He Once Passed Along Sunflower Street

Koharu had lived on Sunflower Slope ever since she was small, and she was a great deal like the place itself: quiet, still, sparing with words. She had never forgotten the teacher she had in the sixth grade. His name was Kamiya Ren. Even after graduating from elementary school, she kept in touch with him. He was only a little over twenty, a young man who had returned to his old school to teach after finishing university. But Koharu knew his true dream was somewhere else. He taught English, yes, yet she had watched him paint, and when he painted there was a silence about him that somehow felt full of blazing feeling. Koharu often went to his studio and sat there for entire afternoons while he worked. Usually he only noticed she was there after he had finished a canvas. She never disturbed him. Instead she copied him, using scraps of paper he had discarded and whatever paint was left to smear at colors of her own. More often than not, though, her attention drifted toward the fruit can sitting on the windowsill. The glass jar was beautiful, labeled Pineapple Fragrance. Inside, the golden juice and fat yellow pineapples seemed to drift like little suns. Looking at it made Koharu swallow hard. Two weeks later that can reached her hands, on one condition: that she practice painting seriously. But Koharu never imagined that one day, the exchange for a can of pineapple would end up being Kamiya-sensei's departure. He left at the end of 2003. By then Koharu had already been out of elementary school for two or three years, but she still went to his studio every day after classes to paint. He said he was going to Tokyo to try his luck, to fulfill his dream. She did not even know he was leaving until she came to the studio and found only an address for her, and two cans of pineapple left behind. What he never knew was that Koharu had never even opened the first can he had once given her. She kept it on the windowsill and let it shine in the sunlight until it expired. Then, one day, she poured the pineapples out into the ditch by her front door. The fragrance had gone. Only a sour, spoiled smell remained. Yet she was not sad. Instead, she thought she could still smell that sweet pineapple scent, just as if he were speaking close beside her ear. She washed the pretty jar clean and filled it with tropical fish instead, one black, one white, one red. The three fish flashed happily through the water, especially lovely in the light. That night Koharu dreamed that she herself had turned into a can of pineapple, left alone in a corner until a man took her away. His palms were stained with deep colors and rough with calluses, but they carried no warmth at all. When she woke, she cried. The year Kamiya-sensei left was the year winter settled into her bones. In the middle of one freezing night, Koharu climbed out of bed without turning on the light, propped her easel by the window, and began painting by moonlight. She wanted, like him, to chase her own dream.

Koharu's painting improved by great leaps. She was best at portraits and watercolor. When people praised her, she always said, "It's because my teacher taught me well." No one knew who that teacher really was. To everyone around her, Koharu remained a strangely quiet mystery, a little pine tree standing in sunlight, even her name unusual enough to be remembered. That description came from a notebook entry written by a boy named Kashiwara Yu. Koharu found the diary while cleaning the classroom. She only meant to see whose it was, but instead she opened it and found that passage. After steadying herself, she put it back on his desk. That night she wrote a letter to Kamiya-sensei and told him what had happened, then went to bed carrying a tiny, secret happiness inside her. By then Kamiya Ren had opened a gallery in Tokyo called Joined Branches. Once he even sent her a photograph of himself, a black-and-white passport photo. Later he wrote that the photo for his new ID had gone missing, and only then did Koharu realize that this one had slipped into the envelope by mistake. The thought made her a little disappointed, but still she went on writing him one or two letters every month. He had only replied five times, and even that was enough to make her deeply happy. Kashiwara Yu's diary stirred her in ways she could not quite explain. The next day she secretly stole a glance at him on purpose. It was the first time she had truly noticed him. He wore his hair cut close. The whorl of hair on his crown leaned left. She was still peeking at him when he suddenly turned and looked straight at her. Koharu dropped her head at once. Although they had already been classmates for a year, Koharu had never really spoken to him, just as she had never spoken first to anyone at school. She had no friends. Every day she simply carried herself upright and walked through the campus alone. Even after learning that Kashiwara Yu liked her, she went on by herself, painting and painting until late into the night. She painted pineapples by the dozens and then colored them yellow, that same rich yellow as the label on the pineapple cans. Of all colors, yellow was the only one she truly loved, so yellow paint always ran out fastest. One day she snapped and tossed the emptied paint tube behind her, only to hear a startled sound. She turned and saw Kashiwara Yu looking at her awkwardly. The front of his white shirt had been splashed with paint. He seemed at a loss for words, his face a little red. "You like painting?" he asked. "Mm. What about you?" "I like reading better. And singing." That was the first conversation between them. It was a strange one, yet all at once Koharu wanted to invite him to see the tropical fish she kept at home. She could not have said why. Maybe it was simply because she felt bad. But in the end she said nothing.

Koharu mailed Kamiya-sensei a photograph of the tropical fish, but she waited and waited and no reply came. Every day after school she rifled through the mailbox by the door. There was always the newspaper, always advertisements, and always disappointment. Even though she never got what she was waiting for, she kept waiting all the same. She painted harder than ever. On holidays she even carried her easel to the seaside to paint from life. Kamiya-sensei had once told her that beneath the roughest tide, there was always a stillness the eye could not see. He loved the sea. So did she. That was why Koharu went every weekend, rain or shine, to paint on the shore. One weekend, under a gray sky and a sea stripped of its old blue, she noticed a tall, thin figure walking farther and farther into the water. It frightened her badly. She shouted across the empty beach, but the woman did not react at all. Koharu ran out toward her. By the time she reached her, the water was already over Koharu's thighs. The tide was surging. She seized the woman and dragged her back toward shore. The woman did not resist, only let herself be pulled. Once they reached safety, Koharu stood there panting and finally saw the woman's face clearly. She was very beautiful, with a quiet sort of beauty, but there was vacancy in her eyes, the lostness of a child. Before Koharu could say anything, a voice called urgently from behind them, "Sis, are you all right?" Koharu turned and found a familiar face. Kashiwara Yu. He stopped too when he saw her. For one second Koharu felt as though she had stumbled into a film. The woman was his older sister, Kashiwara Haruna. As anyone might have guessed, her mind was no longer sound. She moved and smiled like a child. Yu tried hard to explain. "She wasn't always like this. It's just... something happened to her." His voice caught, and Koharu did not ask more. Looking at this exquisitely beautiful woman, seven or eight years older than herself, Koharu suddenly felt deeply sad. Haruna lived with a child's freedom, yes, but what kind of story lay behind that blankness? The next morning, before leaving for school, Koharu took one of the pineapple jars with her. She gave Yu one of her black tropical fish and asked him to give it to his sister. Maybe with a fish for company, she would not feel quite so alone. That was what Koharu thought. Tropical fish were so bright that perhaps they could chase away some of the darkness inside her. It was only then that Koharu noticed something between herself and Kashiwara Yu had begun to change. He smiled at her more, spoke to her more, and before long they were walking to and from school together like old friends. When he asked carefully once why she liked painting so much, Koharu thought a long time and still could not explain that it felt like a habit, or perhaps a promise she had once made to a can of pineapple.

Four months later, Koharu finally received a reply from Kamiya-sensei. It was only a single page, but she spent more than an hour reading it. His handwriting was still as rough as ever, the kind of script one expects from an artist. The last sentence said, Koharu, you are a child with real artistic feeling. Please don't give up on painting. Promise me. She read that line again and again, nodding solemnly to herself as if accepting some grave mission. Every evening after that she changed the water for the tropical fish. They had grown so much that their plump bodies were beginning to strain against the jars. Could fish miss someone too, the way people did? One day, while she was out buying fish food, Koharu saw Kashiwara Haruna sitting near the mouth of Sunflower Street with the pineapple jar in her hands. When Haruna looked up, Koharu suddenly saw that the jar contained no water at all. The fish inside had been dead for a long time. Haruna's eyes were red as if she had been crying. Koharu led her home and gave her another fish from her own jar. Haruna brightened instantly, smiling with pure delight, and ran off hugging the jar to her chest. But when Koharu looked back at the one lonely fish left on her own windowsill, she could not help feeling a little sad. That afternoon Haruna stayed in Koharu's yard, playing with the jar and the fish inside while Koharu sat not far away and painted her portrait. Haruna was almost as silent as Koharu herself, never saying a word. When Koharu looked up at her, she only smiled, the smile opening like a flower. By the time Kashiwara Yu came to take his sister home, evening had fallen. Haruna walked a few steps, then suddenly turned around and, copying the way Yu did it, raised her hand and waved. "Koharu, goodbye." It was the first time Koharu had ever heard Haruna's voice. It was so crisp and bright that she felt an indescribable delight rise inside her. She waved hard in return. "Goodbye, Sister Haruna. Come play with me again!" That summer Koharu finally had two friends. One was Kashiwara Yu from her class, and the other was his sister, Kashiwara Haruna. Of course Koharu did not forget the work she was supposed to keep doing. She still wrote to Kamiya-sensei and began sending him her paintings too. One of them showed a vivid, beautiful woman against a blue background. It was not Koharu herself. It was Haruna. Teacher, I have friends now, she wrote. We have a good time together. Teacher, your gallery must be doing well. Teacher, I think I miss your paintings a little. After writing the last sentence, she folded the letter carefully, pasted on the stamp, and set it aside for mailing. She did not know where she had found the courage to write something like that. She also did not know why, at that exact moment, she suddenly thought of Haruna and longed to see the fish she had sent her, still living inside the pineapple jar. Was it happy? Kashiwara Yu, however, seemed to see straight into her thoughts. He was forever telling her things about Haruna, how she had grown much happier after getting the fish, how she often asked after Koharu, how carefully she looked after it. Koharu would sit still and listen, chiming in now and then, the two of them like old friends already. Yu was always bringing her news of Haruna and the fish. One day he added that Haruna had loved canned pineapple too, in the past.

For art-school students, it was not all that hard to bring their practical marks above the university line; the difficult part was still the academic subjects. When the school paired students into one-on-one study groups, Koharu and Kashiwara Yu ended up together. He took the task very seriously. After every class, he handed Koharu his notes. His writing was long, thin, and neat, far easier to read than Kamiya-sensei's. They often stayed late at school studying, and afterward Yu would walk her home. On mornings with an early class, he would bring warm milk for her in his schoolbag. "My sister told me to," he always said, and Koharu accepted it without argument. Sometimes they went together to see the tropical fish Haruna kept. She had cared for it well. It had grown too large to move freely in the jar, yet when Koharu suggested replacing the pineapple jar with an aquarium, Haruna clutched it stubbornly and refused to let go. The words Pineapple Fragrance on the glass had already been rubbed down to a pale gray, stripped of their original brightness. Once Koharu asked Yu quietly, "How did your sister end up like this? Didn't you ever take her to hospital?" Yu let out a heavy sigh and only said, "A sickness of the heart needs medicine for the heart." After that he fell silent. In one letter to Kamiya-sensei, Koharu wrote: Teacher, can love make a person lose her direction and pay a terrible price? She had no idea how he might answer. He had not written back in a long time by then. Maybe the gallery was doing too well, she told herself. Maybe he was simply busy. That was how she gathered the strength to keep going. Her secret goal was to study hard, get into a university in Tokyo, and then go see his gallery. No one knew this, and no one could guess it. It was like a song composed only inside her own heart.

The post office where Koharu usually mailed her letters was closed one day, and she stood by the entrance a long time unwilling to leave. The old watchman looked at her and smiled. "Young lady, why do I always see you here sending letters? To your boyfriend, is it?" Koharu blushed at once. "They're for my teacher." The old man chuckled. "I'm only teasing you. I suppose not a lover, no. These days there are so many ways to keep in touch and they're all so fast. Letters are too slow. Most people have already given them up. But you really do respect your teacher. There aren't many girls like you left." He kept talking, perhaps, but Koharu heard almost nothing. She took the letter back home in her hand. A month earlier, wanting an easier way to reach her, her parents had bought her a mobile phone. The only numbers stored in it were her parents' and the house line. She had not yet sent even a single message. Only then did Koharu realize she had never once asked Kamiya-sensei for his phone number. It had been years since she heard his voice. Was it still the same? Had it changed? Had it grown tired? Carefully she opened the letter again, added her own phone number, sealed it once more, and tucked it into her schoolbag. When she looked up, she discovered that the last tropical fish she was keeping had died. Maybe, she thought, she simply wasn't suited to keeping little creatures. Or maybe fish, like people, were frightened of loneliness. The first text message Koharu ever received did not come from Kamiya-sensei. It came from Kashiwara Yu, a Christmas message sent late at night. Sitting at the window with the phone in her hands, Koharu traced his outline on the fogged glass with one finger and suddenly realized she could not remember when she had ever given him her number.

With Yu's help, Koharu's grades improved a great deal, and because her English was strong, she also made up for his weakness there. Together they both got better. They spent many hours talking about schoolwork, but even more hours talking about things that had nothing to do with school at all: the fish Haruna was keeping, Koharu's paintings, little scraps of daily life. By then they had grown close in a way that no longer surprised either of them. So when Yu turned up with a strawberry cake to celebrate Koharu's birthday, she did not think it strange. She must have told him her birthday at some point, she supposed. It was the first strawberry cake she had ever eaten, fragrant and sweet. After making her wish, she could not wait and scooped a bit of cream onto her finger and licked it off. Maybe the childishness of that made Yu laugh, because he copied her at once and began eating cake with his fingers too. Soon the once beautiful cake was full of holes, utterly ruined. "What did you wish for?" he asked. "Do you think there's such a thing as pineapple cake?" "Of course there is." Koharu did not tell him her wish. Wishes are supposed to stay unspoken if you want them to come true. That afternoon Yu asked her to go to the amusement park with him. Koharu assumed he would bring Haruna, but when she got there he was alone, holding a stuffed Winnie-the-Pooh under the sun, his shadow stretched long behind him. On the roller coaster, Koharu grew frightened and clutched his sleeve, screaming all the way. It felt as though every pent-up feeling she had been carrying came flying out of her throat with that scream. Yu caught her hand and did not let go for a long time. Her palm was full of sweat, wet and warm, just like the tide inside her chest. When they got off the ride, she gently tugged her hand free and walked ahead. He hurried after her and caught her hand again, the other arm still wrapped around the stuffed bear. She pulled away a second time and strode out in front. "Koharu!" he called. There was clearly something he wanted to say. "Let's go see your sister," Koharu interrupted at once. "And buy a few pretty fish for her." "Koharu, actually..." "Or we could bring Sister Haruna to the amusement park next time. She'd love it. Why didn't you bring her this time? Really..." She yanked the subject aside again and then watched the color drain slowly from his face. Finally he burst out, "Koharu, you know what I want to say. You know I like you. Why won't you let me say it? What are you afraid of?" Koharu froze. Her throat closed as if a fishbone had lodged there. It took her a long time to force out the words. "Kashiwara Yu, you mustn't like me. I'm not worth liking. We could never be together." "So is it because you're planning to go to Tokyo and look for your teacher Kamiya?" he shouted. She stared at him. "You read my letters?" He had nothing to say for himself. Koharu kept staring, eyes reddening as if they might start to bleed. "I won't forgive you," she said. Then she turned and ran, leaving him standing there with only her thin back in front of him. After that she truly cut him off. He tried more than once to speak to her, but she looked straight through him as if he were empty air. She only worked harder, painted more, studied more, and kept her eyes fixed on Tokyo.

Kamiya-sensei had gone a full year without replying when Koharu received an email from Kashiwara Yu instead. By then Haruna had changed. "Koharu. Thank you." Koharu turned and saw Haruna smiling at her, tears in the corners of her eyes. Koharu began crying too, though inside she was flooded with a joy too large for words. There was a steadiness in Haruna's gaze that Koharu had never seen before. Under the fierce daylight, she suddenly remembered the contents of Yu's message and found herself unable to speak. He had written: Maybe you think it was despicable and shameless that I read your letters. But I never meant to. That day I borrowed a book from you, saw the name Kamiya Ren on the envelope, and lost control. Weren't you always asking about my sister's story? Then let me tell you. She used to love painting too. She had a painter for a fiancé. But after they got engaged, he said he wanted to go to Tokyo and make something of himself. My family refused to let my sister go with him. That very night she ran out of the house, but on the road to the station she ran into thugs. Afterward she became the person you know now. Kamiya Ren never knew any of this. He never wrote her even a single letter. In late August of 2008, Koharu left the town where she had lived for eighteen years and boarded the train for Tokyo. She stood in the station a long time before she got on, unable to say what she was waiting for. When she finally boarded and looked back, all she saw were her parents, already beginning to look old, still calling her by her childhood nickname. The address Kamiya-sensei had given her led nowhere. After three hours of searching, she finally asked the nearby shopkeepers and learned that Joined Branches had already gone out of business more than a year earlier. No one knew where the owner had gone. The words of Kamiya-sensei's last letter came back to her again and again. They were only a few hasty lines, but she had memorized them completely and never forgotten them. Nearly every Sunday she rode the subway toward Wangfujing Street, but she never found him. She never changed her phone number, but not once did she receive a call from him. She never knew that one evening, on the subway ride back to school, the man sitting beside her in a business suit with a briefcase, talking into his phone, was in fact her Kamiya-sensei. They failed to recognize each other. Nor did she know that Kashiwara Yu had come to Tokyo too. His university lay less than two kilometers from hers, and every Sunday he took the subway to a bookstore on Wangfujing Street where he worked part-time. They never ran into each other again. Amid the rolling thunder of the train, Koharu closed her eyes. It felt as though something inside her had fallen away, and as though something else had been added in its place, but she could not have explained it. She did not know that Yu sat not far away with his eyes closed, catching up on sleep.

At the beginning of 2009, a gallery opened on Sunflower Street. Its name was Joined Branches. The owner was a breathtakingly beautiful woman. Every day she sat there smiling inside her little shop, as though guarding a dream that would never die.