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Section 1
## Illustrations
## "So Long as the Eyes Are Full of Rainbows"
Taiwan edition. Reposted from Light Novel Kingdom. "I'm innocent! This is a mistake!" Just as I was about to be tossed into the little boat, I decided I ought to say my piece after all, and so I stated my case. The woman gripping my shoulders leaned in and looked at my face. I hadn't thought she would react, so I was a little surprised. "Really? You swear?" "Huh? That's... hahaha." I laughed, not taking it seriously, and the young woman smiled at me, eyes narrowed in amusement. "Olleh?" "O-Ollaha?" "And then Eybdoog." I was tossed out, lightly. "Gyaaaaaah." This long journey began in a thoroughly frivolous way. Even cold noodles, eaten for something like ten days straight, eventually grow hard to get down. By switching among flavors I held out another three days, but I still gave up just short of two full weeks. It got so bad that the mere sight of white provoked a rejection response in me. If I put noodles in my mouth now, the moment I swallowed they would probably come out my nostrils. For a college woman, having anything besides water or blood run from one's nose is really not appropriate. Even if I weren't a college woman, I would probably be unable to breathe. So it was about time I went and bought something else. Accompanied by a pair of sandals worn down into the shape of the soles of my feet, I opened the door that led into summer. Stepping out of this little apartment, nearly drowned among the student quarter, I found the cicadas far away, their cries scattered into the shape of a doughnut. I looked up, and those cries seemed to form...
## "Gunmetal Soul"
I only picked up a dog. It was on the way home, at dusk. Under a late-day sky with a faint glow, the puppy was alone on the road. It sat motionless in the very center of the street, ears and tail drooping, lifeless, like a single black drop of water fallen onto the pavement. The dog and I looked at each other. A pair of eyes buried in that ball of fur, like obsidian, seemed to be speaking to me as well. I'm not especially averse to dogs, and with the conditions this complete, I truly could not look the other way. When I picked it up, thinking I should at least get it off to the side of the road, I ought to have noticed that all of this was wrong. The puppy's nose twitched, as if it could not hold back. Then the puppy's little mouth opened wide. The mouth was small, yet it gaped far too far. The way it opened was like twisting off a bottle cap, sharing something with the feel of switching an inanimate thing. Then, from deep in that immature mouth and tongue, something white sprayed out. The stuff spread open like a bedsheet and covered me entirely. The color went from white to gray. I could not keep up with the change in that instant, yet my mind, for some reason, devoted itself to not letting the puppy fall to the ground. After all, if I let it fall, I might hurt it. My hands and my field of vision were both taken up, and the situation kept getting worse. The gray held me and would not let go, as if it were chewing me. I am quite sure that happened, and yet... Consciousness unfolded along with a body soaked in the sweat of sleep. I lay in a dim room, the quilt muggy against my back. At first I thought, it's night...
## "A Life of Pure White"
That day, from the moment I got up, I kept feeling eyes on me. For the record, the time I got up was four in the afternoon. Before thinking about what kind of gaze it was, I doubted the clock. "Whoooa." I couldn't help crouching down. Unbelievable—how many hours had I slept? After my bath yesterday I had been drowsy the whole time, so I had meant only to sleep a little, and I remembered it was a little past six in the afternoon then. I told myself a short sleep would do; I lay down, the sun went down behind the hills, and before I knew it I had overslept, and my head ached. "Uh, which is to say... I slept negative two hours, yeah." A casual touch found that the hair at the back of my head had been slept into spikes. I combed those fluffy, curling tufts with my fingers and looked out the window. The room had only one window; look at it long enough and it called to mind a solitary cell. The sun was still high in the sky, and from outside came the wails of little kids, as if they were shouting, "It's so hot!" Judging by the hour, might they be kids on their way home from the school pool? "So hooot—" I murmured the words along with them, and drew the heat blanketing the whole room deep into my nose. As that heat ate into me, self-reproach welled up little by little. "Unconstructive." That insult, the one that described me most precisely, spun over my head without stopping. "This won't do... it really won't." Unsettled, I lifted my pajamas and checked whether the area around my navel had gone moldy. Nothing was wrong. And the moment I touched it, I found it perfectly smooth. According to my friend, that was because I hadn't gotten too much su...
## "On the Planet That Suits Us"
Up to that point, Yukinaga and I did not know each other's names. To this day I still don't know whether Yukinaga is a family name or a given name. Simply because we were at the same school, introductions were skipped as a matter of course, and we have missed the chance ever since. I always felt that the moment we were together everyone would tease us, and that did in fact happen, so we began avoiding each other; in the end, I think we spoke face to face only about twice. Even so, among my elementary-school classmates, Yukinaga left the sharpest memory, because she told me her secret. When I heard it I thought it was incredible, and also thought there was something wrong with her head; I was shaken hard by all sorts of feelings, and that must be why the impression stayed so deep. All I knew of Yukinaga was that she was called Yukinaga, and that she was an alien. When I was in elementary school, something called pillow-pairing was very popular. It was a kind of fortune-telling: if two people fell asleep at the same time and dreamed the same dream, it meant the two of them were a good match. I don't know who spread it, or how far the craze went; I only know that before anyone noticed, pillow-pairing had sunk in deep, and we talked about it on about the same level as walkthroughs for the newest video games. Yesterday I had a dream like this, I went to sleep at such-and-such. Basically they never matched. And the contents of the dreams were a mess; most of the time you felt the person hadn't dreamed at all and was just making it up on the spot, but no one else called them on it, and people answered offhand. I was almost always the listener, and never took the position of bringing up my own dreams. After all, I couldn't remember what I had dreamed at all...
## Final Chapter: "Exile, Zero Light-Years"
Most likely because I was elated, and because my heart was pounding. I came awake a little earlier than the time the spaceship was set to wake me. My body was not awake yet, so I could not move even a finger, but I still opened my eyes a crack. I began to hear my own breathing, and little by little a quickening started. The pure-white air slowly cleared from above my head, and bit by bit I regained my freedom. Before departure, I had already designated the landing site. So I did not have to do anything. I only had to wait. Just a little longer. The light filling my eyes kept trembling around them. The feeling of weightlessness seized hold of my heart and would not let go. Surely so that I would not forget. Thanks to that feeling, too, the first thing I remembered was this name. The day we said goodbye felt as if it had only just happened. Saying hello. Hello. A little will mixed itself into my breath. The end of the long journey was right before me, pressing down on me more heavily than any moment that had come before. I did not know whether we would be able to meet again. But there were two pieces of luck. One: I was still alive. Two: the planet of water was, right now, truly before my eyes. So I swore an oath to the parting between her and me. I have come back here. "Approaching Earth. Prepare for impact." "Uuuh—uh, uuuh—... I... am... back..."
## Afterword
Suited to you—the rest omitted. Hello, everyone. I'm Hitoma Iruma. This time it's an alien story. Same as always, isn't it. I imagine that in about ten days I'll already be playing Pokémon. A new Pokémon game comes out → I buy it and play. I really don't know how many years this process has gone on. What I bought then was the blue one, so it was Sapphire. I remember it was a version where you could travel under the sea, which is why I liked it. But in both Ruby and Sapphire, Slowpoke never showed up. Is that all right? And the video-game shop nearest my house has finally closed for good. There's nowhere nearby to buy games anymore. What a headache. This has nothing at all to do with this book, but when I was writing the previous one, Adachi and Shimamura 3, what troubled me most was the subtitle. That time I had to actually use the names of colors, and at the same time keep them unified as the names of flowers, and once I got into it, it took an enormous amount of time. The Soil used in that anime's main story begins in black and ends by turning white. It may be only a coincidence, but I think that process of change is beautiful. Also, lately I've been listening a lot to the theme song of World Destruction. It was included as a bonus when I bought the game version, and the piece really is wonderful. Sensei Hidari, who is handling the illustrations for my work again after so long—how many years has it been since we worked together? And the last time we actually met was years before that... Time really does pass quickly. I remember Hidari-sensei calling themself part of the Matsuzaka generation, while I said that Buriki-sensei and I were both of the Darvish generation, and now...