He’d thought she would’ve wanted him to leave ASAP, but it seemed he was mistaken. He ordered a coffee, then took a seat at the reading counter. He looked out at the rain pounding the Shinjuku Gyoen Park. The blurry trees outside the glass were lit by streetlights, and he could see Sayaka making his coffee in the reflection.
Keiichi looked down at the book in his hands. It probably wouldn’t be a good idea to read it right there. He’d have to say something to her about it, and he didn’t want to provoke her emotions any further. But in saying that, he was also hesitant to read anything else.
As he just stared out the window, he heard the sound of a bell approaching him and saw that Sumi had come to sit near his feet. He reached down and scratched her head. She was sure letting him touch her a lot today. Had she come out because she sensed how awkward the mood was?
Sayaka appeared in the window’s reflection, carrying his coffee on a tray. Sumi slipped under the counter, curling up at Keiichi’s feet. The woman apologized for the wait, passing him his cup. She then held the tray to her chest as she stood straight up beside him.
“Thank you.” When he turned toward her again, he could see that her eyes were still a bit red.
“It’s actually not the first time I’ve bought books from your shelf,” she suddenly said, lips pulled tight. Her eyes narrowed, and she combed her fingers through her bangs a few times. “I’ve been coming to Frère to buy your books for a while, even before becoming a shelf owner myself. I wanted the impressions you’d write.”
“Those are just add-ons,” Keiichi said, inwardly shocked. He’d thought his books had been selling fast lately, but had she been the buyer?
“The way I always read books is just by comparing them to what I know to determine if I like them or not. I never even thought about what the author was trying to write.” The reason she read like that was because she was trying to supplement what she didn’t have with what she read. While she’d respected the people who wrote the books, that wasn’t all.
“I think it’s fine for people to read books different ways. I write out my impressions like that, but it’s not like I think I’m an absolute authority or anything.” Keiichi wasn’t just saying that for the sake of it—that was his honest belief.
“I wanted to read books like you do, Kajiwara-san. But I can’t. I’m afraid to. When I try to think of what the author was feeling, it’s like their thoughts are invading me, or something.”
“Their thoughts are…invading you?” Keiichi couldn’t help but repeat.
He had thought that by sounding out the author and pseudo-experiencing a life that he would never have known, that he could gain new views. He’d never thought of it as an invasion of his thoughts.
Having new questions brought up against something he’d thought of as normal, Keiichi groaned. By trying to see all sorts of authors’ viewpoints, did that make her feel like she herself was just a hodgepodge of them?
“When I read, I wonder what I would have done, and it’s like I’m digging deep into myself or something. It wasn’t until just recently that I realized I was someone who couldn’t read books as anything but my own interpretation, even though I want to read things in a way that gets close to someone else like you do, Kajiwara-san,” she explained.
“I don’t know if I’m getting close to an author at all. I don’t know what they thought writing it. From an author’s point of view, I might have missed the point,” he countered.
“Even so, I think the authors would absolutely be happy about your impressions,” Sayaka said, putting power behind the words. “I mean, as much as you might want to know a person, you never will. You can’t even know yourself completely. So I think it’s enough that you face them and try to understand them. I think it saves them.”
This time, she spoke as if she was carefully choosing each word.
Keiichi thought back to one of the lines he read from her memo block. “All humans are surrounded by a membrane. No matter how many words you exchange, or how much you pound their chest, you can never rip through.” He chewed over the words once more in his mind.
“Isn’t it obvious that you would need to face someone if you wanted to know them? Though, whether you can understand them or not is a different story,” he said.
“Huh?”
Sayaka’s double-lidded eyes widened behind her glasses, and she went silent. Her gaze was pointed at Keiichi, but her thoughts were far, far away.
“Um, Kajiwara-san, you…” she began, looking as if she was about to say something, before shaking her head and opening her mouth once again. “You really like people, don’t you?” Her tense expression finally softened. While he stood there baffled, she declared that he absolutely did.
Honestly, hearing someone say he liked people didn’t really feel right. It might have been that in his efforts to look at other people, he hadn’t looked very deeply at himself.
Sayaka stood there with her lips opened slightly, staring him right in the face with no reservations. But it was as if she was looking his way, yet thinking about herself; it was that sort of look. Some line triggered something in her, and words flowed through her mind, heading in a new direction. Maybe you couldn’t create works without that much happening.
Keiichi listened to the rain as he waited for Sayaka to return to the world he was in.
“I always despair once I finish writing,” she suddenly said. Though it felt abrupt, when he put her actions along with the faces she made, her pace didn’t seem off at all. As he made little sounds to let her know he was listening, she sat down off to his side, one seat between them. She might have forgotten she was minding the store at all, because she leaned forward, resting her chin on her palms with both elbows on the counter. Her eyes were looking outside.
“I’d wonder why that was the only way I could express things, even though it wasn’t really that. I write, and erase, and sometimes I end up not being able to do it, but… When I get sick of it all and throw it all away, I’m always relieved, like ‘Ah, now I don’t have to worry about it anymore.’ But why is it that I write again? I mean, if I didn’t write anything, then I wouldn’t despair,” she said.