“Let’s sit down,” Sakurai said.
We took a seat on the bench.
“So what’s going on?” I asked.
Sakurai let out a breath and said, “I feel so stupid. I mean really lame.”
I waited in silence for her to continue.
“My scores were worse than the last time. I tend to get pretty depressed about stuff like this. Even knowing how colossally silly it is, I can’t help it.”
“I don’t think it’s silly,” I said.
“Really?” said Sakurai. “You don’t think I’m being lame for getting depressed over some test scores?”
“You took the test seriously, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then there’s nothing wrong with getting depressed. I’d say that’s natural.”
“Why?”
“If someone took the test, didn’t get the scores they wanted, and was laughing about it like they didn’t give a damn, that would be lame. Whether it’s a test or the 100-meter dash in the Olympics—I don’t think it’s any different.”
Sakurai looked me in the eyes and asked, “Do you really think so?”
“A hundred percent.”
A relieved look came over her face.
“Do you ever get depressed, Sugihara?”
I nodded. “Of course I do.”
“About what, for example?”
“About a lot of things.”
Leaning forward, Sakurai peered up at my eyes. “If you’re depressed, I hope you’ll talk to me about it.”
I nodded.
Sakurai was in high spirits the rest of the way to the station and kept body-checking me.
“Do you know what my sister said?” Sakurai asked, while landing a roundhouse kick to my thigh. “She said you were very good looking. Especially the way your eyes are so sharp and intense. She said you’re like a classic Japanese man.”
Spotting a plastic frog on display outside a pharmacy, Sakurai cheered and ran toward it. Gazing at her from behind, I went back and forth over whether I should tell her everything about me. But the instant I saw her slamming a roundhouse kick into the frog’s body, nothing seemed to matter. I ran over next to her and drilled the frog in the head with a roundhouse kick. A man who might’ve been the manager came out of the pharmacy, yelling, “What do you think you’re doing?!” so we took off down the street. Sakurai grabbed my hand as we ran. I squeezed her hand firmly in mine. We ran with all our might.
By all appearances, everything was going great.
One Tuesday the first week into October, I received a call from Jeong-il. A quiet rain was falling that night.
“How about we meet on Sunday?” he said excitedly.
“I’ve got plans that day.”
Jeong-il persisted. “Come on, just for a little while.”
“Is it something you can tell me over the phone?”
“No, I want to tell you face-to-face.”
“What’s this about?”
“Something really awesome.”
“Awesome how?”
“Listen, it’s something I really want to tell you about, something only you’d understand.”
I conjured up my schedule for that day in my head and said, “How about after noon?”
“What time?”
“Between one and three.”
“Perfect.”
“Same place as usual?”
“One o’clock at the east exit of Shinjuku Station.”
“Okay. Come on, just give me a clue.”
“See you Sunday.”
He hung up.
5
There was a seventeen-year-old boy who went to high school in Tokyo.
He fell in love with a girl that he always saw on the train platform on his way to school. It was love at first sight. She was also a student at a high school in Tokyo and was very pretty.
Every time he saw her, his heart ached terribly. He didn’t know how to tell her what he was feeling. To begin with, he had no idea what language to use to speak to a girl like her. None of the adults in his life had taught him about such things, nor had he been taught much about people of her kind. She wore a chima geogori, the traditional girls’ uniform of North Korean schools.
After some hesitation, the boy confided in his friends. Naturally they teased him and goaded him on, saying, “We’ll be standing right next to you when you tell her.” The boy didn’t have it in him to protest. He was a shy and delicate boy. One of his friends said, “Keep this to psych yourself up,” and gave him a butterfly knife.
One Wednesday morning, the boy and his friends gathered on the platform. She appeared before them at the same time she usually arrived. The girl’s beauty took the boys’ breath away. A passenger nearby overheard one of the boys say, perhaps out of jealousy: “If you get turned down by a Korean girl, you have to be our errand boy.”
Goaded on by his friends, the boy timidly approached the girl. He stood diagonally behind her.
“Um . . .”
The girl trembled reflexively. North Korean terrorism, suspicions of abductions of Japanese citizens, and the nuclear program were burdens the girl wearing the chima geogori was made to bear on her slender shoulders. Once she’d been punched in the shoulder by a fiftyish salaryman. On this very platform.
Fearfully she turned around and caught sight of the boy blinking nervously before her. He looked familiar. He’d been on the same train car several times and had glared at her with a terrifying look.
Holding her bag up to her chest, she unconsciously braced herself and asked, “What is it?”
What must he have been feeling just then?
Intimidated by the overwhelming beauty of her voice? Or shocked by the realization that she could speak Japanese? He just stared at her face, saying nothing. Shrinking under his gaze, threatened, she looked all around her, crying for help inside. The surrounding passengers quickly averted their eyes, so as not to get caught looking.
A student came up the stairs and emerged onto the platform. As if it were the most natural thing in the world, he met her gaze and heard her silent cries for help. He was her senpai. He despised North Korea for making his kohai suffer in this way, despised the misguided Japanese who bullied the weak. He quickly went up to the boy and shoved him in the back. I couldn’t bring myself to blame him for his mistake. If I were there, I would’ve done the same thing. He and I were given to making such assumptions in the circumstances we lived in, always.
The boy stumbled forward, and after righting himself, turned around. A male student in a school blazer was standing there, staring at him with a serious look.
For a second, they stared each other down, quiet. According to the stories in the papers, the boy later told the police that he believed that the other guy was the girl’s boyfriend and was out to hurt him. He was scared. He had felt ashamed and embarrassed because everyone was looking at him. He couldn’t remember what happened next.
An announcement that a train was arriving came over the PA. As if it were some kind of cue, the boy pulled out a butterfly knife from his jacket pocket, clumsily unfolded the knife, and pointed it toward the student’s chest. The student had never been in a fistfight before, and, obviously, never had a knife pointed at him before. Even when I—a seasoned brawler—had a knife pulled on me for the first time, I felt all the pores on my body open up in an instant and almost peed in my pants.
The student—Jeong-il—was braver than I was. Without flinching, he edged closer to the boy to try to knock the knife out of his hand with his bag. I should’ve told him that when I had a knife pulled on me for the first time, I ran faster than Carl Lewis. That the only people who survive in this world are cowards. And that true heroes are destined to die young. That the world needed him, so if anyone pulled a knife on him, he had to run faster than a speeding bullet.
As he stepped forward, Jeong-il raised his bag up over his head and swung down with all his might. The boy threw his free hand up in front of his face and took the hi
t. The distance between them closed. When Jeong-il raised the bag again, the terrified boy reflexively swung the knife upward in a diagonal motion. It happened at the same moment Jeong-il leaned in as he swung his bag again.
The knife plunged into the carotid artery running down the left side of Jeong-il’s neck. The boy pulled back the knife as if to shake off the horrible sensation running up his arm, and Jeong-il’s bag came down on the knife. The knife clattered as it hit the ground. The train pulled into the platform. Jeong-il instinctively pressed his palm up against where the knife had been. Blood began to spray out like a shower from between his fingers.
Having seen everything up close from beginning to end, the girl opened her eyes wide, parted her lips slightly, and let out a silent scream. In the blink of an eye, and I truly mean in the time it takes to blink, the white shirt beneath Jeong-il’s blazer seeped with dark blood. Seeing the blood, the boy pitched forward and began to throw up everything in his stomach. Jeong-il fell to his knees on the platform. The girl put her tiny hands over Jeong-il’s hand, covering the carotid artery. In an instant, her hands were soaked in blood. The train came to a stop and opened its doors. Not a single passenger boarded the train from the door nearest Jeong-il, the girl, and the boy.
“Please call an ambulance!” cried the girl to no one in particular.
Turning a deaf ear to the girl’s plea, passengers filed into the train in an orderly fashion.
Again the girl cried toward the many doors sliding closed, “Please call an ambulance!”
As if nothing had happened, the train pulled out of the platform and headed for the next station. The friends who had goaded the boy on had disappeared.
Finally, a young station attendant appeared. “Is anything the matter?”
“Please call an ambulance!”
The attendant, reacting to the desperation of her cry, rushed immediately to the stationmaster’s office. Jeong-il’s limp body slumped against the girl. She caught him. She sat down on the floor, holding him in her arms from behind, and rested his body on her lap. There was nothing more she could do for him. From the time the ambulance arrived to when the gurney was finally brought over, she glared, first at the boy still vomiting in front of her and then at the curious onlookers ogling from afar. When the paramedics finally came with the gurney, she cried inconsolably, large tears falling down her cheeks.
Jeong-il bled out. By the time the ambulance got to the hospital, it was already too late. The police arrested the boy. Due to his diminished mental state, the interrogation was cut short, and he was sent to a detention house. The boy suffered from a severe case of diarrhea in the middle of the night and became dehydrated. He was taken out of detention and sent to a university hospital nearby. Hospital staff was preparing the boy’s IV in a room on the sixth floor, with its large window half open. Apparently, it happened very quickly. The boy, who until then had been lying in bed, unable to walk, suddenly rushed to the window, slid it all the way open, and put one foot on the windowsill. He stopped and turned around, and after muttering “sorry” in the general direction of the staff in the room, climbed over the windowsill and threw himself into the darkness. The boy and Jeong-il died on the same day. The hospital was also the same hospital Jeong-il had been taken to.
It was a tragedy. There was no two ways about it. But whatever the tragedy, people are desperate to find even a fragment of salvation. I was no different. Two days after the incident, I talked to an old friend from my Korean school days, and he gave me an account of the girl on the platform:
Jeong-il lay slumped in the girl’s lap when suddenly his head moved. There was a faint smile on his pale face. His gaze was directed at the track, his eyes slowly moving as if he were watching a train pull into the platform.
Jeong-il had been watching me run down the track. I was sure of it. I wanted it to be true. And what was the problem if it was?
The night of the incident, I learned about Jeong-il’s death through a phone call from his mother. Not even twenty-four hours had passed since Jeong-il’s call the night before.
“Jeong-il has died,” Jeong-il’s mother said as soon as I answered the phone. Her voice sounded clearer than usual and very beautiful.
I wasn’t fully able to grasp the meaning of the words and could only utter, “Huh?” And as if my voice was some kind of cue, she began to cry. Her feeble sobs trickled into my ears. I restrained myself from asking too many questions and listened to Jeong-il’s mother sobbing. The phone beeped several times, signaling a call on the other line. I ignored the call, silently cursing whoever it was that invented call waiting.
After crying for nearly twenty minutes, Jeong-il’s mother apologized and explained what had happened.
“Jeong-il adored you, Sugihara-kun. Thank you for being his friend,” she said before hanging up the phone.
I only answered, “Yes.”
After hanging up the phone, I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling. I must’ve stared for about an hour. But what I’d been thinking about I can’t remember.
I got up and went into the living room. My mother was gone, away on a trip with Naomi-san in Phuket. My father was watching an instructional video on golf.
“Jeong-il’s dead.”
My father pressed stop on the remote control and turned off the TV. I told him what had happened. After listening to my story, he muttered, “I see,” and let out a deep sigh. Then he got up off the sofa, came up to me, and roughing up my hair, said, “Try not to think too hard about it. For now, it’s best you cry your eyes out and eat whatever the hell you want.”
I nodded. I said thanks and left. A few minutes after I returned to my room, the phone rang. I pressed the button on the handset, and it was Sakurai on the line.
“You didn’t pick up earlier,” she said.
I wavered over telling her about Jeong-il, but in the end, I decided against it. I didn’t have the energy or confidence to clearly explain to her everything that had happened.
“I just have a lot going on right now,” I said. “Can I call you tomorrow?”
After a brief silence, Sakurai asked, “Did something happen?”
“I’ll tell you about it soon, I promise.”
“Okay . . . so I guess I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
As I moved to hang up the phone, Sakurai hastily said, as if she had just remembered, “You remember our date on Sunday, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, good.”
I hung up the phone.
Sunday morning, I left the house.
Soon after Sakurai and I started dating, we’d promised to go to the opera together as part of our hunt for “cool” stuff. Neither of us had seen an opera before.
We had been listening to famous operas on CD and picking out the ones we might like to actually see. The Marriage of Figaro, Tannhäuser, Madama Butterfly, The Knight of the Rose, Cavalleria rusticana, La traviata . . .
I said that I wanted to see Cavalleria rusticana, and Sakurai said that she really wanted to see La traviata. Naturally I was the one to cave. We agreed to go see La traviata, but unfortunately there were no performances in the near future. Sakurai was planning to spend several months, starting in November, studying for the entrance exams, so we only had until October. Then we discovered Cavalleria rusticana was going to be playing in the middle of October.
We bought the tickets for a shocking amount of money in the beginning of August and began studying up on the opera. We learned the lyrics and storyline by listening to the CD countless times in the media room. We steadily carried out preparations for attending our first opera.
Everything was set. So when I called Sakurai and canceled on Saturday, the night before the performance, she sounded pretty upset.
“Why?”
“I have to go to a funeral for a friend.”
She fell silent for a moment and then asked, “When did your friend die?”
“Wednesday.”
“Why didn’t you tell me until tod
ay?”
I couldn’t answer.
“That’s messed up, definitely.”
“You’re right.”
For a while there was a heavy silence between us.
“Was he an old friend?” asked Sakurai.
“Yeah.”
“Is it that I’m not reliable or something?”
“Why do you think that?”
“If I had an old friend die, I would definitely tell you about it and ask you to help me through it. Besides, didn’t I tell you to talk to me if you’re ever depressed?”
“I’m sorry. But this doesn’t have anything to do with you being reliable or not. Really. I’ll tell you about it soon. I promise.”
Sakurai said nothing more to try to make me feel guilty. I asked her to go with someone else so the ticket wouldn’t go to waste, and she answered disappointedly, “Maybe I will.”
Since I overshot my intended train station by two stops and the bus stop by three, I was nearly an hour late to the funeral.
When I went inside the enormous hall not too far from Jeong-il’s house, the funeral had already come to the climax, and Jeong-il’s uncle on his mother’s side was giving a speech. Despite wondering why Jeong-il’s mother wasn’t giving the speech, I shook it off and in a daze stared at Jeong-il’s mother holding a framed portrait of Jeong-il in her arms as the uncle droned on. She looked terribly worn out.
During the ten minutes I listened to his speech, the uncle must’ve said, “Jeong-il didn’t live to see his twentieth birthday” three times. I felt dizzy every time he said it.
The funeral ended. The attendant said, “A light meal has been prepared for everyone, so please make your way to the second floor.” I weaved past the others going upstairs and caught up with Jeong-il’s mom. We’d only had a chance to exchange silent bows at the wake, so I wanted to give her a proper greeting.
I stood in front of her. She took one look at me, and after letting out a sigh so deep she might deflate into nothing, she began to cry on my chest. The corner of the picture frame containing Jeong-il’s portrait hit me several times on the chin.
Jeong-il’s mother cried, “Why did he have to die?”
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