Summer，Fireworks，and My Corpse Read online

  Laughter filled the room, only to be broken by Yayoi’s shout. “Mom, turn the channel! My anime’s starting already!”

  Mrs. Tachibana, sitting closest to the TV, sighed and turned the dial. “Okay, all right. But just because food and anime are the only things that will keep you two quiet.”

  The anime was shown in a marathon until six, and by then we’d made our way through the pile of ice cream cups. For some reason, at six, there was nothing on but news programs, and we quickly became bored again.

  So we left to go play in the woods behind their house.

  *

  At six o’clock in the summer, it’s still bright outside. The leaves of the trees formed a ceiling of green above us, and sunlight spilled through the gaps and made patterns on the rocks and the roots that poked up from the ground. The smell of the forest was so enticing I felt like I could suck it in until I choked.

  Ken had told us he would come and meet us after he’d walked Midori home, so the two of us decided to climb our tree. It was what we always did when the three of us came to the forest.

  Up a few slopes into the forest, there was a clearing with a hill. From the south side of it, you could see the whole village. A single tall tree stood in the clearing with low branches perfect for climbing on its southern face. Ever since Ken found it, the top of the tree had been our secret hideout.

  “You mean you can’t watch TV while you eat?” Yayoi was asking me. “We don’t get in trouble for it in our house.”

  “Yeah, that’s nice. I wish I’d been born in your place.”

  Yayoi’s smile disappeared. She hesitated, then said, “I wish I’d been born in a different family too.”

  Yayoi jumped onto a rock that rested next to the tree. Ken had rolled it there from nearby to help us shorter girls climb up onto the lowest branch. I bet that hadn’t been easy for him to do.

  “Why do you say that?” I asked.

  Using the rock, I started up the tree after her. Ken had taught us which branches to climb on and in which order to make it the easiest. Our destination was an extra-wide branch that grew near the top of the tree. The view of the village from up there was much better than from the clearing below. You could even see the shrine and the old stone foundation. There was just enough room for the three of us to sit, and just the three of us knew about it.

  “Come on, tell me why,” I insisted.

  “Well, because . . .” Another pause. “My brother and I could . . .”

  “Your brother?” I looked up at Yayoi in surprise. She’d already made it to the branch and had sat down.

  Moving my way from branch to branch, I climbed up as easily as walking up a staircase.

  I sat down on the branch and took in deep breaths of the crisp air. It was cooler and more refreshing than the thicker forest air on the ground.

  Among the green paddy fields stretching out below us, red and silver tape glistened in the sun, and the yellow eyes painted on the bird-repellent balloons floated in the breeze. There were even some scarecrows—protecting the rice from sparrows, not crows. Occasionally, they let forth an explosive sound I could feel echo through the pit of my stomach and vibrate through my head. Ken had told me that those devices, called “scare-sparrows,” were gas-powered machines with a timer-activated noisemaker designed to frighten sparrows away.

  Gazing out at the view, I asked Yayoi, “You don’t wish you were born in a different house so you could marry Ken, do you?”

  Yayoi widened her already wide eyes even farther and turned to look at me. She seemed to shrink inward, and then she nodded. She pouted her lips and said, “Ken’s my brother. I wish he were just Ken and I didn’t have to call him Brother.” Her legs dangled from the branch.

  We were fairly high off the ground, but we never worried about falling. The rough bark wasn’t slippery, and children are nimble and quick.

  “But Ken likes Midori, right?” I offered.

  “I know . . .”

  Yayoi had started growing out her hair about a year before, and hearing her confession, I wondered if she had done it to be more like Midori.

  Yayoi and I both liked Midori. She treated me no different than she did the rest of her family, and she gave me all that ice cream. Plus she said my sandals, the ones with the flowers on them that my mother gave me, were cute. It was natural that Ken would like her too.

  I understood that brothers and sisters couldn’t marry, and yet I was still jealous of Ken and Yayoi spending all their time together.

  “Oh, you knew?” I felt bad for upsetting her. Thinking it wasn’t fair for her to be the only one flushed and embarrassed, I made a confession of my own.

  “Did you know that I like Ken too?”

  “What?” It sounded more like a little shriek than a word. Yayoi looked at me in shock. Her eyes burned red, as if reflecting the sunset.

  “I . . . I like Ken too,” I repeated softly, intoxicated by the thrill of saying it out loud.

  At that moment, I saw Ken walking toward us in the distance.

  “Heyyy! Up here!” I called down to him, waving my arms wildly. He saw me and waved back at me with both hands. That made me happy.

  After a moment I lost sight of him as he passed under more tree cover. Even though I knew it would be a little while before he came out into the clearing, I strained myself this way and that just to see if I could spot him between the leaves.

  “There he is!” I caught a glimpse of him running my way.

  That was when it happened.

  Through my light jacket, I felt a small, warm hand on my back. Oh, that must be Yayoi’s hand, I thought, and in that instant, the hand pushed me. Hard.

  I lost my balance and slipped from the branch. I saw the leaves rise up around me in slow motion. As I fell I snapped through branches I’d climbed up only moments before and I kept falling. I came down hard on one branch and heard the sound of myself snapping. My body twisted into a wrong shape, and I let out a scream that didn’t make it past my throat. And still I fell. In midair, I was sad to see that one of my favorite sandals had come off.

  And then, as my back struck the rock at the base of the tree, the one we’d been using as a step stool, I died.

  *

  Dark red blood flowed from everywhere—from my nose and my ears, from gashes all over my body. Even my eyes cried with it. It was all such a small amount, really, but all I could think was how I didn’t want Ken to see me like that.

  The snapped tree branches thudded to the ground around me, and scattered leaves floated down onto my body.

  “Hey, what was that noise?” Ken called out, running to the tree. “It sounded like a snapping tree bran—”

  Seeing my body, he froze.

  Yayoi was climbing down the tree in tears. Since my dead body was currently occupying the stone, she leapt down to the ground from the lowest branch. She stood up, bawling, and wrapped her arms around Ken.

  Ken regarded his sister and my corpse with a reassuring smile and, like a parent calming his crying child, asked, “What on earth happened here, Yayoi?”

  He came closer to me and said, “Satsuki, you’re dead, right?”

  That settled, he again cast his smile upon his sister.

  “I need you to stop crying and tell me what happened.”

  Yayoi, seeing him beaming at her, stopped crying and said in a slow, wavering, and pained voice, “Well . . . we were talking up on our branch . . . and . . . Satsuki slipped and fell.”

  “Oh, so she fell? Well, you couldn’t have done anything about that.” He spoke in a persuasive, grown-up tone. “You didn’t do anything wrong, so don’t cry.”

  He turned back to look at me. “We’d better tell Mom. Come on, let’s go.”

  Ken took Yayoi’s hand to pull her away.

  But she shook her head forcibly, no no no, refusing to budge.

  “What’s wrong, Yayoi?”

  “Well . . .” She hesitated as she thought of an excuse. “Well, wouldn’t Mom be upset if she
heard about this? I don’t want to make her sad!” She burst into tears.

  I could sense that Yayoi was afraid. She was afraid that someone would find out what she had done.

  He thought it over. “Yeah, you’re right.” Almost to himself, he said, “Not just Mom, but Midori too.”

  His face lit up with sudden inspiration. “That’s it! Let’s hide Satsuki. We’ll be fine as long as nobody finds out that she died here!”

  Yayoi looked at her brother with a mixture of sadness and happiness.

  My eyes, frozen open, could only gaze at them with envy.

  *

  “But how are we going to do it?” Yayoi asked. “We don’t have a shovel or anything to bury her.”

  “I know,” Ken answered with a kind smile that could dash away all of his frightened sister’s worries. “That’s why we brought her here, right? Just leave everything to me, and you won’t have anything to fear.”

  He was carrying me over his shoulder, taking care not to let any of my blood dribble onto his back.

  We were near the edge of the forest along an empty road that passed through the woods.

  Yayoi looked around, puzzled. “What are we going to do here? How can we hide Satsuki?”

  Ken laid my body upon the ground and lightly brushed away a patch of dirt, revealing a row of concrete tiles the size of cutting boards that covered a ditch. He bent over and pried up one of the slabs. The ditch appeared to connect to a creek that ran all along the paddy fields. But that day it was dry and contained only empty space. Ken lifted a few more tiles. The ditch was fairly wide, and he was able to fit my body snugly inside.

  He then lowered the concrete slabs back into place, just as he had found them. They must have been heavy to move. But Ken silently went about his work.

  “Brother, wait.”

  Ken, just about to lower the last slab, stopped, holding it in place.

  The gap was a window, just one tile wide, through which my feet could be seen. On one foot, a sandal. On the other, only dirt. I felt self-conscious under their intense stares.

  “I see,” said Ken, unconcerned. “I guess we’d better go look for the missing sandal.”

  Ken unceremoniously lowered the final slab, sealing me in darkness. He then covered the tiles with dirt once again, concealing the ditch from casual observation.

  Yayoi and Ken worked together to hide any evidence that the earth had been disturbed, and as they finished, the sun sank beneath the horizon.

  *

  Just like any other evening, the Tachibana family was all gathered in their living room. Dinner had been served on the kotatsu-turned-dining table, and the small room was filled with the smells of delicious food. Ken’s grandmother and grandfather had just returned from working in their fields, and his father, wearing a sleeveless undershirt, was sitting in the strong cool breeze of an electric fan and watching a baseball game on the TV.

  “Dad, change the channel,” Ken said. “Starship Sagittarius is about to start. You know Yayoi watches that every week.” He looked to his sister for support. Starship Sagittarius was an anime program about three lovable characters working together to pilot their starship across the galaxy. Yayoi, who hadn’t been paying attention to the conversation and had a mouthful of food, frantically nodded her head up and down.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” their father replied, timidly turning the TV dial. “Since nobody seems to care what I want to watch.”

  “And turn the head of the fan over here. We’re hot too.”

  Their father pressed the button to oscillate the head of the fan without a word. It was one of those older models with a pin sticking out near the motor that you press to start the fan’s panning movement.

  When her brother said turn the head, Yayoi shuddered, remembering the way my neck had been twisted around in the fall.

  Starship Sagittarius started without regard to Yayoi’s mental discomfort. Her grandparents talked about their fields, how their watermelon crop was growing, how their rush mat was getting old and needed replacing, and so on.

  “Excuse me,” came a voice from the entryway.

  Mrs. Tachibana replied with a loud “Coming!” and went to the front hall.

  Yayoi, upon hearing the voice from the front door, began to tremble. Ken had surely recognized the voice too, but he didn’t have the slightest reaction. He just kept on quietly eating his dinner and watching the anime.

  Before long, Mrs. Tachibana came back into the living room. She had left the caller waiting at the front door and quickly motioned for the two children to come over.

  “Hey, Satsuki’s mother just came by, and she says her daughter hasn’t come home yet. Do you know anything?”

  Ken noticed that the hand Yayoi held her chopsticks with was shaking and answered for the both of them.

  “No, we split up in the forest. Same as always.”

  “Oh, I see . . .”

  Leaving further comment until later, Mrs. Tachibana went to the front door to tell my mother. Disappointed, defeated, and on the verge of tears, my mother said only, “All right,” and headed back home. It hurt to see her like that. She looked so terribly small as she walked away—nothing like the angry demonic mother who yelled at me not to watch TV while we ate.

  Mrs. Tachibana stood there watching my mother leave, then went back into the living room.

  “I’m worried about Satsuki,” she said, taking another mouthful of white rice. “It’s already dark out. Where could she have gone at this hour? And with all these kidnappings? I’m really worried.”

  Each time her mother said I’m worried, Yayoi lost a little more strength and lowered her head a little farther, as though trying to hide from her mother’s gaze.

  Ken asked his mother, “Is Satsuki’s mother going to look for her in the forest?”

  “Yeah, it sounds like it. Satsuki was an only child, after all, so I’m sure she’s all the more worried. I wonder what happened? She was saying it might be best to tell the police.”

  “The police?” Ken and Yayoi said in unison. The two looked at their mother—Yayoi with desperation and Ken with something that looked like excitement.

  “Well, don’t you think this could be related to those recent kidnappings? She was last seen in the forest, right? There might even be a search party out there tomorrow. Even if she hasn’t been kidnapped, she could be lost in the woods right now. Her mom said she’d start looking right away.”

  The two kids hadn’t expected to hear talk of the forest, but it was the most obvious place to look for me. Aside from the forest behind their home, there wasn’t anywhere else in the area where a child might get lost.

  When Yayoi heard that my mother was searching the forest, her expression froze. My body wasn’t in a place where it would be discovered, and the two of them had cleaned up all traces of blood. But they hadn’t been able to find my missing sandal. Ken had climbed back up the tree to see if it had gotten caught on a branch, and Yayoi had searched the ground until her back ached. But no sandal.

  If the sandal weren’t discovered, the police would likely consider my disappearance a kidnapping and would focus their search outside the forest. But what if my mother found it? She would recognize it immediately. She would remember how happy I’d been when she gave them to me.

  “I’m really worried,” Mrs. Tachibana was saying. “Maybe I should help her look.”

  I couldn’t tell if Ken was listening or not. He was sitting there, amused, watching the anime on TV.

  *

  Ken and Yayoi shared a bedroom. The room was twelve feet long on each side, which was more space than they needed. The night was hot and humid, and the large bedroom window had been left open in an attempt to cool down the room, if only a little bit. There weren’t any burglars around to worry about in that area, anyway. A night-light provided the room with dim yellow-orange light, and a blue mosquito net hung suspended from the ceiling, draped down over two futon mattresses spread out in the middle of the floor.


  Ken was asleep, breathing quietly. But Yayoi couldn’t sleep. When she closed her eyes, she couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened that evening.

  “Hey, Brother . . .” Yayoi said, nearly crying. She was wrapped in a towel cloth blanket—we called it a towelket—barely enduring the heat. Her bangs were plastered to her forehead with sweat.

  Ken sleepily mumbled a response and sat up. It was so hot he had pushed not only his comforter aside but his towelket as well. He stood and reached up to turn on the light. He had hung a cord down from it so he could switch it on and off without getting up, but the cord was laying on top of the mosquito netting. He tried to tug the cord from under the net, but it kept slipping through his fingers.

  “Don’t worry about the light, Brother.”

  “All right,” Ken said, still half asleep. “Well, what’s the matter, Yayoi?”

  “I’m scared. Could I . . . come over there with you?” Her voice was embarrassed and pitiful. She was sweating so much it looked like she might boil away.

  Ken took a moment to respond, then said brusquely, “Oh, sure,” and laid back down on his futon.

  Even in the heat, Yayoi kept her towelket wrapped around her, as if hiding something, as she crawled over to his futon. She pressed her warm forehead against his back and closed her eyes.

  And as the room filled with the peaceful regular breaths of sleep, the dark curtain of night fell over Ken and over Yayoi, over my corpse hidden in the ditch, and over my mother, weeping as she searched through the forest.

  Day Two

  Early the next day, Ken and Yayoi went to their morning exercise session, a sequence of group calisthenics choreographed by radio and held at the shrine every day during summer break. The shrine felt pleasant in the morning, and the cool, crisp air was revitalizing. As the sun began its ascent into the sky, the few cicadas that had begun singing earlier were joined by a full chorus.

  After the exercises were completed, a sixth grader (the oldest grade schooler in the village) made a stamp on the attendance cards of the children present. He commented on how I wasn’t there that morning, but Ken ignored him as if it were not his concern. His attention was elsewhere.