Pain, Pain, Go Away

Chapter 9

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Let There Be Love

My sister, with the pretext of having “ignored her” for not making eye contact when we pa.s.sed in the hallway, dragged me by the hair to my room, opened the door, and shoved me in.
Enduring the pain in my elbow after being severely thrown into the hard floor, I looked up and saw the delinquents my sister brought along, joyfully shouting vulgar things at me.
The room had a sour smell, like a dump full of beer bottles and empty cans. I tried to run, but as I turned my heel, a droopy-eyed man missing front teeth kicked my shin, and I fell flat. They cackled.

Then began the usual festivities. I was to be their toy.
One filled a gla.s.s with whiskey to the brim and told me to drink it down straight. Naturally, I had no right to refuse, so I reluctantly reached for the gla.s.s.
Then a woman wearing so much perfume as to smell like a bug-infested plant proclaimed that time was up and winked at a man beside her. The man held my arms behind my back and forced my mouth open. The woman poured the whiskey in.

I knew from prior experience that if I stubbornly refused to drink this, a worse punishment would await. So I gave in, and gulped down the whiskey in my mouth.
I desperately tried to keep from howling from the burning sensation in my throat and the peculiar smell like mixing medicine, barrels, and wheat. The crowd jeered.

Somehow, I drank the entirety of the gla.s.s. Within ten seconds, I felt severe nausea. Everything from my throat to my stomach burned, and my senses were muddled and spun, as if someone was grabbing hold of my head and shaking.
I was one step from acute alcohol poisoning. I heard an ominous noise nearby. “Okay, time for a second!” The woman pushed the gla.s.s in front of my face.

I already lacked the energy to run, and the hands binding me wouldn’t be shaken off no matter how much I resisted. The whiskey was poured in, and I began coughing horribly in the midst of it.
“Disgusting,” the man holding me said, releasing my arms and pushing me away. Having lost my sense of balance, I felt like I’d fly up to the ceiling and stick to it, but in reality only fell flat on the floor.

I crawled toward the door desperate to somehow escape, but someone grabbed my ankle and pulled me back.
My sister squatted next to me and said, “If you can last an hour without throwing up, I’ll let you go.” I was about to shake my head, knowing there was no possible way, but before I could, she punched me in the stomach. She hadn’t even intended to give me the chance.
I found myself puking up on the spot, and the crowd cheered.

A short and stout woman announced that I would be punished for losing the game, took out a taser, and turned it on.
The firecracker-like sparking sound made me cower. I knew the amount of pain it could induce far better than she did.

Immediately, she put the electrode to my neck, and a shriek that I couldn’t imagine was my own came out my throat.
Finding it funny, she applied it in many other places, aiming for areas with thin skin. Again. And again. And again. And again.
As if to fill the gaps between the pains being inflicted upon me, the alcohol brought back more nausea. When I threw up again, the crowd booed, and I suffered a particularly long tasering for it.

And yet I didn’t feel any suffering. That kind of thing wasn’t enough to “undo.”

Familiarity is a scary thing; I had become able to make it through such agony.
I emptied my head to prepare for any kind of attack, and packed it full of music instead. While they berated me, I focused on exactly recreating music in my mind to dull my other senses.

I’ll go to the library tomorrow and stuff in lots more music, I decided.
The small, drab library that had been in the area for over three decades had little in the way of books, but was rich with music, and I almost daily listened to their selection in the listening corner.

At first, I enjoyed intense music that tried to blow my gloom away. But I soon found that the most effective thing for dealing with agony wasn’t excellent lyrics or a snug melody, but “pure beauty,” and so my tastes shifted toward calmer songs.
“Meaning” and “comfort” would eventually leave you behind. “Beauty” wouldn’t snuggle with you, but it would stay in the same place. Even if I didn’t understand at first, it would wait there patiently until I arrived.

Pain lays waste to positive feelings, but you can’t lose the feeling of regarding something beautiful as beautiful. In fact, pain just makes beauty more apparent. Anything for which this doesn’t hold true is just an imitation of true beauty.
Merely-fun music, merely-interesting books, merely-deep paintings - they couldn’t be relied upon in a pinch, so how valuable could they truly be?

As Pete Townshend said, “Rock and roll won’t solve your problems, but it’ll let you dance all over them.”
Indeed, my problems won’t be solved. That was the essence of my salvation. Any thought that had the prerequisite of solving all my problems, I didn’t believe. If there was nothing to be done about anything, then nothing would be done about everything.
Forget about such “relief” as the ugly duckling becoming a beautiful swan. As I thought, the ugly duckling would have to become happy remaining ugly.

How long did it take? It could have been minutes, it could have been hours.
Either way, when I came to, my sister and her friends were gone. I’d made it through their torment yet another day. I was victorious.
I stood up and went to the kitchen to gargle two cups of water, then went to the toilet to throw up again. I stood in front of the sink to brush my teeth.

I looked terrible in the mirror. My eyes were congested and red, yet my face was pale, and my shirt had stains of whiskey, puke, and blood.
I wondered when I’d bled and checked myself for injuries, yet found none. But as I started to brush, I realized I’d bitten my cheek while being attacked with the taser. My toothbrush was soaked red.

It was 4 AM. I took aspirin and stomach medicine from the shelves in the living room, changed into bedwear, and lied down on my bed.
No matter how much I was hurt, there was no changing that tomorrow would be an ordinary day of school. I had to get my body at least some rest.

I took the teddy bear from under my pillow and hugged it. Even I questioned such a method of consoling myself. It truly stunned me.
But I supposed it might just continue this way. While I’d long sought a soft embrace, I knew that there was no person who would provide it to me.

The public high school, having an isolated feeling from the thick trees around it, was not one I attended willingly.
I’d hoped to attend a local private school, but my mother insisted that women didn’t need extensive schooling, and my stepfather claimed that no high school I went to would change anything, refusing to let me take entrance exams anywhere but the public inst.i.tution a single bus ride from home.

Whenever the starting bell rang, it was ignored, and voices continued chattering around the cla.s.sroom. The cla.s.ses didn’t test anything of worth, and by noon, a third of the students had left early.
There were hundreds of cigarette b.u.t.ts behind the gym, and about once a month, someone would get arrested or get pregnant and drop out; that was the sort of school it was.
But I told myself I had to be grateful I was going to high school at all. Some children don’t even get a proper middle school education.

Noon cla.s.ses began. The room was so noisy I couldn’t make out anything the teacher was saying, so I started reading the textbook by myself when something hit me on my shoulder from behind.
A paper bag that still had a few things inside. A little bit of coffee flew out and stained my socks. There was laughter, but I didn’t even turn around.
During cla.s.s, they wouldn’t do anything worse than this. If throwing a paper bag at me was all they’d do, I could ignore it and continue studying.

I suddenly looked up and made eye contact with the teacher. A young woman, in her late twenties. She must have seen the paper bag too, but she feigned ignorance.
But I didn’t blame her for it. I similarly wouldn’t do anything for her if she were to become a target of the students. We only looked out for ourselves.

After school, I headed directly for the city library. I wanted to listen to music, yes, but I also wanted to quickly get somewhere quiet and sleep.
It was awkward using the library like a comics cafe, but I wasn’t aware of anywhere else I could have a peaceful sleep.

At home, my father or sister could wake me up and beat me at any time, and in the cla.s.sroom, if I carelessly nodded off on my desk, I could have my chair pulled out from under me or garbage dumped out on my head.
I couldn’t sleep in such places, so I slept in the library. Luckily, the sorts of people who wanted to inflict harm on me didn’t come near it. Plus, I could read books and even listen to music. A fantastic invention, libraries.

Sleep deprivation fundamentally weakens people. Just halving the amount of sleep would severely lower my resistance to things like physical pain, verbal vilification, and anxiety about the future.
If I yielded even once, it would take considerable time and effort to return to appearing tough as usual. No, if I wasn’t careful, maybe I could never return to that.

I had to be strong and resilient. So keeping up with sleep was essential. Any day I couldn’t get more than four hours of sleep at home, I slept at the library.
I wouldn’t say the hard chair in the private study room was comfortable to sleep in, but it was the one and only place where I could belong. During the open hours of 9 AM to 6 PM.

After listening to some light music, I checked out John Irving’s The Cider House Rules and read it. My drowsiness. .h.i.t a peak after reading just a few pages.
The time pa.s.sed as quickly as if someone stole it away, and a librarian shook my shoulder to tell me that the library was closing for the night.
The alcohol from yesterday had finally left me, and my pain had settled. I bowed my head to her, put the book back on the shelf, and left the library.

It was completely dark when I went outside. In October, the sun began to set very early.
On my way home, the cold wind made me shiver, and I thought about the same thing I always did:

Will a letter come today?

It had been a long five years since we became penpals. In that time, my surroundings changed greatly.
My father died of a stroke, and several months afterward, my mother married the man who was now my stepfather. My surname changed from “Hizumi” to “Akazuki,” and I gained a sister two years my elder.

The moment I saw the man that my mother told me she intended to marry, in the spring of my first year of middle school, I predicted that my life would be thoroughly destroyed, and thought to myself, “I’m doomed.”
Every element that made him up gave me a foreboding feeling. While I couldn’t quite express in words why I felt such ill omen, after 17 years of life, I didn’t need to say “I suppose I’d call him a bad person” or “I suppose I’d call him a good person” - at a glance, he was clearly a bad person. That was what my subconscious acc.u.mulated knowledge told me.
Why had my mother chosen this plague-carrier, of all people?

Just as I predicted, my stepfather was an exemplary bringer of ills. He felt inferior about his social standing, and lept at the chance to beat others down in order to cover for it.
In addition, he was a coward, so he would only target those weaker than himself. He’d berate service workers for “hardly providing a service,” explicitly asking their names to insult them; or when a car rear-ended him, he’d force the whole family to get down and apologize in the street.

Yet he honestly seemed to believe that such actions were “manly” and that he was doing them a service.
The most terribly worrying part was that my mother, at least, seemed to be taken by his idea of “manliness” driven by his own sense of inferiority. He was truly, truly beyond help.

As someone who thought this way, my stepfather believed that using violence to secure his position as the head of the family was an essential element of manliness.
What were the other elements? Beer, smoking, gambling. He revered them as symbols of masculinity. Perhaps he would have liked to add “women” to the list, but alas, no amount of work on his “manliness” would make any woman - my mother excluded - come near him.

Perhaps aware of this himself, he would occasionally repeat, though no one had asked, something like this: “Loving my one and only wife makes me feel like I have something to live for. So while really, I’ve had countless opportunities to go after other women, I’m not interested at all.”
And of course, before these words were hardly out of his mouth, he’d beat my mother.
I tried to break up the violence many times, but my mother told me, “Kiriko, please don’t speak up. Things only get more complicated when you’re in the equation.”

After she told me that, I came to simply stand aside and watch.
In any event, it was my mother’s choice. All I could do was watch it unfold.

One day, when I was alone with her, I asked “Haven’t you thought of divorce?”
But she said such things as “I don’t want to trouble my parents,” and “I’m hopeless without a man,” even ending with “We all have our faults.”
A complete tour of all the words I didn’t want to hear, I thought.

My stepfather’s violence gradually came to also target me, his daughter-in-law. Well, it was the natural flow of things.
He’d beat me for the most trivial reasons, like getting home a little bit late or leaving school early. His handiwork slowly escalated, until one day my drunk stepfather pushed me down the stairs.
It wasn’t as serious as it could have been, as I wasn’t hurt in any particularly bad spots, but that one occasion got my mother furious, and the next day she briefly hinted at the idea of divorce.

Yes, only hinted. Wary of her husband’s anger, she was careful not to speak the word “divorce.”
She simply said, “If you keep treating Kiriko and I like this, I might have to take some measures of my own.”

And she wasn’t allowed to say any more. My stepfather picked up a nearby gla.s.s and threw it at a window.
At the time, I was in my room reading a reference book. When I heard the sound of the window shattering, my pen stopped, and I hesitantly wondered if I should go check the living room.

Just then, the door slammed open and my stepfather came running in. I nearly shrieked, and I think I should have - I should have screamed as loud as I could.
Maybe then someone in the neighborhood would have heard and come running. …I’m joking, of course.

My mother came in behind, sobbing “Stop this, she has nothing to do with this,” but he beat me regardless. I fell out of my chair and hit the side of my head against the desk.
Yet I couldn’t think much more than “Great, so he won’t even let me study in peace.” Like it or not, seeing domestic violence every day got me used to it.

But as he struck me a second time, a third, a fourth, a fifth, a chilling fear arose from my core. It was my first time experiencing it.
I had a sudden thought. What if this man doesn’t know any limits?
I instantly began to cry, and my body trembled. Perhaps they were tears wept because I was already predicting the tragedy in the months to come.

My mother kept trying to grab my stepfather’s hand, but with the sheer difference in strength, she was quickly brushed off.
“It’s your fault,” he said. “I’m not doing this because I want to. But if you’re going to make a fool of me, I’m going to have to take it out on her too. It’s all your fault…”

I had no idea what he was saying. But somehow I understood his reason for beating me, rather than my mother who his anger was directed at. This was more effective than targeting her directly.

I was beaten for nearly two hours straight. Just as he wanted it, my mother never spoke of divorce again.
As if taking a liking to it, it came to be that when I didn’t listen to him, he beat my mother, and when she didn’t listen to him, he beat me.

My one salvation was my correspondence with Mizuho. If there was any time in my life that could be praised, it was when I’d roped Mizuho into becoming my penpal.
I waited for my opportunity ever since that autumn day in sixth grade when our homeroom teacher told us he would be changing schools.
But being so cowardly, it was difficult to take that first step, and I ultimately wasn’t able to bring up the topic of becoming penpals until his very last day.
If I hadn’t squeezed out enough courage then, and hadn’t ended up exchanging letters with Mizuho, I’d have nothing to live for and probably would have died at 13 or 14. So I praised my past self.

To be honest, the “correspondence” I speak of is probably slightly different from what most people would think.
In my letters, I didn’t write tearfully to Mizuho about how I lived in fear of my stepfather, stepsister, and school to have him comfort me.
I did write things just as they happened for a few months after starting, but once my stepfather arrived and things changed completely, I started to lie about everything instead.

That isn’t to say I didn’t have any desire to complain and cry, and to have Mizuho console me. But I feared that myself changing would change him as well.
If I had written about my hardship exactly to the letter, Mizuho would come to worry for me and carefully choose inoffensive topics, no longer talking as much about the positive occurrences in his life.
Then our correspondence would be reduced to a written form of counseling.

I didn’t want that. So I created a fictional “Kiriko Hizumi.” My father being dead, my mother remarrying the worst human alive, being horribly bullied at school, I made not a peep about.
All that was for Kiriko Akazuki to deal with, and had nothing to do with Kiriko Hizumi. Kiriko Hizumi was a girl living a normal yet fulfilling life, who could also reflect upon the happiness she was blessed with.

I enjoyed briefly becoming her to write my letters. By the time I was writing a second sentence, I could fully a.s.sume the role of Kiriko Hizumi.
As small details that gave my lies a hint of truth piled up, I came to feel like I was living two lives simultaneously.

Ironically, my fictional life soon overtook my real one. If, for instance, I had written letters from the standpoints of both Kiriko Hizumi and Kiriko Akazuki, and asked strangers to guess which described an actual life, I would expect nine out of ten to pick Kiriko Hizumi.
That was the extent to which I delved into my fiction and out of my reality. Endless days of abuse. If there had been even the slightest change, it might have felt more real.

I loved Mizuho.

I did, though, feel it was strange to “love” someone who I hadn’t met in five years simply because he and I got along well. What was I doing falling for the recipient of my letters whose face I could hardly imagine anymore?
The possibility that because no one else would fill such a position, I had no other choices for love but him, was one I lacked enough evidence against to deny.
It could have also been because we really hadn’t talked much at all outside of letters, so I was only seeing his good side.

Still, I was oddly convinced of it. Mizuho was the only one in the world I could feel this way about.
There was no basis, but there didn’t have to be. I’d never wanted to be forcibly justifying or logically explaining my own feelings.
Falling in love shouldn’t require explaining anything to others. If anyone does feel that such a thing is necessary, I suspect they view love as a means rather than an end.

My mind, ever eager to make itself difficult to save, decided to create an imaginary Mizuho based off his letters, handwriting, and stationery.

In my imagination, he had grown very tall after grade school, and now was about a head taller than me. A good height difference for hugging.
Despite the cheerful loquaciousness of his letters, I imagined that if we met in person, he’d be too shy to even look me in the eye and bad at enunciating. Occasionally, it would lead him to say startling things to me without hesitation.
Normally he had a somewhat gloomy expression, and his way of speaking could be called calm at best and indifferent at worst, but his occasional smile was just as it was when he was 12.
It would completely take me by surprise as it appeared, that dizzyingly lovable smile.

That was the Mizuho I imagined. I was shocked to find when we later reunited how many of my predictions were spot-on, but that’s for a bit later.

When I returned home, I didn’t go to check the mailbox, but underneath an owl statue by the front door. I’d arranged with the friendly postman to have him put any letters sent by Mizuho Yugami there instead.
Of course, it wasn’t the same delivery person every time, so some days a letter would end up directly in the mailbox.

I peered under the owl and saw that there was no letter. Sighing, I opened the front door. I quickly regretted it. I should have checked inside first.
My stepfather had just put down his briefcase, and was in the middle of taking off his shoes.

“I’m home,” I meekly voiced. He quickly turned his back to me and stuffed something in his suit pocket.
I found myself strangely caught up on that action. It gave me a bad feeling.

“Hey,” he replied. Definitely sounds awkward, I thought to myself. Like how a guilty person would reply. My unease swelled.
I boldly asked, “Um, did you hide something just now?”
“…Hmm?”

His tone darkened instantly. He took an offensive stance, and took a quick breath as if to prepare to shout at any time.
But this told me without a doubt that he felt guilty about something. And it also no doubt had to do with the thing he hid in his pocket. Such a brazen man would have no other reason to hide mere mail.

“It’s something addressed to me,” he oppressively stated. “You’d better watch your mouth.”
Figuring I’d be given the runaround if I asked indirectly, I got straight to the point.
“In that case, can you show it to me? Just for a second.”

His face instantly showed a panicked expression. But just as quickly as it appeared, it changed to anger instead.
It was one of his creeds that victory in these situations went to the one who first got the upper hand and shouted out the other. And indeed, that was effective, when the other was someone weaker and with no ground on him.

“Who do you think you are?”, he growled, closing in on me. I smelled a greasy smell. He grabbed my collar and lightly smacked my cheek.
However, with this I was able to confirm there was an envelope poking slightly out of his pocket. From the gray, high-quality paper and handwriting of the address, I recognized it as a letter from Mizuho.
He noticed where I was looking, let go of my collar, and thrust me away.
“Don’t push your luck,” he told me as he went up the stairs. I tried to chase after him, but my legs wouldn’t move. My body knew how pointless it was to resist that man.

I collapsed to the floor. He was the one person I didn’t want knowing about it.
He’d lock himself up in the study and read through that letter Mizuho wrote for me. And he’d chuckle about learning a new one of my weaknesses.

He was always that way. I don’t know if I’d call him a peeping tom, but my stepfather wanted to know all his family’s secrets. For being a champion of manliness, he seemed to considerably enjoy things in the realm of gossip.
Whenever my mother got a phone call, he’d have her report on what it was about. He opened up any and all mail that came in for himself. Whenever he had the chance, he’d sneak a peek at cellphones (though I wasn’t given one, so that wasn’t a danger I went through). And I’d seen him sneak into my room to fish through drawers more than twice.

And now this. I had to settle for him reading the letter. There would be nothing shameful written there.
Other than the fact that I’d been continuously lying, our correspondence was perfectly healthy. There was nothing to worry about it being read.

What I was far more afraid of now was that my stepfather, to conceal the truth of having read a letter addressed to me, would dispose of the evidence somewhere like a train station or a convenience store trash can.
Just imagining it made my pulse pound. Those letters were my treasures. My creed. My life. Losing one was more painful than my body being burned alive.

When my stepfather went to work the next day, I abandoned all shame and honor and dug through the trash cans around the house. Then I took a flashlight and searched all the trash cans along his commute.
In the restroom of a convenience store next to his company, I found the crumpled gray envelope.
But the all-important contents were nowhere to be found.

If this were only a one-time occurrence, then I could accept it being lost. I could just write that I’d put it in my bag to read it elsewhere and lost it along the way.
But I was sure that after this event, my stepfather would be wary of the mailbox and the surrounding area.
And when he found a letter addressed to Kiriko Hizumi, he’d happily stuff it in his pocket, bask in his superiority as he read it in secret, then ball it up and discard it somewhere on his way to work.

Further correspondence may be difficult, I realized.

Why couldn’t I “undo” the event of my stepfather finding the letter?
I’m sure it must have had to do with the guilt I felt over continuing to lie to Mizuho.

This relationship is unhealthy, it should be terminated, and perhaps this incident would be a good chance to abandon it.
By feeling that way for even a second, my wish lost its purity and strength, and “postponement” of the event became very difficult.

The feeling that bad things always come at you all at once may be an illusion along the lines of “it always starts raining when I start washing my car.”
But the same day I was in the depths of despair after being unable to find the letter, something even worse happened.

When I went to school at lunch and entered the cla.s.sroom, a few girls grabbed me by the neck and dragged me behind the gym.
I wasn’t particularly surprised, as I’d noticed they had their eyes on me for a while. It was akin to seeing a cloudy sky start to rain.

The degree to which my cla.s.smates detested me wasn’t extremely severe or extremely weak, but just moderately right there in the middle.
I was strong enough to resist it, but not enough to fully defend myself. And not weak enough to completely give in, but enough to give up on bettering the situation.
Whether it’s sports, a board game, or bullying, it’s most enjoyable to beat someone who’s “strong yet weak.”

Upon realizing that, while I had no way of making myself any stronger or weaker, just the feeling that I’d figured out the reason significantly lessened my worries.
That must be why people who lead miserable lives become more introspective, I mused.

After all six of the girls had beaten me up, they pushed me to the ground. My mouth was pried open, and a bucket of dirty water was poured in.
I didn’t know where they got the water from, but it seemed to have just the same kind of impurity as the water used for end-of-the-day cleanup. People really enjoyed having me drink strange things, it seemed.

I tried holding my breath and refusing to gulp it down, but someone grabbed my neck and squeezed it, causing a considerable amount of the water to go down.
The mixed taste of detergent and dust filled my mouth and ran down from my throat to my stomach. I couldn’t bear it and threw up. Gosh, I was throwing up all the time lately.

“Clean that up later,” a cla.s.smate said with satisfaction, and they left. I went to a washing area and threw up more water, then washed my clothes and body.
My wet uniform dripped water, and enduring the gaze of pa.s.sersby, I went down the hallway to my locker in front of the cla.s.sroom. But when I opened it, my jersey wasn’t there.
Suddenly, I noticed the faucet running at the sink a few meters away. Sure enough, my jersey was there, getting waterlogged.
Such intricacy. What had driven them to go this far?

I went to the infirmary, borrowed a change of clothes, and put my uniform and jersey in the dryer.
My eyes were starting to lose focus, and something inside me seemed about to break. But I just barely held my ground. By taking repeated deep breaths, I aired out my stagnant body.

They say suffering makes fools of people, but being abused by everyone was just making me empty.
So perhaps this shouldn’t be called suffering, but emaciation. I was being worn down day by day.

After school, I stopped by the library, sat in the hard chair, and wrote a letter to Mizuho.
Just writing the sentence “I want to talk face to face” took twenty minutes. “Some things, I just can’t bring myself to say in letters. I want us to look each other in the eyes and hear each other talk.”

Communicating through letters had gotten difficult. I didn’t have a cellphone. Even using the home phone was difficult with my family watching, and I didn’t have the money to have satisfyingly long conversations on a public phone.
But I still wanted to keep things going with him. Which meant we’d have to meet in person. I had no other choices. I decided I would meet Mizuho.

That said, it was a long shot. Mizuho would quickly see through the differences between the fictional Kiriko Hizumi and the real Kiriko Akazuki.
Maybe I could fool him if it were only a couple of hours, but if our relationship were going to continue outside of letters, I wouldn’t be able to hide the truth forever.

When I reunited with Mizuho, I would have to confess my lies. How would he respond to that?
He was kind, so even if he learned he’d been deceived for five years, he wouldn’t show his anger, I was sure. But no doubt he would be disappointed. I couldn’t help but be afraid of that.

Or maybe I was being too optimistic. Just because I was indifferent didn’t mean I could deem others to be the same way.
After all, I seemed to have some uncommon quality that made everyone everywhere hate me at all times. I needed to take that into account.

Perhaps the worst case scenario was Mizuho would scorn me for my lies, call me tactless, and disappear from my life.
No, maybe he’d never even accept my suggestion in the first place. It was possible he was friendly with me because it was via letters, and wasn’t interested enough to care about meeting in person. I could see him pinning me as an impudent girl.

I could “undo” those things. Because after the day I found the run-over corpse of a gray cat I’d adored at eight years old, I was a wizard. I became able to make events such that they never happened, for a fixed time.
However, if Mizuho showed his distaste for me, and I nullified it, I would retain the memory of him rejecting me. Would I be able to continue our correspondence with a straight face, knowing that?

When all hope is lost, what am I to do?
Simple. I would retreat into fantasy, as always. Something easy to imagine: a train. The time doesn’t matter, but let’s say it’s evening.

I’m at a railroad crossing. A small railroad crossing with no one around. Ding, ding, ding. The alarm starts to sound off. I watch for the right time and duck under the gate, then lie down on the track. My neck and my shins are positioned on the tops of the rails. After looking at the stars for a few seconds, I slowly close my eyes. I feel a vibration from the tracks. The sharp light from the headlights peeks under my eyelids. The brakes screech, but it’s already too late. My neck comes off in an instant.

That was my fantasy.
What a good world. So many easy and reliable ways to end a life. And that’s why I was able to live so intently.
“If you can’t stand this game anymore, you can just turn off the power. You have that right.”
Until the moment I well and truly couldn’t stand it, I would hold tight to the controller to uncover all the details of this sick game.
Incidentally, in seventeen years of playtime, I did come to learn one thing: that it’s pointless to hope for any kind of “creator’s intent.”

After napping until closing time, I mailed the letter in a round postbox installed near the entrance and left the library behind.
As I walked the residential streets filled with warm light, all the families seemed to be living in harmony. But I figured the reality couldn’t be so, and they all had their own terrible problems to deal with.
At the very least, I wasn’t hearing any shouting or screaming from their houses.

After waiting a week feeling like the girl in Please Mr. Postman, there was still no reply from Mizuho. I began to lose my mind, unable to stop imagining bad possibilities.
What if his reply was delayed because he was thinking about how to refuse me? Or was he simply busy with school and clubs? Maybe a reply had come, but my stepfather s.n.a.t.c.hed it? Was he upset about how I hadn’t touched upon anything he wrote in his last letter? What if something happened to him? Did I exhaust his good graces with my impudence? Would he never reply again? Had he long since seen through my lies?

I stared at myself in the mirror of the dim library bathroom. My eyes had heavy bags, and were muddled with black.
No one would be itching to meet such a ghastly girl, I thought.

Ten days pa.s.sed. I began to consider the possibility of carrying out my railroad crossing fantasy.

Upon returning from the library, I saw the familiar postman arrive at my house and run off.
My heart pounding, I searched underneath the owl statue. But my despair only deepened. Just in case, I checked around the mailbox too, but of course, found nothing there either. I pathetically checked under the owl again. No.

I stood there. My hate for it all became unbearable. As I considered destroying this owl to distract myself at least somewhat, a voice came from behind.
I turned around and greeted the mailman; he had purposefully come back for me. The short man in his early forties kindly returned the greeting.
In his hand was a gray envelope with high-quality paper.

He whispered to me.
“I was here a moment ago and was about to put this under the owl as usual, but your father was just coming home. You want to avoid him seeing it, right?”

I was too grateful to say a word. Thank you, thank you. I deeply bowed to him again and again.
His sun-baked face distorted into a sorrowful smile. He must have been faintly aware of my situation. “I’m sorry I can’t do anything for you,” said his eyes.
So I replied in the same way. “You don’t need to worry about it. Besides, isn’t this all too common?”

Not wanting anyone to interrupt the moment, I went to the waiting area of a local bus station and opened the envelope.
My hands trembled. Just to be sure, I checked the address and sender again. Kiriko Hizumi. Mizuho Yugami. No mistaking it. As long as this wasn’t a wish-fulfilling illusion, this letter was written from Mizuho to me.

I took out the letter and slowly digested the words written there. A few seconds later, I leaned on the back of the bench and looked up at the stars.
I folded up the letter, put it back in the envelope, and held it over my heart. The sides of my mouth naturally lifted, a smile eking out. My breaths seemed a little warmer than usual.

“Mizuho,” I whispered.
The sound of that name was, for the moment, my entire life.

There was an incident in which money was stolen from a student’s wallet, and having not been in the cla.s.sroom at the time, I was the number one suspect.
Two teachers asked me in the staff room what I was doing then. I replied that I was drying my clothes in the infirmary after my cla.s.smates dirtied them, and the nurse should know that as well, so could they please confirm these things from the start?
There were less than thirty minutes until my meeting with Mizuho, so I was agitated and spoke harshly.

The teachers had their doubts. They knew the kind of treatment the students usually subjected me to, and began to question if I was getting payback. They deemed the infirmary business to be a blatant creation of an alibi.
“We won’t call the police, so just fess up now,” a math teacher b.u.t.ted in to say. My holding time kept being prolonged.

Once it was ten minutes past the arranged time, I slipped out of the staff room without warning. “Wait,” they shouted and grabbed my arm, but I shook it off and ran.
I ignored them shouting “Do you think you can run?” from behind me. By doing this, they’d obviously only be further convinced of my guilt. But did I care? It was neither here nor there.
As much as I rushed, the promised time of 5 PM had already pa.s.sed. But maybe Mizuho would wait for me if it were only an hour, say.

I ran without regard for the people watching. Sweat ran down my forehead. My big toe ran up against my cheap loafers, peeling the skin. My heart shrieked in want of oxygen. My vision narrowed. But I just ran.

Mizuho had indicated a small train station, right around the middle of the line connecting our houses, as our rendezvous point.
Luckily, it was within walking distance of school. If I hurried, I could get there within thirty minutes.

More calamity awaited. Right after turning a corner, a bicycle flew out in front of me. We both went the same way to try and avoid each other and collided head-on.
My back hit the asphalt, and the impact left me unable to breathe. Clenching my teeth as I squatted on the ground, I waited for the pain to recede.
The high schooler riding the bike ran up and apologized furiously. I acted like it was nothing, stood up, said “Sorry, I’m in a hurry,” pushed him away, and started on my way again.
Suddenly, pain shot up my ankle, and I faltered.

I made an impudent request of the high schooler insistently apologizing to me.
“Um, don’t worry about the accident. Could you take me to the train station in exchange?”
He gladly accepted. I sat on the luggage carrier of the bicycle, and the boy wearing a knit blazer took me to the station.
Ultimately, I seemed to get there faster than I would have on foot. Luck hadn’t given up on me just yet.

On reaching the roundabout outside the station, I said “This is good enough,” got off the bicycle, and hurried to the building while holding my leg.
A clock standing out among shrubs showed it was ten minutes to 7 PM. A departure whistle echoed across the platform. The stopped train began to move.

I had a bad feeling.

I stood alone underneath the flickering fluorescent lights. After watching the second hand of the clock complete three revolutions, I sat in one of the chairs, of which there were only six.
With my sweat dried, my body was cold, and there was a throbbing pain in my head. I took a paperback out of my bag and opened it on my lap.
I mechanically read the words, but caught none of their meaning. Still I continued to flip pages.

I wasn’t expecting that if I waited like this, Mizuho would come running up to me out of breath.
I just needed some time to accept the fact that I’d wasted our one chance at reuniting.

“Did you not make the train?”
I turned and saw the boy who brought me here. I couldn’t be bothered to explain the situation, so I nodded.
He lowered his head. “I’m really sorry. It’s my fault.”
I did the same. “No, there was no chance of me making it in the first place. In fact, you taking me on your bicycle got me here much faster than expected. Thank you very much.”

The boy was about a head taller than me, and had sort of a melancholy air about him. He bought warm milk tea from a vending machine and offered it to me.
I thanked him and accepted it, used it to warm up my hands, and slowly drank. Calming down caused the pain in my ankle to surmount, but compared to the wounds others inflicted with hostile intent, it was nothing.

I observed the boy again as he sat two seats away from me. I hadn’t noticed before with my fixation on the rendezvous, but the uniform he wore seemed familiar. Yet I couldn’t remember where I’d seen it.
A knit blazer and a gray necktie. It was different from the numerous uniforms I’d seen coming home from school, and it wasn’t a uniform from any of the high schools I’d hoped to attend.

I took my time searching every nook and cranny of my memory. That was it. About two years ago, something had led me to use a computer at the library to research a certain high school.
His uniform the same one I’d seen students wearing on the front page of the school’s website.

When I remembered what had led me to do that research, a theory instantaneously came to mind. But I instantly rejected it. “Something that convenient couldn’t actually happen.”
I felt pathetic for even briefly entertaining such a ridiculous idea.

Noticing me looking at him, the boy blinked with a “What is it?” kind of look. I quickly averted my eyes. He looked at me curiously for a while. The modesty of his gaze just made me more nervous.
I watched the up-train leave. I watched the down-train leave.
We were suddenly alone in the station.

“Are you waiting for someone?”, the boy asked.
“No, nothing like that. I just…”
My words came to a halt. He waited for me to continue. But upon realizing that the words that would follow after “I just” were “feel comfortable next to you, so I don’t feel like leaving,” I had to close my mouth.
What was I about to say to this boy who I’d only just met? I was getting really overconfident about him just being a little nice to me.

After watching yet another train go, I spoke.
“Um… I’m grateful for your concern, but you don’t need to accompany me forever. I’m hardly unable to move from my injuries or anything. I’m just staying here because I want to.”
“We think alike. I’m just here because I want to be, too.”
“…Is that right?”

“Something kind of sad happened today,” he sighed. “I’m sure me running you over earlier was because I let myself be totally distracted by it. I know it’s no reason to moan to you about it, but the moment I leave here and I’m alone, I’m gonna have to face up to my sadness again. I don’t want to do that, so I’m not moving from this spot.”

He stretched and closed his eyes. The mood lightened, and I felt myself getting sleepy.

It wasn’t until some time later that I realized the person sitting next to me was the boy I adored.
Surprisingly, my “much too convenient theory” was almost perfectly accurate to reality. Mizuho had waited thirty minutes, and when I didn’t show, decided to head to my school directly on his bicycle, then ran me over on the way.
If we hadn’t dodged the same direction and collided, we might have easily pa.s.sed each other by. I was grateful for that happenstance.

“There’s something I need to confess,” Mizuho said.
In my foolishness, I misinterpreted him as meaning a confession of love and was thrown into disarray. Having thought so much about how wonderful it would be if he felt the same way, I couldn’t get around to considering the other possibilities.

Oh, what do I do? I was conflicted. While I very glad that Mizuho felt that way, there was no way I could respond to that. Because the girl he loved was someone separate from the “Kiriko Akazuki” who stood before him.
In truth, I should have told him right away: “It’s not me who you love, but rather Kiriko Hizumi, the fictional person I’ve made up.”

But the words got caught in my throat. As I imagined how, if I kept quiet for now, Mizuho would whisper sweet nothings to me, I immediately put aside my ethics, my conscience, and my common sense.
I could just tell him the truth after he’d confessed to me, my cunning side said. Once I’ve squeezed that brief happiness enough to crush it, I could reveal that I was Kiriko Akazuki, who had no right to his love, and endure his scorn.
Before the confession or after didn’t make a major difference. With a life like this, I had to have at least a moment to dream.

“I’ve been hiding things from you ever since middle school, Kiriko.”
He’d been thinking about me for that long? I grew happier, but also sadder. Probably because I’d been betraying Mizuho for that long, too. For that long, I’d played with him using my illusion of the non-existent Kiriko Hizumi.

My conscience had a second wind. “Um, Mizuho, I…”, I bravely interrupted, but Mizuho spoke over me.
“I doubt you can forgive me now, but I still need to apologize to you.”

Apologize?
At last, I noticed I was making a major misunderstanding. He wasn’t confessing his love for me.
So then, what was he confessing? What was there to apologize for?

“The "Mizuho Yugami” in the letters is entirely fictional,“ he told me. "He’s no more than a person I made up to continue my correspondence with you. The person you see now, the real Mizuho Yugami, is someone completely different from the one in the letters.”
“What in the world…?”, I uttered, half with relief. “What do you mean?”
“I’ll explain things in order.”
And then I learned the truth.

Having thought only of myself, when I heard Mizuho’s confession, I was so shocked as to lose the chance to admit to my own lies.
I was glad that we had told the same sorts of lies for the same reasons since the same time, glad that his appearance and general air and speaking were just as I imagined them, so very, very, very glad, that it no longer seemed the time to reveal my own secrets.

After regaining some presence of mind, I heard some unthinkable words come out of my mouth.
“Is that right? Mizuho, you’ve been fooling me all along?”
What was I, the pot calling the kettle black?
“Yeah,” he nodded.
“So really, you never had a single friend, did you?”
“Right,” he nodded again.
“I see.”

I stopped talking there, brought the empty can of milk tea to my lips, and pretended to sip it.
“I don’t mind if you hate me,” Mizuho stated. “I deserve it for what I did to you. Lying endlessly over five years. I came here today because I wanted to talk with age-seventeen Kiriko at least once. I don’t want anything more. I’m satisfied.”
He was a liar, but an honest liar, I thought to myself. And I was a dishonest liar.

“Hey, Mizuho,” I cooed.
“What?”
“Please, at least answer this next question without lying. What were you thinking when you met me?”
He sighed. “I wanted you not to hate me.”

“In that case,” I began without delay, “I’ll be your friend.”
I, the one generally pleading for such a thing, took advantage of Mizuho’s honesty.
His eyes widened a little bit, and with a puff of laughter, he said “Thanks.”

Maybe this lie wasn’t necessary. If I were honest and revealed that I too had not a single friend, and was abused at home and at school, maybe Mizuho and I could feel a kind of codependency, and sink comfortably in a desperate, unhealthy, festering relationship.

But just once, I wanted to interact with someone as just a normal girl. Not scorned, nor pitied, without consideration of my family or my past, to be seen as me.
And most importantly, I wanted to attempt in reality - unilaterally, at that - the fantasies that had come to mind during our correspondence.

The first thing I did with my position was arrange for us spend more time together.
“Mizuho, you should spend more time with others,” I informed him. “Looking at you, your biggest problem seems to be that you’re used to your one-person rhythm. So first, you need to start learning the rhythm of two people.”
I only intended to make something up at random, but this was actually something that I personally thought about often.

“I get what you’re saying,” Mizuho affirmed. “But how?”
“You can just meet with me. More frequently.”
“But won’t that bother you, Kiriko?”
“Are you bothered, Mizuho?”
“No,” he shook his head. “I’m glad.”
“Well, I’m glad too.”
“…I don’t understand what you’re talking about sometimes, Kiriko.”
“That’s because I think you don’t need to understand.”
“I see.” He furrowed his brow.

We came to meet three days a week - Monday, Wednesday, and Friday - to spend our time after school together.
Since there was a danger of there being people who knew me at the train station, we changed our meeting place to a gazebo on the side of a walking path in the Western-style residential district a five-minute walk away.

It was a small gazebo with a green-painted hexagonal roof and one long seat. We sat in it with a CD player between us and listened to CDs, using an earbud each, with the person bringing the CDs switching off each time.
We had discussed music extensively in our letters, but given the nature of letters, we could only share in past experiences. Thus, being able to share an experience in the present tense was fresh and exciting.

Occasionally we’d let some thoughts leak out, or explain what we liked best about a song, but we generally just immersed ourselves in it in silence.
The cords on the earbuds connecting us were short, so we naturally leaned close to each other, and sometimes our shoulders would happen to touch.

“Kiriko, doesn’t this make things kind of cramped?”, Mizuho shyly asked.
“Indeed. But don’t you think it’s just right for getting you accustomed to people, Mizuho?”
I provided a valid-sounding logic to justify the distance. He just replied “Guess you’re right,” then fully leaned on my shoulder.
“You’re heavy,” I complained, but he ignored me, acting like he was too focused on the music.

Sheesh. I was dumbfounded. Not by Mizuho, but by myself. Using my position obtained with lies to make a boy do whatever I said.
It was a lowly act that couldn’t be forgiven. Were I struck by lightning, hit by a meteor, or run over by a car, I would have no right to complain.

I need to tell him the truth someday, I told myself.
But every time I saw his humble smile, every time his body touched mine, every time he called me “Kiriko,” my honesty was shaken.
Just a little longer. Can’t I indulge in this dream for just a little longer? So the lies kept coming.

Yet a month after my reunion with Mizuho, a sudden end came to that relationship. My mask came off, and he saw my true colors.

After the money theft incident, my cla.s.smates treated me as a thief. There had long been completely baseless rumors about me being a prost.i.tute, so I didn’t think much of being called a thief now.
Unfortunately, this was a school full of sticky-fingered individuals where wallets and other items were pilfered almost daily, so responsibility for all of these events came to be pinned on me.
Even the theft of a student ID, from a third-year cla.s.sroom which I’d never entered, was made out to be my doing. What benefit would it be to me to steal that?

After school, a group waiting shortly outside the gate caught me and scattered everything in my bag out on the road. They even searched through uniform pockets and my wallet.
I suspected this meant they’d already ransacked my locker and desk as well.

Of course, there was no reason for them to find the stolen student ID, so the search ended after about twenty minutes. But that didn’t mean it was the end period.
The group pushed me into an irrigation ditch as revenge. There wasn’t water running down it, but there was slimy mud with a rotten odor and nearly 20 centimeters of dead leaves.
As I landed, my foot slipped and I landed in the mud. Then the contents of my bag came raining down on me one by one. The laughter gradually faded into the distance.

I felt a sharp pain in my thigh. In tripping, I’d been cut with a shard of gla.s.s or something, making a long wound that bled profusely.
In such a dirty place as this, it could get infected with bacteria. I have to get out of here quickly, I decided.

And yet my legs wouldn’t move. It wasn’t caused by the pain, nor the shock of seeing my grotesque wound.
I felt like something was tightly gripping my stomach, making it hard to breathe regularly. It seemed I could feel hurt just like anyone else.
This is nothing compared to middle school when you were pushed into the freezing pool in winter, I told myself.

Lying down face-up in the cold mud, I thought. This ditch is much deeper than I am tall. Even if I could leap up and grab the edge, it would be difficult to crawl out. There must be a ladder somewhere.
But before I find that, I have to gather up the contents of my bag. My notebooks and such are probably now useless, so I’ll only take the minimum of what I need.
I’ll give up on going to our rendezvous point today. I’ll just say I was sick or something. As soon as I can get out, I’ll head straight home, hand-wash my clothes, then throw them in the washing machine… Then I’ll think about what to do next.

The CD I had brought to listen to with Mizuho landed close to me. I went to pick it up, and saw it had cracked.
I took a look around. Not only was it pitch black, there were fences on both sides of the ditch, so no one could even see me.

So for the first time in a while, I cried. I held my knees and huddled up, and let out sobs.
Once I’d started, the tears flooded out without resistance, and I forgot when to stop.

The people who had pushed me into the irrigation ditch didn’t necessarily throw all of my belongings into the mud. A few printouts and notebooks were left on the road to be scattered by the wind.
One of them indirectly came to be picked up by Mizuho on his way home. His good hearing didn’t overlook my crying mixed in with the wind.

I heard someone climbing over the fence and dropping down on my side. I quickly stopped crying and held my breath.
Whoever it was, I didn’t want them to see me crying in the mud.

“Kiriko?”, a familiar voice called, and my heart nearly froze over. I immediately laid my face down to hide myself.
Why? I was fl.u.s.tered. Why was Mizuho here? Why did he know it was me squatting down in a ditch?
“Is that you, Kiriko?”, he asked again. I kept silent. But when he called my name again, I made up my mind to reveal myself.

Coming clean was something I would have to do someday. Trying to prolong it as I had only led to my lies being exposed in this terrible way.
This was my retribution.

I raised my face and asked, “How did you know I was here?”
He didn’t answer my question. “Ah, so it is you, Kiriko.”

Saying nothing else, Mizuho threw something up into the air, hopped down, and landed on his bottom in the mud. There was a splash, and a few drops of mud hit my face.
Then shortly afterward, a lot more came down. What he had thrown was his open school bag, so textbooks, notebooks, pencil boxes, etcetera all fell into the mud one by one.
He lied down face-up just as I had been doing. Not a care about his clothes and hair getting muddy.
We were both silent for a while.

“Hey, Kiriko.”
“Yes?”
“Look at that.” Mizuho pointed directly upward.

That’s right, I thought. It’s the winter solstice today.
We lied down together in the mud, looking up at the full moon.

I didn’t tell him about the wound on my thigh. I didn’t want to worry him any further.

As we walked through the dark ditch, making squishing sounds with our footsteps, I confessed all of my lies.
How I’d been lying in my letters since middle school. My family situation becoming tumultuous with the arrival of my stepfather and stepsister. Starting around the same time, being bullied at school as well, leaving me with nowhere to be. And all the details of the treatment I’d received.

Seemingly on purpose, he didn’t make any sounds of affirmation or say apologetic things; he simply listened to me in silence.
I had once tried going to the school counselor who came once a week and telling him all my troubles, but the 24-year-old college graduate would only give annoyingly exaggerated and formal responses whenever I said anything.
This came off to me as an extreme appeal to the fact that they were listening, and I distinctly remember how uncomfortable that forced “sincerity” made me.
So Mizuho lending me an ear and shutting up during it made me happy.

I just wanted him to know how I really was; I didn’t seek pity. So even when it came to the subject of domestic violence and abuse, I made an effort to explain it as indifferently as possible.
It still didn’t change the fact that I was worrying him. Anyone hearing such a serious opening of my heart would surely feel some kind of a sense of duty. “I need to tell her something comforting.”

But no such magic words existed. My problems were too involved, and no practical solution

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