This may come as a surprise, but Hasekura Yukino can tell when other people are lying.
A certain high school, a certain first-year classroom. It was lunch break, and two acquaintances stood at the desk of Yukino, who had finished eating early.
They weren’t quite close enough to be called friends, but they were the sort of girls she’d chat with if the chance came up. To kill time, they had set a deck of cards on her desk, and the game they’d chosen was Old Maid.
Yukino reached her pale, slender fingers toward one of the cards held by the girl in front of her, whose cheeks were flushed and whose heart was clearly pounding. As if to cover her nerves, the girl said:
“Ahh… 【that’s not the one I wanted you to pick, though】! Are you really going to draw it?”
For an instant, Yukino winced. She passed it off as a look of indecision.
Her face had twisted because of the dreadful taste.
Yukino was a person who tasted other people’s voices. If she said so, someone might tell her to see a doctor, but she had. The diagnosis she was given there was “something resembling synesthesia.”
Synesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon in which one stimulus automatically triggers another kind of sensation, such as “perceiving colours in numbers” or “perceiving smells in sounds.” Apparently, over a hundred types have been confirmed.
Whether hers was among them was unclear, but Hasekura Yukino’s synesthesia was “voices have a taste.”
The taste changes with the speaker’s emotions. Anger is spicy, and sadness is sour.
Disgust is strongly bitter. And lies are complex, unpleasant and foul, like vomit.
So, certain that “that’s not the one I wanted you to pick” was a lie, Yukino hid her bitter expression behind a smile, drew the card her classmate didn’t want drawn, and tossed it onto the pile without even looking at it.
“Waaaah⁉ I lost again⁉ Amazing, eight wins in a row⁉”
The classmate clutched her head and wailed the instant the card was taken. Yukino didn’t gloat. She raised her eyebrows as if delighted by her good luck, with a thin, soft smile. Her braided, dark-brown, shoulder-length hair swayed.
“—I won again. 【Looks like I’m lucky today.】”
Naturally, she kept her condition hidden from those around her. No one enjoys having their lies seen through.
One might assume she could exploit such a constitution in all sorts of ways. But as far as Yukino was concerned, anyone who could exploit it deserved praise for it.
The taste of lies was truly the worst. It felt like having vomit put straight into her mouth by the other person in the middle of a conversation. Her mouth was filled with the sour smell of having just thrown up, and the taste of lukewarm stomach acid and chewed-up lunch coated her tongue in a sticky film. As a child, she had vomited over and over, alone in an empty house. Whether thanks to that or not, her malnourished body was quite thin, and she was slightly shorter than average.
For these reasons, she wanted to hide her condition, but at the same time she wanted to hear as few lies as possible.
Judging that she’d already done more than enough of the communication required of a classmate, Yukino lowered her brows and spoke to the two girls, who were chattering away and about to start a ninth round.
“【Sorry, actually, lately I’ve been falling behind in my studies. Would it be okay if I studied a little?】”
When she lied, she felt as if she were vomiting. There was dizziness, and a sourness deep in her nose.
She worked hard at keeping her smile from twitching. The two girls understood, saying “Huh, I thought your grades were good” and “They are, really. Probably hard to keep up, right?” before leaving.
After seeing them off with a pang of guilt, Yukino quietly took out her wireless earphones.
“【Ugh, I’ve seriously not been sleeping lately.】”
“Oh, right, right. 【No, I invited Nanako too, but she said she’s not coming.】”
“【Look at this, I got it in a ten-pull. Paying? Nope, nope!】”
It was a matter of awareness. Subconsciously, a distant stranger’s conversation is processed as noise, but once she noticed it, she heard all of it. As if fleeing the nausea, Yukino stopped up her ears with the earphones.
She played a song by an instrumental band whose name she only half remembered. Vocals were no good. Even the slightest murkiness, and her ears would pick it up, so she didn’t want voices.
Having shut herself off from the outside world with the sound a jazz band spun, Yukino took out her textbook and notebook and began going through the motions of studying, as if savouring her solitude. She did feel lonely in it, but more than that, it calmed her. Someone like me probably can’t live a happy life, she thought.
*
Hasekura Yukino, first-year high school student. Girl. Height: 155 cm. Weight: 38 kg.
Her mother played around with countless men, and her father had divorced her over an affair. She had inherited the refined looks of her mother, who never stopped chasing men at any age, but that same mother almost never came home, leaving Yukino chronically malnourished. Her skin was sickly pale, and her dark-brown braided hair was damaged.
One day, when she came home, her mother’s shoes were unusually there in the entrance, and beside them was a man’s pair of shoes belonging to who-knew-whom. The moment she opened the unlocked door, her mother’s moans flew out at her, then stopped abruptly.
“Oh, did someone come home?”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s just my daughter.”
“Huh… are you on bad terms?”
“【It’s not that. I love her.】 It’s just, well. She creeps me out.”
Yukino put the earphones she’d taken out back in. With her expressionless face unmoving and her head bowed, she walked quietly down the dim hallway and went back to her room without so much as showing her face in the living room.
She locked the door behind her, and since she couldn’t wash her hands, she wiped them with an alcohol towel instead.
*
—On another day, on her way home from school, the voices of a loud fundraising drive pierced right through her earphones.
“【Please donate for children less fortunate!】”
“There are children in need all over the world! Please donate!”
She turned the volume up and walked past in silence. Eyes that seemed to want to say something stabbed into her back. If she could, she’d have liked to help with the fundraiser, but as someone who paid for her daily meals out of her own part-time wages and got by on sweet buns for breakfast, lunch and dinner, she’d sooner have been on the receiving end.
*
On yet another day, right after she arrived at school, a boy called her outside the school building and confessed.
“I’ve 【always】 liked you, Hasekura. 【I did.】 Um, 【you’re kind and lovely】—”
Four hours after politely turning him down, a girl from the next class, someone she’d never met, called her out.
“【No, I’ve been curious about you for a while now, thinking you’re cute, and wanting to be friends.】 Huh? Oh, 【it doesn’t matter to me that it’s not a boy or anything. Nope, nope】… Yeah, um… I see. So we really have no connection, huh.”
*
“Hello, do you believe in God?”
“G-God?”
“Yes, God. If you believe in God, you too can be happy—”
One day, a middle-aged woman with a cheerful, friendly smile came to the house. The moment she saw Yukino’s face through the door chain, her smile deepened and she shrugged.
“—Doesn’t look like you could be. Please forget I said anything. 【I wish you happiness.】”
Apparently her face was so unhappy that even religious solicitors would flee barefoot. Have more faith in God, people.
Apart from that last line, every word had been sincere, which was somehow all the more frightening.
*
That was how it was. The world overflowed with lies.
And Hasekura Yukino didn’t think that was a bad thing.
There’s a saying that a lie can be expedient. There’s the phrase “putting up a front.” Where there is language, there are lies. The present is an extension of a history woven in that way, so there was no reason to deny it. At the same time, even if lies weren’t evil in themselves, the discomfort that welled up the instant she heard one, and the forced, direct confrontation with the truth of being unable to be deceived, wore down her spirit the more she communicated. It made her averse to dealing with people. It made her not want to get close to anyone.
If this had been an illness, maybe it could have been treated. But the hospital she’d been taken to in childhood, by a mother who still put a little effort into raising her then, had carelessly diagnosed it as “synesthesia.” That isn’t a disease. Yukino didn’t want to learn any more vividly about her own misfortune, and she had a feeling that openly advertising such a clearly abnormal constitution would only cause trouble. So she chose to go on living with it.
And so she believed she would probably never live happily or die happily.
*
While she was thinking this, a grey year passed, and Yukino moved up to second year, a grey youth so utterly the same shade that it matched down to the colour code.
Classes are reshuffled at this school. Nearly sixty percent of her classmates changed. Saying they “changed” makes it sound as though she were at the centre of things, but Yukino’s position in class was neither good nor bad. She kept relationships with the majority that were as shallow as a puddle.
In early April, right at the start of the new term, committee assignments were held.
Normally the class president moderates class discussions, but this meeting was for deciding exactly that. So at first the homeroom teacher took charge, and within a few minutes two girls had been installed as president and vice-president.
“Then the president is —, and the vice-president is —. Okay. I’ll leave the rest to you.”
The male homeroom teacher, young but with a dignified air, told the president to chair things for now, and one girl bounded eagerly up to the podium.
Yukino, at the back of the classroom, had been absorbed in vaguely searching for the easiest, least conspicuous role. Only once she came to the front did Yukino spare a little attention for her.
The girl who was president of Class 2-C was brimming with confidence and resolve in her bearing.
She seemed slightly taller than Yukino. Her hair was a raven black, long and reaching her back, styled in a way that felt natural rather than careless. It was glossy and beautiful, nothing like Yukino’s starved, badly damaged hair. Her features were so well-formed they inspired admiration, and her expression was a bold smile, with no doubt whatsoever in her own worth and ability.
“—Then, let’s get right to the proceedings… but before that, allow me to introduce myself properly.”
The girl spoke in a clear voice like a ringing bell.
It was a lovely voice. She was smiling prettily, and she had the character to take on a tedious post like class president. Surely she was a gentle, admirable person, Yukino thought, resting her chin in her hand. Then she realized at once how naive that had been.
“【Thank you all so much for entrusting me with the responsible post of class president.】 With the class reshuffle done, I imagine many of you will be speaking with many classmates for the first time, but as your president, I intend to carry out my duties responsibly.”
Yukino gave a faint “Hm?”, frowning, and cautiously narrowed her eyes to look at the girl.
The taste of a lie slammed into her without warning. But surprise just barely outweighed the discomfort.
Everyone lies, but she had never expected to be served one in a committee-assignment greeting.
“【Though my abilities are truly meagre, in building a class that is comfortable for everyone】 I will do my utmost, 【while I sincerely hope that all of you will lend your support and cooperation to an inadequate person like me.】 For this coming year, 【I hope we can all get along happily. Though I am young and inexperienced,】 I look forward to working with you.”
At that, the girl gave a bow. The gesture was so polished that gentle applause rose naturally.
Yukino joined in with a limp clap, but with her mouth hanging open in amazement, tasting vomit, she couldn’t help murmuring a dumb “Wow.”
Lies, lies and more lies came in rapid succession. They were mostly of two kinds, self-deprecation and social niceties. Flipped around, this meant the girl thought very highly of herself, and despite her words, had no intention of getting especially close to anyone. And yet, by volunteering eagerly and giving a polished speech, she had already shown enough to suggest her self-assessment was probably accurate. Whatever her true feelings, her sociable mask, which had perfectly fooled her classmates except for a certain few exceptional girls, was magnificent. Above all, her words about carrying out her duties responsibly had been entirely free of falsehood.
Her commanding poise was like the night sky, her lies like scattered early-summer rain, and her confidence lay hidden within them like a hazy moon.
Beautiful and self-assured, she drew the eyes of the whole class.
Even Yukino, who’d had little interest at first, found herself staring.
Just then, the girl let out a small “Oh” and smiled sheepishly.
“Sorry, I haven’t introduced myself yet.”
The girl gave a little “ahem” and composed herself. A ripple of laughter spread through the classroom.
“—I’m Miyazono Chiharu. For the next year, I look forward to working with you.”
That was the first meeting of Hasekura Yukino and Miyazono Chiharu.