1980: It iced over horrendously the day Kozue Kiguchi brought a fourth child and a third daughter into the world. Her husband Hiro wasn't there - he had been at all the other births, but an accident on the freeway and the associated traffic backup meant that despite his desperate attempts he wasn't able to be at the hospital until the event was over and done with. He was still the first person other than the nurses and the mother to hold the baby, bawled openly just like he had all the other times while Kozue smiled tiredly from the hospital bed. They named her Marina, using characters from his mother's name and her grandmother's. Four year old Kazuya pawed excitedly at his new baby sister under thirteen year old Minami's watchful eye, while eight year old Asami amused everyone by being more interested in the balloons.
1986: It was soon a running joke in the family that Marina had been born old. She was an exceptionally quiet baby and never cried, to the point where her concerned mother took her in for some examinations - but there was nothing wrong with her. As a toddler and into childhood she was very reserved and seemed to prefer to play with her toys by herself than accept the company of her siblings. Well-behaved, clean and tidy, Marina only seemed to get fussy when she was fussed over, and had an unnerving habit of silently staring at people as if somehow reading them. So it was a shock when on the day of her sixth birthday, Marina suddenly and without warning passed out cold on the kitchen floor, surrounded by freaked out classmates. When she woke in a hospital bed she was inconsolable for hours, kept insisting someone was going to die - she couldn't produce a name but described him with perfect clarity, an old man in a green sweater and khaki slacks. He was going to knock over his coffee, she insisted, and his grandson was going to be so upset. No one she spoke to could determine who she was talking about, and she never did find out who the man was.
1992: Throughout her childhood, Marina was essentially unremarkable. She was often thought of as much more intelligent than other children her age because she was so obedient and spent so much of her time reading, but her grades put her not far above average. She didn't show a particular aptitude for any one thing and wasn't ambitious - she decided she'd like to be a receptionist when she grew up, and it seemed to fit her mature personality and organized nature so well that nobody questioned it. The one exceptional thing about her was how she puzzled every doctor she ever met - not one of them could explain why she would randomly pass out once every few months in an episode that drained her for days, and then be fine the rest of the time. There just didn't seem to be anything wrong with her. After the first time, she'd decided not to tell people about the visions she had anymore.
1995: Marina was fifteen when she saw the death of somebody she knew for the first time. It was her uncle Ichirou - he'd been sick for a long time, he was nearly 90, it made sense that it was time for him to go. But it still hit her hard. She could feel the visions coming on now, a feeling like getting hit in the back of the head that gave her at least enough warning to sit down before her body gave out beneath her - but she'd been expecting another stranger, like all the others. Old and young, they'd all been strangers, and now she was watching and not watching her uncle. She hadn't even seen him in over a year. When she woke, she was desperate to, begged her sister to take her, couldn't convince any of the others to go. In the end, Asami and Marina were the last ones to see Ichirou alive. It was the strangest thing, though. They hadn't called and yet he'd seemed to know they were coming. Asami said later that she thought his talk of a place nearby where psychics lived was some kind of delusion. Marina couldn't shake the thought that he was telling her to find it.
1999: She didn't. Find the place, that is. Marina went right back to her quiet life with her books and her sweet, boring high school boyfriends and her newfound terror of seeing someone she loved every time the visions came on. Or worse, of not getting a vision and someone she loved dying anyway. But things settled again, and the people she saw had gone right back to being strangers. Sometimes they were children. Those were the worst.
2002: Marina was 22 when she met Yusuke Naka. He was at a family birthday party and at first she thought they might be related, but it turned out he was just there as a friend to provide one of her cousins moral support. They got talking somehow, to this day she doesn't remember how, and he charmed her immediately with his leather jacket and his earrings and the way her parents hated him from the start. It was a break from the norm that she felt she desperately needed and didn't know how to make herself. They were married within the year. Kozue and Hiro tried to be happy for their youngest daughter, but they never really did come around to Yusuke.
2010: The marriage was turbulent, to say the least. Yusuke didn't seem to settle into being a husband at all, going out drinking with his friends every night and - horrifically embarrassing for his in-laws - he skipped around from part-time job to part-time job, never making enough to support his wife as they thought he should. They bickered like children, but somehow always seemed to come back to one another, promising they loved each other and would change. Actually, it was mostly Marina promising to change. It wasn't exactly the ideal setting to bring a child into, but accidental pregnancies will happen, and despite Yusuke's misgivings Marina wouldn't hear of any option but keeping it. She gave birth in June to a robust, healthy baby boy, who against her husband's wishes she named Ichirou after her late uncle.
2013: Later, Marina would say that it should have been clear years before that Yusuke was cheating on her. But it took her arriving home from a day out with Ichirou to find her husband literally in bed with another woman, like something out of a movie, for it to sink in. She didn't know what to do. Just slammed the bedroom door on Yusuke's hurried excuses and bolted. She went to Asami's house, not her parents', because she couldn't face them in the moment. But despite her tears that kept coming and coming, resurfacing every time she thought they had about dried up, and the angry advice of both of her sisters, Marina answered her cellphone the sixteenth time Yusuke called it. They were married, after all. That meant something. They could fix this.
2015: It didn't stay fixed. Not for long, anyway. Marina tried valiantly to hold things together for the sake of their son - a gentle, fragile little creature who cried at everything and became ill at the slightest breeze. But even she couldn't ignore how Yusuke would leave the room to take phonecalls, and how he'd started continually accusing her of cheating despite the fact that she didn't even have any male friends other than her brother and her sisters' husbands. Finally, the straw that broke the camel's back was Hannah. A sweet young thing of barely 20 who came to the door asking for Yusuke while he was out - and then, when asked if his wife could take a message for him, blanched. I'm so sorry, she said. I had no idea he was married. We've been sleeping together for months. Apparently marriage didn't mean to Yusuke what it meant to Marina. After just five years of marriage, she drew up divorce papers, left them on the kitchen table with her half filled out and a note from Hannah scribbled on an envelope telling him it was over with her too. It wasn't the girl's fault, after all. She'd been duped too.
2016: With two children already and a third on the way, there was no room for Marina and Ichirou at Asami's house, and she couldn't imagine imposing on her elderly parents to move back into her childhood home. Not only that, it seemed to represent more of a failure than she could stomach. Kazuya lived in an apartment, so that left Minami. With a thirteen year age gap, they had never been the closest of the siblings, but all the same Marina's sister welcomed her with open arms - as did her husband and... well, she liked to think their daughter did too, but being a month and a half old it was hard to tell. Marina dove into the surprisingly lucrative business of handmade vegan soap and upcycling furniture, desperate for some way to get back on her feet and support herself and her son under her own steam again. And in the meantime, things started to happen. Things randomly falling over were easily put down to the wind, or just things settling as they will. Ichirou getting his hands on things he should never have been able to reach was probably just typical childish ingenuity. But a hovering teddybear is hard to explain away. Marina's heart sank as she finally had to admit the truth. Her son, too, was capable of more than any human should have been - and she didn't know what to do. But there was that place. The town her uncle had told her about all those years ago. Maybe it was real after all? It felt like her only hope. Ichirou's only hope.
2017: Against every law of logic, Marina actually found it. Or what seemed like it. Her uncle had never given her a name, but the town was nearby and had a reputation for housing residents with certain abilities nobody seemed able to explain. Most people put it down to urban legend - and she might have, too, until now. Because if there was a chance, she had to take it. She might have been okay without a community to share her experiences with, but she refused to subject her son to it - especially if his ability was so much harder to hide than her own. Marina and Ichirou moved in to an apartment in River Ridge in February, and are only just really settling in. Marina's soap-making venture, Kigumachiro, operates tidily out of their living space. Ichirou has a place in a school nearby and while neither of them know many people yet, the atmosphere of acceptance toward the heretofore thought impossible is encouraging. Hopefully this will be exactly what little Ichi needs.
Kids' cartoons, snow, yoga, trying to make cute lunchboxes, fun outings that don't cost much, looking at the stars, reading, new kinds of tea, getting up early, dancing in the kitchen, quiet time, Pokemon Go, swimming in natural water, chess and other strategy games, Christmas, almonds, manga, fingerpainting
Yusuke being a dick about visitation (or anything Yusuke does really), pushy mothers, people who chew loudly, cats, humidity, bad hair days, ball games, high heels, trash, social media, roombas
Pink Lady, Seiko Matsuda, Momoe Yamaguchi, David Bowie, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Keiko Fuji, Pet Shop Boys, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Cyndi Lauper, Southern All Stars, The Clash, Cher, Hiroshi Itsuki
Cujo, Watership Down, Harry Potter, Pan Horror, Wagahai wa Neko Dearu, The Hunger Games, The Odyssey, Anna Karenina, The Kite Runner, Little Women, The Rats