Chapter 8: The Videotape

That night, Miura did not get home until nine. He glanced at the shoe cabinet beside the entryway. The leather shoes his father had worn that morning were not there.

He took some leftovers from the fridge, heated them up, and ate a few halfhearted mouthfuls. He was just about to go to his room when his mother came downstairs.

“Oh, it's you, Kazuya. You could've said something when you got home. I thought we had a burglar.”

“A burglar wouldn't have let you hear him.”

“Out playing with the older boys till this late again, and you didn't even call home.”

“How many times do I have to tell you? It's rehearsal!” Miura snapped.

“Yes, yes, rehearsal. So how did rehearsal go?” His mother was not particularly interested in the answer.

“Tch... Terrible,” Miura replied. “That guy Saionji suddenly said he had something to deal with at home and didn't show up. The third-years spent the whole day moping around, sighing about how it was the end of the year again and how this time next year they wouldn't be high school students anymore, or whatever. All they could talk about was the pressure to get into college, their futures, jobs. Aren't they embarrassed, acting like that in front of the younger members? What a bunch of useless losers.”

“I think your seniors have a point. If you keep wasting your time like this, Kazuya, you'll be just like them next year.”

“Give it a rest. All I have to do is get into some average university. Once I graduate, Father's bound to pull some strings and have a job lined up for me, isn't he?” Miura started to get up and leave as he spoke. Conversations like this with his mother usually ended this way.

His mother sighed and dropped the subject. Then she remembered something and called after him. “Oh, right, Kazuya. I found a package in the mailbox with your name on it. I've put it on your desk.”

“Got it,” Miura answered offhandedly, closing his bedroom door.

Leaning against the door, facing the pitch-dark room, Miura found memories crowding his mind. He had originally joined the light music club for two reasons. One was to rebel against his father; the other was that he thought it would be an easy club to coast through.

Things had turned out quite differently. These young people, who seemed so rebellious and unruly to outsiders, did not spend their days hanging around smoking together as he had imagined. Instead, they practiced like mad all year round. After joining, he had sunk almost all his free time into the club, often practicing late into the evening on weekends, just as he had today. Even his father, who had firmly opposed his taking up an instrument, had gradually begun to change his attitude.

If you put in the effort, you could change some things...

Once Miura began to think that way, he started taking the band seriously. Unfortunately, lately the seniors who had once been so steadfast and reliable had all changed.

“Look, my parents are still counting on me to go to university. Even if I don't quit the club now, I'll have to leave when I graduate, won't I?”

“Oh, me? I might go straight into training at my dad's factory in my last semester. How much longer will we be able to play together...?”

“Just let it go. We all know we'll have to give it up sooner or later, however hard we work. Do you actually want to become a professional musician? You've only been learning for a little over a year. A beginner like you should put that idea out of his head while it's still early. There are middle school kids who are better than us seniors. It's the talented kids with parents in music and families who can afford it who get to take that path.”

“Miura-kun, you can't imagine what it's like to go without lunch for half a month just to replace a set of strings. I'd love to be able to say the same things you do, but this is the real world. We seniors have to make compromises when it comes to our futures. It's already an unwritten rule in the light music club. Third-years hardly ever stay to the end, so you need to be ready to take over as president at any time. Be someone the younger members can rely on.”

For the past few months, this was all Miura had heard. He often thought, “Bunch of bastards. All that talk about being someone the younger members can rely on, and aren't you all running away yourselves?!”

He pushed those oppressive thoughts aside and turned on the light.

A large envelope lay on his desk. There seemed to be a thick rectangular object inside.

“Tch... Mom's been coming into my room without asking again,” Miura grumbled to himself. Then he walked over to the desk and opened the envelope.

Inside were a videotape and a card.

On the front of the card was a word in capital English letters: books. On the back were a few lines of small handwriting.

“So this is a videotape? Never seen one before. How am I supposed to watch it?” Miura picked up the tape, unsure what to do with it. He knew that over a hundred years ago people had used something called a VCR as their main means of recording and playing video, but so many generations of technology had superseded it that by now he would probably have to look in a museum to find one.

He could only put the tape aside for now and read the writing on the back of the card. “After that incident, the Suzuki family moved to Okinawa to get far away from you. But three months later, on December 8, 2099, one year ago today, Suzuki stabbed his sleeping parents to death in a frenzy, then went downstairs and turned on the gas stove. All three members of the family were ultimately reduced to ashes.”

Miura went deathly pale. His temples throbbed, and the hand holding the card began to shake, followed by his entire body. His neck had gone stiff. Slowly, he turned his head and stared at the videotape on the desk, unable to tear his gaze away.

Miura suddenly remembered a ghost story he had once heard, set in the days when people still used videotapes. Most of the details had grown hazy, but he remembered one part very clearly, in which a ghost haunting a videotape would crawl out of the television to claim its victims...

Five minutes later, he locked the card and tape in a drawer, rushed out of his room, changed his shoes in the entryway, and left the house.

The night was cold, but Miura felt as though the blood in his veins had frozen, colder still than the air.

His family lived in a good neighborhood. The area around their house was quiet, yet a bustling shopping street was only a few minutes' walk away.

There were at least ten audio and video shops nearby, though they were some distance apart. Miura spent over an hour asking at them one by one. At last, at the seventh shop, he got the answer he wanted.

“Huh? A VCR?” The young owner, who had green hair and a nose ring, wore exactly the same expression as every other shopkeeper so far. But his next words gave Miura a lift.

“Some stinking beggar actually brought one in yesterday. I step out for five minutes to take a shit, and my brainless dad buys it for a hundred and change. Why? You want it?”

A harsh, gravelly voice shouted from the room behind the owner. “Ungrateful brat! Is that any way to talk about your old man?”

“Shut up, you old fart! Want me to send you to the scrapyard along with that antique you bought?!” The owner turned and bellowed at the top of his lungs, his rasp indistinguishable from his father's. Then he turned back as if nothing had happened and continued in his normal voice. “Hey, kid, I'll practically give it away. Let's call it...”

Before he could finish, Miura slapped two hundred onto the counter. “Keep the change. Just give it to me.”

...

December 9, one in the morning.

Miura finally had the VCR set up and put in the videotape.

It should not have taken him so long to watch it. But after bringing the VCR home, he had to go out again because he had forgotten to buy the right cables. Once he brought those back, he discovered that he needed another set of cables and an AV switch to connect this ancient device to the flat-screen color television in his room, which meant a third trip.

After three or four hours of running around, Miura finally had the videotape playing in front of him.

It opened with two utterly absurd lines of text: “This film was produced by me personally. Please remember every detail in it. They will be of great help to you in the near future.”

Next came the signature of this “me,” Tian Yi, along with an unfamiliar address.

The film on the tape was not particularly frightening, though of course what happened in it would have been quite frightening in real life.

There were only two characters, both computer-generated 3D models. They looked like doodled figures, with round heads and clearly visible polygonal edges along their bodies. Each figure was a single color, one orange and the other purple, perhaps to tell them apart. There was not a single line of dialogue in the entire film, or even any sound effects. It looked like something a child had made.

Yet although little care had gone into the character designs, the setting was extraordinarily realistic. The school was unmistakably the high school Miura attended, recreated down to every flower and blade of grass on the playing field. Every object the characters handled was rendered to perfection, as though the real thing were right there before his eyes. Even with computer visual effects as advanced as they were in 2100, this degree of realism could only be seen in some of the biggest blockbuster films.

Miura watched the whole film in a cold sweat. It was not very long. In the end, the orange figure killed the purple one.

The use of clear tape to leave a gap at the edge of a first-floor window, a steel wire to trip someone, the hiding place, the strangling motion, the method of disposing of the body... Every detail played out before Miura's eyes. Many parts were even shown in slow-motion close-ups. Before the orange figure lunged at the other one, for instance, the film showed how it held the rope, the rope's total length, and how many times it wound it around its palms to leave a convenient length in the middle for a backhand strangling grip, and so on... These shots seemed deliberately intended to make Miura remember them.

But why?

Miura could not figure it out, so he watched the tape over and over. What did any of this have to do with what had happened on September 4 last year? Why did this Tian Yi want him to watch it?

By half past seven, it was fully light. Miura had watched the videotape at least ten times and still “got nothing out of it.” At least, that was what he thought at the time.

Today was another day off. Miura checked the time, then went to the bathroom to wash and make himself presentable. Taking the card with him, he left home again.