Asagiri Slope, Where Memory Fell

"At Asagiri Slope, the castle of memory has already fallen." I once told you that my greatest wish was to grow up as quickly as possible and leave the place that made me unhappy. What I never told you was that, for a time, my greatest wish was to die.

The demolition of Asagiri Slope was scheduled for the middle of the night. It was not a district of skyscrapers or office towers. There was no need for a row of self-important experts to gather around blueprints and calculate the weight of explosives. A bulldozer or two, a couple of loaders, and the whole work of destruction could be done. Yes, destruction. That is the word I mean. On that midnight street, I stood on the opposite side of the road. Behind me, the high-rises of the newer city glittered with hard neon light. I watched everything that had once been my world collapse with the force of a landslide. And of course I saw you there too. You stood outside the yellow line, lifting your face toward the noise with an expression that was solemn and almost reverent.

You did not see me. You were holding up an old woman while she wiped at her tears. Every city has streets like that, old and worn, vanishing little by little beneath the city's tireless hunger for renewal, just as in the course of a life one must keep accepting new people and building new bonds, until some of the past has to be forgotten to make room.

Traffic still flowed in an endless stream along Choami Avenue. Across the road, through a sky full of dust, I looked on and suddenly found tears running down my face.

I am someone who never really had a childhood. Or rather, there was no such thing as happiness anywhere inside it.

When I was five, I stood in a courtroom. It was supposed to be an age of innocence, but even then my small face was already marked by weariness and restraint. My parents' marriage had reached its end. Their mistake of a union had dragged me down with it. The court awarded me to my father, whose financial situation was slightly better. When I heard the result, my lips moved just once, and in the end I chose silence. A life is often knocked off its original track by only a few important decisions. One page turns, another opens, and all sorts of consequences begin to unfold. That was the first time I understood what parting meant. Outside the courthouse, my mother pulled me aside. Her eyes were full of tears, and her reluctance to let me go was real. My father stood a few meters away, smoking in silence. Great white coils of smoke blurred my sight until I could no longer make out his expression.

Softly, I said to my mother, "It's all right. Really." Even now I do not understand why I said it. It sounded as if I were comforting her, but perhaps I was only trying to comfort myself. It's all right, Hayashibara Shiori. Don't be afraid. It was late spring, just before summer. Yet my little hands were cold, cold all the way from my ring finger up to the place called the heart. That was cold too. When I followed my father home, I saw the woman who had finally shattered his marriage to my mother sitting in the living room watching television. When she saw me come in, she gave me a slanted glance, and I instinctively shrank behind my father. There was something terrifying in that look. She was no harmless person. I was not stupid. I knew the days ahead would not be easy. My father called me to dinner in a dull voice. For the first time in my life, I did not dare pick the food I disliked out of my bowl the way I had done in front of my mother. When I lifted the fatty piece of meat with my chopsticks, ready to drop it on the table, I saw the cold eyes of that woman opposite me. I hesitated, and in that hesitation my courage vanished. The meal was so miserable that the mouthful of fat rolled in my stomach for hours afterward. Nausea ruled me completely. I wanted to run to the toilet and vomit until there was nothing left.

But I did not dare. Still I did not dare. At night I could hear their quarrels even through the bedroom door, and naturally the subject was me. I tried as hard as I could to shut those sounds out, but my ears caught every word of their conversation.

All I could do was pull the blanket over my head and pinch my own thigh hard, telling myself not to cry. Hayashibara Shiori, do not cry. From that time on, I learned not to. Tears only brought more scolding, more humiliation. My father chose to ignore everything in order to preserve a fragile peace inside the home, and I too chose silence, making myself smaller and smaller so my existence would take up less room.

When adults fail to behave like adults, children can only grow up in a hurry. That year the thing I did most was tilt my head back and stare at the sky. I did not know how long I would have to wait before I could leave that so-called home.

I never expected the day to come so soon. I do not remember how it began. Maybe she had been losing at mahjong. Maybe her period had made her especially irritable. Maybe there was no reason at all. Maybe she had merely looked at me and found my face unbearable. First came a storm of abuse, those filthy words that still make me tremble when I remember them as an adult. Back then, when I was still so small, they were no different from knives driven into my chest.

I crouched in the corner with my arms over my head, staring at her in terror. I could not imagine how deep a hatred had to be to make a woman speak that way, or how fierce her anger had to burn before it could distort a face so completely. Perhaps it was the look in my eyes, the one I could not explain, that enraged her further. She rushed over, seized me by the hair, and slapped me twice across the face.

The gold ring on her finger scraped hard across the bridge of my nose. Then she slammed my head against the wall, and I felt something warm run from my lips down over my chin.

It was not tears. Tears are not red. Great flowers of crimson opened over my white shirt, blooming to the point of horror. I froze. She froze too. Then my father, who had just stepped through the door and seen the whole thing, froze in exactly the same way.

That night they had a terrible fight. From my room I heard the crash of countless things breaking. I looked at myself in the mirror and smiled a strange smile. Beside my hand lay a dictionary. I had opened it to one particular word: death.

Death means the end of life. I did not fully understand what the word contained, but I thought that perhaps I could die now. The end of life did not seem any more frightening than life itself. The next morning my father said, "Shiori, how about staying with Grandma for a while?" I nodded. I said nothing else. It was the first time I had ever clearly seen guilt and helplessness in that man's eyes. Perhaps it was not that he felt nothing for me. It was only that many things were beyond his control. And that was how I came to Asagiri Slope, like a dead leaf at dusk, drifting wherever the current pushed me.

Grandma took me in as casually and carelessly as she might have taken in a stray cat or dog. Before my father left, he crouched down and rubbed my head. "Shiori, there are a lot of things you'll understand when you're older," he said. "Don't cry."

I smiled. "Dad, when have you ever seen me cry?"

Maybe my smile was too strange. Maybe my tone was too calm. Whatever it was, he visibly shuddered. From that moment on, I was no longer a child. A soul raised too quickly by reality had come to live inside that small body, and it was already exhausted. That was everything that had happened before I met you. Years later I often thought that if the court had given me to my mother from the beginning, or if my father had sheltered me even a little inside that violent household, perhaps I would never have gone to Asagiri Slope. If I had never gone there, I would never have met you. There would have been no later entanglements or resentment, no grief, no hard bewilderment.

And there would never have been you, someone capable of ruling my youth and the whole shape of my life. Yet everything unfolded as naturally as water running downhill. It was simply the arrangement fate had laid out. More than ten years later, I finally came to believe in destiny. The first time I saw you, I was in the dusty old attic above my grandmother's house, looking through the window into the neighboring yard. Your whole family was gathered around a table, eating together in laughter. There was a persimmon tree in the yard, heavy with fruit. The sound of your laughter was so bright that I stood there in a daze, feeling a kind of envy I would not even admit to myself.

My grandmother was not especially fond of me, her only grandchild. It was not really her fault. My fault was that I was not a boy. The old generation's preference for sons ran too deep. I remembered my mother fighting with my father more than once over that very thing. She once said that when Grandma learned at the hospital that the baby was a girl, she turned and walked away. So I was never surprised by the indifference she showed me.

She often locked me inside the house and went out to play mahjong. In her old age, all her happiness had been staked on that national pastime. Whether her granddaughter was hungry or cold did not matter to her in the least.

My daily entertainment was sitting in the attic reading old comic books. I had turned those ragged volumes until all their corners curled. I was bored enough by then that I finally decided to do something about your family's persimmon tree.

I do not remember what day of the week it was. At dusk a flock of pigeons flew over my head. In the falling light, the persimmons in the tree next door glowed a deep golden yellow. I picked up a small stone and threw it almost without thinking. To my shock, my aim was good enough to knock one down. At the exact moment it fell to the ground with a dull thud, you opened the gate and came in. That was the first time our eyes met. I was shaken. Your eyes were so bright and transparent. Those were truly the eyes of a child.

You stared at me for a long moment and then shouted, "What are you doing? Hey, what are you doing?"

I was so frightened I did not know what to say. I ran inside at once, praying only that you would not go complain to the adults. Otherwise there was no telling how my grandmother would punish me.

But things turned out differently. That night your mother came to knock on the door, bringing you with her. I hid upstairs in the attic, biting my lip in regret. If time could have flowed backward, then even if I had bored myself moldy I would never have tried to hit one of your persimmons down.

It turned out I had misjudged you all. Your mother had not come to complain. She brought a basket of persimmons and came to visit. Through the crack in the door I saw her smiling as she said to my grandmother, "I brought a few persimmons for the child. Please don't mind." Grandma came into the room to call me out so I could thank you. I shrank into myself, barely daring to lift my head, and said in a tiny voice, "Thank you, Auntie."

Behind your mother, you stared at me without the least restraint, as if I were some visitor from another planet. Naturally you were curious. You could not understand why all the other children in the neighborhood spent every day running and shouting outside in groups while I never once stepped out of the house.

It was thanks to your mother that things changed. After talking with Grandma for quite a while, she smiled and said, "She's old enough for school now. In a few days I'm taking Hokuto to register. I may as well bring Shiori along too." On the way to register, you kept asking me questions. "Why are you called Shiori? Because you only ever talk to yourself?"

I was grateful that your mother had not told on me, and that made me polite to you as well. "Yes," I said. "More or less I only talk to myself."

You opened your eyes wide, clearly unable to understand why I was such a strange child. But your mother understood my family well enough. She gave your head a light tap and said, "Hokuto, don't be rude."

In a way, I suppose we were childhood sweethearts. After that, every morning you would stand outside my grandmother's house and shout at the top of your lungs, "Hayashibara Shiori, time for school!" From Asagiri Slope to the school, we had to pass an abandoned station. Every afternoon after class, we would walk a little way along the disused tracks. Plants with names I never knew grew wild by the roadside, and the sunset dyed the whole sky red at the far end of the rails.

You said that when you grew up, you wanted to be a scientist. Then you asked me what my greatest wish was. I said, "My greatest wish is to grow up quickly and leave this place that makes me unhappy."

What I never told you was that once, for a while, my greatest wish had been death.

Time flowed on like a river that never turns back. In its swift current, we grew up quietly together.

You were never a serious student. When we entered middle school, I was placed in the advanced class, while you went into the ordinary class next door. Your mother always used me as an example when she scolded you, and you would only shrug and say, "I'm saving the family money, aren't I?"

The advanced class cost eight hundred yen more than the ordinary one. Grandma called my father over to discuss the tuition. In those years he came to see me very rarely. Even when he did, he was always in a hurry, sitting for less than half an hour before rushing off again. Maybe those eight hundred yen would not have meant much to another family, but for me they were a torment. I hated the posture of having to hold out my hand and ask. It made me feel ashamed. My father smoked one cigarette after another under the dim light, and no one spoke.

Then I sprang from the bench like a spring. Softly I said, "Dad, don't trouble yourself. I'll think of something." In truth there was nothing to think of. The only thing left was to call my mother. She had once given me a phone number and said, "If anything happens, call this." Yet in all those years I had never used it even once. I held the receiver for a very long time before finally pressing the numbers. No one taught me this lesson; I learned it by myself. If refusing money was pride, then let pride lose. Even if someone threw money at me, I would crouch down and pick up every note one by one. Compared to hunger, cold, and not being able to pay school fees, a little bit of dignity was nothing.

The money from my mother arrived quickly. That night I sat for a very long time at the corner of a street in Asagiri Slope. The summer sky was crowded with stars. Cicadas sang in the trees. Amid that whole noisy shimmer of life, I heard only the lonely beating of my own heart.

You came running over and sat down beside me. By then you had grown very tall, and the shape of your Adam's apple had begun to show in your throat. Quietly, you asked, "Did you solve it?"

By that time, you already understood my family's situation completely. The first time you heard that my stepmother had hit me, you stared in disbelief and said, "How can there be a woman that vicious?" You had grown up inside a cheerful and loving household. Of course you could not understand the kind of dislocation I had lived through.

But on that still summer night, sorrow surged through me all the same. You let out a small sigh. "Things will get better later."

I looked at you and smiled lightly. At that age, comfort could only go so far. Words are pale and powerless, and you did not know what else you could do for me. Very gently, I rested my head on your shoulder. Your body trembled before you could stop it.

In a low voice, I said, "Hokuto, you're my only friend. I know I have to leave Asagiri Slope one day, so studying hard is the only way out for me." I was like a scholar from some old dynasty, my whole head filled with examination success, rising high, and leaving behind the stretch of earth where no one had treated me kindly since the day I was born. "If I go, you'll be the only person I'll miss."

You were silent for a very long time. Only much later did I understand that it was that night, and those words, that changed you. You turned from a heedless child who played and laughed without thought into a boy who sat under a desk lamp deep into the night, fighting his way through the sea of exercises.

Perhaps it was then that you began to love me. Or perhaps even earlier, from the first evening when I knocked a persimmon out of your tree with a stone and you looked up at me through the last light of dusk. We did not know what love was then. Over the three years of middle school, you changed so completely it was like seeing a new person born. You grew taller still, and your voice deepened into something full and low. In that blue school uniform, walking through a crowd, you looked so good that the eye wanted to follow you.

And what surprised even you was how clever you really were. Once you put in even a little effort, everything changed. Yet you never once said the most startling sentence out loud. You never looked at me and said plainly, "I like you."

You never said any of that. We still walked a stretch of the tracks together after school, just as we had when we were children. Those nameless plants by the rails had stubborn lives. In their blooming and withering, they witnessed our years as they passed. At our middle-school graduation, you said, "Let's stay together, always." There was no subject in that sentence, but I understood exactly what you meant. I only smiled and said nothing, because I knew we could never stay together forever.

At the end of August, an unexpected visitor came to Grandma's house. The woman I had not seen since the day we parted outside the courthouse when I was five was my own mother. The moment I opened the door and saw her, my mind went blank. All those years had passed, and she was still beautiful.

The instant she saw me, her eyes reddened. Tears streamed down her face in lines. She choked for so long she could not even say my name. In the end I was the one who spoke first, calmly enough. "Mom. You've come."

For years, on those countless nights when I bit my teeth into the blanket and forced myself not to cry, my only prayer had been that someone would come and take me away. I had waited and waited, only to be disappointed over and over until my heart turned gray and I stopped dreaming altogether.

I never expected that one day would really come.

Very softly, my mother asked, "Would you like to live with me?"

The next morning I knocked on your door. You came wearing a loose white shirt and rubbing sleep from your eyes. Before you could say a word, I blurted out the news in all my excitement.

"I'm leaving. My mother has come to take me away."

You stared at me blankly. The hand you had been using to rub your eyes slowly fell to your side. You just stood there, motionless, even forgetting to blink. We stayed like that for a long, long time. The smile on my face gradually faded. "Hokuto," I asked, "aren't you happy for me?"

I had thought that as my only friend, you would be glad for me. I had waited so long, endured so long. At last I could leave this place, leave Asagiri Slope, leave the dusty old attic, leave my indifferent grandmother, leave my weak and helpless father, leave my vicious stepmother.

At last I would no longer be living under someone else's roof. I would no longer have to read other people's faces before I could breathe, no longer have to live as carefully as if walking over thin ice. You tilted your head and looked at me for a long time. In the end, you only asked, "When are you going?"

We had only one day left together. Once we sat down, we suddenly realized we had no idea how to spend it. Whatever we did would feel too little. Whatever we chose would feel like carelessly wasting the day away.

So we walked back and forth along Asagiri Slope again and again. All the memories of our adolescence were there. Not all of them were happy ones for me, but because you were in them, I still felt they were worth treasuring. In your white sneakers, you told me again about that night when you knocked at Grandma's door and she said I had not come home yet. You ran all over in panic looking for me. At last you found a small white figure standing beside the green mailbox at the corner of the street.

You said you saw me leaning against that mailbox, all alone, showing you only the thin and lonely line of my back. You told me that was the first time you had ever understood what heartbreak was, what it meant for your chest to ache on someone else's behalf. I listened quietly, and little by little I came to understand something too. What had settled between us over those years was not merely friendship. At some point, it had changed in some subtle way. I looked into your eyes. They were still as bright and transparent as they had been the first time I saw you. Reflected in them, my own face was full of reluctance and sorrow. There on the stretch of abandoned track, I stepped behind you and wrapped my arms around you. Fireflies rose from the weeds in uncertain sparks. I knew.

You said, "Maybe this is only the most ordinary night of your life. But I will have to live on it for many years."

I would not let you turn around. I did not want you to see that I was crying. People say the number of tears a person carries is the measure of how much innocence and softness remain hidden in the heart.

I did not cry when my parents divorced. I did not cry when I was beaten. I did not cry when I was treated lightly or ignored. But when it came time to part from you, I did. The purest and softest part of me was given to you alone. After that, there was no longer room in those inward places for anyone else.

The next time I saw you was on a bright afternoon. I had just started university. After carrying my luggage into my apartment, I went out to buy milk tea, and suddenly I heard a voice behind me calling my name. "Hayashibara Shiori, how have you been?" In the flare of that instant, I recognized the voice completely. My whole body seemed to jolt with electricity. I did not dare turn around.

Why did tears rise to my eyes without warning? Why did dampness suddenly bloom in my palms? Why, amid all the noisy voices around us, could I once again hear the beating of my own heart so clearly?

You came over, took my face in your hands, and laughingly tugged at my cheeks. I stared at you at close range, scarcely daring to breathe.

It was really you. Kamiya Hokuto. It really was you. Great tears fell from my eyes one after another. Yours too had reddened slightly. You gave a soft, rueful laugh. "The admissions line at this university really is high. After I filled out my application, I had no confidence at all. It was close." You said it as if it were nothing, but we had grown up side by side. How could I possibly miss the weight hidden beneath such casual words?

Since you were trying to make something heavy sound light, all I could do was answer lightly in return. "I'm glad you're well."

That night we walked for a long time through the vast campus. You spoke first about your own life. In high school, you had studied even harder than before. Sometimes you played basketball. In your free time you bought basketball magazines and read them. You paid attention to current affairs, to the people in countries far away where war still smoked in the air. In late autumn you climbed the persimmon tree at home to pick the fruit yourself. With only a few plain sentences, you summarized those years of your life. Then you asked, "What about you?"

I parted my lips, but no words came. How was I supposed to tell you about the life I had lived in those years? My mother had come to take me away only because she had at last married a wealthy man and escaped poverty for good. The only flaw in that arrangement was that the man was nearly twenty years older than she was. No matter how hard I tried, I could never bring myself to call him Father. Apart from that, I was still what anyone would call a good girl. My mother sent me to piano lessons and painting lessons. She bought me the newest clothes. On my seventeenth birthday, I even received a diamond jewelry set. I could see how desperately she was trying to make up for everything she believed she owed me from the past.

They often took me to business banquets. I wore champagne-colored dresses and high heels, put on delicate makeup, and learned to be polite and composed in front of strangers with blurred and forgettable faces, every inch the proper young lady.

Little by little I learned more and more brand names. I came to have three closets full of clothes and a dressing table crowded with perfume and cosmetics from the most expensive labels. At the private high school I attended, every girl moved through the world with a clear goal and a steady smile.

They were beautiful, clever, unruly, elegant. A faint halo seemed to circulate around them whenever they lifted a hand. They were miserly with both pride and tears. They treated love cautiously, knowing exactly when to advance and when to retreat. They were still so young, and already their minds were terribly strong. How frightening that was. More frightening still was the fact that I had become one of them. From the beginning, when I was mocked as a country girl, to the end, when I fit smoothly among them, only I knew what I had thrown away, what I had put down and abandoned. It had once been part of my life. It was the part of me I had carried out of Asagiri Slope. The part that could never be copied or redrawn again.

I did not know how to tell you any of this. Your eyes were still as clear as they had ever been, and my heart could not bear it. How was I supposed to hand those cruel facts over to you? What perfect phrasing could reduce that distance between us to the smallest possible measure? I was no longer the girl who had picked up a stone in the attic to knock down a persimmon. No longer the girl who clutched eight hundred yen by a mailbox and sat there in quiet despair. No longer the girl who held you on the tracks and wept without a sound.

Kamiya Hokuto, if I had told you all this, you would have felt that you had lost me. Yet even without hearing it from my own lips, you began to sense it anyway. Once I went to eat with your friends at a dirty, greasy little restaurant outside the school gate. I held my chopsticks over the dishes in front of me for a long time before finally setting them down again.

Your friends told me to drink. Golden beer slopped over the lip of a disposable cup. The white foam splashed onto my skirt, and without meaning to, I frowned. A girl at the same table leaned toward me and asked, "Hayashibara Shiori, your earrings are beautiful. Where did you buy them? How much were they?" I hesitated only a moment, then smiled and said nothing. You saw every one of those details. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught the faint crease between your brows. Yet neither of us spoke.

How had it happened that we, who once understood each other through a single look or one soft sigh, had grown so strange and distant? After that, you never asked me to join you and your friends again. And I never asked you to come shopping with me. I knew very well that sometimes one piece of clothing cost more than your living expenses for an entire month. Gradually the quarrels began. You accused me of vanity, of materialism, of worshiping money. The disappointment and hurt in your eyes showed without concealment. Coldly, you said, "Hayashibara Shiori, the way you are now is ugly."

I looked at you in disbelief. The Kamiya Hokuto in my memory was the person closest to me in the whole world. He had been my only companion in those early years, the first bold stroke in the chapter of my youth that belonged to love. And now he was the one standing in front of me, using the most cutting words to wound me.

I gave a bitter laugh. After a long while I said quietly, "Hokuto, you don't understand. I was frightened by poverty. Because I lost too much when I was young, because too much was denied to me, I gradually stopped placing my hopes in feelings. Instead I began to cling to the more tangible things. Compared to those thin and unreliable affections, material things are much easier to obtain."

Of course you could not accept that. You asked me, "Then what am I to you?"

I looked at you, and in truth I was asking myself the same thing. What were you to me, Hokuto? I had held on to the memory of you so fiercely. When I first went to live with my mother and the girls at school isolated me and mocked me, I kept telling myself that I was not alone. I still had Hokuto. If he knew I was being bullied, he would stand up for me. It was by comforting myself that way that I survived those lonely days. But when we had both finally grown up, when we thought at last we might really stay together, we discovered it had all been nothing more than a cruel joke played on us by time itself.

I turned away and did not answer you.

That weekend, the son of one of my mother's friends drove to the university to take me out to dinner. Following my mother's instructions over the phone, I dressed beautifully. But when I closed the car door, I caught sight of you in the rearview mirror.

I saw that face of yours, full of disappointment and helplessness. Then a message came from you. You wrote: "This weekend is the demolition of Asagiri Slope. Are you coming back?"

At the same moment, the boy driving beside me said, "It's my birthday this weekend. Remember to come."

I thought about it, then said all right. What you did not know was that in the end I went back anyway. Halfway through the birthday party, I slipped out without hesitation. No matter what I had later become, the soft and innocent corners inside me belonged to you alone. That was where the attic still stood. The persimmon tree. The railroad tracks. The fireflies. But after that, you never came to look for me again. Only once, on the day the winter vacation began, I happened to see you coming out of the school cafeteria hand in hand with another girl.

I sat inside the car, wrapped in an apricot-colored scarf, watching you in silence. A song was playing on the stereo. The lyrics said that hooking pinkies could never compare to a diamond ring, and that when people set their sights on higher ground, selfishness becomes inevitable.

Hokuto, I thought, one day you will forgive my selfishness.

And there, once again, I heard the beating of my own heart. Tears I had not shed in so long ran hot down my face.