“Didn’t I tell you? Owowowowow!” I arch my back and try to flap my foot in pain, but Hina-chan keeps a tight grip on my calf, refusing to let go. Those tiny arms contain unknown reserves of strength. She flashes me a cheeky smile as if to say, Do you have any idea who you’re up against? I’m pretty sure Hina-chan would be the most requested masseuse at any salon in town.
Yoshi is my next-door neighbor, a single guy in his late thirties. Before I met Hina-chan, he and I would occasionally go drinking in one of the cheap izakaya in town—two singletons whiling away the time, talking about nothing of significance. After breaking up with my then-boyfriend, I had crawled into life in my current apartment like some bedraggled survivor of a natural disaster, and Yoshi had done more or less the same—or the opposite, depending on how you looked at it. I was sick and tired of men; he was sick and tired of women.
Living with that boyfriend, my exhaustion had kept growing. He was a perfectly decent guy, and it wasn’t like we argued all the time or anything, but sharing that cramped space with a creature so inflexible in both body and mind, and changing my existence to fit in with his being, wore me out like nothing else. Cohabiting with a man, I felt my body growing heavier, and I stopped acting on my own initiative. Instead, I would watch him, trying to gauge what move he was going to make next, or what he thought about things. It felt like I was accumulating a mound of pebbles inside me. In principle, the flat we’d shared was my home, but I always felt like I was in someone else’s house. At some point, it dawned on me: I didn’t want to live with another person. We broke up soon after that. So, when I met Hina-chan, I felt like patting myself on the back for the incredible luck that had befallen me.
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
