For the next several days, I behaved myself. I didn't leave the apartment for anything other than food. I stayed inside the tiny space, arranging origami paper I bought at the stationery store and folding cranes.
Miyagi looked at the row of cranes on top of the desk and asked, "Are you folding a thousand?"
"Yep. It's exactly what it looks like."
Out of the few dozen I'd completed, she picked up a blue one, pinching its wings between her fingers and examining it with great interest.
"Are you going to make all one thousand? Why?"
"To wish for happiness for the rest of my life before I die," I claimed.
I enjoyed doing busywork with no meaning. The room soon filled with cranes of all colors—pink cranes, red cranes, orange cranes, yellow cranes, light-green cranes, dark-green cranes, light-blue cranes, dark-blue cranes, purple cranes.
The paper birds spilled over the table, blew around from the rotating standing fan, cluttered the floor, and added color to the bland tatami room.
I looked upon my handiwork with subtle satisfaction. Was there any form of prayer purer than a beautiful, meaningless act?
As I folded the cranes, I wanted to speak to Miyagi at several points, but I took pains to resist making conversation. I didn't want to turn her into a source of solace. It seemed unfair, gaining peace of mind through her.
But on the other hand, Miyagi seemed to be softening her treatment of me, bit by bit. When our eyes met, she would actually look away rather than stare holes through me. Her gaze was less like focusing on a fixed object, warmer than the initial reception she'd given me.
It might have been that she was opening up to me after our conversation at the station, but I didn't know that. Perhaps all monitors were ordered to be nicer to their subjects as the remaining time dwindled.
The most important thing was that she was only here to do her job. If I forgot about that and got carried away, I'd be sorely betrayed eventually.
It took five days, but at last the task was finished. I counted them again to be sure of the number, and as I did, I saw a few that seemed too good to be made by me. Some nosy, helpful person must have made them while I was asleep.
I put them all on a string, creating a proper row of a thousand cranes, and hung it from my ceiling.
Now, back to the letter.
The night I finished making the cranes, I was cleaning out my jeans pockets before I washed them, and I found a folded-up letter.
It was the one I'd addressed to my "ten-years-older" self.
I'd stuck it in my pocket the night I dug up the time capsule and hadn't touched it since.
I tossed my jeans into the washing machine inside out and reread the letter, which I'd only skimmed through the first time.
This is what it said.
To myself in ten years,
I have to ask you to do something only you can do.
If I'm still a leftover ten years later, I want you to go see Himeno.
She's helpless without me…
…and I think I'm helpless without her.
I chose to show Miyagi the letter.
"Ten years ago, you were a surprisingly honest and kindhearted little boy," Miyagi said, impressed. "And what do you plan to do?"
"I'll go and see Himeno," I said. "I think I'm starting to understand just how foolish and pointless it is. And I'm well aware of how stupid it is to fixate this much on a childhood friend I haven't seen in ten years. But this is my ten-year-old self asking for it. Ten-year-old me wants to cherish that. Yes, it might make me hurt even more than I already do. It might fill me with even more despair. But I can't give up until I've seen and decided for myself… I just want to see her and talk to her one last time. She gave me a life, so I want to repay her with the three hundred thousand yen I got for selling my life span. Or whatever's left of what I haven't used. You're probably against that idea, but I made that money by selling my life, so I can do what I want with it, can't I?"
"I won't stop you," Miyagi said. "It's not like I don't understand that feeling."
I was taken aback, because I didn't expect her to support the suggestion.
At the time, I did not stop to carefully consider the meaning of what Miyagi said. But later on, when I thought back on her words, I comprehended them at last.
Miyagi more than understood how I felt.
She had an intensely keen knowledge of exactly how it felt. And she'd known it long before I ever did.
"I'm thinking of going to visit Himeno's house as early as tomorrow morning. She's living with her parents now, isn't she?"
"That's right. After separating from her husband, she's been relying on her family the entire time," Miyagi said, and she glanced at me in a searching way. She probably felt some resistance to the idea of talking about Himeno in my presence. She was worried I'd blow up again.
Uncharacteristically, I said, "Thank you."
"You're welcome," she replied with relief.
To explain how I knew Himeno's address after her family moved away from mine, I first have to describe the letter Himeno sent to me the summer we were seventeen.
When I read it, something felt terribly, inexplicably wrong.
It did not seem like a letter she would write.
The contents of the message were trivial. She wrote about how she was so busy studying for college entrance exams that she didn't have time to read any books, how she was writing this letter during her breaks between study sessions, what college she was trying to get into, and how she might try to come and visit over winter break.
They were all things a seventeen-year-old girl would write, in round, puffy letters characteristic of a teenage girl.
But that's what made them strange. It wouldn't be a big deal at all if some average seventeen-year-old girl wrote this. But it was Himeno sending me this letter. The girl I'd known was the furthest from average; she was at least as twisted and stubborn as me.
Where was the sarcasm? Where were the insults and complaints? What happened to the Himeno whose every facet was inverted? Did people really change that much by the time they were seventeen? Or was her writing just that different from her way of speaking? Had she always been earnest and ordinary when writing letters?
I never figured out suitable answers to these questions, and two weeks later, I sent back a reply that largely responded in kind. I talked about how I was busy, too, and took extra time to write back because of it, about the college I was trying to get into, and about how delighted I'd be if she visited.
I waited for her response, but nothing came the next week, or even the next month.
Himeno did not come to visit during the winter break that followed.
Had I made some kind of mistake? At the time, I thought I'd really stretched out of my comfort zone to make it clear that I wanted to see her, too.
Initially, I thought I'd done a bad job of writing back. But more likely, Himeno was already pregnant by some other guy I didn't know—a man she'd be married to at eighteen and divorced from at nineteen.
In reflection, it wasn't a very comforting memory. But at least the letter she wrote to me told me where to find her. That one thing made it a blessing.
I never intended to go back to school, but in order to know the exact lot of her house, I needed to use the computers at the library. I had already stuck the key into my moped and placed my foot on the pedal when I remembered something Miyagi had mentioned once.
"Didn't you say something about how I couldn't be more than a hundred yards from you?"
"That's right," she said. "I'm sorry, but I can't have you going off on your own… That vehicle can seat two, can't it?"
"Technically," I admitted. I'd bought the Cub 110 secondhand to ride to school. Its rear rack had been removed to attach a tandem seat instead. I didn't have a backup helmet, but nobody else could actually see Miyagi, so she couldn't get into trouble because of it.
"Then we can use that to travel if you want—assuming you don't object to taking me along with you."
"Not at all. It's fine."
I started the engine, dropped the kickstand, and pointed behind me. Miyagi pardoned herself and got onto the back seat, placing her hands around my midriff.
I drove the usual route, only slower. The morning was pleasant and nostalgic. While we headed down a long, straight stretch, I noticed a huge cumulonimbus cloud against the blue sky. The outline was clearer than usual, but it seemed empty somehow.
It had only been a few days since I visited the college, but it felt strangely distant and cold now. All the students milling around belonged to a completely different world than me, and they seemed so fortunate and happy. Even the occasional downcast individual exuding an aura of gloom seemed to be enjoying that misery, to my eyes.
I only spent enough time in the library to print out the map before I left. The cafeteria area wasn't open yet, so I bought a sweet-bean bread and cup of coffee from the vending machines and ate my breakfast in the lounge. Miyagi quietly chewed on a donut.
"Hey…this doesn't necessarily mean anything, but I'm curious—how would you spend your last few months, if you were in my situation?" I asked her.
"Hmm… I don't think I could say unless I were there," she answered, then glanced around for a bit. "Um, I know I told you this before, but it's better if you don't address me in public like this. They'll think you're a crazy person talking to yourself."
"It's fine. I am crazy."
As a matter of fact, the people in the lounge were giving me funny looks for chatting with the empty air. But I didn't mind. If anything, I wanted them to be suspicious of me. If I was going to slip out of everyone's memory in my last little time left, then maybe it was better to be memorable for talking to myself.
I finished my food and stood up. Miyagi excused herself and walked up to me.
"I've been thinking," she said. "About your question. And…this is going to be a very serious answer, but if I only had a few months to live, there are about three things I would absolutely want to do."
"Oh? I'd like to hear this."
"Well, they're not going to be much help to you," she cautioned. "The first is…to visit a lake. The second is to build my own grave. And third, like you, would be to go and see someone who was once important to me. That's what I'd say."
"That doesn't tell me a whole lot. Can you explain in more detail?"
"The lake is a typical lake, nothing special. I just remember the stars being unbelievably beautiful there when I was a kid. It was the most stunning thing I've ever seen in my miserable life. I'm sure there are countless examples of more awe-inspiring sights in the world, but the stars over that lake are the most beautiful thing I know."
"I see. When you say a grave…do you mean you want to buy a plot?"
"No. Basically, I just want to find, say, a great big rock and decide, 'That will be my grave.' The important thing to me is that I pick it out and that it remains my grave after I'm dead, at least for a few decades. And as for the person I care about," she said, lowering her eyes, "I'm afraid I can't tell you that."
"Got it. So it's a man, huh?"
"You could put it that way."
She clearly didn't want me to ask about it.
I considered the topic. Someone Miyagi cared about. She said she became a monitor at age ten. And it was someone she "once" cared about, so it would have to be a person Miyagi was close to before she became a monitor.
"I might get hurt, and I might be disappointed, but ultimately, I would go to him, I think. So I don't have the right to deny you what you want to do now."
"This doesn't sound like you. You get very passive when it comes to yourself," I said with a laugh.
"My own future is the only thing I know nothing about," Miyagi said.
It was almost a letdown how easily I found Himeno's house.
At first, I couldn't even believe her family lived there. It made me think it had to be someone else with the same family name, but I couldn't find the name Himeno on any other sign plates. By elimination, this had to be the place where Himeno lived.
Her old house near mine was a large, old, traditional home, which in my sense of childhood wonder seemed perfect for a family with a name that included the Japanese word for "princess." If I didn't have the map and nameplate, I would have forgotten all about this house five seconds after I turned away. It was a totally neutral and colorless cheap building.
I did not hesitate to ring the doorbell, because I already had a feeling she wasn't there. I rang it three times over a span of three minutes, but no one came to the door.
Instead, I figured someone would come home by the evening, so I chose to kill time in the area. Maybe the map I printed out at the college would show me somewhere I could hang out until nightfall. My eyes landed on the words City Library. After the brief visit to the college library this morning, my desire to read had been kindled.
It was a neat little library from the outside, but one step through the door made it clear what a terribly old structure it was. It had the musty smell and run-down aura of a condemned school building. Their selection of books wasn't bad, though.
For a while now, I'd been thinking about what books I might want to read before I die. Or to rephrase it, what books would be useful to me in what brief time I had left?
That was the only kind of book I wanted to read. If I spent the moments before my death on words that meant nothing to me, I'd just regret all the time I'd spent on such books in the past. What was I even getting out of them in the first place?
Maybe my picks would be different in another month. But this time, I chose Paul Auster, Kenji Miyazawa, O. Henry, and Hemingway. Not the most intriguing of selections. Given that everything I picked up was short stories, it was probably less that I was a fan of these writers and more that I just didn't want to read something long. I wasn't sure if I had the willpower to deal with a story beyond a certain length.
While I was reading O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi," Miyagi moved from sitting across from me to my side, peering over my hand at the page.
"You're going to monitor me and read at the same time?" I asked quietly.
"Something like that," she said and leaned even closer. I thought she had a very relaxing scent.
I sat in the library and read until it closed at six o'clock. Now and then I would give my eyes a rest by going outside to the smoking area for a cigarette.
It was a brand-new experience for me, reading a book with someone else. Instead of just thinking about my response to a passage, I was always conscious of how Miyagi might have felt reading the same page. The act of reading felt denser and richer.
Then I headed back to Himeno's house, but again, nobody answered the doorbell. So I waited outside her house for about an hour in case someone arrived, knowing full well that the neighbors would be suspicious. The sun went down, and the safety lights on the phone lines came on. The cigarette butts were piling up at my feet. Miyagi was watching me with reproach, so I pulled out a portable ashtray from my bag and put the butts inside.
Today was probably a bust, I decided.
I couldn't deny that a part of me was relieved that Himeno didn't show up. On the way back home, I made a wrong turn somewhere and found myself driving through a shopping area with hanging paper lanterns. It took quite a long time before I figured out that it was very close to my parents' home. I'd never traveled this route.
They were holding a summer festival at the shrine up ahead. I was feeling hungry, so I stopped the Cub in a parking lot and walked through the festival grounds and the smell of overcooked sauce, looking for whichever cart appealed to me most.
It had been ten years since I saw this festival in person. After Himeno moved away, I stopped going to any local festivals and events. As I remembered, it was still a small gathering, with only ten or fifteen carts in total. Despite that, it was lively. Places with little in the way of natural entertainment tend to get the most excited about things like this.
Buying an okonomiyaki and frankfurter were according to plan, but after that, I lost my mind and decided to get one item from every stand. I returned to the stone stairs with takoyaki, shaved ice, grilled corn, kabayaki, fried chicken, candy apple, chocolate-dipped banana, yakitori, fried squid, and tropical juice.
"What do you expect to do with all of that?" Miyagi asked with exasperation.
"Make my childhood dreams come true. I can't eat everything myself, so you need to help me," I said, and I got down to work. Miyagi reached hesitantly for my bag and pulled out the kabayaki, then said, "Thank you for the food" and began to eat the grilled eel.
By the time we got to the twelfth item, both Miyagi and I were sick of the smell of food. We were both light eaters, too. I felt as if a volleyball had been inflated inside my stomach. I was so full that I didn't want to stand up for a while. Miyagi licked the candy apple with a grumpy expression.
From atop the stone steps, you could see the entirety of the festival grounds. Stands and carts lined the narrow path to the shrine, with two rows of paper lanterns hanging over them like runway light strips that brought a low red glow to the shrine grounds. The people milling about were in high spirits… In other words, it was exactly as I remembered it from that day ten years ago.
The last time, I sat here—with Himeno—on the stone steps, watching the people walk through the grounds. I had resigned myself to the thought that we didn't have the right to join in. I was waiting for something that would affirm our right to exist, to make everything make sense.
That was when Himeno made a prediction. Something "great" would happen and make us "glad to be alive," ten summers later. That was also when she said that if we hadn't found marriage partners in ten years, we should get together.
Well, here I was, ten summers later. The girl who came up with the promise wasn't a leftover; she was used goods. I wasn't a leftover, either; I was going to end my life without ever going on sale.
But in the end, we had both reached this moment, and we were unclaimed.
We were alone again.
Where was Himeno now, and what was she doing?
As the buzzing of the cicadas filled the shrine, I prayed to the god there.
I realized quite a lot of time had passed. I heard Miyagi's pencil writing in her notebook nearby. The festival was nearly over, and the crowd had mostly trickled away. I looked up, gathered the trash, and slowly got to my feet.
A figure was climbing the steps.
It was too dark to see their face, but the instant I could see their outline, time stopped.
"It's too good to be true," people like to say.
But reality has a way of connecting things in the most ironic of ways, even if those involved never realize it.
Pure joy was buzzing through every cell in my body.
With each step she took, it was as if all the memories of her, from the day we met when we were four to the summer day she moved away when we were ten, passed through my mind, one at a time.
She had changed over the last ten years, but no matter how her appearance might evolve, I would never fail to recognize her.
Once she was close enough for us to see each other's faces, I rasped, "Himeno."
The woman stopped and looked at me with blank eyes.
Gradually, her expression turned to dumbfounded shock.
"…Kusunoki?" Himeno said, her voice as crystal clear as it had been the last time we met here.