The Book of Heroes (7 page)

“There, there. That’s the way,” the book said, sounding satisfied. “Good night, miss. Get some rest.”

I’ll let go of the book and just walk out of the room. We’re done here.

Wait. No we’re not.

“Is there really no way I can help my brother? Are you sure none of the grown-ups can do it? My parents and the police can’t help?”

“That’s right, they can’t.”

“And I can’t help either because I’m a little girl? So who could? Who else is there? Isn’t there anybody who could help my brother?”

“What would you do if I told you?”

“If there is, I’m going to go to them and ask them to help my brother.”

I would go and ask, and they would listen.

“If you know, you have to tell me. Where can I find someone who can help my brother?”

Yuriko wasn’t looking at the clock, so she didn’t know how much time passed before the book answered, but it seemed like an eternity. “Nowhere here. An
otherplace
.” There was something in his voice that sounded sterner, more solemn than before. “You would have to leave your world in order to find someone who can help your brother, little miss.”

How am I supposed to do that?

“Is that what you were talking about when you said adults couldn’t even leave this world?”

“That’s right.”

“But I’m a kid…so I can?”
If I can, I’m going.
“Where is this other place? Is it in another country? Would I have to take an airplane?”

“Not just any other place, an
otherplace
. A place outside this
Circle
you’re in.”

The book began to explain.
Circle
meant this world. And not “world” like in “world history,” or even “world map,” or the other worlds that Yuriko was familiar with. It meant something bigger, much bigger.

“You could walk to the farthest corner of Earth, or the most distant star, and that would still be inside your
Circle
as we see it. Your world, or to be more precise, the story of your world is all inside this Circle, and nowhere else.”

This wasn’t very helpful. But Yuriko had found one thing to seize hold of.

“But if I really, really want to go, um, outside my Circle, I can, right? Would you take me there?”

“Well, you are a child…” the book muttered. “And because you’re a child,” the book said, a little more loudly, “you can make this kind of immense decision. The kind of decision that might change your life. The kind you can never take back.”

She couldn’t tell whether the book was rolling his eyes or was genuinely impressed with her.

“But I suppose there’s no helping it, after all it was my fault for talking to you in the first place. I have a responsibility.”

Something deep in Yuriko’s chest tightened, but for the first time in a long while it wasn’t thanks to sadness or anger.

“Thank you! Thank you so much.”

“Don’t thank me yet. This isn’t going to be easy. And I won’t be able to do it by myself,” the red book admitted. “That’s why I need to take you to my friends first. And besides,” the book added quietly, “that’s where the Way In is, anyway.”

“So we have to find your friends? Where? A bookstore, maybe? A library? You’re pretty old so…maybe a used bookstore?”

The red book chuckled. “You’re pretty funny, miss. Maybe you’ve forgotten?”

Forgotten? Forgotten what?

“Do you really think your brother picked up a book like me, with all the strange things written inside me, at the local bookstore? Think about it. Try to remember. How long ago was it? It was still cold outside. You and your brother were all wrapped up in your thick coats. Remember going to a place where there were books like me, so many you could hardly count them?”

Yuriko picked the book back up off the shelf and sat down so she could think better.
When it was still cold? Wearing coats? With my brother—

“And all of us went, our whole family?”

“That’s right.”

White breath puffing in the air. A place with so many books you couldn’t count them.

Yuriko’s mouth hung open. “You mean my uncle’s cottage!”

“Well, to be precise, he’s your father’s uncle, which makes him your great-uncle.”

It had been the first Sunday of December the year before. The whole family had piled in the car.

“I remember he had this incredible reading room there—it was like a whole library inside.”

“And that’s where I was,” the red book said softly. “The Hero was there too.”

But Yuriko was too busy thinking and remembering to hear his whispers. Where was her great-uncle’s vacation home, anyway? It couldn’t have been far, since they went there and came back in the same day, but it had been in the mountains—she remembered that well. And they had driven on some dirt roads to get there. She remembered her mother gasping at every bump.

“How am I supposed to get all the way up there by myself? I don’t even know the address or the road.”

“Well then,” the red book said, and she imagined a twinkle in his eyes. “This is your first test.”

CHAPTER TWO

The Hermit’s Library

Kids can think up great lies.
They’re just not very great at telling them. In order to tell a really good lie, Yuriko knew, you first have to believe in it yourself. Emboldened by the red book’s encouragement, Yuriko spent the next thirty minutes getting ready. It was easy to come up with a suitable lie, but hard to make a convincing performance of it.

It didn’t take much for her to wake her parents. Neither of them had slept particularly well since her brother’s disappearance. It was only recently that they even bothered with sleeping in their bedroom. For a while, they had just nodded off wherever they happened to be—in the living room, in a chair, or on the sofa. They had left the front door unlocked and would jump up and run outside at the slightest sound in the hope that Hiroki had come home at last. Finally, the police had told them they couldn’t keep on like that forever, and they had begun sleeping properly again.

When Yuriko began her lie, her mother’s expression changed almost immediately. She wasn’t surprised or angry. A mix of joy and regret crept over her thin features. Why hadn’t she thought of it herself sooner?

“I completely forgot about it myself, Mom,” Yuriko was saying. “He could hide out at our great-uncle’s summer cottage for weeks without anyone knowing.”

“That’s right. Yuriko’s right,” her mother said as she shook her father by the shoulder with her left hand. Her right was around Yuriko’s shoulder. “I’ll bet Hiroki’s at the cottage!”

“How would he get all the way out there?” her father groaned, wiping the sleep from his eyes. “He doesn’t have a car. He’s only in middle school.” He wasn’t buying it, but Yuriko detected a glimmer in his eye. He
wanted
it to be true; he just wasn’t letting himself get his hopes up.

“Hiroki’s always done what he wants to once he sets his mind on something. And he’s smart too. And clever. I’m sure there are lots of ways he could have gotten out there. He could’ve hitchhiked.”

Her mom was sitting on the edge of the bed, ready to leave that very instant.

“Just wait,” her father said. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“Well I can’t just sit around here doing nothing. Can you? What if he’s out there?”

“Shouldn’t we tell someone we’re going?”

“Who 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 old.”

Yuriko remembered Uncle Takashi saying that if the location were just a little better, or the place in a little better shape, it might make sense for them to put money into renovations and make it a summer cottage the whole family could enjoy. “But not like it is now,” he had said. “The place is a bona fide ruin.”

“Those books, though—Takashi was talking about showing them to a specialist at some point. There were so many of them there, one or two might actually be worth something,” Yuriko’s mother said. “Did your brother ever say anything about them, Yuriko?”

Her mother was sharp. Yuriko shook her head. “Nope. But I remember he was pretty impressed with how many there were, and how our great-uncle must have collected them all by himself.”

That was true. When her brother had seen the reading room at the cottage, he had wanted to stay in there for hours. He said he thought there must be books from all over the world there.
Check it out, little Yuri. Here’s one in English, and here’s one in French, and I’ve never even seen this language before. This one looks like it might be hundreds of years old.

“Hiroki always was fond of reading,” her mother said in a soft voice.

“Come to think of it, it’s been almost five months since we were there. I wonder if the place is locked?” her father muttered, suddenly worried.

“If it were locked, he would’ve just broken in through a window,” her mother said, urging Yuriko’s father to drive faster. He shifted his grip on the wheel. Yuriko stuck her hand back inside her backpack.

Mom really thinks he’s there waiting for us.

—There’s nothing you can do about that. She’s his mother.

But it’s my fault.

—If you’re going to wimp out now because you’re afraid of hurting your mother’s feelings, you’ll never make it where we’re going. Besides,
the red book added,
you should get some sleep.

How can I possibly sleep? I’m not even sleepy.

—Then tell me what you know about the owner of the cottage, your great-uncle.

You mean you don’t know? Didn’t my great-uncle buy you?

—I want to know what you know. So I can put what you know and what I know together. You don’t have to explain it to me, just try to remember by yourself. I’ll hear.

Yuriko leaned back in her seat and started to remember everything she could about her great-uncle.

The first time she had even heard about him had been about a year ago, in the summer, when the weather was still warm. They had been sitting around the dinner table when her father suddenly said, “You know, it seems I have an uncle.”

Her father’s father—Yuriko’s grandfather—was an only child. He had no siblings. So how could a great-uncle suddenly appear out of nowhere?

“The circumstances are a little complicated. My parents never mentioned it to us until now,” her father explained to her mother, who was just as shocked as the children were.

Apparently, from the time Yuriko’s grandfather was in fourth grade to the time he was in eleventh grade, he had an adopted brother.

“He was the son of a man who had helped out my father’s father at work.”

Though Yuriko’s father had made the announcement to everyone at the table, when it came to talking about the details, he spoke only to her mother. As it always was with talk between adults, Yuriko couldn’t follow a lot of what he was saying. Her brother just kept eating like he wasn’t particularly interested, but Yuriko knew he was listening because when she shot him a glance to ask what something her father was saying meant, he would give her a “you don’t need to understand” look back.
If you really need to know, I’ll tell you later.

“There was all kinds of trouble,” her father was saying. “The child had been passed from relative to relative. No one wanted the burden, and so in the end they came to my grandfather, begging him to adopt. He had a reputation for his generosity, I guess.”

Her mother started asking lots of questions.
Was the child legitimate?—Yes.
(Whatever that meant.)
And the mother?—She ran off, saying she couldn’t raise the child alone.

The questions went on, but Yuriko quickly lost track of who had done what to whom, and why.

“How old was he when they adopted him?” she finally managed to ask, during a lull in the conversation.

“Just a year younger than my father.”

“So they were like brothers then.”

“Had everything gone well, yes.”

But everything hadn’t gone well. The adopted brother hadn’t been a good fit with the Morisaki family.

“Though I suppose it was a better place for him than anywhere else. They did make it for several years, after all.”

“The poor child,” her mother had said.

Apparently, the adopted brother and Yuriko’s grandfather had never gotten along.

“My grandfather put him through school,” her father said, “but he quit as soon as he got to high school. He left home soon after.”

The adoption hadn’t been formal, so there were no certificates or papers to deal with. The boy had simply disappeared.

“My grandfather was pretty put out for a while—I think he expected the kid to be a little more grateful. And my grandmother was sick with worry about it, but there was not much either of them could do in the end.”

Yuriko’s grandfather had completely forgotten about his adopted brother by the time he was an adult. Pretty soon he was a father in his own right, and then a grandfather. His own parents were long gone by then.

The adopted brother’s name was Ichiro Minochi. “Minochi” because he had never officially taken the Morisaki name.

“What an unusual name!”

“His mother’s maiden name, apparently.”

And Ichiro Minochi had died.

“Happened just last month,” her father had told them. “The lawyer they put in charge of managing his affairs contacted me—that was the first I’d heard of any of it.”

Ichiro Minochi had left a will specifying that part of his estate was to go to the Morisaki family, who had taken care of him when he was a child.

“His estate…was he rich?” Yuriko’s mother had asked, eyes wide, chopsticks still in her mouth.

“He had some luck with the stock market. Was an investor of some standing, it sounds like. Never know where life is going to lead, do you? He had no family and I don’t think he ever graduated from high school, but here’s this success story.”

Except Ichiro Minochi had died alone, with no family or relations. The bulk of his estate had been earmarked for a charity.

“My dad was sure impressed when he heard. Said he wished his parents were still alive. They’d have been happy to hear that Ichiro made something of himself.”

“So do we just get the money? What about taxes? I’ve heard about people getting an inheritance and ending up owing more than they get,” her mother had said.

“Don’t worry about that. The lawyer’s taking care of everything. We’ll only receive what we’re actually due.”

“Wait, but
we
won’t get it, will we? Doesn’t it go to your father?”

Yuriko’s father had laughed. “Yeah, but that just means it will be mine and my brothers’ before long.”

It was about a month later that Uncle Takashi paid them a visit. (
My, you two have sure grown! How’s the baseball coming, Hiroki? Hitting any home runs?
) Her uncle and her father had talked together for a while. She remembered her father hadn’t looked pleased.

“Oh well. I guess it was too much to hope for,” she had overheard her father saying.

“That’s what Dad told me,” her uncle had said. “No such thing as a free lunch after all, eh?”

According to the lawyer, after all the paperwork was finished and taxes were paid, all the Morisaki family was due for their inheritance was an old cottage up in the mountains north of Tokyo.