Black Fairy Tale

by Otsuichi

  My grandfather sighed.

  I was mortified and I felt my face turn red. I wanted to run.

  They started to praise the old Nami. That Nami wouldn’t have disappointed them. She would have played the piano beautifully. They talked about the differences between how I was then and how I was now, my mother reciting a list of my faults.

  I couldn’t raise my head. I wished I could just disappear. I felt the same way whenever I was at school. Everyone wanted to be with the me who still had her memories. There wasn’t a place for the current me. Even the ones who still talked to me weren’t anyone I knew—they were people Nami knew.

  *

  The next day I was taken to the hospital. It wasn’t the one I always went to, but rather a small hospital outside of town.

  I asked my grandfather why they didn’t take me to the usual hospital.

  He said, “In order to get you a new eye, I couldn’t go through all the proper channels, so we have to go to a small hospital. But don’t worry, you have a real doctor.”

  Just before the operation I saw the eyeball in a glass container, floating in clear water, looking at me.

  I was put under anesthesia and they performed the transplant surgery.

  It was over quickly.

  2

  Someone else’s eye was put into the hole in my head and the optical nerves were connected with tiny threads. For three days after the operation I wasn’t allowed to touch anywhere near my eye, not even through the bandages. I was even told to avoid excessive eye movement.

  For a time, the left side of my face felt off, unnatural. It felt heavy, like something was pressing against it. Sometimes I noticed that my head was tilting to the left.

  Four days later I was allowed to remove the bandage from my face, although I was still confined to my room. By that time the unnatural feeling in my left eye had almost completely disappeared.

  The doctor said to me, “Even with the bandage gone, you may not be able to see very well at first. The connections between the optical nerves are still fresh. But they should soon acclimate to your body, and you’ll be able to see normally again. Be absolutely sure you don’t rub your eyes for a while.”

  What I first saw through my left eye was hazy and washed out, as if I were looking through a pane of frosted glass. And everything was too bright. My eye must not have been able to adjust to the light yet.

  There was a calendar on the wall of my hospital room. On its lower half was a grid of the days; a photograph was on the upper half. The picture was of an empty swing in a daylit park.

  Since the calendar hung on the wall opposite my bed, it was all I looked at. When my bandages were first removed, the edges in the picture blurred together and I couldn’t see much. But after two days, I was able to make out even the chains of the swing.

  One week after the operation it was time for me to go home again.

  My mother came to pick me up. It was the first time she had come to the hospital. Only my grandfather had come to visit me, and that was only once. And even then we hadn’t had much to talk about, and he’d quickly lost interest and left.

  “Can you see out of your left eye again?” my mother asked. “When you only had one eye you didn’t look much like the Nami I used to know, but now that you have both eyes again I’m sure that will change.”

  I looked into the mirror and noticed that the irises of my eyes weren’t quite the same color. I looked closely at my left eye. It was clear and brown.

  My mother appraised my completed face and gave me a satisfied nod. “At least you look like the old Nami again. You look lovely.” Then she crossed her arms and admonished, “But hurry up and get your memory back. It’s like you’re not Nami anymore. How did you get this way? There’s nothing more horrible than having your own daughter forget all her memories of her mother.”

  She left the room to finish the paperwork for my release.

  I stayed seated at the foot of my bed and stared at the calendar on the wall. I could sense that the optic nerve between my left eye and my brain had connected properly. And yet, the calendar’s picture was slightly blurry. I was crying. I took a tissue from the side of the bed and, careful not to rub it against my eye, wiped away the tears around it.

  My chest was so filled with sadness that I thought I would burst. I thought over the things my mother and my classmates had said. They’d loved the old me deeply. But the new me couldn’t do anything right. Most of the time somebody tried to talk to me, I didn’t know what to say. I knew that while they watched me try to stammer something in reply, in their heads they were comparing the me they had known with the me now standing before them. Even when I tried not to notice it, I could still feel it. And then I’d think about how much happier they would all be if they still had the model student Nami instead of the good-for-nothing me.

  As I sat there thinking, I looked over at the calendar and the picture of the girl on the swing.

  I decided to get my things together before my mother returned, and I started to shift my eyes from the calendar in order to begin.

  But an uncertainty came to me—just a small doubt at first—but when I realized what had caused it, the feeling turned to dread.

  The photograph on the calendar had been of an empty swing. Now a girl was sitting in it.

  I groaned and touched my hand to the left side of my face. It felt hot. My newly transplanted eye was warm—not hot enough to burn, but my optic nerve seemed to be twitching.

  I thought I saw the swing in the photograph move. And when I tried to tell myself that was impossible, it moved again.

  Bewildered, I closed my eyes, expecting to see only darkness. I was wrong. Even with my eyelids closed, the girl remained. If anything I could see her more vividly. That was when I noticed that the girl and the swing were semi-transparent. Only my left eye could see the image. I closed my right eye and opened the left; the image was still clear.

  I tried to convince myself that it was just some daydream. The picture grew before me, enveloping me, filling the sight of my left eye, replacing the hospital room with a park I had never seen.

  As the vision swept over me, I clutched at my bedsheet to make sure I was still in the hospital room.

  The girl lowered herself from the swing. She was young, not even old enough for grade school, and had long hair that bounced as she moved.

  The chains of the swing had started to rust; behind the park was forest.

  The dream in my left eye started to sway and my body seemed to shift, although I knew it hadn’t really. The girl approached me, a smile filling her face.

  Then, like a wave receding into the distance, the dream gently vanished. My left eye saw the calendar as it had been before—an empty, still swing.

  I felt slightly nauseated. What had that been? A dream. A hallucination. An illusion. I had only thought I’d seen the swing move, and my left eye had begun to dream.

  I looked again at the calendar. Some of the details were different from my dream. The chains of the swing had no rust. In the background was the ocean.

  The door opened and my mother came in.

  I left the hospital filled with strange thoughts. I had wanted to take the calendar home with me, but couldn’t find the words to ask.

  The smile of the little girl in the dream of my left eye kept replaying in my mind. It was a smile that took me in and accepted me—all of me. A pleasant warmth filled my chest. Since the day I’d lost my memory, nobody had made me feel so happy.

  As we left the hospital, my mother noticed me crying. She gave me a suspicious look and asked, “Why are you crying?”

  I didn’t know how to answer. When that girl smiled at me, I’d felt content, and for the first time I realized how tense, how uneasy, and how miserable I was.

  *

  After I left the hospital I returned to my normal daily life. I went to school, I took my classes. I didn’t talk much with anyone. I was alone.

  When I first awoke with all my memories gone, I
’d spent much of my time in confusion. I’d listened to the conversations around me passively. I’d just been nodding, not thinking, not feeling. But after the transplant I began to understand how I was feeling each moment.

  Sitting at my desk in class, I asked about the model student I had been. Even with my new eye and the bandages gone, I was still in exactly the same situation as before.

  “Unlike you, the old Nami used to talk to everyone and entertain them.”

  That doesn’t sound like me at all.

  “Yeah, like a different person. And she was better at everything too. We lost that last volleyball match in gym class because of you. The old Nami would have nailed that spike.”

  I felt alone on the volleyball court. I messed up so many times that no one let me near the ball anymore. My teammates looked at me with irritation. I was out of place.

  The classroom was noisy. It was the break between periods and excited voices rang in the air. I sat alone at my desk waiting for the next class. The breaks were the loneliest parts of the day for me. I felt pitiful.

  I closed my eyes and recalled the dream from the hospital room. The girl who smiled at me. The swelling in my chest. I could feel her, abandoned in the darkness, afraid, her hand reaching out to me and softly gripping mine. Whenever I felt lonely, I could remember that dream and find calm.

  What was that little girl? Was she just a dream? Ever since I’d awoken in that first hospital, useless and hopeless with no left eye and no memory, I hadn’t had a single dream. If that daydream in the hospital room had been reconstructed from my old memories, then that girl was a part of those memories.

  I asked my mother, Do you know anything about a girl with long hair or a swing set surrounded by woods?

  She shook her head. “No, I don’t.”

  That wasn’t what I’d hoped to hear. If my memories came back, I wouldn’t need to be sad anymore—the me I was now would disappear and the Nami everyone loved would return.

  *

  I was at the train station on my way home from school when I experienced my second waking dream.

  I was standing by myself on the edge of the platform, nudging the raised yellow bumps of the tactile warning strip with the toes of my shoes as I looked down at the tracks. Around me swarmed a crowd of students and other commuters on their way home. Groups of high schoolers talked and laughed as they passed by. I worried that they were laughing at me.

  There was still a short wait before my train came.

  I faintly felt my left eye growing warm. At first I thought I was imagining it, but the feeling grew hotter and hotter. Blood pulsed through the capillaries of my eye, so much so that I felt as though a heart had been transplanted there instead of an eye.

  I froze and focused my mind on what I saw. I was still looking at the railroad tracks. The rails had been shiny and silver, but the ones I saw now were covered with brown rust.

  A dream was coming. Confident, I closed my eyes, knowing from my experience in the hospital that I would see the dream more clearly that way.

  The rails slid downward, as if I had tilted my head up. But before my eyes was not another platform set against the evening sky. What I saw was a forest, and it filled my vision with green.

  The ground was covered in green grass. A single train car sat deserted there, almost buried among the trees of the forest. From its shape it looked like a type that hadn’t been in service for a decade. Its window frames were bent and without glass, and grass grew atop its roof. The unmoving train car was becoming a part of the forest around it. Sunlight dappled the leaves of the plants. It must have been summer.

  The view was so beautiful my breath caught. I had no memories of a deep forest, no memories of a limitless horizon. I couldn’t remember any of the things I had seen in the first seventeen years of my life. The scene was entirely new to me, engraved deeply into the blank slate of my mind.

  The dream was semi-transparent. I opened my right eye and turned my head to look around. As I’d expected, it seemed like no one else could see the rusted train. Through my right eye I saw a businessman reading a newspaper.

  No matter which direction I turned, the image of the train in my left eye followed. I looked up, I looked back, and the train was still in front of me. It was like my left eye and my right eye were in different locations.

  Suddenly I noticed the figures of several children in the windows of the train. Had they been using the train as a playground? I saw other children whacking the body of the train car with sticks, but it made no noise. There was only image. And yet I felt as if I could hear the sound of the wind and the insects.

  The point of view in my left eye swayed. It rocked up and down at a steady pace. I stood motionless on the train platform but felt as if I were walking. I had to be careful to keep my balance and not fall from the platform.

  As I approached the dream train, it grew large in my vision. The children were looking at me. My line of sight was low, and I realized that in the dream I was a child too.

  I stopped at the side of the train, looking up at one of the windows. The train loomed frightening and large to my child-self. Bits of paint clung to the surfaces not covered with rust.

  An aggressive-looking boy gazed down at me from the window. A small arm with the small hand of a child rose up from the lower right edge of my view. It was my own arm, connected to the child I was in the dream. My hand reached up for the window, but the window was too far.

  The face inside the window drew back. After a moment it returned, and the boy threw a small rock at me. Standing on the train platform, I gasped, startling the man next to me.

  Inside the dream, a boy who had been hitting the train with a stick turned and threw the stick at me. My child-self reflexively raised an arm to cover my face.

  On the train platform, I realized that I had struck the same pose.

  A train glided along the tracks, stopping alongside the platform. The dream ended and my eyesight returned to normal.

  *

  When I got home I documented my dream at the train station on a sheet of loose-leaf notebook paper, including sketches of the scene and the children I’d seen. I even recorded when and where I had the dream.

  I suspected the dream at the station wouldn’t be my last.

  First was the little girl on the swing. Second was the train car overgrown by forest. I didn’t know what would come next. Maybe the dreams were of places I’d seen before I lost my memory. Maybe they were scenes from movies I’d seen.

  But I’d noticed that the dreams had certain peculiar rules to them. For example, both dreams came when I had been looking at an object that matched something in the vision—the first, a swing and the second, train tracks. The instant the two semitransparent images coincided, a film reel within my left eye was stirred to motion.

  I saw the dreams only in my left eye—my newly transplanted left eye. I started to think of the eye as a little jewel box filled with dreams. Most of the time the box was locked, and it worked just as a normal eye does. But with the right key—a key like the swing or the train rail—the box would open and a dream would pour out.

  I kept the records of my dreams in a three-ring binder.

  I replayed the sights of the train dream in my mind. My child-self had reached up to the boy in the window, only to be hit by a small rock . . .

  I could only guess at the meaning, but I must have been trying to join in their games and been rejected.

  What I saw in the dream stirred my heart. It stuck with me, like a memory from my own childhood long ago. Thinking of the dream filled me with sadness. I had never seen the abandoned train car playground or the group of playing children keeping me out. With no memories of my own, it was all new to me.

  I was starved for memories. I had none since I first awoke in the hospital not that long before. I was like dry, barren sand. Without memories, I had no roots, no foundation on which to stand.

  But then came those mysterious dreams. Visions of places and experie
nces I hadn’t seen poured deep into the corners of my heart and provided me comfort.

  *

  One week after my dream at the train station, my dream diary had grown twenty pages long. Just as I’d hoped, I’d seen many dreams.

  The analogy of the keys and the locked jewelry box had proven correct. Things I happened to see, even on TV or in books, became keys that freed images that had been locked into my left eye.

  Anything could be a key—a milk carton turned on its side, the surprised face of a little kitten. Each time I saw one of the keys, my left eye would grow warm. I couldn’t choose when or where—the instant one of the keys caught my left eye, it just happened.

  And then the box of dreams inside my left eye would open. The films were only fragments. In one I was standing alone, looking down at the shards of a broken window. In another I was being chased by a dog. In yet another I had been left behind in what looked to be an empty, lonely schoolyard. And so on.

  With each passing day, the dreams came more frequently.

  One day I was by myself, sitting at my classroom desk, idly staring at my eraser. My left eye began to feel hot. My chest filled with anticipation of the dream. I know this may be a strange way to say it, but I felt excited—like I had found an old photo album of myself I had never seen before.

  Before long the eraser had flipped the switch on the film projector in my eye and the dream began to play, the semitransparent tableaux of my left and right eyes overlapping. I closed my eyes and the playback of the dream was all I saw. My dream-self was in a classroom. The other children in the class looked like middle-schoolers, so I probably was one too. In each dream so far I had been a different age.

  It appeared that we were about to take a test. A man who looked like a proctor walked down the aisles placing problem sheets on each desk.

  In the dream, my right hand gripped a wooden pencil. It was a boy’s hand—I could tell by the black sleeves of my school uniform. I was always a boy in the dreams. With the pointed tip of the pencil, I began to write my name on the test paper. The sloppy lettering read “Kazuya Fuyutsuki.” Next to the space for my name were the words ENTRANCE EXAMINATION and the name of a high school.