9
On March 1st, the day of Kasumi's high school graduation, it was lightly snowing all morning. At Kasumi's request, Ogami was going to pick her up from school at 1 PM. She asked him to take her on a little drive afterward. Her parents were apparently too busy volunteering as usual, and wouldn't be at the ceremony. They must have seen no point in attending the graduation of their already-dead daughter.
After crawling out of bed just before noon and eating a combined breakfast and lunch, he put on his duffle coat and left the apartment. Along the way, he bought coffee at the convenience store, then parked his car at a park a short distance from Kasumi's high school. The snow was intermittently stopping and starting back up, but either way, the sun was hidden behind thick clouds. It looked like it would be a gloomy day, not very befitting of a graduation.
He waited for Kasumi while sipping coffee and leisurely smoking. After finishing his cigarette, he reclined the seat, lay down using his hands as a pillow, and closed his eyes. The voices of children playing in the park were carried to the car on the wind. He could just barely hear their shrill screams, perhaps from a game of tag.
Why do children scream so much?, Ogami wondered. There's probably lots of reasons, but maybe the primary one is that it's simply fun to scream. Maybe vibrating your throat to emit a sound that shakes the air is just too much fun not to do. So there's no meaning to the actual words being screamed.
Thinking about it, that didn't change much even as an adult. The majority of people's conversations are meaningless. They're like animal cries that can represent a handful of emotions. And fundamentally, that's all a conversation has to be. If people aimed to only speak things that had meaning, everyone would eventually just go silent.
I suppose I'm thinking about things like this because I've had a lot more meaningless conversations with others - that is, Kasumi - in the past month, something I hadn't done for a long time outside of work. Conversations whose content had no real meaning, whose only purpose was to mutually affirm friendship.
But that's going to end today. I'm going to reveal my true nature to her. I'll coldly tell her that my kindness toward her this past month was no more than my duty as a Sakura, and that I had actually found it only a burden.
I'll push her down the same hole I was once pushed into.
There was no room for doubt that Kasumi was a person at serious risk of suicide. Dealing a blow to her now, as she stood at the edge of a cliff, might be the last push needed. In fact, it was almost certain. I wouldn't be directly getting my hands dirty, and likely no one would blame me, but I would know that it was murder.
If she died, I would have to carry that sin for the rest of my life.
Is it worth going that far for this revenge?
It is, Ogami answered himself after some thought. Inflicting that great of a wound on someone is the only way I can strike back at this world. I have to prove that I'm not someone who just suffers wounds, but can also inflict them. Until I fulfilled that, I would be forever looked down upon as a weakling who can't put up any resistance.
With his decision solidified, his head felt clear, and energy flowed through him. He felt like he was about to truly become free. He hadn't even felt this refreshed at his own high school graduation.
Ogami sat up in the seat, and waited patiently for Kasumi to arrive.
Before long, he saw her entering the park. She had her usual uniform on under a coat, but she wore a corsage on her chest, and carried a tube containing her diploma under her arm. Once she made eye contact with Ogami, she waved and jogged over.
As Kasumi sat in the passenger seat, Ogami remarked: "That's nice."
She didn't seem to understand what he was referring to at first, but noticing Ogami's gaze focused on her corsage, she laughed with embarrassment.
"Want to try it on, Ogami?"
"What am I gonna do wearing that around?"
It's fine, it's fine, she said, taking off the corsage and putting it on Ogami's chest. It seemed to use a clip, making it easy to remove.
It was a corsage of artificial cherry blossoms.
Around graduation season, sakura didn't really bloom in the Town of Sakura. The earliest you could see them in full bloom was mid-April. So they weren't really a symbol of goodbyes or new encounters, instead leaving a stronger impression as something you went to see with new friends to deepen your relationship.
A corsage of cherry blossoms, in a town where they wouldn't bloom for a while yet, felt like a consolation to bring about at least a little bit of that spring feeling.
"You sure you don't want to be with your friends?", Ogami asked. "Don't friends do lots of stuff together after graduation?"
"I didn't have any friends I was that close with," Kasumi said. "They were a bunch of people I could figure I'd never meet again after graduation. So it's more fun being with you, Ogami."
"Well, thanks," Ogami said, starting up the engine.
Exiting from the park onto the main street, there were still graduates wearing their corsages around. Likely not wanting to make eye contact, Kasumi put her head right up against the headrest and looked straight forward. Soon afterward, as the graduates went out of sight, she unbuttoned her coat and let out a big sigh of relief.
After driving around for nearly two hours with no destination, they entered a shopping mall at Kasumi's suggestion. It was an old mall, with not a single store suited for young people, and they noticed some spots left empty, hidden by partitions. There was a gathering of elderly people at the benches by the escalator, which was the only lively spot in the whole place.
Entering a ticket-operated cafeteria on the top floor, the two had soba noodles together. The whole west wall of the cafeteria was a giant window, and because Kasumi had chosen a window seat, the evening sun was blinding.
After eating, they took the elevator to the roof. By then, the sun was starting to set. The rooftop was used as a plaza, but they saw no else one there.
After having a cigarette at the smoking area in the corner, Ogami walked along the edge of the roof with Kasumi. Unfamiliar sights from an unfamiliar town stretched out below them. It looked so mundane, it could be replaced by another town while you weren't looking and you wouldn't notice.
"I think the feeling of graduating is finally starting to sink in," Kasumi murmured.
"Congrats," Ogami said.
"Thinking back, they weren't very decent years of high school." After saying that, she looked toward Ogami and laughed. "But I'm really glad you were there for the last month of it. I might not have made it through this winter if I were by myself."
"I've been helped a lot thanks to you, too. And it's been fun," Ogami remarked. It wasn't exactly a complete lie. If he hadn't encountered Kasumi after returning to the Town of Sakura, he probably would have been at a loss for what to do. She gave him a clear objective, and that kept him from ever being bored this past month.
Kasumi was quiet on the drive home, occasionally holding her mouth to stifle a yawn. Ogami said she should sleep if she was sleepy, so Kasumi replied "I'll do that" and closed her eyes.
Ogami slowed the car down and drove gently so as not to disturb her sleep. It was best for her to rest up while she could, so that she would have a clear head once they reached the essential scene.
Even upon arriving in the Town of Sakura, Kasumi didn't wake up. Bits of snow had started to fall slightly before entering town. It was a modest snow; even if it continued all night, it was dubious if it would reach even a centimeter.
While waiting for a stoplight, he glanced casually back at Kasumi sleeping. Then, as if sensing that, she opened her eyes, caught Ogami's glance before it could flee, and smiled.
"How long did I sleep for?"
"Thirty minutes or so," Ogami answered. "We're almost at your house."
"Oh, sure enough. Feels like kind of a waste..."
Despite it only just turning 7 PM, the town was totally silent. The sort of silence you'd expect around 3 AM. Ogami drove slowly down the roads, considerably narrowed due to the snow pushed to the side by snow plows.
Soon, their destination came into sight. He could discern the yellow and black warning colors even from a distance.
Right as he was about to stop the car in front of the railroad crossing, the warning bell started up, and the gate began to lower.
What an ironic coincidence, Ogami thought.
And that coincidence was demanding that Ogami do it here and now.
"Hey," Ogami said. "You know about prompters?"
Kasumi seemed to immediately discern the change in Ogami's tone. He could sense the sudden tension in her limbs.
"What are you talking about?", she asked back with unnecessary cheerfulness.
"Prompters. Some people call them Sakura."
"I know that, but..."
"When the System finds someone who might kill themselves, it chooses a Sakura from people close by. Sakura bear the duty of acting as a good friend to them, to prevent their suicide. Forbidden from revealing themselves, they're expected to act like they're doing it of their own volition."
Kasumi glanced at Ogami to judge his expression. "Ogami, are you angry about something?"
"I'm your Sakura," he said.
Even after the train roared past the railroad crossing, Kasumi was still silent.
When the gate went up, Ogami drove the car forward, and parked on the side of the road past the crossing.
The bits of snow were swallowed by darkness the instant the headlights turned off.
The videos the detective brought had featured hardly any clues toward understanding Sumika's inner thoughts. The camera had only captured Sumika Takasago as an actor. With each change of role, she became like a different person, sometimes giving the feeling that even her physique and age changed to match the role. These transformations were enough to make you doubt if she even had a true self, an authentic self.
As an actor, Sumika excelled at ad-libbing. During rehearsals, she often spoke lines that weren't in the script. You would know as much if you knew the script, but if you didn't, they would have scanned as perfectly natural. They didn't affect the big picture, and also didn't confuse the other actors.
But strangely enough, when you heard the original lines after seeing her ad-libs, it felt like it was the original that was wrong. You came to view it not as if they were ad-libs, but that only she had been handed the real script, which she was just acting out as-is.
In reality, she probably didn't think of it as ad-libbing. Maybe she read the script diligently, and in attuning her senses to the mood of the show, intuitively realized "no, this isn't it." This line is somehow obstructing the natural flow of things. And so she caught hold of a more natural, more appropriate line, which she then spoke.
What happened to Ogami here, past the railroad crossing, was something similar to that. The script he had prepared in advance had only lines meant to hurt Kasumi written in it. It was a script he'd spent much time polishing, but when he went to act it out, someone in his head spoke. No, this isn't it. Those aren't the words that would come naturally. That's a tortured, dead line produced by artifice. There's surely something else you ought to say here.
Of course, it's not like he could arrive at the correct answer instantly like Sumika. It took some time. So first, he decided to walk things back a bit. If he traced it from the beginning, maybe it would become clear where he was getting stuck.
"When we first met, that wasn't the case yet," Ogami began. "When I reunited with you in late January, I wasn't your Sakura yet. I'd been informed of Sumika's suicide, and returned to town to determine if it was true or not. As soon as you confirmed it, my business was done, and I left town. That was supposed to be the end of it. But when I got back to my apartment after that, a light-pink envelope had arrived. It was a notice that I had been selected as a prompter, and you were named as the individual at high risk of suicide. So I returned to town, rented an apartment, and interacted with you once more."
Ogami paused there and gauged Kasumi's reaction. Her hands sat on her lap, and she gazed at the darkness outside with pursed lips. But there was no tension or unease on her face. He could imagine that from the first word of his confession, she'd anticipated everything up to the conclusion, and was quietly confronting her sadness alone.
Ogami continued. "The whole time, I was wondering why someone like me was chosen as a Sakura. There should have been plenty of more suitable candidates, I thought. But it would seem I'm not your only Sakura. You have multiple others assigned to you. According to what one of them told me, it's somewhere around six. And I'm one who came in rather late. It must be they ran out of viable Sakura choices, forcing them to pick someone like me who might as well be an outsider."
He took a cigarette from his pocket and lit it without opening the windows. After taking a puff, he thought to himself: this too is part of the act. A prop to fill space in the conversation, while silently indicating that you've given up on caring about the person in front of you.
"The other thing I found bizarre was the very fact that you were wanting to kill yourself. At a glance, you didn't look at all like someone who would do a thing like that. I even thought the System had made a faulty diagnosis at first. Or maybe there was something about you that could be easily misinterpreted. But recently, after sneaking a peek at the photos you've been taking, my thinking changed. I may not know a clear reason, but you are in fact trying to die. And of course, I can tell it's something to do with your ties to Sumika. Because your world revolved around her."
After reaching this point, Ogami suddenly became conscious of the corsage on his chest. He unclipped it, and after some indecision, placed it on the dashboard. The fabricated flowers had a life and glossiness to them as if they had just bloomed, glowing faintly in the darkness.
In the way an ad-lib calls for an ad-lib to follow it, he continued naturally with words not in the script.
"But to tell the truth, I don't care what the reason is. All that's important is that you have a powerful desire to die, incomparable to your average suicidal person."
Behind the car, the railroad crossing's warning bell began to ring again.
The flashing lights dyed the deep blue darkness a faint red.
"We can cooperate with each other," Ogami said. "And if you want to know why, it's because I'm fed up with living, too."
*
Three nights later, Kasumi came to the apartment. Seeing Ogami's face, she didn't put on her prior friendly smile, simply bowing her head with a "Pardon me." Then she went into the bathroom with her shoulder bag, quickly changed, and came out. It was a dubious outfit for the season, a gray camisole and shorts a slightly darker gray. On top of that, both were soaking wet, with water dripping from them.
"I'll go out first," Kasumi said without even meeting eyes with him. Then she unlocked the window and stepped out onto the veranda. Ogami spent a while smoking a cigarette, looking at the drops of water she'd left on the floor. Once he finished it, he took off the sweatshirt he'd been wearing, leaving just a T-shirt, and headed to the bathroom.
The shower water was still on a cold setting, and he felt like he was suffocating the moment it touched his skin. Even so, he grit his teeth and got his whole body wet. Then, dripping water onto the floor, he quickly moved to turn off the lights, exit onto the veranda, and close the window.
There were two chairs out there, side by side. Kasumi sat in one, her thin shoulders already starting to shiver. Ogami sat down in the other. He grabbed a bottle of whiskey placed on the air conditioning unit, opened it up, and took a straight swig. His throat instantly heated up like it was burning.
"Can I have that too?", Kasumi asked.
Ogami handed her the bottle. She opened the cap with shaky hands and lightly poured it into her mouth. Calmly gulping it down, she quietly said "I see, so this is how it tastes. I can't fathom the minds of people who would drink this willingly."
Even so, alcohol was an indispensable prop. According to Kasumi's research, drinking greatly increased your risk of hypothermia. Getting your clothes wet was also effective, and fatigue, hunger, and lack of sleep boosted it even more. With all the conditions in place, it was possible to freeze to death even on a calm spring night.
Of course, the veranda couldn't be called a suitable place for freezing to death. The handrails served as a wall protecting from the wind, and only a single window separated them from an ideal place to take refuge. This was just a dry run. They wanted to know in advance how much suffering it would actually involve, or to reword that, how much resolve they would need to have.
It's foolish to be putting in more practice for freezing to death than for graduation, Ogami thought. But the stage and date had already been decided, so for now, all they could do was rehearse.
Ogami had invited Kasumi to a double suicide, and she accepted the invitation. The next morning, Ogami's world had changed completely. The thin frost on the window, the long icicles hanging from the roof, the piled snow in the parking area, the oppressive leaden sky - that morning, all of it had a picturesque tinge, as if being viewed through an old film.
He felt as light as if he were released from a job he'd worked for a decade. So light, in fact, that it made him uneasy. He found himself looking for reasons to suffer, thinking "I shouldn't be able to feel this at ease, I must be overlooking something important." Soon he realized he couldn't find any such reason, and he felt both relief and a touch of dissatisfaction. It was that kind of lightness.
Kasumi had proposed three conditions.
Rather than do it right now, I want to wait until the spring equinox.
If we die, we should do it in the same place as my sister.
If possible, we should freeze to death.
When Ogami asked why it couldn't be right away, Kasumi replied "because it would stand out."
"Apparently, many students who kill themselves do it at the end of spring break. I want to slip in with them if I can. Spring break only just started, didn't it?"
He felt it was pointless for a person who was about to die to be concerned about things like that, but the spring equinox did seem just right as a dividing point.
"Or are you feeling pressed for time, Ogami?"
"No, there's no real rush. I'll match with you."
Kasumi nodded silently. Then she asked after a short pause:
"You said you weren't interested in why I wanted to die, Ogami, but I'm interested in why you do."
"The same as you," Ogami answered simply. "My ties to Sumika."
"Is that the truth?", Kasumi asked dubiously. "I mean, wouldn't it be odd that you were chosen as my Sakura if you yourself had suicidal desires? Shouldn't you be having a Sakura assigned to you?"
"I did have one, long ago. That experience trained me such that I could deceive the System."
"Is that something you can do with mere training?"
"It's not like Handcuffs are looking into your very mind. As long as you know the standards for its diagnoses, you can counteract it."
"Then would it also be possible for a healthy person to pretend to be considering suicide?"
"There's plenty of people in the world making such an effort. But I've never heard of any who succeeded. It seems they won't be treated as suicidal without some pretty clear evidence. Innocent until proven guilty, so to speak."
Kasumi's eyes turned to her Handcuff, which she removed and placed next to the corsage. Then she turned to Ogami with a smile that looked weary. "So in trying to stop my suicide, the System instead set up a double suicide."
"That's what happened, yeah."
"If you're going out of your way to invite me, are you afraid to die alone, Ogami?"
"I am," Ogami said. "And you?"
"If I weren't afraid, I wouldn't have waited until six Sakura were assigned to me," Kasumi said with a laugh.
Kasumi was right to choose freezing as the method, Ogami thought after their first rehearsal. It was indeed painful. The wet clothes stole away your body heat in a blink, changing from simply feeling cold to a discomfort closer to pain. As your consciousness became hazy, you started to think of nonsensical things. On the back of his eyelids, he saw a jumble of fragmented memories even more disjointed than a dream.
But it didn't have the sense of death. It felt like strictly an extension of everyday suffering. The intoxication may have also helped there. And maybe another part was having been born in a snowy place, and being used to the cold. It had this feel to it like you could go all the way without even realizing you were stepping toward a fatal situation.
When they returned to the room, the two took off their freezing clothes before anything else. They took turns taking a hot shower, sat in front of the heater, and bathed in the warm air for a while. Once they'd recovered enough to sufficiently move their bodies, they had some premade stew and drank hot cocoa. But even then, they were having a hard time removing the chill that had reached their core. Putting something warm in your mouth only warmed the area around your stomach, and warm air only heated up your skin. Their feeling in parts of their limbs had dulled, a symptom that didn't heal even by next morning. Several languid days passed, like after getting a high fever, and they frequently felt sleepy.
"Why did you choose freezing to death?", Ogami asked a few days later.
"Why indeed?", Kasumi repeated. "I'm not really sure myself. Maybe because I was born in a cold town, I wanted to make use of it at the end."
It was strange logic, but he felt like he understood what she was getting at. Just being born in a place with lots of snow is a kind of punishment. You can get some benefit from it on rare occasion, but there are far more negatives overall.
Yet if they could make that their ally in the very end, maybe they could believe there was some small meaning to being born in this place.
Even if the very idea of it "having meaning" was meaningless.
After he'd put it into words once, his thoughts had hardened before he knew it. From an impromptu line that came about in his talk with Kasumi, he finally came to understand why he had returned to this town, and why he accepted being Kasumi's Sakura.
In short, I was unable to abandon my hope, he thought. In returning to the Town of Sakura and following the trail of Sumika, a part of me had been hoping that some comforting truth would arise.
What if her being a Sakura had actually been a total lie, and she had some deep reason for having to keep me away? Or what if it was true she'd been a Sakura, but while performing as one, she found her feigned affection becoming real? What if she only realized her affection after we completely cut ties, and up to the moment of her death, she was dragging that past behind her?
What if she had kept thinking about me the way I'd kept thinking about her?
What if her death was caused by that regret?
What if, had I simply offered reconciliation, she would have gladly accepted it?
Maybe I'd been hoping for a sweet regret such as that.
But learning about her hidden face from members of the troupe and her own father, that faint hope was completely extinguished. The conclusion revealed when all those different perspectives were combining into one was this: Sumika was no more than a mirror who reflected other people's ideals. There was no other way to explain the logic behind her actions. She was the ultimate people-pleaser, and in a sense, like a kind of hollow doll. Even what Ogami thought was affection had just been a reflection of his own.
Then again, if it was just despair over that, he surely wouldn't have gone as far as considering death. He probably would have gone on to live an even more hopeless life than before, but suicide should have been at least a few steps further off.
What was it that pushed me over the edge?
Maybe it was Kasumi's influence after all, Ogami thought. I was poisoned by her, and became captivated by death - perhaps that's ultimately all there was to it.
It's hard to be sure what the truth is. Perhaps the effect came before the cause - rather than dying because I have a reason, I had been searching for a reason to die. It's conceivable that returning to my hometown after so long just has me temporarily depressed. But if you were to ask the System, you would probably get an awfully complex motivation, not explainable by one simple reason. That was surely it: on the whole, I want to die.
Kasumi became addicted to their freezing-to-death rehearsals. Every few days she'd come to Ogami's apartment, take a shower in her clothes, and go sit in the cold wind on the veranda. Ogami accompanied her each time. And in those moments where they had to return to the room or there'd be no coming back, and not the moment they went back to the warm room itself, he found that he was enveloped in a bliss that was hard to describe. Most likely, it was a sense of harmony that arrived when his mental closeness to death aligned with his physical closeness to death. Ogami imagined Kasumi kept repeating these rehearsals, too, because she was enchanted by this feeling.
While at the start of each session his attention was drawn to the shivering, lightly-dressed Kasumi, once his body heat started to drop below the heat in the air, his senses gradually turned inward, and everything else became a vague "external," allowing him to relish a feeling of truly being alone. When he retreated into his inner consciousness, all these things from the past came to mind one after another. It wasn't exactly his life flashing before his eyes, but it was as if his brain were re-evaluating if this life was worth living or not.
When he thought back on it all, it was 22 years with hardly anything happy or enjoyable. Opening the lid on his fatal middle school memories only revealed complete nothingness. The life of a ghost, who can neither touch or be touched by anyone. No, maybe there had been just a little bit of good in there. But it wasn't enough to stick in his memory. Indeed, other people were mirrors - so as a person without mirrors in his life, he couldn't recognize his self, and accordingly, was unable to remember any events surrounding that self.
Still, while patiently dredging through the depths of his memory, his fingertips touched a faint warmth. It wasn't a very significant memory. In fact, it was so shabby that it only felt more miserable to hold it up as a good memory.
About half a year after he started doing work on matchmaking apps, his work as a Sakura was once praised by the company president. When passing each other by, he said something like "you do some pretty good work, huh?", slapping him on the shoulder. That was it. That was literally all there was to it.
The president was a man so listless you couldn't imagine he was the president of a scamming business, and he lacked any dignity or style, yet he was reasonably admired by the staff for his effective cunning. He wasn't the sort of person who did flattery, so Ogami was able to honestly accept praise from him.
Even looking back on it now, it truly was a meager event. But as much as he searched himself, that was about the only heartwarming memory. All his other memories were covered in frost.
I guess it's no surprise I'd freeze to death, thought Ogami.
During their third practice run, it snowed. It was fine snow that fell in bits and pieces, looking like dust on a projector. It was a windless night, so the snow didn't get onto the veranda, but Kasumi stood up on her bare feet and leaned over the handrail, opening her palm to try and grab the small snowflakes.
"Ogami, did you know?", Kasumi said as she looked up to the sky. "Double suicides are generally only done by family or lovers."
Ogami figured it was something total strangers could do too, but it was a pain to move his mouth stiffened by the cold, so he just said "Hm."
"It's something family or lovers do," Kasumi repeated. "Maybe it'd be more natural if we matched that, too."
Kasumi picked up her folding chair, stuck it next to Ogami's, and sat down. Her bare, thin shoulder touched Ogami's arm, but he couldn't afford to feel anything. He just thought, her shoulder's cold.
"Ogami, you liked my sister, didn't you. Then since I'm so much like her, you must like me at least half as much, right?"
"Well, sure," Ogami said.
"Huh, is that right?"
"Sure," Ogami repeated.
"Hmm." Kasumi pondered while cracking her numbed knuckles. "I was just imagining you'd reject me. I guess it's worth speaking your mind."
"But we can't become lovers."
"Why not?"
"I like the idea of dying with a stranger."
Kasumi looked at Ogami's face emotionlessly for a while, then soon smiled weakly.
"You have some strange tastes, don't you."
She let out a small sigh. The breath coming from her frozen body didn't even turn white.