Volume 1 - CH 2

As the drawn mochi turned out to be just mochi, I ate it and also drank the barley tea that came along with it.

The barley tea came in a black cup, and it was normal barley tea, just too strong. It was still barley tea. The mochi was a mochi, and barley tea is just barley tea.

Perhaps the reason this barley tea was too strong was that I remembered the one served at my teacher’s house. The barley tea served at my teacher’s house was usually very strong because the barley tea bag was left in the tea pot.

This barley tea was darker in color than mentsuyu. It was in a black cup, which made it look even darker. It was pitch black. And to be honest, it doesn’t taste good.

It was a barley tea, and a normal mochi, anyway. It was just food.

…And I ate it but it’s not something you think about after eating and drinking, but I wonder if they were safe to eat.

The copy paper on which I had been drawing just a few minutes earlier was now completely empty as if nothing had ever happened. In other words, if I think about it plainly and without regard to science or common sense… I can say that “what I drew in my drawing has materialized”. Or “this is all me hallucinating.” No, I don’t want to believe the latter one.

“…another one.” (Tougo)

Since I had another chance, I drew a mochi on a gray plate. A black cup of barley tea that is too thick.

I had to eat what came out, and since it was a good opportunity, I ate it one more time. Well, it tasted like mochi and barley tea.

“…more.” (Tougo)

I wanted to verify it a little more, so I drew it again. And I knew it was mochi and barley tea.

…What the hell is this?

I have only known in works of fiction that what you draw becomes a reality because I can’t explain this.

I think there are not enough ingredients for a mochi drawn with a pencil on paper to become a mochi. A mochi cannot be made of paper and pencil lead.

Therefore, I have no choice but to question the mochi that has just appeared. I think it’s too late to question it after eating it, though.

Well… even if the mochi and barley tea were really made of copy paper and pencil lead, it would probably be okay. Paper and pencil are not something you would die from eating. Rather, since they tasted good, so be it. Even if they turned back into paper and pencil in my stomach, it would be fine. Thank you for the food.

Well, I was thinking about it for a while, but when my stomach was full of mochi, I started to feel sleepy. Maybe human beings are simpler creatures than I thought. No, or maybe I am.

I got sleepy, so I’ll think about it tomorrow. I don’t want to think about anything now, and I’m tired of being so surprised. I decided to recline against a tree and go to sleep. I felt a little cold, but I thought I could sleep if I curled up.

Good morning.

When I woke up, the sky was bright. And it was still the same forest.

I was hoping that things would be back to normal after I woke up from sleep, but I guess it was not to be. I had no choice but to get up.

Lightly brush off the dirt on my pants… I sat down again.

I have to plan what to do today.

The mochi I drew became a mochi. That was a tremendous shock… well, whatever I do today, I’m going to make it all a verification of that.

Because I’m too curious. I don’t care about clues to get back to the original world or anything else right now. I don’t care about human settlements either. No more exploring today. I just want to investigate the mysterious phenomenon of a drawn mochi becoming a mochi.

… Well, it’s okay, isn’t it? It’s okay like this.

At any rate, I think I got some energy from the mochi and barley tea. …It’s fine that I spend the day drawing pictures today.

“Will it work with other things, not mochi?” (Tougo)

Now I’ll do my experiment. Let’s draw some pictures.

The first one is a cherry tomato.

… Because I’m bored of eating only mochi. There’s no deep meaning.

But the cherry tomato did not materialize.

I drew a mochi, and the mochi materialized. Why is the mochi good, but not the cherry tomato?

Next. A Pencil.

I couldn’t think of anything in particular to draw, so I drew what I had in my hand. It was one of those pencils with a graphite lead inside a wooden shaft painted a deep green color, like the ones I often see.

…didn’t work either. I don’t know why.

Next, a bicycle.

I felt tired from walking.

But I gave up halfway through. I couldn’t draw the bicycle because I didn’t remember its structure well.

Next, a knife.

I thought it would be useful for exploring the forest, and I also wanted to sharpen my pencil soon. And I simply wanted to draw metal.

I have practiced drawing metallic luster before. Glass and metal are fun when you can draw them with just the black of a pencil and the white of the paper.

As for the knife, I drew the one I borrowed from my teacher’s house. I remember it because I used it all the time. The body is black like coal, and the blade is sharpened smoothly and has a metallic luster. The handle was made of black wood. The sheen was beautiful too, and when I first borrowed it, I was surprised that I could borrow such a beautiful thing.

…and then it appeared.

Huh. It really appeared.

Just as the drawn mochi became a mochi, a drawn knife became a knife.

“…mochi, barley tea, and a knife…?” (Tougo)

I wonder why. Tomatoes and pencils are no good, bicycles are…… well, I gave up on that one. But a knife is okay.

What is the logic……?

The first thing I can think of is drawing ability, I guess.

As for the mochi and barley tea… I had actually drawn them several times. Since I was still in middle school, with just pencil and paper. Since the summer of eighth grade… the only art materials I could use were paper and pencil, so for the next year and a half, all I did was do sketches every day, all day.

I drew all kinds of things in the teacher’s house… and among them, rice cakes and barley tea appeared frequently, so I drew them the way they look.

…Surprisingly, mochis are difficult to draw. It’s just a white blob. So, I think I was always trying to figure out how to make a mochi look like a mochi.

Because of that, even though I am now in a place I don’t know, I can still draw mochi and barley tea.

It might be the same with knives. One of the sketches I found in an art resource book was of a glass bottle and a metal tumbler. That made me want to draw metal because I had drawn spoons, faucets, knives, and all sorts of metal.

It’s maybe why… Simply, I was good at what I just drew, the mochi and the barley tea, and then the knife. Yeah. That’s probably true.

But if we go with that, I think the cherry tomatoes should be materialized.

I drew quite a few cherry tomatoes. Every year, from summer to fall, I painted about one cherry tomato a day. Thanks to that, a whole bunch of 500 sheets of A4 copy paper disappeared during the summer. About one-tenth of that was all lost in cherry tomatoes. I probably have a hundred tomatoes in total, adding up all the summers I have spent so far.

So… I think that cherry tomatoes should materialize as well. I think… but no cherry tomatoes appeared.

Then there is the pencil. I am not convinced about this one either.

I drew a lot of pencils. I could draw a pencil because I could do it in my room.

When I draw in my room, I am limited in what I can use as a motif, so pencils are used more often than not. I am not mad about the pencil because it helped me learn how to compose a drawing.

So, I think I should be able to materialize a pencil as well, but… for some reason, the pencil didn’t appear either.

In the meantime, it had passed noon and turned into dusk. That was fast…

I thought it was time for me to eat again, so I took out the mochi and ate them again.

I want to eat something else… but I’ll hold off on that. I don’t know if I can make something other than mochi.

But I’ll put up with mochi as food, but I need a place to sleep. A bed or a futon. At least a blanket.

So at least something. I’d like to find some kind of law about this “materialization of what I drew in my drawing”…

It was at that time.

Something fell down beside me.

It was a nut. A red one. Like the ones that grow on cherry trees in the summer. But brighter, yellowish red.

…It looked like a cherry tomato, and I felt like I hadn’t seen color in a long time.

That should be it I had been looking at nothing but paper and pencil today. All I saw was the world of black and white…

…Black and white.

Really. Up until now, I’ve been drawing in black and white.

I looked for the source of the fallen nut. I looked up to see if they had fallen from a tree, but they had not. Unfortunately, the tree I was lying on did not bear any fruit.

I looked up at the tree next to it, thinking it might be the one next to it, but it wasn’t it either… I would have noticed it yesterday if there was a tree around here that was bearing nuts.

Does that mean a bird dropped it? If that’s the case, then there’s only one nut… well, that’s fine.

I crushed the nut using one of the stones around me.

The juice that came out of the crushed nuts was, as expected, red.

I took the red juice with my finger.

Then, I smeared it on the drawing of a cherry tomato that I had made in the morning.

“……I knew it.” (Tougo)

And I saw that the cherry tomato that I drew on paper became a real cherry tomato.