You Said You'd Take Me to Ishigaki

At last, at four in the morning, the train entered Okinawa. All the mixed and restless feelings in the carriage seemed to settle with that hour. I climbed down from my berth and went to the passage between the cars. Someone had gotten there before me: a young couple, pressed against the window, kissing in the dark after the lights had gone out. Watching them, I suddenly remembered being sixteen and going to Tokyo, sitting in a senior-year classroom and writing my name carefully across the top of a textbook: Yuki Tsubasa. Tokyo was a diseased place. Whether in the noisy bustle of Shibuya or the drowned silence of some narrow alley, the people born and raised there carried a deep-rooted sense of superiority, speaking in local cadences that left outsiders fumbling. That year Class 1 of the science track admitted two transfer students, three months apart. It was supposed to be a proud school that almost never accepted transfers. My parents had gone to absurd lengths to push me in. Three months later Higa Kanade stood at the lectern and smiled with careless ease while I gripped my pen so tightly my fingers went white. The proud bones of my dream school, it seemed, could be broken just as easily by his family's bundle of cash as by my own parents' scheming. Most transfer students begin with where their father is from and where their mother is from, as if birth alone were a title. Higa Kanade said only this: "My father is from the main islands, my mother is Okinawan. I grew up on Ishigaki."

At that, all my resentment vanished. We sat together in the back corner of the room. Kanade did not talk much. He liked to stare out the window and drift somewhere far away, but that did not stop me from holding my textbook upright and secretly studying him instead. Our math teacher had a terrible memory. I was one of the rare students whose name he remembered. On a hundred-and-fifty-point test, my worst score had once been sixteen. The routine never changed. He would call on me first, watch me stand there blank and speechless over the problem, then summon one of his beloved top students to recite the answer in a calm voice, after which he would sneer, "Yuki Tsubasa, your chances of getting into Todai are about the same as mine of becoming president of the United States." The whole class would burst out laughing. Someone always had to play the fool. That day, when the latest mock-exam papers were handed back, I suddenly snatched Higa Kanade's paper and began reading out the answers in a solemn voice. The math teacher froze, grabbed my own paper, and barked, "Whose is this?" Terrified, I pointed at Kanade and tried to say his name, but my tongue tied itself into nonsense. That was how the two of us ended up standing in the corridor as punishment, the damp cold of early spring in Tokyo cutting straight to the bone. Kanade was shivering. After a while he asked, "Yuki Tsubasa, did I do something to offend you?" I bared my teeth at him and looked him over carefully. "Has any girl ever told you that you're good-looking?" He faltered, then turned his face away and refused to answer. A whistle sounded from downstairs. I leaned over the railing and saw Fujii Asahi, pushing his bicycle along with his usual showy swagger. I slipped off my uniform jacket and draped it over Kanade. He glared at me, but his face reddened as he said angrily, "Who does that?" I darted down the stairs, tossing over my shoulder, "You can always keep it and call it a token of love." Kanade stood there speechless.

Fujii Asahi, who studied law, was one of my mother's favorite students. He was always lounging around our place with that bicycle of his, a tall, handsome young man who made the fashionable girl next door lose her composure whenever he came by. When I had first arrived in Tokyo, I lived with my mother in faculty housing near the law school. There was a little grove nearby, full of paulownia trees. After eating in the cafeteria, I would pretend to be a student and take walks there, and the scent of the blossoms stretched through a whole soft summer. That grove was full of couples too. One night I was crouching in the flowers catching fireflies when the student couples around me suddenly scattered like startled birds. Before I understood why, I was caught by the student union. "Your name? Which department? Which class?" The boy in the white shirt holding a notebook was clearly the one in charge. He had beautiful eyes, and behind the lenses was a small smugness I later learned came from wearing plain glass just to look good. I stood there dripping wet. He lectured me sternly. "The school explicitly forbids people from meeting in the grove at night. It's indecent. Understand?" I shook my head. He bared his fangs and said, "Hand over your student ID, or we'll have to search you." Then my mother roared from the doorway, "Fujii Asahi, you've got some nerve. Who gave you permission to search my daughter?" The whole meeting room full of student officers fell instantly silent. Fujii Asahi just stood there with his pen in the air, stunned.

On a Tuesday afternoon, sunlight pooled across the salon window while the hairdresser held up my waist-length hair and asked uneasily, "Are you sure you want it permed?" I waved a hand and said, "Shorter. Livelier. Cuter." He promised me a surprise. Later I ended up crouching beneath a streetlamp in an alley, hugging my mushroom-like new head. Someone called from behind me, laughing softly, "What kind of mushroom are you growing there?" I looked up. Fujii Asahi was riding straight toward me. The instant he noticed my hair, he and the bicycle went down together in a spectacular heap. I looked at him once and burst into tears. He rubbed his wrist, clicked his tongue, and said, "Tsubasa, you really never get boring." He bent to help me up, and just then someone rushed out from the mouth of the alley and shouted, "Take your hands off her." I stared blankly at Higa Kanade. His shadow stretched long under the streetlamp, sharp and cold. He dragged me behind him, cursed Fujii Asahi hard, and without hesitation kicked him twice more. Then he pulled me away at a run. We tore through streets and crowds until we reached the waterfront, where the night wind off the river made people shiver. From his huge bag he dug out my uniform jacket and wrapped it around me. In his mild, distant voice he asked, "Yuki Tsubasa, are you hurt?" How could I have been? I found my own name on the breast tag of the jacket and saw how neatly it had been washed and pressed. A little flicker passed through his eyes. There were tourists everywhere. Someone called out for us to look over, and a passing photographer snapped our picture on an instant camera. Then came the frantic sound of a bicycle bell. Fujii Asahi wobbled up on his battered bike and said glibly, "Little junior, are you planning to elope with this guy?" Waving the photograph in his hand, he added, "Nothing pleases me more than breaking up a pair of lovers." I walked straight over, snatched the photograph from him, and jumped onto the back of his bicycle. "Asahi, let's go home," I called. We were both filthy, and the bike had taken a hard fall, so the ride lurched and rattled all the way. Sitting sideways on the back, I kept looking at Kanade. He stood there without moving, and then quietly vanished into the river fog.

The girls in my class watched endless Korean and Japanese dramas and liked to huddle by the door after class swapping spoilers. I always claimed the seat by the window, laughing loudly at the opening and then losing interest halfway through because I was secretly watching Higa Kanade across the room instead. The dramas were ridiculous. My feelings were not. One day the conversation turned to those stupid amnesia plots, and everybody slapped their desks in outrage while I lay on mine, full of temper and unable to say a word. Was I supposed to tell him not to think that acting blank and silent meant he had already performed the role of the forgotten hero? This wasn't some eight o'clock idol drama. Later the senior classrooms were suddenly moved from the fifth floor to the first. One afternoon during self-study I lounged by the corridor window cracking melon seeds with great confidence. Kanade glanced over once and went back to his geometry. The student in front of me grabbed a handful of seeds and whispered, "Tsubasa, be careful. If the homeroom teacher catches you, you're dead." I pointed smugly at the window. "I've already adjusted the glass so it reflects people coming down the corridor." Everyone was impressed. They actually applauded. I was preening in triumph when I turned my head and found our homeroom teacher standing outside the opposite window on the other side of the room, glaring at me with a black face. I had completely forgotten the classroom had been moved. Both sides were exposed now. Later I was made to stand on the platform and reflect on my crimes. Corporal punishment had already been banned, so my teacher smiled and said sweetly, "Yuki Tsubasa, isn't it a bit selfish to eat seeds by yourself? Why don't you go buy ten jin for the whole class? I'll even give you one full study period to enjoy them together." The whole room cheered. I stood there stunned. The rest can be skipped over. What I remember is hauling back a huge bag of melon seeds and handing them around, then being left with far too many and dropping the remainder on Kanade's desk in defeat. "No need to thank me. They're all yours." He still wore that half-dead expression. Out of everyone in the class, he was the only one who had not touched a single seed. After study hall everyone left for dinner, and I ended up crouching in the corner with a broom, crying over the floor thick with shells. Someone tapped me lightly. I looked up. It was Higa Kanade. He frowned, wiped my tears away with his sleeve, and then cleaned the whole classroom for me. I sniffled and stared at him. He sighed helplessly. "Stop crying. You look like a rabbit with pinkeye." That only made me cry harder. At last he grabbed an English dictionary from his desk and shoved it at me. "Here. You can have this. Just stop." I glared at the dictionary. "You're so stingy. Fujii Asahi buys me food when he wants to cheer me up. What kind of gift is a ragged old dictionary with its corners curled?" I threw it at him. The pages burst apart across the floor, and from inside spilled pieces of red and green so delicate they looked like paper. I picked one up and held it close. "What's this? Some kind of specimen?" Carefully, almost tenderly, he gathered them up and shot me a look. "Poppy flowers. From my hometown." Their veins and petals were preserved whole, vivid as ever. It must have taken him a great deal of care to keep them so well. Closed together in the palm, they looked like a tiny shining lover. I lunged over and snatched them all back with a grin. "Mine. Mine. All of them are mine." He looked at me and said, "Do you always go around tormenting people like this?"

During the Qingming holidays, my father returned from Okinawa on official business and brought me a piece of artificial amber with a blooming red flower sealed inside it. He had spent twenty-one years working narcotics in Okinawa, and even my name had ended up tied to flowers because of him. I took out the pressed poppies Kanade had given me and compared them proudly with the amber piece. My father's eyes suddenly sharpened and he demanded, almost in a scolding voice, "Where did you get these?" I froze and could only answer honestly, "A classmate named Higa Kanade gave them to me." At once his tone softened, his smile returning as if nothing had happened. Later I sat on a stone bench by an old street, turning the petals over in my hand while a film crew scattered sparsely across the road shot some exterior scenes. Fujii Asahi came rattling up on his bicycle. He was a rich boy, but he could never bear to replace that broken bike of his. It was absurd: such a fine, elegant man, ruined by a wreck of a bicycle. He flicked my forehead and said, "Junior, what are you staring at so dreamily?" I thumped my chest and declared grandly, "At this critical senior-year moment, I have decided to fall into a passionate romance with my deskmate Higa Kanade." The more I said, the emptier I sounded. At last I wilted and added in a voice like a mosquito, "Asahi... I think I've fallen for a boy in my class." His bicycle fell over with a clatter. Slowly he sat down beside me and murmured, "That's not good." "Why?" I asked. He looked down at me and smiled bitterly. "Because the chick I've been raising at home has been stolen by a weasel." I rolled my eyes. "What kind of stupid metaphor is that?" He lowered his head. "But my chest really hurts." He caught my hand and pressed it to his heart. For one instant it thundered under my palm. Then his face changed. He went ghost-pale, curled in on himself, and began to tremble all over. Panic-stricken, I held him, thinking he had been struck by some sudden illness. The film crew crowded around. One of them took a look and said quietly, "He's in withdrawal." I stood there shivering from a distance as I watched Fujii Asahi crouch in the corner and inhale his powder under the wall. The world truly could change in an instant. He looked at me once with a lost expression, then got on that broken bicycle and fled. That night I took the subway to Asakusa and saw him again, half a carriage away, sitting stiffly in the corner with no expression on his face. I had learned a few tricks of tailing people from my father, the narcotics cop, and somehow I followed him all the way without being noticed. At last he turned into a strange neighborhood of winding little lanes and I lost my bearings. I was standing beneath a small tree when someone took my hand tightly. I spun around in fright. It was Higa Kanade. My whole face was wet before I had even realized I was crying. "Kanade," I said, "how are you here?"

The last big event our class did together was the morning calisthenics competition. Everyone spent luxurious scraps of spare time practicing for it. I stood at the end of the line craning my neck to look for Kanade. He was tall and thin, and if he had done the movements in that precise, serious way of his, he would surely have looked beautiful. But I never once saw him practice. He answered roll call once and then stopped showing up. Higa Kanade was left-handed. People say left-handed people are clever, but I knew his had come later. During one weekend cleaning duty I saw him wiping windows with a rag; before his right hand had even lifted to shoulder height, it fell back and he sat there sweating cold. There was a small round scar at his shoulder, a little hole. The story was that he had been accidentally shot while hunting with his grandfather in the Okinawan mountains. Whether that was true or not, it was obvious he could not do the morning exercises. By then summer had come. Warm wind traveled in from the sea, and the locust trees in the school grounds were thick with blossoms. On the day of the competition, the classes had to march past those trees. Kanade stood beneath one of them in the blue-and-white summer uniform shirt, watching class after class go by with a look of quiet melancholy on his face. Who knew how many gazes he overturned just by standing there. When it was Class 1's turn, I broke out of formation and ran to stand beside him under the tree. I must have looked absurdly conspicuous. The neat square of our class dissolved at once into chaos. Everyone was shouting. Mortified, I let Kanade drag me away. We ran until we ended up hiding on the roof of the teaching building. By the time the exercises ended, the graduating classes had gone to take their graduation photographs. Looking down from the roof, Kanade gave a little smile and said, "Yuki Tsubasa, do you want to run away with me? I'll take you to Ishigaki, to my mother's place. I'll show you Kabira Bay, and all the wind and moonlight there. If you like it, you can stay by the sea. There are poppies blooming all around our house, front and back. Do you want to see them?" I kept turning that sentence over behind my teeth, tasting it, and feeling a sadness I could not name. He touched my face lightly. His fingers were cold. "You won't get another chance, girl." Down below, the crowd dispersed. Our class came in dead last in the competition. The huge classroom later fell strangely quiet. The homeroom teacher came in prepared to comfort everyone, but before he could get a word out he began to laugh, and then the whole class dissolved into laughter too. Missing the one and only graduation photo of my life should have been enough to make me bitter. Maybe if time could run backward, I would regret it. But I had done it, and I had done it without hesitation.

There was only a month left before the entrance exams, and nerves often kept me awake all night. My mother made sparerib and walnut soup for me and said casually, "That student of mine, Fujii Asahi, went to school today to file for leave. They're sending him to rehab. Did you know?" "No," I said, my face perfectly still. She looked surprised. "I thought you knew. His family background is too eye-catching. Of course the people outside would rack their brains trying to lay traps for him. Go visit him when you have time." I nodded. Then she added, "By the way, your father is coming back next month." I jerked in alarm. "Please no. Aren't you two worried about putting pressure on me?" She laughed and scolded me. "Narcissist. Who said he's coming back for you? I heard a case he's been following for a long time is finally closing. The drug lord fled to Tokyo, so he's coming back with it." At that, my right eyelid began to twitch. In May, most of the seniors no longer came to school. I was standing in a neighborhood in Asakusa where Kanade and I had agreed to meet. The route was oddly familiar. Just as I reached the corner, someone clapped a hand over my mouth from behind and dragged me away. I fought hard, twisted my head, and bit down on the web of his hand. He hissed and let go. "Junior, you're vicious." I turned around in delight and threw myself at him. "Fujii Asahi!" He said lightly, "Couldn't stand rehab. Came out for a walk. I waited and waited for my little junior to visit me, and since she never did, I slipped out to find her instead." I punched him once. Then he grew serious. "Do you really like that boy named Higa?" I said nothing. Staring off somewhere beyond me, he murmured, "You should like your senior instead. Your senior likes you very much too." I stared at him. "Is that how it works?" He pushed me toward the road back and sighed. "Little junior, you've grown old. Hurry home. The entrance exams are almost here and you're still running around. I'll tell your mother." I was so flustered I started hurrying away, but before I could go he grabbed me again. I had never seen him so serious. "Don't like that boy," he said. "If you do, a lot of people will get hurt." I gasped. "It's just puppy love. How can it be that serious?" Before I finished speaking, Fujii Asahi kissed me with the force of a storm.

My father really did come home in June. Work seemed to be going well. At dinner he even drank a few cups of sake in a good mood. Then he said, "Tsubasa, are those poppy specimens of yours still around? Bring them over and let Dad have a look." He turned the petals in his fingers with satisfaction. "You don't know this, but these are a new variety of opium poppy. High yield. Perfect for drug production." He was a little drunk and smiling. "I knew it the moment I saw them. I'd been hunting everywhere and there it was, right under my nose." The smell of alcohol seemed to cloud everyone in the room.

Three days before the entrance exams, our whole class gathered again in the classroom to hear the teachers go over the final instructions. I nudged Kanade lightly. Aside from the heavy nasal tone of a cold and a face even paler than usual, he looked no different. "Kanade, shall we apply to schools in Kyoto together?" I asked. "I grew up at my grandmother's there. I know the place really well." He patted my head and nodded slightly. After the meeting, the class clattered off to karaoke under the most dignified of excuses: how else were we supposed to face the exams with the right frame of mind? I walked ahead. Kanade suddenly caught my arm. "Tsubasa, did you see the news the other day? The anti-drug division in Okinawa busted a trafficking ring. The biggest dealer was arrested in Tokyo. One of the detectives had your family name. The given name sounded familiar too." I turned my face away. "That's my father." Kanade let go and only said, "Oh." Inside the karaoke room everyone was in an uproar. Kanade stood in the corridor smoking. Plenty of high school boys smoked in secret, but Kanade was clearly new to it. He held the cigarette stiffly between straight fingers like someone determined to choke himself to death. "What's wrong?" I asked. "Nothing. The entrance exams are coming. I'm nervous." Then he touched my face. "Tsubasa, do your best. Let's go to Kyoto." He bent and kissed me once on the forehead. When the others dragged him inside to sing, he couldn't refuse, but he was truly tone-deaf. In the end he threw away the microphone and sang an old song a cappella instead. "Beautiful Ishigaki Island / can't keep hold of my father / Tokyo is so big / is there any home for me? / One home for Father, one home for Mother / and I am the extra one..." It was an old, old song. He sang it with such feeling that tears rolled down his face, and by the last line he couldn't hold the note. All those classmates who usually laughed at everything fell into the same stunned sadness. Kanade said softly, "So this is what it feels like to really graduate." And then everyone cried.

That grief of parting was everywhere, but I was crying for none of that. I cried only because I could not help it, murmuring Kanade's words to myself: graduation, graduation. And yet in all the years after that, I never saw Higa Kanade again. When the entrance exams ended, there was only the anxious wait for results, and through all of it there was not a single word from him. Once the score sheets came out, we rushed to fill in our choices. I got the acceptance notice from Kyoto just as I had wished. Kanade was still nowhere to be found. He had left no address. Even his acceptance letters were collected through the school. Our homeroom teacher told me he had done only so-so on the exams, enough perhaps to squeeze into an ordinary university somewhere. His choices were a wild scatter: first-tier schools, second-tier schools, third-tier schools, even junior colleges, everything under the sun. But they all had one thing in common. Not a single one was anywhere near Kyoto.

On New Year's Eve that year, Fujii Asahi drank with my father while I slipped outside to smoke in secret. He came out after me. "Little junior, you've really gotten style. Only great men hold cigarettes like that." I stared at him. "My father has been dealing with heroin for decades. He hates addicts more than anything. So why is he calmly drinking with you at the same table? Did you think I knew nothing? My father has been a detective for more than twenty years. I could tell at a glance that the scar on Kanade's arm was a gunshot wound. Why did you happen to appear twice under his building? Why did he deliberately ask for my father's name? And those poppy specimens..." Afraid my parents would hear, I dragged him farther away. "Fujii Asahi, tell me." He shouted back, "Could you have made your father let it go? Higa Kanade's father was trafficking heroin between Okinawa and Tokyo. When I was using, I came into contact with them. I was the one who kept feeding your father information." I crouched there in the street and cried. There was no one on the road. Behind us all the household lights shone on in quiet rows.

That year I finally learned from a teacher where Kanade had gone. He kept in contact with no one and was trying to live a clean life, clean of everything. The only time he ever came back to school was to take away all his records. Ishigaki and the place he ended up were separated by an impossible distance, and when I finally got off the train and found my way to his campus, I spent a whole afternoon waiting beneath the men's dormitory. At last I saw him. I had on a huge hat and dark glasses, the most foolish disguise in the world. He walked right past me holding a girl's hand. Maybe he saw me. But he had already begun to plan out his life so carefully, putting all his strength into erasing the past. How could I disturb him? Every day the world is full of people crossing one another's sightlines in endless streams. Some are marked from the first glance as people meant only to be remembered. What I fear most is time. One day he may forget me. Or I may forget him. And everything I carried, all those years of longing and ache, will vanish in an instant.