I left the air-conditioned room and headed to the combined dining room and kitchen. There were dishes for two sitting in the drying rack, and some papers left out on the table. I took a glance. They were about child support, benefits, and the like...all bureaucratic stuff. There were notes stuck to the fridge with magnets. A shopping list, a list of dates for vaccinations, and a scribbled face, likely drawn by Kasumi.
I opened the freezer. In addition to the box of ice pops, there were bags of frozen food. Broccoli and spinach, white fish, dumplings, and sliced bread.
I stood there in a daze for a little while.
“It’s a home...” I mumbled to myself.
Inside the fridge, I saw “home.” The place felt lived-in, in a way Kozakura’s mansion never had before. It had been getting better ever since Toriko and I started dropping in regularly, but this blew even that small amount of change out of the water.
I don’t know why, but...my chest hurt.
It made me feel incredibly sad, and lonely.
I felt almost like I had been left behind, even though that wasn’t the case at all.
At least, it shouldn’t have been.
The cold air caressing my feet brought me back to my senses. I’d left the freezer open. I needed to close it before the things inside started to thaw.
I grabbed three ice pops, closed the freezer door, and headed back to Kozakura’s room.
“Took you long enough,” Kozakura said. “Did you make a side trip somewhere?”
“Sorry.”
“Hm? It’s not a problem, but are you okay?”
“It’s nothing. Take an ice pop.”
“I’ll have the grape one.”
“And you, Toriko?”
“What are these? Orange and apple?”
“Probably. I just grabbed them at random, so I don’t even know.”
“Hmm, I’ll have this one then.”
“You two sit while you’re eating too, got it?” Kozakura warned us.
“We’re not children...” I protested.
“It sets a bad example for Kasumi.”
If that was her argument, I’d have to accept it. I joined Toriko on the sofa, and we were on our best behavior as we enjoyed our ice pops. Kasumi, meanwhile, had long since finished hers, and was gnawing on the stick, leaving her teeth marks on it as she messed around with the tablet.
“Whatcha looking at?” I asked.
Kasumi’s eyes stayed glued to the screen as she read out, “The formal name of England is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Sanmaland. It was originally settled by Celtic people known as the Furiten. They were always playing mahjong, but then one of them left, and they didn’t have enough people to play. That’s how three-player mahjong, or sanma, was born.”
I don’t even know what she’s saying...
“Is that what’s written there?”
Toriko tried to look over her shoulder, but Kasumi held the tablet to her chest.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to take it from you...” Toriko tried to reassure her, but Kasumi didn’t let her guard down.
“You can’t. People will come out of the concrete.”
“Huh?”
“It was revealed that during road work, or large construction projects such as dams, bridges, and air ports, people were being thrown in as human sacrifices, and in 2009 the slogan ‘people from concrete’ appeared. You must know about the tunnels and overpasses that collapsed after they took the people out of them!”
Having said all of this fluently, Kasumi got to her feet and rushed out of the room.
“Did I make her mad?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Kozakura said before musing, “Frankly, I think she looks at the internet too much. I tell her to keep it in moderation, but I spend so much time absorbed in my work I can’t control her usage. I’ve put a child lock on it, and I do check her browsing history, so I think I’m monitoring her, at least.”
“If you really wanted to, you could shut off the internet, couldn’t you, Kozakura-san?”
“Sorawo-chan, what would you do in Kasumi’s position if I turned off the internet?”
“Look for every possible way I could get around it.”
“I’ll bet.”
“She only reads the internet? No books or manga?” Toriko asked.
“She’ll read anything,” Kozakura replied. “If I let my guard down, I’ll find her looking at textbooks she’s swiped off my shelves.”
“Whoa, isn’t that kind of amazing? She’s a genius,” exclaimed Toriko.
“Nah, it’s not like she can actually read them. They’re full of kanji, and she doesn’t have the background to understand the material. Some of them are even in English. I thought she might be a genius too, at first, but as I watched, she just flipped through until she got bored, and tossed the book aside. Though, I can’t say it was a total waste for her. Her language acquisition may not follow established patterns, after all.”
“Hmm. Maybe she’ll become like a real scholar some day?”
Kozakura cocked her head to the side at Toriko’s comment. “I wonder about that. I think as her language acquisition progresses, she’ll become more and more ordinary.”
“You do?” asked Toriko.
“She has all these unconnected words inside her head, like little islands, and pulls out whichever ones seem to fit the current situation. Like a parrot mimicking human speech. In order to connect all those little islands, she needs basic education, and once those gaps are filled in she should become more like other kids her age.”
“How are you going to get her to learn that basic material?” I asked.
“I’m teaching her.”
“You, Kozakura-san?”
“I bought some educational books for kids and some picture books, and we’ve been using them. If I’m going to send her off to school, she needs to be able to speak to some degree.”
“Wow...”
“What?”
“No, it’s nothing.”
I was weirdly feeling lonely again for some reason. I sucked my ice pop as Kozakura fixed me with a dubious look. The cold apple-flavored treat made my teeth hurt.
“So, how did you end up formalizing you taking Kasumi?” asked Toriko.
“We went with a plenary adoption.”
“I figured that’d be it,” Toriko said, nodding.
“You figured?” I asked.
“Yeah... I looked into it, because I was curious. Since we don’t know who her parents are, she doesn’t have a family register. I wondered what would happen in that case.”
“I initially talked to Migiwa about pulling some strings to have a family register created for her, but when we thought about Kasumi’s future, we decided it was better to take the orthodox approach. Once they finished recovering from T-san incident, we went to the police, the child guidance office, and welfare services to report we’d found an abandoned child, and—”
“Huh?! You’ve been doing all that?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’ve been doing all of that. But things were a mess after that. The system needed to put Kasumi in an institution. But she’d just come back here on her own. Her case worker didn’t know what to do. I felt sorry for them. I mean, she kept escaping from situations where it was physically impossible to.”
“What did you do about that?”
“There was nothing I could do, so I contacted them when she came here. They would quietly go through the formalities, pretending to examine this place and wherever she’d escaped from, checking that nothing unusual had happened... Eventually, it was decided that they couldn’t find her parents, and the local government would make her a family registry, which put us on course for a plenary adoption.”
“Wow, that’s amazing!” Toriko exclaimed.
“It sure was. We used a bunch of Migiwa’s connections, which is kind of cheating, but it was still damn hard. I went through the pre-adoption training program, and they even visited the house.”
“So, that means Kasumi’s really your daughter now, Kozakura-san?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Huh...” I couldn’t help but be amazed. Kozakura may have felt awkward to have both of us staring at her, because she waved her hand and changed the subject.
“So? What brings you two here today?”
“Ah, it’s not that we have any business here, it’s uh...” I glanced at Toriko. She sat up straight, and cleared her throat.
“We have something to report.”
“Uh-huh,” Kozakura said.
“We’re going out now.”
“Congrats,” Kozakura said, clapping her hands lethargically. “And?”
“That’s all. We just thought you should know.”
“Best wishes.”
“Thanks.”
“...”
“...”
There was a strange silence.
“Huh? Um, Kozakura-san, is that all?” I asked.
“What?”
“No, it’s just...”
“Should I act more delighted? If you ask me, you could’ve gotten on with it a lot sooner. Would’ve made people less irritated...”
“Um, strictly speaking, we’re not quite going out,” I tried to clarify.
“Huh?” Kozakura’s brow furrowed and she looked at Toriko. “Anything to say about that?”
“Well, we have some differences of opinion, but she’s largely okay with it, so it’s all good.”
“Toriko, what are you even talking about? Are you two really going out?”
“We are, we are,” Toriko insisted.
“And Sorawo-chan? You’ve agreed to this?”
“We have an agreement.”
We disagree over how to present the relationship to others, though.
Kozakura looked dubiously at each of us. “I dunno. You two sure can’t make anything clear...” she muttered. It was more on the mark than I expected, and I almost smiled despite myself.
Unclear. If I needed one word that defined our relationship, the nue, I don’t think I could have chosen a better one.
“What’re you grinning for?”
“Not a thing.”
Apparently, I had in fact smiled despite myself. Kozakura looked at me suspiciously as I struggled to wipe the grin off my face, but then she seemed to switch gears.
“Well, whatever. Honestly, I don’t have the free time to waste on other people’s love lives.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet,” I said. “You must have your hands full looking after Kasumi.”
“That’s not all. I’ve got more things I want to do now.”
Kozakura looked back at her desk. Was that some kind of programming code in the window open on the monitor in front of her? It was whatever she’d been banging away at when we’d come in.
“It’s a good time, so do you want to hear about it? It has something to do with what you’re doing.”
“What we’re doing...by which you mean what exactly?”
When I asked that, Kozakura got a slightly prideful look on her face.
“It goes without saying, doesn’t it? Exploring the Otherside.”