Masamune Okazaki

allen was because I’d gone into capsaicin shock (hey, that has a nice ring to it) and had been flooded with memories of my past life. I didn’t feel like diving into that with him, though. I’d only been alive for seven years, but even I knew better than to think that concepts like “past lives” and “reincarnation” had any place in the worldview here.

And yet, here I was, with all these memories of the old me. What’s more, I was able to understand the concepts of a “past life” and “reincarnation” as if they were completely self-evident. That was precisely why I knew that there must’ve been people out there who believed in reincarnation, and why I’d come to think that it was very plausible that I myself might’ve experienced it.

But in the world I was currently in, the dead returned to the earth, and

t talking about it here was even more complicated. If you wanted to talk about such abstract concepts—like reincarnated souls and past-life memories—then you’d have to start by explaining what they were and why they mattered. After all, the people here had no exposure to them. They didn’t even exist in fairytales. What’s more, even if I were to do my best to explain it all, it seemed unlikely that I’d get the response I was looking for.

It didn’t help that my previous memories were so fuzzy and fragmented. Even though I’d managed to recall my perspective on life and death, I didn’t feel confident that I could explain it in any logical way. I could imagine explaining things like video games and electricity, and it seemed doable to describe what it was like to live in the world in which they ex