“What happened that day…,” Sora began. It was the first time in a long while that he had talked face-to-face with Tamuramaro and spoken of Awata-guchi. He gazed at Fuuka, who was making the gyoza filling in the kitchen. “What Fuuka did was also fueled by my anger. I had the same rage inside me. In fact…”
Sora had been stunned by the way Fuuka had stormed through the soldiers like wildfire—but he also remembered vividly that the one who had longed for death to befall them in that moment was none other than himself.
“In fact, that rage was mine and mine alone.”
How did Fuuka become Sora’s hands and feet, mindlessly enacting what Sora felt? These days, Fuuka’s body and thoughts were so clearly distinct from his own that Sora couldn’t help but wonder.
“That’s only natural,” said Tamuramaro.
Sora braced himself for the inevitable mention of Aterui.
“You knew that your beloved master was killed there. And besides, if I could do it all over again now, I’d save your life in a different way.”
In the last 1,200 years, Tamuramaro had rarely mentioned Aterui to Sora. But he hadn’t forgotten his orders that day to offer Sora as a new attendant to the lustful Imperial prince, who later became Emperor Heizei.
“But if I were to go back in time, that would still be the only way to save you.”
As he listened, Sora realized that Tamuramaro walked through from one age to the next with his feet on the ground, fully recognizing the ways of each period without letting them drag him down. Sora wasn’t very good at adapting to the logic of the times.
“Either way, I would have died,” said Sora. Even if he had been thrown into the prince’s bed before he could kill himself, his soul would have been dead.
“Do you still have a grudge against me?” Tamuramaro gave a resigned smile.
At the direct question, Sora thought over it again. Even though he couldn’t readjust his own logic, he understood by now that Tamuramaro had been trying to save his life at Awata-guchi. But it was hard to put any of that into words.
“Just now…,” he began, switching the subject to the present day. “My feelings weren’t the same as Fuuka’s. I wasn’t angry, but Fuuka was.”
“Oh? Can I kill Tamuramaro now?” Fuuka appeared with a bowl of gyoza filling and plopped down behind Sora.
“None of us can die, remember? No one can kill us. You can munchy-munchy him, but keep it at that.”
“It’s thanks to Miroku-bosatsu. We’re all on a journey through eternity,” added Tamuramaro.
Fuuka could never remember this fact, and whenever he thought his brother’s life was threatened, he nearly killed the one responsible. And in the past, he had killed them at times.
“Hey, Tamuramaro, why aren’t you more like an old dude?” Fuuka grumbled. He set down the bowl with the filling next to Sora—it was full of salted hakusai cabbage, ground meat, ooba leaves, and a generous amount of scallions kneaded together.
“What’s gotten into you? You’ve never asked me anything like that before.” Tamuramaro’s eyebrows rose.
Fuuka pointed at the TV without a word.
“Sakanoue no Tamuramaro, who died from a disease at fifty-four years old…”
The program was still delving into the history of Kiyomizu Temple, and the narrator was just mentioning Tamuramaro’s age at death.
“I called to Miroku-bosatsu on my deathbed, and they popped up. So I asked them to put me in my body when I was at my strongest and most active.”
“What the…? You could ask for that? And that sloppy Miroku-bosatsu granted your wish?”
Sora was dumbfounded, hearing for the first time why Tamuramaro’s current body was younger than the age he died, or even when they had crossed paths at Awata-guchi.
“It’s probably ’cause they’re so laid-back. Why so surprised?”
“But—we didn’t get any older for more than a thousand years!”
“Exactly,” Fuuka complained, his silver hair tied in a ponytail and his torso wrapped in an apron. “We couldn’t drink much, either!” He cracked open a beer can, as though to make up for all the years he couldn’t drink.
“Wait till we fry the gyoza, Fuuka,” said Sora.
“No, let’s drink and cook together,” Tamuramaro cut in, taking two of the cans that Fuuka had brought over and handing one to Sora. “Don’t know why, but…this is nice. Making gyoza.”
After they clinked the cans together, Tamuramaro was lost in the gyoza-wrapping process again.
“Yeah. Gyoza is good,” Sora replied, popping open his own can. He’d always liked making these.
“Who knew you two were getting on so well, living like this,” said Tamuramaro thoughtfully.
“Hey! This is weird!” Fuuka broke in, looking back and forth between the two men.
“What is?”
“I dunno! You’re acting more like friends now! You haven’t been hanging out together without me, have you?!”
Fuuka had been turning into a white dog in the presence of other people for the last 1,200 years, and it was only with his brother, and occasionally Tamuramaro, that he could be in human form. Which meant for all that time, he had rarely been in the company of anyone but his brother.
“No, listen, Fuuka. We were in the same year at university. We took the national bar exam at the same time. Of course, we went to the same get-togethers a few times—”
“Mixers, you mean. Blind date drinking parties.” Tamuramaro sniggered, dashing Sora’s attempt to mollify Fuuka.
“Ugh! Sora!”
“Well, well. I’m guessing you’ve never been with a woman, Fuuka?” asked Tamuramaro, more serious now. He himself had had a wife and children during his lifetime.
“How can I when I turn into a dog every time?!”
“Good point. No way around that.”
“What about you, Sora?!” Fuuka turned to his brother. “I know what those parties are like!”
“Don’t believe whatever he says! I haven’t been to any of those parties, and besides…!”
Sora was always doing his best to live his life with as much composure as he could muster, but right now it was spinning out of control, thanks to gyoza, beer, Kiyomizu Temple, and Tamuramaro.
“I’ve been too busy worrying about other things. That hasn’t changed in twelve hundred years,” he concluded.
“It’s a long time, that,” Tamuramaro remarked in a pensive tone, which got on Sora’s nerves even more.
“I mean, we looked like children for so long. I wish we would’ve had a choice.”
“Was there a choice? It’s one thing to turn back time you’ve already lived, but another to fast-forward to a nonexistent future, don’t you think? Seems reasonable to me.”
“You think there’s any form of order to what that Miroku-bosatsu does?”
The “sloppy Miroku-bosatsu” had reappeared before Sora and Fuuka several times over the centuries, but they were always as insouciant as ever. There wasn’t a single occasion when they had not been irresponsible.
“‘Order,’ huh. Well, we’ve already veered off course from the laws of nature, if it comes to that. Wonder how our bodies work? We never die, but we get hungry. We can get injured, too. But…” Tamuramaro looked at the brothers, suddenly more solemn than usual. “Last time I saw you in the Showa period, around the 1960s, both of you still looked like children, just as you had back when I first met you. Now you’re all grown-up. What happened?”
It was a question that Sora had puzzled over for a long time, and Tamuramaro threw it on the table so matter-of-factly.
“Tamuramaro,” Sora began, turning to face him properly. It was now or never. “You fed us when we were still ‘children’ in the Showa years, but we left without saying anything to you. I am sorry.”
Sora bowed to Tamuramaro in an earnest apology, although he didn’t press his starch-and-gyoza-filling-covered hands to the floor. The resulting palms-up pose was rather funny-looking.
“What’s this? It’s not like you to apologize to me. We’ll see pigs flying tomorrow.”
“I’d give anyone a sincere apology for discourtesy,” Sora retorted, turning away.
Fuuka peered at his face inquisitively.
“I missed you guys when you suddenly disappeared, but I wasn’t worried. I knew you wouldn’t die. Did you leave because you grew up?”
“We noticed our bodies growing older after we left your house.”
The brothers had lived as children for more than a thousand years, but after living with Tamuramaro in the time of rapid economic growth in the Showa period, their bodies had unexpectedly begun to develop. When he reflected on that time, Sora could identify a certain trigger.
“Was that what happened?” Fuuka piped up.
“Yes. Especially you, Fuuka—you shot up all of a sudden. I was surprised.”
Fuuka looked back at him with wide eyes. Sora wanted to pet his brother’s head, but of course he still had potato starch on his hands.
“We’d slept under the same roof a few times before then, too, in the Edo period and Meiji era. But sometime after World War II, society changed, and it got harder for kids to live on their own. That’s why I took you in,” Tamuramaro reminisced aloud, summing up his reasoning in plain words.
“We even got pulled into an institution for war orphans by the GHQ one time. Though we escaped almost immediately.”
Sora heaved a sigh, remembering their hard times before, during, and after the war, despite their immortal bodies. But come to think of it, that marked the end of an era when the number of deaths made the world of politics go round in Japan.