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As I sat down beside you, I had an odd feeling, as if thousands of invisible threads were finely tying your body to my heart. The minute movement of your eyelids and the slight flutter of your lips were enough to stir my heart.
But truly wishing for something, from the heart, isn’t that simple. It might take time. In the meanwhile, you might have to give up all sorts of things. Things that you treasure. But don’t give up, no matter how long it takes.
Since most of those are really important dreams and teach me a lot of important things.” “A lot of important things?” I asked. “About the me I don’t know about,” you replied.
Dreams were like a crucial water source nurturing your heart, conveying something vital.
The shadow crouched there, listening to the Gatekeeper’s words. I did feel a little guilty. Unavoidable, I suppose, since I was getting rid of my alter ego.
This might be one of the issues with eternity—not knowing where you should go next. But how much value was there in a love that didn’t seek the eternal?
Just as the people of the town had no horizontal curiosity about geography, they lacked any vertical curiosity about history.
My shadow said, “It’s up to you to decide what you’re looking for in your life. It’s your life, after all. I’m a mere appendage. I don’t have any great wisdom, nor any real role to play. Yet if I totally vanish, it will cause some inconvenience. I don’t want to sound conceited, but I haven’t been with you all this time for no reason.”
Time passed slowly, though, never once reversing course. One minute took one minute, one hour took exactly one hour. Time passes ever so slowly, yet it doesn’t rewind. That’s the lesson that period of life taught me. Obvious, of course, but sometimes it’s the obvious things that have the most significance.
Like the dawn arriving and sunshine streaming through the window, I repeated to myself. A nice turn of phrase, that.
“ ‘People are like a breath; their days are like a fleeting shadow.’ Do you understand that? Human beings are as insubstantial as an exhaled breath, and what they do in their lives is but a moving shadow. Well, these words really got to me when I was younger, but it was only after I died, and became what I am now, that I truly understood them. It’s true, we humans are but a breath, and I, dead now, don’t even have a shadow anymore.”
As always, when he had free time he read books, and wrote fiction, yet after he turned thirty, his desire to create, which had once burned like a red-hot flame within him, gradually diminished. Like a traveler who discovers, without realizing it, that he’s crossed a great, meaningful divide. There were fewer and fewer days when he sat at his desk, his pen filling in manuscript pages.
Mr. Koyasu couldn’t grasp what his own existence meant, but he no longer cared.
Life, after all, was a long, drawn-out struggle. No matter how much sadness there was, how much loss and despair awaited us, you had to steadily move forward, step by painful step.
Mr. Koyasu shook his head slightly. “I understand why you’d think that way, but actually that’s not the case. All that’s inside the grave is the bones of the three of us, and there’s no connection between the bones and the soul. Bones are bones, the soul is the soul—one material, the other immaterial. A soul that’s lost a body vanishes in the end. And because of that, even though I’m dead and in the realm after death, I am all alone, just like when I was alive. My wife and child are nowhere to be found. The three names are simply carved on the gravestone, that’s all. And this soul of mine,
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“Indeed. Loneliness is extremely hard. Whether you’re alive or dead, the wasting away, the pain is exactly the same. But even so I still have the strong, vivid memories of having loved someone with all my heart. A feeling that seeped into the palms of my hands and still remains. Whether you have that warmth or not makes all the difference in the way your soul remains after death.”
Once you’ve tasted pure, unadulterated love, it’s like a part of your heart’s been irradiated, burned out, in a sense. Particularly when that love, for whatever reason, is suddenly severed. For the person involved, that sort of love is both the supreme happiness and a curse.
But even in the world after death I am totally alone and the riddle remains.”
“Sometimes I just don’t understand myself,” I admitted honestly. “Maybe I’ve lost sight of me. I don’t have a sense that I’m living this life as myself, as the real me. Sometimes I think I’m merely a shadow. When I feel that way, I get this restless feeling, like I’m simply tracing an outline of myself, cleverly pretending to be me.”
“The real self and his shadow are essentially two sides of the same coin,” Mr. Koyasu said in a quiet voice. “Depending on the circumstances, they can change roles. That’s how people can overcome troubles and survive. And tracing something and pretending to be something are very important sometimes. It’s nothing to be concerned about. Because the person here right now is indeed you.”
What I can say is one more thing—never give up believing. If you can believe strongly, deeply, in something, the road ahead will become clear. And then you can prevent the terrible, inevitable fall to come.
The world was, day by day, becoming a more convenient, and unromantic, place.
An epidemic of the soul.
Whatever the motivation, it was a fait accompli. Half unconsciously, almost reflexively, I’d invited her out to dinner and she’d accepted. Many things in life are like that, though, if you think about it—moving ahead on their own without regard for the intentions or plans of the person involved. To take it a step further, I’d have to say that at this point I was bereft of any intentions or plans.
But I welcomed the cold, since it cooled down some of the confusion swirling around within me.
Mr. Koyasu nodded. “True, the town erected in his mind may differ in lots of small ways from the one you actually lived in. The basic structure is the same, yet the details have been changed so it’s a town made for him. Since it’s a town that exists for that purpose.”
And you need to live the life you chose, in the world you chose to be in.”
A faint sadness came over me as the thought arose. Like colorless water, utterly devoid of warmth, my heart was quietly immersed in that sadness.
I shut my eyes and thought about time. In the past—for instance, back when I was seventeen—there was literally an inexhaustible amount of time. Like a huge reservoir, filled to the very brim. So there was no need to consider time. But now was different. Time, I knew, was limited. And as I aged, considering time had even greater implications. Time, no matter what, ticked away, ceaselessly.
“I think the wall surrounding the town is the consciousness that creates you as a person. Which is why the wall can freely change shape apart from any personal intentions. A person’s consciousness is the same as a glacier, with only a fraction of it showing above the water. Most of it is hidden, unseen, sunk in a dark place.”
“I wonder if I’m worth waiting for.” “That remains to be seen,” I said. “But there’s a certain value in wanting to wait, even if it takes time.”
What is real, and what is not? In this world is there really something like a wall separating reality from the unreal? I think there might be. No, not might—there is one. But it’s an entirely uncertain wall. Depending on circumstances and the person, its texture, its shape transforms. Like some living being.
If I had to label it, I’d say it was a concept existing on the periphery of reality.
“Did you know that? The two of us are nothing more than someone else’s shadows.”
I passed in front of the clock tower, and as I did, I habitually glanced up at the clock. As always, the clock had no hands. It wasn’t a clock that told time, but a clock that showed the meaninglessness of time. Time hadn’t come to a halt, but it had lost any significance.
It was hard to imagine a lonelier sound than a river flowing at night.
However—there isn’t just one reality. Reality is something you have to choose by yourself, out of several possible alternatives.
I am he, and he is me, the boy had declared. The two of us becoming one was, he said, entirely natural, and by doing so I could become more the essential, real me. Had I become more the real me? Is this—the me here now—the essential, original me? But who’s to decide? How can you distinguish a subject and object that meld together? The more I thought about it, the less I understood about who I am.
“Exactly. Time here stopped.” I gave this some thought and then said, “So if there’s no time, nothing ever accumulates?” “Right, where’s there’s no time there’s no accumulation. What looks like accumulation is nothing but a transitory illusion cast by the present. Imagine turning pages in a book. The pages change but the page numbers do not. There’s no logical connection between the new page and the previous one. The scenery around us may change but we’re glued to the same spot.” “An eternal present?” “Exactly. The only time that exists in this town is the present. There is no accumulation.
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“Then we have already switched roles. Meaning he’s actively functioning as the real me, while I’m a secondary entity, like I’m his shadow. I can’t help thinking that. Is that really possible? For the real person and his shadow to switch like that?” The boy considered this, then said, “Well, I can’t really say. Since it’s basically your issue. For me, though, I think either way’s fine. Whether I’m the real me, or a shadow. Either way, the me here now, the one I see as myself—that’s me. There’s nothing beyond that. Maybe you should consider it the same way too.”
Your heart is like a bird flying through the sky. The wall can’t prevent your heart from flapping its wings.
“Believe in the existence of your other self,” Yellow Submarine Boy said. “That’s my lifeline.” “That’s right. He’ll catch you. Believe in that. Believing in your other self is believing in you, yourself.”
As Jorge Luis Borges put it, there are basically a limited number of stories one writer can seriously relate in his lifetime.
Truth is not found in fixed stillness, but in ceaseless change and movement. Isn’t this the quintessential core of what stories are all about? At least that’s how I see it.
