Volume 1 - CH 1.2

To explain the said serious reason, I retold what happened when I was three. At the time when my fragile child mentality was twisted beyond repair, like when a heated glass cooled before it could take its designated shape.

The reason was my father—Saegusa Ryuunosuke.

Dad was a novelist. With his characteristic writing and unparalleled sensitivity, he was praised for his astounding storyline. 

He was a brazzen writer who used Ryunosuke Akutagawa as his pen name, the same as the great writer from the Taisho period. His arrogant and irreverent personality was once again exuding when he named his son Yakumo.

[TN: Not sure about Yakumo one, some classical figure, perhaps?]

One day, the two of us were strolling along the Abukuma River at dusk.

“Dad, why do you have only one eye?” The three-year-old me asked.

Dad stroked his stubble and chuckled wickedly. “It’s a pain to deal with, so I plucked it out. Ripp”

“What happened to the eye…?” I asked fearfully, not sure whether I wanted to hear the answer or not.

“I ate it myself”

Horrified, I shouted, “You’re lying!”

He turned around, walked up to me, and crouched to my eye level. “It’s true, my son.”

He yanked the black eyepatch back.

The blood-red evening sun illuminated everything, except for the gaping hole. It felt as if the murmuring stream of Abukuma River and the light glittering on its surface had been sucked into the darkness, never to return. 

That was the moment my mentality got twisted to an irreparable extent.

I began to feel pain. Pain from the darkness of the missing eyeball.

The “absence” of the right eye “hurted”—

It wasn’t the wound that hurted, but the concept of the absence of what ought to be there– in other words, “blank space”– brought me pain. For example, when the tail of my Godzilla toy broke off, the pain of this “blank space” drove me to tears.

A few months later, I fell down the stairs of the apartment building. For a while, I cowered on the stair landing. Eventually, I got up, fighting the intensifying pain, and made it to my room on the third floor. I crawled to the bathroom. When I looked into the bathroom mirror, I saw my left temple splitting open, and blood trickling slowly. 

I wiped the blood off and saw white underneath.

However, I remained calm. Gingerly, I fingered the wound and prodded the peeled skin back to its original place. 

When I finished aligning, I thought, the “blank space” was no more.

It didn’t hurt any more.

I wrapped the bandages around my head several times, and started watching TV cartoons, relieved. My temples throbbed, but it was distant, like someone else’s pain.

Eventually, Mom came back and screamed. She cried, fussing at my wound. I couldn’t quite figure out why she cried, but she was crying, so I cried too.

And our position reversed when Mom was diagnosed with Chloride Blight.

From her missing limbs, I felt intense pain

“It hurts, doesn’t it…Mom, it must have hurted…” I had said.

And Mom, not understanding my pain, cried because I had cried. 

“It doesn’t… No, it doesn’t…” She said while hugging me with her nonexistent arms.

In easier words, I had a worse kind of phantom limb pain. It was, afterall, the pain, the “blank space” of things around me that I had taken on, resulting in an invisible, untenable wound.

Eventually, I found a special bandage for this special wound. That was, to gather objects to fill the blank. I could be anything, a tree branch, a clean rock, a blade of grass. The important thing was to wish. Wishing that the object assembled would fill in the wound. Wishing that it will chase the pain away.

That put me on my hunt for objects to fill in the blank space of Mom’s limbs. 

At first, I walked around the classroom. I had thought about the big triangular ruler that the teacher uses to write on the blackboard. But no, that would make Mom look like a Gundam. 

What about the chalk? The pencil case someone left behind?

That was when I noticed the cherry blossoms in full bloom.

Up against the crisp blue of the spring sky, the flame of the cherry blossoms was eye-watering. The wind blew, it was like embers spewing from a great bonfire. I looked up to the trees, and turned my eyes to my feet. The petals that fell in the shade of the trees were like dots of wildfire in distant, silhouetted mountains. When I took one of them up, it was actually cool and cold. Although I felt an imaginary heat seeping out instead.

I had a feeling that these petals would fill in the blank space for Mom. I felt as if they would join the wind and become her new limbs. They seemed to melt the bitter pain for me.

So I collected the cherry petals. Petal by petal, I collected the cherry blossoms. Wishing that it would heal mom, I continued walking and collecting.

４

I sat on the desk right next to the piano and stared at my cupped hands for a long time, feeling the childish shame of saying too much.

When I finished, I finally looked up. The girl had covered her face. For a moment, I thought I saw something shining on her cheek. Was she crying?

But before I could get a better look, she immediately rubbed her face and looked straight at me. Her eyes seemed to be a little red, but in the end I could not tell if she had actually shed tears or not.

“You’re… strange. Feeling pain from blank space is the weirdest, your sensibilities are also bizarre. Who describes cherry blossoms as flames?”

When she called me strange, I felt my body heating up. I was at an age when being different from the norm was embarrassing at that time.

“But I understand,” upon my reaction, the girl quickly added, “My mom said that when expressing a passionate flower—a bright red rose or a bougainvillea, for example–on the piano, play it with a blaze. So what I was saying is that you have a keener sense than most. Like how I have the perfect pitch”

[TN: Perfect pitch, is a rare ability of a person to identify or re-create a given musical note without the benefit of a reference tone]

“You have the perfect pitch?”

I got up and went to the guitars on the opposite side of the wall and played the few notes I knew.

“Do you know what this note is?”

The girl smiled.

“A ‘la’. Maybe a little bit closer to ‘sol♯’. Hmm, my senses are usually a little fuzzy around the ‘la’”

“Wow, that’s impressive enough!”

“So, what do you think of my performance?”

“Very good,” I answered immediately.

“No, I want it in your weird description. So, what do you think?”

I sat back for a while. Her eyes were so captivating that it took longer than necessary.

“The pain went away from me. Each note was so beautiful and seemed to be in its proper place. It was as if it was destined to happen from the beginning… what’s the word?”

“Fate?” she prompted.

“That. it was as if fate was ringing in my ears.”

“As if fate was ringing in your ears…” She looked surprised, like when something rolled to her feet in darkness, and she was probing to find out what it was.

Suddenly, like a flower blooming, the girl smiled.

Then, a little embarrassed at the late introduction, “I’m Yuzuki Igarashi. ‘Yu’ from swaying, and ‘Zuki’ from moon; wavering moon. You?”

[TN: For those wondering what that means, check out this Quora]

“Saegusa Yakumo. Eight’s ‘Ya’ and clouds for ‘Kumo’… What’s the song you played?”

“Frédéric Chopin, ‘Farewell’”

That was my first encounter with Yuzuki.