June 5th, 2024
Miyoko Tanashi's first experience of religion is the typical mixing bag of any young child in that era of Japan. A little of this, a bit of that, some names, some rituals, some philosophies tying it up in a neat little bow. She doesn't think on it because it never matters, and why should it? There is only the eternal and present now.
She splashes water for purification at a shrine, she has a little luck-charm tied to the strap of her school bag, and she's familiar with the sight of an upraised hand of Buddha. They're all just simple, easy things; habits that she is expected to learn to fall into as she grows up, like tying shoelaces, or washing hands.
She knows this that and the other, but it doesn't sink in, doesn't mean anything.
Not yet.
What she has learned cannot withstand this kind of grief.
Miyoko sits, stunned, on a plastic chair that is hard and cold and slippery and every texture a seat shouldn't be, clutching the glass of water a nurse gave her and trying to scrape together a single coherent thought when the bottom has gone out of her world.
Parents are a fact of life. They happen like sunshine, like rain, like gravity. They can't be gone. They can't be dead.
Except- except they are.
And now what?
Now what?
There is no "now what." For every moment and every step of Miyoko's life, there has been an adult to guide her, parents to tell her what to say and what to do and who to thank. Even if one were to set aside the thunderous mountain of grief crushing her underneath it, she does not know what to do. She does not even know what to think.
Her knowledge of religion, at this point, is too gentle to stand up under the hollow, aching weight of this sorrow and loss. Her parents did not teach mourning rituals to her. They did not know they would need to; all her other relatives are gone. They should have been no one she needed to mourn for, yet.
One of the kami in Miyoko's childish collage of knowledge is what seems to be known to some people as kami-sama, the kami of them all, best and greatest and only. She's distantly familiar with the wall hanging of the doll nailed onto a crosspiece of two sticks, and knows it to be some kind of presentation or manifestation or representation or something else of that kami.
She learns a little more when one of the wrung-out nurses finally has a moment to spare for her, enfolding her in a starchy hug and stroking her hair as Miyoko cried, telling her that this kami-sama has plans for everyone and that her parents have gone somewhere wonderful and happy, and that they'll always be watching over her as she grows.
The nurse tells Miyoko that she is loved –even if she can't see it yet– and the best thing she can do for her parents now is grow up happy and healthy.
Miyoko believes her, in the same way a drowning victim will cling to a boat in a flood.
Love does not survive in the orphanage.
Love does not even make it past the doors.
All it is is hitting and hurting and fear, the bone-deep terror that sinks its teeth into Miyoko's brain and thrashes her mind like a terrier with a rat. Every moment, every breath, is teetering on a precipice of doom, and her nerves are constantly stretched wire-tight, twanging and prickling and jumping like electric currents.
She can't even relax in bed. The walls are thin, and she can hear the distant thumps and yelling deep in the bowels of the building –even when she cries, even when she wraps her sad excuse for a pillow around her ears. She can hear, and the terror that it might be her the next night and the sick giddiness that it's not her this night has her stomach in knots and bile rising in the back of her throat.
They are given paper and materials to learn. Miyoko would not say that they are taught, because teaching involves lessons and the only lessons here are how to avoid a beating. But they are given schoolwork and expected to complete it, and because the people here are from oversees part of the curriculum is something called catechism.
It's a strange, tricky foreign word, but Miyoko chants it over and over to herself ever since she saw Erika pronounce it wrong in class and get a ruler whipped across her face –on the flat side, thankfully, otherwise it would have cut her cheek to the bone.
But Miyoko does not want that to be her, and so she repeats the slippery syllables over and over again in private until her tongue can glide perfectly along them. She studies just as hard, hunching over her rickety wooden desk and scribbling out words on her papers with the feverish intensity borne of soul-deep fear.
See how hard I'm studying. Look how hard I'm working. Don't punish me! Don't punish me!
Some concepts slip through the haze of terror and the painful perfection of repeating lessons back to the orphanage staff. Kami-sama's proper English name is God, and she must shape the first letter differently than when she is talking about other kami because he is singular and important and all the other spirits she knew are not important at all, actually, by comparison. They are cheap imposters in paper masks compared to the-kami-with-a-capital God.
God is important, and God loves. Miyoko is told that frequently, but in as many words she and the other orphans are also told that they must earn God's love; that they were born defiled, as all humans were; that their parents dying is proof that their sins still needed cleansing.
They are told, in word and deed and endless experience, that suffering cleanses sin.
When Miyoko is old enough –smart enough– to try and run, and she finds herself lost and frightened, scratched and muddy, staggering through the rain, she prays to God.
She prays because it is what she has always known will attract the attention of the divine; the orphanage's lessons shape the formula of her prayer, they and the nurse tell her whom to address it to, and her desperation to return to the comparative paradise of her past life fuels it.
This isn't fair.
She didn't do anything to deserve this.
Miyoko understands that the orphanage directors say with bone-deep certainty that all humans are born in sin and from sin, but her parents never said that. Her classmates never said that. The nurse and the social workers and the doctors never said that. Nobody else ever said that.
And even if it was true, she had lived a happy life until the train accident! If she was cursed with sin, then the punishment should have followed her from the start!
To have known what it was to be happy and then live like this is a far worse punishment than having been born into this kind of life.
It isn't fair. It isn't fair!
Miyoko hurls her defiance to the heavens, filling her shout with the essence of her very soul.
If this was the life she was meant to live, then she doesn't want it. She won't have it. If suffering cleanses sin, then surely by now she has suffered enough to cleanse a hundred lifetimes.
If this is all she's ever meant for, then she won't continue this fate. She will accept a lightning bolt, be smote from the earth, and once dead, she will return to her parents in the paradise the nurse said waited for her.
But if the kami that is called God is capricious enough, fickle enough, to allow her fate to be changed, then Miyoko challenges it –him– right here and now.
She will not have this life. She rejects it with every inch of her soul. She will have her fate changed, now. Death or salvation –she accepts either into her heart with a fierce joy that makes her hair feel like it is standing on end, crackling along every inch of her skin.
But perhaps that is simply extra charge from the roaring bolt of fire that spears down out of the sky and destroys a stump a few meters away.
Miyoko's heart shakes in her chest as she watches the smoke rise from the charred wood, but inside, she feels a kind of euphoria. That could have been any tree in this forest, any smoking stump on the mountainside. But it is the one next to her. It is like a voice, speaking in her ear, that someone is watching.
The awe that fills and swells her spirit drains a little when Miyoko looks around and sees nothing. She shivers, suddenly recalling that she is cold and soaked to the skin –and then sees a little glint of light reflecting through the trees.
When she follows it, she finds a phone booth, which is dry and, comparatively, warm. She crawls inside and shuts the door, and then, with a piercing gleam of hope, sees the coin.
It is ten yen. Enough for a call, however short.
She can call for help
Miyoko clutches the coin until the edges dig into her palm, and thinks as she has never thought before.
This is it. God helps those that help themselves is a favorite saying at the orphanage, meant to make them work harder, and Miyoko knows that this is is her first and only opportunity. Anyone could have forgot a coin, lightning could have fallen anywhere –but they didn't. They happened at this time, in this place, and together they make a miracle that she cannot disbelieve.
This is God acknowledging her efforts, and giving Miyoko a chance to prove herself –to earn the salvation she feels trembling just beyond the tips of her fingers.
God helps those that help themselves. He has arranged for this, and now it is up to Miyoko to grasp her destiny in both hands and make something of it –to break free of her doomed fate.
She has to get this right.
Miyoko thinks of who she can call, who can believe her, and remembers a name.
Hifumi Takano.
She has one chance –one chance only to remember the numbers soundlessly garbled through blood in her father's mouth, one chance to dial those numbers one by one into the rotary, one chance to squeeze the receiver against her ear, shut her eyes, and pray that it is right, that Hifumi Takano will be there and hear her.
One chance to create a miracle.
"Hello?"
Paradise cannot even begin to compare to what life is like after her Grandpa adopts her. Miyoko wakes up every morning in her clean, soft, peaceful room, and cannot believe it all over again.
Grandpa is like her parents, in that he believes in religious matters in an easygoing, hodgepodge sort of way. Miyoko doesn't mind it. She will believe whatever he believes, because Grandpa can do no wrong in her eyes, and she is very young still. Her ability to form her own convictions is only just beginning, coalescing slowly out of everything she has learned and seen and been taught.
She believes in the divine, of course, even though Grandpa is a scientist and treats it with a certain amount of gentle skepticism. The miracle of the coin and the lightning is not so easily forgotten by her.
But as she listens to her Grandpa talk and works to help him organize his notes, Miyoko begins to wonder about things she has not been given the luxury to wonder about before. Kami are everywhere and in everything, so teaches her classmates, and yet Miyoko knows that they are real, when even she can tell that her friends think otherwise.
The budding young scientist who makes tea for her Grandpa and his guests and listens attentively as he talks through his theories begins to make theories of her own.
Kami are real. She knows this, irrefutably. But if divinity can be accrued, like with nekomata and other yokai, then what is divinity, truly? Is it simply a natural power? And if so, can that power be harnessed and understood, like electricity or magnetism?
But her fledgling theories and thoughts are far less important than her Grandpa's research, into which he pours so much. Miyoko puts her questions aside and works just as hard as he does, because he is her Grandpa who has given her so much.
He sometimes says that he doesn't mind if his research doesn't gain publicity until after he is dead. Miyoko doesn't understand, and then he explains the concept of Jesus Christ to her.
The catechism at the orphanage didn't go into much actual detail about kami-sama God-with-the-capital-letter, and so Grandpa explains it to her; that this Jesus died and was reborn after three days –reborn in people's hearts, where he would live forever– and that is why Grandpa does not mind if his research does not immediately bear fruit. As long as it is known someday, so too will he.
Miyoko is pleased with the idea of her grandfather living forever, immortalized by the wonder of his research.
She is excited to make it so.
Gods are decided by what is in people's hearts.
Then, what difference does it make, what authority do gods have, to toy with people's fates? Why, when they draw their very power from believers, are they so cruel as to constantly throw dice to decide those believers' destinies?
Miyo decided long ago, on that fateful night, that she would not allow her life, her destiny, her fate, to be decided in such a way. She swore it with such white-hot intensity that the heavens themselves answered her call, and she bent the world into the shape of a miracle –a faint, fragile, and fleeting one, a mere coincidence in so many words, but… a miracle, nonetheless.
And she learns from that, oh my, yes.
A heart that is indomitably focused on one goal will bend the very whims of fate to suit that goal. Gods may throw the dice to control fate, but an unshakable conviction is enough to shave a corner of those dice, bounce the table, jostle those plans.
For one reason or another –Miyo does not care which– she has reason to believe that gods cannot truly, actually, visibly act. They cannot send down floods of angels or hordes of locusts, as in tales. They cannot, she suspects, even truly manifest themselves in human sight. All they can do is twitch reality a little bit, shift and settle things so that, by mere happenstance and luck, in-potentia miracles are created.
That is fine. Gods belong in people's minds, anyway.
She has seen those dice in play, and she has seen how to break free of them. She has plans to; indeed, nebulous plans in her mind that go even further than that –vicious little thought-experiments that she indulges in as a faceless revenge fantasy.
…Miyo does not often think of the betrayal, not in so many words and actions. She uses the memory of the emotions instead –the sudden shock, the hot wave of tears and shame– to urge herself relentlessly onwards.
Success after success. Valedictorian, socialite, scientist; perfect grades, perfect manners, perfect beauty. She cannot, and does not, allow anything to shake her in the slightest. She will stand at the peak of the world, and look down on all those that mocked her beloved Grandpa. She will etch his name and his triumph into reality because it is not fair that anything else should occur.
The gods can throw whatever dice at her they like; she will overturn each and every one of them. Each challenge is surmounted gracefully, each victory tucked with commendably modesty under her belt. She studies the world around her and relentlessly applies herself to targeting, exposing, and using the vulnerabilities she notices.
Hinamizawa Syndrome will become known.
And on that day, Miyo Takano and her Grandpa will become gods in the minds of mankind.
10.36 AM, USA Central Time
