I sat on a campus bench, the autumn wind blowing around me, thinking about Maori’s life in high school and Tooru’s request. About those days when I didn’t even call him by his first name.
I was holding one of Maori’s handwritten journals from high school—one of the real ones. Tooru was in it. They had laughed together every day. Hard and sad things must have happened now and then, but there were never any problems between the two of them.
Maori had Tooru, and Tooru had Maori.
Even though Maori suffered from anterograde amnesia, as long as she had Tooru and her journal full of happy memories, she was able to keep on living and believing in the future.
Until that day.
I wasn’t sure if I should do this or not, but I decided to write about what happened to organize my thoughts.
My boyfriend, Tooru Kamiya, is dead. My past selves have described Tooru Kamiya in other entries, so please read those.
They said the cause of death was sudden heart failure. Kamiya’s mother died of heart disease, and they said he might have inherited it.
I didn’t know that people could just suddenly die.
I only know about him from what’s written in my journal. I barely remember what he looks like.
Even so, when I learned that he had died, I couldn’t stop crying.
A little while ago, I was at the wake with Izumi. I saw Tooru Kamiya lying in his coffin.
The person who made my past selves so happy had stopped moving.
I still can’t make sense of it. I’m just sad, sad, so endlessly sad.
Every time I reread my past journal entries, the sadness wells up in me. I’m in there. Kamiya is in there. On every page, he and I are smiling.
I’m not trying to make my future self sad. Maybe I shouldn’t be writing this entry, or if I write it, maybe I should tear it out and throw it away.
But today’s self will only exist once. None of my other selves can take their place.
That’s why I made up my mind to leave a record of today in my journal. Future selves, I’m sorry. Forgive me for leaving this journal entry behind.
Kamiya. I want to be with you. I want to see you and talk with you.
You’re good at brewing black tea, I hear. Will you make me a cup? I want to know all about you. I didn’t just want you to support me. I wanted to support you, too.
I want to be with you.
But I can’t, can I? I’m so lonely. So sad.
Maori was in shock from Tooru’s death. After that, she had to face two absurd realities every morning: her own amnesia and his death. She began to grow weaker. Her parents and I had heard that depression could be a complication of anterograde amnesia, and we worried that might be happening to her.
I considered removing the mention of Tooru’s death from her journals and making up another reason for his absence. But that would only be a temporary solution. Worse, it would go against his last wish.
“If I die, I want you to erase me from Hino’s journal.”
Two days before his death, he had collapsed, and one day before his death, he had asked that of me.
I hardly had any interactions with Hino before she lost her memory. So…if I die, as long as I’m not in her journal, we can make it like it never happened.
I’m certain he didn’t want to die. He only said that to me out of an abundance of caution, because his own mother had passed suddenly from heart disease. But his request was cruel. Normally, people try to leave behind traces of themselves when they die. They have a powerful desire to leave proof that they once lived. But Tooru wanted the opposite. He wanted to erase all trace of his existence from his loved one’s memory. He thought only of her.
“I think it might be possible. But are you okay with that?” I asked him that day. He smiled sadly.
“I think I’ll be okay with it.”
The next night, he left the world of the living.
I agonized over what to do, but in the end, I decided to carry out his wish. Together with his sister and Maori’s parents, I erased him from her journals. I kept her real journals, binders, and old phone at my place.
Once all traces of Tooru were gone, Maori gradually recovered. She wrote new journal entries on her computer, drew every day, and lived a quiet life, waiting to recover from her amnesia.
She forgot Tooru completely. It was like he had never existed. But unlike Maori, I couldn’t erase him. My first crush. The first guy I ever liked. And now he was dead.
But as the days and months passed, I felt like I was coming to terms with his death. That’s what it meant to go on living.
But…even if a person comes to terms with death, how can they come to terms with the unrequited feelings they had for someone who died?
I spent my first year of university trying to figure that out. I tried to find someone new to like, but I couldn’t. I was stuck on my first crush, I guess. I didn’t think anyone could replace Tooru.
That continued into my second year. I knew I couldn’t go on like that. I had to forget him. I just didn’t know how.
I…like you.
That’s where I was when I met Naruse. His interest in me was almost blinding, and although I tried to turn him down, I made the mistake of accepting on one condition.
“I’ll date you, but under one condition. Don’t fall in love with me. Can you promise me that?”
Playing at romance should have been enough. A temporary, superficial, coincidental, transient, make-believe love.
Hello. I found you.
You’re pretty attractive yourself.
Thank you for today. I had a good time. I’m looking forward to the aquarium.
But in a way, Naruse was similar to Tooru, and I began to have feelings for him in spite of myself. That made me afraid of him. I felt like he would overwrite my memories of Tooru. The places I’d been with Tooru, the things I wanted to do with him, the things I wanted to see. I felt like Naruse’s presence would inescapably erase all those things.
I was conflicted. I wanted to forget Tooru, but I also desperately didn’t want to. And I ended up hurting Naruse because of it.
Maybe I’d be better off if I could forget everything, like Maori. But that wasn’t because Maori desired it. She inexorably forgot the things she wanted to remember. She was made to forget memories—of Tooru Kamiya, the person she loved.
As fall turned into winter, one month after I had sat on that bench reminiscing about the past, Maori found a sketchbook full of drawings of Tooru in her room. About a year and a half had passed since his death.
“Do you know who this is?” she asked me one afternoon at a café, showing me the sketchbook.
I’d thought I removed all trace of Tooru—journals, photographs, even drawings. I didn’t realize that she had hidden sketches of him behind a bookshelf in her room.
For the first time, I told her the truth. That she used to have a boyfriend named Tooru Kamiya. That his support was the reason she’d managed to graduate from high school. That one day, he had suddenly died. Not just that. I told her that following his last wish, I had erased all trace of him from her journal.
She was shocked. I was afraid our friendship would end that day. But that wouldn’t have been like her. She forgave us for what we had done. Although she was surprised, she smiled, with great effort, I’m sure, and told me she was grateful that we had tried to protect her.
After talking to her parents, I returned her the original journals. She read them and began trying to learn about the boyfriend she had forgotten for so long. She even contacted Tooru’s sister in Tokyo. It seems his sister had expected to get that call one day. She came to our town, and I introduced the two of them. Maori asked about Tooru and seemed to gain some direction in her life.
Tooru had wanted her to forget him completely and regain her own life. There was no need to remember past sorrows. But Maori chose to face his death, even as she went on living. She chose to remember him. She vowed that one day she would remember everything.
But as for me…