Chapter Four:
A World Without Lies or Pain
JUST AS WE WERE COMING UP on the city of Sendai, we finally made it out of the rain. Words could not express the liberation I felt upon gazing up at a clear blue sky for the first time in several days; it might even have been a more emotional moment for me than making it out of the Seikan Tunnel, to be honest.
The urban sprawl that was now cropping up along the highway made the past week or so of trudging through the less populated lowlands from Morioka feel like some sort of fever dream. No longer were we constantly on pins and needles, wondering when we might come across another grocery store or mini-mart. Both food and shelter were now in ample supply. These reliable creature comforts gave us much more physical and mental leeway to stop and smell the roses a bit—taking detours to check out nearby sightseeing attractions or stay the night at fancier, more expensive-looking resorts.
At the moment, we were taking some time off from our travels to check out a lovely riverside park not too far from Sendai Station: West Park, it was called. The whole place was dyed a brilliant, luminous yellow by the fragrant ginkgo trees that had scattered their autumn leaves across the ground. It was truly a sight to behold.
“Hey, Mugino!” Akira called out to me excitedly. “Check it out!”
I turned to see her gathering a pile of fallen ginkgo leaves with her feet. She drew her leg back and kicked them up off the ground—but just as they started fluttering back down to earth, they froze in place, suspended in midair. Akira looked at me giddily, her eyes aglow, waiting for some sort of reaction.
“Very pretty, yeah,” I agreed.
“Yikes, tough crowd… Here, why don’t you try?”
This did not, admittedly, seem very much like my kind of fun, but I figured I might as well give it a shot if she insisted. I gathered up some leaves with my feet, just as Akira had. I knew I’d need to really get them high into the air for the best effect, so I reared my right leg back as if winding up for a penalty kick, then slammed my foot down and drove it through the base of the pile.
“Bwagh!”
The momentum from the follow-through made my left leg slip, reminding me—as I lost all contact with the ground and watched my life flash before my eyes—that yes, fallen leaves were typically a bit slippery. I crashed down in predictably comedic fashion. As I gazed up into a pale-blue sky garnished with golden ginkgo trees in what may very well have been my final moments, I couldn’t help but be taken in by the picturesque beauty of it all for a short while. Also, my back hurt, so I couldn’t get up right away.
“H-hey! Are you all right…?” Akira cried, rushing over in a panic. I felt bad for worrying her, so I finally sat upright.
“Ah ha ha… Yeah, sorry. Guess you know I’m not much of an athlete now,” I said, playing it off with a lighthearted joke. Relief washed over Akira’s expression for a moment—but then she angrily placed her hands on her hips like a chiding mother.
“Gee, ya think?!” she said. “I mean, come on, big guy! Don’t go giving yourself a hernia now, for cryin’ out loud… Pfft! Ah ha ha ha!”
Akira hunched over and burst out laughing like a little kid, clutching her sides as though she literally couldn’t contain herself. Watching her expression go from worried to angry to hysterical before my eyes was so amusing that I couldn’t help but chuckle along. In a silent park in a world on mute, we laughed like idiots for no one to hear.
After taking our time walking around the perimeter of the park, Akira and I headed into a nearby dining hall. For the first several legs of our journey, we’d made an effort to only eat premade lunches and side dishes from supermarkets and convenience stores as far as actual meals went. But once Akira recovered from her cold, we talked things over and agreed to treat ourselves to a slightly more indulgent meal at a restaurant or dining hall once every few days. This establishment was a sort of buffet-style eatery in which you could just grab whatever foods you wanted and scoop them onto your plate, which was a bit of an easier format for my morals to stomach. Not that we weren’t still dining and dashing either way, obviously—but it felt less terrible, at least, considering we weren’t swiping food out from under the noses of other customers or the waitstaff. It was the first time I’d gotten to enjoy a nice, hot, filling meal since our journey began.
Once we were finished eating, we made our way over to a public bathhouse downtown, which we’d learned of thanks to a foldout tourist map we’d picked up from a brochure rack at the station. As soon as we made it to our destination, Akira and I wasted no time splitting up and heading into our respective gendered baths. After soaking my weary muscles for a bit, I took some time to wash the few days’ worth of clothes I’d hauled into the bathing area with me. Not in the bathtub itself, obviously—just borrowing the bathwater, and even that felt pretty taboo—but there weren’t many other options for doing a full load of laundry all at once in this world, so whatever.
“All right, think that should do it.”
Washing phase, complete. All that was left now was to wrap them up inside a bath towel, wring the moisture out, and keep them on my person as we walked around town for a while—otherwise, they wouldn’t actually dry out. It typically didn’t take more than five hours if I just dangled them in a bundle from my backpack or tied them around myself like a cape or waistcoat.
Up until recently, I’d just been washing the areas around the pits, cuffs, and collars that were most prone to collecting sweat, then wearing the clothes like normal with those areas still damp. But that had turned out to be a far more unpleasant experience than I ever imagined, and the wetness only made it feel colder, so I’d recently swapped over to this new laundering method. It was definitely a chore to lug around wet clothes with me all the time, but at least they got cleaner with this method.
I dressed myself and headed back out to the lobby. After passing by some elderly men who’d been frozen mid-conversation in the hallway, I spotted Akira sitting on a sofa with her hair wrapped up in a towel like a turban, leafing through some sort of pamphlet.
“Hey, sorry for the wait,” I said.
“All good,” Akira mumbled, not even lifting her head.
“So, did you pick out a place for us to stay tonight?” I asked, placing my laundry on top of my backpack as I sat down in the chair beside her.
“Mm-hmm. Was thinking maybe we could do something a little different for a change, actually.”
“Oh yeah? What’s that?”
“Heh. That’s for me to know, and you to find out,” she said, snapping the pamphlet shut as she leaned forward and pushed herself to her feet.
We gathered our things and left the bathhouse. My wristwatch showed that it was 10:00 p.m.—about time for us to hit the hay. We walked right past a row of hotels as Akira led me down the street toward the station. As I wondered with anticipation where on earth she intended for us to sleep tonight, I was baffled to see her suddenly take a sharp left into a massive department store.
“Uh, you sure this is the right way?” I asked.
“Oh, I’m sure, all right,” Akira said, a sort of prideful confidence in her voice as she started walking up the frozen escalator. She led me all the way up to the back of the fourth floor, then spun around and triumphantly declared, “Okay, here we are!”