Stars in the Deep Sea

Prologue

Step by step, I moved forward through the dark blue depths, slow and laborious.

It was a winter dusk. The sunset spread magnificently across the sky, its light like a gentle hand.

My throat felt full of dust. The river wrapped itself around me tenderly, like a mother welcoming home a child who had been gone too long.

My whole body floated and sank in the water. Little by little, my feet lost anything solid to stand on. The only thing in my hand was a utility knife. Its blade was sharp. When I pressed it hard across my wrist, I did not feel pain.

Bright blood spread through the water in widening rings, like roses blooming on the surface.

At last my head sank under too. River water filled my eyes, my ears, my nose, my mouth.

In the rise and fall of the current, I seemed to see every face I had ever known layered one over another.

Shiraishi Yuzu's voice was light, almost careless. "I wasn't the only one who slept with Kamiya Asato. Go ask your dear friend Morikawa Kana how it feels."

Fujiwara Jun's tone was cold as iron. "If you really want to do something for me, then stop bothering me forever."

My father's voice was low and dark. "From now on, I have no daughter like you. You should act as though you have no father either."

Tachibana Mikoto screamed, "Mio Nanami, no matter how cheap I am, I'll never be as cheap as you. You're the unbeatable queen of trash."

And then there was Hayashibara Yuto, half mocking, half irritated. "Seriously? You're not so weak you can't take this, are you?"

Sana cried so helplessly. "Big sister Mio, it hurts... it hurts so much. Help me..."

Even Ruko, who was always so easy, so detached, had wept. Even she had said, in the end, that she had nothing at all.

"Mio, stop this. I'll take you to the hospital. You'll be fine soon."

Yoshiki Kitagawa. Kitagawa Yoshiki.

All of their voices tangled together and swelled into a roar above my head. When the last thread of light vanished, I closed my eyes and said goodbye without making a sound.

Goodbye to the past I could never return to.

Goodbye to the futures I had never been able to foresee.

Goodbye to all the people who had hurried through my thin, cold life and blotched-out youth, yet left so many marks behind.

At the bottom of that dark blue water, the final line of light disappeared.

Chapter 1: The Stars Go Dark

1

When I woke, I had not even had time to take in my surroundings before Kitagawa Yoshiki struck me across the face so hard that sparks burst before my eyes.

The first words out of my mouth were, "What the hell? Are you insane?"

He stood by the window with the light behind him, so I could not make out his face. But I could feel him trembling, the kind of tremor that comes from fury held on too tight. His voice was colder and crueler than I had ever heard it.

"You wanted to die that badly? Disappointed it didn't work? Even if you had died, I would have dragged your body out of that river, taken it to your mother, and told her that her daughter died for love."

The moment I heard the words died for love, all the strength went out of me. I could not even find the strength to argue. I gripped the bedsheet with both hands, trying to make myself look calm.

It was useless.

Whoever said there were no tears left at the bottom of sorrow was lying. It felt as though every drop of water in my body was being drained through my eyes.

The room was so quiet that all I could hear was our breathing. I cried in silence until I was choking too hard to say a single word.

After a long time, Kitagawa came over. He smoothed out my tangled hair and softened his tone a little.

"How are you supposed to go to the funeral looking like this..."

I let out a scream so suddenly that I startled myself. I glared at him with hatred.

"Why? Why would you say that? Why would you provoke me?"

He did not move. "Provoke you? You weren't afraid of death. What are you afraid of now?"

Then he turned and walked out. Before he closed the door, he looked back at me.

"The funeral is the day after tomorrow. If you still want to see him off, you'd better eat something before then."

The white door clicked shut.

I scrubbed the tears off my face with my hand, still wrapped in thick layers of gauze.

There was nothing to cry about. Since I hadn't died, then I would live properly.

I would eat. I would gather strength.

I would go to the funeral.

Hayashibara Yuto's funeral.

The moment those words formed in my head, the tears surged up again.

Two days later, I sat stiff as a corpse in Kitagawa's car while he watched me through the rearview mirror. I said flatly, "What are you looking at?"

He gave a dismissive snort.

I had no idea where the funeral was being held, and I had no desire to ask. Kitagawa was the sort of man who arranged everything properly once he had decided to do it, so when he tossed a black dress suit at me and told me to change, I was not surprised in the least.

He had always been that dependable.

Apart from that slap.

Just thinking about it made me touch my cheek. He noticed at once and gave another short laugh.

"Want to slap me back?"

I answered in the same dead voice as before. "A gentleman's revenge takes ten years."

He sighed. "Nanami Mio, I'm your boyfriend and the one who saved your life. Since the moment you were dragged back two days ago, you've treated me like dirt. I haven't even argued with you about it. I even drove you here myself..."

He stopped there, tactful enough not to finish the sentence.

Midosuji was as full of life as ever. Bus drivers raced their giant buses down the broad avenue like tanks. Inside the crowded buses, every face had that same expression, worn numb by living.

Luxury cars shot by now and then. Most of them held middle-aged men with gleaming skin and thick bellies, but sometimes there would be young women too, immaculate behind expensive sunglasses. At red lights they would light slim cigarettes and smoke them with practiced elegance.

Their age, and the cars they sat in, invited all kinds of speculation.

I took a cigarette from my bag and was about to light it when Kitagawa shouted, "Do not smoke in my car!"

I rolled my eyes and decided to treat his objection as background noise.

He glared at me in the mirror. "Can you stop looking like your whole family just died?"

That finally made me snap.

"Illiterate idiot. If you don't know what words mean, watch more television. Looking like your whole family died means your parents are dead. You look like your whole family died. Your whole family looks like your whole family died."

After that, he drove in stony silence.

The moment we arrived at the entrance to the funeral hall, all the strength and courage I had forced into myself on the way there vanished. I grabbed Kitagawa's hand hard. He set aside our petty grievances with unexpected generosity and gave me a look that said: It's all right. I'm here.

Hayashibara Yuto's memorial portrait hung in the center of the hall.

The instant I saw his face, I broke.

Everything that had happened rushed back like a film being wound backward too fast. My knees buckled. Kitagawa caught me before I fell and held me upright by force while leading me in front of Yuto's relatives so I could bow.

I never saw Yuto's parents.

Not when I was his girlfriend, and not now, when I had come to see him off one last time.

Maybe one day, passing through a street or a shopping center, I would brush shoulders with an ordinary middle-aged couple and never know that they were his mother and father, never know that their son and I had once shared a fierce and blazing past.

Kitagawa helped me to a seat in a corner.

Even through my grief I noticed that a great many girls here were just as sad as I was. In weather this cold, they still insisted on wearing only sheer black stockings below the waist. Their resistance to winter left me full of admiration.

For one sharp instant I remembered all the girls who had once fluttered around Hayashibara Yuto, and I cried even harder.

Then, through the blur of tears, I heard a voice that was at once familiar, strange, and utterly revolting.

I looked up.

Of course it was her.

Tachibana Mikoto.

She saw Kitagawa and me too. She looked awful, face wet with tears. After hesitating for a moment, she still chose not to speak to me. She turned and walked away.

Kitagawa asked softly, "Was it really her who took those photos?"

I ground my teeth together. "Then go search all of Osaka and find me a second person who hates me that much and is that despicable."

He drew me into his arms and patted my back as if soothing a child.

"There, there. It's over now."

I bit my lip so hard it hurt.

Some wounds never pass.

When we got back from the funeral, I collapsed on the bed like a stalk of lettuce left out to dry.

Kitagawa, who almost never smoked, spent forever trying to light a cigarette. I was about to say something vicious when he cut me off with a look that meant, shut up.

Ignoring my protests, he yanked the curtains open.

Winter sunlight poured through the huge glass windows. Fine dust danced in the light. From the twenty-first floor, the Yodo River spread out vast and immense below us.

Boats moved along it, each with its own route and destination.

I walked over, took the cigarette from his lips, and drew deeply on it.

"That day," I said, "I really meant to die."

He said nothing. He only reached around me from behind and folded me into his arms. His chin rested on my head. His breath touched the tip of my ear.

I could smell that familiar faint scent on him.

Davidoff.

He and Hayashibara Yuto had always been absurdly picky, yet they had agreed on perfume of all things. Maybe because the brand had begun with tobacco, and tobacco carried a kind of masculine severity.

The difference was that Yuto wore Cool Water.

Kitagawa wore Echo.

Echo.

Kitagawa Yoshiki.

He was the enduring echo left in my short life by everything good I had ever known.

As evenly as I could, I said, "Yoshiki, I told you a long time ago that I'm not like the girls you knew before me. I'm not healthy and bright. I didn't grow up in a warm, comfortable home. I'm not like them. I don't have lots of relatives or lots of friends to spread my feelings across. I only have one share of love. Either I give none of it, or I give all of it. Can you really bear something that intense?"

He only held me tighter and said nothing.

My heartbeat pounded like the drums in a heavy-metal song.

At last, he spoke.

And all the tears I had been holding back came crashing down.

"When I carried you back out of that icy river," he said, "I had only one thought. Bring you home. Make you happy. Give you a life with joy in it."

Outside the window, night had settled, vast and changeless.

And there in front of me sat Hayashibara Yuto, his eyes full of grievance.

I reached out, wanting to touch his face, that face I had once loved and that had later shattered. I began speaking in fragments.

This was all your fault. Why couldn't you stay with me properly? If you hadn't been so willful, none of this would have become what it is...

He kept looking at me.

And just when my fingers were about to touch his face, his features changed, little by little, until they became Asato's.

Kamiya Asato's eyes were always this indifferent, this cruel, staring at me without a word.

I met that imagined gaze in silence.

Look carefully, Kamiya Asato.

You are the reason I became so afraid of love.

So exhausted by it.

The curtains stirred in the night wind. In that dark room I stood facing my own hallucination as time thundered backward.

Who was that girl in the white shirt, with the stubborn mouth and clear bright eyes?

Her skin had not yet been scoured by tears.

Her fingers had not yet been stained yellow by cigarettes.

None of the hurts had arrived onstage yet.

That was me, five years ago.

Time rolled back to four years ago.

Osaka was famous that year because of a wildly successful talent show called National Idol Selection.

That show's influence was so great it could put Ando Haruka, then just an ordinary college girl, on the cover of Weekly Asahi. To girls who had dreamed of stardom since childhood, it looked like a stage on which to show their gifts and a shortcut to making their dreams come true.

That same summer, Mr.Children held a farewell concert in Osaka, drawing fans in floods. It was the first time a concert of that kind had been staged there.

None of that had anything to do with me.

What happened to me was something tiny, barely worth mentioning in a city as big as Osaka.

One afternoon at five-thirty, just as class ended and I was about to rush out of the room, Harada Shiori stopped me in a panic, her face grave.

I said impatiently, "What now?"

She stammered around it for a while before I finally understood what she meant.

The week before, our midterm had been supervised by a middle-aged teacher who thought far too highly of herself.

The moment I saw her from a distance, I felt faintly sick. She had the kind of tightly curled perm I loathed and wore shiny scarlet heels that clacked all the way down the corridor.

Takahashi Saori had tried to comfort me kindly.

"Maybe she looks better from the front."

When the woman reached the podium to unseal the exam papers, I turned around and rolled my eyes so hard at Saori that she should have felt them hit. Innocent as ever, she tossed me a note that read: Maybe she's actually nice. If you get the answers, pass them to me.

Unfortunately, that middle-aged teacher who had dressed herself up like a flower arrangement no one wanted was not remotely inclined to show mercy to optimists like Takahashi Saori.

The way she swept the room with her round eyes, like twin infrared scanners, left me with only one thought.

We're dead. Absolutely dead.

And I was right. By the time the exam ended, I had not managed to copy a single multiple-choice answer.

When the papers were collected, normally sweet-tempered Takahashi Saori flung herself over her desk and raged, "Would it have killed her to let one or two things slide?"

Fujiwara Aya, packing her bag beside us, echoed her like a broken machine. "Would it kill her? Would it? Would it?"

Then suddenly she stopped and smiled at us in a way that could honestly be described as obscene.

She held up a packet of little white pills.

I clutched my chest. "An aphrodisiac? What are you planning?"

She looked at me with deep contempt. "Nanami Mio, can there be a little less filth in your head? Not every pill in the world is an aphrodisiac. It's a laxative. I bought it a few days ago for fun. Want to..."

Saori and I exchanged one look and reached the same conclusion instantly.

Fine.

If she wouldn't let us copy and left us to drag home miserable scores and get scolded for them, then we wouldn't let her off easy either.

We would dose her with laxatives and make her regret being born.

When I stole the old witch's teacup out of the faculty office, I said to Shiori and Saori with great seriousness, "If we get caught, we take the blame together. We live together and die together."

They nodded with the solemn devotion of elementary-school children joining the Young Pioneers.

When the old witch opened her cup and screamed, "Who put chalk dust in my tea?" I nearly stood up and shouted, You idiot, that's laxative.

By the end of the exam, I had already forgotten the whole thing.

So when Shiori brought it up again that afternoon, it honestly felt like she was making a mountain out of nothing.

I waved her off like a fly. "All right, all right. We said we'd live and die together. Stop panicking. I've got somewhere to be."

Then I slung my bag over my shoulder and ran for Qinglan Middle School as if my life depended on it.

By the time I got there, Morikawa Kana and a whole pack of friends who had materialized from nowhere and looked even more excited than I did about the coming fight had already been waiting outside the gate for over half an hour.

Qinglan was one of Osaka's best schools. After college entrance exams, plenty of no-name schools liked to post huge acceptance lists at their gates and pretend they were challenging the elite.

But not Qinglan.

And not my school, Beiling High.

The moment Kana saw me, she shoved her watch right up against my face.

"Country thug, look what time it is. I thought you fell into a toilet and died."

I pushed her fake-status watch away with open disgust. "Could you please try to improve your manners?"

That watch of hers had once left me speechless.

She had gone about it with such mystery.

"Know what a Mickey watch is?" she had asked.

I admitted humbly that I did not.

Her vanity had glowed with satisfaction as she held up the wristwatch with Mickey Mouse's face printed on it and said, "This is a Mickey watch. Name brand, you country thug."

I had nearly died of rage. "It's Mickey. Mickey. There is no extra syllable in there."

Country thug was a word she had invented especially for me. Every time she used it, I felt vividly and specifically insulted.

When the girl finally appeared, Kana ground out her cigarette under the heel of her shoe and said in the voice of a gang boss, "Country thug, let's go have a little heart-to-heart with her."

According to reliable intelligence, the girl we were about to have that heart-to-heart with was named Ono Yuki.

The first thing the thieving hypocrite Morikawa Kana said when she heard the name was, "Ono Yuki? Sounds scandalous."

And now, the moment she saw the black-rimmed glasses and the TEENIE WEENIE T-shirt on this so-called Ono Yuki, jealousy burst into flame inside her.

"What the hell? While I wear a Mickey watch, she dares to wear TEENIE WEENIE?"

If I had not grabbed her, she would have charged over before I did.

Not willing to let Kana steal my thunder, I strode forward grandly and blocked Yuki's path.

"Hey. Need a word with you. Let's talk."

She looked at me suspiciously. "Talk about what?"

I hated girls like this, the type who treated themselves like tragic heroines and walked around looking pitiable before anyone had even touched them. If I actually hit her, wouldn't she just die of heartbreak on the spot?

Kana joined in at once. "Ono Yuki, right? If you're not answering, we'll take that as yes. Come on. We've got something to discuss."

She clearly did not want to go, but under the weight of our collective menace she still had no choice but to follow us around behind the gate, to a quiet little corner.

We all stood around her as if watching a monkey show.

Kana kept muttering, "Why are you so skinny? One punch and you'd break. Does your family not feed you? And yet Kamiya Asato still buys you cake all the time?"

That name burst through my head like a spark into dry grass.

The last scrap of reason in me burned away.

While Ono Yuki was still trying to understand what on earth this swarm of barbaric girls had to do with Kamiya Asato, I lunged at her like a madwoman and started hitting.

When I was done unleashing my animal nature, Kana stared at me in awe and said, "Sister, from now on you're the boss."

Yuki crouched on the ground, eyes wide with misery and hatred.

"Didn't you say you just wanted to talk?"

"If I say let's talk, does that mean we actually talk? If I told you to go eat shit, would you go do that too?"

After beating her physically, I moved straight on to humiliating her mentally.

It was the first time I had discovered that somewhere deep down I was, in fact, a shrew.

Before we left, Kana squatted in front of Ono Yuki and said with solemn sincerity, "From now on, don't let Kamiya Asato buy you cake anymore. Otherwise this hysterical woman will keep coming to have little talks with you."

Even after we got into the taxi, she kept looking back in that direction with real reluctance.

I was honestly curious whether she was worried about Ono Yuki or just still wondering if that TEENIE WEENIE shirt was authentic.

That night, after evening study hall, my boyfriend Kamiya Asato was waiting for me outside the gate of Beiling High.

He demanded furiously, "Why did you go beat her up? I have nothing to do with her."

Even though he was a full head taller than I was, I refused to back down.

"If you did have something to do with her, I wouldn't have just hit her. I'd have killed her."

He stared at me for a long time.

I stared right back, stubborn as anything, though in truth I was terrified. That fear leaked out quickly enough through my tears.

I cried.

I had beaten someone else up, and then I cried myself.

Whenever I cried, he had no way to deal with me. After one resigned sigh, he rubbed my already messy hair even more and said with open indulgence, "You're impossible. Come on, I'll buy you something to eat. Stop crying. It's not like you got hit."

There was a food cart by the school gate. The old woman who ran it had been selling fried snacks there since I was in elementary school. Stinky tofu, cauliflower skewers, mushrooms, taro, sausages, row after row of choices.

I stood in front of the cart and pointed with imperial authority.

"That one. That one. That one. And that one too..."

Ten minutes later I let out a deeply satisfied burp.

"Ah. A full stomach leads to indecent thoughts."

Asato smiled so gently that all the anger on his face vanished. "Mm. Excellent poetry."

Under a sky full of stars, the first person I ever loved spoiled me without a shred of principle. He never held my faults against me. He never minded my temper.

Once I had eaten enough, I began setting rules for how he was allowed to interact with other girls.

"First, you are not allowed to buy them cake. If they buy cake for you, you have to throw it away immediately to prove your chastity."

He pinched my cheek. "Fine. I agree to all of it."

Suddenly I felt so touched I might cry again.

I tugged on his sleeve and puckered my lips at him.

"Hey."

He raised an eyebrow and smiled. The real diamond stud in his left ear flashed brilliantly when he tilted his head.

That was our first kiss.

Clean.

Pure.

Shiraishi Yuzu.

If there had been no Shiraishi Yuzu. If only.