Let There Be Love
My sister, with the pretext of having “ignored her” for not making eye contact when we passed in the hallway, dragged me by the hair to my room, opened the door, and shoved me in.
The room had a sour smell, like a dump full of beer bottles and empty cans. I tried to run, but as I turned my heel, a droopy-eyed man missing front teeth kicked my shin, and I fell flat. They cackled.
Then began the usual festivities. I was to be their toy.
Then a woman wearing so much perfume as to smell like a bug-infested plant proclaimed that time was up and winked at a man beside her. The man held my arms behind my back and forced my mouth open. The woman poured the whiskey in.
I knew from prior experience that if I stubbornly refused to drink this, a worse punishment would await. So I gave in, and gulped down the whiskey in my mouth.
I was one step from acute alcohol poisoning. I heard an ominous noise nearby. “Okay, time for a second!” The woman pushed the glass in front of my face.
I already lacked the energy to run, and the hands binding me wouldn’t be shaken off no matter how much I resisted. The whiskey was poured in, and I began coughing horribly in the midst of it.
My sister squatted next to me and said, “If you can last an hour without throwing up, I’ll let you go.” I was about to shake my head, knowing there was no possible way, but before I could, she punched me in the stomach. She hadn’t even intended to give me the chance.
The firecracker-like sparking sound made me cower. I knew the amount of pain it could induce far better than she did.
Immediately, she put the electrode to my neck, and a shriek that I couldn’t imagine was my own came out my throat.
As if to fill the gaps between the pains being inflicted upon me, the alcohol brought back more nausea. When I threw up again, the crowd booed, and I suffered a particularly long tasering for it.
And yet I didn’t feel any suffering. That kind of thing wasn’t enough to “undo.”
Familiarity is a scary thing; I had become able to make it through such agony.
The small, drab library that had been in the area for over three decades had little in the way of books, but was rich with music, and I almost daily listened to their selection in the listening corner.
At first, I enjoyed intense music that tried to blow my gloom away. But I soon found that the most effective thing for dealing with agony wasn’t excellent lyrics or a snug melody, but “pure beauty,” and so my tastes shifted toward calmer songs.
Merely-fun music, merely-interesting books, merely-deep paintings - they couldn’t be relied upon in a pinch, so how valuable could they truly be?
As Pete Townshend said, “Rock and roll won’t solve your problems, but it’ll let you dance all over them.”
Forget about such “relief” as the ugly duckling becoming a beautiful swan. As I thought, the ugly duckling would have to become happy remaining ugly.
How long did it take? It could have been minutes, it could have been hours.
I stood up and went to the kitchen to gargle two cups of water, then went to the toilet to throw up again. I stood in front of the sink to brush my teeth.
I looked terrible in the mirror. My eyes were congested and red, yet my face was pale, and my shirt had stains of whiskey, puke, and blood.
No matter how much I was hurt, there was no changing that tomorrow would be an ordinary day of school. I had to get my body at least some rest.
I took the teddy bear from under my pillow and hugged it. Even I questioned such a method of consoling myself. It truly stunned me.
The public high school, having an isolated feeling from the thick trees around it, was not one I attended willingly.
There were hundreds of cigarette butts behind the gym, and about once a month, someone would get arrested or get pregnant and drop out; that was the sort of school it was.
A paper bag that still had a few things inside. A little bit of coffee flew out and stained my socks. There was laughter, but I didn’t even turn around.
But I didn’t blame her for it. I similarly wouldn’t do anything for her if she were to become a target of the students. We only looked out for ourselves.
After school, I headed directly for the city library. I wanted to listen to music, yes, but I also wanted to quickly get somewhere quiet and sleep.
I couldn’t sleep in such places, so I slept in the library. Luckily, the sorts of people who wanted to inflict harm on me didn’t come near it. Plus, I could read books and even listen to music. A fantastic invention, libraries.
Sleep deprivation fundamentally weakens people. Just halving the amount of sleep would severely lower my resistance to things like physical pain, verbal vilification, and anxiety about the future.
I wouldn’t say the hard chair in the private study room was comfortable to sleep in, but it was the one and only place where I could belong. During the open hours of 9 AM to 6 PM.
After listening to some light music, I checked out John Irving’s The Cider House Rules and read it. My drowsiness hit a peak after reading just a few pages.
The alcohol from yesterday had finally left me, and my pain had settled. I bowed my head to her, put the book back on the shelf, and left the library.
It was completely dark when I went outside. In October, the sun began to set very early.
It had been a long five years since we became penpals. In that time, my surroundings changed greatly.
Every element that made him up gave me a foreboding feeling. While I couldn’t quite express in words why I felt such ill omen, after 17 years of life, I didn’t need to say “I suppose I’d call him a bad person” or “I suppose I’d call him a good person” - at a glance, he was clearly a bad person. That was what my subconscious accumulated knowledge told me.
In addition, he was a coward, so he would only target those weaker than himself. He’d berate service workers for “hardly providing a service,” explicitly asking their names to insult them; or when a car rear-ended him, he’d force the whole family to get down and apologize in the street.
Yet he honestly seemed to believe that such actions were “manly” and that he was doing them a service.
What were the other elements? Beer, smoking, gambling. He revered them as symbols of masculinity. Perhaps he would have liked to add “women” to the list, but alas, no amount of work on his “manliness” would make any woman - my mother excluded - come near him.
Perhaps aware of this himself, he would occasionally repeat, though no one had asked, something like this: “Loving my one and only wife makes me feel like I have something to live for. So while really, I’ve had countless opportunities to go after other women, I’m not interested at all.”
I tried to break up the violence many times, but my mother told me, “Kiriko, please don’t speak up. Things only get more complicated when you’re in the equation.”
After she told me that, I came to simply stand aside and watch.
But she said such things as “I don’t want to trouble my parents,” and “I’m hopeless without a man,” even ending with “We all have our faults.”
My stepfather’s violence gradually came to also target me, his daughter-in-law. Well, it was the natural flow of things.
It wasn’t as serious as it could have been, as I wasn’t hurt in any particularly bad spots, but that one occasion got my mother furious, and the next day she briefly hinted at the idea of divorce.
Yes, only hinted. Wary of her husband’s anger, she was careful not to speak the word “divorce.”
At the time, I was in my room reading a reference book. When I heard the sound of the window shattering, my pen stopped, and I hesitantly wondered if I should go check the living room.
Just then, the door slammed open and my stepfather came running in. I nearly shrieked, and I think I should have - I should have screamed as loud as I could.
Yet I couldn’t think much more than “Great, so he won’t even let me study in peace.” Like it or not, seeing domestic violence every day got me used to it.
But as he struck me a second time, a third, a fourth, a fifth, a chilling fear arose from my core. It was my first time experiencing it.
I instantly began to cry, and my body trembled. Perhaps they were tears wept because I was already predicting the tragedy in the months to come.
My mother kept trying to grab my stepfather’s hand, but with the sheer difference in strength, she was quickly brushed off.
As if taking a liking to it, it came to be that when I didn’t listen to him, he beat my mother, and when she didn’t listen to him, he beat me.
I waited for my opportunity ever since that autumn day in sixth grade when our homeroom teacher told us he would be changing schools.
If I hadn’t squeezed out enough courage then, and hadn’t ended up exchanging letters with Mizuho, I’d have nothing to live for and probably would have died at 13 or 14. So I praised my past self.
To be honest, the “correspondence” I speak of is probably slightly different from what most people would think.
I did write things just as they happened for a few months after starting, but once my stepfather arrived and things changed completely, I started to lie about everything instead.
That isn’t to say I didn’t have any desire to complain and cry, and to have Mizuho console me. But I feared that myself changing would change him as well.
Then our correspondence would be reduced to a written form of counseling.
I didn’t want that. So I created a fictional “Kiriko Hizumi.” My father being dead, my mother remarrying the worst human alive, being horribly bullied at school, I made not a peep about.
As small details that gave my lies a hint of truth piled up, I came to feel like I was living two lives simultaneously.
Ironically, my fictional life soon overtook my real one. If, for instance, I had written letters from the standpoints of both Kiriko Hizumi and Kiriko Akazuki, and asked strangers to guess which described an actual life, I would expect nine out of ten to pick Kiriko Hizumi.
I loved Mizuho.
I did, though, feel it was strange to “love” someone who I hadn’t met in five years simply because he and I got along well. What was I doing falling for the recipient of my letters whose face I could hardly imagine anymore?
It could have also been because we really hadn’t talked much at all outside of letters, so I was only seeing his good side.
Still, I was oddly convinced of it. Mizuho was the only one in the world I could feel this way about.
Falling in love shouldn’t require explaining anything to others. If anyone does feel that such a thing is necessary, I suspect they view love as a means rather than an end.
My mind, ever eager to make itself difficult to save, decided to create an imaginary Mizuho based off his letters, handwriting, and stationery.
In my imagination, he had grown very tall after grade school, and now was about a head taller than me. A good height difference for hugging.
Normally he had a somewhat gloomy expression, and his way of speaking could be called calm at best and indifferent at worst, but his occasional smile was just as it was when he was 12.
When I returned home, I didn’t go to check the mailbox, but underneath an owl statue by the front door. I’d arranged with the friendly postman to have him put any letters sent by Mizuho Yugami there instead.
My stepfather had just put down his briefcase, and was in the middle of taking off his shoes.
“I’m home,” I meekly voiced. He quickly turned his back to me and stuffed something in his suit pocket.
I boldly asked, “Um, did you hide something just now?”
But this told me without a doubt that he felt guilty about something. And it also no doubt had to do with the thing he hid in his pocket. Such a brazen man would have no other reason to hide mere mail.
“It’s something addressed to me,” he oppressively stated. “You’d better watch your mouth.”
“In that case, can you show it to me? Just for a second.”
His face instantly showed a panicked expression. But just as quickly as it appeared, it changed to anger instead.
However, with this I was able to confirm there was an envelope poking slightly out of his pocket. From the gray, high-quality paper and handwriting of the address, I recognized it as a letter from Mizuho.
“Don’t push your luck,” he told me as he went up the stairs. I tried to chase after him, but my legs wouldn’t move. My body knew how pointless it was to resist that man.
I collapsed to the floor. He was the one person I didn’t want knowing about it.
Whenever my mother got a phone call, he’d have her report on what it was about. He opened up any and all mail that came in for himself. Whenever he had the chance, he’d sneak a peek at cellphones (though I wasn’t given one, so that wasn’t a danger I went through). And I’d seen him sneak into my room to fish through drawers more than twice.
And now this. I had to settle for him reading the letter. There would be nothing shameful written there.
Just imagining it made my pulse pound. Those letters were my treasures. My creed. My life. Losing one was more painful than my body being burned alive.
When my stepfather went to work the next day, I abandoned all shame and honor and dug through the trash cans around the house. Then I took a flashlight and searched all the trash cans along his commute.
But the all-important contents were nowhere to be found.
If this were only a one-time occurrence, then I could accept it being lost. I could just write that I’d put it in my bag to read it elsewhere and lost it along the way.
And when he found a letter addressed to Kiriko Hizumi, he’d happily stuff it in his pocket, bask in his superiority as he read it in secret, then ball it up and discard it somewhere on his way to work.
Further correspondence may be difficult, I realized.
I’m sure it must have had to do with the guilt I felt over continuing to lie to Mizuho.
This relationship is unhealthy, it should be terminated, and perhaps this incident would be a good chance to abandon it.
The feeling that bad things always come at you all at once may be an illusion along the lines of “it always starts raining when I start washing my car.”
I wasn’t particularly surprised, as I’d noticed they had their eyes on me for a while. It was akin to seeing a cloudy sky start to rain.
The degree to which my classmates detested me wasn’t extremely severe or extremely weak, but just moderately right there in the middle.
Whether it’s sports, a board game, or bullying, it’s most enjoyable to beat someone who’s “strong yet weak.”
Upon realizing that, while I had no way of making myself any stronger or weaker, just the feeling that I’d figured out the reason significantly lessened my worries.
I didn’t know where they got the water from, but it seemed to have just the same kind of impurity as the water used for end-of-the-day cleanup. People really enjoyed having me drink strange things, it seemed.
I tried holding my breath and refusing to gulp it down, but someone grabbed my neck and squeezed it, causing a considerable amount of the water to go down.
My wet uniform dripped water, and enduring the gaze of passersby, I went down the hallway to my locker in front of the classroom. But when I opened it, my jersey wasn’t there.
Such intricacy. What had driven them to go this far?
I went to the infirmary, borrowed a change of clothes, and put my uniform and jersey in the dryer.
So perhaps this shouldn’t be called suffering, but emaciation. I was being worn down day by day.
Just writing the sentence “I want to talk face to face” took twenty minutes. “Some things, I just can’t bring myself to say in letters. I want us to look each other in the eyes and hear each other talk.”
Communicating through letters had gotten difficult. I didn’t have a cellphone. Even using the home phone was difficult with my family watching, and I didn’t have the money to have satisfyingly long conversations on a public phone.
Maybe I could fool him if it were only a couple of hours, but if our relationship were going to continue outside of letters, I wouldn’t be able to hide the truth forever.
When I reunited with Mizuho, I would have to confess my lies. How would he respond to that?
After all, I seemed to have some uncommon quality that made everyone everywhere hate me at all times. I needed to take that into account.
Perhaps the worst case scenario was Mizuho would scorn me for my lies, call me tactless, and disappear from my life.
However, if Mizuho showed his distaste for me, and I nullified it, I would retain the memory of him rejecting me. Would I be able to continue our correspondence with a straight face, knowing that?
When all hope is lost, what am I to do?
What a good world. So many easy and reliable ways to end a life. And that’s why I was able to live so intently.
Until the moment I well and truly couldn’t stand it, I would hold tight to the controller to uncover all the details of this sick game.
As I walked the residential streets filled with warm light, all the families seemed to be living in harmony. But I figured the reality couldn’t be so, and they all had their own terrible problems to deal with.
After waiting a week feeling like the girl in Please Mr. Postman, there was still no reply from Mizuho. I began to lose my mind, unable to stop imagining bad possibilities.
No one would be itching to meet such a ghastly girl, I thought.
Ten days passed. I began to consider the possibility of carrying out my railroad crossing fantasy.
Upon returning from the library, I saw the familiar postman arrive at my house and run off.
I turned around and greeted the mailman; he had purposefully come back for me. The short man in his early forties kindly returned the greeting.
“I was here a moment ago and was about to put this under the owl as usual, but your father was just coming home. You want to avoid him seeing it, right?”
I was too grateful to say a word. Thank you, thank you. I deeply bowed to him again and again.
So I replied in the same way. “You don’t need to worry about it. Besides, isn’t this all too common?”
Not wanting anyone to interrupt the moment, I went to the waiting area of a local bus station and opened the envelope.
I folded up the letter, put it back in the envelope, and held it over my heart. The sides of my mouth naturally lifted, a smile eking out. My breaths seemed a little warmer than usual.
“Mizuho,” I whispered.
There was an incident in which money was stolen from a student’s wallet, and having not been in the classroom at the time, I was the number one suspect.
There were less than thirty minutes until my meeting with Mizuho, so I was agitated and spoke harshly.
The teachers had their doubts. They knew the kind of treatment the students usually subjected me to, and began to question if I was getting payback. They deemed the infirmary business to be a blatant creation of an alibi.
I ignored them shouting “Do you think you can run?” from behind me. By doing this, they’d obviously only be further convinced of my guilt. But did I care? It was neither here nor there.
Luckily, it was within walking distance of school. If I hurried, I could get there within thirty minutes.
More calamity awaited. Right after turning a corner, a bicycle flew out in front of me. We both went the same way to try and avoid each other and collided head-on.
The high schooler riding the bike ran up and apologized furiously. I acted like it was nothing, stood up, said “Sorry, I’m in a hurry,” pushed him away, and started on my way again.
“Um, don’t worry about the accident. Could you take me to the train station in exchange?”
Ultimately, I seemed to get there faster than I would have on foot. Luck hadn’t given up on me just yet.
On reaching the roundabout outside the station, I said “This is good enough,” got off the bicycle, and hurried to the building while holding my leg.
I stood alone underneath the flickering fluorescent lights. After watching the second hand of the clock complete three revolutions, I sat in one of the chairs, of which there were only six.
I mechanically read the words, but caught none of their meaning. Still I continued to flip pages.
I wasn’t expecting that if I waited like this, Mizuho would come running up to me out of breath.
I turned and saw the boy who brought me here. I couldn’t be bothered to explain the situation, so I nodded.
I did the same. “No, there was no chance of me making it in the first place. In fact, you taking me on your bicycle got me here much faster than expected. Thank you very much.”
The boy was about a head taller than me, and had sort of a melancholy air about him. He bought warm milk tea from a vending machine and offered it to me.
A knit blazer and a gray necktie. It was different from the numerous uniforms I’d seen coming home from school, and it wasn’t a uniform from any of the high schools I’d hoped to attend.
I took my time searching every nook and cranny of my memory. That was it. About two years ago, something had led me to use a computer at the library to research a certain high school.
I felt pathetic for even briefly entertaining such a ridiculous idea.
Noticing me looking at him, the boy blinked with a “What is it?” kind of look. I quickly averted my eyes. He looked at me curiously for a while. The modesty of his gaze just made me more nervous.
We were suddenly alone in the station.
“Are you waiting for someone?”, the boy asked.
My words came to a halt. He waited for me to continue. But upon realizing that the words that would follow after “I just” were “feel comfortable next to you, so I don’t feel like leaving,” I had to close my mouth.
“Um… I’m grateful for your concern, but you don’t need to accompany me forever. I’m hardly unable to move from my injuries or anything. I’m just staying here because I want to.”
“…Is that right?”
“Something kind of sad happened today,” he sighed. “I’m sure me running you over earlier was because I let myself be totally distracted by it. I know it’s no reason to moan to you about it, but the moment I leave here and I’m alone, I’m gonna have to face up to my sadness again. I don’t want to do that, so I’m not moving from this spot.”
He stretched and closed his eyes. The mood lightened, and I felt myself getting sleepy.
It wasn’t until some time later that I realized the person sitting next to me was the boy I adored.
If we hadn’t dodged the same direction and collided, we might have easily passed each other by. I was grateful for that happenstance.
In my foolishness, I misinterpreted him as meaning a confession of love and was thrown into disarray. Having thought so much about how wonderful it would be if he felt the same way, I couldn’t get around to considering the other possibilities.
Oh, what do I do? I was conflicted. While I very glad that Mizuho felt that way, there was no way I could respond to that. Because the girl he loved was someone separate from the “Kiriko Akazuki” who stood before him.
I could just tell him the truth after he’d confessed to me, my cunning side said. Once I’ve squeezed that brief happiness enough to crush it, I could reveal that I was Kiriko Akazuki, who had no right to his love, and endure his scorn.
He’d been thinking about me for that long? I grew happier, but also sadder. Probably because I’d been betraying Mizuho for that long, too. For that long, I’d played with him using my illusion of the non-existent Kiriko Hizumi.
My conscience had a second wind. “Um, Mizuho, I…”, I bravely interrupted, but Mizuho spoke over me.
At last, I noticed I was making a major misunderstanding. He wasn’t confessing his love for me.
“What in the world…?”, I uttered, half with relief. “What do you mean?”
And then I learned the truth.
I was glad that we had told the same sorts of lies for the same reasons since the same time, glad that his appearance and general air and speaking were just as I imagined them, so very, very, very glad, that it no longer seemed the time to reveal my own secrets.
After regaining some presence of mind, I heard some unthinkable words come out of my mouth.
What was I, the pot calling the kettle black?
“So really, you never had a single friend, did you?”
“I see.”
I stopped talking there, brought the empty can of milk tea to my lips, and pretended to sip it.
He was a liar, but an honest liar, I thought to myself. And I was a dishonest liar.
“Hey, Mizuho,” I cooed.
“Please, at least answer this next question without lying. What were you thinking when you met me?”
I, the one generally pleading for such a thing, took advantage of Mizuho’s honesty.
And most importantly, I wanted to attempt in reality - unilaterally, at that - the fantasies that had come to mind during our correspondence.
“Mizuho, you should spend more time with others,” I informed him. “Looking at you, your biggest problem seems to be that you’re used to your one-person rhythm. So first, you need to start learning the rhythm of two people.”
“You can just meet with me. More frequently.”
“Are you bothered, Mizuho?”
“Well, I’m glad too.”
“That’s because I think you don’t need to understand.”
Since there was a danger of there being people who knew me at the train station, we changed our meeting place to a gazebo on the side of a walking path in the Western-style residential district a five-minute walk away.
It was a small gazebo with a green-painted hexagonal roof and one long seat. We sat in it with a CD player between us and listened to CDs, using an earbud each, with the person bringing the CDs switching off each time.
The cords on the earbuds connecting us were short, so we naturally leaned close to each other, and sometimes our shoulders would happen to touch.
“Kiriko, doesn’t this make things kind of cramped?”, Mizuho shyly asked.
I provided a valid-sounding logic to justify the distance. He just replied “Guess you’re right,” then fully leaned on my shoulder.
It was a lowly act that couldn’t be forgiven. Were I struck by lightning, hit by a meteor, or run over by a car, I would have no right to complain.
I need to tell him the truth someday, I told myself.
Just a little longer. Can’t I indulge in this dream for just a little longer? So the lies kept coming.
Yet a month after my reunion with Mizuho, a sudden end came to that relationship. My mask came off, and he saw my true colors.
Unfortunately, this was a school full of sticky-fingered individuals where wallets and other items were pilfered almost daily, so responsibility for all of these events came to be pinned on me.
I suspected this meant they’d already ransacked my locker and desk as well.
Of course, there was no reason for them to find the stolen student ID, so the search ended after about twenty minutes. But that didn’t mean it was the end period.
As I landed, my foot slipped and I landed in the mud. Then the contents of my bag came raining down on me one by one. The laughter gradually faded into the distance.
I felt a sharp pain in my thigh. In tripping, I’d been cut with a shard of glass or something, making a long wound that bled profusely.
I felt like something was tightly gripping my stomach, making it hard to breathe regularly. It seemed I could feel hurt just like anyone else.
But before I find that, I have to gather up the contents of my bag. My notebooks and such are probably now useless, so I’ll only take the minimum of what I need.
I took a look around. Not only was it pitch black, there were fences on both sides of the ditch, so no one could even see me.
So for the first time in a while, I cried. I held my knees and huddled up, and let out sobs.
The people who had pushed me into the irrigation ditch didn’t necessarily throw all of my belongings into the mud. A few printouts and notebooks were left on the road to be scattered by the wind.
Whoever it was, I didn’t want them to see me crying in the mud.
“Kiriko?”, a familiar voice called, and my heart nearly froze over. I immediately laid my face down to hide myself.
“Is that you, Kiriko?”, he asked again. I kept silent. But when he called my name again, I made up my mind to reveal myself.
Coming clean was something I would have to do someday. Trying to prolong it as I had only led to my lies being exposed in this terrible way.
He didn’t answer my question. “Ah, so it is you, Kiriko.”
Saying nothing else, Mizuho threw something up into the air, hopped down, and landed on his bottom in the mud. There was a splash, and a few drops of mud hit my face.
He lied down face-up just as I had been doing. Not a care about his clothes and hair getting muddy.
“Yes?”
We lied down together in the mud, looking up at the full moon.
How I’d been lying in my letters since middle school. My family situation becoming tumultuous with the arrival of my stepfather and stepsister. Starting around the same time, being bullied at school as well, leaving me with nowhere to be. And all the details of the treatment I’d received.
Seemingly on purpose, he didn’t make any sounds of affirmation or say apologetic things; he simply listened to me in silence.
This came off to me as an extreme appeal to the fact that they were listening, and I distinctly remember how uncomfortable that forced “sincerity” made me.
It still didn’t change the fact that I was worrying him. Anyone hearing such a serious opening of my heart would surely feel some kind of a sense of duty. “I need to tell her something comforting.”
But no such magic words existed. My problems were too involved, and no practical solution