Overdose of Silence | [Tanuki's Short Story]

I am a sound designer.
I pick out the necessary sounds from the world and erase the unnecessary ones.

To me, the noise of the city was far too persistent,
and before I knew it, I had begun to crave absolute silence.

I moved to a seaside town as if to escape.
In the attic of an old rented house, I found that box.

A wooden box with a deep, cold luster like ebony.
The surface was densely carved with fine, complex geometric patterns,
as if to absorb sound waves.

On the lid, in a script resembling creeping vines, were the words 'Echo Return Box'.

Even when I shook it, it made not a sound.
It was as if the inside were a vacuum.

I placed it on the desk in my workspace.
As a beautiful object that embodied ultimate silence.

I finished my work for the day and sank into my chair, exhausted.

The monotonous sound of waves could be heard from outside the window.
I felt irritated even by that, and muttered unconsciously.

"Be quiet."

At that moment, my words were suddenly sucked into the air.
The sound of the waves, which had been ringing incessantly, stopped abruptly.

No, that's not it. The sound was continuing.
But it was not reaching my eardrums.

As if on the other side of a thick wall,
leaving only its presence behind,
the sound itself had vanished.

Startled, I looked at the box on the desk.
The patterns on the box seemed to pulse ever so slightly.

My curiosity as a professional was ignited,
and I began to let the box listen to all kinds of sounds.

Birdsong, classical music, human voices.
Any sound, when near the box, lost its contours,
and dissipated into meaningless reverberations.

The box was eating sound.
And not indiscriminately, but
prioritizing the sounds I consciously deemed 'unnecessary'.

This box was a perfect noise-canceler,
editing my world.
The power of the box made me irresistibly captive.

The barking of a neighbor's dog, the sound of cars driving in the distance, the sound of the wind.

Every time I returned home saying "I'm home," I would have the box absorb every sound of daily life,
drowning in the pleasure of creating a perfectly silent space.

In that absolute silence,
my work is progressing better than ever before.
The sounds I create are becoming sharpened and increasing in purity.

I first noticed something was wrong
when I was listening to classical music for work.

Beethoven's 'Symphony No. 5'.

I should have been moved by its powerful melody and
the roar of the timpani,
but now it sounds like nothing more than a sequence of notes.

Even though I can analyze the composition in my head,
no emotion that strikes my heart wells up.

It feels like having the colors stripped from a beautiful painting,
leaving me to look only at the line art.

Next, I lost the ability to understand humor.
I can understand the clever banter of the comedians I saw on TV
as being logically funny.

However, I don't have the sensation of laughter welling up from the bottom of my gut.

Along with the unnecessary laughter I let the box absorb,
the resonance of the emotion of laughter itself
was disappearing from within me.

My world had begun to quietly distort.

One day, my mother's voice on the phone
felt terribly thin.

"Are you doing well?"
The words lacked the warmth I should have felt in the past.

Suddenly, memories of the time I lived
in a studio apartment in the city came back to me.

A call from my mother that reached me
when I was exhausted from work that lasted until late at night.

What I heard from the other side of the receiver
was not just her worried voice saying,"Are you eating properly?
"

The faint sound of the old grandfather clock at my parents' house ringing in the background.
The laughter from the TV in the next room occasionally mixing in.

All of those ambient sounds
gave my mother's voice the warm resonance
known as home.

That noise was the comfort
that unraveled my heart.

But now, what reaches my ears
is a voice that sounds like it is being emitted from a sterile room,
with all background noise stripped away.

I can understand the meaning of the words.
However, the texture of the emotions that should have resided within them,
the tremor of the voice, the nuance of concern,
have been cleanly filtered out.

Like symbols stripped of their meaning,
they only echoed emptily.

The words and sounds I have been feeding the box
are losing their weight and reality in the real world.

I could no longer taste the flavor of words,
as if I had developed a taste disorder.

I was terrified. Is this box not eating sounds,
but the very concepts themselves?

The silence I wished for every time I returned home each day.

As the price for that, the accompanying peace and warmth,
the resonance of connections with family,
had vanished from my world.

Even when I try to recall the scenery of my hometown,
like an old photograph filled with noise,
its outlines are blurred.

I must throw the box away.

I grabbed the box with trembling hands and rushed outside into the stormy night.
I will sink this cursed box to the bottom of the sea.

The moment I stepped outside, the world bared its fangs.
The sound of the wind raged in my ears like a blade,
and the sound of the lashing rain pierced my eardrums like countless needles.

A distant siren shook my skull directly,
and I crouched down on the spot and vomited.

An unbearable flood of noise.

I had become a body that could not remain sane for even a second
without the nothingness created by the box.

I crawled back into the house and placed the box on the desk.
The moment the world was filled with a silence that felt like a lie again,
I felt a deep sense of relief, as if I had been saved from hell.

And then, I realized. I can no longer escape.
This silence is my only salvation.

I hugged the box tightly.

Ah, that's right. There are still sounds left to feed it.
The final sound that proves my existence.

The fundamental resonance for me to be me.

If I feed it that, I can become one with the ultimate silence.

With trembling lips, I whispered softly to the box.

My own name.

Before that voice could become a sound, it was sucked into the box.
It was drawn into the depths of the box before it could even become a sound.

My body began to slowly turn transparent from its outline.

My thoughts, my memories, and the very concept of my existence,
quietly, so quietly, returned to the depths of the box.

***

When a season had passed.

A town resident passing by the house
tilted their head in wonder.

The sound of the sea, the sound of the wind,
and even the cries of the seagulls that should be calling nearby,
do not reach that one spot in the house.

As if blocked by a thick glass wall,
they are unnaturally cut off.

Inside the house, a black wooden box placed on a desk
rejects every sound in the world,
maintaining an absolute silence.

Waiting for the next seeker of silence
who will eventually visit this house.

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