Chapter 1

PROLOGUE As I was waiting for the signal at the crosswalk in front of Odakyu HALC, I happened to look up. Outside the west gate of Shinjuku Station, the sky was cramped, hemmed in on all sides by tall buildings. Plus, the color was duller in the early morning. It was blue enough for a reprieve from the gray city, though, and I could feel that summer was on its way. I visualized that “summer aura” as something like a dense mass of air slowly descending from the heavens. Squinting, I tried to trick my eyes into seeing it. In that instant, the memory of that special summer sixteen years ago came back to me. My lungs constricted, and I thought I might tear up. It took me a little while to notice that the signal had turned green. Hastily, I started walking, a few beats behind the people around me, and made for the west ticket gate. It was a terminal station during the commuter rush. The backs of the crowd formed a sort of current, surging through the automatic ticket gate one after another, and the sight didn’t surprise me or trigger any real emotion. When had I stopped being startled by how many people lived in one town, each of them with their own separate lives? I was aware of the fatigue I was carrying. I was thirty-one, and the weariness of those thirty-one years had seeped into me. It wasn’t that big a deal. But it wasn’t nothing, either. Out of nowhere, I thought, I don’t want to go to work today. It struck me as being just a little funny. What was I, a kid? Come to think of it, though, had I ever skipped school as a kid? I got the feeling I hadn’t. Ultimately, I probably hadn’t managed to grow up right. When someone doesn’t have it together as an adult, it’s because they flunked childhood. They don’t know how much value there is in being a grown-up. Whatever the cause, my misgivings about my stunted maturity lingered like a stiffness in my sides. Mentally, I ran over my schedule for the day. I didn’t have any meetings on the agenda. Some of my jobs were urgent, but they’d probably work out somehow. I tossed my work bag into a station coin locker, then locked it. I took my phone out of my pocket, started to call in… But then I changed my mind, turned off the phone completely, and put it away again. If I was going to play hooky anyway, I wanted to do it all, like a kid. When it came to my destination, I didn’t hesitate. I took the Chuo Line to Tokyo Station. At the window, I bought a ticket to Aomori and an express ticket for the Tohoku Shinkansen, bound for Hachinohe. Boarding the 8:56 Hayate, I curled up in a cramped seat and dozed for three hours or so. At Hachinohe, I transferred to an express that took me to Aomori Station. After a thirty-minute layover, I boarded a diesel train on the tiny Tsugaru Line. This train would go all the way to the tip of the Tsugaru Peninsula, the northernmost point on the island of Honshu. The good old local line. A two-car train. Just five trains per day. It hadn’t changed a bit. The atmosphere in the practically deserted car was strangely gentle. The people who lived here in the Tsugaru region all used this one line, and these trains always had a certain familiarity peculiar to them. I felt just a little alienated here. After all, as far as this place was concerned, I was already a foreigner. That familiarity didn’t include me anymore. There was a middle-school couple in a distant box seat. I watched them, smiling a little. Their uniforms were from my old school, and they hadn’t changed a bit. I could hear what they were saying. It was a trivial conversation, patent kid stuff. The boy and the girl both appeared to be having a lot of fun, though. They weren’t holding back. I used to be like that, too, long ago—cheerful and unreserved. My treasures were dumb little things and deliriously fun. My best friend ever had been there—and so had one beautiful girl. The three of us had ridden this train together, and I’d wanted the slow, heavy diesel train to go even slower. Now, the memory felt like a story from some distant world… Yes, I’d come a long way. Back then, I’d stretched out my hand desperately, trying to go as far as I possibly could. But what was the place I’d been struggling to reach? This? I didn’t know. I got off at Tsugaru-Hamana Station, one stop before the end of the line. Glancing at the tiny bicycle parking lot out of the corner of my eye, I set off in the opposite direction from the village. I passed under the elevated track for the new Tsugaru Strait Line, which was only half-built and had never actually opened. From there, the ground began sloping gently upward. Before too long, I came upon the ruins of a prefab factory. I cut across its lot, bent down and stepped through its broken fence, then spent about half an hour climbing the small mountain behind it. When I’d passed through a dense stand of trees, the view abruptly opened up to reveal a shining pale-green plain, almost like a pasture. Young undergrowth had sprung up as far as the eye could see, releasing its fresh scent into the wind. It was a wide, endless world of light green. Slowly, I started walking through the grass. The silky rustle of the blades brushing against one another softly tickled my ears. A good distance away, on my right, the remains of a dilapidated station sat exposed to the elements. There was a row of three concrete platforms and a wooden pedestrian bridge rising up and over the tracks to connect them. The walls and floor of the bridge were broken in places. The station had been abandoned, half-finished, and in the end, not a single train had ever gone through it. Nothing would ever come to this place, and you couldn’t go anywhere from it. Once, it had held something that was everything to me. When I looked up, the sky was almost too wide. Thick, fluffy clouds floated across a deep-blue sky. I tilted my head back and turned in a circle, and the sky turned, too, as though the blue was gathering around me. There was an airplane flying high overhead. A small, pure-white plane. The Velaciela… It wasn’t there in the real sky, but I could see it in my memories—a plane with a strange shape, one you’d never, ever find in any aviation catalog. The Velaciela. It had been the product of our trio’s combined strength. A heartrendingly beautiful plane. “Oh, wow…” I heard Sayuri’s voice, right beside me—but that was just in my head, too. She was gone now. The remnants of the memory had replayed only when I saw this scene, that was all. Even so, I saw her, as real as anything. I heard her phantom footsteps in the grass as she trotted up from behind me, ran past me, and turned. Her short school uniform skirt swayed, and so did her shoulder-length black hair. “An airplane?!” Sayuri sounded happy. She looked the way she had in middle school, sixteen years ago. Why are you showing up so young? I know what you look like when you’re older, you know. The touch of the wind on my skin pulled me back to reality. Both the airplane and Sayuri vanished, like candle flames suddenly blown out. I gazed absently at the spot where her illusion had stood. I stood there for a while, in a daze, looking at the green of the grass and the blue of the sky. The ground swelled into a hill, and beyond it, I could see the cape. Beyond that was the ocean. The water was a chilly blue-black. It was deep and dark, but there was something strangely transparent about it. That was the color of the Tsugaru Strait in summer. On the other side, the gray-blue landscape of Hokkaido was visible—hazy, partially blended into the sky. But something felt wrong. Something was missing from the picture. Right. The tower. Once, when you looked across the ocean at Hokkaido from this spot, there had been a white tower there, on the far side of a misty sky. To be visible from the Tsugaru Peninsula, the tower had to be enormous and tall. It reminded me of the concept illustration of a space elevator I’d seen in a science magazine: a beautiful, perpendicular white line, as if it had been drawn onto the sky with a ruler. A gigantic, dreamlike structure that might have been brought in from another civilization on another planet… But there was nothing. It’s gone now. We lost it. The green grass bent in the wind, rippling like water, bringing to me again that trace of Sayuri. “I’ve always felt like…like I was going to lose something. As beautiful as this world is…” She’d told me that, once—that she had always felt loss approaching. I was still in middle school, and there was no way I could really have understood what she meant, but those words had sent strange shivers through my soul. It was several years before the war began. Back when Hokkaido was still called Ezo and occupied by another country—an enemy country. A place you could see, not so far away, but could never actually go to. Unreachable, at the far edge of the sky. The place we promised. Right. That summer, the three of us had looked at that tower from this spot, and we made a small vow together. On that distant day, our promised place—hers and mine—stood beyond those clouds. It was my fault we’d lost the tower. Sayuri wasn’t here with me anymore, either. Sayuri… How was she? Why couldn’t I be with her now? As I listened to the grass rustling, I looked down, counting on my fingers. All the things I’d lost, damaged, or discarded over the course of these ten-odd years. When I actually counted, there didn’t seem to be all that many—so how could they be this heavy? I started walking on unsteady legs over to where the rails lay, set in place and then abandoned. There was a spot where two tracks converged, then branched off again. When I reached it, I sat down on the rusty rails and cried, just a little. Maybe it was that all the things I’d lost were things I couldn’t afford to lose. Still, that outcome was inevitable as long as I was me, and he was him, and she was her. Our destinations were set, and our routes hadn’t allowed transfers. I stayed there, unmoving, until the sun began to take on a slightly reddish tinge. Finally, I shook my head, dispelling my sadness. Slowly, I got to my feet, lightly dusting the red rust from my trousers. It was time to return to the present. Turning my back on that view beyond the ocean, I quietly started walking.