Only when the time machine had completely vanished did I release my hold on the door and let Aijima peek out. The only hint that a whirlwind had just blown through was the insistent tinkling of the wind chime.
“The door wouldn’t open!” Aijima snapped, his voice livid.
“Oh, yeah, it does that sometimes.”
“It felt as if someone was holding it from the other side.”
“Now why in the world would anyone do that? Aha, ahaha.”
I exchanged looks with everyone else. At this point all we could do was bluff him out. On the sofa, Higuchi and Hanuki and Akashi beamed innocently, while half-buried in the piles of garbage Ozu and Tamura did the same.
“Where’s Jōgasaki?” Aijima sniffed.
“He had something urgent to take care of,” I told him.
As soon as Aijima stepped out of the room, he gasped softly. “But where is the time machine?”
“Time machine?”
“It was just here, was it not? I certainly saw it.”
“Did you?”
I cocked my head in confusion, and everyone else did the same.
Aijima seemed to have lost his nerve. “How curious.”
“Maybe you were just seeing things,” chortled Tamura.
Aijima turned his acerbic gaze on Tamura. “And who are you?”
“Me?” stammered Tamura.
“You seem rather comfortable here for someone I’ve never seen before.”
“This is Ozu’s cousin.” Akashi swiftly came to the rescue. “He’s here over summer break to visit the campus.”
“Yes, yes, exactly. My name is Tamura.” Going with the flow, Tamura affectionately threw his arm over Ozu’s shoulder.
“Did you find your glasses?” Akashi inquired.
“Unfortunately not,” answered Aijima, sounding put out, before beginning to fish through the garbage in the hallway.
We needed to get him out of here before the time machine returned. But he showed no inclination towards leaving, instead striking up a conversation with Tamura.
“How do you find the campus? Not so interesting as you might expect, I suppose?”
“Well, yes, when you put it that way.”
“Everyone thinks that.” Aijima nodded knowingly. “That means that you are not testing your potential. If you do end up enrolling here, you would do well to visit the foot of the clock tower during welcome week. There you will find all manner of circles waiting to usher in new members. The doors to an infinite number of futures await you. If you wish to make the most of your college years you must enter a circle. As long as you remain a bystander, the future will never be open to you!”
“But there aren’t any circles I’m really interested in.”
“Enter one anyways.” Aijima’s spectacles glinted. “Otherwise those four years will be wasted. Let us say you lived in a 4½ tatami room, just like this one. What is there for you here? There is neither love, nor adventure. There is nothing. Today would be the same as yesterday, tomorrow the same as today, your days as boring and tasteless as tofu. Could you say that was really living?”
“Sure you could,” I shot back. “There’s plenty of flavor in it.”
“Like the taste of sour grapes, for instance?” he pressed unrelentingly. “Take one step outside that door and you will see that the world is filled with possibilities. And that is because you yourself are filled with possibilities. Your true worth lies in those infinite possibilities. Of course, there is no guarantee that a rose-colored life awaits. You may be lured into a cultish organization, or be embroiled in internal struggles and end up being hurt. But let me say this: there is nothing wrong with that. It is the essence of youth to live these possibilities with all your might.”
It may have been preachy, but he was completely correct. For someone who, hemmed in by impossibilities, found it impossible to leave this 4½ tatami room, this was all very painful to hear.
But this was no time to be impressed. Akashi had been behaving erratically for some time now, casting her eyes along the floor and around the piles of garbage.
What’s wrong? I silently mouthed at her.
Where’s the remote? she mouthed back.
“Say, might I trouble you to look for my glasses?” Aijima said to me. “These ones I’m wearing are merely for show, you see, and wearing them makes it ever so difficult to get in the right frame of mind. I shall return to fetch them tomorrow afternoon, so be sure to find them by then.”
“Sure, I’ll find them for you.”
Once I accepted his request, Aijima at last took his leave.
The moment he vanished down the stairs, Akashi and I frantically started searching our surroundings.
“What’s up?” asked Hanuki, getting up from the sofa.
“I’m not sure why, but the remote is gone.”
“That’s not good!” shouted Higuchi and Hanuki, jumping up.
“Not good! Not good!” cried Ozu and Tamura, circling around the corridor.
They all began to ransack the garbage.
“Look carefully!” Akashi reminded them anxiously. “We can’t afford to mess up the past!”
◯
After spending some time searching, all we’d come up with was Aijima’s glasses. There was nary a trace of the remote.
Akashi sighed. “Jōgasaki must have taken it with him in all that commotion earlier.”
“Though he seems a reliable fellow, nothing could be further from the truth,” sighed Higuchi.
“Like you’re one to talk!” Hanuki snorted with amusement. “But that spells trouble, doesn’t it? Like, we’re in trouble If he doesn’t come back soon, right?”
It was currently past 5:30. There were less than 30 minutes remaining until the Cola Catastrophe.
What concerned me was the odd look on Jōgasaki’s face right before the time machine departed. He’d seemed so shocked, staring at the control panel. When I wondered what it meant, Higuchi piped up, “Seeing his destination must have been a shock, I suppose.”
“When did you set it to, Higuchi?”
“99 years into the past.”
We were all speechless when we heard that.
“I simply couldn’t resist when presented with the opportunity, you see. I tried to warn Jōgasaki, but didn’t quite manage in time. But this is his own fault, you know. Imagine, thrusting me aside to get in himself, and not checking his own destination!”
“99 years ago is the Taishō period!”
“Indeed.”
Tamura hesitantly raised his hand. “Er, that might be a bit of a pickle. See, at the time this area was a swamp. That’s according to the landlady, anyhow.” And he began to relay the legend of the kappa.
There were no houses here during the Taishō period, only forests and fields stretching as far as the eye could see. The land on which the Shimogamo Yūsuisō currently stood had been a large swamp, an eerie place even during the day, where tightly-packed algae floated like strands of hair on the surface of the murky water. This swamp was the origin of the apartment’s unusually gloomy name: Yūsuisō, or “House of Murky Waters”.
One late summer’s eve, a man had been returning from a visit to the village doctor across the river when he passed by the swamp. Beneath the rays of the setting sun, the waters of the bog were red as blood, making the already unsettling landscape even more terrifying. The man quickened his pace that he might pass as quickly as he could, when he heard, borne on the noxious wind blowing from the swamp, a peculiar cry.
“Blurgh! Wurhghgh! Euerhgh!”
A shudder went through the man when he looked in the direction of the voice.
In the glare of the sun on the water there floated a monstrous figure. Even from a distance it was clearly enormous, draped in green algae and spitting something from its mouth, crying its horrendous cry, “Euerhgh!” There was no doubt that it was a kappa, coming to drag another oblivious traveler into the swamp.
The man tripped over himself as he fled into the village, shouting, “Kappa! Kappa!” The people of the village had long feared rumors of a kappa, and quickly responding to the man’s panicked cries, they took up arms and headed towards the swamp.
However, no sooner had they arrived than a blinding flash lit up the area, and a howling gale bowled the villagers down. Some were overcome by fear and fled. The strange light and the gale died away, leaving no trace of the strange creature. Only the wind blew mournfully over the surface of the blood-red waters.
99 years ago, this apartment did not exist. Not only that, but the ground on which the apartment was built had been a swamp.
If Jōgasaki had taken the time machine on the second floor, and he had gone back in time 99 years to the very same location—
“What if that kappa was actually Jōgasaki?” Tamura finished.
His words were met with a leaden silence.
At that moment a loud sound came from the floor below.
“Is that him?” Hanuki gasped.
We rushed down the hallway to peer down the stairs. For a while the first floor was silent, and then we heard a sound approaching, like the sound of drenched cloth slapping the floorboards. Slap. Slap. Slap. The thing that came up the stairs was hulking and covered in algae, just like the kappa of legend. It was Jōgasaki, back from the swamp. In his arms he was carrying the time machine, and he stomped his feet on the staircase with every step he took.
When he reached the second floor, Jōgasaki slowly lowered the time machine to the floor. “Euerhgh!” he gagged loudly, before ripping aside a strand of algae that was tangled around his face. Without warning he lunged at Higuchi Seitarō, his eyes burning with rage.
“Were you trying to kill me!?”
◯
With the help of Ozu and Tamura, I managed to pin Jōgasaki’s arms behind his back. “You dumped me into a swamp!” he howled as he tried to shake off our frail bodies. “You sank the time machine! You made me puke all over myself! Look at all this fuckin’ algae! I nearly died! Apologize! You apologize to me!”
Considering that it was a miracle that he was still breathing, it would have been stranger if he hadn’t been angry. Even Higuchi himself had no choice but to bow himself to the ground.
“Truly, I am most regretful.”
“From now on, you don’t get to touch the time machine.”
“It seemed a most prime opportunity, at the time.”
“I’ll say it one more time. You. Don’t. Touch. The. Time. Machine.”
Jōgasaki was a sorry sight. He was completely drenched in reeking swamp water and covered in dark, muddy strands of algae. If you ran into him at night you’d definitely think he was some sort of demon. That the villagers had mistaken him for a kappa was not hard to imagine. So it was that the legend of the kappa, passed down since the Taishō period, turned out to have its origins in Jōgasaki’s fall into the swamp.
But we were less concerned about the origin of the legend than in the remote.
“Jōgasaki, we need the remote,” I said.
“Remote?” Jōgasaki frowned.
“The air conditioner remote! That’s the key to everything!”
“Oh, yeah, I got it right h—”
He reached into his pocket, then froze. His jaw dropped, and before our eyes his face turned pale.
“I dropped it.”
“Dropped it? Where?”
“The swamp. I dropped it in the swamp.”
“God, Jōgasaki!” Hanuki groaned. “What is wrong with you?”
“Come on, I just barely made it out alive!” Jōgasaki cried despondently. “It’s not my fault!”
The remote was now out of our reach. Even if we went back in the time machine to retrieve it, how were we supposed to find it at the bottom of a swamp?”
“It’s over,” I moaned in despair.
Then Tamura clapped his hands. “I think I’ve got something!”
“What is it?”
“You just need the remote from room 209, right?”
“That’s right…”
“Capital. I’m going to take the time machine.” Tamura hopped into the seat.
“Where are you going, Tamura?”
“Don’t worry, I’ll handle it. You’re in good hands!” Tamura snapped off a salute, and in an all-too-familiar burst of light and wind he was gone.
Given that Tamura was the cause of this chain of spacetime woes, I didn’t feel like his hands were a very safe place to be. We all exchanged worried looks. The rays of the setting sun illuminated Akashi’s concerned expression. Yesterday was almost over; another long summer day was coming to an end.
“Akashi, what time did you come back from the book fair yesterday?”
“Just before 6. I heard the landlady broadcasting over the speakers right when I came through the front door.”
—Higuchi, Higuchi Seitarō, come here at once to pay your rent.
It was the same Voice of God that we would hear again the following day.
About ten minutes after Akashi returned to the apartment, Higuchi, Ozu, and Jōgasaki came trooping in from the bathhouse. And as they were taking off their shoes in the entrance hall, Hanuki had stopped by after getting off work.
“And then I was the last one to arrive,” I mused.
But everyone looked at me quizzically. Jōgasaki, Hanuki, Higuchi, Ozu, Akashi, they all had the same expression on their faces: what are you talking about?
“What’re you all looking at me for?” I asked.
“Don’t play dumb,” snorted Ozu. “You were here before all of us.”
“Hold on, what?”
“When we got back from the bathhouse, you were already here.”
“Who’s playing dumb? Sure, I left the bathhouse first, but after that I had to take care of something. I didn’t come back until after 6. Everyone was already gathered here, and then for some reason you started telling me to do a striptease!”
“You’re certain?” Akashi suddenly broke in sharply. “You’re certain that you came back after I did?”
“Yeah, why would I make that up?” I looked back at Akashi, confused.
In the faltering light, Akashi’s brows were furrowed, and she was biting her lip.
Suddenly the hallway was filled with light, and the wind blustered and howled.
Tamura had returned.
◯
“Is this it?” Sitting behind the control panel, Tamura proudly held something out.
It was the remote control, which we’d thought was lost in the swamp forever.
“That’s it!” Akashi shouted, pointing at it. “But how did you get your hands on it?”
“To tell you the truth, I brought it back from the future.”
More precisely, he had gone to March of the year after he had originally departed. When he arrived, he was greeted by the members of the Shimogamo Yūsuisō Time Machine Committee, led by none other than future-Tamura himself. They’d already been apprised of the situation, and had the air conditioner remote ready to go.
“Things sure do go quick when you’re talking to yourself!” Tamura chuckled.
The surprising thing was that 25 years later, they were still using the same air conditioner in room 209.
“Are you sure though? Doesn’t this mean you won’t be able to use the air conditioner?”
“That’s alright,” Tamura grinned. “You see, Shimogamo Yūsuisō is due to be demolished…the landlady let us know some time ago that we’d need to move by the end of March. This air conditioner’s been in room 209 so long, I couldn’t possibly take it with me. Besides, it’s far too old. I think it’s time for it to hang up its hat.”
“So that’s why you went to March to get it!”
“Yep, because no one’s going to use it anymore.”
“Tamura, you’re a genius!” I exulted. Everyone else chimed in, too.
“Not bad, for a lameass.”
“Like, I’m super impressed that someone so lame could pull that off.”
“You have earned my respect, even if you are exceedingly lame.”
“People from this era really are rude,” he winced, getting out of the time machine and reverently passing me the remote. “Here, it’s all yours.”
Thus the remote was restored to us.
I placed it on top of the fridge, prompting everyone to spontaneously break into applause.The remote had left a gap when it sank into the swamp of 99 years in the past, but that gap had been filled by the remote from 25 years in the future, and now everything that occurred yesterday had been recreated perfectly. For a while, none of us dared to believe it. The chain of cause-and-effect, so perilously close to breaking, had been miraculously restored, and the destruction of the universe had been averted. It had taken such a turn, such an acrobatic sleight-of-hand to bring it all to an end.
“So shouldn’t we head back soon?” Hanuki broke us all out of our reverie.
We hurriedly piled into the time machine. There were so many of us that getting us all in required a tricky balancing act. While we pushed and shoved, Akashi crouched down to the control panel and started turning the dials.
“Make sure you get it right, Akashi!” Jōgasaki warned, pushing aside Higuchi.
“Not to worry,” Akashi replied.
But even after the settings were dialed in, Akashi remained unmoving, staring at the controls. All of our urging couldn’t convince her to pull the lever. Suddenly she stood up and shouted, “Something just isn’t right!” causing us to lose our balance and spill out onto the floor.
Grabbing my arm, Akashi silently led me a distance away from the time machine. “Things just don’t line up,” she said in a low tone. “”When I came here yesterday, you were already here.”
“That can’t be right. I was the last one to get here.”
“That’s why I’ve been thinking. Maybe, yesterday, that was—”
A loud, unpleasant crackling noise came from the corners of the hallway. The speakers on the ceiling had come on.
“Higuchi, Higuchi Seitarō. Come here at once to pay your rent!” The stern voice of the landlady rang through the hallway.
From the time machine everyone began to shout at us.
“Hey, what are you guys doing?”
“You two can fool around with each other later!”
“Hurry your asses up or we’ll leave you behind!”
Akashi waved at them impatiently, then turned to me. “I need you to stay behind.”
“What? Why?”
“Because we made a promise yesterday!” She looked at me pleadingly. “You have to invite me to the Gozan no Okuribi. Then everything will line up.”
We heard noises coming from the front entrance on the ground floor. Past-Akashi had returned from the used book fair. Soon enough she would be coming up the stairs. I was stunned, but Akashi gave me a nod, then turned and ran down the hallway to get in the time machine. She gave me a wave. “Don’t mess it up, please!”
“No, wait, Akashi…”
“I’ll come back for you, I promise!”
The time machine vanished, leaving me all alone in the past.