Chapter 8 : June III

I ran into Ms. Mikami, who had been out of school for so many days, that morning on the stairs. It was the start of the week, Monday, June 8.

It was on the landing between the second and third floors on the East Stair in Building C. I was going up and Ms. Mikami was coming down. It was just slightly before 8:30.

"Oh…Good morning."

Flustered, I gave her an unintentionally awkward greeting. Ms. Mikami came to a stop and looked down at me as if she'd seen something odd, but her eyes shifted immediately away from me and floated unnaturally in space.

"Good morni—um, you're early. The warning bell hasn't even rung yet. Uh, I mean…"

She didn't greet me or respond in any way. I thought it was a little strange, but I couldn't ask her if anything was wrong here in the stairwell, either. There was a brief, incredibly uncomfortable—or rather, embarrassing—moment, and then…

Finally, we went past each other, Ms. Mikami never saying a word. That same instant, the bell began to ring.

Obvious question number one: Why, at this hour, was the teacher coming down the stairs? The short homeroom period was starting now…And yet she was moving away from the classroom, not toward it. Why?

There were still several kids hanging around in the hall on the third floor. But they were all from the neighboring classes, and no one I recognized from Class 3 was among them.

Was Mei here today? I wondered. Was she going to show herself at school, or…?

Thinking about it without really thinking, I opened the door at the back of the classroom.

I was surprised.

This surprise was the exact opposite of the one I'd had last Thursday, when the detectives from the Yomiyama Police Department had released me from questioning and I'd come back to the classroom.

That day, I'd been surprised that not a single person from my class was in the room in the middle of sixth period. This was the opposite…Meaning that even though only the very first morning bell had rung, nearly everyone was in the classroom already, and they were all sitting at their desks, totally disciplined and silent.

"Oh…"

I made a sound inadvertently and a few students turned around to look at me. But they gave no more reaction than that and turned back around right away.

Mr. Kubodera was standing next to the teacher's platform. There were two students standing atop the platform: Tomohiko Kazami and the new class representative for the girls, Izumi Akazawa.

Extremely confused by the weird atmosphere in the silent classroom, I slowly moved to sit at my own desk.

"So that is what we'll be doing. Are there any…No, we've said enough, I'm sure," Kazami said from the platform. I heard something fearful in his voice. Beside him, Akazawa stood slightly at an angle, her arms across her chest. Something about her looked—to use a slightly anachronistic phrase—like a bandit queen.

I lightly poked the back of the student in front of me, then asked in a whisper, "Did something happen this morning?" But the boy, named Wakui, didn't turn around or respond.

This was why Ms. Mikami had been coming down the stairs, anyway. The lightbulb went on for that, at least. As the assistant teacher, she had been present for this class meeting until a few moments ago, and then…

I swept my eyes furtively around the room.

As expected, Mei wasn't there. There were two other empty seats: Yukari Sakuragi's and—right—the boy who had died suddenly over the weekend, Ikuo Takabayashi's.

Kazami and Akazawa came down from the platform and went back to their seats. Mr. Kubodera took their place in the center of the platform.

"It was a brief two months, but we should all offer our thoughts and prayers for Takabayashi, who studied with us in this room."

Mr. Kubodera strung the words together with a solemn expression and yet, somehow, sounded as if he were reading an example sentence out of a textbook.

"His memorial service will be at ten o'clock this morning, so Kazami and Akazawa will attend on the class's behalf. I'll be going as well. Should you need anything during that time, please talk to Ms. Mikami. Are there any questions?"

The classroom remained utterly silent.

Though he'd been addressing everyone, Mr. Kubodera was looking at an angle up at the ceiling, and his eyes never moved.

"We've had yet another sad event, but we can all pull through it without losing heart, and certainly without giving up, if everyone works together."

Pull through without giving up? If everyone works together? Hm-m-m. I couldn't quite pinpoint what he meant by that.

"Now then…We must all respect the decision of the class. Even Ms. Mikami, who is in a very difficult position, told us earlier that she would do 'whatever possible.' So…are there any questions?"

After the third repetition of "are there any questions?" Mr. Kubodera lowered his gaze to the students' faces for the first time. Probably every student but me, all probably wearing the same solemn expression as their teacher, nodded deeply.

Ah. So I really hadn't understood what he was getting at. Even so, this was not exactly an atmosphere where I could put my hand up and declare "Question!"…

Right up until he left the classroom a few minutes later, Mr. Kubodera never once looked my way. I don't think it was my imagination.

❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖

First period was social studies. When that class ended, I immediately stood up and called to Yuya Mochizuki.

After receiving the phone call two days ago, on Saturday, when he'd learned of Takabayashi's death, he had hurried home, his face ashen. Obviously the news had bothered him. But then—

In a certain sense, his reaction was extremely honest.

He must have heard me call to him, but he didn't react at all. He had looked around, seeming twitchy, then scurried out of the room, as if fleeing from me. It was driving me crazy chasing him down, so I let him go.

What's his deal?

That was all I thought of it at the time. That he really didn't want people to find out that he'd snuck over to my house on Saturday.

But that wasn't the end of it. Between the end of that class and lunch, I became uncomfortably aware of something.

It wasn't just Mochizuki.

For instance, the boy in front of me, Wakui. Before second period started, I poked him in the back again and asked, "Got a second?" But he didn't turn around.

What's up with him? I frowned.

Wakui had chronic asthma, I guess, so he would use a portable inhaler, even during classes. I, at least, had felt a kind of kinship with him as a fellow sufferer of a respiratory condition, and now…What's up with this cold-shoulder treatment?

I was vaguely annoyed, but even so this was nothing more than one example. In other words…

Not a single person in the class came over to talk to me. Even if I tried to talk to them, they didn't react at all, like Wakui, or they left without ever saying a word, like Mochizuki. Even people whom I'd chatted with pretty casually up till last week, like Kazami and Teshigawara and a couple of others.

At lunch, I tried calling Teshigawara on his cell phone. But all I got was the standard message that "This phone may be turned off or in an area without adequate signal…" I tried calling him back three times during the break, and got the message three times. I spotted Mochizuki and called out to him again but, just like after first period, he didn't respond.

And so it went all day.

In the end, I never had a full conversation with anyone from class that day. Really, forget that, I never once had a chance to even be called on during class by a teacher, and pretty much never spoke out loud except to talk to myself. Even if I did talk, no one answered me, and that treatment just went on and on and on.

Given all of that…

I was forced to take a fresh look at things.

To reconsider the alienness ( = "enigma") surrounding Mei Misaki, whether piece by piece or the overall picture of it, that I had detected since first becoming a part of this third-year Class 3 at the beginning of May. To rethink what it meant, which I had almost but never quite managed to grasp all this last month. What lay behind it. And the form of this "reality" that encompassed it all…

❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖

What became my focus was the question—which shouldn't have needed asking—of whether or not Mei Misaki existed.

Was she there, or wasn't she?

Was she present in this class, in this world, or wasn't she?

So many questions that had started to bother me as soon as I transferred here. I couldn't even start to list them all.

Here was someone that not a single person in the class had any contact with—or even tried to. Thinking back on it now, I had never once seen anyone from class go up to her, or talk to her, or call her name, or even say it out loud.

And the reactions everyone had when, in the midst of this treatment, I approached her or talked about her…

The reactions of Kazami and Teshigawara that first day, for instance, when I had spotted Mei on a bench in front of Building Zero and talked to her. The reaction of Yukari Sakuragi that same day when I had spoken Mei's name in conversation while we sat out of gym class. The reactions of Teshigawara and Mochizuki—had it been the next day?—when I'd gone into the secondary library after seeing Mei there. And there were others. A lot of others.

In the end, Teshigawara had been thoughtful enough to call and give me a warning.

Quit paying attention to things that aren't there. It's dangerous.

And there was what Ms. Mizuno's little brother Takeru had said to her, too.

He demanded "Why are you asking me that? There's no one like that in my class." He looked totally serious, like I've never seen him before.

Is she actually there?

The way no one made contact with Mei, or even tried to, wasn't limited exclusively to the students. Overall, the teachers involved with third-year Class 3 seemed to do the same.

None of the teachers ever took attendance at the start of class by calling out names. So they never spoke the name "Mei Misaki." I had never yet seen Mei get called on in class to read from the text or solve a problem.

I couldn't fault her for going up to the roof by herself during gym class instead of watching from nearby. Even if she was late to class, or skipped completely, or left in the middle of a test, or was absent for days at a time…Neither the teachers nor the students seemed to take any notice.

The circumstances under which I first encountered her at the hospital—that had probably helped, and even though I believed it was impossible, there were times when even I considered the possibility of "the nonexistence of Mei Misaki."

Because I don't exist.

She'd even said it herself at some point.

To them, I'm invisible. You're the only one who sees me, Sakakibara…what would you do then?

And I had seen firsthand the uncanny way she suddenly appeared and vanished in that basement room in "Twilight of Yomi"…

Maybe Mei Misaki really isn't there and she doesn't exist, after all.

Maybe she is like a ghost that only I can see and hear, and not real at all.

The fact that her desk was the only one in the whole classroom that was such an incredibly old model and the fact that the name tag pinned to her chest was made of such stained, wrinkly paper seemed to corroborate that idea somehow.

…However.

Thinking about it realistically, no—there was no way such a ridiculous thing could be true. In which case I had to explain all of these various events and facts some other way…In fact, there was a conclusion that made much more sense, thinking about things this way.

Mei Misaki is there, she really does exist.

But everyone around her deliberately acts as if there's no such person as Mei Misaki. That was the conclusion.

I even wondered if this was some sort of "bullying," which you hear so much about. Bullying in the form of every member of the class flat-out ignoring her. But—and I was pretty sure I'd talked to Ms. Mizuno about this, too—even if that were the case, there was still something strange about it.

I'd been dragged into that "Sakakibara" issue last year and had real experience with how terrible that had made me feel. So maybe that was just making me oversensitive. This was totally unlike simple bullying by snubbing. This is going to sound vague, but something in the air around this case was very different. Too different.

It could be that they're all afraid of her.

Oh, right. Ms. Mizuno had said something like that, too…

…Anyway.

Did Mei Misaki exist or not?

I pondered over which was true and which was false, but it was incredibly hard to figure out the answer. That was the problem. Unless I took some sort of decisive action.

I had wavered again and again between the two theories, between the opposite extremes, swayed by the situation or my state of mind in the moment. Telling myself that I didn't have any choice. But…

Today, at last, I felt as if I had reached at least one answer thanks to my own visceral experience. I couldn't say I had it all, but I felt as if I understood the "shape" of what lay at its heart.

That being, in other words, this. What was happening to me.

Something like this must have been happening to Mei this whole time.

To test it out, I stood up from my seat without asking in the middle of sixth-period language arts class and left the room. A minor commotion had popped up across the room momentarily, but Mr. Kubodera didn't say a word to reproach me. Ah. So it was true.

I went over to a window in the hallway and looked up at the rainy sky where low clouds were piling. I was feeling pretty depressed; but on the other hand, my heart felt a little bit lighter.

I thought I now understood "what is this?" to a certain degree.

The next question was "why?"

❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖

Exactly as sixth period ended, I went mutely back into the classroom. Mr. Kubodera left without saying anything to me or even sparing me a glance. As if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

I headed to my desk to grab my bag when, by chance, my eyes met Mochizuki's as he was getting his things together to go home. Just like before, he swiftly turned his eyes away; but as he did it, his lips moved slightly, briefly. I read the word "sorry" in the movement.

Something might happen soon that you'll think is really unpleasant.

The words Mochizuki had spoken to me when I'd seen him on Saturday rose unbidden.

But even if something bad happens to you after this…we need you to put up with it.

He had told me that, looking very serious. Hanging his head and sighing feebly.

Just tell yourself that it's for everyone's benefit. Please.

For everyone's benefit…maybe the answer to "why?" lay there.

I went back to my desk and stuffed my textbook and notes into my bag. Then, checking to make sure I had everything, I glanced inside my desk and—

I noticed something that I had no memory of putting in my desk.

There were two sheets of paper, folded in half.

When I took them out and opened them, a whispered sound escaped me. "Oh—" I looked around quickly, but Mochizuki wasn't in the room.

The two sheets of paper were a copy of the class list for third-year Class 3. Mochizuki must have done this, giving me what I'd asked him for on Saturday…

On the back of the first sheet, he had written something in green pen. His handwriting was pretty bad, and it was all scribbly…but I could just barely make out what he'd written there.

I'm sorry.

Ask Misaki what's going on.

I looked around one more time, then consciously lowered my voice and murmured, "Okay."

He had clearly written "Misaki" on the paper. Her name was being conveyed to me point-blank by a third party in the class. The existence of "Mei Misaki" was being directly acknowledged. This was the first time that had happened, I do believe.

Mei is there after all. She really does exist.

When I came to my senses, I fought back fiercely against the growing threat of tears.

I turned the paper over to the front and checked the list of students' names. I found it right away.

The name "Mei Misaki" was written there, unmistakably. But it was written between two rows and her address and phone number, written beside her name, were struck through with two lines. What did this mean? How was I supposed to interpret that?

Despite the strike-through, I could read the address and phone number written there easily enough.

4-4 Misaki, Yomiyama

That was Mei Misaki's address.

Obviously I knew the name of the town "Misaki," and I also had some recollection of the area in the "4-4" block. I was pretty sure of it.

"Blue Eyes Empty to All, in the Twilight of Yomi"—the building with that doll gallery—was, in fact, Mei's house.

❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖

A woman who might have been Mei's mother answered the phone.

"Um, is Misaki…is Mei there? My name is Sakakibara. I'm in her class."

"I'm sorry?" she replied, her voice sounding slightly taken aback, or maybe uneasy. "Sakakibara, you said?"

"Koichi Sakakibara, yes. I'm in the third-year Class 3 at North Yomi with…Um, this is the Misaki household, right?"

"It is…"

"Um, is Mei there right now?"

"I'm not sure…"

"She didn't come to school today, so…uh, if she's there, could you put her on the line?"

Once I'd figured out her address and phone number, there was no way I was putting this off. I left the school building and went to an unfrequented corner of the schoolyard, where I had quickly dialed the number on the class list on my cell phone.

The woman who might have been her mother stalled, sounding more than a little confused. "I'm not sure."

I gave her one more push. "Please, ma'am."

After a moment she said, "All right. Hold on a moment, please."

There was a long pause after that, and I listened to a crackly version of Für Elise (even I know the name of that song) play on a loop, until finally…

"Hello?"

I heard Mei's voice in my ear. My grip tightened on my cell phone.

"Uh, this is Sakakibara. Sorry to call you out of the blue like this."

There was a weird pause of two or three seconds; then she curtly asked, "What do you want?"

"I want to see you," I replied, refusing to waver. "There's something I want to ask you about."

"You have something to ask me?"

"Yeah." I followed that up right away: "That place is your house, huh? That doll gallery in Misaki."

"I thought you already knew that."

"In the back of my mind, maybe…but I wasn't sure until I saw the class list. Mochizuki gave me a copy. But he told me to ask you what's going on."

"Oh, really?"

Her reaction was apathetic—or more like a deliberate play at being uninterested. In contrast, I just got louder.

"Did you hear that Ikuo Takabayashi died?"

"What?!"

This time I got the right reaction: a short burst of surprise. Apparently she hadn't heard about him.

"It was sudden, on Saturday afternoon, of a heart attack. Though they said he'd always been pretty sick."

"…Oh." She had returned to her distant demeanor, even more staunchly than before, it seemed. "The second one to die in June."

The second one to die in June. Meaning that Ms. Mizuno had been the first?

"And then today…" I went on, undaunted. "When I went to school, the class was acting weird. It was like everyone had agreed to act like I wasn't there."

"You?"

"Yeah. The whole day, as soon as I got there. So I figured, maybe it's the same as what they're doing to you…"

A brief silence intervened, and then at last—"So they decided to try that," Mei said, her voice a heavy sigh.

"What do you mean?" I asked, putting force behind my words. "Why…Why would they all do something like this?"

I tried waiting the length of her previous silence, but there was no answer. This time I held my voice in check more.

"Anyway…that's why I want to see you and ask you what's going on."

No answer.

"Come on, can we meet up?"

Still nothing.

"Come on, Misaki…"

"Fine." Her voice was thin when she answered. "Where are you right now?"

"Still at school. I'm just about to leave."

"Then why don't you come here? You know how to get here, right?"

"Uh, yeah."

"Okay. In about thirty minutes, then, I'd say. In the room in the basement. All right?"

"Perfect. I'm leaving now."

"I'll tell Grandma Amane you're coming. I'll be waiting."

"Amane" was written with the characters for "at the root of heaven"—that was something I found out later. The word "Grandma" reminded me immediately of the old woman greeting visitors at the table next to the entrance.

❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖

And so it was that I visited "Blue Eyes Empty to All, in the Twilight of Yomi" for the third time.

The doorbell ringing dully. The voice of the white-haired old woman greeting me. The twilight dimness within the gallery at the cusp of sunset…

"Mei is downstairs," the old woman said when she saw my face. "You go on in. No need to pay the fee."

There were no visitors in the gallery on the first floor.

There aren't any other customers right now, anyway…

Right. The old woman had twice told me that, the two times I'd been here before. That there weren't any other customers…and yet.

When I'd gone down to the basement, Mei had been there both times.

I had felt a slight nagging in my mind about why that could be, and I'd found it strange…and because of that my mind had been inclined, however slightly, toward the "nonexistence of Mei Misaki."

But the answer had been the simplest thing imaginable.

Now that I knew, there was nothing strange about it at all. There hadn't been any secret meaning in the old woman's words; she had simply given me the bare facts at the time.

There aren't any other customers anyway…

She'd been exactly right.

Because Mei wasn't a customer. This building, including this gallery—this was her home.

I slipped between the ranks of dolls on quiet steps, heading for the back staircase. Once again consciously taking deep breaths for the lifeless dolls.

The music playing in the museum today was not string music: it was a haunting female vocalist. The lyrics, backed by an equally haunting melody, weren't in English or Japanese. It might have been French.

It was a little before four in the afternoon. And in the display room in the crypt-like basement, sunk in a greater chill than the first floor, in the very center of the room—

Mei stood, alone. Wearing a thick, black long-sleeved shirt and black jeans, this was the first time I'd seen her dressed in anything other than her school uniform.

Fighting back the tension rising uncontrollably within me, I raised a hand in a casual wave. "Hey."

"Well?" she asked me with the faintest of smiles. "How does it feel to not exist?"

"It doesn't feel great," I replied, deliberately pursing my lips at her. "But…even so, I kind of feel like a weight is lifted."

"Oh? And why's that?"

"Because now I know that Mei Misaki exists."

However…

Even so, it could be that the girl who's here in front of me really truly isn't there…The doubt flitted through my mind, whisper though it was.

I blinked harshly to banish the thought, then fixed my eyes squarely on Mei and took a step closer.

"The first time I met you here—" I spoke the words just so I could hear myself say them. "You told me, 'I come down here sometimes. Since I don't hate it in here.' That day, you didn't have your bag with you, even though you had just come from school…which tells me that ordinarily you live on the upper floors of this building and 'come down here sometimes.' That day, you came home and put down your bag, and then, because you were in the mood, you came down here."

"Obviously."

Another faint smile touched Mei's face as she nodded. I went on. "When I asked you if you lived nearby, you told me, 'Well, yeah.' That was…"

"Look, we use the third floor of this building as our house. There's nothing wrong with saying that's 'nearby,' is there?"

Yeah, so that was what she'd meant.

"That old woman who's always next to the door—you called her 'Grandma Amane'?"

"She's my mom's aunt. Which makes her my great-aunt. My mom's mom died young, so as far as I'm concerned, she's like my grandma."

Mei spoke diffidently, and without faltering.

"Bright lights aren't good for her eyes, so she started wearing those glasses all the time. She says she can tell people apart just fine, so I guess it doesn't affect her work."

"Was that your mom on the phone?"

"You surprised her. I never get phone calls from kids at school."

"Oh. Um, maybe I'm just imagining things, but is your mom, uh…"

"Is she what?"

"I mean, is your mom the one who made the dolls here? That Kirika person?"

"Yeah." Mei nodded without apology. "Kirika is her stage name, I guess you could say. Her real name is a lot more common. She spends most of the day holed up in that workshop on the second floor, making dolls and painting pictures and whatever else. She's a weirdo."

"Does the 'M' in 'Studio M' stand for Misaki?"

"Not so complicated, huh?"

That middle-aged woman in the marigold-colored clothes who'd been on the landing of the outside stairs the second time I'd come here. I had already figured she was involved with the doll studio, but could that have been Mei's mother—the doll maker Kirika herself?

"What about your dad?"

Mei's eyes slipped away. "Same as yours," she replied.

"You mean…he's overseas?"

"I think he's in Germany right now. He's out of Japan more than half the year, and then he's in Tokyo for more than half of what's left."

"Does he work in trade or something?"

"I dunno. I'm not really clear on what his job is. But I guess he's got tons of money, because he built this place and lets my mom do whatever she wants."

"Wow."

"You could call us a family, but it doesn't feel very connected. Which is fine."

The fog, like watery ink, that had always surrounded the character of Mei Misaki. For some reason I felt faintly confused at the realization that it was lifting slightly.

"You want to go to the third floor?" Mei asked. "Or did you want to keep talking here?"

"Uh, that's okay."

"You can't really handle this place, can you, Sakakibara?"

"It's not that I can't handle it—"

"But you're not used to it yet, are you? To the air in a place packed with the emptiness of the dolls? You must have a lot more questions."

"Um, yeah, I do."

"Then…"

Mei turned silently on her heel. She started to walk off toward the back of the room. She went to one side of the black coffin that held the doll of the young girl that looked so like her; then she disappeared. Lagging by several beats, I hurried after her.

Behind the coffin, the deep red curtain hanging over the wall was swaying slightly again today, in the breeze from the air-conditioning.

Mei glanced back at me, then pulled the curtain open without a word. And there—

A cream-colored steel door.

There was a rectangular plastic button on the wall beside the door.

"Did you know this was here?" Mei asked as she pushed the button.

I nodded to her, my face scrunched up. "When I came over before, you disappeared back here. So I checked behind the curtain that day."

With the low whir of a motor, the iron doors opened to either side. It was the door to an elevator that linked the basement with the upper floors.

"Come along, Sakakibara." Mei got into the elevator, then gestured for me to join her. "We can talk things over upstairs."

❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖

Three black leather sofas were set around a low glass-topped table. There was one two-seater and two single-seaters. After plopping into one of the single-seaters, Mei gave a short sigh and then looked at me.

"Go ahead. Sit down, at least."

"Oh…right."

"Do you want anything to drink?"

"Uh, no…I'm fine."

"I'm thirsty. Do you want lemon tea? Tea with milk?"

"Um, whichever."

We'd come up to the third floor on the elevator, to the Misaki family home. My first impression was how the place seemed barely lived in, if at all.

We'd moved to the spacious living/dining room. The furniture was unpleasantly sparse for the amount of space they had and, to top it off, every detail of the room was too precisely arranged. Even the carelessness of the TV remote being tossed into the center of the table seemed unnatural.

The windows were all closed and the air-conditioning was on. It was still only early June, but the air-conditioning was running surprisingly hard.

Mei stood up from the sofa and went into the kitchen, then immediately returned with two cans of black tea. "Here." She set one can in front of me. Then, pulling the tab off her own can, she plopped back down on the sofa.

"So?" Mei took a swig of the tea, then looked at me with a cool gaze. "What do you want to talk about first?"

"Uh…well."

"Why don't you ask me questions? Maybe that'll be easier."

"I thought you hated being interrogated."

"I do hate it. But today, I'll allow it."

Mei spoke in a teacherly tone, then smiled in amusement. Drawn in, my tension was easing, but I quickly got on the ball and straightened my posture.

"All right. Let me just confirm something again," I said. "Mei Misaki—you're alive, right?"

"Did you think maybe I was a ghost?"

"I'm not going to say I didn't have doubts sometimes, to be honest."

"I guess I can't blame you." Mei smiled in amusement again. "But now all your doubts are gone, I hope. If we're talking on the level of whether or not I exist, then absolutely, I'm alive. A real, flesh-and-blood human being. The only people who think I'm 'not there' are the ones in third-year Class 3 at North Yomi. Though actually, that was supposed to have included you, too, Sakakibara."

"Me?"

"Yeah. But that failed pretty early on. Now you're like me and…It's hard to explain."

I noted down the words that stuck out to me—"failed," "like me"—in a corner of my mind and asked Mei another question. "When did it start? When did everyone in class start pretending that no student named Mei Misaki existed? Has it always been that way?"

"What do you mean, always?"

"Like, as soon as you started third year? Or before that?"

"Once we joined third-year Class 3, of course. But it wasn't right away."

There was no longer a smile on Mei's face as she answered.

"When the new semester had just started, we thought this year was going to be an 'off year.' But then we found out it probably wasn't going to be, and the discussions wrapped up in April…So, to be accurate, it started on May first."

"May first?"

"You got out of the hospital and first came to North Yomi on the sixth, right?"

"Yeah."

"Friday the week before that was the first day. There was a three-day weekend after that, so effectively, that was the third day."

It had started that recently? That threw me for quite a loop. I had gotten the idea somehow that this had been going on longer—at least before I came to this town—and in a sustained way.

"A lot of stuff must have seemed strange to you after that first day."

"Well, that's true." I nodded deeply to underscore her comment. "Every time I talked to you or said your name, Kazami and Teshigawara…everyone around me would react so weirdly. It looked like they wanted to say something, but nobody ever did."

"They wanted to tell you, but they just couldn't do it. I think that's how it turned out. They wound up cutting their own throats. They should have told you everything before you came to school. They're paying for it now."

"What do you mean?"

"You should have done like everyone else and treated me like I'm 'not there.' It doesn't work otherwise…but up till then, I don't think any of them were taking it that seriously. Remember what I told you? How even I only half-believed it, deep down. How…I didn't buy into it a hundred percent."

She was right; I did remember her saying those words, but…

"It's not just 'bullying,' is it?"

I pushed on with my questions.

"No. I don't think anyone is thinking of it like that."

"…So then why are you the target?"

Mei cocked her head slightly. "Who knows? It's kind of just the way things worked out. But I never interacted much with anyone anyway, and plus my name just happens to be Misaki, too…So maybe it seemed perfect. In a way, it almost makes things easier for me, too."

"Easier? You can't—"

"I can't mean that?"

"That's right, you can't. There's no way it's a good thing that the kids in class, and even the teachers, are ganging up and ignoring a single student."

My voice grew rougher as I spoke, but Mei let it wash past her.

"I'm pretty sure that the teachers who deal with Class 3 spread the word through different channels than the students."

Her tone was stubbornly detached.

"For example, not taking class attendance by roll call. There are teachers who do roll call in other classes. But they don't do it in Class 3. You know, so they don't have to call my name. Class 3 is the only one that doesn't have to 'stand' and 'greet,' too. It's the same reason the teachers never go down the rows and call on us in order, no matter what class we're in. I will never be called on, and if I'm absent or I leave halfway through the class, no one's going to say a word about it. And I'm excused from all cleaning rotations and everything else. The teachers reached that understanding amongst themselves. And when the midterms rolled around, I guess they weren't allowed to excuse me from that, but they didn't care how lazy I was when I filled out answer sheets just to get out of there, did they? Just like everything else…"

"So gym class, too, then?"

"Gym class what?"

"Since they split gym class into boys and girls, I heard that Class 1 and 2 have gym together and Class 4 and 5 have their gym together, but Class 3 is the only one by itself. I thought that was kind of weird. You could argue that one class has to be the odd one out since there's an uneven number, but why would it be Class 3?"

"So other classes don't get pulled in. So the number of students affected doesn't go up. Maybe they do it out of some kind of concern like that. Although there's always been an 'arrangement' for gym class that the person who's 'not there' doesn't participate and sits out whenever they can."

"An arrangement, huh?"

That word called up a memory.

Obey whatever the class decides.

The third "North Yomi fundamental" that Reiko had taught me. And then last week, Thursday, when the classroom was empty, Mr. Kubodera had said…

We need to obey whatever the class decides, without fail. All right?

I let out a deep sigh, feeling overwhelmed, and reached for the can of tea Mei had brought me. It was bitingly cold lemon tea. I pulled the tab off the top and drank half the can in one go.

"If we go through listing every single thing, I don't think we're ever going to finish."

I looked back at Mei's face.

"Basically, the same thing that's been happening to you since the beginning of May started happening to me this morning. So with everything I went through today, I felt like I had a pretty good idea of what was going on. But the thing I still don't understand is why are they doing it?"

Yes. The question was "why?"

It wasn't simple "bullying." Mei, the one going through it, had even said so. And I agreed. But on the other hand…

The students and the teachers had agreed to treat one particular student as if they're "not there." In a normal context, no, that wasn't "simple" bullying. It was heinous, over-the-top bullying. That was why my voice had gotten so raw before when I said, "There's no way doing something like that is a good thing." But…

Thinking about this by forcing the word or the concept of "bullying" onto it, at least, was wrong; it didn't make sense. That fact was inescapable.

There was probably no malice in what they were doing, whether student or teacher, like in so-called bullying. If there was no contempt or mockery of their target, then there was also no intent to try and strengthen their group ties by singling her out…That's how I thought of it.

What they had instead was fear and dread…That's also how I saw it.

Before, I'd thought they were afraid of Mei, but it wasn't that. Rather, it was like fear and dread not of Mei herself, but of something they couldn't see…

"Everyone's desperate now," Mei said.

"Desperate?"

"Sakuragi and her mother died in those accidents in May, so they couldn't say they only half-believed it anymore. And then once June started, there were two more. It's begun, for sure."

…Which didn't explain much.

"So then…I mean, why is that?" I asked, each word a gasp for oxygen to my depleted lungs. "How is any of that related to anything else? Why would that make everyone gang up on someone and act like they're 'not there'? It's so pointless."

"Why? You really think that, don't you?"

"I do."

The short sleeves of my summer uniform exposed my arms, which had been covered in goose bumps for some time now. And it wasn't going away. And not just because the air-conditioning was too cold.

"Do you remember the story about Misaki from twenty-six years ago?" Mei asked at length, covering the eye patch on her left eye with the palm of her left hand, as if to hide it.

Twenty-six years ago?…Ah, so this really did have something to do with that.

"Of course," I replied, leaning forward on the sofa.

Her hand still resting over her eye patch, Mei's voice was quiet as she told the story.

"Misaki, the popular kid in third-year Class 3, died and everyone kept pretending that 'Misaki's still alive anyway'…And then on graduation day, the image of Misaki, who couldn't possibly have been there, showed up in the class photo. I think that's as far as we got."

"Yeah."

"You still don't know the rest?"

"No one will tell me."

"Then I'll tell you now," Mei said, moistening her lips with a flick of her pink tongue. "What happened twenty-six years ago was the trigger, and ever since, third-year Class 3 at North Yomi has drawn nearer to 'death.'"

"Nearer to death…?"

Actually, on my first day at school, Mei had said something similar when I'd talked with her on the roof of Building C. I still remembered it vividly.

Third-year Class 3 is the closest to death. More than any other class at any other school. Much more.

"What does that mean?"

I inclined my head, rubbing my arms briskly.

"The first time something happened, twenty-five years ago, Misaki's classmates had all graduated. It was the third-year Class 3 that came after them. The same thing started to happen after that, though it doesn't happen every year. Maybe about once every two years."

"And that is…?"

"I'm going to tell it the way I've seen it, but don't get the wrong idea: I've heard all of this from other people. This has been passed on through lots of people over a lot of years."

So basically, some kind of legend—the situation made it impossible to write the whole thing off as just that. I nodded solemnly, my eyes fixed on Mei's lips.

"The students have their own channels for handing the story down among themselves, separate from the teachers'. Last year's third-year Class 3 tells next year's third-year Class 3. That's how I first found out about most of this. This stuff goes around in the other classes and the other years kind of like a rumor, but at its root, this is a secret that only people involved in third-year Class 3 know, that they absolutely cannot talk about to anyone else. So…"

"Come on, what is it?"

I couldn't stop chafing my arms. The goose bumps just wouldn't go away.

"A mysterious event that first happened to the third-year Class 3 twenty-five years ago," Mei said, flinging the words out. Then she broke off and my breath caught. "When that happened—when it started, I mean—there was at least one death every month, without exception, in third-year Class 3 that year. Sometimes it was the students, sometimes it was their families. There were accidents and illnesses, sometimes a suicide, or they would be involved in some kind of accident. There were people who said it had to be a curse."

A curse…"The curse of third-year Class 3," huh?

"What is it?" I asked again. "What is this 'mysterious event'?"

"Well—" Mei finally dropped her hand from her eye patch and replied, "There's one extra kid in the class. No one notices when they get added. There's an extra person, and no one has any way of telling who it is."

❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖

"There's one extra person?" I repeated it back to her, not understanding. "Someone had to have…"

"I told you, we don't know who it is," Mei answered, her expression unmoving. "It first happened twenty-five years ago. April 1973. As soon as the new semester started, they realized they were one desk short in the classroom. They thought they'd gotten enough desks ready for the number of students in the class that year. And yet when they tried to start class, they realized they were one short."

"And that was because the number of students had gone up?"

"Yeah. But you can't tell who the extra kid is. You can ask everyone, but no one will say it's them, and no one else knows, either."

"…Even so." Unable to grasp this idea, I cut in with the most obvious of questions. "Can't they look something like that up on the class list or in the school records?"

"It doesn't work. No matter where they look, the class list, all kinds of records, everything seems to match up. More like, they can't tell that the records don't match up, because things are changed—like, tampered with—so they can't prove anything. So they're just short one desk."

"Tampered? So someone secretly doctors the records?"

"'Tampered' is a metaphor. See, it's not just the records. Everyone's memories get altered, too."

"Uh-h-h?"

"You don't think that's possible, do you?"

"Well…no."

"But apparently it's true."

As she responded, Mei looked extremely confused about how to explain it. "It isn't anything a person could have done. That's the kind of 'phenomenon' it is. At least, that's how someone explained it to me."

"A phenomenon…"

Argh…I could barely understand what she was telling me.

Tampering with the records? Altering people's memories? That kind of thing was totally…

When someone dies, there's a funeral.

I don't know why, but out of nowhere, my grandfather's papery voice played in my ears. With it came a strange, low-frequency sound, Vmmmmm…as if obscuring his words.

I don't…I don't want to go to any more funerals.

"At first, they all thought someone had screwed up, so they dug up an extra desk and chair and forgot about it. I suppose that's natural. It's not something that would normally occur to anyone, the number of students going up by one without anyone noticing. No one took the possibility seriously. But then…"

Her right eye, not hidden by the eye patch, slowly closed and then opened again.

"Like I said, starting that April, people linked to the class started to die each month. This is an indisputable fact."

"Every month…for a whole year?"

"For 1973, I think it was six students and ten family members. That's not exactly normal."

"…No." I couldn't disagree with that. "If that really did happen…"

Sixteen people in one year. I knew that number was definitely out of the ordinary.

Mei slowly closed and then opened her right eye again, then went on. "And then—the same thing happened the year after that, too. When the new semester started, they were one desk short and every month someone died…And by then the people in the middle of it knew it couldn't be anything ordinary. Some people even said that it must be a curse…"

A curse…"The curse of third-year Class 3."

"If it's a 'curse,' then where did it come from?" I asked, and Mei replied calmly as follows:

"It was the curse of Misaki, who'd died twenty-six years ago."

"Why would Misaki put a curse on anyone?" I pressed. "It's not like Misaki had any really horrible experiences in class or anything, right? Everyone was sad about the sudden death of such a popular kid…weren't they? And Misaki cursed them anyway?"

"It is strange, isn't it? I think so, too. That's why someone told me that this is different from what you'd call a curse."

"Who's 'someone'?"

It was starting to bug me, so I thought I'd ask. Mei didn't answer and instead started to press ahead with the story. "So then…"

"Wait." I stopped her and pressed a thumb against my left temple. "Let me organize this a little. Twenty-six years ago, Misaki from third-year Class 3 died. The next year there was an 'extra person' in the class, but no one knew who it was. Then, every month, the kids in the class or their family members started to die. I mean, what exactly is the logic tying this stuff together? Why do people die when there's someone extra? Why would…"

"I don't know any formal logic for it." Mei gave a slight shake of the head. "I'm not really a specialist in this issue. It's just that after all the stuff that's happened up till now, I dunno, I've got a picture that's come together from experience. Everyone involved knows the story since it gets handed down every year."

She lowered her voice a bit before saying, "The someone extra is 'the casualty.'"

❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖

"…What?"

The tip of my thumb pressed even harder into my temple.

"Um, is that…You mean, Misaki who died twenty-six years ago?"

"No, it doesn't work like that." Mei gave another small shake of her head. "It's not Misaki. It's some other 'casualty.'"

"Casualty…"

The words scratched into Mei's desk in the classroom—

Who is "the casualty"?

The words flashed dubiously through my mind.

"It was everyone in the third-year Class 3 twenty-six years ago acting that way that started all this. They decided that their dead classmate Misaki 'wasn't dead anyway' and 'was actually still alive, right over there,' and kept the act going the whole year. The result was that when they took a photo in the classroom the day of graduation, it showed Misaki, who couldn't have been present in the living world. If you think about it, 'the casualty' had been called back to them."

Mei went on, her expression as static as ever.

"Meaning…maybe that was the trigger and that's why the third-year Class 3 at North Yomi is 'closer to death.' Maybe it became a site, like a vessel that draws 'the casualty' in. It's something like that."

"It draws the casualty in?"

"Yeah. Obviously there's no rational explanation for it, but still that's what started to happen. That's how the story goes."

Just like the other time she'd told me of this, surrounded by the dolls in the basement, Mei had at some point shifted to a tone that suggested the secrets of the world lay exposed before her.

"'The casualty' is part of the class because the entire class is closer to death. I suppose you could look at it the other way, too. Since the casualty got mixed up in the class, we came closer to death. Whichever way it is—are you listening, Sakakibara?—'death' is emptiness. Just like the dolls. If you get too close to it, it sucks you in. That's why…"

"That's why someone dies every month?"

"Try thinking about it like this," Mei said. "I came up with this on my own, though. The closer we get to death, the easier it is for people to die compared to a 'site' that's not like that."

"What does that mean?"

"For example, even if you go about your daily life the same way, you're more likely to have an accident. Even in the same accident, you're more likely to get badly hurt. Even with the same injuries, you're more likely to die from them. Like that."

"Ah…"

So this stuff popped up in all different facets of life like a risk bias and kept building up until at some point it yanked you once and for all into death? Was she asking me to interpret it like that?

So was that why Yukari Sakuragi had met such a string of unfortunate accidents and lost her life? And why Ms. Mizuno had died in that elevator accident?

"…But that doesn't—"

That doesn't make sense, I thought.

How could anyone believe that? It was utterly unacceptable in a thought process based on common sense. I couldn't possibly…

Hey, Sakakibara, d'you believe in ghosts or curses or whatever? Is that your thing?

In the midst of my intense confusion, several scenes came back to me.

So-called paranormal phenomena, in general?

That was the unprovoked grilling I'd received from Teshigawara and Kazami at lunch on my first day at school. Had they been feeling me out with those questions? In order to lay the groundwork for revealing this issue to the transfer student?

And yet they had never gone into any more profound details…

…Of course.

That was because I'd spotted Mei right then, sitting on a bench across from a flowerbed in front of Building Zero. I'd ignored their alarmed reactions and headed over to her…Was that why?

"Um, do you mind if I ask you a couple things I don't really get?" I asked, moving my finger from my temple.

"Go ahead," Mei replied, stroking the eye patch over her left eye. "But I'm not an expert. There's a lot I don't really understand, either."

"Okay." I nodded and straightened my back. "Um, first of all…You said that the one extra person is 'the casualty,' right? Does that mean they're like a ghost?"

"Well." Mei's head tilted to one side. "It's probably not like the usual image of a 'ghost' that's out there. It's not just an ethereal presence. It has a physical body, they say."

"A physical body…"

"It's kind of a strange thing to say, but 'the casualty' is no different from a living person. It has its own flesh-body."

"So, like a zombie, then?"

"Well…" Mei's head tilted to one side again as she looked back into my face. "I think it's different. They don't hunt people down or eat them or anything."

"Probably not, huh?"

"And when people die every month, it isn't as if 'the casualty' reached out with its own hands to kill them. The casualty has feelings and it has enough memories to integrate into the situation, and it has no idea at all that it's 'the casualty.' That's why you can't tell who they are."

"Hm-m-m. So then—" My question drew together slowly. "At some point or other it becomes clear who the 'extra person' mixed into the class that year was, right?"

"That—yeah. They say you find out after graduation is over."

"How do you find out?"

"Because the extra person disappears. They say the records and memories of the person go back to the way they were, too."

"What kind of person gets mixed up in the class as the casualty, exactly? Has it ever been someone without any link or association to the class?"

"I dunno…Oh, but there is kind of a rule for it."

"A rule?"

"It's a person who's died as part of this phenomenon before. Whether it's an actual student from third-year Class 3 or their little brother or sister or…"

"Then who could it have been that first time, twenty-five years ago? Was it Misaki, since they'd died the year before? But then wouldn't someone have…"

Someone would have realized "Misaki's here," wouldn't they? Maybe that thought was proof that I just couldn't let go of "rational thinking."

"A lot of the changes and tampering happen all on their own, so I don't think it would have seemed strange even if it were Misaki," Mei responded. "But I heard that's not what happened that year."

"Then who was it?"

"Misaki's little brother or sister. They'd died at the same time Misaki did…and they were one year younger than Misaki, so they would have been a third-year that year."

"Misaki's little brother or sister…I see." I spoke the words myself then and couldn't help acknowledging it. "You're saying that for a whole year, no one—not the teachers and not the students—noticed that this kid who had died the year before was in the class and they just accepted it as reality?"

"That's what I'm saying."

Mei nodded, then let out a long sigh and shut her eyes, the very picture of exhaustion. Two seconds, then three, went by before she murmured, "Ah, but—" and opened her right eye a slit. "No matter how much I try to explain it, it's a hard story to pin down when you start thinking about it."

"How come?"

"Well…" Mei mulled over her words, but when she spoke they came with hardly any hesitation at all: "After a year where that happens, obviously the fact remains that a lot of people died, but they say that people's memories about the event itself fade. Especially about who was 'the extra person' in the class. There's some difference between people, and some people forget right away, but in most cases the memory becomes hazier over time until eventually…"

"They forget?"

"I heard this example from someone.

"Suppose a levee breaks and water from the river floods the town. It's like the water is finally receding. The fact that there was a flood remains, unquestionably, but after the water recedes, the memory of what got flooded and how badly starts to get fuzzy. It's like that. It's more that they can't help forgetting, not that they're forced to forget, I guess.

"Twenty-five years ago is like a fairy tale since it's before we were born, but in a global sense it wasn't that long ago. But when the memories of the people involved fade like that, it's like you said before, Sakakibara. It's become a total legend now."

At that, a corner of Mei's mouth softened, but her expression froze again right away.

"Until the end of my second year, I'd only caught snatches of rumors. After they decided the classes for third-years, they called a meeting right away, and a couple of the kids from Class 3 the year before who were graduating were there, too. There was kind of a 'torch-passing' about this issue. That was the first time I heard the reality of the 'legend'…"

Her tone of smothered emotion never faltered, but for her, it sounded as if there was all sorts of chaos in her heart.

"They explained it to us and I realized that this wasn't a lie or a joke: that maybe we had to take this seriously. Even so, deep down I only half-believed it. As for everyone else, there were some kids who believed it completely and some who didn't really buy it…"

A lighthearted tune cut through the room, playing in the oval clock that hung over the TV to tell the time. Six o'clock. It was that late already?

I wouldn't be surprised to start getting worried phone calls from my grandmother asking "Where are you? Are you all right?"

What an awful machine.

I remembered Mei's comment, whenever it had been.

No matter where you are, you're connected. They can catch you.

I turned off the cell phone, still in the pocket of my pants.

"That's a rough outline of what we talked about," Mei said, then rested her slight chin in both hands. "You want to hear the rest?"

"Uh, yeah. That'd be…"

How could I not want to? Come on.

"Will you tell me?" I asked, straightening my back again.

❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖

"Ever since twenty-five years ago, this 'abnormal phenomenon' has kept happening, although not necessarily every year. As you might expect, people have tried to come up with something to counteract it."

Mei began to tell me "the rest." Her tone was as detached as ever, and still suggested that even she needed to grope for words.

"But something as insane as this, so completely incompatible with real-world logic…maybe you could call it supernatural…this kind of story could never be discussed by an official school administration."

"That's for sure."

"So as a first step, at least, discussions at the local level, at the level of those directly involved in 'the curse of third-year Class 3,' have been at the core of all kinds of strategies that people have considered."

"Like an exorcism?"

It was the simplest strategy that had occurred to me so far.

"They may have tried that," Mei replied without the slightest of smiles. "Changing classrooms, for example. They tried switching from the room they'd used in the old building—Building Zero—for third-year Class 3 every year up till then. Thinking maybe the curse was tied to that spot, to the classroom."

"Uh-huh."

"But it didn't do any good. They built a new school building and moved the third-year classrooms from Building Zero to Building C thirteen years ago. Apparently they were hoping that would be the end of it. But of course it didn't end."

"So you're saying it wasn't the classroom or the school building; it was purely the third-year Class 3 group that was the problem?"

"That's what I'm saying."

She replied much as she had earlier, then let out another long sigh and shut her eyes.

For just a moment, I thought the cold of the overly air-conditioned room would turn her breath white. Without realizing it, I had begun rubbing my arms again.

"And this is where I suppose we finally get to the heart of things," Mei said, gently opening her right eye. "They say it happened ten years ago. It's not really clear if someone got the idea and spoke up about it or what, but they found a strategy that was effective against these events. If you do this, you'll be able to avoid disaster—a strategy that makes it so people don't start dying every month."

"Oh…"

It was at that point that a vague image came into my mind of what sort of "strategy" Mei was talking about. That's why. That. Meaning…

"We treat someone like they're 'not there' in place of the 'extra person.'"

The words that came from Mei's lips were exactly what I had imagined.

"That way you bring the class back to the number of people it's supposed to have. You balance the books. That's how you prevent disaster for that year…with that talisman."