Hyakki Yagyou

Chapter One: Fur ball, Alienation

Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night.

-         Edna St. Vincent Millay 

December 1st, 6:45 pm

“I’m home!” Emi shouted from the hallway. The key slipped easily back into the lock and she turned it once, then twice and let it be, turning back to see the cat rushing to greet her with a loud meow.

The creature curled itself around its owner’s legs quickly, meowing and looking up as if saying “I missed you”, or “I’m hungry”. Somehow, for cats those two were not all that different. Mio would get his food very soon, Emi thought as she grabbed the cat and carried him back into the kitchen. He was getting pretty heavy, she thought as the cat wriggled a little in her arms, trying to look up, its little eyes a glow asking for that delicious cat food. And maybe add some catnip too, human.

How long had it been since she had Mio-chan? Two, three years? No. It had to have been four. She was twenty now and if she remembered correctly, she had just celebrated her sweet sixteenth birthday when on a cold winter morning she saw the kitten freezing, mewling hopeless and starved. Emi was just on her way home from school when she heard the kitten’s sounds from under one of the cars on the parking lot. Having a weak spot for these furry creatures, Emi had to stop walking and kneel down to find the one making those tiny sounds. And it was Mio-chan! A small, green and grey kitten curled into a fur ball, shivering, terrified of the cold and with that of a certain death.

Who would leave this poor thing out here, all alone? It could not have been its mother. Or they just got separated. Emi did not ponder too much over that. She reached over for the kitten and took it home. Ever since then, the two were inseparable. Even when Emi moved to Tokyo to go to University, she brought the cat along. She was lucky enough to find a rental apartment that actually allowed pets. 

But then again, this was “the ghetto”. The suburbs. An ancient building with bad plumbing and ventilation pipes, whose hallways always smelled of alcohol, urine, cigarettes and cheap perfume, luckily not all these smells at the same time. The landlord was an old grumpy man and his a bit less grumpy but still equally unpleasant wife and the neighbors were as quiet as the dead. Only every now and then would Emi hear the middle-aged woman who lived in the apartment above her argue with her husband. 

There were exactly forty five apartments in this small, old building. Actually, right now it was a housing development since two years ago they have started to build a whole new part.

The construction was terribly loud during summers and autumns. In winter, it would die down and the building looked eerie: an old part on the right with the forty five apartments out of which barely thirty was occupied and the part on the left which was still a skeleton of a construction, with new forty apartments being a plan for the future. Who knows how many would be inhabited anyway. And would this mean that the construction company would decide to get the right part into a better shape as well?

If yes, they would have to move the inhabitants out, somewhere, until the reconstructing is over. This thought made Emi’s stomach twist. Where on earth would she go? She had no one here. No one. Well… Keita. She had him. But she had not seen her brother in eight years. So, how did he count anyways?

“There you go.” She said breaking the thread of her thoughts and the silence of the small apartment she lived in and opened a can of cat food, poured it into a small, jade blue bowl and then pushed the bowl towards the cat. Mio’s attention soon enough drifted from his owner to the food and Emi knew that he would fall asleep soon thereafter. This meant a very calm, quiet evening for her.