Pain, Pain, Go Away is a novel by Sugaru Miaki, also known as Fafoo, author of Starting Over and Three Days of Happiness.
Unlike Miaki’s previous two books, Pain, Pain, Go Away is not a rewrite of any story posted to 2ch, but an entirely original one. The plot involves a young man who becomes a killer - but his victim has the power of “postponement,” temporarily delaying her death.
I encourage you to buy the book yourself to support the author. (Amazon.co.jp) (Kinokuniya)
This time, I’ve also made a PDF version of my translation. You can read it here. (The PDF is for the entire book.)
Part 1 is here. Part 4 is the last part, with Chapters 8 through 10. Enjoy!
The violence isn’t quite as extreme this time, but Chapter 9 has more descriptions of abuse than all the others, so be aware of that.
——
Chapter 8: Her Revenge
To get straight to the point, we proceeded to take the lives of seventeen people all told, including the first three.
The fourth victim was the girl’s former homeroom teacher. After killing the man who, now in his sixties, had been battling with stomach cancer, she stated “Let’s take this as far as we can go.”
And so she added on thirteen more people she had deep grudges against who weren’t part of the original plan.
As far as relationships, the breakdown went like this: seven were middle-school acquaintances, four were high-school acquaintances, two were teachers, and there were four “other”s.
The gender statistics: eleven women, six men. How they were killed: eight died immediately, four ran, two tried to talk it out, three resisted. Those were the final results.
Not everything went exactly to plan. In fact, we failed many, many times. In getting to the seventeenth murder, our targets ran five times, the police arrested us four times, and we suffered major wounds twice.
However, the girl “nullified” it all from happening. No, we didn’t play fair at all. We abandoned all responsibility and had everything our way.
It may seem like I’m just laying out numbers here. But if you talked to me right after I’d finished helping with the seventeenth murder, that’s just how I’d describe it. By about the fourth or fifth, each of the victims were just numbers to me.
That’s not to say none of the victims left any impression on me. Still, it wasn’t who was being killed that was important to me, but the girl’s every action in carrying it out.
The more deeply-rooted her anger, the more blood that spilled, the greater her reluctance, the most radiant her revenge was. That beauty alone didn’t grow stale no matter how many times I saw it.
Once the eleventh victim was made deceased, the supposed time limit on the accident’s postponement, the ten days, had already passed.
And on the fifteenth day, when all seventeen were dead, the effect seemed to somehow hang on.
Even the girl found it odd. I considered that while continuing her revenge, a strong desire to not die just yet arose that prolonged the postponement.
After completing the seventeenth murder amid a thicket red with maple trees, the girl took my hands and we spun around in the falling leaves, like dolls in a mechanical clock.
When I saw her innocent smile, I felt like I finally understood the greatness of having accomplishing something.
And when the postponement came to an end, that smile would be lost forever.
I thought it such a horrible loss, as horrible as the world losing one of its colors.
I’d done something there was no taking back.
By this time, I could feel such a pain in my chest at last.
Once the girl was done expressing her endless joy, she came back to her senses and let go of my hands awkwardly.
"You’re just the only one I have to share my happiness with, you see…", she insisted.
"I feel lucky for that," I replied. "That makes seventeen, right?"
"Yes. All that’s left is you."
Dry leaves piled on the seventeenth corpse. The tall, large-nosed woman who had minutes ago been breathing was one of those who had joined the girl’s sister in abusing her.
We’d tailed her on her way home from work and spoken to her once she was alone. She appeared to not remember the girl she had once tormented, but the moment she pulled out the scissors, the woman sensed danger and fled.
At first, this led me to think she might be troublesome to deal with, but that she chose to escape into a thicket was nothing short of idiotic. We could easily focus on her murder without worry of being seen.
One thing that disappointed me was how the girl, quickly becoming practiced in murder, came to no longer bathe in bloodspray or meet significant resistance.
While her swift movements and her pinpoint accuracy with the scissors were beautiful, it was a little sad no longer seeing her get bloody and weary.
"Once I’m out of targets to take revenge on, I doubt I’ll have a very strong will to keep my postponement going," the girl remarked. "In essence, your death will mean mine."
"When are you doing it?"
"I’d better not delay it too long. …I’ll have revenge on you tomorrow. That will put an end to it all."
"I see."
I squinted my eyes as the sunlight came from the west through the trees. The whole thicket was a shade of red that felt like the end of the world.
And indeed, for the girl, the end of the world was nearing.
It was our final dinner together. I suggested having a meal at a fancy restaurant suitable for a day of celebration, but she promptly denied.
"I hate formal places, and I don’t know anything about manners," explained the girl. "I don’t want to be so nervous for our last meal that I can’t taste the food."
She was exactly right. So in the end, we ordered steak at our usual family restaurant and toasted with soft-drink-like wine.
Perhaps because of her mature expression, as long as she wore the right clothes, one could easily see her as a college student, so the waiter didn’t say anything about her being old enough to drink.
While picking at a montblanc at dessert, the girl informed me “I’ve never eaten a montblanc before now.”
"Your thoughts?"
She made a grim face. “I didn’t want to learn this late in the game that there was something so delicious in the world.”
"I know how you feel. I wish I didn’t learn so late how fun it was to eat with a girl I like."
She gently kicked my shin as if to rebuke me. But I knew from my fifteen days of experience that she wasn’t angry, she just came to seek awkward contact when she was drunk.
"Well, lucky you, you’ll be able to forget once my postponement ends."
"I didn’t say I wanted to forget. Just wanted to know sooner."
"And that’s what you get for driving drunk. You idiot."
"Right you are," I nodded.
Looking displeased, the girl put her elbows on the table and pointlessly swirled her wine glass.
"The fun of buying clothes, the fun of getting my hair cut, the fun of going to an amusement center, the fun of drinking, the fun of playing piano all day - I never wanted to know any of it."
"Right, keep on getting angrier at me. That grudge is what you’re going to kill me with tomorrow."
"…Don’t worry. I will carry out my revenge." She took a swig of wine and slowly gulped it down. "Sweet talk all you like, you’re the one who ended my life. None of the things you’ve done for me will cover that up."
"Fine by me."
The time for worrying had passed days ago. Now I was just looking forward to the moment she stabbed me with her scissors.
It was sad to imagine being stabbed by the person I loved, but it wasn’t so bad considering that regardless of why, I would temporarily be the only thing on her mind.
The reason I was content with being killed wasn’t because I saw it as atonement for killing her, nor did I want to take responsibility for my assistance in many murders.
I just wanted her to successfully take revenge on as many people as she could, and offered myself to be the last.
And, strictly speaking, I wouldn’t die. I’d only temporarily die for the duration of the postponement’s effect.
In the main timeline - not quite an accurate description either, but being commonly used in movies and books, it stuck with me - the girl was already dead, so no “cat” or its “claws” existed to kill me.
As long as that other me didn’t commit suicide, I would get to keep living.
However, the one who would keep living was one who would never know the girl while she still lived.
That was my punishment for one accidental death and assisting in seventeen intentional ones, I insolently supposed.
"I just have one question…"
"Yes?", she replied, slightly tilting her head.
"If our meeting hadn’t been the way it was, what do you think would have happened?"
"…Who knows. It’s pointless to consider."
I couldn’t stop myself from imagining, though. What if I hadn’t run her over?
I rewinded back to that night. After buying beer at the supermarket, drinking it, and starting to drive, a slip of the wheel would drive me into the gutter, and I wouldn’t be able to get the car out.
I didn’t have my cellphone either, so I would just have to wait in the rain for a friendly helper to drive by.
Then the girl would appear. Why was a high schooler walking around at this hour, way out here, without an umbrella, all by herself?
Though finding it strange, I would ask her, “Hey, can I borrow your cellphone? My car’s stuck, as you can see.” She’d shake her head; “I don’t have a cellphone.” “Oh, too bad… Say, aren’t you cold?” “I am.” “Do you want to warm up in my car?” “No. That’s very suspicious.” “Personally, I think you’re pretty suspicious, walking around on an empty road in the dead of night without an umbrella. Don’t worry, I won’t do anything weird. Suspicious persons like us should get along, right?” The girl would hesitate, then wordlessly get in the passenger’s seat, and we’d both sleep.
We’d wake up to the morning sunlight. A truck would be honking its horn. It would tow the car out of the ditch. We’d thank the truck driver.
"Now, I should get you home. Or would school be better?" "I won’t be able to make it now. Because of you." "I see. I guess I did a bad thing." "Since I’ve given up on school now, please just drive around at random." "A joyride, you say?" "Please just drive around at random."
After joyriding around rural roads all day, I’d part with the girl. What a strange day, I’d chuckle.
A few days later, she and I would happen to meet again. I’d stop the car, and she’d wordlessly get in instead of going to school.
"Well, how should we waste today?" "Please just drive around at random, mister kidnapper." "Kidnapper?" "Stranger, then." "Nah, I think kidnapper is better." "Isn’t it?"
Then we’d come to meet almost weekly. Having found a wonderful means of recreation, we’d help each other rehabilitate from our ills.
Years would pass, and the girl would push through high school to graduation, and I’d be reintegrated into society and work part-time jobs.
Even then, we’d go driving every Friday night. “You’re late, mister kidnapper.” “Sorry about that. Let’s go.”
What an absurd, ideal relationship. But even if we had met in such a way, while I could have possibly gotten close with her, I certainly wouldn’t fall in love.
By going along with her revenge, I felt I came to deeply understand her. That could have been a biased impression, however.
That night, I woke up from a pressure on my lower stomach. Someone was straddling over me. My five senses, sleepy and dulled, came back one at a time.
First was hearing. I heard rain falling on the roof. Next was touch. I felt hardness with my back and the back of my head; I’d slipped off the sofa and was sleeping on the floor.
Then, something sharp was thrust at my neck. I didn’t even have to think to realize that it was the girl’s dressmaking scissors.
When she said “tomorrow,” she had apparently meant the moment the date changed over.
My eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. The girl was not in her evening wear, but had changed into her usual uniform.
As soon as I realized that, I felt the reality that yes, this was the end.
I felt everything was going back to normal.
"Are you awake?", the girl asked weakly.
"Yeah," I responded.
I didn’t close my eyes. I wanted to see how she carried out her revenge to my very last.
I couldn’t make out her expression in the dark. But her breathing and her tone told me she probably wasn’t trembling with delight, nor was her face contorted with rage.
"I’m going to ask you some questions," she told me. "As a last confirmation."
A sudden wind blew, shaking the whole apartment.
She asked her first question.
"You assisted me over these fifteen days to atone for your actions. Is that right?"
"More or less," I answered. "Though by doing that, I just added to my crimes."
"You claimed you fell in love with the sight of me taking revenge. Is that true?"
"It is. I doubt I can make you believe it, but…"
"I’m not looking for anything but "yes" or "no,"" she interrupted. "You want me to kill you because, in accordance with your objective of atoning, you want me to get revenge on as many people as I can. Correct?"
"Right." Strictly speaking, I didn’t want to die, but if those were my only two options, then it was closer to a yes.
"I see." She seemed to accept my answers.
I mistakenly believed that these questions she was asking me were to assure herself that I actually sought the conclusion we were about to arrive at, justifying her murder.
I thought that the more I said “yes,” the more it would push her to commence with her revenge.
The questioning came to an end. My heart raced; it was happening.
My mind was clear, and the attunement of my senses rapidly escalated. I even felt the slight trembling of the girl’s emotions via the end of her scissors. Slowly but surely, that hesitation went away.
I could tell her conviction was building. The scissor point advanced, albeit only millimeters. The stimulus to my pain receptors brought my attentiveness to its maximum.
The fear of death and the anticipation of beauty melted together like a drug filling my brain, causing a flood, wrapping me in an aimless ecstasy that made me want to shout.
My body shivered to the core. That’s it, pierce it right through, I cheered. Put an end to all of it with those scissors. Deal the finishing blow to this walking corpse who’d deserved death for twenty-two years.
It was unfortunate that I couldn’t see her expression in the dark. Would she be joyful as blood spewed out my neck into her face? Or angry? Or sad? Or hollow? Or perhaps she’d be completely lacking in -
"I can certainly understand your thinking," the girl said.
"That’s why I won’t kill you. I refuse killing you."
She took the scissors away from my neck.
I didn’t understand what was happening.
"Hey, what’s this? Are you really losing your nerve now?", I asked provocatively. But the girl heeded it not, and threw the scissors onto the bed.
"It doesn’t exactly constitute revenge if I kill someone so desperate to be killed, does it?", she supposed, still sitting over me. "I won’t grant your one and greatest wish. …That is my revenge."
By then, I realized what she meant by “last confirmation.”
She wasn’t trying to ascertain whether her murder would be justified, but how meaningless it would be to murder me.
"…So if this fulfills your revenge," I thought, "why hasn’t your postponement ended?"
"It simply hasn’t sunk in yet. No need to worry; I will die. It shouldn’t be long before the remnants of my will burn out."
The girl stood up drearily, straightened her blazer’s sleeves and the creases on her skirt, and walked away from me toward the front door.
I wanted to get up and chase after her, but my legs wouldn’t move. I could only lie on the floor and watch her go.
As the girl reached the door, she remembered something and came to a stop. She turned around and walked back.
"There is one thing I need to thank you for," she nearly whispered. "Despite all the wounds on my body, you called me "beautiful." I don’t know how serious you were, but… it still made me very happy."
She got on her knees next to me and covered my eyes with her hand. With the other hand, she held my chin.
Her soft hair brushed on my neck. As if giving me mouth-to-mouth, her lips gently encompassed mine.
I don’t know how long the moment lasted.
Our lips parted, and she took away her blindfolding arm and left the room.
Instead of a goodbye, she parted with “I’m sorry.”
For the first time in ten days, I lied down on an empty bed and closed my eyes.
Fumbling around, I grabbed the scissors the girl threw aside. I put the point under my chin and breathed steadily.
I didn’t need to look into any proper method. I knew what to stab and how, I knew how long it would then take to die - after she’d showed me ad nauseam, I knew.
My beating pulse felt the blade. My mind was calmed by that fixed rhythm. I suddenly recalled hearing that when people died, their hearing remained to the very end. The other senses would die off, but hearing would hold on until just before death.
If I stabbed my own artery now, my senses would fade, and I’d die hearing nothing but the sound of raindrops.
I temporarily put down the scissors and reached for the CD player. I wanted to at least decide the sound that accompanied the end of my life.
Putting on an unfittingly noisy song seemed more suitable for my death than a sad song that lamented it.
I put The Libertines’ Can’t Stand Me Now on full blast, then threw myself on the bed again and grabbed the scissors.
Alas, I listened to three songs just sitting there. I hadn’t expected myself to start enjoying the music.
Come on, get a hold of yourself. You’re going to go through the whole album at this rate. And then what? “Next album?”
Fine, the next song. Once the next song is over, I’ll do away with this ridiculous life of mine.
But as the fourth song was seconds from ending, there was a knock on the front door.
Ignoring it to focus on the music, I heard it being busted open. I hid the scissors under the pillow and turned on the light.
The art student, entering without permission, hit stop on the CD player.
"You’re a neighborhood nuisance."
"Just different tastes," I joked. "So did you bring a CD to replace mine with?"
The art student looked around the room and asked, “Where’s that girl?”
"She left. Just a while ago."
"In the rain?"
"Yeah. I exhausted her good graces."
"Huh. That’s a shame."
She took out a cigarette and lit it, offering me one as well. I took it and put it in my mouth, and she lit it for me.
It had an order of magnitude more tar than I was used to, almost like the ones Shindo used to smoke, so I nearly started to choke. Her lungs must have been pitch black.
"Where’s the ashtray?", she asked.
"The empty can." I pointed to the table.
After finishing her first cigarette, she started on another without a moment’s delay.
She must come here with something to say, I supposed. Being upset about the noise was just an excuse.
I think she’d told me that once. That she was horribly bad at saying what she really thought.
So she was probably in deep thought now, because she wanted to say something important to me.
Upon finishing three cigarettes, she finally spoke.
"If I were a good friend of yours, I’d probably say you should go after her right now. "Or else you’ll regret it your whole life," or something. But since I’m such a sly and clever woman, I won’t say that."
"Why not?"
"Hmm. Why not, indeed?"
Without any connecting logic, she said over her cigarette, “Winter’s coming soon.”
"You know, I was born in the south. Even when it snowed there, it was rare that it ever stayed to the next day. So I was astonished when winter first came for me here. Once the snow piles up, you don’t see the ground again until spring. And thanks to this image of snow as this light and fluffy pure-white stuff, the heaviness of snow piles, the dread of walking on icy roads, how snow looks like volcanic rock when it’s exposed to exhaust fumes, and so on… it was a little disappointing."
I didn’t find myself thinking “what is she going on about now?”
This was just the awkward girl’s best way of expressing herself.
"But even so, when it snows a lot at night, and a plow wakes me up in the morning, and I open my fogged-up window to look at the street, it’s a sight to see every time. Like the world got a fresh coat of white. And on the other hand, when I get back home at night shivering, it’s also great to have a warm cup of sugar-loaded coffee."
She paused there.
"…That’s all I’ll say. If you still want to go see that reaper, I won’t stop you."
"Right. Thank you."
"Seriously, between you and Shindo, why do all the guys I get friendly with go away so quick?"
"I guess only people who start thinking about dying understand your charm."
"That doesn’t make me very happy," she laughed with confliction. "Hey, I’ve always wanted to ask. Did you never so much as hold my hand because you just didn’t have any interest in me? Or was that out of courtesy to dear departed Shindo?"
"I wonder. I don’t really know myself. Maybe I resigned myself to never beating him from the start."
"…Thanks, that’s an answer that does make me happy. I think I feel a little better."
She held out her left hand. Probably not her right because she was wary of my injury.
"Will you at least give me a handshake this last time?"
"Sure, gladly." I held out my left hand. "Goodbye, uh…"
"Saegusa," she told me, grabbing it. "Shiori Saegusa. First time properly using my name, eh, Mizuho Yugami? I like those kinds of non-committal relationships."
"Thanks for everything, miss Saegusa. I found our relationship pretty comfortable, too."
She readily let go of my hand. I didn’t want to prolong it either, and turned my back to her.
I buttoned up my coat, tied my boots tight, and opened the door holding an umbrella.
"I’ll be lonely with you gone," I heard miss Saegusa remark from behind me.
The traditional tactic would be to go around to places where I thought the girl might have gone.
But there was no need. I happened to know where she was headed. She’d left me a few clues.
I thought about them in the order they occurred to me.
The first clue, I found when I bought tickets to get on the train. My wallet had been tampered with; the cards were arranged differently. I didn’t even need to ponder whether it was the girl’s doing.
My first thought was that she’d taken just enough money from me to spend during her remaining time. But checking carefully, I found not a single yen missing, and my ATM and credit cards were untouched.
After considering several possibilities, I decided on this: she was looking for something I possessed, and checked my wallet because it was likely to be there.
The second clue was the “I’m sorry” she left me with. An apology directed at the person who killed her.
What was that an apology for? She’d clearly explained the “thank you” just before it: “Despite all the wounds on my body, you called me “beautiful.” I don’t know how serious you were, but… it still made me very happy.”
But no explanation for the “sorry.” There was no way she just didn’t think it was worth explaining. After all, I was racking my brain trying to figure it out.
Maybe she had a reason for not explaining it, yet at least wanted her feelings to be known before she went. So it probably didn’t just stop at “I’m sorry.”
The third clue was back four days ago. While the girl was showering, I thought I’d continue writing my “unsent letter” to Kiriko, so I opened the headboard cupboard, but the partially-written letter was gone.
I didn’t pay it much mind then, but - having no doubt in my mind the girl had read it - why didn’t she put it back where it was?
In my room, so utterly bare as to lose the feeling of being “orderly,” losing something was simply impossible. And yet I never saw that stationery since.
Unless she meant to tease me and hid it in a CD case or between books, or threw it in the trash, only one possibility remained: She still had the letter.
After thinking this far, I looked back on all the days since meeting her. It was a simple puzzle.
My memories were distorted.
Why did she hate her surname of “Akazuki”? Why were her “classmates” a mix of high schoolers and college students?
And as I’d wondered from the start, why was she walking alone without an umbrella in that desolate place the day I ran her over?
But really, why had I taken so long to notice something so simple?
Some of the clues, whether consciously or not, were left behind by the girl’s own hand.
She should have been able to hide it if she wanted to, but she left evidence of having gone through my wallet. She said “I’m sorry” as she left.
She’d left just one string leading to the truth.
If miss Saegusa hadn’t knocked on the door then, I would have plunged the scissors into my throat without ever knowing. I needed to thank her. In fact, she’d helped me time and time again.
But I didn’t regret how we ended up parting. That anticlimactic end was a perfect fit for our relationship, I’m sure.
Having no car, I took one train and three buses to my destination.
The third bus got stuck in traffic on the way. There’d been an accident in the rain, and I saw fire trucks and police cars going down the opposite lane.
I told the driver I was in a hurry, paid the fare, got off there, and walked alongside the row of congested cars.
At the bottom of a low slope, there was a flooded area spanning several hundred meters, and the water went up to my knees at its deepest part.
At this point, long socks wouldn’t be any help. My tightly-laced boots filled with water regardless. My wet clothes stole away my body heat.
The cold and the atmosphere made my wounded pinky begin to ache. And thanks to the side wind, the umbrella was little more than a consolation.
Soon a strong wind came, and as I grabbed the handle of the umbrella tightly, its skeleton broke to pieces.
Now rendered useless, I tossed it to the side of the road and walked through the rain so severe that I could barely keep my eyes open.
After walking about twenty minutes, I finally escaped the flooded area. Emergency vehicles surrounded an overturned mid-sized truck and a highly-damaged station wagon.
Every turn of the sirens illuminated the raindrops and the wet ground, turning the whole area red. Car horns echoed from the direction of the traffic jam.
As I turned the corner, a high schooler riding a bicycle holding an umbrella in one hand nearly ran me over. He noticed me just in time and hit the brakes, then the tires slipped, making him and the bike fall over.
I asked if he was okay, but he ignored me and pedaled away. After turning to watch him go, I went back to walking.
I knew exactly how much longer I’d need to walk to reach the girl.
Because this was the town where I was born.
The whole park was flooded, glittering from the morning sunlight peeking between the clouds. I could see just a single small wooden bench, appearing to float on the water.
The girl was sitting there. Naturally, she was soaked. She was wearing the knit nylon jacket I loaned her on top of her uniform. A broken umbrella leaned against the back of the bench.
I trudged through the puddles to approach her from behind and covered her eyes with my hands.
"Who is it?", I asked.
"…Don’t treat me like a child."
She grabbed my hands and pulled them down to around her solar plexus. I fell forward and assumed the stance of hugging her from behind.
She let go after a few seconds, but I was fond of the position and kept it.
"This brings back memories," I told her. "On the day of the accident, I sat in the bench you’re sitting in now all day, pelted by the rain. I was trying to rendezvous with someone. …No, that’s not the right way to put it. I was just one-sidedly waiting for Kiriko to come."
"What are you talking about?"
I knew she was playing dumb. So I just kept talking.
"In sixth grade, because of my dad’s job, I had to change schools. On my last day at my old school, I was about to head home feeling all lonely when a girl talked to me. She was Kiriko Hizumi. Though we’d almost never talked before, as we were about to part, she told me she wanted us to be penpals. I suppose anyone would have done the job for her; she just needed someone far away to send letters to. And I’d merely found her request hard to turn down - at first, I wasn’t actually that into the idea.
"…But as we went on writing each other, I realized our thoughts were almost frighteningly similar. We found agreement in everything we talked about. She’d understand feelings which I thought impossible to convey to anyone, in exactly the way I intended them to be understood. It didn’t take long before our correspondence, started so unassumingly, became something for me to live for."
Her body was cold. Because she’d been waiting in the rain for me, for who knows how many hours. Her face was pale, and her breathing quivered.
"One day, five years into our correspondence, Kiriko wrote that she wanted us to meet and talk in person. I was glad. She wanted to know more about me, and wanted me to know more about her. That fact, at least, really filled me with joy."
"…But you didn’t go to meet her," she said. "Isn’t that right?"
"Exactly. There was no way I could go meet Kiriko. I don’t remember the exact time, but shortly after entering middle school, I started to lie in my letters. And not just one or two little white lies. My life was miserable then, not to mention insipid. I didn’t want to write things just as they were and disappoint Kiriko, or get her pity. So I faked having a perfectly healthy and fulfilling life. If I hadn’t, I thought our correspondence would have quickly ended."
As I explained this, I began to ask myself if this would have really been the case. Would writing letters about my lonely life at a middle school where I just couldn’t fit in really be reason to stop being penpals?
I would never know now.
"But that desperate effort came to be my downfall. The girl who I trusted most in the whole world told me she wanted to meet in person, and yet if I responded to her plea, all of the lies I’d told her would go to ruin. I knew Kiriko would hate me if she knew what kind of person I was underneath my cover of lies. She’d scorn me the moment she found out I’d written falsehoods to her all those years. So regretfully, I gave up on meeting Kiriko. I never replied to her letters again, either. I didn’t know what to write. That’s how our relationship ended. …Of course, giving up on a five-year habit was hard. Refusing to let go, I still wrote letters to console myself, with no intention of mailing them. I slowly piled up letters that no one would read."
I took my arms off from around her and went around the bench to sit next to her.
She took something out of her bag and handed it to me. “I’ll give this back.”
It was the unsent letter I wrote to Kiriko. So she did have it.
"From what I’ve heard thus far," she mused, "your story about sitting on this bench the day of the accident, waiting for miss Kiriko, doesn’t sound logical."
"My friend’s death is what set things off. We knew each other since high school. He was a guy I could trust, so I ended up telling him about how I’d lied and lied to my penpal, then stopped replying to her when I was about to be found out. Then about a month before he died, he told me, "You should go meet Kiriko Hizumi." He had no doubt it’d be a positive thing for my life. And it was rare for him to suggest something to me like that."
Yes, Shindo always hated giving people advice or listening to their troubles. Similarly, he hated being given advice or asking others to listen to his troubles.
He hated the tendency of favorably accepting anything as long as it was done in good will, even if it lacked prudence or judgement. That was taking a huge amount of responsibility, and so long as he lacked the confidence that he could handle the issue, he felt he shouldn’t say a word about other people’s lives - that was Shindo’s view.
So for him to give me some real advice worth calling advice, he must have been pretty serious about it, by his standards.
"So I decided I’d send a letter for the first time in five years. I wrote that if she was willing to forgive me, she should come meet me in the park near the elementary school we used to go to."
I raised one of my legs to cross them, which caused a ripple in the puddle, making the blue sky shimmer at our feet.
The desolate tree branches and sky as cloudless as if it’d given up on everything made me feel that winter was approaching fast.
"I waited all day, but Kiriko never came to the park. It wasn’t unreasonable. I’d completely ignored the letters she kept sending after I stopped replying; suddenly saying "I want to apologize" only after my friend died was really pushing my luck. I knew she must not have needed me anymore, which made me miserable. So I escaped into alcohol. I bought whiskey from the store on my way back from the park, and just started driving right after drinking it. And then, I ran you over."
I took out a cigarette and my lighter from my pocket. The oil lighter lit without issue, but the wet cigarette had a terribly bitter taste.
"I see. I more or less understand it now," the girl said.
"That’s it for my story. Now it’s your turn."
She put her hands on her knees and stared deep in thought at the peeled bench seat.
"…Say, Mizuho." She used my name. "Do you know why miss Kiriko didn’t come to this park on the day of the accident?"
"That’s what I came to ask," I replied.
"What I think," she prefaced cautiously, "is that miss Kiriko did set out for the appointed place. However, it took her considerable time to work up the resolve to do so. This time, it was she who had a reason she couldn’t go meet you. Indeed, she couldn’t look you in the face. On the other hand, learning that after five years of silence, the person who she thought had long forgotten about her still wanted to see her, she must have been happy enough to cry. After weighing her options at length, miss Kiriko decided she would go meet mister Mizuho."
She seemed to be speaking in as indifferent a tone as she could manage. Like she was denying her words the chance to show emotion.
"However, her decision came a bit too late. She fled the house, still in her school uniform, past 7 PM on the promised day. On top of that, it was raining terribly, so the buses and trains weren’t properly functioning. Ultimately, it was around midnight that she reached her destination. Naturally, there was no one in the park. She sat on the bench, struck by the rain, and lamented her own foolishness. She finally understood just how much she had hoped to reunite with mister Mizuho. Why was she always making these mistakes? Why did she worry about useless things and neglect what was most important? Miss Kiriko, in a state of stupefaction, began to trudge back the way she had come."
And I knew better than anyone what happened to Kiriko after that.
She and I had reunited in the worst possible way anyone could imagine.
What’s more, neither of us had even realized it.
"There’s one thing I don’t get," I pondered. "What did you mean by "you couldn’t look me in the face?""
"…This isn’t the appropriate place to explain that."
Kiriko put her hands on her knees and stood up laboriously. I did the same.
"Let’s go back to the apartment for now. We’ll take warm showers, put on dry clothes, eat tasty food, get some good sleep, and then go somewhere appropriate for talking about the truth."
"All right."
Kiriko and I barely talked on the way back.
We held each other’s cold hands, and I walked slowly to match her pace.
There should have been so much to talk about, but upon actually reuniting, it seemed as if words weren’t necessary. The all-understanding silence was comforting, and no one wanted to speed it up with excessive words.
After napping together for a few hours on the bed in the apartment, we took the rickety shuttle bus from the station to the “appropriate place,” arriving as the sun was beginning to set.
It was an amusement park on top of a mountain. After buying tickets and passing through an entryway with a jacket-wearing rabbit doll, we were met with a faded fantasy spectacle.
Behind the stands and ticket booths, a merry-go-round, and a revolving swing, I could see such attractions as a giant Ferris wheel, a pendulum ride, and a roller coaster.
There was noise from the attractions all around me, and shrill voices yelling. Large speakers around the park played infinitely cheery big band music, and I heard the sound of an old photoplayer among the attractions.
Despite what a rainy day it was, there were huge crowds. It was about half-and-half between families and couples.
Kiriko looked at it all nostalgically, holding me by the hand.
I, too, walked through the amusement park I’d surely never visited before with a sense of familiarity. Perhaps I have been here, I felt.
She came to a stop in front of the Ferris wheel.
After buying only the tickets we needed from an automated machine, we got onto the gondola.
As we looked down on the park, one of the lights shining in the darkness went out. I think it was a lamp near the fountain.
That was only the beginning; though it was certainly not yet closing time, lights continued dropping off one by one.
The park was disappearing. And at the same time, I felt something I’d lost inside me slowly returning.
The magic’s fading, I realized.
The postponement of the accident was ending, and at the same time death came to Kiriko, everything she had postponed was going back to normal.
Nearly all the lights were gone. The once-flourishing amusement park was now an inky black sea.
When the gondola reached the top of the wheel, my memories returned.
Chapter 9: Let There Be Love
My sister, with the pretext of having “ignored her” for not making eye contact when we passed in the hallway, dragged me by the hair to my room, opened the door, and shoved me in.
Enduring the pain in my elbow after being severely thrown into the hard floor, I looked up and saw the delinquents my sister brought along, joyfully shouting vulgar things at me.
The room had a sour smell, like a dump full of beer bottles and empty cans. I tried to run, but as I turned my heel, a droopy-eyed man missing front teeth kicked my shin, and I fell flat. They cackled.
Then began the usual festivities. I was to be their toy.
One filled a glass with whiskey to the brim and told me to drink it down straight. Naturally, I had no right to refuse, so I reluctantly reached for the glass.
Then a woman wearing so much perfume as to smell like a bug-infested plant proclaimed that time was up and winked at a man beside her. The man held my arms behind my back and forced my mouth open. The woman poured the whiskey in.
I knew from prior experience that if I stubbornly refused to drink this, a worse punishment would await. So I gave in, and gulped down the whiskey in my mouth.
I desperately tried to keep from howling from the burning sensation in my throat and the peculiar smell like mixing medicine, barrels, and wheat. The crowd jeered.
Somehow, I drank the entirety of the glass. Within ten seconds, I felt severe nausea. Everything from my throat to my stomach burned, and my senses were muddled and spun, as if someone was grabbing hold of my head and shaking.
I was one step from acute alcohol poisoning. I heard an ominous noise nearby. “Okay, time for a second!” The woman pushed the glass in front of my face.
I already lacked the energy to run, and the hands binding me wouldn’t be shaken off no matter how much I resisted. The whiskey was poured in, and I began coughing horribly in the midst of it.
"Disgusting," the man holding me said, releasing my arms and pushing me away. Having lost my sense of balance, I felt like I’d fly up to the ceiling and stick to it, but in reality only fell flat on the floor.
I crawled toward the door desperate to somehow escape, but someone grabbed my ankle and pulled me back.
My sister squatted next to me and said, “If you can last an hour without throwing up, I’ll let you go.” I was about to shake my head, knowing there was no possible way, but before I could, she punched me in the stomach. She hadn’t even intended to give me the chance.
I found myself puking up on the spot, and the crowd cheered.
A short and stout woman announced that I would be punished for losing the game, took out a taser, and turned it on.
The firecracker-like sparking sound made me cower. I knew the amount of pain it could induce far better than she did.
Immediately, she put the electrode to my neck, and a shriek that I couldn’t imagine was my own came out my throat.
Finding it funny, she applied it in many other places, aiming for areas with thin skin. Again. And again. And again. And again.
As if to fill the gaps between the pains being inflicted upon me, the alcohol brought back more nausea. When I threw up again, the crowd booed, and I suffered a particularly long tasering for it.
And yet I didn’t feel any suffering. That kind of thing wasn’t enough to “undo.”
Familiarity is a scary thing; I had become able to make it through such agony.
I emptied my head to prepare for any kind of attack, and packed it full of music instead. While they berated me, I focused on exactly recreating music in my mind to dull my other senses.
I’ll go to the library tomorrow and stuff in lots more music, I decided.
The small, drab library that had been in the area for over three decades had little in the way of books, but was rich with music, and I almost daily listened to their selection in the listening corner.
At first, I enjoyed intense music that tried to blow my gloom away. But I soon found that the most effective thing for dealing with agony wasn’t excellent lyrics or a snug melody, but “pure beauty,” and so my tastes shifted toward calmer songs.
"Meaning" and "comfort" would eventually leave you behind. "Beauty" wouldn’t snuggle with you, but it would stay in the same place. Even if I didn’t understand at first, it would wait there patiently until I arrived.
Pain lays waste to positive feelings, but you can’t lose the feeling of regarding something beautiful as beautiful. In fact, pain just makes beauty more apparent. Anything for which this doesn’t hold true is just an imitation of true beauty.
Merely-fun music, merely-interesting books, merely-deep paintings - they couldn’t be relied upon in a pinch, so how valuable could they truly be?
As Pete Townshend said, “Rock and roll won’t solve your problems, but it’ll let you dance all over them.”
Indeed, my problems won’t be solved. That was the essence of my salvation. Any thought that had the prerequisite of solving all my problems, I didn’t believe. If there was nothing to be done about anything, then nothing would be done about everything.
Forget about such “relief” as the ugly duckling becoming a beautiful swan. As I thought, the ugly duckling would have to become happy remaining ugly.
How long did it take? It could have been minutes, it could have been hours.
Either way, when I came to, my sister and her friends were gone. I’d made it through their torment yet another day. I was victorious.
I stood up and went to the kitchen to gargle two cups of water, then went to the toilet to throw up again. I stood in front of the sink to brush my teeth.
I looked terrible in the mirror. My eyes were congested and red, yet my face was pale, and my shirt had stains of whiskey, puke, and blood.
I wondered when I’d bled and checked myself for injuries, yet found none. But as I started to brush, I realized I’d bitten my cheek while being attacked with the taser. My toothbrush was soaked red.
It was 4 AM. I took aspirin and stomach medicine from the shelves in the living room, changed into bedwear, and lied down on my bed.
No matter how much I was hurt, there was no changing that tomorrow would be an ordinary day of school. I had to get my body at least some rest.
I took the teddy bear from under my pillow and hugged it. Even I questioned such a method of consoling myself. It truly stunned me.
But I supposed it might just continue this way. While I’d long sought a soft embrace, I knew that there was no person who would provide it to me.
The public high school, having an isolated feeling from the thick trees around it, was not one I attended willingly.
I’d hoped to attend a local private school, but my mother insisted that women didn’t need extensive schooling, and my stepfather claimed that no high school I went to would change anything, refusing to let me take entrance exams anywhere but the public institution a single bus ride from home.
Whenever the starting bell rang, it was ignored, and voices continued chattering around the classroom. The classes didn’t test anything of worth, and by noon, a third of the students had left early.
There were hundreds of cigarette butts behind the gym, and about once a month, someone would get arrested or get pregnant and drop out; that was the sort of school it was.
But I told myself I had to be grateful I was going to high school at all. Some children don’t even get a proper middle school education.
Noon classes began. The room was so noisy I couldn’t make out anything the teacher was saying, so I started reading the textbook by myself when something hit me on my shoulder from behind.
A paper bag that still had a few things inside. A little bit of coffee flew out and stained my socks. There was laughter, but I didn’t even turn around.
During class, they wouldn’t do anything worse than this. If throwing a paper bag at me was all they’d do, I could ignore it and continue studying.
I suddenly looked up and made eye contact with the teacher. A young woman, in her late twenties. She must have seen the paper bag too, but she feigned ignorance.
But I didn’t blame her for it. I similarly wouldn’t do anything for her if she were to become a target of the students. We only looked out for ourselves.
After school, I headed directly for the city library. I wanted to listen to music, yes, but I also wanted to quickly get somewhere quiet and sleep.
It was awkward using the library like a comics cafe, but I wasn’t aware of anywhere else I could have a peaceful sleep.
At home, my father or sister could wake me up and beat me at any time, and in the classroom, if I carelessly nodded off on my desk, I could have my chair pulled out from under me or garbage dumped out on my head.
I couldn’t sleep in such places, so I slept in the library. Luckily, the sorts of people who wanted to inflict harm on me didn’t come near it. Plus, I could read books and even listen to music. A fantastic invention, libraries.
Sleep deprivation fundamentally weakens people. Just halving the amount of sleep would severely lower my resistance to things like physical pain, verbal vilification, and anxiety about the future.
If I yielded even once, it would take considerable time and effort to return to appearing tough as usual. No, if I wasn’t careful, maybe I could never return to that.
I had to be strong and resilient. So keeping up with sleep was essential. Any day I couldn’t get more than four hours of sleep at home, I slept at the library.
I wouldn’t say the hard chair in the private study room was comfortable to sleep in, but it was the one and only place where I could belong. During the open hours of 9 AM to 6 PM.
After listening to some light music, I checked out John Irving’s The Cider House Rules and read it. My drowsiness hit a peak after reading just a few pages.
The time passed as quickly as if someone stole it away, and a librarian shook my shoulder to tell me that the library was closing for the night.
The alcohol from yesterday had finally left me, and my pain had settled. I bowed my head to her, put the book back on the shelf, and left the library.
It was completely dark when I went outside. In October, the sun began to set very early.
On my way home, the cold wind made me shiver, and I thought about the same thing I always did:
Will a letter come today?
It had been a long five years since we became penpals. In that time, my surroundings changed greatly.
My father died of a stroke, and several months afterward, my mother married the man who was now my stepfather. My surname changed from “Hizumi” to “Akazuki,” and I gained a sister two years my elder.
The moment I saw the man that my mother told me she intended to marry, in the spring of my first year of middle school, I predicted that my life would be thoroughly destroyed, and thought to myself, “I’m doomed.”
Every element that made him up gave me a foreboding feeling. While I couldn’t quite express in words why I felt such ill omen, after 17 years of life, I didn’t need to say “I suppose I’d call him a bad person” or “I suppose I’d call him a good person” - at a glance, he was clearly a bad person. That was what my subconscious accumulated knowledge told me.
Why had my mother chosen this plague-carrier, of all people?
Just as I predicted, my stepfather was a exemplary bringer of ills. He felt inferior about his social standing, and lept at the chance to beat others down in order to cover for it.
In addition, he was a coward, so he would only target those weaker than himself. He’d berate service workers for “hardly providing a service,” explicitly asking their names to insult them; or when a car rear-ended him, he’d force the whole family to get down and apologize in the street.
Yet he honestly seemed to believe that such actions were “manly” and that he was doing them a service.
The most terribly worrying part was that my mother, at least, seemed to be taken by his idea of “manliness” driven by his own sense of inferiority. He was truly, truly beyond help.
As someone who thought this way, my stepfather believed that using violence to secure his position as the head of the family was an essential element of manliness.
What were the other elements? Beer, smoking, gambling. He revered them as symbols of masculinity. Perhaps he would have liked to add “women” to the list, but alas, no amount of work on his “manliness” would make any woman - my mother excluded - come near him.
Perhaps aware of this himself, he would occasionally repeat, though no one had asked, something like this: “Loving my one and only wife makes me feel like I have something to live for. So while really, I’ve had countless opportunities to go after other women, I’m not interested at all.”
And of course, before these words were hardly out of his mouth, he’d beat my mother.
I tried to break up the violence many times, but my mother told me, “Kiriko, please don’t speak up. Things only get more complicated when you’re in the equation.”
After she told me that, I came to simply stand aside and watch.
In any event, it was my mother’s choice. All I could do was watch it unfold.
One day, when I was alone with her, I asked “Haven’t you thought of divorce?”
But she said such things as “I don’t want to trouble my parents,” and “I’m hopeless without a man,” even ending with “We all have our faults.”
A complete tour of all the words I didn’t want to hear, I thought.
My stepfather’s violence gradually came to also target me, his daughter-in-law. Well, it was the natural flow of things.
He’d beat me for the most trivial reasons, like getting home a little bit late or leaving school early. His handiwork slowly escalated, until one day my drunk stepfather pushed me down the stairs.
It wasn’t as serious as it could have been, as I wasn’t hurt in any particularly bad spots, but that one occasion got my mother furious, and the next day she briefly hinted at the idea of divorce.
Yes, only hinted. Wary of her husband’s anger, she was careful not to speak the word “divorce.”
She simply said, “If you keep treating Kiriko and I like this, I might have to take some measures of my own.”
And she wasn’t allowed to say any more. My stepfather picked up a nearby glass and threw it at a window.
At the time, I was in my room reading a reference book. When I heard the sound of the window shattering, my pen stopped, and I hesitantly wondered if I should go check the living room.
Just then, the door slammed open and my stepfather came running in. I nearly shrieked, and I think I should have - I should have screamed as loud as I could.
Maybe then someone in the neighborhood would have heard and come running. …I’m joking, of course.
My mother came in behind, sobbing “Stop this, she has nothing to do with this,” but he beat me regardless. I fell out of my chair and hit the side of my head against the desk.
Yet I couldn’t think much more than “Great, so he won’t even let me study in peace.” Like it or not, seeing domestic violence every day got me used to it.
But as he struck me a second time, a third, a fourth, a fifth, a chilling fear arose from my core. It was my first time experiencing it.
I had a sudden thought. What if this man doesn’t know any limits?
I instantly began to cry, and my body trembled. Perhaps they were tears wept because I was already predicting the tragedy in the months to come.
My mother kept trying to grab my stepfather’s hand, but with the sheer difference in strength, she was quickly brushed off.
"It’s your fault," he said. "I’m not doing this because I want to. But if you’re going to make a fool of me, I’m going to have to take it out on her too. It’s all your fault…"
I had no idea what he was saying. But somehow I understood his reason for beating me, rather than my mother who his anger was directed at. This was more effective than targeting her directly.
I was beaten for nearly two hours straight. Just as he wanted it, my mother never spoke of divorce again.
As if taking a liking to it, it came to be that when I didn’t listen to him, he beat my mother, and when she didn’t listen to him, he beat me.
My one salvation was my correspondence with Mizuho. If there was any time in my life that could be praised, it was when I’d roped Mizuho into becoming my penpal.
I waited for my opportunity ever since that autumn day in sixth grade when our homeroom teacher told us he would be changing schools.
But being so cowardly, it was difficult to take that first step, and I ultimately wasn’t able to bring up the topic of becoming penpals until his very last day.
If I hadn’t squeezed out enough courage then, and hadn’t ended up exchanging letters with Mizuho, I’d have nothing to live for and probably would have died at 13 or 14. So I praised my past self.
To be honest, the “correspondence” I speak of is probably slightly different from what most people would think.
In my letters, I didn’t write tearfully to Mizuho about how I lived in fear of my stepfather, stepsister, and school to have him comfort me.
I did write things just as they happened for a few months after starting, but once my stepfather arrived and things changed completely, I started to lie about everything instead.
That isn’t to say I didn’t have any desire to complain and cry, and to have Mizuho console me. But I feared that myself changing would change him as well.
If I had written about my hardship exactly to the letter, Mizuho would come to worry for me and carefully choose inoffensive topics, no longer talking as much about the positive occurrences in his life.
Then our correspondence would be reduced to a written form of counseling.
I didn’t want that. So I created a fictional “Kiriko Hizumi.” My father being dead, my mother remarrying the worst human alive, being horribly bullied at school, I made not a peep about.
All that was for Kiriko Akazuki to deal with, and had nothing to do with Kiriko Hizumi. Kiriko Hizumi was a girl living a normal yet fulfilling life, who could also reflect upon the happiness she was blessed with.
I enjoyed briefly becoming her to write my letters. By the time I was writing a second sentence, I could fully assume the role of Kiriko Hizumi.
As small details that gave my lies a hint of truth piled up, I came to feel like I was living two lives simultaneously.
Ironically, my fictional life soon overtook my real one. If, for instance, I had written letters from the standpoints of both Kiriko Hizumi and Kiriko Akazuki, and asked strangers to guess which described an actual life, I would expect nine out of ten to pick Kiriko Hizumi.
That was the extent to which I delved into my fiction and out of my reality. Endless days of abuse. If there had been even the slightest change, it might have felt more real.
I loved Mizuho.
I did, though, feel it was strange to “love” someone who I hadn’t met in five years simply because he and I got along well. What was I doing falling for the recipient of my letters whose face I could hardly imagine anymore?
The possibility that because no one else would fill such a position, I had no other choices for love but him, was one I lacked enough evidence against to deny.
It could have also been because we really hadn’t talked much at all outside of letters, so I was only seeing his good side.
Still, I was oddly convinced of it. Mizuho was the only one in the world I could feel this way about.
There was no basis, but there didn’t have to be. I’d never wanted to be forcibly justifying or logically explaining my own feelings.
Falling in love shouldn’t require explaining anything to others. If anyone does feel that such a thing is necessary, I suspect they view love as a means rather than an end.
My mind, ever eager to make itself difficult to save, decided to create an imaginary Mizuho based off his letters, handwriting, and stationery.
In my imagination, he had grown very tall after grade school, and now was about a head taller than me. A good height difference for hugging.
Despite the cheerful loquaciousness of his letters, I imagined that if we met in person, he’d be too shy to even look me in the eye and bad at enunciating. Occasionally, it would lead him to say startling things to me without hesitation.
Normally he had a somewhat gloomy expression, and his way of speaking could be called calm at best and indifferent at worst, but his occasional smile was just as it was when he was 12.
It would completely take me by surprise as it appeared, that dizzyingly lovable smile.
That was the Mizuho I imagined. I was shocked to find when we later reunited how many of my predictions were spot-on, but that’s for a bit later.
When I returned home, I didn’t go to check the mailbox, but underneath an owl statue by the front door. I’d arranged with the friendly postman to have him put any letters sent by Mizuho Yugami there instead.
Of course, it wasn’t the same delivery person every time, so some days a letter would end up directly in the mailbox.
I peered under the owl and saw that there was no letter. Sighing, I opened the front door. I quickly regretted it. I should have checked inside first.
My stepfather had just put down his briefcase, and was in the middle of taking off his shoes.
"I’m home," I meekly voiced. He quickly turned his back to me and stuffed something in his suit pocket.
I found myself strangely caught up on that action. It gave me a bad feeling.
"Hey," he replied. Definitely sounds awkward, I thought to myself. Like how a guilty person would reply. My unease swelled.
I boldly asked, “Um, did you hide something just now?”
"…Hmm?"
His tone darkened instantly. He took an offensive stance, and took a quick breath as if to prepare to shout at any time.
But this told me without a doubt that he felt guilty about something. And it also no doubt had to do with the thing he hid in his pocket. Such a brazen man would have no other reason to hide mere mail.
"It’s something addressed to me," he oppressively stated. "You’d better watch your mouth."
Figuring I’d be given the runaround if I asked indirectly, I got straight to the point.
"In that case, can you show it to me? Just for a second."
His face instantly showed a panicked expression. But just as quickly as it appeared, it changed to anger instead.
It was one of his creeds that victory in these situations went to the one who first got the upper hand and shouted out the other. And indeed, that was effective, when the other was someone weaker and with no ground on him.
"Who do you think you are?", he growled, closing in on me. I smelled a greasy smell. He grabbed my collar and lightly smacked my cheek.
However, with this I was able to confirm there was an envelope poking slightly out of his pocket. From the gray, high-quality paper and handwriting of the address, I recognized it as a letter from Mizuho.
He noticed where I was looking, let go of my collar, and thrust me away.
"Don’t push your luck," he told me as he went up the stairs. I tried to chase after him, but my legs wouldn’t move. My body knew how pointless it was to resist that man.
I collapsed to the floor. He was the one person I didn’t want knowing about it.
He’d lock himself up in the study and read through that letter Mizuho wrote for me. And he’d chuckle about learning a new one of my weaknesses.
He was always that way. I don’t know if I’d call him a peeping tom, but my stepfather wanted to know all his family’s secrets. For being a champion of manliness, he seemed to considerably enjoy things in the realm of gossip.
Whenever my mother got a phone call, he’d have her report on what it was abou