"........."
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Nagi did not look satisfied.
✦ ✦ ✦
“What went wrong?” she muttered. What terrible thing had happened that brought all this to pass?
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“Must be the bug,” Boogiepop said.
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Nagi looked up.
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“The world is not moving unrelentingly in one direction. It moves in all directions, like a swarm of bugs. Sometimes they make one unified motion, but other times, like this case, the movement simply collapses, Without ever resulting in anything. That is all.”
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“Then what should I do?” Nagi asked, her voice tight. “How can I stop this from happening again?
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What can I do to make things turn out better?”
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Boogiepop frowned. “You intend to try again?”
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Nagi glared at him. “Is that a problem?”
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“No. . .but if that’s the case, then this is not goodbye.”
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“Eh?”
✦ ✦ ✦
“We may well meet again, many times, in similar circumstances,” he said, with a wink.
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“I suppose.” Nagi shook her head.
✦ ✦ ✦
When she looked up again, the cloaked figure was gone. He had vanished in an instant.
✦ ✦ ✦
".........."
✦ ✦ ✦
She stood stunned for a moment, but then shook her head again, “Oh well,” she said.
✦ ✦ ✦
Then she slowly walked away, dragging her injured leg. She glanced back at the body once, but soon moved forward again. This time she did not stop.
✦ ✦ ✦
The full moon above bathed the world in its
✦ ✦ ✦
constant glow.
✦ ✦ ✦
“The Bug” closed.
✦ ✦ ✦
In the world covered in ruins, everything crumbled and destroyed, Boogiepop’s story ended.
✦ ✦ ✦
“I see,” Echoes said, nodding gravely. “Nothing can be explained easily. Everything is complicated..."
✦ ✦ ✦
He sighed.
✦ ✦ ✦
Boogiepop silently nodded in assent.
✦ ✦ ✦
It was dawn now. The sky was turning pale.
✦ ✦ ✦
The air never moved. If either of them dropped something, it would undoubtedly echo without end.
✦ ✦ ✦
Boogiepop began to whistle, and Echoes began to hum along. He had only heard it once, but he remembered the melody.
✦ ✦ ✦
For a while, they performed in chorus. No one else was here to listen, and the melody drifted around them quietly.
✦ ✦ ✦
The horizons grew indistinct, like an out of focus camera. The blur was drawing closer to them, but their performance continued.
✦ ✦ ✦
Eventually the world was only in focus for a few meters around them, and only then did their song end.
✦ ✦ ✦
“...I’ve never sung before,” Echoes said, grinning. “It was very enjoyable.”
✦ ✦ ✦
Boogiepop again produced that asymmetrical
✦ ✦ ✦
expression, half smile, half smirk.
✦ ✦ ✦
“This world is almost finished. We must say goodbye, Echoes-kun, but I’m glad we met.”
✦ ✦ ✦
“Yes. I am grateful that we were brought together here. I know not what quirk of fate it was, but just as Kirima Nagi carries on her fight, accepting the feelings of those she meets, I am grateful for what fate has done. Thank you,” he said quietly, placing his hand on his chest.
✦ ✦ ✦
Boogiepop nodded lightly.
✦ ✦ ✦
The world around them was vanishing quickly.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Where will you go now?” Boogiepop asked.
✦ ✦ ✦
Echoes smiled. “I will watch over the world from a distance. No matter what happens to me. Yes. . .I’m just taking my turn.”
✦ ✦ ✦
“I see.”
✦ ✦ ✦
“And you? Boogiepop, what will you do?”
✦ ✦ ✦
“Well...” he shrugged. “First off, I’d better meet the Piper-he made this world before Zoragi destroyed it. He appears to be waiting for me.”
✦ ✦ ✦
His eyes looked rather stern.
✦ ✦ ✦
“And then? You will fight on?”
✦ ✦ ✦
“Well...” Boogiepop started to answer, but the vanishing of the world had reached Echoes.
✦ ✦ ✦
His figure went out of synch with this world, blurred, and was gone.
✦ ✦ ✦
All that remained was Boogiepop.
✦ ✦ ✦
so,” he said, absently.
✦ ✦ ✦
And, left all alone, he began to whistle once more.
✦ ✦ ✦
".........♪"
✦ ✦ ✦
Even time had vanished. Only the hazy light of dawn remained. And there, Boogiepop whistled quietly, his Whistle reaching nowhere, and no one.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Boogiepop at Dawn ” all over.
✦ ✦ ✦
AFTERWORD
✦ ✦ ✦
Beginings
✦ ✦ ✦
Erm. Most of the time, when people are ready to start something, they have already stuck their noses in pretty far. Take the phenomenon known as love at first sight; it does not actually begin at the chance meeting.
✦ ✦ ✦
First, that person’s heart has to be ready for such an encounter. That way, when he runs across someone who perfectly fits that form, he falls in love. This readiness is not always based on an ideal type, but can also be based purely on negative emotions, whittled down by his reactions to things he hates until a form is made unconsciously. When something appears that is the inverse of these negative emotions, the person falls as though the ground underfoot has crumbled.
✦ ✦ ✦
Thus, nothing in the world ever truly begins; there is always a certain amount of preparation beforehand.
✦ ✦ ✦
To give an example, this happened when I was still a student. I was staring vacantly at the street below out the window of a train stopped at JR Yuraku-cho Station when I thought I saw a black shadow in the middle of the crowd. I’m nearsighted, and I soon lost track of whatever it was. . .I think. I was pretty out of it, so it might just have been my imagination. I spent most of my time rather dazed back then. But this thing was like a black mass rising directly out of the ground, like a youkaz' or spirit. Perhaps I never really saw it, but just thought something like that might be neat.
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At the time, I was already writing novels (during class. . .so consistently that even people I didn’t know knew that I was writing novels. . .incorrigible) so you might say I should have just written about that, but at the time I was writing a different kind of novel and didn’t feel like it. My head was full of that one thing, and I never even looked at anything else; but looking back at it, even then I was interested in all kinds of things, and I did spend a lot of my time on unrelated matters. I had started listening to music, but I had no intention of connecting that interest to my writing. It was just for fun. That’s still partly true, even now. I did several other things that had equally little effect on my writing. They should have had everything to do with it, but I never noticed. And the shadow I saw out the window of the train was just one tiny piece of this.
✦ ✦ ✦
So when I did decide to write about it, all the preparations that I needed to write about it had already been done. I don’t really know how. When I started I was all revved up to begin and I poured my energy into it. Yet, apparently, it had already started long before. Apparently everything works that way.
✦ ✦ ✦
Even if you fail constantly, if you end up slamming your face into the wall over and over, you are already starting something, and no matter how fruitless and depressing it might seem to be, even if it really is sad, nothing can stop it from starting. Even if nothing lies ahead of you but darkness.
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I think.
✦ ✦ ✦
This looks optimistic, but it really isn ’t.
✦ ✦ ✦
Oh well.
✦ ✦ ✦
BGM “The Beginning is the End is the Beginning”
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by THE SMASHING PUMPKINS
✦ ✦ ✦
Translation Notes
✦ ✦ ✦
The End is the Beginning is the End
✦ ✦ ✦
Nagi’s name
✦ ✦ ✦
凪 means “calm” in the sense of a lack of wind. It clearly contains the same metaphorical connotations in both languages; the kanji looks a little like 風-kaze or “wind.”
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Style
✦ ✦ ✦
Flock of Crows
✦ ✦ ✦
Technically a “murder of crows,” but in this context that was confusing.
✦ ✦ ✦
Public Enemy No. 1
✦ ✦ ✦
Love & Revolution
✦ ✦ ✦
“Man was born for love and revolution,” are the words of author Osamu Dazai. They come from his novel Shayo, The Setting Sun.
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Green
✦ ✦ ✦
Mijukumono, an inexperienced person. Literally means “Unripened.”
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Child is the Father to the Man
✦ ✦ ✦
In keeping with Kadono’s tradition of musical references, an album title by Blood, Sweat & Tears. A discovery made because that was how I was able to trace it back to the English expression...
✦ ✦ ✦
A Three Year Old’s Soul Lasts a Hundred Years The Japanese expression “Mitsugo no tamashz'i hyaku made-translated fairly literally, but with an eye on preserving the actual meaning. Another translation is, “What is learned in the cradle is carried to the grave.”
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The Piper at the Gates
✦ ✦ ✦
of Dawn “Reprise”
✦ ✦ ✦
I’m Just Taking My Turn
✦ ✦ ✦
“Ana hito no kawari ni ” is literally, “In place of that person.” It is unclear who Echoes is talking about.
✦ ✦ ✦
Piper
✦ ✦ ✦
Waikyokuou is translated literally as “The King of Distortion,” but it appears to be a quotation from the Japanese translation of the lyrics to Stairway to Heaven. Apparently that’s how some poetic translator chose to render “Piper.” The character of Piper plays a role in the fifth Boogiepop novel entitled Boogiepop Overdrive.
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Zoragi
✦ ✦ ✦
Zoragi is a rubber suit style monster that also appears in the fifth novel.
✦ ✦ ✦
Kouhei Kadono
✦ ✦ ✦
A frustrated man wandering through life. He
✦ ✦ ✦
moves at one speed, and he left behind before he realized it. Wrote a about a hitman when
✦ ✦ ✦
he was nineteen that, in firetrospect, may have been of critical importancéjé. It also might just have been a sign that progressed at all.
✦ ✦ ✦
Kouji Ogata
✦ ✦ ✦
Born in Osaka Resident. Barely managed
✦ ✦ ✦
to get enough credits to graduate from Osaka Design School. Did a lot of things after which brings us to the present. Enjoys motorcycles, tennis, andremote controlled models. Popular and frantically busy. Likes," to drink.