Read Online Last Winter We Parted by Fuminori Nakamura - Free Book Online

again.
    “See … Ah … Look.”
    She holds the photo right in front of my eyes. My breath catches.
    “… Will you … save me?”
    She looks at me.
    “… There’s someone I want you to kill.”

Archive 5

    Your letter is really boring.
    The reason why you became a member of K2. Do you think you can satisfy me with that kind of scratch? If you’re going to peer inside someone’s mind, you’re going to have to reveal something of yourself.
    From now on, I’m not going to write anything about the murders. Not until you give me something definitive about your own self. No matter how lonely I may be, I’m not going to let you talk me into going there.
    You got it? Don’t be so disappointed. It’s your own fault anyway.

    But then again, sitting here like this, in a prison cell and in front of a blank page, one is wont to write something. They say that death-row inmates are always writing letters. Some of them just keep writing letters addressed to no one—who knows who they’re intended for. I should be happy I still have someone to write to. That’s why I’m asking you. Come on, show me just what’s inside your head.

    … I guess I’ll tell you about when I was arrested. Something different from what you want to hear about. I’ve been thinking I’d like to try to describe to someone how strange it was when that happened. Maybe, if it were you, you might have thought it was happening to someone else.
    When they put the handcuffs on me, I thought, “Theycaught me.”… It may sound strange, but I remember feeling tremendously relieved. Like they had finally seized hold of a balloon that had been floating all over the place. Now I would no longer have to lie to anyone. Now I would no longer have to keep up with the confusion inside my mind … The irony is that prison is what a criminal is trying to avoid, but it is also the very thing that, at his core, he is yearning for. Here he no longer needs to go on living as an alien entity within a normally functioning society. The alien entity finds himself when he’s in handcuffs. It felt like … an appropriate resolution to my life.
    What’s more … once I was arrested, I wouldn’t be able to have a camera anymore. I wondered if I would be capable of being separated from my camera. The camera … Who invented such a thing?… What a terrifying device. Don’t you think?
    But people are—no, I mean I am—very selfish. I was arrested, and now that my life has been significantly restricted, after a while, I find myself wanting to be out there again. I find myself wanting to hold a camera once more. If I were to get out, I wonder if the balloon would start floating all over the place in the confines of my mind once more, and then explode again. Then I’d be arrested and relieved all over again. It’s a harsh existence … See what I mean? Sometimes I think they should just kill me already.
    I’m not doing so great today. I had thought it might relax me a bit if I wrote for a while, but the words are depressing me. Usually I can only write letters when I’m feeling calm enough.Part of my obsession with cameras is that, even though I’m a criminal, there are still people who think the photographs I took mean something. But then, my photos … No, I think it would make you happy to read this so I won’t write it. I’ll just say that, lately, there’s one thing I can’t stop thinking about. It’s … well, I wonder why the hell was I born?

    … A pretty random tangent, I guess. But this is your fault. Because you refuse to reveal yourself.
    By the way, recently someone else has emerged who wants to write a book about me. He’s already come to visit me twice at the prison. We talked through the acrylic glass. And you haven’t even come to see me once.
    Just like you, he has a habit of jumping the gun with his questions, and he seems kind of unreliable, but apparently my sister has taken a liking to him. I don’t know what