Chapter 8.6

Natsuno returned to his room and stripped off his uniform throwing it recklessly aside. Succumbing to the hot air trapped in his room he opened the window. For an instant he moved to close the curtain as usual but, he soon remembered there was no need to so that.

---Right, there's no need to do that anymore.

Natsuno stared out the window into the firs looming close their backyard. There was only a low stone wall left as the barrier to the backyard. It was indeed an antiqued and mossed over the old stone wall, but it only came up to about Natsuno's calf. Still, it was a tentative boundary line. Within the wall were a dense thicket of growth. Looking at it from Natsuno's bedroom window, one had a full frontal view of it. The underbrush about half as tall as Natsuno were, according to his mother, raspberry plants.

(Megumi's dead.)

In those raspberries' shadows. Pressed up against the trunk of a fir, Natsuno knew that Megumi stood there time and time again. It started when the weather became less severe, it became incessant during spring break, then for a while there had been longer stretches but lately it had picked up again. From the bowers, she stared at the window. ---Natsuno did know, of course, what that meant.

Megumi was always like that, Natsuno thought. Visiting the house of her one-sided love, secretly peeping through the window. That was probably, as seen by Megumi herself, a brave and lovable thing to do. He was certain she was doing that to play the part of a maiden in love, enjoying the pain of one-sided feelings to its fullest. Maybe she even had expectations of it. Like that the one who found her standing there like that would be touched by Megumi's love and accept and return her feelings.

But, Natsuno would emphatically pass on that role. Megumi didn't get it. Megumi was caught up in her own little world, without a thought to spare to the likes of the other's mind in the matter. If that weren't the case, then she shouldn't have been able to fail to realize that of course Natsuno would be uncomfortable with her peeking into his house like this, invading his privacy.

Give me a break, he thought. Megumi had expectations of certain courtesies from Natsuno. It was expected that today, he should grieve even the loss of that girl, should thankfully receive her articles. He was supposed to be touched by Megumi's sentiments, or maybe she'd have liked him to let a single tear slip out.

(....Like a school play.)

What Megumi expected Natsuno to be was her partner in what was nothing more than a high school romantic drama. What that girl expected of Natsuno was to take on the role of the one-sided love interest of the heroine who died young and tragically. That was the role that everybody was assigning to Natsuno. A boy from the big city who moved into the village set up as a foil to her, or possibly the one with emptiness in his heart from the harsh city life, the one who didn't notice her there. While thrusting these roles onto people, Natsuno was condemned to follow their script. No one---really, not a one---realized that it was just a self-centered scenario she had set up for herself.

"A real laugh."

Natsuno spit outwards into the raspberry fields.

Natsuno hated Megumi. He knew what Megumi expected. Those were expectations Megumi came up with on her own. But, Megumi was not aware that those were nothing more than self-important expectations. She wanted him to say this, to respond like this, while she didn't state that up front, she tried to direct the flow of conversation to make him say the expected lines, to take the expected actions.

--I'm not very sophisticated compared to those city girls, huh?

--Natsuno-kun, you hate me, don't you?

--You look like you're going to tell me not to even look at you again or something.

It was exploitation to get what he wasn't putting out. Natsuno was firmly set against having the role she wanted him to play thrust onto him, but in this village people not only threw themselves into those kind of exchanges, they didn't even realize they were being made to play a part, or worse still they thought it was a virtue, to play to their partner's expectations.

(It's a village wide circus act.)

Megumi cast Natsuno as her partner in her love story on her own. While doing as much, Megumi herself was only acting the part of a love story's heroine, in nothing more than a superficial dream. It wasn't something she longed for with any urgency. She was just playing a girl in love, immersed in her own self satisfaction. Megumi was the incredibly predictable, not remotely complex type.

But---Natsuno thought. Even that Megumi had one single thing that she would put on a serious face for, and that was when talking about the city. She said she hated the village, wanted to go out to the city. In that alone could he see a real drive in her, and on that alone did Natsuno sympathize.

Megumi was always saying she was going to a college in a city. To tell the truth, Natsuno didn't really believe it. While making a fuss that she was definitely going to go, Megumi didn't show any signs of actually preparing to do that. Saying she wanted to go here or there for school, when offering up names she had nothing but ones she'd just heard in passing, which were all good schools, and yet Megumi didn't care about her own grades. Natsuno wanted to leave the village too. To do that, he thought, he would go to a college in a city come hell or high water. That was why he was preparing for that. If he could at least just return to the city, he wouldn't be picky about the college or the department, he had even thought. Looking at it from that enduring Natsuno's perspective, he didn't think that Megumi's so called escape plan had much feasibility, and that while she might have said this and that, in the end Megumi would, just like it seemed had apparently happened with high school entrance exams, at the eleventh hour, find some reason like that her parents wouldn't permit it and betray herself. She'd be stopped up in the village while saying some day for sure, and doubtlessly take up root in the village.

He thought of Megumi as that kind of person but Natsuno did at least have the feeling that the sentiment of wanting to leave the village was sincere. And Megumi----died.

Megumi really did break out of Sotoba, through death. Or maybe it should have been said that death allowed her out of Sotoba, or that she wouldn't have broken out at all by any means other than death.

---Maybe the same went for him.