by Shin Towada
“Oh, I get it now! You’re like a pet!”
He was pleased at having found the answer. A puzzled expression crossed Chiehori’s face.
“I couldn’t figure out why you wouldn’t lift a finger no matter what, but if I consider you the same as a pet it all makes sense! From now on, little mouse, I’m going to make you my pet!”
“What? No, I don’t wanna be,” Chiehori said plainly and started looking at the photos she had taken.
“Is this the same fascination humans have with cuddly cats? It’s really intriguing!”
Without much consideration Tsukiyama patted Chiehori on the head. He looked at her and thought she’d be handy in size and easy to keep as a pet.
“Forget about that, Tsukiyama. Have you heard of scheduling blog posts?”
Chiehori put her camera down and looked up at Tsukiyama. It was a sudden change in topic.
“Of course. You write a post and then you have the ability to set a time you want it to go live. Right?”
“Exactly. The thing is, I scheduled a post with the photos I took of you eating to go up at exactly 1:00 a.m.”
On the one hand, this meant that she had wanted to expose the brutal photos proving he was a Ghoul on the Internet. But she didn’t seem to be trying to threaten Tsukiyama or deceive him, either.
“I set it up because I thought there was a chance I might die and my body would never be found, and I hated that idea. So I wrote something like, ‘The culprit is Shu Tsukiyama, a student at Seinan Gakuin University High School, please investigate him.’ But it seems like I’ve survived, so I’ve gotta delete that scheduled post.”
She seems so useless, but she’s logical; she seems so stupid, but she’s very sharp.
Chiehori looked out the window from which she had nearly just been dropped, and pointed to an azalea tree a short distance away, where she had hidden her bag.
“Oh, but first we have to get out of here somehow. We can’t just go strolling out of this hospital.”
She rubbed her index finger against her temple, as if she had not thought that far ahead. Tsukiyama laughed out loud at the sight.
She does all these things uncalculatedly, as if they were natural to her. There’s no category for her, she’s just a unique creature called Chie Hori.
“Well then, shall we leave this place?”
I got what I wanted. There’s no use in being here anymore.
“Oh?”
Tsukiyama picked Chiehori up under her arms and stepped up onto the window frame. Then he turned back to look at the nurse, who stood on the other side of the hysterical old man. She was crouched down, trying to catch her breath.
He gave her a smile.
“I hope we can be good ‘friends’ with you, madam.”
She made a confused sound, not understanding his meaning. Tsukiyama said nothing more before springing out the window.
“What on earth … What just happened?”
The menace threatening their lives had left. But the nurse’s trembling still had not stopped, and she stayed sitting on the floor. She was too upset to move.
The first one of them to stand was the old man, who had been groveling on the floor. But soon he fell again, crying out in pain. The nurse looked at the old man’s ungainly form and felt somewhat calmer. She put her hand against the wall for support and slowly stood up. Whatever else, she now had to go back to the nurses’ station and report a Ghoul attack. She put her hand on the knob of the room’s door.
“I won’t forget …”
The old man’s voice sounded like he had been crawling across the desert. The nurse looked at him in surprise.
“Everything you did to me, I won’t forget it!”
He was bleeding from everywhere his skin had been torn off, but the old man shot a sharp eye at the nurse, stopping her in her tracks.
“I’m going to reveal everything, how you kept on hitting me! You wouldn’t know humanity if it looked you in the eye, girl!”
Suddenly there was a crack, the sound of something breaking. Something that had been worn down under extreme circumstances.
The nurse’s hand dropped from the doorknob. Silently, she walked back toward the old man.
She walked past where the old man was, then took a pair of gloves out of the pocket of her white coat.
She stopped in front of the shelves. She picked up the fruit knife from where it sat near the fruit, still giving off a sweet smell.
“W … what are you …”
The nurse turned back to the old man.
The edge of the knife gleamed in the sliver of moonlight that shone into the room.
V
A few weeks later, Tsukiyama was having a coffee after class at a café near the school. Sitting across from him, Chiehori was gobbling down a crepe.
“Oh, by the way, did you see what happened?”
Now feeling full, Chiehori opened her laptop and tapped at the keyboard. Then she turned it toward Tsukiyama to show him.
It was an article with the shocking headline, “Sickbed Bloodbath: Horror at the Hospital.” The victim was a 94-year-old male patient.
With the amount of skin he’d had ripped off, the old man should have been able to survive if given immediate care. But the article used words like “murder” and “death.”
“It looks like they’re putting all the blame on me. But I feel sad for him.”
The article said that a nurse on the night shift doing her rounds had tried to protect the patient from a Ghoul but was attacked herself, and fainted.
Chiehori turned the laptop back toward herself. “It was kind of your fault to begin with,” she said.
“She’d been hiding her cruelty since the beginning. I just picked up on it.”
Sparked by Tsukiyama’s words, Chiehori started going back through the data on her camera, and looked again at the picture of the old man embracing the nurse.
She saw the nurse, the one who’d been referred to as unable to hide her smile, looking at the old man as if he were lower than a dog.
“Oh, this is it. I did meet that nurse before.”
“Some hobby you have.”
She had taken a picture of the nurse’s decisive moment. Although in some situations there was a possibility of harm to herself, Chiehori crossed that particular dangerous bridge with typical calm.
“After all, she’s now ‘the brave nurse,’ so she’s getting a lot of sympathy at the hospital.”
“Huh?”
“She told me, ‘I’m going out with that doctor I always had a crush on now, thanks to you.’ She expressed her gratitude to you, Tsukiyama. She said you’re like a god.”
The world is cruel. Just as doing good is not limited to helping people, doing wrong is not just about stealing someone’s happiness. But that’s what makes it interesting.
“Nobody’s as powerful as a tragic princess.”
Tsukiyama brought his coffee up to his lips and took a sip, rolling it over his tongue.
“I can’t wait until her happiness gets flambéed,” he said.
But it wouldn’t be enough, not nearly enough.
Tsukiyama’s own tongue was begging for it. The sublime taste that would send him into a daze—the taste of her happiness.
Someday I’ll run into her again, I can feel it in my bones. Tsukiyama’s smile deepened.
Chiehori saw, got him in her viewfinder, and pressed the button.
With dreams in my head and my instrument on my back I go to the city. Let this sound someday reach the world.
“Okay, I’m heading off now.”
The Shinkansen platform, just before departure. A young man stood with his beloved guitar slung on his back and huge suitcases in both hands. His friends who had come to see him off patted him on the shoulder and wished him good luck.
Momochi Ikuma, 22 years old. An aspiring musician moving to Tokyo.
“Mom?” Ikuma called to his mother, who was standing at a slight remove with a sad expression on her face. But she did not take a step toward him. Ikuma walked over to her.
“I’m gonna do my best, so don’t worry,” he said.
The bell signaling that the train was about to depart began to chirp. Ikuma got on board in a hurry. The doors closed, and the Shinkansen slowly pulled away.
“We’re all behind you!”
“Good luck!”
His friends yelled out words of encouragement from the platform. His mother waved goodbye with tears in her eyes. And for Ikuma, the platform became smaller and smaller as the town he had been so used to living in suddenly got far away.
Ikuma thought about his friends and the look on his mother’s face, and he cried alone.
Momochi Ikuma was a Ghoul.
“Wow, amazing …”
When he arrived in Tokyo, Ikuma was overwhelmed by the number of people everywhere. Occasionally he had come to Tokyo to go to concerts, but this dwarfed all those times.
All that seemed far away now that he was, from today on, living in Tokyo.
Ikuma gave himself a quick slap on the cheek to get motivated, then he excitedly boarded his next train.
It was true outside of Tokyo, too, but generally it seemed to Ikuma that a rough sort of people gathered here. And the same was true for Ghouls too. Tokyo was right in the middle of the country. The Ghoul population was huge, so something unexpected could happen at any moment. Tokyo was also the home of the CCG, professional Ghoul killers. Too bad if you got caught up by them.
“All right, finally here.”
Ikuma had chosen to live in the relatively peaceful 20th Ward, not too far from the heart of the city. There was lots of green space, even some fields here and there—it looked a little like his hometown.
And it was in the same neighborhood as Kamii University, so lots of other people his age lived there, making for good camouflage.
But the house was a tiny sliver of a place, which he couldn’t get over. It was much smaller than his parents’ house, but the rent was insanely high. Still, from now on this was his castle. First he had to buckle down to be able to pay the rent and utilities.
Ikuma took his guitar out of its case. It had been his closest companion since he bought it in high school with money from his part-time job. He stretched his hands and started playing a song by his favorite band.
“Hey, shut it!” His neighbor banged on the wall and yelled at him to stop, so Ikuma quit playing quickly and apologized sheepishly through the wall. He checked his watch. It was 11:00 p.m.
Fair enough, he thought. Welcome to the city, huh?
And this is how Ikuma’s Tokyo debut came to an end on his first day.
The next day Ikuma got a magazine of job listings and looked for something part time. He decided to go with a job as a mover. After all, he was a Ghoul and thus had several times the strength of a human.
There was just one more thing that Ikuma definitely had to do in order to continue living. That was securing some “food.”
Sure, he had the “lunch box” that his mother had given him, but someday that would run out. Now that he was living on his own away from home, he would have to be able to get food on his own.
Ikuma changed into some black clothes that wouldn’t stand out, got on the cheap bike he’d bought at a secondhand store, and set out into the darkening streets of the city.
“Whew, made it.”
He had finally arrived at a famous suicide spot on a well-known hill. It was nearly two, so it was already pitch-black, and nobody was around.
He had a good view from where he stood, and he could see a sea of trees for about twenty meters down the hill. Ikuma sniffed hard, smelling for something.
“Really, nothing?”
He had thought this would be an easy place to find a corpse, but no scent of blood or death came to his nose.
But he couldn’t just give up that easily.
After that night, Ikuma headed for the hill after work every day. With a four-hour round-trip it was quite hard work, but he used the time to work on his lyrics and come up with melodies in his head, and it wasn’t that hard if he sang to himself.
“Hey, sorry, excuse me …”
But day after day he was faced with nothing but disappointment. Days went by wasted. Before he realized it, he had been in Tokyo for over a month.
“Oh, this isn’t good …”
The “lunch box” his mother had given him was completely empty, and so was the refrigerator. Ikuma dragged himself outside sluggishly.
Better change it up. But what if I change location and run into someone? Oh God … he thought to himself.
He decided to ride to his usual hill that day anyway. As he neared the hillside, he was just thinking that he’d better come up with somewhere else to go if he struck out again that night when it happened.
The wind gently caressed his cheek as Ikuma suddenly hit the brakes on his bike.
“That smell …”
It was the smell of death.
Ikuma started pedaling with all his might. The bike tenaciously climbed the hill, but it was too slow for Ikuma.
“Here!”
Ikuma left his bike on the side of the road and ran off with all the force in his body. His eyes turned red at once, and his limbs had the power to act in response. It was his true nature, sleeping inside him until now. He kicked the ground once and the soil and grass flew a few meters away.
“Car!”
The hill was always deserted, but today of all days, there was a car parked at the top. There didn’t seem to be anyone in the car. The smell was even stronger there, changing his hunch into a conviction. Keeping up his momentum, Ikuma jumped down from the hill.
“What? Nothing?”
When he landed there was no corpse there as he’d expected. There were bloodstains on the ground, as well as an incredibly intense smell, but he couldn’t see a body anywhere.
“W-what’s going on?”
In the darkness, it was hard to search the nearby area. No way could another Ghoul have caught the scent and taken the corpse away, he thought. Ikuma looked up at the sky, not knowing what to do. And that’s when he realized someone was staring at him.
He screamed in shock and fell backward.
Ikuma’s eyes popped wide open, his lips were bloodied, and he had twigs stuck to his body. Just like the prey of a butcherbird impaled on a branch for later, the man’s corpse hung from a tree. He seemed to be in his fifties or thereabouts. When I jumped down I never would’ve anticipated this, Ikuma thought.
“H-how did you die?”
There was no reply to Ikuma’s question, of course. Putting his hands on his hips, Ikuma pushed himself up and took a look at the man.
“Why did you have to die, hm?”
Ikuma gently brought his hands together and silently prayed for the man. Then, kicking at the soil and jumping up, he climbed the tree.
“This might hurt a little, sorry.”
Ikuma put his weight on the branch of the tree that the man was stuck on, bending it until it snapped, and the man fell to the ground. Then he jumped down and pulled the branch from his body, which was lying on the grass. His eyes were fully open, as was his mouth, which looked like it was ready to scream. Ikuma wanted to close them both, but he realized it would probably be considered strange to go that far.
Ikuma looked the corpse over again. The man’s right arm had extensive damage to it and looked like it might tear off even now.
“I’m really sorry …”
Ikuma put his hands together again before pulling the man’s right arm off. If I just leave it at this maybe they’ll think a wild animal got at him.
He
put the arm in a plastic bag, wrapped it in a cloth, and slipped it into his bag. Ikuma put his hands together in prayer again over the man’s body before leaving the scene.
“Better deal with this quickly.”
When he got back home, Ikuma put the arm on a cutting board and got out a knife. He cut the meat off the bone, minced it, and formed it into meatballs. Then he put the meatballs in hot water along with the bone, waited for the water to come to a boil, and then removed them from the pan.
“Smells great,” he said to himself.
But he wasn’t going to eat it all now. He chilled the meatballs, wrapped them up, and put them all in the freezer.
He put the bone on the table, as well as a single cup of the broth.
“Thank you for this meal,” he said, putting his hands together in gratitude, before drinking the broth.
“Yum …”
Next he gnawed at the pieces of meat that were stuck to the bone. Once he’d crunched away at it and gnawed it clean, his stomach was full. He reflected on how glad he was to have a small appetite.
Then he washed and dried the bone again before breaking it up with a hammer and turning it into bone meal.
This’ll keep for a while, he thought.
Ikuma was filled with relief, but at the same time he also felt a sense of the meaninglessness of life well up inside him.
“I wish someone had been there for you, other than me,” he muttered to himself, staring at the fridge. But I eat people’s tragedies.
“I’m no better than a hyena …”
He spent his days at his part-time job, and his nights looking for corpses. Any spare time he spent busking in front of train stations or in parks. What he really wanted was an audition in some big industry office somewhere, but he wasn’t familiar with Tokyo yet so he didn’t know what to do or where to go.
He was getting used to this area little by little, though. There seemed to be a lot of coffee shops around, because whenever he walked down the street he caught the smell of good coffee. He still couldn’t afford that kind of indulgence, but one day, when he was on his feet, he wanted to try a cup of coffee at one of those places.
