The Music Box Remembers Spring

I forgot everything that ever happened. Or perhaps I only pretended to. I heard the doctor say, "She's lost her memory. Maybe it will come back someday." So I just grinned at them foolishly.

Last night I had a dream. A strange village, a strange field, and a train on a winding line that kept passing them again and again. On the fifth day I got off, carefully buried the music box beneath the seventh tree, and thought: this way no one will find it. This way it will be mine forever.

Spring is the season I hate most, because that was when I lost my music box. That day I turned over the table and the bed nine times, searched the room three times, nearly found the corpse of every cockroach in the house, and still the music box was gone. So I ran all the way to the dump two li away and searched it inch by inch. Worst of all, there was a gale that day, a real force-seven or force-eight wind. I must have looked completely insane. Kamiya Yuma said so later. "I met you at your most catastrophic," he told me. "Have you ever imagined what kind of fate that makes between us?" I smiled faintly and said, without changing expression, "A doomed one." It really was. I was busy searching when he sprang out of a mountain of trash beside me like one of the rats that sometimes darted out of the heap, lifted the blackened thing in his hand, and said, "Are you looking for this?" "My music box? My music box?" I lost control at once. My eyes were full of hope and pleading. "Please give it back to me. It's very important to me." "But how do you prove it's yours?" he asked. "It's very old. The black paint has come off the left corner. The middle got crushed once. But if you wind it up, it can still sing. The tune goes like this. 'The doll and the little bear dance, dance, dance, one-two-one, they dance a circle round and round...'" I was frantic. I pulled a hundred-yen bill from my pocket and held it out to him. "Please, just give it back." Kamiya Yuma looked at the money in my hand, then weighed the thing in his own. "It's only a piece of junk. Why do you want it? A hundred yen could buy you a new one. But..." He smiled. "I don't want the money. Just tell me your name." His eyes were quick and lively as they searched my face. So I said, "Hayakawa Dan. Dan, the one that means warmth." "Hayakawa Dan," he repeated. "All right. Be good, little sister. Too bad what your big brother picked up wasn't a music box. What he picked up was a magnet..." "What? You lied to me?" I hurled the bag of rotten banana peels I had just picked up straight at him, added, "You damn trash-picker," and then squatted down and burst into tears. If every person has a soul, then that music box was mine. I had lost my soul. What was I supposed to do now?

After twenty-four hours of feeling empty and forty-eight hours of dragging myself through life, life still had to go on. I couldn't go around pouring out my misery to everyone like some tragic widow. At least somebody had listened to her. At least for a while she had been comforted. But what about me? Only I knew what that music box meant. I could only tell one person: Shiraishi Yuri. "Yuri," I said, "the music box is gone. The only thing Asakura Minato left behind, and I lost it. Do you think I'm useless? Help me think. Maybe I put it somewhere. It's been so long even I've forgotten." Yuri, clean and pale, with simple trusting eyes, was my best friend. Perhaps she had once cried because I told the story of Asakura Minato too vividly, and so when my music box went missing, she felt the pain too. "Then what do we do?" she said. "Let's look for it together." But that day we never made it to the dump. Right in front of the hospital gate, Yuri let out a scream. Flailing awkwardly to shake off a boy who was trying to latch onto her, she shouted, "Dan, save me!" So I exploded like a fishwife and went in with fists and feet, left hook, right kick, until the person I hit cried out in pain, "Hayakawa Dan, what are you trying to do?" "Dan!" Yuri's face changed from shock to delight. "You must be Dan's boyfriend, right?" Boyfriend? I turned it over in my head a few times before I remembered that he was the bastard from the dump. "You'd better not be rotten to the core," I said. "If you pick up used syringes at the hospital and sell them to shady dealers, do you know how many people you'll kill? Get lost." Kamiya Yuma coolly lifted his arm to show me Yuri's hand clutching his sleeve, then shamelessly leaned in and said, "Say it properly. I'm the one being grabbed here, okay? Somebody else is the one insisting I become Dan's boyfriend, okay?" The two of them made me so angry my heart split into eight pieces. I sent him flying with a kick and roared, "My boyfriend is Asakura Minato. The one and only Asakura Minato in the whole universe!"

That year there were misunderstandings mixed into everything. Kamiya Yuma was not a scavenger at all. He was one of the top students at Kyoto Institute of Technology. He hung around the dump because what other people threw away sometimes made the perfect parts for his little inventions. I looked at him impatiently and said sourly, "What does that have to do with me? I don't want to see you. Go away." Kamiya Yuma shrugged. "All right then. But can I invite the two of you to go see the cherry blossoms with me this weekend? I heard we've had lots of spring rain this year. The blossoms are beautiful. And you..." He smiled at Yuri as brightly as a sunflower. "Little sister, you'll come, won't you?" "Yes!" Yuri waved happily at him. "I'll definitely come!" Kamiya Yuma really was clever. In one stroke he found my weak point. Yuri had stared at the lavender we planted for two whole days and said, "Dan, let's go see flowers that have already opened." She had waited for that lavender with such lonely patience that I couldn't refuse. So I took my twelve parts reluctance and went with her. On Saturday morning, Kamiya Yuma waited for us at the gate of Kyoto University, camera hanging from his neck, grinning from ear to ear. "Hayakawa Dan," he said, "I knew you'd come back. Come on. Let's take a picture to commemorate our first date." I wanted to stay out all night somewhere and then go home and cry, but when I saw him again he was still all sunlight and enthusiasm, as if nothing at all had happened.

With a stiff face, I let Kamiya Yuma push me into position at the gate of Kyoto University so he could take a picture with Yuri. Then Yuri skipped over to him, laughing. "Dan, let me take one of you two. I know how this works. You press this button, and you'll be inside the picture. Hurry, make a pose."

Yuri nearly drove me mad. In the photos there was my furious steamed-bun face again and again, Kamiya Yuma flashing scissors with his fingers, my mushroom haircut, Kamiya Yuma's cocky crossed legs.

Then he lowered his voice and asked, "Yuri is your sister, isn't she? I could tell at once she's different from other people. Some families, when one child becomes like that, they have another..." I cut him off. "Her surname is Shiraishi and mine is Hayakawa, all right? She only became like this because of an accident. The doctors say she's forgotten everything that came before. Her mind is only about five years old. Don't get any ideas about her, or I'll tear you to pieces." Kamiya Yuma made a small sound and said, "Sorry." "And what about the music box?" he asked after a moment. "The music box was a gift from Asakura Minato. He went abroad. He's my boyfriend. I miss him a lot." The moment I said it, I regretted it. I stamped my foot. "Why do you have so many questions? Are you running some kind of census?" He was left awkward and speechless, and luckily Yuri came running back just then. "There are so many cherry blossoms inside. Come on, both of you..." So she dragged me away, and I smiled as I ran with her from one tree to another, from one stranger to the next. That day I seemed to forget my unhappiness. I forgot that after Yuri and I had left our old lives behind, nobody like him had appeared around us for a very long time. He stayed beside us, playing with us, laughing with us, almost as close as family, almost like an understudy who had stepped into somebody else's role.

Because of one season of cherry blossoms, Kyoto University became Yuri's favorite place and mine. We pressed fallen petals into books, put them into bottles, scattered them across the man-made lake. Pink and white, and simply looking at them made you feel at peace. Once Yuri pointed into the distance and asked me, "That grandmother has been sitting under the tree all day. What do you think she's thinking about?" What indeed. Maybe she was thinking about the man who had once sworn himself to her, who said he would return when the cherry trees flowered, and still had not come back. That was what I thought in my heart, but what I said to Yuri was, "Are you hungry? Let's go get something to eat." The food had already been bought. Kamiya Yuma stood there smiling and beckoning me over. "You two were having such a good time I almost hated to spoil the mood. It's just a pity everything I bought has gone cold. Yuri, this is for you." He handed the bag to Yuri and flicked a look at me, so I had no choice but to follow him to a quieter corner. He was very serious that day. He hesitated a while before saying, "Hayakawa Dan, let's be together." I lifted my chin. "And why do you think that just because you say you want to date me, I'll say yes?"

He looked at me and said, "Because you know how to taste happiness out of bitterness, down to the smallest detail. Then let me stay beside you two. The two of you make me feel tender." Then he gave a rueful smile. "I knew you'd say something like that. So let me step back and just stay beside you, all right?" I felt a faint reluctance rise in me, and while I was still wondering how to refuse his kindness, a girl burst out and ruined the whole moment. "Kamiya Yuma, you can't be with her. Come with me." She seized the front of his shirt and tried to drag him away from me. The scene felt strangely familiar, and that was why I laughed. "What are you two doing? Staging a rescue so he won't be too embarrassed after I reject him?" Of course I knew she spoke that way because she liked him, but my joke broke the tension. Color came back into Kamiya Yuma's pale face and he said, "Dan, so you saw right through it. Takahashi Kaori, stop pulling..." But Yuri knew nothing about any of this. With sticky rice still stuck to her mouth, she came charging over in outrage. "What are you doing? Why are you pulling him?" She rushed up and tugged at the girl with all her strength. "You're not allowed to steal Dan's boyfriend..." Kaori Takahashi got angry. The moment she let go, Yuri fell to the ground and burst into tears. "You're not allowed! You're not allowed..." But Kaori paid her no attention at all. She walked straight up to me. "I'm Kaori Takahashi. And you?" I didn't tell her my name. I ran over, helped Yuri to her feet, wiped away her tears, then turned back to Kamiya Yuma as if I were deliberately provoking Kaori. "Wait for me at the old place tomorrow," I said. "You know it, right?" A lot of people lose because of obsession. Kaori's eyes could not bear a grain of sand because she liked someone. And wasn't I exactly the same? We could not bear this grain or that grain, and in the end we could not even bear ourselves.

I remember the laughter left behind on the narrow lane in front of our house. I remember the shy streaks of chalk on the old wall. I remember the warmth still lingering on Asakura Minato's bicycle seat, and that shabby music box that held all our past inside it: the breeze, the swing, those days of gentle light. So I had to go back to the dump and search it properly from top to bottom. Kamiya Yuma got agitated when he heard what I wanted. He had come happily, wearing a new shirt, with a new haircut and popcorn from the shop on the corner in his hands, clearly treating the whole thing as a date. So when I finished talking he just stared. "Hayakawa Dan, are you serious? We're really doing this again?" "What else are we supposed to do? Since you were able to fool me that day, it means you must have seen it. Either give it back, or help me look." After that I bent down and started moving forward inch by inch through the rotting smell. But Kamiya Yuma didn't help. He watched me go from east to west, from south to north, watching my hope turn to fury, until at last he said, "Hey. Stop looking. Come here. I'll give it to you." "Where is it?" I was wild with excitement. I thought my little performance had worked. But Kamiya Yuma only laid a hand lightly on my palm. "Here," he said. "Air." Then he added, "Hayakawa Dan, this place was cleared out yesterday. What you're seeing now is new garbage. Your music box is really gone." Then I truly despaired. That huge dump could not hold all my tears. I felt as if I might faint. "Was that broken music box really so important to you?" he asked. Kamiya Yuma could be so innocent that he always managed to pry open the wrong wound. So the next thing he saw was a slap coming down on him with thunder and wind behind it. "What do you think?" I said. "Asakura Minato, Yuri, and I grew up together. We went from preschool all the way to high school, and we were always close. Yuri and I both liked Asakura Minato. We once promised that no matter which one of us he chose, the other would give her blessing, and our friendship would last forever. He gave me that music box on my eighteenth birthday. After that Yuri suffered a head injury in an accident, and Asakura Minato got accepted to a university overseas, and we were all scattered apart." "Huh?" he said. "And what does that prove?" "It proves Asakura Minato liked me. It proves I am not allowed to lose that music box." I said it with absolute certainty, then turned and plunged back into the endless trash, hoping against hope that luck would return it to me.

I searched from morning until noon that day. In the afternoon the wind rose again, and I looked like some windblown demon. At last Kamiya Yuma couldn't stand it anymore. He came over and caught my hand hard. "Are you sure he liked you? Are you sure he hasn't forgotten you? He's already gone. Watching you keep searching like this makes me feel as if you're forcing meaning onto something, and it hurts to watch." "Then what am I supposed to do?" I grabbed his collar as though I were mad, and the tears came in a flood again. "Should I have run after him and said I love you, don't go, come back? You don't understand this feeling. You really don't."

Cherry blossoms open early and fall fast. In less than half a month, all that former splendor had turned into clusters of leaves. I was sitting under a tree, mourning the scene, when Kaori Takahashi appeared and threw me a dirty look. "I was afraid you wouldn't come. Didn't expect you to be this punctual." Holding a withered blossom between my fingers, I looked at her sidelong. "What do you want with me?" What else could Kaori Takahashi want except to tell me to keep my distance from Kamiya Yuma? Yet she stood there insisting that he was always trying to get close to me, as if she herself couldn't believe it. "Hayakawa Dan, don't laugh," she said. "I always feel like you're some kind of fox spirit. You came from who knows where, and you've wrapped yourself around Kamiya Yuma so he can't get away." "That's a lovely idea," I said. "If I were really a fox spirit, I'd have gone off to act in Strange Tales already. What would I still be doing here?" The comparison was so ridiculous and so infuriating that all I could do was answer, "If I don't let him go, what are you going to do? Pull out a spirit mirror and capture me?" "You don't even like him, so why won't you let him go?" She was so busy pressing that point that she failed to notice my temper rising. And that finally set mine off. "How do you know I don't like him?" I asked. "I..." Her mouth moved as she searched weakly for a reason. "I just know. And if you dare toy with him, I won't go easy on you." The truth was that Kaori Takahashi was lovesick and I was stubborn to the point of self-destruction, and I almost seemed to be asking for trouble with the way I spoke. So I asked exactly how she meant to not go easy on me, and whether she could demonstrate. She hesitated for two seconds, then gave me a black eye. My eye really did turn panda-black that day. Yuri sat in front of the television, trying to imitate something she had seen by rolling an egg over the bruise. Whether my skin was too bad or the egg was too old, half an hour later my eye looked exactly the same. Yuri panicked, shoved the egg into my hand, said, "I'll think of another way," and ran off. What other way could innocent Yuri possibly think of? With a mind like hers, all she could imagine was that if there were someone else in the world as hurt as I was, then nobody would laugh at me anymore. So she went to find Kaori Takahashi and planned to punch her back. But Kaori was not someone who went down easily. By the time I arrived, she had already pushed Yuri over several times. Even then Yuri was still determined. "Dan, I have to avenge you." But avenge what? There were so many people standing around watching. If the two of you weren't embarrassed, I was. I rushed forward to pull them apart, but the force of my charge made them both let go at once. Yuri in particular staggered backward on momentum, all the way to the edge of the road, and fell hard. By the time Kamiya Yuma arrived, half the crowd had already dispersed. I helped Yuri to the side and was about to buy her some water when she said, "Dan, why am I here? My head..." She touched the back of her head and fainted. I cried out in shock, "Yuri, wake up!" Kamiya Yuma was frantic too. "Get her to the hospital. Hurry!"

Nothing we did could change the sorrowful cast of those days. In green May, along a stone-paved lane, I walked quickly with a thermos lunchbox in my hands. Inside were freshly fried steaks, salad I had just dressed, and fresh juice. I tiptoed up behind Kamiya Yuma. He turned, made a shushing gesture, and smiled brightly. "I saw you." Then he said, "Yuri is all right. The doctor says that after another two days of observation she can leave the hospital. And there's something new. She seems to have some awareness of the past now. She may recover." I handed him the lunchbox and suddenly didn't know what to say, so I made an excuse about wanting to walk around. When I had gone quite a distance, I looked back. Yuri's eyes were fixed on me, and there was something in them besides innocence. In the lobby I saw Kaori Takahashi. She had brought a great deal of fruit, yet stubbornly stood at the information desk waiting for us. "Hayakawa Dan, I have something to say to you." She must have liked Kamiya Yuma very much, because as she sat there talking, tears welled up and spilled over. "Liking someone is such exhausting work," she said. "Even when you know it's a long, tiring kind of exercise, you still keep going." "I know," I said, and took out a tissue to wipe her tears. "But I can promise you one thing. If I don't like him, I absolutely won't be with him." Kaori cried for a long time, so hard that I saw all the softness in a girl's heart, saw my former self in her. But when she stood up, her temper had come back. "Hayakawa Dan," she said, "I'll find proof that he doesn't belong with you." What could I do to stop her? All I could say was, "Wonderful. I'll be waiting." My life really had not felt this stormy in a long time. I found myself almost expecting what would come next. But in truth I was not nearly as pleased as I looked. On the road flooded with sunlight, I turned back, my breath tasting like soda water, and every breath hurt in my lungs. Old things and new scenery injured the heart in exactly the same way. Then Kamiya Yuma ran up to me in excitement and said, "Yuri seems to be getting her memory back. Just now she said Asakura Minato's name..." "Really? That's wonderful." I wanted desperately to run to her at once and talk to her, but after only two steps toward the ward I stopped. I needed a long stretch of time to think. If Yuri got her memory back, what would that mean for me? Something good or something terrible? A continuation of love, or the breaking of friendship? In the end I decided to leave the hospital. "Kamiya Yuma, please take good care of Yuri," I said. "I'll come see her another time." In fact I never truly left. I stood outside the room and watched Yuri sleeping, watched the startled look on her face when she woke, and heard her ask Kamiya Yuma, "Has Dan really always been good to me?" "Yes," he said. "The two of you are like the fine rootlets on a ginseng root, all grown together." Yuri smiled. "Then I'll wait for Dan to come see me."

That year, I never went to see Yuri. I fell ill instead and ran a high fever for three days. I hid in online games, devoured novels, watched pirated films, trying to bury myself inside some virtual world built of words and images, but nothing really buried anything. I muttered nonsense in my fever for two whole days, and when it broke I still insisted on slinging a sketch board over my shoulder and going with my classmates to paint in a remote village. In the curling chimney smoke and falling dusk there, my brush stayed mute and the paper in front of me stayed blank. Every day Kamiya Yuma called and reported Yuri's progress in recovering her memory. "Yuri remembers that you both liked the same white dress," he said. "Yuri remembers the song you used to sing together. Yuri remembers the diary you wrote together." "Does she remember the boy we both liked?" I asked. "Yes," he said. "She remembers." Three years later, Yuri finally remembered all of it. I heard that the first thing she did after leaving the hospital was call Asakura Minato, then go back to our old high school and turn her leave of absence into a formal withdrawal. "Asakura Minato," she said, "I'm coming to find you." I waited in silence, painted in the last glimmer of firefly light, and came back to live in this city again like a mouse with its tail tucked in. "Did you do something to Yuri?" Kamiya Yuma asked me. "Is that why you're too guilty to see her?" I shook my head. "No. Do you believe me?" Kamiya Yuma only smiled. "Yuri is leaving. Come see her off." At the international airport in June, I dawdled for ages before finally arriving one hour before boarding. Yuri ran over and hugged me tightly. "Dan, I'm going now. You have to take care of yourself." We didn't need many words. We just cried until our eyes swelled, cried all the way to the boarding gate. Then Yuri turned and waved to me. Her face was full of happiness. "Goodbye, Dan." "Goodbye," I said. "To both of you." I walked back wearing the expression of someone carrying grief, and near the dump I saw Kaori Takahashi waiting for me. Gone was the helplessness she had shown at the hospital. She waved at me in triumph. "Hayakawa Dan, I told you I'd find proof. Proof that you don't like him." "Where's the proof?" Kaori Takahashi reached into her backpack and took out something that flashed for only a moment before I cried out, "My music box. How did it end up with you?" Kaori wound it up, and with the tune playing she said lightly, "I stole it from Kamiya Yuma while he wasn't paying attention. It's falling apart, but I still found the name Asakura Minato on it. So what, he was your boyfriend?" I ignored the question. I only watched as she weighed it in her hands twice, then hurled it into the garbage heap. Someone had set old rubber on fire there just then, and the moment my music box fell in it was swallowed whole. I never did try any heroic trick like snatching chestnuts from a fire. Kamiya Yuma held me in a death grip from behind. He wanted to explain that in his hurry to leave he'd forgotten to put the music box away. But what interest did I have in listening? I kicked and bit and fought to break free and throw myself into the flames, but in the end I could only collapse beside the smoking heap, crushed and desolate. This time my soul was really gone.

The lavender bloomed. No one asked about my boyfriend anymore, and Asakura Minato never came back. I couldn't even be bothered to ask after their happy life. I only wanted to live quietly inside memory, but there were always so many third people trying to smash what little hope I had left. Kamiya Yuma came to see me and said again, "Hayakawa Dan, let's be together." I did not look into his eyes. Cruelly, I said, "I'm sorry. I never liked you. Not from the moment you found my music box and didn't return it. You lied to me, and I will never like you." "But is liking someone really more important than being liked?" Kamiya Yuma pulled me back as I tried to walk away. "Yuri hasn't remembered everything yet. She only remembers that the three of you were together that day, and that you accidentally knocked her down the stairs, and after she rolled down she remembered nothing. But I know the rest. I found a secret inside the music box. Under the little spinning doll, carefully carved: 'For Yuri.'" He shouldn't have driven me that far. He shouldn't have forced me to remember Yuri's betrayal. Yuri had already lost her memory, and for so long I had told myself to let it go, that any wrong in the world was mine. But my nerves snapped. "That's right," I said. "That music box never belonged to me in the first place. I was greedy and kept it for three years, kept a pair of lovers on opposite sides of the world. So what? If Yuri hadn't broken our promise and told Asakura Minato she loved him at my birthday party, would I have panicked and stumbled and knocked her down the stairs?" Kamiya Yuma's face changed. It filled with pity for me, compassion for me. He wanted to pat my shoulder and say, "Dan, this is my fault..." But someone rushed up from behind us and said, "You music-box fox spirit, still trying your charms?" I was shoved down the stairs, just as Yuri had been shoved three years before by me. As I fell, I remembered my own frozen horror from that day and the cry that tore out of Asakura Minato, but by the time my head struck the stairs I knew nothing anymore. Would the story repeat itself?

I forgot everything that ever happened. Or perhaps I only pretended to. I heard the doctor say, "She's lost her memory. Maybe it will come back someday." So I just grinned at them foolishly. Kaori Takahashi held my hand while we crossed the street, and I shook her off. Kamiya Yuma waited for me at the corner, and I passed him as if he were a stranger. After a while, they both stopped appearing. Alone, I learned again what quiet life felt like, what it meant for the world to be peaceful and the years gentle. I watched the cherry blossoms bloom again. I watched the calendar turn to my birthday. That day was meant to be different, perhaps, because I received a gift, mysterious in its EMS wrapping. I tore off the packaging and felt my heart tremble. Who could have sent this to me? Asakura Minato, who now knew the truth? Yuri, who had regained her memory? Kamiya Yuma, who thought I still needed a music box? Or Kaori Takahashi, trying to make it up to me? It might have been any one of them. But now I had "lost my memory," hadn't I? I ought to be happier. So I wound it up and listened cheerfully as it sang: "The doll and the little bear dance, dance, dance, one-two-one. They dance in a circle, dance, dance, dance..."