I had just found a small tree frog and was in the middle of chasing it when it started to rain. It was hopping about frantically and when I finally managed to grab it I caught sight of a red polka-dot umbrella just past a low fence.
It was Michiru. She was walking right towards me. I jumped to my feet.
“Oh, you’re still out here?” she asked, without any apparent surprise. “Hey, I left my hat somewhere around here. I’d hate for it to get wet. Have you seen it?” she asked mildly, tilting her head. It was as though the fact that I couldn’t speak like a normal kid didn’t bother her at all.
I froze in terror. All I could do was shake my head violently. I had never been alone with her before.
“What’s that?” She drew even closer. I shaped my hands into a bowl to hold the frog in. “A … fr … frog,” I said through clenched teeth. So long as my teeth were shut tight I was okay.
“What? A frog? You’re okay with touching something like that? Wow!” She sounded genuinely impressed. “Did you catch it yourself? What kind is it? Let me see. C’mon, let me see. I know! Let’s let it swim in the pond,” Michiru said breezily as she skipped over the low flat stones that lined the pond.
I jerked my way over to her, as requested, then slightly pulled back my hand that had been acting as a lid covering the frog. As I did so, the frog, which had been docile until then, perhaps startled by the sudden light, sprang towards Michiru’s shoulder.
A short shriek and a splash sounded out in unison as Michiru lurched backwards and tumbled into the pond. The red umbrella flew all the way to the middle and flipped upside-down, floating on the surface.
It wasn’t a deep pond. I don’t really know how, but one of Michiru’s socks got caught up in the branches of a bush at the edge of the pond, and due to this she was unable to get up from the position she landed in—facing the sky with her head below the rest of her. With just one leg sticking out from the water, she could do nothing but writhe.
I could tell she was screaming under the water. I couldn’t hear a thing, but there were lots of bubbles. I just stood there as the water churned, my mind devoid of any thoughts, eyes wide open.
Michiru’s thin leg was right there before me, and I could see the pointed branch poking through the white fabric of her sock. If I took off her sneaker and her sock, she could have escaped from the pond in no time. In some remote part of my mind, I was aware of this. And yet I stayed as I was, just watching as Michiru thrashed in the water. It might have been that I was simply overwhelmed by the sheer abnormality of the scene. I had no ill will towards her.
The water suddenly went still, as though the frantic splashing hadn’t actually happened. When the bubbles cleared I saw Michiru, her hair swaying within the greenish water.
I felt a surge of relief, and smiled at Michiru. This was because she looked relieved, too. Her eyes and mouth were open beneath the water.
I thought that she had gone through the hole in place of the frog she had let escape, that her soul had left her body and gone on by itself to dissolve into the darkness on the other side. Then I left through the back gate I often used and went home.
The adults and the other kids all cried over Michiru’s death, thinking it an unfortunate accident.
I retraced it all in my mind, again and again. In the short moments that led up to her death, my usual sense of discomfort melted away, and everything seemed pure and bright, all the trees and stones in the garden, the sky and the whole world beyond it. Mysteriously, I could sense that that was the true form of the world. It felt like a miracle to be standing there, right in the center of the world as it really was. The sensation lasted only until the pond grew quiet.
After the funeral, everyone stopped going to Michiru’s house to play. Sometime later I hugged Nana, the first time I had done so in a while. She had become an elderly woman even though she was still a girl. The red enamel on her lips was faded and patches of her blond hair had come out, revealing her scalp and the pimple-like holes where the bunches had been inserted.
I dropped Nana from a stone bridge into the dirty river that ran by my house. Her arms jutted into the air as she floated away, the thin, white, cord-like reeds that covered the riverbed brushing against her back.
Nobody would pour water through her anymore. She would flow through the water as it would flow through her, all the way to the ocean, to a deep, dark hole at its floor.
I threw my doll away because the feeling I’d had when Michiru was dying had become my Nan-Core.
In a world full of hostility like shards of glass, I came to think of myself as special, someone who had been selected to protect a special secret. I still didn’t speak much, but my new, warped sense of confidence allowed me to talk normally with my classmates in middle school. The bodies of the other boys and girls all gave off an odor like raw fish, and I knew that mine did, too. But while they were drawn towards sweet things like romance, my desire was, needless to say, only for Nan-Core.
I want to experience that again. That was the only thought I couldn’t shake from my mind. I desperately yearned for it again, that miraculous light that had touched me only while the greenish water of the pond had churned. The well in Michiru’s garden had opened a deep, pitch-black void in my chest before I’d even noticed.
So I waited, impatient for the next sacrificial offering to appear. I didn’t understand why, and there was nothing I could do to stop myself. I suppose all I can say is, that’s just the sort of person I am. And if it wasn’t for a series of insignificant coincidences, I might have anxiously craved it for the rest of my life. Even now I believe that might have been a strong possibility. Yet on a Sunday nearing summer vacation during my freshman year of high school, the cogs of chance snapped together in such a way that made it seem more like someone’s design than mere happenstance.
I was sitting on a bench in the park near the train station, reading a book. There was an unseasonably cool breeze, and the park was bustling with people. I looked up for no reason in particular, and saw a couple of kids that appeared to be brother and sister running, hand in hand, down one of the paths towards me. Unwittingly, I gave a small cry from shock—from her age, to the straight hair that fell on her shoulders, it was startling just how much the girl resembled Michiru.
3
The first notebook abruptly ended there.
I panted as I downed deep breaths. It felt as though I had been so absorbed in reading that I’d forgotten to breathe at all. Confused and puzzled, I ended up gazing meaninglessly at the notebook’s cover.
What is this thing? It was clearly pretty old from the way the paper had yellowed. Based on the fact that the author had grown attached to a doll it made me think it was written by a woman—at the same time, however, the mother was also described as being considerably uncomfortable with it, which could imply that she thought, It’s ridiculous for a boy to be playing with dolls.
I wondered if Dad had written it. It could have been a draft for a novel. Dad had worked in the field of accounting his whole life, right up until two years ago when the logistics company he worked for went bankrupt. I had never seen him read a novel or anything of the sort. The shelves in the study were evidence of that—apart from a handful of papers illuminating the human rights issues of children, they were mostly stuffed with books on finance or taxes, with a few on ancient Japanese history that covered things like the mysteries of the country of Yamatai and Queen Himiko, and a couple of journals on frontier-land travels.
Of course, that didn’t mean it was impossible for him to have written it. Maybe he’d written it out of some unexpected interest but kept it hidden from the family out of shyness.
I concentrated on things like that, trying to convince myself they were true. I swallowed, trying to tamp down a swell of anxiety.
By the time I realized what I was doing, I had already started reading the second notebook.
I watched the girl and I knew I was staring at her with an unnatural intensity. I called out s
ilently from my heart—Michiru, Michiru—and of course they walked straight past, neither the girl nor her brother noticing.
There was a grouping of vending machines ahead on the path that circled the park, so I wondered if they might be going there to get a drink. I still don’t know if that was the case, as they never made it that far.
Instinct pulled me to my feet, and I began to follow them.
How small and frail they all seemed to me, girls the age Michiru and I had been back then.
Just as I began to follow them the girl stopped abruptly, deciding for some reason to put on the white hat that she had been carrying. As she did this a sudden gust of wind caught the hat as if it had been waiting to do so all along. The hat sailed into the air then fell into a gutter between the park and the road. The gutter had an iron grate covering it, reddish with rust, and it was just a stroke of bad luck that the hat had slipped underneath. The siblings cried out in dismay, as did a young man sitting on a bench nearby.
“You idiot. Hey, it’s not my fault. Mom’s gonna be mad,” the boy said, stepping over the low fence that bordered the park to peek into the gutter. Despite his spiteful tone, it looked like he wanted to get the hat back for her.
The young man appeared preoccupied with watching them, so I sat down on an empty bench next to him.
“Can you reach it?” The girl was nearly in tears.
“Eww, gross. It’s full of junk. Ah! I see it, it’s caught down there.”
The boy stuck a hand through the grate and tried rummaging around. He grit his teeth and pushed his arm through to the shoulder, but the hat was still out of reach.
The young man who had been watching them got to his feet.
“Hey kid, lemme take a look for you.” He moved the boy aside and peered down but immediately said, “Oh, it looks too far to reach, even for an adult.”
When he said this, the girl standing by the gutter began to sob aloud. The man, at a complete loss, dragged his fingers through his unkempt hair that hung nearly to his shoulders. After considering for a while he crouched down and gripped the edge of the iron grate, then he tensed, grunting as he lifted it up a good four inches. He lowered it back down and exhaled noisily.
Though still hazy and shapeless, an idea of what could happen floated into my mind. My interest had shifted from the girl that looked like Michiru; now I was fascinated with the boy. The gaping maw of the dark well in my chest was stretched open, desperate for him.
“All right, I’ll pull up the grate, you grab the hat as fast as you can, okay? Go round that way—okay, get ready …”
The man stepped into the gutter and strained, using both hands to pull up one side of the grate while the boy, already waiting on his stomach, lowered his torso through the gap.
“Can you go a little higher, mister? Just a little … uff … a little further.”
I could see the man’s back from where I was. His muscles were bunched tight, trembling slightly around his shoulders and the back of his neck. I had no idea how heavy the grate was, but it was about two feet wide and over three feet long.
“Hey, kid. H-Hurry it up …”
“Ah, I just touched the edge, I’m almost there …”
A muffled groan came from the man’s throat, but he couldn’t form words.
I got up from the bench and started to move closer, holding my breath but walking normally.
The boy’s thin neck.
I was almost choking on the anticipation welling up inside me. Everything I could see around the dark hole had started to shimmer with radiant light: the park, the power lines, the sky. The creature called my self awakened. The new reality was so vivid it stung, and I wanted to suck it dry.
“Ng, uugh …”
The man gave another loud groan and I saw the boy’s legs scrape restlessly against the ground. I didn’t know if he had finally reached the hat or if it was the man’s grunting scaring him, but either way he was trying to wriggle out of the gap. The man holding the grate must have seen this, too. I could tell he was summoning his last reserves of strength for a final, desperate push, probably thinking the ordeal was almost over.
Now—
Making it look like I was trying to help, like I couldn’t bear to merely stand by and watch, I took the edge of the grate in both hands. I was full of Nan-Core. I felt drunk but also sharply alert, both sensations ruling my consciousness without contradiction.
I tensed my muscles, pretending to lift the grate while actually pushing it down. In fact, I hardly needed to put any effort into it at all. The man’s strength was already at its limit—it only took a slight nudge for his grip to fail.
There was the sound of the grate coming down. Then the boy’s legs jerked unnaturally, convulsing. It was over in a second.
The echoes of sound quickly died out, giving rise to an emptiness that made it feel like time had stopped. The man sat on his heels and the young girl was still standing as both stared vacantly at the inert legs on the asphalt. The thin, childish legs made the sneakers on his feet look disproportionately rugged.
A crowd began to form. After some time I got to my feet and walked away.
I wondered whether the man would argue his defense. Whether he would say his failure to hold on was because of a passerby, that someone had pushed down on the grate out of malice. That as a result, it wasn’t his fault the kid had died. Or did he not even realize what had happened in that moment?
I ran these thoughts through my mind as I walked down the path. When I got to the vending machines I slipped some coins into one of the slots, hoping to soothe my parched throat.
After reading this far, I sank weakly to the ground from where I had been leaning against the window frame.
I couldn’t keep reading. There was a dull nausea wriggling in my stomach, and I had broken out a greasy sweat.
What are these? What are they doing in our house? I kept telling myself to calm down, but I only began to fret more and more. I rubbed my hands vigorously over my face, wondering semi-seriously if I was dreaming. If it wasn’t a dream it had to be something Dad had written. Something he had tried for fun when he was young, something he had forgotten about. He had probably come across the notebooks when sorting his things, but hesitant to throw them out, had shoved them into a box instead.
That must have been it. After all, what other possibilities were there?
I couldn’t imagine someone as placid as Mom writing them. And it didn’t make sense to hold on to them if they were someone else’s work. My parents weren’t sociable people, they weren’t close enough to anyone to do that.
Nothing to get worked up about.
I repeatedly muttered this to myself and tried to continue reading, but the chill was still there, crawling up from the pit of my stomach. I couldn’t see why I was getting so shaken up. What was it that made me think it was Dad’s diary, that it was a confessional text based on fact? When I’d normally skim through this kind of thing without a second thought, certain that it was fiction. When no son worth the name would suspect his father in this way.
Still crouching down, I took two, then three, deep breaths, waiting for the chills to subside. My head was spinning with doubts that shouldn’t have been doubts at all. That childhood memory of Mom being replaced by someone else … Was it true after all? And if so, what happened to my real mother afterwards? Who was the woman I’d always thought of as my mother?
What was the significance of that bundle of hair?
I was afraid. I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that the notebooks would contain information about my first mother. That the mother who’d left had been murdered, that they would explain in detail both why and how it had happened.
Right now, I could put the notebooks back in the bottom of the box, shut the closet doors, and pretend none of this had happened. The option was there. If I was lucky, I might, over time, come to think of what I had already read as pure fiction, perhaps even forget about it completely. But I knew that was impossible, that
I had to read them to the end, no matter how miserable they might make me or how much I might come to regret it.
Once I graduated high school, I happened to end up in a two-year course at a technical school. While I was still far from sociable, I had a much better understanding of the difference between behavior that stuck out as odd and behavior that appeared normal, and as a result I was able to live while blending in seamlessly among other people.
When I was with other students, who knew nothing about Nan-Cores as they worried over future careers or dreamed of relationships, I remember feeling a mix of powerful superiority and melancholic envy.
I knew the word “Nan-Core” didn’t really exist, of course. I had realized that a long time ago, probably when I was in my fifth or sixth year of elementary school.
I think my childhood doctor had actually said “an anchor.” He had said I lacked a “sensory” or “cognitive” or “emotional” anchor. He used to push up his glasses and mumble, and my young ears couldn’t catch what he said too well, but even so it seemed a strange thing to mishear.
It wasn’t a problem by that point, though. The word had laid roots inside me, become something that was mine alone. I couldn’t correct it, there was nothing to be done about it. It expressed everything I lacked in my day-to-day life, all the things that were otherwise impossible to put into words. What other word out there can describe the inexplicable phenomenon that occurs when someone’s life fades away?
It was, incidentally, in my second year in elementary school that the hospital visits stopped. During my last examination my mother asked the doctor whether the lump at the back of my head would continue to shrink, and even disappear one day.
“I’m afraid it’s impossible to predict. It’s an extremely rare condition, so there’s a great deal we don’t know about it. To be honest, I’d like to do an autopsy just to see what’s going on in there.”
My mother cried that night as she related the story to Dad. We stopped going after that; she couldn’t forgive the doctor for the insensitivity he had shown in talking about an autopsy of a child that was still alive.
Nan-Core Page 3
