Tomo-chan had been hoping for this for nearly five years, and now it was finally about to happen.
The person she’d liked for so long was starting to feel the same way about her.
Tomo-chan was trying to keep her cool.
But deep down inside, she didn’t feel anxious at all.
The person she liked was texting her frequently and had started inviting her out to eat. This is nice was what she thought.
The person she liked worked for a company on a different level of her office building. Tomo-chan knew the company published a travel magazine, but because she didn’t travel very much, she wasn’t very interested in the magazine.
Tomo-chan did admin and odd jobs at a small design firm and always had the radio playing at her desk. When she heard a song she liked, she bought the CD from a music store nearby and played it a few times in the car on her way home. She’d try singing along, too, in her high, slightly reedy voice. Doing this would bring back all kinds of memories, so she’d go and park by the riverbank nearby, to sit quietly and listen to the sound of insects for a while.
This kind of stillness had always been very important for Tomo-chan.
She’d recently heard a song about a dragon named Puff that had been popular some time ago. Whenever she listened to it, Tomo-chan felt so strongly for poor Puff, abandoned and forgotten by Jackie, that she found herself starting to cry—and not just so her eyes would brim with tears, but she’d weep and sob enough that she usually tried to avoid thinking about the song at all.
Tomo-chan’s heart took her on so many journeys over the course of its movements and fluctuations that she didn’t feel the need to travel. If she joined friends for a trip to a hot spring, she might notice the change of scenery, but that was all. She’d had two relationships so far, and both had petered out because she was such a homebody. Her boyfriends came away almost impressed by how stubbornly she stuck to her unremarkable habits, and also how they could never tell what she was thinking.
For most people, being raped, even once, would be enough to make them wary of men.
That wasn’t true of Tomo-chan.
And even though she was only sixteen when an older boy whom she’d known since they were both kids had taken her to the river, dragged her out of his car, and violated her, Tomo-chan never came to hate that spot on the riverbank, either.
That memory paled in comparison to the breezes that blew through there, the cold texture of the weathered bench where she often sat, and the view that changed with the seasons.
She came to loathe the boy who did it, of course.
She’d already noticed as they were having a meal together that she was repulsed by the way he ate his food. He doesn’t respect it, she thought. Tomo-chan preferred to take her time when she ate, and the way he did it—as though he was shoveling the food into a roaring void—made her shudder.
Tomo-chan and her mother had kept a small vegetable patch in their garden, so she was used to carefully preparing undersized produce, or eating green beans three meals a day, and she hated to throw out even a shriveled potato or a daikon top. So it stood to reason that she found the boy very unlikable. But out of some momentary lapse of judgment, or maybe an uncharacteristic burst of curiosity, she had gone with him. At sixteen, being alone with a boy was new and exciting, and while hearing about the kinds of things he thought about was slightly tedious in some ways, it was also very interesting. She was also fascinated by the unfamiliar shapes of his neck and hands. That was why she got in his car.
Of course she knew that men and women had sex, having seen it in movies and so on, but what she learned was that if you didn’t like the other person, it wasn’t at all enjoyable, only sickening and humiliating. But I put myself in this position, she thought, lying still and trying to make sense of it.
Tomo-chan wasn’t religious, but by nature she was very good at believing. As the disgusting wetness spread between her legs, she thought, over and over: He did this to me against my will. He abused his power as a man. Who knows what will happen to him now? And although there was no ill intent in her words, nonetheless, they acted as a pure and powerful curse.
As she was leaving, she said to him, in an oddly cold voice, “I hope something extraordinary comes your way.”
The following week, the boy got in a traffic accident that left the bones of his hands and feet in pieces and crushed one of his testicles. He was hospitalized for half a year.
Six months a pop, Tomo-chan thought, and this, too, seemed to make sense to her, in some unknowable way.
How Tomo-chan had fallen in love with Misawa-san, the person she liked, was a mystery even to her.
She had often seen him in the café on the first floor of their office building. Misawa-san was around forty, tall and slim, already considerably bald, and had hairy fingers. Which was to say he didn’t come across as handsome at all. But Tomo-chan couldn’t keep her eyes off him. When she looked at him, something dashing seemed to rise out of him that spoke far more loudly to her than the way he looked.
Tomo-chan tended to move slowly.
It took two years for her to start making eye contact with him and nodding when they met.
And in any case, Misawa-san often met his girlfriend for lunch.
Seeing them together pained Tomo-chan’s heart. The two of them looked very close. Misawa-san’s girlfriend was pretty, though not a great beauty, and tall like him, and had good posture and big round eyes with long lashes. She seemed quiet and composed. She and Misawa-san smiled at each other even when they didn’t have much to say.
I bet they’re going to get married. That’s nice, Tomo-chan thought.
It is perhaps worth mentioning about Tomo-chan’s character that because she saw the two of them were happy together, it never occurred to her to picture herself coming between them.
It simply transpired that she and Misawa-san saw each other often enough that they naturally started to acknowledge each other, which was a development that was quite welcome to Tomo-chan.
Tomo-chan also had an almost compulsive aversion to taking something that wasn’t rightfully hers.
Her father had walked out on Tomo-chan and her mother after falling in love with another woman. This woman was his secretary and had spent a lot of time in their home. At first, she had seemed unassuming, and was kind to Tomo-chan, and considerate and helpful to her mother.
But before they knew it, the secretary was the one cooking dinner for Tomo-chan’s father in the small kitchen at his office, where he often stayed late working on his interior design business, and eating with him. Tomo-chan even heard she had started taking cooking lessons just for this. She called up every night claiming to have work to discuss, and when Tomo-chan’s father stayed home sick with a cold she personally brought him a basket of fruit, and when Tomo-chan and her parents planned to visit her grandmother out of town, some urgent work always came in at the last minute and kept her father from joining them.
“Some people can’t resist trying to take what doesn’t belong to them,” Tomo-chan’s mother would laugh, back when she still had the upper hand.
One winter her father broke his leg on a company ski trip and had to go to the hospital. Tomo-chan and her mother flew to Hokkaido only to find the secretary pressing her young body up against his, crying dramatically. She had taken his hand and was rubbing it against her cheek.
“Don’t cry,” he murmured to her, clearly besotted. “It’s only a broken leg.”
How is this happening? Tomo-chan wondered. Mom and I—we rushed up here—with all his favorite food to cheer him up—but now we’re just standing here with our mouths haning open. Can it really look like she cares more than we do? And if the answer is no, then why can’t he see through it?
Tomo-chan had seen the secretary earlier, downstairs in the cafeteria opposite the hospital’s reception desk. She’d been smoking a cigarette while digging into a plate of omurice and breezily chatting away on her phone. Tomo-chan was amazed at the difference in her demeanor between then and now, the suddenness of the transformation. No one could say her distress wasn’t genuine. It was just that there was definitely something vulgar about it, too.
“Please forgive me for crying. I was so worried about him, I couldn’t help myself,” the secretary said.
“Your dedication to your job is admirable,” Tomo-chan’s mother said curtly. Tomo-chan loved her for that. She loved her, and as that feeling of love welled up, she gave her mother’s hand a squeeze. There in that hospital room, the two of them were like ships that had run aground and had nowhere to go.
Tomo-chan took a lesson from that intolerable scene at the hospital. She vowed: I’m going to find a man with a warm heart. Someone who’d never fall for such a cheap trick. There must be someone out there like that.
It might have been a particular conversation she overheard between Misawa-san and his girlfriend that first made Tomo-chan like him.
“Between my dying dog and work? Of course the dog comes first—the company’s not going anywhere. I take my work seriously the rest of the time, so they can’t possibly think less of me for it.”
It seemed that Misawa-san had taken two days of leave to be with his dog on its deathbed.
“I think you’re absolutely right,” his girlfriend said. She nodded slowly.
“I mean, we got Shishimaru when I was still in college. I’d have regretted it forever if I hadn’t been there for him at the end,” Tomo-chan heard Misawa-san say.
They’re a nice couple, Tomo-chan thought again. But rather than feeling jealous, or even envious, she was thinking about finding someone like that for herself.
Perhaps no man could help feeling drawn to a younger body when it threw itself at him. But the fact that Tomo-chan’s father got dragged all the way into marrying the secretary was entirely on him.
Tomo-chan’s mom didn’t immediately grant him a divorce. She said she’d give it three years, and divorce him if he hadn’t come back by then.
In the meantime the secretary had Tomo-chan’s father’s baby. She must have dedicated every last drop of her mental energy to befuddling and bamboozling him in order to make this happen, and most likely given herself a headache in the process.
“Who are you trying to impress?” Tomo-chan had asked her the last time they met. Her mom had decided she didn’t feel up to facing the woman, so Tomo-chan had gone instead to hand over the divorce notice that her mom had finally signed.
Tomo-chan didn’t have a lot of friends, but she did treasure many things: her coworkers, her parents, her pet parakeet, her pothos plants, romantic movies . . . the list was endless. Life, for Tomo-chan, was about making sure she was neatly surrounded by all the things that were important to her.
“I’ve always gone after what I want. It’s just who I am,” the secretary said with a shrug.
She’s being honest for once, Tomo-chan thought. If only she was always like this, maybe we could have been friends.
The baby in her belly must have made the woman speak candidly. And that was what convinced Tomo-chan to let her father go. He wanted to leave, after all. And since he naturally gravitated toward roles that enabled him to realize his ideas, perhaps her mom had always been too much the finished article for him, instead of someone he could shape—maybe it all made some kind of sense.
For some time after that, whenever an ad came on TV that had been shot in Hokkaido, Tomo-chan immediately felt nauseated, and sometimes vomited. They made her remember the way the freezing damp air had pricked her cheeks, which would take her straight back into that hospital room, and then humiliation rose inside her, hot and slow: the anguish of being trapped in a place that should have been hers—where she should have most belonged—but where she was no longer welcome.
Sometime in the spring, Misawa-san started eating lunch alone.
Tomo-chan noticed the change immediately. He looked glum and had bags under his eyes. He seemed to have lost his spark.
She thought perhaps this was the opportunity she’d been waiting for. But she also wanted to leave a hurting person be. So she gently kept her distance and waited. She wasn’t sure that someone else wouldn’t get to him in the meantime, but he was getting thinner before her eyes and so she told herself, Too soon. Not yet. It would be like force-feeding a sick bird.
She waited, not like a hawk watching its prey, but easily, like a bud that was waiting for its time to flower.
Then, one day, it happened—the coincidence she’d been waiting for.
The café was busy that day, and Tomo-chan ended up sharing a table with Misawa-san and two of his coworkers.
Misawa-san said, “I’m sorry, we’re crowding you.” She smiled in reply. His courtesy made her want to smile at him.
At first, Misawa-san and his coworkers, who were a couple, chatted among themselves, while Tomo-chan took tiny mouthfuls of her ground chicken on rice and reveled in her happiness. But soon the couple started making vacation plans, excluding Misawa-san, and he turned to her and saw her for the first time.
“Do you travel a lot for work?” Tomo-chan asked.
Misawa-san nodded.
What does it mean, she asked herself, that I like him all the way down to his hairy fingers, and their overgrown fingernails?
It was much like how, as a bird lover, she never found the grotesque cleft inside a parakeet’s throat off-putting.
“Do you know anywhere in Hokkaido that would make me fall in love in spite of myself?” she asked.
“Sure, you could marry me and come to Otaru, my hometown! What do you say?” Misawa-san said, and laughed.
Tomo-chan felt like her heart would jump out of her chest, but Misawa-san didn’t seem at all embarrassed. He just sat there with a smile on his face.
“Excuse the joke, but I did grow up in Otaru. There are lots of great places around there. Do you have something against Hokkaido?” he asked.
“I do. I went there once, and it made a bad impression.”
“It can happen to the best of us. What can we do to change that? Because I think Hokkaido is wonderful.”
Misawa-san smiled. It was a genuine smile that said, Let me show you what I love about it. Tomo-chan gave him her number, and they started to text.
The first time they went for a meal together was at a little lunch spot fifteen minutes away from their office building.
Misawa-san had taken the time to gather a briefcase full of information for Tomo-chan, including photos, past issues of his magazine, and brochures from hot spring inns.
“You’ll find plenty of places to stay with great views just a short distance out of town. Are you going with your boyfriend?” Misawa-san asked.
“I really wanted to take my mom. But she passed away a little while ago, so I think it’ll just be me. So she can make her peace with Hokkaido, too,” Tomo-chan said.
“How did she pass?”
“She had a brain hemorrhage. It was very sudden.”
That night, Tomo-chan had been at the hospital, where she had rushed as fast as she could, all alone. She wanted to call for her father. But it had been so long since she’d seen him that the man she longed for was the kind father who’d been at her side years and years ago, but who was no longer anywhere to be found. Her father now was a stranger who belonged in a different home, with a new family, and was probably spending the evening with them relaxing and watching TV.
Tomo-chan’s grandma and aunt were on their way from their hometown, but wouldn’t get there for a while yet. Her mom had suffered a series of seizures and had already taken her last breath by the time Tomo-chan arrived. In the emergency room, everyone around her was coming and going in a hurry. She noticed a patient who’d been brought in by ambulance getting discharged to go home with their family, and started to cry.
We should have been taking you home, too, Mom, she thought.
But she told herself that it was too late, that what had happened had happened, that she had no choice but to face it. She was outside in the hospital garden, leaning against a tree in the sheer darkness and looking upward. She saw the dark branches silhouetted prettily like lace against the dark of the sky. They were swaying. The bark of the tree’s trunk was warm at her back.
Tomo-chan recalled all of this and felt like she might cry.
“I’m sorry . . . That must have been hard,” Misawa-san said. “Let me help. I want to make sure your trip is just the way you want it. That makes me sound like a travel agent, but I can probably give them a run for their money when it comes to local knowledge.”
Tomo-chan nodded.
Misawa-san had sturdy legs, from all that walking around he must do, traveling to different places for work, and the strength to carry around a heavy bag like it was nothing.
If I could go to Hokkaido with you, I know I’d fall in love with it. The words were in her throat, but she couldn’t say them yet.
She just pictured herself saying them and flushed scarlet all over her face and neck, all the way down to her collarbones.
Now, if you’ll allow me to change the subject—
Tomo-chan is not the one writing this story. That is down to a novelist who has caught occasional glimpses of her life. But this writer, too, is not writing it herself, but rather is doing it on behalf of something greater, which for our present purposes we can call God.
Every day, people all around the world direct one urgent question its way: Why me? Why did this have to happen to me? And well they might. God doesn’t lend a hand. God didn’t open Tomo-chan’s dad’s eyes to what he was doing, or throw down a bolt of lightning from heaven to stop her from being raped, or materialize in the hospital garden to put an arm around her shoulder when she was all alone and crying.
Nor is it certain that things will work out well for her and Misawa-san. They might head to Hokkaido together, but her small breasts and dark nipples might be a disappointment to him, or her inscrutable air of fatalism put him off. Then again, he might find that same mystique attractive to the point that they decide to get married. But even then, Tomo-chan isn’t guaranteed her happily-ever-after. Even Misawa-san might someday run away with a younger woman just like her father did.
Whichever of these comes to pass, God won’t lift a finger to help.
But Tomo-chan has always been watched over, albeit by powers too puny to be called gods. They offered neither compassion, nor tears, nor encouragement, but they witnessed her, all too neutrally, as she slowly built up a reserve of something important in herself.
When she watched her dad being led astray by the secretary, and felt so deeply hurt, and tossed and turned at night, they saw her small back curled tight, and the sadness in her chest. They saw the unyielding hardness of the ground beneath her when she was overpowered by the boy’s desires at the riverside where they had played together as children, and her vacant, forlorn expression as she walked home on her own afterward.
Later, when her mom died, even in the dark of the night when she was more alone than she had ever been, Tomo-chan was safely held. By the velvety glow of the night, the touch of the wind as it drifts softly past, the blinking of stars, the voices of insects, and things like that.
Somewhere deep down, Tomo-chan knew this all along. And so she was never really alone.