Book Girl and the Famished Spirit (20 page)

The man who had shut her away in darkness and stolen light from her! The murderer of her aunt and father!

Flames burned in her eyes and a searing pain tormented her.

She wanted only a little bit more time—just a bit more—until she exacted her revenge on him. Just a bit more.

“Take off your sunglasses, Aoi. Next week, I’ll be married here in this dress. I want you to congratulate me.”

When we opened the door to the chapel, Amemiya was standing in front of the altar, wearing a pearl-white wedding dress. Both hands were wrapped in bandages. The moonlight shining through the stained glass windows illuminated her thin body like a spotlight.

I saw a tall man in a suit nearby, and my heart leaped into my throat.

Was that Tamotsu Kurosaki? From where we stood, I could only see how tall he was.

“What a wonderful feeling. Once I have a husband, you will no longer be my guardian and you’ll lose everything. You messed up my entire life. You murderer! You stole my family from me! You deserve to suffer and despair! You deserve to be cast into hell!”

Her tiny white face radiated frailty—but the impact of the tempestuous curses she flung from her thin lips struck me as if taking the full force of a gale head-on.

The night she had first met Ryuto, Amemiya had been standing on a swing, alone in a raging storm, pumping the swing with wild energy.

I imagined that she must have looked much like this that night
and when she’d grabbed a broken dish and brutally driven it into Ryuto’s stomach.

It was the ravening face of someone who had descended into madness. Her skin was ghoulishly pale, and rage, suffering, and hatred flashed in her eyes like lightning tearing open the sky.

Now at last she was unleashing the storm that had howled through her heart unbeknownst to anyone, which had been held back and sealed in for so long. She hurled it, with all the ferocity of a life forfeit, at the man she most despised in this world.

The fractured emotions displayed by Hotaru Amemiya—just one little girl—overwhelmed us and left us mute and paralyzed like people trembling before nature’s fury in the very heart of a storm, nothing more than victims to its caprice.

Tamotsu Kurosaki, despite his long tyranny over Amemiya, was no exception. Now the roles of master and subject were reversed, and he stood frozen, his back to us.

“My mother didn’t love you even a little bit. She thought of you as nothing more than a servant, and she mocked you. ‘I love you, Aoi,’ ‘I’ll never leave you, Aoi’—all those things you forced me to say were lies! They were your own delusions! Even when I was saying I loved you, in my heart I was cursing you, wishing you would die!”

I had no way of knowing how brutal this implacable storm would become or how much destruction she would attempt.

My throat was sticky and dry, and I couldn’t blink. It was as if my eyes were held open by pins.

Ryuto was leaning on my shoulders, and he groaned, his lips trembling. His voice was almost a gasp. “Back off, Hotaru… just back off…”

Right—don’t go any further, Amemiya. It’s not safe to unleash any more of your hatred on him.

Warning lights were flashing inside my head. My throat constricted and I had trouble breathing.

Don’t say anything more to hurt him! You’re backing him into a corner telling him that!
He made time flow back on itself in order to reclaim the past he had lost, and it was still denied to him. This time he might just destroy everything.
What you’re doing is incredibly dangerous, Amemiya!

You really do intend to die here with him!

Kurosaki moved.

His arm reached into his jacket, and I saw him pull out something black and shiny. My body went instantly cold.

Ryuto tried to run toward Amemiya, but Maki grabbed his arm and pulled him back.

Why Maki?!

The gun was pointed straight at Amemiya. She did not waver. Instead, she unleashed her last, decisive blow on Kurosaki.

“Who could ever love a man like you? My mother knew that she would be miserable if she married you, so she cast you off and married my father! And I’m just like my mother!”

No! That isn’t true!

The words rang out in my mind, but who were they directed at?

Maki still held Ryuto back, but I slipped past them both and ran toward Amemiya, ignoring the shock on their faces.

Even I didn’t know how I managed to do something so bold.

I was nothing more than a bystander in this story, and I didn’t believe in rocking the boat so why had I decided to get involved now?

Was it because I couldn’t stand to watch someone die in front of me? Or because of the pull Kayano had over me since she reminded me so much of Miu? Or was it because I could still remember the sad look on Amemiya’s face when we’d spoken in the library, or because I felt like I, too, was guilty of Kurosaki’s crime in trying to go back to the past, even if it meant selling his soul to the devil?

I couldn’t begin to explain the turbulent impulse that threw me into motion.

But all of those things had something to do with it, I knew. My body moved faster than my mind. Fear, hesitation, cowardice, calculation, and everything else was expunged from my mind in an instant.

Needing to communicate in that impetuous way, I threw myself at Kurosaki and grabbed his arm.

“Inoue—!” Amemiya shouted in surprise.

I got my first full look at Kurosaki’s face.

He was a tall, thin man with the same features as the boy in Amemiya’s sketchbook. I had pictured something dynamic and ominous like a demon, so when I saw the listless, corpselike vacancy in his face, I was shocked.

His hair was a light brown, and his eyes were like glass beads with a blue cast. He had handsome features that women would have found attractive, but his cheeks were sunken and he was horribly emaciated. He looked like a withered man well over a hundred years old. He seemed to be exhausted with life, as if he was trying to put an end to this story as soon as he could.

This… is Kurosaki?

He wasn’t like I’d expected. He looked very delicate… and very sad…

Could this truly be the demon who had locked Amemiya away in a world of darkness?

What he’d done to Amemiya could never be forgiven, but the eyes that gazed down at me, full of suffering and despair, inspired a piercing sadness rather than rage.

Yes—I had wished for this, too! I had wanted to go back to the past whatever the cost!

“Amemiya! What you’re saying is wrong. Kayano never said
that about him. This won’t help anyone. Not you or him. You’ll only suffer,” I hissed, panting.

Then a clear voice like an organ note rang out in the tensely quiet chapel.

“You’re right; Hotaru was lying. There was a different reason that Kayano absolutely had to marry Takashi.”

Tohko approached us, her long, thin braids swaying, leaving Maki and Ryuto standing in shock.

Kurosaki turned around and his eyes widened. Amemiya saw the sketchbook Tohko clutched to her chest, and she paled.

“I have no connection to your story. I’m just someone who reads all the tales the world has to offer, but there’s something I’ve noticed since I
do
read so much. The story’s main characters are always driven apart by unfortunate misunderstandings and missed chances, and they go farther down the path to catastrophe. A story that should have had a happy ending can be transformed into a tragedy by the slightest mistake or hint of duplicity.

“It was like that for Heathcliff and Catherine in
Wuthering Heights.

“Living in a remote village in nineteenth-century England, the daughter of a lonely, misanthropic clergyman produced one book for the world during her entire life with hardly any resources or experience and only the amazing power of her imagination. Have you ever read her story of love and hatred, of revenge, and an almost miraculous hunger, Hotaru?

“When it came out, the critics as a whole said that it was immoral, savage, vulgar, badly written, had an incomprehensible failure of a plot, and so on. They said that it should have been called
Withering Heights
instead. They tore it apart. Readers also
furrowed their brows at the violent passions of the protagonists, and the book didn’t sell at all.”

The book girl held herself tall and noble as she continued her diatribe, as if challenging them all. Her clear black eyes flashed with intelligence.

“The more I read the book, the hungrier I get. My heart grumbles for sustenance and my throat feels like it’s closing relentlessly in on itself and my brain burns with this crazed hunger, and it gets hard to breathe. But still for some reason, I always read it to the end.

“The characters in the book are all unflinchingly assertive and selfish, scorning and wounding each other by laying bare their emotions like animals, whether it’s hatred, sadness, or love. I don’t think I could ever be friends with any of them.

“Catherine often throws tantrums and goes on hunger strikes; Heathcliff is a spiteful stalker; and even Nelly is a busybody who talks too much; and the second-generation Catherine’s stuck-up behavior toward Hareton is just too much, even if she does soften at the end! You want to shove your face into the book and shout at them to have a little sympathy for other people, to take a breath and calm down, to go out into the world and broaden their horizons.

“But still, at some point that tumultuous story and the deeply flawed people living in its shut-off world—the forthright souls free of deception—become so dear that they tear at your heart.

“It makes you think that it would be great if you could rip open your heart like that and have a love that would go to the farthest extremes to pursue and lay claim to one another, and it makes you believe that if you had someone who loved you that much, you wouldn’t need anyone else, or that if you could meet someone like that, there could be no greater happiness.

“That’s the kind of story this is.

“Even as you feel terror and anxiety crushing your chest, wrapped up in a world of bellowing storms, you can’t stop reading. You may be afraid, you may despise it, you may refuse to accept it, but you can’t help but be intrigued. Even the flaws become charming. That’s the kind of power this story has.

“Technique alone could never produce something like that. It had to be written with Emily’s soul. That’s the reason it’s still being read more than a hundred years later.”

Kurosaki lowered the gun and looked at Tohko as if she was some unearthly creature.

What was this girl? Why was he listening to her mutely?

The dazed look on his face demanded as much.

In contrast, Amemiya was hunched over in anguish, trembling.

Tohko’s eyebrows knit together sadly as she said, “… Kurosaki and Kayano are very similar to Heathcliff and Catherine in
Wuthering Heights.
They grew up together, never apart for even a moment, feeling as if the other one’s soul was their own. But when she became old enough, Catherine married Edgar, the son of a good family. She tells Nelly that if she were to marry Heathcliff, it would reduce her to poverty, and Heathcliff overhears this and leaves the estate.

“But Heathcliff was the only one Catherine ever truly loved, not Edgar. And Heathcliff never cared for any woman but Catherine.”

Kurosaki’s eyes wavered at the impact of that, and Amemiya closed hers firmly, awaiting the words she feared hearing.

“Catherine tells Nelly that if she marries, she’ll be able to rescue Heathcliff from her brother Hindley and help him to make something of himself. She says that was the most important reason for marrying Edgar. Of course, not everyone understands that reasoning. It’s only natural that it would be criticized as immoral. But that was Catherine’s pure, unsullied motive, which came from her love for Heathcliff.

“Catherine declares that her soul is made of the same stuff as Heathcliff’s, which is as different from Edgar’s soul as moonlight and lightning or frost and fire. As time goes by, her love for Edgar changes, but her love for Heathcliff is an eternally solid bedrock, which doesn’t look enjoyable on the surface, but which she couldn’t possibly live without. ‘I am Heathcliff,’ she says.”

After remaining silent through all this, Kurosaki exposed his passion for the first time to interject.

“What are you trying to say? Are you implying that Kayano’s feelings were the same as Catherine’s? That she became Amemiya’s wife in order to help me out of my pitiable lot? Ridiculous. Your fantasies mean nothing. Kayano told me that she was getting married with a smile on her face. That if she married me, she couldn’t have a house with a pool or a Yorkshire terrier.”

Tohko’s eyes shone with tears, and she looked even more dejected.

“You’re right. You can’t believe me no matter how much I argue, so I’ll give you proof of Kayano’s love for you.

“You and Kayano exchanged letters that you wrote in a number code, right? Before she left school, Kayano left messages for you on the desks and walls in classrooms. They’ve all been wiped off now, but at the time the school newspaper wrote about a ghost leaving mysterious numbers everywhere, and I was able to find part of her message.”

Tohko took out her student handbook and opened it.

I remembered the pile of student essays on the desk in the club room, and I gasped. In her own way, Tohko had been moving the investigation steadily forward.

Tohko slowly read out the numbers she had written into her handbook.

“15-5-11-28-17-8-21-28-3-21-28-25-28-17-3-28-15-5-11—25-28-13-25-2-2-28-2-5-12-21-28-17-5-25-28-22-5-8-21-12-21-8”