Mushi:Vol5 Epilogue 19

EPILOGUE 19: Snow White

Thou must labor arduously so this land may bear fruit.

Labor until thou returnth to that place whence thou cometh from.

Thou cometh from dust, and to dust thou shalt return.

"Yes! I will come back soon!"

And that was the truth.

Come! Lord Jesus!

May Our Lord Jesus be with us all.

My homeroom teacher was very weird.

Her name was Akutagawa Shirayuki.

She didn’t tell us her age, but she still looked pretty young. She should be in her twenties. She teaches Japanese, and was also the advisor of the Literature Club. Moreover, she secretly wrote and published novels even though she was a high school teacher and a civil servant, and therefore prohibited from taking on other jobs.

“… Ahh, I’m late again.”

Sensei was wearing her reflective silver-green glasses. She put her feet on the teacher’s table, looking like a truly cocky rebel. She wasn’t a small person, and she didn’t look very chubby or babyish, but it just felt like she was being very childish.

I went to school at the Kanaryō Prefecture High School. The after school club activities here weren’t all that active, so the whole place felt pretty much abandoned after a school day. The rays of the setting sun shone through the window, and I could see only the Track and Field Club was out practicing. No matter where we were, everyone must be feeling bored.

Yes, no one else mattered. My current problem was this person with her legs high on the table and showing a complete lack of manners. Did she even know the basics of etiquette as a teacher? So what if she was wearing jeans. This pose really makes me unwilling to even looking at her. This woman…

A pointless impulse suddenly arose in me. I dumped the four books in my school bag and the hundreds of pages of freshly-printed manuscripts onto a table – I didn’t care which student's table it was – and put all of my weight on it carelessly.

Then I loudly informed her of my thoughts regarding those stories she wrote.

“Sensei, I got tricked.”

“Oh? What do you mean?”

Her chair, which she was balancing precariously on just two legs, suddenly collapsed on the floor. Sensei got the chair up again in a rush and pouted, still looking like a kid.

I slammed all of her published books I was holding onto the table. Those books had bright green covers. There were no strange titles on it, nor did it contain her own name, but it was her pen name.

“What the heck is this mess? Is this the memoir of your high school life, Sensei? Your ordinary first crush and the tales of your friendship? Do you even understand the purpose of documentary writing?”

“Un-huh!”

“Don’t un-huh. I’m not complimenting you!”

I stared coldly at her. Sensei lowered her head and took out a cigarette, then took out a lighter and ignited the cigarette smoothly, proceeding to smoke with a blissed expression on her face.

She breathed out a huge puff of smoke and I went into a coughing fit. What was she thinking? She only started being my homeroom teacher this year, but we have worked together previously in the Literature club, so we were not complete strangers. Even so, I didn’t know anything about her personality.

As if I was trying to get rid of a stench that was getting closer and closer, I grabbed the pages on the table to fan away the smoke amidst my own complaints.

“Please don’t smoke inside a classroom. You’re gonna get fired if someone catches you doing that.”

“Pwah. I’m not gonna listen to the words of a student who don’t even understand my novels. You better die from my second-hand smoke. The risk is three times higher than normal! Three times!”

Three times the risk of what? Rates of lung cancer?

I got more upset and started to furiously flip through her manuscript. She gave this to me to look over in order to have the opinion of someone who was completely unfamiliar with her work. This was all to edit and proofread her work before official publication.

The books she already finished looked like they were manga volumes. There were illustrations in it, which was rare for this kind of books.

Mmm, she gave those books to me as references. It was not easy to quickly read through all of them. After all, those were not published copies, but were bound manuscripts.

Apparently, the contents of these books were recorded by my teacher when she was sixteen years old, and was a faithful description of her memories. That was why my interests were piqued thoroughly by the premise and stayed up the whole night to finish them all. The contents… were just as outlandish as manga volumes.

“You didn’t even feature yourself throughout the entire story…”

“Why are you not addressing your teacher with honorifics? You have no manners.”

She pouted, and I wanted to rebuke her that things such as manners were not important at the moment. Akutagawa Sensei then suddenly put on a rather nostalgic expression and reached out for the manuscripts on the table. There was an old, faded scar in the middle of her palm - and I jumped.

At the very end of her manuscript – at the very end of that dreamy world – the girl named Usagawa Rinne was wounded. Gankyū Eguriko, Rinne’s friend, tried to kill herself by using a spoon to stab into her heart. Rinne put her hand in front of the spoon to stop her friend – that was how it went, right?

“Ahh. This?”

Sensei touched her scar gingerly, lovingly. She moved as if the wound still had not closed. It did not feel fake. She was serious.

“This was incredible. It was a world of dreams, but this wound was real –”

She stopped talking, and took out the necklace that she always wore around her neck. Something – an ancient spoon – was dangling from the end of the necklace.

A sudden chill grasped my heart.

Sensei saw I was scared. She took this opportunity to puff out her chest and wave the spoon about as she continued.

“‘I’m gonna gouge out your eyeballs!’, right? I somehow brought it from that world into our reality, just like this wound. It was left stabbed into my hand, so it came back with me. That is why I believe in everything I wrote.”

She was a grown adult, but her eyes were clouded, as if she was a child drowning in daydreams. Sensei continued as she reminisced.

“That world was not a dream. It was real. I – as Usagawa Rinne – met Guriko, fell in love with Sensei, and lived like that. Aha.”

“You’re still calling him ‘Sensei’? Seriously?”

“You wanna have a taste of romance, boy?”

“No, thank you.”

Sensei got rid of her serious expression and started to laugh as I looked at her. She was like a little kid, giggling for no reason at all.

But… Of course, I don’t think Sensei’s writings were all lies. It was just hard for normal people to accept them. Some parts of the book was very cruel and violent, and some other parts were very warm and heartfelt. If this was a true story, then it was actually a rather disturbing tale.

The persona named Usagawa Rinne was sleeping within Sensei’s body. At the end, she chose to keep on living and returned to this original world – even so, it was still possible that everything she experienced was simply a dream, because her real life at the time was too dreary. Perhaps that was indeed the correct answer.

But I have imagined what it may mean.

Many people – all of us – considered ourselves to be the center of the world. Internally, we possessed the entire world, and that was our starting point to write our own legends, with ourselves as the protagonist. When death descended, our worlds would also face their ends.

These worlds existed at places we didn’t even know about.

Sensei sought out one of those worlds. Right now – deep within Sensei’s mind – Gankyū Eguriko, Sakaki Guryū, and all kinds of different and strange people were perhaps still alive.

They were inside that small, untouchable world of legends. The world that Sensei encountered upon death. The world that only existed in the gap between life and death.

“… If you dislike this world, then perhaps you can manage something like this too.”

As if she knew what I was thinking, Sensei looked at me from behind her glasses and continued in an egotistical way.

“Wouldn't it be fun? Wouldn't it be great? Wouldn't it be awesome?”

Sensei kept waving her hands around like she was performing a show. She looked so silly. I couldn’t hold in and gave out a laugh, then lowered my voice and replied seriously.

“No, I won’t do that just yet. I don’t feel despair towards the world… I'm just like how you are now, Sensei.”

“That’s right. This world is surprisingly happy. Even though I never again met the people in the other world –”

She suddenly seemed anxious as she said this. My bizarre homeroom teacher put her hand on her chest and screamed.

“Guriko-chan! Sensei! Are you worried about me? But… I’m fine! I’m still alive! I’m living a good life! I’m as happy as I was while in I was in your world!”

Those actions seemed both funny and weird at the same time. But I was touched by her for some reason. She had friends and a lover, but they would never meet again, would never speak to each other again, and would never reach each other again. That must be the loneliest feeling in the entire world.

I prayed that those people would answer Sensei if they heard her screams. I prayed for those incredible people who were born miraculously and accidentally in the world Sensei created. Maybe she was only able to come back to this world because those people were also trying their best to survive, that they wanted to stay alive and did not give up.

I was not God. I might suffer a lot in this world, where I cannot predict how the future would be. But Sensei might be able to keep it up. The companions who supported her and gave her strength were living in the world deep within her mind.

What kind of people would populate a world revolving around me?

It was silly, but I started to smile when I imagined this. Maybe I was laughing at my own thoughts. Sensei’s face blushed and she seemed to be complaining. No, I was just fantasising – but that actually felt pretty good.

“Seriously, Guriko-chan and everyone else actually exist! They are still living in the world within my mind! Stop laughing! Seriously, do you think I’m an idiot?”

Yes yes, I’m sorry, Sensei. I’ll stop laughing.

If you dislike reality, then go travel to that world. I still don’t understand anything about you, Sensei.

I don’t know if Sensei’s story was true or not.

However – the scar on her palm, that bloodstained and rusty spoon, and the mythologies recorded within her five books – her memories of God felt real.

That world had definitely existed within Sensei. It contained her blood and tears, her flesh and her kin, her love and everything else besides.

I actually wanted to see that world, but that would probably be impossible. But that was okay. I don’t need to rush. I will perhaps see the same thing on my dying day.

I already feel very satisfied in this world. I have this weird teacher, my friends, my family, and those dreary but precious days. Those hazy but happy days.

My homeroom teacher was very strange.

Her name was Akutagawa Shirayuki.

She was an energetic and rather foolish ordinary person who called herself – God.

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