A Manual for Absolute Sorrow

What is the greatest sorrow, to you? Poverty, hunger, hallucinations? Schizophrenia, depression? Or something else altogether? What, to you, is that boundless, absolute sorrow?

Only things stained by money have any value in existing.

My name is Toko Takahara. I am seventeen this year. I ran into Natsuki Kamiya by chance, because of a love letter written in blood.

For me, the most complete and total sorrow is this: I had only just fallen in love with you, and already we had to part.

It was December, a day of hard wind. The heat indoors dried out my throat; outside, winter snow was flying thick and cold. On my first day of pottery class, I made myself a piggy bank with a long neck and a fat belly. Some people might have taken it for a vase, but in truth it was going to be the place where I kept the first real money of my life. Pottery was the sort of artsy, refined class that other students took to cultivate their tastes. For me, a girl who had dropped out in the third year of middle school, it was a tool for making a living later on. From wedging the clay to glazing it, I put my whole mind into every step. The clay slowly took shape between my palms and fingers. If it warped by accident, I would start over. In the end, you could always pinch it into the form you wanted. Yuu Asai said that if life could be like that too, if you could knead it into the shape you wanted, how wonderful that would be. It was the first time in his life Yuu had ever said anything so literary, and I was absurdly touched. When he said it, I nearly cried. Yuu is four years older than I am, a petty hoodlum, the sort who gets by without ever making much of a splash, the sort who could never become a real boss. Of course, Toko Takahara had never once dreamed of becoming a gangster's woman either, so that did not matter. More important than that, let us talk about my savings. The piggy bank I had shaped so carefully was soon sacrificed. It died in the hands of a silly girl with rouge on her face. When it shattered, it let out a shrill noise, as if complaining about its brief little life. It had been hard, a little rough, fired at high heat, yet somehow mournful, and therefore all the more fragile. After that brittle grief, a slip of paper slid out from the broken body. Judging from my years of reading endless romance novels, anything this ornate had to be a love letter. I picked it up off the floor and gave it a shake in the warm air, and there I saw the three blood-red characters of Natsuki Kamiya's name. The blood had dried almost black, red enough to look full of resentment. I had barely taken it in when the silly girl snatched the letter from my hand. Her eyes were clouded with a cold mist. She turned to the boy sitting quietly nearby and said in a gentle voice, "I put my love letter inside your pottery. I thought you would find it sooner or later. But you love ceramics more than you love me." Two clear streams of tears spilled down her face, and she ran off. I wanted badly to chase after her and explain: miss, what you smashed was not Natsuki's vase. It was my piggy bank. I had meant, once the misunderstanding was cleared up, to sit down and discuss compensation with her properly. But the boy with that bookish, almost old-fashioned air had already stepped forward and caught my wrist. Behind his glasses, a pair of amber eyes smiled at me with apologetic warmth. "I'm sorry she broke your vase." I laughed coldly to myself. What did her breaking it have to do with him? Then he added, "Because you put the vase on my shelf by mistake." I followed the line of his finger and saw it: three neat words written in fountain pen on the cabinet. Natsuki Kamiya. Irritated, I said curtly, "No matter how you put it, you indirectly smashed my piggy bank." "Piggy bank?" he repeated in surprise. "Yes. Savings. Only things with money attached to them are worth existing. Who would want some flashy little vase?" Natsuki Kamiya was still holding my wrist, and suddenly he smiled. He was a very beautiful boy, with elegant hair, noble eyelashes, a gentleman's nose, and sensual lips. He was a prince who had always been well cared for, the sort of prince who wore a crown in a colored storybook. And what was I, beside him? A little maid in the cold palace carrying wash water for a fallen concubine. That was the distance between us. All at once I grew sick of this lofty, polished fraud. A fraud, yes. I stared coldly at the hand holding mine. Natsuki let go with a smile and said, "How about I buy you a drink?" He had taken my measure exactly: greedy for money, greedy for alcohol, greedy for beauty. At that moment Natsuki possessed all three. Even so, I asked him seriously, "You think my work of art is worth only one drink?" Natsuki answered calmly, "In fact, it isn't worth a cent, Toko. So you're the one coming out ahead." What a bastard. And so, for the sake of that artwork worth exactly one drink, I went to a tavern with him, on the principle that waste should be avoided.

The tavern was hidden in a very deep alley, with rows of brown bottles hanging outside on hemp rope. Inside, smoke blurred the air. The heating was weak. Every kind of feeling seemed to be howling inside the dense smell of alcohol: ambiguity, decay, desire. It was a miniature society, and Natsuki Kamiya and I sat in the middle of it, drinking in silence. Through drunken eyes I looked at him and asked, "So what are you going to do?" Moonlight floated inside the cup in his hand. "About what?" he asked.

I said, "That rouge-faced girl. The one who smashed my piggy bank. Do you really love her more than your ceramics?" Slightly drunk, Natsuki smiled and nodded. "Of course. She bled for me. She cried for me." Then, after a pause, he added, "But I like you even more than I like her." I cannot deny that in that instant, with that hazy smile caught on Natsuki Kamiya's lashes and the frozen world still lying outside the window, my heart went soft and the ground beneath it gave way. My thoughts blurred for a moment. I was no longer clear-headed. So I tipped the glass back and poured drink after drink down my throat, sending the bitterness splashing into my stomach, until I turned back into cool, sharp Toko Takahara.

You think you love me only because you are even more muddled than I am.

I did not throw up the sour wine and food in front of Natsuki Kamiya. Before someone clean, I wanted to look clean too. So I threw it up in front of Yuu Asai instead. He patted my back, his face grave, and said, "Toko, is this the first time you've ever been drunk?" Lying in bed without a scrap of strength left, I argued back that it was only the first time since I turned ten. Yuu froze, then said nothing more. He brought out a towel and wiped my face, then my palms, tucked the blanket around me, sighed in the darkness, and quietly shut the door on his way out. I did not mean to hurt him. I was only telling the truth. I really had been drunk once before, when I was still a child, with my mother. She loved to drink, and she loved me, so she never tried to restrain me. I said I wanted to drink, and she pushed a bottle of shochu toward me and drank with me. The alcohol burned so badly I felt sick for days. Then my mother asked, "Will you still want to drink after this?" I shook my head, and she said, "There it is. You can only learn to avoid suffering later if you've tasted it yourself first. I can't help you. You'll have to fumble your own way down your road." I was only eight then, and that was what my mother said to me. That is why I loved her too. Thinking of her, I slept dully on until broad daylight. Yuu had gone out to work. His work meant wandering around until he found someone who looked both rich and timid, then going up to "borrow" a little spending money from them. I looked down on him. But everything I ate, wore, and used came from this man I despised. Which made me despise myself even more. Whenever I was with Yuu, I could see all the filthy parts of myself, magnified in every movement he made until they blotted out my whole sky. But when I was with Natsuki Kamiya, I seemed to borrow some of his light. For a few brief moments I felt as noble and proud as he was. So after that drink with him, I began to love talking with him, kneading clay with him. The rouge-faced girl never appeared in pottery class again. Sometimes I even thought, meanly, that her one appearance had been only to bring Natsuki and me together. After class he and I would wander one long damp alley after another. Moonlight dropped down from the narrow strip of sky overhead and settled gently on the frost-white heaps of snow, as if the drifts were dusted with tiny fireflies. One of the alleys was especially narrow. Natsuki asked, "How many people do you think can walk side by side through this alley?"

"A fat man would have trouble getting through it alone," I said. Natsuki came over, took my hand, smiled mysteriously, and whispered in my ear, "I think it's exactly wide enough for the two of us to walk shoulder to shoulder." So we held hands, our shoulders touching, our steps falling into the same rhythm as we walked that long alley together. I felt slightly drunk, though neither of us had touched a drop. At two in the morning, the city was sinister and cold, exactly like the nights when I was fourteen. Back then I used to run for my life behind Yuu Asai, with the north wind slashing my face like needles. Yuu would grip my hand and drag me forward against the wind, shouting, "Hurry up, Toko Takahara, hurry!" But now the person beside me had changed. Now it was a boy who looked like a gentleman, a nearly perfect boy named Natsuki Kamiya. He held my hand without urging me on, without the least impatience. At the end of the alley he turned me to face him, looked straight into my eyes, and said slowly, "Toko. This alley is called Lovers' Slope. People who walk through it shoulder to shoulder are destined to fall in love." I asked him whether that meant the fat man who went through alone was condemned never to know what love tasted like. Natsuki lowered his lashes a little and said, "I don't know. I only know the one I love is you, not some fat man walking through alone." The air smelled faintly of moss. "But do you love me?" I asked. "Truly," he said. "And what does that have to do with me?" I asked again. "I want you to love me the same way," he said.

I laughed, showing all my white teeth, and asked him, "What is love? Can my love provide you with meals? A place to live? Love is only a form of self-deception, another way of admiring yourself. I don't want any part of it." Natsuki looked wounded. Stubbornly he stared at me and said, one word at a time, "You think you don't need love because you're confused. One day you will understand that people cannot survive on food and shelter alone." I answered at an easy pace, "You think you love me because you are even more confused than I am. And I hope you understand something too. People cannot go on living with love alone and no food or roof over their heads, you pure white boy who knows nothing about the world's suffering." What the hell did he know? I thought bitterly.

How do you completely forget someone? Unless you lose your memory, there is no other way.

The sky was overcast. I was squatting on the roof behind the classroom, smoking. They were delicate ESSE cigarettes, mint-flavored. I drew on one deeply and watched the people hurrying along below. I first learned to smoke when I was fourteen, from Yuu Asai. "Inhale it into your lungs," he told me. "You have to take it in. Then you won't be afraid of the smell anymore, because it'll have become part of your body." I learned everything quickly. Yuu's overcoat used to wrap around my face while he said, "Don't be scared, Toko. It'll pass." Breathing in the tobacco scent on him, I would feel the days stretching out endlessly with nothing to look forward to. There were days when we had been hungry for so long we felt as if we could eat each other's flesh. Hunger is the sort of thing that terrifies you for life once you have tasted it even once. So Yuu picked up cigarette butts in the street and stole us a lighter. He said smoking would wake us up, keep us from falling asleep, because if we slept now, we would freeze to death. In those years Yuu and I sat with bloodshot eyes, shivering as we waited for dawn. I pinched out my cigarette, and then Natsuki Kamiya came over and sat beside me. It was the thirteenth day after he had confessed to me, and he still came looking for me to talk. Perhaps all he knew how to do was love; he had not yet learned how to resent me. I handed him a cigarette. He took it, snapped it in two, and tossed it aside. He said smoking was bad for the lungs. I thought he was meddling in things that were none of his business and wasting my cigarette to boot. I picked the half-smoked one back up, relit it, narrowed my eyes, and looked at him provocatively. "If it's bad for my lungs, that's my business. What's it to you?" Natsuki refused to yield. He took it from me again, crushed it out, and said steadily, "From the moment I started liking you, your good and your bad both became my concern. If you're doing well, I'm happy. If your lungs are ruined, I'll feel so bad my own lungs will hurt." What could I say to that? I only looked silently into the dense winter fog in the distance, where most of the scenery was blurred away. Then I asked him whether he liked winter. Natsuki shook his head. "I hate it with a passion." So I said nothing. But on that winter dusk, for some reason, Natsuki suddenly began talking to me from the deepest part of himself. "My father died in winter," he said. "He died in a humiliating way. That's why I hate winter. A person has to hate something, or love something, and so I hate winter... and I love Toko Takahara." He smiled until his eyes narrowed. Since Natsuki Kamiya had opened his heart to me, it was only fair that I open mine a little too. So I told him that I also hated winter, more than anything. In winter I learned what cold was, what hunger was, what it meant for living to be harder than dying. I told him too that there was one face burned into my mind: a twisted, fleshy face swollen with desire. In dreams I always saw it pressing toward me until I could not breathe, and then beneath that face I would see myself, bleeding from every orifice. Then I asked him, "Tell me. How do you completely forget someone?" Natsuki thought for a moment and answered with apology in his eyes, "There's no way, Toko. You have to understand that. Unless you lose your memory, there is no other way." Perhaps that is where human sorrow lies. We spend all day thinking, I am going to forget that bastard completely, and yet in the very act of that determination, the person only sinks deeper and more solidly into memory. I thought he was exactly right. Gray-black clouds drifted slowly over from far away. Light slid over Natsuki's young forehead, and he said, "I want to tell you my story." I said, "Go ahead."

To this planet, one person's disappearance is no more than a single breath, a single blink.

Natsuki Kamiya had a perfect family, flawless to the point of being untouchable. His father was the chairman of a private university-affiliated school, his mother a fashion designer of some renown, and his two older sisters graduates of Keio. Perhaps because the women outnumbered the men at home, Natsuki had been especially close to his father. "He was practically a god to me," Natsuki told me, full of yearning. "A kind god, with a sense of humor." But when Natsuki was fifteen, that kind god fell into hell. News broke that the head of the school had been keeping a mistress. The whole city buzzed with scandal. For a school chairman, it was a devastating blow. Not long afterward came the news that the mistress had swallowed pills and killed herself. Natsuki's father was dismissed from his post and remained at home. He arranged for the foolishly devoted woman to be buried. Three days later, he himself was found stabbed to death in his house. The poor man had been drowned alive by the ruin brought by women. I did not know how to comfort Natsuki. The world is full of tragedies. I am not Kannon, able to save all beings with dew from a willow leaf. I am only Toko Takahara, barely able to save herself. In this world, one person's disappearance is nothing very great. One breath, one blink, and the swift-moving world leaves it behind. So I said, "Maybe that's for the best. At least your father and that mistress can be together after death. Lovers united at last." Natsuki shook his head. "It wasn't a lover's suicide. My father was murdered."

I curled my lip. "What is this, some television melodrama? Where do all these lovers dying violently come from?" My dismissive tone nearly angered even the usually gentle Natsuki. He grabbed my arm, shoved me into his private car, and I sat in the passenger seat in silence, watching to see what he meant to do. In fact I had wanted to tell him that I liked him too. Natsuki took an old yellowing notebook from the compartment and opened it to one page. "Look," he said. "It really was murder." Pasted onto the page was a clipped newspaper article, old enough that the edges had frayed and the print had blurred. In the photograph there was only a smear of black and gray: thick blood, a dull knife, a black shirt, a gray face, black trousers fallen to the knees, gray underclothes. It made me slightly sick. I handed the notebook back to him and asked irritably what he was showing me for. Natsuki closed it and answered seriously, "I want you to know that every single thing I say to you is true. Including when I tell you I like you. I won't lie to you, not even half a sentence." I was silent for a while, and then I said, "I think I may have fallen for you too. But what can I do, Natsuki? I'm the kind of person who never tells the truth. I suffer from a disease that will kill me if I speak honestly." He stared at me, because he plainly had not expected me to confess like that. For a full fifty-three seconds he sat there stunned, warm light trembling in his eyes behind his glasses. Then he pulled me into his arms and kissed my forehead. "That's all right," he said. "From now on, I'll take everything you say backwards. Everything except the part where you said you like me." I smiled and said nothing more. Natsuki Kamiya was an unfortunate boy: his father had been murdered, and the police still had not found the killer. But he was lucky too. Lucky enough that even without his father, he was still living a life of privilege. He had sworn he would find the real murderer and avenge his father. Look at that: he still had a dream. Unlike me. Once my mother was gone, I had nothing left. In the dead of night I wandered the city streets. I loved that traceless darkness, the streetlamps, the snow reflecting faint light, the vagrants sleeping on frozen ground. So I was not afraid of the night. I moved through it at ease. Then, one dawn, I opened the door and Yuu Asai's palm landed across my face, hot and vicious. I shouted, "What the hell, Yuu? Are you crazy?" His eyes were bloodshot. "The crazy one is you, Toko Takahara. Do you even know what you're doing?" Holding my burning cheek, I stared at him and said in a low voice, "I'm in love. That's all. I'm just seeing a boy who loves me." "Bullshit!" Yuu shouted. "Is it him who loves you, or you who love him?" It became a contest to see who could shout louder. I shouted back, "Fine. I love him too. So what?"

The more a sorrow looks ordained, the more fiercely it drives us to struggle against it.

Yuu and I came to blows. We left each other bloodied. That was when I finally understood just how many years Yuu Asai had loved me. That long, lingering love, in the dawn when I fell in love with Natsuki Kamiya, suddenly became a catalyst. It turned Yuu's love into hatred, his refusal to abandon me into a refusal ever to look back. The boundary between love and hate has always been blurred. He decided to give me up. He would no longer care whether I lived or died, whether I went hungry, whether anyone bullied me. He slung a simple bag over his shoulder and left without turning around once. I stood there blankly, watching his back recede. It was three or four in the morning. A dim white light came rolling over the horizon, swallowing the darkness and swallowing Yuu's figure with it as he walked farther and farther away. The shoulder that had once lifted me bodily off the ground, the hands that had wiped tears from my eyes, were gone from me now. And yet I did not feel lonely, because I had fallen in love with Natsuki Kamiya, and surely love would never let a person be alone. I went on attending pottery class. I went on buying a bottle of hot corn soup on the way home. I went on letting Natsuki drag me through every long alley in the town. I made myself another piggy bank, this one dark blue, still with the long neck and round belly. Natsuki handed me a hot drink and asked, "Another piggy bank?" I nodded. Smiling, he asked whether I had calculated its capacity, how many one-yen coins it could hold. I said no, and that he could try dropping one in every day and find out. He laughed loudly and called me a sly little fox. As I dropped coins in, he asked what else I meant to put inside. Smiling wickedly, I said I was going to learn from the rouge-faced girl and drop in blood letters, one every month right on schedule. Natsuki listened to that without missing a word and promptly flushed bright red. He pinched my cheek and called me obscene. I laughed so hard I could barely breathe. Ah well, I really was obscene. To salvage my image, I straightened my face and said solemnly that one day I would drop a secret into it. What secrets could someone like me possibly have? I might surprise him, I said. The things I kept hidden would scare him to death. He smiled in the warm glow, and suddenly I could not quite bear it. So I told him that on his birthday I would put the secret into the piggy bank, and if one day he ever became poor again, he could smash it open and take out his coins and my secret; both would belong to him. Natsuki was visibly moved. "You know my birthday?" he asked. I said I did. It was written on his identification card: February fourteenth. He rubbed my hair and said people born on Valentine's Day were supposed to be fickle. I told him that was nonsense, that I would hang myself only from his tree. Then he asked about my birthday. I lifted my face and told him it was February fourteenth too, the very same day. I am sure the phrase fate brought itself to his mind, because it came to mine as well. But I also knew that the world contains not only fated meetings. It contains fated sorrows too. Long ago, I believed that the more inevitable a sorrow looked, the more fiercely it would stir us to fight it, and that was how I had stayed alive until now. That was long ago. Now I thought differently. A sorrow that is fated can never be defeated, because life lives in the dark while you stand in the light. If it stabs you once today, that does not mean it will show mercy tomorrow and give up the urge to shoot you instead. Whatever life hands you, you have to take. There is no flinging it off. So even if I could only laugh drunkenly with him for thirty banquets and never once speak of parting, I would still stay to the very end. I looked into Natsuki's clear eyes, saw my own face reflected there, tugged down his collar, lifted my head slightly, and kissed him on the mouth.

What I cannot let go of is exactly what I will never forget.

There was only one month left before our birthday. To keep my promise, I wrote out three slips of paper in advance, one secret on each, and dropped them into my piggy bank. During those days I often dreamed of Yuu Asai. I missed him. He could be my father, my older brother, my friend, my shelter, my salvation. In the dream, I was still a little girl barely into my teens. Our family was poor, and I had grown up half-starved. At fourteen I looked little different from a ten-year-old, with very short hair because it used less shampoo, an unreadable face, a withered body wrapped in a school uniform, and white canvas shoes on my feet. I stood outside a large house and rang the bell. It was a pale white house with a red roof. The yard was full of plants, though in the cold of winter they were all stripped bare. I stared at them while I waited for someone to answer the door. A gust of cold wind swept over me, and I shivered hard. An uncle opened the heavy black gate and led me inside with a smile so gentle and indulgent that I nearly burst into tears. No one else was in the house. He made me a cup of hot milk himself and handed it to me with a smile. I gulped it down and felt warmth return to my body. Then I told him that my mother had died, that I no longer had the money for school fees, and that before anything else I thought I ought to buy myself a warm coat. So could I trade the house my mother had lived in to him for some money? He kept smiling and brought over a fruit basket, with apples, pears, and an exquisitely made fruit knife. I told him I did not want fruit. I had come to talk about the house, about repaying what we owed. Leaning back on the sofa, he looked me up and down until my whole body went cold. Then he said, "Don't forget, that house only existed because I lent it to your mother in the first place." That was when I understood: my mother had been the kept woman of this man. He had provided her with a place to live, and now that she was dead, he meant to take it back. I had been naive. I straightened my clothes and said, "Then Principal Kamiya, please process my withdrawal from school." His face shifted slightly. "You can stay in your mother's house," he said. Then, after a pause: "In her place." I wanted to vomit. The darkness of human nature opened up in front of me. I said nothing, only moved to put my shoes back on. Suddenly my body left the floor. He slammed me down, a vicious light in his eyes. "Your mother is the reason I lost my post as principal. You can pay her debt for her." Then he lunged at me. Outside the window snow whirled down, covering the black earth. In the confusion, my fingers found the fruit knife. I did not think. I drove it into his body with every ounce of strength I had. Blood burst out, staining my school uniform red. Just then, a boy in a school uniform pushed open the door and said respectfully, "Principal Kamiya, you wanted to see me—" Then he stopped, staring at me and at the man crumpling away under heavy blood loss. I was so frightened I began to cry. The boy locked the door at once, slipped off his shoes, came over, checked the man's breathing, hauled me to my feet, and asked, "Did you do this?" I nodded. "Scared?" he asked. "Can you still walk?" I nodded again. He gave a light nod of his own and said, "No one will come by the principal's house at this hour. Pull the knife out. What are you standing there for? Hurry." Dazed, I pulled the knife free. The boy went to the kitchen, brought back disposable transparent gloves and a rag, wiped the fingerprints from the refrigerator, then, wearing gloves, went into the bedroom, took out a loose set of men's clothes, and threw them at me. "Put these on. Cover your uniform." I did as he said. Then he ransacked the drawers and cupboards, took the cash, and carefully wiped every trace of fingerprints clean before leading me outside. He said his name was Yuu Asai and that he had come there to process his own withdrawal. Then he laughed bitterly and said, "What a coincidence. Our mothers both fell in love with the same piece of trash. Your mother was luckier than mine. Mine went mad and runs around town claiming she's the principal's wife." I began to understand something of Yuu Asai's circumstances. I tried to pull one corner of my mouth into a smile for him, but my tears only kept spilling. He wiped my eyes and said, "We'll take one man's overcoat, one pair of men's shoes, size eleven, and some cash. Then the police will suspect a large, strong man who killed the principal during a robbery." Yuu looked down at me and rubbed my hair. "Don't worry. No one is going to guess it was a tiny runt like you."

On February fourteenth, sunshine that had not visited for a long time spilled all over the earth. Natsuki Kamiya held my hand and was taking me out for our birthday dinner. It was Valentine's Day as well. He gave me a gift, a ring. I knew it was expensive. Once, in a book, I had read a line: the person who loves you most is the one who gives you the biggest diamond. I slipped the ring onto my ring finger and thought this was the most precious gift I would ever receive in my life. Natsuki rubbed my hair and asked where his present was. I smiled and told him it was on his place in pottery class, right where I had once mistakenly set down my piggy bank. If he went to fetch it now, I said, I would wait for him here. Natsuki nodded, bright light in his eyes, and ran off toward the pottery class. The hem of his coat lifted in a tender curve in the wind. I stood there watching his back for a long time, long enough for it to look unbearably happy, long enough for my vision to blur, long enough for him to vanish around the corner. Then I turned and walked away in the opposite direction. I knew the warm sunlight was drowning my back.

I had only just fallen in love with you, and already we had to part.

The three slips of paper said this. The first secret: Natsuki Kamiya, the truth is that I had already fallen for you when you first offered to buy me a drink. But I hated my own imperfection, so I chose instead to hate you. The second secret: You once said your greatest wish was to catch the murderer who killed your father. Well then, happy birthday. Your wish has finally come true. Congratulations. I am as glad as you are. The third secret: Natsuki Kamiya, you once asked me what, to me, that vast and absolute sorrow truly was. At the time I answered hunger. In fact I lied to you. For me, the most complete and total sorrow is this: I had only just fallen in love with you, and already we had to part. Oh, and one more thing. Listen to me. I do not love you. Truly. I do not love you.