The Boy Amakusa’s Loopy Spell

Stories

## Illustrations

## Chapter One: The Fool

Let me talk about how things were back then.

Back when it felt as if the turning of the seasons would go on forever. Back when optimism and pessimism were not in contradiction, and existed together.

Back then, the most effective weapon we had for making war on this world was—stupidity.

I am a boy in the second year of high school. I would like to say, "I'm an ordinary high school student," but in fact, looking at me, I am not all that ordinary. My name is Tengusa. Of course, that is not my real name. My real name is Shinta Yanagihara. The problem is this name my father gave me. My father—Ten'nosuke—once seemed delighted to explain to the people around him: "The name is written Shinta, but it is actually read Shin." He had no idea whatsoever that Shinta is another name for agar. Led by my mother, relatives and friends all said the name would not do, but my father insisted on using it anyway. I am sure that once the mistake was pointed out, he flew into a rage out of embarrassment. That is the kind of man my father is. Oh, and among the relatives, the only one who seemed to agree that "the name is written Shinta, but is actually read Shin" was my father's mother, my grandmother. She really does meddle in things that are none of her business.

The first class after I entered high school. From the moment the homeroom teacher said, "Yanagihara Agar? What a strange name," my nickname was decided: Tengusa. Just in case, let me say this—tengusa is the raw material of agar. How tengusa is made into agar, I'll explain next time.

Before that, I have to talk about my friend. No, it isn't that I absolutely have to say it now. It's only that he is with me right now...

## Chapter Two: The Circle of Fools

1

"Hey, don't wipe your ass!" The one who started talking was Satoru. As always, we were in "Insomnia."

"What?" I asked.

"I mean, after you poop, don't wipe your ass!"

"No, of course you're going to wipe."

"But sometimes, no matter how much you wipe, something still sticks to the paper, right?"

"That has definitely happened. In the end your ass starts to hurt."

Looking to Koa for agreement, he said, "Ours at home is a bidet."

"Anyway." Without arguing, Satoru went on. "It just feels like your whole ass is poop, and you keep wiping forever. Ah, what is even going on."

"Even if you ask me the reason, I don't know."

"Then who are we supposed to ask?"

"The poop." The one who said that was Koa.

"Koa said 'poop,' Koa said 'poop'!" Satoru yelped, making a huge fuss.

"You are such an elementary schooler."

"Because that Koa actually said 'poop.'"

"Ugh—poop, poop, I'm so sick of this."

It felt as if we had talked away a lifetime's worth of poop.

"You're looking lively. That's good." Natsuho said, slumped over the back of a chair.

"Mm." I answered with a lecherous grin. A second-year boy this straightforward isn't so bad.

A month had already passed since that shocking incident. Which is to say that even I needed a month before I could get back to having pointless conversations with my idiot friends like this. For a while I kept having nightmares, talking in my sleep, even jolting awake in the middle of the night. Even that optimist, Hikaru Beer...

## Chapter Three

1

Meal trays were piled into a mountain on the cart. Dinner at the hospital comes early. By the time I went after school, it was already after dinner.

"Ah, Little Ten, you're here."

Grandmother seemed to have mixed me up again with my father—her child, that is. But she was in good spirits. Nothing like when something had happened and the hospital called us in. Seeing Grandmother smile made me happy too.

"You don't look well." Grandmother said, staring at my face.

"Ah, do I?" I pulled out the metal chair and sat down.

"No matter what it is, you can tell me. Some things feel easier just from being said." She smiled. That alone felt a little healing, and before I knew it I had said more than I meant to.

"Um, let me ask something strange. What if—what if someone were after Grandma's life."

Shh— Grandmother pressed a finger to her lips.

"You can't say things like that here."

"Ah. Right."

Right. It was not a matter of what-if. Grandmother truly believed someone was after her.

Grandmother looked timidly around her and trembled.

"I'm sorry. I won't say it. Um, there's something I wanted to talk over."

I scrambled to change the subject.

"Um, there's someone I like."

I hadn't meant to say anything like that. Trying to catch Grandmother's attention, I let it slip.

"Ahh—" But the tactic seemed to have worked. Grandmother took it up. "That's wonderful. Congratulations."

"No, it isn't exactly something to congratulate me for."

I explained everything that had happened at our house last time...

## Epilogue

Clear skies.

On a clear evening, a lukewarm wind was blowing. Whether I wanted to or not, I still remembered that day.

So many things happened all at once that day. It was as if every great event a life would hold had ended on that day. And so, about that day, about everything that happened to me that day, even now, more than half a year later, I still cannot put it in order.

That day, Natsuho disappeared.

She disappeared together with the imagined persona that filled the sky and the land.

After that I never met Natsuho again. I don't know what happened. I think—I hope—that Jico Mac granted my wish. I hope she is living in good health somewhere now.

That day, I parted forever from one of the most important people to me.

My grandmother.

Late that night, Grandmother died. As if she had simply gone quietly to sleep, she set out on a journey. When the notice came that she was critically ill, my father and I went to the hospital.

There were too many things in my head, flowing in a tangle.

I could not think about it seriously. In fact, I was not sad at all. I did not shed a tear. There was the wake, there was the funeral, greeting so many people, handling, in place of that useless dad, all the procedures that have to be done when a person dies. Time passed in the busyness, and in the end, even now, I still have not felt grief.

Oh, and there was one thing worth being glad of. Chinatsu Yamashiro—the mother of Suteki Yamashiro, who had filed a curse-killing petition to avenge her murdered daughter—came to see me. She said she had canceled the curse-killing petition. At first I did not recognize who she was, because back then she was holding a grudge...

## Afterword

Hello, everyone. I'm Osamu Makino.

I am always writing novels about how a person ought to live, that sort of thing. So I am often scolded—"Too cruel," "Not moral enough," "What if a child imitates it," "The child won't stop crying"—things like that. This time, too, when I was invited to consider writing for Dengeki Bunko, I said, "Mm, a story about a boy who gets pregnant after a god assaults him," and then I got a lecture.

So this story is not about a boy getting pregnant.

I thought a great deal about what I ought to write, but I simply could not come up with it. I only wanted to try writing the delusion that filled my head back then, the subject of "I am the king of the world."

I am still plenty of an idiot now, but for the six years from middle school through high school, I was an idiot through and through. If you ask what an idiot through and through is, it is this: you are an idiot, and yet you do not think you are an idiot, and you even believe you are genuinely clever, a genius, something like that.

Looking back now, an excessive stupidity was whirling in my head.

Fortunately, I had idiot companions, and as an idiot I managed to survive. Idiot though I was, I was saved by idiot friends.

A little embarrassed by that kind of foolishness, and only by thinking about those days when three one-liter bottles of energy a day were being wrung out of me, I wrote the outline of this novel.

And so, this novel is the story of an idiot protagonist (that said, he is much smarter than I was back then) and his idiot friends, going on and on doing idiot things. Still, idiots have an idiot's way of doing things, and as...