an excerpt
Kinoku Nasu
Illustrations by Takashi Takeuchi (TYPE-MOON)
Translated by Paul Johnson
(Editor’s note: The commentary discusses how The Garden of Sinners will be receiving an American release. Unfortunately, only the first chapter has been published as Del Rey Manga went defunct before the series had more releases. The original text spells Kinoko’s name as “Kinoku” which will be kept.)
The Garden of Sinners is a novel with a unique history—and a dazzling future. The novel was first serialized on artist Takeuchi’s website, beginning in 1998. But the novel did not begin to find its true audience until the creators featured an excerpt on the disk for their visual novel blockbuster, Tsukuhime. A visual novel is a special kind of video game, an interactive, electronic novel that combines text and visuals; the best-known example in the United States is perhaps Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. It is entirely appropriate that The Garden of Sinners should have gotten its start in the world of the Web and visual novels: This hyperactively inventive novel has a true twenty-first-century sensibility that shows a tremendous anime and video game influence. Its dazzling imagery, in fact, cries out for visual interpretation, which has arrived in the form of a magnificent anime. The Garden of Sinners is currently having all seven chapters adapted into an unprecedented full series of complete animated movies, with the first chapter being released in December 2007. It looks set to be a record-breaking hit for the creators Kinoku Nasu, a scenario writer and novelist; and Takashi Takeuchi, an illustrator with the game company, TYPE-MOON. Takeuchi and Nasu have been friends since middle school. Takeuchi has illustrated not only The Garden of Sinners, but other works by Nasu, such as Tsukihime and Fate/stay night. The creators talk about The Garden of Sinners in an interview, including exclusive remarks on its publication in the United States, in the bonus features at the end of this volume. The first chapter of The Garden of Sinners is presented here. The novel will be published in the United States, in its entirety in two volumes by Del Rey Manga, beginning in 2009.
One day, I took the main street route home. This was unusual for me, just a whim of the moment. I had been walking, not thinking about anything in particular, down the street—that street whose buildings I was so tired of looking at—when someone fell from above.
I hardly even had a chance to hear it. The muffled splattering sound.
But it was obvious: someone had fallen from one of the buildings above … and was now dead.
Deepest crimson gushed down the asphalt. Only the long black hair still retained its former appearance. Thin, fragile, white-looking limbs. And a lifeless, smashed face.
This series of images was like pressed flowers, trapped flat between the old pages of a book. I guess Probably. Only because the corpse, its neck twisted into a fetal position, looked to me like a folded lily.
A View from Above
1
On the night it turned August, Mikiya suddenly dropped in out of the blue.
“Evening, You’re looking as fatigued as always, Shiki.”
The unexpected visitor stood in the entranceway. He smiled as he shot me this lame greeting.
“Actually, yeah, there was an accident just before I got here. A girl committed suicide. Jumped off a building. There’s been a lot of that going on lately. But you never think you’re actually going to see one, huh? … Here you go. For the fridge.”
As he unlaced his boots, he tossed me a bag from a convenience store. There were a couple of cartons of strawberry Häagen-Dazs inside. I guessed I was supposed to put them in the fridge before they melted.
Mikiya had finished undoing his shoes and was over the threshold before I’d finished groggily inspecting the bag.
I lived in a studio apartment. Not counting the three-foot-long hallway leading from the entranceway, the door led straight into my room, which served as both bedroom and living room.
Glaring at Mikiya’s back as he strode hastily into the room, I followed suit.
“Shiki, you cut class today, right? I don’t care about grades, but if you don’t at least watch your attendance, you won’t be able to go on to a decent school. You haven’t forgotten, have you? We promised to go to college together.”
“Yeah, like you have the right to lecture me about school,” I replied. “For starters, I don’t actually remember making that promise. And besides, didn’t you drop out?”
“… Uh, well, I guess I don’t really have the right, now that you mention it,” said Mikiya awkwardly, sitting down. Yeah, he always did betray himself when backed into a corner. That’s something that came back to me recently.
Mikiya sat down in the dead center of the room. I lowered myself onto the bed behind him and lay sideways on it. Mikiya stayed like that, facing away from me. He was pretty short, and I absentmindedly gazed at his tiny back.
His full name was Mikiya Kokutō, and it had somehow happened that he’d been a friend of mine ever since high school. He was kind of boring: it was like he’d been permanently frozen in the shape of a student or something. But he was a real treasure compared to most guys today—the ones who show off all the latest fashions, one by one, like it’s some kind of race, before ultimately burning themselves out. He didn’t dye his hair or let it grow long. He wasn’t tanned and didn’t accessorize. He didn’t carry a cell phone and didn’t fool around with girls. He was only five five. His features were on the “cute” side, and his black-framed glasses strengthened that impression even more.
He’d graduated now and was wearing everyday clothes, but if he were to get dressed up and walk down the street… he might be so good-looking that people would stop on the street to stare at him.
“Are you listening, Shiki? I saw your mother. You should at least drop by your house, shouldn’t you? You’ve been out of the hospital for two months now, and you haven’t even called?”
“Yeah. I don’t have any reason to, that’s why.”
“Uh… You don’t need a reason for a happy family get-together, you know. You haven’t spoken to them in two years. All you need to do is sit down and have a proper talk with them.”
“…Nah. I can’t see it happening, so forget about it. If I saw them, it would just make us all feel even more distant from each other. I even feel weird around you. So how do you expect me to carry on a conversation with total strangers like them?”
“Look, nothing’s gonna get fixed like that, is it? Things’ll stay this way your whole life if you don’t make the first move and open up to them. It’s a tragedy to not be able to even meet up with your own parents when they’re living so close by.”
I frowned at his judgemental tone.
No good, he said? What was no good about it? There was no funny business going on between me and my parents or anything like that. The case was simple. Their daughter had been in a car accident. She lost all of her memories from before the crash. That’s all. Biologically speaking, and according to the census register. I was still family. I didn’t see any problem with just leaving it at that.
But Mikiya always worried about people’s emotional well-being. Even though stuff like that held zero interest for me.
Shiki Ryōgi has been my friend since high school. It was a private school, famous for sending students on to good colleges.
You don’t see a name like Shiki Ryōgi every day, so it stuck in my mind when the application results were being posted, and then I ended up in the same class as she was. After that, I became one of Shiki’s very few friends.
Since our school was a prep school without a dress code, I think everyone expressed themselves by wearing different things. In that kind of crowd, Shiki really stood out like a sore thumb in school.
The reason was because she always wore a kimono.
The modest, informal look really complemented her slender shoulders, and she only had to walk in to make the classroom feel like a classic samurai castle. That’s how powerful the effect was. It wasn’t just the look either. Her movements and the way she acted were all perfect. Only in class did she utter anything resembling words. I think that was the only thing that gave us any idea of what Shiki was like as a person.
As for her actual looks, well they were too good to be true.
Her hair was as pretty as a dark black silk, cut in half-hearted fashion, then left to its own devices. The result was a short cut just long enough to hide her ears. Strangely enough, it suited her so well that a lot of pupils mistook her for a boy.
Shiki was so good-looing that if a boy looked at her, he thought she was a girl, and if a girl looked at her, she thought it was a boy. Her features were more awe-inspiring than beautiful.
But if you asked me, I would say that she had something even more fascinating than these characteristics: her eyes.
Her expression was slightly sharp yet tranquil. Her brows were delicate. She had a way of always seeming to be gazing at something invisible to us. In my opinion, this summed up her entire personality.
That’s right. Until she ended up the way she did.
“Jumping…”
“Huh…? Ah, sorry. I wasn’t listening.”
“Suicide by jumping. Does that count as an accident, Mikiya?”
My mumbled, bored-sounding words jolted Mikiya out of his silence and back to his senses. With that, he thought seriously about the question. His answer was naively straightforward.
“Yeah, I’d definitely say that’s an accident… but… it’s… I don’t really know how to put it… If a person commits suicide, they’re dead and gone right? They do it of their own free will. The responsibility is theirs alone. But if you jump from a high place, the responsibility doesn’t completely belong to that person. Hard to distinguish it from falling. That’s more like an accident”
“So not murder and not accidental death,” I said. “The line seems pretty hazy, if you ask me. But if people are gonna kill themselves, I just wish they’d do it without bothering others.”
“Shiki, it’s not nice to speak ill of the dead.”
Mikiya’s tone didn’t sound scolding, nor was it cold or blunt. It was so boringly predictable that I could tell he was going to say it even before he opened his mouth.
“Cocteau, I really hate how you generalize stuff.”
A sudden and brutal objection. Mikiya didn’t take offense, though.
“Aah. You haven’t called me that in a while,” he said.
“Really?”
Mikiya nodded like a particularly well-mannered squirrel.
I had two names for him—Mikiya and Cocteau—but I didn’t really like the sound of Cocteau… I don’t really know why. My musings had brought about a lull in the conversation, and Mikiya clapped his hands like he’d remembered something.
“Speaking of which! It’s a bit weird, but my sister saw it.”
“Hm? Saw what?”
“You know, her again. The girl at the Fujō Building, flying. You said you saw it, too, didn’t you?”
I didn’t say anything. But, yeah, I remembered it. It had all started three weeks before and was something of a ghost story.
In the business district was a high-class apartment complex called the Fujō Building, and I saw what looked like a person in the sky above it. If Mikiya’s sister Azaka had seen it, too, then it wasn’t just me. The thing had to be real, it seemed.
After my accident, I’d been in a coma for two years. Ever since, I’d been able to see “things that shouldn’t be there.” Well, according to Tōko, it was more like I’d become able to perceive them rather than see them; basically, my brain and eyes had been raised to a new level, become more acute somehow. That was all. Not that I thought it was interesting in any way.
“If we’re talking the Fujō Building,” I said, “then I saw it plenty of times—not just once. Obviously, I don’t know if I’d be able to see it now, though, since I haven’t walked that way in a while.”
“Hmm. I go that way a lot, but I’ve never seen anything.”
“It’s because you wear glasses.”
Mikiya pouted, saying it had nothing to do with his glasses. His response was warm, with no hint of maliciousness. And that was why it was hard for him to see such things.
Even so, it just kept on happening: the mind-numbingly dull phenomenon of people jumping—or falling or whatever. I didn’t know if there was any meaning behind it, so I’d asked Mikiya’s opinion.
“Mikiya, why do you think someone would jump?”
Mikiya shrugged dismissively.
“Jumping, falling… I don’t understand either,” he said naturally. “They’re not something I’ve tried yet, are they?”
2
On the night August ended, I decided to take a stroll.
Even though it was the end of summer, the open air was quite chilly. It was long after the last train had departed, and the town had fallen silent.
Quiet, cold, desolate: it was like an unfamiliar ghost town, even. Devoid of pedestrians and all human warmth, the scene looked as artificial as a photo and made me think of an incurable illness.
Sick, diseased, abnormal.
It felt like everything, from the dark windowed houses to the brightly illuminated convenience stores, could crumble at the sound of a cough.
Amid it all, the verdant moonlight accentuated the night. The moon was the only thing that looked alive in this totally anesthetized world. It made my eyes hurt horribly.
That was what I meant by abnormal.
When I left my house, I’d put on a black leather jacket over my light blue kimono. The sleeves of the kimono were tucked up in my jacket, and I was sweating. Despite that, I wasn’t hot… In fact…
The weather hadn’t felt cold to me the whole time.
Even walking out so late at night, I would meet people.
Someone just looking at the ground, walking briskly onward. Someone else standing morosely before a vending machine. A small group, congregating in the lights of convenience stores.
I cast around for a meaning to these actions, but, after all, I was an outsider looking in. There was no chance of my understanding. For one thing, I myself had no reason to be walking out at night like this.
I was, after all, just repeating my old self’s habits. Nothing more.
It had happened two years ago.
I, Shiki Ryōgi, was just about to move up to the second year of senior high school when I had a traffic accident and was hauled off to the hospital, just like that.
It happened on a rainy night. Apparently, I was thrown from the car. Fortunately, it was a nice clean crash: no major injuries, bleeding, or broken bones. On the flip side, all the damage ended up unluckily concentrated in my head.
I was in a coma from that point on. Maybe it was because my body was pretty much in perfect condition, but the hospital decided to keep me alive, and my body desperately carried on breathing as I lay there unconscious.
Then, two months ago, Shiki Ryōgi came back to life.
The doctors were apparently as shocked as if Lazarus himself had woken up in their hospital. Just from that, I knew, after all, just how hopeless my condition must have been. I was in for something of a shock myself, though not as big as theirs.
I’d go so far as to say I didn’t know who I was. My memories up until that point were strange, somehow. To put it simply, I couldn’t trust my own memory.
It’s different from a simple memory defect that prevents you from recalling your past… the kind of defect that’s called amnesia.
Tōko told me the word memory refers to four processes the brain carries out: encoding, storage, recall, and authentication.
“Encoding” is how an image you’ve seen is written onto the brain. “Storage” is how you retain it. “Recall” is retrieving stored information. In other words, recalling memories. And “authentication” is how the brain checks that the recalled information is consistent with the previous memories.
If you are physically unable to perform just one of these four mental processes, the result is a defective memory. Naturally, because there are lots of ways it can go wrong you get a lot of totally different kinds of memory defects.
But in my case all of the four processes were working fine. My memories of the past didn’t feel real, but they were still in total agreement with the images I’d built up back then. Which means my “authentication” process was working, too.
Even so, I was completely unsure about my past self. I didn’t feel that I was me at all. Even if I recalled the Shiki Ryōgi from the past, I could only think of her as a different person. Even though I was definitely, without a doubt, Shiki Ryōgi.
Shiki Ryōgi disappeared during that two-year blank.
Perhaps not as far as the rest of the world is concerned, but my contents were hollowed out all the same. My memories and the personality I used to have. Those links had been hopelessly severed beyond repair.
My memories have become nothing more than vacant images. But since I still have access to those images, I could still pretend to be my former self. I could pass myself off to friends and family alike as the Shiki Ryōgi they knew.
As you’d expect, this wasn’t especially nice for me, though. It tormented me with an unbearable suffocating feeling.
It’s just like I was copying. I wasn’t living at all.
I was like a newborn baby. I didn’t know anything. I hadn’t acquired anything of my own. Yet my seventeen-year-old memory proved that I was a fully grown human being.
Fundamentally, emotions that I should have felt from various experiences were there in the form of memories. But I didn’t experience them. Try as I might to make them real to me, they were still things I already knew. If they evoke no reaction, it doesn’t feel like you’re alive… It’s the same as when a magician’s sleight-of-hand tricks fail to surprise you anymore.
And so I repeated the same routines my former self used to do, all while feeling like a zombie.
But I went on doing it for a simple reason: if I did it, then maybe, just maybe, I’d be able to go back to being who I was. If I kept at this, maybe these nighttime walks would start to mean something to me, too.
Yeah, that’s right. I might even be able to say that I loved my old self.
Feeling like I’d walked a fair distance, I looked up. This was the business district, the source of all those rumors. A row of buildings, all neatly lined up at the same height. The glassy surface of the buildings now reflected only moonlight. The buildings, standing in formation along the main street, felt like nothing more than a meandering phantom world of shadow images.
Among them was a conspicuously tall shape. This twenty-story-tall, ladderlike structure looked like a long, narrow tower and seemed so tall it almost touched the moon. It was called the Fujō Building.
It was an apartment building, but no light shone from it. The residents must all have been asleep. The time was close to two in the morning, after all.
And at that very moment… a tedious shadow came into my field of vision. A humanlike silhouette, floating into view. No, it wasn’t a simile: the girl was actually floating.
There was no wind.
The night air was strangely chilly for summer. My neck shuddered from the cold.
Of course, this was all just my imagination.
“Well, look at that. Here she is again.” I said.
I wasn’t happy about it but couldn’t help seeing it. With that, the girl in question flew, as if leaning against the moon.
A View from Above
An image of a dragonfly. Flying away, restless.
A butterfly followed it, but the dragonfly didn’t slow down. All of a sudden, the butterfly couldn’t keep up and fell, powerlessly, just as it disappeared from my field of vision.
It formed a bow in the air as it fell. It fell like a flattened lily, in a snakelike arc. That image was heartbreakingly sad.
Even if we couldn’t go on together, I at least wanted to stay beside it for a while. But that was impossible. Because my feet weren’t on the ground, and I couldn’t even stop.
——
Someone was talking, and I resigned myself to waking up. My eyelids were heavy. Proof that I hadn’t slept even two hours. It was touching that my body still wanted to get up and be active despite that fact, though. And this touch of vanity was enough to secure my victory over sleep… Seriously, I’m always getting into trouble like this.
I remembered for sure that all last night, I’d stayed up to put the finishing touches on some plans. I must have fallen asleep here in Miss Tōko’s room.
I rose up from the sofa energetically. Sure enough, the sight of the office met my eyes.
Shafts of summer sunlight. It seemed that it wasn’t even noon yet. And amid those shining rays, Shiki and Miss Tōko were deep in conversation. Shiki was leaning against the wall, while Miss Tōko sat cross-legged on a fold-out chair. As always, Shiki was wearing a kimono as though it were the most natural thing in the world. As for Miss Tōko, she was wearing plain, tight black pants and what looked like a snazzy new white shirt. With her short hair and plunging neckline, she really did look like some kind of presidential secretary. Though, that said, her expression whenever she took off her glasses was so indescribably ghastly that she’d probably never get a job like that even if a disaster wiped out every other woman on earth.
“Morning, Kokutō.”
The glance that Miss Tōko gave me was… well, the same as always. From looking at her glasses-less face, I could guess that she and Shiki had been having one of those conversations.
“I’m sorry. I guess I overslept.”
“Stop with the pointless explanations. I’ve got eyes, you know,” she replied bluntly, cigarette in mouth.
“Make some coffee since you’re up. It’ll be good rehabilitation for you.”
Rehabilitation? What, like, back into society?
I didn’t know why she felt I needed something like that, but Miss Tōko was always like this. I wasn’t about to ask her to elaborate.
“Do you want anything, Shiki?”
“I’m fine. I’m off to bed any minute now.”
It looked like Shiki was definitely suffering from sleep deprivation. She had probably gone off for one of her night time walks after I dozed off last night.
Next to Miss Tōko’s private room, which served as the office, was what looked like a kind of kitchen. Maybe it had been some kind of lab originally as it had three faucets in a row. In short, it was more like a drinking area at a school than a kitchen sink. Two of the faucets were tied up with wire and out of use. I didn’t know why. Miss Tōko simply said it made things easier, but it struck me as pointless and just annoyed me.
Okay, I thought, firing up the coffeemaker. The first thing I did when getting to work was to make the coffee. I’d now progressed to the point where I could do it in my sleep. Almost half a year had passed since I, Mikiya Kokutō, had become an employee here.
Actually, no. It felt strange to put it that way. This wasn’t a company, in any case. The reason I’d barged my way in anyway despite knowing all that, was solely because I was hopelessly fascinated by Miss Tōko’s work, I guess.
After Shiki had sealed herself away in a perpetual seventeen-year-old time bubble, I had graduated from school, clueless, and drifted into a college. I’d promised Shiki I’d get into that college. Even though it looked like she would never recover, I wanted to keep that vow at least.
But after that, nothing. Once I became a university student, I was just counting off days on the calendar. And while I was blankly idling away the hours I dragged myself to some event or other a friend had invited me to, and I found a doll.
This doll had been so elaborately crafted that it was pushing the limits of ethical decency. It was like a human being had been frozen still. Yet, at the same time, it obviously felt like a mere fabrication of the human shape—something that would never move on its own.
A human shape, clearly not a person. Yet simultaneously impossible to see as anything but.
Someone who would come back to life at any moment. That’s how it looked. But it was a doll; it had never been a living thing. And yet I couldn’t help but feel it was alive, but in a place human beings could never reach.
This contradiction captivated me. Most probably, it reminded me so much of Shiki’s condition.
The identity of the person exhibiting the doll was a blank. The accompanying pamphlet didn’t even offer a hint. I frantically dug around for information, and it turned out to be an unofficial display, the maker an unknown name in the industry.
Her name was Tōko Aozaki. She was a recluse. Though she was an expert doll-maker, it seemed she also did plans for buildings. In any case, despite the fact that she would do anything to just create, she didn’t accept commissions. The work always came from her side. She’d go to the people in question, say “I’m going to make this,” get payment in advance, and then go off and set about making it.
Either she was a bona fide libertine or else a real eccentric. My interest was piqued. Even though I really shouldn’t have, I looked up her address.
It was far from the heart of town: neither a residential area nor an industrial district. No. In fact, Tōko Aozaki’s house was hardly what you’d call a house at all.
Frankly, it was a ruin. And I don’t mean it was just a little bit run-down either. Construction had started on it many years ago during the boom years but the economy had gotten worse, and they’d given up on it partway through, leaving a genuine abandoned building, in every sense of the word. The exterior “building” shape was pretty much done, but the insides were a different story, with all the walls and floors totally bare, consisting of nothing but their raw materials.
They were probably aiming for six floors if they’d actually finished, but now there was nothing from the fourth floor up… It may be more efficient to construct a tall building from the top floor down, but this one must have been built using old-school methods. Because it had been abandoned halfway, the partly completed fifth floor now made for a makeshift rooftop.
The building site was surrounded by a high concrete wall, but I doubt it would have kept anyone out. It was a deeply mysterious building so much so that it was a miracle the neighborhood kids hadn’t turned it into a secret base or something.
Well, in any case, it seemed that Tōko Aozaki had bought this abandoned place that nobody else wanted. The kitchenesque room in which I was currently pouring coffee was on the fourth floor. The second and third floors were where Miss Tōko did her work, so we all usually communicated up here on the fourth.
…Anyway, back to the story.
Eventually, I got to know her and dropped out of college to come and work here. Amazingly enough, I was being paid wages and everything.
According to Miss Tōko, you can break humans down into two diphyletic categories: makers and searchers as well as users and destroyers.
“You’ve got no talent as far as creating goes, Mikiya” she’d said to me bluntly. But she’d employed me anyway. I must have had some skills as a “searcher,” I guess.
“What’s taking you so long, Kokutō?”
A demand rang out from the next room.
When I looked, I found the coffeemaker had been filled with dark, black liquid for some time.
“Seems that yesterday was the eighth one now,” said Miss Tōko suddenly, stubbing out her spent cigarette. “It’s about time the rest of the world started noticing the connection.”
She probably meant the recent epidemic of female high school students jumping to their deaths. I doubted she was talking about the harsh water shortages we’d been having this summer. As topics of woe went, that wasn’t one she’d normally go for.
“The eighth one…?” I ventured. “Uh, don’t you mean the sixth?”
“The number went up while you were spacing out. Starting from June, there’ve been three a month on average. I wonder if there’ll be another one before three days are up.”
Discretion clearly wasn’t her strong point. Miss Tōko cast a glance at the calendar. There were just three days left in August… That left three… There was something not quite right there, though, and doubts immediately surfaced in my consciousness.
“But they’re all unrelated though,” I said. “The girls who killed themselves were all from different schools, and they didn’t even know each other. Well, I guess the police could be keeping information from the public though.”
“How cynical of you. That’s not like you, Kokutō. Mistrusting others like that.”
The corners of her mouth raised as Miss Tōko teased me. The glasses-less person I was looking at now became the most malicious-looking individual imaginable.
“…But they haven’t released any suicide notes,” I continued. “Six people… no, eight, you say? If that’s all, then they could at least make an official announcement or something like that, but they’re keeping a lid on it. That’s concealment of information, surely?”
“That’s what I mean by connection,” Miss Tōko replied. “Actually, common features would be a more accurate description. Of the eight, most of them were seen jumping of their own accord from various places by multiple eyewitnesses. None of the girls had any evident personal problems. None were taking drugs or under the influence of shady religions. There’s no doubt that these were spontaneous suicides, inspired by individual anxiety. Therefore, they didn’t want to leave any last words, and the police probably don’t consider the factors they have in common to be important.”
“…So, it’s not that they aren’t releasing the suicide notes. There never were any from the start?”
Miss Tōko nodded at my incredulous question, not looking a hundred percent certain. But was that really all there was to it?
Something wasn’t right there. I took hold of the coffee cup and let thoughts run through my head as I sampled the bitter beverage.
Why weren’t there any suicide notes? A person doesn’t kill herself without leaving a note.
Speaking from pure logic, a suicide note is a sign of lingering regret. When people who don’t want to die but see no other choice decide to finish themselves off, they leave their reasons behind in the form of a note.
Suicide without a note.
Having no reason to leave a note. To no longer have any kind of view on the world and just bow out… vanish without protest. That’s total suicide. Such a complete suicide would leave no suicide note from the start, and wouldn’t, I felt, even draw attention to the fact of the death itself.
Which meant that jumping to one’s death wasn’t actually total suicide.
Dying in front of onlookers like that felt in itself like a form of suicide note. Surely it was because they wanted to leave something for the world to remember them by… because they wanted to announce their deaths in some fashion? So it only made sense that they must have left suicide notes.
So what was going on? Had a third party taken the girls’ last notes away, since none had been found? No, then we’d have been leaving the realm of suicide altogether. What, then? There was only one reason I could think of.
In short, that they had literally been accidents.
That the girls had never intended to die. In that case, there would have been no need to write notes. It would be like just heading out for some shopping and getting hit by a car through pure bad luck. Just like Shiki had gone out last night.
…But still, I couldn’t for the life of me think how someone could just go out shopping and end up falling off a building.
“Mikiya, it’ll stop with the eighth jumper. There won’t be anymore for a long time after that.”
Shiki’s words cut off my runaway train of thought.
“What, you know they’re going to stop?”
The question was out of my mouth before I knew it.
“I saw it, that’s why.” Shiki said. “There were eight of them, flying.”
“Aha. There were only that many at the building, huh? So you knew how many there’d be right from the start, Shiki?”
“Yeah,” Shiki said. “I took care of her, but the girls will still be lingering around there for a while. Pretty miserable state of affairs, though. Hey, Tōko… do you think that’s the fate people get stuck with if they go throwing themselves off buildings like that?”
“I wonder. It’s hard to say. There are so many factors involved. But, historically speaking, though there have been a lot of experiments, no human being has ever managed to succeed in flying under their own power. The words flying and falling are actually closely interlinked. But for people who are truly obsessed with the sky, however, that fact doesn’t register. The result is that they end up aiming for the clouds after they die, too. Rather than falling to the ground, it’s like falling up into the sky.”
Shiki frowned, not happy with the answer.
…She was angry. But at what?
“Um, excuse me,” I interjected, “but I’m not following this at all.”
“Huh? Oh, just the Fujō Building ghost story,” replied Miss Tōko. “I was thinking that I’d have to see it for myself to see if there’s any substance to it or if it’s just a bunch of reflections. I was going to go take a look when I had some free time, but Shiki killed it. So I won’t have a chance now.”
…Aha. That story, like I thought.
When Miss Tōko took off her glasses and got together with Shiki, it was usually this kind of occult stuff they talked about.
“You heard that Shiki saw a floating girl above the Fujō Building, right? There’s more to the story. It seems there were human-looking shapes bustling and flying around the girl. Since they don’t leave the building, we were talking about whether the place acts like a net, trapping them.”
They’d lost me. My face clouded over. What I was hearing was just too strange and difficult to understand.
Miss Tōko must have seen my expression, because she broke it down for me.
“So, there was someone floating at the Fujō Building, with the figures of all the suicide girls around her. And those girls looked like ghosts, right? That’s all there was to it. Pretty simple, eh?”
I nodded in tentative agreement.
I grasped the essential point of the story, but it seemed I’d joined in after the tale had ended yet again. From what Shiki had said earlier, it looked like she had done away with the ghost or whatever it was herself. Miss Tōko and Shiki had known each other two months now. In my position, I usually only ever heard the endings of these kinds of stories.
I wasn’t like these two women. Incredibly average old me didn’t want to get mixed up in stuff like that. But I didn’t like being completely out of the loop either, and so this state of affairs was pretty much just right for me. It’s what they call “making the best of a bad situation.”
“It’s like something out of a pulp novel,” I said, and Miss Tōko agreed.
Only Shiki didn’t seem convinced. Her eyes filled more and more with annoyance, casting sidelong glances and glaring at me.
Had I done something to make her mad?
“Hey… Speaking of Shiki seeing ghosts… It started in July, didn’t it? And weren’t there four of them at the Fujō building back then?”
I was asking the obvious, just for the sake of clarification, and Shiki shook her head moodily.
“Eight,” she said. “There were eight of them flying there from the start. I told you, didn’t I? That there wouldn’t be more than eight jumpers. Because the order goes in reverse for them.”
“What, so you could see eight right from the start? Hey, you’re like the amazing future-seeing girl.”
“Yeah, right. I’m normal. It’s the other side that’s messed up,” Shiki argued. “Yeah, weird. Like fire and ice living as roommates. So…”
Miss Tōko wasted no time in picking up where Shiki’s vague statements had left off.
“So, time works strangely on the other side. Time doesn’t pass in one solitary way. The mileage things have before decaying away is uneven. So it’s a fact that there’s a time lag between the breakdown of the human body and the memories that fill that body. Do a person’s memories disappear after their body dies? I don’t think so. Nothing just disappears abruptly, as long as there are observers left, watching. Things fade away gradually.
“Memories of a person… no, a record, in fact. Say the observer isn’t a person but the environment surrounding that record. In that case, it walks the streets as a unique, phantom vision after death, like those girls. This is one aspect of the whole ‘ghost’ phenomenon. The ones who end up seeing these visions are those who have something in common with them: friends or family of the deceased. Shiki’s the exception. Well, that’s ‘trace time expiration’ for you. But in the case of that building rooftop, it happened slowly. The trace of the girls from when they were alive hasn’t yet caught up to their original time.
“The result is that their memories alone are still living.
“What we have is probably the extremely delayed-action reality of those girls, projecting itself onto that place as phantoms.”
At that point, Miss Tōko lit the latest in who knows how many cigarettes.
In short, even if something disappears, as long as someone remembers it, it isn’t gone. And if something is remembered, it’s alive. And if it’s alive, you can see it. That was my best guess.
Which meant that they were illusions at the end of the day. No, actually, the way Miss Tōko herself labeled them “phantoms” meant they were definitely something more other-worldly and impossible than that.
“It’s a good theory. No harm in running with it,” said Shiki. “The problem is her. I got a good hit in, but if she’s corporeal, it’ll just happen all over again. And I’m sick of protecting Mikiya already.”
“Agreed. I’ll take care of Kirie Fujō,” Miss Tōko said. “You just walk Kokutō home. He’s still got five hours until quitting time, so use that bed over there if you want to sleep.”
The bed Miss Tōko was pointing at hadn’t been cleaned once in a whole half year and looked like the inside of an incinerator packed with wastepaper.
Shiki, naturally, ignored this.
“Well, what was she, then, in the end?”
A cigarette in her mouth, Tōko the sorceress gave a considered “hmph” and stepped soundlessly over to the window.
She surveyed the outside world from there.
There were no lights in the room, which was illuminated solely by the daylight from outside, making it difficult to tell if was daytime or evening inside.
Beyond the window, by contrast, it was clearly day. Miss Tōko gazed out at the summer afternoon streets, standing in silence for a while.
“She probably used to be one of the ‘flying’ types, too.”
The cigarette smoke absorbed into the white sunlight. Her back was to us as she looked down over the landscape. Like a mirage amid a white, misty haze.
“Kokutō, when you look down at the ground from somewhere high up, what image does it make you think of?”
My absentminded senses snapped back into focus at this sudden question.
Somewhere high up, huh? There was always the time I’d visited Tokyo Tower as a kid, I couldn’t remember what I’d been thinking at the time, though. The most I could remember was frantically trying to find my house from up there but not being able to.
“Er… smallness?” I ventured.
“That’s a stretch, Kokutō,” came the blunt rebuttal.
I pulled my thoughts together and offered a different suggestion.
“…Well, I guess it doesn’t really suggest anything to me, but it’s beautiful, isn’t it? Scenery is incredible when you see it from high up.”
I guess this seemed a more heartfelt answer than my last one, because Miss Tōko nodded slightly in approval.
Then, her eyes absolutely unmoving from the view outside, she began to speak.
“Looking down at a landscape far below is a magnificent spectacle. Even bog-standard scenery becomes something wonderful. But that’s not the impulse you feel when you see a panoramic view of the whole world you’re living in. No, there’s only one impulse you get from that view from above…”
Miss Tōko paused slightly when she said the word impulse,
An impulse isn’t based on reason or intelligence. I don’t think an impulse is something that comes from inside you, like your thoughts do, but rather something that swoops down from outside. Something that sweeps over you. Like a violent mugging. No matter how much you try to resist. That’s what we call an impulse. But what kind of violence could there be in a view from above…?
“It’s distance,” Miss Tōko said. “That panoramic view is far too spacious, too expansive. It creates a definite sense of estrangement from the world. And humans can only draw peace of mind from the things around them, even at the best of times. No matter what elaborate maps you may have, no matter the fact that you know you’re in such and such a place, it’s still nothing more than what we can touch and feel. We cannot feel the connecting points in what our brains register as this planet, this country, or this city. We’d have to go and physically visit those linking points for that. And, in fact, that’s fine. Our awareness is supposed to work that way.
“But if you get a view that’s too spacious, it throws a spanner in the works. You’ve got thirty feet that you can touch and feel around you, but you’re looking down over thirty thousand feet. They’re both the same, both the world that you live in, but the former seems much more real.
“See? There’s a contradiction right there, isn’t there?
“It’s proper and natural to recognize the vast scenery you’re looking out over as being ‘the world you live in’ more than the confined space you can actually feel with your body’s senses. Yet you cannot for the life of you feel that you are part of what you’re looking down at.
“Why is that? This is just my hunch, but I think people always give priority to the information they get from their surroundings. So, at this point, ‘sense,’ or knowledge, and ‘feelings,’ or experiences, chafe against each other. Before long, there’s friction, and your senses start acting erratically.
“The city looks so small from up here. I can’t believe my house is down there. So that’s what that park really looks like? I never knew there was a place like that over there. It’s like I never knew this town at all. It’s like I’ve ended up somewhere far, far away… —A view from too high up makes feelings like those surface. The person feels like they’re somewhere miles and miles away, even though they’re still standing in their own town.”
A high-up place is a distant place. I understood that distance aspect completely. But what Miss Tōko was talking about was probably more of a psychological thing.
“So basically, it’s not good to look at things from high up for too long?” I asked.
“It’s not good to take things to extremes. The sky has been thought of as a separate world since time immemorial. Flying is the same as going to another world. If you don’t arm yourself with civilized thinking, you get influenced by deviant perceptions. Common sense literally goes out the window. Protect your awareness, and, naturally, you avoid such bad influences. If you have a firm footing, there’s no problem. Once you’re back on the ground, everything’s normal again.”
Now that she said this, I thought about when I used to look down over the sports ground from the roof of my school. I’d suddenly be struck by the inexplicable thought of what it would be like to just leap off.
Of course, I’m joking. I never had the slightest intention of actually doing it, but why, I wonder, would such a clearly deadly thought jump into my head like that?
Miss Tōko said that everybody’s different, but I don’t think it’s especially rare for anybody to picture climbing up somewhere high and jumping off.
“…So it’s a case of your thoughts temporarily going crazy?”
As soon as I voiced the notion that had surfaced in my head, Miss Tōko gave a dry laugh.
“Everyone dreams about doing taboo things, Kokutō. People like imagining things they don’t do; we have a staggering capacity for self-satisfaction, after all. Only… Yeah, we were getting closer just then. The important thing is that the temptation of the taboo only rears its head in the appropriate place and not elsewhere. That’s just common sense. Your example just now… It’s not that a person’s senses go crazy; it’s that their reason becomes paralyzed.”
“This is dragging on now, Tōko,” said Shiki, clearly unable to put up with anymore.
As I thought about it, the conversation had certainly moved far off the original mark.
“It’s not dragging,” Miss Tōko said. “If we take it as the classic four-step narrative structure of introduction, development, twist, and conclusion, we’re still only in phase two.”
“I’m only interested in the end. I’m not wasting my time joining you two and your inane banter.”
“Shiki…”
Harsh but honest. Shiki carried on, though, despite my one-word interjection.
“So, if there’s a problem with looking at landscapes from high places,” she said, “then how do you explain our everyday sight? When we’re walking around normally, we’re still higher than ground level, aren’t we?”
Shiki’s attitude was all wrong, but her words, in contrast, had hit the mark. People’s eyeballs are definitely placed higher up on their bodies than the actual ground. Which means that we basically get a view from above even by simply standing at ground level.
Miss Tōko nodded, taking Shiki up on this challenge.
“But the earth’s surface, which you think of as ground level, is still an unreliable viewpoint to go on. And anyways, that aside, you still wouldn’t exactly call our normal field of vision ‘a view from on high,’ would you?”
“Field of vision doesn’t mean the images that our eyes can see but rather the images our brains take in. Our field of vision is protected by our common sense, so our standing viewpoint doesn’t feel to us like we’re high up. Even that’s governed by common sense. There’s no notion of height there. But on the other hand, we all of us live with a view from above. Not physically speaking but spiritually. There are a lot of individual differences at work. Those with the most expanded minds aim for great heights. But, even then, they don’t leave the box they’re in.
“Human beings live in boxes and can only live in boxes. We’re not meant to see from God’s viewpoint. If we cross that line, we become the monsters we’re warned about.
“Hypnos, the personification of sleep, and his twin, Thanatos, the personification of death, switch places. No one knows one from the other, and in the end, it becomes impossible to distinguish between them.”
As she continued, Miss Tōko herself was looking down at a world below. As she looked down, her feet were fixed to the ground. That felt to me like an extremely important point.
All of a sudden, I remembered a dream I’d had.
At the end of it, a butterfly had fallen.
If she hadn’t tried to follow me, she could probably have flown even longer and more gracefully.
Yes, if she’d just fluttered her wings and floated along she would have been in the air for so much longer. But she’d realized what it was to really fly. She couldn’t bear just floating there, weightless. That’s why she fell. She just stopped floating.
I tilted my head as I thought all this. So, there’d been a poet hiding inside me all along, had there?
Miss Tōko cast her cigarette away out the window.
“The disturbances at the Fujō building might well have been the world the girl was seeing. I’d hazard a guess that the difference in atmosphere that Shiki sensed is the wall separating the inside of the box from the outside. It’s like a weather discontinuity line, detectable by human senses.”
Finally, with Miss Tōko’s speech at an end, Shiki’s irritated look lifted.
She looked away with a sigh.
“Discontinuity line, huh? I wonder which one she thinks is the warm front and which is the cold one?”
In sharp contrast to the serious-sounding speech she’d just heard, Shiki really didn’t sound like she was remotely interested.
“Obviously, it’ll be the opposite of whatever you think,” retorted Miss Tōko, adopting the same kind of nonchalant air.
Her neck shivered. Was the shaking due to the chill she felt outside or the chill within?
Shiki Ryōgi couldn’t tell. So she didn’t dwell on it and calmly advanced.
There were no signs of life at the Fujō Building. It was two in the morning, and the apartments were lit only by white electric lights. Their glow illuminated the cream-colored walls, appearing to continue down into the depths of the passageway. There was no human warmth in the artificial light that swept away the darkness so completely. It felt more ominous than the dark it was supposed to keep at bay.
Shiki passed through the card-check entranceway and boarded the elevator.
There was no one inside. The interior was mirrored, evidently set up to allow those riding in the elevator to see themselves.
Reflected in it was a languid-eyed figure in a black leather jacket over a light blue kimono. The eyes were laid-back, showing no interest in anything around. Facing her reflected self in the mirror, Shiki pressed the button for the rooftop.
The world around her began to move upward, accompanied by a faint mechanical whir. The mechanical box was on its way up to the roof. A secret room for all of a few seconds. Right now, Shiki was cut off from anything that was happening outside these four walls and had no way of engaging any of it. This feeling managed to slightly penetrate the void that was her heart.
Right now, this tiny box was the only world that was real to her.
The doors parted soundlessly. Ahead was an utterly black space, completely at odds with what had come before.
Shiki emerged into a small room. There was only one door–the one to the roof–and the vacant elevator returned to the ground floor as she stepped out.
There was no light, and her surroundings were chokingly dark. Her footsteps echoed as Shiki moved through the tiny room, opening the door that led to the roof.
The deep black was replaced by a dim darkness. A panoramic outlook of the nighttime city leaped into view, filling her eyes in every erection. The roof of the Fujō Building had been built blank and featureless. The bare concrete floor stretched out, dead level, surrounded by a wire mesh fence.
Apart from a water tank on top of the small room from which Shiki had just emerged, there was nothing else to draw the eye.
The place itself was a completely ordinary rooftop. Yer the landscape struck her. The roof was about ten floors higher than the surrounding buildings, and the view was more lonely than pretty. Climbing the thing ladder, Shiki found it to be like looking down over the world.
The city was like a dark deep ocean where no light could penetrate, and it was certainly beautiful to behold. Burning lights here and there looked like the twinkling of deep-sea fish.
—If my field of vision is the whole world, then the world is sleeping right now.
Forever, for all I know. Though I bet it’s only temporary. More’s the pity.
This stillness grips my heart more than any cold does.
So much it hurts—
The stillness of the night sky was conspicuous against the street and houses far below. If the city was the deep sea, then the sky was purest darkness. Stars twinkled among the black, as if they were scattered jewels.
The moon was a hole. Shiki could only see it as a huge, remarkably alluring opening that pierced through the black drawing paper that was the sky. This was because she had heard, back at the Ryōgi family home, that the moon wasn’t actually reflecting light from the sun at all. Instead, they said, it was merely scenery from the other side beyond, showing through the opening.
The moon, it was said, was an open door to another world.
The moon represented sorcery, the female gender, and death. Against that backdrop, a single human figure was suspended, floating.
Around the figure flew eight girls.
Rising there in the air was the pale figure of a girl.
White clothes, so florid and brilliant they could have been mistaken for a showy dress, and black hair down to her hips. Slender limbs protruded from her garments, making her look all the more graceful.
Her indifferent eyes and thin eyebrows would probably have secured her a place in the most prestigious of beauty pageants.
Shiki guessed her age to be in the early twenties. Of course, she doubted whether placing some’s age was applicable when it came to ghosts. But, in any case, she doubted that the translucent girl was a ghost.
She was definitely there. The girls twisting through the night sky around her… they would be the ghosts. The girls, drifting randomly through the air, felt more like they were swimming than flying. Their forms were vague, though, and faded into translucency occasionally.
A shining white woman with a mass of girls swimming around her in a seemingly protective formation, there above Shiki’s head.
This series of images was not repellent.
Rather, it was…
“Hmph… This sure is magical,” Shiki scoffed mockingly.
The woman’s beauty was unearthly, inhuman. Her black hair was as magnificent as strands of silk thread, smoothed out by one with a comb. Had it been stirred by a strong wind, her billowing hair would perhaps have been a vision of mystic beauty.
“In which case, I’d better kill you,” said Shiki, and the woman must have heard this because she cast her eyes downward.
The rooftop of the Fujō Building was over three hundred feet above ground, the woman another teen feet above that. Their eyes met as Shiki looked up.
No words were exchanged. No mutually understood language even.
Shiki reached into her jacket, she pulled out a lethal weapon: a seven-inch blade–more a knight than a sword.
A murderous intent filled the eyes looking down from above. Instantly, the white garments flickered. The woman’s hand swept smoothly down, her fingertips pointed at Shiki. What her frail, willowy limbs suggested, however, was not a living white color.
“Bones or lilies.”
A voice echoed long into the windless night air. The outstretched fingers were full of the intent to kill.
Suddenly, the white fingers were pointing at Shiki’s body. Shiki’s head swam with a pulsing clamor. She staggered, as though her slender frame were about to tumble down.
But only once.
The woman above faltered slightly at this.
Her subliminal suggestion, urging her victim to fly, wasn’t working on this girl.
Her ability to force the image of flying into a person’s very consciousness was beyond the realm of hinting and was more like full-fledged brainwashing. There was no resisting it. As a result of the inevitable suggestion, whether they believed it would actually happen or not, people simply ran over the edge of the roof, secure in the firm belief that they could fly.
Shiki had brushed this urge aside after only slight dizziness.
Maybe, the woman pondered, it had just been a glancing blow. She resolved to try once more.
It would be much stronger this time.
Not “You can fly” this time. A strong compulsion: “You will fly.”
And yet…
Shiki looked up at her before she could do it. Two arms, two legs, one torso. One small spot slightly to the left of the center of the chest. Shiki could clearly see the cross section before her eyes: a blueprint for death.
The chest, above all, would be the best place to aim for. That would mean instant death. Illusion or no, Shiki was determined to prove she could be killed. Even if this girl was a god.
She raised the knife in her hand holding the hilt in a backhanded grip, Shiki narrowed her eyes at the opponent in the sky above.
Asshe did, an impulse welled up in her once again.
…Fly. You can fly. You’ve always liked the sky. You were flying only yesterday. Maybe you can fly even higher up today.
To freedom. To peace. To laughter. You have to go. Where to? To the sky? To freedom?
—It means…
…An escape from reality. A yearning for the heavens. Reversing gravity.
Your feet aren’t on the ground. Flying unconsciously. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go… go now!
“You must be joking,” muttered Shiki, and raised her empty left hand.
The lure of the sky had no effect on her. She no longer even felt dizzy.
“I don’t have yearnings like that. I don’t feel alive, so I don’t know what actual suffering is. That’s right. To be honest, I’ve got no interest in the likes of you either.”
Her words were melodic, dismissive.
Shiki didn’t feel the bittersweet joys and sorrows or various binding restrictions associated with life. So she didn’t feel any kind of fascination with the prospect of liberation from suffering.
“Still,” she went on,”I can’t have you taking a certain someone with you. If you want a reason, it’s because I saw him first, so I’ll be taking him back now.”
Shiki’s empty hand grasped the open air. The woman and accompanying girls were drawn toward her, just like that, while she pulled her hand back as though reeling in a line.
They were like fish being hauled up onto land in a net.
The woman’s features changed, and she hit Shiki with redoubled force of will. If she could have vocalized her intention, it would probably have come out as a scream of “Fall!”
Disregarding the woman’s rage entirely, Shiki gave an angry retort.
“You fall.”
Her knife stabbed through the chest of the rapidly descending woman. It was as simple as stabbing fruit; the pierced woman was entranced by the sheer sharpness of the blade.
There was no blood.
Paralyzed by the shock of the knife, which had thrust all the way through her back, the woman twitched only once. Shiki merely tossed the dispatched body away. The woman’s form sailed past the fence and plunged soundlessly.
Even on the verge of falling, her hair made no fluttering motion, and her clothes billowed in the wind as she melted into the darkness. She looked like a white flower sinking into the ocean depths.
With that, Shiki left the rooftop.
Even now, the figures of the floating girls remained overhead.
3
After being stabbed through the chest, I came to.
It had been a huge shock. That girl must have been incredibly strong to just pierce someone’s heart like that.
And yet, it hadn’t been an angry, frenzied strength.
She had simply sliced through bone and muscle, calm and collected, as though it were nothing.
A terrible sense of unity.
The sense of death was sweeping my body. Again and again, the sound of my heart being run through. To me, that sensation hurt more than the pain.
Because it was both fear and indescribable pleasure. My body was shaking, a chill running down my spine to the point of insanity.
I felt anxiety and isolation of tear-inducing magnitude and a clinging attachment to life. Then, soundlessly, I started to weep.
Not from fear or pain.
It was because I, who would pray each night to see tomorrow morning, was experiencing firsthand something I had never felt—death. Most probably, this chill would be with me for eternity. I would never be able to escape it.
Or, on the other hand, I wouldn’t escape as long as I myself was in love with this sensation.
The sound of a door opening.
It was afternoon. There was a trace of sunlight shining in through the closed windows. Medical consulting hours were over, so this must be someone on a social call, I thought.
My room was a private one, and I shared it with nobody.
The only things here were rays of sunlight that had just poured in, the static cream colored curtains that had never known a breeze, and the bed I was in.
“Excuse me. You must be Kirie Fujō.”
The visitor seemed to be a woman.
After speaking out in an incredibly husky voice, she came over to my bedside, not bothering to sit down. She must have been standing over me, looking down. Her gaze felt cold.
…This woman is terrifying. She’ll destroy me for sure.
Even so, inside I was rejoicing. It had been so many years since someone had come to visit me. So what if it was death, come to finish me off? I couldn’t send her away.
“You’re an enemy, aren’t you?”
The woman nodded in agreement.
I focused my senses and tried with all my might to make out the figure of this visitor.
It must have been the sun’s fault, but all I could see was a vast silhouette.
She was minus a jacket, but her pristine, wrinkle-free clothes made her look like a teacher. I relaxed a little at this. Only, I had to take points off for the strong orange tie around her white shirt. It was too gaudy.
“Are you one of that girl’s acquaintances?” I asked. “Or are you her?”
“No, I’m a friend of the one who attacked you and the one you attacked. Honestly, of all the weird people to get mixed up with. You’ve really… well, we’ve both got bad luck.”
Having said this, the woman took something out of her breast pocket and immediately put it away again.
“No smoking in hospital rooms, huh?” she said regretfully. “It looks like your lungs are gone already. Smoking wouldn’t do you much good.”
It must have been a box of cigarettes then.
I had never touched cigarettes, but I wanted to see what this woman looked like smoking. Maybe… in fact, definitely, it would have suited her, like lizard pumps and a snakeskin bag on a shop mannequin.
“It’s not just your lungs that are bad, though, is it? That’s the cause, but I can see tumors all over your body. Extremities show sarcoma… and your insides are in especially bad shape. Your hair looks to be the only part that’s unaffected. Even so, you’ve got remarkable physical strength.
“A normal person would have died long before the disease ate them away to this extent… How many years has it been, Kirie Fujō?”
She was probably asking how long I’d lived hospitalized. But I didn’t have an answer for her.
“I don’t know. I stopped counting long ago.”
There was no reason to, after all.
Because I could never leave here. Not until the day I died.
The woman gave a short sigh of resignation.
There was no sympathy there but no revulsion either. I hated it. The only thing anyone could give me was pity. This person wouldn’t spare me even that.
“Are you okay where Shiki stabbed you? From what she said, it was the left ventricle to the midaorta. You must have been sliced through the bicuspid valve.”
Her voice was perfectly calm as she spoke these incredible words. I couldn’t help but crack a smile at the strangeness of it.
“You’re weird. We’d hardly be talking like this if I’d been stabbed through the heart.”
“Perhaps,” she replied. “We’ll see soon enough.”
Yes, that’s right. I’d been wondering if this not quite Japanese, not quite Western-style woman would finish me off, and her words had just confirmed it.
“But you’ll feel its influence. Shiki’s got good eyes. If what she saw was a secondary entity, then its collapse will probably reach your real body. I have two or three things I’d like to know before that happens. That’s why I came out here.”
A secondary entity. She must have been talking about the “other me.”
“I haven’t seen the flying you. Can you explain what you are?” asked the woman.
“I don’t understand, myself,” I replied. “All I can see is the scenery outside this window. But maybe I shouldn’t have looked. I was always looking down at the outside from here. The trees showing the changing seasons, and people coming and going from the hospital… always changing. Even if I raise my voice, nobody hears, and I can’t reach anything if I stretch out my hand. I’ve been gasping and wheezing for so long.Hating the scenery outside for so long. That’s what a curse is, isn’t it?”
“…Hmph. The Fujō blood, eh?” said the visitor. “You’re from a pure bloodline going back into antiquity, They specialized in prayers, but it seems that curses were their real bread and butter. It’s possible that your surname was originally fujō, as in ‘unclean,’ but they changed the way its written.”
Lineage. My family. That ends with me, too.
When I had just been hospitalized, I lost my parents and brother in a car crash. Since then, my medical bills were being paid for by someone who used to be a friend of my father. This person had a complicated name that sounded like a priest or something, so I didn’t remember what kind of person he was.
“But this isn’t a subconscious curse you’re not aware of,” the woman pointed out. “What on earth did you pray for?”
…I didn’t understand that, myself. I doubted even this woman could comprehend it.
“Have you ever stared out at the landscape for a long time? For year after year, kept on looking out until your consciousness stopped?… I hate the outside. I hated it, and it terrified me. I was always looking down from above, the whole time. And after that, one day my eyes went all strange. It was like I was in the sky over that courtyard over there, looking down at the ground below. It felt like my body and my mind were still here, and just my eyes were flying. But, because I couldn’t move from here, all I ended up able to do was look down at this spot from above, though.”
“…So, your brain took in the surrounding landscape. Which meant you could then see it from any angle at all. I imagine.
“Did you lose your eyesight around then?”
This was a shock. The woman had noticed that I could hardly see anymore. I nodded.
“That’s right. Everything got gradually whiter, until I couldn’t see anything. At first, I thought everything would be pitch-black, but it wasn’t. There’s just nothing. That’s what it’s like to be blind.
“But I didn’t have any problem with it. My eyes were up in the sky already. I could see the area around the hospital, so I could never escape from here in the first place. Nothing changes. Nothing—”
At that point, I coughed violently. I hadn’t talked this much in a long time. And my eyelids felt hot.
“I see. That’s how your consciousness got up into the sky. But… then why are you alive? If that apparition over the Fujō Building was your consciousness, you should have been killed by Shiki.”
Yes, I’d wondered the same thing.
That girl… Her name was Shiki, by the sound of it. How was she able to cut me?
In exchange for not feeling anything, that other me had never been injured. That girl, Shiki, had killed the other me easily, as though my other body were truly solid and tangible.
“Answer me. Was the you at the Fujō Building really Kirie Fujō?”
“The one at the Fujō Building isn’t me. There’s a me who is always looking out at the sky and a me who was up there in it. The other one gave up on me in favor of flying, in the end. Even my own self abandoned me.”
The woman by my bed gasped. It was the first time she had displayed anything like emotion.
“Split personality… No, it’s not that. You were one originally but were then granted a second vessel.
“…One personality controlling two bodies. Certainly, I can’t think of anything else to explain it.”
Now that she said that, it sounded probable. I had abandoned the myself here in this room and gone looking out over the city. And yet neither of my two selves was affixed to the ground, and both were merely floating. I, who was so isolated from the world I saw outside the window, couldn’t break through my sense of detachment, no matter how hard I wished for it.
Though we were split, in the end the two myselves were connected.
“…It all makes sense. But why weren’t you content with just projecting into the outside world? I don’t think it was necessary to kill those girls.”
Girls… Yes, those I envied so. They had done a terrible thing. But I was innocent. After all, they only jumped because they wanted to.
“The you at the Fujō Building is like a body of consciousness,” the woman stated. “You used it, didn’t you? Those girls could always fly, right from the start, couldn’t they? Whether it was just in their dreams or they could actually fly for real.
“There are a great many people who don’t sleepwalk but sleepfly. It isn’t a problem, though. Why? Because they show those symptoms only when they are unconscious. Because they fly without any malicious intent while asleep, and the thought of flying never enters their minds when they’re awake. Those girls were special, even in such a group. Though we aren’t talking Peter Pan here, they were especially light during adolescence. One or two of them were probably flying for real, but most would only have been doing it in a dream sense. You made them conscious of this. You drew out that subconscious impression and made it real.
“The result was that they became aware of the fact that they could fly. And, yes, of course they could fly. But only unconsciously. Unpowered flight is difficult. Even I can’t fly without a broom. The success rate for conscious flight is about 30 percent. Those girls just tried to fly as though it were as simple as anything and, naturally, plummeted.”
That’s right. Those girls were flying around me. I thought they could be my friends. But they weren’t even aware of me and just floated there like mindless fish.
It wasn’t long before I realized they weren’t conscious. Even though I thought they’d notice me if I made them aware.
That’s all I wanted. So why…
“Are you cold? You’re shaking.”
The woman’s voice still felt like plastic. I hugged myself, unable to stop trembling.
“I’ll ask one more thing. Why did you long for the sky even though you hate the outside world?”
The reason was probably because…
“Because the sky is endless. I thought that if I could keep going, fly far away, then I’d find a world I didn’t hate.”
Then came the question, asking if I had found it.
I couldn’t stop trembling. It felt like someone was physically shaking me, and my eyelids were becoming hotter and hotter.
I nodded.
“Every night before I fell asleep, I feared that I wouldn’t be able to wake the next morning. Wondering if I would be alive tomorrow terrified. I knew that if I slept, I wouldn’t have the strength to wake up.
“Every day was like walking a tightrope, and all I could do was dread death. But, on the other hand, that’s what made me actually able to feel that I was alive. The smell of death was the only thing that filled my empty days. But I relied on that alone to live… Because I’d shed my old self like a cast-off skin. I can only feel alive by staring death in the face.”
That’s right. That’s why I yearned for death more than life. To fly, as far as I could. To leave this place. That was why.
“Did you take the boy from my place to keep you company?”
“No. I didn’t even notice at the time. I was clinging onto life, wanting to fly while I was still alive. I thought that I could manage that with him.”
“…Shiki’s just like you, then. In choosing Kokutō, there’s still hope for her. Well, I guess there’s nothing wrong with feeling alive through someone else.”
Kokutō. Of course., That Shiki girl had come to take him back from me. His savior had been absolute death to me.
Still, I didn’t regret it.
“That boy is a child. He’s always looking into the sky. Always perfectly upright. That’s why, if he felt like it, he could fly anywhere he wanted. Yes… I wanted him to take me with him.”
My eyelids were hot. I didn’t really understand, but I must have been crying.
Not from sorrow or anything like that… If I really could have gone off somewhere with that boy, it would have made me so happy. Because it would never happen–because it was a dream that could never come true–it was all the more beautiful, and it filled my eyes with tears.
That was the sole dream I had had in all these years.
“But Kokutō’s not interested in sky or anything like that,” the woman said. “…Hmm. Someone who yearns for the sky, yet can’t approach it. Ironic, isn’t it?”
“It is. I’ve heard that human beings hold on to lots of things that they don’t need. I just floated. I can’t fly… All I can manage to do is float there.”
The burning vanished from my eyes. It would probably never happen again.
Because the only that governed me now was the shivering coursing down my back.
“Sorry to have disturbed. This really is the final question: what are you going to do now? I don’t mind treating the wound that Shiki gave you.”
I didn’t answer. I merely shook my head.
The woman, I think, frowned slightly.
“…I see. There are two kinds of escape: fleeing aimlessly and fleeing with a goal in sight. As a rule, I’d call the former floating and the latter flying.
“Only you can decide which one of the two your view from above is. But if, by some chance, you choose based on feelings of guilt and self-reproach, then that’s a mistake. We don’t choose our path because of our sins; we carry our sins down the path we choose.”
And then the woman left.
She hadn’t told me her name the whole time she had been here, but I understood why. There would have been no point.
…That woman had doubtlessly known how I would end things. Because I could never fly. I could only float.
Because I was weak, I couldn’t have done as she suggested.
That’s why I couldn’t beat this temptation.
Back then… the flash I felt in the instant my heart was pierced.
The overwhelming torrential pounding of death and the throbbing of life. I hadn’t thought anything of it, but I still had that simple, important thing left to me.
What I had was death.
The fear gripping my spine. I had to crash into death headlong and, in doing so, feel the joy of being alive. All for the sake of every ounce of life I had–the life I’d shown nothing but disdain for up until now. Yet it would probably be impossible for me to go out to meet that nightlike death. Most probably, that intense vivid last moment was beyond my reach. That death which went through like a needle, like a sword, like thunder.
And so, I tried to get as close to it as I could. No plans came to mind, but I still had a few days left to think, so it would be okay. Besides, I had already decided on the method.
I hardly feel it necessary to say, but for my final moment… naturally, jumping to my death with a view from above would be wonderful.
After the sun set, I left Miss Tōko’s run-down building. Shiki’s apartment was nearby, but my place was about twenty minutes away by train.
Perhaps because of her lack of sleep, Shiki plodded along with a wobbly gait, nestled up close to me.
“Is suicide okay, Mikiya?”
The question came out of the blue.
“…Hmm. I’m not sure,” I replied. “If I’d been infected with a retrovirus that just by my living, everyone in Tokyo would die, then I think I might kill myself to save everyone.”
“What’s that about? That’s way far-fetched to use as an example,” Shiki said.
“No, it’ll do,” I insisted. But I’d do it because I’m weak, though, I think. I wouldn’t have the guts to survive and have everyone in Tokyo out for my blood, so that’s why I’d kill myself. That way would be easier. It’s the difference between a second’s worth of bravery, and courage you have to keep up forever. Anyone can see which one’s harder. It’s a bit extreme, but death is easy, I reckon. It’s just a matter of why you do it. But there will be times when the person in question feels a terrible urge to run away. I can’t deny that or object to it. Because I’m a weak person, too.”
…Yet, still, self-sacrifice of the sort I had just mentioned is justified and would probably be seen as heroic, even.
But no. It doesn’t matter how just or how noble it is; choosing death is foolish. Maybe we have to live, no matter how ugly or how wrong we are, to correct our mistakes. Live on and accept the consequences of our actions.
That’s what takes real courage. I didn’t think I could do that, so I shut my mouth and stopped talking so brashly.
“…Er, anyway,” I said, finishing up, “everyone’s different in the end, aren’t they?”
It was pretty halfhearted, as conclusions go. Shiki glanced at me doubtfully.
“But you’re different,” she said, like she’d seen straight through to my real feelings. Even though it sounded cold, there was a sort of warmth in her words, too. I felt kind of awkward and walked on silently through the town for a while.
The sounds of the main street came closer. The bright lights, the hustle and bustle, the lights of the busy cars, and the sound of engines. A surging crowd of people, a babble of noises.
The station was straight ahead, past the main street’s mass of department stores.
Shiki stopped abruptly.
“Mikiya, stay over tonight.”
“Huh? What’s with this, all of a sudden?”
Shiki pulled me along by the hand as if to say “Just come on, dammit.” …It would be much less of a hassle, since Shiki’s apartment was so nearby, but I felt morally awkward about spending the night at her place.
“No, really, I don’t have to,” I protested, “There’s nothing in your room anyways. It’ll just be boring. Besides, don’t you have stuff to do?”
I knew full well that she didn’t
I knew what I was talking about, and Shiki wouldn’t have a chance to counterattack… or so I thought. But she looked at me sternly, like I was the bad guy, and voiced her objection.
“Strawberry.”
“Huh?”
“Strawberry Häagen-Dazs. Two cartons. You brought them with you and just left them. Clean up your damn mess.
“…Yeah, now that you mention it…”
They were still there. The presents I’d brought because I was feeling a bit hot on the way to Shiki’s place last time. Still, I wonder why I’d brought something like that in the first place. It was almost September, after all.
Well, that was beside the point now, though. It seemed I would have to resign myself to it and just go along with her. Still, I was a little irritated and decided to offer some counteroffensive, at least.
Even though being sniped at like that annoyed me, I had a weakness around Shiki that meant I would just shut up and take it. And even though this showed my real feelings–a cry from the real Mikiya Kokutō–Shiki still wouldn’t acknowledge them.
“Oh, all right then. I’ll stay the night. But still, Shiki…”
Shiki looked at me questioningly, and I turned to her, a serious look on my face.
“Don’t say ‘Clean up your damn mess.’ You should clean up your talk. You’re a girl, you know.”
Shiki was reacting to the word girl.
She turned her back on me angrily and muttered something like “I can talk however the hell I want, dammit.”
One day, I took the main street route home. This was unusual for me, just a whim of the moment. I had been walking, not thinking about anything in particular, down the street–that street whose buildings I was so tired of looking at–when someone fell from above.
I hardly even had a chance to hear it. The muffled splattering sound.
But it was obvious: someone had fallen from one of the buildings above… and was now dead.
Deepest crimson gushed down the asphalt. Only the long black hair still retained its former appearance. Thin, fragile, white-looking limbs. And a lifeless, smashed face. This series of images was like pressed flowers, trapped flat between the old pages of a book. I guess. Probably.
Only because the corpse, its neck twisted into a fetal position, looked to me like a folded lily.
I knew who the person was.
In the end, Hypnos, or sleep, had, after all, become Thanatos… death.
Ignoring the gathering crowd of onlookers, I was walking away when I heard a pattering, and Azaka caught up with me.
“That was a jumping suicide, wasn’t it, Miss Tōko?”
“Yeah, looks like it,” I replied vaguely. To be honest, I didn’t really have any interest.
Whatever the victim’s decision had been, a suicide was only treated as a suicide in the end.
That girl’s final act of will hadn’t been summed up by the word fly, or even float, but rather fall. The only thing in that act had been vain futility. There was no need for me to pay it any attention.
“I heard there were a lot last year,” said Azaka. “Maybe suicide’s coming back into fashion? But I don’t understand people who kill themselves. Do you, Miss Tōko?”
I nodded another vague “yes.”
I looked up at the sky and answered, as though gazing at an impossible vision.
“There’s no meaning in suicide. She probably just couldn’t fly today. That’s all.”
Thank you so much for posting this!