Brocade Night, Part I

That autumn was strangely wrong. It was already the end of September, yet the sun still blazed as fiercely as midsummer, especially at noon, when the city streets were flooded with white light and the whole world seemed stuffed full of honking cars and exhausted people. Sakakibara Yuzuha's face had already collapsed into something longer and more miserable than a bitter melon. She let both arms dangle in front of her and bent so low at the waist that she walked like an overacted gorilla. "Will you please pull yourself together?" Erina shouted for the tenth time. "People are staring." Yuzuha groaned. "Don't forget you're the one who dragged me out to buy underwear. What kind of blood-bound sisterhood is this?" Erina drew herself up proudly. Yuzuha straightened just in time to hear the fatal words explode beside her ear in Erina's full bell-metal voice: "Madam! The discount lingerie shop is right ahead! F-cups are rare, so if you want one, run!" Before the last syllable had finished ringing, Yuzuha was already a blur vanishing around the corner. She had long known that heaven had sent Erina into her life as her natural enemy.

Half an hour later, Erina emerged from the sale triumphant with a bag full of F-cup bras and immediately resumed marveling aloud at Yuzuha's chest. "I haven't seen a woman over eighteen still wearing an A-cup in years. You're a miracle." Yuzuha snorted. "What's truly miraculous is a woman with an F-cup being mistaken for a man. Imagine how masculine she'd have to look." Before Erina could retaliate, Yuzuha darted across the street toward a little kiosk to buy cola. In a district this expensive, the survival of such a shabby private cigarette-and-drinks stand already felt miraculous. At that moment its stout proprietress, perhaps one and a half meters tall and one and a half hundred jin wide, was smiling sweetly at a customer in dark sunglasses and a pale gray shirt. He looked lean, elegant, and self-contained, the sort of man whom, as Erina liked to say, one recognized as aristocratic even before seeing his face. And yet all he wanted was a two-yen bottle of water. He paid with a hundred, drank, accepted the change without looking, and was about to slip it into his wallet when Yuzuha blurted, "Isn't that bill fake?" The words were out before she could stop them. The shopkeeper's face transformed from oily courtesy to battle fury in half a second. The man in the sunglasses checked more carefully and discovered that not only the fifty but also the four tens were counterfeit. Before he could say much more, Erina had already planted herself like a warrior-goddess and launched into an unbelievable torrent of abuse. For a full ten minutes she stood there in a tea-kettle pose and verbally flayed the woman alive, inventing a whole criminal family of brothers with addictions, bombs, and grudges until at last the shopkeeper collapsed into coughing defeat and handed back ninety-eight yen in real cash with both hands. The man accepted the money, said only one clipped "Thanks," and walked off without another glance. Only afterward, when he was already almost out of sight, did Yuzuha finally gasp, "That was Utsugi Hikaru." Erina's eyes nearly fell out. Utsugi Hikaru, the famous director Yuzuha had followed for years in film magazines, the man who spoke in one word where others used ten. "Then what are we waiting for?" Erina cried. "After him!"

They chased him down the street and found him entering a large Western restaurant. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows they quickly saw he was meeting someone. The person across from him made them both stop dead. It was their school chairman, Tsukishima Seiji. There was no way to follow openly now, and no chance they would give up, so they sneaked into the restaurant and ended up hiding beside the women's restroom to think. Erina, hopelessly impressed by the expensive perfume in the air, began musing about becoming a famous director just so she could eat in such places and use such fragrant bathrooms every day. When the coast seemed clear, the two slipped out. At the corner that led back toward the dining room, Yuzuha suddenly froze and dragged Erina behind a giant statue. Voices were coming from just around the bend. One was angry and young. The other older and deeply familiar from school assemblies. "How do you explain this? I found Shirakawa Ran's handbag in your car." It was Tsukishima Hikaru, the chairman's elder son. Seiji's answer came back hard and low. "Mind your own business. If you would stop making trouble and disgracing me, I'd already be grateful." Then Hikaru's voice rose, disbelief turning into fury. "You're really with her? Do you realize she used to be my girlfriend? Have you no shame at all?" There was the heavy sound of one of them grabbing the other. Then Hikaru spat, "So Mother was right. You really are disgusting." A slap cracked through the corridor. Seiji shouted that if he divorced Hikaru's mother, it would be Hikaru's fault. In answer came a laugh so full of pain it made Yuzuha's skin crawl. "This is the love you've been teaching me about?" Then footsteps, retreating fast. A few seconds later Seiji walked slowly back toward the dining room. Through the statue's shadow Yuzuha saw him lift the same hand that had struck his son and rub his own face with it before sitting down again opposite Utsugi Hikaru and saying only, "Sorry." Utsugi removed his sunglasses, narrowed his eyes after the departing figure of Tsukishima Hikaru, and then said coolly, "Let's continue."

Yuzuha left Erina behind in the restaurant and went after Tsukishima Hikaru. She didn't even know why. Perhaps because she had just overheard the collapse of a family everyone treated like a fairy tale. Perhaps because his devastated question about love had opened some window inside her, and what lay beyond it was not sunlight but rain, rot, and a stench she remembered too well. His words kept echoing in her mind: This is the love you've been teaching me about? They struck some hidden place in her memory so hard that her skull began to pulse. The world tilted. Though it was still noon and the sun was bright, a wash of cold moved through her body. She bit down and tried to endure it. Then at last she cried out and dropped to the ground, clutching her head. Feet went on passing all around her, shoes raising little clouds of dust. When you stand in a shaft of sunlight and see dust drifting through it with every breath you take, can you begin to suffocate on the sight alone? That was what it felt like. Dust. Noise. Heat. And then, without warning, memory split open.

She was fourteen again. Her parents were arguing in the house, louder and sharper than she had ever heard them before. Her mother kept insisting on divorce. Her father, frantic and cornered, shoved her aside. Yuzuha stood there frozen, hearing words she barely understood and yet understanding everything. The report card in her hand, with its perfect first-place score, fluttered against her leg like a trapped white bird. Then she was running, crying, shouting "Don't separate! Don't separate!" Their house stood on an old street where heavy trucks rolled through at night carrying dirt and rubble, but her mother always said those drivers were poor working people and it was only they, not the family, who truly had to lose sleep. Her mother had always been gentle like that. Yuzuha ran out into the street blind with tears. Neighbors shouted. Her father chased after her. An enormous truck came on. She heard nothing. She ran straight into it. The brakes screamed. The report card floated from her hand, slow and white in the dust, and dropped into a puddle where it blurred into nothing.

When she woke in the hospital, both her parents were there, pressed shoulder to shoulder beside her bed, their faces lined with worry and looking so close that for a while she thought the whole thing must have been a nightmare. From that day on, neither of them ever mentioned divorce again. Her father's lover never appeared. Her mother remained kind, her father's awful jokes continued, and life rearranged itself as if the crack had never opened. Only one thing changed. Yuzuha never again ranked first in her grade. She did not even rank in the first hundred. Studying became painful. She got headaches so fierce they made her vomit. Yet the father who had once glared if her marks fell even a little never scolded her again. If anything, he became almost humbly careful with her, and that hurt more. It took her three years to piece herself back together after that day. Some things, though, never returned. Her godlike trust in her father. Her pure belief in love. She buried all of it as deeply as she could. Sometimes she even told herself that perhaps by nearly dying, she had somehow mended the disaster in her parents' marriage. If that were true, then maybe it had been worth it. But hearing Tsukishima Hikaru's grief had dragged all of that broken old weight back into the open.

So when she finally caught up to him and confessed that she had overheard the fight, it was less boldness than compulsion. He did not throw her away. Instead he lowered his eyes and began to talk, perhaps because the damage had already been done and he could no longer bear the silence. At the entrance ceremony, he said, he had gotten into a fight because someone claimed to have seen Shirakawa Ran in his father's car. He had refused to believe it. Then today he found her handbag there with the small things he had once given her still inside. He was not pretending to be deeply in love with Ran anymore, he said, but the whole thing was grotesque beyond bearing. His father and mother had been held up for years as the model of loyalty, the story of a woman who chose a man when he had nothing and stayed beside him until he had everything. If that wasn't real love, then what was? And if their love had already rotted, why did they still stand in public and act like a perfect family? His voice finally broke on the question that mattered most to him. His father had gotten everything he wanted. What had his mother gotten? What happened to the years she had given him? He bent over and wept. Yuzuha could not stop her own tears from rising. From the outside Tsukishima Hikaru looked like a boy who had been born with everything. But was he happy? Was he whole? Was anyone seeing the softness and confusion hidden inside him? She reached out impulsively and took both his hands in hers. They were ice-cold. "Tsukishima Hikaru," she said with all the steadiness she could gather, "no matter how small and ordinary I may be, please let me be your real friend." She smiled as she said it, white teeth showing, clear eyes shining behind her glasses. It was not much. But it was what she had.

That night, well past visiting hours, two figures appeared in the VIP corridor of Central Hospital. One was Tsukishima Seiji in a tailored suit. The other was the delicate, pretty Shirakawa Ran. Before entering the elevator she had murmured that she only wanted to steal one glance at his son because his son was part of him, and she cared because she cared for him. Seiji had nearly melted under the sweetness of it. He had been shaken enough when he learned she was once his son's girlfriend, but her tears were so clear, her voice so soft, her explanation so irresistible: she had mistaken the son for the father only because she thought she could never reach the father, and once she understood whom she truly loved, she could no longer retreat. How could he blame her for loving him? They entered the dim room where his younger son Tsukishima Seiya lay sleeping, beautiful and fragile as a shut white flower beneath the small orange bedside lamp. Seiji took his son's hand and wept. This child was the son he loved most, the one in whom all his pride had settled, and yet now he lay helpless, motionless, more like a newborn than a young man. Shirakawa Ran watched the sleeping boy with wide eyes. It was the first time she had seen him in person. He was more beautiful than in photographs. If he ever opened his eyes, she thought with a jolt, perhaps even she would be ashamed. Luckily, he seemed likely to sleep forever. The doctors said his chance of waking was very small. The thought loosened something inside her. At the same time, two tears slid down her cheeks. "How pitiful," she whispered. Seiji's heart softened all over again. He pulled her into his arms.

Then he felt her body go rigid. In the doorway stood Oohara Nishiki, his wife, pale as if she had risen from underground. She stared at the arms in which he held Shirakawa Ran and looked as though her eyes might spit poison. Slowly she stepped inside. Seiji's palms turned cold. He had imagined facing his wife many times, but now that she was really here, all his courage collapsed into guilt. "I thought you'd gone home," he said. Shirakawa Ran gave a little scream and tried to hide behind him. Nishiki gave her no time. With a shriek of hatred she lunged forward, seized Ran by the hair, and tore out a whole fistful. Ran's scream tore through the ward. At the same moment Seiji struck Nishiki across the face so hard that the smaller woman staggered and fell. "You're the whore!" he shouted. The hospital was thrown into uproar. Doctors, guards, nurses, everyone came running. Ran howled in Seiji's arms. Nishiki screamed from the floor. Seiji roared back. In the midst of the chaos, no one noticed the text message still glowing in Nishiki's handbag: I'm at the hospital with him, looking at your son. Come if you dare. Curled against Seiji and crying into his chest, Ran let the faintest smile rise at the corner of her mouth. And on the bed, Tsukishima Seiya's eyelashes trembled. His eyes opened by the width of a blade. In the narrow dark gleam behind them was something almost inhuman.