The Doppelganger Returns

My life was being targeted by a schoolmate.
Unaware of this, I was happily slurping down spicy cod roe pasta with extra shredded nori.

1. Different Colors

“Were you at Building 8 earlier?”
A message arrived from Kana.
“I was at Building 1.”
The detective is in the bar, but I am in Building 1.

When I was in college, my lunch was almost alwaysspicy cod roe pasta with extra shredded nori.
Not mentaiko spaghetti or spicy cod roe pasta, but
strictlySpicy Cod Roe Pasta230 yen.
It is my personal seal of approval, second only to the one my mother makes.

Kana, having found out where I was, came all the way to Building 1.

Kana: “Huh? Yourhair color…”
Me: “Ah, yeah. Yesterday.”
Kana: “It’s aspicy cod roe pasta-inspiredcolor!”
Me: “I-it’s not like that, you know?”
Kana: “The other one is still milk tea brown.”

While Kana wasn't looking, I picked up and ate the shredded nori that had fallen onto the table.

The milk tea brown woman, who was identical to me—a so-called doppelganger—was the main topic of conversation.
Perhaps on the milk tea brown side, the woman with the chaotic kaleidoscope for a brain was the one being talked about.

Kana was especially obsessed with psychic phenomena and occult-like things, so more than me, the actual doppelganger...
No, not more than me.
I had absolutely no interest in that sort of thing.

I didn't believe in monsters to the extent that I once asked the staff playing ghosts at the Fuji-Q Highland Haunted Hospital about their makeup techniques and was completely ignored.

That was because I thought the monsterscustomers who came to my part-time job were much scarier.

Setting that aside,
Kana would send me reports of doppelganger sightings one by one.

After encountering my doppelganger, she would almost always come to check on me.
Every time, she would bring up the topic of
hair color.My emotional state at the time and the instability of my hair color matched perfectly.

I tried going blue-black, deeper than the darkness of night,

I tried a green that would blend into the Aokigahara Forest,
I tried a pink that would even surpass Doflamingo's coat,
just thinking back on it makes me dizzy.
My hair color was much more changeable than mountain weather or a maiden's heart.

That's why, like Player 1 and Player 2 in a fighting game, she and I were always different colors.

Even though we had never met.

2. Escalation

As the days went by, the messages from Kana increased.

On another day,
“Did you go to the Indian curry place?”
That day, I was holed up in my room.
And my lunch was soba.
100% buckwheat soba, at that.
Despite that, I was checking my own body odor.

On yet another day,
“Who was the guy you were with?”
That day, I had unconsciouslyfallen asleep and taken a4-lap journey on the Yamanote Lineabout 4 hours,
and was apologizing to JR East.

The guy I was with...?
The station staff member I was apologizing to was indeed a man.

Me: “It was the station staff.”
Kana: “Huh? Is that guy in the navy T-shirt a station staff member?”
Me: “I did an infinite loop on the Yamanote Line, so I didn't go to school.”

I got a message from Asami.
“Kana hasn't been coming to class lately.”

4. Suspicion

Kana: "Where are you now? The doppelganger is at the research building."
Me: "On the train now"
Up until then, the messages from Kana had been about confirming whether or not I was the real me, but they finally changed to

a report on the doppelganger's location.

And once she realized I wasn't on campus, she blatantly stopped reading my messages.

"No way..."

A single suspicion crossed my mind, but
since it wasn't a very pleasant one,
I weighed it down with stones and sank it.

3. Intent to Kill

After finishing my second-period ethics class, while chuckling at the power words I'd jotted down and imagining the
cod roe pasta I would have in my hands in five minutes, Kana called me, saying, "Come to the cafeteria now! I'm here!"

She hung up on me.

Behind me, as always, the party people were fulfilling their duties as party people with that "typical" vibe.
They usually fulfill their duty by getting hyped at the back of the classroom.
On this day, they were livening up the floor for "Minamin"'s birthday party.

I was always fed up with this unnecessary sense of mission the party people had.
Today, as always, I thought, "Shut up."
I'm really glad that Ado's "that song" hadn't been released to the world yet.
If the timing had been different, I definitely would have become "annoying."
There's even a possibility that I would have been socially finished.
A world line might have been born where that soul repeated the Yamanote Line not just four times, but infinitely, both clockwise and counter-clockwise.

The vector of my annoyance toward the party people had shifted, before I knew it,
toward my own "end."

The jinx crossed my mind, wrapped in the illusion of silence, the opposite of auditory hallucinations.

"If you meet your doppelganger, you will die."

The moment the party people shouted,
"Minamin! Happy Birthday!"
POP!!!!
and set off the crackers, I started running.

Ready, Steady, Go.
A journey to death, so to speak.

My suspicion turned into conviction.

Kana is trying to kill me.
A "murder trick using a doppelganger".

Since when?
Since when did Kana harbor an intent to kill me?
Was it from that time at the training camp when we looked at the sea dyed by the sunset
and she treated a completely unrelated ship like a "Sea Shepherd" vessel?
...Or was it from that time we saw the corpse of a cockroach illuminated by the morning sun together?

While searching for the origin of Kana's murderous intent, I remained calm.
Cafeteria pasta is not suitable for a last supper.
So I bought the usual cod roe pasta (230 yen), not the one from the cafeteria.
The only thing different was that I forgot the extra seaweed.

Perhaps Kana's murderous intent was as extra as the seaweed I missed out on.

With cod roe pasta (no seaweed) in my left hand and coffee in my right,
with my backpack zipper wide open as always,
I charged into the cafeteria, the fortress of the tennis circle.

The cod roe pasta in my left hand is shrinking away from the encroaching scent of soy sauce ramen.

Looking around, I see Kana beckoning with a beaming smile and
Asami with a calm expression.
Asami has likely come to witness my final moments.

Kana: "Yomogi! Over here!"
On the table, two gyoza are pretending to be calm on a plate.
As I sat down, I slurped up a mouthful of cod roe pasta.
The usual taste.
It's just missing some seaweed.

Kana whispered,
"Look, over there..."
It was almost drowned out by the romantic drama of the tennis club, but I could tell from her gaze.

When I followed Kana's gaze...

There is a woman with milk-tea brown hair.

At this point, humans are surprisingly calm, and
I began to make unnecessary deductions about whether what she was slurping was
"miso ramen" or "tonkotsu ramen."

And there is a plate of gyoza on the table over there, too.

It's the first time I've ever stared at someone this intensely.

Finally, she lifts her face from the ramen bowl.

4. Encounter

Perhaps it's because I was staring at her so much.

Our eyes locked.

Time stopped.

The milk-tea brown woman is staring at me with wide eyes.
The woman slurping cod roe pasta with wide eyes.

It's not a double-take or a triple-take.
It's a long-running single-take.

I remain frozen, my mouth covered in cod roe sauce.

Kana: "See? You look exactly alike, don't you?"

My body won't move.

Did I die?

"If you meet your doppelganger, you die."
I see, so that's why my body won't move.

Is the taste of cod roe pasta spreading through my mouth just an illusion?
The sense that remains until the end is 'hearing'—that's a lie.
It's 'taste'.

I notice the gyoza on the plate has disappeared.
'Sight' remains as well.

Asami is moving her mouth, chewing something.
Had she been keeping silent because she was eyeing the gyoza like a hawk? Is that it?

The woman with milk-tea-brown hair is staring wide-eyed, pointing at her own face, then at me, then back at her own face.
She's restless.
That restlessness is slightly irritating, as if I'm looking at myself.

While I'm feeling irritated, she starts walking toward me.
Even though I might die.
'I can't help but try.'
Of all things, are we similar in that regard too?

Just as the Yamanote Line in my brain finished its fourth high-speed loop,
the woman with milk-tea-brown hair
spoke to me, wearing my face.

Milk-tea-brown woman: 'The cod roe pasta is delicious, isn't it?'
Me: 'Oh, do you want some? ...It's already half-eaten. Sorry.'

This is hardly a conversation between doppelgangers.
Surely there's more to it than this.

Ignoring Kana, who seemed most eager to say exactly that, we continued.

Me: 'Was that miso ramen you were eating earlier?'
Milk-tea-brown woman: 'You can tell? The corn was sinking...'

This trivial conversation continued for a while.
Her corn was extra-large.

Unable to stand it any longer, Kana said:

'You two look exactly alike, don't you?'

We nodded with the same expression and at the same time.

5. Facts

In the end, I didn't die.
I just gained one more friend.

Kana started attending class again.
If I had to mention one thing, it's that since that day, Asami has awakened as a gyoza fanatic,
and I've been frequently dragged along on trips to eat gyoza.

It seems all of Kana's passion for doppelgangers
has been replaced by Asami's obsession with gyoza.

I, who was almost killed, and the 'woman with milk-tea-brown hair'—now known as Mahiro—
have become friends who order the sag curry naan set together at the Indian curry restaurant.

Lately, I'm afraid of doppelgangers again.
She doesn't care at all.
In fact, she's living her life calmly, convinced that the eight-year-old me is 'herself'.
She's my daughter.
She looks too much like me.

The day I first met my doppelganger, I did not die.

Now that I am raising a doppelganger, I am not dead.

But humans die eventually.
Whether they meet a doppelganger or not, they die.

While watching my daughter sleep,
I imagine myself passing away before her someday.

Is the one sleeping there really my daughter?

Before I knew it, I was wrapped in the morning light.

Which one of us was sleeping?

Both?

↑
At the university, besides my doppelganger,
there is also a man who admires Liam Gallagher too much.

[Reference Materials]
◽︎Eiga.com
"Detective in the Bar"

◽︎dmenu News
I fell asleep on the train and went way past my destination. If I head back from the next station, will I be charged an 'additional fee'?