Then one summer day, during the hot days, a letter arrived from Akari.
I remember when I saw that light pink envelope stuck amongst the row of apartment mailboxes
I had felt more confused than happy. I thought to myself, why now? I had been so determined
to get used to a world without Akari. The letter from Akari made me remember just how much
I missed her.
Yes, instead of trying to forget about Akari, my mind was suddenly lled with nothing but
her. I had made many friends but every time I was with them, they made me realise just how
special Akari was to me. I would con ne myself in my room reading her letter over and over
again. Even during classes I would secretly slip it in between my textbook so that I could gaze
at it. I read it so many times I could almost remember the letter o by heart.
"Dear Takaki Tohno," the letter began. It was such a nostalgic feeling seeing Akari's neat
handwriting again.
"It has been such a long time. How are you? The summer weather is very hot here but I'm
sure it's a lot easier to bear than Tokyo. But now that I think about it, I prefer the humid
hot summers in Tokyo more - the hot asphalt that looks as if it's about to melt, the high rise
buildings in the heat and the almost freezing air conditioning of the apartments and underground
stations."
Funnily enough, in between the mature writing were tiny little illustrations (like the sun or
cicadas) which made me imagine what the young Akari I once knew was like now as she was
growing up slowly. It was a very short letter that told me how she was doing. She told me
how she went to her new school by the four carriage trains, how she joined the basketball club
to keep t and how she decided to cut her hair short so that it was now only down to her ear.
Surprisingly, it all unsettled me. She didn't write that she missed me and from her words I could
tell that her new life was going well and she was getting used to it. But somehow, I had no doubt
that she would have felt very sad if she wrote that she missed me or wanted to talk to me. If
that wasn't so, she never would have written a letter to me. I felt exactly the same way towards
her.
Since then, Akari and I exchanged letters once a month. I felt it was a lot easier going about
my life than before. For example, I could clearly admit boring lessons were boring. Since being
separated from Akari, I had just thought all the harsh training and unreasonable instructions
that my senior trainers gave me were just the way things were but now I could feel it was all a
little unbearable. My feelings were back. Strangely, it was because I could feel that way that it all became easier to endure. We never wrote about our displeasures or silly things that happened
during our days but we could strongly feel that there was only one other person in this world
that could understand us.
The summer and autumn of our rst year at junior high soon passed and it was now winter. I
had turned thirteen, was taller by seven centimetres, grown more muscular and no longer caught
the cold as easily as before. I felt as if I had become relatively closer to the world. I'm sure
Akari too was thirteen now. Every time I looked at my female classmates in their uniform, I
would imagine how Akari may look like now. Once she had written that she wanted to see the
cherry blossoms again with me someday just like we did when we were in elementary school. She
said there was a large cherry blossom tree near her home. She wrote, "I'm sure the ower petals
there fall to the ground at ve centimetres too."
I was in my third semester when it was decided I was going to transfer schools again.
I was going to move during the next spring break and it was going to be Kagoshima, an island
near the region of Kyuushuu. It takes about a two hour ight from the Tokyo, Haneda airport
to get there. To me, it was no dierent than living at the edge of the world. But by that time,
I was used to such changes in my life and wasn't worried about it at all. My main concern was
my distance from Akari. Since leaving elementary school neither of us had met but we weren't
really that far away from each other when I thought about it. It was only a three hour train
journey to travel between Northern Kansai where Akari was and the Tokyo where I lived. We
could have met up with each other during Saturdays. But once I move to the southern point of
Japan, I may never be able to see her again.