Introduction

1

“Would you like me to tell you about it?”

Mei Misaki’s voice broke the silence. Her willowy fingertip stroked—slowly—down the white cloth of the patch covering her left eye.

“Would you like me to tell you, Sakakibara? A story from this summer that you don’t know about?”

My response was to cock my head. “Huh?”

“A story that you don’t know about from this summer. About another person called Sakaki. That interest you?”

In the twilight haze that was typical of the doll gallery “Blue Eyes Empty to All, in the Twilight of Yomi” of the town of Misaki, Mei’s smile looked a little strained. She seemed to be hesitating, too—and more than a little—even though she was the one who’d brought it up.

“I’ll tell you the story, if you promise not to tell anyone else.”

“There’s another person called Sakaki…?”

“Not Sakakibara, though. This person’s name is Teruya Sakaki.”

She showed me the characters that formed the name. Teruya Sakaki. I’d never heard of the guy before.

“You remember how I was away from Yomiyama for a week before the class trip in August?”

“Oh…yeah. You and your family went to your vacation house at the beach, right?”

“That’s when I met him.”

“This Teruya Sakaki guy?”

“More like, I met his ghost.”

“Say again?” My head tilted to one side again. “His ghost…? So, you mean, like…”

“Mr. Sakaki passed away this spring. He died. So when I saw him this summer, it was his ghost.”

“Er, do you think…?”

“It’s not related to the phenomenon in Yomiyama. Nothing on the level of the casualty in third-year Class 3.” Mei slowly closed her right eye, then opened it again and said, “No, he was definitely a ghost.”

She knew because the “doll’s eye” hidden below her eye patch had the power to see the color of death. That’s how she knew…

A dubious feeling took hold of me, and I darted my eyes from side to side as I breathed in the chill, stagnant air in the display room there in the basement of the Twilight of Yomi.

The phenomenon for this year came to an end the night of the class trip in August, then summer break concluded and the second semester started…It was the end of September, with the season fading steadily toward autumn. I remember it was the afternoon of the fourth Saturday of the month, a day off from school. I had gone to Yumigaoka Municipal Hospital to get the prognosis on the lung surgery I’d had after the class trip, and I was on my way back home.

On a whim, I had decided to visit this place, after so long away.

As it happened, the gallery on the first floor was closed. I hesitated over whether to buzz on the intercom to the Misaki family residence on the top floor, but in the end I decided not to and was starting to walk away when I got a call on the cell phone I had stashed in my jacket pocket—

It was from Mei Misaki.

“Sakakibara? You are outside my house, aren’t you?”

I was startled—how could she have known that?—but she blandly replied, “Just a guess. I just happened to be looking outside…”

“From the third floor? Totally by chance?”

I hastily craned my neck to look up at the building. I could see a wisp of shadow move at one of the windows on the third floor.

“Are you calling from a cell phone?”

“Yeah. I had your phone number written down.”

Mei had told me that she’d thrown her cell phone into the river right after the class trip. But she’d also told me that Kirika had still made her get a new one as soon as she found out…

“Looks like the gallery is closed today, huh?”

“Grandma Amane has actually been sick, for a change.”

“Huh.”

“You want to come in?”

“Oh…um, could I?”

“It has been a while since you’ve come to visit. Kirika—…My mom went out today and everything. I’ll come down and let you in. Be right there.”

2

I think it’s been two months.

If my memory’s not mistaken, the last time I’d been to the gallery was July 27. That day, which was also the anniversary of the day my mother passed away fifteen years ago so soon after giving birth to me, Teshigawara had asked me to come to the café Inoya. I’d come here after that.

That must have been when Mei told me that she and her family had gone to their vacation house.

“My father’s back.”

Mei’s expression had seemed to darken ever so slightly with those words.

“He wants to go to our vacation house with my mother. I’m really not thrilled about it, but this happens every time, so I can’t exactly say no.”

“Where’s your vacation house?”

“By the beach. It takes about three hours to get there by car.”

“Outside Yomiyama?”

Well, yeah. There’s no beach in Yomiyama, is there?…

I’d been waiting a lot longer than Mei’s promised “be right there” when she arrived to wave me into the deserted interior of “Blue Eyes Empty to All, in the Twilight of Yomi.”

With the clatter of a chime over the door, Mei Misaki appeared wearing a black, long-sleeved dress sparsely dotted with blue stitches. Her left eye was covered by an eye patch, as always.

With nothing more than a “come in,” she headed toward the staircase in the back leading to the basement.

As I followed behind her, I noticed Mei was holding a sketchbook under her arm. It was octavo sized, with a dull olive cover.

The sight of the crypt-like gallery in the basement, with its innumerable dolls and doll parts arranged in every available space, hadn’t changed in the slightest from when I’d been there two months ago. The only additions were a table and chairs set in a corner of the room: a small round table painted black and two chairs with armrests and red upholstery.

“Go ahead,” Mei said again, inviting me to sit. “Or would you rather not talk here?”

“No, it’s fine.” I sat in one of the chairs, then put a hand to my chest and took a breath. “I think I’m used to it now.”

“You’re on your way home from the hospital, huh?”

“How could you tell?”

“You told me the other day.”

“Oh. I did?”

I appreciated her remembering. My prognosis had been extremely good. The lead physician had also given me the welcome news that since I’d gone ahead and had the surgery, the risk of a re-re-reoccurrence was extremely small.

Mei sat down in the chair on the other side of the round table and set the sketchbook she’d been carrying down on the table. I looked at the drab olive cover. A “1997” written in tiny numbers in one corner caught my eye, and I murmured, “I thought so.”

“Thought what?”

“That’s not the sketchbook you usually carry. The cover is a different color. Your usual one has a tan cover. Plus this one has 1997 written on it.”

“You’re a lot more observant than most people.”

“Does that mean it’s your sketchbook from last year? Why are you carrying it around?”

She must have brought it down on purpose.

“I thought I’d show it to you, Sakakibara,” Mei replied with a hint of a smile.

I asked, “Is there some extra-special picture in there?”

“I wouldn’t go that far.” Mei let out a short breath, then straightened her posture and raised her eyes. “But I do think it might be kind of meaningful.”

Kind of meaningful? For what?

“Okay, well…”

I’d started to speak, but I couldn’t think what to say next and sat under Mei’s unwavering gaze, at a loss, until she spoke.

“Would you like me to tell you about it?”

Her willowy fingertip stroked—slowly—down the white cloth of the eye patch covering her left eye.

“Would you like me to tell you, Sakakibara? A story from this summer that you don’t know about?”

3

Teruya Sakaki—the other Sakaki.

Mei told me that she’d first met him the year before last, in the summer of 1996. Mei was thirteen at the time. Her first summer break as a middle school student, taken as usual at her family’s vacation house.

“The family of one of my father’s acquaintances lives near there—not that far from our vacation house in Hinami. The acquaintance’s name is Hiratsuka, and we visit each other’s houses and sometimes have get-togethers, kind of like dinner parties…”

I wonder who does the cooking when the Misakis are hosting? The inconsequential thought flitted through my mind.

I doubted Kirika was any good at cooking, and Mei’s abilities were close to zero. So her dad, then?

It didn’t matter at all, but Mei seemed to have read my mind.

“He’s the one who does it…my father on the Misaki side. He seems to like it, I guess since he’s lived overseas so long. But the food is mostly catered, stuff like that…”

Oh. That sounds plausible.

“And then the summer before last, Mr. Sakaki came with that other family. He was Mr. Hiratsuka’s wife’s little brother.”

Mei reached out to the sketchbook on the table, flipped the cover back, and picked up a photograph tucked inside.

“This was taken then,” she said, gingerly handing it to me. I made some noises of solemn acknowledgment, “Hmm, yes,” and dropped my gaze to the photo. It was a five-by-seven-inch color photograph.

It looked like the terrace of the vacation house.

It showed Kirika and Mei, standing there looking bizarrely unchanged despite the fact that the photo had been taken two years ago (though she wasn’t wearing an eye patch)…and there were five other men and women in the picture.

“Where’s your eye patch? You’re not wearing it.”

“My mom told me to take it off when we have guests over.”

Mei had lost her left eye when she was young, and the blue iris of the false eye—the doll’s eye that Kirika, the doll maker, had made specially for her daughter—it probably made Kirika sad that Mei hid it behind an eye patch, given that.

“The person on the far right is Mr. Sakaki. He was twenty-four years old when this was taken two years ago.”

“Which one is your dad?”

“He’s the one who took the picture. So he’s not in it.”

There was an older couple I presumed was the Hiratsukas and a little girl perched between them. A short distance from the couple, on the far right of the group, a slightly built boy stood next to Teruya Sakaki.

Most of the people getting their picture taken were offering the camera an appropriate smile; Mei and Sakaki were the only two not smiling.

“The boy next to Mr. Sakaki is Sou. Mr. Hiratsuka’s wife…her name is Tsukiho. Anyway, that’s her son. He was a fourth-year in elementary school that year.”

So he’s three years younger than Mei and me.

He was a very pale, subdued-looking boy, though not as much as Mei. He had managed a smile for the picture, but there was something forlorn about it. Maybe that was just my imagination.

“Who’s the girl?”

“That’s little Mirei. She was probably three in this picture. She’s Sou’s younger sister, but apparently they have different fathers.”

“So then…”

“Tsukiho remarried with Mr. Hiratsuka. Mirei is the child she had with him, and Sou is the child of her previous husband. He passed away after Sou was born.”

Hrmm. It was kind of convoluted, but not exactly incomprehensible.

“Anyway—”

Mei rested both elbows on the edge of the table and perched her chin on her hands, gazing down at the photo in my hands.

“This was the first time I’d ever met Mr. Sakaki. When someone asked him a question, he would answer, but he didn’t start any conversations himself…He was aloof and hard to please. That was my first impression of him.”

“He looks a little like Mr. Chibiki, don’t you think?”

“I guess.”

“Not like how Mr. Chibiki looked when he was younger. He comes across so different in old pictures from how he is now, you know? This is more like if you took Mr. Chibiki the way he is now and made him be in his mid-twenties. I bet if you put glasses on this guy, they’d look even more alike.”

“…Maybe.”

“So did this Sakaki guy not live with the Hiratsukas?”

“No,” Mei replied, taking back the photo. “Mr. Sakaki has always lived by himself in his Lakeshore Manor…”

Placing the photo to one side of the circular table, Mei seemed to hesitate for a moment, then reached out once again to her sketchbook. She opened it to a page in the middle and showed it to me. “This.” The drawing was—

A picture of a building.

It was a sketch in pencil, but it looked amazingly artistic for a middle school student to have done.

Against a backdrop of forest or woodland, as far as I could tell from looking at the picture, it was a somewhat large, magnificent house. So this was the Lakeshore Manor Mei had just mentioned.

It was a two-story, Western-style building. The walls had clapboard siding, I think it’s called. The windows were basic, tall, and slid open vertically. The roof wasn’t a gable exactly, but instead had a shape where two different slopes met. There were also several small windows in a row just a tiny distance above the ground…

“There’s another sketch of this same house on the next page.”

The composition of this one showed the building from a different angle.

The windows on the second floor were distinctive, different from the rest. They had an elliptical shape with the bottom half cut away at an angle, and there were two of them, on the left and right, in a mirrored pair…They seemed almost like the house’s eyes.

“It kinda reminds me of the Amityville house, you know?”

I found myself giving voice to this impression. Mei cocked her head slightly in confusion, so I asked, “Have you never seen the movie The Amityville Horror? It’s the house in that.”

A frenzied demon house, at that.

“Never heard of it,” Mei replied flatly, her head still tilted to one side.

4

“So this was last summer?”

This question arose because there was a scribble at the bottom right corner of the drawing, saying “8/1997.”

“We went to the vacation house around the same time last year, and when I went for a walk around there, I found this building…and I thought it might be interesting to draw it.”

Mei gently closed the sketchbook.

“It just happened to be Mr. Sakaki’s house.”

“So you ran into Mr. Sakaki last year, too?”

“A couple times, yeah.”

“While you were drawing those pictures?”

“There, too…But the first time I saw him last year was at the seashore.”

“Seashore? But before you called it Lakeshore Manor.”

“Yeah. It’s at a lake…which is actually not that big. Picture more like a pond.”

Mei narrowed her right eye.

“So there’s the sea, and then you walk a little ways from the coast through a small forest, and there’s a pond. It’s called Lake Minazuki…Oh, so I guess it is a lake after all.”

Even after her explanation, I couldn’t really picture it. But then, I wasn’t really familiar with the area.

“Mr. Sakaki had been taking pictures by the sea. I guess that was his hobby. Sou was with him that day, and I was walking by myself along the shore…and so we ran into each other for the first time in a year. He remembered meeting me the year before, too.”

“Huh. So you guys talked?”

“A little.”

About what? I wanted to ask, but decided not to.

I don’t know what it was, but I felt impolite, maybe awkward, asking so many questions, one right after another. I also got the feeling I would get shut down sooner or later—I hate the way you’re interrogating me.

As it happened, Mei continued on her own.

“Actually, Mr. Sakaki was the one who spoke up first. ‘Oh, I see you’ve got an eye patch on’…”

“Mei, was it? We met last year at Mr. Misaki’s house, right?”

Teruya Sakaki walked up to her, his single-lens reflex camera still in his hands, dragging his left leg a little stiffly.

“Are you hurt?” Mei offered.

“Oh, you mean…” had been his reaction, then he nodded slightly and replied, “I was in an accident a long time ago.”

The injuries he’d sustained in the accident hadn’t completely healed, so he still had a limp in his left leg. The accident had happened when he was in middle school. His whole class had been on a bus, and it had gotten hit by a truck…

“What?!”

As I listened, a memory caused my heart to jolt.

“A bus accident in middle school?”

Two years ago, Teruya Sakaki had been twenty-four years old…That’s what Mei had said. So this year he was twenty-six. Which meant he’d been in middle school a little over ten years ago…

“…No way,” I whispered and sucked in a deep breath. “This Sakaki guy used to live in Yomiyama? Are you saying he went to North Yomi for middle school and was in Class 3 as a third-year, and then…No way…”

“The tragedy of 1987.” Mei nodded solemnly. “I thought the same thing when this year’s strategy had started and I was listening to Mr. Chibiki tell all his stories about the old disasters. It made me remember what Mr. Sakaki had said.”

Eleven years ago—in the spring of 1987, the disaster that befell third-year Class 3 on their class trip—the class had gotten on a separate bus and was headed out of Yomiyama toward an airport outside the city when the accident struck on the way there. The driver of a truck in an oncoming lane was asleep at the wheel and rammed into the bus…That’s what Mr. Chibiki had told us.

A total of seven people, students as well as the head teacher, had been killed in the tragedy. Could that really have been the accident that had injured Teruya Sakaki’s left leg?

“So, this summer,” Mei went on in a quiet voice. “When we went to the vacation house and I saw Mr. Sakaki, I wanted to confirm it with him. I thought it was worth it, if there was even a tiny chance he could tell me something that might be useful.”

I can’t believe you! I thought and glared straight into Mei’s face.

How could she do something like that and not tell anyone?

If she had just given me a heads-up even…But I have to acknowledge, it was a very Mei Misaki kind of thing to do.

As always, Mei was utterly indifferent to my high emotion and forged ahead.

“That’s what I was thinking when we left, but Mr. Sakaki had already died. At the start of May of this year. So—”

After letting out a short sigh, Mei casually swept aside her bangs and said, “But I wound up being able to talk to his ghost…So, Sakakibara? Do you want to hear more of this story? Or would you rather not stir up the memories?”

“Um…”

I scrunched my eyebrows together for a second and pressed a thumb against my temple. All the while conscious of a slight low-frequency sound resonating somewhere inside my head, vmm…vmmmmm…

“I do want to hear about it.”

That was my answer. The corners of Mei’s mouth pulled into a smirk and she nodded. Then she started to tell her story.

“Mr. Sakaki died this spring. But they still hadn’t found his body…He’d become a ghost, and he was looking for it.”

Sketch 1

1

It was around the end of July last year when I ran into that girl at the shore, where the Raimizaki lighthouse is visible. I can’t remember the exact date.

Her name was Mei; she was a girl in middle school. I seem to recall that it was the second time I’d met her.

We’d first met a year earlier. The year before last in the early part of August. It was at the dinner party at the Misaki family’s vacation home. My sister Tsukiho had invited me.

She spoke barely a word at the party, limiting herself mostly to mouthing formalities. She was such a fair-skinned girl with a slight build. Quiet and seeming a little sad, she didn’t look like she was enjoying the get-together that night much at all. That’s what I remembered about her.

The most noticeable thing about her at the time was that her left eye was blue. I had heard that her mother, the doll maker, had made a special false eye for her.

That’s why.

The color of her eye, the almost fairy blue, had lingered vividly in my mind…

When we saw each other again last summer, I noticed the patch over her left eye and spoke without thinking.

“Oh-ho. She’s wearing an eye patch now, eh?” I even went so far as to thoughtlessly add, “Why would she cover up such lovely mismatched eyes?”

My nephew Sou, who’d come to visit, asked me, “What does ‘mismatched eyes’ mean?”

The same tone he always used, in the pure alto of a little boy, before the voice changed.

“It means her eyes are different colors.”

After giving my answer, I walked over to the girl.

“You’re Mei, if I recall? We met last year at Mr. Misaki’s house.”

“…Hello.”

She responded in a voice so quiet it was almost swallowed up by the sound of the waves and turned her right eye to look down at my feet.

“Are you hurt?” she asked.

“Oh, you mean…,” I began, then looked down at my left leg and nodded slightly. “I was in an accident a long time ago,” I replied. “Did you not notice it last year?”

“Er…no.”

“My injury never fully healed, so unfortunately I have a slight limp in my left leg now. Not that it hurts, though.”

As I spoke, I tapped my left leg just above the knee to demonstrate.

“It was a terrible accident, actually. I was in middle school. The bus my class was on got hit by a truck…”

The girl angled her head slightly, saying nothing.

“Several of my friends died. So did the head teacher. I was one of the survivors,” I continued.

Again nothing.

“I’m Teruya Sakaki. Nice to meet you again.”

“…Likewise.”

“This is my nephew, Sou…But you knew that. He’s my sister’s—That is, Tsukiho Hiratsuka’s son, but when he’s on vacation, he often comes to visit me…I’m glad we’re so close, but you know, Sou, you need to make some friends at school, too.”

Sou didn’t react to this, but timidly came out from behind me and greeted the girl. “Hello.” Just like the girl, his voice was almost lost in the sound of waves.

A short time later, I felt as if I were rambling endlessly at the girl. About my hobby of taking photos, about the mirages you could see in the ocean here from time to time…

I had a few more opportunities to see and talk to her after that also, but I can’t remember the details. I might be able to bring it back in snatches, but maybe not. Nevertheless—

I do remember making a comment along these lines to her at some point: “Your eye. That blue eye.”

I said it, knowing full well that it was an artificial eye inserted in place of her natural eye.

“With that eye of yours, you might be seeing the same things I am…looking in the same direction.”

At that, she looked back at my face, somewhat startled. “Why?” she whispered. “Why would you…?”

“You know, I’m not sure,” I answered, perplexed, unable to formulate anything more than that ambiguous response—that’s how it seemed. “I wonder why I said that.”

The girl’s name is Mei. Mei Misaki.

I had heard that Mei was written with the character for howl.

The rumble of a mountain. The boom of a thunderclap. Mei Misaki.

It was about nine months after this that I, Teruya Sakaki, died.

2

I don’t mean that I “died” metaphorically. Not “as good as dead” and not “dead at heart.”

I died.

I am no longer alive; I am dead. That much is not in question.

Indisputably, I died this spring—one day at the start of May.

I stopped breathing, my heart stopped beating, and my brain activity stopped for all eternity…and I became what I am now. An existence without the physical body of a living man, and only the consciousness (…soul?) deemed “I.” What you might call a ghost.

I died.

At the beginning of May, getting close to the end of Golden Week. The date was May 3, a Sunday. My twenty-sixth birthday.

It was after eight thirty that night. I believe there was a hazy half-moon blurred into the sky.

I died.

I clearly remember the scene—the sight before me in the very moment that I lost my life, or perhaps just before it slipped away. It forms a vivid picture, complete with a mix of sounds and voices.

I was inside my house. In the spacious foyer with stairs up to the second floor…

I was in the hall of Lakeshore Manor, where I had lived for many years alone. Tsukiho and I had long called this place, doubling as a spacious stairwell, located at the center of the building near the entrance hall, the “grand entry.”

I had collapsed on the hard black floor of the grand entry. I wore black pants and a white, long-sleeved shirt. An ensemble not unlike that of a middle school or high school student.

My body lay faceup. My arms and legs were splayed out, bent at jarring angles. I tried to move but failed completely.

My face was turned sideways. As with my arms and legs, I was totally unable to move it. Something must have happened to the bones in my neck…And then there was the blood.

Some part of my head had split open, and red blood smeared my forehead and cheek. A pool of blood was gradually spreading over the floor. It was a terrible scene.

On the threshold of death, my eyes open wide and glassy—one might say I saw this picture.

Thinking reasonably, you would never expect to be able to see yourself in such a state with your own eyes. There was a simple trick to it.

What I had looked at that day was a mirror hanging on the wall of the room.

A large rectangular mirror taller than a person.

The mirror showed that picture—showed me—as I looked in the moments when my life slipped away. As I lay on the brink of death, my eyes were inadvertently locked on it.

The reflection of my bloody face suddenly transformed.

The contorted, taut expression slackened into an oddly peaceful look, as if freed from pain, fear, and uncertainty…And then.

A faint movement on my lips.

Trembling ever so slightly. It was—

Was I saying something?

Yes. I was…But—

I don’t now know what I might have been trying to say at that moment, or whether I did, in fact, say anything. I also don’t know what I felt or thought at that time. I can’t remember it.

I could hear a sound.

An antique grandfather clock stood in the hall. Its bell chimed once.

It was eight thirty. And as if overlaying that solemn echo—

I could hear a voice.

Someone’s voice shouting faintly.

Calling my name (“…Teruya…”). Ah. I know this voice.

All at once, I noticed.

The sight of myself in the mirror, slipping away. In one corner of the mirror, I could see the reflected form of the “someone” whose voice I heard. It was…

…

…

…And this is where my living awareness cuts off. It wasn’t an out-of-body experience like people talk about so often, but I do believe this was the moment of my death.

Even now, this memory of death lingers so vividly in my mind, but everything before and after is a sprawling blank, as if obscured by a thick fog. The answers to “Why did I die?” or “What happened after I died?” aren’t clear. The “after” part of the “before and after” is more than merely blank…it’s an unfathomable darkness.

Bottomless, empty…the darkness that follows death.

This is how I, Teruya Sakaki, died.

And why afterward, I began this existence—what you might think of as a ghost.

3

When you think about it, it seems obvious, but being a ghost is an extremely unsettling state of being. I’ve learned this from experience.

Ever since my death that night, I’ve had an imperfect sense of time.

And of course, since I don’t have a flesh body, I have imperfect somatic senses.

I can have thoughts, but the supporting memories are extremely vague…Perhaps it would be more correct to say that they’re choppy and vary greatly in intensity.

Nonconsecutive rather than continuous.

Fragmentary rather than complete.

—I suppose that might describe it.

Same with time.

Same with knowledge.

Same with memories. And same with my consciousness.

As if I’m preserving “myself,” barely keeping my balance, while I do my best to string together the nonconsecutive, the fragmentary. As if it could scatter in all directions at any moment, all of it truly eradicated…

I feel this threat keenly, but agonizing over it serves no purpose. All I can do is accept things the way they are now.

Because in any event, I’m still dead.

4

I woke up two weeks after my death.

Which of course is not to say that I came back to life. I noticed that I had suddenly been freed from the darkness that had sucked me in immediately after I died and that there was a “me” here. That’s what I mean by “woke up.”

At first I didn’t know what was going on.

When I woke up, the first thing I became aware of was a certain large, familiar-looking mirror.

The big rectangular mirror hanging in the grand entry. The mirror that had dispassionately shown me drawing my last breath.

All of a sudden, I could see it. Only one or two meters away. Meaning—

I was in front of the mirror. I felt myself “standing” there. And yet—

The mirror in front of my eyes showed not the slightest reflection of me standing there. Even though it showed everything else around me exactly as it was.

I could sense my body.

I felt that I had arms and legs, my chest, my neck, my head, my face—all there like usual. I could even see and touch them with my own eyes and hands. I was wearing clothes, too. Black pants with a white, long-sleeved shirt. The same clothes I’d worn the night I’d died in this spot…

…That’s how I am present in this place.

I could be self-aware.

Regardless, the mirror reflected none of this.

What was going on?

Through intense bewilderment and confusion, I finally achieved a proper understanding of the situation.

That I am present in this place.

But not as one of the living with a physical body. I am one of the dead and have lost my body of flesh.

The body I now felt as “being here” did not actually exist. Neither did the clothes. Surely they were all afterimages of life that only I could sense…And that was why. In other words—for some reason, it seemed that I had woken up here as what people would call a ghost.

I turned my eyes away from the mirror.

There were no longer any traces of the blood from my death on the floor before me. I suppose someone had wiped it up afterward.

I looked slowly around at my surroundings.

The large antique grandfather clock standing to one side of the door leading to the entranceway, the clock that had sounded its bell right before my death—its hands were now stopped at 6:06. They didn’t move. Perhaps there was no one to wind it now that I was dead.

I went up to the second floor.

When I made this movement, I intended to walk up the stairs, but this was presumably also an afterimage of life. As, I’m sure, was the fact that I had a slight limp in my left leg when “walking,” just as I had in life.

When I reached the second floor, a gallery-like path ran almost halfway around the open hall of the foyer.

My library, bedroom, and other rooms were on the second floor. There were also several empty rooms I had almost never used in the many years I’d lived here…so it seemed that the general information about this manor had stayed with me despite my shift to being a ghost.

Suddenly, partway down the second-floor hallway—

My eyes stopped on the wooden banister running along the side facing the open space of the foyer.

It had been repaired, new wood fitted into it, as if it had broken or cracked. It looked very much as if it had been an emergency repair.

I looked over the banister and down to the first floor.

So it had happened right down there. The place I had crumpled to on the verge of death that night. Meaning—

Had I fallen from this spot just moments earlier? And I had hit my head hard, maybe snapped my vertebrae, too…

I groped fearfully through the blank space in my memory where the thick fog gathered. And then…

…A voice (What are you doing…? Teruya?).

Someone’s voice (…Stop it).

Several voices (…Don’t worry about it) (You can’t…Don’t do it!).

It seemed on the verge of coming back to me (…Don’t worry about it), and then slipped away.

I moved down the second-floor hallway. I went into one of the rooms.

It was a bedroom.

Moss-colored curtains were drawn over the window, but the light outside shone through a gap between them, dimly lighting the room.

There was a small double bed. The covers were pulled neatly over it. It looked as if no one had used it in a long time.

There was a small clock on the bedside table.

It was a battery-powered digital clock, and unlike the clock in the grand entry, this one was working normally…2:25 P.M. It showed the date, too. Sunday, May 17.

It was while looking at this display that I finally understood that two weeks of time had passed since my death on the night of May 3.

What had happened in this house that night two weeks ago?

Why and what series of events had led me to a death like that?

The thick fog showed no signs of receding.

I remembered that I had died. But I couldn’t really remember what had happened before or after that. Even I had to admit that an “amnesiac ghost” was pretty funny, but—

Why had I died?

That was when I decided I would answer this critical question.

My vision crackled apart, like a TV screen with a bad signal. Several images floated before me in that moment.

On the bedside table.

A bottle of something and a glass, and also…

Near the center of the room.

Something white hanging there, swaying…

…What?!

What is this?—by the time the question entered my mind, the images had already vanished.

Confused, I murmured, “What on earth…?”

My ears, nothing more than relics themselves, picked up the “voice” issuing from my throat, nothing more than an afterimage of life. In life, my voice had been a rich baritone; hearing the cracking, papery sound that echoed now without any similarity startled me.

Instinctively, both hands went to my throat.

My fingers, only an afterimage, touched my skin, itself an afterimage— Oh. This sensation won’t tell me anything. But…

“My throat,” I tried whispering once again.

My voice was indeed hoarse.

My throat must have been crushed when I’d died two weeks earlier. I’d fallen from the second-floor hallway, may have broken my neck…So, even as a ghost, my voice wouldn’t…

I lingered there gloomily, and the hollow darkness crept back in.

5

Ghosts are said to “appear.”

At graves, for example.

At ruins and abandoned houses, for example.

At intersections and tunnels, the frequent subject of rumors…They appear.

From the perspective of the people to whom a ghost appears, anything these people lack the basic ability to see or feel normally must be a ghost. When they can see or feel them for some spontaneous reason, people are surprised and say the ghost “appeared,” and they’re frightened.

People usually can’t correctly predict when a ghost will appear. Even when they try, they’re often wrong. So most times people are caught unawares. And so they’re scared. I suppose that’s how it works.

However, now that I’d become a ghost, I believed the situation was pretty much the same for the one doing the appearing, too. Meaning that…

A dead person’s spirit (their…soul?) lingering in this world after death is actually an extremely unnatural and unsettling state of being.

It is not continuous.

It is not a definitive ending, but rather a gathering together of fragments, struggling to preserve some sameness.

So—

“I,” as a ghost, will not “exist” perpetually at every hour of the day. I don’t “exist”; I do in fact “appear.”

Absent even this degree of overriding law, without purpose or meaning (so it seemed), from time to time I appear and then disappear. I don’t know how it is for ghosts generally, and there’s no way I could find out, but that’s how it was for me, at least.

I feel like it’s not a very apt metaphor, but it can also be understood using the terms sleep and waking.

When I died and became a ghost, I was usually in the hollow darkness I mentioned before, asleep. I suppose the darkness might have been a threshold between this world and the next. And every now and again, I would wake up and wander through this world. In other words, I would “appear.”

While I was appearing, all I ever thought about was my own death.

Why did I die?

What happened after I died?

I…

The numerous pressing questions of the amnesiac ghost. In addition to which—

A feeling of deep sadness, as if enveloping me entirely…

What was I so sad about?

That was another big question.

What did I have to be sad about anymore?

The fact that I had died?

The twenty-six years of life before my death?

Or maybe…

6

After I woke up on May 17, I’ve occasionally appeared at Lakeshore Manor.

In such times, I wandered alone through a house now devoid of occupants, and while doing so, I firmed my grip on the gradually fading outlines of “myself from life”…

Teruya Sakaki.

I was born May 3, 1972, in the town of Yomiyama.

Male. Single. Twenty-six years old at death.

Yes. That is me.

My father’s name was Shotaro. Shotaro Sakaki.

He was a talented doctor, but six years ago he suffered a severe illness and passed away. It was an unfortunate thing to happen right before I turned twenty. He was sixty when he died.

My mother’s name was Hinako.

She had died suddenly in her mid-forties, much earlier than my father, still young. That happened eleven years ago, during my time in middle school…

My sister Tsukiho was eight years older than me.

Her first husband died quite soon after they were married, and she brought her young son Sou, still one year old, back with her to the family home. That was eleven years ago, too. And then with my mother’s death coming so soon after that…As a result, our family decided to leave Yomiyama.

The first place we moved was Lakeshore Manor.

This mansion, built near Lake Minazuki in the small town of Hinami, was originally a vacation home belonging to my father, Shotaro. So you might say our move here eleven years ago was like an emergency evacuation. In fact, we secured a new house in another area the following year and the family moved there.

It was a short while after my father’s death that I inherited the house and decided to live here. At the time, I was enrolled at a private university in the prefecture, but I decided to use that opportunity to take a break from school. After two years, I finally dropped out.

After that, I continued living here by myself. I never once held a proper job. It was selfishness enabled by the significant inheritance I received from my father.

“I’ve been fond of this place for a long time,” I remember telling someone. Who was I talking to and when was it?

“Dad liked it here, too. It felt like he would take the slightest excuse to come here by himself and stay for a couple days.”

I’d heard that going back decades ago, a wealthy foreigner had built the house in the architectural style of his homeland. My father had just happened to see it and like it, and so he’d decided to buy it.

There was a spacious library in the heart of the first floor, as well, separate from the library on the second floor. Of the thousands of books cluttering the bookshelves (which maybe I should feel bad about), the majority belonged to my deceased father’s collection.

When I was brought to this house as a child, I would always spend many long hours in these rooms of books. While they were packed full of “grown-up books” in every type of field, they also contained many comics and novels that a kid could enjoy, too.

After I became the master of the house, my nephew Sou came to visit often, and just as I used to, he treated this collection of books as his own private library. Even though I would have thought it was tough to come over since it took close to thirty minutes to reach here from the Hiratsuka house by bicycle.

Tsukiho fell in love with her current husband Shuji at first sight and married him the year before my father’s death. She had just become pregnant with Mirei when I started to live here.

Sou…I appreciated his attachment to me, like I was an older brother, but sometimes it worried me a bit, too. I knew he must have some complex feelings about Tsukiho getting remarried and having a little sister with a different father. He was well behaved and introverted but very smart. That alone was reason enough…

“Will you always live here by yourself, Teruya?” Sou asked me once, though I actually can’t remember when. “Aren’t you ever going to get married?”

“Well, I don’t have anyone to marry,” I remember answering, half-joking. “Plus, it’s a lot easier living by yourself. I like this house, and I…”

I…I remember not knowing where to go from there and closing my mouth. Sou was nodding and looking up at my face the whole time.

7

I wonder how the world reacted to my death. Actually, I wonder if my death on the night of May 3 was made public at all.

These were questions I had begun to ask around the latter part of May.

Already half a month after my death, and here was this house believed to have no occupants. And yet the house itself hadn’t died, still felt alive…Perhaps that captures the feeling.

I could hear the sound of the refrigerator running in the kitchen, and once when I appeared, I even heard the telephone ringing.

When I heard the telephone in the grand entry ring, I was in the library on the second floor. It weighed on my mind and so I went downstairs, but of course as a ghost, I couldn’t have answered the phone.

It was the dock for the cordless phone. It had an answering machine built into it, and after the automated message and the beep, the caller’s voice played on the speaker.

“Hey, Sakaki? It’s been a while, just wondering how things are goin’. It’s me, Arai.”

Arai…Would that be with the characters for new well? Or for rough-hewn well?

Groping through my patchy recollections, I teased out a memory. I was sure I’d had a classmate by that name, a long time ago…

Even though I told Sou, “You have to make other friends,” when I was alive—and especially the last few years—I’d had almost no one I would have called a friend.

I don’t think I was a radical misanthrope or anything. I was just somehow terrible at keeping a conversation going to match the other person’s interest or ease their tension, and I never kept relationships going for long…

“I’ll try calling you back later.”

Arai went on. I couldn’t remember what he looked like at all.

“I bet you’re living the easy life, like always. Still, there’s somethin’ I’d like to talk to you about…Anyway, if you feel like it, give me a call. Okay?”

I’m sure that when I was alive, I was seen in the world as “doing whatever he wants, not even holding down a job like a responsible adult.” It sounds different when you say “educated man of leisure” instead, but even setting aside the “leisure” part, I myself wondered about the “educated” part.

Sometimes I would take my hobbyist camera and go on aimless expeditions in the car. When I was taking a break from college, I even wandered all the way to the ocean by myself. And to India in Southeast Asia, and I think somewhere in South America, too, once…But…

But they all felt like distant dreams now, all sense of reality diluted out of them.

What had I been seeking on those trips? The feelings I’d had at the time were totally obscure to me now.

Photos I’d taken decorated the mansion here and there. There were photos of the places I’d traveled to, but there were also more than a few taken nearby. There was also a photo where I managed to catch a great photo opportunity at the ocean of a strange mirage.

8

While sitting (or perhaps “with the conviction that I sat” would be a more accurate phrasing) in the chair at the desk in the second-floor library, I would, among other things, run through my memories of when I was alive.

In one area of the large desk sat an old-style dedicated word processor. But in my present state, I lacked the power to start it up and use it.

For a ghost with no corporeal body, flipping a power switch on machines like this and using them…It seemed I was fundamentally incapable of such actions. Not to say that it was totally impossible for me to touch or move things: I could open a book or notebook, for example, move a door…Those things weren’t beyond me.

I wasn’t sure where the line was drawn, but the latter class of physical actions would probably look to the living like a spiritual manifestation like a poltergeist. That’s the explanation I dreamed up.

“What is this a photo of?” I remembered being asked.

Who had asked me that question? And when?

“On the right there, is that you when you were younger, Mr. Sakaki?”

I at least knew that the other person wasn’t Sou. Sou wouldn’t call me Mr. Sakaki.

A simple, plain wooden picture frame that stood on the desk in the library. The question was about an old color photo inside the frame.

The picture was still on the desk now.

It showed five young people.

Three boys and two girls. The boy on the right in the picture was definitely me. I was wearing a navy blue polo shirt and had my right hand propped on my hip, smiling. I was holding a brown cane in my left hand, but…

It looked like the picture had been taken somewhere near here. There was a lake in the background. Maybe a commemorative photo taken on the shore of Lake Minazuki?

The date the photo was taken was printed in the lower right corner: “8/3/1987.” On the border of the picture frame, someone had handwritten, “Last summer vacation of middle school.”

It was true—1987 had been eleven years earlier. The year my mother suddenly passed away and my family left Yomiyama, and this had been the summer vacation of that year…

Third year in middle school. A fifteen-year-old me/Teruya Sakaki.

The other four people…Yes, they were friends from my class and—

“It’s a photo that brings back a lot of memories,” I think I replied to the question. “Of that memorable summer vacation.”

“Oh yeah?” the other person responded offhandedly. “You look like you’re having a lot of fun, the way you’re smiling in this picture. You look like a totally different person…”

…After playing the memory back to this point, I finally remembered.

That’s right. It was that girl.

The girl with mismatched eyes I’d run into again on the seashore at the end of July last year. When she had come over to this house…

The girl’s name was Mei. Mei Misaki.

She said Mei was written with the character for howling. Mei Misaki—

Sketch 2

1

Ghosts are said to “haunt” things.

The object of their haunting can be a specific place, or a person, or sometimes an object.

For example, when a ghost haunts a house, that house becomes a haunted house. When haunting a person, in the worst-case scenario, the afflicted person might be possessed and killed. Like in the Yotsuya Kaidan, that famous old ghost story. Perhaps the “cursed treasure” that brings its owner bad luck is another example of haunting an object.

There’s plenty of fiction written about ghosts, but none of that is anything more than a product of a living person’s imagination. No one knows, or could possibly know, what an actual ghost is like.

And although I’ve actually become a ghost myself now, that still doesn’t mean I can talk knowledgeably about ghosts in general. The only thing I know about is my own situation…

…Still.

Why did I turn into this?

This continues to bother me.

I don’t think this happens to all the people who die.

What happens to a person after they die? Do they go to an afterlife, like heaven or hell? Or is nothingness the only thing that was ever waiting for us after death?…I decided to set aside such huge questions.

It’s hard to believe that my current in-between state, as unnatural and unstable as it is, could be the norm after death. If the world were so full of ghosts, it would be a big deal…Even as a ghost myself, that’s how it seemed to me.

This in-between unnatural and unstable condition must be a rather unique one to assume after death.

And given that—

Why did I turn into this?

I really couldn’t shake this thought. Which is only natural.

Wouldn’t you expect there to be some fitting reason or cause behind it? It’s impossible to resist the urge to think so.

If I assumed that my/Teruya Sakaki’s ghost was haunting something—

I had the feeling it was definitely a place I was haunting. It was Lakeshore Manor, where I had lived in life and where that life had ended. But—

You might then suppose the only place I could appear was this mansion, but that seemed not to be the case. That, too—

It was the night of May 27.

The first time I appeared anywhere other than Lakeshore Manor.

2

…In a large room facing a veranda.

What had originally been a Japanese-style tatami room had been largely renovated into an imitation of a Western-style combo living and dining room. A high-quality carpet was spread over the floor, on which were arranged a black-painted dining room table and chairs. Several plates and bowls piled with food were set on the table. A table set for dinner.

Three of the living were in this place at the time.

Tsukiho Hiratsuka—i.e., my sister.

Her two children—i.e., the older brother Sou and the little sister Mirei.

The image of the three of them sitting around the dinner table was reflected in the glass of the door to the veranda. Suddenly, I realized I was looking at it.

After a brief moment of bewilderment, I realized Aha. For some reason, without warning, this time I had appeared here, somewhere other than Lakeshore Manor.

“Here” being the Hiratsuka house, where Tsukiho lived.

Although also in Hinami, the house was in the long-standing town center, rather far from the Lakeshore Manor built in the vacation home/resort area. But I had visited it several times during my life. I also remembered this combo living and dining room.

Why had my/Teruya Sakaki’s ghost suddenly manifested here—in the Hiratsuka house—tonight?

The glass door acted as a mirror, reflecting the three figures of the mother and her children. There was no other human figure visible in it. Regardless—

I was positive I was there.

By myself to one side of the dining room table. From there, I took in the sight of the room.

I watched the three people’s faces and movements.

I listened to their voices and conversation. And yet—

Not a single one of them noticed my presence there. To them, the living, the figures of the dead (a ghost) were fundamentally invisible.

A clock hung on the wall.

It was seven thirty P.M. The night was already dark outside.

The clock also showed the date.

Wednesday, May 27.

May 27…Ah yes. I’m sure that was the date.

I slowly dredged a memory back up.

Today, I was sure, was Tsukiho’s…

“Mommy, Mommy!” Mirei said to Tsukiho. “Where’s Daddy? Where’s Daddy?”

“Daddy’s at work, honey,” Tsukiho answered gently.

“At work? Why is Daddy always at work?”

“His work is very important. That’s why.”

Simply put, Shuji Hiratsuka, whom Tsukiho had married seven years earlier, was a businessman from an old family of the area. He was a hotshot who had broadened the business from its origins in real estate and construction.

He was a full twelve years older than Tsukiho, but for some reason he had chosen her for his spouse, despite the fact that she’d already been married and had a child. The details of that were none of my business.

“But today is your birthday, Mommy,” Mirei said.

She would be six this year. She was a young child not yet in elementary school, but she already had a surprising command of the words she spoke.

“He’s not going to celebrate it with us?”

That’s right—May 27 is Tsukiho’s birthday, and also…

“But we always celebrate together,” Mirei persisted. “We do it for Daddy’s birthday, and my birthday, and Sou’s birthday. We put candles in a cake and sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to you…”

“That’s true. But today is a little different. Daddy can’t come home.”

“Whaaat?” Mirei sounded unhappy. “What about the cake? Are we having cake?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t buy any cake today.”

“Whaaaaat?” Mirei looked even more unhappy.

To one side, Sou stayed silent through it all. I couldn’t see his face from where I was, and so I looked at his expression in the reflection of the glass door.

I suppose his face could be called expressionless.

It could also be taken as dispirited, and he looked as if he were intently hidden away in a shell…

“What about Uncle Sakaki?” Mirei asked Tsukiho. “Last year Uncle Sakaki came and celebrated with us, right?”

“Oh…”

At that, Tsukiho showed some faint dismay.

“You’re right, he did. But Teruya said he can’t come today, either. I think he went on a trip somewhere recently.”

Went on a trip? She can’t mean that—

I died that night!

I died, and now I’m here. I became a ghost and appeared here.

I wanted to argue, but I abandoned the idea almost right away. Even if I were to “give voice” to these thoughts and say them aloud, no one would be able to hear me.

A TV standing on a media cabinet was turned on. It looked like a fantasy anime for girls was playing, and finally Mirei turned her attention to that and stopped sulking.

Sou stayed expressionless and silent the whole time. He wasn’t even particularly touching his food.

“Are you all right, Sou?” Tsukiho asked him worriedly. “You don’t want to eat any more?”

“…No,” Sou replied in a quiet voice I wasn’t quite sure I actually heard. “…May I be excused?”

“Do you feel up to going to school tomorrow?”

At this new question, Sou shook his head slightly from side to side, not speaking.

3

When Tsukiho finished clearing the table, she spread a newspaper over it and began reading.

Mirei was quietly watching TV.

Sou was sprawled on the sofa in the living room but was still as silent as ever, with nothing resembling an expression on his face…

None of the three showed the slightest sign of noticing my presence in the room.

No matter how I chose to act right now, none of them would see me, and no matter what I said, none of them would hear. It sounds obvious, but now that I had become like this, I was simply not there to them.

Even so—

Why had Tsukiho said that I “went on a trip”?

I had lost my life in the grand entry of Lakeshore Manor the night of May 3. I had fallen from the second-floor corridor and died. And yet—

Did Tsukiho not know that?

No. She had to know.

Tsukiho must have known.

She must have known that I’d died there that night…(What are you doing…? Teruya?)

When I had looked over the hall railing that showed signs of having been broken and down at the first floor, a memory had seemed to swell back up in my mind. Several voices I had heard that night (…Stop it) (You can’t…Don’t do it!).

I thought that yes, that had been Tsukiho’s voice.

And the other voice answering her (…Don’t worry about it) had probably been my own.

Meaning—

On the night of May 3, Tsukiho must have been there and witnessed my death. So then why…?

It wasn’t just Tsukiho.

I went to stand beside Sou, who was sprawled out on the sofa, and looked down at his face.

Sou—you were there, too, that night…

“…Whatever,” Sou murmured. He said it with such perfect timing that it seemed as if my thoughts had reached him and he had responded to it.

“I don’t know about it. I don’t know anything. About anything…”

“What’s wrong, Sou?”

Tsukiho looked over at him in surprise.

“What’s wrong? Why are you…saying those things?”

It must have looked to her as if he had started muttering to himself for no reason.

Without answering, Sou got up from the sofa. He walked over to the table and turned his gaze down to the newspaper Tsukiho had spread open on the table.

At this point, a relatively large headline in the local news section caught my eye.

That’s what the headline said.

“Wha—? What happened?” Tsukiho’s dismayed reaction. “This article? What about it?”

She had just tilted her head to one side when a weary “oh” escaped her.

“Yes, Teruya used to go to Yomiyama North Middle…”

Tsukiho turned back to face Sou.

“Did Teruya tell you about it?” she asked. But—

Sou remained silent and only gave an ambiguous tilt of his head.

4

The article in the morning edition on May 27.

The “accident” announced in this headline transpired as follows.

It happened the previous day, May 26, in the middle of midterm exams. A third-year student, Yukari Sakuragi, was notified that her mother had been in a car accident and was hurriedly leaving school when she fell down a stairwell of the building, sustaining major injuries that led to her death. The same night, her mother also passed away at the hospital, which she had been transported to.

Reading this article, if Tsukiho or perhaps Sou had sensed something more in this straightforward announcement of an unfortunate accident…

The main reason would have been the name of the school: Yomiyama North Middle. And then the fact that the dead student was a third-year student. It would probably have been these two things.

As Tsukiho said, I had once gone to the same Yomiyama North Middle (abbreviated “North Yomi”). Eleven years ago when my family and I had left Yomiyama, I had been a third-year in Class 3, and…

…I remembered.

My memories of it still remained. I could remember it clearly.

The secret passed on to third-year Class 3 at that school. The undeserved calamities that befall those with ties to the class.

Tsukiho, too, had remembered. While reading the article over again, she must have noticed the school name and realized the connection.

But what about Sou?

“Did Teruya tell you about it?” Tsukiho had asked, and I would have expected Sou to answer yes to the question. Yes, I remembered telling him the story at some point.

All the times I had told Sou stories of my youth when he had come over to visit, despite the not-insignificant hesitation I felt, still I had…

“You moved out of Yomiyama because of that?” Sou had asked me that day, his face slightly fearful.

“Yes…I suppose we did,” I think I replied, lowering my eyes. “We were scared. I was, and so was my father. So we ran. We ran from Yomiyama and moved here.”

5

Since that night, I had started to occasionally appear places other than Lakeshore Manor.

Sometimes inside the Hiratsuka house where Tsukiho and the children lived, sometimes places nearby in their neighborhood that I remembered. Even at Lakeshore Manor, my appearances weren’t limited to inside the house. During daylight hours, I might leave the building and go for a walk in the yard, or I might suddenly appear in the woods nearby or on the shore of Lake Minazuki.

And there was a fact that I discovered for myself while all this was going on.

Apparently it was not yet acknowledged in the wider world that I/Teruya Sakaki was dead.

My death on May 3 had not been made public. The situation was being treated as if I were still alive and had wandered off on a trip somewhere, just as Tsukiho had told Mirei.

What did this mean?

I had definitely died that night.

I had died and become this ghost.

And yet, the world at large didn’t know I had died. Why was that?

There was only one answer I could think of. Namely—

A cover-up.

6

“…How is that going? All right?” Shuji Hiratsuka asked.

“…Yes,” Tsukiho answered in a low voice. “For now…I think it is.”

“The story is that he went off on a trip by himself, correct?”

“Yes. That’s what I’ve been saying.”

“And everything is all right at his mansion, too?”

“The utility bills are automatically drafted from his bank, so there shouldn’t be any problems for now…Same with the phone. I told the newspaper some story, and they stopped the deliveries, too…”

“No one in the neighborhood goes by there. And he doesn’t really have any friends who would drop by.”

“…No.”

It was right at the start of June, one night when I appeared in the Hiratsuka house, that I overheard this discussion between husband and wife. I had been walking by myself down a long, dark hallway of their sprawling old home and happened to pass by the sitting room where the two were talking.

Hearing their conversation through a sliding paper door, I came to an abrupt stop and strained to listen. Now I was a ghostly eavesdropper, I supposed.

“…How is Sou looking?”

That was Shuji asking. Even with his much younger wife, he spoke in this polite way.

After a short sigh, Tsukiho replied, “Still the same. He’s practically shut himself up in his room. Sometimes I call for him and he won’t come out…”

“Well, I suppose there will be no helping that for a bit.”

“But when I ask him about what happened that night, he tells me, ‘Whatever.’ Or ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’ or ‘I don’t remember.’”

“—Is that so?”

Shuji Hiratsuka was a businessman, but on the other hand, he’d had an unorthodox career, having once studied at a medical university and becoming qualified as a physician. In that way, he had maintained a connection with his late father Shotaro, who had been a talented doctor. Apparently that had been the connection that brought him and Tsukiho together.

“He doesn’t appear to be getting weaker physically, is that correct?”

“—No.”

“I’ll look for a good opening and have a talk with him myself. If necessary, there’s a specialist I’m on good terms with, so I can consult with him.”

“It must have been such a shock to Sou…”

“Of course it would be. But…we’re agreed, are we not, Tsukiho? You do understand?”

“—Yes. I understand.”

My eavesdropping had led me from the doubts I’d been harboring toward conviction.

Despite knowing about my/Teruya Sakaki’s death, they—at the least, Shuji and Tsukiho Hiratsuka—were trying to keep others from learning of it. For some reason, they were trying to cover up what had happened on the night of May 3.

7

My/Teruya Sakaki’s death was being covered up.

It was being hidden from the public eye.

Which of course would mean that no funeral had been held, and my corpse had not been cremated or interred.

—So then what?

The question rose up unavoidably at this point.

What had happened to me after my life had ended in the grand entry of Lakeshore Manor on the night of May 3? What had been done to me—or rather, to my corpse? Where had it been taken, and what state was it in now?

When I started thinking about such things—

I began to think that the reason I had turned into this after my death might lie there.

A corpse given no funeral rites and left unburied after death.

A corpse whose current condition and whereabouts were unknown even to (the ghost of) its former occupant.

…That was why.

Because of such a unique situation, I must have gotten stuck in this world after my death in this unnatural and unstable existence.

In which case…

If that were the case, then I…

8

“You know, this lake is half-dead.”

I remembered having this conversation.

It was mid-June. I spoke spontaneously, while standing on the bank of Lake Minazuki and gazing for a long while out at its deep green surface.

“You could say it’s a double-bottomed lake. The water quality is divided into an upper and lower layer—a shallow layer and a deep layer. The upper layer is fresh water, and the lower layer is brackish.”

“What’s ‘brackish’?”

The person I was talking to cocked their head slightly.

I explained that brackish water was low-concentration salt water created by mixing fresh water with seawater.

“Salt water is heavier, so it sinks to the bottom, and over years and years, the oxygen in it dissipates completely. Plants and animals can’t live in deoxygenated water. So the bottom half of the lake is a world devoid of life. That’s why the lake is half-dead.”

“Half…dead.”

The other person repeated those words.

And then she carefully removed the white eye patch that covered her left eye. Yes—the other person was that girl: Mei Misaki. We had been talking, gazing out at the lake surface from this place on the shore.

“Hey,” I said, seeing her movement. “Why are you taking off your eye patch?”

“—Just felt like it,” she answered curtly.

She wore a woven straw hat with her summery white dress. Red sneakers on her feet. A small rucksack was slung over her shoulder, and she held a sketchbook under her arm. Her outfit came vividly back to me.

It was…last summer.

I think it was at the beginning of August. A couple days after we’d met on the beach at the end of the previous month. Sou had come over to visit me, and he spotted her with her sketchbook open where she had installed herself in the shade of the trees beside Lakeshore Manor. She said she hadn’t known it was my house, that she had been wandering the neighborhood and found the house by chance and had wanted to try drawing it, or something along those lines.

I had gone out to the lakeshore, so Sou brought her over to me…

“Do you like drawing? Are you in the art club at your school or anything?”

The girl didn’t answer any of these questions, but ran her eyes over the surface of the lake and said, “I had no idea there was a lake this close to the ocean.”

“You didn’t know about it?”

She didn’t answer.

“There are two other lakes near here actually. Together they’re called the Three Lakes of Hinami. They’re pretty famous.”

She had nodded slightly but continued to scan the surface of the lake, and so I’d said to her: “This lake is half-dead, you know.”

9

“I like this better than the ocean.”

I recall Mei Misaki saying that at the time. I had remembered it.

Early in the midsummer afternoon. But the sky was slightly cloudy and the sunlight was gentle. A breeze blowing in off the lake added a chill.

“Why?” I asked.

“People always say, ‘But the ocean’s right over there…’ Very few people bother coming here to relax. If anything, this is an unpopular, neglected spot.”

“The ocean—” As she responded, Mei slowly closed and then opened both eyes, her right and her left. “The ocean is too full of living creatures. So I prefer this.”

“Hmm.”

And—yes—I’m pretty sure it was after that when, a short while later, I said these words to her: “Your eye. That blue eye.”

With her eye patch off, I was looking at the strange blue of her false eye.

“With that eye of yours, you might be seeing the same things I am…looking in the same direction.”

“Why?” She was the one to ask the question this time. “Why would you…?”

“You know, I’m not sure.” I could only offer this ambiguous response. “I wonder why I said that.”

After a pause, she murmured, “If you’re like me…then I’m not sure that would be a good thing.”

“And why is that?” I followed with another question, and reaching up to lightly cover the blue iris of her left eye with her hand, she shook her head quietly.

“…It just is.”

Mei Misaki.

I had heard she was a second-year middle schooler living in Yomiyama. Meaning that this summer would mark the start of her third year…

I wondered which school she went to.

The thought started to bother me, and almost simultaneously I shuddered as a chill went down my spine. Even as a ghost.

Was it possible—that her middle school was Yomiyama North Middle? And was it possible that she would be in Class 3?

That she was in the same class as that student, Yukari Sakuragi, whose death had been reported in the newspaper?…

…

…

“…It’s not impossible,” I muttered to myself in a rasping croak of a voice.

Sketch 3

1

June passed and July began…The seasons turned toward summer, and all sorts of things changed in all sorts of ways as time rolled on, while I remained unchanged.

In this unnatural, unstable “state of existence” as a ghost, continuing to linger noncommittally in the world of the living in a half-formed way, every once in a while appearing without any set cycle or regularity.

At Lakeshore Manor or somewhere nearby.

In the Hiratsuka house or that neighborhood.

I also appeared in places that didn’t fall into any of those categories. On a seaside path on a rainy day or on the grounds of a dilapidated temple whose name I didn’t know…

And yet no one noticed these frequent apparations. Not a single person.

What could possibly be the reason I had become this way?

I felt as if I already knew the answer to this question. I wouldn’t say I was 100 percent positive, but it seemed plausible.

I don’t think, for example, that I held a grudge against someone or that I held on to some lingering attachment or regret about some task that I had failed to complete. Even as an amnesiac ghost, I would expect to have at least a tiny awareness of it if such strong emotions were at the root of this—and yet.

I felt no malice toward anyone in particular.

And I didn’t have any good guesses about what I might have left unfinished—I don’t think.

All I had was a feeling of sorrow overlying my entire self, profound and yet undefinable…

…That’s why.

Thinking about it, I feel sure the cause is the fact that I remain “unmourned.”

I died, but my death is unacknowledged by anyone, and no funeral or proper burial has taken place. Not only that, but not even I know where my physical body (read: corpse) is or what happened to it after I died. In such an unjust situation, I suppose I will continue on this way.

Which would mean…

2

When I appear somewhere, even if I try to touch someone, they never realize I’m there. I suppose some people might get a feeling, but it isn’t clear-cut.

Ghosts have a lot of problems—is that really what this boils down to?

Suppose I was a vengeful spirit with a violent malice at the root of my existence: I would probably haunt the person I hated and end up trying to kill them. I suppose that sort of ghost has characteristics that make it easy to detect its presence, i.e., easy to spot. These are examples of the pointless things I wound up thinking about.

In my case, I was presumably a different kind of ghost. In basic terms, no one was aware of me or saw me. To say nothing of the fact that I wasn’t trying to haunt or kill anyone specific, not that I even could. No matter where, when, or how I appeared, I was utterly “not there” to people.

All I could do anymore was accept it and think, So that’s how it is…As July started, the feeling of surrender was gaining ground inside me.

For example, I thought about possibly kicking up a fuss reminiscent of a poltergeist to draw attention. But even if I was to try that, I don’t think my message (Teruya Sakaki died and turned into a ghost, and I’m right here!) would come across very clearly. It seemed like it would just get confused for petty tricks. I felt worthless. Of course Sou and Mirei wouldn’t get it, nor would Tsukiho or Shuji, who seemed to be covering up my death…

There was only one avenue left to me now.

Something that might have some meaning if I tried it. That being—

To find my body, presumably.

My body, which had fallen to its death in the grand entry of Lakeshore Manor on the night of May 3. My body, whose death I knew had not been properly mourned and which I knew had not been properly buried.

Where was it now? What state was it in? If I could just find that out…, I thought.

If I could just find that out and see the body for myself, to be able to directly experience my own death in a form so undeniable…

If I could do that, then maybe.

Maybe then I would be freed from my current existence.

3

That being the case—

I started to conduct a search for my body each time I appeared.

I didn’t imagine it would be at the Hiratsuka house or anywhere nearby. The place it seemed most likely to be was Lakeshore Manor or the surrounding area.

With that in mind, I decided that every time I appeared, I would search every conceivable hiding spot with purpose.

First up was everywhere inside the house.

Each room on the first and second floors. In the attic and in the basement. The bathrooms and powder rooms, of course, as well as storerooms and closets and inside various wardrobes. The ability to exert physical influence seemed to depend on the time and location, and there were limits on the range and extent of that influence, but I was able to open and close doors and drawers without difficulty.

There were several rooms with locked doors on the second floor, but these posed no problems to me since I lacked a physical flesh-and-blood body. The mere desire to enter brought me inside. I also went to the attic and basement. I even peered into the depths of an old fireplace that had long gone unused. Nevertheless—

In the end, my body was nowhere to be found within the house…

The next place I looked was the garage built on the grounds, adjacent to the house.

Ever since becoming a ghost, I had yet to go back into the garage. On its face, it was a one-story “shed” made of wood with a timeworn appearance, which I had used in life to park my car and store my tools.

The car was still there, as I had left it.

It was a white station wagon that I won’t claim was cared for impeccably. I didn’t own a moped or bicycle. One reason being the old wound to my left leg, so I had only ever used four-wheeled vehicles.

The car wasn’t locked, and the key was hanging on a pegboard in the garage. Just as I had done in life.

The driver’s seat, the passenger seat, the backseat, the storage space…in all it was the same: My body wasn’t there.

I searched every nook and cranny of the garage, including under the car. But still I found nothing…

It wasn’t in the building.

So then outside, I suppose. In which case, the boundaries expanded endlessly.

The front and backyards on the property. The surrounding woods. The lakeside. It could even be in the ground or in the lake. Even leaving aside the forest, there was always the ocean. Thinking about it sent me into a tailspin.

I had nothing resembling a clue to follow.

In essence, this was an issue tied to “what happened there on the night of May 3 after Teruya Sakaki died?” As it happened, even after becoming a ghost, the very same Teruya Sakaki/I didn’t know. The situation was utterly absurd. The blank, like a thick fog rising over the events before and after my death, I continued to regard with bitterness—

I reviewed my questions.

Why had I died in the first place?

What had happened after I died?

Since these questions remained just that, there were limits on what I could do. At least I could try expanding the range of my search, centering on Lakeshore Manor…

On the other hand, I also had a sense that, well, there isn’t any particular rush about it, either.

Because it wasn’t going to change the fact that I was dead.

Of course, I wouldn’t call my current state a pleasant one, but nor did I have any confidence about what might happen if I were to find my body. I could handle the vague idea of it, but when I considered whether or not it was what I truly wanted, I became somehow uncertain…

…Still.

“When a person dies, I feel like they can connect in some way with everyone.”

Ah…what is this?

Oh yes, this is something I said to someone sometime in the past.

“Who is ‘everyone’?”

When they asked me that, I believe I answered, “I mean everyone who died before them.”

…And yet.

Even though I was dead, I was completely alone here. Stranded in this unnatural, unstable existence.

I don’t want to be like this forever—I know that some part of me felt this way, too.

4

As it neared the middle of July, I happened to be there again when the phone in the grand entry rang.

“Sakaki? Hellooo? You still not there?”

After the machine picked up, a man’s voice I remembered hearing before played on the speaker.

“It’s me, Arai. Have you been gone this whole time or what? I guess you didn’t get my other messages.”

I got them two months ago…but, well.

His tone implied I tried calling a couple other times, you know. Although certainly I seemed to recall that in that call two months ago, it sounded like there was something he wanted to talk about.

“I guess you’re on a long trip? That would be a major problem for me. I can’t remember if you have a cell phone or not. I hope you can try and pick up on this SOS from an old buddy.”

Wish I could, but…sorry, there’s not much I can do about it now. Not to mention that the way I am now, I still can’t really remember what this “old buddy” even looks like.

“I say it’s an SOS, but well, kind of like that other time, I was hoping you could help me out. After all, back in northyomi (?), we went through it all together…Right?”

I thought, Wha—?

We went through it all in northyomi?

I guessed “northyomi” was “North Yomi.” Yomiyama North Middle abbreviated to North Yomi. Where I had gone until partway through my third year, eleven years ago…

So Arai was a classmate from back then?

From North Yomi…in third-year Class 3 that year?

“Anyway, when you get this, could you call me? Please, Sakaki, babe.”

Once he hung up, I went straight to the library on the second floor.

An old friend named Arai…I still couldn’t remember if his name was written with the characters for new well or rough-hewn well, but I thought maybe…

The photo standing on my desk in the library…the commemorative one taken during the summer break of 1987. Maybe one of the people in that photo is him, I thought.

5

They say it started in 1972.

Twenty-six years ago looking back from today and fifteen years ago looking back from when I was a third-year in middle school eleven years ago.

At the start of that school year, a student named Misaki in third-year Class 3 of North Yomi died.

Misaki was a popular kid, beloved by everyone. None of the students wanted to accept such a sudden death, and…

“They said, ‘Misaki isn’t dead. Misaki is still alive, sitting in the classroom right over there.’ All of them started to pretend like that was true. The head teachers did it, too, and they kept the act up all the way to graduation apparently.”

I remembered telling Sou about the old legend.

It was after graduation that strange things started to happen. They say that the figure of Misaki, who couldn’t possibly have been there in reality, showed up in the class’s group photo taken in the classroom after the graduation ceremony.

“A photo of a ghost?” I remembered Sou asking, his head cocked.

“Something like that, anyway. Although I never saw the photo myself,” I replied before continuing with the story.

“They say that became the trigger. And the year after that, strange…or I should say, terrifying things started happening in third-year Class 3.”

It didn’t happen every year. There seemed to be “on years” and “off years,” and in an “on year,” the number of people in the class would go up by one without anyone ever noticing. No one could tell who the “extra person” was. There wouldn’t be enough desks and chairs at the start of the semester, so they could tell the number of people had increased. And then—

“In years where an extra person was in the class, calamities would befall the class.”

“Calamities?”

“It means misfortunes, or accidents. In other words…people would die. Every month, someone related to that year’s third-year Class 3…”

Whether it was an accident, or an illness, or suicide…There were many ways to die, but every month at least one person with ties to the class would die. People with ties to the class included the students and head teacher and also included their close relatives. This would continue until the day of the graduation ceremony.

“Was that—?”

Even when I explained, at first Sou cocked his head in confusion again.

“Was it a curse?”

“A curse…Well, some people say it is. But it doesn’t mean that the extra person who infiltrates the class is the vengeful spirit of the student named Misaki. According to the legend, the extra person is supposed to be a casualty…someone who died in a previous year’s disaster. But that person doesn’t do anything bad themselves. So I think it’s a little different from a normal curse.”

“Did that—?” Sou looked more and more troubled. “Did that happen for real?”

“Have I ever lied to you, Sou?”

“But…”

“It really happened.” I replied with a serious face. “I experienced it myself eleven years ago. In third-year Class 3 at North Yomi…”

The number of desks and chairs in the classroom was wrong, and there was a group of people who started panicking about it being an on year…In April, first one student’s grandmother died. But since that was the death of an elderly person caused by illness, there were a significant number of skeptics who treated it as an unfortunate coincidence. But then—

“At the start of May, we had our school trip, and as the bus was heading to the airport, just before we left the city limits of Yomiyama, the bus got in a huge accident.”

At that, I pointed to my left leg, which still bore the scars of the injury I’d sustained in that accident. A short gasp escaped Sou. His expression transformed from confusion to terror.

“Several of my classmates died in that accident. So did the head teacher, who was riding with us. We were all…everyone in the bus was covered in blood…It was a terrible accident.”

I sighed and slowly shook my head. Sou was looking at me wide-eyed, as if he might start crying at any moment.

“I was hurt badly enough to be hospitalized, and it took a whole month before I could leave. But when I was finally able to go to school, the disaster next struck my own family. You were only a year old, so you wouldn’t remember what happened in the middle of June that year…”

My mother Hinako’s death.

She had gone shopping by herself and suddenly collapsed, and by the time she was transported to the emergency room, it was already too late. The cause of death was listed as heart failure, but according to my father Shotaro, she had been in perfect health. He couldn’t believe she would die so suddenly and became skeptical. Of course, he grieved and was filled with sorrow, too.

I had been unable to say anything before, but faced with that, I revealed the secret of third-year Class 3 to my father. Breaking the commandment passed on to the class—that indiscriminately telling other people about it would bring worse calamity down on us.

I suppose the bus accident in May and my mother’s sudden death in June were both disasters visited on third-year Class 3. I’m sure of it.

If the legend of the class were true, then the disasters weren’t over yet. Someone with ties to the class would die the next month, and the month after that, and the month after that…all the way until graduation. It could be me or my family—maybe my father or my older sister Tsukiho.

“My father—your grandfather—was a doctor, and doctors are scientists, so he didn’t believe me right away. But I begged him so desperately…and I’m sure with the bus accident and my mother’s sudden death, even my father couldn’t help but feel something abnormal was going on…”

“Is that why you moved away from Yomiyama?” Sou asked, his eyes wide.

“That’s right,” I replied, lowering my gaze.

“We were scared. My father and I both were. So we ran. We fled Yomiyama and moved here.”

When I transferred schools and the family left Yomiyama, then of course we would be able to escape the disasters. That’s what we thought. So…

We cleared out of our house in Yomiyama and moved here to Lakeshore Manor, like an emergency evacuation. That was right after the start of July.

That month, one of the students in third-year Class 3 at North Yomi jumped off the roof of the school building and died.

6

These words were written on the old color photo in the standing frame. I stood in front of the desk on which it rested, gazing down at it once again—

“What is this a photo of?”

I remembered being asked this question last summer, in this same spot, by that girl—Mei Misaki.

“On the right there, is that you when you were younger, Mr. Sakaki?”

Five people standing with the lake in the background.

Facing the picture, the boy on the far right with his hand on his hip was definitely me. On the date printed in the photo—“8/3/1987”—a fifteen-year-old Teruya Sakaki.

“It’s a photo that brings back a lot of memories,” I said in answer to her question. “Of that memorable summer vacation.”

“Oh yeah?” she responded offhandedly. “You look like you’re having a lot of fun, the way you’re smiling in this picture. You look like a totally different person…”

I’m sure I do, I now remember thinking at the time. Because I don’t think I smile this way very much now that I’m an adult.

“It’s because I was with really good friends,” I think I answered at the time. “We were all classmates in middle school.”

…Yes.

That’s right: Everyone in this photo, we were all friends in third-year Class 3 that year at North Yomi…

“My dad took the picture for us,” I remembered adding, though she hadn’t asked.

“Grandpa was there?”

A voice came from one side. It was Sou.

I recalled that, unusually, Tsukiho had brought both Sou and Mirei over to visit that day. I could hear the sounds of Mirei frolicking with her mother downstairs.

“Yup,” I replied, turning to look at Sou. “Back then, Grandpa lived in this house, too, and so did you. Although you were just a baby.”

“Did Mom live here, too?”

“Of course she did. It must have been hard for her looking after you back then.”

I seem to remember that the girl listened to us talk in silence, her right eye, without its eye patch, crinkling with a smile.

7

I looked anew at the commemorative photo taken during the summer break eleven years ago. Then I ran through the faces and outfits of the four people in the photo other than myself.

Two boys and two girls.

The two boys were on the left side, and the two girls were on the right side. I/Teruya Sakaki was standing on the right edge of the group with a noticeable gap between the two girls and me. I was holding a cane in my left hand, probably because the injuries to my leg still hadn’t healed three months after the accident.

The boy on the left was tall and lanky and was wearing a gaudy Hawaiian shirt, exuding an unmistakable air of “off to summer holiday!” He had his right hand thrust forward with a thumbs-up and was grinning broadly.

Beside him, a boy wearing a blue T-shirt was comparatively short and chubby, his face ridiculously serious behind his silver-rimmed glasses. His arms were crossed in front of his chest, and his lips were twisted a little grouchily.

One of these two was the Arai who’d called me. But which one was it?

I stared at their faces.

Then I reached out for the picture frame with both hands and tried to gently pick it up. It lifted. Exerting this level of influence over an object this size wasn’t difficult.

I felt like the impression I’d gotten from his voice and way of talking matched the Hawaiian shirt kid on the left more. But…argh, I don’t know. I couldn’t remember which of them was Arai, nor the name of the one who wasn’t Arai.

I shifted my gaze to the two girls.

The one on the left wore a light blue blouse with a tight, white skirt. She, too, was short and wore silver-rimmed glasses, but her short haircut and delicate features seemed to suit her. She was flashing a peace sign and smiling slightly, but her expression betrayed a trace of nervousness.

The girl on the right was slender and about the same height as I’d been at the time, dressed in denim pants and a beige shirt. She was holding down her long hair, which was being teased by the wind, while also flashing a peace sign with a relaxed smile…

…No, I still had no idea.

I returned the frame to its spot and lowered myself into the chair at the desk. I slumped against the back of the chair.

These people had been good friends of mine, and yet…And yet I could remember nothing about them. Not their names, or personalities, or their voices, or how they talked.

“It’s a photo that brings back a lot of memories.”

The words I had spoken in response to a question from Mei Misaki that day last summer echoed very distantly, somehow hollow, in my ears that were themselves nothing more than a “relic of life.”

8

I casually opened a drawer of the desk without any particular purpose.

My eye happened to fall on something while I slumped in the chair, and truly unintentionally, I reached out a hand toward it. It was the lowest, deepest drawer.

Several partitions divided the interior, in one section of which rested a row of several thick notebooks. The notebooks…No, they were store-bought diaries. Seven-by-ten daily planners sold at bookstores and stationery stores toward the end of every year.

They were arranged in the drawer with their spines upward. The spines were printed to read, for example, “Memories 1992”…

…That’s right. I remembered now.

I had started keeping a diary every year in this room. I did it when the mood struck me or when it seemed necessary, and the majority of it was dashed-off notes, so writing by hand had been much more convenient than starting up the computer.

The first volume was from six years ago. The year my father passed away and I inherited this mansion and took up residence here.

That was Memories 1992, followed by Memories 1993, Memories 1994, and so on in order.

I thought, If I could pick these up and read them…

All the different memories that I had lost or that had faded since I became a ghost might come back a little bit…But no.

Before that, I need to— I thought, peering into the drawer.

First would be the new diary.

May 3 of this year, the day I died. If I had written something down before that night, then I might find a clue to why I died.

As it happened—

I couldn’t find that crucial volume, Memories 1998, in the drawer.

…Why not?

I was stymied for a moment and looked around the room.

Maybe on the desk? No.

The bookshelves on the walls, which were full of books and notebooks. Maybe there? No.

I opened all the other drawers in the desk, too. But I couldn’t find the planner for 1998 in any of them…

Maybe I hadn’t been keeping a diary for this year? But why wouldn’t I be? I couldn’t remember what I’d written, but…I remembered writing in it. In this library. At this desk.

“Your eye. That blue eye.”

I don’t know why the words I’d spoken to that girl on the shore of Lake Minazuki suddenly came to mind.

“With that eye of yours, you might be seeing the same things I am…looking in the same direction.”

The same things as me?

In the same direction?

What did that mean…?

Several images flashed suddenly before my eyes when I stood up from the chair.

It was something I’d glimpsed the first day I’d appeared in this mansion, when I’d come up to the second floor and gone into the bedroom…

First of all—yes—it was on the bedside table.

Now I could see it clearly. It was more than an image; I should probably call it a “vision.”

A bottle and a glass.

The bottle probably contained whiskey or some kind of alcohol. And—

Beside that was a plastic pill case with an open lid. Several pale capsules had spilled out from inside…And then—

There had been one other thing in the center of the room.

Something white had been dangling from the ceiling, swaying. Oh—it’s…

It’s a rope.

A white loop had been made at the end of the rope, just big enough for a human head to slip through…

This is…

This looks exactly like…

……

…A voice (…What are you doing?).

Someone’s voice (What are you doing…? Teruya?).

I could hear (…Stop it) (…Don’t worry about it) several voices.

One was Tsukiho’s (You can’t…Don’t do it!).

One was mine (Don’t worry about it…) (It’s…too late for me)…

……

……

…My face just before death.

The face reflected in the mirror in the grand entry, stained with blood.

The contorted, stiff features suddenly slackening into an oddly peaceful look, as if freed from pain, fear, and uncertainty…And then.

A faint movement on my lips.

Trembling.

Words were coming out of my mouth. Wringing out my strength on the precipice of death, some words were…What? What could those words have been…?

What was I trying to say?

They were just barely inaudible. Just barely impossible to read. Just on the edge of communicating…Argh—what could I have been trying to say?

Something clattered, and the vision fell away.

I looked over and saw the picture frame had fallen onto the floor. Had I knocked it over without noticing?

I tried to pick it up and return it to the desk. Just then—

I saw the back cover of the frame had come off. The fastener holding it seemed to have loosened with the impact of the fall, which knocked it free.

That was when I noticed something. There was a scrap of paper between the photo and the back cover of the frame.

What is this? I wondered, taking the paper in my fingertips.

On the scrap of note paper, much smaller than the photo, was handwriting. Written vertically in black ink, it was a list of names—five last names.

The one farthest to the right said “Sakaki,” and I understood immediately.

This was a note listing the last names of the five people in the photo, written in the order they appeared in the photo. I had made a note of it.

I saw the name “Arai,” with the characters for new residence, farthest to the left.

Ah, this was it.

So it hadn’t been new well or rough-hewn well, but rather new residence. Just as I had imagined before, the boy in the Hawaiian shirt all the way to the left was Arai.

My eyes ran over the other three names, too.

I saw that the two girls were, from right to left, “Yagisawa” and “Higuchi,” and the other boy was “Mitarai”…However.

In the next moment—really, almost instantaneously, I couldn’t help but notice it, compelled to it. I noticed and couldn’t help but goggle.

A slight distance below the names, in slightly faint ink, I saw an “X.”

There were two of them.

One was below “Yagisawa.” The other was below “Arai.” And—

Below each of the Xs, small words explained the meaning of the symbol.

“Dead.”

Sketch 4

1

There are things called “crow days.”

Several crows, maybe dozens of crows, which you typically don’t see very many of around here, gather around a house. They perch on the roof or trees in the yard, occasionally cawing, one after another. The number of other wild birds and birdcalls drops dramatically, maybe because they’re afraid.

There are a few days like that each month, and I’ve always called them crow days.

Why do they all get together on those days? Maybe there’s some reason or something sets it off, but I don’t really know.

Crows have an image as a sinister bird, but I most definitely do not hate these crows.

They scavenge in trash bags in the city, so I guess they cause problems, but crows are living creatures, so if they know there’s food in there, of course they’re going to go after it. I’ve also heard that they fly after kids in parks and stuff and peck at their heads, but they don’t do anything like that here. They just caw noisily, and I don’t particularly hate them for that.

Actually—

I took care of an injured crow once, a long time ago.

I treated its wounds as best I could, then put it in a cardboard box with a blanket in it and put that in the garage…I meant to look after it until it got better, but unfortunately it died pretty fast. Before there had been any time to tame it or even give it a name.

I buried it in a corner of the backyard. I made a tiny grave marker for it from a scrap of wood.

I made the marker, a misshapen cross. It’s still there.

Actually…

After the incident with the crow, I tried several times to keep animals as pets at this mansion.

Not dogs or cats, but lizards or frogs I caught in the yard or insects like praying mantises or crickets…The only mammal I ever had was a hamster. I also received a pair of finches that I tried keeping as pets.

At one point, with the finches, I remember I couldn’t stand keeping them locked up in the birdcage anymore, so I let them out. None of the other animals had very long lifespans, and they all died.

I buried them all in a line next to the grave marker I had first put up for the crow. Making the same tiny marker every time I buried one.

Thinking back on it, I wonder if I was doing that to see the thing called “death” in a living creature with my own eyes, to touch it and experience it up close…to try and discover what it meant. I suspect that’s what it was.

2

It’s possible that my own body is now buried in the earth.

Somewhere in the yard of this mansion, for example, just like those creatures I buried. Or maybe somewhere in the surrounding forest…?

With this thought, I carefully scanned the ground on the property. Looking for any signs that the earth had been dug up and reburied. But I never spotted anything clearly indicative of that…

I can’t deny the possibility that I simply overlooked it. But if the burial spot were somewhere outside the property, it would be utterly beyond my power to search for it…

(…here)

Out of nowhere, there came a voice. A fragment of a word.

(at least…here)

What was this?

What could it be?

(…in this house)

Surprised, I tried to catch it…But it slipped through the fingers of my mind and vanished…

(…forget)

Ah…Whose voice was this?

And when?

(everything…that happened tonight)

The answer was just on the cusp of being understandable.

The meaning so close to being visible.

(…you need to forget)

Smothered by a foggy sense of discomfort, my thoughts came to a stop.

3

Wednesday, July 17.

Sometime after the schools of the world had gone on summer break. On this day, just past noon, I appeared at Lakeshore Manor.

The sky was slightly cloudy and not particularly summery, despite it being the height of the season. The sunlight was blunted, and the wind only lukewarm…Yes—and it was a crow day.

I could tell this from the voices of the group outside. Because it was not just a single cry, but the overlapping, resounding cries of several birds.

Ah, a crow day, I thought and peeked outside from a window in the second-floor library. An eastern-facing window with no curtains.

As I looked over the trees in the yard, as expected, I saw the coal-black forms of the crows perched on the branches. That alone was probably close to ten birds.

There were also several on the roof and eaves of the first floor, directly below the window. I couldn’t see them from here, but I was sure there were several more on the second-floor roof, too.

A sky burial—the term came to mind unbidden.

A custom in some country or other, where in order to bury a dead person, the body is exposed in a field and the flesh is picked at by wild birds until only the skeleton is left.

It didn’t seem likely, but could it be that my body, its whereabouts still unknown to me, had been left in a field somewhere and become food for the crows…?

Suddenly captive to such unpleasant thoughts, I gazed out the window at the crows for a long while. That was when—

I heard a harsh sound of a different character than the cawing of the crows.

What was that? Where had it come from?

I looked out a different window and saw the source of the sound.

Below a large magnolia tree at the outskirts of the front yard. There was a human figure picking up a bicycle that had fallen over…

Even at a distance, I could see that the person was wearing a white dress and a straw hat. Exactly like that time last summer we had stood on the shore of Lake Minazuki and talked…It was—

Mei Misaki?

Was it her?

If so, why? Why had she come here now?

Now that it was summer break, had she come back with her family to their vacation home? That was probably it, but even so…

When she moved away from the righted bicycle, she put a hand to the brim of her hat and looked up in my direction, then started walking toward the front door of the house. I didn’t know what she was hoping to do, but she had obviously come to visit me/Teruya Sakaki.

At length—

Downstairs, the doorbell rang.

I was at a loss, but finally went down to the foyer. But there was no way I could answer the doorbell here. Even if I was to respond, she wouldn’t be able to hear my “voice,” and if I said nothing and opened the door—if the door opened on its own and there were no one inside—she would be terribly surprised.

I moved smoothly up to the door and peered outside through the peephole. But there was no longer anyone there. So she’d given up and gone home…

…Should I chase after her?

The thought came to me on the spur of the moment. But—

What would I do when I caught up to her?

What could I do in my current state?

In the end, I did nothing—could do nothing—and went back to the library on the second floor.

Scanning outside through the window, I didn’t see any figures anywhere. The crows were still scattered here and there, and one crow perched right next to the window spread its black wings wide and let out a Ka-kaaw.

4

With a vague sigh, I turned to the desk in the library. I sat in the chair and stared at the photo frame on the desk.

The photo of August 3, 1987—eleven years ago. The photo from the last summer of middle school that brought back so many memories…

The four people in the photo besides me were Yagisawa, Higuchi, Mitarai, and then Arai. Yes—they had been my friends in Yomiyama. My classmates in third-year Class 3, I remembered.

That summer eleven years ago, almost as soon as the vacation started, they had come to visit me at this mansion…or rather, had fled here.

Even if they hadn’t transferred schools and ceased belonging to third-year Class 3, when they went outside the city of Yomiyama, they could evade the “disasters.” That rule had been passed down to us. And so…

Why not come here and be together, at least for summer break?

I had invited them.

And they had come.

We had spent the month until summer break ended at this same Lakeshore Manor. Knowing the situation, my father understood my feelings and had let them stay for that long visit.

As a result—

During summer break, none of them were visited by disasters. Although we heard that some of the people with ties to the class who had stayed in Yomiyama had died in August…

…These are the memories from eleven years ago that I had so far managed to dredge back up.

I took the note out of the frame and set it beside the frame.

Our five names were listed on the paper. Two of them—Yagisawa and Arai—had “X Dead” below them, which presumably meant that the disasters had befallen them sometime after they returned to Yomiyama in September when summer break ended and before graduation.

Of the four who’d gone back to Yomiyama, Yagisawa and Arai had died because of it. I had gotten the information at the time and written it down in this note. No doubt in the desolate mood indicated by the writing.

And yet…

What were those phone calls about?

The “we went through it all together back in North Yomi” phone call had been from Arai. “Arai” was this Arai, and he was supposed to have died a long time ago, and yet…And yet, how could it be?

I hadn’t gotten any more calls from him since then, so the mystery remained just that, but…

Speaking of mysteries, the mystery of the missing diary in the desk drawer also remained.

Where had Memories 1998 disappeared to? Had I myself gotten rid of it for some reason? Or had someone taken it away?

Heaving another sigh, I languidly rose from the chair. Just then—

“Mr. Sakaki.”

I suddenly heard a person’s voice from downstairs.

“Mr. Sakaki, are you here?”

What?

Was this her—Mei Misaki’s—voice?

“You are here, aren’t you Mr. Sakaki?”

What was she doing inside the house? Hadn’t she given up and gone home?

Had she come in through the back entrance? Now that I thought of it, that door was often left unlocked…Was that it?

I should have gone to see what was going on, but for some reason, I was locked in doubt. Actually, it would be more correct to say I was flustered by this unexpected development.

I stood rigid beside the desk, not moving a single step, and held my breath. Despite the fact that I was a ghost and there was no need to do any of this.

After a while—

I started to hear the intermittent slap of footsteps. She had put on slippers and come into the house.

“Mr. Sakaki?”

Every now and then she would call out, her voice drawing gradually closer with the sound of her footsteps.

“I know you’re here, Mr. Sakaki.”

I could tell she was coming up the stairs. If she had gone so far already, might she come into this library…?

“Mr. Sakaki?”

At last, I heard her voice nearby. Probably right outside the room.

The closed door was pulled open, outward into the hallway. And then—

Mei Misaki came into the room.

5

The desk was just to the left of the door, facing the far wall of the room. At that moment, I was standing in front of it.

A large display shelf rested against the wall facing the door, offset slightly to the right. Just at that moment, a clock above the shelf chimed.

It was something my late father had been fond of: A door below the faceplate opened and a white owl flew out and hooted to tell the hour. It was a battery-powered owl instead of cuckoo clock. The hour it tolled was one o’clock in the afternoon.

Her attention apparently captivated by the clock, Mei Misaki came to a stop as soon as she’d stepped into the room and looked straight ahead at the shelves. She did not turn toward me. Of course she didn’t. Because I was a ghost, something living people couldn’t see.

“Oh—”

She made a small sound.

“…A doll.”

She took a step, then two, toward the window to the right, as viewed from the door. She walked as if entranced by the far shelf facing her.

She had murmured correctly: There was a doll in the center of the shelves. A doll of a girl swathed in a black dress, about fifty centimeters tall.

“That’s…”

Mei Misaki’s voice once again escaped her. She seemed utterly fascinated by the doll for some reason…

The next moment…

Two events occurred almost simultaneously.

The first was that Mei Misaki moved.

With a short exhalation, she removed the eye patch covering her left eye.

The second happened outside the window.

A sudden, powerful gust of wind shook the glass of the eastward window. An instant later came the cawing of the crows outside.

Kaaw! Ka-kaaw! The many voices jumped over one another, then the flapping of many wings added to the cacophony. The crows that had been perching all over the yard leaped into the air as one.

From my position, I could see the shapes of the flock cutting past the window, black wings spread wide. I was sure Mei Misaki had an even clearer view, standing as close to the window as she was. And then—

It happened immediately after these two events.

With a start, Mei Misaki turned around and looked in my direction.

Her gaze turned directly onto the place where I stood before the desk, and she cocked her head curiously. The eye patch she had taken off dangled from her left hand, and it was then that I noticed it had gotten quite dirty with mud or something.

“Why?”

Her lips moved very slightly.

“Why…are you in a place like that?”

She wasn’t talking to herself. Her words could only have been a question posed to someone standing in front of her, so—

“Huh?” I “said” it reflexively, despite myself. “Can you really see me?”

“Yes…I can…,” she replied, her right eye narrowing smoothly. There was a cold light in the false blue of her left eye.

“…Why?” I was the one to ask the question this time. “Why can you see me? And you can hear me, too, can’t you?”

“Yes…I can…”

“Even though I’m a ghost.”

“…A ghost.”

Mei Misaki cocked her head again.

“Teruya Sakaki died, and I’m his ghost, but— No one has been able to see me or hear my voice up until now. But you can?”

“He died…”

She tilted her head further to the side and took a step closer to me.

“Mr. Sakaki…you died?”

“Yes, I did,” I replied, my “voice” a terrible croak.

“Really?” she asked, and I replied emphatically: “Yes, really!

“The story seems to be that I’ve gone on a trip, but…in reality, I died at the beginning of May. In the foyer on the first floor of this house. After that, I became like this. A ghost…”

My existence acknowledged by no one, unable to talk to anyone, of course…passing the time after my death until this moment in an unnatural, unstable, lonely state.

“…I didn’t think you could see me. No one can see me in this form. But then, why can you see me? Why can you hear my voice?”

“It’s…”

She started to say something, then trailed off and looked hard at me for a long moment.

Then she deliberately lifted her right hand and covered her right eye with her palm. Her left eye, still exposed—the vacant blue iris that should have been blind—she kept turned on me for another long while, never once blinking…

“Your eye. That blue eye.”

The words I myself had spoken to her that day last summer cut through my mind.

“You might be seeing the same things I am…”

Why had I said something like that to her that day? The same things as me, the same direction as me…Ah. It was—

What was it? The question repeated itself, and as if in answer, a single word rose within me, accompanied by an eerie, unsettling trembling.

It was—

Death.

6

“How did you die, Mr. Sakaki?”

With a short breath out, Mei lowered the hand covering her right eye.

“You said it happened in the foyer on the first floor, but…was it an accident? Or what?”

“Even I don’t really know,” I replied honestly. “I remember the scene from when I died, but the memories just before and after that aren’t clear. I don’t even know what happened to my body after I died or where it is now.”

“Was there a funeral? A grave?”

“That’s what I’m saying…For some reason, a funeral was never held and I was never interred in a grave.”

“…”

“So I think that’s probably why I’m like this. That’s why I’m sure…”

A strong wind rattled the glass of the window once again. Looking outside, the sky appeared to threaten bad weather. It might start to rain soon.

I looked back at Mei Misaki’s face as she stood opposite me.

Even knowing that I was a ghost, she didn’t appear particularly frightened or unsettled and only blinked her right eye as if slightly befuddled. She now removed her hat and pursed her small lips.

After a moment, she opened her mouth to begin: “Umm,” and at exactly the same time I spoke up, “More importantly—”

“More importantly…what?”

She deferred, urging me to continue.

“More importantly—” I plunged ahead. “Your left eye.”

“Wha—?”

“Does that eye have some sort of special power maybe?”

“Why do you think that?”

“Well—” I replied with my exact thought. “Normal people can’t see me or hear me when I talk…And yet, you can. Could that be because of your left eye?”

“Is that what you think?”

“Yeah. Remember, a little while ago, as soon as you took off your eye patch? As soon as you took off the eye patch and exposed your left eye, you noticed I was here—you were able to see me. So…”

“Mmm.”

Holding the brim of her hat against her slight chin, she said, “Yes, I suppose that could be true. Does it bother you?”

“Well…”

“Hmm.”

She puffed out her right cheek ever so slightly. A faint, dubious smile seemed to creep over her lips. And then she spoke.

“I’m a bit different. Especially this doll’s eye. I’m not like normal people…Even if I explained, you wouldn’t believe me, though.”

“So I was right…”

“With that eye of yours, you might be seeing the same things I am…”

…The same things.

Looking in the same direction.

“Why is your eye patch so dirty?”

“Before, I was…”

She pouted her lips, looking uncomfortable. Then suddenly she pointed at the display shelf at the back of the room.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Huh?”

“That doll. It wasn’t there when I came last year.”

As she spoke, she crept closer to the shelf. She brought her face close to the tiny white face of the doll, which wore a black dress.

“There was a doll expo in the town of Soabi at the end of last year…”

Somehow, I managed to drag the memory forth.

“…I liked this one very much, so I bought it.”

“I see. It was nice of you to buy it, Mr. Sakaki.”

“Oh?”

“Did you know it’s one of Kirika’s?”

“Kirika?…Oh, that’s right.”

I remembered now.

“That’s your mother’s professional name, right? She’s shown me some of the ones she has at the vacation house…After that, I found this at the expo and I wanted it very much.”

“…Hmm.”

She tossed her head in a nod, then turned back to me and dropped her head to the side. “But—

“Mr. Sakaki, you died, right? At the start of May, in that big foyer on the first floor?”

Both her eyes—the slightly narrowed right eye and the blue left eye—were trained on me unwaveringly.

“I probably fell from the second-floor corridor and broke my neck or something,” I replied automatically. “I found repairs to a broken spot in the corridor railing. That’s why I think I fell from there.”

“What about the reasons for your fall?” she asked, but I shook my head languidly.

“That…I can’t really remember.”

“An amnesiac ghost, huh?”

Underscoring Mei Misaki’s words, a strong gust of wind shook the window glass yet again. Low and far away, there was a sound like thunder.

“…I’d like to hear more,” she said abruptly, taking two or three steps toward me.

I grew flustered (despite being a ghost!), and a feeble “Huh?” slipped out of me.

“There must be things you remember or that you’ve recalled. I’d like to hear more about even just those things. Tell me.”

“Uh…Uh, right.”

I assented nervously, then spilled a torrent of words on her. Every little thing that had happened since I’d died and become a ghost…As if a barrier had been broken.

I think— Yes, I think I must have been very lonely and very sad these three long months.

Interlude

“…That was how I met Mr. Sakaki’s ghost this summer. Afterward, that same day, he spent a really long time telling me all the details.”

“You had that long of a conversation with a ghost? Face-to-face?”

“Yup. Rain was falling by the time we finished talking…When I was about to leave, he told me I could take the umbrella at his house, but I said no. I don’t mind the rain, after all.”

“Hmmm. Even so.”

“Something bother you about that?”

“Well, of course it does. I just can’t believe—that a ghost…”

“You don’t believe in ghosts, Sakakibara?”

“Well…”

“Maybe you don’t want to believe in them?”

“It’s not whether I want to believe in them or not…Oh, but hey, on the class trip, didn’t you say…?”

“There are ghosts all over the place in horror novels and movies, no? And tons of stories about people who actually saw or talked to them.”

“Well, okay, but…Actually, no. Novels and movies are just works of fiction. And most of the ‘true stories’ are fakes.”

“And yet, the truth is that I did meet him.”

“Hmmm. You don’t really hear about amnesiac ghosts very often, I guess.”

“No?”

“In novels and movies, there’s the ghost detective genre…But those are made-up stories. In those, the victim of a murder becomes a ghost and tries to find out who killed them or what really happened to them. The movie Ghost could, broadly speaking, be put in that category.”

“—Never saw it.”

“Ghost is such a blanket term—there are so many different kinds. And the ones in Japan are really different from the ones in other countries. The classical Japanese ones are all, ‘My wrath shall be avenged!’ And they don’t have feet…Did this guy? This ghost you met?”

“Feet?”

“Yeah.”

“He did. Two feet, just like normal. He wasn’t floating or anything, either.”

“Ghosts also differ in whether or not they can exert a physical influence. Since they’re noncorporeal beings, they can’t be touched by anything, and they can slip right through doors and walls and go wherever they want. And then they contrast this ghostly image by opening and closing doors or moving chairs and tables at haunted houses. Those are some other tricks ghosts can pull…The stories are supercontradictory, so even though we call all of them ghosts, they all have some particular specialty, I guess you could say. As far as the ghost you met…”

“Is appearing once in a while kind of weird?”

“Oh yeah. Now that you mention it, the fact that he’s aware of it himself seems kind of weird. The ghost you met can exert a certain amount of physical influence, right?”

“Opening and closing doors or pulling diaries out of drawers is about it…but yeah.”

“But he couldn’t answer the phone.”

“And he couldn’t use the computer in his library.”

“But he could go into a locked room.”

“…That’s what he said.”

“In any case, what did this guy die of? All this stuff about alcohol and medicine and rope hanging from the ceiling…The stuff he mentioned seems to be hinting at suicide.”

“He said the immediate cause was falling from the second-floor corridor and breaking his neck or something like that.”

“And that observation, to notice your left eye—it’s, I don’t know, pretty insightful of him.”

“That’s true. Insightful and thought provoking.”

“When he said your doll’s eye was seeing the same things as him and looking in the same direction as him, he had figured out that was death, right? In other words, he had been constantly looking at death. He had been entranced by it. Do you think we can interpret it that way? So he…”

“He ended his own life?”

“Or at least he was thinking about it. And then he actually did die.”

“…”

“And then there’s the question of why his death was covered up. By his older sister Tsukiho and her husband Mr. Hiratsuka.”

“…”

“They might have hidden his body somewhere. I wonder if that’s what it is. Anyway, Mr. Sakaki’s ghost was looking for it, right? Even he doesn’t know where it is.”

“Yeah. It sounds like he was upset about it for a long time, in his own way.”

“That’s a weird touch, too. Or at least unusual. Typically, a ghost would know where its body is, and a really common trope is for them to appear so that they can tell someone, ‘It’s over here, please come find it’…Although that’s in fictional stories. Like in that old horror movie classic, Changeling.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Urk— Oh.”

“Still, a bunch of things happened that day that bothered even me.”

“Like what?”

“When I went to visit Mr. Sakaki at his Lakeshore Manor, the front door was closed and no one came when I rang the bell…But when I went around to the back entrance, it was open and I could just walk right in.”

“That was pretty bold of you.”

“I was thinking someone would be there…”

“But when you went up to the library on the second floor, you ran across a ghost, huh?”

“Something like that.”

“You saw him as soon as you walked into the room and took your eye patch off, right?”

“—Right.”

“So all of a sudden, this thing you hadn’t seen just popped up?”

“…Pretty much.”

“Did it surprise you?”

“—Yeah.”

“I guess that would startle anyone.”

“There were a lot of factors.”

“Let’s see…There are a ton of mysteries, just from what you’ve told me so far. Mysteries about Mr. Sakaki’s death, and what happened to his body of course, and other troubling details…”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“…Well?”

“Hm?”

“Tell the rest of the story.”

“—You want to hear it?”

“How can I not hear the rest? Hmmmm…I wonder what it was like at the time. The story was that Mr. Sakaki had gone on a trip? Were Tsukiho and her husband really hiding the truth?”

“—As it turns out, yes.”

“So then…”

“But I’m going to tell the story in order.”

“Oh…sure.”

“So with everything the way it was…I decided to do something about it.”

“Meaning what?”

“I thought, I need to see if this is true. The ghost was appearing at places he had a connection to in life, not just at Lakeshore Manor, so I thought there was a chance. And I wasn’t really thrilled about it, but I asked Kirika and two days later…”

Sketch 5

1

On that night of May 3, as I lay on the verge of death, the movement of my lips…

What I had seen reflected in the mirror in that moment often rose vividly to mind and nothing could quiet my anxiety.

What had I been trying to say?

What had I said?

My face spattered in blood. The contorted, taut expression slackening suddenly…and then—

At first, my mouth opened slightly, as if in a gasp of surprise. But—I think—it was just open; I wasn’t able to say anything.

Then, my lips moved ever so slightly.

The movement was slight and trembling, but this time words came out…I’m sure of it. The sound of the words, my voice, was barely audible…

No matter how hard I try to remember, even now I continue to feel tantalized impatience, the words just on the verge of hearing, just on the verge of seeing, just on the verge of reaching me…Now, finally, it’s…

…The first word I’d spoken.

I feel like it was “tsu.”

And the second was “ki.”

And then my lips moved again. There was no sound to accompany it, but the round shape of my lips—like the vowel o…

…Meaning?

The last sounds I spoke that night were “tsu” and “ki.”

“Tsu” and “ki”—that could be tsuki, the word for moon. And it’s true that there was a half-moon in the sky that night. But that didn’t seem to be related at all. So then what did it mean?

“Tsu” and “ki” may not have been the entire word I’d been trying to say.

It was only a part of it, not the entire thing. There had actually been more, but I hadn’t spoken it. That thought led me to…

The round shape of my open mouth—forming the vowel o. So I could have been saying “o,” “ko,” “so,” “to,” “no,” “ho,” “mo,” “yo,” or “ro”…But…

What if I had been saying “ho”?

“Tsu” and “ki” and “ho”—“Tsukiho.”

Tsukiho—the name of my sister.

That night, I might have been trying to convey the name Tsukiho. But why would I do that, lying on the verge of death…?

…

…

…With a faint, almost uneasy smile on her face, Tsukiho had said, “You’re right, he did. It seems my brother has been off on a solo trip since the spring.”

“Where did he go?”

The person asking had been Kirika. She was Mei Misaki’s mother, as well as the craftswoman who had made my doll of the young girl in the black dress. She was a few years older than Tsukiho, a woman with majestic features.

“I’m not sure…”

Tsukiho had cocked her head to one side, never losing her smile.

“He’s been like that for a long time. He’ll just take off without telling a soul where he’s going. And he’ll be gone for long stretches at a time…I suppose you could call it wanderlust.”

“He sounds as if he enjoys his freedom.”

“There have been so many times when I thought he had come back for a while, and he’d be off again to some foreign country or other. So you might say that we’re used to this sort of thing from him.”

No, that’s not what happened—that’s not true.

I wanted to stamp my foot, listening to them talk.

That’s not what happened this time.

I died and turned into a ghost, and I’m here…

…It was at the Misakis’ vacation home.

In their spacious living room where bright sunlight streamed through lace curtains. The house was built beside the sea, the windows thrown open to let the breeze in, so the sound of the waves outside was constant. There were also the sounds of seagulls or some other seabirds calling.

At Kirika’s invitation, Tsukiho had come over with her two children for afternoon tea. I had appeared right in the middle of it. As if stepping down into the scene.

There were six people seated around a large table, on which glasses for drinks and snack plates were arranged.

They included Kirika’s invited guests Tsukiho, Sou, and Mirei. From the Misaki family, Kirika and Mei. Mr. Misaki—Mei’s father—was also there. Apparently he was in the same age range as Tsukiho’s husband, Shuji Hiratsuka, but he seemed much younger than Shuji and had a sort of athletic cheerfulness about him.

“We really do appreciate the invitation, but unfortunately my husband had a prior engagement…I do apologize.”

Mr. Misaki waved off Tsukiho’s explanation. “We’re here on vacation, but I’m sure your husband is very busy. I heard that he’s in the prefectural assembly now?”

“Yes, that’s right. People were just so insistent, and I suppose he’d made up his mind to do it, too.”

“He’s a man of so many talents, it’s only natural people would turn to him. The election was at the beginning of autumn, was it?”

“Yes. Somehow he pulled through.”

“It must be very difficult for you, as his wife,” Kirika said.

“Oh no, there isn’t really anything for me to help with…”

“Actually, we invited you over today at Mei’s request.”

“Really! Mei wanted me to come over?”

“She suggested it out of the blue, that she wanted to see everyone. And asked us to be sure to include Teruya, too…Isn’t that right, Mei?”

With attention now turned on her, Mei Misaki replied with due politeness.

“Yes, it is. Kirika told me so many interesting stories about Lakeshore Manor last year…”

“Oh-ho. Is that what it was?”

This from Mr. Misaki. He smiled, stroking his sparse mustache.

“Yes,” Mei answered, again with all due politeness.

“Now that you mention it, you visited the mansion last year, didn’t you, Mei?” Tsukiho asked. “I happened to be over at the same time. Along with Sou and Mirei…”

Tsukiho’s eyes crinkled suddenly. It looked to me as if she were holding back tears, but the members of the Misaki family seemed not to notice and she quickly pulled herself together.

“I’m very sorry that Teruya couldn’t come.”

“When do you think Mr. Sakaki will be back?” Mei asked, and Tsukiho once again set her head to one side with a faint smile.

“Who can say? He really is so fickle and unconstrained.”

“Um…have you tried reaching him by cell phone or anything?”

“Teruya doesn’t have a cell phone. There still isn’t much signal out at that house.”

“This area seems to be out of cell phone range, according to the telecom companies.”

This from Kirika.

“Oh. I see,” Mei replied, nodding. Her gaze, which had alternated between Tsukiho and Kirika, now slid off to one side and stopped on a certain spot.

A space behind where Mirei and Sou sat beside each other in chairs. Straight at the spot where I had appeared this time.

She wasn’t wearing her eye patch. I sensed a strange light in the blue iris of her left eye for a moment. So that’s what it was. She could see me again today.

2

“But, Mei, what happened? Why are you wearing that bandage?” Tsukiho asked.

I suspected that she wanted to change the subject, but it was true that Mei had a bandage around her right elbow.

“Oh, I was on my bicycle yesterday and just…,” Mei answered. “It’s not that bad.”

“She was practicing,” Kirika supplied, amending Mei’s response.

“Oh, Mei. Do you not know how to ride a bike?”

“I was thinking it must be embarrassing at this age and offered to get her private lessons, but, well,” Mr. Misaki amended further. “Oh, but you know, there’s no sense forcing the issue, eh? Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. Right, Mei?”

Looking toward his daughter, Mr. Misaki laughed loudly. Mei was silent, her face a blank—but she didn’t particularly look like she was sulking, either.

“Meiii! Meiii!”

Standing up from her seat, Mirei walked over to Mei.

“Meiii, you wanna play dolls with me?”

“Hm?”

Mei cocked her head quizzically, so Mirei pointed toward the display shelf standing in the room.

“That. Dolls.”

“Now now, Mirei,” Tsukiho said, reining her daughter in. “Those dolls aren’t for playing with. Understand?”

Several dolls, presumably made by Kirika, decorated the shelf. The dolls were of little girls and were small, but each had a delicate beauty about it.

Mirei whined unhappily, and Sou gave her a contemptuous look as he moved over to the sofa by himself. Tsukiho’s gaze followed him.

“Sou seems a bit down, don’t you think?” Kirika observed.

“Yes…There’s been a lot going on, and he’s at a difficult age,” Tsukiho replied, sounding a little awkward and looking anxiously in Sou’s direction. “I got the feeling he didn’t want to come along today. But when I said we were having tea at the Misakis’ house, he said, ‘I’m coming, too!’”

“Maybe it’s because Sou is so close to Teruya, so he misses him?” Kirika suggested. Then she twisted around in her chair and called out, “Sou?

“Would you like some more sweets? Maybe some juice?”

Sou shook his head without a word. The next moment, he stood up from his newly taken seat on the sofa and walked toward the display shelf Mirei had been pointing at. He stood in front of it and peered through the glass at the dolls inside.

“Do you like this kind of doll, too, Sou?” Mei Misaki asked, coming to stand beside Sou.

Sou’s shoulders jumped, as if he’d been caught off guard for a moment, then he gave a swift nod. “Um, yeah.”

“Mr. Sakaki liked dolls, too, right?”

“—Yeah.”

“Is that why you like them?”

“—I dunno.”

“Which of these dolls do you like?”

“Oh, uh…”

“Meiii! Meiii!”

Mirei came over to her again.

“Mei, let’s play. I wanna play with dolls.”

“Now now, Mirei,” Tsukiho repeated to get her under control. “It isn’t nice to pester people.”

During this exchange, Sou returned to the sofa by himself. He lowered his gaze, which held a hint of loneliness, and a quiet sigh escaped him…Then finally—

“I don’t know,” he whispered faintly. “I don’t know…anything.”

“Sou?”

Calling her son’s name, a hint of alarm in her voice, Tsukiho rose from her chair.

“You know better than to start talking that way again…”

“Oh…yes, ma’am.”

“Wow, the weather is so nice.”

Now it was Mei who spoke. She turned to the windows where the lace curtains rippled in the wind, and favoring her bandaged right elbow, she stretched her entire body stiffly.

“I’m going to step outside.”

3

The “outside” Mei referred to was the terrace just outside the room—

I felt somehow as if I’d been invited to join her, and though I hesitated somewhat, in the end I followed after her.

From the terrace, Mei had stepped down onto the grass of the yard and was gazing out at the sea. I gradually approached behind her and—

“Mr. Sakaki?” she asked, turning smoothly to look back over her shoulder. The blue iris of her left eye was aimed straight at me.

“Yes. His ghost anyway.”

“Is this the first time you’ve appeared since two days ago at Lakeshore Manor?”

“—I suppose so.”

“I see.”

Mei twisted her body back around and returned her gaze to the sea.

The house was beside the sea, but that doesn’t mean there were waves right in front of us. We were located a few minutes’ walk from the shore, a short distance away on a slight rise, giving an excellent view.

After a long while, Mei spoke.

“I saw a mirage from here once.”

“Wow. When?”

“August last year. The day before we went back to Yomiyama.”

“A midsummer’s vision, eh?”

“It wasn’t anything as amazing as that. There was a ship going along offshore, and it looked like the same ship was floating above it, but upside down.”

“That’s really unusual to see in the summertime.”

“The air close to the water is cooler and the air higher up is warmer, so light is refracted by the temperature difference and looks like a false image…”

“Right. That’s a spring-type superior mirage.”

I recited this knowledge that came so easily to me.

“The winter type is the opposite, where the air close to the water is warmer and the air higher up is cooler, so you see the false image below the actual object. Which is an inferior mirage. I have photos of both kinds of mirage at my house.”

“—I saw. You actually told me this same stuff last year.”

“Oh. Did I?”

“By the way—”

Mei Misaki turned to look back at me once again.

“I feel like we didn’t talk about why I was at Lakeshore Manor two days ago.”

“Oh yes. I suppose that’s true…”

Because I had been busy enough talking about my own situation.

“The fact is,” Mei said, then closed both her eyes before slowly opening them again. “I wanted to ask you more details about the accident you’d been in when you were younger. Eleven years ago, in 1987, when you were in middle school.”

“…”

“You told me the other day that you were in Class 3 at North Yomi through the first semester of your third year in middle school. You said the bus accident that hurt your left leg so badly happened on the class trip…and a lot of people died in it.”

“—That’s right.”

“After that, your mother also died and you moved here from Yomiyama and transferred schools before summer break. So you managed to escape from the disasters.”

“Disasters…that’s right. All of that is exactly like I told you before.”

I nodded dutifully. After returning my nod in the same spirit, Mei started to speak.

“Actually, I—”

I cut her off.

“You’re in third-year Class 3 at North Yomi yourself now. Is that it?” I suggested, anticipating where this was going.

I had thought about the possibility when I read the newspaper article about a student’s accidental death…“It’s not impossible.”

Mei nodded silently, seeming to tremble.

I said, “I happened to see something in the paper at the end of May. Yukari Sakuragi, I think it was. The article said she was a third-year at North Yomi who had died at the school and that her mother had died the same day…Then my imagination just started running wild. Including the possibility that you were in the same class…”

Mei nodded, again seeming to tremble.

“Is this an on year?” I asked. “With an extra person slipped into your class…What about the disasters?”

“—They’ve begun,” Mei replied, her voice subdued. “A couple people have already died. Even the head teacher before summer break.”

“Oh…”

“…That’s why.”

“Why what?”

“If you had lived through 1987, I thought I could ask you for information that might, in some small way, be useful…So that’s why I went to your house, I guess.”

“And then you found out I had already died and become this ghost…I see. Were you surprised? Or disappointed?”

Mei didn’t reply, and instead only leaned her head slightly to one side.

Creee! Creee! a bird called out in the sky overhead. Looking up, I saw several seagulls circling low in the sky.

“Even if I had been alive, I don’t think I would have been able to give you any useful information.”

Her head still cocked to one side, Mei asked, “No?”

“If anything, I think all I could have told you is ‘All you can do is run.’ Like we did all those years ago.”

“Run…”

“Because at least that saved us. And my classmates who came here for refuge over summer break were safe while they were here.”

“Those people in the photo?”

“Yes, them.”

Yagisawa. Higuchi. Mitarai. Arai. As I answered, the faces of the four people who’d been in the photo with me rose in my mind, one after the other, when—

I heard the sound of some sort of commotion.

A sound quite unlike the various noises that had pervaded the air to that point; a sound that stirred up a powerful, instinctive unease…

…The shrill sound of a siren. Probably a police car. Several of them.

They came closer and closer and finally stopped. On the road running alongside the sea, visible from where we stood.

“I wonder what it is.”

In the same moment Mei spoke, I murmured unconsciously, “What could that be? An accident maybe…”

“Hmm. If it had been a car accident, we would have heard a crash or something loud like that. It isn’t that far away really.”

“Then what…?”

“Maybe someone drowned. They’re close to a swimming spot.”

As she spoke, Mei stretched to a fuller height and looked down at where the police cars had stopped. Squinting my eyes to focus, I tried to make out what was happening as best I could.

“Oh…look at all the people they have down there. The police are all heading to the shore…”

The sea breeze carried the sound of people’s voices. I couldn’t make out what they were saying clearly, but the air felt charged with tension.

“Maybe something did happen in the water?”

“Maybe not a crash, but some kind of incident.”

Mei turned back to me.

“Maybe there was some kind of scuffle between people on the beach and they had to call the police, or maybe—”

She trailed off suggestively.

“Maybe what?” I prodded.

And after pausing a bit longer, she responded with this:

“Maybe a dead body washed up on the shore or something. It’s not totally impossible that’s what happened, right?”

“Er…”

The words dead body naturally elicited a strong reaction in me.

A body washed up on the beach. A body that, until it washed up, had been floating in the ocean or sunk below the water. It could be—

It—that dead body…was it mine?

The thought made my vision lurch.

…My body.

Had it been tossed into the ocean after I’d died? And only now…

My body over there. Soaking in the water for so long, it would certainly have gotten bloated. The flesh picked at by fish, it would have been reduced to tatters…

“If it’s bothering you, I can go find out?” Mei offered, as if seeing through to my turbulent thoughts within. “Though I think the information will come in before too long, even if we don’t rush down there.”

“Yes…you’re right.”

I nodded, but I felt too unnerved to stand still and I staggered, as if hypnotized by the distant sight of the spinning lights of the police cars. Just then—

“What’s all this noise about?” Mr. Misaki asked as he came out onto the terrace. “Hmm? What are the police doing in a place like that…? I wonder what happened.”

It was at that precise moment—

I don’t know why, but I could feel my presence fading. If this continued, I would soon be dragged into the “hollow darkness.” I would disappear, in the opposite sense of how I appeared. Such was the sense of foreboding I experienced.

“…I don’t think we should talk,” Mei Misaki said in a whisper. “I’ll see you later, when no one else is around, Mr. Ghost.”

4

Afterward, I only barely managed to stay in that place, but with an entirely unprecedented lack of stability. I suppose the word sporadic applies best. Over a short span of time, I appeared and nearly disappeared, then actually did disappear before reappearing…repeating over and over.

I don’t know what I looked like to the left eye of Mei Misaki.

The commotion of the apparent emergency on the beach went on for a bit, but in the end we never “went to find out” what was going on…We heard the information from Mr. Misaki about twenty minutes later. I don’t know how he obtained the information. He seemed to have gone to another room and made a phone call to someone or other, so perhaps he had a connection with the police. Regardless—

When he returned from the other room, Mr. Misaki informed everyone that “it seems they’ve found someone’s corpse on the beach.” I had started to disappear yet again, but then he said that. It felt as if his words riveted me to the spot momentarily.

Everyone’s reactions were very different.

Kirika murmured, “Oh my,” and put a hand to her mouth. Despite her furrowed brow, her face was nevertheless majestic as she turned it to look out the window.

Tsukiho gave tiny cry of “What!” and then bowed her head, looking somewhat agitated. The color seemed to be draining ever so slightly from her face.

Mirei tilted her head to one side, then turned to her mother and asked, “What’s a corpse?”

Distracted by this, Tsukiho told her, “Uh…it’s nothing,” and hugged her daughter close. “You don’t need to worry about it, Mirei.”

Sou stood up, swaying, from the sofa where he had been sitting away from his mother and little sister. His eyes still as expressionless as ever, he looked around the room and abruptly murmured in a low voice, “…I don’t know,” then lowered himself back onto on the sofa.

“What did they say about the corpse?”

Mei was the one who had asked this question. Mr. Misaki stroked his mustache with a slightly uncomfortable look, evidently regretting how inappropriate the information was for his audience.

“They said it was a missing couple. They took a boat out from a beach on the other side of Raimizaki and never came back…And I didn’t know this, but apparently there’s been quite a flap about it the past few days. The body they just found was probably one of the two of them.”

“—That’s awful.”

“They said it was the drowned body of a woman. They still haven’t found the man.”

“So it was a woman.”

“Yes. That’s what I was told, at least.”

…The drowned body of a woman.

As my presence began once again to gradually fade away, I listened intently to this conversation between the two of them, and I understood.

The drowned body of a woman had washed up on the beach.

A woman…Meaning it wasn’t my body.

When I realized that, I noticed that I felt relieved. It was a bizarre feeling.

Why should I be relieved?

Why would that make me feel better?

At this very moment, I still didn’t know where my body was or what had become of it. I would have to keep looking for it, and yet…Why?

Perhaps I didn’t actually want to acknowledge my death. Could thoughts like that still be inside me, after all this time? I doubted it.

It couldn’t be that. This was nothing more than a trick of my mind…Or rather, perhaps, something instinctive deriving from sensations experienced when I was alive.

5

When the day’s social call broke up, I was again barely holding on to the place, appearing and disappearing, beginning to disappear…going through that cycle.

While I was in this state, Mei Misaki spoke to me, seizing a moment when no one else was nearby.

“I’m thinking of going back to Lakeshore Manor tomorrow.”

She presented the information matter-of-factly in a low voice.

“In the afternoon, say around two o’clock.”

“Huh?”

Surprised, I equivocated. She fixed her eyes on me and smiled.

“Can we talk some more there?”

“—It doesn’t do much good asking me.”

It wasn’t as if I could say, Oh yes, I see, and promise to appear there. That was the reality of being a ghost.

“You can’t make it tomorrow?”

“Well…it’s not really a question of whether or not it’s convenient for me.”

“Hmmm. I guess I get that.”

Mei Misaki pulled a bit of a face, twisting one cheek, but quickly regained her neutrality.

“Well, whatever. I’ll still try going.”

Then suddenly Mei raised her right hand and covered her right eye with her palm. One end of the bandage wrapped around her elbow came loose and swayed.

“There are a bunch of things I’ve been thinking about.”

“Oh…um.”

I was at a loss for how to respond, and she turned her blue eye directly onto me. Then she said: “I think I understand the situation, but…That place was your home, so please put a little effort into appearing there. All right, Mr. Ghost?”

Sketch 6

I moved forward smoothly to stand beside Mei, who returned her gaze to the grave markers.

“That’s true. And the ground looks the same everywhere, not just here,” Mei said, lifting her eyes. “Let’s look somewhere else, then. Will you lead the way, Mr. Ghost?”

Standing outside the shade cast by the trees, the sun beat down mercilessly on me. As if the sun might burn me away as “impure,” since by rights I was a creature who had departed the world of the living and wandered the darkness of the underworld. The instant this thought occurred to me—

Which is about all that I noticed.

3

“No. Basically, I think it was…yeah, I think I was scared. Very scared. Deep inside, I couldn’t help being scared all the time. Just being in the car was scary…So I didn’t like having anyone else in my car, either.”

“You’ve always had that limp, right, Mr. Sakaki?”

Mei had been right next to the shelves, but it appeared she had made a very near dodge. She had escaped the danger of being trapped under the shelves, but she had been knocked to the floor by the momentum. And then, into the spot she now occupied—

Mei stood and picked up her cap, then brushed the dirt from her clothes. When she saw the bandage around her right elbow had started to unwind, she frowned slightly and removed it entirely, then looked down at the shovel and pickax lying on the floor.

“You can see death?”

I didn’t have the first idea how I was supposed to do that, though. I suppose that as a ghost, I was too imprisoned by this relic of life, too bound up with it.

Minazuki-ko…Lake Minazuki.

Sketch 7

1

The movements of my own lips that I had seen at the time. My own voice that I had heard at the time. As well as my thoughts from earlier on the shore as to what it might have meant.

Sou—you were there, too, that night…

After sweeping her gaze around the room in the same way she had in the grand entry, Mei Misaki took several quiet steps up to stand before the desk. Her eyes went to the computer on the desk; then, after tilting her head slightly, she reached out to the framed photo.

“There’s a box over there with a couple keys inside. You should be able to open the doors with those.”

“I see,” Mei Misaki responded shortly, her right eye crinkling. “Your mother and father were close, huh, Mr. Sakaki?”

“December 1979. ‘Christmas Eve Tragedy. Home Destroyed by Fire, One Dead.’…The fire was caused by the candles on a Christmas cake? And it looks like the person who died was a student at North Yomi. In 1979, that might be one of the years that Mr. Chibiki was the head teacher for Class 3.”

“I think I mentioned this before, but I suppose I’ve been dragging out my experiences in Yomiyama from eleven years ago ever since. Still, that doesn’t mean that I was trying to somehow stop the disasters that kept happening at North Yomi after that or that I felt like I should or anything…I’m not sure how to put it. I felt like it had nothing to do with me anymore, but I still couldn’t forget about it, couldn’t get it out of my mind…so…”

4

5

I turned on the lights for Mei and took the lead to descend the stairs. Still limping slightly on my left leg, the relic of life.

There was a curtain rod above the windows.

“I don’t think so.”

“Have you ever been in love?”

“…I wish I could go back to being a kid.”

After a space of a few seconds, I started to speak again, but I realized that Mei’s eyes were fixed not on me, but on the telephone stand resting next to the wall. The base unit of the cordless phone was on it.

“Right. And then…If I find my body and Teruya Sakaki is properly mourned and recognized as deceased, then I’ll finally be able to die right. I’ll go to my rightful death. That’s how I feel.”

“It’s a pretty bold hypothesis,” Mei Misaki said, folding her arms again, but the girl had transformed back into that shade of gray and I couldn’t make out the expression on her face.

Even if I wanted to appear at a set time and place, that wasn’t any guarantee that I would be able to do it. But hadn’t I managed to appear exactly how I wanted to today? So yes, if I made an effort, surely I could do it again tomorrow…

Sketch 8

I was in the grand entry on the first floor, just as I had said the day before. I think I’m right on time, too…I had a visceral sense of it.

The scene from the night of May 3, when I died in this spot, flashed into the mirror as I watched. Like a replay video that had been queued up at someone’s request…

“Teru…ya?”

“Tsukiho…My sister…”

“I’m done.”

I turned and saw her at the far end of the long corridor. She was standing in front of a door (the one—yes—the one to my bedroom)…

The alcohol was whiskey. The pills were probably the sleeping pills I had been using constantly at the time. In a blurred state after taking the two together, Teruya/I had tried to end his own life that night.

If only I were dead…I had often thought this during my life. I had even spoken the words aloud to Tsukiho and Sou.

It wasn’t just limited to automobiles, either. It was always the same whenever I rode in something, whether a train or an airplane. I was always supremely aware of the risk of an accident or death. But in every case, I wasn’t afraid of dying myself. It doesn’t really matter as long as it’s just me. I think that’s how I felt.

After my last breath had left me, as I watched myself in the mirror. After I had been dragged into the hollow “darkness that follows death,” into that perfectly blank space in my memory. Somehow, it seemed that I could see something there…in hazy outline. It seemed I could hear something.

5

6

Reliant on the faint illumination provided by the moon and stars, I squinted my eyes.

This angel statue had been put here to obscure the fact that there were fewer windows, when viewed from the yard. That seemed like a safe bet.

A bizarre density, utterly unlike the hollowness of the darkness that follows death. A bizarre oppressiveness. A bizarre prickling and the discomfort that goes with it. A bizarre…

Light from a bulb dangling from the ceiling. A feeble light flickering unstably.

When I closed my eyes, it seemed a hundred times worse.

I opened my eyes, and my left hand opened to reveal a small rock I’d been holding for some reason. When had I grabbed that? A completely black stone…Was it a piece of coal or something?

…So that’s it.

15

A corpse.

More than half had peeled away from the skull. There was almost nothing left of the forehead, nose, or flesh of the lips. The eyeballs were already gone, leaving only the reddish-black eye sockets…And something was moving inside them.

I flung my hands out in front of me, which landed near the body’s rib cage. There was a shlurp and a nauseating sensation. The force had torn through the webwork undergarments, and the maggots and other vermin that had ravaged the rotting flesh came swarming out…crawling up at me. Up my hands. My arms. My shoulders.

Who was I hoping would save me? How? What could anyone do for me? Even I didn’t know.

That night three months ago, after I had written that suicide note in my daily planner, I had tried to take my own life. In the end, my death had transmuted into a fall to my death following a struggle with Tsukiho, but that didn’t change the fact that my original intent had been “suicide.”

19

20

Independent of the white glow of the fluorescent lights illuminating the hallway outside, the beam of a flashlight was aimed in my direction.

Mei Misaki then aimed her flashlight at the sofa in the back once again. With its light illuminating the horrifying dead body.

“It’s only natural it turned into that when it’s been sitting there for three months in this weather. Rotting and eaten by bugs. Maybe it’s even better that it got that bad. Had you pictured what your body would be like?”

“Oh…well.”

“Nope.” Mei shook her head fractionally. “I don’t think it’s that.”

I groaned weakly. Mei lowered the hand covering her right eye and turned both her eyes straight on me…and finally said again in a clear tone, “So you aren’t actually dead. You’re alive. You have to realize that for yourself, first of all.”

My voice shook even more.

The many times I had appeared at the Hiratsuka house and the time I had appeared at the Misaki family vacation house…hadn’t Sou been there as himself? Hadn’t Tsukiho and Mei and the others talked to him? Hadn’t I seen and heard it happen? And yet she was saying this…?

…

“I saw from the window in the library…”

Since you were in there, I thought there must have been some way in, maybe from outside the house. But I didn’t have time to go looking for it and thought breaking down the wall would be faster. After all, there used to be a door there, and it looked like it had been plastered over…It took a lot of work, though. I felt like I needed to help you, not go looking for someone to help…”

Wearing clothes different from the ones I’d been aware of until now. Not the white, long-sleeved shirt and black pants reminiscent of a middle school student…but rather a yellow, short-sleeved polo shirt and jeans. The clothes, the face, the hair, the arms…all were filthy, caked with dust, soil, and mud. The eyes were bloodshot, and several tracks of dried tears ran down the cheeks. That was—

I—myself—let out a long, deep sigh as if to expel everything from within my body, then shyly looked into Mei Misaki’s face. She merely nodded to me in silence and made no further attempt at speaking.

Outroduction

She had told me “I have no idea” whether ghosts existed. And that “I think, fundamentally, they probably don’t.”

Sou Hiratsuka, so firmly convinced that he was “the ghost of Teruya Sakaki,” who when he appeared had felt things, thought, and behaved to the utmost as that. These were the words and concepts that bubbled to the surface all on their own when I thought about his state of mind. However.

With those words, I couldn’t tell whether purposely or not, a slightly sadistic smile crept over Mei Misaki’s face. “It’s not like this is a question on a language arts test…Right?”

And so he had reached the certainty that it was time. He had forsaken his own life, thinking that there was nothing else he wished for. And then—

She was talking to someone on the phone. Probably Shuji. Sou said he guessed it from the way she talked.

At that point, Sou thought, Tsukiho had probably spoken up. This, too, was a fragment of conversation that Sou had heard in his flickers of awareness and remembered.

As for the diary that had been placed with him, that had probably been to hide evidence. They thought it was a bad idea to leave something that could be read as a suicide note lying around to be found in the bedroom or library. In which case, it might have been better to tear it up and throw it out or burn it. But perhaps they hadn’t done so in order to use it as “insurance” in the worst-case scenario.

How had Sou Hiratsuka managed to get into that room the night of August 2? The door and outside windows were all sealed up, and there shouldn’t have been any gaps big enough for him to get in through.

“I wasn’t sure what to do, but obviously I had to call Kirika first. I gave her a rundown of the situation and asked her to tell my father, too, and then come over as soon as she could.”

I know it makes me look crass, but I attempted to work out an explanation for it afterward. I couldn’t stop myself. Using the key words Mei pointed out earlier as clues—

“In another sense, there was Sou’s desire to not become one of the grown-ups he hates, but instead to become the grown-up he likes best of all, as fast as he could. If he was going to turn into a grown-up he hates, then he preferred to stay a kid. But he was going to grow up whether he liked it or not. So given that, he would want to become the ‘adult’ who was ‘the ghost of Teruya Sakaki, who he liked best.’ Maybe he also wanted to, in some sense, stop time for himself by doing that…”

“It’s good enough, I suppose,” she answered. An image of Mr. Chibiki in a pose I had often seen him adopt seemed to superimpose itself on her. “It’s not really an issue where you can point to one right answer…It’s just…”

“Oh?”

“And then your father came outside. Since he acted like Sou was there with you, the ghost’s perception had to change, too, so he couldn’t talk to you directly anymore and started to disappear…”

At that point, Sou was standing in front of the desk by the left wall, which was in Mei’s blind spot since she could only see out of her right eye—

“When Sou and I talked after that, we were out of step with each other at first, but he was so serious about it when he told me, ‘Mr. Sakaki is dead’ and ‘I’m his ghost’…In the end, I got into the habit of following his lead. I asked him about the details of what had happened up to that point…and while I was listening, I started to understand what was going on in Sou’s mind. Once I did, somehow I understood that pointing out to him ‘but you’re Sou’ right then and there would have been bad…”

When we sat down on the sofas that faced each other at an angle, I felt as if I could hear, unpleasantly clearly, Mei’s breathing and all its subtle changes…And even at this late point, I felt a little fidgety. My heart was racing.

She held out a photograph. When I looked at it, a small noise escaped me. “Oh…Is this it?”

“But what about this person with the ‘X’?”

The students of the 1987 third-year Class 3 at Yomiyama North Middle. Who had been invited by Teruya Sakaki to share a peaceful moment over summer break at Lakeshore Manor in Hinami, unaffected by the “disasters.” But afterward, of the four who had returned to Yomiyama, Yagisawa and Nii had lost their lives…

If I were to look at those photos five or ten years from now, how would they appear to me? That was the question. As time passed, my memories of the “extra person”/“the casualty” from this year would fade and disappear…Vmm…vmmmmm…and she would vanish from the photos. And then an unnatural space where a picture of someone had originally been but no longer appeared would develop in her place…

Maybe Sakaki had even found out that she had been that year’s casualty from his North Yomi classmate Mitarai after the graduation ceremony. His memories of being in love with her, of liking her so much—that impression on his heart had lasted inside him even after she had disappeared. But the girl’s name, face, voice, the words they had spoken to each other, the time they had spent together…all those memories had inevitably faded as time went on and disappeared. And then after however many years, he was no longer able to remember all the things he had shared with her. That’s why—

A fifteen-year-old Teruya Sakaki holding a brown cane in his left hand and resting his right hand on his hip, smiling. The sheer happiness in his smile left me feeling incredibly sad.

What had he been saying at the very end…?

“Staring death in the face, maybe Mr. Sakaki remembered. That her name was Satsuki. And that’s why his expression was so peaceful…”

“Is it okay if I read it, too?”

The air rustled chill.

Afterword

Still, this started out positioned as a side story or a spin-off of Another, but I started to feel like it couldn’t really be a spin-off when Mei Misaki is the heroine. Not only that, but the present day where Mei is telling Koichi the details of the incident is after the final scene of the original Another books—at the end of September 1998. From a timeline perspective, I came to believe it might not be entirely unreasonable to call this a sequel.