Shadows

What is a shadow? According to science a shadow is a dark area or shape produced by a body coming between rays of light and a surface, but I believe shadows represent something much more. That brings you to my story, when I was 13 both sets of my grandparents died. By the next year one of my uncles, an aunt and 2 cousins had also passed away. When I had turned just barely turned 17 both my parents passed in a car crash. I was sent to an orphanage but only stayed there about 2 weeks, when my aunt Kazuo Kawaguchi and her husband Akihiko Kawaguchi adopted me. I was sent to Yokohama, just south of Tokyo where my aunt and uncle live in a old traditional japanese machiya. The machiya seemed to be as big as a mountain. It had two stories, and a private dojo. It was colored in a very dark brown, had black clay tiles and it smelled of wet paint. After I gazed at the machiya, I went and knocked on the oak door. My aunt Kazuo answered the door with a smile that was as bright as the sun.

“I’m so glad you're here. Please, make yourself at home,” she said. So I walked into the living room and saw the iridescent and luxurious furniture and large highly detailed shoji. As I looked around and had very sudden feeling of languor, for I feared that this family would be taken away and I would be left once again under the shadow.

When my uncle Akihiko returned from work at his cafe, which according to him was the best place on earth, he looked at me with great sorrow in his eyes and told me it was a tragedy that my parents had passed away at such young age. He then proceeded to walk up the precipitous stairs that lead to the machiya. I spent the rest of the day up in my room looking at the receding sun and thinking serene thoughts.

After about three weeks of staying with my aunt and uncle, I no longer felt that a shadow was imminent. The next day I started school at Yokohama international high school. When I walked into the school the first thing I noticed was the school was giant compared to schools in Chiba. As I walked into my classroom for Kendo I noticed that the back of the room was completely dark so I decided to sit in the back and as soon as I set foot in the back the darkness seemed to embrace me. I sat down and tried to pretend I was not there. The rest of my day went the same, I pretended I was not there.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

When I came home from school Aaunt Kazou asked how my day went. “It went fine,” I replied, heading to my room. I looked at my desk and saw that Aunt Kazou bought me a Nervegear Ssoftware computer for gaming and school work. I went over to it, turned it on and heard the “hum” of the desktop’s components powering up. Once it had started up, I went and opened my email to see that one of my friends from Chiba had emailed me and asked how my life was going. I replied back with “Fine,” and from there, a conversation started. We chatted back and forth until Aaunt Kazou called me down for dinner. After dinner I decided to go out to explore Yokohama. I left on Uncle Akihiko’s motorcycle and drove to the nearest convenience store. I then purchased some anime rentals and some konpeito and headed back home. When I got back home, I went to my room, inserted the movie disks into my dvd player and sat down and watched city in the sky while eating some konpeito.

When I turned 18, Aunt Kazou and Uuncle Akihiko gave me 800,000 yen and a motorcycle of my own. About 3 months after my birthday I moved into a apartment that was a couple of blocks from their machiya. One evening, as I was taking a walk, I received a call from the police saying my aunt Kazou and uncle Akihiko were both severely injured in a gas explosion at the train station. As soon as I heard this, I ran to the Yokohama University hospital. As soon as I got there, I ran in and checked in using my student ID. Then I went up to the emergency ward, ran to room 706, barged in and saw aunt Kazou and uncle Akihiko were both lying in eye watering white beds. I ran to aunt Kazou and whispered her name until she responded. She looked at me with her light brown eyes and said “I'm so proud of the young man you have become. I’m sure your parents would be very proud as well.”. After a long breath aunt Kazou said “your father wanted you to have this.”. As she said this she reached into her coat pocket and withdrew a brocaded silk tag that I instantly recognized as a Japanese talisman. When she gave it to me I opened it up and saw that there was a piece of dark black wood and saw that it said shadow in modern Japanese. I looked back at aunt Kazou and asked her what it meant, already knowing the answer. She said it said shadow because I was born on the darkest day of the year and that day was called Shadow Day. Then all of a sudden both she and uncle Akihiko gasped and both went still and I knew that they had been taken by the shadow. It was that day that I realized that what we call “reality” is really just a phantom and reality is really a shadow.

To Be Continued