Book 1: Part I: Season of New Leaves — Chapter 6: |
Chapter 6
“The Natural History of the New Japan Islands” writes that over the years, a number of historians, biologists, and linguists have puzzled over the etymology of the name “minoshiro”, and come up with a few interesting theories.
An old accepted explanation was that its name came from the fact that looked like it was wearing a raincoat. But the book doesn’t say what kind of raincoat, and I’ve never seen one before, so I have no idea whether this explanation is accurate or not.
Another reason came partly from the cape-clad appearance, and partly from its white color, combined with the belief that the souls of the dead lived within it. Also, the fact that the minoshiro is usually terrestrial, but returns to the sea to lay eggs was a plausible origin for its name. A later explanation was that the red and yellow eggs that it laid in clumps of seaweed or coral resembled ornaments in the palace of the Dragon King.
Another unofficial reason came from the fact that the when it faced an enemy, the minoshiro’s tail will bristle and stand straight up, like a shachihoko4 found on the roofs of castles in the ancient past. They named it after the castle in Mino, but later research showed that the it was Nagoya Castle that had shachihoko, which was in the neighboring province of Owari. After that discovery, the explanation lost its appeal.
There are also numerous stories saying that “shiro” is the name Shirou shortened. Since Shirou was just over a meter tall, he was called Minoshirou (“mino” is three times the length of a standard-width cloth, around 108 centimeters). A different story said that once he met a snake-like creature with numerous tentacles, which also gave him the name Minoshirou. The stories are varied and hard to get a grasp on.2
Still on the topic of Shirou, one old folktale says that he was cursed by a white snake and turned into a minoshiro. Since other details of the story were lost, there is no way to prove its authenticity.
Personally, I think any of the stories are possible. At least it is much easier to understand compared to the etymology of the name of the toads that are everywhere on Mt. Tsukuba. In the book it says that “it uses powers to draw in and devour insects”. Who would believe the idea that toads have canti?
Another mystery surrounding minoshiro is that it’s not mentioned in most ancient texts. Even though many of the texts from over a thousand years ago are off-limits, the word “minoshiro” is still nowhere to be found in available texts. That means that minoshiro were discovered within the past couple hundred years, but an entirely new creature evolving within such a short timespan is unthinkable.
One hypothesis that seeks to explain this phenomenon has been garnering attention lately. It says that their evolution was driven by the collective human unconscious.
But that seems a bit extreme. Just recently, it was determined that minoshiro descended directly from a species of sea slug called the indica nudibranch that lives around the Boso region. Although it’s hard to imagine a 30-centimeter long sea slug evolving into something as big as a minoshiro, when you look at the {raincoat-like protruding gills} you have to admit that there is a definite resemblance. If the sea slug is really the ancestor of the minoshiro, and they share the same name,3 then that is supporting evidence for the first two theories that were mentioned earlier. But I think more research is still needed.
The reason I’m mentioning all this is that in order to understand what I’m talking about when I get to the part about meeting the false minoshiro during summer camp, you need to know what a real minoshiro is.
Since minoshiro didn’t exist a thousand years ago, it’s possible that they might not exist a thousand years from now. So even though there is already literature on minoshiro, I still want to explain it again here.
Their length ranges from tens of centimeters to one meter, the smallest are about the size of a hornworm, while the big ones are as long as a millipede. They have a big Y shaped antenna on their head, and two smaller pairs of feelers on the end of them. Their eyes are small and covered by skin, so it is assumed that they can only detect light and darkness. Minoshiro have short legs like a hornworm’s or millipede’s (this feature makes them unlike gastropods such as the sea slug), and can walk at a good speed. The movement of their numerous legs is reminiscent of a military march. There are colored, half-transparent quills on their back that glow at the tips.
Minoshiro are omnivores and mainly eat moss, lichen, fungus, various insects, and seeds. They are unaffected by poisons, separating it out of their food and storing it in their bodies. Because of this, minoshiro indirectly cleanse the soil. Their bodies also change colors depending on what they have recently eaten. This can be seen most obviously after a meal of mosses, when they turn bright green. This trait is also seen in sea slugs after eating sea anemones.
When a minoshiro is threatened, it will raise and rattle the quills on its back to intimidate predators. If the predator continues to advance, it will get hit with the quills, which are full of deadly venom. Something worth mentioning is that they never threaten humans in this way.
The minoshiro species includes giant minoshiro (a rare type with body length above two meters and covered in silver bristles), red minoshiro (with half-transparent red bodies), blue minoshiro (with blue-tipped feelers), rainbow minoshiro (covered in fine hairs similar to the powdery scales on a butterfly, and reflect light like jewel beetles), and various subspecies.
Their size and extremely unpleasant taste due to the poison in their bodies mean that minoshiro have almost no natural enemies. Their only predator is the tiger crab, which lurks under sandy beaches. Most cases of minoshiro being hunted by tiger crabs seem to occur around the time they make their annual migration to the beach in order to lay eggs.
Just to be completely clear, let me give a brief introduction about tiger crabs. They are ferocious carnivores descended from the swimming crab, with sharp, diamond-shaped shells forty-five to a hundred-twenty centimeters wide, colored to blend in with the sand, large pincers, three spikes on their heads, and serrated edges on the front of their shells. Their back legs are useful for swimming as well as for burrowing into the sand. Tiger crabs are capable of jumping up to two meters straight up out of the sand in order to catch their prey. They are common around Hasaki beach, but can also be found in meadows, forests, and mountains. They eat everything from frogs, lizards, snakes, and small mammals to sea birds, beached dolphins, whales and other sea creatures. Their heavy shells are nearly impenetrable, though when tiger crabs meet, they often fight to the death, and cannibalism is common. Despite their vicious nature, they are not considered a threat to humans.
It is said that minoshiro can autotomize parts of their bodies to escape from tiger crabs, as well as do other interesting things that I’ve not yet seen.
As for the first part, I have seen it before, quite unexpectedly. It was during early summer the year before we graduated from Harmony School.
“Saki, look over there!” Maria called quietly.
“What is it?”
We were on a little clearing hidden by thickets overlooking the beach. The two of us often went there after class if the weather was good.
“A minoshiro got caught by a tiger crab…”
I stuck my head out over the bushes and caught a whiff of the salt air. The beach was deserted. Looking at where Maria was pointing, I saw a single minoshiro on the sand about twenty or thirty meters away from the ocean. It was writhing as if it wanted to go toward the water but was being rooted to the spot.
Looking carefully, we saw that its legs were clamped between dark green pincers.
“We have to help it,” I jumped up, but Maria pulled me back down.
“What are you doing, stupid! What if someone sees you?”
“There’s no one here.”
“You don’t know when someone will, right? That’s the spot where the boys go fishing.”
Admittedly, running naked across the beach wasn’t something you normally do, so we threw on our clothes and dashed down the hill. As we approached, the camouflaged body of the tiger crab revealed itself. It had the minoshiro’s legs in one pincer, quills in the other, and was looking at it as if contemplating how it should go about eating it.
I faltered. Even though it was just a crab, tiger crabs were known to take on grown bears and kill them. It was said that they don’t attack humans, but for a two kids without their canti yet, it was still impossible for us to do anything.
Until then, I hadn’t prayed that someone would show up to help us. Dear god, if not Shun, then at least Satoru…
“What now? We could try throwing sand at it?”
I was about to have a nervous breakdown, but Maria was appraising the situation calmly.
“Wait. It’s okay, it’s fighting back now.”
The minoshiro started stroking the tiger crab’s claws with its feelers as if trying to soothe it. The tiger crab slowly stopped moving, bubbles frothing from its mouth.
All of a sudden three feelers sprouted from the minoshiro’s back, and started waving as if gesturing to the tiger crab. The feelers autotomized and fell onto the sand, still wriggling.
The tiger crab remained motionless, still holding onto the minoshiro and foaming at the mouth.
Still writhing in pain, the minoshiro raised two more feelers, waved them jerkily in front of the tiger crab, and let them fall to the ground.
Now there were five feelers wriggling on the sand. The tiger crab made no response, and the minoshiro went still.
About half a minute later, the minoshiro started moving again, but this with hostility.
With its free quills it started hitting the tiger crab’s shell. Once, twice, three times. The fourth time, it lifted one single venomous quill, stiffened it with all its strength, and autotomized it. It hit the tiger crab’s pincers as it fell.
The tiger crab loosened its grip. The minoshiro extracted itself and made a beeline for the open water.
Ignoring the minoshiro, the tiger crab picked up two of the feelers on the sand and started eating them.
“Well, it looks like it succeeded,” Maria said.
She was smiling, but it looked more like a grimace. Maria didn’t really like animals, and in actuality probably didn’t care at all about the minoshiro, but pretended she did, for my sake.
“It lost six feelers though, poor thing.”
“It’s a cheap price to pay for its life though, isn’t it? Otherwise it would have been eaten.”
When a minoshiro can’t escape from a tiger crab, it will drop its feelers as bait, hoping that the tiger crab will let go of them to eat the feelers. There’s an interesting phenomenon that occurs here that isn’t seen in other animals: bargaining. How many feelers the minoshiro is willing to drop is a function between its physical fitness and how hungry the tiger crab is.
In the case that negotiations turn sour, the minoshiro will start attacking with its quills. The tiger crab can forcibly overpower the minoshiro, but if a quill slips between the gaps in its shell in the process, there’s a good chance it will die.
This rational behavior is surprising for two species that aren’t particularly intelligent. But for the tiger crab, releasing the minoshiro after it drops its feelers is probably just common sense.
Let’s get back to summer camp.
The next morning, we set about making breakfast and rice balls for lunch with our mess kits. Then we took down the tents, filled in the holes from the poles, covered up the traces of our campfire, packed everything back into the canoes and set off.
We traveled down the river through the morning mist, using both our paddles and our canti. On our left we could hear frequent bird calls, the high, stretched-out cry of the meadow bunting.
The sky was overcast ever since we woke up, which was a shame, but breathing in the fresh morning air drove away any sleepiness I had.
This part of the river was a lot wider than where we were yesterday. The right riverbank was a haze in the distance and often completely obscured by mist.
I thought back to geography class in Harmony School, when we learned about the transition between the Kasumiga inlet and the Tone river.
Two thousand years ago, Kasumiga Inlet was a huge inland sea called Katori Ocean that connected the present day Tone River to the ocean. At that time, the Tone River flowed much farther west into Tokyo bay.
To avoid the frequent flooding of the Tone River and to increase the land available for agriculture, Tokugawa Ieyasu decided to divert the river. After hundreds of years, the estuary was redirected all the way to Inubousaki. Sand was used to partially fill the Katori Ocean to reduce its size and it became the Kasumiga Inlet. (I became interested in Tokugawa Ieyasu after learning that he was able to pull off such a big project, but unfortunately, this story is only instance of him in history and geography textbooks.)
In the thousand years that followed, the Tone River and Kasumiga Inlet became what they are today. First, most of the parts that ran toward Tokyo bay rejoined with the Tone River. It goes without saying that a barren area like Tokyo has no need for water. So, the water lever in the Tone rose, and in order to prevent flooding, a canal was constructed to connect it to Kasumiga Inlet. Because of that, the inlet expanded to a almost its original size. It surpasses Lake Biwa in terms of surface area and is now Japan’s largest lake.
And now, since the lower reaches of the river run right by Kamisu 66, we built multiple canals to use the water for transportation. That’s why going upstream, and finally emerging at the river proper for the first time is quite exciting.
“Hey, let’s go faster,” Satoru said.
“Why? Don’t you want to look around here?” I asked.
“I’ll pass. There aren’t any animals here anyway.”
“But we’re almost at the place we’re supposed to be camping at tonight, right?” Mamoru said uncertainly.
“What are you talking about? Have you forgotten the true purpose of this trip? It’s to look for the evil minoshiro and blowdogs, yeah? Come on, let’s hurry up and cross the inlet and disembark.”
“Umm, Sun Prince said that we’re not allowed on the far side of the inlet. Getting off there…”
This time, even Maria looked hesitant.
“It’ll be fine. We’ll just take a quick look around and leave,” Satoru said nonchalantly, paddling away.
“What should we do?” I asked Shun, who looked deep in thought.
His answer was not what I expected.
“It would be bad if we were found out. But I kind of want to go see, since I don’t think we’ll get another chance to come here in the future.”
With these words, it was decided. Satoru came up with the sneaky idea of going to our formerly planned camping spot and leaving traces to make it look like we spent a night there.
“That way, when the next group comes along, they’ll think we were actually here, right?” he said, sounding pleased with himself.
I’ve never seen him look nearly as happy after doing something actually worth praising.
We set out across the lake again, going faster than was prudent. A small tern flew above us, challenging us to a race, but Sakuramasu 2 caught up to it in seconds. The bird wheeled around and flew out of sight.
I stretched out at let the breeze flow over me. I took off my hat before the wind blew it away and let my hair fan out behind me. My poncho-towel flapped and fluttered.
Even though I couldn’t see anything but water around me, I didn’t get tired of the view. The sun glancing out from between the clouds made a dazzling display on the crystal clear water of the lake, and the spray from our boat made miniature rainbows in the air.
I was so into the scenery that it took me a while to notice my vision going weird. Colors started flickering in front of my eyes and I saw afterimages in the corners of my eyes.
Turning around, I saw Satoru staring intently at the surface of the lake. When trying to move something, like a boat, on water, you first concentrate on an area in front of the boat, and try to reduce the distance. {But after gaining speed, you have to imagine pushing off the water and gliding over it in order to move.}
Both ways involve a lot of concentration and is tiring to do for a long time. Plus the fact that the boat is constantly moving up and while you’re staring at a fixed spot means that it’s easy to get seasick.
Satoru noticed my glance and looked relieved. “We’ve come pretty far, do you want to switch with me?”
I shook my head slowly, “I don’t think I can.”
“What do you mean you can’t?” Satoru said, sounding slightly angry.
“My eyes are all weird, I think I stared at the reflections for too long,” I explained.
Satoru stared disbelievingly at me, then reluctantly said, “I guess we can’t help it then. I’ll have to propel the canoe the whole way.”
I apologized to him, then remembered that I had a pair of sunglasses in my backpack and put them on. They were from my father, who ordered it specially from an artisan. It was made of high quality glass with a special mix of madder and persimmon dye that blocked the sun’s rays. I should’ve worn them right from the beginning.
Everything turned a shade darker when I put them on, but at least my eyes stopped hurting.
We were forbidden to use our cantus if there were any problems with our eyes. Someone as skilled as Shisei Kaburagi could use his cantus in complete darkness, beginners like us needed to be able to see what we were doing in order to create the proper images in our mind.
We crossed Kasumiga Inlet within an hour. As we were travelling over the deepest part of the lake, there was a big splash from the reed thickets and a huge shadow appeared in the water, vanishing in the next instant. It had a sort of diamond shape to it, so it was probably a tiger crab. Since we were nowhere near the shore at that time, I realized that tiger crabs must be better swimmers than I had originally thought.
Behind the reeds, we could see the deep forest and the green river running from it. We looked it up before coming here, and learned that the river was called Sakura River. Mt. Tsukuba should be right in front of us, but it was hidden by the tall trees.
Partway up, the river branched in two. We weren’t sure which way to go, so we chose the left branch because it was flowing more rapidly. About a kilometer later, the dense trees opened up and we saw Mt. Tsukuba ahead of us. The Sakura River wended northward from the west side of the mountain.
If we kept following the river, we’d end up too far away from Mt.Tsukuba, so we disembarked here.
“Yes! We made it,” Shun said, stepping off first.
I went next, followed by Maria, Mamoru, and lastly Satoru, looking exhausted from propelling the canoe the whole way himself. He went off into the bushes and we heard him throwing up. I felt a pang of guilt in my chest.
We hid the canoes among the reeds. Having come this far, it was unlikely that anyone would spot us, but we did it just in case. And to prevent them from floating away, we anchored them deeply in the mud.
“So what now? It’ll be lunchtime soon,” Mamoru said, looking hopefully at us.
“Let’s first go up the mountain and take a look around. Bring only light things that you need, and we can eat lunch when we get up there.”
Since Satoru was still groggy, Shun volunteered to be the leader. We usually complain when Satoru takes control, but everyone was willing to follow Shun. So we shouldered our backpacks and set off up the mountain.
The pathless climb was harder than we expected. Whoever was at the front used their cantus to clear away the ivy and brush, but it was so tiring that they had to switch every five minutes.
On top of that there was an astounding number of bush mosquitos, black flies, and other bloodsucking insects swarming around us. These insects can’t enter the Holy Barrier, which is why there were so many out here. Even though we kept killing them, they never stopped coming. We had to use our canti continuously, which burns a lot of energy. {And because my sunglasses made it hard for me to see the smaller bugs, I was even more tired.}
That’s why when a strange abandoned building suddenly appeared in front of us, we were all dumbstruck.
“What is that?” Maria asked, sounding creeped out.
It wasn’t unreasonable. The building was about the size of Kamisu’s public hall, covered so thickly in ivy and lichen that it looked like a slumbering creature that had grown out of the forest itself.
“…it’s probably Mt. Tsukuba’s shrine,” Satoru said, perusing an old map he had brought.
Although he wasn’t completely back to normal, Satoru had more or less recovered his energy after being back on solid ground.
“A shrine?” I asked, holding back a shriek as I accidentally trod on a toad. There were nasty animals creeping all over the mountain.
“It has a history of at least two or three thousand years. This building too, was probably already considered really old a thousand years ago,” Shun added.
“Should we eat here?” Mamoru asked.
Everyone was undoubtedly hungry, but the prospect of eating lunch here was unappealing.
Just as I was about to object, a blood-curdling scream came from my left. Someone else must have stepped on a toad too, I thought. But when I looked, I saw Satoru standing there, stiff as a board. And when Shun rushed over, he too froze.
“What’s wrong?”
I realized that all four of them had become still as statues. No one could answer my question.
What in the world was going on? I was this close to having a panic attack. Then, as I followed their gaze and saw what they had seen, it was my turn to scream.
In front of me was a bizarre creature I had never seen before.
The names evil minoshiro and false minoshiro came to me. The thing definitely resembled and minoshiro at first glance, but was completely different upon closer examination.
It was about fifty or sixty centimeters long, with rubbery skin that stretched and contracted constantly, making parts of its body bulge and shrink amorphously. On its back were clusters of half-transparent spines like a sea urchin’s, each glowing brightly with all the colors of the rainbow.
The ever-shifting colors overlapped and mixed, creating shimmering patterns in the air. Even with my sunglasses on, I could feel the beautiful lights numbing my brain.
The false minoshiro slunk slowly toward the shrine, leaving a trail of lights in its wake.
My own scream had awakened something in my mind. I turned toward Shun and Satoru and started shouting at them, “Hurry…Satoru! Shun! Catch it, it’s getting away!”
But neither of them moved; they simply stared at the false minoshiro.
I started to use my cantus, but hesitated. Earlier, I said that it was dangerous for multiple people to use their canti on the same thing. If someone was already focused on a target, it was better for everyone else to not use their canti, no matter what the situation was.
Both Shun and Satoru’s gaze were fixed on the false minoshiro. Usually, this was a sign that they were using their canti, but in spite of that, both were frozen to the spot.
It felt like an eternity, but in reality only a few seconds passed. The false minoshiro ambled into the tall grass and disappeared under the main building of the shrine.
I couldn’t understand why the four of them were still frozen in place, and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t even know what had happened in the first place to make them like that. I wanted to shake them awake, but was seized with the irrational fear that if I touched them, they would fall over dead.
The first to be snap out of the trance was, surprisingly, Mamoru.
“…I’m hungry,” he said in a small voice, looking around.
“Um, what exactly happened just now?”
Maria, Satoru, and Shun all came to their senses and sank onto the ground. Satoru looked really sick and Shun rubbed his eyes.
“Are we dead?”
Ironically, Maria’s question startled us into full awareness.
“That story was probably a lie. Don’t worry about it,” Satoru said, groaning.
“Probably” made it sound like he was trying to pretend that he wasn’t the one who made up the lie in the first place.
“That aside, how come I couldn’t move at all?”
“I couldn’t either. Why though? Satoru?” Maria wrapped her arms around herself uneasily.
“I dunno. As soon as I saw the lights, my mind went blank, and I couldn’t concentrate no matter how hard I tried.”
“Ah!” I exclaimed. “It’s just like that time, right? Like when we were at the Temple of Purity, looking into the flames of the altar…”
“I get it,” Shun said, getting to his feet. “That makes sense then. We were hypnotized.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s an ancient technique for controlling people. Through suggestions, you can make them fall asleep, tell the truth, or do whatever you command.”
I couldn’t imagine where Shun had learned something like this.
“But Saki was fine; she yelled at us to catch it and everything. Maybe she’s so thickheaded she’s immune.”
“No I’m not,” I snapped. “It’s because I was wearing sunglasses…”
The most simple-minded one out of all of us was definitely Mamoru, but I stopped myself before I said it aloud.
“Hypnosis uses flickering red and blue lights. The red sunglasses probably cut down its effectiveness. Let me see it really quick.”
As I wondered where in the world he got all this information from, he put on my sunglasses and stared up into the sky.
“But if Saki’s the only one who can use her cantus, it’ll be hard to catch that thing. It seems to like to hide in narrow crevices.”
“Looks like it. Hey, shouldn’t we be heading back soon?” Maria said, uncharacteristically nervous.
“Why don’t we go back to the canoes and have lunch?”
I wasn’t sure if Mamoru was scared, like always, or just hungry.
Suddenly, I had an idea.
“It’s okay! We can catch it.”
The four of them looked apprehensive, but as I explained my plan, their doubt gave way to hope and excitement. I couldn’t deny that seeing that gave me a rush.
At that time, we had no idea what the larger implications of catching a false minoshiro were.
“Alright, this is great. We got a big one,” Satoru said in a satisfied voice, after he had recuperated a bit.
“These guys look like they could be pretty tasty.” Mamoru too, sounded a lot more energetic now that he had eaten his lunch.
“You’re probably the only person in the world who thinks they look appetizing,” Shun looked slightly aghast.
I felt the same way
Levitating two meters above the ground in front of us were three tiger crabs. Contrary to our expectations, they hung there without struggling, blowing bubbles docilely. All three were a mottled, greenish-brown color, and the biggest crab sported a patch that resembled a map of sorts. The medium sized one had thin stripes on its shell that resembled plant roots and the smallest one had spots of green on it that looked like lichen.
Satoru flipped over the largest crab with his cantus to get a look at its underside. The tiger crab suddenly lashed out when the medium sized crab passed through his field of vision. It made as if to swim through the air and snapped its pincers menacingly.
“Woah. What’s its problem?” Satoru said. He grinned nervously, trying to cover up the fact that he had almost run away in fright just now.
We tied up the tiger crabs with some five-leaf vines. It was hard to do it just right so that they could move somewhat freely but still be under our control. Maria tried to loop the ends of vines around the spikes on their shells to make reigns, but the crabs were smarter than we expected. They kept turning to create slack in the vines and pulling them off with their claws. In the end, we had to pass the vines through bamboo stems to stop the crabs from tearing at them.
Although it took much more effort than expected, I was satisfied with our result. The sight of the three tiger crabs on the ends of their leashes reminded me of the ancient method of cormorant fishing. We set off looking for the false minoshiro, keeping an eye on the crabs to make sure they don’t get too close to each other.
We thought that the crabs would be unhappy about being bound and led around on a leash, but we were wrong. Or if they were unhappy, we couldn’t tell; all they did was eat. Everything alive within reach was snatched up and devoured.
At first, we were worried that once they ate their fill, the tiger crabs would stop searching for more food. But instead, they continued forward, dismembering their prey with their sharp claws. {The sight of snakes and toads wriggling in pain seemed to put them off, and they moved on after that.}
If nothing came of the search after all this, everyone would probably hate me for coming up with such an unpleasant idea.
But barely an hour later, Maria’s tiger crab hit the jackpot.
“Looks like it got something again,” Maria peeked under the shrine and grimaced. “Seems like something big this time…”
We all cringed when we heard that. The sight of a tiger crab gorging itself on a larger mammal was something no one wanted to see.
“Pull it out and see,” Satoru said, turning away.
“Help me.”
“You can do it yourself, right? Just use your cantus to pull in the ropes.”
“But it’s creepy,” Maria looked at us imploringly.
I have to confess that I ignored my best friend’s plea and pretended to be occupied with my own tiger crab. I was still feeling slightly ill from having seen Satoru’s crab disembowel its prey just a while ago.
“I’ll do it, then.”
Unexpectedly, Mamoru volunteered.
The two of them started pulling the tiger crab out while the rest of us hung back, expecting something unpleasant to appear.
“Look, they got it,” Shun said.
Hearing that, we turned our attention to the crab.
“The false minoshiro!” Maria shouted.
I put my sunglasses on just in time.
The tiger crab emerged, holding its prey tightly in both claws.
There was no doubt it was the one that had escaped earlier. Even though the tiger crab was clutching it so fiercely that it looked like it was about be cut in half, it was still struggling with all its strength to escape. When it saw us, all the spikes on its back shot straight up and the tips started glowing.
“Shun! Satoru! Hurry and catch it!” I shouted, then realized I was in the same situation that occurred earlier.
Apart from me, everyone else was standing as if petrified. They had all fallen to the false minoshiro’s hypnotism.
I would have to do it myself then. At least this time I had a powerful ally. One with a primitive brain that was impervious to hypnotism, and a stubborn single-mindedness that never let its prey escape–the ferocious, bubble-blowing tiger crab.
Apart from wearing sunglasses, I also knew not to look at the patterns in the flickering lights, so I remained clear-headed. Through half-open eyes, I started systematically twisting and pulling off the shining spikes.
“Please cease your destructive activity.”
An echoing female voice came out of nowhere, startling me.
“Who’s there? Where are you?”
“You are destroying public library property. Please cease your destructive activity immediately.”
The voice was coming from the false minoshiro.
“That’s because you keep trying to hypnotize us.”
“The use of defensive light hypnosis by terminal machines is sanctioned under ordinance 488722, item 5. Please cease your destructive activity immediately.”
“You stop hypnotizing us, then I’ll stop ripping your glowy things out.”
“I repeat my warning. Please cease your destructive activity at once,” the false minoshiro repeated obstinately.
“I’m warning you too. If you don’t stop, I won’t either. I’ll rip out all those glowing things!”
Surprisingly, the false minoshiro stopped shining. Seems like that simple threat was effective enough.
“Are you guys okay?”
The four of them still looked like they were in a stupor.
“Undo the hypnosis, now! Or else I’m going to start plucking again,” I said warningly.
The false minoshiro replied hurriedly, “Effects of light hypnosis wear off in time. The National Institute of Psychiatry’s report, number 49463165, states that there are no observable side effects.”
“Undo it. Now. Or else….”
I didn’t need to finish the sentence. The false minoshiro suddenly let out a piercing noise and I ducked instinctively, covering my ears. The four of them started moving as if waking up from a dream.
I turned slowly back toward the false minoshiro, bursting with questions I wanted to ask it.
“Who are you? What are you?”
“I am the Tsukuba Branch of the National Diet Library.”
“A library?”
“If you are inquiring my model and version, I am a Panasonic Automotive Archive, Autonomous Evolution version SE-778H Lambda.”
I wasn’t sure what that meant, but no matter what sort of monster it was, that was an absurd self introduction. It was like someone walking up to you on the street and saying “Hi, My name is National Library”, or “I’m a school”.
“Are you saying you’re actually a library?” I asked cautiously.
“Yes.”
I looked over the false minoshiro. Now that it had stopped wriggling and glowing, it definitely looked man-made.
“Where are the books then?”
“All paper based print interfaces have either decomposed, or have been lost through wars or other destructive activity. No remaining existences have been confirmed.”
“I don’t really get it, but the point is there are no books? So you’re just an empty library?”
“All information is archived in 890PB of holographic memory.”
I had no idea what it was saying.
“…if you’re trying to confuse us with big words, maybe I should just tear out all those feeler looking things.”
Making threats wasn’t something I was particularly fond of doing.
“The contents of the books are stored inside me, and can be accessed at any time,” it replied immediately.
That was better, though I still wasn’t completely clear how it worked.
“What kinda books?” Satoru asked conversationally.
“All 38,242,506 volumes published in Japan since 2129 AD and 671,630 reference volumes in English as well as other languages.”
The five of us exchanged glances. Kamisu 66’s largest library, in Hayring, had under three thousand books available to the public, and if you included all the books in storage underground, the total amounted to maybe ten thousand. That a body as small as the false minoshiro’s could hold over four thousand times that number was a lie not even Satoru would dare to tell.
“Accessed at any time means that you can read them whenever you want?”
“That is correct.”
“So if I asked you any question, you’d be able to find the relevant book out of all the ones stored inside you?” I asked doubtfully.
“Yes. The average query time is sixty nanoseconds,” boasted the false minoshiro, or rather, the Tsukuba Branch of the National Diet Library.
I didn’t know how long sixty nanoseconds was, but I assumed it was something like sixty seconds.
“T-then…I want to ask…!”
I suddenly became really excited. I could get answers to everything I’ve ever wanted to up til now. Hundreds of questions came to mind all at once. Just as I was about to speak, Satoru interrupted with the most useless question in the world.
“Why are there so many toads around here?”
“Why do you look like that if you’re a library?” Maria asked.
Shun looked like he wanted to ask something too, but was too out of it from the hypnosis to form a coherent sentence.
“I…I want to ask,” I finally decided what I wanted to know most. “Do fiends really exist? Also, what about karma demons?”
We waited with bated breath. Sixty seconds passed, then two minutes, then three, but the false minoshiro remained silent.
“Hey, why aren’t you answering?” Satoru couldn’t wait any longer.
“User registration is required to access query services,” it said, without a trace of guilt for making us wait for nothing.
“Geez, shouldn’t you tell us that first?” Satoru said reproachfully.
“How do we register?”
The false minoshiro ignored Satoru and addressed Maria’s question.
“You must be eighteen year or older, and supply proof of name, address, and age with one of the following: driver’s license, insurance card (with address), passport (a copy with full date of birth, and current address), student identification (with address and date of birth), certificate of residence (issued within the past three months), or other official identification. All must be within the expiry date.
“Eighteen? But we’re…”
“Furthermore, the following forms of identification are not valid: employee identification, student identification (lacking date of birth or address), commuter passes, business cards…”
The false minoshiro was probably talking about some papers that were used way back when. We had a rough idea of what it was talking about because we had learned a little bit about the strange age in which pieces of paper were more important than the people themselves.
“What if we don’t have any of those things?” I asked.
“If user registration is not completed, query services will be unavailable,” the false minoshiro said in the same placid voice.
“Guess it can’t be helped it. I’ll just have to tear you apart bit by bit to get to the books inside you.”
“Destructive activity is a criminal offense punishable by law.”
“What should we do? Start by pulling the feelers out, then cutting it in half?” I said to Satoru, miming a ripping action.
“Hmm, look at how rubbery its skin is. We should probably skin in first,” Satoru leered, catching on to my plan.
“…documentation requirements have been waived. Beginning user registration process!” it said loudly, still in the same soothing female voice. “Will each user please pronounce their name clearly.”
Each of us stepped in front of the false minoshiro in turn and said our names.
“Iris pattern, voice print, and head MRI authentication complete. User registration complete. Shun Aonuma, Maria Akizuki, Satoru Asahina, Mamoru Itou, Saki Watanabe, query services are available for three years starting today.”
“Alright then, why are there so many toads…”
Shun covered Satoru’s mouth with his right hand. “There are a mountain of questions we could ask, but I want to hear the answer to Saki’s first. …do fiends really exist? What about karma demons?”
The false minoshiro didn’t pause for a second this time. “The word ‘fiend’ returned 671,441 hits in the database, and can be roughly separated into two groups. ① Creatures that have reportedly been sighted in the ancient past, frequently called demons, ghosts, ghouls and other similar names, that do not exist in reality. ② A term invented in the final years of the ancient civilization to describe those suffering from Raman-Klogius syndrome, also known as ‘Fox in the Henhouse’ syndrome. It is not confirmed to exist in the present, but did in the past, and is highly likely to recur in the future.”
We looked at each other. We couldn’t fully understand what it was saying, but we could tell that it was something we would never be taught, and something we were definitely not allowed to know.
“Karma demons were also discovered before the fall of the ancient empire, and was a common term for severe cases of Hashimoto-Appelbaum syndrome. Along with fiends, their existence in the present in unconfirmed, but there is a high risk of reappearance.
“That…” Shun hesitated.
I saw his face pale and understood painfully well what he was thinking.
We shouldn’t ask any more than this. The warning came unconsciously.
But opening Pandora’s box when we knew perfectly well not to has been human nature since the dawn of time.