He Once Passed Through Sunflower Street

The truth is, I liked canned pineapple from a very early age.

But I never truly liked pineapple itself. When I was little, I did not understand why. Only later did I realize that sometimes what a person likes is not the taste at all, but the longing stored inside it. Many years later, when I finally bought a can of pineapple in a department store in Tokyo and carried it back to my dormitory, setting it on the windowsill, I stared for a long time at the fruit gleaming in the sunlight and still could not bear to open it.

Because it made me think of Sunflower Street.

The street lay in an old city by the sea in Hiroshima. It was short, narrow, and quiet. In summer, cicadas pressed their sound onto every eave. In winter, the sea wind blew right into the cracks of your bones. I grew up there. When I was little my name was dreadfully rustic, and a teacher gave me a new one. From then on, everyone in the neighborhood called me Kiko. It was as if my name had been polished once, and I began to think perhaps my life, too, might be made a little brighter.

The person who renamed me was called Furuhashi Renji.

He was the new teacher who came when I was in the sixth grade. He had just graduated from university, and yet his gaze already seemed fixed far away, as if he might leave our small city at any moment. Teaching was only how he made a living. What he truly loved was painting. After school, I always liked running to the little studio he rented to watch him sit by the window mixing colors, putting brush to paper, or simply staring into space. The studio was tiny, but there were always cans of pineapple on the windowsill, yellow and bright in the light, like a row of suns that would never rot.

The first time I saw them, I could not take my eyes away. Teacher laughed at how greedy I looked and said that if I wanted one, I would have to trade him a painting. So I began learning to draw. Later he really did give me a can, but I could not bear to eat it, and left it sitting on the sill at home. Not until the winter he left did I pour the expired pineapple and its syrup into the little drainage ditch by the yard and wash out the glass jar to keep tropical fish in it.

He left very suddenly.

He gave me only a Tokyo address, two new cans of pineapple, and one instruction to keep drawing.

By then I was already in middle school, and I still kept up the habit of writing to him. One letter a month, sometimes two. I told him what I had been painting lately, what had happened at school, what color the clouds above the sea were. I thought that as long as the letters kept going out, the thread between us would not break. But Furuhashi-sensei's replies grew fewer and fewer, until at the end there was nothing in them but the repeated line, do not give up painting.

It was around that time that I began noticing Nishihara Kashiwa.

Nishihara Kashiwa was my classmate in high school. He wore his hair cropped short, his white shirts were always washed clean, and he wrote with a thin, elegant hand. The first time he truly entered my field of vision was because I picked up his diary while cleaning. On the first page I had opened by accident, he had written: Kiko is like a small tree standing quietly in the light. She doesn't talk much, and yet people always want to look at her a little longer. Reading those lines, I felt my chest grow inexplicably hot, and hurriedly stuffed the notebook back into his desk.

Only then did I realize that someone had been secretly watching me all along.

Nishihara Kashiwa was a very gentle person. He never barged carelessly into my world the way other people did. Instead, after I accidentally threw an empty paint box and hit him with it, he only asked, blushing, whether I liked painting. During group study sessions, he would quietly place his carefully organized notes on my desk. On winter mornings, he would slip warm milk into my schoolbag, then claim it was only because his older sister had told him to bring extra. Little by little, we began talking. We walked to and from school together, wrote homework beside each other in the library. It was a strange sort of closeness, like the tide arriving at your feet before you even notice it has come in.

And yet the person who truly brought us close was his sister.

Nishihara Haru was seven years older than we were, and very beautiful, but her mind seemed to have stopped somewhere in childhood. She often sat at the mouth of the street holding a glass jar, her eyes vacant, as if a sheet of thick glass stood between her and the world. The first time I met her by the sea, she was walking step by step straight into the water. I dropped my easel onto the sand and ran to drag her back by force. Nishihara Kashiwa came rushing after us in a panic, calling her "sister." Only then did I realize that the boy who always looked so steady had wounds hidden at home that he could not speak of either.

Later, I gave Nishihara Haru a black tropical fish in a glass jar washed out from a can of pineapple. She held the jar as if she were holding a secret that glowed. From that day on, some subtle bond suddenly formed among the three of us. Nishihara Kashiwa would tell me whether his sister had smiled that day, whether she had eaten properly. On weekends, I would go to see her feeding the fish, sitting quietly in the sunlight and teasing its little tail through the glass. Often I felt that the way people draw near to one another is not because of anything grand or dramatic, but because at last someone is willing to bend down with you and tend to the broken bits that everyone else finds troublesome.

And yet in my heart there was always another shadow left behind.

I still wrote letters to Furuhashi-sensei. In letter after letter, I still wrote about painting, about the sea, about canned pineapple, about how I had made two friends. One time Nishihara Kashiwa came to return a book for me and accidentally saw the name Furuhashi Renji written on the envelope, and his expression changed at once. Only much later did I learn that it had not been jealousy. It had been fear.

In our final year of high school, he finally stopped me at the amusement park.

It was my birthday. He had bought a strawberry cake and taken me onto a roller coaster. I was so frightened that I clung to his sleeve the whole time, and after we got off, he still did not let go. The sunset shone across his face, and he was so nervous that even his ears were red. He said, "Kiko, I like you. I've liked you for a very, very long time." It was not that my heart failed to stir in that moment. But when I parted my lips, the first thing that came out was something else.

I said, "Nishihara Kashiwa, don't like me."

He stared at me for a long time, then suddenly asked, "Are you planning to go to Tokyo and find Furuhashi-sensei?"

I froze, then asked whether he had been reading my letters. Nishihara Kashiwa did not deny it. He was silent a long time, and then at last told me the truth he had kept hidden for years.

It turned out that many years earlier, Nishihara Haru had loved painting too. She had once been engaged to a young painter. That painter wanted to go to Tokyo and make his way there, and the family would not allow Haru to leave with him. But on the night he departed, she slipped out in secret anyway, intending to rush to the station. She never met him. On the way, however, she ran into a group of men, and after that, something in her broke for good.

That painter was Furuhashi Renji.

And Furuhashi Renji never knew what happened afterward.

Only in that moment did I finally understand why Nishihara Kashiwa's face always looked so terrible whenever Furuhashi-sensei's name came up. I also understood at last that he had not been competing with me. He had been trying with all his strength to stop me from walking toward someone who had already once torn another person's fate apart.

We parted badly that day.

I did not forgive him for reading my letters, and I did not have the courage to keep facing his feelings. I flung all my emotions into painting and exam study, and in the end I was admitted to a university in Tokyo after all. On the day I left, my parents stood on the old platform waving to me and still, by habit, called out my childhood name. With my drawing tube over my shoulder and a glass jar made from a pineapple can in my bag, I boarded the Shinkansen to Tokyo feeling as though I myself were some gust of wind finally breaking free from Sunflower Street.

But once I arrived in Tokyo, I learned that what we call dreams are, very often, only another form of loss.

I searched for the address Furuhashi-sensei had left me and spent a full three hours getting there, only to learn from a shopkeeper nearby that the gallery called Renzhi had closed more than a year earlier and no one knew where the owner had gone. After that, I went back to that neighborhood almost every week, riding the subway over and over, but the phone never rang and the letters never drew any reply. Once, at dusk, I was dozing in the subway when a man beside me carrying a briefcase and talking quietly into a phone turned his face slightly. For one instant, I almost believed it was Furuhashi-sensei. But then the doors opened, the crowd surged, and neither of us looked at the other again.

Only later did I learn from Nishihara Kashiwa, who happened to come to Tokyo, that he too had moved there, studying at a university less than two kilometers from my school. Every weekend, he worked part-time at a bookstore in Oji-cho. We were in the same city, and yet we never met again.

Sometimes I think the cruelest thing between people may not be never meeting at all, but brushing past each other again and again on the same map and never once saying, so you were here too.

Later still, Nishihara Kashiwa sent me a very long email. He wrote, Kiko, I wasn't trying to force you to like me. I was only afraid that you would hand yourself over to the sort of person from whom there is no road back. He also wrote that his sister seemed a little better lately, that sometimes she would speak, and would sit quietly looking through the art books he brought home. At the end of the email, he said nothing more about liking me. He only wrote that he hoped I would keep painting in Tokyo.

I read that message over and over again, and still never replied.

Until the summer of my second year in university, when I returned once to Sunflower Street.

A new gallery had opened at the mouth of the street, and it was still called Renzhi. The owner was an astonishingly beautiful woman in a white dress, sitting behind the counter with a quiet smile. When she saw me, she inclined her head very gently, her eyes as clear as a washed sky. I stood outside for a long time before I finally recognized her.

It was Nishihara Haru.

She had come back at last.

In that instant, I felt that all the letters that had never been delivered, all the words left unsaid, all the promises that had never been fulfilled, had gone past me like sea wind. No one had truly remained where they were. No one could stay forever in the year they were eighteen.

In the end, I still never opened that can of pineapple.

But I finally understood that the person I had once tried with all my strength to chase was only a beam of light I had cast toward the distance in my youth. The one who truly walked beside me down that old street, the one who had looked at tropical fish and the sea with me, was the one who had really passed through my life.