Love is found in dying (恋蛍 English vr)

第1話

Love is found in the dying

Chapter 1 — A Love Like Fireflies

“Love is found in the dying.”

Yuta liked that idea.

He had decided to bet his life on a love so fierce it would burn him alive. A love so intense, it scorched anyone who touched it. So pure and violent that it refused to be tamed or measured. A love that devoured and consumed.

If love could not be like that, he thought, then it wasn’t worth having at all.

It had to be wild. Dangerous. Glorious.

Near his home, there was a small river. Not particularly large, but near the estuary where Yuta lived, the width of the river spread out like a breathing chest.

Every now and then, a firefly would drift in from upstream—lost, wandering, searching for something.

Or perhaps it was searching for nothing at all.

One summer night, a firefly wandered into their garden.

His mother, stepping outside to take out the trash, noticed a flicker of light.

“There’s a firefly outside,” she said.

Yuta slid the window open and looked out.

“There, near the camellia,” his mother pointed.

Sure enough, at the base of the tree, under the fading summer leaves, a tiny light pulsed, like a heartbeat in the dark.

Yuta slipped on his sandals and stepped outside. His father followed, cigarette in hand.

The firefly blinked on and off, casting dim light across the moss and scattered weeds.

Yuta reached out gently, but his father’s voice stopped him.

“Don’t. Fireflies only live about a week. That light is to find a mate. If you catch it, you might stop it from ever finding one.”

“Only a week?” Yuta asked.

“Ten days at most. Let it be.”

The firefly glowed again, then faded. Its body barely moved, but its presence filled the silence.

Yuta watched, mesmerized.

He was afraid—not of the dark, but of the heat.

What if he touched the light and it burned him?

What if that light was not for him?

What if it never found the one it was calling out to?

“Maybe it won’t ever find anyone,” Yuta whispered.

His father didn’t respond. He only smoked, looking down.

The wind passed softly through the garden.

The salty breeze from the river reached them, mingled with the sound of flowing water.

The firefly flared one last time, then vanished into the night.

From this spring, Yuta had entered junior high school.

Since it was four kilometers from his home to school, he began commuting by bus as soon as the new school year started.

On his way home, he headed to the bus stop as usual.

The stop was crowded with junior high students, and standing slightly apart from the commotion was a lone high school boy.

Yuta had seen him every morning on the bus.

He didn’t know the boy’s name, but they always happened to share the same morning bus. Since junior high and high school had different dismissal times, they never rode the same bus in the afternoon.

Thinking it was unusual to see him at this hour, Yuta also stepped away from the crowd and stood near the boy.

He heard a faint humming—an English song.

Yuta had just started learning English that year, and to him, it sounded cool.

The high schooler was tall and had a slender face.

He had two buttons undone on his school uniform, tilted his head slightly, and curled one side of his mouth as he hummed, almost lazily. He seemed to view the world with a slanted gaze—not a villain, but certainly not a saint either.

He didn’t seem the studious type, but rather, someone quietly rebelling against the world.

Yuta didn’t understand the lyrics of the song.

The boy wasn’t trying to sing it well—it was more like the English melody just happened to slip from his lips.

Yuta wondered if he would someday be able to sing in English too.

No—he felt that he had to be able to.

The boy paid no attention to the passing cars or pedestrians.

He had no interest in the noise of the younger students, and didn’t even glance in Yuta’s direction.

Outside of the morning commute, the next time Yuta met him again was at the library during summer vacation.

Yuta couldn’t bring himself to do his summer homework, so he thought, “If I go to the library, I’ll end up doing it whether I like it or not,” and began to go regularly. This worked out well, and his homework progressed surprisingly smoothly.

At first, he had only planned to go in the mornings, but as he kept working on the assignments, thinking “just a little more, a little more,” he would end up staying past noon and going home because he couldn’t bear the hunger.

Eventually, his mother started making him a lunch, and he began staying at the library until it closed.

At noon, he would eat his lunch in the shade of the building, drink some tea, and go back to studying.

Such days continued.

One day, just after he finished his lunch, he heard someone singing from somewhere.

Wondering who it could be, he craned his neck, and it was that high school boy.

When he realized it was him singing, his interest diminished a little.

The boy was not singing in English, but humming a Japanese song while smoking a cigarette.

“If you marry a wife, let her be talented,

Beautiful in face and kind in heart.

If you choose a friend, let him be one who reads books,

With six parts chivalry, four parts passion.”

It was somewhat old-fashioned, yet a song that deeply touched the heart.

Yuta hadn’t been watching him, but he was drawn to the singing voice.

Since the boy kept repeating the same part over and over, Yuta ended up memorizing it naturally.

When he got home, he asked his mother the name of the song.

“I don’t know. Your father might,” she said.

His mother disliked troublesome things like this. Even when asked something, she often said, “Look it up yourself.”

This time, she passed the trouble onto his father.

At dinner, Yuta asked his father. At first, he didn’t seem to know, but when Yuta recited a few lines from memory, his father responded.

“That’s Yosano Tekkan’s Song of Loving People, I think.”

He even gave an explanation:

“It means, if you’re going to marry, choose someone intelligent, beautiful, and kind.

And as for friends—six parts chivalry and four parts passion.

Passion alone isn’t enough.

You need six parts chivalry to get things done.”

He also added, “Tekkan’s wife was Yosano Akiko. She was an even more passionate poet.”

The next day, Yuta found the poem at the library and copied it into his notebook.

“If you seek the life of love,

Guard your name, oh man.

If you seek the kindness of friends,

Step into fire where duty lies.”

That particular verse especially struck Yuta’s heart.

He also looked into Yosano Akiko and copied the following tanka into his notebook:

“Without even touching

The warm blood beneath

My soft skin—

How lonely it must be

To preach your path, dear sir.”

“That girl, twenty—

Black hair flowing through the comb—

Ah, the prideful spring

Of youth—

How beautiful it is.”

He read the commentary too, and chewed over the meanings.

Yuta looked at his reflection in the mirror of the library restroom.

It was the summer of his fifteenth year—he had not yet reached his own “spring of pride.”

But surely, from now on, a life of pride would begin—he had that kind of feeling.

Tekkan’s song—his father taught him the melody, and Yuta naturally began humming it.

When Yuta started pestering him too persistently, his father began to act annoyed.

One day, with time to spare, Yuta took his dog for a walk to the beach, just five minutes from home.

The dog’s name was Rin, a three-year-old female border collie.

The sound of the waves repeated gently, and a slight sea breeze blew.

With each step, the soft sand tried to swallow his feet.

Now and then, pieces of plastic debris were scattered about.

Because it was an inland sea, the debris didn’t mar the scenery too much—it gathered only in low spots due to the wind.

It didn’t interfere with their walk; they simply stepped around those places.

Without much thought, Yuta began to hum Tekkan’s song.

He felt a little intoxicated by the act of singing himself.

At this late-summer beach, there were only a few remaining visitors.

Only the sun blazed overhead.

The sand was scorching hot.

Even when Yuta sang loudly, no one paid any attention.

The wind and the waves carried his voice away.

Seeing no one around, Yuta unclipped Rin’s leash and let her run free.

He had heard that border collies get stressed when they don’t get enough exercise.

When he found a pine branch, he threw it far.

Rin chased after it, caught it in her mouth, and brought it back.

When he grew tired of throwing it, Rin simply walked beside him, still holding the branch.

Before long, two human figures appeared deep within the pine grove.

From their clothing, he could tell immediately they were a boy and a girl.

The girl was wearing a bright red checkered shirt—so vivid he almost mistook it for a crimson flower.

The boy wore jeans and a black long-sleeved T-shirt.

They looked older than Yuta but not beyond high school age.

He guessed they were students on a date in this pine grove by the beach, probably with only a small allowance to spend.

Looking closely, he realized the boy was the same high school student he often saw on the bus.

The girl looked about the same age as him.

However, they didn’t seem to be talking.

The girl leaned her back against a pine tree and stared at the boy in silence.

Yuta stopped singing and crouched down.

The boy pulled the girl close and kissed her.

Yuta felt his cheeks grow suddenly hot.

He wondered why he had to be the one hiding.

Curiosity stirred him, and he crept closer to watch.

When their lips parted, the boy said,

“Love is discovered in dying.”

“You idiot,” the girl replied,

but she smiled as she lightly tapped his chest.

For some reason, Yuta felt as if he wasn’t supposed to be there.

With that feeling chasing him, he turned and fled from the scene.

Rin happily chased after him.