Earthlings, page 16
“Yuu, have you really left Akishina? We’ve escaped from the Factory and are thinking of going there to live full-time. Won’t you escape with us? Do you really need to be a Baby Factory component?”
“Thanks for being so concerned about me, Tomoya. But I only ever intended to rest a while at that house. Like the summer holidays I enjoyed as a child. Actually, I think I stayed there a bit too long.”
“But you’re Popinpobopian!”
Yuu flinched. My husband leaned forward and grabbed his sleeve. “Natsuki told me everything. When you were a child, you arrived in a spaceship from Planet Popinpobopia. I wish you’d told me yourself.”
“But that . . . It was just a silly childhood fantasy. It’s not reality.”
“What is reality? To me it looks like you’re forcing yourself to become an Earthling.”
Yuu looked down a moment, then raised his head and looked straight at us. “I hear orders in my head. Ever since I was a child, I could hear adults telling me what they wanted me to do, even though they didn’t say it out loud. My mother especially was always telling me what to do without actually saying it. So I always automatically did as they said. I knew I had to in order to survive,” he said flatly.
We watched him silently as he spoke. It must have been the first time I’d ever heard him say so much at once.
“After my mother died, I obeyed the voices of my college professors and other adults around me. When I went to work for the company, I obeyed the company voices. I lived my life unthinkingly obeying orders. When out of the blue I was told the company was virtually bankrupt and was being bought out, I did what the company wanted and resigned. But ever since then I’ve stopped hearing the commands that controlled my life. I no longer know what to do or how to live. Obeying those silent orders was how I had always survived.”
My husband tightened his grip on Yuu’s shirt. I worried about him wrinkling it, but Yuu didn’t seem to notice as he went on, “That was when Uncle Teruyoshi suggested I take some time off and invited me to stay here in his house for a while. It occurred to me then that I wanted to go to the Akishina house again. But that’s all over now. It’s time for me to start hearing new orders. That’s all.”
My husband looked up at Yuu with a sad, angelic face, like an innocent child who has just been scolded. “But Yuu, then you’ll be a tool for the Baby Factory. When really you’re a Popinpobopian. And that’s a wonderful thing to be.”
Uneasily I asked Yuu in a small voice, “Was I also giving you silent orders?”
Yuu looked at me in surprise. “You, Natsuki? Well . . . it’s true I always did hear a silent voice from you, but it wasn’t anything like the orders I was getting from the adults. It was the sound of an SOS. That somehow drew me to you. I guess I thought we were similar. So it was my own choice to be with you, Natsuki.”
“I see.”
I felt relieved, but then Yuu had always been the sort of child to intuit what people wanted him to do. He’d probably said what he had just now because he’d felt that’s what I’d wanted him to say.
“So, you’re going to become an Earthling, just like that, are you, Yuu? Is that what you really want?”
“What I want?” Yuu looked doubtful. “It’s not about what I want. I just want to survive.”
If surviving meant taking his life forward into the future, he was making the right choice. There was nothing I could say to that. My husband stood up.
“I see. Well then, shall we at least hold a divorce ceremony?”
“Divorce ceremony?” Yuu repeated blankly, and I felt uneasy.
“When you and Natsuki were little, you held a marriage ceremony, didn’t you? Natsuki and I also got married. But from now on, a marriage agreement will be irrelevant for us. On the way here, I was thinking that I want to hold a ceremony to sever those relations.”
He took off his wedding ring and put it on the table. “Natsuki, your turn.”
I hurriedly took off my ring and put it next to my husband’s.
“Hold on,” I said and took the tin box out of my bag. I took out the wire ring from when Yuu and I had held our marriage ceremony as children and put it down alongside them. “This one too.”
“Natsuki, you still have it after all this time!” Yuu said in surprise. “My mother found my ring and threw it away. Wow, that really takes me back.”
“Let the three of us now vow to divorce each other. We’ll give our blessing to our end and to our new beginnings.”
At my husband’s urging, Yuu and I got up and stood around the table. He took our hands in his, so we hurriedly did the same, forming a circle around the wedding rings.
In a solemn voice, my husband said, “Yuu Sasamoto, do you swear that from this day forward you shall not be wedded to Natsuki and shall live as a completely separate entity from her, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, and in sickness and in health, and that you shall not love, cherish, or worship, nor stand by her, and shall live life for life’s sake as long as you shall live?”
“Er . . . I do.”
“Natsuki Miyazawa, do you also swear that you shall live as a completely separate entity from Yuu and shall live life for life’s sake as long as you shall live?”
“I do.”
My husband nodded solemnly and turned to Yuu. “Okay, now will you officiate our divorce for us?”
Still looking bewildered, Yuu did as my husband said and started reciting the lines to us.
“Um, Tomoya Miyazawa, do you swear that from this day forward you shall not be wedded to Natsuki and that you shall live as a completely separate entity from her, um . . . for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, and that you shall not love, cherish, or worship, nor stand by her, and shall live life for life’s sake as long as you shall live?”
“I do.”
“Natsuki, do you also swear?”
“I do.”
“Okay,” my husband said. “The ties between us have now been cut. We are no longer family. Each of us is now just living our own life.” He held his hand out to Yuu, who shook it, still looking disorientated. “Well then, we’ll take responsibility for disposing of these rings. Thank you for everything. See you.”
My husband and I went outside together.
“Legally we may still be married,” he told me. “But we’ve now transcended that sort of relationship.”
“Yeah.” I nodded. He was still my husband, but more than that he was a Popinpobopian. This was something I could trust far more than marriage.
We had just started walking, hoping to find a main road where taxis would be passing, when we heard the door open behind us.
“Uh . . . are you leaving just like that?” Yuu asked, coming out onto the street.
“Yes, that’s the idea,” my husband answered cheerfully.
“Should I give you a lift? I mean . . . should I . . . um . . . why . . .” He seemed confused.
“Is something wrong?” my husband asked him curiously.
“I don’t know. I’ve been given my freedom, but I’m not any good at being free. I’m used to following orders, but there aren’t any signposts anymore. Now, or rather for some time now, I’ve accepted that.” He seemed to make up his mind and raised his head to look at us. “I’ve changed my mind. I want to go with you. That’s the only way I can think to make use of my freedom.”
My husband beamed. “I’m delighted. Your freedom has turned out to be in the same place as ours! What kind of miracle is that?” he said, taking Yuu’s hands in his.
Yuu still looked bewildered, but he said, “You’ve both got the Factory after you, haven’t you? Best not tell Uncle Teruyoshi that you’re going to Akishina. I’ll call him later and tell him we all decided to go to Tokyo together. I haven’t got much luggage, so please hold on,” he said, urging us to get in his car and wait for him.
I still didn’t understand what had prompted Yuu to come with us to Akishina, but I was glad we three creatures would be living together again.
My husband and I got into the back seat of Yuu’s car.
“Oh, the moon!” my husband said.
Without my noticing, evening had been drawing in and the light-blue sky was beginning to change color. Outside the car window, the streets were taking on the glow of night. Light was blanketing the surface of the planet. Earthlings were moving busily around the surface of this glowing orb.
By the time we arrived in Akishina, the sky was thick with stars.
The house had only been empty a short while, but it already had the look of an abandoned nest. Inside, the air was stagnant and smelled of mold, and the worn pillars and tatami looked more dilapidated than ever. On the floor in the hall there was some excrement from a nonhuman animal.
Yuu seemed tired from driving. He barely said a word as we went around opening all the windows to let in some fresh air, warmed ourselves in the kotatsu, and ate some defrosted oyaki dumplings.
“The kotatsu won’t be enough. I’ll go get the electric heater.”
My husband was breezy and cheerful.
“What shall we do from now on?” he asked.
“That’s something we’ll have to decide. After all, we’re receptacles now,” my husband said, his cheeks full of oyaki.
Yuu and I were speechless.
“Receptacles?”
“Well, we are, aren’t we? We don’t have a mother planet. We don’t know Planet Popinpobopia at all, and we can’t get back there. So, we’re empty receptacles.” My husband casually wiped a piece of eggplant off his lip as if wondering what our problem was. “So, from now on we’ll live as receptacles. Or rather, continuing to live as receptacles is probably what it means to be Popinpobopian. Don’t you reckon, Yuu?”
Bewildered at suddenly having the conversation directed at him, Yuu glanced nervously at me. “Um . . . I suppose so.”
“Definitely!”
My husband seemed so sure of himself that I somehow felt what he was saying must be true and nodded cautiously. “You’re probably right. After all, we’re aliens, but we don’t know anything about our mother planet. Other aliens are probably doing the same.”
“Yes, they are,” my husband said, as though he knew lots of aliens.
Yuu was still a little anxious. “But what are we going to do from now on? We might very much be Popinpobopians now, but to stay alive we need to rely on Earthling knowledge. And if we keep doing that we might become Earthlings, mightn’t we?”
“We’ll have to think about it. Staying alive is about coming up with ideas. Living on the ideas that we come up with.” My husband frowned and sniffed.
“Ideas? Really?”
“Yes. Not imitating the Earthlings but coming up with our own ideas for living. That’s how we can live on a planet that isn’t our own.”
Taken aback, I looked at Yuu. We had survived so far. Yuu looked deep in thought.
“First, we’ll look for food. It’s like we just crash-landed on this planet. We have to take a new look at the world from that perspective. We must see everything with the alien eye. This mysterious round food is really tasty. This object made of wood is warm. But let’s think harder. What can we, as receptacles, do on this planet?”
“Right. But it’s really cold on this planet. This thing that Earthlings call bedding seems to be just right for sleeping, doesn’t it? Is it okay if I try it out over there?”
“Of course!”
Yuu took some bedding out of the closet, threw it in a heap on the floor, crawled into it, and fell asleep. He had always been so meticulous about making his bed, but now he’d simply crawled into a pile of bedding as if into a nest and was already in a deep sleep.
“He somehow looks as though he’s about to be reborn,” I murmured, staring at the mountain of bedding he’d made. It looked like the pupa of some strange creature.
From the next day, our way of life changed completely.
Yuu was the first to say we should train every day to avoid becoming Earthlings. We would train as Popinpobopians using the same techniques we’d drawn on during our training to become Earthlings.
There was no need to be bound to the concept of day and night, but we decided to go out on the prowl together once while the sky was light and again at an appropriate time after it got dark. To begin with, we could still sense that it was around seven in the morning, say, or three in the middle of the night, but gradually we lost any notion of time other than it being light or dark.
The feeling of being a Popinpobopian existed within us receptacles. It had just been dormant. Rather than gaining a new sensibility, it felt as though we were recovering one we’d always had.
Funnily enough, with training we progressed rapidly. All three of us saw everything from a more rational stance through our alien eyes than we had through Earthling eyes. Any time one of us creatures discovered something through alien eyes, the other two applauded it. We judged what we saw not in terms of knowledge or culture but in terms of whether or not it was rational.
I felt myself progressing faster than I ever had before. I wondered why people in the Factory didn’t undertake this kind of training.
Survival was our main criterion for deciding what was rational. Getting food for that day was more important than anything else.
At first, Yuu would go out alone when it was light to steal vegetables from the garden of the neighboring house.
“I did feel bad about it, but then I thought that it was more rational to steal than use the little money we have left,” he said.
We both strongly agreed with this.
“But if you get caught, it wouldn’t be rational. We’ll all be discovered.”
“True. We have to be careful.”
We decided to use money only for fuel and lighting expenses. We also decided to refrain from using heating and lighting as much as possible. Electricity for the kotatsu and heater was necessary to survive, but we hardly used it for anything else. It was easy to keep the lights off at night and live in the dark. We often used gas for cooking, but sometimes instead we made a bonfire in the garden, when we were sure we wouldn’t be seen.
Procuring food without money was hard. It was more tiring than we’d imagined to hunt animals, and we felt it wasn’t very rational. According to Earthling knowledge, animals that were relatively easy to catch such as rats tended to be unhygienic, but in many cases you could eat them after cooking. A lot of plants were unsafe to eat, and we had to take care when picking them.
We developed rapidly. The world looked completely different from a purely rational viewpoint. We combined the Earthling knowledge from books in the attic with the internet searches I made when I went with my phone to the other side of the red bridge.
“I wonder why the Earthlings don’t seem to want to develop like us,” I said.
“They can’t let go of the knowledge they’ve accumulated, even though it’s nothing more than data,” Yuu answered.
We followed the needs of our bodies. The biggest issue was always appetite. For excretion, we gratefully used the device created by the Earthlings. For sleep, we simply crawled into the pile of bedding whenever we felt like it. It was warmer than laying it out the way the Earthlings did, especially as we could make use of each other’s body heat when we were in there together.
The house was our lair. Inside it we often went naked, having decided that it was pointless to worry about cleanliness, changing our clothes, and doing laundry when we spent most of our time either in the bedding nest or kotatsu, occasionally crawling on all fours, or making food that spattered juice everywhere.
Even though there were two males and one female all naked, we felt a sense of security rather than unease. Neither my husband nor Yuu seemed to take any particular interest in me as a female. But that didn’t mean we didn’t feel any sexual urges. We often raised the topic of breeding and sexual desire.
“Given that we have both male and female, in theory we could breed, couldn’t we?” Yuu murmured as all three of us sat in cold bathwater, using each other’s body heat to warm ourselves to save on heating.
My husband nodded. “As far as managing sexual desire goes, we can do that alone without any need for a male and female to copulate. That would be more rational, don’t you think?”
We always used to talk like this on nights when it had been easy to steal, after we had come back to our lair, washed off the mud, and were ready to sleep.
“The difference is whether we want to procreate or whether it’s enough just to satisfy our sexual desires, isn’t it?” Yuu said warily during one of our conversations. He was always awkward on this topic.
“If we had a child, we would be able to observe what effect our pure lives as Popinpobopians would have on this new receptacle. That would give useful data,” I chimed in.
“As an experiment? I suppose that’s rational,” Yuu said, nodding.
“But Natsuki’s the only female, so it would be a burden on her. Could we perhaps find another Popinpobopian female and persuade her to come here?” my husband suggested.
Yuu shook his head. “Let’s give up the idea. It would be using the womb as a tool. And that would mean that our testes and womb would not be our own, exactly like in the Factory.”
“Yes, I feel the same way about it,” my husband agreed.
I was relieved they felt that way.
“Well then, we two males prioritize sating our sexual urges over procreation. What shall we do with our sperm? Just throw it away?”
“Let’s think of some use for it. What about as food?”
Yuu tilted his head questioningly, and my husband shrugged.
“It must be nutritious, but I don’t see any data about humans using sperm in cooking. There might be some value in trying it, but if we mix it with other foodstuff and it turns out not to taste good, it’ll mean throwing all of it away, won’t it?”
