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the disappearance of utsunomiya haru
The mountain air is brisk once the sun goes down, gnawing and biting at the remnants of warmth until it leaves behind only the sharpness of frost. It’s mid-autumn now, the trees having long since turned a dusty shade of sunset, bare and spindly with only the most remote amount of leaves clinging to each branch, stubbornly hanging on in hopes to survive the upcoming winter and the inevitable freeze, no longer rustling in the breeze but flopping around like day old unsold fish tossed into the roadside dumpster. Where the daytime sun brought with it the barest hints of warmth, the night brings with it a chill that cuts through to the bone.
Perhaps Haru isn’t the best dressed for the weather, having wriggled out under the muddy pump of the outdoor bath in one of the inn’s complementary yukata, deceptively unisex, but in a way that clearly isn’t made for a boy of his build – he’d taken it from the girls’ side of the bath, after all, and the tie sits far too high on his waist.
The two of them walk hand-in-hand down the winding mountain path, the first time she’s let him touch her, and he has been purposefully dawdling, taking in the sights, greedily soaking up the time she lets him thread their fingers together, stroke her knuckles, brush over her nail plates. To any other couple it would be mundane, but for them it’s intimate, and Haru has the determination to milk every second of whatever has caused her to allow him the honour. She doesn't grip his hand back, but he doesn't think he ever expected her to.
She’d explained it in vague terms before they’d left, not looking him in the eye, with her long, stringy hair hanging over her ear, casting a delicate shadow across her dark circles. He can always tell when she’s stopped sleeping, and every day she walks through the door still upright and conscious feels nothing short of a miracle.
“A blessing just for couples, huh?” He repeats, the words feeling like thick syrup on his tongue. A couple, the two of them. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you might like me.”
It’s a jest – he knows in his heart she likes him, even though she prickles when he comes too near, and she seems to balk whenever they make eye contact. He has a good sense for these things, and there’s no doubt in his mind that she likes him.
She leads him off the beaten path, up the sharp ridge of the mountain, following what seems to be nothing other than her own intuition. Of course he goes with her – he wouldn’t dare give up the opportunity to hold her hand, and if this blessing has her letting loose a little, maybe allowing him to hug her, kiss the top of her head? He’s ready to do anything to prove his sincerity to her.
They enter a clearing after what feels like an eternity, though it isn’t really so much a clearing as it is a jagged peak. The trees disappear only because there’s nowhere left for them to stand, the ground giving way to a sheer, steep drop into a misty valley below. They’re so much higher than he thought, but it doesn’t shock him so much – he’s dripping with sweat, it would be embarrassing if the two of them had walked nothing more than five minutes at ground level. He looks off into the distance, but all he can see is stars and inky blackness. It’s difficult to tell where the horizon ends and the forest begins.
He looks back to her, squeezing her hand, the warm light from her lantern casting deep shadows on her face. She looks weary. He wishes she’d allow him to hold her and stroke the claws of exhaustion from her face.
She gestures without words, a sharp finger pointing towards a small hokora overgrown in the edge of the rising peak. It looks… menacing, all burned out candles and slimy moss. He makes a face that he supposes betrays his feelings, and she lets go of his hand, her warmth disappearing and replaced with a freezing breeze. He closes his hand around the empty air.
“For real? It looks like it’s gonna curse us.” He approaches the hokora anyway, his sandals unbalanced on the rough terrain, withdrawing a match from the sleeve of his yukata. He doesn’t question her knowledge – it was her deep passion that attracted him to her in the first place.
From behind him, she blows out the lantern, plunging the both of them into the void. He takes over instead with his match, striking it on the edge of the book and holding it out towards the hokora, doing his best to cup the flame to protect it from the wind.
He does not bother to look over his shoulder back at the void where she might have been standing, so it's without sight that he hears the sickening crack slam into the side of his skull before he feels it. Something hard, sharp, aimed at full force into his head – the sound is like a thunderclap, dominating his every sense and taking over the entirety of his focuses. He's so disoriented by the sound that he doesn’t realise he’s falling until he hits the ground, his vision dissolving into a sight beyond blackness. Nothing. The void.
There’s no time for him to gather his thoughts, to orientate himself, no time for his nerves to register pain, before there’s another blow that rattles through his skull, and all of the lights go out.
--
Kyouko has always felt out of control. Like emotions held within the atmosphere infect her and change her, like a parasite crawling through her mind and taking her over. When she lashes out, it isn’t her, it's the parasite. The vitriol that falls from her mouth - the parasite. The violence that infects her brain and takes her over and moves her body and fills her with a dark deep unending blackness that burns through her skin and turns her words into dripping hateful venom -
She had tried throughout her earlier years to find somebody likeminded who feels the same way, posting endlessly on online forums and help pages and journal services, but nobody’s experience matches hers, and she can’t seem to put it into words in a way that anybody can grasp, which deeply frustrates her. The unending answers of "seek therapy" and "look inside yourself for the answer" make her want to gouge deep holes in her veins so she can dig her hands in there and pull out the parasite herself, just to show it's real. By the time she enters middleschool, she's stopped searching for the answers in humans, confiding in a dusty Ouija board she purchased from a bookstore after the death of the owner. Hoping answers to all of her questions would, could, come from something else, and to her surprise, it actually answered her.
She spent an inordinate amount of time with the board, trying to figure out her emotions while it gave her curt advice and tried to point her in the right direction. The board tells her she should try and embrace the parasite, but it frightens her, and she doesn’t want to do that. The blackness just isn't her. There's an evilness to it that she doesn't want for herself.
By the time she enters highschool, she does her best to kill all her emotions instead, trying to become cold and unfeeling so that the parasite cannot get to her. If she cannot get rid of it, then she will starve it of everything it clearly wants from her. If it feeds off of her evilness, she will choose to give it nothing instead. She drops out of school and isolates herself.
It’s while practicing this that she reconnects with Haru by chance, who is for some reason deeply enamoured with her, and she finds his shameless embrace of his every emotion refreshing and calming, but at the same time he makes her more irritated and the parasite seems to catch hold of her more often. She can’t keep herself maintained when Haru is around because he’s always making her feel things, and a deep hatred for him bores its way into her chest. He opens the door for the parasite to worm its way inside of her, but without him, she is alone with it, and she doesn't trust what it might want from her.
She does her best to avoid him, but Haru pursues her anyway, and she agrees that they can date with deep exasperation. She asks the board what to do, and it tells her that she can use him, but she isn’t sure what it means.
She tries to explain her situation to Haru, but he doesn’t get it, and she only feels more isolated and alone. She asks the board what to do, but it doesn’t answer her, and she feels like the parasite is overwhelming her. At the same time, she clings to Haru's constant presence, afraid to be alone with the thoughts that aren't her own.
She carries on for a while caught between the inky void and the bright light of Haru, feeling more isolated than before, and lashing out at Haru frequently to try and make him get away from her, but at the same time begging him to stay close, and she can’t seem to untangle these emotions. The board abandons her for a long time, and she starts to research cleansing rituals online and how to perform one on yourself. She finds out there is an abandoned hokora deep in the mountains in their home prefecture that will grant any wish in exchange for an equal sacrifice.
She can't breathe by now, and Kyouko is not as much Kyouko as she is the parasite. She stops sleeping, her mind running ragged with hatred and shadow. Her head aches around the clock, and tension never quite unwinds its way from her muscles. She hates being alive. She hates being alone. She hates being in company. She hates how easy Haru seems to navigate life, and with how much love he uses to stroke her greasy hair and rub her aching back.
Kyouko asks Haru to come on a couples' trip with her, and convinces him to go on a "romantic" midnight hike by promising she'll let him hold her hand the entire time. They walk up through the mountain path, and Kyouko tells him that there's a shrine nearby that grants couples a blessing she wants to go to. Haru agrees to go, and they leave the path to go to the shrine.
Whatever brightness that harbours itself within Haru, she needs to take it from him. The brightness is the only thing that can cleanse her soul of the crushing feeling she knows only as "the parasite". She needs to sacrifice Haru to the hokora. She has nothing else to give up.
They find the small hokora in the side of the mountain, and Kyouko tells Haru to close his eyes and pray to it. She doesn't wait for him to do it, but beats him to death swiftly with the lantern and kicks his limp body over the edge of the ridge into the valley below, ecstatic about her triumph and assuming that she is now free from the parasite.
Without Haru though, she feels more lonely and isolated than before, and people constantly bring up his mysterious disappearance, so it feels like she can’t escape the memory of him. She asks the board what to do, but all it responds with is “Haru”, and that annoys her. The parasite never leaves however, and becomes impossible to push away. Every inhale feels like letting it into her veins, letting it take over her body.
Kyouko starts to fall into madness, frantically trying to untangle why her ritual didn’t work, what it is that’s infecting her. Her days no longer flow in a solid sequence, and she starts to fall away from reality like a liquid. Occasionally she feels present and alert, but more often than not she becomes something else entirely, like a voyeur of her own life. She is a backseat to her own experiences, meticulously picking them apart from over her own shoulder. Every thought, every feeling, every action that surrounds the “her” she sifts through like a madman on a mission.
She continues to turn to the board for help, but it rarely answers her. Even when it does, all it spells now is “Haru”.
She wanted his brightness to chase away the void so badly that she was willing to snuff it out just for a chance to hold it. It's with great guilt that she returns to the hokora, with trembling hands and hatred and grief and loathing. She piles rocks, sticks, pulling away ivy and moss, restoring the hokora to its former glory.
It seems obvious to her that Haru must be haunting her because he’s angry she killed him, and she becomes obsessed with destroying everything that reminds her of him to cleanse her life of his spirit. Whenever she watches the scenes of her life and encounters something that stirs up old thoughts of Haru, she can’t help but destroy it in a wild rage. She is no longer herself, but a ghost over her own shoulder, watching her experiences as an observer.
From within the void that stretches across the expanse of Kyouko's life, Kyouko picks out scenes from her memories and from her future, playing them back like videos, watching them with anger prickling in her chest, picking each “scene” apart for traces of Haru to cleanse, entering them like a parasite to devour every last remaining nuance of Haru's once vibrant presence.
Still, the feeling of “Haru” remains, and it only makes her more furious, tearing the scenes apart like a wild animal, leaving them in shreds. She tears apart every scene until there are none left, leaving her sitting alone in the void of what used to be the reel of her life, now made up of nothing but tatters. She keeps one whole though, because she is afraid of what might be left without it. There is only the ritual left.
She steps into the night of her ritual, a parasite of hatred and vitriol, taking out her frustrations of Haru who squeezes her hand with such warmth. She relishes in the crack of his skull, finds comfort in the way his ribs buckle as she kicks him over the ridge, listens to the satisfying splat of his body on the ground below, and hops down after him. She stands over his body, formless, lingering at the fringes of the reel of Haru at the bottom of the cliff for a long time.
When the sun starts to rise, she realises his chest is rising and falling too. It’s the first time she realises that Haru didn't die by her hand at the hokora, and he cannot have been the one haunting her. For a night and two days she watches Haru at the base of the valley, counting his breathing as they lessen and lessen, until she realises she has been staring at his chest for hours and hours when it has long since stopped moving, and insects start to crawl down his throat.
She knows deep within her chest that no matter how much she tries to rid every scene of her life of the ghost of Haru's brightness, the parasite will always remain, because the parasite has been her all along. Even if she withdraws her claws and lays down next to Haru's corpse to rot, the Kyouko whose shoulder she never hangs over will live happily. It won’t be her though, but a Kyouko from the scenes she has cleansed; she is already cursed for all eternity by her own hand.
Kyouko decides she’ll never let that happen, and she will curse every single Kyouko herself so that none of them get a better outcome than her. She won't be alone, then, but surrounded by countless Kyouko's just as pitiful as herself.
Her hatred is the parasite, and she has never been anything more than a pawn in her own game to get in the way of her own freedom and happiness.
She goes back again to the beginning, rewinding the tape, to watch her life all over again. Her beginning again. Her optimism, her ignorance. No, not hers, but hers. She watches a Kyouko who is not her from deep in the void, hatred forming a cloak around her body. She doesn't deserve it, but she does. She has worked hard.
If she cannot achieve peace, then no Kyouko can.
She returns to the hokora and with her last match, she lights the candle.
Perhaps Haru isn’t the best dressed for the weather, having wriggled out under the muddy pump of the outdoor bath in one of the inn’s complementary yukata, deceptively unisex, but in a way that clearly isn’t made for a boy of his build – he’d taken it from the girls’ side of the bath, after all, and the tie sits far too high on his waist.
The two of them walk hand-in-hand down the winding mountain path, the first time she’s let him touch her, and he has been purposefully dawdling, taking in the sights, greedily soaking up the time she lets him thread their fingers together, stroke her knuckles, brush over her nail plates. To any other couple it would be mundane, but for them it’s intimate, and Haru has the determination to milk every second of whatever has caused her to allow him the honour. She doesn't grip his hand back, but he doesn't think he ever expected her to.
She’d explained it in vague terms before they’d left, not looking him in the eye, with her long, stringy hair hanging over her ear, casting a delicate shadow across her dark circles. He can always tell when she’s stopped sleeping, and every day she walks through the door still upright and conscious feels nothing short of a miracle.
“A blessing just for couples, huh?” He repeats, the words feeling like thick syrup on his tongue. A couple, the two of them. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you might like me.”
It’s a jest – he knows in his heart she likes him, even though she prickles when he comes too near, and she seems to balk whenever they make eye contact. He has a good sense for these things, and there’s no doubt in his mind that she likes him.
She leads him off the beaten path, up the sharp ridge of the mountain, following what seems to be nothing other than her own intuition. Of course he goes with her – he wouldn’t dare give up the opportunity to hold her hand, and if this blessing has her letting loose a little, maybe allowing him to hug her, kiss the top of her head? He’s ready to do anything to prove his sincerity to her.
They enter a clearing after what feels like an eternity, though it isn’t really so much a clearing as it is a jagged peak. The trees disappear only because there’s nowhere left for them to stand, the ground giving way to a sheer, steep drop into a misty valley below. They’re so much higher than he thought, but it doesn’t shock him so much – he’s dripping with sweat, it would be embarrassing if the two of them had walked nothing more than five minutes at ground level. He looks off into the distance, but all he can see is stars and inky blackness. It’s difficult to tell where the horizon ends and the forest begins.
He looks back to her, squeezing her hand, the warm light from her lantern casting deep shadows on her face. She looks weary. He wishes she’d allow him to hold her and stroke the claws of exhaustion from her face.
She gestures without words, a sharp finger pointing towards a small hokora overgrown in the edge of the rising peak. It looks… menacing, all burned out candles and slimy moss. He makes a face that he supposes betrays his feelings, and she lets go of his hand, her warmth disappearing and replaced with a freezing breeze. He closes his hand around the empty air.
“For real? It looks like it’s gonna curse us.” He approaches the hokora anyway, his sandals unbalanced on the rough terrain, withdrawing a match from the sleeve of his yukata. He doesn’t question her knowledge – it was her deep passion that attracted him to her in the first place.
From behind him, she blows out the lantern, plunging the both of them into the void. He takes over instead with his match, striking it on the edge of the book and holding it out towards the hokora, doing his best to cup the flame to protect it from the wind.
He does not bother to look over his shoulder back at the void where she might have been standing, so it's without sight that he hears the sickening crack slam into the side of his skull before he feels it. Something hard, sharp, aimed at full force into his head – the sound is like a thunderclap, dominating his every sense and taking over the entirety of his focuses. He's so disoriented by the sound that he doesn’t realise he’s falling until he hits the ground, his vision dissolving into a sight beyond blackness. Nothing. The void.
There’s no time for him to gather his thoughts, to orientate himself, no time for his nerves to register pain, before there’s another blow that rattles through his skull, and all of the lights go out.
--
Kyouko has always felt out of control. Like emotions held within the atmosphere infect her and change her, like a parasite crawling through her mind and taking her over. When she lashes out, it isn’t her, it's the parasite. The vitriol that falls from her mouth - the parasite. The violence that infects her brain and takes her over and moves her body and fills her with a dark deep unending blackness that burns through her skin and turns her words into dripping hateful venom -
She had tried throughout her earlier years to find somebody likeminded who feels the same way, posting endlessly on online forums and help pages and journal services, but nobody’s experience matches hers, and she can’t seem to put it into words in a way that anybody can grasp, which deeply frustrates her. The unending answers of "seek therapy" and "look inside yourself for the answer" make her want to gouge deep holes in her veins so she can dig her hands in there and pull out the parasite herself, just to show it's real. By the time she enters middleschool, she's stopped searching for the answers in humans, confiding in a dusty Ouija board she purchased from a bookstore after the death of the owner. Hoping answers to all of her questions would, could, come from something else, and to her surprise, it actually answered her.
She spent an inordinate amount of time with the board, trying to figure out her emotions while it gave her curt advice and tried to point her in the right direction. The board tells her she should try and embrace the parasite, but it frightens her, and she doesn’t want to do that. The blackness just isn't her. There's an evilness to it that she doesn't want for herself.
By the time she enters highschool, she does her best to kill all her emotions instead, trying to become cold and unfeeling so that the parasite cannot get to her. If she cannot get rid of it, then she will starve it of everything it clearly wants from her. If it feeds off of her evilness, she will choose to give it nothing instead. She drops out of school and isolates herself.
It’s while practicing this that she reconnects with Haru by chance, who is for some reason deeply enamoured with her, and she finds his shameless embrace of his every emotion refreshing and calming, but at the same time he makes her more irritated and the parasite seems to catch hold of her more often. She can’t keep herself maintained when Haru is around because he’s always making her feel things, and a deep hatred for him bores its way into her chest. He opens the door for the parasite to worm its way inside of her, but without him, she is alone with it, and she doesn't trust what it might want from her.
She does her best to avoid him, but Haru pursues her anyway, and she agrees that they can date with deep exasperation. She asks the board what to do, and it tells her that she can use him, but she isn’t sure what it means.
She tries to explain her situation to Haru, but he doesn’t get it, and she only feels more isolated and alone. She asks the board what to do, but it doesn’t answer her, and she feels like the parasite is overwhelming her. At the same time, she clings to Haru's constant presence, afraid to be alone with the thoughts that aren't her own.
She carries on for a while caught between the inky void and the bright light of Haru, feeling more isolated than before, and lashing out at Haru frequently to try and make him get away from her, but at the same time begging him to stay close, and she can’t seem to untangle these emotions. The board abandons her for a long time, and she starts to research cleansing rituals online and how to perform one on yourself. She finds out there is an abandoned hokora deep in the mountains in their home prefecture that will grant any wish in exchange for an equal sacrifice.
She can't breathe by now, and Kyouko is not as much Kyouko as she is the parasite. She stops sleeping, her mind running ragged with hatred and shadow. Her head aches around the clock, and tension never quite unwinds its way from her muscles. She hates being alive. She hates being alone. She hates being in company. She hates how easy Haru seems to navigate life, and with how much love he uses to stroke her greasy hair and rub her aching back.
Kyouko asks Haru to come on a couples' trip with her, and convinces him to go on a "romantic" midnight hike by promising she'll let him hold her hand the entire time. They walk up through the mountain path, and Kyouko tells him that there's a shrine nearby that grants couples a blessing she wants to go to. Haru agrees to go, and they leave the path to go to the shrine.
Whatever brightness that harbours itself within Haru, she needs to take it from him. The brightness is the only thing that can cleanse her soul of the crushing feeling she knows only as "the parasite". She needs to sacrifice Haru to the hokora. She has nothing else to give up.
They find the small hokora in the side of the mountain, and Kyouko tells Haru to close his eyes and pray to it. She doesn't wait for him to do it, but beats him to death swiftly with the lantern and kicks his limp body over the edge of the ridge into the valley below, ecstatic about her triumph and assuming that she is now free from the parasite.
Without Haru though, she feels more lonely and isolated than before, and people constantly bring up his mysterious disappearance, so it feels like she can’t escape the memory of him. She asks the board what to do, but all it responds with is “Haru”, and that annoys her. The parasite never leaves however, and becomes impossible to push away. Every inhale feels like letting it into her veins, letting it take over her body.
Kyouko starts to fall into madness, frantically trying to untangle why her ritual didn’t work, what it is that’s infecting her. Her days no longer flow in a solid sequence, and she starts to fall away from reality like a liquid. Occasionally she feels present and alert, but more often than not she becomes something else entirely, like a voyeur of her own life. She is a backseat to her own experiences, meticulously picking them apart from over her own shoulder. Every thought, every feeling, every action that surrounds the “her” she sifts through like a madman on a mission.
She continues to turn to the board for help, but it rarely answers her. Even when it does, all it spells now is “Haru”.
She wanted his brightness to chase away the void so badly that she was willing to snuff it out just for a chance to hold it. It's with great guilt that she returns to the hokora, with trembling hands and hatred and grief and loathing. She piles rocks, sticks, pulling away ivy and moss, restoring the hokora to its former glory.
It seems obvious to her that Haru must be haunting her because he’s angry she killed him, and she becomes obsessed with destroying everything that reminds her of him to cleanse her life of his spirit. Whenever she watches the scenes of her life and encounters something that stirs up old thoughts of Haru, she can’t help but destroy it in a wild rage. She is no longer herself, but a ghost over her own shoulder, watching her experiences as an observer.
From within the void that stretches across the expanse of Kyouko's life, Kyouko picks out scenes from her memories and from her future, playing them back like videos, watching them with anger prickling in her chest, picking each “scene” apart for traces of Haru to cleanse, entering them like a parasite to devour every last remaining nuance of Haru's once vibrant presence.
Still, the feeling of “Haru” remains, and it only makes her more furious, tearing the scenes apart like a wild animal, leaving them in shreds. She tears apart every scene until there are none left, leaving her sitting alone in the void of what used to be the reel of her life, now made up of nothing but tatters. She keeps one whole though, because she is afraid of what might be left without it. There is only the ritual left.
She steps into the night of her ritual, a parasite of hatred and vitriol, taking out her frustrations of Haru who squeezes her hand with such warmth. She relishes in the crack of his skull, finds comfort in the way his ribs buckle as she kicks him over the ridge, listens to the satisfying splat of his body on the ground below, and hops down after him. She stands over his body, formless, lingering at the fringes of the reel of Haru at the bottom of the cliff for a long time.
When the sun starts to rise, she realises his chest is rising and falling too. It’s the first time she realises that Haru didn't die by her hand at the hokora, and he cannot have been the one haunting her. For a night and two days she watches Haru at the base of the valley, counting his breathing as they lessen and lessen, until she realises she has been staring at his chest for hours and hours when it has long since stopped moving, and insects start to crawl down his throat.
She knows deep within her chest that no matter how much she tries to rid every scene of her life of the ghost of Haru's brightness, the parasite will always remain, because the parasite has been her all along. Even if she withdraws her claws and lays down next to Haru's corpse to rot, the Kyouko whose shoulder she never hangs over will live happily. It won’t be her though, but a Kyouko from the scenes she has cleansed; she is already cursed for all eternity by her own hand.
Kyouko decides she’ll never let that happen, and she will curse every single Kyouko herself so that none of them get a better outcome than her. She won't be alone, then, but surrounded by countless Kyouko's just as pitiful as herself.
Her hatred is the parasite, and she has never been anything more than a pawn in her own game to get in the way of her own freedom and happiness.
She goes back again to the beginning, rewinding the tape, to watch her life all over again. Her beginning again. Her optimism, her ignorance. No, not hers, but hers. She watches a Kyouko who is not her from deep in the void, hatred forming a cloak around her body. She doesn't deserve it, but she does. She has worked hard.
If she cannot achieve peace, then no Kyouko can.
She returns to the hokora and with her last match, she lights the candle.