Not the first time,” my mother had murmured. I always watched the news, paying close attention to any strange cases, but my mother knew more about the local gossip.

According to her, about twice a week—on Wednesday and Saturday mornings—people had been discovering the animals they kept outdoors were missing, meaning that the animals had been stolen late Tuesday and Friday nights. All the stolen pets had been dogs. As the rumors spread, more and more people began keeping their dogs inside at night.

Morino listened with obvious fascination. When I’d told her everything I knew, she asked, “Anything else?” I shook my head, and she began to mull it over.

I was a little surprised that pet kidnappings were a source of interest to her. She had never once mentioned dogs, cats, or even hamsters, so I’d assumed she had little affection for animals.

“What does the kidnapper do with those things?”

“Those things?”

“You know, the stinky things with four legs that make a lot of noise.”

Did she mean the dogs?

Morino stared into the distance in front of her, muttering, “I can’t understand why anyone would gather a bunch of those things together. Is he training some sort of army? Baffling.”

It sounded as though she were talking to herself, so I didn’t respond.

“Wait,” she said, suddenly stopping dead in her tracks.

I stopped as well.

There was still a fair amount of ground ahead of us before the road ended in a cross street. I looked at her, waiting for some explanation for our abrupt halt.

“Quiet,” she said, holding up one finger.

Apparently, her feelers were so attentive right now that just my looking at her was enough to draw that response. I could see her ears perking up, trying to catch a sound.

I couldn’t hear any unusual noises—just a dog barking somewhere. Otherwise, it was an ordinary, quiet afternoon. I could feel the warmth of the sun on my back.

“Nope, we can’t go any farther in this direction,” she declared.

I looked ahead of us. There didn’t appear to be any construction blocking our way, and an old man on a bicycle was even pedaling past us.

“So much for the bookstore. This road used to work …”

I asked about her reasoning, but she only shook her head ruefully in response. Then she began heading back the way we had come.

Morino had a strong tendency to follow her own instincts, regardless of what anyone else said to her. She didn’t blend in with the rest of the class and paid no attention to anything people said to her. She spent the bulk of her time alone, without expression, so for her to look so upset and defeated … it must’ve been something significant.

I glanced down the road again. There were houses on either side of the street, and just inside a gate up ahead, I could see a doghouse—a brand-new one. Had they just bought a dog? I could barely make out the sound of the dog breathing inside. I listened closely for other sounds, never dwelling on the dog at all.

It took me a long time to work it out.

In that time, Morino had quickly placed a good twenty yards between us. I turned to follow her, but she had stopped again, raising one hand to signal me.

“Danger! We can proceed no farther.” Gazing directly ahead, she bit her lip. “We’re surrounded,” she moaned, tension in her voice.

A little girl with a big dog was walking toward us.

The dog was a golden retriever with beautiful fur. Holding a leash attached to its collar was a short, thin girl, probably in the third grade, with hair down to her shoulders, which shook with each step.

As she passed us, her dog met my eye, and as it walked, I could see my own reflection bobbing up and down in the dog’s eyes—dark-black, wise eyes. They stared up at me as if sucking me in.

Then my reflection vanished from its eyes; the dog had looked away from me to gaze up at the girl.

The girl and dog passed us by, turning into a nearby house, one story with a red roof.

“I’m home,” I heard the girl call out. The golden retriever went in the front door with her. There was no doghouse in the yard, so it must’ve lived inside.

When the girl and the dog were gone, Morino peeled herself off the wall and began walking away as if nothing had happened. I assumed she would have something to say for herself, but she said nothing. Her expression and manner were just like always, so I knew dealing with such circumstances must have been something of a daily ritual for her.

“I had no idea this road was so fraught with danger,” Morino said bitterly.

I asked if it was possible to get to the bookshop using some other road, but apparently that would involve a rather extensive detour. Morino had already abandoned the idea of taking me there.

Following along after her, I thought about the missing dogs again. Why twice a week, on Tuesday and Friday nights? What fate lay in store for the kidnapped dogs?

Morino and I found strange cases—and the people involved in them—darkly fascinating. Tragic human death ought to have torn our hearts in two—deaths so unfair that they made people want to scream. But we cut those articles out of newspapers, looking down the deep, dark well at the hearts of the people involved.

Most people wouldn’t understand such interests—but it bewitched us like magic.

This time, it was not an especially strange case, nothing more than some missing dogs. But it was happening very close to home. A small disturbance right next door was much more interesting than a huge fire in some other country.

“Are you at all curious to know who’s kidnapping those dogs?” I asked.

“If you find out, tell me,” she said without expression. I took this to mean that she was hiding her own reluctance to have anything to do with this case … or with dogs.

†

Yuka and I lived in the house with Mama, but Mama was never home. She left in the morning and came back late at night. During the day, only Yuka and I were at home.

I had been with Yuka since I was small. My brothers were taken away right after I was born, and I had been with Yuka alone ever since.

Yuka spent most of her time sprawled out in front of the TV. I would go over to her, lie down on the newspapers spread out on the floor, and rest my head on her back.

When we were bored with TV, we stood up and stretched. Yuka would wander around the kitchen and bathroom, and I would follow after, trying to keep up.

Then we would go for a walk. I liked walks—Yuka and I, walking together. There was a string tying us together during walks. If I started to go the wrong way, Yuka would frown at me.

Sometimes a stranger would come to the house, a big man Mama brought home with her. When he was in the house, the air smelled bad. The comfortable house where Yuka and I lived would vanish.

When he came in, he always patted my head, smiling at Mama as he did—but he never met my eye. When I felt his hand on my head, I always wanted to bite him.

Yuka and I hated him because he would always hit Yuka when Mama was out of the room.

When I first saw it, I thought I was imagining things. Mama had left for the kitchen, leaving Yuka and me alone with him.

Yuka was next to him when he’d suddenly jabbed her with his elbow. Yuka looked surprised, gazing up at him.

He smiled, leaned over, and whispered something to her.

I was watching from the corner and couldn’t hear what he said, but I could see Yuka’s expression change.

I felt a terror run through me. Yuka and I were sitting far apart, but deep down, our hearts were connected. I could feel her shock and confusion flowing into me.

Whenever Mama came back into the room, the man would stop whatever he’d been doing. Yuka would look at Mama anxiously, but Mama never noticed anything wrong.

Yuka looked to me for help, but all I could do was pace back and forth.

Every time he came over, his treatment of Yuka got worse. He even kicked her in the belly sometimes! Yuka would groan in pain and fall to the floor coughing, and I would run to her, putting myself between them, to the man’s great annoyance.

He always came over on the same nights of the week. Those nights, Yuka and I would always huddle in the corner to protect ourselves. The house always felt very sinister when he was around. We could never tell when he might open the door and come in a room, so Yuka was always too frightened to sleep.

Eventually, we could stand it no longer, and we began fleeing the house.

Yuka started making me kill animals after the man began visiting. She cried a lot after he began coming over, and her eyes had a new kind of darkness inside them. That darkness made me very sad.

ii

“We first noticed at eleven o’clock at night,” the young housewife explained as she clutched her sound-asleep child to her bosom. We’d exchanged a few pleasantries at the beginning of the conversation, and she’d mentioned that the child had been born only three months earlier.

“Before bed, my husband went to check on Pavlov, and he wasn’t in his house …” Pavlov was the name of their dog, which had gone missing on a Tuesday night two weeks ago. It was a purebred dog, but of a breed I’d never heard of before.

The housewife and I were facing each other in the front door of a small home of Western construction, which was not much more than a mile from my house.

On the way home from school, I’d decided to make inquiries at the homes where dogs had been kidnapped.

I’d explained to the woman that I worked for the school newspaper and was investigating the series of pet kidnappings that had been occurring in the neighborhood. When I suggested that my work might lead to the capture of the individual responsible, the housewife had become extremely cooperative.

“Thinking back on it, I remember Pavlov barking a lot around ten. But he often barked when people walked past, so we ignored it.”

“And that was the last time you heard him?” I asked.

She nodded.

From here, I could see a tiny yard to one side with an empty doghouse—a fairly large one, with a metal hook out front for attaching the dog’s leash.

“The kidnapper unhooked the leash and pulled the dog away?” I asked.

She shook her head. “They left the leash—and there was a half-eaten chicken nugget.”

The kidnapper must have dropped the chicken, the woman explained.

When I asked if the nugget had been store-bought, the woman was unsure but thought it had looked homemade.

The kidnapper had brought something a dog might like from home to tame the dog and then taken it away. Using a bit of chicken made the whole crime seem rather prosaic—a very common sort of crime, not at all related to professional dog thieves or evil spirits.

I bowed my head and pretended to be grateful for the woman’s help.

She looked sadly at the doghouse, remembering her beloved pet. “I hope you find out who did this.” Her voice was quiet, but there was murderous fury hidden within it.

When the child in her arms began to sniffle, I said goodbye and turned away. As I did, I realized the house across the street had a dog as well. Through the gate, I could see a black dog—a big dog, about half my height.

“Its name is Chocolate,” the housewife said from behind me.

I mentioned that I hadn’t noticed it was there.

“Yes, it almost never barks.”

Chocolate’s house was in a much more visible position than Pavlov’s—but the dog was so quiet that the kidnapper might have simply overlooked it.

I went home, where my sister, Sakura, and my mother were making dinner. My mother was hovering over the pot, stirring, while my sister chopped vegetables.

My sister was two years younger than me and getting ready for her high school entrance exams. She was normally in cram school at this time of day, but she said the school was closed today. Until the spring, she’d worn her hair long, but she’d cut it boyishly short over the summer.

Her personality was the exact opposite of mine, and she helped out around the house a lot. She could never turn down a request for help. For example, if my mother was sitting in front of the TV snacking and she turned toward my sister, clasping both hands together and saying, “Sakura, do the dishes for me?” Sakura would refuse at first.

“Aw, no! Do them yourself!”

But my mother would hang her head and look forlorn—as if it was the end of the world. The moment Sakura saw that, she was done for. She would look totally shocked and hurriedly splutter, “Okay, okay! Don’t cry!” as if she herself were about to.

Then Sakura would jump up and race into the kitchen. As soon as this transaction had been completed, my mother would return her attention to the TV and her senbei. I frequently wondered if Sakura knew how much of what my mother did was a performance. Was Sakura really that naïve? It seemed she was doomed to look after my parents in their old age.

Sakura had a very special talent—at least, that was how I viewed it, although she seemed to think it was more a curse. Most of the time, however, she appeared to be a very ordinary person.

“Did you go by the game center again?” my mother sighed when she saw me come in. I wasn’t a big fan of video games, but that was my usual excuse when I returned home late.

I sat down on a chair in the kitchen and watched them as they cooked. They operated in silent harmony. As my mother stir-fried vegetables, she could hold out one hand silently, and my sister would know exactly what she wanted, silently handing over the saltshaker. My mother would taste the stir-fry, and before she could even ask for mirin, my sister would be bringing it over.

They were both talking to me, so I responded appropriately. They laughed. Sakura laughed a little too hard and gasped for breath.

“Stop making us laugh and set the table. So what did the teacher do?” Sakura asked.

Apparently I had been talking about school. I would occasionally lose track of what I’d been talking about or why people around me were laughing. Everything I had to say to them could be conducted by reflex alone, and the stories were invariably improvised, made up on the spot. Strangely, this did not seem to create any discrepancies.

It must have looked like I was part of a warm and joyous family. My family seemed to think I was an outgoing boy—good at making people laugh but not much good at school.

But to me, there had been no conversation between me and my mother and sister. I forgot what we said as soon as it happened. It was as though I were sitting there in stony silence while everyone around me cracked up for no reason at all, as if I were living in some surreal dream.

“Kiri’s dog is still missing,” Sakura said, washing the cooking implements. My ears had been muffled, barely able to hear anything around me, but suddenly they were picking up every noise. “She was sure it would come home on its own, but …”

I asked for details.

Sakura explained that her classmate’s dog had vanished on Wednesday of last week. There were rumors the pet kidnapper had taken it.

“And when they found the dog missing, it seemed like they’d used a bit of sausage to nab it.”

“My,” my mother muttered, adding that she had forgotten to buy sausage at the store.

“What kind of dog? A big one?” I asked.

Sakura frowned at me, alarmed. Apparently, there was a look on my face I usually hid from my family.

“W-what?” I stammered, covering.

“The dog was a mutt, but a pretty small one.”

Abruptly, I realized I had forgotten to ask Pavlov’s owner the same question. I broke off the conversation as naturally as I could and ran back out the door, still in uniform, my mother calling out after me that it was almost time for dinner.

When I reached the house where Pavlov had once lived, it was getting dark out. I rang the bell, and the same young housewife I had spoken to a couple of hours before appeared. She looked surprised to see me again, and she was no longer holding her child.

“Sorry to bother you again, but there was something I forgot to ask. How big was Pavlov?”

“You came all this way for that?” she said, puzzled. Then she explained that Pavlov had not been full-grown and was still on the small side.

“Only a little bigger than a puppy?”

“Right. But his breed can get very big, which is why his house is so large.”

I thanked her and left.

When the kidnapper had taken the dogs, the leash had been left behind. So how were the dogs transported? Did the kidnapper bring a leash? It would’ve been easier—and faster—to simply unhook the leash from the doghouse, if that were the case. So the kidnapper had taken the leash off the dog’s collar and carried it away.

Now, why had the pet kidnapper chosen Pavlov and not the quiet dog across the street? I would have chosen the one that barked less simply because it would probably be easier to kidnap. But whoever was behind the pet kidnappings had not done that. My best guess was that Pavlov had been taken because he was smaller and thus easier to carry. The dog my sister’s friend had owned was also on the small side. It seemed likely that all the dogs the kidnapper had taken were small ones.

But why pick dogs that were easy to carry? One possibility was that the culprit didn’t have a car or any other vehicle large enough to carry a dog, which would explain avoiding large dogs and choosing small ones. From all the information I’d managed to gather, I knew that the area from which dogs had gone missing was not very large. Someone with a car would have avoided carrying out the crimes in such a confined area, instead collecting dogs from all over the city.

I remembered reading about a kind of analysis used when investigating killings done without motive, purely for the fun of it—it focused on the basis for the killer’s choice of victims. The killer in that case had unconsciously chosen targets that were weaker than himself. For example, all his victims had been less than five feet tall, not a single one of them even close to five foot three. In that case, they were able to speculate that the killer was between five feet and five feet three inches tall. Such a method of thinking might prove helpful in the missing-dog case.

When I got home, my father had returned from work, and my family had started eating already. I told them I’d gone to the convenience store and joined the conversation, smoothly working it around so that I could ask about houses that kept dogs in the neighborhood.

“The dog over there is really cute. I can’t imagine why they don’t keep it indoors, as small as it is,” Sakura said, somewhere in the middle of the list.

“It must bark a lot,” my father said.

I asked for the address. It was Tuesday night, so it was possible the kidnapper would target the house that evening.

†

The house in question was on the corner, an old building of Japanese construction. I looked over the wall and spotted a large garden with a doghouse at the far end. The doghouse looked handmade, like a wooden box, and there was a stake driven into the ground next to it, around which the dog’s leash was tied.

The dog had big eyes, and the moment it saw me, it began barking furiously, jumping around. It was small enough that even a child could carry it easily.

I moved away from the house, hiding myself in a thicket a safe distance away. There were no lights near me, and I was surrounded by darkness.

I checked my watch. It was dark out, but when I pressed the button on my watch, a light inside it turned on so I could read the display. It was ten, the same time they had last heard Pavlov bark two weeks ago. If the kidnapper was coming here tonight, it would be soon.

The ground beneath me was covered in leaves, and the slightest movement shook the branches of the bushes around me. It was early fall, so it was still warm during the day, but come night, it was a little chilly.

I reached into my jacket pocket, touching the hilt of the knife inside, which I had brought with me just in case.

If I did catch a glimpse of the kidnapper, I had no intention of turning the criminal in. I intended to simply watch from a distance, unseen—so it was unlikely I would need the weapon, yet I had brought one of the knives from the knife set with me anyway, without really thinking about it. The naked blade made it easy to cut myself, so I carried it in a leather case I had bought for it.

I enjoyed watching people carry out unusual crimes. This hobby had once led me to encounter a man who had killed several women. I’d stolen a set of twenty-three knives from that man’s apartment, which I now kept hidden behind a bookcase in my room. When I was at home, I often gazed at the reflection of the ceiling light in the metal of the blades—the white light gleamed like it was wet.

Occasionally, my reflection in the blade would transform into the faces of the women those knives had killed. I knew this was just a trick of the mind, but I felt like their suffering and despair had stained the knives forever.

The knives were a little too much for me. I should never have brought them home. I felt like the gleam in that metal surface was telling me to use them.

I checked my watch again, turning the light on and reading the display. It was Wednesday now. Not a single person had passed the whole time I’d sat in the bush.

I wondered where the kidnapper lived. If I knew that, I might be able to narrow down the list of places to wait. At any rate, it seemed obvious I hadn’t seen the kidnapper that day.

Ten minutes later, I left the thicket and returned home.

My parents were asleep, but Sakura was studying for exams. When she heard me come home, she came downstairs, asking where I’d been. I told her I’d been to the convenience store.

†

I’d known the man would be coming today, so I should never have fallen asleep.

I was torn from my slumber by Yuka’s scream, her voice coming from the living room.

I ran toward her.

She had been hiding in back with me, but he must have taken her into the living room. Mama was out of the house, so the man was alone with Yuka.

Yuka was lying in a heap, groaning. She sounded very sad, fighting against the pain.

The man was standing next to her head, staring down at her without expression. He seemed so big, like his head was touching the ceiling. And Yuka seemed so small. All she could do was moan in pain, powerless.

Anger boiled over in my mind. I howled, the voice tearing out of me.

The man turned toward me, eyes wide in surprise. He took a step back, moving away from Yuka.

She lay there groaning, but her eyes were on me, eyes filled with love. From the bottom of my heart, I knew I had to protect her.

I heard the front door open and someone call out. Mama had come home from shopping. That was where she had gone when she’d left him there.

I tried to bite the man’s hand, but Mama grabbed me from behind. My jaws snapped shut a few inches too short.

But that was long enough for Yuka to stand up. As Mama shouted angrily, Yuka ran for the door. I ran after her, and we both fled the house.

Outside, we both ran as fast and far as we could. I heard Mama calling after us, but we didn’t turn around. We fled into the depths of the night.

Rows of lights lined quiet, dark roads, but the only thing they really illuminated was the ground beneath our feet. Our two small shadows flitted from one lamppost to the next.

The night stretched as far as we could see in every direction—but I was with Yuka, so I wasn’t scared. Still, thinking about her made me very sad.

Yuka wasn’t crying, but I could tell she was hurt. I felt it too. Occasionally, the pain was too much, and she had to stop for a moment. It hurt me to see that, but there was nothing I could do but stand by her side.

The animal we had found that afternoon was tonight’s prey—that’s what Yuka said. That day on our walk, we’d found an animal that looked easy to take away. We headed for that house.

I was sure Yuka had noticed it too—it was getting harder to find animals we could steal easily now. More and more houses were keeping the animals inside. They were beginning to take measures against us.

I was always anxious now, afraid that someone would see what we were doing … and I was always on guard, startled by every shadow.

I wasn’t afraid of Yuka, of course, nor Mama, nor even that bad man. I was afraid of strangers. There was someone after Yuka and me because we were taking the animals. And that someone would eventually discover what we had been doing underneath the bridge. It was easy to guess what would happen. If everyone knew what Yuka and I were doing, we would be separated. Without me, there would be no one to protect Yuka, and I couldn’t let that happen.

We could see tonight’s house up ahead. The top of the roof caught the streetlight, but everything else was dark, swallowed by the night. The house was on a corner; when we’d walked past that afternoon, there had been a small dog in the yard.

“Come,” Yuka said, and we stepped forward.

But then something caught my eye. I called out to Yuka softly, and we froze. She looked over at me, puzzled.

A moment ago, there had been a small gleam of light in the thicket across from the house. It had been just a tiny point of light, which had soon vanished—but I knew someone was there. All my nerves stood on end, focused on that spot. I couldn’t be sure, but I felt as if someone was hidden there, watching the house where Yuka and I had been headed. It was possible that my mind was playing tricks on me and there was nothing there—but I felt sure.

Not today, I told Yuka with my eyes. She looked at the house again and agreed.

That night, we did not steal any animals. We spent some time under the bridge, and then we went home. Yuka wanted me to kill something, but I was relieved that I didn’t have to.

Still, I was anxious. The shadow chasing after us had taken form and shown itself. It was not just a figment of my imagination—it was real.

iii

My Tuesday night stakeout had passed without the kidnapper showing. The next day, Wednesday, I casually quizzed my classmates and family, trying to figure out if any dogs had gone missing. But it seemed the kidnapper hadn’t stolen anything that night—or perhaps a dog had been stolen somewhere beyond the reach of my information network.

“Do you know what kind of person is behind this?” Morino asked me, looking up from her book as she sat in the corner of the chemistry lecture hall Wednesday at lunch.

I shook my head. I had no idea.

“Why would anyone steal that animal in the first place? To sell them to pet shops for money?” Morino asked, as if it was utterly incomprehensible that anyone would ever want that particular kind of animal.

“I doubt the kidnapper’s after money—even the purebred dogs they sell in pet shops tend to get put down once they’re fully grown. Almost nobody buys them.”

If someone was in the market, it’d be for research test subjects, not pets. Pet dogs trusted humans, making them easier to handle than wild dogs. I’d heard they would fetch a good price on the black market.

“The only reason I can think of to kidnap dogs is to hurt them. There are people who claim abandoned dogs and cats from Internet sites for that reason.”

“So the kidnapper is killing the stolen pets for fun? That’s pretty crazy,” Morino said.

But something about this seemed off to me. If that was true, where was the killer hurting the animals? Not at home. When the news occasionally mentioned animal bodies discovered in parks, discussions about animal abuse usually followed, but I hadn’t heard about any such discoveries recently.

†

On my way home from school that Wednesday and Thursday, I made inquiries at homes where pets had gone missing, covering one house each day. The homeowners didn’t seem to suspect that I didn’t actually work for the school newspaper, and they were helpful.

But I found no real new information about the culprit. Both the stolen animals were small, and both were mutts. One of the pet owners had found partially eaten food left behind, the other had not.

On Friday, I once again got on a bus, heading for a home with a missing pet. According to the information I had managed to gather, this was the earliest disappearance, and the farthest from my home and school. It was one of the houses along the river.

Comparing my map with the addresses, I found the house I was looking for. It was newly built. I rang the front doorbell, but it seemed nobody was home.

There was a small garden with a bed of tulips, along with a dog food dish in front of an empty doghouse. The dish was made of plastic; it was a bit dirty, and it had “Marble’s dish” written in marker in a childish scrawl.

I left the house and got back on the bus, this time getting off at a stop near home.

It was Friday; another pet might well vanish tonight. As I was thinking about that, someone called out to me. I turned around and saw Sakura, wearing her junior high school uniform and pushing her bike toward me. She jogged a little until she caught up with me.

She always stopped at cram school on her way home, studying for a few more hours, so I asked her what she was doing there so early.

“Something came up, and I couldn’t go to cram school today,” she said listlessly. She looked a little pale and downcast, and she could barely keep her bike going in a straight line.

“You saw something again?” I asked, taking her bicycle.

She thanked me and nodded.

Sakura was born under an unusual star, giving her what I called a gift but what she detested and called a curse: Sakura frequently discovered corpses.

The first time was on an elementary school field trip to the mountains. She had been in the first grade, and she’d become separated from the others. She ended up at the edge of a pond, where she found a human corpse floating in the water.

The second time was four years later. Sakura had gone to the sea with a friend’s family, and she’d once again been separated from the others. This time, she found a man’s body washed up on the rocks by the shore.

The third time was three years later, in her second year of junior high, at her volleyball club camp. After taking a wrong turn while out jogging, she’d found herself in a deserted area. Then she’d tripped over something—a human skull.

Every time she found a body, she came home looking pale. Then she would run a fever and spend the next week in bed.

“Why is it always me?” she cried.

The gaps between her discoveries were getting shorter, and a quick estimate suggested she would find her fourth body this year or next. When she got old, she might very well find them every minute or two.

“So what did you find today?” I asked, as the wheels of her bike squealed at my side.

“On the way to cram school, I saw something … and then I felt sick and decided to skip.”

Between the junior high and her cram school, there was a river with wide banks—broad, shallow, and slow moving. Crossing the river was a big concrete bridge, which lots of cars used. There was a separate lane for bikes and pedestrians.

“I had my bag and a towel in the basket of my bicycle.”

The towel was a blue and white one she used often. A truck had zipped by, and the wind had sent the towel into the air. Before she could catch it, it had flown over the edge of the bridge, dropping out of sight.

With cars zipping past behind her, she had leaned over the railing, looking down. Fortunately, the towel had not fallen into the river. Rather, it was caught on the grass along the riverbank far below.

“I went down to the bank to get my towel.”

At the end of the bridge was a set of stairs made of concrete that led down to the bank. When Sakura reached the bottom of those steps, she’d found herself in a sea of grass with pointy green leaves as tall as she was. She’d pushed her way through them—the grass was thick, but not too thick for a person to pass through.

“I couldn’t tell from up above, but there was a space under the bridge where the grass stopped.” There was a circular patch of dry ground surrounded by a wall of grass. It was like being inside a cage.

The massive bridge loomed overhead like a roof; when Sakura had looked up, half the sky was filled with the underbelly of the bridge.

“I looked around for my towel, but …” She’d heard the buzzing of insects—a great number of flies. Looking closer, she saw the swarm clustered over one spot.

“I pushed my way toward it because it was in the same general direction as my towel …”

As she walked, Sakura smelled something rotting. She parted the grass, and just as she neared the swarm of flies, a black pit opened beneath her feet. It was more of a depression than a hole, only about three feet across and three feet deep. She almost fell in. Then, heaving from the stench, she looked down, and she saw what was in the hole …

†

The hole was filled with an alarming number of lumps. They were torn to bits and shapeless, so at first I didn’t know what they were, just black and red lumps.

Trying to ignore the stench, I bent down, looking closer.

Jaws, tails, and collars—dogs. Beneath the torn fur and flesh, maggots wriggled. There was layer after layer of lumps piled up in the hole. All of them had once had life and frolicked about beneath the sun. It was a strange feeling, the lure of death and destruction.

The hole was filled with rot and stench. Staring down into it, I found myself remembering images of World War II. The hole of death had a lot in common with those images.

I stood up and looked around. Like Sakura had said, there was nothing here but grass: the pointed tips of the grass against the red light of the setting sun and the flies buzzing around them like black specks. The flies must have thought me a friend, as they kept crashing into my uniform and cheeks. Everything was tinted red by the fading sunlight.

When Sakura told me about her discovery, I’d immediately guessed there was a connection between the hole and the pet kidnappings. I figured there was a strong possibility that the place she’d found was the place I’d been looking for.

I sent her home alone and headed for the bridge. I took the concrete stairs from the end of the bridge down to the riverbank and there found the clearing in the sea of grass. There was a cloud of flies a short distance away.

I looked down into the hole at my feet. Marble and Pavlov were among these corpses.

I turned away from the hole, leaving the bridge, and I went home, waiting for night to fall.

When the clock showed ten, I put a knife in my pocket and emerged from my room.

Sakura was still in shock from seeing those dead animals, and she was sprawled out on the sofa in the living room. When I passed in front of her, heading for the front door, my mother looked up from her TV show, asking where I was going. When I answered, “The convenience store,” Sakura muttered, “The midnight convenience store warrior!”

I returned to the space under the bridge. It was Friday, so there was a strong chance the kidnapper would show.

As I walked, I tried to imagine what someone who killed animals for fun would be like. I could almost picture the kidnapper tossing the dead dogs into the hole.

If I could, I wanted to watch the killer work. I was curious about the kind of ritual that preceded the disposal of the corpses.

Things that were merciless and cruel always captivated me. The conversations my classmates enjoyed and the warm words I exchanged with my family never really resonated with me. They were just static, like a radio that wasn’t tuned properly.

At night, the river turned black, like a universe without stars but spread across the ground. The lights on the bridge barely managed to illuminate the water. There were no signs of anyone else around, so the kidnapper must not have arrived yet.

I cautiously descended the stairs and went into the grass. As I pushed my way through it, I remembered what Morino and I had said on the phone before I left the house.

“I’m going to see someone who likes dogs. Do you want to come?”

“I’d love to, but I have so much homework.”

“There wasn’t any homework.”

“My mother’s illness took a turn for the worse. She’s at death’s door.”

“No need to force an excuse. If you’re afraid of dogs, I won’t insist,” I said, and I got a response well beyond what I had expected.

“W-what are you talking about? Afraid of dogs? Don’t be silly! I’m not afraid of those things!”

She’d sounded earnest—not the kind of person who was fun to tease. I apologized and, for the sake of her pride, hung up pretending not to know the truth.

Now I hid myself in the grass.

My knees on the ground, I pulled a digital camera from my pocket. The lights on the bridge above were the only illumination, so it was questionable whether I’d be able to capture anything. I opened up the aperture and set the shutter speed to the slowest setting, trying to get an image without resorting to using the flash. If I used the flash, the kidnapper would know I was there, and I hoped to avoid that.

I did not intend to report the dog killer to the police, preferring to keep the kidnapper unaware of my existence. It was a rule of mine not to get involved. I was a third party, just watching from the sidelines. If I didn’t report the criminal, more pets would be kidnapped, and more people would be sad and would cry, but that did not bother me at all. I was that kind of person.

From where I was hiding, I could see the stairs leading down from the bridge and the clearing. I figured the kidnapper would cross the clearing on the way to the hole, and that was my chance to get a photograph.

The river carried massive amounts of water downstream. Hidden in the grass, I could hear the water moving past. I remember how black the river surface had been. It was a very quiet image.

A chilly wind blew past, rustling the grass around me. One blade poked me in the cheek.

When my watch showed twelve, a shadowy figure appeared on the bridge above. As it came down the stairs, I lowered my head, breathing quietly to keep my presence a secret.

The shadow reached the bottom of the stairs and vanished into the grass. The faint light spilling over the edge of the bridge was just enough to let me make out the swaying grass as the figure pushed its way through before emerging into the clearing. The figure had been hidden in shadow as it came down the stairs—but in the clearing, I could see it clearly.

Emerging from the grass was a girl with a dog. The girl was very short, with hair down to her shoulders. She was very thin. The dog was a golden retriever. It was the same girl and dog that had passed us when I’d been out with Morino.

A smaller dog was in the girl’s arms. The dog was struggling and whining, but the girl was used to holding dogs, so she didn’t drop it.

I got the camera ready.

†

When Yuka and I first found the clearing under the bridge, it was a very hot summer day. There were no clouds in the sky, and the sun beat down on the sea of grass around the bridge.

Yuka and I were on a walk. We’d played like we always did, running until we could run no farther. At last we were too out of breath to run, and we’d stopped on the road by the river.

We leaned against the concrete railing, resting, staring down at the sea of grass below. There was a gentle breeze, and the grass shifted like invisible hands were moving it.

Yuka called me. When I turned toward her, I saw that she was looking at the stairs leading down from the end of the bridge.

As we went down, I could feel her sense of adventure; it was almost dancing. At the bottom of the stairs was a world of green. We moved forward through it, our noses filled with the grassy scent.

Yuka must have decided it was boring walking normally, because she glanced back at me and then suddenly ran forward. Clearly, she was signaling me to give chase. We forgot how tired we were as we chased each other around in the grass.

It was a hot summer day, and I was soon roasting. Still, I followed Yuka through the grass. When I lost sight of her, I’d soon hear her laughing, and I’d surge toward the voice, causing her to run again.

Suddenly we came out into a clearing. It was like the world opened up before us. The powerful scent of grass faded, and a gentle breeze wrapped around us. We were in a circular area that had remained free of grass.

Yuka had found it first, and she was standing in the center of the clearing, appearing surprised. She looked around, and then she saw me come flying out of the wall of grass. At first, it confused both of us, but soon we began to feel like we’d found something special. I could see her eyes glittering with joy.

How long ago had that been? It seemed like a distant memory.

Shortly after we found the clearing, he’d started coming. And then Yuka and I had begun our midnight walks. The wind grew colder every day. We no longer felt the warm light that had enveloped us that summer day.

Even if we did take a walk during the day, we no longer ran or chased each other. We no longer played; we just went looking for homes with dogs. Doing so made it easier to find prey at night.

Yuka told me to do so. I didn’t know why, but I knew it wasn’t for fun. Yuka’s eyes never smiled. Her sadness and hatred overwhelmed all other emotions. I had to do as she asked.

The wind was a little colder than it had been last time. It was still early in the evening, and there were still plenty of cars racing by on the bridge. Their blinding lights raced toward us, our shadows spreading out before shrinking and zipping past us, then vanishing into the darkness.

We looked down at the grass from above. Most of it was lost in darkness. The wind rustled the grass, waves traveling through darkness. We could only make out a small portion of it from the faint light of the streetlights on the bridge.

Yuka and I went down the stairs and into the clearing.

I looked closely at the wall of grass around us. Was anyone hiding there? Could I smell any stranger’s scent in the air?

Just as my nerves were all standing on guard, Yuka called me. It was time to begin.

We placed the dog we’d brought with us in the center of the circle. It was not as small as a puppy but not as big as a grown-up, either—it was a young dog, almost finished being a child. It looked up at us, surprised. We’d kidnapped the dog on our way there.

When we took the dogs, they always called loudly for their owners. When they did that, we would calm them down by giving them my food.

Yuka moved to the edge of the clearing, leaving me with the dog. She always sat there and watched the carnage.

I stared into my opponent’s eyes, and I got ready to jump on him. The dog was cowed by my stare, and it lowered its head. My nerves were on end, waiting for Yuka’s signal.

My opponent had no idea what we were about to do. It looked up at me anxiously, whining—looking for its owner.

A gust of cold night wind rattled the grass like the roar of the surf and then vanished. Silence fell. The stream of cars on the bridge seemed to have died out, and I could no longer hear them. In the silence, I tensed. The air crackled. The little hole waited for destruction and death. I strained my senses, waiting for the moment to begin.

The dog in front of me looked around nervously, cowed by the mood in the air. It whined again plaintively.

As it did, Yuka called out, short and sharp: “Fight!”

I sprang forward, closing the distance between the baffled dog and myself instantly. Our shoulders crashed together. The dog was knocked aside, rolling. I growled. My opponent bared its teeth, still a little confused. Its eyes filled with confused hostility.

My heart began beating faster. I could feel the ground beneath my feet and the flow of air past me so clearly. My mind was occupied with figuring out just how long it would take me to cover the distance between my opponent and me. Every little move the dog made had me guessing which direction it would go. I had been through many fights, so I was getting good at this.

But my heart was always filled with sadness. How long was Yuka going to make me do this? I didn’t really want to kill anything. All my life, I’d never thought my jaws were meant to be used this way.

The dog moved to the right, as I knew he would, and I was there ahead of him. The dog’s fur scattered in the air. Blood spilled, and the dog staggered. Darkness surrounded us.

We fought awhile longer, and then Yuka stood up.

“Bite!” she shouted, her voice charred with hate. Those feelings were all for that man; she had started making me do this after he’d started coming. The suffering locked within her was all released here when she made me kill.

I regarded the wounded dog in front of me, and then I looked at Yuka screaming. I howled. My shrill cry echoed under the bridge. My head felt hot. Why was this happening? Why couldn’t we play and laugh like before?

The dog shivered, trying to hide itself in the darkness. It no longer had any will to resist. It could barely stand, and it was terrified of dying.

I would end it now.

I whispered to myself, advancing on the four-legged animal. I opened my jaws wide and bit it on the neck. My teeth pierced its skin, sinking deep. Blood gushed out, filling my mouth.

That summer day had been bathed in the light of fortune. Yuka and I had found the clearing in the grass while running around. I had jumped on Yuka, and she had fallen over. For a moment, I was worried I’d hurt her, but she lay there looking happy, so I flopped down on the ground next to her, and we gazed up at the sky together. The sun had warmed our bodies, and our noses had been filled with the smell of grass and the faint odor of our sweat …

The animal in my jaws stopped convulsing. Blood dripped off my chin. The body was getting cold. All sound around us had ceased.

I was good at killing now. I didn’t know if it was a good thing, but Yuka had taught me that my jaws could become a weapon.

All warmth had left the dead thing now. All that remained was a cold lump of flesh.

She had taught me, I thought again.

I took the dog that had been in my mouth and placed it on the ground, looking up at Yuka, who stared silently back at me.

I knew what she wanted. I could feel the strength of her will flowing into me.

Why had she made me kill all of these animals?

I had never known before—but now I finally understood: Yuka had been training me.

She had made me kill all these animals so I could experience death that many times, honing critical parts of me. My experience with death would prevent me from hesitating and failing when the time came.

Yuka could not fight that man, but I could become the fangs that would protect her.

Yuka nodded. She knew I understood now. She had been waiting for me to work it out.

I didn’t need any more training, I told her.

The man was sleeping over tonight. We would settle this in the morning. Yuka whispered this to me.

I tossed the dead animal in the hole, washing my mouth in the river and swallowing the animal’s fur. Now we would go home—and wait for morning.

Yuka and I turned to leave the clearing under the bridge. But just as we were about to push our way into the wall of grass, I stopped. Yuka was already in the grass; she stopped too, turning back.

“What?” I could feel her asking.

I looked at her, and then I searched the grass behind me. For a moment, I thought I had seen it move oddly.

Nothing, I thought. Let’s go. I looked back at her and ran to her side.

There may have been someone there. I was sure there had been—the same one who’d been after us, trying to catch us. And at last, he had hidden and watched what we were doing.

Until now I had been afraid of getting caught. Not anymore. I knew what I had to do now, and I was no longer anxious.

We didn’t need to kill animals again. I was done with my training. We no longer needed to fear the shadow that had chased us.

We climbed the stairs. I looked back one more time at the sea of grass, which was shrouded in darkness. I wanted to tell whoever was hiding there what Yuka and I had really been doing. I wanted him to know what had happened to Yuka and why she had decided to do this.

I still think that.

iv

“Hello … ?” Morino’s sleepy voice came from the other end of my cell phone. Her tone indicated she found it completely incomprehensible that anyone would call this early in the morning.

It was starting to get bright outside the window. I had slept only three hours, but I was able to regulate my sleeping patterns at will, so I hadn’t had much difficulty rising early.

I told Morino that I’d found the kidnapper.

“Oh,” she said, hanging up. I didn’t have time to tell her that the kidnappers had been the girl and the golden retriever we’d passed on the street. Apparently, sleep was far more important to Morino than the identity of the pet kidnapper.

My phone rang. It was Morino. I answered, and she got right to the point.

“You took pictures?”

I explained that I’d brought my digital camera the night before but had been unable to get anything usable. There wasn’t enough light under the bridge. The pictures were too dark to see anything.

“Oh,” she said, and she hung up again.

I changed clothes and left my room. My parents and sister were still asleep, and the house was quiet. At the entrance, I put on my shoes, and then I went outside. The sky was red to the east, turning the lampposts into silhouettes.

“Tomorrow morning,” I had heard the girl whisper last night under the bridge. Just after the ritual of death, that tiny little girl had whispered those words into the golden retriever’s ears.

From where I’d been hiding, I couldn’t work out the rest of the sentence. Was something going to happen that next morning, Saturday morning?

Would they do the same thing? I headed for her house, armed with my camera. I knew where she lived. I had seen her go in the gate with her dog the other day. That must be her home. My plan was to quietly follow them and then watch them as they worked.

Shortly after I left the house, I realized I’d forgotten something. I had my wallet and the camera. I checked my pockets, and then I looked up at the second-story window, my room. I’d left the knife in my room.

Was it worth going back for a knife I wouldn’t even use? Or should I head straight for the girl’s house? I didn’t want to waste any time. It would be easier not to go back.

But even as I thought this, I found myself climbing the stairs again. I took a knife from the set behind my bookcase. There was a white sheen on the blade’s surface, and I had to fight off the urge to cut the tip of my finger. When the urge passed, I slid the knife into the leather sheath.

I left the house, my fingers on the sheathed knife in my pocket. It was thirsty, I thought. The blade of the knife was as parched as the desert sand.

I looked to the east, and the sky had turned the color of blood.

†

It was morning.

Yuka and I had woken as one when the light hit us. A single beam of sunlight had slid through the curtains and then across the carpet, the bed, the futon, and our faces. For a moment, we stared at each other.

It was fun to wake up with Yuka. Kicking each other, we wondered how we would play today. I never wanted to forget this moment. Even if we were separated, I always wanted to remember her like this.

Gazing at the dust in the sunbeam, we made up our minds and got out of bed.

We opened the door and looked around.

We could hear him snoring in the room where Mama slept. He always slept in there when he came over. Mama always went to work very early, which meant he would usually sleep in there alone all morning.

Yuka and I quietly walked down the hall until we stood at the entrance to the bedroom. Mama slept in the room at the very back of the house, and there was a sliding door between the room and the hall—but that morning, Mama had forgotten to close it, so it was open wide enough for me to slip inside.

I poked my nose through the gap, checking the room.

There was a futon laid out on the tatami. There the man was sprawled on his back, sound asleep—his mouth half-open, his throat exposed. He was a giant standing up, and I could never have reached his throat to bite, but when he was asleep, the man’s throat was right under my nose.

I slid my body through the gap in the door, entering the room without a sound. The tatami creaked softly as I walked. Yuka stayed at the door, watching. She looked worried.

I was right next to his head now. He didn’t sense me coming, and it didn’t look like he was going to wake up. His eyes stayed shut. The futon was half over his belly, which rose and fell as he breathed.

Something moved in the corner of my eye. I looked and thought I saw a shadow across the window, behind the curtains.

Yuka noticed my look, and she shot me a puzzled frown.

Was there someone outside the window? Or had the curtains moved on their own? Perhaps it was simply the shadow of the tree. I shook my head and put it out of my mind. I had to concentrate on the man before me.

I looked at the man’s face, and when I remembered how he had hurt Yuka, my heart filled with rage.

I turned back to Yuka, staring into her eyes.

We did not need words. I knew what she wanted, what she wanted me to do. I could see it in her eyes.

I slowly opened my jaws.

I would not hesitate. I had done this many times under the bridge.

I bit down.

My teeth sank into the man’s throat. His skin broke, and blood came out. I intended to bite deep, to tear out his throat, but human throats were much stronger than I had expected. My teeth hit something hard, and they would not go deeper.

The man’s eyes opened and he sat up, but my teeth were still in his throat. My body was pulled upward as he moved.

The man looked at me and shrieked in surprise, but not very loudly—critical parts of his throat were already damaged. He hit me in the face with his fist, but I didn’t let go.

Now the man stood up. I hung from him by my teeth, and he shook himself, trying to knock me loose.

I fell to the tatami and rolled.

There was a moment of silence, like time had stopped.

Red drops were falling toward me where I lay at his feet. I looked up, and he was gingerly touching his throat, looking stunned. Part of his throat was torn away, and a lot of red stuff was falling away from the hole. The man clapped his hand over his throat, but the blood seeped between his fingers.

I stood up and spat out what was in my mouth. It fell into the pool of blood on the futon, the piece of flesh I’d torn from the man’s throat.

When he saw that, his eyes widened, and he fell to his knees, scooping it up. He tried pressing it to the wound, but the red stuff kept gushing out. Soon his hand began to shake, and he dropped the chunk of flesh I had bitten off. The man did not pick it up again. Instead, he looked at me, his face a wreck. He looked furious but also like he was about to cry. His mouth opened wide, and he howled. There was a strange whistling sound mixed in with the noise, but it was still loud enough to echo through the room.

Then the man attacked me. He was very strong, and I almost passed out when he kicked my belly.

Yuka screamed in the entrance, frozen there. She didn’t know what to do.

“Run!” I yelled, but she wouldn’t leave me behind.

The man wrapped his hands around my throat. He pushed me down against the bloodstained tatami, spitting horrible words. Blood and spit flew from his mouth in shocking quantities, splashing on my face.

I bit the man’s hand, and he pulled back instantly, giving me enough time to get up and slip through the gap in the door. Yuka and I ran away together.

The man was bleeding a lot, but it didn’t appear as if he was about to die. A dog would have given up by now, but the man did not crumple. Not only that—he was attacking ferociously.

As Yuka and I ran down the hall, a thunderous noise sounded behind us. The man had flung the sliding door open so hard that it had almost broken.

I was scared. There was no way I could kill him. He was so much stronger than me. I could bite him over and over, and he would just stand up and hit me. And if he killed me, then he would go for Yuka after. I didn’t know what to do.

We ran toward the entrance. The man was right behind us, his footsteps getting closer.

From Mama’s room to the entrance, there was one turn, and then the hall was straight. We could be at the entrance in no time at all—yet that time seemed so very long.

We were almost at the door when Yuka shrieked. Her feet slipped, and she went tumbling. She lay in a heap on the floor.

“Yuka!” I cried, and I tried to stop. But I was running too fast, and my body couldn’t stop so quickly. I knocked aside the shoes in the entrance, slamming into the door. Only then did I stop.

I tried to turn around and scramble back to Yuka’s side—but froze in my tracks.

He was standing next to Yuka, blood running from his throat, glaring down at me. He looked so terrifying. He was saying something, but the words were not intelligible.

He took a step toward me, both hands forward, making sure I could not get away.

I couldn’t move. I just stood there, my back against the door. I couldn’t open the door and leave Yuka there alone.

What should I do? Thinking wasn’t getting me anywhere. Rage and regret rampaged through me. He wouldn’t let me attack him again.

I began to give up.

He had hated Yuka and had done terrible things to her, but I had been too weak to save her. No matter how I went up against him, I was powerless, and things always turned out the way he wanted them to. If I had been stronger, maybe then I could have protected Yuka …

His hands were almost on me.

On the floor, Yuka looked up at me.

“Sorry,” I whispered. All I could do was hang my head, turning my eyes away from poor Yuka and waiting for the man’s hands to close around me.

The lights were off, but the morning light came in through the windows, dimly illuminating the room. My head down, I watched the shadows of the man’s hands coming toward me, down the step from the hallway into the entrance, closer and closer.

I’m sorry I couldn’t save you …

Following the shadows of his hands was a line of blood dripping from his throat. It dripped down the step and into the shoes.

I wish we could play together again …

The shadows of the man’s hands reached my shadow. I kept my head down, not moving, but the man’s palms were on either side of my face. I could see his red-stained hands out of the corners of my eyes. His shadow fell over me, like the sun had set and darkness had come.

Yuka …

Tears fell from my eyes.

As they did, I heard something behind me. There was a door behind me, and I heard the sound of shoes on the other side of it. There was a squeak, and then something metal fell onto the floor at my feet.

With my head down, I could see it clatter into view. It gleamed, even covered by the man’s shadow.

The hands on either side of me stopped, taken aback by the sudden noise. There was a silence, like time had stopped.

The sound of shoes came again, but this time, they were moving away. There was a slot in the door for newspapers, and the thing at my feet had been dropped through it. The squeak had been the slot opening.

I knew it was the one who had been following Yuka and me, the shadow I had seen through the window earlier.

I had been dimly aware of his presence, which was why I moved before the man did now. That momentary advantage determined our fates …

†

Eventually, the girl and the dog burst out of the gate and ran off, heading away from the corner where I was hiding. They never noticed me there.

When they were gone, I went back to the house. The front door wasn’t locked. Inside lay the man’s body. He was sprawled on his back, and I could clearly see the knife handle sticking out from his heart. There was a trail of blood leading down the hall, and there were red stains all over the entrance. I examined him, being careful not to touch anything. I didn’t know who he was, but I guessed he was the girl’s father. Did she have a mother? I took a photograph and left the scene. I considered taking the knife, but then I decided to leave it there—it seemed like this was where the knife belonged.

As I left, I wiped the door handle with my sleeve, not wanting to leave fingerprints.

I went home, where I found Sakura watching television and doing homework.

“Where’d you go?” she asked.

I told her the convenience store, and then I ate my breakfast.

After, I went back to the girl’s house. As I got closer, I could feel a buzz in the air. When I turned the corner and came in sight of her house, I knew why. Someone had called it in, and the police were there, with a crowd around them, watching.

The red lights on the patrol car shone on the wall of the house. The people in the street were pointing at the girl’s house and whispering; they must’ve been neighbors—housewives in aprons and middle-aged men in pajamas. I stood behind them, looking up at the house, listening to their hushed voices.

It sounded like the woman who lived there had come home to find a man she knew lying in the entrance with a knife in his chest. From this information, I learned that he had not been the girl’s father after all.

Casually, I struck up a conversation with a woman in an apron. I asked about the people who lived there. Even though she didn’t know me, she answered happily, her excitement overcoming her suspicion.

Apparently, a woman lived there with her daughter and a dog. There was no father; there had been a divorce. The girl refused to go to school, instead spending all her time alone in the house with the dog.

According to the woman in the apron, the girl and dog were missing, and nobody knew where they were.

I turned my back on the crowd and walked away. A block away, I passed some kids on bikes, pedaling toward the crime scene like they were on their way to a festival.

†

A set of concrete stairs led from the bridge down to the bank of the river, which was covered in a sea of grass.

It was a beautiful day, and I could see my shadow clearly as I went down the stairs. The grass shone green in the sunlight, and the wind sent ripples across its surface.

When I reached the bottom of the stairs, all I could see was grass, as tall as me. Looking up, I could see the underside of the massive bridge and the blue, cloudless sky.

I pushed my way through the grass until it suddenly opened up before me, and I came out into the clearing. A golden retriever was sitting in the center of it.

The girl was nowhere to be found.

The dog wasn’t tied up or anything. It just sat like a statue, surrounded by the wall of grass, as if it had known I would come. It had distinguished, wise eyes. A beautiful dog, I thought.

I had thought the girl and her dog might be here, but I had been only half right.

I went over to the dog, putting my hand on its head. The dog didn’t seem scared, and it allowed me to touch it.

There was a piece of paper stuffed in its collar, which I pulled out.

“To the person who gave me the knife,” it said.

Apparently, it was a letter from the girl to me. The girl had noticed me, and she had guessed I might come here.

The letter was torn out of a notebook and written in pencil. It must have been written on the stairs, and the letters were hard to make out.

I read it. It was scattered and incoherent, but I could follow the general idea. She mentioned why they had been kidnapping pets and why they had been doing what they did under the bridge. She explained about the man’s violence and thanked me for giving her the knife. It was a very childish letter, but I could tell she had worked hard on it.

At the end, she asked me to take the dog. It must have taken her a very long time to write that. It had been erased several times, and it must have been hard for her to write. But I knew she had guessed the dog would be put down if she took it with her.

I put the letter in my pocket and looked at the patient retriever. It had a collar but no leash. I wondered how I would get it to come with me or if I should just leave it there.

Yesterday, the girl had beckoned to the dog and it had come, so I tried the same, and the dog obediently followed me.

It followed me all the way home, walking right behind me. I figured I’d forget about it if it turned away, but it never did.

My parents weren’t home, but Sakura was in front of the TV doing homework. When she heard the dog come inside, she turned around and yelped. I told her it was ours now. She was surprised, but she got used to the idea quickly; it was far less shocking than finding corpses. She began thinking up names for the dog, but I stopped her. I had heard the former owner call the dog by name under the bridge, and the same name had been written in the letter. I told her the dog was named Yuka.

I remembered peering in the window of the girl’s house that morning. I had done so just as the girl bit down on the man’s throat. At first, I had no idea what was going on—but now that I’d read the letter, I understood. The dogs the girl had fought and bitten to death under the bridge had all been practice, preparation for killing that man.

I left Yuka with Sakura, sat down on the sofa, and read the letter again. It was written in pencil, and she had pressed very hard, like most children did. I had to puzzle it out one letter at a time. It was clear she worshipped her dog.

I thought back on the night before. That girl had occasionally looked at the golden retriever before acting. Not wanting to get them dirty, she’d removed her clothes before fighting the dog.

She talked about the dog like it was the voice of God. In the letter, she claimed to understand Yuka’s words clearly.

“How did we get this dog?” Sakura asked.

I told her it had belonged to a friend of mine, but the stepfather had hated dogs and had been mean to it, so the friend had asked me to take it in. It wasn’t far from the truth. The girl’s letter had described how her mother’s boyfriend had hurt the dog and how she had been driven to kill him because of it.

“Who could be mean to a dog like this?” Sakura exclaimed, indignant. Yuka tilted her head, looking up at Sakura with deep black eyes. I couldn’t tell if Yuka knew as much as the girl said she did. That girl might simply have been seeing her own reflection in Yuka’s eyes.

My cell phone rang. It was Morino. I left the dog with my sister and went upstairs. Morino told me about a murder that had happened right in our neighborhood.

“We were on that road the other day! It happened right where we were! The wife found the man just inside the entrance.”

“Yeah,” I said. I explained how there had been teeth marks on the man’s neck, a trail of blood from the bedroom to the entrance—and how the knife that had ended the victim’s life had been handed over to the killer by someone else.

“How do you know all that?”

“You see, the girl we passed that day is the killer,” I said, and I hung up.

I liked watching criminals, but I had a rule: I was always a third party, and I never got involved. I had broken that rule this time. I’d seen the girl and dog run toward the door, the man coming after them. And before I'd known it, I’d given the knife to the girl.

I didn’t consider this a bad thing. It didn’t bother my conscience at all—presumably because it hadn’t been my will. I believed the knife had seen the future, and the knife just wanted it to happen.

†

A few hours later, the missing girl was found wandering aimlessly, and she was taken into protective custody. There was blood on her mouth and clothes, and she’d been found alone, in the middle of nowhere.

I learned of this via a message to my phone from Morino, a message I read in my darkened room. My room was quiet—I never listened to music—and I could hear Sakura happily playing with the dog down below.

I closed my eyes and imagined how the girl must have played with the dog under the bridge, on a hot summer day, with the green grass all around them.