The 89TH Temple

By Charlie Canning

Shortlist, 2014 International Rubery Book Award
Finalist, 2013 Reader's Favorite Award
Runner-Up, 2013 Southern California Book Festival
Notable Book, 2013 Shelf Unbound Competition

"A clever, elegantly told story about Japanese young offenders who are taken on a pilgrimage of Shikoku. The style is simple, but potent and poses many questions about philosophy and Japanese society. It is entered as a book for Young Adults, but the judges felt it would be more suitably be categorised as an adult novel. There is much to admire here."

- Rubery Book Award capsule

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charlie Canning
• Release date: Apr 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301783922

Charlie Canning

Charlie Canning teaches Japanese literature and film at Syracuse University.

Book preview

The 89TH Temple

For Matsuki Tomone and Nakagawa Shoichi

Charlie Canning

Although the setting for the novel is the Shikoku Pilgrimage of 88 Temples, The 89TH Temple is a work of fiction. The characters and the circumstances related herein are imaginary and no reference to actual people or events is either intended or implied.

The 89TH Temple © 2012 Charlie Canning. All rights reserved.

Cover photo © 2012 Tokihito Igata. All rights reserved – used by permission.

Part I

1

In some ways, K. was better off inside. At least inside the detention center, nobody questioned that he belonged. This time, he certainly did belong. There was no mistaking that. The detention center was for youths who had committed a capital crime and he had killed someone.

It was odd when he thought about it. He had taken an entrance examination for his last school and had passed that. His parents had paid the tuition and bought him a school uniform. He had attended the entrance ceremony and been assigned a homeroom. These were the things that should have counted for something. But in the end, they were all far less important than being accepted by four of five key people.

At his new school (the wardens and counselors insisted on referring to the prison as a school), he was completely accepted and that felt good. He had a right to be where he was. He was qualified and nobody questioned that.

Another thing that was easier about his new situation was the complete absence of all the subtler forms of ostracism he had earlier endured. He hadn’t realized that there were so many ways you could hurt someone. Life at junior high school had been an almost unmitigated series of affronts and petty humiliations.

Even now, safe from the indignities he had suffered at school, recalling them alone was enough to make his body tense with fear. Since it had taken him years to learn the conditioned responses to a whole host of stimuli and situations, he supposed it would take just as long to unlearn them. But it was taking longer. He didn’t know why. What he had experienced then had become either muscle or scar tissue.

Inside, people understood that there was nothing small or insignificant about petty harassment. Most of the time, the bullying at school was just below the register of something that you could complain about. Although it was serious and every bit as debilitating as the more obvious forms of bullying, you couldn’t complain about it without making yourself look like an idiot.

A good example of this was what had happened to him every week for a year with the school shoes. Each homeroom class had a weekly cleaning detail around the school and theirs was the entrance. This was a large area with a raised platform of shoe cupboards on either side of the main hallway. Their job was to first sweep and then mop the entranceway and the hallway.

This sounded simple enough and not nearly as laborious or time-consuming as cleaning the bathroom or the school cafeteria. But because you had to clean the entranceway in your street shoes and the hallway and shoe cupboard area in your school shoes, you had to change your shoes twice to do the job.

His shoe cupboard was at the bottom of the first row on the left. Initially, it seemed like a good arrangement because he didn’t have far to go to change shoes and could easily change them without having to pad around in his stocking feet. But every time their group was on the cleaning detail, a few of his classmates would rush to clean the entranceway first. Then as soon as they’d seen him change his shoes to join the group outside, they would come back inside and pile up all of their brooms and mops in front of his shoe cupboard so that he couldn’t get to his school shoes without having to move everything to one side. The first couple of times, he had angrily pushed the brooms and mops aside. But once he realized that this was exactly the reaction they had been looking for, he tried not to register any emotion whatsoever. I won’t give them the satisfaction, he thought.

The game wasn’t over, however. In fact, it was just beginning. What had started as a simple schoolboy prank quickly morphed into something much more serious. Soon the stress of trying not to react found its way into involuntary muscle spasms, twitches, and jerks. Now the thing to be ridiculed was not his angry reaction to their overt bullying but his psychological responses to an ever-widening circle of stimuli. After several months of this, he began losing control of his own motor skills. This brought on even more intense rounds of harassment and ridicule. They were closing in. He knew that if he didn’t do something soon, he would not be able to put the fractured pieces back together again.

***

After he had killed Noguchi by bludgeoning him in the head with the metal part of a lane marker and drowning him in the swimming pool, the court spent a great deal of time on the question of premeditation. Had he planned to kill Noguchi in that manner on that day or was it something done on the spur of the moment? In the beginning, he had described it in fairly simple terms as a case of self-defense. Noguchi had been trying to kill him and K. had just beaten him to it. But after repeated questioning over six weeks by four people who took turns putting words in his mouth, he had signed an affidavit confessing to the premeditated murder of Noguchi by drowning.

Of course, in a way it was premeditated. K. was going to kill someone in the pool that day but whether it was going to be Noguchi or any one of half a dozen of his other tormentors was purely a matter of fate. Who was the homeroom teacher going to send out to the pool to tell K. that gym class was over and that it was time for math? He knew that he could count on it being one of the boys who always took such an opportunity to heap scorn upon him. Someone would volunteer. He still smiled at the beauty of it. Someone would volunteer.

When Noguchi came out to get him, K. was still in the pool. Sakana-chan! Noguchi called. K. dove under the water and sat at the bottom near the drain. He waited until he could see Noguchi’s hand beating the water at the side of the pool. Then he sprung off the bottom, grabbed Noguchi by the lapels of his school uniform, and dragged him in.

Before Noguchi could speak, K. had unhooked the lane marker and hit him in the forehead with the metal clamp. When Noguchi reached for the water polo net to try to pull himself out of the pool, K. cut off his retreat. K. then pulled on the net until the cement base jerked into the water. He wrapped the net around Noguchi’s neck, picked up the cement base from the bottom of the pool and threw it in the netting on the other side. Noguchi went down headfirst, flailing and kicking the surface of the water. K. dove alongside him, picked up the cement base and put it squarely on Noguchi’s chest anchoring him down. K. held onto the top of the cement base to steady himself and looked fully into Noguchi’s face. K. could see the terror there, but felt nothing. He waited until there were no more of Noguchi’s air bubbles hitting him in the face. Then K. resurfaced and sat on the edge of the pool.

Where’s Noguchi? Nishi asked. K. pointed to the drain.

2

S. didn't want to go on the school trip. She used to like school trips. That was before.

Anyway, she had already been to the Cloud Building. It was impressive enough as buildings went. She had nodded when her father had told her that it was one of Hasegawa's greatest works. What could the teacher possibly tell her that her father hadn't? It would be a waste of time.

But the school trip was compulsory, her mother said. School trips were not so much about the destination as they were about camaraderie and school spirit. Yes, S. had been to the Cloud Building but she hadn’t been to the Cloud Building with her classmates. She should join in with the others; she should get along.

Her parents didn’t understand. At least, her mother didn’t. She sometimes felt that her father did. That perhaps he had experienced something similar to what she was going through. But how could he? They didn’t have cell phones in those days and there was no such thing as a school blog. Maybe there was something at work. Maybe it was work.

When he came home late at night and put his briefcase on the table, he tried not to look her in the eye until he had had his bath and his first can of beer. Then he would sit down at the kitchen table or in front of the TV, look her full in the face and smile. All the events of the day would be recast. Tomorrow they would do their best. They would persevere. And on Sunday they would have some fun.

Since they didn’t live far from Osaka, the board of education had decided that the school trip would take place over the weekend rather than on three consecutive school days. This way, nobody would miss any classes. Although both students and teachers were unhappy about this, there was no way to remonstrate without appearing that you weren’t serious about education. And everyone was serious about education. The board of education had decided that a trip to Osaka was fun and that school was work. And that was that.

For S., this was a disaster. First, it meant that she was going to have to endure twelve straight days of ridicule. In a normal week, she had managed things so they could only get to her five and a half days a week. There was school from Monday to Friday and volleyball practice on Saturday morning.

Although she had quit the volleyball club six months earlier, she wasn’t really off the hook until the Saturday practice ended at noontime. Up until then, there might be a call from the volleyball coach or another argument with her mother. Even without a discussion, there was still the gym bag that her mother put out in the front hallway every Saturday morning (Whenever her father saw the bag lying there, he would put it in the closet). Would S. go to volleyball practice today? Not a chance.

Saturday afternoons were her decompression time. She turned off her phone, shut off her computer, and just lay in bed. After a couple of hours of this, she would get up and go out shopping with her mother. Then they would come home and make dinner. Sometimes, she and her father would ride their bicycles down to the video store to get a film. He always let her rent whatever she wanted. Once a month, they went out to dinner and saw a movie.

Sundays were special. Her father insisted they do something together. If her mother begged off or if S. had other plans, he would go out alone. Before S. had felt that it was her father that needed them on Sundays. But now, it was S. who needed him. And Sunday, she was going to be with her classmates on top of the Cloud Building.

The other thing that terrified her about the school trip was that it was going to be unpredictable. Life at school had a certain rhythm to it and after a year of being harassed, she knew where she had to sit and what she had to do. She had limited her exposure and cut down the angles. Now there was the bus, the hotel, the restaurants, the museums, and the shops to think of. How could she possibly manage it?

At the hearing, one of the prosecutors had suggested that S.’s first trip to the Cloud Building with her father had been to reconnoiter the place for the murder she planned to commit. She had never seen her father look so upset. He seemed to be fighting off an instinct to rise from his chair. Only his upper body moved. His feet were stuck to the ground. S.’s mother just slumped in the corner and sobbed.

Why did you do it? They had asked repeatedly.

I did it so that it would stop.

What would stop?

The bullying.

And did it stop?

Yes.

3

They belong in jail.

It may be that they were minors when the crimes were committed, but that doesn’t change a thing. They are still murderers.

Murakami smiled. No one had said a word in favor of his plan for nearly an hour. Every official who had anything to do with the incarceration of the seven juveniles had gone on record as being against the scheme from the beginning. But they were going to let him take the seven on the pilgrimage to Shikoku – that was clear. After the board had had their say, the tide would change from indignant opposition to a begrudging, faintly paternalistic setting of conditions. Then Murakami would have his chance to speak.

What’s the good of a legal system if there’s no punishment?

We have to think about society.

Murakami looked at Nakata. Murakami had gone to see him two weeks before the meeting to ask for his help. Nakata was up there with the others but he was not of them. Like Murakami, he was doing what he had to do in order to bring about the desired result.

Murakami looked at the others. They didn’t seem like bad men. What they were saying was stupid, of course. But what if they were all like Nakata? What if they were all just doing what they thought that they had to do to bring about the desired result?

At such times, Murakami liked to think in terms of what was talking instead of who was talking. Right now Ignorance was talking. When Ignorance was finished, something else would speak. It didn’t matter who was mouthing the words. What mattered was what was talking and Ignorance hadn’t finished yet.

"Yes, and what about the families of the victims? They don’t want to see the boy or girl