A Japanese Schoolgirl Read online

  A Japanese Schoolgirl

  Yoko Kajihara

  2012

  Copyright (c) Yoko Kajihara, 2012

  All rights reserved

  Tofu

  I am about to enter a police station in Shinjuku to confess that I have committed a murder. I look up at the Rising Sun crest on the wall right above me, above the main entrance. It is the symbol of legitimate power and I am only a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl wearing a sailor middy top and a short pleated skirt. I cast down my eyes, listening to my heartbeat. It feels as if it were beating right behind my forehead.

  *

  The air inside the police station is very much like the teachers’ room except for the presence of uniformed police officers, men and women, going in and out. Their uniforms look all immaculately clean and the floor polished scrupulously. You can hear phones ringing here and there as if they were connected to a Whack-A-Mole machine.

  I told neither my parents nor classmates about my whereabouts. No one would imagine that I have dropped into this police station on my way home from gakko, our school. My Mobile has been dead for about an hour. I have already stepped outside the omnipresent web of GPS, the cellular network, and search engines.

  I am invisible now.

  I know that there would be no one who can help me out whatever may happen; still, I think I would be all right because I am wearing my school uniform with a pair of black socks and that of black school shoes. This outfit is supposed to be, if what my father said is right, as protective as nun’s robe and as attractive as tutu costume.

  “Sir, may I?” I say.

  “Wait a moment, will you?” responds a young police officer at an information desk.

  He has a mole on the left cheek from which a single short hair has grown.

  “Your name?”

  “Luna Suzuki.”

  “How old did you say you are? Fourteen?”

  “I’m sixteen, sir.”

  He has been on the phone and not attending to me even though I told him twice already that I murdered my classmate Yukio Misawa.

  Other two officers are also busy receiving visitors, specifically, a couple of grumbling middle-aged men, one dressed in maid and another in waitress uniform with heavy make-up. They are making a complaint about being physically harassed by several men in dark business suit.

  On the wall, right behind them, I catch sight of one of wanted posters on which you can see several faces of leading members of terrorists who executed a mass murder at a crowded 3-D theater in an amusement park in Osaka last summer with hydrogen sulfide made from toilet cleaner.

  When the auditorium began to smell of something rotting, it was already too late.

  They took twenty-six human lives including seven tourists from Russia and five from Mainland China. According to the Web News, they also managed to execute a very popular parrot called Sakura-chan, the theater’s real-life mascot.

  It seems that what is deadly is something we cannot see.

  Actually each one of terrorists including three women appeared to have been leading a simple life. They were decent citizens. Just like hydrogen sulfide, they were invisible. It was also said that they were mortally intelligent. Leaders who controlled each subgroup are, for instance, all graduates of the top university to which I myself want to be admitted if I am still allowed to have the future after this confession. To me it seems awkward to find their faces in wanted posters. Each one of them used to be a student who was on the right track to be a member of the elite.

  I am wondering what has gone wrong.

  The young police officer raises his eyes.

  “Be seated over there and wait for your turn, please.”

  I sit down on the edge of the long bench. By my left you can see the middle-aged man who is dressed in waitress uniform and whose breath smells of peppermint chewing gum.

  “Hello, dear,” the man dressed in maid says in a feminine accent, “I love your school uniform very much. It's already the branded, isn't it? It makes you look adorable and innocent.”

  “Oh, thank you.”

  “I heard you killed someone. Am I just hearing things?”

  “No, you’re not. I certainly did it.”

  Then I shrug my shoulders with an embarrassed smile.

  “You’re kidding me, aren’t you?”

  “I wish I were.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad.”

  She, no, he frowns as if with concern.

  *

  My mother, who is a graduate of a four-year women’s college, says that it is quite deadly to be in the center of attention these days. And she is always right.

  When I was still a girl of seven or eight, she kept telling me already: Do not ever be in the spotlight. It is unwise. Do not ever try to capture the center. It is risky. If you are in the center of attention, you will be exposed to envy, grudge, and malice. But, as long as you are in the dark, the very spot right behind the dead center, you can hide and protect yourself from any of them. No one is able to harm you once you become invisible. It is also as closest a place to the center as it is the safest. It is the coziest spot you can find. Bravery never wins in Japan. You must always stand right behind the one in the spotlight and keep watching the whole show in order to manipulate the very show itself. You have to be a puppeteer, not a puppet. Do you know why I am saying all these things to you? It is because I have a very strong maternal instinct. Everything I say and do comes from mother love. I will do anything for the sake of your future. This is the way of the Japanese mother, you know.

  When I was nine, she told me how to cook a large block of tofu with a school of lively swimming loaches in a single cauldron without touching either of them.

  First, pour a plenty of fresh water into the cauldron. Then sink the block of tofu and release a school of live loaches. Let them swim around tofu and have fun viewing. Now, turn on a kitchen stove and set it at Low and wait. There will be left only one place for those loaches to shelter from the water that is heated up every second, but very slowly.

  I heard that my mother had a nightmare after she was asked by her grandmother to watch several railroad workers making that particular dish. My mother was seven at the time.

  “Sir, excuse me.” I nervously raise my hand.

  “I’ll be with you in a minute,” says the young police officer, smiling wearily as if I were his nagging little sister.

  “I see, but…” I say in a choked voice.

  “Just a second, okay?”

  He is yet on the phone. He doesn’t seem to be taking me seriously.

  On my right there is an exit door. It could be still possible to abort my plan and leave here if I would. On my left there is a rest room where I could lock myself inside a toilet booth to call the person who actually murdered my classmate Yukio if my Mobile would not be out of coverage area.

  I still have choice.

  The problem is that I don’t know what to say to the real murderer. I am afraid that the dark plot I framed against the murderer might not work. I seem to have been crushed so hard by something I cannot point at that I can no longer believe what I used to think who I am.

  My dear, you must remember that the tofu is the spotlight, the dead center.

  I know, mother. I know.

  You don’t want to be one of loaches in the death row, do you?

  But, mother, it’s too late.

  No, it’s never too late to try what is necessary. You’re still a teenage girl.

  But I’m about to give myself up to the police and become the news of the day.

  “Sir.” I am casting an upward glance at the young officer.

  “Wait till I finish this case first, will you?”

  “But I need to tell you how my clas
smate was killed.”

  “Just sit and wait, will you?”

  The moment the police officer gives a wry smile with the phone in his hand, I start edging back away from the information desk. I have already noticed that other two officers are also staring up at me as if I were the nuisance of the day.

  I head straight for the exit with downcast eyes.

  *

  Outside the police station an evening breeze smells of yakitori burned black. I am now heading for the Shinjuku railroad station. You can see huge crowds whose faces are all brightly colored with illunimations. Then there is this huge Friday-night crowd in a hallway of the station. It is like an inland sea current crashing against each other and turning into a whirlpool. I weave my way through the whirlpool of crowd and go up a wide concrete stairs onto a platform only to encounter another huge swarms of commuters.

  Three months ago, it happened on this same platform.

  I can still point at the very spot where the body of Yukio Misawa was severed in half.

  Twisted

  It was like a bucketful of water thrown over me without warning.

  I am speaking of Yukio’s e-mail.

  Yukio had fallen into the habit of sending his e-mail, which wasn’t so much a mail as an essay, twice a month regularly to four classmates, Maya, Reiko, Takeshi, and me. In the eyes of Yukio we might have been the chosen, although I had never seriously thought of myself as the one. I rather considered myself a subscriber.

  The following is what Yukio sent me the day before he was killed: I am ugly. Perhaps we Japanese look ugly to the eyes of people in other countries. We have short arms and short legs with a large flat face on a flat body. The shape of our body doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to the renowned drawing Virtruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci of a human figure that is stretching its whole body inside a circle.

  It has been known, for instance, that the naval is located at the golden section of the figure in Michelangelo’s famous life-size sculpture David with a five to eight ratio between the location of the naval and its height, but our body proportions have little to do with nature’s golden ratio either.

  The reason why we Japanese have short arms and legs is that most of us used to be peasants who had to keep crouching in order to stick young rice plant one by one into a paddy field. If we were tall with long limbs, it would be a backbreaking labor. In other words, we Japanese have transformed our own body quite efficiently. And this is why we have the world-renowned car manufacturers which are capable of manufacturing very sensible small cars. They are not just economical but also as nature-friendly as our herbivorous ancestors were.

  Now, in addition to our unique features, our facial expression is quite remarkable as well, for it remains blank most of the time or ‘subtle’ if you take it in a diplomatic sense. In any case, those who were born in foreign soil won’t be able to tell whether we Japanese are about to perform hara-kiri or merely constipated. We all know that it will be to our disadvantage to expose emotions in public, that is, in front of strangers, both socially and politically. That is why we still preserve the art of Noh. Our ancestors refined the way to express delicate emotions by masks of various expressions. This expression of emotions through those masks has become the form of art in our country. In a sense, Noh is the product of our prudence lurking behind our shyness.

  The majority of Japanese are, of course, literally shy and docile like a flock of sheep. All you have to do is to take advantage of those people. Remember that there are only two kinds of people in this world: the elite and the rest.

  The elite is a pack of hounds and I am definitely one of the elite in the making and the rest is a flock of sheep that is destined to be tamed and then kept under control by the handful of us the elite.

  In our country the ugly and the mediocre dominated the beautiful and the gifted in the late twentieth century. Now the wicked and the twisted are to control the good and the straight in the 21st century. And there seems to be no doubt that I am the most twisted of all. It means that this century will be mine.

  Say sayonara with a sneer.

  *

  Thus spoke Yukio.

  To me it still doesn’t sound like a farewell mail.

  Iguana

  It all started three months ago.

  A week before Yukio’s body was severed in half by a rapid-service train, my Mobile began to vibrate on my desk.

  It was around eleven o’clock at night and had been lightly snowing outside. There were a classic glass bottle of Coca-Cola and an original Cup-Noodle on my desk, which were my usual midnight snack. I ignored the call and left the Mobile as it kept vibrating until it started heading itself toward the edge of the desk.

  The caller was Yukio.

  He asked how my midterm turned out. Not so good, I answered bluntly. I was tackling with mathematics assignment on factorization at that moment. Yukio already knew that I had fallen into the sixth. Few days prior to his call, having my school report in her hand, my mother had sobbed like a middle-aged actress in a serial television drama. Later she had merrily gone shopping without leaving a single word of encouragement.

  But mother, I was still the sixth out of one hundred and seventy-five freshmen, was I not?

  Again Yukio came out top in the midterm.

  He said, ‘I no longer get any excitement out of taking an exam. It becomes a routine job, no, it has become a futile labor already.’

  ‘I know. You’re genius. No doubt.’

  He contentedly gave a chuckle.

  ‘Is this all you want to chat about, Yukio?’

  (Actually not.)

  ‘But…I have this math assignment to finish.’

  (It might sound funny to you, Luna, but, as a matter of fact, I’m now looking up at the window of your room and…it’s getting cold out here.)

  I turned off a desk lamp, rushed to the window, and found him pacing in front of a tile-roofed liquor shop with its front shutters closed tight.

  ‘Wow. What are you doing down there?’

  (I’ve been in trouble.)

  ‘Why don’t you come in then?’

  (It’s too late.)

  ‘My parents are fast asleep. I’ll open the front door in a minute.’

  (No, it’s eleven-thirty.)

  ‘It’s only eleven-thirty.’

  Yukio burst into laugher, which was his usual paroxysm of laughter.

  (But, no, I can’t, Luna. I won’t.)

  Before long I slipped from the back door like a female ninja. Yukio was standing still under the eaves of a tile-roofed liquor shop across the side street. Next to him was a row of vending machines: one for cigarettes and three for soft drinks. It was cold and there was no shadow of a car.

  You could see him breathing thick.

  Crossing the street, I covered my head with a hood of my parka.

  *

  ‘It’s out of your character to do a thing like this, you know.’

  ‘I felt an urge to see you,’ said Yukio.

  ‘Wow.’ I made a grimace of embarrassment.

  ‘I mean, I needed to see you.’

  And he pushed up his silver-rimmed thick glasses with the middle finger. Although, in his writings, he always said of himself ugly, he appeared good-looking even with the pair of those thick glasses on.

  I stood by the vending machine for cigarettes and glanced up at the halo of a streetlight into which snowflakes were falling dreamily.

  Yukio gave me a sardonic smile.

  ‘They look more like radioactive fallout than confetti used in a Kabuki theater, don’t they?’

  ‘Did you tell your grandparents about this?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. I’m scared.’

  ‘Who is scared of one’s own grandparents?’

  His parents had been both killed in a newsworthy sightseeing bus accident when Yukio was twelve. Since then he had been under the care of his paternal grandparents.

  ‘I’m afraid of someone else,’ said Yukio.

 
He explained that he had been confined in an inexplicable sense of danger for almost a month.

  ‘You’ve been stalked by someone. That’s what you’re saying.’

  ‘You could say that, yes.’

  Then he added that I should have known the reason why he felt himself being in such danger. He told me that I was the only one who could deliver him out of this predicament, this affliction. He said it as if to remind me of something we had been sharing with each other a long time.

  I asked him back, ‘Are you saying I have something to do with the stalker thing?’

  But he suddenly dropped into silence.

  ‘Please don’t do that to me,’ I said and bit my lower lip.

  But Yukio remained silent.

  It was about a minute to midnight. We were both on a snow-covered sidewalk and Yukio was talking about his fear and his being in danger without giving me any clue as to why he came to feel that way. To make matters worse, he also suggested that I should have known the reason why he was in danger. But there was no Read Me file to see how to deal with this kind of situation. Yukio was the top and I was the sixth in our class. The insolvable must be passed to him, not to me. Besides, I have left my Coca-Cola and Cup-Noodle still untouched on my desk. I have to finish both of them. It is a ritual: It is a vital ceremony for studying. Without a classic glass bottle of Coca-Cola and an original Cup-Noodle, I am unable to maintain my optimal level.

  I broke silence first.

  ‘If it’s someone I should be familiar with, who do you think it is?’

  ‘I can’t tell it now. You’ll see it in time.’

  ‘It means I’m wasting my time here.’

  ‘The problem is that I’m not sure whether my feeling is well-grounded or not.’

  ‘Oh, your feeling. I see. It sounds promising, doesn’t it?’