When Miyagi first came to my apartment as a monitor, I couldn't help but be conscious of her gaze. I remember thinking, If my monitor was an ugly, fat, slovenly middle-aged man rather than a girl, I would have relaxed and been able to think honestly about what I wanted to do.
The monitor who had come to replace Miyagi was just that. A short man with a hideous balding pattern and a face as red as a drunk's, but with pale whiskers and greasy skin. He blinked at an unnatural pace, breathed heavily through his nose, and talked with a thick voice, as if he had phlegm caught in his throat.
"Where's the usual girl?" I asked first.
"On break," the man said bluntly. "I'm her sub for today and tomorrow."
I tried to keep myself calm. Thankfully, the change didn't seem to be permanent. If I waited two days, Miyagi would come back.
"Monitors get to have vacation days, too, huh," I said.
"They're necessary. Unlike you, we've actually got to keep living after this," the man said with derision.
"Okay. That's good to hear. So the vacation is over in two days, and then it goes back to normal?"
"That's the plan at the moment," he answered.
I rubbed sleepy eyes and looked more closely at the man in the corner of my apartment. He was holding my photo album and looking through it. The one full of vending machine pictures.
"What the hell is this?" he asked me.
"Never seen a vending machine before?" I quipped.
He clicked his tongue. "I was obviously asking why you would take pictures like these."
"People who like the sky take pictures of the sky. People who like flowers take pictures of flowers. People who like trains take pictures of trains. I take these pictures because I want to. I like vending machines."
He flipped through a few more pages without much interest, then said, "It's garbage" and tossed the album back toward me. Then he looked at the profusion of origami cranes scattered around the room and sighed with very obvious annoyance.
"You're really wasting the rest of your time with this? It's stupid. Is there seriously nothing better you could do?"
I really wasn't that put off by his attitude. In a certain sense, it made things easier knowing he was going to be completely direct about his thoughts. This was better than if he hugged his knees in the corner of the room and just stared at me as if he wanted to say something.
"There probably is, but if I try anything more fun than this, I won't last," I said with a chuckle.
He continued to complain about and disparage everything he could think of for a while. This monitor seems to be very aggressive, I thought.
I found out why after lunch, when I was lying in front of the fan and listening to music.
"Hey, you," the man said. I pretended not to hear, but then he cleared his throat and said louder, "You didn't do anything to her, did you?"
There was only one person he could mean by her, but I hadn't imagined he would talk about Miyagi in that manner, so it delayed my reaction.
"You mean Miyagi?"
"Who else?" the man said, his brow furrowed with displeasure, as though he didn't even want to hear me say her name.
All of a sudden, I felt affection for this man flooding through me.
Oh, you're just like me.
"Wait, are you close with Miyagi?" I asked.
"…No. I didn't say that. We can't see each other, after all," said the man, suddenly better behaved. "We've only corresponded two or three times by letter. But I was the one at the desk when she sold her time. So I've seen her history in plenty of detail."
"What did you think?"
"I felt sorry for her," the man said flatly. "She's had a really, really unfortunate time."
It seemed like a very honest reaction.
"My life span earned me about the same amount of money as her. Do you feel sorry for me?"
"Hell no. You're going to die soon. You don't matter."
"That's probably the right way to view it," I agreed.
"But she sold the one thing you should never, ever sell. She was only ten at the time. She couldn't have known what she was doing. The poor thing, she's got to continue dealing with nihilistic people like you who are past caring about their life… But back to the topic: You didn't do anything to mess with her, did you? Your answer might have an effect on how easy the rest of your life is."
I decided I liked this man even more.
"I think I was pretty bad to her," I said honestly. "I said some hurtful things, and I very nearly physically hurt her… In fact, I was close to assaulting her."
The man's face went pale, and he looked ready to fight me. I handed him the notebook Miyagi left behind.
"What is this?" He took it from me.
"The details are in there, I think. Miyagi forgot her observation journal. The actual subject isn't supposed to read it, right?"
"Observation journal?" he repeated, licking his thumb and opening the cover.
"I don't really know much about your job, and it doesn't seem like the rules are that strict, but I wouldn't want Miyagi to get punished for some breach of responsibility. You seem to have her back, so I'll give it to you."
He opened it up and flipped through the pages, quickly glancing at the contents. In two minutes, he had reached the end and said simply, "Uh-huh."
I didn't know what was written there. But after that point, the man had hardly another cross word for me. Miyagi probably wrote about me in friendly terms. The presence of some indirect evidence of that made me happy.
If I hadn't gotten the idea to buy my own notebook, I probably would never have written this record down. After I left Miyagi's book with the man, I decided I wanted my own. I went to the stationery store and bought a B5-sized Tsubame notebook and a cheap fountain pen, then thought about what I should write in it.
For the two days I had this substitute monitor around, I should do things I couldn't with Miyagi, I decided. My first inclination was to do something self-destructive, but I had a feeling that even if I didn't mention it when Miyagi returned, she would sense my guilt anyway. So in a more healthy sense, I decided to do something I wouldn't want Miyagi to see.
I wrote down all the things that happened from the day I climbed the stairs in that old building and sold my life span on the fourth floor, up to today. On the first page, I wrote about the class on morals from elementary school. I already knew the next thing to include without having to think about it. The first day I wondered about the price of a life. How I thought I was going to be very important. The promise I made with Himeno. How I learned about the place that buys your life span from the guys at the used bookstore and CD shop. How I met Miyagi there.
The words flowed right out of me. I smoked cigarettes, using an empty can as an ashtray so I could focus on writing. The sound of the pen scratching paper was pleasant to my ears. The room was hot and humid; a drop of sweat hit the paper and blotted the letters beneath it.
"What are you writing?" the man asked.
"I'm recording what happened in the last month."
"Why would you do that? So someone else can read it?"
"I don't know. I don't really care. Writing it down helps me organize it. I'm taking all the things in my head and moving them around to locations where they fit better. It's like a defrag process."
On and on I continued, into the night. My writing was far from elegant, but even I was surprised at how smoothly it all emerged from my mind.
It was after ten o'clock when the words suddenly came to a stop. I realized I wouldn't be able to write any more than that for today. I placed the fountain pen on the table and went outside for some air. The man rose as well, irritated, and followed me out.
Walking into the night without much of a destination, I heard the sound of taiko drums coming from somewhere. Probably someone practicing for a festival performance.
"So if you're a monitor, then you must have sold your time, too, huh?" I said, turning to the man.
"If I said yes, would you feel sympathy for me?" snorted the man.
"Yeah. I do."
He seemed surprised by that. "Well…thanks. But the truth is, I didn't sell my life span or my time or my health. I do this job because I want to do it."
"You got bad taste, then. What's so fun about it?"
"It's not fun. It's like visiting someone else's grave. I'm going to die someday, too. I want to be around for a lot of death now, while I can, so that I can accept it when it happens."
"Sounds like something an old man would think."
"No kidding. I am old," he said.
I went back to the apartment, had a beer after my bath, brushed my teeth, and was spreading out the blanket to sleep, but the adjacent room was noisy again tonight. Three or four people were talking with the window open. It seemed as if there were always people over at that place, day or night. It was a major difference from my apartment, where the only extra people who had ever set foot inside were my monitors.
I put on headphones to act as earplugs, turned off the light, and shut my eyes.
Perhaps because I had been using a part of my brain I never used, I slept eleven straight hours without once waking up.
I spent the entire next day filling the notebook with words again. The radio was covering nothing but the topic of the Koshien high school baseball tournament. My record of events caught up to the present day by the evening.
When I let go of the pen, my fingers were shaking. The muscles of my arm and hand were screaming bloody murder, my neck was absolutely stiff, and I had a dull headache. But the feeling of accomplishment wasn't bad at all. And by recompiling my memories into words, the good ones were made easier to experience, and the bad ones easier to accept.
Then I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling. A large black stain was up there—I had no idea where it came from—and a few bent nails stuck out randomly. There was even a spiderweb in the corner.
After watching a bit of a middle school baseball game nearby, I walked around a local flea market, then went to a dining hall and ate a dinner that might as well have been table scraps.
Miyagi's coming back tomorrow, I thought.
I decided to go to bed early that night. The notebook was still open on the table, so I put it away on the bookshelf and was spreading out my bed when the monitor spoke to me.
"This is something I ask all the subjects I monitor, but—what did you use the money from selling your life on?"
"It didn't say in the observation record?"
"…I wasn't reading in detail."
"I walked around and handed it out, one bill at a time," I said. "I used just a bit on living expenses, but the majority of it I was going to give to someone in particular. Until they ran away from me, that is, so I had no choice but to distribute it to strangers instead."
"One at a time?"
"Yep. I walked around and handed out ten-thousand-yen bills, one at a time."
The man started to laugh uncontrollably.
"It's funny, right?" I said.
"No, that's not what I'm laughing at," the man said through his chortling. It was a strange sound, and it wasn't exactly mirthful. "I see… So you sold your life span away to get money, and you just handed out the majority of it, to strangers, unconditionally."
"That's about right," I said.
"You really are a complete and total idiot."
"I agree. There were plenty of more effective ways of using it. I could have done lots of things with three hundred thousand yen."
"No. That's not what I'm making fun of," he said. Something about the way he said it struck me as curious.
At last, he said, "Hey, listen. Tell me—you don't seriously think your own life was worth three hundred thousand yen simply because they told you so, right?"
The question shook me to my core.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"I mean exactly what I said. When they told you your life was worth three hundred thousand yen, did you say 'Okay' and take it?"
"Well, yeah…but I did think it was way too low at first."
He smacked the floor and guffawed.
"Okay. Okay! Listen, I can't really tell you anything," he said, holding his stomach, "but when you see her tomorrow…why don't you ask her yourself? Ask her, 'Was the rest of my life really worth three hundred thousand?'"
I wanted to question him more about this, but he had no intention of telling me.
Instead, I stared at the pitch-black ceiling, unable to sleep.
All I did was think and think about what he said.
"Good morning, Mr. Kusunoki."
I woke up to the light coming through the window and Miyagi's voice.
There she was, sitting in the corner of the room, giving me a friendly smile—and lying to me.
"How do you plan to spend the day?"
I stopped the words just before they reached my throat.
Instead, I decided I should just play dumb. I didn't want to know the truth if it would cause trouble for Miyagi.
"The usual way," I said.
"The vending machine pilgrimage," said Miyagi happily.
We rode along twisting country roads and past rice paddies under the blue sky, onward and onward. At a roadside rest stop, we ate salt-grilled char and soft-serve ice cream. I found a strangely desolate and shuttered-up business area with hardly any people but tons of bicycles. And before I knew it, night had arrived.
I stopped the Cub at a small dam, then descended some stairs to a little walking path.
"Where are you heading?"
I didn't turn around. "If I was fooling you and led you somewhere completely different, what would you do?"
"Meaning you're taking me somewhere with very beautiful scenery?" Miyagi asked with anticipation.
"You've misconstrued the statement," I said, but she was right.
By the time we were crossing a little footbridge over a stream in the middle of the woods, she had figured out what I was doing.
Miyagi seemed entranced by the sight. "Um, pardon me if I'm noticing the wrong thing, but…I guess fireflies really do light up, don't they?"
"Of course they do. Why do you think they're called that?" I laughed, but I understood what she meant. Miyagi was feeling the same way now that I felt when looking at the stars over the lake. You know these things exist. But when they possess a beauty beyond a certain level, abstract knowledge means nothing. You don't know it until you've seen it.
Slowly, we walked down the path, surrounded by a countless number of floating, blinking green lights. You had to be careful, because looking too hard at the lights might cause a loss of focus and then balance.
"I think this might be the first time I've ever seen fireflies," said Miyagi.
"Their numbers have gone down a lot lately. You can't really see them unless you go to particular places at the right time. We've probably only got a few more days to be able to see them here."
"Do you come here often, Mr. Kusunoki?"
"No. Only once last year, around this time. I just remembered it yesterday."
The peak firefly time passed, so we turned to go back the way we came.
"…May I take this to be thanks for the trip to the lake?" Miyagi asked me.
"I decided I wanted to see them, so I chose to come here. That's all. You can interpret it however you like."
"Very well. I will interpret it. I will interpret it very much."
"You don't have to say it."
I drove back to the apartment, finished my daily ritual of organizing photos, prepared for bed, returned Miyagi's "Good-night," and had just turned out the lights when I spoke to her again.
"Miyagi."
"What is it?"
"Why did you lie to me?"
She looked up at me and blinked. "I don't understand what you mean."
"Let me be more specific, then… Was my life span really worth three hundred thousand yen?"
The moon was bright enough that I could see the shift in her eyes.
"Of course it was," she said. "I'm sorry, but that's your worth. I thought you'd accepted that and moved on already."
"I thought I had, too, until last night," I told her.
Miyagi could sense that I had a reason to be certain about this. "Did the substitute monitor say something to you?" she asked, sighing.
"He just said to look into it one more time. He didn't actually tell me any facts."
"Well, three hundred thousand is three hundred thousand. That's a fact," she said. She was determined not to bite.
"…When I heard you were lying to me, my first thought was simply that you had embezzled the money I was supposed to have received."
She stared upward at me.
"Initially, I thought the real value was thirty million yen, or three billion yen, and you pocketed nearly all of it and told me a false price… But I just couldn't believe that. I didn't want to think you were lying to me from the very first moment I met you. That even when you were smiling at me, there were lies underneath. I thought I must be making some fundamental mistake. So I thought about it all night, and then I figured it out… I was completely wrong about the very initial premise."
In fact, my teacher had told me as much, ten years before this.
I want you to put aside that way of thinking for now.
"Why did I believe ten thousand yen was the lowest possible value for a year of my life? Why did I believe in the idea that you could simply sell a human life for millions or billions of yen? I had too much prior knowledge. Maybe somewhere in my heart, I still accepted the nonsense about life being the most precious thing of all. I was too comfortable in my own preconceptions. I should have approached it with a more flexible mind."
I took a deep breath, then continued, "So tell me…why did you decide to give a perfect stranger three hundred thousand yen?"
Miyagi said, "I have no idea what you're talking about" and avoided my gaze.
I moved to the corner of the room directly across from where Miyagi was sitting and put my arms around my knees, mirroring her.
This made her smile, just a little bit.
"If you're going to pretend you don't know, fine. But let me just say: thank you."
Miyagi shook her head. "It's no problem. If I keep doing this job forever, I'm going to die before I finish repaying the debt, just like my mother. And even if I finished and was free again, there's no guarantee I'd have a good life. So it's better that I use my money for something like this."
"Then how much was my actual worth?" I asked.
She paused for quite a while.
"…Thirty yen," she mumbled.
"The worth of a three-minute phone call," I said with a laugh. "Well, sorry for using up the three hundred thousand you gave me that way."
"You should be. I wanted you to use it for yourself," she said. The content of her words was angry, but her voice was soft and gentle. "Though I'll admit, I understand how you feel. The reason I gave you three hundred thousand and the reason you gave it away are probably the same thing at their core. We're lonely and sad and empty and self-destructive, and so we turned to a kind of conceited, self-satisfied altruism… But thinking about it now, if I'd told you the truth, rather than lying about the three hundred thousand, you might not have sold your life span away. If nothing else, you might have lived longer. I'm sorry for interfering with that."
She was curled up, her chin buried between her knees, staring at her toes.
"Maybe I just wanted, for once in my life, to be in a position to give something unconditionally to someone else. Maybe I was trying to save myself by giving to someone unfortunate in a situation similar to mine—to do something for them that no one would do for me. But ultimately, I was only forcing a heavy-handed attempt at generosity on you. I'm sorry."
"That's not true," I protested. "If you had said, 'Your value is thirty yen,' I would have completely self-destructed. Rather than three months, I would have left less than three days. If you hadn't lied to me, I couldn't have gone on a tour of vending machines, folding paper cranes, stargazing, or looking for fireflies."
"There was never any need for you to be self-destructive. Thirty yen is just a number some big shot somewhere decided on," Miyagi claimed. "To me, at least, you're worth thirty million or three billion yen right now."
"That's a weird way to try to comfort me," I said awkwardly.
"It's true."
"The nicer you are, the more pathetic I feel. I already know you're a kind person. You can stop now."
"Shut up and let me comfort you, please."
"…No one's ever spoken to me quite like that before."
"And I'm not just trying to be nice. I'm just saying what I want to say, that's all. It doesn't matter to me what you think about it."
Miyagi looked down with shy embarrassment.
Then she went on. "I'll admit, at the start, I thought you were indeed worth only thirty yen. The three hundred thousand yen was just for my own sake. I could have given it to anyone, not just you specifically… But over time, my perception of you changed. After the incident at the train station, you took my story seriously. When I told you I never had a choice in this, you sympathized. From that day on, you were no longer just my subject. That's a major problem all on its own, but then I had more problems after that… It might not have meant anything to you, but unfortunately for me, I was happy when you spoke to me. It made me really, really happy that you would talk to me in public, regardless of whether anyone was listening. I've always been invisible, after all. It's my job to be ignored. Talking and eating at normal restaurants, shopping together, wandering around town, walking hand in hand along the river—all these tiny, mundane things were like a dream to me. In the time I've been doing this, you are the first person to treat me like I'm there at all times, from start to finish, Mr. Kusunoki."
I had no idea what to say to that. I'd never considered the possibility that someone might feel gratitude toward me.
"If you want me to…I can keep doing that stuff until the day I die," I said, teasing her.
But Miyagi just nodded. "I suppose you will. It's why I like you." She smiled sadly. "I guess there's no use falling in love with someone who's going away, though."
My chest seized up. I couldn't speak.
It was as if I were a computer that had frozen. I couldn't say anything, I couldn't even blink.
"Mr. Kusunoki, I've lied to you about a lot of things," Miyagi said, her voice getting just a little bit tearful. "About more than just the price of your life and Himeno's past. Like about how I could end your life if you tried to mess with other people. That was a lie. You dying if you travel more than a hundred yards away me? Also a lie. They were just excuses to protect myself. They're all lies."
"…I had no idea."
"If you're angry, you can do whatever you want to me."
"Anything?" I repeated.
"Yes. Whatever awful things you can think of."
"Then I will."
I grabbed Miyagi by the hand, pulled her up into a standing position, and hugged her.
I don't know how long the moment lasted.
I tried to commit everything to memory. Her soft hair. Perfectly shaped ears. Slender neck. Delicate shoulders and back. The subtle swell of her chest. The gentle curve of her hip. I focused all my attention on my five senses, etching the details deep in the center of my brain, committing them to my core.
I wanted to remember them at a moment's notice. I wanted to never forget them.
"This really is cruel of you," said Miyagi, sniffling. "After this, it's going to be impossible for me to forget you."
"Yeah. You better be sad after I die," I said.
"…If that's what you want, then I'll be that way until I die, too."
And Miyagi smiled.
At this point in my short and meaningless life, I finally had a goal.
What Miyagi said had a tremendously transformative effect on me.
I was going to do whatever I could with the two months I had left to repay her entire debt.
That was my plan.
A guy whose whole life is worth less than a beverage from a vending machine.
This is probably what they mean when they say you're in over your head.