Chapter 17

Side Story Together Forever with Kaiketsu Zorori and the Mysterious Aliens! Wow, there are so many customers! After he was done with classes for the day, Hirotaka had gone to visit Koumoto Books with his own special volume in hand. When he saw how animated the interior of the shop was, he was filled with excitement. From old men with white hair to children holding their mothers’ hands to students wearing middle school uniforms like he was, people of all ages were gathered in the store, taking commemorative photographs and making colorful signs introducing their favorite books. The completed pop signs hung everywhere throughout the shop, and the whole place had a bustling, festival-like atmosphere. I felt depressed when I learned that Koumoto Books was going away soon, and I still feel really sad about it, but… The town’s one and only bookstore was special to Hirotaka. He had first visited at this exact time of year nearly a decade ago, pulled along by the hand of his father. It was right after the huge earthquake that had rocked all of Tohoku. At that time, Hirotaka had been a six-year-old kindergartner. He had been playing with wooden blocks with a friend when suddenly a vibration pulsed from below, and their blocks had collapsed and scattered everywhere. After that, the whole building had jolted violently back and forth. Hirotaka and the other children had started crying as their teacher instructed them in an urgent voice to take shelter under the desks. But their young teacher had also never experienced such an enormous tremor, and it had been clear she was also confused and frightened. The shaking continued for a long time, and Hirotaka held his head and cried under the desk. He could hear things falling, smashing, and breaking against the floor. The incessant din scared him so much it was unbearable. Whenever he thought the shaking was over, it would come again and again, Hirotaka crying all the while. When his mother came to pick him up, he clung to her, bawling, and asked— “Mama, did the earth break? I’m scared, so scared!” Though she was pale like the kindergarten teacher, his mother embraced him tightly, her arms trembling. That day, there were no lights in their home, so they turned on flashlights to illuminate the dark rooms and spent the night nearly freezing in the cold. Small aftershocks and more powerful tremors occurred intermittently until morning, and Hirotaka clung to his mother all night, wrapped up in a blanket. Electricity was restored the following day, but then Hirotaka was hit with a new round of shock and fear at the images of dark tsunami waves, murky floodwaters, crumbling buildings, and mountains of rubble that played on the television screen. He wondered if those dark waves would swallow up his hometown as well. He worried about his own house collapsing and being crushed, along with his mother and father inside it. Instead of the cartoons and superhero shows that Hirotaka usually enjoyed every week, the television played an endless loop of footage showing the waves swallowing up towns. Even when he tried to change the channel with the remote, no matter what numbers he pushed and pushed and pushed, they all showed crumbling houses, the groaning and rumbling earth, and pitch-black waves. Hirotaka spent the whole time crying, with a seating cushion over his head. Worried, his father decided to take him on an outing. “Hiro, come with Papa to the bookstore. I heard Koumoto Books is open, so I want to go buy some fun stuff to read there.” It hadn’t even been three full days since the earthquake. The area where Hirotaka lived had sustained only minor damage, and the essential utilities had been reconnected, but the shelves in the supermarket and convenience stores were empty. Everyone wore anxious, gloomy expressions and talked about how it would be best to evacuate far away in case another earthquake occurred. Many of those voices reached Hirotaka’s ears even though he was wearing fluffy earmuffs, so he gripped his father’s hand tightly and hung his head. I wonder if another earthquake is coming. I wonder if we’ll fall down and be buried under the rubble and die. And I wonder if the pitch-black tsunami will swallow us up. It seemed as if the tremors would come for them no matter where they ran, and Hirotaka felt as though he were being tossed about on a small boat in the middle of a storm. His father took him to a bookstore in a slim three-story building. “Wow, it’s really open!” Even now, in his third year of middle school, Hirotaka remembered clearly how his father’s voice had shaken with emotion beside him. He also recalled how his father had squinted his eyes, moved to tears. At the time, he was a child and didn’t understand it, but now he could imagine just how difficult it must have been to open a bookstore for business just three days after an earthquake. Like his father, the owner’s determination moved Hirotaka, and he couldn’t help but feel grateful. Koumoto Books really helped us out back then. Still being pulled by the hand by his father, Hirotaka had entered the shop and had seen a huge crowd of customers. To his surprise, everyone was happily picking out books. The people walking around town had been wearing sullen faces, crying and looking anxious, but here everyone was smiling cheerfully! “Welcome!” A kind-looking clerk with glasses greeted them calmly. When their eyes met, he grinned at little Hirotaka. The other customers came up one after another to talk to the bespectacled clerk. “Thank you so much for opening up the shop, Emon. In times like these, I want to read a ton of books.” “The TV is showing nothing but earthquake news on every channel. It’s making me depressed. I really appreciate that Koumoto Books is open.” “Show me some books that’ll make me smile, Emon.” “Give me a really exciting mystery that’ll help me pass the time!” The man whom they were calling Emon handled all the customers’ inquiries with his eyes narrowed in a smile behind his glasses. Inside the shop, the books that the earthquake had damaged were all piled up on sale for cheap, and people were happily picking them up. Hirotaka’s father also asked Emon about choosing a book his son would enjoy. “He gets frightened whenever we turn on the TV and sits there shaking the whole time with a cushion on his head, poor kid. When I heard Koumoto Books was open, I thought we’d come look for something.” Emon frowned sadly, and tears formed at the corners of his eyes, but he quickly smiled again. “I’m sorry to hear that. Well, thank you for coming.” Then he quickly bent down at the knee and looked Hirotaka in the eye. “Hi there, how old are you?” He asked his age. Hirotaka kept his grip on his father’s hand as he nervously answered. “I’m…six.” Emon frowned sorrowfully again before scrunching up his face into a smile, then looking at Hirotaka with kind and tender eyes. “I see. In the older class at kindergarten, are you? You’re the same age as my kid. In that case, I have a recommendation.” He then showed Hirotaka and his father to the children’s reading corner on the second floor. There were lots of children there, noisily bustling about as they read books. There was even a friend who went to the same kindergarten as Hirotaka. “Ah, Hiro’s here!” Book in hand, the other child sunnily approached him. “This book is suuuper fun! The owner suggested it.” He held it out with both hands, turning the cover toward Hirotaka. On the cover was a fox wearing a black cloth mask over his eyes and a black hat on his head, riding in a rocket. From overhead, some strange green creature was sticking its face into the frame. It looks like a really fun book. Hirotaka read the title out loud. “Kaiketsu Zorori…and the Mysterious Aliens?” Emon was grinning. “That’s right, you read that so well! Your friend showed you before I could, but this is the book I recommend. My son, who’s the same age as you, is a big fan of this series. The fox on the cover is named Zorori, and he’s an outlaw, but he’s also a good guy, and whenever people are in trouble, he helps them. He’s friends with the boar twins Ishishi and Noshishi, and he travels around searching for a beautiful bride. Look here, these boars are Ishishi and Noshishi.” Emon pointed out the two boars, which were drawn in a comical style at the bottom of the cover. “It’s a long-running series, and they’ve published lots of volumes. If you like it, you can enjoy it for a long time.” After he explained, he brought over a copy of the same book that Hirotaka’s friend had been holding. “Start with this one. It’s the tenth volume in the series, but they’re written so that you can understand no matter where you start reading, so it’ll be fine.” “We match!” His friend from kindergarten thumped his book and Hirotaka’s book together. Hirotaka also grinned widely and exclaimed back: “Yeah, we match!” This was the first time Hirotaka’s father had seen his son smile since the earthquake, and he looked relieved. While his father went down to the first floor to look for a book of his own, Hirotaka sat on the mat in the children’s reading corner with his copy of Kaiketsu Zorori and the Mysterious Aliens that his father had just bought for him to read with his friend. When he opened the cover, there was a drawing of a maze filling the whole two-page spread, with Ishishi and Noshishi the boars at the entrance and Zorori the fox standing at the exit wearing an umbrella hat and a cloak. Zorori had one hand up and was speaking in a manga-style speech bubble. His lines had a different font than the rest of the book. “Hey! Get over here quick! We’re camping out here!” “Once Ishishi and Noshishi get to Zorori, then our story begins.” Just looking at the page made Hirotaka excited. When he turned to the next page, Zorori and the boars were on a pleasant journey. All the kanji and katakana characters had their readings written out plainly, so even six-year-old Hirotaka was able to read easily. Just like on that first page, the words Zorori and his friends spoke were sometimes in speech bubbles, mixed in with the regular prose text. It was super easy to read! And so fun! Along their journey, Zorori and his party discover a “crop circle.” On the page was a mysterious design with one big circle enclosing four smaller circles, drawn in a sweet potato field. “Eek! Noshishi, that’s a crop circle—I’m sure of it!” “A crop circle? What’s that? Is it good to eat?” “You two wouldn’t know anything about it. All right, I’ll explain it to you!” On the next page, there was an easily understandable layout with a detailed explanation of the phenomenon, along with the headline “What Are Crop Circles?” Hirotaka read through that, too, his heart pumping with excitement. When Noshishi and Ishishi try to pull up potatoes from the field, a UFO appears, and Noshishi gets sucked up into the spaceship, still clinging to a long, skinny sweet potato. Illustrated across another two-page spread that read from top to bottom, Zorori assembles a rocket in a flash and blasts off into space to save Noshishi. When Zorori and Ishishi arrive at the star where the green aliens live, they have to take many strange intelligence tests to save Earth from the aliens, along with solving some puzzles. They have to contend with alien creatures, and they fall in love at first sight with an alien princess. The story sped right along. This is fun, so much fun! While immersed in the pages, Hirotaka completely forgot about how frightened he had been of the earthquake. There was a somewhat large tremor as he was reading, and his father anxiously went up to the second floor to check on him, but Hirotaka hadn’t noticed the shaking and was still reading Mysterious Aliens. Because the owner, Emon, recommended this book to me back then, I read Mysterious Aliens every day and didn’t have a spare second to be afraid. It’s a fun and exciting read. After reading over and over and over the first book my dad bought for me, I went with my mom to buy a different volume of Zorori. Emon remembered me and asked how I liked the book. “Was it interesting?” “Suuuuuuper interesting!” Hirotaka answered with bright red cheeks, and in response, Emon smiled kindly, his eyes narrowing behind his glasses. “In that case, how about this one next? Zorori makes ramen in it.” He recommended a book titled Kaiketsu Zorori, It’s Hot! A Ramen Showdown, which had Zorori drawn on the cover eating a delicious-looking bowl of ramen. The illustration was amusing, and the ramen looked so tasty that Hirotaka’s mouth began to water. His appetite, which had been absent since the earthquake, immediately returned. “Mama, I want to eat ramen!” Before he had even finished reading the book to the end, he was pestering his mother. In this way, once he had savored each volume to his heart’s content, Hirotaka would ask to go back to Koumoto Books, where he would get Emon to pick out the next book in the Zorori series for him to read. The bookshelf in his room at home held every volume in the whole lineup before he knew it. Even nine years after that, the Zorori series was still ongoing. Whenever a new book came out, Hirotaka enjoyed visiting Koumoto Books and chatting with Emon. Once, when Hirotaka had entered middle school and had visited the shop wearing his new school uniform, Emon had smiled, almost overcome with emotion. “Ah, that’s right… Little Hirotaka is already a middle school student…” His eyes were deeply kind as always as he gazed at him—and Hirotaka, who knew about Emon’s circumstances, found it just a little painful. As far as Hirotaka was concerned, he owed a debt of gratitude to Emon. If Emon hadn’t opened up his shop three days after the earthquake, and if his father hadn’t taken Hirotaka with him to Koumoto Books—he might still be living in fear of earthquakes to this day. Once he had read the whole Zorori series, he had a realization. Emon had been very careful to avoid recommending any books that depicted buildings collapsing or flooding. He had chosen books he knew wouldn’t frighten Hirotaka. Now Hirotaka was able to separate such depictions from his earthquake experience and enjoy those other volumes, but at the time, he would definitely have been too frightened to keep reading. Empathizing closely with the feelings of the reader and selecting just the right book—not only was Emon truly great at running his bookstore, but he was also an extremely sensitive and kind individual. Not to mention a strong person. He’d said he had opened his shop so quickly after the earthquake because he’d known that, in times of crisis, there would be many people who would need books for comfort and support. He truly believed books had that power. In that moment, there was something he could do as a bookseller for the sake of those people. And he had followed through on that. Hirotaka had been surprised to learn much later that Emon’s wife and son had died in the earthquake. The child Emon had said was the same age as Hirotaka was a long-awaited son. They had been blessed with the boy after his sickly wife had all but given up on having children, and Emon cherished and treasured him. “He looked just like Emon and was the cutest little thing. He always said that, when he grew up, he was going to run the bookstore just like his papa!” The regular who’d told Hirotaka about it had been tearing up as she spoke. The day of the earthquake, Emon’s son had gone to spend time at his wife’s family home near the seashore, and there the waves had swallowed up his child along with his wife and her family. That was the reason why Emon had looked so terribly sad when he’d heard Hirotaka’s age. As he spoke to Hirotaka, he had been imagining his dead son. After losing his wife and child in one fell swoop, he’d immediately opened up the shop and had smiled with such a serene expression on his face. How was he able to do that? What could he have been thinking when he’d just been left alone in the world? When he was in the shop, Emon always smiled as he gave advice to his customers and spent the day pleasantly conversing about books. He never let it show that something so tragic had happened to him. How truly kind and resilient he was. I never thought he’d leave us so soon. And so suddenly. And I couldn’t have ever imagined that Koumoto Books would close down. The townspeople had been wondering if there might be someone who could purchase the bookstore and become the new owner, and a few residents had even been making inquiries, but the circumstances were apparently more complicated than that. If Koumoto Books closed, the bookstores would disappear from the town. It was a sad thought, but Hirotaka was a middle school student and couldn’t do anything about it. Besides, something felt wrong about the store continuing on without Emon. As far as I’m concerned, Koumoto Books was Emon. If Emon is gone, then Koumoto Books is also finished. Surely that’s only right. “Hiro, you’re so heartless! How can you accept this so easily? I just can’t stand the thought that the shop is closing! When Hirotaka had declined to sign his friend’s petition to keep Koumoto Books open, his friend had gotten mad, and they had argued about it. “It’s not that simple! It was upsetting for me to hear that it’s disappearing, too. But to me, a Koumoto Books without Emon is not Koumoto Books at all.” “So you’re saying you’re fine with it closing?!” “I never said it was fine. Just, I think keeping it open would be wrong.” “I don’t get you at all. You jerk.” His friend didn’t talk to him for three days. You’re the jerk, Souta. I’m super torn up that Koumoto Books is closing, too, you know. Today Hirotaka had come alone, to say his good-byes to Emon. Just as it had been after the earthquake, the inside of the shop was lively, and lots of customers were happily picking out books. There were old men, housewives, young women, students, and young children. Everyone was smiling. Emon sold books with a smile to make everyone happy, even when he himself was sad and suffering. So I’m going to smile, too, and say farewell to Emon and Koumoto Books. I’m sure that’s what he would have wanted. “Welcome!” A clerk wearing big glasses who looked about high school age shouted a cheerful greeting. Hirotaka had never seen him before, but the clerk’s eyes were twinkling, and his expression was friendly and bright. “We’re holding our store’s grand closing sale at the moment. Did you happen to bring with you a book that is connected to memories of this shop?” “Yes! I brought a book that Emon chose for me—one that I loved most of all!” Hirotaka also answered energetically. When he pulled Kaiketsu Zorori and the Mysterious Aliens out of his bag and held it up high, the clerk with the glasses narrowed his eyes softly like Emon used to do and looked over the cover slowly and deliberately. It was almost as if he was greeting the book. He looked at it with kind eyes, full of affection and respect. His mouth slowly broke into a smile. And he mumbled in satisfaction. “Ah…how wonderful. Your book seems very happy.” The other clerk working next to him shot him a sidelong scowl, but he just smiled. Hirotaka also didn’t understand what he meant and was stunned for a moment, but he was happy to have someone who resembled Emon tell him that. He felt a little embarrassed. “Thank you very much. Um, could I get you to take my photo as well? I want to get a picture and write a display!” “Sure! All right then, stand over here with your friend.” “Huh?” When Hirotaka turned around to follow the gaze of the bespectacled clerk, he saw another boy wearing the same middle school uniform as him, standing there awkwardly. He was holding Kaiketsu Zorori, It’s Hot! A Ramen Showdown in front of his chest. My friend Souta! It was the boy whose petition to keep Koumoto Books open Hirotaka had declined to sign, the one with whom he had been quarreling— Why is he here? When I tried to invite him to come, he refused. He’s also got a book from the same series. Hey, you, your face is red—well, mine probably is, too. I’m burning up. Both boys were fidgeting, each trying to guess how the other would react. The clerk with the glasses spoke up in a clear, cheerful voice. “I’m sure both of you must have some really wonderful memories of Koumoto Books! You both feel the same way about this place, and your books are saying together, ‘Hurry and make up!’ Besides, that’s what Emon would want, right?” It’s not like our books are actually talking! But since the clerk had brought up the owner’s name, Hirotaka and Souta couldn’t very well continue their argument here. After they each checked the other’s expression again, Hirotaka readied himself for whatever might happen and walked over to Souta. Souta opened his eyes wide as Hirotaka thumped his book into the Zorori volume he was holding and smiled slightly. Then, just like back when the two of them excitedly read Mysterious Aliens while sitting on the mat in the children’s corner of Koumoto Books after the earthquake, Hirotaka said: “…We match, huh?” Souta stuck his lip out a little as he answered bluntly: “Yeah, we match.” The boys bumped their books together as they had nine years earlier. Maybe back then, Hirotaka’s and Souta’s books shouted something like: “That hurts!” And complained about the rough treatment.