Chapter 1
Late at night, after everything around falls silent, I sink into a chair and close my eyes.
The scene that floats up from the depths of my mind is always the sa, stamped permanently into my brain.
In the darkness at the back of the temple, a fla burns above the altar. Sparks burst from the fire like orange snowflakes, interrupting the sound of chanting coming from beneath the earth.
Each ti, I wonder why it’s this scene.
Since that night when I was twelve, twenty three years have passed. In that ti, various things have happened. {Incidents more sad and more frightening than I could have ever imagined.} They would rip out by the roots everything I had believed in until then.
And yet even now, why is that night always the first thing to co to my mind?
Is hypnotic suggestion really that powerful?
Sotis, I still get the feeling that I {haven’t fully awakened} from the brainwashing.
Now, my reasons for recording this stream of circumstances surrounding those events is as follows.
Many things were returned to dust, and since that day, ten years have passed.
A span of ten years doesn’t an much in the grand sche of things. But problems piled up, and ironically, when the new order was instated, doubts about the future started sprouting. During this period, I spent so ti studying history, and realized that as human beings, no matter how many tears we have to shed to learn a lesson, the mont the tears are dry, we forget. That’s the type of beings we are.
Of course, nobody should forget the promise that the indescribable tragedy that happened that day will never occur again. I want to believe that.
But maybe so day, in a future where peoples’ mories have faded away, will our foolishness cause us to travel down the sa path again? I can’t shake off this fear.
Because of this I suddenly resolved to write all this down, but ti and again found myself bewildered. It was as if my mories had been moth-eaten here and there, making unable to rember the reality of important details.
Although I checked with people who were there at the ti, as we tend to make up details for the gaps in our mory, I was surprised to find that even our shared mories are contradictory.
For example, right before I t the False Minoshiro on Mt. Tsukuba, I had put on red-tinted sunglasses. I rember this fact as clear as day, but for so reason, Satoru is positive that I wasn’t wearing glasses of any sort. And not just that, Satoru also hinted that finding the False Minoshiro was a feat he had done by himself. Of course, a notion as ridiculous as that is absolutely false.
I put down my pride, interviewed as many people as I could think of, and ca across ever more conflicting points. During that process, an undeniable reality occurred to . That is, there didn’t exist a single person whose mory wasn’t distorted to hide his own faults.
As I was laughing at the pitiful foolishness of humans and writing down my new discovery, I suddenly realized that I don’t have any basis on which to exclude myself from this rule. From soone else’s perspective, there’s no doubt that the mories from which I am writing this are warped to only show my good side.
Therefore, I would like to say that since this story is from my own perspective, it may suffer from being distorted due to self-justification. Above all, the number of deaths that were the consequence of our actions may be motivation for such self-justification, however unconsciously it’s done.
Having said that, I will try to unearth truth from my mories as best as I can because I want to face the facts and realistically portray the events that happened. Also, I want to imitate the style of the old stories in hopes of recreating my thoughts and feelings at the ti.
This draft is written in fade-proof ink on what claims to be anti-oxidizing paper that can last a millennium. When it’s done, I won’t show anyone (except maybe Satoru, and ask for his opinion), put it in a ti capsule and bury it deep underground.
At that ti I’ll make two other copies for a total of only three left behind. If soday in the future the old order, or sothing like it, is restored and all publications are censored, the existence of this record should be kept secret for as long as possible. I think three is just enough for such a situation.
In other words, this record is a long letter left to my countryn a thousand years from now. {When it is read, our true intentions will be revealed, and whether or not they should start out on a new path should beco obvious.}
I haven’t introduced myself yet.
My na is Saki Watanabe. I was born in the town of Kamisu 66 on December 10th, 210.
Just before I was born, a type of bamboo that only flowers once every hundred years all simultaneously ca into bloom. Snow fell in the middle of a sumr everyone thought would not see a drop of rain for three months. Basically every kind of abnormal weather phenonon possible occurred. And then on the night of December 10th, when everyone thought the earth was wrapped in darkness, a flash of lightning illuminated what many would later say was a golden-scaled dragon swimming through the rifts between the clouds.
…the reality is, none of that ever happened.
210 was a normal year, and like all the other children born that year in the town of Kamisu 66, I was a very normal child.
But to my mother, I wasn’t. She was nearing the end of her thirties and was convinced that she would never bear children. In our ti, having a child in your thirties is considered really late pregnancy.
Furthermore, my mother, Mizuho Watanabe, held the important office of librarian. Her decisions not only influenced the future of our town, but in certain cases could also result in the deaths of others. Having to endure that kind of pressure every day, in addition to being careful about her pregnancy isn’t the kind of hardship people usually have to deal with.
During that period, my father, Takashi Sugiura, was the mayor of the town. That in itself was a busy job. But around the ti I was born, the job of a librarian ca with an incomparably greater responsibility than that of a mayor. Of course it’s still like that now, but it was probably even more pronounced back then.
My mother was in the middle of a eting about the classification of a newly discovered collection of books when she went into labor. This was over a week before the expected due date, but since her water broke without warning, she was imdiately transported to the maternity hospital near the outskirts of town. The sound of my first cry was heard not ten minutes after. Unfortunately, my umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck. My face was purple and I was unable to cry properly. The birthing assistant, who was new at the job, nearly collapsed in panic at this. Luckily, the cord was easily cut and I finally breathed in the air of this world and let out a healthy cry.
Two weeks later, in the sa maternity hospital, Maria Akizuki, who would later beco my friend, was born. On top of being a premature breech birth, she was, like , born with her umbilical cord around her neck. Though her condition was much more serious than mine; she was almost dead when she was delivered.
The birthing assistant, ard with the experience from my birth, apparently handled this very calmly. If there had been but a tiny slip and the cord was cut just a bit later, there’s no doubt Maria would have died.
When I first heard this story, I was elated that I had sohow indirectly saved my friend’s life. But now, every ti I rember this, I’m hit with a wave of complicated thoughts. Because if she had never been born, there would never have been such a huge loss of human lives…
Let’s return to the story. I spent my happy childhood surrounded by the lush nature of my hotown.
Kamisu 66 consists of seven villages spread out over a fifty kiloter circumference. It’s separated from the rest of the world by the Holy Barrier. A thousand years from now, the barrier may not exist anymore, so I’ll briefly explain. It’s a thick straw rope hung with paper strears [shinawa and shide] that acts as a shield preventing impure things from entering the town.
Children are warned to never step outside the barrier. Evil spirits and monsters road outside and any child who ventures out alone would suffer terribly.
“But exactly what kinds of scary things are there?” I rember asking my father, albeit less fluently, one day when I was around six or seven years old.
“A lot of different kinds,” he looked up from his docunts. Resting his chin on his hand, he looked at affectionately. Those warm brown eyes are burned into my mory to this day. Never once has my father looked at sternly and only once did he raise his voice. It was because I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going and would have fallen into a gaping hole in the ground if he hadn’t warned .
“Saki, you already know, right? About queerats and copycats and blowdogs.”
“But mom says those are just made up.”
“The others may be, but queerats do exist,” he said so nonchalantly that I was shocked.
“Lies.”
“They’re not lies. Queerats were recruited to help construct the town recently too.”
“I’ve never seen them.”
“We don’t let children see them.” Father didn’t say why, but I imagined that it was because queerats are too hideous to be seen.
“But if they listen to humans, then they’re not that scary, right?”
Father put down the docunts he had been looking over and raised his right hand. As he chanted a spell in a low voice, a thin fiber of paper transford, like invisible ink being revealed, into a complicated pattern woven into the paper. The seal of approval from the mayor.
“Saki, do you know what ‘false obedience’ ans?”
I shook my head quietly.
“It ans appearing to obey soone, but actually thinking the opposite underneath.”
“What do you an by ‘the opposite’?”
“Deceiving the other person, and secretly planning to betray them.”
My jaw dropped.
“People like that don’t exist.”
“You’re right. People betraying other peoples’ trust is impossible. But queerats aren’t people.”
For the first ti, I felt the stirrings of fear.
“Queerats worship and obey us because we have cantus [juryoku]. But we don’t know how they will behave toward children who’ve not yet awoken to their cantus. That’s why we have to prevent queerats and children from eting no matter what.”
“But when you give them work to do, don’t they have to co into town?”
“During those tis there’s always an adult supervising them.” Father put the docunts in a filing box and raised his hand again. The lid shimred and lted into the box, forming a hollow lacquered block. Because no one else knows what he was visualizing as he used his cantus, it’s hard for anyone other than father to reopen the box without breaking it.
“Anyway, don’t ever go outside the Holy Barrier. Inside, the strength of the barrier makes it safe, but if you take one step out, you won’t be protected by anyone’s cantus.”
“But the queerats…”
“It’s not just the queerats. You’ve learned the stories about fiends and karma demons at school, right?”
My breath caught in my throat.
Fiend and karma demon stories are taught repeatedly during our early years of developnt. It becos imprinted in our subconscious. Even though the versions we learn at school are made for children, they still gave us nightmares.
“Are there really fiends…and karma demons and stuff like that outside the Holy Barrier?”
“Uh huh,” father smiled slightly to comfort .
“Those are old legends, they don’t exist now…”
“It’s true they haven’t been seen for the past hundred and fifty years, but it’s better to be prepared for the unexpected. Saki, you wouldn’t want to suddenly et a fiend like the herb-gathering boy did, right?”
I nodded silently.
Here, I’ll summarize the stories of the fiend and the karma demon. However, it isn’t the fairy-tale children’s version, but the full, adult version everyone learns when they enter Sage Academy.
Tale of the Fiend
This is a story from about a hundred fifty years ago. There was a boy gathering herbs on the mountain. Engrossed in this activity, he ca to the Holy Barrier. He had picked just about all the herbs inside the barrier when he happened to look up, and saw that there were still plenty of herbs outside.
He had always been warned never to step outside the Holy Barrier. If for so reason he absolutely had to, he must have an adult with him.
But there were no adults around. The boy was tempted and thought stepping outside for just a little bit was okay. He poked his head out first. He just needed to duck under the barrier, pluck so herbs, and co right back. That’ll be okay.
The boy slid quietly under the rope. The strears swayed and rustled.
At that instant, he suddenly had an unpleasant feeling. In addition to the guilt at disobeying the adults, there was another feeling of unease he had never experienced before.
Reassuring himself that nothing was wrong, he approached the herbs.
Then he saw a fiend coming toward him.
Even though it was about the sa height as the boy, it had a scary appearance. Its anger swirled like a fiery halo, burning everything around it. As the fiend approached, it mowed down everything in its path and made the foliage burst into fla.
The boy went pale, but he forced himself not to scream and stepped back. If he could just slip back under the rope, the fiend should vanish.
But a branch underfoot snapped.
The fiend turned its head, face completely devoid of emotion. It stared at the target of its anger.
The boy ducked under the rope and took off as fast as he could. Everything would be okay as long as he entered the protection of the barrier.
But when he looked back, the fiend had also ducked under the rope!
In that instant, the boy realized that he had done sothing irreparable. He had invited a fiend into the barrier.
The boy cried as he ran down the mountain path. The fiend chased him relentlessly.
The boy ran along the edge of the barrier, toward the stream in the opposite direction of the village.
When he glanced behind him, the fiend’s face was hidden by the underbrush. Only its glowing eyes and leering mouth were visible.
The fiend was seeking a path to the village.
He couldn’t let that happen. If the fiend followed him back, the entire village would probably be destroyed.
As he cleared the last of the underbrush, a sheer cliff appeared before him. The roaring of the river at the bottom reverberated up the walls. Across the gorge hung a new rope bridge.
The boy didn’t cross the bridge. Instead, he headed upstream along the edge of the cliff.
When he looked back, the fiend had arrived at the bridge and was looking around for him.
The boy ran determinedly.
Shortly, another bridge appeared in the distance.
He neared the bridge silhouetted against the cloudy sky. Worn out by years of exposure to the elents, it swayed eerily as if beckoning to him.
The bridge could fall at any ti. No one had used it in over ten years and he had always been warned not to.
Slowly, the boy started across the bridge.
The ropes made a disturbing creaking sound. The planks were made of oak, but looked ready to break at any mont.
When he was about halfway across, the bridge lurched suddenly. Looking back, he saw that the fiend had also stepped onto the bridge.
The bridge swayed more and more wildly as the fiend ca nearer.
The boy glanced down at the bottom of the valley. It was dizzyingly far.
He looked up. The fiend was already closing in on him.
When he could clearly see the fiend’s unpleasant face, the boy brandished the sickle he had been carrying, and in one movent, cut through the ropes holding the bridge.
The bridge swung down and the boy almost slipped off but sohow managed to grab onto the rope.
Did the fiend fall to the bottom? The boy looked. Sohow, the fiend was also clinging to the rope. It slowly turned its murderous gaze toward him.
The sickle had fallen into the valley. He couldn’t cut the ropes anymore.
What should he do? He prayed to the heavens. It doesn’t matter if I die; please don’t let the fiend get into the village.
Did the boy’s wish reach the heavens? Or was it that the ropes could no longer bear their weight?
The rope snapped, sending them down into the valley. The boy and the fiend disappeared from view.
Fiends have never appeared since then.
There are a couple of lessons in this story.
Kids can easily understand that it’s teaching you to stay within the Holy Barrier. For slightly older kids, it’s probably trying to tell us that we should be more concerned about our village than ourselves, and be prepared to sacrifice our lives for it.
But the smarter you are, the harder it is to understand the real lesson.
Who would have thought that the real aim of the story is to let us know that fiends really do exist?
Tale of the Karma Demon
This story is from about eighty years ago. There lived a boy in the village. He was an incredibly bright child, but had one flaw. As he grew older, this flaw beca more and more obvious.
He was extrely proud of his intelligence and looked at everything else with disdain.
He pretended to accept the teachings in school and from other adults, but the important lessons never really reached his heart.
He began to sneer at the foolishness of adults and laugh at the laws of the world.
Arrogance sows the seeds of karma.
The boy gradually drifted away from his circle of friends. Loneliness beca his only companion and confidant.
Loneliness is the seedbed of karma.
In his solitude, the boy spend a lot of ti thinking. He thought about forbidden things and questioned things better left alone.
Unclean thoughts cause karma to grow unchecked.
The boy unknowingly built up more and more karma, and transford into sothing inhuman — a karma demon.
Before anyone knew, the village was empty; everyone had fled in fear of the karma demon. It went to live in the forest, but all the animals there disappeared too.
As the karma demon walked, the plants around it twisted in all sorts of unimaginable shapes and rotted.
All the food it touched instantly turned into lethal poison.
The karma demon wandered aimlessly through the dead, deford forest.
Eventually, it ca to realize that it shouldn’t be living in this world.
The karma demon left the darkness of the forest. Before his eyes, he saw it, wreathed in a glittering radiance. He had arrived at a deep lake nestled in the mountains.
It walked into the lake, thinking that water as pure as this would surely cleanse him of his karma.
But the water surrounding it instantly beca dark and murky, and started turning into poison.
Karma demons should not exist in this world.
It understood that, and quietly disappeared into the bottom of the lake.
The lesson here is probably more straightforward than in the fiend story.
But of course, that doesn’t an we understood the real aning behind it. At least, not until that that day, where in our endless despair and sadness, we saw a true karma demon before our very eyes…
Sorry, sotis as I’m writing, a flood of mories threaten to suffocate and I can’t control it. Let’s go back to my childhood.
Like I wrote before, Kamisu 66 is made up of seven villages. In the center is where the town’s administration is gathered. On the eastern bank of the Tone River is the village of Hayring. To the north, in the middle of a forest dotted with big houses, is Pinewind. East of that, the forest opened up to the coastlands, where Whitesand is. Adjacent to Hayring in the south is the village of Waterwheel. On the other bank of the river toward the northwest is the village Outlook, whose na cos from its location. Lined up with the rice paddies in south is Gold, and Oakgrove is the westmost.
My hotown is Waterwheel. This na probably needs a bit of explanation. Dozens of canals leading off of the Tone River wind through Kamisu 66 and people co and go by boats. Despite that, the constant movent of the water ant it was clean enough to bathe in, though you might think twice about drinking it. In front of my house, in addition to a lot of brightly colored red and white koi swimming around, there were also a lot of water wheels, which is where the na cos from. Every village has water wheels, our village has quite a number of them, and they made for a magnificent sight. Overshot, backshot, undershot, breastshot… Those are all the ones I can rember. There might have been more. A lot of them were used to relieve us of mundane tasks like hulling rice and milling wheat.
Among them was a kind of water wheel only so villages had, with tal blades used to generate electricity. The valuable energy is used to power the loudspeakers on the roof of the public hall. Uses of electricity outside of this was strictly prohibited by the Code Ethics.
Every day just before sunset, the loudspeakers would play the sa lody. It’s called “Going Ho” and ca from a part of a symphony written a long, long ti ago by a composer with the strange na of Dvorak. The lyrics we learned in school go sothing like this.
The sun sets over the distant mountains
Stars stud the sky
Today’s work is finished
My heart feels light
In the cool evening breeze
Co, gather around
Gather around
The bonfire burning brightly in the darkness
Now dies down
Sleep cos easily
Inviting to disappear
Gently watching over us
Co, let us dream
Let us dream
When the song plays, all the children playing in the fields had to return ho. That’s why whenever I think of the song, sunset sceneries reflexively appear in my mind. The town during twilight. Long shadows on the sandy soil of the pine forest. Dozens of grey skies reflected in mirrored surface of the paddy fields. Groups of red dragonflies. But the most vivid mories are of watching the sunset from the top of the hill.
When I close my eyes, one scene cos to mind. It was so ti between the end of sumr and the beginning of autumn, when the weather had just started getting cooler.
“We have to go ho now,” soone said.
When I listened carefully, I could hear the faint lody carried over by the wind.
“Then let’s call it a tie then,” Satoru said, and the children ca out of hiding in groups of twos and threes.
Everyone, ranging from ages eight to eleven, had spent the entire day engaged in a large-scale ga of capture the flag. It’s a ga like a prolonged midwinter snowball fight, where you have two teams who must invade the other’s territory and in the end whoever manages to steal the other team’s flag wins. That day, our team had made a grave mistake in our opening move and seed really likely to lose.
“That’s not fair. We were just about to win too,” Maria pouted. She was more fair-skinned than everyone else, and had big, light-colored eyes. More than anything else, her flaming red hair made her very conspicuous.
“Hurry up and surrender already.”
“Yeah, because we’re way better,” Ryou chid in after Maria. Even at this age, Maria had the makings of a queen.
“Why should we surrender?” I replied indignantly.
“‘Cause we’re better,” Ryou repeated the sa old argunt.
“But you haven’t even taken our flag yet,” I looked at Satoru.
“It’s a tie,” he declared.
“Satoru, you’re on this team, aren’t you? Why are you taking their side?” Maria snapped.
“I can’t help it, the rule says that curfew is at sundown.”
“But the sun hasn’t set yet.”
“Don’t split hairs, that’s just because we’re at the top of the hill, right?” I said, biting back my irritation. Even though we’re usually good friends, at tis like these, Maria annoys .
“Hey, we really have to go,” Reiko said worriedly.
“When we hear ‘Going Ho’, we’re supposed to return right away.”
“If they surrender, then we can go ho,” Ryou parroted Maria.
“Stop it already. Hey, ref!” Satoru shouted exasperatedly at Shun. Shun stood apart from us at the top of the hill gazing at the scenery. His bulldog Subaru sat quietly next to him.
“What?” he replied after a beat.
“Don’t ‘what’ . Tell them it’s a tie.”
“Yeah, it’s a draw,” Shun said, turning back to the view.
“We’re going ho then,” Reiko said and a group of them headed down the hill together because they shared boats to get to their respective villages.
“Wait, we’re not done yet.”
“I’m going, or else the copycats will get us.”
Maria and them looked unsatisfied, but the ga had gradually ended.
“Saki, we should go back too,” Satoru said as I walked toward Shun.
“Aren’t you leaving?”
“Yeah,” Shun didn’t look away from the srizing scenery.
“Hey, let’s go already,” Satoru said impatiently.
Shun pointed silently.
“Over there, you see it?”
“What?”
He was pointing in the direction of Gold, near the border between the paddy fields and the forest.
“There, a minoshiro.”
Ever since we were young, we were taught that our eyes were more important than anything else, so we were all blessed with good vision. This ti too, from hundreds of ters away, on a footpath between the fields where twilight and shadows crossed, I could discern the white shape of sothing moving slowly along.
“You’re right.”
“What about it? It’s not like they’re rare or anything.” Satoru’s usually calm voice was tinged with displeasure for so reason.
But I didn’t move. Didn’t want to move.
The minoshiro moved at a snail’s pace across the footpath, through the adow and disappeared into the forest. As I traced its path, my attention turned to Shun.
I didn’t know yet the na of the emotion I felt. As I stood next to him looking at the village dyed in the light of the setting sun, my chest was filled with a sweet yet painful feeling.
Maybe this too was a fabricated scene. A dramatization made with a mix of similar episodes, sprinkled with a spice we call sentint…
Be that as it may, these scenes still hold a special aning for to this day. The final mory of a life in a flawless world. A ti when everything was in its place and there were no doubts about the future.
Even now, when I think of my first love, it still gives off a warm glow, like the setting sun. Even though that, and everything else would soon be swallowed by a bottomless void of sadness and emptiness.
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