PIED PIPER | dazai osamu

2: aching, the tiger weeps.

How long had you spent in that café, hunched over the table with your pen, scribbling words and musical notes across the paper? The haunting skill in being able to sew sounds together, the skein of notes and frightening talent in being intimate with the voice of death; limp and strung up on the lines of the scores and waiting to be brought to life. Dazai knows. He knows about the wefts and warps in your craft—the opposite of undone; tunes are so tightly woven that it wretches the poor heart from its locked chamber of the ribcage. Painful, mournful, nostalgic. Yet you are unaware of your own misery projected onto the paper like the notes are normal, that they are not the manifestations of the black spots that swarmed your vision on the edge of a seizure. They only have one life between the strings or buttons or the membrane of an instrument. After that, they will be stored away in a binder, only to be looked at but not played. A rather strange habit, Yosano had commented, but I wouldn't blame her; you don't use the same technique when you're inflicting pain.

Was that what your music was? Just to inflict pain, as a machine, as a servant?

The sky was growing rosy, splotched with the occasional cloud but washed orange.

The woman washing the cups on the other side of the counter peers over. She has tried to rouse you from your work, yet all she received was the continuous scrawling of the pen on the paper. When Kunikida walks into the café with a small piece of paper between his fingers, the woman sends him a pleading gaze—and he clamps his hand on your shoulder.

The note from Kunikida had Dazai's round handwriting scrawled on it. You dismantled your flute and fitted it into the slots of the wooden case. It is not a downgrade from the past. The wooden box had a natural scent to it. It was company, like bringing along someone familiar into an unfamiliar place. He says, with a stern face, that he will follow you later, but has to organize the troops to secure the perimeter. He sends you off alone. Says Dazai will meet you there—do you have your gun with you? Like Red-Riding Hood, he sends you away with a basket of your flute and to meet the face of a big-bad tiger.

The sky is dark purple now. Clouds with a pink-gold underbelly soar through the skies. Since it would have been difficult in bringing a cello to the crime scene, you settle with a composition arranged in your mind, selecting and altering bits and pieces of the whistle sounding from the wind breathing through your chest. Parts from memories that you have locked up in the back of your head.

Meanwhile, in the warehouse, sat on top of the crates and boxes were two men: Dazai Osamu and Atsushi Nakajima. The latter had his knees pulled to his chest as though cradling his frenzied pulse, while the former had a red book in his hands.

"Dazai? What are you reading?" Atsushi asks.

"A good book."

"...I'm surprised you can read when it's this dark," He murmured.

"I have good eyes," Dazai replies. An undertone of smugness buried in his words. "Besides, I know everything that happens in this book."

Atsushi smiles, sheepishly, embarrassed. "Then why are you reading it?"

"A good book is good even when read many times," Dazai says. It is true—amongst the vertical lines of text and kanji are folded pieces of your work. Whether that be grocery shopping lists, wish lists, or even scraps of music scores that you hadn't bothered to finish, either jammed to the back of the book or used as bookmarks. The element in having something so personal to you attached into his own favourite novel, where he projects himself into, seemed intimate to him.