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Section 1
## Episode 1: The Counterfeit Family
Scans provided by: Shiwu Xiaoren －－－－－ Mother ran away from home. She left no note. She left no word about it either. She had been living exactly as usual—eating, flying into a rage over some trivial thing, laughing out loud at a good show on television. Then one day she simply stopped coming home, and all at once she was gone. I am not the sort of rebellious daughter people mean. Do mothers, generally speaking, run away from home? I was badly shaken, but that did not change the situation. We went on living as we always had. By “we” I mean myself and Ko. I am a seventeen-year-old girl, and Ko is a five-year-old boy. Our fathers are not the same man, but we were born of the same mother, so we count, for the time being, as sister and brother. In the words of my friend Saki, we are “same mother, different fathers.” I see. Even with Mother gone, I did not feel the least bit at a loss. She was our mother, and yet she could do nothing. Cooking, laundry, cleaning—she was no good at any of it. She liked instant food, and however filthy the house became she never cared. Sometimes she went three days without a bath, and so she wore the same clothes the whole time. Nearly all the housework fell to me alone. I would have liked to ask our father for help, but the thing called a father had vanished long ago, so I could only do it myself. “This is training you”……
## Episode 2: Love
Little by little the season passed from spring into summer. The sunlight began, slowly, to grow stronger, and the green of the trees grew thicker still. When a clear wind moved through them, the tips of the leaves threw off a glittering light, like ripples of brightness and green. I love these turns of the season. Spring into summer, summer into autumn, autumn into winter, and winter back into spring—whichever it is, I enjoy it. That feeling of having taken only half a step—. It was just then that we changed clothes for the season, trading the dark-blue sailor uniform for the white one. The first time I put on the short-sleeved sailor blouse I could more or less guess how it would feel, and still the lightness of it startled me. It was as if I had cast some part of myself away. When I looked back, the dark-blue sailor uniform hanging on the wall met my eyes. Like the skin an insect sheds. If I keep cycling through this molting, perhaps I too will become an adult, one step at a time. After Mother was gone I still went to school as usual. I neither dislike school nor like it, but for nothing worse than a slight cold I would go anyway. I was impressed with myself. I had other reasons, but the wish to go to school was still something worth praising. Talking myself into it, I set my foot on the bicycle pedal, and as I rode I suddenly noticed the pedal had gone light. Right—when Kenichi came yesterday, he seemed to have oiled the chain for me.……
## Episode 3: A Boy’s Troubles I
I like Mizuki. Whenever she says my name, I feel especially happy. If I think about it properly, it is a strange thing. Mother calls me Kenichi now and then too, but what I feel then is always “please, just spare me.” And there is a cloying sweetness in the way Mother says it that makes my skin crawl every time. I think she still treats me as a child, and that feeling has not changed since ten years ago. But I am seventeen now. Being treated as if I were still seven is, in the end, a little more than I can accept. So sometimes I am very cold to her, and Mother never once grows downcast over it. The creature called a mother is truly formidable. Like a boxer, no matter how many times she is knocked down she gets stubbornly back to her feet. Ah well, never mind Mother…… Anyway, I like Mizuki. We have known each other for less than a month, and I do not know why I like her so much. Perhaps because she is cute. She is not what you would call a beauty, but… in any case, she is exactly my type. But Mizuki has fallen for someone else. A teacher who already has a family. A middle-aged teacher, of all people. It is too much. And that teacher has a wife. This is awful. I never imagined she could like a middle-aged man. If that is how it is, I have no chance at all. After all, I am only a seventeen-year-old kid. I……
## Episode 4: The Box of Suffering
Disaster always arrives without warning. My birth father died with no sign beforehand. The second father, too, got up one morning and could never be found again. Mother’s running away was the same. I was not prepared in the least. When Mother disappeared. “Ah. So it is like this again?” That is what I thought. Sudden, once more. This moment had come again. That I can remain in an empty house and feel no panic at all is, I think, because I know this feeling so well. It is not simply that I have grown used to it. I understand it through and through, from the inside out. Reality is a great deal like the game called Red Light, Green Light. However wary you are, however fast you shout “Stop,” the person behind you is always drawing slowly nearer. And then, with no time even to be surprised, you find that reality is already standing at your back. The world is that sort of thing. A little earlier, when I turned on the television late at night, I saw some man—he seemed to be a famous actor, though I had no impression at all of his face or his name—say something like this. “Honestly, I was stretching in the bathroom, and I put so much into it that I suddenly needed to sneeze. I knew it was a bad idea, but in the end I could not hold it in. Right then my lower back went crack, and the pain was terrible. So a word of warning to everyone: you had best not sneeze while you are stretching!” Life, as they call it……
## Episode 5: The Pupils of Blue S
I skipped school. The kitten’s body was terribly weak. I could not leave it, not by a single step. And I had to feed it milk every two hours. If I went to school, the kitten would starve. All that day I kept feeding it milk without a break. Even when I rested, I did not rest in my own room. I slept on the spring sofa in the living room. While I slept, the alarm woke me every two hours. The kitten was not doing well, and yet it seemed already to know that milk was something very good to drink. Whenever I set the glass dropper at its mouth, it would hurry to take the tip in its mouth itself. “How is the kitten?” In the afternoon, Kenichi called. “I feel as if it has picked up a little. It keeps drinking so much milk.” “Then there is a bit of hope.” “Mm.” Because I had stayed in the house the whole time, I was still in my Western-style pajamas. Dazzling sunlight came in through the south window. Warm was not the word for it. Hot was closer. That light, and the wind moving peacefully, and the deep blue of the sky, were all slowly taking on the feel of early summer. “What is the kitten doing now?” “Sleeping.” “Is it cute?” “So cute, so cute, cute beyond all hope. Listen—when the sunlight falls on it, the white down on its face glitters.” While I was gently wiping its body with a damp tissue, I realized this was a very pretty white stray cat……
## Episode 6: A Boy’s Troubles II
I give up. Love and all the rest of it is far too much to handle. It toys with me as it pleases. Over some pointless thing I am, for no clear reason, happy, and then hurt, and even when I know what I ought to do I can never make myself do it. Sometimes I even think it would be better if a thing like love did not exist. Then my life would be steadier than it has been. It is a very strange thing to say, but just now Almighty God appeared before me. “Then I will see to it that you never fall in love again for the rest of your life. How does that sound?” If he asked me that, I would certainly shake my head in a fluster and refuse. I would oppose the offer with everything I had. Really, love is a thoroughly unreasonable thing…… But if I think about it from another angle, that unreasonableness may be something very precious. If you did everything according to logic you might be able to deal with every matter there is, but I am not that sort of person. I know that sleeping early is better for the body, and still I stay up until the middle of the night. I know the exam is right in front of me, and still I go around playing. I know it would be better not to have anything to do with that person, and still I have to do with him. It is because I have tried so many things like that that I know they are, in fact, very interesting. I think everything in this world has a reason for being alive. A famous biologist said it on television a little while ago: certain animals with no special gift, when they fall into a crisis, always……
## Episode 7: The Cat Thief
I know I am in the wrong. I know it does not follow. I know it is only a child’s nonsense. Even so, I still want to keep begging the self that has already done wrong. In the end I have made up my mind. I have no intention of stopping myself. The plan is proceeding in good order. First, find out what the kitten likes. Different kinds of kittens have different tastes. There are cats that eat only dry food, and cats that eat only canned food. Get the type of food wrong, and the plan fails easily because of it. If the lady next door were to notice, she might grow very wary, so I made a point of coming secretly to her door in the middle of the night, checking the kind of cat food heaped on the dish she leaves by the entrance, and making sure whether it was dry food or canned. I slipped several pieces of the food into my pocket. Behind me, Kenichi stood in anxious suspense. He could not rest easy with me going out alone at night. He kept saying “No, no,” and in the end he followed me anyway. The next day I went by myself to the neighborhood general store to trace where that cat food came from. It was simpler than I had expected. I only had to show it to a clerk, and I could learn exactly what kind it was. I bought a whole bag of the red food. Nine hundred and forty yen in all. For someone as poor as I am, that was a very expensive purchase, but there was no helping it. Just in case, I bought a bag of canned food as well. Once the bait was ready, the next thing was the individual……
## Episode 8: Mother
But Mother suddenly came back. At the time I was in the living room, eating a fried egg and bread. I had only just got home from school, and my stomach was completely empty. Several supermarket flyers lay on the table. I chewed the bread slowly with my molars and circled things with a red pen. Tuesday is discount day at this Super Ma supermarket. The bean sprouts here are cheap no matter when you go. One bag is only ten yen. Wednesday is meat-discount day at the Maruyoshi Corporation supermarket. Everything is twenty percent off. But the goods there are expensive to begin with, so even at twenty percent off they are hardly any cheaper. I had only one target, and that was pork. Only its price was reasonable. One hundred grams of pork sold for ninety-eight yen. And because of the twenty percent off, I could get it now for eighty yen. That was not bad. In any case, this week is the anniversary of Takayoshi Supermarket’s founding, so vinegared kelp is only one hundred forty-eight yen, cabbage fifty yen, milk one hundred eighty yen. Eggs seventy-eight yen…… Merely looking at the prices lined up on the flyer made my head swim. I was terribly excited. Even if I had to spend next month’s food money in advance, I thought, I would buy as much as I could. Thinking that, I chewed my bread and drank my milk in great gulps. The edge of the bandage on my face itched past enduring, and as I reached up to scratch it I heard the front door open. At first I thought it must be Ko coming home, but then, from the corridor, I heard……