A week after my mother died, on the day I celebrated my thirty-first birthday, I saw her again. This time, it wasn’t in a station shelter or on a train but at a radio station I visited for my job. Apparently, she worked there. I’m not sure how unlikely of a coincidence it is to run into someone from your hometown in the finite number of business transactions one does in one’s life, but human lives are so long that I suppose it isn’t totally impossible.
The fact that I had no recollection of this woman, even though I had visited this station several times before, meant that I either simply hadn’t encountered her or that it was because I never looked at anyone’s faces unless it was necessary. It only occurred to me that she was the person I had seen at the station back home because she stared at me for an unnaturally long time as we passed each other. I thought this suspicious until I realized I had seen her recently. She was probably wondering if she’d seen me somewhere before as well.
Once a human identifies a target, it’s impossible for them to ignore it, so the next time I visited the station, I noticed her again. I caught her staring at me as she recognized my face, and I greeted her, thinking she must have some business with me. But she simply returned a polite nod and left. I had no business with her myself, so I made no move to stop her.
This situation didn’t change until circumstance brought us together for a fourth time. Well, honestly speaking, it wasn’t the fourth time.
“I knew it…”
It happened when I was introduced to her as a representative of the program I was getting an ad placed in, as the pair of us blithely exchanged business cards. She received my card first, looked at it, and then looked at me again curiously, muttering something vague.
Ignoring her boss—who stood beside her giving a concerned, “What’s wrong?”—she looked at me and said my name.
“I thought that was you, Suzuki-kun.”
I made a baffled expression at this address.
“Um, here,” she continued.
If we were acquainted, she should have just given her name, but instead she offered me her card. What a weirdo. I took it and looked at the name. That name.
“Remember me?”
To be frank, I didn’t. For her to call me Suzuki-kun… Was she someone I had met in college or one of the various acquaintances I had made since becoming an adult? Or, given the station we’d rode from, was she someone from as far back as my high school days?
However, as a member of society, I was aware that telling someone upfront that you didn’t remember them tended to upset them. I knew that could cause further trouble, so I started to try to save face, but thankfully she took the initiative and revealed herself.
“We were in the same class in high school. Though, um, I guess we didn’t talk all that much.”
I didn’t talk much to anyone, so that didn’t narrow it down any.
“We used to always end up at the shoe lockers together on the way home.”
Now I remembered.
“Oh.”
This was Saitou, from high school.
I looked at her card again. I supposed that had been her name. I looked at her in half feigned shock and told her that I did remember her.
“I’m so glad you do! I’d been wondering since I saw you at the station. I wasn’t sure though; you’ve changed a lot from back then. You always have such a big smile when you’re here. Ah, sorry for getting so worked up. This is Suzuki Kaya-san, an old classmate.”
She explained the situation to her boss, who looked at her, then me, giving a loud, “Well, that’s wonderful! Please be kind to this old buddy of yours.”
What was so wonderful about that? I had no idea, but I made a similar expression as him and said, “What a shock, huh?”
These words were mainly meant to smooth things over, but they were at least 2 percent sincere.
Saitou had noted that I was different now, but really I was the one who should be saying that. Putting aside the fact that she was wearing makeup, I could sense no trace of the Saitou I had once known, as far as I remembered her. Between her face, the air with which she carried herself, and even her height, she was like a completely different person. The Saitou I knew never had such hope in her eyes and would have never been so overjoyed by a reunion with an old classmate. Obviously, I had never known her outside of the school building, and it had been more than ten years since then, but still.
Regardless, this reunion, and the fact that it was a reunion with Saitou, held little significance to me. I now had a work acquaintance who was also from my hometown. That was all.
Naturally, even after we had already exchanged business cards, I saw Saitou every time I visited the radio station. That said, she was never the one I was scheduled to meet with. We’d see each other, nod, and go our separate ways. We sometimes stopped to make chitchat, and once the timing had even worked out for us to get coffee with a few folks, but that was the extent of it. The fact that she always had such boundless energy concerned me, but that was really none of my business. The only thought I had about it was that someday, once that wind left her sails, she would probably return to her old self.
Until one day, I heard, “You wanna grab dinner sometime, Suzuki-kun?”
It was when I received this sudden invitation from Saitou, who was nothing more than a former classmate who I had just happened to cross paths with while working, that I began to wonder if she truly wasn’t the Saitou I once knew. I wasn’t inclined to turn her down, though. It didn’t matter to me either way.
“Sure, let’s do that. We can coordinate our schedules. I’ll give you my LINE.”
We had never really had much in the way of one-on-one exchanges before, so this was our first time trading personal contact information.
Our tiny reunion took place during the May holidays, after the frantic days at the start of the school year had ended. Saitou was dressed in dark business casual and I in a suit, having had a single work function to attend that day. On that topic, I of course never attended any high school reunions, but I wondered whether she had. With the way she was right now, there was no way she hadn’t gone. I asked her as we waited for our food at a tidy little restaurant.
“I haven’t,” she said. “They’ve mostly been on the weekends, and weekends mean nothing to radio station employees. I had a few fairly good friends by our third year, but I’m happy enough with just contacting them individually.”
“Though of course we’ve fallen out of touch by now,” she added when the drinks arrived. She shared a pointless perfunctory toast.
“Is there anyone from back home you still keep in touch with?” she asked.
“Nah, not really.”
“That’s how it gets once you’re a busy professional. Plus, I mean, well…don’t take this the wrong way, but you weren’t especially approachable back then.”
Her tone, both wry and considerate, made me chuckle as I replied, “Yeah, I think I get what you mean.” I didn’t deny the accusation because I realized she was probably referring to the incident I’d caused. Stubbornly denying the facts was a surefire way to make someone uncomfortable. Acknowledging your faults and telling the other you had grown beyond them was necessary to maintaining stress-free relations.
“Honestly though, I was surprised to see how much…gentler you’ve gotten. Sorry to bring this up again, I just didn’t think it’d be appropriate to mention at work.”
Considering how the conversation was going, it would be just as strange if the topic hadn’t been broached. I chose my words carefully, trying not to make her feel awkward.
“I mean, I guess I have changed, but I was just as surprised. Remembering how you were in high school, I’d have never imagined you inviting me out somewhere.”
She looked a bit bashful, perhaps aware that she might become the subject of the conversation. I wondered if it was a forced expression.
“Well, when you put it that way, I guess I’ve grown up too, and I’ve gotten a lot more friendly. I think I got less standoffish starting the middle of our second year, though.”
Now that she mentioned it, there had been a point at which her demeanor had shifted pretty drastically, though I hadn’t remembered exactly when that was.
“Thinking about who I was back then, and remembering what you were like at the time, I would have never imagined us becoming work acquaintances. I invited you out because I thought that was a bond worth cultivating, but to be honest, I half expected you to turn me down.”
“I figured it couldn’t hurt to be nice to someone from a company I’m doing business with,” I said sarcastically with a feigned smile, realizing she was still looking for some proof of my inner change.
She gave a toothy grin and replied, “Wow, you even have a sense of humor now.”
I carried bite after bite of tasteless food to my mouth, downing drink after drink in the hopes of dulling my senses. The conversation with Saitou did little to hold my interest, but I rarely got much enjoyment out of conversing with anyone these days, so at least it wasn’t especially painful. I made the right faces at the right times and spoke at an appropriate volume. That was the essence of conversation. It was necessary to avoid making trouble at work by upsetting Saitou, former classmate now turned business associate.
“Oh, right, so what did you go back home for?”
“Ah, my mom passed away.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry… You have my condolences.”
“No, you don’t have to apologize, we’d known it was coming.”
Why did people always apologize for bringing up a relative’s death?
“I don’t really go back there anymore,” I continued. “Do you?”
“Oh yeah, when I have time anyway. I don’t really have any reason to go back, but it sometimes helps to recharge my batteries.”
So it wasn’t so much a miracle of fate that had brought us together on that platform as it was my intruding on Saitou’s routine.
“Is it work that usually keeps you away? Or do you have a family here now?”
“Work. As you can see, I’m not married.”
“Right. Same here, as you can see.”
She held up her left hand to show me the ring finger, as I had just done. She let out an alcohol-laced sigh, then gave a vague apology for throwing out information that I hadn’t even asked about. If she was going to apologize for every single little thing, we would get nowhere.