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THE following day, Akari gathered up her belongings to leave the hospital. When she slid the door to her room open, she found something big sitting outside, blocking the way. It was Tomohito.
His hair was not gold, but its usual black color, and shoulder length again. He looked odd sitting there on the floor hugging his knees, dressed in his fine Western-style three-piece suit. It was a miracle he hadn’t been chased out by any of the nurses.
He got to his feet in a hurry as Akari looked down at him. Scanning her face, he cleared his throat nervously.
“Um, Munakata told me to come and pick you up.”
Ah yes. Munakata had said someone would be coming to escort her home. He just never said who. Akari smiled wryly. But Tomohito seemed different, on edge, as if unsure how to act around her. She could understand that.
“So where is our friend Munakata?”
“He said he’d done enough hard work for this year that we should handle the rest ourselves.”
“Hmph, typical Munakata. Here, take my bag.”
Akari handed her belongings to Tomohito and set off down the hallway.
She hurried out of the hospital, Tomohito trailing behind her with the bags. Once they were outside and headed to the streetcar station, he called out to her as if he couldn’t bear the silence any longer.
“Mistress! What’s going to happen now?”
“First off, we’re going back to the Bookhouse. We’ll take the tram. Or perhaps it would be nicer to walk? Oh, I hope Mayoi and Kansuke are doing all right.”
“Mayoi’s just happy you’re getting discharged from the hospital. Wait, we’re going back to the Bookhouse?!”
Akari looked back at him. Why was that so shocking?
“Yes, I always intended to return. What did you expect?”
“I thought you’d take Munakata up on his offer. Honestly, I’m surprised I haven’t already been sealed away. Munakata hasn’t even said anything.”
They’d known each other only two months, but still, she’d never seen Tomohito look so utterly lost. It was kind of a new look for him. Akari was enjoying it a lot.
They hadn’t come face-to-face since the warehouse fire, and honestly, Akari hadn’t been sure how she was going to handle him. But his reaction was making it much easier.
“Hey, I wanted to ask you. When my dorm was burning…what were you doing there? The timing seems pretty suspicious to me.”
As they hurried along the road together, Tomohito started to look extremely guilty.
Akari narrowed her eyes at him. What was he hiding? Reluctantly, though, Tomohito confessed.
“I heard from Neo that you’d gotten a job in the city. I simply couldn’t stay away… I was just checking up on you, as usual, when we bumped into one another.”
“As usual? So you came to ‘check up on me’ more than once? No, get up! Don’t kneel on the ground in that nice suit, you dimwit!”
Akari had been thinking about Tomohito’s confession and hadn’t noticed him sinking down to his knees to grovel for her forgiveness. She grabbed his arm and yanked him back up. His face was contorted with guilt.
“Well, I knew you’d be angry if you knew the truth, Mistress Akari!”
“So in other words, you’ve been stalking me all over the city, hmm? Or did it start before I even moved here?”
“It started in the city! I swear it!”
Even so, what a creepy thing to do! Akari narrowed her eyes again. But he just looked back at her, his cheeks flushed with emotion, his own eyes wide.
“I never intended to make myself known to you! I just wanted to watch over you until I disappeared. But I couldn’t fight against my own desires…”
…Because after all, I’m a demon. Tomohito lowered his lashes.
His expression indicated that he felt a strong sense of conflict over his true identity as a demon.
“What’s your connection with Neo? And how have you been able to keep on manifesting for all these years? What really happened that day in the village?”
She finally asked him the questions she’d been unable to bring up back at the warehouse. Now all her suspicions were bursting forth.
“At the time…you and Neo were trying to protect the village, weren’t you? But in that case, why did Neo ask me to read out of your Kotogatari?”
Akari was casting her mind back over her fragmentary memories of that day.
Tomohito blinked back down at her as she looked into his face, her heart pounding faster than she’d expected it to.
“Yes. Let’s talk about what happened twelve years ago. Neo came to your village to retrieve a demon that was residing in a kubizuka. In other words…me. Because there were other men, bad men, who were going to come and try to take me too.”
“So, that other demon was theirs…?”
Tomohito nodded.
“I knew I couldn’t let those bad men take me. So I chose to become a Kotogami instead, enshrined by your narration. The men were angry. They had arrived too late. So they tried to destroy me, and the village as well. It took everything I had to bring down their demon, their Aratama.”
Neo had never told her that. But as Akari listened, it all made sense.
“But why did it have to be me who narrated you and made you a Kotogami? Neo was an official Narrator, wasn’t he? Surely he would have done a better job.”
Tomohito blushed, a look of intense guilt flooding his features.
“I wanted my first time to be with you, with your words.”
He gazed into her eyes, his speech impassioned. He was so beautiful, so dazzling right then. Akari felt her cheeks growing hot.
“Truthfully, Neo never expected the narration of a little girl to actually manifest a demon like me. He simply indulged my wish. He was going to take over afterward. I insisted I wanted you to be the first to read me, though. But your narration gave me form. I don’t think you could ever understand how much joy that brought me…”
How could I? Akari thought. But Tomohito looked so happy. She found she couldn’t speak. A moment later, though, Tomohito’s face fell again.
“But in the end, I wasn’t able to save you.”
He brought a hand to his chest, his features twisting with regret.
“I know it was wrong of me, to terrify a child in that way. But I didn’t understand why it was wrong at the time. The regret…it hurt me, like a sword to the chest. I didn’t know why. So I made a deal with Neo. I came to the Bookhouse, to learn about humans.”
“What kind of deal did you make?”
“He agreed to let me stay and be around humans until my manifestation power eventually ran out.”
So that was why Tomohito had passed the last twelve years at the Bookhouse as a Kotogami. Even though he was so very different in form from the “Mr. Demon” of Akari’s childhood…he was also somehow the same.
“Hey…the day of the fire at my dorm, why didn’t you just tell me you were the demon from my childhood? Why didn’t you try to make me a Narrator so that we could be together?”
Then he wouldn’t have had to disappear. He could have stayed with Akari always.
But Tomohito shook his head.
“I only ever wanted you to be a good reader. You had such incredible aptitude… I wanted to restore your love of stories. Not as a Narrator, but as a person who accepts us unruly word spirits and makes a place for us in her heart.”
A good reader. She looked at him, confused. There was such tenderness for her in his expression. She didn’t really understand what he meant, but the passion in his words and his eyes stirred something in her heart.
“I don’t get it.”
“Demons can be touched by the influence of humans as well as Kotogami can, you know. As a demon, I committed countless atrocities, and the result was that I lost my head. Instead of repenting, I continued to seek vengeance. I was every bit the evil demon of the folktales. But then you gave me a new form. Your words showed me a side of myself I never knew existed. Who wouldn’t want to hold on to that for as long as was possible?”
Yes…he had kept himself alive for twelve years to honor what Akari had seen in him.
“But I didn’t remember you.”
“That made no difference to how I felt.”
Still gazing earnestly into her eyes, Tomohito chuckled.
“That’s why I made Neo promise not to try to make you into a Narrator if you didn’t wish it. It was Neo’s power that made you forget. I was worried it would break your heart to go on living with those memories. Even this old demon has a conscience.”