Confessions (21 page)

I hesitate to write about Mizuki here, but I will in order to avoid any inaccurate assumptions.

She is certainly bright enough, and she isn’t silly like a lot of girls. There’s nothing special about the way she looks, but there was nothing wrong with her, either. But none of that had anything to do with why I liked her. What I liked—even admired—about her was the fact that she stayed cool after Moriguchi’s performance. While everybody else (and, I’m embarrassed to say, that included me) fell hook, line, and sinker for her crap, Mizuki showed the skeptical spirit of a scientist and tried to confirm those wild claims. But even when she found out the truth, she didn’t go around telling everybody. She kept it to herself. That’s why I liked her.

In fact, I liked her so much I was willing to stoop to pretty pathetic tactics to get her to like me back. “I just wanted someone to notice me,” I told her. Of course, it wasn’t “someone” I wanted. It was my mother. But still, the line seemed to work with Mizuki.

Unfortunately, she turned out to be a complete idiot. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say she was a fool.

During summer vacation, she would come to the lab every day, and while I worked on my new invention, she sat hunched over her laptop tapping out something on the keyboard. When I asked her what she was writing, she refused to tell me, and I let it go at that. I suppose she was my girlfriend at that point, but listening to someone else’s little problems was still more trouble than it was worth. She finally told me that she’d been writing something to submit to a literary contest. That was a week ago today, the day she sent the whole thing off in the mail.

I told her I’d first noticed her when I realized she had those chemicals. I thought she might be interested in science, and that had made me want to get to know her. But as soon as she heard this, she began explaining the real reason she had them, as though she’d been waiting all along for the chance to tell me her secret.

She wasn’t planning to make a bomb. But they weren’t for some craft project, either. Nor was she planning to poison someone. Or kill herself.

She was simply obsessed with the Lunacy girl and what she’d done. When the news first broke, she had immediately been convinced that the girl was her other self. The name itself was proof enough, she said:
luna
meant “moon,” as did
zuki,
the second character of her name.… She went on like this for a long time, but none of it made any sense. When I didn’t say anything, she just kept talking.

She told me that there were other things that proved she and the Lunacy girl were one and the same person. When they published the list of the chemicals the girl had in her possession in one of the weeklies, she had been speechless. They were exactly the same ones that she, Mizuki, had collected.

For what it’s worth, that list had already been published when I spotted her trying to buy things at the pharmacy. It’s hard to know whether she was telling the truth, but she said she used one of the chemicals she had on hand to test the milk cartons for traces of blood, so at least they turned out to be good for something.

At one point, out of the blue, she suggested testing some of her stock on Terada.

There was something gloomy about her, like a character in a bad after-school special (not that I’ve ever seen one), but I doubt she could have murdered anyone. Still, when the police questioned her about the incident with Shitamura and his mother, she blamed Terada for everything—and it seemed as though she still wasn’t satisfied. But the whole thing struck me as a bit much. I could almost find myself sympathizing with the poor guy. He had been unlucky enough to take over from Moriguchi and then had let her prod him into the Shitamura debacle. But when I asked her why she had it in for Terada, her answer was unforgivable.

“I hate him because of what he did to Naoki. He was the first boy I ever loved…but I like you now, Sh
ū
ya.”

She was putting me on the same level as Shitamura. Could anything be more humiliating?

“Shit! How stupid can you be?” I had thought I’d said this to myself, but apparently I said it aloud. Then, since it didn’t matter anymore, I told her exactly what I thought of her obsession with the Lunacy thing. By that point she was furious, and she accused me of having a “mother complex.”

I had told her a good bit of what I’ve written here, but it was wrong of her to describe it that way. Then when I tried to tell her that, she just pressed her point.

“I’m sure your mother loved you, but she made a hard choice in order to pursue her dream and she left you. She must have had her reasons, but in the end that’s what it comes down to: You were left behind. But if you miss her that much, why don’t you just go see her? Tokyo’s not that far away, and you know where she works. The only reason you’re still waiting for her is that you’re a coward. You’re afraid she’ll send you away. You figured out long ago that she doesn’t want you anymore.”

That was too much. It wasn’t just me she was attacking, it was my mother. The next thing I knew, I had my hands wrapped around her scrawny neck. At last I found myself truly wanting to kill someone—and there was no time to consider the weapon. There was nothing waiting on the other side of this murder. In other words, this was an end in itself, murder as its own reward. She died too quickly for me to hear the bubble pop.

Shitamura’s experience had shown me that no one would pay much attention just because a minor committed murder. I decided her death was of no use to me, and I hid the body away in the laboratory’s outsized refrigerator. But after a week, when no one came looking for her, I began to see how pitiful she was and thought I would take her with me the next day when I went to set off the bomb. After all, I had made it with her chemicals. She had brought them here to the lab because, she said, they seemed to “go with the place.” In the end, though, I had to give up on the idea of carting her to school. Life may be as fragile and light as a bubble, but her body had turned into a lump of lead.

But again, I want to be perfectly clear. Planting the bomb has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I killed the class president.

Three days ago I went to K University to see my mother.

All along I had wanted her to come to me. But as one of the conditions of the divorce settlement, she had promised not to contact me, and, being the serious person she was, the promise had kept her away all these years. Now I was taking matters into my own hands and making it possible for mother and son to meet again.

It took just four hours to get to the university—first on a local train, then the Shinkansen, and finally the subway. It had always seemed like another world, a paradise that could never be reached, but here I was after a short, easy trip. Still, as I got near my destination I could feel my chest tighten. I began to find it difficult to breathe.

Laboratory Number Three in the Electrical Engineering Department of the College of Science and Technology at K University. My mother’s laboratory. As I crossed the enormous campus, my brain was running through various reunion scenarios.

I would knock on the door of the lab, and my mother would answer. What kind of look would she have on her face when she saw me? What would she say? She probably wouldn’t say anything, just hug me tight. But what if one of her assistants or a student answered instead? I’d tell them I was here to see Professor Jun Yasaka. And then should I give my name? Or just wait for her to see me?

I was still trying to figure this out when I reached the Electrical Engineering Department and ran into someone I might have expected to meet here: Professor Seguchi, the judge from the science fair. Oddly enough, he seemed to remember me and spoke up first.

“This is a surprise,” he said. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”

For some reason I couldn’t bring myself to say that I’d come to see my mother, so I blurted out the first thing that came into my head.

“I had an errand nearby and I decided to come and see whether you might be here.”

“Well, I’m delighted you did. So, have you brought along another invention?”

“I have,” I told him. “Several, in fact.” Nor was this a lie. I had brought the Shocking Purse and the Backward Clock and my Lie Detector to show my mother. Professor Seguchi smiled and led me off toward his lab, which was at the eastern end of the building on the third floor—and right under Mother’s.

Once I had shown him the inventions, I could tell him I had actually come to see her.

He would say, You’re Jun Yasaka’s boy? No wonder you’re so smart!

As all this was running through my head, we reached his lab and he showed me into a room that embodied all my fantasies—complex instruments crammed into every corner, shelves overflowing with books and technical journals. He sat me down on the couch and went to get me a cold drink. My eyes wandered around the room until they came to rest on a framed photograph on his desk. The picture showed Professor Seguchi and a woman standing in front of an old castle, perhaps in Germany. The woman next to the professor, who was smiling so happily, was clearly…my mother.

But what could this mean? Maybe it had been taken while they were at a conference together or on a research trip. Even after Professor Seguchi put the drink down on the table in front of me, I couldn’t take my eyes off the picture.

He seemed to notice and laughed bashfully.

“I’m afraid to say it was taken on our honeymoon.”

A bubble popped.

“Honeymoon?”

“I know, you might think I’m too old for that kind of thing. But we were married last autumn, and now at fifty I’m about to become a father for the first time. Strange, isn’t it?”

“A father?”

“The baby’s due at the end of December. But my wife doesn’t seem to care—she’s off at a conference in Fukuoka today. Women are like that now.…”

Bubbles popping, one after the other.

“…Your wife is Professor Jun Yasaka, isn’t she?”

“Yes.… Do you know her?”

“She’s…someone I greatly respect.” I had started trembling, and that was all I could manage to say. The last bubble was gone. Seguchi was eyeing me suspiciously.

“You’re not her.…” I didn’t wait around to hear the end of his sentence. I leapt up and ran out of the room. Though I never looked back, I was pretty sure the professor had made no move to follow me.

I thought she had given up on the idea of a family in exchange for the chance to follow her dream, to be true to her gift. To become a great inventor, she’s been forced to abandon her beloved child.

Her “one and only child.” Isn’t that what she’d said? But she had never come back to find her “one and only.” Instead she’d married up, found a better mate, had another child, and was living happily ever after.

It had been four years since she’d left me, but I’d finally realized the truth. It wasn’t “a child” in the abstract that had held her back; it was me, Sh
ū
ya, a boy with a name, and from the day she walked out of the house, I was already a thing of the past, already fading from memory. I was sure that Seguchi had realized who I was, so the fact that there was no word from her after my visit made this all too clear.

So you can think of the mass murder I’m about to commit as my revenge against my mother—and this last will and testament as the only way I have to tell her what I’ve done.

As with Moriguchi’s daughter, I need a witness this time as well. So I’ve appointed you, the visitors to my website. I hope you’ll be watching as I create a catastrophe that will go down in the annals of juvenile crime, and I hope you will tell my mother it was my way of showing her my pain.

Farewell!

Farewell!

I pounded on the podium as I finished reading “Life”—my stupid essay—and then reached into my pocket for my phone. The number was preset. I slowly pressed the Send button—that is, the detonator for my bomb.

One second passed, two, three, four, five.…

…Nothing happened. What could have gone wrong? Was the bomb a dud? No, I hadn’t even heard the vibration from the other phone I’d wired in as a trigger. It couldn’t be? I bent over and peered under the podium.

The bomb was gone.…

Someone must have seen the website and removed it. But who? It was a delicate business disarming a bomb. And why hadn’t they called the police? Could it be…my mother?

Just then the phone in my hand started ringing. Number withheld.

My finger was trembling as I pressed Talk.

Sh
ū
ya
? It’s Momma.…

Is that what you were expecting? I’m sorry to disappoint you, but it isn’t Momma. This is Moriguchi. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

I suppose you’re wondering why the bomb didn’t go off. Well, you see, I disarmed it this morning.

I have to say I was quite impressed with the mechanism. Clever of you to rig it so that the trigger was deactivated below a certain temperature. That way you could flash-freeze it at your little laboratory and bring it to school in a cooler. No matter how much it got shaken around, as long as it was cold it was safe enough. Your knowledge of chemistry is almost as impressive as your engineering skills.

If you had put that ability to good use, I’m sure you would have made a wonderful scientist. But you chose to use your gifts for evil, to make weapons to carry out your stupid little schemes.

I read the love letter to your mother that you left online. Anyone who could write a thing like that and put it up on a website without dying of embarrassment must see himself as some kind of tragic hero.

It’s a sad and beautiful story. Brilliant mother…her only son, blessed with the same genius. Tears in her eyes, she leaves the boy behind in the dead-end town to follow her dreams. But not without first promising him that she’ll come running back if he should ever need her. The boy believes her. The father remarries, has a child with his new wife, and leaves the boy to a lonely existence. He wants to see his mother again, so he enters an invention in a contest. But there’s no word from Mother. So he decides to kill somebody. Surely she’ll come back if he finds himself in enough trouble, if he becomes a killer. Unfortunately, the plan is spoiled by a stupid classmate. Luckily, the victim takes revenge, and to his delight he finds out he’s sick. Surely she’ll come if he’s ill. But it turns out he isn’t—ill, that is. So he uses a girl, a classmate, to try to forget his troubles, but when she calls him a momma’s boy, he kills her. Finally he decides to go visit his mother. But before he can see her, he meets her new husband and learns she’s pregnant. It suddenly dawns on him that he is really and truly abandoned, and he decides to take revenge on his mother.

I know I skipped some of the details, but I think that’s the general drift. And for the final act, you planted the bomb.

Are you a complete idiot? You use that word about everyone and everything in your love letter, but what do you think that makes you? What have you ever really created? What have you ever done for any of those people you looked down on? Any of your “idiots”?

You said you didn’t think your own father deserved to live, but who do you think gave you life in the first place? Yet you seem incapable of understanding that fact, and you think that just because you get good grades in school you’re some sort of anointed being. But you’re wrong. You’re the most deluded of all, the biggest idiot I’ve ever met.

That’s the sort of person who killed my Manami, who snatched my precious girl from me. So I read your little postings and I decided to have my revenge, but I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve been a little vague. I should probably explain what I’ve been up to, beginning with my speech on the last day of school.

It’s true that I collected blood from my husband, Sakuranomi, that morning while he was still asleep, and I brought it to school. The milk was delivered at nine o’clock and put in a refrigerator next to the office. I left in the middle of the assembly and used a syringe to inject some of the blood in the cartons destined for your cubby and Shitamura’s. I even managed to find a spot on the crease where you wouldn’t notice the tiny hole. Then, when you were done with the milk, I gave my speech. I knew how cruel your classmates could be, and I wanted to throw you to the wolves, so to speak. You see, adults are bound by rules and would protect you no matter how evil they knew you to be.

I never had any illusions about my chances of giving you AIDS. As you realized later, the transmission rate from a little joke like mine is extremely low. But as long as the chances aren’t zero, I felt as though I had meted out a proper punishment.

And I thought I was finished with the whole thing. Not that my feelings had changed. I knew you would live with the fear of AIDS for a time and that your classmates would make you miserable, but that wasn’t going to cheer me up. No form of revenge could have made me hate you any less. If I had cut the two of you to shreds with a knife, I think I would have hated the little pieces of you just the same. I realized that revenge was never going to wash away what had happened, never going to make me stop hating you with every ounce of my being.

Yet I believed I could force myself to put a stop to all this. I would never forget Manami, but I had no intention of spending the rest of my life dealing with children like you. My time with Sakuranomi was coming to an end, and when he was gone I intended to make a fresh start. I had never thought much about what I could do to help others, but I was determined to do so in my new life.

A month later, in April, when he knew he was dying, my husband told me something shocking. He said he was sorry he had never been able to make me happy, but he had at least wanted to be sure he wasn’t leaving me behind to scandal and jail. So he had spoiled my revenge. He had felt me drawing his blood that morning and had realized I was planning something. He had followed me to school and seen me putting the blood in the cartons. Horrified, he had waited until I was gone and had replaced the cartons with new ones. He said he knew I might never forgive him, but that it was wrong to repay evil with evil, and that revenge would never make me feel any better. Even more importantly, he was convinced that you boys could be rehabilitated, made whole again, and he wanted me to believe it, too. He said I had to believe if I was ever to be whole again myself.

Those were his last words. That we should not seek revenge even though someone had murdered our child. That the children who had killed Manami could be rehabilitated. I suppose if anyone ever deserved to be called a saint, he did.

Which, according to your logic, would mean his mother must have been reading him fairy tales from the time he was a baby. But she wasn’t. I doubt you ever bothered to look at the article about him that was posted in the back of the class, but his mother died soon after he was born. When his father remarried, he was in fifth grade—just as you were when your father remarried. Unlike you, he wasn’t a model student and he couldn’t get along with his stepmother, so he was constantly running away from home. His life after that was nothing to be proud of, and I’m sure he would have been on your list of idiots had you run into him along the way. And yet, a man like that wanted to save your life.

You may be right when you say that our sense of right and wrong is just something we pick up as children in school. Sakuranomi didn’t learn many of those simple lessons until he was almost an adult, when he realized he had somehow missed out and felt he had to catch up, to make himself whole. You’re like him in that, too—you somehow missed out on a basic sense of good and evil, and you even know it. But instead of trying to solve the problem, you act as though it’s somehow cool to be bad, or you blame your mother for making you that way. Or perhaps you were afraid that by changing your behavior you would somehow be cutting ties with that absent mother—that bad girl you so much wanted to be like—so you refused to change. But none of that matters now.

I was never able to accept what Sakuranomi had done. I could never forgive him for insisting he was thinking about my happiness but acting like a teacher rather than a father until the very end. And it goes without saying that I can never forgive you boys, despite his desire to protect you. But revenge is a subtle thing, and I wasn’t able to hit upon a new plan right away. So I decided to bide my time and see how things developed.

Werther-sensei, Yoshiteru Terada, has kept me informed about everything that has happened since I left the school. He was actually a student of Sakuranomi’s, and since we overlapped a year, I remembered him quite clearly. He wasn’t one of the more troubled boys in Sakuranomi’s circle, but he did seem to idolize his teacher more than any of the others. So when he heard that his hero had tried cigarettes in middle school, he started smoking himself—though he mostly just coughed—and when the story went around that Sakuranomi had drawn graffiti on the car of a particularly cruel teacher, Werther tried that as well. Imitation was always getting him into trouble. But that meant he was unusually impressionable and thus quite useful for my purposes.

When Sakuranomi died, I was able to convince the media not to publish the time or place of his funeral. They seemed to buy the argument that such an admired teacher needed to “live on forever in the hearts of his students.” But Terada managed to find out and came to the service. He said he needed to “make recompense for all the trouble he had caused his teacher,” and while I was sick to death of platitudes, I could hardly turn him away. After the funeral, he knelt down in front of the memorial tablet and began apologizing for all his past offenses. I suspect that even Sakuranomi would have found the display distasteful, but I did learn something useful from his confession. He said that he felt it was his duty to carry on Sakuranomi’s work, that he had decided to become a teacher, and that he had started work at S Middle School in April, at the beginning of the new school year.

I told him that I had taught at the same school until March, at the end of the previous year, and asked him how things were going. That was when he said he had taken over as homeroom teacher for the B Class. I suppose some things are just fated. He didn’t seem to know I had been the homeroom teacher before him, so I asked about the class without telling him. He said his one problem was a student who had stopped coming to school. A boy named Shitamura. As I listened to Terada’s account, I could tell that Shitamura believed he had contracted the virus but had not told his mother. It seemed a bit odd in this case, but I knew that there could be hidden walls between mothers and their children, and I began to think how I could make use of the situation.

In other words, I began to plan how I could drive Shitamura even further into his own little corner. I offered Terada timely advice, always suggesting that it was what Sakuranomi might have done in a similar situation. Sakuranomi would have gone to the boy’s home, and he would have taken another student with him. At times Werther seemed a bit skeptical, but I knew that he would eventually come around and that when he did he would be utterly persistent. He would insist on going every week, and when he was turned away at the door, he would call up from the street. I could foresee everything.

I told him I would be happy to give him advice whenever he needed it, and that I would keep his confidences. And he must have felt that he couldn’t discuss any of this with his colleagues at school, since he was constantly sending me email to ask my opinion. I don’t think anyone should accuse him of being reckless in his dealings with Shitamura, since he was regularly in touch with the previous homeroom teacher.

He even wrote to ask me what to do when you were being bullied. He said he wanted to put a stop to it, but I told him that rather than doing it himself, it would be more effective to have one of the other students confront the bullies. That way the class could identify the problem as a group. I had been hoping to intensify the attacks against you, but in the end the situation got twisted around, as so much with Terada always does, and poor Kitahara-san suffered the brunt of their cruelty. This is one thing I truly regret.

I suppose if she hadn’t been caught up in all this, you would never have killed her, and I am terribly sorry, but whenever I feel guilty I am immediately reminded that you boys are ultimately to blame. None of this is my fault. You killed Kitahara-san. She hit too close to home with the words “mother complex,” and you murdered her in a blind fury. What did you call it? “Murder as its own reward”? What does that mean? The word games of an idiot.

While I was just sitting back and watching the two of you, Shitamura killed his mother. I can’t imagine what happened between them, and even if I could, I wouldn’t pretend to understand. But the one thing I can say with certainty is that Shitamura would never have killed his mother if he hadn’t killed Manami in the first place. So in the end I have no sympathy whatsoever for the boy or his mother. In her case, it was her reward for raising him the way she did. Despite Sakuranomi’s interference, I felt that my revenge against Shitamura was complete.

Which just left you. As you’ve said yourself, while it was Shitamura who actually killed Manami, she wouldn’t have died had it not been for your stupid plan. I wanted to see you both suffer and die, but if I were forced to decide which of you I hated more, it would be you.

I would have been perfectly content had your classmates killed you during their brutal games, but my hopes were dashed when Terada reported that he had “solved” the bullying problem. He seemed so happy with himself, and he thanked me for the advice I’d given him. He was amazed that the threat of infection had actually turned out to be useful in keeping the other children at bay—something he might have realized from the beginning.

Be that as it may, I could see now that I would have to take matters into my own hands. Still, I was quite certain that you would never feel sorry for what you’d done to Manami even as the life was being choked out of you. So what was the point? I needed to find your weakness. Though it seemed futile, I checked your website daily. But there were no postings after the news about your theft-prevention purse. Still, the lack of updates was a clue in itself: Since I knew you despised useless things, why had you not shut down the site? I had all but given up on a speedy revenge and resigned myself to watching and waiting. If it took forever, I would discover something you loved and then destroy it. But just at that point, you returned to your site.