Friday, early afternoon. At this hour, Sakurai should have been in her long seminar period. I no longer knew since when I had been keeping her timetable of days and hours in my head.
When I passed through the automatic doors, the wooden floor creaked faintly. At the four-person table by the window on the third floor, she was not where she usually was. There was no beige cardigan, no pale blue card case. However many loops I went around, I never got used to walking through a place "where Sakurai wasn't." Only the sound of my shoes followed me all the way to the back.
I stopped in front of the folklore studies section. Second shelf from the top, seventh book from the left. My fingers reached the cloth-bound spine. I pulled it out. A small round stain at the lower left corner of the cover. The book I had borrowed from her, on my desk at home, had a stain in the same place. The size and the depth of color were different.
—A different copy.
There were any number of books in the world with the same title.
Oral Traditions of Eastern Japan.
I sat at the table by the window and opened it. Chapter Eight, Section Two: Narratives of Taking Back in the Oral Traditions of the Tohoku Region. The passage her voice had laid out that night at the summer festival was waiting on the paper now, turned into dry type. This time I didn't close it.
To take back the one you love from fate, there is no way but to erase their image from two hearts.
I read it twice. The third time, I read it remembering the color of the moss at the shrine.
Below it on the same page, the supplementary notes were set in two columns. With the pad of my finger resting against the edge of the type, I went down with my eyes alone. It noted that "two hearts" was written in more than one way. Taken as "a divided heart," it meant the heart that splits in two within a single person, the kind found in Buddhist scriptures and waka poems. Reason and wish, resignation and attachment. The note set down only that one line, and decided nothing further.
The way her gaze had dropped when she went on quietly, on the bench at the shrine, came back to me.
—So that's how it can be read. I'd been reading it as two people's hearts.
Her voice settled over the small, fine type of the note. I laid them side by side on the desk: the note that had decided nothing, and her voice that had decided. Without my knowing, the finger holding down the edge of the page had been stroking the corner of the paper.
—Is it the two, within me?
—Or the two, of her and me?
Outside the window, dry leaves rustled briefly.
—There's no use thinking about it. This isn't something I get to choose. Either way, I'm the one who disappears.
A voice remained, one grain at the bottom. Maybe the two people's hearts she spoke of was closer—I left that voice undecided. Decided or not, there was only one thing I could do.
Still, one thing weighed on me. If it was the first reading, her feelings for me would remain inside her. With them still there, she would be left holding a me that had become a blank.
—I want to tell her goodbye.
That was what I thought.
—If I'm going to tell her, how do I leave it behind?
Telling her directly, before the accident—that, too, had already been proven; she wouldn't take me seriously. A notebook, I thought. Whatever I wrote became unwritten when I went back. But if I didn't go back, the notebook in the present hadn't gone blank either. So I just had to write it on paper and hand it to her.
—Where do I leave it?
The image of the desk at home came to mind. The old cloth-bound book. The one she had held out to me on the night of the twenty-third, saying, "This was a book my grandmother treasured." The title on the cover was too faded to read.
—I can slip it into that book.
It wasn't certainty. Only, the indentation in the paper and the weight of the book on the desk connected in my head with one short line. A keepsake book. A book I could not keep from returning. Someday it would surely make its way back into her hands.
Go to the shrine. Pray. At the desk, in the time I returned to, write it in a form that could be slipped into the book. After that, go to the intersection and save her. That was all there was to the order.
—I knew what I had to do.
I walked past the side of the front desk. Outside the automatic doors, the dry cold of the year's end stood waiting.
—I erase my side. With that, she comes back.