Chapter 207

“Do you remember, Konoha? I was trying to climb the tree one morning and you passed by.” “How would I forget that? A normal president wouldn’t be climbing trees first thing in the morning.” “I wasn’t really trying to put a baby bird back in its nest.” I wouldn’t be right in the head if I believed an excuse like that. I thought this, but I kept quiet. “There’s a trick where if you tie a ribbon around a tree branch at school without anyone seeing you, your wish is supposed to come true. So I wanted to tie a ribbon up, too. I got disappointed because I thought I’d failed when you saw me. But after I hung the ribbon up to dry in the clubroom, it disappeared, and then I found it tied around a branch of the tree.” “…” “You had a scrape on your cheek that day.” “…” “There was also a scrap of leaf stuck to the front of your uniform.” “I don’t remember it that well,” I said curtly, and Tohko stopped looking at the view, turned her face toward me, and smiled. “Yeah… it’s been more than a year. It’s ancient history.” Her gaze was very kind and enfolding… wrenching my heart even more. “Tohko, here.” I held out the heavy brown envelope in both hands. “For graduating.” I looked Tohko straight in the eyes, packing my emotions into them. “It’s the novel I wrote. I’m giving it to you.” Tohko’s face grew serious. Then she looked like she was about to cry, and after that she slowly smiled. “Thank you. I’ll enjoy it.” She accepted the envelope and hugged it to her chest like a treasure, along with the tube and flowers. “I’ll take my time reading it once I get home.” The gentle gesture filled with affection made my chest grow hot. “I’m sorry, I have to go now. I’m meeting Aunt Kanako. We’re going to tell Ryuto about the graduation.” “Are things going well with Kanako?” “Well… it’s still hard for us to talk after all. But I’m sure it’ll just take a little more time.” She probably thought that was fine. Tohko’s tone was placid and tender. Whenever Kanako wrote Yui’s story, she would probably tell Tohko her true feelings through that. Because I doubted she was the kind of person who could say it out loud. Because even when she was with someone she loved, she was the kind of person who found it difficult even to smile. She could only say things through writing. And so Kanako Sakurai would continue to be an author. “Remember to come tell me if you get in.” “I will.” “If you don’t, I’ll think you flunked after all.” “It’s fine. I’m confident.” Tohko puffed up her flat chest and smiled. They would announce the results on March 23. One week later and the passage of time felt slower. At the same time, I felt the urgency that there was only a little bit of March left. When April came, I would be a third-year and Tohko would go north. Though if by some chance she didn’t pass, she might take a year off and come hang out in the clubroom between study sessions. This was Tohko, who’d gotten hit with an F on her end-of-year tests. She might’ve bragged that she was confident, but the chances of flunking were way higher. But she said the secondary exam didn’t have a math section, so who knew. She might’ve passed… Either way, it wasn’t as if I would never see her for the rest of my life. And yet, while waiting for that day, my chest had been twisted up by anxiety. And then the twenty-third arrived. Since today was the ceremony for the last day of classes, people dispersed from the school building during the afternoon and the place became deserted. I went to the book club room, sat in a chair, and waited for Tohko to come. I wondered what time they would announce the results. No way she would have gone to the school itself to get them… I’d heard there were services that would check the results for you and let you know by telegram or e-mail, but had she done that? Even when the hour came when club usually started, Tohko hadn’t appeared. Outside was a pleasant blue sky and the cherry blossoms were blooming earlier than in most years. When I’d first met Tohko, spring had come unusually late. A long, long winter had dragged on, and the cherry blossoms seemed like they would never bloom. But this year spring was early. While I gazed at the pleasant scenery, I grew sleepy. Spring had the power to seduce people into sleep. My body grew warm and my eyelids were so heavy I couldn’t fight them. Thinking, Just a quick nap…, I put my face down on the uneven surface of the desk and closed my eyes. If Tohko came, I was sure she would wake me up. The sound of a page turning… The sound of a gentle tearing… The rustling sound of chewing… I woke up to the familiar sounds I’d taken in over two years. The inside of the room was dyed by the golden western sun. Dressed in her school uniform and sitting with her feet pulled up on a fold-up chair next to the window, Tohko was tearing up the pages of a book and putting the pieces into her mouth. The chair was positioned at an angle, so she was hidden from the light streaming in, and I couldn’t really make out her expression. But the book on her lap had only the very last page left. And only one or two bites of that. There was a riiip and the page became even smaller. She slowly chewed and swallowed it, and her slender fingers reached for the final scrap. A faint sound of a page tearing. Slightly open lips. A fragment of a word disappearing inside them. When she’d swallowed it, Tohko turned her head toward me. Her face was sad. Even though she always looked so happy when she was eating books. “You were awake…?” “I just woke up.” “Oh.” Her eyes softened gently. That, too, made her look more grown-up than usual. “… I finished the last of Alt-Heidelberg. It was so sweet and heartbreaking… incredibly delicious. Thank you for buying it.” I gaped when I saw that the very last page had been torn out of the book. “I got into college.” “… Congratulations.” “I told you I’d do great on the real one.” I tried to say something, but the words caught in my throat. She spoke the name of the university in Hokkaido that I’d predicted she would, and then Tohko opened the bag at her side and took out a heavy-looking brown envelope. It was the manuscript I’d given her. Why was it still around? It had been more than a week. Tohko gazed at me with an even more profoundly kind look than before and said in a gentle voice, “The novel you wrote for me… was succulent, and gentle, and absolutely wonderful! It was so melancholy it made my chest ache until I couldn’t bear it, but after I finished reading it, I felt pure and warm… I’m sure it would taste so good if I ate it.” Anxiety stabbed into my heart. My voice was hoarse. “… I want you to eat it. That’s why I wrote it.” Tohko shook her head. “I can’t eat this story.” She set the pages down on the desk. “It would be wrong to eat it.” “Why?” She wasn’t making any sense. But she had always been beside me while I was writing her snacks, pressuring me to hurry, hurry, hurry. When I held one out, she’d take it with a grin and a “Thaaaaank yooou” and knock it back with a crunch. I pulled the pages out of the envelope and flipped through them. There was no sign that a single one of them had been touched. That meant— “Take it to Mr. Sasaki, Konoha. That’s what you need to do now.” My eyelids grew hot, and a burning lump filled my throat—and I begged. “Why won’t you eat it?!” Sorrow colored Tohko’s eyes. But a smile came over her face almost immediately, and like an older sister, she said, “Because I’m a book girl.” Her words were filled with a transparent decisiveness. “I’m the daughter of Fumiharu Amano. My father loved my mother’s food and he always looked so happy eating the things she wrote, but he would never eat the things Aunt Kanako wrote. He would say, ‘I’m sure this would taste good if I ate it… but it would be wrong to eat this.’ It was a story that had to be shared with everyone, so it would have been wrong for him to put it into his stomach.” My heart trembled. My eyelids grew ever hotter. “I don’t—I don’t understand that! I wrote it because I wanted you to eat it, Tohko!” I had put the feelings I couldn’t express very well out loud into my novel. I’d written for Tohko alone. And she’d even read it. Had my feelings not come through to her even so?! Had nothing gotten through to her?! Why was she looking at me with those placid eyes? There was a handwritten manuscript right in front of her. Couldn’t she tear in from the edges and eat with a crackle of paper like she always did? “Please eat it! Please. I want you to eat it! I thought I was supposed to be your author!” Tohko stood up, her face still gentle, then pulled my face close and hugged it in her arms. She smelled like violets and my cheeks, ears, and eyelids were enfolded in a gentle warmth. “Don’t look so sad. C’mon, if you make such a sad face, I won’t ever be able to have fun again, knowing that.” That was one of Kathie’s lines from Alt-Heidelberg. In the scene where the two part ways. Tohko whispered in a placid, gentle voice, “Ah, Karl Heinz, if you do that—if you do that, yes, if you do that, what shall I do?” The sound of Tohko’s heart that I had once felt under my palm—I could hear it right against my ear. Thump, thump… beating out a gentle pulse. “Youth is so beautiful and brief—” she murmured sadly, then released her arms and pulled away from me. She picked up her bag and stood up, then walked to the door. I watched her with a despairing gaze, and then, as if to give me courage, she stopped and smiled. Then, in a tone she might use to teach something very important to a little child, she told me, “You can’t be my author. You have to be an author for everyone. Because you’re capable of that.” The door closed. She was leaving. I watched her go blankly, as if my soul had left my body. “You can’t be my author.” How could she say that now, after everything that had happened? She was leaving. But I’d written it for her. She was leaving! The emotions that shot up from inside me brought me to my feet, and I flew out of the room, chasing after Tohko. The hall was empty already, and I didn’t see her long braids or her delicate back anywhere. I didn’t even hear footsteps. Feeling panicked, as if Tohko had disappeared into some unknown other world, I ran down the stairs and changed my shoes at the school’s entrance. The golden glow before night comes. There was a girl moving through the school yard, swathed in the haze of that warm light, her long black braids dancing in the wind. A petite back, a slender waist. A rippling skirt. White flower petals tumbling like flickering phantoms. Even the scarf around her willowy neck was a brilliant white. That scarf! It was mine! My scarf that Kotobuki said she’d lost! I shouted so loud it tore at my throat. “Tohko!!” In the gentle light and flower petals dancing in the wind, Tohko turned around. Maybe it was because I was crying. Her expression shifted until she looked like she was about to cry, too. As fat tears rolled down my face, I ran up to Tohko, practically hurling myself at her, and hugged her slender body. “This… isn’t good-bye, right? We can still see each other whenever we want. Let me know your address when you find out what it’s going to be. I’ll write you a letter. I’ll send you snacks every day. I could take a flight to Hokkaido, so that makes it closer than Iwate! You could take a train that stops at every station or an overnight bus, but who knows how long it would take you to travel, so I’ll go to you! You wouldn’t mind, right?” “… You can’t do that.”