The School Festival of the Dead

Stories

## Illustrations

## Prologue

+Art source/proofreading: Duoduo

+Artwork: Josou Shounen

"Machiko, hey, Machiko—I'm over here, I'm over here!"

Machiko lifted her head toward the voice, and she could hardly believe the sight before her. She froze where she stood. On the fourth floor of the reinforced-concrete school building, her classmate Yamazaki Yuko was waving down at her from the balcony. But Yuko was standing on the balcony railing.

The railing was only a few centimeters wide, and yet Yamazaki Yuko was walking along it as calmly as if she were out for a stroll.

"What are you doing!"

Only then did Machiko come to her senses and shout.

"I'm walking."

A leisurely voice drifted down from above.

"That's far too dangerous! Come down!"

Below the balcony was a concrete path. Machiko thought she had to find someone to help.

"I'll be fine..."

"No! What if you fall! Come down! Come down, Yuko."

School had long since let out, and there was no one nearby to help...

"Stop messing around! Come down!"

"All right."

Yuko waved, and Machiko finally let out a breath of relief. Then Yuko stepped down from the railing and leapt off on the outside of it.

Machiko had never seen anyone fall from a height. In movies, people usually drift slowly downward, screaming the whole way. Real life was nothing like that.

Without any warning, Yamazaki Yu...

## Part One: Musashino Academy

1 The T Hotel

"Your father doesn't seem to have arrived yet."

"We got here too early. Let's sit for a bit, Mom."

Machiko and her mother, Yuuki Keiko, sat down on the sofa beside them.

"Oh my, what's wrong with this sofa."

Machiko smiled and said, "Once you sit down, it's hard to get up again."

This was the T Hotel in Hibiya, Tokyo. Past the heavy revolving doors lay a spacious lobby. Bellmen with gold braid on their uniforms moved briskly back and forth, and more than half the guests coming and going were foreigners.

Machiko listened carefully to snatches of conversation from the foreigners passing by. Besides English and French, she could not tell what the other languages were. Even so, she had the feeling that she herself had become a diplomat, seated in an international conference hall.

"This is really quite uncomfortable."

Keiko, sitting on the sofa, kept shifting her hips. She was too heavy; once she sank deeply into the cushions, getting back up took real effort. Besides, Keiko was not used to a place like this. She had grown up in a bustling Tokyo neighborhood and had never taken to stiff, formal manners.

"Machiko, that dress would look better with a necklace."

"Would it?"

Machiko looked down at the pale blue dress she was wearing.

"Trust me. Why don't you look around while your father still hasn't come? Go on. I'll wait here."

"Mom, you really don't have to think about me this much."

"Don't I?"

"Your kindness, I..."

## Part Two: A Summer Adventure

1 Mr. Kurabayashi's Secret

The word "multitaskers" (note: people who do two or more things at once, such as listening to music while reading) was popular a long time ago, but no one uses it anymore. Not because multitaskers vanished, but because everyone became one.

Machiko was no exception. She could listen to music through her headphones, work English exercises, keep her mouth full of cake, and think about tomorrow's plans all at the same time. For her, it was easy.

But this summer vacation would not let her have things her way. Writing her summer homework, investigating the truth of a murder, and carrying on a romance—doing those three things at once was beyond even Machiko, capable as she was. If she could pour out her love while her right hand flipped through a dictionary, her left hand held a pistol, her right foot stepped a dance, and her left foot chased down a killer, she would have to be some kind of monster.

So she would have to take them one by one. In that case, the efficient thing was to start with whatever she could finish quickly. Of the three, solving the case and being in love both involved other people, so they were harder to keep to her own schedule. That left only the summer homework. In the past she always dashed it off in one burst during the last three days before vacation ended; this time she had steeled herself to finish it in the first three days of the vacation—and things did not go as she wished.

Why was that? She truly meant to write it, but on the English-to-Japanese assignment...

## Part Three: The School Festival of the Dead

1 The New Term Begins

The second term began on September 8. The students back at school had endless things to talk about, and Machiko was of course at the center of it. Her classmates kept asking what it had been like then, whether it was all true, until she could hardly hold them off.

In addition, Class C's homeroom teacher was now Misawa, who taught music. From the school's point of view, it was unwilling to make public the truth of Mr. Kurabayashi and Sachie's sudden disappearance, so it had Misawa tell the students only that Mr. Kurabayashi had urgent business and had to return to his family home in the countryside, and so could not come back to school for the time being. After hearing this explanation, the students began to stir and voice their discontent. Misawa went on:

"Because Nagaike Sachie is Mr. Kurabayashi's wife, she went back with him, and has for now taken a leave of absence."

When the teacher finished, the gasp that rose in the classroom was every bit the shock of a chimpanzee walking in to teach the class.

The students who had been secretly in love with Mr. Kurabayashi were nearly in tears.

"That's awful. That's just awful."

Sighs rose here and there. Machiko pretended she was hearing the news for the first time and put on a look of surprise, because if she admitted now that she had known all along, she would surely be torn to pieces.

What was crueler still was that exams began at once. After the five-day exam period ended, the class gradually settled back into calm from its excitement.

It was already mid-September, and everyone had grown absorbed in something else—...