Part Three
1.
In April everything is reshuffled.
On the first day of term the class lists go up on the first floor, three sheets side by side, and all two hundred eight of us crowd in front of them looking for our own name and then for everyone else's. I was in 3-2. Yuriko in 3-4. Nakano in 3-4.
There's nothing to be done about it. Nobody you know decides it, and there's no office where you object. It's like the weather, except that it happens once a year.
Yuriko said, during the break: "We'll still see each other." And we did still see each other, most days, but no longer in the way where you didn't have to say anything. Once you don't sit next to someone, you have to arrange to meet, and an arranged meeting is a different thing from being side by side.
Nakano and I wrote to each other for a while. Then we wrote less often. Nothing happened, it simply stopped, and so gradually that I couldn't name the day.
2.
The third year is made of paper.
Practice exams in May, June, July, September, October, November. Each one returned with a probability of being accepted somewhere, expressed as a letter and a percentage. Mine for the prefectural university was 40 percent in May, 50 in July, 60 in October. You learn to read these numbers like a pulse.
In June there was the three-way meeting. My mother took a half-day and sat beside me in the small room with my file open on the desk between us and the homeroom teacher, and the three of us worked through the same figures I had already worked through alone, out loud, politely, for twenty-five minutes. That is how it is done here: you sit through the entire conversation about yourself.
The teacher asked whether we had considered a second, safer application. My mother said we had. I hadn't known that we had.
Cram school moved to Sundays. Then it was Sundays and Wednesdays. My mother drove me in the evenings, because the last bus goes too early, and on those twenty minutes we often didn't speak at all, and that was good. Once, shortly before Christmas, she said at the lights on this side of the bridge:
"If it doesn't work out, nothing is broken."
I said, I know.
She said: "No, you don't know. I'm telling you anyway, so that you'll know it later."
3.
The national examination is in January, the same two days for the whole country, half a million of us at once.
You travel to the prefectural capital the evening before if you can afford it, and we could, so we slept in a business hotel with rooms so narrow the suitcase wouldn't fit beside the bed. In the morning my mother bought me a katsu sandwich, because katsu sounds like the word for winning,³ and she made a face while doing it, as though she found it silly herself, and she did it anyway.
It snowed. Not much, but enough for the train to be ten minutes late, and in the hall outside the examination building two hundred people stood facing the same direction and nobody spoke. At the entrance, people from a cram school were handing out hand warmers.
The examination itself isn't what stayed with me. What stayed with me is the break between two subjects: I sat on the stairs in the stairwell with my bentō on my knees, and beside me sat a girl from another school, also alone, and we didn't exchange a single word, and when she stood up she gave me a small nod. That was all.
³ Katsu (カツ) — a breaded, deep-fried cutlet. The word sounds exactly like the Japanese for “to win”, so it is eaten before examinations and matches. Everybody knows this and half of them believe it.
4.
Then there is the second one, at the end of February, set by the university itself. You need both.
By then the January result is in, and everything has been settled except the thing itself. Your application has gone to the place you want and to a safer one, and you can work out the cut-off mark for that faculty to within about fifteen points, and you spend five weeks carrying that number around.
The campus is on a hill above the city and it was raining on the day. I remember the slope from the bus stop, and a man in a windbreaker directing us with both arms like an aircraft marshal, and the hallway outside the hall with two hundred pairs of wet shoes in it.
Two subjects, then an interview of eleven minutes with two members of staff who had my paperwork in front of them and asked why library science.
I gave the answer I had prepared, and it was true and it was also flat, and one of them looked up and asked whether there had been a particular librarian.
There had. I said so. She wrote it down.
I went out through the wet shoes and down the hill and caught the 16:20, and my mother met me at the other end and did not ask a single question until I had eaten.
5.
I passed.
The results went up on March eighth, and you can look them up online these days, but my father insisted we drive there, because that's how he did it and his father before him. So we stood in front of the board, and on the board were the numbers, and mine was among them, and my father let out one long breath and then didn't say a word the entire way home and took second helpings twice at dinner, which from him is the utmost.
I wrote to Yuriko immediately.
She answered three hours later: Congratulations. I already got my acceptance last week, just never had the chance to say.
I read that and looked at the screen for a while. It wasn't meant unkindly. I know it wasn't meant unkindly. But the whole of the last year is in that sentence: that there were no chances left, that you need one, that we could both have made one and neither of us did.
I wrote back: Then we'll celebrate both. Tell me when.
6.
The graduation ceremony was on March first, a week before the results, so most of us still knew nothing.
The gym was set out with chairs, the flags at the front, the parents in dark suits and dresses along the sides. The principal gave a speech in which the word "gratitude" occurred four times. Then the certificates were handed over, class by class, name by name, and each of us walked to the front and bowed and walked back, two hundred eight times, and it took an hour and nobody found that too long.
Then we sang. First the national anthem, then the school song, then "Tabidachi no Hi ni" (On the Day of Departure), the one they sing at every graduation in the country, the one designed to make you cry. It works. It works on everyone, including the ones who spent three years saying they hate this school. They cried the loudest. I don't think they were crying about the school.
Afterward, photographs outside, in groups, certificate tubes in hand. The cherry trees along the school fence weren't there yet, only buds, a few days too early.
Nakano was standing with the boys from 3-4, and at some point he came over, gakuran open at the collar, and stopped one step too far away.
"Well?" he said.
"I won't know until next week."
"You'll make it."
"You don't know that."
"I do," he said.
There's a custom here where girls ask boys on graduation day for the second button of the jacket, the one over the heart. Some boys have none left by the end of the day. Nakano had all of his.
I didn't ask.
To this day I don't know whether I should have. But I think if I had asked, it would have become something you keep in a drawer, and this way it has stayed something open, and open things last longer.
He said: "Take care of yourself." I said: "You too." And then someone called him over for a photograph.
7.
Last of all I went back once more to the shoe lockers.
The classes were already outside, the hall empty, and I opened my compartment and took out the indoor shoes, three years old and worn down at the heel. On the floor of the compartment lay the name card, behind a little strip of plastic. I pulled it out and put it in my pocket. I still have it, in the drawer for the things there is no drawer for.
Iida-sensei stood at the end of the hallway and waved, with her whole hand, which doesn't suit her at all.
Outside, Yuriko was waiting for me at the bike racks, where we had eaten the popsicles. She said nothing when I came. She just linked arms, the way she did in the first year, and we walked to the station together, along the paddies, which are still gray in March and already under water, because it all starts again soon.
Here, everything changes in April at the same time. The schools, the jobs, the trees. That's practical, I think. You only have to be sad once a year and you can get on with the rest of it.22Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡAJRmT0VaVR
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