It was the end of autumn in my second year of university. The rain had been falling since morning, and the surface of the wet asphalt was hazy like smoke. Days like this made me melancholic. My mood sank, and my thoughts drifted deep down. There was a river to my right, and beyond the white guardrail, the view was faintly blurred in the mist. Only the rhythmic ticking of the car's hazard lights echoed strangely loud. That became the rhythm of the world. Everything was made up of that rhythm. I looked at the river once more. The rain was falling on this side of the guardrail, and the exact same rain was pouring down on the other side. Water falling onto the road, and water falling onto the surface of the river. Looking up from the dark, low sky, the raindrops still fell slowly from a height of several hundred meters, their fates divided by a mere matter of centimeters upon reaching the ground. I found this imagery strangely amusing and shared it with the person in the driver's seat, who was resting his cheek on his hand against the steering wheel. He opened his mouth with a look of annoyance. "A symbol of this world and the afterlife? Indeed, this world and the next are separated by just that much. But whether it seeps into the ground or flows down the river, it eventually reaches the sea." The sea. The "sea" as referred to by my mentor, the one who taught me the occult, was surely synonymous with "nothingness." He did not acknowledge an afterlife. By an afterlife, he meant a world outside of this earth, like hell or heaven. I wasn't quite sure why he refused to believe in it. But it was certain that he stubbornly held that belief. It was still a little too early for dusk. My mentor and I had been waiting the whole time inside the car parked on the shoulder of the road. It seemed that the other day, on a rainy afternoon, my mentor had seen something interesting right here.
"We've got good rain falling." With those words, I had been called out, and now here I was. It felt like a detective stakeout. Thinking that, I took a bite of an anpan and tilted the milk carton. To my left was an empty lot, and in the weeds, a wheelbarrow left behind by someone was being beaten by the rain. No one passed by. Suddenly, my mentor broke the silence. "Suppose there is a child who has been raised in a basement since birth. Would that child not know what rain is until experiencing it outside the basement for themselves?" he asked, saying something eerie. "The history of rain is older than fire. Ever since humans were apes, or even before that, don't you think the memory of rain resides in every living organism on the earth's surface?" Deep within our genes... With those words, he rustled through a convenience store plastic bag. Even though there was only an anpan left, he rummaged through it stubbornly, despite having been the one to buy only anpan in the first place. The memory of rain. My thoughts sank deeply once again. Animals inherently possess the ability to recognize what is dangerous to them. And what they should prey on as well. When encountering them, reactions encoded in their genes are triggered. For more primitive life forms, phototaxis or chemotaxis might be just that. Similarly, could reactions to rain also lie dormant within our bodies from birth? Memories passed down continuously from an unimaginable past. I tried to recall what it was like when I experienced rain for the very first time.
Naturally, I couldn't remember such a thing now. I wanted to ask everyone: "What was your first rain like?" Surely no one could answer, even though everyone must have experienced it. It felt somehow amusing. I searched my own memories once more. The smell of rain was always nostalgic. Where did that nostalgia come from? While pondering such idle thoughts, my mentor's yawn suddenly brought me back to reality. "It's coming." A figure appeared ahead down the rain-streaked road. My mentor wiped the foggy windshield with his sleeve. I strained my eyes and stared straight ahead. A red umbrella came into view. Then, the figure of a woman holding the handle of that umbrella emerged. I couldn't make out her expression. She was probably around thirty, judging by her clothes. And I felt a bad vibe. I immediately realized the source of that unease. Walking right behind the woman with the umbrella was a girl of about five or six, trailing behind. Pink shoes. A yellow hat. If it weren't for the rain, they would have looked like a perfectly ordinary mother and child. But right now, it was a bizarre sight. A woman holding an umbrella. Walking one meter behind her, head bowed, was a child without an umbrella. If they had been walking close together under the umbrella, there wouldn't have been anything strange about it. At just a single meter apart, it felt as though they were in this world and the next.
"Because of the rain, my nose isn't working." With those words, my mentor stared intently at the two of them. Before long, they passed by the side of the car and faded back into the mist of the rain. "Do you think they were living humans?" He was asking me. I didn't know. And it seemed my mentor didn't either. Their figures were no longer visible. I leaned my seat back and reached out to wipe the still-fogged rear window, but my hand just wandered emptily through the air. "Both mother and daughter are flesh and blood. The mother is flesh and blood, the daughter is a spirit. The mother is a spirit, the daughter is flesh and blood. Both mother and daughter are spirits." My mentor muttered this without much emotion. Every single possibility was sad. For some reason, it was terribly sad. Feeling suffocated, I rolled down the window of the passenger seat just a little. The fine, rustling sound of the rain drifted into the car. The ticking sound of the hazard lights marking time grew fainter. The sounds, the scenery, my heart—everything was enveloped and trapped by the rain. It seemed the world had turned into this kind of place. Did we know back then that the rain we experienced for the first time would eventually stop? Suddenly, I felt like asking everyone that question.
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