Little Brother Touki

The rainy season in Koya is long. In the weeks between late spring and early summer, the little lanes of blue brick and stone are always drowned in mist. Azaleas bloom all over the mountains, bright as clouds at sunrise, and people say it is the most beautiful season of the year. When I came up from the foot of Mount Hiei to the halfway pavilion, the slopes were full of flowers. The sanatorium sat half hidden in dense woods, a two-story white Western house with nothing but azaleas in the beds before it. Tono led me there beneath a slanting sun that made everything feel dead and weightless. Then a cat dropped from the second-floor balcony, circled my feet once, and walked away as if nothing had happened. Two figures appeared above us, blurred in the glare. "Shirofuji, I didn't lie to you, did I? Cats don't die from falling." "Oh." "Shirofuji, you could try a dog too. It might not die." The shorter boy picked up a half-grown husky and threw it straight down. It let out one broken whimper and landed stiffly in my arms. The two boys stared, then bolted downstairs. They were both wearing blue-and-white striped patient clothes. The taller one took the dog from me, checked its breathing, and raised an eyebrow at the shorter boy. "See, Shirofuji? Your dog really didn't die." Tono pulled me behind him. Two nurses rushed out of the sanatorium and shouted, "Touki Shinonome, you're teaching Shirofuji nonsense again. Come back inside and behave." Touki only smiled and moved lazily toward them. Looking back at me, he said, "New girl? Great. The boy in room 204 killed himself, and Shirofuji and I were just worrying we'd have no one to play with. Now we won't be bored." Before he'd finished, the nurses had already grabbed him by both arms. He gave a mocking laugh. His hospital gown pulled loose, showing thin collarbones and a body all sharp angles. Shirofuji, who was still a round-faced child, cuddled his dog and shuffled away after them, but before going he said very earnestly, "Touki's telling the truth." Then the nurses turned to Tono, all apologies and bows. "Mr. Tono, please don't worry. We'll take good care of Tsukishima Aya." Tono sighed and patted my head, saying the kind of polished thing he always said. "I'll come and see you often." I narrowed my eyes, suddenly fully awake. "Oh, you're leaving? Then I won't see you out." Tono stood there a moment, his mouth moving as if he wanted to say something, but in the end he said nothing. Later I stood on the roof of the sanatorium and watched his car wind down the mountain road. Touki lay along the rail as if he might fall asleep and tumble over. "Aren't you afraid of falling to your death?" I asked. He looked at the sky and answered, "What about you? If you're not mad, why have they sent you to a psychiatric sanatorium?" The sunset over the mountains blazed in long bands of cloud and gold.

Before long the nameplate on room 204 had been changed to Tsukishima Aya. A round-faced girl called Shinju came to my door carrying one of Shirofuji's cats. "Touki, are you back?" she called. Touki and Shirofuji came shuffling over in their slippers. Touki was my age; Shirofuji was much younger. Everyone in that big house was still only a child. "Shinju, tell me something sad so I can feel better," Touki said, shaking the girl at the door with a grin. Shinju flung off his hand in fury and threw the cat to the floor. Shirofuji turned white and dove after it. The cat screamed and shook in his arms. Tears welled up in him at once. Shinju stared, then fled. The cat's front leg was broken. Touki tore off the bandage wrapped around his own waist, where white after white layer hid some old wound, and bound the cat's leg with it. Blood began to seep from his waist again. The noise had already alerted the nurses at the end of the hall. Touki peered out, turned skittish as a frightened bird, and dragged Shirofuji and me away. Behind the sanatorium there was a broad stone platform, a hidden place from which to watch sunrises and sunsets, almost never found by others. The cat crouched there in misery, but every time it spotted a butterfly it perked up again. Shirofuji chased butterflies in the weeds. Touki lay flat on the stone and closed his eyes. His voice turned suddenly dark. "Shirofuji, I'm sorry. If I hadn't spoken, your cat wouldn't have gotten hurt." Shirofuji propped his chin on his hands. "Shinju's getting worse. She used to just throw cups at us. Now she's started on animals." Touki rubbed his head and gave a faint smile. Then, still without opening his eyes, he said to me in that sharp, nasty tone of his, "New girl, if you're going to live here, you'd better have some sense. Don't let anyone bully you." The dusk slipped down over his face, thin and beautiful. Sixteen, maybe seventeen. No one had ever said anything like that to me before.

In the middle of the night, with moonlight spilled all over the room, the doorknob turned and Shirofuji slipped in. "What are you doing?" I asked. He came closer and knocked lightly on my head, then leaned an ear to it as if listening seriously. "Mm. The sound's just right. The watermelon is ripe." I stared at him without daring to make a sound. From inside his clothes he took out a big kitchen knife and brought it down on my head. My heart almost burst. I clamped my hands over my mouth to stop myself screaming. The knife had already touched me, but it was soft, no more than a sheet of paper. Someone was standing in the doorway. Touki leaned there with his arms folded, moonlight on him like something unreal. "Scared you, new girl?" he said lazily. I touched my face, furious and shaking. "Touki Shinonome, you freak! If you hate me, say so. If you want to fight, fight. Why team up with Shirofuji just to scare me?" Touki gave a cold laugh and turned on the light. He took the prop from Shirofuji's hand. It was only a paper knife painted so skillfully it looked real. Shirofuji was motionless now, as if fast asleep. Touki turned to me and smiled in a way I couldn't read. "Anyone who can end up here must have something extraordinary about them."

For a long while after that Touki wouldn't speak to me. Shirofuji tugged his sleeve and complained, "Touki, why won't you talk to Sister Aya? I like her." Touki and Shirofuji stood on the roof staring down at the road, watching groups of pilgrims and tourists pass. Koya was famous for its temples, and sometimes monks and nuns crossed the mountain road below. All at once Touki seized Shirofuji's hand and ran downstairs. "What are you doing?" Shirofuji asked. "I've got some good stuff in my room," Touki said, grinning. "It'll go moldy if I leave it there any longer." Shirofuji clung to me from behind like a tail. "If Sister Aya doesn't go, I won't go either." Touki snorted and stuck out a hand to me as if granting alms. "Fine. New girl, come with us." In Touki's room on the second floor, he began rummaging through everything. I stood in the corner and stared. Two whole walls were lined with bookcases crammed to the top with books. I pulled one down at random, stared at the pages full of symbols, and asked helplessly, "What kind of heavenly script is this? You can actually read it?" Touki looked up once. "Advanced calculus. I got bored of it two years ago." I stared. "Two years ago? How long have you been here?" Shirofuji spread his hands with old-man weariness. "Touki was already here when I came. I've been here three years." He paused and added, "When they tested him, his IQ came out at one hundred and seventy-eight. I think his family decided he had schizophrenia because the way he behaves is too strange. I've never seen any of them visit." Touki's hands paused on the cabinet for only a second. The room went silent. Then he suddenly let out a wild cry. "Found it! Found it!" He pulled out three drab outfits: one Taoist robe and two blue-green monks' robes. Soon Touki was dressed like a little priest, and Shirofuji and I had been forced into the monk robes with hats jammed down over our hair. At a path along the mountain, Touki started fingering a string of prayer beads and chanting nonsense to every passerby. Tourists kept dropping "incense money" into his hand, and the moment they turned their backs he would beam with delight. "This isn't your first time doing this, is it?" I asked. Folding his hands piously, he said, "New girl, you really are no fun." Then I lowered my eyes, only to find a pair of feet stop before us. I looked up. Tono was bending down with that same gentle smile. "Aya Tsukishima, I came to see you." I moved my lips slightly. "Shin Tono."

Tono sat with me on a bench near the flower beds. He kept silent, and it didn't take long for the silence to turn into that thing it had become between us, a place where nothing could be said. Then he took a red invitation from his coat. It smelled faintly of ink. Inside, every formal character had been written in careful little brush strokes that must have taken him a great deal of effort. "Aya Tsukishima, in two months I'm marrying your older sister. Come be our bridesmaid." He spoke cautiously. I smiled, shook my head, and said, "Why bother? You've seen the state I'm in." Relief flashed through him and he hurried to say, "Then at least come to the wedding." I folded the invitation away, snapped off an azalea bloom beside us, and tucked it into his lapel. "Shin Tono, I wish you and my sister a happy marriage." At dusk the roof of the sanatorium was the most beautiful place of all. The heat of day would fade, the birds would go quiet, and up there you could grieve as much as you wanted or go mad with joy and no one would look twice. "Stop watching. He left long ago." Touki jumped down from the railing, loud as always. "New girl, you cried. You cried..." At fifteen, perhaps even earlier, I had met Tono in the studio at the art academy. The curtains had been drawn and only a narrow crack of light came through. I had pulled off the sheet and shown him a body like a butterfly ready to fly. I placed his hand over my heart and needed no other words. I used to watch the passing monks from the roof and think that the Buddhists were right to believe in fate. And yet my own heart had been betrayed so easily. "Aya, let me go," Tono had said beneath the camphor trees at the academy the year before. Once a person stops loving you, the past becomes entanglement, affection becomes burden, and your whole existence turns into a thorn in his future. He wants to abandon you and will even send you to a psychiatric sanatorium to do it. "Was it you, Tono Shin?" I sank against the railing. The mountain weather changed in an instant and night rain began to fall. I wiped my eyes and said to Touki, "Touki Shinonome, I'm too powerful. I only got a little sad, and the sky started crying." Touki frowned, looking every bit the fine-boned boy he was. "Aya Tsukishima, stop crying. It's ugly." I sniffed and said, "Touki Shinonome, didn't you want to know what was extraordinary about me? Then you'd better take care of me. Once I fall asleep, I know nothing." I tilted my head against the railing and drifted off. I rarely appeared around other people. If I did, it meant my mind was in relatively good shape. I suffer from severe narcolepsy. Tono said he couldn't spend his life with someone who could collapse into sleep at any moment. In the haze before sleep took me, I felt someone gather me into his arms. The midsummer rain was cold from the mountain air, beating through hair and clothes like pain made physical. And somewhere in it I heard Touki crying for me, raw and broken.

Every year at the beginning of autumn, Koya held a great Buddhist festival, and the faithful came crowding up the mountain to burn incense. The path of blue stone steps would be packed with visitors. Shirofuji stuck out his tongue like his dog. "Sister Aya, it's so hot." Touki flattened all the temple money we'd scammed into a fan and strutted around waving it like a landlord's spoiled son. "Let's go join the fun at the festival," Shirofuji begged, tugging his sleeve. "What's interesting about that? Just a sea of heads. If the nurses catch us sneaking out, we'll get locked up again." I had barely opened my mouth when Touki suddenly stood up and snapped open his money-fan. "No," he declared grandly, "we are definitely going." So on the day of the festival, the three of us hid in one corner of the summit hall. The worshipers moved like waves. Touki, who knew every inch of the place, shoved through them as if born to it. Once the chanting started, he began yawning. The hall was full of dignitaries and rich patrons. Shirofuji curled his lip. "Officials and businessmen believe in this stuff the most. Last year's first incense offering sold for over a hundred thousand." After the endless chanting, everyone in fine clothes visibly relaxed. A wealthy couple sitting in the last row opened the auction with half a million. The whole room went still. It felt like a farce played inside something pretending to be holy. Shirofuji sighed that it was boring after all. Touki, who had looked half asleep until then, was staring at the couple without blinking. I patted him. "What's so strange about rich people from the provincial capital?" Touki suddenly flung my hand aside, staggered to the lotus pond behind the hall, and began vomiting. Shirofuji and I clung to him in alarm. Each time he retched, his face grew a shade paler. After the festival, the three of us sat in a row on the viewing platform beneath the hall. Touki refused to leave and refused to speak. We stayed until dawn. By five in the morning the platform had filled with people waiting for sunrise. The wealthy couple from the festival came too, arriving in a BMW 5 Series. Touki turned toward them and called, expressionless, "Dad. Mom." He had once said that everyone sent to the sanatorium possessed some extraordinary quality. In truth, he was the one whose heart had been torn open by things so ordinary they cut like glass. He was the only person in that place who was completely sane.

When we returned, the nurses were frantic and red-eyed. Touki grandly took all the blame onto himself, and they locked him in the upstairs room behind the rear yard. I stole candy from Shirofuji and sneaked to the punishment room. When I knocked, Touki asked slyly from inside, "Who's there?" I said nothing. He laughed at once. "Aya Tsukishima, you've come to bring me something good to eat, haven't you?" I mumbled that the credit belonged to Shirofuji; I'd stolen it from his candy jar while he was napping. The crack beneath the door was too narrow, and I couldn't push the candy through. I worked up a sweat trying. Inside, Touki sighed as if I were hopeless. "Tsk. How am I supposed to insult you properly? Why don't you throw it in through the back window?" So I went around and tossed the candies in one by one. Touki stood at the window, grinning. "Didn't your parents say anything to you?" I asked. With candy in his mouth he answered vaguely, "They gave me a bundle of cash. Too big to make a fan with." He stayed at the window catching sweets while I stood below and cried for no reason at all. His fingers stretched through the bars toward the open air, but the wall was too high and I couldn't tell what he wanted. Rain came down in sheets. One person's wild crying, another person's accumulated years. When Touki came out of confinement, he carried both his big bookshelves into my room. Downstairs, Shinju kept tormenting Shirofuji's cats and dogs. "Why do you still let her have them?" Touki demanded. Shirofuji stroked the cat in his arms and touched the dog on the head with helpless tenderness. "Shinju's pitiful too. No one dares play with her. She just sits there staring all alone." And like that, the damp and airless summer suddenly ended.

Touki stayed in my room, pulling books from his shelves. "Aya Tsukishima, if you want something, read these." I stared at him. "You sound like you're making out a will." Touki glanced sideways at me and smiled. "I'm being discharged." My heart gave a jolt. "You never really belonged here anyway." "No," he said. "It's because there's someone I care about so much that I want to hold her hand and kiss her in the ordinary world, instead of being idiots together in a psychiatric sanatorium for the rest of our lives." When he said it, his black-and-white eyes shone with something I had never seen in them. I sniffed hard and said nothing. My eyes were already wet, and I was afraid that if he spoke one word more, I'd start crying like rain. "Aya Tsukishima," he said, "let me give you a present." "What?" "My first kiss. Do you want it?" I jerked my head up, and Touki was already kissing me as if he meant to turn the whole world upside down.

Touki left the sanatorium dressed with elegant care, every inch a rich family's young master. The BMW 5 Series waited outside. He tugged Shirofuji's ear and touched my cheek. "I'll come back for you soon," he said. Then he got into the car and was gone. The sunset sank, and even the sky went dim. Shirofuji cried himself hoarse against my shoulder. Without Touki, the two of us were like a pair of lost white rabbits. Shinju grew bolder and bolder about snatching Shirofuji's animals, and no one in the ward yelled in outrage anymore. Everything fell silent. On the Mid-Autumn night in August, Shirofuji sneaked into my room. Through the fog of sleep I made out his face and was seized by alarm at once. "You're not sleepwalking in here to slice open watermelons again, are you? Where's the knife?" Shirofuji waved his hands. "I'm not asleep yet. Let's go find Touki." I shook my head violently, but the next moment we were already running downhill in our striped patient clothes and slippers. "Shirofuji, there are no lights, the road is dangerous. Slow down," I shouted. He was like a horse broken loose. Then suddenly he twisted around and cried, "Touki doesn't want us anymore, does he?" I froze. He went on through tears, "Otherwise why did he leave all by himself? He was always with me. Eating, teasing people, getting punished, always, always." I couldn't answer. It was enough for him. "He definitely doesn't want us anymore," he said, and burst into sobs. "I don't care, Sister Aya. I have to find Touki and bring him back." The night road in the mountains was slick with mist. The few lamps were half broken. Shirofuji was too wild with feeling to watch his step. He slipped and tumbled straight down the stone path. "Shirofuji!" I screamed and threw myself after him.

Was it one second? An hour? A whole day? I held Shirofuji's head in my lap. Blood was everywhere and my own body had gone numb. "Shinju is pitiful," he panted. "You said that already. Don't talk anymore. Doctors are coming." I was shaking as I held him. "Shinju is pitiful. I hate that she hurts my cats and dogs. But I hate even more seeing her sit alone staring with no light in her eyes. She cries too, in corners." His breath hitched. "Shirofuji, don't talk." "Sister Aya, I like you. I like Touki too. If you two leave together, what am I supposed to do?" He tilted his head and then said nothing more. The night wind whistled through the trees. The August air had already turned cold enough to belong to autumn. Moonlight spread over Shirofuji and me with a softness that felt almost merciful, and then there was only stillness. After Mid-Autumn, Koya grew crisp and high and full of fragrant osmanthus. I sat in a wheelchair while someone held me in an embrace so desperate it was almost a howl. I buried all feeling inside myself and never let it show again. They said I was like a plant now, sleeping too deeply, perhaps already half gone. That, I think, was what the doctor told Touki.