If Only You and I Were Left in This City

I once read a line online that said maturity is nothing more than the moment when something you once could not bear to let go of suddenly becomes something you no longer want at all.

If that line was not just something somebody made up to cheat an editor's fee, then I suppose I really have grown old. Because, Kusumi Asahi, if you and I were the only ones left in this city, I still would not run toward you with my whole life the way I did so many years ago.

The first time I met Kusumi Asahi was in a computer repair shop on a back street behind the station, a place that looked as though it might go under any day.

My laptop had been with me for three years. It was heavy, clumsy, and held every draft I had ever written and every fragment of my life, and that day, of all days, it suddenly went black. When I burst into the shop with it in my arms, Asahi was sitting in the backlight, a cigarette between his lips, a pair of overly serious black-framed glasses on his face, tapping at a keyboard. He did not look older than his early twenties. There was a light shadow of stubble along his jaw, and when the summer sunlight streaming in from outside touched it, there was something unexpectedly gentle about him.

Twenty minutes later, he looked up and told me very calmly, "It crashed."

I asked with all due humility, "Why did it crash?"

He said, "Too much pressure in life, probably."

It was not a funny joke at all, but after saying it he laughed first. Before I had the chance to ask what could be done, he had already sprung up from his chair and gone out the door. The one who came back in was the shop owner. When he heard what had happened, he slapped his thigh and looked as if the sky were collapsing. He said it was over, that the machine had probably fallen victim to that guy again.

Only later did I find out that Asahi had once deleted a folder in that shop. It had contained nothing but photographs of him and his girlfriend. The owner said Asahi had stood on the street holding the computer and crying like a madman that day, and ever since then he had treated the place like an object of revenge, sneaking in every so often just to wipe other people's data clean. Childish, obsessive, ridiculous. But when I heard the owner's final words, "That girl is dead," the curses that had already reached my lips suddenly fell silent.

That summer, I ghostwrote stories for other people by day and went to bed early at night, doing my best to live like a normal person. The job had been found for me by Kitahara Riku. He was in Rotterdam, and yet somehow he could still arrange everything properly from half a world away. He told me, "Akira, I'm coming back to Japan soon. Until then, let me find you something that can feed you properly." The work he found was ghostwriting for a young female author who used the name Aki. She never showed her face. She only paid on time and accepted manuscripts on schedule, like a shadow that existed only in an inbox.

Kitahara Riku had been a chubby little boy when I first met him at seven. Many years later, when he returned to Japan, he had grown so thin I could barely recognize him. But when he smiled, his eyes still curved into a line, and he still asked me, "What do you want to eat?" as if ten years had only bent around a corner and carried us back to childhood. The only thing Riku did not realize was that I had long since ceased to be the Asano Akira who wore white T-shirts, drank milk, and went to bed at nine every night. The person I became after that suffered from insomnia, smoked, and sat at the computer before dawn knocking out pages while pouring ice-cold beer into herself, as if I were deliberately trying to ruin my own life.

What truly dragged Riku and Kusumi Asahi into each other's orbit was Riku's Samoyed. The dog's name was Shiromaru, round as a puff of breathing snow. He and Riku both ate something bad and got sick. Riku was still trapped in the toilet, so I had no choice but to take Shiromaru to the nearby animal hospital, and when I pushed open the door, there was Asahi again.

This time he had shaved clean and was wearing a spotless white doctor's coat, standing beneath the light and listening to the dog's heartbeat, as if he had been put together all over again. He quite clearly did not remember me as the unfortunate sixteenth victim. He only swept me a glance, lowered his head to stroke Shiromaru's fur, and said lightly, "Looks like he's under a lot of pressure too."

I deliberately brought up the incident with the computer files to needle him. He dropped the joke at once, lifted his eyes to me, and said with a seriousness almost cruel in its sharpness, "He ate what you gave him because he trusts you. If you're going to keep him, then you have to be responsible for that trust."

For some reason, I suddenly felt a little wronged.

People are strange that way. He was the one who had brought me bad luck, and yet the moment he turned serious, it was I who began to feel guilty first.

Later, after Shiromaru finished his drip, I realized I had forgotten my wallet. Without so much as a change in expression, Asahi kept the dog at the clinic as a hostage, grabbed his motorcycle keys, and asked if I wanted to go for a ride. The night wind cut across my face like a blade. Sitting behind him, my arms wrapped around his waist, I could hear my own heartbeat making so much noise it nearly drowned out the engine. We rode all the way from Yokohama to the coast outside Kamakura. The sea wind smelled of salt and fish, and the waves came one after another against the embankment. He stood in the darkness looking at the water, and only after a long time did he say that Aki's ashes had been scattered there.

Aki.

The name the shop owner had tossed out so lightly in a single sentence suddenly acquired a real shape.

After that, I began inventing reasons to go to the animal hospital. By day I helped Asahi there, trimming fur, disinfecting, feeding medicine to cats and dogs, and at night I went home and kept writing for Aki. Asahi never had much of a pleasant face for me, but I still showed up every day right on time, like a thick-skinned intruder who could not grow tired. Riku could not stand it. One weekend he pushed open my front door, only to be hit by the reek of cigarette smoke in the whole room, and frowned hard. He stuffed my half carton of cigarettes and all the beer in the refrigerator into a trash bag and trembled with anger. "Asano Akira, look what you've done to yourself."

I had been about to snap back, but then he pulled a panda eraser from his pocket, one from many years ago. I had shoved it at him as a casual gift when we were seven and forgotten it myself, yet he had carried it with him for more than ten years. Riku said, "I always wanted to save it and use it when I saw you again. But I could never bear to." In that instant, something inside me suddenly quieted down. It was not the cigarettes, not the alcohol, not the lively stories I wrote in the middle of the night, but a kind of real stillness that finally touched the ground.

But however quiet things became, the fact that I liked Asahi still grew through me like wild grass.

In the end, I still ruined everything.

That evening at dusk, only Asahi and I were in the clinic. I was sitting beside the injection table eating pomegranate, spitting out seeds and deliberately teasing him with Aki, asking whether he kept leaving his beard unshaven because he was waiting for her to come back and scold him for it. I regretted the words the instant they left my mouth, because the look he turned on me was as cold as shattered ice. But by then I had already been driven mad by jealousy. I was jealous of a girl I had never even met, jealous that even in death she still occupied his whole heart so steadily.

So I walked over, grabbed his collar, rose on tiptoe, and kissed the corner of his mouth.

Asahi froze all over, and in the next second he shoved me away. My eyes were red, and I asked with the recklessness of someone who had already broken the jar anyway: if he could be with so many women he already knew were unsuitable, then why, of all people, could it not be me? Asahi was silent for a long time. At last, in a hoarse voice, he said only, "You think you're the same as them?"

Before I could decide whether those words were an insult or something else, Riku burst through the door with Shiromaru and punched Asahi in the face.

It was the first fight Riku had ever been in.

It was also the first time I had watched, with my own eyes, someone who had spent his whole childhood doing nothing but handing me snacks and toys end up with his face covered in blood because of me. That night I helped Riku to a small clinic to have him bandaged. He kept hissing with pain, while I crouched outside the door holding Shiromaru and wept so hard I shook. I thought then that Kitahara Riku had truly had rotten luck. When he was seven, other children shut him out because he was so fat, and I was the only one willing to play with him, so he took me for the best girl in the world. But in truth, all I had wanted at the beginning was his endless snacks and the way he always paid when we went out.

Yet he had never once minded.

After that, I quit the ghostwriting job for Aki. But when the final payment was settled, the client sent me one message.

"Hey. Come out and meet me."

We met at a restaurant near Yamashita Park. Through the floor-to-ceiling window, I saw Asahi at a glance. He was wearing a white shirt, drinking tea with red goji berries floating in it, the afternoon light falling over him so quietly that it was like finally seeing the true shape of a dream. I went in and sat down. He ordered lemon juice for me, looking so natural it was as if we had never torn each other apart.

Then he looked at me and told me the truth I had never dared examine too closely.

Aki was not someone else. It had been Aki's old pen name when she was still writing.

The fees I had been paid, the magazine samples, the commissions that had appeared on schedule like shadows all these years, every one of them had been arranged by him. After Aki left this world, he had only wanted to find someone who could keep writing in her place, so that there would still be someone in the world who remembered the name Aki, someone who at the end of every month would still go to the same newsstand and buy a magazine with her name printed on it, pretending she had not left, pretending she was still living well somewhere.

With my head lowered, I suddenly could not say a single word.

What was crueler still was that Aki was not only the name I had borrowed when I wrote. She was also the pair of eyes through which I now saw the world.

Many years earlier, my mother and I had been in a car accident on our way to an amusement park. She died on the spot, and I was left blind after severe corneal damage. My father was a surgeon. Later, he finally found a patient willing to donate corneas for me. That patient was Aki. She had been hospitalized with stomach cancer and never woke up again after her operation. There were far too many ugly rumors outside about whether my father had made mistakes in surgery, whether, because of me, he had allowed selfishness to cloud his judgment. In the end, my father could not carry it either. He followed my mother out of this world in a drunk-driving accident. I had always believed I had grown used to these wounds. Yet sitting in front of Asahi that day, I discovered they had never scabbed over at all.

I told him that if I had known I would meet him in this life, I would rather have stayed blind forever.

It was the first and only time I ever said anything that cruel to him.

Asahi did not argue. He only drank with me in silence. We ordered a whole table full of food like two people with binge-eating disorder, eating desperately, drinking desperately, as if filling our stomachs might also fill the hollowness inside our hearts. Later I got drunk and collapsed over the table, crying in a hopeless mess. Asahi carried me on his back for a long while. The city lights dimmed little by little. Resting against him, I smelled the faint scent of hibiscus in his collar and heard the steady, weary beat of his heart inside his chest.

Toward dawn, he lowered his head and kissed me.

The kiss was light and cool and faintly salty with tears. I had always known it was not proof that love had finally descended upon me. It was more like a consolation that had come too late, a farewell he knew he should not give and yet gave anyway.

Many years have passed since then. I no longer smoke, and I rarely drink. I have made my life quiet and clean again, and I go on writing, publishing books, and giving interviews under the name Aki. Riku still likes dragging me and Shiromaru all over the place in search of good food, as if nothing at all has changed over the years. Neither of us has ever spoken that long love aloud again. It is as if, so long as we do not say it, it cannot hurt.

I know that somewhere in this world there must still be a young man who has the habit of beginning his sentences with "Hey." Perhaps he has let that unobjectionable bit of stubble grow back. Perhaps at the end of every month he still walks into a newsstand and lowers his head over the magazines printed with the name Aki. Perhaps one day, on some page, he will see a woman grown a little soft and round, with a gentle face. Perhaps his fingers will brush over her face as lightly as he once stroked the little animals in his care.

Only I, in this lifetime, will probably never again have the chance to reach out and touch the stubble on his face, bright with sunlight.