Yae Momoi had memories of a previous life. Though she was a little unsure if she should think of them that way.
Yae once lived in a small town on the island of Shikoku in Japan. She moved to Tokyo in her late teens to go to university but ended up returning home after graduation. She worked for a steady company that dealt with cartographic information. Yae landed her position thanks to her part-time job studying the production of maps while she was a student. Fortunately for her, there happened to be an affiliate company located in her hometown, and the parent company offered to let her continue working for them there if she planned on returning home. Taking advantage of their kind offer, she did just that.
Yae’s job involved endlessly walking through street after street, visiting house after house, with a handwritten map in one hand as she conducted surveys of the area. It was during this kind of soulless, mundane work—she suspected—that she had gotten caught up in some sort of accident and died…but it could have been something else entirely. Her memories of the end were foggy, and she wasn’t entirely sure of what had happened.
It could have been an illness. It could have been death from overwork… That would have been a rough way to go. Trying to pinpoint exactly how she’d died was distressing, so Yae decided not to think too hard about it. Regardless of how it happened, she woke up one day to find herself reborn in this world.
Because her memories were more than mere fragments, because they were so vivid, it didn’t really feel to Yae like she had been reborn. It felt more like she remained the same Yae Momoi while only her body regressed to that of a three- or four-year-old toddler.
People born in this way were called uroko. The word roughly meant a “child who took a detour” and originated from the idea that the person’s previous life was a detour before they returned to this world. As far as Yae understood it, uroko were people reincarnated from Japan.
Some of this world’s old literature spelled uroko with different characters meaning “hollow” and “child.” This was because children born in this way appeared within a tree hollow, as if the tree was giving them a motherly embrace.
Being reborn was rare in this world but not unusual. It was slightly less common than the percentage of people born left-handed in her previous world, which was about 10 percent of the total population. The proper word used for the birth of an uroko was an awakening.
There were many other people who had awoken in the hollow of a tree just like Yae. In most cases, however, memories of their previous lives grew hazy with time. They naturally fell away as the soul grew accustomed to the laws of the new world, since they were unnecessary for life here. Despite this, ten years after her awakening, Yae still retained her old memories.
When comparing her current life to her previous one, she often wondered if Izumo—the country where she lived now—was Japan from the distant past or one possibility for its distant future. It was as if civilization had collapsed through repeated progression and regression, changing the shape of countries in the process. Even the place of people and animals in the world defied all her previous understanding. People, beasts, and their respective paths had been thrown into disarray by the merciless hand of fate.
That was how Yae thought of this strange world where the spectacular was ordinary.
It took a while after her rebirth to be able to calm down and accept this world with a level head. The period immediately after she was born was especially difficult and panic-inducing.
The day of her awakening, she awoke from what she thought was a nap to find herself curled up like a fetus inside the hollow of an old tree. Feeling anxious, she left the tree and was shocked by what she saw.
“Where am I?” she muttered, before noticing her hands and growing even more aghast. “Huh? Are these my hands?” A pronounced fear was audible in her words.
Her limbs had shrunk considerably. Her hands were clearly those of an infant. Instead of the camisole and underpants she wore to bed for pajamas, she was wearing a soft, semi-transparent cloth that felt like it was made of chiffon.
“Huh?!” Yae cried out, overwhelmed. Even her voice sounded like that of a small child. What’s happening? Is this a dream? In the midst of her panic, a part of her understood that her soul had been properly reborn in this world.
If she had been aware of only one of her two lives, she might have been able to accept the new world more quickly. With both jumbled inside her head, however, her original thoughts and memories had much greater pull. It was natural that the consciousness of a twenty-four-year-old woman would be stronger than that of a newborn baby.
Yae was instantly consumed by fear, and she left the tree to seek help. That turned out to be a mistake. If she had remained there rather than wandering about indiscriminately, someone with a developed sense of smell would have perceived the awakening of Yae’s spirit and come to get her. But the unsteadiness she felt in her newly child-sized limbs drove all ability to reason out of her brain. I’m having trouble running. What happened to my body? Where should I go? How do I get back home?
Confused and running all around the area, deep in the mountains, it took no time at all before Yae began to gasp from exhaustion. She was a helpless toddler, after all. There was no way she was going to have the stamina to hike through a mountain pass without any gear. Her feet were in agony. She wrapped leaves around them to alleviate the pain, but the sight of her primitive state caused tears well up.
“I’m going to die…,” Yae muttered. She spent the rest of that day in a miserable cycle of crying, fainting, waking up, walking, fainting, and crying some more.
The next morning, she woke to the sound of squirrels the size of cats dashing around her head, and the realization that she really was going to die finally set in. The harshness of her hunger outweighed her fear. The desperate need to quell her starvation ruled her mind.
Won’t someone come to save me? she thought hazily. I’m just a helpless child. What has the world come to that a little girl can be left to cry herself to death in a dark mountain forest? Will no kind stranger suddenly appear and save me?
“I’m hungry. I’m going to die…”
The bottoms of her feet were bleeding, and the pain was too great for her to stand. After some time of practically rolling down a gentle slope, Yae caught a whiff of a pleasant scent. It smelled sweet and a little sour, like a fruit. In reality, it was a rotten sweetness, but her all-consuming hunger easily pushed aside whatever meager sense of danger she felt.
She desperately crawled in the direction of the scent until she found a pomegranate tree with twisting branches… At least, Yae decided to see them as pomegranates.