I knew this one. “It’s the marathon runner Kokichi Tsuburaya’s death note.”

“Ping pong, ping pong![30] That’s right! It’s amazing you knew that.”

I couldn’t really brag about knowing famous people’s last words, but Misaki praised me anyway. She sounded oddly taken with the contents of that death note, “Mikka Tororo… this is like some kind of joke, isn’t it?”

“Conversely, that might be why people are struck by it.”

“I see. That really clears things up for me”, she said, nodding repeatedly. “Tsuburaya, the runner, apparently went home to the countryside right before he died. Then, he ate grated yam with his mother and father, it says.”

“Hm.”

“I guess everyone wants to return to their hometowns before they die, after all.”

“Now that you mention it, Misaki, are you from this city?”

“No, I’m not. The north star is in that direction… so I’m probably from over there.” Misaki pointed in a north-by-northwest direction.

She said the name of a town I didn’t know and explained that it was a small town on the Sea of Japan, with a population of five thousand. According to her, it supposedly had a beautiful cape, but that cape had become a somewhat notorious spot for suicides.

“Ever since some famous person jumped off its cliff during the Meiji era, it’s like it’s become a Mecca for suicides. They say that so many people either jumped deliberately or slipped and fell accidentally that they had to construct safety barriers to prevent further incidents. When I was little, I didn’t know anything about that and was always playing on those bluffs. One day, I saw a strange woman there.”

Misaki continued, “She was by the cliff’s edge, on the high cape. It was a beautiful early evening, and the sky was a bright red. The woman, too, was beautiful.”

“And?”

“I took my eyes off her for just a moment, and she vanished. Even now, I sometimes see her in my dreams. It might have just been a dream to begin with, though. I mean, she had a really cheerful smile on her healthy-looking face. Alone, she stared at the ocean and late-afternoon sun. And then, in that one short instant, as I glanced away, she disappeared. A strange story, isn’t it?”

It was a strange story.

“What could have happened? I think she should have at least left a suicide note—maybe about grated yam or something”, I joked, trying to lighten the mood.

“I want to eat some grated yam.”

“It makes you itchy.”

“Yeah.” She nodded.

“It’s delicious, though, isn’t it?”

The conversation had begun to stray. I, too, was exhausted, after all. But Misaki was laughing. “Ah, how fun, how happy. You think so, don’t you, Satou?”

“Sure.”