We found Grandfather lying in the attic. It was a small, six-mat room, dark even during the daytime, its only window about the size of a piece of A4 paper. In the middle of the room, under the naked light bulb that dangled from the ceiling, was the futon mattress I’d left out that morning.
My grandfather, Reijiro Fuchigami, was sprawled face down on the futon. His left arm was trapped under his belly; his right hand grasped at the tatami mat. Just beyond his reach lay a large sake bottle. It must have been almost empty even before it fell over, because the spilt contents formed only a small dark patch on the tatami.
The few white hairs Grandfather had left, a sort of candyfloss-like swirl at the back of his head, were spattered a dark red. Lying in front of his face, hiding it from view, was a copper vase. Its former contents, a bunch of out-of-season moth orchids, were strewn across the tatami. Emi had bought them as a present for Aunt Kotono, knowing she liked orchids. So, really, they should have been in Aunt Kotono’s room. Not here.
He’s been hit with the vase. That was the thought that crossed my mind, and presumably everyone else’s. But no one—not Mother, not Fujitaka, not Yoshio, not Aunt Kotono, not Kiyoko, not Aunt Haruna, not Mai, not Runa—moved an inch. Even Ryuichi and Emi seemed to have frozen in the face of this momentous event. Everyone just stood there, jostling around the cramped doorway, barely able to breathe.
Eventually, after who knows how long, I found myself stepping forward into the room. This was my bedroom whenever we stayed at the mansion—a fact that seemed to have instilled a strange sense of duty in me. In any case, no one stopped me as I went to kneel at my grandfather’s side.
I took his wrist. It felt like a cut of ham that had been left out too long. There was no pulse. So he was dead. That much had been obvious from the moment we saw him lying there, but the confirmation still came as a shock. Or rather, it filled me with a fresh sense of despair.
I turned to look at my family, who were still peering through the doorway. I had no idea what you were supposed to do or say at a time like this. I must have had a pretty idiotic look on my face, but nobody was laughing. Instead their expressions were blank, as though all the emotion had been scoured from them. Watching them, I began to feel like bursting into hysterical laughter. For one thing, with the exception of Kiyoko, they were all clad in the bizarre combination of brightly coloured tracksuit and sleeveless chanchanko jacket that was the standard ‘uniform’ whenever we stayed at my grandfather’s mansion. Given the circumstances, there was something almost grotesquely hilarious about the mismatched outfits.
It was Emi who recovered first. She seemed to have received the silent message I was trying to convey, because she abruptly turned and clattered off down the stairs—presumably to phone the police.
Her departure broke the spell. There was a sort of collective sigh. Then, as if this was the cue they’d been waiting for, my mother, Aunt Kotono and Aunt Haruna suddenly turned on the histrionics. Father, Father! Oh no! How could this happen! That sort of thing. Sobbing and wailing as if trying to make up for all the time they’d been dumbstruck.
‘You mustn’t touch him!’ exclaimed Yoshio, restraining Mother as she tried to embrace my grandfather’s body.
‘We have to preserve the crime scene until the police get here!’ shouted Runa at her own mother, who was trying to do the same.
‘What crime scene? What are you talking about?’
I couldn’t even tell who shrieked these words—my mother or Aunt Haruna. In the close confines of the attic, all hell was
breaking loose.
‘Isn’t it obvious?’ said Yoshio urgently. ‘Look at him. Just look at him! He’s been murdered!’
Murdered. That one word from Yoshio was enough to make everyone freeze again. Murdered, their fearful eyes said. Murdered, really? But how… how could something like this happen to us, of all families? This can’t be real. A murder, among upstanding citizens like us…?
But I was shocked for a different reason. The question on my mind was the same—how could this have happened?—but in my case it wasn’t just rhetorical. I really wanted to know how.
On this day, the 2nd of January, no murder was supposed to take place at the Fuchigami household. Its non-occurrence was something I’d already established as fact. Yesterday—or more precisely, on the ‘first’ 2nd of January—nothing untoward had happened. The day had ended without incident. And yet today—or rather, on this second version of the same day—my grandfather had been murdered. Why?
As these thoughts swirled through my head, my eyes briefly met Runa’s. She didn’t seem to register my gaze. She was too busy staring fearfully back down at Grandfather’s body.
Even at a time like this, I couldn’t help noticing that she wasn’t wearing her earrings. When had she taken them off? Yesterday—the real yesterday, that is, the 1st of January—I was sure she’d been wearing them. Like everyone else, she’d been obliged to change into the ‘uniform’ when she arrived at the mansion for our New Year’s gathering. Worn with her bright yellow tracksuit and blue chanchanko jacket, Runa’s earrings always looked utterly out of place—and yet she made it a rule never to take them off. Which, of course, only made their absence all the more noticeable…
It was in the early years of elementary school that I first became aware of my ‘condition’. Not that it started then. My memories are a little vague, but I have a feeling I was born with it. It just took me a while to notice.
My name is Hisataro Oba, but not many people actually call me that. ‘Hisataro’ is a fancy way of reading the characters, and most people opt for the simpler ‘Kyutaro’ instead, which they combine with my last name to get ‘Obakyu’. Which is fun. ‘Obakyu’ also happens to be the name of a character from a manga series that was popular in the sixties, one my generation has barely heard of, which means the older folks get to have a good chuckle at my expense, too. In any case, I wish people would leave my poor name alone.
I’m sixteen now, and I attend the Kaisei Academy, a combined middle and high school in the city of Atsuki. I’m in my first year of high school. It’s one of the more prestigious schools in the prefecture, with a good track record of getting its pupils into top universities, and if you walk around with your Kaisei uniform on, the adults tend to treat you with respect. I attended a local middle school until last year when, in accordance with my mother’s wishes—maybe ‘orders’ would be closer to the mark—I took and passed the entrance exam and transferred to Kaisei for the high school portion of my education. When I reveal this to most people, they tell me, with obvious admiration, that I must have a good head on my shoulders, but actually that’s pretty far from the truth. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that I have quite a bad head on my shoulders. Proof of this can be found in the fact that, when it comes to my grades, I consistently rank among the lowest-performing pupils in my year.
You often hear about kids who manage to get into elite schools and then, through a sort of recoil effect, start slacking off and underperforming. That’s not what happened with me. The truth is, I’ve never been very academically gifted. And if you’re wondering how I managed to pass the entrance exam for a school as exclusive as the Kaisei Academy, well, that’s where my ‘condition’ comes in.
When asked to describe me, there’s a phrase people love to fall back on. Old for his years. Apparently, talking to me feels like sitting opposite some elderly man sipping green tea on the veranda and telling yarns about the old days while he soaks up the sun. This can only be described as an accurate assessment of the situation, the reason being that, despite my tender biological age of sixteen, my mind is at least thirty years old. Just to clarify, this is not a figure of speech. It’s a mathematically provable fact.
It was food that first made me aware of my condition. As a young child, the only thing I showed much interest in was filling my belly. And even at that age, I’d found the occasional lack of variety in the menu a little odd.
‘Tamagoyaki and potato salad, again?’ I’d muttered one day.
‘What are you on about?’ my mother had snapped. ‘We had hamburger steaks yesterday.’
At the time, I could only remember us having hamburger steaks a few days ago. I thought this was strange, but there was eating to be done, so I gobbled down the meal—only for the tamagoyaki and potato salad to appear again the next day. You can see why I might mutter ‘again?’ again. And when I did, my mother narrowed her eyes again.
‘What are you on about? We had hamburger steaks yesterday.’
At this point, even an elementary school kid with nothing but food on his brain started to notice that the problem wasn’t limited to the dishes on the table. When I turned my attention to the conversation around the dinner table, it turned out my father and brothers were talking about the same thing as the day before. Something about how Westerners were obsessed with picking on other countries for what they ate, and what difference did it make if we ate a bit of whale
or tuna every now and then? Now, maybe I only noticed because the topic involved food, but they talked about the same thing the day after that, and the day after, too. The exact same exchange. The weirdest thing was that they were even repeating themselves word for word.
Then I realized that it wasn’t just my family. My teachers and friends at school were all saying and doing the same things as the day before.
‘Alright, everyone, listen up,’ said our square-faced teacher, eyeing us sternly through her black-rimmed spectacles. ‘No going near the shrine on the hill behind the school, okay?’
‘Why’s that, Miss?’ asked Oda, who at the time was my rival for biggest-dunce-in-the-class. ‘Is it haunted or something?’ he added quizzically.
‘How very unenlightened of you, Oda.’
‘What’s an “onion light” mean?’
‘It means you’re a very silly boy. No, there’s something much worse than your average ghost at the shrine.’
‘What, like a monster?’
‘There’s no such thing as monsters, Oda. You’ve been watching too much anime. No, some naughty kids have been going there and doing very naughty things. So, no going to the shrine on the hill. Otherwise you might see something you shouldn’t.’
‘What kind of naughty things?’
‘Well, that’s… erm… I… See, there was a girl from another school who went there to play, and she saw two older kids playing a funny game. The girl had taken her trousers off, and she was trying to make the boy do the same.’
‘Why did she try to make him take his trousers off?’
‘Well, it was all part of the game. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you what happened next.’
‘They swapped trousers?’
Just to be clear, Oda wasn’t trying to crack a joke. He was asking because he really didn’t know. In fact, I’d say that fewer than half the pupils in the class were precocious enough to decipher the teacher’s cryptic allusion. Even I had assumed they were just swapping trousers, as ridiculous as that seems now. Anyway, I digress, but the point is that this conversation was repeated verbatim in
class the next morning.
‘Alright, everyone, listen up,’ said the teacher, her nostrils flaring like those of some beast scrambling after its prey—exactly as they had the day before. ‘No going near the shrine on the hill behind the school, okay?’
‘Why’s that, Miss?’ Oda’s voice sounded just as dopey as it had yesterday, too. ‘Is it haunted or something?’
‘How very unenlightened of you, Oda.’
‘What’s an “onion light” mean?’
‘It means you’re a very silly boy. No, there’s something much worse than your average ghost at the shrine.’
‘What, like a monster?’
‘There’s no such thing as monsters, Oda. You’ve been watching too much anime. No, some naughty kids have been going there and doing very naughty things. So, no going to the shrine on the hill. Otherwise you might see something you shouldn’t.’
‘What kind of very naughty things?’
‘Well, that’s… erm… I… See, there was a girl from another school who went there to play, and she saw two older kids playing a funny game. The girl had taken her trousers off, and she was trying to make the boy do the same.’
‘Why did she try to make him take his trousers off?’
‘Well, it was all part of the game. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you what happened next.’
‘They swapped trousers?’
This exchange happened in first period the next day, and the day after that, too—always starting with the teacher telling us not to go to the shrine on the hill and ending with Oda’s line about swapping trousers. And this wasn’t the only thing that kept recurring. In fact, everything that had happened the previous day—from the menu at breakfast to our teacher’s every word; from the specific details of the break-time dodgeball match to who got in a fight with whom, and who started crying, and who stepped in dog poo on the way home; from the menu at dinner to the programmes on TV—it was all exactly the same, day after day.
And then all of a sudden the repetition stopped, and the real ‘tomorrow’ arrived. No more tamagoyaki and potato salad for dinner, no
more angry criticism of the views of Westerners on whale and tuna, and no more mention of trouser-swapping, except as something funny that the idiotic Oda had said the previous day.
As you’ve probably worked out, the same day was repeating itself over and over. Not only this, but I appeared to be the only one aware of what was happening. Like so many wind-up toys, everyone else would go around doing and saying exactly the same things as the day before—as though it were the most natural thing in the world and this was simply an ordinary day like any other. They had no idea they were acting out the same scenes over and over, like on a videotape caught in a loop. I was the only one who knew.
My secret name for this phenomenon is the Trap. Basically, once I fall into the Trap, I’m condemned to repeat the same day over and over until I climb back out of it. Like a scratched record where the needle keeps skipping back and playing the same passage over and over.
I never know when the Trap is going to spring into action next. As far as I can tell, there’s no fixed pattern for how often it occurs. It might be as often as a dozen times in one month, or only once in eight weeks.
But when it comes to the duration of each ‘loop’, and the total period for which I’m stuck in the Trap, there are clear rules. Each loop lasts one full day, from midnight to midnight—twenty-four hours, in other words. And the Trap always lasts for a total of nine days. Of course, that’s just my subjective experience of the situation, and in reality only one day has gone by—so strictly speaking, it would be more correct to say the day lasts for nine loops. It can also get confusing to refer mentally to ‘yesterday’ or ‘tomorrow’ while I’m in the Trap, so instead I tend to think in terms of the ‘first loop’, ‘second loop’ and so on.
As a general rule, once I’m in the Trap, everybody else’s words and actions are identical from one loop to the next. I say ‘as a general rule’ because they can also be deliberately made to do something else entirely. Of course, the person making them do so is none other than yours truly.
Once the Trap is activated, the only person who can intentionally follow a different course of action to the previous loop is me, because I’m the only one aware that time is caught in a loop. If I speak differently to someone
from one loop to the next, they can’t help but respond differently. If I don’t complain that we’re having tamagoyaki and potato salad again, the end result will be that Mother won’t have said her usual annoying line about how we had hamburger steaks the day before. This ability to alter the ‘end result’ is where my ‘condition’ really comes into its own. In other words, I can deliberately alter the course of reality.
The benefits of this first became clear to me one evening when I was watching a baseball game with my father and brothers. It was the Yomiuri Giants versus their biggest rivals, the Hanshin Tigers, and the Giants ended up winning by a devastating margin. The match had been billed as a pitcher’s duel, but in the bottom of the fifth inning the Giants managed to score an astonishing and record-breaking nine consecutive home runs, from the leadoff hitter right through to the pitcher batting ninth, after which they just had to hold on for the win. My father, a Giants fan, was wild with joy; Yoshio, who hated their guts, was writhing around on the floor in agony; Fujitaka, who supported the Lotte Marines, sat there trimming his nose hair and yawning. It was a pretty lively evening.
Seeing as I didn’t have a team myself, I just sat there scratching my head and went to bed as usual. But when I woke up the next morning, I discovered that this dramatic day had fallen into the Trap.
Just like in the previous loop, the baseball game started. My father sat there excitedly with his beer and edamame. Despite still being in middle school at the time, Yoshio swiped a mouthful of his beer. Fujitaka was cleaning his ears with a cotton bud. In other words, everyone was having a fun enough evening in front of the television, except me—I was bored stiff. How could I not be? I already knew the result. Nine-zero to the Giants, a runaway victory. With the added bonus of a record-breaking nine consecutive home runs.
Before I knew it, I had blurted it out.
‘The Giants have got this one sewn up.’
My father loved the enthusiasm. Yoshio was infuriated.
‘What are you on about?’ he said. ‘The game’s barely started.’
Then it got started, and the score was nine-zero. The mixture of elation and despair in the living room was roughly the same
as in the previous loop, except this time Fujitaka just yawned, without trimming his nose hair. My comment had subtly altered reality.
In the next loop, I got a little mischievous.
‘Hey, you know what?’ I said as my father and brothers were getting ready to watch the game. ‘I feel like something crazy’s going to happen in the fifth.’ They had a good laugh at my expense, telling me to quit the Nostradamus act, but it played out just as I’d predicted.
Still, they didn’t seem that blown away. I decided to take things up a notch. In the next loop, I very clearly predicted that in the second half of the fifth inning the Giants would knock out a series of home runs. When they went ahead and scored their nine homers, Father was too busy whooping with joy to notice how right I’d been, but Yoshio sat there staring slightly suspiciously at me. Fujitaka must have been slightly taken aback, too, because this time he failed to trim his nose hair or yawn.
In the next loop I got a little cocky and announced that I’d cast a spell on the Giants so that every single one of them would hit a home run. This was greeted with jeers of derision, but then the fifth inning came around and they all went quiet. There was something subdued about even Father’s celebrations this time, while my brothers were just staring at me like I was some kind of freak. That I found a little nerve-wracking.
Realizing I’d taken things a bit too far, I spent the sixth, seventh and eighth loops simply watching the game in silence. Then, in the ninth loop, I suggested to my father that we make a bet. If the Giants managed the win with a shutout, he’d give me some extra pocket money that week. Then Yoshio, apparently feeling I needed to aim a little higher, made the following generous and somewhat rash remark.
‘Idiot. If they manage a shutout, you can have every single one of my manga.’
The result, of course, was that I found myself with a cash windfall and Yoshio’s entire manga collection. ...
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