Ten Years

In the summer of 2006, three months after Riko returned to the city, she stood out wherever she went with her short wine-red hair. Passersby kept glancing at her. Even that was not enough for her. She always seemed to crave a little more attention. So she wore a dangerously short skirt too, one that threatened to reveal more than it hid if she moved the wrong way.

Across the street stood a man, tall and straight-backed. His skin was darker than before, but the dimples were still there.

Yes. It was him.

When Riko found him on a dating site, she had stared at the screen for a full minute. She had never imagined that this was how they would meet again. Years ago, the proud boy she had known would definitely have said that meeting people online was idiotic.

Now, standing before the possibility at last, she found she could not treat him as an ordinary mark. She wanted to spend time with him, yet she did not want him to recognize her.

So she pulled a face mask from her bag and put it on.

Heart fluttering, almost giddy, she crossed the street and stopped beside him.

"I'm Riko," she said. "I've got a terrible cold. I don't want to infect you."

The flicker of dislike on his face was exactly the same as it had been all those years ago.

"You've kept me waiting forever," Osawa Ryo said. "And couldn't you do something more natural with your hair? Still, your eyes are pretty."

Riko thought that was the first compliment he had ever given her, though it came out in the most awkward possible way. Yes, even if he turned to ashes she would know him: Osawa Ryo, who always spoke as if superiority came naturally to him.

Suddenly she was glad she had gotten double-eyelid surgery the year before. Her eyes had been swollen for a whole month, like two soft shoots wrapped around them. For beauty she was willing to spend money, sweat, and blood. If the man standing before her now praised her a few more times, she might burst into tears. After all, she had done it for him in the first place.

She had never known on what day it would happen, but in a sea of people she had always believed they would meet again somewhere, on some street, just like this, as if dropped from the sky into a world where everything was growing.

The afternoon heat came in wave after wave. Riko felt half faint from lack of air. Even if prickly heat broke out all over her face under the mask, she could not expose herself.

Ryo looked around. There was nowhere much nearby to go except a bar called Blue Hour tucked away in an alley.

"Let's sit there for a while."

He had barely finished speaking before Riko started waving both hands in refusal. "No, no. If we go straight through this street, there's a little teahouse. It's close."

So, because she insisted, they walked under the sun for a full twenty minutes before they found the place. Ryo was baffled. Why ignore the closest option and come all the way here? He ordered tea for her, then dropped lazily into a sofa seat. The air conditioner was blasting. A second later he seemed to think of something, got up, and adjusted it so the cold air blew away from her instead.

Riko could have screamed.

My God, she thought, if I don't cool down I'm going to die.

Sweat fell from her in heavy drops. She wanted desperately to tell him that she didn't have a cold at all. In this weather, what kind of idiot catches a cold?

Ryo made himself comfortable on the sofa and motioned for her to drink her tea.

After hesitating for a while, Riko took off her mask with trembling hands.

One second.

Two seconds.

Three...

Ryo did not recognize her.

She did not know whether to feel lucky or unlucky. A tiny disappointment rose in her heart. She had once been happy, but from the moment she left Ryo she had never been happy again. And now, when the world had finally turned enough for them to sit facing each other once more, he looked at her like a stranger.

Maybe her face had never stayed in his mind from the beginning.

Still, at least he seemed to know how to care for someone now. He had worried about her cold. In the old days there had not been a single thing good about him. Truly, not one.

Later stories always begin for no reason at all.

In 1996 there were three kinds of students on campus. There were the outstanding good students. There were the notorious bad students. And there were the ordinary ones who moved through school in straight lines: no peaks, no valleys, grades neither good nor bad, interests too faint to mention, family backgrounds too vague to boast about and too harmless to criticize. Even teachers' eyes skimmed right over them.

Riko was that sort of student, as painfully ordinary as her name suggested. There were several girls in class with nearly the same name, so in her own head she secretly gave herself another one: Caili. No one ever called her that. Teachers skipped over girls like her when they asked questions in class anyway.

She spent her days with her head on her desk like a plant that had been cut from its stem. Sunlight slanted in through the window and lit one corner of her desk. She drifted off looking at the ridges in the fields outside, where little yellow flowers bloomed in spring and birds sometimes alighted on the branches.

The school was attached to a university, yet stood absurdly in the countryside. Riko had come there from the city to live in the dorms, and at first she had never quite gotten used to it. The dormitory girls were all city kids, spoiled in the same way. They would pile up a week's worth of socks and carry them home on weekends to be washed.

Riko did the same. Just wringing out a thick towel exhausted her, so every Sunday at noon she lugged a bag of dirty clothes onto a bus, rode an hour home, wolfed down a decent meal, and then rushed all the way back in time for evening self-study.

For a girl as pressed by schoolwork as Riko, an afternoon was enough time to do all sorts of things.

And so, always hurrying, always anxious, the moment the dismissal bell rang she darted out of the classroom.

At the turn on the ground floor, she crashed straight into someone.

It should have been a tiny incident, the kind of thing forgotten by the next day. But it lodged in her mind with startling force, because when they collided, their lips touched by accident.

Years later, Riko would still wonder: Had they really touched mouth to mouth? Or had they missed by a single millimeter?

What she knew for certain was that she had smelled fresh cigarette smoke on his breath, thick tobacco and something soft besides.

The boy was even more startled than she was. In fact, he overreacted magnificently. He stumbled back with an audible "Ah!" and clapped one white, clean hand over his mouth, as if he were the one who had just been taken advantage of.

Who, exactly, was supposed to be the girl who had been wronged here?

Riko was mortified and furious. She dropped her head in a panic and saw that the bag she had been carrying had spilled dirty socks all over the floor.

The humiliation only deepened.

Even now, remembering the scene made her blush hot. A delicate-looking girl had dropped a pile of grimy, foul-smelling socks right in front of a handsome boy. When she described it later, she liked to invent his thoughts for him and make the story sound more romantic, but the truth was that she had been petrified.

Her face went scarlet.

The boy frowned. His white hand moved from his mouth to his nose. He must have understood by then that she was neither a newly arrived laundress nor a traveling sock vendor. Wonderful. First the accidental kiss, then the total loss of dignity.

Riko felt like dying.

Pretending calm, she crouched down to gather the socks. One of them was pinned under the boy's shoe. At that moment the phrase utter humiliation flashed through her mind. She tugged. He lifted his foot. The tread pattern of his sole was stamped clearly across the sock. She shook it hard in the air and stuffed it back into the bag as fast as she could.

The boy's expression grew even more contemptuous. His brows knotted. His mouth twisted. Without saying a word, he turned and ran toward the sports field.

Under the sun his back looked light and quick.

Strangely, Riko thought, he's only about as tall as I am.

Later, whenever she remembered that miraculous collision, her face would flush while her insides spun into chaos. Another second and she might have seen his embarrassment clearly. Such a pity he ran away. Really, he had been more flustered than she was.

The more she told the story, the more excited she became, adding details as she went. The world was just that strange. It had to be him and her. Maybe it was their first kiss.

At once the moment swelled in importance. For a girl whose life had been bleak and monotonous, that one absurd little accident let a beam of light into her heart. Without it, everything might have gone on being bleak forever. There would have been no later story.

There are a hundred answers to how love begins.

She saw him again at Monday morning assembly.

The campus loudspeaker called out, "Osawa Ryo, Osawa Ryo," and the boy from the next class jogged all the way up to the flag platform. Riko recognized him instantly and felt a strange surge of admiration. Even the way he raised the flag looked easy and stylish. He was not one of the ten famous campus heartthrobs, but Riko liked boys whose looks were clear and understated. Thick brows, big eyes, and high noses only seemed vulgar to her the more she looked at them.

Later she heard that Ryo had a father who was a professor. That did not mean he was a great student himself. His grades rose and fell like a roller coaster. He played a little basketball and a little soccer, though not particularly well. His only real passion was photography. The photos he took were pinned up on the campus bulletin board, and every time Riko passed she could not help glancing over. She could not tell whether they were any good, only that they looked faintly mysterious.

Now and then she would catch sight of him in the corridor, talking expansively, choosing his words with easy wit, like one of those politicians on television standing behind a lectern. Lofty. Superior. If he had run for president, she would have voted for him.

In short, she was thoroughly captivated.

At a school full of outstanding people, she was as ordinary as dust. He was ordinary too, but at least he was a larger stone.

And so the little speck of dust fell in love with the larger stone.

Her chest felt ready to burst. At sixteen, in the heat of summer, she hurried and sweated and panicked without stopping.

That summer the thing she did most often was carry a bucket upstairs because the water pressure never reached the fifth floor. It gave up on the fourth. Ryo lived in the fourth-floor dormitory. She lived on the fifth. Only an iron gate separated them, and every night after lights-out it was locked.

One day she was carrying a bucket downstairs when she ran into him on the fourth floor.

"Osawa Ryo."

Good heavens. She had actually said it out loud.

He turned back, surprised that the girl from their collision knew his name.

"What?"

"Could you fill a bucket of water for me from the fourth floor?" Riko blurted out, suddenly full of reckless courage.

Ryo stared at her. "There's a tap right there. Can't you do it yourself?"

In Ryo's entire memory, he had never once fetched water for a girl. He thought boys who showed girls that kind of attention were ridiculous.

Riko had no words. Yes, the tap was close. It was also inside the boys' restroom.

She just stood there staring at him, hurt all over her face, with the exact expression of a puppy begging to be let in.

Something in Ryo softened. He took the bucket from her.

"Hey. You're insanely lucky. How am I filling water for a girl like you?"

What that sentence meant depended on whom you asked. But for Riko, the bucket he lifted for her set off a dramatic chain reaction.

Ryo gradually noticed that every time she spoke to him, her face flushed with excitement, and it was as if even her little braid would lift and fly.

Something about her drew him in.

Even later, when the two of them sneaked off to the field ridges to meet in secret, he was still thinking about what that something was.

It was a Sunday afternoon after a heavy rain. The weather had finally turned cool. Ryo carried his camera. Riko wore a creamy little dress. The wet earth smelled of rot after the storm. Mud clung to their shoes. Every step left a print.

By all rights, it should have been a terrible date.

Riko thought it was romantic.

She smiled, though she was also awkward and a little at a loss.

Ryo watched her through the camera lens, catching her expressions one by one. Her eyes were like a deer's, full of worship and anxious eagerness to please him. Her smile looked stiff, as if once her lips had stretched to a certain point they forgot how to move any farther.

Suddenly he found her almost funny.

This silly girl, he thought. I probably ought to date her for a while.

Maybe the daily thirty-two-degree heat had simply made him stupid. At first, that was all it was.

Beyond the long twilight, not a trace of warmth remained.

Summer vacation arrived.

Ryo wanted only to be a goldfish in cold water, sleepy and lazy. Every afternoon at three o'clock, though, he got a phone call from Riko. The girl with the braid always chirped brightly, asking him to come out and play.

"Idiot," he grumbled once. "Do you know three o'clock is the hottest time of day?"

And from the other end of the line came her shameless answer. "You're always slow, so I have to call an hour early."

An hour later, Ryo would appear in the apartment garden, and Riko would already have bicycled through the heat from one end of the district to the other on her little princess bike, panting as she jumped off.

"Wow, you're not late today." Laughing, she would reach out to pinch his arm.

Ryo would frown and retreat in alarm. "In weather like this, what are you clinging for?"

Sometimes they sat under the shade of a tree listening to the dull drone of cicadas until they grew bored out of their minds.

Once they went to the movies. Riko no longer remembered the title. The air-conditioning inside the theater was too strong, and she eventually reached out to take Ryo's hand. It was icy. She had to withdraw her own hand again and steal a glance at him. His face gave nothing away.

At the time, Ryo was thinking miserably, Dear God, how did I end up liking this girl?

She was affected. She was stubborn. And she had dragged him to a movie this corny.

They had only been together a month, yet it had felt impossibly long, as endless as the maddening sound of the cicadas.

This was his first love. He had hoped he might meet a girl he could think of with absolute certainty, slap his own chest, and say: I love her.

But he had no such confidence. First love, it turned out, was like a glass of plain boiled water: utterly tasteless.

What, exactly, was he enjoying?

Only when the movie ended and the credits rolled did he finally understand. What he enjoyed was her blind admiration.

He liked being circled around. He liked being listened to. He liked that all she had to do was nod and smile and look at him with a bit of nervousness in her eyes.

He felt strangely disappointed in himself when he realized it. At the same time, he recognized how vulgar it all was.

When they came out of the theater, Riko was still immersed in the film. It had been their first real date, and they had watched a tragic love story. She had even imagined the hero's face as Ryo's.

"Did you see me crying just now?" she asked. "If I disappeared like that girl did, would you come looking for me?"

Ryo hated the question immediately.

"There's no if. It's only a movie."

But Riko would not let it go. "I mean really. What if I really disappeared?"

Inside, he felt only irritation. As the sun lowered, his face darkened with it. At last he said, "That question is unbelievably stupid."

On the way home, Riko did not speak again.

At the crossroads, Ryo squeezed the tip of her little finger.

At sixteen, he was utterly lost when it came to love.

When they parted, their hands dropped weakly away from each other, as if by the time the long twilight was over, no warmth at all could remain.

By the time we ask whether we'll remember, the answer has usually existed from the start.

Teenage love always came for no reason and left just as quickly.

Arrogant boys were proud at all times, their thoughts strange and unwieldy, like sick elephants: heavy, irritable, and clumsy. Ryo was blunt and straightforward. He had none of a grown man's tenderness. What sweet talk could anyone really expect from a sixteen-year-old? He could not do it. If that was a virtue, perhaps it should have been called simplicity.

He never said I love you. He never even said I like you.

Boys who guarded an inner kingdom of their own treated such words like dirt. Ryo used his camera to record the world instead, taking what he considered meaningful pictures as if that were the only pursuit worthy of him.

So when Riko asked what he wanted to do in the future, he answered without hesitation, "A reporter. Speak for the people. Defend justice."

Riko smiled. "Then you have to work hard."

It sounded sharp and glorious, exactly the sort of job he should have.

A faint ache stirred inside her. What should she do in the future? She was weak, ordinary, and not the sort to fight anyone. Maybe she could become a cashier in a supermarket. As long as her hands were quick, she would not have to say much. Just take the money, make change, pack the bag, and not even smile the way salesclerks had to.

The thought made her sad, quietly and dully.

The big bowl of shaved ice on the table had nearly melted into water. She only stared at his camera in a daze.

The summer of 1996 was slipping toward its end with the final cries of the cicadas.

She heard the thrilled, frightened shouts of tourists spinning on the rides and felt dizzy herself. Time, she realized, could not be held.

When summer vacation ended, she would leave this place with her parents for another strange city.

She did not tell him while they ate ice at the kiosk. She did not tell him while they climbed to the mountain top. She did not tell him when he took her picture.

The day trip to Forest Park had been her idea. Ryo had nearly refused. To him, Forest Park was just the kind of place elementary-school children were marched to in spring. He had already been there countless times.

But Riko pleaded until her stubbornness scraped every last nerve he had.

In the end, he convinced himself with a different thought: after today, I'll finally be rid of this clingy, tasteless girl.

Of course he did not notice anything unusual in her behavior that day.

She had suddenly turned sentimental.

Standing on the summit while the wind rushed around them, she spread both arms wide toward the deep green forests below and shouted, "Osawa Ryo, will you always remember me?"

The echo rolled from the mountains as though it had come from another world.

Ryo frowned automatically. Glancing at the tourists nearby, he felt embarrassed.

Then Riko puffed out her cheeks. "I don't think we've ever taken a picture together."

With obvious reluctance, Ryo took out the camera.

The day felt unbearably long to him.

They stood side by side, stiff and straight. The wind tossed their hair. The boy's face was distant, aloof, faintly defiant. The girl beside him still looked like a startled little deer, humble and timid, as if everything she had been given came from God.

Quietly she reached out, trying to hook a finger around his.

But with the click of the shutter, she was too late.

She stood there, unhappy and quiet. Behind her spread great swaths of blue sky, and below her the deep green drop with no visible bottom. One step too far and a person could die.

A strange thought came over her. If one day in the future he forgot her, perhaps she might as well jump from here and leave only a love shattered to pieces.

Even she was startled to realize that at sixteen she could already love someone that deeply.

Ryo took the camera back and carefully slid it into its protective case.

And then disaster struck.

As Riko went on asking whether he would remember her in the future, a group of joking tourists crashed into them. The innocent camera slipped from Ryo's hands and rolled straight down into the dense green below.

"Ah!" Riko cried out.

Almost by instinct she made as if to rush after it, then stopped, staring at him in disbelief. The camera had been with him for so long, yet he did not seem heartbroken in the slightest.

"It's not worth it for one camera," Ryo said with a shrug.

Later, whenever he thought of the last day he spent with her, he felt as if he had done something shameful.

He asked the tourists for compensation, then even tried to console her. "That old thing was pretty low-grade anyway. I was just waiting for an excuse to get my parents to buy me a new one."

"But our only photograph was in it."

Riko was nearly crying.

On the way down the mountain, she sobbed so hard her shoulders jerked. Ryo could not understand it at all. The girl was stubborn to the point of being hateful.

After that, he went back to school and discovered that when he passed the classroom next door, Riko's seat had already been taken by another unfamiliar student.

At first he only let out an offhand, so that's what happened. But little by little, her face faded away along with the lost camera. The memories that had existed only inside it were gone too, beyond retrieval.

Time really did change them both.

So he forgot her, as a matter of course.

Like always, they had not held hands. They had not embraced. The tears on the girl's face had already dried in the wind, and dust rose from the road.

She said, "Looks like the wind's picking up. Goodbye, then."

That one farewell finally pulled them into different worlds.

The difficult boy who hated the trouble of pleasing girls poured all of his limited time into studying. He discovered that first love was exhausting and not very fun. He got into a top university and at last became a reporter.

By twenty-six, he no longer thought meeting strangers online was stupid or shameful.

Time really had changed them both.

At last the girl had a place online where everyone called her Caili. She had not become a supermarket cashier after all. She had realized that without a college degree, even such an ordinary job was not easy to get. So she drifted through the city's underworld instead. After sixteen, the straight line of her life had become an electrocardiogram of violent highs and lows. She had learned that she could never be ordinary again. Every day was full of danger, deception, and struggle, like some lurid outlaw drama.

Riko and Ryo parted outside the little teahouse.

Ryo went back to the station to pick something up. His news editor came in flushed with excitement, carrying a thick stack of papers.

"Big story tomorrow. We're taking hidden cameras into a bar called Blue Hour. We've had tons of complaints. Do you know how much they charge for a glass of water? A hundred yuan. It's extortion. Supposedly they use people online to lure dates there and then squeeze them. Be careful on the undercover job tomorrow..."

At once Ryo thought of the obscure little bar tucked in the alley, and of the flicker of tension that had crossed Riko's face when he suggested going there.

Something was wrong.

He did not stop to think. The next day, he headed straight for Blue Hour.

The instant he saw Riko, it felt as if a hand had closed around his throat. He could not even shout. A strange anger jammed in his chest instead, so fierce he almost cursed aloud.

He laughed bitterly at his own naivete. He had been foolish enough to trust a stranger online. If he had walked into this bar the day before, he too might have ended up surrounded by a group of thugs and forced to pay one hundred and ninety-eight yuan for two glasses of plain water.

He did not dare think about how many people the ring had already trapped.

At that moment Riko was curled up on a sofa drinking imported liquor with another customer. She could drink astonishing amounts. Watching her, no one would have guessed that she had once had the clear eyes of a little deer.

Then she stood, called for the bill, and a moment later the customer was cursing at the top of his lungs. People shoved one another. Ryo saw a brutal, bandit-like hardness flash over Riko's face, and his heart clenched.

She saw him too.

In the dim light, his anger was written all over his face. She knew that a reporter would not come here without a reason. But she did not think too much about it. He had seen this version of her now, and in the end some sort of ending was necessary.

That night, everyone in the bar except the owner was arrested.

Riko saw Ryo once again. He stood there holding a microphone, stern and righteous in a way that stirred fierce satisfaction in the watching crowd. When the camera turned toward her face, she lowered her head deeply, looking for an instant almost as shy as she had at sixteen.

Then he seemed to remember something and asked in a low voice, "Why didn't you take me there at the beginning?"

Riko smiled faintly.

"You really did forget me."

Cheap to some. Priceless to me.

Late that night, Ryo was still editing the footage.

When he reached the shots with Riko in them, he paused.

In his mind he saw a girl with single eyelids and a mouth that tilted slightly upward. He saw again the moment their lips had brushed at that corner years ago, and the way her cheeks had flamed red. It was as if, somewhere in the dark, the god of fate had given a cold little laugh. She had asked whether he would always remember her, and he had indeed forgotten her completely.

In this story, she had been the brave one, the one who chased after love.

That love had begun on the afternoon of their clumsy collision. Later she went to prison.

Sometimes he felt guilty. But he was a man who believed in justice. It never occurred to him to become sentimental for the sake of personal warmth or human attachment. The hard kingdom inside him seemed impossible for any army to conquer. In the end he could only sigh at the unpredictability of the world. How did she become like this? That one question had to contain all the rest of his complicated feelings.

Time spun forward.

In 2008, when Ryo got married, a heavy parcel arrived for him.

Under the warm lights of his new home, he opened it. The smile on his face froze at once.

It was the camera that had rolled down the mountain years before.

The lens was cracked. The paint had flaked away. The body was covered in mottled scars. It had clearly been wiped clean with great care.

Something seemed to seize Ryo's heart in a fist.

He felt a suffocating tide rise slowly into his eyes. Through the blur, he saw that small, stubborn, obstinate girl climbing down with a rope, inch by difficult inch, searching among jagged rocks and tangled roots.

Down there lay her precious memories.

But to the other person in the story, all of it had once been disposable.

Some people need a very long time to say goodbye to the past.

Ten years later, returned together with that camera, was the love she had once held so deeply.

Cheap to some.

Priceless to me.