Only Much Later Did I Learn Which Star You Were

Some girls, when they reach a certain age, sixteen or seventeen, say, suddenly grow beautiful, and the dim light they once gave off turns dazzling. Other girls are born beautiful and clever and cherished, and so they grow proud; their lovely eyes seem perched atop their heads, unwilling to look down at the pitiful little planets revolving around them. But then perhaps one day they suddenly can no longer understand mathematics or physics or chemistry, suddenly grow fat, suddenly become shortsighted, and their perfect world caves in. So it is only much later that we learn to tell, among the people who pass through our lives, which are meteors and which are fixed stars. But by then, can we still meet again? Can we still fall in love? Can we still say, I'm sorry, so you were this kind of star...

He walked toward her, his eyes shining like a little boy gazing at a Christmas Eve present. The fatal thing was that he was so tall, so lean, so handsome. With every step he took toward her, she retreated three in panic until she hit the corner wall. She hid behind the curtain, sweaty fingers clamped around its edge. Izumi Kamiya tugged and tugged but could not pull it aside, and when he let go the entire room heard the girl's breath of relief. Just as Karin Shiraishi thought she had escaped, he whisked the curtain back and, smiling, said, "Seeing you again is enough. Karin Shiraishi." In that instant she stared dumbly at Izumi Kamiya and at his smile, faint as starlight just coming into bloom. She had to admit he was no longer the Piggy Izumi of memory. Boys do change when they grow up. He looked as though he had gone off to Korea for a makeover and come back remade, beautiful head-on, clean in profile, handsome even from a forty-five-degree angle, with a clarity about him like the ringing water of a spring. The whole room erupted at once, bursting into applause as if the whole world had waited century after century for their reunion. But even later Karin could not figure out why, in that moment, she suddenly became as fierce as some wronged heroine in an eight-o'clock melodrama and splashed the drink in her hand straight across that deliriously happy face. She ran. From where he stood he asked, low and melancholy, "Karin Shiraishi... do I still disgust you that much?" Several days later, while buying roasted potatoes at the little stand by the station and practically drooling, Karin thought of Izumi again and muttered a resentful curse. It was all that damned rich girl Moe Yuuki's fault. She had pulled in sponsorship from her father's company and actually held the junior-high reunion in a revolving restaurant. People said the food there was amazingly good. In the end, she thought bitterly, it was all because one part of her had no backbone. She looked down at the round belly on her, swollen as though she were three months pregnant. Taking the piping hot potatoes, she strangely did not eat them at once. She opened her eyes wider and wider and finally made out, beneath the poplar across the street, Izumi Kamiya, the one who kept making girls drift past and drift past again. The softness in his gaze as he watched her seemed to say, How can you be this adorable? If you get any cuter, I'll have to arrest you. While she stood frozen, he hurried across the road, so anxious he even dared run the red light. By the time she shrieked and came to herself, his hand was already around her wrist. To get free, Karin slapped the bowl of spicy potatoes across his face. Chili got into Izumi's eyes. He wept from the burn, but would not let go, only repeated anxiously again and again, pleading, "Karin, don't run." Karin paid him no mind. She bit down on his wrist hard enough to draw blood. Only then did Izumi finally release her. He struggled to open his eyes to see which way she had fled, but he simply could not; every time he tried, the tears poured harder.

Karin, fresh from escaping with her life, was startled by the ringing phone in her backpack. Izumi could not possibly have tracked down her number that fast, could he? Luckily it was only a classmate from high school. She answered, and the girl's voice came through an octave too high. The gist was that some boy in class had visited Moe Yuuki's homepage. Since Moe's beauty was famous across the city, everyone watched her page, and the new reunion photos she had uploaded included quite a few shots of the inconspicuous Karin Shiraishi. Which meant the lie Karin had told when she first entered high school had been exposed. The year of the high-school entrance exams, Karin Shiraishi's name had appeared on the admissions list of an ordinary school. How could that be possible? Karin Shiraishi, whose intelligence and beauty surpassed even Moe Yuuki's, had been a legend in junior high. It was said that for a lot of boys, their first fantasy was Karin Shiraishi and only then Moe Yuuki, which was why on the day she entered school, crowds had packed around her classroom. Fat Karin Shiraishi squeezed inside and said, "Teacher, I'm here to register. My name is Karin Shiraishi." Disappointment rolled out like a tidal wave. "So she's not that Karin Shiraishi." "Just a namesake, probably." "Hell, I thought heaven had finally looked after the boys at Municipal Third High." Karin kept forcing a smile as she lowered her head and squeezed out through the crowd, and one boy still refused to give up. He reached out and tugged at her face as if expecting to peel away a human-skin mask and reveal beneath it the same face that could topple kingdoms. She screamed and denied it. "Sorry. I'm not that Karin Shiraishi." The beautiful, brilliant Karin Shiraishi had vanished into thin air. No high school had heard of her. Some guessed the beauty had gone overseas...

Karin ran into a manga cafe, cursing Moe Yuuki as a beautiful viper, and opened her homepage with trembling fingers. In photo after photo, the Karin who kept stuffing things into her mouth existed only as a pitiful, ridiculous foil to Moe's radiance. And in every picture Izumi Kamiya's gaze crossed the crowd to land on her and stay there. When Karin walked back out, night had deepened and the wind was wild around her. Silently she returned to the street where she had abandoned Izumi. He was still crouched there. Several girls coming home late from evening study stopped to ask in gentle voices whether he needed help, but he kept his tear-filled eyes shut and stubbornly shook his head. She had only just come up behind him when, recognizing her footsteps, he said in a voice light and joyful as if it had grown golden wings, "Karin Shiraishi. You came back. I thought if you ran back to look for me and couldn't find me, that would be awful, so I didn't dare go." He had waited like that before too, alone in the revolving restaurant, looking up through the transparent glass roof at the splendid stars and smiling as he waited in excitement; during that hot summer after junior high, leaving her a message, "Karin, don't be sad. I'll take you to the zoo to cheer you up," then waiting there with a smile in the smell of fresh monkey droppings. Every time he waited, she never came. Today, at last, she had. He was so moved he did not know what to do. "Let's go to the hospital," Karin said. She had just helped him to his feet when a white car rolled to a stop. Seeing the mess his face was in, Moe Yuuki got out with a sigh and, with force hidden under her calmness, took him away from Karin. Pushed aside, Karin only heard her murmur, "Karin Shiraishi, you were the one who threw Izumi Kamiya away back then. So now..."

His eyes were wrapped in thick layers of gauze; they would not be unbandaged for a week. Every five minutes he asked, "Karin Shiraishi, are you still here?" and each time she had to mumble an answer to reassure him. After more than a dozen exchanges, he suddenly sat upright in nervousness and asked timidly, "Karin... may I call you Karin? Can I keep coming to see you from now on? I can help you with your studies. I remember you said in junior high that you wanted to go to Keio University. Ah... that's awful, I don't mean your grades are bad now. I mean... could we be friends? Study together? Go to the amusement park once in a while? When you're unhappy you can call me, no matter how late it is. I'm getting more and more muddled, but you understand, don't you? I just... don't want to lose you. Because you're important." Blindfolded, he was so flustered and afraid, his fingers digging deep creases into the pillow, yet his face kept turning unerringly toward her, as if the eyes beneath the bandages could still look straight into her shivering soul. Karin said nothing for a long time; her eyes seemed to have weathered an entire rainy season. When she finally wanted to speak, Moe said from beside the bed, smoothing his mussed hair in a soft voice, "She just left. She didn't hear what you said." So Karin said nothing. She slipped away along the wall without a sound. Halfway through the night, restless and unable to sleep, Karin pulled down the dust-covered junior-high yearbook from the top of the bookcase. In the group photo, Izumi in his uniform looked like a rice dumpling of a boy, gentle in disposition and timid by nature. Standing in the center of the front row, ringed by everyone else like a moon among stars, was the old Karin, hair falling straight, brows and eyes pale as ink-wash painting. In the picture, Izumi could not keep his attention on the camera; he was glancing sideways at her. Then Karin looked into the mirror. Over the last two years she had swollen a little. No, that was too modest. She had swollen twice over. No, that was too abstract. She had blown up like a balloon. The helplessness of that reality tore her apart like a beast. Whenever she was sad, her stomach woke with it. So let's see how fat you can get, then. Angry at herself, Karin went to the refrigerator and ate against the cold air until she was full. It was the same sweet, glutted sadness she had known during the long vacation after she failed the entrance exam. She did not say a word. She only kept eating. "Karin, you can repeat the year," her mother had said. "You only did badly because you had such a high fever." Karin had shaken her head in silence. Her halo had been that of a genius beauty. To repeat a year would have been humiliation itself. How many girls would pinch their noses and sneer, "Oh, Karin Shiraishi, you're repeating?" Back then her heart, like her stomach, had still been grand. She thought she could go to an ordinary high school and make a princess's return during university entrance exams, go to Keio all the same. But on the first day of school she was completely destroyed. She had grown so fat she did not even recognize herself. The boy who tried to rip off her mask made her understand that she could never go back. She lost all her light in peace and could only pitifully hope that no one remembered the old Karin Shiraishi. The news that Karin Shiraishi really was at Municipal Third High swept through the school and never lost its heat. So many sightseers craned their necks outside her classroom only to leave disappointed, muttering pitying things. No one cared that Karin's heart was jumping on needles, bloody beat after bloody beat. After his injury had healed, Izumi appeared at the gates of Municipal Third High. In that silver-gray uniform he looked as noble and aloof as a calla lily. Karin passed him with her head down; the strong field of grief around her made him seem to sink into deep water. At the side, among a crowd of girls from her school and others, a vicious girl sprang onto her toes and pointed at Karin, shrieking with the excitement of a once-in-a-century department-store sale: "That one, see her? The one swollen up like a caterpillar. That's Karin Shiraishi. Bet you never imagined it, right? She never went abroad. She's been hiding in Municipal Third High all this time!" By the time Izumi rushed over he had already lost all reason. His beautiful face had gone hard and cold. After a ringing slap, he said frostily, "If you bully her again, this won't be the last time I hit you." Then, trembling with panic, he searched the crowd for Karin and never noticed he was standing in the middle of traffic. The next second a motorcycle struck him down. In the shrieking confusion, a plump girl darted forward like a rabbit and threw herself toward him. Dizzy and half-conscious, he wrapped his arms tightly around her, and the very first words out of his mouth were, "Karin, it's all right. You won't be hurt. I won't let anything happen to you." Karin had already grown too strong for tears, but his tears fell above her like floodwater. He was heartbroken. The Karin he loved so much, treasured so much, how could anyone treat her that way?

In junior high, Izumi Kamiya, who secretly loved Karin Shiraishi, was only a fat underachiever. Everyone called him Piggy Izumi. He had a gentle nature and a silly, quiet smile. It was perfectly ordinary for him to like Karin; every male student could understand that. He came early to school every day because Karin came half an hour early every day to review. Every time he passed her desk and stole a glimpse of her tranquil profile, he became so delighted he walked into walls. One day Karin fell asleep at her desk, her delicate rosy cheeks faintly flushed, her long eyelashes combing the clear sunlight. Izumi stared. He stood there at attention, as if paying homage to her sleeping face. Then, in a dizzy spell, he leaned down and kissed her. He was devout as someone kissing an angel. The kiss landed on her forehead. Then a girl's scream woke them both. The girl who saw it pointed at him as if he had committed some monstrous crime. "Oh my God. Piggy Izumi. You actually dared kiss Karin Shiraishi!" Several boys arrived after hearing the news and hauled him into the boys' bathroom to teach him a lesson in morality. After that, the whole class bullied Izumi without restraint. They would knock over his lunchbox while he was eating, and whenever something bad happened it somehow became his fault. Day and night teachers punished him with laps around the field and public-cleaning duty. He fainted several times from low blood sugar. Before the entrance exam ever came, he withdrew from school. The next year he took the exam again and actually got into Municipal First High. When student council president Moe Yuuki saw the tall, bamboo-straight, handsome Izumi at orientation, she was so startled she nearly fell over. Later, when Karin took the newly injured Izumi home again, only his little cousin was there, curled up on the sofa watching Mars and crying her heart out over the male lead's miserable fate. The moment she saw Izumi she cried, "Cousin, did Ling and Luo end up together in the end?" Karin was baffled and asked him why on earth he knew that.

Karin almost gave the answer herself. She had shed plenty of tears over Mars. She had a crush on Vic Zhou; elegance, melancholy, and gloom made the perfect whole. In junior high she had used that as a yardstick to measure all boys and found them inadequate one by one. But Izumi had already replied, "Don't worry. They end up together."

Only then did the little cousin notice the girl standing beside her brother. Her brother was looking at Karin, smiling with his eyes, all awkwardness and shy delight. Taking the hint, she packed up the DVDs into a whole big bag and said, "Then I'll go first, cousin. I'm borrowing your Meteor Garden, Mars, and Silence." Once she left, Karin finally broke. She wiped tears of laughter from the corners of her eyes. Izumi Kamiya, of all people, actually collected that many romance idol dramas. Izumi was embarrassed at first, but when he saw how happily she was laughing, he suddenly laughed too, just like the gentle, silly Piggy Izumi from junior high. When they had laughed enough, Karin helped him onto the bed and tucked the blanket around him. As she was about to go, he caught her hand, his face red as a monkey's backside, and said, "Karin, my birthday is coming up. Will you come?"

At that moment Karin lowered her eyes and saw the photograph of her from junior high on his bedside table. In it she was wrinkling her nose, her smile unbearably sweet. When he realized she had noticed it, even the back of his neck turned red. Lowering his head, he stammered, "This, that..." and had no idea how to explain himself.

When Karin walked out of the Kamiya house, sunlight enclosed her, but it could not warm her for a long time. The world, to her, was a cruel ice cellar, mercilessly taking away all her fresh young dreams. And yet what Izumi had just said kept echoing in her ears: "I used to have three rolls of fat on my stomach. If you pinched my arms, there was more flesh there than on yours. So what? You're still you, Karin Shiraishi. Even if you're disfigured, even if you're blind, even if you're deaf, even if you're plump like this now, as long as you're healthy, you're still you, Karin Shiraishi." Why not? Suddenly courage flooded her. She leaped down the steps, lifted her face, and shouted up to the second floor, "Izumi Kamiya!" A moment later he hauled himself to the window, staring in shock at the girl below. Only when he was sure it was really her did his face break into a dazed smile. "Izumi Kamiya, let me tell you something. I have a huge appetite. I want a three-layer fruit cream cake, and whole roast lamb too, six parts lean and four parts fat, the kind that turns silky the moment you bite into it." "Okay!" he answered, overjoyed.

Karin stared oddly at his lawless smile, then slowly lifted her eyes to the sky. The clouds were white, moving lazily. All at once she felt much lighter.

For the great eater Karin Shiraishi, Izumi chose a buffet for his birthday. The moment Karin saw the chocolate fountain, the sushi platters, and the glistening roast lamb, she smiled until her eyes vanished. Like a little shock trooper charging into battle, she plunged into that sea of food and stacked a mountain on her plate. The little cousin came over carrying fruit and was struck dumb by the state of Karin's eating. Embarrassed, Karin dragged Izumi off to one side and piled whatever she saw onto his plate, whispering, "Today you have to show what you can do. If you don't, I'll be the only one embarrassing myself." She remembered that Piggy Izumi had loved food too. The little cousin opened her mouth as if to say something, then said nothing. Because Izumi, holding that mountain of food, looked so astonished and happy, like some foolish concubine who had waited forever for a coldhearted emperor. With mouths full, he and Karin kept looking at each other and smiling and smiling. The little cousin muttered, "Do whatever you want. To die under a peony is romantic even as a ghost." Only an hour later, Karin was supporting Izumi outside a drugstore while he lay faint in her arms, fragile as an infant. The little cousin came hurrying out with medicine, stuffed a fistful of pills into his mouth, and sighed again and again. Karin was full of guilt. She had not known Izumi's stomach trouble was this serious. Halfway through the meal he had suddenly said he was going to the restroom for a moment. When he did not come back for a long time, a staff member pushed the door open and found him collapsed on the floor amid vomit. "I know you, Karin Shiraishi," the little cousin said in the tone of a world-weary old woman. "The idiot in your arms has said your name so many times my ears have gone numb. When Izumi was little, he was actually very lovable, pretty as a little girl. But his immunity was poor, and he got sick easily. He kept taking steroid medicine. It made him better quickly, but it also fattened him into Piggy Izumi. That would have been nothing. His heart was good. He'd break his bread in half for the pigeons in the square and help old ladies across the street. He fell in love too, and of all people he fell in love with you. He kissed you once like a fool and paid dearly for it. After the classmates' teasing, his health got worse again. He left school to recover. The doctor prescribed steroids that really worked for him, but he refused to take them anymore. A boy who had never cared about his weight cried and said he wanted to get thin. After that, every time he ate a little too much, guilt drove him to the bathroom where he'd stick fingers down his throat and not relax until he'd vomited everything up. He tormented that fragile stomach of his so badly that later, whenever he ate too much, his body would reject it on its own and he would throw up clean. He ran like mad. He studied like mad. When I asked him why he was pushing himself so hard, he took out your photo. His face lit up with this holy, foolish brightness and he said dreamily that someday he wanted to become someone worthy of standing beside you. I asked him what kind of boy you liked. He pulled out Mars, pointed to the male lead who had finally grown into a real actor, and said with a little jealousy, 'That's the one she likes best. A little melancholy, very handsome, fearless in love, like a lonely count from a literary novel.' He watched the dramas you liked and read the romances you liked. He knew your pride came from waiting with all your heart for a hundred-percent count of that kind. He didn't just like you. He lived for you. He was quick-tempered and soft-hearted, but he forced himself not to retreat in danger, forced himself to stand alone, forced himself to become good enough and strong enough. That love carried him through his hardest days, until he was tall and thin, until he turned beautiful, until his very soul had grown into the perfect count you would love. He likes you. Admires you. Misses you. Loves you. Karin Shiraishi, the way he loves you is by fulfilling every one of your fantasies." The little cousin looked at the sleeping Izumi. "Pitiful, isn't he? Foolish, right? Yes. That's exactly how foolish he is. Foolish beyond repentance." She strode away. Karin hailed a taxi and, holding Izumi as tears streamed down her face, crossed more than half the city.

At the Kamiya house, Moe Yuuki stood at the door in a pink dress like a newly opened rose, a gift in her hands. She had wanted to surprise him, but by the time she had finished waiting in the dark her heart had gone cold. When she saw Karin supporting Izumi, she stood up with a desolate smile and said in a voice shattered by rage, "Karin Shiraishi, you have no shame. You never even liked Izumi. Now that he's handsome and smart, you just want to borrow his light so people will look at you again. I'm not like you. I liked Izumi Kamiya when he was still Piggy Izumi in junior high. The other boys were so shallow, they thought smoking, fighting, and waiting in an alley with a guitar made them handsome. Only Izumi was careful and patient. Once our class lost a ball game. You and I both cried. All the boys surrounded you, and all the girls were jealous and wanted nothing to do with us. Izumi felt bad for you too, but when he saw me crying all alone, he came over kindly, told me bad jokes, and fumbled to wipe away my tears. I understood very early that appearances are only a trick; the heart is what matters. While you were still shallowly enjoying the thrill of being adored by everyone, I had already discovered that Izumi Kamiya's heart was more precious than diamonds. So you don't deserve to fight me for him." After standing there for a very long time, Karin bent to Izumi's ear and whispered, "Happy birthday." Then, with utmost solemnity, she handed him over to Moe like the sacred transfer of a national treasure between two countries. She had never hated to let go of something so much, but in the end she steeled herself and ran. The night was cold. She shivered in it. She knew she had already come to like Izumi Kamiya very, very much. But she also knew that no matter how much she liked him, it was still less than Moe liked him. When Izumi had been only a stone, Moe had already known he was a star. Karin had been too late. She no longer deserved to dream such a dream.

The little cousin came to look for Karin more often than Izumi did. Karin hid from him, refusing his calls and dodging him whenever she saw him, having someone pass along the message, "I don't want to see him and be reminded how pitiful I am." But she could not refuse the little cousin. The girl was only in junior high and already knew that if you wanted to hook a boy you had to give him a little pain and then a little sweetness, agree once, refuse three times. Karin curled up pitifully under her blanket, listening as the cousin said Izumi stared at her photograph the way thirsty people imagine plums. According to her, Izumi believed his mistake was making Karin feel the gap between them, just as he had once felt it when he loved her. So the fool stuffed himself like a pig, but his stomach absorbed nothing; it only left the room reeking sour from vomit. He had been rushed to the emergency room several times, and every time Moe had been the one beside him. Feverish and half-conscious, he would cry and murmur, "How do you make other people like you?" Each time he tried so hard to close the distance, only to discover that Karin was still just as far away. When Karin asked the little cousin why she kept coming, the girl stuck out her small chest and declared, "Back then I watched you torment my brother. Now I want to see how my brother torments you, how you can't eat or sleep, how love makes you thin and foolish." By the end of the speech she herself had grown melancholy, hugging her knees and muttering, "Why is loving someone so hard? Maybe I should break up with my little boyfriend." One day the little cousin burst into Karin's house in a fury and shouted, "Satisfied now? The ignorant boy went off with the witch." At Moe's birthday party, with tears in her eyes, Moe smiled as she recalled the girl who had been second-best forever and had fallen in love with Piggy Izumi. She said one sentence so true it drew tears from everyone there, including Izumi: "Izumi Kamiya, when everyone loved you, I loved you humbly too. When everyone stopped loving you, I still loved you." Couldn't one say it this way as well, Karin Shiraishi? When everyone loved you, Piggy Izumi loved you humbly too. When everyone stopped loving you, Izumi Kamiya still loved you. Karin had once believed that. And yet perhaps Izumi was tired. He said yes. He would feel sorry for the Moe who had once had no one to comfort her, just as he would feel sorry for the Moe who had silently guarded a hopeless love that only she knew the pain of. That was kindness, not love. He had spent all his love on Karin. Then it was time for the university entrance examinations. When Karin walked into the exam room, the proctor compared her to her photo three times before he dared let her in, and even called the principal of Municipal Third High to confirm she wasn't a stand-in. After the results were posted, Keio University held a party for incoming freshmen. Karin arrived late because of traffic. By the time she got there, every soul in the room had already reached the height of revelry. She was the only one left sober. And then she saw Izumi Kamiya there with Moe Yuuki. Moe had known he would apply to Keio, so this year she had applied to Keio too.