Another Episode S / 0 Read online

  ~To Dear A.K.~

  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.