The Aosawa Murders

by Riku Onda

Hisako liked listening to the sound of the sea, apparently. Sometimes she begged to be taken to hear “Kimi’s sea”. When told the sea didn’t belong to anybody, Hisako would only laugh and repeat, “It’s Kimi’s sea.”

I cannot help but see it as a peculiar twist of fate that the author should have died here, in this city, just as it is in the process of attempting to eliminate all trace of the house where the murders occurred. It is as if time has been turned back.

“We weren’t especially conscious of it, but I do think now that all of us being at the scene of the crime as children did have something to do with it,” he told me. “My sister’s book was called The Forgotten Festival, but for us it was The Unforgettable Festival.”

I think I told you once I’ve never felt comfortable in my skin. It’s like there’s an outer me that’s the container, and another me on the inside, and the two don’t fit together at all.

I’m too scared to sleep. The thought of seeing those people and the white cat in my dreams terrifies me.

This is not how she’s supposed to be; I can’t quite believe it. The woman I know, the woman that everybody spoke of, was not like this. Her appearance is unsettling, and I can’t understand why.

I return her gaze. Though I cannot see her pupils because of the sun at her back, I know I must be reflected in those eyes. Eyes through which Hisako Aosawa now sees.

I was told the chances of success were very low because it fails for many people, but it worked for me. It was a miracle.” She speaks softly, but her bleak tone suggests that she considers her recovery to be anything but a miracle. “What was it like to see again after decades?” I ask, pretending not to notice the unhappiness in her voice. I suspect some kind of trap and am wary. “I was disillusioned by so much beauty, I suppose.”

because my world before that was so much more interesting.” In her voice there is a note of quiet despair.

When I heard this news, however, the thought that crossed my mind was that she had another reason for wanting to forget about the murders. Which was – as several people I spoke to suspected – because she was the mastermind behind the crime.

Hisako pumping the swing in the park, Hisako’s mocking smile, Hisako looking at the crepe myrtle, Hisako being waited upon, Hisako behaving like a queen, Hisako receiving the origami cranes.

“I used to be special. The world was mine,” she mutters angrily. “Now I don’t feel special or satisfied at all. When my eyes awoke, I realized the world belonged to strangers and that I never had anything from the start.”

“When I was blind, I felt like a goddess. Full of confidence. People thought I knew everything. But once I could see again I became timid and always looking nervously around me. I aged instantly. It was like a spell had been broken.”

Hisako slowly traces the line of the glass flower with her finger. “That man used to call me Flower Voice.”

They had a strange kind of arrangement. The man hardly even attempted to look at the girl’s face. Apparently he liked listening to her more than anything.

Once it happened that their conversation suddenly stopped and the sound of the sea vanished at the same time, as if a magical hush had been cast over them. They discussed this moment. A moment when everything disappeared. And the sheer bliss they felt at being the only two left in the world.

And this was probably the moment. The moment when the young girl unintentionally uttered the comment that started it all.

But on her face is an expression of satisfaction, even pride, and her eyes glitter with the reflection from the glowing horizon.

The more she denies it, the more clearly I hear another voice: I did it, I knew everything, I made it happen! Her voice rings triumphantly in my head.

In a flash, she remembered it was a special day. A storm would come. That’s right, she recalled. This day was going to be a very special one for her family. But she was the only one in the house to know that it would be special in a different sense to what everybody else in the family or neighbourhood was expecting.

Is it a sin to know something? To know that something might happen?

Why is it always like this? Why is there never any peace and quiet in this house? The world she yearned for and had dreamed of for so long was a far cry from the one she knew, a world filled with vulgar music, scolding and grumbling, flattery and deference, nasty gossip, scheming in the shadows, plotting and manoeuvring behind the scenes, and her mother’s praying voice filled with hypocrisy and damnation.

It had been her wish. This had been her wish for so long that she couldn’t remember when it first began. What she wanted was to be alone. To spend time in the house alone. To enjoy her time in peace and quiet. And be able to listen in peace, properly, to real music from around the world.

A storm is coming. A storm to take away everything. A storm that will bring me everything.

She had been in search of another country. A dream country that nobody else knew of. A country just for the two of them, a country of endless quiet, where the world was banished. The two of them had called that country Eugenia.

“Those people were so noisy, you know, all the time. Ever since I was little. They couldn’t keep quiet. Always talking, never happy unless they were making some noise or other. They had no confidence in the value of their own existence.”

Cities and people both generate sound in the process of change, she thinks. The same world never exists twice, and in every moment, with every passing second, people live in a different world.

Her body retains an approximate memory of the geography that allows her to meander through the hustle and bustle like a migratory fish returning home.

She has always felt fearful in this graceful, tranquil space, a fear rooted in the powerful menacing tension that pervades Japanese gardens, one akin to a life-or-death battle, springing from the sharp separation between the observer and the observed. The observer and the observed. In the end, I was the observer, I suppose, she thinks, standing fixed to the spot, gazing at the framed square of garden. She was always one of the observed, and she knew it.

If there is no observer, the observed also does not exist. A garden such as this, where every single angle of vision is calculated with thorough awareness of the viewer, would not exist without that appreciative eye. Observers and the observed can be accomplices, but the line between them does not cross.

She saw in her imagination an image of the young girl lying in bed. Her. The survivor, Hisako.

I journeyed alone all this time That I might meet you again.

I’m the only one in the world who knows the real Hisako. But I have no intention of accusing her of anything. I would never do anything so tedious and inelegant.

I always tried to be somebody. Somebody other than myself. I wanted to know what it felt like to be someone who wasn’t me. Hisako. But ultimately I was made to understand that I am merely an observer.

But Hisako knew about crepe myrtle, and in her mind she used that name for another, different flower, one she’d seen in the past. I knew that. I’m probably the only person who did.

A sign of bats. That mysterious saying of Hisako’s.

The bullets turn into blue light. She is not thinking any more. She is a small girl alone in the blue room, wandering in search of forgiveness and water. Through the long summer that has continued since that day. Her eternal, never-ending summer.