東方プロジェクト二次小説・オリジナル小説サイト
Chapter 11:Hopeless Masquerade

—31—

'One of the Sages who created Gensokyo', she had said.

Genji descended and stopped, having apparently landed on the ground just in front of the woman in the chair even though there didn't appear to be anything for him to stand on. We climbed down from his back and found solid footing beneath our feet. Standing there on this plane of nothing, we stared in amazement at this woman who had just declared herself a sage. Matara Okina. Were there really other sages beyond Yakumo Yukari who were responsible for Gensokyo's creation?

"You look surprised to hear that." Okina said, looking down at us from her elevated throne. "Did you not know there were other sages besides Yukari? Well, I suppose that's to be expected. She's in charge of maintaining Gensokyo's day to day operations, and I am a secret god after all." She chuckled to herself in a way that seemed completely without mirth, as if she were answering the questions I had only thought and not spoken. Her gaze was both condescending and piercing as she looked down on us. She seemed to me as if she could see right through us.

"You must be Maéreverie Hearn," she said to me, then turned her eyes to Renko. "And this must be Usami Renko. Just what is Yukari playing at, I wonder? Well, it's no matter. If whatever crisis she imagines were to actually occur, she'll have to show her hand sooner or later."

"—What do you mean?" Renko blurted out. Leave it to Renko to just wade in without hesitation no matter who she might be questioning.

Okina rested her chin on her fist and quirked an eyebrow as she turned to Renko. "Was it not Yukari who brought you here?"

Even Renko didn't have an answer to that question.

"For Yukari to have gone to the trouble of bringing you of all people to Gensokyo means that the two of you must be a part of some plan of hers."

Why had we come to Gensokyo?

It was almost hard to remember, like trying to recall words from a dream, but we had had another life once, Renko and I, in a time and a place far away from here. Life in Gensokyo had become my reality. Kyoto and the Scientific Century seemed impossibly far away.

I tried to remember. Usami Sumireko's room, in Renko's grandparents' house, in the sleepy streets of Tokyo. An amber jewel with an insect suspended inside of it. A rift in space that we had fallen through. ...And then, the Youkai Sage appearing before me at the end of the Spring Snow Incident. Her gloved hand dropping that same piece of amber into my palm before pushing me into a gap where I would then give that jewel to Sumireko in her childhood. These great mysteries surrounding us had long been forgotten amidst the rhythms of our daily lives.

Why were we here in Gensokyo, and what exactly was that amber stone with an insect suspended inside of it? Who was Sumireko Usami, and how was she connected to Gensokyo? And why, in all the years we had been here, had Yakumo Yukari refused to ever appear in front of Renko?

"What do you mean 'you of all people?'" Okina blinked in surprise at Renko's clear confusion.

"Ah, I see," Okina intoned, nodding to herself. "Of course you wouldn't know. Tell me, have you ever even met Yukari?"

I answered this time. "I have. Renko hasn't though."

Okina turned her gaze back to me. "I see. I don't doubt she has her reasons for that. I wonder though, would they be sentimental reasons, or purely practical ones? Well I suppose it's none of my business one way or the other."

Okina shook her head dismissively, but Renko held up her hand in protest, an almost wounded expression on her face. "Hold on! Quit acting like an omniscient narrator who already knows what's going to happen in the story. You can't just cryptically suggest that you have information concerning us and then not explain yourself. If you know why we're here, could you please share it with us?"

Okina laughed at that, a short, barking scoff of a laugh. "You think me the narrator of your story? How very apt. All of Gensokyo is just such a story and Yukari is its author. I am not here to aid Yukari's plans, nor do I intend to sabotage them. Let her have her fun, I'm merely curious to know what she's playing at."

"You're saying that we're just pawns in some game that Yukari is playing?"

"I believe so, if only in the sense that all of Gensokyo is her game board." Okina's smile broadened, crinkling the edges of her eyes, but although her smile was joyful it didn't seem the least bit kind.

"I will tell you what I can," Okina said, lifting her head from where it rested on her hand and leaning forward to speak. "There is a deep connection between the two of you and the woman you know as Yakumo Yukari. A connection too deep for simple words to describe, though I suspect you know this already to some degree. You are being watched over by Yukari's shikigami, are you not?"

"...You mean Ran? We've been told that we are, but to be honest I never feel like I'm being watched."

"If Ran is watching you, then that is the same as if Yukari were watching you herself. In all likelihood she has been watching you from the moment you first set foot in Gensokyo. But despite that close attention that she has paid to you, you have never seen Yukari yourself. Am I correct, Usami Renko? That is no coincidence. She has a good reason to avoid appearing in front of you."

Renko seemed like she was about to ask a question, but Okina cut her off before she could voice it.

"I can't tell you what those reasons are, of course." Okina smiled playfully. "Though I suspect there is also a very good reason why Yukari has been appearing in front of you, Maéreverie Hearn. Just as there is a reason why you look so much like her. I won't be telling you about either of those reasons either though. If I were to do so, Yukari would probably try to kill me."

If you're not going to tell us then why mention it?

I would be lying if I said that I had never considered the idea that our presence in this world might be in service of some unfathomable purpose. My belief in that idea had faded over time though. Or rather, I should say that I had stopped caring about whether or not that was the case.

The truth of the matter is that events don't really have any meaning inherent to them. It's only the subjective view of an observer that gives anything the sorts of associations needed to ascribe meaning. If I think something is meaningful, then it is. And if I don't, then it's not. That's all there is to it. Whether it was the Youkai Sage or Usami Sumireko who brought us to Gensokyo didn't matter to us, even if it might have had some importance to whoever was responsible.

To think otherwise would be an idea of the sort of megalomaniacal bent I would expect to hear coming from Renko. Ultimately, no matter what 'meaning' Renko might conjure up to link clues together and explain an incident, her theories were entirely irrelevant to the actual perpetrators of those incidents. Whether Renko was right or wrong had no impact on either the people who caused the incidents or on people like Reimu, who cleaned them up.

Similarly, it didn't matter if Yukari had some purpose in mind for us. Nor did it matter what we had found in Sumireko's room. It was none of our business either way. Things had simply happened the way that they had, and that was that.

I let out a sigh and looked over at my partner. Renko was deep in thought, fiddling with the brim of her hat again. Unlike her, I don't have the brains to spare to think through the hidden meanings of every word uttered in our presence or see hidden 'truths' behind every circumstance. I am, after all, not a great detective myself. Watson's role is simply to record the detective's exploits, and mine was simply to provide a much-needed dose of relativism to Renko's spiraling megalomania.

"Umm. Miss Okina," I began.

"Hmm? What is it, Maéreverie Hearn?"

"I just wanted to say that regardless of what you say, I'm Maéreverie Hearn and she's Usami Renko. That's all we are. No matter what intention the Youkai Sage or anyone else may have had in bringing us here, they can't control our destiny. Nothing they may have planned for us has any impact on who the two of us choose to be."

Renko raised her head and looked over at me. Okina's eyes narrowed suspiciously.

"What's this? Do you not have any interest in your own fate? 'Why am I here' and 'What will happen in the future' are fundamental questions that every human asks."

"Miss Okina, are you at all familiar with the science of Relativistic Noology?"

"Perhaps I am, and perhaps I am not. What of it?"

"It's a philosophical premise based around the idea of absolute subjectivity. Human beings can only experience the world through the lens of their own individual subjectivity. The reality I experience is the one shaped by my own perceptions, and no one but me could possibly be the protagonist of my story. The idea that the same is true for everyone is the basis of Relativistic Noology.

Humans always seek to attach meaning to their experiences. So long as their experiences are shaped by bias and context, that will never change. However, in Relativistic Noology, the choice of what meaning to ascribe to an event rests with an individual and resists any framing suggested by an outside force. If someone else tries to tell us what something means, individuals are able to chose whether to accept that new meaning or reject it completely. Subjectivity is mutually inviolable—The meaning of my existence is something that only I can decide."

"That's a noble belief. Do you imagine that every moment of your life up until now has been determined solely by your will alone?"

"Of course not. I recognize that my subjective experience of the world is constantly changing under the influence of external forces. But in the end only I can choose how I will perceive the world. For example I ended up becoming Renko's partner and following her everywhere because she asked me to, but ultimately I'm the one who accepted her request and chose to define myself as 'Renko's partner.' Only I can choose whether to accept the things that happen as a part of my reality or nothing more than a dream."

I paused to take a breath and glanced over at Renko. "Merry..." she started to say. I didn't let her finish.

"So, Miss Okina. You can suggest whatever you like. But no matter how you or the Youkai Sage see us, no matter what purpose you imagine we might fulfill for you, our duty is only what we've decided it will be: to unravel the secrets of the world according to our interests. My partner and I are the Hifuu Club. That is what I have chosen for myself. I'm Maéreverie Hearn, a detective's assistant. Partner to Usami Renko, the great detective whose delusions of grandeur I will listen to and record. No matter how much the circumstances around us might change, that's still who I've chosen to be."

I wish I could say my grand speech had a point. The words I spoke at the time poured out of me without much thought behind them. I couldn't even tell you now what exactly I was rebelling against.

But despite that, Okina listened to my incoherent words with keen interest.

"Very well," she said. "I'll refrain from making any further pronouncements or speculations about the two of you." Once again her smile deepened. "—no matter what the future may hold for you."


—32—


"Well then, let's discuss something more timely then. You have questions about Hata no Kokoro, do you not?"

Without waiting for us to answer, Okina snapped her fingers. As soon as she did, a pair of doors behind her opened, and a girl stepped out from each. The girls were dressed in some sort of uniform, matching outfits consisting of short-skirted ruffled dresses with aprons, shawls and lumpy-looking folded eboshi hats. One of the girls' outfits was an eye-shockingly bright pink and the other was a deep forest green. They were holding implements of some kind which looked to be fresh-cut stems from different plants—flowering ginger in the pink girl's hands and young bamboo in the green one's. The girls emerged from their doors to take up positions just behind and to either side of Okina. and then, wordlessly, they began to dance, thrusting their plant cuttings upwards as if cheering her on.

"Usami Renko," Okina began, the corners of her smile curling upward. "Your deductions were quite impressive, I must say. I was indeed the original owner of the masks that became Hata no Kokoro and I was also the one who sent her to Gensokyo. Incidentally, it was also my two servants here who first instigated the commotion in the human village."

"...So someone really was behind those odd dances. Why do it though? What's the point?"

"That you cannot see that far ahead shows the limitation of your reasoning," Okina said with a smirk.

Renko frowned and crossed her arms, one hand unconsciously drifting up to fiddle with the brim of her hat again. She stewed for only a moment before her eyes went suddenly wide. "...You were sending them to try to find the missing mask of hope, weren't you!"

"Congratulations, detective. I see you have become worthy of the title you have given yourself." Okina clapped slowly, the sound of her hands falling flat in the emptiness of the void we occupied.

"So then... You weren't the one who took the mask of hope from Kokoro in the first place, were you?"

"Quite right. Since Shotoku had ended up in Gensokyo, I merely thought it would be proper to return the masks she had given me. Those masks had become a tsukumogami over the years, but that's besides the point. Why would a secret god like myself have any desire to hide one of that menreiki's masks and cause an incident in Gensokyo? "

"To give Kokoro a sense of self, I thought... You wanted her to awaken as a youkai, didn't you?"

"Do you think I would care for the mind of a tsukumogami?" she asked, leaning back in her throne and once more resting her chin on her hand.

The two girls flanking Okina showed no emotion at all at her callous declaration. I suppose it had been foolish of us to expect a secret god and one of the sages of Gensokyo to think or behave anything like how a human might.

Renko's eyes flitted from one dancer to the other then back to Okina. "So then the one who stole Kokoro's mask of hope was..."

"I neither know nor care," Okina said dismissively. "I sent my girls into the village to magnify the desire for hope among the humans and heighten their despair at its loss. I had hoped that doing so might cause whoever had taken the mask of hope to show themselves quickly so that this matter could be resolved. After all, it wouldn't do to return the masks to their creator with one of them missing."

Renko groaned, tucking her chin to her chest as her hand raised up to pull at the brim of her hat. The secret mastermind that Renko had fancifully imagined as orchestrating events turned out both to exist and to not be the party responsible for the theft of the mask. If anything, her interference had been an effort to try to resolve the Incident, just as Renko's actions had been.

"So do you now understand the truth of this matter, little Miss great detective?"

"I do," Renko muttered. "Everything but the identity of the original culprit has been explained."

"Just so," Okina intoned, imperiously. "You may search for whoever stole the menreiki's mask on your own, if you like. Finding the answers to matters such as that is beneath my concern."

"Alright then. There's just one more thing I'd like to ask you then."

"Oh? You presume to demand more?"

"You were responsible for giving Kokoro her name weren't you? You gave her the family name 'Hata' to make it easier for the Crown Prince to recognize her as something she had once created, didn't you?"

"Correct."

"...The name 'Kokoro' means 'soul' or 'heart', but Kokoro is unable to display any emotions and indeed had no sense of self at all when she was still in your care, didn't she? So why pick that name? Is her entire existence just an ironic joke to you?"

Okina narrowed her eyes at that, looking disdainfully down towards Renko, then clapping her hands together. "I believe it's time for you to leave, detective."

The moment she said that yet another door opened, this one directly behind us, swinging wide as it soundlessly closed in on our position, moving through the invisible floor we were standing on. Renko and I took a brief second to glance at each other, then scrambled to grab a hold of Genji's shell. As all three of us suddenly surged backwards into the open doorway, Okina laughed and spoke to us one last time.

"I will give you one last piece of advice, Usami Renko. Your curiosity will eventually lead you to the truth about yourselves. Keep this in mind, oh great detective. It is the ultimate fate of all those who chose to investigate the affairs of others."

And then the door slammed shut.

—

All at once we were back in Gensokyo, flying through the skies over Misty Lake on Genji's back.

"...It looks like we're back."

In front of me, Renko took in a deep breath of cool air, looking all about as she took in her surroundings. Beneath me, Genji was grumbling. "I'm getting to old for this…"

I let out a heavy sigh the words "I thought we were done for…" escaping from my lips.

Renko turned around to face me, her face blooming into a goofy grin. "You looked pretty cool back there, Merry."

"What? Oh, that rant? Please forget about that." As soon as I thought about it, I began to get embarrassed. Maybe seeing how Keine had negotiated with Mamizou had made me a little overly bold. "I just... don't like other people deciding for me what I am..." I mumbled.

"So then you decided all by yourself that you wanted to stay by my side, right?" With the way Renko was staring at me, eyes alight and grinning stupidly, I couldn't say anything. I looked away.

"That's what you said, I heard it loud and clear. That's who you are in your own self-conception, Merry: my partner. I never knew you loved me so much."

"Shut up, Renko." I reached out and grabbed at her cheek to hide my embarrassment.

"Oww! Owww! Quib ib, Mebby!"

Renko was right, of course. I was here by her side, working as her assistant because I chose to do so and continue to make that choice. I'm smart enough to know that letting her know that would do no good though. Besides, while it might be what Renko would want,the decision is ultimately mine.

...Renko herself is probably choosing to remain my partner as well. The mutual inviolability of our respective subjectivities means that I can never know for certain and I can only draw conclusions based on the evidence I observe. But for the moment, my evidence was that Renko was still beside me.

As far as I'm concerned, that's all that mattered.


—33—


Anyway, enough about that. There's still one mystery about this incident left unsolved, after all.

"Who was the mastermind responsible for stealing Kokoro's mask and throwing it into the Underworld?"

I happened to ask that question of Renko a few days later, after we had returned to the village. I had been sorting through all of my notes about this case at the time and Renko had been lying on her back on the floor, staring up at the ceiling. Her response to me had been to simply mutter "I don't know."

"The most likely answer is that it's someone we've never met," she added after another moment's consideration. "And since the list of possible culprits includes every youkai and god in Gensokyo who we haven't met yet, we don't really have a way of narrowing it down. It would only have to be someone capable of taking a mask and throwing it in a hole and that's basically anybody. Since Kokoro never saw who took it, we've got nothing to go on."

She remained silent for a moment, staring up at the ceiling, then suddenly sat up. "...Well almost nothing to go on." She muttered. "I suppose we could narrow the possibilities down a little..."

"Oh? How?"

"By considering this mastermind's motive. It's kind of an odd crime when you think about it. They stole the mask of hope, but they didn't keep it. They found a fissure that goes straight down to the Underworld and threw it in."

Renko picked up her hat, which had been laying on the floor beside her and ran her fingers around its brim while she spoke.

"I can think of two possible reasons why someone would do that. One's kind of sweet if we're being charitable and the other... not so much."

"How so?"

She leaned forward and propped her elbow against her knee then rested her cheek on her upraised fist, almost as Okina had done on occasion. "Merry, how is the Underworld generally regarded in Gensokyo?"

"Huh? Um, well I guess it would be just like Yuugi put it, a 'Paradise for the despised,' right?"

"Exactly. It's a place where all the most hated beings in Gensokyo were gathered up and sealed away so that they wouldn't trouble the people who live on the surface. 'Hope' is not something you'd normally expect to find a lot of down there. Additionally, it was Koishi who picked up that mask when it fell through the fissure, but there's someone who would probably have been more likely to come across it, given where it fell."

"You're talking about Kawashiro Mitori."

"Exactly. The kappa who hates humans. I think she was the one who was supposed to find the mask. The question is, did the culprit want to give her the mask for a kind reason, or a malicious one?"

I thought about it for a moment and saw where Renko was going with this. If the perpetrator had taken the mask from Kokoro and intended to throw it down to Mitori, then they must have had one of two reasons for doing so.

"If the culprit had good intentions, then they probably wanted to throw something that was filled with hope into the Underworld where something like that would never be seen normally. Their plan would have been for Mitori to pick it up, and regain some of the hope that she herself had lost."

"...If that was the mastermind's reasoning, then the one behind all of this would have been—"

"Nitori, most likely. But there's one big problem with that theory."

I nodded. It was an obvious flaw. "Nitori could just go deliver the mask to her sister in person if that was her intent."

"Exactly. We know Nitori has been going to meet her sister on a somewhat regular basis. If her intention was to give the mask to her sister as a gift, she could easily have done that without going to the trouble of doing something so unreliable as dropping the mask into a fissure where anyone could have picked it up. In the end that's precisely what happened—Koishi picked it up instead of Mitori."

"So it probably wasn't someone with good intentions then."

"Probably not."

Renko let out a sigh. I rested my chin on my hand and tried to think. If the mastermind had malicious intent...

"...We don't have a lot of info to go on, so we can't be sure, but if the mastermind was in a position to take one of Kokoro's masks, then they were probably in a position where they could have hurt her if that had been their aim. The fact that all they did was swipe a mask and throw it away suggests that Kokoro isn't the one they wanted to hurt."

"...You're suggesting that they were trying to hurt everyone living on the surface instead?"

"I'm not sure if our perpetrator knew what the effect of stealing the mask of hope would be, but they could probably tell that it was powerful. At the very least it would seem like they wanted to shift the balance of power in Gensokyo. Taking hope away from the people on the surface and putting that hope in the hands of the despised youkai of the Underworld, maybe even directly into the hands of someone who explicitly hates humans."

I thought for a moment about how things might have played out if the mask had fallen into the hands of someone with a grudge against the surface world. What would have happened if that youkai had showed up in the human village with the mask? What if the only person who could save the village was a youkai who hated humans? Was that what the mastermind of this incident was trying to achieve?

"Renko, do you think there's really someone out there who hates the human village and everyone living on the surface that much?" I asked, shaking my head as if to clear the unpleasant images I had been imagining from my mind's eye. "And if there was, why wouldn't they just use the mask to cause problems themselves?"

"I'm not sure about that part myself, to be honest. Maybe the person who swiped the mask was a weak youkai or a fairy who wouldn't be able to use it. Or maybe it was someone who hated the idea of holding onto something so full of hope."

"What do you mean by that?"

"Well imagine that there was someone who would hate having that much hope around even if they were planning on using it for malicious purposes. Someone with some sort of backwards reverse ideology who hates any sort of positivity. Someone like that probably would have hated the mask of hope. If they exist, that is. This is all just conjecture, so unless we end up meeting the mastermind, we'll never know."

Saying that, Renko let out a sigh and laid back down on the tatami mats.

"...Ultimately, we can't know. But if there really was a mastermind responsible for stealing Kokoro's mask, and if they really did throw it into the Underworld just to cause problems..."

Renko placed her hat on top of face, covering her eyes as she muttered from beneath it.

"Then we'll probably hear from them again. They caused a big incident and got away without a hitch this time. I expect someone like that would probably try to do something else before too long."