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Kara no Kyoukai (Light Novel) - Volume 2, Part IV: A Hallow - II
Volume 2, Part IV: A Hallow - II
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For most everyone else in the world during the laid back days of early June of 1998, it was as calm and easy a summer as any other. For Tōko Aozaki, it was the season she would first come to know the intriguing personality known as Shiki Ryōgi. It all began when Tōko had just taken in a new hire, impressed by the boy’s ability to track her down despite her preventative efforts. As fate would have it, this new hire apparently had a yarn to spin about his friend, the previously mentioned Shiki, and as a way to pass the time on a particularly lazy afternoon, Tōko decided to listen to him.
Apparently this Shiki was in a coma, brought on after a car accident. She was in a persistent vegetative state, where the chances of waking up are below zero with the decimal numbers going into extreme lengths. It seems that he also heard, from the nurses’ gossip at least, that Shiki hadn’t aged a day since her coma, a little detail that Tōko had been immediately suspicious of.
“Really now? Even the dead haven’t seen the end of entropy yet.” she had said, trying to hide the curiosity in her voice. “Sounds a bit like…magic, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t expect you to believe it, ma’am, but it’s true. There’s not a spot of the last two years on her. Still, enough about my personal hang-ups. I don’t suppose you have any curious coma stories to match mine, do you ma’am?”
He hadn’t expected Tōko to take him seriously, but nevertheless, she folded her arms and tried to dig up a story. “Let’s see now—there was this story from some far off country where a woman got married then promptly fell into a coma when she was twenty years old. God knows what the reason was, though. Rude of her, huh? Anyway, her particular case lasted for fifty years. Heard of it?”
“Can’t say I have,” said the boy, shaking his head. “So what happened to her after she woke up?”
“A surprisingly healthy mental state. Almost like she never even went into a coma! Can you imagine? She started recalling past memories, names; the whole deal. Sad that it didn’t do anything to make the husband happy, though.”
“What? Why would the husband be sad after her wife recovered?” “Well, it’s more the wife’s problem, really. Her mind was as fresh as it
was before the coma, but her body’s taken the atrophy train to seventy
year old land. She wanted to run, go exercise, do athletics, but she obviously couldn’t, and she couldn’t really understand why. The fact that she’d aged fifty years just didn’t register as the truth in her mind. The husband on the other hand, felt so bad for the wife that he actually said, with tears coming out of his eyes, that it might have been better for everyone if she hadn’t woken up.” She said all this as she relaxed in her chair, swinging it from side to side lazily. “How about it, huh? Now that’s a story I don’t expect you to believe. Hope it helped contextualize this entire thing for you.”
After Tōko told this story, the boy fell silent, prompting her to speak and prod him into conversation again.
“Oh, but has a bad premonition suddenly crept into the little man’s head?” Tōko asks with a playful grin from cheek to cheek decorating her face. The boy nods in assent.
“It’s a thought I’ve never wanted to entertain, actually: the thought that Shiki might not actually want to come back.”
“Ah, but what’s this?” Tōko suddenly said, putting a hand on her temple and pretending to be a psychic. “I sense a reason behind this. We’ve got a lot of time to kill, so please, do tell.” The boy seemed angered at this approach, and turns away.
“I’d really rather not, ma’am. You know, it wouldn’t hurt to be a bit more sensitive to people.”
“Hey, you’re the one that started talking about her in the first place, friend. Don’t start telling stories if you don’t like where they’re leading. I’m only asking to pass the time, and because every time Azaka calls me, she always keeps yapping on about this ‘Shiki’ person. I mean, how on Earth can we women gossip when I don’t even know the first thing about the person?”
As soon as Azaka’s name is mentioned, the boy frowns in dismay. “I’d been meaning to ask at some point, ma’am, but where and how exactly did you and my sister meet?”
“Long story short, we met when I was on a trip to investigate a little case I was working on. We met, and due to circumstances beyond my control, she ended up finding out about me being a mage.”
“Well, whatever. I would ask that you please refrain from pulling her in too much into your world, though,” he said, the suspicion clear in his voice. “She’s at a very delicate and impressionable age.”
Tōko couldn’t help but chuckle at that. “You don’t know the half of it. I won’t butt into your family problems, you have my word. And in exchange for that, let’s go back to our previous topic and get me interested in this
Shiki person.” She lights a cigarette and leaned forward on her desk, the head cradled in her hands positively beaming.
Seeing there was no talking Tōko out of it, the boy could only sigh as he started to tell the story that began two years ago, on the snowy night when he and Shiki first met. In high school as classmates, Shiki had showed no interest in making nice with the rest of the student body, but it was the boy who struck up a friendship with her. But in the second half of freshman year, around the time the serial killer started making him or herself known, Shiki became more aloof and withdrawn, a matter eventually explained when she eventually revealed to him that she suffered a split personality, one of which had a taste for murder. If and how she was connected to the serial killings was never found out. In a rain-soaked night colder than any that had come before, Shiki encountered an accident before the boy’s very eyes. The boy and the girl were whisked away to a hospital, where she still resides in a coma.
At first, Tōko listened to this story as one would listen to any half-truth told over a beer, but as it progressed, the smile was slowly wiped from her face. At last, the boy finished relating the story, wearing a solemn expression of that told of how delicate a subject this must have been for him.
“So, I guess that’s the long and the short of that particular two-year old story,” he concludes.
“Well, she isn’t some vampire in torpor, I can tell you that. Still, now I might have some idea…” Tōko’s words descended into the particular brand of murmuring she has when she’s pondering the solution to a hard problem. The smile that had disappeared from her face now returns, though this time as a sly curl of the lips. “Remind me again what character you use for her name.”
“It’s ‘Shiki’ as in ‘sūshiki’, or ‘formula’. Why? Is there anything special about it?”
“Or, alternatively, the ‘Shiki’ as in ‘shikigami’, that unique Japanese style of goetic theurgy. And on top of that, she’s a member of the Ryōgi dynasty. I’m beginning to see what this is all about, and it stinks of magic.” Unable to contain herself, Tōko extinguished her cigarette on the ashtray and stands up. “The hospital was in the suburbs, wasn’t it? I’ll be back in a few. I just need to go see about this sleeping beauty of ours.”
And without waiting for a reply from the boy, Tōko left her office, along with the boy, unable to think of anything except how exactly she had found herself in such a favorable position. She felt like she could almost feel the subtle rifts and changes in the skeins of fate, shifting to bring her here, at this singular point.
