HARMONY
PROJECT ITOH
Harmony
© 2008 Project Itoh
Originally published in Japan by Hayakawa Publishing Inc.
English translation © 2010 VIZ Media, LLC
Cover and interior design by Sam Elzway
All rights reserved.
No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the copyright holders.
HAIKASORU
Published by
VIZ Media, LLC
295 Bay Street
San Francisco, CA 94133
www.haikasoru.com
ISBN: 978-1-4215-3954-6
Haikasoru eBook edition, August 2010
CONTENTS
<part:number=01:title=Miss.Selfdestruct/>
<part:number=02:title=A Warm Place/>
<part:number=03:title=Me, I’m Not/>
<part:number=04:title=The Day the World Went Away/>
<part:number=epilogue:title=In This Twilight/>
About the Author
<part:number=01:title=Miss.Selfdestruct/>
<?Emotion-in-Text Markup Language:version=1.2:encoding=EMO-590378?>
<!DOCTYPE etml PUBLIC :-//WENC//DTD ETML 1.2 transitional//EN>
<etmclass="underline" lang=jp>
<etmclass="underline" lang=en>
<body>
01
I have a story to tell.
<declaration:calculation>
<pls: The Story of a Failure>
<pls: The Story of a Defector>
<eqclass="underline" In other words, me.>
</declaration>
02
<theorem:number>
<i: When children become adults, they become data.>
<i: When adults die, they are liquefied.>
</theorem>
No, that’s not quite right. Better to describe it in prohibitions:
<rule:number>
<i: A child’s body should not be reduced to data until it has matured.>
<i: When an adult dies, the body should be disincorporated into liquid.>
</rule>
Children’s bodies are restless, eager. They won’t sit still, not even for a moment. An adult’s body is always moving too— moving steadily toward death—but at a far more deliberate pace.WatchMe doesn’t belong in a restless body. WatchMe doesn’t belong in the body that skips and runs. WatchMe monitors constancy, but a child grows every day. They’re changing all the time. What’s constant about that?
So,
<list:item>
<i: While my tits are still getting bigger…>
<i: While my ass is still getting bigger…>
<i: No WatchMe in me!>
<i: A body with WatchMe is an adult body.>
</list>
For a high school girl like me, growing up was the last thing I wanted to do.
“Let’s show ’em, the both of us,” Miach said one day. Miach Mihie was her full name. I sat behind her in class. While everyone was getting ready to go home, she turned around in her chair and leaned over my desk.
“We’ll make a declaration, together: we’ll never grow up.”
<list:item>
<i: our bodies>
<i: our tits>
<i: our pussies>
<i: our uteruses>
</list>
“These things are ours. That’s what we’ll tell them. We’ll whisper it at the top of our lungs!”
Yeah, me and Miach were the weird kids.
In a world of kind, thoughtful, group-consciousness types, we might not have been entirely on our own, but we sure felt like it.
<declaration>
<i: We won’t become them.>
</declaration>
Part of a whole world practically tripping over itself not to offend others, to be thoughtful of others—even of me.
“Hey, Tuan, you know what?” Miach’s eyes sparkled. Miach knew everything. Of all the delinquents in our class, she had the best grades. Miach never spoke to anyone besides me and Cian—Cian Reikado, our other friend—unless it was absolutely necessary.
I still don’t know what Miach saw in us. I didn’t get very good grades, and while I wasn’t ugly I wasn’t particularly attractive either. The same went for Cian. Sometimes I wondered why she hung out with us at all, but I never asked. Not once.
“A long time ago, there were men who would actually pay to have sex with a couple of innocent bodies like ours. So all these girls who weren’t even poor would sell themselves as fuck toys, and they wouldn’t even feel guilty about it at all. And neither would the morally depraved men who bought them. They’d meet up in hotels and pay them cash.”
“What?” I said, giggling. “You want to sell your body?” The way Miach was talking, she sounded like she would be off for the nearest red-light district right then if she could—that is, had they still existed anymore. There, a little girl could be as depraved as she wanted to be. She could throw away her whole life, destroy her body with loveless sex, diseases, alcohol, recreational drugs, and cigarettes.
Plague, booze, and smokes—loot too good to pass up.
You couldn’t find any of these things in Japan, a nation obsessed with health, or anywhere else under admedistration rule, for that matter. All these vices, things which had gone more or less ignored in the past, had been carved into a list of sins by the all-powerful hand of medicine, and one by one, they had been purged from society.
“If there were still men of that caliber of depravity around today, maybe growing up wouldn’t be as bad as it sounds. But there aren’t.”
She had a point. Had the streets been filled with people secure in their own perversion, then maybe, just maybe, we wouldn’t hate school and pretty much everything else so much. But the world kept getting healthier and more wholesome, more peaceful, more beautiful, and just depressingly good. Have a little selfrespect, you might tell it, but I doubt the world would care.
<declaration:anger>
<“We don’t know what rock bottom is like. And they wouldn’t let us know, even if we tried.”>
</declaration>
Miach’s favorite line.
Miach knew everything. For example:
<list:item>
<i: How to tweak a medcare unit to convert medicules into a chemical weapon capable of killing a city of fifty thousand people.>
<i: How to trick a medcare unit into making small amounts of feel-good endorphins.>
</list>
“Medcare units are these magic boxes,” she told me once. “All you need is a half tank of medicules and you can do just about anything. Want to fill a bathroom with poison gas? Beyond easy.”