I didn’t have parents or an academic record. Even if I’d still burned with it, the ambition I’d had to go on to higher education, to move up in the world, to become rich—almost like a desire for revenge against fate—was impossible for me to realize now. But like a fever being cured, that desire had completely vanished from within me.
Other things were more important to me now. Living in peace. Finding people to love, loving them. Being grateful.
I worked part-time at a cake shop, helping customers. Eventually, I was allowed to watch the bakers and learn their jobs so that I could help out, but only when there weren’t enough people around to get the job done. My hands were nimble, and I was a quick learner, so soon I was working in both the front and the back of the shop. Three years into it, the owner said she’d make me a regular salaried employee. That said, I was a contract employee, and that contract had to be renewed every year.
Sometimes, I’d remember the time I worked at the cake shop back when I was going to that academic school. It would suddenly hit me that I’d worked as a girl then, and it felt strange. Almost like it hadn’t actually been me.
Shortcake, chocolate cake, fruit mousse, cookies—I learned how to make them all with my eyes closed. Some evenings, my older colleagues would take me out to drink. I started spending time with girls too, although I never had anything like the dazzling radiance of a first love. Maybe because I was used to girls, having been one. The fact that my first love had actually been a Bamboo and a murderer started to fade from my mind.
In my midtwenties, at the invitation of a man I’d gotten to know at a bar, I joined an amateur theater group as a hobby. I was tall, if nothing else, and there were few male actors, so I was a priceless treasure. I got a fair number of speaking roles. And some people came specifically to see me, so that was fun. It tickled me to hear my own name shouted out from the audience. Aah, I’m alive, I’d think. I wasn’t going by my real name, Kyo, though, or my sister’s name, Nako. I was using yet another, different, name.
And so the days passed like this. I came to cherish the people I met in this new town. When I thought that I might suddenly never see them or the town again, all of it felt unbearably precious to me.
I had friends too, and sometimes lovers. The theater troupe disbanded after I turned thirty. That night was like the end of a festival. At the closing party, we all slapped each other’s shoulders, telling each other, “Aah, we were so young, eh?”
Eventually, the cake shop, which was in a residential area, opened up a small branch in front of the station, and it was decided that I would work there. I thought about maybe moving closer to my new workplace. Closer to the station, the rent was higher, but I could get a smaller place to offset that, and at any rate it was just me living by myself. I talked it over with my lover, and she was really put out for some reason. “Hey, whoa,” she chided me. Like, wasn’t it about time I settled down, wasn’t I getting to be a little old for this?
Maybe it was inevitable, but, well, I did love her, and before I knew it, she was about to be put onto my family register. I couldn’t help feeling that she’d played me a bit like the proverbial fiddle, though. Well, whatever. In any case, it had been fifteen years. You grow up. I worked hard, and I laughed every day.
It was a hot summer day that year, a day the news said was the hottest of the year. That night, to celebrate our engagement, a friend had planned a simple party for me and my fiancée. I closed the shop and cleaned up, and then I checked the clock and flew out the door.
There was a girl standing at the bus stop in front of the station, looking extremely troubled. She seemed like she wasn’t from around here. Her clothing was somehow different. And when I saw her looking up at the bus schedules, then peering at a map, I figured she was lost.
She was wearing a large white medical mask, the kind you wear when you have a cold or it’s allergy season. Her long hair wasn’t done; it fluttered in the wind, a black curtain. Her physique was small, and she was thin to the point of being skinny. Well, she was like a lot of teenage girls. She wasn’t incredibly attractive, but she wasn’t bad either. Uninterested and in a hurry, I passed by her.
“Uh, um.” The girl looked up at me.
“Hmm? Me?” With no other choice, I brought my feet to a halt, and the map was thrust at me. I was surprised. No greeting, no “excuse me,” no “could you tell me,” no “please” or “thank you.” It was clear she wanted to ask the way, but still, the kids these days honestly had no manners. Exasperated, I begrudgingly took the map.
“Where are you trying to go? You can give me the map, but I still don’t know what you want.” I was also in a hurry, so my reply was curt. But I couldn’t just walk away from a child in trouble. The whole situation was annoying.
The girl stared at me like she was horribly disappointed. I looked back at her, my face blank. Finally, she pointed vaguely at some spot on the map. She was so sullen it was almost rude. I realized her pale finger was shaking, and an odd feeling sprang up in me.
“What? Here? That’s close. Don’t get on at this stop. You’ll want to get on the number five over there, okay? Get off at the seventh stop, and it’ll be on the other side of the road. But, listen, what business does a kid have in a place like that? It’s a temple, you know?”
“Huh? A temple?”
“Hey now, you. You pointed to this spot yourself, didn’t you?”
“I know!”
“Huh?”
“I know already!” She sounded even more obstinate. But at the end of her declaration, she shuddered, like she was about to burst into tears.
Bewildered, I looked at her again. Maybe I knew her? But the outline of her face covered by the mask and the two eyes didn’t look familiar.
“Thanks, Nako. Okay, bye!”
I blinked.
“Take care, ’kay?”
In that instant, I felt a cold wind blowing at my feet, mixed with snow, knocking me back to the other side of the distant past.
Beautiful tears like pearls welled up in the girl’s eyes. One dropped onto the mask and wet it. Her hair was long, and it covered her ears, so I couldn’t tell if both ears were there or not. Unconsciously, I shifted my gaze to the arm opposite the one that had thrust the map out at me. The long-sleeved shirt flapped in the wind. She was missing an arm.
But…I couldn’t remember her name!
Then the bus arrived, and passengers came trudging out of it. The sidewalk in front of the station was suddenly full of people. The girl turned on her heel and started walking away quickly, as if to flee.
What was your name…?
I stood there rooted to the spot for a while and then hurriedly moved to go after her. My first love—she had come all the way from the distant past, that winter’s day fifteen years ago, to see me.
Just like she had been then, she was young. No, childish. And like always, she was straightforward. Right—she had protected me, hadn’t she? Even though they had tortured her so horribly. She probably still hadn’t told them I was actually a boy, that they’d never find a girl no matter how hard they looked. We had loved each other that much…
What was your name?
I seriously couldn’t remember. Memories of how close we had been surged back into my heart, a mysterious surf. But I couldn’t remember her name. I…
I pushed through the crowd, advancing slowly. I never said thank you. I left, and that was the last time I saw you.
Aah!
You told me, didn’t you? That in fifteen years, there’d be the fiftieth anniversary celebration of Ruirui’s enthronement, the descendant of the royal family currently wearing the crown. You said criminals might be pardoned then. It had been exactly fifteen years. Did you spend all those years alone, buried deep underground in the cannery of that far-off town? And then you were finally dug up from the earth, let out of the barrel, and you went looking
for me. Tonight, you found me, you came to see me. Talked to me, pretending to ask for directions…
Did you believe with your uncomplicated heart that we would smile at each other and delight in our reunion? For a Bamboo, the memory would have been like yesterday, after all.
You. That day long ago, you…
Who on earth are you?
“Heeey!” I called the girl, idiotically. “It’s you, isn’t it? It’s me! I can remember. I know I can remember. So just hold on. Heey! Heeey…”
Heeey…
The crowd in front of the station only grew larger. For the briefest moment, I thought I saw an empty sleeve flapping in the summer wind, but I quickly lost sight of it.
I ran. Sweating, I kept looking for her. But she was already nowhere to be found, this ghost of the past who had come to me for a fleeting moment on a summer day fifteen years after the fact.
Her voice came back to me, so intent on that long-ago evening: Weird! But we were having so much fun together every night!
Bamboo…
Bamboo don’t change. They keep thinking the whole time. Throughout their long lives, the whole time. They don’t get older, so the nature of their thinking doesn’t change either. It wasn’t the Bamboo. No. It was the humans who actually forgot that they had been close.
I finally understood what the two gentle Bamboo had told me back then.
Our dream is for you to grow up and live. And it doesn’t matter a bit if you get busy and naturally forget all this about having lived with some weird grass monsters. Because that is in itself growing up, living and changing.
I stood frozen in the throng and bustle, watching the vision of the girl departing, feeling at my wit’s end as I watched the last traces of the past glittering and disappearing. And then I started slowly walking in the opposite direction. I staggered and stumbled in my sadness and shame.
I was fairly late by the time I showed up at the restaurant where my friends were gathered. My fiancée was sick of waiting for me and looked up with relief at my arrival.
“Sorry I’m late.” I smiled. “Sorry, guys.”
They raised their voices in welcome, and I was suddenly relieved. Aah, I thought, with a pain in my heart, still feeling the same shame at myself as before I’d stepped into the restaurant.
I had to at least cherish this now. That was all I could do. I had promised to live. To change. To never give up. That day…
My Bamboo, supposedly more precious to me than anything. Aah, that day…
Kyo! Humans are fire!
One of my friends started a toast. Glasses were clinked. A bus drove by outside, rocking from side to side. I heard the sound of the engine. The taillights shone hazily, but it passed by soon enough, and it grew dark again.
Aah. But…your… What’s your name? Aah…
And then, just like the buses that roared as they drove by the restaurant, time passed. Years in the blink of an eye.
Face
Krnch. Krnch. The soles of my leather shoes on the ground. My head was hanging, my eyes resting on the tips of those shoes. The hot, dry sand swallowed my feet and released them again. Sweat on my temples ran down the back of my neck. I could hear the crashing of the waves from the ocean behind me. The merciless summer sun felt like it would melt anything and everything.
“There it is! The cottage there!” The young man was a little ahead of me, but now he stopped and stretched a hand out slowly, pointing.
I squinted. And there it was, that familiar house, a distant mirage in the summer afternoon. Aah, it hadn’t changed at all. Or maybe it was a bit weathered by wind and rain; the color seemed like it had faded. Or maybe it was just that I remembered it wrong.
A sign was stabbed into the ground at an angle, for rent in big red letters.
I smiled slowly, sinking into the sand.
I stepped timidly onto the wooden terrace once so familiar to me. Grains of sand were stuck to it, but the wooden bench where the two young men had so often sat next to each other was exactly as it had been.
“Well, it is an old building. But the price is very reasonable for just that reason. I’ll open it up now! Whoops! The fitting’s a bit off, hmm? Have to get that fixed… Oh! The former residents just left everything behind—furniture, boxes, a whole bunch of stuff. If you wanted to rent the place, though, of course we’d take care of all of that for you… Wait, what?”
“I said, it’s fine the way it is. You don’t have to throw anything out. I’ll take it.”
“Really! Hmm, this place?” The young real estate agent looked up at me curiously. Perhaps he was starting to think that this tall older man was actually a mysterious character.
I laughed quietly for him. “The truth is, when I was a boy, I used to live around here. I left when I was seventeen, but when you hit my age, you suddenly get homesick. Or maybe it’s just nostalgia, you know? Ha ha! At any rate, seniors can’t exactly pay a fortune in rent, either, hmm?”
“What? Around here?”
“Mm-hmm. Back then, we had all these prefab houses crammed together in that empty lot, you know? It was an elementary and junior high school. I suppose it’s long gone, though.”
“Oh, no, it’s still there!” The man suddenly grew overly familiar and came closer. A cloud-free smile popped up on his face. “I went to school there too. So you’re an alumnus, hmm?”
“Oh! Looks like we have something in common then.”
We smiled brightly at each other. The lease was proffered, and I accepted it. We went inside.
My heart suddenly started pounding wildly. The living room was basically unchanged from the way it had been back then. The same sofa and table. The bookshelf. Only the wall clock was different; the hands were frozen, motionless.
“Hmm? What’s the matter?”
“Oh, nothing.” I shook my head. I noticed the exaggerated look of surprise on the young man’s face, as though he were worried that the mysterious old man might collapse and die right then and there. I grinned reassuringly and then breathed deeply to calm my heart. I sat down on the dusty sofa and spread the lease out before me.
Beyond the glass doors, the dazzling summer light. The glittering blue ocean. The waves echoed invitingly.
After that night, I made my fiancée an official member of my family register. Eventually, we had a single child, a boy. I was put in charge of a new branch of the cake shop, and I moved my family to a bedroom town. Our son grew up, got a job, started his own family.
I was past sixty now. One day—well, last winter, our son decided to take us on a trip in the name of filial piety. But I had work that clashed with the dates of the trip, and I was forced to stay home. So he and his mother flew alone together to Shanghai, since it was the time of year when the famed hairy crab was at peak deliciousness. There was an accident. A large something, a bird, possibly, flew into the engine of the commercial plane they had boarded. The airplane dropped into the ocean between Japan and China. Almost nothing was recovered.
I had two grandchildren, but my son’s wife and her parents took them in. Around the same time, I was diagnosed with an incurable illness, a disease which appeared to be slowly advancing. How much longer would I be able to keep fighting?
So I decided to move. The people who had pursued me in the past—be it the organization in the town above or the Bamboo government—had likely long forgotten about me, after all these years. In which case, I figured I would go back to the town where I had lived so long ago. And I ended up renting this beloved cottage. The lease was signed in no time at all.
This would most likely be my last residence.
Now, the following morning, I brought over my very few belongings and moved in right away. I had breakfast, and then I rolled up my sleeves and got to work cleaning the dust-covered floor.
It appeared that my Bamboo had left abruptly, taking basically nothi
ng with him. What on earth had happened, I wondered. A foreboding feeling flitted through my heart; maybe he had long ago departed from this world. But when I went into the small interior room, the large wooden chest that should have been there was the only thing missing. So I reframed the situation. He was still in this world, he had just moved away. Probably someplace far away.
Other than the chest, though, pretty much everything was where it should have been. Even the candlesticks of assorted designs placed throughout the room.
I neatly wiped away the dust piled up on the furniture and casually opened the cupboard, where I got a surprise. The old cameras were all still there. Together with a neat pile of 8 mm camera film spools. I slowly reached out and picked one up. And then my eyes fell on another spool.
Abruptly, it felt like a hand was squeezing my heart tightly. Written on the spool was “Kyo,s here!” in magic marker.
I went and looked for the projector I was sure was in the interior room. My hands started to shake.
In the smaller room, dim in the evening light, I got ready to project the film onto the unfinished, dirty wall in place of a screen—and then stopped. I needed some time to prepare myself mentally. I made some tea, drank it, made another cup, and drank that down too before I finally stood up again.
I went back to the projector. I reached a hand out. The film started rolling, clacking away. I leaned against a pillar and watched closely with nervous eyes at a vision from the past.
A young man with pale skin and a shy, thoughtful look appeared on-screen. I groaned. Yoji.
In the back of my mind, I saw again Yoji’s face in profile, burning, bathed in the light of the morning sun. Accept everything. His voice filled my ears. My back still up against the pillar, my body jerked liked I had just been punched hard in the gut. The memory of my crime on that distant day came rushing back. I mustered up my courage and turned intently back to the screen.
Oh! I was stunned to see how young he had been. Much younger than my own son, of course. He looked somewhere between boy and man, didn’t he? I had relied on him so completely, so wholeheartedly, back then, this youth with his thin lines. It seemed funny to me now.
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