Part One
1.
Koromogae.¹ On June first the uniforms change all across Japan, and nobody asks whether the weather agrees.
I stood in front of the hallway mirror at six forty-five, in the summer blouse, short sleeves, and outside it was raining so finely that you couldn't see it, only hear it. My mother set a bowl of rice on the table without a word and said I should take a cardigan. I said cardigans weren't allowed from today. She said, then in your bag. That's how we always do it. She wins, but quietly, and I give in, but not until the front door.
The bus was full. You can read schools off uniforms the way you read coats of arms: the checked skirts from North Prefectural, the dark blue ones on the girls from the Catholic school, and us, red at the sailor collar, Kita High, third choice for most of us and first choice for nobody. I held on to the strap and went through the kanji for the second-period test in my head. I knew nineteen out of twenty. The twentieth was 憂,² and it refused to stay in my head, because I had never once written it in my life and probably never would.
¹ Koromogae — the seasonal changeover of clothing, fixed by custom to June first and October first. In schools it is a date rather than a decision: everyone switches on the same morning, whatever the thermometer says.
² 憂 — read yū, and as a verb ureu: to grieve, to be troubled about something. It sits outside the set of characters a pupil is required to master, which is why it can be sat next to for years without ever being written.
2.
There was a note in the shoe lockers.
Not in my compartment. In the one beside it, which belongs to a boy called Nakano, and it had slipped halfway out, and I saw it because I always look too closely. It was folded like a small envelope, with one of those stickers you buy in the passage at the station, a rabbit with oversized eyes.
I pushed it back in and changed into my indoor shoes and went up the stairs two at a time, and on the landing I ran straight into Yuriko, who grabbed my elbow and said: "You're all red."
"I ran."
"You've never run."
Yuriko has been my best friend since we were seated next to each other in the first year, which means nothing more than that our family names sit close together in the syllabary, and that classes here are seated in name order. That's how most friendships start. You sit beside someone for a year because the system says so, and then it's happened.
3.
The kanji test was in second period and I got nineteen out of twenty. Of course that was the one I got wrong.
Then math, then English with Ōsawa-sensei, who says every sentence twice, once in English and once in Japanese, as though the English version alone wouldn't hold. We translated a text about a Canadian family at breakfast. Maple syrup. Not one of us had ever eaten maple syrup, and Ōsawa-sensei explained it as a kind of honey, which isn't right, but I said nothing, because I only knew it from a video myself.
At lunch we ate in the classroom, as always, the desks pushed together into groups of four. Yuriko had tamagoyaki; I had rice with a pickled plum and the little sausages my mother scores with a knife so they come out of the pan with legs, like small octopuses. She has done that since I was six. I've never told her that there's an age past which people stop doing that, because I don't want her to stop.
Nakano sat two tables away, laughing at something with the other boys, and I didn't look over.
4.
At three thirty it was cleaning time.
Every class cleans its own room; that's how it is, that's how it's always been, and in elementary school I thought it was lovely and now I barely notice it. You push the desks against the wall, you run the cloths along the floor, on all fours, in a row, and for four minutes the whole class is a single animal crawling across the room. Then the hallway. Then the sink in the stairwell, where somebody has always rinsed out a paintbrush and not washed the paint away.
Yuriko and I had the stairs that week. She swept, I held the dustpan.
"He asked," she said into the broom.
"Who."
"Don't."
I held the pan and looked at the dust. "And?"
"And I said you have cram school on the weekend." She kept sweeping. "Which you do."
That was true. Saturdays from two until six thirty, math and English, in a building above a pharmacy, under fluorescent light and those desks all lined up facing the board, no window in your line of sight, so nobody looks out. In the third year Sundays will be added. Everybody knows that. Nobody says it out loud, the way nobody discusses the weather in August; you simply endure it.
"Thank you," I said.
Yuriko stopped sweeping and looked at me, and I realized I had meant it, and she realized it too, and then she went on sweeping, because otherwise it would have gotten awkward.
5.
I'm on the library committee, which at our school means roughly: no club.
The real clubs are baseball, brass band, kendo, tennis. They train until seven, until seven thirty in summer, and the girls in the brass band have the most chapped lips in the entire school come winter. The four of us on the library committee sit behind the circulation desk and stamp maybe six cards a day, and spend the rest of the time reading. Iida-sensei, the librarian, pretends not to have noticed.
That day I was reading Botchan, the one about the young teacher from Tokyo who is sent out to a provincial school and falls out with everyone. It's more than a hundred years old and the school in it is still our school: the same tone in the staff room, the same way a conflict is never spoken but postponed until it wears itself out. I read the passage twice where he decides to be honest, and it makes everything worse.
Iida-sensei came past and looked at the cover and only said: "Good book."
"He's an idiot," I said.
"Yes," she said. "That's the beautiful part."
6.
At six fifteen I walked to the station. The rain had stopped, the road was steaming, and in the paddies at the edge of town the frogs were so loud that I couldn't hear my own footsteps.
Nakano was standing at the level crossing.
Not waiting for me, I think. Or yes. There is no way of telling, here, because nobody does anything straight out, and when they do, they do it so that both sides can claim afterward that it was nothing. He had his bag over his shoulder and his sleeves rolled up, which isn't allowed, and he said:
"You read a lot."
"Yes."
"What, right now?"
I told him the title. He nodded, the way you nod when you know the title but not the book.
The barrier lifted. On the other side stood a woman with a bicycle and a child in the seat behind her, and the child was waving at nobody, just into the air, the way children do.
"I heard you have cram school on Saturdays," he said.
"Yes."
"Until when?"
"Six thirty."
"Oh." And then, after exactly the length of pause you need to change your mind and say it anyway: "And after?"
I looked at the tracks. In the west the sun came through under the cloud cover, the way it sometimes does here, briefly and from below, and for maybe two minutes the paddies turned copper.
"After, nothing," I said.
He didn't say "good" and he didn't say "then let's meet" and he didn't say anything else. He only nodded once more and went his way and I went mine, and my heart was beating so hard that I could feel it in my wrist, at the place where the bag strap cuts in.
7.
At home I hung the winter uniform in the closet, all the way in the back, where it would stay until October.
My mother asked how the kanji test went. I said nineteen out of twenty. She said: "And which one, Nao?"
"Yū," I said.
She took the pen from beside the telephone and wrote 憂 in the margin of the newspaper, slowly, stroke by stroke, the way she had learned it thirty years ago. Grief. Melancholy. The head on top, and the heart beneath it, and right at the bottom the dragging feet.
"There," she said. "Now you won't forget it."
She was right. I have never forgotten it since.40Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ7HrY5bi9tK
and then Add to home screen.