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Kono Naka: Shinohara Wakaba Wa Tabi Ni Detai
[In Which Shinohara Wakaba Wants To Travel]

In the mountains in autumn
Because there are so many fallen leaves,
Looking for my lost beloved,
I cannot find the path.
- Anonymous, from the Manyoushuu

 
I was born in Tokyo, into a family of two parents, three children, a dog, and five fish. The fish all died off when I was about three years old, and my parents never bought any new ones. Money was tight in our household, because my younger brother was autistic, and most of what my father earned went towards his care and medical expenses. So then it was just two parents, three children, and the dog.

My older brother was seven years older than me, and according to the doctors, he was going to be a girl. They were going to have named him Yuriko, but he turned out to be a boy and Yuriko was definitely no name for a boy. Disappointed, they waited until I was born, but my grandmother on my father's side, who had somehow fallen in love with the name Wakaba, was adamant that my name should be Wakaba. My parents really had no choice but to agree, but story was a well-known fact in our family, and everyone except for that one particular grandmother called me Yuriko. I thought it was amusing, but I was six years old before my mother told me that story, and by that time, I'd grown up thinking that my name was Yuriko, so it stuck.

I loved animals. I loved anything furry that walked, moved, or crawled across the earth, except caterpillars. Some of the girls at school used to bully me by putting caterpillars inside my desk before I got to school in the morning, and I would be putting my books away while the teacher called roll, and I would scream. Our homeroom teacher caught on after a few times and put a stop to that, but it didn't stop the girls from banding together and ganging up on me after school, pulling my hair and kicking me and doing all the other things insecure elementary school kids did.

They said it was because I had curly hair, but I have no doubt that even if my hair was completely straight and shiny like theirs, they would have found something else to tease me about. I was always the quiet one, the shy one, and everyone knew that my brother was not quite "normal". I didn't have any friends until I got to junior high, and even then they were few. I spent most of my free time by myself, reading fantasy books or just staring up at the sky outside my window, wondering what life was like outside Japan, in a world where there were no cruel classmates and in a place where people like my brother would be treated as people.

In high school, I grew sure enough of myself to join the theatre club. You'd think that for a shy girl like me, something like theatre would be completely out of my league, but for some reason, performing on stage did not bother me. Public speaking did, and to this day I cannot stand there in front of a crowd of people I don't know and say things. Faces begin to swim in front of my eyes and I start feeling dizzy. But acting was completely different. In acting, I was someone different, someone not myself, someone who might or might not be the shy, curly-haired, mediocre student that I was at the time, and it made me feel powerful, in control.

My parents had raised me to believe that I could do anything I put my mind to, which was unusual among Japanese parents at the time. I saw all my friends graduate and either stay at home and get married, or go to vocational school and become OLs and get married, or get into a prestigious university and graduate and…get married. Rubbish, my father said. In the world of twenty years ago, perhaps, a woman's highest ambitions might have been to get married, but nowadays, in modern society, there was so much more of a future for me than that.

I took his words to heart and joined a theatre group. The pay was not much, and the practice hours were long, but I loved it. And not only that, I was apparently good at it.

I had been with the troupe for half a year when I met Saionji Kyouichi.

I suppose I couldn't actually call it a meeting, because I had known Kyouichi ever since we were in grade school. Our mothers had been best friends in university, and our fathers got along quite well. They were invited over to our house for dinner occasionally, and when they went on vacation they always brought us home a little souvenir. I know my father felt bad sometimes that we never bought them anything, but our family never went on vacation, because of my little brother.

I hated Japan sometimes because of it. I had suffered so much abuse in elementary school because of it, because my little brother was "different", and no matter how much my poor mother insisted that the view of people who had mental illnesses in Japan was changing, I had yet to see it. The Saionji family was, in my memory, the only family who never said a word, who went out of their way to help if we needed them.

But I was so shy that I'd never even spoken two words to Kyouichi whenever we saw each other. He had always been a studious boy, though with a mischievous gleam in his eyes at the oddest times, as if there was another Kyouichi, wild, rebellious, locked behind the gaze of the serious, quiet Kyouichi that we all knew.

He and I lost track of each other, I suppose, after a few years. He was about four years older than me, and I heard from my mother one morning at breakfast that he'd gone to Todai to study literature. That was nice, I said, filing that information in a corner of my mind for who knew what, and had picked up my backpack and gone to school. I didn't think about it again until that night at the play, when we had taken our last bows and I had gone backstage to change out of my costume, and there was a reporter waiting for us.

At first, I didn't recognize him. He'd bound his long green hair up into a semi-ponytail, and was wearing a casual button-down shirt and jeans, and I hadn't seen him in at least five years. He'd approached me with a friendly smile, bowing slightly.

"I'm with the Tachikawa News," he began, "and I'd like to ask you a few questions about your performance, if you don't mind."

I was slightly flattered. This was the first time I'd ever been interviewed, and I felt a little leap of joy. After every show, there would be some journalist or reporter backstage, but it had never been for me, always for one of the other leading ladies or the manager of the troupe, and I had gone home every night wondering when my turn would come. As he began asking me questions about my presentation of the character I was playing at the time, about my voice inflections and why exactly I had decided to become an actress, I couldn't help but stare at his curly green hair, the long, straight nose, the handsome planes of his face, and wonder why he seemed so familiar.

"Thank you for your time," he said, finishing up the interview, apparently unaware that I had been more engrossed in staring at him than in answering his question. Or perhaps he was used to it. He was a very handsome man. "I'll give your troupe a call when this article is printed, since I'm sure you would like to read it." He flashed a polite smile that made his face and his eyes light up, and I know I blushed, though the dim lights of the backstage didn't show it, for which I was glad. "Shinohara-san, was it?"

"And you are?" I said, more out of a duty to be polite than anything, though my heart was suddenly beating fast.

"Saionji," he said, bowing again. "Saionji Kyouichi."

It hit me all at once and my mouth dropped open. "No way. Kyouichi?"

He recognized me about two seconds after that, and we stood there in the hallway like two idiots, laughing our heads off, till the manager stuck his head out from behind the office door to see what was the matter and told us in an irritated voice to be quiet.

Kyouichi was adamant that he should take me out to dinner or something sometime so we could "catch up," as he called it. I was a little flattered and a little excited, and said yes, and gave him my cell phone number so he could get a hold of me the next time he was free. I watched as he gave me a friendly smile and a wave, and as the door closed behind him, I shook my head and blinked and wondered if it had all been a dream, because this Kyouichi was nothing like the boy Kyouichi I still had filed in my memories somewhere.

We went out for coffee in one of the little cafes lining the streets of Harajuku about two nights after that, and I'm not sure how it happened, but after we had sat there talking for at least four hours, we went home on the train and then he came over and everything was just kind of a blur from there.

Kyouichi was not my first boyfriend, but he was definitely the one that sticks out in my mind as a strong presence, someone who was not just a boyfriend but a friend, someone who I knew I could count on as being there when I needed him. All of the other boyfriends and even most of my friends would spout off things about being "there," because wasn't that what friendship was all about? And then when I actually needed them most, they were not "there."

But Kyouichi was different.

I don't think I have ever felt as alive as when I was with him. I had never been an especially attractive girl, but there were days I would walk into practice and one of my colleagues would waltz over, complimenting me on how pretty I looked that day. If it was a male colleague, it would be usually followed by "and do you want to go out to dinner tonight?" Whereas one of the girls, who knew a little more about my personal life than the men did, would interject, "Baka! She's got a boyfriend!"

My parents liked this latest development. I knew they were already planning the wedding the first time I mentioned Kyouichi's name to them, and I knew that made Kyouichi uncomfortable. He had mentioned to me many times that he was not ready to settle down yet, that the role of Japanese husband did not appeal to him. The role of dutiful Japanese wife had never appealed to me either, but sometimes looking at him, I could see myself playing that role, if it was with him.

Looking back, I realize the reason I felt so comfortable, so free with Kyouichi wasn't just because of the way he treated me, nor was it simply because of the fact that I was so in love with him I would go anywhere and do anything he asked me. I was in love with him, probably to that degree, but there are more things to being in love than lying there at night staring into a pair of pretty violet eyes and feeling his silky green hair wrap around me and feeling wanted. No, one of the main reasons I felt so at home with Kyouichi was because I enjoyed the company of his friends.

Kyouichi didn't have many friends, but those that he did have were crazy, wacky, off-the-wall, and I loved them. About a week after we officially started dating, he had sworn up and down that if I would only go with him and his friends to dinner, I'd find that I fit in completely. I had been wary at first, because none of the other boys I dated had ever wanted me to meet their friends, and when I had, I found that they were all the same – chain-smoking, crude liars to whom I was just their friend's latest conquest. So I hesitated. He finally had enough one night and told me we were going out to dinner, just him and me. It wasn't until we stepped into the diner that I realized that he had not quite been telling the truth.

I will always remember meeting Tsuchiya Ruka there in that smoky, dimly-lighted cramped eatery with the waiters squeezing between the narrow aisles delivering beer and tempura udon and curry rice and big pans of okonomiyaki fresh from the kitchen, with the raucous drunks trying to sing pop songs in the background and the gossipy women at the next table telling some scandalous tales about their boyfriends. I had been expecting a group of reporters, perhaps a few women, but mostly serious, studious boys a few years out of university, probably there to have a beer and to make small talk with Kyouichi's girlfriend before they could go home.

The first thing I noticed when we entered the diner was a table of about three or four men seated close by the door, talking and laughing over a few beers and a big plate of what looked like eggrolls. When Kyouichi pointed to that table, and one of the men turned around and waved, I had to fight hard not to let my mouth drop open.

There was a long-haired man sitting closest to me who looked up with an easy grin, and Kyouichi said he was a plumber, Mitsuru. The next man over, (Tatsuya, said Kyouichi, in a whisper, stay away from him – he's one of those womanizers – which earned a snort from Tatsuya, who said I heard that!) was an editor in Kyouichi's department. And then there was the man at the edge of the table, licking his fingers from the last eggroll he had just eaten, looking up at us with cheerful blue eyes that were almost purple in the light, through a mop of shaggy purple hair.

"You must be Shinohara Wakaba," he said, nodding his head in an almost-bow from where he was sitting. "I've heard a lot about you."

"Yuriko," I corrected automatically, feeling my cheeks heat again, doubly glad for the dim lighting this time. I felt Kyouichi's amusement as he pulled out a chair for me and then took a seat, reaching for one of the eggrolls at the same time.

"Ruka is our odd man out," Tatsuya said, grinning. "Ruka likes to travel."

"I like trains," Ruka said in a calm voice, deadpan. "I liked them so much that a few years back I decided that all I wanted to do for the rest of my life was ride them."

"You're a….conductor?" I hazarded, not believing for a moment that this man lounging on the edge of his chair was a JR train conductor.

"Oh hell no," Ruka said, and the plumber smothered a laugh. "I don't think I'd last a day working for the train system…they'd kick my ass out the door first chance they got. No, I just ride the trains. I've been all over. It's a fascinating country, Japan, and people have seen too little of it, if you ask me."

"I didn't know you could do that," I said, and Ruka laughed again. "So you…don't live anywhere? You don't have a job? Anything?"

Ruka looked contemplative. "I've got lots of friends. In all kinds of places, low, high, east, west, wherever you'd like to look. As for a job…I work odd jobs. A few months here, a few months there. I'm into construction right now, but I'm quite sure I'll get sick of it in a couple weeks. Maybe I'll go back to Hakodate."

"It's cold up there," Mitsuru protested, and Ruka shrugged.

"It's getting towards winter. I haven't been skiing in a while."

I stared at him, trying to make sense of Ruka's words. No job? No home? He sensed my confusion, because he laughed again and offered me an eggroll. I took it with one clumsy hand. "The train system in this country really is something terrific," he told me, as if confiding some important secret, blue eyes dancing mysteriously. "There isn't anything better than to just be on the train to somewhere, anywhere…even Yokohama, to look outside the window at the blue sky or the cityscapes, and realize that you're traveling across kilometers and kilometers of history. There's history everywhere here, you know. Japan is full of history. You Tokyo-ites seem to forget that sometimes."

"Aw, shut up," Kyouichi said, and the plumber laughed, and I felt my lips turn up into a smile. Ruka turned around, raising his hand for another beer.

"History, huh," I said simply, not daring to speak up and say that I'd never really been out of the Tokyo area. I'd been to Yokohama, of course, and my family had been to Enoshima once for two days during the summer when I was in the fifth grade. My older brother and my father and I had gone to play on the beach, and my mother had wandered the town with my younger brother, who had smiled so widely for weeks after that trip that I would beg my parents for the chance to go to Enoshima again, just so he could smile like that. But money was tight, and we never went.

"You'll forgive Ruka," Tatsuya said. "He's from Osaka. He's got some kind of weird Kansai wanderlust itch that he's been trying to scratch forever and hasn't quite succeeded yet."

"And probably never will," Kyouichi proclaimed. A plate of okonomiyaki appeared in the middle of the table, accompanied by the rapidly retreating form of a waiter's back, and I took a small slice for myself. It smelled heavenly and tasted just as good. "Ruka's one of those people who are like shadows, I think…never here for long, never know when he'll be back."

"But I will be back," Ruka proclaimed, placing both hands on the table and sitting up very straight, looking like an impish king on his throne presiding over court. "You know I'll always be back."

I thought about Ruka that night after Kyouichi had dropped me off at home and begged leave, saying that he had an article to finish. I wondered what it would have been like to grow up like that, without restraints, without being tied down to the town you were born in because of something you could not control. I wondered what it would be like to ride the train at night, far from the lights of Tokyo, with the shapes of people asleep in the seats around you and the only light the far-off twinkle of the stars, knowing that Japan was full of history and you were out to discover it.

"We should take a train ride somewhere," I said to Kyouichi some time after that, and he ruffled my hair and grinned.

"We should," he said.

But we never did. He was always busy and I was always busy, and I suppose it was only natural that our relationship never quite worked out like either of us wanted to. I was the one to break it off in the end, to the sorrow of both sets of our parents. But none of them wept any angry tears over it. None of them were like that – mine had raised me to be independent, to do what needed to be done, and Kyouichi's parents never meddled much in his affairs, for which both of us were grateful.

In the days that followed our breakup, I took to taking long walks around the neighborhood, hands in my pockets, wandering aimlessly, deep in thought. It would be assumed that Kyouichi's friends would be more of a hindrance than a comfort to me at the time, but I took to spending week nights at the bar or at the diner with them, the same diner in which we'd all met. Usually it was just me and Tatsuya, because Mitsuru worked odd hours now, and Ruka was…somewhere. He was always somewhere not here. It was quieter without Kyouichi and definitely quieter without Ruka, and sometimes I would sit and wonder how Kyouichi's friends had become my friends and had ceased to be his.

But one night about two weeks after Kyouichi and I had stopped seeing each other, I walked into the diner and the familiar head of purple hair was there, turned towards Tatsuya at our usual table, and I stopped in my tracks, startled, before he turned and saw me and his eyes lit up and he gave me a big smile that just made me feel like everything was right again.

"It's not good for you to take walks alone, with the crime rate going up as it is," he said later to me. "I'll go walking with you, how's that?"

We took to taking walks together after work as the sun set and the air grew quiet and still. I told him about my childhood, about my brother, and he grew grave and quiet, nodding thoughtfully to himself. I had only ever told a few people about my family, because of my fear that people would see me as odd because of my brother. But I knew Ruka was not like that.

"Japan is an odd country," he told me. "We pride ourselves on loving beauty, yet we have a specific idea of what beauty is, and if it doesn't meet our standards, we push it away and pretend it doesn't exist. That's a little strange, I think, just like saying you love dogs, but only loving one breed of dog and pretending the others don't exist."

"Sometimes I used to wish I wasn't Japanese," I said in a low voice. He didn't laugh, just nodded.

"I think many people wish that. And probably many people across the ocean wish that they were Japanese. It's not about wanting what you don't have, though…it's about looking around you and realizing Japan really is a beautiful country, through the corruption and the insensitivity and the greyness."

He never pushed himself on me, and I don't even think he was ever interested in me. Ruka was not that kind of person. Being interested in a girl would tie him down, and the one thing that made Ruka special was he was from everywhere and nowhere all at once, with no ties, nothing to hold him back. I was never interested in him in that way anyway, and so I respected his code. He'd regale me with tales from around the country, and then we would wax eloquent on the way the birds were nesting in the trees today, or perhaps if there was a sale at the department store downtown, or on how I had bought too many potatoes and I would never be able to eat them all before they went bad. He'd offered to take half the potatoes.

"Yuriko," he'd said one day, "Life is like a lightning storm sometimes. You stand in the rain and wonder what exactly you've gained by getting yourself all wet, and then the sky lights up like lightning and everything is so crystal clear."

"But the lightning doesn't last long enough," I said. "And besides, I hate thunderstorms."

Ruka snapped his fingers. "Exactly," he said. "That's why."

It wasn't till I was home that night, lying in bed, that I figured out what he had been trying to say. The next day, after work, I went to Kyouichi's apartment and knocked on the door, and as he stood there, blinking at me, I brushed past the awkward silence of not having spoken to him in a month, and told him to get dressed and look presentable, that we were going out to dinner.

"Thank you," I said to Ruka later that night as Kyouichi argued with Tatsuya about stock prices.

"I don't know what you're talking about," he said, and I laughed.

He was gone the next day, on the train on the way to Aomori up north, Tatsuya said, though he didn't sound too sure. "I think he got a call from a friend or something…who knows with him, though. I don't think the man's got a family or anyone he's really close to, to be moving around like that."

I asked Kyouichi about it the next night, after he and I had a casual dinner and were taking a walk around the park to aid our digestion, as Ruka would put it. It seemed right that he and I would be here together, not dating, just friends, because for some reason even though we might marry other people and move on with our lives, there was something that could not just be brushed aside.

"Ruka has always been like that," he said, "since I've known him. I can't even remember when or where I met him, just that he's been a dependable part of my life for many years now, and I can't imagine him being anything else. I think he has a big heart for people, and maybe that doesn't involve the meaning of relationships as most of us see relationships…but you can always count on Ruka."

"I'm glad of that, at least," I said. "I'm glad I can count on all of you." And Kyouichi had looked at me and given me a small grin.

I have not seen Ruka for about four months now. He sent all of us a postcard from Okinawa, but that's the last I have heard of him since then. I don't believe that's the last we will ever hear from him, but it is a mystery as to when we will see him again. Perhaps I'll walk into our usual diner tomorrow night and I'll see him leaning against the wall, purple hair maybe a little bit longer, a little bit shaggier, but his cheerful smile as bright as always.

Kyouichi and I will remain friends, I think, and that's as much as I really want. The two of us are too different, too independent, and I feel a small understanding to what Ruka feels, not wanting to be tied down to anything. Kyouichi is moving on with his life already – he quit his reporter job at the newspaper and got a job as a freelance editorial writer, and is very happy. I am thinking of leaving this town and maybe moving elsewhere, maybe Osaka. My parents have said they will support me in whatever I do, which is a good thing because I don't think I would have the courage to do something like that otherwise. I know Kyouichi doesn't want me to go, and Tatsuya, who I think has a small crush on me, doesn't want me to go either.

I'll see, I think. Maybe Ruka will come back before I make up my mind and I can ask him about Osaka, if the skies are as blue there as they are in Tokyo and if the little birds make their nests in the trees there too the same as they do here. Most likely he'll give me a smile and a wave and tell me to go see for myself.

But who knows? Japan is full of history, a beautiful country in which the stars shine bright at night over the tracks of the railways, and there is so much to explore that I don't think I could do it if I had a thousand lifetimes.

31 January 04