Another, Vol. 1 (20 page)

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 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.”