Ahh, that day had made such an impression on me. So much so that it’s strange I’d forgotten about it until now.
In high school I had been on the badminton team (I was only a backup’s backup), and on that particular day we had practice as usual. But during the first breather, I realized I’d forgotten my water bottle in my locker and went back to the classroom to get it.
The school building was very quiet during the extracurricular period, and I didn’t pass anyone in the hallways. The late afternoon sun poured in through the windows almost aggressively, and my eyes hurt as they were filled with the crimson light.
Reina Myoko was, for some reason, reading a book by herself in the classroom.
She seemed to have taken the intense afternoon sun captive and leashed it under her control. The setting sun had transformed her from a girl hunched over, turning the pages of a book, into someone in a movie scene.
She stood up, still unaware of me, and opened the window. I watched to see what she would do. She looked affectionately at the hardcover book and touched the open page. Then, without any hesitation, she began to tear the page out—ripppp, ripppp—without any change in expression. She persisted until the page was shredded into small pieces. She tore up several more pages, and then took the pieces and threw them out of the window.
The scraps of paper fluttered gently in the crimson sky like the petals of cherry blossoms.
There was something awful about that scene. It felt like Reina had calmly stepped past some line that shouldn’t have been crossed.
However, it was even more beautiful than it was awful. If I’d been holding a DSLR camera instead of my racquet, I would have instinctively snapped a few photos at that moment. Ah, if only I had taken her picture, then I never would’ve forgotten what she looked like.
But when I snapped out of my daze, I didn’t feel right. I’d run into a classmate in an empty classroom. Even if I managed not to address the whole book thing, I was going to have to say something to her. This wasn’t even her classroom. Why was she there in the first place?
I was now faced with a very pragmatic problem, the exact opposite of the illusory scene I’d just encountered: What I was going to say to this girl I didn’t know very well?
I don’t remember exactly, but I must’ve come up with something harmless to say. Given my lower-middle class background, I must’ve resorted to a silly grin.
Ahh, now I was remembering! Reina Myoko had been exchanging the appropriate pleasantries with my awkward self, when she suddenly opened her eyes wide with surprise.
“Hey, Yuri,” she greeted me. That reminded me—she called classmates by their first names, whether she was close with them or not. “Your fingers are so lovely.”
I had trouble believing someone as beautiful and special as Reina really thought someone so commonplace as me had lovely hands.
“Everyone is always complimenting mine…” I said. “They say that only my right hand is perfect. I always want to tell them that saying ‘only’ is rude!”
“Is there something wrong with your left?” she asked. “Ahh…you’ve got scars.”
“Yeah. When I was little, I was holding hands with my sister while we were running in this big park, and when I fell down…umm, ha ha.”
I laughed uncomfortably. I wasn’t sure how much I could say to her. But Reina ignored me and the scars on my left hand. She seemed to be captivated by my right hand.
“Ah, ha ha…Stop staring,” I joked. “My right hand is nice, but you’re beautiful all over.”
“It’s just that I have a slightly better sense of how I appear to the world than others do.” Then she added a comment I didn’t understand: “I don’t have real beauty in the way that your fingers do. Your right hand is the real thing. One of a kind, unlike me.” Then Reina Myoko smiled elegantly. “Hey, do you know what a misdirection is?” she said suddenly.
Confused, I said, no, I didn’t.
“It’s a technique used in a sleight of hand trick. It means ‘to shift the focus of the audience.’ By getting the audience’s attention with an exaggerated gesture or something, you conceal from them the most important part of the trick…But I think it’s not just for sleight of hand tricks, don’t you think? It happens all the time in reality. People miss the most important thing because there’s something flashy right in front of them.”
This was the first time I’d ever heard her talk so much at once, and I interspersed the conversation with sounds of approval and understanding despite my confusion.
“For example,” she continued. “Say you have a beautiful flower in a vase. Everyone would be paying attention to the beautiful petals on the flower. But what if the vase was actually full of muddy water? Super dirty water from the day after a heavy rain that even water bugs would hesitate to go near. The water should be changed right away, but because the flower’s so pretty no one ever thinks the water’s dirty. So the flower withers.”
When she finished, she quietly turned away from me. It seemed she had realized how strange it was to talk about this kind of stuff with someone she wasn’t close friends with.
Flustered and confused, I asked about what I’d just seen, without really thinking it through. “Hey,” I said. “Why were you ripping up that book just now?”
Reina stared into my eyes, as though she were testing me, but she didn’t seem upset.
“It was a beautiful story,” she said. “The sentences flowed like a stream. The psychology was subtle, like the author had peered into the human soul with a microscope. And the overall composition was supported by a structure as natural as the human skeleton. At the same time, the story was incredibly warm, and the immediacy of the author’s love for fiction really came through.”
She turned away from me again. Behind her, the setting sun was turning a burnt umber color, creating a dramatic backdrop.
She added, finally, “That’s why I wanted to rip it up.”