IV. Memory/Twins

i

I have a classmate with the family name Morino whom I talk to occasionally. Her given name is Yoru. If you read the names together, you get Morino Yoru, or “the woods at night.” Her hair and eyes are both jet-black. Our school also has black uniforms, and Morino always wears black shoes. The only color anywhere on her is the uniform’s red scarf.

The name Yoru matches Morino’s black-clothed figure perfectly. Her commitment to the color is so great that I imagine if the darkness of night were given human form, then it might well look like her.

In direct contrast to all that black, her skin is pale like the moon, as though it’s never known the sun. There’s no flush of health; she seems to be made of porcelain. There’s a small mole under her left eye, and she has a mystic air, like a fortune-teller.

I once saw a girl with a similar air in a movie, a movie that opened with a couple drowning. The rest of the film depicted their attempts to adjust to life after death. The leading ghosts were invisible to normal humans—but eventually, they found a girl who was able to see them. That girl was the heroine of the movie, and her name was Lydia.

“I’m basically half-dead myself,” Lydia had said, explaining why she was able to see the ghosts. “My heart is filled with darkness.”

Lydia wore all black and was sickly pale. She preferred staying indoors and reading to playing outside, and she seemed very unhealthy.

Some people began calling people like her “Goths.” Goth refers to a culture, a fashion, and a style. If you search for Goth or “gosu” online, you’ll find any number of pages. Goth is short for Gothic but has little connection with the European architectural style. It has much more to do with the Gothic horror novels popular in Victorian London, like Frankenstein or Dracula.

It seems fair to call Morino a Goth. She frequently expresses an intense interest in torture methods and execution devices, and a fascination with the dark side of humanity is a common characteristic among Goths.

Morino rarely exchanges words with anyone else. She has nothing fundamentally in common with our healthy, overenergetic classmates. If classmates smile and speak to her, Morino will simply stare back at them, her blank expression never crumbling—and she’ll say, “Oh.” Even if classmates wait for her to say something else, nothing will happen: Morino will react no further.

Most people who speak to her end up feeling ignored. The girls in class have said as much. Ever since, they have begun looking down on her.

This attitude only helps complete the barrier around her that keeps everyone else away. While everyone else is laughing and talking, Morino alone remains utterly silent, as though she is in some other dimension, as if there is a shadow cast on the spot where she sits.

But Morino doesn’t intend to ignore anyone. After talking with her awhile myself, I became convinced of this. It isn’t out of spite that she doesn’t happily respond; rather, it is simply because she is that kind of person. She has nothing against the others, and she is equally distant with everyone.

After carefully observing such interactions, what I sensed was confusion. When someone spoke to Morino, she couldn’t figure out how to respond, and she was unable to think of anything to say. But this was all speculation on my part, as I didn’t know what she was actually thinking. Most of the time, her emotions didn’t register outwardly, and it was hard to tell what she felt.

For a while after we first spoke, I thought she was like some sort of doll. The impression she gave off was one more like an object than something animate.

†

One Wednesday in October, just after the leaves were changing from green to red, Morino came into the classroom with her head down, and everyone fell silent. Her long black hair was hanging down, obscuring her face, and she was walking slowly, dragging her feet in a very creepy fashion. Most of the students must have thought she looked like a ghost—but her air was much more dangerous, like some sort of wild animal.

The barrier around her had transformed from its usual transparent sphere into something covered in spikes; she seemed like she might attack anyone who got too close to her. She was silent, as always—and nobody ever spoke to her, anyway—but you could see just how different her mood was by the tension on the faces of those sitting near her.

I was not all that intrigued. I simply assumed she was in a bad mood. That day, we didn’t have a moment to speak, so I didn’t learn the reason why. (Morino would never approach me to speak when I was talking to any of our other classmates.) I learned the reason the next day, though, after school.

When homeroom ended, the other students stood up and left the room. Eventually, the class was empty—and so quiet that it was hard to imagine how noisy it had been a few minutes earlier. Only the rows of empty desks, Morino, and I remained.

A pleasantly cold breeze drifted in through the windows. The class next door had not been dismissed yet, and I could hear the teacher’s voice from down the hall.

Morino was sitting low in her seat. Both her hands hung listlessly at her sides, and she looked exhausted.

“I’m not sleeping much,” she said, yawning. There were shadows under her eyes. Her eyelids were half-closed, and she stared past them into the distance.

I was in my seat, preparing to head home. Her seat was over on the other side of the room. There was no one else there, so I could hear her well enough, and it didn’t occur to me to move closer to her to talk.

“Is that why you were so strange yesterday?”

“I get like this sometimes. No matter how hard I try to sleep, I can’t. Insomnia, I guess.”

She stood up. Still looking very sleepy, she staggered toward the chalkboard.

There was an outlet at the front of the room, and an extension cord plugged into it, which was connected to the eraser cleaner. Morino unplugged the cord, which was a good sixteen feet long. Leaving the other end connected to the eraser cleaner, she wrapped the cord around her neck. She stood there that way, motionless.

“No, doesn’t feel right,” she said, shaking her head and dropping the cord. “When I can’t sleep, I always wrap something around my neck, close my eyes, and imagine myself being strangled to death. Then I can fall asleep—it feels like sinking deep underwater.”

I was disappointed: she hadn’t yet gone mad from lack of sleep. “If that helps, you should try it before you’re this far-gone.”

“Not just any bit of rope will do.”

Morino was after a certain type of rope, and the extension cord had not proved an effective substitute.

“I’ve lost the one I used the last time. I’m trying to find a new one, but …” She yawned, looking around blearily. “I don’t really know what I’m looking for. If I could figure that out, goodbye insomnia.”

“What did you use last time?”

“No clue. It was just something I found, and I tossed it out as soon as I could sleep without it.”

She closed her eyes, fingering her throat. “I just remember how it felt …” She opened her eyes, as if she’d just had an idea. “Right, let’s go rope shopping. You should buy some rope or cord yourself; it might come in handy. You might need it when you kill yourself.”

The class next door had finished, and I could hear the sound of all those chairs being pushed back at once.

†

We left school and headed for a large general store on the edge of town. It was a fair distance, but it was on a big road with a lot of buses, so it didn’t take us long to get there. The bus was about half-full, so Morino sat down while I stood looking down at her, hanging on to a strap above me. She put her head down and tried to sleep, but even the bus’s comfortable sway was not enough, and we arrived without her having slept a wink.

The large store was filled with wood and metal for construction, as well as any number of tools. We wandered through the aisles, looking for anything like a rope. AV cables for connecting TVs and video players, clothesline, kite string … they had everything.

Morino picked up each one, feeling it with her fingers—carefully, as if she were choosing what to wear.

She seemed to have fairly strong opinions about what sort of rope should be used to hang oneself, and she explained them, looking haggard. “First, thin string would just snap. Electric cords are strong, but they lack in beauty.”

“What about plastic?” There was a big ball of plastic string on the bottom shelf, and I only asked because I happened to see it.

She shook her head, expressionless. “lt stretches. Ruins everything. I’m done here.”

We found a number of different chains in another section of the store. From two-centimeter-thick heavy chains to delicate chains only a millimeter or two across. They were on the shelves in rolls, like toilet paper. There was a machine nearby that allowed you to cut the chain to the length you needed.

“Look at this—so thin, but it says it can hold up to a hundred pounds,” she said, holding a thin silver chain between her fingers. She pulled it out, pressing it to her neck. The chain in her hand caught the light, glittering. “Nice color—would make even a dead body look beautiful … but when you hanged yourself, the links would probably bite into your skin.”

She let it drop. It wasn’t a match for her ideals.

She’d spent a lot of time thinking about what kind of rope she’d want to kill her.

If I were going to strangle somebody, what kind of rope would I use? I pondered this as we wandered the store.

“I don’t want it to tickle my neck,” she said, when I pointed to a rough woven rope. “Old-fashioned rope like that was all over the house in the country where I used to live. They use it on the farm a lot.”

She had lived somewhere else until the fourth grade—in the mountains, a two-hour drive from here.

“Where my mother was born and raised, my grandparents have a little farm. My father used to drive two hours to and from work every day.”

But they had eventually moved to spare him that drive. All this was news to me.

“I always thought that when it came time to kill yourself, you’d slit your wrists, not hang yourself,” I said.

She held our her wrist. “You mean this?”

On her wrist was a thick white line, like a welt. The skin was slightly raised, and it was clearly a scar left from a slashed wrist. I’d never asked about it, so I didn’t know why she’d cut her wrist.

“That’s not a result of trying to kill myself—it was just a sudden impulse.”

She went through her life without expressions, but she apparently did have emotions strong enough to produce that kind of reaction. Her lack of outward expression was similar to the way a thermos is never hot on the outside: No matter what was going on inside, it never affected the surface.

But when emotions get too strong, humans have to do something. Some people encase their emotions by playing or exercising, whereas others calm their emotions by breaking things. People in the latter group could let their feelings out just by breaking furniture or the like. But Morino was unable to direct those feelings outward, so she’d directed them at herself.

Suddenly, a familiar voice called out to me.

I turned around to find my sister, Sakura, standing a short distance away and looking at us in surprise. There was a big bag of dog food in her arms. She’d just happened to be here shopping.

Morino looked over sleepily. She saw the picture of the dog printed on the bag, and her cheek twitched.

Sakura remarked on how surprised she was to see me there, and then she regarded Morino.

Morino looked away, not because she was avoiding Sakura’s gaze but because she was avoiding the picture of the dog. She would never even go near a shelf with the word “dog” on it.

“And your pretty friend?” Sakura asked, curious. I explained politely that this was probably not the kind of person Sakura imagined her to be. She didn’t appear to believe me.

“Okay. Mom sent me out here. I have to get the dog food and pick up some clothes at the dry cleaner’s.”

Sakura pulled a note out of her pocket and read it. Her character was a lot better than mine. She was supposed to be busy studying for exams, but she still couldn’t refuse a request to do someone else’s work.

“Then I have to pick up some tofu and tangerines from the woman next door and walk the dog when I get home.”

She waved at Morino, grinning.

Morino was too busy not looking at the dog food to notice. She had one hand on a shelf for support, denying the existence of the picture on the dog food with all her might.

When I was sure Sakura was gone, I said, “You can look up now.”

Morino straightened up, turned toward the shelves as if nothing had happened, and began examining a roll of wire on the shelf.

“Was that your sister?” I nodded.

“I had a sister—a twin sister. She died a long time ago.” I had not known this.

“Her name was Yuu. Yuu …”

As she explained this, she ran her fingers along the long silvery wire, white teeth showing between her bluish lips and her quiet voice emerging through both.

Yuu had hanged herself and died, Morino Yoru told me.

She had wrapped any number of ropes around her neck today, but Morino had not found anything that would solve her sleeping problems. I left without buying anything, either.

We crossed the parking lot, heading for the road. With the heavy lines under her eyes, Morino looked as if a strong burst of wind would be enough to knock her over.

There was almost nothing around there except the massive general store: fields and vacant lots covered in dry grass and the newly paved asphalt road running through them. The area would be developed in time, though.

On the side of the road, there was a bus stop with a bench, where Morino sat down. One of the buses that stopped there must go to her house.

The sun was getting low in the sky. The sky was still blue, but the undersides of the clouds were turning pink.

“May I ask about your sister?” I said, glancing at her. She sat in silence, not answering.

There weren’t a lot of cars on the road in front of us. One would pass every now and then, but for the most part, there was only the wide expanse of asphalt, along with the empty plane of dried grass beyond the guardrail. In the distance, there was a single iron tower, like a speck on the horizon.

“Go ahead,” she said eventually.

ii

“Yuu died when we were in the second grade, so I only remember her as a child, not even eight years old … At the time, we lived in the country—nothing but farms all around.”

Her house had been on the slope of a mountain. There was a forest behind it, and they could constantly hear the sound of bird wings flapping.

“Yuu and I slept next to each other in the same room. When it got dark and we tried to go to sleep, we could hear owls in the darkness outside.”

It was an old wooden house, with floors and pillars that gleamed darkly. There was green moss growing on the roof tiles, and there were a number of broken tile fragments on the ground around the house. It was a comfortably large house, and all the rooms had tatami floors—except for the kitchen, which had been added later. The twin girls, Yoru and Yuu, lived in that house with their parents, grandmother, and grandfather.

Morino’s father drove two hours into town to work every day. Her grandparents were often out, checking the water in the rice fields or carrying different farming tools from the shed. The fields and paddies were a five-minute walk from the house. All the daikon and cabbage they ate came from those fields.

“But the daikon we grew were not shaped as nice as the ones in shops, and they were a little bit yellow.”

There were a number of trees in the yard. The ground was bare earth, and it would turn to mud when it rained, forming pools of muddy water. If you went outside after it rained, the ground would stick to your feet and try to trip you.

There was a shed on the left side of the house—a small one built right up against the side of the house. They kept the farming tools in there. The roof had been broken during a typhoon, but rather than fix it, they had just spread a blue tarp over the top. It leaked a little, but there was nothing more than tools inside, so it wasn’t really a problem.

“I played with my sister all the time.”

When they entered elementary school, they walked hand in hand to the school in the valley. The road was thin and winding. On one side, the mountain sloped sharply upward, and it was covered in trees. The other side also had trees, but it was possible to glimpse the view below through the leaves. Piles of brown leaves would gather on either side, and the path got slippery in the rain. The branches on the tall trees blocked the sun, and the road was always gloomy and damp.

“It was downhill all the way to school, and easy. But it was uphill all the way home, and exhausting.”

Yoru and Yuu had identical faces, down to the location of their moles. And they both had long hair down to their waists. They always chose similar clothing. I could easily imagine the two identical girls running down the tree-covered mountain road.

“We looked the same. Even our mother couldn’t tell us apart. Sometimes, before we took a bath, we would both take off our clothes and stand there silently.”

When that happened, their mother could not begin to guess which was the elder sister and which was the younger.

“But our expressions and behavior were different, so if we started talking, everyone knew who was who.”

Even as a tiny child, Yuu always found it funny when their mother stared at them in confusion. And the moment it struck Yuu as funny, their mother could point right at them and say, “This is Yoru, and that’s Yuu.”

Yuu had always shown her emotions more easily than her older sister. When she was talking with her parents, she always smiled.

“At the time, our favorite games were drawing pictures and pretending to be dead.”

During summer vacation, the elementary school pool was open, and they could swim all they wanted.

“It was a small school, and there were only about a hundred students. There were fewer than twenty students per grade, but the pool was packed every day, all summer long.”

Under the blinding white sunlight, the children splashed around. If you were to lie on your back in the pool, your ears underwater, the cicadas in the mountains would sound like walls tumbling down.

“There were always a few adults around the pool, making sure the children didn’t do anything dangerous. Sometimes they were teachers, sometimes students’ parents. Most of the time nothing happened, and they would sit on a bench in the shade, gossiping.”

One day, the twins decided to surprise the adults watching by pretending they had drowned. They floated facedown in the water, lying limp, competing to see which of them could hold out longer and look most like a corpse.

They must have made an eerie contrast with the children playing noisily all around them, the two girls floating quietly in the water, their hair spread out like seaweed, only their backs above water, immobile as long as they could hold their breath. When they could no longer stand it, they would lift their heads slightly, take a breath, and then die again.

“The reaction was bigger than Yuu or I had anticipated.”

The women watching the pool were two of their classmates’ mothers. When they saw the girls lying motionless, one of them jumped up on the bench and screamed. All the children in the pool turned toward the bench. The little kids splashing around, the older kids practicing swimming—everyone knew something had happened. The mother who had not screamed stood up and ran to try to save the drowning girls … but running next to a pool is very dangerous.

“She tripped and hit her head, knocking herself unconscious. The mother who had screamed saw that, and she went to call an ambulance. Yuu and I got out of breath and stood up, only to find everyone around us in a state of panic. It was like hell on earth. The younger kids were crying, scared and confused. There was a boy next to the unconscious woman, shaking her shoulder and shouting, ‘Mommy!’ He was one of our classmates.”

The twins had looked at each other and, without another word, they’d quickly gotten out of the pool and fled, without even changing clothes.

“We went out the back gate, each with a bag holding our clothes and towels in one hand and our shoes in the other. As we ran along the path through the rice paddies in our swimsuits, ambulance after ambulance screamed along the distant road toward the pool. How many bodies had that women seen? There were at least five ambulances.”

The school was at the bottom of the mountain, and rice paddies stretched as far as the eye could see on the side away from the mountain. Green rice stalks covered the ground, making the world appear completely flat. The girls walked along the path among the paddies.

“The grass pricked our feet.”

They didn’t know what had happened after the ambulances reached the school. They didn’t think about it much—just went home, ate some shaved ice, and went to sleep.

“That wasn’t the only time we played dead. We also spread ketchup on each other’s faces and pretended it was blood.”

They stood in front of the refrigerator, squeezing ketchup on their fingers and dabbing it on each other’s faces. Their pale skin was soon red.

“The ketchup started dripping down, and we had to lick it off. Eventually, we got bored with the taste of ketchup, so we wiped it off with sausages and ate those.”

Another time, they had left the house with a can of meat sauce.

At a corner not far from their house, there had once been a traffic accident. A kindergarten boy had been hit by a car and had died. Yuu laid down in the same place and closed her eyes.

“ ‘Go ahead,’ she said, and I emptied the can of meat sauce on her face. It looked just like her brains were coming out. I told Yuu not to move, no matter what happened. She kept her eyes closed so the sauce wouldn’t get in them, and she nodded.”

Yoru had hidden in the bushes, waiting for someone to come by and scream. When children saw them, they wouldn’t be surprised the way the grown-ups were—they’d come over assuming it was some sort of game.

“Even the people who screamed soon realized it was just meat sauce, and then they laughed. We had done this kind of thing before, and our neighbors knew all about it.”

“No cars went past?”

If there had been a traffic accident there, then cars must have gone by there sometimes. And Yuu was lying in the street; she might’ve been in danger.

When I asked this, Morino explained without expression, “A car did come. Yuu had her eyes closed and didn’t notice. It slammed on the brakes, stopping right in front of her. The noise made Yuu sit up, wipe the meat sauce off her face, and turn around—only to find the bumper right in front of her. The bumper was polished silver, and her face was reflected in it …”

“You didn’t call out and warn her?”

“No. I watched in silence. I wanted to see what would happen.”

I searched her voice for any trace of guilt, but there was none. It must not be a quality she possessed. In this sense, she was a lot like me.

“We were twins, so we looked the same. We thought alike too. But our personalities were a little different. My sister was weak.”

A bus passed in front of the bench where we were sitting. It stopped and waited for us to get on, but Morino didn’t move, so it pulled away, leaving the stench of its exhaust behind.

The sun had reached the horizon, and the sky in the east was dark. A wind was blowing, shaking the dry grass beyond the guardrail.

Morino sat low on the bench, her hands clasped tightly together on her knees.

“We spent a lot of time thinking about death. Where would we go when we died? What would happen to us? We found these ideas fascinating. But I think I knew more about death than Yuu, and I was a much crueler child.”

With no expression, Morino told me how she’d ordered Yuu to do all kinds of things.

“At the time, we kept an animal in the shed. It had four legs, drooled a lot, and stank—you know the type I mean.”

Presumably, it had been a dog. I was surprised to hear she had once had a pet dog.

“I ordered Yuu to mix bleach into its food. I wasn’t trying to make it turn white or anything dumb like that. I just wanted to see it suffer.”

Yuu had begged Yoru to stop.

“But I didn’t listen, and I forced her to put the bleach in the dog’s food. She didn’t want to, but I didn’t let her stop.”

Eating bleach didn’t kill the dog, but it was very sick for two days. Morino’s parents and grandparents had nursed the dog, looking worried. It had convulsed and moaned in pain all day and all night, its howls echoing across the mountain sky.

Yoru observed it all, but Yuu had been too scared; she’d stayed in the house, her hands over her ears.

“Yuu cried a lot.”

Yoru had observed her sister just as she had the dog. Rather than give the dog the bleach herself, she’d placed all the guilt squarely on Yuu. Yoru’s experiment had allowed her to observe both the dog and her sister suffering.

Yoru and Yuu had played at hanging themselves too, but only once.

“To be more accurate, our game stopped one step short of hanging ourselves. It was raining out. We couldn’t go outside, so we were playing in the shed. This was a month or two before Yuu died.”

The sisters each had placed a wooden box on the floor of the shed, piling a second box on top of the first. They’d stood on top of the boxes, placing their necks in a loop of rope hanging from the beam overhead. All they had to do next was jump off the boxes and die.

“I said we would jump on the count of three—but I was lying: I wasn’t going to jump. I was going to watch Yuu as she was strangled to death.”

One … two … three. On the count of three, neither one did anything. Neither girl jumped, and there was a long silence.

“Yuu had guessed what I was thinking, so she didn’t jump. When I asked her why she hadn’t jumped, she just stood there looking terrified.”

Yuu couldn’t point out how unfair it was, so she stood and took Yoru’s flood of insults.

“You bullied Yuu?”

“You could call it that. But I wasn’t conscious of it at the time. Most of the time, we got along fine. And Yuu did her own share of awful things. She was better at pretending to be dead and scaring people than I was.”

“Did your family know what your relationship was like?”

“No.”

Morino fell silent, staring at the road in front of her. A car passed by. It was getting dark around us, so the car had its lights on. For a moment, her profile was caught in the light. The wind was blowing her hair around, and several strands were stuck to her cheek.

“Yuu died during summer vacation when we were in second grade. It was sunny that morning, but it got cloudy quickly, and by noon it had begun to rain …”

Shortly after noon, their mother had gone shopping. Their father was not at home, and their grandparents were out as well. Only the twins were home.

At first, the rain was barely more than a mist, tiny drops on the window, but it gradually grew stronger, and the drops on the window swelled and began trickling down the pane.

“At about twelve thirty, I saw Yuu go into the shed. She didn’t say anything to me, so I assumed she wanted to do something alone, and I didn’t follow.”

Yoru sat reading alone.

About an hour later, she heard the front door open. When she went to see who it was, Yoru found her grandmother with a bag of pears.

As her grandmother closed her umbrella, she explained, “Our neighbor gave me these. Shall I peel one for you?”

“I said I would go call Yuu, leaving my grandmother in the entrance and running to the shed.”

Yoru opened the shed door—and saw it. She screamed at once.

“Yuu was hanging from the ceiling, a rope around her neck. I went back to the front door, where my grandmother was standing with the pears in her arms, surprised to see me panic-stricken.”

She told her grandmother that Yuu was dead.

Yuu had hanged herself. lt was a suicide, but an accident. The rope around her neck was not the only one; around her chest, just under her arms, there was a second rope—a rough, heavy rope, the kind used in farming. One end was tied around Yuu’s body, and the other end was hanging behind her like a tail. The same kind of rope was hanging from the ceiling beam. It had all been part of one rope originally—but it had broken.

“My sister hadn’t meant to die. She’d meant to hang from the rope around her chest and pretend she’d hanged herself, to scare everyone else. But the moment she jumped, her weight had been too much, and the rope broke.”

Yuu’s funeral had been a quiet one. And that was the end of the story.

I had one more question, but I didn’t ask it. I just watched Morino’s tired face, listening to her sigh.

The sun had set by now. The lamps along the side of the road were on, and a light in the side of the bus stop illuminated the time schedule. We sat on the bench, bathed in the glow of white light around the bus stop.

In the distance, I could see a pair of headlights. The big square shadow behind them must be a bus. Soon I could hear the engine, and then it stopped in front of us.

Morino stood up and stepped through the open door. I left the bench as well.

We didn’t say goodbye; we didn’t even look at each other.

iii

lt was a Saturday, two days after Morino Yoru had told me about her sister’s death. It dawned cloudy.

There was no school, so I boarded a train early in the morning. The train took me away from the city, into more and more remote areas. As we swayed from side to side, the crowd of passengers got off one by one, until only I was left. I looked out the window, watching the sunless, dark-green farms slide past me.

I got off the train at a station near a few remote farmhouses. I got on the bus outside the station, riding it for a while, until it started up a slope and the trees began to thicken. We were high enough to look down on the village now. The road was thin, barely wide enough for the bus to pass. On both sides of the road, the trees were growing over the guardrails and tapping on the bus windows.

I got off at a stop in the forest. When the bus had driven away, there were no vehicles on the road. I checked the schedule. There was only one bus an hour. There were no buses going back in the evening, so I would have to leave before then. There was nothing around me but trees, but I walked awhile, and it soon opened up so that I could see a few houses ahead.

This was where Morino had been born, where she had lived as a child.

Once, I stopped and looked around me. When it was sunny, the autumn leaves must’ve made the mountains look red. But under these clouds, everything looked drab.

I began walking toward the house where Morino had lived. As my feet carried me forward, I remembered the conversation I’d had with her the day before, at school.

Friday at lunch, the library had been almost empty. There were bookshelves lining the walls, and the rest of the space was filled with desks and chairs for reading. Morino was sitting in the back, the most deserted part of the room. When I found her, I went over and spoke.

“I want to see the house where you used to live.”

She looked up from the book she was reading and frowned. “Why?”

“Have you forgotten that I like to visit places where people died?”

Morino looked away from me and back to the book in front of her. As I stood next to her, I could only see the curve of her neck. She was attempting to ignore me, focusing on the book.

I looked down at the book she was reading. On the corner of the page, it said, “Chapter Three: You Are Not Alone … How to Live Positively.” This came as something of a shock to me.

Her head still down, Morino corrected my assumption. “I thought this book might put me to sleep.”

There was a long, uncertain silence, until finally she looked up. “I regret ever telling you about Yuu. If you’re going, go alone.”

The house and shed were still standing. Her grandparents lived there, farming.

I asked why she didn’t want to go, and she said lack of sleep meant she was just too tired.

The next day was Saturday, and there was no school, so I decided to go to the country then. I had Morino give me the address and directions. It looked like I could make it out there and back in the same day. I gave Morino a notebook to have her draw a map.

“They’ll be surprised if a strange high school boy shows up out of the blue,” I said. She nodded, and she promised to call them and tell them I was coming. We decided to say I was going to take some photographs of the country.

“Is that all?” Morino asked, as expressionless as always.

I looked at the map she had drawn. “Your maps always give me goose bumps,” I said, and then I turned my back on her. I could feel her staring at me all the way to the library doors. It was as if she wanted to say something, but the words were caught in her throat.

Blackbirds flew against the low, ashen clouds. I looked down at the notebook in my hand and the map Morino had drawn. According to the map, the road went through the middle of a kindergarten. I found it hard to believe any parent would send their children to a school like that.

Deciphering the map, I headed in the direction of Morino’s old home. I had the house number and several landmarks, so I was sure I could get there even if the map proved unhelpful.

As I walked, I ran over the story Morino had told me on the bus bench again, the story of a girl with a cruel mind and her twin sister.

Yuu had been found hanging from a rope.

But there was one thing that didn’t make sense about Morino’s story—namely, the part where she found her sister’s dead body.

Yoru had opened the door to the shed and screamed at once. Then she had run to her grandmother and told her that Yuu was dead.

Why had Morino known instantly that Yuu was dead? They were always pretending to be dead and surprising people, so why didn’t she assume her sister was simply faking it?

Shrieking in surprise when you saw something like that was only natural, and a real corpse probably looked much more horrible than someone pretending … but the fact that she had never even considered the idea that it was a prank, instead instantly running to tell her grandmother … that seemed very unnatural to me.

I compared the map and the road again. There was a deep river valley in front of me. According to the map, this was a dry cleaner’s. The clothes would get wet as soon as they were cleaned, I thought.

As I crossed the bridge, I looked up at the sky. The clouds were hanging low around the mountaintop, and the trees up there looked very dark.

After walking awhile longer, I found the house where Morino had once lived. Built in the mountain’s embrace was an old building, the roof covered in moss, just as she had said. There was nothing around but trees and fields, and it must have been pitch-black at night. No gates or walls—I simply followed the road until I found myself in their yard.

As I headed toward the front door, I noticed the shed on the left. This must be the shed where Yuu’s body had been found. The walls were of dry, white wood. There was a blue tarp over the top, tied in place with plastic string. It was very old and leaning to one side.

Glancing sidelong at the shed, I stood at the entrance. The door was made of glass set in a wooden frame, and it slid open to one side. I rang the doorbell, and someone called my name from behind.

When I turned around, an old woman was standing there, a hoe in one hand.

Her back was curved, and she was wearing loose work trousers, with a towel around her neck. I decided she must be Morino’s grandmother.

The hoe in her hand had dirt stuck to it. She was standing a fair distance away, but I could smell the earth on her.

“Yoru called last night. I was worried you weren’t coming!” she said. The grin on her wrinkled face made it hard to see any resemblance to Morino, who always seemed as if she had already died, sharing nothing of the vitality and sunny disposition her grandmother radiated.

I bowed my head and explained that I would leave as soon as I had a few good pictures. But Morino’s grandmother ignored me, hustling me into the house.

There was a shoe box inside the door and a number of what looked like souvenirs placed on top of it. The hall led away into the house, which smelled of air freshener and strangers.

“You must be hungry!”

“Not really.”

She ignored me, sitting me down at the dining room table and placing a dish laden with food in front of me. Eventually, Morino’s grandfather appeared. He was a tall old man with white hair.

The two of them seemed to think I was engaged to Morino.

“You must marry Yoru someday,” her grandfather said suddenly, bowing his head as I reluctantly ate. I glanced out the window, wondering if I would be able to see the shed and get back before it started raining and the final bus left.

There was a picture on the side of the kitchen cabinets. In the picture were a pair of doll-like little girls. They both had long black hair, and they were staring directly at the camera, not smiling at all. They were dressed all in black, and they were holding hands. It looked like the picture had been taken out front. I could see the door to the house behind them.

“Yoru and Yuu,” the grandmother said, catching my gaze. “You heard about her twin sister?”

I nodded.

“That was when they were six,” the grandfather said. Neither one of them had anything else to say about the picture.

After I had eaten, I was allowed to clasp my hands in front of the shrine. I knew that showing my manners like this allowed a number of other things to move forward smoothly.

Looking at the photograph of Yuu in the shrine, I imagined that her death must seem like only yesterday to her grandparents. It had been nine years ago. Nine years to Morino or me was more than half our lives—but to people her grandparents’ age, nine years was probably not much different than one or two to us.

After I had clasped my hands, Morino’s grandparents sat me down in the living room and asked what their granddaughter was like at school. Before I could begin to answer, they were telling stories about what Morino had been like as a child. I assumed they had no interest in anything I had to say.

“Oh, right, we have some pictures she drew in elementary school!” her grandmother exclaimed happily, standing up and vanishing into the back.

The grandfather watched her go, and then he bowed his head to me apologetically. “My wife’s getting a little carried away, I’m afraid.”

I shook my head—a generic reaction seemed appropriate.

“Yoru has never really brought any friends home, you see. When we heard you were coming, she got excited.”

Morino’s grandmother came back in carrying a paper bag, which she set down on the table before pulling from it a number of pages of old drawing paper—pictures Morino had drawn in elementary school using paint and crayon. I had guessed as much from her maps, but Morino appeared to have no artistic talent at all.

On the back of the pages were names and grades.

Some of these were drawn by Yuu. Their drawings had been kept together. There were drawings with Yoru’s name from first through sixth grade, but Yuu’s were only for first and second. This fact really drove home the truth that there had been a girl here named Yuu who was no more.

I compared drawings the two of them had done in second grade.

“You can hardly tell what either one of them was trying to draw, can you?” the grandmother said, beaming. There was no difference in the twins’ artistic ability. But they had been attempting the same subject, and they had produced similar drawings.

Both pictures featured a symbolic representation of a cross section of a house, in the middle of which two girls with long hair stood next to each other. Presumably, those girls were themselves.

“I wonder what they’re doing,” the grandmother said.

“Standing in the house?” the grandfather replied.

“I suppose,” she laughed.

I said nothing, but I knew what they had been drawing. There was a red line around each of the girl’s necks, connected to the ceiling. These were drawings of them playing at hanging themselves in the shed.

“They drew those pictures during summer vacation in second grade, for homework. Yuu was supposed to take that picture to school when vacation ended, but … they drew it just a few days before Yuu died.” She smiled fondly at the memory.

There was not much difference between the pictures, but Yuu’s was a little more detailed. In hers, a red line wound around the beam above, boxes were stacked on top of each other, and the sun shone above the house. And there were the shoes they wore.

In Yoru’s picture, none of this was drawn in any detail; it was colored very simply, or possibly boldly. The legs were flesh colored all the way down, with no attempt at shoes. The background was all dark gray.

My attention focused on the shoes in Yuu’s picture. One girl was wearing black shoes, and the other was wearing white ones. I wasn’t sure if there was any meaning to that, but I decided to make note of it.

I put the picture back down on the table.

“I’d better take those photos,” I said, and I went outside, carrying my digital camera.

When I opened the door, though, everything looked white. At first, I thought it was mist, but it was merely drizzle—tiny drops all over the mountains. It wasn’t the kind of rain that made it worth using an umbrella, so I wandered around in it, snapping pictures at random. After I’d done that for a while, it started to rain harder.

Eventually, I pretended to randomly find my way to the shed.

The shed door was made of wood. It was closed, and I couldn’t see inside. I could hear rain pounding on the tarp on the roof. I grabbed the door handle and opened it. It was a little stiff, but it opened.

The light slanting in through the entrance lit the interior hazily. It smelled of dried plants.

It was about six and a half feet tall and about ten by thirteen across. The floor was dirt, almost clay.

There was a beam near the ceiling, under the half-broken roof. There were a number of holes in it, and I could see the blue of the tarp though them. A single light hung down.

In the story, there had been a dog here, but there wasn’t anymore. It must have died. There was a small door cut in the wall next to the door, presumably for the dog. The dog must have been tied up next to that.

I stepped inside. The air in the room seemed to quiver. It was slightly damp and a little chilly.

Once, Yuu had been there, hanging from the ceiling beam. It felt like the dead little girl was still hanging there.

There was a switch next to the entrance. I flipped it, and the light turned on. It was a very dim bulb that illuminated very little.

I remembered everything Yoru had told me: two boxes piled on the ground with the girls on top, about to hang themselves … the bleach they had mixed into the food for the dog they kept in there.

I had my doubts about Yoru’s version of how Yuu had died.

Yoru had known her sister was already dead when she’d opened the shed door; she’d only pretended that she’d just discovered it at that moment.

Why had she needed to do that? What would make her want to hide that? The more I thought about ir, the more I felt like she must have had something to do with her sister’s death.

“We found Yuu here.”

I turned around and found Morino’s grandmother standing in the entrance. She peered gravely into the shed, gazing slightly upward.

“I heard she died trying to surprise everyone.”

I turned to look at the same place her gaze was fixed. That must have been where Yuu was found.

It was raining really hard now. I could hear it pounding on the ground. But inside the shed, it felt like all the sounds outside were muffled, even the rain hitting the tarp above us and the wind rushing past.

Drops of water slipped through the hole in the roof, which had been broken in a storm and had never been repaired. But there was almost nothing in the shed, so the water did no harm.

To one side were farming hoes and spades, even a scythe leaning against the wall, plus pruning shears and a thick roll of coarse rope.

There were several different kinds of cord next to the dog’s door, left there even after the dog had died. There were several different colors, but my eyes were attracted to the red one.

“I remember it so clearly,” Morino’s grandmother said quietly. “I came back from a neighbor’s, and I was putting my umbrella away. Yoru was standing in the entrance …”

Her version was the same as what Yoru had told me. When Yoru had seen the bag of pears, she’d gone to call her sister. She’d opened the shed door and screamed. There was one thing about the story that bothered me; before I could ask about it, though, I felt something strange underfoot.

My feet were sticking to the ground. The floor was made of clay, so when it rained, the water leaking from the ceiling moistened everything, making the ground soft and sticky.

I lifted my foot and felt my shoe peel away from the ground. A film of mud remained attached to my sole.

It had been raining the day Yuu died. The ground must have been like this. But the footprint I’d left behind was not very deep, and the twins had been children, weighing a lot less than I did. Were they heavy enough to leave footprints?

I looked out through the open door. It was raining hard. If it had been raining longer than it had today, the floor of the shed would have been wetter still, so the girls might have left footprints.

It had started raining around noon the day Yuu died. Yuu had gone into the shed shortly afterward, and Yoru said she had stayed inside. When she found the body, Yoru said she had seen it from the shed door.

If Morino’s grandmother had seen Yoru’s footprints inside the shed, then the story I’d been told at the bus stop was a lie. If Yoru’s footprints had been in the shed, then that would prove she’d been there before she supposedly found the body.

“When you found Yuu, were there any footprints on the ground?”

It seemed unlikely the grandmother would remember such a trivial detail, but I asked anyway.

“Yuu’s footprints, yes,” Morino’s grandmother said. The box she’d been standing on had been knocked on its side; when the grandmother had gone to pick it up, she’d seen child-sized footprints on the ground.

Oh well, I thought. It was only natural that Yuu’s footprints were on the ground.

“You could tell they were Yuu’s footprints at a glance?”

“Those girls looked exactly the same, so we told them apart by their shoes. Yoru wore black shoes, and Yuu wore white. They had different soles, and the ones on the floor of the shed were definitely Yuu’s.”

I remembered the picture Yuu had drawn. It made sense. They must have been Yuu’s shoes then. Yuu had been found hanging from the ceiling, barefoot, with her white shoes placed on the ground next to her. As with many suicides, she had lined her shoes up neatly next to her.

“There were no signs of Yoru’s footprims?” I asked, just to be sure.

Morino’s grandmother nodded, wondering why I had even asked. Yoru had not stepped inside after finding the body. Her footprints were nowhere to be found. Only one child’s footprints were in the shed.

“Is the rope that was tied around Yuu’s chest still around?”

Morino’s grandmother shook her head. She seemed to have forgotten all about it. “Anyway, you’d better stay here for the night. It’s raining very hard.”

I thought about it and nodded.

We left the shed and went back into the house. Morino’s grandmother told me a number of places that would make for good photographs.

“I hope the weather’s better tomorrow,” she said.

As I took off my shoes, I noticed a little plastic toy among the objects on the shoe box. When I picked it up, I discovered it was a little flower brooch, the kind you get as a prize in a candy box, of a very cheap color and design.

Which of them had owned this? Looking at it, I was reminded again that they had lived here when they were very young.

The brooch in hand, I looked down the long hallway into the house. Morino’s grandmother had already gone into the living room and was out of sight.

I stood there thinking.

In my mind’s eye, the two doll-like twin girls from the photograph were walking down the hallway toward me, whispering to each other and gravely thinking about how they could next pretend to be dead. In my imagination, they went all the way to the end of the hall and turned the corner. Trying to follow them, I took off my shoes and stepped up into the house. I looked around the corner where they had vanished, but of course, there was nothing there—just a quiet, dark space at the end of the dimly lit corridor.

iv

On Monday, Morino was clearly glancing sideways at me, wondering. She obviously wanted to ask what I’d been up to in the country. But I spent the entire day pretending not to notice her gaze.

I didn’t speak to her until all the other students had left the room after the final class of the day. A few students had suggested I walk home with them, but I ignored their requests—which is not to say that I didn’t respond. Without any conscious participation on my part, my mind created some believable excuse, smoothly deflecting their invitations. I had no idea what excuses I’d made. I had no interest in my classmates whatsoever, and such interactions were always carried out automatically, allowing me to live without making waves.

Finally, the sound of my classmates’ footsteps faded, and the hall outside the room grew quiet. Only Morino and I remained. She was hunched over in her seat like a sinking ship, glaring sidelong at me.

I slowly crossed the quiet classroom toward her seat. She sat three rows from the window, three rows from the back.

“I hear you spent the night in the country. My grandmother called to tell me about it,” Morino said sleepily. The lines under her eyes had grown worse.

“She’s a good cook.”

I sat down in the seat in front of her, sideways, with the row of windows in front of me. It was still light out, and the sky was only slightly yellowed. In the distance, I could hear some sports team running and calling out as they did. The lights in the room were off, and the only illumination in the room was pouring through these windows.

“I heard a number of things at the house where you once lived.”

“For example?”

“The pranks you and your sister pulled as children. That Yoru would never cry no matter how much they scolded her, but that Yuu always cried instantly, hiding behind her sister.”

“She always depended on me.”

We sat in silence for a long moment. There was a quiet tension in the air. I looked at her again.

“I’ve figured out a number of things about Morino Yuu. I’m not sure about every detail, but …”

Morino stopped glaring at me. She slowly looked away, closing her eyes. Her lashes seemed to tremble above the dark lines under her eyes.

“I thought you might,” she said bitterly. She asked me what I had figured out.

“Yuu died when she was eight, nine years ago now,” I said. Morino did not open her eyes. “Nine years ago, that day, you found her body hanging in the shed, and you went to tell your grandmother. But you’d known there was a body in there already. You’d been waiting in the entrance for someone to come home so you could pretend to discover your sister’s death while someone was watching.”

I stopped, waiting for Morino’s reaction. She was silent for a moment and then she asked if that was all.

“You already knew your sister was dead. But you were acting, trying to hide that fact. When I try to imagine what would make you do something like that, I always come to one conclusion. In other words, you had something to do with your sister’s death.”

Morino nodded.

I continued. “Yuu had tied two ropes to the ceiling beam, one around her neck and the other under her arms, supporting her body.”

The little eight-year-old girl had jumped off the wooden box. For a moment, it must’ve looked like she was hanging from the rope around her neck. But in fact, the rope around her chest was keeping her from falling too far.

Then another girl appeared, a girl with the same face. That girl took the pruning shears from the wall and went over to the girl hanging from the ceiling. She cut the rope around the girl’s chest with the shears.

The rope broke, and this time the girl was hanging from the rope around her neck.

“You killed her.”

Morino opened her eyes a little, not looking at me—not looking at anything for long.

“Didn’t you hear about the footprints? My footprints were nowhere in the room.”

I imagined the girl hanging there barefoot. The ground in the shed had been softened by the rain.

“No, you left footprints all over the shed. But nobody knew the truth. After you cut the rope and killed her, you saw your own footprints on the ground. And you knew you couldn’t just walk away without arousing suspicion. You had to do something …”

Morino had looked up at the hanged corpse she’d made and down at the footprints on the ground, knowing she was in trouble. Then she saw the shoes that were placed next to each other on the ground, and she made up her mind.

She took off her own shoes, stepping onto a fallen box. Careful not to leave any more footprints, she put on the shoes that had been placed under the corpse, replacing them with her own.

Now the footprints belonged to the dead girl.

“All you had to do then was slip out through the dog door. The ground was still dry there, and you wouldn’t leave any footprints.”

Morino finally opened her eyes and looked at me. “And my motive?”

“Hatred,” I said.

Morino looked very sad. “When you said you’d ‘figured out a number of things about Morino Yuu,’ I knew you’d caught me.”

I nodded.

It had baffled me: Why had her grandmother been so sure it was Yoru standing there when she’d opened the front door? They were twins, and they looked exactly alike—nobody could tell them apart at a glance.

But if she had been wearing black shoes, then it would’ve been obvious.

“lt must’ve been hard to go nine years without telling anyone, Morino Yuu.” That was Morino’s real name.

†

A group of girls went down the hall laughing merrily.

Morino Yuu listened to them for a moment, until their voices faded and the hall was silent again.

“You’re right,” she said. “I’m the younger sister. I was the one who was always crying, always ordered around.” She frowned, looking at me. “How did you know?”

“Yuu didn’t know that people take off their shoes when they hang themselves. That made it all clear. When you were playing at suicide, Yoru might’ve told you, but I imagine you forgot.”

I told her about the pictures I’d seen in the house, the pictures they’d drawn of themselves playing at hanging.

“Those pictures were drawn during summer vacation nine years ago, just before Yoru’s death—which means whatever can be gleaned about the artist’s personality at the time is also true about her personality on the day Yoru died.”

Yoru and Yuu had drawn the same thing, but there had been a number of differences: In Yuu’s picture, both girls had been wearing shoes. But in Yoru’s picture, the girls’ legs had been flesh toned all the way down. At first, I’d thought Yuu had drawn more details—but later, I changed my mind.

I began to think that Yoru had drawn the picture correctly, from memory. Yuu had drawn the sun, but Yoru’s picture had a gray background—further evidence. At the bus stop, Morino had told me the hanging game had happened on a rainy day. It was not that Yoru had forgotten to draw the shoes—it was simply that they had both been barefoot.

“You said it yourself at the bus stop: you knew more about death than Yuu did; you were much crueler than she was. You were saying that as Yoru; so as a child, Yoru must have known about the strange custom of people taking off their shoes before hanging themselves.”

When the twins had played at hanging themselves, they’d probably taken off their shoes and placed them aside. Yoru had known that was what you did, and she had probably insisted on it. That knowledge was reflected in her drawing.

But not so with Yuu: She had taken off her shoes when they were playing and then forgotten all about it. She didn’t know the custom, and so she’d drawn herself hanging with shoes on.

The corpse in the shed had been barefoot, though. If Yuu had been playing at being hanged all by herself and had died when the support rope broke, then her body would’ve been wearing shoes.

Yuu was silent, listening carefully to nothing. Then her lips parted slowly and she spoke. “My sister with the black shoes died. And maybe I did hate her a little. But your guess isn’t completely accurate.” Her voice was very quiet. “You didn’t see the rope around her shoulders, did you? I didn’t cut it. It broke on its own.”

At around noon that day, her older sister Yoru had suggested they pretend to have hanged themselves, to surprise everybody.

Yuu had agreed, and the two had set to work in the shed just as it began to rain.

The dog was alive then, and it watched them work, looking puzzled.

“My sister piled up the boxes and wrapped the ropes around the beam. I stayed below, making sure the boxes didn’t fall over.

Yoru was on the boxes before the rain turned the ground soft, so her footprints were not in the shed.

Yoru alone was going to pretend to be dead, and Yuu was supposed to guide someone to the shed. Their preparations continued, and soon Yoru had both ropes around her body.

“And then my sister jumped.”

Yoru had kicked away the boxes and fallen. The moment it looked like she was hanging from her neck, though, she was actually caught by the rope around her shoulders.

She had looked down at Yuu and smirked.

“When she was tricking people, she always had a little twisted smile. She never used any expressions when she was talking with our family; when she was tricking people was the only time she seemed to be enjoying herself.”

But a moment later, the rope around her shoulders broke.

“I didn’t do anything. The rope simply wasn’t strong enough for my sister’s weight. It broke close to the ceiling. If you had seen the rope or had been told more about it, you would’ve guessed correctly. It broke much too high for me to have reached.”

Yoru hung there for a moment.

“I quickly tried to help. I wrapped my arms around her body and held her up. I was holding her in midair, trying to keep her from dropping any lower.”

In the shed, there had been a girl hanging from the ceiling by a rope around her neck, desperately supported by a girl who looked just like her. The hanging girl struggled, kicking her legs wildly in the air. The dog had been tied up next to them, and it began barking furiously. The sound of the dog barking and the girl suffering was deafening in the tiny room. It seemed like that moment lasted for eternity.

“I tried to stop my sister from dying. I wasn’t very strong, but I held her up. She kept screaming, though, her heels slamming into me.”

Morino sat hunched over in her chair, staring at the wall across the room, seeing nothing but the events of that day. The girl’s memories were nothing but a nightmare to her now.

If Yuu’s grip were to slip, her sister’s body would fall, and the rope would tighten.

Yoru’s eyes had been wide open in terror as she screamed at her sister—but she hadn’t been screaming encouragement.

“She said, ‘Hold tighter, stupid.’ ” Morino closed her eyes tightly, holding her emotions in check. “When I heard that, I stopped trying to save her. I let go.”

Yoru’s body had fallen.

Her toes had stopped just above the ground. Yoru had not been wearing shoes; she was barefoot. Her toes were spread wide, all the muscles contracted, shaking at first. The dog barked furiously, hurting Yuu’s ears. The convulsions and that barking seeped deep into her mind.

“Finally, her strength ebbed away, and her toes stopped moving.”

Yuu had stepped backward and felt the ground stick to her shoes. She’d left footprints.

“If it had been my weight alone, there wouldn’t have been footprints.” Her sister’s shoes had been placed on the ground next to her.

“I remember seeing those and deciding to lie to everyone. In that little shed … my sister’s body still swaying slightly, like the pendulum of a clock.”

The little girl’s immature brain had thought desperately and seen a path before her. She had changed into the black shoes, putting her own white shoes in their place.

Walking on dry ground, she had slipped out through the dog door. Her shoes were black, and black shoes identified her as Yoru. She had to call herself Yoru and act like Yoru.

“I could no longer smile like I used to. I had to keep my face blank, like my sister’s. We were always together, and I knew what my sister was like. I could imitate her. For nine years, no one ever guessed that I was Yuu.”

She gave a long, weary sigh.

At eight years old, she had watched her own funeral. She had lived most of her life never saying her real name. Nobody knew what was going on inside her, and those emotions had built up until she had slashed her wrist … all because of her sister and the name that had been buried with her. The road the young girl had decided to follow was one of sadness and isolation, one on which her entire existence depended.

The light from the windows was fading, turning gold. The pale yellow curtains were half-drawn, dimming the sun. I could hear the sound of the baseball team at batting practice echoing through the air. Time in the empty classroom ticked by in silence.

At last, Morino opened her mouth, still not sure if she should say it. “Do you remember where and when we first met?”

I believed it was in this classroom, at the beginning of our second year of high school. She looked a little disappointed to hear that.

“In junior high, I saw you at the museum, looking at a human body cut into slices. Then, in the spring when we entered high school, I saw you in the library reading a medical text on autopsies. I recognized you at once.”

That’s why she had known I was acting in class. It made sense. We each had detected what the other was hiding from those around us.

“I find it hard to believe that you used to laugh and smile when you were Yuu.”

“I know. I once was like that, but ever since I left the shed, I thought people would know I was Yuu if I smiled. I spent nine years trying not to have any expressions, trying to be my sister. Now I can’t smile, not even if I want to.”

She seemed ever so slightly forlorn; I doubted anyone else would have noticed it. She looked away from me as she continued, “I thought you might be the first to call me by my name.”

I stood up. “I have something for you. I took it with me from your home in the country.”

I removed it from a bag on my desk. “What?” she asked, not getting up.

“The rope you were looking for. I think it will fit nicely. Close your eyes—I’ll put it on you.”

Morino sat still, closing her eyes. I stood behind her, and her tiny shoulders stiffened; she was more than a little tense.

I wrapped a red rope around her neck. It was a dirty rope. I had found it in the shed, where it had been used to tie up the dog.

“I also know why you hate dogs so much.”

I gently tightened the rope around her long black hair and her pale slender neck.

As the pressure tightened, her shoulders shook. For a moment I stood there like that. Then I tied the rope, letting the ends of it hang down behind her.

“Yes … that’s it …” she sighed. All the tension poured out of her, everything inside her softening, releasing.

Yoru had died hanging from the dog’s rope, a fact that had been sealed away deep in Morino’s memories. She had never realized the rope she was looking for was the same one that had killed her sister.

“I never hated my sister. She did horrible things sometimes, but no one could ever replace her …”

I picked up my bag and went home. When I passed her seat as I left the room, I turned back to look at Yuu one more time. She was sitting in her chair, her legs stretched out in front of her, her hands folded in front of her chest, the red rope around her neck tumbling down her back to the door.

Her eyes were closed, her lashes lowered. There was soft downy hair on her cheeks, like on a rabbit’s back. It glistened in the light of the setting sun, as though she were clad in light. A tear ran down her check, falling from her chin onto her uniform.

I left her alone, closing the classroom door behind me without a sound.