2 - I've Been Reincarnated in Another World
This is what you'd call memories from my previous life.
According to recent research, a newborn baby's vision is apparently blurry and hard to see with. Something about not yet being able to focus, and other explanations like that, but I don't remember the details precisely. Still, when you're actually born as a baby with a conscious ego capable of thought, the world was filled with anxiety. Right after being born, the brightness dazzled my eyes, but once my eyes adjusted, the room I was laid in was dim. The man and woman I understood to be my parents were there, but I couldn't see their faces clearly. I couldn't tell from their expressions whether they were angry or smiling, so I was just anxious and scared.
For a baby, crying is practically the job. Or rather, it's the only thing you can do.
Was my crying stressing out my father? Was my mother being driven into a corner?
Having just enough intelligence made these things a source of anxiety. Things like death from abuse due to childcare neurosis. I'd rather pass on that, having just barely been reborn. I went through a painful experience and was born even though I never asked for it. I don't want to be unreasonably killed by the people who went and gave birth to me on their own.
...There was a time when I thought things like that, you know.
My vision remained unclear as ever. But the worries I had for the first few days after birth turned out to be completely unfounded.
...If anything, not crying made them worry so much they kept poking my cheeks. What kind of doting idiot parents are these?
Because of my memories from my previous life, I was oddly considerate. I tried to be a good child. Not crying, not fussing, being obedient. So as not to be a burden on my parents in this life. But faced with a baby who required so little care and was too quiet, my parents grew worried instead. They thought I might be too weak to even have the energy to cry.
Out of that worry, my parents fussed over the baby (me) whenever they had free time. At first I endured it, but when they kept poking my cheeks over and over, even my patience finally reached its limit. I was worried about my parents developing childcare neurosis, but I couldn't stand having my cheeks poked every single day. For the sake of my own peaceful sleep and my parents' peace of mind, I made up my mind and wailed at full volume without holding back. I thought they'd make a displeased face at having a high-maintenance baby, but faced with a baby crying vigorously, my father jumped for joy.
...At that moment, I understood. In this life, causing my parents a bit of trouble makes them happier.
That said, I have the self-awareness of having lived past adulthood in my previous life. Acting like a baby came with a certain amount of embarrassment.
...Endure it. I'm a baby. Wailing is my job. If I don't cry, my parents will worry.
I held back on crying at night, but during the day I did my baby duties without restraint. As a bonus, even. And passed my days peacefully. As I began to get used to baby life, something started to bother me.
...I can barely understand what my parents are saying, though...?
Was this because I was a baby? The words my parents exchanged above my head, the calls they made to me many times a day. I couldn't make any of it out properly. The one word I barely managed to catch was "Tina," a really short word. Since it came up most often when they spoke to me, it might be my name in this life.
...That's clearly not a Japanese name, is it? A kirakira name? (T/N kirakira neemu, literally "sparkling names," a Japanese trend of giving children unusual or difficult-to-read names) Is it a kirakira name?
If not, maybe I was born in a foreign country. Since I was Japanese in my previous life, I don't feel like I'd adjust quickly if it's a country too far away. Even though I'm a baby who can stay shut in at home, I was already terribly anxious about my future "park debut."
As more days passed and my blurry vision gradually grew clearer, I understood the real reason I couldn't make out my parents' words.
...Isekai reincarnation, it's here!?
Or maybe I washed up on a deserted island and was born to a couple who became Adam and Eve. In my now-clear vision, there were no signs of civilization like lighting fixtures. The only light was the sunlight coming through the window. No wonder the room was always dim. I, a baby, was laid to sleep in a crude room that seemed to have no connection to things like windows designed for letting in light or earthquake-resistant construction. No matter how you look at it, this is not a house in modern Japan.
...So the reason I couldn't understand my parents' words was because the language was different. That makes sense.
It's not just the language. The culture is probably different too. Today, like every day, morning comes, and I look up at my parents as they peer into my face and rain kisses upon my cheeks, letting out a deep sigh internally. I don't feel like I'll manage to get by in this world.
Once my neck was stable enough to hold my head up, my father frequently wanted to hold me. From the words I somehow managed to catch, my father's name was Saro. His clothes were the plain Villager A look, like a mob character out of a Western fantasy story, but his hair was a bright gold with a luxurious wavy curl to it. His eyes were purple, and his build was slender. He had a somewhat worn-out look from life, but his features were well-proportioned.
...Honestly, his appearance would be more convincing if they told me he's actually the illegitimate child of a noble.
Compared to my biological father, who was too gorgeous to be considered Villager A, my mother was truly ordinary. My mother's name was Chloe. She had short, fluffy red hair. Her eyes were brown, and she was on the short side. Her face was more cute than beautiful, and compared to my father, she was a villager through and through.
...Though, her way of speaking feels really refined. Compared to the villagers who occasionally come to see the baby's face, the clarity is totally different.
Maybe it's about the difference between standard speech and a dialect. My parents' words and the villagers' words are slightly different.
...City-raised youngsters who eloped and came to the countryside. Something like that?
Since a baby can do nothing but sleep or eat, I take the information I've gathered and expand it a hundredfold, two hundredfold, imagining.
Or rather, I fantasize. There's nothing else I can do.
As an adult-minded person who's become a baby unable to do anything satisfactorily on her own, if I don't keep myself occupied with something, the mountain of idle time might just kill me. I do wonder about using my parents in this life as material for my fantasies, but I don't know any other humans I could bring into them right now. Such is life in a baby's narrow world. I hope they'll forgive me.
By the time I could pull myself up to stand, I'd become able to understand my parents' words fairly well. I tried calling out "Father, Mother" once, but the words that came out of my mouth were "papu, mau." Something even before baby talk. A baby's vocal cords apparently won't speak the way your head understands. It was a first word full of frustration for me, but my parents made a huge fuss and were overjoyed, so I'll call it good.
By the time I was toddling around, I'd become able to speak a bit better, but it was truly at the level of "a bit better." This is probably a drawback of having memories of a previous life lived as a Japanese person. No matter what, my head converts my parents' words. Picked up by ear. Into Japanese once, and that time lag makes it take time before I can respond. You hear English, construct sentences in your head, rearrange the grammar and convert it to Japanese, then understand the meaning. The reply to the understood words floats up in Japanese, you arrange the grammar and convert it to English, then convey it in English. The image is something like that.
On top of that, there's also the embarrassment peculiar to Japanese people who are bad at pronunciation. As a result, the conversational method available to me became broken talk. If I just offer up key points as individual words, even if my pronunciation is a bit off, the other person will think about it and guess what I'm trying to convey. It's a truly other-people-reliant method of conversation.
...Isekai reincarnation isn't all good things! My Japan-born memories are dragging me down!?
For a Japanese person who fears failure to an extreme degree, isekai reincarnation while retaining knowledge from a previous life was a bit too high in difficulty. No convenient feature like auto-translation exists. If it did, I'd want to hear an explanation that a hundred out of a hundred people would accept. What kind of mechanism it's made with, where it is, who made it, why the protagonist can use it, and so on. At any rate, in the situation I'm currently placed in, no such convenient thing existed.
It was broken talk, but communication was possible. I suppose the best approach is to learn the language while chatting with my parents first.
Is my pronunciation okay? Am I misunderstanding the meanings? Is the grammar correct for the words I want to convey?
Once I started thinking about such things, there was no end to it. As a result, I grew into a quiet toddler. My parents worry that my speech is delayed, but as expected, after spending years in a world of nothing but a different language, I became able to understand what I heard.
Once I could move around somewhat freely and became able to help around the house, the first thing I started was cleaning.
...Mother is someone who cleans diligently too, but from the perspective of a meticulous Japanese person, it's rough and leaves a lot undone, which bothers me.
It's not just cleaning the rooms. The overall level of hygiene concerns me. When did they last wash their hands? The household water comes from a well, but is it safe to drink? Are there parasites, is that okay? More than that, I want to take a bath, I want to wash my hair, I want to wear clean clothes washed every day, and so on. Once one thing started bothering me, everything started bothering me.
...Mother says "firewood is too precious," but I'll gather what I use myself, so don't complain.
I had no absolute confidence in the effectiveness. But doing something gives me a little more peace of mind than doing nothing. For daily hand-washing and drinking water, I tried boiling it once for sterilization. This way, even if there are scary parasites in the well water, they'll probably be killed. Probably. I remember a TV program from long ago that covered "an incident where a child swimming and playing in a lake died after a parasite entered their body." Since we can't verify the safety of the well water using machines and chemicals like in modern Japan, I want to take whatever self-defense measures I can think of and carry out.
When I started going outside the house to gather firewood and draw water, my world expanded just a little. Speaking was still difficult, but I could understand what I heard, so I could also comprehend conversations between villagers. I know that the ladies gossip at the well about how the village chief, old man Jacob, is greedy and stingy, and how the village chief's house is so fine thanks to the sacrifice of the Daltowa couple.
...The village chief's house. That's considered fine? I think it's not much different from ours.
Looking at it with the sensibilities of a modern Japanese person, even the village chief's house, which the villagers envy as being fine, is just a little bigger and not much different from our own poor house in this life. When I listened closely to the conversations between the ladies, it seemed the reason the village chief's house became fine was also connected to the reason the Daltowa couple lost their child.
...The Daltowa couple. That's Mister Oban and Aunt Ulary?
I guessed the central figures of the rumors from the well-gossip conversations and tilted my head. We only had the kind of relationship where we exchanged greetings now and then, but they were a gentle and pleasant couple. My own impression was "a pleasant couple," but the Daltowa couple were somewhat isolated within the village. They weren't invited to gatherings and such, and while they exchanged greetings with the villagers, I'd never seen them chatting amiably. To put what I'd sensed bluntly, I had the feeling they were being passively excluded. The so-called ostracism. (T/N mura hachibu, a traditional form of village-wide ostracism and shunning)
The cause of it, it seemed, was the village chief (this guy). About twenty years ago, all the crops were ruined by disease, and the village chief sold a village child and used the money to buy food from elsewhere, allowing the villagers to survive the crisis. At that time, with the money that was left over, the village chief rebuilt his own house, and apparently gave no compensation whatsoever to the couple who lost their child. At first, the villagers were concerned about the couple. But there was no way the hearts of a couple who'd lost their child would heal so easily. Before long, as if to say "once it's past the throat, one forgets the heat," (T/N a Japanese proverb equivalent to "once the danger is past, God is forgotten") the villagers forgot they'd survived by sacrificing the couple's child, began to find the perpetually grieving couple bothersome, and started to shun them. Or so the story went.
...If it had been sold by the couple's own will, that'd be one thing, but the village chief selling someone else's child and using the leftover money to build his own house. That's messed up. What the hell.
The will of the child who was sold also bothers me, but more than that, I was shocked by the sheer shamelessness of the village chief and the villagers.
...As I thought, there's something about that village chief, isn't there?
I recalled the face of the village chief, whom I'd occasionally run into since I started going out to gather firewood, and furrowed my brow. He was a disliked village chief, but for some reason he was kind to me. The moment he saw my face, he'd put on a worried expression and say "you're so thin," then "are you eating properly?", "if you become my household's child, I'll give you sweets," "first, come over to play." There were various patterns, but all of them boiled down to the invitation of "become my household's child." For now, it was all too suspicious and I'd refused every invitation, but it seems that was the right call. If I'd carelessly gone into the village chief's house, it feels like a slave trader would have been waiting.
...Besides, there's no way I'd want to go play at the village chief's house where Marcel is.
I recalled the face of the village chief's grandson, who comes to bully me the moment he sees me, and pushed that face out of my thoughts. Marcel apparently likes me, it seems. When he sees me, he follows me around, pulls my hair, and yanks my arm with all his strength. They say boys bully the girls they like the most, but from the perspective of the one being bullied, it's nothing but a nuisance. In the first place, why bully someone you like? Do they really not realize that being bullied would never make the victim like the bully back? Lately, even dealing with him has become tiresome, and I deliberately avoid Marcel in my movements. Once my body gets a bit bigger, it might not be bad to whack him with all my might with a piece of firewood and make him never even think about coming near me again.
I gathered as much firewood as I could hold in both hands and entered the house through the back door by the kitchen. From the door leading to the living room, I heard voices arguing. A rare occurrence.
...A marital fight? That's unusual.
My parents in this life are basically lovey-dovey. They don't hold back just because their daughter is in front of them. They're constantly lovey-dovey, all over each other.
...No. It's the village chief. He finally came all the way to our house.
Among the voices I could hear from the living room, a slightly hoarse old man's voice was mixed in. I pressed my ear to the door and eavesdropped on the conversation in the living room. To roughly summarize the content, it was "hand over the child." Of course, the words were a bit more decorated. The main thrust was pushing an unwanted sense of obligation. "She's so thin, it's pitiful," "surely you're not even giving her adequate meals."
My parents' counterargument was something I was hearing for the first time.
Namely, the reason our household's savings were so meager was apparently because of harassment by the village chief. The field was small, and when it was made, the preparation was sloppy, leaving many obstacles like stones and tree roots. Our turn for using the irrigation channel came last every year, so the crops in our field sprouted late and harvest came before they could grow sufficiently. My father's request to at least adjust the order of using the irrigation channel each year by drawing lots or something was dismissed by the village chief as "natural treatment for newcomers to the village."
...That shitty old man. While saying "you're poor and pitiful so hand over your child," he was deliberately causing that poverty himself.
No matter how you look at it, this is a premeditated crime.
...Now then, what shall I do about this?
I pondered a method of revenge that would leave no evidence and wouldn't weigh on my conscience. The ideal would be for the village chief to pass away, but I certainly don't want to become a murderer. If I were to wish for anything, it'd be death by natural causes.
...Though they do say "the hated child prospers." (T/N a Japanese proverb meaning those who are disliked tend to thrive and live long) Those types don't die easily.
How could I make him stop harassing my parents? While I was thinking of methods that were as peaceful as I could come up with and wouldn't require worrying about evidence, my parents apparently succeeded in driving the village chief out. The village chief left, cursing at my parents, who to the very end did not choose the option of handing over their daughter.
...It's good that the village chief stopped being a nuisance, but.
Ever since they drove the village chief away, our household was blatantly ostracized. The villagers, who normally only whisper complaints behind the back of the tyrannical and stingy village chief, still apparently defer to him when it counts. The villagers would say they were short-handed for field work and make my parents help with their fields, but wouldn't help with our field, which fell behind in work as a result. A truly splendid display of trash behavior. When I asked my parents why they helped with the villagers' fields even when treated like that, they gave me an answer softened for a young child, something to the effect that we're newcomers to the village so it can't be helped, and right now we should be earning goodwill.
...Really, what shall I do about this?
Just taking it lying down isn't satisfying. Isn't there some way to drive out the village chief? That's what I think, but in the body of an infant who can't freely control words and lacks the strength to carry things properly, what I can do is limited.
...Well, there were good things that came from being ostracized too.
The Daltowa couple, with whom we'd previously done no more than exchange greetings when we met. Recently, our household has been interacting with that couple. You could call us fellow ostracism members, I suppose. Households disliked by the village chief, getting along with each other. Now we help each other with our fields, and since the couple, who unexpectedly have some influence in the village, arrange the irrigation channel for us, our field's growth has improved dramatically.
...Thanks to that, I've grown a bit taller too.
Maybe because the field's harvest increased a little and the amount we could eat increased, I grew a bit taller. Until now I'd looked younger than my age, but now I'm just a little on the small side.
"Tina-chan, eat more."
So saying, Aunt Ulary puts steamed potatoes on my plate.
"I'll give you some of my eggs too."
As if competing with Aunt Ulary, her husband, Mister Oban, put a slice of fried egg on my plate. I stared at the plate piled high with steamed potatoes and fried egg and let out a sigh internally.
...I get that they're doting on me, but I'll turn into a pig.
I have, on occasion, properly told them that I can't fit this much in my stomach. But they just laughed it off, saying children shouldn't hold back. At first I tried my best to eat everything I was served, but if I emptied my plate, they'd ask "was it not enough?" and add more. It feels like it goes against etiquette, but I learned that when eating with the Daltowa couple, it's necessary to leave a little on the plate.
Lately, wary that I might be kidnapped by villagers including the village chief if I walked through the village alone, my parents never left their daughter by herself. When I was left at home alone, I was left in the care of the Daltowa couple. When that happens, the couple dotes on me like I'm their own child, but I can't help feeling it goes a bit too far.
...Maybe I'm a substitute for the child they sold?
I sometimes think that, but of course I've never pointed it out.
"Be careful of the village chief."
After the meal, as I was half-asleep and dozing from being full, I heard the voices of the Daltowa couple and my parents, who had apparently come to pick me up, above my head.
"That time was the same. One day, the village chief called in a slave trader from outside on his own, and they were taken away."
...Isn't that pretty much impossible to prevent?
Half-asleep, I still retorted internally. It's difficult to keep watch over the village chief's actions at all times. I had the feeling there was no way to prevent him from arbitrarily calling in a slave trader.
...But still, that's no reason to just obediently let yourself be sold, right?
Why was the Daltowa couple's child sold by the village chief's will?
"The situation had become one where selling a child was the only way for all the villagers to survive. A slave trader had even been arranged, and surrounded by all the villagers, we weren't allowed to say we didn't want to let go of our own child...!"
...In other words, they were threatened by the circumstances.
They didn't want to let go of their own child, but with so many villagers' lives at stake, they couldn't say they refused while living in the community of the village. He's a village chief who pisses me off in many ways, but it seems he did at least do his job as someone who holds the village together.
...The reason I'm being targeted. Is it because I'm the daughter of newcomers?
I understood that despite all the harassment, my parents, who say "we should earn goodwill" and let the villagers use them as they please, were probably being targeted as a reserve for emergencies.
...But if he's really a village chief who protects the villagers' lives, then he should start by selling his own child or grandchild.
She rarely says it out loud, so the protagonist is fairly combative on the inside.
Next chapter, she grows up a bit and turns eight.