You Were the Wound I Could Not Hide

Our tomorrow might already have been a final goodbye. Our forever, too, could only come to an abrupt end in tomorrow. When that moment came, would we be sad because of it? Near the end of that winter, I waited for Kamiya Aoharu to finish work. While I was waiting, I smoked an entire pack of cigarettes. By the time the New Year's bells rang, he finally appeared in front of me wearing a face full of fatigue. "You don't have to come wait for me after work anymore," he said as he walked ahead of me. "It's too cold, and it isn't safe for you alone." In that whole year, we never dated. We never held hands. We never kissed. I thought there could not be a sadder kind of love in the world. When the New Year's fireworks lifted into the sky, I stood in the dim stairwell and said, "Aoharu, leave me." He said nothing. He sat there on the stairs smoking. Then he got up and walked off into the darkness at the far end. I knew Kamiya Aoharu would come back, so I sat there and waited. When I woke, I found him crouched in front of me. His eyes shone like stars suddenly lit in a winter night, bright and cold and sorrowful. He smiled, took my right hand, and placed something in my palm. It was a train ticket. Then Kamiya Aoharu stood up and went downstairs. The rusted iron door clanged shut behind him. I clenched the ticket in my hand. The air was so still. I had never felt so lonely before, so lonely it became hard to breathe. Asakura Nei, winter really was coming to an end. So were we.

Before that, in the winter when I left Nanzawa with my parents and came to Emi, my father had already auctioned off the company he had run for five years, and my mother had quit her job as well. Emi was my father's hometown. All the way there, I pressed my hand to the train window and watched the trees, the roads, the houses slide backward in a rush. My mother spent the whole trip talking to me about Fuyo, again and again, and most of all about the things she liked, the things she hated, the colors she loved, the things she was accustomed to and the things she was not. Every corner of life was described in such detail that, little by little, I finally understood what jealousy was supposed to feel like. Or perhaps it was something I had always had buried in me. Emi Station was so old it hardly looked real, and over the station wall I could see only rows of tired buildings. I touched the red string tied around my wrist. Kamiya Aoharu had slipped it there in secret just five minutes before I boarded the train. He had pulled me behind a pillar, lowered his head, and looked at me with those mild, star-bright eyes. Smoothing my hair, he had said, "Sumiko, the name of that city sounds just like yours. Emi. Ehara Sumiko." He had smiled then, and his smile was plain and clean, with a shallow dimple in it. But I had left that boy who had always been so kind to me behind. Emi was bitterly cold, and when I looked up there was only the flood of people pouring out of the train. I stood stupidly in the doorway, lost, not even hearing the people behind me complain that I was blocking the exit. Someone shoved me once, and I stumbled once, and then a hand seized my arm hard and yanked me aside. "If you want to die, you don't need to do it in such an idiot way." The voice came from above my head, annoyed. I lifted my face and saw a boy with clear, sharp features. When I turned back I saw a man carrying a hard-edged crate brushing past where I had been. "Thank you," I said, stepping away from him at once. "You're here as a tourist, right?" He laughed and looked me over. "No." I squeezed my left wrist, the way I always did when I was nervous or unable to trust someone. Then I heard my mother calling my name from the crowd. I nodded quickly to him, muttered goodbye, and ran off. Much later, after my father had pulled me along and we had gone quite far, I looked back once through the crowd and found the same watchful, cool-tipped gaze still there. Asakura Nei, that was the first time I met you, and it ended almost immediately. At the time I remembered nothing about your clothes or your voice or even your face. I remembered only how calm your eyes were.

The house we moved into had been empty for fifteen years. The yard was full of weeds, the rooms draped with cobwebs, and the whole place smelled of mold. It took a full day just to clean it. My mother locked herself in one room to sort through Fuyo's things and would not let anyone enter. My father cleaned the house and yard with me and sent me out to buy soap and other things. When I came back carrying a pile of supplies from the little shop, someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned and found you again. You looked delighted. "It really is you. You're easy enough to recognize. There can't be anyone else in all of Emi with hair that long." I turned to leave, but you called after me, "If you ever want to go anywhere in Emi, come find me. I sell snacks at the station all through the holidays. And if you want to raise a kitten, I can help with that too!" I was carrying too much to answer, so I only ran, and even from far away I could still hear you shouting after me. I was terribly timid. I was afraid to meet other people's eyes, afraid of other people's warmth, afraid of their kindness. It made me panic, as if I were always one step from being seen through. When I got home, my mother was waiting at the door. Seeing me, she said, "Why did it take you so long just to buy a few things?" I said nothing and held them out. She slapped them from my hands and said, "Why are you always so gloomy? Looking at you makes me miserable." "I'm sorry," I said, with my head lowered so far the words seemed to come from ten thousand miles away. Suddenly she fell silent and went back inside. In the middle of the night I heard her sobbing softly in the next room, calling Fuyo's name. I knew she missed her. She would rather spend every waking hour mourning the one who was gone than look me in the face. I was the same. No matter how hard she struck me or how cruelly she spoke, I only lowered my head and said I was sorry. As soon as I said it, she stopped. As soon as I said it, my father's eyes filled with pain and apology. I buried my face in the clean bedding. It carried a faint sweet scent. Fuyo and I had once slept under it together. Fuyo was my twin sister. Our faces were alike, but our natures were nothing alike at all. She was always clear about what she wanted from life, clear in her joy and clear in her sorrow. I was not. I hid everything I disliked and everything I loved. But I loved her, truly loved her. I thought she was my other self, the self I could never manage to become, living brightly in my place. Fuyo used to say, "Sumiko, when I look at you, it's like looking at another me inside my own heart." She was that kind of sister. I had never imagined losing her. We were bound to each other as naturally as breathing.

The next afternoon I bought a butterfly kite from a little street stall and went by myself to the shore at Emi to fly it. I stumbled and stumbled and still could not get it aloft. In the end I watched it plunge straight into the river. I found a branch and tried to fish it out, but all I could do was watch the last trace of purple-red sink and go drifting downstream in the current. I stood there for a while, then kicked off my shoes and stepped into the river after it. The winter water was shallow, just over my ankles, but the cold cut into me like a blade. By the time I managed to catch the kite and turn back toward shore, you were standing there on the bank with your mouth open. I held the kite and stared. Why did I always keep running into you? You were the first to move. You ran over, seized me with one hand, and dragged me out. After that you bought me a pair of thick socks and cotton shoes and took me to a late-night diner to eat. Emi was a town full of water. If I sniffed hard enough, I felt I could really smell a trace of the sea in the air, cool and faintly salty. You had already ordered for us while I was still sitting there in a daze, and said, almost as if to comfort me, "Once you've eaten, I'll take you home." Instead I looked at you and said, "I like it here." You smiled with your whole face. "I knew you would." And I really did. I liked Emi because there were no stone lanes here, no tall buildings, only rows of parasol trees that would bloom one after another in spring. More than that, I liked it because there was nothing here that remembered Fuyo. You reminded me then that I had said I wanted a cat, and you took me to the cat station, a place that took in stray cats. Many of them were sick or injured, missing a leg or an eye. Students your age came there during their holidays to volunteer. I chose a white cat that had lost one hind leg in an accident. You tucked the hair from my cheek behind my ear and said softly, "Your hair is beautiful." I had worn that long hair for seventeen years. It had passed my shoulders and then my waist. I was too lazy to cut it, too lazy to even trim it, and left it to grow just as my life had grown, directionless, stretching onward wherever it would. Like the long years behind me. But in those long years, Fuyo, you had already left yourself. You had left me too.

At the end of one winter in Nanzawa, Fuyo met Kamiya Aoharu. Fuyo in those days was like an angel standing on a cloud, while I was only a secular thing down in the dust, looking up at sunlight and dew too far away to reach. Fuyo told me later how she had met him. She had gone back to school to fetch homework she had forgotten and, outside a bookstore, seen a line of university boys holding signs offering tutoring in the bitter cold. Kamiya Aoharu was not the most suitable of them, perhaps, but she walked straight up to him anyway and said, "I need a tutor." She chose him for only one reason: she had just seen him help a child who had slipped in the snow. Later she said to me, "Sumiko, I actually hate the smell of paint. But not as much as I hated the thought of leaving him out there in the cold." She told our mother she wanted to learn painting, and our mother agreed at once. She bought her fine materials and, just as Fuyo asked, invited a university student to tutor her in drawing. That student was Kamiya Aoharu. It was the first time I saw him. He was twenty, with a young face, wearing a clean checked coat, schoolbag in hand, standing in the doorway while a whole night's snowfall lay white behind him. He smiled and said, "May I ask if Fuyo is here?" Fuyo came running downstairs in her pajamas and said, "This is my younger sister, Sumiko. I'll take you to meet my mother." In the sitting room my mother looked Aoharu up and down very carefully. She liked him at once. He was obedient, polite, the sort of boy elders always approve of, and besides that he really was talented. When I brought tea in, my mother looked up and said, "This is Fuyo's twin sister, Sumiko. They look exactly alike, but this child is always so gloomy." Fuyo tugged at her sleeve. I think she was trying, as she always did, to keep me from being hurt. But even then I took it for granted. It was not the first time our mother had held me up against my sister in front of guests. I went back to the kitchen and slammed the tray into the sink hard enough to splash myself. After that, Aoharu came every afternoon of the holiday to tutor Fuyo. When the weather was clear, they had their lessons on the balcony. While my mother and I shoveled snow below, I could hear Aoharu's clean voice drifting down like music on the winter air. Sometimes while helping my mother cook, I heard her say, "Fuyo may really become a painter one day." I said nothing. Then she would add, "Sumiko, I don't expect you to catch up to your sister, but at least don't embarrass us too badly." Once I looked her straight in the face and said quietly, "There is nothing in the world I hate more than painting." She stared at me, shocked. A few days later Fuyo dragged me out to buy paints for Aoharu's birthday present. Winter was ending. Nanzawa in spring was the most beautiful place, with azaleas ready to bloom across the city. Standing outside the shop, I watched a few kites totter through the gray square. Fuyo came out clutching the package and said with a smile, "Next year let's fly kites together." Then she asked, "Sister, what is your dream?" I looked at her, at that girl with a face like a painting. She answered her own question before I could. "To stay with Kamiya Aoharu forever. If that counts as a dream." So Fuyo's dream had never been becoming a painter at all.

I named the white cat Ning, after the ning in your name. When I carried it home, my mother saw it in the yard and ordered me to take it away immediately. I stood in the doorway without moving forward or back. She came to shove me, and nearly pushed me and the cat both outside. My father happened to come home just then and managed to talk her back indoors. Later, while I was giving Ning water, he sighed and said, "You know your mother hates small animals." I lowered my eyes and said quietly, "If she only tried, she'd like it." He sighed again. "Don't blame your mother. None of us wanted things to turn out like this. It was only an accident, after all." Hugging Ning close, I lowered my head. Of course I knew it had been an accident. But it had changed my entire life and made me into something so weak and shameful. The next day Ning fell ill. It wouldn't eat or drink and gave out little miserable cries. I carried it straight to you. You were disinfecting cages at the cat station and the moment you saw me and the cat in my arms you understood. It was only a small cold, you said, but it needed to stay at the station under observation for a few days. I couldn't bear to leave it. So for several days I kept going to the cat station, helping care for the strays and clean the place. Sometimes I did nothing at all but trail behind you. Wherever you went, I went too. When you were busy and had no time to talk, you only turned and checked on me now and then before going back to work. At night I followed you to the station to sell snacks from a little four-wheeled cart. Not many trains stopped in Emi, but I liked standing by the carriage windows and handing things to you so you could pass them up to the passengers. After a while the university volunteers started to tease you, saying, "Asakura Nei, when did you get such a sweet little girlfriend?" You only grinned. On Sundays you took me to fly kites on the mountain above Emi, where the ground spread out wide and flat. You told me that in spring wildflowers of every color would bloom there, and it would be so pretty to pick a bunch and put them in a bottle. That day your dragon kite crashed headfirst into the ground before it ever got high and broke two of its ribs. "Asakura Nei, what's your dream?" I asked suddenly, looking at your bent head as you repaired it. Your profile then was so beautiful that even now I cannot bear to forget it. You smiled lightly and said, half joking, "Just like this. When your kite breaks, I'll mend it." I stared, and you lifted the kite toward me. "There. Fixed." In the end, that kite never flew either. You wanted to throw it away, but I refused, hugging it like something precious. Looking at me, you sighed. "Ever since I met you, you seem to love broken things." You saw me home only at dusk. Long before we reached the yard, we could hear my mother crying and screaming inside. Those few days, my parents had been fighting all the time. My father stayed out late for business, and I spent every day at the cat station, leaving my mother alone in the empty house. My father was gentle and patient. No matter what she accused him of, he rarely answered back. But that time my mother cried, "If Fuyo were still here, this family would never have fallen so low." My father's face darkened. "What do you mean by that?" She went on, "Why was it Fuyo who was taken away? Why Fuyo of all people? Sometimes I wonder whether it was really just an accident. After all, only that child saw what happened." My father slapped her then. I stood stunned at the door, and behind me stood you, equally stunned. I remember thinking that someone like you, whose life was whole and ordinary, could never possibly bear to look at something this ugly. My mother's wailing finally stopped. My father sat on one side smoking and said in a broken voice, "Sumiko is our daughter too. How can you suspect her?" Neither of them noticed that I was standing there. It was you who dragged me away. When I could barely stumble along any farther, you simply picked me up and carried me. All the way, I buried my face in your neck and soaked your clothes through. "Asakura Nei," I asked you, "tell me. What am I supposed to do?"

You let me stay out that one night. You did not go home either. You stayed with me at the cat station while Ning recovered. You told me about your family, how your father had died early, how your mother ran a little snack shop, how you spent your holidays earning next year's school fees and food money while still finding time to volunteer at the cat station. You said you liked cats because they looked tame and obedient, but inside them were the sharpest claws and teeth. That, you said, was instinct. And instinct was the most frightening thing in the world. Perhaps that was why I could never forget what happened afterward. Fuyo always dragged me along with her. No matter where she went, she reached for me. Even if I hid, I could never escape the hand she stretched toward me, fine-boned and soft. Once she dragged me with her and Aoharu to fly kites on the riverbank. The three great kites had taken her two days to make, and when Aoharu saw them he said with bright eyes, "Fuyo, these are wonderful." My own kite that day was a complete mess. I tangled my line and ruined not only my kite but other people's as well. Fuyo stepped in front of me and apologized for me. Aoharu even gave away his own kite as compensation. When he went to buy water, Fuyo said in a low voice while sorting out my knotted strings, "If you always need someone else to help you, how will you ever grow up?" "Is this because of Aoharu?" I smiled and asked. She frowned. "You know that isn't what I mean. And you're already sixteen. You can't stay like this forever." I turned my face away, and in that moment I was filled with a fear I could not name. How, exactly, was I supposed to live? What could I possibly do to make our parents look at me for even half a moment? What would it take for someone like Kamiya Aoharu to stand beside me? Was it because I was gloomy, because I was mediocre, because I could not shine the way Fuyo did? I could gather up ten of my own small virtues and still not equal one glance from her. That night, when Fuyo came into my room to apologize and pressed her cold feet against mine, saying in a little voice, "I'm sorry, Sumiko. I'm only afraid that if one day I'm not here, who will protect you?" she could not possibly have known what I had said to Aoharu earlier that day. I had told him that I liked him. And Kamiya Aoharu had answered only, "Having Fuyo is enough for me."

The winter in Emi grew colder and colder. My mother answered me less and less. Whenever she wasn't home, I slipped into the room she had prepared for Fuyo, the room full of the things she had carried from Nanzawa: calendars, cushions, dolls, huge photographs. One day she caught me there, snatched a picture from my hands, and screamed, "What are you trying to do to Fuyo?" I stared at her. "I only wanted to look at her..." "She isn't yours!" she cried. "You're not my daughter at all." "Then who am I?" I asked. "If she isn't my sister, who am I?" But she only held the photograph tighter. So I whispered, from beneath my hair, "Then let me go back to Kamiya Aoharu." My mother froze, then suddenly grabbed a pair of scissors from the table. "Don't say that name again. If you do, I'll never let you leave Emi." I wanted to scream, to struggle, but when the scissors bit down and a lock of black hair fell away, all sound died in my throat. "Give Fuyo back to me," she kept saying. "Give Fuyo back to me." I don't know how much time passed before the room fell silent. My mother was gone. The scissors lay nearby, wrapped in my severed hair. I staggered all the way to the station, hiding my ruined hair under a hat. I went to the cat station for you, but you weren't there. I went to the station itself, but you weren't there either. With nowhere else to go, I curled up on a bench in the waiting room. It was you who woke me. You had come to fetch the phone you'd left behind, and you found me instead. When you saw my hair, your eyes filled with shock and anger. You took me by the hand to the nearest salon, slapped down a banknote, and said, "Give her the most beautiful haircut you've got." From the first day I met you, you had always been smiling. But that day your brows were furrowed so tightly it was as though they would never smooth out again. After the haircut, you led me outside, not even waiting for your change. "Where are you taking me?" I asked. "To find the person who cut your hair," you said. "How can anyone do something like this?" "It was my mother," I told you. "She cut it. She just did a bad job." You stopped walking at once and let go of my hand. I knew then that you had remembered the fight you had overheard that night, the words my mother had thrown and my father had answered.

I have never forgotten that winter in Nanzawa either. Kamiya Aoharu used the paints Fuyo gave him to win first prize in a school arts competition the next spring. To thank her, he asked her out for a meal, and Fuyo dragged me along because, as she said, she had picked the paints with me. Aoharu's eyes were so gentle that day, and there were words in him he could not quite say. I thought I should never have come. By the end of the night all three of us had been drinking, even Fuyo, who never touched alcohol, because I coaxed her into one small bottle. Near midnight I helped her into a taxi and then turned back inside to the room where Aoharu had fallen asleep over the table. What I wanted was only a crude little game, one in which the only true players were Kamiya Aoharu and me, and Fuyo would have to remain a bystander. When the first morning light fell through the window, Aoharu woke with a start and found me beside him. I sat there with my shoulders bare, watching him calmly. "Why?" he asked. "No reason," I answered, lifting my chin. "Even so, if Fuyo still wants you, then I lose. That's all." It was the first time Kamiya Aoharu had ever called me by my full name, and he did it in fury and disgust. He dragged me out of the covers, seized my throat, and tightened his hand. He looked at me with anger, unwillingness, and deep disappointment. Then at last he let go, dressed, and left. I spent the whole morning crouched against the wall, trembling. God knows what that poor hotel maid must have thought when she came in and found me. Later, unable to erase Fuyo's presence from my world, I turned the knife on myself instead. If I could not wipe out Fuyo, then perhaps I could at least wipe away her happiness. When I was carried into the ambulance, Aoharu had come running. I smiled at him weakly and thought: if this happens, then there will only be Fuyo left, and won't that be enough? I stayed in the hospital for two weeks. Fuyo never left my side. She read me Dickinson. She bought thread and needles and tried to embroider charms for my safety, pricking her fingers until they bled. Aoharu came too, I knew he did. He stood outside the glass, looking in at me with cold eyes. He had already told Fuyo everything. He had never hidden anything from her. That was the kind of honest person he was. Once, while I pretended to sleep, I heard my father tell Fuyo that the hardest thing in the world was meeting a truly honest person. Fuyo said only that she wanted me to get well. My mother refused to come at all. Her hopeless daughter had ended up in a hotel and slit her wrist. It was the sort of scandal neighbors chewed over for weeks, and in the end it was Fuyo who bore the disgrace of it. She dismissed Aoharu from tutoring her and would not let him visit. One day, sitting by my hospital bed, she said quietly, "I know you aren't trying to steal Aoharu from me. But why have you become like this?" "It's not pretending," I told her. "You don't know how jealous I am of you. Every flaw you have becomes its own kind of light, and I..." I smiled at her faintly. "I can't make even one thing I want come true." She was silent for a long time. When I finally turned to look at her, her face was already covered in tears. "I'm sorry, Sumiko," she whispered. "Aoharu didn't do anything." "It was only a game," I said. But by then I no longer knew how to make the game end.

That winter, a girl fell from the rooftop of Nanzawa Hospital. The dead girl was called Ehara Fuyo, and the witness was her younger sister, Ehara Sumiko. The following spring, Kamiya Aoharu came to Emi with a travel bag, dust on his clothes, and all the fatigue of the road on his face. By then I was following you back from the cat station carrying an armful of supplies. The moment I saw him, all the strength I had spent so many days pretending to possess shattered at once. You reached to steady me, and I pushed your hand away. I crouched down clutching my chest and cried so hard I could not breathe. From the beginning, fate had given me no choice at all. The Fuyo and Sumiko of before, the Aoharu of before, even you in the present, perhaps none of you were really the shore I was meant to reach. Only when I saw Kamiya Aoharu did the grief inside me flood loose like that. I wanted only to tell him how much I missed him. Not once, Aoharu. Not once had I stopped missing you. That day you sensed more than I said and took Aoharu and me back to your little house. I had always kept your room tidy. There was a vase of flowers on the windowsill, carrying a quiet fragrance. You made tea for us, looked at me once, and then left us alone. "School will be starting soon," Aoharu said first, his voice rough and dry. "Aren't you coming back to Nanzawa?" I shook my head. "Then what am I supposed to do?" he burst out. Tears filled his eyes. He seized my hand and said in a rush, "It was an accident, wasn't it? None of us knew it would turn out like that. But how long are you going to keep punishing yourself?" I shook my head. "I am not punishing myself." "You're lying," he said. "You are lying. You can fool everyone else, but not me. I'm Kamiya Aoharu." At that point you came in and shoved him away from me. If I had not grabbed you, your fist would have landed on him next. You dragged me outside and said angrily, "Why are there always people around you who want to hurt you?" And then, because you had earned the truth, I told you everything. I told you about Fuyo, about Aoharu, and about all the filth hidden in my heart. I told you that I was the one who had asked Fuyo up to the rooftop that day. I had stood on the narrow edge where one sway would have meant a fall. Fuyo came to pull me back. In that moment, I thought all I would need was one slight tug to erase her from the world. I thought then that there had never been anything uglier in me. But just then, Aoharu arrived and called out softly, "Fuyo."

What none of them knew, what not even my father and mother ever knew, was the rest of it. When I reached out and grabbed Sumiko's hand, it was Sumiko who let go. She had never truly meant to hurt me. She was gentle. She only carried too much bitterness, and who in this world has never longed for more than their share? She had once asked me, If you were me, would you make the same choice? So I became Sumiko, and I erased myself, Fuyo, from the world. By the end of that year, my parents had signed the divorce papers. I went with my father. In the days before we left Emi, you came to find me more than once, but my father sent you away and you still would not leave, standing downstairs for hours. Before I went, I came to see you with Ning in my arms and Kamiya Aoharu beside me. "This is my boyfriend, Kamiya Aoharu," I said. For a moment you were too stunned to speak. That night you drank without saying much while Aoharu, understanding everything, stepped outside and left us alone. At last you looked up at me and said, "Sumiko." "I'm Fuyo," I answered. I think the only person in this world who truly understood me, who knew who I was no matter how much I changed, was Kamiya Aoharu. But you only said stubbornly, "No. You're Sumiko." You fell asleep holding my hand. I never told you that I was leaving, and not coming back. When I left your side, I bent down and pressed my lips, light and cold, to the tears on your cheek. I thought then that only that kiss was clean enough, and only that kiss was truly yours. I left Ning with you.

In Nanzawa, I sat in a yard full of sunflowers writing in my journal and copying out poems. My father's business gradually prospered again, but in the second year after the divorce my mother finally broke completely and was admitted to a sanatorium. My father visited often. I went as well. She had already erased me from her memory. This time the one she had erased was Fuyo. "Do you know Sumiko?" she asked me. "She's my daughter. I ruined her in my own way. Help me find her." I could only hold her tight and whisper, "Mother, Sumiko is here. Fuyo is here. Neither of us has ever left you." In the end, I never took the ticket that could have brought me to you. By the first spring, Kamiya Aoharu had vanished from my life too, and I knew that at last he had let me go. But the red string around my wrist still kept me safe and warm. Dickinson wrote that waiting an hour is too long, if love is waiting just after it; but waiting ten thousand years is not too long, if love lies at the end. Is there anything in this world more fitting, warmer, or more beautiful than love? Whether it was Aoharu's stubborn love for me, his final release, my tenderness and guilt toward Sumiko, or your love for me that drifted out of reach in the end, all of it is enough to fill me with gratitude and peace. So let us wait, then. Let us wait ten thousand years for the next meeting.