CGBTS Chapter 4

Chapter 4 – Ten Years

Novel Title: あの夏から戻れない (Can’t Go Back to That Summer)

Author：宮緒葵 (Miyao Aoi)

Illustrator：笠井あゆみ (Kasai Ayumi)

Translator: K (@kin0monogatari)

Protagonists: 櫛原夏生 (Kushihara Natsuo -MC) & 四辻柊 (Yotsutsuji Shuu -ML)

*Please read at knoxt.space, the original site of translation. TQ*

֍֍֍

Natsuo cautiously opened the eyes he had squeezed tightly shut, and nearly collapsed. ……Shuu was gone. Even though he had been right beside him just moments ago.

“Shuu? ……Shuu!?”

He shouted loudly several times, but no answer came back. Just as he summoned his courage and was about to take a step forward, a powerful gust of wind roared through, blowing everything away. The thick mist, the strangely hushed air, and the darkness that had been coiling there.

Meeeeen, meeeen, meeeen……

Listening to the returning chorus of cicadas in the distance, Natsuo stood there in a daze. What spread out before his eyes was not darkness, but a lake filled to the brim with blue water.

A large ripple spreading across the clear surface of the water slowly dissolved into it.

After that, Natsuo ran down the mountain, falling several times along the way, and told Shigehiko and his parents at the cottage that Shuu had disappeared. The adults notified the police, and a large-scale search operation was launched, involving even the local volunteer fire brigade and the Self-Defense Forces.

Taking into consideration the possibility that Shuu had been abducted, the police apparently conducted a thorough investigation of the people staying at the campground, as well as vehicles that had been passing through the area around Mount Hinayama at the time.

Based on Natsuo’s insistence that Shuu might have fallen into the lake, several divers apparently searched underwater. But in the end, they failed to find Shuu, and as time passed, the number of people involved in the search gradually decreased…… After two weeks had passed since his disappearance, the search by the public authorities was brought to an end.

“I told you so many times that you mustn’t go into the mountains by yourselves!”

For the first time in his life, Natsuo was struck by his parents and severely scolded, but Shigehiko did not blame him. When Natsuo told him that Shuu had wanted to go to the otherworld, Shigehiko lowered his eyes sadly and told him the truth: he and Jennifer had been planning to divorce after returning from this trip.

Jennifer had been emotionally unstable to begin with, but apparently, she had finally reached her limit with her frequently absent husband and brought up divorce about a month earlier. Shigehiko, too, had grown tired of his wife’s stubborn refusal to adapt to life in Japan, and they reached an agreement without difficulty.

However, Shuu had apparently been vehemently opposed to his parents’ divorce.

The reason was that Jennifer, who was going to have custody of Shuu, planned to return to America with him after the divorce. Shuu had desperately pleaded with Shigehiko, saying that he wanted to stay in Japan and did not want to be separated from Natsuo.

Shigehiko himself wanted to grant his son’s wish, but raising a child was impossible for someone like him who could barely even stay at home. Even if he fought for custody, it was obvious that he would lose. Shuu’s wish was not granted. This family trip had been planned as a way to at least give him some final happy memories.

After hearing the circumstances, Natsuo’s parents willingly cooperated with Shigehiko as well. They had probably kept the divorce from Natsuo because they wanted his final trip with Shuu to end happily. No one could have imagined that something like this would happen to Shuu.

―――I want things to stay like this forever. I want to stay like this, forever and ever, together with Natsuo. For that, I wouldn’t even mind going to the otherworld.

The reason Shuu had been acting strangely the entire time, and the reason he had said those things, was because he knew that once the trip was over, he would be separated from Natsuo. And yet Natsuo had not taken him seriously. In the end, he had pulled his hand away.

……It’s my fault……!

If only Natsuo had not let go of his hand that day, surely Shuu would never have gone missing. The adults――even Shigehiko, who had told him about the otherworld――had assured him that “such a thing is impossible,” but Shuu must have been taken away into the otherworld that spread beyond that mist. ……Because it was none other than Shuu himself who had wanted it.

Less than six months after Shuu went missing, Jennifer divorced Shigehiko and returned to America. For a time, thoughtless slander and abuse circulated, suggesting that his parents might have been involved in his disappearance. Apparently, the situation became unbearable for her.

For two or three years, Shigehiko recruited volunteers and regularly searched Mount Hinayama, but the searches stopped after he remarried a woman who had been his assistant.

When Natsuo insisted that he would search on his own if necessary, his parents absolutely refused to allow it. It was unthinkable to let a child search through the mountains alone. Natsuo already felt responsible for what had happened to Shuu. When his parents pointed out that going into the mountain in such a state would only result in another person going missing, a child still under his parents’ protection had no way to argue back.

It has been ten years since Shuu’s disappearance.

Natsuo, who had once been an elementary school student, had become a university student. But Shuu was still missing. No one believed that Shuu was still alive anymore.

Shigehiko had sold the house in the neighborhood and moved away with his new family, while Natsuo heard from his mother that Jennifer had apparently remarried in America as well. Though they never said it aloud, Natsuo’s parents and little sister must have believed that Shuu had died somewhere.

But Natsuo simply could not give up.

Shuu was definitely alive. ……In the otherworld beyond the mist. He could not help but believe that. If Shuu had died somewhere, Natsuo was certain he would have known.

What turned his baseless confidence into certainty was an incident reported in the news soon after his first summer vacation as a university student began. A body had surfaced in that same lake on Mount Hinayama where Natsuo had lost sight of Shuu.

When it was discovered that the body belonged to a man who had disappeared on Mount Hinayama thirteen years earlier――three years before Shuu vanished――the media erupted into a frenzy. According to the results of the autopsy, the man had died of heart failure, and there were no signs of foul play. Yet despite a thorough investigation, the police could not determine where or how the man had lived during those thirteen years. In this day and age, with surveillance cameras installed everywhere throughout the city, living without leaving behind a single trace was practically impossible.

֍֍֍

Next update: 2026.10.05

֍֍֍

Would appreciate some donation. Thanks!