Black Fairy Tale

by Otsuichi

  My viewpoint panned over to a window beside my desk. The outside was dark with rain, and the face of a young boy reflected back at me in the glass. I had never seen the face before, but I knew it belonged to me in the dream.

  And with that the dream faded.

  Kazuya. I wrote the name down on a sheet of my notebook paper so I wouldn’t forget it. I added the date I’d seen the dream and the name of the high school printed on the test paper, then put the sheet of paper into my binder.

  That night, as I sat watching TV in the living room, I thought about the daydreams my eye had presented to me.

  My father had not yet returned home from work. My mother and I were alone in the house. We had not become close. She looked at me like I was a stranger. And when she talked to me, she never called me by name, only “you.” Even in the way she spoke, she kept me separate from Nami.

  After dinner I wanted to go straight to my room but decided to keep my mother company so as not to be rude. I felt guilty about only seeing her during meals. Maybe I couldn’t be Nami, but I could still spend as much time with her as possible.

  A special program on missing persons was on the TV that night. Displayed across the bottom of the screen was a telephone number for anyone who had seen or heard anything to call.

  Any memories I’d once had of television shows—even famous ones that had run for years—were gone from my mind.

  As the picture of a boy who’d gone missing some months before appeared on the screen, I recalled the face of the boy I’d seen reflected in the window in that dream.

  In my dreams, I was a boy named Kazuya, and the images were all from his viewpoint. There was no sound, only visuals, and they flowed past as if seen by his eyes. Every dream had taken place from somebody’s distinct point of view—the view rocked from side to side as I walked forward, and occasionally everything would go dark, as if I had blinked.

  It was not a third-person view looking down from above.

  My heart began to race. I had seen dreams where I had been talking with other people, but because there was no sound, I hadn’t been able to hear what name others called me. Now that I had found it—Kazuya—the dreams suddenly felt concrete.

  My mother stood up and said, “I’ll clean up the dishes. Are you going to keep watching TV?”

  No, I’m fine.

  A picture of a girl appeared on the screen. She could have been in grade school, or maybe middle school. In the picture, she was outside, cooking with several other girls, possibly at a summer camp. The faces of the other children were blurred out.

  Suddenly, heat burst through my left eye. It was like the warmth that came before each dream, only this time far more fierce. My eye pounded like a heart immediately after a full-out sprint, and the nerve connecting eye and brain began to scream.

  I was so startled that I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t even close my eyelids. I was motionless, my eyes affixed to the girl in the middle of the screen.

  The box inside my eye opened. A bead of sweat trickled down my spine. Something terrible inside the eye was about to emerge. I felt it coming, not a dream, but a nightmare.

  Abruptly the screen went dark, and the picture of the girl vanished. The fever in my eye faded rapidly and my body was released. As my breath escaped from my lips, I looked up at my mother. She had the remote control in her hand.

  “Did you want me to leave that on?”

  I shook my head.

  3

  Saori and the owner of the café were talking. I—that is to say, Kazuya—was leaning on the counter, head resting in my hands, watching them. Beside the counter was a vase with white flowers. As Saori turned, she knocked over the vase. The water within silently ran across the counter.

  The dream ended there. I opened my eyes and closed my magazine. I took a sheet of notebook paper from my backpack and recorded the dream:

  Day dream was seen: March 10

  People appearing in dream: Saori, café owner

  What triggered dream: Reading a magazine in my room. Left eye responded to white flowers in an advertisement.

  Content of dream: Saori was talking with the owner of the café. As she was working, she knocked over a vase of flowers and became upset. The flowers fell to the floor and the water from the vase spread across the counter. A pool of water formed around the base of my coffee cup.

  *

  The dream had taken place in Melancholy Grove, a coffee shop. I placed the sheet of paper in my binder. Two weeks had passed since I had started keeping a diary of the dreams, and over that time the binder had grown thick and cumbersome to carry.

  Saori was Kazuya’s older sister. She had a part-time job at the café.

  The same people appeared many times in my eye’s dreams. Because I couldn’t hear any of the conversations, most of their names remained unknown to me, but Saori’s name had been on her bedroom door.

  Saori often showed up in the dreams within my eye. I became vaguely aware that she and I—well, she and Kazuya—were brother and sister.

  Sometimes she was a child and other times she was grown up. My viewpoint grew taller and shorter along with her. We weren’t always children in the dreams. But whatever our ages, she always looked at me with the same kindness. She had been the girl on the swing in that first dream.

  Her hair and fashion changed along with her age. One time, her hair was long and braided; another, straight and shoulder length. But one feature was uniquely hers, and whenever I saw it I knew I was seeing her. With few exceptions, her nose was red. Whether it was some disease she’d had from birth or just a bad case of allergies, her nose was constantly runny. She blew her nose until it became irritated and red.

  In my left eye, I often saw her blowing her nose. I saw her buried in a pile of wadded-up tissues. I saw her out shopping, a box of tissues under her arm. I saw her blowing her nose while waiting on customers at the coffee shop.

  Aside from that, she would have been beautiful, but she spent her life with tissues bunched up under her nose, unconcerned with the gaze of others.

  In the dreams we walked together, we played cards together. In one, we were children arguing through tears. Between the tears and the snot, her face was a total mess.

  Most of the time Saori was taller than me, but I had dreams in which Kazuya had outgrown her. Those times, his viewpoint was taller than my own, and I saw the world from higher than I ever had.

  The world I saw in the dreams was always the same. There were no sudden wars, no voyages into space, just moments from a normal, regular life. I took in those dreams with all my effort. They were memories—footprints of the past—and having none to call my own, I took all I could from them.

  *

  Day dream was seen: March 12

  People appearing in dream: Saori, our parents

  What triggered dream: Saw a cotton swab on my bookcase. Left eye responded to the white cotton at its tip.

  Content of dream: Saori and I (probably in our grade school years) were taking turns lying in our mother’s lap to have our ears cleaned out with cotton swabs. When it was Saori’s turn, I started playing a short distance away. I held a toy locomotive in my hand. Saori seemed not to like having her ears cleaned and held her head stiff. Her snot ran down onto our mother’s lap. Behind them, our father walked by.

  Day dream was seen: March 14

  People appearing in dream: My (Kazuya’s) father, his coworker

  What triggered dream: Left eye responded to a truck idling at a traffic light. Waiting for the dream, I missed my chance to cross the road.

  Content of dream: My father was working at a lumber mill, work gloves on his hands. Judging from my viewpoint, Kazuya was still a small child. Blotches of machine oil dotted my father’s work clothes. Felled trees were piled up on the bed of a large truck, and a young man was working alongside the vehicle. He was wearing the same clothes as my father, so he must have been a coworker. I started walking over to my father, but he raised his hand to stop me. I thi
nk it was a signal saying, “It’s too dangerous over here, stay away.”

  Day dream was seen: March 15

  People appearing in dream: Saori, a middle-aged couple

  What triggered dream: Left eye responded to the butt of my father’s cigarette.

  Content of dream: Saori and I were in a man’s home. The man was drunk and he slapped a tray out of a woman’s hands. The dishes on the tray scattered across the floor. Saori wore a stiff expression.

  *

  The world of Kazuya and Saori Fuyutsuki lay deep in the mountains. Many of the scenes of my dreams took place on mountain roads, with tall peaks on one side and a cliff protected by a guardrail on the other.

  Kazuya and Saori lived with their parents, making a family of four. I hadn’t seen their grandparents in any of my dreams. After Kazuya’s viewpoint reached a certain height, his parents stopped appearing in the dreams. Maybe they had moved out.

  I gathered up the countless settings that unfolded in the dreams. I enjoyed the task.

  Inside the dreams, my parents held me warmly in their arms. It felt pleasant when they did so, but it also filled me with guilt toward my real mother. It didn’t feel right to be more at ease around the parents in my dream than around my actual mother.

  At school and at home I lived in a state of constant unease. Thinking of the world inside my dreams made that feeling fade. Sometimes I’d discover myself escaping from reality into the dream world, and it saddened me.

  Whenever my mother or my friends talked about Nami, I felt a pain in my heart. When Mr. Iwata or any of my other past acquaintances spoke to me, I couldn’t look them in the eye. I’d start to worry about how I would fail them next, then my legs would begin to shake and I’d want to run away.

  “Nami, it’s your turn to erase the blackboard today.”

  Oh, yes, okay . . .

  Even that much of a conversation with one of my friends made my heart feel like it would burst. I lived each day in anxiety and fear. Did I pronounce my words strangely? Did I smile right? Did I do anything to displease them? Whenever I looked at my piano, I remembered how I had disappointed my family, and I wanted to cry. Every little thing became a terror, until I could no longer move my body.

  Even though I knew that wasn’t how I should think, I couldn’t help it. I wished I could live in the world in my eye—Kazuya’s world—not my own.

  I couldn’t become Nami. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t play the piano and I couldn’t pass my lessons and make my teachers like me again.

  At some point I had stopped seeing myself as Nami.

  But it wasn’t just that. I was becoming different from when I had first lost my memory and hadn’t understood the things around me. For someone who had reset, who had started from zero with no memories, I carried too many scenes inside—too many memories that couldn’t have belonged to Nami, an only child raised in the city.

  I was afraid of dogs. I kept my distance from them for fear of being bitten. At first I didn’t understand why.

  My mother once commented, “And you used to like dogs so much . . .”

  Later I realized the fear came from one of the dreams inside my left eye.

  One of the dreams recorded in my binder was as follows:

  *

  Day dream was seen: February 26

  People appearing in dream: A large dog

  What triggered dream: On my way to school. Left eye responded to a dog being walked.

  Content of dream: I ran, chased by a large dog. Just as it was about to bite me the dream ended.

  *

  I think that was when my wariness of dogs began. The things I had seen as Kazuya had affected who I was in real life.

  During class, Yuri said to me, “It’s like you’ve become a completely different person lately. But you still can’t seem to do anything right. You’d better get your memory back—and fast—or you’re going to fall behind everyone.”

  I nodded. I really was incapable of anything. Everyone was piling Nami on me until I wanted to die. I could never be even an imitation of her.

  My mother showed me a video tape of a time when I still had memories—that is to say, a video tape of Nami. She hoped it would awaken some of my memories, but it didn’t work.

  When the video began to play it showed Nami, dressed in a lovely outfit, standing upon a stage. She bowed to the audience, then sat down at a piano and began to play. It was a beautiful melody. I closed my eyes and let the sound flow to my eardrums, and a semi-transparent world opened inside my head. Nami’s fingers moved confidently across the keys. It was like a miracle.

  Another tape captured the image of her at a birthday party as a young girl. The party was in our living room. Nami was surrounded by friends, talking in an uninterrupted stream. In ten minutes she said more than I did in a week of school. She chatted, flashed her dimples, and occasionally smiled broadly to the delight of the crowd around her.

  An aura seemed to shine around her. The girl on the tape may have had my face, but she was a different person. I felt shut away in the dark.

  *

  Day dream was seen: March 21

  People appearing in dream: My parents, people working at the lumber mill

  What triggered dream: Left eye responded to a circular saw in a hardware store.

  Content of dream: My father and my mother had an accident.

  *

  I went to the hardware store to buy a compass for school. Inside, I got lost trying to find the office supply section and ended up in the area where the construction tools were kept.

  On one of the shelves was a small circular saw. As soon as I saw it my left eye warmed. I stopped, focusing my attention on the saw’s round blade.

  Although nobody had touched it, the blade started to noiselessly spin. In the center of my vision, the real-life circular blade viewed by my right eye overlaid the circular blade seen by my left eye. The dream was beginning. I closed my eyes.

  Within the dream, the circular saw sprayed wood shavings into the air. Its round blade spun quickly, sucking in white boards and cutting them into pieces. I was at the lumber mill where my father worked.

  The dream was only a visual experience. But the image was so clear I thought I could hear the sound of the wood being cut, that the scent of fresh-cut wood was filling my nose.

  The workers at the lumber mill were using electric saws to cut the timber, and I stood beside a building watching them. I could see a large loading bay for the trucks. From the height of my viewpoint, I’d say I was still a boy.

  Then my view shifted and I saw my parents standing together. My mother often brought me to visit my father at work.

  My parents were standing next to a large truck. Several large tree trunks were piled in the bed of the truck and secured with rope. My father waved me over. I started to approach them.

  Without warning, one of the trees fell from the bed of the truck and onto my parents.

  Standing in the hardware store, I screamed.

  In my left eye, I saw the two of them crushed beneath the tree. I wanted to stop the dream, but I had no control over it. I opened and closed my eyes, but the dream played on. And even when I turned my head to look away, the vision was still in front of me.

  My dream-self stopped still and remained motionless until a crowd of workers ran over to me. From a short distance, I silently watched the figures of my parents trapped beneath the tree. The tree was quickly lifted from them, but I could see that they weren’t moving. Maybe that was why I hadn’t ever seen Kazuya’s parents in dreams that took place when he was older.

  My father lay broken upon the ground, blood pouring from his head.

  The memory in my left eye cut off, and its vision returned to normal. I lay slumped on the floor in the aisle of the hardware store. An employee had heard my scream and ran toward me.

  *

  At the end of March I returned to the hospital where I had undergone the transplant surgery for a scheduled follow-up exam. Dire
ctly after I’d first been released from the hospital, I’d made several return visits, but this was the first in the month of March. Because I remembered how to get to the hospital, I turned down my parents’ offer to drive me there and took the bus by myself.

  Standing outside the hospital, I gave its facade another look. It was a small hospital, hidden outside the town. I hadn’t given it much thought before, but the building had an unusual atmosphere. For one thing, there wasn’t a sign. Second, the entrance was obscured by a growth of trees. I would bet that most people walked by without ever knowing what it was.

  Inside I changed out of my shoes and into the standard green hospital slippers. I tried to find a pair that hadn’t been torn or had a hole in one or the other, but there were none. I saw no sign of any outpatients other than myself. At the reception desk sat an expressionless nurse whom you could call old and almost get away with it. Not only was the waiting room dimly lit, but the whole inside of the building was too.

  When I had been staying in a private room on the second floor, I hadn’t noticed it, but now I sensed a dubious air to the place. Maybe that was a sign of the changes inside me.

  The nurse at the desk directed me to an examination room. It was a drab room with only a changing screen, an examination table, a desk, and a chair.

  The doctor, mustached and just past middle age, was at the desk filling out some documents. I bowed to him.

  His eyes went to me, then back down to the papers in his hand.

  “Please lie down on the table,” he said.

  I did so and waited for the examination to start.