Black Fairy Tale

by Otsuichi

  “When I asked what her name was, it turned out I knew her. She used to be a regular here.”

  She had died in another place, and Shiozaki had moved to the town where she’d been born. He hadn’t offered the painting to the café out of simple generosity.

  I finally understood. Everyone in this town was seeing visions of the dead.

  Once when I had gone a while without visiting them, Kyoko and Saori both said, “Nami, there’s something a little different about you.”

  “What’s different about me?” I asked, but they couldn’t give me a clear answer. Looking back on it now, maybe change had come to me without my noticing, and they had subconsciously picked up on it.

  Kyoko and Saori were like mother and daughter. Whenever Saori had the time, she went to Kyoko’s house and the two would talk—not just of those who had died, but lighter talk and gossip.

  Sometimes Saori would play with her brother’s watch, turning her sad face toward its unmoving secondhand. But I knew that, slowly, one click at a time, that watch, stopped at the time of Kazuya’s death, was moving again.

  In the café I read Sumida’s book The Eye’s Memory again—the story of the girl who put eyes into her head and saw dreams.

  Kazuya’s eye had gradually ceased to show me visions. More and more I found myself at the end of a day thinking, Oh, I didn’t see any of Kazuya’s memories today.

  Maybe I’d already seen everything that had been burned into the eye. Or maybe I’d stopped seeing them because the eye had become completely integrated with my body. I had a feeling it was the latter. The eye only showed the past of another person. If it replayed all the things I’d already seen for myself, I’d be overwhelmed.

  At first when I stopped seeing Kazuya’s memories, I was sad. But soon it just felt normal.

  Sumida was in my final vision. He sat beside Kazuya in the bright sunlight and they threw rocks at empty cans. It was the first memory I’d seen that was about Sumida.

  The vision in the library hadn’t been of Kazuya’s death. After Sumida had blindfolded him and taken him to the side of the road, Sumida had pushed him in front of a car and killed him. I hadn’t actually seen the moment Kazuya died.

  Well, that was what I thought, until one day I realized I was wrong. I had seen that moment.

  Some time ago, I’d experienced a vivid nightmare in which I was hit by a car.

  The darkness of my closed eyes must have overlapped with the darkness in the blindfold Sumida had used to cover Kazuya’s eyes, and the memory was drawn out. When I was asleep—or maybe I’d just dozed off—I saw myself jumping in front of a car. I had incorrectly assumed it was just a dream. Of course, there was no way I could know for sure. Maybe I was wrong. But I believed I saw the moment of Kazuya’s death.

  In the brief flash of the nightmare, the car was blue. Later I learned that the car that had killed Kazuya was blue. In the vision from the library, the car was white. And when I had that vivid nightmare, I hadn’t yet known the color of the car that killed him. I think the car being blue shows that I wasn’t just having a dream.

  I closed the book and waved Saori over to order some coffee. Just then I noticed the vase of flowers sitting on the counter, and I recalled the vision I’d seen of Saori knocking it over. Strangely, the flowers in the vase seemed exactly the same as the ones in the vision.

  Are they fake? I touched them; they were real. Maybe Kimura has Saori keep only the same kind of flowers here.

  “A long time ago,” Kimura said, “Sumida picked those flowers as a present for Saori. And they’re still alive. Isn’t that something?”

  Beyond the white flowers, Saori blew her nose.

  4

  That summer, as I sat in the breeze of my air conditioner, I suddenly remembered it.

  I can’t quite explain what “it” was. It wasn’t a distinct memory, and it had no real form.

  But it felt strange and out of place in my head, like an object caught in my throat refusing to go down. It brought a rift between the world as I knew it and the world of reality. If I had to compare it to something, I’d liken it to that uncomfortable feeling you can get right before you wake up, when you start to realize you may be in a dream.

  I thought it might be a sign that my memory was coming back.

  I was right.

  *

  Gradually my memories returned. And although I had been fearing it, it happened so naturally and so gently that I didn’t try to resist.

  Before I knew it, I could recall the name of a teacher I’d had in grade school and I remembered when my family had gone on a vacation. It became strange to think that I hadn’t been able to play the piano. At school my grades skyrocketed, something which pleased me greatly.

  “Are you really Nami?” Saori tilted her head and pulled at my ear. I dodged free from her hand, crying out through fits of laughter, Hey, stop it! This isn’t a disguise! I’m me!

  She put an elbow on the counter and said, a little sadly, “You seem at peace.” Later, thinking back on that moment, I wondered if it had been her farewell to her brother.

  I should have always been aware I was myself, but that demon of total forgetfulness, with skill so fine I didn’t even notice it happening, separated me from myself. Then all that remained was the me who had existed prior to the loss of my eye. I don’t want you to misunderstand me—“me” and “my memories” are two separate things.

  I have my memories of my time in Kaede. I remember what I did. But when I think back upon who I was then, I’m like another person. The way I interacted with people, the way I thought—everything about me was different.

  My mother says I was a completely different person, all the way down to my mannerisms. “I’ve never seen you so fearful,” she’d say.

  Before then I had always enjoyed listening to people and telling them my thoughts in return. When I suddenly changed into a person who almost never talked to anyone, my mother hadn’t known how to cope.

  I looked at my left eye in the mirror. It had been a long time since one of Kazuya’s memories had come to life. No matter what I looked at, nothing became a key to unlock the box of memories.

  Sometimes I’d start to wonder, Did any of it really happen?

  Then the letter came from the police.

  *

  Summer passed and I continued attending cram school in preparation for the looming college entrance exams. One night when I came home my father handed me an envelope.

  The envelope was a charming pale blue. The second I saw it the image of Hitomi Aizawa flashed into my head. The sack around her body back in the cellar had been the same pale blue, soft to the touch.

  Her name was above the return address.

  I went upstairs to my room, sat at my desk, and opened the envelope. Inside was a letter from Hitomi, written for her by her mother. Not knowing my address, she had asked the police to forward it to me.

  In the letter she wrote words of thanks and said she wanted to meet me to talk, if only once.

  I read and reread the letter I don’t know how many times. Already I had come to think of that day as something that hadn’t really happened, just some nightmare. But now I gathered my memories, one after another. They seemed almost as if they belonged to somebody else.

  Hitomi Aizawa’s small body nestled in the carriage.

  And Shinichi Hisamoto and Yukie Mochinaga.

  I hadn’t heard any talk of those two being discovered. Did they still live up in the mountains? Or had they never really existed?

  I pictured them. Their giant form concealed among the quiet trees. Crawling into an opening in the rock face when it rained, the two of them watching the falling raindrops. Wriggling their carelessly placed limbs to carry them into the darkness away from the sight of others . . .

  I took out my binder and set it atop my desk. For the first time in a long while I opened the records of the visions of my left eye.

  Not that long ago I carried this heavy thing as I walked that town
. The pages, worn ragged from all the times I’d flipped through them, contained handwriting that didn’t seem my own.

  They stored every last detail—the scenery young Kazuya had seen, Saori’s expressions—everything in the visions his left eye had shown me.

  I turned the pages one by one.

  That’s when that feeling, the one I’d nearly forgotten, came to me again. My left eye—Kazuya’s eye—suddenly grew warm.

  I was flustered, taken by surprise. Ever since my own memories had returned the eye had remained dormant.

  Quickly I saw that the pages of the binder were doubled over each other, with differences between the pages in my right eye and the ones in my left. I gently closed my eyes. The sight of my right eye went dark and the vision in my left eye pulled into focus.

  My viewpoint lifted from the rows of words written upon the notebook paper. What I saw wasn’t my room. It was Kaede.

  In front of me were abandoned train tracks stretching off into the distance. Off to one side mountains blanketed with conifers soared up into the sky. They looked pitch black in the weak sunlight. On the other side the sleepy town spread out among the lines of tall transmission towers. In my left eye, I was walking across hills of withered grass, looking at the binder I held in my hands.

  I knew immediately that it wasn’t one of Kazuya’s memories.

  My left eye remembers. It remembers how I searched for Hitomi, how I pursued her kidnapper. How I looked for the blue brick house, how I walked the streets. How I endured loneliness as I wandered over the windy landscape. How hopeless and adrift I felt, not knowing what to do. It all burned into the eye.

  And I’m seeing it. The rusted rail lines continuing into the distant forest. My feet on top of one of the rails. Myself tottering along it, trying not to fall.

  That memory was still inside my head. I even knew what I had been thinking at the time. But it wasn’t the way I thought anymore. My interests were different and so were my immediate reactions.

  Therefore, she wasn’t me. Just as she herself had thought, that girl, fearful and without her memories, was an entirely different person.

  Intellectuals, or those who can be entirely dispassionate, might claim that she never existed. Or that she was just me without my memories.

  Sitting at the desk with the binder spread open before me, I closed my eyes and silently prayed. When she had ceased to be, it was equivalent to a person’s death. I never wanted to hear anyone tell me that she’d never existed, or that she was some scab atop my lost memories. That girl, with all her ineptness, was different from me—and she was real.

  Besides, if the eye only ever showed me the memories of other people . . .

  That girl, who only existed in this world for a brief time, faced great difficulties and suffered because of them. I knew exactly how hard it had been for her.

  Everyone at school had talked about me. She was constantly compared with me, and she pitied herself for who she was. She couldn’t seem to do anything right and she thought herself inferior.

  But she wasn’t defeated. No matter what terrors she found before her, she never backed down.

  My eyes still shut, I put my head on top of the desk. I left my room as she had rearranged it. The still night came in through the window, the cool air of a summer just passed. It’d been half a year since she had gone to Kaede.

  And as I watched the memory of her walking atop the rails beneath the cloudy sky, that heavy weight in her hands, I promised myself:

  I will never forget. I will remember you, you who lived stronger than anyone I know. Forever.

  Afterword

  Originally published in the Japanese paperback edition of Black Fairy Tale.

  *

  Hello, I’m Otsuichi. How are you all doing? I’ve been spending my days finding sustenance from the self-serve drink stations in family restaurants. The wind was strong today and almost knocked me over as I was going home from the restaurant. I barely avoided falling onto the side of the road and getting run over by a truck. It would have been better if I had.

  By the way, Black Fairy Tale is now in paperback, although I didn’t perform any major revisions on it. Owners of the hardcover edition need not purchase this in search of any changes.

  Black Fairy Tale was the first work I’d written longer than two hundred pages of genko yoshi manuscript. Having just graduated from college, I decided not to look for a job, instead seeking to make my living as an author.

  “I don’t care if it ends up as garbage, I just need to complete a long-form work. If I want to survive as a professional writer, the novel is a barrier I must overcome.”

  That was my impetus for writing Black Fairy Tale. And this bizarre thing was the result. Everyone, I’m really sorry.

  Anyway, today at the family restaurant, I read through the galley for Black Fairy Tale. Galleys—the manuscripts that are made just before a book is printed—serve as the final check for things like typos and omitted words, or phrases I want to change. With a red pen firmly in hand, I had to read through it carefully—with open eyes. I confronted the galley, occasionally quenching my thirst at the drink station.

  But I had written Black Fairy Tale while I was still honing my craft. Each time I saw my infantile self in the spaces between the words, my temperature rose and my pulse quickened.

  I was ashamed. The words I’d written utterly shamed me. I couldn’t even read them. If I had to describe it, I’d say it would be like if you were forced to read a diary from your teenage years. I never kept one myself, but that’s exactly how it would feel.

  I read one line, and I could feel my cheeks turn bright red. I read a second line, and my hand holding the red pen started to shake, and I began to stamp my feet under the table. I read a third line and thought, “Damn it, no more!” and I rolled up the galley and whacked it against the wall.

  When I’d read up to the second chapter, I reached the limit of my shame, and my nerves broke.

  Soon those embarrassing words would be printed and sent out into the world. Faced with the nearly unbearable humiliation, something in the back of my skull snapped. I realized I was about to make a strange monkeylike cry and frantically held it in. Witnessing this suspicious behavior was a family—a boy in grade school, perhaps, and his parents—in the next booth.

  Stop it. Don’t look at me. Don’t stare at me like you should feel sorry for me.

  In each hand I gripped one half of a pair of disposable chopsticks, and I held them in a menacing pose. I glared at the family, and they looked away, like they had seen something offensive. I’m sure they were laughing at me on the inside. By the looks in their eyes, I could follow their silent conversation:

  Mother: “Dear, did you see that young man at the next table in that dreadful tracksuit? He’s that Otsuichi, the guy whose infantile and clumsy novel is being turned into a paperback.”

  Son: “I don’t want to grow up to be like him.”

  Father: “That’s right, Takashi, be smart. Don’t get some crazy idea about writing an embarrassing novel.”

  Son: “Yeah, I’m going to study hard and become a decent member of society. While I’m in college, I’ll look for a job. I won’t think about making a living as a writer.”

  Takashi . . . Oh, Takashi . . . You are smart. Well put, Takashi. I stared at him, the wooden chopsticks still gripped in my hands. His mother hugged him in an effort to keep him from my sight. Takashi was right. Why hadn’t I tried to line up a job before I graduated from college? Why did I get the idea I’d write for a living? Without that notion, I’d never have written a full-length novel. I wouldn’t have written Black Fairy Tale. And I wouldn’t be distraught over this galley.

  When the rest of my classmates were lining up their future employment, I was helping my friends make independent movies and getting short stories published in magazines. Those activities provided me a respite when I would feel a nervous breakdown coming on in a seminar. The thought of finding employment hurt my head too much to t
hink about. I was running from having to put on a suit and go to interviews and take tests. Now my former classmates wear business suits, and I put on my unwashed tracksuit.

  My classmates’ suit-and-tie appearances put me to shame. They jostle about in society and grow as people. Then there’s me, sitting in the corner of a family restaurant, slurping away at the sweet juice from the drink station like some stag beetle finding sustenance. I don’t grow. My days are days of sloth. Where did I go wrong? It makes me want to cry. It makes me want to die.

  Takashi, don’t be like me. Live a proper life. Keep playing baseball. Don’t make your parents cry.

  I bestowed my biggest smile upon the boy in the next booth, and I gave him a cheer. Takashi’s mother stood and took her boy by the hand to the register. They moved quickly, trying to escape my view. When they had left, I returned to my revisions, mindful not to let my heart break. But as I worked, my mind was still on Takashi. Good luck, Takashi. Whatever you do, just don’t become a writer. Find a good company to work for and give your parents something out of your first paycheck. Please, I beg of you.

  When I finished with the galley, I left the restaurant and pedaled my bike back to my apartment. Pushed about by the wind, I nearly fell over. Moments later, a truck passed right beside me. I was mad at the driver. Why didn’t you hit me? Why hadn’t you driven another thirty centimeters to the left, you damn no-good driver?

  So I lived on. And without incident, this paperback was published.

  —Otsuichi, March 18, 2004

  Glossary

  uncle: In Japan, middle-aged men are often called “uncle.”

  bento: Japanese lunchbox consisting of rice, fish or meat, and cooked or pickled vegetables.

  akanbe: Immature taunting gesture consisting of pulling down one’s lower eyelid.