Part 1: Kozue
1
Born in an English-speaking country in which one’s present when- and whereabouts add up to nowhere—I am Disco Wednesdayyy. Having ‘Dis’ and ‘co’ lined up one after the other for a first name is already crazy, but the Wednesday in my last name has three ys, so my friends pronounced it like the “Yeeeehaw!” of a cowboy, laughing their hearts out while screaming “Wednesdayeeeh!” So...due to various circumstances butterflying out of control, I was now a detective specialized in searching for missing kids. On my Cadillac, I wrote my name, my office address, phone number, and, above all of that, ‘Baby, in the end, you’re only searching for yourself.’
Everyone I meet always tells me “Stop acting like a living joke” at first, but ultimately, what’s the difference between my lifestyle and you guys’ lifestyle? I, too, pay my taxes; I, too, arrange my CDs neatly in order; and when I talk to the person next to me in the stands and see a fly ball that’ll obviously be a foul, I, too, shut up. That’s normal. No one can escape from that reality. So if I’m a living joke, then so are you guys, don’t you think so? After living through car chases in the opposite lane, freakish calls from wrong numbers in the middle of the night, clients trying to scam me, twists, more twists, and all kinds of clichés you can find in worthless American movies, well, I just kinda realized that stuff would happen when it was due to happen. In the real world, things derail in ways that those movies couldn’t possibly depict. Because of one such event, I was currently living in Tokyo, Japan, together with the adorable Kozue. The six-year-old Yamagishi Kozue had been kidnapped by Oda Kenji last autumn, so I took custody of her after finding them living in Oda’s mansion in the middle of Setagaya. However, two months after retrieving Kozue, Yamagishi Kazuo and Kanoko gave me a call and asked me to give Kozue back to Oda. Kanoko added, “Though only if that person still loves Kozue and wants her,” so I enquired, “But Kozue-chan wasn’t raped or touched in a sexual way,” but she didn’t falter. “That’s not why. We simply cannot think of her as our child anymore. It’s not like anything about her is different from before she was kidnapped, so we were probably the ones who changed.” After two more months of homestay at her house, counseling, and attempts at persuasion, I went to consult Oda. But he apparently had earnestly reflected, grieved, and had a change of heart; he told me that, even given the opportunity of becoming her official parent, he didn’t want to commit the same mistake twice. He then proposed something thoroughly absurd, that he’d pay me to express his gratitude for that experience.
“I’m not trying to deal with the situation by using money. But, you know, even if it’s not much of a help, money can get you somewhere at times, right?”
Even though I hadn’t received any additional payments since the initial fee I’d charged the Yamagishi parents with, I hadn’t tried to adopt Kozue myself and still didn’t like the idea of giving her to an orphanage; so I told him, “You’re the one who stole her, Oda, so you should take the responsibility for it,” but Oda Kenji kept annoyingly suggesting unloading Kozue onto his sister and her husband. After two weeks of not living in either the Yamagishi or the Oda residence, experiencing the hotel life, Kozue and I kinda came to the agreement that we should just live together, just the two of us. Like most conclusions that emerge when feelings get entangled in such affairs, it was neither logical nor realistic, no matter how temporary it would be. But even then, I thought why not. The Snake in the Sun of San Diego, Sharon Styron, would probably say, “How honest, aren’t you just projecting your orphan self onto that kid?” trying to ridicule me, but all the blah blah blah I’d told Sharon about me being an orphan was a lie; the Wednesdayyys are living near Detroit and my big brother and little sister should still be alive around there. I bet Sharon sensed it was a lie but still continued, pretending to be fooled. Sharon had ten billion times the time and a hundred billion times the money that Oda had. She had no interest in me, but her free time and resources would surely push her to investigate me.
In reality, I was endlessly prolonging nonsensical false pretenses. I’m an abandoned child found in the middle of a disco house’s dance floor on a certain Wednesday morning in 1971...though that’s what I make people think, when in reality, I’m just a normal orphan. I was found in the middle court of the Saint Paul Cathedral on a Wednesday night. My real name is William Eady...but that’s just another false identity Disco Alexander Wednesdayyy is trying to imitate. My whole life was just one trick. My dad was a manufacturer of agricultural machinery and the leader of his sector, Charles Thomas Wednesdayyy; he was a kind, decent father to me. So to answer the question of why I felt the need to make myself false identities at any given occasion; regardless of whether my name was a fake one or not, I was still Disco. And since I was born with the given name Disco, it’s inevitable, I gotta have some twists.
William Eady really existed. He was a friend of mine, a lawyer, and a despicable man with almost nothing good going for him. However, it was only when I got angry at that dude did I truly realize what’s important in life. Stuff like I need to choose only one girl and be thoroughly kind to her and not give a single look at other women nor get close to them and solely breathe the same air as her, or the people calling me an idiot aren’t my enemies but just idiots, so because he brought me all that enlightenment, he was important to me. Thinking about how I’d taken up the name William Eady myself, that showed just how much he grew rooted to my heart.
Kozue and I were residing in the third building of Villa Hapira Kojimacho in room 303, provided by Oda Kenji’s little brother and reserved under the name Yamagishi Kozue. It was a three-floor maisonette-style condo with three bedrooms, a living room, a dining kitchen, a bath, toilets, a garage, stairs, corridors, and halls connecting all of them like a block puzzle. Just being inside it made me feel extremely intellectual. I’m Mister Tetris. While I was busy spending all my time thinking about how to efficiently use the space, the rainy season eventually ended and the hot, stuffy Japanese summer started.
2
“Kozue, wanna go see some fireworks?” I asked, and to my question, Kozue raised her face from The Robber Hotzenplotz and said “Chaan.” She misused an expression from Ikura-chan. I grabbed Kozue by the hand and went to buy a yukata from a Tokyu Store, then got out on the Tama River’s terrace area; with her now wearing purple clothing in the same style as what the adults were wearing, as well as wooden sandals. Just walking tired her out, so I carried her with my left arm up the bank, sat on the grass there, and watched the fireworks while eating grilled squid together. Kozue imitated the fireworks’ sound with her mouth: “Ryuryuryuryuryuryuryu... Baoom!” “Unyunyunyunyunyu... Mdooom!” but she got sleepy halfway through and fell asleep with her head in her knees.
(NT: Namino Ikura from the long running manga/anime Sazae-san. Being only about 18 months old, he can only speak with the three sounds ‘chaan’ ‘haai’ and ‘babu’.)
I put the sleeping Kozue on my shoulder, returned to the condo, put her to bed, and got to watching the remake of Charade in the living room’s home theater while drinking a beer, but then, my phone rang. I answered the call. It was William Eady. “What are ya doing that keeps you in Japan for so long?” William said. “If you’re seriously thinking about adopting her, then staying as a lone detective in Japan with no jobs or prospects won’t get ya anywhere. Come back to America. You’ll be able to see the big picture more clearly, ’kay?” He then laughed like a small delinquent. “I mean, are you serious about taking a daughter in? You? Really?”
The orphan detective Disco Wednesdayyy, that pretended to be the orphan William Eady I’d made up, had impregnated the production chief of a costume maker in Hollywood about five years ago and stayed with her through it, but the real me had been stuck on Norma Braun, an old high school classmate, for the past three years; so I hadn’t indulged in women much. Norma Braun...uwaaa, sounds too backwater-ish. So, to explain why I was attracted to a woman with a name like ‘Nwormah Brawn’: to be totally honest, I’d liked her ever since high school, but Norma wasn’t too popular. Like, she was a
geek, and I was extremely popular, so we kinda lived in different worlds and I missed the chance to talk to her. Then, three years ago, we met at a class reunion... There, I got to confirm the divineness of Norma Braun that only I could understand. Norma Braun was a kind, honest, and daring girl who doesn’t discriminate, who I’m definitely sure is lewd, and is the reason for why this world was right; that had been the case three years ago, obviously was the case now, and it would be in the future, too.
“Norma Braun.” “Goddamn Disco, shit. You finally talked to me.” “Finally, yeah.” “How have ya been living?” “I’m having some fun.” “Fun, eh. Everything going well?” “I wish.” “It’s not unthinkable.” “I wonder.” “You see, I had decided that if you took three steps towards me, I would move in your direction too, you know?” “Hm.” “But you kept to the eye-contact game and didn’t move an inch from the position you persuaded yourself to be in. You put on childish airs and continuously stepped on the love between you and I and you. And this is your reward.” Me, the diamond on the ring finger of Norma’s left hand, and the cooked duck on the round table. “You could’ve been the one to make a move, couldn’t you?” “What’s up with that? You set your eyes on me first, no?” She tilted her head slightly and laughed. Norma Braun had lost about 10 kg since our high school days and had become so much prettier I had a hard time recognizing her at first; she looked like a brunette Cameron Diaz.
Kozue should have been sleeping, but she woke up, got out of her room down to where I was, and started to fall asleep sitting with her head in her knees next to me. “Kozue, go sleep on the second floor.” “No!” “Are you scared of being alone?” “It’s cold.” “Then I’ll turn the cooler down for you.” “No!” “It’s even colder here, no?” “Cooold.” I went to grab a towel blanket from the second floor and enveloped the seated Kozue in it, but she said, “Hooot.” “What is? The towel blanket?” “Disco.” “Is that so?” “I lied. You’re not, Disco.” I resumed the movie while wondering what meaning there could be behind those kinds of lies, and since it hurt me nevertheless, it took me more time than expected before I could focus on the movie again. Both Thandiwe Newton and Mark Wahlberg looked like hairless monkeys. The story progressed without any suspense or anything. They put on a CD of Charles Aznavour causing the real one to appear in a corner of the room, and Newton and Wahlberg continued to sing and dance. Who in hell created this movie, seriously...I thought, jokingly, but then Kozue, who was silently sleeping, rolled up in the towel blanket by my side, said, “Ouchiiiie,” and raised her face, so I looked at her and saw that Kozue’s body had grown larger.
...Not just that, she’d also become older.
Like a teenager wearing child-wear way too small for her. She looked at me, still sitting in the same pose, said, “Wow, many things sprung out just now,” and smiled. She then closed her eyes and umumummumon, her body shrunk and returned to its original size.
I stared at Kozue, but she kept her face buried between her knees with only her shoulders slowly moving up and down as she breathed, so I could tell she didn’t notice anything that happened and just continued to sleep. Even though Kozue was the one sleeping, apparently I was the one dreaming.
Since it had been so brief, started and ended so abruptly, had visibly left no traces of it ever happening, and Kozue had seemingly no memories of the event, I attempted to pin it on the beer. Nothing happened for two whole days after, but on the third day at about half-past six in the morning, as we were eating breakfast, “Woah, it seriously happened again. Oh crap, my panties and everything’s about to burst. Hello? Hey!” I watched Kozue say those words with a smile as her body grew up to a high-schooler’s size. I readily put down my coffee cup and asked the girl, “Who are you?” but there was no doubt she was Kozue. I’d found kids that went missing for three, five, ten, or even 30 years. I could identify people regardless of their age. However, by the time I’d finished mouthing my question, the small Kozue was there with her mouth gaping open. “What~?” Kozue asked. “Do you understand what happened just now?” I asked back, but she replied with, “What happened~?” so it didn’t seem like she’d noticed her body’s transformation. “At Nakamurasan’s house...the coffee...and tree...with a big cat, you see, and she sleeps, Mew-chan,” Kozue voiced this terrible mess of a sentence while chewing on another bite of her anpan. Nakamura-san was the landlord of Villa Hapira Kojimacho, who lived in room 101. Nakamura Itsuwo, a grannie. And Mewchan was just a result of Kozue being unable to pronounce Meru-chan due to the anpan in her mouth; must be an abbreviation for Merkmal, that grannie’s cat. Even if I could pick up the proper nouns, I couldn’t make sense of the rest. “Kozue, no going to see Nakamura-san today,” I said. “Eh~ no way.” “Kozue, do you feel anything off with your body?” “Eh?” “Does anything hurt?” “Nothing~.” “But I still feel like there’s something off, so you can’t go outside today.” “But I have no fever.” “Even if you don’t.” “Please~.” “Nope. Stay still here today.” “Dad won’t coffee at Nakamura-san’s place? Even then?” “I have no idea what you’re saying, Kozue.” She then laughed her heart out, so maybe Kozue was enjoying her inaptitude to speak. Or maybe it’s not that she couldn’t say it, but simply didn’t. “You see, so the coffee, you see, when it becomes long and big like whooo, the sun, you see, says you can take it easy.” “I see,” I said before laughing a bit myself. “Anyway, you stay here for today.” When I said that, Kozue once again let out an “Eh~,” but after that, she kept silent and focused on finishing eating her anpan. I then recalled that Nakamura-san has a coffee plant growing in her greenhouse. Kozue probably wanted to tell me that the tree had grown a lot, that she’d seen the state of it, that grannie had been told by someone to take it easy, and something else, like that she’d been told to take a nap. I didn’t care about what that other thing was. This time I managed to understand a bit of what Kozue was saying by chance, but in normal situations when I can’t understand anything she says, not even 1%, I didn’t let it bother me. There was no end to it.
Not letting her visit the Nakamura grannie was the right choice. That day, in the evening, as Kozue was drawing original zoo animals on her sketchbook, she suddenly let go of her crayons, became big, and stood up, saying, “Wowah. Hold on, why are my panties so tight for the third time, geez, it mega hurts.”
She looked around and found me. “Ah, that foreigner again. Hello? He-” But before I could say hello back, Kozue became small again. She fell on her bottom with a plop, was surprised, then laughed. “I was asleep~,” Kozue said, to which I asked, “Kozue. How much do you remember about before you fell asleep?” “What~?” “You were drawing, weren’t you?” “Yes.” “Do you remember why you stood up?” “I was asleep~.” “You don’t remember?” “Not really. Disco saw me. Embarrassing~,” Kozue hid her visage. “What was?” “I was asleep.” “What was embarrassing?” “That you saw me sleeping.” “You weren’t, though,” I said. Saying that meant I had to tell Kozue about why she didn’t remember something even though she wasn’t sleeping. I screwed up, I thought, but Kozue didn’t ask; she went back to drawing her turtle-like creature with seven legs while chanting stuff like “Kangaroo~.”
I went to the convenience store to buy orange juice and ice cream, bought female underwear for adults and tried making Kozue wear them, but she resisted. “Please no! Please! No! Please! No! Please! No!” followed by an ultrasonic “Kyaaaa!” Kozue found making me run away fun, so she chased me around while ripping apart the air with her scream.
I entered Kozue’s bedroom at night to check on her sleeping state. She was sleeping with her body straight like the spare lead of a mechanical pencil and with both arms tightly packed against her body. The towel blanket was covering up to her chin. Kozue’s slumber was always profound, so she stayed that way until morning. Though when she was awake, she would play all day, run around the house screaming choo choo like a train, roll around, draw, play at being a cook, etc. I bet she was playing with all her might, going full throttle all day, so much so that she didn’t have the strength to turn around in her sleep at night. It’s like she was taking a break in a pool; on land too, it’s sometimes better to steady your breathing, no? As I was half-asleep on the sofa but still somewhat on guard, I heard a voice saying “Mister foreigner! Where are you?” which fully woke me up and made me open my eyes. I raised my body while calling, “Kozue!” The lamp on her bedside table lit the room in an orange light; Kozue found me on the other side of the sofa’s back, then said
“Here you are. Who are you?” I answered “Disco,” to which she replied with “Pardon?” before returning to the small Kozue with a smuuul-pon, and back to sleeping again. Due probably to her body moving when she shrank, her sleeping position was somewhat disturbed, which was unusual for Kozue. I stood up from the sofa and went to Kozue’s side, lifted her head while I set up the pillow under it, then straightened her arms and legs; looking at her small figure on the double bed, she seemed as if she was afraid of something, so I internally swore to myself to protect her from any kinds of danger. However, she had a peaceful expression, as if to say there was nothing to fear anywhere, which, in the moment, I found to be reliable. After pulling up the towel blanket up to Kozue’s chin, I opened the door and was about to leave her bedroom, but I still wanted to be there for her when she would grow big again and search for me, the ‘foreigner,’ so I instead decided to grab the futon from my room and sleep on the sofa.
I laid my head on the armrest, closed my eyes, and started wondering whether Kozue was traveling through time internally. No time machine, no paradox where you risk encountering yourself, just going back from the period where you are to another one. Earlier, Kozue said ‘mister foreigner’ when seeing me; that was proof she still had in memory the other times we met, so these time frames were arranged chronologically for the older Kozue. She even said “Pardon?” in English earlier. When talking to the Yamagishi couple and Oda, they kept repeating “Pardon?” on our first encounter. Maybe even the small Kozue could use that level of English, but it was more likely that when the older Kozue, who was around high-school age and had learned some English, came to this era and asked for my name, she got confused and that’s why she said “Pardon?”
After that, I started thinking that the Yamagishi couple got scared seeing the older Kozue and tried to push the eerie girl onto Oda or me while keeping that a secret, but in fact, we’d now been living together for over three weeks and there had been no sign of this phenomenon happening up until recently. Kozue didn’t seem any different from normal. Of course, there was still the possibility those timeslips had already happened and ended in the past, and were only resuming now. For that, I had to confirm with the Yamagishis and Oda.
Furthermore, I considered the possibility that Oda’s kidnapping emotionally scarred Kozue, which made her develop a personality disorder. An additional personality to Kozue. I heard that in cases of multiple personality disorder, the facial features and stature could change depending on the personality. Jekyll and Hyde. Could a human skeleton grow and shrink between an adult and a child’s stature in a matter of a few seconds?
But if I asked myself these kinds of questions and expected to solve them in order, I would go crazy long before that happened. I felt like I was having hallucinations. Was Japan the problem, was this lifestyle the problem, or was my life itself the problem... Well, all of them could be said to be bad and not bad anyway. And the same could be said for anyone’s lifestyle and life. Not everyone starts going crazy and hallucinating a kid growing and shrinking in both age and size whenever they have a problem. I was sure staying still in this small house for all this time had made me use my brain weirdly; that’s the conclusion I reached: I’d do some work. I’d move my body to make some money. Humans weren’t made to sit still. They must either play or work.
I put the sleeping Kozue on my shoulder, returned to the condo, put her to bed, and got to watching the remake of Charade in the living room’s home theater while drinking a beer, but then, my phone rang. I answered the call. It was William Eady. “What are ya doing that keeps you in Japan for so long?” William said. “If you’re seriously thinking about adopting her, then staying as a lone detective in Japan with no jobs or prospects won’t get ya anywhere. Come back to America. You’ll be able to see the big picture more clearly, ’kay?” He then laughed like a small delinquent. “I mean, are you serious about taking a daughter in? You? Really?”
The orphan detective Disco Wednesdayyy, that pretended to be the orphan William Eady I’d made up, had impregnated the production chief of a costume maker in Hollywood about five years ago and stayed with her through it, but the real me had been stuck on Norma Braun, an old high school classmate, for the past three years; so I hadn’t indulged in women much. Norma Braun...uwaaa, sounds too backwater-ish. So, to explain why I was attracted to a woman with a name like ‘Nwormah Brawn’: to be totally honest, I’d liked her ever since high school, but Norma wasn’t too popular. Like, she was a
geek, and I was extremely popular, so we kinda lived in different worlds and I missed the chance to talk to her. Then, three years ago, we met at a class reunion... There, I got to confirm the divineness of Norma Braun that only I could understand. Norma Braun was a kind, honest, and daring girl who doesn’t discriminate, who I’m definitely sure is lewd, and is the reason for why this world was right; that had been the case three years ago, obviously was the case now, and it would be in the future, too.
“Norma Braun.” “Goddamn Disco, shit. You finally talked to me.” “Finally, yeah.” “How have ya been living?” “I’m having some fun.” “Fun, eh. Everything going well?” “I wish.” “It’s not unthinkable.” “I wonder.” “You see, I had decided that if you took three steps towards me, I would move in your direction too, you know?” “Hm.” “But you kept to the eye-contact game and didn’t move an inch from the position you persuaded yourself to be in. You put on childish airs and continuously stepped on the love between you and I and you. And this is your reward.” Me, the diamond on the ring finger of Norma’s left hand, and the cooked duck on the round table. “You could’ve been the one to make a move, couldn’t you?” “What’s up with that? You set your eyes on me first, no?” She tilted her head slightly and laughed. Norma Braun had lost about 10 kg since our high school days and had become so much prettier I had a hard time recognizing her at first; she looked like a brunette Cameron Diaz.
Kozue should have been sleeping, but she woke up, got out of her room down to where I was, and started to fall asleep sitting with her head in her knees next to me. “Kozue, go sleep on the second floor.” “No!” “Are you scared of being alone?” “It’s cold.” “Then I’ll turn the cooler down for you.” “No!” “It’s even colder here, no?” “Cooold.” I went to grab a towel blanket from the second floor and enveloped the seated Kozue in it, but she said, “Hooot.” “What is? The towel blanket?” “Disco.” “Is that so?” “I lied. You’re not, Disco.” I resumed the movie while wondering what meaning there could be behind those kinds of lies, and since it hurt me nevertheless, it took me more time than expected before I could focus on the movie again. Both Thandiwe Newton and Mark Wahlberg looked like hairless monkeys. The story progressed without any suspense or anything. They put on a CD of Charles Aznavour causing the real one to appear in a corner of the room, and Newton and Wahlberg continued to sing and dance. Who in hell created this movie, seriously...I thought, jokingly, but then Kozue, who was silently sleeping, rolled up in the towel blanket by my side, said, “Ouchiiiie,” and raised her face, so I looked at her and saw that Kozue’s body had grown larger.
...Not just that, she’d also become older.
Like a teenager wearing child-wear way too small for her. She looked at me, still sitting in the same pose, said, “Wow, many things sprung out just now,” and smiled. She then closed her eyes and umumummumon, her body shrunk and returned to its original size.
I stared at Kozue, but she kept her face buried between her knees with only her shoulders slowly moving up and down as she breathed, so I could tell she didn’t notice anything that happened and just continued to sleep. Even though Kozue was the one sleeping, apparently I was the one dreaming.
Since it had been so brief, started and ended so abruptly, had visibly left no traces of it ever happening, and Kozue had seemingly no memories of the event, I attempted to pin it on the beer. Nothing happened for two whole days after, but on the third day at about half-past six in the morning, as we were eating breakfast, “Woah, it seriously happened again. Oh crap, my panties and everything’s about to burst. Hello? Hey!” I watched Kozue say those words with a smile as her body grew up to a high-schooler’s size. I readily put down my coffee cup and asked the girl, “Who are you?” but there was no doubt she was Kozue. I’d found kids that went missing for three, five, ten, or even 30 years. I could identify people regardless of their age. However, by the time I’d finished mouthing my question, the small Kozue was there with her mouth gaping open. “What~?” Kozue asked. “Do you understand what happened just now?” I asked back, but she replied with, “What happened~?” so it didn’t seem like she’d noticed her body’s transformation. “At Nakamurasan’s house...the coffee...and tree...with a big cat, you see, and she sleeps, Mew-chan,” Kozue voiced this terrible mess of a sentence while chewing on another bite of her anpan. Nakamura-san was the landlord of Villa Hapira Kojimacho, who lived in room 101. Nakamura Itsuwo, a grannie. And Mewchan was just a result of Kozue being unable to pronounce Meru-chan due to the anpan in her mouth; must be an abbreviation for Merkmal, that grannie’s cat. Even if I could pick up the proper nouns, I couldn’t make sense of the rest. “Kozue, no going to see Nakamura-san today,” I said. “Eh~ no way.” “Kozue, do you feel anything off with your body?” “Eh?” “Does anything hurt?” “Nothing~.” “But I still feel like there’s something off, so you can’t go outside today.” “But I have no fever.” “Even if you don’t.” “Please~.” “Nope. Stay still here today.” “Dad won’t coffee at Nakamura-san’s place? Even then?” “I have no idea what you’re saying, Kozue.” She then laughed her heart out, so maybe Kozue was enjoying her inaptitude to speak. Or maybe it’s not that she couldn’t say it, but simply didn’t. “You see, so the coffee, you see, when it becomes long and big like whooo, the sun, you see, says you can take it easy.” “I see,” I said before laughing a bit myself. “Anyway, you stay here for today.” When I said that, Kozue once again let out an “Eh~,” but after that, she kept silent and focused on finishing eating her anpan. I then recalled that Nakamura-san has a coffee plant growing in her greenhouse. Kozue probably wanted to tell me that the tree had grown a lot, that she’d seen the state of it, that grannie had been told by someone to take it easy, and something else, like that she’d been told to take a nap. I didn’t care about what that other thing was. This time I managed to understand a bit of what Kozue was saying by chance, but in normal situations when I can’t understand anything she says, not even 1%, I didn’t let it bother me. There was no end to it.
Not letting her visit the Nakamura grannie was the right choice. That day, in the evening, as Kozue was drawing original zoo animals on her sketchbook, she suddenly let go of her crayons, became big, and stood up, saying, “Wowah. Hold on, why are my panties so tight for the third time, geez, it mega hurts.”
She looked around and found me. “Ah, that foreigner again. Hello? He-” But before I could say hello back, Kozue became small again. She fell on her bottom with a plop, was surprised, then laughed. “I was asleep~,” Kozue said, to which I asked, “Kozue. How much do you remember about before you fell asleep?” “What~?” “You were drawing, weren’t you?” “Yes.” “Do you remember why you stood up?” “I was asleep~.” “You don’t remember?” “Not really. Disco saw me. Embarrassing~,” Kozue hid her visage. “What was?” “I was asleep.” “What was embarrassing?” “That you saw me sleeping.” “You weren’t, though,” I said. Saying that meant I had to tell Kozue about why she didn’t remember something even though she wasn’t sleeping. I screwed up, I thought, but Kozue didn’t ask; she went back to drawing her turtle-like creature with seven legs while chanting stuff like “Kangaroo~.”
I went to the convenience store to buy orange juice and ice cream, bought female underwear for adults and tried making Kozue wear them, but she resisted. “Please no! Please! No! Please! No! Please! No!” followed by an ultrasonic “Kyaaaa!” Kozue found making me run away fun, so she chased me around while ripping apart the air with her scream.
I entered Kozue’s bedroom at night to check on her sleeping state. She was sleeping with her body straight like the spare lead of a mechanical pencil and with both arms tightly packed against her body. The towel blanket was covering up to her chin. Kozue’s slumber was always profound, so she stayed that way until morning. Though when she was awake, she would play all day, run around the house screaming choo choo like a train, roll around, draw, play at being a cook, etc. I bet she was playing with all her might, going full throttle all day, so much so that she didn’t have the strength to turn around in her sleep at night. It’s like she was taking a break in a pool; on land too, it’s sometimes better to steady your breathing, no? As I was half-asleep on the sofa but still somewhat on guard, I heard a voice saying “Mister foreigner! Where are you?” which fully woke me up and made me open my eyes. I raised my body while calling, “Kozue!” The lamp on her bedside table lit the room in an orange light; Kozue found me on the other side of the sofa’s back, then said
“Here you are. Who are you?” I answered “Disco,” to which she replied with “Pardon?” before returning to the small Kozue with a smuuul-pon, and back to sleeping again. Due probably to her body moving when she shrank, her sleeping position was somewhat disturbed, which was unusual for Kozue. I stood up from the sofa and went to Kozue’s side, lifted her head while I set up the pillow under it, then straightened her arms and legs; looking at her small figure on the double bed, she seemed as if she was afraid of something, so I internally swore to myself to protect her from any kinds of danger. However, she had a peaceful expression, as if to say there was nothing to fear anywhere, which, in the moment, I found to be reliable. After pulling up the towel blanket up to Kozue’s chin, I opened the door and was about to leave her bedroom, but I still wanted to be there for her when she would grow big again and search for me, the ‘foreigner,’ so I instead decided to grab the futon from my room and sleep on the sofa.
I laid my head on the armrest, closed my eyes, and started wondering whether Kozue was traveling through time internally. No time machine, no paradox where you risk encountering yourself, just going back from the period where you are to another one. Earlier, Kozue said ‘mister foreigner’ when seeing me; that was proof she still had in memory the other times we met, so these time frames were arranged chronologically for the older Kozue. She even said “Pardon?” in English earlier. When talking to the Yamagishi couple and Oda, they kept repeating “Pardon?” on our first encounter. Maybe even the small Kozue could use that level of English, but it was more likely that when the older Kozue, who was around high-school age and had learned some English, came to this era and asked for my name, she got confused and that’s why she said “Pardon?”
After that, I started thinking that the Yamagishi couple got scared seeing the older Kozue and tried to push the eerie girl onto Oda or me while keeping that a secret, but in fact, we’d now been living together for over three weeks and there had been no sign of this phenomenon happening up until recently. Kozue didn’t seem any different from normal. Of course, there was still the possibility those timeslips had already happened and ended in the past, and were only resuming now. For that, I had to confirm with the Yamagishis and Oda.
Furthermore, I considered the possibility that Oda’s kidnapping emotionally scarred Kozue, which made her develop a personality disorder. An additional personality to Kozue. I heard that in cases of multiple personality disorder, the facial features and stature could change depending on the personality. Jekyll and Hyde. Could a human skeleton grow and shrink between an adult and a child’s stature in a matter of a few seconds?
But if I asked myself these kinds of questions and expected to solve them in order, I would go crazy long before that happened. I felt like I was having hallucinations. Was Japan the problem, was this lifestyle the problem, or was my life itself the problem... Well, all of them could be said to be bad and not bad anyway. And the same could be said for anyone’s lifestyle and life. Not everyone starts going crazy and hallucinating a kid growing and shrinking in both age and size whenever they have a problem. I was sure staying still in this small house for all this time had made me use my brain weirdly; that’s the conclusion I reached: I’d do some work. I’d move my body to make some money. Humans weren’t made to sit still. They must either play or work.
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