When only Chiaki and I were left in the art room, I asked him, “Why didn’t you say something back to her?”
“Her comments didn’t bother me. She’s probably bottling up a lot of stress. I hear the volleyball team practices are tough.”
“That still doesn’t give her the right to say whatever she wants. I bet one look at your painting would’ve shut her up on the spot.”
“In that case, though, she probably wouldn’t have come back here.”
“What’d be the problem with that?!” I grimaced dramatically, prompting Chiaki to smile wryly as he sharpened a pencil. “Are you not going home yet?” I added. “You aren’t working on your oil painting tonight, are you?”
“I want to get a little practice in for the practical exam. I’m not that good at croquis drawing.” Chiaki hoped to earn an art school recommendation by doing well at the competition, but he was also gearing up for the general entrance exam. There were prep academies for getting into art schools, and their students cranked out pieces so sophisticated that you couldn’t compare them to art club projects. “If you aren’t going home either, why not help me out, Iguchi?”
I went over and stood by the window, as Chiaki instructed. The rain had stopped around sunset, and the sky was partly visible through the clouds. A round, bright moon rose, and I felt the fall breeze blow through the window.
Chiaki measured perspective with a pencil, then began sketching quickly in his book. Just like when he sketched the plaster figurine, he would draw something, flip to the next page, and then repeat the process. He asked me to change my pose every five minutes, but I didn’t really know what to do, so I mostly stood upright.
“How come you’re rushing to finish?” I objected. “You should draw more carefully.”
“Croquis drawings with a live model need to be done in a specific timeframe. This helps me practice for that. I’ll actually need to draw in charcoal for the practical exam, but since I got a chance to stay late, I didn’t want any time to go to waste.”
The rule was that club activities had to end by six-thirty in the evening, but students could continue past then if their club advisor was still on campus. Still, most teachers had busy lives and didn’t try to stick around.
“Does Rintaro always stay late?” I asked.
“Yeah. He comes in early to unlock the art room for me, too. He’s supporting my art club projects and my post-graduation goals, so it feels like I’ve gotta do whatever I can to meet his expectations.”
Well, that explains why Rintaro always seems so tired. As I turned my face toward the sky, the relief of solving that mystery washed over me.
“Oh! That pose is good. Don’t move.” Chiaki stood and turned the classroom lights off. I was looking up toward the moon, and it shone down on me like a natural spotlight.
Chiaki started drawing again, but seemed to be taking his time, in contrast with his approach to his croquis drawings earlier. Whenever I got tired and tried to lower my chin, he ordered me not to move. I leaned my head back on the windowpane, realizing for the first time just how challenging it was to stay in the same position for a long time.
“If you think the moon’s pretty now, just wait until you see the harvest moon next month,” he told me.
“When’s that supposed to happen again? The tenth night or something?”
“Yikes. Please don’t tell me you forgot that the festival for the harvest moon falls on the fifteenth night. I think you’re mixing it up with that Ten Nights’ Dreams book we read.”
“Oh, right.” I nodded. Just before summer break, we’d read some of Natsume Soseki’s Ten Nights’ Dreams in Rintaro’s modern Japanese literature class.
“I had this dream. I sat with arms folded by the side of a bed where a woman lay on her back. She quietly told me she was going to die.”
Those were the book’s first few lines. Our textbooks only included the first chapter. More than the actual plot, what stuck in my mind was our discussion during the second half of the class.
“Natsume Soseki left us many classics, like Kokoro and Botchan,” Rintaro said. “Whenever I read Ten Nights’ Dreams, it reminds me of something that supposedly happened while Soseki was working as an English teacher.”
He wrote “I love you” in English on the blackboard. It was such a common English phrase, we all knew what it meant, but no one could see why we were discussing English in a modern Japanese literature class. Still, Rintaro’s tangent was a much-appreciated break from real studying.
“How would you say this in Japanese, um…Tono?”
“I love you?” Tono-kun translated when Rintaro put him on the spot.
Rintaro nodded in satisfaction. “One of Soseki’s students thought the same and likewise translated this as ‘I love you.’ But Soseki pointed out that Japanese people don’t often say ‘I love you’ directly. He suggested that ‘The moon is beautiful, isn’t it?’ would be a poetic interpretation that appealed to the Japanese sensibility.”
Apparently, the jury was still out on whether Soseki had actually said that. But when Rintaro glanced around his usually half-checked-out class and saw that he’d caught its interest, he tried to keep the momentum going. “Anyone know the response to Soseki’s poetic ‘I love you’?”
Chiaki raised his hand. “‘I could just die.’”
“Correct. You’re pretty familiar with Futabatei Shimei, right, Sakura?”
Chiaki was the most avid learner among Rintaro’s students. As class representative, he couldn’t afford to bomb his homeroom subject, so he put his nose to the grindstone studying modern Japanese literature. He’d apparently always done well in literature classes, maybe because they had a strong link to the arts.
“Rintaro wound up giving us homework on Ten Nights’ Dreams for summer break, didn’t he?” Chiaki mused.
That snapped me out of the memory. “Yeah. I had a good laugh when saw the assignment.” I heard insects chirping on the breeze. The weather became brisk at the end of August, and I was a little chilly wearing only my uniform in the classroom at night.
A cloud covered the moon, and since Chiaki couldn’t see what he was drawing, he paused. “About what happened earlier… I think Manabe came in here trying to find you, Iguchi.”
“She went out of her way to be nasty again, you mean? What the hell?”
“That’s not what I mean. I think she hoped you might agree if she complained about how annoying it was to be in a club. That you might end up skipping and hanging out with her. Maybe she was looking for a way to make peace with you.”
His hypothesis blindsided me. I turned to stare at him.
He just reminded me to look upward again, then casually dropped a bomb. “She asked me out during the school festival, you know.”
I somehow concealed my surprise and continued staring up.
“It was during the bonfire,” he continued. “I noticed she was coming to help the scenery group a lot, so…yeah. Didn’t you two have your falling out around then?”
“How’d you turn her down?”
“I told her I liked someone else, but she wouldn’t stop asking if I was going out with you.”
Maybe the text I’d sent wasn’t the only reason things went sideways between Manabe and I. She’d had suspicions about my relationship with Chiaki, and even once she confessed her feelings and learned the truth, she’d probably steered clear of me in case interacting was awkward or hurt her self-esteem.
I sighed heavily as background details I’d been unaware of all along finally surfaced. “Love really does make people idiots.”
Why did that feeling even exist? It was only a temporary illusion—one my mother was always at the mercy of. The man who was supposed to love her had ditched her and their child. All she’d done since was repeat a cycle of seeking a partner, getting hurt, lamenting her pain, and finding a new partner all over again.
The girls who’d dyed their hair in junior high weren’t any better. They didn’t like that the boy they were crushing on was friendly with me, and they’d lashed out in petty jealousy. Now Manabe was doing the exact same thing.
“Don’t say that, Iguchi. There’ll come a day when you understand how she feels.”
“I don’t want to understand. I don’t want to be like that.”
“Love isn’t something willpower can stave off. Take me, for example.”
I knew Chiaki had feelings for someone since we’d talked about a number of things while hanging out in the art room.
“Sometimes the sparks fly as soon as you meet someone. Sometimes you hate someone, until suddenly they’re all you can think about. Sometimes you fall in love with someone you shouldn’t. That’s just what love is.”
The clouds moved with the wind, and I saw the moon floating between them in the sky. “She called me out in front of everyone during the inspection. I doubt she wants to be friends again.”
“She’s just jealous of your hair. Yeah, school rules or whatever make it annoying now, but once you’re an adult, it’ll be great to have light-colored hair without having to dye it.”
Manabe had gone to the trouble of dyeing her hair despite the school’s dress code, and she’d witnessed how close Chiaki and I were to boot. From her perspective, I probably seemed to get everything I wanted. That was a total misconception, though. I didn’t have anything.
“I like your hair,” Chiaki added. “It looks like it’s twinkling in the moonlight.”
And, yes, I was in the thick of a foolish unrequited love of my own.