Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE Tale of Cherry Blossoms 1 “Look, it’s almost like snow.” It’s already been seventeen years since Akari said that to me. We’d just started sixth grade, and we were passing a small forest on our way home from school with our backpacks. It was spring, and all the cherry trees were in full bloom. Their petals drifted down silently, carpeting the asphalt under our feet and turning it pure white. The air was warm, and the sky was a clear pale blue, as if someone had dissolved blue paint in plenty of water. We were close to a major highway and the Odakyu Line, but almost none of the noise from either of those reached us. The only sound in our ears was birdsong celebrating the spring. There were no other people in sight. It was a picture-perfect spring scene. In my mind, at least, memories from that time feel like snapshots. Or video footage. When I revisit them, I watch who we were then from a distance, from outside the frame. A boy who’s just turned eleven, and a girl the same age who’s just about his height, in a world filled with light. In the pictures, I always see them from behind. Every time, the girl runs on ahead. I remember the faint loneliness that flickered through the boy’s heart in that moment, and even now, as an adult, it makes me just a little sad. …But I digress. Back then, I think Akari had said that the clouds of fluttering cherry blossoms reminded her of snow. I didn’t see it, though. As far as I was concerned, cherry blossoms were cherry blossoms. Snow only came in winter. “Look, it’s almost like snow.” “Huh? Really? I dunno…” “Hmm. Well, never mind,” Akari said shortly. She spun around to face me, about two steps ahead. Her light-brown hair shone in the light from the sky, and then she made another cryptic remark. “Five centimeters per second, they say.” “Huh? What is?” “What do you think?” “No idea.” “Then use your brain a little, Takaki.” That was easy for her to say, but I still didn’t know, and I told her so. “It’s how fast cherry blossoms fall,” she answered. “Five centimeters per second.” Five centimeters per second. Something about the phrase sounded so mysterious. I was genuinely impressed. “Huh. Geez, Akari. How do you know that?” “Hee-hee!” Akari giggled cheerfully. “There’s more where that came from. For rain, it’s five meters per second. Clouds are one centimeter per second.” “Clouds? You mean the ones in the sky?” “Yeah.” “They fall, too? Aren’t they floating?” “Nope. They’re made up of tiny raindrops, after all. Clouds only look like they’re floating because they’re so big and far away. The droplets fall slowly and get bigger and bigger, until they turn into rain or snow and come all the way down to the ground.” “…Huh.” I was fascinated. I gazed at the sky, then looked at the cherry trees again. In Akari’s musical, delighted voice, these things seem like important cosmic truths. Five centimeters per second. “…Huh,” Akari mimicked, teasing me, and then she abruptly took off running. “Hey, Akari, wait up!” Hastily, I ran after her. Back then, Akari and I were in the habit of taking things we’d learned from books and TV, little tidbits that struck us as important—like the speed of a falling flower petal, for example, or the age of the universe, or the temperature to melt silver—and trading them with each other on the way home from school. Like squirrels gathering acorns for hibernation or travelers learning to read the stars for a sea voyage, we collected those glittering treasures scattered across the world. For whatever reason, we genuinely believed we’d need information like this later on. Back then, Akari and I knew all sorts of different things. We knew the positions of the constellations in each season, where to go to see Jupiter, and how bright it looked from each location. We knew why the sky looks blue, why the world has seasons, the age in which the Neanderthals disappeared, and the names of the species that were lost in the Cambrian period. We were irresistibly drawn to everything that was much bigger and farther away than we were. Now, though, I’ve forgotten most of those things. All I remember is the fact that I knew them once. 2 The whole time Akari and I were together—the three years between fourth and sixth grades—we were two of a kind. We each had fathers who had to move frequently for work, and we’d transferred into our grade school in Tokyo. I’d arrived from Nagano in third grade, and Akari had relocated from Shizuoka in fourth grade. Even now, I remember her obvious anxiety as she stood stiffly in front of the blackboard on her first day. She wore a pale-pink dress, her hair was long, and her hands were clasped tightly in front of her. The low spring sunlight slanting through the classroom windows illuminated her from the shoulders down, leaving everything above them in shadow. Her cheeks were flushed with nervousness, her lips were pressed together tightly, and her wide-open eyes stared straight ahead into space. I thought, I bet I had that exact same expression a year ago, and that instant sense of kinship pulled me to her. As a result, I think I was the one who spoke to her first. We were friends almost immediately. Akari was the only person I could talk to about the real issues, like how our classmates who’d grown up in Setagaya looked really mature, and how it felt hard to breathe in the crowds in front of the station, and how the tap water tasted shockingly bad. We were both still small and prone to getting sick, we liked the library better than the athletic field, and gym class was agony. We both preferred having long one-on-one conversations or reading books in solitude over having fun in a noisy group. The apartment building where I lived was company housing for my dad’s bank, and Akari lived in some other company housing, so we shared the route home from school part of the way. We grew to need each other quite naturally, and we spent most of our lunch breaks, afternoons, and weekends together. Of course, our classmates ended up teasing us quite a bit. In retrospect, what they said and did was trivial, but I didn’t have very thick skin back then, and every single barb hurt me deeply. Akari and I grew to need each other more and more. Just to give you an idea—one time, I’d made a trip to the bathroom during lunch, and when I got back to the classroom, Akari was standing frozen in front of the blackboard, all alone. On the blackboard, there was a heart around our names. Typical harassment, really. Our classmates were hanging back, whispering to one another and watching Akari. She’d gone up to the board because she wanted them to stop teasing us, or maybe because she wanted to erase the graffiti, but she’d frozen in embarrassment before she could actually do it. The sight made me furious. Wordlessly, I stalked into the classroom, grabbed a blackboard eraser and scrubbed off the drawing, then grabbed Akari’s hand and ran out of the room. I never thought about the implications. Behind us, our classmates erupted in shrieks and squeals, but I ignored them and kept running. My heart was pounding so violently it made me dizzy, thanks to both the bold action I’d taken and the softness of Akari’s hand in mine. For the first time, the world wasn’t quite so terrifying. No matter what sort of awful things my future held—all the inevitable school transfers and tests, all the unfamiliar places and strange people—I could bear them as long as Akari was there. Even if the emotion was still too childish to call love, I clearly liked Akari, and I felt very plainly that it was mutual. Our tightly clasped hands and running feet gave me an ever-firmer sense of it. As long as we had each other, we’d have nothing to fear. I believed it with all my heart. Those feelings only grew more certain over the three years I spent with Akari, and they never faded. We decided we’d take the entrance exam for a private middle school that was a modest distance from where we lived. We threw ourselves into our studies and spent more and more time together. I think we were both rather precocious, at least emotionally. We were well aware that we had created our own little world for ourselves, but we’d decided it was no more than the run-up for our new middle school lives. We didn’t fit in with our class now, but then we’d graduate and start our new middle school life afresh with all the other students. Our world could grow then. The emotion we shared was a soft pastel now, but we hoped it would take clearer form once we were in middle school. Someday, we’d probably be able to say “I love you” right out loud. We kept our surroundings, and even each other, at arm’s length, but that distance would shrink to something more appropriate. We’d get stronger now, then acquire more freedom. Looking back, I think we may have traded knowledge so desperately back then because we each could feel the loss that was coming. We were clearly drawn to each other, we wanted to stay together forever, and yet we felt, and feared, that it might not come true. We had already transferred schools once. Maybe we were frantically trading fragments of ourselves so we would be ready when our precious counterpart was gone. In the end, Akari and I went to different middle schools. When we were in sixth grade, one winter night, Akari called and broke the news. We didn’t talk on the phone much, and she’d called unusually late at night (although it was probably only around nine). As soon as my mom handed me the receiver and said, “It’s Akari,” I knew it wasn’t going to be good. “Takaki, I’m sorry.” Akari’s voice sounded so small over the phone. The next thing she said was something I couldn’t believe, and it was the last thing I wanted to hear. “We aren’t gonna go to the same middle school,” Akari told me. She said that, because of her dad’s job, they would be moving to a little town in the northern Kanto region during spring break. Her voice was shaky, as if she might burst into tears at any moment. I didn’t understand any of it. My body suddenly flushed hot, and the center of my head cooled like ice. I couldn’t really process what Akari was saying or why she had to tell me all this. “Huh…? But what about West Middle? We got in and everything,” I finally managed. “They said they’re working it out with a public school in Tochigi… I’m sorry.” I could hear the muffled sound of cars going by on the other end of the line—Akari was in a telephone booth. I was in my room, but it was as if I could feel the cold air of the phone booth through my fingertips, and I crouched on the tatami flooring, hugging my knees. I didn’t know how to respond, but I groped for something to say anyway. “No, I mean… You don’t have to apologize, but… It’s just…” “I told them I wanted to live with my aunt in Katsushika and go to school from there, but they said not until I’m older.” I could hear Akari’s muffled sobs, and for an instant, there was only one thought on my mind: I don’t want to hear any more of that. The next thing I knew, my voice had turned harsh. “…I get it, okay?!” I cut her off, and I heard her gasp quietly. But I couldn’t stop. “Just stop,” I said firmly. “Stop…” By the time I said the word a second time, I was desperately fighting back tears. Why…? Why did it always turn out like this? There was a full ten seconds of silence. Then, through her sobs, I heard Akari say, “I’m sorry…” Still crouched down, I pressed the receiver against my ear. I couldn’t take it away from my cheek; I couldn’t end the call. It was obvious that my words were hurting Akari, but I couldn’t help it. I hadn’t yet learned how to control my feelings at times like this. Even after that last uncomfortable phone call with Akari ended, I stayed where I was, hugging my knees. I spent the few days after that feeling awful. Akari had to be far more anxious than I was, and I was horribly ashamed of myself for not being able to say anything kind to her. Before I got my feelings sorted out, our graduation ceremony came, and that awkwardness still existed when we parted. After the ceremony, Akari came to talk to me. “Takaki, this is good-bye, isn’t it?” she said softly. Even then, I couldn’t say anything else; I just looked down. What do you want me to say? I thought. Up until now, Akari’s presence had been my only lifeline. I’d planned to start trying to grow up, but her presence was what had helped me believe I could do it. Back then, I was still very much a kid. Some force I didn’t understand was taking everything from me, and I could never believe I would come back from this. Akari was still only twelve, and she hadn’t had any choice in this, but I couldn’t accept the injustice of our separation. No way in hell. Before I had recovered, the new term at my middle school began, and I had to adapt to a new, unfamiliar routine whether I wanted to or not. Alone, I went to the school Akari and I had planned to attend together. Little by little, I made new friends, and I took the plunge to join the soccer club and started getting exercise. The days were busier than they’d been in elementary school, but as far as I was concerned, that was all for the best. Spending time by myself wasn’t as pleasant as it had been before. To be more honest, it was painful. I went out of my way to spend as much time with friends as I could, got right into bed after finishing my homework at night, then woke up early and threw myself into my club’s morning practices. Akari’s life in her new area must have been just as busy. I hoped that she’d gradually forget me in her new environment. In the end, I’d let her down. I thought I should forget Akari, too. Maybe our experiences transferring schools had taught us how to do it. Just as the summer heat was beginning in earnest, a letter from Akari arrived. When I found the pale-pink envelope in the bank of mailboxes at my building and realized that she had sent me a letter, I remember feeling more bewildered than happy. Why now? I thought. I’d spent half a year desperately trying to adjust to a world that didn’t have Akari in it. Getting a letter would only remind me how much I missed her. And that’s just the thing. In the end, while I’d tried to forget about Akari, she’d been all I thought about. I’d made lots of friends, but every friend just reminded me of how special she’d been to me. I holed up in my room and read that letter over and over. Even in class, I stuck it between the pages of my textbook and snuck glances at it. I did it so often that I’d memorized the whole thing. Dear Takaki Tohno— That was how the letter began, in Akari’s neat, familiar handwriting. It’s been a long time since we last spoke. How are you? Summers here are hot, too, but much more pleasant than in Tokyo. Looking back, though, I liked those humid Tokyo summers. The asphalt would get so hot I expected it to melt, and the skyscrapers would shimmer like a mirage in the heat, and the air conditioning in the department stores and subways was always too cold. Among the oddly mature-sounding words, she’d drawn little pictures (suns and cicadas and buildings), and I felt as if I could see her growing from a girl into an adult. It was a short letter; she only talked about what she’d been up to lately. How she rode a four-car train to the public middle school, how she’d joined the basketball club to build up her strength, and how she’d decided to cut her hair to keep it out of her face. How it all made her nervous, too. She didn’t write anything about missing me, and the letter made it sound as though she was adjusting to her new life well. Still, I sensed that Akari definitely was lonely and that she did want to see me and talk to me. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have written a letter. Those feelings were exactly like mine. After that, we began writing about a letter a month to each other. Corresponding with Akari seemed to make life a lot easier. Like when a class was boring, I was able to name the feeling. After I’d been separated from Akari, I just accepted the rigorous soccer practices and customary hazing, but now I was able to identify how painful those things were—and strangely, that made it all much easier to bear. We didn’t talk about our everyday gripes and complaints in our letters, but the feeling that there was one person in the world who understood made us both stronger. In that way, the summer of our first year in middle school passed, and so did autumn, and then winter came. I turned thirteen. In the past few months, I’d grown a full seven centimeters; I’d put on some muscle, and I didn’t catch colds as easily anymore. It felt like the distance between me and the world had shrunk to an appropriate distance. Akari would have turned thirteen, too. Sometimes I’d see the girls in my class in their uniforms, and I’d wonder what she looked like now. In one of her letters, she wrote that she wanted to look at cherry blossoms with me again, the way we’d done in grade school. She said there was a really big cherry tree near her house. In spring, I bet the petals fall at five centimeters per second, she wrote. After I started my third term, I found out I’d be transferring schools. We were moving during spring break. Our destination was Kagoshima—not the part on Kyushu proper, but on an island off the coast of Kyushu. It would take about two hours to get there by plane from Haneda Airport. It sounded like the far edge of the world to me. By then, though, I was used to changes in my life, so I wasn’t too upset. The problem was the distance between Akari and me. We hadn’t met face-to-face since the beginning of middle school, but now that I thought about it, we hadn’t been all that far apart. You could get from Akari’s town in the northern Kanto area to the part of Tokyo where I lived in about three hours, if you were willing to switch trains a few times. Come to think of it, we could have visited each other on the weekends. If I moved to a town in the distant south, though, any possibility of seeing Akari would be gone. So I wrote to Akari and told her I wanted to see her before I moved. I suggested some times and places, and her response arrived promptly. We both had third-term finals, I had to get ready for the move, and she was busy with club activities, so the time that worked for both of us ended up being an evening after class at the end of the term. I checked the train schedules, and we decided to meet at the station near Akari’s house at seven in the evening. If I skipped club and left right after class, I’d be able to make it by then, spend a couple of hours talking to Akari, then take the last train back home to the city. As long as I managed to get back at some point that day, I’d have no trouble finding an excuse to give my parents. I’d have to transfer from the Odakyu Line to the Saikyo Line, then the Utsunomiya Line, and then the Ryomo Line, but since I’d be traveling on regular trains the whole time, the roundtrip fare would only be about thirty-five hundred yen. That wasn’t a minor expense for a middle schooler, but there was nothing I wanted more than to see Akari. There were still two weeks left until our rendezvous, so I took plenty of time to compose a letter to hand her. It was probably the first love letter I’d ever written. I wrote about the future I dreamed of, influential books and music, and how special Akari was to me. Maybe the way I expressed my emotions was still artless and childish, but I wrote them down as honestly as I could. Now, I don’t remember what I wrote in much detail, but I think it took up about eight sheets of stationery. Back then, there were so many details I wanted to tell Akari, things I wanted her to know. I thought, if she just read that letter, I could survive Kagoshima. The letter held fragments of my current self that I wanted Akari to have. During the days I spent writing that letter, I dreamed about Akari several times. In those dreams, I was a small, swift bird. I slipped through the nighttime heart of the city and its web of power lines, flapping my wings, racing up to the sky above the buildings. I flew hundreds of times faster than I could run around the athletic field, and my avian body was buzzing with the elation of a journey to see the most precious person in the world. As I watched, the ground fell away. In the strong night wind, the dense lights of the streets twinkled like stars, and the lines of traffic looked like pulsing arteries and veins. Before long, I was through the cloud cover, flying above a moonlit sea of white. The pale, transparent light illuminated the cloud peaks dully, as if I were on another planet. I could go anywhere in the world, as far as I wanted; my feathered body was brimming with joy. In the blink of an eye, I was near my destination. In high spirits, I dived steeply, watching the land where she lived speeding by below me. I could see farm fields and rice paddies rolling far into the distance; the roofs of sparse houses, human habitation; and a moving line of light that wound its way through the dense forests growing here and there. A train. I was sure I was on that train. Then I saw her, waiting on the station platform, all by herself. She was sitting on a bench, with her hair cut short and tucked behind her ears, and near her, there was a big cherry tree. It wasn’t blooming yet, but I could sense the captivating riot of emotion that slept beneath its hard bark. Sensing me, the girl looked up, into the sky. I’d see her soon. Soon… 3 It rained on the day we’d promised to meet, starting in the morning. The sky was solid gray, as if someone had covered it with a tight lid, and fine, cold raindrops dripped straight down. Spring had been on its way in, but this was like it had had a change of heart and turned back. That day smelled like deep winter. I pulled a dark-brown duffle coat on over my school uniform, put the letter to Akari in the bottom of my school bag, then left for school. Since I was planning to get home around midnight, I left a note for my parents, telling them I’d be out late but not to worry. They didn’t know Akari’s parents anyway, and even if I’d told them about the situation beforehand, I didn’t think they’d have let me go. I spent all my classes that day gazing restlessly out the window. Nothing from the lessons stuck with me. I imagined Akari, who was probably in her school uniform, and the conversation we’d probably have. I thought of her pleasant voice. I hadn’t really recognized it when we were together, but I realized I loved her voice. I liked the vibration of it in the air. It always brushed my ears gently, softly. The thought that I’d hear it again soon made my whole body glow with heat, and every time it did, I gazed out the window at the rain to cool it down again. Rain. Five meters per second. Even though it was daytime, the world outside the classroom was gloomy, and lights were on in most of the windows in the buildings and condos. On the landing of a distant apartment building, a fluorescent light was almost dead, and it flickered from time to time. As I watched, the raindrops gradually grew larger, and by the time class was over for the day, the rain had turned to snow. After school, once I’d checked to make sure none of my classmates were around, I took the letter and the memo out of my bag. I hesitated a little, then put the letter in my coat pocket. I wanted to give it to Akari, no matter what, and I’d feel safer if it was in a place where my fingertips could always find it. The memo was a list of train transfers and boarding times; I read through it again, for the zillionth time. First, at 3:54, I’d take the Odakyu Line from Gotokuji Station to Shinjuku. Then I’d transfer to the Saikyo Line, ride it to Omiya, transfer to the Utsunomiya Line, and ride that to Oyama. Then I’d transfer to the Ryomo Line and reach my destination—Iwafune Station—at six forty-five. I was supposed to meet Akari there at seven, so the timing would be perfect. I’d never taken such a long train trip on my own before, but I told myself it was going to be fine. It would be okay; none of this was hard. I ran down the gloomy school stairs, stopping at my shoe locker in the entryway to change into my outdoor shoes. When I opened the metal door, the clank echoed loudly in the deserted entry hall. That alone was enough to make my pulse speed up a bit. Deciding to leave the umbrella I’d brought that morning, I went out through the main entrance and looked at the sky. The air had smelled like rain that morning, but now it smelled like snow. The scent was sharper and more transparent, stirring something restless in my heart. As I watched the myriad fragments of white drifting down from the gray clouds, I started imagining myself being drawn up into the sky. Hastily pulling up my hood, I ran to the station. It was the first time I’d ever been to Shinjuku Station on my own. The place was almost foreign to me, but I did remember coming all the way to Shinjuku several months back, to see a movie with a friend from class. My friend and I had taken the Odakyu Line to this station, and when we’d gone through the JR East Gate ticket barrier and tried to get up to ground level, we’d gotten really lost. The complexity and confusion of the station had left a much bigger impression on me than the movie had. I left through the Odakyu Line ticket gate, carefully stopped and looked for a directory sign so I wouldn’t get lost, then followed the arrows toward JR Ticket Sales, walking quickly through an enormous hall full of pillars toward a bank of dozens of ticket machines. I joined a line that looked a little shorter than the rest, waiting for my turn to buy a ticket. The lady in front of me looked like an office worker; I caught the faint, sweet scent of her perfume, and for some reason, it sparked a sad, painful feeling in my chest. When the next line over moved, I caught the pungent scent of mothballs on the coat of an elderly man beside me, summoning that vague anxiety I felt whenever we moved someplace new. The voices of all those people merged into a low roar echoing around the underground space. The snow-wet toes of my shoes felt a little cold. My head swam a bit. When it was my turn to buy a ticket, the absence of buttons on the machine confused me. (Back then, almost all station ticket machines were the push-button type.) I stole a glance at my neighbor and saw that I just had to touch the screen directly to select the appropriate ticket. I went through the automatic ticket gate and into the station itself. Keeping a careful eye on the platform directory signs, which stood in ranks as far as I could see, I wove through the crowd, making for the Saikyo Line platforms. I passed a multitude of platforms: YAMANOTE LINE OUTER LOOP, SOBU LINE BOUND FOR NAKANO, YAMANOTE LINE INNER LOOP, SOBU LINE BOUND FOR CHIBA, CHUO LINE RAPID TRANSIT, CHUO MAIN LINE LIMITED EXPRESS… On the way, I spotted a station directory map, stopped, and examined it closely. The Saikyo Line platforms were at the very back. I took the memo out of my pocket and checked the time on my watch (a black G Shock I’d been given when I started middle school). My train left Shinjuku at 4:26. The digital display on my watch read four fifteen. I’d be fine; I had plenty of time. I found a bathroom and went in, just in case. I’d be spending about forty minutes on the Saikyo Line, so I thought I should probably do my business first. As I washed my hands, I saw my reflection in the mirror. There I was, under the bleached-out fluorescent lights, on the other side of the dirty glass. I’d grown in the past six months, and I probably looked a little more mature. My cheeks were faintly red, either from excitement or from the cold, and it embarrassed me. I was on my way to meet Akari. The Saikyo Line train was getting crowded with people going home, and I couldn’t find a seat. Copying a few other people, I leaned against the wall at the very back of the train, looking at the weekly magazine headlines on the advertisements, gazing out the window, and occasionally stealing glances at other passengers. My eyes were restless, and so was my mood. I didn’t feel like getting out the sci-fi novel I’d brought along, either. A high school girl had snagged a seat, and she was talking with a friend who stood in front of her. I caught snippets of their conversation. They both wore loose socks and short skirts, showing their slim legs. “What did you think of that guy earlier?” “Who?” “You know, the one from North High?” “Him? Ew, nobody would go for him.” “Aw, that’s not true. I like guys like him.” I thought they were probably talking about a boy they’d met at a party. I wasn’t the one they were talking about, but for some reason, I was kind of embarrassed. I looked out the window, touching the letter in my coat pocket to reassure myself that it was there. The train had been traveling on an elevated track for a while now. I’d never been on this route before. The sound of the train and the way it rocked were both subtly different from my Odakyu Line, my anxiety about traveling to a new place increased. The weak winter sun tinted the sky near the horizon pale orange, and the ground was jam-packed with buildings as far as I could see. The snow was still falling. We were probably out of Tokyo and into Saitama by now. The cityscape looked far flatter than the one I was used to. The ground was covered with midsize buildings and condominiums. At a station along the way called Musashi-Urawa, we stopped to let a rapid train go by. A voice came through the speakers and announced, “Passengers who are in a hurry to reach Omiya, please transfer on the opposite side of the platform,” and about half the people on the train hustled out of the car and lined up on that side. I joined the end of the line. In the low western sky, which was caught between dozens of elevated railway tracks and the thick layer of still-falling snow, the small setting sun peeked out from occasional breaks in the clouds. The hundreds of roofs reflected the pale light. As I gazed at the view, I suddenly remembered that I had been here before, a long time ago. Oh right—this wasn’t my first time on this route after all. Just before I started third grade, when we’d moved from Nagano to Tokyo, I’d boarded a train at Omiya with my parents and taken it to Shinjuku. This view had been completely different from the familiar rural scenery of Nagano, and I’d been swamped by anxiety watching it stream by outside the window. The idea that I’d be living here from now on, in a place with nothing but buildings as far as the eye could see, worried me so much I almost cried. Even so, five years later, I’d managed to survive this far. I was still just thirteen, but that thought was what crossed my mind. It wasn’t melodramatic, just the truth. Akari had saved me. I hoped fervently that I’d done the same for her. While it wasn’t as big as Shinjuku, Omiya was also an enormous terminal station. I left the Saikyo Line, climbed a long stairway, and headed through the station crowds to the Utsunomiya Line platform to make my transfer. The scent of snow was even more intense inside, and the shoes of the milling crowd were soggy with snowmelt. The Utsunomiya Line platform overflowed with returning commuters, and there were long lines waiting in the spots where the train doors would be. I stood by myself, away from the lines of people, and waited for the train. Even if I joined a line, I wouldn’t get a seat this time, either. —And then my anxiety started to return. It took me a moment to realize that the feeling had been caused by a station announcement. “Attention, passengers. Due to the snow, the Utsunomiya Line train bound for Oyama and Utsunomiya is running approximately eight minutes behind schedule,” the announcement said. Up until that moment, I hadn’t even considered the possibility that the trains would be delayed. I checked the memo and my watch again. According to my note, I was supposed to board the 5:04 train, but it was already 5:10. The temperature suddenly felt much colder, and I shivered. Two minutes later, with a long, echoing whistle, the train’s light streamed in, but even then, the chill didn’t fade. The Utsunomiya Line was even more crowded than the Odakyu or Saikyo lines had been. Everyone was finishing up their work or studies and heading home. The train car was much older than the others I’d ridden in that day, with box-type seats that held four people. It reminded me of the local line back in Nagano. I held on to a seat grip with one hand, put my other hand into my coat pocket, and stood in the aisle. The heater was on, and the car was warm; the windows were fogged, and all four corners were thick with water droplets. Everyone was limp, tired, and quiet, fitting in well under the fluorescent lights. I felt as if I was the only one who didn’t fit in, and in an attempt to cancel out a little of that dissonance, I held my breath and gazed steadily out the window at the flowing scenery. The landscape held very few buildings now, and the endless fields were completely covered in snow. Far away in the darkness, I could see the lights of houses, sparse and twinkling. A row of huge steel towers with blinking red lamps ran all the way to a distant mountain peak, spaced at regular intervals. Their enormous black silhouettes looked like a line of ominous giant soldiers stationed on a snowfield. This was a truly unfamiliar world. As I gazed at that landscape, I thought about the timing to meet Akari. If I ended up arriving late, I had no way of letting her know. Back then, cell phones weren’t ubiquitous enough for middle schoolers to have, and I didn’t know Akari’s home phone number. Outside the window, the snow fell harder and harder. Ordinarily, it would have taken an hour to reach Oyama Station, where I’d make my next transfer, but the train crawled along, falling further behind schedule. The distance between stations was so much longer compared to the urban lines, and the train spent an incredibly long time at each station. Every time it did, the same announcement played in the train: “Attention, passengers. Because later trains are delayed, we will remain at this station for a short while. We apologize for the delay at this inopportune time. Thank you for your patience…” I checked my watch again and again, praying that it wouldn’t be seven o’clock yet. But time kept steadily ticking by, although the distance grew no shorter. Every time I looked, a dull, pulsing ache ran through me, like an invisible force squeezing me. It was like the air was a cage that was getting smaller and smaller. At this point, I’d never make it. When seven o’clock came around, the train hadn’t even made it to Oyama Station. We were stopped at Nogi, two stations away. After I transferred at Oyama, Iwafune Station—where Akari was waiting—was another twenty minutes away. For the two hours I’d spent on this train since Omiya, anxiety and despair had kept my emotions electrified and tense. These had been the longest, hardest hours of my life. If you asked me whether the train car was cold or hot, I couldn’t have answered. All I could feel was the late-night scent that drifted in the car and the emptiness of my own stomach. I hadn’t eaten anything since lunch. The next thing I knew, there were just a few people in the car, and I was the only one standing up. I dropped heavily into a nearby empty box seat. Immediately, a dull numbness spread through my legs, and fatigue welled up from the depths of my body, seeping through my skin. Everything in me had been unnaturally tense, and I hadn’t been able to let go. I took Akari’s letter out of my coat pocket and stared at it. The time we’d promised to meet had passed, and by now, I was sure she was starting to get nervous. I remembered my last phone conversation with her. Why does it always turn out like this? After that, we spent another fifteen minutes at Nogi, and then the train began to move again. When we finally reached Oyama, it was after 7:40. I left that train and ran to the Ryomo Line platform to transfer. My memo was useless now, and I balled it up and tossed it into a garbage can on the platform. The Oyama Station building was big, but there weren’t many people in it. After I’d run through the station, I saw a space like a lobby plaza. It had a stove in its center, and several people sat huddled around it in chairs. They might have been waiting for family members to come pick them up. They blended into this scenery naturally. I was the only one driven forward. To get to the Ryomo Line platform, I had to go down some stairs and through a sort of underground corridor. The ground was plain bare concrete; thick, square cement pillars stood at regular intervals, and pipes crawled across the ceiling, twisting together. The platform was sandwiched between two rows of pillars, with both sides open to the elements, and the low moan of the snowstorm echoed through it. Pale fluorescent lights vaguely illuminated the almost tunnel. The shutters on the kiosk were closed tightly. I felt as if I’d wandered into the wrong place, but a few other people were waiting on the platform for the train. There was a vending machine next to a small stand-and-eat soba stall, and its yellow light looked marginally warmer than anything else here. On the whole, the place seemed very chilly. “Due to the snow, the Ryomo Line is running significantly behind schedule. We apologize to our passengers. Please continue to wait for the train.” An impassive announcement echoed over the platform. I pulled up the hood of my coat, trying to block out the cold just a little more, then leaned against a concrete pillar to get out of the wind. Sharp, cold air seemed to crawl up me from the concrete below my feet. Between the anxiety of keeping Akari waiting, the frigid weather leeching my body heat, and the stabbing pain in my stomach, I was beyond tense. I could see two office workers eating soba at the counter of the soba stall. I considered getting some for myself, but then I thought that Akari might be going hungry while she waited for me. I couldn’t just eat on my own. I decided I’d get a hot can of coffee, at least, and I walked over to the vending machine. When I took my wallet out of my coat pocket, the letter I was planning to give Akari fell out. Looking back, even if all that hadn’t happened, I don’t know whether I would have given her the letter. Either way, I don’t think much would have changed. After all, our lives consisted of so many things, and that letter was just one of them. In the end, no matter how intense my feelings were, they would have changed, slowly, over that long span of time. Whether I’d given her the letter or not. When I took out my wallet, the letter fell, and in that moment, a gust of wind snatched it away. In the blink of an eye, it had blown off the platform and vanished into the dark. I very nearly burst into tears, but I looked down, gritting my teeth, and managed hold them back. I didn’t buy any coffee. In the end, the Ryomo Line train I was on stopped completely about halfway to its destination. “Due to the effects of the snow on the schedule, the train will stop here,” the onboard announcement said. “We understand that you are in a hurry, and we apologize, but there is currently no estimated time when service will be restored.” Outside my window, a dark snowfield seemed to roll on forever, and the blustering blizzard rattled the window frames. I had no idea why we had to stop out here in the middle of nowhere. When I looked at my watch, it was already two full hours past the time we’d said we’d meet. How many hundreds of times had I checked that watch today? The thought of seeing any more time tick by made me sick, and I took off the watch and put it on the small table attached to the wall, under the window. It was hopeless. All I could do was pray that the train would start moving again soon. Takaki, how are you? Akari had written in her letter. I have to get up early for my club, so I’m writing this letter on the train. For some reason, when I visualized Akari from her letters, she was always alone. And now I was the same. I had quite a few friends at school, but this was the real me—sitting all alone in a train car, his face hidden by his hood. The heat had to be on, but the interior of this four-car train, with its sparse scattering of passengers, was an incredibly cold place. It was the most horrible moment of my life. Sitting in the big box seat, I curled up into a tight ball, gritted my teeth, and did my best not to cry. The time felt like hatred itself, and all I could do was hunker down and weather it. When I thought of Akari waiting for me, all alone in a cold train station, and imagined how forlorn she must feel, I felt like I’d go crazy. I desperately hoped that she’d gone home. But Akari was definitely waiting. I knew she was, and the conviction hurt me and filled me with sadness. Outside the window, the snow wouldn’t stop falling. 4 By the time the train finally started moving again, more than two hours had passed. I reached Iwafune Station after eleven at night, over four hours past the time we’d promised to meet. Back then, that hour was the dead of night. When I stepped down onto the platform, my shoes sank deep into fresh snow with a soft crunching noise. The wind had died, and flakes of snow fell slowly and silently down from the sky. The platform I was standing on didn’t have a wall or a fence or anything along it, and a snowfield that went on as far as I could see came right up to its side. The lights of the town were distant and sparse. It was very quiet; all I could hear was the noise of the idling train’s engine. I crossed a small pedestrian bridge and slowly walked to the ticket gate. From the bridge, I’d been able to see the town in front of the station. Only a handful of houses had lights in them, and the whole place seemed silent, hemmed in by the snow. At the gate, I gave my ticket to the station worker, then went into the wooden main building. The waiting room was just past the ticket gate. The moment I stepped inside, warm air and the nostalgic scent of a kerosene stove enveloped me, and a hot lump worked its way up from the depths of my chest. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to ride it out. Then I opened them again. A lone girl was sitting in a chair in front of the kerosene stove, her head drooped. The slender girl wore a white coat, and at first, she looked like a stranger. I walked over to her and called to her: “Akari.” My voice was hoarse, as if it belonged to someone I didn’t know. A little startled, the girl raised her head, slowly, and looked at me. It was Akari. Her large eyes were filled with tears, and the outer corners were red. She looked more grown up than she had a year ago, and her face reflected the stove’s yellow glow softly. She seemed more beautiful than any girl I’d ever seen. An ache I couldn’t put into words ran through me, as if someone had gently brushed a finger across my heart. I’d never felt this sensation before. I couldn’t look away. As I watched, the tears in Akari’s eyes grew larger and larger, and the sight seemed like something sacred to me. Akari caught the hem of my coat with her hands and squeezed it tightly, pulling me one step closer to her. As her white hand clutched my coat, a teardrop fell onto it. The moment I saw it, a mass of feelings I couldn’t choke back welled up again, and the next thing I knew, I was crying. The tub of boiling water on the stove bubbled softly in the small station. Akari had brought a thermos of tea and a homemade box lunch. We sat side by side in the chairs in front of the stove, with the wrapped box lunch right between us. I drank the tea Akari handed me. It was still plenty hot, and it had a very aromatic flavor. “This is delicious,” I said, and I meant it. “Really? It’s just regular hojicha.” “Hojicha? I’ve never had it before.” “You’re kidding! You must have!” Akari said. Even so, I was convinced this was the first time I’d ever had tea this good. “I’m not so sure…,” I told her. “I am!” She seemed to find the whole thing very funny. Like her body, Akari’s voice seemed more grown-up than I remembered. Her tone was a mixture of gentle teasing and slight bashfulness, and as I listened to her, my body gradually grew warm again. “Also, here,” Akari said, unwrapping the lunch and taking the lids off two plastic containers. One had four big rice balls in it, and the other held lots of colorful side dishes. Mini hamburger steaks, sausages, rolled omelets, cherry tomatoes, broccoli—all arranged neatly in pairs. “I made it, so there’s no guarantee it’ll taste good…,” Akari said. As she spoke, she folded the cloth the containers had been wrapped in, setting it down beside her. “But please help yourself, if you want to.” She sounded a little self-conscious. “…Thanks,” I finally managed. Something hot was welling up in my chest again. The fact that I was so quick to cry embarrassed me, and I desperately fought back the tears. Remembering I’d been hungry, I hastily added, “I was seriously starving!” Akari smiled happily. The rice ball was heavy, and I opened my mouth wide and took a big bite. As I chewed, I worried my tears would finally spill over, and I looked down and swallowed so that Akari wouldn’t notice. I’d never eaten anything so good. “This is the best thing I’ve ever eaten,” I told her honestly. “Oh, you’re exaggerating.” “I mean it!” “I’m sure it’s because you were hungry.” “I dunno about that…” “I do. I’ll have some, too,” Akari said cheerfully, picking up a rice ball. After that, we spent a while working our way through the food. Both the hamburger steaks and the rolled omelets were especially good. When I told her so, Akari gave an embarrassed little smile, but she still sounded rather proud when she said, “I stopped by my house after school and made it… I had to get some help from my mom, though.” “What did you tell her when you left?” “I left a note saying I didn’t know what time I’d be back, but I’d definitely come home, so please don’t worry.” “That’s what I did, too. I bet your mom is worrying anyway, though.” “Hmm… I’m sure it’ll be okay. When I was making the lunch, she asked me who I was giving it to, and I smiled. She looked kind of happy. I bet she understands.” I was curious about what exactly she “understood,” but I couldn’t bring myself to ask, so I chewed my rice ball instead. The rice balls were generously portioned, and having two each filled our stomachs nicely. I was left feeling very satisfied. The small waiting room was illuminated by a dim yellow glow, and our knees that we’d turned toward the kerosene stove were toasty warm. By then, we weren’t paying any attention to the time; we drank the hojicha and chatted as much as we wanted. Neither of us even considered going home. We hadn’t confirmed it aloud, but we each understood that that was what the other was thinking. We both had so much we wanted to say that we’d never manage to get it all out. We expressed how lonely we’d been over this past year—not out loud, but we kept letting the other know implicitly how hard it was to be alone and how much we’d longed to see each other. When the station worker knocked softly on the waiting room’s glass door, it was already midnight. “I’m about to close up the station. There won’t be any more trains tonight, you know.” It was the elderly station employee who’d taken my ticket. I thought he might be mad at us, but he was smiling. “You look like you’re having a good time, and I didn’t want to interrupt,” he said kindly, in a voice that had a slight regional accent. “I do have to close up, though. It’s the rules. Be careful on your way home in all this snow.” We thanked him and left the station. The town of Iwafune was covered with a thick blanket of snow. The flakes were still falling straight down, but strangely, the late-night world wasn’t cold anymore, even caught as it was between the snow in the sky and the snow on the ground. We walked over the fresh snow, side by side, feeling oddly exhilarated. I was several centimeters taller than Akari now, and the thought made me very proud. The pale streetlamps illuminated circles of snow ahead of us, like spotlights. Akari ran toward them cheerfully, and I was captivated by the sight of her back. It looked far more grown-up than the one I remembered. Akari took me to see the cherry tree she’d written about in an earlier letter. It was only about ten minutes from the station on foot, but that put us in a wide tract of farmland, with no houses in sight. There was no artificial light anywhere at that point, and we could just barely see by snow light. The whole landscape shone faintly. It was so beautiful, like the careful, exquisite handiwork of someone unseen. The cherry tree stood all by itself, beside a footpath that ran between rice paddies. It was magnificent, thick and tall. We stood under it together, looking at the sky. It was pitch-black, and snow drifted soundlessly down from it, filtering through the interlaced branches. “Look, it’s almost like snow,” Akari said. “Yeah, it is,” I responded. I got the feeling I’d seen her watching me and smiling beneath a cherry tree in full bloom. That night, under the cherry tree, Akari and I shared our first kiss. It happened very naturally. In the moment our lips touched, I felt as if I understood where things like eternity and hearts and souls resided. I thought we’d managed to share everything of the thirteen years we’d been alive with each other—but the sadness of the next instant was almost unbearable. After all, I didn’t know where I should take Akari’s warmth, or her soul, or how I should handle them. Akari’s precious everything was here, and yet I didn’t know what to do with it. I knew that we still wouldn’t be able to stay together forever. Boundless time and enormous lives lay ahead of us. Although that unease gripped me for a moment, it slowly melted away, until all that remained was the sensation of Akari’s lips. The softness and warmth was like nothing I’d ever known. It was a truly special kiss. Even now, looking back, I’ve never had another kiss so full of delight and purity and intensity. We ended up spending the night in a little shed beside a field. The wooden shed had all sorts of farm tools in it, and Akari and I pulled an old blanket off a shelf, removed our wet coats and shoes, wrapped ourselves in the blanket, and talked for a long time in whispers. Akari had been wearing a sailor suit under her coat, and I was in my school uniform. Even though we were wearing our uniforms, right now, we weren’t lonely, and that filled me with joy. While we talked, under the blanket, our shoulders touched from time to time, and every so often, Akari’s soft hair brushed my cheek or neck. Every time, the sensation and the sweet scent sent a thrill through me, but her body heat was already all I could handle. When Akari spoke, her breath stirred my bangs gently, and mine softly stirred her hair. Outside, the clouds gradually thinned, and every so often, moonlight shone in through the thin glass window, filling the shed with a mystical light. While we were still talking, we fell asleep. When we woke, it was six in the morning, and the snow had stopped. We drank some of the hojicha, which was still faintly warm, then put on our coats and walked to the station. The sky was perfectly clear. The sun, which had just risen above the ridgeline, made the snowy countryside sparkle and shine; the whole world overflowed with dazzling light. This early on a Saturday morning, we were the only passengers on the platform. As the orange and green Ryomo Line train pulled in, the sunlight poured down over it, gleaming and glinting off the cars. The doors opened; I stepped onto the train, then turned around and looked at Akari, who was standing on the platform right in front of me. The buttons of her white coat were undone, and her sailor uniform peeked through the gap. This was Akari at thirteen. Oh right, I realized. We’ll be on our own from now on. We both have to go back home alone. Even though we’d talked so much only a short while ago, even though we’d felt so close, our parting came abruptly. I had no idea what to say at a moment like this, so I stayed silent. It was Akari who spoke first. “Um, Takaki?” All I could manage was a questioning noise that might have been a response or a breath. “Takaki…,” Akari said again. She looked down. Behind her, the snowfield glittered in the morning sun, almost like a lake, and I noticed how beautiful she was against that background. As if she’d made up her mind, Akari raised her head, looked me straight in the eye, and continued. “Takaki, you’re going to be just fine. I’m sure you will!” “Thanks…,” I said with difficulty, and immediately after that, the train doors began to shut. No, not like this. This isn’t right. I had to say something more profound, more concrete. I yelled with everything I had, so that she’d be able to hear me even through those closed doors. “You take care, too, Akari! I’ll write! I’ll call you!” In that moment, I thought I heard a bird cry sharply, far away. The train began to roll, and we each set our right hands on the glass, matching them to each other. They slipped apart immediately, but for a moment, they had overlapped. On the train home, I stayed there, in front of the door, for a very long time. I hadn’t told Akari I’d written her a long letter and then lost it. Partly because I was sure we’d meet again someday and also because, after that kiss, it felt as if everything about the world had changed. Standing in front of the door, I softly set my hand over the spot on the glass that Akari had touched. “I’m sure you’re going to be just fine,” she’d said. It was a strange feeling, as if she’d made an accurate guess about something, although even I had no idea what that “something” was. At the same time, I had a feeling that someday, in the far distant future, those words of Akari’s would give me a very important kind of strength. Right now, though, I thought, I just want the strength to protect her. I kept gazing out the window, and that desire was the only thing in my mind.