It's About Time I Told You My Story

These days, tales of being "reborn into another world" have become quite ordinary.

They're turned into manga, into anime; everyone laughs and enjoys them as fairy tales. What a fine age this has become — for in the old days, the moment you breathed a word of such a thing, people would have pointed at your back and whispered that you'd lost your mind.

So I've decided to take the plunge, and set it down in writing.

This is my story.

— Though I should say, I didn't come from a world of swords and sorcery. If anything, it's the other way around. I was thrown, one day without warning, out of the same modern Japan you know, and into this country long ago — around the close of the Heian age.

Transmigration, they'd call it.

The man I used to be was nobody special, working an unremarkable job. A "consultant," of all things — and though I'd studied the sciences, it was the computing sort; I carried no grand scientific wisdom that would be of the slightest use in an age like this. No cheat powers were handed to me, either. So there was no way for me to become a hero. All I could manage was to live out this era quietly, without drawing notice.

There is just one thing about me that isn't ordinary.

I do not age.

For reasons I cannot explain, this body has stayed exactly as it was on the day I was thrown here — a thousand years and more have passed, and still it does not grow old. And so I have made my way as a peddler, walking round and round from province to province. Stay too long in one place, and people begin to wonder: "that fellow never ages." So one day I slip away without a word, and in some other land, wearing an innocent face, I set to selling salt and small wares all over again. That is the life I lead.

Why was I granted such an unending life?

...Because of a single vow, perhaps. That is what I've come to believe.

Back when I still lived in the modern world, I lost many people dear to me. Above all — my wife, who was dearer to me than anyone. And it was only after she was gone that I finally understood. I should have told her more of what I felt. I should have treasured her more.

By the time I came to regret it, it was already too late.

So, alone, I made a vow in my heart. — If ever I am born again, this time I will love without holding back. And this time, I will be sure to say so.

Perhaps that wish was simply too strong. Before I knew it, I had become, in this age, a body that cannot die. ...Though the truth of it, even I don't really know.

Well, then.

Why has a man like me taken up the brush?

Not to recount my heroic deeds — I haven't a single one. What I want to tell you about is the ordinary lives of the nameless people I've met along this long road.

What they ate, what they wore, what they believed, the words they laughed with, and the ways they held someone dear. The small, small lives that never, ever find their way into the textbooks.

I am, most likely, the last one left who remembers them.

Even so, I do not remember everything of these thousand years. Some things stay vivid in my chest; others I can only half recall. Now and then, at some small prompting, a "come to think of it..." rises back to the surface. It is those stray fragments that I mean to write down.

An old woman's knack for a pot of soup travels from village to village, from age to age. Some nameless soul's kindness, changing shape, lives on for centuries. I am something like the courier of it — quietly gathering up the scraps of living that others left behind, and carrying them on into the next age.

When I think about it, all this while I have only ever told other people's stories. "That was thanks to the shopkeeper." "That was the work of the master craftsman." Always leaving myself for later.

But it has been a thousand years now.

— It's about time, surely, that I told a little of my own story, too.

Take it for a fairy tale and laugh, if you like. I don't mind.

Only this much is true: every one of the people who appear in these pages truly, certainly, lived.

So then — let us begin. The tale of my long, long journey.