YURA Sugano was a girl who lived a sad life. One where no one else seemed to notice she even existed.
She attended a private school that had only been built four years ago, just a fifteen-minute walk from her house. A combined middle and high school, it was for those students who wanted a good shot at getting into a famous local university. It was not for the faint of heart.
The school was split into a normal and a progressive curriculum. Of the students who’d passed, Yura had, over her three years, gotten the lowest grades in every class outside of Modern Japanese. Her grades were bad, and her athletic skills were unbelievably poor. She wasn’t completely uncoordinated but significantly slower than the others.
The only thing she could perform equally with others in was origami, which every student got into at one time or another. But when she entered high school, her homeroom teacher had told her mother, “She needs to stop being such a child. Always playing with origami…” And she hadn’t touched origami since.
She was bad even at life’s basics, dimwitted to the core. Ever since coming to that realization, she’d only done the bare minimum, seeking to avoid troubling others at all costs.
It didn’t take her long to conclude that avoiding any forms of attention minimized the damage.
She always wore her auburn-tipped long hair the same way to keep it hidden.
She’d never changed her hairstyle or fashion over the years.
She spoke very little and never assertively.
Her classmates could barely remember her name.
The only impression she seemed to leave on them was as the person always in the shadow of her lively best friend, Tomoko.
That was just how things were for Yura. Even if her experiences were painful, there seemed to be nothing she could do to change them. She’d only been scolded harshly about it once by Tomoko, though she couldn’t remember what’d brought it on.
“Don’t you ever get tired of being a shrinking violet, scared of everything? This moment will never come again, so you should enjoy it,” her friend had told her.
Yura had taken it in silence.
After all, she’d thought the same thing about herself many, many times.
But in her heart, Yura knew the truth—that she couldn’t be like Tomoko—and that would never change. So, she’d resigned herself to it.
Her dainty body—so tiny for a high schooler—spawned so many inferiority complexes and an enormous amount of self-loathing. Those twin impulses bore their fangs every chance they got. They told her she was a coward. That she hadn’t one redeeming quality.
She lived with that pressure, even as it threatened to crush her. She lacked the strength to rise against it but carried a sarcastic sense of humor that served as her one meager defense against her sadness.
She continued dousing the smoldering flames of dissatisfaction that lingered in her heart, and the ashes had long since cooled. She no longer even had that flame. The ashes were soaked; there was nothing left to burn.
The only thing Yura could do was hold these ashes close, lest they turn to dust and blow away for good.
That’s right. I’m a coward who lacks the courage to change.
No one expected anything serious of Yura anymore.
And that was just fine with her.
That was what she wanted, this was how she made it through: Even if they laugh, eventually they’ll forget I’m even here.
✦ ✦ ✦
STANDING in front of the antique glass door, the first thing Yura noticed through the glass were the mountains of opened boxes stacked like a barricade on the other side. They hadn’t taken down the Closed sign. She could hear the din of packing tape being torn off from inside the little shop.
Holding the bag of pudding she’d brought as a gift, Yura knocked gently on the stained-glass door as she always did.
“Hello, it’s Yura. Is Tomo-chan here?” she called in a soft voice.
When she rang the doorbell—a rare variety of metal knocker instead of electric—she heard the sounds of vigorous packing stop, replaced by the sounds of boxes being shoved about. She could see a foot through the glass kick a box aside before the front door was yanked open.
“Welcome back, Yura!”
With a little dirt that looked like it might be soot on the tip of her nose, Tomoko Hatada poked her head out. She had a large box cutter with the blade out in one hand and pieces of packing tape stuck to her clothes. When her eyes met Yura’s, they both burst into laughter.
“That was fast. Did something happen?”
Her brows furrowed with concern and Yura frantically shook her head.
“No, nothing happened.”
“Really? Well, that’s good.”
Relieved, the smile returned to Tomoko’s face. She swept back her hair, which had been pulled back in two ponytails behind her ears.
Seeing the cheerful Tomoko lifted Yura’s spirits a bit as well.
Tomoko’s face was glistening with sweat from exerting herself so much inside the cramped, poorly ventilated shop. Her blouse collar stuck to her sweaty neck as she used her sleeve to wipe her face, the cloth becoming black in the process. The sight caused her to burst into laughter.
“It’s crazy, huh? My old man brought all this back last night,” she said, indicating all the boxes scattered throughout the room.
Yura nodded. It looked like they’d been moving.
Tomoko’s new father—her mother’s new husband—owned this sign-less antique shop.
Only by following a street that stretched through the crowded residential areas and twisted and turned so many times it disoriented anyone walking it, and then climbing a gentle hill, one would come to a narrow, one-way street. Amid a school zone and houses packed so close together, one could barely fit in between even if they hunched their shoulders, stood the door to the shop. The first time Yura saw it, she felt like she’d discovered something magical.
This shop was also what’d first brought Yura and Tomoko together. It was right around the time Yura had entered high school and, as she often loved roaming about in a daze, she ended up lost and discovered this shop by accident.
She could see expensive-looking vases through the curtainless windows. Yura had gasped when she realized, haphazardly placed among them, was a school bag much like her own, even bearing the same school logo.
The bag was leaning against a thin glass vase—one with a price tag reading 200,000 yen—and looked as if it might topple it over at any second. If someone even lightly brushed against it, it’d surely fall. Her experience with poverty winning out over her introvert nature, Yura pushed open the door with the “Closed” sign on it.
The bag’s owner, at the time, was Tomoko Asai.
Her father was apparently the owner of a chain of furniture stores spread all over the country. It was a large store, dealing in both domestic and imported furniture. A household name Yura had heard many times before, as Tomoko’s father currently worked as the representative for the Kanto showroom.
“This shop is my new papa’s hobby,” Tomoko said, taking a big gulp from her carton of soy milk before handing it over to Yura who greedily drank.
“Your new…papa…?”
“Yup. Number four.”
Yura had almost coughed up her soy milk on Tomoko, whose face was so nonchalant at the sudden reveal. As she patted the sputtering Yura’s back, Tomoko insisted she’d been lying. But later, Yura found out it was true. This was her mother’s fourth lover.
“And the fourth man I’ve called Papa.”
Tomoko’s mother worked as an illustrator for magazine articles and essays. She’d first gotten divorced when Tomoko was still in diapers and had remarried and divorced numerous times, leading her to raise Tomoko on her own. Having inherited her mother’s fighting spirit and tenacity, Tomoko was, in Yura’s eyes, incredibly brave.
Two months after they’d met, Tomoko had taken her current surname, Hatada. The polar opposite of Yura, Tomoko was lively, with a larger-than-life personality. Her favorite things were soy milk and pudding. Exercise and cooking were her specialties. She was the picture of an honor student and Yura’s irreplaceable, one and only best friend.
That morning, Tomoko had called Yura first thing and left her dumbfounded. She told Yura she’d chipped a front tooth.
“I was fighting with my little brother and ended up flying down the stairs. I chipped my tooth. It’s so horrible! I just can’t come to school today.”
Tomoko’s tone was so light and airy, she might as well have been talking about the weather. She was slurring her words a bit, and it sounded as if she had something pressed against her cheek.
“With this tooth chipped, I can’t get married, let alone go to school.”
When Tomoko hung up with a laugh, Yura remained with her hand on the receiver in shock.
But looking at Tomoko now, nothing seemed any different. On closer inspection, her upper lip was slightly swollen. Yura knit her brows together.
“Is your tooth better? Are you okay to be up and about?”
In response, Tomoko opened her mouth wide. She pulled the corner of her mouth back so Yura could see the tooth that’d been treated, then indicated it with her thumb. Yura laughed without meaning to.
“By the way, is that a gift?”