If He Was the Sun, Who Was the Moon?

In the little theater on campus, a movie was playing. Shiraishi Kaoru's phone kept lighting up in the dark, and she leaned close to my ear and whispered, "I'm stepping out to take this." I was busy chewing dried fruit and barely listened. Who knew she wouldn't come back until the movie was over, and by the time the theater had emptied I still couldn't see her anywhere. I had no choice but to call. The place on the other end was noisy. She laughed brightly. "Hey, I'm having a late-night snack. I forgot all about you!" I hung up and marched off in a huff to drag her back and demand an explanation. As I walked toward the night stalls in the shopping street, I had no idea what was about to happen, or what would unfold after that. Kaoru waved to me from far away. "Shion, here. Over here." I sat down still pouting. She poured me a glass of beer, golden beneath a froth of white, and patted my shoulder with shameless cheer. "All right, don't be mad." Only then did I notice the boy in front of me. He wore a white shirt and black-framed glasses, his hair cut short. The fingers curled around his chopsticks were long and pale. When he smiled at me, showing a row of white teeth, I was genuinely startled. How could there be a boy who looked so clean? Kaoru introduced us at last. "Kamiya Suo, my brother. He came to see me today." Then she turned and pointed at me. "Nakahara Shion, my roommate. We're the same kind of troublemaker, so we get along." She wasn't wrong. We had become fast friends and partners in crime from the very start. During freshman training, neither of us could get the marching right. The instructor lost his temper and made us stand in the blazing sun for half an hour. Ten minutes in, the backs of our shirts were already soaked. I squeezed a wink at the girl who was still practically a stranger and whispered, "Do you want to faint, or should I?" Kaoru caught on at once, shot me a look, and the next instant dropped straight to the ground. I nearly screamed. Damn, with acting like that she should have gone to drama school, not journalism. I put on a frantic face and accompanied her to the infirmary. The doctor couldn't find anything wrong and decided it was just the heat and exhaustion. Thanks to her, I got out of being punished too. We bought two ice creams and sat in the infirmary sharing them when Kaoru said, "Did you know our names are both medicinal herbs?" I stared at her. "Really?" Whether her name counted, I didn't know. I only knew that Shiraishi Kaoru sounded beautiful together, whereas mine sounded like some dark-purple herb people toss into a fish pot. Sitting across from me, you confirmed her claim: Shion really was a medicinal herb. Then, in a calm voice, you recited its effects from memory as though reading them off the back of your hand. I gaped at you. Kaoru burst out laughing and shoved your shoulder. "Enough showing off. We know you're learned." You scratched your head, embarrassed, but before you could say more, the next table started shoving and yelling. I jumped out of my seat. You caught me in a single swift movement and pulled me behind you, taking my place yourself. Before I could recover, a stool flew through the spot where I had just been sitting. Everything froze for a few seconds. Then Kaoru pressed a hand to her chest. "That scared me to death. Shion, are you okay?" I only stared at you. You still looked as unruffled as ever. Suddenly I laughed. You really did have something of an immortal about you.

You were a medical student, so after that I wasn't surprised anymore that you could rattle off the properties of shion so neatly. You even told me that Suo was a medicinal herb too. I widened my eyes. "Then if you marry Kaoru someday, won't that make you a whole family of herbal medicine?" Your face reddened, then went pale, as if you wanted to scold me and swallowed it back instead. After a long while you only said, "Don't go matching people up at random. Kaoru thinks of me as a brother." When I went to Kaoru for confirmation, she was nowhere near as gentle as you. She rolled her eyes at me. "Are you crazy? Kamiya Suo has never once treated me like a girl." The story of how the two of you met was actually simple enough. You had gone to the same high school. She was the beauty of her year; you were the top boy in the science track. You had probably both heard each other's names, but there had never been a reason to cross paths until one mock exam in your third year, when the seating chart was randomized and she ended up right in front of you. She arrived more than twenty minutes late for the English test. While you were bent over your paper, she suddenly turned around and asked, "Do you have an extra pencil?" You were kind enough to give her yours. She didn't hand it back until only a few minutes remained. Neither of you did well on that exam. When it was over, she apologized. You shook your head and said nothing. After that you knew each other, nothing more. If you ran into one another on campus, you exchanged a smile and a nod. That was all. If not for the afternoon when you finished helping a teacher grade papers and came out at dusk to see Kaoru surrounded by several girls, it might have stayed that way. She clearly had no confidence at all, but she still wore an expression of perfect fearlessness. You watched from a distance, still wondering whether to go over, when she happened to glance sideways and spot you. Delight flared across her face. She waved hard. "Honey! Honey!" Your face turned so red it nearly matched a tomato, and even after she looped her arm through yours and dragged you a long way off, you still couldn't get a word out. In the end she slapped your shoulder grandly and said, "Kamiya Suo, thank you so much. If you hadn't pretended to be my boyfriend, I'd never have gotten myself out of that one." You weren't stupid. A few words were enough for you to understand what had happened. Kaoru had long been famous for her beauty. Even in the tense atmosphere of senior year, there were still moths forever circling her flame, and just as many girls who disliked her for it. Scenes like that were unavoidable. Kaoru struck a pose of aggrieved misery. "I was so wronged." Then she turned and smiled at you. "Kamiya Suo, you're my savior." You told me that was when you truly got to know Shiraishi Kaoru. In the evening light she tilted her face up and smiled at you. Her eyes were so bright they seemed on the verge of spilling over. Her skin carried the faint sheen of an apple. When she smiled, her teeth showed in a white, shell-like curve. You were not the kind of person who judged by looks, but in that instant you admitted her beauty had moved you. And you believed she wasn't the way people said she was. I laughed at you. "I knew ages ago that you liked Kaoru." You asked me when exactly I had known. I never told you: it was the first time I met you, when you pulled me quickly behind you. Your eyes, though, had been on Kaoru the whole time. Girls' intuition can be frighteningly precise.

Our schools weren't far apart. It only took fifteen minutes to walk from one to the other, and at first Kaoru often brought me along when she went to see you. Not that she or I meant to be cruel, but there really weren't many pretty girls at your school. After she'd gone a few times, Kaoru stopped censoring herself and sighed, "Every time I come over I hope to see someone who'll make my eyes light up, but most of the time all I get is darkness. Poor Kamiya Suo." You were always quiet, always smiling with that gentle patience of yours. Later Kaoru met Asakura Kagetoshi, and something helpless crept into those smiles. How could I describe him? He was a boy as dazzling as the sun. When he stood beside Kaoru, I always thought of the saying that in a drab crowd, they were the only two people wearing red. He and you were nothing alike. He was the sun, and you were moonlight. On weekends Kaoru went on dates with Asakura Kagetoshi, and you asked me out to eat instead. When you waited for me at my school gate, leaning against a utility pole by the road, your shadow was long and unbearably lonely. For some reason my heart skipped a beat. Even years later I would still remember that profile of yours, half in light and half swallowed by darkness, your long limbs, the faint botanical fragrance that always seemed to cling to you. Gradually I understood why Kaoru had never felt anything for you. You were too quiet, too tranquil. In this garish world, beneath the stab of neon and the pounding of heavy music, you were like a thread of clean wind, so easy to overlook. Yet to me, that very simplicity felt achingly beautiful. When Kaoru wasn't around, there was always a trace of awkward distance between us, or at least that was how it felt to me. You seemed perfectly at ease, asking what I wanted to eat. Around you my appetite always shrank; a few bites were enough to make me feel full. You asked lightly about Kaoru and Kagetoshi. I tried so hard to catch something in your eyes, only to find it was useless. They were limpid and clean, holding none of the grief or disappointment I expected. In truth, what had happened between them was simple enough. Kagetoshi studied photography. He and his classmates were always wandering around campus with SLR cameras slung over their backs. One day Kaoru walked into his frame by accident. Later that photo appeared on the school forum. She had gone to demand an explanation, but somehow the two of them met and fell for each other. You never asked anything more. From beginning to end, I thought of you as a gentleman. Time passed in a flash, and before we knew it late autumn had arrived. You ordered me a bowl of red-bean and glutinous-rice chicken soup with chestnuts, scallion, ginger, and tender pieces of chicken. The warmth spread through me from the first sip. Through the steam rising from the bowl, I looked at your calm face and felt a sudden ache of grievance. You went on talking to yourself, saying that those ingredients would raise body temperature and drive the cold from a constitution like mine. You were loving Kaoru in the dusk, and I, after a single bowl of soup, fell in love with you.

Before Kaoru's birthday, you asked me to come help you choose a gift for her. The bus lurched and swayed, and I was trying to find a chance to lean against your shoulder when you suddenly stood up. "Grandma, please sit." I looked at you blankly while the old woman thanked you over and over, then said to me with cheerful certainty, "Young lady, your boyfriend is a good boy." She wasn't wrong. Kamiya Suo, you really were a good boy. It was just a pity you weren't my boyfriend. We wandered all over the department store and still couldn't decide what to buy Kaoru. Then we passed the Anna Sui counter, and I saw a familiar figure. That figure had stood waiting under the girls' dorm countless times for Kaoru. I called his name softly. He turned at the same time as the girl beside him. His face was full of shock. The girl at his side was beautiful, even more beautiful than Kaoru. And she was not Kaoru. My head seemed to explode. I couldn't understand how something that rotten had happened to land in front of me. Should I tell Kaoru? And if I did, how could I put it gently enough not to hurt her? But if I didn't tell her, was I supposed to let her go on being deceived? For a moment I was so flustered I barely noticed how dark your face had become. Kagetoshi walked over. It was the first time I had seen him from so close. His eyes were sincere, his voice sincere too. "Shion, Kaoru and I broke up a while ago. Didn't you know?" That left me completely stunned. Even after Asakura Kagetoshi said goodbye, I still couldn't believe it. They had broken up? And not just yesterday, but some time ago? Had I really been so stupid that I hadn't noticed a single sign, or had Kaoru hidden it all that flawlessly? That night I finally asked her. She paused in the middle of removing her makeup, then nodded in the end. "Honestly, him too. If he found a new girlfriend, did he have to be so showy about it? It makes me look ridiculous."

I stared at her, at the way she pretended not to care, and asked softly, "Why didn't you tell me? Aren't we friends?" She turned and smiled at me. I was startled to see her eyes were red. "It wasn't anything good. Why drag you into feeling bad too?" I don't think I was mistaken. She really was crying. That night she climbed into my bed and said she wanted to sleep beside me. In the middle of the night I woke to find her facing the wall, her shoulders trembling in the dark, her quiet sobs painfully clear.

Heartbreak or not, her birthday still had to be celebrated. Kaoru was popular enough that once she suggested karaoke, people answered in a swarm. Quite a few of Asakura Kagetoshi's friends were there too, and some of them even grumbled that they still liked Kaoru better. You and I walked at the very back of the crowd, watching the chaos ahead of us. Colored lights flashed over Kaoru's face, dazzling and bright. She shouted so loudly, laughed so wildly, that at first glance it looked as though she had truly put everything unhappy behind her. But happiness was not supposed to look like that. I sighed. Kamiya Suo, you were so quiet and so clear; how could someone like Kaoru ever learn to look your way? I spent all my worry on your behalf and forgot myself in the process. You never liked crowded places, and even less places that were too noisy. While Kaoru and the others were drinking games and everyone else was fighting over the microphone like a swarm of bees, you sat in the corner with a deep crease between your brows. It was I who rescued you. I went over and said, "Kamiya Suo, come take a walk with me." The more time I spent with you, the more I appreciated your steadiness and reserve. Compared with the chattering boys around us, you were so much lovelier. I often wondered whether I ought to tell you I liked you. But we were both intelligent people. How could anyone fail to know who liked them and who didn't? Once an older girl told me that if you liked a boy, you should never be the one to walk over. If he liked you, he would come to you himself. Suddenly I wanted some oden, and you came with me to the convenience store without a word. Foolishly, I picked out my food and paid for it before you could say anything, then went to wait outside. When you came out you asked in surprise, "Why were you in such a hurry? I was going to pay for you." I was too independent then, and too young to understand that sometimes a girl ought to let a boy spend a little money on her. A flash of lightning lit the whole night sky. In that instant your face was so close to mine, and beneath your eyebrow there was a small mole. I had to force down the urge to reach out and touch it. Rain came down in sheets. Water filled my vision, and the eaves stitched the rain into silver lines. For me, that was already enough to count as a perfect scene. We sat on the plastic stools outside the convenience store, silent, watching cars blare through the rain, couples sharing umbrellas, careful feet skirting the puddles by the roadside. Every light on the street was burning. Every face was alive. Kamiya Suo, the whole world was loud and restless, and only you were quiet. When we went back inside, Kaoru was already drunk. She threw her arms around me, then lifted her flushed face to you and said, "Kamiya Suo, Shion likes you, doesn't she?" My expression at that moment must have gone rigid, but you were perfectly composed. You didn't answer her. Instead you turned to me and smiled. "She's drunk. Don't mind her." Sometimes closeness and distance are as plain as that. That night you took us home. I sat in the front seat of the taxi while you helped Kaoru into the back. I heard her muttering to you, "Future Doctor Kamiya, is there any medicine that can cure a broken heart?" Then she asked, "Kamiya Suo, do you like me?" You never answered. In the rearview mirror, I watched a tear slide slowly from the corner of her eye.

When Kaoru sobered up, she apologized to me for what she had blurted out. Her solemnity only made me feel more at a loss. Then she said, with the gravity of someone making an important decision, "I want to be with Kamiya Suo." I looked at her speechlessly. After a while I walked over, crouched before her, and took her cold hand. "Then what about Asakura Kagetoshi? Kaoru, what happened between you two?" If she had not been hurt to the core, how could she have stopped even speaking his name? If she had not been hurt to the core, how could the sight of a vaguely familiar back on the street freeze the smile on her face? Kaoru pressed her lips together. Her eyes were full of resolve. Then, very softly, she laughed.

She said it wasn't a situation Kagetoshi had created alone, nor was it entirely his fault. "It was me," she said. "Always anxious, always afraid of losing him. The tighter I tried to hold on, the more powerless I felt." She looked at me with a smile, and tears streamed down her face all the same. "Shion, I don't think I even know how to love someone yet. I don't know what the right way to love a person is." I patted her back, too heartsick to speak. I was not as selfless as I would have liked to believe. When I heard Kaoru say she wanted to be with you, I had to admit that for one instant I felt unwilling, almost resentful. But in the end all I could do was make myself smile and say, "It's the right decision." She looked at me, as if she wanted to say something, but in the end she said nothing. Still, I understood that she wanted my forgiveness. The truth was, there was nothing to forgive. She had known you first. She had always been the person who mattered most in your heart. She had only taken a long and winding road before finding the right direction, and you were the harbor she was meant to come to rest in. That was why both of us were so shocked when you turned her down. Kaoru came back looking so listless and hollow that she frightened me. In disbelief she said, "Kamiya Suo rejected me outright. He said, 'I'm sorry, Shiraishi Kaoru. I really did like you once, but now I've fallen for someone else.' Shion, is there really not one person in this world worth trusting?" I kept silent, because I truly didn't know what to say. Beautiful as Kaoru was, clever as Kaoru was, there were still times when she was only a naïve girl blinded by the very brilliance she carried. When I pressed you for an answer, your face showed something new for the first time, a smile as mischievous as a child's. "Who I like is none of your business." I was a little in the wrong, but I still put on an aggressive face. "Because Kaoru is my good friend." What I did not say was that I liked you too. You were holding some plant whose name I didn't know, and you teased me by saying you wouldn't tell me either, only that it was self-heal, a perennial herb, its fruit oval, its scent faint, its taste mild, useful for lowering blood pressure and easing inflammation. By then, after spending so many days around you, I was on the verge of becoming half a medical student myself. You kept dodging the one answer I cared about most, and I hated my own flustered persistence so much that I finally gave up. I was just about to say goodbye when my phone rang. It was my roommate, her voice more panicked than I had ever heard it. "Shion, Kaoru is going to jump. Hurry, hurry." You ran with me, both of us panting by the time we reached the rooftop. Kaoru was there with her hair in disarray, her eyes unfocused, perched on the railing and looking up at the sky. In that moment she was beautiful enough to break the heart. She didn't look at us at all. Only after I called Asakura Kagetoshi and got him there did some trace of sense return to her face. He walked over and held her tightly, and the careful way he moved, the look in his eyes, made it impossible for me to believe he did not love her.

You were the one who told me about Kaoru's past. She had been adopted, and while you were still in high school, a flock of gossiping girls spread it everywhere. It seems that in every city, every school, every class, there are always girls who are isolated and pushed aside. Some are singled out because they are too quiet and don't fit in. Some because they are too bright, too striking, and everyone turns against them. Kaoru belonged to the second kind. At your school she had always been the common enemy of the girls. Even before that mock exam, you had already noticed her once. You were taking some papers to the teachers' office when you passed an arts-class classroom and saw a girl pick up a stool and hurl it at another girl, then lunge forward as if she meant to slap her too. That fierce, savage girl was Shiraishi Kaoru. She had her hands at the other girl's throat and was shouting herself hoarse, "Who are you calling a bastard? Who?" That incident earned Kaoru a disciplinary mark, and the whole high school division buzzed with rumors. She was an abandoned child the Shiraishi family had taken in. On another girl, a background like that might have earned sympathy or pity. But because it was Kaoru, it became the softest place to stab. On the night of graduation there was a farewell gathering. Everyone went up in turn and said the things they had always wanted to say, all the words they had kept buried for lack of a chance. Bold girls bounced up to confess their feelings. Brave boys stood there asking for girls' phone numbers. You were sitting in the last row of the hall when Kaoru, her face proud and defiant, walked up the steps and onto the stage. She looked around once and said in a light but steady voice, "Takahashi Eiko, I will never forgive you." Then she walked out of the hall as if no one else existed, leaving the stunned crowd only the sight of her solitary back. By then you and she were already close friends. You found her later on the athletic field. She was staring expressionlessly at the empty track, both hands clenched into fists. You asked softly, "Kaoru, why do this?" Her voice shook a little. "All these years, other people have found love, friendship, glory. All I've ever had is pain and hurt." You couldn't really blame Shiraishi Kaoru for being extreme, for being stubborn. Her youth had been harsher than anyone else's from the start.

All you could do was sigh and hope time would teach her, little by little, that hatred makes people narrow, ferocious, and unhappy. Those were the lessons your grandmother had given you. She was an old practitioner of herbal medicine, and after your grandfather died she insisted on moving back to the countryside alone, where she enjoyed the fields and spent her spare time helping the neighbors with their stubborn ailments. To live generously was something you had absorbed since childhood. But you had no idea how to pass those things on to Kaoru. At that time, Kaoru was like a hedgehog bristling with raised spines, unwilling to let anyone near who thought differently from her. She was the one you liked, yet there was absolutely nothing you could do with her except remain by her side. You chose the medical college in the same city as your first choice, spent every weekend taking her out to eat, watched her leave the place that had hurt her, enter a new school, make new friends, accept a new love. You were genuinely happy for her. And yet she was hurt again, because the unease and fear she had carried since she was young kept seeping into the way she loved Asakura Kagetoshi. In the hospital garden, Kagetoshi stood before us with reddened eyes and said, "It's not that I wasn't serious about her. But her possessiveness truly frightens me." Then he looked at me with a gaze I still cannot explain. "Nakahara Shion, I do love her. But I'm even more afraid of her. I'm only an ordinary person. I don't think I can bear a love as extreme as hers." When Kaoru woke from her sleep, I was the only one beside her. She said, "Shion, my mother came to see me."

It was summer vacation. You bought train tickets and went home with Kaoru, and because I was returning to school two days later than you, I went to the station to see you off. Kaoru pinched my cheek and said, "I've thought it through. No matter what, she's my mother. I should at least meet her properly." I smiled in relief, glad that what I had said to her that night had finally taken effect. After you and Kagetoshi had both gone, she told me the reason she had nearly broken was that, after so many years, the mother who had once left her casually at someone else's door had suddenly come back looking for her. In the moonlight, Kaoru's eyes filled with tears. You had said that in high school she had been the sort of fierce girl who never cried, and yet the older she grew, the more plentiful her tears became.

She said, "She cried on the phone and told me she had her reasons back then. She was young. She didn't even know whose child she was carrying, and in the end she had no choice but to leave me behind. Now she has money and thinks she can make it up to me, so she's come back to find me. But did anyone ever ask whether I even want to acknowledge her?" I cried with her. I could understand what you must have felt back then, sitting shoulder to shoulder with Kaoru in the bleachers. But I still forced myself to tell her that in a person's life there are many choices made because there is no other way. She should not punish herself for what her mother had done, and she should not lose faith in love because Asakura Kagetoshi had left her. Life was still long, very long. There were still countless beautiful things she had not yet seen. How could she throw away her life over such grief? I did all the talking that night while she listened in silence. I told her every story I had ever known that was warm, encouraging, bright, full of hope. I talked until my throat was dry and my tongue felt burned, but I did not dare stop, afraid that even a moment's pause might waste everything. At last, when the sky at the horizon was beginning to pale and I had run out of words, she looked at me and smiled quietly. Then she said something that had nothing to do with anything we had been discussing. "Shion, I think the person Kamiya Suo likes is you." My heartbeat went instantly out of rhythm. Her smile was so like yours. "I trust my intuition. I told you before, girls' intuition can be frighteningly precise." On the platform, you suddenly turned back and said to me, "There's something I'll tell you after school starts." Behind you, Kaoru winked at me. But I never imagined that parting at the station would become forever. You had gone back to the countryside to visit your grandmother. Passing the reservoir, you heard a group of children shouting for help. You were a good boy, even that old woman on the bus had said so, and when you jumped in, you never came back up. Kaoru was sobbing so hard she could barely speak when she called to tell me. I held the phone numbly, unable for a long time to accept that it was true. Your calm smile still seemed to hover right in front of me. How could you simply vanish like that?

Even in the end, I never found out whether the thing you had meant to tell me after school started was the same thing Kaoru had guessed. I would never have the chance to know. In the autumn of the following year, Kaoru and I were eating at a restaurant near school. While we waited for the food, a younger girl came in carrying a bunch of dandelions, and almost without thinking I murmured, "A perennial herb. Its root is conical and often curved..." Kaoru looked at me in a daze, her eyes shining. Then the bowl I had ordered was set down in front of me. I scooped up a spoonful of the glutinous-rice chicken soup, and it tasted so good it almost brought tears to my eyes. Outside, the rain was falling harder and harder. Softly, I said, "It's beautiful." Kaoru looked puzzled. "Are rainy days beautiful?" I shook my head. I had no intention of telling her that the most beautiful thing had never been the rainy day itself, but that night under the eaves when we stood together, hiding from the rain.