Where the Sky Lanterns Drifted

I

When we were young, for whom did we dance? For love, perhaps, or perhaps only for loneliness. And after the years have worn us down, why is it that we are still as lonely as ever, yet would rather pass one another like strangers?

That absurdly literary sentence came out of Kamiya Rio's mouth all at once while the sky lantern was slowly rising. I turned to look at him. His face was tilted slightly upward, following the lantern into the sky, and his eyes were as calm and gentle as they always were.

I suddenly wanted to ask him whether he had looked like this when Mochizuki Satsuki left too, so steady, so composed, never letting anything show.

The windmills by the sea lit up at night with a dangerous, charming glow. I insisted that he take a picture of me. Remember, I told him, my side profile looks best at a forty-five-degree angle. He gave me a look full of contempt and said, "You're such a nuisance. It's not like you're especially pretty, so why are you so obsessed with being photographed? Don't you know how to hide your shortcomings?"

I was not angry at all. It was true. I was not beautiful. At least not as beautiful as Mochizuki Satsuki.

Anyone who had ever seen Mochizuki Satsuki would admit that she was beautiful. Even passersby who brushed shoulders with her on the street would stop first and look at her.

Yes. Look once, and only then keep walking.

She was the kind of girl who would still be stunning even if she dressed herself in a complete mess.

If beauty came in ranks, Mochizuki Satsuki belonged at the very tip of the pyramid.

After he took my picture, Rio said teasingly, "Hey, Shiraishi Yiqing, can you pick a different pose next time? You're always making a peace sign. You're such a village tyrant."

I had no idea where he had learned such a heaven-shaking phrase, but the first time I ever heard it was when he used it to describe me. It was one weekend. I was wearing a rose-red sweater under a green jacket and walking past his house on my way to meet the boy I had a crush on. He leaned out the window and shouted, "Village tyrant, heading off to sell eggs?"

That one sentence ruined my mood for the whole day. When I met the boy I liked, I gathered all my courage and complained, "Someone said I looked like a village tyrant today..." I had not even finished half the sentence when he froze for a moment and then burst out laughing.

At that moment, I heard the sound of my heart shattering.

But Rio did not remember any of that. The green jacket had been something he helped me buy. "Looks good," he had said. "Like a green turtle." The rose-red sweater was also something he had gone shopping with me for. He had said that looked good too. "Like a singer in a bar. Sexy."

But when I wore them together, he called me a village tyrant.

Maybe it was because he had spent too much time around Mochizuki Satsuki, a person who could wear rags and still look beautiful. It had given him absurdly high expectations of me, as though I too were the sort of girl whose natural beauty could not be hidden even under rough cloth and plain hairpins. It was a little discouraging.

And yet on Valentine's Day, when every couple in the city was out in pairs, who was it keeping him company in all his loneliness if not me, this so-called village tyrant? As for his goddess, who knew where she was, smiling elegantly at someone else.

There were so many people in the streets that I suspected the whole city had come out. Girls were carrying flowers, wearing lovely makeup, glowing with life. And there we were, one village tyrant and one beautiful boy, walking through the crowd like total anomalies. I kept stealing glances at him, feeling so ashamed I wanted to bite off my own tongue.

Mochizuki Satsuki, where are you?

Mochizuki Satsuki, the person beside me misses you so much.

II

Rio and Satsuki and I had known one another for a very, very long time.

Haesong Road was where Rio and I grew up. We had lived there from the day we were born. It was a quiet street, simple and warm, where all the families got along well. Rio and I had been an inseparable comic pair since childhood. According to him, when I was six I would lick the strand of green snot hanging by my mouth while I ate, then suck it right back in at lightning speed.

As a woman with self-respect, I could not bear being mocked like that by someone who still wet the bed in second grade. I remember one cloudy morning in that second-grade year, I went to call for him so we could walk to school together. He shuffled out hesitantly while his mother carried an enormous kettle of hot water into the bedroom.

"Auntie, what are you doing?" I asked in curiosity.

Ignoring Rio's attempts to stop her, she said bluntly, "Rio wet the bed. I can't hang the quilt out today, so I'm seeing if I can dry it with hot water."

That incident kept him from ever holding his head high in front of me. Every time he mocked me for eating with snot, I struck back with the bed-wetting story.

Mochizuki Satsuki appeared at the end of the summer when we were in fifth grade. One day a truck came rumbling into our usually peaceful street, stacked high with furniture and luggage. Rio and I had been crouching on the ground playing marbles. We stared stupidly as Satsuki climbed down from the truck.

That was the first time she entered our lives. Pale skin. Black hair. A lace princess dress that would look tacky now, but had been fashionable back then. And on her face, a weariness completely out of place on a child.

She looked down at Rio and me from above, let the corner of her mouth lift, and gave us a smile that was polite and yet kept us a thousand miles away.

At the time, I disliked her very, very much.

The moment she appeared, she stole all the attention little lecherous Rio had ever given me. It was only after Satsuki had vanished around the corner that he came back to himself and said to me with great solemnity, "Yiqing, you should learn from her."

I had scoffed then. But years later, whenever I thought of the look on her face that day, I could only smile bitterly and admit that people really are visual creatures. Judging by appearance is simply human nature.

That night my mother told me that Mochizuki Satsuki's family had moved into Lin'an Street. Her father drove freight trucks, and her mother was very young and beautiful. Then my mother paused and said, "Too young, really, for a daughter that old."

My mother was right. That glamorous woman in high heels, drenched in cheap perfume, was not Satsuki's real mother at all. A few days later, deep in the middle of the night, the whole street heard Satsuki screaming and crying. Wearing my rabbit pajamas, I followed my mother out to see what had happened. The neighbors all came too, including Kamiya Rio, who normally claimed he was always asleep by nine.

Little Satsuki's black hair was twisted in her stepmother's hand. Her face was contorted with pain, and the skin exposed through her clothes was covered in purple-red welts. One glance was enough to know she had been beaten with a stick or something like one.

I covered my mouth, unable to believe anyone could treat a little girl so viciously. I had never liked Mochizuki Satsuki. But at that moment, I cried.

My mother spent a long time trying to calm the situation before she managed to get Satsuki away. That night she had Satsuki sleep beside me. As I led her home by the hand, Kamiya Rio was standing right in front of us.

His gaze passed right over me and landed on Satsuki. It was a look I had never seen on his face before.

From that moment on, he was no longer a child.

III

Those years were full of hardship for Mochizuki Satsuki. Whenever her father was away driving, that fierce stepmother would find some excuse to beat her. Sometimes it was for stealing money. Sometimes it was for breaking a bowl while washing dishes. Sometimes it was because the woman had lost at mahjong and merely seeing Satsuki put her in a bad mood.

In short, for those years Satsuki was nothing but the tool her stepmother used to vent her rage.

On Haesong Road, if someone's child misbehaved, the parents would threaten, "Keep that up and we'll send you to Mochizuki Satsuki's house." It worked every time. That alone shows how deeply that stepmother's shrewish reputation had lodged itself in everyone's mind.

And yet Satsuki did not become the timid, shrinking, cowardly girl so many people feared she would. She was like a rose growing in the desert, blooming more brilliantly the harsher the world became. Every time she was beaten, she would climb up from the ground, brush the dirt off herself, and then shout toward my house, "Yiqing, come out and play."

I asked her countless times, "What are you going to do if this keeps going?"

She would look off into the distance and say in that old-before-her-time way of hers, "It's fine. If she keeps hitting me, she'll get old. And if she gets old, she'll die. Then everything will be simpler. I mean, if..."

After that she would lean her head lightly against my shoulder and sing a song, one so old it sounded as though it belonged to another lifetime: "The stars in the sky do not speak. The doll on the ground misses her mother..."

Every time she sang it, my nose would sting.

Even now, I cannot say exactly what kind of feeling I had for Mochizuki Satsuki. We had known each other since childhood and watched each other grow up. There was a toughness in her, a stubborn strength that I admired deeply. If not for Kamiya Rio, I think everything might have been much simpler.

That summer in our second year of middle school, I took some math problems to Rio's house because I could not solve them. The door had not been fully closed, so I slipped inside on tiptoe without even taking off my shoes. My plan was to sneak into his room and clap him on the shoulder hard enough to scare him to death.

His room was beautifully done, and the door to it was made of glass. I stood outside it for a long moment.

In the end, I only tapped my own forehead and slipped back out the way I had come.

I did not know how to drink at that age. But the moment I stepped out of his house, I began vomiting uncontrollably, so hard my stomach cramped. Maybe it was the heat. Maybe I had heatstroke. I do not know. I only know I threw up until I blacked out. A neighbor found me and carried me home, and then my mother took me to the hospital, where I spent two days on an IV drip.

For those two days I lay there as though I had been cursed, unwilling to wake. By the time I was finally discharged on the third day, Mochizuki Satsuki had already left Haesong Road. People said her real mother had taken her away. I had no idea how dignified or beautiful that mother might have been, but from the hysterics of Satsuki's stepmother alone, one could guess a little.

That night I found Kamiya Rio by the sea. When he saw me, he grinned. And I suddenly realized that this boy who had wet his bed in second grade had grown unexpectedly tall.

That was the first time we ever released a sky lantern. It was made of red oiled paper, festive and bright. The wind off the sea was so fierce I thought it would freeze my face off. I struggled for a long time before I managed to light the candle inside. And when the lantern finally rose, trembling, into the sky, I saw the rims of Rio's eyes turn damp.

IV

From middle school through the end of high school, Kamiya Rio's love life remained a complete blank. The girl who appeared beside him most often was me, who in his eyes was hardly different from a boy.

I do not know when it happened, but at some point he turned from a grubby caterpillar into a beautiful butterfly. I know that metaphor is a bit absurd for a boy, but it is still true. One day, this person who had grown up at my side became the object of every girl's attention at school, and since no comparable chemical reaction ever occurred in me, I could not help feeling somewhat discouraged.

Thanks to him, countless girls came to me for information. Why did he never date? Why was he so devoted to the sacred path of study?

Staring at those glowing faces, I blurted out, "Maybe... maybe he likes boys."

The rumor spread through school at horrifying speed. Rio came storming over to settle accounts with me. I hid in the girls' bathroom and refused to come out. He blocked the entrance and shouted at the top of his lungs, "Darling, darling, come out."

From that moment on, I became the public enemy of every girl in school.

After that, no one ever came to ask me about Kamiya Rio's love life again. Instead I became, in their words, a scheming viper. They said Rio and I were clearly already an old married couple, and yet I still made up lies to deceive them.

How unfairly I carried that blame.

But Rio was immensely satisfied with the arrangement and insisted I be satisfied too. According to his logic, it set both of us free.

Old married couple. It was, really, quite a warm phrase.

Some lies are warm.

On his eighteenth birthday, we drank far too much. We were both a little drunk. Then he suddenly said, "Yiqing, shall we go release sky lanterns?"

Sometimes I think I am a truly hopeless person. Whatever he said, I did. Like a little servant. No ideas of my own, no principles, no demands.

For years, under some strange spell, he kept dragging me off to release sky lanterns. I had never seen a boy so devoted to such a thing. In my mind it belonged to girls, but when he did it, it never looked affected. Somehow, whenever he watched a lantern rise into the sky, he seemed like a particularly tender version of Kamiya Rio.

That night, on his birthday, he finally said, "You know I have someone I like in my heart, don't you?"

I sat stunned for a long time, then made an indistinct little sound of agreement.

He did not care much about my reaction. Perhaps what he needed was simply someone to listen, and Shiraishi Yiqing, who had walked through so many old years beside him, was the perfect choice.

"If you like someone when you're very, very young," he asked, "does that count as love?"

I did not know.

But for Rio, it certainly did.

I have always been a crier. In the darkness I let tears run silently down my face, but my voice stayed calm as I said, "Rio, I know. Two days before Mochizuki Satsuki left, I went to your house to ask you to help me with math. Your bedroom door was glass. I saw the two of you holding hands. I saw you kiss her forehead."

What I did not say was this:

Rio, it was at that moment that I understood the person I had loved for so, so many years loved someone else.

V

Getting into the same university had been a promise between Kamiya Rio and me ever since childhood. I was not as naturally gifted as he was, but hard work makes up for clumsiness, and I was not stupid.

He studied architecture. I studied news and directing. In his words, that made both of us technical talent. On the evening we arrived at university, we gathered up what was left after paying tuition. There was still a little over a thousand left between us, and we grew as excited as two convicts newly released from prison, swearing we would go eat something truly good.

At the school gate, I saw someone.

I squeezed my eyes shut hard, then opened them again.

The person was still there.

I grabbed Rio. "Am I seeing things?"

He stopped walking and said nothing. Cars passed between us. Across the road stood that person, smiling at us. It was the same smile from years before, polite and impossibly distant.

I do not know how long it was before Kamiya Rio gently freed his hand from mine, walked over, and threw his arms around her.

I lost my voice. I lost my hearing. I lost my sight.

That evening I ate a great deal. It felt as though only by stuffing food into my mouth as fast as I could could I prove to myself that I still existed. Otherwise I might at any moment dissipate like smoke.

They talked and talked, but I could not hear any of it. They looked at the way I was cramming down food and laughed. I could not see clearly enough to laugh with them.

At last my stomach was cramping so hard I thought I would burst if I swallowed even another sip of water. I staggered to my feet and left first. Kamiya Rio and Mochizuki Satsuki, as though by some perfect tacit agreement, neither of them tried to stop me.

That was the first time I felt how utterly unnecessary I was to Kamiya Rio.

On the way back, time seemed to slide backward to that long-ago summer. I saw him again, kissing Satsuki's forehead with such careful reverence, while her face held an almost devout stillness.

The kiss had felt holy then.

Just like that time years ago, I could not stop myself from crouching by the roadside and vomiting. But this time I did not black out. The more I threw up, the more awake I became.

Kamiya Rio, no matter how long I guard you, I will still only ever be your one incomparable best friend.

Those empty years had only been borrowed happiness.

I did not know how Mochizuki Satsuki had found us, or whether she and Rio had been secretly in touch all along. I was like some foolish extra cast without knowing it in the love story between them. My role was merely to prove how unwavering their love was.

It had always been this way. Of the three of us, I was always the one who got left outside.

The least beautiful, the dullest, the stupidest.

On the first night after we entered university, Kamiya Rio did not return to the student apartments.

At noon the next day he was waiting for me outside the women's dormitory. The very first thing he said was, "I'm sorry."

I did not understand why he had to say those words. It seemed to take him a long time to gather the courage before he finally added, "Last night... I was with Mochizuki Satsuki."

I could not control my emotions at all. Tears surged up like a tide. I stared at him and said, "Why tell me after you've had your fun? To show off?"

Maybe my eyes were blurring, but in that instant I thought I saw guilt and reluctance pool deep inside them. In the end, though, he said nothing.

I watched him walk away through tears and knew that I had finally lost him.

VI

For two whole years, we had no contact at all. Not during summer vacation, not during winter break. We did not even take the same bus home. When I finally returned home, I learned that Rio's family had moved away too. Once people became rich, many of them left Haesong Road for somewhere more comfortable. As time passed, the memories and happiness the old street had carried grew thinner and fainter.

During those two years, I started dating someone.

Xu Xiaoyang was in the same department as Kamiya Rio, so I never went to find him when classes ended. I did not want to run into Rio and stand there with nothing to say. From childhood on, I had never once imagined there would come a day when Shiraishi Yiqing and Kamiya Rio would stand on opposite banks of a river. We had played marbles together, climbed walls together, stolen vegetables from other people's gardens together. Those memories felt as though they had happened in a previous life.

Xu Xiaoyang was the complete opposite of Rio. He wore black-framed glasses, kept his hair clipped short, dressed in sportswear, and would say sorry first whether he stepped on someone else's foot on the bus or someone else stepped on his.

Being with him, I never felt the same anxious, aching turmoil that I had always felt around Kamiya Rio. He always yielded to what I wanted. He was an honest person. My mother said honest boys were dependable. My mother would not lie to me, so I kept telling myself not to think about people and memories that had already been pulled out of my life.

Now and then I heard news of Rio through Xiaoyang. Rio had always been a bright figure, ever since childhood. He won the top scholarship every single year. But Xiaoyang said that for some reason, Rio always seemed desperately short of money.

Any piece of news about Kamiya Rio was real news to me by then. I froze, puzzled.

His family had always been comfortable. His parents were generous with him. Why would his classmates get that impression?

I knew my mother spoke the truth. But when you are young, it is impossible to live by truth alone.

Two years had not faded my feelings even a little, so when Rio suddenly appeared in front of me the week before Valentine's Day, I still did not have the courage to brush away the hand he reached out to wipe my tears.

That night we did the same ordinary thing again and went to release sky lanterns. We sat on the empty school track, drinking and watching the lantern rise. There was something broken in Rio's voice. I could hear it, but I could not quite grasp it. Later, his head rested on my shoulder, and I felt something dampen the ends of my hair. I did not dare move, afraid even the slightest tremor might frighten him.

He murmured, "Do all girls become worldly, calculating, and vain when they grow up?"

I did not answer. I do not think he wanted one.

When I finally saw Mochizuki Satsuki again, I understood everything. It was very simple, really. Money. Nothing more than money.

Everything she wore, used, carried, or put on had a price tag that must have been astronomical. There was not the slightest trace left in her of the girl who used to sing, "The stars in the sky do not speak. The doll on the ground misses her mother." We sat together in a bar. She drank as though it were water. I kept my teeth sunk into the straw in my watermelon juice and could not say a word. Even the way she smoked looked practiced, almost practiced on purpose.

We sat in silence the entire night. Just as I was leaving, she suddenly reached out and caught my arm.

"Yiqing, don't hate me."

My body went rigid. "What right do I have to hate you?"

Her hand slid down from my arm. It was so cold. "Yiqing, one day you'll understand. Fate has never treated me kindly."

VII

When I finally told Xu Xiaoyang the truth in my heart, that simple, good-hearted boy scratched the back of his head and gave a foolish little smile.

"It's all right, Yiqing," he said. "I really do like you. If it's real, you don't have to apologize for it."

How many absurd things are there in this world? A loves B. B loves C. And C loves someone who may not even have appeared yet.

On Valentine's night, I went with Kamiya Rio to release sky lanterns as an old friend. He said something in that absurdly literary tone of his, and I had no idea where he had picked it up. When we were about to part, I finally asked him, "Do you miss Mochizuki Satsuki?"

He tilted his head and thought for a moment before saying, "She eats shark fin. I eat glass noodles. She rides in a Benz. I ride the bus."

I was very satisfied with that answer.

But I had underestimated the spell Satsuki still held over him. Even though she had disappointed him, the aftertaste of her remained. Just as he could still come to me and be received, there was in his heart a place that would forever receive this girl, scarred in body and mind alike.

I truly lost hope in Kamiya Rio when I saw Mochizuki Satsuki once more, even the sunglasses on her face unable to hide the bruises beneath.

She looked just as she had that night so many years ago, her face twisted with pain. Through the tea-colored lenses I could not tell whether her eyes still held that same lost helplessness. Back then she had been frail and thin, lying beside me in bed at night and crying softly into my shoulder. Now, at last, she was standing in daylight, leaning into the arms of the boy who had loved her all these years.

When I turned away, I had no idea it would be the last time I would ever see Kamiya Rio.

When Xu Xiaoyang's voice came through the phone, I felt as though I had fallen into a black hole in space. If what he was saying was true, then I would never see light again in this life.

Over the phone he said, "Rio needed money like mad. He took on all kinds of side jobs... He wasn't in a good state. That lift was never meant to hold that many people, but he insisted on going up... The lift fell. He died on the spot..."

How dare he use that word for such a beautiful life.

I could not forgive it.

The construction site was full of dust. I stood in front of a patch of blood that had not yet been cleaned up, my chest twisting in agony. I opened my mouth. I wanted to say something, but what came out instead was bile. I doubled over and vomited again, while a loud droning filled my ears.

Rio.

You really left me like this.

I did not go to the funeral. I lay in bed like someone whose tendons had been cut, whose spine had been snapped. I could not move, speak, or cry.

I felt as though I had died too.

Rio, in the place you've gone, are there warm red sky lanterns?

VIII

The last time I went to see Mochizuki Satsuki, I dressed as plainly as I could, in white, like mourning clothes.

She was living in a psychiatric hospital. She had already gone blind, and her mental state was very poor.

Through a long chain of inquiries, I learned many things, all the things they had never explained to me.

When Satsuki's mother came to take her away that year, Satsuki did not, as we had imagined, go on to a carefree life. In truth, even her mother was only a mistress who could never stand in the light.

When Satsuki was in high school, she was struck from behind one evening after study hall. When she woke, she had lost the purest and most precious thing a girl can lose.

After that she was never able to study in peace again. That was how someone as clever as she was ended up not going to university at all, drifting into society far too early.

A girl that young and that beautiful is in danger the moment she is no longer sheltered inside a campus.

I had guessed correctly. She and Kamiya Rio had stayed in touch all along, even if only by fragments of letters. Rio knew that she was not living well, and not happy.

Every time he dragged me out to release sky lanterns, he had only one wish in his heart: that the lonely, helpless girl he still cared about somewhere deep inside him might be well.

By the time we entered university, Mochizuki Satsuki had already gone too far down a road that led farther and farther from happiness.

At first it was only cigarettes. Then white powder. Then colored pills. At last, syringes.

One mistake led to another. Whenever she still had a shred of clear thought left in her, she tried to let Kamiya Rio go.

Maybe some feelings are simply karmic debts that can never be untangled. The more she ran, the harder Rio chased. It was a dangerous game, and in the end none of them escaped being pulled into the vortex of tragedy.

She needed money. Far too much money. And Rio was only a student. What little he had could never satisfy what she needed.

This girl who had once been beautiful as a rose had lost her soul somewhere along the way.

While Kamiya Rio was working himself to the bone trying to make money, she was blinded by brutal means at the hands of another man's wife. The method was cruel, but everyone believed she had deserved it. No one stood up to say a single word for her.

When Kamiya Rio died, she was still waiting in the tiny room they had rented together, expecting him to bring back delicious fried noodles.

I crouched in front of her and looked at her through tears.

Mochizuki Satsuki, I had hated you once. Hated you so, so much.

I hated that you had been given the one thing I wanted most, and never seemed to know how to treasure it.

Only now did I truly understand why you once said fate had never treated you kindly.

She could not hear a single word I said. She only kept smiling and repeating the same sentence.

"Even if my eyes cannot see, my hands will still remember your face."

IX

That night I bought a great many sky lanterns.

I lit them one by one and sent them up one by one.

They carried with them my longing for Rio and my forgiveness for Mochizuki Satsuki. Higher and higher they flew, farther and farther, until at last they all disappeared.

I do not know where those lanterns drifted in the end.

But I do know this:

For the rest of my life, on no holiday, with no one, will I ever release another sky lantern again.