The Book of Heroes by Miyuki Miyabe Page A

would we tell? The police?” A dark cloud passed over her mother’s face. “Not if I have anything to say about it,” she practically shouted. “We’re finding Hiroki ourselves, as a family. We can tell the police later!”
    Gradually, her mother’s enthusiasm nudged her father into action. It was the usual pattern of events whenever big things got decided in the Morisaki household.
    “Fine, okay. We’ll go. Yuriko—”
    “I’m going too!”
    “Of course. We have to take Yuriko,” her mother agreed. “I won’t split up this family again,” she added, the words catching in her throat.
    Forty-five minutes later, the three remaining members of the Morisaki household had piled into the car and driven out into the quiet city streets. Packing had taken them all of fifteen minutes (her father had to stop her mother before too long, as she packed a change of clothes for her brother, and food, and cold medicine in case he had caught a cold, and medicine for diarrhea…). The remaining half hour they had spent figuring out the exact address of the cottage and how they would get there.
    They had only been to her great-uncle’s place once. They hadn’t thought they would have a reason to go back. When her great-uncle had died, the family had decided to leave the handling of his affairs to the lawyers. So her father couldn’t remember where he had stashed the year-old memo with the cottage’s address on it. At first, when he couldn’t find it, he’d suggested they call his father to find out, but Yuriko’s mother refused. She didn’t want to have to explain to him why they wanted to know. “He’d probably call the police. I know he would,” she said. Yuriko’s grandparents on her father’s side of the family had always been cold to Hiroki, she explained. When her father started defending them, Yuriko had to butt in to stop them. In the end, it was Yuriko who found the memo tucked away in one of her mother’s many places where she was in the habit of “keeping things for just in case.”
    Her parents sat in the front. Whenever they went out someplace in the car, her brother always sat behind the driver’s seat, and she would sit behind the passenger seat. Now it was just her in the back seat. On her knees, she carried a pink backpack inside of which was the red book.
    —Good work, little miss.
    Yuriko stuck her right hand into the top of the backpack and laid her palm across the book’s cover. She could hear his voice like she had in Hiroki’s room.
    You know, she aimed her thoughts toward the book, when I was telling them, I started believing it myself. I really started to think maybe he was out there in the cottage.
    —Unfortunately, that’s impossible, the book replied. Your brother’s disappearance has left a hole in you, I know, but don’t fill it with empty hope. What matters now is whether my friends are still there in the cottage or not.
    What do you mean? You said that’s where they were.
    —Try asking your father. Ask if any of his relatives came to the cottage and did something with the books.
    Yuriko pulled her hand out of the backpack. She leaned forward.
    “Dad? Remember when we went to visit the cottage? Do you think anyone went in there after us to clean up?”
    Her father’s eyes darted to the rearview mirror. “If they have, I haven’t heard about it.”
    “So it’s all there just like it was? Remember all those books? It was like a library…You think they’re all still there?”
    “I should think so, Yuriko. If somebody did anything, my father or your Uncle Takashi would have told me.”
    Takashi was one of her father’s two brothers, the oldest in her father’s family.
    “Weren’t they saying that they couldn’t find a buyer for the house?” her mother asked. She had a hand on the dashboard, like she was trying to push the car to go just a little bit faster. “It’s just so remote out there. There wasn’t even a proper road. And the building was getting pretty