That’s right! You should learn this truth, too, Misaki. If you do, you won’t come up with more ridiculous plans. You’ll stop looking to people like me for help.
She was terribly stupid. She was clinging to a horrifyingly enormous despair. I was appalled by the loneliness that caused her to seek help from a piece of human trash like me. I cursed the misfortune that had fallen upon her. I cursed the unreasonable fact that children couldn’t choose their parents. I wanted a cheerful girl like her to live a strong, healthy life.
Please, do your best, somewhere. I’m all right. I’ll be fine on my own. It’s best for me to be alone. I’ll live alone and die alone.
Even still, I had hope. I had hope….
Look, just over there—it’s shining, pale, and gentle.
It was my hometown, the one that drew forth nostalgic, bittersweet tears. Autumn plains that continued forever. Memories from long ago. The eternally fleeting glances from giggling little girls. The peace of the black cat, hit by a car. There was no longer anything painful or difficult anywhere. I was fine now.
“That’s right. You are now”, said a little girl.
The life-sized anime doll, which Yamazaki had left behind as a present, stared at me. She was an angel. She started to move, and she guided me forward.
We traveled to a faraway planet. It was beautifuclass="underline" a blue sky with white clouds, the cool wind blowing across a spring field that stretched into the distance. We stood in the middle of the field, and the girl picked one pure white flower and held it up in front of me. With her slender fingers, she grasped a petal and pulled it out. “Life.”
Then, she pulled out another petal. “Death.”
She was telling a flower fortune.
“Life … Death … Life … Death … Life … Death … Life … Death.”
The last petal fluttered to the ground.
The girl smiled gently.
Chapter 10. Dive
Part One
Summer ended. I’d depleted my living expenses. I had no money left for food, so I decided to try sleeping to conserve energy. I would be awake for five hours, and then I’d sleep for fifteen. I tried living on that schedule.
For the first three days, I didn’t really have any problem fasting. At worst, my stomach hurt a little bit. By the time the fourth day rolled around, though, I couldn’t think of anything but food. I want to eat ramen. I want to eat curry and rice. Regardless of my will, my body seriously wanted calories. This craving was impossible to fight.
Finally, on the fifth day of fasting, I left the apartment. Spending my last few hundred yen to buy a pastry and another part-time job magazine, I decided to start doing physical work that very day.
Physical day labor… I mastered the work surprisingly easily, bringing supplies into event halls, helping with moving and the like. Once in a while, I made a mistake and got punched by one of the higher-ups; even so, the work was refreshing. The rougher I treated my body, the more and more empty my head became. For the first time in several years, I could go to sleep and wake up feeling refreshed.
Given all my credit card debt, I worked night and day for the first month. After registering with a temporary agency, I was able to get daily work. Once I’d accumulated a degree of wiggle room in my savings, I immediately reduced the amount of work I was doing. I decided to work for about half a month at a time, then staying holed up for the second half. As long as I could make about one hundred thousand yen a month, I could actually maintain a rather pleasant life.
Whenever possible, I tried to work nights. Nighttime traffic control was the best job. To be a security guard, you needed to get registered by taking a four-day legal training course; once you finished that, however, no other work was easier.
In the middle of the night, I waved the glowing red guide stick back and forth at construction sites far from human habitation. The only thing I could hear all night long was the echo of construction equipment operating behind me. On the nights when I worked as a guard, I was alone. Sometimes a car would pass, but all I had to do was wave the guide stick appropriately and caution, “Look out, slow down.”
Because I almost never needed to speak to others while working, I felt the same as when I holed up in my apartment. I just relied on my conditioned reflexes to wave the guide stick, back and forth, back and forth. The night wind was a bit chilly, but my pay for this was ten thousand yen per night, counting my travel fare.
I’d work, and then I’d shut myself away—earn my living expenses, and then shut myself away. This lifestyle continued and, with frightening speed, time went by. While I kept working, it turned to winter.
It was the winter of my fifth year as a hikikomori. This year felt thoroughly cold—probably because I had previously sold off my kotatsu to the secondhand shop. Even covered head to toe with a blanket, I still was freezing, always shivering uncontrollably. At that point, in place of a body warmer, I decided to try using the laptop computer, which Yamazaki had left behind when he moved.
“It’s an off-brand Pentium 66 MHz notebook computer. I didn’t want to have to carry it, so I was going to throw it away. But seeing as I have it, I’ll give it to you, Satou”, he’d said.
He’d left with those words.
I set the laptop on my stomach and turned on the power. A noisy whirring indicated that it was operating, and an anime wallpaper appeared on the liquid crystal screen. Being an older machine, it generated an amazing amount of heat. Soon, I warmed up and began to grow sleepy.
Just then, I recognized a familiar icon displayed on the computer’s desktop.
It looked like the executable file for the erotic game that Yamazaki had been making. Positioning the cursor on the file, I clicked to open it. The hard disk started groaning. After a long loading period, the game began.
I played it for several hours. And then, I understood… I understood that this was a terrible, terrible game.
The genre was an RPG, but it was an extremely cheap RPG, with about one hundredth of the first Dragon Quest[35] game’s content. It wasn’t an erotic game any longer, and the story was utterly ridiculous—basically, the concept was something along the lines of “a journey about love and youth taken by soldiers fighting against a giant, evil organization”. The game told the story of an average young man who becomes a warrior to fight evil and protect the heroine. This wish-fulfillment scenario eventually bypassed the player, continuing meaninglessly on and on and on.
I was dumbfounded.
Come on, what idiot could have come up with such a stupid scenario? It was me. I was the very person who had written the original outline for the story.
I grew sad. It was a bittersweet sadness, because I thoroughly understood the scenario of the game: Soldiers taking a stand against evil.
This had been our exact desire; we had wanted to fight an evil organization; we had wanted to fight villains. If a war had broken out, we would have joined the JSDF[36] right away and launched kamikaze attacks. That definitely would have been a meaningful way to live and an attractive way to die. Had there been villains in the world, we would have battled them. Fists raised in the air, we would have fought. There was no mistake about it.
There weren’t any villains, though. The world was just complicated in various ways, and there weren’t any obvious villains to be found. It was excruciating.
Our personal desires had become the framework for the game. As I progressed farther into it, I realized that it actually had a wonderful story. It was a simple, beautiful story. Right now, in fact, the main character, fighting an enormously powerful enemy, vowed to protect the heroine.
36
The Japanese Self-Defense Forces, established after World War II, are Japan’s military branches.