It was a weekday evening in mid-August.
A short message from Sakurai had arrived around noon that day.
"Tonight there's a summer festival near an old shrine on the edge of town. It only happens once a year."
"It's a place I was often taken to as a child. I'd be glad if we could go together, just once."
I waited for her in front of the ticket gates of a small private-line station.
From the direction of the gates, I saw the hem of an indigo yukata. A white obi, her hair gathered up at the back, the white nape of her neck showing in the evening light. The heels of her geta struck the floor tiles twice.
"Sorry to keep you waiting."
Sakurai said it in a voice a little brighter than the one she used in the library.
"Not at all," I said.
Beyond the roundabout in front of the station, a stream of people flowed on toward the street at the foot of the hill. The lanterns of the stalls were lit, still modest in the thin evening light. Candied apples, the splash of water at the goldfish scooping, the smell of grilled corn.
About halfway along the row of stalls, Sakurai stopped.
"At summer festivals, it was always this."
It was a stall selling Uji kintoki shaved ice. They handed over only one spoon. Sakurai took the cup in both hands and stepped aside, next to the stall.
After taking a bite herself, Sakurai turned the handle of the spoon toward me and held it out.
"You too, Seto."
—Her "It's still too early," from the second floor of the café, the time she had stopped the same spoon just short of her lips, came back to me briefly. My hand was a little slow.
Sakurai smiled with only her eyes.
"Tonight, it isn't too early anymore."
A little pale green syrup was still left in the bowl of the spoon. I checked once, with my eyes, the edge where Sakurai's lips had touched first, then brought it to my mouth. The cold loosened over my tongue, and the faint bitterness of matcha stayed behind, at the very end.
I gave the spoon back. Sakurai brought it straight to her own mouth, this time without hesitating.
"When I was little, I wanted this so much I was always tugging on the hand I was holding."
As we tried to make our way out of the row of stalls, I lost sight of Sakurai once in the crowd. The outline of the indigo yukata blended into the shadows of other yukata. When I went back a few steps, Sakurai was beside the shaved-ice stall, looking for me.
I took her hand.
"So we don't get separated," I said aloud.
Our fingers didn't lace deeply; it was a touch where only our palms lightly met. Sakurai looked up at me from half a step behind,
"So we don't get separated, right?"
she said, returning the same words and softening only the end. Our eyes met from below, and I was slow to look away. I could feel heat spreading around my ears, and I faced forward again. Sakurai began walking half a step behind me.
"Hardly anyone comes to the shrine itself."
Once we were past the row of stalls, the voices suddenly grew distant. At the end of a narrow lane off the street at the foot of the hill stood an old wooden torii gate. The sacred rope had just been replaced with a new one, and around the base, the wood was stained green with moss.
Past the torii gate, the gravel approach became a gentle upward slope. On the stone walls on either side, the blue of the last hydrangeas lingered in a thin, sunken color. Halfway up the slope, Sakurai rested her hand lightly on the rim of an old water basin half buried in moss, and stayed like that for the length of a breath.
At the foot of a stone lantern beside the approach, a small, faded omamori charm pouch had been left. Rain and sunlight had drawn almost all the white out of the cloth; only the navy of its tied cord remained, faintly.
Sakurai indicated it with her eyes.
"It seems people used to leave omamori here before they went home."
That was all she said before starting up the slope again.
When we reached the grounds, the shrine office was closed. In front of the worship hall, Sakurai bowed twice, clapped twice, and bowed once more. The length of each beat of the motions was like the length of the moments she took returning a book to its shelf in the library.
A sound came from far off. From the direction of the riverbank. A low burst crossed the night air a beat late, and a thin light spread over the gravel of the grounds.
"They've started."
We sat side by side on a bench beside the worship hall. Sakurai on the right, me on the left. Between us, a little more than a fist's width.
Another firework went up. A beat later, Sakurai laughed softly.
"Seto, you always do that, don't you."
At her words, I looked at my left hand. I wasn't holding a mechanical pencil, but my index finger and thumb were making a motion like pressing something twice in midair. The moment I noticed, it stopped.
"That habit of pressing twice with your fingers."
"...A habit?"
"Yes. I counted once."
"...You counted?"
"About four times an hour, roughly."
Still in profile, Sakurai laughed again, a step higher than usual.
"It isn't a bad habit," Sakurai said.
"It's cute."
Another firework went up. The low burst, and the light spreading a beat later. Still looking toward the light, Sakurai went on.
"I've never been comfortable with men who are popular."
"Serious men are a little cuter."
"...Cute?"
"Yes."
Sakurai suddenly looked up at the sky. I looked up too.
Between the fireworks, the sky was darker than I'd thought, and the stars were deep. Because the grounds were away from the lights at the foot of the hill, the stars sank thick almost to the point directly overhead. A pale band, perhaps the Milky Way, cut across the sky in a single line.
"That's Lyra."
Sakurai pointed at a strong blue point of light, nearly straight above us. From it, four thin stars traced a small parallelogram.
"At the planetarium the other day, right at that part of the story, you were dozing off, weren't you, Seto."
She said it smiling with only her eyes.
"It's the stars of that instrument. The one carried by the man who went to bring back someone he'd lost."
Only when she said it did I see the real thing for the first time. The arc that had been drawn in thin lines across the indigo ceiling of the dome was now there with nothing drawn on it, simply at the very top of the deep summer sky.
"...This time, I'm awake."
When I said it, Sakurai laughed out loud. A short laugh, just a half step higher than usual.
The quiet between fireworks went on for a while.
Sakurai wore a thin silver watch on her left wrist. A white face, a leather band the color of amber candy. She stroked the face once with the pad of her right index finger, then returned her finger to her lap. At some point, without noticing, I had come to know that she had a habit of touching her own wrist now and then.
"Something seems to have happened to my grandmother here, when she was young," Sakurai said.
"She never told me the details, not once. Only that when she was young, there was someone she had loved deeply. That they didn't end up together. That was all."
"After that, she married my grandfather. Sometimes she'd bring me here. She would bow in front of the worship hall for a long time."
The shadow of the worship hall's roof stretched slowly across the gravel in the faint moonlight.
"Among the old stories I heard as a child, there was a legend about this shrine."
Legend. I repeated the sound of it softly to myself. In that moment, a line from the table of contents of the book I'd borrowed from the library turned in my head toward the same direction. "The Chapter of Images." And beneath it, added in small type, "To take back the one you love from fate."
"To take back the one you love from fate—" Sakurai said quietly.
"Oh, no, sorry. That's from that book, the table of contents."
"That's what the book is about. Partly because of my grandmother, I'm researching it for my senior thesis. May I say the rest in my own words? The way I heard it, though."
"Please."
Just then, an especially large firework went up over the riverbank. The low burst shook the gravel of the grounds once, and afterward a thin light lit the edge of the worship hall's roof white for the space of two breaths.
"To take back the one you love from fate, there is no way but to erase their image from two hearts."
After the light faded, Sakurai went on.
"Yes. That's it, that passage," I said. "It was written in the table of contents. In the end, I never opened the main text."
"Heh. That's so like you, Seto."
"What did you think? Of that passage?"
"I wondered if 'two hearts' meant the two sides of your own heart."
"So that's how you read it."
Sakurai didn't correct me firmly.
"I'd been reading it as two people's hearts."
"Ah. That might be the more natural reading."
"As a child, I thought this was a frightening story," Sakurai continued.
"But then it struck me. This story doesn't say to offer up your life. It says 'erase their image.' Not a life, I thought."
Over by the worship hall, the bell rope swayed slightly, and the bell rang, very faintly.
"When I was little, whenever a sound like that rang, a hand would be laid lightly on my head. To tell me my wish had reached them properly."
Sakurai opened her right hand once on her lap, then closed it again.
"Maybe even now, I wanted to lay my hand on someone's head."
Another firework went up in the distance. This time only the sound reached us; the light didn't.
We got up from the bench and went down the approach. We passed under the torii gate, and when we reached the bottom of the slope leading to the street at the foot of the hill, the presence of the festival crowd came flowing toward us.
It was then. From her side, Sakurai took my hand.
"So we don't get separated."
Sakurai said it aloud. The same way I had said it on the way there.
Her fingers touched the base of my index finger once, then slowly shifted, and she took hold again. The sleeve of her yukata brushed the arm of my shirt once. Right next to the coolness of the silk was the warmth of skin.
Neither of us said anything as we walked to the station, still holding hands. The sounds of the festival on the street at the foot of the hill had already grown far away.
In front of the ticket gates, Sakurai's fingers left mine slowly, one at a time. Last of all, the pad of her little finger stayed on my palm, and then only the coolness of the air came back between us.
"The place we went today. It was a place full of memories of my grandmother," Sakurai said.
"This was the first time I've brought anyone there."
Before passing through the gate, she paused slightly, waited two breaths, and fed her ticket through without looking back. The heels of her geta struck the floor tiles twice again.
In my head, the same passage played once more, in her voice.
—To take back the one you love from fate, there is no way but to erase their image from two hearts.
The train started moving, and outside the window, in the sky toward the foot of the hill, a last firework spread low and vanished.