Sunrise, p.14
Sunrise, page 14
But before she knew it, she was running toward the window.
Her foot still on the windowsill, the student turned slowly to look at her.
Haru cried out without thinking.
“Mio-chan!”
It was Mio-chan.
Mio-chan as she always was, the stray hairs above her forehead fastidiously pinned down, a flowered cotton mask carefully affixed to her face.
Mio-chan’s body jerked with surprise.
Her pale thighs shone in the light, exposed beneath her hiked-up skirt.
The two girls looked directly in each other’s eyes.
Mio-chan was silent.
Silent.
Haru wondered if Mio-chan had already lost her words.
But you wanted so badly to shed!
You said that if you achieved shedding, you wanted me—me in particular—to be happy for you.
Happy for you, from the bottom of my heart.
You held my hand.
You promised.
Absolutely.
And now here you are, trying to shatter like a jewel!
Haru felt something akin to betrayal.
But then Mio-chan nervously pulled her mask down, exposing her mouth, and slowly parted her lips.
“I don’t think I can shed, Haru.”
Her voice sounded clear as always, not muffled or blurry at all.
Mio-chan still had her words.
Haru could see a little white tooth peeking out from behind her dainty lips.
Shocked at her words, Haru couldn’t think of what to say.
Wha—?
Mio-chan was the soul of sincerity. Her lips parted again.
“So I decided to try reincarnation.”
And then she smiled a little. Haru noticed for the first time that she was slightly bucktoothed.
Mio-chan was still looking straight at Haru.
“According to Buddhist teachings, when you do bad things you end up reborn in the realm of bugs and beasts, right? Maybe this way, I can become a real bug.”
Her eyes were so dark and clear.
What is she talking about?
Haru was at a loss for words.
Mio-chan seemed to sincerely believe that since she couldn’t seem to become a bug by shedding, she would try to become a literal insect.
Mio-chan continued to speak confidently, her mask still hooked under her chin.
“Being a bug seems much more respectable than being a piece-of-shit human anyway.”
And with that, Mio-chan turned back toward the open window and went about finishing her preparations for jumping.
She stood up in the window, spreading her arms wide like wings.
She lifted a foot.
And then it happened—the door to the science classroom slammed shut with a bang.
The two girls turned to look at it.
Miss Mitsuko, her hand still pressed against the door, was looking in their direction, her eyes wide. She began to walk straight toward them without saying a word.
Her jade-green spring coat swirled around her like the still-wet wings of a cicada newly emerged from the ground.
The two girls stared at Miss Mitsuko as she approached.
Silence.
Miss Mitsuko wasn’t saying a word.
She just silently walked toward them.
It seemed possible she might even encourage Mio-chan to shatter like a jewel.
Haru waited for her to speak.
Miss Mitsuko walked right up to Haru and Mio-chan and stopped. Still, she kept her silence behind her white unwoven mask.
Haru and Mio-chan remained silent as well.
It was a long silence.
Miss Mitsuko then extended her right hand and wordlessly showed them the object it held.
Filled with trepidation, the two girls hesitantly peered into her hand.
It looked like a small thermometer.
No, not a thermometer.
A pregnancy test.
Not only that, they could clearly see two pink lines in the little window.
One foot still on the windowsill, Mio-chan turned to look at Haru, who returned her gaze from where she stood rooted to the floor beside the window.
The result was positive.
In other words, she was pregnant.
Haru was once again at a loss for words.
What is going on?
She slowly looked back at Miss Mitsuko.
But she still just stood there, silent.
She seemed to be making no effort to say a word.
Haru had no idea what she was trying to communicate with this pantomime.
And then it came to her: perhaps Miss Mitsuko thought she and Mio-chan had snuck into the science classroom because they wanted to abort an unwanted pregnancy. And so she thought she’d display this before their eyes. To demonstrate that curses didn’t exist—not in this classroom, not anywhere.
She would fulfill her mission as a teacher of science.
If so, what a wild misunderstanding!
Haru couldn’t help but stifle a laugh.
Though, come to think of it, maybe it wasn’t as far off the mark as it seemed.
Both Haru and Mio-chan had come to this room to rid themselves of something.
Something unwanted, like an unwelcome baby.
Or a wished-for baby who never arrived.
A thin thread of spider’s silk hung from the ceiling in the corner of the room.
Hanging there, so very thin, it glittered faintly in the light as it moved in the breeze.
But still, what a moment to tell us about her pregnancy!
Haru made a mental note to be sure to write all this down in her phone.
But wait—why was she making these notes again, exactly?
Haru stood there, silent behind her pale purple mask.
Mio-chan spoke, her voice soft, her foot still on the windowsill.
“Congratulations.”
Haru’s reddish-brown skirt moved softly in the breeze, like slowly unfurling wings.
THE FLYING TOBITA SISTERS
THE GLASS IN the windows of the buildings spread out before me glittered like so many scattered jewels. The city lay at my feet. I could see the roofs of individual houses and modest apartment buildings in the valleys dividing the high rises, and between them, trees sprouted fresh new growth, glimpses of green like stitches in the urban fabric. A broad strip of asphalt ran perfectly straight through it, crossing the city’s center on its way to the sea.
I took a deep breath. It tasted of spring. And then, following the path of the road below me toward the sea, I flew. My hair, my tie, the cord of the earphones pumping music into my ears—all fluttered in the wind as I took off. There were some strong winds up here. On the verge of losing my balance, I used my wings like a rudder to right myself.
As I was doing so, my wings flapping as I twisted in the air, my bag, which was hanging at an angle from my body, came dangerously close to snagging on a lightning rod extending up from one of the high-rise roofs.
The wind in spring was dangerous, not only because of its unpredictable gustiness, but also because of the yellow dust it gathered as it swirled and eddied across the ground. The air around me was foggy with pollen and dust, and I blinked again and again to clear the particles from my eyes.
Looking behind me, I could see my classmate Makino bobbing around in the air behind me, buffeted too by the wind. He was clutching his overstuffed bookbag to his side, his gold-rimmed glasses ready to fly right off his face. This would be a day when it would be better to fly low than high, it seemed.
Our ancestors had tried for centuries to fly.
Icarus tried it using bird feathers fixed with wax; Leonardo da Vinci left behind detailed, scientifically-sound drawings of possible flying machines; the legendary Chinese military strategist Zhuge Liang may or may not have invented the hot air balloon; Abbas ibn Firnas attempted to fly off a cliff in Cordoba only to fall to the earth, injuring himself. In Japan, the inventor Chūhachi Ninomiya designed flying machines whose mechanisms imitated crows and jewel beetles, but he ended up abandoning them after he failed to get his hands on the right engine—there are so many tales and legends like this left from the world before flight.
My mother had worked as a researcher at a university and devoted herself to the study of such attempts. She focused her studies especially on Otto Lilienthal. Born in nineteenth-century Prussia, Otto and his brother Gustav studied the mechanics of bird flight, eventually developing contraptions that would allow humans to do the same. They concentrated especially on the wings of storks and cranes, and finally constructed an artificial cone-shaped “flying hill” near Berlin that was fifteen meters high; Otto jumped from it over and over, fitted with wings modeled on the birds he studied.
My mother had one of Lilienthal’s bird sketches pinned to the wall near her bed. She would show me pictures of the wings and gliders he designed that allowed him to fly. Of course, in the end, he fell to the earth during one of his flights and died.
Our ancestors wanted so badly to fly into the air. I want to understand how they felt, looking up at the sky but unable to fly . . .
My mother fluffed up her hair and wings as she said this, her eyes shining. I was still in elementary school then, and she was talking about this with me and my father as he fluttered around the kitchen making dinner. He was frying fish on the range, steam rising in white clouds from the pan. Felix, our tortoiseshell cat, was napping under the table, and my mother reached down to give him a pet as she continued to talk, her wings quivering with excitement.
The Wright brothers, hearing of Lilienthal’s death, redoubled their efforts to make their own flying machine, and in 1903, they succeeded in becoming the first people in the world to launch an airplane into flight.
It was in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, over the Kill Devil Hills.
These sandy dunes were so named because, it was said, there was once enough rum buried beneath them to kill the devil. The Wright Flyer sailed through the air above them on its fourth attempt, and in the end succeeded in flying 852 feet in 59 seconds.
Chopsticks and rice were now set out on the table. The fish we were having that day was, ironically enough, flying fish. My mother brandished her chopsticks in her hand but didn’t use them to put anything in her mouth, as she was still consumed with telling us about her research.
Crunching down on the dorsal fin of my fried flying fish, I listened to my mother and thought childishly to myself, Who cares about all this stuff? Everyone can fly now! The miso soup Dad made is getting cold, you should stop talking and concentrate on that.
“The wind is awful today, huh? Damn headwinds.”
Makino said this to me as he adjusted his gold-rimmed glasses, having just sneezed. “Even if we beat our wings as hard as we can, we’ll still be late for the morning assembly!”
I gave him a perfunctory answer and tried to concentrate on flying, but Makino persisted, pursuing me through the sky.
“That street down there,” he said, drawing me up short by tugging on my wing and pointing to the ground beneath us. He closed one eye and made a show of tracing the road’s path with his finger in the air.
He continued, a bit haughtily.
“I heard that’s where the Tobita sisters are going.”
It was the road that ran straight through town. The road to the sea.
I wasn’t intending to look down at it, but thanks to Makino, I found myself following it with my eyes. How many kilometers was it? It would take less than ten minutes to fly, of course.
The sun’s rays shone down on the asphalt, making it glint silver here and there along its length.
“I know,” I replied, snorting a bit derisively. “Everyone does. Now, let’s get going before we’re really late!”
I playfully bumped Makino’s wing with mine, then took off as fast as my wings could carry me, riding the wind without a backward glance.
It only took a comparative blink of an eye before the Wright brothers’ 1903 flying machine was developed for practical use. In the span of eleven years, swarms of planes filled the skies over Europe during World War I. And during World War II, the skies over the whole world buzzed with war planes, and not long after its end, the V2 rocket was developed, which could fly into space.
Subsequently, the Soviet Union launched first Sputnik 2, carrying the space dog Laika, and then Vostok 1, carrying the human cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, into space. In this way, our ancestors conquered first the skies, then space, then finally stepped foot on the surface of the moon.
During this period, France conducted many experiments launching cats into space; during one such experiment, the cat managed to run away just before the flight was to occur. The cat was never found, and it is in honor of this brave runaway that our Felix was named.
Makino wasn’t the only one who gossiped about the Tobita sisters—everyone did.
First of all, they were beautiful. It would be no overstatement to call them the most beautiful in our class, our year, even the whole city. Deep hawk-brown eyes; long, blue-black hair, lustrous as a swallow’s back; lips the color of cardinals. Their pure white wings were full and airy as they spread expansively from their backs. They turned the heads of men and women alike wherever they went—people found it hard to get them out of their heads.
But at the same time, they were also quite peculiar.
Rumors swirled about their background—that their father had been taken to a psychiatric institution after he tried to cut off his own wings, or that their mother’s ancestors had been legendary marathon runners. Perhaps in tribute to the latter, or for some other mysterious reason, the sisters always wore little sneakers on their feet.
A mystifying custom.
I couldn’t remember ever wearing a shoe.
After all, the things were rather a hindrance during flight. It was a big deal if you lost a shoe into the valleys between the buildings, and there had been incidents when a shoelace tangled in an electric line, resulting in death. Shoes were obsolete relics of times past, like corsets. They could be beautiful, of course—high heels made of glass; dress shoes made of supple, polished calfskin; sandals decorated with real diamonds—but as antiques for display, not things to wear. And besides, our feet had grown small and slender with the generations, hardly the kind of appendage suitable for a shoe.
So it was a shock when the Tobita sisters showed up for school decked out in matching neon-blue-and-yellow sneakers. The sight of them dangling at the ends of the long, thin legs of the sisters in their miniskirts made for a strange counterpoint to the expanse of their wings.
The Concorde—a passenger airliner with a name meaning harmony that could fly at supersonic speeds—appeared, then disappeared. But only slightly slower passenger planes became incredibly common, and our ancestors spent countless hours of their lives flying around in them. Networks of airways spread across the globe, and by the 2000s, more than 90,000 planes would crisscross the skies every day. Though not everyone could fly in those days—it was primarily people from the developed world, plus the wealthy elite from the developing. But the spread of air travel coincided with the development of telephone communication and eventually the internet, resulting a world that our ancestors felt was getting smaller and more crowded, trapping them in the feeling that everything there was to know and everywhere there was to go had already been discovered.
It was starting then that we began to lift off the ground ourselves, I think.
And after that, it wasn’t long before the first wings began to sprout from people’s backs.
They were small at first, of course, but steadily became larger and larger.
Like people in places like India spending their food budget to keep their cell phones running, people began to covet wings more than anything, willing to sacrifice any necessity. But soon, wings began to sprout on those from all walks of life, and people who would have never ridden in an airplane in their lives became able to fly.
It was going to start at four o’clock, right after school.
Makino informed me of this as he ate his sweet melon bread, casting a look my way that said of course we were going to go and watch together. I concentrated on stuffing my own melon bread into my mouth, ignoring him.
What was to start at four was the Tobita sisters’ run down the road to the sea.
The Tobita sisters were going to . . . run.
Run along the ground.
However many kilometers to the sea, the sisters intended to stay with their feet on the ground the whole time, running.
Our ancestors would fall over dead if they heard that, I thought, though on second thought, they were already dead, so I guess their souls would rise up to smite us. They’d worked so hard to finally achieve flight at the expense of life and limb over hundreds of years, and now these girls were going to start crawling along the ground again on purpose?
The cat that lived behind the school came over as we ate, and I broke off a piece of my melon bread to share with it. The cat flipped over to show its belly to me and purred, grinding its wingless striped back into the dirt as it squirmed around. I reached my hand down to stroke its belly, and it leapt up and fled, fast as a bird. I watched the runaway feline as it kicked up leaves on its dash through the camellia and azalea bushes, unable to look away until it disappeared from sight.
It’s been half a year since my mother moved out, taking Felix the tortoiseshell cat with her. What would she say if I told her about the Tobita sisters? Knowing her, she’d probably approve.
We finished our melon breads and tried to slip in unnoticed through the windows in the back of the classroom, but a strong wind slipped in with us, and the teacher naturally saw us and made us fly into the hallway and think about what we’d done.
Just as dinosaurs and Neanderthals eventually disappeared from the world, so too did those without wings, who couldn’t fly. Though it took a lot less time for this to happen that it had primates walking on all fours to be replaced by humans walking upright on two feet.
