Now that he mentioned it, that did make sense. If I were going to part with my toe, even for just a little while, I wouldn’t treat it like shit. I’d want to ice it up and wrap it carefully. Maybe even put it in a really pretty box and deliver it myself, leave it somewhere obvious so they’d be sure to find it right away, then ring the doorbell and run like hell. Would that be too much to ask for your own toe?
“And he would have been worried about how long it would take to collect the ransom. If he wanted to have the toe reattached, he would have been in a big hurry.”
He had me there. Oh well.
“When you think about it, your theory doesn’t make sense. And there’s one other hole in it. It seems Sano’s parents couldn’t get their hands on anything like ten million yen. They look sort of rich, but they don’t have that kind of money. They would have had to sell their house to get it. In that case Sano wouldn’t have had anywhere to come home to after getting the ransom, and he knew that.”
“I see what you mean, but how do you know all that stuff?” I asked.
“Know all what stuff?” Yoji said.
“That the Sanos didn’t have the money and all.”
“It was on their website.”
“Website?”
“You didn’t know? Sano had his own website, and his mom and dad posted stuff about the kidnapping. Everybody was talking about it. Then they started this fundraiser to get the ransom money together. Said they would still need two million yen more after they’d sold off everything they owned, that they’d have to sell the house in three days’ time if they couldn’t raise the whole ten million. It’s all there, right on their site.”
“No way!” Some people have no self-respect. Then again, their son had been kidnapped. “So did they get the two million?”
“It doesn’t look like it. I think everybody thought it was a joke.” Who wouldn’t? Something like that appearing all of a sudden on the web—looks kind of fishy.
“Then last night they added a link to Voice of Heaven, and everybody started posting on the bulletin board and it went totally viral. It was crazy. Apparently that was the end of his mom and dad’s attempt to raise the money.”
Of course it was. You can’t put anything true on the web. You can’t tell people what you really want—or need. You can’t get your prayers answered by tossing them into some fictional universe.
Pretty pitiful. Sano’s mom and dad…and their prayers.
Pretty pitiful to ask when you know ahead of time no one is going to answer.
“So they’ll have to sell the house,” I said.
“Don’t say that—or at least don’t make it sound so simple. Where would they go?”
“It doesn’t matter how it sounds, they’ll still have to sell the house. If you want to change the situation, you have to change how you deal with it, change the whole game.”
“I suppose you’re right. But that’s why I want to find Sano before it comes to that. That would solve the problem.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I said. But it also sounded practically impossible. I mean, especially if Sano hadn’t faked the whole thing—I mean if he really had been kidnapped, and a real kidnapper had cut off his toe and really sent it to his house and wanted real ransom money. That was truly scary. Totally creepy. No?
“You’ve got to stop sticking your nose into stuff you don’t understand, Yoji. It might be dangerous.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not alone. There are a bunch of us.”
“Then you should leave it to the bunch. Why don’t we forget about it for now and do something else?”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” he said.
Why did everybody care so much what happened to Sano? Were he and Yoji really such good friends?
“I didn’t think you and Sano hung out together,” I said, sitting down on some sort of playground ride that looked like a pink bear stuck on a spring. The bear tipped over, and I went with it.
“That has nothing to do with it,” Yoji said. “If somebody’s hurting right in front of you and you can do something to help, you do it. I don’t get worked up about trying to save refugees in Ethiopia, but when some guy in our class has been kidnapped, then I can’t help worrying—and trying to do something. Who wouldn’t?”
You’re right, Yoji. Not many people would say it out loud, but you’re right: sympathy has limits and borders. Even if somebody is really hurting, writhing in pain, if the pain is happening far away, or if it somehow doesn’t seem real, then almost nobody would take the trouble to lend a hand or walk across the street or even so much as glance sideways. That’s natural enough—just the way things are—but no one is willing to admit it. The urge to help and to stay out of it always seem to be at odds somehow.
I suppose people can only do what they want to do.
Or maybe that’s not right. I wanted a Yoji who was some kind of hero, who was willing to help anybody, not just Nizaki or Urayasu or Sano from our class, but the refugees in Ethiopia or the man in the moon or aliens lost in some wormhole.
But there was nobody like that, and it might be scary if there were. A guy like that would have to spend all his time trying to preserve his hero image. So I guess I’d rather have an honest, forthright Yoji. He’s cuter that way anyway.
Still, even if it was just to
