Real World (18 page)

* * *

Everything about the second semester of my senior year in high school felt cold and distant. I hadn’t seen my classmates since the summer break began and they were all too busy to sit down and talk about my two friends that had died. My class was clearly divided into all sorts of cliques. The bookworms were the most numerous, then came the jocks, the Shibuya clubbers, the Barbie Girls, the nerds, and others, and the deaths of these two girls—Kirarin and Terauchi, who belonged to the one group hardest to fathom—didn’t seem to really hit home with anybody else. Kirarin’s death had been covered in weekly magazines and on TV talk shows, so girls who were into gossipy stuff like that sometimes checked me out like they wanted to ask me about it, but I pretended not to know anything. Compared with the splashy affair of Worm and Kirarin, Terauchi’s suicide didn’t stand out much, although one of those dry weekly newsmagazines did have an article once about a classmate of Kirarin’s having followed her in death by taking her own life.
“Toshi-chan, you’re all skin and bones.”
Haru, her hair bobbed now, stood blocking my way. Her new boyfriend had apparently told her he didn’t like her Yamamba style, so she’d done a total makeover into a Mod. But because of all the makeup she’d worn, her eyebrows and eyelashes had gotten pretty sparse, and this new style didn’t suit her.
“Really?” I touched my cheek. “I didn’t notice.”
“It’s no wonder, though. When I heard about Kirarin and Terauchi I was, like, totally shocked. Which is why I thought I’d change my look and cut my hair. My boyfriend had nothing to do with it. I just thought I’d become the kind of shabby person I’d always made fun of.”
“The world’s changed for you then?” I asked.
“It has. Or at least the kind of guys who try to pick me up.” Haru raised her thin eyebrows as she smiled. “Guys who think I’m some weird creature are always trying to pick me up. At cram school it’s nuts. But it doesn’t matter—none of them are worth the time, anyway. Toshi, you haven’t been to cram school at all. Did you apply for the winter session?”
Not sure how to respond, I stared off into space. Cram school. Entrance exams. Before all this happened those were all I could think about, worrying about how the exams were right around the corner. But now it seemed so far away.
“I don’t know yet,” I replied.
“Yeah, I hear you. You were pretty close to Kirarin and Terauchi, so it must have been a shock. Y’know, I never really liked Kirarin that much, to tell you the truth. She was kind of a Goody Two-shoes. She went out partying all the time, yet when she was with you guys she pretended to be all serious. I know I shouldn’t say this now that she’s dead, but her death didn’t hit me the way Terauchi’s did.”
People’s deaths really do carry different importance for different people. Everybody pretty much had forgotten all about Worm’s mother, and for me, Kirarin’s death just made me sad. Sure, it hurt when I thought I wouldn’t ever see her again, when I remembered all the times she’d been nice to me, when she’d said something funny. Crying for her was like a conditioned reflex. But Terauchi’s death was totally different. Her suicide had a powerful effect on me—it hardened everything in my heart, and drained me. Left me dazed and confused. And I still haven’t figured out how to deal with it. It’s sad, for sure, but I don’t feel like I’m totally empty or anything, more like my mind’s a blank still trying to figure out what happened. It was like that hollow feeling had turned me dull. People were always giving me these weird looks and unwanted sympathy.
“What’s happened to Yuzan?” Haru asked.
After Terauchi’s funeral, Yuzan fell off the grid. Once she called from a bar in Shinjuku 2-chome and said she had a new girlfriend and wouldn’t be coming home anytime soon, and I wasn’t to worry if I didn’t see her for a while. She was apparently going to lean on her new lover and heal that way. It was also clear that Yuzan had decided to come out of the closet. After Terauchi’s funeral it became clear how much it had hurt Yuzan to learn that Terauchi’s final letter was written just to me.

* * *

“Toshi, is it true that Terauchi left a final letter?”
Right after the funeral, Yuzan came over to me. She had on her school uniform skirt, which she wasn’t used to wearing. It was tucked up a bit. She looked bewildered. I was sure Yuzan liked Terauchi a lot, and the fact that Terauchi had died without saying a word to her clearly had shaken her. I couldn’t lie. You understand why, right? If I did lie, I’d have to make up some other plausible story, and the last thing I needed was another burden to carry around. Keeping Terauchi’s secret was enough of a burden, and it made me feel like I was going to collapse.
“It’s true,” I said.
I stared down at the floor of the funeral parlor, which reflected the bright light of the chandelier overhead. Kirarin’s funeral had been a private affair, but Terauchi’s was open and held at a brand-new funeral parlor. All of us—her parents’ relatives and in-laws, people from school, classmates—stood out in the courtyard, noisy with the shrill cry of cicadas, to see off her casket. I overheard one middle-aged lady complain that with suicides they usually held private, low-key funerals, but to me this kind of funeral fit Terauchi perfectly. An unexpected ending. If Terauchi were here she might have said this and laughed.
“What did she write?” Yuzan asked.
I quickly gave her the kind of perfunctory answer I’d given Terauchi’s mother. Yuzan bit her lip in frustration.
“Really. So she didn’t say a thing about me?”
“She didn’t write about anybody else. Just about her own personality.”
“Then why’d she address it to you? And not her old lady?”
Yuzan looked blank. I shook my head.
“I have no idea. Nobody ever knew what was in Terauchi’s head.”
“I wonder,” Yuzan said, and then was silent.
But I think
I
understood her, Yuzan probably wanted to add. If Kirarin had lived she probably would have said the same thing as Yuzan. Terauchi might have tried to deceive us, but sometimes we liked her warped attitude and offbeat sense of humor. And sometimes we almost painfully felt these were our own.
“Ah—this is so, so hard. Man—everybody’s gone.”
Yuzan wiped her tears away with her palm like guys do. I’m still here, I wanted to say, but couldn’t. It was like Yuzan and I were saying good-bye, each of us on opposite shores with Terauchi’s letter standing between us.
“I feel so lonely,” I said.
“You shouldn’t, Toshi. You should be happy ’cause you still have your whole family and everything.”
I felt pushed even further away from Yuzan. Was I really happy? I asked myself. This person to whom Terauchi’s final letter was entrusted? She’d written that she’d uncovered the darkness that lay within her. Terauchi should have uncovered the real me, too. But instead she said farewell. As I stood there vacantly, Yuzan tapped my shoulder.
“About the cell phone, don’t worry about it. It was in my name, so you have nothing to do with it. I doubt the cops’ll ask you about it.”
It
was
kind of strange. According to Worm’s dad, when he talked to us three days after Terauchi’s and Kirarin’s deaths, miraculously Worm had only external injuries, nothing internal. He could talk and was being interviewed by the police. Still, I’d heard nothing from them yet.
“Well, see ya.”
Yuzan duckwalked away, her summer school uniform looking uncomfortable on her. She had her usual backpack slung across her shoulder and I noticed a key holder attached to a zipper as I watched her walk away. The key holder had a
purikura
instant photo the four of us had taken when we were fooling around back in the holidays at the beginning of May.
“Miss Yamanaka, I wonder if I could have a word with you.”
In the shadows at the entrance to the funeral home the female detective was waiting for me. A little ways off to the side was her partner, the middle-aged man. The woman had on a wide-brimmed white hat and a scarf around her neck, perhaps to keep from getting sunburned. She’s just like Candy, I thought, and came to a halt, awaiting judgment.
“I’m so sorry for all these shocking events that have happened to you, one after another. My apologizes for coming to see you at the funeral. Why don’t we go over there where it’s a bit cooler?”
The two of them motioned me over to the shade beneath some trees in a small park next to the funeral home. The people who’d attended Terauchi’s funeral slipped past us, heads drooping.
“I still can’t figure out what led to your neighbor and Miss Higashiyama getting together. Her parents said they have no idea, and the boy’s father said the same. Miss Higashiyama’s contact list didn’t contain your neighbor’s number at all.”
I summoned up the courage to ask, “The boy next door didn’t have a cell phone?”
He didn’t, the detective said as she glanced at her notepad. Great. Worm threw it away. I wanted to dance for joy, but soon felt ashamed at caring only about saving my own neck.
“It surprised me, too,” I said. “Maybe they just happened to hook up.”
“I wonder about that.”
The female detective looked up, doubt in her eyes. The old man spoke up.
“The boy said the same thing, but you and Miss Higashiyama were friends, and the only thing I can think is that you helped bring them together.”
“I don’t know anything about it,” I said.
“But you talked on the phone with Miss Higashiyama the day before she died,” the female detective said.
All of a sudden it hit me that this was just like something else I’d experienced before. Those pushy canvassers in front of the station. Guys with their questionnaires, women clutching clipboards. Young girls practicing to be fortune-tellers.
Tell a lie.
Come on, Ninna Hori, you can do it! Acting’s your forte. You’re the only one who’s going to protect yourself. I could hear Terauchi whispering this to me.
“There was just something I needed to ask her. I had no idea where she was. We just talked about movies and stuff like always and then I hung up.”
Cold sweat was running down from my underarms. I was trying my hardest to cover up something, but I knew it wasn’t just my own guilt.
“Is that right?” the woman said, a disappointed look on her face. “I’m also wondering whether Miss Terauchi’s suicide might not also be connected to this affair. We know she talked with Miss Higashiyama, and all I can think is that they argued about her being together with the boy.”
“Terauchi wasn’t that kind of person,” I insisted. “What I mean is, the kind of person who would die for somebody else. She wasn’t stupid. She was much smarter than that, very sensitive, the kind where you weren’t sure if she was completely unattractive, or the total opposite. But she’s not the kind of person who would die over something dumb like that.”
As I was speaking I started to cry. The weird thing was, this was the first time I’d cried over Terauchi. The woman looked concerned and frowned.
“I’m very sorry. We’ll ask you about this at some other time. Still, it’s all very puzzling,” she said, catching the eye of her partner. The old guy nodded and brushed away a mosquito.
“We heard that Miss Terauchi left behind a letter. I wonder what was in it. We actually had a call come in with information that led us to the two of them, and I have the feeling it was Miss Terauchi who made the call. I sense that since you were all good friends, when you found out the boy next door had run away you got together to help him. I’m guessing that Miss Terauchi found out about this and got angry, called the police, and when Miss Higashiyama was killed in that unfortunate accident, she felt responsible and took her own life.”
I was taken aback. It sounded so stupid when someone else put it into words. Which is exactly why I had to lie. Not to protect myself so much as to protect the truth about how all of us felt when we first heard about Worm. Or to protect what Worm felt in the instant he murdered his mother. Because it was something nobody else could know.
“Don’t you think that’s taking it a little too far?”
I wiped away my tears, dumbfounded.
“It is a bit much, isn’t it?” she said. “I don’t think even you all would do something that stupid.”
The detective’s tone was sarcastic, but it didn’t bother me. I’d seen her close her notepad, so I knew she’d given up on pursuing it further.
“Well, we’re off to question the boy.”
And that was the last time the police ever came by.

* * *

I was standing there blankly, thinking of all that had happened at Terauchi’s funeral. Haru was waving her hand right in front of my face.
“Hey, you all right? You look really out of it.”
“I’m okay. It’s just that lots of things have happened.”
“When everything’s back to normal come back to the cram school, okay?”
Haru said this gently as she pulled up her loose socks, which had slipped down. “Bye-bye,” I told her, then realized with a wry smile that those had been Terauchi’s last words.

* * *

When I got home there was a letter waiting for me on top of my desk, from some guy I didn’t know. What is this? I thought. I sat down at my desk, gathered myself together, and opened the envelope. Even now, every time I see a sealed letter it gives me the creeps.
Dear Miss Yamanaka,
I’m sure you’re very surprised to get a letter out of the blue from someone you don’t know. My name is Wataru Sakatani, and I’m a student at Waseda University. I used to go out with Kirari Higashiyama and I got your address from her mother. I hadn’t heard from Kirari for a long time, and it was a real shock to hear about this terrible accident. I can’t believe, even now, that she’s actually gone. It’s so sad.
I learned of her death when the police came to my house. They came because the day before she died, I got a call from the suspect. Also, on the day of her death, I was worried about her and called her cell phone. The first call she made was on the hotel’s records, and the call I made the day she died they found on her cell phone records.
I don’t know much about what happened but I somehow feel I’m to blame. I haven’t been able to say this to anyone else (meaning, I don’t think they’d understand—not that I’m trying to hide my mistakes), but I decided to tell you everything.
To go into more detail, I can’t help but think that it was my phone calls that got Kirari into that accident. Or that maybe this all happened because our relationship had gone bad.
I called her cell phone simply because I was worried that something had happened to her, and at first she sounded happy, but by the end she seemed sad. I wanted to suggest that we start going out again, but that weird phone call the day before made me worry she’d changed too much, so I didn’t say anything. I had doubts about her. For a moment I thought I’d call her again, but I didn’t. But if I had called her a second time, if I had asked her to see me again, maybe she wouldn’t have gone with that boy.
I don’t think this kind of speculation is pointless. I’m sure I’ll be thinking about her for the rest of my life. All the what ifs and if onlys…Anyone who says I should stop thinking about these kinds of things doesn’t have burdens himself. Or else is a person who never had a decisive moment in his life. I’ve been thinking about all kinds of things, and I’ve decided I’m going to live with this burden for the rest of my life. I’m sure there will be times when that feeling will be strong, and other times when it isn’t.
When I heard from Kirari’s mother that her good friend Terauchi had taken her life on the same day, I felt very, very sorry for you, Miss Yamanaka. I imagined that, even more so, you must be suffering, wondering
what if.
If that’s the case, then I truly feel sorry for you. As I said before, all we can do is live with our burdens (though maybe you don’t have any). To live and
imagine.
That’s the job left for those of us who’ve survived.
Maybe I’ve said too much. But it helps me a lot to write to you. Thank you for reading what I had to say.
Yours,
Wataru Sakatani
I took out Terauchi’s last letter from my drawer and lined it up with Wataru’s. There was something, I wasn’t sure what, that the two of them shared.
We’re in the same boat. What I mean is, you have to deal with my death.
I’m dealing with it already, I said to her. Bye-bye, Terauchi. Those of us who’ve survived—me, Worm, and Yuzan—will remember you and Kirarin for the rest of our lives. Wataru will remember Kirarin. And the man next door will never forget his wife.
A sudden thought hit me. The next time I go to karaoke, I’m through with using a fake name. No more Ninna Hori. Tears welled up in my eyes, and my name written by Terauchi on the envelope—
Miss Toshiko Yamanaka
—was blurry.