D-0008 That password changed last week

This was compiled from interviews with a person who, in the 2000s, used to stay home alone in company housing in Kanazawa, and from copies of several volumes of the message notebook that hung in the family’s kitchen at the time. The interviewee was in the third year of elementary school then and is in their thirties now. Both parents worked, and from the autumn of third grade the child came to spend the late afternoons alone. It was a period when notices about strangers approaching children kept circulating in the school district, and the mother wrote out the rules for staying home alone and put them up on the refrigerator. Do not open the door for anyone you do not know. When someone comes on an errand for the family, have them say the password from outside before the door is opened. The people who came on errands were the grandmother, or familiar faces from the same building, and no one else. The password was changed by the mother from time to time, announced at the dinner table, and written small in a corner of the message notebook. It was a rule that followed the advice of a crime-prevention handout from school, and the notebook itself is mostly taken up with notes about milk to buy and what time someone would be home.

The first caller came in February 2004. In the late afternoon the doorbell rang, and when the child picked up the receiver, a voice said, your mother asked me to come, and then said the password of the time: kettle. By the rules, the door should have been opened, the interviewee says. Why it was not is something they cannot quite put into words, even in the interview. Because it was no one I could tell by the voice, is apparently the closest they can come. As for what kind of voice it was, all they can recall is, an ordinary adult’s voice. The caller waited a while, said, kettle, once more, and left. The footsteps faded toward the stairs.

When the child told them at dinner about not opening the door, the mother made an odd face before any praise came. We stopped using kettle last week, she said; it is oden now. The father nodded too. We told you the evening we changed it, and you answered us, was the mother’s account, but the interviewee has no memory of it. Going back through the message notebook, there it was: in the corner of a page from a week before, the new password in the mother’s hand. It was the child’s habit to look through this notebook before bed each night, and on that same page there is a line in the child’s own writing. Only the rewriting in the corner, they had no memory of ever seeing.

The same thing happened several more times over the two years and more that followed. The intervals were irregular; there were months in a row, and there was half a year of nothing. The caller always came in the late afternoon, always alone, and always said the password the child believed at that moment to be the current one. And when the parents came home and were asked, the password had always changed a little while before. Where the copies survive, the dates of the rewritings in the corner of the notebook can be picked out: each one falls three to ten days before the day the caller came. The handwriting of every rewrite looks like the mother’s, yet in the later interview the mother says she remembers deciding on a new password only once or twice at the very start.

There is one winter in which the order broke. In December 2004, the caller said a word no one had been taught. Tsukushi - the horsetail shoots that come up in spring, a word out of season - and the child heard it as, they have got the password wrong. When the year turned, at the dinner table in March, the mother chose a new password. Let’s make it tsukushi, she is said to have said; it is spring outside now. The child could say nothing, and watched in silence as it was written into the corner of the notebook.

From around this time, the interviewee began deliberately not learning the passwords they were taught. A word I do not know is a word the voice outside cannot say either - that, they recall, was the child’s reasoning. In the several months they kept themselves from learning it, the caller never came once. When the school year changed and the parents went over the rules for staying home alone again, they learned the password once more. At the end of that spring, the caller came again.

The rule itself faded away on its own in the spring of 2007, when the interviewee started junior high school. They had outgrown passwords for staying home alone, and the rewritings in the corner of the notebook end there, as far as the copies go. There is no clear date for when the callers stopped. What the interviewee remembers is the count: six times in all, they heard a voice say the password and go away. All six times, the door was never opened.

Near the end of the interview, the interviewee says it never once felt as though the someone outside had been wrong. The house’s decisions always moved on and left me behind, and what stayed in my hands was the password that was already over - that was the way they put it. Another reading remains from the sorting process. Perhaps, in that household, the used-up passwords were not being thrown away, but being claimed. Neither reading reaches who the late-afternoon caller was.

The interviewee still remembers the last password they were taught at their parents’ house. In the interview, they did not say what it is. It has been nearly twenty years since they learned it, and not once, they say, has it been spoken from outside the door.