The Girl

Stories

## Suicide Note

Taiwan edition. Reprinted from Niku (makeinu.weclub.info)

Every child in the world ought to be made in a test tube.

All you need is the eggs and sperm of the gifted, and you can manufacture excellent human beings.

If that cannot be done, then settle for the next best thing: let every child grow up in a state orphanage or some place like it. Everyone wears the same clothes, eats the same meals, lives in the same rooms, receives the same education, has the same parents... and lives in an equal environment.

In an environment like that, if you were still looked down on for being unintelligent and not working hard, finishing at the bottom of the class, or shut out because your personality was twisted, you would have nothing left to say.

In both schoolwork and sports, I worked incredibly hard in private. I read a great many books, listened to a great deal of music, and never forgot to flip through fashion magazines, but I never boasted or showed off in front of anyone.

In a provincial city where there are not many choices, keeping up a high standard without compromising yourself is no easy thing. But I kept at it, right up to today.

Even when I was shut out, I never gave up trying.

Suicide is a declaration of defeat. I would never do anything so shameful. I kept telling myself that, neither servile nor arrogant, enduring until now with a positive frame of mind.

Because I did not cause this situation. This is not my fault. Someday, I would be free.

—I was once utterly convinced of that.

**

I can't make sense of it.

Does a person, before committing suicide, have to post a suicide note this baffling on a blog? If it were me, no matter how...

## Chapter One

July 17 (Friday)

*

—I feel so awful it's past bearing. This is hell itself.

It's a public girls' school, and yet aside from the faculty office and the student cafeteria, nowhere else has air conditioning. That has to be bad for your health, doesn't it? With the heavy curtains drawn, the gym where all three hundred and sixty students of the school are gathered together is exactly like a sauna. And mixed into it are the smells of every kind of body spray, filling the place with a stench like the industrial air freshener they set out in public toilets.

Sitting in a place like this for two hours is pure torture.

Once the two days of the weekend are over, summer vacation begins.

Today is only a half day of class, but I would rather the holiday started early than come and sit through this pointless routine program. In first year I still felt that if the school required it, I had no choice but to obey. After moving up to second year, walking thirty minutes one way just to come all the way to school feels utterly stupid.

Anyway, at least it is better than yesterday. Yesterday they held the inter-class softball tournament on the field under the blazing sun.

Several students got heatstroke, and even the nurse from the health room fainted. I was serving as a first-aid helper, and all I could do was lay towels soaked in ice water on the faces of the classmates lying in the shade, as emergency treatment—

Are you trying to murder me for my money?! Do I look like some old person stuck in bed?! Are you a wicked daughter-in-law?!

The classmates with heatstroke cursed me nonstop. Still, I have already run the experiment and proved that this method cannot easily take a life.

Today is the human rights film screening.

What movie is worth having every student in the school even...

## Chapter Two

July 27 (Monday)

**

I can finally see it.

The nursing home "Silver Castle." This fairy-tale building, white walls and a red roof, was finished last year, like a castle appearing in the forest of a storybook world.

I remembered someone in that fun-loving crowd from class saying before, "I thought that place was a love hotel. I never thought it was a nursing home." They might well have meant here.

I just never expected the journey to be this far.

Even though it is summer vacation, I got up at seven as usual and left the house at eight. Seven minutes on foot from home to the station, a twenty-minute train, then another twenty-minute bus from in front of the station, and from the bus stop at the foot of the hill I walked up an unpaved road halfway up the slope.

There is no dress code, but it is still a school assignment, so I stuffed my gym clothes in my bag and wore my uniform. I probably should not have worn leather shoes.

The map the school gave me said, "Ten minutes on foot from the bus stop," but I have already been walking for twenty.

Is it because I walk slower than other people? On the way to school or home, Yuki never once complained that I was slow... I suspect brochures for nursing homes and the like usually write the distance shorter on purpose, to stress how convenient the access is.

If I had known, I would have asked Yuki to come with me...

I really cannot manage this alone. I want to go home, but...

My mouth is parched, and all around me is empty—no convenience store, no vending machine, not even a dingy little shop. Even I, a teenager, am panting like an ox. Those people with one foot already in the coff...

## Chapter Three

July 28 (Tuesday)

**

I have had enough. I cannot stay in a place like this. "The place closest to heaven"—today I am saying goodbye to it.

At first it went smoothly enough.

I changed into my gym clothes, put on thick-soled sneakers, and left the house with a canteen of iced barley tea, and the walk from the bus stop to the nursing home did not feel hard. The building stank, but I knew I would get used to it after five minutes, so I paid it no mind.

I never thought that after only half a day's work I would be nearly dead from exhaustion.

First thing in the morning, the older man and I mopped the corridors and stairs inside the building, and after that we wiped the screen windows and the shelves on the walls with rags. Just when the windows were bright and the tables clean, the corridors and stairs were dusty all over again. There was nothing for it but to wipe the corridors and stairs a second time.

And in the blink of an eye it was noon. It is all the older man's fault. I was only doing what he told me.

I am worn out in body, and my heart is tired too, and that is his fault as well.

What is the matter with his attitude?

When I saw him take up the mop and start to clean a place I had already wiped, I reminded him as gently as I possibly could: "Mr. Takao, I have already wiped there." He only said, stone-faced, "Sorry." But if he happens to cause trouble for one of the old people—say, he knocks over a cane by accident, or spills the water from the bucket on the floor—he drops to his knees and knocks his head on the ground with wild exaggeration: "Oh dear, oh dear! I've done it again. Sir, I beg you to forgive me~"

If it were only that, I would think he takes these old people for precious cloth...

## Chapter Four

August 1 (Saturday)

**

We are putting the old people's calligraphy and paintings up on the bulletin board in the third-floor corridor. The older man is posting the upper row; I am posting the lower.

Ever since I saw the murder notice, I have been watching him. Whether we are working, eating, or resting, every time I come back to myself I find I am staring at him. I have looked so often that he has asked me three times, "Did I do something wrong again?"

Every time I play dumb and ask him back, "Huh? What did you say?" But when he notices a girl looking at him, what occurs to him is that he himself has done something wrong. It is too pathetic. When he rides the train, if someone steps on his foot, he is sure to apologize and say "Sorry."

I once saw a famous woman fortune-teller say on television that there are two kinds of people in the world: the lucky and the unlucky. He must belong to the unlucky. Of course, I am no exception.

He works hard at every single task, and still he causes trouble for other people. When he lines up the tubular steel chairs, he gets his fingers pinched. Even when he calls those old people "Sir~" in that exaggerated way, trying to warm the mood, he only makes the atmosphere more awkward.

Just now he spilled every thumbtack on the floor. I can barely stand him, but what saddens me more is that I can predict what he will do next.

"Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry..."

He said it with wild exaggeration and hurried to pick the tacks up, without noticing at all that the box was full of hair and dust. He does not mean to. He really is careless, though...

## Chapter Five

August 4 (Tuesday)

*

I only met little Subaru's father recently. He must be the nursing-home staff member who saved Grandma. When I heard the name "Silver Castle," I finally realized that the surname "Takao" Meat Bun told me is the same as the name tag I saw on that older man's chest. I really took the long way around.

But I cannot recall what he looks like at all. Even after learning the truth, I still have trouble connecting that featureless older man with fine-featured, handsome little Subaru. Subaru's mother must be a stunning beauty.

When I learned in the hospital corridor that Grandma had been saved, I was truly shaken. I badly wanted that man to die. If I had had the time then, I would certainly have thought about how to frame this meddling, self-satisfied man. But now I have no such thoughts at all. On the contrary, I am grateful he saved Grandma.

That night I thought it through calmly, alone. If Grandma had choked to death on the mochi Fujioka brought, how would I have felt? At first I might have been glad, but as time passed and the days grew long, regret might have welled up little by little.

No matter how strict a teacher Grandma used to be, the ones who suffered most were our own family—Dad, Mom, and me, living under the same roof. If Grandma had been killed by Fujioka, a stranger I had never once met, and simply dropped dead, where would all the resentment I had endured until now go?

And if Fujioka had been a well-behaved student back then, I might not have had to bear all that torment. Thinking of that, I don't want...

## Final Chapter

September 1 (Tuesday)

*

Summer vacation is over. Today is only a half day of class. Starting tomorrow, classes begin in earnest, a full six periods. They ought to move those few days from before vacation to here, so the feeling of it could ease in gradually.

Atsuko and I promised to see a movie together this afternoon, and after the movie we are going for cake, so at noon we just ate something casual at the student cafeteria. Shiori, whom we had not seen in forty days, ate with us too.

I was about to line up behind the curry queue when Atsuko dragged me over to buy hamburger gratin, and with a tray in each hand she carried my hamburger gratin to the seat for me of her own accord.

More than her noticing that I could not carry a tray, I was surprised she could hold, in one hand, a tray with a plate of hamburger gratin on it—and do it with both hands at once. I had always thought Atsuko fretted over things that were unnecessary. Maybe I have been running away all along too.

It was my first time eating the cafeteria's hamburger gratin, and it was better than I had imagined. The season ahead suits gratin even more. When I get home I will fill a plastic bottle with sand and properly train the strength in my right hand.

"How was summer vacation?"

After we finished eating, while everyone was reapplying lipstick, Shiori asked us.

"Nothing special. Pretty ordinary, right?" I looked at Atsuko.

"Yeah. We didn't go traveling, and we didn't go out shopping. What about you, Shiori? Weren't you at your relatives' the whole time? I'm so jealous you got to go to Tokyo. Were there lots of really trendy shops?"

"It wasn't as good as I imagined, but at least I bought the things I wan..."

## Suicide Note: Sequel

I thought of Seira.

I thought her death would leave me carrying a heavy grief for the rest of my life, but when disaster fell on me, I came to understand, bone-deep, that it had only been someone else's affair.

My life fell into the abyss within a single day—no, in the blink of an eye. Even living the same life as always, even without doing anything wrong, what is coming cannot be escaped.

It is all my father's fault—that stupid dad of mine.

Last month he was arrested for coercing a high school girl into indecent acts during this year's summer vacation.

The girl who was harmed did not want it made public at first. She asked my dad to pay a hundred thousand yen to settle. He refused to pay the money, and so she went to the police.

The newspaper printed my dad's name. When a minor commits a crime, the name is not published, to protect the minor's future. When a parent commits a crime, the name is published even if there are underage children at home.

The criminal's children are innocent. Is there no law to protect them?

My dad's name is not rare in this area, but in less than three days everyone at school knew the criminal in the paper was my dad—and at the same time, they started shutting me out.

First they ignored me. Then came the vicious bullying.

Someone stuffed several pieces of underwear into my desk and my locker. When I passed classmates, they would mutter "pervert" under their breath. When humiliation made me frown, the ones waiting to watch the show burst out laughing all at once.

Y and A could hardly be called my friends, but when I first transferred to this school they were close to me. They also...