Fleeing Through Time's Flood

I never became the person I once imagined I would be. But without Hashimoto Sumi, I don't know whether I could ever have fought my way through the flood of time, turned wounds into resolve, and become who I am now. Once, Sumi and I spent a whole afternoon talking passionately about what we would be ten years later. She said she wanted a life full of color and perfume. A girl like her, who at sixteen already possessed a charm many women in their twenties had not yet grown into, seemed fully entitled to such confidence. Beautiful girls always seem to choose plain ones as their closest friends. That was the role I played. I was heavyset, always wrapped in dull gray clothes like a zongzi tied too tightly. I stubbornly believed that a fat girl's youth came only in one color: gray. The gray of old brick walls, flaking lime, hidden drafts leaking through cracks. Inferiority was the illness that never left. Sumi was a wild sea; I was a dried-up cold pond. She was a blaze of fireworks; I was flat, colorless daylight. If Sumi had built for herself a stage blazing with lights, then I was the strip of shadow swallowed underneath the follow spot. Of course, these were only the delicate differences imagined by an adolescent girl crippled by her own self-loathing. Intimacy is always woven from dependence and envy at once. Sumi had virtues that made me marvel, and of course she also made me feel small. But she never noticed any of that. Perhaps people who stand out simply live too brightly. Their days are too full of pleasures to spare much thought for these tiny private winds of sadness, joy, malice, or shame. Only weeds growing at the edge of other people's brilliance are this sensitive to every shift in the air. Back then, Hashimoto Sumi, Asano Kai, and I were an unshakeable trio. We had been classmates since elementary school, a decade of it by then. Sumi had only grown more graceful with time, and Kai, with his high nose, long limbs, and athletic build, had become one of the basketball team's centerpieces. Only I remained the same lumbering, swollen creature, dragging my weight from side to side with those broad heavy steps. If it weren't for the long history between us, people as good as they were would never have bothered to keep me in their circle. Sumi had gone through one romance after another, devoting herself wholeheartedly to making her love life into legend. She was like a walking issue of a romance magazine. Kai, meanwhile, had become the focus of every girl who had just discovered the idea of liking boys. Girls saved him seats in self-study hall. They spied on him through compact mirrors propped behind their pencil cases. At his games, walls of people formed around the court to cheer him on. With those two at your side, even if you wanted a low and hidden life, it was impossible. The gossip came like thorns in my ears, then turned into acupuncture needles twisting under my skin, pricking my nerves all the way to the bone. Every time I heard sharp words like third wheel, dragging behind, delusional, playing Xishi when you're only Dongshi, I would only tighten my chest and walk past as if I had heard nothing. At moments like that, Sumi would always reach for my hand and raise it high, then throw a cold look at the people whispering. So before they had ever rejected me, I had no standing to dissolve the three of us myself. Even walking away from a crowd requires qualification.

In the second semester of our first year, we had to choose between the humanities and sciences. Sumi's grades were poor, so she chose the humanities. Kai and I might have had more promise in science, but because the three of us were so fixed in our little formation, we silently chose the humanities too. We had promised each other that even in university we would apply to the same school and the same major. Once I entered the humanities track, my desk drawer began to fill with every kind of classic and literary work. I discovered that I could polish a poor sentence until it shone like cut crystal. It felt miraculous. I bought myself a beautiful diary with a lock, as though I had found a hidden door that would let me step away for a while from the harshly sealed reality around me. Reality so often cornered me until there was nowhere left to go. I had gone too long without speaking. But to whom could I confess anything? And who would ever care to hear it? Inferiority spread itself across those pages like spilled mercury, shattering, gathering, and settling in line after line of crowded handwriting. Before the classes split, we had a farewell party. People carried a DVD player and amplifier into the room. Kai was chosen to sing, and after clawing helplessly at his head for a while, the host kindly told him to choose someone to do a duet with him. Without any warning, he called my name. There was a burst of surprise from the room, and I hurried to the front in a panic. We sang a duet. My voice was thin as a thread; his wandered in and out of tune. But I thought it was a beautiful song, so beautiful that every note seemed capable of dropping into a lake and opening ring after ring across the water. It felt as though the whole tide had filled my chest, fine and winding and stirring. Sumi's grades were ordinary, but because she was lovely and sweet-natured, every teacher adored her. Kai continued to live inside that beam of public attention. I remained my usual unnoticed self, my only trace of existence perhaps the fact that I stood in the shadow of Sumi and Kai's radiance. But after that song, a secret buried itself inside me. It was like a snowball, growing larger the longer it rolled. Maybe it had been there even before, waiting only for some little force to set it in motion. From then on, Asano Kai appeared in my diary more and more often. I had never known that I, too, was capable of liking someone with such complete devotion. Loving a boy who could never possibly love me back, and loving him in such a quiet, timid, even pathetic way. It was the kind of love that had to be endured in silence. I often reread the passages in which I described my feelings for him, exhausting everything delicate and beautiful I could find in language. My tremulous, sensitive heart, imprisoned inside this clumsy body, could hardly keep still.

I was like a creature with antennae sticking out of my skull, able to detect the slightest change in the air. And Sumi lived under a spotlight. Every movement of hers could be seen. When she saw me, she still smiled, but not with the same careless ease as before. When we walked shoulder to shoulder, the space between us was still close enough, yet something like a crack had opened. Later she began accepting the requests of boys who offered to cycle her home, and that left Kai and me going the same way alone. Without Sumi there to hold the middle of the world together, there was much less life in our walks home. Sometimes we had long stretches of silence so blank they turned awkward. Rumors about me and Kai spread through school like a plague. Though I always acted resistant, inwardly I was secretly pleased. If we could never really match, then at least being mentioned together fed some small selfish hunger. The rumors grew louder and uglier, carried as much by mockery as curiosity. And then, at exactly that point, Sumi came back into the middle of us. I thought she had returned to rescue me. Instead, I saw them holding hands. I understood then. Of course Kai would choose her. There was nothing to blame in that. If I had been Asano Kai, I too would have chosen Hashimoto Sumi without hesitation. What I could not bear myself to suffer, I had no right to force on someone else. If things had gone on quietly from there, I might still have managed to pretend to be strong, or pretend not to care. But then one day someone broke open my diary. Page after page was torn out and pasted along the corridor wall, and eighty percent of what was there were love letters I had written to Kai. Some people laughed and laughed. Some stood gawking. Some read my sentences aloud in affected, sugary voices, mocking the intensity and delicacy of words that suited my fat body so badly. There is almost no crueler humiliation. For a girl diseased with inferiority, this was perhaps the worst degradation possible. My eyes nearly burst with blood. I rushed forward like a mad thing, tearing the pages down, stooping to pick them off the floor. Such shame is a kind of exposure that leaves you with nowhere to stand. Kai came down from the stairs to help me gather them. Then someone shouted. Even with my eyes closed I would have recognized that familiar voice: "Asano Kai, what are you doing? Get up!" After saying that, Sumi turned and ran into the crowd. Kai looked at me for one second, stuffed the things in his hand into mine, lowered his head, and got to his feet to chase after her as if he too were fleeing. That night, when I got home, I stood in front of the mirror and looked at myself for a long time. It was the first time I had ever forced myself to stare directly at my own reflection. I cried until I lost all control. My face looked like a block of melting ice, distorted by the running water over it. I swore at myself viciously that I would get rid of this ugly body. Someday I would make every one of them look again.

That was how the three-person alliance abandoned me all at once. After that I lived a monastic routine: classroom, dormitory, library. Shame turned into fuel. I studied until my whole body seemed to burn. By the time entrance exams came, I won a place at one of the best universities in the city. Kai got into an ordinary second-tier school. Sumi went to a vocational program. The promise we once made, none of us kept. At the graduation ceremony someone sang onstage, and when the line came about the gods turning away from a girl driven to the end of the road, I sang along from below and found myself crying helplessly. When a song can wring tears out of you, it is always because somewhere it has struck real flesh. When a person can be remembered with a tangle of love and hate, there is always something about them that has cut itself into the bone.

The summer before my first year of university, I stopped eating rice entirely. I survived on boiled vegetables and water. My stomach shrank in its own emptiness, secreting acid into a hollow that felt like a punctured sack. I climbed stairs, skipped rope, ran until my lungs tore. In the forty-degree furnace of midsummer I sweated like rain. My family grew so alarmed they almost dragged me to a psychiatrist, but by the end of that summer I had lost twenty jin. I was still far from graceful, but at least the outline of my face and body had begun to emerge. I thought often of a fairy tale I had loved as a child: a woman doomed to live in the sea who falls in love with a man on land, suffers immeasurably, and grows feet to walk beside him. Those feet, once removed from the softness of the water, are like blades. Pain and love kill each other step by step until she turns at last into foam. No one ever knows what tortures an ordinary person has endured to stand where they eventually appear. At university I kept excellent grades and took the top scholarship every year. In my third year I met Isshiki Kei, a year above me, through the literary society. The beginning was simple. I wrote often for the campus journal; he was one of the editors. I still wasn't pretty. I never expected romance, never hoped for some glamorous encounter. So when Isshiki Kei took my hand, I felt as if I had been unexpectedly favored. I held his hand stiffly, palms sweating.

This city is neither very large nor very small. On a day I had no way to foresee, I ran into Hashimoto Sumi again. She called from a distance, "Mizuno Mio! Mizuno Mio!" "You've lost so much weight. You're so much prettier." In truth I was nowhere near as slim as she claimed, but her face was heaped with smiles, as if meeting me again were something joyous and uncomplicated. Perhaps that old thing I had never managed to forget was, to her, something that had dissolved as easily as the meeting itself. Since she could behave as though nothing remained, so could I. The conversation was flat as the mineral water between us, yet it frothed strangely in the throat. Nearly four years had passed. "Why haven't you contacted us?" she asked. I knew very well who us meant. The more forbidden something is, the more tempting it becomes to step across it just to prove you can. I think my answer sounded natural enough. "How are you and Asano Kai now?" "We're great. Look." She lifted her hand. A platinum ring flashed there. "He gave me this." The smile on her face shone all the brighter in that bright metal.

Because we exchanged numbers, Sumi occasionally texted me after that. The only time we met in person was on Christmas Eve, when she and Kai invited me and Isshiki Kei out to eat. A first love is like the hero of your life; even if you want to forget, you never can. It was my first time seeing Kai again in four years. He almost didn't recognize me. I remembered the vow I had made in front of the mirror four years earlier, with tears all over my face. Deep down I had always wanted to see him again. The awkwardness between me and him was much worse than the awkwardness between me and Sumi. He still felt guilty, I think, for leaving me there that day and going after her. But I let it go quickly, with a smile. I had no right to blame someone for making a choice that came honestly from his heart. Sumi chattered brightly to Isshiki Kei about how close the three of us had once been, carefully skipping every ugly part. On the way home, Isshiki Kei said, "I envy you. To have such good friends." I smiled and said, "Yes. Very good."

Then one night Asano Kai called while I was studying in the dorm. I went downstairs after I hung up. The yellow-white lamps lit the sports field as brightly as day. Kai stood at a distance with his back to me, his shadow stretched so far by the light that it covered my feet. I called his name softly. He turned, hands in his pockets, awkward at first. "Sorry to bother you this late." His breath smelled of alcohol; his words came thickly. "I saw Hashimoto Sumi get into another man's car." He looked at me with eyes bloodshot and raw, as if the red threads in them were wires lighting my whole face. I had heard rumors like that too. Luxury cars often waited outside the gates of Sumi's school. Once again I was being called in to do emotional social work. That was all he wanted: a place to pour out his misery. Then suddenly he swayed and leaned toward me, pressing me back against the basketball stand. His body cut off the light. I tried to turn away, but he pinned me too close for me to move. My heartbeat climbed to its highest edge. In that one second, the answer to every question about love and longing became clear. The sigh inside me was like a bank of dark clouds swallowing the sun and squeezing out a torrent of rain. When the light returned to my field of vision, I saw Isshiki Kei standing behind Kai, expressionless.

On my birthday that year, just as he had the year before, I waited at home for Isshiki Kei. He did not call until noon the next day. "I'm sorry," he said. "I was out drinking with clients until I was dead drunk. I missed your birthday." Isshiki Kei graduated a year before me, and we did not fall into the usual pattern of breaking up the moment campus life ended. But lately I had begun to sense that something between us had changed. The truth came on the day I called him and the voice that answered struck me like a blow to the head. It was not Isshiki Kei. It was a voice I knew too well. Once that voice had made Kai turn from me and chase after her. Now it came to me through Isshiki's phone. Later, when Isshiki agreed to meet, he confronted me almost at once. "Hashimoto Sumi is your best friend. You made the same mistake once already. Why make it a second time?" I stared at him. "What are you talking about?" He went on accusingly: "Back in high school, you exposed your own diary and ruined Hashimoto Sumi and Asano Kai. And now on the school field I saw what happened with my own eyes." "Hashimoto Sumi told you that?" I asked. He said yes. I dragged an old cardboard box from the back of my cabinet, tore off the tape, and spilled several old photographs onto the desk. I had no photos of myself alone. Every one I had kept had been taken only because Sumi dragged me into them, and each showed that old grotesque body so plainly that even being photographed had once felt like punishment. It was a past I had been desperate to bury. I had hidden it layer upon layer, unwilling to reveal even a little, like someone who had brushed against death and chosen selective amnesia over memory. But now I had to break my own vow. Crying, I said to Isshiki Kei, "Tell me honestly. If I had used the method you accuse me of, if I had publicly destroyed the relationship between her and Kai, would that have made me cunning or just ridiculous? Look at me in these photos and answer." He had no reply. Years of belittling myself had long ago erased the instinct to plead prettily. So he understood that when I said we were over, it was truly over.

I called Hashimoto Sumi and said in a voice as steady as I could manage, "First: because of you, Isshiki Kei and I have broken up. Second: just because I don't speak doesn't mean I don't know. Back then, when my diary was pried open and pasted all over the walls, it was you. Why won't you leave me alone even now? There are things you can reach out and take without effort that I have to bleed for. Why do you still insist on taking them from me too?" She was silent for a moment, then said, "Do you know why we became friends? Because whatever you want, I will want too." At the time I was preparing for graduate school. History had come around again: another fork in the road, another moment of choosing. I was shattered. The truth was I had never wanted to meet Hashimoto Sumi again. She was like a ghost cast over my adolescence, and even now I still couldn't shake her off. The demons living inside my body woke again. There was a hole in me that I tried to fill with food, stuffing myself until my stomach swelled and hurt and I wanted to vomit. The weight I had fought so hard to lose came rushing back, even worse than before. I often skipped class and shut myself in at home, refusing daylight.

Hashimoto Sumi tore me to pieces once more. Isshiki Kei and Asano Kai, both of them became trophies in the battle she won over me. And yet in the end Sumi stayed with neither. Kai told me over the phone that she was now preparing to study film and might have opportunities to make movies. He wanted to see me, but I refused. I had become a wreck again and didn't want anyone to see me. This time I truly let my parents drag me to a psychiatrist. Simply admitting there was an illness to be faced was already a giant step. Some losses in life are eventually compensated elsewhere. My graduate-school results came back, and once again I got in. Treatment and pressure went side by side. I lost dozens of jin again, and this time even more than before. All the pretty clothes in the window could finally be worn by me without going crooked. There were moments when I stood in front of the mirror and hardly dared believe the woman there was myself.

When I finally decided to meet Asano Kai again, we stood face to face after all those turns and near-misses and recoveries. This was the boy I had loved in secret as a teenager and watched from afar as an adult. How difficult it had been to reach even that minute of standing beside him. But the tragedies written into my life have always loved repetition. That day Hashimoto Sumi called him while I was standing right beside him. The moment he answered, his face changed. He looked at me awkwardly. "If there's something to say, then say it," I told him. He hesitated, then said, "Something's happened to Sumi. I have to go." In an instant time dragged me back to that old scene: Sumi plunging into the crowd, Kai running after her, fleeing as if from disaster and leaving the whole empty world to me. I saw again that unbearable old self of mine and felt a fear deeper than anything. I rushed forward and caught his hand, shaking my head. He rested his hand on my hair. "I'll go and come back. Soon." I still shook my head. For one second our opposing forces canceled each other out and held the world still. Then Kai looked at me once, and though the force he used was small and gentle, my hand dropped at once, heavy as stone. The second hand kept ticking. It was two in the morning by the time he came back, travel-worn and exhausted. I had already packed my bag. I was sitting on the sofa, and when the door finally sounded, I set the apartment key on the tea table and said goodbye. He caught my sleeve from behind, just as I had once tried to hold him back. The tears I had frozen finally started to fall. Turning my face away, I asked, "What is so good about Hashimoto Sumi?" He did not answer. "What is so good about her?" His eyes were red too. And suddenly I found that I wanted to forgive him. Forgive every choice he had ever made, and the helpless truth inside those choices.

On my birthday, Isshiki Kei sent flowers in the name of friendship. We had become the kind of people who could only meet again as friends because guilt sat between us. I forgave him as I had forgiven Kai, but that did not mean I could take him back. Everyone seems to pass through Hashimoto Sumi before eventually passing by me. It became a law of my life. But new people do appear. Life is always trying to renew itself. My graduate adviser, Kitahara Yukima, was one of those people. We became especially close. At first it was because my academic work was the strongest among his students. Then it was because he listened to all my rambling beyond the work itself. He was older than I was, but not by enough to make distance feel impossible, and his rational mind always knew how to dissolve the knots in my emotional one. Gradually I began to understand that it wasn't history repeating out of spite. It was simply that my life needed to sever itself completely from everything tied to Hashimoto Sumi before anything new could grow.

When I saw her again years later, she was wearing black fishnet stockings and glittering high heels sharp enough to hurt the eye. Her hair was bleached yellow and split at the ends. Under a cropped patent jacket she wore a lace camisole. Her whole body looked withered from the shoulders down. She walked with her knees bent, wavering slightly as she tried to hail a taxi. Kitahara Yukima and I were out shopping together. I asked him to stop the car across the street and went over alone. When she turned at the sound of her name, I found that the more completely I had cut myself loose from everything connected to her, the more calmly I could face her. In the bright restaurant where we ended up sitting, the light fell on that once-overblown face of hers and showed rough skin, dimness, scattered brown spots. It had been only three years. She already looked steeped in smoke and waste. She had not ended up living any better than before. Cigarette in hand, she talked to me on and off until I learned the shape of her recent life. In her first year at film school she had met a man involved in filmmaking. Before she even graduated, she got together with him because he promised he would make a film for her. He really did shoot one in the end, but it sold badly and swallowed all the money they had. After that there was no glamour left. She rolled up her sleeve and showed me the cigarette burns on her arm. Then I understood that the night Kai went to her and we broke apart for good, it had been the first time that man hit her. Kai had rushed over and gotten her out. He had kept all of that from me. Only then did I understand that he had truly loved her, because love can do things reason never will. "What else am I supposed to do?" she said, blowing out smoke. "He hits me, I squeeze money out of him, and then I go out and spend it." When I asked after Kai, she gave a bitter laugh, flicked away ash, and said, "He's no better off than I am. Pulls customers at a gym now. Still better than that useless man, though." Once, everything I had had was something Hashimoto Sumi could effortlessly reach for. But from the moment I decided to cut myself off from her, our lives separated completely. The person she had become no longer had the power to take my whole world. At parting she suddenly smiled and said, "Honestly, seeing me like this must feel pretty satisfying." Whether she believed me or not, I answered, "Not at all." But after I turned away, heat seemed to rise behind my eyes and leave them aching.

The growth rings had already carved themselves into our lives; beneath old bark, new shoots were still trying to force their way up toward the light. Hashimoto Sumi did not become the person she had wanted to become. But without her, I don't know whether I could ever have made it through the flood of time's long escape, drawn courage from injury, and become the person I am now. Even so, I have begun to wonder, between the two of us, which one is truly the survivor.