Chapter 5.2

My training began the very next morning.

A knock came on the bedroom door early in the morning.

“Let’s go,” Natsuko called.

I was handed old gym shorts and a t-shirt. My old clothes were still washing, Natsuko said. She took off on a jog and waved for me to follow. We ran southeast, down the streets of Sapporo still covered by night.

We ran until we reached a park laid by the river. My legs began to burn less than halfway to our destination, and I arrived at the park heaving last night’s food into the nearest trash bin.

“From now on,” Natsuko said, “you’ll be running with me here every morning unless I say otherwise. You need more strength and stamina.”

“To kill you, you mean?” I gasped.

“Is this going to be a routine question for you?” Natsuko frowned. “Is everything going to come back to that?”

“What are we training for then?”

“What if I told you,” Natsuko said. “That I just wanted you to be strong?”

“Strong enough to kill you?”

“That too,” Natsuko sighed, “but after I’m gone, you’ll have to be strong enough to stand on your own. That’s what we’re truly training for, Fujiko.”

Natsuko walked to the edge of the riverbed. She sifted around on the banks until she found a smooth rock. She returned and placed it in my hand.

“Your first task,” she said, “is to break this rock.”

“Break it?”

“Yeah.”

I hurled the rock to the ground.

“With magic,” Natsuko rolled her eyes.

“I think you should’ve been more precise with your instructions.”

I picked the rock again. With magic, Natsuko had said. But how was I supposed to do that? I squeezed my hands, my eyes, clenched my spine and my gut to exert some amorphous pressure on the rock. But of course, the rock did not break.

“Up until now,” Natsuko explained, “you’ve been using magic subconsciously to see. Using it is second nature to you, but therein lies our first problem. In order to use it, you need to learn how to feel it, the imaginarium, we call it, that is around you.”

“Imaginarium,” I muttered.

“Think of it as the building blocks of your sight, of your existence,” Natsuko said. “Channel it correctly, and you’ll be able to perform all kinds of feats.”

Natsuko's hand gestured towards the river. She leveled her index and middle fingers, then snapped them back into her palm.

“Rise,” she said.

A thin stream leapt up from the river and soared into the clouds hanging low over the city. It didn’t look all that impressive until the vertical tributary tore the clouds apart, dispersing them as tears vanishing just before the dawn.

“How did you do that?” I asked.

“There are two ways to perform magic,” Natsuko answered. “For almost everyone, it’s through a system of incantations. You recite things and suggest that the imaginarium perform feats to your liking. You’re different, Fujiko.”

“What’s the second way?”

“There’s a saying,” Natsuko said. “Only imaginarium can command imaginarium. But that’s what you can do, Fujiko. Your ability to see through closed eyes means you’ve been commanding it since the very beginning.”

“But you can do it too, can’t you?”

“Yes,” Natsuko nodded, “but I don’t have the same natural talent for it as you do. You just need to open your eyes to accomplish wonders. Now try again. Break the rock.”

I wasn’t sure what talent Natsuko saw in me. By the time the sun rose, I was still staring at the unblemished rock in the palm of my hand. I felt nothing, not the flow of imaginarium, nor the remote possibility that the rock could be broken by my hands. By the time the sun began to set, the status quo had not changed.

“We’ll try again tomorrow,” Natsuko smiled. “Let’s take the rock home, as a souvenir.”

Oh, what a mistake that was.

The next morning, Natsuko told me to stuff the rock in my pockets on our morning jog. The reason why seemed obvious. I had yet to break the rock. I was taking it with me to the river to try again.

But Natsuko had different ideas in mind once we arrived.

“What are you doing?” she asked when I fetched the rock out of my jacket.

“What do you mean? I’m trying to break the rock.”

“No. Put it back in your pockets. Wait here.”

Once more, Natsuko perused the rocks smoothed by the Toyohira River. She picked out another one. This one was heavier, with sharp edges to prove that it had not yet been tamed by the river.

“Try this one,” she said.

I didn’t understand the logic. Was she lowering the difficulty? Were smooth rocks indestructible or something?

Again, I spent the day trying again to turn the rock into dust. Natsuko did nothing to help. She instead watched me from the shade of a nearby gingko tree. I thought that perhaps she would take breaks, nap during the long hours of zero progress, but she kept a watchful eye over me.

“You want to at least show me how you’d do it?” I asked at one point.

“Wouldn’t make a difference,” Natsuko shrugged. “You have to learn how to open your eyes first.”

When evening came, Natsuko came over and repeated her words from yesterday.

“We’ll try again tomorrow. Take this rock home too.”

So that made two rocks in my pockets.

And thus began an arduous cycle, where every day’s failure meant another rock I had to stuff in my jacket or shorts, more weight that I carried during every morning’s jog, more exhaustion and frustration as I stared into the unique contours of every new rock that Natsuko fetched from the river.

Why did I persist? Why did I acquiesce to the demands of a woman who professed that our training would only end with her death? The answer was quite simple.

What would I do otherwise?

What had I been doing otherwise before this? Maybe I was afraid to go back to… whatever that was… that silent oblivion.

A month passed, and thirty rocks found their way into my pockets. Natsuko added a challenge that she thought was funny. If a rock fell out during the jog, that meant twenty pushups, and twenty more for each rock that dropped out while I was doing them.

“How much longer is this going to take?” I moaned. “Every day, we come here, and I stand here until the sun goes down, staring at a new rock.”

“As long as it takes,” Natsuko replied. “Take your time.”

“I’ve started naming the rocks,” I murmured. “Today is Sakura. Yesterday was Hanako.”

“You sure it’s a good idea to get attached to something you’re going to destroy?” Natsuko asked.

“Is that a warning?” I asked. “A warning to not get too attached to you?”

“Let me tell you a little secret,” Natsuko smiled. “To truly destroy something, you have to really see it for what it is. The reason why you haven’t broken the rock is because you don’t understand it at all.”

“So what? You’re saying Sakura and Hanako have feelings?”

“What I mean,” Natsuko said, “is that you have to open your eyes, Fujiko.”

From that day forward, each new rock I handled with extensive care. I spent time, even after our daily “training” was over, mulling over the finer details of each rock, the curvature of the smooth ones, the sandy textures of the ones not yet embraced by the river.

But a week passed. I was still met by repeated failure.

“You’re still not opening your eyes,” Natsuko repeated.

“What are you talking about?” I growled. “I’m trying, okay? I’m trying, but it’s not working. I’ve studied every rock you’ve given me here, but everyday, nothing happens.”

“Perhaps you’re still not seeing it.”

“See what?” I snapped. “What more is there to see?”

In my frustration, I held the rock to my face and opened my eyes. Sunlight washed in and a white blanket covered my pupils. A sharp pain spread from the center of my irises, but I blinked back tears and kept my focus on my hand, on the rock that, as I concentrated, broke through the film bleached over my eyes.

“What do you want, Natsuko? Here. See? I’ve opened my eyes. Now I’m looking at you, Tetsuo. Why don’t you just do us all a favor and turn into dust? Why don’t you all just turn into dust?”

And just like that, Tetsuo, or Rock Number 34, disintegrated.

I could feel the imaginarium pouring out from my eyes. It wrapped around the rock in my hand and crushed it into gray mist. It then slithered down my arm and into my jacket. When I put my hand in my pockets, all I could fish out were grains finer than bits of flour.

“See?” Natsuko shrugged. “Told you. You had to open your eyes.”