I already felt terrible, and it was a miserably hot night. So when I dreamed, it was very vivid and memorable.
After I woke up, I mulled over the dream while underneath my blanket. It wasn't a bad one. If anything, it was happy. But there's nothing crueler than a happy dream.
In it, I was a teenager in a park. It wasn't a park I knew, but I was there with classmates from elementary school. Apparently, there was a class reunion going on.
Everyone was playing around with firecrackers. The smoky haze was lit red by the sparklers. I was standing at the edge of the park and watching them.
How is high school? asked Himeno, who was suddenly there next to me.
I tried to glance at her sidelong, but her face was blurry. I didn't know her after age ten, so I suppose my brain couldn't imagine how she looked.
But my dream self thought she was utterly beautiful. He was proud to have known her for years before that point.
I'm not really enjoying it, I said honestly. But it's not the worst.
I guess I'd say the same, agreed Himeno.
Secretly, I was happy to hear her teen years were miserable, just like mine.
I find myself thinking, she went on, that life was fun back then.
Back when? I asked.
Rather than answer, Himeno crouched down and looked up at me. So are you still a leftover, Kusunoki?
I suppose, I replied, watching her closely. I wanted to see her reaction.
Oh, Himeno said, smirking a bit. Well, I suppose I am, too.
Then she grinned, her cheeks dimpled, and she added, That's good. Right on schedule.
Yeah, right on schedule, I agreed.
And then I woke up.
It wasn't the kind of dream you were supposed to have when you were twenty. It was so childish; I felt disgusted with myself. But a part of me was desperately trying to cling to the memory. I didn't want to let it melt away into nothing.
It was true that when I was ten, I didn't really like Himeno all that much. Whatever affection I held for her, it was very small.
The problem was that a "very small affection" was something I never felt for a single person after that point.
Perhaps that seemingly tiny bit of tenderness was actually the greatest I would ever feel in my life—and I didn't even notice it until long after she was gone.
After I had memorized all the tiny details of my dream about Himeno, I lay there in my bed, thinking about the day before. I had gone to that faded old building and sold all my future life, except for three months.
It wasn't like some waking dream that seemed unreal in the light of the following day. It was an utterly real experience in my mind.
Not that I regretted selling the vast majority of the rest of my life span on a sudden whim. And I didn't suddenly realize the value of what I'd lost. If anything, I felt relief, as if a weight had been lifted off my shoulders.
The thing that kept me attached to life was a shallow hope that maybe, just maybe, something good might happen in the future. As baseless as that hope was, it was extraordinarily difficult to give it up. Even the most worthless human can hope for that improbable stroke of luck that wipes out all that misfortune.
That was my salvation, and my trap. In a way, having someone definitively tell me, "Nothing good will happen in the life ahead of you" was kind of liberating.
Now I could die in peace.
At this point, I might as well enjoy my remaining time. I wanted to be able to say, "It was a crappy life, but once I accepted my death, the three months were pretty happy in the end" when my time was up.
First, I'd go to the bookstore and read some magazines, then think about what to do with my time, I thought—and then my doorbell rang.
I wasn't expecting a visitor. Nobody had visited me once in the last few years, and I couldn't imagine it happening in the next three months, either. Someone got the wrong door or was raising funds for charity or was looking to convert new believers. In any case, I didn't have a good feeling about it.
The bell rang again. I bolted to my feet and immediately felt a return of the powerful nausea from last night. I was hungover. But I managed to stumble over to the entryway to open my door. Standing outside was a girl I didn't recognize. And next to her was a wheeled suitcase that clearly belonged to her.
"…And you are?" I asked.
She gave me an exasperated look, then irritably removed a pair of glasses from her bag and placed them on her face, glaring at me as though the answer should be obvious now.
And then I knew who she was.
"The one who appraised my life span yesterday…"
"That's right," she said.
The impression her suit left was so strong that I hadn't recognized her at all in plain clothes. She wore a cotton blouse and saxe-blue denim skirt. Her black hair hung down to her shoulders and curved inward a bit, though I couldn't tell that yesterday with it tied up. I sensed a note of loneliness in her eyes. Below her skirt, her slender right leg had a large bandage on the thigh. The wound must have been deep, because I could see it even through the bandage.
At our first meeting, I couldn't pinpoint her age as anything more specific than eighteen to twenty-four, but seeing her now, I had a much better idea. She was about my age. Nineteen or twenty.
But what was she doing here?
The first thing that popped into my head was that she came to tell me there was a mistake in the appraisal. She got the number of digits wrong. Maybe she mixed it up with someone else's results. A part of me hoped she was here for an apology.
She removed her glasses again, neatly tucked them into their case, then stared at me with emotionless eyes.
"My name is Miyagi. I'll be your monitor from now on," she said and bowed to me.
Monitor. I'd completely forgotten. She did mention something like that, I now recalled. I also remembered how overwhelming the nausea was and ran to the bathroom to throw up.
When I emerged from the bathroom with a completely empty stomach, Miyagi was standing right on the other side of the doorway. It might have been her job, but she didn't know how to keep her distance. I pushed her out of my way to get to the sink, where I washed my face and gargled, slugged down a cup of water, then returned to my bed on the floor. My head was killing me. The humidity wasn't helping.
"As I explained to you yesterday," said Miyagi, who was standing next to my pillow now, "you have less than one year of life left, so from now on, you will have a monitor at all times. Furthermore…"
"Can you go over this later?" I asked, outwardly annoyed. "As you can see, I'm not in a great condition to listen now."
"Very well. I'll wait."
Then Miyagi took her suitcase to the corner of the room, placed her back against the wall, and sat down, cradling her legs with her arms.
And then she just stared at me.
Apparently, her plan was simply to sit in place and monitor me from there, for as long as I was inside my apartment.
"Treat me as though I am not even here, if you'd like," Miyagi told me from the corner. "Don't mind me. Just live out your life like you always do."
But her reassurance did not change the fact that I was being watched by a girl who could not be two years apart from me in age. I couldn't help but be aware of her, and I stole a glance in her direction. She was writing something in a notebook. Maybe she was making some kind of observation record.
It was unpleasant, being scrutinized like this. I felt the side of myself that was facing her prickling, burning from her gaze.
She had indeed given me a detailed explanation of the monitor role yesterday. According to Miyagi, many of the people who sold their life span there grew despondent and desperate when they had less than a year left and started causing problems. I didn't ask what "problems" these were, exactly, but I could guess.
The reason people follow the rules is because of the weight trust and reputation hold in life. But when you know for a fact that your life is about to end, things change. Reputation doesn't go with you to the afterlife.
So to prevent people who sold their life span from becoming erratic and harming others, they set up the monitor system. Anyone with less than a year left received a monitor. If they started acting inappropriately, the monitor would immediately send word back to base, and they would cut you off right there, regardless of how much time was actually left. With a single phone call, the girl sitting in the corner of my room could end my life.
However—apparently, this was shown through data to be an effective method—once they were just a few days from death, people stopped feeling the urge to harass others. So when there were only three days left, the monitor would leave.
I'd only be alone for the last three days of my life.
I don't know exactly when I fell asleep. The next thing I knew, my headache and nausea were gone. The clock said it was around seven in the evening. It was about the worst possible way I could have spent the first day of my last three months of life.
Miyagi was still there, unmoving, in the corner of the room.
I endeavored to go about my normal business while not thinking about her. I washed my face with cold water, changed into a pair of faded blue jeans and a ragged T-shirt, then went out to buy dinner. My monitor followed me about five steps behind.
I had to shade my eyes against the powerful light of the setting sun. The sunset was yellow today. The cicadas were buzzing from the distant woods. Smaller automobiles passed sluggishly on the road next to the sidewalk.
Eventually, I arrived at a pit-stop restaurant along the old national highway. It was a wide, squat building with trees behind it that grew over the roof. From signs to roof to walls, it was hard to find a spot that wasn't faded with time. Inside the building were about ten vending machines lined up along the wall and two narrow tables with pepper-flake shakers and ashtrays on them. The music from a few arcade cabinets that were at least ten years old played from the corner, which brought the faintest touch of warmth to the lonely, run-down interior.
I put three hundred yen into a noodle vending machine and smoked a cigarette while I waited for the machine to prepare my bowl. Miyagi sat in a round chair and looked up at the one fluorescent light that was flickering. How was she going to eat while she was monitoring me? I didn't think she could go without food and water, but she was just creepy enough that I had to wonder if that was true. She was like an automaton, I guess. Barely human.
When I was finished slurping down cheap-tasting tempura soba—at least it was hot—I bought a can of coffee from the beverage machine and drank it. The heavily sweetened iced coffee seeped into the dried-out husk of my body.
The reason I was choosing bad food out of a vending machine when I only had three months left to live was because I didn't know anything else. The person I'd been never had the option to go a little out of his comfort zone and eat at a fancy restaurant. My last few years of poverty had completely sapped me of any kind of imagination.
❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖
When I returned to the apartment after my meal, I took a pen and my notebook and decided to put my future actions into a list of bullet points. At first, it was easier to think of things I didn't want to do rather than things I did, but as I wrote, some things I wanted to accomplish before I died came to my mind.
Things to do before I die
- Don't go to college
- Don't work
- Don't hold back when you want something
- Eat something delicious
- Look at something beautiful
- Write a will
- Meet with Naruse and talk
- Meet with Himeno and tell her how I feel
"I wouldn't do that if I were you."
I turned around saw Miyagi standing behind me, rather than sitting in the corner. She was looking over my shoulder at what I was writing.
To my surprise, the item she was pointing at was Meet with Himeno and tell her how I feel.
"Does a monitor have an obligation to spy on their target and intrude with advice?" I asked her.
Miyagi didn't answer my question. Instead, she told me, "This Himeno person has been through a lot. She gave birth at age seventeen. Then she quit high school and got married at eighteen but was divorced a year later. Now that she's twenty, she's living with her parents and raising her baby. Two years from now, she's scheduled to kill herself by jumping. And her last message will be extremely dark… If you go to see her now, nothing good will happen. And Himeno barely remembers you. She certainly doesn't remember the special promise you made when you were ten."
I could barely speak. It felt as if all the air in my lungs had been sucked out.
"…You know that much about me?" I mumbled at last. Desperately trying to hide my panic, I asked, "Based on what you just said, it sounds like you know everything that's about to happen, too. Is that right?"
Miyagi blinked a few times, then shook her head.
"What I know is what might have happened in your life ahead, Mr. Kusunoki. At this point, such information is pointless, of course. By selling your life span, your future was greatly changed. And out of those things that might have happened, I only know the most important events."
Without taking her eyes off the notebook, Miyagi reached up and pulled her hair back behind her ear. "It seems Himeno was someone very important to you. The plot synopsis of your life was all about her."
"Only relatively speaking," I protested. "It just means nothing else was very important to me at all."
"You may be right," said Miyagi. "All I can tell you now is that going to see Himeno would be a waste of your time. It will only ruin the memories you have of her."
"Thanks for your concern. But they were ruined long ago."
"I've still saved you time, haven't I?"
"Maybe. Anyway, are you allowed to just tell people about the future like that?"
She looked curious. "If I might turn the question back on you, why did you assume I shouldn't?"
I couldn't come up with a good answer. If I tried to use that future information to cause trouble, Miyagi could simply call back in and have the rest of my life cut off.
"In essence, we just want you all to live the rest of your lives in tranquility," she explained. "That's why I am giving you advice based on your future and warning you away from actions that might harm you."
I scratched my head. I wanted to snap back at her, to tear into her.
"Maybe you think what you're doing is helping me avoid hurt or disappointment. But couldn't you also say that what you're doing is robbing me of the freedom to be hurt or disappointed? Let's say… Let's say I actually wanted to hear that from Himeno directly, not from you, so that it could wound me. All you've done is stuck your nose in where you're not wanted."
Miyagi sighed with obvious annoyance.
"Oh, I see. I thought I was just being a good person. If that were the case, then maybe what I said would have been careless. I'm very sorry," she said, then bowed to me. "But let me also say," she continued, "that I wouldn't go in expecting much in the way of fairness or integrity from what's going to happen next. You sold your future life away. That means you leaped into a world that works on cruel and illogical principles. There is almost no point in arguing for your own freedom or rights here. You did this to yourself."
Then Miyagi returned to the corner of the room and wrapped her arms around her legs again.
"But for this one time, I will choose to respect your freedom to be hurt or disappointed, and I will not comment on the other items on your list. Feel free to do as you wish, so long as it does not cause undue harm to others. I will not stop you."
That's already what I was going to do. You don't have to tell me, I thought.
I did not miss the look of faint sadness that crossed Miyagi's face. But I didn't think that hard about what the expression might mean, either.