Book Girl and the Captive Fool (21 page)

Akutagawa raised his face.

Once more, surprise spread over his handsome, masculine features.

I held out my hand.

“Let’s be friends. Even if we fight or part ways eventually, for now I want to be your friend.”

Akutagawa watched me, his eyes still wide.

I submitted myself to his gaze.

Even if he hurt me or if I hurt him, something new would come out of it—a bond that would mature.

Believe that—

Akutagawa’s eyes crinkled warmly.

Then he reached out a big hand and powerfully gripped mine.

His hand was flushed with heat. I squeezed it back firmly.

There was no need to acknowledge this with words.

We were friends now.

It’s been a long time since I wrote to you.

In these last two months, I’ve received many letters from you, but I haven’t been able to respond. I hope you can forgive me.

In your letters, you write repeatedly for me to come see you and I can tell that you’re annoyed at me, but there were circumstances that kept me from visiting you.

To be honest, I was afraid to face you.

I met you last winter. In the third term of my first year.

I’d come to visit my mom and got to know you because you were staying at the same hospital.

You were all alone in the hall, practicing walking.

You stumbled and fell many times, but you would get back up and start walking unsteadily; then you would fall again, then start walking again. Your body wouldn’t do what you wanted it to, and you were getting awfully frustrated with it. You muttered bitterly to yourself a lot, and it looked like you were crying a little.

That glimpse of your tears stuck in my mind, and after that I would hide around the corner almost every day and watch you walking, utterly incapable of speaking to you.

Then one day after you’d fallen down in the hallway just like you always did, still crumpled up on all fours on the floor, you said something in bitter irritation.

“You’re always standing there peeping out at me. I’m not a freak show.”

Can you imagine how shocked I was?

How I felt like a sly blade had stabbed me in the chest when you then lifted your face and glared at me, and I saw violent rage and hatred burning in your eyes? How you took me prisoner in that moment?

As I apologized, you assaulted me with cold remarks and tried to put me at a distance.

Even after that, whenever I would go to see you and try to talk to you, you looked unhappy and tried to distance yourself from me.

If I tried to help you, your rage would flare, and you insisted that you could do everything on your own, that you didn’t want pity from someone like me, that you didn’t want me to help you out.

I told you how I felt, knowing that you would be angry.

I had from the beginning overlaid your image with the girl I’d hurt long ago.

That girl was in the same grade as me in elementary school, and her name was Mayuri Konishi. I probably told you this story at some point.

Every time you insulted me, I felt as if she was attacking me. And so I was being redeemed a little by it.

That was because I believed I was someone who deserved to be attacked.

It gets a little complicated, but at the time I was going out with Konishi, whom I’d run into again in high school.

But she wasn’t the way she used to be, and the way she had become made it utterly impossible for me to like her as simply a member of the opposite sex. And then the fact that it was a
betrayal of my mentor, who was in love with her, might have also put a damper on my feelings for her.

Konishi looked at me with needy eyes that said it was enough for us just to be together, and she never complained or reproached me for feeling nothing for her. She relied on me and trusted me.

It was cowardly of me, but I felt she was a burden. Then I tasted an even more powerful guilt because of that.

So whenever loathing for me came over your face, which reminded me of the Konishi from my past, I felt that by accepting your punishment I was being forgiven and it calmed me, even as my heart snapped apart and I felt such pain I thought it would choke me.

And so I was even more drawn to you.

At first you simply despised me as you would a worm, but once you found out that I was a first-year at Seijoh Academy, you became eager for my visits. Then you started asking me all sorts of things about school. It was to get information out of me about a person who lived on in your heart with a biting pain.

You told me, your eyes burning with hatred, that he had hurt you deeply and stolen your future from you.

After I started my second year and moved into the same class as him, you and I became closer than ever. At the same time, our relationship transformed into something much more difficult for me to bear.

Even worse, you ran into him at the hospital.

When I came to your room a few days before summer break, you were pale and you told me how he had come to the hospital.

Apparently he’d come to visit a classmate. You asked me obsessively who the girl with him had been, and whether he
was close to the person he was visiting since she was a girl, too, and what their relationship was to each other.

After that day, you started acting strangely.

When I thought you were staring absently out a window, your temper would flare suddenly or you’d get horribly annoyed or start crying or screaming or hitting me.

One day when I went to see you, you were lying in bed ripping sheets of paper into tiny pieces.

You had told me you wanted to write letters and asked me to buy that paper for you.

Maybe you were planning to send him a letter on your favorite stationery.

I guess you had some sort of internal conflict, and you’d torn up the letter you’d started writing.

As you ripped the letter up, your eyes flashed with uncontrollable irritation and hatred, and there was blood on your lip. Probably because you’d bitten down on it so hard. There were traces of tears on your cheeks.

Then predictably, you pressured me to help you get revenge on him.

You probably realized yourself that it was closer to a threat than a request.

You were prepared to use any means necessary to draw me in as an ally, and you screamed that if I wouldn’t hear you out, you would cut your wrists and die; you tried indecent acts on me, called me a coward for not doing what you told me to, and threw things.

Then when I stopped going to the hospital, you started sending me letters almost every day.

Since I knew only too well how much determination and strenuous effort it cost you to write so much, it haunted me even more to see the stationery turned black with so many
typed-out words and the haltingly handwritten address on the envelope.

I should have set the letters aside unopened, but to my despair, I had already started to have feelings for you, not as a replacement for Konishi, but for yourself.

You might actually commit an act that would end your life.

It wrenched my heart to think that, and since I knew that you were capable of actually doing it, my suffering only deepened.

And then I thought, what if you were wallowing in sorrow, what if you were crying all alone, what if you were begging for my help? And I couldn’t help but open the letters.

At some point I even started to believe that granting your wish might be atonement for the mistakes I’d committed in the past.

Not thinking anything for myself, listening only to your will, living only for you. If I could do that, how easy everything would be.

In fact, I did try to put a letter from you into his shoe locker once. I thought maybe if I did that, it would help me commit.

But there existed inside me, as unshakable as a boulder, a rationality that told me it was wrong to do that, and in the end I tore up the letter and threw it away.

Being an honorable person.

I think I told you how after that incident in the past, I’ve lived my life with that resolution in mind: that I had to be an honorable person at all times, and that I could never hurt anyone ever again.

And yet you asked that of me.

To betray a classmate and hurt him.

I can’t listen to requests like that. It isn’t honorable. But even as the annoyance and intensity of your letters increased,
Konishi was slowly going crazy from the inadequacy of my responses, and I was being driven into a corner.

I was frantic to save her somehow, but I was just spinning my wheels. Konishi’s actions violated all reason, and she was approaching unassailable madness.

I barely managed to rein myself in by addressing the letters I would have sent you to my mother instead.

And that took me to my absolute limit. I was unable to save Konishi as she descended into madness, but even in a situation like that, I couldn’t help thinking about you, which made me feel like an awful person. I felt such despair that it blacked out everything else in my mind.

I believed I was unworthy of seeing you as I was then. Even when I went to visit my mom, I couldn’t stop by your room.

I’ve been suffering these last two months. I swear I haven’t abandoned you. It’s selfish of me to ask, but I want you to understand that at least, if nothing else. These last two months have been essential, at least for me.

Now that the issues with Konishi are resolved and I’m free from the past, I’m finally able to send you a letter.

I’ll start with the conclusion.

I won’t be able to drive him into a trap or demean him.

Because I’ve become friends with him. You are important to me, and so is he.

I may hurt him eventually because of you. But I want to be as honorable toward my friend as possible from now on. I don’t want to set up traps or make any other cowardly acts against him.

I’m making that clear to you.

I’ve been unable to say something as simple as that to you these last two months, and I was caught in a loop of foolish acts like slicing your letters apart with a box cutter and cutting myself. I kept sending my replies to my mother.

I’m probably still a fool.

But someone taught me something: All people are fools.

So at least be a fool who acts with ideals in your heart.

And so I recognize the fool that I am, and with that knowledge I’d like to move toward you and toward him.

A week had gone by since the culture fair.

Our play had gotten good reviews, and messages of support trickled into the goblin mailbox—I mean, the love advice mailbox—in the school yard, saying things like “That was
really
good. I felt my heart just
ache
” and “Now I want to read Saneatsu Mushanokōji’s books,” which made Tohko happy.

She ripped up the notes she got from the mailbox and would bring them to her lips, beaming cheerily.

“Yummmm! It tastes exactly like sweet, freshly picked peaches—or maybe grapes—that you had to work hard to gather. I can feel it filling my belly with freshness!”