Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Part One
“A Town in Blue”
“或る街の群青”

Writing things out by hand is always hard for me.  It’s slow, and after a while my hand starts to cramp.  Not to mention my penmanship isn’t the best.  As a modern person, I’m just not used to it.  With that said, the inconvenience of it does make me think carefully about what I put down.  I don’t want to write something unless I’m sure it should be said.  Admittedly, when I write lyrics for songs, I use a pen and paper too.

The doctor, Ishikawa-sensei, was the one to suggest I keep a journal.  I’m supposed to record my thoughts, whatever they may be, for my own reflection.  I don’t have to show anyone; there are no requirements for what I can or can’t write.  However, the one thing Ishikawa-sensei insisted on was that I do things the old fashioned way - that is, not with a computer.

I don’t really get why that part is so important, but I don’t want to upset Ishikawa-sensei, and by extension my parents, so I’ll do what he says.  Firstly, I should say I’m not the best at expressing myself clearly, so whatever I write in here might not make the most sense.  I’m also a little stupid, so I might say something silly or incorrect every now and then.  If anyone ends up reading this someday, I apologize in advance.

Ishikawa-sensei visits twice a week, once on Wednesdays and again on Saturdays.  The first time he came to my room, I refused to speak with him.  I feel bad about it now, but at the time I was afraid of him.  I felt sure that he was going to take me to a cold, empty hospital somewhere far away, tie me to a chair, stick me full of needles, and declare me unfit for participation in society.  And then keep me in a bottle on a shelf somewhere.

But it turned out he wasn’t that sort of doctor.  If I had to guess, I’d say he was a therapist of sorts.  The second time he visited, he sat in the hallway and spoke to me through the closed door.  My mother gave him a cushion and some water.  The third time, because I felt guilty, I let him crack the door open a little.  I watched him from my futon.  He was short, even for his generation, with a balding head.  His eyes, surrounded by deep set wrinkles, were kind looking.  He reminded me a bit of my grandfather on my mother’s side, who passed away when I was about five.  Especially his voice.  It was raspy, like the scrape of acoustic guitar strings.  After a few more visits, I began to trust him.

Unlike everyone else, including my parents, Ishikawa-sensei never once asked me to explain myself.  He never demanded to know what had happened to me, or where I’d been for the last two years.  For the most part we just talked about mundane things.  Our favorite foods, or music that we liked.  Hiromi Gō.  Polkadot Stingray.  I’m pretty lousy at keeping up a conversation, but he didn’t seem to mind.

After about a month, I asked Ishikawa-sensei why he never questioned me like the others.  Mostly I just felt bad because he had to keep talking to a gloomy lump like myself.  I always stumble over my words, and I never say things the right way.  I was worried he would eventually lose patience with me.  Then I’d really have no one.

But Ishikawa-sensei was very kind.  He said that it wasn’t his job to understand me, but rather to help me understand myself.  Afterwards, he reached into his bag and handed me a notebook and a box of pens that he’d bought from the store.  A gift for me, he said.

At first I had no clue what to write about.  I kept starting, then stopping, and starting again, only to cross out everything I’d written.  After a week the floor of my closet was littered with crumpled up pieces of paper.  It’s difficult to write about myself.  Some of the lyrics I’ve written are about me, but that’s different.  With lyrics, I can hide behind the vagueness and symbolism of the words.  Writing out my thoughts like this, I’m completely exposed.  And there isn’t anything about me worth exposing.

I confided in Ishikawa-sensei about this, and he said that writing is a bit like walking through a forest at night.  Sometimes you can only see what’s right in front of you.  But, step by step, you carve a path forward.  I thought to myself, if I was brave enough to do that, I would have done it already.  But he was doing his best on my behalf, so I figured I should at least try my best too.

After he left, I shut myself in the closet and tried writing again.  At that point, all I could think about was how much my hand hurt from gripping the pen.  So I started with that.  It’s been about an hour now - now I’m here.  Once I managed to get started, I ended up writing more than I thought.  I guess Ishikawa-sensei was right.

I’m getting tired, so I’ll leave things there for now.  In the morning I’ll write about the first thing that comes to mind.

When I think about where to start, I keep coming back to one person.  That person is Kita-san.  For some reason, when it comes to explaining everything that happened, that feels like the correct place to begin.  I’m not sure why - it just feels right.  So I’ll start there.

The last time I saw Kita-san, we were walking through Shibuya together.  There was a boutique in Harajuku she wanted to visit.  We went in the morning, on a weekend in January.  I remember it was snowing that day.  The new year’s crowds hadn’t died down yet, and the streets were packed with people.  I held Kita-san’s hand tightly as we left the station.

At the boutique, Kita-san bought a new sweater.  A black one to pair with her favorite brown coat.  It suited her really well.  And as a surprise early birthday gift, she bought me a new scarf.  A thick red one that matched the color of her hair perfectly.  I’d lost mine on a windy day about a month prior - the collar of my tracksuit had gone stiff from being turned up against the wind for so long.

I refused the gift at first.  It was too expensive, and it wasn’t even February yet.  But Kita-san insisted that she’d been saving for a while, so it was no problem.  Besides, she said, she was tired of watching me walk around with my shoulders raised all the time.  I blushed when she said this, and when she saw she laughed and wrapped the scarf around me, all the way up to my nose.

“Let’s go,” she said, before taking my hand again.

The crowds were even stronger later in the day.  The sun was high in the sky, but it was still lightly snowing.  Along with the countless heads bobbing down the street, and the huge buildings all around us, it felt like we were inside a giant snow globe.  The scarf tickled my nose as I followed behind Kita-san, her warm fingers intertwined with mine.

I remember thinking how lucky I was to have met Kita-san.  Without her, I never would have witnessed a sight like that.  I’m terrified of crowds, and even worse with directions.  She made that possible for me.  The thought should have made me happy, but for some reason it only brought tears to my eyes.  Why was I so filled with sadness that day?  No matter how hard I try, I can’t remember.

The Chiyoda line was packed to the gills on the way home.  We stood pressed up against the doors, pretty much nose to nose.  Kita-san wound the scarf around the both of us so we could squeeze closer and make more room.  When our eyes met, she giggled and whispered, “Sorry.”  I shook my head before averting my gaze.  She smelled like freshly peeled oranges.

The train swayed gently.  Kita-san linked our arms together so I wouldn’t lose my balance.  I worried that I smelled like sweat or mothballs, but was also too scared to ask.  At one point, she put her lips to my ear and asked if I would go see the cherry blossoms in Ueno Park with her when spring came.

Why was I so sad that day?  I still can’t quite remember.  When she asked me about Ueno Park, I felt once again like I was going to cry.  I don’t know what to do with this feeling, this sadness without a name.  All I know is that at the time, I never wanted to be parted from Kita-san.  I wanted to be with her always.  Without her, I would be reduced to nothing.

But we never got to see the cherry blossoms together.  After that snowy morning in Shibuya, I never saw Kita-san again.

I can’t remember what happened after I said goodbye to Kita-san that day.  Just like that unexplainable sadness, there’s a huge blank in my memory.  If you were to ask me why, I wouldn’t be able to tell you the reason.  I know it sounds crazy.  But that’s the truth.  I must have gotten off the Chiyoda line and gone somewhere.  But where did I go?  And how did I get there?  I should know the answer, but I just don’t.  It’s not just that I can’t remember what happened.  I don’t even know why I can’t remember.

By the time my eyes opened, night had already fallen.  At first I wasn’t sure where I was exactly.  I was seated on a swing set in a park somewhere.  My hands gripped the chains on either side of me.

After a moment, I realized I was in the park where I first met Nijika-chan.  I felt disoriented, like when you fall asleep without meaning to and wake up in the middle of the day.  Had I been sleeping?  That was hard to believe; I’m usually too aware of my surroundings to sleep anywhere that isn’t my futon.

And in any case, I had no recollection of deciding to go to that park, much less arriving there.  In fact, I couldn’t remember anything after getting off the train earlier that day.  My brain felt spongy - like bread that’s been dunked in soup and left to soak.  My legs wobbled like they’d just climbed a mountain.  If I hadn’t been sitting on the swing set, I might have fallen over.

All the windows in the surrounding houses were dark.  My shadow stretched out in front of me, long and strangely shaped.  At the other end of the park I could barely make out the silhouettes of those wooden animals fixed to springs that little children ride on.  In the darkness they looked like the real thing.  All I could hear was the chirping of crickets.  It must have been very late. 

I checked my phone, which said it was three in the afternoon.  That couldn’t be right.  It was so dark and quiet out that it was probably closer to midnight.  I realized my parents were probably worried about me.  I’d left in the morning and been gone all day.

I decided to let them know I would be home soon.  But when I dialed home and held the phone to my ear, a woman’s voice smoothly informed me that I had no signal.  Baffled, I turned the device over in my hands several times.  I tried again with no luck.  My phone didn’t seem to be broken otherwise.  But there was no signal, and the time was clearly wrong.

It was best to head home as soon as I could.  It wasn’t a good idea to be out alone so late.  The crowds in Harajuku must have tired me out.  I wasn’t used to places like that, after all.  After coming here, I must have dozed off until nighttime.  That was the only logical explanation.  Even if it didn’t seem likely.

I pocketed my phone and got to my feet.  That was when I realized that my body was completely drenched in sweat.  It was January, but the nighttime air felt incredibly humid, as if it were the height of summer.  I was still wearing my winter coat and the scarf Kita-san had gifted me.  Underneath all that, I was sweating like a pig.  It must have been nearly forty degrees celsius outside.  My usual tracksuit, which I wore underneath, stuck to my back like paste.

I quickly removed my coat and scarf.  I felt weirdly unsteady on my feet.  As fast as I could, I stumbled away from the park in the direction of the station.

It took me several tries to find the train to Kanagawa-ken.  I kept making wrong turns and ending up on unfamiliar streets.  When I finally found the station, it was so late that I barely made the last train.  I should have known the area around Shimokitazawa station like the back of my hand, but I chalked it up to the odd fogginess in my head.

The ride back felt even longer than usual.  I dozed off and snapped back awake several times.  My body felt fatigued, probably dehydrated from sweating so much.  I wondered how long I’d been sitting there, slowly melting in that bizarre winter heat.

When I finally reached home and tried to unlock the front door, the key wouldn’t turn. 

I tried several times, but it held fast.  I pulled the key out, wiped it against my pant leg, and inserted it a second time.  Still nothing.

On the train I’d developed a splitting headache, and it had only grown worse since.  My temples throbbed as I tried desperately to get into the house.  But no matter what I did, the door wouldn’t open.  I must have angered the gods somehow, I thought.

The lights inside the house were off.  Everyone was probably asleep, and my phone wasn’t working.  For several moments I fretted about ringing the doorbell.  My mother was sure to scold me for being out so late, and getting locked out no less.  But I had no other choice.  After going back and forth like that for some time, I pressed the doorbell.

A minute passed, but nothing happened.  I rang once more, and to my relief, the lights in the house flicked on.  But the door didn’t open.  Instead I heard a pair of footsteps just inside, then a series of hushed whispers.  

I knocked on the door and called out to them so they would know it was me.  But the door remained closed, and the whispering on the other side grew more intense.

Why weren’t they opening the door?  I knocked again.  In my nervousness I hit it harder than I intended.  It rattled loudly on its hinges.  I called out to them again.

The space beyond the door was completely silent.  A minute later, the lights switched back off.  I was plunged into sudden darkness on the front porch.  Somewhere in the distance, a dog started barking.

I called out to them again and rang the doorbell.  But this time there was no response.  The windows on either side of the door remained dark.  I raised my voice as much as I dared given the time of night, desperately jiggling the knob.   The dog started barking even louder as my voice carried down the street.  Okaa-san!  Otou-san!  But the door remained closed.

I stood stock still on the dark porch, covered in sweat.  They must be angry at me for being out so late.  That was the only explanation I could think of.  I was a bit surprised they would lock me out over that, but if that was to be my punishment, I had no choice but to accept it.  At least it wasn’t cold out.  Hopefully I wouldn’t be disowned in the morning.

Having resigned myself to spending the night outside, I sat down on the front step and dozed off.  I don’t know how much time passed, but eventually, I heard the sound of a car engine.  I looked and saw a police car pulling up to the house.  The growl of the engine abruptly stopped as both doors popped open.  A pair of officers emerged from inside, approaching me slowly.

The officers asked me to step away from the door and come speak with them.  At first I just stared from where I was, completely frozen.

After several moments the first officer, an older man with streaks of gray in his hair, asked again for me to move.  His voice startled me into action.  I quickly scurried over to them, beneath the shadow of a large tree outside the front gate.

They asked for my name, which I gave.  Then they asked if I was a resident there.  I was too afraid to speak properly at first, but eventually managed to say that I was.  The first officer shined his flashlight on the nameplate behind me, then glanced at his partner.

My heart pounded in my chest.  Perhaps the officers had stopped me because I was out past curfew.  But they hadn’t just been passing by.  Someone called them here.  Was I being framed for some crime?  Was I about to be arrested?  Suddenly, my breathing became labored.

The second officer, a young woman perhaps in her thirties, spoke to me in a kind voice.  She must have realized how terrified I was - I’d never spoken to a policeman in my life.  She told me the couple in the house had called, saying a stranger was trying to enter their home.

A hot summerlike wind shook the branches above us.  I shook my head profusely and explained that my parents lived in the house, along with my little sister.  We also had a dog, a shiba named Jimihen.  That part probably wasn’t important, but I wanted her to know I was telling the truth.  She nodded and asked me to stay calm.  Surely this was just some sort of misunderstanding, she said.

The older officer swung the gate open and walked up to the door.  I waited beside the gate.  I wrung my hands together, the red scarf crumpled between my fingers.  What misunderstanding could there have been?  This was the right house, I was sure of it.

The officer knocked on the door and announced in a firm voice that he was with the police.  A moment later the lights inside the house were back on.  I heard the sound of the latch unlocking.

At that point, I was still expecting to see my parents standing inside the house.  I’d been taking the same commute back home from Shimokitazawa for years by then.  I know I’m pretty clumsy, but surely there was no way I’d end up at the wrong house. 

As I thought that, my eyes drifted to the nameplate beside the gate.  The one the officer had shined his light on earlier.  The kanji written there was different than usual.  It was a name I did not recognize.

I looked back to the door.  As I did, the officer removed his hat and bowed deeply.  And past his bent back I saw the faces of the people standing inside the house.  My heart dropped in my chest when I saw their faces.

It was two elderly people.  One man and one woman.  For a moment I thought they might be my grandparents, but then I remembered that wasn’t possible.  My grandfathers had both passed away already, and my grandmother lived all the way in Nagoya.  

In other words, they were complete strangers. 

They took me to the police station after that.  I sat in the back, directly behind the driver’s seat.  I wasn’t handcuffed or anything, but I was so frozen with fear that I might as well have been.  The female officer saw that I looked sick and rolled down the window for me.

As we drove, they asked several times for my address.  I could only repeat the address of the house we’d just left.  I gave my parents’ full names.  I didn’t know what else to say.  I just kept repeating those same things, over and over.

Ever since waking up in that park it was one strange occurrence after another.  First the phone, then the key.  Now I was sitting in the back of a police car, being escorted to the station by two officers.

The throbbing in my head was getting worse.  I felt like a tree was going to sprout from it at any moment, splitting my skull clean open like that famous rock up in Tohoku.  My stomach churned, the bile rising up to my throat.  I felt like I was going to be sick.

When we reached the station, I was so terribly anxious that the second I got out, I bent over and threw up all over the sidewalk.  My entire body shook all over.  The female officer helped me, patting my back.  It was so embarrassing, I thought I could cry.  If I wasn’t so dehydrated, I just might have.

Once I was able to move, I was escorted into the station.  The inside seemed pretty empty.  At least, I don’t remember seeing anyone else there.  I was shown to the bathroom so I could clean my mouth and face of vomit.

After I was done they took me to a small room in the back.  There was a cot pushed up against the wall.  A desk sat beside the window, stacked high with folders stuffed full of papers.

The female officer had me sit on the bed and told me she would be back with some tea.  I sat ramrod straight at the edge of the bed.  A moment later she returned, holding a tray with a pitcher of barley tea.  I was handed a cup and told to drink.  As I gulped down the tea, she took my coat and hung it over the desk chair.  She tried to take the scarf too, but I was clutching it so tightly that she let me keep it.

Meanwhile, she sat on the desk chair and asked how I was feeling.  Hesitantly, I asked for more tea, and she poured me some.  I gulped that down too, and she gave me more until I was satisfied.  I felt a little more calm once I was no longer dehydrated.

The officer handed me a notepad and asked me to write out my full name and address.  I wrote them, as well as my parents’ names, and handed the notepad back to her.

She asked if I was lost.  I shook my head and said that, as far as I knew, that was the house where I lived.  

She then asked if I knew my parents’ phone numbers.  I knew my mother’s.  The officer handed me her phone, and I dialed the number.  This time the call went through.  But the woman who picked up wasn’t my mother.  It was a Chinese restaurant somewhere in Kanagawa-ken.  I was sure I called the right number.  The officer suggested that perhaps I had misremembered it.  I wanted to say that wasn’t possible.  But the words died in my throat.

After that, the officer asked where I’d been earlier that day.  I replied that I’d gone to Harajuku with a friend.  Her name was Kita Ikuyo.  We were classmates at the same high school.  I told her the name of the school as well.  She wrote all this down in her notepad.

She asked what I was doing with my friend in Harajuku.  I said we had gone to shop for clothes.  Kita-san wanted a new sweater.  

The officer smiled.  

“A sweater?”  She asked.  “In June?”

After a pause, I asked what the date was.

She informed me that it was about three in the morning on the thirtieth of June.

The look on my face must have said it all, because she asked what was wrong.  I didn’t know what to say.  The thirtieth of June?  But it was January.  It had snowed just that morning.  It was January, I’m sure of it.  But then I remembered that stifling heat I’d woken up in, on the swingset.  And the sweat rolling down my neck.

The officer asked again if I was alright.  I looked down at my shoes.  Finally, I said that my phone hadn’t been working properly since earlier.  I took it out and showed her.  She appeared satisfied by this and did not press further.  But, she asked, why was I carrying around a coat and scarf in this weather?  After another awkward silence, I stuttered that we’d been buying clothes for a cosplay.

There was a knock on the door.  The older officer popped his head in and beckoned to his partner.  She rose from her seat and promised to be back soon.  As she left the room, I recall I was filled with a sudden fear of being left by myself.  But the door shut with a soft click before I could say anything.

Writing about all this now, even I have a hard time believing any of it is real.  I feel like I’m writing a fictional story about someone else.  But it is real, and it really did happen to me.  I really did wake up in a park in the middle of the night, with no memory of how I got there.  And when I got home, there really were two total strangers in my house.  It sounds like the beginning of a novel.  I wish it was.  That would be a lot easier to explain.

I dozed off for a while.  The female officer returned and gently woke me.  She apologized for disturbing my rest, then asked that I follow her.  We left the room and relocated to another one down the hall.

The older officer was waiting there.  It must have been his office, as he was seated behind the only desk.  An electric fan sat next to the open window behind him.  Outside, I could see the sky slowly lightening.  I must have slept until about dawn.

As I sat, I saw that the older officer was holding a thick black folder in his hands.  There were all sorts of documents inside, but he shut it before I could make anything out.  The female officer closed the door and took a seat beside us.

First, the older officer asked if I was feeling better.  He also apologized for holding me at the station for so long. 

The good news, he said, was that they were able to contact my parents.  Apparently I was listed as their daughter in the local registry, so it was actually rather easy to find them.  They were currently on their way to the station to meet me.  

I was filled with relief when I heard this.  Some strange things had happened, but as long as my parents were involved I felt sure things would turn out fine one way or another.  I’d been worried they’d brought me here because I was in some sort of trouble.  It seemed like nothing bad was going to happen after all.  However, I quickly realized that wasn’t the end of it.  He had more to say.

The officer asked me to repeat where I had been earlier the previous day.  I told him again about Kita-san and Harajuku.  I didn’t mention waking up in the park near Shimokitazawa.  I couldn’t explain it myself, so I was afraid to tell him about it.

After a pause, he asked suddenly if I was presently in any danger.  And whether I had any injuries or illnesses, physical or mental.  I shook my head.  He asked if I had a good relationship with my parents, or if I fought with them often.  I replied that as far as I knew, we had a good relationship.

Finally, he asked when the last time I saw my parents was.  I replied that it had hardly been a day since I spoke to them last.  When I said this, both officers exchanged a meaningful glance.

I didn’t want to act impatient, but I didn’t understand why I was being asked all these things.  What was so important about these strange questions?  What were they trying to get at?

In the end, he sighed and placed both hands on the desk, palms downward, fingers splayed.  For a while he was silent, and all I could hear was the hum of the electric fan behind him.  The room became tense as both officers stared at me wordlessly.

After several moments of this, I finally lost my composure and began to tear up a little.  I didn’t mean to, but I had become increasingly agitated and I simply couldn’t help myself.  I asked the officers what the problem was.  Was I in trouble after all?  I didn’t mean to, but I must have raised my voice by mistake, because they both looked at me as if startled.  I met the eyes of the female officer, and was taken aback by how sad she looked.

She assured me I wasn’t in any trouble at the moment.  I asked then, what was the point of all these questions?  When I said this, she looked at the older officer, who nodded back.  She then returned her attention to me.

The reason they were questioning me, she said, was because my name had come up in their file in connection with a previous case.  When I heard this, I protested that I had never in my life committed a crime or been arrested.  But the female officer clarified that my name hadn’t been connected to anything illegal.  

“It is correct that we mostly handle criminal cases,” she said.  “But we also handle cases concerning missing persons.”

At that point, the older officer picked up the black folder from earlier and set it in front of me.  Inside was a stack of musty white papers.  At the very top of the first page was a small photo of a young girl.  It was a picture of me.

“According to this file,” he said, “You have been missing for the last two and a half years.”

Chapter Text

I was taken to the lobby to wait for my parents. The female officer, whose name was Saori-san, waited with me. Occasionally she would squeeze my hand and ask if I was okay. But I was too listless to give any sort of response.

You have been missing for the last two and a half years. When I heard those words, I sat there quietly for a long time. In the end all I could say was that I didn't understand what they were saying. I asked if this was some sort of test. He said he wasn't testing me at all. I repeated that I had no idea what they were talking about. It went back and forth like that a few times, until he gave up and had Saori-san take me away.

By then the sun had risen, and the station slowly filled with more employees. I could feel them all staring at me as they passed through the lobby. One of the men said in a joking manner, "Lost child?" To which Saori-san replied, "In a way." I wanted to tell them I wasn't, but couldn't summon the courage to say so.

It really was the height of summer in Kanto. I realized that as I waited for my parents to come. I could hear the cicadas crying outside. The air conditioning unit above the door was working overtime to fight off the morning humidity. It really was the thirtieth of June, and not January. Now that the day had turned and it wasn't night anymore, I knew that it hadn't all been a dream.

I shook my head and pushed those thoughts away. I told myself it didn't matter. Once my parents got there I would explain everything to them. They were sure to be upset with me, but at this point I didn't care about that. Once they arrived things would resolve themselves, surely.

About ten minutes later I heard the doors open. When I looked, I saw my parents standing in the entryway. Our eyes met, and they froze, staring at me with their jaws hanging wide open. Saori-san helped me to my feet so I could stand before them. When I drew closer, I saw that my mother had covered her mouth with her hand, and that her eyes were filled with tears.

I began to stutter out an apology, but before I could get it out my mother fell to her knees and embraced me. All of a sudden she was weeping profusely into my shoulder. Her cries were so loud that the entire lobby stopped and turned to look at us. Taken aback by her reaction, I looked to my father for help, but found that he was silently weeping as well. He came over and embraced the both of us. I stood there, buried beneath the two of them. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Saori-san tear up and turn away too. I couldn't understand the meaning of those tears. I didn't understand why they were so glad to see me.

It was a long time before my parents were composed enough to take me home. Even after we left, my mother would occasionally be overcome with emotion and was forced to pull over. My father, who seemed a little more calm, switched with her and drove us the rest of the way. Saori-san followed close behind in a patrol car.

Out the window, I watched as we returned to our usual neighborhood. However, once we got to the local streets the car took some unfamiliar turns. We pulled into the driveway of a house I did not recognize.

My father helped me out of the car. I clung to his arm and looked up at the house. He saw me staring and asked what was wrong. I mumbled that it was a completely different house. He gave me a confused look and asked what I meant. But he seemed so exhausted from crying earlier, and my mother as well, that I didn't think it wise to repeat the question. I mumbled that it was nothing.

We went inside, Saori-san included. I assumed she was there to explain to my parents what had happened. The genkan had differently colored tiles than before. It was also smaller. There seemed to be less shoes lined up there than usual, and the pattern on the wooden floorboards was different. I know I keep repeating myself, but it really was a completely new house. Yet it also had the air of a place that had been lived in for a long time.

I wandered further inside. My parents followed close behind in case I stumbled. I went into the living room, then the kitchen. All different. The staircase spiraled clockwise instead of counterclockwise. If I went upstairs, I was sure the bedrooms would be different as well. The kotatsu wasn't out anymore. Of course it wasn't, with this heat. But it was out just yesterday.

I couldn't help myself from asking again. How did they move everything here so suddenly? Why move in such a rush? Why didn't they tell me anything? But when I turned to look at my parents, I realized from the looks on their faces that they didn't understand my questions.

Saori-san proposed that we all take a seat so she could explain to them what had happened. But my mother ignored her and instead asked me where I had been all this time. There was so much anguish in her voice that I instinctively teared up, even if I didn't understand the reason for it.

I told her I'd gone to Shibuya with Kita-san. She'd seen me off in the morning when I left. Didn't she remember? Kita-san bought me a scarf for my birthday. I showed it to her, the fabric shining blood red in the morning sunlight.

I stood there, in the living room, holding the scarf out to my parents like an offering. The two of them exchanged a glance.

"Hitori," my mother said, "Who is Kita-san?"

When I heard this, I was so shocked that I was silent for several moments. That was when it occurred to me then just how unusually quiet that house was. I hadn't realized it until then, but as we all held our breath I noticed that something was missing. What was it? Something that had always been there, in the background. A source of noise that was always part of the atmosphere, like the hum of the fridge, or the crying of cicadas in summer. Small footsteps and high pitched laughter. By the time I finally figured it out, I had forgotten my mother's question. Instead I asked one of my own.

"Okaa-san," I said, "Where is Futari?" But they just stared at me. I asked them again where Futari was. But they remained silent no matter how many times I repeated myself.

Just over two years ago, on a Monday morning in April, I left for school as usual. By the time the sun set, however, I had not yet returned. My mother became concerned and called my phone. I didn't answer. She then called the school, which informed her that I was not there.

They reported me missing to the police that night. Several officers were dispatched to the area around my school. But I was never found. I was fifteen years old at the time.

After a full day had passed, the search area was widened to include the greater Tokyo area. Every precinct in the prefecture was notified about me. Apparently the story even ran on the local news for a couple nights. The police went to my school and questioned everyone. Nothing came up. A day became a week, and a week became a month. Eventually, two whole years had gone by.

Until yesterday. After all that time, I suddenly showed up on the doorstep of an elderly couple's home, trying to get in with a key that didn't fit the lock. The police were called, and I was taken to the station. They ran my name in their database, and realized I was the very same girl who had mysteriously disappeared more than two years ago. I simply popped back up, like a dandelion in the first week of spring, as if I'd never been gone in the first place.

Saori-san explained all this as we sat around the kitchen table. My parents watched us both nervously the entire time. She asked if I really had no idea what she was talking about, and if I really had no memory of living in this house. I said I did not.

I forced a dry laugh and asked if we were on a prank show, the ones that they air sometimes on television. Surely they were all just messing around. But everyone just stared at me. Seriously, what was going on? I asked them many times. Where was Futari? And Jimihen? But just as I couldn't answer their questions, no one could answer any of mine.

Finally, Saori-san reviewed what I had told her at the station. They had reached out to the school. I was indeed a registered student there, but had obviously not attended any classes since going missing. After that, they asked about Kita-san, since I mentioned her by name. They confirmed a student with that name did attend the school. In the morning a teacher was sent to ask her if she knew me. But when they spoke to her, she claimed to not know me at all.

I remained silent. Everyone was waiting for me to say something, but I was too afraid to speak. I sensed that what I wanted to say, and what they wanted to hear, were two different things. Saori-san prompted me to speak, but I screwed my eyes shut and shook my head. Even though I wanted to, I couldn't come up with the right words. My heart and mind were completely frozen. I've always hated that about myself. When it really matters, when it's actually important, I'm never able to do things the right way. That's just the kind of person I am.

Just then, the kitchen table between me and everyone else felt like it was a million miles wide. I felt like they were all looking at me as if I'd done something terribly wrong. If this wasn't a prank, if it was real, what crime was I guilty of? I was as confused as the rest of them. The crime, I guess, was that the world appeared different to me than it did to everyone else. In that sense it was like nothing had changed after all.

Reading back everything I've written to this point, I realize I sound more composed and level headed than I felt at the time. I suppose that's because I'm writing this out slowly by hand, after carefully considering what I should say. Anyone would sound more put together if presented that way. I don't even think the words in this notebook sound like they were written by myself. It's more like a purified, condensed version of me is speaking here, after removing all the unnecessary parts that get in the way. Only what is essential to myself makes it onto the page. I guess that's what writing is supposed to be?

If someone I know was to read this and think, "that doesn't sound like her," I couldn't blame them. I'm not the best writer out there, so I can't really find the right way to explain how I felt then. I surely was filled with fear, confusion, and everything in between. But at the same time, everything was so overwhelming that I barely outwardly expressed anything I was feeling. In hindsight, my body was waiting to react because I was still in denial about everything.

I didn't leave the house for three days. My parents didn't want me to go outside. They never said this explicitly, but they looked nervous whenever I went near the front door, as if they were afraid I would make a run for it. During those three days, I didn't go to work, nor did I go to school. Despite this, no one ever reached out or stopped by to see what happened to me. No one from the band, and not a single person from the live house.

Most of this time was spent locked in tense discussions with my parents. After Saori-san left, they tried to get to the bottom of what really happened to me. But this didn't change the fact that I had no idea what they were talking about. We just kept going around in circles like before, and eventually my mother began to cry. She said I must be sick. I said that I wasn't. My father attempted to mediate between us, but even his voice was strained. This continued for the better part of three days. We would argue, then part ways to rest, then come together to do it all over again. Through these repeated encounters, I came to realize that the anguish my mother and father felt was genuine. Whether it was true or not, they really believed what they were saying. They were possessed by a grief that I couldn't understand. This alienated me from the two of them. For the first time I felt like I couldn't trust my own parents.

On the second floor of the house there were only two bedrooms. Mine and my parents'. In the room that belonged to me, there was only one guitar. The old Gibson my father gave me back in middle school. On the other hand, the Yamaha I'd bought at Ochanomizu, together with everyone during my first year of high school, was nowhere to be found.

Those three days were like living in a dream. I lay awake every night wondering just what had happened. Had I been kidnapped by aliens and taken to another planet in my sleep, one that resembled mine, but with some crucial differences? Or had I woken up in a strange parallel universe? Maybe I'd hit my head on the swing earlier and this was all a crazy hallucination.

I turned every possibility over in my mind, but the implications of those possibilities left me paralyzed. All I could do was stare at the ceiling and hope that I would wake up soon. Downstairs, I could hear my parents arguing with each other.

One thing I couldn't forget was what Saori-san had said about Kita-san. How they'd asked her about me, and she'd said she didn't know me. I just couldn't shake that from my mind. When I tried calling her number with our landline, it was picked up by the wrong person again. An old woman answered this time. She spoke in a brusque tone and demanded to know what I wanted. In a weak voice, I asked for Kita-san. In response the old woman laughed and said, "I knew a Kita once. Eight years ago, she ran away with a man from Hokkaido and died in a snowstorm. She owed me ten thousand yen. I bet my money's still buried in the ice somewhere." Then she hung up.

Ever since I started writing, I've spent a lot of time looking at my hands. It can't really be helped - they're right there, one gripping the pen, the other holding the paper flat. Looking at them so much reminded me of a conversation I once had with Kita-san. It's hard to write about such sad and painful things each and every time I open this notebook, so today I'll write about something different.

We were on the train together. For some reason, many of my memories of Kita-san involve the train. I believe we were heading back from school. The entire train car was painted orange, presumably because the sun was setting. For it to set so early, it must have been winter again.

"How big are your hands?" She asked suddenly. We pressed our palms together to compare. Hers were smaller and thinner than mine. "I always have a hard time reaching certain chords on the guitar. I wish my hands were as big as yours."

I confessed that I'd always personally disliked my hands. Perhaps a silly thing to dislike about oneself, but I'm the type who worries about everything and anything. They're large for a girl, and the fingers are thick and a little knobby. The tips are rough and calloused from playing the guitar all the time. Good for the instrument, but not much else. Kita-san's hands were much dantier and prettier.

She shook her head and took my hand again. The skin between my fingers was always dry in the wintertime, but she didn't seem to mind.

"This might sound weird," she said, "But I'm really into hands. I've always been interested in them. My hands, my parents' hands, the hands of people in our class - all of them, really. I think hands tell a lot about a person. And they're all unique. Everyone's got their own fingerprint, after all. When I meet a person, it's one of the first things I look at. Anyways, Hitori-chan, I think you have really wonderful hands. It's kind of hard to explain, but you've got the sort of hands that could do anything. They're not just meant for a singular purpose. When I hold them, that's the feeling I get. Gosh, I must sound crazy to you, don't I? But I really mean it. So you shouldn't dislike them."

Ever since that day, I've occasionally thought about that conversation I had with Kita-san about hands. If I'm being honest, I never figured out what exactly she meant at the time. What did it mean to have the sort of hands that could do anything? Even if I had a chance to ask her again, I feel like Kita-san wouldn't be able to give me an answer. Oftentimes, she said things purely from the heart. But that is also one of the many things I admire about her.

I snuck out of the house on the fourth day. It was around five in the morning. I wanted to leave even earlier, but the trains wouldn't be running then. I knew that meant I wouldn't be able to return home before my parents realized I was gone. Even so, I put on my shoes and quietly slipped out the door.

I'd decided that I had to go and see Kita-san. Out of everyone, she was the only person whose existence had been confirmed by another person. Saori-san had also said that Kita-san claimed not to know me. But I would go and see for myself. As I held the red scarf in my hands the night before, that single thought possessed me. It allowed me to muster the bravery to leave the house.

It was a weekday, and summer break couldn't have started yet. Kita-san would surely be at school today. I would go wait at the gates until she arrived. Since I'd left so early, I was bound to get there before her.

I took the first train of the day and was soon on the Odakyu line. My commute to the school is very long. Even leaving that early, it took me nearly two hours to get from Kanagawa-ken to the heart of Tokyo. I sat in the last car at the very end of the train. As I waited, I wondered suddenly if the school would be in the same place as before. What if it was like the station in Shimokitazawa? As I drew closer to Tokyo, a knot of fear began to grow in my stomach.

At one point the doors opened and admitted a flood of people. The morning rush had started. Most of those who entered were adults in suits. The click of briefcases and polished shoes filled my ears. A few of the passengers, however, were students. After a couple more stops, I noticed that some of them were wearing the uniform from my school.

Eventually there was a stop at which a large crowd of students entered the car. Suddenly the train was packed. I gave up my seat to an elderly man with a cane and stood. From afar, I eyed the crowd of kids my age. I inched closer, careful not to lose my balance on the moving train. None of the students appeared to recognize me.

I pushed my way to the far side and peered into the next car. I could see through the small round window that it was also filled with students. Even more of them were wearing our uniform. When we arrived at the next stop, I left my car and entered the next one, apologizing several times as I squeezed my way deeper inside.

It seemed almost every person in this car was from my school. I bowed my head left and right as I cut through the middle of the aisle. Sumimasen. Sumimasen. Some people gave me weird looks when I peered at their faces. I just kept lowering my head when they noticed. Another stop came and went. The bodies surrounding me surged from side to side. When I looked up, I thought I saw a familiar shade of red at the far end of the car, by the doors.

My breathing grew ragged as I elbowed my way through the crowd. Somehow the summer heat had snuck underground and infiltrated that air-conditioned train car. My body began to itch all over. The world was closing in on me. Another stop came and went. I pushed through one more wall of uniforms and briefcases. And then, just like that, Kita-san was standing before me.

She stood in front of the closed doors, one hand holding the railing above her head. With her other hand she scrolled through her phone. She wore a tense expression, as if she were focusing very hard on whatever she was looking at.

I stood beside her, also holding the railing. For a while neither of us said anything.

"Hello," I finally managed.

She glanced over at me.

"Hello."

"Crowded train today," I continued. My voice was so quiet that I barely even heard it over the rattle of the tracks.

"That's Tokyo for you," Kita-san said after a pause. "Everyone's alone together."

The train ground to a halt. A woman's voice calmly announced the name of the stop. Kita-san went back to her phone. I stood in silence beside her, gripping the railing tightly with both hands.

"It's even worse in the winter, isn't it?" I said. "We're all wearing thick coats. There's even less space for everyone."

Kita-san raised her head again. I noticed the bag slung over her back was unadorned. Usually she had all sorts of stickers and pins on it. But not today. It was a plain, completely unaltered bag.

"Well, good thing it's not winter then."

I noticed that she didn't look back at her phone this time. Instead she stared at me intently, as if taking in every detail of my appearance. Self consciously, I touched my face. That was when I realized tears were spilling down my cheeks. They poured from my eyes and stained the floor of the train car.

"Are you all right?" Kita-san's voice sounded very far away. A few people nearby noticed me crying and whispered amongst themselves. I squeezed the handrail so hard my knuckles turned white. I felt the train losing speed once again. We were almost at the next stop already.

"Kita-san," I said, "Do you really not remember me?"

Kita-san lowered her phone. I don't know what expression she wore then. I was too afraid to look at her.

"Sorry," she said. "Have we met somewhere before?"

The knot in my stomach tightened to the point of agony. I lifted my hand and put it over my mouth. My tears would not stop. A deep, heart rending loneliness, deeper than anything I'd ever felt before, was tearing me apart in that moment. I can't describe it in any other way. It would be too painful even to try.

Kita-san lifted her own hand and reached out to me. But I shirked away from her.

"I'm sorry," I mumbled. "I mistook you for someone else."

The doors slid open. A stifling humidity, the kind you only get when it's summer in the city, rose up to meet me. By now everyone on the train was staring at us. I could feel the weight of all those eyes crushing me. I didn't know what else to do. I turned and ran into the morning heat.

Shimokitazawa is a good place.

I remember thinking this one day on the way home from practice. Once we arrive at the rehearsal room, we'll typically warm up by playing one of our own songs. I don't know how other bands do it, but when it came to the four of us, we all had pretty different tastes in music. There weren't many songs that all of us liked, and of those there were even fewer we knew how to play. Kita-san preferred pop music, while Nijika-chan mostly listened to punk and mellow core. As for Ryo-senpai, well, let's just say she didn't listen to anything you'd find charting on Oricon. To be fair, I'm pretty much the same.

That first moment when all our instruments come together is very special to me. In the beginning, I had no experience playing with other people, so I was pretty lousy. I didn't know how to keep in time with the others and match their rhythm. Playing in a group is completely different than playing alone, as it turns out. Before I joined a band, I'd never considered that possibility. For the three years leading up to that point, I'd only ever played by myself. In the closet, so I wouldn't disturb my neighbors. Actually, even my own guitar sounded different when plugged into an amp. I was so used to playing with headphones I'd forgotten what that sounded like.

Once I'd pushed past the level of being lousy to something approximating "passable," I learned what it felt like to connect to someone else through music. Ah. I'm a part of the world, I thought. Ryo-senpai's music uses a lot of call and response. I'll play a phrase, and someone else is always there to meet me halfway. A song we composed in our second year, called "Blue Spring and Western Sky," is a good example of this. It's hard to describe music with words, but I start first, then Kita-san joins in. Then Ryo-senpai, before Nijika-chan brings it all together. When I call, someone answers. In a way it's like my own existence is being confirmed somehow. When I played alone in my closet, even if I didn't use headphones, the sounds just bounced off the walls and came right back.

After practice, we pack up and head to the station together. Nijika-chan stays behind of course, though she always sees us off at the door. Each time she would wave and say, "See you tomorrow!" Thanks to her, I realized how nice it is to have someone say that to you. Your family members don't say things like "see you tomorrow." It's a given that they'll be there the next day. With friends though, it's a little different. It wasn't like any of us thought something would prevent us from seeing each other again. Even so, out of reflex we always said, "see you tomorrow." I think there's something less permanent, or at least more fleeting, about friendship compared to family. It's a little sad to think about friendship that way, but that's also what makes it so precious. At least, that's how it was for me.

On the way home I always stopped to buy red bean buns from a little shop by the station. The lady who worked there learned my face and thanked me by name when I paid. I always bowed sheepishly back. Sometimes I bought two and gave one to Ryo-senpai. At the turnstiles, she would usually realize she was out of money and ask someone to swipe their pass for her, at which point Kita-san would sigh affectionately and reach into her bag.

While waiting on the platform I would bite into my food, and as I chewed that thought would cross my mind. Shimokitazawa is a good place. My friends are there. Starry is there. Point is, people smile and say hello. In Shimokitazawa, I exist. Besides my own house, that's the first place where I can say that was true. In Shimokitazawa, I exist.

That's why I'll always be so grateful that Nijika-chan found me at the park that day. I'm sure that without her, I would have continued plodding along the same lonely path as before. The fact that we were both there that day, in that particular time and place, is to me nothing short of a miracle.

Just before the train arrives, Nijika-chan calls my phone. Ryo isn't bumming off you two again, is she?

I miss everyone so much. Even now, I can almost taste the sweetness of the red bean on my tongue.

Chapter Text

They found me wandering around the middle of Shimokitazawa at night.  I was looking for Starry.  It was supposed to be there, in 2-chome, beside the Setagaya city library and across from a Lawson.  I’d memorized the location exactly because I was afraid of getting lost.  But it wasn’t there.

When they brought me home, I went to the landline and called every phone number saved in my contacts.  All of them were picked up by strangers.  I shut myself in my room and opened my computer.  Surprisingly, the password was still the same one I’d used since middle school.

It was the first week of July, 20XX.  In other words, six months earlier than that January morning.  But it wasn’t as if I’d simply gone back in time.  When I looked on Google, there was no such place called Starry anywhere in Tokyo.  

Next, I looked up the winner of the most recent Japan Series.  My father is a big fan of the Tokyo Yakult Swallows and always had the games on in the living room, so I had some awareness of the sport.  As far as I knew, the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks had won last year.  But according to the net, the Yomiuri Giants had defeated the Hawks in the most recent series, four games to one.  

There were other changes as well.  I didn’t recognize the name of the current prime minister.  I don’t know much about politics, but I was at least aware of that much.  It turned out the page where I uploaded all my guitar videos was still there.  But the subscriber count was much lower than before.

The whole world had shifted ever so slightly to the side.  That was what it felt like.  Most things, the fundamental things, were still the same.  There were still seven continents.  The Earth still orbited the Sun, as far as I could tell.  Japan was still called Japan.  It was the details that had changed.  Like the location of a station, or the existence of a live house.  Or the presence of a sibling or pet.

I spent the whole night glued to the computer, trying to learn the extent of what had changed.  By the time the sun rose outside, I hadn’t slept a wink.  My parents wanted to talk - I’m sure they were very upset with me, but I was too distraught to have a proper conversation with them.  To be frank, I’d suffered a complete mental breakdown.

They waited a number of days, but my condition did not improve.  I attempted to leave the house again more than once, intent on searching for the others.  But I was apprehended each time.  I spent the rest of the time shut in my bedroom, hiding inside the futon.  I refused to speak to anyone, whether it was my parents or Saori-san.  I barely slept.  I barely ate.  I didn’t touch the guitar.  All I remember doing is backing up all the photos on my phone to my computer and sifting through them, one by one, sometimes staring at a single picture for hours.  Oftentimes I fell asleep with my fingers caressing the screen.

This continued for a few weeks, or perhaps a month.  As summer slowly turned to fall, my parents began to look for professional help.  That’s how I met Ishikawa-sensei.

It’s been three months since.  Thanks to Ishikawa-sensei, I’ve managed to begin having regular conversations with my parents again.  I realized I wasn’t the only person he spoke to during his visits.  He also counseled my parents fairly often.  As a mediator between us, he gave advice so that we could begin to communicate properly.  I apologized to my parents for leaving the house without telling them.  They forgave me rather easily, but I think they were just glad I was speaking to them again.

After that day, I met with Saori-san a few more times.  But it quickly became apparent that I couldn’t be of much help to her.  Eventually my parents realized the meetings were making me stressed.  They spoke to the people at the station, and Saori-san quietly disappeared.

Since then, I’ve been talking with my parents a lot.  Sometimes our conversations go very deep into the night.  In their view, we’re making up for two years of lost time.  Through these conversations, I’ve learned a few important things.

The first is that for the most part, our collective memories of the past actually line up until about my fifteenth birthday.  For example, we agree that I was born in Nagoya, where my parents lived with my grandparents on my mother’s side.  The four of them took turns raising me until I was about five, when my grandfather passed away.  At that point I was bigger, and my father wanted to get a better job closer to Tokyo.  So we moved to a small two bedroom house in Kanagawa-ken.  My parents wanted my grandmother to come with them, but she couldn’t leave behind the home she’d lived in with my grandfather for so long.  So she stayed, and the three of us moved closer to the city.

After this, however, is where our memories begin to contradict.  I remember the small two bedroom house we lived in when we first moved.  My parents showed me photos, and it was definitely the same house.  I recall we lived there for about five years, until my mother became pregnant with Futari.  We sold the house and moved to a three bedroom in the same neighborhood.  But as I said before, my parents had no memory of that house, or of Futari.

What is it about my fifteenth year that causes this contradiction?  Obviously, according to my parents, that’s when I went missing.  But I have no memory of that.  In my head, in my memories, did something happen to me when I was fifteen?  I’ve spent the past three months wracking my brain for an answer.  But nothing comes to mind.  There must be something there, but I can’t parse it.  

Memories and people are both slipping away from me.  During our conversations, I asked my parents how my grandmother was doing.  They told me that she had passed away a year after my disappearance.

So in this world, I have no younger sister, and even my grandmother is gone.  My dog is gone, and though Kita-san exists, she doesn’t remember me.  As for Nijika-chan and Ryo-senpai, and everyone else, I have no idea.  Maybe they’re out there somewhere.  I’ve searched social media and the rest of the net to the best of my ability, with no results.  I have to assume that even if they are out there, they’ll be the same as Kita-san.  Strangers with familiar faces.

Recently, Ishikawa-sensei asked if I’ve kept up with my journaling.  I handed him the notebook and said he could read it.  He made to open the notebook, then seemed to change his mind before handing it back.

“You don’t have to prove anything to me,” he said.  “If you’re at peace with whatever’s written here, that’s what matters.”

Am I at peace with it?  I don’t know.  I can’t stop thinking about what’s real and what isn’t.  I keep taking the red scarf out from its place in the drawer, just to check that it’s still there.  Was the Kita-san on the train that day the real Kita-san?  Or was she a different Kita-san?  My basic question is, are the Kita-san who gave me that scarf and the Kita-san on the train one and the same?

When I go to the top of the stairs and listen, my parents are always in the kitchen, anxiously talking about me.  Even after things settled down a bit, I’ve felt a sort of distance between us.

It’s like someone has put a perfect replica of a famous painting in front of me.  I know it’s a fake, but I can’t find any details that give it away.  They look and act like my parents, but there’s something missing, something I can’t describe.  It goes deeper than just our contradicting memories.  They’re still searching for someone.  And that someone isn’t me.

Today I want to write a bit about us - that is, Kessoku Band.  Since it seems like no one remembers us except for me, if I were to forget, then any trace of the four of us would be gone.  That doesn’t sit right with me, so I want to record a few things here.

In the spring of my fifteenth year, I joined a band.  That seems like a simple statement, but for me it was a life changing event.  I’d wanted to be in one for years at that point, but always lacked the courage to make it happen.  Actually, even if I had the courage, I probably would have still failed to do so.  I’ve never been the type who is capable of moving the world around me.

That’s why it was such a miracle when Nijika-chan found me that day.  When I looked up from the ground and saw her running towards me, I had the sense that the world was finally beginning to move.  Nijika-chan had that sort of power.

Thanks to that chance encounter, my life changed.  I got to be in a band.  I met a whole bunch of strange and interesting people.  And the world slowly grew wider before my eyes.  One thing I’ve realized is that people naturally live through each other.  By that, I mean everyone is their own little world, and when two people meet, you can see a little bit farther than before.  Like sitting on someone’s shoulders to get a better view of the sea.  We all have our own vantage point from where we’re standing.  Before I turned fifteen, I had no idea about all those other perspectives.

This is also what makes live performance so special.  I learned that when a group is performing together, all those different perspectives combine into a single vision.  Maybe I’m being dramatic here, but that’s what it’s like for me.  Of all the things being in a band entails, performing is the best part.  

You see, I’m pretty lousy with words - writing’s different, because I can take my time to think things through.  In a fast paced conversation, I can never hope to keep up.  I have a habit of thinking about what I want to say at least three times before I say it.  That way, I can avoid saying the wrong thing and making a fool of myself.  But the problem with that is, by the time I’m ready to speak, the moment has already passed.  The conversation has left me behind, and everyone’s moved on to something else.  Eventually I give up and retreat into my usual daydreams.  I guess that’s why it’s easy for me to feel like I’m not a living, breathing part of the world.  Most of the time, I’m just a spectator.

The four of us once performed at a pretty large venue in Shinjuku.  We knew the members of another band who often held shows in the area, and they helped us land a slot at their usual live house.  It was a pretty big deal for us, a high school band with just over a year of experience, to get an opportunity like that.  We practiced like crazy leading up to the show.  Even Ryo-senpai, who is usually laid back to a fault, seemed to take it rather seriously.

Before we knew it the night of the show rolled around.  I remember how nervous I was - there were more people outside than I’d ever seen at once.  I tuned and re-tuned my guitar about six times to calm myself down.

Once the show started though, all of that slipped away.  The space beyond the stage went pitch black so that I could hardly see the crowd.  I closed my eyes and let the music swell up and consume me.  I’ve practiced all of our songs countless times because I’m deathly afraid of slipping up on stage.  Once I’m up there I try my best to trust my body.  I felt the pulse of the amps and the hum of the strings beneath my fingers.  I heard the sound of Kita-san’s breathing in sync with my own.

The venue was totally packed - I’d never played in front of such a loud crowd before.  There must have been at least two hundred people there.  Our playing was tight that night.  The crowd was liking us.  I could feel their energy filling the room and carrying us forward.

I think it was during our third song.  We were in the last chorus of “Into the Light” when someone threw a whole box of party poppers onto the stage.  Those cone shaped ones you see at birthday parties.  They scattered everywhere and exploded between me and Kita-san, sending a huge cloud of confetti everywhere.  The crowd erupted into hysterics, but somehow the four of us kept playing.  I remember Kita-san was so surprised she began to laugh as she sang.  We all had our hands occupied by our instruments, so we couldn’t shield ourselves from all the confetti.  It scattered everywhere and covered the stage, glittering like multicolored snow.

Of course, throwing anything onto the stage under any circumstances is a major violation of the rules.  Whoever threw the party popper was kicked out of the venue almost immediately.  I never saw who it was exactly.  And I’m not advocating for them or anything, but at the same time, I’ll never forget that moment.  That view of Kita-san smiling in a cloud of confetti, with the stage lights refracting all around her, is painted into my memory forever.

After the show, everyone gathered to hit up an izakaya together.  Kita-san wanted a picture of the four of us.  “As the band’s minister of social media, I need to commemorate this occasion!” I remember she said that while insisting we all bunch up in front of the building.  In these group photos, I’ll typically hang out near the edge, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible.  That day I tried to do the same, but Nijika-chan noticed and grabbed my elbow.

“Bocchi-chan’s in the middle!” she said, and before I knew it I was being manhandled into the center.  I tried to wriggle free and crawl away, but I was quickly recaptured by the others and returned to the middle, despite my protests.

I still have that picture.  The four of us standing outside the live house, confetti in our hair.  It was cold outside, so we’re all bunched together like a flock of penguins.  I remember Kita-san kept making us retake it because I wasn’t smiling properly the first few times.  If I could, I’d print out a hundred copies and paste them all over my room again.  But I’m sure if I did that, I’d really get locked up in a mental hospital this time.

There have been a few times I wondered what I did to deserve everything that happened these last few months.  The way I see it, I was just minding my own business when everything suddenly fell apart around me.  But now, looking at this photo again, I find myself thinking that it’s not like I did anything to deserve those miracles either.  I was just in the right place at the right time.  It’s not like I trained my body for decades, climbed a mountain, and fought a lion to earn that chance.  It just happened - in a cosmic sense, there was no rhyme or reason for it.  I mean, if there was, you’d have to start asking why there’s things like war, or famine, and so on.  

What I’m saying is that at the end of the day, I’m no different than I was before.  I’m just a piece of driftwood floating in the ocean.  Wherever the currents take me, I go.  Like I said, I’m not the type who is capable of moving the world.  If I can accidentally stumble into such a convenient situation, who’s to say I can’t stumble out of it?  Maybe I shouldn’t feel like I was wronged, or that something was taken from me.  In fact, maybe my feelings on the matter aren’t relevant in the first place.

After that day I snuck out of the house, my parents monitored my whereabouts very closely.  They got me a new phone with a tracking app installed.  The app was locked with a password so I couldn’t tamper with it.  If the phone was turned off, they would also be notified.

I didn’t object to this.  I understood they were just worried about me.  Plus I wasn’t going anywhere anyways.  If I needed to step out of the house, I specifically asked either my mother or father to take me wherever I needed to go.  On one occasion, I needed to replace the strings on the Gibson, so I asked my father to come with me to the music store in Ochanomizu - the same one where I bought the Yamaha.  He seemed very confused that I seemed to know the way there already.  Although the woman who sold the Yamaha to me wasn’t there.

After some time passed without incident, my parents relaxed their oversight on me.  They removed the app from my phone and more or less allowed me to move about freely again.  This happened a bit sooner than I expected - I’d more or less resigned myself to being a prisoner in my own home for the foreseeable future.  In hindsight, I think Ishikawa-sensei might have had something to do with it.

Once I had my freedom back, I began to occasionally make visits to Shimokitazawa.  I wasn’t attending school yet, and there was nothing much for me to do at home.  So I hopped on the train and returned to that once familiar place.  There were actually more record shops and CD stores around than I remember.  A couple more live houses too.  But no matter where I looked, Starry wasn’t there.

During these trips, I also made it a point to stop by the park where this all began.  I’ve been back there a few times now, and in the end, all I can say is that it’s a perfectly ordinary park.  Nothing more.  I sat in the swing and went back and forth, trying to see if I could unlock anything in my memories that way.  I sat on the wooden animals and closed my eyes.  I even laid down on the ground and stared up at the sky, which was framed all around by the summer trees.  None of that did much.  I got a sunburn, that was all.  An old woman who was passing by asked me if I’d lost my mind.

The last time I was there, staring up at the sky, the clouds suddenly closed in and it began to rain.  One of those sudden autumn rains that comes out of nowhere.  I leapt to my feet and ran for cover.  Down the street there was a small CD shop.  I ducked inside as the rain continued to pour down.

It was hot and cramped in that shop.  The man behind the counter was sleeping in a chair, but he woke when he heard the door chimes jingling.  He went into the back and came back with a towel, which he tossed at me without a word.  I thanked him meekly before drying myself off.  Once I was done he took the towel back, threw it in a basket, and returned to his nap.

I decided to browse around for a bit.  Since I started frequenting Shimokitazawa again, I realized that many of the bands I followed had different discographies now.  Asian Kung-Fu Generation, for instance, had two albums out that I’d never heard before.  To this day I haven’t listened to a single new song from any of these bands.  I just can’t bring myself to put them on.

The shop had headsets hanging next to the shelves that you could use to sample the music.  I slipped them on and picked out one of the classics.  AKFG’s fourth album, World World World, is my favorite.  They’re not my favorite band ever, but I’ve always had a personal connection with them, partly because the lead singer, Gotoh Masafumi, shares the same surname as me.

I passed some time that way as I waited for the rain to stop.  There is a sameness to some of AKFG’s music that makes it easy to space out without meaning to (I mean this in a good way).  I believe I was halfway through A Town in Blue when I happened to look to my right.  When I did, Kita-san was standing next to me.

She was listening to something on her own pair of headphones.  The very next section after mine was the classical music section.  She was holding a CD in her hand that said “Schumann” on it.  I don’t know a thing about classical music, but I remember that very clearly.  She looked up and saw me, and lowered the headphones to her neck.

“You’re that girl from earlier,” she said, in a matter of fact way.

I slowly removed my own headphones.  “Oh,” I mumbled.  “I guess I am.”

“So what’s your deal?” she asked.  “Following me around again?”

I looked down at the floor, took a deep breath, and counted to three before replying.

“I’m sorry about before,” I said.  “I mistook you for someone else.”

She made an unconvinced noise.  “And this someone happens to have the same name as me?”

I nodded.  Kita-san watched me for a moment longer, then shrugged.  Outside, the rain was still falling.

“So, did you ever find them?” she asked, rifling through CDs as she spoke.  “The other Kita, I mean.”

I clenched my hands inside my pockets.  “No.”

“You don’t have their number?”

“I don’t think a phone call would work.”

“Are they abroad?”

I stared at my shoes.  “Something like that.”

Kita-san picked out a few more CDs.  I noticed that all the ones she chose had the same name on them as the first.  I had the sense that the conversation was over, but I also couldn’t just leave things as they were.  I had to say something.  Simply turning around and leaving, I felt, would be the wrong choice.

“Do you like classical music?” I asked.

At first Kita-san didn’t respond.  I thought for a moment that she hadn’t heard me, but after a while she spoke.

“I guess you could say that,” she said.  “Or to be more precise, I used to like it.  That version of me has gone off somewhere.  Every now and then I stop by shops like this and try to find that person.  But it doesn’t seem to help much.  Schumann doesn’t move me like he used to.”

“That’s happened to me before,” I said.  “Bands I used to like not being my taste anymore, I mean.”

She smiled to herself.  “It’s not really a problem of changing taste.  Actually, I hardly listen to music at all anymore.  What about you?”

I was about to tell her that I loved music, but her question made me go still.  I realized suddenly that until that day, I hadn’t listened to music at all in the last three months.  Usually I was either listening to music or playing pretty much constantly.  My mother used to nag me to give my eardrums a rest once in a while.  You’ll go deaf before you even get to my age.   She used to say that all the time.  How had I gone three whole months without putting on a single song?  It hadn’t even crossed my mind once.

“I’m not sure,” I said at last.  “I guess I don’t listen to music much lately either.”

Kita-san smiled at me this time.  “So we’re just two frauds in a CD shop, huh?”

The man behind the counter told us he would be closing up soon.  We left the shop and stepped outside.  The rain was still pouring down at full force.  A fine mist clung to the street.

“You have an umbrella?” Kita-san asked.  

I shook my head.  She reached into her bag and handed me one.  

Instinctively, I reached out and grabbed the end of the umbrella pointed towards me.  My eyes followed its length up to Kita-san’s arm, and finally her body and face.  She wore her hair in a ponytail.  I could see her whole neck, and the soft bumps of her collarbone.  I remember Kita-san saying she never did ponytails because she was insecure about her hairline.  When I thought this, suddenly it hit me for real, in front of that CD shop on a rainy afternoon in October, that this wasn’t the Kita-san I knew.  This was an entirely different person, with her own personality and characteristics, no different than a stranger.  She would never remember me no matter how much I talked to her.  And like the rain, there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.  It would fall, and I would watch, just like I always had.

I accepted the umbrella without a word.  Now that I think about it, I didn’t even say thank you.  But Kita-san didn’t seem to mind.

“I was supposed to go on a date today,” she said.  “But they stood me up when the rain hit.  I ran into a convenience store to buy these and everything.  Can you believe it?  Anyways, you can have that one.  It’s cheap, so do what you want with it.”

Kita-san popped open her own umbrella.  She took a few steps into the rain before turning back.

“See you around,” she said.  “I hope you find whoever you’re looking for.”

Then she walked into the mist and disappeared.

It was still raining when I got home.  I left Kita-san’s umbrella by the door to dry and went upstairs.  After having a shower, I sat by the window and watched the rain for a while.  Just then, seemingly out of nowhere, I remembered something.

I was fourteen at the time.  Middle school.  It was raining that day, just like this.  On that particular day, I’d taken a whole stack of my favorite CDs and spread them out on my desk at school in a desperate ploy to get someone to talk to me.  But no one did.  Instead I sat there like an idiot in front of my embarrassingly large pile of CDs, like I was one of those unpopular booths at a large convention.  One of the albums I brought that day was, incidentally, AKFG’s World World World.

Those CDs dug into my back as I lugged them around.  I felt like such a loser.  Once again, putting the onus on others had failed me.  Why couldn’t I just muster the courage to talk to people myself?  But if it were that simple, I wouldn’t have to resort to such roundabout methods.  If it were so simple, I thought, I wouldn’t be the way I am.

I took a detour from school that day.  By then it had stopped raining.  Instead of taking the train home, I went all the way to Tokyo.  At this point, I’d already gotten it into my head that I would go to a different high school, far away from my hometown.  One where no one would know who I was.  There was one school, called Shuka High, which had entry requirements lax enough for my putrid grades.  I stood outside the gate that day and promised to myself I would start a new chapter of my life in high school.  This time, I told myself, I would change.

On the way home, I got tired from dragging the CDs around and stopped to take a break.  I ended up in that small roadside park with the swingset.  I remember it clearly.  How could I have forgotten this until now?  I can see it so vividly in my mind.  The little puddles of rainwater scattered around the swings.  The creak of the chains as I sat in the seat.  The startling freshness of the air.  It was undoubtedly spring.

I kicked off and swung slowly to and fro.  Maybe it was because of the weather, but I was filled with so much melancholy that day.  I wanted to be in a band.  I wanted friends.  I wanted a way out.  At the very least, I wanted a cure for the aching loneliness in my heart.  Was I asking for too much?  Maybe, in the grand scheme of things, a cure for loneliness was a bigger deal than I thought.  But I still wanted it.  I wanted it so badly I could feel the desire tearing me apart from the inside.

All right, I told myself.  I’ll close my eyes and count to three.  After that, I’ll be a new person.  No more moping.  No more excuses.  I’ll give up everything to become someone new.

Having decided this, I shut my eyes tightly and slowly counted.  One…two…three!

At that moment, I opened my eyes and let go of the swing, intending to leap off and land on my feet.  But when I did, all I saw was darkness.  The ground and sky were gone.  My hands, which had been gripping the chains, were empty.  I was hurtling through an endless void, unable to tell right from left, or up from down.

When I opened my mouth and screamed, there was no sound.  I couldn’t see my own hands.  I couldn’t see anything.  My entire being was tumbling through empty, formless space.  I was everywhere and nowhere all at once.

And then it was over, as quickly as it began.  I woke up on the ground in front of the swingset.  The CDs were scattered all around me.  I distinctly recall that, in those initial moments of consciousness, I couldn’t remember a single thing about myself.  Not even my name.

This memory struck me like a thunderbolt.  I sat in shock by the window in my bedroom, staring at my own reflection.  I couldn’t believe that I had forgotten this so completely until that very moment.  How had such a bizarre occurrence slipped my mind until now?  It was like a tiny person had gone inside my skull, picked out the precise details, and thrown them away.

I left the window and took out my collection of CDs from the closet.  I have a whole cardboard box of them stored in there, filled all the way to the brim with everything from Aerosmith to ZUTOMAYO.  As the rain pounded down outside, I sifted through each and every one of those CDs.  I took one pass through, then a second.  But the one I was looking for wasn’t there.  I know my whole collection by heart, and there was no doubt about it.  My old copy of World World World was nowhere to be found.

Chapter Text

Part Two
"Neoteny"
"ネオテニー "

Hello again.  It has been some time.

I was cleaning out my closet when this notebook fell out of the top shelf.  It hit me on the head before landing on the floor facedown.  The notebook Ishikawa-sensei gifted me, all those years ago.  I had completely forgotten about it.

You see, these last handful of years, I haven’t written a single thing down.  I’ve just drifted through life in my usual way, never thinking to record any of my thoughts like I did back then.  But when I looked down and saw this notebook on the floor, I was filled with the urge to write again.

So I picked it up and set it down on my desk.  It’s a pretty thick one, and there are plenty of pages left.  I skimmed the first few before quickly realizing I didn’t need to.  My memories from those days are still crystal clear in my mind.  Ironically, I think that because I wrote these things down, I have no need to remind myself of them.

Sitting here now, I suddenly find myself overwhelmed with memories.  My room is still a mess - I was in the middle of cleaning out my closet, after all.  But something tells me this is more important.  In a way, this is just another form of cleaning that I have to do.  One thing I have managed to learn, after all, is that the mental and physical are not so separate as we might think.

The opening pages of this notebook are filled with events that occurred in my life.  However, I haven’t written much about how these events changed me, that is, my personality and worldview.

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what happened to me.  The first thing I did was go on the net in hopes of finding any accounts similar to mine.  I read about a variety of topics - teleportation, otherworldly encounters, religious experiences - the like.  A police officer in Seoul fell down a well and was found a week later in a Norwegian forest.  There was a man in Malta who woke up one day to find that he had grown a sixth finger on his left hand.  A girl in Germany happened upon a dog who could speak broken English.  As it turns out, the world is filled with such strange and unexplainable events.  

But of course doing this did not turn up any concrete answers.  It wasn’t like I could go to anyone about it either.  My parents and I were on speaking terms again, but they still became uncomfortable when I brought up anything to do with my old life.  I was on my own.  

The awkwardness at home became unbearable to the point that I preferred to be anywhere else.  For the first time in my life, my bedroom was not a place where I could feel safe.  I wandered around at my leisure, going as far from home as I could without getting lost.  At one point I even ended up at an old temple on the outskirts of Tokyo.  One of the priests saw me hanging around and approached me, most likely thinking I was up to no good.  People my age don’t often hang around temples, after all. 

But once we’d talked for a while, he realized I wasn’t there to cause trouble.  He even spent some time listening to me.  I didn’t give him all the details, but he seemed to understand I was going through a difficult time.

“The way I see it,” I recall him saying, “the gods impart lessons to us in the form of suffering.”

What lesson was that supposed to be?  That things could go terribly wrong at any time, without cause and without any apparent reason at all?  I could have told you that.  If that was what the gods were trying to impart to me, then well, all I had to say was that suffering might be too blunt of an instrument for their purposes.  Not that the gods were about to listen to me.

Other than the temple, I went to the library, or if not there, the aquarium near the Skytree.  I had a whole list of places I cycled through.  In hindsight, my criteria was anywhere I could be around people without being expected to talk.  Even the train would have done.  In fact, I did often leave the house and get on the Odakyu line without any particular destination in mind.  While I was too afraid to speak to anyone, I also didn’t want to be alone.

Six months passed like this.  Performing fruitless research, killing time in the city.  And maintaining a cordial, albeit strained, relationship with my parents.  Before I knew it, fall became winter.  A new year began.  

And I turned eighteen.

Until recently, the age of adulthood in Japan was twenty, but it was recently lowered.  I was now an adult.  Which wasn’t to say I felt even remotely like one.  I couldn’t cook anything, I still lived with my parents, and I had no idea how taxes worked.  I didn’t even have a high school diploma.

Even so, my eighteenth birthday was a sort of trigger that caused me to take a serious look at my overall situation.  That situation was, to put it frankly, rather bleak.  In this world, I never attended a single day of high school.  Also, because Starry was gone, there was no evidence of me ever having had a job.  And it went without saying that I had no special connections that I could leverage.  There was no shot of me getting into a respectable university either.

It hit me all at once that time was going to keep moving, without any regard to what I was dealing with.  I was already eighteen, with nothing more than a middle school diploma to my name.  

There are plenty of movies that romanticize being young and directionless.  But to me that’s a whole load of nonsense (I’ve always hated stories like that actually).  Who would ever want to reach the age of adulthood with no clear purpose set out for themselves?  What’s so cute about it?  The movies can do that because there’s a script, and for the most part there is a happy ending waiting for the characters.  In other words, there is no real uncertainty involved.  And the thing that made being young and directionless so very painful, I realized, was the uncertainty that plagued every waking hour.

Another six months passed.  I stopped going outside as often.  It depressed me to see high school students on the train younger than I was.  All I did everyday was laze around the house, or sit in the yard looking up at the sky.  I wondered what the others were doing.  I wondered where they were.  And if I would ever see them again.

My parents watched all of this unfold from afar.  I almost wished they would shout at me for being so pitiful.  In a roundabout way, I wanted to be punished for my own inadequacy.  It didn’t feel right that someone as useless as myself could be allowed to sit around the house each and every day, eating their food and sleeping under their roof.

But my parents were never the type to handle things forcefully or directly.  In hindsight, that might be why I ended up such a soft and ineffectual person.  I know that makes it sound like I’m blaming them for all my problems.  That’s not what I’m trying to say.  I’m simply talking about cause and effect.  I was lucky that my parents didn’t throw me out of the house the second I turned eighteen.  But that also might have been a curse in its own way.

Things came to a head late in the summer.  My father was reading a book in the living room when I came down to get water from the kitchen.  My mother was there as well, sorting through the mail.  I was about to head back upstairs when my father suddenly snapped his book shut and got to his feet.

“We should go on a trip,” he said.  As if a very obvious thing had finally dawned on him.

My mother looked up from the mail.

“A trip sounds nice,” she said.

A trip?  To where?  Now?  Even if I managed to speak up then, I don’t think I would have gotten proper answers to those questions.  Before I knew it the three of us were packed into the car.  My father didn’t turn on the GPS or anything.  He simply pulled out of the driveway and headed down the road.  It was early in the morning, and the sun had just peeked over the horizon.

We drove for a long time.  My mother sat in the passenger seat beside my father, and I in the back.  At first I thought we would just go to Tokyo, but in that case we wouldn’t have taken the car.  My suspicion was confirmed when we got on the highway, completely skirting the city and heading north.

My father put on some music, but after an hour he turned it off.  Occasionally my mother would ask me if I was feeling car sick or was thirsty.  But that was it.  Besides the hum of the engine and the occasional click of a turn signal, it was silent.

Once we’d cleared the city, the scenery outside slowly changed.  The buildings became lower, the landscape more mountainous.  It occurred to me that I’d never taken a car anywhere north of Tokyo before.  I’d been to Sapporo on vacation, but we took a plane then.  This was my first time seeing Tohoku with my own eyes.  Despite it being part of the country where I was born, I didn’t know a single important thing about the place.

We got all the way to Fukushima before my father had to stop for gas.  By then it was around noon.  There was a small beach with a little cluster of restaurants and shops.  We got beef bowls for lunch and leaned against the hood of the car as we ate, watching the waves hit the shore.  I could hear the water roiling beneath us.  It was a windy day at the height of typhoon season, the sky a deep shade of gray.  A flock of seagulls floated overhead, fighting amongst themselves just above the clouds.  Their cries sounded very distant.

By late afternoon we arrived in Sendai, where my mother bought food and my father topped up on fuel.  He got directions from a woman working at the gas station.  Then it was back to driving.  

I can’t say for sure what compelled my father to take us on this impromptu road trip.  Really, I can’t even call it a road trip; we didn’t stop at any sightseeing locations, unless you counted the beach.  We just kept plodding along, slowly but steadily, carving a path up the eastern shore of Japan.  As if running from, or perhaps searching for, something without concrete form or substance.

We finally stopped when the sun began to set.  Just off the highway that carved through the mountains was a small town, the name of which I can’t recall.  It was so small it might as well have not had a name.  I think we were in Miyagi, or maybe even Iwate.  Either way, we were deep in the Tohoku countryside by then.

We spent the night at the town’s only ryokan .  The sort of place where they provide your own kimono to sleep in.  Our room was simple - three futons laid out side by side on a tatami floor.  All I’d done was sit in the car all day, but regardless I felt tired.  I went straight to sleep.

When my eyes opened, it was still dark.  About four in the morning.  To my side, I saw that my mother’s futon was empty.  My father was still there, snoring loudly.

I stepped into my slippers and left the room.  There was a medium sized garden in the back, rocks covered in moss exposed to the night air.  A porch overlooked it from inside.  I found my mother sitting there, gazing at the rocks and the water flowing between them.  I sat beside her, and together we watched the reflection of the moon on the garden pond.

A shadow passed over the garden.  There was a bird flying overhead.  What sort of bird it is that flies above Tohoku in the dead of night, I can’t say.

My mother lifted her hand as if to reach out and touch me.  I stayed very still.  Her hand hovered in the space between us for a while, then fell back to her side.  The moon wavered on the surface of the garden pond.  Actually, maybe there was no water in that garden after all.  In the darkness it was impossible to tell.  But the moon did waver.  That I know for certain.

During this same trip to the countryside, another person from my past figured in a strange incident, one that I still can’t quite believe actually happened.

My mother quickly fell asleep after we returned to the room that night.  I, on the other hand, remained awake inside my futon.  By the time the sun began to rise I had yet to fall back asleep.

I decided to go for a walk until my parents woke up.  Maybe I would find a store and buy something for the drive back.  With this in mind, I left the room and wandered into town.  It was such a small place that I had no real worry of getting lost.  I figured as long as I could still see the ryokan, I was fine.

It was a humid morning.  I had to fight off endless swarms of insects as I walked.  The grass growing by the road was heavy with dew.  Now that it wasn’t night, I could see the mountains in the distance very clearly.  They had a deep green hue and looked both extremely close and incredibly far at once.

I walked for some time, but never happened upon a store.  Eventually I spotted a vending machine sitting beside the road.  It was next to an old bus stop that had only a single rotting bench.  Not exactly a 7-11, but it would have to do.

I went around the bus stop and stood in front of the vending machine.  That was when I spotted something sticking out of the bottom, that is, the flap where the drinks usually pop out.

More specifically, it was a pair of human legs.

A person is stuck inside of this vending machine, I thought to myself.

Now, before I continue any further, I want to assure you, the hypothetical reader, that I am not making any of this up.  My father really did wake up one day and decide to drag us all the way out to a tiny little town in the middle of the countryside.  He is the least spontaneous and risk-loving person I know besides myself (I had to have gotten it from somewhere), but nevertheless this did actually happen.  And it’s true that, while taking a walk down the road the following morning, I happened upon a beat-up vending machine with a pair of human legs sticking out the bottom.  Nothing above the waist was visible from the outside.  It reminded me of a deer being digested by a python, the way their spindly legs jut out as they are slowly and steadily swallowed.

At first I just stood there and stared, too dumbfounded to react.  When stumbling upon a scenario as uncommon as finding a person stuck inside of a vending machine, I believe it is important to take one’s time to process all the available information.  After all, the sheer absurdity of the situation was not the only reason I found myself unable to speak or move.  

It was also because I just so happened to recognize this particular pair of legs.

At that very moment, the legs in question twitched, in a manner that was not unlike the movements of a dying grasshopper.  A rustling sound came from inside, and then an audible groan echoed out.  Once I heard the voice of the person inside the machine, I couldn’t help myself from speaking.

“Hiroi-san?”

“Huh?  Who’s there?” The voice inside the machine shouted.  “Where am I?  Help!”

A loud banging noise came from within the walls of the metal casing.  The legs sticking out of the machine began to writhe wildly, scraping against the dirt at the edge of the road.  I heard the sound of wood clopping together.  Both feet were wearing a pair of geta sandals, the toes painted black.

“Hiroi-san?” I shouted this time.  “Is it really you?”

“Yes, it is me!  I don’t know who you are, but you’ve got to help me!” she shouted back.  “I can’t move.  I think I’m stuck.  Get me the hell out here!  My head’s killing me.  Oh goodness, I think I’m going to be sick.  Quick, before-”

The rest was interrupted by a wretched gurgling sound that reverberated from inside the machine.  A moment later the stench of vomit pierced my nostrils, acrid with the flavor of cheap sake.  The legs went stiff, pointing ramrod straight like two antennae, before going limp again.

“Oh, man.  This is a new low,” she groaned.  “Please, help me.  I’m gonna…oh…”

In a way I’m glad there wasn’t a single soul around at the time.  I couldn’t call for help, but at least nobody had to witness me gripping Hiroi-san’s ankles with both hands and tugging with all my might.  It took several attempts to dislodge her from the machine.  She also screamed loudly every time I pulled.  Her hair must have been tangled inside.  As the sun climbed higher in the sky, my body became completely drenched in sweat.  At last, with one final herculean effort, I dug my heels in and pulled Hiroi-san free from the machine.  The two of us fell backwards onto the ground in a cloud of dirt, where we lay for a long time, covered in the smell of summer grass and vomit.

“Man, I really thought I was a goner for a minute there,” said Hiroi-san.  “Thanks for helping me out!”

I stared at the dirt covering my pants and shirt.  “Uh…sure.”

We were sitting on the bench at the bus stop.  I’d bought some water from the vending machine for the both of us.  Luckily it still worked.  I stuck my hand into the flap and caught the bottles before they hit the pool of vomit I knew was sitting at the bottom.  When I stood back up, I saw that it was one of those old vending machines that also sold alcohol.  In fact it was so old I didn’t even have to present an ID to buy from it.

On the way back to the bench, I found Hiroi-san’s bass guitar.  It was sitting inside its case just behind the stop, partially hidden in the long grass.  There was something off about it, but I couldn’t quite place it then.  I picked the guitar case up, dusted it off, and brought it beneath the shade covering the bench.

“Thanks,” she said.  “Think you can get some sake too?”

“Sorry…I’m underage.”

I’d already told my parents I’d gone for a walk and would be back soon.  The sun was blazing high in the sky now.  I could hear the intense cries of cicadas.  Hiroi-san grumbled irritably and covered her ears with her hands, then switched to cradling her head, then back to her ears, and so on, until she gave up and sagged over the back of the bench.

“Where the hell are we?” she asked.

“I think we’re in Iwate,” I said.

“Iwate?!  Man, I’ve really done it this time,” Hiroi-san chuckled to herself.  “Shima’s going to kill me.”

I felt disoriented.  It didn’t appear that I was dreaming.  And yet I had a hard time believing this was reality.  How was it that the two of us had met here, of all places?

“Hiroi-san,” I said, “How did you end up all the way out here, exactly?”

She mulled it over for a bit.  “Hm, let’s see…I was drinking around Shinjuku.  Then I ran out of money.  I bummed a few more drinks off my friends, then I lost them.  I ended up falling asleep on the bus.  After that…huh, I don’t remember.  I woke up inside a vending machine.”

She chuckled to herself, but stopped because it made her head hurt too much.

“Oh, everything hurts.  I’d shoot myself if I could afford the bullet,” she moaned.  Then she glanced at me.  Her eyes, half drunken and half sober, scanned my face.

“You said my name earlier,” she said.  “I assume we’re acquainted?”

I gestured wordlessly for a moment, unsure of what to say.  Part of me still believed this was some sort of dream, and I wasn’t really speaking to Hiroi-san right then.

“Well…we are acquainted,” I said at last.  “But, um, you might not remember me.”

Hiroi-san patted me on the back.  “Don’t take it personally.  Everyone in Shinjuku knows me.  But I only know maybe ten percent of them.”  She took a quick swig of water.  “So do you live around here?”

“I live in Kanagawa.  I’m on a trip with my family.”

“Kanagawa, Kanagawa…Kana Kana Kanagawa.  You like music?  Ever been to Shinjuku?”

Perhaps because Hiroi-san was taking this whole situation in stride, I felt somewhat able to do the same.

“I have,” I said.  “I’m actually a fan of yours.”

“Really?  Well shucks, thanks!  Never knew I had fans all the way out in Iwate.  Oh, I guess you’re not actually from here.”  She laughed to herself before clutching her head again.  “Ooh…”

She really was the same Hiroi-san.  Maybe she didn’t remember me, but nothing else about her had changed.  The realization brought me a sudden sense of comfort.  I didn’t care anymore that we’d met under such absurd circumstances.  I was glad that our paths had crossed, no matter how unconventionally.

“Please try to drink more responsibly,” I said gently.

She smiled at me.  “If I had a hundred yen for every time I’ve heard that, I’d be able to buy happiness.”

“You must really like drinking.”

“Sure do.  How old are you?”

I told her I was eighteen now.

“That’s a tough period.  Old enough to go to war, too young to drink.” She shook her head.  “At that age all I could do was get myself drunk on dreams.  Sad dreams, happy dreams - my head was pretty much permanently in the clouds.  I sure had a lot of things I wanted to do back then.  Man, it all feels so long ago now.”

With that she laid her head in my lap and closed her eyes.  I stiffened momentarily, then relaxed.  She must have been very tired.  I supposed I didn’t mind.  Hiroi-san had always treated me with a natural familiarity, as if we were sisters.

“I’ve never been to Iwate before,” she said.  “But this place feels familiar, somehow.”

I asked what she meant.  But she didn’t reply.

A heron trilled softly somewhere overhead.  The sky was an astonishingly soft blue that day.  Hiroi-san lay on her side with her back facing me.  Through the gap in her faded green dress I could see the faint outline of her ribs.  I felt that if I were to reach out and touch Hiroi-san then, my hand would have passed straight through her.  I sat very still, careful not to disturb her rest.

She didn’t speak for a long time.  Soon I realized she had fallen asleep.

I sat there on the bench until Hiroi-san woke up.  About twenty minutes went by.  When she woke she turned so she was facing straight up, her eyes fixed on the roof of the bus stop.

“Can I tell you something a bit strange?” she asked.

I nodded.

“I had this dream once,” she said.  “In the dream there was a monkey that sat on my shoulder and followed me everywhere.  No one else could see it, but it was always there.  This monkey had a special power.  Anytime I was unlucky, he could turn the tide in my favor.  Say I was short on rent - he’d make it so I found the money I needed underneath my bed.  The price this monkey demanded for his services was a finger.  Each time he granted me good fortune, he would leap down from my shoulder and tear off one of my fingers with his teeth.  He had this huge, powerful jaw filled with these big blocky teeth - a real proper set of chompers.  The pain was agonizing.  He’d always bite down right on the knuckle, leaving a perfectly clean stump behind.  Now, get this - each time the opposite happened, that is, whenever something unlucky happened to me - the finger would grow back.  And I could sacrifice it again the next time I needed help from the monkey.  So I lived like that in the dream, trading my fingers for good luck when I needed them, and growing them back whenever I could.”

I sat quietly and listened.  The heron trilled again, much further this time.

“When I woke from that dream, I was on a park bench somewhere,” she continued.  “Just like this.  I laid there thinking about the dream.  I thought, was there even any point in going through all that pain?  That is, letting the monkey bite off my fingers all those times.  If I had to experience misfortune to grow them back anyways, wouldn’t it have all been the same if I just lived a normal life, without relying on the powers of this magic monkey?  It all just seemed so pointless.  What do you think?”

I said I wasn’t sure.  I’d never met a magic monkey before.

Hiroi-san laughed softly.  I could feel her shoulders shaking gently in my lap.

“Really?  I see them everywhere.  On every corner.  Offering me miracles, all while drooling through those big, blocky teeth.  My fingers ache just thinking about it.  Even now they’re watching us.  You know, more than anything, I think I’d like to become someone who doesn’t need miracles.”

She was silent again after that.  Suddenly it became apparent that she was crying.  Small, quiet sobs, so minute I hardly noticed at first.  As she cried, the sky darkened overhead and a fine rain began to fall.  An unannounced summer rain that slowly drenched the mountains and fields of grass all around us.

I stayed with Hiroi-san until the rain stopped.  Soon I saw the bus appear at the far end of the road.  It trundled up to the stop where we were seated, its doors opening with a hiss.

Hiroi-san shouldered her bass and got on the bus.  She’d already left her number in my phone, along with a promise to thank me properly one day.  Any trace of sadness had vanished from her demeanor, as quickly as it had come.  She stood just inside the doors and saluted me.

“I’m glad we met today!” she said.  “Thanks again for your help.  I really am the luckiest girl, aren’t I?  Hope I catch you at a show sometime!”

“No problem…um, is this the correct bus back to Tokyo?” I asked.

She laughed at that, though I wasn’t trying to make a joke.  “It’s going somewhere.  That’s good enough for me!”  With that the doors shut between us, and the bus took off down the countryside road.

As I watched the bus depart, Hiroi-san cracked open the window and stuck her head out.  I could see her ponytail flying wildly in the wind.  She waved and called out to me at the top of her lungs.

“See you around, Hitori-chan!”

I stood at the stop and waved until I couldn’t see the bus anymore.  Now that I’m writing this all down at last, something peculiar has occurred to me.  Perhaps my memory is just incorrect.  But I don’t seem to recall ever telling Hiroi-san my name.

I began to search for a part-time job upon returning to Kanagawa.  

Eventually, I managed to land a position as a data entry clerk.  The work could be done from home - the company was a technology firm headquartered in Osaka.  I’m not even sure what they did exactly.  My only task was to take rows of data from one spreadsheet and input them into another.  It was boring, repetitive work, but that was why I was able to get hired.  I had to suffer through one fifteen minute phone call in order to be onboarded, but otherwise I was left alone to complete my assigned tasks.

As for the time I had outside of work, the majority of it was spent studying.  I had resolved to take the upper secondary school equivalency exam in order to obtain a high school certificate.  I used the money from the new job to buy books and other study materials.  The exam was only administered twice each year, once in August and again in November.  It was already late August, and I had no confidence that I would be ready by November, so I would have to wait until the following summer.  That would give me plenty of time to prepare.

I held off on informing my parents about this.  It would be terrible if I got their hopes up only to fail.  For the most part they gave me space, so it was easy to keep my activities hidden.  During the day I hammered away quietly at my computer.  The pay was meager, but I had basically no expenses, so whatever I didn’t spend on my studies I saved.  After work I hit the books.  Studying again after so long made my head hurt, but I kept at it until it got dark and I was too tired to go on.  At that point I went to sleep and did it all again the next day.

I didn’t really question the reason for this change in my behavior at the time.  I was too busy to care.  But looking back on it now, I’m sure that strange encounter with Hiroi-san in Tohoku had something to do with it.

In the spring of the following year, I told my parents about my plans.  It occurred to me this was the first time I ever informed them of something rather than asking them.  When I did, my mother began to cry.  My father put his hand on her shoulder.  He told me they would support my decision.

I felt a strange sense of relief as I watched their somber faces.  Once I was gone, the two of them would be free to live as they pleased without having to worry about me.  Maybe then my soul would also be at peace.

Spring gave way to summer.  I was nineteen by then.  I took the equivalency exam in August and promptly failed.  I didn’t have to wait for the results - I knew as soon as I walked out of the building.  When I got home, I quit my job and devoted every waking hour to studying.  I did this for the next ten weeks, barely sleeping and doing enough practice problems to fill this notebook twenty times over.  When the next test date rolled around in November, I retook the exam.  This time I passed.

Summer had turned to fall, and winter was well on its way.  Soon I would be twenty.  The sheer weight of that number drove a huge stake into my heart whenever I thought of it.  I had to do something about myself before it was too late.

That being said, having a high school equivalency diploma didn’t suddenly make me an attractive candidate in the eyes of employers.  I applied to hundreds of jobs in the first few months.  But I might as well have piled all those applications up in the yard and set them on fire.  Not a single person got back to me.  It had taken a significant amount of effort on my part just to get this far, and yet the world was telling me it was not nearly enough.

My father had a friend at a marketing firm in Tokyo that was hiring - through this tenuous web of connections, I somehow managed to get a phone interview.  When the time finally came though, I was so nervous that I completely flubbed it and left a terrible impression.  Needless to say, I didn't get the job.

Out of desperation, I sent an email to Ishikawa-sensei and asked to meet with him.  He had stopped coming by a while ago, but left his number with me in case I ever needed anything.  We met at a coffee shop near the station.  It was an uncommonly sunny February morning.  It might have even been the week of my twentieth birthday, now that I think about it.

We greeted each other before taking our seats.  After the usual niceties, I explained my present situation to him.  Once I was done explaining myself, I fell silent and waited for him to speak.  But it was a while before he said anything.

“If I may ask,” he said at last, “Why did you decide to do all this?”

Why?  I thought.  Because I hate myself.  I’d been nothing but a burden for my entire life.  It was only thanks to sheer luck that I managed to get this far.  I was blessed with good friends and an understanding family, and because of that I lived for twenty years without ever taking a serious look at myself.  

Lately, I’d been thinking that what happened in the park that day was probably a karmic rebalancing of sorts, a recalibration by the universe to put things in their correct order.  I’d had my time in the sun, but now my luck had run out.  And in the bathroom mirror where I washed my face every night I saw the eyes of someone averting their gaze from the truth.  I couldn’t do a single thing on my own.

Ishikawa-sensei phoned me about a week later.  An old college friend of his was a manager at a small proofreading company in Yokohama.  Due to a recent incident (he didn’t go into much detail) they’d had to let go of several of their staff and were looking for people to fill the vacancies.

I had a phone interview the following week.  Compared to my last one, it was a rather informal affair; the person who spoke to me appeared distracted.  In any case, I managed to pass and was invited to their office.

That was how I found myself on a train to Yokohama one spring morning.  It was the first time in my life I ever wore dress pants and a blazer.  All borrowed from my mother, of course.  The shoes and shirt I took from my old school uniform.  Looking at my reflection in the window of the train, I felt like a complete fraud.

Outside the office building, I suddenly felt sick and had to run into a public restroom to vomit.  My legs trembled as I clutched the walls on either side.  For a while I really thought about turning around and going back home.  But I knew if I did that I’d never forgive myself.

I did end up getting the job.  The interview was an absolute disaster, and I was sure that I’d failed, but a few days later I was extended a formal offer of employment.  In hindsight, they must have been truly desperate for people.  Against all the odds, and even my own expectations for myself, I had finally secured a proper job.

As the company was located in Yokohama, I would have to move.  With my parents’ help I secured a small apartment on the outskirts of the city that was within my meager budget.  It was a long walk from the nearest station, but that was how it had to be.  My parents offered countless times to send me money so I could find a better place.  But I refused their help.

So that’s the story of how I left home in the spring of my twentieth year and moved to Yokohama.  It was only a couple hours away by train, but it might as well have been on the other side of the world.  I’d never lived alone before, nor did I know anyone in the area.  A perfect recipe for disaster.  I’m sure my parents thought the same, but in the end they made no particular effort to stop me.  They must have realized I would not be swayed no matter what they said.  

I had to get far away, not only from them but also from everything I’d ever known.  I had to take responsibility for myself.  I couldn’t be a burden to anyone anymore.  Nor could I go on living with the self loathing I carried in my heart.  These thoughts gave me a sort of faux courage, allowing me to do things I ordinarily would have thought impossible for myself.

The moving truck came in the morning to take me to Yokohama.  My parents helped me load my things into the back before we exchanged goodbyes.  In their eyes, I could see countless things they wanted to say which could not be said, countless things they wished they could do which could no longer be done.  In the end they simply said they loved me and let me go.  I got into the truck with the driver and set off.

I recall now that, because there was limited space in my new apartment, I left behind a good portion of my belongings when I moved.  Among those were my CD collection, Kita-san’s scarf, and the old Gibson that had been my companion for the better part of ten years.

Chapter Text

My time in Yokohama was pretty much a waste.

Leaving home at such a young age was every bit the disaster one would have expected.  I knew that going in, but I still felt a need to confirm that disaster, to feel its effects on me, like the primitive apes that lived before imagination.

The proofreading company where I was employed mostly did work on school textbooks.  My task was to pore over every manuscript page, exhibit and footnote, fact checking each line and making grammatical tweaks where necessary.  Given my neurotic disposition, I turned out to be a very slow worker.  There was no question that I was the slowest on the entire staff.  After a month, my manager handed me the keys to the office and told me to lock up when I was finished.  It was safe to assume I would be the last to leave on any given day.

As for my other coworkers, any chance of a relationship beyond the minimum courtesies was doomed from the start.  There were two distinct groups at my office - the first being comprised of the long time employees who had survived the recent layoffs.  These people had known each other for years, and had already formed their own clique amongst themselves.  For the most part they did not bother with us new recruits unless absolutely necessary.  This was understandable, since they were much older than us.  Their concerns revolved around their spouses, children, and pensions.  All foreign concepts as far as I was concerned.

The second group was us, the new recruits.  Besides myself, these were all recent college grads.  Some had even gone to graduate school.  I was the only one who was hired without a degree.  I never advertised this fact or told anyone about it, but at some point the word must have gotten out.  Eventually I realized they were gossiping about me when they thought I couldn’t hear.  They surmised that I must have had some sort of backdoor connection, or I’d simply lucked into the job on no merit of my own.  To be completely fair, this wasn’t entirely untrue.  This theory of theirs was only confirmed when they saw how much I struggled to complete my work.  I hoped that my habitual overtime would at least show that I was taking the job seriously.  But on one occasion I heard them laughing in the kitchen, saying that I was only trying to suck up to the managers.

So that’s how I became the employee who came into the office extra early, brewed enough tea for everyone, and sat at my desk before hammering away at a textbook manuscript until long past dinnertime.  Never speaking to a single soul, hardly looking up from my computer.  Nor did anyone speak to me.  I took lunch alone at a nearby convenience store.  In other words, it was the exact existence I had led while I was in school.  Besides the clothes I wore and the tasks I was assigned, not a single thing had changed.

When I was younger, I often dreaded having to grow up and work a menial office job that was neither lucrative nor fulfilling.  I was terrified of this fate, one which awaits the vast majority of people, and often daydreamed of ways I could escape it.  In hindsight, this was a very arrogant dream that I had.  To think I was so special that I could be exempt from life’s common struggles was delusional at best.  Nevertheless, as a child I was very afraid of ending up as a “boring adult.”  I could think of no worse outcome for myself.

This fear of mine, however, hardly entered my mind during my days at the proofreading company.  I was simply too preoccupied to think about such things.  My childhood fear was superseded by a deeper, more compelling one - that is, the fear of not being able to provide for myself.  I’d more or less been cut off from my parents, and I had no other relatives or friends to rely on.  I was completely on my own.  Therefore, I didn’t have the luxury of worrying about whether I was leading the sort of life I’d envisioned.

But this isn’t to say that I was completely accepting of my situation.  When working overtime at the office, I occasionally found myself staring listlessly out the window, at the other buildings filled with unfortunate souls burning the night away.  I would look at my reflection in the glass and struggle to make sense of the person I saw there.  What the hell am I doing?  I thought.  Of all the possible turns my life could have taken, I never would have imagined that I would be sitting in a cramped cubicle on a Friday evening, poring over a passage detailing the events of the first Sino-Japanese war.  Yet here I was doing just that.  It was amazing to think, despite my deep desire to not end up in a place like this, I’d found myself here as if it were an inevitability.

For a while, I simply ignored these feelings.  I had more important things to worry about.  Like learning how to fold my own laundry, and how to crack an egg without making a mess.  Or how to file my taxes.  How to dress properly for the office.  How insurance worked.  Which number to call when my toilet stopped working.  And whether it was worth paying the extra hundred yen for wheat bread.

I passed about two years like this.  And ever so slowly, through the process of endless trial and error, I began to craft myself into something vaguely resembling an adult.  I established a routine and stuck to it religiously.  My alarm went off at six thirty in the morning each day.  Once I’d gotten dressed and had something to eat, I made the fifteen minute walk to the station to catch the seven thirty train, and was at the office by eight.  By eight thirty the tea was done brewing, and before another person walked in I was already there, pecking away at my constantly growing mountain of manuscripts.  

I worked until I had completed about as much work as everyone else, which usually meant I stayed late.  Once I was finished I locked up and began the long journey home.  Sometimes I picked up dinner at a convenience store.  The street I lived on was always dead quiet as I walked along it, the plastic takeout bag swinging from my arm.  My apartment, too, had the stagnant air of a place that had remained undisturbed for several hours.  After eating and taking a shower, it was already past ten.  I would play some net games before crawling into bed and going to sleep.

It’s not like it was all bad.  Having a routine in place gave me the sense that I was following a process correctly, and there were even times when I felt happy.  Sometimes, on nights when work went smoothly and I didn’t have to stay so late, I’d go for dinner at a local restaurant.  After eating I’d take my time walking home, letting the evening air linger on my skin.  In such moments I would feel a measure of satisfaction with myself.  Hopeless as I was, I was managing to get by on my own.  That had to be worth something.  Maybe things would turn out alright after all.  On nights like this I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.

At one point, however, such days became increasingly uncommon before disappearing altogether.  The fear that had motivated me in those early days slowly faded away as well.  As I became accustomed to my new life, any sort of emotional extreme in either direction gradually dissipated.  I was left only with a general numbness that accompanied me through each day.  My routine carried me forward with an automatic precision.  During this period, I hardly ever thought of Kita-san or the others.  One morning, I looked at the calendar on my phone and was shocked to realize two whole years had gone by.  I had completely lost my concept of time.

I went to the dry cleaner’s that day to pick up some clothes.  When I walked in, the clerk behind the counter was listening to the radio.  It was some sort of talk show about economics.  A man with a stern voice was speaking about retirement funds.  Within the next twenty or thirty years, he said, the government would run out of money for the national pension system.  The elderly were living too long, expenses were on the rise, and there weren’t enough young people around to bear the burden of those expenses.  The National Diet would have to raise the age of eligibility from sixty five to seventy, or at the very least cut back significantly on the amount of individual distributions.  The country, said the man in his stern voice, was on a collision course with cold, hard reality.

On the train, I thought about how long it would take for me to turn seventy years old.  I was just about twenty two at the time, so it would take forty eight years.  Nearly five decades.  That same amount of time, I knew, had once seen two world wars, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.  It was in the history textbook I was proofreading that week.  That was how long it would take for me to get my pension.  Assuming it even existed by then.

It wasn’t as if I’d left home and gotten work solely because I wanted a pension.  But if not that, I suddenly wondered, what had I done it for?  My initial goal of relieving my parents of their burdens was accomplished.  Now I was here, adjusting passages about Nobunaga and Hideyoshi and Meiji, and for what?  As I sat there on the train, not a single justification came to mind.  I was hurtling through a deep, dark tunnel in an indeterminate direction, with no idea where I would end up or when.

I was laid off from my job in the last week of February, nearly two years to the day I met with Ishikawa-sensei in the cafe.

There had been whispers that the firm was deep in the red and had no hope of being profitable again any time soon.  Even I was aware of this, because my manager had a habit of muttering to himself without realizing.  On Valentine’s Day it was announced that they would be holding evaluations for all the employees.  We were typically given reviews annually in the summer, so this was out of the norm.  It was clear to everyone what this meant.

I was the first one to be called into my manager’s office.  We had a brief, mostly one sided conversation, after which he handed me an envelope containing my severance package.  I offered no words of protest.  It was apparent that my own opinions on the manner were neither welcome nor relevant.  I had no choice but to accept it.

When I got home, I fell onto my bed and stared at the ceiling for a long time.  My chest was filled with a strange, murky feeling.  I had the sense that I had expended a great deal of effort only for it all to end rather unceremoniously.  Yet I felt no anger or indignation.  All I’d done when that envelope was handed to me, was take it with both hands before bowing and leaving the room.

As I laid there, it occurred to me that this whole time I’d only been pretending to have control over my own destiny.  The late hours, the tea brewing in the kitchen, and the seven thirty train, were all ways for me to convince myself I wasn’t helpless.  But like oil in water, the truth makes itself clear in time.  That envelope had cut through my illusion with the simplicity of a spring breeze.  I imagined the managers seated in a circle in a meeting room, carefully crossing out the workers who would be let go.  With the stroke of a pen the course of my life was altered.

I supposed I ought to be thinking about what to do next.  But I was too preoccupied with the notion that it wouldn’t really matter what I did.  You see, I’ve always been the cynical type, but I think this was the first time that I felt a genuine nihilism taking root in my heart.  I was a kite in the wind - my world a summer storm.

In the end I decided to take a short break before trying to find another job.  I barely ever spent money aside from the bare necessities, so I had a decent amount of savings in the bank.  I could afford to go a few months without working.

The novelty of not having to go to work wasn’t so bad at first.  I didn’t have to wake up at six thirty anymore.  I could go grocery shopping in the middle of the day, when it wasn’t so crowded and everything I wanted was still in stock.  No more spending money on dry cleaning for my work clothes, or developing a sore back from being self conscious about my posture at the office.  Only after being out of work did I understand just how much my life had been occupied by it.

It wasn’t long before I became terribly bored though.  Without a job, suddenly there were forty plus hours every week I somehow had to fill.  That being said, I couldn’t really enjoy myself doing anything because any sort of self indulgence came along with a hefty dose of guilt and self loathing.  If I have time to be doing this, I would think, didn’t I have time to be doing something more productive?  But I didn’t want to work either, so on most days I ended up just doing nothing.  As it turns out, when you don’t work you can’t have fun.  And if you can’t have fun there’s no incentive to work.  

Spring rolled around, and with it came the beginning of baseball season.  Around this time I got into the habit of putting on a game and listening to it while I laid on my bed.  My father used to put on Swallows games in the living room all the time, and I suppose I felt nostalgic for those times.  You could stream the radio broadcast on your computer for most teams in the Tokyo metro area.  I would stare at the ceiling and listen to the announcer reel off stats I didn’t understand, and the soft murmur of the crowd in the background, punctuated by the occasional crack of a bat.  It helped the apartment feel a little less empty.  I would close my eyes and pretend I was at the game, sitting beneath the early spring sky, sipping soda and cheering on my favorite players.  Not that I actually knew the name of a single person playing in those games.  I didn’t even know which teams were playing most of the time.

I never told my parents that I’d lost my job.  I visited home once during Christmas after the first year - we had dinner together, and I stayed overnight before returning the next morning.  I didn’t come home after that.  I made up vague excuses about being busy with work.  Since being laid off, I hadn’t called a single time.  Just the thought of speaking to them made me feel nauseous.  I would never be able to tell them the truth.

Before I knew it, four months had been lost.  I spent the time playing net games and daydreaming about ways I could get rich without having to work.  I knew I couldn’t keep sitting around forever.  Eventually I’d run out of money.  But I just couldn’t bring myself to care.  I was numb to everything.  Whole weeks went by in the blink of an eye.  Soon it would be summer.

On one particular June afternoon, I was listening to a baseball game as usual.  It was very warm that day, and I fell asleep at my desk without meaning to.  Later I was woken suddenly by the roar of the crowd.  A player on the Swallows had hit a walk off home run.  The announcer was shouting loudly, and behind him I could hear people screaming in excitement.  The noise was so intense that for a second I thought I was at Jingu Stadium myself.  But I wasn’t.  I was alone in my Yokohama apartment, miles away from where the Swallows played.  At that moment I was filled with an overwhelming desire to be there alongside everyone else.  I pressed my hands against my computer screen, trying to phase into it and transport myself to Jingu Stadium.  But the screen held firm.  An unbreakable barrier stood between me and the rest of the world.

In the spring, Kita-san and I often went on walks by the river.  As soon as the weather warmed up enough she would invite me out, and we’d go walking until we found a cherry tree where we could sit and talk.  From the grass we plucked small stones and took turns tossing them into the water.

“I used to come here by myself sometimes,” she told me.  “I’d sit here, watching people pass by.  Couples, siblings, classmates - I rarely saw anyone who was by themselves, like me.  It made me a little self conscious to be here alone.  After a while, I stopped coming by myself.  It’s funny, isn’t it?  If it wasn’t for other people, you’d never realize when you’re lonely.”

In the summer the river became busy with people.  I hated crowds, so instead Kita-san would invite me over to her house.  Her parents were rarely home, she said, so it was fine to come anytime.  It was true - I never ran into either of her parents during any of my visits.

Kita-san lived in an unassuming three-bedroom house in the suburbs.  The kind of neighborhood where the grass was always trimmed and the homes all looked the same.  By the time I arrived she was always waiting beside the front gate, dressed in a light sundress or collared shirt that displayed the soft bumps of her collarbone.

Her father had a pretty nice stereo system in the living room, which we could hook up to a computer to listen to music.  At Kita-san’s request I played her many different kinds of rock songs, and taught her about all the subgenres that existed - everything from punk to shoegaze, blues to psychedelic.  Despite being the vocalist of a rock band herself, she mostly listened to pop, which I guess gave her a case of imposter syndrome at times.  

During these listening sessions, she seemed to enjoy Western rock the most, particularly bands from the eighties.  Her English was pretty good, much better than mine, so she had an easier time connecting to the lyrics.  Aerosmith was her favorite, because she liked Steven Tyler’s harmonica solos. 

“Harmonicas are so small and cute,” she said.  The stereo system was playing a live version of “Cryin’.”  “You can carry one with you wherever you go.  A little piece of music in your pocket.  It’d be nice if we could fit our guitars in our pockets, wouldn’t it, Hitori-chan?”

Hitori-chan.   Besides my family, she was the only one to call me that.

For Kita-san’s birthday that year, I bought her a pair of harmonicas from Ochanomizu.  Nothing too fancy, but I’ll never forget the delighted laugh Kita-san let out when she opened the gift.  

She quickly handed one to me, and while sitting in her living room we tried to learn how to play the solo in the bridge of “Cryin’.”  There’s a video of Steven Tyler playing it live during a concert in New York or Moscow or wherever.  With his big lips and flowing locks of hair, even his silhouette is enough to recognize him by.  I’ve always thought that if rock and roll had a physical body, that body would look like Steven Tyler.  Maybe he’s not the most famous rock star of all time, but for some reason when I think of rock, I picture Steven Tyler.

We played together for a long time.  But try as we might, we couldn’t get our harmonicas to sound like Steven Tyler’s.  In the end we gave up and learned the chords on guitar instead.

“Is it true that you taught yourself guitar?” Kita-san asked later.  “You didn’t have a teacher?”

I nodded.  “My father had some instruction books lying around from before.  But other than that, I didn’t have a teacher.”

She shook her head.  “It’s remarkable that you were able to become so good on your own like that.”

“I put a lot of time into it,” I admitted.  “But it wasn’t like I had anything else to do.  I was always cooped up alone in my room anyways.”

Kita-san smiled softly.   “You should be more proud of yourself.  Since I started learning guitar, I’ve realized how much further ahead than me you are, and how much work it must have taken to get there.  And not just work - you have talent.  I could never get to your level on my own, not in a million years.” 

“I don’t think it’s anything special,”  I said.  “I just didn’t have anything else that was mine.  That was all.  Before I started playing guitar, I felt helpless all the time.  I still do, but once in a while, I’m able to escape that feeling.”

Kita-san tucked her legs underneath her and seemed to digest my words.

“It’s funny you say that,” she said at last.  “Watching you play on stage, oftentimes I’m the one who feels helpless.  Sometimes, Hitori-chan, I see this amazing light pouring forth from inside of you.  Under that light, I’m helpless - all I can do is watch.  I’m filled with this strange feeling, like I need to reach out and grab hold of you, or you’ll disappear forever.  It’s a simple thing, but so hard to explain at the same time.”

“Like playing the harmonica?”

Kita-san smiled.  “Yes.  A bit like that.”

All of Kanto was gripped by a smoldering heat wave that summer.  Perhaps the sun had lost its hold on the sky and fallen a little too close to the earth.  The days were so humid I thought I’d drown simply by breathing.  I spent many afternoons laying flat on the bed in only my underwear, slowly cooking in the oversized oven that was my studio apartment.

Most of my days were spent sleeping.  Though I hardly went anywhere, I felt tired constantly.  Even sleeping for ten or twelve hours wasn’t enough to stave off the exhaustion that ate away at me.  It felt like I was only closing my eyes rather than getting actual rest.  Nor did I feel fully awake when my eyes were open.  I was perpetually trapped in this halfway state, in which I was both dreaming and awake at once.

At one point I opened my eyes and saw Kita-san, Nijika-chan and Ryo-senpai sitting on the floor beside my bed.  They were chatting casually amongst themselves.  Nijika-chan saw that I was looking and waved to me.  Her lips mouthed something, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying.  I simply watched her, covered in a thick sheen of sweat.  

Kita-san seemed to chide her, as if to say she should leave me alone.  Ryo-senpai said something to both of them, and then they all went back to their previous conversation.

I wanted to call out to them, but my body would not move.  My flesh and bones were slowly melting away.  An almost violent tiredness fell over me then, and I closed my eyes.

When they opened, Kita-san was sitting on the edge of my bed.  Her fingers were intertwined with mine.  They felt exceptionally cold, almost freezing against my skin despite the heat.  She saw that I was awake and smiled down at me.  I tried to smile back, but only managed a soft groan.  I felt my stomach rumble.

Are you hungry?   She seemed to ask.  I nodded.  When I did, she left the bed and went to the kitchen.  From the fridge she took out eggs, scallions and instant rice.  I heard the sound of water being drawn into a pot, then the click of the stove sparking to life.  Kita-san grabbed a knife and began to slowly chop the scallions, humming softly to herself.

The sound of the knife against the cutting board and the water boiling on the stove filled me with vague recollections of my childhood.  I could not recall the last time I had felt the presence of another person so close to me.  Until then I had not realized just how quiet it was inside of that apartment.  And until I lost my job I never truly understood how many hours there were in a day, a week, a month, a life.  Some things simply do not exist until they are gone.  All at once it occurred to me just how utterly alone I was.  I was laying at the bottom of a very deep well.  Baking beneath the sun like desert earth.  Even if I were to cry out, no one would hear me, and if they did, no one would come.  The teenage girl who had dreamed of making friends while practicing guitar in her bedroom closet felt so impossibly far away now.  In order to get this far, it had been necessary to crush the part of me who harbored such dreams.

Kita-san finished working in the kitchen.  She brought over a piping hot bowl of steamed eggs over rice and set it on the table in the middle of the room.  It was sprinkled with chopped scallions on top and lightly salted.  She stood beside the bed and looked down at me, as if waiting for me to get up and eat.  But try as I might, I still could not move.

I’m sorry, Kita-san, I tried to say.  I’m too tired.  I’ll eat a little while later.

She seemed to understand my meaning, and smiled before kneeling on the floor beside me.  With her cool, icy hand she gently stroked my hair.

That’s fine, she seemed to say.  When you’re ready, go ahead and eat.  Take all the time you need.

I fell asleep once more.  When I woke up, Kita-san was gone.  But the food was still sitting on the table.  I got out of bed and forced myself to eat, though I was no longer so hungry.  The hot food left me sweating heavily after I was done.  Perspiration dripped from my chin and arms.  

I stood up and stripped off the remainder of my clothes, then grabbed a towel from the bathroom and dried myself off from head to toe.  Then I threw open the refrigerator and sat on the floor with my back to it, still naked.  I leaned my head against the inside of the refrigerator door and listened to the ticking of the clock on the wall.

Small footsteps pattered to my right.  I looked and saw Futari clambering up onto my desk chair.  Jimihen was standing beneath her, his tail wagging vigorously.  Futari was laughing loudly as Jimihen playfully nipped at her ankles, trying to climb out of reach of his mouth.

“Be careful,” I croaked at them.  “You’ll hurt yourself.”  But they ignored me.  When I looked away and back again, the two of them were gone.  

I was visited by many more people over the course of the afternoon.  Among them was Seika-san, who sat in my desk chair and watched me with her arms crossed, saying nothing, though she had a concerned expression on her face.  After that it was the two girls who had watched my road live with Hiroi-san.  They carefully toweled my body dry, which had become covered in sweat again.  I went back to sleep.  With the refrigerator still open to my back, I dreamt that I was suntanning in the middle of the Arctic.  

When I woke up again around twilight, Steven Tyler was sitting in my desk chair.  In his hands he held a harmonica.  He was playing a soft tune with both eyes closed.  When he saw that I was awake he stopped and crossed one leg over the other, folding both arms behind his head.

“Hey there, dreamer,” he said.  The distinct rasp of his voice was unmistakable.  “Crazy weather we’re having this week, wouldn’t you say?”

With his big lips and flowing hair, there was no doubt about it.  This was Steven Tyler in the flesh.  More specifically, it was a younger Steven Tyler; he appeared to be in his twenties or thirties, though in the faded orange sunlight it was difficult to say for sure.  He wore deep maroon bell bottom pants, and on his feet were a pair of dusty looking boots.  Wrapped around his neck was a brightly colored satin scarf.  Despite all the clothes he had on, he appeared entirely unbothered by the heat.

“Days like this remind me of Sunday school,” said Steven Tyler.  Somehow, he spoke in perfect Japanese.  “Sorry, I was raised Catholic.  Maybe you didn’t know that.”

He paused to wipe at his brow, though no sweat came away when he did this.

“We had a pastor at our church with only one arm,” he continued.  “He claimed to have lost the other in the war.  Which war he was talking about, and how exactly he lost that arm, I never got to the bottom of.  Anyways, every Sunday this pastor would sit us down in a circle and read to us from the book of Numbers.  All that damn pastor cared about was the book of Numbers.  Not Genesis, not Exodus or Psalms - Numbers.  His bible had this big hole in it, right through the middle - my friend was convinced it was made by a bullet.  I never got to the bottom of that either.”

He stopped once more as if to wait for my response, but I said nothing, so he picked up again.

“Anyways, in the book of Numbers there’s this story about the Israelites.  They’ve been searching for the promised land, you see, and have finally found it.  But it doesn’t appear all that great.  At least, that’s what I remember.  They complain to God that the promised land wasn’t all it was trumped up to be.  Basically, they’ve lost faith in God, and this gets him so angry that he condemns all of the Israelites, the whole lot of them, to wander the desert for forty years.  Forty years!  Imagine that.  God was essentially saying to the Israelites, ‘you ungrateful lot, wander the desert until you all die out and a new generation takes your place.’  And that’s exactly what they did.  None of them lived to see the promised land.  Every single one died in the desert.  These were the same Israelites who survived slavery in Egypt, witnessed the ten plagues, watched Moses split the sea - after all that they died like dogs, burned redder than cherries and leaking sand out of every hole.  Just thinking about it makes me so damn sad.  But I can never get that story out of my head.  On hot nights like this, I think about the Israelites who never managed to reach the promised land.  And I fear death a little more each time.”

After that he ignored me and went back to playing his harmonica.  I realized he was much older now.  In the process of telling his story, he had aged perhaps thirty or forty years.  As if he’d been wandering the desert alongside the Israelites all that time.  Deep wrinkles scored the skin on his face, and his hands shook as he played.  He seemed short of breath.  Despite his best efforts, he could not produce the same rich notes as before.  I fell asleep to the wheeze of Steven Tyler’s harmonica.

It was morning when I finally regained consciousness.  My desk chair was empty.  I was alone.  

The refrigerator motor groaned from working overtime all night.  I shut it and went to the bathroom, where I washed my face with cold water.  I looked in the mirror for a long time.  And all of a sudden I remembered something.  That unexplainable sadness that had filled me during that morning in Shibuya, when I said goodbye to Kita-san for the last time.  I recalled the reason for it.  As I stood with both hands gripping the bathroom sink, all the memories I had lost for the last five years finally returned to me.

Chapter Text

I have detailed two strange occurrences in this notebook so far.  The first, chronologically speaking, is the incident I experienced in the spring of my last year of middle school, when I was fourteen.  The second I wrote about at the very beginning, at which time I was seventeen years old.  There is, however, a third strange occurrence which I have not yet written about, which took place between the aforementioned two events.  This third event is what I had been unable to remember until now. 

In the fall of my second year in high school, Ryo-senpai once mysteriously disappeared for a period of about two weeks.  During this time we had no idea where she was, nor were we able to contact her.  Her parents called the police when she didn’t come home that night.  An investigation was quickly launched.  Her face was even shown on the news.  The situation came as a great shock to all of us.  Everyone at our schools expected her bandmates to have some idea of what had happened, but we had no clue.  Ryo-senpai had given no indication that anything was wrong.  Whether she had vanished of her own accord, or been taken somewhere against her will, we could not say.  

At the end of those two weeks, however, Ryo-senpai suddenly reappeared as if nothing had happened.  Like turtles in a pond - gone one moment, there the next.  We were elated at first, as the three of us had begun to think we would never see her again.  But our happiness was short-lived.  We quickly realized that something about her had changed.  She was different from the Ryo-senpai we had come to know.  I mean what I am about to say in the most abstract terms; but the Ryo-senpai who returned to us was not the same as before.

I will start from the beginning.  It was a cool evening in October.  Much like the day I stood outside the CD shop with Kita-san.  In fact, it was raining then too.  A heavy, windless rain that came straight down like needles from the sky.  We were walking to the station after practice.  Kita-san had an appointment to renew her passport that day, so she was not with us.  Outside the station Ryo-senpai put her hand on my shoulder.

“Want to join me for a bit?” she said.

There was an udon place nearby.  When the bill came I reached for my wallet, but Ryo-senpai waved me off and paid it herself.  I remember thinking this was so unusual that I forgot to do the customary protesting about splitting the bill.

“Any new song ideas lately?” I asked, trying to make conversation.

Ryo-senpai made a vague motion with her head.  “Too many.”  She appeared distracted, as if trying to catch a glimpse of something very far away.  Finally she focused on me and put both hands on the table.  “There isn’t space for much else up here.  Even when I’m doing something else, it’s always there in the background, chugging along on its own.  Like those little music boxes with the wind up springs.”

“A music box that never unwinds itself, you mean?”

“Guess so.  I suppose when I’m not looking, someone comes along and winds it further.  So it never stops.”

“So that’s how it sounds inside your head all the time?”

“Music?  Yes.  Or perhaps it’s more accurate to just call them sounds.  Taking those sounds and organizing them in a certain way is what we call music.  But music is just a processed version of what occurs naturally.  The same way that writing is a derivative of conscious thought.  In the beginning, art imitated life, and since then we’ve just been going back and forth.  Derivatives of derivatives.”

I nodded.  Ryo-senpai took the receipt from the table and carefully folded it into squares, using her thumbnail to make the creases as crisp as possible.

“What about you?” she said.

“Me?”

“What does it sound like inside your head?”

I didn’t respond immediately.  “I’m not sure.  I’ve never really thought about it before.  That’s a bit like trying to describe a color, or an emotion.  The right words for it aren’t there.”

Ryo-senpai nodded.  “Then let me ask you this.  Inside your head, is it ever quiet?  As in completely still, with no movement at all.  Obviously I’m not asking if you’ve ever been completely thoughtless.  You’d have to be dead to manage that.  I want to know if you’ve ever existed entirely within the present moment.  Without sparing a single ounce of energy towards thinking about something else.”

I thought about it for a short time.  But in truth I knew the answer before she finished speaking.  “No.  I haven’t.”

“You’re thinking of something else even now, aren’t you?”

I blushed.  “Yes.”

Ryo-senpai smiled.  “I’m the same.”

She did not ask what it was I was thinking about exactly.  Nor did I ask her.  We both understood that we were not to venture into that particular territory.  In some ways you could say I had the least casual relationship with Ryo-senpai out of all the band members.  But we were also uniquely connected in a way we did not share with the others.  I mean this in more ways than one.

The two of us talked a bit more after that.  But Ryo-senpai appeared distracted.  It was clear her mind was preoccupied by another topic entirely.  After a while I suggested we go home, and together we entered the station and caught the late night train.  I had to make a transfer to get back, so I got off first.  I stepped onto the platform and waved goodbye to Ryo-senpai.  She waved back, but she had that faraway look in her eyes again.  As if she was motioning to someone standing a great distance behind me.  When I turned instinctively to look, however, nobody was there.  By the time I looked back the train had already left.  And Ryo-senpai was gone.

That was the last time anyone saw her before she disappeared.  When the police came to the live house they questioned me very closely.  I told them everything I knew.  How we had gotten udon together at the place by the station.  That I’d said goodbye to her on the platform before my transfer.  And that I hadn’t seen her since.

I spoke briefly with Ryo-senpai’s parents as well.  They were both very distraught during our conversation.  Her mother informed me that they had been fighting lately about whether Ryo-senpai would go to college.  She was sure their recent clashes had something to do with her daughter's disappearance.  I thought to myself, would Ryo-senpai really run away over something like that?  It wouldn’t change anything, and she was not the kind of person to indulge in pointless endeavors.

I managed to keep a fairly level head at first.  Normally I would have gone into a full blown panic, but I was oddly calm.  So were Kita-san and Nijika-chan.  More precisely, I think that Kita-san and I were carefully watching Nijika-chan and gauging her reactions.  As the closest one to Ryo-senpai, she ought to be the most affected by the situation.  But she seemed as even-keeled as ever.

I think no one wanted to believe that anything had happened to Ryo-senpai.  Eccentric as she may be, she was not an irresponsible person, and could be trusted to handle herself.  Not that this prevented everyone, the police and our classmates included, from coming up with a whole host of theories.  I heard them whispering in the classroom and on the morning train.  That she had been kidnapped and murdered, or else committed suicide.  That she’d run away from home.  Or that there was money or drugs involved.  

I did my best to ignore these rumors.  But I would be lying if I said they didn’t bother me.  What was the point of making such outrageous assumptions?  It was as if everyone was eager to condemn Ryo-senpai to a horrible fate.  I expressed this to Seika-san, and she told me the following.

“People don’t like not knowing,” she said.  The cigarette between her lips emitted a tiny trail of smoke.  “They like answers.  Any answer will do, so long as it does away with the unknown.”

“Even if that answer is something terrible, like death?” I asked.

“Especially if it’s death.” She dropped her spent cigarette on the ground and crushed it beneath her heel.  “Death is the ultimate answer.”

A whole week passed.  But Ryo-senpai had yet to be found.  Nijika-chan didn’t show up for work on the seventh day.  I finished the shift by myself.  Sometime after sunset, I heard the door to the live house open.  I thought it was a customer, but it was Nijika-chan.  She was completely drenched in rainwater.  Apparently she had skipped out on work and combed through every inch of Tokyo since that morning.  But in the end she could not find Ryo-senpai.

“Sorry,” she said as I dried her face with a handkerchief.  “I had to try.”

I said she didn’t have to be sorry.  But she did not seem to hear me.

Seika-san took Nijika-chan upstairs for a shower.  Unwilling to walk home in the rain, I sat at the bar and did a little research.  Apparently, around a hundred thousand people are reported missing in Japan every year.  It happens more here than almost anywhere else in the world.  It’s been that way since the fifties.  A hundred thousand people every single year.  The vast majority of those are found eventually, or at least confirmed dead.  But even so, about ten thousand of the original hundred thousand remain unaccounted for.  A truly staggering number of people.  Enough to pack the outfield bleachers at Jingu Stadium.

I went upstairs to check on Nijika-chan.  She was in her room, seated on the edge of the bed with a towel draped over her neck.  She had her practice drum pad between her legs.  Sticks in each hand, she drummed out a steady beat in fours.  She often did this to calm herself.  Even when I sat beside her, she did not stop her drumming.  It continued on in the evening darkness, mixing with the thud of the rain against the bedroom window.  

After a while, she abruptly stopped and asked me to hold her.  With some hesitation I did, the ends of her hair damp against my neck.

“She’ll come back, won’t she?” Nijika-chan said.

I stayed silent.  I could think of a number of reasons she wouldn’t, each more upsetting than the last.  Surely Nijika-chan thought the same.  Neither of us wanted to voice those possibilities aloud.  As if doing so would cause them to manifest and become reality.  The only thing we could do was wait for the truth to slowly reveal itself, in its careful and agonizing manner.

As we watched the rain together, I thought again of the faraway look I’d seen in Ryo-senpai’s eyes.  That image kept bothering me, resurfacing again and again as if demanding my attention.  And I had a sudden thought.  Perhaps Ryo-senpai was not in Tokyo at all.  She could have gone someplace very far away, but maybe that place was not one we could physically reach.  In fact, this felt to me like the only possible explanation.  Somehow I knew it without a shred of a doubt.  Ryo-senpai has gone somewhere very far away.   But not in the sense that a train leaves the station, or a person leaves your side.  The kind of loss I am talking about is more like watching rain fall over the ocean.

Ryo-senpai was found exactly one week after that day.  As I had suspected, she was not in Tokyo.  In spite of this premonition, however, I never could have guessed where she would ultimately be located.

“She was in Iwate Prefecture,” Seika-san said over the phone.

“Iwate Prefecture?!” I exclaimed.  “You can’t mean Iwate Prefecture in Tohoku?”

“That’s exactly it.”

They’d found her walking alongside a highway in the mountains in the dead of night.  At around two in the morning, a local police officer spotted a young girl while driving home from the station.  Ryo-senpai.  Her clothes were in tatters, and she was missing her left shoe.  A cut above her eye slowly dripped blood in a trail behind her.  Her bass guitar was missing.  When the officer got out of his car and called out to her, she kept walking as if she hadn’t heard him.  He ran after her and grabbed her by the wrist.  The moment he did, it was like she suddenly lost all the strength in her body.  She crumpled to the ground like a windless sail.

I stood in the hallway with the phone pressed to my ear, listening in disbelief.  I could tell from the way Seika-san spoke that she hardly believed what she was saying herself.  Why in the world was Ryo-senpai in Iwate of all places?  How did she get there?  And what happened to leave her in such a battered state?  I had so many questions that I didn’t know where to begin.  The momentary burst of relief I’d felt had been quickly swallowed.  One mystery was solved, but now an even deeper one was revealed just beyond it.  Like unearthing a strange, alien-like plant only to find a bottomless pit underneath.

Ryo-senpai was taken to a local hospital in Iwate to recover from her fainting spell.  The police asked her why she had been walking alone next to the highway at such an odd hour.  But she couldn’t remember.  It was like there was a huge blank in her memory, she said.  In the end they could not get to the bottom of what happened.  She appeared lucid, however, and aside from the various cuts and scrapes on her body she was unharmed.  They had her spend the night at the hospital, and in the morning an agent from the police department in Tokyo was sent to collect her.

During the long drive back to Tokyo, the officer sent to escort Ryo-senpai asked again why she had been in Iwate.  But she could not offer any explanation.  She remembered saying goodbye to me on the train platform that night, but everything between then and being found next to the highway was lost to her.  As they spoke, the officer had the sense that Ryo-senpai was not trying to hide anything.  She really didn’t know.

Ryo-senpai was held in the police station upon her arrival in Tokyo.  Her parents headed there as soon as they heard the news.  Seika-san drove Kita-san, Nijika-chan and myself to the station in her car.  We were all eager to see Ryo-senpai as soon as possible.  However, a strange scene awaited us when we arrived.  Ryo-senpai’s parents were standing in the lobby, having a heated discussion with a pair of officers.  I could tell from the way they spoke that they were very upset.  Once our group approached, the officers relocated us all to another room so we would not crowd the lobby.  There they sat with us and explained the situation.

Roughly half an hour earlier, Ryo-senpai had been reunited with her parents.  She had been eager to see a familiar face, but once her parents arrived she did not exhibit happiness or relief of any sort.  According to the officers, she acted extremely apprehensive the moment she laid eyes on her parents’ faces.  Her nervousness was apparent in her body language.  This tension only worsened during their conversations, until Ryo-senpai finally turned to the officers and asked them to remove her parents from the room.

A surprised silence filled the room when we learned this information.  Beside me, Ryo-senpai’s mother began to quietly weep.

Seika-san asked the officers why Ryo-senpai had made such a request.  The officers responded that they were not sure, but Ryo-senpai had insisted upon it so adamantly that they’d had no choice but to respect her wishes.  One of the officers led her parents out to the hall.  The other remained behind and asked Ryo-senpai what was going on.  Only once she was sure they were alone did she inform the officer of her reasons.  She claimed to not recognize the people who had just left the room as her parents.

At this point, Ryo-senpai’s father scoffed and said that this was impossible.  Nijika-chan concurred and stated that she had met both parents several times and could vouch for their identity.  The officers agreed that Ryo-senpai’s claim did not make much logical sense.  That being said, she actively refused to leave the station in her parents’ custody.  Ryo-senpai had turned eighteen about a month prior.  In the eyes of the law she was considered an adult.  The police could not transfer guardianship of her over to anyone without her consent.

My head spun with these sudden revelations.  I had thought things would be fine now that Ryo-senpai had been found.  Instead the situation was only becoming more convoluted.

The officers asked if any of us would be willing to speak with Ryo-senpai in hopes of reasoning with her.  Nijika-chan quickly volunteered herself.  Seika-san said she would accompany her sister.  The two of them left the room with the first of the officers.

I expected their conversation to last for some time, but to my surprise Nijika-chan and Seika-san returned after only a few minutes.  Nijika-chan’s eyes were rimmed red with tears.  The manager’s face, too, appeared deeply disturbed.  Kita-san and I quickly surrounded Nijika-chan and asked what had happened.  But she only shook her head and said that something was very wrong.  She said the person they had just seen was not the Ryo-senpai that she knew.  I asked what she meant by this, but she was too distraught to offer a proper explanation. 

Kita-san asked the officers to take her to Ryo-senpai next.  They agreed, but asked that the rest of us go one at a time to avoid overwhelming Ryo-senpai.  She had appeared afraid when so many people entered the room at once.  We all consented to this, and Kita-san left the room.  However, like Nijika-chan, she returned after only a brief absence.  She explained that Ryo-senpai had spoken to her as if she were a stranger.  With a voice filled with barely suppressed fury, she had accused Kita-san of wanting to harm her.    

I could not contain my shock upon hearing this.  How could Ryo-senpai say such a thing?  Did she not recognize Kita-san either?  But Kita-san said that Ryo-senpai had addressed her by name.  It wasn’t that she had forgotten who Kita-san was.  Rather, it was as if she did not believe the person she was speaking to was the real Kita-san.

It was my turn next.  By then I was so terrified that I almost opted out of speaking to Ryo-senpai.  But I swallowed my fear.  I needed to see what was going on for myself.  The officer led me down the hall to another room.  With a key he unlocked the door and motioned for me to enter.

Ryo-senpai was waiting inside.  She sat at the end of a small wooden desk in the center of the room.  It was early in the morning, and the room had very large windows, so the floor was flooded with white sunlight.  Everything was so bright that I had a hard time looking directly at Ryo-senpai, who sat fully bathed in the late October sun.  

The officer stood in front of the door.  I sat across from Ryo-senpai, who had not taken her eyes off me from the moment I entered the room.

I made to speak, but she held up a finger and silenced me.

“Stay still,” she said.  “Let me get a good look at your face.”

I sat quietly in my seat, not moving a muscle.  Ryo-senpai squinted at my face for a long time, her hands gripping the edge of the table.  At last she sat back and broke out into a relieved smile.

“Bocchi.” Ryo-senpai sighed.  “Thank goodness.  I’m really glad to see you.”

The tension inside me unwound a minuscule amount.  Similar to the others, I had prepared myself to be treated with hostility.

“Ryo-senpai.”  My tongue felt stiff in my mouth.  I forcefully bit down on it to snap myself awake.  “Ryo-senpai, what’s going on here?  Is everything okay?”

Her expression grew serious.  She had a nervous energy about her that I had never seen before.  She placed her hands on the table and leaned forward to speak in a low whisper.

“Listen carefully, Bocchi.  Something is very wrong.  There are strange people here posing as our friends.  You’ve seen them, haven’t you?  They’re out there in the hall.  I don’t know what they want, but whatever it is, it can’t be good.  I’m really glad you’re here, Bocchi.  When I was unable to recognize the others, I became very afraid.”

I stared at her.  “I don’t understand.  What are you talking about?  What do you mean, you can’t recognize them?”

Ryo-senpai sat back in her chair.  She appeared vaguely disappointed, as if I had told her the lottery ticket I’d bought was a dud.  She crossed her arms and began to tap her finger on her bicep in an irregular pattern.

“Ryo-senpai.”  I took a deep breath.  “Just what happened to you exactly?  Where have you been the last two weeks?  We’ve all been so worried.  I thought something terrible happened to you.” 

My voice wavered as I spoke, but I could not contain my own agitation.  Ryo-senpai leaned forward again.

“I’m not sure exactly where I was,” she said.  “After we parted ways on the train, I can’t remember a thing.  It’s like I was dreaming for a very long time.  My mind’s filled with all these emotions - emotions I must have felt while I was wherever I was.  But when I try to think back I can’t piece anything together.  It’s just like a dream.  All I’ve got is memories of memories.  Derivatives of derivatives.”

“But how did you end up all the way in Iwate Prefecture?  It’s so far from here.  After I got off the train, where did you go?”

“I don’t know.  I went somewhere, that’s for sure.  But I can’t remember.  I didn’t even know I’d been gone for so long.”

I wrung my hands beneath the table.  “And Nijika-chan?”

“Like I said, that isn’t Nijika.  It’s someone, maybe even some thing else.  The real Nijka is…well, I don’t know where she is.  But if you’re here, she must be nearby.”

“Senpai,” I said, “This is some sort of joke, right?  You’re just messing with us.  The others said you spoke to them as if they were strangers.  But that’s impossible, isn’t it?  You know us.  Why are you doing this?”

Ryo-senpai gave me a pitying look.  As if she was gazing upon a child who understood nothing about how the world worked.  “So you can’t see after all.  I got my hopes up for nothing.”

I sat in stunned silence.  I looked up and caught the officer by the door staring at us.  He averted his gaze when I saw him watching.

“If that’s not the real Nijika-chan,” I said slowly, “Then how do you know I’m real?”

Ryo-senpai closed her eyes.  “That’s a good question.  It was clear the second I saw your face.  You’re the real Bocchi.  The same way I knew instantly the others were fakes.  We’re from the same place, you and I.  But the others aren’t like us.  They aren’t supposed to be here.  Either that, or it’s the other way around.  Maybe the two of us are the ones who are in the wrong place.”

They transferred Ryo-senpai to a psychiatric facility in Setagaya.  As she refused to return home to her parents, there was nowhere else for her to go.  She would be held there for the next three months, during which time she hardly had any contact with the outside world.  Any communication she did have with the others was through me.  She refused visitation from anyone else.

The doctors sat down with Ryo-senpai when she arrived.  They asked why she would not go home.  She explained that the two people who had come to retrieve her from the station were not her real parents.  They might wear the same faces, but they were not the real deal.  The same went for Nijika-chan, Kita-san, and Seika-san.  All this she said calmly, in a very matter of fact tone of voice.  As if it were the most obvious thing in the world.  The doctors then asked, if all of them were imposters, where had their actual counterparts gone?  Ryo-senpai replied that while she did not know, it was easy to surmise that their absence was the responsibility of these imposters.  Until she got to the bottom of things, she believed it was safer for her to stay away from them.

I observed this exchange from the corner of the room.  The doctors informed Ryo-senpai that she would have to remain at the facility until they had determined it was safe for her to return to her daily life.  Ryo-senpai was accepting of this.  She told them she had no intention of trying to leave without their permission.  Her highest priority, she said, was to find a way to return to “that place.”  Once she managed that, it would hardly matter whether she was physically inside the facility or not.  

What she meant by this was not immediately clear to me.  The doctors ignored this part of her answer, likely thinking it was a meaningless comment tied to her other delusions.  But it stuck in my mind.  She stated in no uncertain terms that her plan was to return to “that place.”  I can only assume she was referring to the place she went to while she was missing.  But where that was exactly, and how she intended to get there, I didn’t know.  At that point I had yet to realize the magnitude of the ordeal we were all about to endure.

The following day I attended a meeting which included the doctors and Ryo-senpai’s parents.  As her parents had not been allowed in the room themselves, they asked me to be present.  The doctors sat us down and explained the various conditions they believed Ryo-senpai could be suffering from.  They showed us several different diagrams of the brain and pointed to various parts of them.  I hardly paid any attention to what they said.  In the first place I wasn’t smart enough to understand it.  But I also had the unshakable feeling that none of this was even remotely relevant to Ryo-senpai.  The real answer could not be explained by a simple diagram or a diagnosis.  That much I knew for sure.  

That week, Ryo-senpai underwent a full brain scan at the facility.  The intention, said the doctors, was to check for any anatomical damage to the brain tissue.

“They won’t find anything,” Ryo-senpai told me after the exam.  “It’s not my physical self that’s the problem.  In the first place it is not a problem that can be observed.”

As she predicted, the scan came back showing a totally clean bill of health.  There were no abnormalities in Ryo-senpai’s brain functions.  Nor did she have a history of mental illness or regular drug use.  The typical warning signs of psychological issues were not present.  

Furthermore, we had yet to figure out why Ryo-senpai had been wandering through the mountains all the way in Iwate Prefecture.  If anyone had spotted her earlier, they likely would have informed the police.  Yet it was also difficult to believe she could have survived for two whole weeks without ready access to food or water.  She was wearing the same clothes she’d had on when she went missing, so it was unlikely she had any help in that time.  Not to mention her bass guitar was also missing.  The whole thing was puzzling from start to finish.

I went to see Ryo-senpai in the hospital every day.  As the only bridge between her and the others, it fell to me to report on her condition.  But the way things were going, they would not be able to justify keeping her at the facility for much longer.  She could not stay if there was nothing demonstrably wrong with her.  

But this would quickly change.  Following this brief period of relative normalcy, Ryo-senpai started to exhibit a variety of strange behaviors.

Soon after she moved into the facility, Ryo-senpai began to spend the majority of the day sleeping.  When I arrived after school she was usually fast asleep.  Most times a nurse would wake her, and the two of us would converse for a little while.  But after an hour or so she would always return to her rest.  On days I couldn’t come to see her, she apparently slept through the entire evening uninterrupted.  

It got to the point that Ryo-senpai was sleeping for no less than fourteen or fifteen hours every single day.  For the small stretches where she was not sleeping, she did little more than eat or relieve herself.  She had been having regular sessions with a psychiatrist in the afternoons, but since this development occurred she stopped attending them.  The facility staff performed a number of additional examinations, but found no observable problems with her heart, brain, or immune functions.

By November this trend had shown no indication of reversing.  It was decided the nurses would monitor Ryo-senpai closely to ensure she stuck to a normal sleeping schedule.  Once this change was implemented, she returned to a more typical day and night cycle.  Under the nurse’s watchful eye she had no apparent problems with sleeping eight or nine hours each day, getting some light exercise outside in the mornings, and eating three separate meals.  It was clear, then, that Ryo-senpai had not been sleeping for such inordinate lengths of time against her own will.  She had been doing so intentionally.

In spite of this interference, it was not long before a new development occurred.  Once the nurses began to moderate Ryo-senpai’s sleeping habits, she instead took to meditating in her room throughout the day.  She would sit on her bed facing the window with her legs crossed for hours on end.  The nurse, thinking that she was trying to sleep again, would then approach her from behind to wake her.  But when she looked she saw that Ryo-senpai’s eyes were wide open.  They were open, but they did not appear to be seeing anything.  Her eyes were glazed over with that same faraway look from before.

If the nurses shook Ryo-senpai’s shoulder or poked her face, it was possible to break her out of this trance-like state.  But these methods became less effective over time.  Eventually it was nearly impossible to rouse her without resorting to borderline violence.  Short of striking her across the face or holding her nose and mouth closed so she could not breathe, her concentration while in this state could not be broken.  The doctors even approached me for advice, but I had no idea Ryo-senpai was even capable of such a thing.  In the time I knew her I never once saw her meditating.  I could only conclude that she had gained this power recently.  But how exactly she had managed this was yet another mystery.

As December approached, Ryo-senpai was spending the majority of the day in this meditative position.  During these periods her heart rate slowed to an extremely low pace, and she no longer blinked reflexively.  To protect her vision, I had to help the nurses apply lubricant to her eyes at regular intervals.  It was a small miracle that she even continued to breathe unconsciously.  The doctors were completely baffled as to what was going on.  There was not a single diagnosis they could make that adequately explained her symptoms.  Yet it was obvious that she was far from healthy.  During this period she barely ate or drank.  She was hardly ever conscious long enough to do so.  Her body weight decreased dramatically, and her skin took on a pale, veiny quality.  She no longer responded to our words when we spoke to her.  Not even to mine.  As if she was merely a ghost who had become temporarily visible to us.  She existed on an entirely separate plane of reality.  A full six weeks had now gone by.  When the month turned, the doctors told Ryo-senpai’s parents they would have to transfer her to a more specialized facility.

In the midst of all of this was me.  At first I diligently reported my observations to Nijika-chan and the others.  It was pretty much the only thing I could do.  But after a while I began to fabricate my reports or omit information from them.  I simply could not bear to fully describe what was happening to the others.  Her parents and I agreed to keep the truth between ourselves.  Watching Ryo-senpai’s condition deteriorate over those three months was one of the most painful things I have ever experienced.  Since regaining my memories, flashbacks from that time have continued to haunt me in my sleep.  The cold emptiness of the facility halls.  The steady sound of Ryo-senpai’s breathing as she meditated.  And the incredibly distant look in her eyes.

The only reason I do not want to write further about my own feelings on the matter, and the trauma this experience undoubtedly inflicted upon me, is that I know Ryo-senpai must have suffered much more greatly than I did.  I am convinced that Ryo-senpai only resorted to such extraordinary measures because she deemed them to be necessary.  It was obvious what she was trying to do in hindsight.  She was trying to dream her way back to “that place”.  At the police station she described her period of absence as being like a very long dream.  By sleeping and meditating to such extreme lengths, she was attempting to decouple her own conscious self from her physical body.  It is clear to me now that the “place” that Ryo-senpai described was not a physical one.  Therefore, it was necessary for her to shed her physical form in order to return there.  Her unnatural ability to sedate her own mind for extended periods of time, then, must have come about in order to fulfill this objective of hers.

It was not long before I began to avoid the others.  I have always been a terrible liar, and I knew I would slip up and expose the truth eventually.  I understand that doing this must have hurt Nijika-chan greatly.  No one else was more desperate for information about Ryo-senpai than her.  At that point it had been nearly two months since they last saw each other.  I’m sure that Nijika-chan came to hate me in those final days.  If I were in her shoes, I would have felt the same.  But at least back then, I believed that the pain I inflicted upon her was still lesser than the pain of learning the truth.  If this experience had to destroy anyone, that person ought to be me.  It felt natural to treat myself as the most expendable out of the four of us.  At the time that felt like the right way to go about things.  But even this small compromise was enough to break my heart.  I was sure that the four of us would never be the same again.

I spoke with Ryo-senpai for the last time at the end of December.  It was a rare moment of consciousness for her.  She was sitting in bed beside the open window.  Outside, a gentle snow was falling.  I sat beside her with my hands clenched in my lap.  I spoke when I could not bear the silence any longer.

“Ryo-senpai?”

“Hm?”

“What are you thinking about right now?”

She closed her eyes and leaned back on the pillows.  The calluses that had once covered her fingertips were all healed.  Now they were smooth and unmarred, like stones left at the bottom of a deep river.

“Nothing,” she said with a small smile.  “Nothing at all.  It’s quiet.  I can’t hear a single thing.”

I understand that what I have written here is only a heavily truncated account of what happened.  If I wanted, I could go into much greater detail about my daily experiences from that time.  I could write about the effect the whole ordeal had on Nijika-chan.  Or the great lengths Kita-san went through to provide her with comfort and companionship.  I could say more about Ryo-senpai, and the futile efforts made by the doctors, her parents, and myself to return her to her original self.  But I don’t want to.  It’s just too painful.  In any case, it is impossible for me to deliver a full account from beginning to end.  After all, I wasn’t around to see what would ultimately become of Ryo-senpai.

It is clear to me now that the events which happened to Ryo-senpai and myself are inextricably connected.  The similarities between our situations are too numerous to ignore.  We both disappeared for an extended period of time.  Upon our return we found ourselves in a strange world that only appeared familiar on the surface.  It is obvious that the same principle was at work in both cases.  But what does it all mean in the end?  What is the significance of these parallels?  And why, of all the many people in the world, were the two of us chosen to bear this unique burden?  Is it really that we were being punished for some unknown crime we committed?  Or, as I have often deeply feared, was it a truly meaningless event that occurred for no particular reason at all?

These are the events which led up to that fateful morning in Shibuya.  Kita-san invited me out in hopes of providing a distraction for the both of us.  I realize now that this was the reason for my unexplainable sadness that day.  I was slowly suffocating beneath the weight of my own powerlessness.

I went to the roadside park that day because I wanted to be alone with my thoughts.  I sat down on the swingset and began to rock back and forth.  Just as before, I closed my eyes and counted to three.  As my hands relinquished their grip on the chains, I wished deeply that things would go back to the way they had been before.

Chapter Text

Part Three
"Morning Light Falls on You"
"君に朝が降る"

I have wondered about something for a long time now.  And that is whether the events which occur in our lives have any inherent meaning, or we only ascribe meaning to them for our own sanity.  They say we humans ended up taking over the world thanks in part to our ability to recognize patterns.  Where a monkey sees only an old tree, we also see the passage of time and the inevitability of death.  But time, like patterns and meaning, might just be something we humans made up because we don’t like not knowing.

Recently, I met with my father for dinner.  Near the end of our meal he handed me this notebook.  He’d found it in my old room while doing some spring cleaning.  If I didn’t want it anymore, he said, he would throw it away.  But he wanted to ask me first.  He recalled the days, all those years ago, when I would spend hours with this very notebook inside my bedroom closet.  Thinking about that now, I feel a little guilty that I have consistently neglected to keep track of something I spent so much time working on.

I told him I would take the notebook for now and decide later.  We paid our bill and left the restaurant.  When I got home, I sat at my desk and began to read.  But once again I found there was no need for me to remind myself of what I wrote back then.  Maybe that’s why I keep losing this notebook by mistake.  Even if I do, it keeps finding its way back to me one way or another.  Ever since Ishikawa-sensei handed it to me, it has been a part of my life.  Is there any real meaning to that, I wonder, or is it another mere coincidence?

The first time I wrote in this notebook, I was seventeen years old.  Once I had said everything I wanted to say, I lost track of it until the summer after I turned twenty two.  I had decided to leave Yokohama and move back to Kanagawa.  While cleaning out my closet I happened upon it, and I spent the rest of the week writing.  After I had exhausted myself doing this, my mind forgot all over again.

That was three years ago.  I’m twenty five now.  Once again I feel the need to put all my thoughts and emotions from the last handful of years into words.  How many more times will it be necessary for me to do this?  Will there ever be a day when I won’t need to write?  If such a day ever comes, it can only mean that I’ve made peace with all the things that keep me up at night.  How wonderful that sounds.  Until then, I have no choice but to keep writing.  It’s all part of this long journey of life which may or may not have any particular meaning.  They sometimes say the journey itself has its own meaning.  Whether that is true or not I can’t say.  Right now I am still a monkey gazing at an old tree.  Only when it is gone will I know what it meant to me.

My father called me one afternoon.  This was in August, six months after I lost my job at the publishing company.  At first I almost let the call go to voicemail.  I was sure he was going to ask what had been going on in my life lately, and I had no desire to discuss that with him.  But I decided to answer in case it was an emergency.  As it turned out though, he hadn’t called just to ask how I was doing.

On the phone, my father informed me that my mother had been acting strangely as of late and had gone to see a doctor.  This was done more as a precaution than anything else.  Upon examining her, the doctor recommended she stay at the hospital for a short while so they could run more tests.  She had been there for three days now.

I noticed that my father did not say my mother was feeling unwell.   Rather he said she was acting strangely.   Further, he had not described the nature of her condition.  I asked him to elaborate further.  He paused, then said that my mother was not in any immediate danger.  She’d just been sleeping a lot more than usual lately.

I gripped the phone and asked my father to repeat himself.  He stated again that my mother had been sleeping for increasing amounts of time for the last few months.  They had thought it was just general fatigue, but recently she was having difficulty waking up and going about her day.  Thinking it was better to be safe than sorry, they’d gone to get the family doctor’s opinion.  He knew a sleep specialist who might be able to help them.

My father asked if I could come to Kanagawa to visit the two of them sometime soon.  If he had said this under any other circumstance, I likely would have tried to find a way out of it.  But I immediately accepted and said I would be there that weekend.  He seemed surprised that I agreed to come home so readily, but I did not explain my reasons to him.  When I hung up the phone, a cold sweat had formed over my body.

I took the first train back to Kanagawa that Saturday morning.  My father was waiting for me at the station.  It had been more than a year since I saw him last, but in my nervous state I hardly took the time to greet him.  We got in the car and drove to the general hospital where my mother was staying.

She was sleeping when we arrived.  The room felt oddly familiar to me.  Buried beneath the hospital sheets, my mother looked much younger than I remembered.  I went to the bed and took her hand, then I called out her name.  But she did not respond.  She was in a deep slumber.  

I called out to her again.  But she could not hear me.  My father approached from behind and said that my mother slept very deeply as of late.  When it was just the two of them at home, it was nearly impossible to wake her against her will.  The doctors believed she may have developed a mild case of hypersomnia.

As I stared down at my mother’s immoble expression, I thought abruptly of Ryo-senpai.  Suddenly I felt a wave of nausea overtake me.  I knew immediately that I was going to be sick.  I ran into the nearest bathroom, where I fell over the toilet and gave up everything I had.  My entire body shuddered.  Bile dripped from my lips.  I retched several times, as if by doing so I could excise the memory from myself.  But memories, for better or worse, are not stored in the stomach. 

My father was waiting outside the bathroom.  He held me and said that he understood I was worried, but my mother had only been resting.  The sleep specialist would come tomorrow to examine her.  Then they would understand what was going on.  He said this as if it were very simple.  I knew in my gut that it was far from simple.  But there was no way I could possibly explain this to him.

I returned to my mother’s bedside.  The afternoon sunlight drowned out the lines on her face, giving it an almost infantile appearance.  I thought I caught a hint of a smile on her lips.  Maybe it was just a trick of the light.  As I watched my mother, I tried to remember the last thing I had ever said to her.  But it was too long ago.  Yet another mundane memory given importance by the passage of time.

I moved back to Kanagawa a month later.  After that day I went to see my mother, she did not wake from her slumber.  By the following morning she had yet to open her eyes.  The nurses made every effort to wake her, but she was completely unresponsive.  They immediately called for the doctor.  But nothing he did could penetrate the barrier around my mother.  She was trapped in a perpetually comatose state, the cause of which was totally unknown.

There was a great panic amongst the hospital staff when this took place.  My father was also very distraught, and even became uncharacteristically angry with the doctors.  Of course he would.  It was his own wife, after all.  If anything, I was the one who acted abnormally.  Once I realized what was happening I went completely numb inside.  It was the same song and dance all over again.  

By the end of the following week my mother was still asleep.  They transferred her to a different hospital which specialized in caring for comatose patients.  I discussed things with my father and agreed to return to Kanagawa for the time being.  I didn’t have a job in the first place, so there was no reason I had to be away from home.  Though at this point  I had yet to tell my father about this.  When he asked, I only said I would figure things out with my company and get back to him.

I returned to Yokohama after that weekend.  The first thing I did was go to my landlord and beg him to allow me to break my lease, which still had six months left on it.  The landlord flatly refused my request.  I’m sure I seemed to him like a good for nothing twenty something who had gotten herself into some kind of trouble.  To be honest, it took me several hours just to muster the courage to show up at his doorstep.  I’d known my chances of succeeding were slim, but I simply could not afford to pay rent on a place I wouldn’t even be living in.

In the end, I got down on my hands and knees and bowed down to the floor before asking him to reconsider.  He appeared shocked by my desperation and asked why I needed to break the lease so urgently.  I told him my mother was sick and I needed to return home to help my father look after her.  

The landlord, himself a middle aged man, appeared to soften when he heard this.  He said he would think about it and sent me away.  A few days later, he called and said he would allow me to break the lease.  He then told me he had lost his own mother a few months earlier to cancer.  He was going to keep the next month’s payment and the security deposit.  But the rest, he said, I wasn’t to worry about.

So that’s how my two and a half years in Yokohama came to a close.  I spent the last month steadily selling off all my furniture.  After a few weeks there was nothing left other than a bare mattress, and a small folding table that doubled as my nightstand.  On the weekends I traveled to Kanagawa to see my mother.  In the final week of my lease, I was cleaning out my closet when I rediscovered this notebook.  I spent those last few days writing down everything I could.

I left Yokohama on a windy morning in September.  Carrying a suitcase filled with what few things I’d decided to keep, I returned to my old bedroom in Kanagawa.  I told my father that I’d managed to break my lease.  As for work, I lied that my company had recently opened a satellite office in Tokyo, so they’d had no problems with me relocating.  I understand this is quite an extraordinary thing to lie about, but I was too ashamed to tell him the truth.  He was under enough stress with my mother’s condition, and certainly did not need the added burden of knowing I was unemployed.

I began to visit my mother in the hospital on a daily basis.  After the initial barrage of tests, there wasn’t much else to do other than wait for something to change.  But in that first month nothing changed at all.  My mother continued to sleep as if it were the most natural thing in the world.  Her vitals were completely normal, as was her brain activity, and yet she would not open her eyes.

My father said that my mother would have been happy to know I’d visited home, in spite of the circumstances surrounding my return.  Apparently she would always say how much she missed me and wished to see me again.  But she never once called or sent a text after my first year away from home.  I’m sure that was my fault.  I must have given the impression that I didn’t want her to reach out to me.  Until that moment I didn’t understand how much I must have wounded her by doing this.  There must have been so many times she wished to speak to me, or at least hear my voice.  What parent wants their child to disappear from their life?  But I had convinced myself that this was the case.  I’d figured that they were better off not having to worry about a washout like me.

After this realization, I found it difficult not to blame myself for everything once again.  I felt sure that my prolonged absence was the cause of my mother’s condition.  No matter how many times I held my mother’s hand or spoke to her, it made no difference.  Soon I began to wonder if I really was there, in that hospital room, saying Okaa-san, Okaa-san, over and over again.  My physical self was there, but the real me, just like Ryo-senpai, might have been in some other, far away place.  A place which could not be reached through ordinary means.  Perhaps my mother, just like Ryo-senpai, had yet to wake up because she had gone to search for me.  Our physical bodies might have been present in that hospital room, but our true selves were elsewhere.

Since I had nothing better to do, I often assisted the nurses in caring for my mother’s body.  I helped shift her position in bed to prevent the forming of sores on her skin.  I bathed and washed her, and helped bend and stretch her limbs to slow the effects of muscle atrophy.  In October the Japan Series rolled around, so I put that on the radio and listened to the games with my mother.  The Swallows weren’t playing that year, but I hardly cared about that.  I was just thinking, if she could somehow still hear everything that was going on around her, maybe she would feel like she was back at home in our living room, where my father would always put on baseball games.

After a while, the nurses began to remind me that the facility had counseling services available for patients’ family members.  I always nodded in response to these reminders, but it did not occur to me that I should actually follow through on them.  Only when the doctor also began to do this did I realize that everyone had become concerned about me.  At first I couldn’t understand why.  Surely my mother, or at least my father, deserved more attention and concern than me.

However, I soon understood this was the exact reason they were so worried.  Ever since this entire ordeal began I had acted in a perfectly stoic manner.  My mother had been asleep for weeks.  There was no explanation for her condition.  Nor did we know if she would ever recover.  Faced with such a situation, I should have acted at least a little distraught.  I should have cried, or become angry, or grieved in some observable way.  But I did none of these things.  Instead I went about my daily tasks with an almost bored calmness.  As if there was nothing particularly interesting about any of it.

It’s not as if I was trying to hold myself back.  It’s not like I was filled with turmoil on the inside and doing everything I could to keep it hidden.  I’m too clumsy to manage such a thing.  I acted indifferent because that’s how I truly felt.  That sounds terrible, I know.  But it’s the truth.  I felt only a muted resignation.  Oh well, my heart seemed to say.  That’s just how things are.   I couldn’t muster any indignation or anger at all.  Not even sadness.  

Each morning, I rose early and dressed myself as if to go to work.  I put on a blouse and skirt, then threw a blazer over it.  I put on a pair of dress shoes and was out of the house before my father woke up.  He couldn’t know I wasn’t working, so I wandered aimlessly around Tokyo until evening came and it was time to go to the hospital.

Thanks to this, I ended up spending countless afternoons drifting from place to place with no particular destination in mind.  I didn’t have much money, so I avoided going to restaurants or shops.  Instead I sat in parks or watched the river.  On days when it rained I went to the public library and did some reading.  I read whatever struck my fancy at the time.  I never finished any of the books I started - I simply picked up the first thing I saw and read it.  Each day had its own story.  But because I never finished any of those stories, the endless stream of days began to take on a disjointed and erratic nature.  I began to lose track of when, where, and who I was.  My entire self was dissolving into the infinite ocean of time.  I understood that I couldn’t keep going on this way.  But even this I observed with a cool, detached air.  I was hurtling straight toward the edge of the abyss.  And I didn’t care.

Sometimes I sat on the train and rode it round and round in circles for the whole day.  From the end of the car I watched thousands of people filter in and out, in and out, like blood rushing through a beating heart.  And I would think to myself about death.  During this period I thought a lot about death.  I wondered if my mother was going to die.  I wondered if Ryo-senpai was still alive.  I thought about my late grandparents and where they were buried.  I thought about what it would be like when my father died.  And finally, I thought about my own death.  I tried to imagine what it would be like to be dead.  But all I could do was go right up to the moment preceding death before my imagination failed me.  That moment of realizing it was all over, that flash of panic before the very end.  When I started to think about that, about the sheer and absolute nature of death, I would suddenly become filled with abject terror.  My heart pounded in my chest.  My body broke out in a cold sweat.  Once, a woman seated beside me noticed my breathing had become labored and asked if I was alright.  I waved her off and said nothing.  Eventually, once I’d breathed slowly for long enough, this overwhelming fear would recede to the back of my mind.  Rationale would arrive and wrestle me back into submission.  There’s no point in worrying about that, it would tell me.  You’ve still got a long way to go before that day comes.  But then, I would think, that doesn’t mean it won’t come, does it?  And the fear would return.

Maybe you’ll laugh at me for acting this way.  Sometimes I even laugh at myself for the amount of panic I feel over something we all know is going to happen.  Every person is aware that they are going to die one day.  But you know, even now, when I’m laying in bed at night trying to sleep, sometimes I will suddenly begin to think about the fact that I’m going to die.  And I’ll feel that heart pounding fear set in again.  I don’t want to die.  I don’t want to die.  Would we all be happier if we didn’t know our lives were going to end?  Maybe it would be better to close our eyes one day and never wake up.  I am only twenty five, and yet I fear death so deeply.  To those who read this and laugh at me, is it that you don’t fear death at all?  Or are you just better at not thinking about it than I am?

I wrestled with these sorts of thoughts every single day.  Eventually I began to think seriously about killing myself.  Again, I didn’t reach this conclusion because of an outburst of emotion or anything.  It just felt to me, at the time, like a viable course of action given my present situation.  I had the sense that I’d been uniquely cursed by the universe.  Everyone I knew was gone.  I didn’t have a job, and my mother was in the hospital.  I’d lost everything.  What I still had, I was sure to lose eventually.  Even if, by some miracle, I managed to turn my life around and achieve happiness, at the very end I was going to die anyway.  At the conclusion of even the happiest life there lies the insurmountable unknown of death.  So what was the point then?  In a convoluted sort of way, I had become so afraid of death that I was sick and tired of being afraid of death.  Might as well skip all this unnecessary suffering and go straight to the finish line.  My soul was tired, and I just wanted it all to be over.

That’s why, on an uncommonly sunny October afternoon, I walked down into Shimokitazawa station.  One of the platforms there did not have any barriers separating passengers from the tracks.  What’s more, there was an express train scheduled to pass through that day without stopping.  Which meant it would be coming through at full speed, without decelerating to pick up additional passengers. 

I arrived at the platform and waited.  The express train appeared from the mouth of the tunnel.  It roared past my nose and was gone in an instant.  Five minutes later the next train arrived.  I took a deep breath and closed my eyes.  When the rumble of the train receded, however, I was still standing on the platform.  I was so close I felt the heat coming off the metal plating of the train car.  And yet my feet remained firmly rooted to the ground.

After half an hour of this I finally turned around and left.  I walked to a different platform and took another train to the hospital.  When it got late I returned home to Kanagawa.  Then I undressed, showered, brushed my teeth, and went to sleep like usual.  In the morning I put on my work clothes and left the house as if nothing had ever happened.

This was how I passed the fall of my twenty second year.  Courting death, trapped in unmoving stasis.  I continued to take the train in endless circles.  Sometimes I descended into the station and didn’t emerge until after the sun had set.  I would sleep the entire afternoon away on the train.  This wasn’t such an uncommon sight in Tokyo, so no one ever disturbed me.  I slept so long that when night came I couldn’t fall asleep.  I would stay awake until the sun rose and it was time to leave the house.  Then in the afternoon I would feel tired and fall asleep on the train again.

It felt like I was constantly slipping in and out of consciousness.  I was floating inside a deep ocean, only surfacing occasionally for air.  Sometimes I found myself standing on a station platform beneath the open night sky.  Others I was smashed in with the morning commuters.  On one occasion, I got on the train after leaving the hospital and slept for so long that I reached the end of the line.  By the time I opened my eyes, service had stopped for the day.  A very cross man in uniform shook me awake.  As soon as I realized my mistake I apologized profusely, grabbed my things, and practically bolted out of the train.

The air outside was startlingly crisp.  It must have been well past midnight.  I was in an unknown station in an unknown town.  I ended up standing outside the station until morning, shivering in the winter cold with a hot can of vending machine coffee pressed between my thighs.  By the time the first train back to Kanagawa was ready to depart, my fingers had already gone completely numb.

This episode snapped some sense into me, and I resolved to be more careful.  I’d gotten off relatively easily last time, but if I kept this up something bad was bound to happen.  Yet only a few days later, I was taking the train home from the hospital when I felt a familiar exhaustion fall over me.  I tried desperately to stay awake.  If I fell asleep now, I felt sure I would wake up at the end of the line again.  But it was like an anchor had been tied to my leg.  No matter how hard I fought I couldn’t keep my head above water.  The waves closed overhead, and sleep took me.

I slept for a long time.  The soft clarity of a deep, dreaming sleep enveloped me like waves on a beach.  I remember thinking there was no way I was going to wake up before service ended for the day.  I was definitely going to get in trouble again.

Soon I felt a hand on my shoulder.  I shirked away from it, trying to return to my slumber.  The hand retreated for a moment, then returned, more insistent this time.  I screwed my eyes shut and shook my head.  I wasn’t ready to wake up yet.  I needed more time.  Just a little longer.  A little longer, and I would be ready.

“Hitori-chan,” a soft voice whispered.  “We’ve almost arrived.  Wake up.”

The train was still moving when I opened my eyes.  It was daytime.  Warm sunlight pierced through the windows, painting my shadow clearly across the floor.  

Right beside my shadow was a second shadow.  The two shadows melded into one another, without a clear distinguishing border.  I looked up and saw Kita-san sitting next to me, her hand resting on my shoulder.  She wore an exasperated smile on her face.

“You’re finally awake,” she said.  “Were you up late watching videos again?”

I stared back at Kita-san.  A shaft of sunlight cleaved the air between us, illuminating a column of dust.  For a long time I didn’t say anything.  My brain felt like it had been tied to a post and stretched out over the length of a baseball field.  Part of me was there, in that train car, but another part of me was elsewhere, coalesced at the end of a very long string.

“Kita-san,” I murmured, my voice hoarse.  “Is it really you?”

“Who else would I be?  Take a look outside, we’re nearly there.”

I looked out the window.   Fields of grass stretched out on either side of us.  In the distance I saw the silhouette of a station, and beyond that, the uniform geometry of a small town.  I couldn’t tell which town it was on sight, but it appeared vaguely familiar to me, so maybe we were somewhere near Kanagawa.

“How long was I asleep?” I asked.

Kita-san turned my face towards hers and began to gently smooth down my hair, which had become unkempt while I slept.  “I’m not sure.  We passed through a long tunnel earlier.  You were awake when we went in, but by the time we emerged, you were out like a light.  I didn’t even notice at first.  I just kept talking to myself.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay.  I’m the one who dragged you all the way out here.”

Once Kita-san had finished fixing my hair, I turned my gaze back to the window.  As I took in the fields of grass and the baby blue sky overhead, I remembered the reason we had come here.  

About two hours west of the city, on the prefectural border between Yamanashi and Tokyo, there was a small town surrounded by mountains.  This small town was where Kita-san’s grandfather was buried.  He had died about a year prior.  Now she was going to pay her respects at the grave.  However, she had been afraid to go by herself, and so she’d asked me to accompany her.

It was a bit of a strange request.  In fact, I tried to refuse at first.  It seemed inappropriate that I should be present at the grave of someone I was neither acquainted with nor related to.  Surely I would be breaking some kind of taboo.  But Kita-san had made it clear that if she had to go alone, then she wouldn’t go at all.  I had never seen her act so insistent about something before.  Surely she knew that I was weak willed and would crumble if subjected under enough pressure.  I didn't think Kita-san was the sort of person to take advantage of another’s weakness in this manner, but I suppose that just goes to show how desperate she was.  Desperate enough to act in ways unlike her.   

Kita-san cracked open a window and let the air in.  Humidity quickly filled the train.  In an instant I understood that it was summer.  For a moment I caught the unmistakable scent of fresh cut grass, and sneezed loudly.  Kita-san closed the window and handed me a tissue from her bag.

I took it gingerly.  Kita-san looked beautiful as always.  She wore the navy blue sundress she favored on days like this.  Around her neck, she’d tied a ribbon of similar color to match.  Her black shoes were polished to perfection, and on her arm she had a drawstring bag decorated with little sunflowers.  Seventeen year old Kita-san, in the flesh.

Once I’d blown my nose, I crumpled the tissue in my fist before shoving it in the pocket of my tracksuit.  I looked down at myself briefly.  I was wearing my usual pink tracksuit, complete with the aroma of mothballs.  All at once it occurred to me how sweaty I was.  I looked at my reflection in the opposite window and saw the perspiration dampening my face.  My seventeen year old face, as vacant and ineffectual as ever.

“Hitori-chan,” Kita-san said softly, “I want you to know it means a lot that you’ve come here with me.  I can’t explain it very well, but I feel like you being here is very important.”

The train came to a stop.  We had reached the station.  A tiny old station with only a single platform, the tracks overgrown with weeds.  We got off the train and made our way to the outskirts of the town.  All around us I heard the whirring of cicadas.  The trees lining the sidewalk cast dappled shadows over the concrete.  An old dog lay curled up outside the nearest house, its tail flicking languidly at a cloud of flies overhead.

Chapter Text

It was a long walk from the station to the cemetery. The town was small, but we were on foot and there was no straight path to get there. Not to mention neither of us really knew the area. We kept taking one road, getting lost, turning around, and getting lost again. After a while I wasn't sure if we'd gotten any closer to our destination.

Another reason the journey took so long was how similar each street looked. We would traverse one block only to find that the next appeared identical to the last. Rows of small, traditional style homes, their tiled roofs and soft wooden facades wavering in the summer heat. It was a very clear day. Many of the yards we passed had laundry lines put up, shirts and pants and boxers floating in the morning breeze. In the distance I could make out the distinct shape of Mount Fuji.

We stopped to rest at a small park in what appeared to be the very center of the town. From a nearby fountain we drew some water, then sat beneath the shade of a tree. It sort of reminded me of the roadside park where I first met Nijika-chan. There was no swingset, though.

Kita-san took out a handkerchief and gently dabbed at the sweat beading her brow. Then she turned it inside out and did the same for me, the tips of her fingers just barely holding my chin in place. I caught the scent of freshly peeled oranges. Thankfully I didn't sneeze this time.

"I'm not sure if I mentioned this before," said Kita-san. "But my grandmother lives in this town too. She and my grandfather moved here when I was a little kid."

"She must be lonely living by herself."

"My aunt came to live with them about five years ago. She isn't married, and my grandmother needed help around the house. Now it's just the two of them, living together."

"Are you going to see them today as well?"

Kita-san released my chin and turned away. "Probably not. Actually, I'm not on very good terms with my grandmother. I haven't spoken to her in about a year."

I waited for her to continue, but she said nothing more. Kita-san flapped her handkerchief a few times, folded it on her lap, and returned it to her bag. Then she got to her feet and stretched both hands overhead, letting out a long sigh.

"Let's go," she said, and we were off.

This time the streets seemed to take on a bit more distinction from each other, and we managed to reach the cemetery in one spurt. It stood at the far end of the town, surrounded by a veil of trees with skinny white trunks. A dirt path nearby led to a small temple. We went to the temple first. It appeared empty initially, but a middle aged woman was sweeping the grounds behind the main building. She waved for us to join her inside. Once the two of us had cleaned our hands, she lent us a bucket of water, a brush, and a pail.

Kita-san tried to pay for some sticks of incense too, but the woman waved the money aside and sent us on our way. By now the midday sun was blazing overhead. The steady drone of cicadas blanketed everything. Over the tops of the trees, I could see the backs of many mountains and hills.

A sudden stillness enveloped us as we entered the cemetery. Even the air felt cooler. The trees seemed to crowd in, shielding everything within their branches from the noise of the outside world. With their skinny white trunks, they gave off the air of silent stone guardians, placed here to protect the peace of the dead. Aside from the occasional call of a bird, it was silent.

Kita-san's grandfather was buried near the eastern border of the property, beneath the shade of a young cherry tree. Based on its size and the thickness of its roots, the tree might have been younger than the cemetery itself. There were four graves in this particular section. They stood side by side, more or less indistinguishable from each other. It was easy to guess that those graves had seen better days. The grass between them was scattered with leaves, and the names on the headstones were clouded with dirt. You couldn't even tell who was buried there.

Without a word Kita-san placed our things before the first of these four graves and began to clear away the leaves. I hung back at the edge of the path, unsure if I should involve myself. But Kita-san soon motioned for me to join her, and with some hesitation I did, stooping down to pick up every speck of debris we could find. Once that was done we took the bucket and pail and began to carefully clean each of the graves, using the brush to scrub away the tougher stains and patches of dirt.

This process took a while. Halfway through we had to get more water from a nearby spout. By the time we finished we were both drenched in sweat. I was in a tracksuit, but Kita-san was wearing her nice navy blue sundress. If she minded the state of her clothes, though, she didn't make it known. She lit incense for each of the four graves before kneeling down to pray. I waited patiently until she was finished, then the two of us retreated to outside the entrance of the cemetery. We sat in the grass beneath the shade of a tree, fanning ourselves with the packing paper the incense had come in.

"My family owns that whole section of the cemetery," Kita-san explained. "My great grandfather bought the lots a long time ago. Those are the people buried there - both of my great grandparents and my grandfather. And his sister, my great aunt. There are several more lots just behind theirs. One figures to go to my grandmother, and maybe the next two will be for my parents. It's a bit morbid to think about, but I guess it's better than not having a place to be laid to rest. Apparently lots in Tokyo are really expensive nowadays."

I thought about the dirt that had covered the names on the headstones. "Is the shrine responsible for maintaining the graves?"

Kita-san smiled wanly. "No, the families are. But I figured my aunt wouldn't have had the time to come here to do that. And I was right. It's only been a year, but those graves were in such a sorry state."

"What about your grandmother?"

"Her health has gotten a lot worse in the last year or so. Pretty much as soon as my grandfather died, she took a steep decline. At least, that's what I heard from my parents, who heard it from my aunt. She's got her hands full looking after my grandmother. No way she'd have time to clean all those graves. That's why I decided to come here."

"You must have been very close with your grandfather."

"Not really. In my whole life, I don't know if we had a single proper conversation."

We put the pail and brush in the now empty bucket and made our way back to the dirt path. Kita-san held one side of the bucket, and I the other. The bottoms of her black shoes, once so shiny and polished, had become brown and appeared to melt into the earth.

"Kita-san," I said. "If you don't mind me asking, what happened between you and your grandmother, exactly?"

Kita-san said nothing. I figured she didn't want to answer my question. It wasn't any of my business, after all.

At the temple we found the woman from before and returned the items we had borrowed. Then we got back on the dirt path once more. The walk was the same every time, but with each repetition the scenery appeared slightly different than before. We were about halfway down the path when Kita-san spoke again.

"What I'm about to tell you is something I haven't spoken about to anyone outside my family," she said. "It isn't a pleasant topic, and it may cause you to view me differently. Is that okay?"

I nodded. Kita-san closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

"Around this time last year, I developed what you could call a strange mental condition," she said. "This condition was likely triggered by my grandfather's passing. You see, until then, I'd never once thought about the reality of death. I pretty much went about my life without thinking about how it would end. Or more precisely, it never really occurred to me that it could end. After my grandfather died, though, the way I saw the world completely changed. Suddenly I couldn't help seeing everything through the lens of death. It was like waking up from a very long dream. Out of nowhere it hit me that all this was going to come to an end one day, and there wasn't a single thing I could do about it. No matter what happened between now and some unknown date far in the future, at the very end I was going to die."

A heron trilled overhead. Kita-san looked up at it, then down at the dirt path, then back up at the heron, as if trying to make out some invisible string tying the two together.

"Once I had this realization, my mind was totally consumed by thoughts of death," she continued. "I couldn't stop thinking about the fact that I was going to die. From the moment I opened my eyes in the morning it was the first thing I thought about. It got to the point that it began to interfere with my daily life. I would be in the middle of doing something, let's say folding the laundry, when all of a sudden I would start to think about dying. Once that happened I would be unable to continue whatever task I was doing. Everything around me would completely lose its meaning. I had developed a very strange affliction. Basically, I was so paralyzed by the reality of death that I could no longer go about living like normal. Death appeared to me like a problem that needed solving. There was no way I could move on without taking care of it first. But death obviously isn't the sort of problem you can solve. Actually, maybe it shouldn't even be called a problem in the first place."

I listened quietly. Had Kita-san really been struggling with such thoughts all this time? Guilt began to creep over my heart. I hadn't even noticed.

"Don't feel bad," Kita-san said gently. "For the most part I was able to keep these thoughts hidden. I still acted like normal around other people. But the whole time I would be thinking about death in the back of my mind. It was like I had been split in two. One half of me continued to act as the normal Kita, while the other half wrestled endlessly with the unsolvable problem of death."

"How long has this been happening?" I asked.

"For months," she replied. "Lately I've begun to lose sleep. My health suffered, and I missed school a couple times because I got sick. I stopped getting my period. I even lost a little hair. Eventually my parents caught on that something was wrong. I kept making up lies to avoid telling them the truth. I thought they would call me crazy, or even laugh at me. But they finally managed to drag the real reason out of me. I was afraid of what they would say, but they actually took the whole thing rather seriously. They didn't scold or punish me. Instead, they gave me some money and told me to take a trip to where my grandfather was buried. My parents didn't say anything else. Only that I should come here, pay my respects, and return. But as you know, I was too afraid to make the journey alone. Now here we are. Hitori-chan, what do you think my parents expected would happen once I arrived here?"

I wondered the same thing. Had they thought that by forcing Kita-san to stare death directly in the face, she would be able to come to terms with it? Or had they assumed she would reunite with her grandmother and receive some form of wisdom from her? Maybe their true intention was unrelated to either of these things.

"Truthfully, nothing actually happened between me and my grandmother," Kita-san said. "I just haven't gone to see her since the funeral. I haven't written or called. She's become very weak. But I still haven't gone to see her. I'm terrible, aren't I? She's surely come to hate me by now."

We returned to the four graves beside the young cherry tree. By now the incense had finished burning. The scent still lingered in the air.

Kita-san knelt to pray once more before we left. Watching her like that, kneeling amongst the rows and rows of headstones, it occurred to me that there was a good chance Kita-san would be buried there too one day. When that day came, how would I feel? Would I even be around by then? When this thought entered my mind, I suddenly felt very lonely. No matter what, there would come a day when I had to say goodbye to Kita-san forever.

It was around two or three in the afternoon when we left the cemetery and returned to the town. We were both starving, but the next train was scheduled to leave for Tokyo in less than an hour. After that another one wouldn't come until later that evening. We did our best to hurry, but the streets were confusing us again, and we appeared to make little headway.

Kita-san walked about ten yards ahead of me. My shadow, cast long by the afternoon sun, stopped just short of bridging the gap between us. I tried to catch up to her a few times, but whenever Kita-san saw my shadow beneath her she walked a little faster. Eventually I gave up and kept a respectful distance from her.

I think it was about twenty or thirty minutes later that I noticed we kept passing by the same house. A two story traditional style home, nearly indistinguishable from the ones beside it. But after several repetitions I was able to pick it out from the others. The tiles were painted a cool gray-blue, like the sea on a cloudy day. The front door looked worn and had imperfect edges. It must have been opened and closed many times over the course of several years.

We passed this house, then made a turn at the corner and walked down the length of the street, only to pass it again. I lost count of how many times we repeated this process. Kita-san seemed content to continue walking no matter how much time elapsed. I watched her carefully, waiting for any indication that she was ready to move on. But none came. Maybe it was up to me to break this endless cycle we had found ourselves in. Was that what Kita-san meant when she said my presence here might be important?

"Kita-san!" I called out.

She stopped walking, though she did not turn around. We were standing in the middle of the street, directly in front of the house.

"Kita-san," I repeated. "Are you really sure about this?"

I saw her reach up to grasp the strap of her bag. "About what?"

"About going home," I said. "Without seeing your grandmother."

Kita-san said nothing.

"Kita-san." I wrung my hands together, searching for the right words. "I may not be able to understand what you're going through at the moment. However, I feel like if you don't go to see your grandmother now, you will end up regretting it. In fact, I am somehow very sure of that."

She turned halfway towards me, the ghost of a smile on her lips. "How do you know I'm going to regret it?"

"Because, Kita-san, I never got to say goodbye to you either."

The smile disappeared from her face. She looked down at her shoes, the bottoms still caked with dust, baked in now by the heat. Then she looked back up, walked up to me, and took my hand.

"You're right," she said. "Let's go."

We left the street and stood before the house. Kita-san rang the doorbell, and then we waited for several moments. I counted all the way to a hundred. Just as I thought there might not be anyone home, I heard the sound of footsteps approaching.

A middle aged woman opened the door. Like Kita-san, she had a petite and slender body, though her eyes were narrower and her nose higher. She wore glasses, and her hair was cut into a neat bob.

"Ikuyo," said the woman.

Kita-san bowed her head. "Oba-san, it's good to see you. I apologize for showing up unannounced. I hope I'm not disturbing you."

The woman, who must have been Kita-san's aunt, squinted at Kita-san for a second, then shook her head. "No, it's no problem. You came to visit, then? Why don't you come inside?"

She left the door open and disappeared back into the house. I didn't get a chance to introduce myself. In fact, Kita-san's aunt had not so much as glanced in my direction. I followed Kita-san into the house, closing the door behind us before leaving our shoes at the genkan.

The interior of the house was refreshingly cool. There was hardly any decor to speak of. The building appeared to be fairly old, but everything was very clean and well maintained. Not a single speck of dust could be seen on the wooden floors. Kita-san made her way to the kitchen, and I followed close behind, being conscious not to step too loudly.

Like the rest of the house, the kitchen was absolutely spotless. A window in front of the sink had a view of the backyard. As soon as I walked in I noticed something peculiar about the wall. Three different clocks were hung there, the kinds with pendulums, ticking away in unison. They were placed in a sort of triangle formation. When I looked closer, I saw that all three displayed different times. Which clock was supposed to be the correct one I couldn't say. It was an odd wrinkle in an otherwise sterile house.

Kita-san's aunt was already making some tea by the sink. She motioned for us to sit at the kitchen table. We each took a seat, and a moment later she brought over a plate of crackers and two cups of tea. One for herself, the other for Kita-san. She took the third and final seat at the table, turning it to face Kita-san fully, once again ignoring me.

"I haven't been to the store yet this week," said Kita-san's aunt. "So all I've got is finger food. Hope you don't mind."

"That's perfectly fine," said Kita-san. "I didn't call ahead or anything."

"So what's the occasion? I don't imagine you just happened to be in the area."

Kita-san shook her head. "I came to pay my respects at Ojii-san's grave. The lots needed some maintenance, so we took care of that too."

Her aunt tilted her head. "Is that so? I suppose it's been a little while since I last made the walk up there. Living in a quiet house like this, sometimes you lose track of time. The years all meld into one another."

"I'm sure it's much quieter than it was before. Are you getting on fine?"

"You know me. I don't need much to get by," said the woman. "Coffee, tea, and a good book are plenty. I bet your life is a lot more exciting than mine. I heard you play in a band these days?"

"Yes. I sing and play the guitar."

"That so? I never would have thought you'd end up doing something like that. Feels like just yesterday your father was dumping you here so he could take your mother out on dates."

Kita-san smiled. "He used to say it was quality time for the two of them, and for the two of us."

Her aunt snorted and downed the rest of her tea. "Pretty convenient way of thinking. Then again, I haven't got children of my own, so maybe I just don't understand."

The two of them finished the crackers, and Kita-san's aunt took the tray back to the sink. She returned with a handful of roasted chestnuts that were kept in a jar on the kitchen counter, placing them in the center of the table. When she sat back down it was silent. I watched them both, waiting for one or the other to speak. But neither of them said a word. We sat there like that for a minute or two, listening to the ticking of the clocks right above our heads.

"Oba-san," Kita-san said at last, "I want to be honest with you. At first my intention was to visit Ojii-san and then return home. I knew it would be improper, but I've been going through some personal things lately. I'm not trying to make excuses. I just want to explain myself. Due to my own inadequacies, I found myself avoiding this place. I want to apologize for doing that."

Kita-san's aunt picked up one of the chestnuts, which had already been cracked open, and began to slowly peel it. Her fingers moved deftly, in a manner that suggested she had performed the exact same action thousands of times in the past.

"That's not something you ought to apologize for," she said. "Sounds like you were just going through a tough time. So what? Life does that to you every once in a while. Feeling responsible for that is like saying you have control over the way things turn out. Most things in this world aren't up to us."

"Lately I've been struggling to accept that," said Kita-san. "I guess I'm the type who feels the need to control what I can, even if it's only the smallest, tiniest thing. I don't like to feel helpless. I'm always dealing with the fear that I haven't done all that I can. For a long time now, that fear has been at the bottom of everything I do."

Her aunt sighed. By now she had peeled three or four of the chestnuts, but not a single one had passed her lips. They lay on the table, stripped bare like stones from the bottom of a riverbed.

"You've always been too kind for your own good," she said. "Too kind and too diligent. People like you always suffer needlessly."

"Even so, I decided I should come and tell you I'm sorry. I would like to speak to Obaa-san as well. Is she sleeping upstairs?"

When Kita-san said this, her aunt stopped peeling the chestnut in her hands halfway through. She set it down on the table and stared at Kita-san over the ridge of her glasses.

"What are you talking about?" she asked.

"Obaa-san," Kita-san repeated. "I would like to see her. I've heard her condition has worsened lately. Is she not home?"

Her aunt sat back in her seat, then turned to look out the window above the sink. For a long time she didn't say anything. I waited beside Kita-san, my fingers unconsciously gripping the ends of the tablecloth. It was quiet. At some point, without my noticing, the clocks on the wall had stopped ticking. Their pendulums were completely still, pointing straight down like rain on a windless night.

The woman passed one hand across her face, then reached across the table and put that hand over Kita-san's.

"Ikuyo," she said. "Your grandmother died two months ago. The funeral was in June. Don't you remember?"

I left the kitchen and put my shoes on at the genkan. Then I slipped out the door and walked back along the road, in the direction of the cemetery.

Kita-san had asked to be left alone. Her aunt nodded and left the kitchen, leaving the peeled chestnuts on the table. I remained where I was, but in a quiet voice Kita-san repeated her request. At that point I rose from my seat and took my leave.

It wasn't long before I reached the dirt path leading to the temple. I entered the grounds and went inside the main building, but the woman from before was nowhere to be found. I went back outside and made a full circuit around the temple. Not a single soul other than myself was there.

I returned to the cemetery next, making my way to the young cherry tree. The four graves from before were still there. I noticed there were a few leaves and petals scattered around the headstones already. Not nearly as many as there had been when we first arrived, but enough to suggest that no one had come by to maintain the graves in a week or so.

Once I had taken inventory here, I walked to the next row of lots, directly behind the one where Kita-san's grandfather was buried. I noticed there was a fifth headstone that I hadn't seen before. The name engraved there was a woman's. This must be where Kita-san's grandmother was buried. Why had she not been buried beside her husband? How had we missed it while cleaning the graves earlier?

I stared silently at the name on the headstone. So Kita-san's grandmother was dead after all. Which meant by the time we'd arrived, it was already too late.

I knelt down and began to pick up the stray leaves lying around the grave. But I only managed a few before I lost the will to continue. The strength left my body, and I fell to my hands and knees in the grass.

Hitori-chan. Someone was calling my name. Was it Kita-san? Hitori-chan. Hitori-chan. A sudden wind picked up amongst the trees, distorting the voice echoing amongst the headstones. Hitori-chan. Out of nowhere I felt my fingers begin to ache. Who was calling out to me? No matter how hard I focused, the voice was unrecognizable. Mustering the last bit of strength I had left, I raised my head and looked up at the grave where Kita-san's grandmother was buried.

A large monkey sat on top of the headstone, its big, blocky teeth shining in the afternoon light. It had bright yellow fur and tiny red eyes. Its body appeared to pulse in rhythm with my heartbeat. In and out, in and out, like a lung expanding and contracting. With its small spindly hands the monkey made several grasping motions in my direction, drool dripping from its rubbery lips.

Hitori-chan, said the monkey, practically laughing around its oversized teeth. Care for a miracle, Hitori-chan?

"Hitori-chan?"

I opened my eyes. It was nighttime. The first thing I saw was the snow falling from the sky. A steady, gentle kind of snow, so light it melted as soon as it touched my nose. I wore a coat and scarf, and my feet were encased by thick boots.

In other words, winter in Tokyo again.

Kita-san stood beside me. We were in front of an izakaya. Warm yellow light spilled out from behind the door, painting our shadows across the snow lining the street. I had come outside for some fresh air, but I must have taken a while, and so Kita-san had come to check on me. The door was still slightly ajar behind her. Through the small crack I could see everyone from the live house eating together. Nijika-chan. Ryo-senpai. Seika-san and PA-san. Even Hiroi-san was there. Seeing them all at once like that, I felt a genuine happiness in my heart.

Kita-san shut the door to keep the cold out. She linked our arms together and pressed close to me, our breaths fogging beneath the night sky.

"You've been out here a while," she said.

"Sorry," I replied. "I was just lost in thought."

"What were you thinking about?"

I pondered the question. What had I been thinking about? It took a minute, but I managed to recall what it was.

"I was just thinking about how lucky I am," I said. "That I got to meet everyone. That I get to spend time with you all like this. I never thought I'd get to do anything like that."

"Really?"

"Yes. To me, it's nothing short of a miracle."

Kita-san's hands were unprotected from the cold; she had not put on her gloves before coming outside. I took off one of mine and handed it to her. She put it on her left hand, and the right she slipped into the pocket of my coat, where our fingers naturally became intertwined.

"You know, Hitori-chan," said Kita-san, "Sometimes I feel like you genuinely think none of this has anything to do with you. Like there isn't a single thing that we have to thank you for. Do you really think everything that's happened is nothing more than a miracle?"

I looked up at the sky. "I don't know what else it could be."

Kita-san sighed.

"Nijika-chan told me the story of how you two met," she said. "How they needed a guitarist, and there you were, in the swingset at that park. If not for that, none of us would be here now, would we?"

"It was just a coincidence," I said. "I just happened to be in the right place at the right time."

"Right. There was definitely some luck involved." Kita-san readjusted her grip on my hand. "But think about it this way. If you hadn't been carrying your guitar that day, Nijika-chan probably would have walked right past that park. It's because you had a guitar that the two of you met. Rather, it's because you decided to learn the guitar that all of us met."

I looked down at my shoes. "I guess. But if not for that one stroke of luck, I probably would not have been able to move forward."

"Is that so bad? I think that life would be pretty boring without luck. Every little thing would be no different than a math equation. That bit of random chance is what makes being alive so exciting."

One of the workers at the izakaya came outside to have a smoke. We remained silent until he had finished his cigarette and gone back inside. The smell lingered for a while, mixed in with the inertness of the snow.

"I think it just bothers me that it wasn't up to me in the end," I said, resuming our conversation. "Like, if I woke up one day and the past couple years turned out to just be a really vivid dream. Would I be able to recreate the circumstances I'm in right now? I think that would probably be impossible. If it were just me all alone again, I'm sure I'd just go back to the way I was before. That's why I'm so grateful, but so afraid of losing everything at the same time. I feel like it could all be taken away from me at any moment. Even as I stand with you out here, Kita-san, I am so happy. But I'm afraid it's a happiness I can't protect."

The sound of Hiroi-san's laughter came from behind us. A moment later she was rebuked by someone, probably Seika-san, and then the whole table began to laugh in unison. Kita-san exhaled and leaned her head on my shoulder.

"You want to know something?" she asked. "If we're being realistic, there will eventually be a day when we'll have to say goodbye to everyone. Nijika-chan, Ryo-senpai, and all the others. Maybe it won't happen for a long time. Maybe it'll happen tomorrow. But at some point we'll reach a fork in the road, and they'll go one way, while we go another. Even you and I, one day, will see each other for the very last time. There's no helping it. Given that, would you say it doesn't matter how things play out? Does it make no difference to you if today is the last time we'll ever see each other?"

I met Kita-san's eyes. "Of course it matters."

"That's what I'm saying. Hitori-chan, I don't think happiness is something you can protect. If you could, it probably wouldn't be as precious as it is. Happiness might be something that's meant to be lost, then reclaimed, and lost, again and again. Don't you think that is the purpose of dreams? When I have a good reason to get out of bed in the morning, I often find myself thinking, 'Ah, so this is what it means to be alive.' It's because we have things we want that we have things to look forward to. So it's okay to experience loss every once in a while. In fact, it might even be necessary. We're not as helpless as we might think. You were the one to teach me that. When I met you, I felt like my life was finally beginning to take flight. That is why you will always be so special to me. To me, Hitori-chan, you are someone with the power to move the world."

Chapter Text

Who knows how long we stood outside that izakaya? I imagine at some point, we went back inside to join the others. Then we must have left and gone our separate ways. I returned home and disappeared beneath the covers of my futon. A quiet end to another fulfilling day. When I opened my eyes, I was back in the nameless town beneath the shadow of the mountain, alone in the cemetery as I was before.

Kita-san found me just before sunset. I was standing in the very middle of the property, eyes fixed on her grandmother's grave. It stood alone, unaccompanied by anything.

As Kita-san approached me, I turned and pulled her into a sudden embrace. I did not hold her particularly tightly, but she stayed very still, in a manner that suggested she would remain there until I released her. I'm not sure why I did this. When I saw Kita-san, I knew only that I had to hold her.

Finally I relaxed my arms and stepped back. Kita-san reached out and gently wiped at the corners of my eyes, where a few stray tears had gathered. Then she took my hand.

The two of us left the cemetery together. Outside the entrance Kita-san stopped and handed me her bag.

"Hitori-chan," she said, "Do you mind waiting here for a moment?"

I nodded. She turned and went back the way we had come. I was prepared to wait quite a while, but after only a few minutes Kita-san returned to the entrance. She took her bag back and offered me a small smile.

"Let's go," she said.

As we made our way back through the town, Kita-san told me she had already spoken to her aunt about coming to visit in a few weeks. It would be Obon by then, so the timing would be prudent. This time, she said, she would come alone.

Once again Kita-san walked a few steps ahead of me, and so I could not make out her expression when she said this. I gave a brief response, and we passed the rest of the walk in silence.

We reached the station just as the sun began to dip below the horizon. I noticed that the dog that had been lying nearby was gone. The flies were still there, floating forlornly in the empty space the dog had left behind.

The last train of the day arrived only a few minutes after we stepped onto the platform. Before I knew it we were already well on our way back to Tokyo.

On the train, Kita-san produced a small bag of roasted chestnuts her aunt had given her. We spread napkins across our laps and ate them together. I'd heard chestnuts could give you indigestion if you ate too many of them, but I was so hungry at that point that I hardly cared. We both scarfed them down, and in a short time they were all gone.

Only a few minutes of sunlight remained in the day. The shadows at the bottom of the train car slowly crept up, consuming more of our bodies with each passing moment. Soon, I thought, I would be unable to see Kita-san with my own eyes.

As the darkness advanced up to our shoulders, I asked Kita-san in a soft voice if she was going to be alright. She pondered my question for a moment, then told me she thought so. She had simply refused to look at what was right in front of her. That was all. Thanks to me, she'd been set back on the right path. I protested that I had hardly done anything. But she shook her head and said that without me, things would have been very different.

I turned to look at her as the shadows rose up to our necks. Kita-san's head seemed to float directly in front of me, her eyes shining with the last dying light of the sun. As I looked into those eyes, I felt a sudden intense yearning for Kita-san, in spite of the fact that she was sitting right beside me. I wanted nothing more than to run my hands along her face, through her hair, behind her ears. To experience her in totality, in a manner so complete that it would become impossible to separate the two of us from each other. If I did that, would I no longer have to be afraid of losing her? But I felt intuitively that even if I were to achieve such a thing, it would violate some fundamental principle underlying the connection between me and Kita-san.

I didn't want to say goodbye to her. Yet a deep, buried part of me understood that Kita-san and I had already parted ways long ago. Since then I had been wandering, away from my own self, in search of that which I had lost. Even now I was only clinging to a specter of what once was. Reality was calling for me. The sun was setting, and it was time to return home.

By now the shadows had gone over our noses. Kita-san leaned forward and pressed her forehead to mine.

"When will I get to see you again?" I asked.

"Whenever you want," said Kita-san. "Name a time and place, and I'll be there."

I tried to think of a fitting occasion for us to meet. In the end I couldn't come up with one, so I went with the first thing that came to mind.

"The next time it rains," I said. "The following morning, once the weather clears up, let's explore the city for a while, then go to Ueno Park. We'll meet at the station in Shibuya. You know the one."

"Okay," she replied. "It's a promise."

I pulled back to take one last look at Kita-san. But at that moment we entered a tunnel, and what little light we had left was snuffed out. I was plunged into a complete and utter darkness, one so deep that I instinctively gasped for air. But there was no air to be had. When my mouth opened the darkness poured into my body, filling my lungs, squeezing every last molecule of oxygen from my bloodstream. Then a second darkness, even deeper than the first, rose up and swallowed me from within.

A very bright light roused me. I opened my eyes to find a man in uniform shining a flashlight in my face. He was shouting at me to wake up. The train was no longer moving, the doors left wide open. I could feel how cold the air was outside. It was nighttime, and I had once again slept until service had ended for the day.

This time I only apologized once, carefully collected my things, and gingerly made my way off the train. The man in uniform continued to berate me as I walked away, pointing his flashlight at my back.

While leaving I briefly caught a glimpse of my appearance in the window of the station. My work clothes were thoroughly disheveled, my hair all over the place.

After several minutes I happened upon an empty bus stop not far from the station. From a nearby vending machine I bought a can of hot coffee and hunkered down at the end of the bench, clutching the can to my stomach underneath my shirt. My phone was about to run out of battery, so I quickly sent my father a message that I was fine and would be home in the morning. Then I curled up into a ball and waited for dawn.

Miraculously enough I still managed to sleep a couple hours on that bench. I was lucky that no one with ill intentions came along. I would have made an easy target. I rose to my feet and tossed the unopened can of coffee, now ice cold, into the trash. Then I returned to the station and boarded the first train of the day.

I had been on the train for about half an hour when it occurred to me that I was heading back to Tokyo instead of Kanagawa. Out of force of habit I had made a beeline for the city. I figured I would tell my father I had headed straight to work that morning and would be back home in the evening. Having resolved to do just that, I arrived in Tokyo and emerged aboveground, intending to spend the rest of the day at the library.

I took the backstreets so I could get there faster. About two thirds of the way to my destination, however, I happened upon a strange sight that stopped me in my tracks.

Halfway down a narrow street that cut between two rows of houses, there was a large circle that had been drawn in with chalk. At the very center of this odd circle, written in huge bold strokes, were the words BAD LUCK (不運). The circle was big enough that it was impossible to cross to the other end of the street without stepping inside of it. Probably someone had placed it there as a sort of joke, forcing passersby to either walk over the inauspicious characters within, or find another way around.

A woman sat crossed legged in the middle of this circle. I saw her the moment I turned into the street. This woman was none other than Hiroi-san. Her usual guitar case hung from her back, but she wore different clothes than usual. An oversized green hoodie and thick ski pants. The two pieces of clothing did not match each other very well, as if they had been chosen haphazardly without any concern for aesthetics.

As I drew closer, I noticed that Hiroi-san's skin was incredibly tanned, to the point that she appeared darker than soil after a long rain. If not for the color of her hair and eyes, I would not have been able to recognize her.

I walked all the way up to the edge of the chalk before stopping. Hiroi-san looked up and met my eyes, tilting her head as if she had only just noticed me.

"Hey, Hitori-chan," she said. "It's been a while."

Not knowing what else to do, I bowed my head briefly. "Long time no see, Hiroi-san."

"To think we would meet here and now, of all places." Hiroi-san tapped her finger against her knee. "Do you think there's some deep meaning behind it? Or is it just a coincidence?"

"Hard to say," I replied. "What's the difference between meaning and coincidence anyways?"

She smiled. "Convenience, maybe."

After that Hiroi-san held her hand out to me. I took it and helped her out of the circle. We began walking down the remaining length of the street.

"I could go for lunch," said Hiroi-san. "What about you?"

We went to a ramen shop that was nearby. After sliding into one of the booths we each ordered a bowl of shoyu ramen with pork chashu. I also got a side of karaage for us to share. For the first twenty minutes or so neither of us said a word, as we were too busy filling our bellies.

"Say," Hiroi-san asked around a mouthful of noodles, "How long has it been since we last saw each other?"

I thought about it briefly. "Around four years or so."

"So you're old enough to drink now, right?"

I asked the waiter for beer. Perhaps I should have been more specific, because he came back with two opened bottles and placed one before the both of us. Hiroi-san made a delighted noise and began to down her bottle, while I only stared at mine.

"Hiroi-san," I said, "If you don't mind me asking, what were you doing in the street earlier?"

Hiroi-san downed a large gulp of beer. After wiping her mouth with her sleeve, she said, "I was just taking a short rest. I'd been walking for a pretty long time, you see, so I was just a little tired."

"But why in such a spot? Where did that circle come from?"

"No clue. It was there when I arrived. I figured it was probably the one spot in the city where I'd be left alone. I could get some much needed peace and quiet. And I was right - the second anyone turned onto the street and saw me sitting there, they turned right back around."

I took in Hiroi-san's appearance. It had been four years, and yet she looked like she had not aged a day. Aside from the impressive tan. She should have been nearly thirty by now. Then again, Hiroi-san had always possessed a sort of timeless quality, as if the rules which constrained others did not apply to her.

"What were you doing before that?" I asked. "Actually, what have you been up to for the last four years?"

Hiroi-san did not answer immediately. Instead she swirled the last bit of beer left in her bottle, staring into it with one eye closed. Then she set the bottle aside and placed her hands on the table.

"It's not a pleasant story," she said.

"That's fine," I replied. "I don't mind unpleasant stories."

She eyed me for a moment. "That so?"

I said nothing. Hiroi-san downed the rest of her bottle and settled back in her seat with a sigh.

"Let's see. Where should I begin?" she said.

"I suppose we could pick up from Iwate Prefecture."

"Right. Last time we met, I got on the first bus I saw and left Iwate Prefecture. To tell you the truth, I had no idea where it was going, but I figured the first order of business was to get to a proper city before figuring out how to get back to Tokyo. Thing is, once I was on the bus I became so tired that I slept through the rest of the day. When I woke up the bus had reached its final stop. I couldn't recognize a single thing outside the window. I asked the driver where we were, and he told me we were in Aomori. Aomori! I could hardly believe it. I had gone all the way to the northernmost point of Honshu. If I wanted, I could have taken a boat across the water to Sapporo."

Hiroi-san reached for her bottle, only to remember it was empty. I wordlessly slid mine across the table. She picked it up before resuming her story.

"Now I'm thinking, 'Great, Shima's going to kill me,'" she said. "But it's not like I could avoid telling her where I was. So I scrounged a few quarters from a vending machine and called her number from a phone booth. Honestly, I was really hoping she wouldn't pick up. But she did. Boy, you wouldn't believe how mad she was. We were supposed to hold a big live the night before, but I was a no-show, so they had to cancel the entire thing. We lost a lot of money thanks to me. Not to mention everyone was worried. Shima definitely had every reason to be angry. So I'm standing there in this smelly phone booth, right, just listening to her lay into me. And I mean just saying the most brutal things she could think of at the moment. I knew I deserved it, but at the same time, I found myself getting angry too. After all, it's not like I wanted to ruin things for everyone. I felt like she was making me out to be this heartless person who didn't give a damn about anyone else besides myself.

"Long story short, we had a huge argument over the phone. In the end she told me she never wanted to see me again. I said some stuff back I shouldn't have. Then I hung up and got the hell out of there. But I didn't go back to Tokyo after that. Going home was the last thing I wanted to do. I wandered around Aomori for a while, picking up odd jobs here and there. I couldn't busk for money without an amp. But I didn't have any desire to play music anyway. After I woke up in that stupid vending machine in Iwate, I didn't open my guitar case a single time. Every night I went drinking at the bars around Aomori. I slept in parks or inside empty doghouses in people's backyards. I'm really fortunate that all this happened during the summertime. If it was winter, I probably would have died.

"After two or three weeks of this, there was a night when I met a man while drinking at the bar and went home with him. I shouldn't have, but I was drunk and he said I could sleep over at his place. At that point I'd been sleeping outside for more than two weeks; I wanted to fall asleep on a real bed so badly it hurt. It was raining really hard that night. I'd already told him I had nowhere else to go. We went to his house and he showed me to his bedroom. I blacked out at some point, and when I woke up the guy was taking my clothes off. I stayed very still, not moving a muscle. When he noticed I was awake he stopped, but when I didn't react he started again. Then stopped. Eventually he asked me why I wasn't resisting. Wasn't I afraid? I asked him, if I resisted, would it matter in the end?

"When I said that, something in his face changed, and he got off me. He sat at his desk, where he took out some cigarettes from the drawer and began to smoke. Then he asked if I wanted one. I said I did, so he tossed me the box of cigarettes and a lighter. Soon we were both smoking together, neither of us saying a word.

"After a while, he told me that his wife had died the year before. He didn't say what happened to her, just that she died. Maybe he was waiting for me to ask. But I wasn't about to listen to a sob story from some guy who was feeling me up five minutes ago. Even if he did let me bum a cigarette. So I just stayed quiet. Eventually he got up and left the room. When he came back he was holding some clothes and an envelope full of cash.

"He put them on the bed and said I could have them. The clothes were his wife's, so he didn't need them anymore. He sat back down at the desk and lit another cigarette. He said he wasn't going anywhere, so if I wanted to call the police, he wouldn't try to run. After that he stopped talking. I put my clothes back on and took the money. The wife's clothes I left. Then I grabbed the rest of my stuff and got the hell out of there.

"I didn't think the guy was going to follow me or anything, but I still ran away from the house as fast as I could. I ran until the sun started to rise. Once I stopped I realized I still had the cigarette in my mouth, so I threw it away. It occurred to me that I was starving, so I went into a McDonald's for breakfast. You know the little playgrounds they have there for kids? It was empty, so once I'd eaten I crawled into the plastic tube above the slide and laid down. Face up, arms folded over my chest. Just thinking about what the hell I ought to do now.

"You see, Hitori-chan, I've always been a wreck, but I think it was starting to really hit me just how much of a wreck I was. I'd made it this far on the back of some fortunate friendships and a lack of regard for the future. And for what? Now here I was, contemplating life inside a McDonald's playground. I felt like I needed to do something drastic, something with enough velocity in the opposite direction so that I could really change course. But what would be good enough?

"Just then an idea came to me. As it turns out, Aomori has an international airport. I might have even heard a few planes taking off when the bus was arriving in the city. When I remembered that, I suddenly got all inspired, and I headed straight to the airport. I slapped the envelope of money on the counter and asked for a seat on the very next plane headed out of there. It was a connecting flight to Beijing. I figured, why the hell not? I'd never been to China before. Next thing I knew I was on a plane to Beijing."

"What were you planning to do there?" I asked.

Hiroi-san pointed at me. "That's the thing. I had no idea. Really, I just wanted to get far away from everything. Shima, Tokyo, myself. Everything. Basically, I wanted to become an entirely new person. In order to achieve something like that, you've got to change your environment a sufficient amount. Otherwise you're just drawing from the same well. At least, that was my thought process at the time."

The waiter came by to ask if we needed anything. I shook my head. He left the check on the table before retreating into the kitchen. Hiroi-san waited until he was out of earshot before resuming.

"Now, during this flight to Beijing I sat next to a middle aged Korean gentleman," she continued. "He spoke pretty good Japanese though, so we struck up a conversation. I learned that he was the head of an environmental conservationist group in Beijing. Every summer he takes a small group of volunteers to the Mongolian border to plant trees in the desert there. You see, the desert to the north of China keeps getting bigger and bigger each year, which causes these terrible dust storms that reach all the way down to Beijing and make a real mess of everything. They get so bad people can hardly breathe, and small children get sick. The guy said it was because there weren't enough trees in the desert to keep the soil anchored down. So that's where his group came in.

"I thought, what a noble person! Even in this terrible and selfish world, there were still people like this man doing their best to make a difference. He just spoke so passionately about the project, I guess I was a little smitten. I told him I wished I could be a part of something important like he was. To which he said, in that case, why not come with us?

"That was good enough for me. So that's how I ended up on a train bound for the Mongolian border. We spent a few days in Beijing first, during which he took me to their office so I could sign all the relevant papers. I left my guitar and some other things there for safekeeping. I also got to meet all the other volunteers. For the most part they were Chinese kids, around college age or so, many of them family friends or even relatives of the group leader. All real nice folks. I don't know a lick of Mandarin myself, but they didn't seem to care at all about that. When the time came we piled into an overnight train, and we were headed for the desert.

"We rode all the way to the last stop. This tiny middle of nowhere town, even smaller than the one where you and I last met. From there we got in pickup trucks and drove westward. Soon we were deep in the heart of the desert. We passed several swaths of trees, some huge, some small. I was told we were going to a still undeveloped stretch of land further out, to lay down a fresh batch. There was a small camp there already.

"We drove for a long time. When we finally reached the camp the sun was minutes away from setting. I fell asleep halfway, so it was like finding myself in a totally new world. The camp was little more than three shacks placed in a row, plus a small wooden structure that housed a toilet. Other than that it was nothing but sand. Sand as far as the eye could see. There was so much sand, filling my vision no matter which direction I turned, that it seemed to pour into my soul because it didn't have anywhere else to go. That's how much sand there was. It felt like I'd reached the very edge of the world.

"I was going to be out there with them for two weeks. As it turned out, the little wooden structure had no toilet inside of it yet. We had to dig a hole in the ground first. When it was deep enough we brought out this big black bag and used it to line the hole. A cheap plastic toilet seat was put on top. That was our bathroom. Then we had to clean up the inside of the shacks. By the time we did all that it was nearly midnight. It'd been boiling hot when we arrived, but at night the temperature dropped and it was freezing cold. There weren't any beds in the shacks though. In fact, there wasn't a single piece of furniture at all. We spread sleeping bags on the floor, then hooked a big net to the ceiling to protect us from insects while we slept. Everyone was starving, so we had a quick dinner before clocking out for the day.

"Right before I fell asleep, I remember noticing just how incredibly quiet it was. I'd never experienced a silence like the one out in the desert before. It's deeper and more complete than anything you can imagine. The silence in the desert was not just the absence of sound. Rather, it was a force which blocked out sound altogether.

"When I woke up the next morning, I was so sore I could barely move. But there was work to do. That meant preparing the soil, taking measurements, and tending to the trees. I won't bore you with the specifics. But it was back-breaking work. There was a small village nearby of maybe a hundred people; a bunch of them came over for the day to help us out. We worked from sunrise to sunset. That night the villagers invited us to have dinner with them. So we piled into our trucks and went to the village. There was a single farm there with lots of cute little lambs. One of the men said something to me - apparently he was asking which one I liked the most. I pointed at the one I thought was cutest. Turns out that was the one they slaughtered that night for dinner. If I'd known that was what he meant, I might have picked the fattest one instead. Oh, well.

"So that was life out in the desert. Rising and falling with the sun. Working my body to exhaustion. Sleeping in pools of sweat. Shitting in a hole in the ground. It was a miserable existence, there's no denying that. But you know, when it was all said and done, I felt strangely happy. Every day I fell asleep the second my head hit the pillow. The world felt wonderfully small. As long as I finished my day's work, nothing else mattered. My mind felt at ease. In fact, from the moment I got on the plane to Beijing I hadn't had a single drop of alcohol. But the entire time I was out in the desert, I had no desire to drink at all.

"It was as if I'd finally unlocked the secret to happiness. All the way out here, at the very edge of the world, I'd found what I was looking for all along. The only thing I prayed for now was that this feeling would never leave me. But that was impossible from the start, right? I mean, we were only going to be there for two weeks. From the rip that pure happiness I'd discovered was meant to disappear. One way or another, something would cause it to leave me.

"That 'something' came on the fifth day. That night, I went sleepwalking for the first time in my life. At around one in the morning I unconsciously crawled out of my sleeping bag, slipped under the net, and left the shack. I stumbled around for a few minutes before I woke up and realized what I was doing. Such a thing had never happened to me before, so I didn't know what to make of it. Maybe I'd needed to use the bathroom? But the toilet hole was in the complete opposite direction. I turned around and went back to the camp. Then I got back in bed and fell right back asleep. In the morning I felt the same as usual, and so I quickly forgot about the whole thing.

"But that very night it happened again. This time I walked for ten or fifteen minutes before regaining consciousness. I was far enough away from the camp that I couldn't immediately see it when I turned around. Now I was afraid. What was wrong with me? Why did I keep getting out of bed and walking into the desert every night? Maybe toiling under the sun every day was starting to do weird things to my brain. I don't know. But I didn't say anything to the others. I didn't want them to think I'd gone crazy, or worse, send me back home. I felt like I had nothing left to return to, and I didn't want to lose the small simple happiness I shared with all of them. So I kept my mouth shut.

"The next day I worked harder than ever before, hoping if I became sufficiently exhausted, I would sleep so deeply that it would be impossible for me to sleepwalk. That night I waited until the person next to me had fallen asleep, then tied our ankles together with a piece of string. If I left the bed, it would alert them, and they would hopefully stop me before I got too far.

"This plan worked like a charm. I was still in my sleeping bag when the sun rose in the morning. I felt so relieved. I went about my work that day as usual, then that night I repeated the same method with the string. This way I figured to make it to the end of the trip without issue.

"Things continued like this for three days. Then, on the night of the third day, I went sleepwalking again.

"This third incident was different from the last. Somehow I'd gotten up in the middle of the night, untied the string around my ankle, and left the camp again. Only this time, I didn't wake up after a few minutes. I kept walking and walking. I walked for hours. I wasn't even wearing shoes. During this entire period I was unconscious. When my eyes finally opened, I was standing in a vast expanse of sand, miles away from everything else.

"Once I understood the situation I had found myself in, I stood very still, trying my best not to panic. But fear got the better of me. I began to scream. I screamed as loud as I could until my voice gave out. But no one heard me. No one came. It was the dead of night in the middle of an endless desert. I wore nothing other than a loose shirt and shorts. And I had no idea where I was.

"I thought about trying to retrace my footprints in the sand to find my way back. But it was a breezy night, and my tracks disappeared after about twenty yards. I had no idea which direction I'd taken when I left the camp. If I chose one at random and started walking, I might actually get further from where I needed to be. Realizing this, I stood frozen in place, shivering in the wind.

"I stayed there for what felt like hours. But eventually the need to do something became overwhelming. I felt sure that a coyote or other animal would happen upon me eventually. I'd be dead meat then. The idea of remaining stationary became unbearable to me. So I started to walk. I chose an eastward direction, the direction of home, and began to slowly put one foot in front of the other.

"As I walked, the sun gradually began to rise. Soon it was daytime in the desert. The wind had died down, so it was quiet. That same impenetrable silence from before. I could practically hear my own blood rushing through my ears. I walked and walked. By midday it felt like I must have covered several miles. But when I turned around my tracks were invisible. No proof of any progress made. At one point I lost my sense of direction because the sun was directly on top of me. I couldn't remember which way I'd been facing before. I walked for a while longer, then stopped, then turned around, only to stop and go back the way I'd come.

"Eventually I gave up and fell to my knees in the sand. There was this tiny scraggly bush next to me. It cast the smallest of shadows on the ground. I crawled into that shadow and curled up into a little ball. My stomach was begging for food. My throat was parched. I hadn't had anything to eat or drink since the night before.

"After a few minutes the bush's shadow moved with the sun, exposing me to the heat again. I crawled forward a few inches before curling up again. And again, and again, repeating the same process over and over. For some reason this repetitive movement came very naturally to me. I seriously thought I was going to die. After everything, this was how I was going to go out? Baked to death at the edge of the world? In my mind I saw my bones lying half buried in the sand, bleached white by the sun. All of a sudden I desperately wanted a drink. One last drink before I kicked the bucket. But it'd take a miracle to find alcohol in the middle of the desert, that's for sure.

"As I laid there in the sand, I started thinking about the happiness I'd felt in the last week or so. That precious happiness I would have done anything to protect. And I realized something. That happiness I felt, it wasn't because I gave a shit about the environment, or seeing the world, or anything of the sort. I felt happy because for the first time in a long while, I'd chosen my own suffering. You see, Hitori-chan, the only thing guaranteed to us in this life is suffering. But I don't mean that in a bad way. I'm saying that suffering is our one and only right in this world.

"All of a sudden I felt like such an idiot. I should have just apologized to Shima and gone back to Tokyo. Instead I was going to die in a place no one would ever be able to find me. I hated myself so much at that moment. I would have given anything to hear Shima's voice one last time. But all I had was silence."

Hiroi-san leaned back in her seat, a weary expression on her face. The waiter came and took the check.

"So what happened after that?" I asked.

"I was found just before sundown," Hiroi-san said. "I passed out by the bush. When I opened my eyes, a bunch of men were shouting at me to wake up. Four or five of them. Maybe they were from the village. I didn't recognize any of them, though. At the time I was so messed up I could barely speak. They took me to the village where I'd gotten off the train. I spent a day there recovering, then I was taken back to Beijing, where I was admitted into a local hospital."

"The other volunteers didn't come to get you?"

Hiroi-san's face suddenly grew serious. "No. I wondered the same thing. After a couple days I was discharged from the hospital, but no one had even called to ask what happened to me. I figured it was because there's no cellphone signal out in the desert. Since I had nowhere else to go, I decided to go to the office where I'd left my stuff. But no one was there. One of the janitors let me in. I had to root through a whole pile of things to find my guitar. It was already covered in a thick layer of dust, like it hadn't been touched in years."

The second bottle of beer had hardly been touched since Hiroi-san began her story. She picked it up as if to take a sip, before seeming to think better of it and setting it aside.

"While I was leaving the building I ran into someone at the entrance," she continued. "It was the group leader. The second he saw me he screamed and ran away, shouting as if he'd just seen a ghost. That was the last I ever saw of him."

A brief silence fell over us. The waiter came back and left the change.

"So," said Hiroi-san, "What do you think of my story?"

I spent several seconds digesting all I had just heard.

"All in all you were in Aomori and China for about a month," I summarized. "Did you return to Japan immediately afterwards?"

Hiroi-san nodded.

"Then what have you done since then? It's been four years. When I first saw you, Hiroi-san, you were so dark I could hardly recognize you. As if you'd been living in the desert all that time."

Hiroi-san tilted her head slightly to the side. "You know, that's a good point. At the moment, I can't seem to recall what happened next. I'm sure it'll come back to me eventually."

Suddenly she laughed, hiccuping slightly at the end.

"Who knows, maybe I just dreamed the whole thing up."

I stared at her. Sometimes, I really didn't know what to make of Hiroi-san.

We gathered our things, thanked the staff, and left the ramen shop. Until we stepped outside it didn't occur to me how long we had been there. It was well into the afternoon now. As we stood on the side of the road I rubbed my stomach gingerly. Indigestion again. Maybe I'd eaten too much.

I asked Hiroi-san what she was going to do now. She told me she was going to search for Shima-san. They'd fallen out of contact over the years, but she wanted to see her again and at least make amends. Then, she said, she didn't know what she was going to do.

"Hiroi-san," I said, "If possible, I would like to see you again. If you plan to stay in Tokyo, that is."

The two of us exchanged numbers, then watched the sunset in silence. Hiroi-san took out a cigarette, smoked about half of it, then dropped it on the ground before crushing it beneath her heel.

"Funny story about this bass guitar, by the way," she said. "When I went to retrieve it from the office, it occurred to me I hadn't played it in several weeks. From the moment I woke up in Iwate Prefecture, I hadn't opened the case a single time. So I opened it up. And guess what? The guitar that was inside wasn't even mine. It was someone else's."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that a different bass guitar was in that case. In fact, once I took a closer look I realized the case itself was also slightly different than my own. I have no idea how it happened, but somehow I lost my own bass and ended up with this other one. Take a look if you don't believe me."

With that Hiroi-san shrugged off the guitar case on her shoulder and leaned it against the side of the ramen shop. She grabbed the zipper and pulled it down about halfway, far enough that I could see what lay inside.

Ryo-senpai's bass guitar was there, gently reflecting the afternoon sunlight.

I parted ways with Hiroi-san at the station. We made plans to meet again the next day. She wanted to show me around all the live houses in Shinjuku, and was very pleased when I mentioned I knew how to play the guitar.

"If I can't track Shima down, I'll have to start a new band," she said. "You can be our guitarist!"

As for the bass guitar, I asked that Hiroi-san continue to take care of it. She had considered selling it somewhere so she could get another one closer to her own preferred specifications, but when I told her I would buy it off her myself in that case, she seemed to change her mind.

"If it's that important to you, I'll hold onto it," she said. "Whoever this bass used to belong to, it found its way to me. Could just be a coincidence, but it could mean something too. Guess you're telling me it's the latter."

I nodded. Hiroi-san smiled and shouldered the case before waving goodbye.

"See you tomorrow, Hitori-chan."

When was the last time someone said that to me? It must have been years.

The hospital was very quiet when I arrived. The nurses nodded in passing when they saw me. It had been long enough by now that they all recognized my face. I bowed to each of them in turn before slipping into my mother's room.

She lay in her usual position, hands folded loosely over her chest. The last bit of the day's light illuminated a narrow strip of her face. I pulled up a chair and took a seat by the bed.

It was strange. I had been there just yesterday, but it felt as if I hadn't laid eyes on my mother for a very long time. Like I had finally returned from a long and arduous journey.

Tiredness dragged at me. I folded my arms on the edge of the bed before resting my head on them. Through one open eye I watched the narrow shaft of sunlight on my mother's face slowly grow thinner. Then it disappeared, and a moment later sleep took me.

Chapter Text

Though I am the owner of this notebook, I often find myself wondering about the meaning of all that is written here. If you were to ask me, I would not be able to tell you what purpose this story is meant to serve. I use the word "story" deliberately. To me that feels like the only way to describe the contents of this notebook. A story, after all, could be completely made up, or it could concern events that actually took place in reality. The only difference between the two is how much you trust the storyteller.

In reflecting on those arduous summer days in Yokohama, and the tumultuous fall in Tokyo that followed, I recalled how arbitrary everything seemed to me. Placing each distinct event beside the others yielded no particular wisdom. It was like writing words in a language I couldn't read. Meaningless symbols, one after another. Where did all this come from? Where was I headed? These were the sorts of questions filling my mind at the time.

But as it turns out, sometimes life churns in a particular way, and out of nowhere things appear to fall into place. Whether that phenomenon is real or not is up for debate. Maybe we just think this to be the case due to the limited ways in which we view the world. Imagine, for example, a person born at the bottom of a very deep well. To a person like that, "daytime" is something which occurs for only a brief moment, when the sun is directly overhead. They have no idea that an entirely different world exists outside the well. Probably they don't even know that they live at the bottom of something called a "well."

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that perspective dictates everything, even if we are often not aware of the limits of said perspective. In a meaningless life, in which the beginning and end are already predetermined, and nothing in the middle is guaranteed, the only way to achieve "freedom" might be through this thing we call "perspective."

In the fall of my twenty second year, I tested the limits of my own sense of self, straying further from the person who constituted my own being than ever before. It would be no exaggeration to say that I embarked on a very long journey. And yet when I returned, I found myself right back in the same place where I began. To the naked eye nothing had changed. But I know this was not the case. A marked shift had taken place in the world. I think the best way to put it is not that I reached the end of a long journey. Rather, I had finally reached the beginning of one.

The morning after I listened to Hiroi-san's story, my mother opened her eyes at last. I fell asleep the night before at her bedside, and when I awoke she was sitting up, gently stroking my hair with her hand. When our gazes met she smiled and said, "You're home." To which I said, "Tadaima." It felt as if I was meeting her for the very first time.

After a moment I came to my senses, and rose to call for the doctor. Before I could leave, however, my mother took my arm to stop me.

She said there were some things she needed to tell me first. Her voice was hoarse from disuse. I replied that whatever it was, it could surely wait until a doctor had examined her. But she shook her head and said that it couldn't wait. I saw in her eyes that she was serious. Despite my misgivings, I relented and sat by the bed once more.

Once my mother was convinced I wouldn't leave, she relaxed her hold on me. She corrected her posture in bed, then slowly smoothed down her hair and clothes, before finally taking a big breath. I sat silently, waiting for her to speak.

My mother asked me to listen very closely. I wasn't to speak, only listen. She understood that she had been sleeping for a very long time. In that time, she said, she had a dream. A long, long dream with no distinct beginning or end. But now that she was awake, the details of that dream were starting to slip away from her. She wanted to tell me what she could before it was too late. If I interrupted her I was likely to break her concentration, so she would speak unhindered until she could continue no longer. It was very important, my mother said, that I follow these instructions.

In response I nodded without saying a word. My mother appeared satisfied. She grasped my hand and took another deep breath.

"Even now I can feel bits and pieces falling away from my memory," she said. "I will try to speak quickly, but even then I'm afraid we won't reach the end."

"The dream started in the middle of an endless stream of days," my mother began. "Though it is equally likely that it started long before that, and I only became conscious of my surroundings later. Even our earliest memories, after all, don't begin the moment we are born.

"I was putting up the laundry in the backyard when I heard the front door open and close. The way the house was laid out, there was a nearly straight channel from the genkan to the yard. Whenever someone went in or out the sound would reach me. I feel the need to explain this because the house in the dream was different from the one we currently live in. A different house, with a different yard. But there was something familiar about it nonetheless.

"I turned and looked into the house. It was a beautiful spring day. A sudden rain had come through that morning, but it had since cleared up, and the sky was as fresh and blue as mint. I stayed watching the front door from the yard for a time. But no one appeared. And yet I had heard it open and close, of that I was sure.

"I finished hanging up the laundry. Then I returned to the house and walked around the living room. It was empty. My husband was out running some errands, so the rest of the house was quiet. What else had I been expecting? All of a sudden, a slight chill passed through me. I brushed it off and exited the living room.

"However, when I passed by the genkan, something in the corner caught my eye. Tucked away in the shadow of the door, between the wall and the shoe rack, was a single pair of loafers. The kind schoolgirls wear with their uniforms. I had never seen those shoes before. They obviously weren't my husband's, and they were much too small to belong to me.

"I squatted down and inspected them closely. The shoes were lined up as if to take up as little space as possible. The soles were covered in a fine layer of sand, maybe from a playground or park somewhere. When I picked them up, my thumb briefly touched the padding inside. I detected a faint heat emanating from the fabric. Whoever had been wearing those shoes had taken them off only a moment ago.

"I left the shoes where they were and slowly made my way upstairs. By now my heart was beating nervously in my chest. I didn't want to believe it, but based on the sound of the door earlier and the unidentifiable shoes in the genkan, I couldn't help wondering if a stranger had entered the house. But if that was the case, why would they take off their shoes at the entrance? If it was a thief, it would have made more sense for them to leave as few traces of their presence as possible. Not to mention that it appeared the intruder was a girl of high school age. I could not think of a single such person who had reason to come here.

"The second floor of the house had three bedrooms. The door to the first bedroom was shut. I quietly shuffled up to it, barely lifting my feet from the floor, before carefully turning the knob and peeking inside.

"My daughter, Futari, was taking her afternoon nap as usual. She lay in bed with her arms and legs splayed out around her, chest moving steadily with her breathing. She did not react at all when I opened the door. Clearly she was sleeping very deeply.

"I watched her through the crack in the door for a minute or two. Once I was satisfied that all was well, I closed it and returned to the hall.

"The second bedroom belonged to me and my husband. The door was already ajar, and when I looked inside it was empty. On a whim I searched through the closet and opened several of the shoeboxes we kept there. But none of them were meant for the kind of shoes I'd seen downstairs.

"I already knew that the third bedroom at the end of the hall was completely empty. We'd bought the house knowing we had no immediate use for it. At the moment it was fitted out as a spare guest room, with futons and comforters in the closet. Occasionally my in-laws would use it when they came to visit, but that was all.

"Every now and then my husband and I floated the idea of having a second child. But those plans never materialized. At the moment we only had Futari. There were a variety of practical reasons we hadn't yet tried for another, and besides I was more than happy with the way things were now. But at the same time, I had always felt that the family remained incomplete in its current state. I had no real justification for thinking this way. It was just a strange feeling I had. As a result I never expressed these thoughts to my husband. Even so I had carried this feeling with me for the last several years, and every now and then it would resurface, as if to remind me of its presence.

"I put the shoeboxes away and left the room, intending to go back downstairs and call my husband to ask about the loafers. Just as I put my foot down on the first step, however, I heard a noise from the far end of the hall.

"It was a brief noise, but in the relative silence of the house it felt deafening. A hollow sound, like a wooden mallet being plunked against the ground. It had come from inside the third bedroom at the end of the hall. I left the stairs and quietly walked up to the door. It was slightly open, but not far enough for me to see inside.

"As I stood there, I heard the same wooden noise again, followed by the sound of someone clearing their throat. My heart leapt in my chest. There was undoubtedly another person inside. I must have left the front door unlocked without realizing. While I was in the backyard putting up the laundry, a stranger had opened the door, left their shoes at the genkan, and made their way upstairs. Now they were here, in the spare bedroom.

"Once I realized this, my body moved reflexively, and I pushed the door wide open with my hand. Midday sunlight flooded past me and filled the hallway, pouring in through an open window opposite the door. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the unexpected brightness. When they did, I saw someone kneeling on the floor in the center of the room.

"A teenage girl in a pink tracksuit sat there, carefully cleaning a guitar with a cloth. She appeared to be about fourteen or fifteen. Overgrown bangs covered soft blue eyes, the same color as mine. She looked up when I opened the door, and our gazes met.

"'Ah, Okaa-san,' she said in a quiet voice. 'I didn't realize you were home.'

"I stood there for a brief while, my hand hanging limply from the doorknob. For some reason I could not bring myself to speak. I remained rooted in place, as a soft spring breeze passed through the window and into the hall.

"The girl with the guitar tilted her head. 'Okaa-san, is something the matter?'

"That managed to rouse me out of my stupor. I rubbed at my eyes with the heels of my hands before offering a smile.

"'No, no, I'm just fine," I said. 'Welcome home, Hitori.'

"My eyes fell on her clothes. I noticed that the bottoms of her pants and the back of her jersey were covered in dirt. A number of CD cases were also scattered about the floor, similarly sullied. When I asked what had happened, she looked away bashfully and said that she'd fallen off a swing.

"'Sorry about the mess," she said. 'I promise I'll clean up soon.'

"That's okay,' I replied. 'As long as you aren't hurt.'

"She smiled at me, then went back to tending to her guitar. I went downstairs and checked on the laundry. Then I got started on dinner and swept the living room while it was on the stove. My husband returned a couple hours later. I called my two daughters down, and the four of us had dinner around the kitchen table. Just like we always did. Everything felt right, all as it should be.

"I know what you might be thinking. How could I react so calmly to this situation? Did I know this Hitori or did I not? To answer that, I believe it's crucial to consider that there were essentially two distinct halves of myself existing simultaneously within me. What I mean is that there was a part of me that understood very clearly that I had never seen this girl before in my life. I only had one daughter, and that was Futari. If I birthed another child besides her, it was simply impossible that I would not have any memory of it. Even if my mind managed to forget, my body, the body of a mother, would have instinctively recognized the truth. That much I know for sure.

"However, there was a second part of me which was separate from the first. This second part had a different set of memories. To this other me, I had always had a daughter named Hitori, who played guitar and was too shy to introduce herself to strangers. I think that was why, when I saw you in the bedroom that spring day, nothing felt particularly amiss. Watching you brush your hair in the mornings, or lie in your futon at night, it all seemed to fall into perfect place. This is how things have always been. I had that genuine feeling in my heart. As I said, my body would have recognized my own flesh without the need for memory. I believe that same principle applies here. Even though my own mind could not recognize you, Hitori, my flesh understood intimately that you were one of my own. As a result, though your presence in that house did not have any logical consistency, I did not act as if this was the case. Instead I carried on as if nothing had changed. As if things had always been that way.

"That being said, how you ended up in that house with us was a mystery I could not unravel. Where did you come from? And where had you been before arriving here? For several days I found myself agonizing over these unanswerable questions. I felt that if I did not resolve these loose threads, I would not be able to continue on in peace. But there was no way for me to do this. My husband asked me a few times what was bothering me, but I could never bring myself to explain the situation to him. I had no idea if he had perceived the same thing as I did, and if he had not, he was sure to think I'd gone mad.

"There was only one thing I could be sure of, and that was the temporary nature of our time together. One day I would have to say goodbye to you for the last time. I knew this in my bones, deep inside, as surely as I knew the sun would rise tomorrow. You had stumbled into my life, and at some point you would stumble just as easily out of it. The reality of this stared me in the face every day. I was constantly afraid that I was going to lose you. Perhaps that is why I could be overprotective of you at times. I wanted to hold you close to me forever. My sweet and innocent Hitori. That we were able to meet, to me, is nothing short of a miracle.

"But try as I might, that day eventually came. A day when you didn't come home. It was a cold winter morning, much like today. I put on a coat and went walking around the neighborhood. By the time the sun began to set I still hadn't found you. So I kept walking. I walked and walked as night fell around me. But in that dream I probably walked forever. Our time together had come to an end. I felt this in my heart. Like two intersecting lines, we crossed paths for a brief moment, before continuing infinitely onwards in separate directions. That is when I understood I would never see you again."

All of Kanto was besieged by a frigid winter that year. Each day felt so cold I thought I would go stiff and turn to wood overnight. On top of that, it snowed almost constantly. There might have been more days with snow than without. The stuff seemed to fall from the sky without respite, piling up on the roads, on the windowsill, on the roof of the house. The weather was a constant topic of discussion on the news. Large trucks went around salting the roads each morning.

That being said, it never rained. It snowed so often, but in between there was not a single day where it turned to rain. When it didn't snow the sky was invariably a perfect shade of blue. Not a single cloud anywhere to be seen. I didn't notice this at first, but eventually I found myself subconsciously watching the weather forecast in anticipation of rain. Why I did this I couldn't quite say.

I met with Hiroi-san a few times a week. She was cross that I'd flaked on our plans earlier, but understood once I explained the situation. We usually met at the station before strolling around Shinjuku together. During some of these strolls she was sober, and others she was her usual inebriated self. Due to this she often forgot things we had already talked about and brought them up again later, or failed to recall information I had already conveyed to her. Who will be today's Hiroi-san? I often found myself wondering this while on the train to Shinjuku.

Others might have become frustrated with Hiroi-san's inconsistent nature and decided to stop meeting up with her. In fairness I think this is understandable. While my opinion of Hiroi-san was never negative, there was a period in which I felt it was impossible to keep up with her, and I felt nervous in her presence. This is still largely the case, but my fear of Hiroi-san's unpredictability largely fell away at some point. I'd hardly seen her in that time, so it wasn't that I simply became used to her personality. I suppose I merely came to terms with the fact that today's Hiroi-san could very well be gone tomorrow.

One afternoon in December, Hiroi-san asked me if I was interested in forming a band with her. She had finally managed to track Shima-san down, and in recent weeks they had made efforts to mend their relationship. Their former guitarist Eliza-san, however, had returned to her home country in England some years ago. I would effectively be Eliza-san's replacement. We were sitting in the riverside park with the Buddha statue. The one where Hiroi-san and I met for the very first time. The statue had a fine layer of snow covering its head and shoulders. Beside us, the surface of the river was still and gray.

Hiroi-san was fairly drunk when she made this proposition to me, so I couldn't be sure if she was being serious. After a brief silence I told her I would think about it. She patted me on the back and said not to let it stress me out. Just an idea she'd happened to have.

"I was just thinking," she said, "You look happiest when you're on the stage, Hitori-chan."

"But Hiroi-san, you've never seen me play, have you?"

I wasn't trying to make a joke that time either, but Hiroi-san tilted her head back and laughed loudly nonetheless.

That evening I went to see my mother at the hospital, where she was going through a physical rehabilitation program. The trainers said she was progressing well, but it would still be a while before she could return home permanently. Months spent lying still in bed had caused certain neurons in the brain to fall into disuse. My mother had yet to relearn how to walk. Nor could she sit up in bed or feed herself without assistance. But the trainers assured us these were only temporary.

When my mother was resting in bed, she was often too exhausted to move or speak much. Usually my visits to the hospital were passed in silence. I had the feeling that I was merely a spectator to her suffering.

Every once in a while though, I would reach out and take my mother's hand. And in her sleep a small smile would grace her face. In this tiny way, I was able to move the world. It was a very little thing. But it at least served as undeniable proof of our existence in that room.

Upon returning home that night I went into the closet and took out the old Gibson. After years of neglect, it had fallen into a rather sorry state. The body was covered in a thick layer of dust. I retrieved a damp cloth from the kitchen and carefully wiped it clean. The strings needed replacing, so I decided to take it to a shop the next morning.

I got the Gibson back from the shop later that week. The strings were new, the body polished. I weighed it in my hands before sitting down to play a few chords. I wasn't really planning to play anything, only to test it out to make sure everything was working correctly. My father, however, was walking down the hall at the time and happened to hear me through the door.

He knocked before entering the room. When he saw me holding the Gibson, he asked if I had decided to start playing again. There was a delight in his voice that caught me by surprise. Feeling self conscious, I set the Gibson down. I said I was still thinking about it. I had only taken it into the shop on a whim.

My father looked a little disappointed, but quickly smiled and said he was happy I was considering taking up the guitar again. He missed those times when he and my mother could hear me playing from the downstairs living room. It made the house feel less empty, he said.

Our conversation went no further than that. My father went to sleep for the night, and I put the Gibson back on its stand. As I laid down in my futon, however, I found myself thinking about what my father's words. Was such a tiny thing really enough to make him happy? Until then it had never occurred to me that someone else would care if I ever played the guitar again. I thought about Hiroi-san's request, and the smile my mother wore in her sleep. I wondered if I too could become a living, breathing part of this world.

All of Tokyo seemed to hold its breath that winter. When I rose in the morning and took the train to the city, I felt this sense of trepidation in the air all around me. Everywhere, from the live houses in Shimokitazawa to the izakayas in Shinjuku, was vibrating in anticipation of something.

This feeling of anticipation penetrated my heart, and I found myself searching for its source. At first I thought it had to do with Hiroi-san's request, which I had yet to give a proper answer to. Or my mother's continued stay in the hospital. But I concluded it had nothing to do with these things. Rather, it was more accurate to say that my apprehension existed in spite of them.

Between my mother and Hiroi-san, my social circle had finally widened a little. They were only two people, but to me this made a world of difference. I had already resolved to come clean to both my parents about my employment situation once my mother was out of the hospital. I intended to begin searching for a new job once the year turned. As for the guitar, I still hadn't decided what I was going to do, but the idea of playing again did not repel me as it once had.

However, something was still holding me back. That general numbness, which had accompanied me since those early days in Yokohama, still clung to me like a sticky fog. I had yet to break free from this shadow that followed me. I didn't know what it would take for me to achieve this. It was entirely possible that such a thing was beyond my own capabilities. Perhaps I had no choice but to resign myself to this halfway existence, in which I was constantly waiting, always searching for a missing piece of myself. In effect I was waiting for a miracle.

In the midst of all this, time continued its solitary march onward. The snow continued to fall. Christmas came and went. December became January. And a new year began.

That week there was a cold front so severe that I woke up shivering in the middle of the night. Stumbling out of my futon, I pawed my way around the room until I found my dresser. From the top drawer I took out a pair of thick socks and put them on. In the darkness I accidentally grabbed something else and pulled it out along with the socks. It fell softly to the floor, draping across my foot. The moment I knelt down to feel it with my hands, I realized that it was Kita-san's scarf. I had forgotten that it was in there.

On a whim, I decided to take the scarf to bed with me. I wrapped it around my neck before curling up in a ball beneath the covers. The fabric smelled slightly of dust, but beneath that, there was a hint of citrus. I quickly fell back asleep.

I had a dream that I was trying to play the guitar again. But no matter how much I tried I couldn't produce a single sound. I kept picking up the Gibson and dropping it onto the floor. When I looked at my hands, I saw that it was because I had no fingers. My arms ended in two smooth, round stumps. The palms were still there, but everything beyond the knuckles was gone, the appendages removed with a near surgical precision.

I woke up again with a gasp. Immediately I pulled my hands out from under the blanket and examined them in the darkness. I couldn't see very well, but I could tell that my fingers were still there. All ten of them. I carefully bent and flexed each one in turn.

Once I was satisfied that nothing was amiss, I let my arms drop down to my sides. It had been so cold earlier, but I was now covered in sweat.

A pattering noise came from my right. I turned my head and saw that it was raining. Not only that, there was a proper storm coming down outside. A peal of thunder fell from the sky and rumbled through my chest. It was raining hard enough that I decided to get out of bed to make sure the window was closed all the way. Then I pulled up a chair and watched it come down for a while.

It rained through the rest of the night and the following morning. By noon the storm gave no indication of stopping. It was a Sunday, so I was able to stay home the whole day without issue. I turned on the news and listened to the anchorwoman explain the expected trajectory of the storm. It was the first rain of the year. When I went to sleep that night, I could still hear it pattering against my window.

The sky cleared up by morning. There were still scattered patches of drizzle here and there, but the worst of the storm had passed. I was struck by the uncharacteristic urge to go outside and feel the sunlight against my body. So I dug out a small folding chair from the closet, the kind you take to the beach, and went out to the yard. In the damp grass I unfolded the chair and sat down on it, the fabric seat sagging beneath my weight.

I remained there for some time, my head tilted up toward the sky. Shafts of sunlight punched through the clouds and warmed my skin. It should have made me feel relaxed, but I couldn't shake the feeling that I was forgetting something. It had bothered me since that morning. The sense that I had missed an important detail. Like constantly spotting a moving shadow through the corner of my eye, only to spin around and find nothing there.

My unease left me feeling antsy, so I went into the house and brought the Gibson out to the yard. I sat down as if to play something from memory. But my fingers stopped just short of the strings.

Now that I thought about it, I hadn't heard any new music in so long. The last time I recalled purposefully listening to anything was years ago, during a storm much like the one which had just passed, in that CD shop where I met Kita-san.

The moment I thought of Kita-san, I felt a jolt run through my body. I understood then what had been bothering me.

I'd made a promise. A promise to Kita-san. That we would meet in Shibuya after the next rain. A different me had made that promise, in a different time, and yet it now felt so salient that it could have been just yesterday. We were supposed to see each other at the station after the weather cleared up. It was already past ten. I was late.

I left the Gibson in the living room and ran from the house in the direction of the station. The morning air was startlingly crisp that day. The white snow made it appear as if the gods had decided to wipe the world clean and start anew.

I ran to the station in one spurt without stopping. By the time I arrived I was completely out of breath. From the station I took the Odakyu Line to Yoyogi-Uehara, where I transferred to the Chiyoda Line in the direction of Shibuya City.

On the train I collapsed onto the seat in exhaustion. Sweat trickled down my forehead and between my eyes. Kita-san's scarf hung loosely around my neck. I wondered if she would really be there when I arrived. Perhaps she had grown tired of waiting and already left. Or perhaps she had never come in the first place. There was no way for me to tell until I got there. I could do nothing but wait.

The train passed through a long tunnel. In the window across from me I saw my reflection. Beyond that I saw a million more copies of myself, stretched out infinitely into the darkness. All of me was hurtling through a deep unknown. There was no telling what waited on the other side.

Chapter Text

Near the start of the opening title animation for Bocchi the Rock!, there is a brief moment in which we see Hitori floating through a dark void.  This image is immediately followed by a depiction of the swingset from the park where Hitori first met Nijika.  To be completely honest, I hardly noticed this small sequence at first, but during subsequent viewings it began to stand out to me.  It is these two images that would later serve as the initial inspiration for A Morning in Shibuya.

Bocchi the Rock! happened to air during a period of relative difficulty for me.  Throughout that year I faced a number of ordeals as a consequence of my personal shortcomings.  At the time I became somewhat convinced that life itself was meaningless.  Why was I made to suffer this way?  What was my “reason for living?”  I often found myself thinking about such things.

I believe this is why, although I do not consider myself a particularly socially anxious person like Hitori, I was able to connect intimately with Bocchi the Rock!   It helped me to maintain a more positive outlook when I was struggling to do so.  The scene where Nijika finds Hitori at the roadside park stands out to me especially.  For no particular reason, the two of them were in the right place at the right time.  Yet it is precisely because life is meaningless that such miracles can occur.  I have no doubt that my feelings from back then had a significant influence on the contents of this story.

When I began writing A Morning in Shibuya , my desire was to try many things which I had not attempted before.  As such, there are many “firsts” associated with this work.  I filled the narrative with a variety of topics I had not touched on in the past.  This is the first time I have written a story of this length in the first person perspective.  Finally, it is the first time I wrote the majority of the story before posting anything online (I believe I was halfway through Chapter Eight when Chapter One was posted) to ensure proper continuity and a reliable release schedule.  I began writing on Christmas day and finished the story in June of this year, just under six months later.

Due to the nature of this work, I did not necessarily plan everything in as much detail as I might have normally.  That being said, from the very start I envisioned the story ending with Hitori on a train bound for Shibuya.  To me that always felt like the most natural stopping point.  By the end, the story has made one big circle, finishing in the same place in which it began.  And yet things are not the same as before.  Hitori now sees the new in the old.  Something is made of nothing.  I suppose this is the essence of what she calls “perspective.”  

I consider this work to be complete in and of itself.  I understand there have been a number of things left unresolved by the narrative.  Was Kita waiting in Shibuya for Hitori?  Is it possible for Hitori to return to the world she once knew?  Does she continue writing beyond the stopping point of this work?  There are no hard and fast answers to these questions.  I have my own opinions, of course, but you shouldn’t consider those opinions to be the end of the matter simply because I am the author.  My desire is for the reader to draw their own conclusions.  Many sections, after all, were written to allow for multiple angles of interpretation.

When it came to working on this story, I resolved to do so diligently, without the long breaks in the middle that I have taken in the past.  There were times in the last six months when I nearly came to resent the almost daily obligation to commit energy to this project.  However, due in part to my own stubbornness, once I got started there was no turning back for me.  This story was written across three different seasons, in three different cities, in my apartment, in cafes, in hotel rooms, in my childhood bedroom, on airplanes, and of course, on trains home after a long day of work.  Looking back on it now, a lot has changed since I first penned the opening lines of Chapter One.  But that is actually one of my favorite things about writing novel length stories.  As the characters learn and change, so do I.

Thank you to my two beta readers, without whom this story could not have been completed in its current state.  I am very grateful for your feedback and support.  I am also very grateful to Aerosmith, For Tracy Hyde, Itsue, Keiichi Okabe, Kinoko Teikoku, MASS OF THE FERMENTING DREGS, sakanaction, tricot, Tokyo Incidents, and of course, ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION and Kessoku Band for creating the soundtrack to which this story was written.

Finally, thank you to everyone who took the time to read this story and share their thoughts in the comments.  I looked forward to them each week, and I am happy that I was able to share this work with you.  I hope you enjoyed it.  Shibuya Saturdays have come to an end, but I am sure we will meet again soon.

7/14/2024: After some discussions with readers, I have decided to put together an "omake" of sorts for this story.  The document contains an extended author's note and some deleted scenes, among other things.  If you are interested in learning a bit more about the circumstances behind this story and the overall writing process, you can do so by clicking here.