Volume 1 - CH 1.3

After leaving the coffee shop, Kei instructed Haruki to find the bread bakery where the cat had been found. He figured that while she wasn’t much for striking up conversations, she also wasn’t so shy that she would run into problems asking around for the location.

After seeing her off, Kei headed for a pay phone in the corner of the shopping district. It was easy to miss, since it had no booth, so he preferred it for privacy. Picking up the receiver, he inserted a coin and dialed a number from memory.

Before long, he heard a voice.

“The number you have dialed is no longer in service. Please check the number, and—”

Kei hung up the phone and re-inserted the coin that rolled out, dialing the same number.

“The number you have dialed is no longer in service.”

He repeated the process over and over again.

“The number you have dialed i—” “in service. Please che—” “and try again. The num—” “dialed is no—” “check the number, and try again.”

The woman’s voice continued to chide him.

Kei repeated the movements again from muscle memory.

“The number you have dialed, is no longer—”

Finally, Kei heard a discrepancy. Despite having the same robotic tone, the timing of its sentences changed.

“in service—”

Kei spoke quickly.

“Asai here. I have to ask you something.”

“Please check the number, and—” the voice was overlapped by three short, electronic sounds. Beep, boop, bop.

“and try again— It’s been a while, Kei.”

The robotic voice responded. Kei let out a small sigh, though he made sure it wouldn’t be heard on the other end.

“Can we quit it with this whole process already, please?”

The process aside, Kei wanted to stop talking with a disembodied voice. Although he was more or less used to it now, he never enjoyed the feeling.

“Absolutely not. What if my identity was discovered through my voice?”

Would that really make a difference? It’s not like you’re in the business of making friends.”

“What, so I’m just some friendless loser to you? That hurts, I’ll have you know.”

In all honesty, Kei doubted that The Operator had anything along the line of close acquaintances, let alone friends. But then, the only times they met were through occasional chats on the phone, so for all Kei knew, they could have hundreds of friends.

“So, you do have friends?”

“Of course. You and Tsushima-san, for example.”

“Seems like I’ll have to call again later to set that straight.”

“How rude! To think you would say that to someone as friendly as me.”

Even joking around with that voice made Kei feel unsettled..

Kei had no idea who was on the other end of the phone. Not their face, name, or even their gender. All he knew was that Tsushima had started calling them “The Operator1” for convenience. What mattered was that this guy, or perhaps girl, was very good at gathering information, and was always willing to share it… if the price was right.

“Moving on, I understand you’re looking for a cat today?”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

He2 had probably already grilled Tsushima about it. The Operator was a big fan of digging around where nobody asked him to. Perhaps he had been a puppeteer in his past life, given how much he enjoyed pulling strings3.

“I can introduce you to the residential cat expert. In exchange, I’ll need three sets of both T-shirts and bedsheets, all pure white.”

“Just ask Tsushima-sensei for whatever you want later.”

“Hasn’t Tsushima been getting on your case about that recently?”

“Okay, okay, T-shirts and bedsheets, got it.”

Kei would deal with the billing himself later.

“Good. Transaction approved.”

With just that, Kei’s bank account would be debited for the cost of the items. The Operator had connections with the Bureau, so Kei didn’t have to give his PIN. Kei tried not to think about the implications of that too hard, opting to push the conversation forward.

“So, who’s this cat expert you were talking about?”

“Nonō Seika. She’s your age and in the same grade, but attends a different school. Her ability allows information transfer, much like you. Her ability is limited to cats, though. I doubt anyone else in Sakurada knows and loves cats more than her.”

This girl sounded incredibly convenient, whoever she was.

“Where do I have to go to find her?”

“Hmm, on a weekend, she’ll most likely be at Kamisaki Shrine. Lots of cats like to gather there and nap.”

Kamisaki Shrine was incidentally where Kei had just promised he’d take Haruki for the festival tonight.

The Operator continued with an amused lilt.

“Any more services I can provide you with?”

“I want everything you have on her.”

“More than happy to help out a friend. Nonō-san attends Ooyama High, and spends all her free time at the shrine. She’s known to skip class fairly often, but she’s smart enough about it that she won’t be held back a grade. Also, due to the people she knew growing up, she doesn’t talk much like other girls her age. She never bothered bridging the communication gap, so her relationships with her peers are rather strained.

“An interesting detail. I’ll keep that in mind.”

“I could tell you where she lives, but we don’t want to break the law, now do we?”

That knowledge would likely cause more problems than it would solve. Just knowing where she went to school gave Kei plenty of wiggle room.

“I don’t think that’s necessary. Thank you for your help.”

“Mhm. Oh, and Kei, just one more thing for the road.”

“What’s that?”

“Do you know what a MacGuffin is?”

A MacGuffin? It was certainly familiar. Just two weeks ago, Tsushima had used him to send the message, ‘The MacGuffin is going to be stolen.’ He couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

“Tsushima-sensei seems more informed than me on that.”

“Well, that’s inconvenient. The thing is, I was specifically told not to ask you about it. But I just couldn’t keep my curiosity down.”

“If they tell you not to ask, then don’t ask.”

“But they were so specific about it. How could I resist?”

Talk about circular reasoning. But admittedly, it was strange. Tsushima was going out of his way to keep it under wraps.

Maybe there really was something bigger to this MacGuffin.

“So, you really don’t know?”

“I know the dictionary definition, and could tell you some myths that use one. But for this specific instance, I really don’t know anything. Sorry, that’s all I got.”

With a curt farewell, Kei hung up. When the receiver dropped down, his coin ejected, like all the times before. Kei once again had to question the legality of these calls, since they never registered for payment. It made him uncomfortable, so Kei immediately turned and headed for the bakery, leaving the coin in the return box. A pretense of justice was better than none at all.

By the time Kei had caught up with Haruki to check her progress, she was holding a bag bearing the logo of the bakery they were searching for. He figured she had done her part. The bag turned out to contain cream-filled buns.

“Please, have one.”

Kei accepted the proffered bun and bit into it. A heavy and rich custard cream spread throughout his mouth. It was very sweet. He liked sweet things, though, so that wasn’t a problem.

He swallowed, then spoke.

“How did things go?”

“The clerk claims that they didn’t see the accident, but they vaguely recall the sound of brakes screeching.  They said it was probably somewhere around 8 or 9 AM, but they weren’t certain.”

“I see.”

Kei nodded in response. Murase claimed to have found the cat at 9:15, so the times lined up.

“What shall we do next?”

“The Operator pointed me to a girl who loves cats. From what I heard, her ability should be quite useful to us.”

Kei checked the time on his phone. 11:22. They were running out of time. He wanted to meet this Nonō Seika in the time of “today”, if possible. He decided to quickly head to the shrine she was said to always be at.

Kei made his way through the shopping district with Haruki. As they walked, he could tell that she was interested in his conversation with The Operator, so he gave her the play-by-play. After hearing through to the end, she looked up at his face, tilting her head to the side.

“What is this MacGuffin?”

“Wish I could tell you.”

No matter how he looked at it, Kei couldn’t find a link between a MacGuffin and finding this cat.

“You don’t know what it is, either?”

“Well, it’s less that I don’t know, and more that I’m not sure how to explain it.”

He had read a paragraph or two regarding the topic in the past..

“A MacGuffin is like… like a trap to catch lions in Scotland.”

“Scotland?”

Kei nodded. Haruki’s confusion was understandable, since it sounded like a random example.

“The catch is, there aren’t any lions in Scotland.”

Haruki’s well-shaped eyebrows bent inwards.

“Is this some sort of trivia quiz?”

“No, that’s not what I’m going for. The idea is, a MacGuffin is a tool that would otherwise be useless, which gets you out of a specifically created problem.

Haruki thought it over for a few seconds, before resigning with an ‘I don’t really get it’ in her typically frank manner. Kei knew he had explained it poorly, so he gave it another try.

“A MacGuffin is typically movie or theater terminology. When the protagonist is given an item that kicks off the plot, like a pointless trinket or a letter full of nonsense writing, they call that a MacGuffin.”

“What does that have to do with a Scottish lion trap?”

“That was a story Alfred Hitchcock told to illustrate what a MacGuffin is.”

— One man says, ‘What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?’ And the other answers, ‘Oh that’s a MacGuffin.’ The first one asks ‘What’s a MacGuffin?’ ‘Well,’ the other man says, ‘It’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.’ The first man says, ‘But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,’ and the other one answers ‘Well, then that’s no MacGuffin!’

“To be honest, I don’t really get how this all connects. MacGuffin is just a nonsense word to begin with.”

MacGuffin was really just a byword. The title of MacGuffin was meant to be given to something else, like a prop used in the story. ‘The MacGuffin is going to be stolen’ would never be said under normal circumstances. It would only make sense within the realm of meta commentary, where the author considers their own story.

“Maybe MacGuffin is a codeword or something.”

If he knew what it meant, would that make him the protagonist? What kind of crazy story could involve jumping through all these hoops? It was starting to give him a headache.

Having been fully engaged in the conversation, Kei finally noticed they had reached the shrine they were heading for. Preparations for the night’s festival were well underway, and various stalls for takoyaki, goldfish scooping, cotton candy, and more were lined up by the dozen. Most were still under construction, but some were already open to the public, leading to higher foot traffic than one would normally expect at a shrine.

“I thought we would be coming here later tonight,” Haruki grumbled beside Kei.

She wasn’t much for making faces, but Kei could’ve sworn he saw a glimmer of dissatisfaction. She was definitely doing it on purpose, too.

“We’ll still be coming here later. How about I buy you a candy apple to tide you over?”

“No. It’s only noon, I mustn’t eat one now.”

“It’s gonna taste the same no matter what time you eat it.”

“That’s not true at all. A candy apple is the most delicious precisely when you eat it at night during a festival. It would be wrong to go out of my way to eat one in the daytime.”

She was right, the things being sold here probably got most of their value from their festival attachment. After all, candy apples were never up for sale in the supermarket. With that in mind, Kei decided to hold back on the mini castella cakes for that evening as well.

When he nodded in assent, Haruki smiled and remarked, “We had this same conversation last year.”

Sure enough, she was right. He could remember every word.

“On the other hand, if you’re buying, then I’ll gratefully enjoy a candy apple.”

“Let’s save it for tonight. We don’t have the time to spend on that right now, and there are still cream buns left.”

Even as he said that, Kei’s senses told him that the time called “tonight” wouldn’t be coming for a much longer time.

The pair quickly walked through the assorted stalls, glancing back and forth, before making their way up the flight of stairs leading to the shrine proper. Kei hadn’t been here in quite some time, probably about a year. He could’ve recalled the exact number of days if he wanted, but that would be pointless.

The atmosphere was much calmer atop the steps. Despite the number of people visiting the stalls, it wasn’t the typical time for going to a shrine. Still, likely due to the festival, things were slightly more lively than he recalled from his last visit. But also just as he recalled, there were no girls sleeping with a group of cats.

“Is it possible she didn’t come here today?”

“I suppose so.”

“Shall we search around a little longer?”

“Yup.” Kei nodded in response to Haruki’s question, still sweeping the area, when he happened upon a calico cat.

Kei walked closer to it. The cat seemed to be deciding between staying in place and running away. Before it could decide, Kei spoke to it.

“Excuse me, I’m looking for a Nonō Seika-san.”

It was a little embarrassing to talk to cats at his age, but he had been told that Nonō Seika’s ability let her transfer information using cats. It was worth testing if this cat could signal Nonō somehow, or do something else unexpected.

The cat began walking away disinterestedly. Kei could’ve accepted that as a sign of failure, but he didn’t want to give up yet. He continued speaking to the retreating back of the cat.

“I’m looking for information about a cat that was in a traffic accident yesterday. He died in front of a bakery in the shopping district. We want to do everything we can to save him.”

The cat suddenly stopped, turned around, and stared Kei in the face. The cat’s eyes were unreadable. In fact, getting stared at like that by a cat made Kei feel judged.

“Please.”

As Kei bowed his head, the cat walked up to Kei’s feet. It sat down, then gently and purposely pawed at his calf twice before turning around and walking in the direction of the shrine.

Haruki spoke up. “Do you think it wants us to follow?”

“I sure hope so, or I just made a fool of myself for nothing.”

The cat walked forward confidently, without looking back, so Kei and Haruki followed behind so as not to lose it. Kei checked the time again. 12:46. They were really cutting it close now.

The cat walked towards the back of the shrine, which faced the mountains. The path led to an aging stone staircase, which was narrow and weathered like an old tombstone. The stone was so old that it was sun-bleached white and rounded from erosion.

The cat quickly stepped up the stairs, with Kei and Haruki in tow. Cicadas chirped as the sunlight shifted through the swaying trees. Eventually, the stone steps wore away, no longer assisting their ascent up the weed-ridden hill. The fresh grass felt good under Kei’s shoes, to the point that he internally chided himself for getting distracted in their circumstances.

Eventually, the cat broke into a dash. At the top of the hill was a shrine much smaller than the one they were just at. Many more cats lazily spread themselves around the area.

There, atop the steps in the center of the shrine, sat a young girl with her eyes closed. Her skin was a pale white.

“Nonō-san?”

When Kei called her name, the girl slowly opened her eyes. She responded with, “Good morning.”

She looked Kei directly in the eyes. Kei noticed that all the cats surrounding her were also looking his way.

“Did someone really get into an accident yesterday?”

Kei nodded.

“He was a cat with gray fur, blue eyes, and a crooked tail, owned by a girl named Murase Youka.”

Nonō closed her eyes once more. Kei checked the time. She was already staring at him again by the time he moved his gaze back up.

“Since when?”

“Huh?”

“When did this Murase become his owner?”

“About half a year ago.”

Nonō’s eyes immediately lost all interest, and she looked away.

“There is no such cat in Sakurada.”

What a preposterous claim.

“Surely you don’t mean to tell me that you know every cat in Sakurada.”

“And why couldn’t I?”

“Nobody could possibly keep track of all that information.”

As long as new books continued to be written, it would be impossible to read every book in the world. It would similarly be impossible to keep track of every new cat being born every moment of every day. It wouldn’t be humanly possible to know just the number of cats currently in Sakurada, let alone all the details about them.

But Nonō retorted without missing a beat. “You just can’t understand how to think in cat time. Things impossible within human time can be done inside cat time. Of course, the same is true in reverse.”

Cat time? Kei couldn’t even begin to imagine such a concept. But Sakurada was a town of infinite impossibilities within its abilities. Kei needed to allow a margin of error in his understanding, because there was no time for doubts. He decided to shift gears, and began trying to accurately and efficiently tell Nonō the story as he knew it.

“Take a look at this. Yesterday morning, this cat was run over in front of a bakery.” 

He pushed his cell phone towards Nonō, displaying the picture of Mike that he had received from Murase. She reluctantly looked at the phone, before muttering to herself in a quiet voice.

“I suppose I haven’t seen him in a while.”

“It is true that the accident occurred. At least, that’s what I was told.”

“So, if it really did happen, how do you plan on saving him?”

“Her ability can make that possible.”

Kei turned the attention to Haruki. She seemed disinterested in the conversation, but noticing that she had become the center of attention, she held out a cream bun.

“Would you like one?”

Nonō paused, then shook her head. “No, thank you. Instead, next time you come by, bring the cream puffs from Sangatsudou in front of the train station.”

“Understood.”

Kei quickly responded, trying to speed things along. Time was of the essence. It was already 12:55.

“I need you to tell me everything you can about the cat, where he was and what he was doing in the last three days. If you can tell me that, I can definitely save him.

“I don’t just know all that. But, I can try and find out.”

“Then, please try. I promise it’s all for him.”

Nonō furrowed her eyebrows slightly. She was probably trying to make a face at him, though it was hard to tell.

“I must say, I’m a bit worried. How can I trust you, a man stuck walking in the footprints left behind by a young girl?”

Kei swallowed back an exasperated yell. He had no idea what she was talking about. He forced his brain into overdrive, and figured she must’ve gotten the wrong idea about Haruki.

“You’re wrong. Kei and I walk together, side by side.”

Haruki herself denied it, but Nonō didn’t react, to the point that she may not have heard it at all.

“Hm, I see. Is this Murase a girl with red glasses?”

“She is. Do you know her?”

“You could say that, I suppose. Just a moment.”

Nonō closed her eyes once more, her body relaxing into the stairs. Kei stared at his cell phone’s display, watching the moments tick by. Nearly a minute later, she re-opened her eyes.

“Can’t sleep.”

She what?

“You can’t use your power unless you’re asleep?”

There were no abilities that didn’t have some sort of limitation.

Nonō scratched at her head with her pointer finger.

“Not exactly. The gist is that I have to separate myself from my own consciousness. It’s really just that sleep is the quickest option.”

This ability was anything but convenient. It needed activation time, and would be extremely easy to interrupt.

“Well, you’ll admit that this is basically your fault, right? You woke me up when I was sleeping so peacefully.”

“That’s an unfair way of putting it. I couldn’t talk to you unless I woke you up.”

“Then you should just show up in my dream. How come you didn’t do that?”

“Why would you just assume I’m capable of that?”

“Dunno. Just a thought I had.”

The conversation was starting to break down, but Kei steadied his emotions. He had learned just about everything he wanted to know, so the next best step was to use their time to confirm one important detail.

Kei asked his final question.

“If you use your ability, can you learn where the cat is?”

“I don’t really know, since he’s dead.”

That didn’t make a difference.

“What if he was alive? Would you know his current location?”

“Sure, I would. So he’s alive?”

“No.”

It seemed they would have no problems. This had turned out better than Kei had expected. He would have to thank The Operator later. If you had the right information, Sakurada always had the perfect ability for the job out there somewhere.

Nonō closed her eyes yet again.

“I’ll try a little harder to sleep. Why not sing me a lullaby?”

“Haruki.”

Kei turned around to a puzzled Haruki tilting her head.

“You want me to sing?”

“Here’s a song I like. I don’t remember the name, but it goes…”

Nonō hummed a tune. Hm, hm-hmm, hmmm-hm, hmmm.

Haruki stared at Kei, searching for words.

“Do you really want me to sing?”

“You don’t have to sing.”

Kei checked the time. 12:58:47. It wasn’t safe to risk any more.

“Reset.”

Just one word.

With that alone, the last three days were wiped from existence.

End of Chapter 1

1The Japanese for this designation is 非通知くん, or “Hitsuuchi-kun”. “Hitsuuchi” is a term referring to a withheld-number phone call, designed to hide caller identity and prevent call logs. I removed the honorific as this is a title rather than a proper name, and opted for “The Operator” as a reference to phone call management. I also found it more efficient than a longer name like “The Unknown Caller”.

2From this point forward, the referential pronoun for The Operator is 彼, “kare”, which is a direct “he/him.”

3The original noun Kei uses to describe them is 黒幕的, Kuromakuteki, or “black curtain master” which is in reference to ancient kabuki theater. It describes the person performing all the stage theatrics behind the black curtain, modernly used to refer to a mastermind pulling the strings in a place unseen.