Normally, being struck with a hot iron frying pan would leave a mark, but when I hesitantly touched the spot, I didn’t have a bump there. My hair was fine too. Was it a hallucination? Or was the entire series of events that led to me being hit by a mujina that had Toriko’s face all one “phenomenon”? I don’t even know if there’s a distinction between the two, but...it was probably the latter.
There’s a rather minor ghost story that includes the same sequence of events I had experienced. The title it was given on the accumulation site was “The Girlfriend I Met on Mixi.”
One morning, without warning, the experiencer gets smacked with a frying pan by the girl he’s been dating. She shouts, “Have you learned your lesson?” Then walks off, leaving the experiencer in a state of confusion.
Taken on its own, this would just be an incident of violence. It’s what came after that made this a ghost story.
The experiencer tries to contact his girlfriend in an attempt to figure out why she’d suddenly assaulted him. However, he finds her phone has been disconnected, and her workplace tells him, “No such person ever existed.” The apartment where she lived is an empty shell too. There’s no one at her family home, and even the name plate has been removed.
Using her father’s business card, which he received when he’d visited her family at home once before, he goes to the office where the man supposedly works, but once again there is no such person. He’s even told the business card is a fake. He visits the high school where she said her little brother was active on the baseball team, but the uniforms there, and the baseball team’s uniform, are both different from the ones the brother wore.
He remains unsure of what she meant by “Have you learned your lesson?” and has no idea what motive her entire family had for tricking him, but people beyond just the experiencer have also met her, so she wasn’t just a hallucination or delusion. Unable to figure out what in the world’s happened, he’s creeped out and afraid... That’s the kind of experiential report it is. It’s more or less certain that the situation I had experienced was following the outline of this story.
Having thought it through this far, there was one inevitable conclusion:
What if this ghost story continued along the same track?
Wouldn’t Toriko vanish, and it would be like she never existed in the first place?!
Clutching my still throbbing head, I rushed out of the apartment, driven by that sense of urgency. (And not just because I’d snapped.)
We won’t see each other for a week, and she won’t contact me either—that’s what Toriko said, but what do I care? I’m going to show up at her house. First thing’s first, I need to check that she’s safe.
Taking the bus down the same road I’d come, I took the Saikyo Line back in the Ikebukuro direction. It was morning commute time at this point, so the train was packed. I endured that for thirty minutes, crushed by the congestion and my own sense of urgency, and when the train finally spat me out at Ikebukuro I was all worn-out.
The rain that had been falling when I left home had gotten stronger in the last half hour. Raindrops bouncing off the roof of the stopped train drenched the platform, and the air was heavy with rainy season humidity.
With no time to rest, I transferred to the equally crowded Yamanote Line. I’d called and texted Toriko multiple times at this point, but she didn’t respond.
My uncertainty mounted. Could she really have...?
The last time I tried to go to Toriko’s place, the Time-space Man got in my way. It was a pain in the butt that time too, but I knew that Toriko had gone to the Otherside searching for Satsuki Uruma by herself, so I was able to go after her. Even if I was a bit cowardly about it.
But if Toriko vanished without going anywhere in particular, I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I could search whatever places came to mind, but there were a limited number of those. Just the university in the surface world. Maybe Canada was a possibility, but I’d have absolutely no idea how to go about searching for her in that case. That only left the other world.
If it came to that, then I’d be in the same position as Toriko when she was searching for Satsuki Uruma.
Everyone would give up on her, and as she faded from memory, I alone would believe in her survival, frequently going to the Otherside. Then, like Abarato, I’d gradually go insane.
It could’ve happened to Toriko, and it could still happen to me.
At the same time as I was shuddering at this all too possible future, I was also shocked by something else.
I know way too little about Toriko. Where she might go. What she’s been through. Who she knows. Where in Canada she lived, and what her life was like there. Or even what kind of kid she was.
Any information I can recall is minor, and fragmentary.
What have I been looking at all this time? We’ve been together for a whole year.
No, I guess we’ve only been together for a year.
I thought we were close...thought I knew her well...thought we had an emotional connection, but was that all an illusion? Was it just an assumption on my part?
“How do you feel about me, Sorawo?”
That question, which had me so indignant over how trite it was... All of a sudden, it was starting to feel incredibly significant.
I’d thought, Why’s she asking that? But when you consider the fact that I know next to nothing about Toriko, the meaning of the question changes.
Maybe the issue wasn’t whether I loved her or not, but a problem that came long before that.
Was I even interested in Toriko to begin with?
“Sorawo-chan, are you engaging in first contact with Toriko properly?”
When two different cultures come into contact, if you measure the other by your own standards, that’s cultural understanding.
This was the most basic of basics in cultural anthropology, something which had been drilled into us since the very first lecture.
Maybe...I hadn’t been making first contact.
The train arrived in Nippori. Pushed by the rush of people, I got off, went down the stairs, and out the gate.
I climbed the hill, out of breath, in the unrelenting rain. The wall of a graveyard continued along the left-hand side. Turning onto a side street at the top of the hill, I could see Toriko’s apartment building in the middle of a residential area.
Walking quickly in that direction, I tried calling again... No luck. She wasn’t answering. I was still feeling anxious as I arrived at the building.
The building uses an auto-lock system, so I’ll need to punch her room number into the panel in the entrance hall to call her—but what if she doesn’t answer? I was thinking as I reached the entrance, but one of the residents was just coming out. Nice timing. I quickly walked past them through the automatic door. They glanced in my direction, scaring me for a second, but apparently they didn’t have time to stop and call me out on it.
I got in the elevator and pressed the button for the fourth floor. There was nothing posted about cleaning the water tank.
Getting off on the fourth floor, I headed into the hallway. The town I could see over the chest-high wall was misty in the rain. The announcements coming from the direction of the station and the sounds of the trains were vague and muffled.
At the end of the hall was Room 404. Toriko’s place.
Coming to a stop in front of her door, I peered through the peephole. The last time I came, the room had been filled with the blue of the Otherside. How about now? I couldn’t imagine what was on the other side of the door.