You Were the Stranger I Waited for in Vain

I was standing at the roadside waiting for the light to change when, just as the red was about to die, a car cut across my vision. The heat that day had left me weak and slow, but the instant I looked into that car, my whole body jolted. The long afternoon light seemed to split open, and time itself began to turn backward. Kanzaki Soma. In that single glance, I recognized you at once through the window. You were in the driver's seat. Beside you sat a woman with a fine, elegant profile. The car paused before my eyes for the briefest moment, then roared away. But I knew it had been you. I had thought that after so many years I had already forgotten ever loving you. Yet the moment I saw you, tears flooded up into my eyes. I don't know whether some grain of dust flew in and made them sting, but as I rubbed at them and crossed the street, the time from three years earlier came drifting back like cloud-shadow over water.

Wakana had dragged me to watch the senior boys' basketball game with all kinds of bad intentions. I knew perfectly well that Nishino Yo had put her up to it. Ever since he saw me dance a peacock number at the New Year's party, he had pursued me fiercely. Standing at one hundred and fifty-five centimeters, I had looked straight up at his one hundred and eighty-five and said with complete dignity, "Oh, sorry. I don't think we're suited." Nishino Yo had been devastated. Wakana said he was the darling of the school. From first year to third, no one knew how many girls had written him love letters without moving him in the least, and yet somehow, right before graduation, he had fallen for me alone. Maybe he had always thought his own conditions were flawless and had never really been rejected before. So when he asked why, I said, "I think you're too tall. We don't match." Wakana said she had seen people reject boys before, but never anyone as vicious as me. "One eighty-five is perfect," she protested. "Wakana," I said, "I'm only one fifty-five. If we walked down the street together, people might think we were father and daughter." In the end, under her combined assault of wheedling and force, I had no choice but to go.

Soma, even now, years later, I am grateful I went that day. If I hadn't, I would never have met you. I cared nothing at all for basketball, and the game itself bored me. In that crowd full of cheers and heat, I felt like a complete outsider. I was looking around listlessly when something impossible to name seemed to pull my gaze, and in the turn of my eyes I saw you. There were handsome boys all over the school, but at that moment it seemed to me that every one of them was dim beside you. You were leaning against the railing a little way off, talking on the phone, and the sunset covered half your face like cloudlight. All at once the shouting and cheering around me vanished. It was as if you alone were standing between heaven and earth, a streak of light aimed directly at the eye. Your smile was like evening glow. There was gentleness and ease in the corners of your brows. I stood there stupidly, unable to speak. Even when Nishino Yo scored and Wakana cried out in excitement, I never blinked. Wakana noticed something was wrong, turned to look at me, followed my gaze to you, and said in a tone of admiring certainty, "He must be on the phone with his girlfriend again." I was surprised she knew, and then she told me all about you. That was when I learned that you had long since become the favorite rumor of every girl in school. You were a transfer student. At your last school you had fought someone over your girlfriend, and your parents had transferred you to First High because of it. You were supposed to be a delinquent. In the sunlight, the little line of studs still in your left ear flashed faintly. You were loyal to a fault. Though you were popular in the new school, your eyes held only your girlfriend. You called her every day. People said once you had stayed on the phone from midnight to noon and earned yourself the title of "telephone king." Listening to Wakana talk about you, I was filled in an instant with admiration. And mixed into that admiration was the first stirring of love at first sight, the kind of feeling that sprouts like a seed and can, in a blink, grow into a tree large enough to shadow the sky.

That night I unexpectedly agreed to Nishino Yo's invitation and went to their celebration dinner, because I knew you would be there. You had just joined the basketball club. You were only a substitute, but people said your skills were not to be underestimated. At the dinner everyone winked at Nishino Yo, grinned at me, and called me sister-in-law. He had drunk a little and his face had gone bright with excitement. I watched you instead. You were not as cold as I had imagined. On the contrary, though you were new, everyone seemed to know you well, slinging arms around your shoulders and urging more drink on you. You accepted every glass with easy generosity and drank as if it were nothing more than bottled water. When the group had drunk enough, somebody proposed games, the usual truth-or-dare nonsense. Since many of the boys had brought girlfriends, no one dared pick truth for fear of inviting the wrong question and getting someone angry, so dare produced endless ridiculous scenes. One boy had to bite a shoe and spin in circles. Another was sent to beg a stranger for a strand of hair. Then, as if heaven had heard my sincere prayer, it became my turn to control fate and your turn to obey it. I thought you would choose dare like the others, but instead you said openly, "Truth." Everyone around us urged me to ask something explosive, but just as I opened my mouth, your phone rang. You glanced down at the screen, stood up at once with an apologetic look, and said, "Sorry." Everyone understood at once and agreed to let you go. The round was voided without discussion. But as I watched the smile in your eyes when you answered that call, and the look of your back when you turned away, the question I had already prepared got stuck in my throat. I had no courage at all, and yet that night I really had wanted to ask you: Someday, will you ever love someone else?

Wakana said I had gone mad. I had a perfectly good Nishino Yo right in front of me, and yet I chose you, where I stood no chance. But Wakana didn't understand that love never cares who arrived first. There may be unforgivable crimes in this world, but there is no such thing as an unforgivable person to love. After that, I began to notice everything about you. You rarely spoke to girls and mostly stayed with a group of boys. At one hundred and seventy-five centimeters, you were exactly the height I imagined for a boyfriend. Though you were the shortest one on the team, your jumping made up for what you lacked. Your skills were among the best. You reminded me of Mitsui Hisashi from Slam Dunk. I began going to games all the time. Everyone thought I was there for Nishino Yo and teased him whenever they saw me. I watched from the opening whistle until you all walked off the court in your jerseys, drenched in sweat, and then I discovered one of your tiny secrets. Before every game you liked to set a cup of hot water by the side of the court. When it ended, you would run over and gulp it down. One day, for some reason, the cup got knocked over and shattered, and after the game you had no hot water. The disappointment on your face was so plain it made my heart ache. I thought it was such a good habit, especially beside all the others who reached for cola or bottled water after the game. So after that I found a few cups and started putting out hot water myself every time. When the games were over, people would laugh and say, "Sister-in-law is so thoughtful." Nishino Yo would smile at me. I looked only at you. You drank the water with concentration and then went off to call your girlfriend. So you definitely never knew that the girl standing right there beside you liked you. There are many kinds of love in this world: obsessive love, combative love, fearless love. I chose the plainest kind of all. Waiting. Because I knew I had no extraordinary beauty and no brilliant mind.

Wakana told me Nishino Yo believed my first rejection might have been mere hesitation, and because afterward I kept drawing close and then pulling away, he meant to ask me out properly one more time. She looked at me as though I had committed some unforgivable crime. I patted her shoulder and said, "Relax. I'll explain it clearly." I threw on a T-shirt, jeans, and flip-flops and ran downstairs. I thought that if I showed up dressed like that and he still decided I liked him, then either his eyesight was faulty or I was far too heavenly for this earth. But before I reached the place, I ran into you. You were sitting on the roadside with your phone pressed to your ear, your forehead against your knees, a cigarette between your fingers, drawing on it over and over. I had never seen you like that. Compared with your usual swagger, you looked utterly defeated. I stood beside you a long time without hearing you say a single word into the phone. At last, puzzled, I touched your shoulder. You looked up. Your eyes were red as if you had not slept all night. When you saw me, you stared in a daze for several seconds before snapping the phone shut. I asked what was wrong. You only shook your head. So I thought for a moment and then sat down beside you. Anyone who passed along Jiefang West Road that afternoon would have seen two equally shabby figures sitting side by side in T-shirts, jeans, and flip-flops. That was when I discovered another small secret: you were wearing the exact same ADI flip-flops as me. The tiny coincidence delighted me for no reason at all. I have forgotten how the people passing us must have looked at us, but for a long time afterward I would remember that feeling of sitting beside you on the roadside. It was like a line from a song: when all the scenery has been seen through, I will still sit with you and watch the slow water flow. I forgot all about Nishino Yo waiting for me and sat there with you the whole afternoon. By the time the lamps came on, you stood and brushed the dust off your clothes. Your eyes no longer held that same darkness. As you pulled me to my feet, you said, "Thank you." But I knew that even if you had restored your face, the wound inside remained, because right before we parted you asked me a question. "Can one person's love really shift to someone else because of time and distance?" I understood at once why you were hurting. I could have answered in a way that would have snuffed out your hope, but I couldn't bear to make you sad. So I told you with absolute certainty, "No. Real love doesn't change, even if the stars turn and the world moves." I said it with such hard conviction it sounded like a declaration. When you heard me, you smiled at last. The truth was I had never even dated anyone. I said it only because I was looking at your face. But that, too, was the vow I made to you. From the very beginning I was that stubborn, leaving myself no way back.

Nishino Yo never asked why I had missed our meeting. I pretended not to know he had ever asked. But after that day, you and I seemed suddenly to grow familiar. You got along well with Nishino Yo because the two of you were always running off to the manga cafe to play Warcraft, and whenever you casually asked if I wanted to come, I followed like a fool. It stayed that way until the start of our final year. The two of us ended up in the same class, and Nishino Yo repeated a year and was transferred into our class as well. What began as stopping by the manga cafe after school turned into skipping class together in perfectly legitimate disgrace. I didn't even know how to play games then. When I went online, I only listened to music and read gossip. Whenever I found a good song or some new scandal, I would chatter away to you both, and though you almost never listened because you were too absorbed in your raids and leveling, I still delighted in keeping you company. By then you and your girlfriend had already reconciled. That earlier collapse had only been a brief detour in your love story. Another boy had tried to pursue her, but she held her ground, and so your train of love thundered on. The difference was that because you had repeated a year when you transferred, by the time we were in our final year, your girlfriend had already gone to university. She was studying in a coastal city. People said the air there was good, the land and water gentle, and it made people bloom. So your girlfriend had become even prettier. Once, while you were looking at her blog, I stole a glance. There was her photograph, sunglasses on, smiling broadly and beautifully. A rare beauty. You called less often, but your contact on chat never broke. Every night, aside from games, you video-called her. No matter whether you were in the middle of a boss fight or leveling, if she spoke to you, you quit immediately.

Every morning before self-study the three of us walked back to school together. On the way we had to cross a railway line, and I always begged you both to walk along the tracks with me. You always ignored me and called me dramatic. But one day you unexpectedly pulled Nishino Yo along and came with me. It was four in the morning, and you looked unusually alive. Standing by the rails, watching the train roar past, you said happily, "She's finally coming back to see me." And there in the gray light before dawn, looking at your outline a little way off, I suddenly felt the faintest ache. I had spent all those days with you, and that had given me the illusion that I had filled the empty stretch of your life, grown beside you, accompanied you through it, and that one day you would surely be moved by me. I thought you had agreed to walk the tracks because I had pestered you for so long. I hadn't understood that you were only reenacting your own longing for her return.

Not long after that, I finally met the famous girlfriend in person. Hayashida Kanon appeared at the classroom door, and every girl envied her while every boy admired you, because she really was breathtakingly beautiful, and beside you she made a perfect match. You walked together across the grass behind the classroom building, and the whole class leaned out the windows sighing over what a perfect pair you made. I lay with my head on the desk pretending to sleep. I didn't want to lift it again. I felt wretched. But after Hayashida Kanon left, you were as wretched as I was, because she had come back this time to break up with you. University really is a journey that tests people. There are too many dazzling things to look at, too much scenery to lose oneself in. She had forgotten the person left behind and hurried toward some new brightness. Before she left she said, "Don't blame me for liking the new and hating the old. I just can't stand your not being there when I'm lonely." You drank bottle after bottle and asked me what love really was. For someone like me, whose emotional world was still a sheet of white paper, it was an impossible question. So I only drank with you, bottle after bottle. Only Nishino Yo stayed calm, watching us. Sometimes I suspected he had never really liked me at all. He never indulged me in meaningless things, like walking the railway tracks, but when I did other meaningless things, like drinking with you or learning to smoke because of you, he never stopped me. That night both of you got drunk. Only I, who flushed after a little alcohol, stayed unexpectedly clearheaded. With my face burning red, I walked the midnight streets with you both while you shouted nonsense. Then you took out your phone and called your girlfriend. Into the receiver you murmured again and again, "I like you. I really do. If it would bring you back to me, I wouldn't want the whole world. Just wait for me. Give me half a year and I'll come to you. We'll never be apart again." You spoke so many love words, each of them as scorching as the liquor we'd just drunk. At last, still talking, you bent over and vomited against a roadside lamp post. When I picked up the phone you had dropped, a cold, familiar voice repeated from inside it, "The number you have dialed is currently switched off."

I will always remember that night. The three of us sat on the midnight street, backs touching, like old friends speaking of our hearts. There was your scar, the one on your arm. You said it came from the fight you'd once had over your girlfriend. You said you always put hot water by the court because she had taught you that habit. You said that every night you went out to the internet cafe to talk to her because, even though you had long sensed she would leave, you still stayed with her diligently. If she did not say it first, you would never ask. You told many stories about the two of you, but in the end none of them could buy back a whole ending. I could not see your face in the dark, but hearing the pain in your voice made me want to cry more than you did. I said, "If a boy ever treated me that well, I would never leave him in this lifetime." The moment I finished, Nishino Yo beside me started muttering. "Feelings are all about timing and circumstance. Miss either one and it's no use. Natsuki, I was good to you too, wasn't I? But you still acted as if you couldn't see it." I said, "Oh, please. With that attitude of yours?" He argued back, "Natsuki, I really did like you. Truly. I admit that at first part of it was because of my mother. She was a dancer, and you were exactly her height, one hundred and fifty-five centimeters. When you appeared at the New Year's party dancing that peacock dance, I was captured for a reason. The way you moved was exactly like my mother in her old photographs." I laughed and said, "Nishino Yo, so you have an Oedipus complex." He told me to shut up. Then he said his mother had once loved another man, but she had not married him. She married Nishino's father instead, not because she loved him, but because he was a way out. She spent the rest of her life depressed and unhappy, and died young. "Do you know why I wasn't angry when you rejected me?" he asked. "Because I knew you didn't like me. If you don't like me and still get together with me, you'll only be unhappy. My mother's life already taught me enough. I won't make you repeat it. I won't force you, and I won't drown you in kindness until guilt and gratitude turn into something that looks like love." Then he said, "Everyone in this world loves in a different way." He looked at me steadily while he said it, and perhaps because he had drunk too much, I thought there was something bright in his eyes. It made me suddenly unbearably sad. Soma, I thought Nishino Yo was right. Everyone has their own way of loving. Mine was simply this foolish, stubborn kind of waiting.

After you and your girlfriend broke up, you changed a great deal. You stopped going to the manga cafe with us, though you still climbed the wall with us to get out of school. Later I found out you had been going to bars. I learned it when several police officers came to school and the homeroom teacher called Nishino Yo and me into the office. The police told us that you had taken drugs in a bar and then gotten into a fight with a group of young men from outside school. You were in the hospital now. The moment I heard it, everything in my head went blank, and after that I could no longer hear whatever grave discussion followed.

That afternoon after school, Nishino Yo and I went to see you. I stood by your bed, looking at your head wrapped in bandages and your whole body swaddled up like a mummy, while the monitor beside you kept beating on. You had your eyes tightly shut. I couldn't stop myself from crying. I did not understand why you refused to cherish yourself. If you lost someone, would ruining yourself really make her come back? But no matter how violently my heart shook, no matter how continuously the tears fell, you saw none of it. The doctor said you had suffered a head injury and would not wake for some time. I collapsed completely. The feelings I had held back for so long burst out in that instant, fierce as lava. I stayed by your bedside and refused to leave no matter how Nishino Yo tried to pull me away. Your mother came too. She was a Buddhist. She had heard that the omamori from Senso-ji in Asakusa were especially powerful, and insisted on going there. So I took the overnight train with her and spent the whole night helping her along under a tremendous rain. We climbed up together, prayed for a charm, and hurried back. On the slope, my feet slipped and I slid several feet before catching a branch. When your mother pulled me up, I was soaked in mud and water. She looked at me with aching eyes and said, "If Soma had been with you from the very beginning, how much better it would have been." She understood everything. Hearing that, I felt as though the world had turned over. Yes. If you had loved me from the beginning, then none of these obstacles would have stood in the way. You would not have crossed so many dangers only to find no whole answer at the end. I do not know whether it was the power of the charm or simply your time to wake, but on the day after we came back from Asakusa, you opened your eyes. When you saw us at the bedside, you smiled once, then let your head fall weakly to one side, your eyes empty. The joy I felt at seeing you wake faded with your coldness. But then it rose again, because I remembered the wish I had made kneeling before the Buddha: please let you wake up quickly. Now you really had. To me that meant the wish had worked. I stubbornly told myself that the fact you still did not see me was only because I had forgotten to ask for that part.

While you were in the hospital, Nishino Yo and I returned, almost without meaning to, to being the three of us. Before I went with your mother to pray for your safety, Nishino Yo had asked, "Natsuki, are you sure you're going?" I nodded without hesitation. Then he said quietly, "Actually, from the first dinner you agreed to have with the team, I knew you didn't like me. Every time you looked over, you weren't looking at me. It was always Soma." I turned away, not knowing what to say. At last he sighed. "If you need help somewhere, say it. I'll help you." I stared at him. He smiled crookedly. "If I can't be happy myself, then maybe seeing the person I like happy can be its own happiness." Nishino Yo was a sports boy, but when it came to love he could always say things that sounded as if they had been written in a book. He said it was because his parents' love had taught him too clearly that the only thing to do was let love follow its natural course.

You began playing Warcraft with Nishino Yo again, only now you were no longer just wasting time. You played with a savage desperation, as if you meant to pour your whole strength into it. I was still your little tail. One day I saw your status message: The most painful expression is having no expression at all; the saddest thing is that I still miss you so much. I knew Hayashida Kanon had become the wound you would carry forever. I also knew that my own most painful expression was the way I kept smiling at you and got nothing back, and my own deepest sorrow was that I still loved you all the same.

They say the best way to free yourself from one love is to begin another. When you read that somewhere, you believed it at once. From then on, the girls around you changed like revolving lanterns. Watching the noise around you and the increasingly hollow look on your face, I wondered if perhaps I should stop waiting. All at once I wanted to confess, to tell you that I had liked you from the very first time I saw you. I thought: if you can be with so many girls, why not with me? So that night, when we went across the river to eat grilled meat, I drank a little to grow brave. Nishino Yo saw my signal and got up with some excuse. I downed another bottle before I finally dared tug on your sleeve and say, stumbling over the words, "Actually... I've liked you for a long time." The moment you heard it, you laughed. "Natsuki, what kind of joke is that? You're one of the guys." I understood what that meant, but drunkenness made me shameless. I clutched your sleeve and said, "I don't want to be one of the guys. I want to be with you." But you only smiled and said, "Natsuki, you've had too much. You really have." Even after Nishino Yo came back, you kept saying I was drunk. Perhaps because Nishino Yo had seen my confession fail, I suddenly felt unbearably humiliated. I flung off your hand, said stubbornly, "I'm not drunk," and jumped up from the stool and ran away. I never went back. The farther I ran, the sadder I became. I thought of that whole year of loving you in secret and how hard the road had been. I texted both you and Nishino Yo to say I was leaving first, then switched off my phone. That night, because I was heartbroken, I did not take a taxi home. Instead I walked and walked. From the far west bank of the river to the far eastern edge. More than eighty li, crying as I went, from ten at night until five in the morning. When I crossed the Xiang River bridge, I clung to the railing and cried for a very long time. I thought that if the broad black water could carry away my tears, it might carry away your image too. It was the longest road I had ever walked in my life.

When Nishino Yo called, I ran to the hospital in a panic. He told me you had been hit by a car while drunk on the road. Fortunately it was only minor abrasions. When I saw you, the expression on your face was a little awkward, but you smiled and said, "Natsuki, if you're taking care of a patient, you can at least buy him lunch." It was as if nothing from the night before had happened. I answered vaguely. But over lunch Nishino Yo suddenly said that in a few days he would be leaving to study in Singapore. I stared at him in disbelief, thinking he was joking. He only smiled and said this was his farewell meal, that he had not wanted to tell us too early. Back in high school his father had already planned it all out: after the entrance exams he was to go abroad. His life was different from ours. He would inherit the family business and had long since learned how to face separation. That was why he had always been so calm, so cool. And in that moment an odd sadness came over me, because I realized that after the entrance exams we would all be divided by distances too far to see across. None of us said very much. We only finished that meal quickly and said goodbye. We all knew none of us could bear the feeling of parting, so we pretended it didn't exist.

A few days later, Nishino Yo really did leave. At the airport he ruffled my hair and said, "Silly girl, the more I look at you now, the more you feel like a little sister." I said, "Really? What kind of brother abandons his sister in deep water and hot fire and runs off overseas by himself?" He laughed. Then you and he shook hands and knocked shoulders lightly. When the plane carrying Nishino Yo lifted from the horizon, I understood that it was not only the moment we parted from him. It was the moment I would part from you as well. From the beginning the three of us had been a fixed triangle, but once he was gone, you and I became suddenly strange to each other. We went out together less and less. You came to class less and less. Sometimes we only brushed past each other at school and smiled in greeting. The girls around you continued to change at speed. When it came time to fill in our university choices, I looked over my form again and again, but even as I watched you leave the classroom, I still did not have the courage to ask where you were applying. In the end we separated just as one might have expected. I heard from classmates that you had gone to the same coastal city as Hayashida Kanon. I chose neighboring Yokohama. We exchanged phone numbers and LINE accounts like old friends, and almost never used them. Only on holidays would I sometimes send you some harmless greeting.

Once, deep in the night, I received a text from you. It was the only real message you ever sent me. You wrote: Natsuki, university really is a dazzling world. It really can make people lose themselves. I think I may have fallen for a girl. And I think maybe I have already forgotten Hayashida Kanon's face. That was also the only message from you I never answered. Because I didn't know how. Because I didn't know how to tell you that I had seen thousands of people whose hair looked like yours, whose eyes looked like yours, but none of them had your face.

Sitting at home chatting online with Nishino Yo in distant Singapore, I told him that I had never imagined I would see Kanzaki Soma again in the third summer after our parting. He sent a smiling emoji and wrote, You still like him, don't you? I hid behind a joke and replied, I'm only surprised, that's all. Nishino Yo sent back, The next time you run into him, you should buy him a drink. I asked why. He said, Do you remember the night we drank on the west bank and you ran off? The truth is, he got hit by that car because he was looking for you. You foolish girl, your phone was off. Soma was terrified you'd do something rash, so he went searching everywhere. When he saw a girl standing on the Xiang River bridge from far away, he thought it was you, got excited, and rushed over without seeing the car coming. Three years later, hearing the truth at last, I sat in front of the screen and wept uncontrollably. Then Nishino Yo wrote again: Do you know why Soma rejected you so firmly? Because he thought of you as a friend. Because he knew Hayashida Kanon's shadow would stay in him for a long time, and he didn't want to hurt you. It wasn't that you couldn't have been together. He chose to push you away so that you would fall once, give him up, and walk the rest of your road properly.

As I stared at those lines from Nishino Yo, my tears would not stop. And right then I saw that you had come online. You almost never did. Your long-empty status message had been changed. It now read: Love is growing old slowly together. In that instant I remembered that three years earlier, when you asked me what love was, I had not been able to answer. But now, Soma, how badly I wanted to tell you. Love is feeling happy the moment your icon lights up. Love is that in three years we spoke only twice, and each time it felt as though flowers had burst open across the whole world. But I also knew that no matter how I loved you, we had missed both timing and circumstance. Three years ago, it was because you were still in love with Hayashida Kanon. Three years later, it was because you had already begun to love someone else. I was never inside the scope of your longing. I could grow up beside you, but I could not hold your hand. I could throw an arm over your shoulder, but I could not embrace you. I could wait, and still I could not wait my way into being with you. So all I can do is watch you slowly, slowly become a stranger, the kind of stranger one turns away from and forgets.