So We Look to the Sky Read online

  Copyright © 2010 by Misumi Kubo

  English-language translation copyright © 2021 by Polly Barton

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  First English-language Edition

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Originally published in Japanese under the title (Fugainai Boku Wa Sora Wo Mita) by SHINCHOSHA Publishing Co., Ltd.

  English translation rights arranged with SHINCHOSHA Publishing Co., Ltd. through the ASIA LITERARY AGENCY and Japan UNI Agency, Inc.

  Arcade Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

  Arcade Publishing® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

  Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2021933411

  Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt

  Cover illustration: © George Peters/Getty Images

  ISBN: 978-1-951627-71-3

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-951627-93-5

  Printed in the United States of America

  Contents

  1 Mikumari

  2 The Enormous Spiderweb Covering the World

  3 The Orgasm from 2035

  4 A Goldenrod Sky

  5 Pollen Nation

  1

  Mikumari

  LET’S SAY FOR THE sake of argument that a typical, healthy sex life for the dopey kids who live around these parts is the kind that my classmates have: stopping off on the way home from school at someone else’s house, or a cheap motel, or finding a deserted spot outside and doing it two, or three, or as many times as the mood takes you, then making your way back home, crotch still tingling, and putting on your best butter-wouldn’t-melt face as you eat dinner with your family, eyes pinned to the TV news—well, if that’s the case, I guess at some point I strayed pretty wildly from the typical, healthy path.

  With the end-of-term ceremony over with and my report card in my bag, I walked straight past my house and crossed the bridge. On the road running along the other side of the river I turned in to an apartment building and took the elevator to the top floor, checking that the coast was clear before making my way toward the apartment at the very end of the hall. The door was unlocked. I opened it just a crack and slipped through, entering the small room closest to the entrance.

  Inside the room the blackout shades were drawn, and it took some time for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, but my ears were alive to every sound. My hearing was pretty good in general, and I was always the one to hear my friends’ phones when they vibrated and stuff. Laid out on the double bed was Anzu, dressed up as a character from some anime. “Anzu” was the name she’d taken for herself, and I had no idea what her real one was. The outfit, modeled loosely around the sailor uniform most high-school girls wore, had an incredibly short skirt. The thighs jutting out from underneath made me think of tree trunks, and the blond wig with attached cat ears was also seriously unflattering.

  I approached the bed and Anzu opened her eyes a little, pointing wordlessly to the costume that was waiting for me on its hanger in the corner of the room. As directed, I unbuttoned my school uniform, letting it drop to the floor, and put on in its place the silky lab-coat type thing that would transform me into another character from the same anime. I capped it off with the long blue wig and pair of small spectacles also laid out for me, then went and stood beside the bed. I could hear a whirring noise like an electric toothbrush. Flipping up Anzu’s skirt, I saw a pink electrical cord trailing out of her skimpy panties. I pulled the panties down until they hung around her right ankle, and I propped up her knees.

  Anzu made a gulping sound, as if she was swallowing a whole mouthful of saliva. When I tugged slowly on the cord trailing out of her body, a load of liquid came spilling out of her, leaving a big wet patch on the sheets.

  “I see you’ve been waiting for me like a good little girl.”

  I was now fully in the role of this character, whoever the hell he was, which meant I was obliged to come out with gross lines like that. That was part of the agreement I had with Anzu. As I spoke, I saw her body jerk, her back arching so it lifted off the sheet.

  Before we had sex, Anzu would write a script. I would act according to the script, come out with the lines she’d written for me, and then we’d do it. That was the deal.

  I put Anzu’s index and middle fingers in my mouth now and sucked on them in the perviest way I could muster, with lots of slurping sounds. That, too, was part of the script.

  Anzu groaned, a perfectly unsexy groan as if she’d just been kicked in the stomach. I moved the vibrator onto her clitoris, and began sliding Anzu’s fingers around in my mouth. Instantly she began wailing at a pitch that was strangely grating, “Oh, Lord Muramasa, I’m coming!”

  “Not yet,” I said in a stern voice, as the script had demanded.

  I opened Anzu’s legs up into an M-shape and moved my face right up to its center. I stuck my middle finger into the place where all that slimy, glistening liquid was coming from. Then I took it out, smeared the liquid I’d scooped up across her clitoris, and began to move the vibrator around and around on top.

  “Aaaaaaaah! Lord Muramasa, it’s too much! I’m cooooooooommmming!!!” Anzu said, arching her body back like a bow and shaking so violently that all the flab on her lower half shook, then falling totally still. I could only assume Lord Muramasa was the guy I was cosplaying as. Truth be told, I didn’t know a single thing about this anime series that Anzu was so obsessed with.

  “What a naughty little girl you are,” I said, patting her head.

  When she’d got her breath back, Anzu sat up and unzipped my jeans. My cock had been starting to get hard from more or less the moment I walked in the room. Now she took it in her mouth, coating it in her saliva, then quickly changed posture and straddled me. By this point, the room was so warm that the little spectacles had steamed up. I lay there faceup on the bed as Anzu rocked back and forth on top of me, reaching out my hands from time to time to fondle her nipples through the fabric of her uniform. She moaned rhythmically, mm, mm, mm, and with every movement, more of her warm juices caught in my pubic hair. Glimpsing the rolls of fat on her belly, her wig that was now askew, I felt myself starting to lose it. I shut my eyes tight and concentrated on the feeling of being inside her.

  “I’m gonna come,” I blurted out, and Anzu leaned over and whispered in my ear in the tiniest of voices, “Come as much as you want.”

  It wasn’t the voice of some cosplay character, either—it was her real voice. The moment I heard it there was no holding back anymore, and I shot hard inside her.

  It was at the beginning of my first year of high school when Anzu—well, hit on me, basically. A friend had dragged me along to Comiket, a huge comic market in Tokyo, and I was hanging around there kind of bored when Anzu came up and told me that I looked exactly like so-and-so from this anime, took a photo of me, and then all but forced my email address out of me. We started texting, and I was pretty surprised to discover that sh
e lived in the exact same part of town outside of Tokyo that I did, in an apartment building directly across the river—that was some coincidence. That surprise, though, was nothing to when I discovered that she wasn’t the same age as me, as I’d assumed, but twelve years older, and married. In other words, when I actually thought about it, what I was doing was having an affair with someone’s wife.

  I don’t watch anime or TV at all, so a good part of what Anzu said went straight over my head. I just knew that, so long as I was in this room, I wasn’t allowed to be my normal self. I had to wear the cosplay outfits she prepared for me, make my face up white, and sometimes put in color contacts, too. When she saw me all done up, she’d go all dewy-eyed and take a ton of photos.

  The first time Anzu invited me over to her apartment, I sort of forced her back on the bed, not really thinking for one second that she’d be up for it, but it turned out she was. The one condition was that the sex had to be in cosplay. From that day on, I’d been coming around once or twice a week after school and we’d been going at it like crazy, barely an unscripted word passing between us.

  Anzu was my first, and she taught me all kinds of stuff about sex I had no idea of—that there were lots of different positions you could do, and equipment you could use. Not always, but often when we were through, Anzu would apologize to me and slip me a ten-thousand-yen note. At first, I didn’t really grasp the significance of that neatly folded note, so I didn’t really feel that bad about it. I thought of it like the “little something” an aunt or someone would give you when you went around to visit. But even a brain as stupid as mine couldn’t resist the truth of the matter forever, and one day it finally filtered through to me: Anzu was paying me to fuck her.

  I was lying back on her bed afterward, smoking a cigarette, listening to some kid running down the hallway outside. What the hell am I doing? I wondered to myself, as all the while my non-smoking hand fondled Anzu’s crotch. I felt the smooth skin growing sticky beneath my fingers. Anzu began making little noises, then her hand reached out for my cock. I hadn’t once worn a condom with Anzu, not from the very first time—which was my very first time, ever.

  “It’s fine,” Anzu would always say, “I can’t get pregnant,” and I’d always had the sense that I shouldn’t ask any more, but today, for some reason, I did.

  “Are you not going to have kids?”

  I felt the heat instantly drain from Anzu’s body, and she got up from the bed.

  “It’s none of your business,” she said, in her regular voice, and left the room. I waited a while but she didn’t come back, so I got up, picked off a sliver of tissue that was stuck to the head of my cock and threw it in the trash, then changed out of the lab coat and back into my uniform. I remembered what my mom had said to me a bunch of times: You can’t just go blurting out whatever damn thing comes into your head. And today, of all days, when I’d had something to talk to Anzu about. Oh well, I thought vaguely as I put on my shoes at the entrance. It’d just have to wait till next time.

  I came out of Anzu’s building and walked across the bridge in the direction of home. Letting all the strength drain from my body and dragging my feet, I watched the enormous evening sun as it sank down behind the mountains. Looking down off the bridge, I saw a man in a yellow T-shirt and track pants emerge from his makeshift home of vinyl sheeting and wooden boards and take a piss.

  I opened the door to my house, and a loud moaning greeted me. My mother was a midwife, and she ran a maternity clinic out of our house, which meant, more often than not, there were women giving birth in my home. It was just a regular sort of house, with no soundproofing or anything like that, so wherever you were in the building, you could hear the sounds of women in agony. I found it so weird to think that people made the same sounds when they were having sex as they did when they were in labor. Honestly, if you weren’t told that these sounds were the sounds of someone giving birth, you would definitely assume it was just porn with the volume turned up really loud. Growing up in this house, that had been the soundtrack to my childhood.

  As I was picking at the bowl of simmered daikon left out on the kitchen table, my mom came rushing into the kitchen.

  “Got a minute?” she said, and without waiting for an answer, led me through to the tatami-floored birthing room at the back of the house. The woman’s husband, who was supposed to be her birth partner, had been held up at work, and my mom wanted me to step in and rub the woman’s back in his place.

  “It’s the sacrum you want to focus on, okay?” my mom instructed me.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. I know everything,” I said, placing the palm of my hand so it adhered exactly to the flat plane above the tailbone and rubbing gently.

  “I do apologize,” said my mom to the woman giving birth. “The other nurses are on summer holiday, and this delinquent son of mine is the only one around.”

  The young woman’s face, all crumpled up in agony, suddenly relaxed.

  “No, no! He really knows what he’s doing,” she said, and smiled at me. It was such a pretty smile, I felt a pang go shooting through my chest.

  “See?” I said, and my mom grinned as if she was genuinely pleased.

  Sometimes, when the other midwives were off or there was nobody to accompany the women in labor, I was called in to help with the deliveries—only when the women gave their permission, of course. I guess I must have taken after my mom after all, because whenever I saw women giving birth in real pain, I would be overcome by an urge to do something to help them, to make their pain less bad. Today, thanks to my expert sacral massage technique, the delivery was over in no time at all, and a new person entered the world.

  * * *

  I’d gotten a summer job as a lifeguard at the local pool, together with Ryota from my class at school. I was crouching down outside the door to my house, eating a freeze pop, when Ryota turned up to pick me up on his bike. Mine was broken, so he gave me a ride to the pool on the back of his.

  “I’ve got some good news for you,” Ryota yelled without turning around, standing up as he pedaled. “Nana’s got a job at the pool reception desk.”

  Ryota was my best friend at school, but even him I hadn’t told about Anzu. Nana was a girl in my year, and I’d had a crush on her since I’d first got into the school. The more wrapped up I got in my sex life with Anzu, the more I’d put my thoughts of Nana on hold. But then, just after the end-of-term tests, she came up and asked me out.

  “Give me some time, okay?” I said right away, thinking, of course, of Anzu. I kind of surprised myself, to be honest, not going down the two-timing route. Apparently, I had a little pocket of decency left in me after all.

  As I was waiting for Ryota to lock up his bike in the racks, someone grabbed my arm from behind. I turned around to see Nana, a good ways shorter than me. She gave me a big smile, then let go of my arm and went tottering off toward the pool entrance, just like a little kid. Her front teeth were on the long side, and when she smiled, she reminded me of a squirrel happily clutching an acorn.

  I got home that evening to discover three boxes of condoms waiting for me on my desk. I went tearing down the stairs and slid open the door to the tatami room where my mom was kneeling at the low table before a stack of papers.

  “What the hell are these?” I said, holding up one of the boxes.

  “Use them!” she replied, without lifting her head.

  “Who gets given condoms by his own mother?” I shouted.

  She looked up, grinned at me in the way she did when she was on to a secret of mine, and held out a hand. “If you don’t want them, give them back.” As I was standing there at a loss for words, she added, “It’s not just about pregnancy, you know. You can end up with a penis like a cauliflower if you’re not careful!”

  Hearing my mom say the word “penis” always sapped the strength from me, immediately. It had been the same ever since I was young. In any case, I knew it was useless to try saying anything to her when she was being like this, so I
closed the screen door without a word, my condoms still in my hand.

  “I’m not ready to be a grandma yet, okay?” my mom bellowed from the other side.

  That evening, I had a message from Nana, so I ate dinner early and set out for the riverbank. Outside my front door, I stopped and turned around, ran back up to my room, and stuffed two of the condoms into my back pocket. The sun had gone down some time ago. I ran all the way to the place we’d arranged to meet, overtaking the leisurely old couples walking their dogs and the young kids scurrying home from summer school.

  Nana was standing by the bike path, a lone figure silhouetted by the light of the vending machine. Something about the sight of her standing there so small and alone made me want to cry. We walked along the path talking, Nana pushing the bike she’d come on. For some reason, the whole scene felt deeply satisfying to me: walking along above the riverbank with Nana, pushing a bike, the summer break only just begun. I had this feeling like this was a stage I had to pass through in order to move on. No sooner had the thought formulated itself than I asked myself, On to where? I didn’t have a clue.

  “You’re going out with someone, right?” Nana said, looking up at me. I knew instinctively that it was best not to give any details, so I simply nodded, and then, after a pause, added,

  “I want to make a clean break with her before you and me start anything.”

  Now it was Nana’s turn to nod silently.

  The following day, on the way home from work, I stopped in at Anzu’s apartment. Just as before, Anzu was lying on the bed, all dressed up in her cosplay outfit, love egg in, eyes closed. Ignoring the costume she’d laid out for me, I went up beside the bed and looked down at her. I am pretty shortsighted, and from afar like that, with her face painted so white that it was impossible to see the skin underneath and her fake eyelashes on, Anzu could have been someone from my school. When I crouched down close beside the bed, though, I could make out a couple of wrinkles at the corner of her eye. I took a deep breath and then moved my mouth close beside Anzu’s ear.