Now that’s a scary thought.
Then just suppose I really was eaten up by someone—someone I just decided to call “Olle”—whose face was on top of the monster’s head, and that the monster really did swallow me. If you suppose all that, then maybe I’m still in the monster now. And I just haven’t realized it yet since I’m still living in the world of phantasms.
But how can you tell? Am I still alive? Or did I die back there and it’s just taking me a really long time to realize it? Am I just fooling around with all these illusions until I finish dying? I don’t think I can tell the difference. I know I’ve been doing a lot of really crazy stuff, but have I really been doing it?—that’s where I’m not so sure. I’ve been to all these totally weird places, and now it seems like I’m back where I started, one complete lap—but how do I know I’m back? Or not? And having Tansetsu Sakurazuki around isn’t helping anything—he’s so totally bizarre I don’t know what he’s going to do or where we’re going to go. It wouldn’t surprise me if he suddenly looked at his watch and said he was late, late for a very important date, and had to be going—but that he’d take me with him, anywhere I wanted to go, in exchange for a pair of my panties, and then giggle and take my hand and tap his heels together and we’d fly up into the sky. Wouldn’t surprise me at all.
I suppose if that happened, I’d just have to cope. Maybe I’d end up someplace in the real world but still totally lost, or maybe we’d go to some other world. Who knows, I might even give him a pair of my panties, if I felt like it. It might be worth it just to see the look on his face.
But the one place I wouldn’t want to go is back to that forest. I don’t care whether it was real or a total fantasy. I don’t ever want to be that scared again. If that’s some sort of place you’ve got to pass through right before you die, then I may have to live forever.
So I guess for now I’m going to believe that the monster and the forest were things I made up inside me somewhere—that the world and I made up together. I don’t much care whether the monster is just another me, or whether it’s actually some sort of bridge between me and the Round-and-Round, or even a thread linking all of us together. As long as it’s not really cutting up flesh-and-blood kids and mashing them together, it’s all the same to me.
Though I guess if it’s all just stuff I made up in my head, then there’s a chance I’m not real either. “I think, therefore I am”—or something like that, but if I’m somehow stuck together with another person and we can go back and forth like that, then how do I know it’s really “I” doing the “thinking”? I may think I’m “thinking,” but it’s possible that it’s the other guy who’s really thinking. You may think you’re thinking all you want, but if it’s someone else doing all that thinking, it doesn’t add up to “I am.” I guess.
So no one really knows whether they even exist or not—and they don’t even realize they don’t know. Because they haven’t been through all this stuff that’s been happening to me. But now I know. I have absolutely no idea what’s real and what’s made up, but at least I know that I don’t know.
I know that the whole “I think therefore I am” thing is a pile of shit, but I also know there’s nothing I can do about it. I can see that the “I am” part is pretty sketchy, but in the end that’s fine by me. Shit, I’m pretty much fine with “I’m not.” If anybody out there doubts my existence, I’m not putting up an argument.
And I’ll tell you why: because all this stuff I’ve been doing, this whole life of mine—living with my brother, mooning over Yoji, fooling around with people other than Yoji for no good reason, the meaningless fights, dying, coming back—all of it has been a hell of a lot of fun. And that feeling—that fun—is absolutely real. I’m sure of it. So in the end, everything else is okay too. It’s all okay. Not a problem. I even enjoy doubting my own existence. The ultimate purpose of life is to have fun. Even for people who don’t think that’s what they’re aiming for, it still ends up coming first—always. People who are suffering end up enjoying the suffering, and people who are struggling like the struggle. Whatever it is you’re doing now, you chose it on some level, and for you it’s the most fun thing there is. So maybe that’s why I totally rejected the monster and made the dark forest go away, because I really don’t like fear and pain…which is why I’m here enjoying myself now—wherever here is.
It’s great here.
Even though everything’s still as stupid as it’s always been.
2
In the north corner of Chofu, near the Nogawa River, there’s a temple called Eiganji, and in that temple is an old statue of Asura, dark and gloomy, with the gold leaf peeling in places. The statue was supposedly carved by a man named Yoshitaka Koyama, though there’s no way to know for sure. Anyway, this Yoshitaka Koyama was something of a known bad boy in these parts, and after doing something to totally piss off his parents, he ran away to the temple, and there, after various adventures, he saw the error of his ways and started carving images of the Buddha. At least that’s how the story goes: bad boy mends his ways and takes up life as
