Emi Sekiyama [I4-I5] Nicety
This one is of a track meet. She is standing in her tank top and shorts, hair tied back and up, face glistening in sweat, between two boys - one is barely taller than her, the other towers over both. She’s holding a bouquet of yellow flowers.
The writing on the back reads, ‘Last day at track. Me, Tatsu and Kazu. Coach got me flowers!’
“This year’s Battle Royale Programme is now underway! While you can now see the interactive twenty four hour coverage of this class fighting to the death on NHK 2, little detail has as yet been released on the class in question, only that they hail from the Shinagawa Ward of Tokyo and are second year high school students, another unusually high age.
“Remember that on NHK 2, you can select your student of choice and follow them around the battle area via interactive as they fight for their lives in what promises to be the most gripping Programme yet!”
“Let’s go. We shouldn-we shouldn’t stay here.” Tatsutarou’s voice shook. His face was blotchy, patches of red and pale clashing on his cheeks.
Emi nodded jerkily, and her feet were in autopilot as she walked in step with the guy away from the shelter, the warmth, of the Visitor’s Centre. That crowd wouldn’t be in there, waiting and crowing in delight at their hoax. No hoax was this good.
Kei Aihara wasn’t going to be in there.
“Why were you there?” Her voice sounded alarmingly normal, if a little high pitched.
Tatsutarou. She forced her mind to go at a normal pace - it seemed to be working at half speed. What did she know about Tatsutarou Iwamoto. He took track. He was good at it. Faster than her, but not the fastest.
“I thought…” He took a deep breath and started again. His voice still shook almost uncontrollably. “I thought I might find food or… a weapon or something. My weapon - I got a plastic bag!”
He laughed, and there was a touch of hysteria colouring the sound. Emi’s face twisted in a fearful grimace. She found herself shifting so that they were walking slightly further apart. Just a little.
He wasn’t unpopular, but he didn’t have a specific group of friends. He tended to hang onto other people’s groups and none of them minded that, but after a while he had the good sense to detach and move to another clique.
In an odd act Emi only noticed because she helped arrange the events, he never brought his family to parent-teacher evenings. But of course she knew why that was. Probably the whole class knew by now.
There was suddenly fear like ice in her stomach. She shouldn’t have even started to think about this.
“What about you?” he asked suddenly, shaking her out of her frozen reverie. Emi started to dazedly ask, ‘what about me’, but then realised he meant her weapon. What weapon did she get. She hadn’t yet checked. With an “oh” of comprehension, she reached into her bag - the torch had been all she’d picked up before, the first thing her fingers had come to. Rummaging through, her fingers touched something rough - bread - a plastic shape that was maybe one of her water bottles, then something cold, metal and covered in ridges. It was this object she drew out of her bag, and held it before the light thrown by Tatsutarou’s flashlight.
“It’s a cheese grater,” Tatsutarou said stupidly, and Emi nodded mutely.
To think she had always laughed at those kids who got what the bookies dubbed ‘gag weapons’.
She stumbled again.
“Be careful,” Tatsutarou muttered, seemingly more out of reflex than anything else. He took a deep breath. “We need to find shelter. Somewhere to hide. We’re gonna be alright, okay?”
Emi thought she understood -maybe he needed this just as much as she.
“Yeah.” She nodded. “We’ll be fine.”
- “Congratulations.”
“Huh?” Emi spins round and finds herself next to Yuuji Yanagihara, putting his shoes away in the shelf next to hers. She’d been so lost in thoughts of absolutely nothing she hadn’t even noticed.
“Class reps?”
“Oh!” She’d been so out of it she’d momentarily forgotten everything. Yesterday the class rep vote results had been announced. She had apparently beaten Kotone by one vote, a fact which, while embarrassing next to Kenji’s utter landslide, was still enough to give her a smug bubble of satisfaction in her stomach. There were no hard feelings toward Kotone, of course not, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t gloat in her mind. “Thanks. Sorry you didn’t get it.”
“Nah,” Yuu demurs. “Kenji was always going to win that. He deserved it.” Beat. “Bastard.”
They both snicker as they move toward their homeroom. For the few moments it takes, there’s companionable silence. Yuu is one of those people with whom silence is just as comfortable as a lively conversation.
“So congratulations,” Yuu slides the door open and waits for her to pass through. “You get to shepherd this lot around for the next year. Punish them. Make them bow. Go to school meetings…”
“Why did I sign up for this?” Emi’s still laughing as she takes her seat.
They found a craggy rock face just off the hiking trail, three sides bearing down and making something of a shallow cave. Tatsutarou told her he thought they might be in I5, but he wasn’t sure - it could be still I4. It wasn’t much, and it didn’t provide shelter from anything in particular, but it was hidden and it was off the beaten track. But Emi wasn’t thinking about logical things enough to care about where they were.
Her mind was spinning.
They sat about half a foot apart, huddled up in silence.
They were alone.
Each of them had laid out the contents of their bags - identical in each and every way, with the exception of just one thing: where Emi had her cheese grater, Tatsutarou had, exactly as he had said, a large plastic bag, embossed with English writing and horribly loud whenever they touched it. Emi flinched from the sounds it made and eventually, Tatsutarou stowed it back in his bag.
Emi felt sick now, but silently she bore it down, swallowing convulsively whenever the lump rose in her throat - it was easy to pass off her shaking as general cold and fear and that’s what it partially was.
But it wasn’t just that.
- “You know the Iwamoto family, don’t you? They live pretty near here.” Her mother’s voice trickles in through the open bedroom window, Emi paying little attention as she works on algebra homework. She fully plans on getting this done now so she can go to Kotone’s later - not that Kotone is going to know that until Emi phones her before she leaves.
“Yeah, of course I do. Old Saki Iwamoto comes into the salon sometimes.” Ms Akita. They’re standing leaning against opposing sides of the fences splitting the two back yards, their usual spot. They rarely gossip about anything interesting enough to eavesdrop on, so Emi doesn't bother.
“Emi told me today that their grandson’s in her class.”
Emi’s only partially listening now because her name’s been mentioned. Her classmates aren’t generally any interest of her mother’s…
“Oh, Christ. That grandson?”
“He's their only grandson.”
Emi’s full attention is on the conversation downstairs now.
“Small world. Well, I wouldn’t worry about him. Atsuko’s a lovely woman.”
“I'm not saying she isn't.” Her mother sounds uneasy. “But they’re on the same school team together, Kumiko. I don’t like it. I don’t want a rapist’s son hanging around with my daughter, to tell you the truth.”
Emi has stopped writing. Her pencil is poised over the paper in the middle of scribbling the last equation, but she’s lost interest in writing it.
“Don’t worry about it, Michiko. I’m sure there’s nothing wrong with the kid. What’s his name, Tarou?”
“Tatsutarou.”
“I don’t think you have anything to worry about with him. Honestly, don’t worry.”
At this point, Emi gets up and silently shuts her window. She then sits at her desk for what must be over a minute, staring at the notebook in front of her without really seeing any of it.
And then she gets up, makes her way over to the landline phone in the corner and has smashed in a phone number in seconds.
Emi’s group of friends never hangs out with Tatsutarou again.
And now here they were.
“Emi?” The voice breaks the eerie silence bearing down on the cliff face. If they kept quiet long enough, maybe they could each have pretended that they were all alone here.
“Hm?” Her own voice is even higher pitched than usual.
“What do you think’s going to happen now?” There’s a fragility to his voice Emi doesn’t want to hear.
“I…” She knows. “It’s like he said. In three days time, we’ll all be dead. Except for one person.” She sighs. “One lucky person, huh?” That high pitch again.
“Can you see anybody in our class killing anyone?”
Of course she couldn’t see it. Half her class, she’d privately thought for a while now, were functionally retarded. There were the ones who were actually retarded or blind or disabled and then there were the ones who were just generally a bit thick and had no idea what was going on around them. Could they really kill anyone?
Sometimes, privately, she had idly thought that this was the kind of class they should put in a Battle Royale.
But that was back when Battle Royale was just something on her TV screen, something you collected trading cards of - like her semi-valuable Chinatsu Kawaguchi, Yuuki Watanabe and Miyuki Ishida cards, collecting dust in her desk. And she’d never seriously imagined it.
Wouldn’t ever really wish it on them.
But sometimes she had to wonder what people like these really had to offer. What people like the boy sitting next to her had to offer. And at that, the frisson of fear flashed its way down her spine once again.
“Maybe,” she finally answered, underlying tremble in her voice. “The Programme makes people do a lot of things. When people are scared, they do really stupid things.”
“You’re right.”
He laughed again, and there was that tiny touch of hysteria. “We’re gonna die, right? You and me both. And some kid like Akio’s going to win and we’re going to be dead and-and why should he win?”
Emi stayed silent, kept her mouth closed. She didn’t want him to hear her teeth chatter.
“He doesn’t deserve to win this. Someone else does. Anyone else.” He sounded pleading, as if asking her could make Akio not live past three days.
“Did you ever watch the Programme?” The sudden change in focus made her start.
“Uh. Yeah…. I did,” she answered hesitantly, not sure where the conversation was suddenly going. The change of direction had confused her and right now, she didn’t think she could take any extra confusion.
“Did you ever see any of the kids who would, uh… confess stuff to each other?”
If Emi had even wanted to answer, Tatsutarou didn’t give her the time. He seemed to be rushing on in case he ran out of courage before the end.
“I always thought it was pretty dumb, you know? Really stupid.
“But now, you know? I think I kinda get it. I mean before…. We didn’t hang out, you had a boyfriend…”
Emi swallowed down a rush of bile along with the urge to hiss out, have a boyfriend. She didn’t want to hear any more, but she didn’t have the nerve to tell him to stop, either. Her hands twitched with the urge to clap them over her ears. She knew what was going to come next and she’d never wished for anything more in her life than to be away from here, this moment.
“And I’m not gonna get the chance again…”
She almost wished for someone to come around the bend and see them - someone, anyone. The infamous Akio, for all she cared.
“Emi,”
It was like bracing for impact.
“I really like you, okay?”
The breath she was holding froze in her lungs, like she knew it would.
The interactive channel is something of an innovation in that it allows the viewer to select the student they want to see, instead of the usual affair in which one continuous channel is shown at all times and the view changes either during an important event or every seven minutes. The cameras follow the movement of the collars and it’s really a very impressive system.
At four minutes past two in the morning on Day 1, combined viewership of the Iwamoto and Sekiyama channels was at around 1,000. Two minutes after that, it had jumped over ten percent. Over the next hour, it reached at one point a peak of 5,000. The viewers, at times, can be as animalistic, sadistic, morbid as the spectacle they’re enjoying.