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Chapter Text

It was mid-March when I got a call from Akari.

I was putting away my go-ke after laying a game out on my board when the phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Hikaru? How are you?”

Akari was my childhood friend. Her voice over the phone was cheerful and forward. She sounded as though she had picked up the receiver without a thought in her head and had called me just like that. Usually when she talked to me there was a kind of hesitancy in her tone, like she didn’t want to say the wrong word, or like she thought she might offend me if she wasn’t careful. The brightness in her voice today sounded as fresh as a clear blue sky. It was a little off-putting.

I closed the window to soften the noise of the traffic outside, and sat down on my bed.

“What’s up?”

“I was thinking of going to a shrine,” she said. I could still hear the smile in her voice. “There’s one that’s close to my school. I thought maybe we could go together tomorrow.”

“Umm…”

“You’re not busy, right Hikaru? You usually don’t have matches on Sundays.”

To tell the truth, I was really confused by why she was calling me at all. A few months earlier she had confessed that she liked me and had asked me to go out with her. I hadn’t really known what to say, so I had turned her down, and as you might expect, we didn’t really talk after that. Actually, this was the first time I had talked to her since that day.

“Well, I promised my grandpa I would play against him tomorrow,” I said.

“Can’t you reschedule it? This is important.”

I couldn’t see how going to a shrine on a Sunday could be important, especially with a guy who had rejected you. I didn’t know what we were going to do there or what we would talk about in between. On top of that, I had been planning on studying Go all day after playing against my grandpa. I didn’t like to think about sacrificing all that time just for a trip to some shrine.

“I feel like you could find someone else to go with you,” I said.

“No, Hikaru, it has to be you!”

I was surprised by how insistent she sounded. From the way she was talking, it really sounded like a life and death situation. I cleared my throat.

“Um, all right. What time are we going?”

“Three o’clock,” she said. “And bring some change with you, okay?”

“Sure. I’ll meet you outside your house.”

“Bye!”

After she hung up, that bright blue sky sound kept ringing in my ears for a few moments. I had to blink several times to get the color in my head to calm down and match the color of the dim light in my bedroom.

。。。

I met her at her door at three, like we had promised. Red camellias bloomed over the neighbors’ fences. Akari was wearing a polka-dotted dress that stopped just above her knees. I was wearing what I always did, baggy jeans and a T-shirt and my yellow rain jacket. We got on the train without saying much to each other.

I realized a few stops down the line that I had forgotten to take my medication with me. I thought about telling Akari and asking her if we could go back so I could grab it, but I decided against it. It wasn’t like the medication really worked anyway, and I didn’t think anything serious would happen to me if I didn’t take it.

About a year ago I had started getting dizzy spells, only once every month or so. They started becoming more frequent after a while, so my mom made me go to the doctor and tell them about my symptoms. The doctor seemed kind of confused. He said that there wasn’t anything wrong with my inner ears, and that my blood pressure was fine, but he gave me some pills anyway. The dizziness hadn’t stopped. It had continued on, not getting any better or worse, and after a while I kind of got used to it. I could even tell when it was coming. I’d start feeling my breath get short, and my heartbeat would get really loud, and then I’d feel like something was pulling me down, like everything was tilting. It would pass after a while, whether or not I took the pills.

But there was something I hadn’t told the doctor or my mom about, something I really couldn’t tell them about even if I wanted to. Every time I got one of those dizzy spells, it was when I was thinking about Sai.

Akari didn’t know about Sai. If she had known about him, she probably wouldn’t have taken me to that shrine. When we got there, she turned around and looked at me very seriously.

“This is a special shrine,” she said. “They say that if you pray for success in love, you’ll really be able to get together with the person that you like!”

“What’s so special about this one?” I asked. To me, it seemed like an ordinary shrine, jammed in between two buildings that were much taller than it. If anything, it looked a bit shabbier than the average shrine in Tokyo.

“There’s a ghost here!” Akari said, like she fully expected me to believe it. “If you pray to her, she’ll hear your prayers and make them come true!”

“Hmm,” I said. I looked at the building. “No, I don’t think there’s a ghost here.” I wasn’t completely confident, but I was pretty sure. “Besides, do you even have someone that you like?”

Akari’s large eyes turned up to me, and she smiled slightly. “I do.”

We walked to the front part of the shrine. The closer you got to the actual shrine, the shabbier it looked. The lanterns on either side of the torii looked like they had been eaten away at by some kind of insect. Some of the wooden beams that made up the structure had large chunks missing from them. At the foot of the donation box was an empty can of beer. Overall, the scene was depressingly ordinary — way too normal-looking to have any kind of supernatural aura about it. All the same, because of what Akari had said about ghosts, I was starting to feel kind of funny, a little off-balance. The strong smell of detergent from the laundromat next door was mingling with the smell of incense from the shrine and making me feel lightheaded.

“Hey Akari,” I said, picking up the beer can. “The guy that you like right now… what kind of guy is he?”

“His name is Eiji. I met him at my high school Go club. He’s a professional Go player.”

“What?” I laughed. “First me, and now him. You must really be into Go professionals, huh?”

She took the can from my hands and set it back down by the donation box. “Don’t tease me, Hikaru.”

“No, I guess I’m just kinda surprised. I didn’t expect you to still be so into Go even now.”

“I don’t like him because he’s a Go professional. I like him because he’s a good person,” she said. She reached into her coin purse and took out a 100 yen coin. “Hikaru, that’s why I wanted to ask you here. I need your help. I need you to talk to Akira Touya.”

A gust of wind blew in between the buildings, making the white shide papers flutter above our heads.

“…Touya? You want me to talk to Touya?”

“You’re always with him. Can you put in a good word for me? I don’t have any way to contact Eiji-kun. He came to our school one day to give a presentation, and afterwards when we were talking together…” Akari trailed off, and bit her lip, looking downwards. It was pretty clear that she was totally gone for this guy. I sighed.

“You know, even if I talk to Touya, he might not even know the guy. Just because they’re both Go professionals…”

“But they go to the same study group! Eiji-kun told me so when we were talking. He said that he and Akira Touya were always playing against each other and that it was really exciting, like climbing a mountain or… or fighting a wild animal!”

It probably would have sounded like an exaggeration to someone else, but I knew exactly what he meant. Playing against Touya was always like that. It was like breathless combat, like a sword fight where you knew that you were only one wrong move away from a cold steel blade against your throat. The kind of excitement that Go players live for. I knew all about that feeling because Touya was my rival. Akari knew about our rivalry too, and I guess that was why she was looking at me expectantly with that 100 yen coin held snug between her fingers.

“You’ll ask him for me, won’t you Hikaru?”

Her polka-dotted dress flapped as the wind tugged at it, and I found myself staring at her exposed knees, wondering why I was in this situation, about to help my childhood friend get together with her newest crush. Akari was pretty cute, after all, as far as girls go. Why had I turned her down again?

But I pretty much already knew the answer to that question.

“Sure. I’ll ask him,” I said, reaching into my pocket for a coin.

“You will?” Akari’s whole face lit up. “Thank you so much, Hikaru!”

“Hey, don’t thank me yet. I don’t know if he’ll be able to help you.”

“I’m sure he will!” she said. “Touya-san is so kind after all!”

“Kind? Him? That’s not the word I’d use.”

The two of us moved up to the grate, and threw in our coins. I thought Akari looked pretty cheerful, and that made me a little happy.

“You should pray for love, too, Hikaru,” she said. Her eyes were closed and she was smiling, her hands clasped in prayer.

The wind whirled around and blew incense smoke into my face, so I tried not to cough.

“Okay,” I said. There was a kind of sadness in the air, somewhere in the too-sweet scent that lingered around us, or in the way the light was shining down from high, high above the buildings. The ground felt like it was tilting, and my breath was caught in my chest. Honestly, I didn’t have a single prayer in my mind.

I’ve never been good with ghosts, even fake ghosts. I’ve never been good with love, either.

Chapter Text

I met Touya about a week after the shrine visit with Akari, and unfortunately, the meeting did not go at all like I had planned. 

On a usual week, depending on our schedules, it wasn’t strange for Touya and me to see each other three, four, or even five times in the same week. We’d run into each other at the Go Institute and our eyes would meet quietly, just recognizing each other without saying anything. Or we’d meet at his dad’s Go salon, either accidentally or on purpose, and play a few games. Even if for some reason we didn’t manage to see each other at the Institute or at the salon, we always met at the weekly study sessions with Serizawa-sensei. 

Touya was a kind of darling of the study group. I liked to tease him about it. Everyone wanted to play against him or hear what he had to say, so he spent a lot of time doing the rounds, almost like he was the teacher instead of Serizawa-sensei. At the end of a game with someone else he’d sometimes look over to me, and I could see that he wanted to play against me. It was a hard, serious look on his face. Eyes so sharp they could cut right through you. In the years I’d known Touya, that was one thing I could always tell for sure — when he had that look in his eyes, it was because he wanted to play a game against me. 

For me, I had to say that playing against Touya wasn’t the hard part. Sitting down, putting our stones out on the board, getting lost in the intricacies of the battle — all of that was familiar. But when you get to playing against someone for a long time, you start to notice little things about them: the way they move their hands or the way they hold their head when they’re thinking. All these little details about Touya gradually started to stand out to me, like sparks flying in the dark. That’s how I thought of it in the beginning, anyway. Like these little glimmering moments that flashed out suddenly and blinded you. But then you keep looking for them after that. That’s how it was when I was around Touya. 

That morning, it was raining pretty hard. I had promised my grandpa that I would play a makeup game against him, but had ended up canceling because of the weather. I felt bad — I had already canceled the first time because of the trip to the shrine with Akari. But when I called his home phone to apologize, I only got his answering machine. I figured he had probably gone shopping or something. He was always forgetting to buy things when he went to the grocery store, so he ended up going there about four times as often as most people do.

On the way from the station to the Go Institute, there were huge puddles of water everywhere along the sidewalk. I was trying to keep my mind on the game I was going to play in an hour, but for whatever reason, I kept falling back into memories, or really, the same memory over and over again. It was kind of like I had a song playing on repeat in my head, except instead of a song it was a certain day in summer back when I was thirteen. Sai and I had been walking through the city after an insei class on a Saturday.

“It’s so hot!” I had complained. “Sai, aren’t you hot?”

He had smiled quietly and held his paper fan to his lips. “I can see how hot it is when I look at you, Hikaru.”

He sometimes had that way of answering without really answering. Back then it had gotten on my nerves from time to time. 

“How come I have to be out here in the heat when you don’t feel anything at all?” I had grumbled. “It’s not fair!”

The sun glinting off his long black hair, he had looked pensive. I had half expected him to reprimand me, but he only said “It isn’t fair… is it,” and his voice had sounded a little sad. 

Even through the rain coming down all around me I could still feel the heat of that summer day. The smarter part of me knew I shouldn’t be thinking about Sai, and especially not before a match, but still everything about that day was coming at me full force: the singing of the cicadas, the air coming up wavy off of the sidewalk, the melancholy lips behind the paper fan, and those words. It isn’t fair… It isn’t fair… It isn’t fair… The rain soaked right through my sneakers, but I hardly felt it. There must have been something I could have said to him. I’m sorry? Or maybe Hey Sai, what do you say you and I go get some ice cream? But neither of those was quite right. It wasn’t like he could have eaten the ice cream anyway.

I guess it was partly because of me being stuck in that memory that things didn’t go well with Touya. When I walked into the Go Institute, he was standing right there inside the doors.

“Shindou,” he said. 

I’d noticed before that sometimes when Touya was waiting for me, he would stand with his hands at his sides and his posture straight. It made him look pretty intimidating, honestly, like some kind of predator with its eyes fixed on its prey. I didn’t mind it if he just wanted to play a match against me, but somehow I got the feeling that this time it was different.

“Hey Touya. Here for a match too?” I asked, putting on a smile.

“You were late for three of your matches this week. Tell me why.”

Typical Touya. Getting straight to the point.

“Oh, uh, that? No reason,” I said. I shoved my hands in my pockets and pretended to be interested in a poster advertising the Young Lions competition on my left. 

Touya never missed anything. When I won a match, he knew. When I lost a match, he knew — and he knew how and when and why too. When he didn’t understand something, he would usually ask me right out. The only exception was questions about Sai.

“I don’t understand why you would allow yourself to risk forfeiting a match,” he said, deliberately placing his hand over the sentence I had been reading on the poster. “Letting your guard down now is completely out of the question.”

“I’m not letting my guard down.” 

“Then explain it to me,” he said. 

The truth about my being late was that the first time I had overslept. The next two times I had gotten dizzy on my way to work, and had had to sit on a bench for fifteen minutes until I could walk again. But I wasn’t about to tell him that. 

“Hey, do you remember my friend, Akari?” I asked. “Brownish hair, kinda cute?” I could see from his face that he wasn’t going to answer me, so I kept going. “So I was talking to her, uh, the other day when we went to a shrine together, and — man, it was really windy that day actually — and yeah. So she was telling me about this guy that she met…”

“Spare me the rest,” Touya said, cutting me off. “I don’t have any intention of listening to your friend’s story. That doesn’t concern me.”

I was starting to feel like the air in the Go Institute was really hot. It was way too early in the season, but I was hearing a faint sound of cicadas around me, a mournful crying pressing in from all sides. 

“You know, you’re really annoying sometimes,” I said, planting a fist against the wall to steady myself. “Whether or not I’m late to my matches doesn’t concern you either, right?”

“It does!” he snapped. I could see his glaring eyes, but only vaguely through the towering white clouds that were rising up before me against the backdrop of a piercing blue sky. I could feel sweat collecting on my brow. 

I was arguing out of pure instinct, but the worst part of it was that I knew he was right. I was letting my guard down. I really wasn’t good enough. Here I’d spent years and years chasing after him, but I still could barely win against him, and these days I was winning less and less. Even if he was a rival for me, how much longer could I still say that I was his rival?

“Look, Touya,” I said. “I just want to talk to you about Akari.”

“Forget it,” he said. The tone of disgust in his voice hit me right in the heart. “We should go to our matches.”

“Right. Fine,” I said. “You go ahead.”

He did go ahead, but not without looking back at me. The one thing that I wanted to avoid more than anything else was him starting to pity me, so I glared back at him, putting all of my force into that thin line of connection between our eyes. Slowly, as I breathed in and out, the vividness of the memory was fading and I could see the brown carpet and the white walls of the Go Institute. I could see Touya turning his back on me and walking to his match.

。。。

It probably shouldn’t be much of a surprise that I lost my match that day. 

After it was over, I walked out into the humid spring air, and stared up at the rain-wetted utility poles and the grey sky overhead. Everything was so clear when I looked at it now. I could see in perfect detail every sharp black wire against the clouds, and I felt like an idiot for having given in to that memory, having let it take me over like that. I felt bitter. I wanted to go to a place that matched my mood, so I started walking north, into Bunkyo ward. 

A few years ago, Ogata-san had told me that he liked to walk around Tokyo when he was in a bad mood. He said that he’d go to the seediest place that he could find — some kind of real rat hole — and steep himself thoroughly in the atmosphere. Even when it was starting to get to him, he’d force himself to stay just a few minutes longer, just a few minutes longer… until he really couldn’t stand it anymore. It was only once he started feeling actually sick to his stomach that he’d let himself go home. He’d go back to his apartment, pour himself a beer, and study Go. I’d been surprised at the time to hear that Ogata-san of all people was the type to start feeling uncomfortable in an unsavory establishment. He practically exuded seediness himself. But I’d also thought that his idea wasn’t so bad, and I figured now would be the perfect time to try it out for myself. 

I walked through the neighborhoods without a particular destination in mind. I thought that once the right place came along, I would probably know it — and sure enough, before too long I spotted a Go salon with the dirtiest sign I’d ever seen. It really looked like someone had taken a mud-soaked rag and wiped it all across the red and white lettering. When I opened the glass doors on the bottom floor, there was an elevator on the left, and a cheap clothing boutique on the right, with a foreign-looking clerk who was giving me the stink eye. I got in the elevator quickly and held down the button that said “3.”

The Go salon was full of smoke and some other stench, some kind of mixture of mildew and cooking grease. The master was hacking big, dry coughs as he talked with a spindly guy wearing a hole-ridden T-shirt and a grey newsboy cap. I made sure that he saw me drop seven hundred yen onto the counter, and headed to the far end of the room to find myself a board away from the other customers. 

I had a book in my bag: Honinbo Shuusaku, Complete Works. The cover was slightly ripped and I’d spilled broth on some of the pages when I had been studying while eating. I took out the scrap of paper I was using as a bookmark, and picked up where I had left off the last time. 

Tsuruoka Saburosuke. One of Shuusaku’s pupils, the note said. Which really meant one of Sai’s pupils. The battle spread out to the center from the lower right-hand side of the board. I placed each stone down slowly, forcing myself not to rush, even though the stench in the air was nauseating. I knew I owed this much to Touya. I owed it to myself. To Sai.

Ito Showa. The game was left unfinished. I wondered, as I looked at the shapes, how I would have finished it, or if I was any stronger than this opponent. I heard a burst of rough laughter around me, and thought I felt their eyes on me. But I didn’t allow myself to look up.

Gennan Iseki. Murase Yakichi. Kadono Kamesaburo. I didn’t know anything about them other than their playing style. I didn’t know what kind of face Sai had made when he had whispered the moves to Torajiro, what kind of face Torajiro had made when he had played them. And I could feel Touya’s glare from earlier in the afternoon burning into me, making my heart clench tightly with every stone I placed. In spite of everything, I was only sliding backwards, wasn’t I? I couldn’t give up playing Go, because then those years with Sai really would have been for nothing. But I couldn’t see how it was any better to keep pretending that I was in any way worthy of being Touya’s rival at this point. I breathed in that rotten air in the Go salon like it was a punishment and mechanically put down stone after stone. 

The master came up to me at some point — maybe after several hours, I wasn’t sure — and tapped me on the shoulder. 

“Kid, we’re closing up,” he said.

When I looked up I realized that most of the other customers had left. I figured it was probably dark outside, but you couldn’t tell in the windowless room. 

“I’m going,” I mumbled. But then from my pocket I could feel my phone vibrating, and I held up a hand in apology as I took the call and began to gather my things.

My mom was on the other end of the line.

“Mom, can I call you back?”

When she didn’t say anything, I started feeling a strange sensation in the pit of my stomach. Just like that memory that had spread outward from inside me until I couldn’t see anything else. Just like the steady clack of stones on the board, the same 470 games circling through my fingers day after day. I had the feeling that something else was coming that I couldn’t stop if I wanted to, something cruel and inevitable.

“Hikaru,” my mom said. “Your grandfather passed away this morning.”

Chapter Text

They set the funeral date for Sunday. My mom spent the whole time on the phone, it seemed like. First she was calling our relatives, then she was calling the cremation service, then she was on the phone with Grandpa’s mahjong buddies. I hadn’t even known he played mahjong, but I heard her make half a dozen calls to the guys from his mahjong parlor. It was the same script every time: Yes, he had been alone in his house, he fell down the stairs when he was coming down from the attic. We didn’t know about it until the evening. He had just turned 81.

Mahjong, huh. What a riot.

My mom made me clean out his refrigerator and bring the stuff back to our house. I found five plastic bottles of mayonnaise — like he thought he was gonna run out — and three jars of pickled plums. Not a whole lot of vegetables.

I kept looking up towards the attic while I was cleaning. It wasn’t that I felt any kind of squeamishness about the fact that there had been a body nearby not so long ago. If anything it was more of a restlessness, like I was waiting for something to happen, waiting for the sense of normality to disappear. It was really weird, but it felt like I was completely separate from the whole thing. The fact that my grandpa had died hadn’t sunk in at all, and I just kept doing the task in front of me, my hands moving on their own. The sunlight streamed in through the windows and bounced off the counters, filling the whole kitchen with pale yellow light. The glass bottles of grandpa’s old vitamin drinks clinked as I moved them into the box, one after the other. I kept holding my breath without realizing it, waiting until the last moment when it all came out at once.

Hours passed by. I went home, went to my tutoring commitments, went to my matches.

On Saturday, my dad flew back from Kagoshima. I was upstairs when he walked into the house wearing a business suit and carrying a suitcase. I watched him set the suitcase down heavily in the living room and walk to the kitchen. He evidently didn’t know I was in the house, so I came downstairs quietly, and just watched him look around in all the cabinets for a few minutes. It seemed like he was trying to find a bowl. He looked in cabinet after cabinet. When I finally took pity on him and showed him where they were, he seemed startled to see me.

“Hey Dad.”

“Ah… You were here.”

“Yeah.”

It had been a while since I had seen him. He had a scab on the side of his face by his left eye, and he was losing more of his hair than I had remembered. When I held out the bowl to him, he took it and nodded curtly in thanks. He looked really out of place in our kitchen. Like some kind of stranger who had accidentally wandered into our house.

“How are you?” he asked. It sounded like a script, as though someone had told him what to say.

“I’m good. How’s work been?”

“Mm. Busy,” he said. He waited for me to say something. When I didn’t, he asked me “Are you still playing Go?”

“Yeah.”

He nodded. He was still holding the bowl in both of his hands.

“Well, I’ll be up in my room,” I said after a moment.

“Oh, um, Hikaru…” he said.

“Yeah?”

“Where’s the rice?”

I showed him where it was, and went back to my room.

It seemed like time was passing slowly, ticking forward while I barely moved at all. I laid out Torajiro’s games on the board in my room while my parents’ muffled voices drifted up the stairs, and I watched the grey clouds outside condense over the sun. The neighborhood around our house gradually lost all of its color as the light faded. There was a place where Sai had used to sit — right there on the other side of the board. When I looked at it, my heart started to ache so badly that I had to get up and walk across my room, pick up my water bottle, put it back down, move all of the books on my floor under my bed, sit back down again, take all the stones off of the board and start again from the beginning. When I heard a crashing noise, I opened my door and looked downstairs.

My mom and dad were standing around the remnants of my grandpa’s vitamin drink bottles. It looked like my dad had knocked the box off the counter. The liquid was spreading slowly across the floor.

“Ha,” my dad laughed. “He liked these, didn’t he?” Then he looked up at me. “Ah, it’s all right, Hikaru.”

It was something in the way that he said my name so casually, so easily, that made me want to hit something. I’m not a violent person. But in the moment he said my name that way, there was suddenly an anger in me that I could barely contain. A guy who comes back for his father’s funeral and acts like he hasn’t been away for the better part of ten years. A guy who can call his son’s name so easily after only coming home for New Year’s and Obon… who’s never been to a single one of his son’s matches. And he tells me it’s “all right.”

What would you know? I wanted to ask him. How can you laugh when your own father just died?

But then I saw my mom’s face just behind him. Her eyes were large and filled with worry, and I could see how much she didn’t want us to fight. Her hand rested lightly on my father’s shoulder, almost quivering.

“I’m not gonna have dinner,” I said, and left them to clean up the glass.

。。。

When we got to the funeral hall the next morning, it was white. Every part of it was white. The sky outside had been muggy, dark, threatening rain, but inside it was so bright and clean that it hurt my eyes.

In a moment, my mom and dad had gone somewhere, disappeared around a corner. I looked over my shoulder and saw the heavy, humid clouds far away through the entrance doors, and felt a moment of panic come over me, freezing me in place.

Sai is gone, I thought. Sai is gone, Grandpa is gone. I’m alone.

The funeral hall was far outside the city, and I couldn’t hear the sounds of traffic in the building. The silence all around me was so complete that I felt paralyzed. I tried to concentrate on the sensation of my feet on the floor, and I breathed in and out slowly.

A person was coming up behind me. I could feel him approaching me, but I didn’t look at him. His hand slapped hard onto my shoulder, and I stumbled.

“Shindou-san, I’m sorry for your loss,” he said.

I regained my balance and turned around. He was a man I had seen before, maybe several years ago. My intuition told me he must have been one of Grandpa’s old Go buddies, though of course I didn’t remember his name or anything like that. He was wearing a black suit a shade lighter than mine. Thick eyebrows and square glasses.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I know you were close with him.”

“Yeah.”

“He was so proud of you for your Go.”

I nodded, and wondered if he was making fun of me. Anyone following the Go world knew that I had been doing worse in the past few months. I noticed vaguely that he was wearing a toupee, and had a sudden flashback to a time long ago when I was twelve; Akota-san from Go class had been bullying an inexperienced player, and I had emptied a go-ke all over his shiny, perfectly-coiffed wig. Sai had reprimanded me for being naughty, but I hadn’t worried too much about it. Somehow, I had been a pretty carefree kid back then. Way too carefree to have deserved the greatest Go player in the world by my side.

“He really was a great teacher,” Square Glasses said.

“Who was?”

“Your grandfather.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Do you know he taught my daughter how to play Go in only one night? He taught her all the basics one evening when he was visiting our house. That must have been thirty years ago. But of course none of us were ever able to get anywhere near the level that you’re at, Shindou-san. How have your professional matches been going?”

“Um,” I said. People were pouring into the while hall around us now. I didn’t recognize any of them, and I was starting to feel slightly nauseous. In the huge open hall there was nothing to hold onto, only the glasses guy in front of me, and he was still waiting for me to answer him. From my pocket, I felt my phone vibrating. I grabbed it quickly, my fingers scrambling to turn it off, but I stopped when I saw the words on the screen: Go Institute of Japan.

“Hello?” I answered, feeling like I didn’t have enough breath to talk quite right.

“Shindou-sensei?” the voice said tentatively.

“Yeah.”

“We were just calling you about your match today…”

“What? I canceled it,” I said, my stomach beginning to churn. “I canceled it. I don’t have a match today.”

“We have you scheduled for 10:30 AM…”

“No! I canceled it! I’m at a funeral! I don’t…”

“There must have been some miscommunication…”

“I can’t be there,” I said hurriedly. “I called in last week. I shouldn’t be on the schedule. I…”

“I see,” said the voice. The glasses man was looking at me with an expression of concern. I struggled to find my breath.

“Can you tell them I’m not coming? I told them last week.”

“We’ll see what we can do,” the voice said placidly. I hung up, and looked around me anxiously for any chair, any place to be that wasn’t here.

“Could you, um,” I muttered to the glasses guy, motioning with my hand. Looking confused, he moved away from me, and I stepped past him, my eyes scanning the room.

I was actually going to be sick this time, I could feel it. There were too many people, too much white, too many bright lights hanging from the ceiling, too many black suits and black dresses, and pearls around necks, and black dress shoes. My feet were moving forward as I took shallow breaths, trying to stay upright. Still no sign of a chair, only the bodies that were moving away far too slowly to clear a path for me.

And then, inexplicably, like some kind of vision I had conjured up in my mind, the people cleared before me and I saw Touya standing right in front of me, looking straight at me with an indecipherable expression.

I couldn’t understand why he was here. I hadn’t invited him; I hadn’t told my mom to invite him. He hadn’t known my grandfather, and I couldn’t think how he had known to come here. But the relief of seeing him was crashing over me overwhelmingly. Without thinking or knowing what was happening, I found myself mumbling “Sorry,” and falling towards him, feeling his arms catch me, and then my eyes were finally closing to block out the brightness of the hall. My heart was pounding as my hands reached out to grasp the stiff fabric of his suit. This was Touya, who I’d never touched before in my life, never hugged. His grip on me was surprisingly firm, and I wondered if that was maybe to keep me from falling over. I couldn’t tell how much force was in my legs.

“I…” I started to say, then realized that my mind was blank. I was still feeling the world turning around me. Touya’s arms were pulling me upright, and I heard his voice soft in my ear “Let’s find a chair.”

“Yeah,” I said, but my arms weren’t listening to me, weren’t letting go of him.

“Shindou,” he said.

I know, I thought. I know everyone’s probably looking at us. I know I should be letting go of you, but I can’t. I don’t know why. I know this is stupid. I know I should be able to stand on my own, but I…

“Shindou,” he murmured. “There’s nothing to fear.” His voice was soft and firm. He readjusted his arms around me, and that’s when I knew I was done. I didn’t have anything left in me to resist with, so I just let him hold me like that, with one of his hands on my lower back and the other on my shoulder.

There’s nothing to fear. As I felt the swell and fall of his breathing against my chest, those words repeated over and over in my head. They filled the space behind my closed eyes and drowned out the sounds around me until they and Touya were all that was left.

Chapter Text

We didn’t get out of the funeral hall until around five o’clock. Me, my mom, my dad, and our neighbor all piled into her car, and we drove home in the rain. In the front seat, Mrs. Tanzawa and my mom were talking about the typhoon that was due tonight, how it was really unusual in this season. My dad sat next to me with his hands in his lap, saying nothing. Outside, the dark clouds that had been threatening in the distance earlier in the day had taken over the sky. Wind pushed at the car as we sped along the highway. 

In the warmth of the backseat, I was starting to think about what had happened at the funeral, and starting to feel really stupid. Touya had held me like that for a long time while everyone else had moved into the main room. At a certain point I had realized that I was actually able to stand on my own. The dizziness had passed and I would have been fine if he’d let me go, but I kept letting him hold me for about a minute after that.  

Way to impress your rival, I thought. Wander over to him and faint into his arms like some kind of damsel in distress. Yeah. That’ll make a good impression. That’ll inspire confidence. 

Who knows what he had been thinking when he’d been hugging me. Part of me had been surprised that Touya hadn’t yelled at me — but I guessed you’d have to be a real jerk to do that to someone who couldn’t even stand up straight on his own. When we’d separated, I had felt his eyes on me as I’d walked to the front row. He’d sat in the back, and somehow for the rest of the funeral I hadn’t gotten a chance to talk to him. I hadn’t really wanted to either. What would I have said? Hey, thanks, buddy. Sorry for publicly embarrassing you. See you ‘round.

“Oh, look at that!” my mom was saying. She was pointing to a table in someone’s yard that had been knocked over in the wind. “Can you believe how strong it’s blowing? I’m glad we’ll be home before the typhoon really starts.”

I felt my dad re-cross his legs next to me, and I turned my eyes to look at the tiny drops of rain flecking against the window. I was pretty sure I knew exactly what was going to happen when we got home. We’d get out of the car and thank Mrs. Tanzawa for driving us back. Then my dad would pat my mom on the back and say that he had some work to do, and my mom would nod obediently and start making dinner, and I would go upstairs and look at that Go board again and try to bring myself to study. Because what else was I going to do?

As we passed under a bridge, something blurred and orange caught my eye. We were going by Shinjuku Station, and several workers in fluorescent raincoats were moving a commercial stall out of the rain. The wind was blowing their coats first one way then the other while behind them the huge station windows glimmered darkly, reflecting the red and white lights of passing cars. Suddenly I remembered the last time I had been in Shinjuku Station, and what I had been doing there. I sat up straight in my seat, realizing that I had to get out of the car as soon as possible. 

“Mrs. Tanzawa, can you stop the car?”

“What?” The rain had begun to fall harder, so I raised my voice. 

“I need to get out,” I said. 

“What are you talking about, Hikaru?” My mom had turned around in her seat to look at me worriedly.

“I left something in a coin locker,” I said, unbuckling my seatbelt. “Today’s the last day before they take it away. I have to get it back.”

“A coin locker? But what about the typhoon?”

“I’ll be fine. I’ll take the train home,” I said. 

I saw my mom look over at my dad. To my surprise, he looked me up and down, and then his head slowly dipped down in silent permission. Blinking her eyes hesitantly, my mother put her hand on Mrs. Tanzawa’s arm. 

“I’m sorry, but do you mind pulling over just a moment?”

I thanked them as I got out of the car. The chilly, wet air immediately enveloped my body as I shut the car door behind me and half-jogged to the station, feeling grief and excitement coiling together in my heart. 

How could I have forgotten? How could I have almost lost something so important?

The last time I had come to Shinjuku Station had been a week and a half ago — a few days after my visit to the shrine with Akari. Even though I had tried my best not to let it get to me, the whole trip to the shrine that day had really shaken me up. When I was trying to study, the thought of that stupid urban legend ghost had kept coming into my head. And Sai of course. I kept thinking that if I had actually prayed to Akari’s love fortune ghost, maybe my love life wouldn’t be such utter crap. Maybe I’d finally be able to get over a guy who definitely didn’t have feelings for me and who definitely only saw me as a rival, if that. 

Eventually, I had gotten fed up, and had looked on the internet to find something out. “How to exorcise the memory of a ghost?” I had typed. I hadn’t really expected anything to come up, but the first page in the search results was from someone’s blog — a self-proclaimed “phantom guru.”

To set yourself free from the influence of a malevolent ghost or spirit, the blog had said, simply create a substitute vessel in which to house the spirit. By burying this vessel, you will sever the bond between you and the spirit permanently. 

What a load of BS, I had thought. If I had thought something like that could work, I probably would have tried it when Sai first started haunting me. I could definitely see eleven-year-old me doing something like that. But all the same, even if it was pointless, there was something that I liked about the idea of a burial. So I had looked around my room to find something that I could bury. 

I had come across the shoebox from the new Nikes I had bought a few weeks ago. Inside it, I put a few incomplete kifu recreated from memory, a broken collapsible umbrella, two Go stones, and a pair of sunglasses I had used to wear when I was a kid, just because I had always thought that Sai would’ve looked cool in sunglasses. I sealed the box by wrapping some tape around it a few times, and had shoved it into my closet for later. 

I thought that was gonna be the end of it until I found a good place to bury it, but of course it couldn’t be that simple. It took me a while to realize it, but eventually I figured out that every time I passed the closet in my room, I would start feeling a little dizzy. My head would start to spin and my heart would start to ache. It was like all of my memories of Sai were concentrated into that one box, and no matter how much I tried to block them out, they came rushing into my brain whenever I got near them. 

So I took the train to Shinjuku Station the next day, found a coin locker that let you keep your stuff there for awhile, and locked the shoebox away there, where it couldn’t hurt me. But now the ten days were up. It was time to get it back.

 。。。

There were still a ton of people in the main part of the station. People going out shopping, people wearing raincoats over their business suits, high schoolers and college students slouching around in corners, chic ladies with pink and gold purses clacking around in high heels. The windows showed the dark sky outside and the violent gusts of wind like a silent movie. Navigating the crowded station, I made a couple of wrong turns along the way, but I finally got myself to the same coin lockers as I had used before. Here, in the grimy hallway, there was hardly anybody around. The harsh fluorescent lights glared overhead, and the green lockers glinted eerily. I could feel the box nearby. I could feel my memories of Sai swimming up to the surface again.

Hikaru, let’s play a match!

Please, Hikaru!

Hikaru, just one!

He’d been like a little puppy — always anxious to play, always running around in excitement. Who knew how many times I had told him to stop bothering me, told him to just give me a break and let me do what I wanted to do. There was no point in feeling bad about it now. There was nothing I could do about it anymore. But sometimes the guilt was so intense, I could hardly stand it. 

I found the right locker, crouched down, and pulled the door open slowly. The shoebox was still taped shut messily, shoved all the way to the back of the locker. 

“I’m back,” I whispered, and reached out my hands to take both sides of the box and pull it towards me. 

“Hikaru?”

The voice had come from behind me. I panicked. Shoving the shoebox into my backpack as quickly as I could, I stood up again and nearly fell over from the dizziness. Although she was half hidden in the shadows, I could see a girl in a white lace dress standing at the other side of the hall, looking at me. She took a step forward into the light.

“Akari?” I spluttered. “What the hell are you doing here?”

She pushed a strand of hair behind her ears. “I was just taking a walk,” she said innocently.

“Now? It’s a typhoon, you know?”

“But you’re also out in the middle of a typhoon, Hikaru!” she protested. 

I couldn’t argue with that. 

“Won’t your mom be worried about you?” I asked, slinging the backpack over my shoulders and feeling the weight of the shoebox hit against the small of my back. “Isn’t she kind of strict about you going out?”

“That’s why I’m here,” Akari said. “Sometimes I just want to be somewhere where no one knows me.” Under the fluorescent lights, her usually rosy face looked strangely pale and mature. “Where I can just be myself.”

I stared at her face for a moment, then shook my head. “Well, sorry you ran into me then.”

“What are you talking about? I’m always happy to see you, Hikaru.” She said it like she really meant it. “Actually, I was just thinking about you.”

“Uh, I wasn’t able to talk to Touya yet about your friend. About, um…”

“Eiji,” she reminded me. “That’s all right. You can ask him the next time you see him.”

I thought about the sensation of Touya’s arms around me. The next time I see him. Oh boy…

“Hey, do you mind if we sit down?” I asked. 

“Here? But your suit will get dirty!”

I had forgotten I was still wearing a suit. It looked like it had already gotten dirty where the sleeves had brushed the inside of the locker, but at the moment I really couldn’t have cared less. All of the weight of the day seemed to have hit me at once, and I was suddenly immensely tired.

“Just for a minute, okay?” I said, and kneeled down onto the tiles. From above me, I heard Akari giggle. But the next moment she was sitting next to me, her arms wrapped around her knees. I stared at the floor. 

“You know, Hikaru… I’m still not over you,” she said quietly. 

“Really?”

“A part or me likes Hikaru, and a part of me is over Hikaru…”

I turned up the corners of my mouth. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

She held up her hands to show me. “It’s like a scale,” she said. “On one side is the part of you that likes someone, and on the other side is everything else. If you keep putting your thoughts into one side of the scale, eventually it gets heavier than the other side, and you start to forget how much you like that person, bit by bit. But you never really forget entirely.”

I thought I could hear the sound of wind vaguely, even from this far into the station. It was a mournful, lonely sound.

“What if you keep putting thoughts into the wrong side of the scale?” I asked.

Akari’s light brown eyes met mine as she looked at me thoughtfully. “It depends on what you want, probably,” she said. “If you really want to be in love with someone, you’ll probably keep putting thoughts on that side of the scale no matter what.”

“Then I guess I’m a lost cause,” I muttered.

Maybe she hadn’t heard me, or maybe she had just chosen not to ask me about it, but Akari didn’t say anything — just took my hand in hers quietly and squeezed it. We sat like that for a few minutes. Nobody came by. The fluorescent lights buzzed above our heads, and I thought of someone else’s hand I would rather be holding. 

Holding hands with Akari wasn’t too bad though.

“You’re pretty nice, you know that?” I said.

“Me?” Akari laughed. “I’m nothing near as nice as you are, Hikaru!”

“I bet Eiji’s gonna be crazy about you in another month or two.”

“He won’t be if I don’t get a chance to see him again!” she said scoldingly. “You’d better hold up your end of the promise!”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Just give me a couple days.”

She kissed me on the cheek, and stood up, brushing off her dress. “Good luck with Go, okay?” she said. And then she walked right out of the room without looking back.

Chapter Text

I got a text from Touya the next morning at 6:30 AM. 

“Help me fix my bicycle,” it said. 

Not “Hello,” not “Good morning.” There wasn’t even a “please.”

Sheesh. 

I got out of bed and stretched. I had accidentally left my window partially open during the night, and there was a stain on the sill where the rain had pooled. The inside of my room smelled fresh. 

I mean, I hadn’t even known that Touya owned a bicycle. Didn’t seem like his style. I felt like he’d probably be the kind of guy to go all out with safety precautions. Imagining Touya with a fluorescent vest and a helmet on made me snort so loudly that my mom poked her head in my room to see what was wrong.

“Hikaru? Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said. “Is there any breakfast?”

“No, your father’s still asleep.”

“‘Kay. Then I’ll just have toast,” I said, grabbing my backpack.

“But… are you going somewhere?” my mom asked. 

“Touya’s,” I answered, jumping down the stairs two at a time. 

“Hikaru, quiet!” my mother whispered anxiously, leaning over the banister. “Won’t Touya-kun be asleep? It’s only a quarter to seven!”

“Oh, he’s awake,” I said. “I think he wakes up at like 4.” I stepped into the kitchen. Deciding to skip the toasting part, I undid the twist tie and grabbed a couple of slices of white bread. 

“Hikaru… are you sure you’re all right?” My mom had come down to the bottom of the stairs and was looking at me concernedly. 

Yeah… I mean I guess it made sense that she was worrying about me. When your kid starts fainting right and left and going out to random train stations in the middle of typhoons, maybe you start to worry.

I lifted my head and gave her a smile. Probably a smile. “I’m fine,” I said. “I’ll see you later.”

 。。。

The shoebox was still in my backpack. As I walked from the station, I could feel it bouncing against my back, feeling heavier than it probably should have. The front gardens of people’s houses were blooming with all kinds of flowers — deep pink, cobalt blue, tangerine orange and velvety purple. Long thin leaves spiked out, tangling with carefully trimmed hedges and overgrown grass. The air smelled like soil.

I thought that the neighborhood where Touya lived had a kind of otherworldly feeling to it. Maybe “otherworldly” was too strong of a word, but there was still that sensation every time I walked there, like I was losing myself. The first time I had tried to get to Touya’s house I actually had gotten lost. It hadn’t just been that it was dark; there was something about the way that each garden seemed to melt into the next one. One after another the grand houses rose up from behind well-tended yards, looking imposing and somehow forlorn. Now, after the rain, the dark green leaves of the bushes and trees were slick and glossy. Moss on the stone fences had become so vivid from the moisture it was almost glowing. 

I’m here because he asked me over, I reminded myself. It’s not for me, it’s for him. 

The gate to his house was open, so I let myself into the front yard. Realizing that I hadn’t texted him back yet, I reached into my pocket for my cell phone, but stopped when I heard the door open. Touya’s back was turned to me as he checked the lock. 

“Touya,” I called out. 

He turned over his shoulder to look at me, then made his way through the garden to where I was standing. 

“You didn’t text me,” he said. 

“I was gonna, but then I saw you opening the door,” I said. 

With the morning light shining into them, his dark eyes seemed to be charged with more electricity than usual. He was looking at me like he was trying to figure something out, like I was a puzzle he was trying to solve or a game he could win if he only found the right move. I didn’t like that at all.

“So what’s wrong with your bike?” I asked, starting to walk towards the house.

Stepping past me, he led me to the side of his house, where a maroon-colored bicycle was parked under an awning. I picked it up. It was pretty lightweight, and sleek. It was actually a really nice bike; probably had cost at least 40,000 yen. 

“I got it for my birthday last year,” he said. “But I haven’t used it.”

“Well you lucked out,” I said, crouching down to look at it. “This is a classy bike. Why did you call me over though? You could’ve just taken it to a shop.”

“How does it look?” he asked, instead of answering my question.

I tried turning the pedals, but they seemed to be jammed. Looking at the gears, I could see that the chain had fallen off. On my right, Touya had crouched down next to me. From the corner of my eye, I saw his long black hair slip over his shoulder strand by strand as he leaned forward. As though in slow motion, the curtain of hair swung forward to hide his profile. A shiver ran down my arms.

Don’t think about it. Just act normal. Just be cool.

The thing was, Touya probably hadn’t thought very much about what had happened at the funeral. Maybe he had been confused by it, but I was pretty sure he hadn’t thought of it the way that I had. He hadn’t spent his night remembering what it had felt like to be held. Knowing Touya, he was probably more concerned with the reason why his so-called rival had fallen out of the Ōza tournament a few days ago. Why his so-called rival was literally fainting in crowds. Wondering if the two were related. 

I found the rear derailleur and pushed it forward so there was slack in the chain. Then I pulled the chain up and around the gears again, and pulled the bike up to try the pedals. The wheels started turning. 

“There you go,” I said. “All fixed. Honestly, you could’ve done that by yourself. You didn’t need me.”

I heard him sigh. He brushed his hair behind his ear and stood up, so I stood up too.

“Shindou,” he said. “Do you remember when you gave me a card for my birthday?”

I looked at him suspiciously, trying to figure out why he had brought that up now. “Yeah,” I said. “I remember.”

It had been on December 12th. The two of us had been walking to the train station after an interview. On the way, I’d seen the card in a store, and on a whim, had bought it for him and signed it right then and there. Happy birthday to Akira Touya from Hikaru Shindou. “Maybe this’ll be worth something someday when I’m rich and famous,” I had joked. 

He had smiled wryly and put it in his bag. “I’ll make sure to treasure it carefully,” he had said.

That had been a year and a half ago, before I had realized that maybe there was something else that made me want to chase after him, maybe something more than Go. These days, I really wished I could go back to the way things had been back then.

Touya was looking at me very seriously. “You didn’t buy a card for me last year,” he said.

“Oh,” I said, laughing, not sure how else to respond. My stomach hurt. “Sorry. I guess I forgot.”

“It’s all right,” he said shortly. “This can be a replacement.”

A replacement. A replacement for what? Why did he care about getting a birthday card? He’d never cared about that kind of thing before. It had always been Go — only Go. If we saw each other, it was to play a match or to discuss a match. He’d never before asked me to his house to do something like fix a bicycle. But if the quality of my Go was decreasing, maybe that’s all I was good for now. Maybe he was trying to let me down softly, still keep some semblance of a friendship even when I couldn’t be what I had used to be for him.

The thought hurt so much that I found myself blinking back tears. I swallowed, trying to get a hold of myself.

“Well, I guess that’s it,” I said. I started to turn around, but suddenly a bird called out from behind me, its cry so close, so sweet, and so sharp that I jolted in surprise and reached out for something to hold onto. Quickly, Touya’s hand reached out to catch my arm.

“Shindou.”

I heard the bird fly away behind me, the flapping of wings. Touya was staring into my eyes. 

“What?” I asked, but I knew he could already see all the emotion in my face. His other arm rose up awkwardly to touch me. He was trying to hug me again.

“Touya, stop,” I said, trying to pull away. “Look, I’m fine. You don’t have to…”

But he kept his grip on me, somehow hesitant but stubbornly refusing to back down. He didn’t bring our bodies together. His arms were on my back, but no other part of us touched — it was an attempt at a hug. A gesture.

In spite of my dizziness, I pushed him away.

“It’s fine, okay? You don’t have to do that. It’s weird, right? When we’re both guys.” Touya said nothing, watching me step away and brush off my shirt. “Anyway, I have to leave for my match,” I said. 

“Who are you playing?”

“Nishiguchi 6-dan.”

“I see.” 

I walked down the path to the gate. He followed me, and placed his hand on a stone lantern, looking solemn. “When is your next match after that?”

“After Nishiguchi? Uh… not until Wednesday afternoon I think.”

“What about tomorrow? Do you have any tutoring sessions?”

“Tomorrow? No, I don’t have anything tomorrow.”

“Will you go on a bike ride with me?”

It was probably pure stupidity that made my heart jump like that. Behind Touya, I could distantly hear the sound of the deer scare in the garden. The Japanese pine rustled as a light breeze swept through it. What the hell am I doing, I thought. But I nodded.

“Sure. Yeah, okay.”

“Good,” he said. “Then I’ll meet you at Iriya Station at 1:30 PM. Can you get there from your house?” 

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Good.”

“See you later then,” I said, and waved goodbye.

When I turned around to look at him from the other end of the street, he hadn’t moved from the stone lantern. One hand still rested on it while he stared off into the distance. I realized that my chest was aching like crazy. Like I was already missing the feeling of his arms around me. 

I had never touched Sai. If anything ever happened to Touya, I thought, maybe it would hurt less now that I knew what it felt like to hold him. Then again, maybe it would hurt more that way. 

The leaves on the trees sent a tiny shower of droplets over my head as the breeze passed through them. I walked to the station, and took the train up to the Go Institute for my 9 o’clock match. 

Chapter Text

Tuesday the 31st. Touya was late. 

We had promised to meet at 1:30, but it was 1:36 and I still couldn’t see him anywhere. People walked up and down the stairs to the subway station while I sat on the guardrail with my hand on the seat of my bike, cars whooshing past behind me. Thin, wispy clouds were streaked all across the blue sky. Sai was still in my backpack. Not Sai… the mementos of Sai that I wanted to bury. Was it because of the box that I felt like I was somehow floating, or was it because I was waiting for Touya? The city sounds and the footsteps of the commuters, even the fresh feeling of the air on the last day of March… all of it was faint, swirling around me like I was transparent. And going on a bike ride with Touya — that especially didn’t feel real.  

Since he still hadn’t arrived, I went to the convenience store to buy onigiri. One for me and one for him. I didn’t know what kind he liked, so I had to guess. Salmon, probably, I thought. When I came out of the convenience store again, he had arrived and was standing by the entrance to Iriya Station, holding the handlebars of his bike and trying to pick me out from the crowd.

“Hey,” I said. 

He looked at me as I walked toward him. “Did you wait for a long time?” he asked. 

“Not too long.” I grinned. “You’re not wearing a helmet.”

“I couldn’t find a bicycle store on my way here.”

“You’ll probably be fine,” I said, handing him his onigiri. “Where are we going?”

“It’s north from here,” he replied vaguely. “I drew out a map.”

“Of course you did. Whatever, I’ll just follow you.”

“All right. Are you ready?” he asked, and swung a leg over the frame of his bike. 

“Yeah,” I said.

 。。。

As it turned out, Touya didn’t actually know how to ride a bicycle. We biked in single file with Touya ahead, and me pedaling slowly behind him. Every time we came to a turn or an intersection, he fumbled a bit with the brakes, but he never ran into anything and we never needed to get off or stop. It ended up being a pretty leisurely ride that way. I wasn’t used to going so slowly, so I noticed things I didn’t usually notice; the color of a painted handrail on a bridge that overlooked the train tracks, apartment complexes tinted light pink, the gazillion potted plants lined up in front of an old man’s house, or kids playing baseball in a fenced-in field, shouting at each other and horsing around. 

The one part of the scenery that didn’t change was Touya’s back in front of me. I watched the line of his shoulder blades under the striped shirt he was wearing, watched his legs moving up and down. We didn’t talk, except for a couple of times when Touya warned me we were going to make a turn. He didn’t look back once. Eyes on the road ahead.

After about an hour of riding, we got to a steep hill, and I realized that Touya didn’t know how to change gears. 

“Hey, hold up a sec,” I said, and parked my bike so that I could show him. 

He stopped with difficulty and turned to look at me. 

“It’s like this,” I said, showing him the gear shifters. “Flick, flick, flick for the small stuff. And then the large gears are on this side, okay?” 

“I understand,” he said. “I think you should go ahead now. Our destination is at the top of the hill.”

“Why do you want me to go ahead?”

He wiped some sweat off his forehead. “I don’t have any confidence in my ability to go up a hill.”

“But if I go ahead of you…”

“Don’t worry.”

For a second, I felt a weird sense of anger coming over me. It was something about the coolness of his tone of voice, the self-assured way he held himself even in this kind of situation. 

“Okay, I’m going ahead,” I said, swallowing the emotion.

There was no shade and no trees on the hill, only empty lots filled with grass and weeds on our left. Buildings had become sparser. The sun had gotten hotter, and I could feel my T-shirt sticking to the skin of my back. I thought about Sai — I had mostly stopped riding my bicycle after I’d met him. In third and fourth grade I had used to ride in the park with my friends every day after school, and we’d practiced doing tricks and stuff like that. But then I’d started taking Go lessons, and there had been the Go club at Haze Middle School, and of course private lessons with Sai. A kid like Touya had never learned how to ride a bike because he’d been studying when he was in third grade instead of fooling around doing wheelies. Yesterday, when he had invited me out on this bike ride, I’d known it was out of pity for me, but I still hadn’t been able to turn him down. If I had been stronger, I would’ve said no. I would’ve studied instead. 

Because riding bikes with Touya wasn’t going to get me even a fraction of an inch closer to his skill level. It was only going to feed the part of me that couldn’t give up on him. 

“Shindou, on your left,” I heard Touya call out from behind me. 

We were almost at the top of the hill and I could see a big shrine there. The grey stone gates stood out prominently against a backdrop of dense greenery. There were hydrangea bushes at the foot of the gate, and discolored stone lions standing on pedestals. Without taking my eyes off the shrine, I got off my bike and waited for Touya to catch up.

“Here? This is where you wanted to take me?”

Touya was short of breath as he answered. “The kannushi of this shrine was a renowned Go player. I think it will be very interesting to learn about the history.”

“Go, huh. I guess I should have known. Do you wanna go check it out?”

He nodded.

We parked our bikes by the chain link fence at the perimeter. 

“I’ll lock them together,” Touya said. 

“Oh. Okay.”

The trees seemed to be filled with birds. I could hear them, but not see them, even when I looked up high into the dark branches overhead. Our bodies dipped into the deep shade of the trees as we walked through the gate towards the shrine, and Touya’s eyes moved keenly around us, as though looking for something. 

“What?”

“There might be an informational plaque somewhere.”

“You’re really serious about learning about this kannushi guy, huh?”

“I wanted to come here with you.”

“Well, I’m here,” I said. 

“It should be useful for you to know, as a Go player.”

“Yeah, I get it. History, right?”

“He was a contemporary of Shuusaku Honinbo,” Touya continued in an even tone. “I thought you might be interested.”

I didn’t respond to that because a lump had suddenly formed in my throat. A seed of panic. But I wasn’t going to lose control this time. Not again, not in front of Touya. 

“Ah, here it is,” Touya said, stepping onto a side path that led to weather-beaten sign. He brushed some dirt off of it, and looked at me. I was staring straight ahead of me, trying to breathe normally. “Are you going to read it?” he asked. 

“Yeah.”

The Fujinami family in the Edo period, the title of the sign said. I skimmed my eyes through the first two paragraphs. 

The gist of it was that this Fujinami family had been pretty important in the Imperial Court back in the day, but in the Edo period somebody ruined it by getting on the emperor’s bad side. They could still get jobs taking care of the shrines, so that’s what a lot of them did. One of the Fujinami sons — Sadanaga Fujinami — apparently had risen pretty high in the ranks as a Go player before his wife and two daughters suddenly succumbed to cholera. He was so shattered that he quit Go and took a position tending the shrine instead. His daughters and his wife had died within a single day of falling ill. 

I tightened my grip on the straps of my backpack, remembering Sai’s expression the day I had asked him about Torajirou’s death. 

Torajirou was a good person! Sai had insisted, his eyes shining with distress. He was clever and kind…!

But even good people disappear just like that, I thought. You think you’re going to see them tomorrow, and then you don’t. You wake up, and they’re gone. A phone call, and they’re gone. Everyone, no exceptions. No matter how brilliant or kind they are.

Next to me, Touya was tracing his finger across the plaque. “Hmm,” he said. 

“What?”

“Oh, it says that the shrine is supposedly haunted by Fujinami’s spirit.”

I was already feeling dizzy, but I dug my heels into the ground and controlled my voice to make it sound normal. “This one too, huh?”

“What do you mean?”

I shook my head. “Nothing, it’s just that story about Akari that you didn’t want to hear.”

“I didn’t mean—“

“It’s fine,” I said. “We don’t have to talk about it. You came here to learn about this Fujinami guy, right?” Touya was staring at me with that look again, like he was trying to understand me, so I kept talking, not looking him in his eyes. 

“Must be nice though,” I said. “You get to the peak of your fame, and then you just disappear. Nobody knows how good you might’ve been. Or how bad you might’ve been. You’re always a rising star in everybody’s minds.”

Touya looked at me solemnly. “How can you know when you’re at your peak?” 

“You kind of just know, don’t you?” I said.

“Shindou—“

“Hey, do you wanna see what’s over there?” I interrupted. 

Dark green shadows played over Touya’s face, and his brows were furrowed. His eyes followed to where I was pointing, behind the shrine. This time I could see the question in his eyes, and I could see him swallow it back.

“Is that where you want to go?” he asked me.

“Yeah.”

“Let’s go then.”

 。。。

We walked around the shrine. When we got to the other side of the building, a small field spread out before us, a fence holding back the brush and the trees that pushed in from all sides. Across the meadow there were a few dead stumps and hundreds and hundreds of small yellow and white flowers. Wild daffodils. 

Touya and I both stood and stared for a moment. It was beautiful. For a second, I felt completely lost. Touya must have been feeling the same way, because he didn’t move at all. There was something in the atmosphere that was light and sweet and melancholy all at the same time. It took effort for me to move my feet from where I was standing. I felt like if I spoke, something would be broken. 

Touya followed behind me as I waded into the field, and when I crouched down in the grass he did the same. I didn’t recall having made the plan, but I already knew what I was going to do. Reaching into my backpack, my hands found the shoebox and paused there a moment as the memories began to flood me again. 

Soon you will be playing against Touya… 

Hikaru, you are fearful. Fearful of my attacks on the board.

I am here! Set out the Go board and stones! I am right here!

Play him someday? The way I feel now, it might as well be never.

Hikaru, you can’t even beat me!

Everything was muddled together, a thousand multi-colored memories spinning like a pinwheel in my mind. Sai’s voice, a self-assured smile, the fan pointing to kosumi, tears falling down his cheeks at our first game, newspapers spread on the floor, the long white sleeve reaching out across the board, laughing at digital fish, dancing for joy, hamburgers at McDonald’s, begging me to let him play — just this one game.

I’m sorry Sai, but I can’t do this anymore. I can’t have you in my head, not when you’re gone. I won’t forget you, but I need to say goodbye. 

“Shindou.”

I’ll keep playing Go, Sai, no matter how much it hurts. Even if I just keep sliding backwards like this, I’ll keep playing for you. Because I can’t forget everything that you gave me. 

“Hey Touya,” I said quietly. “I’m gonna bury something, okay?”

Touya watched me lift the shoebox carefully out of my backpack. “Is that for your grandfather?” he murmured.

“No,” I said. “It’s for somebody else.”

He watched me as I began to clear away the grass, digging into the soft earth. For a moment I thought he was going to yell at me for doing this on someone else’s land. But instead, after a few seconds, Touya’s hands joined mine. 

Both of us moved together, the same motion over and over again. His long fingers sometimes brushed against mine, but mostly it was the sensation of soil and grass against our skin. The dirt crusted over my palms and got under my fingernails, and the shallow indentation in the ground slowly grew deeper.

Looking up at Touya’s face, I couldn’t help feeling that he looked really out of place, almost like a completely different person. I’d never seen him with any dirt on his hands before. His cheeks looked lightly sunburnt, and with his lips parted slightly as he worked, I could almost see the old Touya in him, the way he had looked when he was twelve. It had been six years since then, but now that I thought about it, I couldn’t come up with a single memory of us doing something other than Go together. This was maybe the first time. 

“You probably never did this kind of thing when you were a kid, right?” I said.

“I didn’t,” he replied, and I laughed. 

“Yeah, I thought so,” I said. 

“And you did.”

“Play in the dirt and stuff? Yeah, I used to.”

As we continued digging, a bird called from one of the trees behind the fence. Once, and then once again. 

“That’s the same one that was in your garden,” I said, looking up to the trees, trying to find it.

“You won’t be able to see it,” he said. “That’s an uguisu. A bush warbler.”

The bird called a third time, and somewhere from the depths of my memory I recalled a story Sai had told me long ago.

It was a game, he had said. It was always in the beginning of spring, and we called it uguisu-awase. We gathered in a circle, each bringing his own bush warbler in a cage, and the birds would sing for us under the trees in the courtyard. The winner was whoever’s bird had the most beautiful voice. It was my favorite part of spring. 

So you used to like doing stuff other than Go too, I had said.

Of course. But these are customs of days long past.

I looked at Touya’s hand, which was resting gently on the shoebox. In that moment, it suddenly felt like all three of us were together: Touya, Sai and me. 

“Will you help me?” I asked.

“Yes,” Touya said, and we lowered the shoebox into the grave, and buried it. 

I picked a single daffodil and placed it on top of the mound. “Do you wanna go back?”

Chapter Text

We had a late lunch together at a gyudon restaurant, then started on the bike ride home. Touya lost control going down one of the smaller hills and almost twisted his ankle trying to stop the bike, so after that we went even slower than we had on the way up. It was the same city around us as always, but everything seemed quieter somehow. The sound of my bike, the sound of Touya’s bike, the whirring as we coasted past the storefronts of buildings.

By the time we had reached Touya’s house, the sun was setting.

Touya got off his bike and parked it under the awning. He was limping slightly.

“Are you okay?” I asked, taking a step across the gravel toward him.

“I’m fine,” he said. 

“Your ankle’s not…?”

“It will be fine.”

He was staring at me, as though expecting something. Oh, a goodbye probably. We’d been together all day, and it was getting dark now. He probably wanted to be alone. But at the same time that I realized that, I also realized that I didn’t want to say goodbye. It was a weirdly desperate feeling. Not yet! I’m not ready! Just one more minute! Even I knew that it was pretty ridiculous.

“It’s getting late, huh,” I said, starting to turn my bike around, “I guess I should probably…”

“Shindou.”

“What?”

He paused, his lips tight.

“What!?”

“I’m concerned about the way you’ve been acting recently.”

In spite of myself, I felt a sudden pain in my chest. Here it was, I thought. I should have known it was coming.

“Do you mean my Go?” I asked.

He nodded slowly. 

I kicked out the kickstand of my bike, and set it down in the gravel roughly. “You don’t have to worry,” I said. “I know my games have sucked recently, but I’m not going to give up. I’m gonna keep pushing myself until I’m good enough. I’ll keep pushing myself no matter what.”

Without moving, he continued looking into my eyes. “I don’t want you to do that,” he said. 

“What!?” My voice came out louder than I had meant it to. “What do you mean? You don’t want me to push myself!?”

“No, I don’t.” His eyebrows were furrowed. Standing across from him, I felt angry, unbalanced. 

“Then what am I supposed to do? Just fall behind and stay a 4-dan forever?” I yelled. “You want me to stop chasing you? Is that what you want!?”

“How could I ask you to chase me if I knew it would make you miserable!?” Touya shouted back. 

I stared at him. His eyes were large with anger, and even in his anger he was beautiful, orange light from the setting sun streaming in from behind him, the garden a patchwork of shadows and gold. 

“I’m not miserable,” I snapped. “I’m fine. I like playing Go with you. I want to chase after you. I like going to conferences together. I like being with—” 

I swallowed hard, realizing what I had been about to say. 

“I’m fine,” I said again. My heart was pounding in my chest and the world seemed to be tilting around me. I had to leave. If I didn’t leave now, I knew I was going to do something stupid.

“Thanks for taking me to the shrine,” I said. “It was nice.”

“Shindou, wait.”

“I should probably go home.”

“Shindou, tell me the story about Akari.” He had grabbed my sleeve, his face set in determination.  

It felt like something was twisting in my heart, like my throat was filled with something heavy. “It isn’t anything,” I said. “She just wants you to set her up with some guy from your study group. It’s not important.”

“You told me that the shrine you visited together was haunted.”

“It wasn’t really haunted. It was a fake ghost. And even if it was a real ghost, it would have been fine, you know?” I said, my voice becoming thick. “Getting haunted isn’t the worst thing that could happen to you. It could even be the best—”

The tears came all at once, and I couldn’t speak.

The best thing that ever happened to you.

“Shindou!” Touya shouted.

I hadn’t realized that I was running, but my feet were suddenly moving underneath me. Tears were running down both my cheeks, and my breath hitched as I tried to breathe in. 

God, I miss him so much. I miss Sai so much.

Why? Even though I had said goodbye, even though it should have been over…

“Shindou, wait!” 

I could hear Touya’s voice from behind me, and I realized that I was running into his garden instead of out of his garden, like an idiot. The light had faded almost completely and the shapes were dark in front of me. I didn’t know where I was going, but I kept running ahead, the trees and bushes scratching my arms as I ran. By now I was sobbing just like a little kid, and Touya could hear me. I wanted to disappear. Everything hurt too much.

“Where are you?” Touya’s voice came from far away. “Ah—!” There was a stumbling sound, and I realized that he had fallen down. 

“Touya!”

“Shindou, where are you?”

“You don’t — don’t come after me… your ankle…” The words were hard to get out, but I didn’t want him to see me. I leaned into the plum tree, letting the rough bark dig into my back, and pressed my fists into my eyes until they made stars. 

“How can I reach you?” His voice rang out clear from across the garden. “When I try to get close to you, it’s as though you turn away. Every time I try…”

“You don’t have to reach me,” I yelled, wiping away tears. “Being rivals is enough, right?”

When I opened my eyes, I could see the moon still low in the horizon in front of me, the small white circle caught in the branches of the tree, surrounded by dark pink flowers. The night felt like it was pouring into me, filling me up.

“I realized,” Touya called out, “that I was taking it for granted that you would always be there. I’ve learned now. It’s not enough for me to simply hope that you’ll stay by my side. I have to give something back to you. I want to know you.”

“There’s nothing good to know about me,” I whispered.

“Shindou, I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. If there’s something I can give, I will give it to you. If I tell you about myself, will you let me get closer to you?”

I didn’t answer, watching the moon blur again with tears.

“I can’t watch horror movies and I don’t like fish cakes,” he said. “I can’t cook and I can’t sing. Please don’t disappear. I won’t let you disappear. I won’t let you!”

I clenched at the ground. I could hear the sound of footsteps. He was coming towards me.

“Please, Shindou!”

“I was haunted,” I yelled. “I was haunted by a ghost for two and a half years and then he left me all alone. My grandpa’s dead, and I’m so scared I’m going to die, or you’re going to die, or my mom is or my dad is, and I can’t even play Go like I used to…!”

I felt as though everything were dissolving around me. The deep pink of the plum blossoms were melting into the paleness of the moon. My heart was empty.

And then his hand was on my arm. 

“I found you,” he said. 

Chapter Text

He took us inside and turned the lights on in the kitchen. Then he took my hand and led me to the living room. 

“Come,” he said, and we sat on the couch. 

He didn’t ask me anything; didn’t say anything. He pulled me close to him and wrapped his arms tightly around me. The light from the kitchen only barely reached the room, and everything was quiet aside from the hushed whirring of the electric fan and the faint tap of the deer scare that we could hear from the open window. Touya’s house smelled like old wood and incense. I moved my arms out from between us, and hugged him back. We didn’t move.

He was hugging me like a child would hug someone, I thought. There was something protective and almost stubborn about his posture. With his head tucked down near my shoulder, I could lightly feel the movement of his breath. His shirt was soft, and his hair looked so smooth and silky that I wanted to stroke it. 

I must be going crazy. Maybe I am crazy. Is this real?

“Touya,” I said, like I was testing out my voice. I still felt hoarse from crying.

He shifted, and drew me even closer. 

“Are you okay?”

He nodded. So very carefully, I moved one hand to stroke his hair. We stayed like that for probably ten minutes, maybe longer, until Touya took my hand and squeezed it tightly and said in a soft voice “Let’s make dinner.”

 。。。

He handed me a bowl of snap peas. “Can you take off the ends?”

“I thought you didn’t know how to cook,” I said. 

He smiled. “This is the only recipe I know.”

“You liar.”

He got some tofu, mushrooms, and an eggplant from the refrigerator. “I really only have enough for one person.”

“It’s okay.”

I started taking the ends and the strings off the pea pods while Touya cut the carrots.

“There was a period when my father couldn’t play Go,” he said, his eyes fixed on the cutting board in front of him. “He told me about it a few years ago.”

“Oh yeah?”

“It was when he was twenty-two. It only lasted a couple of months, but during those months he couldn’t even look at a Go board.”

“Your dad? No way. I don’t believe that.”

“He told me he considered quitting. It was a kind of temporary madness that overtook him. Everywhere he looked, he saw corruption and sorrow. He began to lose his faith in the world and wanted to retreat from it entirely. Even so, all he knew was Go, so his alternative career choices were quite limited.”

I imagined the former Meijin walking through the streets of Tokyo in his kimono, looking at the buildings around him and seeing nothing but grey.

“Of course, soon after he began playing again he met his sensei, and once again became absorbed in the game. He never stopped playing again after that. But I was surprised when he told me the story. I never would have guessed that he had experienced such a period in his life.”

I waited for Touya to continue, but he didn’t say anything else. He was staring at the carrots, his fingers resting lightly on the counter.

“Look,” I said, “I’m sorry I’ve been playing such crappy Go. I went around telling everyone I was your rival, and then I don’t know what happened, I just… got scared or something. You’ve seen my games. You know how I’ve been playing. I’m going to do better, but I—“

“Shindou,” Touya said abruptly. “I have complete confidence in your Go.”

I blinked my eyes. “What?” I said. “I mean, why…?”

“Go players do not lose strength; there is only a failure to adapt to circumstances. No matter how harshly you judge your own skills, there’s no meaning if you aren’t able to accurately recognize the depths of your abilities. Humility is not the same as baseless self-criticism.”

He took the bowl of peas from me and began snapping the ends off and roughly casting them aside. 

“I know your Go, Shindou, and I know that you will be my rival for as long as we are alive. That is why you should stop talking about disappearing.”

I grabbed the bowl back and moved it so it was right between us. “I never said I was going to disappear.”

“You implied as much.”

“I didn’t! You worry too much.”

“Did you think I hadn’t noticed your dizziness? You can’t be my rival if you’re not well enough to play,” he said. “I think that would make anyone worry.”

I sighed heavily, and ran my hands through my hair. “When your dad was feeling… when he couldn’t play Go, what did he do? How did he get out of that?”

“He met my mother,” Touya said softly. “They met in the first week of October, and he courted her for two weeks before realizing his feelings. He told me that once he had made the decision to confess his feelings to her, he was able to play Go again.”

I laughed. “I didn’t know your dad was such a romantic.”

“There are many things he doesn’t say.”

I reached into the bowl, but there was nothing there. Touya had finished preparing the last of the peas. I watched him sweep the discarded ends into a bowl and empty them into the garbage. He turned to the sink and began washing his hands.

“Hey Touya,” I said, not looking at him.

“What?”

“I love you.”

When there was no response for a few seconds, I looked over at him again. He had turned the water off and had tilted his head back, his eyes closed. He took a slow, deep breath in as though he were savoring something. Outside, the wind blew through the trees.

“I love you too,” he murmured. 

In that moment, I saw him again. The Touya who couldn’t watch horror movies and who hated fishcakes. Not only the most brilliant mind in the Go world today, but the one who was just a person, just as human as me. He opened his eyes, and turned to me. 

“But Shindou,” he said, “I don’t know anything about ghosts.”

Without thinking, I began laughing. Touya looked completely confused, and that only made me laugh harder.

“You don’t…” I said, then had to stop to try and keep a straight face. “You don’t have to know anything about ghosts!”

“Shindou, I—“

“You already know the important parts,” I said. I took a deep breath, and looked at him seriously. “You already know Sai. You already know how he played.”

There was a moment before I saw the shock enter his eyes. 

“You don’t mean…!”

“Yeah.”

“Shindou!”

In a swift, awkward movement, he took my hand and drew me towards him until we were hugging again. A tight, desperate embrace, like he wanted to eliminate all the distance between us. His fist gripped the back of my shirt almost angrily.

“Hey,” I said, moving a hand toward his back.

“Don’t let go!” he said, and my heart beat faster as I realized something.

The times before when he had hugged me, maybe he hadn’t been doing it for my sake. Maybe it had been for him. Maybe he had wanted this just as much as I had, and hadn’t known how to ask. 

And with that realization, there were suddenly sparks going all through my body and so much love in my heart that I thought I was going to fall over from the intensity. I held on to him tighter, not wanting to let even an inch of him go. 

“Touya,” I said. “If it’s you, I think I can talk about Sai. You just have to ask, okay? It’s not easy for me. I get, um… I get kind of emotional about it. But you can ask me. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

“I want to know everything,” he said.

Chapter Text

On a May morning the air coming through the living room window in Touya’s house is light pink, like spring. The sunlight is shining through the plum tree and tinting the room. Touya is brushing the black and white stones off the board into his hands. We’ve been playing for four hours.

“Shall we take a break?” he asks me, his eyes still distant as he continues to recall the shapes of the game.

“Sure,” I say.

He gets up and walks to the kitchen while I lean back on my hands and look around me. I still don’t really feel used to Touya’s house. Sometimes when I come over his parents are here, and I feel out of place and don’t really know how to act. But then there are the days when we can just sit and play long beautiful games in the sunlight like this, just the two of us. Recently it’s been like that every weekend.

When my phone starts ringing, I pick it up and take a look. It’s Akari, and I smile, thinking I probably know what she’s calling about. It feels like forever ago that we talked. I answer the phone.

“Hey what’s up?”

“Hikaru!”

I can hear the joy in her voice, instantly.

“What, did you win the lottery?”

She giggles. “No, don’t be silly! It worked, Hikaru! The ghost really helped me!”

“Hold on,” I say. “The ghost?”

“The ghost at the shrine! The ghost for success in love! It worked! Eiji asked me out today!”

I laugh. “That was me, don’t you think? I was the one who talked to Touya and asked him to talk to Eiji for you. Shouldn’t you be thanking me instead of the ghost?”

“But I think the ghost was a big part of it,” she says stubbornly.

“Whatever, if you say so. But I’m happy for you.”

“Eiji’s so cool!” she gushes. “He wants to take me to the ferris wheel for our first date. Isn’t that romantic?”

“That’s pretty romantic,” I agree.

Touya comes in and sets a glass of barley tea next to me, then kneels down on the other side of the empty board.

“I’m so happy,” Akari says. “I wanted to tell you first, Hikaru. It’s thanks to you that I was able to go out with Eiji.”

“That’s what I just said! I was the one who-”

“No, but I mean something different! It’s because I fell in love with you the first time that I was able to fall in love with Eiji,” she says. “I think falling in love the first time made it easier somehow.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah. Once you start loving someone you start loving everything else too. Your teachers, your classmates, the sun, the color of the grass… even bugs and worms! That’s how it is for me anyway! And then when I start loving everything, falling in love with a person kind of happens naturally, before I even know it.”

“If you talk like that, people are gonna start thinking you’re kooky,” I tease. Touya is looking at me, smiling just slightly.

“But what about you, Hikaru? Did your love come true too?”

“Uh…” My eyes flick over to Touya and I bite my lip. “Yeah.”

“What? Really? Do you mean it?”

“Yeah. Uh, anyway I’ll tell you about it later, okay? I gotta go.”

“Wait, Hikaru, you can’t just…!”

“I’ll talk to you later okay?” I say, and hang up before she can say anything back.

The sun, the color of the grass, bugs and worms…

Akari sure says funny things sometimes.

Touya looks at me as I toss my phone back into my bag.

“Do you think there really was a ghost at that shrine?” he asks me.

“The one with Akari?” I ask and scratch my head, grabbing the barley tea. “Maybe… who knows. I don’t think Sai was the only one out there."

“Right,” he says. “I think so too.”

We both listen to the bugs humming and buzzing in Touya’s garden and sip our tea.

“Hey Touya, let’s go on a walk,” I suggest.

“All right,” he agrees.

。。。

As it turns out, the dizziness didn’t go away on its own. I kind of thought it would after I buried Sai’s box, but it still gets to me a couple of times a month — the only difference is that it’s not as bad as it used to be.

I wonder why. I’m just happier I guess.

When I talk to Touya about Sai, he gets really quiet and listens really carefully. He asks me questions, but some of them are things I can’t answer, so I feel kind of dumb for not asking Sai more about his life. When I start to feel really guilty, Touya grabs my hand and takes me to the Go board, and we play until I can’t think of anything other than Go. And sometimes he leans his head on my shoulder and we hold hands, just sitting together. I think I like that just as much as I like playing Go with him. He always seems happy when he’s holding my hand somehow, even if he doesn’t say anything.

When I had my preliminary B match for the Tengen, Touya couldn’t come watch me, but my mom and dad came. When I came out into the lobby, they were both there, holding their coats and smiling awkwardly.

“The young man in the room explained what was happening to us,” my mom said. “He said your… oh what was it? Your extension? He said it was very good.”

“Oh, uh, thanks,” I said. I didn’t tell her that I had no idea which extension she was talking about. I was so surprised to see them, I just kept looking back and forth from my mom’s face to my dad’s.

“It’s definitely more than I can understand,” my dad said. “But I’m glad we came. I guess now I know what you’ve been doing, or I have at least a little bit of an idea.”

“Yeah, thanks for coming,” I said. “You didn’t have to.”

“We wanted to,” my dad said.

We all left the Go Institute together, and my dad took us out for ice cream. It was kind of weird — I couldn’t remember the last time we’d all gone out as a family — but it was nice. He got chocolate, I got strawberry, and my mom got vanilla. Halfway through, my mom and dad switched cups.

“I’m not giving you guys any of mine,” I warned them.

“That’s all right, Hikaru!” My mom laughed.

Maybe it was something about Grandpa dying. Or maybe it was something my dad had always wanted to do. He told us that he thought he could probably get transferred back to Tokyo starting in December. He was going to talk to his boss and see.

“Cool,” I said.

“Yeah. It will be good to see you two more often again,” he said, and licked the back of his spoon thoughtfully.

。。。

Touya and I walk down through his neighborhood to the little park behind the hospital. It’s hot, and there’s fluff from the poplar trees floating around in the air and covering the ground so thick it almost looks like snow.

“It’s getting into your sandals,” Touya tells me, laughing, so I just take them off and walk barefoot.

“I think this will be a good memory,” I say.

“When will it be a good memory?” he asks.

“Maybe when I’m old.”

He clasps his hands behind his back and looks thoughtful. “I would like to make many more memories like this with you.”

“Yeah? Sounds good to me. What kind of things should we do? Eat food? Go on trips?”

“Yes.”

“Play Go?”

“Of course.”

We sit down under the tree, and look up at the branches. Slowly, like it’s floating down from the sky, I feel a memory coming back to me — a day with Sai.

We’re walking around school after a club meeting, talking about how I lost against Tsutsui-san again. Sai is encouraging me, telling me not to give up. And then we’re passing by the baseball field and we can hear the crack of the bat and the other kids yelling, and Sai is asking me what baseball is and how you play it, and I’m promising him that we’ll listen to a game on the radio sometime. Then he asks me what the radio is, and I ask him if we can just talk about Go instead, because this is getting complicated.

We’re holding hands and walking along, and the air is hot, but I’m happy because Sai is with me.

No, I think. I can’t be holding Sai’s hand, because Sai was a ghost and this hand is warm and real. I can feel it squeezing back gently.

“What are you thinking about?” Touya’s voice asks as though from far away.

I laugh. The branches of the poplar tree overlap with the branches of the trees outside Haze Middle School. I can hear Sai chattering on behind me; I can feel Touya’s shoulder next to mine.

“Nothing,” I say, closing my eyes again and smiling. “I’m just dreaming.”