“You know, Kanako, nobody likes a braggart. Are you just studying to try to earn praise? That’s not what it’s for. You should be studying for your own sake.” She’d admonish her daughter with a smile.
When she was very small, Kanako had often forgotten things she needed for school. This was something else she couldn’t help. The teacher had even told her parents to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything, but Kanako’s mother hadn’t done that.
It wasn’t that she’d forgotten, or that she’d found it too much trouble. She would carefully study all the print-outs, so that she would know what Kanako needed for the next day’s class. But she wouldn’t warn her daughter, or remind her. So Kanako would forget something, get yelled at, and come back. And what would follow?
“I knew it. You really are hopeless, Kanako.” Her mother would laugh as if she’d done something outrageous. “I knew about it since yesterday, but if I told you, you wouldn’t learn anything from it,” she would assert.
One time, Kanako had vomited in school. It was because of her mother’s cooking, which appeared to have been rotten.
She’d spent some time in the hospital then, and her mother had come dutifully to her side. Yet even then, she’d shown no signs of apology. “I took a bite and thought it tasted strange, but you seemed to be enjoying it, so I assumed it was fine...”
It wasn’t enough to be called neglect, and she’d taken just enough care of her daughter so as not to invite comment. She’d never been violent to her or used abusive language. She just never said one kind word, or supported her, ever.
When Kanako’s father was around, he often took her side. But her father was busy with work, so he was almost never home. That left her all alone with her mother.
Her words, so gentle on the outside, yet so laced with venom, slowly opened a wound inside Kanako.
There was no one to protect her, no one to see how deeply she’d been hurt.
Over time, she began to think of her mother as a monster. An insect without a human heart. A poor machine programmed to act like a mother.
Such thoughts were how Kanako shielded herself from the unbearable thought that a mother might feel spite towards her child.
Her mother had left right after summer vacation had started in her first year of middle school. It had been an amicable separation.
Kanako should have welcomed the departure of the mother who did not love her. Even if it made her life a little harder, it should have been nothing compared to the psychological burden she had borne during the previous years. Indeed, that might seem to be the case, on the surface.
The reality was different.
In reality, Kanako felt a deep sense of abandonment.
Kanako had avoided coming home most days because she hadn’t wanted to see her mother, but having her completely removed from her life opened a void inside her heart. It made Kanako realize that no matter how her mother treated her, she still loved her mother, and wanted to be loved by her.
A monster, an insect, a machine. She had tried to tell herself that her mother was these things, but in the end, she never convinced herself of it.
Instead, her heart had continued holding on to a dream. Perhaps, when she grew up, then she would be able to understand and forgive her mother. Perhaps they would be able to look back together and laugh at all that had happened.
But with her mother gone, that had been no longer possible. In place of that dream came a deep sense of rejection.
Kanako hadn’t cared what might happen anymore, to anyone.
“It was just a divorce,” some might say. “It’s not like it was abuse, just insufficient affection.”
But it didn’t feel that way to Kanako.
It was a little while after her mother had left her that Kanako had begun to think about suicide.
✽✽✽✽✽
The next thing Kanako knew, she was in her own room, in bed.
She reached a sluggish hand for the bedside table, and checked her alarm clock.
It was night.
She touched her face with her hands. Her eyelids were damp. She had a vague memory of crying.
Yuichi must have brought her home. She wondered how worried he must have been after seeing her freeze up like that.
But as the memory of that afternoon came back to her, she realized that she didn’t care.
The sight of that happy family.
She couldn’t understand.
That woman shouldn’t have been capable of such an expression. She wasn’t a happy, loving person who smiled kindly at her child.
It was unbelievable.
All that woman did was look down on people and laugh at them. She simply wasn’t capable of loving anybody.
As long as that was the case, it would be fine. It was a hard thing for Kanako to accept, but after her mother had been gone for a while, she’d begun to think of things that way. Maybe her mother had just been born that way, or maybe it was something in how she had been raised, but Kanako had decided that that was the reason her mother hadn’t loved her, and she was trying to forgive her for that. She simply could not hate her mother.
“Why...” Kanako murmured to herself, even knowing that no answer would come to her.
“Shall I tell you?” But suddenly, there was a voice.
Kanako sat up and turned to face it.
A woman stood at the entrance to the room. A woman with glasses, whom she had seen before.
“First, let me quell any silly misconceptions you might have,” the woman said. “The reason I’m here is that the front door was unlocked. I didn’t just appear out of nowhere.”
“You’re the sorceress...” Kanako whispered. The woman she’d met in the library as a child that day. The woman who had set a book in front of her and left. The woman who had changed Kanako’s life.
“I didn’t think you’d make it this far. I thought you might kill yourself when your mother left,” the woman whispered, with deep emotion in her voice.
Kanako could do nothing but stare, dumbstruck, at the woman.
It was definitely strange for a woman she’d only met once, long ago, to come barging into her room. But Kanako gave no thought to driving her out.
She didn’t care about anything anymore. Whoever she was, or whatever she was saying to her... none of it mattered.
“I did want you to feel despair, but I can’t have you completely breaking down,” the woman said. “Please, try to get it together a bit more. There’s no way I can win the Evil God story now, so I really need my Plan B.”
The woman walked closer, squatted down, and peered into Kanako’s face. Kanako’s eyes, reflected in the woman’s, were empty, but Kanako couldn’t tell.
“Well, never mind,” the woman said. “What I’m about to tell you will show me your true worth. If this doesn’t wake you up, then that’s that. Just another seed I planted that didn’t blossom.”
The woman put her hand to Kanako’s cheek. Then, she said:
“Your mother wanted a boy.”
Kanako couldn’t understand what she meant right away. Her mind was so scattered, she needed time just to process the string of sounds into words.
“That is to say, she didn’t want a girl,” the woman added helpfully.
At last, Kanako began to understand what she meant.
“That’s... all?” she whispered.
It couldn’t be true. Was that really all it was?
But she couldn’t deny it.
Her memory confirmed it.
The sinking feeling Kanako had always had, that no matter how good she was, she would never be loved... it had been accurate.
“Yes. That’s all. Life can be so unreasonable, can’t it?” the woman said dryly, as if not terribly invested in it.
The next thing Kanako knew, she was laughing weakly, her head hung. There was nothing she could have done about that. It had all been set in stone, the moment Kanako had been born into the world. But if that was all it took to keep her from being
loved, then what was she supposed to do?
She hadn’t been wanted. She shouldn’t have been born.
She wished she had known earlier that from the very beginning, there was no hope to be lost.
“I didn’t have much faith in the ‘Isekai Writer,’ but I guess everything really is worth a try,” the woman said with a smile. “Now, do you feel sufficiently despairing of the world? Do you think it’s time to end it?”
The woman held out her hand.
Kanako stared at it dimly.
Chapter 6: In Imitation of the Half-Isekai Classroom
It was Monday. Yuichi was walking to school with Aiko. His expression was grave, and Aiko seemed listless, too.
“I hope Orihara is okay...” Aiko said.
“I haven’t tried to contact her since then,” said Yuichi. “I made sure she got home safe, though.”
Kanako had collapsed into Yuichi’s arms the day before. He had been at a loss as to what to do, but Aiko and Yoriko had appeared soon after and helped him take care of her.
They’d wanted to take her to a hospital, but all the while apologizing, Kanako had insisted that she wanted to go home.
The three of them had helped her back home. Yuichi had wanted to stick around for a while to look after her, but Kanako had been adamant that she be left alone to rest. He’d been worried, but he hadn’t been about to argue when she was so insistent, and so they’d left.
After returning home, Yuichi had told Mutsuko about what happened. Worried, Mutsuko had tried to get in touch with her, but in the end, Kanako’s condition remained a mystery.
“She might show up to club, but if it turns out she’s still home sick, I’ll go to check on her,” Yuichi said.
As they talked, eventually, they arrived at the school.
As they stepped onto the school grounds, Yuichi looked up at the sky. It was a casual gesture, since he didn’t expect to see anything. Yet, contrary to his expectations, he saw it there, proudly asserting its existence above the school building.
It was a giant, Western-style castle, floating upside-down in the sky.
“Is that it?” It seemed Yuichi was able to see it at last.
The castle stood upon a floating island, which itself was extremely large. The outskirts were lined with forests, with the castle walls closer to the center. Inside the castle walls was a courtyard, which surrounded the castle itself.
The castle was dotted with smaller buildings, ringed around a much larger, mountain-like structure.
Around the castle flew some kind of creature. It was not a bird, but a reptile, and from time to time, it breathed fire. A lizard-like creature with wings.
“...That’s a... dragon, right?” Yuichi asked. The dragon didn’t seem to realize they were there, but thinking about what would happen if it did set a chill up his spine. There was nothing a human could do about something like that.
“It seems like it’s come down pretty far... hey, do you see something reddish up there?” Beside him, Aiko was also looking up at the sky. She was talking about something even higher above the island. In places where the sky should have been blue, instead, it was faint red.
“The ocean?” Yuichi asked. “So it’s not just a castle. An entire world is up in the sky up there, upside down... seriously, what the heck is going on?” Now that he could see it, it only seemed natural to find it bizarre. “I mean, it’s pretty weird, isn’t it? But what’s even weirder is that people don’t find it that weird...”
“That’s true... but I can’t help but feel like that’s how it’s always been...” Aiko murmured.
Everyone was way too calm about this. It wasn’t that they couldn’t see it. How could you see a castle floating upside-down in the sky, and just accept it as a normal part of the day?
But that was only the beginning.
There was a knight in armor standing at the entrance to the school building. He stood grandly astride a horse, looking down on the students as they filed in.
“Who... the hell is that?” Yuichi burst out.
There was something familiar about that armor. It looked like the set that had fallen on the roof a few days before.
It was moving, so clearly, there was someone inside of it now. With the label “Twelve Hell Kings” hanging above his head, the man stood by the entrance, checking each student as they came by.
The students all looked unhappy about having to line up, but none of them seemed at all dubious about the presence of the armored knight.
“Huh? It’s Rochefort of the Twelve Hell Kings, isn’t it?” Aiko asked Yuichi, as if that were obvious.
Blue Sky Rochefort, one of the Twelve Hell Kings who protected the Demon Lord.
“No, I mean, don’t you find it bizarre?” Yuichi demanded. “Why is there a knight in armor at our school?!”
“Oh... you’re right,” said Aiko. “Huh? And how did I know that was Rochefort?” Aiko suddenly seemed to realize how strange it was that she had been able to recognize him.
They listened to the conversations of the students in the line.
“What’s he doing?” one asked.
“He says he’s trying to see if Lady Lasagna is hiding among us.”
“Again? She goes missing all the time. She must be pretty bored up in that castle, huh?”
Demon Lord Lasagna. He had heard that name before, too. She was one of the main characters in Kanako’s story.
“Hey, we’d better line up quick so we won’t be late, right?” Aiko pointed to the line.
“Noro... please don’t adjust to this...” Yuichi wondered again how she could just accept it.
“Yu! Do you think this is an attack by a new Stand-user?” Mutsuko broke in.
“Are you suggesting there was an old Stand-user?” Yuichi asked.
At some point, Mutsuko had appeared behind him, and Yuichi objected to her comment in his usual way.
“But this is definitely a strange situation!” Mutsuko declared. “Yet, while I’m thinking about how it’s strange, somehow, it doesn’t seem so strange! Look! I sorta feel like those things have been here all along, too!”
Mutsuko was pointing at a large lizard running around nearby. It was about the size of a bird, and walked along on two fat legs, with two small arms that seemed purely vestigial. It was a theropod, a type of dinosaur.
“Noro, do you know what these things are?” Yuichi asked.
“They’re dragons, right?” Aiko asked. She seemed to find it completely normal, even as Yuichi stared in shock.
“No, no. Look, there have never been dragons on the school grounds!” Yuichi burst out.
“They nest around the castle and the Demon Lord looks after them, I think,” Aiko said.
“The Demon Lord looks after them...” Yuichi was just thinking he’d heard that somewhere before, when he heard a loud roar. The ground shook, and something came around the corner of the school building.
Yuichi stared up in mute amazement.
It was a giant statue, standing as tall as the third floor of the school building. The creature — the Colossus, most likely — turned its horned head, and looked down at Yuichi and the others.
Different worldviews...
Yuichi was starting to feel like he was realizing what that meant.
The term “worldview” had come up before every now and then, and he knew, rationally, that it could be a source of strange phenomena, but Yuichi had never wholeheartedly believed in it before now. Without such a grandiose idea, though, there was no way to explain what was going on here.
He could explain a serial killer as a criminal who was slightly stronger than most. Vampires and anthromorphs could just be other races that had existed for a long time in secret. Beings like The Head could just be bizarre things that happened now and again in the long course of human history.
But how could you explain a castle in the sky, a walking Colossus, and an armored knight looking over the students as if it was routine?
“What’s wrong? You�
��re scowling...” Aiko asked from beside him.
“Oh... I was just trying to process what I’m seeing,” Yuichi said.
Aiko didn’t seem to be thinking about it nearly as deeply.
“What do you think, Takeuchi?” Yuichi asked.
“I think it’s clearly a bizarre phenomenon. And I find it extremely strange that everyone else is so accepting of it,” Natsuki said in her usual dispassionate voice.
After class, Yuichi and the others walked past the athletic field to visit their club room in the old school building. Mutsuko had called a meeting.
He looked at the athletic field, at the little terrestrial dragons running to and fro. There seemed to be more now than there had been that morning.
He wondered if the effect had spread outside of the school at all, but he had no way of knowing. There had been a mist covering the grounds since around lunchtime, and because of that, most of the students had decided to put off going home. They seemed to assume it would lift soon enough.
As they entered the club room, they found Mutsuko waiting in front of the whiteboard, as usual.
Kanako wasn’t there, but Yuichi hadn’t really been expecting her.
“Now! This is a very interesting situation, but we can’t exactly let it continue!” Mutsuko declared. “As a person who fights catastrophes wherever they strike, I feel I must act! We’re going to break out of this situation!”
Mutsuko was fired up. It was a bit reassuring to see her acting the same as ever.
“How do we break out of this situation?” Yuichi asked as he sat down.
Aiko and Natsuki also took their seats.
“Good question. First of all, the state of affairs is limited to the school! There’s no effect outside. In other words, the solution is probably somewhere on school grounds!” Mutsuko seemed to have investigated the surrounding situation before Yuichi and the others had arrived.
“That’s better than the alternative, I guess,” Yuichi said. Even so, he wasn’t about to let his guard down. There was no guarantee that the area of effect wouldn’t expand.
“Now, the presence of Blue Sky Rochefort and the Colossus suggests that it has some connection to Orihara’s book!” Mutsuko declared.
The Melancholy of the High School Girl Light Novel Author?! Page 13