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messiah novel (you are in shine, part 15)
"Ei-chan. Look after Moe once you get back from cram school and the guests are over."
While putting on his sneakers, he replied "yes" without really thinking about it.
He couldn't have imagined in his wildest dream that it would be the last time he'd ever hear his mother's voice.
It was the beginning of spring in his second year of middle school.
April. The cherry blossoms bloomed especially late that year, perhaps it'd be a cool summer. The news was already hastily declaring that vegetable prices would rise due to a shortage of rain.
But even so, it was a spring that couldn't be replaced for Eiri, who had just turned 13. Even when the school was closed, there was still the cram school. Not to mention club activities.
He had chosen to join the astronomy club once he had gone to junior high school. Physique meant everything when it came to baseball and soccer. That meant that Eiri, who wasn't tall by any means, wouldn't be part of the regular team to begin with. And on top of that he didn't have the passion to keep practicing hard for three entire years.
But with the astronomy club physique didn't mean anything. --- Although he joined the astronomy club due to such a simple thought, he started to like watching the stars more and more, and ended up becoming so absorbed by it that he ended spending nights at school with the club members.
He liked the stars.
They were more beautiful than diamonds, and they were unbelievably far away. But when he'd look through the lens, they'd look like he could just immediately grab one. He liked that.
Eiri became engrossed in his club activities. His mother got worried that his grades would drop, and told Eiri that he'd have to go to the cram school as soon as his club activities were over.
So when he came home from the public junior high school, which was 15 minutes away by bike, he threw out the bag his telescope was in, quickly ate dinner and left by bike once more to go to the cram school.
It was tiring for his stamina, but since his fellow club members all did it as well, he didn't consider his parents to be particularly strict.
He had been living like that for a year.
Eiri's father had a medium-sized food manufacturing business that operated across Tokyo and the local district. Every single day he was racking his brains over how he could expand the company to a major manufacturer.
Although he was just an ordinary man, Eiri and his little sister Moe were always happy to be able to taste the samples of new sweets that their father would bring back from work. On rare occassions Eiri's father would let his friends come over to the house to test the samples, and Eiri became popular among his friends due to it and felt proud. Everyone wanted to come to Eiri's house for the candy.
Thinking of it now, his house would have been like heaven to Haku.
Parents both in the same company as the boss and subordinate, a son in the second year of junior high and a daughter in elementary school, a very normal family.
---- But that ordinary life was crushed one day without advance notice.
He thought that it was a little strange for visitors to come to his house at night.
But since he heard his father calling an old friend under the old cherry tree in the garden to come watch the blossoms, he didn't care that much about it.
The cherry blossoms at his home were amazing and well-known in the whole neighbourhood, and every year when the cherry blossoms bloomed he was able to enjoy watching them without even having to leave his house.
When Eiri came home from the cram school, he opened the gate to the back door in order to put away his bicycle.
At that time he became aware of a burnt smell.
Something was burning.
Even so, Eiri figured it could just be from a barbeque, so he went into the garden without worrying about it.
He wasn't alarmed at all.
And then he saw it.
Blood was splashed all over the window, the glass that opened up into the living room.
His father and sister who had fallen, lying on top of each other.
His mother, wearing her apron, dead with her eyes wide open.
"Mo..."
The spring air was heating up, coiling stickily around the back of Eiri's neck.
No, the warmth wasn't due to it being spring.
It was on fire.
His house was.
"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!!!"
He screamed like that inside of his head.
But in all actuality his voice wasn't able to form a single sound.
Aside from a groan he couldn't even curse the man who likely killed his parents and little sister standing in front of his eyes with even a single word. Nothing.
He just ran away.
Eiri's instinct made him act to disappear from the man's eyes, despite his own will and feelings.
He threw his bicycle aside and ran. It was a mountain bike that his father had bought for him to go to school with to celebrate him getting into junior high. It was slightly modified so he could carry his astronomy tools on it. It was a bicycle to be proud of. But that didn't seem to matter anymore.
He had to get away.
His feet and arms moved of their own accord. Eiri ran without looking back at anything at all.
He stretched his arms to avoid letting the pitch black terror trip him up, and he couldn't stop his feet or his breath. He ran for his dear life. He just ran in his recollection.
After that the memory ended.
It was raining all around.
Eiri noticed that his body has collapsed on the asphalt.
He wanted to see how he was doing, but his body didn't move. He didn't feel any pain either.
What he was feeling was similar to the fatigue you'd feel when you'd have to run twenty laps around the school building on a hot summer day, participate in a soccer tournament and then go home, bursting through the entrance and just wanting to collapse.
The rain was hitting Eiri's cheeks.
It wasn't rain that was coming down in drops. It was like the rain was coming from a faucet, the kind of rain that soaked you to the bone. His body gradually grew cold, and he felt so cold, as if he was going to freeze all up to his eyelashes.
Die.
He would die.
His brain, which was barely working by now, warned him loudly. But Eiri didn't have the physical strength or willpower left to do something about that alarm.
Why had he collapsed in such a place?
The rain was pouring down onto his heavy soaked body as if it was pushing him to the asphalt he fell onto--- No, he didn't have a sense of reality anymore.
This wasn't real. He settled it was just that kind of dream.
Because he had been studying at the cram school only just now. Before he had gone to the cram school, he had been doing his club activities. Before that, he had been at home. His father had gone out to buy beer for the cherry blossom viewing, his mother had been preparing hand-rolled sushi. His sister had been pouting, because she didn't have school and had a lot of spare time, but their parents didn't have time to play with her...
That was Eiri's reality.
He heard a thud.
He didn't have any feeling in his body. So even when a Chinese-looking person speaking in broken Japanese came closer and put Eiri into a garbage can that was nearby like he was just something bothersome, he couldn't do anything.
He got thrown away. Like trash.
At that moment Eiri realised that the feeling of dying and the fear had joined hands.
Since he didn't feel anything anymore now. Even the fear wasn't really there anymore due to the cold, hunger and fatigue.
The last thing he heard was the sound of something being plumped down.
And then there was someone's voice saying, "Hey, a human being came out."
---- A middle-aged man had picked Eiri up.
When Eiri came to, he saw a bowl made of stainless steel, as if he was being provided a meal. Steam was rising up from the served white rice like a bathtub in a public bath.
He was asked if he had an appetite, and when he nodded, they poured spicy cod entrails with spicy sauce over it. Eiri had never eaten entrails before, the particular cuisine of the peninsula. So in the end he only ate a mouthful of it and then just ate the white rice.
Even if you didn't die, it still seems like you have a bad fortune, the man, Gwon, said bluntly.
He had gone to the races first thing in the morning and had lost. He had already been drinking during the daytime, and when he kicked a trash can out of retaliation for his loss and sent it flying, a child's corpse had rolled out.
But it actually wasn't a corpse, but it was a dying Eiri.
"You were so thin and filthy when I picked you up that you reminded me of a stray dog."
Gwon laughed in a way that made the gums of his teeth show. Since his actual teeth had broken off, he had replaced them with ceramic teeth.
He had said that all of his teeth had been broken off due to a conflict when he was younger.
Gwon was the boss of the Suji Group, a Korean mafia group living and operating in Japan.
"Suji stands for sutchon*. It means 'purge'."
Since Eiri couldn't even remember his name, either from a psychological shock or due to hitting his head, Gwon called him Suregi. He had said it was since that meant 'garbage' in their language.
"All humans are trash when they are born. They're not angels. Just garbage."
He often said that, as if it was his favourite phrase.
"You can't eat unless you're mooching off your parents or your country. People live from trying to become something other than garbage."
You're garbage.
I'm garbage.
From now on he was going to crawl up and become something other than garbage. Going out of that trash can.
He was like garbage when he got out of that house. He looked like an incredibly short sickly Japanese person.
In fact, Eiri was only about 150 centimeters tall, despite being thirteen years old. He got interested in firearms when Gwon recommended a pistol to him. He was asked if he did any club activities before, and when he replied that he had been in the astronomy club, he got a gun.
Eiri immediately became infatuated with it. Perhaps he wanted to overcome the complex about his body that had made him give up on soccer before.
He liked seeing things through the lens.
In the past he had seen the bright stars while sitting on the veranda with his father and his telescope.
Now he saw people's lives through the scope.
Before Eiri realised it, he was able to eat heaps of rice again.
He liked the name Suregi. Eiri almost never used his real name in front of his comrades.
He didn't forget about his family. But whenever he thought of his family, it felt strange, as if it wasn't real. His former and current life were so different from each other that he didn't feel like he was the same person as before anymore.
Kaidou Eiri died back then.
He was shot and killed by that strange, tall man with hair the colour of a freshly brewed cappucino. Just like his parents. And then he burned along with the cherry blossoms and turned into ashes. He was no longer in this world.
Suregi was the one that was here now. He was picked up by a mafia boss, was named by him, and ate white rice with cod entrails on top every day like a bad-looking small child...
"Why are you part of the mafia, old man?"
Eiri said while eating the heaps of white rice that was as usually served in the bowl made out of stainless steel. The many younger people in the group called Gwon "old man".
"I didn't want to deal in women and didn't want to do medicine, so the mafia seemed like the only thing for me."
Even though the Suji group was called a mafia gang, they were pretty small. They scrambled with the Phillipines and Taiwanese mafia among the districts in Tokyo and places in the countryside.
"Don't you get jealous when you see groups that do stuff like making illegal bootlegs?"
"Don't tell me you'd think that would still be all that great after you joined them."
Gwon drank his vegetable juice with a wry face. He quit drinking beer ever since his bride pointed out that he was growing a belly lately.
"But old man, it seems like you hate the mafia."
"I don't like it, yeah."
"Then why are you doing this?"
"It's since I decided to protect the land."
If Eiri had to put the expression on Gwon's face into words in that moment, he would have said it was like the stone lion guardians that you'd always find in front of shrines.
"The northern country where our ancestors lived no longer exists. There's only a different country over there now. I don't have a place to go back to. So I risk my life to protect this place here."
At those words the young man who was nowadays greedily devouring the cod entrails nodded.
"We only have this place here."
Even though it was such a small rural town filled with cheap-looking soap and illegal copy shops and where violence was like an instinct, it was the place where Gwon belonged after he had set down his roots here.
Sharp nodded silently. No matter what this place was like, and no matter what their methods were like, Gwon and the others had rooted themselves here. And just maybe he was like a weed that had been blown in out of nowhere by the wind, and before he knew it he had gotten stuck to the trees and started to sprout. That's what he thought.
Three years passed since he had been called Suregi.
In normal terms of this world Eiri was at the age where he'd be graduating from middle school, but Eiri had to abandon his house and family back then.
He couldn't go back to his house by now. There was no one to go back to. On the contrary, the person who had killed his parents back then might come back as well to kill Eiri too.
Back then the media had covered the case in a big deal for a while, calling it a robbery arson-murder case where a whole family was murdered. But since three years had passed now, it had been forgotten as just one of many unresolved cases.
He wished he would have gone to the police back then. Clues that would lead to the culprit--- If he had just told them about that silhouette he saw, the criminal investigation wouldn't have been stopped and might have headed in a different direction.
But Eiri didn't feel like acting on those thoughts anymore.
It was as if someone was desperately warning him inside of his head to not touch that incident anymore.
He only survived by chance. Technically speaking all of them should have been killed. So it would be no good to speak up about it.
Did he not have a life now that he had only been able to scrape together with great difficulty?
Forget it, forget it.
He was telling himself it for his own good. Forget everything, just spread your roots here as a young hoodlum of the Suji Group-----
Someone had said long ago that fortune comes with loud footsteps, but misfortune arrives with silent, sneaky steps.
Just like how the god of death had snatched away his family on that spring day, Eiri lost Gwon.
He was shot by a gun and died. He was attacked by another group during a turf war.
"You're going, Suregi."
Jeong, who was the number two in the group, said so while handing Eiri a M67 hand grenade and a M66 modified gun.
You were indebted towards our old man. He picked you up from god knows where and fed you. Naturally you need to take revenge. That's how it is.
Eiri nodded without hesitation.
The M66, which had been illegally produced by one of the Suji Group's factories, felt familiar in Eiri's hands.
Eiri immediately left. He hid the gun and hand grenade under his coat and took the Yamanote line.
After carefully trying to think of what the opponent would do, he would usually to just burst into their headquarters. But this time he didn't get that far.
Jeong had heard that the boss of the Phillipine mafia, who had killed Gwon, was planning on staying in a hotel at Narita. Of course it was so he could escape on a flight to avoid the revenge.
He wouldn't be able to touch him if he got to Narita. So he had to finish everything before the target would get in the car.
He targeted the target right away when he was trying to enter the black sedan, throwing the hand grenade from the pedestrian bridge and fired as much as he could at the sedan's back when they tried to escape.
It was raining, and his opponent was out of luck. The sedan had to stop before the target showed up.
The revenge was complete. Jeong would probably be shouting for joy right about now. It didn't matter whether Gwon's soul would be able to rest in peace or not now. The members of the Suji Group were still left behind, whether he was resting in peace or not.
When he tried to escape, he got five shots to the stomach.
The cold rain fell like shots from a shotgun down upon the bloodless corpse.
He had no power left to avoid the signboards for snacks whose lightbulbs had been broken, and so he slammed into them and started rolling... and before Eiri knew it, he was lying in a small backalley.
Jeong had told him that if he could get back to the hideout, he would give him a forged passport to get on a ship from Yamaguchi going to Shanghai. But there was no chance left for him to get there. As his consciousness faded, he thought he was going to die like this. And indeed, if Eiri would have been left like that for another hour, he would for sure have died of multiple organ failure.
It rained on that day as well.
When he saw that in front of his eyes was a garbage can similar to the one he had been born in, Eiri laughed.
He could tell from how cold the raindrops that were hitting his cheeks were that the air was getting warmer. Spring was coming.
The cherry blossoms were blooming.
Ah, would he die in the spring again?
--- You're garbage too.
Become something other than garbage from now on. Get out of the trash can.
"Spread your roots."
He missed the stainless steel bowl from Gwon's place, the cod entrails, the way Gwon showed off his ceramic teeth whenever he laughed.
He wondered what became of Gwon's ceramic teeth. Whether they were burned when he was ceremated, or whether they were put into the urn with his ashes.
"I have nothing but this place. So I'll protect it."
Where did that guy end up going back to---?
notes:
* 'suji' is written as 須知, and he explains here that the kanji aren't used for their meaning, but for their reading (aka phonetically).