Nan-Core (16 page)

“But—”

“Don’t be hasty. I’m not going to give up after one try, don’t worry. I plan on going again and again, and I’ll make sure they tell us what’s going on, even if I only get a little info at a time. So for now, boss, you need to throw yourself into running the cafe.”

It must have been hard for Ms. Hosoya to watch, to see how witless and spineless I’d become after Chie’s disappearance. She must have been devastated herself, yet she had worked hard to keep Shaggy Head running in Chie’s absence. I found myself too embarrassed to look her in the eye.

“Sorry.”

At the moment, all I could do was apologize. My only choice was to leave it in her hands.

I didn’t want to admit it, but it was possible that Chie had fallen back in love with her husband after seeing him again, that she had just dumped me. That I could believe. What I
couldn’t believe was that she had only gotten close to me in order to steal my money.

There had always been a part of Chie that seemed unknowable, and that was an aspect to which I was powerfully attracted. But ever since she’d left, I had begun to question whether she’d loved me as much as I’d loved her.

Maybe she hadn’t, but I still continued to wish for her return.

Knowing that when it rains it pours, I was on the verge of panicking.

Even so, the next day I mustered all my energy and threw myself into work. It helped that the cafe was still busy, but the greatest incentive had come from Ms. Hosoya’s warning that I really needed to concentrate on the business. I kept a keen eye on the interior of the shop, wiping stains from table legs where dogs had peed a little to mark territory, and making sure to run over with a damp cloth whenever someone got dribbled on by another customer’s dog. I deftly handled female customers who tried to hang around and gossip at the register despite a line forming behind them, and even gave Nachi some headache pills when he was moaning about a hangover.

Of course, the whole time, no matter what I was doing, there was always some part of my mind that was thinking about Chie. I wanted Ms. Hosoya to get back to Okayama as soon as possible to ask her parents for the rest of the story, but she thought it would only backfire to be too hasty, while giving them plenty of time would help Chie’s parents open up to her.

She finally decided she’d visit them again the following
week, but that felt like an eon away. It was the same for Chie’s story as it was with the remainder of the notebooks—I didn’t feel like I could endure the agony of waiting.

When it was getting towards evening, Yohei called my cell. I had been worrying over whether he’d managed to pick up the copy of the family register but I hadn’t tried calling. I was only just getting back on track at work and knew that if something knocked me off-kilter I’d never regain my footing. I was scheduled to meet him that night, so I’d told myself to be patient until then. Yet the moment I took the call, all that patience proved worthless and I was utterly derailed from anything work-related.

“Ryo, I’m gonna stay the night,” was the first thing out of the brat’s mouth.

“Huh? Hey, did you get the register? And what do you mean, ‘stay the night’? What about our meeting?”

Luckily everyone else had already taken their afternoon break except me, so I signaled the part-time girl next to me with a look and, still holding the phone to my ear, went upstairs.

“Don’t worry, I got it. I’ll fax it from the hotel. I realized that there’s no need to meet up if it’s just to hand the register over. Since I’ve come all this way I’d like to see a bit of Tokyo. Forget about the steak dinner, could you spot the hotel instead?”

“Hotel? Ugh, you …”

He was right about faxing being more convenient than meeting up, but it still felt like I’d been cheated. In truth I’d wanted to see him as planned. I had all sorts of questions and complaints that I wanted to put to his scientific mind.

Yohei paused for a moment, perhaps intuiting the state of my own, and casually dropped a bomb. “To cut to the chase, Mom did have a younger sister after all.”

“What?”

“But it seems she’s gone.”

“Gone? You mean, she went missing? You can get that from the family register?”

“The register says a court declared her missing, presumed dead. Have a look when you get the fax.”

“What the hell? When was this? What year?”

“Let’s see … She was declared missing in 1997.”

“What? But that’s well after the move to Komagawa. I was in middle school, and you were in elementary school.”

“That’s when the decision was handed down, but obviously she would have gone missing a long time before that.”

“Yohei, do you understand how big a deal that is? It means the notebooks are real. The sister, she was killed.”

“I knew you’d say that. Look at the register all you want, have a ball with all your wild theories. I’ll join you for dinner again once you’ve cooled off.” His tone made it painfully obvious that he wanted to hang up.

“Wait, hey, was there anything else you found out?”

“Everything else was in the clear. Dad was never divorced, and there were only records for us, no mysterious birth or death certificates for other kids. That’s it for now.”

That’s it?
I threw the phone onto the bed and thumped down on the rumpled sheets. But I got back onto my feet straightaway and started to pace the small room. It didn’t calm me down in the slightest. I looked out the window and saw the dogs playing tranquilly as usual, ranging about inside
the fence. They looked resigned and satisfied, seeming at once to behave like a pack yet also not like one at all. They each acted according to their own desires while actually conforming to subtle constraints of order. After watching them for a while I felt myself cool down a little, as I always did. I wondered if dogs actually exuded something that had a tranquilizing effect on humans.

I sat on the chair at my desk and switched on my laptop. Breaks were fixed at just fifteen minutes, but I wanted to do a little research into how courts declared people missing after hearing what Yohei had said.

It was after eight when the fax of the family registers came through. Unable to wait any longer, I was sitting at a table in the cafe, eating frozen rice pilaf I’d heated up in the microwave. I usually ate on the second floor, but the fax machine was downstairs so I had little choice.

Yohei had faxed the old family registers for both Dad and Granddad, documents that were rendered obsolete after the family’s permanent residence was registered in Komagawa.

Although family registers don’t have much text, they are hard to read, especially those from before everything was digitized. I neglected my food as I spent a long time skimming through the papers, but I finally managed to pin down a number of facts.

First: Dad’s register was transferred from Sendai, in Miyagi Prefecture, to Maebashi when I was four and in the hospital. Neither Yohei nor I had visited, but Sendai was Dad’s birthplace, and he had continued to live there with his unwed aunt after his parents had died. After the fire he had moved
to Maebashi to live with my grandparents. There he had not only applied for local residency—moving from somewhere in Tokyo—but had switched his permanent residence from the Miyagi address at the same time. Even though he would again change his permanent address to Komagawa just a few months later.

Mom’s name was there, listed as his wife, and the eldest daughter of her parents. She was in the Miyagi register because of the marriage, and nothing else, not her birthday or the date of the marriage, seemed to contradict anything I already knew. It was as Yohei had said. Apart from the fact that Dad had re-registered at Komagawa so quickly, there was nothing that stood out as particularly suspect.

The problem was with my grandfather’s register. There, after Misako, Mom’s name, was listed another name: Emiko, the second daughter.

I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Emiko. The name Gran had let slip through tears in the nursing home. It was an obsolete register so each name had a diagonal strike-through. The name Emiko was struck off as well, but unlike the others, there was a strange inscription in the documentation column next to it.

The note was written without punctuation. The name,
Ryosuke Yanagihara, was that of my late grandfather. Even though I’d been warned on the phone, actually seeing it with my own eyes gave me an icy shock that crawled up from deep within my gut. The night silence of the empty cafe felt suddenly oppressive.

Emiko Yanagihara.

Was she my real mother?

Had I lived my whole life not knowing a single thing about her, of her very existence, of this person who was presumed dead, who had left me behind? If she was the murderer who had written the notebooks, that meant the blood of a killer ran through my veins.

I sat in a daze. My head swirled with all the words and the various scenes in the notebooks. After a while they resolved together into a single floating image of a woman in a floral dress, holding a folded parasol and a white handbag. Her features were indistinct, but I could feel an incredible tenderness in the way she smiled in my direction. She looked like she wanted to say something to me.

Why had she gone missing?

From some internet research I’d done earlier that day, I’d gathered that if someone had been missing for over seven years, a relative could apply in court for a missing persons declaration, which effectively made the missing person recognized as deceased. It was too late to change anything, but I wanted at least to know what had happened to Emiko Yanagihara, how she had died. I would have to come to terms with it all, no matter how sinful the blood I’d inherited. The thought made me want to cry.

Dad’s old register had been struck off in 1988, the time
of the move to Komagawa, but the other of the two obsolete registers from Maebashi, Granddad’s, hadn’t been struck off until 1998—a whole decade later. He had come with us to Komagawa, so why hadn’t he processed his register at the same time?

There was only one answer: to sever Emiko’s name from the family. With a missing person declaration to confirm death, her name would be absent from any new records made thereafter. So he’d waited, moving the register to Komagawa once that was done. They’d all been in it together; my grandparents, Dad, Misako. It was the only possible conclusion.

My eyes fell closed. I pressed my hands into my temples.

Holding still in that pose I could nearly make out a faint something, a silhouette peeking up from beneath my dark doubts. Maybe I didn’t need to work out what had happened after all. Maybe the truth was already out in the open, and the only problem was that I just couldn’t accept it.

Sometime later I picked up my spoon and finished what was left of the pilaf I’d heated earlier. Having cooled so much, it felt as tough as uncooked grains of rice.

Nothing particularly interesting happened over the next few days. Finding myself with no choice but to wait, I took each day as it came, my mental state in chaos as I felt both preoccupied and absent-minded. I did a pretty decent job at work, or at least I think so. Or perhaps it was thanks to the work that I was able to hold on. And besides, I got to work with dogs. If I made eye contact they came up to me, drooling a little. When I fussed over them, petting their heads or tugging at their ears, I found it impossible to dwell on other things. It’s hard to gauge just how much those moments rescued me.

The hardest time was after the cafe was closed. At night, by myself, my head would fill with a never-ending stream of rambling thoughts. My feelings swayed between resentment that had nowhere to go and misery that made my chest clench. My thoughts kept running over the same things even though I knew it was pointless.

I would slowly sip a beer each night. I knew it would be better to snap out of it, to listen to some music or give Yohei a call, but for some reason I didn’t want to. I preferred to sit quietly in my chair, a prisoner to the cycle of my thoughts. When the alcohol had seeped into my body, I would fall into
bed without even changing out of my clothes and be pulled into a light sleep.

One such night, I felt a presence appear next to me, as though someone was right there. It was my mother, at my bedside, watching me like she had watched “you” all those years ago, staying with him until he fell asleep. The thought coiled around me as I lay there half-asleep. I could almost feel her pleasantly cool palm nearly touching my forehead. My young mother, my mother who had died so young, whose name was Emiko.

I tried to concentrate to get a better look at her indistinct features, but instead countless words from the notebooks rushed out, hiding her face from sight. She seemed to be calling out to me from behind those words. She was probably long dead, and yet it felt like she was asking for my help.

Mother
.

I tried to call out but my voice didn’t work. I tried to move but my body only twitched, like I was stuck in a fit of sleep paralysis. I was beset with helpless panic, but I maintained my focus and at last a dim figure began to take shape against my closed eyelids. The sleeveless summer dress, the white handbag, the face smiling in my direction—only for some reason, it was Chie. Her almond eyes, her slightly creased eyelids, the tiny mole underneath one eye, the girl I would never forget, no matter how hard I tried, her familiar scent, like spring flowers.

I suddenly couldn’t tell if it was my mother or Chie that was calling for help. I knew I would probably fail them both, let both of them die. That premonition swelled relentlessly.

My throat rasped as I groaned in horror, the sound of my
own voice rousing me. Sweating and gasping for air I began to sob quietly, the possibility hitting me that, just like my mother, Chie might already be dead.

Despite everything, Sunday eventually came around. I stayed at work as long as I could but ended up having to leave during the day’s busiest period. I felt all the worse when no one seemed annoyed in the slightest, not Ms. Hosoya, not even Nachi, who usually liked to mouth off.