After the Dream, We Finally Grew Up Together

Dear Shiori,

If people are destined in the end to bow before fate, destined to press out, little by little, that last small glimmer in their eyes, then all I can hope is that your soul truly did become peaceful in the years that followed. Peaceful enough not to remember the wind and snow of that old mining town, not to remember the black coal dust by the tracks, and not to remember how seriously you once told me that one day, no matter what, you were going to leave that place.

The first time we truly spoke was because you threw a rock into my head.

Back then, we were both still in elementary school in that old coal town in Hokkaido that the world was beginning to forget. Your mother was gravely ill. Her hair was always in disarray, and she wandered the town all day cursing at anyone she saw. When her illness flared up, she would even grab dirt from the ground and stuff it into her mouth. The adults feared her, and the children learned their cruelty from them. After school, you were always the first to run out through the gates, pulling out the little water bottle and blue towel you kept with you to wipe your mother's hands over and over before taking her by the hand and leading her home. Behind you trailed a long line of nasty children, singing ugly little rhymes as they walked, laughing at your thick skin and at your mad mother.

Every time, I followed behind, wanting to rush up and fight them for you, and every time I lost my nerve before I could take a real step.

Because I knew I could not beat them.

But that day, you finally could not bear it anymore. You spun around, bent down, snatched up a rock, and hurled it. The whole pack scattered at once, but the rock struck me squarely in the forehead. Blood came at once. Before I had time to cry, everything went black and I fell. Later, my father cursed me out and said what kind of man faints at the sight of blood, that I was a disgrace to the Aoi family. But you stood outside the clinic with eyes as red as if they might bleed, clutching a handful of freshly picked cherries, and whispered to me that you were sorry.

At that moment, I suddenly felt it had been worth getting my head split open by you.

You stuffed the cherries into my hand and turned to leave, and in a rush of heat I shouted after your back, "If anyone ever bullies you again, tell me. I'll beat him up for you!"

The truth was that I was thin as a reed in those days and could not even protect myself. But you still stood there in the yard and cried, your shoulders shaking. I remember it clearly. You were wearing an old sweater washed pale with years, your hair all blown loose by the wind, your whole body so slight it looked like a sheet of paper about to be carried off across the snow. And yet it was you, just like that, who made me want for the first time to grow up, to become stronger, to protect someone properly.

Later, I really did try to stand up for you.

On weekends, when there was no school, you would carry a bamboo basket to the railway switch and collect fallen coal. The little coal train slowed there, and chunks often dropped from the edge of the cars. You said winter was coming, and your mother was afraid of the cold, so the more we gathered, the more days the stove at home could keep burning. I crouched by the tracks with you, my fingers stained black with soot. The most hateful person in town at the time was Mineta Yamato. His father had taken over the last little coal pit in the town, and because of that he seemed to think even the coal cinders fallen by the rails belonged to the Mineta family. That day he kicked over your basket and dumped the coal we had spent so long gathering back onto the ground. Furious, I hurled myself at him in a pose borrowed from television martial arts. He brushed me aside with one easy movement and sent me sprawling into the snowy weeds like a fish rolled over on its belly.

While bending to gather the coal back into the basket, you fought back a laugh and told me that once I had mastered peerless martial arts, he would never stand a chance against me.

That was how you always were. You suffered more than anyone, and still insisted on making your words light, as if they were jokes.

You also said that once your father came back for the New Year, nobody would dare bully you anymore. He worked all year near Sapporo and could return only for a very short while. But even that tiny hope was enough for you to keep your life standing.

That was how we grew up, inch by inch. You won your way into the best high school in the little city through your grades. I slipped over the cutoff line and into the same school by the skin of my teeth. You were in the advanced class. I was in an ordinary one. After school, you still had to ride all the way back to the mining town to care for your mother, and all I could do was stand by the third-floor window of the school building and watch you wheel your bicycle out of the shed and speed away down the old eastern road. By then your hair had grown long, and you always tied a blue ribbon at the back of it. As you rode, the ends of your hair and the ribbon flew behind you together, like the only bright thing in our ash-colored youth.

You said, "Aoi, now we've finally grown up. Now we finally have the power to change the things we could do nothing about when we were little."

I still remember exactly how you looked when you said that. You were picking blades of grass one by one from your mother's hair, your expression serious to the point of stubbornness. You said that no matter what other people thought of her, she was your mother, and so no matter what happened in this life, you would never abandon her. At the time I wanted very badly to tell you that I had never once looked down on your mother. I also wanted to tell you that if you wished it, I would stand beside you too and help you keep watch over her. But in the end, I said nothing.

I was always like that. The things I most wanted to say turned me cowardly the moment they reached my lips.

In our second year of high school, boys at school started quietly asking about you. Good grades, few words, a beautiful face. In private everyone had given you a nickname: the Ice Beauty. Once, while riding home beside you, I asked in an offhand tone what you would do if some boy liked you. You turned and looked at me and smiled a little. "The boy you're talking about wouldn't happen to be you, would it?"

My ears burned, and I denied it almost by instinct.

Much later, you told me that if I had admitted it then, you might really have tried to like me.

But a life like this is never short of almosts.

Over those same years, Mineta Yamato slowly changed as well. He no longer led people in bullying you the way he had when we were children. Instead, he began driving the family's small truck over to your house with watermelons, vegetables, and coal. At first I thought he had simply grown a conscience, until the second semester of our third year, when something happened to your mother.

We were in the school cafeteria eating lunch that day when the chopsticks slipped from your fingers. You looked up at me and said, "Aoi, I've got such a bad feeling." By the time we reached the mouth of the town, all we learned from the ice-pop lady was that your mother had been struck by a van and taken to the hospital. When we finally chased our bicycles there, your father was sitting in the corridor with his head in his hands, weeping. The doctor said the bleeding in her brain was severe and that they had to operate immediately, but your family could not even gather the deposit for surgery. Your father said in a broken voice that the money had been saved for your university education, and even if he took it all out, it still would not be enough.

You dropped to your knees at once, seized your father's hand, and said, "We can earn money again later. But she's my mother."

I had never seen you that desperate.

You ran out of the hospital that day, and I spent half the town on my bicycle trying to catch up with you, without finding you anywhere. When I came back to the hospital, though, the nurse told me the surgery fee had already been advanced by someone else. At the end of the corridor, Mineta Yamato was sitting beside you outside the operating room, holding a peeled banana in his hand and awkwardly pushing it toward you. Only later did I learn that the money had come from Mineta Yamato's father. It was also that day, on the hospital stairwell, that Mineta Yamato pulled me aside, a cigarette clenched between his teeth, and said, "Stay away from Shiori from now on. She's already agreed to become a bride in the Mineta family someday."

I did not believe him. I thought he was only trying to frighten me.

But fate excels above all in setting the things you refuse to believe one after another directly in front of you.

On the morning before the university entrance exam, your mother still had not woken. She remained forever in an age when she would never hurt anyone again. The next day, you did not go into the exam hall. I ran to your house like a madman, wanting to drag you out of that pitch-dark room. You were kneeling before the altar, and your eyes were frighteningly empty. I asked why you were not going to the exam. You only smiled faintly and said, "Aoi, none of it means anything anymore."

It was the first time I lost control in front of you. The first time I called your mother mad. The first time I took the sharpest words I had and drove them straight at you. I said that from beginning to end there had only ever been her in your heart, so what was I, then? But you did not cry, and you did not hit me. You only stood there quietly, like a piece of wood burned hollow by fire. It was then that Mineta Yamato came out from the back room. He dragged me into the yard and said coldly, "Life-saving money doesn't come free. Shiori's already agreed to live with me from now on."

I threw myself at him and the two of us fought.

It was the first time in my life I had truly seen blood and not fainted. All I remember is being shoved away again and again, then getting back up and slamming into him again and again. Later, you ran out and threw yourself between us, your eyes red as you shouted at me, "Stop hitting my boyfriend."

I stopped on the spot.

Of course I knew you were trying to shield me. You knew that if it went on, I would only come off worse. But those words still struck the softest part of my chest like nails. The sun that day was white and blinding. I turned and walked away before the tears could fall. That entire summer, I never went to see you again.

When the new term began, you did not come to see me off. Not long after that, the Mineta family moved away, and you left the old mining town with them. Some people said you had gone to Muroran. Others said Sapporo. Later still, the coal in the mine was exhausted, the tracks were abandoned, and the station fell silent. Only when I returned home on school breaks each year did I still find myself going by habit to stand for a while beside that strip of railway now overgrown with weeds, remembering how we used to crouch there collecting coal as children, remembering the careful way you pressed cherries into my palm, remembering the way you looked up at me in the tree and said, "Aoi-nii, you're the only one in town who's ever been kind to me. From now on, the cherries from our house will be only for you."

So many years have passed, and I still do not know whether you ever truly ended up with Mineta Yamato, or whether you later managed to live the life you wanted. I only sometimes remember the sight of you in our second year, riding your bicycle straight into the evening wind, and the way you said that we had finally grown up, finally gained the power to change the helpless things from before.

But it turns out there are things growing up cannot change.

Dear Shiori, if in the end you really did surrender to fate, then please do not blame yourself too much. Not everyone who runs forward with all they have can outrun birth, poverty, illness, and one accident that came too late. Not everyone who once gripped a dream tightly in both hands is able, in the end, to carry it to the place they wanted it to go.

And yet whenever I think of you, I still see that girl beneath the cherry tree, the one with the blue ribbon in her hair, standing there to catch the fruit.

Her eyes were so bright, bright with the belief that the world would one day treat her gently.

And even now, I still do not know how to forget her.