The little counseling clubs in Sapporo always liked to choose playful names to attract people. The one I had just joined had only twelve members and called itself Secret Box. The purpose, as its name suggested, was to make people speak the secrets buried in their hearts and free themselves from the suffering those secrets caused. The organizer, Hazuki, was a young woman from Kansai, just like me. She carried a secret story of her own bound up with her background, and every time a new member joined, she told it again from the beginning. Then, with patient encouragement, she coaxed another story in exchange from whoever was still carrying a burden. That was how I was tricked. After hearing her story, full of tenderness and pain, I offered up my own without much struggle at all. I told them I had a younger uncle only three years older than I was. That was how I began, because even then some part of me was still dodging what mattered most. The real name buried in my heart had been written a thousand times in sleepless nights, each stroke clear and careful, yet I had never once dared speak it aloud in broad daylight. It was not so much that I feared facing the past as that I despised the self I had been then and could not forgive the decision I made in a single instant. Fate, however, is fair. From the moment I chose to betray myself, I have gone on living with shame and unease clutched close against my ribs. My uncle, Mochizuki Akiharu, was my grandfather's late-born son. One afternoon a motorcycle came out of nowhere, struck a man down, and sped away. The blood spread at once beneath the body. If the news reports had not appeared the same night, if my uncle had not run home in terror and collapsed before my grandfather, I might never have connected him with it. Grandfather flew into a rage and beat him, but in the end he could not bear to send his son to the police. A hit-and-run that killed a man meant prison, and he could not bear it. So he used every connection he had to send my uncle far away from our hometown. When I learned what he meant to do, I clenched my fists and told my parents I had seen everything and that I wanted to testify. If I had really gone through with it then, this would never have become the secret that has haunted me. But my parents stopped me, then my grandfather himself begged me, and finally even my own anger gave way. I learned then how hollow the word justice can feel. I was shut up at home while relatives came one after another to lecture me. By the time I nodded and agreed to stay silent, my grandfather, to make sure of it, had already arranged for both my young uncle and me to leave the country. Four years ago we walked out of the airport into a foreign sky, and from that point onward much of my life was simply rewritten by force. I have not gone back once in those four years. I am afraid of the city that taught me what shame is. When I finished, Hazuki only smiled at me, the way I had expected she would, without a trace of sentimental shock. But as everyone else began taking their turn, she stopped me before I left and said, very quietly, "If I'm not mistaken, you didn't finish your story. That uncle of yours isn't really the main character, is he?"
She was right. The true heart of it was another person entirely. His surname was Kitahara. Even now, when I think of him, the first words that come to mind are all the soft ones: kind, gentle, decent, impossibly self-possessed. He came from a poor family and had to apply for school subsidies every year, and yet he never looked ashamed. He carried himself with the calm of a grown man. He was the sort of boy girls naturally liked, because his cleanliness made them want to take care of him. I noticed him in secret at first. I had taken drawing as an elective simply to fill time. One study period, when the classroom had emptied and I stayed behind with my sketchbook, he happened to come in. Seeing my half-finished drawing, he politely asked whether he could look. Then he stayed, watching while I completed it. When I offered him the pencil in return, he hesitated, tried, and in ten minutes produced a sketch that startled me. His copy of my sketch was more fluid than the original, better in proportion and detail than mine. I asked whether he had ever studied art. He said no so many times that I finally laughed and told him he ought to be the one learning properly. "Then teach me," he said. So I did. He became my apprentice. He called me Master. I called him Pigsy. After school we stayed in the classroom together and drew. To keep him from truly going astray, I began studying more seriously myself. He understood everything at a touch. Sometimes he could do beautifully what I still struggled even to demonstrate. The way he bent over a page, his eyes clear and gentle and fearless, was enough to leave a girl dizzy. I began comparing every boy's chin to his and, to my own horror, always deciding his was still the best. He knew, I think, that I watched him too long and too often. Sometimes he would look up at me suddenly and smile, then lower his head and go back to drawing, and that smile made all my secret thoughts feel less like shame and more like something natural. Three months passed. My own drawing improved quickly, and when the teacher praised me, I turned around and praised Kitahara instead. One day, blushing furiously, he handed me a silk handkerchief embroidered with two blue fish. "My mother made it," he said awkwardly. "I keep using your art supplies. I couldn't just keep taking advantage." The excuse was transparent, and I knew it. When I asked why there were two fish, he answered too quickly, "Because you're a Pisces." Then his face reddened still more. I knew then that he had thought carefully about the gift. He only needed some excuse to give it to me. Later he said he had originally wanted his mother to embroider my name, but the two characters had been too difficult, and besides, even if the whole cloth were blue, it still would not look like the sea. "Yuanlan," he said, trying the syllables softly. "It sounds like a wave that got lost on the ocean and drifted too far." The way he spoke my name was so gentle that it seemed to alter it forever. After that, he talked all the time about the picture he wanted to paint one day: the most beautiful sea, with one wave always facing north. He said we would paint many beautiful things and sign them with both our names. At the time I believed every word.
Then came the afternoon when the motorcycle killed a man. Only a few seconds before it happened, Kitahara and I had been comparing notes we had taken from our library books, the evening wind soft, the sunset lovely. Then his father died in the road, hit by my uncle. There was no way out of that story that did not hurt him. No matter whether I stepped forward or stayed where I was, someone would be wounded, and no matter how hard I fought against it, the one finally wounded was always Kitahara. My silence saved my uncle and betrayed Kitahara. Everything after that was force: family pressure, grandfathers' tears, a transfer, a departure, and four years spent making myself into someone who never had to go back. Yet shame kept gnawing all the while, and that was why I told Hazuki only the half of the story that concerned my uncle and not the half that carried Kitahara's name.
Hazuki kept her promise and, in exchange, told me another story. A year earlier she had gone back to the city I had fled. There, by chance, she had ridden a bus called the Wandering Bus and met its young driver. Painted across the side of the bus were two missing-person notices. He had once lost the two people dearest to him, Hazuki said: one could never come back, and one he was still searching for. Because the notices were strange and compelling, she waited until the bus reached the last stop and then went to ask him what exactly he was trying to find. He was silent for a very long time. In the end he only said he did not really know anymore. They spoke a little longer, and when he learned that she had come back from Hokkaido University, he suddenly froze. Then he gave her something. What Hazuki received was a painting. A blue sea, and on it a single wave. She told me that when he handed it over he said nothing, and yet she felt, for no reason she could explain, that she had been entrusted with something heavy. After she returned to Sapporo, a friend was wandering around campus one day when someone nearby casually said my name in Chinese. Hazuki thought at once of that painting. Later, when she was preparing material for the club, she used the painting as the back cover of the flyer and even pinned one copy to the bulletin board at our school. That was how all the stories circled shut. It was because of that painting that I became interested in her club and walked in carrying some vague, impossible expectation. Now the painting sat before me, and Kitahara's voice seemed to sound in my ear again. Yuanlan, Yuanlan, a wave that got lost at sea and drifted too far. One day I will paint the most beautiful sea, with one wave always facing north. One day we will paint beautiful things and sign them together. My tears came without my consent. When I thought of how I had betrayed him, I felt as if a thorn had been driven into my heart. Hazuki patted my shoulder and said, "Yuanlan, it's been another year since I came back and met you. He may still be on that wandering bus, waiting for you. Don't you want to go back and see him?" The word go back filled me with shame. For four years, whenever I even thought of going home, I wanted to slap myself. My family had done everything they could to hide my uncle away. After I left, I heard he dropped out of school and vanished from sight. Kitahara's fate, Kitahara's future, had been overturned by the choice I made in a single instant. How could I possibly still have the face to stand in front of him? But Hazuki only looked at me steadily and said, "If you don't go back, that's a wound that keeps going on for him too. And I don't think you're doing well either. I believe he's already accepted his father's death. What he has not let go of is you, because he knows you are still somewhere in this world, alive. He's still waiting in the place where you left him, still keeping watch over the future you once promised together. You could still give him comfort. You could still give him hope, if you chose to." "And what about the secret?" I asked. "The secret that my uncle killed his father? If I tell him, then there really will be nothing left for him to hope for." Hazuki answered quietly, "He may already know. Or perhaps he simply refuses to drag you into that tragedy. If speaking the secret aloud would only make more people suffer, then perhaps it is better to let it remain unspoken." I sat there with the painting before me and understood at last that some endings do not arrive as answers. Sometimes they arrive as a road waiting to be taken, and all that matters is whether, this time, I can make myself turn back toward it.