I noticed Sanae straighten up beside me. I held my breath. Ignorant of whatever was going on with us, Aki started into the song she had written. It was the first time I had heard an acoustic arrangement of it. Hearing it with just guitar really highlighted the unique qualities of her voice. Sadly, I couldn’t clearly recall Chika’s singing voice. If this song was the same one that she had sung, how would she have sung it?
Still, as I listened to the words, I was filled with something like conviction that I did, in fact, know the lyrics. I felt them tracing the scars left on my heart.
After “Silhouette,” Aki sang three more songs, stepped off the stage, and then returned again amidst cheers and undying applause. The man who had performed first appeared with her, and the two did a song together before the concert finally came to an end with the distinct air of a curtain falling closed.
Sanae and I looked at each other. We waited for most of the other attendees to clear out before heading to the green room to say hello.
“So you know that song ‘Fifteen,’ right?”
“Yeah, I think she said it was a cover.”
“Mm! I met Aki when a colleague of mine told me that there was a girl doing a cover of a song that features the vocalist of my favorite band.”
I wonder if this means something, she muttered and then looked at her phone. It appeared she had gotten some message from one of Aki’s staff, and we moved locations.
I followed behind her, smiling and bowing my head as she called out to a male staff member, exchanging a cheerful greeting. We stepped through a door that would typically be off-limits for anyone but staff. It was surprisingly cramped back there, and among a crowd of several older people performing various tasks, we found Aki, holding a bag of ice to her throat and staring at her phone.
Sanae slipped past, greeting the various staff members. When Aki looked up, her wholly sullen expression from onstage suddenly burst.
“Oh! Sunou-san!”
“Long time no see!”
“Looked pretty cool up there, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, you were super cool!”
“I’m glad.”
“I liked that arrangement of ‘Silhouette.’”
“It’s a good song, yeah?”
In her smile, there was a measure of youth that had been present on her face onstage. I’d heard that she was currently twenty-one.
I wondered how I should broach the main topic. I stood idly at attention behind her until there was a gap in the conversation, and she swiveled back to me, pushing me toward Aki.
“Sorry for the surprise intrusion. This is a colleague of mine. He heard ‘Silhouette’ and immediately fell in love with your work. I figured it’d be nice to at least give him a chance to say hi, if that’s all right with you?”
“Lovely to meet you. I’m Suzuki Kaya. Your performance was wonderful.”
Somehow, I managed to hide my nerves in front of her and give her my prepared greeting with the appropriate air of excitement. I couldn’t say that I wasn’t thankful for how long I had spent living with my true feelings kept under wraps. Aki gave another sunny smile.
“Oh, thanks so much! Pleased to meet you. I’m the vocalist of the band Her Nerine. You can call me Aki.”
I fought back my nerves as I received her cheerful greeting. What could I say to confront her? What could I ask to learn about the connection between the song that Chika sung and this Aki? I had considered a million different ways to go about this up until now.
I wanted to ask what had inspired her to write the song. It wouldn’t be an unnatural question since she had already heard that I liked it. I wanted to know about Aki herself as well, but it’d be weird to ask her that out of the blue. I knew from her official profile that she had started the band with some friends from her hometown. I supposed the conversation could expand from there. I wondered if she knew anything about Chika or about Chika’s world. Aki. Aki.
When I tried to convey all my muddled thoughts to her, all that came out of my dry mouth was, “Aki… Is that aki like autumn, the season?”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing from my own mouth. What the hell was I saying? My nerves and a multitude of intertwined thoughts had made me ask something utterly meaningless. The time I had here was probably limited. As I sat there suffering—though I didn’t let it show on my face—Aki looked briefly surprised. But then she gave a warm smile and said, “Not quite,” drawing something in the air. “It’s written A-ki, with ‘a’ like the first character in yasui, and ‘ki’ like the ‘gei’ in geinou,” she explained.
“…Oh, is that your surname?”
I needed to change the subject, and fast. I didn’t feel good about this line of questioning. I would get nothing meaningful here.
“It is, yeah. I don’t like being called by my first name, so I started using my last name. This is my first name.” Again, her finger danced through the air, a habit of hers perhaps. Her finger drew one straight line, then two identical sets of five strokes, followed by a set of four. I couldn’t read what she was trying to write. “One song,” she offered, the name of a person who was practically born to sing. “That is, Ichika.”
At first I thought I had misheard her.
“Aki…Ichika.”
I remembered chanting that sound over and over in my mind more times than I could count. I probably forgot to even arrange my face.
“Kind of a showy name, huh? It’s sooooo embarrassing!” Aki Ichika laughed amiably.
I looked briefly at Sanae, who knew exactly what was going on. She gave me a small nod as though she was holding something back, then swiftly broke into a smile.
“Should you really be giving your real name out to folks you’ve just met? Someone might abuse that.”
“I mean, what’s a colleague of yours gonna do, Sunou-san?”
The two women joked and laughed together like kindred spirits. I watched them and listened to them.
Or I should have been listening.
Without realizing it, my consciousness had drifted somewhere else.
My heart plunged into that old, familiar darkness.
Then, I noticed. There seemed to be two glowing eyes there. There seemed to be twenty glowing nails there.
No, they were there.
I heard a voice.
It wasn’t just some crumbling memory. It was like she was really there. No, she was there.
“My voice and appearance would be different in a way I might not even recognize at first.”
I’d had no idea what she meant back then.
“There are things deeper down, immovable things that we can’t choose.”
I see.
“If I had been born into your world…”
Chika had vanished. The bus stop was gone. The war was over.
I’d thought that there was nothing left.
“…I still would have met you.”
I understood now. We knew how to meet each other.
“How do you write ‘Kaya’?”
Aki’s voice drew me back, and my heart returned to my current location in the concert venue. I swiftly started to adjust my face when I realized it wasn’t necessary. I was already wearing a genuine smile.
“‘Ka’ as in kaori, ‘ya’ like the ‘ya’ of yayoi.”
“Oh, how stylish!”
I wondered what I was supposed to do here. How should I interpret the existence of the girl Aki who stood before me, and what was I supposed to tell her? A number of thoughts ran through my head. Given that this world and Chika’s were connected—and that we never did determine what influence they had on each other—it was neither absurd nor impossible to think there could be an equivalent to Chika in my world. Given that, I probably should have conveyed all this to her somehow. Maybe there was something I could do for her.
I thought about it, but the answer I came up with was so simple there could not have been any other.
Our conversation proceeded smoothly, with Aki imploring us to come to her band’s next show. I told her sincerely that I was looking forward to it. When we parted ways, the two women shared a friendly handshake, and Aki bowed politely to me.
In the end, there was only one thing that I wanted to do, to say to her.
“I pray that we can both be happy.”
Aki looked at me curiously, as she’d probably rarely heard something so emotional from a person she had just met, and returned a joking, “Sure. Thanks, bud,” with another quick bow.
After sharing a few more quick greetings with the staff around us, we returned to the main floor. We left the now mostly empty venue and climbed the stairs. Once we got to the top, I looked at Sanae. I saw several emotions float across her face in turn, then her lips parted.
“Are you all right?” she asked kindly, and I in turn replied, “Thank you.”
Though there were probably a million things she wanted to say, she held them back and smiled.
I looked up at the sky.
The final thought that ran through my mind was: I wonder if Chika ever met me over there.