Tatsuhiko Takimoto - Welcome to the NHK!

Only my next door neighbor was energetic. He unabashedly made noise. From early morning until the middle of the night, anime songs rang out at loud volumes. He said that recently, he needed only four hours of sleep a day. He was working hard on his creative projects, with the help of anime songs. Bloodshot eyes flashing, he vigorously applied himself to these meaningless activities.

One day, Yamazaki said, “I’ve finally gotten through a big part of my game.”

“Oh, really?”

“Tomorrow, I’m going to start making a bomb.”

“What?”

Without answering, Yamazaki silently gnawed on some white bread. It was a pretty half-assed breakfast. As I wasn’t as lazy as he was, I properly toasted my bread and quickly fried an egg.

“Like I told you before, don’t take food out of other people’s fridges without permission.”

I pretended not to know what he was talking about.

Misaki was wearing long sleeves even though it was summer. She was in a good mood, though.

“This is so fun, so fun, so fun”, she said. She really did seem to be having fun. She was swinging happily on the swing set.

Of course, tonight felt tropical. It was so hot that I sweated even without so much as speaking.

Misaki, however, seemed cool enough. Hair streaming behind her as she energetically swung back and forth, she said, “By the way, Satou, do you want to eat the leftover cat food?”

At some point, the park’s black cat had gone missing. It had been quite a while since he had shown himself. Either he had been hit by a car and gone to heaven, or he’d taken off on a journey somewhere.

At any rate, I turned her down. “I don’t need it”.

“I stocked up on that cat food. Ah, what a waste.”

Jumping down off the swing, Misaki stepped into the cozy sandbox next to the jungle gym. Picking up a green shovel that one of the neighborhood kids had left behind, she started making something in the sandbox.

I asked, “What is that?”

“A mountain.”

She was right. It certainly was a mountain. Set in the middle of the sandbox, it was a sharply peaked mountain. It angled steeply, like Mount Fuji drawn by Hokusai [28] Katsushika Hokusai, the legendary printmaker. , thus looking as though the slightest vibration would make it crumble. But the sand mountain soon was perfectly complete. It was wonderful work, using sand wet with the evening dew.

Clapping her hands to brush off the sand, Misaki circled the mountain once. She looked expectantly at me.

I said, “It’s a nice mountain.”

A little smile on her face, Misaki shouted, “Yaaah!” and aimed a forward kick at the mountain. “Things with shape will one day fall apart.”

“That’s right.” I nodded.

There was actually a huge variety to the books Misaki pulled out of her backpack, night after night. She apparently borrowed them en masse once a week from the library. There were novels, poetry collections, practical guides, and reference books. Misaki read books of all different shapes and sizes, and then she would read them to me.

“Well then, the text for tonight is The Last Words of Famous People. Its title refers to the words that exemplary people leave behind at the moment of their deaths….”

Refers to…?

“Let’s think about what life is!” she cried.

It was a dramatic line, and I was done in by Misaki’s ability to make such grand, unusual declarations with an utterly normal expression. Then again, seen from another perspective—well, compared to yesterday’s topic of “Let’s think about what it means to live”, it wasn’t that big a deal.

Regaining my composure, I urged her to continue, and Misaki immediately started reading the text aloud.

The book collected the last words of famous people from all around the world, from ancient times to modern days. I listened quietly and respectfully. As she read from the book, however, Misaki seemed to grow bored with it, and her theme changed along the way.

“‘More light…’ Well then, whose words could these be?”

What, a quiz?!

“Three… Two… One… Time’s up! The answer is Goethe. Well, that line is too cool, isn’t it? I think that Mr. Goethe must have thought it up far, far ahead of time.”

“M-maybe he did.”

“Okay then, next question. ‘Mikka Tororo [29] Three-Day Tororo is a dish of grated Japanese yam (tororo) that is eaten on the third day of the new year, hence its name. was delicious.’”

I knew this one. “It’s the marathon runner Kokichi Tsuburaya’s death note.”

“Ping pong, ping pong! [30] Ping pong is the conventional Japanese onomatopoeia for both doorbells and game show success indicators. That’s right! It’s amazing you knew that.”

I couldn’t really brag about knowing famous people’s last words, but Misaki praised me anyway. She sounded oddly taken with the contents of that death note, “Mikka Tororo… this is like some kind of joke, isn’t it?”

“Conversely, that might be why people are struck by it.”

“I see. That really clears things up for me”, she said, nodding repeatedly. “Tsuburaya, the runner, apparently went home to the countryside right before he died. Then, he ate grated yam with his mother and father, it says.”

“Hm.”

“I guess everyone wants to return to their hometowns before they die, after all.”

“Now that you mention it, Misaki, are you from this city?”

“No, I’m not. The north star is in that direction… so I’m probably from over there.” Misaki pointed in a north-by-northwest direction.

She said the name of a town I didn’t know and explained that it was a small town on the Sea of Japan, with a population of five thousand. According to her, it supposedly had a beautiful cape, but that cape had become a somewhat notorious spot for suicides.

“Ever since some famous person jumped off its cliff during the Meiji era, it’s like it’s become a Mecca for suicides. They say that so many people either jumped deliberately or slipped and fell accidentally that they had to construct safety barriers to prevent further incidents. When I was little, I didn’t know anything about that and was always playing on those bluffs. One day, I saw a strange woman there.”

Misaki continued, “She was by the cliff’s edge, on the high cape. It was a beautiful early evening, and the sky was a bright red. The woman, too, was beautiful.”

“And?”

“I took my eyes off her for just a moment, and she vanished. Even now, I sometimes see her in my dreams. It might have just been a dream to begin with, though. I mean, she had a really cheerful smile on her healthy-looking face. Alone, she stared at the ocean and late-afternoon sun. And then, in that one short instant, as I glanced away, she disappeared. A strange story, isn’t it?”

It was a strange story.

“What could have happened? I think she should have at least left a suicide note—maybe about grated yam or something”, I joked, trying to lighten the mood.

“I want to eat some grated yam.”

“It makes you itchy.”

“Yeah.” She nodded.

“It’s delicious, though, isn’t it?”

The conversation had begun to stray. I, too, was exhausted, after all. But Misaki was laughing. “Ah, how fun, how happy. You think so, don’t you, Satou?”

“Sure.”

“We’re coming to the end. The last day of the project is approaching.” Misaki returned the book to her bag. “I’ve given all these helpful lectures, Satou, so you should be just about ready to become a model adult, right?”

Standing up from the bench, she said, “You understand now, don’t you? Why you’ve become a worthless person? Why you’ve become a hikikomori? You should understand by this point.”