The Cause of Her Death

(Translated by Saya)

When I was a second-year high school student, a classmate called Minako*1 passed away. The cause of her death, I heard, was leukemia.

Her house was located in Ichikawa, in Chiba prefecture *2, and it took me more than an hour to reach the place where her funeral service was held.
I wasn't particularly close to Minako, so I left as soon as I finished offering incense. *3

The whole class was sunk in grief for a long time after that, but gradually we regained normalcy and in time the memory of her death faded from our minds.
By the time I graduated from high school I had totally forgotten about the unfortunate girl who had died young.

After high school I went to college and then began working.
One day I bumped into an old female friend from high school by chance.
It was she who first approached me on the street. If she hadn't walked up to me and called my name I wouldn't have recognised who she was, because she had become much thinner in comparison to how she used to be in high school.
In fact, she was so frail that she looked ill.

"It has been a while."
We exchanged brief greetings, and as she said she wanted to talk to me more, we headed for a cafe nearby.

We first told each other what we had been doing lately and so on.
 And then my friend abruptly asked me,
"Do you remember about Minako?"
"Minako? Oh, you mean the girl who died of leukemia."
I recalled then that she and Minako were close friends.
"I felt sorry for her at the time."
"Yeah, about that..." She knitted her brows. "She didn't actually die of leukemia."
"Really? Then of what illness did she die?"
Frankly I had zero interest in the subject.
You sometimes hear people hiding true causes of their deaths, for one reason or another.
But, undeterred by my bored reaction, she pressed on with her story.

"I really want to tell you something. You need to hear this."
"What is it? OK, go ahead and tell me."
I had already finished my work for the day.
I saw that she had become uncommonly serious.



The following story was what she told me, in essence.
The year before last, she received, out of the blue, a call from Minako's mother, inviting her to the seventh death anniversary of her daughter.
Since she was a good friend with Minako, she promptly replied that of course she would go.
The death anniversary was held not only for Minako, but also for Mianko's father who died soon after Minako died.

After the ceremony, Minako's mother said she had something important that she wanted to reveal to my friend, and so they went to the house owned by Minako's family, and entered one of its rooms.
As it turned out, the room used to be Minako's bedroom.

At first, they simply reminisced about some memories relating to Minako, but then after a while the mother said something unanticipated.

The mother said, she wanted to impart to my friend the truth about Minako's death.

So the mother began talking about it, but she had hardly opened her mouth before one of her relatives came in and said there was an urgent phone call for her, and so the mother had to stop her story in its tracks.
When the mother returned to the room again, she apologised and tried to restart her story, but this time a child of one of her relatives suddenly had a seizure, and again she was interrupted and couldn't finish her story.
In the end, they ran out of time, and parted with each other saying they would continue the talk on some other day.

At this point, my friend paused, breathing out a deep sigh.
"Do you still have time?" She asked.
I couldn't help but be drawn to her story.
"I do. Don't worry."
"For some time after that, I heard nothing more from Minako's mother. And I wasn't sure if I should call her or not."
"I understand."
I let her talk freely, only responding to her when it was necessary.
"I then forgot about her for a while, but last year the mother contacted me,
and I was invited to Minako's house again."
"I see."
After this she proceeded to tell me the following story.

On the day she was supposed to go to Minako's house, something came up and she couldn't keep the appointment anymore.
She called the mother and suggested to her that perhaps they could talk over the phone, but the mother insisted they see each other in person.
So she went to Minako's house on another day.
Then Minako's mother said she needed to tell her a few things before she revealed the most important part of the story.

She said, the truth was that Minako's death was so sudden that she wasn't able to be there for her when she drew her final breath.
However, her husband, Minako's father, was there, and some time after Minako died, her husband said he wanted to tell her the real cause of Mianko's death.

But when the husband tried to tell her about it, he always got interrupted in one form or another, and couldn't finish his story. So she wasn't able to hear it for a long time.
Finally, about half a year after Minako's death, her husband told her what trully happened to Minako.
But the husband died suddenly the next day.

The mother was now going to tell my friend the most important part of her story, but right at that moment, they were interrupted by a visitor to the house.
It happened to be an important visitor that the mother couldn't igonore. She went to the front door, dealt with the visitor, and came back.
It was around this time that my friend started feeling there was something really wrong about the whole affair.

The mother, when she came back, sat down and asked her, "Uh...Where was I? How much have I told you?"
My friend replied, "You just told me about your husband who passed away suddenly."
The mother went, "Oh? Have I already told you that?" looking puzzled.

"I started feeling creeped out by it all..."
"And? Were you able to hear what the mother wanted to tell you?"
She shook her head no.
"The strange thing is, after that our conversation somehow turned to the memories about Minako's life. I don't know how it happened. Before I knew it was evening, and it was time for me to go home."
"So you heard nothing at all in the end?"

She became quiet.
I drank up the now tepid coffee, and said,
"Shall we go to another place? We have been in this shop for too long."
She agreed. By this time we had become hungry so we decided to head for a fastfood restaurant.
I paid for our drinks, and we left the shop.

On the way to the fastfood restaurant, my phone rang. It was a call to let me know that another friend of mine had been involved in a car accident and my presence was needed there.
I really wanted to stay and listen to the rest of the story from my friend, but I had to go.
She said she would call me again, so I left.

The accident wasn't a big deal at all.
Two days later, she called me at home.

"I couldn't tell you this before, but the truth is Minako's mother died a few days before I saw you."
"What? You mean just before I talked to you in the cafe?"
"Yes. And she finally told me the real cause of Minako's death, the day before she died."
"......."
"Do you want to hear what she told me?"

I hesitated but said,"I must admit I'm curious, but don't tell me." I told her loud and clear. "You hear me? Don't speak about it to anyone, ever again. Forget about the whole thing."

"Thank you." She sounded relieved. "But I feel I have to tell Minako's younger brother, at least."
"Don't. Just forget about it."
"But he is the only family member left in Minako's household."
"Somethings are best left unsaid. This is one of those things."
"OK..."
The conversation with her ended there.

I couldn't get rid of the anxiety I felt about my friend.
Minako's brother was already an adult, and it wouldn't surprise me if he started to suspect something was wrong about his family members' successive deaths.

I phoned my friend again.
She told me then that she went to see Minako's brother but didn't tell him about the cause of Minako's death.
I told her again to keep quiet about it and hung up.
Some time after that I tried contacting her again but she was apparently too busy to pick her phone up and we never again had a chance to talk.

About a month later, the news of her death reached me.

I never found out what she told Minako's brother in the end.

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*1 Minako - in the original text, the girl's name was abbreviated to just "M," but I thought it would make the reading easier if a full name was given, so I randomly chose this name for the story. (But I just recalled I knew a girl called Mianko a long time ago, who once told me, while we were chatting in a cafe, that she couldn't count how many men she had made cry. I was like, it that something to brag about? LOL)
*2 Chiba Prefecture - This is the place where you find Tokyo Disneyland. Yes, it says Tokyo Disneyland but it is actually in Chiba. LOL. They named it "Tokyo" because it sounds better that way (Nobody outside of Japan knows Chiba, after all). For this reason, some Japanese refer to Tokyo Disneyland as "Chiba Nezumeyland (Nezumi being a Japanese word for mouse)."  Anyway, Chiba is actually a really nice place with an attractive sightseeing district like Sawara.
*3 Offering of incense at funeral - See Japanese Funeral Etiquette: Some Helpful Guidelines.