You Have to Remember Me

When Kanzaki Sawa looked at me from within the crowd, I heard my own heartbeat miss once, clear as a dropped bead. The square was full of an endless tide of people. A few sat resting on benches scattered at random. Young girls in short skirts showed their long legs, earphones plugged in, their faces unreadable. Perhaps they were waiting for someone. Waiting for a person who might appear in the next second, or might never appear in this lifetime. I said quietly to the girl beside me, "He's over there." Morikawa Koharu's eyes curved into two new moons as she smiled, her white teeth shining like shells. "Suzuki Sumire, I'm a little nervous." I looked at her calmly. Her smile was always like a flower in full bloom, fresh and clean. I took a deep breath. "What are you afraid of? I'm here." I led her toward him slowly, as if walking toward the ending of a fate I had known all along. I lifted my head and said to the easy-smiling boy before us, "Kanzaki Sawa, I'm Suzuki Sumire. This is Morikawa Koharu." The moment I finished, he broke into a wide grin. That childlike, guileless look settled on me, and suddenly a soft tide rose inside my chest. Ah, Kanzaki Sawa. So long, and yet here you are.

On the way to karaoke, none of us spoke. But each of our faces betrayed something: Koharu's eyes glittering with excitement, Sawa's expression calm though the corners of his mouth kept threatening a smile, and me, blank from eyes to face as though my soul had slipped away. Later, on our way back to the private room after helping ourselves to food, he suddenly said, "Suzuki Sumire, you're nowhere near as ugly as you said." I turned to look at him and finally couldn't help laughing. The milk drink in my hand spilled a little, white and cool like moonlight, and suddenly I was back at the night when we first spoke online. Kanzaki Sawa was one of the most famous moderators on the city forum. I'd only heard of that forum because of Koharu. She liked shopping, photography, and online browsing, and the place gathered everything young people loved. The first time she brought up his username, she narrowed her eyes and asked me how to read the four characters. After I told her, she said it was too troublesome and nicknamed him "Four Ghosts" instead. The first post I ever replied to there was one of his. On a whim he had started a thread asking, Come on, everyone, which high school has the prettiest girls? Since it was the moderator speaking, the replies came fast. All of them said the girls at their own schools were the prettiest, and of course all those respondents were girls themselves. I don't know what mood I was in back then, but I replied: I don't know which school has the prettiest girls, but if you're asking which school has the ugliest, it's ours. Not long after, he sent me a direct message with only one line: So in your school, are you one of the pretty ones or one of the ugly ones? I answered briefly: I'm the class monitor of the ugly-girl class. Later he added me on LINE. I was never good with words, so it was almost always him talking. I told Koharu, "This boy really does know how to chat." She wheedled me into doing a video call. When I saw him on the screen, I don't know why, but it felt as though a great wind rushed straight through my chest. Koharu sat beside me eating chips and sighing, "He's really handsome." A few months later, one night when nearly everyone on my LINE was offline and only his icon was still glowing, he suddenly said, "Suzuki Sumire, let's meet." I thought about it and said yes, but I had one condition: I wanted to bring a tagalong. In other words, your fan, Koharu.

If calling Koharu Kanzaki Sawa's fan had still been half a joke before, then after karaoke the title became real enough. There is a line somewhere that says that when one woman falls in love with a man, the first person to notice is not the man, but another woman who has also fallen in love with him. I no longer remember where I read that. I read too many books and magazines and stuff too many stray sentences into my head. But when Koharu and I were each licking an ice cream on our way back to the apartment and she suddenly said, "Not bad," in that offhand way of hers, I understood at once who the subject of the sentence was. Before I could think of what to say, she tore off the last bit of disguise and asked in a conspiratorial whisper, "Suzuki Sumire... do you think I should go after him?" I had known Koharu for more than ten years, and there were almost no wishes of hers I had ever refused. She always took me for naturally easygoing, someone who never thought too hard, so she brought me everything to discuss, big things and small. In middle school she had once stared at a Hello Kitty watch in a display case until her eyes sparkled, so on her birthday I bought her the authentic new-season model from the shop. Because I acted too calm about it, she spent years suspecting I had bought her a cheap fake from a street stall. In our second year of high school she had a first love that ended badly: the boy she was dating developed a taste for tall, bright, dewy girls and started fooling around with a younger one before he had even broken up with her. Koharu was the kind of tiger made of paper. All noise and energy most of the time, but when trouble really came she only knew how to hide and cry. I, on the other hand, simply gathered some people and had the boy beaten until even his mother would not have recognized him. The next day, protected by my presence, Koharu stood there and roared one word at his apology: "Get lost." At graduation I casually asked her where she wanted to apply, then copied those choices into my own forms without changing a stroke. At last she couldn't bear it any longer and blurted out, "Do you like girls?" I stared at her, understood what she meant, and laughed helplessly. "What you really want to ask is whether I like you, isn't it? Relax. I like boys." If anyone really asked me why I was so willing to be good to her, all I could say was that this was fate. I believe people have a kind of magnetism between them. The day I saw her in a classroom at seven years old, I surrendered to it. Fate has a great hand that can turn clouds and rain, and with a light stir it can arrange all the joy and grief in the world. Koharu's greatest virtue was her purity. No matter how many injuries and blows she suffered growing up, inside she remained as clean as a child. After her first love fell apart, she dated a few more people, and none of them ended well. Sometimes I truly admired the way she charged straight into love, as if she could not live without it. On my eighteenth birthday she drank too much, cheeks red, leaned against my shoulder and murmured, "Suzuki Sumire, things never go smoothly, but I still believe in love." I patted her face and said firmly, "You'll be happy. Very, very happy." Later when she was sober, she asked me why I was so certain of that. Looking into her bright dustless eyes, I answered, "Because a girl with a good heart, a pretty face, and kindness like yours has no reason not to be happy." She smiled in a meaningful way. "So in your heart I'm that perfect." So when she looked at me with shining eyes and asked, "Can I go after him?" even though he was also the person I liked, I answered the way I always had: lightly, almost lazily. "Of course." The moment I said those two words, my heart missed a beat again, just as it had when Kanzaki Sawa looked at me.

Then there came a message from him: I always get irritated when it rains. Even an idiot could tell what he was angling for. I could not tactfully respond, Then how could I make you less irritated? But if I said nothing at all, it would seem rude. So I wrote back: Do you need to air your quilt? If I had been a boy, I would have thought the girl on the other end was hopelessly unromantic. But I had no choice. Koharu liked him, and I had to keep my distance. Just as I was still reminding myself of that, another message came in: I'm at your school gate. Come out. I stared at the screen. I blinked, and the words were still there, shining. It was not a hallucination. Kanzaki Sawa meant it. Koharu was sleeping soundly in bed with a stuffed bear nearly fatter than she was, and I spent a long time wrestling reason against feeling without finding balance. Before I could decide anything, he called directly. Terrified, I shoved on a pair of slippers and ran downstairs without even changing out of my pajamas. When I arrived in front of him, breathless, he was standing there with milk tea in his hands, smiling in a way that was both bashful and familiar, like a boy who had crossed mountains and years and still felt as fresh as a passing breeze. We stood face to face. His gaze was a close-woven, burning net. He leaned slightly toward me, his fingers skimming naturally across my face. His eyes seemed filled with a soft white fog, but where that gaze fell, sparks flew. Every inch of my skin felt as if it had been called awake from sleep and set lightly on fire. He said softly, "You really haven't changed." I lifted my chin and smiled, but a small sadness rose in me. Then he changed the subject. "I've been standing here half an hour. I've seen a lot of girls from your school come out. Where are all these ugly girls you talked about?" At last I managed to say one word. "Pervert."

He only laughed, said nothing more, slipped his white jacket over my shoulders, and then took my hand. Every movement flowed into the next, natural and practiced. We spent the whole night at the movies. Sometime in the middle I fell asleep leaning against his shoulder. When we came out, daybreak had already brightened. I will never forget how clear his eyes looked then, or the words he said: "To wake up every morning with sunlight and you beside me. That's the future I want." Back in the dorm, I looked at Koharu's sleeping face. She made a small indistinct sound. Nobody else could have known what it was, but I had been with her too long. I knew exactly what those blurred syllables meant. Since childhood and now almost into adulthood, the word she called in her dreams had never changed: Mama. To everyone else she had always been a thoughtless, sunny girl. If the sky fell, she had me to hold it up with her. Only I knew that the dark place in her heart had never disappeared. Her cheerfulness was just the surface. Beneath it, a vast wound still bled day and night. I climbed into my own bed, pulled the blanket over my head, and cried in silence. I knew then that I would never again have any private contact with Kanzaki Sawa. It did not matter whether he was the reckless boy from years ago or the gentle, polished man he had become. We could not have any further connection. But my obedient surrender to a whole night's worth of hand-holding had given him the wrong idea. The next morning, he actually texted me: Wife. Wake up. I held the phone the way one might hold a grenade. Koharu had been woken by my stupid ringtone, a cartoon voice chanting, "Shiro, Shiro, let's go for a walk..." and mumbled, "Who's calling you this early?" Fortunately I reacted quickly. "A shameless 10086 message reminding me to top up my phone bill." She accepted it and turned back over. But that was when I understood how serious the situation had become. If I didn't cut it off decisively, things would only grow more tangled. If Koharu ever learned that while encouraging her, I had also become entangled with Kanzaki Sawa behind her back, then the friendship we'd spent years building would be damaged for certain. I would not allow anyone to destroy what lay between me and Koharu. So that same day I sent him a LINE message: Let's have Pizza Hut tonight and celebrate your farewell to singlehood! Happy as a fool, he failed to grasp what I meant, replied at once that he'd treat us, and then posted on the forum, Brothers, I'm not playing with you single dogs anymore!

I looked at those white characters on the dark screen and the teasing congratulations piling up beneath them, and pain spread through me as if it had crossed mountains. I truly dared not imagine how awkward that evening at Pizza Hut would be. So that I would have no way back, I shouted toward the bathroom, "Koharu, how about I help you settle Kanzaki Sawa tonight?" She poked her head out, smiling so brightly I almost thought a flower had bloomed from the doorway. It had been years since I had seen her smile that radiantly. But when Koharu and I walked up to the table Sawa had already claimed, he froze. Then he immediately smiled. Fool that he was, he probably thought Koharu had come to witness his departure from singlehood and kept telling her to order anything she liked. I stared out at the city beyond the window, all its neon and indulgence, and felt my nose sting. We parted in bad spirits that night. The moment I said, "This best friend of mine likes you," Koharu's face flushed scarlet, and Sawa's turned just as abruptly white. After a long pause, he managed at last to squeeze out, "I'm honored by the mistake." My hand slipped on the pizza cutter and I nicked my own finger.

Koharu bought me the most expensive bandage she could find and stood there with her lips pursed, studying it with absurd seriousness as if trying to determine why it cost so much. Guilt-ridden, I said, "Koharu, he has terrible taste. Forget him. There are millions of men in this land. If this one doesn't work, we change to the next." She looked up at me, her gaze as clear as spring water, and I felt my shameless face about to split open under it. She said softly, "I'm fine. I just feel a little embarrassed." Hearing her say she was fine eased half my guilt at once. Then she added, "But somehow, I really do like him." At once the guilt multiplied instead of shrinking. I didn't know what to do, so I fled guiltily to the computer. It would have been better if I had not turned it on. The moment I did, I couldn't help opening the forum, and there I saw that Sawa had edited the post to say he had only been joking, not to take it seriously. The replies below had instantly become mocking. I stared at the screen and at his gray LINE icon and felt tears almost ready to fall. Then my phone rang. The screen lit up with the name ATM, my father's nickname in my contacts. Once Koharu had told me about a classmate whose phone had been stolen; the thief had texted her mother pretending to be sick and cheated thousands out of her. After that I got smart and changed Dad to ATM. What thief would ever guess it meant my biological father? He rarely called. He preferred wiring money, as if the more money he sent, the more complete a father he became. So seeing his number startled me badly. His voice was as steady as ever, but after what he said, I could no longer be steady. "Your mother is back," he said. "She wants to see you." When I hung up, Koharu looked at me anxiously. Her expression told me my face had gone pale, so I forced a smile and said, "My mother came back. She wants to see me." Koharu was more delighted than I was. "Then go!" "But... I don't know how to face her." I wrapped my arms around myself, my mind utterly blank. Koharu crouched down in front of me and looked at me with a sincerity so deep it nearly undid me. "Suzuki Sumire, don't be stubborn. Go see her. I will never get another chance to see my mother. Don't leave yourself with regrets." The moment she said that, tears slid down her face. The instant Koharu cried, I became useless. I nodded like a pecking chick. "All right, all right. I'll go." I ran out of the apartment and forgot something terribly important. I didn't close LINE.

By the time I came back from the five-star hotel where my mother was staying, full of good food and carrying a matcha cake in my hand, I found Kanzaki Sawa standing there, handsome as ever. I jumped. "What are you doing here?" He looked just as confused. "Didn't you ask me to come on LINE?" At that exact moment, Koharu emerged behind him like a ghost. I had never seen her look like that before: drained face, resentful eyes, disappointment spread through her like frost. In a flash I understood. The one who had asked him to come over from my LINE account had been her. Faced with the three of us, I did not know where to put my eyes. Sawa looked from me to Koharu and back again, still not understanding. After a long silence, Koharu let out a deep sigh. "Sumire, do you know what I find hardest to bear? Not betrayal. Deception. Being fooled by you like this..." Before she could finish, I cut in. "Koharu, I didn't..." But I discovered I couldn't explain it properly either, and so we all sank again into an awful silence. It was Sawa who broke it. At last he understood enough to pat Koharu on the shoulder and say, "Don't blame Suzuki Sumire. This is all my fault." Koharu said nothing more. She smiled once and turned away.

My mind was empty. I went back into the dorm in a daze. The room was empty, and I suddenly felt I could not breathe. The truth was that I had brought the cake back because I wanted to ask Koharu something. My mother had returned this time to take me away with her, and I wanted to ask Koharu what I should do. I cried and cried, and then Sawa called. Only then did I remember he was still downstairs. I tried to smother my sobbing, but the moment I picked up the phone, I started crying again. He sighed softly. "Come out, Sumire. I'll help you look for her." We said we were looking for Koharu, but really we had no destination. After walking through the crowded streets for a long time, Sawa suddenly said, "Yesterday I was cleaning out old photo albums at home and found a photograph by accident. It's from when I was six or seven, me and a little girl standing together. She had a tear mole at the corner of her right eye." I went still and said nothing. He continued, "I remember that girl was my father's patient. She had witnessed a car accident, been frightened so badly she wouldn't speak, and spent a whole year under his care. I used to play with her often. She always wore white clothes and white skirts. Then one day she suddenly disappeared." At last he turned to look at me fully. There was so much tenderness in his eyes that I almost could not withstand it. He held my hand and said, "Sumire, where have you been all these years? Why did it take me so long to find you?" It should have been romantic. It wasn't. I shook my head. "It's not me. That girl wasn't me." The girl with the tear mole at the corner of her right eye was Koharu.

How could I ever have explained it properly? The reason I had been good to Koharu all these years, the reason I felt I owed her, was something no amount of money could ever weigh out. When I was six, my mother discovered my father's mistress and demanded a divorce in a fury. The three of us were in the car together. My mother, worked up beyond reason, beat and cursed at my father while I shrank into the back seat without daring to make a sound. It was raining hard that day. The whole city seemed drowned, visibility low. My father, driving while fending off my mother's blows, did not see the woman who suddenly stepped out. That day was her daughter's birthday. She had only gone out to buy a cake for her little girl and, in her hurry, failed to notice the light. She never imagined she would die under a car. I saw the blood spread into the rainwater with my own eyes. That red flooded everything. For years afterward, that violent red was the base color of my dreams. The first time I saw Koharu was in the hospital. I stood at one end of the corridor watching her tiny, bewildered face. She could not understand why her mother lay on a cold bed beneath a white sheet, why her hands and feet no longer moved, why her eyes would never open again.

I finally told Kanzaki Sawa the truth I had kept crammed in my heart for years. The pain in his eyes as he listened was real. He gripped my hand so hard, those palms warm and broad, with something like the power to bring the dead back. I murmured, "Maybe it really was fate. Later we became classmates. She didn't recognize me because she'd never seen me back then, and her face hadn't changed much in a year. In that moment I told myself: what my family owes her, I will repay." But what did "repay" even mean? What could I possibly use to repay it? All I could do was protect her with my small strength and satisfy her materially as much as I could. I wanted, with a near-violent intensity, to make her happy. Yet nothing I could do would ever bring her mother back. The first thing I said to her had been, "My name is Suzuki Sumire. Would you like to be friends?" She had looked at me and smiled, fresh and fragrant, her teeth white. "All right." I would never let anyone hurt her. And yet I myself had broken that vow. Whether intentionally or not, the hurt had already been done.

When I was weeping against Sawa's shoulder, my mother's number lit my phone screen again. The hotel room was carpeted thickly. The air smelled of coffee, and a bouquet of white calla lilies stood on the table. My mother looked at me, hollowed out and undone, and shook her head softly. "I had meant to go pay respects to an old acquaintance," she said, "but from a distance I saw a girl at the grave, so I didn't go over." I understood at once. The old acquaintance was Koharu's mother. The girl at the grave had been Koharu. My mother ignored my stunned look and went on. "I know what happened back then left a deep mark on you. But these years, you've already done enough." I covered my face. Tears spilled through my fingers. "No. How could it ever be enough? No matter how much I do, it won't be enough." I could never forget that rainy day, my parents' argument, the startled woman struck by the car and falling straight down. The truth was that I saw her before we hit her. But I was so frightened that no sound came out of my throat. For years, every time I jolted awake from a dream, it was because I had seen that terrified face again, the one that seemed to ask me: why didn't you say anything? The moment I begin to speak of these things, it feels as if a torrential rain starts falling across my whole world. My mother held my hand and patted my back while I shook from sobbing. Very gently she said, "Sumire, leave this place. Forget all of it. That's the best way." I looked up at her earnest face, bewildered. Was it? If I left, could I really forget? Forget the harm and the trying to mend it? Forget those faces that had run through my whole childhood and youth? I didn't know if I could do it. But I was willing to try.

So when I left the hotel, I nodded and said yes. I told myself I was not noble enough to leave for Koharu's sake or to make room for Koharu and Kanzaki Sawa. I was not an obstacle standing between them. Whether I existed in that place or not would not change what they did. I was leaving only so that I myself might live more honestly, more lightly, more cleanly. If I left, I could be reborn. As for everyone else, what would happen to them, I did not know and did not want to know. I only knew there was one person in my heart who would remain there no matter how the years changed. Like a beautifully bound book, wrapped and put on the highest shelf. I would never open it again. Dust would gather on the shelf, the lacquer would peel, but I would still know it was there. That would be enough.

I left with my mother without saying goodbye to either Koharu or Kanzaki Sawa. It was like the end of a silent black-and-white film: I withdrew in silence. But in the end, I still told one lie. The girl in white in the old photograph Sawa found was not Koharu. After I turned six, I wore nothing but white. I cannot explain why, just as I cannot explain why I stubbornly believed that if I erased the tear mole at the corner of my right eye, I would never cry again. For a year I shut myself inside my own world and spoke to no one. Kanzaki Sawa's father was my doctor. Every day I went at fixed times for treatment. I remember there was a little boy in that house about my age, delicately handsome, prettier than I was. Sometimes we played together. But he never knew my name, because I never spoke to tell him. No. That isn't quite true. I think I did say it once. A year later, on the day my treatment ended, he happened to be sick. I went into his room and saw him sleeping. I think I said one sentence then. My name is Suzuki Sumire. You have to remember me.