The next day, in the afternoon, a detective stops by the library. I'm lying low in my room and don't know he's there. The detective questions Oshima for about twenty minutes and then leaves. Oshima comes to my room later to fill me in.
'A detective from a local precinct was asking about you,' Oshima says, then takes a bottle of Perrier from the fridge, uncaps it, pours the water into a glass, and takes a drink.
'How did he know I was here?'
'You used a cell phone. Your dad's phone.'
I check my memory and nod. That night I ended up all bloody in the woods behind that shrine, I called Sakura on the cell phone. 'I did, but just once.'
'The police checked the calling record and traced you to Takamatsu. Usually police don't get into details, but while we were chatting I got him to explain how they traced the call. When I want to I can turn on the charm. He also let out that they couldn't trace the person you called, so it must've been a prepaid phone. Anyhow, they know you were in Takamatsu, and the local police have been checking all the hotels. They found out that a boy named Kafka Tamura matching your description stayed in a business hotel in town, through a special arrangment with the YMCA, until May 28th. The same day somebody murdered your father.'
At least the police didn't find out about Sakura. I'm thankful for that, having bothered her enough already.
'The hotel manager remembered that you'd asked about our library. Remember how he called to see if you were really coming here?'
I nod.
'That's why the police stopped by.' Oshima takes a sip of Perrier. 'Naturally I lied. I told the detective I hadn't seen you since the 28th. That you'd been coming every day, but not once since.'
'You might get into trouble,' I say.
'If I didn't lie, you'd be in a whole lot more trouble.'
'But I don't want to get you involved.'
Oshima narrows his eyes and smiles. 'You don't get it, do you? You already have gotten me involved.'
'Yeah, I guess so-'
'Let's not argue, okay? What's done is done. Talking about it now won't get us anywhere.'
I nod, not saying a word.
'Anyway, the detective left his card and told me to call him right away if you ever showed up again.'
'Am I a suspect?'
Oshima slowly shakes his head. 'I doubt it. But they do think you might be able to help them out. I've been following all this in the newspaper. The investigation isn't getting anywhere, and the police are getting impatient. No fingerprints, no clues, no witnesses. You're the only lead they have. Which explains why they're trying so hard to track you down. Your dad's famous, too, so the murder's been covered in detail on TV and in magazines. The police aren't about to sit around and twiddle their thumbs.'
'But if they find out you lied to them, they won't accept you as a witness anymore-and there goes my alibi. They might think I did it.'
Oshima shook his head again. 'Japanese police aren't that stupid, Kafka. Lacking in imagination, yes, but they're not incompetent. I'm sure they've already checked all the passenger lists for planes from Tokyo to Shikoku. I don't know if you're aware of this, but they have video cameras set up at all the gates at airports, to photograph all the boarding passengers. By now they know you didn't fly back to Tokyo around the time of the incident. Information in Japan is micromanaged, believe me. So the police don't consider you a suspect. If they did, they wouldn't send some local cop, but detectives from the National Police Agency. If that happened they would've grilled me pretty hard and there's no way I could've outsmarted them. They just want to hear from you whatever information you can provide about the incident.'
It makes perfect sense, what he says.
'Anyhow, you'd better keep a low profile for a while,' he says. 'The police might be staking out the area, keeping an eye out for you. They had photos of you with them. Copies of your official junior high class picture. Can't say it looked much like you, though. You looked really mad in the photo.'
That was the only photograph I left behind. I always tried to avoid having my picture taken, but not having this one taken wasn't an option.
'The police said you were a troublemaker at school. There were some violent incidents involving you and your classmates. And you were suspended three times.'
'Twice, not three times. And I wasn't suspended, just officially grounded,' I explain. I breathe in deeply, then slowly breathe out. 'I have times like that, yeah.'
'You can't control yourself,' Oshima says.
I nod.
'And you hurt other people?'
'I don't mean to. But it's like there's somebody else living inside me. And when I come to, I find out I've hurt somebody.'
'Hurt them how much?' Oshima asks.
I sigh. 'Nothing major. No broken bones or missing teeth or anything.'
Oshima sits down on the bed, crosses his legs, and brushes his hair off his forehead. He's wearing navy blue chinos, a black polo shirt, and white Adidas. 'Seems to me you have a lot of issues you've got to deal with.'
A lot of issues. I look up. 'Don't you have any?'
Oshima holds his hands in the air. 'Not all that many. But there is one thing. For me, inside this physical body- this defective container-the most important job is surviving from one day to the next. It could be simple, or very hard. It all depends on how you look at it. Either way, even if things go well, that's not some great achievement. Nobody's going to give me a standing ovation or anything.'
I bite my lip for a while, then ask, 'Don't you ever think about getting out of that container?'
'You mean leaving my physical body?'
I nod.
'Symbolically? Or for real?'
'Either one.'
Oshima flips his hair back with a hand. I can picture the gears going full speed just below the surface of his pale forehead. 'Are you thinking you'd like to do that?'
I take a breath. 'Oshima, to tell you the unvarnished truth, I don't like the container I'm stuck in. Never have. I hate it, in fact. My face, my hands, my blood, my genes… I hate everything I inherited from my parents. I'd like nothing better than to escape it all, like running away from home.'
He gazes into my face and smiles. 'You have a nice, muscular body. No matter who you inherited it from, you're quite handsome. Well, maybe a little too unique to be called handsome, exactly. But you're not bad looking. At least I like the way you look. You're smart, you're quick. You've got a nice cock, too. I envy you that. You're going to have tons of girls fall for you, guaranteed. So I can't see what you're dissatisfied with about your container.'
I blush.
'Okay, I guess that's all beside the point,' Oshima continues. 'I'm not crazy about the container I'm in, that's for sure. How could I be-this crummy piece of work? It's pretty inconvenient, I can tell you. Still, inside here, this is what I think: If we reverse the outer shell and the essence-in other words, consider the outer shell the essence and the essence only the shell-our lives might be a whole lot easier to understand.'
I stare at my hands, thinking about all that blood on them, how sticky they felt. I think about my own essence, my own shell. The essence of me, surrounded by the shell that's me. But these thoughts are driven away by one indelible image: all that blood.
'How about Miss Saeki?' I ask.
'What do you mean?'
'You think she has issues to overcome?'
'You'd better ask her yourself,' Oshima says.
At two I take a cup of coffee on a tray up to Miss Saeki's room, where she's sitting at her desk. Like always there's writing paper and a fountain pen on the desk, but the pen is still capped. Both hands resting on the desk,
