"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players"
Shakespeare, As You Like It
Preface:
A collection of short stories, hopefully running the full gamut of tenderness and tragedy, thematically linked one after another, centered on the question: "what's inside?". Not all will be sad or horrific or violent, just as not all of what's inside is not so dark and dreary. As the cycle nears its end, the works should get more tender and happy. I hope that in this set of works, there will be one or two that don't just entertain, but also ring true (and don't turn out to be flaming garbage on legs).
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The more time passes, the more I wonder if this is really what I should be writing, what I should be doing. Nonetheless, having started, I must see this to the end. To be honest, I envy those other fanfic writers, be it on pixiv or in this website, who can have fun writing fanfics and can bring others fun. All I am, it seems, is the ramshackle jottings of some stupid woman, one stupid woman who must write or else.
闇祭 / WALPURGISNACHT
"Everything in this world is fake. My life is nothing more than a drama that you penned. Please, prove it. "Faust" is on show."
（この世界はすべて嘘でした。私の人生はあなたの書いた戯曲にすぎません。それを証明して下さい。「ファウスト」が上演中）
tentative list of works:
(日本魂）The Soul of Japan
（子どもの神様）The God of Children
（天国画）Alina's Best Artwork
(月様太陽様) The Sun and The Moon
I Talk To The Rain
（御稜威の夜）Night of Power: すべて平安！夜明けまで！
(父を失ってあの日）The Day I Lose My Father
(廻り姫）Rolling Girl
(逝義）Justice
(ある馬鹿の一書）The Life of a Stupid Woman
Noi
(少女記）An Account of A Young Girl: Madoka's Summer Holiday Assignment
(過去帳）Death Register
（夢夜々）The Nights Dreaming
（何が彼女をそうさせてか）I Dream of the Future
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日本魂・The Soul of Japan
A/N: "What's inside? Inside of us?" Post-Series.
At first, my aim was to write a simple piece about "the soul of Japan", whatever it might be. But at some point, the writing seems to have taken off on its own, and now it seems to have expanded broadly around the "loss of faith in the human heart". I suppose this means this short story will now stretch to 30000 words or so. Writing this makes me deeply uncomfortable; perhaps because it runs a bit against my natural grain, being too removed from the present state of things. I only hope that it won't turn out to be a failure; else I really will get started on a fluffy MadoHomu work ― at least I can be sure that that will not be a waste of time. The writing of this work gives me little satisfaction, but still comfort.
LIFE IS MORE HELLISH THAN HELL ITSELF
(人生は地獄よりも地獄的である)
Ryuunosuke Akutagawa, Words of a Dwarf (侏儒の言葉)
1.
What is the soul of Japan?
I don't know. What does it mean? I don't know. When do you use it? What does it look like? I don't know a single thing. I don't even know if there's really anything inside ― inside of us.
Just the other day, a friend of mine asked me off the cuff, "If people have souls, what about countries?" And frankly, I couldn't answer her because I don't know what a soul is. I don't even know what a "Japan" is. Maybe if you ask to point on the map, I can find it for you. But that's about it; if you ask me, "What really is a Japan?", then I've got no clue at all. And of course, if I don't know what it is, then you can't expect me to know what it's like. It was a ridiculous question anyways, not worth thinking about. Even if I could hold a soul in my own hands, I still don't think I'd know. Someone I knew had an answer though. "I'm a zombie!" she said. I thought she was an idiot for saying that, and I told her off, saying that we can't be zombies because we're alive. But now that when I think about it again, I realise that even an idiot can have a point sometimes. If I could hold my soul in my hands, what different would I be from a machine with its batteries?
Maybe it's because of a difference in our personalities, but to me, she was difficult to understand. I don't know how she came to think the way she did. I don't think she knew very well either. She wanted to be a real hero, a selfless saviour fighting for the weak and the needy. She was always living in her own la-la-land. I told her, "You think that by putting your life on the line for others, somebody's gonna stamp a form declaring that you're doing the right things, that you deserve to live?" But all she wanted was to live life so intensely that she could die at any moment without regrets, I think. For this purpose, she believed that there were some things weren't supposed to be discovered. She couldn't question herself. She couldn't feel pain or regret. She couldn't look back on what she'd done and ask herself: why? Or what for? Or what happened? This much I can understand, though I still don't know if I can really agree with her or not. Now that she's no longer here, I wish we'd been better friends while we still could. Maybe things could've been different? I don't know.
In the end, I really don't have an answer. Maybe if I went overseas I'd know better; apparently the foreigners know us better than we do, maybe it's 'cos their eyes are bluer than ours. But I do recall this, a story I heard from a friend of a friend. If anything, this story is probably the closest thing I've got to an answer. It's actually a very funny little story, so maybe you'll laugh or something, I dunno. I hope you do. It's just a story, so maybe you'd think, you know, that it's just a waste of time. It's true that it's just fiction, but if you read it the right way, fiction can be real too, y'know? And I mean at the end of the day, none of this is true. No need to take it too seriously, yeah? Nothing good happens to those people who take things too seriously.
2.
But before I go on, I've got to start with a bit of an introduction.
Y'know, my old man was a good man. My old man used to run a church. To be blunt about it, he was always too honest and too kind. Maybe he really was too good a person. Otherwise, he'd still be running a church even now. Whenever he read the newspapers in the morning, his eyes would fill with tears out of sympathy. He was the kind of person who took these kinds of things to heart, yeah? And when he saw how people were still in pain everywhere, the rich and the poor, the good and the bad, he thought that something just wasn't right with the system, you know? I mean, it's a natural conclusion, isn't it? You've got a problem, but the solution doesn't work anymore. At some point, something's gotta give y'know?
That was what the old man thought. "For a new era to be saved, it needs new faith." This was what he liked to say. That's why on one occasion, he went as far as preaching things that weren't in the doctrine to worshippers. He was especially critical of those things which he thought were old remnants of old faith, parts of a solution that just wasn't relevant anymore. They needed to be let go or we would be stuck in the past forever, running rounds in a wheel of suffering.
Maybe it's because of this that, in the beginning, my old man never believed in it – the soul of Japan. He didn't know for sure if Japan had a soul, but he knew it didn't need one anymore. It was nothing but sweet words to get the people to find hope and belonging in a world of pain, even as everything was burning around them, even as their faces of their parents and their children were boiling and bubbling in the cold black rain. Somewhere along the line, he even thought it was slowly turning into the work of the devil. My old man tried to spread the word.
"Admiral Togo possessed the soul of Japan. Yukio Mishima possessed it. And the local fishmonger has it as well," he said in one of his sermons. "Swindlers and murderers also have the soul of Japan. Since it is a spirit, it is always blurry and fuzzy. There is no one in Japan who hasn't had it on the tip of his tongue, but there's no one who has actually seen it."
But however convincing he might have been, it was clear to everyone that he did not have the slightest knowledge of what the Japanese spirit was. These were not words that someone with the soul of Japan on the tip of his tongue would utter. Everyone knew that he was not like them, that he didn't want to become like them. Everyone knew that he was trying to make them become like him. And how could someone who did not even believe in something like the soul, who thought the soul was too abstract to be true, really devote himself to God? My old man turned away lots of people with what he was saying, but he believed that he was only speaking the truth. He never stopped.
Of course, on the other hand, the worshippers' feet came to a sudden halt. One by one, they deserted him and denounced him as a heretic. Then he was excommunicated from the Church. No one listened to what my old man had to say. But I mean, it's only natural, isn't it? Looking at it from outside, it was nothing but a shady new-age religion, wasn't it? No matter how much his words made sense, no matter how obvious it was, to the whole world he was just a deranged nuisance, just like the old lady in the park who sits on the bench and hums enka all day and talks to her husband who is not there anymore. Our whole family was outcast from society and left in a state without nothing to eat.
Even my sister had to stop going to school because every time she would come back with her skin blue-black all over. She would never tell us what really happened. One time though, I think in spring, she left her bento behind at home. I went to her school to give it to her. Then, in the courtyard gardens behind the school building, through the thicket, I saw some of her classmates forcing her to get down on her knees. They scribbled something on her face with an oil marker, and they kept on telling her, "If you don't like it, then too bad. Blame yourself for being born into your family. You did something rotten in your past life, didn't you?" "You octopus!" "Don't say that! Rude!" "What? I'll say it if I wanna say it, octopus!" And eventually they all agreed that she ought to just kill herself. It's better that way, they said. I just stood shocked in my feet; I always thought some of these were her good friends. I couldn't understand what was happening, and I guess I still don't.
3.
What they said next was, "Oi, you forgot your bento, didn't you?" My skin turned cold. Then from the corner, a voice came hollering out. One of the boys gave a thumbs up and told him to bring it here. And from behind the bushes, some kid holding a broom and dustpan swept a bunch of flower petals and something else into my sister's face. I looked closer. It was a dying bumblebee. Its wings were still twitching, its stinger outstretched, trying to dig into anything it could reach.
"Couldn't find any honey for you, sorry."
"See, we got you some lunch. Don't mind, dig in. Lots of nutrition!"
It started out light-hearted as always and almost looked like it was all some joke in some mean-spirited fun. But when she refused to cooperate, they got angry. They shoved her head forward and kicked her thighs. Still she didn't move.
"Oi, oi, what's wrong? You're hungry right?"
"…i …iyada…"
"Huh?"
"Iyada!"
"Oi! What, don't know Japanese? You reading too much of those English gosuparu."
"Iyada! Iyada! Iyada, iyada, iyada!"
One of the boys gave her a tight slap, then another one pulled her cheeks.
"Hey! Keep it down! What if the teachers come! Then it'll be all your fault!"
"If my mom finds out, she'll get angry!"
My sister shut up after that, but she just stayed in her kneeling position, looking at the bee as if she was about to cry. They kept on shoving her from behind, saying hora! hora!, with one of the girls even stepping on her back and yanking her hair up. But every time, my sister would grit her teeth and squirm upright.
"C'mon, you're taking too long."
"We gotta play more after this."
"When is the bell going to ring? Oh no, I forgot to bring my homework again…"
"We'll feed you ok?"
"If you don't, we'll tell everyone that your father's one of those new fake Kirishitans trying to scam people's money."
That was when I snapped out of it. I ran up to them and beat the shit out of the slow ones. It was easy; I was bigger and I was stronger. The faster ones got away though. I yelled my lungs out, and I punched them to the ground, and I made sure to knock some of their teeth out as a warning. At the same time, I pitied them and I felt bad about what I was doing. I mean, the children probably didn't see what they were doing was wrong. It's not their fault that we were just fake Kirishitans out to scam people's money and cheat people into buying faith. We were just born bad people in the first place. We just deserved it for being born. Silly us; we should have aborted ourselves while we could!
4.
Looking at it logically like this, they probably thought they were meting out justice for those who couldn't do so. Or maybe they were just doing it because they were bored, I dunno. But no matter what it was, they were just doing what anybody else does on a regular basis: choose to see certain people as less than human, the badder the better. I think it's only natural; we don't have all the time and energy in the world to see everyone as more than just a doormat. And I just did what had to be done by bashing their faces in for it. Maybe I didn't really need to do that, but I know I damn well wanted to.
When I heard the teachers shouting at me from far away, I realised what I had done. I quickly carried my sister on my back and took off. I ran and I ran and I didn't think of looking back. I probably gave one of them a concussion, and then some. His name was Tarou-kun. I know it because I could hear a girl crying his name from high up in the school building. When I turned to see, she was already leaning too far from the window. I can't forget that scene. I looked back forward and ran faster.
As I ducked past the streets, shifting from alley to alley, I asked myself. We're all good people, aren't we? I asked myself. Then why do we do this to each other? All because Adam ate some fucking apple? Maybe things would've been different if he'd eaten a peach instead and become like Son Goku or Momotaro. When I thought about how funny the whole situation was, I don't know why, but I started crying. I was crying, but my sister wasn't. She was tough like that, I guess. I asked her if she was alright, and she said yes. I asked her if she was feeling hungry, and she said yes. I waved to her the bento in my hand. It was probably all messed up inside from all the fighting, but food was food. I made her promise never to forget her lunch again. And she never did.
We made it back home by dinnertime (an irony, because our family couldn't afford to have dinner that day), after I took a trip to a private clinic and begged the doctor to treat my sister. I promised him that I would pay back the money one day, somehow, anyhow – I could work for him without pay, he could put me on debt forever, I didn't care – so long as my parents never found out what happened to my sister. I got lucky. And soon afterwards my sister stopped going to school. Honestly, I was relieved. I couldn't always be there to protect her when the time came.
What was happening, I couldn't understand it. Something, everything was wrong. I couldn't understand what was happening to our family. My old man didn't say anything that was a mistake. They were just different from what other people had to say, things that people maybe were too stubborn to listen to. Even five minutes would have been enough. If people could just lend him their ears for five minutes, anyone would have understood that all the things he said made sense. Yet no one stood by him. Why did we have to be punished for trying to do good things with good intentions? I felt frustrated. I felt bitter. I couldn't let this go on. It wasn't fair; it wasn't right. The fact that no one could understood what that person was saying, I just couldn't take it anymore.
All my old man had was his family, who sympathised and believed in him until the very end. We were all stuck with him in the same boat anyways. We were supposed to be prepared to live and suffer together as one family. That's what family's for, yeah?
Now y'see, the old man had two kids, both of them girls: Kyouko and Momo. This is a story I heard from a friend of a friend about the girl named Kyouko, a normal story of a girl who wanted to save her family and save the world. But it's not some heroic tale or adventure, nothing uplifting like that. All I got from it, and all you'll ever get from it, was a story you could find in any old body anywhere. It happens every day. No, actually, it could never happen here, of all places, you know it. Really, a five-year-old could've thought of something better, but I guess it is what it is. No point crying over spilt milk. It's just a fictional story anyways; it's all made up, so… right then ―
日本魂・The Soul of Japan: to be continued.