All the World for Miss Rabbit

When I was little, my sister used to tell me the story of "The Happy Prince."

She said the Happy Prince gave away the red ruby on his sword and the blue sapphires in his eyes, and in the end he lost his brightness, yet he was still happy. Back then I did not understand how a person could give away the things most precious to them and still manage to smile. Many years later, I finally understood that some people are not miserable because they have nothing, but because they can no longer place that small bit of love in their hearts openly into the hands of the one they want to give it to.

My name is Morino Mifuyu, and I was born with a cleft lip. Much later, my mother let it slip while quarreling with relatives that when she saw me for the first time in the delivery room, it was as if something had frightened her, and she turned her face away. We lived in an old apartment building on the outskirts of Yokohama. The place was small, and the air always smelled faintly of disinfectant mixed with old wooden cabinets. My sister Nao was pretty, quiet, and an excellent student, the kind of child who made everyone smile whenever her name came up. I, on the other hand, felt like a button that had fallen into a crack in the floor, something no one cared enough to bend down and retrieve.

But Nao had never once treated me with disgust. When our father lost his temper and chased me with a hanger, she stepped in front of me. When our mother bought new dresses only for her, she waited until I was asleep and secretly tucked them beside my pillow. In winter, when I was made to stand as punishment in the living room, she would run out with a quilt and huddle with me by the entryway. On many nights, I thought white wings must have been growing from Nao's back, and that she was a sister who had walked straight out of a fairy tale.

With her protecting me at home, I could still breathe a little. At school, I had to take everything alone. In fourth grade, a group of older girls cornered me behind the playground, wrote "ugly freak" across my face with a marker, and forced me to run lap after lap around the track. My chest hurt from running. My tears and the ink blurred together. Even my breathing tasted like rust. In the end I could not bear it anymore and squatted beside the grass, bursting into tears. Back then, what I feared most was people staring at my mouth. What I feared almost as much was seeing disgust and curiosity in their eyes. It felt as if, so long as I did not speak, did not smile, did not lift my head, I could still pretend I was no different from anyone else.

That was when Sakakibara Minato came out from behind the bushes.

He was wearing a black hoodie. His face was as cold as a piece of glass just hauled out of winter, his curly hair hanging over his forehead, and his eyes were a rare blue. I learned later that his mother was French, which was why he had eyes unlike anyone else's. That day he crouched down in front of me and stared at my tear-streaked face for a long while before suddenly asking, "Are you a rabbit?"

I covered my mouth instinctively and cried even harder. He did not try to comfort me. He just grabbed my wrist and dragged me toward the girls' restroom behind the school building. The girls inside shrieked and ran when he burst in. He pressed me in front of the sink and ordered me coolly, "Wash it off." I did not dare lift my head. I could only sob as I wiped the ink from my face bit by bit. Later the whole thing reached the teachers, and the two of us were punished together, cleaning the playground and the toilets for a full month.

That was how, when I was ten years old, I came to know Sakakibara Minato.

He was like a piece of stone with a strange temper. He took me over walls to skip cleaning duty, egged me on to steal hot dogs from the convenience store by the station, and whenever trouble came, he always ran faster than anyone else. Yet for some reason, someone like that was always the first to rush out when people bullied me. When I was punished with cleaning, he would deliberately bring a broom and dawdle beside me until dark. When someone snatched my lunch away, he would break his own bread in half and shove some at me, though he refused to admit he felt sorry for me. The year we graduated from elementary school, he had to delay moving up because he had missed too many classes and his transfer paperwork got tangled up, which left him a year behind kids his age. By some odd twist, he later ended up entering the same high school as me. I asked if he had done it on purpose. Leaning against the window with that maddening grin of his, he said, "Dummy rabbit, I was waiting for you."

I had always doubted whether that was true, because every time we got into trouble, the one left behind to take the blame was always me.

That summer after junior high graduation, Minato's mother Claire started teaching him French at home. I often went over to raid their refrigerator and listened in while I was at it, only to end up learning nothing but the nonsense he taught me on purpose. For the longest time, I believed "idiot" and "goodbye" were both French words, until one day I said them in front of Claire and made her laugh so hard she had to brace herself against the table. Minato sat on the sofa slapping it and laughing. I got so angry I devoured half a box of sandwiches and two bottles of milk, then sprawled on his bed with his teddy bear in my arms and refused to get up.

"If you keep stealing food like that, one day you're going to poison yourself." He said it without even turning around from the computer game he was playing.

That afternoon, I really did curl up in pain on the floor of his room. It felt as if a rusty iron clamp were twisting inside my stomach, and sweat kept rising from my forehead in layers. The moment Minato heard me, he panicked so badly he did not even shut down the computer. He scooped me up and ran straight out into the rain. He pulled his jacket completely over my head while he himself got soaked through. When we reached the hospital, the doctor said I had simply overeaten and then accidentally eaten ham that was close to expiring. It was only a stomach spasm. I curled up on the bed, too embarrassed to look at him. He sat beside me dripping water everywhere and still scolded me. "You really are something. Even eating looks like life or death with you."

That night, the ward on duty was cold as a well. To make myself brave, I forced him to sit and listen while I told ghost stories. Halfway through, though, it was I who started trembling at the sound of the wind outside the window. The light at the end of the corridor was frighteningly white, and the window frame rattled under the night wind. The farther I went, the less courage I had, until in the end I had nearly wrung the life out of the blanket in my fists. Minato watched me climb into his bed and did not laugh. He only tucked me against himself and lightly enclosed my clenched fist in his palm. He was so close that his breath fell against my forehead, warm as a small flame under a lamp. Later he even hummed, in a low voice, a French lullaby I had never heard before, the melody thin as gauze, holding all the cold shadows in the hospital room outside. That was the first time I understood clearly that one person's embrace could be entirely unlike home. Not cold, not reluctant, but something that made you want to close your eyes and entrust your whole self to it.

After we got to high school, Nao said to me, "If you don't want people to keep staring at you, learn to smile first." So every morning I practiced in front of the mirror, lifting the stiff corners of my mouth bit by bit. Slowly, it was true that more people started coming over to talk to me. But what interested them was never me. It was always Sakakibara Minato. Because of those gemstone-blue eyes, the girls secretly called him the Glass Marble Prince. I became their messenger, their chocolate transfer station, their mailbox for love letters. Every time, Minato would stuff all those things right back into my hands unopened, sling his bag over his shoulder, vault the low wall behind the school, and tell me to keep up.

His favorite place to take me was a riverbank beneath an overpass. It lay at the edge of a residential neighborhood, where the wild grass grew taller than a person and a narrow river ran beside it, reflecting the clouds overhead. Sometimes airplanes passed above us, their roar pressing the whole sea of grass into a trembling hush. Sometimes he folded the love letters he got into paper boats and set them adrift one by one on the water. At other times, he would snatch my lunch as if by right and declare that he was testing it for poison. If a strip of seaweed stuck beneath his nose, looking like a tiny moustache, I would laugh so hard I could not straighten up, and he would flick my forehead and call me an idiot. If I urged him to at least read what people had written, he would lift his chin like an overproud cat and say, "I don't want to. Too much trouble." Mixed-blood boys on television were always elegant, like ornaments in a display case, but Sakakibara Minato was not. He was noisy, childish, exasperating, and impossible, yet he shone with a vividness no one else had.

Later, the student council and the arts club put on a summer English stage play together. Minato and Nao were chosen as hosts, and at the end they even had to dance a piece from Swan Lake. Standing in the crowd in the auditorium, watching them beneath the spotlights, I suddenly felt like a branch that had grown in the wrong place on a vine, awkward and unnecessary. Nao wore a pink-and-white costume and smiled with the brightness of an entire field of flowers in bloom. When Minato held her by the waist, the tenderness on his face made my chest tighten. I thought of the boy who had drawn me into his arms in the hospital, and for the first time I felt something close to mean and shameful jealousy. His hands, I realized, could rest on someone else too.

Early the next morning, I pushed into Minato's hand the love letter Nao had stayed up half the night writing and told him it was from my sister. He took it, held it up to the light for two seconds, and without even opening it tossed it straight into the trash can at the end of the hall. I should have been glad, but something caught in my chest and hurt in a dull, airless way. That day he still slung an arm around my neck the way he always did and headed toward the station, saying he was taking me to the convenience store for fresh croquettes. I did not say a word the whole way. The sun on my face felt bitterly hot.

What was truly long was that summer vacation.

Sakakibara Minato went to France with his mother. He did not even say goodbye properly before leaving, only sent me pictures through social media. Lavender in Provence, snow in the Alps, sunlight on the streets of southern France. He said he would bring me a present when he came back. Every day I stared at my phone, waiting for his messages the way one waits for the tide. Ten days later, I could not endure it anymore and ran to the public phone booth by the station to call him overseas. No one answered. When the automated tone sounded, I said into the receiver in a hoarse voice, "Sakakibara Minato, if you don't come back soon, I'm really going to starve to death."

Suddenly someone knocked on the booth door three times.

When I turned around, the person who should still have been in France was standing outside, travel-worn and exhausted, his hair flattened and disheveled from the long flight. I threw myself into his arms and smeared tears and snot all over his shirt, unable to get out a single proper sentence. At noon that same day, my parents went to the ward office to file for divorce. My mother took Nao with her. My father said he had no way to support one more child, and in the end neither of them chose me. I stood in the hallway crying and clutching at their sleeves, and they only pulled their hands away as if shaking off a nuisance. After that, I was sent to live with my grandmother in a one-story house even older and narrower than the apartment we had left. My grandmother was elderly and unsteady on her feet, and even the heater in the house broke down now and then, but she still stroked my head and told me it was all right, that Mifuyu could live with Grandma just as well. The sky that day hung so low it felt ready to press down on our heads. I asked Sakakibara Minato if, to everyone, I was someone who did not matter at all.

He looked at me for a long time before saying, "To some people, you're one of a kind."

I did not dare ask whether he meant himself.

After the new term began, Nao came to see me often. She brought cake, fruit, and study materials, and sat beside my bed stroking my hair the way she had when we were little. She said she missed the days when we would whisper under the same quilt, missed the stray cat that always came to beg for food in the alley behind our old house, missed the stone slope she had walked me across hand in hand. Then she lowered her head, her cheeks faintly pink, and said softly, "Mifuyu, I want to be with Sakakibara Minato."

I had never seen such a bright expression on Nao's face, as if she had hidden an entire sky of stars inside her eyes. And that was exactly why I could not say a word. I began avoiding the two of them on purpose, ducking my head and hurrying away whenever I spotted Minato from a distance. He thought I was sulking again and kept asking what was wrong, and I could only answer vaguely. He said I had become like a turtle lately, pulling back into my shell the moment I saw him. I wanted to laugh when I heard that, and at the same time I could not laugh at all. Then one day after school, I hid in the little grove behind the school hill, and through the shadows of the trees I saw Nao throw herself into his arms. He stood there without pushing her away at once. In that instant, I felt as if someone had shoved me violently from a great height.

It was not long before everything went wrong.

In an alley at dusk, a group of punks with dyed hair cornered Sakakibara Minato behind the convenience store. Nao had fallen to the ground and was trembling with tears. Minato stood in front of her alone, his face and arms covered in injuries, but he still refused to back down. From far away I saw one of them raise a wooden stick high, as if he meant to bring it down on Minato's head. In that second, I did not think of anything at all. I simply shut my eyes and rushed forward. When the stick came down on my head, it was as if all the light in the world had been snatched away in a single motion. I only heard someone shouting my name, and the voice seemed to come from very, very far off.

I lay unconscious in the hospital for half a month.

When I woke, Nao was the only one in the room. Her eyes were red as she peeled an apple for me, her hands shaking with care. I asked whether our parents had come. She was silent for a long time, and in the end she only touched my head. At once I understood. Some things, it turned out, did not change even at the edge of life and death.

Later the doctor spoke to me alone. Because of congenital developmental problems, he said, my optic nerves had always been more fragile than those of ordinary people. After such a severe head injury, my vision might grow steadily worse, and no one could say when I would lose it completely. His words felt like a basin of ice water poured straight over my head, and yet I only sat there quietly, not even daring to cry. The doctor also said emotional upheaval could worsen the condition even faster, so it would be best if I cried less, lost less sleep, and avoided drastic swings in emotion. Listening to all those instructions, I could only find them absurd. A person like me had to ration even her grief carefully.

That afternoon, Sakakibara Minato came in a wheelchair. Protecting Nao had left his leg and ribs injured too, and his face was swollen almost beyond recognition. The moment he came in, he seized my hand. His voice was rough with strain. "What the hell were you thinking that day? Who told you to run out like that?" His mouth was scolding me, but his fingers were trembling badly, as if it was only now that the fear had fully reached him. Looking at those brilliant blue eyes of his, I suddenly wanted to reach out and touch them, just to make sure they were still the same as before. But in the end I only turned my head away first and said softly when he leaned closer, "From now on, protect my sister the way you did that day. She already has so, so much love, but she still likes you very much."

Sakakibara Minato froze. For a long time, he did not speak. Just before the hospital door closed, I heard him ask in a low voice, "What about you, Mifuyu? Who's going to love you?"

I buried my whole face in the blanket and bit my lip, not daring to let myself cry aloud.

After I left the hospital, I withdrew from school. My eyesight declined even faster than the doctor had expected. I began taking the wrong roads, lifting the wrong cups, walking into doorframes. Later, even when my grandmother stood right in front of me, I could only tell it was her by her voice. Then one morning I woke to find the world had gone completely dark. I had always been afraid of the dark, ever since I was little. Back when Sakakibara Minato had been by my side, I could still pretend to be calm. But then all I could do was cling to my grandmother's hand and cry myself ragged in that narrow house. An old woman and a blind girl, with even their silence full of dampness.

Later, an aunt in the neighborhood who knew my grandmother introduced me to a community radio station, where I became the host of a midnight call-in program. Every night at midnight, I sat in the soundproof booth and answered strangers' calls under the name Little Forgetting, listening as they spoke about heartbreak, unemployment, running away from home, and secrets they could not say aloud. I was always telling other people that if you wanted to go on living, you had to learn to forget. But when it came to myself, I learned that some people and some things could never be forgotten at all.

One night, I heard Nao crying on the other end of the line. Again and again, she told me she was sorry. Sorry that when we were children, her own mischief had caused our mother to go into premature labor, so I was born with a defect. Sorry that, in order to remain the child who was favored, she had said many cruel things about me in front of her classmates. Sorry that even though she knew Sakakibara Minato was softhearted, she had used his concern to get close to him. Sorry that the punks in the alley had been people she brought in the first place, because all she had wanted was to force Minato to say, in front of her, that he did not like me, and she had never imagined things would go so far. She also said that after I disappeared from their lives, Minato had gone mad looking for me everywhere, growing his hair long and growing painfully thin, asking every person he met whether they had seen a girl with a rabbit-like mouth.

I could not bear to listen any longer. I reached out and turned up the background music. An old song was playing in my headphones, one about a person who was clearly unhappy and yet still struggled desperately to learn how to smile. Suddenly I thought of the Happy Prince Nao used to tell me about, and of the way I had spent all these years trying so hard to lift the corners of my mouth, believing that if I smiled, I could really fool everyone, even myself. But in the end, what I had lost was never dignity, or pride, or the will to keep going. What I had really lost was the blue sapphire in Sakakibara Minato's eyes that had once shone only for me.

Much later, on an early summer afternoon, I sat in my grandmother's yard listening to the wind pass through the treetops. The cicadas rose in waves, like surf beating against a shore I could no longer see. I was lost in thought when I suddenly heard the gate open softly. Footsteps crossed the stone path and came all the way to where I was before stopping. In the next second, someone took my hand.

I knew the warmth of that hand too well.

He did not speak right away. He only spread open my palm and, with one fingertip, wrote words on it very slowly. Of all the French I had ever studied, that was the one sentence I had learned most carefully. The letters fell into my hand like tiny sparks, burning through the shell I had forced myself to grow over the years little by little. I started crying at once, my shoulders shaking. I tried to pull my hand away, but he held it even tighter.

"Don't go." Sakakibara Minato's voice was very close, rough with strain. "Mifuyu, don't run away from my side again."

I raised my hand and groped until I touched his face. My palm met hot wetness, and I did not know whether it was my tears or his. He lowered his head and rested his forehead against mine, like the boy who had once folded me into his arms in a hospital room. Only then did I finally dare believe that somewhere in this world, there really could be one person who saw me as someone utterly irreplaceable.

The Happy Prince lost his jewels, his gold leaf, and his light, but he was never left with nothing. Because he held love in his hands and carried love in his heart, even if in the end all that remained was a cracked heart of lead, he was still richer than so many others.

I tightened my grip on Sakakibara Minato's hand and said softly, "Je t'aime."

What I had always wanted to give him was never an explanation, nor a farewell, nor some answer sheet delivered far too late.

It was my one remaining whole heart, placed quietly and completely into his hands.