Another, Vol. 2 (13 page)

“Let’s take a picture,” Yuya Mochizuki suggested a little awkwardly. He took a compact camera out of a side pocket of his day pack and pointed it at us. “A photo to remember this by. It’s our last summer of middle school, so…How about it?”

“Why don’t I take the picture?” Ms. Mikami replied, turning toward Mochizuki.

“Uh, no. You should be in the picture.”

Mochizuki shook his head, looking a little flustered.

“Everybody line up over there. Good. Okay, Ms. Mikami, please get into the shot, too.”

We all lined up in front of the gate to the lodge as he directed. We stood centered around a bronze plaque on a blackened stone gatepost that read “Sakitani Memorial Hall.”

“Okay, I’m taking the picture!” Mochizuki said, readying the camera. “Maybe we should put the bags off to the side. Sakakibara and Misaki, could you move in a little closer? You too, Ms. Mikami…Okay, good. Ready?”

We heard the shutter click.

The “everybody” in the picture consisted of five people in total. Me and Mei, Ms. Mikami, and the mismatched duo of Kazami and Teshigawara.

All of us students were dressed in our summer uniforms—white short-sleeved open-collar shirts for the boys and a white short-sleeved blouse for the girls. Since we weren’t at school, no one was wearing their name tag. Like her students, Ms. Mikami wore a white blouse with a light brown jacket over it.

The buzzing of cicadas cascaded down from the forest that surrounded the clearing the building was in. Even so, the strident calls of the brown cicada and the bear cicada were absent. The soothing voice of the evening cicada was there, a sound so rare to hear inside a city. Growing up in Tokyo as I had, the first time I’d heard the call so long ago, I’d thought it was a bird singing.

“Okay, Mochizuki, now you get in,” Teshigawara said. “I’ll take the picture.”

“Oh, but…”

“Don’t be shy. Go and stand next to Ms. Mikami.”

“Um, okay…”

Mochizuki handed the camera to Teshigawara, then scurried over to us and took his place. Teshigawara wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm, then raised the camera and said, “Here goes!”

He raised one hand up high. The sound of the shutter followed immediately after.

“Hm-m-m. Let’s do one more. Hey, Mochizuki! You’re too far away from Ms. Mikami! Snuggle right up there. Sakaki, you and Misaki too! You stay where you are, Kazami…Okay, now that looks nice.”

What exactly was he trying to imply?…Not that I really cared.

“Here we go! Chee-e-ese!”

“Cheese”—people have been using that word to get people to smile for a picture forever…Not that I really cared about that, either. But right now that lack of interest felt strangely pleasant.

The evening of Saturday, August 8, was a slice in time when I managed to give myself over to that lack of interest ever so slightly, so I felt a certain degree of peace…

Together, we had taken the public bus to reach this spot at the foot of Yomiyama Mountain on the northern fringe of the city. We’d gotten off at the end of the line; then climbing the hillside on foot had taken another twenty minutes. During this progress, more than half of the students who’d come along had acted more or less like that…

With a veneer of peace.

I knew everyone else was aware of it, too.

In reality, I knew that every last one of us felt fierce anxiety and fear deep in our hearts. We all understood each other’s feelings, but it was an unspoken understanding that we didn’t show outwardly.

Don’t speak of it frivolously. If you say it out loud, the object of your anxiety and fear will turn into an immediate reality.
We had all fallen into that sort of mind-set…
Probably pretty common in a situation like this
, I thought. Plus…

Given that, everyone was probably completely aware that this “veneer of peace” wouldn’t last all that long. There was no way it could.

The Sakitani Memorial Hall stood in a forest at the foot of the mountain. It was a Western-style building that had a slightly classical air, contrary to the vague expectations I’d formed before arriving.

Mr. Whoever-he-was Sakitani was an alum of North Yomi and also a local celebrity. He’d originally built this place as a facility for his company and had donated it to the school a few decades ago. They’d named the place after him, so now it was called the Sakitani Memorial Hall.

“To be honest, the school has no idea what to do with it.”

I’d heard that from Mr. Chibiki, as part of a combo offer with some other basic information.

“The money and resources it takes to repair and maintain the building are outrageous, and yet the place has been used less and less in recent years. Still, they can hardly sell the place off.”

At the beginning, only a handful of students agreed to go on the camping trip. Makes sense, I guess.

Sure, Ms. Mikami had told them it was “an important ritual,” but without having a more concrete goal laid out for them, it was pretty natural that they’d be reluctant to go. Even if fleeing town was out of reach, shutting yourself up at home and staying put was obviously much safer than going on some camping trip. There were plenty of people who held that opinion.

But then the shut-in Atsushi Ogura went and died the way he had at the end of the previous month.

Even if you shut yourself up at home and didn’t set foot outside, you were never totally safe. When they realized that, some students said, “Well, in that case…” and had a change of heart. Apparently a rumor made its way around promising that if we went on this camping trip, everyone would be saved. And so, after the permission deadline had passed, a string of people popped up, saying, “I’ve decided to participate after all…”

With the number spiking at the last minute, we wound up with fourteen people on the trip. Nine boys and five girls. That was a participation rate of fifty percent. Including our chaperone, Ms. Mikami, fifteen of us would be spending two nights and three days at the Sakitani Memorial Hall, starting today.

We had gathered at the front gate of the school. There, Ms. Mikami had informed us, “We’ll be climbing Yomiyama tomorrow. We’ll visit the shrine on the mountain and pray for the class’s safety.”

The students’ reactions were mixed, but I hadn’t detected any real conviction in her voice when she made the announcement in the first place. And it wasn’t just me. I think Teshigawara and Mochizuki, at least, had the same thought. Maybe Mei did, too.

A class camping trip had followed the same schedule over summer break fifteen years ago. On August 9, everyone had gone up the mountain to pay their respects at the shrine…But I was very familiar with the outcome of that day. And I knew Ms. Mikami herself was fully aware of it, too—how two students had died in freak accidents on the walk back from the shrine.

So I’m sure she couldn’t help feeling reluctant herself. Even so, literally at the end of her rope, she had made her decision: if there was even the slightest chance…Yeah. That’s probably what had happened.

There was a couple living at the Sakitani Memorial Hall who kept the place up. The two looked to be around sixty years old. Their name was Numata.

Mr. Numata was a skinny man with a small frame. Deep wrinkles crisscrossed his dark, balding forehead and he had sunken, upturned eyes that looked totally cantankerous. He was just as tight-lipped and gruff as he looked. Mrs. Numata had a contrastingly beefy and generous build. She bustled around regardless and spoke cheerfully. As the line of us came toward her, her welcome was almost disturbingly grandiose.

I wondered if the two of them had been here during the camping trip fifteen years ago.

The thought struck me out of nowhere, but this didn’t seem like a good time to suddenly hit them with a question like that.

The two-story building was constructed in a Western style, with mortar painted over a wood frame. To give a very rough sketch, the structure had a “U” shape with its back to the mountain in the north and the frame opening toward the south.

It had originally been a recreation facility for a company, and had continued to be used in that vein ever since. In addition to the spacious hall and dining room, the building included a fair number of bedrooms, as well. They were basically two-person rooms, and although the place was visibly becoming more decrepit, the interior decorations and fixtures were a little bit like a hotel. The bathrooms and showers were communal, but every room was air-conditioned.

There were enough rooms for each person to have his or her own, but following Ms. Mikami’s instructions, we were split up two to a room. This was probably done out of a concern for safety.

And so.

I wound up sharing a room with Yuya Mochizuki.

“Did you bring the tape?” I asked Mochizuki once we’d put our bags in our room and relaxed a little. His expression went instantly hard, and he nodded solemnly.

“Yeah. I brought a small tape player, too. All we had at my house was a tape deck, but Tomoka lent me this one.”

“Did you tell her what it’s for?”

“I didn’t really explain what’s on the tape. She asked me about it, but I didn’t feel like I could talk about it.”

“Oh.”

I lay down on a bed, then crossed my arms and put them behind my head. I thought back to four days ago when, on the afternoon of August 4, Teshigawara and I had gone over to Mochizuki’s house.

Mochizuki had called the night before to say, “I fixed the tape.” And so the next day, we’d quickly gotten together to listen to it.

Remembering my promise to Mei, I tried calling the cell phone number she’d given me, but no matter how many times I tried the number, she never picked up. She told me later that she’d still been at the vacation house by the beach that day, which was outside the service area, and reception was pretty bad there.

And so the three of us had listened to the tape on a stereo with a tape player that Mochizuki had in his room.

There was a ton of background noise, and the recording quality was not what I would call great. We were reluctant to turn the volume up very high, too, so we put our ears right up next to the speakers and focused all our attention on the voice coming out of them…

“Um, my name…My name is Katsumi Matsunaga.”

The voice on the tape began with an introduction, then told the story of going up Yomiyama on the camping trip fifteen years ago and how there had been two accidents on the trip back down the mountain. After that, there was a long pause before he continued.

“…And then. The most important part happened after that.

“Right after we all got down the mountain at last,
it
happened.

“
It
being that…that I…”

What he—Katsumi Matsunaga from fifteen years ago—told us next was most definitely the “confession of a crime” he’d committed, as well as a “warning” and “advice” for us, who were following in his footsteps fifteen years later.

“We came down the mountain and went back to the lodge to call for help…And in the middle of all that confusion—I’ll be honest—there was a little flare-up.”

Matsunaga’s story continued thus:

“Honestly, I don’t remember what set it off. I was pretty badly shaken up, like all the rest of them…So I don’t remember the details of what might have caused
something like that
to happen.

“But anyway.

“We were outside the lodge, out in the woods.
One of the other boys
and I were yelling at each other, and it escalated until we were wrestling.

“Thinking back on it now, I never could stand
that guy
. I don’t know what it was. I guess he was just so blasé about stuff, no matter what happened. I guess it just kept wearing down my nerves until finally I got angry at him…I mean, that’s the kind of guy he was.

“After both of those accidents and the terrible things that had happened to those two people that day, there he was, as laid-back as ever, like it didn’t matter to him at all, and I think that just enraged me…I think I was probably the one who grabbed him first, and then we got into a fight out there.

“He was…”

And then Matsunaga said the name of the “other boy” / “that guy.” I think. But just at that part, the noise on the tape got a lot worse and I couldn’t make out anything he said. It was the same for the rest of the recording, too: Whenever he said “that guy’s” name, it would get covered up by really bad static. We never managed to find out his name.

So now that I’m writing down what Matsunaga said on the tape, I guess all I can do is put “——” for the boy’s name.

“Anyway, we sort of had a fight out there…And when I came back to my senses, he wasn’t moving.”

His voice at this part was lower than before. It sounded as if it was shaking, though maybe I was just imagining that.

“We started wrestling, and I think maybe I shoved him as hard as I could, but…I just can’t remember the details.

“He stopped moving.

“He’d fallen down next to a huge tree in the middle of the woods. I shouted at him, but he didn’t answer. When I went over to him, I found a branch rammed deep into the back of his head, and blood was gushing everywhere.

“When I shoved him and he fell back against the tree, a branch must have been sticking out right in that spot and stabbed him in the head…That’s what I figured. It’s the only thing I could imagine, given the situation.

“——…died.

“I tried taking his pulse. I even put my head on his chest to check for a heartbeat…But he was definitely dead. I…I’d killed him.

“That was when I got really scared and I ran back to my room in the lodge.

“I’d killed ——…and I couldn’t tell anyone. I’m going to be honest and admit that I was thinking that if someone found him, it might get brushed aside as an accident.

“The rain kept pounding the whole rest of that day, and we wound up staying there one more night. Although some people’s parents came and took them home. The police came, too, and asked us all sorts of questions…But even then, I didn’t say anything about what happened to ——. I couldn’t.