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## Illustrations

## A Distant Summer

Scan: illyfhy Beyond the rusted wire fence, the ruins lay sunk in the sea. Towers stood out of the water in ranks, parting the tide, like clusters of silver spears flashing in the sun. The summer he turned twenty-two. Overhead, a hard white glare and an ultramarine sky. Today, too, the heat was unbearable. A blazing sun, a true summer day. This week, Onakae slipped once more through a gap in the fence and walked into the zone where entry was forbidden. As always, he crossed the plank laid over the window of the fourth building on the east side and went inside the ruins. A rusted iron door. A table no one used, and a chair with a broken spring. Concrete walls with half the paint already peeled away. A scene he knew by heart. Clack, clack, clack—he went down a flight of stairs, and when he reached the floor he wanted, he headed for the emergency exit. Beyond the emergency door stretched an endless blue sea. He jumped into the little boat tied with rope. His weight settled onto both feet. The boat tipped once, then righted itself. He untied the rope, bent down, switched on the power, and set off. Put-put-put— The light engine sound vanished into the waves. An engine that used electric artificial muscle was quieter than one that burned gasoline. A wreck he had found by chance, repaired from a book, and put to use. This little boat was the only thing in his life so far that he felt he could show off to anyone. The towers' tempered glass flashed under blue sea, blue sky, and sunlight. He threaded the concrete jungle as he pleased. The small spray kicked up by the hull made his heart…

## The Credits That Loop Forever

Twelve minutes later Come to think of it— Was this still inside the movie theater? But how could that be? It did not feel like one at all. Instinct said something was wrong. He had not reached a conclusion yet. Half his brain was still asleep. Half dreaming, half awake, he thought in a daze. The silence around him was unnatural. Less a cinema than an empty gymnasium. No coughs, no whispered talk, no sound of bodies shifting. Nothing of the kind. Nor could he feel the presence of people who ought to have been right beside him. From the ceiling ahead came a piano piece gone out of tune. The slow music reached his ears with perfect clarity. If he had to put the melody into words, it was a watcher's snicker. The film itself was a thriller with plenty of buzz and no tension at all. August 30, 2030. The birthday of Honami Kiri, a girl one year above him in the same high-school mystery club. He had worked up the courage to ask her, "Want to see a movie together?" Of course he had never meant to see a thriller in the first place. However thick-skinned he was, he had not planned to take the girl he liked to a horror film on her birthday. What he had wanted to see first was the film starring Giordano, praised as a fantasy spectacular, but every ticket happened to be sold out, so they had no choice but to switch to this one. The ads claimed the realism was so overwhelming that rumors spread it was based on a true story. Watching it, he found nothing but an endless string of shots of a girl being chased by a monster, stitched into a "blockbuster." The ending…

## The End of Summer Vacation

Now: 156 hours and 43 minutes left "If, say—" Walking along the river, I asked her: "If giving up your own life could save the world, Yoshikawa, what would you do?" Blinding sunlight. Black shadows under that blinding sun. A blue sky too deep to read. Mountains rolling on and on. The racket of cicadas. A river murmuring as it ran. Lukewarm air. A cool breeze drifting in. On the way back from cram school. As always, we walked side by side through a summer landscape. "That strange dream again?" Yoshikawa asked. Her shirt threw back a dazzling white in the sun. The straw hat cast a shadow, and I could not see her face. Her voice, though, made it plain—she was in a bad mood. "I can't believe you can say something that ridiculous so many times!" Amid the rain of cicadas, she complained. She was right. I had been trying to hold it in, but whenever I was with Yoshikawa, the moment I relaxed even a little, it slipped out. "Talk about something that matters. It's our last summer of high school, and then we'll all go our separate ways for college. Haven't you thought about making good use of the time we have left?" She said it, displeased, and then she smiled. "Like, I don't know—what movie should we go see together today? Something like that." "The Giordano film doesn't come out until September, does it?" "Movies Giordano isn't in are already out in August." "Is that all right? Examinees doing things like this." "Examinees are exactly the ones who have to! You don't get it, do you~ I can tell you don't~" As she said it, she slipped her arm through mine…

## The Forest of a Thousand Years

Rolling dunes, and a sky grading from red in the east to deep blue, were all my eyes could reach. This was no place a human could live. A non-residential zone. Dusk. The hour of the day I liked best. Humming as I walked the endless world of sand, I opened the leather pouch at my waist, took out the last seed, and buried it in the sand. I let out a quiet sigh and prayed the seed would sprout soon. …With that, today's work was done. The pouch that had been full of seeds when I left was empty now. I stood on a dune and looked around. Someday, all of this would become a very, very large forest. I had not forgotten my promise to my teacher for a single day. Looking back, footprints lay in the sand. Footprints that would vanish soon, like proof I had lived here. I could not help thinking: if only the footprints would stay. Once I climbed the dune, I could see a white domed building in the distance. My home was under that white semicircular roof, an hour's walk away. Farther on stood a great cluster of high-rises, reaching into the air as if they meant to climb the sky. In the distant past, this whole area had been drowned when the sea rose, then left alone, and became a footprint of human culture. Since the last "human"—my teacher—died, two hundred and four years, three months, fourteen days, three hours, fifty-seven minutes, and eighteen seconds had passed. The dusk had not changed in those two hundred and four years, and surely from now on…

## Afterword

Nishimura? Who's that? To the many readers who bought this book with that thought in mind: hello. Oh, that guy? Still putting out books? To the few readers who thought that: long time no see. I'm Yu Nishimura. Every stage of the work is finished, and at last I've reached the afterword. With help from many sides, I managed to complete this book. Ah… it's a little embarrassing to say, but the fingers that hammered the keys are still shaking with the joy of going to press. In this state I doubt I can write anything decent, so I've decided to have a drink first. Cheers. …The drink is down. What follows is something I find hard to say without a little courage from the alcohol. I don't know if I'm the only one who feels this way, but when you want something, even if you chase it with a clean heart and everything you have, the chance of actually getting it is less than one in ten. Life, as they say, fails to go as we wish eight or nine times out of ten. Only after sinking in the mud, falling, rolling, crawling, and coming away covered in scars do we manage to take one step forward. That seems to be the rule of the world. But if you think about it carefully, there is nothing unfair in it. The earth does not turn with us at the center, after all. So trouble arrives whenever it likes, and never asks what we want. We go on living while complaining, "How did it come to this…" or "Why does nothing ever work!" We truly cannot have things just as we wish. And yet that is what keeps the balance… The god of fate does not hand out happiness easily. So you, reading this now! Even if your life is unhappy at the moment, don't let it weigh on you. Because in this world, there simply is no such…