Prologue
When I woke up in my bed that morning, I was still feeling kinda sleepy.
I had nothing in particular to do that day—no games that I wanted to play, no books I wanted to read badly enough to make me shake off my weariness and win against the urge to sleep. I had no reason to get up, and there was nothing I could do about that. Once I’d decided to give in, all I had to do was let my weary brain have its way, and I soon drifted off again.
By the next time I woke up, there couldn’t have been more than a few minutes left until the afternoon. My tiredness was gone, and now I was thirsty. I sat up in bed. After looking at the clock, I reckoned that I’d slept a whole nine hours. Looks like it’s yet another day of me being a good for nothing, I told myself.
The thought made me feel uncomfortable, so I headed to the washbasin to wash my face.
The air was bitingly cold as I stepped out of the heated room. I was a bachelor living alone in a wooden, single-story house that must have been built around 1960. My grandfather, a college professor, had originally chosen it as a place to enjoy his retirement, so it had been renovated when he’d left his job. The place had previously been occupied by a quiet old couple. On the surface, the house still looked to be in fairly good shape, but unsurprisingly, it had begun to creak rather loudly as of late. Though that wasn’t an immediate concern, I knew I wouldn’t be able to live here my whole life.
I wasn’t feeling hungry, but I had to do something with the leftover rice I’d cooked yesterday. I took what was left in my rice cooker and made it into chazuke—rice tea soup.
While my food digested, I turned my attention to an online game I’d been playing recently and caught up with the community. I was beginning to get bored of the game, but it would be good enough for killing time for a while yet. Ever since I’d quit my job to become a no-lifer, I’d found myself with far too much time on my hands. A way to fill the endless days was just what I needed.
When I logged on to the game, I found it empty—it was the middle of the day, after all. So, I went back to another game I’d bought a month earlier. Since I’d already cleared it, all that remained were some required tasks for one hundred percent completion, but it had been an enjoyable game and those tasks were fun in their own way.
Back when I had a job, the time between game release cycles felt too short compared to the little leisure time I had, and the list of games I’d wanted to play would continuously grow. Once I’d quit my job and turned my life into nothing but free time, however, I’d rapidly cleared that backlog. Now, the long wait for release cycles was agonizing.
Once the sun was setting, I logged on to the online game again. After taking a break to eat dinner and take a bath, I played until around 3 a.m. By that point, I was tired, so I went to bed.
My bank balance barely declined because I lived such a simple life. It meant that I felt no sense of urgency, and each lazy day that passed was no improvement over the one before.
As fun as it was, I felt as though some part of my mind was blurry, and as though my life carried the sweet yet putrid odor of rotting fruit. It was a vaguely unpleasant feeling, but I was reluctant to break free from this dormant state and once again give everything my all. I simply trusted myself to the abundance of time, and I soon fell asleep.
✧✧✧
When I woke up the next morning, my mind felt unusually sharp and alert, as though I couldn’t have possibly slept a single minute longer. I checked the clock on the wall and found that it wasn’t particularly late. I had to conclude that my physical fatigue had lined up nicely with my body clock to allow me some good quality sleep.
After washing my face, I decided against sitting in front of my computer desk like always—it seemed a waste to stick to my sluggish habits on a day when I had such a spring in my step. I figured I’d head out somewhere to make the most of this day of strange energy.
There were a few consumables that I needed to top up. I could have just ordered everything online, but I didn’t mind going out for a walk. It wasn’t like I had anything better to do anyway.
I slipped on a jacket over my sweater, slid open my front door, and stepped outside.
The sky looked too clear to be considered winter, and the air was warm too. After a slight pause, I went back inside and took off the sweater that I’d been wearing under my jacket before going back out again.
Deserted shopping centers certainly held a lot of charm, but they had an atmosphere that somehow pushed people away. Maybe crowded, thriving stores looked more welcoming than empty ones. As a socially awkward guy with no real desire to get to know the staff, I felt a little uncomfortable in mom-and-pop stores. You know, the ones where the customer service was dependent on the owner’s good nature.
The problem with people was that whenever they met someone new, they seemed to want to classify them somehow. They’d generally ask what you did for a living, and as someone unemployed, that might have been what put me off.
All of this meant that rather than supporting the local business, I was heading for a small shopping center that was within walking distance.
As I moved away from my residential area, which was near a mountain, I approached the more densely populated urban area.
The people here were productive individuals who worked honest jobs every weekday. I used to be just like them, so the idea of living a respectable life wasn’t alien to me—I simply had no desire to go back.
That said, seeing all these working people in their suits made me feel out of place, like I was the only one not pulling my weight. Now that I was here, I couldn’t wait to be home. Perhaps the whole reason people pursued careers was to avoid this sort of feeling. Or perhaps not.
Once I’d finished shopping at the grocery and general stores, I decided to head straight home.
The shopping mall also leased out space to a few other small stores, such as a clothing store and a furniture store that sold stylish desks and chairs. None of them caught my interest. I had more than enough clothes and furniture, and I had no real desire to upgrade to anything better. I passed them by and left the shopping mall, by which point I was unusually exhausted. It was probably the result of seeing so many people hard at work.
There was a time when I’d worked at least five days a week, sometimes staying overnight at the college for several days when I’d risked falling behind. There was no sickness preventing me from working. If I hated feeling like I was letting myself decay, I could just get a job somewhere, or maybe even start a business based on my own ideas. I had the free cash. It was something I thought about occasionally, but it never led to any action.
I knew why: it was because I had no motivation. I felt no urge to be useful to strangers, nor did I want to use my earnings on material possessions like fancy cars. I’d also stopped caring about appealing to the opposite sex. Having savings meant that there was also no incentive to earn money to pay for food—in other words, I didn’t need to work to stay alive. Perhaps I’d grow tired of feeling this way someday, and that would create enough of a push to spur me into action.
Alternatively, there was the possibility that I would put an end to it all once I figured out an easy way to do it. But it felt like a waste to die while I still had my savings, and the idea of dying after my money had been used up was a horrible thought. Choosing death while carefree enough to make that choice was one thing, but I suspected it was something else entirely to die while feeling I’d been backed into a corner.
With these negative thoughts running through my mind, I was about to cross a bridge spanning a river near my home when I saw something happening that I couldn’t make sense of.
There was a girl—a child of early elementary school age with a mysterious sort of air about her. What baffled me was where she was walking. She wasn’t on the sidewalk or the road—she was walking on the bridge’s guardrail.
It was highly unlikely that she was deep enough in debt that she might be killed over it, so I couldn’t understand why she was reenacting the steel beam crossing from a certain gambling manga. There were no sadistic millionaires around to enjoy the spectacle of some poor soul desperately trying to get rich. The girl couldn’t have given up on life, so I was at a loss to explain why she was doing such a thing.
It was then, with perfect timing, that the rail she was standing on shook.
Maybe an overloaded truck had just passed by. Whatever the cause, I couldn’t look around to investigate. My eyes were fixed on the girl as she lost her balance and looked as though she would plummet into the river.
The bridge shook vertically, her body seemed to float, and then she took three small steps along the railing in an apparent panic. By that point, her body was tilted toward the river while her feet were still planted in place. It was clear to anyone watching that there was no recovering from that pose. She raised up her other leg in the direction of the bridge in an attempt to shift her center of mass toward the other side of the railing as much as she could. It looked like a desperate bid to beg the laws of physics to show mercy on her. Then, after striking a pose with her limbs outstretched and body tilted, the girl disappeared from my view.
I ran to the railing and looked down into the river, which had swelled due to the time of year. There, I saw the girl being swept downstream, and it looked as though she couldn’t swim.
I could save her, but I might die. I hesitated for a moment, but then quickly made my decision. Well, that wouldn’t be such a great loss. It’s not like I’ve got anything in particular I want to do before I die, and no one would miss me anyway. What would it matter?
I took off my jacket to strip down to my shirt, then jumped over the railing. After a three-meter or so drop, I plunged into the river. When my body hit the water’s surface, I was struck with an incredible coldness, as though my blood vessels were all constricting at once. The shock made me feel like my whole body was a rag being wrung dry, but I endured it and started swimming.
It had been about four years since I’d last gone swimming, since neither the beach nor the swimming pool were part of my daily life. I swam and swam, the flow still carrying me, until I finally reached her.
Once I’d caught up to the exhausted girl, I grabbed onto her clothes and headed for the shore while I struggled to keep my head above water. I could feel my body’s warmth rapidly draining away, and my strength was fading. It was then that I realized I hadn’t eaten that day because I’d planned to grab a bite while I was out.
After just barely reaching the river’s edge alive and somehow getting the girl ashore, I didn’t have enough strength left to drag myself out of the water. The river swallowed me up and carried me away.