Chapter 14 : The Blue Period

Change began to take proper shape when my life had less than fifty days remaining.

As I wrote earlier, my boldness in acting like no one was watching (or that one person was watching) rubbed many people the wrong way. When I talked happily to an invisible partner, there were more than a few onlookers who whispered in each other's ears, or who yelled awful things I was meant to hear.

Of course, I couldn't complain about that. I was the one who was choosing actions that displeased them.

Three men confronted me at a bar that day. They were the kind of men who spoke loudly and looked for opportunities to make themselves appear strong, carefully choosing when to get aggressive based on the number and size of their opponents. They must have been bored, because when they saw me drinking alone and talking to an empty seat, one sat right next to me and started giving me shit.

Before, I might have been stubborn and said something back, but now I was no longer interested in spending my energy on such things, so I just waited patiently for them to lose interest and move on. But once they understood I wasn't going to argue back, they got more involved and got even more aggressive. I considered leaving the bar, but given how they seemed as if they didn't have anything better to do, I judged they were likely to follow us out.

"This isn't good," Miyagi said, worried for me.

I was just wondering what to do when I heard someone say, "Hey, is that you, Kusunoki?" It was a man's voice. I couldn't think of who would call out to me, so that was startling enough, but it was what he said next that completely stunned both me and Miyagi into silence.

"So you're out with Miyagi again today, then."

I spun around to see who was talking.

The man was not a total stranger. It was my neighbor who lived in the apartment next door. The one who always rolled his eyes when he saw me leaving my apartment and chatting with Miyagi.

If I recalled correctly, his name was Shinbashi.

Shinbashi walked toward me and said to one of the men harassing me, "Pardon me, do you mind if I use that seat?"

His words were polite, but his behavior put heavy pressure on them. The man looked at Shinbashi's imposing height of over five foot ten and the mean glare that was clearly accustomed to threatening people, and his attitude promptly changed.

Shinbashi sat down next to me and spoke not to me, but to Miyagi. "I hear about you all the time from Kusunoki, but I've never actually spoken with you. It's nice to meet you. My name is Shinbashi."

Miyagi froze in place, taken aback. But he nodded as though she had said something. "Yes, that's right. You remember me? I'm honored. We've passed by each other a number of times outside the apartment building."

They weren't actually having a conversation. It was clear that Shinbashi couldn't actually see Miyagi.

I suppose he's pretending to be able to see her for my sake, I thought.

The men who'd been bothering me had lost interest now that Shinbashi was here, and they began to leave. Once the three of them were gone, Shinbashi exhaled and dropped the polite smile he'd been wearing. Now he was back to his usual scowl.

"Let me make this clear," Shinbashi said. "I don't actually believe there's some girl named Miyagi with you."

"I know. You were rescuing me, weren't you?" I replied. "I appreciate that. Thank you."

"Actually, it's not that, either," he said, shaking his head.

"Then what is it?"

"I'm sure you'll never own up to it, but here's how I see the situation. What you're doing is a kind of performance art, an attempt to see how many people you can get to embrace the illusion that this girl named Miyagi is real. You're trying to prove you can affect the perception of others through the act of pantomiming… And your attempt is fairly successful on me."

"Does that mean you can sense Miyagi's existence to an extent?"

"I don't want to admit it, but yes." Shinbashi shrugged. "And on that topic, I've got more than a little interest in the change that's happening inside me. After everything that you've made me sense, I wonder—if I actively accept the existence of this Miyagi, will I actually be able to see her?"

"Miyagi," I said, "is not very tall. She's pale and on the delicate side. Her eyes are usually cold, but sometimes she'll give you a little smile. Maybe her eyesight is poor, because when she's reading small text, she'll put on a pair of thin-framed glasses, and they look great on her. Her hair's medium length and has a tendency to curl inward."

"…I wonder why?" Shinbashi said curiously. "All the features you just described, every last one, match my exact mental image of Miyagi."

"And she's sitting right in front of you. Why do you think that is?"

Shinbashi closed his eyes. "I don't know."

"She wants to shake your hand," I said. "Will you put out your right hand?"

Somewhat skeptically, he extended his arm. Miyagi happily looked at his hand and clasped it with both of hers.

Shinbashi looked at his hand bobbing up and down and said, "This is probably Miyagi shaking my hand, right?"

"That's right. You might think you're doing the shaking, but actually, it's her. She seems really happy about it."

"Will you tell Mr. Shinbashi thank you?" Miyagi asked.

"Miyagi is saying 'Thank you' to you," I relayed.

"I had a feeling that was the case," he said with wonder in his voice. "You're welcome."

After that, with me as the go-between, Miyagi and Shinbashi traded a few words.

Before he returned to his original table, Shinbashi turned back to me and said, "I don't think I'm the only one who senses Miyagi sitting next to you. I think everyone's feeling that sensation initially and telling themselves it's just a stupid illusion. But given the right opportunity—say, the knowledge that they're not alone in that perception—it might actually be possible to have everyone accept Miyagi's presence very quickly. Of course…I have no proof backing me up. But I hope it happens."

Shinbashi's prediction was correct.

It was hard to believe, but after this incident, people around us began to accept the presence and existence of Miyagi.

It didn't mean everyone suddenly believed in the reality of an invisible person, of course. It meant they treated my nonsense as a kind of shared understanding and reacted to me accordingly. Miyagi's existence never became more than theoretical to them, but it was still a major change.

I frequently visited the town's entertainment destinations, high school culture festivals, and summer holiday events, until I became something of a local celebrity. By playing the role of a silly, blissful man, the rest of the town started treating me like a pitiable but amusing kook. Many of them were kind enough to look fondly on me as I held hands and hugged my imaginary girlfriend.

One night, Shinbashi invited Miyagi and me over to his room.

"I've got too much alcohol, and I need to finish it off before I go back home to visit… Would you mind helping me with that, you two?"

We went next door, where three of his friends were already busy drinking—one man and two women. Shinbashi had already told the drunks about me, and they began asking me questions about Miyagi. I answered them all, one after the other.

"So Miyagi's right here with us?" asked a tall girl named Suzumi with heavy makeup as she tipsily brushed Miyagi's arm. "Oh my God, I kind of feel like she is."

There wouldn't be any sensation, of course, but maybe there was some inkling of a presence. Miyagi softly held Suzumi's hand.

The other man, Asakura, was a quick thinker. He asked me a few probing questions about Miyagi, trying to catch me in some kind of contradiction, but the total consistency of my answers tickled his fancy, and after that, he offered his cushion to the spot where Miyagi was sitting and poured a drink, leaving the glass on the floor next to it.

"I like women like that," Asakura said. "It's a good thing I can't see Miyagi. If I could, I'd probably be trying to hit on her."

"Doesn't matter either way. Miyagi likes me."

"Hey, you can't just make up your own answers," protested Miyagi. She hit me with her cushion.

Riko, a small girl with a pretty face who was clearly the drunkest of them all, looked up at me from her spot lying on the floor and said sleepily, "Kusunoki, Kusunoki, prove to us just how much you love Miyagi."

"I'd like to see that, too," agreed Suzumi. Shinbashi and Asakura looked at me with great expectation.

"Miyagi," I said.

"Yes?"

She turned to me, her face just a little flushed. I kissed her. The drunks raised a cheer. Even I knew this was a little ridiculous. None of these people actually believed in Miyagi. They just thought of me as some crazy, funny guy to hang out with.

But what was wrong with that?

I became the biggest clown in the neighborhood this summer.

For better or for worse.

A few days after that, on a clear and sunny afternoon, my doorbell rang, and I heard Shinbashi's voice.

When I opened the door, he tossed something at me. I reached out and caught a car key.

"I'm going back home," Shinbashi said. "So I'm not going to need that for a while. You can borrow it for the time being. Take Miyagi out to see the ocean or the mountains or something, why don't ya?"

I thanked him profusely.

As he left, Shinbashi said, "It still doesn't seem to me like you're lying. I can't believe Miyagi's presence is simply something you're creating with a convincing pantomime… Maybe there really is some world only you can see. Maybe what we see is only a little part of the full truth of the world. Maybe it's just the only part we need to be visible."

And with that, he got on the bus and went back home. I looked up to the sky; the blinding sunlight was the same as ever, but I could sense a hint of autumn in the scent of the air.

The cicadas burst into their screeching song, calling for the end of the summer.

That night, we got into bed together. The boundary between us had vanished by now.

Miyagi faced me in her sleep, breathing quietly and looking as peaceful as a baby. I never got used to the sight of her sleeping face. It was always meaningful, and always dear to me.

I slipped out from under the blanket, careful not to wake her, so I could fill a glass of water in the kitchen to drink. When I came back, I saw that her sketchbook was on the floor in front of the door to the changing room. I picked it up, turned on the light over the sink, and opened it to the first page.

Much more was drawn there than I expected to see.

The waiting room at the station. The restaurant where I met Naruse. The elementary school where the time capsule was buried. My secret base in the woods with Himeno. The room cluttered with a thousand paper cranes. The old library. The carts at the summer festival. The riverbank where we walked the day before I met with Himeno. The observation deck. The community center where we spent the night. The Cub. The candy store. Vending machines. Public payphones. The starry lake. The used bookstore. The swan boat. The Ferris wheel.

My sleeping face.

I turned the page and, for revenge, began to draw Miyagi's sleeping face instead.

The tired fog was making my head fuzzy, so it wasn't until I was completely done that I realized I hadn't drawn something from beginning to end for several years.

I had given up on doing art.

When I saw the finished piece, I was surprised and satisfied, but I also felt something small in the back of my mind nagging at me.

It would have been easy to overlook it. It was a very small feeling, the kind of thing I would easily forget about as soon as I moved on to think about something else. I could have just ignored it, placed the sketchbook near Miyagi's pillow, and gone to sleep, full of happy thoughts about how she might react in the morning.

But I knew.

I focused all my mind, every thought in my brain, to search for the cause of this feeling.

It slipped through my grasp like a bobbing message in a bottle floating in a dark sea.

After most of an hour, when I was ready to give up and pull my hands back out of the water, it suddenly floated right into my grasp by sheer coincidence.

Carefully, so carefully, I pulled it out of the ocean.

And then I understood.

The next moment, I was possessed. I covered the sketchbook in pencil with a single-minded fervor.

It lasted all night.

A few days later, I took Miyagi to go see some fireworks. We walked a path through the rice fields at sunset, crossed the train tracks, passed through the shopping area, and arrived at an elementary school where the event was happening. It was a famous fireworks show in this area, and there were many more stands and carts than I expected to see. The crowd was so large, it made me wonder just how many people lived in the area after all.

When they saw me walking hand in hand with Miyagi, passing children pointed and crowed, "It's Mr. Kusunoki!" The laughter was friendly—kids like crazy people. I lifted the hand holding Miyagi's in response to their jeers.

When we lined up at a yakitori cart, some high schoolers who had heard about me approached and teased, "Your girlfriend's pretty hot." I replied, "Isn't she? You can't have her" and put my hand around Miyagi's shoulder. They cackled and whistled.

This kind of thing pleased me. Whether they believed me or not, everyone enjoyed my little show of saying, "Miyagi is right here with me."

Better an artifice enjoyed than a truth ignored.

There was a PA announcement about the start of the fireworks show, and within a few seconds, the first volley was away.

Orange light spread across the sky. Cheers arose from the crowd, and the bang arrived a split second later, shaking the air itself.

It had been many years since I'd seen a fireworks show up close. It was much bigger and more colorful and more fleeting than I'd envisioned in my head. I'd forgotten how those huge displays of color took only a second or two to spread and vanish, and I'd never thought about how the sound of them bursting hit you in the gut like a punch.

They shot off dozens of fireworks. We lay down on the ground behind the school to watch, where we could be alone. I had a sudden desire to see Miyagi as she was entranced by the spectacle. So I glanced over when a burst of color illuminated the ground and discovered that she was thinking the same thing. Our eyes met.

"We're on the same wavelength," I chuckled. "This happened before. In the bed."

"That's right," said Miyagi, smiling shyly. "But you can always look at my face. You should watch the show while you can."

"That's not necessarily true," I said.

Maybe this was the best time to do it. Nothing like a fireworks display to let the waterworks flow.

"I know I've got another vacation day tomorrow, but I'll be back the day after that. Unlike the last time, this one's just for a single day."

"That's not the issue."

"Then what is the issue?"

"…Listen, Miyagi. I've become a little celebrity around the neighborhood. People smile at me—half the time, they're making fun of me, but the other half, they mean it. I don't care why they're smiling at me; I'm proud of that. I can say for certain that there aren't many things that are better."

I lifted myself up and put a hand on the ground so I could look at Miyagi from above.

"When I was in elementary school, there was this guy I hated. He was really smart, but he hid it and played dumb to get other people to like him; I thought he was a prick. But…nowadays, I feel like I get it. The truth is, I was incredibly jealous of him. I think what I really wanted to do was this—to get along with everyone. Thanks to you, I've managed to do that. I've finally reconciled with the rest of the world."

"Well, that's good for you." Miyagi sat up and took the same posture as me. "So…what is it you really want to tell me?"

"I want to thank you for everything," I said. "But I guess I don't really know how to say it."

"You say, 'And I'm looking forward to more,' don't you?" she said. "You still have over a month left. It's a little early for this, don't you think?"

"Look, Miyagi. You said you wanted to know what my wish was. And I promised to tell you once I thought of one."

She paused for several seconds.

"Yes. If I can help you with it, I'll do anything."

"Okay. Then I'll be direct. Miyagi: When I die, I want you to forget all about me. Everything. That's my one little wish."

"No," she said immediately. But just as quickly, she seemed to recognize my plan.

She had a premonition of what I was going to do tomorrow.

"…Mr. Kusunoki, I know you're not thinking of what I'm thinking. Please don't do anything stupid. Please."

I shook my head. "Think about it. Who could have imagined that a man worth thirty yen would lead such a wonderful end of his life? Nobody would have seen this coming. Nobody would have read the analysis results you looked at, or whatever it was, and envisioned where I am now. I had the worst life imaginable, and look at how happy I am. You don't know what your future holds, either. Maybe a man with much more to offer you than me will come along and make you happy."

"He won't."

"But I should never have met someone like you, Miyagi. So you could also find—"

"He won't."

I couldn't reply to that, because she knocked me over.

I lay flat on my back, and she buried her face into my chest. "Please…Mr. Kusunoki."

It was the first time I'd ever heard her cry.

"Please just stay with me for the next month. I'm coming to terms with everything else. I'm coming to terms with the fact that you're going to die soon, and that I can't see you on my day off from monitoring, and that other people can't see us holding hands, and that after you die, I've got to keep living on my own for another thirty years. I'm bearing all of it. But please don't throw away the time we have—these precious few moments we can be together. Please don't do it."

I caressed her head, over and over and over, as she sobbed.

We went back home to the apartment and fell asleep in each other's arms.

The whole time, Miyagi's tears never stopped flowing.

She left the apartment in the middle of the night.

We hugged again at the front door, until she loosened her grip and pulled away longingly, and gave me a sad, lonely smile.

"Good-bye. You made me very happy."

Then she bowed and turned her back to me.

She walked away slowly under the light of the moon.

The next morning, I went with the substitute monitor to the same old crumbling building. The place where Miyagi and I first met.

There, I sold off thirty days of my remaining life span.

I actually wanted to sell every last day of it, but they didn't do transactions for the last three days, apparently.

When the substitute monitor saw my results, he was startled. "Did you come here knowing that this would be the result?"

"Yeah," I said.

The thirtysomething woman who ran my results seemed troubled. "I'll be honest…I don't recommend what you're about to do. At this point, the money itself can't be a major issue, can it? If you spend your last month acquiring proper art supplies and drawing, your name will stay in the art textbooks long into the future. Do you realize that?"

She glanced at the sketchbook I had tucked under my arm.

"Listen carefully. If you go back home without making a transaction, you're going to spend the rest of your thirty-three days drawing like your life depends on it. The entire time, that monitor girl of yours will be at your side, cheering you on. She will never criticize your decision. And after your death, your name will be a part of art history forever. You must be aware of this by now, right? What's your problem…? I just don't understand."

"If money is meaningless after you die, then so is fame."

"Don't you want to be eternal?"

"Eternity means nothing to me in a world where I don't exist anymore," I said.

"The world's most popular art" they'd call it. My work would prompt an explosive debate and ultimately lead to the greatest of honors and recognition.

But now that I'd sold my thirty days, that was just another potential future that would never come to be.

Here's my thinking. Maybe my ability to draw could have bloomed at last if I'd spent an appalling amount of time working at it. And my fate was to lose that chance to a freak traffic accident or something before the necessary time could accrue.

But by selling my life span and, most importantly, being around Miyagi, the vast expanse of time I would have spent was severely compressed. Somehow my talent was able to blossom in the time just before I died.

That's what I choose to believe.

I was good at art once.

I could re-create what I saw as accurately as a photograph, or dismantle it and rearrange the parts into a completely different image, absolutely naturally, without any kind of training. When I saw paintings in a museum, I could understand with crystal clarity, within some realm of meaning completely separate from language, why things that "shouldn't have been painted that way" actually "had to be painted that way."

How I saw things may not have been correct from start to finish. But in any case, I think anyone who knew me at the time recognized that I had an uncanny talent for art.

In the winter of my seventeenth year, I stopped drawing. I felt that if I kept going the way I'd been doing it, I would never be the kind of great and important person I promised Himeno I would be. At best, I might have been an unremarkable artist who did not excel in any particular area. By ordinary people's standards, that might have been successful enough, but to keep my promise, I focused on being as special as it was possible for a person to be. I needed a revolution. I could not allow myself to draw out of mere inertia.

The next time I held a pencil would be when everything had clicked into place. I wouldn't allow myself to draw until I was seeing the world in a different way than any other person. That was my decision.

It wasn't the wrong decision, I think.

But in the summer of my nineteenth year, without having achieved the clarity I sought, I allowed myself to hold the pencil again out of sheer fretfulness. It wasn't until much later that I realized that was the worst possible time for me to attempt doing art.

As a result, I lost the ability to draw. I couldn't even sketch a simple apple. The instant I tried to turn something into art, there was indescribable chaos within me, violent, like a scream barely repressed. I was racked with anxiety, as if I was stepping out onto nothing but air. I couldn't feel the necessity of any line, of any color.

I realized my genius was gone, had slipped out of my grasp. And I didn't want to struggle with it any longer. It was too late for me to start all over again. I threw away my pencils, fled from competition, withdrew into myself.

At some point, I had become too fixated on making my art acceptable to everyone. That was the main source of the chaos, I think. My fatal flaw was the belief that drawing something everyone would enjoy would make it universal and everlasting. In picking up the pencil again when I was most deluded, I was ruined and left "unable" to draw. Universal appeal does not come by obsequiously sucking up to everyone around you so that they like you. It comes from digging to the bottom of your own well and painstakingly dredging up what's down there. It lies within the results of a completely individual and personal approach.

In order to realize this, I needed to draw again without any fixation or purpose, but purely for my own personal enjoyment. And it was Miyagi who created that opportunity for me. It was her sleeping face that made it possible for me to draw, in a sense that was completely beyond what I thought it meant to "draw" before.

What I drew over the course of that night was my custom that I had maintained every night since around the age of five, where I drew the imagery in my head before I went to sleep of the world I wanted to live in. Memories that never happened, places I never went, from a time that might have been the past or the future. And by drawing Miyagi's sleeping face, I understood the means to express these concepts that had been building within me. I'd probably been waiting for that moment to arrive. It happened just before I was about to die—but my technique was at last complete.

According to the woman who ran my results, the art I was supposed to create at the end of my lost thirty-day period was "like de Chirico taken to a sentimental extreme." That was her interpretation, but it did sound to me like something I would try to draw.

The value I got for the opportunity to leave my name in art history earned me an eye-popping price. Since it was only thirty days' worth, it wasn't quite enough to pay off all of Miyagi's debt, but she would be free if she worked just another three years.

"Thirty days that are worth more than thirty years." The substitute monitor smirked as we parted ways.

This is how I lost the chance to be eternal.

The "summer in ten years" that Himeno once prophesied was coming to a close at last.

Her prediction was half-wrong.

Here at the end, I was not an eminent figure or a rich man.

Her prediction was half-right.

Something great did indeed happen. As she said, I was glad to be alive, with all my heart and soul.