It was the night I got back from visiting home. A year earlier, on the night of December 23, Toru had sat on the sofa, talked only about the book, talked about tomorrow, and gone home with nothing more. That he had written "Please forget about me now. And you, for your part, please be happy," I had learned from his letter. Taking off my coat, I remembered that line.
In the evening, I had stopped by his hospital room. I returned the bundle of letter paper that had been lying face down on the side table to the bottom of my bag, along with the handkerchief, folded the same way as when I brought it. After two weeks and a little more resting above his sleep, the bundle had dried ever so slightly. "I'm taking these home," I told him, without voicing it. His eyelashes didn't move. I closed my bag and put the chair back where it had been. Just short of the door, I looked back. For the first time in two weeks, there was nothing on the side table.
With that same bag in my hand, I rode two stations back from the nearest one and passed through the gate of my old university. Entry for alumni only required signing my name at the reception desk. There was less than an hour until closing. Inside the library, a few students studying before exams were scattered across the reading tables at the back.
The folklore studies shelves stood against the far wall of the first basement floor. A different library from Toru's, a different shelf. But the book was the same.
I reached toward the second shelf from the top. At a hundred and fifty-two centimeters, it was just barely within reach, and I rose onto my toes. My fingertips touched the corner of a cloth-bound spine. The coolness of the cloth that had sat beside Toru's fingers on that library's shelf, that day in Part One, came back to my fingertips once more, from the same position on a different shelf in a different building.
Oral Traditions of Eastern Japan.
I lifted it down from the shelf with both hands. I set it on a four-person reading table at the back. I slowly opened the cover. It did not feel like my grandmother's copy on my desk; it had the feel of a book turned by many hands over many years.
I found "The Chapter of Images" in the table of contents. On the back of the chapter's title page was a small note. I held the type down with a fingertip and followed it with my eyes.
To take back the one you love from fate, there is no way but to erase their image from two hearts.
The printed line had sunk cleanly into the fibers of the paper. The line I had heard so many times in my grandmother's voice, had told Toru in the rain-soaked shrine grounds, that his fountain pen had copied out, and to which the continuation of the spoken lore had been added in the margins of my grandmother's letter. Here was the type it had come from. The impression of the letters came back to my fingertip, ever so faintly.
After the line, there was no further note. Not on the back of the title page, not beneath the text, not at the end of the book—nowhere did it say which reading to take. Even when I leafed all the way to the index, there was no entry for "two hearts."
The book, for its part, left only the single line of the original and kept silent, handing over no interpretation.
On the day Toru borrowed this book, too, it must have been just like this here—blank. His fountain pen had copied out the blank side, and carried the blank side home. From a line with no note, he had had no choice but to draw out his own reading.
On this side, the spoken lore in my grandmother's letter had filled in that white margin. That day at the shrine, my eyes on the hands in my lap, I had said, "I had been reading it as two people's hearts." From outside the printed type, my grandmother's spoken lore had been holding up that reading. Two voices, with the book's silence between them, were facing in one direction.
I closed the book. I slid it slowly back in, the edge of its spine at its original height. Before I let go, I noticed it didn't quite line up with the spine of the book beside it. When I pushed it back with a finger, the difference disappeared. The row on the shelf returned to the way it had been before I came.
Where I stepped back, the outline of a day faintly overlapped—the day in front of that library's shelf when Toru's right shoulder had been a little ahead of my left. But this was a different shelf in a different building. Letting the two overlap, I stood for a while in the white light of the basement floor.
I said good night to the security guard at the entrance and went outside. The December night air was dry, and my breath rose white. I didn't stop by the shrine. I knew there was no longer any need. What I would carry on the day was already gathered, all of it, on my side.
Back at my apartment, I went to take off my coat, and my hands stopped. I hung the coat over the back of the chair for the moment and sat down at the desk. I laid them out on the desk. Toru's bundle of letter paper, my grandmother's book, my grandmother's letter, and my grandmother's old omamori charm pouch, which I had brought home from the paulownia box.
After laying out the four of them, I stood up from the chair. I slipped my fingers into the right pocket of the coat on the chair back.
The pad of my finger met the small pouch, white with a navy cord, that had stayed there all along, put in and never forgotten. It was the small pouch Toru had set on my palm on the evening of Christmas Eve a year ago, saying, "Here." At the time, I accepted it without understanding why he had bought it. Only that his voice had sunk one step deeper than usual stayed at the back of my ears.
I took it out of the pocket. I set it on the desk beside my grandmother's old charm pouch.
It was the same design. The way the outline was shaped, the way the cord was knotted, the width of the stitching along the cloth's edge. The only difference was how the years had settled on them. The white of my grandmother's had sunk to a pale yellow, its navy cord faded to gray. The white of Toru's was still white, its navy cord still navy.
Across a distance of half a century, from the shelf of the same shrine office, by different hands, two of the same design had come to lie side by side on my desk.
My grandmother, too, had bought this there, and prayed. Toru, too, had bought this there—for me.
The outline of the reason Toru's voice had sunk so deep was only now, at last, reaching my side. That evening, perhaps he had understood only half. Understanding that much, in that sunken voice, he had set it on my palm.
Toru's letter paper, my grandmother's letter, the two charm pouches of the same design—they lay side by side on the desk.
I looked at my hands. They weren't trembling. My heart was beating at its usual pace. The room was quiet. Outside, a dog barked once.
I stood and took letter paper and a fountain pen from the shelf. I went back to the desk and started to write something on a sheet. The nib touched the paper. I didn't write. I lifted the nib from the paper. I don't need to write it, I thought. There's no need to leave it in writing the way Toru did. I won't tell anyone. If I tell, they'll stop me. I don't want to be stopped. I set down the pen and folded the paper.
I put the plan together in my head. December 24. On the same date as a year ago, for just one day, with him. Ask Toru's family for permission to take him out for a few hours. Put Toru in a wheelchair. Trace the places of Part One together, in reverse. The front of the apartment building, the planetarium by the river, the library entrance, and then the folklore studies shelves. Last of all, head to the shrine. Push him slowly up the gravel approach with my own hands. In front of the offering box, place Toru in his wheelchair half a step behind me, and pray.
I wouldn't write it down. I laid it all out in my head.
I picked Toru's charm pouch up from where it lay beside the other on the desk and returned it to the right pocket of my coat. On the day, I would carry it there, in my coat pocket. Beside the offering box, on the gravel, I would set it down: "I'm returning this to you." That far was the arrangement on my side.
My grandmother's old charm pouch I left on the desk.