The Lying Counselor’s Eloquent Reasoning - Chapter 60
With the help of the eye drops given by Uroma, Ryuichi’s quality of life was greatly restored. Yes, quality of life. It may sound a bit overly exaggerated, but it was the quality of life. He was able to return to the level he had been at before he ran over the cat. His abnormality in his left eye was cured.
The people at his company naturally celebrated the removal of the eye patch from his left eye. It was fortunate for Ryuichi that the period of the eye patch was not prolonged as he had explained to the people around him that it was a simple case of fungus. He was pleased to see his subordinates honestly congratulating him on his recovery, and felt that they adored him as the president.
Although he was a divorced bachelor, he had many friends who congratulated him on the recovery of his left eye in private as well. Ryuichi felt that he was a man who was loved by others, and this made him pleased. During the period when he was wearing the eye patch, he had refused to be photographed for magazine interviews, but in response, he now went around appealing to the people involved to photograph him. He seemed to be fully overjoyed to be free of his haunting problem.
In the meantime, of course, he continued to use the eye drops that Uroma had given him. Once a day, it was that simple. It was unbelievable that this was the only thing that cleared up the problem that even the hospitals could not find the origin of it.
Who exactly is this Uroma guy? How could a mere counselor who is neither a doctor nor a researcher prepare such a medicine? To begin with, the way he spoke and acted was strangely clean and smooth. His answers to my questions were very sharp and his mind seemed to revolve swiftly. Being the president of a company, Ryuichi had to deal with a lot of people, but the way he spoke made him seem like a brilliant lawyer or an elite salesman. He wondered if all counselors were like that. This was the kind of person he would love to have in his sales team… He had the mindset of a businessman all the way down.
Eventually, however, Ryuichi remembered the last thing the man had said to him. That’s right, when he gave him the eye drops, he mentioned the following. That these drops had the side effect of causing him to have slightly strange dreams.
In fact, the words were true. About a week after he started using the eye drops, he experienced a dream. In the dream, he was a junior high school student, riding his bicycle at night, when he encountered a black cat and ran over it.
Upon awakening in his bed, Ryuichi recalled that the content of the dream was something he had actually experienced a long time ago. It had been so long that he had forgotten about it until now.
“I see, I had ran over a black cat before…”
Never in his life did he think he would run over a black cat twice. While feeling rather uncomfortable, he thought back vaguely to that time. The incident had happened on his way home from cram school, as he recalled. After hitting the black cat with the bicycle, he stopped and inspected the area for a moment in shock, but the cat’s body seemed to have been flung into the bushes by the side of the road and was not discovered. Three days later, in the evening, he went there again, but by that time, the black cat’s body was gone. Ryuichi, who was still in junior high school, had no way to confirm whether the black cat was still alive when he hit it with his bicycle, or whether its carcass had already been cleaned up. Therefore, it was something he had forgotten all about.
Well, whatever it was, it was the cat’s fault for running out into the road on its own. This one was just running straight at me…
Ryuichi thought about it and immediately tried to forget about the dream. However, he had the same dream every night since then. Since it was a side effect of the eye drops, it would likely be like this for as long as he continued to use them. As expected, he was fed up. Remembering Uroma’s last words that if anything happened, he should come back again and that Sunday, he immediately went to meet the man.
“I see. So you keep dreaming about your old experience of running over a black cat. That must be really unpleasant. Something must be done about it.”
The man named Uroma was as understanding as ever. Next to him was the girl he had seen the last time he arrived. She was wearing her school uniform before, but today she was in plain clothes. Perhaps she works here.
“But if you keep recurring to the same dream, it could be a sign of some emotion you’re not conscious of.”
“That can be figured out from dreams?”
“Yes. In depth psychology, dreams are considered to be a true reflection of human unconsciousness. Emotions and impulses that are repressed in the unconscious and that one is not clearly conscious of appear as dreams.”
“But my dreams are simply old memories, aren’t they?”
“That’s the significance of them being recurring dreams. Most likely, your unconscious mind is sending out some kind of message by elevating the memory again and again to your surface consciousness.”
“U-Unconsciousness is transmitting a message?”
The unconscious mind can pull something like that off? Ryuichi was somewhat astonished.
“So, what is the meaning of the dream?”
“Well… You ran over a cat with your bicycle, which is probably an experience of failure for you. And at the time, you left the scene without properly verifying the outcome. Yes, you left without checking the result of your failure. For you, Mr. Akiyama, who has overcome many failures and kept on succeeding, I would say that it was indeed an ‘uncharacteristic behavior’.”
“Uncharacteristic behavior…”
Ryuichi was awestruck by those words. Yes, just as the man in front of him had just said, he had overcome many failures in order to achieve his current position. With each failure, he reflected on the outcome, identifying the mistakes and what went wrong. As an example, when he ended his marriage, his ex-wife’s last words to him were, “You have no love. You only look at yourself. You should just marry a mirror”. After some thought and reflection on those vindictive words, he eventually developed and released a service that combined a magic mirror and face recognition AI to watch over the elderly. It was much better in performance than the conventional type. Yes, it was this experience that made him who he is today.
“Perhaps subconsciously you don’t approve of making even small mistakes and forgetting about them without thoroughly evaluating the results. You are much more self-conscious and proud of yourself than you think. Therefore, your unconscious mind is condemning you for continuously neglecting the experience of running over a black cat, either in the form of a dream or a shadow of a black cat across your left eye. I suspect this may have been the actual root of your visual disturbance in your left eye.”
“I-I see…”
Well, they say that failure is the mother of success, and my true spirit has been sending me signs in my dreams to let me be aware of this. Ryuichi was completely impressed by Uroma’s analysis. As he had expected, he seemed to be a very capable man.
“After all, the only thing to do here is to revisit the scene of the accident and seek out the body of the black cat you ran over. It is the only way for you to be free from the shadow of the black cat.”
“But it’s been more than a month, you know. I doubt if there are any dead cats in the area??”
“Even if you don’t find the cat’s body, that’s okay. What’s important to you is the action itself, to see the consequences of what you’ve done. In a way, this is like a purification ritual for you.”
“Hah, purification?”
“So let’s hurry up and get going. Let’s go to the site now.”
“What, right now?”
“Yes. We’ll go with you. Mr. Akiyama, will you show us the way?”
Although Uroma was forceful, his suggestion itself seemed very reasonable and correct. Ryuichi did as he was told, and together with him and a girl who seemed to be his assistant, he left the counseling room and drove to the accident site.