ear Ninna Hori,

Or maybe I should say “Dear Miss Toshiko Yamanaka”? Or maybe “Dear Toshi-chan—I love you”?

I’m writing to you, Toshi, because you’re the only one I can tell this to. I know you might get mad and say, “What a thing to say!” But I know you’ll also sympathize with me and say that Terauchi must be a pretty lonely person. And that’s fine. Both are true, so please listen to me.

By the time this letter gets to you tomorrow morning, I won’t be here in the world anymore. I know starting out the letter like this makes it sound like some dark manga or dumb novel, and I bet it’ll disappoint you. But it’s true. As soon as I mail the letter I’m planning to die. I’m going to die right away because I think it would be a lousy thing if you heard about my death before you got this letter, and I want to avoid that at all costs. By the way, I actually did try writing a dumb novel like this with a similar opening line, but the thing turned out to be the pits, so I crumpled it all up, ripped it into a million pieces, and flushed it down the toilet along with my pee.

This is the first and last serious letter I’ll ever write to you, Toshi, and I wish I could stop hiding, but it’s like that’s all I can do anymore. Still, I feel sorry for myself and feel awful about vanishing from this life, and I’m writing this as a kind of pep talk to tell myself I’ve got to have the guts to do it, and I’m having this dilemma about how I can possibly convey to you the struggle I’m going through. Words are such a pain, so sluggish I feel like ripping my tongue right out. But if you think about it, writing this puts it into words, but since I’m not telling you directly, in person, my struggle is not so much about words as it is about me. That’s right—I’m still afraid of being totally honest. I’m more afraid of this than dying. So what am I doing getting all shy about something like writing, huh?

Okay, I’ve finally calmed down a bit. If you say I hide things because I’m shy, that can’t be right. I’ve finally realized it’s for a different reason—that I don’t want to see the darkness that lies in my heart. And this agony I’ve been going through as I try to figure out what I want to tell you in this letter, Toshi—I finally understand the reason I’m writing. I’m really a dismal excuse for a person. But I’m so tense and nervous, hoping I can somehow communicate to you, Toshi, about the kind of person I am.

I know this is a roundabout way of talking, but that’s the way my thoughts work, spiraling round and round. My mind works like that, too, but the conclusion is surprisingly simple. All I want is for someone to understand me before I die. With death staring me in the face, I finally understand the reason novelists write books: before they die they want somebody, somewhere, to understand them. In my case this isn’t my mother, or father, or Yukinari, or Yuzan. It’s just you, Toshi-chan.

I know you may find this a pain, but I want to wipe the slate clean before I die, so please read this. If you don’t want to, could you just stop here? Even if you don’t want to read it yourself, that’s cool, but whatever you do, don’t show it to my mother, okay? Just keep what you’ve read so far in your heart and throw it away.

I’m sorry if this is a burden for you. But I’m so happy I met you, Toshi. If I hadn’t, I’d have died without revealing to anyone the darkness inside of me. This might sound all pure and righteous, but it isn’t. The reason is that I need to die, but only after really taking a good hard look at myself and seeing what kind of person I am. Do you see what I mean? And to do that, you need somebody else’s eyes to look at you. So please, Toshi, see through to the real me, be brave, and laugh. Say, “What a jerk she was, that Terauchi! A girl like her leaving the world? Well, I say good riddance!” Is that asking too much?

If our positions were reversed and you were in my shoes, I would definitely do that. I promise you I would. You might think that’s kind of a sneaky thing to say, to talk about something impossible like making a promise to you even though I’m dying first. But there’s nothing sneaky about it. Because I’m exposing things I’ve dragged out while you weren’t aware of it. You’ve changed me, little by little, Toshi. So we’re in the same boat. What I mean is, you have to deal with my death.

I don’t think you understand at all why I’m going to die, so let me explain a little. That’s only fair. There are a couple of reasons why I can’t go on living anymore.

One is my difficult personality. I think you know about that. I’m this superphilosophical kind of person. Stuck in a prison of abstract ideas and overpowering emotions, I have this personality that makes it really hard to survive. Plus, I’m living in the middle of a familiar transformation, I guess you’d call it, something mankind’s never experienced before, with the role of the family getting more messed up than anybody imagines, changing day by day, growing more and more complicated and individualistic, something nobody can really comprehend, and I have to pretend to fill all these roles every day. Otherwise I can’t survive. That totally wears me out. In the reality of everyday occurrences I’ve had to submit to people in order not to lose them.

It’s less the submission that bothers me, I guess, than how it makes my life miserable. And what happens if I can’t forgive myself for making that choice? And what if, in order to keep on living, I have to continue to accept myself? What am I supposed to do? Conclusion: It’d be best if I’m destroyed. The best thing is for me to just vanish.

By the way, the person who’s caused me so much grief is someone you’ve met before, Toshi—my mother. A mother complex? Sorry, that’s not it. I’ve already gone beyond that. Still, as a person, I like her. I don’t want to make her suffer, yet I’ve turned into this old person who shouldn’t outlive her.

There’s one more major reason that I don’t want to—can’t—go on living. There’s something I have to take responsibility for. Kirarin’s accident. The accident in which Kirarin and that taxi driver from Nagano died, and in which Worm was critically injured. It’s all my fault.

After I die, nobody will be able to discover the truth, so I want to set it down clearly here. The night Worm and Kirarin phoned me I told the police where they were. I made an anonymous call from a public phone at a convenience store in front of the station and told the police that they were in a vacant cottage in Karuizawa. That’s why Worm and Kirarin tried to escape the police dragnet by robbing a taxi, which led to the accident. So something that never should have happened did, all because of my thoughts and actions. A clear-cut cause-and-effect relationship. I was the one who caused it, and I should probably get the death penalty. Or maybe what I should say is I’m the one who pronounced the death sentence on myself.

I can hear you saying, Toshi, that I shouldn’t feel responsible. But, like some criminal who’s convinced that what he’s doing is right, I ran Kirarin and Worm into a corner and tried to punish them. That’s a fact. I despised Worm because he ran away from something that can’t be undone and chose the easy way out of something that can be. Which for him was killing his mother. He chose the easy path and then ran away, and I despised him for it.

I love my mother too much and so I forgave her, but I hated myself for forgiving her, and started to hate myself so much that I didn’t want to be in this world anymore. At the same time I burned with hatred for Worm, for the hostility he had toward his mother. ’Cause what he did didn’t involve my kind of roundabout thinking. It evaded thinking, actually. It was just too simple. I was angry because he boiled down his trouble into a very simplistic response. I think I started to apply this weird logic to Kirarin, too. Needless to say, I was also angry at you, Toshi, for hesitating to report Worm to the police, and at Yuzan for lending him her bike. Still I pretended as always to be casually helping out Worm and Kirarin. I wonder why. Maybe I’m evil, after all.

After I phoned the police I felt awful, like I had something bitter in my mouth that I couldn’t get rid of, no matter how much I swallowed. Now I realize that taste came to me the instant I crossed the line. That night I tried to avoid the whole thing, got into bed, and forced myself to shut my eyes, but then had lots of weird dreams. In one dream, Kirarin was riding in the back of a truck, going off to be sold somewhere. In another one, I reported my mother to the police. Wonder what Freud would say about that?

Then early the next morning I got a phone call from you. As soon as I heard you scream through the cell phone that Kirarin had died, I knew it. That what I had done had brought on a tragedy that could never be undone. For me the idea of something that can’t be undone seemed an internal emotion, etched in the hearts of the living. But when I realized I’d lost Kirarin, that this was something real that truly was irreparable, I got goose bumps all over. I was terrified. Terror is more dangerous than the prospect of self-exposure; I could see my whole philosophy of life falling apart. The world I’d thought was real collapsed, and out of it another reality appeared. A meta-reality. I’d been pondering for a long time who I was and had almost reached a conclusion, but now I had to start again from scratch. I wonder if I was wrong.

I was acting strangely, so my mom asked me what was wrong. “Kirarin died in Karuizawa,” I told her, “in an accident.” My mother was shocked and said, “How could that happen? Her poor mother.” What do you think I said back to her then, Toshi? A line that even now makes me blush. Something so dumb that would make this hyperphilosophical girl a complete laughingstock. No matter that this letter is my suicide note, it’s too embarrassing to write down what I said to my mom. Out of consideration for our friendship, I hope you’ll forgive me.

Anyhow, I’m ashamed of myself. And very, very tired. It seems like I’ve reached the right moment to die. I feel sorry for my mother, but she has someone more important in her life than me, so I’m sure she’ll survive. Sorry, but I’m not thinking about my father and brother, either. I’m sure that for you, Toshi, getting this letter knowing I’ve died will be really tough. But you’re a good person, with a strong, honest soul, and I know you’ll be okay. Not me, though—I’m done for. I want to say good-bye to everybody. Hmm—sounds like something from Dazai Osamu, doesn’t it? How pointless was that, writing reports for school? Bye-bye. I’m off on a journey to the real world. ’Cause within this meta-reality what’s real is this—my death. You hang in there, now, okay? Later, dude.

Kazuko Terauchi

No doubt about it, this was a suicide note. I’d never held a suicide note, or read one, in my life. When I thought that these were Terauchi’s last words, somehow I couldn’t fathom what they all meant.

She ended up not actually mailing the letter. It was sealed, with my name on it, on top of her desk. It didn’t have a stamp on it, so she must not have wanted to take the trouble to buy one. Instead she jumped off the roof of a nearby apartment building. Even though she’d made such a big deal about how she wanted the letter to arrive before the news of her death. Such impatience. Just that fact alone revealed how confused Terauchi had been. It made me want to laugh, but instead my face was all scrunched up in pain. Come on, you dummy! I wanted to say. Get it right!

Worm’s mother’s death, Kirarin’s death, the death of that taxi driver, Worm’s injury, Terauchi’s suicide. Too many shocking things had happened one after another, and tears wouldn’t come. I couldn’t think about it deeply. Like an empty shell, I opened up Terauchi’s last letter and had to read it with Terauchi’s parents and my mother looking over my shoulder.

“What did she say?”

Terauchi’s mother asked this the second I finished reading. In just half a day her face had turned dry and listless, drained of life. She looked desperate to know the reason why her daughter killed herself. Only Terauchi’s father was sobbing—her mother was toughing it out. Yukinari, her younger brother, had shut himself in his room and refused to come out.

My mother rested her hand on my shoulder as if to protect me, and it felt heavy. Terauchi’s mother had phoned us, saying, “There’s a letter left behind addressed to Toshiko, so I’d like you to come over and open it.” As soon as we heard this, we dropped everything and raced over.

I’d never imagined that I’d be hearing about Terauchi’s death, and it was all so sudden and crazy that it was almost funny. That’s why I couldn’t

cry. My heart just felt empty. To begin with, early that morning we’d gotten the shocking news of Kirarin’s death and that turned into a huge uproar, not just in my house or the neighborhood, but with calls coming from school, too.

The female detective who’d questioned me before was the one who told me the news about Kirarin’s death in the accident. And then, half a day later, this phone call telling us Terauchi had killed herself. So as I started to read her letter, I had no clue at all what it was all about. I was totally confused and tried my best to be calm.

This is how it all took place:

Early on the morning of August tenth, our home phone rang. It had to be either a salesman or a relative. Other people would just call each of our cell phones, which made a phone call coming in the morning all the more ominous. Nobody else was up yet, and I counted the rings as the phone echoed in the quiet house—one…two…Six thirty by my clock. It’s got to be bad news, I thought, and tugged my blanket up to my chest. At the fifth ring it sounded like Dad answered it downstairs. No way. No way! The extension in my room rang, and it was Dad’s voice.

“It’s from the police. They want to talk to you.”

I was pretty depressed, figuring they’d finally caught Worm and had learned how we’d helped him get away. I guess depressed isn’t the right word. It was more like Darn it all! Racing to think up some excuses, I reluctantly came on the phone.

“Good morning. My apologies for calling so early.” It was the female detective from before, and she was so polite it made me even more confused for a second.

“Toshiko? I apologize if you were sleeping,” the woman went on. “But something terrible has happened and I thought I should let you know. It will shock you, but please try to remain calm. It’s hard for me to make this call. The Nagano Prefectural Police contacted us and informed us that a high school student named Miss Kirari Higashiyama passed away a short time ago in a hospital in Karuizawa. She was with the boy who lives next door to you, and I was really surprised, wondering how this happened. She goes to the same high school as you, so is she a friend of yours? I wonder if she had been seeing the boy next door before this. I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me whatever you know.”

Kirarin was dead. I was totally shocked, and was sure that Worm must have killed her.

“Was Kirarin murdered?”

“By Kirarin you mean Miss Higashiyama?” the female detective asked calmly. “I don’t have all the details, but we do know that your neighbor robbed a taxi late last night. The taxi was weaving back and forth and crashed into an oncoming car and was destroyed. Miss Higashiyama went through the windshield and was thrown onto the road. They said she was unconscious. She suffered trauma to her entire body and passed away. It’s unclear why she was with the young man, but eyewitnesses state they seemed to be close. Please tell me what was going on.”

The detective, it surprised me, was close to tears. A random thought sprang into my mind—the image of the heavy brooch pinned to her blouse. The fact that Kirarin was dead just wouldn’t sink in.

“I have no idea,” I said.

Which was true, I didn’t have a clue. I might have known that Kirarin was with Worm, but why did she have to die? It made no sense. It was like some totally astonishing thing had just fallen from the sky and my world was suddenly in chaos.

“Is that so? Well, I guess we can talk about it more some other time.”

She sounded resigned.

“How do you know they attacked a taxi?” I asked.

“The driver was cut with a knife and died from loss of blood. His throat was apparently cut. They must have cut him from behind. Your neighbor testified to this as well at the hospital.”

Damn. This was awful. How could Worm take Kirarin with him and do something like that? I couldn’t believe it. My knees started to shake and I couldn’t stand. I collapsed onto the bed. Somebody tapped me on the shoulder. I looked up and Dad was there, holding out an opened newspaper to me. The headline read, “Runaway Assaults Taxi and Causes Accident.” The news managed to make it into the morning paper. Neither Worm’s nor Kirarin’s name was given, but she was described as “the high school girl accompanying him,” hinting at her being an accomplice.

“What happened to Worm—I mean the boy next door?” I asked the detective.

“He’s got injuries on his right arm and head and broke some ribs, and was taken to the hospital.” Maybe I was just imagining it, but her voice sounded cold. “They suspected some internal damage, as well, but I haven’t heard anything after that. We’re going there now to check on the situation.”

As soon as she hung up, I dialed Kirarin’s cell phone but only got her voice mail. What happened to her phone? When I pictured her little pink cell phone lying along the side of some road, it hurt. I dialed her home next, but it was the same thing—voice mail.

I looked at the curtain. I could sense, outside, the blue sky of morning. It looked like another hot summer day. Was this really happening? I couldn’t believe it, and my mind was total confusion.

My father seemed to be saying something but I couldn’t absorb it. Suddenly I realized I had to phone Terauchi. I jumped up to get my cell again, and when he saw this, Dad left my room.

If I hadn’t phoned her, Terauchi might not have died that day.

“Terauchi, Kirarin’s dead.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Did you hear me? Kirarin’s dead.”

“I heard you.”

Her voice was so small and low it sounded like it was filtering up through the earth’s core. How can she possibly be so calm? I wondered.

“I’m not kidding. The police just phoned me. Worm attacked a taxi driver and there was an accident. Kirarin was unconscious and died. Worm just broke some bones and survived. The driver died, too. They said his throat was cut. The two of them attacked the driver. What happened, do you think? Maybe they were trying to rob him? What should I do? What are you supposed to do in a situation like this?”

I got all this out in a rush of words and finally noticed Terauchi’s silence.

“What’s the matter, Terauchi? Did you hear what I said?”

She answered in this slow, casual way, “That’s awful. That things ended up like that.”

“Of course it’s awful,” I said. “But they’re dead, and there’s nothing we can do about that. I was so shocked when I heard. It’s all my fault. What do you think?”

I was shaken, convinced I was to blame for the whole thing. I never told the police about my bike and cell phone being stolen. I’d gotten in touch with Worm a number of times after that, and even rooted for him to escape. All of us had been idiots. Criminals, even. Terauchi tried to cheer me up.

“There’s no need for you to get all upset, Toshi. You didn’t do anything so bad. I’m the one who did something bad.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m the one who changed fate, I guess.”

Terauchi mumbled this puzzling thing. Then I heard this popping noise, like she was getting the kinks out of her neck.

“What’s that sound?”

“I’m setting my alarm clock.”

“You’re going back to sleep?”

I couldn’t believe how nervy she was. What she thought of all this, what she was thinking about, I didn’t even try to imagine. Or even give it a thought. All I could think about was myself. About me and how the adults were going to blame me. Looking back on it now, I can see that when she set her clock she was setting a time limit for herself, for how much longer she had to live.

“That’s right. I’m going back to sleep. See you, Toshi. Hang in there.”

What do you mean, hang in there? Am I the only one who has to hang in there? Terauchi’s coolness bothered me, and I couldn’t help but get angry at her. Like she felt she was okay because she’d just been an observer all along. So I pushed down hard on the End button on my phone. This was the last contact I ever had with her, pressing down hard on the button to end the call. The sensation stayed in the pad of my thumb for a while. In contrast, when I called Yuzan next she made me feel encouraged, but at the same time, got me even angrier.

“Kirarin’s dead?” Yuzan shouted, and burst out in tears. “How could this happen? I-I won’t stand for it. I’m gonna kill that Worm myself!”

“Well, okay, but Yuzan…” I said. “I feel responsible for Kirarin’s death. I made a huge mistake.”

“But I’m the one who’s most guilty. I took the bike to Worm, gave him the cell phone, so it’s my fault. Don’t blame yourself, Toshi. You have to remember that Kirarin went on her own to meet up with him, so in a sense she brought it on herself. All of us were kind of enjoying his escape. It’s a shock that Kirarin died, but don’t let it get to you that much. All of us will take responsibility. You don’t need to suffer over it alone.”

As I listened to Yuzan, I suddenly realized that the shattering of the glass I’d heard next door was the beginning of the end of the world. Ever since that day things had gradually been changing, and today was the final blow. Things couldn’t possibly go any lower. I recalled how Terauchi’s voice sounded like it was filtering up from underground. But Kirarin’s death was too much of a shock for me to dwell on anything. I fell back on my bed. Kirarin—are you really dead? It came back to me—her overlapping teeth showing when she smiled, that lively look she always had when she was startled. I started to cry. She really was dead, after all. I couldn’t believe I’d never see her again.

“Toshi, are you okay?”

Yuzan’s worried voice called out from the cell phone that I was still clutching. I nodded again and again but couldn’t stop the tears. I suddenly noticed that my door was open and that my mother was standing there, looking pale.

“Don’t you think you should go to Miss Higashiyama’s house?”

“I’ll call you back,” I told Yuzan, and hung up. She was in tears, too, and couldn’t reply.

I called Kirarin’s house but all I got was some woman who just kept gloomily repeating that she didn’t know anything, that the day for the funeral hadn’t been set. I didn’t know what to do and paced back and forth in my room.

Reporters started calling us around ten a.m., and I shut my curtain tight. Next, Worm’s father stopped by. He said that before he went to see his son in the hospital in Nagano, he wanted to find out from me what had been going on between Worm and Kirarin. He was gaunt, like a sad old man—so much for the former dandy with his ascot. The arrogant face he used to make as he walked past our house was nowhere to be seen.

“What sort of relationship did my son and Miss Higashiyama have?” he asked.

“I really don’t know,” I lied.

“Is that so,” he muttered back, then suddenly fell to his knees on the floor of our dirty entrance.

“I am truly, truly sorry for all the trouble we’ve caused you. I don’t know where to begin to apologize for the death of your friend. Please forgive us. I know my son will spend the rest of his life trying to redeem himself for what he’s done to all of you. I should have supervised him more carefully, and since I didn’t, this horrible tragedy has taken place, and now I can only hand my son over to the courts. I feel so sorry I don’t want to go on living.”

This middle-aged man was apologizing to me, a high school girl, for his son. You got it wrong, I wanted to tell him. It was like a game we were playing with Worm. And your wife’s murder was part of the game we were enjoying. I stood there, silent, with no idea how I should act. None of this, though, meant very much after I learned that Terauchi had died.

“Why don’t you have a bite to eat? You haven’t touched anything since this morning.” It was almost evening when my mother came up to see me as I lay on my bed, weeping. Just when I started downstairs the phone rang. I motioned to my mother that I’d take it. I had a hunch it was for me. The phone rang on, like it was specifically waiting until I got downstairs.

“Toshiko? I’m afraid I have some terrible news. Kazuko just killed herself. She left a letter addressed to you. Can you come over right away and open it?”

My brain just went totally blank. I’d heard people say this before, and that’s exactly what happened. A total whiteout. I was so shocked it was like I forgot how to move my arms and legs.

* * *

The undertaker, with this pained expression, set down the tray used to offer incense. After a quick autopsy, Terauchi’s body was back home. And there she was, lying in a coffin. Her face was covered with a white cloth. I just kept staring at her fingers, the blackish fingertips clasped at her chest. When she fell she must have hemorrhaged inside. Maybe they weren’t showing her face because it’d been injured. Her beautiful face—what had happened to it now? You dummy, jumping off a building like that! Now we can’t see you. How am I supposed to say good-bye if I can’t see your face?

* * *

“What did she say in her letter?” Terauchi’s mother asked me again.

“She said not to show it to anybody else, so I don’t think I should,” I was finally able to reply. Next to me, my mother stirred, like she was bothered by this. I knew exactly what she wanted to say to me: You know that’s not right, Toshiko. This is Terauchi’s mother we’re talking about. Show it to her. Tell her what she wants to know.

“I understand. It’s just that I’m her parent and would like to know what she wrote.”

Terauchi’s mother’s shoulders slumped as she muttered this. I thought maybe it would be okay to tell her the main points of the letter, so I scanned it again, but I’m lousy at summarizing things and nothing of the contents stayed with me. If it were Terauchi doing the summarizing, she’d do a great job, explaining things by emphasizing exactly what mattered. Still, you know something, Terauchi, I wanted to tell her—this is really poorly written. You always were a lousy writer. To really understand this, a person would have to read it a hundred times. Despite all this, I went ahead and tried to explain what was in the letter.

“Mainly what she says is that she’s a very philosophical type of person and living exhausted her. There were things that make her and the world incompatible. And she said that as her friend I’m the only one who can understand this, so I shouldn’t show it to anybody else.”

“Was it studying for entrance exams that did it?” Terauchi’s mother asked.

“Maybe. I’m not really sure.”

“I understand. This must come as such a shock to you, too, Toshiko. Asking you this must upset you.”

Terauchi’s mother gave a quick smile. I couldn’t imagine what the problems between her and Terauchi had been, but the smile told me that she understood her daughter’s feelings.

“Kazuko said this to me,” her mother said. “When she heard about Miss Higashiyama’s accident she said, ‘It’s all your fault.’ I don’t know what she meant by that.”

I found that part of Terauchi’s letter. It’s too embarrassing to write down. So you were too embarrassed to even tell me. My mother shook my shoulder.

“Please show her the letter, Toshiko. Kazuko asked you not to, but her parents have the right to see it. It might be addressed to you, but I don’t see how you can keep it to yourself.”

The right. I wonder about that. It’s addressed to me, so doesn’t that mean it’s just mine? My brain wouldn’t function and I just stood there, my mother shaking me. No matter how much she shook me, I still clung tightly to Terauchi’s letter. She’d said things about her mother and how turning in Worm and Kirarin to the police made her want to die. The last thing I wanted was for anybody to learn about that. Especially her mother.

“It’s okay,” Terauchi’s father said, interrupting. “No need to force yourself to show it to us. If those were Kazuko’s final wishes then we should respect them. Because I think she’s still out there, watching us.”

At this we all turned to look at the white wood coffin. She’s definitely smiling inside there, I thought, her shattered face grinning. I thought of her pleasant features. When I thought that I’d never see that face again, talking to her just this morning seemed like an illusion. Reality started to fade away.

“Terauchi!! You idiot!!”

A voice shouted from behind us. It was Yuzan, shoulders squared, dressed in her usual T-shirt and work pants. The instant she saw the coffin, she collapsed on the floor in tears.

“How could this happen? Tell me! They said Kirarin’s dead, too. What am I going to do?”

You got that right, I thought. What am I going to do, too? I’d never been so confused in my life. I noticed that Yuzan, who usually referred to herself by the rough masculine word ore, had switched now to the feminine atashi. It was weird, but a strangely calm part of me could notice something like that. Next I had to go over to Kirarin’s house in Chofu. I was sure I couldn’t see her face either. The two of them had both been crushed. Completely disintegrated, the two of them. Why? I still couldn’t comprehend that all these things had happened. Am I to blame for all this? Did it all happen because I didn’t report Worm to the police? Thoughts kept swirling round and round in my head. Worm used my cell phone to call the three of us, Yuzan lent him a bike, Kirarin thought it’d be fun, so she went to see him, and Terauchi reported them to the police. This is crazy. Wasn’t there an anime movie like this? Rinbu/Rondo or something? Kind of out-of-date, I guess. I started to feel faint, but unlike in a movie, I didn’t lose consciousness. My head was, in a strange way, totally clear.

* * *

Everything about the second semester of my senior year in high school felt cold and distant. I hadn’t seen my classmates since the summer break began and they were all too busy to sit down and talk about my two friends that had died. My class was clearly divided into all sorts of cliques. The bookworms were the most numerous, then came the jocks, the Shibuya clubbers, the Barbie Girls, the nerds, and others, and the deaths of these two girls—Kirarin and Terauchi, who belonged to the one group hardest to fathom—didn’t seem to really hit home with anybody else. Kirarin’s death had been covered in weekly magazines and on TV talk shows, so girls who were into gossipy stuff like that sometimes checked me out like they wanted to ask me about it, but I pretended not to know anything. Compared with the splashy affair of Worm and Kirarin, Terauchi’s suicide didn’t stand out much, although one of those dry weekly newsmagazines did have an article once about a classmate of Kirarin’s having followed her in death by taking her own life.

“Toshi-chan, you’re all skin and bones.”

Haru, her hair bobbed now, stood blocking my way. Her new boyfriend had apparently told her he didn’t like her Yamamba style, so she’d done a total makeover into a Mod. But because of all the makeup she’d worn, her eyebrows and eyelashes had gotten pretty sparse, and this new style didn’t suit her.

“Really?” I touched my cheek. “I didn’t notice.”

“It’s no wonder, though. When I heard about Kirarin and Terauchi I was, like, totally shocked. Which is why I thought I’d change my look and cut my hair. My boyfriend had nothing to do with it. I just thought I’d become the kind of shabby person I’d always made fun of.”

“The world’s changed for you then?” I asked.

“It has. Or at least the kind of guys who try to pick me up.” Haru raised her thin eyebrows as she smiled. “Guys who think I’m some weird creature are always trying to pick me up. At cram school it’s nuts. But it doesn’t matter—none of them are worth the time, anyway. Toshi, you haven’t been to cram school at all. Did you apply for the winter session?”

Not sure how to respond, I stared off into space. Cram school. Entrance exams. Before all this happened those were all I could think about, worrying about how the exams were right around the corner. But now it seemed so far away.

“I don’t know yet,” I replied.

“Yeah, I hear you. You were pretty close to Kirarin and Terauchi, so it must have been a shock. Y’know, I never really liked Kirarin that much, to tell you the truth. She was kind of a Goody Two-shoes. She went out partying all the time, yet when she was with you guys she pretended to be all serious. I know I shouldn’t say this now that she’s dead, but her death didn’t hit me the way Terauchi’s did.”

People’s deaths really do carry different importance for different people. Everybody pretty much had forgotten all about Worm’s mother, and for me, Kirarin’s death just made me sad. Sure, it hurt when I thought I wouldn’t ever see her again, when I remembered all the times she’d been nice to me, when she’d said something funny. Crying for her was like a conditioned reflex. But Terauchi’s death was totally different. Her suicide had a powerful effect on me—it hardened everything in my heart, and drained me. Left me dazed and confused. And I still haven’t figured out how to deal with it. It’s sad, for sure, but I don’t feel like I’m totally empty or anything, more like my mind’s a blank still trying to figure out what happened. It was like that hollow feeling had turned me dull. People were always giving me these weird looks and unwanted sympathy.

“What’s happened to Yuzan?” Haru asked.

After Terauchi’s funeral, Yuzan fell off the grid. Once she called from a bar in Shinjuku 2-chome and said she had a new girlfriend and wouldn’t be coming home anytime soon, and I wasn’t to worry if I didn’t see her for a while. She was apparently going to lean on her new lover and heal that way. It was also clear that Yuzan had decided to come out of the closet. After Terauchi’s funeral it became clear how much it had hurt Yuzan to learn that Terauchi’s final letter was written just to me.

* * *

“Toshi, is it true that Terauchi left a final letter?”

Right after the funeral, Yuzan came over to me. She had on her school uniform skirt, which she wasn’t used to wearing. It was tucked up a bit. She looked bewildered. I was sure Yuzan liked Terauchi a lot, and the fact that Terauchi had died without saying a word to her clearly had shaken her. I couldn’t lie. You understand why, right? If I did lie, I’d have to make up some other plausible story, and the last thing I needed was another burden to carry around. Keeping Terauchi’s secret was enough of a burden, and it made me feel like I was going to collapse.

“It’s true,” I said.

I stared down at the floor of the funeral parlor, which reflected the bright light of the chandelier overhead. Kirarin’s funeral had been a private affair, but Terauchi’s was open and held at a brand-new funeral parlor. All of us—her parents’ relatives and in-laws, people from school, classmates—stood out in the courtyard, noisy with the shrill cry of cicadas, to see off her casket. I overheard one middle-aged lady complain that with suicides they usually held private, low-key funerals, but to me this kind of funeral fit Terauchi perfectly. An unexpected ending. If Terauchi were here she might have said this and laughed.

“What did she write?” Yuzan asked.

I quickly gave her the kind of perfunctory answer I’d given Terauchi’s mother. Yuzan bit her lip in frustration.

“Really. So she didn’t say a thing about me?”

“She didn’t write about anybody else. Just about her own personality.”

“Then why’d she address it to you? And not her old lady?”

Yuzan looked blank. I shook my head.

“I have no idea. Nobody ever knew what was in Terauchi’s head.”

“I wonder,” Yuzan said, and then was silent.

But I think I understood her, Yuzan probably wanted to add. If Kirarin had lived she probably would have said the same thing as Yuzan. Terauchi might have tried to deceive us, but sometimes we liked her warped attitude and offbeat sense of humor. And sometimes we almost painfully felt these were our own.

“Ah—this is so, so hard. Man—everybody’s gone.”

Yuzan wiped her tears away with her palm like guys do. I’m still here, I wanted to say, but couldn’t. It was like Yuzan and I were saying good-bye, each of us on opposite shores with Terauchi’s letter standing between us.

“I feel so lonely,” I said.

“You shouldn’t, Toshi. You should be happy ’cause you still have your whole family and everything.”

I felt pushed even further away from Yuzan. Was I really happy? I asked myself. This person to whom Terauchi’s final letter was entrusted? She’d written that she’d uncovered the darkness that lay within her. Terauchi should have uncovered the real me, too. But instead she said farewell. As I stood there vacantly, Yuzan tapped my shoulder.

“About the cell phone, don’t worry about it. It was in my name, so you have nothing to do with it. I doubt the cops’ll ask you about it.”

It was kind of strange. According to Worm’s dad, when he talked to us three days after Terauchi’s and Kirarin’s deaths, miraculously Worm had only external injuries, nothing internal. He could talk and was being interviewed by the police. Still, I’d heard nothing from them yet.

“Well, see ya.”

Yuzan duckwalked away, her summer school uniform looking uncomfortable on her. She had her usual backpack slung across her shoulder and I noticed a key holder attached to a zipper as I watched her walk away. The key holder had a purikura instant photo the four of us had taken when we were fooling around back in the holidays at the beginning of May.

“Miss Yamanaka, I wonder if I could have a word with you.”

In the shadows at the entrance to the funeral home the female detective was waiting for me. A little ways off to the side was her partner, the middle-aged man. The woman had on a wide-brimmed white hat and a scarf around her neck, perhaps to keep from getting sunburned. She’s just like Candy, I thought, and came to a halt, awaiting judgment.

“I’m so sorry for all these shocking events that have happened to you, one after another. My apologizes for coming to see you at the funeral. Why don’t we go over there where it’s a bit cooler?”

The two of them motioned me over to the shade beneath some trees in a small park next to the funeral home. The people who’d attended Terauchi’s funeral slipped past us, heads drooping.

“I still can’t figure out what led to your neighbor and Miss Higashiyama getting together. Her parents said they have no idea, and the boy’s father said the same. Miss Higashiyama’s contact list didn’t contain your neighbor’s number at all.”

I summoned up the courage to ask, “The boy next door didn’t have a cell phone?”

He didn’t, the detective said as she glanced at her notepad. Great. Worm threw it away. I wanted to dance for joy, but soon felt ashamed at caring only about saving my own neck.

“It surprised me, too,” I said. “Maybe they just happened to hook up.”

“I wonder about that.”

The female detective looked up, doubt in her eyes. The old man spoke up.

“The boy said the same thing, but you and Miss Higashiyama were friends, and the only thing I can think is that you helped bring them together.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” I said.

“But you talked on the phone with Miss Higashiyama the day before she died,” the female detective said.

All of a sudden it hit me that this was just like something else I’d experienced before. Those pushy canvassers in front of the station. Guys with their questionnaires, women clutching clipboards. Young girls practicing to be fortune-tellers. Tell a lie. Come on, Ninna Hori, you can do it! Acting’s your forte. You’re the only one who’s going to protect yourself. I could hear Terauchi whispering this to me.

“There was just something I needed to ask her. I had no idea where she was. We just talked about movies and stuff like always and then I hung up.”

Cold sweat was running down from my underarms. I was trying my hardest to cover up something, but I knew it wasn’t just my own guilt.

“Is that right?” the woman said, a disappointed look on her face. “I’m also wondering whether Miss Terauchi’s suicide might not also be connected to this affair. We know she talked with Miss Higashiyama, and all I can think is that they argued about her being together with the boy.”

“Terauchi wasn’t that kind of person,” I insisted. “What I mean is, the kind of person who would die for somebody else. She wasn’t stupid. She was much smarter than that, very sensitive, the kind where you weren’t sure if she was completely unattractive, or the total opposite. But she’s not the kind of person who would die over something dumb like that.”

As I was speaking I started to cry. The weird thing was, this was the first time I’d cried over Terauchi. The woman looked concerned and frowned.

“I’m very sorry. We’ll ask you about this at some other time. Still, it’s all very puzzling,” she said, catching the eye of her partner. The old guy nodded and brushed away a mosquito.

“We heard that Miss Terauchi left behind a letter. I wonder what was in it. We actually had a call come in with information that led us to the two of them, and I have the feeling it was Miss Terauchi who made the call. I sense that since you were all good friends, when you found out the boy next door had run away you got together to help him. I’m guessing that Miss Terauchi found out about this and got angry, called the police, and when Miss Higashiyama was killed in that unfortunate accident, she felt responsible and took her own life.”

I was taken aback. It sounded so stupid when someone else put it into words. Which is exactly why I had to lie. Not to protect myself so much as to protect the truth about how all of us felt when we first heard about Worm. Or to protect what Worm felt in the instant he murdered his mother. Because it was something nobody else could know.

“Don’t you think that’s taking it a little too far?”

I wiped away my tears, dumbfounded.

“It is a bit much, isn’t it?” she said. “I don’t think even you all would do something that stupid.”

The detective’s tone was sarcastic, but it didn’t bother me. I’d seen her close her notepad, so I knew she’d given up on pursuing it further.

“Well, we’re off to question the boy.”

And that was the last time the police ever came by.

* * *

I was standing there blankly, thinking of all that had happened at Terauchi’s funeral. Haru was waving her hand right in front of my face.

“Hey, you all right? You look really out of it.”

“I’m okay. It’s just that lots of things have happened.”

“When everything’s back to normal come back to the cram school, okay?”

Haru said this gently as she pulled up her loose socks, which had slipped down. “Bye-bye,” I told her, then realized with a wry smile that those had been Terauchi’s last words.

* * *

When I got home there was a letter waiting for me on top of my desk, from some guy I didn’t know. What is this? I thought. I sat down at my desk, gathered myself together, and opened the envelope. Even now, every time I see a sealed letter it gives me the creeps.

Dear Miss Yamanaka,

I’m sure you’re very surprised to get a letter out of the blue from someone you don’t know. My name is Wataru Sakatani, and I’m a student at Waseda University. I used to go out with Kirari Higashiyama and I got your address from her mother. I hadn’t heard from Kirari for a long time, and it was a real shock to hear about this terrible accident. I can’t believe, even now, that she’s actually gone. It’s so sad.

I learned of her death when the police came to my house. They came because the day before she died, I got a call from the suspect. Also, on the day of her death, I was worried about her and called her cell phone. The first call she made was on the hotel’s records, and the call I made the day she died they found on her cell phone records.

I don’t know much about what happened but I somehow feel I’m to blame. I haven’t been able to say this to anyone else (meaning, I don’t think they’d understand—not that I’m trying to hide my mistakes), but I decided to tell you everything.

To go into more detail, I can’t help but think that it was my phone calls that got Kirari into that accident. Or that maybe this all happened because our relationship had gone bad.

I called her cell phone simply because I was worried that something had happened to her, and at first she sounded happy, but by the end she seemed sad. I wanted to suggest that we start going out again, but that weird phone call the day before made me worry she’d changed too much, so I didn’t say anything. I had doubts about her. For a moment I thought I’d call her again, but I didn’t. But if I had called her a second time, if I had asked her to see me again, maybe she wouldn’t have gone with that boy.

I don’t think this kind of speculation is pointless. I’m sure I’ll be thinking about her for the rest of my life. All the what ifs and if onlys…Anyone who says I should stop thinking about these kinds of things doesn’t have burdens himself. Or else is a person who never had a decisive moment in his life. I’ve been thinking about all kinds of things, and I’ve decided I’m going to live with this burden for the rest of my life. I’m sure there will be times when that feeling will be strong, and other times when it isn’t.

When I heard from Kirari’s mother that her good friend Terauchi had taken her life on the same day, I felt very, very sorry for you, Miss Yamanaka. I imagined that, even more so, you must be suffering, wondering what if. If that’s the case, then I truly feel sorry for you. As I said before, all we can do is live with our burdens (though maybe you don’t have any). To live and imagine. That’s the job left for those of us who’ve survived.

Maybe I’ve said too much. But it helps me a lot to write to you. Thank you for reading what I had to say.

Yours,

Wataru Sakatani

I took out Terauchi’s last letter from my drawer and lined it up with Wataru’s. There was something, I wasn’t sure what, that the two of them shared.

We’re in the same boat. What I mean is, you have to deal with my death.

I’m dealing with it already, I said to her. Bye-bye, Terauchi. Those of us who’ve survived—me, Worm, and Yuzan—will remember you and Kirarin for the rest of our lives. Wataru will remember Kirarin. And the man next door will never forget his wife.

A sudden thought hit me. The next time I go to karaoke, I’m through with using a fake name. No more Ninna Hori. Tears welled up in my eyes, and my name written by Terauchi on the envelope—Miss Toshiko Yamanaka—was blurry.