Our minds are infected by a virus called “stories” that someone injected into our brains. That’s what I said. We must abandon stories. I said that too. And I’ve seen the first humans, and the birth of stories, too.
The result of all that is the person I am now. The writer of this story.
But as I said at the beginning, it took me until the death of my ex-girlfriend to realize my destiny. Living in a world with a low story density had given me what amounted to amnesia. Perhaps I needed an event that was like an overdose of stories to remember.
After my memories came back, I spent a fairly long time writing about the life of Akuto Sai. This, I believe, is the end of that process.
But it wasn’t easy.
Around 2010, when the story began to reach its end, it took courage to start writing. I had no ideas in my brain, just a dull headache. It was like I was being slowly strangled by an invisible noose around my throat. There was a strange, unpleasant feeling, a weight that made it hard to move, or hard to even stand up. This unpleasant feeling only grew as my desire to write down these words increased.
I knew what writers had always called this. A slump. Writer’s block.
Someone of a more traditional literary bent might’ve called it a devouring mold, or a stalking black dog. But I gave it a stupider name: the crazy monster. The crazy monster sat in the corner of the room, and whenever I stared at it, it would leap on my shoulders.
If I slept, or did something to distract myself that involved no mental work whatsoever, it would eventually vanish. But during the times when that wasn’t possible, I would have to do a little exercise to get the unpleasantness off my shoulders.
The problem was, I would have to exercise to the point where it put a serious strain on me for it to have any effect, and this was also a bit of a gamble. Sometimes it would help, and other times, it created a pain in my shoulders that made me want to throw up. The pain got to the point where it was devouring my life.
By the time I realized that I couldn’t defeat it, or tame it, it finally occurred to me what it was. It was lightness. The lighter I tried to make what I was writing, the harder it became to write.
I need to elaborate more about what I mean by “lightness”.
Normally, the word would refer to something superficial. Something that didn’t make you think. But in this case, I mean something virtual.
First, the main characters had left their physical bodies behind. By this I mean that they were capable of surviving physical shocks that would kill an ordinary human, and sometimes would display superhuman powers. For this reason, the characters had personalities that were extremely slanted in one direction or another, and seemed inhuman.
The story was written to have a happy ending, and even if there was some unhappiness, it was there for a reason. Sometimes, to avoid an unhappy story, the characters wouldn’t age, and their minds wouldn’t mature. When I tried to write these “light” stories, the unpleasant feeling was always there.
So what if I tried to write a “heavy” story? I tried it, just to get my mind off things, and the more “virtual” it became (that is, even if the characters seemed real, if the story was still fictional) the more the “crazy monster” would be waiting for me.
It was clear that this was an obstacle set by the stories themselves.
I felt like I’d seen the core essence of stories. This was a story written to destroy stories, and it was clear that the stories were fighting back. Looking back, there had been many obstacles in my way up until this point, but all of them were caused by the stories controlling my memories and actions. This goes for how books sell, too.
People are ashamed of “light” stories. But the lightest stories are the ones they love. Many people buy light stories in secret, stories that satisfy their base urges. The heavy stories, on the other hand, are the ones that are said to capture the essence of humanity, and those who write them are praised and called “intellectuals”. And even the most impossible stories are allowed to be believed if they become the text of a religion.
Are stories like gravity? Do they pin us to the Earth with their weight, and make us avoid lightness? And if the true nature of humans is to seek lightness...
I heard a sound of some kind, in my mind. I knew exactly what I had to do to complete my mission.
This world was created by the Demon King. And it was my job to lead the Demon King, and his sunken thoughts, to “lightness”.
The method immediately occured to me.
The Law of Identity would have access to this world. That much was clear from how Keena tried to stop the Demon King. The Law of Identity wanted a real ending. So I would show her the story’s destruction.
Looking back at the way this world was created, it was clear that the Law of Identity must be hiding, unseen by the Demon King. The Demon King was omnipresent in this world, but without the characters’ identities, that is, in the mathematical sense, unless the characters were themselves, the stories couldn’t exist.
But the Demon King had failed to find the Law of Identity in this world. Most likely, this was because of his preconceived notion that Keena was asleep.
Put another way, my goal was to bring the Demon King and the Law of Identity together. And to do it, I would need “a story that denies stories.” And the search for it would be the last story.
“I have no idea what any of the things you just said meant.”
A rather foul-mouthed Junko Hattori said to me, as we sat in a cafe in Kamata station. I’d called her here to explain this. Or try to explain it, at least.
Hattori was sharp, but she could be stubborn and prone to reject anything she saw as a flight of fancy. I’ll probably have to explain to you who Junko is. When the Demon King rolled back the story to around the year 2000, we were given different personalities and lives.
The world was created from nothing in 1990, and we were all given false memories of the past. So in this world, Junko Hattori was an old co-worker of mine. Her old appearance, and her old story, had been taken from her, and now she was a thin, and to be honest, plain-looking girl.
“In other words, this world was just made a bit ago... Well, about ten years ago, in fact. And what I want you to do is bring back your old memories as that character,” I continued. She may not know what I was talking about, but if I kept appealing to her memories, maybe I could get through somehow.