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 — the middle of the Heian period, a thousand years or so before now.

Transported, they'd call it. Not reborn — carried over, in this very body.

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 that. Even lighting a fire — the first time I tried, an old woman of the village laughed at me. So there was no way for me to become a hero. All I could manage was to live quietly, without drawing notice, and survive.

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. Stay too long in one place, and people begin to wonder: "that fellow never ages." So every few years I gather up my things, and in some other land, wearing an innocent face, I begin to live all over again. There were years I walked the roads with salt on my back; years I sat at the counter of a shop; years I turned the soil of a paddy. That is the life I have led, for a thousand years.

Why was I granted such a life?

That, even I don't know. Only that it came after I had lost someone dear to me, back in the world I left behind. That is all there is to say.

Why, then, 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.

For instance: I know the name of the wild green a certain old woman dropped into her soup. I know why a certain man, salting down his plums, set one stone fewer on the lid. I am, most likely, the only one left who remembers such things.

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.