Prologue

Prologue

 

Two girls talked on their way home from school at sunset, taking a road that ran by the river.

 

“Oh, really?”

“Yes! There's absolutely nothing about that in the Bible.”

“So how come everyone writes about it like it’s a big deal?”

“Kirima-san! You know Kirima Seiichi always said not to believe what ‘everyone’ says!”

“Fair, but… my dad wrote about this somewhere, right?”

“No, he never did. I read this in a book by Malet.”

“Kazuko, I swear you’re way smarter than my dad ever was.”

“Th-that’s not true at all. But the point is, Cain may have killed his brother Abel, but he never felt guilty for it, and God forgave him. That’s all it says in the Bible. There was no lifelong burden like in the movie East of Eden.”

“Wasn’t there a…sign? I thought he was marked in some way.”

“Yeah, that part is from the Bible.”

“So didn’t that lead to everyone pointing fingers at him? You’d think it would.”

“That’s where everyone’s got it wrong. The mark God put on Cain was to prevent anyone from harming him because of his crime. Any injury inflicted on Cain would be paid back sevenfold. In other words, he was basically given official license to do whatever he wanted.”

“Haha, like the idle vassal to the shogun.”

“And the Bible does go into what happened to Cain after that. He founded a town, had a happy family, and achieved great success in commerce, industry, agriculture and the arts. He was the foundation of everything we know today as ‘culture.’ The man who killed his brother in a fit of jealousy became the progenitor of everything we consider great.”

“Is that really true?”

“That's all it actually says.”

“He never regretted any of it? It said he became a wanderer, right?”

“That’s all latter-year interpretation. I mean, even in the Middle Ages, when the church considered it a sin to fail to take the literal word of the Bible as truth… even they broke that rule to interpret this as God preventing injury to Cain to teach him the meaning of sin.”

“Huh.”

“I know it’s hard to process, but…like, it feels like reality as we know it, right?”

“It does, yeah. But, Kazuko, you’re… You know…”

“Weird?”

“Yeah, very. Getting all worked up about a topic like this.”

“I don’t think I’m nearly as weird as you, Fire Witch.”

“Hahaha, that's for sure!”

“Hehe…”

 

The two friends laughed happily.

 

“So what else, Professor Suema? Any other world-wide mistakes bothering you?”

“‘Professor’? I hate it when people call me that.”

“Can you blame them? You know more than most real professors do. You’re a Goddess of wisdom and knowledge.”

“Are you making fun of me?”

“Totally.”

“Argh!”

“Haha, sorry, sorry. But…is there?”

“Hmm… Well, what about the box?”

“Box? Like…the myth?”

“Mm. The box containing all unhappiness and evil.”

“I know the story. It was given to a girl who opened it out of curiosity, and in so doing ruined everything.”

“Yes, that one. And she hastily closed it, leaving behind…”

“‘Hope,’ wasn't it?”

“Doesn’t that strike you as weird? Why was hope included in a box of misfortune and evil?”

“Good point.”

“Once again, everyone’s been given a simplistic interpretation that gets the true nature of the story wrong.”

“So what was the last misfortune left behind?”

“‘The future.’”

“Huh?”

“To be more precise, premonitions and harbingers. In other words, the greatest misfortune is to know for certain what is going to happen.”

“Is that ‘misfortune’?”

“I mean…you know everything. You know the good coming your way as well as the sad partings. You’ve already seen what’s going to happen. If we knew all of that, how would we go on living?”

“……….”

“But because ‘the future’ stayed trapped, people were able to hold on to the faint glimmer of hope that someday better things would come. That’s the point of the story.”

“I see…”

“The girl given the box was named Pandora… A name that means ‘she who has been given everything.’”