Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

"In retrospect, my first love came rather late.

I was in my third year of middle school, and every day after school I went to Nijigahara to read.
The first time I saw the girl at Nijigahara, she was crying.

She held her pendant to her chest and cried. She said she had found it in the muddy stream.
I don't know why she was crying, but to me it seemed so beautiful.

At the time I was surrounded by my ugly parents and sister, leading their modest lives . . .
. . . And feeling dissonance with and distance from the world.

But her white arms and legs seemed to me to belong to a person from another world.

She gave me one of the matching butterfly pendants.
And from then on we met every day at Nijigahara.

At some point we began telling a fantastic story of a world apart from this world.
I don't remember how it began . . .
. . . But through our conversations our story began to develop its own cosmology.

I gave her a journal I wasn't using, and she began writing out the story, every day, like a thing possessed.

The story went like this.
'The Story of the Girl and the Seven Villagers and the Monster who Lived in the Tunnel.'

One day, a beautiful girl who could predict the future came to the village.
One day she prophesied that the monster in the tunnel would bring disaster.

The girl had been sent by God.
But the villagers feared her. They cut off her head and offered her to the monster.

Another girl, the reincarnation of the first, came to the village.
But once again the villagers sacrificed her to the monster.

Still another girl came. The pitiful tragedy was repeated again.
The monster, its stomach full of girls, grew larger and larger.

I think that's how the story went.

With her limited vocabulary, she continued the story, but I don't know what happened after that.

And the reason is that by that time I had lost interest in the story.

All I was interested in was . . ."

haunting and beautiful excerpt.

But did the excerpt become reader commentary in the end—that's all I'm interested in!
But no need to reply. Some mysteries are better left mysterious.