The first time I saw her again, she was standing in the doorway, peering in with the timid wariness of a little deer. It was raining hard that day. The wind was wild, and the rain was slapping the pavement outside. She held a large black umbrella that made her already thin body look even smaller. My coworker was half asleep on the bar, and on an afternoon that dead we had both been hoping to steal a little laziness. Then she seemed to gather up all her courage, folded her umbrella, drew a breath, pushed the door open, and stepped inside. A man in the corner stood up and waved to her. She lowered her head and hurried toward him. I stopped her long enough to tell her to leave the umbrella at the door. She looked so startled that I had to take it from her myself, set it in the stand, and hand her the numbered tag. She glanced at me with the same flustered embarrassment and then went to sit across from the man. My coworker shot me a suggestive look. Only then did I really understand what kind of meeting this was. The man was not young. His hairline had retreated. The lines in his face were deep. I despised him at once. Lately men who wanted paid company had taken to using our café, hiding in the dim light and soft sofas, buying time with girls who needed it. I knew her name from the reservation slip: En Karasawa. My palms had already gone damp. They ordered a few pastries. When I brought them over, she sat there like a length of black silk, all silence. She was more nervous than I was. Once or twice the man's hand drifted toward her fingers, and if I had not needed this job, I would have punched him and pulled her out of there myself. But the world runs on endurance, not impulses. So I stood there with my heart in my throat, waiting. A little before four, the man finally got up and left. She remained on the sofa for a while, dazed and fragile, her young face like enamel. She was even prettier now than before. I had never imagined I would meet her again like this, and clearly she had never noticed me at all. When she came to retrieve her umbrella, she could not find the tag and said it did not matter, that she would collect it next time she came. The summer storm had already broken, and a rainbow appeared at the horizon. I watched her walk back toward the university and felt something heavy settle inside me. She had said she would come again.
If I remembered right, she was already in her second year. That university was full of beautiful boys and girls, with private cars lined up outside the gates at all hours. She was still studying dance, the thing she had always loved. In high school I had watched her onstage and thought she moved as lightly as snow. When she came the second time, she was much more composed. I returned her umbrella, and she nodded to me before going straight to the deepest corner, where another new man was waiting. My coworker began wagering under his breath that she would be in some rich man's car within the week. I wanted to tape his mouth shut. But the truth was that I was afraid too. A raw, anxious heat had wrapped itself around me. I remembered the punks who used to wait for her outside the school gate when we were sixteen, swarming around her like flies while she looked at them with open disgust. I had wanted to beat every one of them senseless. Back then I even carried a knife in my schoolbag for a while. My deskmate found it and nearly fainted. When I told her to mind her own business, she ran straight to the teacher, who confiscated it and called me an idiot. Maybe I was one. Other people memorized in an hour what took me a day. My mind wandered off into outer space. My deskmate used to say my brain was not human. My father had almost given up on me. He hit hard, and his belt wore out fast. The last time he beat me was in the second semester of our first year. After that, he never hit me again. Even my deskmate once told me, almost kindly, that I would probably amount to something one day, just not through studying. Then she gave me one of her sly looks and asked why I had lately been taking such an interest in the corridor outside the class next door. I barked at her and told her not to talk nonsense, and she only curled her lip and said that even if I did not look half bad, En Karasawa liked boys with brains. I cursed her for reading too many romances. But from that moment on I almost wanted to kill her for having guessed so cleanly. Later I would discover how many things become impossible to say the older we get. Everything changes in a moment. And now, at eighteen, I had met En again, only to see her beginning to sit across from men as disgusting as the ones I once wanted to chase away from her.
I did not even last the week before I could no longer endure it. She came almost every night after that. I had no idea what she talked about with those men, but every time she left, my heart climbed into my throat. Thankfully, each time she still went back to the university by herself. Then, one day, she stood up abruptly and told the man in front of her to please keep his hands to himself. He burst into ugly curses. The filth in his voice was like dirty water thrown in her face. People at other tables began to turn and stare. Something burst in my head. Before my coworker could grab me, I was already there, punching the man in the shoulder. Cups and plates crashed to the floor. It was idiotic, of course. A café waiter throwing punches for a female customer. The boss nearly fired me that night. He asked whether I had been drinking and gone mad. I only wished I had been drunk enough to break the man's ribs. In the end it was En who pleaded for me. The job had been hard enough to find. While I stood there wiping blood from my nose, she looked at me with suspicion and asked whether we knew each other. Just like four years earlier, I turned dumb the moment it mattered. Once, back then, I had written her a letter only to have it shredded by my own clumsy nerves before it could even reach her. So now, when she asked, all I could manage was that I had merely stepped in because it seemed right. She studied me for a second longer, then said she only wanted money. Faster money. There was nothing improper in that, she said. She was not stealing. She was not selling herself. She only needed to earn faster. I had no answer. I was no one to judge her choices.
After that she stopped coming to the café. A month later my coworker told me he had seen her climb into a sports car the night before. I knew exactly what that meant. So after work I waited outside the university gate until nearly ten. When she finally stepped out of that car, red handbag bright in the dark, I pulled her aside. I had a thousand things caught in my throat and managed only one: that she should stop going, and that whatever trouble she was in, I would help. She looked at me for a long time before answering, and when she did, her face was wet with tears. Then she laughed a little, so bitterly that it hurt to hear. Who exactly did I think I was, she asked. Was I going to help with my few hundred yen of waiter pay? With my fists? She needed a great deal of money to pay off the debts her father had left behind. A great deal, and quickly. She did not want to be old and still paying it. I stood there under the moonlight looking at her pale face and felt pain move through me like something living. At sixteen I had trailed behind her bicycle after late cram school classes, watching until she vanished safely into her building before riding on myself. Her back had always looked so thin and defenseless to me. There are people in this world who force themselves to do difficult things because they see no other choice. Back then it had been me, guarding her from a distance. Now it was her, trying to drag a whole household out of debt with her bare hands. I wanted to tell her I would save every bit of pay I made, that I could take extra shifts, that it would add up. But I knew she would hear only insanity in it. So I said nothing.
Everyone said Yuu Natsuki was crazy. I put every yen I earned into a biscuit tin. I slept only three or four hours a day, but when a person is running toward one goal, he discovers that his body contains more strength than he ever imagined. If my father had seen me then, perhaps he would have felt a little better about me. When he beat me that final time in our first year, I was expelled not long afterward. What I had done was real enough. I had fought with one of the punks who kept bothering En. We ended up in an abandoned building. He tried to shove me out a window. I dodged. He went over instead. I reached for him too late. He survived, but when he woke, he said I had pushed him. The school announced over the loudspeaker that Yuu Natsuki of first-year class three was being expelled for fighting and causing severe consequences. I packed my books, said goodbye to my deskmate with more swagger than I felt, and walked out at sixteen into a life of carrying gas canisters, hauling water, lifting heavy goods in warehouses, any labor I could find for a boy without a diploma. My father, after that last beating, stopped hitting me. He only cursed. I think he was too tired to do even that much more. Two years later, on the day of En's entrance exam, I sat beside a flower bed outside the gate and waited as if I were the one taking the test. When she came out, I hid behind a tree and watched her, like a pale chrysanthemum blooming across that whole summer. She got into the art university she had always wanted, and I went to dinner with my old deskmate afterward because she blackmailed me into paying for the information. She asked whether I meant to keep standing watch beside En forever. Why not, I said. It made me happy. I ended up going to the same city, to the neighborhood around her university. It sounds premeditated because it was. By then even my father, dropping me off at the station, only told me to make something of myself and call home if money ran short. A train carried me away from our small town. I had to make something of myself. And I had to be somewhere near her. Those two needs became the same thing.
Sometimes the simplest dreams are the hardest to achieve. Time shoves us forward until our lives harden into something entirely new. Before graduation En came to see me. She told me she was leaving the city. We met in a hotpot restaurant. Steam rose between us, and though the fish balls and beef and mushrooms rolled merrily in the broth, they had no taste at all to me. I only wanted the air between us to stay light. So I asked where she planned to go. She said only that she had to leave, no matter where. Then I asked, because I could not help it, whether there was any way to make her stay. She thanked me for valuing her so highly, then asked if I liked her and told me to give that up if I did. She was not worth it, she said. Her past was too ugly. She lit a cigarette, and through the smoke I saw her eyes redden. Even before she finished, I knew the answer she was giving me. When she stood up to go to the restroom, I took every bit of money I had earned over those years and slipped it into her oversized bag. I knew she would refuse it if I tried to hand it to her. If I left before she found it, then perhaps it would already be too late to return. When she came back, she said she had looked for our old class photo once and had not found me in it. She had thought I must have been one of her classmates. But perhaps not. In any case, she said, she was glad to have known me for a while. I smiled and said goodbye. That same cold night, my father was lying in a hospital bed back home, waiting for the useless son who had not asked the family for a single yen in all those years but had also failed to save any for himself, because he had spent all his love thinking of one girl. It was only then that I finally understood I could not go on behaving like a scoundrel. I had to go home. I had to shoulder at least some part of the life that had been waiting for me all along.
Time is a strange thing. You think a hard day will never end. You think your father's belt will go on forever. Then without your noticing, he lets you fly, and one day he is gone and no one is left to beat you with a belt again, no one left except the part of you that misses him and feels guilty. Four years later I was in Osaka. I had gotten a driver's license and started working transfers around Tokyo Station. One day I saw En Karasawa again. She was seven months pregnant. She had changed, of course, and so had I. She recognized me immediately and laughed in surprise. We talked only a little. She said she now went to Tokyo regularly for checkups and planned to give birth there so her child could have an easier life. She did not want her baby to struggle the way she had. Her husband looked older than her, but I thought she must be happy. Before she got in the car, she thanked me for helping her all those years ago and said she would return the money with interest. I smiled and nodded. I wished her only safety. Long before that, I had once liked a girl who looked like a light little deer under a September sky. She broke into my heart and never really left. But time's most precious work is to push us toward the true shape of happiness. Life is easier beside someone who loves you. Later my old deskmate found me again and said she had kept the love letter I once wrote to En hidden all these years. Did I still want it back? I hooked an arm around her shoulder and asked how much longer she meant to keep being angry with me. She laughed and said it was lucky there was still time. And I thought then that what human beings cannot live without is not only the ability to love, but also the ability to be loved.