“A society that doesn’t let kids live on their own isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it was a step in the right direction, in my opinion,” Tamuramaro said, perhaps thinking along the same lines as Sora. “The world does change a lot in twelve hundred years. How’d you get your family register?”
“Once we started looking like adults, I worked by the day, drifting from town to town, and bought it.”
“It was lucky for both of us, getting the registration right before everything went electronic. Nowadays, it wouldn’t be so easy.”
Apparently, Tamuramaro had bought his family register around the same time as Sora. Sora guessed that was when he changed his name as well.
“Why did you pick Maro Tamura, of all names?”
Whenever someone heard his full name, they did a double take. After all, Sakanoue no Tamuramaro was a famous historical figure whose old fortress and such were still featured on TV.
“We’re well into the twenty-first century now. I figured I could pass by saying my parents were big fans of the sei-i taishogun, or something like that.”
“Was it a joke?”
“I got my name back. Same goes for you, doesn’t it?”
Sora was speechless, and he wasn’t sure how much Tamuramaro meant what he said.
“Sora’s your childhood name, isn’t it? It’s rather short,” Tamuramaro remarked. The subject was trivial, but it snagged on Sora’s mind.
Sora tried to explain what it meant, but for some reason, he couldn’t utter a word.
“This is so boring,” Fuuka blurted out, pouting. “I’m gonna go grill some gyoza. You wrap the next batch.”
Fuuka was used to having Sora all to himself, and he found it frustrating to see the way Sora talked differently when he was with Tamuramaro.
“Is he hitting that rebellious age? That’s proof he’s growing up,” Tamuramaro murmured, looking at Fuuka’s back as he returned to the kitchen with the wrapped gyoza. Then he turned to Sora. “You’re really not giving up?”
For 1,200 years, Sora and Fuuka had been on a journey they’d never asked for. They had nowhere to return to. They couldn’t go back to the north now, since it was a completely different place. No one was there to welcome them home.
“I’ll find a way to turn Fuuka back into a human.”
Against all odds, Sora wasn’t about to let that go. Turning Fuuka back meant liberating him from his fate of becoming, as Miroku-bosatsu put it, “one who single-handedly kills a multitude.”
“You saw how he tried to tear that thug’s throat open back there. How would you go about doing that?”
“I wonder…if he still has the same belief inside him.”
“You don’t need power to kill. You need intention. To will and to believe.”
That’s what Miroku-bosatsu had said. They never told Sora what exactly it was that Fuuka believed in that made him kill people. But after all these years, Sora finally had an inkling of what that belief was. Yet he still feared looking directly at the truth.
“If only that Miroku-bosatsu had never appeared…,” mumbled Sora.
“Then you would’ve died at the age of twelve, before you even got to know anyone. Is that it?” Tamuramaro smiled with an air of resignation.
“Why did they appear only for us anyway? Once in a hundred years or so, someone did appear who would slaughter people en masse. But many of them were initially overlooked, weren’t they? …Like Hitler.”
Sora didn’t want to put Fuuka’s fateful burden together with Adolf Hitler, one of the most famous representatives of genocide in history, but the discrepancy still bothered him.
“Remember what Miroku-bosatsu said.”
“What?”
“You could see them. Those too relentless in their belief wouldn’t have been able to do that, even if Miroku-bosatsu was right in front of them. That’s how they are.”
Sora pondered over this for a long time, trying to understand Tamuramaro’s reasoning.
“How they are, huh.”
The phrase was very vague. Before now, that kind of ambiguity would have been completely lost on Sora.
“And Buddha isn’t there to dole out punishments,” Tamuramaro went on. “They appear before those who need them.”
“But I didn’t even know Miroku-bosatsu back then.”
Even as he spoke, Sora grasped that this was probably the way it was. He could at least somewhat understand that gods and Buddhas didn’t work according to a set of laws, not like the legal system.
“Hey! It’s time for episode two!! Change the channel!” A wet towel came flying out of the kitchen with Fuuka’s shout, amid the juicy sizzling of gyoza.
“What’s that?” Tamuramaro asked.
The two of them wiped their hands with the towel.
“It’s the crime drama series that Fuuka’s hooked on. He’s a fan of the informant, one of the side characters. He wants to dress up like him.”
Fuuka was obviously fed up with seeing Kiyomizu Temple on the screen, and he’d grabbed the remote to change the channel. A trailer for the crime drama was already running.
“That is a nice outfit. Want me to get it for you? To celebrate our new life together.”
“You know only you and I will see Fuuka in this outfit, right?”
The informant’s costume was rather idiosyncratic, like an indigo samue that Japanese Buddhist monks wear as work clothes, except embellished with vermilion embroidery. Sora couldn’t even begin to guess where he’d go to buy such a thing.
“…Aterui had—”
“Shut up.”
Sora cut Tamuramaro off, but he knew what he was about to say. Aterui had worn something similar, although the resemblance wasn’t strong. Sora wasn’t sure whether Fuuka had any recollection of it, but ever since Sora had noticed this similarity, he found himself thinking about Aterui more often.
“Miroku-bosatsu told me never to speak of it, but Aterui’s name did leave a mark on history,” Sora observed. Countless times, he’d almost asked Tamuramaro whether that had been his doing, but he could never say it out loud.
History remembered Aterui as a wise, resilient leader of the north—which wasn’t in keeping with how the revolt at Awata-guchi was erased from all records. So many things about Tamuramaro, or Sora’s image of Tamuramaro, perplexed him. Things didn’t match up between the history the winners had written about Tamuramaro and what Sora saw of the Tamuramaro who sat right in front of him.
“In your case…,” Sora began. He gazed at the man who must have betrayed and executed his lord Aterui, who was like a father to him, and left his head exposed in the open. He knew from the soldiers’ words at Awata-guchi as well as from historical texts like Nihon Kiryaku that Tamuramaro had begged the emperor to spare Aterui’s life.
“Your appearance matches your age that’s on the register, Tamuramaro. You look older than you did when you were at university, like a normal person. It makes sense that they could turn back time, but not the other way round.”
“I don’t have as much control over it as you think. I’m just getting along in years, you know.” Tamuramaro shook his head and drank some beer. The aging of his body wasn’t something he’d wished for.
“But for me, at this rate…” Sora paused.
Forty years ago, after he had left Tamuramaro’s house, Sora had suddenly become an adult. A desire had sprung up in him to study and get involved in law—the legal system that developed as an extension of the old ritsuryo—so he sought to set up his family register. His life as Sora Oushuu began with applying for university. But even now, he hardly looked older than his late twenties.
“At this rate…what?” asked Tamuramaro, though he’d seemed like he wasn’t paying much attention. “You don’t want to say it? It’s a good town here.”
Tamuramaro always spoke in a way that kept some space open—not for himself, but for the one he was speaking to. Even after 1,200 years, this was still an impossibly difficult thing for Sora to handle.
“Gyoza’s ready! Right in time for the show!!”
Fuuka rushed in, putting down a tray with two plates of golden, crispy gyoza arranged like a disc on the table.
“Looking good!”
“The ones with ooba leaves are best with just vinegar and soy sauce.”
He laid out chopsticks and more beer cans for all of them, his eyes already fixed on the TV.
“Thanks, Fuuka.” Tamuramaro crammed his mouth full of gyoza filled with ooba. “Mmm, good stuff! Ow, hot!”
They clunked their cans together again—they just felt like it.
The ooba came from Keita at the fresh produce store. He’d apparently deduced from their other groceries that they were having gyoza for dinner, and he had wrapped some ooba with the hakusai cabbage for free.
“Thanks, Fuuka. So good! Whoa, it is hot!” Sora cried out in pleasure, savoring the steaming-hot juice squirting out of the wrap.
Keita had been generous with his gift, and the ooba’s subtle, fresh scent made the gyoza irresistible. The three couldn’t stop wolfing them down until every single dumpling was gone.
If their bodies continued to stay still in time, never growing any older, they would eventually have to move on from this town, away from the people they’d come to know. It was only a matter of time, several more years at best, until the townspeople would start to grow suspicious of Sora’s apparent youth.
I’ve never felt like this before, thought Sora.
Sooner or later, they wouldn’t be able to stay in Shizukuishi. When he thought about that prospect, it weighed down on his heart like lead.
He didn’t remember anything about his parents, and perhaps as a consequence, he’d never felt attached to any particular person or town. As far as he could recall, he’d never formed a good relationship with anyone, really. The brothers had held each other close, supporting each other to survive. All Sora needed was Fuuka.
At least, that’s how the two of them had been living for the last 1,200 years.