Teshigawara’s Attack on Kazami

Teshigawara’s Attack on Kazami is the decisive example of how the search for the Extra Person becomes dangerous when suspicion is treated as proof. Convinced that Tomohiko Kazami is the returned casualty, Naoya Teshigawara isolates his friend, attacks him, and causes him to fall from a second-floor balcony; the resulting uncertainty briefly leaves open whether Kazami is dead, while Mei Misaki’s doll’s eye establishes that he is not the Extra Person.## Suspicion and Misidentification The incident grows out of the class’s attempt to identify the Extra Person who has entered the group during the disaster year. Teshigawara tells Koichi Sakakibara that he has been troubled by the possibility that the Extra Person came with them on the trip and wonders whether some small sign might reveal that person’s identity. The question turns ordinary uncertainty into a demand for visible evidence, even though the phenomenon is specifically resistant to such inspection. Teshigawara’s suspicion focuses on Kazami’s apparent failure to remember several childhood experiences they had shared. He had questioned Kazami about a secret riverside base where they played as elementary-school third-years and about a fifth-year summer plan to cycle to the ocean, which they abandoned outside town. Kazami did not recognize either memory. Teshigawara interpreted these gaps as proof that the real Kazami had died long ago and that the present Kazami was the Extra Person who had entered the class that spring. That reasoning is explicitly mistaken. The Extra Person is not a fake substitute whose memories can be tested against another person’s recollections. The casualty returns as the actual dead person, without awareness that death has already occurred, so childhood-memory lapses cannot identify the phenomenon. The memories Teshigawara invokes could have faded for anyone, yet his anxiety converts ordinary uncertainty into confirmation.## The Confrontation Teshigawara lures Kazami away from the shared rooms by suggesting that they inspect a recreation room at one end of the second floor. Once there, he deliberately provokes him, demanding to know whether he is the real Kazami or the Extra Person in their class. Kazami becomes shaken, panics, and finally loses his temper. Teshigawara reads this reaction as guilt, reinforcing the conclusion he had already reached rather than reconsidering the weakness of his evidence. His actions are also shaped by the recorded instruction to return the Extra Person to Death in order to save everyone. Teshigawara tells Koichi that he believed Kazami had to die if he was the casualty. The confrontation begins as shoving and argument rather than as a clearly planned killing, but it escalates beyond his control. The two somehow end up outside on the balcony, and before Teshigawara understands what is happening, Kazami falls. The fall produces an immediate reversal in the meaning of the encounter. Teshigawara had imagined himself as someone acting decisively against a supernatural threat; instead, he has become the direct cause of a classmate’s possible death. When Koichi asks whether he killed Kazami, Teshigawara can only confirm that Kazami fell. His confession reveals not calculated murder but a fatal action born from panic, certainty, and the pressure of collective catastrophe.## Immediate Uncertainty and Recognition Koichi recognizes that the fall from a second story might not have been fatal. Because Teshigawara had not gone down to check Kazami’s condition, Kazami might still be breathing or merely unconscious. This uncertainty briefly creates a possible path toward rescue, but it cannot undo the violence that produced it. Mei looks through the window and quietly shakes her head. Using her doll’s eye, she tells Koichi that it is not Kazami. Her perception of the color of death identifies Kazami as someone other than the Extra Person, directly contradicting Teshigawara’s central assumption. The revelation exposes the attack as a tragic misreading: the evidence Teshigawara used was inconclusive, while the supernatural sign accepted by Mei points elsewhere. The event therefore separates two kinds of knowledge. Teshigawara acts on circumstantial interpretation, childhood-memory discrepancies, and a frightened response; Mei’s judgment supplies the only overt indication that Kazami is not the casualty. Yet even Mei’s ability does not make the moral situation simple, because the group’s reliance on the doll’s eye continues to place life and death in the hands of uncertain perception.## Context of Escalating Violence The attack occurs within a broader atmosphere of accusation. Izumi Akazawa has already told Mei and Koichi that they bear responsibility for the disasters that have struck the class, including Mr. Kubodera’s death, and demands an apology from Mei after the end of the Not There Strategy. Her courtroom-like certainty and Teshigawara’s private investigation express the same crisis impulse: when the class cannot control the Yomiyama phenomenon, it searches for an individual who can be blamed or removed. The earlier Kubodera event provides a grim precedent for the collision between a classroom setting and lethal violence. Mr. Kubodera’s speech breaks into unintelligible sounds before he slowly withdraws his right hand from a bag on his desk, revealing a sharp silver-bladed knife. In the later attack, a different student acts under the belief that violence can restore order. The settings differ, but both incidents show how the ordinary structures of school life are invaded by weapons, panic, and death. Koichi’s movement through the dark building after the balcony incident carries the same instability into the surrounding space. He notices blood, enters the dining hall despite having the option to follow the others, and is suddenly grabbed by the ankle. Soon afterward, he discovers that an unnatural sound and smell come from a fire consuming an entire room. These immediate dangers widen the consequences of the attack from a private confrontation to a night in which suspicion, injury, and disaster spread through the group.## Consequences and Narrative Significance Teshigawara’s attack demonstrates the destructive force of the command to return the casualty to Death. A rule intended to save the class becomes an authorization for unilateral violence when its target is chosen through guesswork. The event’s central error is not simply that Teshigawara selects the wrong person; it is that he mistakes the need to act for the possession of knowledge. The later investigation into the Sakitani Memorial Hall massacre provides a stark factual contrast. The victims there are found to have died from stabbing, blood loss, or a fatal fall rather than from the fire itself, and Mieko Numata is conclusively held responsible for the deaths of six people before dying by suicide. Against that externally established account, Teshigawara’s attack remains marked by uncertainty: the fall is witnessed only through his distressed confession, Kazami’s survival is initially unknown, and the identity of the Extra Person is not confirmed by the attack. The incident thus changes the stakes of the investigation without solving its mystery. It proves that the class’s countermeasures can generate the very deaths they claim to prevent, while leaving the supernatural question unresolved. By turning a friendship into a test, a memory gap into evidence, and a frightened reaction into a death sentence, Teshigawara’s Attack on Kazami becomes the clearest warning that the search for the Extra Person can reproduce the disaster through human judgment alone.