She acted selfishly, but sometimes she would seem concerned. She would say warm, kind things to me.
Tohko was the only one that I couldn’t lie to, just as Akutagawa found it impossible to lie to his mother.
After all, Tohko had seen me be weak and pathetic this whole time.
She knew all about my cowardice and my stupidity.
And so she was the only person I couldn’t lie to.
And then to ask me if I wished I had never met her—it wasn’t fair asking me that.
She already knew the answer.
No fair! No fair at all!
How totally unfair of you, Tohko!
“Gah… that’s not a fair question. It’s not fair to ask me that when you already know…”
The tears I’d been holding back welled up in my eyes, but I kept arguing “it’s not fair” through my sobs. Tohko walked up to me and reached out her white hands to cup my cheeks. It was a cool, gentle sensation.
My nerves relaxed, but I kept my face down as more tears spilled from my eyes. Tohko whispered a line from the play in her clear, kind voice.
“I believe in you. You will be victorious. Your goodness and sincerity will help you grow to great things. I will be with you when you feel all alone. Walk the path you believe in with commitment. Your path will be long, and fools will disparage you. But you have a destiny that only you can fulfill.”
My voice thick with emotion, I answered, “That’s… not something Sugiko actually said. It’s just one of Nojima’s fantasies.”
“That’s true. But I’m not a fantasy.”
The hands that had cupped my cheeks moved to hold my hands. Then she pressed my hands over her heart.
“I’m really here.”
Her intelligent eyes looked straight into mine.
Below the jacket and shirt of her uniform, I felt Tohko’s heartbeat. It carried all the way into my palm.
Tohko’s chest was bony and hard, but it was warm, and beneath her skin, I could feel the proof that Tohko was alive and that she existed.
Thump… thump… it went.
I couldn’t stop crying.
My throat and my chest felt like they were ripping apart, and my hot tears gushed out of me like water from a broken faucet.
As I listened to the sound of Tohko’s heartbeat with my hand, I realized something.
I had decided that after Miu, I would never get attached to anyone ever again. But I realized that all this time, I had been growing deeply attached to Tohko.
That after crying pitifully like this in front of her and spewing my feelings at her, each time I had felt the warmth of Tohko’s hands, and I had gotten back up.
I couldn’t possibly wish that I’d never met Tohko.
“Now, now, stop crying. You can use my handkerchief.”
Gently slipping her hand out from our overlapped grip, Tohko pulled out a light blue handkerchief. I accepted it, and pressing it against my face, I said, “This is the handkerchief I lent you.”
“What?!”
“That was more than three months ago.”
“O-oh? Was it really?” Tohko mumbled. Then she went on in embarrassment, “After you wipe your face, shall we go to school?”
“Yeah.”
After I’d splashed some water on my face at the sink at school, I headed to my class.
In the space of a day, the classroom had been transformed into a manga café. The desks were pushed together to make tables, which we set around the room with chairs; the manga everyone had brought from home were lined up on shelves; and billboards with anime characters on them had been hung up.
“Is Akutagawa here yet?” I asked. A classmate told me, “He’s doing some morning practice at the archery hall.”
I went to the practice hall and found Akutagawa all alone in his archery uniform and facing a target.
He drew back on the bow in his hand; straightened his spine; stared at the target with a tense, firm expression; and then released the arrow.
The arrow skirted the target and lodged into the matting propped up behind it. When he saw that, his brow furrowed in pain.
“Akutagawa?”
I called out to him, and his eyes widened in surprise.
“Inoue—”
“Sorry about yesterday. Something’s been getting to me, too, lately, and I just boiled over. I was trying to run away. But I stopped running. So I was wondering if you would be in the play with me. We could confront the things we’re afraid of there.”
Akutagawa’s eyes grew even wider, and he looked down at me.
I lifted my face up to look back at him.
Without fear, smiling, dignified.
The surprise in Akutagawa’s eyes gradually shifted into an optimistic determination.
“All right.”
He nodded, then smiled just a little.
In that moment, I felt as if a refreshing feeling of empathy had flowed into my lungs along with the pure morning air.
When I returned to the classroom with Akutagawa, who had now changed back into his uniform, it was oddly abuzz.
Had there been some kind of crisis?
Just then, Kotobuki’s friend Mori ran up to me.
“It’s terrible, Inoue! Nanase collapsed, and they took her to the nurse’s office! They said it was a cold. She was burning up!”
“She what?!”
Akutagawa and I both ran down to the nurse’s office and found Kotobuki lying on a bed breathing raggedly, her face bright red.
“I… I’m sorry, Inoue. I—”
She looked at me, tears in her eyes.
“I’ll still be in the play,” she croaked. Something about her admirable display of intensity lodged in my heart.
“You can’t. You should call your family and go home.”
“But then I’ll be causing everyone so much trouble.”
“You couldn’t help it, Kotobuki. It’s my fault you got sick.”
The reason she had become sick was because she’d stood out in the rain for such a long time. I couldn’t let her feel like she was responsible.
“It’s okay. We’ll take care of the play.”
I said this with a smile empty of all falsehood, and Kotobuki’s eyes teared up again.
“O-okay…”
“Whaaaat? Nanase collapsed with a fever?!” Tohko shouted, her eyes bugging out. She was dressed as a maid, acting as waitress in her class’s curry restaurant.
“Would you play Sugiko for her, Tohko? I bet you have all the lines memorized anyway,” I said.
“What about Nojima?”
“I’ll do it,” I answered crisply. Tohko’s eyes widened slightly; then she quickly smiled and nodded.
“All right.”
Akutagawa then asked, “If you play Nojima, then who’ll play Hayakawa?”
“Hayakawa hardly has any lines, so we can cut him out with some ad-libbing.”
“That’s true. Let’s do that. There’s hardly any time left before the curtain goes up. We have to get Chia and discuss everything.”
At that moment, Maki appeared with a sketchbook in her arms.
“Bonjour, Tohko! I came to behold your maid costume. I see that a true beauty really can look good in anything.”
“Argh! Why are you here?! My manager told you I wouldn’t be here till this afternoon!”
“You didn’t expect such an obvious lie to deceive me, did you? Now surrender yourself and let me sketch you.”
Tohko pulled off her apron and shoved it at Maki.
“Unfortunately something extremely urgent has come up. I’ve gotta go.”
“Hey, Tohko! Your shift’s not up yet!”
One of her classmates, also dressed as a maid, rushed over to stop her. Tohko pointed at Maki.
“Make her do it instead.”
“Wait, what? Tohkoooo!”
Takeda was dressed in a short festival jacket, selling octopus dumplings from a stall in the school yard, when we met up with her. By the time we’d talked
about the changes in the performance, changed into costume, and run into the auditorium, it was only five minutes before the curtain went up.
I stood in the wings with Takeda, our chests heaving as we got our breathing under control.
I was sure that Tohko and Akutagawa were standing by on the opposite side in a similar state.
“That… was pretty close,” said Takeda.
“Y-yeah.”
“I’m glad you came today and didn’t blow the play off. You are the one who told me I had to live.”
I glanced over and saw that Takeda wasn’t smiling. Her face and the whisper of her voice were both quite soft and detached.
“I’m just like you, Takeda. I’ve been wearing a mask this whole time and avoided getting close to people. But if I see this play through to the end, I think I might be able to get past that part of myself. And not just me—Akutagawa might, too.”
“I’d like to see that. If it works, I’ll have some hope, too.”
The stage was as dark as a night that goes on into eternity. I couldn’t make anything out on the other side.
I wondered what Akutagawa was thinking about right now.
I wanted to overcome this together.
I prayed for it so powerfully my heart trembled.
Please, please.
A buzzer rang to announce the curtain’s rising, and we stepped out onto the stage.
In spotlights like moonbeams, Akutagawa and I proceeded slowly past the unopened curtain, he from stage right and I from stage left.
“This is the story of myself, my truest friend Omiya, and the woman I loved.”
My voice went out quietly into the auditorium through the microphone fixed to my collar.
Then came Akutagawa’s deep, resolute voice.
“This is the story of myself, my truest friend Nojima, and the woman he loved.”
The curtain silently lifted, and a third spotlight lit up the center of the stage, illuminating Tohko’s slender back.
Her straight black hair reached her hips. A big ribbon was tied at the back of her head. She wore a bewitching pink kimono with fluttering sleeves and burgundy empire-waisted pants.
“I first met Sugiko in the hallway outside the second floor of the Imperial Theater.”
I wasn’t a professional actor, so of course my performance wasn’t spectacular. I merely pictured the person Nojima was in my mind, overlaid his emotions on my own, and worked hard to say his lines in a loud, clear voice.
For now, Akutagawa’s voice was steady, too.
When Tohko turned and sent her hair fluttering, the packed seats of the audience were filled with gasps of appreciation.
That was how pretty, how beautiful without hyperbole Tohko looked with her hair down, her entire bearing redolent of a book girl from an older, purer age. She was like a violet blossom announcing the advent of spring.
“Where are you going?”
“To my flower lessons.”
The always-pumped hyperactivity she had when she played Nojima was ratcheted down to a nice level in her performance as Sugiko. The way she recited her lines and her movements as she dipped her head at Nojima were both simple and pretty.
I watched Sugiko walk away gracefully the way Nojima would have, thinking, Ah, this is the most beautiful flower nature has made.
A being that is gentle, noble, dreamlike.
“Precious, precious girl. I will be a man worthy of becoming your husband. Until I am, I beg you not to marry another.”
I knew what it felt like to pray so hard for something.
To be happy just looking at the person you love for your heart to leap, to tirelessly imagine things turning out well for yourself, and to love a person ceaselessly to the point of foolishness.
My feelings for Miu mingled with Nojima’s feelings for Sugiko.
Other people might consider it nothing more than a stupid fantasy or deluded misconception.
Maybe I hadn’t understood Miu’s feelings.
But there was nothing false in my love for her.
Facing Sugiko at the Ping-Pong table, gripping the paddle tightly, we shot balls back and forth.
There was a smile of enjoyment on the face of the girl he loved. Each time she swung the paddle, the long sleeves of her kimono fluttered like butterflies’ wings.
I was sure Nojima would have wished for this moment to go on forever.
“Where else would I find a woman so innocent, beautiful, and pure, so considerate, and so lovely? God is offering this woman to me. How cruel He would be otherwise.”
“Where does this happiness come from? Is this illusion? It is much too rich for that.”
“I cannot but love her; I cannot lose her. I will not be denied. God, have pity on me. Grant us our happiness.”
But despite how much Nojima loved her, Sugiko loved his best friend Omiya.
Omiya had always been aware of the feelings Sugiko had for him. So he always treated her coolly. Ironically, that only attracted Sugiko to him even more.
“Why don’t I stand in for Nojima?”
Omiya faced Sugiko across the Ping-Pong table. As he acted out Omiya pelting Sugiko with merciless shots, Akutagawa’s expression was tense and forbidding. The conflict Omiya was feeling came through with almost painful clarity.
It was Akutagawa’s own conflict and his own suffering, as well.
After the incident six years earlier, he had vowed to be always honorable and intelligent.
After he started high school, he must have felt so conflicted when Igarashi asked him to introduce him to Sarashina and when Sarashina told him she wanted to break up with Igarashi. He must have agonized over his decisions.
It must have tortured Akutagawa that he couldn’t return Sarashina’s feelings, though he felt how strong they were, and his guilt toward Igarashi must have wrenched his heart.
He had hidden those feelings for an entire year beneath a placid exterior, and never letting slip any complaint, he would only open up to his mother, who slumbered at the hospital, through the letters he wrote to her.
I didn’t want to deny his awkwardness, his almost obstinate honor.
No matter how foolish it might be, no matter how mistaken.
You chose that path after careful consideration.
The story was approaching its climax.
Omiya was going abroad in order to sever his attachment to Sugiko.
“I pray for your happiness,” he said with a quiet smile to Nojima, who had come to see him off.
Sugiko watched Omiya as he said that, tears springing to her eyes.
Our emotions mingling—
With Nojima’s, with Omiya’s, with Sugiko’s—
Until I see myself in the people living inside the story as I read it.
Until I rejoice alongside them, laugh alongside them, feel sad, suffer, shout, and cry as I turn the pages.
Nojima proposes to Sugiko, but she turns him down.
Pressing the plaster mask of Beethoven that Omiya has sent from overseas to my face, I crouched in the center of the stage and sobbed out Nojima’s feelings.
Heartbreak is truly an awful thing.
I didn’t know how I was supposed to overcome this unbearable pain that dashed my hopes in an instant, that covered the world in darkness, that cut my heart to shreds.
God—why did you take away the only thing that mattered to me?
Miu—I still haven’t forgotten you. Every time I think of you, my breath catches, and I feel my chest tearing apart. Why did you refuse me and go so far away?!
Darkness fell over the stage, and Omiya stood at stage left, his face filled with anguish. A dim light illuminated him.
“Dear, honored friend. I owe you an apology. You will understand everything if you look at the story that appears in a certain literary magazine. I will not compel you to read it. It is my confession. And I ask you to judge us.”
A spotlight fell over me as I huddled in the center of the stage. I looked down at a handmade magazin
e and flipped through the pages avidly.
Sugiko appeared at stage right and turned a tormented gaze toward Omiya, who stood at stage left.
Then lit by faint spotlights, Omiya and Sugiko began to alternately read the letters published in the magazine.
“Please don’t be angry, Mister Omiya. It took all of my courage to write to you.”
Tohko’s clear voice spoke ardently of Sugiko’s passion for Omiya.
In contrast, Omiya stubbornly refused her and begged her to accept his best friend Nojima.
“You are still unaware of the good in Nojima. I hope you will recognize his soul.”
“Please, Mister Omiya, I want you to see me as an independent human being, as a woman. I want you to forget about Mister Nojima. I am the only one here.”
“You are idealizing me. Even presuming that you came to be with me, it would not make you happy.”
“You are a liar. Truly a liar.”
The tense exchange continued.
Tohko’s voice was colored by passion, her cheeks burning scarlet and her eyes filling with fiery tears as the lights shone on her.
In contrast, Akutagawa’s expression slowly grew darker and firmer.
“I don’t know how I should reply to you. I am at a loss. I wish I could talk to Nojima. But I lack the necessary courage. I feel so bad for him.”
With each word he spoke, Akutagawa furrowed his brow in pain. His tightly balled fists were trembling.
Akutagawa’s suffering pierced my heart.
The commandment he imposed on himself to be honorable, the terror of making a decision.
The events of the past had hog-tied him and pinned him down mercilessly.
Please don’t give up. Cast off your commandment.
You’re not a bad person.
You were honorable.
I want you to find a way to move on.
“I wondered whether to send this letter or if I had better not. I think it would be better not to. However—”
He stopped.
Akutagawa’s face contorted, he opened his eyes wide and stared out at the audience as if he’d just suffered a terrible shock.
In the third row from the front, right in the middle, sat Mayuri Sarashina with bandages wrapped around her neck.
Book Girl and the Captive Fool Page 16
