Too Late for Us to Start Over

The first time I saw Fujii Shin, I was trembling behind the cloth curtain in an acupuncture clinic.

I had always been sensitive to the cold. Every time the seasons changed, my legs would ache, and what I feared most in the world were needles. Whenever a silver needle went into my skin, I could not stop myself from shaking, shaking so badly that even the doctor would sigh. Fujii Shin was the old acupuncturist's grandson, and he loved standing outside the curtain peeking at my miserable state. Later he laughed and told me that every time he saw me, he felt as though he were looking at a kitten drenched in the rain, curled up tight with "I'm not going to make it" written all over its face.

I hated the way he took such delight in my misery, and yet I could never do anything about him.

One time, after cupping, my legs were covered in huge purple bruises, and I absolutely refused to leave the clinic looking like that. Fujii Shin sat in the waiting room with me until dark, doing his homework and talking to me on and off. Once night had fully fallen, he pushed his bicycle and walked me home. When we reached the crossroads, he suddenly turned around and asked if I wanted to go somewhere really fun.

That was the first time I entered the abandoned factory by Osaka Bay.

In the middle of the building a makeshift light was burning. Electric guitars, a bass, and drumsticks lay scattered across the floor, and the air smelled of metal and dust. And in that rough, ramshackle space, I heard a voice come pouring out of the speakers, a voice I knew too well. It was the voice that put me to sleep every midnight, the voice I listened to in secret even with my radio turned down to its lowest possible volume. The DJ from the late-night radio show stood beneath the yellow light with a guitar in his arms, singing.

His name was Shoji Sho.

I had imagined his voice as something like night itself: quiet, low, like a slowly flowing river. But the real Shoji Sho standing in front of me was the opposite. He was young, sharp, blazing, like a piece of iron that had been in the fire, the kind that could make the air crackle the moment he opened his mouth. The radio work was only a side job. What he really wanted was to sing a band called Too Young To Die onto a much larger stage.

"Since you brought me to meet my idol," I said, raising my chin at Fujii Shin from the back of his bicycle, "I'll forgive you for always sneaking looks at me when I get acupuncture."

Fujii Shin snorted and pushed harder on the pedals. One streetlight after another slid over our heads. I sat behind him with my schoolbag in my arms, while my heart had already flown ahead to that ruined factory.

Not long after that, Shoji Sho came looking for me on his own. He said Fujii Shin had mentioned that I was good at writing compositions, and asked whether I would be willing to write lyrics for the band. He tossed me a demo and said, in a voice both careful and offhand, "No restrictions. Just give it a try." That night I listened to the melody dozens of times. The darkness outside slowly turned to dawn before the first line finally fell onto the page. When the sample print with the track list arrived, I looked at the credits and saw my name beside Shoji Sho's under "lyrics." It felt as if something had slammed hard into my heart.

I thought this was fate quietly tilting in my favor.

But fate is never that simple.

On the day the band finished its first indie EP, Shoji Sho took Fujii Shin and me out to a bar to celebrate. That was the first time I saw Yanagihara Hotaru. She wore a blue-violet dress, a dusting of silver at the outer corners of her eyes, and stood among the crowd like a lamp lifted by the night. Shoji Sho drew her down to sit beside him with the ease of a movement he had made a thousand times. Only then did I learn that she was not just the band's backing vocalist, but the woman everyone already took for Shoji Sho's girlfriend.

On the way home that night, I asked Fujii Shin whether they were a couple.

He nodded and said, "Probably."

I lowered my eyes to the ruffles of my plaid skirt and felt the little glass bottle of wishes I had been hiding in my heart shatter all at once. The truth was, I should have understood it long before. Someone like Shoji Sho was never going to cast light on my shadow alone.

Later there was a composition contest at school, and on the very same day Shoji Sho's band was due to play a music festival out in the counties. I was so restless in the exam hall that in the end I handed in my paper early and ran all the way to the station through the pouring rain. To save time, I cut through a patch of woods and ended up with mud all inside my shoes. By the time I came gasping into the transparent rain shelter at the venue, Shoji Sho was standing backstage. He looked startled when he saw me, and then a helpless smile broke over his face. He handed me a hot can of black tea and said, "Didn't you say you couldn't make it?"

That night I stood in the crowd and watched fireworks and rain come down together, watched him sing the lyrics I had written to a whole unfamiliar world, and felt as though I too had been lit up by the stage lights.

But in the end, I could not hold out until the show was over.

I slipped away to catch the last train, and somewhere by the dark edge of the grass I lost consciousness. When I opened my eyes again, I was back on a bed in the acupuncture clinic. The person who pushed through the door was Shoji Sho. He bent over to look at me and said, "Were you trying to be stupid? You almost got yourself left out on a field somewhere." In that instant his face was so close to mine. The smell of medicinal herbs, wet cloth, and the faint smoke on him tangled together like a net slowly drawing shut. Just as our foreheads were almost about to touch, the door was suddenly pushed open, and Fujii Shin's voice came through first.

That kiss which never truly fell stayed in my heart afterward all the same.

Not long after that, I went to have a tooth fixed. My mouth was full of the taste of blood while the implant was being done. The pain made my hands and feet turn cold, and the first thought that came into my head was to call Shoji Sho. When he answered, I could not manage a full sentence. I only mumbled that my mouth was full of blood. He came almost immediately and took me to the old factory. No one else was there. Wind came in through the broken window seams, and I hurt so badly tears were running down my face. When Shoji Sho bent and kissed me, the kiss was fiercer and more hurried than I had imagined, as if he wanted to use one kind of pain to suppress the other one in my mouth.

I traded a tooth for a love that seemed, at last, to have really begun.

Or rather, I thought that was what it was.

From then on, I began deliberately avoiding Yanagihara Hotaru. The more inferior I felt in front of her, the heavier my guilt grew. Fujii Shin quickly sensed that something was wrong. One day after school, he cornered me at the end of the hallway and asked if I was together with Shoji Sho. I still do not know why I acted so stubborn then, but I told him everything, clean from start to finish. His expression darkened at once after he heard it. "You knew he and Hotaru are together. How could you still do this?" Ashamed and furious, I turned the knife back on him and said that if he felt so bad for Yanagihara Hotaru, maybe it was because he liked her.

After that, we did not speak properly for a long time.

Later on, Fujii Shin really did start riding around with another girl on the back of his bike, passing in front of me like a gust of wind. I too began appearing in Shoji Sho's world in the role of his girlfriend. It was a world I did not belong to at all. Underground live houses, the smell of smoke and liquor, uproar that lasted till dawn, women with makeup so heavy it looked like a mask, and pairs of eyes that saw only the band's lead singer and never the high school girl in a plaid skirt standing beside him. In the middle of them all, I often felt like a patch of moss no one noticed in the corner of a wall.

And yet whenever Shoji Sho sang the lyrics I had written onstage, I would believe again that there was still some line between us that no one else could see.

Too Young To Die became popular quickly. First the festivals, then the record company, then larger and larger stages. Shoji Sho quit the midnight radio show and threw himself entirely into fiercer music. I, meanwhile, began skipping school often, lying often, cutting class, all so I could follow him from one performance to the next. When the mock exam rankings came out, I had dropped more than twenty places at once. The teacher called my parents into school, and my home exploded overnight. My father said he was going to send me to one of those strictly run boarding schools out in the outskirts. For the first time in my life, I fought back that fiercely, slammed the door, and ran from home.

I went straight to the bar where Shoji Sho was performing.

The lights were dim there, and the air was thick with the sweet, greasy smell of beer mixed with perfume. A woman named May was dancing pressed close against Shoji Sho. Her nails were painted a violent red, and her whole body looked like a vulgar flame. Standing outside the crowd, watching her hand climb up onto Shoji Sho's shoulder, I felt the string inside my head snap. I rushed over, grabbed a beer from the table, and splashed it all over her.

The whole room fell silent at once.

May lifted her hand to strike me, but Shoji Sho stopped her. With a cold laugh, she said, fine, then if I can't hit her, let her have a taste of what being splashed feels like. Then she handed another glass of beer to Shoji Sho.

I still remember the silence of that second even now.

Before I could truly believe what I was seeing, Shoji Sho had taken the glass. Expressionless, he poured the beer over my head. The cold liquid ran down through my hair and the back of my neck, and I stood there nailed in place. Somewhere around me, someone said softly, "She's just a high schooler. It was only for fun. Who told her to take it seriously?"

After that night, I agreed to go to the boarding school.

I said goodbye to no one. I quietly finished the paperwork and left, as if I had been pulled out whole from my former life. The closed schedule, the dorm lights-out, the orderly routine so neat it bordered on mechanical, all of it pressed down on me until I no longer had time to think about anything else. Three or four months later, when I returned to the city for a follow-up appointment, I saw Shoji Sho's official album in a record store. Laser-printed cover, elegant packaging, famous producer, wall-to-wall promotion. I bought it and looked inside, only to discover that most of the songs were the old ones after all, except that in the lyric booklet, the lyrics I had written now carried a different name.

May.

I called Shoji Sho and said, congratulations, you finally released a real record. He was silent for a long time before saying in a low voice, "About the lyrics, I'll make it up to you with money." I stood leaning against the hospital corridor wall and suddenly found the whole thing laughable. So in the end, all that remained between us was a single sentence: I'll pay you back. I asked him whether it did not feel like a waste to sell away his talent like that. Very softly, on the other end, he said, "I'm sorry, Yukumo. There are a lot of things in this world you don't understand yet."

After the call ended, Fujii Shin came and sat beside me and raised his arm toward me. "If it hurts, bite me."

So I really did bite a deep mark into his arm.

Later on, I took another year to prepare for exams. Fujii Shin got into a university in the south, the same one as the girl he later truly came to like. I thought a great many things would gradually pass that way. Until one day Yanagihara Hotaru came to see me and told me that after I fainted at that music festival, the one who carried me on his back while searching everywhere for a ride was not Shoji Sho, but Fujii Shin. It had also been Fujii Shin who took the lyric booklet bearing May's name and went to Shoji Sho to fight him hard over it. The person who had always been closest to his cousin was the very one who let their relationship sour because of me.

So he had never been standing up for Yanagihara Hotaru.

He had only liked me, and never been willing to admit it.

But by then, everything was already too late.

After university, I joined a newspaper as an entertainment editor. The next time I saw Shoji Sho was at the release event for his new album. The flashbulbs made the line of his face look flawless. He spoke without a leak in him anywhere, and even the angle of his smile felt precisely trained. He was no longer the boy who had held a guitar and sung in the old factory. A colleague grabbed me and said, come on, let me introduce you to Shoji Sho, maybe you can even get an interview out of it. I looked at the man in the middle of the crowd, held up by countless gazes, and suddenly shook my head and turned away.

I knew that the Shoji Sho I had once loved with such reckless abandon had already died in that old factory, and in that glass of beer.

As for Fujii Shin, it was too late for us too. When we are young, we always think there is plenty of time ahead, that misunderstandings can be explained slowly, and that love can be confessed slowly too. But time never gives people that kind of chance. It only pushes us forward, letting us grow up as we go, while the person we most wanted to know again is left forever at some turning in the old days.

The rain passes, the sky clears, the clouds scatter, the wind grows still.

Only we no longer have time to start over.