Love Comes After Simulation

[The thought first arose in September.]

[Your wife was nearing the end of her life. Desperately, you tried to think of what you could still offer her, how you could bring her some joy and comfort during this final stretch of her journey.]

[The only things left in her heart were thoughts of a child and the snow in Yoshida Town. Traveling posed too much risk, so you considered visiting a welfare home to bring back a girl for her to choose as a daughter. At the end of September, she initially refused your tentative suggestion, only to face her first close brush with death soon after.]

[At the start of October, she seemed in good spirits the day before, but that night she developed a fever, pain, and moments when her heartbeat and breathing stopped. After a night of emergency rescue efforts, she lay weakly on the hospital bed.]

[Her body had suffered a great blow. She spent most of her days in deep sleep, occasionally opening her eyes slightly, her gaze fixed on some void. No matter what you said beside her, there was no response. The doctor told you her consciousness had yet to return.]

[She began to murmur in her sleep on the second night after the rescue.]

[She had been transferred to a special intensive care unit, with equipment and nurses constantly monitoring her condition. When you arrived in the morning, a nurse told you that she had spoken during the night.]

[The communication device used to monitor sudden changes had faithfully recorded her murmurs. The voice was faint, indistinct, and dry. As soon as she made a sound, the nurse beside her, delighted, called out to her. The nurse’s well-intentioned actions caused you some trouble—their voice had drowned out your wife’s murmurs.]

[You couldn’t determine exactly what she said, but you sensed that her tone was calm. It was neither a painful groan nor the ramblings of resentment or anger.]

[You entered the room, held her hand, and asked about the meaning of her words. You shared the joy you felt upon hearing her voice. Your wife lay silently beneath the white bedding, unresponsive, without moving her lips, showing no expression, not even a flutter of her eyelashes.]

[You thought of the fairy tale about the sleeping princess. The image of a candied apple appeared in your mind again—this time, it no longer symbolized beauty and temptation but rather the malice and poison of fate.]

[No matter how many times you kissed her cool lips, your wife could not spit out that cursed apple to regain her health and vitality.]

[That night, you stayed in the dimly lit hospital room by your wife’s side.]

[In the stillness of the night, only the faint hum of medical equipment could be heard. You leaned against the edge of the bed, lowering your head, trying to find traces of your wife’s voice in this silence. Sleep-deprived for days, exhaustion quickly eroded your spirit, leaving you weary.]

[When you heard that voice, you thought it was a figment of your dreams. You had heard that familiar voice countless times in your sleep. Fortunately, the soft hum of the nearby equipment reminded you—it was not a dream.]

[You turned your head to listen closely to the words your wife spoke.]

[“Are you tired?”]

[You caught the words clearly. Your heart skipped a beat as you thought your wife had woken up and was expressing concern for you. You looked at her face. Under the faint glow of the nightlight, you saw her tightly shut eyes. She hadn’t woken up—it was her murmur.]

[You looked again at her lips, and it seemed as if there was a smile faintly curling at the corners.]

[What could have prompted her to say those words, to smile like that? What was she dreaming of?]

[You began to guess.]

[In the two days that followed, your wife murmured four more sentences. You heard three of them yourself, and the fourth you learned from a recording. These sentences were all fragments of ordinary conversations: “You’ll fall down”; “The candy shell is so hard”; “I won’t come back again”; “So solemn.”]

[Each sentence was gentle, with a faint trace of tenderness.]

[Adding the previous sentence, there were five complete phrases in total. You cross-checked and pieced them together, understanding their meanings, their context, and the dreamscape in which your wife was speaking.]

[“Are you tired?” was something your wife often asked you before you were married, as you carried her to the top of Mount Azuki. “You’ll fall down” was from the swings at the park, where you’d always play tricks, making the swing sway precariously so she’d cling tightly to you. “The candy shell is so hard” referred to the town festival, where she loved the sweet-and-sour candied apples, though the hardened sugar coating always took great effort for her to bite into. “I won’t come back again” was her cheerful farewell to the hospital building when she was discharged. “So solemn” was her observation during your wedding ceremony at the serene Motoi-hime Shrine.]

[From these words, you deduced the first word of the faint recording—’hydrangea.’ Your wife had been speaking of hydrangeas.]

[Six voices, six phrases, six treasured memories you shared with her. You wondered, in her endless dreams, had your sleeping wife returned to your shared past? To those moments of beauty and joy?]

[This realization brought you comfort and joy. Her slumber was not wrapped in impenetrable darkness but illuminated by the vibrant bubbles of dreams, shimmering with every color.] ř

[On the third day, she spoke her final murmur—’The snow is so beautiful.’]

[You shuddered. What snow was she speaking of? The snow she once tasted off the shrubs, or the snow she had longed for since childhood, the snow of Yoshida Town that she had always missed?]

[By late October, your wife’s condition had slightly improved. She regained consciousness for a few precious minutes each day, but every word, every movement, every glance drained her strength and left her exhausted.]

[The doctor told you this was likely the final flicker of her life’s flame.]

[Her last murmur echoed in your mind, leaving you restless and determined.]

[You invited her to go see the snow in Yoshida Town. She softly agreed, with a faint smile.]Nôv(el)B\\jnn

[For your wife, whose life was reduced to its final embers, any external stimulation was a lurking trap for death. The slightest mishap could see Death’s scythe pierce her fragile chest. You hired a doctor from Chigusa University Hospital and meticulously prepared for the journey.]

[You first took a medically modified plane to Hokkaido, then traveled by a similarly adapted bus to the outskirts of Yoshida Town, where you stayed at a hospital you had purchased.]

[Death, though it shadowed your wife during the journey, did not claim her. But time, an omnipresent predator, continued to gnaw at her body, and you prayed for the first snow of the season to arrive early.]

[In early November, the sun shone brightly, and dry winds swept through the lush, green mountains.]

[By mid-November, rain came, drenching the hills and making the forest even more verdant. After the rain, the sun blazed even more brilliantly.]

[Your wife’s moments of wakefulness grew fewer. Her consciousness became increasingly blurred, and when she opened her eyes, they seemed clouded, as if veiled by mist.]

[On the fourth Saturday of November, the snow finally began to fall.]

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