The Monster on the Road Is Me Read online

  Aiko left me on the ground. She picked up her fallen textbooks and loosely stacked them in her arms. She stared off into the mountains behind the school, chattering to herself, bleeding down the outside of her leg. She didn’t look at me again. Her feet shuffled forward, and I lay there watching as she walked up an old tea farmer’s footpath. From somewhere behind the school, a flock of crows lifted up like a black wave and stormed after her. Their cries were deafening, but Aiko didn’t even notice.

  The next morning they found Aiko’s body in the school gymnasium. She had drunk a liter of cleaning fluid. I was the last person to see her alive. I should have gone after her.

  Something I Regret

  2

  The day before Aiko’s funeral I steered my bicycle down the backstreets to the Lawson’s convenience store. Of course, the easiest way to get to Lawson’s is riding straight down Route 33, but my folks are afraid I’ll fall asleep and drift out into traffic. So I take the backstreets. And always wear my special helmet.

  Sometimes I pretend my bicycle is a Yokosuka seaplane. And instead of riding down dusty old backstreets, I’m flying along the coast of Japan, delivering shiitake to all those people who can eat mushrooms without throwing up.

  For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to fly. To be a pilot who could soar above the clouds and leave the tiny roads and the mountain villages behind. Sometimes I even pretend I was alive during the Pacific War. You should totally be a pilot, Koda, someone would say. You never suddenly fall asleep. In fact, I’ve never seen you sleep for even a single moment. You could fly to America and back without ever getting tired.

  And I’d say, Yeah, I pretty much never sleep. Got too many things to do.

  This would get back to the admiral of the Imperial Navy, who would give me my own Zero-sen fighter plane.

  Fly like the god wind and crash your plane into the enemies of our beloved emperor, the admiral would say.

  Or, I’d interrupt, instead of doing that—and this is just a thought—I could fly around the world. Which would also be good for the emperor and all that other stuff.

  The admiral would step back and size me up. I don’t like it. I do not like it one bit. But you are the boy who never sleeps, so here are the keys. Make the emperor proud. And by the way, take off that helmet, boy. There are no helmets allowed in the Imperial Navy.

  Yes, sir! Gladly, sir! I’d say, punting my stupid helmet off the side of the aircraft carrier.

  But then I get to the convenience store and remember I’m just a high school kid with a secondhand bike and a sleeping disorder. Oh well, there’s always the ride home.

  “I’ll take a bowl of oden,” I told Haru as I walked into the store.

  “What do you want in it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Konyaku, tamago, a little daikon.”

  “Broth?”

  “Sure.” I slid Haru two go-hyaku coins.

  “Nah, take it. On the house.”

  Even though he was three years older than me, Haru was my only friend in Kusaka. That makes it sound like I had friends outside of Kusaka. Nope, he was my only friend, period.

  Haru lived with his uncle in a broken-down house at the end of our street. His uncle was the kind of man who would push a shrine maiden down a flight of stairs for a warm glass of sake. Or for anything really: a coin, an old boot, a bit of tinfoil. The man was simpleminded, and a bastard. Not a good combination.

  Haru didn’t graduate from high school. He dropped out, stayed in Kusaka, and eventually picked up a job at Lawson’s. I usually stopped in after school or when I was in the area delivering shiitake to the vegetable stands behind Route 33.

  “How’s your paper?” he asked, sliding a pair of chopsticks across the counter.

  “The one from homeroom?”

  “Sure. The one about the robot.”

  “Robot?”

  He pulled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket. “It’s not about a robot?” he asked.

  “No. When did you ever have robot homework?”

  He shrugged.

  “And that is why you didn’t graduate,” I said.

  “Let’s go outside,” Haru said, walking around the counter.

  “Can you just take a break like that?”

  “I don’t know. There’s no one here anyway.”

  We sat down on the curb and Haru lit his cigarette. He held it out to me, but I ignored him. I might be the only fifteen-year-old in Japan who doesn’t have a fascination with smoking. Just not that interested in it. I did try it once. My face got all puffy and my skin turned bright red. It was like my body was somehow allergic to breathing in poison.

  And really, none of the other fifteen-year-olds should be smoking either. It’s obviously against the law. But no one takes that seriously when you can just walk down the street and drop a couple of coins into a jidōhanbaiki.

  In Japan we love our vending machines. We’ll put anything in them: cigarettes, batteries, TV dinners, raincoats, pornography, used underwear. Think of almost anything, and I’ll bet you can find a jidōhanbaiki somewhere in Japan that’s selling it. I’ve seen a six-year-old kid buy a two-liter bottle of sake from the vending machine down the road. I guess his father was too lazy to get up and buy it himself. At least, I hope that’s what was happening.

  “People like robots, you know,” Haru said.

  “Hmm.”

  “Maybe it’s a girl robot. She could wear this sexy outfit and fly around rescuing people.”

  “You remember what homework is, right?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “The paper is on something we regret,” I said.

  “Shimizu-sensei?”

  I nodded.

  Haru took another drag. “I bet he regrets assigning that now.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Didn’t you say that girl talked to birds?”

  “Aiko talked about birds. There’s a difference.”

  “But they were birds that weren’t there?”

  “A bird,” I said. “It was mostly this one bird. Yatagarasu. But yes, he wasn’t there.”

  If Aiko was crazy for talking to something no one else could see, then a lot of people in Japan are crazy. The ghosts of ancestors, gods and goddesses, spirits from local shrines—most people worship things they’ve never actually seen. I didn’t care if Aiko was a little too quiet or spent her breaks on the balcony looking for a three-legged crow. Crows are cool enough, or so I used to think.

  “Who drinks bathroom cleaner?” Haru asked. “Who wants to die like that?”

  “It was a message,” I said.

  Haru snubbed his cigarette and flicked the butt into the parking lot. “How do you figure?” he asked.

  “Well, they closed the school after Aiko’s body was found, right? They washed down the doors and the genkan and the stairs. They polished and mopped everything to get the school back to the way it was. But now the building just reeks of cleaning fluid. They didn’t remove Aiko from the school at all. They just scrubbed her deeper into the walls.”

  “That’s pretty sick.”

  “They realized it, but only after it was too late. You should see the place now. No one messes around in the halls or plays badminton in the courtyard during break anymore. Everyone just stays inside with the windows open and the fans on,” I said.

  “And I thought this mimonai Lawson’s job was bad.”

  “It was a message, Haru. No one can ignore her now.”

  “I bet it was a message about that driver—what’s his name?”

  “Yori-san?”

  “Yeah, the crazy guy who drives the bus.”

  “Yori.”

  “I bet the message was: He finally did it. The creepy little driver finally killed one of us.”

  I pushed up from the curb. “Whatever. I gotta go.”

  “Seriously? Are you mad? It was a joke, Koda. Not a good joke, I see that now. But c’mon.”

  I kicked out the stand on my bike and steadied the box of
mushrooms tied down to the back. “I’ve got deliveries to make, Haru. See you tomorrow.”

  “Whatever,” he said.

  I fastened my helmet and pushed off down the street behind Lawson’s. The sliding door dinged softly behind me.

  Forget Haru. I didn’t know why, but Aiko had chosen me just before she died. She had walked up to me and whispered in my ear. All I’d ever done was stare at her from the back of our homeroom class, but for some reason she stepped into my dream and told me she had nowhere left to hide. Her death wasn’t random. It meant something. It had to. I just couldn’t see it yet.

  3

  Aiko’s family lived in a house that must have been two hundred years old. Latticed wood and paper doors. Bonsai trees. A small pond for koi. All tucked into a mountainside covered with bamboo and scrubby trees and ferns twisting over the ground. An ideal Japanese house in an ideal Japanese town, right?

  Instead of traveling to Kōchi City, Aiko’s father decided to hold the funeral inside their home. The front doors were pulled open, the family shrine was moved to the sitting room, and the yard was flooded with flowers and lanterns and ihai spirit tablets.

  I wound my way through the maze of men and women in black suits and dark kimono. I saw classmates in pressed uniforms, eyes stained, holding on to their handkerchiefs like they were tiny pieces of Aiko herself. They never thought twice about her before, but after she died she suddenly became the most important person in the entire world.

  Ino-sensei stood near the entrance to the house, placing a hand on the shoulders of the students walking by. At times she would cross her arms and hold her elbows as if trying to physically hold herself together. Headmaster Sato walked up the front stairs with his wife and nodded to the school counselor without looking her in the eyes.

  I put my foot on the first step.

  “Hello, Koda,” Ino-sensei whispered. “Did you come alone?”

  I nodded. Someone in the sitting room was crying loudly. Now that I was standing here, I wasn’t sure I could actually go inside. I couldn’t keep the images of Aiko’s family from running wild through my head. I knew that tomorrow morning Aiko’s father would dress in his black suit and drive his daughter’s remains to the crematorium. He would return home and wait while a Buddhist priest laid her body on a metal tray and closed the oven door. In time, her father would get a call from that priest telling him to return. Aiko’s father would stand over the ashes of his daughter. He would pick out her bones with a special pair of chopsticks and place them carefully in an urn.

  “Start at the feet and end at the neck,” the priest would say. “That way she’ll be upright in the tomb.”

  Aiko’s father would nod and concentrate on keeping his hands steady. He’d wipe at his eyes, trying not to spill his tears on what remained of his only child.

  “Please, come in,” said a woman sitting at a thin table at the top of the stairs.

  I shook away the images, bowed to Ino-sensei, and walked inside Aiko’s home. I set a silver-and-black envelope of condolence money on the table. The woman took the envelope and said, “Thank you, Okita-san. Please sign your name here.”

  I picked up the pen and wrote Okita Koda into the guest registry. The woman bowed and motioned for me to enter the sitting room.

  I turned the corner to see Aiko staring at me. She was wearing her school uniform, a silver barrette pinned in her hair. She looked pretty but serious. Not a corner of a smile. No sadness in her eyes. She looked like she was thinking. Thinking of how she could escape the golden frame keeping her trapped inside that huge portrait.

  Guests were seated on either side of Aiko’s shrine. I walked up the center aisle and bowed to her family on the left and then again to the right. Her father was there, his face red and stony. Her mother was missing. Maybe she and Hiroshi the Salaryman couldn’t be bothered to return to Kusaka.

  I stepped closer to Aiko’s portrait, which was drowning in a sea of flowers and fruit, mochi rice balls, and leafy green branches. I draped a string of juzu prayer beads over my hands and bowed to her. Standing there, I didn’t know what to whisper to Aiko. I wasn’t very good at talking to things that weren’t there. After a few moments I bowed again. I guess our last conversation wasn’t really a conversation at all. I hoped if Aiko was watching, or listening, or whatever, I hoped she knew the things I couldn’t say out loud.

  I reached out and took a pinch of incense. I dropped it into the copper burner set up in front of the shrine and watched the smoke drift up over her portrait. The wisps hung in the air and then disappeared completely. I started to leave, but stopped when I caught sight of a three-legged crow.

  To the side of Aiko’s portrait sat another shrine. This one belonged not to an ancestor, but to the absent Yatagarasu. In the most ancient historical records, this large three-legged crow led Jimmu, the first emperor, to what would become the first capital of Japan. The small shrine was decorated with paper lanterns and statuettes and reliefs showing how Yatagarasu swept down from the heavens and saved Jimmu, leading him safely to his new home. Maybe the shrine was there so that Yatagarasu would find Aiko, too.

  I turned and bowed quickly again to her family so that they wouldn’t see my face. I hurried through the room and out the front door. The woman seated at the thin table handed me a decorated bag full of tea and small chocolates. I thanked her and quickly walked away from Aiko’s used-to-be home. I held my hand over my eyes and stepped down into the crowd of mourners, winding my way toward the front gate.

  I thought I could make it through Aiko’s yard. I thought I could get on my bike and push away from that place where three-legged crows look for lost girls and words hang in the air like threads of smoke. But before I could reach my bike I collided with another girl, this one dressed in gray.

  I looked up and for a fraction of a second I thought I’d run into Aiko. The girl was about Aiko’s height and her eyes looked almost identical. She even had a silver barrette in her hair.

  I wanted to bow and say Sumimasen, but the words froze solid in my mouth.

  “Get up,” the girl in gray said.

  I tried to answer, but the world had become so cold that my lips could barely move.

  “Get up, Seimei! Please!” she screamed, looking past me as if I weren’t even there.

  Icy air swirled around my limbs, stiffening my muscles, locking my face and eyes onto hers. This wasn’t real. I’d fallen asleep. Not here. Please, don’t let me lose my mind here.

  The girl in gray reached out, and the tips of her fingers began to smoke. “You’ll wish you were dead,” she barked. Smoke swirled up out of her sleeves and through the neck of her dress. “By the fire of Inari, you’ll wish you had died with the rest of them!” Through the freezing fog her eyes burned like broken shards of brimstone.

  I forced the funeral bag in front of my face, shielding myself with tea and small chocolates. The girl screamed and the world around us exploded in flames.

  “Koda. Koda, open your eyes. Look at me, Koda.”

  Ino-sensei lifted my neck and pressed a damp handkerchief to my forehead.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. The words dribbled out of my mouth and down the side of my face. I tried to stand up.

  “Slowly,” she said, helping me to my feet.

  All around me stood classmates and teachers and people I’d never seen before. People who should have been paying their respects to Aiko but now looked on in utter confusion at the fifteen-year-old who had just passed out in her front garden.

  I pushed past Ino-sensei and steadied myself. They weren’t saying it, but I knew they were thinking it. At a classmate’s funeral? How could he do such a thing? Has he no shame?

  “I’ll drive you home,” Ino-sensei said.

  “I’m fine,” I shot back.

  “Koda, I’ll put your bike in the back and drive you away from here.”

  My knees felt weak. “Okay,” I whispered, because getting away was the only thing I wanted.

  The girl in gray,
who was never smoking and was never on fire, stood off to the side. She watched me as Ino-sensei and I stumbled through the crowd of silent mourners. When I looked back from the front gate, she was still staring at me, leaning between the black suits and dark kimono, keeping her eyes firmly locked on mine.

  4

  It’s called suiminhossa. Sleep attacks. It mostly happens when … How did the doctor put it? When the area of my brain that regulates stress dominates the motor control centers of the brain itself. In other words, my feelings sucker-punch my head and I black out. It’s only really dangerous when I’m riding my bike. Or attending funerals, apparently.

  It didn’t always used to be like this. Before Aiko, I’d only had two attacks in my whole life. The first time was when I was thirteen. It was embarrassing. Also, it happened at a public bathhouse—so I was as nude as a sumō wrestler’s left butt cheek.

  I’d soaped myself clean in the showers and then stepped outside to the public bath. Steam was rising from the water and drifting up into the open mountainside. There were other men on our side of the partition, mostly old, lounging around in the hot water with their arms folded neatly across their bellies.

  I sat in the water next to my father. He leaned back, closed his eyes, and let out a long sigh of relief. Soon, though, I got this uneasy feeling. Not the feeling of being surrounded by old, naked guys—I had gotten used to that feeling a while ago—but the feeling I was being watched. And I was. I turned to see a stumpy man crouching in the water on the opposite side of the bath.

  I was going to say something like Hello or Good evening or Maybe you shouldn’t stare at nude boys in a bathhouse, but he had this look in his eyes. He seemed annoyed by me being there. Like I was seeing something I shouldn’t be seeing.

  My father shifted and brought handfuls of hot water up over his head and neck. Is it strange to be sitting in a public bathhouse staring at a naked man who is staring back at you? Probably. Probably, yes. But no matter how upset the squinty man appeared to get, I just couldn’t look away. The fear bubbling up inside wouldn’t let me tear my eyes from his. He had this tanuki-gao. A raccoon-face. You know, kind of squished in the middle. Awful, beady little eyes. A face that makes you think he’s hiding a whole mouthful of razor teeth.