Published at 31st of August 2019 12:33 am

Volume 1, Panorama - I

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Shiki Ryōgi is my friend from high school. We studied together in a pri- vate school famous for putting a lot of its students on the fast track to a college education. On the day that I was looking for my name on the lists of people who had passed the entrance exam, I saw a name that caught my eye: “Shiki Ryōgi.” As names go, it was a pretty peculiar one, and our being classmates ensured that it would get stuck in my head. Ever since then, I’ve become possibly the only friend Shiki’s ever had.

Due to our school having no uniforms, and a casual clothing policy, a lot of people dressed in a multitude of ways to express themselves. Even in that sort of environment, Shiki stood out from the crowd.

Largely because of the kimono.

At first, that particular wardrobe choice made it seem as if the prime minister himself walked in on the classroom, forcing everyone to silence. But once it became clear that Shiki wasn’t sparing any words for anyone except the queries of the teachers, which were uncommon, people started to stop caring. Not that Shiki minded.

The cultivated air of inapproachability, intentional or not, certainly wid- ened the distance more than the clothes already did, but Shiki’s features undoubtedly helped out in that regard as well.

Black hair framed Shiki’s face, as it does now; cut long enough to hide the ears. However, it was clear that the maintenance of it seemed to Shiki like it was time wasted, evidenced by how it looked like it was cut with reckless abandon. Yet the cut was just at that height where people start to second guess Shiki’s gender on first contact. More than anything though, it would be Shiki’s eyes that lend your feet to stop. Those eyes carried a piercing gaze, seeming to bear witness to something invisible, something “other”. To me, those eyes were a definition, synecdochic to character.

But then, the accident happened…

“The jumpers.”

“Wha—oh, sorry, I wasn’t listening.” Mikiya cocks his head towards me a bit to listen.

“I said ‘the jumpers.’ As in the people who took a header on the sidewalk off a building. Would you say that what happened was accidental, Mikiya?” He shuts up for a moment and actually tries to think on the casual ques- tion seriously. He puts a hand on his chin, evoking the puzzled intensity of

stumped detectives the world over.

“Well, it’s on the person who jumps if he really wanted to do that or not. As for how society will look at it, they do classify ‘falling from a high place’ as an accident so—”

“Not a murder, not exactly a suicide, and not exactly an accident either. That’s vague,” I muse. “I don’t know if it occurred to them that killing them- selves would just inconvenience a lot more people than they thought it would. Maybe they should have grabbed a handbook on the subject and died a bit better.” As soon as I say that, I see Mikiya shake his head in disap- proval.

“I guess I have to add ‘speaks ill of the departed’ to your already illus- trious résumé of insensitivity.” He replies in monotone disappointment, almost without a note of chastisement. Typical.

“Ah, Kokutō. Ever the killjoy.” Despite my objection, he doesn’t even seem to care.

“Hah, that’s rare. It’s been a while since you called me by that name.” “That so?”

He nods like a squirrel. I tend to pronounce his surname a bit differently than you would normally, with a sort of French flavor; a small joke that originates way back in high school. I don’t really like the ring of the nick- name though, so I stick with “Mikiya” for the most part, but sometimes I just blurt it out, like an involunatry emission of boredom or frustration. In the silence of my reverie, he suddenly claps his hands as if remembering something.

“Oh yeah, while we’re on the topic of rare things, I just remembered that my sister Azaka said she saw it too.”

“Saw what now?”

“The girl you said you saw floating around the Fujō Tower.”

Ah, yes, the Fujō Tower, former high-rise condominium situated in the commercial office district of town that used to serve as residence to the more privileged tax brackets, now abandoned and leaving people with little else save its husk and its memory. And a haunting, if what Kokutō says is true. Passing by it some days ago, I happened to see a spectral figure in that looked quite human. If Azaka saw it too, then it must mean it’s real.

My second sight, the ability to see these types of events, has its roots (as much as one can point out a definitive origin to this weirdness, at least) in one event, a point in time that feels simutaneously distant and recent. I was in a traffic accident two years ago, and because of that I spent those last two years in a coma. After waking from that coma, I began to…see things that weren’t there before. Tōko would say that what I’m doing isn’t so much “sight” as it is “perception.” In other words, it seems my senses have “awakened” to a higher level of perception, but it’s all technical magi- cal gobbledygook that I couldn’t care less to understand.

“I did see it more than a few times, but I haven’t been there lately so I wouldn’t know if it’s still there,” I say, as I stretch out my arms.

“I don’t know why,” says Kokutō, perplexed, “but I pass by there all the time and I don’t see anything.”

“I’d say it’s because you have one extra pair of eyes too many,” I throw back at him.

“Erm, I don’t think glasses have anything to do with it.” Mikiya is always like this. He’s on a no-nonsense path and he’s going to stick to it come hell or high water. Honestly, I think it’s his naiveté that makes him not see these…”other” things. Nevertheless, these trifling incidents of people fly- ing and falling seem to be set to continue. I can’t puzzle out the meaning behind it all, so I ask Mikiya a question.

“Mikiya, do you know the reason people fly?”

He gives a shrug. “Wouldn’t know. I mean, I’ve never tried flying before anyway,” he says with a yawn.

It is a night approaching the end of August, and I decide to take a stroll. Despite summer quickly coming to a close, the air usually remained warm, which makes the chill running through the air tonight a rare and unusual event. The last train has come and gone, and a deathly silence has blanketed the city. This dead part of town is largely bereft of people, and looked like something foreign. Even the few pedestrians present seem fake, unnatural, like they were from some old daguerreotype. The whole thing reminds me of he scent of corpses, of grave pallor that stretched its damning influence across the city, as unstoppable and incurable as a terminal disease.

Everything—from the foreboding houses with no signs of life or light, to the dimly lit convenience store that offers little respite from the dark- ness—everything feels like all it takes is one bad moment to make them all fall down in violent upheaval.

The moon seems like the last refuge of life, even as my Eyes take in the richness of death in all things. This place is no exception, and my eyes hurt because of it. It’s sickening.

I took a black leather jacket with me when I left the house, and now I wear it atop my light blue kimono. The kimono’s sleeves get bunched up inside the jacket, and the heat warms my body. Even then, it still isn’t hot.

Well, not exactly. For me, it’s more like it wasn’t cold to begin with.

Even in such a deep night like this one, you can still encounter a few people making their way on the streets.

A man with the complete suit-tie-briefcase ensemble hurriedly making his way down the lane, his face cast downwards, features hidden by the shadows. A loiterer sitting by the light of the vending machine, his head swimming in the potent cocktail of alcohol and narcotics. Vagrants hanging around the vicinity of the 24-hour convenience store, maybe pondering how exactly they’re going to bust it, or just trying to find safety in numbers.

Who knows what reason these people may find themselves out here in the middle of the night, walking dangerous streets? I don’t even know my own reasons. I’m just doing what I used to do before.

…Two years ago.

In a different time, I was on the cusp of going into my second year of high school. But in that rain-soaked night, I was involved in an unfortunate traffic accident. I was brought to the hospital straightaway. Apparently, I didn’t receive much in the way of bodily harm; few wounds, nothing seri- ous, but nothing much beyond that. If it was really an accident, it was a pretty damn clean one, I’d say. On the other hand, peculiarly, I did receive serious damage to my brain, through which I lapsed into a deep coma. That’s what they told me at least. That night is the only time I have trouble even recalling.

Because I had little serious physical injury, it wasn’t a big stretch for the hospital to keep me alive, and my unconscious self grasped and groped for that last sliver of life. Statistically speaking, after 6 months, the chances of a coma patient coming back are pretty slim, but there are the aberrant cases, like myself. The doctors were so surprised at my recovery two months ago; it’s as if they saw a corpse rising from the grave. Guess they never expected me to pull a Lazarus on them, which I guess clues me in to their close to zilch hopes on my case. Though perhaps not equaling their exaggerated reactions, I too had a surprise waiting for me.

My memories became…alien, foreign, like they were coming from the head of a different person. Put simply, I’m dissociated from the memories, unable to put stock in their validity. It was different than mere amnesia, or a lapse in memory.

As Tōko would say, there are apparently four systems or steps the brain uses with regards to handling memory: encoding, storage, retrieval, and recognition.

“Encoding” is writing your impressions of an experience as information in your brain.

“Storage” is actually keeping that impression or memory.

“Retrieval” is calling back that stored information, or in other words, remembering.

“Recognition” is confirming whether or not that information was the same as what actually happened.

If, in any one of these steps, there is some sort of failure, then you get memory disorder. Depending on which of these steps fail, you get very different cases of memory disorder. In my case, however, there isn’t a prob- lem with any of these steps. Though I can’t place my memories as my own, “recognition” is working because I can identify my memories as my previ- ous experiences.

Even then, I still couldn’t trust these memories. I had no real feeling that I am the Shiki Ryōgi that was. Perhaps it was some other Shiki Ryōgi, some other high school student, some other person who had an accident. But I’ve seen the documents; I am Shiki Ryōgi. At least that’s what my brain tells me

Two years of oblivion have reduced me, if not to emptiness, than to something that sits closely beside it. It laid waste all that I was inside, and severed what connection existed between my memory and personality through two years of “living” like a shell, on the boundary of emptiness. And though there was precious little drama here compared to actual soci- etal rejection, it drives me to worry all the same. All my memories are just reflections on the water, and I don’t know whether I’m the reflection or the real thing. With these memories, I know how to act like the Shiki Ryōgi that my parents and friends knew, but I know it best; it’s all just an act, just mimesis. It’s like being a newborn baby: not knowing anything and lacking any sort of world experience. Or possibly it’s more like not living at all.

Still, the memories do help. I mean, they make me into a functional human being, after all. I already have the emotions people have from expe- riencing something. It’s not real, hands-on experience or anything, but at least it’s there. It results in this weird feeling where if I do something, I feel like it’s my first time doing it and also feel like I’ve done it a hundred times before. There’s no amazement, like a magic trick where you can see the strings in the sleeve.

And so I continue to play out this strange role. The reason is quite simple. Because by doing so, maybe I can return to some semblance of the past. Because by doing so, maybe I can figure out why I like walking so late at

night.

I guess, in a way, you could say I’ve fallen in love with my previous self.

I try to get my bearings in the neighborhood, and I realize I’ve walked pretty far, enough to reach the office district of the city. Buildings that stood at heights almost similar to each other lined the street, looking like soldiers arranged in neat little firing ranks. The surface of these buildings are riddled with little glass windows, themselves in their own arrange- ment. The reflection of moonlight as well as of the other buildings borne atop their shining surfaces creates a sort of shadow world, where monsters and their kind lurked.

One shadow stands taller than the rest, however. Like a perverse monu- ment, it stands long and narrow, with a height that looked like it could reach the moon.

The Fujō Tower.

No lights or signs of life are present in that building. Seeing as how it’s two o’ clock in the morning, I really shouldn’t be surprised. The coldness of the still night is irregular at this time of summer. The bone in my nape creaks from the cold, despite the lack of any tangible feeling of a breeze. I decide that it’s just my imagination. As I looked up at the towering struc- ture, a black shape flits past my sight, almost unnoticeable because of the lack of light. Looking closer, I realize it’s a shadow of a human figure, and then I realize it’s not a shadow at all. The silhouette of a woman comes floating into view atop the building. I didn’t mean that as a turn of phrase though. She literally is floating.

“Hmph, so you’ve shown yourself today as well, I see.” I say.

I don’t like her up there, silhouetted against the moonlight. But I can hardly do anything about what I can see. And as quickly as I saw her, she vanishes, flying as if the moon was her cradle.

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