The Place You Called From
Time passed in a blink, and before I knew it, it was the deadline of the bet, August 31st.
It was pouring rain from early in the morning. Appropriately bad weather for my last day, I thought, looking out the window. The weather report said it would rain all over the country all day. The TV showed a crowd of people with umbrellas at a scramble crossing in the city, and read out the estimated rainfall in each area.
Hajikano and I gave up on going outside and spent the day lying in the room, gazing at the rain from the porch, and watching disaster reports on TV. The fact that it was the last day is exactly why we didn’t want to do anything special, just savor a meager but certain happiness.
In the evening, while listening to a record on a turntable found in the closet, Hajikano crept up and covered my back. Her hands came around to my chest, holding a fruit knife.
“Hey, Hinohara. I really enjoyed these ten days,” she said. “It was really like a dream. When I lied down at night and turned off the light, I kept thinking, "maybe this is a dream I’m having unconscious after my suicide attempt.” I was worried that the next time I woke up, I’d be in a hospital, all alone. …But when I woke up in the morning and opened the screen, you were always there. And I was so happy to know it wasn’t a dream, and that alone almost made me cry.“
Hajikano stopped there.
”…So please,“ she said pleadingly, putting the knife in my hand.
I refused it, and she pouted. "Mean.”
I took the knife from her hands and put it back in the kitchen. When I returned to the closet, Hajikano was lying down there.
She looked up at me and asked, “Do you not like seeing blood?”
“I’ll consider it.”
“That way, I’ll be able to feel your warmth to the end.”
“Greedy, huh.”
“That I am. You just realized?” She smiled.
This was when I finally noticed that the crying mole under her eye was gone. I got up close to her to look at her face and make sure it wasn’t a mistake.
So that mole wasn’t real after all. Hajikano had been seeking my help all along, with that distress signal she thought up in grade school.
“What’s wrong?”, Hajikano asked, blinking.
I hesitated for how to reply, but after a few breaths, only said “Nothing, it was just my imagination.” Now, I was Yuuya Hinohara. Talking about the crying mole would be bizarre. That was within Yosuke Fukamachi’s jurisdiction - and he would never appear before Hajikano ever again.
Looking at her at close range, Hajikano closed her eyes as if expecting something. I parted her bangs and lightly flicked her forehead. She opened her eyes and turned away with dissatisfaction. It was such a childish reaction, my face broke into a smile.
“What do you mean?”
She took a deep breath before answering.
“Last night, I finished reading my diary.”
I looked at her face dumbfounded. “…Why would you do that? Didn’t you decide to stop remembering?”
Chigusa sat at the edge of the water and looked up at me.
“May I have a cigarette?”
I took a pack from my pocket, pulled out the last one, and handed it to Chigusa. She put it in her mouth, and I held the lighter to her face. Chigusa coughed from the bitter taste and knit her brow.
“It really doesn’t taste good, does it.”
I stood next to Chigusa and gazed at her outfit once more. No mistaking it, she was the Chigusa Ogiue I knew. Her voice, her body, her scent, her behavior, it was all as I remembered it.
But it was also she who was the “woman on the phone,” who’d offered me a bet.
“Don’t talk too loud,” I said. “I don’t want to wake up Hajikano.”
“Not to worry, she will not wake until dawn,” Chigusa said with conviction.
“Yes, I’m aware,” she nodded. “What was she like?”
“I only saw her photo, but she was pretty.”
“Is that so. Hooray,” Chigusa raised her hands in delight.
I turned around again to make sure Hajikano wasn’t awake.
Then I got to the point.
“There’s one thing I don’t understand.”
“I mean it couldn’t be a happy ending.”
After an unnaturally long pause, Chigusa suddenly put her hands to her mouth and laughed.
“You’re so sharp, Fukamachi, and yet so slow where it’s most important.”
“What’s so funny?”, I asked, taking offense.
Chigusa took a deep breath to calm herself, and wiped tears of laughter from her cheek.
I couldn’t understand what Chigusa was saying at all.
She stood up tall, and made a ceremonious declaration.
“Congratulations, Fukamachi. You’ve won the bet.”
*
Like I explained before, The Mermaid of Agohama was like a mix of the legend of Yaobikuni told in Fukui, and Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. The story begins with a girl living in the little fishing village of Agohama eating the flesh of a mermaid her fisherman father caught without realizing what it was, and becoming immortal also without realizing it.
It was long, long ago.
For a few years after she ate the mermaid flesh, not a single person noticed the change to her body. It was very normal for growth to stop around her age, so even she never even thought that she had become immortal.
A decade later, everyone was astounded by her peculiar body. Compared to other girls her age, she was all too young-looking. White skin and glossy hair, just like a girl of fifteen or sixteen. And not only that. Ever since she ate the mermaid flesh, a difficult-to-describe charm radiated from the girl’s body, even seeming as if she glowed slightly. Naturally, the young men of the village became entranced by her.
But after several decades, as others her age had their hair turning gray, the fact that she still showed no sign of aging began to feel definitely strange to the people of the village. There had simply been too few changes to her. It couldn’t be dismissed as “liveliness” anymore. Was she really human?
Still more decades passed. By that time, most of the girl’s friends had died. And though that much time had gone by, her body still showed no sign of age. She stood at the deaths of innumerable people, her heart worn down each time. When her last friend died, the girl decided to leave the village she was born in.
She girl became a Buddhist priestess, and went around the country in pursuit of death. In her long journey, she acquired Buddhist powers, and came to use them to heal the sick and give help to the poor. But she never found a means to be freed from her eternal life. As overwhelmingly many days went by, she became unable to even remember her own name. And by the time she forgot her reason for traveling, by coincidence, she arrived in her hometown.
…Up to this point, you’d be right to say there’s no real difference between The Mermaid of Agohama and Yaobikuni. To get more exact, the legend of Yaobikuni also existed in places besides Fukui. Depending on the region, the protagonist could be a rich man’s daughter, or given the mermaid flesh by a mysterious man, but they all shared the point of an immortal girl becoming a Buddhist priestess, wandering the country, and arriving back home.
The legend of Yaobikuni ends with the girl finally dying after arriving home. But in The Mermaid of Agohama, this is where the story truly begins. Back in her home fishing village after centuries, exhausted from a life full of others’ death, the girl cut off communication with people and decided to live in the sea. Yet when she saw people in trouble, she couldn’t help extending a hand, so as she brought people from shipwrecks to shore and saved people from drowning, she came to be worshipped in the village as a god of the sea.
One night, the girl saved a young fisherman drowning in a storm. The fisherman was hardly conscious, but he thanked the girl and tightly grabbed her hand. With this incident, she fell in love with the fisherman many centuries younger than her. Every time he went fishing, her heart beat fast. At those moments, she really was a girl of sixteen again.
One day, a few years later, a young mermaid came to the girl. The mermaid said she sought the aid of her powers. The girl listened, and found that the mermaid had fallen in love with a human man. She said she would make any sacrifice to become a human and live with the man. Thinking of the young fisherman, the girl sympathized with the mermaid’s plight, and turned her tail into human legs. Not knowing that the man the mermaid loved and the young fisherman she loved were one and the same.
As they parted, the mermaid said: “What am I thinking, falling in love with a fisherman of all things? Even though my mother was killed by a fisherman…” The girl had a thought. What if, perhaps, her “mother killed by a fisherman” was that mermaid my father caught? Was it her mother’s flesh I ate back then?
When she found out the mermaid’s love was for that young fisherman, the girl regretted her actions. But she couldn’t interfere with the course of the mermaid’s love. I ate her mother’s flesh, so I have a duty to advocate for her happiness. That’s the least I can do to atone.
And so the young fisherman and the mermaid were wedded. The two had a happy life. It seemed as if there wasn’t any room for displeasure. But there was an ironic twist of fate. One day, the mermaid couldn’t bear not to tell her husband everything about her, and revealed that she had once been a mermaid, not a human. This set the tragedy into motion. The fisherman had lost both his parents in a storm when he was young, and it was believed in the village at the time that storms were caused by the singing of mermaids. As a result, he had a deep hatred of mermaids.
Upon learning that his wife was a mermaid, the fisherman despaired and threw himself into the raging sea. The mermaid jumped in to save him, but having lost her tail, she didn’t even have the strength to carry him and swim. By the time the immortal girl came rushing over, they had long since drowned. The girl grieved, and decided to live alone at the bottom of the sea.
That was the gist of The Mermaid of Agohama.
But Chigusa made an addition.
“Then a few centuries passed, and while leaving the sea again after quite some time, the girl saved a drowning boy. The boy who felt somehow similar to that young fisherman, having some kind of thought, visited the beach near-daily afterward, and he began to weigh on the girl’s heart. The boy came to love a certain girl, but feeling that he wasn’t a suitable partner for her, seemed to keep those feelings in his chest. I want to help him, the girl thought. This time, I’ll make it work. No mistakes like back then. I would make this boy’s love succeed in the best possible way.”
*
“I win?”
Chigusa nodded.
“Yes, that’s right. You have surmounted many forms of adversity, marvelously ending up with a mutual love with Hajikano. Though it seems you haven’t realized it yourself.”
“What do you mean?”, I said, my voice unconsciously raising. “That can’t be right, can it? I mean, Hajikano…”
Chigusa interrupted. “Hajikano is not as slow as you think. She had long since seen that you were Yosuke Fukamachi assuming the name of Yuuya Hinohara.”
I was too shocked to speak.
“Your long conversation earlier was a roundabout confession. She told you to your face that she had always loved you, and now loved you even more.” Chigusa shrugged. “Did you really not notice that?”
My legs buckled and I collapsed on the spot. Chigusa chuckled at my reaction.
“It was convenient for her as well to remain fooled. She hesitated to admit her affection to Fukamachi, but if it were "Yosuke Fukamachi as Yuuya Hinohara,” she could share her feelings without it weighing on her.“
I ran through my interactions with Hajikano in the past few days in my head.
That time… and that time… that that time…
Hajikano knew who I really was, and still accepted my affection?
I lied down face-up and put a hand over my face. "I was a fool.”
“That’s correct.”
I pulled my hand away. “So then why did you take such roundabout actions? If you just wanted to make my love succeed, was there any point to removing my birthmark, any point to appearing before me as Chigusa Ogiue?”
“I wanted the two of you to experience every kind of hardship. Taking away your birthmark, your ultimate weapon which earned you Hajikano’s sympathy; borrowing the appearance of Chigusa Ogiue to shake your feelings; creating a situation where there was no salvation except by killing Hajikano - I wanted to have it proven that you could both overcome it all.”
“…I get it,” I said. “Come to think of it, that letter you sent mentioned "a way for both of us to survive.” Was that a trap?“
"Yes. Hajikano saw who you really were because you were constantly attending to her for ten days. If you had followed the letter and chosen to search for "the woman on the phone,” you would have very little time together, and it would have likely been impossible for her to realize who you really were by today.“
I was starting to accept it, but then a new doubt appeared. "But, that one time, you linked the calls to make an opportunity for me and Hajikano to talk, right? What was that about? Just on a whim?”
Chigusa scratched her cheek with a troubled look. “That was completely outside of my expectations. I did not imagine you would try to burn your face. I mean, there would have been no purpose to it. I was stunned, but at the same time, I rather admired it. I saw you really would go that far for Hajikano. In deference to that recklessness, I allowed you to talk on the phone for just ten minutes. …By the way, do you have an ashtray?”
“Nope. Put it in here.”
I offered her the empty pack. She grinned, put the cigarette butt in her hand, then held it up to me. A moment later, the cigarette butt had turned into a white camellia. Unlike my magic tricks, there was probably no secret to this one. She handed me the flower with a cocky look. I held it to my nose; it had a faint sweet smell.
“Kind of a pity about Hinohara,” I said, looking at the flower. “He seemed pretty fond of Ogiue.”
“Is that a fact?” Chigusa put her hands together and her eyes widened. “But not to worry. By dawn, there won’t be anyone left who remembers me.”
“And I’m no exception?”
“Really. I guess I can keep staying here.”
“Until when?”
“Yes, always.”
“You’re not lying?”
And I carried out the “final job” Chigusa had taught me.