Book Girl and the Famished Spirit by Mizuki Nomura Read Free Book Online Page A

looked like brush writing on singed and yellowed paper and mentioned disturbing things like a “herd of possessed swine,” “I’m come home,” and “I shall make you swallow the carving knife.”
    “We have to do something about this right away or else the book club is going to get attacked by a herd of possessed pigs! I’m going to get a butcher knife with a ribbon around it instead of a bouquet of black lilies. The book club is facing a threat to its very existence, Konoha.”
    “We’ve been standing on that precipice for a while, in my opinion.”
    We did have only two members, after all. That didn’t quite rise to the level of an actual club.
    Tohko glared at me sharply.
    “Try to be serious about this, Konoha. Listen, come to the club room as soon as school lets out today. We have to work out our strategy. Promise?”
    The bell announcing the end of break rang, and after making doubly and triply sure, Tohko scrambled off.
    Kotobuki had been glowering at me the entire time.
    Geez.
    I felt bad for Tohko, but I had plans after school.
    During class, I gazed out the window and thought back over what Ryuto had told me the day before.
    “There’s a girl I like at your school. She’s a second-year like you. Name’s Hotaru Amemiya… You know her, Konoha?”
    Did I know her? Wasn’t that the girl Tohko and I had carried to the nurse’s office? I was flabbergasted.
    “Actually, we’re already going out, but something seems off. It’s not going well, I guess.”
    Ryuto just kept saying one astonishing thing after another.
    “What?! But don’t you have other girlfriends? Three of them?”
    “Oh yeah, I’m going out with them, too. There’s two or three others. Or is it four or five? They change so fast, I can’t keep track.”
    I stared wide-eyed at Ryuto, but he laughed it off without the slightest sign of guilt.
    “If you’ve got that many girls, who cares if it’s not going well with one of them? I mean, do you actually like Amemiya?”
    “Well, to be honest, it’s more like I think I’ll like her a whole lot
soon
.”
    “What does that mean?”
    I was appalled, but Ryuto’s eyes gleamed lustily.
    “She’s seriously dangerous, and I like that.”
    “You like dangerous people?”
    I understood him even less.
    But just like when Tohko was expounding on books, a fire had been lit under Ryuto.
    “I don’t like ordinary girls. But a girl who would kill a guy to make him hers and then kiss his still-warm lips… a girl like Oscar Wilde’s Salomé? They drive me crazy. Like Kiyohime turning intoa snake to chase her man or the grocery girl Oshichi who set fire to a building just to see hers one more time. I want to be loved like that, be obsessed over, be hated.
    “Psychologically speaking, I’m a masochist. It gives me a huge thrill for a girl to insult me when there’s both love and hatred in her eyes. After all, hatred is the strongest emotion people have, right? Love weakens and changes over time, but
true
hatred can’t be forgotten that easily. It only gets stronger as time goes by. Don’t you agree? I feel like being hated makes love last way longer. You can keep hating someone because you love them, and you can keep loving them because you hate them.”
    I was utterly overwhelmed by this philosophy of love. It was so unusual for a first-year high school boy. I heard him out, wide-eyed, telling myself that the guy was trouble. But when he declared that hatred was the strongest of all human emotions, I felt as if cold fingers had caressed my heart.
    Ryuto continued talking across the table from me, but he grew fuzzy and in his place a girl appeared, looking at me with piercing eyes.
    Miu—!
    It was the same look Miu had given me that day when she’d gone home by herself and I’d called out to stop her.
    A cold gaze like a knife carved out of ice.
    Until then, we had been best friends, and Miu had always teased me and told me how much she liked me in a bouncing voice and smiled