I could see the wavy hair and the triangular fin, carved from stone, behind Miyaki. For some reason, it looked familiar. Miyaki glanced at me strangely, and then she began walking toward the mermaid stone. The gritty scent of dust filled the air.
“Miyaki, don’t go!”
I reached out instinctively just as a loud crash reverberated in my ears.
Small fingers clutched my wrist, which was thrust into the air.
“Are you all right?”
The sight of a dreary cemetery buffeted by winter wind awaited me. The sort of thing you might see in any small country village.
My whole body had gone stiff. At first, I thought it was Miyaki’s hand that was shaking, but I soon realized it was my own wrist.
“What just happened…?”
I rotated my neck stiffly to stare at Miyaki. I could see my own heavily backlit reflection in her dark eyes.
“You were smiling, Katagishi,” she said.
But I heard another voice, high and sharp like a thin plate of steel being struck, behind us.
“Well, I guess you’re not like them after all.”
No sooner had I turned than the concrete block well at the back of the cemetery toppled over like a breaking wave. A plume of ashen smoke billowed our way. One of the large concrete fragments struck the mermaid-shaped gravestone, lopping off the head from the neck up. The stone mermaid’s head rolled across the ground, landing face up on the blanket of pine needles underfoot. A smile was on her face.
Miyaki stared at it, frozen.
“This place isn’t safe… We should get out of here,” I said.
Miyaki nodded weakly in response.
Miyaki and I hurried back down the hill, keeping our eyes fixed on the ground.
The shadow of the mountain stretched behind us, as if chasing us away, repaving the asphalt from sunset to the deepest black.
“The mermaid granted immortality after all. Not as a blessing, though, but as a curse,” I said, staring at my own toes. “Not the nice kind of immortality we humans picture of eternal youth and endless life. But more like a nightmare, I think, where they endlessly repeat their last moment before death.”
“What do you mean…?”
“The villagers mentioned having premonitions, like some sort of danger detector. I think what’s happening is that when someone here has a brush with death, it’s as if the tape gets rewound for them by a second or two, sending them back to the moment just before they die. They don’t age or perish while in that moment. If they can spot a way out, they might still escape. But if they don’t or if it’s something that can’t be escaped from, like illness or age, then it’s quite possible the moment repeats forever…”
I felt a shiver of horror crawl up my back as I spoke. Immortality, but as a curse. Locked forever in the moment of death. Perhaps unaware of what was happening. Or perhaps aware but unable to escape, on a slow and steady descent into madness. Either way, the nightmare likely continued until the flesh eventually rotted away.
Miyaki glanced up at me in concern and then lowered her eyes. She must have guessed what I had seen and had decided not to ask.
“So from the outside, it looks like the people in those dreams are smiling?” she said instead.
“I think so.”
“If that continues until they rot away entirely, though”—Miyaki lifted her face again, staring up at the cemetery atop the hill—“getting buried instead of cremated must be true hell for them.”
The shadow of the mountain slowly crept along the slopes, like the wet strands of a mermaid’s hair clinging to her skin.
Susaki was waiting in the parking lot when we arrived at the convenience store by the station.
“Are you heading back to Tokyo?” Susaki asked, cocking her head in a childlike fashion, just like before.
“Yes. Thank you again for your assistance…”
Miyaki made a feeble attempt at a polite smile. Susaki did not smile back. I don’t think I had ever been so grateful for a frown as I was at that moment.
“Susaki, your grandfather…?”
I had to ask. The flag, which proclaimed the village’s ranking in the best villages you’d never heard of, fluttered in the wind.
“Was he smiling when he died?”
Miyaki turned toward me with a glare. Susaki used her bare, scuffed feet to toy with her sandals as she shook her head.
“No. He didn’t smile much while he was alive, either. But he didn’t suffer. When my grandmother went to wake him up for breakfast, she found him dead in his sleep. His face looked a little tired.”
“I see.”
I remembered the strange voice I had heard at the cemetery. “Well, I guess you’re not like them after all.” It had been a woman’s voice.
Susaki’s grandfather had also been an exception. The mermaid had cursed this village, but the curse didn’t seem to apply to everyone who had anything to do with this place. If I had to guess, I would say that so long as a person wasn’t like the villagers, who had earned the mermaid’s grudge by selfishly gobbling up anything and everything in their wake, then the curse would pass them by. My own nightmare had ended the moment I tried to save Miyaki.
We said good-bye to Susaki and boarded the train that arrived as soon as we set foot on the platform. Once I collapsed into the blue seat, a wave of exhaustion washed over me.
“Dammit, Rokuhara. Remind me to never take another request from him…”
Outside the window, the sea reflected the colors of the night sky. Once the train began moving, we would probably pass through the neighboring town where Susaki lived.
I suddenly remembered Susaki telling me that the mermaid legend had originally come from their village. If that was true, why had the mermaid washed up all the way over here?
The enmity between these two villages was deep-seated. What if the neighboring village, knowing what the villagers here were like, had intentionally delivered this curse into their laps? I turned away from the window, trying to banish those thoughts.
As I glanced to the side, I saw Miyaki retrieve a small, box-shaped device from her briefcase.
“What is that?”
“It’s a handheld game. You make your own village.”
She showed me the screen, which displayed red-roofed houses and gardens blooming with mismatched flowers from all four seasons.
“It’s cute, right? You have to protect the gardens by chasing away wild dogs and insects that show up every now and again, but if you mess up, you can always reset.”
“Aren’t you sick of villages at this point?”
“That’s just it. After the work we do, I need this escape into fiction,” Miyaki muttered, taking back the console. “Speaking of which, your theory about the mermaid’s curse kind of sounds like a similar method as the game, doesn’t it? Whenever you’re not happy with how things are going, you can simply reset back to an earlier stage.”
“I guess.”
“If you do that too many times with a game, though, the system gets overloaded and causes the game to bug out. Trees start poking through walls, and dogs clip straight through houses. Kind of like what we see with divine incursions.”
“What an unpleasant analogy.” I stared out the window at the night sky once again. “That might be fine for the player, but what about all the people in the game?”
Unlike the people in Miyaki’s game, however, there was a way out of the mermaid’s loop. Moral rectitude. The vengeful mermaid demanded only one thing. Total and utter decency. Like a strict guardian spirit, watching over the villagers.
I remembered the strange voice I had heard in the cemetery, possibly belonging to the mermaid. And I remembered my own words as well. “Miyaki, don’t go!” I had shouted, reaching out for her. Maybe if I had said the same thing to my wife before she disappeared, things would have turned out different. I was getting used to calling Miyaki’s name, though I hadn’t said my wife’s name out loud in a long time. Come to think of it, the two names were only a syllable apart. Maybe that was what had put these thoughts in my head.
I cut my trail of thought there. No point wondering about such things. I hadn’t said anything to my wife back then, which was how I wound up where I was now, constantly chasing the shadows of incomprehensible gods.
The train began moving. I turned my eyes the other way, not wanting to see the fishing village as it rushed past, instead catching sight of the parking lot we had just left. Susaki stood there in the faint gloom, her shadow stretching like one of the Sanskrit grave tablets that were left for the dead.