Where Is Heaven? I Need to Find You

From 2007 to 2009, I listened to the same song over and over again.

There was a line in it that said, "You have to be happy." It was the lightest sentence in the world, and also the one sentence I was never truly able to say to you. Because when you like someone, selfishness is often the first thing you learn. You want them to look only at you. You want them never to love anyone else. How could you sincerely wish them happiness?

The first time I saw you was in a deafening live house in Shibuya. It was the annual offline gathering for the Green forum, with lights swinging wildly and music thudding hard enough to numb the chest. I had gone there for Natsukawa Tatsu. At the time I had just posted a grand, blazing confession on the forum, saying he was my light, the only brightness in the pitch-dark life I wanted to chase after. But that night, the one who dazzled me first was you.

You held your badge up in front of me and grinned with shameless confidence. "Hayashi Kana, haven't you been looking for me?"

It took me two steps of being tugged along by you to realize that the name on the badge was not Natsukawa Tatsu at all. The real Natsukawa Tatsu came walking through the crowd and draped an arm over your shoulder, laughing and telling you to quit fooling around. Only then did I finally see the name pinned to your chest.

Ochiai Yo.

In that instant, I knew I was done for.

Natsukawa Tatsu was quiet, like a river at winter dusk. You were the complete opposite. Heat lived in every glance and every curve of your mouth. When you spoke, you liked leaning in on purpose, just to tease a chorus of gasps out of the girls around you. You asked me when I was going to write a confession post for you too, so you could enjoy some glory for once. I rolled my eyes at you, but in my heart I had already tucked your name away. Only later did I understand that what I felt for Natsukawa Tatsu was probably no more than the sudden dazzlement of youth. What I felt for you was love at first sight, and love to the end.

The next time I saw you was at the skating rink in Ikebukuro. I wobbled toward you on my skates, tapped your shoulder, and said what a coincidence. You were even more natural than I had imagined. You took my hand, steadied me, and led me in slow circles by the edge of the rink, as if you had lifted me out of my own awkwardness and straight into the rhythm you were used to. When we stopped to rest, you twisted open a bottle of water, tugged your collar loose, turned your head toward me, and suddenly said, "Kana, I think we'd be good together."

I nodded almost instinctively, without the slightest hesitation.

Looking back now, I know how recklessly foolish I was in that moment. But if youth does not contain at least one such wild, unthinking leap, it hardly deserves to be called youth.

After that, record shops in Shibuya, internet cafes, family restaurants, karaoke rooms, corners of the street still glowing late at night, all of them held our shadows. I uploaded our photos to the forum one by one, as if I wanted the whole world to know how happy I was. But happiness, once spread open in the light, can sometimes be taken away. Before long, I received a private message from a stranger.

It contained only one sentence: "The person Ochiai Yo really loves has never been you."

I demanded to know who it was.

Back came a name.

Mizuhara Rin.

It was not that I had never heard the name before. There had always been rumors about her on the forum, that she had gotten into an elite school, that she was beautiful and brilliant and could host, voice act, and write with equal ease. But when she left the forum, she had demanded that everything related to her be deleted, so I had never once seen what she really looked like. Not until I begged Natsukawa Tatsu to show me a photo. The moment I saw it, I understood what it meant to shrink in shame before someone. In the picture, the girl stood beneath a light, her features cool and sharp, like someone born to live in the kind of place people spend their whole lives chasing after.

I also finally understood the small letter tattooed on your arm.

It was not decoration. It was the shadow she had left behind.

One day, when we passed a tattoo shop, I dragged you inside and said I wanted something etched into my arm too. At first you laughed and told me my skin was too sensitive and I should not mess around. But when I looked up and asked if that letter had been for her, your face suddenly darkened. You gripped my wrist and demanded to know who had told me. The silence in you, and the anger in you, were more answer than any answer could have been. Watching your back as you turned and walked away, I realized for the first time, with full clarity, that in your heart I weighed less than an old name.

Later, Natsukawa Tatsu told me your story bit by bit.

You and Mizuhara Rin had once been the couple everyone envied. Later, she was lured away by a brighter future and a more comfortable life, and she was the one who left first. You could not accept it, and you would not lose. Then, at exactly that time, you met me: a girl who posted grand confessions on forums, who rushed forward without a thought for consequences, who looked far too much like the Mizuhara Rin of years before. You pulled me to your side, not necessarily because you truly liked me, but because you wanted her to see that without her, you could still live loudly and brightly. The pity of it was that I took it all too seriously. So seriously that I turned myself into a stepping stone laid in the path of your return.

I sent you a message saying I would not cling to you, that I only wanted to see you one last time.

We met that day at a fast-food place by the station. You sat across from me with the brim of your cap lowered, barely willing to look me in the eye. I deliberately ordered far too much, filling the table with burgers, nuggets, and fries, as if stuffing my stomach might keep my heart from feeling so empty. I even deliberately sent you across the street to McDonald's to fetch garlic sauce for me. Without a word, you got up and went. Through the floor-to-ceiling window, I watched you cross the striped crosswalk and suddenly felt my nose sting.

When you came back, I asked whether you felt guilty toward me.

After a moment's silence, you nodded gently.

I came so close to crying, and still I smiled and said, "Then remember it. You hurt me. Don't forget."

When we walked out of the restaurant, Mizuhara Rin was standing at the door. She slipped her arm around yours as naturally as breathing and turned to smile at me, beautiful in a way that left no room for flaw. Beside her, you looked so gentle that it was as if the days you and I had spent together had never happened at all. Only then did I understand completely that from beginning to end, you had only used me to stage a move in your own game, and I had truly taken it for love.

After we broke apart, I started believing in horoscopes, tarot cards, anything at all that could help me patch the lie back together. I told myself our fate had not run out, that we had only become separated for a little while. And just when I was almost ready to fool myself completely, you called me.

On the phone, you told me that the pen in your room was one I had given you, that the jasmine tea in your cup was the one I had bought, that even the note stuck to your medicine box was in my handwriting. You said you missed me. My hand shook around the phone as if I were holding on to something about to shatter. But before I could say anything, you lowered your voice and said we could not talk long, because Mizuhara Rin would check your call history.

At the time, I did not know that this was not ordinary nostalgia.

It meant you were ill.

The fever burned my whole body into a haze. It was Natsukawa Tatsu who took me to the hospital and kept watch at my bedside all night. When I woke, he was asleep with his head resting by the bed, his face worn with a kind of exhaustion I had never seen before. It was also that day that he finally told me what he had kept from me all along. Your moods had been unstable for years. You had long been receiving psychiatric treatment. Your parents' relationship, your chaotic old love, the family troubles that had weighed on you for years, all of it had hemmed you in like sheet after sheet of iron. Mizuhara Rin had left you, returned to you, controlled you, tested you, left again, and come back again, each time carving another line into the same wound. Natsukawa Tatsu said the reason he had always stayed beside you was that you were his stepbrother, and your father was also the man who had taken his mother away from the life she once had.

Only then did I realize that every one of us was living on with ruins strapped to our backs.

For a while after that, Natsukawa Tatsu and I tried to stay beside you together. When your mood was good, you still laughed, still joked, still stood in front of me as if nothing had ever happened. But it took only a little alcohol, a little provocation, a little shadow cast by the past, for you to lose control all at once. That night at the little bar we often went to, some drunk deliberately knocked over your drink, and you snatched up a bottle and smashed it at him. The sound of shattering glass shook me to the bone. That was when I finally believed Natsukawa Tatsu had never lied to me.

Later, after we left the bar, we ran into that group again at the intersection. The arguing, the shoving, the curses, everything happened too quickly. Both you and Natsukawa Tatsu had learned boxing, and at first you could still hold your own, but there were too many of them. Very soon it dissolved into chaos. Someone grabbed my hair and slammed me against the wall. My phone flew out of my hand. In the confusion, someone fell, the back of his head striking the exposed rebar at the edge of a construction site. In an instant, the world went horrifyingly silent. All that remained was the sound of my own breathing, scraping at my ears like a blade.

At the police station, the officers asked who had pushed him.

Natsukawa Tatsu looked at me, then at you, and finally lifted his head and said, "I did."

I knew why he said it.

Because by then you were already curled up in the chair, shaking, clawing at your own hair again and again, your eyes so empty it looked as though you could not see anything at all. Because I was crying so hard I could not get out a single word. Because he was the only one still able to stand steady that night, so he took the collapse of all of us onto his own shoulders.

In the end the court gave him two years. He smiled at me and said it was all right, that if he just held on, it would pass. Your father, meanwhile, forced you out of the country for treatment. I could not see you before you left. All I received was a very short text message that said only, "Kana, I'm sorry."

From then on, I spent my life running between two places. On weekends I went to visit Natsukawa Tatsu. On weekdays I kept going to class, kept working, kept living what was supposed to look like a normal life. Natsukawa Tatsu always said that when he got out, we should go to Hokkaido together, to see the snow, to see the sea, to go somewhere no one knew us. I always nodded and agreed, but there was always an empty space inside me, because I knew I was still waiting for someone else.

Until that dawn, when Mizuhara Rin called me.

She said you were dead.

The treatment overseas had never gone well. You shut yourself in the dark, would not eat, would not drink, would not speak. One dawn, you climbed out from the eleventh-floor window of the sanatorium. In a hoarse voice, she asked me over the phone whether I had anything I wanted her to leave with you. I stood there holding the phone, feeling as if the whole world were sinking beneath me.

In the end, though, I said nothing.

What was there left to say? That I hated you, hated the way you had used me as a piece on the board, hated the way you made me understand how wretched loving someone could be? Or that I loved you, loved you so much that even knowing I had never occupied the most important place in your heart, I still thought of you again and again in the middle of the night? Every one of those words had come too late, too late like a letter that would never reach the hands of the person it was addressed to.

Later, I went to see Natsukawa Tatsu and told him you were gone. He sat behind the visitation glass without speaking for a very long time. Then he slowly lifted his hand and touched my forehead through the barrier the way he used to when he wanted to comfort me. In that moment I suddenly thought that if the first person I had fallen for at first sight had not been Natsukawa Tatsu, and if I had never met you afterward, perhaps all three of our lives would have weighed a little less than they do now.

But there is no such thing as perhaps in this world.

When I left the prison, the sunlight was so bright it hurt. The line of words I had impulsively carved into the inside of my arm in my youth was still there. The color had faded, but the words remained clear.

Heaven and earth bear witness.

I had once stood in front of you and spoken those four words so loudly, believing that if my love was fierce enough it could withstand all the caprice of fate. But in the end, I failed to keep anything. I did not keep you. I did not even keep that stretch of feeling that had been the most reckless, the truest, the most heedless thing I had ever known.

Many years later, I still hear that old song on the street now and then. It is still singing, "You have to be happy." Whenever that happens, I find myself wondering whether, if heaven really exists, there is no sickness there, no obsession, no fear that refuses to stay down when you wake in the middle of the night. Whether there is a very bright light there, shining on you, finally allowing you to sleep in peace.

Ochiai Yo, you are no longer in this world.

And yet on certain rainy nights, I still lift my head and stare at the sky for a very long time, unable to stop myself from asking one question.

Where is heaven?

I need to find you.