The Boring Model Student

Even many years later, Kitagawa Niro's speech at graduation was still brought out every year at class reunions, reheated like some famous side dish and served up with the drinks. It was a wonderfully ironic thing. For three years Niro had won Inagawa High School's top scholarship, and every time the school selected its model students her name was the easiest choice in the world. At the very end of the graduation ceremony, she went up onstage as the student representative. Inagawa High required uniforms, so for all of high school she had looked gray and dull in the same tracksuit. But that day she wore a silk dress printed in white flowers on red, contact lenses, curled hair, and the final lines of her bright, upright speech were these: "They tell us these have been the most beautiful years of our lives. To be honest, I hated high school. I hated all of you. I hope you all go to hell. And Kamiya Yoshiomi, I love you. Thank you." The whole hall froze. The principal and dean's faces turned the color of liver. The boy called Kamiya Yoshiomi instantly became the most discussed name in Inagawa High. Who was he? A model student from the school next door, people said, except that he wore glasses. Or a smiling boy from Class 11. Or a delinquent from the previous year who skipped school and spent all his time in arcades. Rumor never cared whether it had a beginning or an end. Outside the hall, Typhoon Mary had only just passed, and the sky above the school was a blue so pure it looked as if the clouds had cracked open. The wind moved over it all softly, like a song carrying everyone back toward a much earlier time.

Inagawa High's arts building had a vast practice room lined with mirrors and deep-brown wooden windows hung with thick white curtains. One evening Niro, who had been assigned to clean it, pushed open the door and found Kamiya Yoshiomi inside. His face, painted for rehearsal, flashed in the dark, and then his singing rushed toward her and swallowed her whole. In the oversized emptiness of the room, the stories and characters on his tongue made time seem to turn back by centuries. He was singing a female role, and in costume, with a flick of sleeve and a turn of body, he was beautiful to the point of absurdity. Niro stood there holding a broom and noticed in the trash a physics quiz from the day before, crumpled around a catastrophic score. She smoothed it out and, trying to sound casual, said, "If you throw it away like that, the physics teacher is going to launch you into a projectile-motion problem." She held up the paper. Yoshiomi only smiled. "Let me lend you mine so you can correct it," she said. "That would be better than the trash, wouldn't it?" He thought a moment and accepted. They walked out together, and when the door opened the sunlight outside came pouring in like a white wall. Colored glass at the end of the corridor cast bright, extravagant patterns. In the middle of that walk, Niro suddenly looked up and pulled a face at the glass. Yoshiomi laughed. He was utterly unlike the boys she had known. She had already heard the rumors about the new transfer student who never behaved according to type, who irritated teachers and went his own way. He looked to her like a handsome little bourgeois runaway, while she herself was the model student who had to keep her shoulders level and chin lifted and walk like a proper girl. He possessed something precious that had been taken from her by force, something miraculous and necessary in the face of dull, suffocating life. She imagined him burdened with some heavy family history or tragic childhood wound, imagined his brows shadowed by longing and some magnificent legend behind him. After school, when he rode his old black bicycle up to the bus stop and said, "Don't wait for the bus. I'll take you," she accepted that privilege as carefully and as joyfully as she could, pretending it was perfectly ordinary. Summer was coming. The sweet fluff from the parasol trees drifted through the air like snow. They rode after a low cloud together, the wind lifting the fluff into the air around them, and she held his waist and laughed with narrowed eyes like a cat. It was 1999. Kitagawa Niro had just turned sixteen.

All through that summer she played a private game called imitation. She stayed home reading the entries on Yoshiomi's homepage, following his signature line, trying to guess his inner world. He wrote about the university lawns nearby, freshly cut and smelling of green under the heat; about twisting his ankle in a dark soccer match before the holiday and taping it with a cartoon bandage; about how terrible the cola was at Starlight Cinema; about climbing to the roof in summer mornings and watching the sky turn from lake-blue to crow-blue to plum-blue. So Niro taped her own ankle, bought the same awful cola, climbed to the roof at dawn, wore the white he liked, drowned her wontons in vinegar because he did, and wanted to go to Suzhou simply because he had once said it was beautiful. When he posted a new photograph of himself standing before a wall of white roses outside the convenience store where he was working part-time, she started going there constantly, buying enough food to overflow the kitchen at home. One day she carried away a ridiculous number of canned meats, and he laughed and asked if she wanted to add fifty yen and choose soy milk, peanut paste, or yogurt as well. "Can I have all of them?" she asked. "If you can finish them," he said. No one would ever have understood if she tried to explain that she and Kamiya Yoshiomi had never dated and yet she had known him more deeply and for longer than anyone else had. Love, it turned out, could grow inside a relationship that did not even exist. Around the same time, during one empty self-study period, she had been sketching at her desk when he came in, looked over her half-finished drawing, and asked politely whether he could see it. Then he sat beside her and waited while she finished. When he tried it himself, he revealed such talent that she could only stare. "You should be the one learning painting," she said. "You've got a gift." In the end she told him to come study with her after school. He called her Master and she called him Pigsy. Every evening they stayed behind in the classroom. She taught him what she had learned, and because she didn't want to lead him badly, she began studying painting with a seriousness she had never possessed before. He understood everything with a touch, and sometimes he drew better than she could even demonstrate. The way he painted was unbearable to watch: the concentration in him, the softness of his gaze, the fearless light of youth. His jaw was so handsome that for a while she began comparing every boy's chin to his and realized, in terror, that his was still the best. She kept telling herself that she was his teacher, that she should not abuse that role, but all such words broke apart the moment she looked at him. Whenever he smiled at her as if he knew, those secret little stirrings only felt more natural.

Three months passed in a blink. Her art teacher praised her rapid improvement, and in turn she praised Yoshiomi. He suddenly grew awkward and, under pressure, produced a gift from behind his back. It was a silk handkerchief embroidered with two blue fish. "My mother made it," he said, face reddening. "I keep using your supplies. I can't always take advantage." The excuse was flimsy, and she knew it. When she asked why there were two fish, he answered at once, "Because you're a Pisces." Then he blushed even harder. Niro understood in that instant that the gift had been chosen with care, and that the excuse had only been tacked on afterward. The handkerchief in her hands was light, but her heart had never been fuller. He looked down at the sketchbook and said softly, "Originally I wanted my mother to embroider your name, but your name... Yuanlan... it was too hard for her. Then I thought, even if she stitched it in blue, it still wouldn't look like the sea." His voice made the simplest syllables of her name sound beautiful. Much later she would understand that in the eyes of someone who cared for you, even the plainest name became singular and full of meaning. "I won't lose my way," she said. "As long as I look at you, I'll be able to see." He broke into a bright smile, a strange light moving in his eyes, and the two of them both knew what that light meant. Yoshiomi said that someday he would paint the most beautiful sea, and on it there would be a single wave always heading north. He said that afterward they would paint many beautiful things and sign both their names to them. She nodded yes to everything. No one in class ever noticed what had happened between the girl Kitagawa Niro and the boy Kamiya Yoshiomi, what they had promised, what they had dreamed together. They were sensible children. They knew too well that adolescent feeling was not meant to spill over. They were supposed to put school first. So they spent weekends in the library, each with a book of drawing methods, taking notes and then discussing them afterward. Those days were simple and happy, and in memory every one of them seems flooded with clear weather and sun.

Then Kamiya Yoshiomi transferred away as suddenly as he had arrived. His mother explained, helplessly, that his father's work meant they had already changed schools three times in two years. Niro sat nearby helping the chemistry teacher mark papers, trying not to hear, and developed a deep hatred for geology on the spot. The farewell party was held in a karaoke place. Their homeroom teacher came too, so she could not act as wildly as she wanted. She could only sit and watch other girls sing duets with Yoshiomi while she was being eaten alive inside. She visited him once in the hospital with the teacher when he was sick and said only proper things like take care and come back to class soon, and then awkwardly added that if he had questions about schoolwork he could ask her. She sat through the oral English camp staring stupidly at him across the room. She hid behind the crowd during the basketball tournament to cheer him on. She prayed for seats so she could end up in front of him in class. In the photograph from the farewell night she was smiling brilliantly, though afterward she shut herself in the karaoke bathroom and cried for a very long time. When the night finally ended, she walked from Nakano South Road to Nakano North Road and back again. Rain began to fall. Her canvas shoes were soaked through. Rage and sorrow tangled together inside her, just as they had on the first day she met him. What had begun as something nameless had accumulated, day by day, until it had become rain and collected into a shallow river inside her heart. The boy had walked through it all with a careless step, stirring it up. Standing on Zhongxing Bridge, her whole chest full of misery, Kitagawa Niro finally shouted into the distance. "I'm going to perm my hair and paint my nails and wear camisoles and become beautiful! I'm going to fall in love! I'm going to stop being a model student! I'm going to marry Kamiya Yoshiomi!" The words spiraled into the sky and were snatched away by the wind like a yellow balloon.

Years later, in Tokyo, the winters were mild and wet, and Niro had nevertheless developed seasonal depression. She knew the medical explanations by heart: the dim light, the chemistry of the brain, the advice to eat sweets and seek out bright places. So one winter afternoon she rode the subway all the way from Kichijoji to the big department store and sat there until evening. On her way out she stopped to buy a large box of nut chocolates, and fate, as if pointing with some invisible finger, directed her through the revolving door at exactly the right moment. Behind the thick glass, she saw Kamiya Yoshiomi. Before her eyes could even accept the shock of it, he was already stepping onto the escalator. He had hardly changed at all. He was still too tall to stand perfectly straight, still the same when he smiled, still the same when he frowned a little, still the same soft hair brushing his ears. The only difference was his arm, now linked with that of a girl beside him, long-haired and bright-eyed and fresh as if she had just been bitten from some ripe fruit. They were laughing together. She watched them from behind, and in that instant the first feeling of her youth rose up like an old boat dragged slowly from water, rusted through but still unmistakable. Yoshiomi would never know about the sensation she caused at the graduation ceremony. He would never know that the girl standing only a few paces behind him had once looked at him as if he contained a whole future. Niro could no longer prove whether or not early love was harmful to the mind. She only understood that first love was like the cheap nut chocolate sold in department stores: beautiful packaging, sweet enough, but if you swallowed it too quickly there was almost nothing there. Only if you chewed it slowly could you taste the tiny nut hidden inside, small but real. Or, more bleakly, perhaps what you had eaten was only a chocolate already gone stale. Niro had always thought metaphors were among the sharpest of human inventions. Feeling the box of chocolate in her pocket, she walked out into the rain and the keen little wind. She sent a text to a number long since abandoned. Then she dropped her umbrella, turned onto another road, and began hopping forward in little leaps while the world bobbed up and down with her. She thought of a song. Life was a journey that never allowed a backward step. She no longer had to tuck in her tail and go on being the model student. If it were all to happen again, she still didn't know whether she would choose differently. She only knew that the years had been pressed flat and fine, and that somewhere inside them, the feeling she had once called a secret still remained, small and hard as the nut inside the chocolate, impossible to bite through and impossible quite to forget.