Late at night, after everything around me falls silent, I sink into a chair and close my eyes.
The scene that floats up from the depths of my mind is always the same, stamped permanently into my brain.
In the darkness at the back of the temple, a flame burns above the altar. Sparks burst from the fire like orange snowflakes, interrupting the sound of chanting coming from beneath the earth.
Each time, I wonder why it's this scene.
Since that night when I was twelve, twenty three years have passed. In that time, various things have happened. {Incidents more sad and more frightening than I could have ever imagined.} They would rip out by the roots everything I had believed in until then.
And yet even now, why is that night always the first thing to come to my mind?
Is hypnotic suggestion really that powerful?
Sometimes, I still get the feeling that I {haven't fully awakened} from the brainwashing.
Now, my reasons for recording this stream of circumstances surrounding those events is as follows.
Many things were returned to dust, and since that day, ten years have passed.
A span of ten years doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things. But problems piled up, and ironically, when the new order was instated, doubts about the future started sprouting. During this period, I spent some time studying history, and realized that as human beings, no matter how many tears we have to shed to learn a lesson, the moment the tears are dry, we forget. That's the type of beings we are.
Of course, nobody should forget the promise that the indescribable tragedy that happened that day will never occur again. I want to believe that.
But maybe some day, in a future where peoples' memories have faded away, will our foolishness cause us to travel down the same path again? I can't shake off this fear.
Because of this I suddenly resolved to write all this down, but time and again found myself bewildered. It was as if my memories had been moth-eaten here and there, making me unable to remember the reality of important details.
Although I checked with people who were there at the time, as we tend to make up details for the gaps in our memory, I was surprised to find that even our shared memories are contradictory.
For example, right before I met the False Minoshiro on Mt. Tsukuba, I had put on red-tinted sunglasses. I remember this fact as clear as day, but for some reason, Satoru is positive that I wasn't wearing glasses of any sort. And not just that, Satoru also hinted that finding the False Minoshiro was a feat he had done by himself. Of course, a notion as ridiculous as that is absolutely false.
I put down my pride, interviewed as many people as I could think of, and came across ever more conflicting points. During that process, an undeniable reality occurred to me. That is, there didn't exist a single person whose memory wasn't distorted to hide his own faults.
As I was laughing at the pitiful foolishness of humans and writing down my new discovery, I suddenly realized that I don't have any basis on which to exclude myself from this rule. From someone else's perspective, there's no doubt that the memories from which I am writing this are warped to only show my good side.
Therefore, I would like to say that since this story is from my own perspective, it may suffer from being distorted due to self-justification. Above all, the number of deaths that were the consequence of our actions may be motivation for such self-justification, however unconsciously it's done.
