The Nebuta of Life: Resurrecting the Spirit of Aomori

Chapter 3: Mud-Smeared Will to Live

Guided by his grandmother Fumi's storytelling, Ren immerses himself in the muddy reality of 1954 through the texture of the old drumming stick. In 1954, eleven-year-old Arata ignores the adults' warnings and crawls through the debris with his friends to gather materials for their makeshift Nebuta. Cold mud, the burnt smell of soot. Inside the darkness of his silent room, their father Daigo's frozen heart begins to waver as the raw, vibrant "energy of life" from the children invades his quiet trauma.

＜Story＞

The air in the hospital room grew warmer with each word spoken by Grandmother Fumi.

Ren quietly felt the splinters of the clumsy drumming stick in his hands with the pad of his thumb.

The "instant sense of omnipotence" that had existed beyond the smooth glass screen of his smartphone was now completely gone.

This piece of wood possessed the resistance of an uncompromising material and the weight of a reality that could not be easily moved.

"Arata was a truly stubborn boy. No matter what anyone said to him, he would run straight to the piles of debris."

Grandmother Fumi’s raspy voice brought the cold autumn wind of 1954 back into the sterile room.

--Three days had passed since Arata shouted, "Let's do the Nebuta!"

Eleven-year-old Arata and a handful of children crawled through the piles of ruins and garbage dumps around Aomori Port.

Dented drum cans —Ittokan— soaked in typhoon mud.

Splintered, broken pieces of wooden boards. And the remnants of mud-smeared washi paper clinging to the walls of collapsed houses.

Everything they gathered was "waste" that the adults completely ignored.

"What do you kids think you're doing playing in the mud? It's disrespectful, stop it!"

Even when passing adults hurled cold, angry words at them, Arata never stopped.

Sifting through the freezing mud with his bare hands, letting the dark soil wedge under his fingernails, Arata gathered the materials relentlessly.

Their fingertips were swollen red and purple from the cold, and their skin was cracked and bleeding.

Yet, the rough friction of skin against skin every time they rubbed their thumbs and index fingers together was a vivid proof that they were still "alive."

They lined up their scavenged treasures in an empty lot, dissolved crushed soot in water, and painted a demon's face onto the torn washi paper.

It wasn't skillful. It was distorted, clumsy, and fierce—a demon's face that looked as if the raw instinct to survive had taken physical form.

Eighteen-year-old Fumi, though fearing the adults' scolding, was drawn to the empty lot by Arata’s fierce intensity.

"Arata, this... needs more red."

Fumi took the brush and added a touch of the remaining red ink to the eyes of the demon Arata was painting.

A single red fire kindled on the torn piece of washi paper. In the silent, frozen town, it looked like the only ember that still held warmth.

The burnt smell of soot, the sea salt, and the stench of decaying sludge blended together, rising from the sweat on the children's foreheads.

That mud-smeared "energy of life" reached the ears of their father, Daigo, who was shutting himself inside the dim house.

In a room where the sliding doors were tightly closed to block out the sunlight, Daigo kept staring at the dark tatami mats.

To him, the mats in front of him were the very "pitch-black, freezing surface of the sea" that had swallowed his father, Mosaku.

Deep inside his ears, the roaring storm of that night and the shattering screams continued to echo as a relentless hallucination.

But through the drafts of the sliding doors, an alien sound invaded the room.

--The harsh metallic scraping of an Ittokan being dragged along the ground.

"Tie it tighter!" "The washi paper is tearing over there!"—the noisy, desperate shouting of the children.

And then, the burnt smell of soot brushed against Daigo's nose.

Daigo's back flinched, ever so slightly.

His dark fingertips, which had been gripping the mud-stained tatami, clenched slowly in deep conflict.

The "sounds of the deathly storm" that had been ringing in his ears were violently disrupted by the "vibrant energy of life" echoing from outside.

Torn between the urge to cover his ears and the urge to touch that warm sound, Daigo could only tremble in absolute silence.

Into his heart, still captive to the sea of the dead, the muddy heartbeat of living creatures was forcing a fresh, cold wind.

Ren let each and every one of his grandmother's words sink deep into his chest.

Frictionless, easy methods like gathering supporters online would never reach this "mud-smeared heat."

A real Nebuta was something you raised by plunging your own hands into the heavy mud of reality that refused to budge.

Grandmother Fumi’s dry, weathered hand gently rested over Ren’s hand on the drumming stick.

"Tomorrow, on the dusk of the fourth day, Ren... that's when all the ice melted."

Deep within Fumi's eyes, the burning red color of that autumn dusk in 1954 was beginning to ignite once more.

＜Afterword＞
An awkward "Nebuta of Life" built from waste scavenged from the debris. At the sound of the children's raw energy of life, the fingertips of their father, Daigo, flinch in his silent room. Next time, in Chapter 4, the cry of "Rassera!" will echo across the leaden port.

Continued in 【Chapter 4: Screaming Ultramarine, Melting Ice】

📖NextChapter:https://note.com/ttukumoo/n/n86c1037b38b7
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🌐 Original Japaneseher:https://note.com/juicy_laelia8513/n/n6c82b5a1110b

"Thank you so much for reading to the very end!"💗