Sleeping Scholar of the Forest - Chapter 1

Sleeping Scholar of the Forest

The summoning ring of the telephone echoed through the room. To Shuuji Shiraishi’s1 dulled mind, the noise sounded like it was coming from somewhere far away.

Which would be why he didn’t react. But when his answering machine switched on, and the mechanical message began in a woman’s voice, he was finally pulled back to reality.

‘This is Mori from Takara Publishing. Thanks for all your help.’

Mori must have figured he wasn’t home, and started to leave a message, and it was Shuuji’s body, rather than his mind, that reacted to her voice. He picked up the receiver.

“My apologies. This is Shiraishi.”

“Ah, you are home. Were you asleep?” Mori asked in a good humored tone.

“No, I wasn’t asleep.”

“Good then. I wanted to talk about your next job.”

With Mori, even small talk moved quickly on to work topics.

Shuuji was a book designer, and Mori was the editor-in-charge at one of his publisher clients. Shuuji had been with Mori since just about the time he’d started in this line of work, and it was no exaggeration to say that she was the one who’d made him into a one-stop book designer. That was why, even though it’d been six years since he’d become a designer, he still couldn’t say no to Mori.

“That front cover the other day went over really well, Shiraishi, did you hear?”

Mori launched into the conversation all on her own, but she must have noticed Shuuji’s lack of response, and asked her question to double check.

“Sorry, my head isn’t really working…” Shuuji answered honestly. Usually, his mind switched over the second he started talking to Mori, but today, although he could hear Mori’s voice, none of what she was actually saying was making it into his brain.

“‘Is something wrong?” Mori asked. Shuuji’s mumbling and his weird tone of voice must have made her wonder if he wasn’t feeling well.

“Uh, yeah, yes, I do have a bit of a fever.”

He hadn’t even checked his temperature, but he couldn’t tell her the real reason, so he went along with her suspicions.

“So you weren’t sleeping, you were just staring off into space, huh. Maybe we should leave shop talk for next time then.”

“If you wouldn’t mind, that would help.”

“I understand. I’m not in any rush myself, so how about Wednesday, two days from now?” she asked, and Shuuji’s eyes reflexively found his wall calendar. Shuuji knew it was the fourteenth day of the month, but he had no clue what the Wednesday two days from now would be.

“Today… What day is it?”

“You don’t even know what day it is? You are sick, huh,” Mori said, dumbstruck. “Today’s the fourteenth of July, so two days from now will be the sixteenth,” she told him, in easy to digest specifics.

“Ah, okay. That’s fine then.”

Having been told the date in concrete terms, Shuuji’s dazed mind finally came to grips with it.

“For today, you get some rest, and get better quickly please.”

– – –

The vacation house was in Okutama,4 about a two hour drive from the heart of Tokyo. Before, Koutarou would pick him up in the car on Friday night, and then drop him off at his apartment on the way to work Monday morning.

But that day last week, Shuuji had stayed behind in the vacation house. He’d been working on some stuff with a looming deadline that morning, and he wasn’t going to finish it in time if he left with Koutarou.

If that day had been like normal, if he’d been able to finish his work a little faster, maybe Koutarou wouldn’t have gotten in that accident. Shuuji’s regrets pained him.

Shuuji had a license, but he didn’t own a car, so first he stopped to rent one, and then he headed for Koutarou’s condo on his own. He knew Koutarou wouldn’t be there, of course, but he wanted to see that place too, one last time.

He arrived at the condo, and parked the car on the street. He’d intended only to look from the car window, but when he saw the building, his body naturally got out of the car.

– – –

Thanks to his detour, the sun had entirely set by the time Shuuji arrived at the vacation house.

He opened the door with the key he hadn’t quite been able to let go of, and an unfamiliar, chilly air washed over him. It’d only been a week since he’d been here, so that wasn’t any different than usual, but Koutarou was gone now, and today was the only day this place had ever felt so bleak.

Bearing up under the loneliness that collected inside him, Shuuji headed for the stairs to the second floor.

Originally, this vacation house had been an ordinary two-story building. After he’d purchased it, Koutarou had made the first floor into a lab and storeroom, and had remodeled the second floor into private living space. Shuuji never stopped on the first floor, he only ever passed through it on his way to the second floor.