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Chapter 11
When I finish talking it's pretty late. Sakura listens intently the whole time,
resting her head in her hands on the kitchen table. I tell her that I'm actually
fifteen, in junior high, that I stole my father's money and ran away from my home
in Nakano Ward in Tokyo. That I'm staying in a hotel in Takamatsu and spending my
days reading at a library. That all of a sudden I found myself collapsed outside a
shrine, covered with blood. Everything. Well, almost everything. Not the important
stuff I can't talk about.
"So your mother left home with your older sister when you were just four.
Leaving you and your father behind."
I take the photo of my sister and me at the shore from my wallet and show
her. "This is my sister," I say. Sakura looks at the photo for a while, then hands
it back without a word.
"I haven't seen her since then," I say. "Or my mom. She's never gotten in
touch, and I have no idea where she is. I don't even remember what she looks like.
There aren't any photos of her left. I remember her smell, her touch, but not her
face."
"Hmm," Sakura says. Head still in her hands, she narrows her eyes and looks
at me. "Must have been hard on you."
"Yeah, I guess...."
She continues to gaze at me silently. "So you didn't get along with your
dad?" she asks after a while.
Didn't get along? How am I supposed to answer that? I don't say anything,
just shake my head.
"Dumb question--of course you didn't. Otherwise you wouldn't have run away,"
Sakura says. "So anyway, you left your home, and today you suddenly lost
consciousness or your memory or something."
"Yeah."
"Did that ever happen before?"
"Sometimes," I tell her honestly. "I fly into a rage, and it's like I blow a
fuse. Like somebody pushes a switch in my head and my body does its thing before
my mind can catch up. It's like I'm here, but in a way it's not me."
"You lose control and do something violent, you mean?"
"It's happened a few times, yeah."
"Have you hurt anybody?"
I nod. "Twice I did. Nothing serious."
She thinks about this.
"Is that what happened this time?"
I shake my head. "This is the first time something this bad's happened. This
time... I don't know how it started, and I can't remember at all what happened.
It's like my memory was wiped clean. It never was this bad before."
She looks over the T-shirt I haul out of my backpack, carefully checking the
blood I couldn't wash out. "So the last thing you remember is eating dinner,
right? At a restaurant near the station?"
I nod.
"And everything after that's a blank. The next thing you knew, you were
lying in the bushes behind that shrine. About four hours later. Your shirt covered
in blood and your left shoulder aching?"
I give her another nod. She brings over a city map from somewhere and checks
out the distance between the station and the shrine.
"It's not so far, but it would take a while to walk. But why would you have
been over there in the first place? It's the opposite direction from your hotel.
Have you ever gone there before?"
"Never."
"Take off your shirt for a minute," she says.