This is a story I heard from Kyosuke. It was the spring of my first year in high school. I invited a friend I had made after entering the girls' high school over to my house. Her name was Yoko. She was very loud in her speech and actions, and just keeping up with her always left me feeling flustered and busy. Still, she was the only real friend I had made around that time. My family kept a lot of animals, and when I told her about them, she insisted over and over that she wanted to see them. "Huge. That cat is huge!" As soon as we stepped into the living room, Yoko hopped up and down, saying that. "What's its name? Its name?" "Bu." "Bu?" It's a long-haired cat that my younger sister and mother call "Bu-chan." He’s a Maine Coon, an American breed. We got him from an acquaintance when he was a kitten, and though we were told they naturally grow quite large, this one developed a bottomless appetite on top of that, pushing his weight well past ten kilograms. His real name is "Boomer," but no one in the family calls him that anymore. "Heavy." Yoko scooped Bu up and cried out happily. Bu had a sleepy look on his face, letting himself be handled as if even shifting his weight was too much trouble.
Catching wind of the commotion, Lazarus came trotting into the room. "Oh, a dog." He’s a Welsh Corgi, a very clever boy. He’s well-behaved and listens closely to instructions, so we keep him indoors. His back is dark brown, and his chest is white. He has short legs and runs with quick, pattering steps, which makes him adorable. He’s an adult dog, but since he’s on the smaller side, he looks about the same size as Bu the cat. Lazarus began darting in circles around Yoko, who was holding Bu, while sticking his tongue out. Bu followed those movements with his eyes, still cradled in her arms. Yoko shrieked "Wah, wah, wah, wah," looking around just as frantically and getting all excited. We also had another male mixed-breed cat named Momota, but he was always out wandering and rarely came home. "Sis, a guest?" Before I knew it, even my sister peeked in, still wearing her school uniform. "Yeah. You, just get lost," I snapped, feeling self-conscious about my friend seeing my family and brushing her off coldly. My sister stuck her tongue out and made a grimace. Then she pulled her head back from the hallway. Yoko’s eyes went wide with surprise. Pointing down the hallway where my sister had vanished, she asked, "Seriously?" I just told her, "Yeah."
After playing with Bu and Lazarus for a while, Yoko asked, "What else? What else is there?" "Well, we also have a mynah bird named Peach and two hamsters." When I said that, Yoko’s complexion paled slightly. "You keep hamsters..." she said, wearing a stiffened expression. What's wrong with her? "No, ever since I got bitten by a venomous hamster when I was a kid, I've just never been good with them." A venomous hamster? It didn't sound like a joke; her tone was uncomfortably serious. "I mean, I like them, though," she added with an empty laugh. I didn't get it. "Do you want to just look at them?" I asked, and she replied, "...Yeah. Just look," so I led her to the next room. We kept an orange cage on top of a shelf, housing a pair of golden hamsters. Back then, I kept wondering why they weren't having any babies, but I later found out they were both males, which explained a lot. "So cute." Yoko hid behind the door at the entrance of the room, saying that with only half her face showing. At that distance, she couldn't possibly see much. "They're not venomous." They were used to people, so unless they were really agitated, they wouldn't bite even if you offered a finger. However, no matter how much I called out and told her that, Yoko shook her head. I learned later that Yoko was actually allergic to hamsters. Even their shed fur and dander would trigger coughing fits and rashes for her. Apparently, when she was bitten by a hamster at a friend's house in the past, she went into anaphylactic shock and had to be rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.
Even so, she must have really liked hamsters, because even after that, Yoko would occasionally ask me to tag along with her to the pet shop in the downtown department store. At times like that, Yoko would stand a distance away, staring intently at the hamster section, asking me about every single thing the little animals were doing. Every time, I would give a wry smile and use gestures to explain how they were eating or how their little paws moved. It wasn't just embarrassing; honestly, it was mortifying. But seeing how happy Yoko looked made those feelings melt away. "This is P-suke." I picked up Peach the mynah bird in his cage from the corner of the room and headed toward the door, since Yoko didn't look like she was going to step inside. "Aw, so cute." Slipping past Yoko as she said that, I went back to the living room. Peach got excited that his castle was on the move, tossing his head and chirping in a high-pitched voice. The moment I placed the cage on top of the low chest of drawers, he stopped chirping instantly. He looked around with a bold, almost defiant expression, as if to say, "Is this my new castle now?", before starting to trill again. "P-suke-chan," Yoko called out, and Peach answered immediately. "Pii-chan, Pii-chan." "A boy?" "Yeah." "Yeah, yeah. Pii-chan is a good boy. Pii-chan is a good boy."
Peach walked back and forth inside the cage while chirping. "P-suke, what about Momotaro?" When I said that, he tilted his head. "Once upon a time, in a certain place..." When I spoke the opening lines, he soon started copying them in an unnaturally low voice: "Once upon a time, in a certain place..." Peach was great at this. "An old man and an old woman lived there, pyoro-pyoro..." "Wow. So good!" Yoko clapped her hands in delight. Peach's Momotaro story always ended up looping back to the "once upon a time" part around the time he recruited the monkey as a companion, and he never actually made it to Onigashima, the demon island. Back when my dad had worked hard to teach him, he could say the whole thing through to the part where they defeat the demons and make a triumphant return home, but it seemed he would forget if we left it alone for too long. My theory was that the repetitive structure—recruiting a dog, a monkey, and a pheasant using the exact same narrative beats—was the main culprit. There’s that memorable phrase: "Please give me one of the millet dumplings tied to your waist." It gets repeated after the dog and again with the monkey, so he probably just gets confused right around there.
Even so, Yoko was thrilled and begged to feed him. With no other choice, I decided to let her give him just a little treat, placing a few of his favorite sunflower seeds in Yoko's hand and letting her feed him directly through the bars of the cage. Every time Peach reached out with his beak, Yoko squealed and fussed. Hearing the commotion, Lazarus came trotting back into the living room wagging his tail, sniffing around Yoko's feet with a *sniff-sniff*. "Hey, did you buy P-suke somewhere? Or did someone give him to you?" "Ah, a relative gave him to us. We got him when I was three, and it's been two years since then, so he's about four or five." "Hmm. We should keep a mynah or a parrot too." Hearing Yoko say that so innocently, I decided to tease her just a little bit. "You know, this guy occasionally says some creepy things." "Eh? What kind of creepy things?" "...Things nobody taught him." Hearing that, Yoko made a slightly spooked face. Peach had originally been kept at my relative's house, but after the grandfather of that household passed away, the bird had started chirping strange things. "The food is tasteless. There's no flavor. The food is tasteless." "I don't have any cigarettes. I want to smoke a cigarette. Let me smoke."
Those were things the grandfather had been muttering during his hospitalization before he died. He had never said such things at home while he was alive. Not only that, but he would sometimes speak in nag-like tones, sounding exactly like the grandfather himself. "Make sure you shut the toilet door properly." "Eat every last scrap of your vegetables." Things like that. If it were just those phrases, the grandfather said them often enough that it wouldn't be strange for Peach to have picked them up. However, less than a month after the grandfather passed away, the bird suddenly blurted out something like this: "On the god-shelf, make sure you put up a white paper properly." Indeed, Peach had said to paste white paper on the household altar. At first, the family had no idea what he meant, but he repeated it so often that it started to feel unsettling. When we asked an elderly neighbor about it, we learned it was an ancient custom. It's called sealing the god-shelf. When someone dies in a household, you seal the family altar with white paper until the forty-nine days of mourning are over, and you aren't even supposed to worship at it. This is to keep *kuro-fujou*—the pollution of death—away from the altar. Yet, no one in the family had known about that. The only one who would have known such a custom was the old grandfather. It was as if the grandfather had possessed Peach and was teaching us that very thing. Things like that kept happening, and the uneasy relatives decided to part with Peach. That's when my parents, with their bad habit of loving animals, stepped up, and he ended up being brought to our house. The things he used to say at his previous home gradually faded away. Or rather, since everyone in our family eagerly tried to teach him whatever selfish things we wanted, he forgot them to make room, like blocks pushed out of a toy. In particular, the phrases spoken in that late grandfather's tone, which had frightened our relatives, stopped dead in their tracks after he came to us—so much so that we started doubting if he had ever really said such things at all.
However, confirmation of our relatives' stories came from a different source. About half a year after Peach became part of our family, he suddenly started chirping a foul phrase: "I'll kill you." He sounded thoroughly amused while chirping it, but those listening were chilled to the bone. An investigation was launched to find out who had taught it to him, but everyone in the family denied knowing anything. I had no memory of it either. Since we kept him in a room without a television, he couldn't have picked it up on his own. Someone in the family must have taught him. I remember my younger sister, who was suspected of being the culprit, getting indignant and running away from home for a bit. In the end, we never figured out where he picked up the phrase "I'll kill you." Around that time, Peach began occasionally chirping other phrases that nobody should have taught him. "There's a pocketbook dropped in the park sandbox." "Kakizawa-san's husband became a department manager." "The election car is so noisy." Most of them were trivial things, but none of us had any recollection of them. Worse still, some of the information was things nobody could have known yet. For instance, by the time Peach said the election car was noisy, no election car had come around our neighborhood yet. It was deeply unsettling because we had no idea why Peach was speaking like that. My sister's theory was that Peach was, so to speak, a living radio—that he was receiving the thoughts of someone whose frequency matched, and automatically speaking them aloud. In the case of the relatives who previously kept him, the grandfather had died, but his soul was still lingering around that house, occasionally borrowing Peach's voice to speak. I told her there was no way that was true, but she insisted that animals have a stronger spiritual connection to ghosts than humans do. Her supporting evidence was, "Even Bu-chan the cat stares at empty walls sometimes." That was something I had actually wondered about myself before.
According to my sister, now that Peach was at our house, there were no grandfather spirits nearby anymore, so he was currently picking up the thoughts of the neighbors and the voices of wandering spirits. When she explained it like that, Yoko made a disgusted face and stepped back. "No way." Peach, who had just had the sunflower seed he was about to peck at pulled away, bit the bars of his cage from the inside in annoyance, rattling them with a clatter. "I'm really bad with that kind of stuff, so cut it out." "My bad, my bad." I laughed as I said that, but somewhere in a corner of my chest, I felt a sudden sensation as if I had been stroked by something freezing cold. It was a bizarre imagination, entirely different from the ghost story my sister was pushing. It had slipped smoothly into my own head out of nowhere once before, bringing with me a certain vague anxiety and vertigo. I had just remembered it. "Oh, come on." Without even noticing my stiffened expression, Yoko shook her head and reached out her hand to offer Peach another sunflower seed. At her feet, Lazarus was still sniffing around with his nose close up, looking up from underneath. Perhaps bothered by all the sniffing, Bu, who had been curled up in the corner of the room, woke up and started sniffing her from the opposite knee. "Hey, hold on. Aren't these guys being a bit rude to a lady lately?" Yoko stood there making a weird face, and I laughed and told her, "They're always like this with people they're seeing for the first time." "Really?" "Really." Crossing my arms, I asserted it with unnecessary firmness.
A few days after that happened. Waking up in the middle of the night, feeling thirsty, I got out of bed. What time is it now? I thought about turning on the light, but not wanting to be blinded by the glare, I ended up just walking out of my room in the dark. The second-floor hallway had only a single small light glowing beside the stairs, and I made my way down to the first floor relying on that illumination. Everyone in the family was asleep, and the house was dead silent. I crept into the kitchen on tiptoe, using the blue light of the rice cooker's display to guide me as I took some tea from the fridge. After draining a cup of full, I let out a breath. The silence made my ears ring with a high-pitched hum. I wondered idly when the last time was that I woke up in the middle of the night like this. It was while I was slipping quietly out of the kitchen, trying not to wake the family, and moving down the hallway on tiptoe. My ears caught something other than the silence. I stopped and looked in the direction of the sound: the living room door was slightly open. It felt like it had drifted slightly. In my mind, I played back a *creak* that shouldn't have been audible. It wasn't like we locked it normally, and since it wasn't the season for air conditioning or heating, leaving the door ajar was usual business, but my intuition told me of some nameless premonition. Gently approaching and widening the gap of the door, the dark interior stretched out beyond it. "P-suke?" Lowering my voice, I called out the mynah bird by his usual nickname.
* * * Again, I heard something. From inside the room. Someone's voice. It was clearly different from the squeaking of the hamsters. It sounded like a human voice. "Peach?" Stepping into the room, moonlight filtered faintly through the window curtains, casting bizarre striped patterns across a space as dark as the ocean floor. * * * There it was again. I heard it again. Coming from the birdcage in the corner of the room. The cage was covered with a black cloth. To keep the light out. We always did that when Peach went to sleep. From inside that black cloth, a mumbled, whispering voice could be heard.
Ah, Peach was talking. In human words. I felt a chill, welling up for no reason, race across the surface of my skin. Just what on earth was he saying? * * * I strained my ears as I slowly drew closer. Why is Peach awake at this kind of hour? Was it just a coincidence? Or was he always awake? Late at night, after everyone in the family had fallen fast asleep, was he sitting alone inside his small cage, talking about something we knew nothing about? My sister's words flashed through my mind. Peach would receive the thoughts of people who weren't there or people who had died, and chirp them out as words. Just like a radio. That was why he would occasionally fluently utter things nobody should have taught him. Was it happening now, too? Words nobody taught him, or perhaps stories no one in the family should have known... If so, were invisible human words drifting around this dark room right now? Or was a dead person, someone who could neither be seen nor touched, standing right here in this room? My hand brushed against the cloth draped over the birdcage, and I froze.
The terrifying imagination brought by my sister's claims suddenly grew faint, and I felt another imagination well up from somewhere dark inside me. When I half-laughed while listening to my sister's story, I had actually been harboring a completely different imagination of my own. I had instinctively shoved that creepy thought deep down into my heart and tried to forget it. Until now. And yet. The imagination I had formed. No, the imagination I *had* formed. It was this: Me, suddenly waking up from bed in the middle of the night. Yet I had no consciousness. No consciousness as myself. Walking down the stairs like a sleepwalker, standing in front of the birdcage. And speaking to what was inside. Me, acting unconsciously. Or perhaps, another person who had slipped inside the vessel that was me. The words were— *...soumudo...* The sound entering my ears brought me back to my senses.
A voice came from inside the birdcage. A muffled voice. Terribly difficult to catch. I held my breath and strained my ears. The voice continued through the cloth. *...mitsuka...* *...shikichi...* *...runosan...* That was all I could finally make out. The voice stopped, and after a moment, the exact same words repeated. *...soumudo...* *...mitsuka...* *...shikichizu...* *...runosanposha...* I still couldn't catch it well. Why
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