It was a strange road. Endless dark night no matter how far I walked. There was no light. From time to time, I brushed my hand against my body and stroked my face—I felt so tenuous that if I didn’t, I couldn’t even be sure I existed, as if I had turned completely invisible from head to toe. 

I was all right. I still had my body, its warmth. My long hair, my five fingers on each hand, my eyes, my nose—everything was where it should be. Even so, I felt uneasy, and I couldn’t help reaching up to touch some part of my body every now and then. 

Where was I? I must have been walking for a long time, but I didn’t feel tired at all. In fact, the more I walked, the lighter I felt, it seemed to me—as light as if wings had sprouted from my back. I could hardly tell whether my feet were touching the ground.

What could have brought me here, to a place like this? It was like I’d fallen down to the bottom of a well. Or to the other side of the earth. 

I thought I heard someone call me from outside the house, and when I rushed out, the darkness unfurled into the cold hush of the night. Led on by the voice, I wandered into an unfamiliar alley, and after that, I lost all sense of time and place. The more I walked, the more I became something floating in the air, and I could feel my thoughts of our house and my family, my work, slipping away from me. All I can remember now is the voice that called to me, how beautiful it was, clear as glass, its coaxing tone pressing me to hurry, hurry. When I stepped out into the icy night, someone seemed to stand beside me and softly touch the tip of my shoulder—I remember a hint of that, too. 

I live in the suburbs about an hour away from Tokyo by train, where rice fields and vegetable patches still dot the neighborhood, but even in this rural town, I had never seen darkness quite like this one. Usually, if I stepped outside, even late at night, I would see some lights from someone’s house or apartment, or street lamps, or the headlights from a car passing by, and I could make out the dim lines of footpaths between the rice paddies. But that night! What utter darkness—it was extraordinary. 

Still, I had a feeling that I knew the air of this darkness—this preternatural, pitch-black night—from somewhere before. Otherwise, it would have been impossible for me to walk on like that, so calm and steady.

Somewhere in the distance, I heard the dry rustling of tree branches. I could feel the wind too. At the same time, a faint whiff of snow brushed against my nose. Why think of snow when I couldn’t see a speck of white anywhere around me? It could have been the biting February air that made me imagine it, or my memory of the snow I’d seen on the peak of Mount Tanzawa a few days ago.

The clear, bell-like voice rang out in the night, calling to me again. 

“Don’t fall asleep. Trust me, I’ll find a perch for you.”

“A perch?”

No one answered, but the air stirred around me, and I found myself walking faster than before, as if something was urging me on. When I listened closely, I heard the swishing and stirring of innumerable things in the dark. Tens of thousands of black shapes thronged the air. Standing in their midst, I smelled coal this time. As far as I knew, I was surrounded, hemmed in close by this swarm of blacknesses. 

Even though I couldn’t see anything, blinded by the dark, I could sense these black presences as distinctly as if by touch. Rolling by soundlessly was a sooty black iron pot, and a black brush soaked in black danced in the air. Countless strips of mourning clothes were waving and fluttering. Black lacquered geta sandals marched along, scraping against each other as their hollow clip-clop rang in the air. Fields, too, with blocks of coal fresh out of their bales piled high.

This was a country of blackness, a world of nothing but black.

Sometimes Buddhist priests in black robes gathered close, their deep, murmuring recitation of sutras resonating all around me. 

“See, I’m here for you, you’ll be okay.”

I heard the clear voice again, and it somehow reminded me of my little sister who lives far away. Or maybe it was my daughter’s voice. The three of us sound so alike we often get mistaken for each other on the phone. Like oil seeped into blotting paper, the voice was drifting, swaying in the darkness.

Suddenly, I felt something wet on my body. It was raining, apparently. February rain should have been chilling, but I didn’t feel cold at all. Perhaps because of the rain, a ripple spread through the darkness, a wave of joy brimming with life, of sheer thrill and rapture so powerful I felt swept up with it. There was a sudden shift in the atmosphere—the rain seeping into the ground gave off a raw smell, but at the same time, a keen crispness penetrated every current of air. Like a beast protected by a thick coat of fur, I filled my nostrils with the air. It flowed all the way down to the very depths of my body, awakening the thing that lay dormant there. 

What was this fierce emotion? I couldn’t hold it back, the thing that sounded like a howl rising from deep within my throat. My blood took on the gleaming blackness of obsidian and oozed through my body with slow, heavy throbs like crude oil spouting from the earth. 

It seemed to me that, in the dark, I was transforming into something inhuman, surrounded by these black presences. My muscles creaked with searing pain as if my bones might jut out of my body. The agony was so intense that I almost yelled out, but it wasn’t just pain—it was accompanied by a sweet pleasure, too.

Something horrific was happening to me. It was as if I had stepped into another dimension as soon as I’d left the house. My body was shrinking little by little, marked by violent pangs of pain. My anatomy was changing into something inhuman. Eventually, I felt my two legs become oddly thin and short, and instead of walking on the ground, I was hopping.

What was happening to me? I wanted to check my body but couldn’t see anything. I wanted to call out my sister’s name. But try as I might, I couldn’t remember what it was. Not just her name—I couldn’t even bring back her face, her laugh, all the memories we’ve shared since childhood... It didn’t stop at my sister. I couldn’t remember my daughter’s name, or face, or what she was wearing, or what we had eaten for dinner together, even though she had been lying next to me only moments ago.

“Cruel.” 

A choking groan escaped from my throat. It sounded rough and withered. When did I lose the human tongue? Not so long ago, I’d been reading newspapers and books, talking with my daughter, surrounded by language, but human language was now gone from me entirely, as if bleached out. All I could see around me was darkness, darkness, darkness. A vast darkness through which I could only grope my way forward. In this pitch-black world, I could feel the myriad presences of living things, the winds, the trees, the undulations of the earth, and the black forms, but I couldn’t even call out to them.

“Let us go.”

It was the bell-like voice again. A beautiful, misty voice.

“Soon, you’ll become a great, black eye that can gaze at the whole world in an instant.” 

Was this the voice of a god? Whatever it was, I realized that I was walking down a path that had already been laid out for me. I’d known that this would happen someday, and my life in the human world had only been a temporary lodging. In my makeshift form, I’d gone shopping, played with my daughter, laughed with her father. A flame lit up in the corner of my memory—yes, that was the kind of creature I’d been.

As soon as I realized this, I became aware that I had now morphed into a giant black bird. My wet, gleaming eyeballs reflected infinite darkness. I was no longer on the ground. Only the sharp sounds of my wings cutting the wind resounded in my ears. In the deep, never-ending darkness, I kept on flying through the pitch-black world. For many days, many weeks, I went on circling in the darkness without even knowing my destination. 

Though I was in the midst of the inky blackness, not even knowing what kind of time was passing there, I could smell the surface of the earth very clearly. At times, deep fissures rose into view, darker than the darkness around me, and I realized that I was flying deep in the glaciers from hundreds of millions of years ago. Sometimes I flew in the dark bowels of the earth, where minerals rasped against each other. The sharp tips of the glinting black minerals nearly grazed my soft wings and eyes many times, but no matter what danger I was in, I remained strangely unscathed.

After a while, I became aware that I wasn’t the only one flying there, but was surrounded by similar creatures, quietly flocking around me. 

A long time seemed to pass. 

“Look, there’s a perch. Rest a little and look below. If you can see something of value to you, you should find your way back home in time.” 

The clear voice rang out just next to me. When I stared hard, I could make out something like a black bar hanging sideways in the air. I grasped it tightly. Then I peered down, far below in the thick darkness.

There was a single spot that gave off a faint light, and that was the house I should have been in. In the depths of the night, I could see a small room. My daughter, still only in elementary school, was sound asleep, her face artless. On her right, her father slept in his pajamas with light blue stripes, his hands neatly clasped over his chest as usual. Who was it that lay on her left? A woman with long hair… 

It was myself. There was no doubt about it. I was fast asleep on my side, my body slightly curled, my hand placed on my daughter’s shoulder, my face smooth and peaceful. 

“See, that’s the world. That’s your precious world.” 

Down below, the air was brimming with content. Deep sleep unravelled their bodies, setting them loose, at ease. Defenseless, full of trust—no cracks to mar the whole. 

That was my world, my cherished world.

Perhaps sensing my gaze peering down from the darkness, the woman turned in her sleep, half-opened her eyes, and stared back at me suspiciously. In a moment, she closed her eyes again. What did she see…? She held out her hands to me, a faint smile playing on her lips. 

At last, I could feel myself turning back into a human, little by little.

I endured the creaks of pain, and when I stood again at the front door in my original form, the house embraced my whole body in its gentle warmth. Looking back, I suddenly saw snow fluttering in the wind. Colors had returned. The bare trees in the garden were trembling in the cold. In the frozen darkness of the sky above, innumerable black things, the forms that had been by my side only a moment ago, were about to fly off, who knows where next. 

I stepped into my old, temporary lodging. A human woman once more…

My blood, no longer black, flowed through my body a vivid red.