Since other people are now linking from the translations too, it’s this part. It cuts a few directions. I suppose the Millennium Puzzle and Heart Puzzle have pieces rather like building blocks.
“I loved playing with building blocks, oftentimes all on my own. I didn’t really have a lot of blocks however and so I would often destroy what I had previously erected, beginning with the building process from anew. I would do this over and over again. Around my neighborhood, there was this toy store and its window front had been decorated with a giant block-built house, a sight I visited rather frequently. No matter how much I tried to build after that block house with my own blocks, I would only be able to rebuild the front of the house, with the interior entirely missing so my house was little more than a flat surface.
In my neighborhood lived A-kun, whom I was friends with and came to play over and he had a big brother who was about to enter fourth grade who had bought a cutting edge, newly released building block rocket and asked if I wanted to build it up with him together.
All the individual parts of the space rocket were building blocks that I previously hadn’t seen. On the round-shaped package of the rocket was an illustration that surpassed even the elated feeling you always get in excitement before the process of building begins. All of the blocks I had were angular and these blocks’ parts were round and to me, who didn’t want to lose to these curves, that came as an eye-opening revelation.
Amid these parts, one shone brilliantly, a small, see-through block part. To me, who was stuck in the world of primary colors, that was a diamond.
That part, which was rounded and a mere centrimetre in size, was a small block that would be put on the tip of the rocket.
And so A-kun and I built the rocket.
After an hour of exchanging comments like “That part must go there!” and “Where does that go?”, we were finally done and had completed our rocket.
“Hmmm, so you’re finally done with it!”
A-kun’s big brother had finally made his way around and expressed his feelings but then, the moment thereafter, shouted with the loudest voice:
“Wait! That’s not true! The see-through part that goes at the tip of the rocket is missing!”
A-kun, too, was startled and frantically started looking all over the place.
“You two! Start looking! If we don’t find it, the rocket can’t be finished!” and A-kun, while his big brother was fixating his gaze on us, started looking desperately with a face that looked like he was about to cry.
As for me, I was startled by how enraged his big brother was and my entire body had gone into a frozen state of shock. But there was another reason I couldn’t move my body…
It was because I was holding the see-through block in my left hand.
“A-kun already has so many other blocks and this is just a single one and it’s so small anyway, it’s not even a centrimetre big, after all!” – that’s the thought that was going through my mind.
The big brother, furious, his head having taken a red shade. A-kun, ready to cry.
And then there was me, who, if I were hardpressed, couldn’t tell you what kind of face I was making, fleeing through an external corridor to the outside.
On the way back to my house, I kept the block in my left hand, pressing it hard. … I was also crying like I had gone mad.
I never met A-kun ever again thereafter.
I felt that in that moment, I lost a very important part of my heart.
In the first chapter of Yu-Gi-Oh!, Jounouchi, who took a piece of Yugi’s puzzle, at last musters up the courage to face Yugi and return the puzzle piece to him, that’s the story I wrote.
Even now, I think I am still holding that piece in my left hand… and that sure has given me reason to think.”
