Confessions (6 page)

As he came to the end of his story, B added that he barely remembered the events he’d been describing due to the shock he had experienced at the time, but he felt that he’d been honest with me—that he’d told the truth.

So this was how Manami really died.

A and B continued to come to school, despite the fact that I now knew the truth. They saw no signs that the police were about to appear in our classroom. A wondered about this; in fact, when he’d finished his confession, with that almost ecstatic look on his face, he’d asked me as much. Why hadn’t I reported my suspicions to the authorities? But I told him that nothing had changed, that it would still be regarded as an accident, and I had no intention of turning it into the kind of sensational murder he had wanted it to be. Then there was B’s mother, who had listened to her son’s confession with a blank, dumbfounded look on her face. I told her that as a mother myself I wanted to kill both A and B. But, I added, I am also a teacher, and though I recognized my duty to report these crimes and make sure they received the appropriate punishment, I had a teacher’s duty to protect my students. Since the police had determined Manami’s death to be an accident, I told her I had no intention of reopening the case and stirring up trouble. You can imagine that it was a rather noble little speech.

I went home, but a short time later there was a call from B’s father, who had heard the whole story when he returned from work. He wanted to discuss some sort of monetary compensation, what they call a “solatium,” but I wouldn’t hear of it. If I took money from his family, B would feel that the whole thing had been put to rest. But I want him to reflect on what he’s done and to lead a better life from here on, without ever forgetting his crime. And if his father finds it necessary to be around a bit more to support his son when his past is weighing heavily on him—well, all the better.

Now that is a reasonable question. How do I justify letting them go free when it’s possible A might kill again?

You certainly have been paying attention—I suppose it’s a skill you learn from your computer games. Though I have to admit it’s hard for me to understand why you got so frantic when I was talking about HIV and can listen to the story of a murder without even getting upset. But you misunderstand when you worry about A killing “again.”…You see, he didn’t kill Manami in the first place. B did. That night after Mrs. Takenaka left, I came back to school and measured the voltage in the pouch. Without going into the details, what I found was that the purse was incapable of stopping the heart of an old person with coronary disease, or even that of a four-year-old child. I tested it myself, and I can assure you that the shock was far less painful than the one I’d had from touching a frayed cord on my washing machine. I’m convinced that Manami was just unconscious. As I said earlier, the cause of Manami’s death was drowning. The next day, when it was reported that she’d been found in the pool, A went to B and asked him why he’d butted in and done something so unnecessary. I suppose I wanted to ask B the same thing, though for different reasons. Even if he couldn’t bring himself to go get help for her, why didn’t he just run away?

If he had, Manami would still be alive!

I do not want to be a saint.

I am not being noble by keeping the identity of A and B a secret. I haven’t told the police because I simply don’t trust the law to punish them. A fully intended to kill Manami but didn’t actually cause her death; while B had no desire to kill her but brought about her death. If I did hand them over to the police, they probably wouldn’t even be sentenced to a juvenile institution; they’d be let out on probation and the whole thing would be forgotten. I wish I could electrocute A. Drown B like he did my daughter. But neither punishment would bring back Manami. Nor would they be able to repent for their crimes if they were already dead. I wanted them to understand the value, the terrible weight, of human life, and once they’d understood, I wanted them to fully realize the consequences of what they had done—and to live with that realization. So how was I supposed to accomplish this?

I know someone who lives with this kind of weight on his shoulders. He provided me with some inspiration.

If you’ll remember, this whole discussion started with the idea of calcium deficiency, but calcium isn’t the only thing we lack. In the past, Japanese people had a refined sense of taste, but these days it’s said that more and more children can’t even tell the difference between hot and mild curry, a problem supposedly caused by a zinc deficiency. So, I wonder about all of you—how sensitive are your tongues? A and B, specifically—their tongues. It looks as though you all finished your milk, but did any of you notice an odd flavor? Perhaps a bit like iron? You see, I added some blood to the cartons that went to A and B this morning. Not my blood. The blood of the most noble man I know—Manami’s father, Saint Sakuranomi.

I can see from your reactions that most of you have figured it out.

I’m not sure how quickly my little experiment will take effect, but I would like to urge A and B to have their blood tested in a few months. The incubation period for the HIV virus is usually between five and ten years, so that should give you plenty of time to think about the value of life. It’s my hope that you’ll come to understand what a terrible thing you’ve done, and that you’ll beg forgiveness from Manami’s spirit. As for the rest of you, you’ll be continuing on together as a class next year, so I expect you to look out for these two and take special care of them. I doubt you’ll be sending your new teacher any of those frivolous text messages about the value of living.

I haven’t decided yet what I’ll be doing next. The truth is, I may not have the freedom to decide after today. But if something is to happen to me, I only hope that it will be delayed long enough for me to see the results of what I’ve done.

What’s that? What if the results never appear?

Well, then, I suggest A and B watch out for swerving cars.

I am hoping to spend spring break with Manami’s father. We’ve been living together since the “accident,” and though he doesn’t have much time left, we have decided to spend it peacefully together. I hope you have a productive and pleasant vacation, and I want to thank you for the past year.

Class is dismissed.

Just a few months ago I saw you every day, Y
ū
ko-sensei, but now I don’t know how to find you or where to send this letter. You stood there in front of us and told us that you couldn’t trust the law to punish the boys who had taken the life of your little girl, that you were going to handle them yourself—and then you disappeared. That was pretty thoughtless, I think. If you were going to do that to them, then you should at least stay and face the consequences. You should be here to see what happens to them.

I decided you need to know the rest of the story, what happened after you left us, and so I tried writing you a long letter to tell you everything. Then I realized I didn’t know where to mail it or what to do with it—until I remembered a new writers’ prize they were advertising in that magazine you were always reading in the teachers’ lounge. Kids in their teens win those things all the time, so I decided to send my letter in to the contest. It’s a long shot, but who knows—

One thing worries me, though. The magazine had been running a column by Sakuranomi-sensei for months now, but it ended in April. So even if I win the contest and they print my letter, you may have stopped reading it. Like I said—a long shot.

Anyway, I want you to understand that I’m not doing this because I want your help. It’s just that there’s something I’ve got to ask you.

It’s this: Can you feel it in the air? Do you sense it in the atmosphere? Whether it’s stale or fresh, stagnant or fluid? I’m convinced that the auras of all the people in any place get together to create the mood. I guess I’m supersensitive to this kind of stuff—probably because I never got comfortable with my own aura. Sometimes I feel like I can’t breathe, and all I can think about is the feeling of the air around me.

Anyway, if you had to pick a word to describe the air in our class after the new teacher came, you’d have to say it was…bizarre.

We haven’t seen Naoki since that day you left, when you told us what you’d done to him and Sh
ū
ya. But he was the only one absent in B Class on the first day of the new school year. Everybody else was there, even Sh
ū
ya. I guess that was actually more surprising—that he was there. Nobody said anything to him, we just stood around whispering about him. And he didn’t seem to care at all. He sat down at his desk and started reading some book, but there was a cover on it so I couldn’t tell what it was. Not that he was acting tough or anything—that’s what he’s done every day since we started middle school. But that’s what was so weird: Nothing seemed to have changed.

It was nice out and the windows were wide open, but the air in the classroom seemed heavy and stale. Then the first bell rang and our new homeroom teacher came in. He’s young and kind of bouncy or something, and he went right up to the blackboard and wrote his name.

“They’ve been calling me Werther ever since I was in school, so that’s what I want you to call me, too.” We still feel pretty weird about it, but that’s what I’ll call him here. “But don’t worry,” he told us, “the name’s the same, but that doesn’t mean I’ve got the Sorrows part.” Nobody laughed.

“What? You haven’t read it?” he said, moaning and striking this dumb pose like he was in a play or something. Of course we got it: The characters for his name in Japanese mean “worthy,” so some nerd figured out that was “Werther” in German and thought it would be cute to pretend he was the guy from
The Sorrows of Young Werther
. We got it. Very funny. But didn’t he get it? Couldn’t he tell what was going on in the room? Didn’t he feel the air?

“Oops, almost forgot. We need to call roll. So I know Naoki’s absent—his mom called to say he has a cold—but is everybody else here?” Another bad sign: He was already trying to buddy up to us, calling us by our first names. You never did do that; you always treated us with respect. Then he started right in with his self-introduction.

“I wasn’t much of a student in middle school myself,” he said. “I smoked, and if a teacher got on my bad side, I’d let the air out of his tires or something. But my homeroom teacher for eighth grade straightened me out. He was the type of guy who would toss out his whole lesson plan when something had happened to one of his students, when he felt like there was something serious that needed talking about—and I bet we missed at least five English classes just for my little crises!” He laughed at this point, but I doubt anyone was actually listening to him. They were probably all thinking, like I was, about Naoki’s “cold.”

We all knew he wasn’t sick—not in the way Werther thought, anyway. But I guess I was a little relieved to hear that he was still planning to come to school—that he hadn’t transferred somewhere else. A lot of kids were glancing around at 
Sh
ū
ya
 through all of this, but he just sat there looking at the teacher like some honor student—though you could tell he wasn’t really listening, either. Werther didn’t seem to notice one way or the other and just charged on.

“This is the first day of my first teaching job, so you, members of B Class, are my first-ever students! And since I’m new, I want you to be able to start fresh, too, so I’ve decided that I’m not even going to read the files your first-year homeroom teacher left on each of you. I want you to feel like this is a new beginning, and I want you to think of me as a big brother, as someone you can talk to about anything at all.”

They always extend homeroom that first day before the opening ceremony, and Werther had talked for what seemed like forever. But finally he wound things up by taking out this brand-new piece of yellow chalk and writing on the board in huge letters:

I don’t really know what you thought of us—as individuals, I mean. And I can’t imagine what you might have written about Naoki and Sh
ū
ya in those files. But if Werther had bothered to read them, I bet none of this would have happened.

Naoki was absent day after day, and none of us said a word to Sh
ū
ya, but things were pretty calm going into the middle of May. It wasn’t like we were all being mean to Sh
ū
ya or hated him or anything—more like everyone had just decided that he didn’t even exist. We all got really good at avoiding him, just like we got used to ignoring the stifling feeling in the classroom.

One night they played this show on TV that was about a middle school, and they mentioned that some class had decided to use the homeroom period as reading time. They said that just those ten minutes a day had improved the students’ attitude and helped with their ability to focus, and that the kids actually improved academically. As I was watching, I thought about 
Sh
ū
ya
.

The next day, there was a new “library” in the back of the homeroom class. Werther had brought this little bookshelf and a whole bunch of books from home.

“I know they’re a little dog-eared, but I want us all to start reading every morning and getting absolutely everything we can out of life!” Werther told us. Like everything he said, this sounded pretty dorky, but it didn’t seem like a bad idea…until we went to look at the titles of the books. I have to tell you that most of us had started to get used to Werther by this point—maybe even liked him a little. He is pretty good-looking, after all. But after that we could never take him seriously again. You see, one whole shelf of the case was filled with books by your friend Sakuranomi-sensei, Manami’s father.

I guess Werther couldn’t help noticing that we weren’t impressed with his little library. Maybe that’s why he took a book off the shelf when we were doing problems in his math class later in the day and started reading to us.

“…
I was never interested in religion, but as I wandered around the world, going from country to country, somehow I started carrying the Bible with me. There’s a verse in Matthew 18 that talks about a man who has a hundred sheep. Now if one of those sheep
is lost, the man will leave the ninety-nine on the mountain and go looking for the one; and if he finds it, he’ll take more pleasure in the sheep that was lost than in the rest that did not go astray. Now to me, that’s the definition of a true teacher…”
At that point, he closed the book. “Let’s forget about math for today and have a class meeting,” he said, his voice getting really quiet and almost churchlike or something. “I wonder if we can’t put our heads together and think what to do about Naoki.” I guess he suddenly realized that Naoki was a lost sheep. Anyway, he had us put away our math books without even checking the answers to the problems.

Naoki had a “cold” for the first week of school, but after that Werther had just said that he “wasn’t feeling well.”

“I have to admit that I’ve been lying to you about the reason Naoki hasn’t been coming to school. He isn’t playing hooky. He wants to be here, but somehow he lacks the will to come—it’s a psychological block of some kind.”

I couldn’t really see what the difference was between “wanting to come” and “having the will to come,” but that’s the spin Werther put on it—though it wasn’t clear whether the explanation was his own idea or he was just repeating what Naoki’s mother had said.

“I apologize for not being honest with you about this,” Werther said, and I guess I felt a little sorry for him just then. Naoki had a psychological block all right, but Werther was the only one in the room who didn’t know how he got it.

I don’t think anyone in the class told anyone else about the things you said before you left. After school that day, we all got the same text—“If you tell what A and B did, you’re C”—though we never did figure out who sent it.

All this was leading up to Werther’s big idea: “I want us to think about how we can create an environment that will make it easier for Naoki to come to school,” he told us.

Of course, nobody said anything to this. Even Kenta, who had been playing the straight man for a lot of Werther’s stupid jokes, just sat staring down at his desk. But Werther chose not to notice—or to assume that we were all thinking hard about what he’d said—and started in, telling us his own ideas. As usual, I doubt he really cared what we were thinking anyway.

“Why don’t we make copies of your class notes and deliver them to Naoki at home?” This brought disgusted groans from various places around the room. “Why not?” Werther asked Ry
ō
ji, picking on him because his groan had been the loudest.

“Because,” Ry
ō
ji muttered, not looking up, “my house is on the other side of town from his.” Not bad for an on-the-fly excuse.

“No worries,” said Werther. “How ’bout we do this? You take notes in shifts, and then once a week Mizuki and I will deliver them to Naoki’s house.”

Why me? Because I’m class president again this year (Y
ū
suke’s vice president, by the way), and because I live in the same neighborhood as Naoki. I made sure not to let on how I felt about his plan, but I guess he could tell I wasn’t thrilled right from the start. At one point he asked me straight out why I was cold with him—I don’t know for sure why he would say that, but it might be because I was the only one who refused to call him Werther to his face. Anyway, the next thing I knew he was asking me whether
I
had a nickname. I told him I didn’t—that everyone called me Mizuki—but then Ayako spoke up and practically shouted, “Mizuho!” And she was right, that was what everybody called me for the first few years of elementary school. “Mi-zu-
ho,
” they’d say, stretching out the last syllable for emphasis.

“I
like
it!” Werther said. “It’s settled. From now on I’m going to call you Mizuho. What about the rest of you? Fate brought all of us together in this class. Let’s really get to know each other, break down all the walls between us!”

So after that, thanks to Werther, I went back to being Mizuho.

We started taking the notes to Naoki’s house on the second Friday in May. I knew right where he lived and had actually been inside lots of times, since one of his older sisters had sort of taken care of me when I was six or seven.

Naoki’s mom came to meet us at the door. I hadn’t seen her in a long time, but she looked just the same—perfect makeup, beautiful clothes. When I’d been there playing with his sister, I remember how she would talk nonstop about Naoki, even when he wasn’t in the room: how she was serving pancakes because they’re his favorite, how he’d found her crying from cutting onions one day and had handed her his little handkerchief, how he’d taken third in the handwriting contest.

I thought we’d just give her the class notes and leave, but we ended up going in and sitting down in the living room. Naoki’s mom didn’t seem too thrilled about this, but Werther had apparently been planning on it from the beginning.

I knew the living room, too. I used to play Othello there with his sister. Naoki’s room was right over where we played, and his mother would call up toward the ceiling and tell him to bring down a deck of cards. The sister who took care of me then is off at college in Tokyo now, and there was no way to tell whether Naoki was up there. His mother served us tea and then sat down to talk to Werther.

“Your predecessor is responsible for Naoki’s emotional difficulties,” she said. “If every teacher were as dedicated and enthusiastic as you clearly are, this would never have happened.”

As I watched her, I knew Naoki hadn’t told her what you’d said and done to him that last day in class. If he had, she wouldn’t have been so full of herself, and she couldn’t have sat there bad-mouthing you. Since he hadn’t told her, that meant he was suffering up there all by himself. Anyway, she went on complaining about you—Moriguchi this and Moriguchi that—without mentioning what happened to your daughter. I doubt she even knew that Naoki had been involved.

Naoki never came down, and eventually I realized we were only there to listen to her griping. But Werther sat nodding with this stupid, sympathetic look on his face, as if this was the most wonderful thing he’d ever heard. I’m not sure he was even listening to her.