Misaki pulled at me. “There’s an abandoned home nearby, but…”

“An abandoned home?”

“My house.”

After about a ten minute walk, we came to the abandoned house. The windowpanes were shattered, and a large hole had opened in the front door. We spent the whole night in a house that looked about ready to collapse. Surprisingly, though, I don’t remember it being all that cold.

We talked and talked about all sorts of things in that house, where there was a missing floorboard with every step. Misaki told me about her memories of that house. Most of them were tragic, but a few were kind of nice, too.

“My first father… I don’t even remember his face, but he named me. Because there’s a beautiful cape nearby, he called me ‘Misaki’, meaning ‘cape’. It’s been a rather appropriate name, don’t you think?”

I laughed.

Eventually, I grew a little tired. After I had fallen into a few seconds of sleep, Misaki suddenly shook me lightly. “In the end, what’s the N.H.K.?”

As it would be a long discussion, I didn’t repeat my explanation. Misaki got out from under the coat she’d been using as a blanket, and she pulled her secret notebook from her bag.

“I thought of an N.H.K., too.”

“Huh?”

“It’s dark, so can you use your lighter? Oh! It’s okay, I can read the letters, even in the darkness”, she said quickly, as she started writing something in her secret notebook with a ballpoint pen.

“Um, okay, it’s finished.” She tore out the page and handed it to me.

The only light came from the moon shining in through the window. Lying face up, I forced my eyes into focus to read the contents of the paper.

Contract for Membership in the N.H.K. (Nihon Hitojichi Kokankai)[40]

The purpose of the Hitojichi Kokankai:

Members will exchange hostages with each other; you offer your lives to each other, as hostages. In other words, it means, “if you die, I die, too, dammit!” If we agree to this, then we will be unable to act, like nuclear powers, glaring at each other during a cold war. And even if we want to die, we will be unable to.

If the situation turns into, “I don’t care, even if you die”, then this group’s system has failed. Let’s make sure that it doesn’t become that way!

President of the N.H.K., Misaki Nakahara

Name: _____ Member #: _____

“Look, sign it quickly.”

I took the ballpoint pen from her. I was troubled by it for a while. In the end, nothing at all had been resolved. It wasn’t as though anything had changed.

“Let’s look forward in life”? Are you an idiot?! We have dreams, so we’re okay? We don’t have any kind of dreams!