From the New World Read online

  From the New World

  By Yusuke Kishi

  Disclaimer

  新世界より (From the New World) is copyright Yusuke Kishi, 2011.

  This is a fan translation by eerabbit ([email protected]).

  No infringement of copyrights is intended, and is not authorized by the copyright holder.

  This translation may not be duplicated, sold, or uploaded anywhere outside of http://shinsekai.cadetnine.org

  Please support the author and buy the novel if it gets translated!

  Some notes on the translation

  I don’t claim to be completely fluent in Japanese, so there will be translation mistakes as well as silly typos that I’ve overlooked. Please let me know if you find any.

  I’ve removed most of the footnotes that are in the online version, because I feel they’re distracting. The ones that remain are now endnotes that are linked in the text.

  Special terminology will be the same as the ones used in UTW’s fansub of the anime. You can visit them at http://utw.me

  Part I: Season of New Leaves

  Chapter 1

  Late at night, after everything around me falls silent, I sink into a chair and close my eyes.

  The scene that floats up from the depths of my mind is always the same, stamped permanently into my brain.

  In the darkness at the back of the temple, a flame burns above the altar. Sparks burst from the fire like orange snowflakes, interrupting the sound of chanting coming from beneath the earth.

  Each time, I wonder why it’s this scene.

  Since that night when I was twelve, twenty three years have passed. In that time, various things have happened. {Incidents more sad and more frightening than I could have ever imagined.} They would rip out by the roots everything I had believed in until then.

  And yet even now, why is that night always the first thing to come to my mind?

  Is hypnotic suggestion really that powerful?

  Sometimes, I still get the feeling that I {haven’t fully awakened} from the brainwashing.

  Now, my reasons for recording this stream of circumstances surrounding those events is as follows.

  Many things were returned to dust, and since that day, ten years have passed.

  A span of ten years doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things. But problems piled up, and ironically, when the new order was instated, doubts about the future started sprouting. During this period, I spent some time studying history, and realized that as human beings, no matter how many tears we have to shed to learn a lesson, the moment the tears are dry, we forget. That’s the type of beings we are.

  Of course, nobody should forget the promise that the indescribable tragedy that happened that day will never occur again. I want to believe that.

  But maybe some day, in a future where peoples’ memories have faded away, will our foolishness cause us to travel down the same path again? I can’t shake off this fear.

  Because of this I suddenly resolved to write all this down, but time and again found myself bewildered. It was as if my memories had been moth-eaten here and there, making me unable to remember the reality of important details.

  Although I checked with people who were there at the time, as we tend to make up details for the gaps in our memory, I was surprised to find that even our shared memories are contradictory.

  For example, right before I met the False Minoshiro on Mt. Tsukuba, I had put on red-tinted sunglasses. I remember this fact as clear as day, but for some reason, Satoru is positive that I wasn’t wearing glasses of any sort. And not just that, Satoru also hinted that finding the False Minoshiro was a feat he had done by himself. Of course, a notion as ridiculous as that is absolutely false.

  I put down my pride, interviewed as many people as I could think of, and came across ever more conflicting points. During that process, an undeniable reality occurred to me. That is, there didn’t exist a single person whose memory wasn’t distorted to hide his own faults.

  As I was laughing at the pitiful foolishness of humans and writing down my new discovery, I suddenly realized that I don’t have any basis on which to exclude myself from this rule. From someone else’s perspective, there’s no doubt that the memories from which I am writing this are warped to only show my good side.

  Therefore, I would like to say that since this story is from my own perspective, it may suffer from being distorted due to self-justification. Above all, the number of deaths that were the consequence of our actions may be motivation for such self-justification, however unconsciously it’s done.

  Having said that, I will try to unearth truth from my memories as best as I can because I want to face the facts and realistically portray the events that happened. Also, I want to imitate the style of the old stories in hopes of recreating my thoughts and feelings at the time.

  This draft is written in fade-proof ink on what claims to be anti-oxidizing paper that can last a millennium. When it’s done, I won’t show anyone (except maybe Satoru, and ask for his opinion), put it in a time capsule and bury it deep underground.

  At that time I’ll make two other copies for a total of only three left behind. If someday in the future the old order, or something like it, is restored and all publications are censored, the existence of this record should be kept secret for as long as possible. I think three is just enough for such a situation.

  In other words, this record is a long letter left to my countrymen a thousand years from now. {When it is read, our true intentions will be revealed, and whether or not they should start out on a new path should become obvious.}

  I haven’t introduced myself yet.

  My name is Saki Watanabe. I was born in the town of Kamisu 66 on December 10th, 210.

  Just before I was born, a type of bamboo that only flowers once every hundred years all simultaneously came into bloom. Snow fell in the middle of a summer everyone thought would not see a drop of rain for three months. Basically every kind of abnormal weather phenomenon possible occurred. And then on the night of December 10th, when everyone thought the earth was wrapped in darkness, a flash of lightning illuminated what many would later say was a golden-scaled dragon swimming through the rifts between the clouds.

  …the reality is, none of that ever happened.

  210 was a normal year, and like all the other children born that year in the town of Kamisu 66, I was a very normal child.

  But to my mother, I wasn’t. She was nearing the end of her thirties and was convinced that she would never bear children. In our time, having a child in your thirties is considered really late pregnancy.

  Furthermore, my mother, Mizuho Watanabe, held the important office of librarian. Her decisions not only influenced the future of our town, but in certain cases could also result in the deaths of others. Having to endure that kind of pressure every day, in addition to being careful about her pregnancy isn’t the kind of hardship people usually have to deal with.

  During that period, my father, Takashi Sugiura, was the mayor of the town. That in itself was a busy job. But around the time I was born, the job of a librarian came with an incomparably greater responsibility than that of a mayor. Of course it’s still like that now, but it was probably even more pronounced back then.

  My mother was in the middle of a meeting about the classification of a newly discovered collection of books when she went into labor. This was over a week before the expected due date, but since her water broke without warning, she was immediately transported to the maternity hospital near the outskirts of town. The sound of my first cry was heard not ten minutes after. Unfortunately, my umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck. My face was purple and I was unable to cry properly. The birthing assistant, who was new at the job, nearly collapsed in
panic at this. Luckily, the cord was easily cut and I finally breathed in the air of this world and let out a healthy cry.

  Two weeks later, in the same maternity hospital, Maria Akizuki, who would later become my friend, was born. On top of being a premature breech birth, she was, like me, born with her umbilical cord around her neck. Though her condition was much more serious than mine; she was almost dead when she was delivered.

  The birthing assistant, armed with the experience from my birth, apparently handled this very calmly. If there had been but a tiny slip and the cord was cut just a bit later, there’s no doubt Maria would have died.

  When I first heard this story, I was elated that I had somehow indirectly saved my friend’s life. But now, every time I remember this, I’m hit with a wave of complicated thoughts. Because if she had never been born, there would never have been such a huge loss of human lives…

  Let’s return to the story. I spent my happy childhood surrounded by the lush nature of my hometown.

  Kamisu 66 consists of seven villages spread out over a fifty kilometer circumference. It’s separated from the rest of the world by the Holy Barrier. A thousand years from now, the barrier may not exist anymore, so I’ll briefly explain. It’s a thick straw rope hung with paper streamers [shimenawa and shide] that acts as a shield preventing impure things from entering the town.

  Children are warned to never step outside the barrier. Evil spirits and monsters roamed outside and any child who ventures out alone would suffer terribly.

  “But exactly what kinds of scary things are there?” I remember asking my father, albeit less fluently, one day when I was around six or seven years old.

  “A lot of different kinds,” he looked up from his documents. Resting his chin on his hand, he looked at me affectionately. Those warm brown eyes are burned into my memory to this day. Never once has my father looked at me sternly and only once did he raise his voice. It was because I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going and would have fallen into a gaping hole in the ground if he hadn’t warned me.

  “Saki, you already know, right? About queerats and copycats and blowdogs.”

  “But mom says those are just made up.”

  “The others may be, but queerats do exist,” he said so nonchalantly that I was shocked.

  “Lies.”

  “They’re not lies. Queerats were recruited to help construct the town recently too.”

  “I’ve never seen them.”

  “We don’t let children see them.” Father didn’t say why, but I imagined that it was because queerats are too hideous to be seen.

  “But if they listen to humans, then they’re not that scary, right?”

  Father put down the documents he had been looking over and raised his right hand. As he chanted a spell in a low voice, a thin fiber of paper transformed, like invisible ink being revealed, into a complicated pattern woven into the paper. The seal of approval from the mayor.

  “Saki, do you know what ‘false obedience’ means?”

  I shook my head quietly.

  “It means appearing to obey someone, but actually thinking the opposite underneath.”

  “What do you mean by ‘the opposite’?”

  “Deceiving the other person, and secretly planning to betray them.”

  My jaw dropped.

  “People like that don’t exist.”

  “You’re right. People betraying other peoples’ trust is impossible. But queerats aren’t people.”

  For the first time, I felt the stirrings of fear.

  “Queerats worship and obey us because we have cantus [juryoku]. But we don’t know how they will behave toward children who’ve not yet awoken to their cantus. That’s why we have to prevent queerats and children from meeting no matter what.”

  “But when you give them work to do, don’t they have to come into town?”

  “During those times there’s always an adult supervising them.” Father put the documents in a filing box and raised his hand again. The lid shimmered and melted into the box, forming a hollow lacquered block. Because no one else knows what he was visualizing as he used his cantus, it’s hard for anyone other than father to reopen the box without breaking it.

  “Anyway, don’t ever go outside the Holy Barrier. Inside, the strength of the barrier makes it safe, but if you take one step out, you won’t be protected by anyone’s cantus.”

  “But the queerats…”

  “It’s not just the queerats. You’ve learned the stories about fiends and karma demons at school, right?”

  My breath caught in my throat.

  Fiend and karma demon stories are taught repeatedly during our early years of development. It becomes imprinted in our subconscious. Even though the versions we learn at school are made for children, they still gave us nightmares.

  “Are there really fiends…and karma demons and stuff like that outside the Holy Barrier?”

  “Uh huh,” father smiled slightly to comfort me.

  “Those are old legends, they don’t exist now…”

  “It’s true they haven’t been seen for the past hundred and fifty years, but it’s better to be prepared for the unexpected. Saki, you wouldn’t want to suddenly meet a fiend like the herb-gathering boy did, right?”

  I nodded silently.

  Here, I’ll summarize the stories of the fiend and the karma demon. However, it isn’t the fairy-tale children’s version, but the full, adult version everyone learns when they enter Sage Academy.

  Tale of the Fiend

  This is a story from about a hundred fifty years ago. There was a boy gathering herbs on the mountain. Engrossed in this activity, he came to the Holy Barrier. He had picked just about all the herbs inside the barrier when he happened to look up, and saw that there were still plenty of herbs outside.

  He had always been warned never to step outside the Holy Barrier. If for some reason he absolutely had to, he must have an adult with him.

  But there were no adults around. The boy was tempted and thought stepping outside for just a little bit was okay. He poked his head out first. He just needed to duck under the barrier, pluck some herbs, and come right back. That’ll be okay.

  The boy slid quietly under the rope. The streamers swayed and rustled.

  At that instant, he suddenly had an unpleasant feeling. In addition to the guilt at disobeying the adults, there was another feeling of unease he had never experienced before.

  Reassuring himself that nothing was wrong, he approached the herbs.

  Then he saw a fiend coming toward him.

  Even though it was about the same height as the boy, it had a scary appearance. Its anger swirled like a fiery halo, burning everything around it. As the fiend approached, it mowed down everything in its path and made the foliage burst into flame.

  The boy went pale, but he forced himself not to scream and stepped back. If he could just slip back under the rope, the fiend should vanish.

  But a branch underfoot snapped.

  The fiend turned its head, face completely devoid of emotion. It stared at the target of its anger.

  The boy ducked under the rope and took off as fast as he could. Everything would be okay as long as he entered the protection of the barrier.

  But when he looked back, the fiend had also ducked under the rope!

  In that instant, the boy realized that he had done something irreparable. He had invited a fiend into the barrier.

  The boy cried as he ran down the mountain path. The fiend chased him relentlessly.

  The boy ran along the edge of the barrier, toward the stream in the opposite direction of the village.

  When he glanced behind him, the fiend’s face was hidden by the underbrush. Only its glowing eyes and leering mouth were visible.

  The fiend was seeking a path to the village.

  He couldn’t let that happen. If the fiend followed him back, the entire village would probably be destroyed.

  As he cleared the last of the underbrush, a sheer clif
f appeared before him. The roaring of the river at the bottom reverberated up the walls. Across the gorge hung a new rope bridge.

  The boy didn’t cross the bridge. Instead, he headed upstream along the edge of the cliff.

  When he looked back, the fiend had arrived at the bridge and was looking around for him.

  The boy ran determinedly.

  Shortly, another bridge appeared in the distance.

  He neared the bridge silhouetted against the cloudy sky. Worn out by years of exposure to the elements, it swayed eerily as if beckoning to him.

  The bridge could fall at any time. No one had used it in over ten years and he had always been warned not to.

  Slowly, the boy started across the bridge.

  The ropes made a disturbing creaking sound. The planks were made of oak, but looked ready to break at any moment.

  When he was about halfway across, the bridge lurched suddenly. Looking back, he saw that the fiend had also stepped onto the bridge.

  The bridge swayed more and more wildly as the fiend came nearer.

  The boy glanced down at the bottom of the valley. It was dizzyingly far.

  He looked up. The fiend was already closing in on him.

  When he could clearly see the fiend’s unpleasant face, the boy brandished the sickle he had been carrying, and in one movement, cut through the ropes holding the bridge.

  The bridge swung down and the boy almost slipped off but somehow managed to grab onto the rope.

  Did the fiend fall to the bottom? The boy looked. Somehow, the fiend was also clinging to the rope. It slowly turned its murderous gaze toward him.

  The sickle had fallen into the valley. He couldn’t cut the ropes anymore.

  What should he do? He prayed to the heavens. It doesn’t matter if I die; please don’t let the fiend get into the village.

  Did the boy’s wish reach the heavens? Or was it that the ropes could no longer bear their weight?

  The rope snapped, sending them down into the valley. The boy and the fiend disappeared from view.