by Otsuichi
I stared at the ceiling for a time. When I looked to my side, I noticed a large mirror on the wall. In the center of the mirror I saw myself, lying flat on the exam table.
I thought back to the eye transplant operation. I had been lying on a similar table in the operating room. That was when I had first met the eyeball that was now in the left side of my face.
Before, I’d only had one eye and a hole where the other should have been. After the surgery my appearance matched Nami’s, but that hadn’t really changed anything aside from how I looked, and I had been disappointed.
At first my mother had been happy to see my new, complete face.
She’d looked at me straight on and said with a pleased expression, “That’s my Nami’s face.” She beamed at me, pinching my cheek between her fingers. I was so surprised I think I almost jumped. And I was overjoyed. It was wonderful to see my mother happy like that.
But before long, it became clear that I was still not Nami. Whenever I did something wrong or made some mistake that Nami wouldn’t have made, my mother’s mood worsened. With my face now like Nami’s, I think my mother found it even harder to forgive me.
The doctor, finished with the documents, set them down in a neat pile on the desk. The examination was about to begin.
As I looked over at the mirror on the wall, I felt my left eye grow warm, the usual indicator of a coming dream. The reflection in the mirror was a key, triggering a dream. But as long as I waited, the dream didn’t come. I didn’t see the young Kazuya or Saori or the forest. In my left eye I saw only myself, flat on the exam table, looking up at the ceiling.
No, wait. I felt my pulse quicken. Something was off. And then I realized that what I was seeing was unnatural: impossibly, my reflection was looking up at the ceiling. If I’m looking at the mirror, shouldn’t my reflection be looking back at me? It was strange to see my own profile in the mirror.
As I pondered it, I noticed another peculiarity. My eyesight was somewhat blurred, as though I were underwater, and the edges of my vision were distorted.
Suddenly, I realized what was happening. I’m not seeing the examination room—this is the operating room. That’s me on the operating table moments before my surgery.
Confused, I closed my eyes. My vision had felt out of focus, but now it became distinct, and the operating room projected sharply onto the back of my eyelid. Why is this vision being shown to me like one of the eye’s dreams? This isn’t Kazuya’s world.
I strained my memory for the events just before the surgery. Yes, beside me there had been a glass jar with the eye in it. This matches what the eye would have been seeing.
The realization pierced through me. The edges of my vision are distorted because I am looking out from inside the glass jar. It’s blurry because the eye was suspended in water.
This isn’t a dream. It’s what the eye saw. The visions I’d been seeing weren’t illusions or daydreams. They were undeniably the eye’s memories. Locked inside the jewelry box of the eye were sights of the past that had burned into its retina.
“Sorry to make you wait. Now, shall I start the examination?”
The doctor was standing next to me. I shook my head and sat up on the table. In my left eye, I still saw myself lying flat. My uneasy expression turned away from the ceiling and across at me.
I had been looking at my right profile. Looking at myself head on, I saw that my left eye socket was a pitch-black hole.
4
After having realized the true nature of the images shown to me by my left eye, my medical exam passed by in a daze. I think the doctor asked me some questions, but I don’t know how I answered. After a time, the checkup was over and I left the hospital.
On my way home, I stopped at a bookstore and looked through the shelves for books on high school entrance exams. I found a thick book listing every high school in the country and searched for the name of the school on Kazuya’s test. I found it almost immediately. The high school on Kazuya’s test paper I had seen in my left eye really existed.
Before seeing the vision in my left eye, I had never heard of the school. I had assumed the visions were not real, that they were only dreams of another world unrelated to my own. But this school was real, and it existed in my world.
If everything I’ve seen in my eye has been dreamed up by my own imagination, how do I explain this? Did I hear the name of the school somewhere and incorporate it into my dream? No, that doesn’t sound right. If anything, this is proof that the visions I’ve seen in my left eye are events that actually occurred.
Before making its way into my head, the eye had once belonged to a real person named Kazuya. Everything it had shown me were memories of scenes Kazuya had witnessed. I had given my “Dream Journal” the wrong name—to name it correctly, I’d have to call it the “Scenes-the-Eyeball-Witnessed Journal.”
The discovery left me with mixed feelings, but what I felt most was confusion.
I’d thought that my dream world did not exist. I had thought that when I entered the oddly familiar fantasy world I transformed into a fictional character named Kazuya Fuyutsuki. I had taken in the images from the eye and stored them in the void my memories had left behind. My mind, once a blank sheet of paper, had become filled with things Kazuya had seen. Through the eye, his experiences had become mine. I felt like I was more Kazuya than Nami.
But Kazuya wasn’t just someone I had imagined. Saori and everything else I’d seen in the eye were not from some fantasy world of my own creation. It was all real. That was what caused my confusion. Suddenly I was afraid. When it had all been a dream, Saori hadn’t been anything more than a character in a movie. But now that I understood that the visions were recordings of the past, everything and everyone I’d seen took on actual weight.
But I felt more than fear alone. Rather, a feeling of fevered anticipation spread within my chest.
The people and places I’d seen in the dreams had given me courage when I had no memories of my own to lean on, and as I thought of the fact that everything I’d seen actually existed in some other place, I was filled with excitement.
The earth I stood on connected with scenery I had thought existed only in my imagination. The sky that spread above me was above Saori too, and at that moment she could be looking at the same point in the sky I was.
In the eye I’d seen fragments of Kazuya’s world—schools, train stations, and place names; every glimpse caught at the periphery of my dreams was recorded in my journal.
The day after my examination I researched them all, one by one. It wasn’t that hard, and within a day I’d determined which part of the country Kazuya and Saori lived in.
It was about a half day’s ride on the bullet train from my town. I looked up the area in an atlas and found, printed in tiny letters, a name I’d once seen in my left eye. The town was up in the mountains and far from the sea. I stared at the page for some time.
I wanted to know what had brought Kazuya’s eye to the hospital and decided to ask my grandfather.
I went to the phone. Several times I started to press the buttons of his phone number, but during each attempt I became scared and set the receiver back in its cradle. I’d only spoken with my grandfather once, when he came to visit me in the hospital. I couldn’t remember what we talked about, only the feeling of shame I was left with when I couldn’t hold up my end of the conversation.
After a number of rings, my grandfather answered. He sounded happy to hear from me. “How is your eye? Has your memory returned?” His cheerfulness calmed my nerves.
My memory hasn’t returned, but the eye is fine. We talked about my parents and other things before I brought up my question.
“You want to know where I got the eye?” I heard caution in his voice. “Nami, that’s not something you need to know . . .”
He didn’t tell me exactly, but I got the understanding that he hadn’t obtained the eye through proper channels.
The eye donor had applied to donate his organs and
after his death, with the permission of his family, his usable organs were removed from his body. The organs were harvested by an organization overseeing such donations and transplanted into recipients.
My grandfather had secured the eye unlawfully from an important man in that organization. There was a long list of people requesting an eye transplant, and the wait for one numbered in years. And beyond that, people who had lost both their eyes were given priority over those who, like me, were missing only one. If my grandfather hadn’t gone outside the legal channels, I would not have received an eye.
The eye was supposed to have gone to somebody else. I felt guilty. I had stolen the eye unfairly from someone who needed it to see.
“Are you angry with me?” my grandfather asked.
I’d never . . . But I think you shouldn’t have done that. I felt thankful for the good fortune that had brought Kazuya’s eye to me, but in my conscience I knew he’d done something wrong.
Then I had an idea. Nervously, I put the receiver against my face. To help me make things right, there’s one more favor I have to ask of you . . .
“Anything I can do for you.”
I thought it was a good idea, but I was afraid he might refuse.
I’ll donate my organs. When I die, the eye can be passed on to someone who needs it.
For a second, the phone went silent and I regretted saying it.
Then my grandfather’s laugh came through the line.
“I like it! I’ll seriously consider it.”
I felt my cheeks flush with surprise, and a warm, peculiar feeling welled up inside me.
Even after I hung up the phone, a happiness remained with me. Inside my heart, I thanked my grandfather again and again.
*
Kazuya was dead. That was a fact. He must have signed a document declaring that, after his death, his eyes could be donated. Some tragedy had occurred and he’d passed away. His eye was then taken from his body and transferred into mine.
I watched the memories of his childhood, taking in the times of sadness and times of cheer. I was at his side through his many experiences. I even shared his emotions.
They were only images, but somehow, his feelings showed through. They became a part of me—his happiness, his sadness, all of it.
I loved Kazuya. I loved seeing the world as he saw it. So when I learned of his death, I felt sad.
What does Saori feel now that she has lost her parents and her little brother? I opened the atlas to the page I had bookmarked. I couldn’t count how many times I had done so. And every time I did, I lost track of the time.
I want to meet her. Not that I’d know what to say, but it would be enough just to see her face. Thinking about it weighed on my heart.
Even after I learned that the visions weren’t dreams, I continued to see them every day. As many as five times in a single day, my left eye would grow warm and the film inside the box would start to spin. Events witnessed over the course of a single human life projected into me at random.
Sadly, once shown to me, the same scenes never came again. Each film played only once. If I didn’t pay attention, there wouldn’t be another chance. I observed each scene carefully, committing every detail to memory.
I never grew tired of the visions. If anything, I thirsted for more. I wanted to learn everything I could from them, and with each passing day my love for Kazuya and Saori grew.
But as it did, I felt my own parents and my school life fading from my thoughts.
One day my mother confronted me. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked. “I got a call from school today. They said you haven’t been showing up.”
I’d been reading books in coffee shops. And dozing off in libraries. And spending an entire afternoon on a bridge over a pond in the park, watching the ducks swim.
Guilt filled my heart. But I was too frightened of going to school. And even when I tried, when I reached the schoolyard gate my legs would become too weak to take another step.
I was sure Nami could have passed right through those gates without a single thought—she would have jogged into the classroom where her cheery friends were waiting. But there was no place for me there. Or anywhere.
“Why aren’t you going to school?” my mother demanded. “Didn’t you used to like it before?”
I noticed that I cringed as she spoke. I had betrayed my mother and it hurt me.
My mother hadn’t forgotten Nami, and she resented who I had become. She thought that if she accepted who I was, Nami would truly be lost.
“Don’t you like school? Look at me and answer!”
I felt like my heart was being squeezed, but I gathered my resolve, looked my mother in the eye, and said, my voice shaking from worry and sadness, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I didn’t go to school.”
I tried to study and I tried to practice my piano, but I couldn’t do it like I used to. I even practiced how to smile. Everything I’ve tried I’ve been inferior at, and I know everyone is fed up with me. I feel completely worthless now.
But I help around the house and I love you, Mother, and I hope that you can love me again. I told her all of this.
My mother gave me a cold look and left the room without a word. She stopped talking to me after that. The rift between us was beyond repair.
*
The next day I rearranged my room. I shifted the furniture to how I wanted it. I moved my TV and my bed; I even bought new curtains and tore the posters from the walls. I made the space Nami had created my own. No trace of Nami’s room remained.
My father, hearing the racket, came to see what was going on. Pointing a finger at my bookshelf, he asked, “What happened to Yoikoro?”
Yoikoro was the name of a stuffed pig.
“I put it in the back of my closet.”
“I can’t believe it! I never thought you’d even think about putting your little piglet away.” He shook his head. “I can’t say I’m happy to see this happen.”
Unnerved, I started to wonder if I should just put the room back to how Nami had wanted it.
As I tried to stammer out some response, my father picked up a binder from my desk. He flipped through the pages and asked, “What’s this?”
It was the binder in which I’d recorded the scenes from Kazuya’s life.
Inside I panicked, but I managed to say, “Um, well, it’s sort of homework.”
Disinterested, my father placed the binder in my hand. The weight of it gave me courage. Recalling the memories I had seen in my eye, I looked at him and said, “Father, I want to make this room how I want it. I’m not concerned about what things I might have cared for in the past.”
He nodded, considering my words. “I suppose that’s fine.”
*
That afternoon, I went to the library to look for newspaper articles mentioning Kazuya’s death.
I didn’t know anything about how he died. I didn’t know when he lost his life or how it had happened. I didn’t really expect rummaging through old newspapers would help me find articles mentioning the death of a man like Kazuya, but I couldn’t just do nothing.
The city library kept copies of newspapers from the last three years. But even though they had the old papers, I didn’t know how to go about searching through them. I stood in front of the bookcase that held the rows and rows of newspapers, overwhelmed by their number. When had Kazuya died? I considered it.
I’d heard that donor organs were transplanted relatively quickly after they were obtained. My eye wouldn’t have been stored somewhere for even a few months. Therefore, I reasoned, it would be best to search the newspapers that were published just before I underwent the transplant surgery. I had to look back weeks or months, not years.
The operation had been on February 15. Starting from that date, I carefully searched backward through the newspapers.
I slowly scanned the pages for names in traffic accidents and obituaries. As my eyes passed over the printed type, I noticed that each name was followed by a numbe
r in parentheses: their ages.
I wondered how old Kazuya was when he had died. In the memories, I’d never seen a wrinkle on Saori’s face. The eye hadn’t witnessed her in old age—or even middle age. That meant that he might have died young.
In fact, even at the oldest I’d seen her in the eye’s visions, she couldn’t have been past her late twenties. If my logic was correct, then Kazuya had to have died in his twenties.
For two hours I hunted through the library’s newspapers. I found a bundle of newspapers that looked to be from the right period. I pulled it down from the shelf, took it over to a desk, and began to search through the columns. The work was hard on my eyes, and after a time I took a break to give them rest. Thinking about it from my left eye’s standpoint, I was forcing it to look through articles in search of the death of its own body. It was a cruel task.
I kept looking, but I never found the name of Kazuya Fuyutsuki. There was a chance I had overlooked it in one of the newspapers I had already checked, but I was sure I hadn’t. After all, he had lived in a different region. That was why his name wasn’t printed in any of our local papers. Reluctantly, I gave up.
I gathered the papers and went back to the bookshelves. The papers were stored in order, and I had to look through the shelves for their rightful place.
That was when I saw it. My eyes had stopped on one of the bundles of newspapers lined up on the shelves, in the section where last year’s issues were kept. A picture on the topmost paper in the bundle had caught my eye.
It was an article about a missing girl and included a portrait of her face. The article wasn’t particularly prominent on the page; fate must have moved me to discover it.
In large printed letters, the headline read, FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD GIRL MISSING. The article itself began, “Yesterday, Hitomi Aizawa, age fourteen, disappeared after leaving a friend’s house . . .”
I looked at her photograph. Her face stared in color straight at the camera. It looked like a class photo. I felt like I had seen her somewhere before.