Brocade Night

She had never thought there was anything wrong with wearing glasses, but one day Onda Kaori said offhandedly, "What guy likes a girl in frames these days?" and for some reason the sentence pierced straight through her. After that, Sakakibara Yuzuha made up her mind to trade her glasses for contact lenses. Even after putting in the popular enlarging lenses everyone called beauty contacts, she did not feel especially changed herself, but everyone around her said she looked much prettier, and naturally her mood lifted. It was only a little disappointing that Shiraishi Ame did not praise her. Perhaps he had been too busy these last few days, busy enough that whenever he saw her he said nothing beyond a few dry work instructions. It left her low-spirited, and also secretly worried that he was working himself too hard. The thought unsettled her. That night, after fumbling forever and still failing to remove one of the lenses, she gave up. Onda Kaori often left hers in for a week at a time, and nothing terrible happened, so surely one night would not matter. Before climbing into bed, Yuzuha called softly for Erina, but there was no answer. Everyone in the room must already have been asleep. Maybe she had simply come back too late. Lying there, tossing and turning, she remembered Erina saying by accident that morning, "Lately 'Shiraishi Ame' seems to have become your new catchphrase." Yuzuha touched her own heated cheeks. Was what she felt really that obvious?

The next day was the final day of the arts festival, and by eleven in the morning Sakakibara Yuzuha, normally the liveliest person in sight, still had not appeared. Her absence threw all the little unnoticed jobs into chaos. Nami and the other volunteers ran around putting out fires, but danger kept popping up everywhere. Furious, Shiraishi Ame found a gap in his schedule and went straight to Yuzuha's class, only to learn from Onda Kaori that she had been taken to the hospital that morning with agonizing pain in her eye. Apparently she'd gone teary-eyed and clung to the taxi door saying she could endure it, until Erina subdued her with a Pegasus Meteor Fist. For reasons he could not quite explain, hearing that did not fan his anger at all. Instead it left him with a thin line of unease tugging at his heart the rest of the day. The festival finally ended in noise and celebration, and Utsugi Hikaru deliberately refused to announce the cast for Brocade Night 2 on the spot, leaving behind a maddening suspense. That night, after everything was cleared away and Shiraishi Ame locked the student council office, he found the elevator had shut down early and had no choice but to take the stairs. At the first landing he nearly jumped out of his skin. Someone was standing there in the dark. He called out, and the answer came back at once. The voice sounded familiar. When he moved closer, he saw that it was Yuzuha, the very same Yuzuha who had been in hospital all day. Even under the dim light he could see how swollen her eye still was. Her back was pressed stiffly to the wall, her fingers laced tightly together as though she wanted to say something but did not dare. Strangely, seeing her there made him relax. He reached out and patted her shoulder. "Why are you here? Your eye isn't better yet, is it? Why aren't you in hospital?" The more he asked, the lower she dropped her head. Finally she managed, "I spent the whole day on an IV. The inflammation's gone down. I'll go back tomorrow. I'm sorry. I couldn't hold out to the end." She had slipped away from Erina's close surveillance after returning from hospital just to come apologize to him. Shiraishi Ame felt moved. Compared with the students who volunteered only to collect a good evaluation, Yuzuha's seriousness and stubbornness stood out like a landscape all its own. In four years at this brilliant school, he had seen countless pretty girls, but girls as clear as spring water and as tenacious as wild grass were still new to him. Somewhere along the way, he had begun to feel that Yuzuha was different, different in a way that made her impossible not to think about.

He motioned for her to come downstairs with him. Their footsteps echoed through the long stairwell like two hearts beating. "Don't think about it like that," he said softly. "You've already done very well. When I heard you were sick today, I wanted to go see you immediately, but I really couldn't get away." Yuzuha widened her eyes. "You're not going to scold me?" The moment she did, pain from her eye stabbed through her again and she stumbled. Shiraishi Ame caught her by the hand. Her hand was icy. His was burning. Both of them grew embarrassed at once and pulled away. "Do I really look that overbearing?" he asked quietly, startled that this was the image she'd carried of him. Yuzuha shook her head, only to wobble again. With a sigh, he took her hand and laid it against his own sleeve. "Hold on to me." His voice was gentle and left no room for argument. She did as she was told, afraid the pounding of her heart might betray her if she refused. After that, they said almost nothing. There was only the sound of their breathing between them. The staircase felt at once impossibly long and absurdly short. By the time they stepped out on the first floor, both of them let out a long breath. Shiraishi Ame walked her all the way back to the dormitory. The moonlight was bright, and they each kept to their own side of the road, as if deliberately avoiding the awkwardness of what had happened on the stairs. He asked about her eye. She explained that she had slept in her contacts the night before and probably got unclean water in them while bathing too; by morning her left eye hurt as though pierced with needles, red and streaming tears. The doctor said it was extremely dangerous. If the contact lens stayed in too long, even the cornea could be injured, so they removed it and put her on anti-inflammatory drips. "Weren't you wearing glasses before?" he asked. "Why switch to beauty contacts?" Yuzuha flushed, stammered for a while, and finally admitted, "They said no boy would ever like a girl in glasses." Shiraishi Ame laughed in genuine surprise. "You're really honest." Only then did she realize they had reached the dorm. Humiliated, she turned to flee inside. "Wait." He caught up in two strides. When Yuzuha turned, she nearly ran into him. Without any glasses on, the moonlight looked unusually blurred to her that night, and therefore unusually intimate. She did not know where to put herself. Shiraishi Ame reached out, gently plucked a fallen leaf from her hair, and said, in a low voice, "Don't wear beauty contacts anymore. You were fine the way you were before." Yuzuha sprang back from him as if she had been shocked and fled all the way up to the fourth-floor landing, where she stopped and bent double, gasping. Through the stairwell window she watched him from above. He did not leave immediately. He stood there with his head slightly bowed for a full two minutes until the curious dorm matron finally came out to investigate the gossip surrounding the school's famous good boy. Only then did he come to himself and walk away. His figure retreating under the moon looked so tall and clean. Since when had he raised such a storm inside her? Could she dare imagine that she was not the only one caught in it, that if only the paper-thin window between them were torn open, they might be in love with each other? The thought made her shy and reckless at once. Even the pain in her eye had disappeared.

Elsewhere in the same city, rain had begun to fall outside Shirakawa Ran's window. The telephone rang suddenly and startled her so badly that every hair on her body stood on end. "Seiya? Seiya, what's wrong?" The first thought in her mind was that something had happened to him. These past few days he had not appeared at any of their usual meeting places, always claiming illness, and that alone had already filled her with unease. Now he was calling her in the middle of the night for the first time ever. "Ran. It's me." Tsukishima Seiya's voice came over the line, weary and heavy with sadness. "What happened to you?" she asked, suddenly aware of what helpless concern really felt like. "I... I had another dream just now." His voice steadied somewhat, but the sadness deepened. "Dream?" she echoed. "Lately I keep dreaming of her. She sits by my bed and talks to me. She kept me company so much while I was unconscious, and yet I forgot her. It hurts." Ran understood most of it at once. "You dreamed of that girl again." He gave a soft sound of assent. "I'm sorry, Ran. The closer I get to you, the more I feel I'm betraying her. I keep asking my mother and my brother about her, but they insist no such person ever existed, that she was only my imagination. I really feel useless." Ran gave a small cry. She had not imagined Seiya could be so hopelessly devoted to the girl from his dreams. Had she, while he lay unconscious, really left such a deep imprint on him? Then again, perhaps what people receive at their weakest is always what they hold dearest afterward. If so, wasn't all of this arranged by heaven? Wasn't she fated to receive this beautiful love? Why should she keep stepping away from it? She remembered the matter she had been turning over in her heart night after night and finally made up her mind. "Xiao Xing, there's something I want to tell you. Something I've hidden from you for a long time." She slowed her voice carefully, trying to steady herself. "When we met by the river, that wasn't the first time I'd seen you. Before that, we'd met many times. You just didn't know it. The girl you're talking about... it was me." Silence fell at the other end. Ran looked up at the blurred world beyond her rain-streaked window and knew he would struggle to believe her. He would think she was lying, or comforting him, or both. So she pressed on. "If you don't believe me, I can take you to the ninth floor of the Central Hospital and you can ask Head Nurse Peng. She's my cousin. I went to see her there once by chance. Your room door was open. You were lying there all alone. I don't know why, but suddenly you looked terribly lonely to me, and I just wanted to go in and talk to you." The breathing on the other end changed. It quickened slightly. He was wavering. Ran pressed the phone more tightly against her face. She had been rehearsing these explanations for days. She had really gone to Head Nurse Peng to ask for help. Whether Seiya believed her or not would decide whether her future would be light or dark. "After that... I went to see you whenever your family wasn't around. You were always asleep. Your family was hardly ever there..." She added the details in a rush, but the unease inside her only grew. Her voice thinned. Still he did not answer. Her confession broke under the weight of her own nerves and turned into silent sobbing. "You... you don't believe me," she whispered, perhaps to herself, perhaps to him. It seemed to take an entire century before Tsukishima Seiya finally spoke. "Could you come out now? To the place we always meet?" he asked in a low voice. "I want to see you."

They sat side by side on a bench by the river. The rain had stopped, but the bench was still wet, so Seiya took off his coat and spread it there for her. It was already early winter. Their breath drifted white in the air. Ran looked at him sitting there in only a sweater and felt an ache of concern, yet he said nothing, and she did not dare move any closer. That was when she realized how humble it could be to want to give warmth to someone else. In love, if he did not ask, you did not dare offer. She kept her head down so he would not see her grief. Tsukishima Seiya sat silent for a long time. Then he sighed softly. When he spoke, his voice was a little lower than usual but still clean and clear, and the subject he chose had nothing to do with what she had expected. "When I was very little, I was a very, very good child." He said he learned piano quickly, cooked dishes that were beautiful as well as delicious, knew how to paint, never dirtied his clothes, never did anything dangerous. He half closed his long eyes as if sinking into memory. "Every child wants adults to notice and praise him. But once I became that good, I found adults only treated me like a perfect doll. They'd pass by, pat my head, and move on. Most of their attention went to my older brother." Ran knew he meant Tsukishima Gekko, and the knowledge made her heart jolt coldly. Yet Seiya did not notice. He was speaking wholly of his own story. "My brother was the opposite of me. He was mischievous. He hated doing anything our parents wanted. He did whatever he liked. Children his own age naturally adored him, but even adults paid him more attention, because they were always worried about him. They were forever circling around him. They never had to worry about me. No matter when they looked back, I would still be exactly where I was supposed to be. Little by little, I really did turn into a doll." He took a deep breath and let it out, white in the night. "Who cares what a doll thinks? The doll was disappointed. All his effort had earned him something he never wanted. That's when he started wishing that one day there would be someone who looked only at him, listened only to him, cared only about what he was thinking." Ran's eyes burned. She had never known that Seiya carried sadness like this. Everyone saw him as heaven's own favorite, but who had ever cared about what he felt? What they cared about was the assurance and glory he gave them. Seiya breathed in once more, then out, and as the white mist of his breath dissolved into the air, his face softened into a smile as warm and tender as a flower opening in spring. He turned fully toward Ran. Before she could react, he opened his arms and drew her gently into them. His sweater was cold, but his hands were steady and strong. Then his chilly lips brushed along the back of her neck, landed on her forehead, drifted down over the bridge of her nose, and finally his forehead came to rest against hers. He never kissed her mouth, and yet this was still the first kiss he had ever given her. It felt like being brought back from the dead. His breath hovered at her lips. His voice was like heaven to her. "Ran, I always hoped the girl from my dream was you. Thank God she really is." Her legs nearly gave way. All the strength she had been using to hold herself together vanished, and she wept wildly in his arms, almost fainting from it. "Do you really love me? Are you sure?" she kept asking over and over through tears. "I love you," Seiya answered. Even if she had asked a hundred times, his answer would still have come without hesitation, gentle and certain enough to calm the heart. It was the only time in her life that she ever truly received those three words from a man. By then she had already walked through too much mud to think herself worthy of them, and yet she desired them with the greed of a person drinking poison. She did not know that every declaration of love Seiya gave her in that moment would one day come back as a blade pressed against her, one cut after another, claiming its debt from her body and heart. If she had known, would she still have walked willingly into that field of knives? Life grants no such ifs. "Do you love me?" he asked. "I do. I could die for you," she murmured, nestling into him in a daze. She could not see his smile then, blooming in the freezing dark like a red lotus from the far shore, beautiful enough to look almost demonic.

Tsukishima Seiji could not understand why Shirakawa Ran had insisted on meeting him in broad daylight, but in the end he gave in. The truth was that he adored the little enchantress. She was a second spring in his life, the proof that he was still a man with charm left in him. About a year earlier, he had accidentally snagged a girl's skirt while parking. She fell, he was alarmed, and afterward he learned she was a student at his own school. The instant she recognized him, her face had turned red as an apple. That shy, innocent look had moved him against his will. She had asked for his business card, but he had principles then. In recent years he had played the field, yes, but never in his own backyard. He valued his reputation, his standing, everything he had worked so hard to build. So even though it was plain the girl had feelings for him, he did not dwell on it. Yet this girl, Shirakawa Ran, turned out to be unlike any other. She could spend hours waiting along a road she knew he had to take, only to panic and hide the instant his car appeared. She once pretended to be running student-council errands just to slip into his office and leave behind cakes she had made herself, one with a clumsy little heart on top. Most astonishing of all, when he showed the slightest sign of catching a cold, she blocked his car like a child and insisted he take medicine. At first he found it novel. Later he found it troublesome. Once, unable to bear it any longer, he got out of the car and shouted at her. She ran off crying, leaving her diary behind in the bag she dropped. Some devil made him pick it up and read it. The effect on him was like spring rain falling on a dead tree and forcing it to burst into flower. He had never thought he might feel such joy again in this lifetime. It seemed like a gift from God. What he held in his hands was two entire years of Shirakawa Ran's love diary. She had loved him from the first day she arrived at the school. She knew there was an enormous gulf between them, yet she could not control herself and only let that love torment her in silence. He saw how pure and wholehearted it was, how it was the adoration of a young girl for a real man, how she had laid the finest years of her youth at the feet of her longing. The part that shook him most was the page where she admitted that, after realizing she had no hope with him, she had deliberately gone to his son Tsukishima Gekko and become his girlfriend instead. He knew Gekko's nature: a new girlfriend every month, no girl leaving so much as a clear face in his memory. Never in his wildest dreams had Seiji imagined that one of those girls had chosen Gekko only because she loved him, the father, and wanted a substitute. Then, very quickly, she discovered that a son could never replace the man she truly loved. She had written in her diary: I was wrong. A father and a son can be worlds apart. The man I love is mature, wise, sensual, full of the irresistible charm of a real man. Tsukishima Gekko is only a child. What praise could possibly move a man more than that, a man who had thought life was already drawing toward its close? Tsukishima Seiji's heart burned like an old house on fire. He kept telling himself he only wanted to see her, only to lead her back from the wrong road. But when he found himself alone with her and studied her carefully for the first time, her pretty face wet with tears, he discovered that he himself had become a boy. When Shirakawa Ran threw herself into his arms, he did not reject her. On the contrary, with her he proved to himself that he was indeed still a mature man, his charm stronger than any young boy's. The days that followed were full of worry, yes, but she was low-key and sensible, and except for the time she asked him for a small apartment, which made him hesitate, she never did anything he disliked. For her, he even gave up all the other women in his life. She was his little demon. The one thing that had shaken him was Seiya's sudden return and his questions about Ran. Before Seiya left the country, Seiji had made promises he had not forgotten, and if he were honest, there were times he truly feared his younger son. Arranging that little apartment for Ran had definitely broken their agreement. He did not really believe Seiya would turn against him over something so small, but he still hesitated. Then Seiya's accident struck him hard, and in that moment of shock and need, Ran's tenderness pulled him closer to her than before. When Seiya woke and seemed to have forgotten everything, never once mentioning what he had said online before the accident, Seiji quietly relaxed. If life went on like that, wife, lover, sons, all in balance, it might still have been a comfortable arrangement. Only now Oohara Jin no longer seemed quite the flawless wife she once had been.

Thinking this, he looked up and saw Oohara Jin sitting elegantly on the white sofa in the private room where he and Shirakawa Ran were meant to meet. She seemed as startled to see him as he was to see her, and husband and wife both began calculating silently at once. Then a light laugh came from behind him. Shirakawa Ran appeared in the doorway, radiant, smiling at the pair of them. "Sit down, both of you. I'm the one who's late." The atmosphere in the room turned strange at once. Outside, the waiter quietly pulled the door shut, judging by long experience that something interesting was about to happen. Ran sat up straight across from the husband and wife, who had each taken opposite ends of the long sofa, the distance between them wider than the room required. Both had been summoned separately by Ran, and even a man as experienced as Tsukishima Seiji could not guess what game his little mistress meant to play, so he settled in to watch. Ran smiled sweetly at Oohara Jin. "I asked you here today because I need a favor." She said the words of someone asking for help, but the tone was all certainty, nothing submissive about it. Seiji frowned. "Ran, have you had enough of this?" he said, annoyed now in earnest. Ran did not surrender. She only turned her smile on him for an instant and then looked back at Jin. "Before, I promised that if you took the initiative and divorced the chairman, I wouldn't tell him about that matter. But I've changed my mind. You and the chairman have been through many years of hardship together. I think he ought to share the pressure that story will bring. So I've decided to tell him the whole tale." Oohara Jin shot to her feet. In one instant she lost all composure. Her face went paper-white. She shook so hard she could barely control her own body. "You... you can't. You promised. I'll divorce him. I swear I will. We can go do the paperwork today, right now." She whirled and lunged toward Seiji, colliding with the tea table so hard that hot water sloshed over the back of her hand. She did not even feel it. "We'll get divorced today. Today." Ran shook her head. "It won't help. Whether you divorce him or not, I am still going to tell this story. Because after he hears it, I need the chairman to do me a favor." Ran's deliberate mystery and Oohara Jin's near-hysteria finally pushed Seiji past the edge. He shoved Jin back down onto the sofa, pinning her there with one hand, then turned on Ran. "What kind of game are you two playing? Speak clearly. All of it." Then, to Jin, he said, "If this is really the reason you're suddenly willing to divorce me, then I need to hear it even more. You know my temper. Let's spare ourselves the struggle." His forceful tone brought instant silence. After a long while, two tears slipped out from the corners of Oohara Jin's tightly shut eyes and ran down her face, pale as snow. She knew her nightmare of many years was finally about to become real. Ran looked at them both coldly and began to speak, aware that every sentence from now on mattered. "The story I'm about to tell may sound familiar," she said. "But while I'm telling it, no questions. Let me finish. Twenty years ago, the romance between the young star Oohara Jin and the teacher Tsukishima Seiji was a sensation. What no one knew was that hidden inside that marriage was a staggering conspiracy."

Oohara Jin's aunt had been the most famous lawyer in the city. Because she had fallen out with Jin's father, she had been estranged from the family for years, and very few people knew the two women were related. Yet the aunt adored Jin, and Jin often saw her in secret. That was the year Jin fell in love with poor young Tsukishima Seiji. She spent a long time full of anxiety about the future and often thought of giving up a love that seemed to have no prospects at all. But just then her aunt handed her a tremendous secret, a secret that changed the entire course of her life with Seiji. Tsukishima Seiji, poor as he was, had a distant uncle who was extremely wealthy, had never married, and had no children. The old man's temper was famously strange. He had no dealings with the Tsukishima family at all. Yet after Seiji's parents died, that uncle quietly left all his property to the nephew he had never even bothered to know. The lawyer handling the will was Oohara Jin's aunt. And when she learned what her favorite niece was suffering over, she broke professional ethics and told Jin everything. That secret meant only one thing: Tsukishima Seiji, who at present possessed nothing, would become a wealthy new elite a few years down the line, though he himself knew nothing of it. Jin instantly saw the shape of her life. She ignored the violent objections of her parents, ignored the puzzled speculation of everyone around her, and walked into marriage with Tsukishima Seiji, turning their union into a celebrated love match. But only she and her aunt knew what truly lay beneath it. She thought that if she could only endure a few years of hardship, the reward would be a perfect marriage with love and money both. Then, two years later, something happened that nearly drove her mad. As I said, Seiji's distant uncle had never married and had a bizarre temper, which was why he had done something as strange as leaving his whole estate to a nephew he had never even known. What Jin never dreamed of was that the old man could reverse himself on a whim, like a child changing the rules of a game. Two years later he returned to her aunt and changed the will again, revising the entire estate from a gift to his nephew into a charitable foundation. Everything should be clear now. Tsukishima Seiji believed that the woman sharing his poverty had chosen him out of love alone. In reality, Oohara Jin had calculated from the beginning and intended to have both love and fortune. After enduring two years of hardship, she suddenly learned that hardship might last her whole life. To leave behind a dazzling star's life only to become an aging wife in permanent poverty? Of course she went mad. And in that madness, she did something. Eighteen years ago, on the afternoon of May fifteenth, she went to the mouth of a street called Paulownia Street. Over the previous two years she had learned every detail about Seiji's distant uncle, memorized his car, his face, everything. Her aunt had notified her that he would be going to the law office that day to alter the will, and because the main road was under repair, the only possible route was through that small street. She meant to stop him there and beg him to reconsider. Perhaps at first she intended only to plead. But once she identified herself and stated her request, the old man, true to his vicious temper, flew into a rage. He cursed the lawyer for her immorality and raised his cane to strike her. Just when she thought all hope was lost, the cane slipped from his hand. The old man crumpled against the car door, his face twisting as his body seized with pain. She remembered at once what she had learned in her own investigations: he had a severe heart condition. She had always believed he did not have long to live. She had only never imagined it would happen now, at exactly this moment. She saw the pain of his seizure plainly. Of course she was frightened. And yet, as she trembled and reached into his coat for the emergency medicine he carried, a single thought flashed through her mind: if the old man died right there, he would never reach the lawyer's office, and he would never be able to change the will that meant everything to her life...