Phenomeno:Volume 4 Prologue
Prologue[edit]
Thanks to her tendency to suddenly throw up whenever she tried to pry into the paranormal that lay in the crevices of this world, I had unconsciously forgotten, but the girl known as Yoishi Mitsurugi, was a beauty.
“I thought I’d start by getting to know you a little better.”
With a line like that, she started living—or rather, parasitizing in my loft apartment for about a month now, and a lot of things have happened. So many things have happened that I now realized something basic.
She always looked like she was in a daze, but I too would often find myself in daze when looking at her profile. It was because I was overwhelmed by the length of her eyelashes, the depth of her eyes, and the beauty of her lips, which were shaped in a cheeky curve, though her nose was what somewhat small. Argh, it can’t really be explained well just by describing her features individually. Anyway, when they’re mixed in together with her black hair and her straight-cut bangs, it’s like they begin to take on a kind of fairy-like aura, and I think to myself:
What a waste.
That’s right, If I were to give an analogy, she was like a wild cat, untouched by human hands.
To begin with, her abnormality in not taking a bath was evident of that. She was so stubborn about it that if you were to let her be, she probably wouldn’t take a bath for the rest of her life. The dirt, sweat and odor on her body combined to form an awful stink and that’s why, on the second day of her parasitizing in my home, I forced her to take a bath. She looked truly annoyed and babbled something incomprehensible: “Frequent cleaning weakens an organism’s immune system”, but what’s really annoying is someone who’s unaware of their own stench to the people around them. Of course, I couldn’t do it with her naked, so I made her sit down in front of the bathroom sink in her school uniform, and washed her damned long hair twice. I rinsed it afterwards, applying the hair treatment I had bought, and carefully dried it with a hair dryer. Thanks to that, her black hair regained its original beauty, like pearls that spilled downwards, but it was a little funny to see Yoishi endlessly fiddling with her shiny, silky black hair with an iffy look on her face, as if it were not her own.
Speaking of ‘wild cat’, she usually had her arms on her knees, looking a little lonely as she gazed at something only she could see. If one were to see that scene alone, she would resemble a young girl who was dreaming, and in a sense, it could be a scene from a fairy tale. Yet suddenly, in an instant, she would realize something. That something was a faint sensation born in the border between this world and that one, a strange feeling that had been twisted by the malice of humans. She alone would notice these tiny scars that most people would live without noticing; She would raise her beautiful eyebrows, and whisper, “It’s strange”. Before I’d realized, I would find the ground swaying beneath my feet, and be inevitably thrust down to the world beyond, forced to run away with tears in my eyes every time.
That’s right, if you leave out the occult part, she’s like a quiet and inconspicuous sixteen-year-old girl. With a height of about 160 cm, she probably doesn’t weigh that much. I’d say she's on the skinny side, but her butt is in pretty good shape. If she walked with her chest up, she would look good in her own way, but since she was always hunched over with her back rounded and her head hung down, her beautiful appearance was rarely communicated to the world. She seemed to have no friends of her own age or sex at school -- Was it because she slept or read books in class? Or was it because of the barrier she set around herself that made her hard to approach? Was a cold wind blowing at her feet? Or was she carrying an invisible old woman on her back? Whatever the case may be, she always had a gloomy atmosphere surrounding her.
“Say, don’t you have some club activities or something?”
I asked Yoishi on a certain day.
I was concerned about her future, as soon as she got home from school, she started opening all kinds of creepy books such as, ‘A History of Medieval Execution Devices’, ‘A Genealogy of Homicidal Maniacs’, ‘Case Files from Unsolved Atrocities’. I thought that if she at least started club activities, she’d make friends, start paying attention to the way people looked at her, and that might change her in various ways – however--
“It’s meaningless.”
Yoishi retorted without even closing the book she was reading.
“I mean, student life isn’t just about studying all the time. I'm sure that having silly conversations with friends is something important that you’ll only be able to experience at this time of your life.”
She cocked her head to the side in response, as I continued to add:
“How should I explain this, having high school friends is like having a telepathic understanding, or like having a comradery with someone who you share meals with, something like having a blood fellowship with someone who can understand you without having to talk about it. I’m sure that it will be an important asset for you in the future.”
“Future…?”
“Yes, the future. Don't you have something you want to do in the future? I don’t know if you want to go on to university or get a job, but you’ve thought about it a little, right?”
“No.”
“Huh, no...? You haven’t even thought about it once?”
“Most of what we plan and worry about for the future, with all of its undetermined complexities, will be for naught.”
“Well, that’s true, but…”
I tried to come up with some kind of rebuttal, but Yoishi suddenly began speaking something incomprehensible.
“It is said that a first-rate professional Shogi player can read 30 moves ahead in the beginning, and 500 to 600 moves ahead in the middle of a game - but even with that much, the difference between victory and defeat can be a momentary error in judgment, or a hole in one's thinking. That is to say nothing of this world, where countless people live.”
I thought life and Shogi were different, but, at the end of the day, wasn’t everything in life like a composed shogi problem?[1] I didn’t know anymore, so in the end, I kept my mouth shut. It wasn’t until much later on that I realized she had dodged my question.
At any rate, I don’t know if it was because she’d read countless books, but I was no match for her when it came to arguments. She would thoroughly answer questions that she could answer, but in situations like this when she decided (one-sidedly) that it would be safer not to answer, she would often brush me off like this. And the me of the time wouldn’t even realize that she was being evasive.
However, the signs came suddenly.
On a certain day, I found a stuffed toy of a frog dangling from the edge of her worn-out bag. “So, you like those kinds of things too, huh?”, I laughed. She glared at me and took off the doll and placed it inside her bag, but I was probably somewhat relieved at the time. No, you might even say that it gave me strength. It was a kind of hope: If Yoishi’s heart, which was completely stained pitch black, still had the mentality of attaching a stuffed doll to her bag, there was still some hope after all.
Thereafter, I started trying different things. Her meals always consisted of snack food from the convenience store and soft drinks in PET bottles, so I cooked her some stir-fried spinach as a test; She sniffed it incessantly for about a minute, before finally eating it. Without describing It as delicious or unsavory, she simply ate it in silence, without leaving any leftovers behind. She still wouldn’t take baths voluntarily, but when I called on her to take a bath once every three days, she would somehow manage to sit down meekly in front of the bathtub. She even started to clean up her own vomit when I told her to. That was without a doubt the training of a wildcat, but it was definitely accompanied by the sense that things were somehow moving forward.
The fact that a high school girl who I was not in a relationship with was parasitizing in my loft was certainly not something that I could be open about from a socially acceptable point of view. However, a hope was starting to bud inside me that I might be able to help her adjust into society: She who had diverged to the paranormal and away from the common sense of this world.
I would turn Yoishi Mitsurugi into a respectable high school girl.
Well, I didn’t exactly know what being a respectable high school girl entailed, but at any rate, shouldn’t Yoishi Mitsurugi be improving her lifestyle and habits so that she can smile and live more brightly under the sun? I’m sure that she would be cute when she smiles. I mean, she has all the ingredients. I’m sure it will be so adorable that it would be enough to remake the landscape of the entire universe. I wanted to see that smile—no, it didn’t matter what I wanted, at any rate, I was determined.
Yes, everything begins with determination and resolve.
And with that—
The ‘Yoishi Mitsurugi Rehabilitation Plan’ had begun.
Translator's notes and references[edit]
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