“Um, Miss Norie, I’ve said this a lot, but you don’t need to meet me at the door when you’re in the middle of cooking…,” Minoru said, looking at the ladle.
Norie’s smiling face transformed into an unhappy one.
“And I’ve told you a lot that you don’t have to call me Miss Norie, Mii!”
“Even so, I’ve gotten so used to it by now… Uh, something’s rattling around in the kitchen.”
At Minoru’s words, Norie fell silent for a moment.
“Aaah, the pot’s going to boil over!” she yelled, bounding back down the hallway.
Minoru exhaled a puff of air and started up the stairs. As he went, he heard another shout.
“We’re having gyoza today! Now hiring one person to fold the dumplings!”
“…I’ll be there right away after I change clothes!” Minoru yelled back, dashing up the stairs.
Minoru’s large room had tatami mat flooring and was on the second floor of a four-bedroom house built fifteen years ago. Following his policy of having as few possessions as possible, he didn’t have much furniture. There was a low bed along the eastern wall, a bookshelf built into the western wall, and a simple desk and chair next to a floor-to-ceiling window on the south side.
There was a notebook computer on top of the desk that was a hand-me-down from Norie, but he didn’t have anything like a TV, video recorder, or gaming system. There were only about thirty novels and academic books lined up on his bookshelf, and supposing someone came over to hang out, he would have trouble figuring out how to pass the time. But for better or worse, he didn’t have any friends he was that close to.
Minoru put the top and bottom of his school uniform on a hanger and took off his collared shirt and T-shirt. Opening the closet in just his boxer briefs to take out a change of clothes, Minoru’s hand stopped suddenly.
There was a large mirror mounted on the inside of the closet door. His half-naked reflection in it drew his gaze.
Minoru had often heard indirectly that people considered him a gloomy guy, and he thought that was exactly right. His eyes had a skeptical look about them, and his mouth was so tight that it seemed he had forgotten how to smile. His bangs, which had grown down past his eyebrows, got in the way when he ran, but he didn’t feel like cutting them any shorter. His build was more feeble that it was thin, and the weakness of his neck and shoulders in particular was just like a girl’s.
Moreover, the somehow diluted feeling of his hair color confirmed his dreary image. It wasn’t that his hair was white, but depending on how the light hit, it could look gray. This wasn’t the color he had been born with; it became like this after that night eight years ago. It would be easy to dye it black, but his teachers and classmates had never said anything about it, so he left it alone.
Minoru, checking that nothing about his body had outwardly changed, fixed his gaze last on his bare chest—the exact center of his visible ribs. His white skin showed no injuries, no hollows, and no protrusions.
Still, there was no denying it any longer. What had happened three months ago was not a daydream. Something was lurking there. The thing had brought about a mysterious phenomenon, preventing the handles of the bike and the fist of Minoru’s classmate from touching him.
The result was that it protected him from harm, but instead of gratitude, he had a creepy feeling. He thought about all the abnormal things going on, which couldn’t be explained by the common sense of the world Minoru had been living in. As he contemplated this, goose bumps popped up all over his exposed skin.
But.
As he whispered, “…Common sense…,” in a low voice, his shivering left him.
Common sense. Common sense.
Under the “Common sense” section in Minoru’s dictionary, a piece of writing by the nineteenth-century novelist Ogai Mori was quoted.
“Common sense is the capacity to comprehend normal occurrences and take appropriate measures.”
If common sense was the ability to understand ordinary things and act accordingly, Minoru had lost sight of that. He wasn’t clear on where the line between normal and abnormal was.
Was running ten kilometers every morning normal? Abnormal? Was not having any friends to hang out with on days off normal? Abnormal? How about having someone come into one’s house and murder their whole family? And is it normal for the person responsible to not get caught, even after eight years? Is it abnormal?
If all of those things are normal—then one wouldn’t be shaking in their boots when their running time improved or when they didn’t get injured when they should have because of something that fell from the sky and slipped into their body. Despite the fact that there had been a big fuss when signals broadcasted by an extraterrestrial civilization were captured by a telescope on the moon, things had gone completely silent in less than six months.
Anything that can happen will happen. Or in this world, anything can happen.
Minoru tore his eyes from his reflection in the mirror, put on an old sweatshirt and cotton pants, and left his room. When he went into the living room after carefully washing his hands in the first-floor bathroom and gargling, Norie padded over to him quickly from the kitchen at the back of the house holding a big bowl.
“Nice timing, Mii! I just finished getting the ingredients ready.”
“Oh, then I’ll…”
As he started to say, “Then I’ll help you right now,” he looked down at the bowl and was speechless for a second.
“…Hang on, won’t this be too much?”
The dense mixture of gyoza ingredients—cabbage, bok choy, green onion, garlic chives, minced meat, and roughly chopped Shiba shrimp—rose to the top of the bowl. Norie and Minoru were the only ones living in the house and neither of them were big eaters, so no matter how he looked at the situation, it seemed like they’d have a lot left over.
But as Norie placed the bowl on the dining room table, she said with a self-satisfied air, “Even if we make too many, they last for a pretty long time when you freeze them. Apparently, the trick is to flash-freeze them after adding a little flour.”
Minoru sat down in a chair, thinking that what Norie had said meant gyoza day would be coming again before too long. Lined up on the table, there were dumpling wrappers (premade as usual), a big stainless steel tray to put the finished dumplings on, and a bowl full of water that they would use to seal the dumplings.
Norie sat across from Minoru and gave him a fearless smirk.
“We’re going to compete to see who can make more, Mii,” she said, suddenly declaring war.
“L-let’s not compete over speed… I can’t see anything but a depressing future for us if we don’t seal the wrappers well enough.”
“I’m going to grill the gyoza, so even if there’s a little bit of an opening, it’s totally fine! On your mark, get set, go!”
…No wonder she’s the deputy chief examiner at the prefectural office.
Minoru rushed to grab a spoon as he whispered this inwardly. He performed his work quickly, scooping up the right amount of ingredients, putting them in a wrapper, creating a fold, and crimping it together. He had intended to concentrate on what he was doing, but his thoughts wandered little by little to the past.
Eight years ago, when Minoru had been brought into this home after being orphaned, Norie never ran out of smiles, always working to fulfill the roles of both sister and mother.
However, at the time, Norie had just graduated from college and begun working at the prefectural office. He had always thought of her as an adult, but at the time she was a mere seven years older than Minoru was now. Seven years from now, when Minoru was twenty-three, he really couldn’t imagine himself looking after a child about whom the only thing he knew was their name.
Come live with me.
That’s what Norie had said to a downcast Minoru back then. In a voice without an ounce of indecisiveness or hesitation, smiling gently.
Most of Minoru’s relatives had shown an unwillingness t
o take him in after he lost his family one night in that gruesome incident. Norie’s father, who was still living at the time, had also apparently thought it would be difficult; he had already lost his wife (Norie’s mother) and was living with just his daughter.
But it seemed that Norie had fervently tried to persuade him.
To Norie, Minoru was the child of a cousin on her mother’s side, meaning he was her cousin once removed. Why did Norie, fresh out of college, take a child who she had met few enough times to count on one hand, a child who was separated by five degrees of relatives, and make him into family? He had never asked Norie herself directly.
But about one year after Minoru came to this house, Norie’s father, Kouhei Yoshimizu, told him. Norie had lost her mother in a car accident when she was eight, the same age Minoru was. From that time until middle school, she was a child that almost never smiled.
Although for his daughter’s sake he had at first opposed arranging an adoption, Mr. Yoshimizu was stern but kind with Minoru after adopting him. He had collapsed four years ago because of a brain hemorrhage and passed away. Norie, too, lost both of her parents at a young age.
In the eight years Minoru had lived with her, the only time the smile had disappeared from her face was when Mr. Yoshimizu died.
“Okay, finished!” said Norie, bringing Minoru out of his reverie.
They had cleaned the bowl out, and the rows of milky-white gyoza inside the stainless steel tray were divided into two groups: one close to Minoru and one on the other side. Norie started tallying the ones she had made, counting, “Two, four, six, eight, ten,” so Minoru had no choice but to go along with her.
“Thirty-one for me! How about you, Mii?”
“Um…thirty-three…”
“Ooh!”
Even after he had announced the results, Norie gave him a smile that took up her whole face. She pressed her hands together, which were white with flour.
“Just as I expected, Mii! I’ll nominate you for the high school men’s event in the All-Japan Dumpling Folding Competition!”
“Th-thank you. So…we ended up making sixty-four. Is that really okay…?”
“Oh, isn’t that a nice number? If we make eight each of grilled gyoza, fried gyoza, steamed gyoza, and boiled gyoza, it’ll work out perfectly.”
“I don’t think that’s going to work. And you said it was fine for there to be openings in the wrappers, since we were making grilled gyoza…”
“Well, guess it can’t be helped. Should I freeze half?”
When Norie started to take the tray to the kitchen, Minoru hurriedly called out to her, “Freeze two-thirds!”
4
He was still in the city of Saitama.
Even if he lived here he could never grow to like it, but it was curious that in the two short days he had stayed here he had developed a certain affinity for a city name that he had at first found laughable. He also might have felt that way because he had been able to find top-quality prey here.
Takaesu finished showering and returned to his room in a bathrobe, pulling the curtains wide when he approached the front window. From the deluxe twin room of the high-rise hotel he had checked in to last night, he got a panoramic view of Saitama’s new city center at night. The footbridge that stretched out west from the train station was decorated with lights this time of year, and the quiet twinkling of the innumerable blue LEDs had its own sort of charm.
The large, gently sloping flat surface that spread out directly from the north side of the footbridge might have been the roof of Saitama Super Arena. It looked just like a flat-topped seamount rising from the depths of the ocean. If he could have that whole space to himself to set up a dining table there, it would probably feel wonderful.
As he looked down at the nighttime scenery, Takaesu moved his right hand to pull out a round thing of about two centimeters from a paper bag on the nearby table. He tossed it into his mouth.
The glossy brown color resembled a chocolate truffle, but it wasn’t. It was a macadamia nut in its shell, said to be the hardest of the edible tree nuts.
He rolled the macadamia nut—which people usually used a special nutcracker to open—around his mouth for a while, then held it lightly between his first and second premolars.
He slowly, slowly applied pressure. The feeling in his mouth was just like that of biting a steel ball. His upper and lower jawbones creaked, and the masseter muscle that connected them shook. If the average person bit down this hard, they would surely break a tooth.
Of course, Takaesu was not the average person, however. No. He was not a person at all. He was a shark. A shark that swam through the city, devouring people.
There is a shark called the tiger shark. It’s a large variety that can grow to a maximum length of seven meters, and it has another name: the man-eater shark.
The tiger shark’s teeth are a special shape. They have a double-layered structure with sharp, knifelike points and thick, sawlike bases. This shark, which can break even a sea turtle’s shell with these teeth, was Takaesu’s third favorite shark.
Imagining himself in the form of a tiger shark, he bit down with all his might. The nut burst open in his mouth with a pleasurable popping impact. The thick shell broke vertically and the one-size-smaller embryo—the part commonly referred to as a macadamia nut—rolled out.
Holding the shell in his mouth, Takaesu spit out only the embryo into the wastebasket.
The shell had broken in two, and he chewed one half on the right side and one on the left. This second battle also ended with his teeth victorious. The shell broke apart, and he crushed it into even smaller pieces. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.
Three months ago, this would have been impossible for him. No, at that point, Takaesu would’ve had concerns about the hard-baked rice crackers and beef jerky that even children could eat without trouble. At the restaurant he had come to critique, he would’ve had terrible trouble fooling them if they had sent out stiff cantuccio biscuits.
But it was different now. Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch.
On the day that it had taken refuge in his lower jaw, Takaesu gained new teeth. Teeth that could crush any food, no matter how hard. Glorious teeth that kept growing stronger the more hard things he ate.
“Chew, chew, chew, chew,” Takaesu murmured in a singsong voice as he persistently went on chewing the fragments of the shell, which had become as fine as grains of sand. “Chew, chew, chew, chew.”
Suddenly, an indescribable fishiness spread through his mouth. It wasn’t the taste of a nutshell. It was the taste of dried-up anchovies…dried sardines.
Chew it up well, Hii. Chew. Chew. Chew more. If you spit it out, you’ll get a pinch. There now, chew. Chew. Chew. Chew.
“…!”
He was struck with an intense nausea and gagged a little, but he held it together somehow. The dried sardine flavor went away after a few seconds, so he swallowed the macadamia shell, which was now a paste. Takaesu didn’t know if it had any nutritional value in general, but with that his teeth became a little bit stronger.
Shaking off memories of a distant past, he imagined the near future. Was that girl here today as well, running along the road that passed through the new city center below him? Did she go home and eat a full dinner, and was she now deep asleep in her bed, growing a little more?
He painted a picture in his mind of the calcium absorbed by the young girl’s body, circulating in her veins and permeating her snow-white bones. That alone brought a gush of saliva to his mouth. There was an itchy, stinging throbbing in the center of his lower jaw. Tossing a new macadamia nut into his mouth, Takaesu rolled it around, pretending to bite it, soothing the thing. He trembled slightly.
Not yet. It was still too early.
He was checked in to the hotel under a fake name, but it was impossible to avoid all of the security cameras in the lobby and the hallways, and the employees of the Italian restaurant he had visited the night before would likely remember Takaesu. He would need to
wait at least one more day…no, two more days before taking action.
Luckily, he had his laptop with him, so he could write his draft at the hotel. He would just think of this delay as a spice to increase his pleasure when he bit down on bone.
“Sleep well and grow, Signorina,” Takaesu whispered to the young girl who was probably sleeping somewhere in the urban landscape he saw below his window. Then Takaesu bit through the second shell forcefully.
5
Minoru finished flipping through to the end of a running magazine that he wasn’t even that interested in and returned it to the magazine rack.
He looked down at the digital watch on his left wrist: 4:25 p.m. Not even thirty minutes had passed since he came to this convenience store, but an employee who had been shooting glances at Minoru—or at least had seemed to be shooting glances at Minoru—for a while was probably thinking, It’s been half an hour already.
He’d planned on killing some time at the nearby library before his plans at five o’clock, but it was unexpectedly shut down for the day. But the employee wasn’t aware of Minoru’s circumstances, and he would probably soon reach the limit for how much idle in-store reading he would tolerate.
Akigase Park, where they were meeting, took less than five minutes to get to by bike. There was nothing for him to do for the remaining thirty minutes other than to read a book or something on a park bench while braving the cold wind. Luckily, he was wearing a wool Chesterfield coat over his uniform today, and there was a hardcover book in his bag that he had planned on returning to the library. Rereading a book was nice sometimes.
Having decided on his next course of action, Minoru left the magazine section and headed toward the shelves of snacks.
Minoru didn’t have enough willpower to leave the store without buying anything after having stood there reading for half an hour, but it wasn’t like he had much financial leeway, either.
While he was thankful to his adoptive sister, who worried every month about whether his allowance was enough, he made sure he got only the lowest possible amount he needed to get by.