Manato had been born a hunter, so he figured that was just how things were. If they ran into an opponent they couldn’t possibly handle, there was nothing they could do. They could prepare all they wanted, but when the time came for them to die, they’d die. There was no need to be scared all the time. However, the other Canaries couldn’t help but worry.
The night was especially scary. Or rather, the forest at night was. It always felt like dangerous beasts might be targeting them, so it was hard to sleep soundly.
The Canaries searched for ruins. When ruins were uninhabited, there was usually a reason for it. Like maybe they had started to crumble and were prone to collapsing and burying people alive. Or maybe animals avoided an area because being there made them feel sick, for no reason the Canaries could understand. Or maybe there was a colony of great apes there, or some great bears had turned a nearby train station into their den. It was rare for there to be ruins without people or dangerous beasts living in them, but it also wasn’t completely unheard of. Those were the sorts of places they stayed in while living the hunter life.
However, ruins were easy targets. People and beasts alike would often enter ruins they came across to explore. They might be looking for things they could use, or to live there if the place was habitable. Intact buildings required extra caution. If it was just hunters the Canaries ran into, that was fine, but there were also former yakuza roaming about, and those guys preyed on people, not beasts.
There was a large cluster of ruins south of a big town called Mebashi, and the Canaries came across a dying former yakuza there.
The former yakuza had been abandoned by his gang and was lying on the floor in the basement of a large building. He was emaciated, with legs that were wasting away. Unable to do anything more than sip from a pool of dirty water, he would be dead in less than ten days. The group happened to have a lot of deer meat at the time, so Manato gave the man a couple pieces, and he was incredibly grateful.
“I’ve been a terrible person my entire life, yet here on my deathbed, you’re giving me deer meat. Now that I’ve had one last good thing happen to me, I can die anytime without regrets. Thanks.”
The fallen yakuza said he was from a yakuza organization called the Gonnodo-kai that ran a large town called Nagano. But he’d done something to dishonor himself, after which he had been unable to remain in Nagano any longer. He had then started traveling around with some other former yakuza, raiding villages and traders, abducting residents from small towns, killing and eating people.
“All right. I’m not sure if this is enough to count as a reward, but let me tell you something. There’s this place called Kariza in between Mebashi and Nagano. Kariza’s pretty famous, so maybe you’ve heard of it. But this should be new to you. Deep in Kariza, there’re some big houses that’re still intact. I always wanted to live there someday. To find me a good woman, get a house all of my own, and die there...”
†
The Canaries started preparing to travel to Kariza. They soon encountered the driver of a flatbed minitruck whose vehicle was stuck in some mud, and after they helped him out, he told them that they could reach their destination by following the road west from Mebashi. He regularly carried cargo between Mebashi and Nagano, and warned them to watch out for bandits along the road, though really that went without saying. Bandits were ex-yakuza, or actual yakuza, who robbed those who passed by. They could be bought off with money from nearby settlements or objects of value, but the Canaries had no money. Anything they did have on them, they had because they needed it, so they couldn’t go giving things away willy-nilly. Bandits had a lot of weapons, and they tended to show up in large groups. That meant the Canaries couldn’t beat them in a fight either and would have to avoid them.
The Canaries went off the road where they could, traveling through the mountains. It was a rainy time of year, so one of them caught a fever along the way. He coughed a lot and was constantly quivering. The feverish Canary said to go on without him, but Manato and Juntza wouldn’t hear of it. They took turns carrying him. He was lighter than the girls, Amu and Neika. When they told him it was no problem because he was so light, he laughed and said no way.
The little Canary smiled a lot. Possibly even more than Manato. He was short, with long, nimble fingers, slender shoulders, and a lean chest.
When Manato was carrying him, the little Canary chirped on about their lives in Tsunomiya and since they had left. It was all about how this had been a lot of trouble, or that had been terrible, but the little Canary always ended his stories by saying how fun it had all been and laughing. Manato would agree that, yeah, it had been fun, and then the little Canary would laugh even more until he started coughing, and when the coughing wouldn’t stop, he’d complain about how Manato had made him laugh, and then laugh even more. Which of course meant more coughing.
The little Canary didn’t make it to Kariza. With the constant rain, it was hard to find a place to bury him. They dug up the soft earth at the base of a tree and laid him to rest there. Then they all piled mud on him together. The Canaries were reduced to Manato, Juntza, Amu, and Neika.
Kariza turned out to be a town full of yakuza that really didn’t get along with each other. They all belonged to different groups with names like the something-something-kai or the something-something-gumi and fought over turf. There was a big market in town with lots of stuff to buy, and there weren’t just trucks driving around but also carts drawn by oxen or horses.
The Canaries got suspicious. Maybe that dying ex-yakuza had lied to them?
Kariza wasn’t that big of a town. But the market was relatively large. A lot of people lived there, but they were mostly yakuza.
The ex-yakuza had said that deep in Kariza there were some big houses that were still intact. But where was “deep in Kariza”?
In the south of Kariza, there was a huge mansion people referred to as the Palace that was home to a yakuza boss called Shigatake. In the north, there was an armed encampment belonging to a yakuza group called the Bunge-gumi, making the area too dangerous to approach.
None of this discouraged the Canaries. They would head into Kariza for supplies occasionally, living the hunter life as they searched for the alleged houses in the backwoods. They got into some fights with the yakuza but always managed to survive them by running into the mountains.
The people around Kariza were terrified of a giant bear named Three-Eyes, so not many hunters lived in the area. True to its name, Three-Eyes had three eyes, and when it stood on its hind legs, it was supposedly three times as tall as a fully grown human. It was furry, with black and white spots, and had once even burst into the center of the town to attack people. They said that thirty people had been devoured that time.
If there was really a beast like that around, there should have been paw prints, claw marks, droppings, and other traces left by it, and yet there were none. That put Manato at ease, but the other Canaries were still pretty scared. The residents of Kariza were even more terrified of Three-Eyes, though.
There was a memorial plaque for the thirty people killed by Three-Eyes in Kariza and even a statue of the bear. Once, a man had gotten drunk and pissed on the statue. The yakuza had beaten him to death when they caught him. Manato didn’t know if this was true or not, but Shigatake’s Palace and the Bunge-gumi’s armed encampment both had little shrines to Three-Eyes called kamidana, and there were stony-faced yakuza who prayed at them every day, hoping that the bear would never return to Kariza.
Eventually, they found what they had been looking for far, far north of the Bunge-gumi’s armed encampment. There were the remnants of two houses a little up the hill from the road, and then two more that had collapsed. A little farther in, there was just one more—a sturdy looking two-story house that was still intact.
The forest around them was gloomy, and visibility was terrible. They’d had to get pretty close before realizing the building was there at all. The doors and windows were locked, and they couldn’t find a way to pry them open, so the Canaries smashed a window to get in. There was dust and cobwebs, but many things had been left lying out, unmoved since the last time someone had lived in the house. The ex-yakuza had apparently known about this place, yet it remained untouched. Surely, no one else had found out about it, then. Now, it belonged to the Canaries.
Let’s stay here and live together from now on. None of them bothered to say that. Not Juntza, not Amu, not Neika, not Manato. It went without saying that they were going to. Maybe Three-Eyes did live out in these mountains, but who cared? This was a house with pillars and beams that weren’t rotting, a roof, walls, and even a fireplace. They’d secured a place all their own. The Canaries would die someday, like the other Canaries, their parents, the ex-yakuza, the people who lived in the towns, the yakuza, and the wild beasts. But they could live in this house until then. And when they died, they’d have the others bury them nearby.
There were two bedrooms upstairs in their house. Juntza said he’d sleep in the room with the fireplace downstairs. Manato took the bedroom on the first floor, while Amu and Neika slept upstairs.
As he went to sleep on a proper bed for the first time, Manato thought about his parents. If they had found this house back when they had been living as hunters, how might things have been different for them? Both of them would surely have been delighted. They’d have laughed and smiled and then laughed and smiled even more when they woke up the next day.
“Awaken.”