Too Good to Be True
For the few days to follow, I was obedient. I didn’t go out except to eat, and keeping myself to a small area, I just kept folding paper cranes with a ton of origami paper I bought from the stationery store.
Looking at all the cranes lined up on the table, Miyagi asked, “Are you making a thousand-crane chain?”
Miyagi picked up a blue one from among the dozens, pinching it by both wings, and looked at it with interest. “You intend to do so all by yourself? For what?”
The cranes flooded off the table, and would be blown all over the floor by the slowly-turning fan, coloring the dull room.
But meanwhile, Miyagi’s attitude toward me softened. When we met eyes, she actually looked at me. Rather than looking at me like an object, I’d say she was much more warm than before.
In any event, she was with me for the purposes of her job. If I were to forget that, it would surely come back to bite me.
After five days, the task was finally done. While I went through recounting them, I found many cranes that were too good to believe I made them.
I ran a string through the thousand cranes, and hung my completed creation from the ceiling.
It was the letter to myself ten years in the future. I’d left it in my pocket since the day I dug up the time capsule.
This is what it said.
To me ten years from now:
You’re the only one I can count on to do this.
Because Himeno’s hopeless without me,
“You were surprisingly honest and kind ten years ago,” she remarked after reading, impressed. “So then, what do you intend to do?”
“Go meet Himeno,” I replied. “I’m starting to realize how foolish and pointless that is. I can definitely acknowledge how stupid it is to still be attached to a childhood friend I haven’t seen in a decade. But this is a request from myself. I made it ten years ago to me right now, and I want to respect it. Sure, it might bring me more pain. I might be even more disappointed. But until I see it with my own eyes, I can’t give up.
”…I want to talk with her just one more time. And as thanks for giving me my life, I want to give her the 300,000 yen from selling it. Even if I’ve already spent some of it. You might be opposed, but I don’t care. It’s my lifespan, and my money.”
But later I would think back on them, and realize their true meaning.
“Indeed. It seems she’s been depending on them ever since her husband left.”
I uncharacteristically told her “Thanks.”
To explain how I knew where Himeno lived after changing schools, first I’d have to talk about the single letter I received from Himeno in the summer, when I was 17.
It really seemed like the kind of things a 10-year-old girl would write, but in the handwriting of a 17-year-old girl.
Or was it simply that, despite how she talked, she always wrote like she was an ordinary girl?
Unable to find a satisfactory answer to my doubts, two weeks later, I sent a reply rather similar in content to the letter I’d received.
I patiently waited for a reply, but after a week, after a month, there were no further letters from Himeno.
Maybe I didn’t write it very well, was my thought then. But… by then, Himeno was already carrying the child of someone I didn’t even know. The child of someone she married at 18, then divorced a year later.
Looking back on it like this, I can’t say it was a good memory. But the letter she sent did tell me where she was. I was glad for that now.
As I put the key in my moped and put my foot on the kick pedal, I remembered something Miyagi said.
“Oh yeah, I can’t go more than 100 meters from you, huh.”
“I guess it can,” I said. The second-hand Cub 110 I bought for commuting to school had a tandem seat instead of a rear carrier. I didn’t have a spare helmet, but nobody could see Miyagi, so it wasn’t like anyone would stop us.
“No way. Don’t worry about it.”
While going down a long straight road, I noticed a tall tower of clouds in the sky.
Even the rare unhappy person I passed by seemed to be relishing their unhappiness.
“Hmm… I don’t think I’d know until I was in that position,” she replied, then looked around her. “Um, I know I told you before, but you shouldn’t talk to me in places like this. They’ll think you’re a strange guy who talks to himself.”
But I didn’t mind. In fact, I wanted to be actively weird. Better to remembered as a weirdo than not remembered at all, I suppose I thought.
When I stood up after finishing breakfast, Miyagi came up beside me.
“Ooh, I’d love to hear them.”
“The lake is… just a lake. However, I do remember looking at an incredible starry sky there. It may be one of the most beautiful sights I’ve seen among my shabby life experiences. There are no doubt more beautiful sights in the world, but as far as those I "know,” that starry lake is the most.“
"I see. …And the grave, you wanna make sure you buy a piece of land?”
“Huh. Suppose it’s a guy?”
She evidently didn’t want to go any deeper.
I thought. A person who was important to Miyagi. Well, she became an observer at ten. And by someone who “was once” important to her, she was probably talking about someone from before that.
“That doesn’t seem like you. A lot more timid when it’s you, huh?”, I laughed.
I found Himeno’s house so easily, I did a double-take.
But the place I found with the map was a seedy-looking dwelling with so little personality, you’d forget it if you looked away for five seconds.
I didn’t hesitate as I pushed the doorbell because I still had the faint impression that she wasn’t there. I rang the doorbell three times three minutes apart, but no one came to the door.
“Public library” caught my eye. Ever since I visited the school library this morning, a faint desire to read had been bubbling up in me.
It looked like a neat little library on the outside, but one step inside told me it was a horribly old place.
I figured I would only read those books. I didn’t want to read one that had essentially lost its value at this point and regretfully think, “What was so enjoyable about reading this?”
Maybe it would have been different a month later. But then, my choices were Paul Auster, Kenji Miyazawa, O. Henry, and Hemingway. Not particularly interesting picks.
“Wanting to try observing and reading at the same time?”, I asked in a whisper.
She sure does have a calming smell to her, I thought.
I read until the library closed at 6 PM. Sometimes I’d go outside to rest my eyes and smoke in the smoking area.
The sun set, and the safety lights on the power poles came on. Cigarette butts piled up by my feet. Miyagi looked at them disapprovingly, so I took a portable ashtray out of my bag and collected them.
It seemed best to call it a day and try again some other time.
There seemed to be a summer festival going on at the shrine up ahead. I was just starting to feel hungry, so I stopped the Cub in a parking lot and went walking through the sauce-scented stands, looking for something good to eat.
I hadn’t seen such a festival in ten years. I’d stopped going to the local one since Himeno left.
I bought octopus dumplings, shaved ice, broiled sweet corn, usuyaki, deep-fried chicken, a candy apple, a chocolate banana, grilled chicken, grilled squid, and tropical juice, and took them all to the stone steps.
“What are you doing buying all that?”, Miyagi asked, shocked.
I started working through them. Miyagi hesitantly reached into my bag and began eating the usuyaki.
By the time we’d partaken in all twelve items, Miyagi and I were deeply fed up with the smell of food. We both had pretty small stomachs, after all; it was like trying to fit a volleyball in there.
Everyone passing through looked cheery… in short, it was no different from that day ten years ago.
That day, too, I - Himeno and I - had sat on the steps like this, looking at the people walking down below. We conceded we had no right to mingle among them.
Furthermore, she said that if we both hadn’t found someone to marry in ten years, being that we were both “on the shelf,” we should be together.
Well, I was in that summer now. And the girl who made that promise wasn’t on the shelf, but was second-hand goods - and my life was going to end with me being not only unsold, but unfit to sell.
Once more I prayed at that shrine surrounded by the buzzing of cicadas.
I noticed quite a lot of time had passed. I heard Miyagi’s pencil against her notebook. The festival was drawing to a close, the shadows of people growing sparse.
Some things are too good to be true. So people say.
With each step she took, everything from the day we first met at 4 years old, to the summer day she went away and moved schools, ran through my mind.
“Himeno.”
The girl stopped and looked at me with hollow eyes.
Himeno said my name in the same transparent-esque voice that only she had.