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sparklyjojos · 5 years

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[THE CHILDISH DARKNESS Recaps, Chapters 1-2]

Note 1: As this book is a direct sequel, it requires good knowledge of the events of Smoke, Soil or Sacrifices (recapped here).

Note 2: Please be aware that the book revolves around a dysfuntional family, bad relationships, heavy depression and self-harm, and that the narrator might not be a very morally upstanding man.

Note 3: Do not believe his lies.

Note 4: Or do. It’s your call.

Note 5: Different people want to believe in different stories, after all.

[tw: gore, body horror, csa, suicide, sorta homophobic undertones?]

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ONE

[Our narrator is Natsukawa Saburou, a writer of trashy mystery novels and one of the older brothers of Shirou, the narrator of Smoke, Soil or Sacrifices.]

Saburou recalls his time in middle school when he was concerned about possibly being gay and in denial, since he liked to suck girls’ fingers and that’s ALMOST like blowing a guy, RIGHT? But his actually gay friend Okamoto Yasuhiro, known as Okachi, said that Saburou didn’t seem to be actually gay. On the other hand, their mutual friend Kaede seemed to him to have some lesbian vibes. (The three often hanged out together.) Okachi also claimed that while there is a line between straight and gay, it’s faint and sometimes cannot be seen clearly.

When they were In high school, Kaede’s father died in a work-related accident, and she reacted to it by eating a tremendous amount of food and falling into a few days worth of sleep. While she was sleeping her left arm started to swell unnaturally. As it turned out, a womb-like structure had developed there, along with a fast growing fetus, which was cut out in surgery and then cut out again when the same unbelievable event repeated. Kaede’s family claimed that maybe it was the dead father trying to come back to help Kaede, as she had a stalker called Araki Kazuo.

Whether the dad thing was true or not, Saburou decided to solve the problem by beating up Araki. The two engaged in a lot of fights escalating to using weapons. After learning about the problem, Saburou’s brother Shirou said that maybe their older brother Jirou was right: just beating up a guy wasn’t enough, you had to use much more drastic measures. Saburou followed this advice as far as cutting Araki’s two fingers off, internally horrified at the act and how much the threats coming out of his own mouth sounded like something Jirou would say. Upon returning home he popped the fingers in the fridge in case one of Araki’s buddies asked to get them back (nobody did) and sat down to play the piano to calm himself down.

At that time Saburou loved to play the piano, but only a single piece: Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3. No other music resonated with him so much, and as the result he was a rather poor pianist. One day when he heard the musically gifted Jirou play Beethoven, he was struck by the artistry and emotion heard in the piece. [By struck I mean he even popped a boner and had to go deal with it, because this is Maijo Otaro’s book.] The difference in skill between them was obvious and depressing. Then Saburou noticed that Jirou in all his genius seemed to get quickly bored with each piece and just randomly choose what to play. Maybe Jirou had genius, but Saburou had just enough skill to play the one piece he loved. Maybe their approaches were both okay. It was hard to judge.

While playing, Saburou thought about how Araki had yelled that his stalking was the proof of his love for Kaede. Surely there was a ‘love’ there, much like both sides of an abusive relationship may be convinced of their ‘love’. Maybe Kaede’s dead father also tried to return out of ‘love’, oblivious to the fact that each time he only hurt his daughter more and more.

[And then Saburou tried to lick those cut off fingers in the fridge and was like ‘well, I’m disgusted, and since these belonged to a guy that clearly means I’m not gay!” ...Whatever you say, narrator.]

TWO

What is a story?, the narrator is wondering. Why does it exist? Why don’t we employ our power of imagination solely to think of new ways to find shelter or food, but we need stories? Why do we need to give birth to fiction, something that doesn’t exist in this world? Why do we need the lies called a story?

The narrator believes that it’s because you can’t tell the truth using anything other than lies. Every writer knows that using a lie will make something seem more real than just faithfully recreating reality; will make deep emotions deeper. A story is a truth you want to tell, but told in lying words. Something that can ellicit joy greater than just plain laughter, or suffering greater than just normal pain. It’s not really something you explain as much as something you feel.

Maybe it’s not that the writer chooses a story, as much as the story has a chance meeting with the writer and can be transferred to others through him. Maybe that’s why no one can write just any story or pass down just any truth. The story is the one who conveys the truth by using the writer as a tool.

Certainly when Saburou was writing two novels in high school, The White Forest (白い森) and The Hymn (賛歌), he did want to convey truths: about commitment and detachment, and how one could at once be with others but still stay separated from them. When he came to write cheap mystery novels later, he ceased to be the tool of the story. Focusing on monetary gain, he wasn’t able to write something more real than reality.

Shirou noticed that and kept criticizing how stupid Saburou’s new novels were, how he’d sold himself out and that he’d become a factory producing the same thing in a different package over and over again, and even snapped one of Saburou’s books in half once. Saburou understood the point: he should be writing more important things and give his life some value. There was value to someone like Shirou, an ER surgeon saving lives every day, but Saburou didn’t really do nothing special.

After the recent case and Nozaki’s attack [see: Smoke, Soil or Sacrifices], 29-year-old Saburou started to feel like now that he had witnessed a true case, he wouldn’t be able to lie convincingly in his novels, and therefore would be unable to convey the truth. He gave up on the idea of turning the Nozaki case into a book, even if it’d bring a lot of money. Or maybe that was just his attempt to escape the reality of what happened.

Saburou called his editors and announced he’s not going to write anything anymore. He had stable income from a cram school he had once established (with an apt acronym of NAPS), and since nobody there really liked him coming around and trying to help, he could fill his time with whatever else he wanted.

At first he focused on sleeping with women. Many women, who tended to be the girlfriends and wives of his friends. So many women that in an attempt to take each one to a different hotel, he sort of ran out of all good hotels in Fukui, and only then realized how ridiculous this whole way of living was and maybe he should focus on something else.

For some time he was playing the piano in a club called Super Dash Penguins [clearly the greatest club name ever] near the Fukui station. He was doing pretty good when imitating famous jazz pianists, and maybe that was precisely what he was best at: not doing anything original of his own, just putting a little twist on something created by others.

Around that time, in March, Saburou accidentally witnessed a teenage girl burying a mannequin in the middle of a field. Quite suspicious activity, seeing as the case of Nozaki burying multiple women was still fresh in everyone’s mind. So when the girl then rode her bike past his car, he decided to stealthily follow her [while commenting about how pretty she is in a highly creepy way. Er, narrator? Please stop?]. She was circling between what seemed to be her house and various places in Nishi Akatsuki, each time taking a mannequin from the shed, riding to some remote place and burying it. Saburou decided to investigate the shed while she was out, but during his first attempt he was almost caught by a thin bespectacled man wielding a hoe – probably her father – so he had to return to the car and wait for a more opportune time.

At the more opportune time, Saburou managed to sneak inside the shed and found a map of Nishi Akatsuki with fourteen red pins. Six of them marked the locations of Nozaki’s attacks, and eight pointed to the places where the girl had buried the mannequins.

Unable to do a lot more, Saburou returned home. His mother was still in a coma, his father Maruo and oldest brother Ichirou were still hospitalized, and Shirou spent a lot of time at his girlfriend Atena’s place, so Saburou was usually completely alone in the Natsukawa house. On that day, though, Shirou was home and slammed a news article on the table in front of him. Together with a bag containing a pair of real human legs.

The article provided the names of people who had gone missing since February, all having the surnames Aoki or Aikawa, which fit the pattern that Nozaki used to choose victims. What’s more, the disembodied legs that probably belonged to a missing person were found buried in a location that would lie on top of Jawakutora’s spiral on the map of Nishi Akatsuki.

Saburou remembered the girl burying mannequins. While the points on her map seemed rather randomly chosen, she might have something to do with the copycat. Saburou was a little afraid that Shirou’s impulsiveness would result in him trying to punch the truth out of the girl, but it’s not like all Natsukawas didn’t have this sort of temper.

They arrived at the girl’s house. Shirou invited himself in and by being loud, flashy and acting like he had the full right to be here, got the girl’s father (who’s not the thin guy Saburou saw earlier) to show them her room. The father stated that the girl – Fuse Yurio – hadn’t shown any changes in behavior recently, but to be honest, she had always been a strange child in the first place.

Shirou in his chaotic investigation of Yurio’s room carelessly threw a lot of books on the ground: a lot of weird mystery novels in the vein of Nisio Isin and Seiryoin Ryusui, as well as a plethora of paranormal trash, mostly about UFO. (“Oh, look, now these are some really stupid books,” Shirou said throwing Saburou’s entire Runbaba series to the ground. Fair enough.) Finally Shirou found a suspicious bundle of volumes held together with a rubber band saying DON’T TOUCH ME, using hundreds of tiny kanji for ‘death’ to make the letters. How very teenage. The bundle contained several tomes with novel-like titles, one of them called Runbaba Notebook and featuring a poor picture of very effeminately looking Runbaba.

Shirou noticed aloud that the first character of each title put together created a message: Dad comes into the room at night. The possible implication made Saburou so outraged he wanted to jump at Yurio’s father with fists before they even tried to make sure there’s really abuse going on, but Shirou managed to stop him. The father claimed that he had no idea what the message was about. Yurio was apparently weird enough to do a creepy thing like that randomly. Shirou decided he’d want to hear the explanation from the source, but it seemed Yurio didn’t have a cellphone he could call.

Further investigation revealed a file titled ‘suicide note’ on Yurio’s PC, containing a description of her being abused sexually by her father, and: “I just want to know that at least my life is my own. My body will soon disappear from this Earth.”

Saburou really did punch the father this time and Shirou had to hold him back to prevent carnage (“Sorry Mr. Fuse, this guy here loves kids and snaps when he hears about child abuse”). While Shirou acknowledged the abuse might really be happening, he also couldn’t ignore the possibility that this could be just a kind of a cry for attention on Yurio’s part, or that it may be a sort of self-harm done in one own’s imagination.

Shirou then found a set of school books and a middle school uniform, all unused, and only then did Saburou realize that the girl had been out in the fields during school hours. According to the father, Yurio had been homeschooled even since she’d refused to attend classes, probably because her unusual personality had made her a target for bullies. Shirou asked for a way of contacting Yurio’s peers that still were friends with her.

While the father left the room to put together a phone number list, Shirou scolded Saburou for punching people without thinking. “Seems you haven’t used your head properly in years! Is it going to take another dead Runbaba and closing yourself in that damn warehouse for you to actually think?!” Saburou didn’t have an answer to that. Shirou asserted that right now the most pressing issue wasn’t figuring out all the family’s issues, but finding Yurio, who might have really been planning suicide.

And so Saburou had to focus on thinking. He couldn’t afford another Runbaba, couldn’t just close himself off from the world in some dark place. Finding this girl was all that mattered, this girl who smelled of citrus fruit and would surely grow up into a beautiful woman one day [um, narrator, your focus on those things in a thirteen-year-old girl is kinda creepy].

Shirou got a call from his friend Sanbonsugi, who had been watching the place that those disembodied legs had been found at. Sanbonsugi witnessed the murderer coming back to the crime scene. The man’s description exactly matched that of the man with glasses that Saburou had seen snooping around Yurio’s house earlier.

Shirou found a mostly destroyed notebook in an oil drum used to burn trash, which could mean Yurio got rid of the evidence for whatever plan she had in mind. The map in the shed had a new addition that Saburou hadn’t seen earlier, a sentence scrawled on it: YOU CAN’T FIND ME.

The two brothers got moving through the town. Shirou called each person from the list that the father had provided and learned that apparently Yurio had a boyfriend. [“Don’t look so down about it, you lolicon,” Shirou said towards Saburou. Thanks for recognizing the creepiness, dude.] The boyfriend was a sixteen-year-old Hashimoto Takashi. (“Seems you’re not the only lolicon around, huh?”) The brothers split, Saburou searching for the boyfriend and Yurio, while Shirou went on to catch the glasses-wearing murderer.

Saburou was unsuccessful in getting any information from Hashimoto’s parents. They didn’t seem to be interested in their son’s life in the slightest and had no idea who Fuse Yurio was.

Meanwhile, Shirou and his friend caught the murderer while he was checking on the buried body parts. The guy was Takano Yoshiki from the neighboring town Nanjou, and when Shirou arrived at his house, inside he found Yurio’s boyfriend Hashimoto Takashi, dead from suffocation, still tied to a chair with tape.

After beating the shit out of Takano, Shirou discovered yet another map of Nishi Akatsuki covered with pins, this one portraying what Takano had been attempting to do by burying the body parts: draw a giant monkey similar to that of the Nazca Lines. Jawakutora’s spiral would create the monkey’s tail.

After Shirou called Saburou, and after they beat the hell out of Takano once again, they asked him about the reason for drawing the picture. Takano answered,

“For Great Jawakutora.”

This time it was Saburou who had to pull his brother away to prevent murder.

Saburou then found Hashimoto’s sports bag. Stuffed inside was an array of nine balls used in different sports as well as a globe. The soccer ball had a paper ring around it. It must have symbolized Saturn, the globe – the Earth, and the rest – the other planets and the Sun. Why would a high schooler lug those around? Why would the same high schooler be killed? Maybe he and Yurio planned to do something that interferred with Takano’s little project. That would explain why Takano had been hanging around her house with a hoe: to follow her and dig up the mannequins so they wouldn’t mess up his Nazca monkey design. But what image could be created using ten “celestial bodies” and eight mannequins... and six buried women?

Saburou couldn’t figure this out, but Shirou put two and two together as soon as he saw it, running to the nearby computer to search for it (using awful dial-up Internet, because this is early 2000s) and make sure.

The Pioneer plaque was sent to space twice, on board of Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11. Aside from a drawing of two humans and the Pioneer probe, it also featured a message for the aliens on how to find the probe’s origin. The pulsar map using 14 pulsars -- that starburst shape on the left side of the plaque -- could be used to calculate the position of the Sun, and the drawing of the Solar System below pointed to the third planet from the Sun.

Ten objects of the Solar System, fourteen pulsars. Ten balls, six buried women and eight mannequins. A strange girl obsessed with UFO could definitely come up with something like this.

Shirou said that the pulsar map could be pointing them to where Yurio is. Her writing YOU CAN’T FIND ME might have meant that she desperately wanted to be found. Clearly, this was the time for Saburou to step in. Saburou replied that he wasn’t the one who had managed to find all those clues, but Shirou retorted that it had been Saburou who had already found Yurio once, and Shirou wouldn’t be able to figure the situation out without that.

So Saburou started to think about where Yurio could be. Maybe she and her boyfriend Hashimoto had planned to kill themselves so that their naked bodies would symbolize the man and the woman from the Pioneer plaque. If so, then maybe the additional fifteenth line of the pulsar map – the galactic plane – would point to them, just like it seemed to point to the two humans in the drawing.

Saburou put on his warmest clothes (even March is quite cold in Nishi Akatsuki) and walked deep into the dark mountains, moving along the ‘galactic plane’ towards the Hand Pond, called so after its characteristic hand-like shape. The lake seemed like an appropriate place for a meeting between two teens.

The mountain forest at night was cold and frightening, mostly because of the possibility of walking into a bear. But also because of an urban legend claiming that a family of cannibals known as Chiuhi lived in secret underground tunnels stretching all throughout the mountains, and that they’d be more than ready to pull a lonely wanderer like him into a hole and eat him.

Although what really scared Saburou was the possibility of Jirou somehow being there, that horrifying man ready to enact revenge on the family starting from his younger brother.

Finally Saburou caught the distant glimpse of the pond glinting with moonlight. Finally a spot of light in the oppresive darkness. Was Yurio still alive? Dead? If she had already died, then maybe exhausted Saburou could just lie next to her instead of Hashimoto and die too so her efforts wouldn’t be in vain, or something.

Upon arriving at the moonlit lake Saburou turned off his flashlight and became one with the darkness.

It wasn’t a bad feeling. Maybe once you’re caught by the very thing you’re afraid of, there’s no further point in fearing it.

In the quiet darkness, Saburou heard music coming from within him. Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3. He whistled to the tune and in response heard a small sound somewhere in the darkness. Was that Yurio? A bear? The Chiuhi? Jirou? A UFO full of aliens? He continued to whistle until someone asked, “Who’s there?” A girl’s voice with no discernible emotion.

Saburou thought that maybe it’d be better if aliens really showed up right now, responding to “the Pioneer plaque” or maybe “the Nazca monkey”. People had killed or were planning to die just to make these images. That’s why the aliens really should notice them and show up.

If Saburou was writing a novel about all this, he’d certainly make that happen.

A story passed from an enthusiathic creator to the recipient in the sky...

Even if it’d be a lie, that’d be okay. After all, it was the known truth of stories that a person’s great effort would without fail be noticed by someone else.

[>>>NEXT>>>]

#sparkly reads tcd #maijo and jdc stuff #it sure has been a while huh #remember when I said it'd be a single post recap? *looks at 18k words file* ...yeah

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