Chapter 1:
Monochrome Skies
MAN, I hate summer.
Such were my thoughts as I sat broiling on the concrete platform, praying my train would soon arrive to grant me a brief reprieve from the midmorning swelter. It was only the beginning of July, and already it felt like stepping into a sauna every time I walked out the front door. The blistering heat and humidity would have been miserable enough on their own, but add to that the endless laughter of cicadas, and it was enough to make my morning commute feel like a sick form of torture. Just when I thought things couldn’t possibly get any worse, a muffled announcement rang out over the station’s lone loudspeaker.
“Erm, attention, all passengers. We regret to announce that we’re experiencing a significant delay due to an unexpected collision with a deer farther down the line. We deeply apologize for the inconvenience, as we know your time is valuable, but ask that you please bear with us as we address the situation…”
The rusty old loudspeaker choked out a crackle of static from its perch atop a nearby utility pole as the announcement cut off. Ugh. Not again, I groaned. The same thing had happened last month, albeit with a wild boar instead of a deer.
Only a single set of tracks ran through the ramshackle station, which looked directly out over the open ocean. All that lay on the inland side of the platform were dense woodlands and a steep upward incline. As it was one of the few truly remote stations left in the prefecture that had yet to be remodeled, it had become a somewhat popular destination for explorers looking to venture off the beaten path. Unfortunately, the rail line’s dilapidated state also meant that these kinds of delays were relatively frequent. Not that I generally minded being late for school—any other time of year, I would have welcomed the free tardy slip—but right now, I would have vastly preferred to sit in an air-conditioned classroom than languish beneath the hot sun for God knew how much longer. Delays due to wildlife could last anywhere from a few minutes to an hour, though the announcer’s use of the word “significant” led me to believe I was going to be stuck for at least another thirty minutes, based on prior experience.
“Great. Guess I’m getting cooked alive…” I grumbled as I hung my head in resignation, the harsh sunbeams beating down mercilessly on the back of my neck. I lifted the sleeve of my button-down and wiped a trickle of sweat from my temple before it could get into my eye. You’d think it wouldn’t be too hard for them to install a covered waiting area with an AC unit, but then again, this station didn’t even have automated turnstiles, so perhaps that was too great a luxury. All I could do was hobble over to one of two small benches under the rickety wooden shelter to try to get some relief from the heat. One of the two was already occupied by a couple of girls from my high school, chattering blithely as though the scorching weather didn’t bother them in the slightest.
“Hell yes! Looks like we might get out of first period gym class after all!”
“Aww, but that poor deer, though…”
“Hey, survival of the fittest, right?”
It was like this every morning. These two never seemed to be on quite the same wavelength—but judging from their perpetual giggling, this apparently didn’t bother them all that much. I took the empty seat opposite them and scooted as far down the bench as I could so as not to make them feel like I was intruding on their conversation. The shade did sadly little to cool me off, so I undid the top button of my shirt and flapped the collar a few times to give myself some air as I leaned against the backrest. Then, as if in answer to my prayers, a pleasant coastal breeze blew by, filling my nostrils with the pungent smell of sea salt.
Just across the tracks, the land gradually sloped down before dropping off into the sea. Over the edge of the cliff, the light blue sky turned paler and paler as it approached the hazy horizon, while in turn, the sea grew a deeper, fuller shade of cerulean. The ocean waves shimmered softly in the sunlight. There was something almost inherently therapeutic about looking out over the ocean in the early morning—similar to watching the fragile flicker of candlelight or the cascading course of a babbling brook. It was one of those things that you could look at for hours and never grow tired of, soothing to the point of hypnotism.
After watching the waves roll in for a while, I twisted around to look up at the tall clockpost behind me. It was already half past eight. Even if the train were to roll in at that exact moment, it still took about twenty minutes to reach our intended station, and classes started at ten till. This being the case, I resigned myself to the fact that there was no longer any hope of making it to school on time and closed my eyes to try to fit in a quick catnap.
Not long after, one of the girls sitting across from me said something that made my ears perk up.
“So hey… Have you ever heard of the Urashima Tunnel?” she asked her friend.
“Uh-oh,” the other girl groaned. “This isn’t another ghost story, is it?”
“Nah, not exactly. I mean, it’s supernatural, yeah, but more in an urban legend sorta way.”
“A scary urban legend?”
“Maaaybe?”
“Nope. Nuh-uh. Don’t wanna hear it.”
“Aw, c’mon. There’s no ghosts involved, I promise. Anyway, the basic gist is that it’s a tunnel that can grant any wish to those who enter it.”
“Any wish? Just by walking into it?”
“Yep. Any wish.”
“Huh… And that’s all there is to it?”
“No, but see, this is the part where it gets kinda spooky… So, like, say you’ve gotten your wish, right? And now you’re ready to go back home. But the Urashima Tunnel doesn’t let you leave that easily. It always takes something from you in return.”
“And what’s that?”
“Years. Years and years off of your life. Go in a teenager, and you’ll come back out as a wrinkly old woman.”
“Whoa… So it’s like, would you trade all the best years of your life to be a billionaire or whatever?”
“Yeah, exactly!”
“Gosh, that is kinda spooky to think about.”
“See, I told you!”
The two girls prattled on—Oh my God, speaking of spooky, I found this huge spider in my room yesterday! Ew, seriously? Yeah, I had my grandpa come in and whack it with a rolled-up newspaper. Ha ha, your grandpa’s kind of a badass. Yeah, he’s great—ditching one topic in favor of the next at the speed of light and crumpling up the previous like day-old newspapers, only good for killing spiders. But I reached my hand into that recycle bin to fish out the one article that piqued my interest from all the ones they discarded to save it from the shredder, then smoothed it out in my mind to give it another look.
The Urashima Tunnel: a mysterious passage that dramatically aged all those who entered it, yet which would grant them any wish in return. It was my first time hearing this particular urban legend, though I could tell from the name and time shenanigans alone that it was based on the tale of Urashima Taro. While “granting one’s every wish” was a fairly tired cliché for stories like this, the “rapidly aging” part was at least pretty unique. I wondered what would happen if someone went in that tunnel and wished to grow younger. Would it cheat the system, or would they simply grow younger briefly before turning into an old coot the moment they stepped back out? What if they wished for an infinite supply of youth serum they could take with them? Or immortality?
Yeah, this is just asking for people to find loopholes, I thought to myself as I opened my eyes to see that the train had finally arrived. I glanced at the clock—it was thirty-five minutes late. Yet thanks to nodding off for a bit with some interesting food for thought, it hadn’t felt that long at all. There was no blood or anything on the front of the train that might suggest it had run over a deer; it looked the same as always. I boarded the train via the rear doors and let out a heavy sigh of relief as the merciful air-conditioning slowly cooled my sunbaked body centimeter by centimeter. As soon as I fell backward into the nearest open seat, the pneumatic doors wheezed shut, and the train set off again toward its destination.
“Thank you for choosing to ride with us today. We’d like to express our sincerest apologies to all of our passengers, so please listen carefully to the following announcement…”
Wait a minute, I found myself thinking out of the blue as the announcer read off one of his employer’s canned apologies. Weren’t we supposed to get a new transfer student today?
Kozaki High was only a stone’s throw away from the nearest station, and it was the school pretty much everyone who lived in the vicinity attended, aside from the extreme over- and underachievers. Despite being out in the boonies, it was pretty much your average high school. Sure, the building could have used a renovation, and you did get the occasional fox or tanuki wandering out on the athletic field, but otherwise it was perfectly unremarkable.
After changing out of my street shoes in the entryway, I made my way to Classroom 2-A. I’d shown up right in the middle of passing period, so it didn’t strike me as abnormal to see a bunch of students out chatting in the halls—but when I reached the top of the stairs and rounded the corner, I was a little taken aback to see that a sizable crowd had formed right outside my classroom. At first I wondered if someone had shattered a window or if a fight had broken out. Then the light bulb went off in my head, and I realized they were probably just here to see the new transfer student. Our teacher had mentioned that we’d be getting a “new girl in class,” so some curious onlookers were to be expected, but I figured she had to be pretty cute to garner this much attention. I shoved through the rubberneckers and into the classroom, and the moment I made it inside, I saw her.