Black Fairy Tale

by Otsuichi

  Contents

  Black Fairy Tale

  Glossary

  Afterword

  About the Author

  About the Cover Artist

  Black Fairy Tale

  by Otsuichi

  Published by Shueisha, Inc.

  Shueisha, Inc.

  2-5-10 Hitotsubashi

  Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo

  101-8050, Japan

  http://www.shueisha.co.jp/english/

  All Rights Reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, events, or places is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright 2004 by Otsuichi

  Translated by Nathan Collins

  English Translation Copyright 2013 by VIZ Media, LLC

  Cover Image by Takahiro Asano

  Cover Design by Claudia Noble

  Originally published in Japanese in 2004 by Shueisha, Inc.

  This English edition was originally published in slightly different form as a printed book by Haikasoru/VIZ Media in USA as a part of Summer, Fireworks, And My Corpse in 2010.

  E-Book English single novella edition is published in September 2013, by Shueisha, Inc.

  E-Book ISBN: 978-4-08-960005-4

  Otsuichi (1978- )

  Fiction (General)/ Fiction (Horror)/ Fiction (Japanese)

  Visit the author’s website: http://otsuichi.com/

  Black Fairy Tale

  by Otsuichi

  The Eye’s Memory

  1

  The raven was able to speak human words because his nest had happened to be in the eaves of a movie theater. When he was a chick, he had watched the movie screen through a hole in the wall as he ate the food his mother brought him. He loved movies, even though his siblings weren’t interested in them. He enjoyed reciting the lines he heard and after a while had learned how to speak like a human.

  The raven met the girl after the theater’s demolition had sent him flying from his home. He was now fully grown, a fine young bird. His parents and siblings had already moved on to other places; alone, he flew aimlessly through the town.

  Near the base of a mountain stood a mansion with blue walls and a large garden with a stately fence around it. Next to the house grew a tall tree with a branch perfectly shaped to perch upon, and so one day the raven landed there to rest.

  Within wing’s reach of the branch was one of the home’s second-floor windows. At first the raven didn’t notice the young girl sitting by the window. Usually when he came this close humans would shout, startled. But this girl had no such reaction. She didn’t even seem to notice him.

  The raven sat on the branch for a while to observe her. He had never before been able to watch a human up close. She had petite features and strawberry lips and sat in a chair near the window, staring off into the distance.

  The raven thought about flapping his wings to draw her attention but rejected the idea. He knew of a better way to get humans to notice him.

  “Ahem!”

  The girl gave a start and, with a mixture of fear and confusion, asked, “Who’s there?”

  The raven finally understood why the girl hadn’t noticed him sitting right in front of her. Normally, this close his black form would be plainly visible to the eye. But sadly this girl had nothing resembling an eye in either of her eye sockets—just two open holes in her little face. She wasn’t able to see anything.

  This is my chance, thought the raven. If she can’t see what I am, she might talk to me. Ever since he had learned to talk, he’d attempted conversing with humans a number of times. But even though he wanted to try out the words he’d learned from the movies, he preferred to avoid people—he knew of the tragedy of his fellow fowl doomed to become fried chicken.

  But if she can’t see what I am, then surely she’ll talk to me. In an affected voice he asked, “Hello, miss, how do you do?”

  “Who is it? Is somebody there?”

  “Don’t worry, I mean you no harm. I just want to talk to you.”

  The girl rose from her chair and walked toward the center of the room. She reached her arms out, trying to locate the source of the voice. “Where are you?”

  The window was open, and after a few beats of his wings he was inside. It was a nice room, with flower-print wallpaper, a soft bed, and many pretty dolls. A round table occupied the center. The raven landed softly on the top of the chair by the window.

  “You have such a strange voice,” said the girl, “unlike any I’ve ever heard. But you don’t have any manners. A gentleman is supposed to knock before entering a lady’s room.”

  “I must apologize. Sometimes I forget what I’ve learned about manners. Why, I’m not even able to hold a knife and fork.”

  “Well, then, how do you eat?”

  “By pecking at the food with my beak, of course.”

  “You’re a strange person, you know.” She smiled, showing off her dimples. “Whoever you are, I’m grateful you came. I don’t have anyone to talk to here.”

  From that day forward, the raven came to visit her whenever he had spare time. At first he had no purpose other than to try out his human words, but after a week he came to enjoy speaking with her.

  The raven saw something different about her. Most other humans flocked in groups of their own and would throw rocks at him. But this girl always stayed alone in her room, sitting on her chair by the open window, enjoying the feeling of the breeze on her cheeks. To the raven, staring at her from the tree branch outside her window, she looked somewhat lonely.

  The raven greeted her. “Hello, miss.”

  Her expression brightened, as if she’d felt a sudden warm breeze on a cold winter day. “You’re hopeless!” she said, not in an angry voice but rather one reserved for greeting a dear friend.

  “You forgot to knock again!”

  The raven hadn’t experienced anything so delightful since hatching from his egg. His mother had never sung for him, only fed him caterpillar after caterpillar, and his siblings were just typical birds with no individuality.

  Drawing from the many movies he’d seen, the raven made up stories to entertain the girl. His conversations with her consisted only of these stories—he’d decided not to talk about himself in order to keep his true nature hidden. Before long, he’d built a false life with an elaborate, nonsensical history.

  One day he asked her, “Miss, why don’t you have any eyes in your head?”

  She tried to sound casual as she told her unusual story: “It happened when I was little. One Sunday, my parents took me by the hand and brought me to church. The church had a beautiful stained glass window and I spent the entire service admiring it. It was really beautiful and I stared right at it, my eyes wide open. That was my mistake, because suddenly the window shattered into a thousand pieces. We never found out why. Maybe somebody threw a rock into it. Maybe a meteorite happened to crash through it. Whatever the reason, the window shattered and I didn’t have time to react. All I could think was how beautiful all the shattered pieces of colored glass were as they fell.”

  Her story reminded the raven of how the floating motes of dust had twinkled, illuminated by the beam of the theater’s projector.

  “The next instant,” she continued, “two pieces of glass pierced my eyes—blue in my left eye and red in my right. I was rushed to the hospital, but all they could do was take out my eyes to stop the bleeding. The last things I saw were the many-colored shards of glass, glittering in the light as they fell upon me. It was a wonderful sight.”

  Someone knocked at the door.

  “Miss,” the raven said, “thank you for talking with me, but I must go now.”

  Ignoring her p
rotests, he quickly took flight through the window.

  He didn’t go far, rather perched on the branch outside her room where he wouldn’t be seen but could still listen to the conversation inside.

  He heard the sound of the door opening. Someone walked into the room.

  “I thought I heard you talking. Was someone here?”

  The voice sounded like it belonged to the girl’s mother.

  The raven couldn’t see it, but he could tell that the girl was having trouble coming up with an answer. His voice had come into her room with no warning, leaving as soon as someone knocked on the door. He wondered what she thought he was.

  He spread his wings and flew high up into the sky. Above him were clouds, below him the gray city.

  I want to show her everything. Until then he hadn’t realized it: the girl had come to fill his heart.

  She had told him how she had lost her sight as if it didn’t matter to her, as if she accepted it as just the way things were. But when the raven told her stories of vast prairies and fantastic creatures, he had seen a dreamlike look on her face that said, “I want to see that.”

  He recalled that she had once said to him, “My dreams are all dark now.”

  She’d tried to hide her sadness from him by changing the subject, cheerfully talking about her favorite things to touch—for just as you might savor the flavors of a fine wine with your tongue, she found pleasure in touching the objects around her.

  He’d asked, “Are you afraid of the dark?”

  She thought for a moment, then gave a tiny nod.

  The raven flew beneath low clouds heavy with rain and thought, If it meant that she could see light and color again, I’d paint the world with blood. It took eyes to see. And so the raven flapped his shiny black wings and flew to the city to collect eyes.

  2

  The raven landed on the roof of a bakery and surveyed the scene below.

  A green, bushy tree grew in the backyard of the bakery, its thick branches stretching out like the flexing arms of a bodybuilder. From one of these arms hung a rope, a tire dangling from its end. The owner of the bakery had tied it there one Sunday afternoon for his five-year-old son, a boy with rosy cheeks and curly hair. This child was now hanging upside down with one leg inside the tire swing.

  The raven was still perched on the roof of the bakery, staring at the boy, when the voice of the boy’s mother came from inside:

  “It’s time for your nap! Quit playing and get upstairs, young man.”

  The boy sprang down from the swing and went inside the house.

  The raven glided over to the tree branch that held the swing. From there he could see into the second floor of the bakery. He watched the boy enter his room and lie down on his bed.

  All right, let’s take his eye. Just to be safe, the raven waited for the child to fall asleep. Soon the bird’s dark eyes saw the gentle rising and falling of the sleeping boy’s chest.

  He flew quietly through the bedroom window. The scent of freshly baked bread filled the room. The boy was still asleep, unaware of the shadow-black raven at his bedside.

  The raven, careful not to crush his gift for his friend, plucked the boy’s right eye out from under his eyelid.

  The boy awoke, saw the raven with his one remaining eye, and screamed.

  “Mom! A raven is eating my eye!”

  The boy flailed angrily at the raven, trying to capture it; the sound of his mother’s footsteps rose from the stairway.

  The raven beat his wings and fled through the window while he still had the chance.

  With the eyeball clutched in his black beak, he soared high into the sky, heading toward the mansion where the girl waited.

  When the raven flew in through the open window of her bedroom, the girl was slumped at her desk, crying.

  The bird thought to say something to her, but his beak was still holding the eyeball. He rested the bloody eye upon the round table in the middle of the room and said, “Miss, why are you crying?”

  Shoulders trembling, she turned her head to face him. She knew where he was just from the sound of his voice. “I didn’t want you to see me crying like this.”

  The two holes in her face were filled with lovely tears, and when she gave a slight turn to her head the tears spilled from her eye sockets like water overflowing a filled cup. The raven found it beautiful.

  “Something sad happened to me today,” she said. “You see that round table in the middle of the room?”

  The raven looked over at the table where he had deposited his bloody gift.

  “On the table,” the girl continued, “there’s a vase with flowers in it. I thought the flowers were blue and fresh.”

  The flowers in the vase were red and starting to wilt.

  “My mother lied to me. I thought the flowers were blue because that’s what my mother told me.”

  “Do you like blue flowers?”

  The girl nodded. “But she could have just told me they were red. I only found out when my father came into my room and said, ‘Those red flowers are starting to wilt.’”

  The raven didn’t want to see her cry any longer.

  “Please stop crying,” he said. “I brought you a present today.”

  “A present?”

  The girl wiped away her tears. She had memorized where everything in her room was and walked straight to the table with the wilted flowers and bloody eyeball, taking not one step too far nor one step too short.

  She moved her hands along the top of the table and found the eyeball of the baker’s son.

  “What is this?”

  “Well, what is it shaped like?”

  She ran the tips of her fingers across the surface of the eye.

  “It’s round. Round and soft.”

  “Try putting it into one of those holes in your face.”

  Slowly, nervously, she raised the soft, round object to her face.

  She paused and asked, “The right one or the left one?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Go on.”

  The girl pressed the eyeball into the cavern on the left-hand side of her face. Since she had done it without thought, the eye pointed off in an unnatural direction. But it rested firmly inside.

  “Well,” said the bird, “how does it feel?”

  “It feels . . . calming. But what is it? It feels like a plug—like a stopper or something.”

  “It’s our secret. You can’t let anyone know that I gave it to you. Not even your mother or your father. You can’t let anyone see you with it either. Keep it hidden safely underneath your bed when other people are around. Put it back in when you lie down in bed, when you’re tired of crying.”

  The girl nodded and yawned, rubbing at her new eye with her hand. The eyeball rolled halfway around in its socket.

  “Good night, mister. Thank you for your present.”

  The girl lay down in her bed and soon fell asleep.

  “Good night,” said the raven and flew out the window and into the town in search of a second eye.

  *

  The next day, the raven returned to the girl’s room with a new present. He stopped on the branch outside her window, making sure that the girl was alone. Seeing that she was, he flew into the room.

  He placed the new eyeball on the table in the middle of the room, and said, “Hello, miss.”

  “Mister, you have to listen!” the girl cried out joyfully. “Last night, I saw a dream! A real dream, with pictures and everything! It’s been so long since I’ve seen any color at all. And this dream was so pretty. In my dream, I was a child living in a bakery.”

  She closed her eyes and described in detail everything she had seen in her dream. The raven realized that even after she had taken his present out of her head, the images the eye had once seen remained in her memory.

  “I was a boy. My father was kneading dough and my mother was shaping bread. Customers who came in smiled at me and spoke to me as I played inside the store. And then I was hanging upside down with
one of my legs in a swing in the backyard. It was a tire swing, hanging from a tree branch.”

  After living so long in a world of only noise and darkness, she was thrilled to have had such a color-filled dream, and the raven was happy for her.

  “It was so beautiful a dream,” she said, “that I kept your stopper in for a really long time. Even after I woke up. But don’t worry, whenever I hear someone coming up the steps, I quickly take it out and hide it. I keep it in a glass jar under my bed. But when I’m alone in here, I put the stopper back in and practice dreaming. At first I could only see the wonderful world of the bakery when I was asleep, but now I can see it when I’m awake, daydreaming. I’m getting better at it already.”

  “Miss, I brought you another present today.”

  “You did?”

  The raven told her he had put another “stopper” on the table and that it too was filled with dreams. Her face beaming with anticipation, the girl took the bloody, beautiful thing into her hand and placed it inside her empty eye socket.

  “I can see it, mister, I can see it!” The girl clutched her hands at her chest, whispering as if in thankful prayer. “It’s like bright aqua blue paint spreading across the world. It’s a flood of color! It’s as if this stopper was full of blue color that’s spilling into my mind.”

  The eyeball the raven had brought that day had belonged to an old woman who lived in a house on a hill surrounded by fields and fields of flowers. When the girl had said she liked blue flowers, he’d remembered her words.

  I want to show her all her favorite things. I must find someone who spends all day looking at blue flowers.

  As he’d flown around the city, he chanced upon the field of blue flowers. In the center of the field was a house and in the house was an old woman who spent her days knitting. She had many grandchildren and knitted handmade clothes for each.