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Satoru’s at the graveyard.
Graveyards are not fun at any time of the year, but it’s goddamn bleak on Christmas Eve. Like everything in Tokyo the boneyard is crammed in awkwardly where there’s space for it, a raised walled plot of earth looking down on a dry cleaner’s and a doujin shop. The doujin shop’s offering a 2-for-1 deal for the holiday, front window decked out in coloured LEDs. Maybe he’ll stop by after.
The graveyard, though, has no trace of holiday cheer. The stone tablets are the tired grey of black cloth that’s been washed too many times, all the vibrancy and life beaten out of them. The wooden markers, commemorating important years since their patrons’ passings, lean crookedly to the side and sport growths of moss on one side. Someone once told him that moss always grows on the north side and Satoru supposes that this means he’ll never be lost in the graveyard, but he never would be anyway because he could toss a stone across it and hit the shi-shi gallery that backs onto it.
It’s been one whole year. Grief bites hard but so does sobriety, and their powers combined were nearly more than a match for him. He was walking wounded for months, felt like he was bleeding parts of himself as he passed along the pavement, leaving behind a trickle of arrogant asshole. He still hasn’t run dry, his well of arrogance and assholery apparently infinitely deep, limitless. When he looks at himself in the mirror he sees the same pale face, the same blue eyes and white hair, colours sharp as HDTV. No sign of emptiness, no tell-tale wrinkles or greyness, and he supposes that must mean he’s doing this wrong. Whatever this is – grief, atonement, life.
He makes it to Suguru’s family plot, the marker tall and clean and stark as a scythe. There’s incense already burnt down in the holder in front of it, someone’s been here before him. He didn’t bring any incense. He didn’t bring anything.
Satoru puts his hands together and closes his eyes and waits for a prayer to come to him. He’s done a lot of thinking in his life but almost no praying, and unsurprisingly his imagination fails him now. It’s not like New Year’s, praying for prosperity or health or a new PS5. Those kinds of prayers, he understands.
What could he want for a dead man?
Unable to find an answer he opens his eyes and peels his palms apart, slipping his hands into the pockets of his long black coat. It’s always cold in Tokyo in the winter, the humidity making the chill worse. He’s wearing a grey turtleneck and a long scarf, and he still feels it.
Satoru turns slowly, eyes sweeping over the graveyard. It’s empty, barren – no. He catches sight of something moving near the street. A young man in a brown canvas coat is mounting the stairs and coming up through the graves, walking slowly. He’s build like a Mac truck and has close-cropped pink hair. Construction worker? Athlete? Satoru watches him weaving slowly through the graveyard. He doesn’t seem to find what he’s looking for, eyes wandering over the tall gravestones.
Satoru’s not in the meat market, but hell, it’s Christmas Eve, he can do a guy a favour. He crosses over to the path and catches the wandering man as he goes by. “You looking for someone?”
He’s not particularly tall – not that anyone is, compared to Satoru – but he’s got a nice face, his eyes soft and his cheeks just a little pudgy. “Huh? Oh, hi.”
“Hi,” says Satoru. “You looking for someone?”
“No. Uh, no. I kinda wondered if there was a bench or something here.”
“Don’t think so,” says Satoru, who admittedly has never stayed long enough to find out. “It’s a pretty small-ass graveyard.”
“Yeah. I wasn’t expecting that.”
Satoru raises his eyebrows. “First visit here?”
“I go by sometimes, but it looks bigger from the road. I work down the street, in the bookstore. But it’s Christmas Eve, so I thought I’d stop by.”
“And… spend some time in the graveyard?” probes Satoru, beginning to wonder if he’s found someone even more unhinged than himself. He tries to remember what kind of bookstore is down the street, the back of his mind scurrying busily.
The guy blinks. “Oh, no. Well, yes, but… I’m from Sendai, see. And my Gramps died earlier this year, just before I moved down to Tokyo. And I don’t really have the savings to make the trip back to see him, but I thought maybe if I just found a quiet place with the right atmosphere it’d still count, y’know?”
“I’m not sure whether that’s thoughtful or just strange,” replies Satoru. “But I guess nothing we do for the dead really makes sense anyway, so why not.”
The guy looks up at him, eyes wide and curious. “That’s what you’re thinking about while visiting a graveyard?”
“I’ve never been good at reasonableness,” replies Satoru. And then, because hell, he’s bored and this guy is cute and weirdly honest, he adds, “There’s a temple nearby, if you want somewhere to pray. Nice garden, plenty of offerings, monks if you want ‘em. I could show you; it’s on my way.” It isn’t really, but he’s not doing anything else.
“I don’t know that I want to pray. I think I just want to remember.”
Satoru shifts, feels the heavy weight of his coat move across his shoulders. “Well, what did he like to do, your grandpa?”
“Um, well, he spent a long time in the hospital. But before that… I don’t really know. He was kind of a curmudgeon, I guess. He didn’t really have friends, or hobbies or anything. He never really went anywhere or did anything. Until he got sick he worked as a parking lot attendant, it was a retirement gig for him. He raised me,” he adds in parentheses, as though that were the least important thing in his list.
Satoru sighs. “Okay, look, what’s your name?”
“Itadori Yuuji.”
“Great. I’m Gojou Satoru. And I know I’m bad at this whole mourning BS, but you are giving me second-hand anxiety with your unfettered, undirected niceness. So come on. Let’s go.” He prods him in the chest with one long index finger, turning him and marching him out of the graveyard.
“Where are we going?”
“Somewhere you can do some remembering, and I can maybe catch a break from my demons. They’re called Pity and Philanthropy, if you were wondering.”
***
Itadori Yuuji, it turns out, works at the local occult bookstore. Satoru discovers this as they walk past on their way further up the hill on which the graveyard is built, while Yuuji (almost unprompted) spills the story of his life. Unwanted child, unsympathetic grandfather, natural athleticism which brought him attention he wasn’t interested in. “I kinda just wanted to do my own thing. I got into the occult through a school club that I joined to get the PE teachers off my back, and it was actually kind of interesting so I just… stuck with it. You can do anything in Tokyo, even run an occult bookstore. Not that I run it, I’m just hired help.”
The strange thing (okay, one of the strange things) about this man is that he seems to harbour no resentment. Not against his parents for ditching him, or his grandfather for being a recalcitrant ass, or his teachers for trying to push him into activities and careers he wasn’t interested in. He seems to have skated right on through all the adversity without any of it sticking to him, kind and compassionate and even-keeled.
Satoru once dropped a guy’s iPhone in a glass of water because he interrupted him.
The hill is steep. They’re on the outskirts of Tokyo here, the hills half-built up and half wild, the roads switch-backs. They pass an ice-cream shop that’s closed for the season, and a recycle shop, and a little roadside shrine to protect the spirits of children and hopefully also late-20s assholes who expire on the climb up the hill.
“… and then I suggested he think about getting some new stock, but he shot me down,” says Yuuji, finishing some obscure story about his manager, a sullen-eyed man improbably named Megumi. Irritatingly he’s fresh as a daisy, completely unwinded by the hike. Satoru can feel his clothes starting to stick to his skin with sweat. “But you haven’t said anything about yourself, Gojou-san.”
“Eh, what’s to tell? I work at a publisher’s, I live alone, and I have a problem with personal boundaries. You know, the usual.”
“You’re being very helpful,” says Yuuji politely, when in fact for all he knows Satoru may be leading him up into the woods to chop him up into little bits and feed him to the local wildlife. But then, in either a fair or unfair fight he’s pretty sure Yuuji could take him to the mat in 5 seconds flat.
“Yes, aren’t I just.”
“You seem kind of… sad, though.”
Satoru looks at him. “You think so? Most people say manic.”
Yuuji looks at him, really looks, in a way no one has in a long time. He’s used to the stares – at his white hair, his blue eyes. Used to the admiration and the envy. But serious consideration? No. “That seems more like a wrapper, I think. Something bright and shiny to deflect attention.”
Satoru shrugs. “I don’t think I have a lot of hidden depths. What you see is what you get.”
“I think you’re trying very hard to show that you don’t really care about anything, Gojou-san. I also just don’t think it’s true.”
“That’s quite an analysis for someone who met me twenty minutes ago.”
Yuuji looks up at him and smiles. “I’m good at reading people.”
***
After another fifteen minutes, by which time Yuuji still looks dew-fresh and Satoru’s breath is rattling in his lungs, they reach the top of the hill. It’s late afternoon and the sun is setting, not quite at the horizon yet but close.
The top of the hill has a bare parking area for scenic views and hot sex romps in the back of Toyota sedans. Fortunately no one’s getting their bump and grind on at the moment; the parking lot is empty.
Satoru leads Yuuji over to the edge, guarded by a long metal fender; he steps over it and sits down abruptly, coat cushioning him from the icy steel. Yuuji stands beside his shoulder, staring out at the view.
They can see all of Tokyo from here, the city painted in hues of yellow and orange. It’s an almost endless stretch of city, a grey carpet dotted here and there with eruptions of sky-scrapers or sliced through by narrow rivers. And, beyond it, Tokyo bay and the ocean which truly is endless.
“Wow,” says Yuuji.
“It’s a nice place to think. Or maybe remember. I don’t do a lot of that.”
“No?”
“No. When I remember, I remember the good times, and then I remember the bad times, and then I remember that I’m here and I’m alone, and that feels worse than the rest of it combined.”
Yuuji steps over the railing and sits down on it beside him. It’s getting cold enough that they can see their breath, Satoru pulling his coat around him more tightly.
“Want to talk about it?”
He doesn’t move. Just sits there, staring out at the bright blob of the sun as it drifts towards the water. “Nothing’s ever really mattered to me. I’m good at whatever I do, but because I don’t give a shit eventually things fall apart. I go through people, and jobs, and apartments, and nothing sticks. Nothing but the booze. I had one fucking friend, and last year we got plastered and went home together, and he got mowed down crossing the street because I was fooling around and not paying attention. So now I don’t even have the booze, or him, or anything.”
“I’m sorry,” says Yuuji, and Satoru’s not actually sure anyone’s said that to him before in that tone.
“You reap what you sow,” says Satoru.
“It’s not really that simple though, is it? Maybe there’s no one thing you did that was bad enough to cause what happened, and probably there’s no one thing that’s good enough to make up for it. But you’re making changes, aren’t you? You’re still here – that’s not nothing.”
Satoru snorts. “If I let myself be defined by my good deeds, I’d be a very small pile of meaningless favours,” he says.
“You brought me up here,” points out Yuuji.
Satoru turns to look at him. “Because I was bored, and you’re kind of hot,” he says.
Yuuji tilts his head to the side, considering carefully, as though reading a line of calculations on an invisible blackboard. “Hm, maybe,” he concedes. “But you could have just asked me to get a coffee, you know. There’s a place just down the street from the graveyard. You didn’t have to go out of your way to bring me somewhere I could be closer to Gramps.”
“Maybe I like it up here,” says Satoru.
“Do you?”
He shrugs. “No. Not really.”
“Then why did you think of it?”
Something about Yuuji’s honesty finds a chord inside him, a chord Satoru didn’t even know existed. “I don’t know how to mourn. I try, and I just feel empty. Death is a vacuum, and I can’t possibly fill it. But maybe bringing you some comfort makes up for that, somehow.”
Yuuji leans back, hands on the railing, and kicks his feet. “Y’know, before Gramps died, he told me that he didn’t want me to go like him. That he didn’t want me to die lonely and alone. And I don’t think I’m going to, because I’ve got Megumi, and Nobara, and Junpei and Maki-san and Toudou-san. But I also think… I think friends, and contentment, and happiness are things you have to work at. They don’t just happen. Even if you’re good at everything, and really good looking.”
Satoru eyes him up; Yuuji’s smiling, just a little.
“Well then – what do you suggest, oh expert on honesty and friendship?”
Yuuji looks up at him, cute and kind and a little pink in the cold. “Want to get a coffee?” he asks.
END