35

The whole situation was beyond anything I could possibly manage. If she was just messed up in the head, maybe I could’ve done something; at least we would’ve been in the same boat. If she was just a monster, maybe I could’ve become the hero who rose up to defeat her.

But I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything to a poor little girl. There wasn’t something for me to do, and I certainly couldn’t defeat her.

I’m basically just one big inferiority complex, so I have a hard time sympathizing with or feeling sorry for anyone. Honestly, it’s probably true to say I hate those kinds of feelings.

But what else could I do other than sympathize with and feel sorry for that little girl who couldn’t have been more than ten years old, whose body bore the marks of being attacked over and over, only sparing her face, neck, and limbs?

And what hurt most of all was that U didn’t think anything was out of the ordinary.

“When I push these blue spots, it hurts.”

U talked about it like she was an acupressure therapist… Maybe because it would shatter her soul to think of it any other way. Shatter her soul, huh? Look at me, using such a novel-esque phrase.

Guess that’s all I have in the face of such an overwhelming reality.

It suddenly made sense why U could attack me with a knife so easily. Why she poked me with the knife to get me to go where she wanted. She did it because that was how she was always treated. She must have lived her whole life threatened with that level of violence… Even having knives thrown at her. No wonder she behaved that way.

Because children imitate their parents.

And if U was imitating… I doubted she was self-aware enough to know what she was showing me, and I didn’t confirm it with her, but I could be almost completely certain that all the open wounds on her body had been made by her parents. In the interest of being thorough, one could argue that she was being violently bullied at school, but that didn’t make sense in an elementary school environment. The damage was too subtly horrifying for that. Sure, young kids can be brutally, uncontrollably violent, but that’s just it. They’re uncontrollable. Kids don’t have the wherewithal to understand that they should avoid the face until they get somewhere around middle school.

Add to that the fact that the wounds, while fresh, were beginning to heal. In other words, none of the damage to U‘s body looked like it had been afflicted within the past 10 days or so.

Which meant that U had been in a violence-free environment for around 10 days, matching up oh-so-neatly with the time her parents “went away”… And when I started looking from that angle, her body being so gaunt that I could see her ribs didn’t check out with just a week’s bad diet. I remembered her offhand remark that eating raw meat and vegetables was more or less how she’d always eaten.

All the pieces were beginning to fit together… and the picture that they formed took the shape of U‘s broken and bruised body.

I hated myself for thinking even for a moment that U‘s parents would be my savior from her captivity… What if I had just told them everything the moment they walked in the door, blind to the whole situation? I didn’t want to think about the consequences, but all I could do was imagine the scenario over and over.

What was I supposed to do?

With an objective perspective 10 years in the future, it’s pretty obvious what I should have done. The moment I saw U‘s naked body, I should have gotten out of that tub and turned on my phone. The call would of course be directed to a child welfare center rather than the police.

But that’s a move that would only work 10 years in the future. Japan didn’t have guidelines in place for dealing with child abuse in 2001. It’s hard to believe that just one decade can make such a big difference, but back then the lines between “discipline” and “abuse” were blurred, and the general consensus was, “Don’t interfere with the way other people raise their children.”

Abuse was certainly happening, but there weren’t any systems in place to recognize it… so I didn’t know what to do when I was faced with it.

So I just kind of stopped doing anything.

The whole time we were in the bath, I didn’t tread upon any serious topics, and I did everything I could to hide how I felt at seeing U‘s scars, both old and new, rippling across her body. I knew I shouldn’t walk on eggshells, but I know that I still ended up saying a bunch of stuff that pandered to her, and though she didn’t say anything about it, I’m sure in her own childish way she knew something was wrong.

That was the moment that the fragile trust between a kidnapper and her victim cracked under the pressure. It was all over. If this was a story, I’d lead right into a final chapter with a neat resolution… but this isn’t a story. This is the description of an incident, so it will conclude in the exact way that the incident did.