Mysterious Setting E-Book

Kazushige Abe

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 277

Beschreibung

A madcap, darkly comic novel about the strange fate of a tone-deaf girl who just wants to sing, from a Japanese literary star __________ 'The most dangerous author working today' BRUTUS 'Abe's superpower is to transform everything he touches into exciting literature' Kotaru Isaka, author of 'Bullet Train' __________ Shiori knows at heart that she's a troubadour. She may be completely tone-deaf, but she won't let that stop her living a life dedicated to music. Even when her dominant older sister, Nozomi, forces Shiori to accept that her wild singing provokes only revulsion, she decides to forge a career as a lyricist instead. At eighteen, she moves to Tokyo to pursue her dream. Isolated and struggling in this unfamiliar city, Shiori seeks connection online, where her trusting outlook leaves her vulnerable to exploitation - with potentially explosive results. Shot through with dark irony and a playful sense of the absurd, Mysterious Setting is a propulsive and gloriously strange novel from one of Japan's most distinctive contemporary writers.

Leseprobe

KAZUSHIGE ABE

MYSTERIOUS SETTING

Translated from the Japanese byMICHAEL EMMERICH

PUSHKIN PRESS

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEMYSTERIOUS SETTINGALSO BY THIS AUTHORABOUT THE AUTHORCOPYRIGHT

56

MYSTERIOUS SETTING

7MYSTERIOUS SETTING

A sophisticated jewelry-making technique in which princess-cut jewels are set without the gold or platinum prongs that typically hold stones in place, allowing their inherent beauty to shine forth to the fullest extent. Pioneered by Van Cleef & Arpels, the technique is officially known as the “Mystery Set.”8

9ARAB NEWSPAPER SAYS AL-QAEDA BOUGHT NUCLEAR WEAPONS FROM UKRAINE IN 1998

CAIRO (Reuters) – The pan-Arab newspaper Al-Hayat reported on February 8 that in 1998 al-Qaeda, the international terrorist network headed by Osama bin Laden, purchased suitcases outfitted with tactical nuclear weapons from Ukraine, and that the organization is holding them for possible detonation in the United States or other countries. […] Ukraine inherited a nuclear arsenal from the Soviet Union on achieving independence in 1991, but in 1994 it agreed to send 1,900 warheads to Russia and sign on to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The Asahi Shimbun, February 9, 2004 10

11WHERE ARE THE SUITCASE NUKES NOW?

In September 1997, former Russian National Security Advisor Alexander Lebed testified that of the 132 suitcase-sized nuclear bombs once in Russia’s possession, all but 48 remained unaccounted for. Although the Russian government denies having developed such devices, a scientist who served as advisor to President Yeltsin has confirmed their existence, and the United States believes that Russia still maintains an arsenal of compact nuclear weapons. In recent years, witnesses have testified that Osama bin Laden may have acquired approximately twenty suitcase nukes from Chechen militants. The bombs measure 60 x 40 x 20 centimeters, making them roughly as portable as ordinary suitcases.12

13

MYSTERIOUS SETTING

THERE WAS A PERIOD, a long time ago now, when I used to go play in this park a lot with my friends. I suppose I must have been about ten or so.

I call it a park, but really it was just a field—no slide, no swings, no jungle gym.

There were these long rows of old stones, chipped and crumbling, like markers of some sort, but that was it. Large stones, small stones. Wherever you looked, that’s all there was.

The park was neither attractive nor nice, but it was quite spacious. Actually, it was huge. My friends and I had more space there than we could ever need.

The park was kind of far away—it took over an hour to bike there from where we lived—but we liked making the trip together, and we went all the time.14

Basically, we had nowhere else to play.

There were five or six kids in the group I hung out with, so we couldn’t stay indoors for long. We lived in pretty small houses, and our parents were constantly getting after us. We were too poor to afford any sort of entertainment we had to pay for.

So we would head out to that wide-open park where we could horse around as much as we wanted without worrying that anyone would complain. To that vast field of rubble.

And what did we do when we got there?

We listened to the old man.

When we first discovered the park, we used to play chicken on our bikes or jump from one crumbling block to the next, eager to prove how brave we were. All that stopped when we met the old man. From then on, we just went and listened to him talk.

His stories weren’t that interesting—they were kind of boring, actually. Something in the way he told them really drew us in, though, leaving us all mesmerized.

I don’t know, maybe we were just desperate for something to do. Anything, it didn’t matter what. It still amazes me, though, looking back, that we stuck with him as long as we did. That we never tired of the old guy and his silly tales.

There was something in the air, I think. Some peculiar feeling you couldn’t quite put your finger on that kept calling us back, over and over. Yes, the park was like that. It had a special magnetism that drew you in and held you—that wouldn’t let you go.15

Why else would kids hungry for action have biked so far to such a desolate place?

And we weren’t the only ones. The park was surprisingly crowded, full of people doing the kinds of things you do in a park. Housewives walking dogs, couples lounging under the trees, old men playing shōgi, young men who had stripped off their shirts to sunbathe. High-school girls practicing dance moves, boys kicking soccer balls around. It was all perfectly ordinary—everything except the park itself, which seemed too dreary to be so popular. Or rather, it felt odd that it was so popular, given how dreary it was.

That’s why I say there must have been something special about it.

Something that called us all there, irresistibly.

To that park.

I’ve forgotten the old man’s stories. All that has stayed with me is the sense that, by and large, they were pretty dull. I don’t regret having forgotten them, not really, though there is a certain frustration in being unable to remember.

One thing I do remember quite clearly is how we met the man.

Given how crowded the park was, no one would have looked out of place. There were people who came up and 16tried to sell you stuff, and just wouldn’t let you alone; a priest who was there every day, intoning his eerie spells; a steady stream of officials and researchers who claimed to be working on environmental surveys; scientists conducting obscure experiments with outlandish equipment. Every so often, a group of volunteers came to plant trees.

I figure it was those crowds of people who gathered in the park to enjoy themselves that brought the old man there. He needed the human contact. None of us ever went with him to his house, but we got the impression he lived alone.

And it wasn’t as if he just swung by the park in the course of his daily walk. He was there on a mission. Not like he had some goal he was trying to accomplish—that’s not the sort of mission I mean. It was about trying to help the people around him. He was engaged in a very private sort of volunteer work. He performed for the children in the park.

Kamishibai, as it’s called. Paper theater.

That, at least, was his plan. The world, however, planted an obstacle in his path. No one paid any attention to the shows he staged in his little corner of that vast park, showing hand-drawn pictures as he narrated the story they depicted. No one, young or old, had any desire to experience such an old-fashioned entertainment.

I can’t tell you how long he kept up those sad performances.

Over time, though, even as the park’s visitors kept ignoring him, they must have begun to notice his presence, as he stood there in the same spot day after day, rotating through 17the series of pictures and recounting his stories to a nonexistent audience.

One day, one of the boys in my group suggested we go tease him. You can imagine it, I’m sure—a bunch of ten-year-olds going to harass an old man and becoming friendly with him instead. That was how we ended up opening the gate to his invisible amphitheater.

I see only one possible explanation for our subsequent transformation, as we morphed from a gaggle of hecklers into a well-behaved audience.

That same magnetism.

As I said, the stories themselves were so boring that it was only natural no one ever came to watch, and the old man had none of the charm or charisma that makes certain people so irresistibly fascinating to others. Could this very lack of charisma have been the thing that drew us back? Maybe we were just being nice?

No, I don’t think so. None of us was so generous, and, besides, I wouldn’t say we felt sorry for him. Certainly, I don’t recall ever feeling that way. He had a sense of purpose, after all, and he didn’t seem particularly lonely.

Eventually, after we began meeting the old man on a regular basis and had even spoken with him a few times, he told us about himself. He was a teacher, he said. One of us asked what school he taught at, and he said he didn’t really work anymore—he was retired. He still thought of himself as a teacher, though, even if he no longer had a classroom. That was why 18he came each day to perform at the park: telling stories was a form of instruction. Finding students had proved to be more difficult than he expected, but he didn’t let that trouble him; he kept at it, offering his free classes to the public.

That’s the sort of man he was. And it’s true, there was something vaguely classroom-like in our interactions with him. At least that’s how it seems in retrospect. Not that we disliked him, as we did some of our teachers at school—though here, too, it may have been that some of the park’s special magnetism had rubbed off on him.

I said I’ve forgotten the old man’s stories, but actually there is one that I remember very clearly. One of the stories he told will stay with me forever.

It’s the reason I can still recall the old man so vividly.

Which is exactly how he wanted it.

He was determined that we should hold on to that story no matter what might happen to us in our lives, however many years passed. He told us so himself many times, so often it got annoying. All he wanted was for us to remember that story—it was the whole reason he had gone on teaching past his retirement.

The story wasn’t wildly funny, or even amusing. There was no soaring fantasy, and it didn’t have any sort of cathartic effect. The plot had its share of ups and downs, I suppose, but I can’t imagine anyone really enjoying it.

What else can I say? And say with confidence?

That everyone who heard it felt a little sad, I guess.19

Maybe “everyone” is going too far.

But if there were five or six people listening, at least one or two would be touched.

And so they would remember the story, and then eventually the day would come when they would feel the urge to pass the story on to someone else.

Now that the old man had found his students, he quit kamishibai. We were good enough listeners, he said, that he could do without the pictures. The story was better without them, because he could really get into the details.

From then on, when he called us over to his little corner of the park, he would just plop himself down on the soft earth and lean against the fence. And the performance would begin.

He started each story with the same set phrase. Every tale has one or two main characters, he would declaim, and of course the one I’m about to tell you is no exception.

This was how the story began.

And it continued…

I’m going to call the protagonist of this story Shiori.

Shiori moved to Tokyo at eighteen; it seems she was originally from Tōhoku Region.

We’re talking ancient history, here—back when I was in my teens.20

Shiori doesn’t seem to have had a very happy life. Fate wasn’t really on her side. But she was an optimist, and seldom let things get her down. More importantly, she had a dream. She had come to Tokyo to become a lyricist.

Shiori never gave up, no matter what happened. That’s the kind of person she was. She could tolerate any sort of agony, physical or mental, as long as she was able to keep believing that enduring it would help her realize her dream. She couldn’t escape the pain outright, but she could numb it by picturing herself sometime in the future, hard at work on a song. She wasn’t actually writing any lyrics right now, but still she could imagine herself—a sparkling, glamorous version of herself—deeply engrossed in conversation with the singers she would eventually get to know. That vision was always with her, a high-resolution image tucked away in the recesses of her mind.

She had decided to become a lyricist because she was tone deaf.

Yes, Shiori was tone deaf. And yet she loved music, so that from the time she was young, whenever a song touched her she would start singing along.

People always got annoyed when she did this, so she tried to sing as softly as she could. As a child, she thought the volume was the problem.

In any event, Shiori was constantly singing. And so she knew, she just knew, that she was destined to live with music.21

She asked her mother about this once, and her mother agreed she might be right. When she became pregnant, Shiori’s mother had gone to stay with her parents so they could look after her, and she had spent a lot of time playing their piano. She hoped it would serve as a sort of prenatal training, but since she had never taken piano lessons and couldn’t read music, few of the chords she produced were beautiful or harmonious. Shiori’s aunt had grown up playing that piano, not Shiori’s mother.

Later on, Shiori would come to the conclusion that she owed her tone deafness to that awful piano playing of her mother’s, but she never felt any resentment.

Soon after she started middle school, Shiori learned the word troubadour. She was flipping through a book at the library when it caught her eye.

She didn’t much like to read, and she hadn’t entirely grasped what the word meant when she put the book down, but just seeing it on the page and repeating it in her head made her feel all tingly inside. The moment she got home, she dashed up to her room and started a troubadour notebook. It wasn’t for poems, however; it was for pictures. She covered page after page with drawings of troubadours as she saw them in her fantasies—figures that grew more and more wondrous, less and less human. She wasn’t very good at drawing, either.

From that day on, Shiori knew she would live as a troubadour. The next time she sat down with her teacher for 22guidance counseling, she announced that she had made up her mind not to continue on to high school. There was no need, she said, because she was a troubadour. There was a phone call home and her mother had to come in for a talk, but Shiori didn’t get in trouble just yet. Her mother thought it was a terrific idea. Her father gave her a thorough scolding, though, and in the end she went to high school after all.

The troubadour suffered a good deal of persecution.

In middle school she had been the subject of numerous “witch hunts” by her classmates, to which she had responded by making sure never to sing in anyone else’s presence—and when the storm came, simply waiting for it to blow over.

Things weren’t as bad in high school, though a few unfortunate experiences revealed to her the awesome the power of music.

The worst was when, three times in a fairly short period, she allowed herself to sing very softly at school—and on each occasion a fellow student had died the next day. One was killed in a car crash; one committed suicide; the third was stabbed by a boy from another school. All three students were girls.

Shiori couldn’t begin to imagine how her singing might be linked to these tragedies, but the connection terrified her all the same. She felt a profound sense of guilt, and now she was more careful than ever not to sing in public.

Even before the three deaths, those middle-school witch hunts had taught Shiori that she needed to keep her troubadour 23identity hidden from her high-school classmates. Whenever possible, she would beg off singing in music class or in the karaoke booth, and, if she couldn’t refuse outright, she would feign shyness, singing so faintly that no one could hear.

Still, whenever something moved her deeply, the song would come. Her voice would burst forth all on its own, revealing her troubadour nature. Everyone, from her closest friends to random students she hardly knew, would freeze, stunned, their faces registering disgust.

Each time this happened, Shiori would remember something her social studies teacher had told her in middle school.

All poets are alone.

It made Shiori sad to think that poets, even singing poets, were so shunned and isolated. Though this also explained why they spent so much time alone with their verses.

Shiori had a positive outlook, it’s true, but she was always hurting inside. The only reason she could put up such a strong front, acting as if the pain didn’t touch her, was that she had a dream she believed in—the dream of being a lyricist. Until she settled on this goal, she had sometimes spent whole days with her eyelids red and puffy from crying. Sometimes being a troubadour hurt so much that she regretted ever having become one.24

She never gave up on her musical life, though. One thing she did to keep the dream alive was to stop at a pet shop on her way home from school.

This shop occupied part of the ground floor of a large supermarket Shiori had passed on her way to middle school, and still passed going to high school now. Her family had two cats, and they had been shopping here for ages. At first, she used to swing by on her way home to get supplies for the cats, on whom she doted: kitty litter, toys, cat food. Often, she bought more than was necessary, and sometimes more than she could even carry, so she had to have the items delivered, and her father would scold her for wasting money.

Shiori’s mother had the same habit. Whenever she had a spare moment, she would drive the family car to the store and stockpile cat goods. It got to the point where her husband felt he had to tell her to stop. Frequently they had so much stuff at home that they could have set up shop themselves. Shiori’s mother didn’t see this as a problem, though, and Shiori learned from her example, visiting the pet shop whenever the spirit moved her to see what new products had come in.

I’m a slave to our cats, she sometimes thought.

Then, on one of her many visits, the slave found a new master.

Or rather, masters. The store had lots of them. They lived in cages, and had colorful wings, and twittered adorably. Shiori had seen parakeets in the past, of course, but she had never 25looked at them in this way before. She began to feel that no form of life was more perfect than these birds.

Unsurprisingly, it was song that brought Shiori and the parakeets together, though she hadn’t really intended to sing to them. She always came to the store alone, but just because there was no one around to hear her didn’t mean she was free to do whatever she wanted.

The parakeets’ tweeting had been part of the store’s atmosphere from the start, of course, but the background music, the sounds of people talking, and all the other noise had kept her from paying much attention. Then one day, just like that, she realized that the birds weren’t just tweeting, they were singing, and from that moment her heart was theirs.

How did this happen, you ask? What made her realize that the parakeets were, in fact, singing? She learned, purely by chance, from a stranger.

Shiori had been holding a pair of tiny cat bells to her ear, gently swaying them back and forth so she could enjoy their tinkle, calming her wounded troubadour heart, when all of a sudden, over in the bird section, someone started shouting.

“Sing! George! Please, please sing! Sing for me!”

Turning toward the voice, Shiori saw a woman about her mother’s age pleading with one of the parakeets. She was dressed in a Tyrolean costume.

“Please, George! I beg you! Sing for me, sing again!…”26

The woman’s voice was full of passion. The next moment, she seized the cage and began rattling it. A clerk ran over, abandoning a customer at the register.

“Excuse me! Excuse me! Please don’t do that!”

Unmoved by the clerk’s intervention, the Tyrolean-costumed woman kept pleading with the bird. “Yes, yes! Sing more, George! Sing for me, keep singing!”

Her plaintive cries could be heard for some time even after the guard led her out, dragging her from behind by the arms. It felt almost as if the woman herself had been singing, her voice transforming a section of the supermarket into a concert hall.

That, at any rate, was how Shiori felt. For a few minutes, she stood motionless and dazed, blocking out all information from the outside world. The supermarket was full of shoppers and clerks, an incredible profusion of objects, but for a few minutes Shiori felt as though her body were suspended in a pure white space, a vacuum.

Only the parakeets’ faint singing reached her.

“Ah,” she thought. Then, for no reason, “George!”

Suddenly gripped by a desire to move, she hurried to the cages. For the first time, she genuinely listened to the parakeets’ singing. Their voices enveloped her, drew her in deeper and deeper, until, without even realizing it, she too had begun to sing—right there in the middle of the store, her voice merging with theirs.

Clerks and shoppers turned to look, regarding her with 27the same revulsion she had seen so many times before on the faces of her friends and classmates. None of them was happy to hear her singing, she could see that. But the parakeets in their wire cages reacted completely differently.

All at once, the birds, even those that had remained silent until then, raised their voices in a magnificent chorus of twittering. They were pleased that Shiori had been moved to join their song.

The noise was so deafening that everyone nearby had to cover their ears. Shiori glanced around, shaken, then turned back to the cage. There was a new liveliness in the parakeets’ eyes, and she could see that they were trying to say something to her as they warbled at the top of their lungs—to communicate some message.

They’re welcoming me.

It was true. She could sense it. The birds were singing their joy, together, telling her how happy they were that she had joined them. That’s what this outburst meant. That, at any rate, was how Shiori interpreted it. That was what she heard in their trilling.

Please, Shiori! Sing more! Keep singing for us, we beg you!

She was profoundly moved. Of course she was! In all her life, no one had ever responded with such passion to her singing. She was so touched that she burst into tears.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t—it might disturb the other shoppers. I’m so sorry, really. But I’ll come again, OK? I’ll come visit you, I just won’t sing. If I did, they’d drag me off like that woman 28earlier, and then we’d never see each other again. Well, maybe occasionally, when no one else is around—maybe I could sing very softly. So please don’t be angry with me for not singing now. And thank you, all of you! You’ve made me so happy, speaking so kindly about my singing.”

One of the clerks was eyeing her. He didn’t care how much she spent, he wasn’t going to have her making grotesque noises in the shop, hurting business. That, at any rate, was how Shiori read his expression. And so, having quietly communicated her gratitude to the parakeets, she left the store for the day.

Now she had a new reason to visit the pet shop.

Indeed, over time, shopping for the cats became little more than an excuse. Her hushed conversations with the parakeets were much more important. The joyful, welcoming song they launched into each time they saw Shiori was a source of strength and encouragement.

Naturally, she begged her parents to let her have some as pets.

Her mother refused. If you’ve got cats, she said, you can’t have birds.

She had a point, Shiori admitted, but she kept pushing even so. It would be fine, she said, she’d just have to make sure the birds never got out of her room.

And who, her mother replied, will look after them when you go out? Shiori had no reply. She hadn’t thought things through that carefully.29

Her mother’s disapproval was a serious blow. Her father opposed the plan for the same reasons, so in the end Shiori had to abandon her vision of a life with parakeets.

In the end, her mother was probably right. The birds would be happier with their friends at the store, rather than living in constant fear of a cat attack. Even Shiori could understand that, now that she had given up on her plan.

The longer the birds remained together, the more joyful their lives would be. They were happiest in each other’s company, even if it was only a matter of time until they were carted off, one by one, to become someone’s pet.

Shiori felt terribly sad, once again, when she realized this. No other poet was as lonely as she was. Her younger sister, Nozomi, came to say that dinner was ready, but Shiori just said she wasn’t hungry and stayed in her room, sobbing uncontrollably.

To a large extent, Shiori owed her thick skin to her sister.

You don’t develop such resilience in a day or two, of course. Little by little, over many years, her heart had been steeled until almost nothing could dent it.

Strength of that sort can’t be measured, and since Shiori had never been one to compare herself to others in this regard it was hard to gauge just how thick-skinned she had 30become. Still, it was certainly impressive how much more mature she was now, in high school, than she had been back in elementary school, when she cried every day. These days she cried no more than two or three times a week.

Though it was true Nozomi had toughened Shiori up, she was also the reason Shiori had become such a crybaby in the first place.

Nozomi showed no restraint in talking to Shiori. She was a sharp-tongued, pitiless girl who said exactly what she thought. And she had never looked up to her older sister—perhaps because they were born in the same year. If anything, Shiori tended to behave with a certain deference toward Nozomi. Their relationship had been that way ever since they were babies.

So, of course, Nozomi made no attempt to comfort Shiori that evening.

“What’s got into you, wanting parakeets all of a sudden?” Nozomi asked.

Shiori made the mistake of answering truthfully. She knew her sister was the last person she should tell about the amazing occurrence at the pet store, but she couldn’t help it. She was exhausted from crying and wasn’t thinking straight.

“How do know they liked your singing?” Nozomi asked when she finished.

Shiori recounted how the birds had burst into song.

“What was their singing like?”31

Without going overboard, Shiori briefly imitated their cries. Gyaa! Gyaa!

“That’s how they sounded? If you ask me, I think they must have been irritated. And they were all making that noise? Honestly, Shiori, I don’t think they meant to be welcoming—just the opposite. They were pleading with you to stop.”

Such was the harsh judgment Nozomi handed down.

Shiori promptly submitted her appeal. It only seemed that way, she suggested, because she had done such a bad imitation of their cries. For a second time, she transformed herself into a cage of parakeets, drawing a deeper breath than before and striving to get the tone just right.

Gyaa-aa! Gyaa-aa!

“Shiori, enough! Shriek all you like, it won’t change anything. It’s beyond me how you could interpret that as anything other than an expression of displeasure. I’m sure you were just misreading the signs, like you always do. The parakeets were begging you to stop, and somehow you got it into your head that it was a song of joy. It’s always like that with you, isn’t it? You really need to fix that. It’s high time you stopped being so self-centered.”

Shiori almost burst out crying again, but she fought the tears back.

Nozomi eyed her older sister, who sat with her face screwed up, hanging her head. Nozomi herself was beaming, her cheeks pinching her eyes. This cheerful expression did not signal, however, that Nozomi was ready to relent. She 32seemed instead to have decided that this was the moment for a swift second attack.

“Listen, Shiori. Dragging animals into your own human fantasies is one of the dumbest things a person can do. Everyone knows that. Do you have even the slightest familiarity with parakeets? How could you possibly think you understand their cries? What arrogance! Oh, sure, it’s nice for you, feeling like you’ve been validated or whatever, but just put yourself in the place of those poor birds! I’ll never be able to show my face in the pet shop again—not after you’ve inflicted such pain on those helpless darlings. It’s inconceivable, really. Persuading yourself they’re thrilled to see you, then talking to them—not just talking, actually singing at them… Just picturing it gives me goosebumps. Look at me, I’m shivering. And you’re so completely oblivious you don’t even notice the damage you’re doing! It’s more than I can take, honestly. I’m ashamed to be related to you.”

Tears welled in Shiori’s eyes as she stared at her sister.

“Maybe I misunderstood the parakeets,” she said, her voice quivering, “and if I did that was wrong of me, and I should learn from my mistake. But I never forced them to do anything, and I only sang three times.”

“You wanted to bring some home as pets, right? When you have a pet, nine times out of ten you start treating them like they’re your playthings. I can totally see it now—just look how you treat our cats! You’d start buying all kinds of crap, filling the cage with pointless gewgaws, and, before 33you know it, you’d have a bunch of hyperstressed birds on your hands.”

Shiori denied having any such intentions. She thought the birds would be comforting, that was all—seeing them every day, listening to them sing. Was that wrong, too?

“What do you think? Listen, Shiori. I want you to use your brain for a little, OK? Before you started going on about getting those parakeets, did you ever pause to consider what it would be like to have them here, given the nature of Dad’s work?”

This was a somewhat malicious question. Their father ran a yakitori chain with locations throughout the southern Tōhoku Region.

Was it wrong, Shiori stammered, for a family to keep pet birds just because its members fed and clothed themselves by selling chunks of chicken on skewers?

This only made things worse.

“No, it isn’t wrong. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m just trying to understand your attitude, that’s all. I mean, your own family lives by slaughtering birds, right? Day after day, we send thousands, tens of thousands of birds to their deaths, and you want your cute little darlings in the pet store to come and ‘comfort’ you. Talk about a split personality! Whatever, as long as it suits your needs, right? If you ask me, you rely way too much on these poor birds. I’m trying to work out how you manage the cognitive dissonance. That’s the point that interests me. It’s perfectly fine to turn living creatures into tools, I guess, if it makes your life easier? Is that how 34you see it? Like, in your mind the birds are no different from your cell phone?”

“No,” Shiori grumbled, “that’s not what I think.”

She hadn’t meant to grumble, but her voice was in retreat. Nozomi’s needling had made her mouth go dry, and she was hoarse.

“Then what were you thinking? What inspired you to ask if you could have those parakeets as pets? What do they mean to you?”

“I love them, I think they’re wonderful!” she said. “I wish I could be one!”

With this, the dam broke. She started wailing.

Those sobs… There was something delicious in the rhythm of her gasping, a beauty every bit as beguiling as her singing was unpleasant. And the longer Shiori wept, the more alluring the sound became. Everyone who heard it felt better, as if all were right with the world.

Despite the haughty disdain she felt for her sister, Nozomi was no different. Indeed, ever since they were both young, Nozomi had taken every opportunity to reduce her sister to tears, simply so she could hear those wondrous cries. She was in love with Shiori’s tears.

Now that she had accomplished her goal, Nozomi sat gazing raptly at her bawling sister, a smile playing across her lips that suggested not merely satisfaction, but ecstasy. She watched her, and kept watching, and then watched some more.35

Under the observant eye of her nosey sister—a young woman who periodically assumed the mien of a police officer or a judge—Shiori was unable to bring her sobbing under control. She wailed and wailed. And then she wailed some more.