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intended to go back to my own room, but plucked up my courage and waited in Kaori’s instead. When she saw my face she climbed into bed without a word and hid under the covers.
    “I saw,” I said, but there was no answer. “I couldn’t believe it. What’s going on?”
    It was like I was talking to myself.
    “What is Father …?”
    Underneath the bedclothes Kaori was weeping.
    “What is he …?”
    “I don’t know,” she said in a small, tearful voice.
    “He calls you to his room, makes you strip?”
    “Mm.”
    “What else?”
    “I don’t know,” she replied, and started sobbing violently. “Now it’s just taking my clothes off, but I don’t know what’s going to happen next. I think he’s going to …”
    “But so far you just strip and he watches you?”
    “Mm.”
    “Mmmm.”
    Wrapped in the futon, Kaori’s body looked tiny.
    “His face, that blank face, suddenly it fills with lust, and I get even more scared, but I can’t move, and your father’s face gets uglier and uglier, and all the time, he’s staring at me.”
    I could hardly breathe.
    “Do you remember? What Father said the day you arrived? He said he was going to show me hell.”
    Kaori raised herself a fraction in the bed and shook her head, still crying.
    “When I turn fourteen. Six months from now.”
    My heart was beating so fast it hurt.
    “Then my father said that you would play an important part. An important part in showing me hell. So that’s it, that’s what he meant. I knew it, he’s mad, crazy, completely insane.”
    Apart from the desk, bed and closet, Kaori’s room was completely bare. She had never asked for dolls or trinkets or anything.
    “He’s planning to do even worse things to you. He’s already old, so maybe he’ll hire someone, maybe even a whole lot of people. And he’s going to make me watch?”
    Kaori was looking at me, tears streaming down her face.
    “But I won’t let that happen.”
    I looked directly into her eyes.
    “Even if I have to kill him.”

THE PROBLEM OF how to murder someone without getting caught has puzzled many people throughout the course of history. Now I was contemplating it too. I’d fantasized about killing my father for ages, but when I was eleven my ideas were just childish. Even though I was still young, in my first year of junior high, now I had to come up with a detailed, viable plan.
    What else could I have done? In the face of the old man’s madness, what could a child like me have done? Even after it was all over I kept on thinking about this. Maybe I could have gone to the police and told them that half a year from now Father was going to show me hell? If I’d done that, I’d havebeen taken into custody as an emotionally disturbed minor. Or maybe I should have got a video camera and taped him watching Kaori. Then I could have sent it to the police or the orphanage where she was raised and asked them to take her back into their care. That might have worked. But those were all just “what ifs.”
    The orphanage’s main benefactor was a company in the Kuki Group—my father, in other words. I remembered two cases where firms related to the family had been accused of minor irregularities, and the local police had hushed them up. Even so, it still might work in this case. Perhaps Kaori could go back to the institution, beyond Father’s reach. But even if she could, would he give up? There was no way that this affair on its own would be enough to send him to prison. No matter how much I wanted to believe it might, the likelihood was far greater that it would not work out. And even if she did go back to the orphanage, it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that he would hire some people and come up with an ingenious plan to get her back—basically to abduct her. For him it was no longer just the enjoyment of taking me to hell. He’d also started to develop an obsession with Kaori herself. I was only given a tiny allowance, much smaller than you’d expect