The Boy Who Blushed

Whenever the sky darkened over Yokohama, people at the east exit of Yokohama Station always seemed to walk faster.

When Tachibana Misaki was seventeen, she transferred from a small mountain town in Nagano to a boarding arrangement in Yokohama, living in a tiny room above a relative's house. She was never very fond of studying. On weekends, what she did most often was help at the newsstand her aunt ran by the station. On sunny days she sold magazines and gum. On rainy days she sold clear plastic umbrellas. She liked watching people: office workers dragging their suitcases, convenience store clerks just off the night shift, students in uniform, hurried travelers. She had always felt that the true temperament of a city was written on the faces of the people brushing past one another.

That was why she liked Yokohama in the rain. The moment it rained, the whole street seemed to fill with stories.

That evening, the downpour came without warning. Misaki ran back and forth across the plaza in front of the station with an armful of umbrellas. She had just called out "Umbrella?" to a man in a suit when someone behind her stopped her.

"I'll take one."

When she turned around, she saw a boy about her own age. Most of his school blazer was soaked through, his hair stuck to his forehead, and his eyes were bright, though his expression was oddly flustered. He casually took a black umbrella and handed her a five-thousand-yen note. Misaki lowered her head to check it, and while she did, the boy simply stood there in the rain watching her, his ears turning red by degrees. By the time she had finally managed to dig out the change and looked up again, the bus doors were already closing. The boy leapt on board with the umbrella in hand, glanced back at her through the fogged glass, and quickly vanished into the curtain of rain.

She had been doing good business that night, but just as she was closing up, a group of punks pretending to buy umbrellas came by. One of them deliberately kept her occupied with pointless questions while another slipped away with the plastic bag holding her money. She chased them half a street in the rain and only managed to snatch back three umbrellas. Not a single bill was left. Misaki cried all night after she got home. What weighed on her mind was not the scolding she would get, but the change she had never managed to hand over. She felt as though she owed the boy with the blushing face a debt, and along with it, an explanation she owed herself.

The next day she went to school with a slight fever. During the break, she leaned in the corridor and stole a look at the lines of students below, only to spot that black umbrella at the tail end of a physical education class. She stared for a long moment, traced the umbrella back, and sure enough found that boy. His name was Koyama Saku, and he was in the class next door. Clutching the change she had pieced together from here and there in her pocket, Misaki ran up to him and stammered that she had not been able to make change the day before, but that if she could borrow the rest, she would pay him back for sure.

Saying, "I'd almost forgotten about it," Koyama Saku slowly flushed red all over again. Misaki could not tell whether it was from the heat or embarrassment. She had just begun to smile when everything in front of her suddenly went black, and she collapsed.

When she woke in the infirmary, Koyama Saku was sitting by the bed keeping watch. The school nurse said she had a fever and anemia and absolutely had to eat lunch properly. At noon he took her to the cheap diner outside the school and ordered a whole tableful of food: fried chicken, ginger pork, potato salad, miso soup, as if he were afraid she might faint from hunger again at any moment. Misaki bent over her food, and heard him say in a low voice, "You don't have to hurry to pay back the rest of that money." All at once, she felt that if heaven had taken away all the money she had worked so hard to earn, it had not left her entirely without compensation.

The first person in class she truly became close to, though, was not Koyama Saku, but Kurumatani Yunsuke.

Yunsuke was tall, loud, always late, and always getting on teachers' nerves, the kind of boy who would be classified as "not very well-behaved" in any school. He was openly good to Misaki. Even when she went to the next class to look for Koyama Saku, he would tag along, acting as if to say, If anything happens, your big brother here will take care of it. Later, when he heard Misaki liked that boy who was always blushing, he nearly slammed the desk. "Are you stupid? Blushing doesn't fill your stomach." Misaki refused to concede and shot back that if that was true, he should try blushing for her himself. Yunsuke rubbed a circle of chalk dust over his face and had her laughing so hard she doubled over.

On the eve of the school festival, the drama club suddenly found itself short a person for a comedy sketch, and Koyama Saku happened to be one of the leads. No one wanted to wear the absurd pig-head costume, but the moment Misaki heard he would be onstage, she picked up the prop without a second thought. She was barely over one meter sixty, and she carried the tall, lanky Koyama Saku all across the stage. At the liveliest moment, the pig mask even fell off, and the entire auditorium dissolved into laughter. Afterward, Koyama Saku treated her to ice cream in front of the station. They sat by the railing overlooking the harbor lights while she told him about all the outrageous and lively little incidents from her hometown. Whenever she got excited, she would talk with her hands. He simply sat there listening, and as he listened, his face turned red again.

That was the moment Misaki decided she had fallen for him.

After that, whenever it rained, Koyama Saku would come to the newsstand and help her sell umbrellas. He said it was because he was afraid that old umbrella vendor from before might give her trouble, but really it seemed more like he was finding excuses to stay by her side. The two of them moved back and forth through the station plaza in raincoats, his long legs carrying him quickly while she called out the prices and handled the money behind him. Once he took her to the underground mall and bought her a wallet with a zipper hard to tug open in passing, saying that this way no one would be able to steal her money again. Holding that wallet, Misaki felt as though she might take flight. She thought that if she only tried a little harder, then perhaps one day she would be able to stand openly at Koyama Saku's side.

But before long, things began to go wrong.

A little shop near the school threw a masquerade party to celebrate the owner's daughter's first anniversary with her boyfriend, and students came whether they knew her or not. Misaki went in wearing a paper butterfly mask, meaning only to have fun, but the moment she looked up she saw Koyama Saku standing beside a long-haired girl. The girl's name was Kana. Her skin was very fair, but the way she spoke was sharp as a needle. Only then did Misaki learn that the ex-girlfriend Koyama Saku had claimed he had "broken up with long ago" had never really gone away at all. In the middle of the music and the smell of beer, Misaki rushed up to him and demanded to know why he had lied. He caught hold of her and said in a low voice that he had reasons he could not explain, and that she should wait a little longer. But Misaki in that moment could not hear a thing. She only felt like the biggest joke in the world.

Worse still, a few days later Kana showed up with several girls and cornered her in the rain. They kicked Misaki's umbrellas one by one into the standing water and stomped them out of shape. Misaki flung herself over them to protect them and looked as miserable as a cat dragged into the mud. In the end both sides were taken to the police station. It was there that the police found that five-thousand-yen note in her wallet and informed her it was counterfeit, part of a recent batch they had been tracking. Misaki's head rang. Every voice around her seemed suddenly very far away.

That bill was the one Koyama Saku had given her the first time he bought an umbrella from her.

Only later did she slowly piece together the truth. Koyama Saku's family had long been helping people hide counterfeit cash. Kana had found out by accident, and used it to force him to stay by her side and never bring up breaking up. The first time he approached Misaki, it had not been because he had fallen for her at first sight. It was only because she looked busy, gullible, and unlikely to make trouble. That day, the color in his face had not come from shyness, but guilt, from feeling ashamed. Afterward, the counterfeit case finally exploded anyway. Koyama Saku's parents were taken away by the police, he dropped out of school, and he seemed to evaporate from the crowd entirely.

Misaki fell badly ill and was hospitalized again for anemia. While the IV dripped into her arm, she kept asking herself why she had loved one person so stubbornly. Perhaps it was only because he had turned back to look at her in the heavy rain. Perhaps only because he had once stood guard outside the infirmary for her. Perhaps only because every time his face reddened, he looked like someone who could not possibly hurt anyone. But it turned out that in this world, even a blush was not necessarily real.

The day she was discharged, she cut her hair short and decided to transfer back to her hometown. Kurumatani Yunsuke came to see her off. For once he did not say anything outrageous. He merely ran alongside the train for a short distance and shouted her name in the rain. Just before the train pulled out, he suddenly told her that the first person who had ever grabbed one of her umbrellas and run was not Koyama Saku, but him. Back then he had had no money on him, and he had not been able to bring himself to come back and return it face to face, so he had quietly hung the umbrella back on the newsstand's door handle. Ever since then, he said, he had remembered the transfer girl who chased after people in the rain trying to sell umbrellas.

Misaki sat there in a daze for a long time. By the time the window had blurred into a sheet of rain, she still had not managed to say anything worth saying.

Many years later, she opened a tiny umbrella shop in her hometown. The shop sold only sturdy long-handled umbrellas and the most ordinary clear plastic ones. People laughed and asked what young person would want to make a living by sitting around waiting for rain. But Misaki thought it was just fine. On rainy days, there would always be someone who needed to be caught and sheltered, and she was willing to be the one to hand them an umbrella.

At twenty-four, Koyama Saku suddenly found her online. He said he had wanted to see her for years, wanted to apologize in person, and wanted to ask how she had been. On the screen his face was faintly red in the glow of the monitor. He was no longer a boy, but Misaki recognized him at a glance. She stared at that face for a very long time, then answered with only one line: "All right. Yokohama."

She returned to Yokohama two days before they were meant to meet. She stayed in a small hotel near the station and spent her days walking alone, slowly, through streets that were both familiar and unfamiliar. The harbor, the overpass, the underground mall, the eaves where she had once taken shelter from the rain. The city seemed not to have changed much, and yet somehow everything had changed. Toward evening, the sky lowered exactly as it used to, and the rain came all at once. Someone carrying an armful of clear umbrellas chased her half a block and asked if she wanted to buy one. Misaki turned around, saw that young, awkward face, and suddenly smiled.

Standing in the rain, she understood for the first time that what she had never been able to forget was perhaps not only Koyama Saku, but also the self she had once been at seventeen, the girl who could give away her whole heart because of a single sentence, a single rainfall, a single moment when a boy's face turned red. She had replayed that instant far too many times over the years, and that was why the flutter in her chest had stretched out so long it had begun to feel like a lifetime.

When a taxi rolled slowly past the station, she did not get in right away. She sent Koyama Saku a message telling him she had already arrived in Yokohama, but wanted to walk by herself a while first. Raindrops landed on the screen and she wiped them away. Then she slipped her phone into her pocket, took a clear umbrella from the boy selling them, and opened it. On the canopy she saw the damp city lights of the whole town reflected back at her.

Some people are meant for reunion. Some people are meant to remain in that one great rainstorm.

And at last she could smile and admit that the boy she had once loved really had blushed. Only from now on, that fact no longer had to keep hold of her.