One day not so long ago, as I was going about living my life—my wonderful, miraculous life now that Hina-chan was a part of it—Yoshi caught up with me by the communal mailboxes. Apparently, he’d clocked that something was going on from the voices that drifted through to his apartment each evening. And so, after he half-dragged me to one of the izakaya near the station, I told him all about Hina-chan, and how the whole thing had come about.
It all started, I told him, with a fishing outing—my first ever. An old friend from school had invited me along, saying it would do me good to try something new, and so I’d found myself heading out on a day trip to the Tama River. My friend brought along all the gear.
For what seemed like an interminably long time I’d sat there, navy rod in my hands, staring at the surface of the river. Just as I was debating whether I’d waited for a catch long enough to be forgiven if I suggested giving up and heading home, I felt a tug. This is it, I thought, this is the part that’s supposed to make it all worthwhile, and I began winding the reel around and around until the white thing dangling from the end of the line came into view. And, believe it or not, it was Hina-chan. Or rather, Hina-chan’s skeleton. My friend promptly phoned the police, and they arrived to collect the corpse in no time. The tranquil riverbank where we’d been fishing just moments ago was instantly transformed into a foreboding crime scene.
Later, looking it up online, I found that Hina-chan’s skeleton dated back a surprisingly long time, but nobody knew much else about it. They’d trawled the river for the bones missing from the skeleton but found zilch. They weren’t even sure whether to treat it as a criminal case. Hina-chan’s skeleton wasn’t deemed a significant artifact of cultural heritage or anything, so it was going to be kept in the storage chamber of some organization I’d never heard of, and whose obscure name spoke volumes about the fact that, really, nobody knew what to do with the thing. It seemed clear that, for all practical purposes, it had been abandoned. But anyway, the skeleton in the vault isn’t really what matters here.
After I’d caught the skeleton, and both my friend and I had been interviewed by the police, we’d parted ways, laughing wryly about how our fishing trip had turned out. My friend said that in all her twenty years’ fishing this was the first time anything like this had happened. To my surprise, she messaged me a few hours later, offering to take me fishing in another spot the following week. I quickly declined. Landing an entire skeleton as my first catch ever went beyond beginner’s luck and belonged to an altogether different realm. All that bone-baiting had left me quite exhausted, so I sunk down onto my bed and fell asleep for a couple of hours, still dressed in my approximation of fishing attire. I was awoken by the sensation of something brushing against my shoulder.
“H-hello?” said a wavering voice. I opened my eyes to see a woman in a kimono standing by the bed, covered in mud and looking right at me. I let out a shriek. The mud-caked woman held up her hand in what seemed intended to be a reassuring gesture.
“I have come to thank you for earlier,” she said.
“Huh?”
“Until today, I lay buried in the depths of the Tama River. Owing to your kindness I have once again seen the light of day, and I felt I couldn’t possibly rest until I had offered my gratitude to you.”
She must be talking about fishing out that skeleton, I thought. But . . . did this mean what I thought it meant? Was this figure standing in front of me dripping mud on my floor some kind of phantom? I somehow managed to restrain my impulse to leap up and scream.
Instead I waved my hand in an attempt at staying cool and said, “Oh, it was total coincidence. Don’t even think about it. I was just in the right place at the right time.”
“Please be so good as to listen to what I have to say. We shall be traveling back in time a couple of hundred years, to the Edo period.”
“The Edo period . . . ?”
And just like that, she began to tell me about her life. You know how in period dramas and TV programs from way back when, one of the characters launches into the story of their entire life? Well, it was just like that.
“That’s right. After losing both my mother and my father to a terrible disease sweeping our village at the time, a relative attempted to marry me off to a certain gentleman, whom I did not desire to marry. When I stated my refusal in no uncertain terms, the gentleman took it upon himself to end my life, and then hurled my body into the river. Ever since, I lay outstretched on the riverbed, undiscovered by a single soul. As the months and days passed, many of my bones were swept away to heaven knows where.”
“What? But that’s awful! That’s . . . that’s completely unacceptable!”
I started to feel unbearably sorry for this ghost standing in front of me. What a bastard that guy was! I mean, he should’ve been locked up! And that relative of hers, too! Fuck! Marriage lasts a lifetime; it’s not just something you can foist on people like that. You have to start considering other people’s feelings a bit more.
“Well, yes, but . . .” Seeing my eyes widening in horror, the ghost lady tilted her head to one side, looking a little pained. Then she went on. “Well, anyway, that is what happened, and that is why I have come to thank you. It would be a great honor if you would let me serve you, as your chambermaid.”
“My chambermaid . . . ?”
I didn’t really know what she was going on about, but I knew that the present situation was untenable. I had the woman strip off her tattered, muddied kimono and then, seeing that her body was equally filthy, I decided to escort her to the bathroom and wash her down. When I picked up her kimono and saw the great gash running down the length of its back, I shook with anger. “Die, you samurai moron!” I hissed. “Yeah, you! I know you’re already dead, but I want you to die again! Painfully!” It seemed like the greatest injustice in the world that a guy that evil was peaceably dead already.
“What’s your name?” I asked the woman as I lathered up her hair. She bowed her head, as if she felt embarrassed to have so much attention lavished on her. There were great clumps of dirt enmeshed in her locks, and it was no mean feat to get them out. This is all your fault, you stupid fucking samurai. If you’ve been reincarnated then hurry the fuck up and die now, in your contemporary incarnation.
“My name is Hina.”
“Hina-chan? Wow, that’s a nice name. I’m Shigemi. People often tell me it’s kind of old-fashioned.”
“Lady Shigemi.”
“Oh, Shigemi-chan is just fine.”
“Right . . . Shigemi-chan . . .”
When I think back now to those first hours Hina-chan and I spent together, I explained to Yoshi, I feel ticklish with self-consciousness and pleasure. How awkward and faltering it all was! Hardly knowing a thing about each other, we both tried in our own way to get acquainted—just thinking about it brings tears to my eyes. What a beautiful thing it is when love begins to blossom.
“So basically, you’re telling me you fished a skeleton from the river, and then a ghost appeared?” Yoshi summarized bluntly.
Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. He who speaks of ghosts and expects to be believed is nought but a fool, and all that. But the truth was, my love for Hina-chan had taken away any fear I might previously have had about what Yoshi might say on the matter.