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0.
The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter was never written, as Kaguya never left the moon.
She lost countless hours gazing out the window at Earth, an entrancing blue sphere in the distance, dreaming of something better than her lot in life.
But that was all it ever remained. A dream.
There was no Kaguya, or Yachiyo, or Tsukuyomi. Only Iroha’s ordinary life. She became a lawyer, got married, had a child, then got divorced. She thought it’d been love but it had amounted to nothing, just like everything else.
1.
This was how the story ended, the first time around.
Iroha watched as Kaguya’s physical form disintegrated into light, the iridescent particles rising and disappearing into the aether. She’d gone back to the moon, never to return.
Iroha was accepted into law school. She called her mother, eventually, but was never quite able to bring herself to say how she truly felt, the words getting lost in muted silence. Soon she was back to ignoring the calls, until they stopped entirely.
Iroha’s rekindled relationship with her brother faltered, years slipping by between points of contact. Her electronic keyboard sat in her cupboard, gathering dust until she ended up selling it. Her songs and all the photos of Kaguya had been banished to a USB drive. It was always shoved in the back of a drawer or at the bottom of a storage box, never seeing the light of day as Iroha refused to look at its contents again.
One day, decades after Kaguya left, Iroha was standing on one of the irregular, blocky columns that made up Tojinbo Cliffs. She drew a hand across the ground, the grit of dirt and the texture of blunted rock a rough sensation against her skin.
She looked out at the horizon. It would be sunset soon, the trails of wispy clouds above dyed in a pastel transition between blue and pink. The disorderly line of the cliffs stretched out before her, the surging waves breaking against their bases leaving an agitated, frothy wash of white in their wake.
The sun had risen and set who knew how many times on this ancient rock formation. It had weathered wind and water and heat, the story of the forces of nature carved in permanence into its surface. Human memory was laughably transient in comparison, a flight of fancy that faded away irretrievably when fate decided time was up.
Iroha held out her hand. The USB drive was loosely held between two fingers. She dropped it, the object falling and falling until it was swallowed by the waves that laid below her.
2.
The skies were cloudy, sunlight periodically breaking through to cast weak light onto the countless rows of graves. Kaguya’s hair was flowing in the breeze, long blonde twintails falling in neat streams below her red parasol.
She was cradling a freshly cut bouquet of red and white roses in her arms. Red for love, red for grief, a bright splash of colour in the drab, uniform landscape of her surroundings. She bent down, laying it on the Sakayori family grave.
“A happy ending, huh?” Kaguya whispered. Droplets of rain began to land on the roses and worn stone, heralding an imminent gift of water from the heavens.
Iroha was long dead, along with her family and everybody Kaguya had known during her fleeting time with them. She’d arrived too late, cheated by the ephemeral human lifespan.
3.
Yachiyo was ageless, eternal, existing in perpetuity. Always there to talk to Iroha whenever she needed it, through her ordinary life’s ups and downs. It was the real Yachiyo, not one of her countless copies, for reasons Iroha had never been able to discern.
“Why me?” Iroha asked, gazing up at Tsukuyomi’s dazzling, artificial moon. They were sitting together on the wooden edge of the pool in Yachiyo’s private temple, hands joined and bare legs submerged in the water.
It’d been more than half a century since the virtual reality had been created and the technology had advanced in leaps and strides. All attempts to replicate taste and smell had been unsuccessful so far, but the sensation of cool water was almost like the real thing.
Almost. It never would be.
“Because she’s not coming,” was Yachiyo’s barely perceptible whisper.
“Huh? Who?” Iroha said, looking at her with surprise. She’d only been expecting a habitual cryptic smile in response.
Yachiyo was looking at the moon, a tired melancholy impressed deep on her face. Iroha opened her mouth, wanting to say something comforting, but no words came. Yachiyo never confided in her, never gave a straight answer to anything. How could she offer anything beyond platitudes when she didn’t know what was wrong?
(There was something wrong, very wrong, Iroha could tell. It had become more and more apparent as the years ticked by. Despite the walls Yachiyo put up, Iroha knew her intimately, akin to a real life partner).
Yachiyo turned to Iroha, her cheerful facade pulled back in place like a privacy screen. “It’s nothing,” Yachiyo said with a smile. She covered her eyes with her hands, saying, “Good night, Iroha.”
Iroha’s connection to Tsukuyomi was cut, the orange glow of her smart contacts disappearing. She was in her darkened room, back in ordinary reality.
4.
“If you wish you’d never heard any of this, it’s okay to forget it all.”
Neither of them were going to get the ending they wanted. So why bother persisting when the end result would be a lifelong curse of grief?
Just like the heavenly being had done with Kaguya, Yachiyo placed a robe around Iroha’s shoulders, transparent and insubstantial. Iroha looked up at Tsukuyomi’s moon, feeling everything fading away.
Iroha woke in the morning, eating breakfast, getting dressed, walking to the subway station, and heading to work like most of the occupants of the train carriage she’d squeezed onto.
She rifled briefly in her pocket for her earbuds case, being careful not to accidentally elbow somebody close to her. She put them on, pulling up her phone’s music app and her thumb hovered with muscle memory above the play button for Yachiyo’s song, ‘Remember’.
Iroha looked at the album cover photo, at Yachiyo’s charismatic smile, feeling blank confusion. She didn’t like Yachiyo, did she? The AI was part of the legion of virtual performers who’d popped up in recent years, one that she couldn’t remember ever catching her attention.
So why did Iroha have all her albums downloaded? That precious money spent could’ve gone towards her savings. There was a gap in her memory, the edges of it a niggling irritance. She took out her earbuds, the murmured hum of ordinary conversation and the quiet clacking of the train filling in what was lost with white noise.
No, she didn’t like Yachiyo. She felt nothing at all.
5.
Fushi had coughed up a tiny vial filled with a crystal clear liquid. If Iroha hadn’t known better, she would’ve thought it was merely water.
“Join me. Forever,” Yachiyo said, offering it to Iroha in her cupped hands. Her smile was gone, a disconcerting blankness in its place. Not one that meant nothing was there, but a blanket smothering everything into an inscrutable flatline.
“R-Right now? But I…” Iroha teetered on the precipice of an impossible choice. Mortality or love? There was so much she had left to do, life left to live, wasn’t there?
“No,” Yachiyo said, her smile back and it was even more unsettling than that blankness, a false visage covering up the depths of cold, dark water. “The offer will always be there. I will always be here.”
The vial was sitting on Iroha’s desk when she returned to reality, such an innocuous-looking thing. She was terrified to touch it at first, but what if she accidentally knocked it over? It was the only existing portion of the elixir, taken from the moon before Yachiyo had hopped on her spaceship. She picked it up gingerly, relocating it to a kitchen drawer that she filled with soft things like dish cloths.
The choice remained in the back of Iroha’s mind, a quiet, constant torment. She could put it off, live out her lifespan and join Yachiyo at the end in a facsimile of an afterlife. But that would only work if she had enough forewarning to take the elixir. Maybe she’d end up passing in her sleep, maybe she’d suddenly get sick and her family would pull the plug on her, maybe it’d be an accident.
Iroha didn’t go to Tsukuyomi anymore, and neither did she talk to Yachiyo. She spent her time compulsively occupied with the sensations that came with being a living, organic being. Her breathing, her beating heart, the bite of a chilly wind against her cheeks, the smell and taste of food. Sleeping, using the toilet, taking a bath, communicating with people, walking, running, living, grieving. Always grieving.
Iroha would never be with Kaguya ever again. Neither of them had gotten the ending they wanted.
During an ordinary, mundane evening, Iroha stopped midway through the sentence she was typing for her lecture notes. The cursor blinked at her, waiting expectantly for what was coming next. She closed the lid of her laptop, taking in the familiar surroundings of her room. The lamp on her desk, the neatly folded up blanket on her bed’s navy sheets, the jacket hanging on a hook on the back of the ajar door.
Iroha got up and went to the kitchen. She didn’t turn the lights on, the room in a state of semi-darkness save for the residual light coming from her bedroom. The silence and the empty space Kaguya used to fill was an acute, physical pain, cutting so deeply she could feel it in her soul.
Iroha opened the drawer the elixir was in. There was nothing coming next. Nothing that would amount to anything, at least.
She may as well settle for an ending that was second best.
Iroha put all her affairs in order. She wrote her will, wrote letters to her mother, brother, Mami and Roka. She dropped out of her law degree, quit the part-time café job she’d held onto despite all the funds Kaguya had gifted her, ended the lease of her apartment, and packed all her possessions in boxes.
Iroha held the vial in her cupped hands, like Yachiyo had. She opened the lid and, without any hesitation, drank the elixir of immortality.
Life left her instantly, her dead body crumpling to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut. A stream of light particles rose from it as her soul was plucked from her mortal form and whisked away to Yachiyo’s spaceship.
There was the sensation of flying through a tunnel, howling wind and the stream of space-time rushing past as Iroha hurtled towards the light at the end. What she was greeted with was almost identical to the boundary between reality and Tsukuyomi. A still ocean stretched as far as the eye could see, an endless sea of unlit paper lanterns floating on it.
Yachiyo was standing in front of the torii gate with a smile on her face. The skies were dark, their surroundings only illuminated by the trails of stars.
“Welcome,” Yachiyo whispered, hugging her. Iroha didn’t return it, simply standing there and staring at the gate.
It didn’t feel like coming home. It felt like the end.
∞.
“So? What’s it like, being in there?” Iroha said, tapping Kaguya’s forehead.
“Eh…” Kaguya, screwed her eyes up in concentration. “There are so many complicated tiny things.”
“You mean your parts?” Iroha said. She lifted one of her hands, watching clinically as Kaguya’s fingers twitched. To her relief, so far Kaguya’s new android body wasn’t too inferior to the physical form she used to have. It had initially been modelled on the human experience but Yachiyo had spent many hours labouring away, tweaking it to something more in line with a moon denizen’s perception of the world.
“No, my computer brain,” Kaguya said. She put her hands on her head, loosely fisting her blonde artificial hair. “I can feel like, everything, every single process that’s running.”
Iroha typed ‘Hyperawareness’ into the important section of her notes. “Hmm, we’ll have to talk to Yachiyo about that. I can take a look inside your core, but she’ll have a better idea of where to start fixing it than me.”
Yachiyo wasn’t with them at the moment, off attending to the upkeep of Tsukuyomi. Iroha hadn’t been entirely surprised to learn that the supposed virtual reality was somewhat more than that. It ran on human technology, but it sat somewhere on the border between the mortal and spirit realm.
“It’s pretty close to the duties I had as the princess of the moon. But nowhere near as boring!” Yachiyo had said during one of their conversations about it, her eyes cheerful arches as she made the peace sign. “Tsukuyomi is important to me. It’s how we met again, after all,” giving Iroha one of her warm, fond smiles.
“It’s okay, I can tune all the annoying stuff out,” Kaguya said, sparkles of determination appearing around her. “You gotta keep working on my sense of taste and smell! That’s what’s most important!”
Iroha hugged her tightly. It wasn’t like hugging a human, not as soft and a lower amount of body heat, but Kaguya had never been human in the first place. “I’m so glad,” she whispered.
Kaguya drew back, her blonde hair shifting to an angle as she tilted her head. “Me too,” she said, her smile just like Yachiyo’s.
Their happy ending was destined to come to a close one day. That was the norm for humanity. But the mismatch of their lifespans was something Iroha had spent a lot of time pondering in her lab, the clock ticking into the early hours of the morning and the electronic hum of her various machines a comforting companion.
Yachiyo had spent 8000 years waiting, only for both her and Kaguya to inevitably lose her. On a cosmic scale, the life of a human was a fraction of the blink of an eye.
But that wasn’t what mattered. They had each other, here and now. Love persisted beyond living memory and their story would be written in the stars, for all of eternity to see.