Stars in the Deep Sea, Part V

At the bottom of that deep, dark sea, I hold my breath. If memory shines like a sky full of stars, then the brightest one is always you. Whenever I close my eyes and summon back your face, your voice, your smile, you become the only light in my endless solitary night, the single star above a boundless ocean. People always say that if you truly want to forget someone, you should fill your life with so many things that there is no room left to think of them. I don't know whether that's really true, but in my final year of high school I decided to test it as if a dead horse might somehow be made to live. What else was I supposed to do if I wanted to stop thinking about him? So for that whole year I pushed myself like a madwoman. History, politics, geography, English, classical Chinese, nothing was allowed to defeat me. Part of it was for him. Another part, maybe the bigger part, was for my mother. I wanted her to understand that her daughter was not the useless creature the world kept insisting she was.

I still remember one of the first real conversations I ever had with Morikawa Kana. We had climbed onto the roof of an old house and were sitting on the red tiles eating braised pig's ears, chicken feet, and drinking Sprite. The roof was covered in dust and moss. We couldn't smoke yet. We only knew how to sit there and talk about our families. I asked Kana whether her father really always brought different women home. She answered while gnawing on a chicken foot that it was hardly better at her mother's place, where different men kept appearing instead. At least, she added coolly, her father's money was better. Then she suddenly asked me where my own father had gone all these years. I had no answer. I had grown up with almost no idea what the word father meant. Other children had fathers who fetched them in the rain and bought them presents on Children's Day. I had none of that. It had always been my mother and me. I never brought up the missing half of the family because there was no use making us both unhappy. Kana, realizing she had struck something softer than she expected, turned from self-pity to awkward sympathy so quickly it was almost funny. "Then you'd better treat your mother well," she said. I nodded. Of course. But then I met Kamiya Asato, and I lost my mind. I threw my studies, my life, my common sense, all of it into chaos. Looking back, I should probably have disemboweled myself in apology.

Then there was that morning not long after, when my mother got up as usual and made me breakfast. A huge bowl of noodles. Two fried eggs on top. All my life I had envied people whose mothers could shape eggs into hearts. Once, in my ignorance, I had even complained that my mother's cooking wasn't delicate enough. She had rounded on me instantly and shouted, "Then go find your own father and ask him to fry them into little hearts for you." After that I never mentioned it again. But that day, as I sat down half asleep, I found two unmistakable heart-shaped eggs glowing on my noodles. I was so shocked that for one absurd second I thought perhaps my mother had fallen in love. She explained in the same calm tone she used for everything that she'd seen a special pan in the supermarket, remembered I had once wanted heart-shaped eggs, and bought it. She said it was her first try, so I was not to complain if they were clumsy. I bent over the bowl and ate in silence because I was afraid that if I opened my mouth, I would do something humiliating like cry. Right there, between those cheap noodles and those lopsided eggs, I told myself that if I did not start fighting for my life now, then I truly deserved to be called a bastard.

Two months before the entrance exams, without telling a soul, I skipped school for two days and secretly went to Kobe to see Kamiya Asato one last time. Not even Kana knew. I turned off my phone, slung on a bag, and got on a night train. The whole journey felt impossible to describe. In the dark carriage, under a dim white bulb, my own face in the window looked bleached and ghostly. At the smoking area I wrote his name with my finger in the fogged glass and thought that if someone had taken a photograph of me just then, it would have looked unbearably literary. I never forgot that feeling: sorrowful, hopeless, repressed, still unwilling to stop loving. I obeyed his old words and did not appear before him. Instead, I hid near his student apartment and watched him for two days. On the second evening, I got back on the train to Osaka. Before boarding, I bought a bunch of zinnias from a roadside florist and told myself I had finally seen enough to let him go. The cruelest part was that the person beside him was not even Shiraishi Yuzu. After trampling my pure first love, the two of them had not even gone on to some vulgar idol-drama happiness together. I slashed the inside of my arm lightly with the little knife I carried for protection and stared at the blood, asking whether the body could ever distract the heart. The next morning I left the zinnias beneath a bus-stop sign and thought of their flower-language: forever lost, forever loved. It felt melodramatic, ridiculous, and still entirely true.

On my eighteenth birthday I walked into the university entrance examination hall. Before that, our teacher had stood in front of the class and said with false lightness that some students should just accept their level, and if they couldn't get the scores then they should either go abroad if their families had money or go out and work if they didn't. Her eyes were pointed right at me when she said it, as if she hoped shame might finally force tears out of me. Unfortunately for her, I was made of tougher things than that. Once, shortly before the exam, I had buried myself under a quilt in summer and cried until I could barely breathe. My mother, seeing me in that state, thought my old drug problems had somehow come back and nearly fainted. When I finally explained I was terrified of failing, she replied in her practical way that if I truly couldn't get into university, then perhaps I could at least wash feet at a massage parlor. There are times when a mother's honesty feels exactly like salt in a fresh wound. I stopped talking, and instead I made myself one promise: even if it killed me, I was not going to become a foot-bath girl. When D University's acceptance letter finally landed in my hands, it felt like the cleanest slap I had ever delivered to the faces of everyone who thought I would end up "out in society" in the worst sense of the phrase. All summer I wanted to pin it to my forehead and walk through the streets like that.

While I was winning admission, Kana was having a full-scale existential crisis about money. She finished vocational school and bounced from job to job, quitting bar promotion because men took advantage of the dark and touched her, failing at fast food because habits learned in noodle shops die hard, and eventually ending up with the same result every time: either she fired the world or the world fired her. When she collapsed dramatically and asked where in this vast earth there could possibly be a place for her, I suggested she try the temple at Shitennoji and see whether enlightenment was hiring. To my delight and horror, she took the idea seriously enough that we ended up there together. We were chased out by an elderly nun for sitting on a bench in temple grounds gnawing on a braised pig trotter like two starving spirits. Later, outside, we noticed a black Audi pull away. Inside sat a bald man and a middle-aged woman I vaguely recognized from a much uglier past. "Still messing around with that little fox-spirit?" she asked. "It's your birthday. Don't ask so much," he answered. The car vanished. At the river Kana and I sat with cans of beer, the wind hard against us, saying many things neither of us would fully remember later. I do remember her apologizing once, very softly, though I was too sleepy and too drunk to ask what for.

Toward the end of summer, my idol and sometime benefactor Rousuran came back from Hong Kong and called to say she had booked a huge room at Windsor for a celebration. She told me to bring as many friends as I wanted, which was comical, because for me that meant exactly one person: Morikawa Kana. I was flipping through my contacts when I paused at Nakahara Sana's name and thought that if I invited her too, then later on when I wanted Sugihara Tooru to buy us something, he'd have no excuse not to. I know exactly what kind of small, vain citizen that makes me. The result was predictable. Although the party was supposedly for me, Sugihara Tooru's eyes lit up the moment he saw Nakahara Sana, and the two of them soon disappeared into a corner together. Rousuran gave me expensive Guerlain makeup. Kana, instead of admiring it, wanted to know what miraculous powers the little meteorite pearls actually possessed. Somewhere inside the maze of rooms and corridors, I collided with a man carrying the mixed smell of perfume and alcohol. I looked up. There are no exaggerations large enough for what I thought in that second. A gentleman like jade. But my bladder was close to exploding, so I fled without even saying sorry. Later that night I saw Sana and Sugihara kissing on the stairwell and learned more than I had needed to know.

Before the real university life even began, my mother managed to make me feel both guilty and loved in the same breath. While helping me pack, she said quietly that all through my high-school years she had lived in terror of getting a call from one of my teachers. It was only a sentence or two, but it landed like thunder. I was so ashamed that I loudly promised I would repay her grandly after marrying into money. She remained unimpressed and only remarked that luckily I had grown up with more confidence than beauty, which meant she no longer had to worry that I might blame her for giving birth to an ugly daughter. Outraged, I texted Kana that I suspected I had been switched at birth. She immediately replied that if I wasn't my mother's real child, then why had the poor woman spent all these years raising such a disaster? It was not comforting.

Kana still came with me on registration day, which meant the two of us turned up carrying bedding, buckets, and giant bags like migrant workers moving into a labor camp. In line we ran into Tachibana Mikoto, dressed like a butterfly escaped from some richer ecosystem entirely, dragging an LV suitcase and smiling hard enough to blind us. She asked how we had come. Before I could answer, Kana said, "By bicycle." Mikoto's eyes widened with what might have been innocence or might have been a practiced art no one could disprove. During military training that first month, she became the queen of sunscreen mooching. The true misery of training was never the drill itself but the fear of coming home looking like an unwanted mixed-race inheritance from Africa. One day, because of menstrual pain, I got leave and ran into Takahashi Saori at the cafeteria entrance. She stood on the steps in yellow high heels while I faced her in ugly Liberation shoes, the difference between us so ridiculous that when she burst into tears, I genuinely thought any onlooker would assume the flat shoes had bullied the heels. She was in the middle of a breakup with Kitagawa Yoshiki and had somehow switched dorm beds to be closer to me, as if heartbreak transformed me into a saint. I had no idea then how tightly her name would knot itself into the life waiting for me later.

The person who set the real trap was Mikoto. She spent every spare moment floating through internet forums, and one day a post appeared with the title: Any girls here who like Akanishi Jin? Check in, first fifty get signed CDs. Since she was an Edison superfan, she logged in instantly and left the unguarded response: I like him most, he's my husband! Naturally the thread owner then edited the title into: Any girls who like me? First fifty get kisses. He even singled out Mikoto's reply as the best one and invited her to a weekend party at Lazy Cat Bar. For all her boasts about nightlife, Mikoto turned coward immediately and latched onto me with both hands. If we were really friends, she said, I absolutely had to go with her. I wanted to point out that our friendship was not quite so epic, but the thought of returning to my dorm and facing Saori's endless tears decided me. So I said yes. Later I would think that perhaps entire lives bend on decisions that stupid and small.

Lazy Cat Bar on the weekend was packed solid. No matter how cold it was outside, inside it was all tropical heat, short skirts, black stockings, and men in shirtsleeves. I wore a plain green long-sleeved T-shirt, jeans, and an embarrassingly practical athletic jacket. Surrounded by all that polished city brightness, I felt like I had wandered in from the seam between town and countryside. Mikoto was even worse off than I was: fate had arranged for her to get her period that day, which meant no alcohol, no bravado, no easy escape. We found Table 97 just as the messages had instructed. And in the moment I looked up, I forgot to breathe. The man smiling there with a dangerous kind of laziness was none other than the "dear Hayashibara Yuto" I had once heard Nakahara Sana calling for in the hallway. The memory hit me so hard that it was almost physical. Up close he was even more striking, with a scar on his forehead that made his good looks feel roughened by something darker. He stared at me for a moment, then leaned closer and asked, "Have I seen you somewhere before?" Inside the deafening noise of the bar, all sound suddenly seemed to drop away. I smiled. I couldn't see my own face, but I knew the smile would be tired and relieved all at once. Somewhere inside me a voice said: after crossing mountains and rivers, here you are at last.