Period 2______14-15 years old

Mission 1

The world within the square container was being completed. During this nice summer break in which he didn’t have to go to school, he clung to and observed the ant farm every day for many hours without ever getting bored of it.

Watching the ants all the time is interesting, isn’t it?

A faceless woman bluntly asked that unpleasant question.

I’m not watching the ants. Idiots shouldn’t say random things.

When he said that without turning around, the faceless woman didn’t say anything anymore, but from that day on he didn’t clean the vicinity of the ant farm anymore. The faceless woman was faceless because she was merely not impressive.

The ant farm’s residents didn’t have a plan and with seemingly meaningless work force they extended their path a bit every day. That path branched without principle, twisted and turned and crossed itself somewhere again so that all was repeated. It seemed like they dug their tunnels randomly, but because the residents didn’t get lost he thought there was surely some kind of system in that world only those who belong to it knew about. At least a system flawlessly completed and unbroken in this closed world. He thought that was an absolutely beautiful thing.

Fushimi-kun, how come you couldn’t bring your independent research project with you?

Huh……?

Why was it again that I couldn’t turn in my observation notebook that I had carefully written every day…..? Something had been in the way….

Gyahahaha, Saruhiko~ did you end up dreaming about this just now?

—cling.

Fushimi could hear the clear sound over his head which washed away the dark memories that had invaded his dreams.

Cling, chimed the refreshing sound. Although the air that came was hot and humid. The air uncomfortably brushed against his hair that stuck to his forehead due to the sweat.

“Mom. Mom!”

The characteristic voice of a child yelling near him spurred the stuffiness and Fushimi frowned, opening his eyes slightly.

“Mom, hey, mom!”

Hot…. Noisy…. With a low groan he wiped off his forehead. He had leaned his head against the frame of the window facing the veranda and had dozed off. Cling, resounded the wind chime over the window.

He looked towards the middle of the room and called out to Yata who was sitting cross-legged on a low table. “You done?”

“Hm, mm, no” mumbled Yata who had stuck his pen between his nose and upper lip while he fanned himself. He was seriously struggling with the math problem in front of him and when Fushimi stretched his neck he saw that Yata hadn’t gotten one question done since the first time Fushimi had checked on him.

“How long are you going to make me wait…” grumbled Fushimi, fed up and leaned his head against the window frame once again.

On the veranda hung the laundry of the five persons family tightly crammed on the clothesline which blocked the sunlight from directly falling into the indoors. But the heat around the window was so high the tatami mats could burn up. Fushimi found it hard to forgive that the window was open in the middle of a hot summer day. Why is only the electric fan on even though they have an air conditioner? On the front side of the electric fan swayed a plastic cord that had been tied to it. The air won’t spread any better with that there, so what’s up with that plastic cord? He didn’t get it at all.

“Mom, hey moooom, Hercules won’t move! Hey moooom!”

Yata’s younger brother Minoru, who was going to be seven soon, lay flat on the tatami mats and yelled again in a whiny voice. In front of Minoru was a plastic insect cage.

“That’s not a Hercules beetle.” The annoyance made Fushimi’s patience run out and he said what he had wanted to point out since earlier.

“Eh?!” Minoru’s expression changed and his body rose abruptly from the floor. “That’s a Hercules beetle! Dad said it’s a Hercules beetle! It’s Hercules!”

‘Hercules, Hercules’ how annoying.

“A Hercules beetle is…”

Fushimi swiftly worked his PDA with one hand. When he looked it up there immediately appeared countless pictures of the rhinoceros beetle with its shining yellow-green body and the great horn attached to it.

“…this one.”

When he showed him the screen, Minoru leaned forward and stared at it intently. He then took the insect cage with both his hands and gazed at the inside of the clear plastic case and gradually his expression turned aghast. The insect that was clinging to the bottom of the case was all in all five centimeters long and just a normal beetle. I didn’t cling to the branch they had put in together and wasn’t moving much at all.

“Moooooooom!” Holding the insect cage Minoru dashed to the kitchen. “Moooom, moooom, moooom! This isn’t Hercules!”

“Minoru! I told you before, you can’t cling to me when I’m handling the fire!”

Minoru started to cry with a monstrous voice when he got scolded by his mother. “But, but! Saru said this isn’t a Hercules beetle!”

“Dad said it’s a Hercules beetle, isn’t that enough?”

“But Saru knows much more than dad! Saru doesn’t lie! Dad lied to me!”

Why are you deciding by yourself that I don’t lie. I do lie.

Somehow an unpleasant feeling emerged in Fushimi and he clicked his tongue, turning his face to the window. Even though he had just corrected a mistake, he was annoyed by his own behavior without knowing why.

“……I’ll go buy something to drink,” he told Yata and as he stood up he could hear the mother’s voice from the kitchen, drowning out the little brother’s whining.

“Saruhiko-kun, we have barley tea here if you want?”

That she had caught what he had mumbled in this tumult truly proved her frightfully keen hearing.

“It’s okay. I’d rather have something with carbonic acid so I’ll go buy some.”

“Bam!”

Something with a squeaky voice came rushing at Fushimi from behind him. It hit him in the knee back the moment he stood up and brought him down facilely.

“Uwah- d.a.m.n brat…”

Grimacing in humiliation Fushimi turned around on all fours when the two-year old Megumi yelled another “Bam!” with her squeaky voice before she clashed with the post of the alcove (1), fell on her b.u.t.t and started to seemingly randomly laugh. In the kitchen the younger brother yelled “Hercules, Hercules” over and over while stomping on the floor in frustration though there had to be other tenants living under them in the house (2). By the window the wind chime was ringing with every swing. The younger sister had resumed her “Bam!”-game and ran around the small living room, crashing with the walls and the post.At the table was Yata struggling with the math exercise and with an expression that he wasn’t only tormented by math but by all life and his shoulders started to tremble.

“Ahhhh! So noisy!” Yata flipped the low table over. “I can’t concentrate! Minoru! Megumi! Can’t you two shut up for a minute?!”

And one more angry voice came from the kitchen, slightly excelling the whiny voices of the younger siblings: “Misaki! You’re the loudest one!”

                                                      †

When Yata hadn’t made any progress they decided to go to the library upon his suggestion.

“…geez. Why did we have to leave; we’re trying to prepare for our entrance exams. Kids should play outside anyway.”

It was late into August and they ended up going outside during a time where the sunshine was harsher than the lingering heat of an early afternoon. The thirty minute walk from the Yatas’ house to the neighborhood’s library felt like torture, worse than being in the desert, wishing for an oasis.

“A minute pa.s.sed. Give me the fan.”

“Ah, already? Here.”

When Fushimi reached out after checking the time, Yata handed the fan he had used for himself (which had been randomly lying around in the living room with a shop’s name written on it) over.

“Ahh, it really sucks to not have a bicycle. And I can’t think of a new suitable vehicle.”

In early spring this year Yata’s bicycle that had always been standing in a thicket next to the school gate had vanished. They didn’t know if it had been stolen, or if it had been spotted and thus removed. Whichever it was, commuting to school by bicycle was against the regulations anyway so he had not been able to properly search for the culprit and he had ended up never finding his bike.

“Looks like my bike already graduated. Another vehicle would be good.”

“Like a motorbike? Though you can’t get your license yet.”

“It just was my birthday so one more year and I can get one.”

“Ah, an ice cream vending machine. Let’s buy some.”

“You really love ice cream, huh? You’ll spoil your stomach, y"know?”

“I decided until summer ends I’ll live on ice cream and carbonic acid.”

“You won’t live long like that. Eat some other stuff, too.”

“Well then, if I don’t live any longer than this then it shall be so.”

“No, no, you need to live. If you die as a student right before his exams you won’t ever have gotten to enjoy life. Ah, one minute pa.s.sed. Fan.”

While walking under the blazing sun they talked about their idle complaints.

Entrance exams, middle school seniors, summer break ending soon.

“Ah-ha, entrance exams, huh. ’s kinda fast.”

Yata complained as if he had already gotten tired of studying for the exams even though he hadn’t even started yet.

“Hmm, yeah.”

Fushimi also thought Yata was being nostalgic because his little sister who had been a baby had grown up and now ran around and talked with her squeaky voice.

“Saruhiko, for you it’s fine because you can go to any school you want, but even though I try my best I won’t be able to go to a decent school.”

“Misaki, you have a lot of energy so if you start cramming one week before you might still make it.”

“I told you to not call me by my first name outdoors, Saruhiko!”

“……” You really have such a contradicting unawareness of yourself, huh. “Isn’t it okay if you just don’t go to school, if you can’t go to a somewhat decent one, I mean. What they teach in school is pointless anyway. One minute.”

Fushimi spat that out both because he was a bit irritated and because of the unbearable heat and he seized the fan before the minute was over. He had tried to be harsh but

“Ah, yeah. You’re right, kinda.”

Yata replied in a bright voice as if he had just remembered something.

“I thought about moving out after graduating from middle school. Minoru is already in elementary school and Megumi is quickly growing up and with five people in that house it’s just way too crowded. So I thought if I want to live somewhere then in Shizume City. There are a lot of realtors there and even underground rooms and if my parents don’t agree I’ll find some place where I can borrow the money. And also…”

Now Yata was about to talk about the core of his idea so he let his eyes sparkle and got closer to Fushimi. Like this he could benefit from the air produced by the fan that brushed against him and he continued to speak.

“Couldn’t we rent a room together? Let’s make it our secret headquarters.”

Fushimi unintentionally stopped the hand that held the fan and blinked.

“……You’re asking me because you can’t pay it by yourself, right?” he said with his eyes half closed.

“Tahaha, you figured it out right away, huh” confirmed Yata lightly with an embarra.s.sed grin. 

“After graduation I’ll work part-time so of course I’ll pay half of it without fail. If I don’t pay you can go ahead and kick me out. That is of course, if you want to live together. I’ll also take care of cooking and cleaning. You won’t have to do anything at all.”

Yata listed those things as if to explain himself and after that his expression suddenly turned serious and he gazed at Fushimi with upturned eyes. His voice became low, a complete change from his usual joking, bright voice.

“Saruhiko. You don’t go to your home for who knows how many days in a month and instead spend the nights in an internet cafe. You only go home when there’s n.o.body else, and if there’s somebody you don’t go home….you don’t need a home like that.”

Fushimi drew back his head a bit, returned Yata’s look and for a moment he was at a loss of words.

Yata usually lacked sensitivity, but strangely enough he had his moments when he precisely understood things. He concluded things through his own values and then pushed forward which usually made him miss his target and that annoyed Fushimi, but if you thought about it like this then sometimes it happened that through a fluke Yata hit the highest point of the target.

0 points or 100 points, that was the kind of person Yata was.

Right now it was good. 100 points.

Fushimi relaxed and let out a faint breath. His expression softened naturally.

“……maybe I’ll play jcube again. If I collect rare cards and sell them on black market auctions, I could make enough money to cover the rent.”

Yata had waited for an answer with a meek expression and got excited again.

“You can make money like that? You really are amazing!”

“Because I don’t want to do some job where I have to move around. And I want at least a cooler and a bath room included.”

“I’d love a place with a rooftop. We’d make it into a heliport and organize sorties with fighter jets. A secret headquarters has to be like that, right!”

“I’d rather have a cellar. We could build a cistern underground and research cosmic rays. Facilities like that are really totally cool, y"know.”

“We can build a rocket to reach the cosmos under the ground!? If we’re underground then we could suck out the water from the sewer and connect it through a tunnel with our headquarters, right?”

“Not a rocket, cosmic rays. Atomic nucleus.”

“Ah, you mean an atom s.p.a.ceship?” (3)

“…Sure, whatever.”

It felt like they had always had conversations like this since the first year of middle school without ever getting tired of it. Fushimi didn’t want to go back home and he didn’t see the meaning of school either. Talking forever like this about trivial things while going on without a destination was the best. Although with the conditions like this, in the standing heat and with their PDA power running down he knew they couldn’t continue to run away. After all they were on the way to the library, where an air conditioner and power sockets were, and they walked the path connected to that real place while the heated asphalt burned their shoe soles.

                                                      †

Yata hardly advanced in his studies but they stayed in the library until its closing hours to cool off there and after that they settled for fast food as a suitable dinner and Fushimi came home late in the evening. Even in the twilight he could make out the form of a foreign car with its hazard light blinking in front of the house. Because the huge house had neither a gate or a garden and was connected directly to the busy main street, the wide foreign car had to stand sideways right in front of the front door, thus taking up at least half of one lane which was probably a pain for any car pa.s.sing it from behind. But the car was parked as if it had the natural right to do so and an intimidating, imposing air surrounded it.

Fushimi edged through the narrow gap between the car and the house’s wall and finally made it to the front door. When he stepped into the entrance hall the air conditioner inside the house seemed to be overworking. He could see a woman wearing a gorgeous evening dress walking down the stairs in the front.

“Yes, this evening I have to take care of something else no matter what so I’m sorry I couldn’t visit you. Please convey my congratulations to your wife. I have arranged for flowers to be sent to her.”

She talked on her PDA with a professional voice and after ending the conversation she turned to a man in a dark suit who had been following her. When she turned to him her voice did a total change and became lower and sharp as a knife.

“I will go to Director Oogawa’s place tomorrow personally. You only go to the morning meeting. And arrange for me tickets for 10 am, please.”

“Yes, ma"am.”

The woman noticed Fushimi looking up from the end of the stairs. As soon as she saw his face, she frowned in a displeased way.

“Are you always this late?”

What right had a person who was usually never there to say something like that. He wanted to go to his own room but because the woman was in the way Fushimi kept quiet and turned to the direction of the dining room in the first floor.

“Hey,” called the woman out from the landing. “It’s about Niki. It’d be better to tell you for now, since he’s your father.”

His body reacted by the mention of that name with a twitch.

If the relationship between that woman and Fushimi was to be explained in the easiest way, then it would be like this: they ignored their own direct relationship and referred to each other through their relationship with that man. For this woman, Fushimi Kisa, Fushimi Saruhiko was “Niki’s son” and Fushimi Niki was “Your father”. For Fushimi Saruhiko Fushimi Kisa was “That guy’s wife” and Fushimi Niki was “Your husband”.

The woman made an eye signal and the man in the dark suit bowed slightly and started to walk out. After the man had pa.s.sed by Fushimi and left for the car, the woman continued to talk.

“It seems he was hospitalized. I also just heard of it the day before yesterday.”

“Hospitalized? Why?” asked Fushimi in return, carelessly reacting in a normal way.

If he thought about how the peaceful days had gone on in this summer break unlike in other breaks, he realized he hadn’t seen that guy’s face even once since the start of August. The woman let him know that that guy had diseases of his inner organs because he had been neglecting his health. Fushimi thought it would have been nice if that guy had been stabbed to death on a street somewhere. But, a disease……he couldn’t imagine it and felt kind of let-down. That guy probably hadn’t even reached his mid-thirties. He had lived a worthless life so that being in the hospital due to neglecting his health fit just well.

“Nishida-san told me which hospital it is, so how about you go and visit him? Genetically speaking he is your father.”

Saying it like that, then the woman was mitochondria-lly speaking Fushimi’s mother. She was the type to dress in a gorgeous evening dress and appear like that to a party, to which she was leaving now, although she looked like she was on her way to a business party rather than to an acquaintance’s wife’s birthday party. He thought it had been about a week since they had last seen each other, but that was all she said to him. Fushimi changed his direction from the dining room away and ascended the stairs to the second floor. He walked on the far left because it felt like that woman’s vigor was still lingering in the middle of the stairs.

Hospitalized…he wondered if that guy would get well. Needless to say that he hoped for a disease that wouldn’t cure. It’d be good if that guy would never leave that sickroom again. Fushimi of course didn’t feel the duty to visit him there. For a moment he thought it might be good to go there and laugh at that guy who was wearing clothes lent by the hospital, stuck in a bed surrounded by old people but when he imagined it in his mind Fushimi suddenly only got furious and didn’t find it funny at all.

For Fushimi “Your husband” that is Fushimi Niki, was ingenuous and insensitive and full with malice he was aware of and malice he wasn’t aware of and he was one of the four things at a time. There had been that moment in front of the newborn room in the gynecology. One doesn’t have to speak of the whole thing, but the moment that guy had seen the newborn behind the gla.s.s window he had yelled his impression in front of all the other mothers and nurses without any scruples: “Uwah, Looks like a monkey. Disgusting!” “Well then, let’s name him like that”, had Fushimi Kisa replied and they settled it on the spot. They had been nineteen at that time. They hadn’t even been full grown-ups.

He knew why he had felt so awful when he had told Yata’s younger brother the truth about the Heracules beetle. It wasn’t like what he had done had been similar to that guy. That guy had only malice in him and in contrast Fushimi did things to 99% with good intentions. If he had left Minoru’s correct world be it would have been good, but even so he had destroyed it and that was just a bit like that guy. Fushimi didn’t want to be forced to be aware of the 1 milligram of him that was similar to that guy.

He had been in elementary school when he had decided to observe an ant farm for his independent research project during summer break. Following his ingrained daily routine for the summer break in that year, the first thing the six year old Fushimi had done after waking up in the morning was to go to the water tank still dressed in his pajamas—- and he had let out a scream. He immediately knew it had been that guy’s mischief. The world he thought to have “a beautiful system” had been crushed to pieces overnight. While he cried the ant farm and his observation notebook burned down instantly. What that guy had done was pour gasoline on the ant farm and throw several big c.o.c.kroaches on the completely destroyed ants.

————-

I translated it as alcove, but actually a 床の間 (tokonoma) is meant.

In the j.a.panese original it mentions that they live in a 社宅 (shataku), a company residence. A house owned by a company in which the employees can live in with their families. It often has the advantage of not having to pay any rent.

Fushimi says 宇宙線 (uchûsen; “cosmic ray”) but Yata misunderstands it as宇宙船 (uchûsen; “s.p.a.cecraft”) since they are both p.r.o.nounced the same. Obviously it didn’t translate well.