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.
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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
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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 computers
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
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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 Quest35 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 wishfulfillment
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 JSDF36 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
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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.
"I'll protect your life!" Heedless of his own safety, he prepared to
challenge the gigantic enemy and the final battle began. I was nearing the
end of the game.
There were three battle commands: "attack," "defend," and "special
attack." No matter how much I attacked the last boss, I couldn't do any
damage. Naturally, just trying to defend myself didn't help, either.
Finally, I had no choice but to use the special attack—the final death
blow. Using my own life energy, I sacrificed myself in order to deal a
mortal wound to the enemy. There was no other way to defeat the final
boss. So, the hero of the game held his "Revolutionary Bomb" in his right
hand and went to perform his special attack.
However, at the very, very end—at the exact second the hero
executed his special attack on the final boss—the game suddenly froze!
The game window closed, and the text editor started up. Yamazaki
apparently had left a letter that seemed like an excuse.
"There really isn't any other way to destroy the huge, evil
organization than to use your special attack. You can gain victory only if
you choose death for yourself because the giant, evil organization
actually is made up of our entire world. Because the second you choose
death, the world disappears into nothingness, the evil organization, too,
disappears into nothingness. Then, peace will come to you. Still, I didn't
blow my own head off with a bomb. That was my choice. No, it
definitely isn't that I just didn't want to go through the pain of drawing
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the CG for the game ending or that I got downright tired of making a
terrible game. Nothing like that. . . "
At first, I tried to smash the laptop. Then, I changed my mind. I had
watched Yamazaki desperately work on this game, but the final
shoddiness of it hit me pretty hard.
What in the world could he be doing right now? This question suddenly
began to bother me, but I decided to try and forget it. I hadn't heard any
news from him since he left, and I didn't feel like contacting him, either.
Those idiotic days from that period in my life had ended long ago.
Christmas came once again. The city lights twinkled.
The guide stick grasped in my right hand, too, lit up in the darkness.
Tonight's work was traffic control in the parking lot of a new
department store that had opened near the station. Because the
entrances were equipped with fully automated ticket machines, I had
absolutely nothing to do. When it got crowded, I tried helping out the
machines; but each time, I just ended up swinging my stick back and
forth.
There were no accidents, nothing happened, and Christmas Eve
marched on in safety.
About an hour before the store closed, a car came by. The car itself
was the sort of Japanese model found anywhere, with nothing special to
note about it. However, because the interior lights were on, I recognized
the girl sitting in the passenger seat. I saw her clearly.
Startled, I tried to push my cap down over my eyes as much as
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possible. The car passed me without hesitation, so there hadn't been any
recognition. But I felt that my high school acquaintance, sitting in the
passenger seat, had looked my way, just for a second.
Of course, that, too, was just a delusion.
My shift ended, and I changed out of my uniform and put the guide
stick and helmet into my bag. Swaying back and forth on one of the last
trains of the night, I headed toward my apartment. On the way, I
stopped by a convenience store to buy alcohol and the like.
I decided I should try getting into the Christmas spirit. Walking up
the steep road that led to my apartment, I drank a beer. I hadn't had
alcohol in a while, so it took effect quickly. Somewhat shakily, I slowly
hiked up the long, sloping path. In the distance, an ambulance's siren
pierced the otherwise quiet night. I finished my second beer.
Merry Christmas.
By the time I passed the park, my gait had been reduced to a
drunken stumble. Walking carefully, I could avoid swaying drastically,
but I figured I might as well just walk like a drunk. I increased my pace
and wobbled from telephone pole to telephone pole. I tripped over a
stone and almost fell. I staggered and was about to collapse in the middle
of the road when, right in front of me, an ambulance rushed past.
I had almost been run over!
I thought perhaps I should complain in a loud, drunken voice, "You
id—"
I stopped in mid-sentence.
The ambulance had pulled up in front of Misaki's house. Her uncle
dashed out of the front door. He yelled to one of the paramedics as they
ran into the house, carrying a stretcher. A short while later, they carried
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the stretcher back through the front door. Misaki was limp.
I watched as Misaki, her aunt, and her uncle sped away in the
ambulance at a breakneck speed.
Part Two
It was almost New Year's Eve. One afternoon, I loitered in front of the
large hospital at the edge of town. This was where Misaki had been
admitted.
Earlier that morning, I had headed down to the manga café near the
station and had gotten the information from her exhausted uncle.
"Anyway, I'm so sorry." Her uncle apologized to me for no reason.
"We thought she was doing better. She'd been much calmer since
quitting school and had seemed really happy recently. I wonder if maybe
that was because of what she'd planned. By the way, how do you know
Misaki?"
"We're sort of acquaintances," I answered. I retreated from the
manga café and had headed straight for the hospital, but. . .
I had been hanging out in the courtyard for nearly two hours.
Among the visitors and patients out for strolls, I was pacing back and
forth on the path from the main gate to the front entrance.
Misaki was in a private, fourth-floor room on the open psychiatric
ward. Apparently, she'd swallowed a bunch of sleeping pills. It was
nearly a fatal dose; had they arrived much later, it might have been too
late.
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It was uncertain where Misaki had obtained the sleeping pills, but
they may have been from the neighborhood psychiatrist. But to have
amassed enough pills for an effective suicide attempt, she must have been
going there for quite for a while. That meant that this attempt clearly
had been intentional. Misaki had planned her death for a long time.
What in the world did I intend to do, showing up unannounced? I
couldn't make anything better for her.
Should I cry saying something like, "Don't die!". . . ?
Should I try yelling something like, "You still have tomorrow!". . . ?
Misaki had written numerous, similar clichés in her secret notebook.
But they hadn't helped her, so she'd tried to overdose on sleeping pills.
In short, there was nothing I could do for her. It might even be
better for me to avoid showing my face. She probably would feel even
emptier, getting a hospital visit from a pathetic hikikomori.
When I thought about the situation that way, I'd decide to go home;
but at the hospital gate, my feet would stop on their own. Once more, I
turned back toward the front entrance and repeated the entire cycle.
My thoughts were looping around. If this kept up, it looked like I
would just keep walking to and fro until nightfall. I couldn't make up my
mind.
Finally, screwing up my courage, I dashed into the hospital before I
could change my mind again. I got a visitor's badge at the front desk,
pinned it to my chest, and headed up to the fourth floor.
The entire fourth floor was an open psychiatric ward. At first
glance, it seemed no different from a normal hospital. I'd thought that a
psychiatric ward would be full of straitjackets, electroshock equipment,
and lobotomy laboratories. However, this open ward was clean and
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cheerful; it seemed like an ordinary part of the hospital.
Or so I thought. When I noticed that an older woman of around
sixty, apparently a patient, had squatted down in the corner of the
hallway, I quickly headed for room 401.
In the far corner of the fourth-floor hall, a nameplate identified
Misaki's room: "Misaki Nakahara," it said.
There was no mistake. This was the room.
I knocked softly.
There was no answer.
I tried knocking again, a little harder; there was still no answer.
However, my knocking seemed to have dislodged the door, though it
might have been open partially to begin with.
"Misaki?" I peeked into the room.
She wasn't there.
Well, if she's not here, there's nothing I can do. I'll go home!
I decided to leave behind the fruit basket I had bought in the
hospital gift shop. And I noticed someone had left a train schedule open
on the shelf next to the bed. The schedule was annotated here and there
in red ballpoint pen. Moving it aside, I put down the fruit basket.
As I did, a scrap of paper fluttered to the floor. I picked it up and
read it: "Mikka Tororo was delicious. Therefore, farewell, everyone."
Shoving the scrap of paper and the schedule into my coat pocket, I
dashed out of the hospital and headed toward the station.
The sun had begun to set.
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They should have put her on a closed ward with iron bars over the
windows, not an open one where she could come and go freely. They
should have put her in a straitjacket and pumped her full of medicine to
make her happy. But because they hadn't, Misaki had left the hospital.
She was heading back to the town where she'd been born. She was likely
going there to die.
I remembered the discussion we'd had a good while ago:
"Tsuburaya, the runner, apparently went home to the countryside
right before he died. Then, he ate grated yam with his mother and
father, it says."
"Hm."
"I guess everyone wants to return to their hometown before they die,
after all."
That was probably true. Misaki, too, must have started wanting to
return to her hometown. She likely intended to dive into the sea from
the tall, sheer cliffs at the cape, where she'd said she often played. It
wasn't going to be that easy, though. Now that I had found her suicide
note and the train schedule, her luck had run out.
As far as I could tell from looking at the notes marked on the
schedule, Misaki had boarded the train only an hour or so before. If I
chased after her, I should be able to make it in plenty of time. I knew
where she was headed, and on top of that, I had money. If I used taxis for
part of the trip, I might even reach the destination before Misaki. There
wasn't any reason for me to worry.
On the night train, I opened a map, purchased at a bookstore along
the way. I looked for that cape—the one where Misaki said she often
played when she'd been little. Here it is. The map showed only one cape
near her hometown, so this had to be it.
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Misaki probably had boarded the train that had departed right
before mine. Mixed in with people returning home for the year's end, she
likely was heading for the town where she'd been born, toward the cape
known as a famous suicide spot. However, she didn't know that I was
following her.
I wouldn't let her escape. I was certain to catch up with her. On that
point, at least, I wasn't worried. The problem lay elsewhere.
When I found Misaki, what should I say to her?
I understood her suffering, if only a little bit. It was just the very tip
of her pain; even so, I could imagine it to some degree. She probably felt
trapped, as though she'd run out of options. And her pain would never,
ever disappear, not in her entire life.
Of course, that was natural. In a way, her pain was common to all
mankind. It was an ordinary suffering. Everyone is troubled by similar
feelings. I, too, was troubled by them.
Even if I keep living, there's nothing to he done. It's only pain.
Knowing that, could I stop her from jumping? Did I have the right
to stop her? As a member of society, I probably should say something
appropriate like, "Even so, keep living!" or "Stop whining!"
I understood all that.
While I was mulling over these things, the train arrived at it's
destination.
Exiting the station, I found that the town was deserted. It was
already the middle of the night; but even given the time, the area around
the station was as silent as a ghost town. There was no sign of anyone on
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the streets.
On top of that, it was snowing and really cold. As the town was
located on the Sea of Japan, it was in something of a blizzard zone. I
fastened shut the neck of my coat and headed toward the sole taxi in
sight. The driver seemed surprised by a customer's arrival. The man,
poised at the threshold of old age, looked like he'd been sleeping in his
seat. Hurriedly, he wiped his eyes.
Getting into the warm car, I pointed at the map to show him my
destination. The driver looked at me for confirmation, with an
expression that said, "Are you serious?"
I nodded, and the car took off, causing the chains on the tires to
clank.
"Sir, why would you want to go to a place like that so late at night?"
"Sightseeing. Please hurry."
About half an hour later, the taxi exited onto a hilly road that ran
along the ocean shore. It headed straight up a steep hill. On the right,
the pitch-black sea spread out. When we reached the top of the hill, the
taxi stopped.
"This place actually has become quite a famous tourist spot, but
there isn't anything here." The taxi driver spoke as though in apology.
I paid the fare and got out of the taxi.
"You don't really plan to. . . No, the construction is complete, so it
should be fine." With that, the taxi driver pulled back onto the road.
I looked around. There really wasn't anything here. Or more
accurately, it was so dark that I could barely see.
As the ocean was on my right side, I thought I would find the cliff if
I headed in that direction, but only sparsely scattered streetlamps lit the
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area. I felt terribly helpless. For the time being, I crossed the road and,
climbing through the space between the guardrails, I set off on a snowcovered
path.
Misaki had to be at the other end of this path. Stepping through the
snow, which came up to my ankles, and taking care not to slip and fall, I
continued down the path cut through the thick brush. With each step,
the surrounding darkness grew deeper and deeper.
Before long, the light from the streetlamps no longer reached me,
and I could hardly see anything at all. Then, the brush thinned abruptly.
The path ended, and in front of my eyes stretched the coal-black sky and
the Sea of Japan. That's right. I had made it to the very edge of the cape.
It was too dark for me to see well, but the cliff was about thirty feet
ahead. I finally had arrived. I had reached my destination!
But what about Misaki?
I looked around, but I couldn't see much. A large full moon floated
in the night sky, but my eyes weren't used to the dark yet, so I couldn't
make out anything but vague outlines. There seemed to be no sign of
anyone anywhere. That was all I could tell.
What did this mean? Had I arrived first? Or had Misaki stopped
somewhere along the way? Or could it be that. . .
My heart began pulsing violently, and my blood curdled.
No, no, it couldn't be. There was no way that she could have jumped
before I even arrived, right? She'd be here shortly. Soon, Misaki would
come walking down that path.
I stepped back and sat on a bench that faced the ocean. With my face
turned expectantly toward the little path, I waited for Misaki.
An hour passed. Misaki didn't come. It began to seem as though she
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wouldn't come down the path at all. I put my head in my hands.
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