I have truly never met anyone more shameless than you. A beauty saves a hero, and not only are you not grateful, you trail after me in the sneakiest way for half the night. When I crossed at the light, you crossed at the light. When I took the underpass, you went up the footbridge. I was carrying a man six feet tall on my back and grunting beneath the weight, and you still would not offer so much as a hand. Only when I was completely spent and staggered into the first McDonald's I saw did you finally slide up beside me like Spider-Man and say, "Spicy chicken burger, large fries, strawberry sundae, mashed potatoes. Thanks." The teasing, wicked smile in your eyes made me lose focus for a moment. It overlapped perfectly with the face of Renjo Sazama in my memory. I shut my eyes, shook my head hard, gave you a glare, and went to the counter to buy myself a small Coke so I could crunch the ice between my teeth. You did not take the hint and disappear just because I treated you like air. On the contrary, you leaned in even closer, like gum that would not come off. Then you said you would tell me a joke and, without caring in the slightest that I was ignoring you, cleared your throat and launched into it with the solemnity of a man onstage: a husband woke one morning and found that his wife had died, so he turned pale, ran downstairs in his underwear, and shouted to the servant making breakfast in the kitchen, "Hey, cook one less egg this morning!" You laughed so hard after that that the service girl behind the counter gripped her mop in suspicion. When you finally stopped, I told you a story in return. Mine was shorter, I said. The teacher assigned an essay on trust, the language had to be concise, it had to end in tragedy, and there was no word limit. So Xiao Ming handed in a single line: "Can I borrow some money?" The teacher wrote back only one word: "Get lost." You laughed until you nearly folded in half, not realizing or pretending not to realize that I was cursing you by implication. Then you looked at me with bright eyes and said, "You're hilarious, Mika Yuuki." A chill ran down my spine. Who was Mika Yuuki? Only then did I understand why you had followed me so stubbornly. You had thought I owed you something. I walked over, stood still, and held out my student ID. "Can you read? My name is Mio Sazama." "That can't be right," you said, staring. You looked back and forth from the card to the boy sleeping against my shoulder. "He, he, he..." "He's my brother," I said. "Renjo Sazama. I was working part-time at the supermarket next to school today and didn't keep an eye on him. He slipped away and wandered into your class reunion. He used to love singing more than anything." I stroked Renjo's hair and tried to smile, but my eyes turned hot with tears, and I had to turn away. When I looked back through the giant glass doors of the McDonald's, I saw you still sitting there in a daze, a flash of sorrow crossing your eyes. This time, at least, you did not follow me.
I did not expect to see you again, and certainly not so soon. It was in the middle of class. I was bent over a bright red decorative knot, the sort of handwork I had taken from the gift shop outside to earn a few extra yen, one piece at a time, three-day delivery, the sort of thing that did not allow mistakes. Then the classroom began to stir. When I turned around, there you were, still in a white T-shirt, only now the logo had changed. You stood there with that same harmless, foxlike smile, while the girls in the back all but burst into flames with excitement. Even before you ever knew my name, I had already known half of yours. You ranked in the top three of the secret catalog of school beauties passed around among the girls. You had transferred in only a month before and already acquired a squadron of admirers. One of the most fanatical among them had sworn that if you ever entered a national idol competition, she would run around the school naked for two weeks to campaign for you. But what was a national idol competition to someone like you? Standing under bright lights, singing and dancing, saying things you do not mean, doing things you do not want, all to be loved by strangers, so that at the end of the road that love builds you can gather only two things: fame and money. And you, whose father appeared regularly on the front page of the city's financial section, had never needed either in that desperate way. I looked down at the half-finished knot in my hands. That was the difference between us. Two utterly different lives. "Mio Sazama," you called. I ignored you. Then you changed tactics and called me "darling." I shot to my feet at once. Stay another second, I thought, and one of your fiercely loyal fans might pour acid on me from behind. You stood against the light, wrapped in blood-red evening sun, beautiful enough to hurt. Yet there was something unbearably sad about the sight. "What do you want? I'm busy." I turned as if to leave, and you pinned me in place with one sentence. "I have a part-time job. Fifteen hundred a month. Want it?" Much later, once we were already close, you told me that before saying that, you had already investigated me carefully in secret. You knew I had no one in the world except Renjo, and that the two of us lived entirely by what I earned. So you approached me exactly where I was weakest. Then you asked whether I thought that was despicable. If I had known it at the beginning, would I still have accepted? When you said those words, we were walking along the river at night, releasing paper lanterns into a city bright as glazed glass. The lantern rose slowly, and our wishes rose with it, while the people who made them remained below. I did not answer you then. I only leaned quietly against your shoulder and looked up at the clear stars. But I heard the heart that had already begun to grow old when I was nineteen sigh very softly.
Yes, I would have. Moriya Itsuki, someone like you, who possessed too much, could never have imagined what it meant to be chosen so precisely by fate. That autumn came early. Ginkgo leaves spread themselves over the streets until the whole world glowed lemon-yellow. After he saw more of you, Renjo took to following you about. He was the same height as you, and yet behind you he seemed as docile as a child. Sometimes, when the three of us walked together, he would behave like one too, saying he was tired and refusing to take another step until you carried him. And you, who looked so upright and untouched by dust, you who had been born with a silver spoon in your mouth and knew nothing of the ordinary hardness of life, would simply bend down and let him climb onto your back. My heart felt as if a white cloud had opened over it, folding itself again and again into something light and soft. We walked home slowly beneath the deep shadows of the ginkgo trees. Renjo fell asleep on your back and mumbled in his sleep, "Mika... Mika..." You gave me a puzzled glance. Who was Mika, you asked, that he still remembered her so stubbornly. Then you smiled faintly and answered yourself. "No matter what, it must have something to do with love. Only love can stay beautiful in a person even after everything else has been forgotten: life, death, the whole world, even the self." I stopped walking and looked into the distance. It was a beautiful story, I said, and a terribly sad one. Three years before, when Renjo Sazama was sixteen, he fell in love with a girl who seemed to have stepped straight out of a fairy tale: beautiful, transparent, elegant, from a powerful family, with a future blazing wide before her. Her parents would never allow that future to stop for a rootless boy with nothing. So they locked her away. Yet that glass doll of a girl, who used to cry if she so much as pricked a finger, gritted her teeth one night and climbed down the drainage pipe outside her second-floor room in her pajamas. For a girl who had never even peeled her own fruit, that did not require any less courage than eloping itself. Their elopement succeeded halfway. They did escape the cold prison her parents had built around her. But in their joy they never noticed the truck that shot out from the intersection. Two minutes later the butterfly-thin girl rose out of this world like a paper lantern and vanished forever. Renjo became what you see now. My words jammed in my throat. The scene froze. I lost my voice, then my sight, and pressed trembling fingers against my face. You stepped close and leaned into me. Your warm, beating heart pressed against my chest while Renjo still slept on your back. In that sacred, shifting light fallen through the ginkgo leaves, the three of us seemed twined together like a single cruelly beautiful body. If time had stopped there, in that empty and clear world, how good it would have been. You walked us all the way home that day, one hand gripping Renjo on your back, the other warming my palm. Later, from my window, I watched your lonely figure recede and remembered what you had said when you handed Renjo back to me. "Mio," you said, "this world is too heavy. Sometimes forgetting is not a bad kind of happiness." Then you told me that you yourself were eighteen, but possessed only eight months of memory. The rest of your life was blank. I stared at you, trying to find some trace of a joke in your face, but the expression there was deeper and graver than I had ever seen before. In the distance I thought I heard fate laughing under its breath in the dark. I looked at you and at Renjo, the two boys I loved most in this life. One of you had stopped in time and lost his past. The other had been left in a stillness so absolute that he had no future. The whole world went mute as a wasteland.
Three days later you came to my classroom with bloodshot eyes, clothes in disarray, and a face drained by exhaustion. Your fan club was scandalized. Some of them even began whispering that perhaps I had seduced you and driven you half mad. You looked at me as though a whole lifetime were passing between us, then gripped my shoulders and told me to come with you. "I've forgiven him," you said. "Come on. Pinky swear." Perhaps I should be grateful that your mother appeared exactly when she did. She was powerful enough to do anything and burst onto the scene once again, carrying you away by force. All the words I had meant to say sank into a black sea without a bottom. Before they shoved you into the car, you turned and looked back at me. I will never forget that look: the despair of already knowing that you were about to lose something and being unable to stop it. It struck through the weakest place in my chest like a bullet. But I had no right to fall, because Renjo Sazama was still at home waiting for me. The train numbered 208 was slow and dirty and disorderly, but it was enough to carry me away overnight, away from you, away from that city, away from a past forever covered with sorrow and never touched by daylight.
In the summer of 2005, on the seventh day after Mika Yuuki and Renjo Sazama had fled together, a sullen little girl met an angry little boy in the broken alley outside the attic where the runaways were hiding. That was you and me, three years ago, Itsuki Moriya. Mika Yuuki and you, the brother and sister in that patched-together family, had never shared a drop of blood. Two children of nearly the same age living under one roof was always dangerous. Little by little, a strange feeling had grown between you. Young as you were, you insisted it was a love greater than the sky. You told me that two months earlier you had quarreled with Mika over some trivial thing and stormed off alone into a back alley far from home, only to be cornered by street punks. Mika had thrown herself into the fight to save you, giving you time to run for help. When you came back, she had already been beaten black and blue. After that you could not believe that she had run away with my brother. I, meanwhile, had only one brother in the world, and I did not want him to leave me too soon. So that gloomy afternoon, two children with poppies blooming in their hearts made a promise. In our plan, if Mika could only see how hard life with Renjo would be, she would understand that youthful love was a flower growing on a cliff. If you cannot jump after it, then better step back while you still have the right to admire it. So I put cockroaches in Mika's handbag. I cut the electrical wires in the house. I spread wax over a floor that was already slippery. Mika did fall, just as I had expected. But she slid farther than I intended. Far enough to reach the stairs. That day Renjo happened not to be home. I sat on the floor in a pool of blood and called you, then curled into myself and shook. Ten minutes later you came crashing in like a mad thing, eyes red, scooped her into your arms, and ran out. By the time Renjo dragged me after you, all I saw was a car twisted out of shape and red everywhere, red enough to drown the world.
Tomorrow, and for the rest of your life after that, you will not see me again. You may pretend that I never loved you so deeply, and that I simply did not love you enough to stand beside you against your stubborn mother. So I am leaving. The truth is that I was never as fierce as I pretended. I am afraid of heaven and earth alike. I am afraid that my own poverty will one day leave you with nothing. More than that, I am afraid that if you stay with me, someday you will remember the truth behind the truth. That afternoon in 2005, I was sitting at the table when I heard Mika hit the floor. The floor, not the stairs. There were still two steps between her and the edge. Then I heard footsteps. One. Two. I turned around in confusion and saw Mika take the last step to the top of the stairwell. She looked at me and smiled, sharp and beautiful as a blade, and jumped. That was the most absolute posture of renunciation I have ever seen in a human life. Blood poured from between her legs. Inside that blood was a life that had vanished before it ever saw the world, a life born from that pitch-dark alley two months earlier, the alley that had never seemed likely to know dawn. A girl raised as a crystal doll from childhood could not bear such defilement in her own body, especially not under the eyes of the boy who had grown up beside her. She was so ashamed she could no longer remain in that house. Then Renjo Sazama appeared, a boy who pursued her relentlessly and who, in certain expressions, looked so startlingly like you. So she chose to flee. In truth she had already become tired of living and frightened of it too. I only created the chance for escape. None of that matters now. You once told me that forgetting might be a kind of happiness. Then go on being happy in that simple way. My leaving will leave sorrow with you, but it will not take away your paradise. As for me, I will never again know such happiness in this life. After leaving you, my heart too has been buried under deep snow. It will never breathe again.