If This City Held Only You and Me

The first time I met Kanzaki Chenxi, he had a thick, untidy stubble, a pair of severe black-rimmed glasses, a cigarette between his lips, and pale, long fingers tapping a black keyboard. After a few strokes he told me, "It's crashed." By "it" he meant my laptop, a stupid heavy thing that had followed me around for three years. I asked humbly, "How did it crash?" Kanzaki lifted his brow and glanced at me. "Oh, that? Too much pressure in life." Then he laughed to himself, open and easy. Honestly, it was not very funny, and a little cold, so I only twitched my mouth out of politeness and hoped for an actual solution. The sunlight that day was a white, blinding thing, arriving in packs against the pale wall. Seven parts of its heat were filtered away; the remaining three crawled up onto Kanzaki's forehead. He frowned. The warm specks of light scattered over his stubble one by one and made it look strangely arresting. As a complete idiot where computers were concerned, all I could do was stand beside him in a daze while he bent over my machine. Twenty minutes later, Kanzaki glanced out the window, hopped down from the chair, and strode out. I stood there stupidly for another three minutes. The person who came back through the door was not Kanzaki but a middle-aged man of about thirty, surely the owner. I should mention that by my estimate Kanzaki was at most a few years older than I was, still young enough to be called a youth, which was why I found that young man's stubble so fascinating. The owner looked at me, then at my computer, and suddenly slapped his forehead. "Oh no. Then your computer must have fallen victim to that brat too. Were there important files in it?" I nodded. He clicked his tongue and said, "Then that's terrible. No computer that falls into Kanzaki Chenxi's hands ever ends well. Young lady, my condolences." Sunlight kept pouring in and landing squarely on top of my head. According to the owner, twelve days earlier Kanzaki had accidentally deleted an entire folder of photographs while installing software there. The owner had gone mad, cursing his ancestors and descendants alike, and storming out with the computer in tears. When he came back, Kanzaki had developed a special skill: any computer he touched afterward was doomed to lose at least one file. The owner told me, with a long-suffering face, that I had become the sixteenth unlucky customer to walk straight into the tiger's den, and offered me heartfelt apologies along with his plans to shut the shop for good. Kanzaki, he said, always found a way to sneak in while he was out at lunch, stubborn and mischievous like an overgrown child obsessed with revenge. At the time I thought the whole thing immature to an astonishing degree and secretly admired the owner's saintly patience in not calling the police. Only later did I learn that the folder Kanzaki had lost contained every photograph he had ever taken with his girlfriend. Later still I learned that the girl in those photographs was already dead.

Those two facts were enough to stop me from cursing him, in the middle of deadline nights, to live on instant noodles forever without ever finding the seasoning packet. In truth, ever since I started ghostwriting, I had never had the sort of discipline a person living on words ought to have. I ate instant noodles often enough, but I almost never stayed up through the night. Thanks to Kanzaki Chenxi, I finally felt, both physically and spiritually, that I had received one proper lesson in professional devotion. This ghostwriting job had been found for me by Kitahara Riku across mountains and seas. He called from Rotterdam over a cup of fragrant Blue Mountain coffee and told me he was coming home. Before that, he had found me a well-paid, discreet piece of work: ghostwriting for a young woman writer whose pen name was Huixi. It truly was a discreet job, and I was deeply grateful. Before Riku returned, he even called me from overseas and said, "Shirakawa Akira, after all these years, do you still remember that I once said I was going to marry you?" Riku was still the same Riku he had always been. I, however, had long stopped being the Shirakawa Akira I used to be. The next time I ran into Kanzaki was when my dog fell ill and I carried my poor giant of a son into his pet hospital. He glanced at me and said sternly, "If an animal is willing to eat the food you prepare, that's because it places absolute trust in you. Don't imagine eating is only instinct. Don't assume its trust is something you deserve automatically. If you raise it, you have to take responsibility, including for what it eats." So he really had forgotten me; perhaps that should not have hurt, but for some reason it did, and I felt both angry and wronged. After scolding me, he examined my boy, fed him medicine, lifted his bear-sized body up onto the table for an IV, and then turned and said, "What are you standing there for? Come help." I went over obediently, held my dog's enormous paw, and watched him shave away a patch of soft white fur. My boy drooped weakly under the drip while I stood to one side and waited. That day Kanzaki looked deliberately composed. He had deliberately shaved his stubble clean, deliberately made himself neat, deliberately buried himself in work. By the time my dog finished the drip, dusk had fallen. Kanzaki changed out of his white coat into a smoke-gray jacket and said, "That'll be one hundred sixty-eight." I thought about it, then said, "I forgot my wallet." Without a word, Kanzaki kept my dog behind as a hostage, grabbed his keys, and asked, "Want to go for a ride?" I grinned. "Can I use it to pay my bill?" "Sure," he said. After a pause he added, "Writers are all poor as hell anyway." I ignored him and jumped onto the back of his motorbike. He drove so fast that I, being very attached to living, had no choice but to wrap both arms around his waist. My head filled with the roar of the engine and the wind, and still it kept chattering on its own: So this is you acting cool? If you remember I'm a penniless writer living off words, why did you delete the documents that kept me alive in the first place, bastard? We rode for three hours under quiet moonlight that ran over the retreating gray buildings and the white flowers blooming sparsely by the road. By the time he brought me to a wild stretch of sea, my hair was a complete disaster. I thought, so this is what people mean by going for a ride. How very much of a ride. Kanzaki looked at me strangely and said quietly, "Chengzi's ashes were scattered here." Then he asked, "Do you know Chengzi?" I nodded. I remembered the owner at the repair shop saying the girl in the folder had been called that. "Mm," Kanzaki said. "She's here." The salt smell of the sea was stronger at night. Stars shone on the gray water and waves kept breaking in our ears. He said nothing more. I said nothing either. We simply stood shoulder to shoulder facing the sea, as if keeping a vigil. When dawn was almost there, I turned in the moonlight and looked at Kanzaki. He stood with his back slightly bent, his beautiful hands hidden in his jeans pockets, and all at once I wanted terribly to walk over and hold him.

During the time my dog was sick, I went to Kanzaki Chenxi's little pet world almost every day. After my dog recovered, I still went every day, more punctually than I showed up for work. Kanzaki seemed not to notice that I had already fallen in love with him at first sight. He treated me like some frivolous penniless woman and wore a sour expression for me at all times. He seemed to have forgotten that it had been he who first suggested we go for a ride, though I admit I had shown absolutely none of the reserve or hesitation expected of a girl. Once I asked him, "If this city had only you and me left..." He cut me off at once. "Then I'd rather look in a mirror and fall in love with myself." But who was I? I was a shameless poor girl. What did I care if he gave me the cold shoulder? So I hovered like a ghost, growing braver with every setback. By day I drifted around the pet hospital; by night I went home to smoke, drink, and ghostwrite. My little life ran in a grim, steady order. Then one weekend Kitahara Riku shoved open my front door, took one step back under the assault of the smoke, and stared through the haze that the fresh air was slowly punching apart. "Shirakawa Akira, what on earth are you doing?" he demanded. I turned toward him with my eyes bloodshot and answered, "Typing for money." Riku pressed his lips together, steadied himself, strode over, snatched the ESSE cigarette from my hand, and, with unbelievable cruelty, threw that stub and the remaining five and a half packs into the toilet before flushing them all away. "Kitahara Riku, you scum! I only just got the toilet fixed! Now you've clogged it again!" "If the toilet's clogged, I'll fix it," he shot back, shaking with anger. "But what's wrong with you, you have to fix yourself." His fury was so overwhelming that I did not dare make a sound. The truth was I felt guilty. The old Shirakawa Akira used to cough for half an hour if she caught so much as a lungful of secondhand smoke. She had been terribly nearsighted, but her heart had been clear and bright. She wore white T-shirts and clean jeans, slept at nine and woke at seven, drank milk and juice, tied her hair into a neat ponytail, and loved scrubbing her canvas shoes clean to dry on the balcony. Back then, Shirakawa Akira thought women who smoked and drank were unbearably ugly. Now I had become exactly the sort of person I used to despise.

The thing I could never forget was the winter when I was sixteen, after half a year of blindness, when I finally saw sunlight again and what met me was blood-red. At fifteen, my mother and I were in a car accident on the way to an amusement park. She died on the spot. She had held me in her arms and spared my life, but the impact tore my corneas. The sudden accident and the sudden darkness made me withdrawn and strange. I used to hide by myself in corners and behind curtains and cry until I gagged. My father seemed to grow old overnight, but he kept comforting me. "Xiaoxiao, don't be afraid. As soon as we find a suitable donor, you can have a corneal transplant. You'll see Dad again. You'll see everything you used to see." Of course I believed him. He had been a doctor for almost twenty years. So when, a year later, he came running to tell me a gastric-cancer patient was willing to donate her corneas, I was not surprised. I only thought: even if I can see again, I still won't be able to see Mom. The operation went well. I thought life had returned to the proper track. I never expected that when darkness closes in, even the brightest light cannot save you. Rumors spread everywhere. Some said that if not for my father's mistake, that gastric-cancer patient might have lived several years longer. Others said my father had intentionally allowed the operation to fail so he could get corneas for me. Media and public opinion forced him out of the hospital. A week later, after driving drunk, my father followed my mother and left me too. I know now that it was not an accident. He had signed an organ donation form and written his last note long before. He told me, Akira, do not hate what you have had to face. My father was not weak enough to be crushed by gossip. But in the end I could only believe that he really had done something wrong for my sake. I moved house. I learned to smoke and drink. I became obsessed with writing every kind of story on every kind of forum, because I knew it was the only way to stand against the night and feed myself. It was not until I began ghostwriting for Huixi that I slowly returned to a normal schedule. Riku had met Huixi on a forum he managed. Or rather, Huixi had found Riku. At the time, Riku loved posting my stories in his section. One day Huixi sent him a note that said, Hey, be my ghostwriter. Following Riku's instructions, I began living like a human being again, sleeping early and rising early, though I never managed to quit smoking and drinking, and even if I had, Shirakawa Akira had already ceased to be the girl she once was. Riku made a circuit of my room and stuffed the beer, white liquor, and wine I had just chilled into a garbage bag. Then, after a moment's thought, he reluctantly spared the grape wine. "Shirakawa Akira, look at yourself," he said. "The bags under your eyes hang lower than your chest. How can you treat yourself like this?" He was about to go on, but I cut him off. "Kitahara Riku, what, are my parents possessing you now? What right do you have to control this and control that? What, do you like me or something?" He yanked me out of the chair in one motion and shouted even louder than I had, "So what if I do? I like you. What about it?" After that, the world went still. He really had grown up. The old Riku had been so soft and sweet, fat and gentle and adorable, someone who only knew how to be good to me and would never raise his voice. I watched his face turn faintly red. Then he coughed, reached into his pocket, and showed me a panda eraser with big ears. "You gave me this when you were seven," he said. "I could never bear to use it. I thought I'd use it when I met you again someday. But even now I still can't bear to." Looking at that panda eraser, at the fragrant little kingdom in his palm, I suddenly felt warm and quiet inside, in a way no amount of smoke or alcohol had ever managed. After all, not every girl in the world gets to meet the eraser she gave away more than ten years ago.

The pity that flashed through his eyes was the kind of medicine that could cure any disease and bring the dead back to life. The next time I went to find Kanzaki, I brought a great many bananas. I had heard they made people happy. I even bought myself a giant pomegranate so that when he made one of his sour faces at me, I could sit on the injection table, swing my legs, and spit pomegranate seeds with dignity. Later I simply ordered myself a nurse's uniform online and started turning up at his clinic as an assistant by day before going home to ghostwrite at night. Unfortunately, the daylight hours were short and only long enough for Kanzaki to roll his eyes at me a few times. "Kanzaki Chenxi, talk to me," I would say. "I can't spend every night talking to my computer, can I? Human beings need conversation. If you don't drink milk, you should just say so. Pouring it away is such a waste." Once I said, "You never shave. Are you hoping Chengzi will come back and tell you to tidy your beard, you bastard?" At last he reacted. He stopped gazing tenderly at the cats and dogs and looked at me instead, and his eyes were frighteningly cold. To be honest, I regretted it at once. I regretted bringing Chengzi up in front of him. I knew perfectly well it was the freshest and forever fresh wound in his heart, something no one ought to touch, and still I said it. I really was hateful. But Kanzaki Chenxi, how could you have known how fiercely I envied that unseen girl, the one who occupied your whole heart? I was so jealous I could have gone mad. Gray birds flew past the window in clusters. The evening wind carried the damp scent of pine. "Get out," Kanzaki said. At the same time, I stepped forward, seized the snowy collar of his shirt, rose up on my toes, and kissed the corner of his mouth like the worst kind of hooligan. Kanzaki froze. Then those hands that were usually so gentle with cats and dogs pushed me away. It was a miserable scene. I thought then that if I ever wrote another story, I would have to give those women who loved in vain a good ending, because only at that moment did I understand how they hurt, how they crashed into things, how they suffocated. I bit down hard and somehow held back the tears trembling in my eyes. "Kanzaki Chenxi," I said, "you can keep changing girlfriends. Big mouth, flat nose, squinty eyes, bowlegs, you don't care what they look like. So why can't it be me?" I must truly have been crazy. Now, looking back, I can no longer tell whether there was more grief in that recklessness or more relief. But I know that no matter how many times that scene was repeated, I would still do exactly what I did that day. I would still say the same rash words, every single one truer than pearls. Kanzaki's gaze darkened, as if he were forcing something down, and yet I went on, driving at him harder and harder. "You stay with them because you want to forget the pain of Chengzi leaving. If you stayed with me, I could make you forget that pain too." By then my heart was shaking violently. Twilight had been pushed back by night. Kanzaki asked quietly, "You think you can compare to them? You say they were all flat-nosed, bowlegged women. What are you? Aren't you worse than any of them?" My head buzzed. Before I could answer, Riku, who had just walked in leading my dog, shouted, "The hell did you just say about her?" and threw a punch. It was the first time the bookish Kitahara Riku had ever cursed, and the first time that honest, thick-skinned Riku had ever thrown a fist. The outcome was obvious. I left the pet hospital one step at a time, holding my dog with one hand and supporting Riku, who had nearly been beaten into a pig's face, with the other. Night pressed down heavily around us. I stopped, took off my nurse's uniform, turned back into the pet hospital, laid it on the table, and came out again. For one instant I saw pity flicker through Kanzaki's eyes. It was medicine that could cure all ills and raise the dead, and it held a little heartache, a little guilt, a little indifference, and perhaps a little longing too. The street was long and we walked it a long while. I wanted to ask my dog whether the youth I loved so deeply, Kanzaki Chenxi, was standing there behind us watching my back and refusing to look away. In truth I wanted to turn around and see for myself. But with my face slick with tears and snot, I must have looked hideous.

That night I took Riku to a small clinic at the end of the street to have his injuries treated. He had been hit badly: bruised eye socket, split lip, even a finger bone out of place. He lay there letting the doctor poke and prod at him while my dog stalked out in disdain at his miserable cries. I went outside too, buried my face in the warm fur of my dog's neck, and shook with sobs. Riku really was an unlucky man. When we were seven he had been chubby beyond reason, ostracized by the other children, and because I was the only one willing to play with him he decided I was the best girl in the world. In truth, I had only tagged along with him because there was always meat to eat when I did. In truth, I had looked down on him too. But Riku never cared. He shared all of his toys and snacks with me, and all I ever gave him in return was a panda eraser, and only because I liked rabbits then and did not like pandas with big ears. He still treasured it more than ten years later, too reluctant to use it. Before he went abroad, he cried until his face turned green and said, "Shirakawa Akira, what are you going to do without me? Who's going to take you out for braised pig's feet?" After he left, every single one of my birthdays was marked by the first phone call coming from him at exactly midnight, timed down to the minute. I never answered once. It always seemed more important to sleep than to pick up the phone. And yet when a person really wants someone to talk to, sleep is the emptiest thing there is. Later, when Riku heard by chance what had happened to me, he came back to Japan without a second thought, because he heard I was lonely and wanted to raise a dog. So he arrived carrying my boy with him and broke into my life all over again. Can you believe it? Love can begin as early as seven years old.

In the end I quit ghostwriting for Huixi. Then Huixi sent me the final payment and added, "Hey, come out and meet me." So I dressed myself up carefully, because that was what Kanzaki Chenxi always did before going to the sea to miss Chengzi. I too had to force myself into looking bright and full of life. Then, at the place we had arranged, I saw him through a huge clear pane of glass. Kanzaki sat there in a white shirt, eyes narrowed, head bent over a drink the color of red amber. I walked in, greeted him as naturally as I could, and ordered myself a lemonade. Yes, you've guessed correctly: Huixi was Chengzi's pen name. And I was only an illusion created by Kanzaki Chenxi, an illusion in which Chengzi had never truly left. After Chengzi died, he wanted to find someone who could take over Huixi's place and become her shadow. Then this young man who always liked to begin sentences with "Hey" could go on, as usual, buying at the end of every month the magazines bearing Huixi's name from the same newspaper stall. That was what hurt me most. My love for Kanzaki could never surpass Kanzaki's love for Chengzi. It was a fact. A poisonous needle lodged between my brows. He sat there wrapped in a sheet of light, his shoulders still slightly bent, and in the end he took me to a crowded food street. We ordered a whole tableful of dishes and ate as if we were two patients with some shared illness, united only by hunger. He poured me beer. The golden liquid foamed white in the glass. I drank one cup after another and said, "I'm sorry, Kanzaki Chenxi. I'm sorry." I cried so hard and so bitterly that I could scarcely breathe. If I had known that somewhere along the path of this life I would meet Kanzaki Chenxi, then I would rather have stayed blind forever than taken the corneas Chengzi donated to me. Across from me he said nothing. His lashes were very long; in the blur they looked as if they might be carrying tiny beads of dew. After a while I thought, What right do I have to cry? How dare I cry at Kanzaki Chenxi with Chengzi's eyes? So I raised my glass and kept pouring alcohol into myself until my thoughts burst apart and my heart sank completely under the liquor. With a thud I collapsed onto the table. In the haze, a pair of cool hands gently covered my eyes, and after a long silence I heard a sigh dissolve beside my ear.

That night Kanzaki Chenxi carried me on his back through one long street after another. The city darkened. The streetlights came on. Only then did he bring me home. I thought I could hear his heartbeat, steady and mournful, beating close against me, and all around us there was the scent of hibiscus. Later I often thought that if Chengzi had never had stomach cancer, if she had never donated her corneas, if my father had never made a mistake, if my computer had not crashed that day, if I had never gone to have it repaired, if Kanzaki Chenxi had never opened my files and seen the photograph of me standing beside my father, then perhaps I might have been allowed to be braver, more willful, more young and reckless. Perhaps I might have been allowed to keep whispering I like you in his ear until even he began to think that perhaps I was not so bad, that perhaps I was truly not so bad at all. But there were no such ifs. Cinderella had no crystal slipper. Nobita had no Doraemon. Shirakawa Akira had no if. I only know with absolute certainty that when the first cold white light spread across the sky, the kiss that landed on my lips, cool and tasting faintly of tears, could not have been something I invented. So, Kanzaki Chenxi, may I believe that perhaps you liked me too, just as I liked you? May I believe that when moss flowers at last, you will come back and take my hand and say, Hey, I missed you to death?

Time is quiet. This is as good a life as any. Many years have passed, and Kitahara Riku has remained stubbornly devoted to taking my dog and me all over the place in search of good food. Life is peaceful now. I earn my living under Huixi's pen name. I no longer smoke and I no longer drink. I like appearing in magazine interview columns with a clean and composed face. I know that somewhere in some corner of this world there must still be a young man who likes to begin every sentence with "Hey," who keeps a not-at-all-annoying stubble on his face and stands in front of a newsstand turning through every magazine that bears the name Huixi. Perhaps he will come upon a girl who has grown a little plumper, smiling with her eyes lowered in one of those interviews. Perhaps his fingers will brush softly over her face the way he used to stroke cats and dogs, gentle and warm. But those sunlight-drenched bristles on his chin are something I will never again have the chance to touch with my own hand.