The Princess Sleeps On

The ward grew dimmer by the minute in the wounded dusk. The last light of sunset was being rubbed out at the edge of the sky. Wind rose outside, but inside the room it was still stifling. Then, suddenly, heavy rain came down. A violent clap of thunder sent the little girl visiting the next bed diving into her mother's arms. But Shiraishi Kotone, lying in her hospital bed, knew none of it. I had lost track of how many days had passed. Every day she only lay there in silence. The sky could fall outside and she would never know. "I came to tell you something huge today," I said to her. "We felt it even at the office. The building shook for several seconds. A lot of people got so scared they ran outside. Later I heard there was a major earthquake in the northeast. Magnitude eight. Terrifying. Can you feel it too?" I gently pressed her fingers. A metal tube was fixed at her throat. Her hair had been cropped close. Her lips were darkened, her skin dull and bloodless. To be honest, I was afraid she might remain like this forever. The doctors said no one could tell when she would wake. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe never. Summer had only just arrived. The news said the quake had reached magnitude 8.0, and my heart clenched at the number. Seeing Shiraishi Kotone in the hospital for the first time had felt exactly like an 8.0 earthquake inside me. So many things were brutally buried under the ruins, and even if you dug them back out, you could never fit them together the way they had been before. The proud, lively girl was gone. She slept without waking, and suddenly the world had no light in it. By winter, the white tower that had once collapsed had already been rebuilt. But the young man who sang in the moonlight, the one whose song could make a sleeping soul float upward, still had not returned. Perhaps this person would never come back. Perhaps he would come back tomorrow. I had brought a copy of Kawabata's Snow Country and read it aloud to her. We had once said we would go to Kyoto together, stay in a wooden inn by the Kamo River, and listen to folk songs drifting over from the opposite bank. When she woke, she would sing again in that clear, winding voice of hers.

From the moment she fell into that sleep, I began keeping a diary, as if there were far too many words trapped inside me with nowhere to go. Back in school, I had written terrible essays. Composition was the thing I hated most. Shiraishi Kotone had once laughed at me for it. "Your essay looks like toothpaste squeezed across the page. It's awful." Then, with maddening delight, she stole my notebook, climbed onto the platform, and read it aloud to the whole class. "There is a girl in our class whose face is covered in spots, like a sesame pancake..." The moment she finished that sentence, Kotone's nose practically twisted with anger. The boys started shouting nicknames, and she flung the notebook back onto my desk. "Asano Tomoaki, your essay is complete nonsense!" The whole class exploded into laughter, and someone shouted, "He wrote about Shiraishi Kotone. Asano Tomoaki has a crush on Shiraishi Kotone!" When you're fifteen or sixteen, there is nothing more terrifying than that kind of ambiguous joke. My face burned. I hurried to defend myself. "I just needed a classmate with distinctive features. Weren't we supposed to make people guess who it was?" Kotone was so furious she looked as though she wanted to throw me out the window. She was angry and mortified all at once, and the freckles on her face seemed to bunch together with it. I lowered my head at once to avoid the gamma-knife glare in her eyes. I stole a few glances at her through the rest of that class. Every time, there was the same bitter, sullen face. She really had been angry. In my memory, I never apologized for it. Who would have cared that much? If she had not mocked me first, there would have been no awkwardness after. I went back and forth over it in my mind and decided we were both in the wrong, and that the one who apologized first would be the fool. That was the logic of boys that age, some absurd masculine dignity and tyranny. Only now do I understand that the reason I stepped on that tiny matter for so long and still remember it now was simply because of her. There was something about her unlike anyone else, and I was gradually being drawn in, which was why I panicked and never knew what to do. Shiraishi Kotone could never have imagined that one day I, too, would be flooded with words, pulling out everything inside me that filled the heart. I miss the two of us from back then. I miss every little crossing of our lives before all of this happened. I keep searching out those traces and repeating them at her bedside, thinking perhaps they might help wake her. So I stayed trapped for a long time in silence and memory. Sometimes my colleague Maki would remind me, "Asano Tomoaki, you've become a slightly quieter person lately." She was my team leader, a girl who could pull in insurance policies by the stack and handle almost anything. She always said, "Wherever you are, survival comes first. Only by fighting can we keep ourselves from looking pitiful." It sounded like something learned from bitterness.

I laughed and said, "Not pitiful. Heroic, almost." The moment the tremors hit, she had grabbed the customer list off the desk and run downstairs with it. A crowd stood outside staring upward in alarm, and she was still on the phone explaining policy options. I think if a real disaster had come, she still would have done the same. She was a workaholic, someone who seemed born without any knowledge of fatigue. In that way she was very much like the old me. Before work ended she asked, "Going to the hospital again?" I nodded, took one of the day's newspapers with me, and saw that the earthquake coverage had grown even heavier. Looking at the death toll that kept climbing, I suddenly wanted to tell Shiraishi Kotone that simply staying alive was already such a tremendous piece of luck.

When I pushed open the door, Kotone's father was sitting at her bedside with both hands over his face. I could see tears leaking through his fingers. He wiped them away, his eyes red and wet, and the moment he saw me he said excitedly, "Just now I put the radio by her ear. When the music came on, I felt her hand move. I called her name, but she still didn't wake." An old song had been playing. I remembered it at once. Back in our first year of high school, at the school arts gala, Shiraishi Kotone had stood on the tall stage with no makeup on, wearing only a plain shirt and blue jeans. When the music began, the applause below was sparse and listless, and I looked past the dark rows of heads to watch her. It was the season of endless rain. A fine shower was falling outside the hall, and through that rain I heard a voice coming from her throat that sounded nothing like her ordinary speech. It was a little husky, like biting into a crisp pear and feeling the fine grain against your tongue, rich and fragrant with something that seemed to pass through time itself. It was as though something inside me had been scooped clean. I stared without moving. By the first line alone, she had captured every heart in the room. Such power was rare. We had been classmates for half a year, and I had never known she possessed a voice like that. Onstage her expression was different from usual too, stripped of some familiar pride. Under the glaring lights of the hall she looked pale and enchanting. It was the first time I realized that in song she became soft. Dusk deepened gently around us. The rain outside grew finer. The streetlamps came on one by one, their light mild and yellow. After the show, I waited outside the hall in nervous panic. She looked tired, her short hair brushing her ears now slightly out of place, her freckles as stubborn as ever, and still I don't know why the sight of her made me feel so quietly content. The moment she saw me, she rolled her eyes. "Asano Tomoaki, what are you after now?" If I said I wanted to walk her home, would she curse me out? Would her bigmouthed best friend trumpet it through the whole school the next day? Somehow I no longer cared. I walked straight over and said, "Shiraishi Kotone, my house is near yours. Let's go together." Sure enough, her friend looked at me in mock disbelief. "Asano Tomoaki, don't think just because you're handsome she'll forgive you." Heaven help me. Girls can be more narrow-hearted than the eye of a needle. Then Kotone said, "If the moon comes out tonight, I'll let you walk me home." The two girls burst into wicked laughter. I felt the rain land a little colder on my face. If the moon came out tonight, it would be a miracle. Kotone put an arm smugly around her friend's shoulders and said, "Let's go." Back then, of course, I did not yet know that girls were not people you could offend carelessly. I stared at her retreating back in almost complete despair. The good feeling that had only just risen in me seemed to be doused in a basin of cold water. Eight minutes passed. I followed them from behind for five hundred meters, through the school gates, across the road, past the first streetlamp, through the students splitting off at the bus stop. Then I looked up. The rain had stopped. In the black sky hung a round, pure moon.

Even now, after so many years, whenever I think of that miracle of a night I still want to tell people about it. "Do you believe it?" I ask. They curl their lips and say, "Things like that happen. How is that a miracle?" But to me, from that night to this very day, everything remains vivid, and yet at the same time it feels like memory from a former life. Shiraishi Kotone could not hide the surprise on her face, but she still said, "Asano Tomoaki, even the moon is helping you. You're really annoying." She let out a long sigh, but her tone was playful. I knew then that the rest of the road belonged to me. Her best friend ran off in pursuit of a bus. Kotone walked slowly ahead with her satchel hanging off one shoulder, swaying back and forth. I stepped in the shadow she cast behind her. The mottled tree-shadows on both sides of the street lay still in the silence. "Your voice is beautiful," I said. "Hm?" "You don't sound the same when you sing." A few seconds of silence passed. Then she said, "The weather's strange today. Rain one minute, gone the next. My dog died yesterday." She did not seem to mean to carry on a conversation. Her back only looked lonelier. Then she suddenly turned and asked, "Do you think someday I'll be able to sing on a bigger stage?" The question caught me off guard. So she had still been thinking about the praise I gave her. I answered as earnestly as I could. "Yes. I think you could become a singer." To prove I meant it, I added, "If you get into a music college, your starting point will already be high." She slowed her steps even more, and as if forcing the words through clenched teeth she said, "That's impossible." In the moonlight, her face looked bleak and sorrowful, and that one sentence sank into my heart as a weight. That was when I knew Shiraishi Kotone was unhappy.

Maki invited only me to her birthday. She seemed to have had too much to drink before I arrived. I apologized and said I had stayed too long at the hospital. She lifted her head, and some bright wetness trembled past her eyeliner. The cafe held a stale kind of time inside it. Kotone and I had once gone to places like that too, though never anywhere so lavish. A six-inch fruit cake sat in front of Maki, with pale strawberries and glossy cherries. "Let's eat the cake," I said. She propped her cheek in one hand, drew a cigarette from the pack with the other, but never lit it. She only held it there emptily. "Sometimes," she said, "maybe it's better not to know exactly how things are." I had been at the company for three months. I had already given all my savings to Kotone's father, and yet her treatment still cost twenty thousand a day. I had to keep working as hard as ever. A man like that had no time to look after anything else. Besides, he was crammed full of memory. My diary had reached page 106, and she still had not woken. Each day the newspapers carried great black headlines about the earthquake, a May of shared grief. So many singers and stars were doing benefit performances and relief drives. As I massaged her arms, I thought: if your road had gone smoothly, perhaps there would be one more voice among those standing onstage and crying out today. Wake up soon.

Maki came to see Shiraishi Kotone once, and after she left I found an envelope of money under the pillow. The next day, the patient in the next bed, who had slept for half a year, woke up. I told Maki the news. Maybe Kotone, too, was already on her way back. "When she gets better, I'll return the money," I said. She gave me a faint smile. "Yes. Maybe Shiraishi Kotone only lost her way. Or maybe in some other time and place she's looking for your old days together." Our old days together. After the night she said "impossible," she threw herself wildly into every school activity. As long as there was a chance to sing, she joined in with shining eyes. She even sang songs she had written herself. Everyone thought she was incredible. "Did you compose it on the piano?" someone asked. She shook her head. "Then on guitar?" Another shake of the head. Every time I passed her house, I never heard an instrument. I only heard her shouting melodies in the bathroom, and then her father's scolding would come at once: "You're not cut out for this." I wanted so badly to tell her that the songs she wrote were beautiful, even if she wrote them line by line on paper and carried the melody in her head. Sometimes she would grow smug in the sunshine of the school grove, the wind lifting the hem of her skirt, and bark at me, "Go buy me a soda. Inspiration's come. I need to create." And off I would run obediently. That was when I understood that a dream is like a bud growing on the edge of a cliff. It pushes up out of the earth and grows day by day. We reach out to pluck it, but there is always distance between us. It is right there in front of us, and all we can do is tell ourselves: a little more, just a little more. That was how poor our lives were then. Not everyone dared to imagine becoming the brightest star on a stage. Because I had glimpsed that secret in her, the thing that made her different, I became fuller and more restless at once. I wanted to help her make it real, and yet I had no idea where to begin. Then she said, "Don't tell my parents I'm studying with a vocal teacher." It should have been a beautiful thing, but with Shiraishi Kotone it could only become a secret. Suddenly I felt sorry for her. If she would not tell her parents, where was the tuition supposed to come from? In the winter of 1999, when we were in our second year, I gave her five hundred that I had saved from New Year's money and from the study-guide funds I begged off my parents. Her breath smoked in the cold and both her nose and eyes were red, whether from the weather or something else. "Asano Tomoaki," she said, "when I succeed someday, I won't forget you."

That sounded awkward to my ears. What I really hoped was that one day, when she held a concert, she would invite me to hear it in person. She tucked the money into her pocket. Just then her father passed nearby and she jumped behind a phone booth. "This much can't possibly be enough," I said. "Why don't you try talking to your parents? Maybe they'll agree." She bit out three words through her teeth. "Impossible." Only from then on did I learn that it was not that she had never tried, but that her father had already decided she was an ordinary person. "Every time I bring home my test scores, I can see the disappointment on his face," she said. "He hardly expects anything from me. As long as I finish high school and find some steady job, that's enough for him. He has no idea how big my dream is." She nudged pebbles with the toe of her shoe. After a few seconds her voice trembled. "I'll go find the rest of the money myself." Watching her back, I felt some force quietly growing there. Sometimes even if you never reach the thing you want, the process of chasing it is already beautiful. Much later, when I watched singing competitions on television and saw boys and girls raising their voices for their dreams, I would feel both joy and pain. That road was all thorns for Shiraishi Kotone. If there had been a nationwide idol competition back then, perhaps she would at least have had one more stage on which to show herself. Whether fame comes in a single night or over ten long years is all fate. Ten days after the earthquake, I went to a temple to burn incense. I did not dare ask for too much. I only said, "My name is Asano Tomoaki. I came." They say if you are too greedy, then even if your wish is granted, you will not be able to repay it properly, and your heart will not be sincere. It was already dark when I left, but even then I could not help turning back and murmuring, Can I ask for a little more? Please, let the girl named Shiraishi Kotone come back safely.

By the time my diary reached page 251, Shiraishi Kotone seemed a little plumper and her hair had grown out, though her skin was still pale and dull. I called Mr. Shiraishi out to have a proper meal. He had not eaten one in a long time. Every day it was steamed buns and pickles. He had grown obviously thinner, and much of his hair had gone white. Halfway through the meal he said sorrowfully, "Tell me, what else is there that could wake her? Honestly, every day I read the newspaper to her, tell her old stories, play music for her. None of it seems to work." All I could say was, "Don't worry. There has to be some other way. Is there anything important between the two of you, some detail you could talk to her about?" Mr. Shiraishi's hand stopped in midair. He slowly set down his chopsticks and sighed heavily. "I went back to the house where the accident happened and found a diary. I thought about it all night. So many things that I never remembered and never cared about were hidden in her heart all along. I've realized what a cruel father I was."

In 1999, Shiraishi Kotone found a vocal teacher behind her father's back. Sunday afternoons were always lesson time. I never knew where she got the money, or whether the teacher simply recognized her talent and took pity on her. There was always sheet music in her schoolbag. Once she told me, "My dad almost found my scores yesterday." Then one evening, under a sky full of sunset fire, Mr. Shiraishi blocked our way home. His face was dark. In a low voice Kotone said to me, "Go. He has something to ask me." I still remember the look she gave me before she followed her father away. I never found out what happened that night. The next Sunday she did not go to class, for the first time ever, and I sensed something had changed. "He found out?" I asked. She nodded. "My bigmouthed friend let it slip." "Did he hit you?" "No. My father specializes in psychological warfare. He'll sit there and reason with you endlessly, tell you to get into an ordinary university, and if I can't, then an ordinary job is fine too." "Why is he so certain you have no artistic talent?" I asked. "Because he doesn't," she said, giving a little shrug, as if she could laugh it off. "Are you really going to stop learning?" "When the university entrance exams are over and I'm eighteen, I'll make my own plans. No one will stop me then." After she said that, her grades slipped again. On the way home she told me, "That only makes me more certain I'm meant to take the performing road." And suddenly I was afraid. The closer the exams came, the more every day I walked her home I felt that once she disappeared through her front door, she might never come back. I admit I was a failure. In all three years of being her classmate, I never once told her I liked her. What I held on to instead was that huge moon from that night, and the way her singing flowed through the streets like tidewater. Years later, when I came across a line in an old song online and thought of her, I called Tokyo and asked, "Are you all right? I remembered you." What I remembered most clearly was the day she left. We sat in a little cafe in our small town, with a laughably mixed-up Chinese-and-Western decor, on rattan chairs covered in fake flowers. She hooked one foot up and let it swing idly. We ordered a set meal, and she also got a watermelon milkshake, cool red and sweet-smelling. It was August, and terribly hot. The cafe's air conditioner had broken, and we ate in streaming sweat. When we finished, she took a deep drink of the watermelon shake and said, "I'm going to Tokyo." I only said, "All right." I didn't dare say, If things go badly, come back. Before she became one more young wanderer in Tokyo, she asked me that same question again: "Do you think someday I'll be able to sing on a bigger stage?" I hated that question. If she had wanted the truth from me, I would have stopped her in every possible way, just like her father. I couldn't bear to lose her. In that sense, he and I felt exactly the same. But I could not tell her the truth, because I had no right to be that selfish. So I said, "You definitely will make your dream come true." Dreams are flowers on the edge of a cliff. I was willing to lift her high enough to pick them. Goodbye, my girl.

Leaning back in the sofa, Mr. Shiraishi spoke in a voice that seemed to come from another time. "I owed my daughter too much. When the results came out that summer, she couldn't even get into a junior college. I was bitterly disappointed. I had nearly arranged to put her into the factory through connections at work, but she absolutely refused. She said, 'Do you want me to spend my whole life driving a crane above the factory floor? You've never known what I wanted.' It was the first time in my life I ever hit her. I always stubbornly believed I knew her well enough. But in truth she hardly spoke at home. I didn't even know what she was like onstage. Later she left anyway. You can imagine how hard it was at first in Tokyo. She never told us any of it." His eyes reddened again. "She never told us. She lived in a basement. She ate instant noodles. She barely had any money. Release a record? How easy is that? Looking at her now, I feel awful. Not until I went to the place she rented did I realize how much she had suffered. Before that I never sent her any money. I thought if she couldn't endure it, she would come home. I was wrong. I truly never understood her..." My heart felt so heavy I could barely breathe. One year I called her and said, "I'll come to Tokyo to see you." She would not let me. Maybe she didn't want me to witness how embarrassed she was. Still, I quietly tracked down where she lived and went anyway. It was an April day filled with drifting poplar fluff. I stood at the corner and watched her walking along with a cabbage in her hand, all thinness and smallness, and I followed her with my eyes to a little row house. She went inside, then after a while carried a small stool outside and sat down to wash vegetables. She chopped the cabbage on a board laid on the ground, fried some of the leaves into one dish, and wrapped the rest in plastic. All the while I heard her humming. If she had known I was there, would she have laughed awkwardly, or cried? I wished she would break down completely and say, Asano Tomoaki, take me home. But when she saw me, the awkward smile on her face flashed by for only a second. Then she said brightly, "Oh, you're here." "I came to see you. To see whether you're all right." "I'm pretty good," she said. "Things are hard right now, but I've already started trying to sell my songs. A record company even called me yesterday." It sounded promising, yet I had no way of knowing whether it was a kind lie or not. And I had no courage to say, Come back with me. If it hasn't gone well, that's all right. I haven't done especially well either, but life back home is manageable. However I put it, it would never have sounded like the words a man should say. She would only have called me shortsighted and small-minded. So all I thought was: all right, my girl. From today on, I'll work hard and earn money. I don't want to see you live like this anymore.

Back at the hospital, Mr. Shiraishi sat silently with his daughter for a very long time. Before I left, I heard him whisper, "Kotone, wake up. Dad still has to tell you he's sorry." I closed the door and stood in the corridor, looking out the window at the traffic of people passing through the hospital gate. Some wore the relieved smile of those cured of serious illness. Some carried grief on their faces. Some cried aloud all the way inside. Birth, aging, sickness, death. This place held all of it. But the little warmth still left in her skin, the one thread of breath still moving in her chest, were enough to make me wait. Even a lifetime would not matter. Then my parents called again from home. I could not hear a single word of anything they said about giving her up. If I had been more capable, I would not have wasted those years after junior college, drifting through jobs, peddling things at a stall, driving a taxi, doing odd work at companies. Maybe then I could have helped her sooner. Maybe she would not have had to keep moving from one awful place to another. Maybe she could have found somewhere safe and comfortable, somewhere she could stay and write songs in peace. I braced a hand against the window and said only one thing into the phone: "If I go back, I'm taking Shiraishi Kotone back with me." When I hung up, I saw Maki standing at the stairwell. "Let's go to the room she rented," she said. "Maybe there's still something important there." So we went there again. A faint smell of gas still lingered in the air. It felt as if something inside me had been cut away. It hurt unbearably. It was in that little room, dreamlike and cruel, that the gas leak had happened and Shiraishi Kotone had fallen into a deep coma. I stood there blankly, wrapped in a thick, asphalt-dark feeling of guilt. When I first heard the news, I couldn't believe that such a lively girl could fall into such a long sleep. My diary had already reached page 300. In fairy tales, by then the prince would already have kissed the princess awake. But fairy tales are only fairy tales. Maki found something. "Maybe this will help," she said. It was sheet music for a song about to be recorded, a clear copy of one of Shiraishi Kotone's originals. If everything had gone well, she would have sung this song herself and used it to begin her dream. The dream she had fought for so many years had finally begun to show the smallest reward, only to be drowned in an instant. Among tens of thousands of people, she had walked alone until everything broke. I found someone to teach me the tune and someone else to help me record it onto tape. I never sing. But this once, for her, I used my awful voice to sing her song. Maki was stunned. "Asano Tomoaki, you may be good-looking, but you sing terribly." I went on singing it again and again, patient through the embarrassment while Maki stood there trying not to laugh. At last it was done. I carried the tape to the ward and played it by Kotone's ear. I thought perhaps if she heard it, she would wake up in anger. I almost wanted her to hear, in that dim half-conscious state, her own song ruined by somebody else's throat, then fly into a rage and sit up shouting, "Who was it? Who dared sing my song this badly?" The moment the music started, my heart nearly leapt out of my chest. But she did not move at all. Not the way it happens on television. No tears, no twitching fingers. This world is not warm-blooded at all. The miracle I had hoped for did not happen again. I thought then that this was a long road, and whatever year or month it might lead us to, I was willing to walk it with her.

In the autumn of 2008, we went back to our hometown, because the medical bills had grown too large to bear. Sometimes fate is that helpless. When Maki saw me off, she gave me a hug and said, "Asano Tomoaki, take care of yourself." I was glad. At last she seemed to understand that all the struggling in life is not for pride, only so that we may stay alive and live happily. The great earthquake had already passed. The people who survived were trying hard to rebuild their homes. But what about the ruins inside their hearts? How long would those take to mend? Were their dreams still there? For Kotone and me now, only one great dream remained: peace. As long as we could live safely and healthily, nothing mattered more. Every day I read my diary aloud to her. I was no longer afraid she would laugh at my clumsy writing, because every line was a cry from the heart. "Wake up," I told her. "When you wake up, we'll go sing by the river." I think that was the moment I finally couldn't hold it in anymore, and I cried.