There were seven people present. Eight if you included Manato. Some were bigger or smaller, male or female, but they were all in about the same situation. They’d all lost their parents. When one of them said “nitwit,” the response was “canary.” Anyone who didn’t say that wasn’t one of them. Apparently, a canary was a bird. None of them knew what kind of bird. They’d just sort of settled on it.
The Canaries lived in places like drainage pipes, manholes, gaps between buildings that were too tight to pass through easily, and buildings that were crumbling and had been declared too unsafe to enter by the yakuza. If they stayed in one place for too long, the yakuza would find them, and that could mean getting killed, so they moved around constantly.
They mostly got their food in the marketplace. They didn’t have money, so they stole from the stalls whenever they could. But if they were caught, the yakuza would get called in, so they had to be very careful. Food someone didn’t finish eating, that went unsold, or that was rotting made for an easier target. It was all thrown out in dedicated buckets behind the marketplace. Garbage or not, though, it seemed there was still some use for it, because yakuza from the town hall came to collect it once every two days. The Canaries took what they could before that.
But there was a lot of competition for the trash.
Lots of people lived like the Canaries in Tsunomiya, and not all of them were kids. There were some groups of adults too. They all wanted the edible trash, and there wasn’t enough to go around. That could mean fights sometimes, but if they made too much of a ruckus, the yakuza would come running, so they had to keep it under control. But no matter how hard they tried to do that, if the other side got serious, they had to respond in kind. One Canary got badly hurt that way and died. There were seven Canaries, including Manato, after that.
One time, over a hundred yakuza were deployed to carry out a “cleanup operation,” and a huge number of garbage scroungers were killed. One of the Canaries got caught by the yakuza and beaten to a bloody pulp. Then their corpse was put on display in the center of the marketplace.
The six remaining Canaries decided it was time to leave Tsunomiya. It wasn’t so hard to come in, but when you tried to leave, you would find fences and yakuza guards in your way, which made escaping pretty tough. The Canaries weren’t the only ones who wanted out of Tsunomiya, though, and there was talk of working together with another group. But someone in the other group turned out to be a traitor who ratted them out to the yakuza. In the end, everyone in that group got slaughtered, the traitor included.
The six Canaries eventually made a run for it in the middle of the day when a large group was coming into town. The yakuza chased them around for a while, but the Canaries managed to shake them off.
Manato figured that with six people, they’d surely be able to manage. Even when it had just been him and his two infirm parents, they had managed to get by as hunters. There were six Canaries, and all of them were young. No one in the Canaries knew exactly how old they were, but they were probably around ten or something like that.
Juntza knew a lot and could read and write. According to him, if a person made it to thirty, they had lived a long life. So, at the very least, they all had another ten years in them. Though, maybe ten years from now their teeth would start falling out like his mom’s and dad’s had. They’d wrinkle up, and their arms and legs would gradually stop working. Then, once they couldn’t eat properly, they’d soon be dead.
One girl called Amu, who had hair like a bird’s nest, was really conscious of the fact that she was missing a tooth that she’d lost when a yakuza had punched her.
“Yakuza live a long time. I hear the mayor of Tsunomiya’s thirty-five. He’s been living for thirty-five whole years. Isn’t that incredible?”
Amu had wanted to go out with a different yakuza but decided she couldn’t do it when he’d mocked her for her missing tooth. She’d thrown rocks at him, and then he’d snapped and kicked her butt.
Manato found it strange that Amu’s front tooth hadn’t grown back. When he asked why that was, Juntza explained to him that after a baby tooth fell out and an adult one grew in, it would never grow back again. It was true that his mom’s and dad’s teeth had never grown back. But while Manato had lost a number of teeth to injuries, they had always grown back quickly. Everyone was surprised when he told them that, but Juntza not so much.
“I’ve heard about this kind of thing before. There are guys like that sometimes. You must be one of them, Manato.”
“One of what?”
“Just guys who are like that.”
After they left Tsunomiya, Neika, who could only see out of one eye, would always say, “Japan’s a big place, so if we’re going to go somewhere, let’s go somewhere far away.”
At first, Manato didn’t know what Japan was. According to Neika, Japan was the name of the world they were in. This world was Japan, and Japan was a big place. Juntza said he’d seen an old map of all of Japan one time. The land stretched all the way from north to south, and there were a bunch of islands stretching way out into the sea that were part of Japan too.
Manato wasn’t so sure about going someplace far away, but it seemed wise to get as far from Tsunomiya as they could. He was sick of living in town, and if they were going to survive in the mountains, they’d need to live as hunters.
Manato taught the Canaries the hunter lifestyle. Juntza was a quick study and learned anything he was taught in no time, so he grew quickly. He was a big guy too. As the oldest person in the group, he probably had a few years on Manato.
“I’m sure I’ll be the first to die,” Juntza would sometimes say with a smirk. “Don’t any of you die before me.”
The six of them lived on the move, playing at being hunters. But then, one of the Canaries developed a fever, became unable to travel or keep food down, and wasted away as the others watched. It eventually sank in that their friend wasn’t going to make it, and the sick Canary stopped breathing the next day.
The other five discussed what to do with the dead Canary’s body. It would begin to rot soon enough. If they left it lying around, the beasts and bugs would eat it, and only bones would remain. Manato was fine with that, and Neika, who hid her sightless right eye under a piece of cloth, agreed with him, but the other three were of a different opinion.
Amu of the missing front tooth and bird’s nest hair said she’d feel sorry for the dead Canary if they didn’t do something.
“If we just leave things like this and take off, I dunno why, but I’d feel absolutely terrible about it. I mean, didn’t we all want to escape together? One of our friends is gone, though, and can’t come along with us anymore. We can’t carry a dead body around either. It’d rot and all. But leaving it behind like this...feels bad.”
Juntza suggested that they say goodbye.
“Our dead friend can’t hear anything we say, and like Amu’s already said, we can’t take a corpse with us. I don’t know what the right thing to do is, but doing nothing wouldn’t sit right with me.”
The five surviving Canaries sat around the dead one. As they were talking about the dead Canary, a murder of crows gathered around them.
“They’re planning to eat you.” Manato said and tried to laugh about it, but he couldn’t.
He didn’t like the thought of seeing the dead Canary being eaten by crows. They all felt the same, and discussed digging a hole to bury the Canary in. Yeah, that was the thing to do. The five of them dug a hole in the ground, and laid the dead Canary in the bottom of it, then piled the dirt back over their friend. It felt right.
The five Canaries traveled around continuing their hunting lifestyle. None of them had been hunters before except for Manato, so there were a lot of complaints about how it was too hot or too cold, or how they were exhausted or sleepy. Even Juntza, the eldest, seemed to struggle with it sometimes.
In the hot season, it was too hot for them to be comfortable even if they went naked, and it wasn’t all that unusual for it to get too cold at night to sleep. During the rainy season, even during the brief periods of sunshine, dark clouds could quickly blot out the sun and hit them with a downpour. If the rain went on for an extended period, the rivers overflowed their banks, leaving everything wet and muddy, which made it difficult to walk. Juntza said there were entire towns that had been submerged by heavy rain.
There were places that had been polluted with poison, but it was normally easy to identify them at a glance because the ground and plants usually looked weird, and there were no birds or bugs around, but with intense rain it became much harder. If they wandered into one of those areas by accident, they’d be affected by the poison and come down with a bad disease. It could even kill them.
The forest also had beasts that they absolutely needed to avoid messing with. Beasts that if they suddenly ran into one, it was safe to assume they were going to die. There were a fair number of such creatures, in fact.
The giant bears, giant boars, and giant apes were particularly bad news. They couldn’t be taken down easily even with a dozen hunters, and the giant apes formed colonies, so hunting even one of them would make enemies of the rest. Though this was just a story he’d heard from his mom and dad, it was said that the great apes would sometimes raid villages and eat people.
Other than those, the great mountain cats were scary too. When hunters lived in groups, sometimes one of them would suddenly vanish, and that was believed to be the work of the great mountain cats. They would creep into the hunters’ camp without making a sound and carry one off to eat. And once they were finished eating their first catch, they’d come back in a few days for another until there was no one left. That was how great mountain cats hunted.