Archive of Our Own

I. PLUTO PROJECTOR

What most people forget about teenagers is that they are still kids. 

Eugene Korekishi had never been much of a kid. Ever since he was born on a quiet September midnight, he had been trapped in the guise of a creature much older than him. Swaddled in a blanket, breathing his first gulps of air, the nurses told his mother that he would be a smart boy. Under what conditions they got this information, he still couldn’t say—baseless, confident claims were one of the things Eugene hated more than anything.

Under the grey skies of a modest English countryside, Eugene grew up on breakfast tea, scones, and hiding in tall grass. He grew up bilingual because his mother would not let him lose his mother’s tongue , his mother tongue. He grew up writing kanji in gridded books and cursive English in his homework assignments. He grew up sitting by his grandmother’s vast lake, watching the swans peck at dried breadcrumbs and watching the seemingly graceful things fight for dominance and territory over by the dogtail grass. 

“Eugene, aren’t you curious about what Japan is like?” His grandmother asked one day, leaning over her half-buttered scone and folding her wrinkling leathery hands under her chin. She was always a woman of great style, of an air of poshness and reliability. Even at her last few lifetimes, her hair was curled perfectly by her shoulders with a pearl pin to hold it in place. 

“No,” Eugene replied honestly. Because realistically, how different would Japan and England be? At its core, they are both islands, a little adrift from the rest of its continent, a little distant and shrouded in deep waters. Even though they are miles away, a million tongues apart and a thousand glances far, they are, at their core, isolated. 

“Japan has so many ghosts, Eugene. They can’t leave because of the water surrounding it. It scares them,” his grandmother laughed, a tinkling sort of sound that rang in her overgrown backyard. “That’s why we also have a lot of ghosts here, too. The water scares them from leaving.”

Ghosts are not factual. That’s one reason why they bother Eugene. Ghosts are also fake, speculative, fictional… All synonyms for unfactual, but all insinuating something different. Eugene watched his grandmother’s eyes twinkle with childish excitement when she talked about ghosts and every time she did, he could see the little girl that never left. The little girl that stayed inside, wowed by the woven wonders of Japan, enthralled by the idea of supernaturality , the idea that there is something beyond them but not above them. 

“Ghosts aren’t real!” Eugene declared, a small smile lifting up the corners of his lips anyway. 

“Of course they are!” She said back, playfully nudging at his stiff shoulder. “Don’t be so caught up in the facts all the time. You’ll miss out on the real world.”

The real world. Facts. Missing out. Eugene couldn’t make sense of anything she said, but that’s how it usually was. In exchange for an adult who would treat him like the proper kid he was, his grandmother used this time to tell him about all of her otherworldly beliefs—things she knew he didn’t comprehend, things he knew he could never understand. 

“Hey Eugene,” a blonde kid in his year leaned back in his chair to talk to him. “Hey. I heard you’re leaving after this year. That you won’t go to secondary with the rest of us.”

It’s true. Eugene’s mother, after his grandmother’s death, decided on everybody’s behalf that it would be fitting for them to move back to Japan. Eugene didn’t have any thoughts on the matter—he didn’t know if he was allowed to have any. 

“Yeah,” Eugene replied, unscrewing the lid of his water bottle. 

“Where’re you going?”

“He’s going to Japan. He’s half chink, don’t you know?” Another kid yelled from across the classroom. “You can tell from his eyes.”

The sip of water took ages to sink in to his stomach. When it did, it was cold and it spread like freezing ice all over his organs, drowning him entirely. That’s right, Eugene finally remembered. He’s an outsider. Even though in the mirror, his eyes were a glimmering green not too different from his classmates, to them he was different. To them, he was a half-Asian anomaly with slimmer eyes and a funny last name.

“You can’t say that, Jack,” a girl hissed from her seat. Eugene could barely hear her, though, and the word stabbed him in all of his soft spots. 

“Whatever,” Jack said. “He knows it’s true.”

Eugene’s grandmother taught him that Kamakura in Japan was a mystical town full of ghosts and wonder. She told him of a long railway that ran across the town, the seemingly endless ocean, and the townhouses that stood shoulder-to-shoulder along the rickety roads. “It’s heaven,” she had said. “Heaven on Earth.”

It didn’t feel too much like heaven when Eugene and his mother moved in to his parents’ old home. It reeked of cigarettes and childhood, the smell stinging Eugene’s head, the same smell that his father possessed before he passed. 

“Geez. He told me he always kept the place tidy,” his mother grumbled, dusting off the ryokan. “I guess it’s my fault for not double-checking. Take your shoes off, Eugene. Your boxes should be in your room.”

His mother’s Japanese sounded so curly, so fluent and flowy. Eugene was the type of kid to never lose, never end up left behind or alone, so he worked hard to make sure he had all smooth surfaces—meaning his Japanese was as perfect as his native mother’s, yet still a little bit foreign just because his English childhood. It sounded so natural from his mother—it was nothing like when she spoke English, forced, spat syllables. 

This was her home. This was where she belonged. 

That night, Eugene and his mother sat on the floor without opening a single box, his mother with a rare can of Japanese beer in her hand. They opened the windows to let the cool summer air in, flapping their clothes in the ocean breeze. The air smelled like salt. 

“We got married here. Right in this house,” she said. “Your father’s mom—your grandmother—loved Kamakura. She loved this stupid house, even though it was all old and tarnished. She loved it so much she let us buy it. And look, we’re all back where we started.”

The floors creaked under their weight, their pale palms pressing up against the tough wooden boards. Eugene was not born in Japan, but in England, where his mother, the smartest woman in her Tokyo university, was looked down upon for struggling with the pronunciation of the word ‘emergency.’ Eugene was born to a capable, intelligent mother and a melancholic, nostalgic father who never had the pleasure of watching him grow up. Eugene inherited all of his genes, from his high nose bridge to his pale skin and his copper hair, while inheriting his mother’s ambition and brainpower, and yet he was still ostracized for being too Asian, too white, too smart, too mature. Where was his middle ground? Where could he reside where he wouldn’t be too much of anything? 

“Eugene,” his mother started, her voice lingering in the air as if she wanted to say something more . He waited with bating breath, tensing his muscles in fear that he would hear something too vulnerable. “Do well in school this year. Okay?”

Mogari Shishikuno looks like a classic Japanese kid with messy black hair and a crooked smile and a personality worth a thousand firecrackers in the hot summer air. Eugene had surprisingly approached him first, dragging him out of the cold ocean waters on the first day of school, wetting their uniforms and sticking his hair to his cheeks. 

And in turn, Shishikuno had saved him by eating the spirit that almost brought him under. 

“What the fuck was that?” Eugene yelled, wiping his face and gawking at the jagged rocks, the spraying water, the kid who looked extremely queasy. 

“It’s a ghost. I ate it for you. You’re welcome.”

“ What ?”

On his first day of school, Eugene had lost his grandmother’s treasured bracelet, his dignity, and half of the contents of his backpack. However, when he entered his homeroom class, Shishikuno had proudly smiled at him while shaking his wet hair like a dog, and somehow that meant a million times more to Eugene than a good first impression to his new school. 

“ Kore … shiki ,” Shishikuno said, rolling his surname around in his mouth like a marble. Eugene was used to people mispronouncing it, shortening it to ‘Kishi’ or something similar. However, Shishikuno, a native Japanese speaker, mulled over it like a difficult subject. “Koreshiki. Eugene Koreshiki.”

“Kore kishi ,” Eugene corrected. 

“Ah, whatever. Think of it like a nickname,” Shishikuno said, sprawling over his desk. “Where are you from, Koreshiki?”

“Japan,” Eugene said. The simple, non-confrontational answer. He said it all the time in England ( I’m from Japan. I’m good at English because I’ve lived here since I was a kid. Yes, I’m mixed. No, I don’t know what your Japanese name would be. No, I do not watch anime. Yes, I can speak Japanese). 

“No, like, you’re mixed, aren’t you?” Shishikuno asked, although it sounded more like a statement. Despite being a kid with bricks in place of brains and an overly jumpy personality, Eugene found that Shishikuno took his social affairs incredibly seriously and handled it with a lot of care. 

“Yeah. My dad is white. My mom is Japanese.” Somehow, it felt okay to say it out loud. And for the first time, the reaction wasn’t negative or confused. It was just a light ‘huh’ from Shishikuno’s half-open mouth before he sprang up to ask Eugene if he wanted to get bread. 

“The new melon bread down the street,” Shishikuno fiended. “I’m serious, man. They didn’t have this kinda stuff in the mountains. Let’s go, Koreshiki!” 

Sitting in the bakery, Eugene let himself be a kid for the first time since he was born. He laughed at every stupid joke, he did stupid things, and he let himself be amused by everything. 

“I like the way you smile, Koreshiki. It reaches your eyes,” Shishikuno commented before taking a bite of his bread. 

Right, Eugene thought. The middle ground, where he’s not too much of anything. A perfect balance. 

“Thanks,” he said. “I like yours too.”

II. MAKE ROOM

“Mogari,” his father declared the moment he was born. “His name will be Mogari.” 

Mo (虎) as in ‘tiger’, gari (落) as in ‘fall’. Tigers are ruthless hunters, unforgiving predators, and they are fearsome, beautiful creatures of the Earth. His father, with all of his might, tried so hard to make Mogari a tiger’s kid, a kid so brave and merciless, overpowered with his overwhelming exorcism skills. 

What he got instead was a disheveled kid with a crooked grin and a taste for adventure. Mogari, from the day he was born, disappointed everybody in his family. His large family tree with a thousand or so branches all looked down at him like a curious creature, more like a mythological animal than a tiger. They asked his father if this was really his biological kid—was this really the next Shishikuno exorcist?—and they pushed him out at reunions and dinners. You can only sit with us if you’re going to take your job seriously , they told him, clad in their kimono.

So Mogari sat alone most of the time. He played by himself, taught himself, and learned by himself. He did almost everything by himself because nobody else would take the time to squat down to his level. The adults in his house were too concerned with trivial matters that Mogari found useless, and his cousins and second cousins and third cousins were all cogs in the machine, afraid of turning around, afraid of defying their parents. 

“The only reason why they let you do whatever you want is because you’re the chief’s son,” one of his nameless cousins hissed at him in the hallways. It was one of those sunny days that Mogari couldn’t see because of the layers of pine trees shielding their estate from the world. It was one of those days where he felt extra alone. 

“So what? Are you jealous?” Mogari grinned. 

At a mere ten years old, Mogari grew bored of exorcism. It’s a gift from God, a wonderful advantage , his family told him. He found it to be a chore, frankly, and the ghosts he swallowed tasted like pure shit and he couldn’t eat more than only a handful at a time. Exorcism was repetitive, boring. Life was repetitive, boring.

“And yet you have so much room in that stomach for dinner,” his father groaned. “Mogari. When are you going to grow up?”

Grow up. Mogari thought that he did plenty of that. He grew up quickly compared to his coddled cousins because of the hours he’d spend by himself, ignored and ostracized. The rambunctious one , they called him. Replaceable. Lazy. Incompetent. The words were foreign but he knew they were meant to hurt. 

Mogari learned how to wash his clothes by watching their housemaids. He learned how to cook basic food from the chef who holed himself up in the kitchen. He observed and learned and observed and learned and did it all over again every day while his cousins wielded bamboo swords and learned how to fight, how to defend themselves, how to exorcise spirits, how to be a Shishikuno. 

He didn’t really need to learn that, though. Exorcism came naturally to him. He would just have to open his mouth and start drinking in the sour air of polluted spirits, then bite like a dog with his fanged teeth. His family, tainted with jealousy and amazement, watched his training sessions like caged, pacing animals. Look at the kid go, they said. He’s a monster.

Mogari finished the last of his soup, placing his bowl down on the dining room table with a soft clink. “Hey Dad,” he said. “Have you ever been to Tokyo?”

”Tokyo,” his father scoffed. “Why do you ask?”

”I wanna go to Tokyo.”

”Where did you hear about Tokyo? Why do you want to go to a city? You know, cities are plagued with ghosts and spirits who can’t rest. You’ll get a headache.”

”Isn’t that good for me? To have some real-world experience?” Mogari asked, almost jumping out of his seat in excitement. He had heard of Tokyo from one of the housemaids, a kind young woman who made a strange deal with his family regarding her spiritual possession. She had told him of Shibuya, of Ikebukuro and Akihabara, of the glistening red Tokyo Tower that oversaw the whole city, of the busy people and even busier lights. She said that the mountains were so quiet, so tranquil, almost eerie. 

“We train in solitude,” his father said sternly. “That’s how it’s always been.”

“Why don’t we just… do it different?” Mogari whined. 

“Because.”

“Because why ?”

“Eat your food, Mogari. Sometimes there’s a thing as talking too much.”

Mogari was not allowed to leave his house unless he was supervised by his father or a trainer, but he left all the time anyway. He found the stillness itchy, the quiet too quiet, and his life just so boring. 

Climbing the evergreens and the pine trees, he headed for a spot that he knew very well nestled between two thick branches. It overlooked a nearby town with tin rooves and stone wells, hoed pathways and a web of people, all small like ants from where Mogari watched them. He watched as they hosed down their cattle, shared food by a bonfire, and danced under the stars. With a crooked grin, he looked at them and imagined him with other people who didn’t think of him as less than or more than, but just another person. 

When Mogari was born, the midwife had pried his mouth open to check for the exorcist’s tattoo. When she saw the jagged black lines resting on his newborn tongue, he was declared gifted—that was the last time Mogari felt special, loved . He grew good at combating negative gazes and judgmental half-smiles and he built up iron walls as thick as the doors in his estate to keep all of it out, but sometimes when the sun was soft and his house was quiet, he let himself feel. He basked in the dirty light like a cat and traced the tatami floors, wondering what was so wrong about him. 

“Mogari,” a housemaid’s voice called from inside the house. “Sir?”

“I’m coming!” He yelled back. 

Mogari’s fourteenth birthday came with a wish. “I want to continue my studies in the city. Take me out of here.”

As always, his requests were met with shocked silence, then a quiet eruption of whispers and head shakes. This idiot kid , they muttered. He wants to do so much. 

“Mogari,” his father hissed by his ear, an ugly sound spitting out from his front teeth. “Be quiet .”

“It’s true, though,” he countered. “I want to live in the city. I don’t think this solitude is working for me. And wouldn’t it be great if I could go into town and help people while finishing my training? Think about it—have you ever thought about it?”

It was clear that, no, nobody in his family had ever thought about it and they were never going to. Mogari waited, holding his breath and crossing his fingers under the bamboo table, but no straight answer ever came. His father, inhaling deeply, cut a thin slice of mochi cake on to his porcelain plate and handed it to him. 

“Happy birthday, Mogari. My son,” he muttered. When was the last time Mogari had felt like his son? When was the last time Mogari felt like a human and not a caged animal? One of his housemaids told him about zoos, places were wild animals are forced to grow old in small, compact spaces, made to be watched by people with curious eyes. From their birth to their death, they are watched, observed. 

“So?” Mogari whispered. “How about it?”

His uncles with their slitted eyes, his aunts with their sharp tongues, his cousins with their unforgiving words. His father, a large man, almost disappearing in nature, looked back at him and he realized just how similar they looked with their crooked smiles and pointy teeth. 

“Why not?” His father finally said. 

Kamakura, a gentle city by the ocean, was Mogari’s beautiful dream packed into a physical place. It smelled of fish and salt and soil, but most of all it smelled like ghosts . 

Everywhere he stopped, from the curious grill restaurant to the public bathrooms, it smelled like the disgusting wafting nature of ghosts. It was perfect for the deal he made with his family, but it churned in his stomach like an angry thing. 

People in Kamakura were interesting. They didn’t wear floor-sweeping kimonos and tie their hair back, but wore shorts in the summer with flapping boxy tees. They said words that Mogari couldn’t even begin to decode and ate strange food wrapped in rustling paper. They looked at Mogari strangely when he passed them in his family’s clothes, and then he realized that maybe no matter where he went he would always be a couple worlds apart from everybody else. 

“Are you a student?” The cashier at the konbini asked him in a tired drawl. 

“A student?” Mogari repeated. “I mean, I guess.”

“Can I see a student ID?”

“I don’t have one.”

The cashier let out a loud sigh, similar to his father’s when he misbehaved. “Then I can’t offer you the student discount.”

“That’s fine. Hey, what is this, by the way?” Mogari asked, holding up his little plastic cup he had laid down a generous five hundred yen for. 

“... Ice cream.”

“Oh. Is it good?”

“Sir, I have other people waiting in line–”

And that’s how his days usually went until school began. 

School was a weird concept to Mogari. He couldn’t leave (well, he shouldn’t get caught ) and he had to sit in a room and open his books and study. It felt a lot like being back home, except when he looked out of his classroom window he could see the ocean and not the wall of bark that surrounded his room. 

They also wanted him to wear a uniform, though it wasn’t the heavy kimono he was used to but a button-down shirt and pants. They had him read from a textbook, but it wasn’t like the thick yellowing books about the types of spirits like the ones lying around in his house. School was like everything he was used to, but for some reason, so much harder . 

There was a special kind of kid in his class named Eugene. Eugene was unlike every other person he had met so far—he was nice, he didn’t look at Mogari with strangeness or disgust, and when he smiled it reached all the way up to his foreign green eyes. 

Mogari had saved Eugene from a vengeful ectoplasm that lurked in the dark waters of a seemingly innocent ocean. Drenched in the ocean’s spit, they had trudged out to the sands in their brand new uniforms, Eugene sputtering like a little kid who had just seen something horrible. Mogari’s teeth had finally bitten into something real , something unfabricated—a real life spirit!—and it sat in his stomach like a heavy bite of greasy food. Even though it made him feel like he was going to throw up, he relished in the success of it all. 

“I’m an exorcist,” Mogari half-heartedly explained. And instead of the usual look, the usual scoff, or the stressed, frantic movements, Eugene sat in his weighed-down drenched uniform and looked at Mogari like he had unlocked a whole other world. Eugene looked, almost understanding but never hating, and for once Mogari didn’t feel so small. 

“An exorcist, huh.”

III. SELF-SABOTAGE

Kaoru was almost never addressed by his name at school. The other kids called him a liar, a freak, and a monster. Never once did his beautiful name of Kanzaki Kaoru fall out from between their snarled lips. 

“He knows it, too,” they said, leaving hectic scribbles on his desk in the shape of crosses and vulgar pictures. “He knows he’s a freak.”

After school, in the golden afternoon sunlight, his third grade teacher had called him to stay behind class. She gestured to his colorful desk, his torn up notebooks and his dirty shoes. She asked him what had happened, holding his wrists gently and looking into his eyes. He didn’t like eye contact. He didn’t like that she could see him. 

Eventually, the ghost gave up and Kaoru watched his teacher’s eye roll out of its socket, dropping with a dirty splat on the floor. That’s right, he remembered his teacher leaving with everybody else hours ago, so there was no way that she could be trying to help him right now. He stood completely still, swallowing his tears down as his teacher melted into a pile of horrible black goo. Once she had done so, he grabbed his backpack and he ran home until he could no longer feel his legs.

Despite this, when he went home he was always Kaoru. He was Kaoru to his mother, Kao-chan to his sister, and a catalyst for the ghosts that loomed around his home. They looked down at him while he slept, gurgled unpleasantly by his ear while he ate, and circle him like prey as he sat in his room, watching their hideous faces contort and break away. 

Kaoru told himself from early on that he was a cursed boy. He didn’t need other people to tell him so—he knew from the way the ghosts looked at him, from they way they grabbed on to the hem of his clothing and dragged their unwilling feet behind as they looked at him with widened eyes. 

“Can you draw one out for me?” His mother asked one night as she sat on the floor of his bedroom. Eyes puffy from crying, he rubbed at them and started drawing the ghosts that stuck to his walls, followed in his wake. He drew them in all of their dark, scribbly figures, their decaying faces and body, their absurdly bent limbs. 

“Kaoru,” his mother breathed out, her voice small and quiet. It sounded like she was trying to tell him to stop, and she held on to his forearm, watching his fervent drawing slow to a stop. 

“I’m scared,” he said. “Can you just tell them to go away?”

“I will,” his mother promised. “I will tell them.”

Kaoru knew his mother wasn’t a liar and that she couldn’t see the same things he did. To her, his room was perfectly clean, his toys tucked away and his walls spotless, but he desperately wanted somebody—anybody—to see his room from his monster-like eyes in all of its grimy dirtiness and horror. 

Hidden in his mother’s arms, he closed his eyes and he whispered to himself that nothing was real until he stopped crying. His mother rubbed circles on his back like she did so often and she told him that he was just fine. She said it over and over again so much so that it didn’t sound real anymore. And when he opened his eyes, he realized that his mother was mostly telling all of it to herself. 

Kaoru had undergone five exorcisms and blessings and everything under the sun by the time he got to middle school. His mother tried her absolute best for him to feel better, for him to stop seeing ghosts and for him to stop being so afraid of the world. None of it worked, leaving everybody from therapists to priests befuddled, begging the question of what the hell was wrong with Kaoru?

The kids in his middle school homeroom class knew exactly what was wrong. It was because he was a monster. 

“Hey Kyosuke,” a burly boy in his class yelled out one day, grabbing Kaoru by the hair. “Did y’know this kid can see ghosts ?”

“Huh. Really?” Kyosuke said, hands in his pockets, eyeing Kaoru like a little creature to be eaten. “Then you must know of Hanako-san, right?”

“That’s not fuckin’ real,” Kaoru snapped, instantly feeling his stomach drop at Kyosuke’s expression. He closed in on him, sharp knuckles a bare inches away from his face as he bared his teeth like a wild animal. 

“What’d you say?” Kyosuke asked, quietly, dangerously. 

“I said that that shit isn’t real.”

“Is that so?”

Bent over the toilet bowl, his hair sopping wet and his clothes soaked, Kaoru knelt in the bathroom stall with his head held down by Kyosuke. 

“Tell me if you see her,” Kyosuke laughed, shoving his head under. “I heard she grants wishes. Maybe you should ask to be less of a freak.”

Kaoru’s words bubbled up in the bowl, reduced to nothing but little white pearls. He gasped for air against the side of the bowl with his head turned to graze the water, his organs filling up with gallons of disgust and regret, eyes blurry with confusion. 

He made a silent wish against the blue, whispering it only to himself; he wished to be dead by the time his torture was over. He didn’t wish for Kyosuke to get in trouble, or to stop seeing ghosts, or to live a better life, but he wished for himself to be dead. 

Kaoru loved manga. He loved action stories with strong protagonists with magical powers, defeating everybody that bullied them. He loved romance stories between shy boys and confident girls, proving that love truly was all around. He loved adventure stories where a big group of friends would go on a trip together to save the world. He loved everything about stories that took his mind away, locked in him a world that only he could see, and expelled every horrible little emotion. 

“All Kaoru does is read manga,” his mother would complain outside of his door on the phone. “He won’t go outside.”

But that’s how he liked it. In the safety of his room, he would sit on his beanbag and tear through volumes upon volumes until he couldn’t open his eyes anymore. The ghosts would swirl around his room but when he sank into the bottoms of the stories that he wished to be a part of, the stories that he longed so hard to live in, nothing in his real world would matter anymore. Not the cold touches, not the insistent stares. Just Kaoru Kanzaki and his favorite distraction. 

There was always a certain distinction of protagonists in manga. With wild, colored hair and flashy appearances, the protagonist was always kept safe even after all of the trouble they went through. No matter what attacked them, whether it be other kids, ghosts, or monsters, they ended up victorious. 

Kaoru snuck out one night to get his ears pierced. He figured that if he looked more scary and intimidating, the ghosts would stay far away. They would be put off by his blazing eyes and his glistening jewelry and his bright hair and they would assume that he was a monster just like everybody else in his world did. So he pierced his ears, red hot throbbing pain in his ears and in his eyes, and he bleached and washed his hair in his messy bathroom sink. 

“Kaoru, come out of the bathroom! I need to pee!” His sister yelled, banging on the other side of the wooden door. “Please!”

When he slid the door open, she stood with her hand to her mouth. She carded through the wet strands of his whitish hair, plastered to his cheeks like albino seaweed, and she tutted. 

“Oh, Mom is gonna hate that,” she muttered, but she kept looking and soon she was stroking his hair like his mother used to do when he got too upset and overwhelmed. “She’s going to hate this.”

“That’s fine,” Kaoru said back, and he realized just how boyish his voice sounded next to his sister. 

“Yeah. That’s fine,” she said. “It’s fine, Kaoru. You look good.”

Kaoru and his sister have the same eyes from his mother. His are scarred and crossed because there was a night where he hated himself too harshly. His sister’s are big and round, curious and inspecting. He hated looking at himself in the mirror or at his sister or at his mother because they were all reminders of what went wrong, how he could’ve turned out, how he should’ve turned out. But with his forehead pressed against his sister’s with her shallow breaths off the top of his head, he reached out to hug her back and he felt strange guilt dripping like acid all the way to his stomach. 

“Are you okay?” He asked quietly. 

“I’m fine,” she replied. “You’re very sweet for asking.”

When Kaoru looked up from his book, he saw two kids staring back at him. One had reddish hair, like the kind you only really see on white people, and the other had a large crooked smile and sparkling eyes much like the ocean of Kamakura. He looked back at them, bleached white hair, itchy scabs along his eyes, and he felt out of place once again. Like every day, he felt out of place. 

“You can see ghosts,” Shishikuno said, his mop of black hair distinct in Kaoru’s memory from the first day of school. These two were the idiots who came late, drenched in salty water. 

“How do you know that?” 

“You helped me, remember? The giant samurai spirit in the water?” Shishikuno said. “You’re brilliant. We need you.”

Ghosts were only ever trouble. They drove Kaoru’s friends away, made him seem like a weirdo, and exploited his childish kindness. Their touches were freezing cold, their eyes swimming with anger, their breaths hot and fiery. And yet, here were two kids who had experienced a sliver of a life similar to his, looking at him without their eyes darting to his scars, his ears, his hair. They looked at his eyes. 

And best of all, they made an effort. 

“We watched Slam Dunk,” Korekishi said hurriedly the next day. “It was amazing . I get it now. Kanzaki, you have a really good taste in manga!”

It was all Kaoru ever really needed to hear. He didn’t need pity or sorrow from other people—what he really craved was connection above all. Korekishi and Shishikuno, idiots drenched in seawater who sat through an entire movie just for Kaoru, were the only two people he had ever met who bothered to care. 

For the first time in fifteen years, Kaoru didn’t feel so alone. In fact, he felt overwhelmed with love, heart surging, and he smiled. 

“Yeah. I can see ghosts. What do you want from me?”

IV. DISENCHANTED

Koutarou’s first memories were of a vinyl spinning and spinning like a hypnotic disc on his father’s record player. At four years old, his stubby hands had gripped on to the edge of the machine, watching the needle scrape lightly across the surface, producing soft sweet music from the thin lips of the vinyl. 

“Isn’t it beautiful, Koutarou?” His mother said, her gentle hands rubbing his back. “Your dad has such good taste in music.”

His mother opened her mouth to hum along to the tunes, her lilting high voice tickling his tummy. 

“Try singing, Koutarou,” she said. So he opened his mouth, too, following the little notes just like his mother. 

Koutarou’s mother passed, but he didn’t remember any of it happening. One morning, he woke up in a frozen glow of the autumn light and he didn’t hear the usual hum in the kitchen, the singing in the living room, or the radio’s staticy music. He got up from his bed, his feet pattering against the hardwood floor, and he walked around his empty house until somebody broke through the quiet. 

“Koutarou,” the voice whispered, slow and soft. “Go back to bed, Koutarou.”

It was the voice of his mother, but no matter how much he spun around and looked and called out her name he couldn’t see her. All he could do was sit in one place and listen. 

“Go back to sleep,” she said. 

“I don’t wanna,” he said back. “Where are you? I can’t see you.”

“I’m not here anymore.”

“What happened?”

The silence returned, and Koutarou noticed how cold his feet felt, how the weather outside was getting a little bit more chilly. How his house seemed so big. 

“Mom? What happened?”

“I’m gone. Say, Koutarou, how can you talk to me?”

“I don’t know,” he replied honestly. “Do you want me to stop talking to you?”

“No! No, never. I’m just happy, that’s all.”

Koutarou liked walking to school, especially when the weather was nice. He would skip along the sidewalk, feeling the spray of the ocean on his face, plucking magnolias and hyacinths and kicking pebbles like a soccer ball. Koutarou liked being outside and he liked saying hello to the aunties at the convenience store and the cigarette-smoking men who were taking breaks from fishing. 

Koutarou liked school even more. He liked playing with his friends and running laps in gym and eating lunch while watching his friend’s new DS games. He liked getting the answers right in math class and writing stupid things in his deskmate’s notebook. 

And sometimes after school his father would come pick him up on his motorcycle with his long hair tucked into his helmet, his arms littered in dramatically colored tattoos and his bike roaring like the music he played from his speaker and all of the other kids would tell Koutarou that his dad was like a rockstar, the coolest person around. And Koutarou would feel like he’s at the top of the world, riding on the back seat of the Hellcat. 

Koutarou loved everything about his life. He especially loved the fact that even though his mother was gone, he could still hear her. It was like she had never left. He could still hear her laughing at his stupid jokes, telling him that his makeshift bouquets were beautiful, and she would still reprimand his father for riding to the school on his bike even though he couldn’t hear her. 

“Mom said not to ride the bike to school,” Koutarou laughed, yelling over the grumbling engine as the roads lurched under him. 

“Yeah? Did she?” His dad said. 

“She did! Really!”

The bike slowed, the world coming back to the tips of Koutarou’s fingers, and his father pulled over to the side of the road right by the water. Even though it was spring, the sun was hot and it panted down on the cement. Koutarou always sweat easily. 

“Listen, kid. I’m starting to get worried. It’s been three years since she’s gone and you still talk about her like she’s here. Is it… Is it hard?” His father asked. 

“Huh?”

“Oh God, that was a stupid question. Of course it’s hard. But Koutarou, she’s gone. You know that… right?”

“I… know.”

“So, tell me about this . She’s… what, talking to you? Is it, like, her ghost?”

“I don’t know.”

“Koutarou, please. I’m trying to make sense of this.”

“I don’t know,” Koutarou repeated. “Dad, I don’t know. I just hear it. And it’s her, it’s my mom.”

“It’s your mom,” his father sighed, closing his eyes. He almost looked like he was praying, his face up to the sun, his hands clasped. “Right.”

“I’m not lying,” Koutarou said, and suddenly he was crying, hot tears dripping down his cheeks. “Dad, I’m not lying.”

“Jesus Christ,” his father whispered, voice barely audible. A car raced by, the music got louder, and the city of Kamakura seemed to shrink in on him. “I believe you, Koutarou. I’m sorry. I believe you.”

One of Koutarou’s favorite things to do was cook with his mother. When he was younger, he would peer over the stove while holding on to her apron, watching the boiling water and the simmering vegetables. He would taste the soup and help season the dishes and watch the glimmering knife slice down on cucumber and carrots and onions. 

Without his mother, Koutarou often found himself assisting his helpless father in the kitchen. Koutarou quickly came to understand that his father was only good with his hands when he was playing the guitar, so he did most of the slicing and boiling. Soon, his father stopped cooking meals and handed the responsibility over to Koutarou. 

He liked cooking. As he entered middle school and his studies became more than just running and playing, he found himself relieving his stress in the kitchen. He would hear his mother’s voice coaching him through family recipes, walking him through the steps with her gentle guidance. 

In middle school, Koutarou also learned to not let others know about his special skill. The kids he used to play with in elementary school soon turned on him when they saw him talking to nothing in the locker rooms, and the girls who came back from winter break looking much prettier called him ‘weird’ and ‘strange’. So he kept it all to himself. It was like a little secret between him and all of the passed souls of Kamakura. 

After school, Koutarou built himself a schedule. He would go home and procrastinate on his homework by baking pastries, then biking to the park to let the ghosts smell the aroma—he found that a lot of them missed the smells and senses of the physical world. He would sit at the park for hours until it went dark, listening to the ghosts who were frustrated, confused, anxious. And while doing so, Koutarou would feel his shoulders get lighter and his heart get softer. 

While walking after school one day, he heard his mother. She came in like a whisper, as if she was telling him a secret. 

“Koutarou, I think it’s time for me to leave,” she said. It was in Koutarou’s second year of middle school, when he begrudgingly realized that he had no friends and he was considered his school’s freak. He stopped, his beat-up sneakers scraping against the cement. 

“What?” He muttered. 

“You’ve grown up so much. You’re so capable. That’s all I really wanted for you. And you’ve gotten good at taking care of your father, of the house… It’s everything I could ask for. I think I’m content now, and I can pass. I’m ready.”

“No, wait—Mom, I’m not ready!” Koutarou said, almost like he was begging. “Mom, can you hear me? Mom?”

And just like when he was a kid again, the world around him was dropped in deafening silence. Koutarou felt like the six year old who lost his mother one more time as he swam through the quiet in search for anything—just anything—until he found himself face-to-face with an elderly woman. 

“Are you okay?” She asked kindly. Everything about her was round and sweet, but for some reason her eyes bore deep holes into his skin. It stung like a million piercings and he found that almost everybody on the street was looking at him, pathetic and hyperventilating, sweating and crying like a little kid. 

“Should we call your parents?” Another person asked, squatting down to look at him at eye-level. When Koutarou looked up at the person’s face, he felt the nauseating sickness travel from his gut to his throat, and he threw up. 

“Hey, kid,” his father said, knocking on his door. In the summer before high school, Koutarou found himself curled up in his room like usual. He wondered what the ghosts did now that he didn’t go outside often. He wondered if they missed him like he missed his mother. 

Koutarou found that it was getting increasingly difficult to look at people when they were looking at him. He could only imagine the things they were thinking. Was he a freak to them too like he was at school? Was he a weirdo like all the girls constantly whispered?

“It’s been a while since you’ve… you know–”

“Been outside?” Koutarou said.

“Yeah, that. But I was talking about the guitar. It’s been a while since you’ve played.” 

He was right. Koutarou was busy stewing in self-doubt and his crippling anxiety to do anything else. 

His father had taught him how to play music at a young age. He told Koutarou was music was a gateway to the soul, a speaker for the mind, and a peek into little people’s lives. His father, a proud musician, often had the house bursting with tunes and made sure to hammer the importance of music to Koutarou. 

“You’re good, you know,” his father said, sitting at the edge of his bed. “Really good. You get it from me.”

That earned a little laugh out of Koutarou. 

“You should play. It usually gets me out of funks like this.”

Koutarou entered high school with a guitar on his back, a baseball cap covering his eyes, and a bucketload of anxiety enough to flood the town. His father told him to be strong, and the ghosts he passed by at the park told him that high school was nothing to be scared of. Koutarou still felt like throwing up anyway. 

He spent his lunch by a stairwell where no students passed through. He ate his homemade bento that he got up early to make and he tugged at his hat. His wonderful silence was soon disturbed by three kids, all of whom looked like terrifying strangers. 

And just like always, his lunch came back up at the sight of their eyes. Koutarou stood frozen, his mouth warm with vomit, and a thousand thoughts crashed into him like a semitruck. Why would they talk to him? How did they find him? Why would they find him?

“Hey, Tamon, right?”

“Fuck. I have to go,” he muttered, right before his stomach acid swirled out. 

The three kids tried again and again without fail. Koutarou felt like a chased animal, constantly terrorized by people he didn’t know. 

Then, one day, the scary kid from his homeroom approached him. “Why can’t you talk to us?”

“I… uh… I have a hard time looking at people. When they talk. I have a hard time talking to… People. Yeah.”

“Oh, I see,” the kid said, rustling through his blonde hair. Then, he untied his tie and held it out in front of him. “So, if I blinded you, could you talk to me?”

When Koutarou’s world suddenly became shrouded in darkness, he felt the jitters subside and his stomach stopped turning. He sat on the cold steps by his lunchbox and he smiled. “Oh, yeah, this totally works.”

“Cool. So, I hear that you can communicate with ghosts.”

“How did you know that?”

“I heard it. We need someone like you in our club. The Phantom Busters. How does that sound?”

“The… Phantom Busters? Wait, can you hear them too?” Koutarou asked. 

“Worse. I can see them.”

Koutarou reached up slowly to pull the tie down from his eyes. “You can see them?”

“Yeah. I mean, it sucks, right? Gets in your way and people think you’re crazy.”

“Yeah. Yeah, they do!” Koutarou agreed eagerly. “I didn’t know there were other people like this. I thought I was… y’know, crazy.”

“You’re not,” the kid shrugged. Koutarou saw that he had scratchy scabs around his eyes, piercings running up his ears, but he looked at Koutarou with such a kind gaze. “So what do you say?”