“Mitsuha.”
I suddenly remember the way I felt when I was a kid, when I’d played my heart out after school, wanting to stay with my friends for hours and hours longer but knowing it was almost time to go home.
“You’ve still got things you need to do. Listen.”
I outline the plan for her that I’d hatched with Teshigawara and Saya. As she listens, Mitsuha nods seriously, and I realize she remembers that the star fell, that the town vanished. That she died once. For her, tonight is a reenactment.
“It’s here…”
Mitsuha looks up at the sky, and as she whispers, her voice trembles slightly. I follow her gaze. In the western sky, which is turning a deep, dark blue, the shape of long-tailed Comet Tiamat is faintly visible.
“It’s all right. You’ll make it.” I say this definitively, as much to convince myself as anything.
“Yes, I’ll try… Oh, half-light’s already—”
Before I know it, Mitsuha’s turned the color of pale shadows, too.
“—It’s already over,” I finish. The last traces of the evening sun are fading from the sky. Night will be here soon. As if to shove down the anxiety suddenly amassing inside me, I force a smile and speak cheerfully. “Hey, Mitsuha. So we don’t forget each other after we wake up…” I take a felt-tip pen from my pocket. I catch Mitsuha’s right hand, then write on her palm. “Let’s write down our names. Here.”
I give the pen to Mitsuha.
“…Sure!”
She breaks into a smile. It’s like watching a flower bloom. She takes my right hand and sets the tip of the pen against it.
Tunk.
There’s a tiny, hard noise by my feet. I look down, and there’s the pen on the ground.
“Huh?” I raise my head.
There’s nobody in front of me.
“What…?”
I turn this way and that.
“Mitsuha? Hey, Mitsuha?”
I call louder. No response. Unnerved, I pace the area. The shadows are sinking into blue-black darkness. Below me are leaden, featureless clouds, and in the gloom below them, I can just make out gourd-shaped Itomori Lake.
Mitsuha’s gone.
Night is here.
I’m back in my own body, three years in the future.
I look at my right hand. There’s no braided cord on my wrist now. On my palm, there’s just one thin, short, half-drawn line. I touch it gently.
“…I was going to tell you…,” I mutter quietly to the line. “No matter where in the world you are, I’ll find you again. I swear.”
Up in the sky, the comet’s nowhere to be seen, and a few stars are beginning to twinkle.
“Your name is Mitsuha.”
I close my eyes, making sure of my memories, turning them into something I can count on.
“It’s okay. I remember!”
Confidence deepening, I open my eyes again. There’s a white half-moon in the distant horizon.
“Mitsuha, Mitsuha… Mitsuha, Misua, Misua. Your name is Misua!”
I’m yelling her name at the half-moon.
“Your name is…!”
Abruptly, the outline of the word I meant to utter blurs.
I quickly snatch up the pen and write the first letter of her name on my palm… Or I try to.
“……!”
After a single line, my hand stops. The tip of the pen starts to tremble. I want to make it stop shaking and grip it tight. I try stabbing it in like a needle, to carve a name that won’t disappear. The pen won’t budge a fraction of an inch. My lips move.
“…Who are you?”
The pen falls from my hand.
They’re vanishing. Your name. Your memories.
“Why did I come here?”
I want to tether them to me somehow, to scrape the fragments of memory together, so I say them aloud.
“Her… I came to see her! I came to save her! I wanted her to live!”
It’s disappearing. Something so precious to me is disappearing.
“Who are you? Who are you, who are you, who are you…?”
Slipping away. Even the emotions I know I felt are leaving me.
“Somebody important, somebody I can’t forget, somebody I didn’t want to forget!”
Everything’s vanishing, sorrow and love alike. I don’t even know why I’m crying now. My emotions are disintegrating, crumbling like a sand castle.
“Who are you, who are you, who…?”
After the sand has completely eroded, just one thing remains. I know it’s loneliness. In that moment, I understand. From now on, this feeling will be all that stays with me. I’ll hold nothing but loneliness, a burden someone’s forced me to take.
Fine, I think defiantly. Even if the world is cruel, even if all I have is loneliness, I’ll still live with everything I’ve got. Even if this emotion is all I have, I’ll keep struggling. Even if we’re separated, even if we never meet again, I’ll fight. As if I’d ever resign myself to this! The powerful, fleeting resolution feels as though I’m picking a fight with the gods. Very soon, I’ll forget even the fact that I’ve forgotten something.
And so, making that single emotion my foothold, I demand of the night sky one last time:
“What’s your name?”
The cry becomes an echo, rebounding off the dark mountains. Asking its question of the void over and over, it diminishes, bit by bit.
Finally, silence descends.
Chapter Seven
Struggle, Magnificently
I run.
I’m sprinting down a dark deer track, repeating his name again and again.
Taki, Taki, Taki.
It’s all right. I remember. I’ll never forget.
At last, through the gaps in the trees, I begin catching glimpses of the lights of Itomori. The wind carries faint, scattered snatches of festival music to me.
Taki, Taki, Taki.
When I look up at the sky, Comet Tiamat is there, shining brighter than the moon, its long tail trailing behind it. The terror nearly makes me recoil, but I scream his name and stomp it down.
Your name is Taki!
I hear the sound of a moped, and when I raise my head, a headlight comes up over the slope and shines right in my eyes.
“Tesshi!” I shout, running up to it.
“Mitsuha! Where the heck you been?!”
He sounds like he’s scolding me, but I really can’t explain. Tesshi’s in his school uniform with the sleeves rolled up, and he’s wearing a helmet with a big light attached to it, like he’s going spelunking. I give him Taki’s message.
“He said he broke your bike, and he’s sorry.”
“Huh? Who did?”
“I did!”
Tesshi’s eyebrows furrow, but he shuts off the moped’s engine and turns on his helmet light without a word. He breaks into a run. “You better gimme the whole story later!” he says in a loud, rough voice.
ITOMORI SUBSTATION—COMPANY-OWNED LAND: KEEP OUT, says the plate on the chain-link fence. Beyond it, transformers and steel towers form a complicated silhouette. It’s an unmanned facility, and the only lights I can see are the red lamps on machinery here and there.
“That thing’s comin’ down? For real?!” Tesshi asks, looking up at the sky.
We’re in front of the substation’s chain-link fence, gazing at the glittering comet.
“It will! I saw it happen!”
As I speak, I look him straight in the eye. We’ve got two hours until it falls. There’s no time to explain.
For a moment, Tesshi looks dubious. Then, with a sharp “Hah!” he grins. His smile looks like something he’s mustered out of sheer desperation. “You saw it, huh?! Then I guess we’ve gotta do this!”
Tesshi practically rips opens his sports bag. It’s stuffed with tubes that look like race batons wrapped in brown paper: water-gel explosives. I gulp. Tesshi takes out a big bolt cutter, sets its blades against the chain wrapped around the substation gate, and says, “Mitsuha. If
we do this, there’s no goin’ back.”
“Please. I’ll take all the responsibility.”
“Moron! That ain’t what I’m askin’!” Tesshi sounds angry, and for some reason, he’s blushing a bit. “Well, we’re both criminals now!”
He cuts the chain, and the loud rattle shatters the darkness.
“When the power in town goes out, the school should switch over to the emergency generator right away! You’ll be able to use the broadcastin’ equipment then!”
Tesshi shouts in the direction of the smartphone. He’s driving the moped, and I’m behind him, holding the phone up to his mouth. Almost no cars pass us, and we’re starting to see the lights of scattered houses along the dark prefectural road. We’re heading for an area between the slopes of the mountains, where the lights are concentrated: Miyamizu Shrine, the site of the autumn festival. Out of nowhere, I feel an odd nostalgia, as if I’ve come back home after a long time away.
“Mitsuha, she wants to talk to you.”
“Hello? Saya?!” I put the smartphone to my own ear.
“Waaaaaah, Mitsuhaaaa!” Saya sounds like she’s in tears. “C’mon, do I really have to do this?!”
Her anxious voice sends a pang through my heart. If I were in her shoes, I’d probably be crying, too. Even sneaking by yourself into the broadcasting room at night is something you’d do only for a friend.
“Saya, I’m sorry, but I’m beggin’ you! Please!” At this point, that’s all I can say. “I’ll never ask you for anythin’ else as long as I live, but if we don’t do this, a lot of people are gonna die! Once you start the announcement, repeat it for as long as you can!”
There’s no response. All I can hear from the receiver are little muffled sniffling noises.
“Saya? Saya!”
I start getting nervous.
Abruptly, I hear a tiny voice. “Okay! Agh, I don’t even care anymore! You tell Tesshi he better buy me somethin’, too!”
“What’d she say?”
Putting the smartphone in my skirt pocket, I yell back loud enough to be heard over the moped’s engine. “That you better buy her somethin’, too!”
“Awright, let’s do this!”
Tesshi shouts determinedly, as if trying to suppress something, and just then, behind us, there’s a bang like a big firework bursting.
We stop the moped and look back. Two, three. One more. The explosions echo one after another, and halfway up the mountain—where we were just a few minutes ago—thick black smoke is rising. In slow motion, an enormous transmission tower begins tilting.
“Tesshi…!”
My voice quavers.
“Ha-ha!”
Tesshi’s breath is shaky, too. It sounds like a laugh.
There’s an even bigger explosion, and the lights of the town instantly go dark.
“Hey,” Tesshi intones, sounding kind of dazed.
“The power’s out,” I say, stating the obvious.
It worked. We did it.
Suddenly, sirens well up, beginning to wail.
oooOOOOOOOOoooooo…!
The earsplitting noise reverberates from speakers all over town. It’s an ominous sound, like a giant’s scream, and it ricochets off the mountains, pervading the area.
It’s Saya. She’s hijacked the wireless disaster prevention system.
We exchange wordless nods, then straddle the moped again. As we race toward the shrine, the speakers broadcasting Saya’s voice spur us on. Slowly, calmly, as if her earlier tearful cries were fake, she delivers the message we came up with:
“This is Town Hall. An explosion has occurred at Itomori Substation. There is a danger of further explosions and forest fires.”
Tesshi’s moped goes off the prefectural road and climbs up a narrow mountain track. It’s the gentler slope up to the shrine—this way, we can take the moped all the way to the back of the main building and avoid the stone stairs on the shrine approach. The seat shakes violently, and I cling to Tesshi’s back as I listen to Saya’s voice booming through the town. She sounds exactly like her big sister. Nobody would suspect this isn’t a broadcast from the town hall.
“People in the following districts are requested to evacuate to Itomori High School immediately. Kadoiri District, Sakagami District, Miyamori District, Oyazawa District…”
“This’s it. C’mon, Mitsuha!”
“Right!”
We leap off the moped and run down the set of wooden steps up the slope of the mountain behind the shrine. From between the trees, I can see the roofs of the long rows of stalls set up on the shrine grounds and the people milling around among them, like fish crowded too closely in a dark tank. As we run, we take off our helmets and throw them away.
“I repeat: This is Itomori Town Hall. An explosion has occurred at the substation. There is a danger of further explosions and forest fires…”
When we hit the bottom of the stairs, we’re behind the main shrine building. The silhouettes of the people gathered for the festival are just ahead, and I hear an uneasy murmur. Tesshi and I dash into their midst as if we’re racing each other, yelling.
“Ruuun! A forest fire’s comin’! This place ain’t safe!”
Tesshi’s voice is unbelievably loud, like he’s using a megaphone. I shout, too, determined not to be outdone. “Please run! There’s a forest fire! Run!” We emerge in the very center of the grounds.
“Yeah, they said there really is a forest fire!”
“C’mon, let’s get outta here.”
“We’re walkin’ all the way to the high school?”
The broadcast set the evacuation in motion, and our shouts are pushing it along. Men and women in traditional wear, children, and old people holding their grandkids’ hands all begin filing toward the shrine gate at the exit. I’m relieved. If things go on like this, we’ll make it for sure. It’s all thanks to him… “Him”?
“Mitsuha!”
Tesshi calls my name sharply. I look up at him.
“This ain’t good!”
Following his gaze around us, I see lots of people sitting down and taking it easy by the stalls or standing, idly talking. They’re even smoking cigarettes or drinking, chatting away and enjoying the evening.
“There’s no way we’re movin’ all these folks unless an actual forest fire comes through! We have to get them to send out the fire brigade and direct the evacuation. You get to the town hall, and this time make sure the mayor…”
Tesshi’s flustered voice is right above my head, but it sounds terribly far away… Him?
“Hey. Mitsuha? What’s up?”
“…Tesshi, listen, what’ll I do?”
My mind isn’t working, and before I know it, I’m pleading to Tesshi.
“His name… I can’t remember his name!”
Tesshi’s face twists with worry. Suddenly, he yells at me. “Who the hell cares, you idiot?! Look around! You started all this!”
He’s glaring at me, furious. Belatedly, I notice that Saya’s call to “Please evacuate to Itomori High School” is now erratic, as if she’s about to burst into tears.
“Mitsuha, go!” Tesshi gives a heartrending yell, practically begging this time. “Go talk your dad around!”
My spine straightens as though he’s slapped me across the face.
“…Right!”
I nod as firmly as I can, then bolt into a sprint, trying to shake myself free.
Behind me, I hear Tesshi scream again. “I said run, y’all! Get to the high school!”
Saya’s voice echoes all over town. “There is a danger of forest fires. Please evacuate to Itomori High School.” I push my way through the lumbering crowd, under the shrine gate, down the stone stairs on the shrine approach.
“You started all this,” Tesshi’d said. He’s right: This is something I—we—started. Still running, I glance at the comet overhead. With the lights on the ground extinguished, the comet’s even brighter. Its long tail streams over the clouds. It’s scattering shining scales li
ke a giant moth. I’m not letting you get your way, I think, as if challenging it to a fight.
It’s all right. You’ll make it.
Somebody once told me that with conviction. I repeat the words silently to myself.
It was early autumn, and I was still in middle school.
I’d finally gotten used to living with just my dad, and after finishing a dinner that we’d both worked hard to make (and still hadn’t been all that good), I was drinking tea and eating an apple while Dad enjoyed a beer.
That day, the news about the comet’s closest approach had pretty much taken over the TV. I wasn’t all that interested in stars or the cosmos, but I did find it kind of amazing how the universe is actually overflowing with phenomena that exist on a completely different scale from humans, like a solar orbit that lasts twelve hundred years or an orbital radius over 10.4 billion miles. As impressions went, it was dumb. Still, it struck me as so awesome that it made me shiver and, at the same time, so frightening it set my heart trembling as well.
“Look!”
Suddenly, the announcer who’d been delivering commentary yelled in excitement.
“The comet appears to have split in two. Around it are…what seem to be countless shooting stars.”
When the camera zoomed in, the comet really had forked above the background of Tokyo skyscrapers. Thin lines like a meteor shower appeared and disappeared at its tip. There was a delicate, almost artificial beauty about it, and my eyes went wide.
Abruptly, the wireless broadcast is interrupted by the click of an opening door.
I hear a short shriek from Saya, and then several familiar male voices emerge from the speakers.
“Kid, what are you doin’?!”
“Hurry, shut it off!”
There’s a clatter like a chair falling over, and then the wireless broadcast cuts off with a brief burst of shrill feedback.
“Saya…!” I stop, calling her name involuntarily.
The teachers caught her. Large beads of sweat pop out as if they’ve just remembered their jobs, falling to the asphalt with audible drips. I’m on the road that circles around the lake, the one that goes to the town hall and the high school, and I start hearing bewildered voices from several evacuees.
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