...It’s so hot. It hurts. I hate thiiis...
A child’s voice cried out directly into my head, filled with pain and suffering.
Well, what do you want me to do about that? I had no idea what to do, and over time the voice grew increasingly quiet.
The moment I realized I couldn’t hear the child’s voice anymore, the bubble-esque thing that had been encapsulating me disappeared with a burst, and I felt my consciousness slowly rising up.
At the same time, I felt a hot fever and pain spread throughout my body as if I had been afflicted with influenza. I nodded and agreed with the child, This certainly is hot and it certainly does hurt. I hate it too.
But the child’s voice didn’t reply.
It was so hot. I tried moving around to find a colder spot in the bed. Maybe due to the fever, I couldn’t move my body like I wanted to. But I struggled on regardless, and in the process of wiggling my body, heard the sound of something like paper and grass rubbing together beneath me.
“...What’s that noise?” My throat should’ve been sore due to the fever, but a childish and high-pitched voice came out of my mouth. It was clearly not my own voice, and it sounded just like the child’s voice that I’d heard in my head a second ago.
I wanted to keep sleeping since the fever was making me feel so sluggish, but I couldn’t ignore the fact that I was in an unfamiliar bed and that my voice wasn’t my own, so I slowly lifted my heavy eyelids.
My fever must have been enormous, as my eyes were wet and my vision twisted. Thankfully, though, my tears were apparently serving as makeshift lenses, as I could see far farther than I usually could without my glasses.
“Wha?” For some reason, I could see the small, unhealthy-looking hand of a child stretched out in front of me. Weird. My hand should be a lot bigger than this. I have the hands of an adult, not a small, malnourished child.
I could move the child’s hand like my own, clenching and opening it. This body that I could move at will was not my own. The sheer shock of that revelation made my mouth dry up.
“...What’s, happening?”
Making sure to keep the tears from dipping out of my wet eyes, I moved my gaze around while keeping my head still. It didn’t take long to notice that I wasn’t in my own room. The bed beneath me was hard and lacked a mattress; it was using cushions made of something prickly and rough instead. The dirty blanket thrown over me had a weird smell, and my whole body was itchy as if it were infested with fleas or bedbugs.
“Hold on, wait... Where am I?” My last memory was getting crushed by an avalanche of books, and it wasn’t likely I had been rescued in the nick of time. At the very least, I was sure no hospital in Japan would treat patients on such a filthy bed. What’s going on?
“I... I definitely died, right?” All signs pointed to yes. I had died being crushed by books. That earthquake was at best a three or four on the Richter scale. It wasn’t the kind of earthquake that killed people. So my death had definitely ended up on the news, something like, “A college girl nearing graduation was crushed to death by books in her own home.”
...That’s so embarrassing! I died twice that day, once physically and once socially. I felt so embarrassed I tried rolling around on the bed, but out of fear for my heavy and pained head, I decided to double facepalm instead.
“I mean, okay, I definitely joked about it. I definitely thought that, if I was going to die, I may as well die getting crushed by books. I honestly did think it’d be better than dying a slow death on a hospital bed.” But this was all wrong. I had dreamed of a happy death at the end of a life surrounded by books. I honestly hadn’t expected an earthquake to happen and crush me to death so soon.
“This is awful. I’d just gotten hired, too. Oooh, my sweet college library...” In this troubled age of high unemployment, I had just managed to land a job in a college library. Through guts and determination to fulfill my dream of a happy life surrounded by books, I passed all the necessary tests and interviews and finally secured victory. This job would involve spending far more time around books than any other, and the library even had plenty of old books and documents.
My mom, who worried more about me than anyone else, even started crying after hearing the news. “That’s wonderful. Urano, you actually found a respectable, good job. I’m so proud of you,” she’d said, tears dripping out of her eyes. And days after that, I just up and die?
My mind drifted to thoughts of how my mother must have cried after learning of my death. She, the mother I’d never meet again, would definitely be mad. I could say with confidence that at some point she'd screamed, “How many times did I tell you to get rid of some of those books?!”
“I’m sorry, Mom...” I lifted up a heavy, sluggish hand to wipe away my tears.
With great effort, I slowly lifted my head and sat my burning hot body up before looking around the room to obtain as much information as possible, paying no heed to my hair sticking to my sweaty neck. The room had only a few dressers for storing things and two tables, apparently beds, each covered with filthy blankets. Sadly, there was no bookshelf in sight.
“I don’t see any books... Maybe this is just a nightmare? A death nightmare?” If a god had granted my wish and reincarnated me, there should have been books nearby. My wish was to keep reading books after being reborn, after all. While thinking things through with my feverish, foggy head, I stared at a spider’s nest hanging off the dark, soot-stained ceiling.
Soon, however, the door opened and a woman came in. Perhaps she heard me moving, or perhaps she heard me talking to myself. But, either way, she was a beautiful woman with a triangular bandanna tied on her head who looked to be in her upper-twenties. She had a lovely face, but she was dirty. So dirty that I would assume she was homeless if I saw her in the streets.
I don’t know who this woman is, but she really should wash her face and keep herself clean. She’s wasting her good looks.
“Myne, %&$#+@*+#%?”
“Hyaaah!” The moment I heard the woman’s incomprehensible speech, a mental dam burst and memories that were familiar, yet not my own, came rushing through. In the span of a few blinks, the accumulated years of memories belonging to the girl named Myne had crashed through my mind like a flood and beat against my brain, causing me to reflexively clasp my head in horror.
“Myne, are you okay?”
No, I’m not Myne! I wanted to protest, but I couldn’t. I was overwhelmed by the indescribable sensation of this strange, dirty room and these weak, small hands becoming familiar to me. I got goosebumps as the language I previously couldn’t understand became fully comprehensible.
The huge flood of information sent me into a panic, and everything I could see before me screamed one thing: You’re not Urano anymore. You’re Myne.
“Myne? Myne?” The woman called out to me, worried, but to me she was just a stranger. Or she should have been, but for some reason, it felt like I knew her. It even felt like I loved her.
The love felt gross and alien. It wasn’t my own. I couldn’t yet manage to obediently accept that the woman in front of me was my mother. As my repulsion and love ground against each other, the woman kept calling out my name. Myne.
“...Mom.”
When I looked up at this strange woman I had never met before and called her “Mom,” I ceased being Urano and became Myne.
“Are you okay? You look like you have a headache.”
I instinctively didn’t want to touch my mom, she who existed in my memories yet was someone I didn’t know, and so I fell back onto the stinky bed to avoid her outstretched hand. I then shut my eyes to fully shut off all visual stimulation. “...My head still hurts. I want to sleep.”
“Okay. Rest well, dear.”
I waited for Mom to leave the bedroom and got to work trying to grasp my situation. My head was messed up from the fever, but I wouldn’t be able to sleep peacefully while panicked like I was.
I had no idea how things had ended up this way. But it was more important to think of what to do next, rather than get stuck on the past. Knowing how this happened wouldn’t change the fact that I had to do something.
If I didn’t use Myne’s memories to fully understand my surroundings, my family would quickly get suspicious. I began to slowly digest Myne’s many memories. I tried thinking as far back as I could, but her memories were those of a very young girl with a weak grasp on language. She didn’t clearly understand everything Mom and Dad said, so there was a lot she didn’t know. My vocabulary was so lacking that over half of these memories were meaningless.
“Oh gosh, what do I do...?”
From the visuals of her memories, I determined a few things. One, my family consisted of four people: My mom, Effa; my older sister, Tuuli; and my dad, Gunther. It seemed like Dad was working as a soldier or something.
The most shocking thing of all, however, was that this world was not my own. My memories of my bandanna-wearing mom showed that she had light green hair, a color best described as jade. It wasn’t an unnatural dyed green, either. She really had green hair. Green so realistic I wanted to pull her hair and make sure it wasn’t a wig.
By the way, Tuuli had green hair and Dad had blue hair. My own hair was dark blue. I didn’t know whether I should be happy my hair was close to black as I was used to, or sad that it wasn’t actually black.
There were apparently no mirrors in this residence — something like an apartment located on the upper floor of a tall building — so no matter how much I explored my memories, I couldn’t find any details on my appearance beyond that. If I were to guess based on how good my parents and Tuuli looked, I probably didn’t look half bad myself. Though my appearance had no relevance to me as long as I could read books, so I wasn’t that worried about it. I didn’t look that amazing as Urano, after all. I could live without being cute.
“Haaah. Really, I just want to read books. I feel like my fever would vanish if I had a book in hand.”
I can survive anywhere as long as I’ve got books. I’ll endure anything. So please. Books. Let me have books. I placed a finger on my chin and began searching my memory for books. Let’s see. I wonder where they’re hiding all the books in this place.
“Myne, you’re awake?” As if to intentionally interrupt my thoughts, a young girl that looked about seven years old stepped lightly into my room.
It was Tuuli, my older sister. Her green hair, tied into a slightly misshapen braid, was so dry I could immediately tell she wasn’t washing it at all. Just like Mom, I wished she would wash her face. She was also wasting her good looks.
The reason I thought that was probably due to my upbringing in Japan, a country so fixated on cleanliness that other countries considered us to be obsessive. But I didn’t care about that. There were more important things in the world. And right now, there was one thing I needed to prioritize above everything else.
“Tuuli, would you bring me a (book)?” My older sister was old enough to know how to read, so surely there were at least a dozen picture books lying around. I could still read despite being sick and bedridden. It’s a miracle I got reborn like this, since I care more about reading the books of this different world than anything else.
Unfortunately, Tuuli just looked at me in confusion despite my sweet smile. “Huh? What’s a (book)?”
“You don’t know...? Ummm, they’re things with (letters) and stuff (written) on them. Some have (illustrations), too.”
“Myne, what are you even saying? Can’t you talk properly?”
“I’m telling you, a (book)! I want a (picture book).”
“What’s that? I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Apparently, words that weren’t in Myne’s memories ended up coming out as Japanese, so Tuuli just shook her head in confusion no matter how hard I tried to explain what I wanted.
“Aaah, geez! (Do your job, auto translatooor!)”
“Why are you mad, Myne?”
“I’m not mad. My head just hurts.”
Looks like my first job will be to pay attention to everything people say and try to learn as many new words as possible. With Myne’s youthful brain and my college graduate wits and knowledge, learning this language should be a piece of cake. I... I hope it’ll be cake.
Even when I was Urano, I worked hard with a dictionary in hand to understand foreign books. If I thought of learning this world’s language as a means to read the books here, I wouldn’t mind the effort at all. My love and passion for books was so great that it pushed people away from me.
“...You’re mad because you still have a fever?” Tuuli reached out her dirty hand, likely trying to feel how hot my forehead was.
I reflexively grabbed her hand. “I’m still sick, you’ll catch it too.”
“That’s true. I’ll be careful.”
Safe. By acting like I was worried about her, I could avoid things I didn’t like. I managed to avoid getting touched by Tuuli’s dirty hand using the advanced social techniques of adults. She wasn’t a bad older sister, but I didn’t want her to touch me before getting clean. Or so I thought, before looking down at my own filthy hands and sighing.
“Haaah. I want to take a (bath). My head’s itchy.” The moment I murmured that, Myne’s memories informed me of the unfortunate truth: The best I would get was a bucket of water to dump over my head and a tattered rag to rub against myself.
Noooo! You can’t call that a bath. Also, there’s no toilet here?! Just a chamber pot?! Give me a break. Attention, whichever god put me here... I wanted to live somewhere modern and convenient.
My environment was so bad it honestly made me want to cry. When I was Urano, I lived in a very normal household. I never had any problems with food, clothes, using the bathroom, or getting books. This new life was a huge downgrade.
I... I miss Japan. It was filled with so many wonderful things I took for granted. Soft washcloths, comfortable beds, books, books, books... But no matter how much nostalgia I felt, I had no choice but to live in this new world. Crying wouldn’t get me anywhere. I had to teach my family the value of cleanliness.
As far as I could tell from my memories, Myne was a weak little girl who often had fevers and ended up bedridden for days at a time. Most of her memories involved the bed. If I didn’t improve my environment, I would probably be dead before long. I could imagine from the poor conditions I was put in while sick that it would be ideal to avoid needing medical attention at all costs.
...I need to clean up this room and figure out how to take baths ASAP. I’m the kind of lazy person that avoided chores as much as possible even with convenient modern electronics. I cared more about reading books than helping my mom. Am I gonna be able to live here?
I shook my head to get those thoughts out of my mind. No, no. Like I said, it’s a miracle I got reincarnated at all. I need to be more positive. How lucky! I get to read books that don’t even exist on Earth! ...Okay. I’m getting enthusiastic again.
First, in order to focus on reading books without worrying, I had to take care of my body. I slowly shut my eyes so I could rest. As my consciousness faded into darkness, one thought dominated my mind:
I don’t care what it is. I just want to read a book as soon as possible. Aaah, whichever god put me here, please pity me and grant me a book! Also, this might be asking for a bit much, but I want a library filled to the brim with books too.
