Offering a subservient smile, Sakamochi raised his brow in response to his caller. He combed back the hair over his right ear with his free right hand.
“Whaaat?” he replied. “That can’t be. I mean that occurred in March. I did receive the report. But if that’s true, then right now… yessir. The central government officials are always prone to exaggeration. Besides, these are junior high school kids. Then they would have known we were listening in on them. Right now there are no signs that any of these students know this. Yessir. So… yes, yes, yessir. Very well then. Oh no, please, I couldn’t possibly accept… well, if you must insist then, thank you very much, sir. Yes, yes. Well then, goodbye.”
Sakamochi took a deep breath and hung up the phone. He held up his pen again and exclaimed, “I’m so busy!” He combed back his hair and began to write frantically on his documents, as if he were clinging to them.
29
When Shinji first found Yutaka Seto, he seemed on edge from the shock of witnessing the deaths of Yumiko Kusaka and Yukiko Kitano, but after a while he seemed to calm down. In a spot beyond the thick branches, where the warm sunlight poured in, Shinji Mimura was listening closely again. There didn’t seem to be anyone else around. Only the sound of a little bird chirping. Whoever killed Yumiko and Yukiko didn’t seem to have noticed Yutaka and Shinji. Still, he had to be careful.
“Relax when you have to. But also be on your toes when you have to. The point is, make no errors of judgment.”
His uncle had told him this. He was the one who taught him everything. Starting with basketball, he was the man most responsible for the education of the boy known as The Third Man. His uncle had also taught him computer basics. When his uncle showed him how to access foreign internet connections, he warned Shinji, you can never be too careful. And now was one of those times he had to be on his toes. That much was certain.
“Hey, Shinji.” Shinji looked back at Yutaka. Yutaka was leaning against a tree, hugging his knees, staring between them. “Come to think of it, I should have been waiting for you in front of the school. Then we could have been together from the start.” He looked up at Shinji. “But I was too scared…”
Shinji crossed his arms with his Beretta in his left hand.
“I don’t know about that. That might have been dangerous.”
That’s right, Shinji realized, Yutaka probably didn’t know that Mayumi Tendo and Yoshio Akamatsu were killed in front of the school. Besides—
That was when he realized Yutaka was crying. His eyes were filled with tears which began to flow down his cheeks, tracing two thin, white lines down his dirty face.
“What’s wrong?” Shinji asked kindly.
“I…” Yutaka lifted his wounded fist and wiped his eyes with a strip from the towel Shinji had wrapped around his hand. “I’m so pathetic. I-I’m a fool and a coward—” He stopped and then said as if spitting up something stuck in his throat, “I wasn’t able to save her.”
Shinji lifted his brow and glanced at his friend. This was something he didn’t bring up, but since Yutaka did…
Shinji said slowly, “You mean Izumi Kanai.”
Yutaka nodded, still hunched over.
Shinji remembered being in Yutaka’s room when Yutaka told him, with a mix of pride and embarrassment, “I like Izumi Kanai.” And Izumi Kanai ended up being one of the first to die. They were informed of her death by the 6 a.m. announcement. He had no idea where she died. He only knew she died somewhere on the island.
“There wasn’t anything you could do, though,” Shinji said, “Izumi left before you did.”
“But I…” Yutaka continued, his head still hunched over. “I couldn’t even find Izumi. I was so scared… I thought, no, it couldn’t happen to her, she’s all right… I tried convincing myself. Then at six o’clock she was already…”
Shinji listened without saying a word. He heard the chirping again up in the treetops. There might have been another bird. The chirping overlapped, as if the birds were talking to each other.
Suddenly Yutaka looked up at Shinji. “I made up my mind,” he said.
“About?”
His eyes still wet, he directly looked at Shinji. “Revenge. I’m gonna kill that bastard Sakamochi and the rest of the fucking government.”
Shinji was surprised. He stared at Yutaka.
Of course he was also totally pissed off at this game and the government that ran it. He didn’t really know Shuya Nanahara’s best friend Yoshitoki Kuninobu very well—he was a little too laid back for Shinji—but he was a nice guy. And the government brutally murdered him. Then Fumiyo Fujiyoshi, and now as Yutaka said, Izumi Kanai, and then others like Yumiko Kusaka and Yukiko Kitano, killed right before their eyes, and then more classmates. But—
“But you might as well be committing suicide.”
“I don’t care if I die. What else can I do for Izumi now?” Yutaka stopped and looked at Shinji. “Is it ridiculous for a wimp like me to be saying this?”
“No…” Shinji paused a bit and then shook his head. “Not at all, Yutaka.”
Shinji stared back at Yutaka and then looked up at the cluster of branches above them. He wasn’t surprised by Yutaka’s sudden emotional outburst, though it wasn’t part of with his clownish persona. Here was another side of Yutaka. That’s why they’d been friends for so long. But—
“I don’t care if I die. What else can I do for Izumi now?”
I wonder what it’s like to feel that way about a girl, Shinji wondered as he stared at the olive-colored layer of tree leaves shining brilliantly in the direct sunlight. He had dated girls and slept with three in fact (not bad for a junior high kid, huh?), but he’d never felt that way about a girl the way Yutaka did.
Maybe it had something to do with his parents not getting along. His father saw another woman. (Apparently he was an excellent bureaucrat, but though it might have been presumptuous for his kid to be saying this, he was a vile man. It was unbelievable he could be the brother of Shinji’s uncle, who radiated brilliance.) His mother couldn’t hold anything against his father, and so whether it was flower arrangement or a women’s group, she went from one hobby to another, lost in her own world. They had normal conversations. They did what was necessary. But they didn’t trust each other, and they didn’t help each other. Their mutual disgust accumulated as they grew older…. Well maybe that was what most parents were like.
Ever since Shinji Mimura became his school’s star basketball player, he got popular with the girls—so going out with them was easy. Kissing them was easy. Then after a while sleeping with them was easy too. But he never fell in love with anyone.
Regrettably Shinji had no opportunity to bring this up with his uncle who always had the right answer for everything. It only concerned him recently, and it was already two years since his uncle’s death.
The earring in Shinji’s left ear came from him. His uncle always had it with him. He told Shinji, “The woman I loved wore this. She died a long time ago though.” It was one of Shinji’s prized possessions. After his uncle’s death, he took it as a keepsake without anyone’s permission. He could hear his uncle saying, “You’ll end up becoming jaded at that rate. It’s not a bad thing to love someone and be loved by someone. Hurry up and find yourself a nice girl.”
But he still never found someone he could really fall for.
He remembered how his precocious sister, Ikumi, who was three years younger than him, asked, “Do you want a romantic marriage or an arranged marriage?” and how he’d answered, “I may end up not getting married at all.”