Starting Over Chapter 24.36

Or to put it more bluntly, my plan to murder my doppelganger. 

Now, if I were caught after murdering Tokiwa, it would all be for naught. 

I tailed him for days on end, believing the perfect moment for me to actually kill him would someday appear. 

The method I desired was to push him from somewhere high up, to make it look like an accident. 

Of course, you always hear about people who do bad things getting arrested because of one little slip-up. 

That guilty thought consumes them until they feel like “it’d be easier if I were arrested,” and that leads to a slip-up. 

So just like I said, it was ideal that I went with a method that weakened the feeling that “I killed him” to keep that from happening. 

So, you know, if he was on a bridge with nobody around and no railing, gazing off ahead of him, I could sneak up and grab his legs, then push him right off. 

No buts about it, I’m not the kind of person who can flex their wits to deceive the police. No matter how tight-lipped I tried to be, it was inevitable I’d make some mistake. 

I may have even killed Tokiwa before he crossed that final line. Man, I’m really glad it didn’t come to that. 

Tailing him wasn’t particularly hard to do. Since Tokiwa was so remarkably identical to my first self, I could easily predict his actions. 

And really, you’re not going to notice you’re being tailed if you’re not someone who looks behind themselves a lot. 

Now when you hear me talk about “tailing” my target, you’re probably imagining this to play out like some hard-boiled private detective story. Well, I’m gonna have to let you down there. 

Plus, the times I could follow him in assured safety were limited. So my primary job was just… waiting. 

I’d once had a part-time job counting people who boarded and got off the train, andthat felt more worthwhile than this. 

The funny thing is, though, I was going out more frequently for the sake of stalking Tokiwa, which soon ended up curing me as a shut-in. 

I went to old clothes stores for changes of clothes to help with stalking, I studied up on tailing techniques from books and the web, I memorized city maps… 

It hadn’t had much in the way of stimuli before, but now it was starting to get a good workout with all that info. 

I suppose it was good to have a clear idea of what I wanted to do. Even if my objective was murder, at least I was working toward something - it had a positive effect. 

But when my sister pointed it out, and I took a good look in the mirror, I did notice how I looked a little more cheery… 

Ah, that’s right. I’ve completely forgotten to talk about my sister. Maybe I should’ve brought it up earlier. 

From a certain perspective, I made her suffer more than anyone else. 

* 25 * 

My memories of my sister were even clearer to me than those of my girlfriend. She played a rather important role for my first self. 

Just a big ball of energy. And merely having her around made me feel more upbeat myself. 

I wouldn’t say her figure was all that “feminine”; it might’ve been that she didn’t pay much heed to proper calorie intake. 

It would have seemed like a joke to anyone who knew about the first time. The sheer difference between them seemed even more significant than my own case. 

And I think it was my fault that my sister changed to be this way. 

Perhaps my sister, as she saw her brother leaving the house with a face like death and coming home only to curl up in his room, lost all hope for the future. 

With both brother and sister gloomy, our whole house would be up late every night. 

They were wonderful people, though I know it sounds weird to say it like that as their son. 

“Now don’t you fail me,” it felt like she was saying. It was a heavy burden for my sister, of course, and every time I saw it I felt like my whole existence was being denied. 

As for my father? It seemed like he decided to give up on the family entirely. He ran off to his own world, started riding motorcycles. 

It was scary to see. Fights broke out every Saturday morning. Nobody could stop them. 

When I was seventeen, my father got in a pretty serious accident. He was hospitalized for a month, for which the house was inordinately peaceful. 

When I changed, it changed my sister, and us changing changed our parents. There was no need for those two to fight. 

Right, well. Me and my sister used to be amazingly friendly. But in the second round, we didn’t even look at each other, much less talk. 

I wondered if my sister hated me. On the rare occasion she did open her mouth, it was usually an insult. 

After all, she looked more out of it than me, and she let her hair grow pretty unkempt. 

It really was a saddening thing. I imagine a father hated by his daughter might feel the same way. 

Yes, the same little sister who should have hated me. 

The first snow of the season had just started to fall that day. Not long after I got out of the bath, I was feeling quite cold, so I turned on the heater for the first time that winter. 

Then gradually the warm air started to flow, and the sweet smell of lamp oil filled the room. 

As I huddled in front of the heater to warm up, the doorbell rang. I looked at the clock: 9 PM. 

The doorbell rang again. Normally, I would ignore it, but I was feeling a little odd that day. 

So I thought we’d just exchange a few words before they left. 

But no, it was my sister at the door. 

Like our father died in a bike accident, or our mother came back home. And that she had come to tell me. 

“Let me stay here for a little while.” 

The fact she was already cleaning things up around here made it clear she intended to stay for a while. 

I was sure the largish Boston bag she carried over her shoulder was packed with changes of clothes and all that. 

First of all, I got my sister something warm to drink, knowing she’d come through the cold. 

She took the hot cocoa from me with both hands and slowly sipped it. As I watched, I thought about what to say next. She peered into the cup. 

To be frank, I didn’t necessarily want to know why my sister had come by. It was sure to be a weary conversation. 

I was so busy thinking about my own burdens that I had absolutely no desire to stick my nose into those of others. 

My sister must have expected I would ask her why she’d come first thing. She seemed dissatisfied by how I hadn’t asked a single question on it. 

Unable to bear the pressure, I reluctantly asked. 

“Honoka, you aren’t on winter break yet, right?” 

My second-life sister really hated having idiotic phrases like that used to describe her. 

But it was surprising. It wasn’t something I would have expected her to do. 

Just putting distance between her and the bad things, waiting for the worst to pass - that wasn’t my sister. 

Of course, that wasn’t true, but I was absorbed with my own troubles. 

“How did you get here, anyway?”, I asked. She replied typically, “Does that matter?” 

“Leave if you don’t like it.” I replied just as typically. 

“So it’s dirty and my taste sucks, but you don’t hate it?” 

But this sister of mine didn’t really want to come to my place. Like me, she probably didn’t have many friends, so this was her only option for running away to.

Winter vacation hadn’t started yet, so I figured she wouldn’t stay long. Even so, she was a nuisance and I wondered if I could get her to leave any sooner. 

And my second-time sister was pretty scary to boot. She always had a sharp, quiet anger in her. 

Just then, she came out of the bath, put on her pajamas, and dried her hair. When she saw the futon and the bed, she unhesitatingly chose the bed after two seconds. 

“I dunno,” she said, pulling up the covers. 

And so we began living together, in a very strained kind of way. 

* 27 * 

At about eight the next morning, my sister shook me awake. 

With a level head, I recalled the circumstances of my sister being there. 

Before my waking eyes were even a third of the way open, my sister said “Take me to the library.” 

She sat on the bed, her hands thrust in the pockets of a gray cardigan, her legs wavering out of her navy-blue short pants, and her soft shoulder-length hair swaying along with that movement. 

The sink water was cold enough to kill a guy from shock, but it’d take a few minutes to get warm water. So I washed my face with that frigid water and quickly changed clothes. 

Like many shut-ins, I was a night owl, so a constructive “sleep at 1, wake up at 8” schedule was exhausting for me. 

Well, maybe it’s more probable that I unconsciously slept more not so much for health reasons, but because my time awake was so harsh. 

I wonder. Maybe humans can only wake up early when they have TV shows they want to watch, dates to go out on. 

Even if she was my sister who I wasn’t on good terms with, who was skipping school, who was running away from home, that didn’t make a difference. 

And even after that, I often stayed on my bed reading or messing with my phone, so if you wanna be accurate, it usually took about ten steps to get from me waking up to getting out of bed. 

As we were about to leave, I realized how lightly-dressed my sister was and went to get a Mods coat for her. 

My biggest motivator was that I was scared of being blamed later, basically. 

My sister looked at me holding the coat out as if to say “Wear it yourself,” then snatched it from me. 

I put on a pea coat I’d worn since high school, lazily tied the shoelaces on my boots, and opened the door. 

That wasn’t my fault, though. My dad used to drive it, and ever since it was passed to me it’d smelled like that. 

The back seat was a mess: textbooks and materials for my classes, convenience store bags of water bottles and empty bento boxes, even tossed-off jackets and shoes. 

There were times I did sit in the car for long periods as part of tailing my double, but the real problem was that no one but me ever rode in the car. 

It’s the same kind of thing as how if you want to be fashionable, you take a job that puts you in front of people. 

“It stinks and it’s dirty,” my sister repeated. 

If you had a “+50 life,” you’d likely fuss over little things to get it up to +51. But if you’re at -50, it doesn’t seem all that worth it to shoot for -49. 

The 9 AM sky was cloudy, and everything was shrouded in a light fog. 

Saying that my coat smelled like cigarettes too, and that wasn’t I going to play some music or something? 

If I wanted my sister’s approval, I’d need to play music in the vein of Sigur Rós or Múm. But unfortunately, I didn’t have any of that. 

I continued to ignore her, and she hit me with a tissue box. “Listen to what people say,” she said. 

I’d gone there to research things for my college homework once before, so I already had a library card. 

I told her “Pick out whatever books you like,” and for once, she obediently nodded “okay” before vanishing into the bookshelves. 

There was a young girl sitting on a chair between the bookshelves along the wall, reading a bulky book. 

Indeed, when you don’t make any plans in your life, your sense of days leaves you, even blurring the line between normal days and holidays. 

Regardless, it was a strange thing, a college student and his high school sister visiting the library early in the morning on a school day. 

I asked “Done yet?”, and she hit me with a book. “No talking in the library!” 

As soon as we returned, she plopped on the bed, sat against the wall, and engrossed herself in a book as thick as some dictionaries. 

She looked up and asked “Where you going, big brother? School?” 

Honestly, that was exactly what I didn’t want her to ask about. 

At times like these, it was best to lie with hints of the truth. 

“Huh. Or at least… that’s what you think about them, huh, big brother?” 

“Yeah, I guess. At least I think of him as a close friend.” 

Still, it was odd. I hadn’t thought she would care in the least where I was going, what I was doing. 

She could do what she liked. I had my own things to attend to. 

* 29 * 

I wanted to settle this doppelganger problem within the year. 

No doubt, if those joyful days came along and I was reminded of how my first-life self and Tsugumi spent them, I would be hit with the worst depression of all. 

To be honest, I had long been in stellar condition to execute the plan. But a minimum of three times, I passed up a chance to kill him that had very little risk. 

Just as I predicted, Tokiwa’s habits were extremely similar to mine. He liked to look down from high places, so there were many times he stood on the bridge gazing at the river, or on steep roads down at the residential district at night. 

And yet I was simply unable to carry out the plan. Probably I couldn’t make up my mind to take the plunge. 

The thing is, there was one other thing I was after in tailing him. I wanted to see Tokiwa’s faults. 

I was waiting for him to show me some kind of defect. 

If only I could find just the slightest reason why killing him was worth it. 

But the trouble was, I went a whole month looking and looking, but he didn’t show me a thing. Didn’t even get haughty about his lack of faults. 

And at critical moments, he would bring them out in a very targeted way, leaving a deep impression on those around him. 

By doing this, he let people’s imaginations swell, and they began to think that he had even more charm than he really had. 

It was magnificent, honestly. It taught me that when you have visible charms, it’s better to show them off from time to time like a reminder, rather than keep them on at full blast. 

No doubt everyone else saw Tokiwa as a very charming individual. 

* 30 * 

So that was another day of doing nothing still. 

She looked at the apple pie and asked “What about veggies?” “Got none,” I told her, and after some thought, she said “That’s no good.” 

So I started. “What’s up?” 

What a thing to ask out of the blue, I thought. 

“…Sorry to push it, but have you never had a girlfriend?” 

“Yeah. Never.” 

Why, she asks… That’s got to be the worst way to talk to someone loveless. 

In my second life, I couldn’t help finding it odd how everyone else was able to find love one after another. 

Honestly, sometimes I kinda want to say “Is that really gonna be alright?” Not that anyone wants to hear this, but it seems to me that two people hitting it off for their whole lives would be a really rare occurrence. 

So if you and someone else’s pictures match up perfectly, that’s gotta mean you’re just both blank canvases. 

I’m just a fussy, bored, lonely self-analyticist who never thinks of anybody but himself. 

Right, where were we… My sister asked me “Why?” 

“Not sure there’s a good reason why,” I said. 

I shook my head. 

“I guess not.” 

That did bring something to mind. 

But it’s not that all my classmates hated me. The problem was my idiotic pride. 

My first life was a bad influence there. I used to be waaay too popular. 

Of course, even as the not-sharpest tool in the shed, I eventually did notice that yeah, I wouldn’t make any friends without starting the conversation. 

It’s the dumbest thing, I’ll agree with you there. But I would’ve rather died than talk to those clowns. 

Never mind for now how true it is, it’s what I think, and it’s helped me a fair bit. 

Naturally, from their point of view, I must’ve seemed like an even bigger fool. 

* 32 * 

You’d know it if you went through it, but high school without friends is frankly hell. 

It’s often said that loneliness is something you get used to, and isolation is something you can’t. 

She looked like she was always thinking “I don’t hope for anything from this world anymore,” reluctantly pushing through high school. That was Hiiragi. 

I’d say she was on the short side, with eyes that hurt easily. She was always looking down, and when she had to look people in the eye, she practically glared. 

It seemed she made a careful effort to pick the most average, unprovocative words as she spoke, but it made people see her as a bother. 

When I was ignored in the classroom, I felt it severely. And those were the times when I looked over to Hiiragi. 

“I’ve got it real bad, but hey, better than her,” I thought to keep myself stable. What a deplorable thing to do. 

However… This could just be my own deluded impression, but I think she was doing the very same thing with me. 

No doubt Hiiragi was looking upon me as the one person even lower than her. 

I looked down on her thinking “She’s in a similar place, but as a woman she must have it worse”; she looked down on me thinking “He’s in a similar place, but I’m still better in academics”… that was the situation. 

And actually, Hiiragi often did too. We came to see each other there frequently. Not like we talked or even greeted each other, but we acknowledged each other’s existence. 

Once every few months I would be struck with terrible depression, upon which I’d go to the infirmary (though not physically sick) and take my afternoon classes off.

But there was a lot of overlap between the classes we each wanted to take a break from, so it wasn’t unreasonable. 

Furthermore, my relationship with Hiiragi got closer in second year. 

However, those who freely chose their seats were restricted from sitting in the very back row. 

Naturally, then, the people who ended up in the back row were people who didn’t really care where they sat. And for friendless people, any seat in the corner will do. 

Though what I would say was that sitting next to her put me at ease. 

That was usually agonizing for me, but when Hiiragi was my partner, I wasn’t so nervous. 

When partnered with others, I’d worry about my voice squeaking, or my attitude being too blunt, or if they were upset about being paired with me, and all that nonsense. 

In that sense, Hiiragi was soothing for me like no other. 

* 33 * 

When it comes to this stuff, you might be thinking I’m some jerk who’s way too self-conscious about his assumptions. 

Even when our seats changed, we tried to sit as close as possible. There was an implicit agreement that when times were tough, we would “use” each other. 

It’s probably closer to “Hey, you’re a loner too, right? As fellow miserables, I guess we should keep company.” 

If we hadn’t, then surely we wouldn’t have stayed together to keep ourselves from being all alone. 

And isolation wasn’t the only common point between Hiiragi and I. Even the quality of our isolation bore a resemblance. 

It came to mind that there was “a place much better than here” somewhere, and it became a huge hindrance since we were stuck “here.” 

I was constantly thinking about the happy days of my first life. As such, my view of the world was duller than usual, and I had little attachment to the “here and now.” 

And so just once, by chance, I was able to bear witness to her smile. 

What a shame, I thought. If she wore that smile all the time, I bet it wouldn’t be hard for her to become the center of attention in class. 

Which means, yes, that for the three whole years leading up to her, I never once saw a smile out of her. 

Graduation… Well, I’d be hesitant to say it was an emotional event for me. 

I had so little attachment to the school I went to that I almost wondered if I was really a student there. 

I kept thinking about it, and I didn’t even feel like going to the rehearsal anymore. 

Its door was always wide open. In my third year, I spent a lot of lunch breaks there. 

I waited there for the rehearsal to be over. If someone who hardly seemed to exist didn’t show up to it, absolutely no one would notice, surely. 

That’s part of the reason I liked the place. I also loved how the instruments, once in the forefront, were now rotting in decay here. 

It took nearly five minutes to notice Hiiragi in the corner of my vision. 

When Hiiragi and I met eyes, I can’t really remember who smiled first. We always had sour looks, but for some reason we couldn’t keep from smiling there. 

Like there had once been this madly wonderful thing, and while it was now totally destroyed, she treasured a part of its ruins - kinda like that. 

Of course, once we exchanged smiles, we quickly looked away and went to doing our own things. 

There was a second-hand CD shop nearby which I’d often visit after school, not being in any clubs. And as I stood there with a CD in hand staring at a cover, Hiiragi would be standing behind me doing the same - silly, but that kept happening. 

I had to admit, things were getting a little warm between us. You would probably think it natural that after all this, we’d be friends. 

However, I wasn’t distrusting of Hiiragi. What I couldn’t put my trust in was, as ever, people’s affections. 

No matter how much we got along, they could someday leave me. So I was scared to even try getting deeply involved with anyone. 

But I wouldn’t change my mind. A relationship where we weren’t too attached, just mutually looked down on each other from a distance, seemed best for me. 

I remember that afterward, we were both scolded by a teacher for skipping the rehearsal. 

I listened in silence with my head low, embarrassing myself with the thought that the teacher might mistakenly believe there was a romantic thing between Hiiragi and I. Hiiragi looked the same way. 

I felt I saw her mouth the words “See you.” 

That’s about it for my memories of Hiiragi. 

Ultimately, I didn’t answer my sister’s question. 

But at the time, I didn’t have the will or energy for that, so I just kept my mouth shut. 

It was awkward to be so close together, but admittedly it was the best place to read in the apartment. 

Luckily, the other tenants here made as little noise as I did. It was a blessing for someone as oversensitive as me. 

I was reading a book on doppelgangers. 

- They appear in similar places as to the original. 

We went to the same university, so we appeared in similar places. 

And he appeared in every way like me from my first life. 

Given this, was he the original and I the doppelganger? 

I looked up from the book and noticed my sister peeking at me. She was curious about what I was reading. It wasn’t really in my character to read, after all. 

“…You wouldn’t know if I told you,” she said. 

Thinking about it, it was kind of miraculous she would ask me of all people that kind of thing. 

Instead of answering, she asked me, “Big brother, do you have any friends?”, turning toward me and pulling her legs down. 

And the way she phrased it, she seemed to know that what I told her about my "close friend” was a story riddled with lies. Man, I felt so defeated. 

“No friends I could invite over,” I replied, but dared to say in such a way as to imply I had any other friends. 

But the words out of her mouth showed no such scorn or abuse. 

“Huh. So the same as me, then.” 

I was bewildered. I tried to think of some kind of reply to that. Because it was definitely odd that my second-time sister would tell me such a thing. 

If I’d just asked her out of the blue “Honoka, do you have any friends?”, she’d normally give some reply like “And what are you planning to do with that information?” 

But before I could say anything tactful, she placed her bookmark and crawled under the covers. 

She looked like she was angry, but she also looked like she was depressed. 

About thirty minutes later, when I was sure she was asleep, I went outside and smoked, shivering under a streetlight. 

Perhaps she visited my apartment out of loneliness, I thought. Of course ,I didn’t think she was “darling” enough for that to be the case. 

I took one last puff and put out the cigarette. The smoke hovered indefinitely about two meters in the air. 

* 36 * 

My memory’s not entirely clear on this, but I had so many friends I was sociable with in my first life that it was unbelievable to me now. 

But now, looking at them from a bit of a distance, they all seemed like good-for-nothings. Most of them seemed entirely unlikable. 

Of course you’d see those whom you have relationships with as good people, and those you don’t as bad people. 

Miserable as it was, I found joy in that. 

My first self was convinced all his college friends were great guys. He earnestly thought “I’m so lucky to be surrounded by all these good people in college.” 

People I used to think of as kind were a big ball of ego. People I used to think of as humble were attention-seekers. 

However, I’m just speculating, but I don’t think it was necessarily wrong of me to feel that they were good people in my first life. 

Perhaps when they stood before me in my first life, they were truly good people. 

Perhaps that if you feel someone isn’t a good person, you carry some degree of responsibility for that. 

Yet there are those who seem to acquire more and more charm regardless of their relationships… Naturally, I’m thinking of Tsugumi. 

Yes, it wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to call it worshipping. 

I’m not sure I could say what was most charming about her. I’d consider every little thing that made her up charming, but I was looking with rose-colored glasses.

Since my mind was always a flower patch in front of her, I couldn’t possibly compare to say what stood out more. 

Even objectively speaking, Tsugumi was beautiful. But if you asked me to explain why “no one else would do” even though there are lots of other such girls, I’d be lost. 

And I’d look at them and imagine what it’d be like if she were there with me now. 

Kind of like a symbol of the happiness from my first life. 

This time - THIS time, I wanted a chance to start my life over. 

Prayed that when I woke up, I’d get my third chance. 

Chapter end