HIDDEN MELODIES REFLECTING THE LOST WORLD OF PEPPERMESSES

According to tales passed down for generations, a few of the stars shimmering in the sky were to be condemned to eternal darkness, punished harshly for defying the decrees of the night. However, dust clusters that resisted surrendering to this fate waged an endless war against the guardians of the night. Despite heavy losses on both sides, neither could bear the disgrace of defeat; they fought on, blind to consequence, driven by sheer resolve. One by one, lights were extinguished, and the armor of the guardians crumbled into dust. For a long while, they watched their legions perish. And when they finally realized the war would not end, they chose to make a pact. 

The stars would not be allowed to attain the necessary heat at the core of their densely compressed mass, formed through the pull of gravity. However, they would be permitted to borrow warmth from the hearts of puppets—beings that defied the laws of the universe. Thus, the souls of the stars split into dust, taking the form of tiny butterflies and began to communicate with humans who stood in contrast to reality. They made agreements, promising to grant these individuals whatever they desired. In return, the humans’ hearts grew warmer, and the sparks within them began to merge, forming bundles of light. Once dozens of bundles had been created, the souls of the stars collected them and began to shine once more.

But in time, these stars began to fade—perhaps for reasons unknown, or maybe reasons long forgotten. Among the countless stars sentenced to punishment, only one immense and powerful star continued to shine. For what might have been thousands of years, it blazed without ever dimming. Yet over this span of time, the dust cluster that endured grew bitter toward the universe. Succumbing to its hatred, it began teaching spells to certain individuals—spells that would plunge the world into chaos. From that great star, only selfish puppets remained, those who had stirred disorder to keep its flame from extinguishing for centuries, along with the remnants of their actions.

(…)

Innocent little bodies, not yet aware of the reality that was treacherously hidden in the depths of the abstract concept called life, in which you were shaped by a piece of mud and left to live the destiny written for it for an unknown period of time as the owner of your existence, were sometimes coming together as a group and sometimes saying goodbye to each other. They all slowly left the building they had come to, hoping to learn. Their laughter bloomed and echoed, growing distant with the expanding smiles on their small faces. A place once filled to the brim just moments before now once again cast the shadow of loneliness upon its empty heart. She knew, of course, there was no choice but to surrender to the silence. After bidding farewell to the teachers waiting in the lounge, she would be completely alone. 

Using the road beside this school, bound in loneliness, to return home, Mizuki would either stop by her aunt’s shop near the center of town to help her aunt fulfill incoming orders—shaping the spinning lump of clay with delicate fingers into various pots, vases, and tea sets—or she would play games with the children who came to the shop, crafting imaginary worlds together with their vibrant, sugarcane-like minds untouched by gloom. Or else, she would try to find fragments of a world that belonged to her by sketching freely with her pencil dancing across the paper. Only while drawing or spending time with children—teaching them, sharing with them—did she truly feel like she was reaching her own essence. Thanks to these two things, Mizuki was beginning to warm her heart again with that word she hadn’t felt in a long time—happiness. And yet, this heart she had warmed was being shaken for several years with a force strong enough to diminish her very existence, for reasons she either didn’t know or couldn’t remember. A large part of this tremor was Mizuki’s ability to feel, in all their folds, the pain-filled cries echoing from the souls of certain people. Unable to adapt to this cruel world, she could hear every dying heartbeat lost in despair, second by second. At first, her brain reacted as if it were under threat—shocked, flinching with each beat. Each one stirred violent tremors through her soul. Yet, over time, these sounds could no longer help but merge with a strange calm. Compared to before, she now heard these cries for help only rarely, and spent her time waiting for them all to cease. But when the screams, imprisoned in silence, went unheard, instead of a flower of joy blooming within her chest, an ever-growing void swept through her like an avalanche, destroying everything in its path.

The time she spent outside of drawing—outside her private world—caused her to writhe in agony, as if her only escape from a world she couldn't keep pace with was to retreat into a universe she could finally call her own. Desperate to prevent these painful sessions from repeating, she knew she had to return to her room as soon as possible. Her feet, quickly falling into synchrony, carried her forward without hesitation as she longed to reach her universe. On the street, she could hear the sound of children playing homemade instruments. Each note that rang out painted the faint traces of memories buried deep in her subconscious with harsh strokes, sharpening them, pulling them back into the light. Everything in her vision blurred, transforming into fragments of a memory that brought sorrow just by being remembered. Her feet obeyed the commands of her brain, marching steadily forward without pause, but her consciousness forced her to relive that memory—controlling her, making her part of its debris.

The memory that resurfaced again in her mind had taken place on a day she went to help her aunt at her shop in the town center, and it unfolded like this: The wind, cradling the gloom of faraway lands… bubble clusters foaming and fading like waves in the sky… dead leaves shedding from trees at the end of their time, embarking on a long journey into the unknown… Creatures of this world, to which Mizuki could not find a single belonging piece of herself, passed by in procession. The silhouettes that emerged and vanished rapidly around her blurred her consciousness, spinning her head. Hoping to feel better, she tried a solution she believed would help—she ignored the bodies that were nothing but passing shadows and instead let her eyes wander over the stones beneath her feet. As her mind got lost in the patterns on the ground, a door to the void creaked open, and what she began to hear inside her head surpassed everything she'd heard so far—screams, deadly in their volume and despair, echoed within her skull. The louder the scream she tried to silence became, the more it grew. Among the crowd surrounding her, she could feel the air refusing to reach her lungs, as if a thick wire was tightening around her ribcage.

Mizuki’s mind was running with the thought that she needed to leave immediately and go to a place with barely any signs of life. Unable to resist the pain flaring in her chest, she placed her left hand over her heart and distanced herself from the crowd that was dragging her down. The moment she believed she had left the dizzying town completely behind, she slowed her feet and fixed them to the ground, then turned around. When she looked back at the town she had run away from, she saw traces of it caught between existence and nonexistence. She drew a deep breath into her lungs. It was then she realized that the wire squeezing her ribcage had loosened, and she could breathe again, like before. She gently let her heavy body fall onto the grass. In her pupils, the gloomy reflection of the sky grew larger and larger. The swelling clouds moved so slowly they seemed frozen in time, unwilling to be dyed in gray. Though invisible, the children of the sky were mounting their iron steeds, selecting a shade from palettes filled with every tone of gray, and chasing the clouds to paint them.

In that moment, as always, Mizuki, in her effort to ease the screaming in her ears and the pain in her heart, pulled out her pencil and sketchbook from her small bag, intending to pour the impressions of the suffocating air onto paper. But Mizuki no longer drew from her heart, no longer truly felt what she was drawing. She had been someone who had always thrown herself into drawing, someone who dreamed of becoming an artist. Yet, for a period of time so long she couldn’t count, whenever she said she wanted to become a painter—wanted to reflect the gloomy emotions of her imagined world of colors to millions across the globe—she had been relentlessly belittled by those around her. Just because her goals were high didn’t mean she deserved this humiliation, didn’t mean she should constantly be struck by the harsh realities of life and have her dreams dragged down. But no one ever understood that truth. As the pressure mounted, Mizuki did nothing but translate what she saw onto paper. The more they tried to convince her that she would die a nobody without ever reaching her dreams, and the more everything went wrong, the more she grew alienated from her dreams. Any budding hope that dared peek through the soil was violently uprooted and left to rot.

Her emotions were shifting more frequently now—too frequently for her to control. Unable to bear the loop replaying endlessly in her mind, she said farewell to the paints and brushes that once brought her joy. Now, she only drew in graphite—dark, shadowy sketches—whenever her heart ached or when the painful screams returned. She felt compelled to scribble something, anything. And today was yet another of those days.

Her slender fingers unzipped her bag, and she snatched her pencil with urgency. As soon as she held it, a violin’s sound—its origin unclear—slipped from her ears into her chest. Without even a trace of hesitation, she longed to listen to the owner of this melody, one that seemed to belong to a world she didn’t know but somehow had always felt she came from—one she believed she’d been torn away from over time. She could feel that the owner of this melody, too, was searching for that cursed missing piece needed to reconnect with life. In whispers, the thought repeated itself: when her body reached the person behind this melody, the enduring sorrow clinging to her ruined life would finally fade. Shutting down every system in her body one by one, she walked toward the sound—a sound that expressed the unspoken agony of the one playing the violin. And with every step, a question echoed through her: “Could the cries of pain within my heart belong to the one who crafts these melancholic melodies from a sculpture carved in rubber?” That question trembled and blended into the ever-closer melody.

Amidst the darkness—at the base of those faint radiant lines spreading in all directions—two crystals held Mizuki’s irises in their thrall. Thanks to these crystals, as if fallen from heaven, she felt for the first time the profound meaning of love, one she had never known before, that night. The dust that dragged the particles of time into the unknown seemed to freeze for a few minutes, as if time itself refused to pass. The erratic breaths mixing with the ashes of the void in her heart—which had drained all her joy and rendered everything meaningless—scattered through her veins like ash dust, laying everything on the line to defeat the darkness buried within her.

The child within her, long lulled to sleep by the fatal enchantments of the dark bouquet growing in her chest, awakened at last—remembering dreams and the meaning of life, joining the battle. With every move the child made in defense, the colorless world was repainted in even more vibrant hues by the brush of hope. As everything regained its color, Mizuki felt a long-extinguished flame reignite in her heart.

As the gentleman’s fingers danced across the violin’s fingerboard, the melodies spilling from the bow brushing the strings turned into a lullaby of nightmares born from the illusion of promised happiness. For a moment, the entire town seemed to transform into a stage for the vanished—a town of forgotten souls. Mizuki, who found herself spellbound by this scene adorned by the gentleman’s violin and resembling a one-of-a-kind painting, wished with all her being that its soul would remain forever imprisoned in this moment. She prayed the fire that had begun to blaze within her heart would never die out, that she would not lose the unknown force reconnecting her to life. A few drops of tears aligned with the moonlight slipped from her eyes.

She understood that the sharp arrows of life had also wounded this gentleman deeply. As she drew closer to him in secret, it was impossible not to notice that the pain in her chest intensified. Somewhere deep inside, the resounding screams that echoed again merged with the violin’s magical whispers, recreating a requiem-like opera. Enchanted by the sorrowful atmosphere of this opera—an opera revealing clues about the abyss in which the gentleman was lost—Mizuki's muddled emotions began to yearn to rescue him from this curse.

Flowers of love bloomed in her fading heart, spreading their tender pollen throughout. Yet what could she possibly say to this stranger—she, who didn’t even know how to heal her own pain? Though her feet were desperate to rush toward the gentleman, her mind had committed itself to holding her back.

At that moment, Mizuki kept repeating to herself countless reasons why she shouldn't approach the gentleman. In an attempt to halt both her thoughts and her body, she took a few pieces of paper from her bag and began writing sentences that might make the gentleman feel better—alongside a drawing filled with hope. Her mind didn’t know who he was, but she wanted to help him. In Mizuki’s eyes, this man too was someone who didn’t belong to the world of puppets.

To comfort him, she folded the paper with the drawing into a paper airplane and threw it in his direction. But, fearing being noticed by the man she admired, her feet involuntarily stepped back. The rustling sound from a twig she had stepped on gave away her hiding place. Her heart raced more than ever, a sharp pain striking her chest. Even though she had finally found someone who might understand her alienated self, she couldn’t bring herself to peek back out from behind the bush and see the gentleman’s reaction. Instead, she hurried back home.

So deeply was she affected by the man and his sorrowful music—reflecting the raw agony of nights spent alone amid stone piles that stifled cries for help, cruelly blocking them from reaching others—that his portrait began to invade her every moment. It stirred something in Mizuki so deeply that she decided to apologize to the paints she had turned her back on and reconcile with them.

When Mizuki returned home, she unlocked the cabinet where she had banished her paints and gently poured the many colors onto her brown palette. Her fingers gripped the brush, letting it dance delicately over the palette. The colors clinging to the brush met the canvas through gentle strokes. Each line challenged the one before it, overtaking it, then joined hands with the next, gradually giving meaning to what had once been meaningless. As Mizuki delved deeper into the details of the painting she was working on, she felt something inside her trembling without pause.

Without trying to name the unfamiliar sensation she was experiencing, she focused excitedly on finishing the painting. She spent hours and hours on it. And even when those hours had drained away and she was left face-to-face with the unfinished portrait, tears still fell from her reddened cheeks. The same misty expression she had seen in the eyes of the gentleman she so admired now appeared at the tip of her brush.

When the portrait was finally complete after days of meticulous work, Mizuki felt an overwhelming desire to gift it to the man who had inspired it. Despite not truly believing he would be there, she returned again and again to the place where she had first seen him.

Few could grasp the traces of enduring sorrow conveyed in the song’s opening. Mizuki constantly wondered how someone who always smiled so sweetly and sang in luxurious venues with a joyful expression could have written such lyrics:
"Was Mr. Asahi, who always wore a big smile on his cassette covers, truly someone who had experienced the pitch-black void of loneliness—darker than any hue loneliness could possess, a void where the soul’s every part seemed to decay piece by piece? Could someone who hadn't drowned in sorrow's ink describe that place with such piercing words? Could it be that Mr. Asahi belonged to the realm of ruined beings? A place only accessible to those whose innocence and hope had been stolen?”

Mizuki had never been able to accept the idea that someone granted the right to live in this desolate world could write something so full of hope. To her, it was a divine gift given to Mr. Asahi. In her eyes, he was a phenomenal soul who could write lyrics without even feeling the emotions himself. Every time she listened to his songs, she could feel the iron bars of the cage trapping her spirit begin to loosen, her body growing lighter than air. Her eyelids closed for a few hours of rest, letting her spirit wander the world of dreams. When the time allotted for her dream was up, her eyes opened again.

She let her gaze fall onto the clock before turning toward the window to watch the infinite sky. The clouds, in different shapes, floated like helpless stars clinging to the dust of passing seconds, traveling through the depths of the pale blue dome above. Their translucent whiteness was scattered across the sky’s sorrowful blackness, as if mirroring human pain. Tiny stars flickered with the hopes of humanity, one by one succumbing to the night’s sorrowful pull. The colorless trees stood like pale, matte columns reaching for the heavens, and in the face of this mesmerizing view, two small brown eyes shimmered.

After glowing continuously for a few seconds, the light in them began to fade. No longer able to withstand the spell of gloom, those two brown orbs darkened and drowned in the sorrowful shimmer of the pale pink, near-red hollows they rested in. The intermittent ache in her chest made her feel as if her soul were being pulled away. Struggling desperately to escape this slow collapse, Mizuki tried with all her heart to feel the contrast between the thick darkness and the misty white that surrounded her garden.

Just then, a melody—like one from the tales of old—gently reached her ears. The song entered her soul, breaking into pieces, each piece carrying a different emotion. Growing more curious by the second, she began scanning her surroundings, trying to locate the source of this enchanting tune. As the seconds passed, she finally found the one she was looking for—but couldn’t decide how to react. Confronted with the scene before her, she could do nothing but gaze in stunned silence.