If her object was to have me read the finished book, then it had to have been written for one reader alone – me. There was a message in it for me. Her goal would be accomplished at the point I received the book and read it. Hence it didn’t matter what happened next.
Ah yes, I’m well aware this is no more than wild conjecture on my part.
After all, the truth is nothing more than a subject seen from a certain perspective. I understand that.
But she’s the kind of person who will stop at nothing once she’s decided on a course of action.
I have no doubt she’s already achieved her objective.
3
THE EMISSARY FROM A DEEP, FAR COUNTRY
An excerpt from The Forgotten Festival by Makiko Saiga, published eleven years after the murders
For the longest time the young girl did not know what to call the crepe myrtle tree, because although she had seen the name written down, she could not pronounce it. But as she grew older and her attention became focused away from the earth, the flowers of this tree, which bloomed between seasons, came to mean no more to her than a pattern vividly inscribed on the fringes of her world.
All human beings are alike at the beginning of their lives in that they live in close proximity to the earth and propel themselves on hands and knees along the ground until mobile enough to stand up and be liberated from the dirt, thus becoming more distant from it in the process. As they begin to become aware of objects at eye level and higher, so begins an estrangement from such novel delights closer to the ground as moss roses, dandelions, ants and rhinoceros beetles.
On this particular day, however, the girl’s attention was drawn by the profusion of red that enswathed the tree. The evenly coloured cloud of red blooms reminded her of the folded paper flowers draped around classroom blackboards to welcome new students on their very first day of primary school. The girl had helped make these by folding layers of pink tissue paper into accordion creases and slipping a rubber band over the centre to hold them in place before opening them out to form a flower. She had folded one after another, flinging each completed flower into a cardboard box, until this bored her and she had begun to play volleyball with the folded paper flowers, sending them lightly through the air before they dropped to the floor.
But these look more like paper balloons than paper flowers, she thought, as she gazed at the tree on this particular day. The blooms were the same colour as toy paper balloons that make a dry, rustling sound when picked up and give a satisfying pop when smacked against the palm.
That day the sky was leaden with dark clouds. They crawled across her vision, blocking the sun, which had not once made an appearance since she had risen that morning. The world appeared drained of colour, and the flowers less vivid than usual. The girl did not like this hot weather, especially the humidity, which made her feel vulnerable and oppressed by a sense of silent malice.
On summer mornings, the air hung heavy.
The temperature remained constant overnight as the machinery of the city continued to function ceaselessly, generating even more heat to add to the already high humidity. The city was like an unventilated factory, and the shrill keening of cicadas that switched on early in the morning like the buzz of idling engines assaulted the girl’s ears as she walked to the park for her early-morning exercises.
The uncomfortable heat constantly generated by this relentless factory sucked moisture from its workers until they were ready to drop with fatigue. As the end of the summer holidays drew near, however, the arrival of a low-pressure system heralding the approach of the typhoon season promised a respite from the heat.
An augury of rain was not the only thing out of the ordinary that day. The young girl was aware of the excitement in the air, unique to a special occasion, which had begun to pervade her neighbourhood early that morning. The air of anticipation that hung over the streets infected everybody, and the grown-ups, instead of keeping to themselves indoors, as normal, were outside rushing to and fro energetically, with more lightness of heart than usual.
Something’s happening at the house with the porthole windows, the girl thought as she stared out at the garden from the dark interior of her home. She should have been finishing her summer holiday homework, but did not feel inclined to do anything as only her least favourite subjects remained. The situation was not yet urgent, but she did not have time to waste. It was the same every summer; there was always a period when the days slipped idly by before she was prompted to exert herself for the final spurt to finish her homework on time.
The girl shared a room with the younger of her two older brothers, who was three years her senior. Their room fronted on to the eastern side of a courtyard garden, roughly three square yards in size. Directly outside the room an old fig tree thick with amoeba-shaped leaves cast a spooky silhouette when evening fell. One night, not long after they had moved to this house, the girl had been frightened to tears by her brother suddenly raising his voice to yell melodramatically, “Look! Something’s moving under that tree!” It was a very old tree and produced a great deal of fruit, which attracted flocks of birds when it ripened.
Even without the tree, however, the old wooden house that her father’s company had rented for them was a gloomy place. There was a mark in a corner of her bedroom ceiling that looked to the girl like a face, and made her feel so uneasy that she could not bear to sleep there alone whenever her brother was away at school camp or elsewhere. She was not a particularly nervous child, but she was unusually imaginative. All the dark shadowy corners in the corridors, stairs and cupboards, and even the patterned paper covering the grime on the screen doors and door shutter box appeared sinister in her eyes and sowed the seeds of occasional nightmares.
Which is why the girl suspected she had had a visitation of another one of her nightmares. She had returned from early-morning exercises in the park, exhausted by the oppressive humidity of an approaching low front. She ate a hurried breakfast then went upstairs and flopped onto the lower bunk, where for some time she hovered in the borderland between reality and dreams. Though her body was all but asleep, one corner of her mind remained vigilant and alert.
Then, all of a sudden, she became aware of some kind of presence. A shiver of fear ran through her. What could it be? she thought. Naturally, the fig tree in the courtyard was the first thing to spring to mind. Two sliding doors separated the bedroom from the garden, each with four glass panes fitted in wooden frames, the lower two of which were frosted glass. All that could be seen through the panes was a blurred outline that cast indistinct shadows.
Someone’s there, outside the glass door… No, not someone – something!
The girl was convinced of it. Tension slowly built as an internal struggle between drowsiness and fear played out. The fear won. She froze, paralysed in fright by whatever it was that she truly believed was out there. What was it? She wanted to see, knew she should see, but at the same time was desperately afraid of seeing.
Suddenly, her neck moved, but not of her own volition; something had made it move. Now she was able to look up and see the glass door as she lay on her bed.
On the other side of the frosted glass she saw a white shadow.
What on earth could it be? A cat, perhaps?
More than anything, however, it looked like a large, white cocoon.
A white cocoon?
The garden could be entered without passing through the front entrance, as the girl knew, because she had sometimes seen neighbourhood cats stroll along the top of the breeze-block fence and slip inside. But this cocoon-like object was too big for a cat; and besides, it moved in the upper reaches of her vision rather than along the ground.