Will the Stand-In Grow Old Too?

By the time he finally understood who it was he loved, the whole world was no longer as it had been when he first met her. Jun Hazuki dreamed of Chiya Matsubara again: the boy in a white shirt and blue trousers lowering his forehead to hers, his voice unchanged, warming her to the marrow of her bones. She reached out for him. Her hand closed on emptiness, and she woke. Tree shadows from outside trembled across the room. Where had Chiya Matsubara ever been? She opened both hands and looked into them. She did not know whether it was because she was too strong that she still could not stop longing for him.

That meeting came toppling toward her like a row of dominoes.

It was early May. Jun was in an old secondhand bookshop leafing through a volume of Yeats when Nozomi Morizaki called. Nozomi's anxious voice burst out over the line: "Jun, if you don't get here right now, I'm never speaking to you again." At that very moment Jun had come upon the translation of "When You Are Old" and reached the line about how love fades away, then climbs the mountains and hides its face among the stars. Her heart had begun to ache for no reason. Before she could answer, Nozomi had already hung up, leaving only the busy tone. Only then did Jun remember that it was Nozomi's birthday and a whole group of friends had arranged to celebrate at karaoke. She alone had forgotten and drifted out after school to buy books instead. It was because of that that she had managed to find the Yeats collection she wanted. When she stepped out of the shop, it was raining. She followed the awnings of the little stores along the street. At the intersection she saw a taxi pull over and someone getting out. Delighted, she ran toward it. She ran too fast, and the hem of her wool skirt snagged on a bicycle parked by the roadside. When she yanked free, the bicycles went over one after another like dominoes. She stopped dead and looked in horror at the long row she had knocked down, then rushed over and began setting them upright one by one. She had no idea how foolish she looked. People passing under umbrellas kept covering their mouths to laugh. Halfway through, someone came over. Looking down, she first saw only a pair of Converse sneakers. When she raised her eyes in flustered surprise, she saw a boy with star-bright brows and eyes crouching beside a bicycle, his hand closing over its handlebar as he said in a faintly reproachful voice, "You're always like this, so muddled, always waiting for someone else to clean up after you." Jun stared at him in confusion. His hair was cut very short. His skin had the clean texture she liked. How could she possibly have forgotten ever meeting a boy as handsome as this one? Her life had been quiet, her circle of friends small. She was certain she had never known such an extraordinary boy. And yet he spoke as though the two of them were already acquainted. She stood there watching him set the bicycles back up one by one, a thousand images flashing through her mind, but she still could not place him. At last he stopped, looked at her standing blankly in the rain, and came over to take her hand. "Come on. Are you trying to stand here until you get sick?" Jun came back to herself, murmured an answer, and let him pull her by both hands to the bus shelter.

Just then a bus went past, splashing water onto her. The rainwater ran cold down her long hair in drops. He reached over to brush it aside, his fingers touching her forehead, and his eyes lit up. "Anna," he said, using a name she had never heard before. A shiver ran through her. Her heart began pounding as if it might leap out through her throat. Red in the face, she looked at him and asked whether he had mistaken her for someone else. He shut his eyes briefly, then shook his head hard, flushing with embarrassment. "I'm sorry." Only then did she catch the faint smell of alcohol on him. Before she could say anything more, he jerked his hand back in panic and turned away as though nothing at all had happened, leaving her alone in the rain watching his retreating back. She did not know whether a boy like that counted as a flirt, whether he was like the boys at school who invented any excuse they could to get close to a girl. Even if there were many similar faces in the world, could anyone possibly mistake someone in so strange a way? And yet she knew, in her own heart, that even if he had done it on purpose, she could not bring herself to resent him. Somewhere inside her, it was as though a seed had been dropped into fertile ground and had already begun to grow before she could stop it.

When he turned around beneath the karaoke lights, her heart seemed to miss a beat. Nozomi Morizaki was waiting at the entrance and rushed over to catch her hand. "Jun, I want to introduce you to someone. He's one of the legends at our school." Jun followed Nozomi into the private room and sat on the sofa. A boy was singing there with his head bowed. The lighting was dim, too dim to see his face clearly. He was singing an old Cranberries song, and because it was a song Jun loved, she strained to hear it through the noise. But the little ribbon of his voice was quickly drowned out by the girls around him squealing and teasing. Nozomi ran over to join them, then waved Jun forward. "Come here, Jun. Let me introduce our upperclassman." The boy who had been singing turned at last, and Jun's heart stopped altogether. It was the same boy who had helped her with the bicycles. He was still wearing the sweatshirt darkened here and there by rain. He saw her too and smiled. "Jun, this is Chiya Matsubara, the student council president at Seiran High. When you come to Anpei in September, all you'll have to do is say his name and nobody will dare bully you." Nozomi, oblivious to the current passing between them, warmly tugged Jun's hand and said, "This is my friend Jun Hazuki. I met her while volunteering with the Red Cross. Doesn't she look an awful lot like someone?" Jun did not quite catch what Nozomi said. All she could do was meet Chiya Matsubara's eyes awkwardly and watch his lashes tremble. Something in those eyes seemed to say, Jun, don't believe Nozomi. She's always talking nonsense. And his face, at that moment, was plainly the face of someone in love. They did not speak much that night. Jun stayed in the corner of the sofa and listened to him sing old songs one after another. Close to midnight somebody requested Pu Shu's "Those Flowers." Chiya stripped off his sweatshirt, stepped into the middle of the room, and whirled it around in his hand as the boys and girls surged toward him in celebration. When he sang the line asking whether they had grown old and where they were now, Jun sat there with a glass of beer in her hand, swaying one leg to the rhythm. Then Chiya Matsubara came walking toward her with the microphone. She stopped humming and stared up at him. He caught her hand as naturally as if it belonged in his and drew her into the center of the room, holding the microphone to her lips. She was so flustered and shy that her voice caught in her throat. Then, as though to rescue her from that mute embarrassment, someone in the crowd shouted, "All of us here today, let's stay together forever, okay? Let's never end up scattered to the ends of the earth." After that they crowded around Nozomi, opened the cake box, lit the candles, and sang happy birthday until Nozomi's eyes filled with tears and the room reached its noisy peak. Then the door burst open. A group of drunk men stormed in, beer bottles in hand, cursing because the noise had disturbed their business. Nozomi's temper had always been explosive. She grabbed a hunk of cake and flung it at the man mangling his Japanese. The cake burst apart and splattered all over Jun. She did not know what to do. Everyone was suddenly brawling and shouting. In the middle of that chaos, someone seized her hand and hauled her into a run. It was Chiya. Somebody had already called the police, and behind them came the shrill scream of sirens. They ran so hard that when they finally stopped at the corner, the strap of Jun's shoulder bag snapped and everything inside spilled across the pavement, including the Yeats volume she had bought at the old bookshop. Chiya saw it roll out, and the smile on his face vanished. Before she could bend to pick it up, he snatched it first and hurriedly opened the flyleaf. Following the motion of his fingers, Jun saw a line she had not noticed before written on the blank page: "Though our hearts are one, we live apart; in sorrow we shall grow old." Underneath it was a bold, sweeping signature: Chiya Matsubara. He said nothing for a long moment. Then he looked at her, who stood there with her face tilted up in a helpless smile, and pressed the book back into her hands. "Jun," he said. She answered softly, but inside her everything had become an ocean in upheaval. Every voice in her told her the same thing: she had been destined to meet him today, and the best proof of it was the book with his name inside. That night, when she got home, she could not bear to open the Yeats collection again. She slid it gently beneath her pillow, leaving Chiya Matsubara's name faceup.

That September, Jun Hazuki became Chiya Matsubara's junior. On the day of the entrance ceremony she watched him go onstage as the student representative. Up there he was just as clean and lucid as he had been in May, white shirt and blue trousers. The September heat made sweat run down the faces of the new students, and the hall buzzed restlessly, but Jun sat silent and still, every bright note of his voice falling into her ears like a spell. Then a month passed. Jun was the kind of girl who was neither especially brilliant nor especially showy. Her days were plain as water, and little by little she sank into the quiet anonymity of Anpei High. Chiya was in the graduating class, in another building, and after the opening ceremony Jun found herself wandering the campus again and again, hoping to run into him. She never imagined the next time would happen like that. One day she slipped out of a math study period she hated and went drifting around the school. Passing beneath a patch of trees, she suddenly heard a voice she knew at once: Chiya's. She climbed the tree by the old wall and slipped into the disused building beyond it, where a classroom was letting music spill out into the hollow air. She hauled herself up to the windowsill and looked in. There was Chiya with a guitar, singing with his band, all of them swaying with the music. Jun stood on the sill waving excitedly and calling his name, lost her balance, and went straight over. She landed hard on the ground and shut her eyes against the tears that rushed up. Then she heard him say, "Jun Hazuki, why are you always this clumsy?" She opened her eyes to find his face suddenly enormous because he had already crouched beside her. He was scolding her, yet she still found herself laughing. "I'm fine," she said. "See? I could go pick a fight with a camel." She tried to stand to prove it and immediately burst into tears again from the pain. Looking pitifully up at him, she watched him sigh, turn his back to her, and crouch again. She stood behind him staring blankly at the white long-sleeved shirt on his back, so white it dazzled her eyes. Her whole body had gone weak. She could not move at all. He reached back for her hand and pointed at his back. "I'll carry you to the doctor." On his back she heard the long, slow beats of his heart and smelled the fresh scent of soap on him. Maybe it was just the weather, but sweat rolled off her forehead in big drops, and her ears and neck burned as though someone had wrapped a hot-water bottle around her. Coming out of the infirmary, he held the plastic bag of medicine and pointed out the red pills, two at a time for the pain and inflammation, and the white ointment, once a day for the swelling. At the end, he looked at her doubtfully and asked whether she had actually remembered what the doctor said, namely that she must keep that foot out of water as much as possible. How could she have remembered? Her heart had already become a blur from watching him. He continued in that soft, reproachful voice, reminding her to take the medicine again and again, and by then he had already thrown her heart into chaos. That night Nozomi climbed down from the room above and onto Jun's bed. "What exactly is going on between you and Chiya? He called and told me to look after you." Jun refused to answer. She yanked the blanket over herself and buried her face in it. Later, after Chiya had carried her back to the dorm, she limped upstairs on tiptoe, then stood by the window and watched him walk toward the rehearsal room by the field. A moment later she saw him come running back and stop under her building. Jun rushed downstairs without caring about the pain in her foot. Standing before him, she asked, "Chiya Matsubara, do you maybe like me a little?" He nodded, dazed, and she threw herself into his arms. His heart was beating faster than it ever had. After that, when she had free time, she went to hear his band rehearse, collected every Cranberries tape she could find for him, and sometimes helped the boys haul their instruments out to a little hotpot place off campus, where they all ate until they thought their stomachs might split. Jun had never imagined such feverish days would come into her calm, ordinary years.

Then winter came down over Kamakura with all its force. Heavy coats appeared in the shop windows, and in no time it was New Year's. When Chiya Matsubara and his band came on at the holiday party, everyone went wild. He sang that same song again. Jun clapped excitedly from the audience until a senior girl beside her said, pointing at him, that Chiya used to sing that song only with Anna Asano, and that the two of them had once fit each other so perfectly that no school event had ever separated them. It was Anna, she said, who had given up and left in the end. Anna Asano. Anna. Jun's hands stopped in mid-clap. At once she remembered the rain, the way he had brushed the hair from her face and called her by that name. Then another memory crashed into her: Nozomi at karaoke, saying she looked a lot like someone. So that was why Chiya had been so good to her. So that Yeats volume had once been meant for someone else. It had belonged to Anna Asano, and he had taken it to the shop only after Anna left him. It had never been the fate Jun had imagined. She crouched down and gulped air into her lungs. Before he could finish the song, Nozomi found her alone at the hotpot place outside the school, soaked in tears and drink. The moment Jun saw her, she buried her face in Nozomi's hair and whispered so softly that only Nozomi could hear, "I don't mind. I was always only that girl's stand-in." She was so drunk that night she never heard Nozomi's repeated apologies and never saw Chiya running madly all over campus looking for her. By the next morning her energy had returned. She was still the old Jun Hazuki who collected Cranberries tapes for Chiya. When he asked why she had left without a word and skipped the celebration, she only shook her head. Unable to do anything with her, he flicked her forehead. Yet a little dark unease had already begun to grow in her. Were those indulgent eyes fixed on Jun Hazuki, or only on Anna Asano's resemblance?

Before she could drive herself truly mad, Chiya came to discuss something with her. His band had begun singing at a bar on weekends, where the pay was surprisingly good. So that winter Chiya Matsubara became a bar singer while Jun went quietly on with school. She seldom saw him on campus anymore. The band had moved their practice elsewhere, since student performers in a bar could not afford too much attention at school. The bar provided them with a basement to rehearse in. It was far from campus. After the monthly exams were over, she went to see him on a weekend. Snow had already begun falling over Kamakura. She called him from the bus. The performance had not started yet, so he met her at the stop. Her hands were cold, hidden up inside her sleeves. He pulled his own hands from his pockets and enclosed hers inside them, firm and warm. She let him hold them all the way to the bar, until they reached the entrance and saw a girl crouching outside in a black sweater just like Jun's. Chiya's hands left hers at once. He strode forward in one big step. "Is it really you, Anna?" Jun watched the girl lift her face with a smile, long hair sliding away from her forehead. The face was delicate. It did not really resemble hers, only the expression did. A tender smile spread at the girl's lips. "Yes, Chiya. I've come back. They told me you sing here now. Would you let me join?" He did not answer. Instead he turned to look for Jun, but she had already pushed the door open and gone in by herself. That night Chiya sang the familiar Cranberries song so badly he might as well have been in another hemisphere. He sang only two songs before hurrying off the stage. Later the three of them sat in a hotpot restaurant, Jun with a drink of her own in the corner. The whole evening became a festival of memories about Anna Asano. From Anna's story Jun heard the old love story between Anna and Chiya: the student council arts minister and the student council president, singing the same song, loving the same poet, holding hands on the school field. At last Jun slammed her chopsticks down on the table and laughed coldly with her chin raised. "If you were such a golden couple, why did you leave without a word? And now that you want him back, you just come back to reclaim him? Did you ever ask whether he might already have someone else by his side?" Anna stared, then laughed loudly as though she and Jun were old friends, even reaching out to touch her hand. "Your junior has had too much to drink, Chiya. She's talking nonsense." Chiya came over and wrapped Jun in his arms, patting her back like he was soothing a child in hysterics. The smell of him hit her, and suddenly her stomach lurched so badly she thought she might vomit. Instead she dropped her head and clung to his waist, pushing her face into his chest. "Chiya Matsubara, tell Anna Asano that I am Jun Hazuki. I am Jun Hazuki. I have my own face. I am not her stand-in." Chiya only lifted his fingers to smooth back the hair the wind had blown across her face. He did not speak. Jun raised her head, bit her lip, looked at his silent face, and shoved him away with all her strength. Because she was angry and upset, she lost her footing and fell hard to the ground. Chiya cried out and ran to her side, clutching her scraped hand in panic. "Jun, are you all right? Does it hurt?" She did not answer, only looked at him with a strange smile. Did it hurt? He was really asking if it hurt? Did she have to cut her heart open in front of him before he could understand whether it hurt? Anna Asano had never seen Chiya look like that: anxious, flustered, worry written in every line of his face. She raised a hand and stopped a taxi, then leaned against the door and looked at the time on her wrist. "Chiya, why don't we take Jun home first and then go find our old friends?" He failed entirely to hear the implication in her tone and tried to lead Jun toward the car. Jun shook free of his hand and looked at him with bright, hard eyes. "From today on, I am Jun Hazuki." Then she turned and walked stubbornly forward into the snow. Very soon her figure was gone, leaving behind only a trail of footprints swelling larger and larger inside Chiya Matsubara's heart.

Chiya Matsubara, I hope you can have a good ending.

After that night Jun fell badly ill. She burned with fever and stayed home on sick leave for half a month. When her strength finally returned, she still hid in her room and did not dare go back to school, afraid that Chiya would stand before her and say, I'm sorry, Anna and I are back together. When Nozomi came to find her, Jun was sitting there with a bag of chips watching a Korean drama. Nozomi did not explain everything, only said that Chiya had been recommended by the school to take the entrance exam for a conservatory and would have to go to Tokyo half a year early for advanced study. But the bar owner refused to release him and demanded an outrageous penalty instead. Anna Asano had quietly taken care of the entire matter for him, and Chiya, driven half-mad, had seized his guitar and gone to kill somebody. Nozomi crouched in front of Jun while Jun kept crunching chips without a word. At last Nozomi tugged at her sleeve. "You have to stop him. If you don't, he'll ruin himself." Jun stared at her and said, one word at a time, "I am not anything to Chiya Matsubara. What exactly am I supposed to do to stop him? Stand in front of him and take the fatal blow for that filthy owner? Kneel and beg him to come back with me? You know it, Nozomi. You knew from the very beginning. I was only Anna Asano's stand-in. Now that the original is back, my role is over." Nozomi let go of her sleeve and clutched at her own hair. "Everyone knows you're not Anna Asano. You're yourself, Jun Hazuki. You're not her stand-in." Then she said she was sorry. That day, she confessed, she had been selfish. She had not been able to bear Chiya Matsubara looking so pure and untouchable, and so she had brought Jun to him on purpose. Jun stared at her in disbelief. She and Nozomi had met through Red Cross work and had become like sisters. How could she have imagined such calculation beneath it? Nozomi's hands had gone white from how hard she was pulling her own hair. "Don't look at me like that, Jun. How could I not like someone like Chiya Matsubara, when we grew up together? But all he ever saw was Anna Asano. Even after she threw him away, when he got drunk he would still say I was only the best little sister he had. So when I met you through the Red Cross and saw that your expression resembled Anna's, I wanted him to meet you. At first all I wanted was to make him remember Anna again and taste, once more, what it meant not to get what he loved. I never knew the two of you would really end up together." Jun came to herself and struck her hard across the face. She had expected Nozomi, with her fiery temper, to stop the blow. Instead Nozomi accepted it without moving, the five finger marks blooming clearly on her cheek. "But you and I both know," she said, "that apart from that first resemblance, you were never really like Anna. Maybe after half a year with you, Chiya had already stopped seeing Anna in you. Maybe he just didn't know it himself." Those words shocked Jun awake. She did not even stop to change out of her slippers before running downstairs. When she reached the bar, Anna was outside clutching Chiya's arm. "I told you I did it willingly. You don't owe me. What are you trying to avenge?" Chiya drove his fist into the glass door so hard that the whole pane shattered. Blood spread instantly over his hand. "I'd rather fail that damn conservatory exam than watch you degrade yourself like this. Look at you. How are you anything like the old Anna Asano anymore?" Anna clung to him, weeping too hard to breathe. "I know this version of me disgusts you. I know the way I helped you was filthy. But you have to understand that I did it because I wanted to come back to your side, nothing more." In that moment Jun Hazuki was the calmest person there. She leaned against the wall some distance away, listening to them, watching Chiya lunge toward the bar. Unable to hold him back, Anna suddenly turned and ran toward the road. Her face was white as paper. The wound on it was ghastly, blood welling out in a rush. Chiya had never imagined she could be so stubborn. The whole thing unfolded like a silent film. He knelt and gathered Anna into his arms, his mouth trembling, tears spilling down his face one by one. "Anna, no matter what you've become, I've never hated you." Jun let out a cold laugh and turned away. Her face stung hotly. When she touched it, she found to her surprise that she had been crying. She bit down hard on her own hand until her teeth shook. No one loves you, Jun Hazuki, she reminded herself. So you had better learn to love yourself. When Chiya came over holding Anna, his face was stricken and wild, blood staining his white clothes. Seeing that unsteady look on him, Jun's heart went soft in spite of everything, and she followed him to the hospital. Anna's parents finally arrived. Later Chiya and Jun came out into the corridor together. He reached naturally for her hand, and she gently pulled away. They stood side by side at the bus stop. When the bus rolled up, Jun's fingers trembled as she took change from her pocket and silently got on. At the last moment Chiya reached out, pulled her back, and wrapped her in his arms. "Every heart can only hold one person. If too many people move in, someone gets pushed out." When she broke free again, he finally understood how determined she was. Pressing his forehead against hers, he whispered at last, "I'm sorry." She looked into his darkened eyes. "Chiya Matsubara, I hope you can have a good ending. I hope you can grow old beside the girl you truly love." Then she jumped onto the bus before him, pressed her forehead to the window, and moved the corners of her mouth at him in something like a smile. It was only when Chiya dwindled into a blurred black dot on the glass that she slid down off the seat and curled herself into the narrow space, sobbing aloud. Chiya Matsubara, I love you so much, and still I can stand before you and lie without changing expression. I don't want you to grow old beside her. I even wished the car that hit Anna Asano had been going faster. But no matter how viciously I curse in private, no matter how bitterly I cling, it cannot match the fact that you do not love me. That alone is enough to grind me to dust. So tell me, Chiya Matsubara, how strong do I have to be to smile and tell you that I hope you have a good ending?

Though our hearts are one, we live apart; in sorrow we shall grow old.

It turned out that a person's disappearance could be just like an encounter, as quick and unstoppable as the fall of a line of dominoes. Before Chiya Matsubara had time to think, Jun Hazuki vanished from his world. On the surface his life scarcely changed. He still sang on campus, still played with the band, still quietly settled the matter with the bar owner. He lost the chance to go away for further study and became, together with Anna Asano once she was out of the hospital, the kind of couple all the underclassmen envied. They still sang that same song at school events. They were still legends in the eyes of the younger students. Only now he kept almost calling Anna by the wrong name. The two syllables of Jun's name rose involuntarily to his throat again and again. When he ate with Anna, he would absentmindedly order a whole table of spicy dishes, then only at the end, mopping sweat from his forehead, remember that Anna was from the south and could not eat spicy food at all, while Jun Hazuki had loved nothing but heat. During breaks in rehearsal he would take out his phone and dial Jun's old number over and over, listening to the message that the line had been disconnected, hoping for a miracle each time. Whenever it rained, he went to wander through the old bookshop where he had once consigned his used books. One day, among the stacks, he found the Yeats volume he had once sent there and that Jun Hazuki had bought. He opened it and found the same line still there: though our hearts are one, we live apart; in sorrow we shall grow old. The words sent a pain through his heart so sharp it felt like illness. It looked as though she had truly meant to leave his world, and so she had taken the trace he left for her and sold it away again, just as he himself had done in the beginning. Only he had never imagined that on the very first day it would be bought by a girl who resembled Anna Asano. He had thought it was chance, thought it was heaven offering him a stand-in for the Anna he had lost. So he had taken all the love Jun gave him as if it were charcoal to warm his hands over. Only later, when she could no longer return, did he see through himself at last. Long before then he had stopped seeing her as Anna Asano's substitute. But time had already moved on. By the time he finally understood who he loved, the world was no longer the same as it had been when he first met her. Even the bicycle parking area beside the old bookshop had been turned into a flowerbed. He touched the line in the poetry book with his fingers as if someone had punched him in the heart, and at last tears slipped quietly out.