The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya

by Nagaru Tanigawa

  Anyway, I hadn’t done it. I couldn’t have.

  I was far too deeply involved with the SOS Brigade. I could no more extricate myself than I could swim out of the deepest part of a swamp without scuba gear.

  That’s why I stayed in the shallows. Here at the edge of a long, shallow beach, where I could stay with my friends, never growing tired of gazing at the far-off horizon.

  I didn’t feel like asking some other unspecified person. I wanted to stay like this. I didn’t need anyone’s opinion. Haruhi and Asahina and Koizumi and Nagato. Their view was my view, and there was no doubt that my thoughts were in concert with theirs.

  So I just wanted to go on like this. As far as we wanted to. We could jump over as many bent rails as we had to, building our own tracks as we went.

  On until the end of time.

  On Monday, after class ended, some sudden caprice compelled our brigade chief to declare club activities for the day canceled and leave school immediately, and feeling fortunate, several of us brigade members—including Asahina and Koizumi—went our separate ways home.

  I felt as though I wanted a little bit more time on my own to think things through, and I was grateful for the opportunity to do so.

  Only Nagato remained in the clubroom, absorbed in reading, perhaps out of some sense of obligation as the president of the literature club. I could only pray no hopeful literature club members-to-be dared to set foot in that cursed location. I wondered if Nagato would do some kind of sneaky data manipulation to prevent that from happening.

  After school ended I got my bike out from the bike parking lot in front of the station, and passing by the road home, pedaled on down a different route.

  My goal was the SOS Brigade’s “usual spot,” the square in front of a certain train station. Although come to think of it, lately I’d been running into Sasaki, Kuyoh, and Kyoko Tachibana there quite a bit.

  Of course I didn’t have any arrangements to meet up with anyone. I just had the idea that if I went there, I might be able to anyway. Just like flipping a coin, I figured the odds were about fifty-fifty, but it seemed that my guess had been anticipated.

  “Hey.”

  Sasaki stood in front of the square and waved.

  “I thought you might come here,” she said. “It’s not very scientific, but sometimes it’s not a bad idea to trust your instincts. Although betting everything on gut feelings or prophetic dreams is just bad reasoning.”

  I illegally parked my bike and walked over to Sasaki.

  She was calmly watching the people come and go, and as I approached she invited me to sit on a nearby wooden bench.

  For a while we were silent, watching the students heading home after being spit out by their schools, and the many other people coming and going like so many freshwater fish in a river.

  It was Sasaki who finally spoke up.

  “Good work the other day. I mean, I suppose in the end it didn’t wind up being involved at all, and getting ditched in front of the school like that totally threw me for a loop. So that was the closed space I’ve been hearing so much about?”

  What had happened to her back then? I asked.

  “I didn’t have anything to do, and it seemed like if I hung around the area I’d only get in the way, so I just retreated. You go up and down that steep hill every day, huh? To be honest, I’m impressed.”

  It wasn’t that big of a deal. Once you got used to it, it was easier than walking around underground shopping districts in the city.

  “I heard most of the details from Tachibana.” Sasaki kept her gaze fixed on her dangling loafers. “I feel bad for Fujiwara, but it sounds like things worked out all right. For me too. I’ve been released from god duty, apparently.”

  I could tell from her tone that Sasaki was being sincere. Not for nothing had I spent so much time with her in middle school. There was just one thing—

  “There’s something I want to ask you,” I said.

  “What might that be? What could there possibly be for you to ask me, apart from academics? I seem to recall you doing that all the time in middle school.”

  “When you came to my house, you said there was another reason for it, besides the stuff going on with Fujiwara and the rest. What was it?”

  Sasaki’s eyes widened considerably. “Oh that? I’m surprised you remember. I’d meant to say it casually enough that you’d forget it right away. I suppose I shouldn’t have underestimated your memory.”

  Sasaki chuckled under her breath and looked up at the sky.

  “It happened about two weeks ago. Someone confessed his feelings to me.”

  In that moment, every comment that came to mind was sealed away, and I found myself forced into total silence. It was as if every word of Japanese had gone flying out of my head, and I couldn’t say anything.

  “It’s a boy from my school. At the time I couldn’t help but feel like, wow, there’s no accounting for taste, and I wasn’t quick enough to be able to reply right away. It felt like such a sneak attack. So I’ve kept putting it off.”

  When I thought about it, Haruhi and Sasaki were alike in some ways. So long as they didn’t open their mouths, their looks would draw an above-average amount of attention from the opposite sex, but if they just stood there silently, their eyes would chase those same guys away.

  “In other words, I came for advice on my love life. Did you ever imagine I would come over with less than a single strand of messenger RNA’s worth of business? But at least I had the good fortune to be able to meet your sister.”

  Well… I felt bad that I hadn’t been useful, I said.

  “Don’t worry about it. It would’ve been better for you if I’d come for advice like that, given the circumstances. I thought about it and decided that it really was the sort of problem I needed to solve myself. It wouldn’t have been very considerate of me to just add noise to your life.”

  We fell silent again. I thought about making some kind of stupid joke, but nothing came to mind. Pathetically, it seemed as though I needed to brush up on my vocabulary. I’d have to ask Librarian Nagato if she had any recommendations.

  The stagnation surrounded us like a jelly, and it was Sasaki again who finally broke it, with yet another shocking revelation.

  “Suzumiya and I went to the same elementary school. We were always in different classes, but even I could tell how much she stood out. She was like the sun. Even in a different class, I could feel the light she gave off.”

  That had to be some kind of joke. There was no way Haruhi had met Sasaki before I did.

  “I was always thinking how nice it would be to be in the same class with her, but it never happened. So when it turned out we were going to different middle schools, I felt kind of complicated about it. I was sort of lonely, but also relieved… It’s true, if you stare at the sun too long you’ll injure your eyes. But if the sun disappears, we lose the warmth of its light… or so I guess you could say. Does this make any sense, Kyon?”

  Yeah, more or less, I said.

  “Thanks to some family issues, my last name changed when I started middle school. That’s why Suzumiya didn’t recognize me when you introduced me as Sasaki. My appearance has changed quite a bit too. I’d grown my hair out to try to look more like her, but then I cut it. It’s for the best, though. If she noticed me now, I feel like it would just make me self-conscious. So keep it a secret, would you? This particular confession is pretty embarrassing for me.”

  I’m pretty sure I exhaled.

  I felt a renewed sense of just how many human connections happened without my knowledge. It felt obvious in retrospect. There are billions of people in the world, and each one of them encounters many others—there are meetings, partings, and reunions. Countless little dramas playing out, all the time.

  And in the end I could only be aware of the relationships in my immediate surroundings. No matter what incidents, what romances might happen, there was no way for me to ever recognize such unknowable things as real, I said.


  “That’s not true, Kyon,” said Sasaki, having regained her bright smile. “Are you saying the only reality is that which is reported on? It’s true that as humans, our knowledge is finite. What exists at the edge of the universe, what is there beyond the universe, and what is the universe, anyway—for me, these truths are still out of reach. But just because you can’t recognize something doesn’t mean the answer doesn’t exist. This is what I think—even if humanity as a species heads for extinction, so long as there’s some life form somewhere ready to observe things we can’t understand, then we could call that being a god.”

  I definitely didn’t understand anymore, now that she’d brought things out to the cosmic scale, I said.

  “We humans have been given the power of imagination. That’s the one thing humans can brag about to the natural world. We can compete with godlike beings. It’s our one weapon, our single arrow.” Sasaki chuckled, and continued. “If you like, Kyon, I’ll stand in for Suzumiya whenever you want—or so I’d say, but I know you’d never wish for even a tiny bit of that. And I’m sure you know what my wish is. In any case, that possibility is now too tiny to be expressed in digits. It would be presumptuous to describe it even as ‘zero.’ It does not exist.”

  She really was always right, I said.

  “And in the end, I didn’t do anything. I’m really not built for this god stuff.”

  Given this world full of people doing all sorts of things that were better off left undone, Sasaki herself should have been well aware just how beautiful it was to hear someone say they weren’t going to do something that they shouldn’t have been doing, I said.

  “Yeah. I didn’t want to just become a simple bad guy. I didn’t want that kind of price on my head. My plan is to avoid being close enough to ruin that I have to take on that kind of work. It’s like an actor playing a cheap trickster even though they have an order of magnitude more talent than that—but that’s where the nuance comes from. But I’m not an actress, and I don’t belong onstage. For good or ill, I can’t act.”

  The only person I know who seemed as if they’d make a decent actor was Koizumi. Definitely not me. I was pretty confident I’d have a lot of complaints for the screenwriter who wrote the script too.

  “It just means that I can’t be anyone besides me, and you can’t be anyone besides you. No one can pretend to be Suzumiya. She probably couldn’t even consciously do it herself. There’s no room for conscious intervention there. No matter how wise or capable you are.”

  These riddles are serving their purpose, I told Sasaki. Just how long was she planning to continue this pseudo-philosophical conversation?

  “How rude. Well, I’m done.” Sasaki’s face turned suddenly serious. “You seem to have steadily increased the number of lovely friends to whom you’re connected and discovered quite a bit of pleasure there, but I’ve been thinking. I want to focus on my studies. I really don’t have the luxury of slacking through my classes and enjoying myself the way we did in middle school. I’m not even paying much attention to how I talk. My school was boys-only until a few years ago, and girls are still a minority, so it’s not an environment I find particularly enjoyable. But I suppose being so lazy before means it’s about all I can expect to come slamming into a wall. That’s why, Kyon—it’s only ever been you. Those times we put our desks together and ate lunch are more precious to me than anything now. I wanted to say something but after thinking about it, I won’t. Yet there’s only one boy in the world who both kept his distance but also paid attention to me, and afterward treated me totally normally, and that’s you.”

  She giggled again.

  “Gosh, it really sounds like I’m confessing to you, doesn’t it? It really wasn’t my intention to be misunderstood, though.”

  Nobody’s misunderstood anything. There’s something screwy in the head with anyone who got the wrong idea, I said. Kunikida’s brain specialized in academics, so he had a strange ability to remember stuff like this.

  “That’s true. The things you don’t really want to remember get forgotten the instant you don’t need them anymore. I’ve already forgotten all the knowledge and techniques I memorized to pass my high school entrance exams. I’m sure the memories I have now will be gone after three years,” said Sasaki sunnily. “But that’s fine. I’ll remember other things—the things I want to remember.”

  Sasaki hopped to her feet as though freed from something.

  “Well, I’ve got to get to cram school. I’m glad we could talk, Kyon.”

  Sasaki started walking, heading for the station’s turnstile without looking back.

  I called out to her slender form with as much energy as I could muster. “Good-bye, old friend! I’ll see you at the next reunion!”

  I don’t know whether she heard me or not, but she didn’t raise her hand. No matter how many years it would be until our next meeting, something about the way she walked away made me think she’d already decided upon the words she’d say. “Hey, friend.”

  Thus did Sasaki and I begin our walk down opposite paths. I wasn’t sure if I should hurry, or if I should take my time—I felt sort of ambivalent about it, but the question was whether a month was enough time in which to come to a conclusion about something. I suppose it depends on the something.

  In any case, the direction I was walking in would lead me toward days during which I would have to decide what present to get Haruhi.

  If anyone had any ideas, I would’ve loved to get a text message or letter about them. I had the feeling it would make a good reference for me to make the best possible choice I could.

  The next day, Tuesday.

  Despite having trudged up this hill for an entire year, its irritation never seemed to abate, so yet again I found myself climbing it in silence.

  “Heya there, Kyon ol’ buddy!” I felt a whack on my back as if someone was trying to kill a cockroach there, and stumbled forward without any intention of exaggerating the impact.

  I turned around and there in front of my face, gleaming like a laminated rare card, was none other than the great Tsuruya.

  “Ah, Tsuruya. Good morning.”

  “Hey, Kyon! Lookin’ nice and clear today, eh?”

  I looked up at the sky to confirm that it was indeed cloudy, then back at Tsuruya, who cackled.

  “I’m not talking about the weather! I’m talking about you, boy, you! You’ve got a nice pleasant look on your face, like something that’s been bothering you for a whole week has finally cleared up—that’s what your face looks like!” she said, as though having seen the entire sequence of events herself.

  In a way, Tsuruya had even sharper instincts than Haruhi herself. I didn’t even find it strange that she’d been able to read so much from my face, although I was surprised at how normal that felt. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you, Tsuruya.”

  “What might that be?” she said, falling in step with me.

  “What kind of guy do you think I am? I mean from your perspective.”

  “Huh? Did something happen? My impression’s not gonna do you any good!”

  “I want to hear your honest opinion on the matter. Not only can I not get a straight answer out of Koizumi or Nagato, but they just spout off intellectual nonsense that I can’t understand.”

  Tsuruya laughed. “I guess you can’t really ask Mikuru either. She’d pretty much only flatter you.” Then Tsuruya suddenly peered at my face. “Hmm, well, Kyon… you’re… like a well-liked minor character. You’re not particularly easy to talk to, but when someone does say something, you always come back with just the right response. You don’t really laugh when someone says something funny, but you also don’t get irritated when someone’s being boring. There really aren’t very many people who will just give you a straight answer like that. That’s you, Kyon!”

  I asked if she didn’t have anything a little more, well, flattering.

  “I guess you’re a decently cute guy.”

  Unsurprisingly, Tsuru
ya’s visual acuity was about as good as a military Landsat bird. Go on, I said.

  “But not that cute.”

  The nice feeling I’d been experiencing popped like a balloon.

  Tsuruya cackled again. “But I don’t think you’re on the wrong track! You just gotta trust in that. You don’t seem like you tease Mikuru too much, after all! You’re just living out your high school life here, normal as can be!”

  Nothing about life in the SOS Brigade was normal, I said.

  “I wonder,” said Tsuruya, light shining in her eyes. “It seems like it’s kinda become normal to you! You’ve got Haru-nyan, and Mikuru, and Nagatocchi, and Koizumi. Who else do you need?”

  Nothing, I could immediately say. I’d had more than enough of new brigade recruits.

  “Nyahaha, I’ll bet!” Tsuruya skipped a step and pulled ahead of me. But then, turning around, she continued. “Don’t forget the blossom-viewing party at the end of the month! I’ve got all kinds of stuff planned, so if you don’t come we’ll bring the cherry blossoms to you!” Then, finally: “Just let me know when you need that weird toy you left at my house! Bye!”

  With a light tone and a wink, she left me behind and tripped her way up the hill. In her receding figure, I saw someone who was going to take life by the horns and wring every bit of fun out of it.

  I was no match for Tsuruya. I probably never would be, not in my whole life. But that sense of inferiority only kindled a strangely warm sensation in my heart.

  Just as Tsuruya’s form was shrinking in the distance, a different acquaintance of mine slapped my back. When I turned, I saw lined up there the two people with whom I mysteriously always ended up in the same class—Taniguchi and Kunikida.

  “Yo!” said Taniguchi, who from what I could tell of his complexion, had finally recovered from his encounter with Kuyoh Suoh. Ever since that random encounter, I’d had a strangely hard time looking at him, but Taniguchi the Ladies’ Man seemed to have bounced back quickly.