One Hundred Shadows

This is a world in which those living on the edges of society, at the very bottom of the social scale, are being brought to the limits of what they can endure. When they reach this point, their shadows rise up, startling sudden, and start calling them away from their lives. It is a world in which, however they choose to deal with these shadows,which seem to offer death an invitation, they find themselves only just barely able to go on with the business of living.

Don't say you feel like you're going to die, if you don't really plan on dying.

Whether something is harmful or not is a matter of personal standards.

I wonder if they call this kind of place a slum, because if you called it someone's home or their livelihood that would make things awkward when it comes to tearing it down.

... I don't really like people who go around saying they don't have any debt. This might sound a little harsh, but I think people who claim to be in no debt of any kind are shameless, unless they sprang up naked in the woods one day without having borrowed anyone's belly, and live without a single thread on their back, and without using any industrial products. Are industrial products bad? That's not what I'm saying. A lot of things can happen in the manufacturing process, can't they, when it's the kind of mass production that uses all sorts of materials and chemicals? Rivers could get polluted, the payment for the labour could be too low. What I'm saying is, even if you buy so much as a cheap pair of socks, that low price is only possible because a debt is incurred somewhere along the line.

Are we ghosts? we wondered. Who could tell, this late at night. We might be ghosts seeking others of our kind, walking under a pale moon.

Money is a powerful thing. Mr. Yeo said that the government had made a show of digging up the first shovelful themselves, then quietly handed over the shovel; that that was how they'd always been, and that nothing ever changes. Then he swore a couple of times. Lately, he said, the shadows have been starting to dominate. Some days when he came to work it was his shadow that went ahead of him.

For instance, is it really so natural and inevitable for an old woman to eke out a living by scavenging cardboard boxes? Is that part of the essence of human life? Is dying like that down to the individual, nothing to do with anyone else? And if it’s not natural and inevitable, just sufficiently common to be accepted as such, isn’t that futility even worse than if it was simply the essence of life?

More than anything else, Nana's not sure if she wants to open up Sora and Aeja and Nana herself to Moseh ssi, not so much the actual Sora, Aeja, and Nana, but as they exist for her, inside her. Between wishing for things to remain as they are and desiring just as strongly to smash things up, to break everything apart, Nana's internal landscape has been in severe upheaval these days.

So how did you feel, when you were following the shadow? Pretty good, I said. I couldn't help but follow it. Mr. Yeo nodded as if to say yes, that's how it is. That's what's scary, you feel light somehow, carefree, if you surrender to the shadow's pulling at you, so you keep on following it, and that's when it strikes. People turn slow-witted when they're in that kind of daze, so it attacks when your wits are the slowest of all, he said, and gently set the probe down on the worktable. Wait and see, it'll start growing now. Growing bigger? That's right. And then what happens? It becomes more dense. Gravity, or something. Oh. Don't worry too much. They say you can survive as long as you keep your eyes peeled, even if you're captured by a fox. Isn't it a tiger? What do you mean, a tiger? The saying is that you can survive as long as you keep your eyes peeled, even if you're captured by a tiger. A tiger, a fox, it's all the same, Mr. Yeo said, pushing a lamp with a tin hemisphere shade right up against the board. What I'm saying is, you need to keep your eyes peeled when what's in front of you has teeth.

I might as well be dark, I thought. If I were dark myself then I wouldn't be hemmed in by the darkness around me , or fear that darkness, would I? What if I became dark and indifferent? If that happened, what would I be? What name could I give it ? Oh, I don't know, I don't know, I should just become dark so I don't have to think about it ...

So it's not as though anything has ceased to exist because it broke; all we've done is confirmed that it never existed in the first place.

You're the one who chose this life, not me, so there's no point acting the victim.

It does still rise from time to time, but I tell myself it's no big deal. I can bear it as long as I tell myself that. It's not really true that it's no big deal, but the more I tell myself that it is easier it becomes to believe it, and with time you really do end up convincing yourself. After all, shadows might rise, but they can also fall, can't they?