Confessions (3 page)

It was already dark when we found Manami and I was terribly upset, so there’s no reason I should have noticed this, but I did remember seeing Muku’s nose poking through the fence that separated Mrs. Takenaka’s yard from the pool. The police investigation turned up bread crumbs in that area, from the same sort of bread they served at Manami’s day care center. Several students testified that they had seen Manami in the vicinity of the pool, and it became clear that she had been in the habit of going there every week. The neighbors were taking care of Muku while Mrs. Takenaka was in the hospital, but Manami had no way of knowing that, and she may have thought that the dog would starve if she didn’t bring him the bread. She must have been worried that I would scold her if I found out, so she always went alone and tried to avoid being noticed. According to the students who had seen these little excursions, she was never gone more than ten minutes or so.

Of course, I had no idea about any of this. When I would ask her what she did while she was waiting for me, she’d give me a mischievous look and tell me she’d been playing with some of you girls. I should have realized then that she was hiding something and questioned her more. If I had, she might never have gone to the pool.

Manami died because I was supposed to be looking out for her and I wasn’t vigilant enough. I am truly sorry, too, for the shock it caused everyone here at the school. It’s been more than a month now, and I still reach out on the futon every morning, expecting to find Manami curled up next to me. When we went to sleep at night, she would always push up against me, making sure that we were touching somewhere; and if I pulled away to tease her, she would reach out toward me again. When I relented and took her hand, she would relax and drop off to sleep. I find myself crying now each morning when I reach out and realize that I will never again feel her downy cheeks or her soft hair.

When I told the principal I would be resigning, he asked whether it was because of what happened to Manami—which is just what you were wondering earlier, Miss Kitahara. And it’s true that I’ve decided to resign because of Manami’s death. But it’s also true that under other circumstances I would probably have continued to teach in order to atone for what I’d done and to take my mind off my misery. So why am I resigning?

Because Manami’s death wasn’t an accident. She was murdered by some of the students in this very class.

I wonder how much you know about the age limits society imposes on certain things, and how you feel about them. For example, how old do you have to be to buy alcohol and tobacco? Mr. Nishio? That’s right, twenty years old. I’m glad you’re aware of these rules. People are legally considered adults when they reach the age of twenty, and every year the TV news covers the crop of newly minted citizens as they drink too much and make fools of themselves at New Year’s, when they celebrate their majority.

Now, it may seem odd that these young people are all overindulging right on cue, right at this one moment in their lives, and of course the fact that the TV cameras show up to film them has something to do with it. But it’s also true that this whole spectacle would probably never have developed if we didn’t have the rule that people aren’t allowed to drink until they turn twenty. The fact that society permits the consumption of alcohol at twenty doesn’t mean it actively recommends that its members drink—or get drunk. Nevertheless, the legal age limit for drinking no doubt plays an important role in promoting the notion that you’re somehow missing out on something if you
don’t
drink once you’re old enough to do so—even if you don’t particularly feel like drinking in the first place. Still, I suppose the age limit does serve some purpose—without it, some of you might actually be showing up drunk for class here at the middle school. And I suppose some of you couldn’t care less about the law anyway and have already started drinking, perhaps at the urging of an uncle or an older friend. So I suppose it’s too idealistic to think that people can be left to develop their own sense of ethics.

But maybe I’m being too vague. Maybe you can’t see what it is that I’m trying to tell you.

Or rather, you’re so busy wondering who the murderer could be that you can’t think about anything else. You may feel a little afraid to be here in the same room with someone who was capable of this kind of crime, but I suspect it’s really your curiosity that’s got the better of you now. I can also tell from the looks on your faces that some of you may have guessed who the murderers are and some of you actually know. I have to admit, though, that what shocks me is to see the murderers sitting there so calmly while I’m up here saying all this to you.

But perhaps “shocks” isn’t quite the right word. I suppose I’m not really shocked at all. Because I also know that one of the two murderers actually wanted his name to become known. While the other—the one who went pale a few minutes ago when I said I knew what they’d done—looks as though he’s about to faint. But don’t worry. I’m not going to reveal your names now, in front of the class.

You all know something about the Juvenile Law, don’t you?

The law was written with the idea that young people are still immature and in the process of becoming adults, so when necessary, the state, in place of parents, needs to find the best way to rehabilitate those who commit crimes. When I was young, this meant that a child under sixteen who committed a crime—even if it was murder—was handed over to Family Court and usually didn’t even end up in a juvenile facility. But that view of children as pure and innocent seems outdated now. The Juvenile Law got turned on its head in the 1990s when fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds began to commit the most horrible crimes on a regular basis. You were just a few years old, but I’m sure many of you have heard of the incident in Kobe where a young man, still a child himself, killed several other children, beheading one of them. I’m sure the rest of you would know what I’m talking about if I mentioned the name that the killer used in the threatening notes he wrote. That case and others like it started a debate about the need to revise the Juvenile Law, and in April of 2001 a new version was passed that included lowering the age of criminal responsibility from sixteen to fourteen.

But most of you are thirteen. What, then, does age mean, exactly?

I suspect you remember a more recent incident, the story of the poisoning of that whole family last year. The young girl who did it was just your age, thirteen, and in her first year of middle school. During summer vacation she started mixing some sort of poison into the family dinner and then writing in her blog about any changes she noticed in her victims. But it seems that the effects of the poison were disappointing, so she ended up adding potassium cyanide to the curry one evening and killing her parents, her grandmother, and her little brother, who was just in fourth grade. You may remember the last line on her blog: “Cyanide did the trick!” The newspapers and TV were full of this story for weeks. That’s right, Miss Sonezaki, it was called the Lunacy Incident—I’m sure you recognize that name. In Roman mythology, Luna referred to the moon or the moon goddess. The word
lunacy
itself came to mean “insanity” or “psychosis” or even “foolish behavior.” The TV and newspapers picked up on the word because she had used it in her blog, and there was speculation that she must have had a split personality—how else would a quiet, serious young girl turn into the insane moon goddess?

The whole thing became a media circus. And I suspect some of you know what became of her, what sort of punishment she received. Despite the publicity and the fancy name given to the case, because she was a minor she was never identified and no pictures ever appeared in the press. All we had were exaggerated reports of her crime and vague conjectures about her dark mental state, and the whole thing faded away, with the truth completely unknown.

But does that kind of reporting, that sort of public information, seem adequate? All it succeeded in doing was planting knowledge of the existence of this sort of utterly inhuman criminal in the minds of some of our young people—and encouraging that pathetic minority of their peers who already admire or even worship that sort of senseless criminal. If you ask me, if we’re going to suppress the names and photographs of underage criminals, we should also prevent publication of the flashy aliases they assume to advertise their crimes. She called herself “Lunacy” on her blog, but since she could only be identified as “Ms. A” in the press, perhaps they should come up with some sort of humiliating alias for her blog name as well. They could blur over “Lunacy” or replace it with “Loser” or “Idiot.” In the same way, for that beheading case in Kobe, we should have been laughing at that pathetic boy’s pretentious use of fancy characters and ridiculous designs for the signature in his notes.

I wonder what sort of image comes to mind when people try to imagine what the Lunacy girl looks like. Think about it for a moment. Would a beautiful young woman call herself a lunatic? If the law says you can’t print a picture of an underage murderer, why let people imagine someone pretty? Print a fake picture instead of a hideous, grinning, evil-minded lunatic. Why not show exactly what this sort of human being is like? If we choose instead to coddle them and make a fuss over them, aren’t we just fueling their narcissism? And won’t there be even more foolish kids out there to idolize them? Above all, when a child commits this sort of crime, isn’t it the responsibility of the adult world to handle it as discreetly as possible and to make the criminal understand its seriousness in no uncertain terms? That Lunacy girl will spend a few years in a juvenile facility somewhere, perhaps write an apology of some sort, and then be released back into society knowing she literally got away with murder.

You may not know this, but the harshest criticism during that incident wasn’t for the girl herself but for the science teacher at her middle school. I’ll call him T to protect his privacy, but it was well known that T was an unusually conscientious teacher whose primary concern was his students’ academic achievement, and that he had complained more than once that the science curriculum was becoming obsessed with safety, to the point where only innocuous, harmless experiments were allowed in the classroom.

Did I know him? Actually, I had a chance to talk with him at the National Middle School Science Fair just a few days before the incident became known. The girl told T that she had left her notebook in the classroom and asked whether she could go pick it up. He was in the middle of a parent-teacher conference, and since the girl was a good student and well behaved, he’d handed her his whole key ring without a second thought. It later came out that she’d bought most of the chemicals in her poison cocktail at the local pharmacy or online, but she’d gotten the potassium cyanide from school—and T was universally condemned for being too lax in managing such a dangerous substance.

It didn’t stop there. There were even ugly—false—rumors that he had tempted the girl, led her on, and he was soon forced out of his job. He’s still suffering the effects even though the media attention has died down. His wife, who couldn’t deal with the endless slander, is in a hospital somewhere for nervous exhaustion, and his little boy has adopted his mother’s surname and gone to live with an aunt in another prefecture. Not long after, a notice went out to all the science teachers from the school board ordering us to make inventories of all controlled or potentially hazardous substances.

Strictly speaking, you don’t need potassium cyanide in a middle school science lab, and, though T might have had his reasons for keeping it around, I can understand questioning his judgment for surrendering the keys so easily. Still, while we don’t have potassium cyanide here at our school, we’ve got lots of other things that could be used to kill someone. We do keep the key to the chemical locker in a cupboard that students don’t have access to, but if someone were willing to shatter the glass on the door, who could say what might happen? Even if you eliminated every dangerous chemical, you’d still have the knives in the cafeteria kitchen, and the jump ropes out in the field house. Even those could be used to strangle someone. Nor do we teachers have the right to confiscate your property, even if we’re quite sure you have a knife. You may be bringing it with the express purpose of hurting a classmate, but if you simply say you were carrying it to protect yourself from a bully on the way to school, we have no recourse. And if we report our concerns up the line, we’re told we should just “be more vigilant.” Only when your knife causes an accident or is used to hurt someone do we finally have the right to take it away from you—but it’s too late by then, and inevitably someone will criticize us for not preventing the tragedy if we knew about the knife. Who is really to blame here? Is it really the fault of negligent teachers?

Was Manami’s death really my fault? What was I supposed to do?

Manami’s funeral was private and as quiet as possible. I know a number of you wanted to attend, and I’m sorry that we could not invite you. Part of me wanted to have a large number of people present to say good-bye to her, but I felt even more strongly that it was important to allow her father to be there. They had only met once before, at the end of last year. I hadn’t even realized it had happened until I was watching television with Manami one evening and she suddenly pointed at the screen.

“I met that man yesterday,” she said. I thought my heart was going to stop. When I asked her what she meant, she said that the man had been outside the fence at her preschool, apparently watching her as she played on the swings. He had gotten her attention and waved for her to come over to the fence, so she went. She’d been surprised that he knew her name, and he asked her whether she was happy. When she said she was, he had smiled. “I’m glad,” he told her and then he had walked away.

I’m quite certain that the man was Manami’s father. The security at the preschool has been tightened recently, and even residents of the neighborhood are checked out if they’re seen lingering too long outside the fences. Still, Manami’s father would hardly have aroused suspicion. And even if someone had stopped him, he could have made up some sort of excuse—and as soon as he was recognized, he would have been invited right in as a famous teacher.