First Snow, Southern Cardamom

My name is Tono Akari. Before I was thirteen, I was the most ordinary kind of boy: cola, basketball, white shirts and blue school trousers, being chased around the house by my father when my grades were bad, liking the tall English teacher more than the Chinese teacher with glasses. After I turned thirteen, I suddenly grew quiet. Every day after class I went straight to an extracurricular art studio with a dark green drawing board on my back. I started with charcoal studies, drawing one sphere after another, then cylinders, the sound of pencil against paper like time running over my shoulder toward the past and splashing up wet footprints of memory. It was only after I could draw still lifes, only after I could sketch faces, that I finally remembered the thin, stubborn features of that girl and slowly brought them out on white paper. I never knew her name. I never knew where she came from. When I met her, she must have been in the worst part of her life. She looked terrible. She was crouched on a rainy street in clothes so torn they dragged on the ground, and rainwater spread slowly outward from their hem. In my memory she was so dirty it was almost astonishing. Thirteen is supposed to be an age of softness and brightness, so her grime and grayness drew my eye all the more. Like a storm arriving in the middle of a fairy tale, she struck the heart because she did not belong. She looked up at me once. On a face caked in mud, only her eyes were bright, amber-clear, as if some clean soul had carved itself out there. In the next second she suddenly rushed me, snatched the grocery bag from my hand, tore open a loaf of bread, and stuffed it into her mouth. For one moment the two of us remained there in the rain without moving at all. I mean, perhaps she had never really intended to run, and I had never really intended to stop her.

My name is Yuki Koko. I had a face so quiet it never seemed to ripple, and I wore the plain, rigid school uniform of a girl who knew better than to draw attention. In the summer when I was seventeen, Kamiya Kanei threw me out of the house and made me move into the student dormitory. In fact, there was a small apartment outside the school, and when Kanei drove me out, he gave that to me too. "Koko," he said, "you need to learn how to live on your own." I stood there in the blazing heat, the apartment key burning in my hand, and squinted into the huge sky while sweat soaked through my white T-shirt. Kanei stood in front of me looking sad, a sheet of hard sunlight pouring down behind him until the clear lines of his face blurred. We just stood there, looking at each other. Then Kamiya Kanei turned and left. He didn't even bother to say goodbye. He simply walked away with no trace of reluctance, while I stayed where I was, gripping that hot key, tears collecting in my narrowed eyes as if they might harden into amber and fall. I dragged my long shadow back to the dormitory. In the middle of the night I climbed down from my bunk and asked my bespectacled roommate if she wanted to sneak out for a drink. She blinked up at me sleepily and said the dorm didn't allow alcohol and anyway it was far too late. I waved her off impatiently, pulled on a coat, and slipped out by myself. I never understood why schools insisted on making themselves into prisons that forced you to stage a whole jailbreak just to go outside. But Michael Scofield is everywhere. That was why, when I jumped the wall and landed, I ran into Tono Akari, the boy who looked at me in surprise from under the moon, carrying a drawing board on his back. To be exact, I was the one who struck up the conversation.

I said, "Hey, you in the Adidas. Sneaking out with a drawing board on your back? That's some professional-grade prison-break equipment." Tono Akari looked at me with open surprise, a brief light flashing across his clear eyes. I don't know why, but those eyes felt oddly familiar to me, like the eyes of some young animal hiding in childhood. He smiled at me and said, "So it really is you." When he smiled, his teeth shone white in the moonlight. I squinted at him. "You know me?" He froze for a second, then laughed at himself and said, "Who knows? The world is this small. Maybe we do know each other." I thought all boys with drawing boards must be like that, talking as if they were quoting some royal law, full of artistic nonsense. But on a night like that, on the night Kanei had driven me away without mercy, on the night my heart was knotted too tightly for sleep, having one fool around with me was the greatest kindness I could ask for. So I smiled back, teeth flashing just as brightly, and said, "If maybe we know each other, then how about you buy me food and a drink?" And the idiot actually took out his wallet and did it. The city did not know how to sleep. Even in the early hours it went on clamoring and glittering. Tono Akari took me to a little tavern. I ordered spicy crawfish and a dozen beers. Only then did I remember to ask his name. "Tono Akari," he said quietly. I nodded and said, "Oh. I'm Yuki Koko." His tolerance was terrible. He went down after only a little, while I kept pouring alcohol into myself one cup and one bottle after another until my vision blurred and my stomach rolled. Then I bought a pack of cigarettes too and lit one, taking a theatrical drag while mint and tobacco hit the back of my throat. In truth, Kanei had protected me too well all those years. Like any child raised in softness, I had gone to bed early and gotten up early, done my homework, never drunk, never smoked, worn a mushroom haircut and white T-shirts and jeans, and passed my days like a glass of clear boiled water. But in one night I changed myself, or at least I pretended to. I drank without blinking, smoked without choking, and congratulated myself on the abundance of delinquent talent in my bones. Akari woke up and drank with me again, with the heroic air of a man marching toward death. We were like two strangers on the run who had met outside the prison walls and therefore felt a kind of sympathy for one another. Later I learned that I had mistaken him. Tono Akari and I were not the same sort at all. Cheerful, upright Akari was not cut from the same cloth as Yuki Koko, who had taught herself how to smoke and drink. He had not been sneaking out of school at all. He had simply been walking back to the dormitory after art class. That night, so drunk he could hardly find north, he suddenly asked me, "Yuki Koko, do you believe that once some people have met, no matter how many years separate them, they'll find each other again in the end?" I only grinned foolishly. Alcohol had taken away my ability to feel sad. It had made me indifferent, absurdly open-minded. I didn't answer him, but there was a voice in me that knew I did not believe it. People who left me never came back.

I later found out who Yuki Koko really was. She was the same ragged girl who had appeared in front of me when I was thirteen and vanished just as quickly. The night she jumped down from the school wall, the moon hung above her like a sheet of white frost, and she looked like some little creature that had dropped out of the sky. Those amber-bright eyes were unchanged. I recognized her at once. She didn't remember me, and perhaps that was for the best. At least now she no longer looked so miserable. The current Yuki Koko had fair skin, good clothes, the appearance of a girl who had once been dearly cherished. But there was injury in her eyes. I thought perhaps she was unhappy. I wanted to be the one who made her smile, so I tried every way I could think of to stay by her side and humored all her nonsense, even letting her paint my face with cheap cosmetics. When Koko smiled, showing one sharp little canine tooth, I was absurdly content. I even began to feel proud, as though that smile had opened because I existed. Then my skin broke out with a terrible allergy and I ended up in the hospital on injections and medication for three days. The afternoon I was discharged, I went to buy something to eat and passed a cake shop. There, under the wall on the shady side of the shop where the ivy climbed thick, Koko was crouched with a cake box in her arms like some lonely little shrimp, bent over the moss at her feet. I stood a long way off looking at her and suddenly wanted very badly to go and put my arms around her.

Later, in the moonlight of her own small apartment, Koko told me why she hated a certain nameless little boy. When she was thirteen, both her parents died of illness, and an uncle sold her to the countryside to be raised as the future wife of a mute man. In that village, girls with the same fate were locked up or beaten if they cried or fought, so Koko learned to be clever. She cried for no one, washed clothes willingly, cleared bowls without complaint, and let everyone believe she was only a stupid girl who thought having food and a roof was enough. That made running away easy. Before dawn one morning she left the village for good and drifted into the city, where hunger, cold, fear, and grief all grew larger rather than smaller. In the worst days of her life, she saw a boy in a white T-shirt and dark trousers carrying a bag full of food. She didn't know where the courage came from. She only knew she ran forward, grabbed the bag, and tore out a loaf of bread. It was a red-bean bun. She told me later that she had looked for that flavor for a long time and never found it again. She thought the boy must have been kind. He had a white T-shirt like a clean soul. But when he raised his hand toward her, she panicked and fled. She ran straight into the path of a car. The person who picked her up from the rain afterward was Kamiya Kanei. When she woke in the hospital, he asked where her home was and whether she had any family. She answered no to both. Then he said, "All right. From today on, I'll be your family." He even gave her a new name. "That name doesn't suit you. Koko. Yes. From now on you're Yuki Koko." After endless wandering and despair, she had a home, a family, and a new name. Kanei planted oleander in the yard, vanished for a week every winter, put two portions of creamer in his coffee, never ate breakfast, and treated her too well. Beyond that, she knew almost nothing about him. He spoiled her, indulged her, stayed awake through her illnesses, ate even the meals she ruined, wore her ugly scarves for whole winters, and granted nearly every wish she made. There was only one thing he forbade: a locked study. Once she tried to open it and he caught her. Looking at her, he said only, "Get out." And she did. He searched for her for three days and nights before finding her and telling her that everything could be hers except that room. "Being kept from one thing," she told me bitterly, "means there are still things you can never truly have." That was why she hated the little boy so much. If he hadn't raised his hand toward her, she wouldn't have run. If she hadn't run, she would never have met Kamiya Kanei. She would never have known the warmest happiness, or the sharpest sorrow.

By then Koko and I had already earned ourselves a disciplinary notice for drinking and disturbing dormitory order. She was sentenced to twenty laps around the field and a three-thousand-character self-criticism; I was merely called in by the principal for tea and a lecture about life. That was when she learned I had been something of a school celebrity since middle school because of my paintings. She only curled her lip and kept running under a sun so vicious it seemed worse than women's hearts. I ran with her. She glared at me and said, "What do you have against yourself? Nobody asked you to run." I was nearly finished but still trying to encourage her. "Come on, Koko. Two more laps." When she asked what I painted, I said, "Whatever I like." Years later, standing in a damp southern town and watching a great rainstorm with cool detachment, I would remember that afternoon, the twenty laps, and the way I said I painted whatever I liked. I would remember collapsing beside her from sheer exhaustion, and the way she later made me her little sidekick. Around that time she became wilder and wilder. She wore strange clothes, dyed her hair all sorts of colors, bought cheap cosmetics and cheap perfume, and spent her weekends in my father's studio, turning herself into someone else among the plaster casts and the soft northern light. She called it evolution, the highest expression of inner self through excessive style. I thought she was mad, more unhinged than the artists, but in the end I simply helped. She painted my face like a master with a palette, saying that if she got skilled on me she would get skillful on herself as well. Then one day I watched her hide behind an ivy-covered wall to stare at Kamiya Kanei. He stepped out of a Lexus wearing gold-rimmed glasses and a colder face than before. He went into a pastry shop called Aftertaste and came out with nothing in his hands. When Koko went in after him, the clerk told her that every weekend he came to prepay for a red-bean cake and left word that if a mushroom-haired girl with big eyes ever came in, she should be given the cake directly. Koko looked at her reflection in the glass. She was no longer that mushroom-haired, big-eyed fool. The cake that belonged to her was one she could no longer take away.

That night she brought me back to her apartment, spread food on the floor, and poured us both drink after drink. Before that she had cooked a dinner that hardly counted as food and wrapped a ragged scarf around my neck. Then she asked me whether, if she were ever sick, I would stay awake all night to watch over her. I said she would never fall ill. She was supposed to stay healthy and happy forever. That answer only angered her. She pressed closer. "Then why did you eat a meal even pigs wouldn't touch? Why did you wear that horrible scarf?" I said, "Because you made the food, and because you gave me the scarf." At that she lowered her head like a bewildered child and asked in that same innocent voice, "Then, Tono Akari, do you love me? Everything you've done for me, was it because you loved me?" I was caught completely off guard and could only stammer, "M-maybe." She sprang up with the bottle in hand and cried, "Kamiya Kanei did all those things for me too, but he didn't love me!" Then she began telling me her story. Under the pale moonlight her face looked pale and stubborn and unbearably lonely. She said she hated the little boy from the rain, hated him so much. Drunk as I was, I wanted to tell her that the little boy had only meant to wipe the rain from her forehead. But my tongue would no longer obey me. My last clear memory of that night was Koko leaning down in the moonlight and kissing my forehead, then walking away, her thin back fading into the dark.

The first time Kanei ever struck her was not only because she had kissed him, but because she had opened the locked study and found the photographs hidden there. The girl in those photographs was called Fuyuko, and Koko looked so much like her that it was almost unbearable. Fuyuko had been Kanei's fiancee at twenty-four. She died of illness before they could marry. Every winter Kanei went to her hometown for a week, leaving Koko alone. Only then did Koko understand. She was Fuyuko's shadow. Her face, her name, even her existence were only echoes of that dead girl. Even so, she still did not want to leave him. Over the years Kamiya Kanei had become her whole city. Only she had never once become his. So he drove her out, gave her money and an apartment, and told her to learn how to live. She stayed for a long time hoping he would regret it, hoping he would search for her wildly the way he had once before and take her home. But he never came. Even when she turned herself into someone gaudy and unrecognizable, even when she wore heavy makeup and held cigarettes in plain sight, he only passed her in silence as if she were a stranger. Then at last she understood that this lifetime would probably never hold another intersection between them. So she decided to leave. Before she did, she went to my studio and stole a sketch. She had wanted to take something of mine with her. Instead she found that page after page of my sketchbook held the same girl: ragged, dirty, armed with a loaf of red-bean bread and eyes bright as stars. On the very last page was an ordinary girl with a mushroom haircut. Koko remembered once asking me what I liked to draw, and remembered my answer. She tore out the page with the mushroom-haired girl, folded it neatly, slipped it into her pocket, and walked out of the city with her head held high, the same way she had once walked out of that mute village at thirteen.

My name is Kamiya Kanei. I am twenty-eight years old and dying of stomach cancer. I once loved a girl named Fuyuko very deeply, and because of her I wounded another girl named Koko. After Fuyuko died, I met a dirty, starving child in the rain and took her home. I gave her a new name, a room, a life, and then, because I was cowardly and selfish, I mistook tenderness, guilt, and dependence for something I could control. By the time I understood that the feeling that would not let me open my hand was love, Koko was already seventeen, already standing on her toes to kiss me, already telling me she loved me. I sent her away. I sold the house, left her enough money to tidy up whatever came after me, and paid in advance for the red-bean cakes she loved, at least so that whenever she wanted one she would have it. After that I kept following her from a distance. I watched her torture herself and forced myself not to go closer, because I believed her stubborn vitality and fierce self-command would someday carry her out of the sorrow of losing me and into the world again. And then she left the city. That night the moonlight was like a thin first snow at the start of winter, quietly covering the shoulders of the girl who never once turned back.