Book Girl and the Undine Who Bore a Moonflower

by Mizuki Nomura

“The fact that the story in it is Demon Pond by Kyōka makes me even happier. I feel as if it was a special volume made just for me.”

  “I’ve read Demon Pond more than a dozen times already. It feels even sweeter and more beautiful than the times I’ve read it before. Out of Kyōka’s stories, now I adore Demon Pond more than A Song by Lantern Light, more than The Grass Labyrinth, more than A Play of Sunlight on Leaves. The woman in the story has the same name as me.

  “I’m also called Yuri. So I wonder if perhaps the reason this volume is with me really is fate.”

  “I snuck out the back way with Chiro and took a stroll to the pond.

  “The pond is scary at night because there’s a ghoul, but during the day it’s very pretty. Chiro was excited, too.

  “I suddenly got the idea, why don’t we name the ghoul Shirayuki? Because there’s a ghoul named Shirayuki who lives in a pond in Demon Pond, too.

  “Then maybe we wouldn’t have to be so afraid of that pale creature.

  “The Shirayuki in Demon Pond obediently keeps a promise for Yuri’s sake. It listens to her singing to blunt its loneliness.”

  Shirayuki…a ghoul…was there really a ghoul? A humanized ghoul, like Tohko… A mysterious girl… A pond…were they sealed in it?

  Enfolded in her gentle voice and the warm blanket, I gradually slipped into unconsciousness.

  The pond I had yet to see floated up in my mind like a wisp and tiny lights bobbed around it like fireflies, and there was a mysterious song like a lullaby.

  A snake is in the swamp there,

  in the swamp there.

  A bead of water ’pon her neck,

  Golden shoes upon her feet,

  Call me this and call me that,

  call me that

  Pale light streamed in through a crack in the curtains. The room was still dark, and the outlines of everything were indistinct.

  That point before night was entirely over, the border between dream and reality…

  So maybe what I’d seen then was a dream.

  Tohko, pale faced and with her eyes bent, looking down at me.

  Her eyes brimming with sadness as they gazed at me.

  The ends of her hair fraying from its braids and tickling my cheek. Tohko brushing it aside with a cool, white hand.

  Almost touching but not quite—that slight and gentle…

  I’d caught a slight, halting murmur in my ear as I verged on sleep.

  “I wonder…how much longer…can I be here?”

  What had Tohko meant?

  Why was she looking at me with such a sad, unguarded expression?

  She left the young lady’s diary on her lap, open to the last page.

  A single red flower rested there.

  It was a dianthus.

  Immersed in its sweet fragrance, I closed my eyes again.

  When I sat up, it was completely light outside the curtains.

  A bird was chirping at the window.

  I gasped and looked around the room.

  Tohko was gone!

  I couldn’t find her in the bed or anywhere in the room.

  As proof that she had actually been there the night before, the blanket Tohko had been bundled up in was folded up in a corner of the bed. The diary was gone.

  When I touched the blanket, it was cold. Where had Tohko gone?

  I recalled the sad expression and the husky voice I had witnessed at dawn in a half-conscious state, as if through an obscuring mist. My heart thrummed and I couldn’t stay still.

  Had it been a dream? Waking to find Tohko gone left me unavoidably anxious and my brain started to burn.

  I was frustrated by my impatience, so I got dressed and left the room.

  How could she barge in and then just disappear?

  But maybe she’d just gone to the bathroom. And anyway, I had no reason to attack Tohko if she’d gone back to her room in the middle of the night…Geez, why was I so worked up?

  I knocked on the door to Tohko’s room, but there was no reply. When I opened it, the room was empty.

  That gave me a shock, and a cold sweat broke out on my skin. Just then, a cold voice spoke behind me.

  “If you’re looking for Miss Tohko, she’s in the book room.”

  When I turned around, Uotani was glaring at me with large accusatory eyes.

  “Miss Tohko was quite dejected. Did you do anything to her?”

  “No,” I answered, shaken.

  So it hadn’t been my imagination last night after all? Had something happened to Tohko?

  “Where’s the book room?”

  “…This way.”

  Uotani narrowed her eyes in annoyance then, and with a shake of her pigtails, she turned her face brusquely away and began walking.

  Uotani proceeded without a word, and I followed her in silence.

  When we reached a nook on the western side of the first floor, Uotani stopped in front of a door and knocked.

  “C’mon in!” Tohko’s voice came back jovially from within.

  Wha—?

  Uotani opened the door.

  That same moment there was a creak.

  Inside the room, it smelled like dry grass, and with only one small latticework window, the air was cool. It was as if time had come to a stop.

  The window was open, but there was no breeze. The walls of the 130-square-foot room were buried behind shelves, which were packed with old books. The shelves went all the way to the ceiling, and a wooden ladder leaned against them.

  Tohko was sitting on a faded old chaise lounge, the skirt of her white cotton dress arrayed around her, reading a book that was spread open on her lap. Several other books were stacked up on a Queen Anne table.

  She’d changed clothes and probably redone her hair. Her neat braids spilled down onto her skirt.

  Her figure was so mingled with the swarm of old books that she was like a single white flower—pretty and gentle and captivating.

  For a moment, I felt as if it were a stranger there, not Tohko.

  Her braids shifted and she slowly lifted her head.

  The instant her clear black eyes met mine, as I stood transfixed, a gentle light came into them, and her lips curved into a smile like a flower blooming.

  “Good morning, Konoha.”

  Uotani bowed politely to Tohko, then left.

  Still standing at the door, I stared at the flowerlike smile that came over Tohko’s face, feeling as if I were still in that dream.

  “What’s wrong, Konoha? You’re spacing out. Didn’t you get enough sleep? But you fell asleep before me last night, and you didn’t wake up even when I pinched your nose closed and tickled your neck.”

  “You did that?!”

  “Sure. You didn’t wake up at all. You fall asleep too easily, Konoha. If you go on a school trip like that, the people in your room are gonna doodle embarrassing stuff on you, y’know.”

  “Grrrrrr.”

  I growled, but Tohko only said with a smile, “Oh, I ate the Tonio Kröger that you gave me as a gift as soon as I got up this morning. Thomas Mann is so good. I was overtaken by a philosophical mood this morning.”

  From the nonchalant way she was talking, it was almost impossible to imagine how sad she had looked at dawn. So maybe I hadn’t seen what I thought I had. And maybe the reason Uotani had said Tohko was dejected was just because she’d been hungry.

  Of course. That was obviously it.

  I began to regret my anxiety, and I shut the door violently.

  “Hmm? You look like you’re annoyed about something.”

  “It’s just your imagination. Have you been awake all night?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You seem pretty energetic, considering.”

  “I’m used to all-nighters. Especially before tests.”

  Tohko puffed her chest out with a proud smirk. How obnoxious.

  “So did you read the whole diary?”

  The smile faded from her small face ever so slightly.

  “Yeah…I did.”<
br />
  Huh? Maybe she wasn’t so upbeat after all.

  As that thought occurred to me, Tohko stood up, a grin engulfing her face, and spread her arms wide.

  “This is the book room mentioned in the young lady’s diary. It’s like a dream world. It’s full of deliciousness! It’s amazing! Sigh. It’s too bad, though. The paper got too old, and it’s past its expiration date so I can’t eat it. It’s so unbearable.”

  She gave a forlorn sigh and walked along the shelves, gazing longingly at the spines of each book.

  The young Himekura lady who’d loved books—perhaps she, too, had picked up a book and flipped through its pages with this same gleam in her eye. That completely ordinary girl had been forsaken in love and drowned herself in the pond.

  “These books were sent by her father in Tokyo for his little girl. For her, books were proof of her father’s love.”

  As she spoke, Tohko took a book down from the shelf and turned back its faded cover.

  “‘To my daughter…,’” she whispered, her voice wreathed in gloom, and then she turned the book toward me, holding the cover open.

  On the inside of the cover, a brush had written, “To my daughter.” I knew they were the words a father had written for his daughter, living in solitude at their villa in the mountains.

  “All the books I’ve looked at have the same words inside. Probably every book in this room does.”

  After a look of sadness passed through her eyes, Tohko’s voice became gentle.

  “It’s because she was forbidden to leave the estate. The books that came from her father were probably the only things she looked forward to. When a book arrived, she was probably so overjoyed that she immersed herself in the world of the story, forgetting where she was.

  “The author Yuri liked best was Kyōka Izumi. That book you’re holding is by Kyōka.”

  I turned it over and looked at the cover and saw the name Kyōka Izumi and the title The Grass Labyrinth.

  Tohko began talking animatedly.

  “Kyōka was born in 1873, and he became an author who published continually through the reigns of three emperors. While drawing from the influence of supernatural literature of Edo period authors like Akinari Ueda, he built his own fantastical writing style that wove the supernatural together with novels written using unique phrasing and alternate readings of words. Interestingly, a lot of his famous works take place in the ‘flower and willow world’ of Edo high culture. His fans include not only readers, but also a lot of authors. Ryunosuke Akutagawa wrote an impassioned review for Kyōka’s collected works, and they say that he even had an influence on Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata.

  “The tales Kyōka tells are like wine made out of flowers! The lovely wild chrysanthemum, the arcane evening primrose, the dazzling gardenia, the dignified honeysuckle, the orange osmanthus blooming gloriously.

  “While you taste, sip by sip, the clear, glittering liquid, all the while growing intoxicated on the fragrance of the flowers, your steps become unsteady, you get light-headed, and you don’t even know where you are anymore. You get swallowed up in the dizzying cacophony of flowers spreading across your tongue.”

  Tohko’s cheeks were flushed, and she let out a sigh.

  She looked as though she was actually drunk.

  “The monk who encounters a beautiful woman living deep in the mountains and experiences something supernatural in ‘The Holy Man of Mount Koya,’ the heart-stoppingly beautiful prose that weaves a spell over a connection cemented through art and a moment of extremity in A Song by Lantern Light. The book you’re holding, The Grass Labyrinth, is another masterpiece in which you can get your fill of Kyōka’s almost dangerous, subtly profound beauty! You could even say that the protagonist Akira Hagoshi has lines that express Kyōka’s work as a whole.”

  Then she lowered her eyes and whispered, almost singing, “‘Whether tis a dream, reality, or illusion…I feel that I may see it with my eyes and speak not of it—and that it is gentle, familiar, touched by pathos, emotional, filled with love, fluffy, and moreover, pure, cool, bloodcurdling, seeming to tear at the heart, that which seems to enchant… By way of example, the feeling of gazing upon your mother’s beautiful breast from within her belly before your birth, containing pure, fragrant milk—’”

  When she opened her eyes, they were limpid and blank, as if she’d returned from another world.

  I was the same, feeling as if I’d traveled through a dream world of phantoms, sucked in by Tohko’s words and her tone of voice. When I came back to my senses, my forehead and palms had become coated in sweat.

  Tohko stretched out a white hand and took a book from the stack on the table.

  This time she showed it to me without opening the cover.

  “Out of everything, what this fan of Kyōka loved most was the play Demon Pond, which features a heroine who shares her name.”

  The beautiful book from the diary—

  During the long years, several books had faded, but the handmade one with the embroidered flowers on the cover seemed to glimmer faintly against Tohko’s chest.

  Tohko described Demon Pond for me.

  “A husband and wife named Akira and Yuri were living in Kotohiki Valley in western Japan. One summer two years before, Akira had come to Kotohiki Valley and heard the stories surrounding Demon Pond from the elderly belfry keeper.

  “How long ago when a dragon god was sealed in the lake, it had promised to never again cause a flood.

  “How in order to remind it of its promise, they had to ring the temple bell three times a day.

  “How if they forgot to ring the bell even once, the vow would lose its power, the dragon god would be released, and everything would sink below the water.

  “The old man died, and in order to protect Yuri, who lived in the village, Akira stayed in Kotohiki Valley as the new belfry keeper and became Yuri’s husband. But there was an ongoing drought, and the villagers decided to make Yuri a living sacrifice. Yuri died and Akira stopped ringing the temple bell. Instantly there was a flood and the village was swallowed up.”

  “The diary mentioned the name Shirayuki, right? It said it was a ghoul, I thought.”

  Tohko replied, “Shirayuki was the daughter of the dragon god who was sealed in Demon Pond, a princess. She wanted more than anything to visit her lover who lived in another pond, but she was bound by the vow inherited from her ancestors and couldn’t leave the lake.

  “This angered her, and in order to break the vow, she ordered the goblins that were her minions to knock the bell down. But when she heard Yuri singing as she waited for Akira, she held herself back. Yuri was something like an oracle.”

  “That’s the same situation as Yuri Himekura, then. There’s a ghoul, there’s an oracle, and there’s a man who comes from another place.”

  “Yes…that’s probably why our Yuri identified with this story so much. And there was another major element that made Demon Pond a special book for Yuri. The fact that Yuri and the student who came to her estate would fall in love had been inevitable ever since Demon Pond was written—ever since Yuri came into possession of it.”

  Her voice was painfully gentle, echoing through the room where time had stopped.

  Yuri Himekura was overlaid on top of Tohko.

  “What do you mean?”

  Her clear gaze quietly turned on me. In the distance, Baron was barking. Dust danced in the feeble light shining through the window.

  “The student who came to this villa was looking for a book that was a keepsake of his mother. It was this book. One book that Kyōka wrote brought the two of them together.”

  Had the diary mentioned that, too?

  Tohko lowered her eyelashes, then looked back at me and declared in a strained voice, “The student who came looking for this book was named Akira.”

  I gasped at the strange symbols that were so reminiscent of a story.

  Yuri was the girl in the villa.

  Akira had come to visit.

 
It could never happen in real life. But it was an inevitability called chance that had happened.

  If the two of them met, they would be bound to fall in love; they were destined to meet and they had met. When they learned each other’s names, how had Akira looked in Yuri’s eyes and Yuri in Akira’s?

  Yuri at least wouldn’t have been able to help falling for Akira.

  A young man with the important name of Akira had appeared before Yuri, who idolized love, and who idolized the heroines of Kyōka’s stories. It was as though Yuri had cherished the idea of him even before they’d met.

  “There are a lot of couples in Kyōka’s stories who fall in love at first sight. Their eyes make contact for only a moment and everything around them is different, the meaning of their life changes, and their souls get deeply bound to one another. Yuri and Akira probably fell in love the same way.”

  A deep gloom showed in Tohko’s eyes, though she spoke matter-of-factly.

  Of course, this story didn’t have a happy ending. Akira had cast Yuri off, and Yuri had drowned herself in the pond.

  “You know, Konoha, their story resembles Demon Pond, but there are parts that take after The Grass Labyrinth, too.”

  I dropped my eyes to the book in my hands.

  “With this?”

  “For one thing, the protagonists’ names. Demon Pond has Akira Hagiwara, and The Grass Labyrinth has Akira Hagoshi. Their names are slightly different, but they’re both Akira.

  “Akira Hagiwara comes to Kotohiki Valley while collecting stories passed down in various regions, but…Akira Hagoshi goes on a journey because he wants to hear once more the rhyme his mother used to sing for him before she died, and he stays at the cursed Akiya mansion, where a lot of supernatural things happen to him.”

  That definitely resembled the Akira who appeared at the villa looking for a book that was a keepsake of his mother’s.

  Wait—

  I felt a tug and remembered something about when I’d come here.