Thus the Girl Feeds on Memories

Stories

## Illustrations

## Prologue

"Hey, Hana."

I gave up struggling.

Faced with me, who had fallen flat on my backside and sat sprawled on the ground in utter disgrace, the girl turned her small palm toward me. Resist, and you will be cursed. That was more or less how it went.

There was no way to escape from beneath her hand.

"Here and now, I shall devour your memories to the last. Those precious memories you have guarded—let this old one feast upon them to her heart's content."

The girl declared it without mercy.

……Ah. So that was it.

That outfit, sweet to excess like a Western pastry, and that childish face—they must have been a trap laid to make the other person drop their guard.

No matter how you looked at her, she was nothing more than a cute girl, and yet the fact that she was a monster was beyond any doubt.

A monster that saw me as prey. A monster that stole what people held dear.

A monster that attacked me in an empty park in the dead of night.

Just like that, she laid her hand upon my head.

Already, I could not move. At some point, she had laid this curse upon me.

"Memories—rather than precious, they are delicious, are they not? Thick, and cloying. And that rich flavor refined and hidden deep within."

With a dull thud, something lit up inside my head.

"Yes. This is it. Your memory."

Look closely, and at the center of the light there was something oval, like a jewel.

She couldn't mean that was a memory, could she? It felt like something I had seen before, hmm……

## Chapter One: Somewhere, Sometime

This town sat in a basin, far from any city that could rightly be called a metropolis.

It was an old coal-mining district called Reitoro Town. During the war, coal was found that could be dug here, and the local population swelled. After the war, through the efforts of the miners who stayed and their families, it grew into a bustling commercial street. It had once been a thriving town.

But that prosperity belonged only to the past.

Mocked now as a relic of the Showa era, it was nothing more than a depressed country town. That, I think, is the impression most people hold of Reitoro Town today, whether they live here or not.

Look up at the sky, and far off you can see the enormous smokestack called Reitoro Tower rising at the town's center. The tower, as if it kept stretching toward the sky, stands atop the largest spoil heap in town. Spoil—coal waste—is the residue left when coal is mined. Pile that waste high enough, and what you get is a spoil heap.

These heaps are ruins that prove this place was once a coal town. The smokestack, of course, no longer runs. I gazed out over the streets of the town and, in my head, gathered up what would go into the diary. At the same time I wiped clean the old candy-ball machine set out at the front of the shop (drop in a coin, turn the crank, and the candy balls come rattling out).

I say the front of the shop, but it is really nothing more than the penny-candy shop where I work and live, and keeping a diary is only a habit of mine. I no longer know how many years it has gone on. It would not be too much to call it a life's work, this thing I must do every day.

The reason I keep writing the diary……

## Chapter Two: The Glow of Magic

"This, you see, is magic, made so that people can forget their pain."

That was back when Yume and I were still close.

We, who had suffered far too much, visited Grandfather's house then.

"That's what Yume thinks."

That day, Yume likened the glowing fragment to magic.

It truly was a thing like magic, something that let us, still children, forget our pain.

"Hey, Big Brother. Mom… she isn't coming back anymore, is she?"

She was never coming back.

Did Yume ask me that even though she already knew, or was she simply too young to understand a reality like that?

"It would be nice if she could come back."

All I could do was answer her with something that vague.

Right now I only wanted to lean on this magic. I wanted to keep leaning on it. I wanted to forget, just like this.

Mother's death, and Father's change……

Summer vacation. A summer adventure, paid for with pocket money we had saved with everything we had, all the way to Grandfather's house.

There, we tasted something gentle.

I noticed the pillow beside me was soaked with tears.

The instant I opened my eyes, tears slid from the corners and fell.

It seemed I had been crying in my sleep.

—Yume? What kind of dream was I having?

Waking up unable to recall the dream you were having only a moment before is something that happens often.

"Huh?"

"Mm—Hana. You're up already? Awfully early."

"Hey, Hana. Memories, in the end, are a key that wakes a vast world out of the abyss called memory, that sort of th……

## Chapter Three: Droplets of Yume

May 14, 2006 (Sunday)

At last, Big Brother has forgotten Yume too.

Just like Father did back then, as if that thing had never existed from the very beginning, he can no longer sense that Yume is here.

Yume loves Big Brother most of all, so Yume will never, ever forget Big Brother, but Big Brother seems to have already forgotten all about Yume.

Even if Yume asks him why, he will not answer Yume.

Because Big Brother has already forgotten everything about Yume.

Yume feels terribly sad about this, and because of it has grown terribly uneasy.

Terribly afraid.

Is it because Yume does not understand why she is being forgotten?

No. It isn't that.

Because Yume knows.

The reason Big Brother, and Father, forgot Yume.

It is surely, all of it, Yume's fault.

To them, Yume is something like a monster that brings misfortune.

That is why it feels sad. That is why it feels lonely. Being forgotten—that is what it means.

And Yume now can understand, too, why Mother was so afraid of being forgotten.

Big Brother—Yume is right here, you know?

But Yume does not want to see Big Brother looking sad.

I had a dream.

Another strange dream. A dream that left the impression of something I had seen, and yet no matter how I searched my memory, I could not find it.

"Thou art mistaken, surely. It is merely one among many virtues. This old one does not hold that the growth of a city stands in proportion to human happiness. Of course, neither do I hold……

## Chapter Four: Beyond the Parting

When I killed Yume, I was only ten.

—Yume, alive only a moment before, her body already gone completely cold.

She had hanged herself with the towel tied to the doorknob.

At first, I thought it was some kind of prank.

Coming home to find my little sister dead—no matter how I tried, I could not imagine such a thing.

No. That isn't right. The me of that time could imagine a scene like that. Something on the order of suicide was not unreal to me. Because Mother had died the same way.

And so I looked away. Away from Yume. Away from Mother's death. Thinking only of not getting hurt myself, I did nothing to save Yume from dying.

And so Yume was no different from someone I had killed.

I remembered now.

A memory I had forgotten once.

My past, once swallowed by Ame.

Yume and I were not born in a country place like Reitoro Town, but in a big city. Father was a perfectly ordinary salaried worker, but Mother did work that, by the measure of ordinary society, was rather out of the ordinary: she was a singer.

The pop songs Mother sang could not be called hits, and they could not be called flops either.

The people who knew her, of course, knew her, but at the time most people never remembered her. That was how it was.

Father and Mother used to be kind. At least when I was just beginning to understand things, there were very sweet memories.

But the good times did not last, and afterward both of them changed. Mother fell ill in her heart, and after that Father seemed to catch it from her and fell ill as well, and both of them became very strange.

Mother's was……

## Epilogue

The sound of chalk striking the blackboard echoed through the classroom.

I fought off my drowsiness and copied the notes from the board. But honestly, I was so sleepy I could not take any of it in.

Because it was boring, I looked around.

Watching what people do, and remembering who is doing what and why they are doing it—I have that sort of habit. When I used to do these things, I would feel something like a sense of duty, a sense of mission.

But now it is different. It is nothing more than a habit of that kind. That is why I say it is entirely a quirk.

"Ahh— well then— picking someone is a bother, so, the student whose number is today's date… Shida, you answer."

"Yes!"

Called on by the teacher, Shida stood up and gave her answer.

The answer was perfect, and the teacher nodded with a satisfied smile.

Shida has been smiling a lot lately.

It might be the influence of Kashiwabara, whom she has grown close to recently. Or it might be that she was always supposed to be this way. It is entirely possible that she was always the sort of person who smiled often, and that for some reason she simply stopped being that way.

And Shida's eraser is nowhere to be seen now.

"Yo, Hana-chin! Busy with the shop again today?"

After school, once homeroom was over and I was about to head back to the shop, Kashiwabara called out to me.

"Yeah. I'm the manager, after all. If I don't run it properly……"

"Mmm— Hana-chin really is amazing. Enough that I want the stuff under your nails……

## Afterword

Well then, first, an introduction.

I am Nanami Sou. The family name and given name divide as Nanami (ななうみ) · Sou (そう). For most readers, this will be our first meeting. What I usually make is games. In most cases I start from the script and the planning. I also end up doing a fair amount of progress management and outside liaison. After moving through several organizations, I belong to none at present. I hope you will look kindly on me.

Thank you very much for buying *And So the Girl Feeds on Memories*. Whether you liked the book or did not, whether you started from the afterword, or whether you have only read the afterword and have not bought the book—thank you all the same.

In whatever form, the fact that I am able to go on living is thanks to all of you who can find some kind of value in the act of "reading something." And if, among the many choices available, you bought a work of mine, then for someone who eats only by writing books there is nothing that makes me happier. Once again, my sincere thanks.

……And with that, this rather stiff opening comes to an end.

The afterword was scheduled to run six pages, and for someone as bad at talk of this sort as I am, it is a situation very much like falling into hell. What on earth should I write to fill six pages of afterword?

First, a few important points the main text never managed to say.

· Ame does not have hair growing in that important place.

· Yume, likewise, does not have any growing there.……