Orpheus and Eurydice

Rice shortages this year and a big price hike in rice plus the extremely hot weather inspired me to write a story set in 2040 when food might not be so easily available.

Odayaka-kun, as everyone on the team calls him, 

is nearing 40, and he’s both too old and too senior 

to be called “kun”. But there’s just something 

youthful, languid and carefree about him. He’s 

lanky, with a casual friendliness like a teenager. 

His real name is Oda, but he is preternaturally calm,

 even when the broken concrete is raining down hard. 

One day an unsecured and unwieldy segment of 

staircase they were crushing in Katata fell two 

stories onto the ground where he happened to be 

standing, lightly grazing his left shoulder. 

He had merely shrugged and stepped aside, and 

after that a young guy, Higashi-san, on the 

crusher team had started calling him Odayaka-kun, 

which roughly means Young Mr. Calm. And the name 

had stuck.

Odayaka-kun has a secret he doesn’t talk about: he surreptitiously collects books in the 
manshons they dispose of. 
Born back in the early 2000s, he still remembers proper elementary schools and the comforting regimens there: serving lunch, cleaning the floor, writing kanji, solving math problems. An avid reader, school libraries were always his favorite places. He’d been much impressed with a manga version of the Greek myths. The Greek gods looked like the mortals they interacted with in the stories, only the gods were more beautiful, haughtier and more fortunate. The people were always pathetic in some way, even when they tried hard not to be.
And then, surprisingly, earlier on the same day they were destroying that same manshon in Katata where the staircase had almost cut his life short, he had found another manga version of the Greek myths. He’d been alone in Suite 304. Of course, all the mansons were filled with junk, dishes, beds, electronics, shoes. When the Great Food Panic of the early 2030s had appeared, food shortages and lack of diesel and gasoline had emptied grocery stores and people had run away from their suburban homes, trying to get to public forests and abandoned houses in remote areas to hunt and grow food.
Those who could had started growing food back in the mid-2020s when rice shortages and rumors about the decline of oil production had swirled, but most people had clung to their old lives simply out of the fact that there was nothing else for them to do. Oda, having graduated from a good university, had held out hope too for better days to bring the end of the endless heatwaves and shrinking rice harvests. Eventually, though he had fled from his cheap apartment near Fushimi Inari in Kyoto, where he’d worked in a moribund convenience store, on foot out to Otsu in Shiga, knowing it was a place blessed with rice fields. Well it was, but hundreds of starving Kyotoites had had the same idea, everyone camping on the shores of Biwako or squatting in empty or abandoned houses. Oda was lucky because he had a freakishly slow metabolism, needing less food than the others. As he was a strong man in his 30s, he started fishing in the lake with a group of guys. There was so little food around that everyone over 60 died quickly unless they were really strong. The most capable and enterprising families often made the choice to travel on, by foot, because the trains were mostly not running any longer, to more rural and fertile and less boiling hot areas on the west coast up near Fukui, Ishikawa, Toyama or down to Shimane and Tottori.
Oda had stayed in Shiga, and after ten years, the little population in the local coastal area they were in was small but surprisingly stable. Hunger was rampant though and they all wanted more rice fields, and it was maddening to see the crumbling gigantic abandoned manshons taking up space where the residents desperately wanted food to grow.
A planning committee had decided that the closest manshons would have to come down by hand, no matter how slowly the job was done. Of course there was no more gasoline, diesel, cars, trucks or things like that. The Food Panic had rendered currencies worthless and made all international commerce a thing of the past. The committee formed the Crusher Brigade and procedures for destroying concrete buildings by hand were studied and then they started recruiting by word of mouth.
Younger men and a few strong women volunteered for the Crusher Brigade; they would use crowbars and hammers to knock the concrete manshons into bits and throw the concrete off the roof. The food rations of the team would be reckoned into the committee’s budget. Oda had volunteered for the Crusher Brigade right away. He knew he would be able to find books left in the suites.
There was that exciting day he found the manga of the Greek myths, not the same edition as the one in his long-ago elementary school, but the gods and goddesses were still as beautiful, as fortunate and as haughty as he had remembered. He’d sat down on an enormous and dusty stuffed white polyester velour sofa near a window in the suite, oblivious to the whack-thud-whack-thud sounds of the crushers in other suites, and randomly opened to “Orpheus and Eurydice”. His eyes filled with tears of pathos when he got to the end; if only Orpheus had been a little less of a yowamushi, a weakling. Suddenly someone was knocking on the door of his suite: “Hey are you ok in there? You’re so quiet!” It’s Kuwata-san, a wiry middle-aged woman who is not strong enough to crush concrete but she brings drinking water around, supervises the crew, and makes notes about what items are left in the manshons in case something might be useful for the community.
“Daijoubu!” Oda sings out extra brightly so she won’t come in. Throwing the book of myths into his bag, he gets up and starts knocking the kitchen counters to bits with the crowbar, first checking to see if any cutlery has been left behind. He’s supposed to put any cutlery or other metal items in his bag and hand it over later to the committee. But all the cutlery is gone. Plastic dishes and containers fill the cupboards. Useless. Later on the Fuel Brigade will come by and remove them so they can be burned for cooking fuel. Plastic makes horribly stinky and disgusting fuel, but the asphalt, which they have torn from the roads to burn in chunks, is almost all gone.
After a while the whole kitchen is laying in pieces, so he decides to go and knock out some walls down near what he assumes is the bathroom. He spies a large and striking framed poster of some flowers in an expansive sunny meadow on the opposite wall at the end of the hall and he makes his way toward it with trepidation, hoping it can be removed so he won’t be forced to bash it to smithereens. His famous calmness has left him, and he thinks: if only Kuwata-san and the others won’t ever know what he knows, or sees what he has seen, his tears, his sympathy, his secret and almost embarrassing passion for art. But there is no reason to be nervous. He has done nothing wrong, he’s just read a story, looked at a poster. So why on earth is Odayaka-kun trembling a little as he walks, like Orpheus stepping towards the sunlit exit of the underworld?