Miyamizu, Hitoha (82)
Miyamizu, Mitsuha (17)
Miyamizu, Yotsuha (9)
The other two peer over my shoulder at the list.
“That’s her……? It has to be some kind of mistake! I mean, she’s—” Okudera-senpai sounds as if she might burst into tears. “She’s been dead for three years.”
Trying to deny her words, I shout, “Just two or three weeks ago, she—!” It’s hard to breathe. I inhale desperately and continue. This time, it comes out as a whisper. “She told me we’d be able to see the comet……”
I somehow manage to tear my eyes away from the letters that spell out Mitsuha.
“So…!”
When I raise my head, my face is reflected in the dark window in front of me. Who are you? I think, out of nowhere.
From deep in my mind, very far away, I hear a hoarse voice. “…My, my. You’re—”
“You’re dreamin’, aren’t you?”
A dream? I’m drowning in a wave of confusion.
What…
…in the world…
…am I doing?
In the next room, I can hear the sounds of a dinner party.
Someone says something, there’s a burst of laughter, and then applause echoes like a downpour. It’s been happening over and over for a while now. I strain my ears, wondering what sort of group they are. No matter how hard I listen, though, I can’t make out a single word. All I can tell is that they’re speaking Japanese.
Thunk! There’s a loud noise, and the next thing I know, I’m slumped over with my head on the desk. I must’ve hit my forehead; a dull pain follows a little later. I’m dead tired.
No matter how much I read the reduced-size editions of old newspapers and magazine back issues, I can’t seem to get the text into my head anymore. I’ve checked my phone several times, but not one of her journal entries is on it. Every trace is gone.
With my head still down, I open my eyes. Glaring at the desk a fraction of an inch in front of me, I try putting into words the conclusion I’ve reached over the past few hours.
“It was all just a dream, and…”
Do I want to believe that or not?
“The scenery looked familiar because I subconsciously remembered the news from three years ago. Meaning, she was…”
What was she?
“…A ghost? Or, no… It was all a…”
All…my…
“…Delusion?”
With a start, I raise my head.
Something’s disappearing.
Her—
“What was her name…?”
Tap, tap, comes a sudden knock, and the thin wooden door opens.
“Tsukasa says he’s going down to take a bath.”
Okudera-senpai enters wearing one of the inn’s light robes. The atmosphere in the room, which had seemed cold and isolated, suddenly softens. I feel terribly relieved.
“Uh, Okudera-senpai?”
I get up from my chair. She’s crouched down in front of her backpack.
“I’ve been saying all sorts of weird stuff… I’m sorry about today.”
Zipping her backpack as if carefully sealing something away, Okudera-senpai stands. Somehow she seems to move in slow motion.
“…It’s fine,” she says, shaking her head with a faint smile.
“I’m sorry we could only get one room.”
“Tsukasa said the same thing to me downstairs,” Okudera-senpai chuckles. We’re sitting facing each other across the little table by the window.
“I don’t mind a bit. They say a group just happened to be staying here tonight, so they don’t have any rooms to spare. The man who runs the inn said it’s a teachers’ union social.”
Then she laughingly tells me how they treated her to Asian pears in the lounge after she got out of the bath. She’s the sort of person who makes everyone want to give her something. The scent of the inn’s shampoo reaches me, like a rare perfume from a distant, foreign land.
“Look at that. Itomori used to make braided cords. How pretty,” Okudera-senpai murmurs, flipping through a volume of local Itomori materials. It’s one of the books I borrowed from the library.
“My mother wears kimonos sometimes, so we have several of these at home. Oh, say…”
Lifting my teacup, my hand pauses. She’s examining my right wrist.
“That one on your wrist, Taki. Is that a braided cord?”
“Oh, this is…”
I set the cup down on the table and consider my arm. This is my good-luck charm: a vivid orange cord, thicker than a thread, wound around my wrist.
…Huh?
Isn’t this—?
“I think somebody gave it to me a long time ago. I wear it sometimes, for good luck…”
The deepest part of my mind prickles again.
“Who was it?” I murmur.
I can’t remember.
Still, if I follow this cord, it feels like I’ll find something.
“…You, too, Taki.”
The gentle voice makes me raise my head to see concern on Okudera-senpai’s face. “Why don’t you go take a bath?”
“A bath… Right…”
But almost immediately my attention returns to the braided cord. I feel as though I’ll lose something forever if I let go here, and I desperately ransack my memories. The dinner party is over, though I don’t know when it ended. The quiet song of autumn insects fills the room.
“Somebody who made braided cords told me something once.”
Whose voice is that? It’s kind and hoarse and tranquil. Like something from a folktale.
“They said that cords are the flow of time itself. They twist and tangle, come apart and reunite. They said that’s time. That’s…”
A mountain in autumn. The sound of a brook. The smell of water. The taste of sweet barley tea.
“That’s musubi—”
The scene bursts into my mind.
The body of the god on top of the mountain. The sake we offered to it.
“…That place…!”
I pull a map out from under the pile of books and open it. It’s a map of Itomori from three years ago that I found in a small independent shop, covered in dust. The topography from back when there was just one lake. The place where we offered the sake should be far outside the area the meteorite destroyed.
If I go there… If that sake’s there…
I pick up my pencil, searching for a landform that looks likely. It was way north of the shrine, a place like a caldera. Desperately, I try to find something along those lines.
I might be hearing Okudera-senpai’s voice, distantly, but by now, I can’t tear my eyes off the map.
…ki… Taki.
Somebody’s calling my name. It’s a girl’s voice.
“Taki, Taki.”
Her voice is earnest, pleading, as if she’s about to cry. A voice trembling with loneliness, like the glimmer of distant stars.
“Don’t you remember me?”
I wake up.
…That’s right. I’m at an inn. I’ve been sleeping slumped over the table by the window. I can sense Tsukasa and Okudera-senpai beyond the sliding door, asleep on their futons. The room is strangely quiet. I can’t hear any insects or cars. The wind isn’t blowing, either.
I sit up. The rustle of my clothes is loud enough to startle me. Outside the window, the world is just beginning to shake off the darkness.
I look at the cord on my wrist. The faint echoes of the girl’s voice linger in my ears.
—Who are you? I ask. I don’t even know her name.
Naturally, there’s no answer.
But, well, that’s all right.
Okudera-senpai and Tsukasa—
There’s a place I need to check, no matter what. Please go back to Tokyo ahead of me. I’m sorry for being selfish. I swear I’ll come back later. Thanks.
—Taki
I write a note. As an afterthought, I take a five-thousand-yen bill out of my wallet and put i
t under a teacup along with the memo.
We’ve never met, but I’m about to come looking for you.
He’s gruff and doesn’t say much, but he’s a really nice guy, I think, studying the sinewy hands on the steering wheel beside me.
It’s the man from the ramen shop. He’s the one who took us to Itomori High School yesterday, and to the city library. I called him really early this morning, and he still did me a favor and brought the car over. If this hadn’t worked, I was planning to hitchhike, but I can’t imagine any cars would’ve given me a ride to a ruined, abandoned town. I’m seriously lucky I met this guy in Hida.
From the passenger-side window, I have a view down to the edge of New Itomori Lake. Half-demolished houses and broken asphalt languish in the water. Even a good ways offshore, I can see telephone poles and iron beams jutting out of the lake. It should be a very disconcerting sight, but I must have gotten used to seeing it on TV and in photos, because I start feeling as if the place has always been like this. For that reason, I don’t really know how to process what I’m seeing. Should I get mad, grieve, get scared, or lament my own helplessness? The reality of losing an entire town is probably too much for ordinary people to get their heads around. I give up searching for meaning in the scene and turn my eyes to the sky. Gray clouds hang over our heads, as if the gods have set an enormous lid there.
We travel north along the lake, and when the car can’t go any higher, the man sets the parking brake.
“Looks like rain,” he mutters, glancing up through the windshield. “This mountain ain’t real steep, but don’t push your luck. If anythin’ happens, you call us.”
“Yessir.”
“Also, here—” He holds out a big lunch box to me. “Eat this up top.”
Automatically, I accept it with both hands. It’s heavy.
“Th-thank you very much…”
…For everything. Seriously. Why would you do so much for me? Oh yeah, and the ramen was super good. I can’t make any of the words come out the way I want them to—all I manage is a tiny “Thanks. Really.” The guy smiles slightly, takes out a cigarette, and lights up.
“I dunno what’s goin’ on with you,” he says, exhaling smoke. “But that picture of Itomori you made. That was good.”
There’s a lump in my throat. Distant thunder rumbles softly.
I’m walking up a path to the shrine that’s as vague as a deer track.
Sometimes I stop to check the destination I’ve marked on the map against the GPS on my phone. It’s all right—I’m getting closer. The surrounding scenery looks sort of familiar, but I’ve climbed this mountain only once, in a dream. I’m not very sure about it. That means, for now, all I can do is follow the map.
After I got out of the car, I bowed low and stayed that way until my ride was completely out of sight. As I did, I thought about Tsukasa and Okudera-senpai, too. In the end, this guy and those two came all the way out here because they were worried about me. I must’ve looked really pathetic. I bet they thought I was about to cry the whole time. I was probably so aggressively distracted that, even if they wanted to ditch me, they couldn’t.
I can’t keep acting like that forever. I can’t keep taking advantage of the help people offer me, I think firmly, gazing at New Itomori Lake through the gaps in the trees.
Suddenly, a big raindrop hits my face. The leaves around me start to rustle and shake. I pull up my hood and break into a run.
The rain keeps falling, pouring down with enough force to carve the dirt away.
The temperature’s falling rapidly, absorbed by the rain. I can feel it on my skin.
I eat my lunch in a little cave while waiting for the weather to let up. There are three big rice balls the size of my fist and lots of side dishes. The thick-sliced braised pork and bean sprouts stir-fried in sesame oil make it look like such a stereotypical ramen-shop lunch that it’s funny. My body shakes with cold, but as I eat, I gradually warm up again. Chewing the grains of rice and swallowing, I can sense exactly where my throat and stomach are.
This is musubi, I think.
“Putting anything in your body, whether it’s water, rice, or sake, is also called musubi. What you put in your body binds to your soul, you see.”
That day, I decided I’d remember those words even after I woke up. I say it aloud:
“…They twist and tangle, sometimes come undone, and reunite. That’s musubi. That’s time.”
I look at the cord on my wrist.
It hasn’t worn through yet. The connection is still there.
Before I know it, the trees have vanished, and I’m in a mossy, rocky area. Below me, I can see fragments of the gourd-shaped lake through gaps in the thick clouds. I’ve finally reached the peak.
“…It’s there!”
Sure enough, beyond me, there’s the crater-shaped basin and the giant sacred tree.
“It’s really there! It wasn’t a dream!”
The rain has subsided to a drizzle, dripping down my cheeks like tears. I scrub roughly at my face with my sleeve, then start down the slope into the caldera.
In front of me, what was a little stream in my memories is now a decent-size pond. Is it swollen from the rain, or has enough time passed since that dream that the landscape changed? Either way, the great tree stands several dozen yards away on the other side.
This is the edge of the next world.
I remember somebody saying that to me once.
Does that make this the Sanzu River?
I step into the water. There’s a big, echoing splash, as if I’ve stuck my foot into a bathtub, and I realize, belatedly, that this basin is unnaturally quiet. The heavy water is above my knees, and every step I take makes a loud sloshing sound. I start feeling as if I’m tromping all over something pure and white with muddy feet, defiling it. Until I arrived, this place had been perfectly silent. I’m not welcome, I think instinctively. My body heat is being sucked away again, into the cold water. Before long, the water’s up to my chest, but I manage to get across somehow.
The massive tree stands with its roots twined around a big slab of rock.
I don’t know whether the “body of the god” is the tree, the rock, or whether the shape of the two of them tangled together is what people worship. There’s a little stairway in the gap between the roots and the stone, and when I go down it, I find a yawning space wide enough for about four tatami mats.
The silence here is even deeper than it was outside.
I unzip my jacket with freezing hands and take out my phone. I check to make sure it didn’t get wet, then turn it on. In the darkness, every single movement sounds violently loud. With an electronic vvum that seems completely out of place here, the phone comes alive, and I use it as a flashlight.
This place is wholly devoid of color or warmth.
The tiny shrine the light reveals is completely gray. On a small stone altar, two four-inch urns sit side by side.
“It’s the sake we carried up here.”
Gently, I touch the surface. I don’t know when it happened, but I’m not cold anymore.
“This is her little sister’s…”
My hand closes around the urn on the left, confirming its shape. When I pick it up, there’s a slight resistance and a faint, dry tearing noise. The moss had put down roots.
“And this is the one I brought.”
I sit down where I am, bring the urn close to my face, and shine the light on it. The porcelain was shiny before, but now it’s thickly covered with moss. It must have been a very long time. I put a thought that’s been inside me all this time into words.
“…Then I was swapping with the Mitsuha from three years ago?”
I untie the braided cord sealing the lid. Underneath, there’s a cork stopper.
“Were we three years out of sync? Did the swapping stop because she died three years ago when the meteorite fell?”
I pull out the cork. The faint scent of alcohol rises. I pour the sake into the lid.
 
; “Half of her…”
I bring the light closer to it. The sake is clear, with several tiny particles floating in it. They reflect the light, glittering in the liquid.
“Musubi. Twisting and tangling, sometimes coming undone, then reuniting…”
I raise the lidful of sake to my lips.
“If time really can ‘come undone,’ then… Just one more time…”
Take me to her! I wish and down it in one gulp. When I swallow, the sound is so conspicuous it startles me. A lump of heat travels through my body. As it hits the bottom of my stomach, it bursts, scattering through me.
“……”
But nothing happens.
For a little while, I sit very still.
I’m not used to alcohol, and I feel a little warm. My head feels slightly vague and dizzy… But that’s all.
It’s no good. It didn’t work.
I put one knee up, then stand. Abruptly, my feet tangle. My vision spins. I’m falling, I think.
…That’s weird.
I’ve fallen over backward, but no matter how much time passes, my back doesn’t hit the ground. My field of view rotates, slowly, up to the roof of the cave. My phone is still in my left hand. The light illuminates the ceiling.
“The comet…!”
Involuntarily, I say it out loud.
There’s a drawing of an enormous comet up there.
It’s a very old picture, carved into the rock: a giant traveling star, trailing its long tail across the heavens. The red and blue pigments catch the light and shimmer. Gradually, the picture begins rising away from the ceiling of the cave.
I stare.
The image, the illustrated comet, is falling toward me.
Slowly, it bears down until it’s nearly on top of me. It blazes with the heat of its friction against the atmosphere, and the lump of rock fuses into glass, shining like a jewel. Even those details are clear to me.
I fall back, and my head hits the rock at the exact moment the comet strikes my body.
Chapter Five
Memories
Falling forever.
Or maybe rising.