You Lost Touch with Momo

Momo, I don't know how long the rainy season here will last. I don't know when the last time I saw you will turn out to have been. I don't know whether you'll ever appear again. Then why did I come? Maybe only because I hoped I might run into you one more time.

The first note Yuto Kitagawa left behind reached me in locker 703 at the station-front library. When I finished reading it, I honestly thought I must have been hit in the head with a brick and started hallucinating. Even Kiya Fujii had never said anything that literary to me. My blood pressure shot up, my face turned red, and for a few seconds I felt as if someone had slipped me drugs. It was the first day I had rented that locker. Summer vacation had just begun, the library was about to become my second base, and I had every intention of spending two months there fighting for my future while healing my wounds and amusing myself a little. I had never imagined I would run into "peach blossom luck" on the very first day. All signs suggested this was a peach blossom badly out of alignment, but it made me curious and restless all the same. Recently dumped women are always bored, and they hate seeing other people in love. In that twisted state of mind, I became obsessed with figuring out who had gotten the locker wrong. Or maybe it was not a mistake. Maybe he simply did not know the locker had changed hands. Anyone could rent the library lockers. The lockers stayed; the owners flowed by. If that was the case, then the two people in this story had probably not seen each other for some time. So I began lurking around the lockers every day, trying to spot whoever might be slipping notes inside. But everyone who came to the library hurried in and out. No one looked as if they had come there to romance anyone. No one stuffed anything into a locker. No one even glanced twice. Sometimes I wondered if I had imagined the whole thing, whether losing Kiya Fujii had made me genuinely abnormal. But I had seen that note very clearly, tucked inside the book, each character plain as day. And there was that girl called Momo. The name sounded so intimate, as if she might be any fresh, mysterious girl who had once existed somewhere nearby. I spent a full week "staking out" the place before I finally caught the suspect. With my nerves buzzing and my girlish heart fluttering in absurd, springlike excitement, Yuto Kitagawa stood in front of 703, used a steel ruler to pry up the slot, saw that there was nothing there, and let a flicker of delight cross his face. It had to be him. He was wearing a green polo shirt, dark blue shorts, and white sneakers that were a little dirty. His calves were strong. Then he took a note out of his bag, read it carefully once, folded it into a tiny square, and slid it under the locker door with great care. I watched him from not far away. Secretly I had hoped he might notice me, but he was absorbed in his own business. When he finished, he turned and left without a word, indifferent to everything around him. That was the first time I saw Yuto Kitagawa. Of course, back then I didn't know his name. All I knew was that he liked a girl called Momo, and that I was wildly curious about their story. From that day on, though, I saw him almost every day. Around ten in the morning he would come into the library while I sat at the wide table beside the floor-to-ceiling windows, watching him look for a seat. Around noon he would leave. At about three in the afternoon he would come back drenched in sweat, probably from playing basketball at the nearby courts. Sometimes I followed him to the lockers just to see what he would do. Very often he passed me carrying armfuls of thick books, opened his own locker, number 702 beside mine, and pulled out a sky-blue backpack. His shoulders were broad. Sometimes he wore brightly colored basketball jerseys that made him easy to pick out of a crowd. At times I even made a point of walking up there so we would stand side by side repacking our bags. We never exchanged a single word. I kept thinking that once he realized I was using Momo's old locker, he would surely say something to me, but he never did. A few times I nearly asked his name and swallowed the words back down. Often I watched his back disappear around a corner, or tracked him from the third-floor elevator as he headed downstairs, and each time I felt as though I had misplaced something. I didn't know why. All I knew was that this inexplicable curiosity about a strange boy gave me a new attachment, and for a while it could even block out the memory of breaking up with Kiya. Wanting to know what had happened between that boy and Momo brought a new little brightness, a new anticipation, into a life that had been smothered in sadness.

I admit I still missed Kiya Fujii terribly. That year the plum rains came late. I spent whole afternoons buried in books, sketching his face and then tearing the drawing into strips, covering them with his name. I loved a city drenched by rain, even though the broken paving stones were like land mines that sent dirty water splashing up when you stepped on them; even though some places were so flooded you had to roll up your trousers and wade through water too murky to see the road beneath; even though wet sandals carried the smell of drains all day and sand rubbed your feet raw; even though in that sticky rainy season, school uniforms clung to your skin and buses were thick with sweat and cheap perfume until breathing became difficult. I still loved that sort of summer. Before Kiya and I broke up, he had taken my hand and walked with me through every corner of the city. When he smiled, he was like a bottle of ice-cold Sprite, all fizz and relief. His hands sweated easily, always cool and damp. "Mika," he used to ask, "you really don't mind that my hands are always sticky like this?" Then, "Mika, what do you even like about me? What is it?" I would say I didn't know, and he would laugh in the most aggravating way and call me a fool. Looking back on it now, we were disgusting, the two of us. Disgusting enough that every memory of us made me want to weep, lose my appetite, and kill myself on the spot. So yes, I am absolutely certain that I only became this warped after splitting up with him. This was the same Kiya Fujii who, after less than a year of dating, suddenly said, "Mika, I need to focus on getting into university. Let's break up." He said it with his eyes lowered. I answered without thinking, "Fine. Fine. I was thinking the same. Let's both get serious about exams." That answer startled him, and to be honest it startled me too. "Mika, do you really mean that?" he asked. "Are you all right?" I smiled at him. "What could possibly be wrong?" Was I supposed to cry until the earth shook, until the heavens themselves were moved, before it counted as a breakup? Then I turned and walked away. I still remember walking very slowly. Part of me thought maybe he would catch up and say something more. He didn't. I could hear my own footsteps growing lighter and my heartbeat sinking heavier. At the corner I turned, clapped my hand over my mouth, and peered back around the wall. There was Kiya Fujii, the boy who had just said he needed to study, walking in the opposite direction shoulder to shoulder with Qian Yayuan from the next class. They were chatting about something amusing. I could see Qian Yayuan laughing so hard she pitched forward onto his shoulder. I stood there like an idiot, tears still on my face. It was my first love. I still don't know whether it counts as ending before it began or as a third party entering the picture, because in the days that followed I never saw Kiya and Qian Yayuan together again. Sometimes Kiya and I ran into each other on the street. He would nod and smile. In a good mood he even asked whether we should walk home together. Some days I guiltily felt we had never really broken up at all. Sometimes I even tried edging a little closer to him. But the careful distance in his smile only pushed us farther apart, until we felt like two fish somewhere in the Pacific: of course there was always a chance of meeting, but as we swam on, each of us forgot the other. I think that failed first love changed the course of my entire life. It made me half-crazy and half-pathetic after that, and all of it can be laid at Kiya Fujii's door. One man altered one woman for reasons he would never understand. And later, I think I altered Yuto Kitagawa and Momo as well. That alteration ruined three people.

Momo, you still haven't come. Where exactly did you go? Summer has come again, and I still miss you. Momo, will you come back?

I truly had not expected Yuto Kitagawa to keep slipping notes into 703 after he realized I was its new owner. I knew he had seen me. I knew he recognized me. So in the end I couldn't stand it. I am not the kind of person who can do everything with a perfectly blank face. The reason I never screamed or made a scene when I broke up with Kiya Fujii was that I really had liked him. I had spent all that time trying to be a lady, to be a princess, in front of him. Since it was over already, I did not want to ruin the image he had of me. I wanted him to remember me as quiet and gentle. But with a stranger like Yuto Kitagawa, I had no need to keep up appearances. One evening, in a very fine rain, I finally stopped him. "Hey, Yuto Kitagawa." It was the first time I ever spoke to him. He turned around in surprise. "How do you know my name?" I held up the notebook in my hand. Inside it was an English exam paper with his name on it and a score of 127, something he had left behind on a table one day while studying. I had followed him around with it ever since. I could have returned it right away, but selfishly, I hadn't. Chin lifted, I told him, "Momo isn't coming. She won't rent this locker again. There's no point writing any more notes. She'll never see them." Yuto's whole face lit up. "You know Momo?" I neither admitted it nor denied it. I only raised my chin higher. "Anyway, you don't need to keep leaving notes. She's not coming back. This locker is mine all summer." He stared at me for a full two minutes. "Then where did she go?" "Abroad," I said with a shrug. "She went to Canada. She'll probably find herself some golden-haired lion king over there and begin an international romance. In any case, she's not coming back." I was amazed at my own fluency. I even coughed afterward to cover it up. Only I knew that I had absolutely no idea who Momo was. I was talking nonsense. Disappointment passed over his face. He seemed to want to say something else, but in the end said nothing. I waved at him as if I couldn't care less and walked away. He didn't call me back. The whole exchange was abrupt and bizarre. I had risked being taken for a lunatic so that I could say something I believed to be very meaningful, and Yuto was almost certainly confused now. Or perhaps he and Momo had never really known each other that well. Even so, I was sure he would come to me again. When the person you like disappears, you cling to anyone connected with them. And if there is no such person, then you go to the places they liked, buy the things they liked. Why else did I keep coming to the station-front library, taking the seat beside the window, renting locker 703, riding bus 95 home two stops before getting off instead of taking 63 straight to the front of my housing complex? There were so many whys. And all of them existed simply because I had once come there with Kiya Fujii, and now he was gone. Even three months after we broke up, even though I busied myself with all kinds of pointless things, I still wanted to think about him again and again, to keep myself living inside the memory of him. So yes, I was sure Yuto Kitagawa would come looking for me again.

He did, though not for quite a few days. We ran into each other in the library corridor. I told him my name was Mika To. He nodded. "Hello." Then I suddenly had no idea how to continue. Outside, thunder and lightning were ripping the sky apart, and the whole city was being soaked by a sudden downpour. The hard concrete buildings looked as though they had been hidden behind thick crystal curtains. Where we stood, we could see the plaza downstairs, people scattering in every direction as if fleeing a disaster. Yuto pulled his eyes away from the window and said, "Mika, right? This kind of weather is made for talking about life and dreams. You got lucky. Come on. I'll buy you milk tea downstairs." Startled and delighted, I opened my mouth not knowing what to say, then heard myself answer in a bright voice, "Okay!" He looked a little amused. Because of the storm, the usually empty restaurants on the library's ground floor suddenly had a few customers in them. That afternoon Yuto asked whether Momo had ever mentioned how they lost touch. I shook my head and said no, only that she had mentioned a boy she met often there and got along with very well. Yuto smiled faintly. "Then today is a good day for telling stories." Listening to him tell one was its own kind of pleasure. His eyes always seemed to hold a dreamy veil of mist. His voice wasn't the booming sort suited to speeches. It was clear and low, like the male hosts on late-night radio, every sentence ending with a trace of private feeling. In that sort of moment, the story itself was almost beside the point. What mattered was that someone was willing to tell it to you. Later I told Yuto stories too, all about Momo, all of them entirely imagined. I kept feeling as though I knew Momo, though that feeling was about as reliable as feeling you knew some celebrity you'd only seen on television. I didn't know her at all. I only said I did so I could get close to Yuto, because at first this was just a prank, a way of relieving the depression inside me. If I had known what would come later, I never would have done it. I had no idea how I was going to keep patching the lie, or when I would ever be able to stop. Momo became a needle in my heart, pricking me with a pain I couldn't explain. Her story with Yuto was not complicated or thrilling. It was simply the sort of thing that happens to lonely men and lonely women all the time. A chance meeting in a library, with books as their matchmaker, sounded much more refined and respectable than anything beginning in a nightclub, but really it came to the same thing. Yuto's tragedy was only that Momo had not appeared for half a year. Her phone was off, her messages unanswered. She had vanished from the world. Because she disappeared, he had failed his second university entrance exam. Not disastrously, but he had still failed to get into the prestigious university where she was studying. He said they had promised each other he would make it in, and that he dared not go anywhere else in case she came back and couldn't find him. In fact, this was already his second attempt, and his first failure had come in the year he met her, again because he had been trying to get into her school. That tiny promise, which might not have meant much to anyone else, had cost him two whole years. Every month he still slipped notes into the locker she used to rent, hoping she would return. Anyone listening to the story knew that if Momo truly wanted to find him, she would have done so already. Phone calls, messages, e-mail, every one of them was easier and surer than a library locker. Everyone knew Momo was not coming back, and even if she did, she would not come looking for him. Everyone knew it except him. I told him Momo had a new life now, that she was doing fine, that he ought to stop thinking about her and focus on getting into university. Yuto looked at me with those misty eyes and said, "Momo and university really ought to be separated. At first I was doing it for her. But after failing twice in a row, now I almost want to see how long it will take me to finally get in. So yes, I still have to go to university. That part doesn't change." Then he smiled, a ring of cream mocha foam just touching his lip. "Mika, help me forget Momo," he said. "She has a new life. I should be happy for her, right?" I was so stunned I bit down on my straw until I couldn't draw air through it. Out loud I agreed. Of course he should be happy. Inside, I was disappointed to the bottom of my soul. I had thought this would turn into some aching, romantic story, something sweeping and dramatic like television. Instead the male lead was weak-willed and the whole thing felt like a game that ended before it even properly began. And still, I could not resist his smile. The second Yuto smiled at me, everything changed. The tiny stir it caused in me was impossible to describe. It was like the difference between sprinting through a sweltering downpour outside and sitting in a clean, air-conditioned restaurant with a drink you like in front of you. Yuto Kitagawa's smile belonged to the second world. That was our first real meeting. Afterward, all through that summer, we kept seeing each other. We ate and drank together, studied together, and sometimes he invited me to watch him play ball. Summer courts under the sun are like saunas built out of fire. Yuto always had teammates save me a "cool" spot first, though all that meant was a patch of shade under a tree. Cicadas screamed. The heat still swallowed the whole court. I still don't know why I kept suffering through that to watch them play. They weren't nearly as good as whatever league I could have watched at home on television. I think sometimes I was simply too idle. The whole summer flew by like a garbage bag streaking over your head on a residential road, gone before you can decide whether it means anything. One day Yuto said, "Mika, seeing you is like seeing Momo. It feels good." I felt ashamed and embarrassed. Of course he had no idea I had simply invented everything for my own amusement. Then a terrible thought came to me: why not help him find Momo? Surely something had happened to her. Otherwise, in this day and age, even if people split up, they didn't usually vanish without a single goodbye. I admit I was bored. I admit Kiya Fujii's betrayal had left me somewhat unhinged. So I went onto those forums full of idle people who loved gossip and wrote a post describing Yuto and Momo's story in the most wistful, moving terms I could manage. I even wrote a sixty-four-line free verse poem in Yuto's voice to Momo. When I hit send, I was full of happiness and accomplishment, the way I used to feel after finishing an entrance-exam composition and imagining it earning full marks. I sat waiting for someone, anyone, to know the truth about the real Momo.

Mika, summer will be over this weekend. I know you won't come here often anymore, and neither will I. But I will miss you. You're a lovely girl. You're as lovely as Momo.

It wasn't the first note I had ever received from Yuto Kitagawa, but it was the first one he had truly written to me. I blushed again, only this time it felt different from the first time. I slipped the note into my schoolbag and left with the sort of smirk only an insufferably smug girl can wear, my whole heart full of spring.

Then school began again. Which meant that all time belonging to myself became less than or equal to zero, though that was hardly the problem. Time is like that part of a woman's body you can squeeze into tight clothes all you like and still never fully hide. So of course there was still time for gossip, and the first explosive piece of gossip of the new term nearly knocked me senseless. Kiya Fujii had transferred schools. That was what the homeroom teacher announced on the first day. Everything in me that still remembered love and rain shut down right there and turned barren along with the boy who had left. Not long after, I heard the real story: Kiya had secured one of those special minority-area admissions advantages by having his household registration moved somewhere else, and the cutoff score from that region was much lower than ours. The reason he had kept it a secret was that he was afraid someone would get jealous and ruin his "relocation" plan. All those "someone elses" included me. Back then, the reason he had been spending so much time with Qian Yayuan was that she was headed down the same road as he was. They were comrades with a common dream, while I was only an outsider. I couldn't decide whether I should be happy that Kiya's closeness to her had been "for practical reasons" or miserable that I had known nothing and ended up as the sacrifice. At the end of the month I told all this to Yuto when we met, and he laughed. "Everyone has the life they want," he said. "Didn't Momo give up our promise because she was going abroad?" His eyes were smiling when he said it, but the mist in them remained, making him seem blurred at the edges. That wasn't good. It felt dangerous. Because by then I had already realized the month had stretched out unbearably long, as long as a cheap television commercial. I had started to miss him. That was dangerous too. But even that wasn't the most dangerous thing. The truly dangerous part was that the forum post I had written about finding Momo suddenly got a response. I received a private message. It said: I am Momo. Can I meet you? I started shaking all over. My fingers wouldn't hit the keys properly. At first I thought it had to be some internet prank, but over the course of about a week she sent more than ten messages. So I decided to meet her. She came with a huge belly, lowering herself heavily into the seat opposite me and looking straight at me. "You're Mika?" she asked. I was astonished. I had imagined Momo a thousand times, and not once had I imagined anything close to the woman in front of me. She smiled when I asked how she could prove who she was. The smile was stiff, and it was obvious she had not smiled much for a very long time, but even so it could not hide how beautiful she was. Red lips, white teeth, a face a little swollen from pregnancy, but still lovely enough that you could imagine how striking she must once have been. She handed me an envelope. "These are all the notes Xiaochuan wrote to me in the library locker. I've kept them all this time, but it won't be convenient to carry them anymore. I'm giving them to you. Please keep them for me. But you mustn't tell him you've seen me, all right?" I pulled a few out at random. They were definitely written in Yuto's hand; by then I had seen his handwriting thousands of times. So she really was Momo. She told me to make Yuto forget her. She said she was married now, living well, that she would never appear in his life again. "Don't look for me anymore," she said. Her voice trembled on the last words. Before I could study her expression, she stood and walked away. After several steps, she turned back, looked into my eyes with great seriousness, and repeated, "Please. Don't look for me again." Then Momo was gone.

I kept Momo's secret through the entire term and had every intention of keeping it for the rest of my life. But coincidence is everywhere in this world. The things you most hope won't happen are always the ones that do. A few days after the New Year, Yuto called me out of the blue. "Mika, has Momo come back?" The question scared me so badly I answered without thinking. "No. She's still in Canada." Yuto said, "Mika, why are you lying? I went to visit relatives for the holidays and saw her at Carrefour. A man was holding her hand and taking her to the underground parking garage. I followed them the whole way, but there were too many people. By the time I tried to call out, she'd already gotten into the car." I had no answer for him. I faked bad reception, said "hello" a few times, and hung up. But I knew my acting was terrible. There was no way I had fooled him. I thought I ought to come clean at last. Once you start with one lie, you only end up inventing a second and a third to support it. I couldn't go on talking to Yuto about Momo forever. I hated the fact that our whole acquaintance had begun this way. So I arranged to meet him and said, "Yuto, I've been lying all along. I don't know Momo. Everything I told you about her, I made up myself. I saw you leaving notes in that locker, thought you were good-looking, and decided to tease you. That's all it was. An evil little joke because I was in a bad mood after my breakup. I don't know Momo or anything about her." He looked at me and asked, "Mika, why are you still lying to me? If you don't know Momo, then why do you have all the notes I wrote to her in your bag?" Once again I had no answer. I had no idea when he had seen them. He apologized and explained that the other day when we had dinner and I went to the restroom, my phone rang. He had looked for it for me and stumbled across the envelope in my bag. That had indeed happened. For the previous few days I had been carrying Momo's envelope around because I wanted to read all the notes. But who could have predicted my phone would ring at exactly that moment? Suddenly I realized there was no longer any way to prove that I truly did not know Momo. No explanation would ever make sense. So I did the worst possible thing: I told him yes, I really had met her. I said she was doing very well, and that she had told me not to worry about her because in a few days she would be flying back to Canada. While I spoke, I almost admired myself. Something I had once said thoughtlessly now had its own expanding plot. But I forgot one thing: even if this were a television drama, I was not the director. I could not control where the story went. Yuto insisted on finding Momo, no matter what. Throughout that early spring, the two of us ran through almost every alley in the city, without finding a trace. I was filled with guilt. I was terrified that he might find her, and equally desperate for him to find her. The contradiction felt as if it might tear me in half. Then one day, on an icy sidewalk, I finally exploded at him. "What is so great about Momo? What's so great? How much do you even know about her? She was just pretty. That isn't love. At best it's animal attraction, do you understand? Animal attraction!" Yuto's eyes turned red as he shouted back, "You're sick. You're a crazy, perverted woman!" Then he suddenly dropped down onto the pavement and muttered, "Mika. Mika, come here." I stood over him. He grabbed my hand, buried his face in his coat, and stayed like that for a very long time. At last I heard him say in a voice so low I could barely catch it, "I'm sorry, Mika. I still miss her. I just want her to give me an explanation, you know? That's all. Just an explanation." I said nothing. Momo's face had already grown a little blurred in my mind, but I still knew I had really seen her. Counting the months, she must have given birth by then. I didn't know whether it was a boy or a girl. I didn't know whether she was happy. None of it had anything to do with my life. That night Yuto texted me: Mika, I've decided to forget Momo. This time I mean it. All right? I didn't answer. I didn't know what to say. Should I encourage him to forget her? Momo was already an ending in herself. I didn't want Yuto tacking some unnecessary sequel onto it. And yet I was unwilling to let a story that ought to have been as romantic as Love Letter end in such an ordinary, throwaway way. I wanted it to be more tumultuous, more vivid. I never imagined, at the time, that people as ordinary as us could stumble into a real tragedy.

After the "Momo reappears" episode, Yuto and I lived through a stretch of simple, peaceful days. We began preparing seriously for the university entrance exams, mine for the first time, his for the third. We tortured ourselves inside our separate circles of battle so that this one would finally be the last. The war ended quickly enough, and then came the miserable boredom of waiting for the scores. One day I was browsing online to kill time when I stumbled across the old thread I'd started about finding Momo. After Momo contacted me, I had forgotten all about it. Now it had not only been pinned, it had taken on a life of its own. People had doxxed Momo. This whole "peach-colored scandal," which ought to have been nothing at all, had been turned by the internet into something sensational and monstrous. Her entire family knew. She became the model case of a woman with improper relations. After she gave birth, her husband took the child away under crushing social pressure. Her brother tried to take the baby back and was beaten badly enough to be crippled. Momo went mad. There were even deeper threads, saying that she had suddenly dropped out and married because her brother had been dragged into some absurd lawsuit, and in order to clear his name she had married the plaintiff. After reading that, I nearly pitched headfirst off my chair. So that was why. I was the direct cause. The last time I saw her, she had looked like someone who had not smiled in years. She wasn't happy. She had yielded to fate. She had become the sacrificial victim of public opinion. Her whole family was ruined. And I had done this. I cried so hard at the screen that it felt as though some mixer had been installed inside my chest and turned my heart into pulp. The whole world collapsed in front of me. After that I lost all interest in everything, including my exam scores. When Yuto appeared in front of me, I almost thought I must already be dead, because for days and days I had been unable to say a single word, and my family believed I had developed some kind of mutism. Yuto thought I was upset because I'd done badly on the exam. He said not to be sad, that he had already decided to apply to the same university as me, that he had scored well enough this time, and that none of that even mattered because what mattered was being with me. Then he reached out and pulled me into his arms. "Mika," he said, "listen to me. I don't want to miss you the way I missed Momo. I don't want one mistake to become something I lose forever." That was when I finally broke. I sobbed so violently it was probably the greatest crying fit in history. I told him he didn't have to treat me like that, because I had been lying to him from the very beginning and could never be forgiven, not ever. Momo was gone, and if I had never started dating Kiya Fujii, if I had never become bored after heartbreak, if I had never pretended to know Momo and turned the whole thing into a prank, then Yuto would still have been leaving beautiful notes in locker 703 with all his innocent hope intact. If I had never made those forum posts looking for her, she would never have become a target for thousands of strangers to curse. Her baby would never have been taken away. Her brother would never have been crippled. She would never have gone mad. If I had told Yuto at once that Momo had come to see me, maybe he would have found her. Maybe they would have run away together. Maybe she would never have arrived at this ending. In the end, I could not keep Momo's secret anymore. I told Yuto everything. I knew that once the truth was spoken, too much had already happened to be repaired. But if I had kept silent any longer, the guilt would have eaten me alive. I knew that nothing I did could ever give Momo back what should have been hers. After Yuto learned the truth, he never appeared again. We lost touch completely. I went away to a distant city for university, because I wanted to forget everything tied to that place and everything tied to Momo.

Later, in a book, I read a line that said there are generally two ways to lose touch with someone. One is that you went looking with all your heart and still could not find them. The other is that you never went looking at all. Yuto Kitagawa. Momo. Yes. I never went looking for Yuto again. I never went back to the library where we met. I never walked that road again. I never stopped at any of the restaurants on the first floor. Never again.