1.

My story starts the way it should end: with death.

I was born and raised in a prefecture of Tokyo city, a suburban district, called Karakura. My father was a doctor who ran a small self-made hospital from the bottom and front part of our house. This is a common thing in Japan: for people to live behind and above their own small businesses, in a compact, neat, two story arrangement, hundreds of little building squished together down long streets. Tokyo is miraculously clean for a city, a point of pride for its occupants, but somehow there never seems to be enough space. Japan has one hundred twenty seven million people, all cramped onto a tiny island chain in the middle of the ocean with the square mileage of about one hundred forty five thousand miles in total. One hundred thousand miles for one hundred million people - and most of those people live in the cities. About thirteen million people live in the city of Tokyo alone at the last estimate, all divided up into forty seven prefectures. Karakura was just one of them.

So my parents and I all lived and worked in the same compact two-story house. The tiny hospital took up most of the bottom floor, and my parents worked there tirelessly all day. My father was the doctor; my mother was the nurse. They were the only two workers, employees and employers both. Our combined living room, family room, dining room, and kitchen - all one space - was behind the hospital. On the bottom floor was one bedroom, set off to the side. Up the stairs on the top floor were two more bedrooms and the single bathroom that didn't belong to the hospital. All the storage space? In the bedroom closets. There was a small space at the bottom of the closet for clothes; the rest was all fold-out shelving.

Our hospital was simply titled. We were the Kurosaki family, and our sign read: Kurosaki Clinic. We sold our appeal based on the fact that we were a family business who knew everyone in the neighborhood, was nearby, and charged affordably. This selling point was necessary, because we weren't open 24 hours a day - though you could probably knock or doorbell ring us into wakefulness, and some people did - and we didn't have many of the amenities that larger facilities did. We couldn't, for example, do major surgery.

That doesn't mean nobody ever died in our clinic, though, and that's where my story begins.

In my first memory, I was about three years old. I was sitting on a colorful little rug in the family room, imaginary playing with some toys. I made the purple dinosaurs and teddy bears climb fast over invisible hills and crash into each other with great mouth noises. (In my mind, the teddy bears were the size of buildings and were at war in a magical forest with the dinosaurs. This made perfect sense to me as a three year old girl.)

Suddenly, there was a great shout from the direction of the hospital and I looked around quickly.

My Dad was in his side office, screaming over the phone at the major Karakura City Hospital, which he did a lot. They didn't like taking patients from his clinic, not even when the patients were dying and the Karakura City Hospital was the only thing that could save them. Dad grumbled often about the head of Karakura City Hospital blacklisting him. Apparently they knew each other, though I had no idea how.

"Tell Ishida Ryuuken to go fuck himself with a rusty metal pole!" my father shouted into the phone. Then he hung up on the receptionist and slammed the phone back down on the desk. "Damnit!"

"Isshin!" I heard my mother call from the long hospital room down the hall, sounding panicked, and I knew it was serious because she had called him by his real name and usually around me my parents called each other Mother and Father.

I could not recall my mother ever sounding panicked before, and I still remember how angry my father was as he stormed back down the hospital hallway. I heard distant shouting and slamming. Morbidly curious, knowing I shouldn't approach but unable to help myself, I stood up and toddled down the hospital hallway, down the long concrete and linoleum my father had paid to have installed to give the hospital a more authentic feel, past the stinging-smelling containers of wipes and antiseptics hanging from the wall, turned at the gleaming glass front door with the bell over it carrying a sign announcing hospital hours, and went into the main hospital wing.

It was simple, a long room, the separating wall having been torn out, lined with neat rows of clean, sterilized hospital beds with white sheets. A window on the far left side often shone cheerful sunlight onto the space through the pretty white curtains - my mother's touch - though today the sky was heavy, still, and grey like a stone.

My parents were standing around the only occupied hospital bed, and I could still picture them now: The tall, mountainous, broad-shouldered figure of my father, square-chested like a boxer with a closely shorn head of dark hair and a beard, the kind of man who looked like he could get through anything, save anyone. And my mother, slim and pretty, with long brown curls, her normally serene and implacable face riddled over with pity and pain.

In between them on the hospital bed was a skinny old silvery-haired man. He did not look small and feeble, not even then. He was tall, trim, and in good shape, wearing fairly nice clothes. But he wasn't breathing, his eyes were closed, and the machine beside him was ringing in a flatline - his heart had stopped. I still remember his bare ribs, his leathery brown chest, his shirt torn open as my father pounded on him and pounded on him with instruments called defibrillators that looked like clothes irons but were really trying to shock the old man's heart back into wakefulness using electricity.

I remember my father pounding on him and pounding on him. I hung onto the corner of the doorway, wincing as I heard a rib crack. Nothing worked. Finally, my father gave up, the horrible ringing continuing. He defeatedly turned off the heart rate monitor and the ringing stopped. There was a moment's pause, my mother watching my father quietly. My father was an emotional man, and after a moment he turned around and flung something across the room.

"Fuck!" he shouted, oblivious as the instrument cracked and dented the wall.

Another pause. "... I'll go call his family," my mother said quietly, understanding. She walked to the door calmly, and then paused in surprise as she saw me standing there, her three year old daughter. "How long have you been there?" she demanded. I lowered my head, silent with shame. My mother sighed, instead of getting angry. "Father, I think you should have a talk with our daughter on people dying in hospitals even when doctors try to help them," she said meaningfully, and left to walk down the hall to my father's office and make the call to the family.

My father turned to look at me, and the sight of me seemed to calm him some. My father was one of those strange men who had actually wanted a daughter - badly. He loved smothering me with hugs and kisses, making me and my mother laugh with goofy antics, and he'd quit smoking the day he found out he was having a baby girl. He was a total spazz off the job, but he was a doting husband and father.

"Best to joke along with your father," my mother advised me once. "In a weird way I think it gives him life."

So now my father knelt down to my level, and I walked over to him. "What happens when a person dies?" I asked, staring up at him.

"Well…" He seemed to be having some sort of internal struggle. "Their soul goes to another place," he said at last. "And then, eventually, they become a baby again and get reborn as a brand new person."

This was a very hard concept for me to grasp. I thought about it for a long time.

"But… hospitals are here so that we make sure that doesn't happen," I said, confirming.

"We try to help people live as long as they can. Most people want to live a really long time," said my father seriously, nodding. Then he stood and made a fist, laughing it off, as he did with most serious things. "Do not worry, my daughter!" he cried, ever the one with the flare for drama. "I will protect everyone from the bad things!"

I knew it was cruel even then, but I had an important question I couldn't quite formulate and I couldn't help pointing it out: "But you didn't protect him. He died."

My father became somber once more. "Yes," he said. "Well, this is very important, my daughter Ichigo. Always remember. Even the people who make it their job to save other people? Even they can't save everyone all the time."

I nodded, looking around at the body of the old man. Then I stopped and blinked in surprise. "Daddy?" I said. "I don't think that man's really dead."

My father looked puzzled, then pitying. "Now, Ichigo, I know this is hard, but -"

"No, Daddy. He must have a twin. There are two of them," I said firmly, pointing. "And one is standing by the other one's bed."

The other old man looked up. Sure enough, there were two of them, and the second one looked and was dressed just like the first, though his shirt was still closed up and his ribs were undamaged. The standing old man stared at me, sunken eyes dark and haunted.

"You… you can see me?" he whispered. We locked gazes for a moment.

"... Ichigo?" said my father quietly. "There's only one person there. It's the dead one lying on the hospital bed."

I frowned. "But there's more, Daddy!" I said, stomping my foot, angry tears in my eyes. I was irrationally upset. "There's a second one!" I walked up fearlessly to the second old man. "Who are you?!" I demanded, pointing up at him.

The man blinked. "My name is Shura," he said in an uncertain, shaky voice. "I was a professor of classical literature at the local university."

I turned around to my father. "His name is Shura," I said, crossing my arms, as if this proved everything. "He was a professor of classical literature at the local university."

My father became angry, starting toward me. "How did you get a hold of his file -?! Wait a minute. You can't read. And you were in the family room." His eyes widened. "How long have you been over there?" He pointed at the door.

I shrugged. "I don't know, maybe a minute?"

"I came in because I had a minor heart attack. I had a major one while I was here," Shura continued quickly to me, and I repeated the information back to my father exactly as Shura had said it, word for word.

I must have seemed very strange: pausing, listening, then relaying back information I could not possibly have known. For my parents, I would realize later, there was no second man. It was as if I was listening to nothing. My father had grown very, unusually pale.

One piece of information clinched it.

"Right before he had the second heart attack," I said slowly, listening, "... he told you that the last thing he'd done before coming here was argue over the phone with his grown daughter. And… now he regrets it," I finished softly, listening. I was a daughter with a father, so this greatly affected me.

My father stared at me for a long moment. Then he called without looking away, "... Masaki!"

Again, serious. This was my mother's given name.

She ran in, as alarmed as I was, and said, "What is it?!"

My father turned to my mother, his expression unusually stilted, and he said, in a tone I couldn't define, "... Our daughter can see dead people."

My mother gasped and turned to look at me, struck silent. "... Ichigo," she said tremblingly at last, "can you see that man?"

"Yes, Mommy, but I don't understand! He's not dead! He's right there!" I said, urgent and afraid.

"Little girl, that is my body. What you are talking to is my soul, the part of me that moves on." I turned slowly to stare up into the dark, sunken eyes of the old man. "Little girl, don't you understand?

"I'm dead."