April couldn’t forget what she has seen. She suspects if that was a dream or not. Dream won’t bring anything, but indeed, she has that small, dark-brown box with her, now lying beneath her bed.
“Do you know that human will turn into grasshopper? ” Hanging high the light in her hand, April kneels on her bed and asks to her sister.
Her little sister, being too tired, just respond with murmuring nod. And their mom comes in, bends down and kisses them both on the cheek, “April, you’ve talked about your dream for the whole day, now it’s time to sleep. ” She doesn’t say in a harsh way, but April still sense her reluctance to listen anymore.
“Fine... ” April sighs, turns off the light and lay back to her bed. On the ceiling she stares at the paintings she and her sister drew years ago. About pine trees, flowing rivers, and the rocks that were washed white by the ceaseless currents. It was about Kami. Every night she just blankly looks into the painting before drifting off to sleep. But today she just couldn’t.
The painting distorts, swirls, and the edge of it melts. Not in a slow, sluggish way. But like a paper that was previously soaked, now dried and different layers just inevitably peeling apart.
In the slits between the pages, birds go through and turn into fish on the other page. April knows, this is what happened and what is happening. It is Kamogawa.
It is Kamogawa, where everything bled into one another, where a bird dives in and becomes a fish, fish, as lines streaming in the river, drenched, stands a human, hair dripping with ink.
That was the man. Just standing there when April amusingly looks at him. His hair, when April tries to see more closely, only softly drift in the wind, like weeds, swaying in the water.
She looks down, with a sense of fleeting luck, hoping to see the fish, while they just rhythmically open and close their mouths. Quiet and still, the drops of ink silently bloom, hidden when their tails flicked.
The man, his eyes as dark, as bottomless, pupils and whites out of proportion. April has to blink hard after looking them to be able to sense color again. Strange though, she could still perceive there are colors, but colors now no longer appear colorful.
She walks into Kamogawa, surprisingly finds the river deviates from her memory. It feels as if the world pouring into it, turning the current into a long, wide ink painting flowing both forward and back.
That man, he doesn’t say anything but walk away without leaving a single word. Yet in his silence, April feels he wants her to follow. So she carefully steps forward, balancing herself in the resistance of currents. As she walks, the supposed icy water doesn’t freeze her, but only surrounds her as mists and clouds.
He walks faster, so April could only lift the hem of her dress, wading after him through the wavering water. In this hurry, April slips on the slick stones and collapses into the water.
Hearing something, she opens her eyes. Her vision, in a similar way, slips apart. Kamogawa flows above her, but what she sees fractures into pieces. Where hands deftly wrapping rice balls in nori, pressing on the notes with her name; butterflies resting on the eyes of a pond turtle basking in sunlight; at the edge of her sight, even there’s a Dragon Palace glimmers, ornate beads catching divine light.
And thousands of others. April struggles and get her head above the water. Her sights, in trembles, finally combine into one again -- but what in her sight already changed. A white, wooden house, nestled among pale cypress trunks. Light pills like milk, with newly turned muds and dew.
How and when did the house appear? April could not recall. She climbed out of river, behind her a faint, gray shadow still left in the water. She feels herself lighter somehow, a little bit more insubstantial.
“Kamogawa brings me here. ” April whispers to herself, justifying her curiosity of walking into the house. She hesitates for some seconds, and give in, pushing the door open and stepping inside. The wooden floor beneath her feet flexes with an uneven groan, sunlight filters through shoji, pouring on the bone-white floor.
The man sits in the corner, at a low table. He holds the brush in his hand, rapidly moving, as if frame by frame, tracing shapes on the paper. And the paper crumples by the time a stroke is done, discarded at the table’s leg.
April walks closer, and in the folds of paper, in the shadows, she sees how the shadow looks eerily resembling insects, fish, butterflies. More realistic than what is actually drawn on the paper. Kami. In the wrinkled shadows, lines not drawn seem to connect themselves.
That’s when the man, also dissolves into droplets of ink, spreading, pooling, recombining. His bones clear a kind of unblended apple green, his compound eyes visible in sharp detail. In these eyes April could see fragments, countless fragments of human world, mountains, ocean.
His faint figure leaves a blurring gray on the paper.
He finally turns to April, trying to form a reluctant smile, “it takes some time. ” he continues,
“You should have known who am I. ”April could see he shape of his mouth changing, but the voice seemed to come from within her, echoing in her ears.
I should have known? April thinks hard, suddenly what she saw beneath Kamogawa flashes back. The Dragon Palace, and the box -- a tale her mom told as a night story. Is he Urashima Tarō? How could he be?
More dazzling even. "But... you are dead." The words left her, a quiet realization. "Am I?"
He didn't speak. Instead, his gaze drifted to the faint, gray shadow she had left in the river, now visible through the wall of the house. Wet.
His inner voice came again, soft as settling dust. “You are, and you are not. The fact that you are dead is already inside that box as part of your past. It is an image captured, but the development is not complete. So for now, you are still alive. ”
Perhaps that’s why he’s here. Observe. Urashima Tarō did open his box, where all his “lives” in the Dragon Palace were sealed. That’s how he collapsed into ashes, each of them keeps mirroring, observing the world -- the world, may just be the layers floating in Kamogawa.
Urashima Tarō quickly blinks. Then his body slowly straightens, again approaching human’s form, with only his eyes still compounded. As thousands of hexagonal shards of light.
In those lights, in the thin seams between his and her blurred shadows, she seems to see the projection of Kami again.
April wakes, half fallen beneath her bed, arms wrapping around the box.
A butterfly lands by her bedroom window, with its compounded, glinting eyes, like a ghost still sees--
waiting for the image to finish developing.