The Shelf Life of Courage

Hayakawa Mio often found herself thinking about what she had been like at sixteen.

Back then, she wore her hair in a messy ponytail with no order to it at all, her eyes always lowered to the ground. There was a stubborn sharpness in her pointed chin that made people unwilling to come near. All year round she hid inside a grimy khaki coat and pedaled her bicycle furiously along the narrow, tree-lined paths on campus.

It was obvious that a girl like Hayakawa Mio did not belong in a high school like that.

The first time Asakura Wataru saw her, mottled shadows from blossoms and sunlight lay quietly over the teaching building, its walls thick with green ivy. He had just been caught by the beauty of that early-summer evening when a shadow dropped from above. Before he could react, something heavy sliced past his ear with a crack. A moment later, several heads poked out from the third-floor windows, followed by shrieks and laughter.

A small girl came hurrying down the stairs and stopped in front of him. Without changing her expression, she jerked her chin and said, "Hey. You okay?" Wataru squinted at her in a daze. She had eyes like a black cat's, sharp and watchful, and even the way she spoke sounded blunt, almost impossible to refuse.

When he looked down, he saw a massive Oxford dictionary sprawled at his feet. A disposable plastic lunch box beneath it had been flattened beyond repair. If he had been standing just a little farther to one side...

...the muscles in Wataru's face twitched of their own accord.

Hayakawa, however, seemed not to notice the storm of thoughts that had blown through him in that instant. She only stared hard at his dazed face. On the surface she still looked as fierce as ever, but inside she was uneasy. Had it hit his head? Had he gone stupid? Surely it couldn't be that perfect a disaster.

While the two of them stood there staring at each other like a pair of unyielding terracotta warriors, a boy on the third floor shouted down in exasperation, "Hayakawa Mio, you bitch, hurry up and bring my dictionary back up here!" Wataru turned to look at her as though waking from a dream, and his mouth opened into an O all over again. Hayakawa did not even lift her head. She stepped onto the open dictionary, ground it back and forth under the sole of her shoe a few times, then kicked it clean across the yard. Throwing out, "Let's go eat. My treat. Call it compensation," she strode off without another glance.

The wind in Kawagoe was fierce that day. Hayakawa Mio's oversized coat swelled in it like a fat jellyfish. Wataru stood there staring at her small back, with the strange feeling that at any moment she might ride that gust of wind and disappear from the city entirely.

Only after they passed through the school gate did they realize it was the holiday right after Golden Week. Every little restaurant outside campus was closed. For the first time, Wataru really saw the street that was usually so noisy and crowded: low buildings, greasy signs, stoves gone cold. In the end they found a bakery just about to shut its doors and bought the last two red-bean buns and a cup and a half of soy milk.

With that same unanswerable expression, Hayakawa pushed the fuller cup toward Wataru.

He smiled. Suddenly he remembered a line he had read somewhere once: if two people have shared bread and salt under the same roof, they are friends. It seemed to suit the two of them then.

Hayakawa only rolled her eyes.

As it turned out, though, she agreed with the line about bread and salt.

Her face still said she did not care about anything. Her bicycle still kicked dust into the air and made people complain. But if she happened to catch sight of Wataru in a crowd, she would pause for one or two seconds, sometimes three, and then give a quick nod.

Once or twice, when several classes were mixed together for P.E. and the students who had chosen table tennis were told to pair up, Hayakawa walked toward Wataru almost without hesitation.

Forehand, backhand, smash, drive. She gripped the paddle like a small animal wholly absorbed in the hunt, fierce and earnest. Only in the instant a winning shot landed would she let a rare smile break across her face.

But only for an instant.

Most of the time, Hayakawa remained apart from the crowd, distant and indifferent, like a hedgehog wrapped tightly in its own defenses. She did not like talking, and she used her hands more often than words. The boys were always yanking her hair loose or tugging at her coat until it was a mess.

Most of the students who lived in the dorms did not live far from school, and on Fridays almost everyone went home. One evening Wataru left later than usual. As he passed the alley outside the school, he saw someone sitting on the ground against the filthy wall, head buried in bent knees. When the person heard footsteps and looked up, it was Hayakawa Mio.

Wataru froze for five seconds. His eyes stopped at the thin smear of blood seeping from the corner of her mouth. Then he turned away. "I'll go buy medicine."

Hayakawa stopped him. "I'm hungry. I want an ice pop."

A little while later, he came running back from the mouth of the alley and handed her an ice-cold soda ice pop, mango flavored.

The two of them sat side by side in silence for a long time. The only sound in the air was the crackle of ice between Hayakawa's teeth. After a while, Wataru tilted his face slightly toward her. "Does it hurt?" Hayakawa shook her head.

"Why do you always get in fights?" he asked.

"Nothing else to do," she said carelessly, taking another huge bite.

It was the most incomprehensible explanation for fighting Wataru had ever heard. He still could not understand Hayakawa's world, so he did the only thing he could and fell quiet.

"Not full," Hayakawa said suddenly.

Wataru hurried off and came back with another one, cream flavored this time. He stared in amazement as she finished it in only a few bites, the white melt from the ice pop tangling with the red thread of blood at her mouth. He had never seen any girl eat an ice pop with such ferocity.

That day Hayakawa said the words "not full" four times. She ate five ice pops in all, and in return, she let Wataru ride on the back of her bicycle for part of the way home.

No one could understand why Wataru had become friends with Hayakawa Mio, her only friend.

Wataru was not handsome. He had no remarkable talent, no distinguished family background. But he had a face that was clean and pleasant enough, grades a little above average, and an uncomplicated, hopeful nature. His greatest virtue was that he was ordinary. The world was full of people like him, and it could not do without them. In a crowd he was hard to pick out at a glance, and because of that, he belonged to the crowd.

Hayakawa did not. She was an anomaly. She belonged outside it.

Maybe Wataru himself did not know why he had become friends with her.

Not long after the start of their third year, the school organized a mountain-climbing trip for the seniors and required the boys and girls to pair off. For reasons he himself could not have explained, Wataru hesitated, politely declined an invitation from a girl in his class, and asked to be put in a group with Hayakawa instead.

That day, in a first for her, Hayakawa was not wearing one of those huge, baggy coats of indeterminate color. She had on a pale yellow knitted vest, simple white short boots, and her ponytail was tied high and neatly, revealing a smooth bright forehead.

For the first time, Wataru realized that Hayakawa Mio actually looked surprisingly gentle.

As expected, their group reached the summit first. Hayakawa was nothing like the girls who had to stop every few steps, half-dead, tugging on their partners for help. From start to finish she did not stop once. Watching her stand straight-backed on a rock and look out toward the distance, Wataru suddenly found himself thinking: maybe this was why he liked being with her. She was not troublesome. She might have been the kind of person who liked making things difficult for herself, but she never made things difficult for anyone else.

Wataru was lazy. He did not like using his brain too much. More than anything, he hated trouble.

Hayakawa had no use for something that feminine. When Wataru, trying to be kind, suggested she could give it to her mother, she said lightly, without even looking up, "No chance."

"Huh?" Wataru blinked.

"She's gone." Her tone was still flat, but Wataru could hear the effort with which she was holding something rough and uneven down inside it. The sun at that moment was like a gigantic carnivorous flower, spilling brilliant light over Hayakawa's face and shrouding her in a sadness that was impossible to name and impossible not to be moved by. Looking at her, Wataru suddenly wanted very badly to hold her.

The thought startled him too. Luckily, their classmates were already drifting over to gather up. Those strange feelings were swept away almost at once by the strong mountain wind.

Still, something in Wataru's feelings for Hayakawa changed after that.

Before, he had been tolerant with her, the way one might be with a child who was a little awkward and did not know how to get along with the world. But after the climb, there was something else mixed in, something between pity and concern.

It sat there, hard and stubborn, lodged in the soft part of his heart, uncomfortable and suffocating.

The world was large, but only to a point. They were not in the same class, not even in the same building, yet there were still plenty of chances to run into each other. Most often they met in the alley outside the school, almost every Friday. Sometimes the fighting was already over, but sometimes he would find Hayakawa in the middle of another scuffle with boys two heads taller than she was. Wataru had no idea how she managed to attract so much trouble.

There was not much he could do for her.

Those boys were all school delinquents. Wataru had no desire to get tangled up with them. At heart, he was someone who feared trouble. So whenever he came across a scene like that, he would stay at the far end of the alley and ring his bicycle bell again and again. The boys would worry that someone from the disciplinary office was coming and scatter in a rush.

Every time, Wataru would buy Hayakawa an ice pop.

Sometimes she ate it through gritted teeth. Sometimes she held it in her mouth one bite at a time until it melted away. Once, after one of the boys drove a hard kick into her stomach, Hayakawa had barely swallowed the ice pop before she threw it all up again. Leaning against the wall as she turned away, Wataru looked at her with worry. "Why do you always have to fight? The people who care about you would be hurt by this."

Hayakawa smiled with the stick between her teeth. "Nothing else to do, right?"

When she turned her face, tears fell. Who cared, exactly? Her mother was in heaven, her father had vanished, and relatives and neighbors alike looked at her as though she were a plague they could not avoid fast enough. Who was left to care? You, Asakura Wataru?

When she was still very young, the world had already taught her that there was only one kind of love that lasted, one kind that was real, one kind that would never betray you.

In November, Wataru and a handful of students selected from the grade's top math performers went into the city for a two-week intensive Olympiad training course.

Hayakawa Mio suddenly discovered that a great chunk had gone missing from her life.

For years she had lived alone inside that hollow emptiness. But this time was different. Before, it had always been empty, and over time she had gone numb to it. This time, though, someone had crossed that empty place and then left again, and the wind had turned it into a marsh of damp, whistling cold.

That year, every street and alley was full of the same song: love really does need courage; if only we believe, we can be together. One day, as Hayakawa rode past a record shop, she suddenly thought that if she were only a little braver, perhaps life might have taken another shape.

Those two weeks dragged by with strange slowness. By the time Wataru returned to school, the ginkgo leaves had silently covered the tree-lined path. Hayakawa straddled her bicycle outside the gates, one foot on the ground, and waited a long time. Wataru's class had still not been dismissed, and the streetlights near her home had been changed; if it got too late, the road would be hard to see. In the end she had to leave first.

It was the same alley again, and once again several boys blocked her way. It was always like this, one stupid repetition after another. The words were always some version of: "Who do you think you are, bitch?" or "You were the one who knocked over my bike in the parking shed yesterday, weren't you?" The world was so big, and yet how tedious and monotonous it could be.

Just as a fist came down toward her, she heard the familiar ring of a bicycle bell.

The boys scattered. Hayakawa wiped the corner of her mouth with her sleeve and stood up. She could imagine Wataru pushing his bicycle and peering anxiously this way. Before, that would have made her feel a little warm. But this time a deep unwillingness rose in her instead. Why? Why couldn't he be a little braver and rush toward her in that gray moment like light falling from the sky? If he had, maybe he might have lit her whole life.

But he stayed where the light was, watching her from far away, offering only a little pitiful pity.

Wataru held out an ice pop. She took it, but did not eat it, even after it had melted. He asked her what was wrong, whether she was badly hurt. She said nothing. Then, after a long time, she made herself ask, "Asakura Wataru. What am I to you?"

He looked startled, and embarrassed too. "Why would you ask that all of a sudden? A friend. Of course you're my friend." He nodded hard, as though trying to make himself believe in the answer.

Hayakawa looked straight into his face. Suddenly she remembered a line she had once seen on the school forum: when the whole world is giving her light, love is standing behind her and smiling quietly. And when the light is drained from the universe, love is standing at her side at once, taking her left hand and telling her that the night will pass. That is why so much of what we think is love is not love at all.

Wataru had written that line. It was in a forum section hardly anyone ever visited. But Hayakawa logged in once every day, simply because Wataru posted there often.

But now she understood it clearly: what she had with Wataru was not love.

Wataru gave a small, absent sound and lowered his head into thought. By the time he looked up again, Hayakawa was gone.

Only then did he realize just how dark that alley really was.

After that, he began seeing Hayakawa less and less. She stopped choosing Fridays to go home, and so the place where they had most often crossed paths disappeared too.

By the time their third year was half over, the flower trees of summer seemed to have been packed away into Pandora's box. Winter break was close. Because some of the old buildings were being renovated, everyone had to switch dorms. By chance, Wataru was moved into a room that girls from Hayakawa's class had once used.

As he slowly arranged his belongings on the top bunk and looked up, he noticed a wall unlike any he had ever seen.

It was covered in writing. The words were messy, but earnest. They told the story of a girl hesitating over whether she should confess her feelings to the boy she liked.

It was easy to see that she was shy and painfully insecure, and just as easy to see how deeply she loved that boy. Wataru found himself drawn in by feelings like that.

He thought it was a very beautiful thing. He spent two straight hours reading all those tiny, densely packed lines, and when he finally reached the end, he looked at the signature.

It was a strange username, but he remembered it. In that little-used corner of the school forum, that ID seemed to appear almost every time he posted.

She must be a kind and beautiful girl, Wataru thought. All at once he was seized by the urge to find her and tell her that love really did need courage.

But winter break began.

He told himself he would ask around once school started again. There were only a little more than twenty girls in that class. It should not have been hard.

One day during winter break, Wataru found an old copy of Norwegian Wood he had bought before. He suddenly remembered Hayakawa saying once that she really wanted to read it. After some hesitation, he called to say he would bring it to her house. Hayakawa seemed to hesitate too before she answered slowly, "Oh. All right." He rode his bicycle toward the address she gave him, smiling without realizing it as he pictured the way she always pedaled at full speed with that serious little face. Then, at a corner, a girl came bursting toward him on a bicycle. They cried out, failed to dodge in time, and crashed together onto the ground.

She was wearing a beige coat, with a long scarf hanging all the way to her knees and fluffy squirrel earmuffs over her ears. Once she had climbed up from the ground, she kept apologizing to Wataru. Both of them tried hard to take the blame onto themselves, and eventually they ended up laughing together. After a few more words they discovered, to their surprise, that she attended the same school. She was a second-year student, and her name was very pretty: Morizawa Aoi.

Before they noticed, they had walked together for quite a while. At the fork where they parted, Aoi turned back and smiled sweetly. "I heard there's a new skating rink on North Street that's supposed to be really nice. Want to go tomorrow?" Everything that followed happened with that same effortless naturalness. By the time Wataru got home, he realized that Norwegian Wood was still in his bag. He thought, never mind, he could always bring it another time. In the days that followed, he went many places with Aoi, and before long he forgot all about the book. As for the story written by that girl with the strange username, he cast that completely to the back of his mind as well.

When the new term began, Wataru was teased into buying everyone dinner because he had gotten himself a girlfriend. He called Hayakawa, assuming that with her personality she would never come to something so noisy. To his surprise, she showed up.

Hayakawa was as silent as ever, focusing on the dishes in front of her. She drank a lot, enough to choke tears into her eyes. Only then did Wataru remember Norwegian Wood. Full of guilt, he asked, "That day something came up and I couldn't bring it after all. You didn't wait for me, did you?"

Hayakawa shook her head and said lightly, "No. I happened to have something else to do that day too. I got busy."

Of course she would never tell Wataru what had really happened: that after his call, she had hurried to tidy up that shabby home of hers, cleaning for three whole hours just to make it look a little brighter; that she had waited until the streetlights came on one after another, and still Wataru never came, not even a single phone call.

She would never tell him any of it, simply because she was Hayakawa Mio.

Then she opened the school forum, logged into that old username, and clicked delete.

At last, she clicked confirm.

That was the last time Hayakawa and Wataru ever saw each other. The world was in fact boundlessly large; if people wished it, even those who stood close enough to touch could fail to meet. People said Wataru had been recommended for admission to a university in the north. People said his girlfriend had transferred away. People said a lot of things.

And then the university entrance exams came.

It was said that at the gathering after the exams, everyone went a little mad.

People got drunk. Someone finally confessed to the boy she had loved in silence for three years. Someone secretly held the hand of the sleeping girl he adored. On the big karaoke screen, Nakashima Mika sang over and over, never tiring: love really does need courage; if we believe, we'll end up together. And Wataru opened the door, walked slowly to that alley, and sat down there for a very long time.

The sky looked like the sea in a storm, vast and distant and savage, as if there were no end to it anywhere. The alley was narrow and deep and black, with not the least trace of light.

Only then did Wataru finally understand how Hayakawa had felt, crouching there time after time.

He suddenly remembered the question she had asked him: what am I to you?

Was she really only a friend? At the very least, should there not have been another word added to that, a good friend? And maybe even more than that? Maybe there had been affection there, even love. He still could not say how deep it had gone.

So when had it begun? Was it when he sat watching Hayakawa in the corner at the dinner with Aoi, seeing her pour glass after glass into herself until something inside him twisted? Or when he saw the grief in her on the mountain, with nowhere for it to hide? Or when he watched milky ice melt over her swollen red mouth?

No. Maybe it had started earlier than that. Three years earlier, when everyone was still shy and curious and trying to size up their new classmates, there had been one girl in an oversized black T-shirt, earphones in, riding her bicycle past him like a gust of wind as if no one else existed. Even then he had remembered the girl named Hayakawa Mio, beautiful as a thorn.

But Wataru was someone who feared trouble. If he had chosen to be with Hayakawa, he would have had to bear the strange looks from classmates and the endless provocations from boys. That really would have been troublesome. He preferred his life to be like a smooth conveyor belt, its rhythm and speed all under control. He was afraid of risk.

And that girl with the strange username, he thought. What had become of her in the end? I wish I could see her now.

But there was no chance anymore. Life is fair in that it offers you opportunities. Life is cruel in that it offers them only once. Once lost, they never return.

In 2008, two years after graduating from university, Hayakawa Mio was working as an art director at a company in Tokyo. She wore a simple white T-shirt with the logo hidden just enough, a large-patterned bohemian skirt, and sandals whose straps wound around her slender ankles. No one looking at the woman she had become, all grace and shifting charm, would have connected her to the little hedgehog she had once been six years earlier. Everyone has a season in which they are most beautiful. Yours may simply not have arrived yet.

One day, as Hayakawa passed through the underground walkway beneath a plaza, two thugs tried to snatch the shoulder bag from her. There were important company documents inside. She gripped the strap hard and tried to wrench it back from them. One of the men slapped her across the face and sent her to the ground.

There were plenty of people around when it happened, but no one stepped forward. Only after the thieves had run off with her bag did a young man emerge hesitantly from the crowd three meters away and hold out a handkerchief to her.

Hayakawa stared for a moment, then took it, a sincere smile appearing on her face. "Thank you."

In 2008, at twenty-four, Hayakawa Mio was no longer the willful, awkward little girl who wanted to turn herself upside down and wage war on the world at every slight. Other people owe you nothing. Some kinds of courage are possible only for the person actually living that life. You cannot expect everyone to treat your life the way you yourself do. That is impossible. Life had taught her that. Just as, in this moment, the man in front of her had given her at least a handkerchief and a look of concern. Compared to indifference, that was already a great deal. More than enough.

She suddenly thought of a night many years before, of that endless narrow alley. Back then, deep in her heart, she had resented someone for not being brave enough.

Looking back now, she realized she had been too harsh.

In January 2009, Hayakawa Mio put on a white wedding dress. The groom's name was Fujii Osamu, the same young man who had handed her a handkerchief ten months earlier, at her most wretched moment.

Only time can teach you this: courage is always one of the rarest and most precious things in the world. The delicate-looking groom smiled as he packed all the invitations he had already written into a large cardboard box. Then he paused, uncapped his pen again, and prepared to add one more. It was for a senior who mattered a great deal to him, a senior who had once told him: Be brave, whether for your own life or someone else's. Seize every chance you are given, because courage, too, has a shelf life.

"Don't give yourself the chance to regret it," the senior had said at the very end. And in his eyes, plainly, there had been something called regret.

Fujii Osamu guessed that this senior, Asakura Wataru, must once have had a story or two of his own.