by Eto Mori
“The old Kobayashi was pretty good, but I think the new Kobayashi’s not too bad, either. You’re way ruder than before, and you’re mean sometimes, but that actually makes you easier to talk to. And I feel like you’re really alive now.” She tilted her head back and looked up at the ceiling. “And to be honest, I knew. I knew you were still the same deep down, even if you’d changed a lot. It was just that I wanted you to be the old Kobayashi, the one who was convenient for me. But the truth is, I really did know that the Kobayashi in that world and the Kobayashi in this world were different, but also the same.”
“How?” My heart started racing. “How did you know that?”
“I mean, that picture you’re painting didn’t change, so.” She shrugged.
“Picture?”
“Yeah, your painting,” she replied. “The unique way you use color. The touch of your brush, the way you look at the canvas. That’s how I knew you were still you.”
Instantly, everything I could see began to radiate with a vivid splendor. I slowly lifted my face and looked around the classroom with fresh eyes.
The eggshell color on the walls that had warmth even in winter. The burnt-umber shelves that occupied the rear of the classroom. The indigo curtains framing the dark windows. The forest green of the blackboard at the front of the room. The burnished silver of the easels. The porcelain skin of the plaster busts. The chestnut beret someone had set on one of their inert heads. The floor stained with multicolored blobs of paint. The white gleam of the fluorescent lights hidden under their dusty covers. Shoko’s black hair shining in the hazy glow. There are hints all over the place. There actually were hints all over the place.
I turned my eyes back to Shoko. There was a smudge of charcoal on her cheek, maybe from when she’d been sketching. I reached out and gently wiped it away with a finger. She flinched and stiffened for an instant, and I was overcome with the urge to hug her, but I restrained myself.
The shrimp who hadn’t even been in Makoto Kobayashi’s field of view. This girl had saved Makoto Kobayashi.
“Wait here,” I said, grabbing her shoulders. “I’ll be back in a minute, so just wait here.”
“Where are you going?” she asked, baffled.
“Doesn’t matter,” I insisted. “Just wait. I’ll walk you home after.”
“I guess.” She looked up at me, doubtfully. “Fine.”
“Okay? Make sure you wait. Promise.”
I flew out of the classroom and raced up the stairs, looking for a place where I could be alone. I was exuberant, too excited for words. I opened the door that led from the landing to the roof and saw that the rain was slowing already. And the thunder and lightning had stopped.
The flash of light I saw was inside my own head.
15
The misty, silky rain quietly painted a slick coating on the concrete roof. The clouds were still thick in the sky, and darkness enveloped me like night had already fallen. When I looked down, the ground below was swallowed up by the same inky black.
Shivering in the cold drizzle in the gap between dark and darkness, I waited for him to come. He had to come. No doubt with frilly white parasol in hand and a smirk on his face.
Eventually, I heard the clacking of footsteps behind me and looked back to see Prapura standing there, a smirk on his face and frilly white parasol open above his head.
“I’ve said this any number of times already,” Prapura said when our eyes met, and held the parasol higher. “Issued by the boss. This umbrella, not my style.”
“I know,” I said with a laugh. “I know what my mistake was.”
Prapura nodded, quietly, and we stared at each other through the veil of rain between us. As I looked into his lapis lazuli eyes, my racing heart slowed, and I felt strangely calm somehow.
“I committed a murder, right?”
The look on the angel’s face didn’t change.
“I killed someone.”
Still, he waited.
“I killed myself.”
Prapura’s gaze on me was steady.
“I murdered my own self,” I said, biting my lip hard. “I’m the soul of the Makoto Kobayashi who committed suicide.”
Prapura tossed his pearly umbrella high up into the sky. “Ding ding ding!”
16
The darkness of heaven and earth instantly became light. It was so dazzlingly bright that I nearly fainted. I felt like my physical body was spinning around and around and around and around, and yet I was still curiously composed as it all came back to me.
Me before the suicide. The memories I’d lost. Makoto Kobayashi’s fourteen years . . .
I’d always loved drawing, ever since I could remember. At the same time, I also loved playing outside with my friends when I was little. Although I did have this shy and timid side, I was extremely popular thanks to the fact that I had one thing I excelled at. Up until grade three or four, the kids in class would crowd around my desk at every break, and I would draw manga or game characters on the scraps of paper they held out. Thinking about it now, it was a golden age. I was very blessed.
But the sun started to set in the last couple years of elementary school. My classmates were more grown-up now; they didn’t want my childish drawings anymore. Some of them even gave me back the pictures politely, like “I’m done with this, thanks.” But still, I felt like they were saying they were done with me. I lost sight of my own value. On top of that, I wasn’t growing as much as I thought I would, and my shorter friends shot past me one after the other. I was like a pop star gradually dropping down the charts.
I hit rock bottom in grade seven. Right when I first started junior high, there was a group that always hung out together, and whenever I said anything, this one guy would say, “Gross.” He deliberately said it loudly enough for everyone else to hear. In time, the rest of the group started to copy him—“Gross, gross.” I’d never been the talkative type to begin with, and this just made me hold my tongue even more. It was only a matter of time before the bullying started. And then it did. And I still didn’t want to remember that part of my life, even if it was all in the past now.
My only salvation was my family and art club.
Mitsuru was a jerk, but my parents doted on me to the point of excess. My slightly unstable mother, and my smiling, peaceful father. Just being with them made me breathe a sigh of relief.
At art club, I could forget about everything else and immerse myself in my beloved painting. Maybe I painted so that I had something to lose myself in and forget the outside world. A little recess for my heart. A meaningful escape. Deflected passion. I totally hadn’t noticed that Shoko had been watching me that whole time.
The bullying let up when I went into eighth grade, but I stuck out like a sore thumb in my new class. I deliberately kept to myself. I was afraid someone would say “gross” if I said something accidentally, and that this would trigger a new round of bullying. No one could stop it. No one could save me. I couldn’t rely on anyone. I couldn’t trust them.
I locked myself up in my own little world. I painted more and more pictures of gloomy darkness, full of cold colors. Even I thought I was kind of in a bad place.
If only I could have just lived in my own little world, everything would have been fine. But maybe deep down inside, I was looking for something more than that. I got more and more anxious. I even started throwing up for reasons unknown around the start of ninth grade. My parents were worrywarts, so I didn’t tell them any of this, though. But out of the blue, I’d be overcome with nausea; I was constantly in the bathroom throwing up. I had a hunch that this wasn’t a physical problem, but some kind of mental issue, which just made it all that much more disturbing.
I can’t go on like this, I thought, seriously. I don’t think I can go on like this. I have to do something.
But what?
I decided to try painting a bright picture.
I had a flash of an almost transparent blue, the color of the rolling ocean. The figure of
a horseman heading up to the surface from the deep, dark seafloor.
I began to paint as though in a trance. As I worked, I promised myself that once this piece was finished, I would try to pull free of my own deep, dark place.
But before that could happen, the absolute worst day came along. Hiroka. Mom. Dad. They had been my salvation, and now they came to beat me down one after the other. Their blows hit all the harder because I’d been so close to turning myself around. The world plunged into darkness, and I couldn’t see color at all anymore. My depression and vomiting got worse, I stopped being able to think properly, my head felt like it was always full of cotton.
This was when the word death started to take on a strange reality. It had flitted through the back of my mind every so often since seventh grade, but it was more than a passing thought now.
Maybe I could just die.
The idea came to me sudden and serious one day. And once it did, it wouldn’t leave my head. It was far easier to think about dying than living, and death was more appealing than life at that point.
My mom struggled with insomnia, and a relative had once bought her some sleeping pills overseas. But my dad said she was better off not taking them and tucked them away. I remembered exactly where he had put them, and I secretly pulled them from their hiding place in the middle of the night.
It just felt so natural to swallow the bottle of pills. And then I died.
Or I should have.
But then a strange angel popped up in front of my wandering soul . . .
“Congratulations! You’ve won the lottery! Your do-over has been a marvelous success!”
The wave of memories receded, and when I suddenly came to with a gasp, I was back in that same gap between the world above and the world below.
This time, though, I had a proper flesh-and-blood body, and in front of me, Prapura’s own body was wrapped in white cloth, the folded wings on his back exposed. I hadn’t seen this formal angel dress of his in a while. He was also back to his old polite way of speaking.
“I do believe you have come to understand the situation on your own, but allow me to explain,” Prapura began.
“The homestay is not simply disciplined training for the soul. It is instead a test period to see whether or not a soul that has abandoned itself as yours did is able to return to the self once more. Put another way, it’s a spiritual test drive. Which makes it only natural that the homestay placement be your very own household. You souls review your own problems again in the very place where you foundered. So? What do you think? Makes a fair bit of sense, doesn’t it? But it wouldn’t be the least bit interesting if we told you all this from the outset, so I kept that part to myself,” he informed me, shamelessly.
My shoulders slumped. What could I say to this angel? When I thought about it, so much of what Prapura said and did had been questionable right from day one.
“So like, looking back, okay?” I finally said. “Your guidance was so half-assed. You always left out the important bits. I feel like I suffered a lot more than I actually needed to. But I guess that was on purpose?”
“Of course.” The angel thrust his chest out. “You may have won the lottery, but we’re giving you the chance to live here after you’ve already died once. We really must have you put in the appropriate amount of effort. You can’t return to life simply because you’re lucky with lotteries.”
“But you made me win the lottery. You tricked me. You even forced me to work,” I complained.
“And as a consequence, you will be able to live once more as Makoto Kobayashi, which you are secretly grateful for. We get results.”
I let out a sigh. I’d never beat this weird angel.
He was right, though; I was glad I wouldn’t be removed from the cycle of rebirth, disappearing like the bubbles in a glass of soda, with all those dark feelings of four months earlier in my heart; without clearing up all those misunderstandings, without knowing how my suicide would affect my family, without having met Saotome, without having held a sobbing Hiroka, and without even noticing the existence of Shoko, the person who had saved me in the end. I was secretly overwhelmed by all this emotion.
“Why can’t you simply let all that emotion out, then?” Prapura asked, opening up his hands in front of him.
I thought for a bit and then said, “First of all, that’s not the kind of person I am.”
“I see.”
“Second, I’m confused by this sudden development.”
“Oh-ho!”
“Third, I hate that you tricked me.”
“Heh-heh!”
“And finally . . .”
“Finally?”
“I’m scared,” I muttered, and yanked my chin up to stare at him. “What’s going to happen to me now?”
“Happen? You’re going to live on as Makoto Kobayashi. That’s all.” Prapura’s answer was plain and simple.
“And what are you going to do?”
“I’ll witness the next lottery and accompany the winning soul.”
“So you’re finished as my guide?” I asked.
“You don’t need a guide anymore.”
“Don’t I?”
“I don’t believe so.” Prapura flapped the wings on his back as if to insist upon the point. As I watched them move, I felt a sudden courage in my heart—no, of course I didn’t. I still felt uncertain, unclear.
“A second ago, before we came here, I remembered everything from before the suicide. And it kind of made me lose confidence in myself again,” I confessed.
“Confidence?”
“Can I really make it work down there?”
“Why wouldn’t you be able to?” Prapura frowned. “Haven’t you done quite well on your second chance?”
“It’s just, it was someone else’s business then.”
That’s right. During the do-over, Makoto Kobayashi had been a total stranger, nothing more than a place to live temporarily. That’s why I’d been able to act without overthinking every little thing. I hadn’t cared what happened next. I cheerfully withdrew my savings, bought whatever happened to catch my eye, said whatever I wanted to whoever I liked.
“But I can’t do that when it’s actually me. I get all cautious. And anxious. And cheap, too, y’know?”
As proof of this, I was starting to regret that I’d blown so much money on sneakers—28,000 yen! I was already beating myself up about it.
Prapura let his wings rest and stared at me. His deep blue eyes were clear today again, not a cloud in the sky. Those eyes had lied to me, gotten mad at me, teased me, but still always watched over me somehow nevertheless.
“You can simply think of it as a homestay.”
“A homestay?” I frowned.
“Exactly.” The angel nodded. “You’ll spend a while in the world below again, and then you’ll come back here. A human life is a few decades at best. Think of this in a more lighthearted way. Tell yourself you’re merely starting another, slightly longer homestay.”
A few decades at best. A longish homestay. It would be easier if I thought about it like that.
“There are no rules for a homestay. People are welcome to spend their time however they wish with the family they are given. However, you cannot leave the homestay early.”
“Right,” I interjected. “You can’t quit, can you?”
Prapura raised an eyebrow. “Did you want to withdraw?”
I didn’t answer. When all was said and done, I did actually want to go back to that world one more time.
He nodded, as if he could see right into my heart.
“If in the world below, you do end up wanting to curl into yourself once more, please remember this time you spent on your do-over. Remember how it felt to move freely without trapping yourself in your own expectations. And remember the people who helped you up.”
As I stared down at my feet wordlessly, I reflected on the fleeting four months of my do-over. I’d spent time with all kinds of people, done so many things with them. I
got the feeling that I would never have made it back to myself if even one of them hadn’t been there for me.
“Now it’s getting to be about time for you to return to the world below,” Prapura said, as if announcing the train’s arrival at its final station. “Shoko is still in the art room, and she’s starting to worry that you’re not coming back.”
Oh, right, I remembered. I’d left Shoko hanging in that cold art room.
“Your family is waiting at home. They are discussing what they should get you for your birthday. It’s two weeks from now, after all.”
I nodded.
“You must hurry back there and study so you can pass the exam for the same high school as Saotome.”
I nodded.
“Hiroka is waiting for you to complete the blue painting.”
I nodded.
“You need to exist in that world.”
I nodded. I had to be in that world. Behind my closed eyelids, I pictured this world where people were waiting for me.
A world so colorful it made me dizzy sometimes.
I was going back to that vortex of brilliant hues.
Time to live, drenched in color with everyone else.
Even if I didn’t know what exactly it was all for.
“Thanks, Prapura.” I turned back to the angel. “I won’t forget you.”
“Nor will I forget you,” he said, with his usual poker face. “You were a handful.”
“You were the first person I could really talk to.”
“Now then, I will begin my final job as your guide.”
“It’s weird. I could honestly talk to you about anything.”
“To guide your return to the lower world. Please do as I say.”
“I felt so comfortable hanging out with you.”
“First, please close your mouth and concentrate.”
“Probably because you’re an angel.”
“Please close your mouth.”
“You’re not a human being. You don’t hurt people, you don’t get hurt so easily. I guess that’s why I felt so comfortable.”
“I told you to shut it!”
A sudden whack on the head startled me into silence.