Part Four — Yuriko
Yuriko Hashimoto, five years later.
1.
We sat next to each other because Hasegawa and Hashimoto stand next to each other in the syllabary. That's all. No decision, no coincidence in the romantic sense, only the spelling of our families.
Nao always took it for a little more than that. She's like that. She looks for a meaning in things, and if there is one she finds it, and if there isn't she finds one anyway. Back then I thought that was what you need in order to be good at Japanese. I still think so.
I was never good at Japanese. I was never bad either. I was somewhere in the middle at everything, and if you are somewhere in the middle at everything in this country, then in the school's eyes you are nothing more than a quiet administrative process.
2.
There's one thing Nao doesn't know.
In the first year, in October, Iida-sensei asked me whether I wanted to join the library committee. Not Nao. Me. She spoke to me in passing in the hallway, because I sat alone in the library twice a week doing the crossword from the newspaper, and she said that was a way of reading too.
I said no. I don't remember exactly why. Maybe because I was tired that day, maybe because I thought it wasn't for me.
Two weeks later Nao joined, and from then on it was her place, and I never went in, except to pick her up.
That's my whole life in one sentence: I was asked, and I didn't notice quickly enough that it was a question.
3.
My mother works at the care home by the canal. Nights, three or four times a week, since I was eleven.
She never said I should do the same. She only never mentioned anything else. If a program about nurses was on, she stayed with it. When I said I didn't know what I wanted to be, she said: "There's always work with old people." Not as advice. As a weather report.
In the summer of the second year I stood in front of the list in the hallway. 160th out of 208. I waited to be frightened, and what came instead was nearer to relief: it was settled now, and I could stop pretending it was still open.
Nao asked if I wanted ice cream.
That was the right thing, and she had no idea that it was. She only knew she had nothing to say. So she bought something instead, and we ate in the shade by the bike racks, and she didn't look at me once, which was also the right thing. Sometimes helplessness is the kinder form of tact.
Then she asked whether I knew what I wanted.
I asked her back. She said yes. Half a beat too fast, and without looking up from the wrapper.
I didn't call her on it. She needed me to believe it. And I needed one of us to know.
4.
About Nakano-kun I have to set something straight. Two things, in fact, and the second one is worse.
Nao thinks I told him she had cram school on Saturdays because I wanted to help her. That's true as well. But I said it on the Tuesday he first asked me about her schedule, and in that moment I realized I had been waiting since April for him to ask me something, anything.
It wasn't serious. I don't want to make it bigger than it was. It was the kind of thing you have at sixteen and no longer have at seventeen, and not for one second did I think of getting in her way.
But it cost me two days, and then I swept and she held the dustpan and I told her I had told him, and she said thank you, and while she said it she looked at me, and I swept on quickly.
She took that for embarrassment. It was. Only not hers.
Here is the second thing.
That same week he wrote her a letter. He showed it to me at the bicycle racks, folded into a little envelope, with a rabbit sticker on it that he had clearly not chosen himself and had clearly been given by his younger sister, and he asked me — me, of all people — whether the shoe locker was too much.
I said it wasn't too much.
He kept it in his own compartment for three days, because he could not make himself walk four steps to the left, and on the morning of June first it had worked its way out where anyone passing could see it.
Nao saw it. She told me so herself on the stairs that afternoon, and she described the rabbit, and she said she'd pushed it back in and gone up.
I could have said one sentence. Four words: Nao, it's for you.
I didn't say them, and by the evening he had taken it out again, and it went wherever those things go.
That is the worst thing I have ever done, and nobody in the world knows it was done, and that is precisely what makes it the worst thing I have ever done.
5.
In the third year we were separated. 3-2 and 3-4, and he was with me in 3-4, and absolutely nothing happened.
In June we stood at the vending machine once and laughed about the modern history teacher. That was everything that happened in an entire year, and honestly it was enough, because half of him was somewhere else the whole time, and I knew where.
I never told Nao about it. Not because it's a secret. But because, spoken out loud, it would have taken on a significance it doesn't deserve.
6.
The acceptance from the nursing school came at the end of February.
I opened it at home, alone, because my mother was on nights, and I put the envelope on the kitchen table and made instant noodles and looked out of the window while I ate. It wasn't a bad moment. It wasn't a moment at all.
When my mother came in at seven thirty in the morning, she saw the envelope before she had even sat down. She didn't ask. She read it, and then she put it down and said: "Good." And then she sat down and laid her hands flat on the table, and it took about ten seconds before I realized she was crying, because she made no sound while she did it.
I waited a week before I wrote to Nao. There's no good explanation for that. I waited until she had sent her message, and then I answered that I had known for a while and hadn't had the chance to say.
That was a lie, and it was petty, and I sent it and regretted it immediately.
She wrote back: Then we'll celebrate both. Tell me when.
Six words, and she gave me every one of them. I don't know whether she noticed what I'd done. I think she did. She notices everything, she just doesn't say it.
7.
At the graduation ceremony I didn't cry.
Everyone around me cried, including the boys who had spent three years calling this school a prison. I stood in the row and sang along and wondered when my mother would wake up and whether she'd make it in time for the photographs. She made it. She stood all the way in the back, in her good jacket, holding her phone up as high as people do who still feel that the height achieves something.
Afterward I waited at the bike racks, because I knew Nao would go back to the shoe lockers one more time. She always goes back somewhere one more time. It's one of the things about her I used to make fun of.
She came out, and she had the expression she gets when she has just committed something to memory.
I said nothing. I just linked arms, the way I did in the first year, and we walked along the paddies to the station.
8.
I start in April. Three years of training, then the national examination, and after that it's a profession that will always exist, in every town, in every situation, until I'm old.
Nao is going to the capital. Forty minutes by train, which is nothing and which is everything, because it means we have to arrange to meet.
We stood at the station and didn't say goodbye, we talked about a day in the summer, and with us that's the same thing.
I think she sometimes believes she had it easier. I think she believes it more often than she admits, and that she's careful with me because of it.
She did have it easier. That's simply true, and it isn't her fault, and I will never hold it against her.
But there's one thing she doesn't know — one more thing, now, and this one I am allowed to keep — and I'll say it here, where she can't hear it:
When I said no to Iida-sensei in the first year, I saw Nao come out of the library two weeks later with three books under her arm and that completely faraway look on her face, and I walked home and thought, for the first time in my life: I want to belong somewhere that does that to me too.
It took me five years to notice that I have it now. It just isn't a room with books. It's the night shift at four in the morning, when Ōkubo-san in room 12 wakes up and no longer knows what year it is, and I sit down beside her bed and say, everything is all right, you're at home, and she believes me.
That's my library committee.
It just found me later.25Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡTtuIm3nhMB
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