Even now, Yoshiki often remembers the sight of Natsukawa Mio standing beside him beneath that vast sky. The evening glow lay across her forehead like a rainbow crown. Many years later he still found himself thinking of that moment, of Mio's thin, delicate face smiling at him in a world washed orange and red, and of the words she said: whether you are a whale or only a little blue fish, you are still swimming with all your strength. In that, there is no difference.
At the gallery, she once cried out over one of his paintings with such explosive feeling that it seemed as though every emotion in her body had burst out in a shout and splashed onto everyone around her.
The air was thick with the salty, far-reaching smell of the sea. The wind rushing at them carried tiny grains of dampness that settled on the skin in a thin, clinging film. Holding Kitagawa Yoshiki's hand, she ran along the shore screaming with delight. When the waves rolled in, they carried a dark green ribbon of kelp that wrapped itself around the top of her pale, almost bluish foot. For one brief instant, as Yoshiki watched the broad smile on Natsukawa Mio's face, he felt that this girl was using every bit of passion in her life to live out that single day.
It was the sixth day since he had met her.
Before that, Yoshiki often wondered what sort of existence he really was. There were four people in his family. His father was a celebrated defense attorney, his mother a well-known surgeon, and his brother, nine years older, had founded his own company two years earlier and was already thriving. Only Yoshiki himself was ordinary, ordinary to the point of discouragement. In seventeen years, the highest honor he had ever received was a "Harmony Award" voted on by his classmates. He drank only one brand of bottled water. He wore the school uniform. His grades were not brilliant, but never poor either. For three straight years he had secretly liked a girl who read The Republic, but he had never confessed, and of course she had never known that among her admirers there was a boy called Kitagawa Yoshiki. That was the sort of person he was: harmonious enough. He had done one thing worthy of admiration, perhaps. He had once pulled a drowning girl out of the water. But by the time he got her to shore, she was already dead.
Yoshiki had looked at that girl's bruised, bluish face and wept bitterly, though he did not know exactly what he was grieving for. Perhaps it was only because his father had once told him that life was nothing more than helplessness layered upon helplessness.
That was when he first learned that helplessness meant something you could not overcome, no matter how desperately you tried.
After that, Kitagawa Yoshiki grew very quiet, as if he were trying to hide even the last trace of his existence. It was true that he often felt lonely.
Loneliness was like a forgotten island resting on the shore of his young heart. Yet it had become a loneliness he almost cherished.
When a person has been lonely for long enough, he learns how to amuse himself. So whether he was happy or sad, he supplied the feeling himself and then savored it alone. One such private amusement was going, on weekend mornings, to see small art exhibitions so neglected they were nearly empty.
The gallery was old and badly in need of repair. The exhibition hall always seemed to breathe out a faint smell of mildew, the sort of smell damp moss leaves behind after rain.
The plaster on the walls had cracked into scales as thin and textured as moth wings. Whenever he stopped in front of a painting heavy with color, white flakes came drifting down beside him.
The gallery was empty. Yoshiki stood in front of a painting that looked either like a sunflower turned toward the sun or a planet bursting apart and stared at it in silence. About five minutes later he turned his head and saw a girl smiling at him. She had a mushroom haircut and a fluffy goose-yellow scarf that must have been three meters long.
His first impression was of her eyes, bright and sly as fireflies, and of the way her short hair and infectious smile seemed to flare suddenly in the sunlight behind her.
Yoshiki felt interrupted. He was about to turn away from those bright eyes and leave when she called after him.
"Hey. Are you trying to decide whether that painting looks more like a sunflower or an exploding earth?"
"Mm..." Yoshiki's voice came out a little hoarse. He had gone too long without using language much around other people.
The girl kept smiling. "And now you're wondering how I knew that, right? That's a woman's intuition. And my intuition tells me it's definitely a sunflower."
Yoshiki's face remained calm as still water. "Actually, it's an exploding earth."
"How do you know? Male intuition?"
"Because I painted it."
The air at the end of autumn held a sharper chill now. Yoshiki tightened the collar of his coat and walked out of the gallery. After a brief silence, the girl hurried after him and patted him on the shoulder.
"That one doesn't count. But at least I do know one thing," she said. "You're planning to run away from home, aren't you?"
In fact, Kitagawa Yoshiki really was planning an escape. Or rather, he was already carrying one out.
He wanted to flee the deep blue seabed that seemed to belong entirely to whales. Down there, Kitagawa Yoshiki was nothing more than a tiny blue fish. Even so small a creature had no place there. Precisely because he was so small, he stood out as something that did not belong. He wanted desperately to swim back to the world that ought to have been his. He had never wanted an entire ocean. A shallow stream would have been enough. So when the mushroom-haired girl exposed him so confidently, Yoshiki stood still for a long time in surprise.
The girl tightened her fuzzy scarf and said in a slightly blurred tone, "I'm Natsukawa Mio. If I guess your name right, take me with you."
Then she offered the statement like a fact. "You're Kitagawa Yoshiki."
A look of astonishment was just beginning to gather on Yoshiki's mild face when Mio stepped forward, caught him by the hem of his coat, tipped her head back, and asked, "By the way, where are you going?"
Yoshiki had the distinct feeling he had stumbled into a ridiculous sort of trouble. First of all, when Natsukawa Mio followed him onto the bus heading for the rural seaside, she announced clearly that she suffered from terrible motion sickness. At first Yoshiki adopted a strategy of saying nothing and hearing nothing. He would not look at her, listen to her, or answer her. But when Mio turned pale and leaned over a plastic bag, vomiting violently, Yoshiki slowly raised a hand under the repeated glances of the other passengers and patted her on the back. By the time she had emptied her stomach and could breathe again, the stop where he meant to get off had long since passed. And this, unfortunately, was the last bus of the day that went there.
Then, after they finally reached the inn near the wild sea in the countryside, he was told that only one room remained. Yoshiki was not the sort of boy who had learned his ideas about life from melodramatic television, so in the shortest time possible he thrust his identification card and room deposit across the desk and secured the last room for himself. It did not matter that he had never intended to stay at that inn in the first place. The important thing was that he could finally get rid of the strange, clingy girl.
If the story had to be told in escalating order, then what happened next was worse. The girl who read The Republic, the one we may as well call the Plato Girl, turned out to be the innkeeper's daughter.
That night Yoshiki lay on the hard wooden bed. The damp blanket over him smelled faintly of watered-down detergent. He imagined that outside this room, the Plato Girl was standing by the freezing late-autumn sea, a small stove lit beside her as she brewed a rich pot of Tieguanyin tea for the guests.
By the time Yoshiki finally summoned enough courage to speak and opened his door, what he saw was Natsukawa Mio's broad smiling face already waiting for him.
"Hi. Fancy meeting you again, Kitagawa Yoshiki."
The unspoken meaning was obvious: don't think you're getting rid of me.
"Idiot. How are you here?" He remembered perfectly well that there had been only one room left.
Mio tilted her head. "I used my beauty and my silver tongue to persuade a guest across from you to give me his room."
Yoshiki's mouth twitched. He shut the door at once. Outside, the sea roared and the moonlight lay very still. He thought he would go talk to the Plato Girl once that shadow called Natsukawa Mio was no longer in sight. With that thought still in mind, he somehow fell asleep.
What followed must have been a dream. Yoshiki dreamed of the year he was nine. The images were hazy, like an old black-and-white film.
When the scene opened, he was only a third grader. He remembered that in the last row, in the darkest corner of the classroom, there had been a girl everyone called Ugly. She was a classmate. Her real name and even her features had grown blurred with time; he only remembered that the children all called her things like Piggy or Stinky. Who knew what her real name had been.
Yoshiki noticed her only because she was truly an unwanted child.
She belonged to a category even more depressing than his own unremarkable self. Her looks were unlikable, her personality unlikable, her clothes unlikable, her grades unlikable. She had none of the liveliness children that age were supposed to have. Day after day she sat in the back row with her messy bangs hanging over eyes that had long since gone dim. Because of that, she was ostracized and bullied by the little cliques in the class. Outside the classroom, the ginkgo trees rustled in the breeze. Yoshiki sat in the middle of the room and drifted for a moment, until he suddenly realized how quiet and empty everything around him had become. When he lifted his head, the classroom was already deserted.
Outside, the cicadas' relentless cry tangled itself with the girls' sly, venomous conspiracy.
"A monster like Ugly. If she died, nobody would care."
"Exactly. She's disgusting. I can hardly believe she's in the same class as us."
"Since no one would miss her anyway, let's just let her die."
Yoshiki pressed himself to the window. In his ears, that sentence kept striking again and again like a curse.
Then let her die.
The one who woke him from the dream was the Plato Girl. In the thick morning fog she knocked on Yoshiki's door and asked with a smile, "Would you like breakfast delivered? Five yen a portion."
Still half asleep, Yoshiki nodded before he was fully awake. It was only after she had gone that he realized he had just thrown away a perfect chance to speak with her. While he was sitting there regretting it, Mio appeared again, leaning against the doorway in a pajama set crowded with little brown bears. Looking at the badly startled Yoshiki, she said with a grin, "I brought a book called Sixty-Six Ways to Win Over a Sophisticated Girl. Want to borrow it?"
"No, thank you."
Yoshiki shut the door again, glanced at the drifting clouds outside, and sat down in defeat.
The inn had something of a youth hostel about it. All the guests sat around a single long table and used shared chopsticks to serve themselves. Seated opposite Yoshiki was the Plato Girl. The innkeeper proudly introduced the braised carp in the middle of the table as a dish his daughter had made and urged everyone to try it. Yoshiki's chopsticks hovered over the fish for a moment before he finally took a piece. "Well?" the Plato Girl asked him. "Is it terrible?" That was the second sentence she had ever spoken to him. In the patterned light of the morning, a faint flush rose to Yoshiki's face. At that moment he sincerely wished all sixty-six of Mio's tricks would go to hell. So he gathered his courage and said, very clearly, "It's delicious. The sauce is rich without burying the freshness of the fish itself."
The Plato Girl blinked, then smiled with warm amusement. The awkwardness brought on by such a stiff and earnest compliment passed quickly enough that no one minded it. Yoshiki discovered that the Plato Girl was somewhat different from the figure he had built in his mind over the years. Somehow she was much more vivid than the "girl who likes reading Plato." Much kinder. Much more endearing. After the meal, Yoshiki hesitated in secret for a moment and then, abandoning the reserve that had been rooted in him for seventeen years, openly helped her clear the dishes.
Outside, the sunlight grew steadily warmer. It fell through the windows hung with sea-blue curtains and leaped over the girl's hair, tied up behind her head, and over Yoshiki's fingers, which had begun to lose their stiffness.
In the kitchen, the Plato Girl asked, "You're Kitagawa Yoshiki, aren't you? We were in the same class, but I don't think we ever really talked."
Yoshiki took the plate she handed him and dried it with a paper towel. "Mm..." He could not think what else to say. It was not as if he could answer, Because I was a socially inept recluse, so naturally no one talked to me.
Before the awkwardness had time to spread, the Plato Girl smiled and said, "Maybe it was because you were too good. I wanted to say hello more than once, but I never could work up the courage. Didn't you know? Lots of people in class have seen your paintings. It was a shock to discover a future master living right there in our classroom."
"Really? I always thought it was because I was too withdrawn, and nobody wanted to bother with me."
"How could that be? You were very popular with the girls. It's just that... boys as outstanding as you don't seem as if they'd want to mix with the rest of us."
Her healthy, rosy face looked especially lovely in the air scented with lemon dish soap.
For one brief instant, Kitagawa Yoshiki felt genuinely grateful to that strange girl called Natsukawa Mio. She was like the white rabbit in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, leading him into a marvelous country.
He saw Natsukawa Mio again that night by the sea.
It was already dark. Yoshiki was outside helping the Plato Girl brew tea when he looked into the distance and saw Mio standing quietly alone on the shore. Her three-meter scarf hung from her shoulders all the way down to the damp sand.
She looked a little lonely, nothing like the bright, almost overbearing creature she had seemed when they first met. The tea's fragrance was faint. For no clear reason, Yoshiki walked toward the black and roaring wilderness of the sea at night until he came to stand beside her.
Then he saw that Natsukawa Mio was crying.
Under the flowing moonlight, that strange girl who was always smiling let her tears spread unchecked, cool as the moon itself across her stubborn face.
The sight caught Yoshiki off guard. They stood there in silence for a while.
Then he turned and said, "According to those sixty-six tricks, when a girl cries you're supposed to offer her a neatly folded handkerchief. So... I didn't bring one."
That was the only dry joke Kitagawa Yoshiki had ever made in seventeen years. Mio ignored the unspoken message entirely. Before he could react, she stepped forward and buried her face in his chest, wiping tears and snot all over him. When she lifted her head again, the eyes that met his were smiling once more, bright as fireflies. Yoshiki truly could not understand what sort of creatures girls were, least of all the one standing before him. But perhaps it was the sudden vulnerability Mio had shown, or perhaps the long silence between them had softened in the moonlight. Whatever the reason, five minutes later Kitagawa Yoshiki, who had always kept people at a distance, was sitting beside her on the ground, each of them telling the other their own story.
The sea at night possessed a dark and mysterious pull. Staring toward it, Yoshiki thought of the girl everyone had called Ugly, and asked Mio, "In games that circle around death, are children more innocent than adults? Or more frightening?"
Mio said nothing. She only listened while Yoshiki told her about the murder he had once witnessed, or failed to stop.
It had happened when he was nine. During morning exercises, Yoshiki had been left behind in the classroom because he was feeling unwell. He stayed there handing out the exam papers needed for the next lesson. Outside, the cries of the cicadas and the cheerful music of the radio exercises circled through the blue sky over the school.
Inside the classroom, by contrast, there was almost complete silence. That was why he heard the secret. It was a secret belonging to three girls and Ugly.
"A monster like her," they said, "if she died, nobody would be sad."
"Then let the monster die."
"Yes. Let's let her die."
The voices came closer and closer, and then stopped abruptly once they realized Yoshiki was in the room. So all he heard clearly was one fragment:
After school. By the river.
When the bell rang for class, Yoshiki kept glancing at Ugly in the last row. She sat there peacefully, one hand propping up her chin while she reviewed her lessons. He did not know whether the conversation he had heard had been real or whether he had imagined it. But if those girls truly meant to kill Ugly, then perhaps the only one in the world who could save her was him, the one outsider who knew their secret.
"Did you warn her?" Mio asked, looking at Yoshiki. "Did you tell her somebody wanted to push her into the river?"
"No."
Yoshiki still remembered the weather on that day: humid, stormy, the air thick with the smell of rotting moss.
After school he was the last person to leave the classroom. He watched Ugly go out with her red schoolbag on her back, her head lowered. He thought perhaps he had imagined too much. So he headed straight for the art room. Near the door he checked his watch. There were still twenty minutes before class would start. Almost without thinking, he turned and ran toward the river.
He followed the riverbank for a long way. The wind tore at his ears like ripped silk. Then the rain began again. By then his school uniform was already soaked through, and he could no longer tell whether the wetness on him was sweat or rain. He ran for about five minutes in the downpour. The rain struck his face like needles. Through the blurred curtain of water he saw three figures fleeing in panic. The unease and terror inside him expanded at once. Somewhere, as if inside a dream, he thought he heard a girl's shrill cry for help. A slender hand rose from the muddy river and vanished again beneath the water. Yoshiki felt his feet root to the earth like stakes of ice. Only when he finally jolted free and leaped into the rushing current did he realize that the girl was already gone.
By the time they pulled her out, she was dead. Her lips were purple, her face swollen and pale. Yoshiki's voice trembled as he told Mio the story, the story of how Ugly had been murdered when he was nine. How cunning could children be at that age? When Yoshiki told the police that those three girls had pushed Ugly into the river, the girls shivered and cried and protested their innocence. According to them, the four of them had gone to the river together to play, Ugly had slipped by accident, and the other three had run home to fetch adults. And they really had brought adults back. So no one doubted the tears of children who looked so innocent.
"You seem very sad, Yoshiki," Mio said after hearing the whole story, watching him steadily with a look of understanding in her smile. "Even if you weren't the one who pushed her in, even if none of it had anything to do with you, you still seem so sad."
Yoshiki did not know where that grief came from. He only kept thinking that if he had stopped it the moment he heard the plot, then perhaps that girl might still be alive somewhere in the world, living quietly in a forgotten corner.
"I often think maybe she left because of me."
That shadow had never dispersed after Yoshiki turned nine. Because it was a secret only he knew, he was fated to guard that loneliness alone, the kind of hopelessness that could be shared with no one.
"But now at least you've told me," Mio said. "So you don't have to walk on alone in sadness anymore, down that road that has been barren ever since you were nine."
Perhaps because they had talked too late into the night, Natsukawa Mio still had not appeared by the time breakfast was over the next morning.
After eating, Yoshiki decided to go to the nearby town to buy drawing paper, pens, and a sketch board. When he got to the station, Mio suddenly patted him on the shoulder from behind and said, "Hi. Take me with you."
By then Yoshiki seemed to have developed immunity to her abrupt appearances. He did not look nearly as startled as he had the first few times. He only smiled and said, "All right."
On the jolting bus, Mio looked out the window with a childlike expression, taking in the passing scenery. She seemed to be in very good spirits. Looking at her lovely profile, Yoshiki could not help asking, "Even if there are many things you don't want to tell me... could you at least tell me why you were crying?"
Mio took up the question as if it were only natural, then smiled and said, "You forgot? I know mind-reading. I was just thinking about when I was little."
"When you were little?"
"Mm. I was really a very annoying, very strange child."
Yoshiki could hardly imagine that this lively girl, so full of smiles, had once had a childhood people hated.
"Back then I kept thinking what a disappointing existence I was," she said. "But later I learned that there is no such thing as someone who would be better off never existing. Behind every person, there is always someone praying for them. Someone who likes them silently, who cares about them, who does not want them to disappear."
"And did you find someone like that?" Yoshiki asked, looking at Mio in amusement. When she turned serious, she was oddly endearing.
"I did," the girl answered with a smile.
On the way back to the inn, Mio carried the sketch board while Yoshiki held the paper and pens. They walked beneath the mild sunlight of late autumn turning toward winter, joking about nothing important. Before they even reached the entrance, they caught the faint aroma of tea. The Plato Girl was brewing another pot. Mio flashed a sly grin, tugged Yoshiki by the arm, dragged him in front of the Plato Girl, and said, "Draw us a picture."
Yoshiki was instantly embarrassed and cursed Mio for being such a busybody. Mio threw him a look as if to say, Be grateful for my psychic powers. I know you don't dare confess on your own. So Yoshiki had no choice but to stiffen his back and ask the Plato Girl with as much calm as he could muster.
"Would that be all right?"
"Of course. Thank you."
The afternoon sunlight was soft, the light just right. Yoshiki set up the easel, sharpened his charcoal pencil, and looked up. Across from him, Mio had already settled herself with comic seriousness into a proper pose, while beside her the Plato Girl sat with the shy curve of a smile. The sun fell on their smooth foreheads. Slowly two girls took shape on the white paper, line by line, shadow by shadow, until Mio's broad grin and the Plato Girl's gentle face stood clear before him. When he finished, Mio said, "There's only one drawing. Give it to the Plato Girl."
The days by the sea passed quietly and gently. Less than a week slipped by. Guests came and went in waves, but Yoshiki remained. He watched the light and shadow race around him while he stayed still, and part of him wanted to stay forever. At night he turned on his phone and found more than twenty messages from his parents and his older brother, all telling him that running away from home without a word was childish and irresponsible. Yoshiki laughed bitterly. Not one of them had even asked whether he might have met with danger. He turned the phone off again. The moment the screen went black, he felt a loneliness unlike any he had known before. It was Mio who broke that night open before he could sink into self-pity. Still in her bear pajamas, she poked her head in to inform him, "Tomorrow I'm going to the beach to play. You're coming with me. Consider it repayment for my improving things between you and the Plato Girl." Without waiting for an answer, she shut the door and vanished. Yoshiki thought that he had nothing better to do. Why not?
Natsukawa Mio screamed, baring a little white canine tooth, as if she meant to burst open with feeling and scatter it over the whole world.
The air was filled with the long salty smell of the sea. The wind that rushed at them carried fine damp particles and laid them over the skin in a thin sticky film.
Holding Yoshiki's hand, she ran shouting across the shore. When the waves broke, they delivered a dark strip of kelp that wound itself around the pale, bluish skin on the top of her foot.
For one instant Yoshiki looked at Mio's broad smiling face and felt that this girl was spending the whole heat of her life on this single day.
It was the sixth day since he had met Natsukawa Mio.
She turned back, smiled at him, and said, "Yoshiki, thank you."
The sunlight above them was fierce. Yoshiki looked at her and was about to answer when Mio cut in first.
"No reason. I just wanted to say thank you."
"Actually, Yoshiki really is an excellent boy. You paint beautifully, you're gentle, and you have a soft heart. Compared to me, Yoshiki is the whale, and I am only the tiny blue fish."
"But Yoshiki, whether you're a whale or a blue fish, you're still swimming with all your strength. In that, there is no difference."
Yoshiki decided to go home. He would apologize seriously to his parents and brother for this childish, irresponsible flight. Then, like Mio, he would swim with all his strength in the stretch of sea that belonged to him.
Early the next morning, after packing his things, Yoshiki knocked on Mio's door.
The man who opened it was a bearded middle-aged guest Yoshiki had seen a few times in the courtyard of the inn, though he had never known which room he was staying in.
Puzzled, Yoshiki asked, "Excuse me... where did Natsukawa Mio go? The girl who was staying here?"
The bearded man looked baffled. "Natsukawa Mio? Young man, I've been in this room for a week. I've never heard that name before."
Yoshiki's mind went blank. Fragments of sentences buzzed through his head in broken loops.
Even if you weren't the one who pushed that girl in, even if it had nothing to do with you, you still seem so sad.
But now at least you've told me. So you don't have to walk on alone in sadness anymore, down that road that has been barren ever since you were nine.
When I was little, I was really a very annoying, very strange child.
And that one final sentence:
Yoshiki, thank you.
In a daze, he went to find the Plato Girl.
"That girl," he asked. "Natsukawa Mio. Do you know where she went?"
The Plato Girl looked at him in confusion, clearly not understanding what he was saying.
"Then... could I see the sketch I made for you? The one of you and..."
The Plato Girl took out a rolled sheet of drawing paper. Yoshiki accepted it and spread it open little by little. It showed only one girl, smiling warmly in the sunlight. Only the Plato Girl.
Yoshiki rolled the drawing up again and handed it back. Standing beneath the desolate sunlight of early winter, he said to her in a voice that was calm and sincere, "Actually, I've liked you for three years."
The Plato Girl kept smiling that shy smile of hers. "Actually," she said, "I've been waiting for you for three years."
That day, carrying only a simple bag, Kitagawa Yoshiki swam back without hesitation toward the bright blue sea that belonged to him, like a fish that had survived a tsunami.
Perhaps.