【Animals】【The Hedgehog Who Keeps a Diary】Animal Series #04

A quiet residential neighborhood at night.

The wind slips gently through the gaps between houses.

The glittering lights of the busy downtown do not reach this far.

This place is a corner of the city—
a quiet place that no one pays attention to.

On such a forgotten edge of the night, Togepy was there.

His species: hedgehog.

Togepy once lived with a human.

A quiet woman, about thirty years old.

He used to doze on her lap in a small house,
while she softly played the piano.

Now, he is in this city.

He does not really know how he came here.

Did he walk here?
Did he run away?
Or was he set free?

His memories are hazy, drifting like mist.

Almost like something from a dream.

There is just one habit he has kept.

Every night, he writes a diary.

A Kokuyo notebook he picked up from inside a rusty mailbox.

For some reason, it was completely blank.

So he decided to write in it,
forming letters with his small hands.

Today, it rained.

He spoke to no one.

But a sparrow perched on a power line, sang, and flew away.

Togepy sometimes thinks to himself.

“What will I become?”

Still, he writes.

By writing, he feels as if he is confirming
that he was “here.”

The diary is not something meant to be shown to anyone.

Sometimes, he has dreams.

—Dreams in which the diary reaches her.

His former owner.

That woman had rescued him
from a narrow glass cage.

The smell of soft towels,
the warmth of her fingers,
the quiet sound of the piano.

In her arms alone,
his spines served no purpose.

That was happiness.

“Do I want to see her?” he asks himself.

…He is not sure.

Perhaps he has grown too used to living alongside loneliness.

But in his dreams, she reads his diary.

“Well written,” she murmurs from the other side of the page.

That is his wish.

Tonight again, Togepy writes in his diary.

He folds his spines inward,
turning the pages softly under the moonlight.

June 5, 2025

The wind blew.

Somewhere, I felt like someone remembered me.