I’d been running for so long. Where to, I didn’t know. For what, I couldn’t say. Maybe I was chasing something, or maybe something was chasing me. All I knew was that I’d been running for a long, long time. Still to this day, I hadn’t stopped. I kept moving forward, swinging my arms back and forth, even when my feet felt more bruised and blistered with every step… Or at least, I thought I was moving forward. Even so, no matter how much time passed, it seemed like I couldn’t reach the finish line.
“Mmngh…”
I awoke with a terrible kink in my neck. I peeled my right cheek off the cold, hard tabletop and lifted my head. Apparently I’d fallen asleep while working at my desk. I could feel my joints creaking as if I were a machine in desperate need of an oil change. I glanced at the digital table clock—it was three in the morning. I stood from my chair and stretched a bit, cracking my lower back with a satisfying pop. The thick scent of ink and wood pulp hung heavy in the air of my silent, sleepy bedroom. As I looked at the heaping stacks of paper spread all over my writing desk, I decided it was about time to call it quits for the night. I’d clean up, take a shower, and then hop into bed for some actual rest. Before I did that, I wanted to finish one last scene. I twisted my shoulders from side to side, then sat down, put pen back to paper, and started inking my streaky pencil lines once more.
That fateful day, when Kaoru ran off into the Urashima Tunnel without me, I did try to chase after him at first, even after reading the letter he’d left for me at the entrance. I figured that even if he’d gotten a several-day head start, that would only amount to like a minute of time in the tunnel, so I could catch up with him easily. Then something stopped me.
“Whatever it is you think you might find in here, you don’t really need it. What you really need is to make a name for yourself as a manga artist ASAP.”
I got all the way to the boundary where the torii began, but that one line from his letter was like a ball and chain around my ankle, tethering me to the outside world and refusing to let me go inside. In a way, it was almost like he’d cast a spell on me, because now, it felt like if I didn’t pursue this manga opportunity, I’d be directly betraying Kaoru. So in the end, I couldn’t do it. I had to turn back.
When I first read the letter, I managed to stay surprisingly calm about the whole thing, though in retrospect, it was just that I couldn’t bring myself to fully confront the harsh reality that I’d been left behind. Then again, thanks to that, I was able to keep a level head and make the right decision, so it was still a net positive. The first thing I did upon making it home that day was call my editor to tell him I’d changed my mind and that I wanted to work with him after all. Thankfully, despite my selfish flip-flopping, he welcomed me back with open arms, and he even said he was glad to hear it.
From that day forward, I devoted myself wholeheartedly to drawing manga in a professional capacity. Even so, all the while, I was waiting. Waiting for Kaoru to return to me.
For the remainder of my high school career, I continued attending Kozaki High and sent whatever projects I’d written in my spare time to my editor through the mail. I faced a whole lot of rejection at first, and I lost more competitions than I could count, but eventually my hard work paid off and I actually won one: I got a short, self-contained story published in a magazine. Obviously, I was satisfied with this result, but at the time, it was hard to feel truly elated. I wasn’t unhappy with my work or anything, mind you, I was just upset with the way things had been going at school.
All of our classmates seemed to have forgotten about Kaoru entirely. Sure, he was the talk of the class for a short while when he stopped coming to school and word got out that he’d run away from home, but by the time our senior year began, everyone was too swamped with entrance exams and worrying about their career paths to mention him beyond the occasional “Oh yeah, what ever happened to that guy?”
I couldn’t help but be reminded of the immense primal fear I’d felt as a child when I saw how quickly everyone moved on from my grandfather’s death—my first experience with existential dread. However, the thought of Kaoru’s existence fading into memory scared me even more than that, so I made a point to always keep him at the forefront of my mind, thinking about him more than anyone else in the world. When I graduated from high school and my editor suggested I move to Tokyo to try to get experience as a live-in assistant for a more well-known manga artist, I immediately turned him down, insisting on staying right in Kozaki. I rented a small one-bedroom apartment in town, and thus began my life as a full-time author.
Of course, both of my parents were vehemently opposed to my pursuit of a career in manga in lieu of further education; they’d always been huge sticklers about that sort of thing. Moreover, my determination was too strong to let them stop me. It was too late. I’d made the choice to devote my entire life to writing manga, knowing full well they’d likely disown me for it. I spent every hour of every day crafting worlds and characters and stories. This hard work soon bore fruit, however. Only a year out of high school, I managed to secure a deal for my very first serialization. That was when things started to get really busy. My required daily workload increased by several orders of magnitude, and I only got about half as much sleep as I had in high school, if I was lucky. Yet for how grueling the lifestyle of a serialized manga artist could be, it certainly served as a potent anesthetic to distract from the constant pangs of anxiety that stabbed at my chest every other waking hour of my life. Not a day went by that the dread of not knowing when Kaoru might return didn’t rattle me to my core.