[Adler]
by and_by_the_tree
Partita
~ p r e l u d e
“A partita is a Baroque dance suite, eclipsed by the sonatas of the later periods.”
The wine glasses clink together once more, flashing softly under the bright white lights of the ballroom. The lady lurking by the refreshments table winces at the sound, sharp over muted laughter and meandering conversation. She makes a half-hearted attempt to look away from the pair sipping from their glasses because it is really rude to stare after all, but the way the light from the chandelier plays upon the flute-shaped crystal is really far too enticing for her to look away from.
Which is ridiculous because she’s not there to work, she’s there to be recognised for her work. Even so, her practiced fingers toy with the zip of her case, running it up and down along its treads as she continues to assess the scene before her with experienced eyes. Just one photo wouldn’t hurt, would it?
And now they’ve caught her watching them. She gives them an awkward smile as they try to speak to her and explains haltingly that she was watching the light. Their words come too fast for her and her smile slips; her fingers continue to fiddle with the zip.
The woman’s gaze lights upon the camera case, and she pulls her companion closer to her side with a torrent of words and an expectant look. She obligingly pulls out her camera and snaps a photo; it made no difference if she did it quickly, for at this angle the glasses no longer sparkled in the light as they did mere seconds ago. She lowers the camera and smiles again. They thank her in short, quick tones and resume their conversation.
She finds another corner and silently checks the photo that she just took. Her finger hovers over the ‘delete’ button - it is hardly a good piece of work, let alone her greatest - before it moves over to the power setting and turns the camera off.
They look happy.
“Excuse me, are you Akari Fujisaki, Japanese photographer?”
And she looks up to see a thin bespectacled English gentleman, dressed in a black suit.
“Hai! Iie, I mean, yes, I am!” She stows the camera back in its case. “Is something wrong?”
“Oh, nothing of the sort, I assure you. I am merely an admirer of your work.” He gives her a short bow. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Kevin Purcell, composer. Your photographs inspired many of my compositions. In fact, your photo of the old toy keyboard was my inspiration for the partita that was shortlisted for the award.”
Again, the awkward smile reappears on her face. She hasn’t spoken more than a few words of English since leaving high school and the British accent made his words even harder for her to comprehend. “Th-thank you?” she tries, stumbling over the way that the foreign syllables were supposed to be pronounced.
Purcell nods understandingly. “There is a piano in the atrium, Miss Fujisaki. If you do not object, I would like you to hear what you have inspired.” This time, he spoke slowly, enunciating every word clearly.
This time she catches more of his words, and she acquiesces to his request (out of curiosity or of boredom, she cannot tell). He guides her to the atrium courteously, animatedly explaining aspects of his work that she cannot understand but pretends to. The words slip past her, requiring little more than a nod or a smile as a sign to keep flowing while her thoughts wander.
But when she is standing in front of the polished black grand piano listening to the first of the prelude’s themes picked out with a firm, clear hand, those thoughts return and Akari thinks she knows why he wanted her to hear it.
~ a l l e m a n d e
“A stately dance with an upbeat. Calm, serious and severe.”
As a child, Akari was essentially the apple of her parents’ eyes.
It didn’t take much for the little child with the cute smile and auburn hair to win over other adults either. They had fawned over her excessively, singing praises about her large brown eyes and small fingers and every other detail that in hindsight, she didn’t think other children lacked.
Her well-behaved demeanour didn’t hurt either. While other children skipped and tumbled and tracked mud onto the clean floors of their homes, Akari sat in the shade of her house watching spiders spin their webs and the older children chase each other home from school, children who stopped to tease the ancient dog that the neighbours across the street owned.
Then her mother would call her in for half a cup of juice and she would make her way in to the kitchen like a stately princess, so careful that she never trip and fall like those boys that ran pass her home every day.
Perhaps this was one of the reasons that Mrs. Fujisaki felt safe even when her daughter was out of sight: Akari never had the propensity for trouble, and was by all accounts a child mature for her age. This made her well-loved by all the mothers that she crossed paths with, not that she could remember who they all were at that age.
It wouldn’t have been necessary, really, but Akari’s parents sent her to a nearby kindergarten when they heard that more than half the kids in their neighbourhood attended one. There, she quickly wormed her way into the teachers’ good books and made a small circle of acquaintances who all stood at varying stages of well-behaved.
Not that she could remember who they were if you asked her about them. Her hazy memories of kindergarten included a long slide that all her classmates seemed to be crazy about, but after going down it once, she never felt the compulsion to keep climbing those plastic stairs, to keep looking down from the very top at a plain of fire-engine red and skid down it as though it was the best thing in the world.
That was not her thing, really, when compared to just sitting on the step of the building and watching the rest of her classmates run up and down the colourful construction for the whole of the short break. Well, not really the rest of her classmates. She vaguely recalled another girl who marked out a spot along the same step some way along but somehow by the time they graduated they were sitting side by side, sharing candies and erasers and Hello Kitty pencils.
She never saw that girl after graduation, but at that time, Akari didn’t know what it meant to graduate. Oh, she understood that she was older, but what it meant, what it made you leave behind and what it made you face, she didn’t quite grasp.
The day that her mother brought her to her new school to be registered, she had sat quietly outside the staffroom. The tables and chairs were all higher than she was used to, but it was alright, the furniture at home was like that too.
“My, what a cute girl.”
Akari looked up from her picture book to see a woman with her hair in a bun, wearing a pink cardigan over a yellow blouse. "Konnichiwa,” she said dutifully.
“Konnichiwa.” The woman smiled. “Are you waiting for your mother?”
She nodded, her twin pigtails bobbing along.
“What a well-behaved child,” the woman cooed. “What’s your name?”
“Fujisaki Akari.”
“Well, Akari-chan, you wouldn’t have seen my son, have you? He’s about this tall, and has a football with him. And he’s loud. Very loud.”
The woman’s hand gestures meant very little to Akari, but she did remember seeing a boy with a football running along the hallway. “I don’t know where he went, oba-san.”
She sighed. “I leave him alone for ten minutes and he’s gone. Oh, Hikaru…”
Akari wanted to go back to her picture book, but it seemed rude to ignore the woman in front of her.
“Excuse me, do you know this boy?”
Akari and the woman turn to see a man pulling a black-haired boy along with one hand and balancing a football on top of a stack of books in the other. The boy looked mutinous at having been caught; his sandals squeaked against the tiles and his lips were set in a pout.
She watched as the boy was returned to his mother, picture book temporarily forgotten. The football was thrust into his hands while his mother thanked the male teacher profusely. Then when the teacher left, his mother turned on him, nagging him unceasingly. He caught her staring, caught her eye, and deliberately gave his own a minute roll.
“Now, say hello to Akari-chan! She’s going to be your new classmate, so be nice to her.”
“Yo,” he mumbled, looking as though he wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.
“Yoroshiku onegaishimasu.” She lowered her head politely, as she was taught. “I hope we get along, um… that is…” she trailed off as she realised that she did not yet know the names of the mother and son that stood before her.
“His name is Hikaru, Akari-chan. Shindou Hikaru.”
~ c o u r a n t e
“Running in triple meter.”
She was always running after Shindou-kun, it seemed. Running after him at school, when he cut recess a little too close and the bell had begun to ring in the start of the next lesson. Running after him on their way home because they lived close to each other, but he never seemed to have the patience to wait for her like she did for him. Running after him at the playground, when he played football with the gang of elementary school kids that staked the area as their territory.
Akari didn’t resent him for it, though. It wasn’t difficult… just different. Gone were the days when she sat alone on the sidelines to observe. Now she ran through the centre of every commotion, added her voice to the chorus of laughter that filled the classroom, constantly trying to catch up with Shindou-kun.
Not that Shindou-kun was her only friend. She had others too, it was so much easier to form those friendships when she was actually with them and not just watching them. But Shindou-kun was special. Shindou-kun walked into her neatly ordered life, kicked his football around, and broke everything until all there was left was his stupid grin as he surveyed the damage obliviously.
She would be lying if she said it hadn’t scared her at first, but she did enjoy having new friends. Even if it seemed like it was one-sided on her part.
Then one day in May, she walked home with Shindou-kun, listening to him talk about football, as has been their routine since their first year. Akari could be proud of the fact that she knew more about their national football team than the rest of her class combined, but that pride was somewhat dampened by the fact that Shindou-kun could still rattle off more facts than she could, and made a show of doing that every afternoon.
They had stopped at the Shindou residence, Shindou-kun mounting the steps without a look back or even a word of farewell. She was used to that too, and cheerfully told his back “Mata ashita, Shindou-kun!” without a trace of bitterness in her voice. Then strangely enough, Shindou-kun turned back.
“Ne, Akari, don’t you want to come in for a bit? Okaa-san is making tamagoyaki today, and she said she would make some for you.”
This caught her by surprise, of course, and she nearly declined the offer out of habit. She really wanted to take a look around Shindou-kun’s house, of course, but to impose on his mother like that…
“Also, I need to borrow your history homework again. I don’t get what sensei is yakking about in class at all.”
She felt a flush colour her cheeks, and without thinking she shouted at him. “Hikaru!”
The only response she got was a cheeky grin.
She lent him her homework anyway. She spent the afternoon doing her math homework while Hikaru shamelessly copied her answers (only when Mrs. Shindou was out of the room, of course). It was fun in its own way, she supposed.
Hikaru shut the door behind her when she left, then as though he suddenly remembered something, pulled it open once more. “By the way, Akari, happy birthday.” Then he slid the wooden frame back, and she was left staring at glow of the lights through the thin rice paper.
Thinking back, her seventh birthday was probably the proper start of their friendship. Hikaru never ceased to surprise her, and in turn, Akari never let herself be scared away. The day he dyed his bangs, she had been shocked at first, but then she laughed it off. The day he collapsed in his grandfather’s attic, she had been frightened, but she ran for help at once. The day he cried at the tournament, she cried too.
And yet, the day he quit the Haze Go club… she didn’t know what to do.
~ s a r a b a n d e
“Slow and dragging, distinctive in its own fashion.”
The science lab, once a place that she all but sprinted towards after lessons, now felt about as welcoming as the principal’s office. Akari didn’t want to go. She didn’t want to slide the door open only to see that there was no one, no Mitani-kun, no Hikaru.
She didn’t want to come either, but there was Natsume and Kumiko, and without Tsutsui-san, she was the last one left who cared enough about the Go club to keep it going.
Natsume and Kumiko. It wasn’t fair that they had to be dragged into this whole business, which was really only between Hikaru and Mitani-kun anyhow.
It wasn’t fair that she had to be involved either.
The lab was empty, as expected. Kumiko and Natsume and herself, they were all responsible students and did their expected duties before going to their afterschool clubs. Without Mitani-kun, without Hikaru, the science lab was empty. And quiet. The reassuring ‘pachi!’ of glass stones hitting wood was nowhere to be heard.
She set her bags aside and retrieved the boards from the cupboard at the back of the classroom. They wouldn’t be needing all of them now. She puts one back, the one with legs. She always thought of that one as Mitani-kun and Hikaru’s board. Besides, the foldable ones are easier to set up and store.
Natsume and Kumiko haven’t arrived yet, but that was normal. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe after what happened yesterday, they would never want to come back again.
She could see the hurt in Tsutsui-san’s face when he told her that he wouldn’t be coming back every day. She let him go. It probably hit him the worst, enough so that going to cram school every day was preferable to coming back to the lab where there were too many boards for too few players.
The glass stones were cool on her fingers as she played, an idle game against herself that had as much spirit as an extinguished candle. Akari didn’t know why she even bothered to try playing against herself. She let black overpower white, always. It looked foolish and had no practical value, and by midgame even she knew that if it had been a real match, white would have resigned fifteen moves ago.
She closed her eyes, her hand in the go-ke of white stones. She could hear footsteps pounding along the hallway, openly flouting the no running rule. They grew louder as the owner drew nearer, and still she kept her eyes shut.
They faded into the distance. Disappointed, she opened her eyes and unclenched the fist that held a single white stone. She should have known all along. Why did she get her hopes up only to see them crash again?
It was a pointless game. She cleared the board until it was as empty as she felt. An extinguished candle served no purpose.
Then again, she should have known that where Hikaru was concerned, she would inevitably involve herself. Because it’s Hikaru, and he was her best friend. Always her best friend, if nothing else.
He would want her to keep playing. For all he said about girls and Go, and how he brushed her off about it all the time, she knew he would like her to keep playing.
So she played.
~ m e n u e t i
“Small steps evolving in a social context.”
Graduation day had been a happy one. Being happy when everyone was excited and emotions were running high was no incredible feat. Anyone could be happy on a day like that. Everyone was happy on a day like that.
Then when the euphoria wore off, reality seeped back in and being happy felt like a hundred years away.
Akari was accepted into the local senior high school. In fact, many of the Haze graduates were accepted into that same school. Kumiko and Mitani-kun were both going to start school with her, as far as she knew. Kaneko-san wasn’t though, she was offered a scholarship from a private senior high school on account of her volleyball prowess. Mitani-kun had outwardly expressed joy at being rid of her at last, but Akari caught him looking pensive once or twice when everyone else was busy congratulating Kaneko-san.
And Hikaru hadn’t even bothered applying at all. Between his life as a Go professional and his abysmal grades on the final exam, he figured there was no point and despite her disapproval, Akari had to agree that he was making an informed decision. She kind of saw it coming either way. That still didn’t mean she wasn’t disappointed.
She joined the Go club when school started, albeit with some hesitation. Was there any point in continuing to play Go? Hikaru wouldn’t even know if she was. Yes, she liked Go, but did she like it, or the memories she made around it? She shouldn’t be living a life built around the past, because there was the future to contend with.
Akari couldn’t be sure, so she compromised. She joined the Go club, which was larger than the Haze one had been, but she didn’t dedicate all her time to it as she did back in junior high. There were far stronger players than she anyway, so she would never be selected for the tournaments. Between the club and the increased workload of senior high, there was plenty to make her life a productive and fulfilling one, and that was all she wanted. Or so she thought.
She was also recruited into the photography club. Photography had been scheduled for the second month of art classes, and after they handed in their first assignment, the teacher had been all too willing to introduce her to the other club members. At least she had proven to be more proficient with a camera than a Go stone. At least she had something to be proud of.
There was a small stall set up by a kindly old woman on the corner of the street at her school, and Akari passed it every afternoon on her way home. She made it a point to buy Go Weekly every Friday so she could read it over the weekend, such that by the end of the first school term, the stall owner knew to save a copy of it for her every week. Akari thought that the old woman assumed that she was a Go fan, judging by the way she would talk to Akari about some of the highlights in the paper now and then. Most of them happened to be about Touya Akira, but Akari didn’t bother correcting the old woman’s impression that she was a fan of his. In retrospect, she figured it was probably because it would hurt more to admit that she had to resort to newspapers to keep up with a childhood friend.
So it was through Go Weekly that she found out that Hikaru had made it into the Meijin League. In all honesty, she wasn’t sure what the Meijin was or its standing in the world of Go titles, but the article made it sound like a big deal and she supposed it was. Hikaru was only seventeen, after all.
She had been so happy about it nonetheless, she picked up the phone and had nearly dialled Hikaru’s number before she
returned to the present. She hadn’t spoken to Hikaru in over a year, so what was she going to tell him? “Congratulations on entering the Meijin League”? That was all that she could think of. She didn’t know enough to say more.
It had been a full year and a half. Who knew if he even wanted her to call?
Even so, her fingertips still remember the numbers as though she just dialled it yesterday.
Akari replaced the phone in its cradle. What she thought was now irrelevant.
~ m e n u e t i i
“A controlled and graceful contrast in a few ways.”
If the days of her childhood blurred together because the imperfections of memory marked the lines between one day of joy and another with an unsteady hand, the days of her adulthood fade into each other because memory refused to make the effort to demarcate the slow passing of emptiness.
Akari graduated from senior high school with decent grades, but had decided against college. For one, it was costly. For another, her photography club teacher had already found her a job with an arts magazine. Between taking photos of subjects that she liked and more years of studying what she might never be interested in, she’d chosen the former easily enough.
Besides, taking photos reminded her that her life wasn’t empty. The world seen through the camera lens was far more forgiving than the world seen without. As long as there was something in front of those lens, her life wasn’t empty. She could live with that much.
She couldn’t bring herself to stop playing Go, though. Neither could she give up reading Go Weekly. Pointless as it seemed now, despite her new colleagues’ lack of interest in the game, she would still drop by Go salons when she passed them and play a game or two, listening to the customers discuss the latest news on the pro scene.
For herself, she said. She had to live her own life, empty or not. If taking photos and playing games made her whole, then that’s what she would do.
~ g i g u e
“The lively imitative finale.”
The seatbelt sign lights up, accompanied by a muted chime. Mechanically Akari secures the seatbelt around her waist without taking her eyes off the window. The flight is a turbulent one, considering that this is the eighth time the captain switched on the seatbelt sign since they took off.
An announcement telling the passengers to return their seats to the upright position, stow their tables away and open their windows plays. Akari ignores it. She’s already done all that, so she continues her cloud-watching. It is midday wherever the plane is passing, and the clouds are bright and voluminous.
Purcell had naturally asked for her opinion when he had finished his little performance. Akari found herself at a loss for words, in both English and Japanese. He had described her thoughts when she had juxtaposed the toy against the files and notes filled with numbers and ever more complex equations precisely. He had described her. With the exception of the joyful gigue that ended it, it was her. It was her, and she couldn’t - or wouldn’t - tell him that. In the end, she managed a decent response that made him utterly overjoyed.
And she’d won the award. She should have been ecstatic about it. Although seeing the photo of a junior high school boy recreating a game of Go alone in the room brought a pang of nostalgia and loneliness to her. She had chosen to put the focus on the stone in his hand, the way the chipped glass caught the light of the setting sun as he resolutely placed it on the board, but there was no denying that the figure holding the stone was a force in itself. It reminded her of too many things she once had, and that killed some of the joy in winning.
Not that she even wanted to be there in the first place. Her editor just sent the photo in without consulting her. If he had, she would probably have refused.
The plane jerks once, and belatedly Akari realises that it has landed. She is back in Japan.
She waits patiently as the captain parks the plane and the vacuum tube connects before unbuckling her seatbelt. She remains in her seat as the other passengers rush to clear customs and collect their luggage. She only brought one carry-on bag with her for this short trip, and it would have been discourteous to jostle with all the other families with young children and hence far more luggage.
When the plane is sufficiently empty she casually collects her one bag and strolls up the passageway. Customs took a little while more, but it wasn’t as bad as the last time she travelled. The holiday period had yet to start in Japan this time.
She stops by the duty-free shops, pondering if she should get some alcohol for her father, then remembering that he doesn’t have guests from work scheduled to visit for dinner and won’t need it. Then guiltily she remembers that she hasn’t visited her parents at all in the last month, and resolves to do so within the following week. She leaves the shop without buying anything.
Meandering towards the sliding doors that lead towards the public area of the airport, she takes her time to observe the other passengers in the arrival hall. Akari thinks it is a pity that photography is prohibited, considering all the rich human interaction that could be captured, immortalised in a picture.
As she passes through the sliding doors, giving her belongings one last cursory check, she hears a loud voice say, “About time!”
Surprised, she raises her head. Her eyes lock on the two-toned hair, the petulant expression, the bright green irises that are fixed upon her.
Her eyes widen. “Hikaru! Why are you here?”
He looks very much like he did, albeit older, more mature. The life of a Go professional suits him well, Akari thinks. He gives her an embarrassed grin. “Well, your mom called my mom to ask if I could pick you up from the airport because your dad is busy. I don’t have a game today, so I said okay. Anyway, congratulations!”
He shakes her hand with so much energy, it’s almost as if he never grew up. Stunned into silence, she can only ask “How did you know?”
His grin turns into a look of incredulous disbelief. “It’s all over the internet! And the news too. Geez, Akari, it’s a big deal, you know?”
So her editor said, but Akari hadn’t believed him at that time. Hearing it from Hikaru, however, convinces her that it’s true. Her cheeks grow warm at his statement. When was the last time Hikaru complimented her…?
Hikaru continues on as though he hasn’t noticed. He probably hasn’t, actually. “I haven’t seen your photo though, they said that they’d publish the photo in the next issue after the final judging. I knew you’d win though, you always take decent stuff. Okaa-san thought so too, she keeps all the magazines with your photos in them because she can’t bear to throw them out.”
Akari hadn’t thought that she could be more startled, but the implication of his words, that he had been following her career the way that she followed his, it is far more than she could have ever hoped.
“Anyway, let’s go. Can we stop by a Go salon on the way back? I haven’t played you in like, forever.” Without waiting for an answer, he starts towards the doors that would take them to the car park.
Akari follows. Her life really unfolded like the partita, after all. Suddenly it seems as if the world seen through her eyes, seen without a lens, is alive and bright once more. As it should always have been, she reflects. When did she lose that spark that made life bright?
She never had it. That spark was never hers. It was Hikaru’s.
Hikaru stops just at the edge of the shelter that the airport architect had been so kind to provide for arrivals waiting for transport to pick them up. He turns back to cast a teasing eye on the once-familiar sight of her struggling to catch up with him. Silhouetted by the midday sun, he is a sight that she would love to capture with her camera. But she doesn’t, because he is Hikaru and she can remember him perfectly well without help.
“By the way, Akari,” he says once she has caught up with him, “happy birthday.”
~end~
Partita
~ p r e l u d e
“A partita is a Baroque dance suite, eclipsed by the sonatas of the later periods.”
The wine glasses clink together once more, flashing softly under the bright white lights of the ballroom. The lady lurking by the refreshments table winces at the sound, sharp over muted laughter and meandering conversation. She makes a half-hearted attempt to look away from the pair sipping from their glasses because it is really rude to stare after all, but the way the light from the chandelier plays upon the flute-shaped crystal is really far too enticing for her to look away from.
Which is ridiculous because she’s not there to work, she’s there to be recognised for her work. Even so, her practiced fingers toy with the zip of her case, running it up and down along its treads as she continues to assess the scene before her with experienced eyes. Just one photo wouldn’t hurt, would it?
And now they’ve caught her watching them. She gives them an awkward smile as they try to speak to her and explains haltingly that she was watching the light. Their words come too fast for her and her smile slips; her fingers continue to fiddle with the zip.
The woman’s gaze lights upon the camera case, and she pulls her companion closer to her side with a torrent of words and an expectant look. She obligingly pulls out her camera and snaps a photo; it made no difference if she did it quickly, for at this angle the glasses no longer sparkled in the light as they did mere seconds ago. She lowers the camera and smiles again. They thank her in short, quick tones and resume their conversation.
She finds another corner and silently checks the photo that she just took. Her finger hovers over the ‘delete’ button - it is hardly a good piece of work, let alone her greatest - before it moves over to the power setting and turns the camera off.
They look happy.
“Excuse me, are you Akari Fujisaki, Japanese photographer?”
And she looks up to see a thin bespectacled English gentleman, dressed in a black suit.
“Hai! Iie, I mean, yes, I am!” She stows the camera back in its case. “Is something wrong?”
“Oh, nothing of the sort, I assure you. I am merely an admirer of your work.” He gives her a short bow. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Kevin Purcell, composer. Your photographs inspired many of my compositions. In fact, your photo of the old toy keyboard was my inspiration for the partita that was shortlisted for the award.”
Again, the awkward smile reappears on her face. She hasn’t spoken more than a few words of English since leaving high school and the British accent made his words even harder for her to comprehend. “Th-thank you?” she tries, stumbling over the way that the foreign syllables were supposed to be pronounced.
Purcell nods understandingly. “There is a piano in the atrium, Miss Fujisaki. If you do not object, I would like you to hear what you have inspired.” This time, he spoke slowly, enunciating every word clearly.
This time she catches more of his words, and she acquiesces to his request (out of curiosity or of boredom, she cannot tell). He guides her to the atrium courteously, animatedly explaining aspects of his work that she cannot understand but pretends to. The words slip past her, requiring little more than a nod or a smile as a sign to keep flowing while her thoughts wander.
But when she is standing in front of the polished black grand piano listening to the first of the prelude’s themes picked out with a firm, clear hand, those thoughts return and Akari thinks she knows why he wanted her to hear it.
~ a l l e m a n d e
“A stately dance with an upbeat. Calm, serious and severe.”
As a child, Akari was essentially the apple of her parents’ eyes.
It didn’t take much for the little child with the cute smile and auburn hair to win over other adults either. They had fawned over her excessively, singing praises about her large brown eyes and small fingers and every other detail that in hindsight, she didn’t think other children lacked.
Her well-behaved demeanour didn’t hurt either. While other children skipped and tumbled and tracked mud onto the clean floors of their homes, Akari sat in the shade of her house watching spiders spin their webs and the older children chase each other home from school, children who stopped to tease the ancient dog that the neighbours across the street owned.
Then her mother would call her in for half a cup of juice and she would make her way in to the kitchen like a stately princess, so careful that she never trip and fall like those boys that ran pass her home every day.
Perhaps this was one of the reasons that Mrs. Fujisaki felt safe even when her daughter was out of sight: Akari never had the propensity for trouble, and was by all accounts a child mature for her age. This made her well-loved by all the mothers that she crossed paths with, not that she could remember who they all were at that age.
It wouldn’t have been necessary, really, but Akari’s parents sent her to a nearby kindergarten when they heard that more than half the kids in their neighbourhood attended one. There, she quickly wormed her way into the teachers’ good books and made a small circle of acquaintances who all stood at varying stages of well-behaved.
Not that she could remember who they were if you asked her about them. Her hazy memories of kindergarten included a long slide that all her classmates seemed to be crazy about, but after going down it once, she never felt the compulsion to keep climbing those plastic stairs, to keep looking down from the very top at a plain of fire-engine red and skid down it as though it was the best thing in the world.
That was not her thing, really, when compared to just sitting on the step of the building and watching the rest of her classmates run up and down the colourful construction for the whole of the short break. Well, not really the rest of her classmates. She vaguely recalled another girl who marked out a spot along the same step some way along but somehow by the time they graduated they were sitting side by side, sharing candies and erasers and Hello Kitty pencils.
She never saw that girl after graduation, but at that time, Akari didn’t know what it meant to graduate. Oh, she understood that she was older, but what it meant, what it made you leave behind and what it made you face, she didn’t quite grasp.
The day that her mother brought her to her new school to be registered, she had sat quietly outside the staffroom. The tables and chairs were all higher than she was used to, but it was alright, the furniture at home was like that too.
“My, what a cute girl.”
Akari looked up from her picture book to see a woman with her hair in a bun, wearing a pink cardigan over a yellow blouse. "Konnichiwa,” she said dutifully.
“Konnichiwa.” The woman smiled. “Are you waiting for your mother?”
She nodded, her twin pigtails bobbing along.
“What a well-behaved child,” the woman cooed. “What’s your name?”
“Fujisaki Akari.”
“Well, Akari-chan, you wouldn’t have seen my son, have you? He’s about this tall, and has a football with him. And he’s loud. Very loud.”
The woman’s hand gestures meant very little to Akari, but she did remember seeing a boy with a football running along the hallway. “I don’t know where he went, oba-san.”
She sighed. “I leave him alone for ten minutes and he’s gone. Oh, Hikaru…”
Akari wanted to go back to her picture book, but it seemed rude to ignore the woman in front of her.
“Excuse me, do you know this boy?”
Akari and the woman turn to see a man pulling a black-haired boy along with one hand and balancing a football on top of a stack of books in the other. The boy looked mutinous at having been caught; his sandals squeaked against the tiles and his lips were set in a pout.
She watched as the boy was returned to his mother, picture book temporarily forgotten. The football was thrust into his hands while his mother thanked the male teacher profusely. Then when the teacher left, his mother turned on him, nagging him unceasingly. He caught her staring, caught her eye, and deliberately gave his own a minute roll.
“Now, say hello to Akari-chan! She’s going to be your new classmate, so be nice to her.”
“Yo,” he mumbled, looking as though he wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.
“Yoroshiku onegaishimasu.” She lowered her head politely, as she was taught. “I hope we get along, um… that is…” she trailed off as she realised that she did not yet know the names of the mother and son that stood before her.
“His name is Hikaru, Akari-chan. Shindou Hikaru.”
~ c o u r a n t e
“Running in triple meter.”
She was always running after Shindou-kun, it seemed. Running after him at school, when he cut recess a little too close and the bell had begun to ring in the start of the next lesson. Running after him on their way home because they lived close to each other, but he never seemed to have the patience to wait for her like she did for him. Running after him at the playground, when he played football with the gang of elementary school kids that staked the area as their territory.
Akari didn’t resent him for it, though. It wasn’t difficult… just different. Gone were the days when she sat alone on the sidelines to observe. Now she ran through the centre of every commotion, added her voice to the chorus of laughter that filled the classroom, constantly trying to catch up with Shindou-kun.
Not that Shindou-kun was her only friend. She had others too, it was so much easier to form those friendships when she was actually with them and not just watching them. But Shindou-kun was special. Shindou-kun walked into her neatly ordered life, kicked his football around, and broke everything until all there was left was his stupid grin as he surveyed the damage obliviously.
She would be lying if she said it hadn’t scared her at first, but she did enjoy having new friends. Even if it seemed like it was one-sided on her part.
Then one day in May, she walked home with Shindou-kun, listening to him talk about football, as has been their routine since their first year. Akari could be proud of the fact that she knew more about their national football team than the rest of her class combined, but that pride was somewhat dampened by the fact that Shindou-kun could still rattle off more facts than she could, and made a show of doing that every afternoon.
They had stopped at the Shindou residence, Shindou-kun mounting the steps without a look back or even a word of farewell. She was used to that too, and cheerfully told his back “Mata ashita, Shindou-kun!” without a trace of bitterness in her voice. Then strangely enough, Shindou-kun turned back.
“Ne, Akari, don’t you want to come in for a bit? Okaa-san is making tamagoyaki today, and she said she would make some for you.”
This caught her by surprise, of course, and she nearly declined the offer out of habit. She really wanted to take a look around Shindou-kun’s house, of course, but to impose on his mother like that…
“Also, I need to borrow your history homework again. I don’t get what sensei is yakking about in class at all.”
She felt a flush colour her cheeks, and without thinking she shouted at him. “Hikaru!”
The only response she got was a cheeky grin.
She lent him her homework anyway. She spent the afternoon doing her math homework while Hikaru shamelessly copied her answers (only when Mrs. Shindou was out of the room, of course). It was fun in its own way, she supposed.
Hikaru shut the door behind her when she left, then as though he suddenly remembered something, pulled it open once more. “By the way, Akari, happy birthday.” Then he slid the wooden frame back, and she was left staring at glow of the lights through the thin rice paper.
Thinking back, her seventh birthday was probably the proper start of their friendship. Hikaru never ceased to surprise her, and in turn, Akari never let herself be scared away. The day he dyed his bangs, she had been shocked at first, but then she laughed it off. The day he collapsed in his grandfather’s attic, she had been frightened, but she ran for help at once. The day he cried at the tournament, she cried too.
And yet, the day he quit the Haze Go club… she didn’t know what to do.
~ s a r a b a n d e
“Slow and dragging, distinctive in its own fashion.”
The science lab, once a place that she all but sprinted towards after lessons, now felt about as welcoming as the principal’s office. Akari didn’t want to go. She didn’t want to slide the door open only to see that there was no one, no Mitani-kun, no Hikaru.
She didn’t want to come either, but there was Natsume and Kumiko, and without Tsutsui-san, she was the last one left who cared enough about the Go club to keep it going.
Natsume and Kumiko. It wasn’t fair that they had to be dragged into this whole business, which was really only between Hikaru and Mitani-kun anyhow.
It wasn’t fair that she had to be involved either.
The lab was empty, as expected. Kumiko and Natsume and herself, they were all responsible students and did their expected duties before going to their afterschool clubs. Without Mitani-kun, without Hikaru, the science lab was empty. And quiet. The reassuring ‘pachi!’ of glass stones hitting wood was nowhere to be heard.
She set her bags aside and retrieved the boards from the cupboard at the back of the classroom. They wouldn’t be needing all of them now. She puts one back, the one with legs. She always thought of that one as Mitani-kun and Hikaru’s board. Besides, the foldable ones are easier to set up and store.
Natsume and Kumiko haven’t arrived yet, but that was normal. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe after what happened yesterday, they would never want to come back again.
She could see the hurt in Tsutsui-san’s face when he told her that he wouldn’t be coming back every day. She let him go. It probably hit him the worst, enough so that going to cram school every day was preferable to coming back to the lab where there were too many boards for too few players.
The glass stones were cool on her fingers as she played, an idle game against herself that had as much spirit as an extinguished candle. Akari didn’t know why she even bothered to try playing against herself. She let black overpower white, always. It looked foolish and had no practical value, and by midgame even she knew that if it had been a real match, white would have resigned fifteen moves ago.
She closed her eyes, her hand in the go-ke of white stones. She could hear footsteps pounding along the hallway, openly flouting the no running rule. They grew louder as the owner drew nearer, and still she kept her eyes shut.
They faded into the distance. Disappointed, she opened her eyes and unclenched the fist that held a single white stone. She should have known all along. Why did she get her hopes up only to see them crash again?
It was a pointless game. She cleared the board until it was as empty as she felt. An extinguished candle served no purpose.
Then again, she should have known that where Hikaru was concerned, she would inevitably involve herself. Because it’s Hikaru, and he was her best friend. Always her best friend, if nothing else.
He would want her to keep playing. For all he said about girls and Go, and how he brushed her off about it all the time, she knew he would like her to keep playing.
So she played.
~ m e n u e t i
“Small steps evolving in a social context.”
Graduation day had been a happy one. Being happy when everyone was excited and emotions were running high was no incredible feat. Anyone could be happy on a day like that. Everyone was happy on a day like that.
Then when the euphoria wore off, reality seeped back in and being happy felt like a hundred years away.
Akari was accepted into the local senior high school. In fact, many of the Haze graduates were accepted into that same school. Kumiko and Mitani-kun were both going to start school with her, as far as she knew. Kaneko-san wasn’t though, she was offered a scholarship from a private senior high school on account of her volleyball prowess. Mitani-kun had outwardly expressed joy at being rid of her at last, but Akari caught him looking pensive once or twice when everyone else was busy congratulating Kaneko-san.
And Hikaru hadn’t even bothered applying at all. Between his life as a Go professional and his abysmal grades on the final exam, he figured there was no point and despite her disapproval, Akari had to agree that he was making an informed decision. She kind of saw it coming either way. That still didn’t mean she wasn’t disappointed.
She joined the Go club when school started, albeit with some hesitation. Was there any point in continuing to play Go? Hikaru wouldn’t even know if she was. Yes, she liked Go, but did she like it, or the memories she made around it? She shouldn’t be living a life built around the past, because there was the future to contend with.
Akari couldn’t be sure, so she compromised. She joined the Go club, which was larger than the Haze one had been, but she didn’t dedicate all her time to it as she did back in junior high. There were far stronger players than she anyway, so she would never be selected for the tournaments. Between the club and the increased workload of senior high, there was plenty to make her life a productive and fulfilling one, and that was all she wanted. Or so she thought.
She was also recruited into the photography club. Photography had been scheduled for the second month of art classes, and after they handed in their first assignment, the teacher had been all too willing to introduce her to the other club members. At least she had proven to be more proficient with a camera than a Go stone. At least she had something to be proud of.
There was a small stall set up by a kindly old woman on the corner of the street at her school, and Akari passed it every afternoon on her way home. She made it a point to buy Go Weekly every Friday so she could read it over the weekend, such that by the end of the first school term, the stall owner knew to save a copy of it for her every week. Akari thought that the old woman assumed that she was a Go fan, judging by the way she would talk to Akari about some of the highlights in the paper now and then. Most of them happened to be about Touya Akira, but Akari didn’t bother correcting the old woman’s impression that she was a fan of his. In retrospect, she figured it was probably because it would hurt more to admit that she had to resort to newspapers to keep up with a childhood friend.
So it was through Go Weekly that she found out that Hikaru had made it into the Meijin League. In all honesty, she wasn’t sure what the Meijin was or its standing in the world of Go titles, but the article made it sound like a big deal and she supposed it was. Hikaru was only seventeen, after all.
She had been so happy about it nonetheless, she picked up the phone and had nearly dialled Hikaru’s number before she
returned to the present. She hadn’t spoken to Hikaru in over a year, so what was she going to tell him? “Congratulations on entering the Meijin League”? That was all that she could think of. She didn’t know enough to say more.
It had been a full year and a half. Who knew if he even wanted her to call?
Even so, her fingertips still remember the numbers as though she just dialled it yesterday.
Akari replaced the phone in its cradle. What she thought was now irrelevant.
~ m e n u e t i i
“A controlled and graceful contrast in a few ways.”
If the days of her childhood blurred together because the imperfections of memory marked the lines between one day of joy and another with an unsteady hand, the days of her adulthood fade into each other because memory refused to make the effort to demarcate the slow passing of emptiness.
Akari graduated from senior high school with decent grades, but had decided against college. For one, it was costly. For another, her photography club teacher had already found her a job with an arts magazine. Between taking photos of subjects that she liked and more years of studying what she might never be interested in, she’d chosen the former easily enough.
Besides, taking photos reminded her that her life wasn’t empty. The world seen through the camera lens was far more forgiving than the world seen without. As long as there was something in front of those lens, her life wasn’t empty. She could live with that much.
She couldn’t bring herself to stop playing Go, though. Neither could she give up reading Go Weekly. Pointless as it seemed now, despite her new colleagues’ lack of interest in the game, she would still drop by Go salons when she passed them and play a game or two, listening to the customers discuss the latest news on the pro scene.
For herself, she said. She had to live her own life, empty or not. If taking photos and playing games made her whole, then that’s what she would do.
~ g i g u e
“The lively imitative finale.”
The seatbelt sign lights up, accompanied by a muted chime. Mechanically Akari secures the seatbelt around her waist without taking her eyes off the window. The flight is a turbulent one, considering that this is the eighth time the captain switched on the seatbelt sign since they took off.
An announcement telling the passengers to return their seats to the upright position, stow their tables away and open their windows plays. Akari ignores it. She’s already done all that, so she continues her cloud-watching. It is midday wherever the plane is passing, and the clouds are bright and voluminous.
Purcell had naturally asked for her opinion when he had finished his little performance. Akari found herself at a loss for words, in both English and Japanese. He had described her thoughts when she had juxtaposed the toy against the files and notes filled with numbers and ever more complex equations precisely. He had described her. With the exception of the joyful gigue that ended it, it was her. It was her, and she couldn’t - or wouldn’t - tell him that. In the end, she managed a decent response that made him utterly overjoyed.
And she’d won the award. She should have been ecstatic about it. Although seeing the photo of a junior high school boy recreating a game of Go alone in the room brought a pang of nostalgia and loneliness to her. She had chosen to put the focus on the stone in his hand, the way the chipped glass caught the light of the setting sun as he resolutely placed it on the board, but there was no denying that the figure holding the stone was a force in itself. It reminded her of too many things she once had, and that killed some of the joy in winning.
Not that she even wanted to be there in the first place. Her editor just sent the photo in without consulting her. If he had, she would probably have refused.
The plane jerks once, and belatedly Akari realises that it has landed. She is back in Japan.
She waits patiently as the captain parks the plane and the vacuum tube connects before unbuckling her seatbelt. She remains in her seat as the other passengers rush to clear customs and collect their luggage. She only brought one carry-on bag with her for this short trip, and it would have been discourteous to jostle with all the other families with young children and hence far more luggage.
When the plane is sufficiently empty she casually collects her one bag and strolls up the passageway. Customs took a little while more, but it wasn’t as bad as the last time she travelled. The holiday period had yet to start in Japan this time.
She stops by the duty-free shops, pondering if she should get some alcohol for her father, then remembering that he doesn’t have guests from work scheduled to visit for dinner and won’t need it. Then guiltily she remembers that she hasn’t visited her parents at all in the last month, and resolves to do so within the following week. She leaves the shop without buying anything.
Meandering towards the sliding doors that lead towards the public area of the airport, she takes her time to observe the other passengers in the arrival hall. Akari thinks it is a pity that photography is prohibited, considering all the rich human interaction that could be captured, immortalised in a picture.
As she passes through the sliding doors, giving her belongings one last cursory check, she hears a loud voice say, “About time!”
Surprised, she raises her head. Her eyes lock on the two-toned hair, the petulant expression, the bright green irises that are fixed upon her.
Her eyes widen. “Hikaru! Why are you here?”
He looks very much like he did, albeit older, more mature. The life of a Go professional suits him well, Akari thinks. He gives her an embarrassed grin. “Well, your mom called my mom to ask if I could pick you up from the airport because your dad is busy. I don’t have a game today, so I said okay. Anyway, congratulations!”
He shakes her hand with so much energy, it’s almost as if he never grew up. Stunned into silence, she can only ask “How did you know?”
His grin turns into a look of incredulous disbelief. “It’s all over the internet! And the news too. Geez, Akari, it’s a big deal, you know?”
So her editor said, but Akari hadn’t believed him at that time. Hearing it from Hikaru, however, convinces her that it’s true. Her cheeks grow warm at his statement. When was the last time Hikaru complimented her…?
Hikaru continues on as though he hasn’t noticed. He probably hasn’t, actually. “I haven’t seen your photo though, they said that they’d publish the photo in the next issue after the final judging. I knew you’d win though, you always take decent stuff. Okaa-san thought so too, she keeps all the magazines with your photos in them because she can’t bear to throw them out.”
Akari hadn’t thought that she could be more startled, but the implication of his words, that he had been following her career the way that she followed his, it is far more than she could have ever hoped.
“Anyway, let’s go. Can we stop by a Go salon on the way back? I haven’t played you in like, forever.” Without waiting for an answer, he starts towards the doors that would take them to the car park.
Akari follows. Her life really unfolded like the partita, after all. Suddenly it seems as if the world seen through her eyes, seen without a lens, is alive and bright once more. As it should always have been, she reflects. When did she lose that spark that made life bright?
She never had it. That spark was never hers. It was Hikaru’s.
Hikaru stops just at the edge of the shelter that the airport architect had been so kind to provide for arrivals waiting for transport to pick them up. He turns back to cast a teasing eye on the once-familiar sight of her struggling to catch up with him. Silhouetted by the midday sun, he is a sight that she would love to capture with her camera. But she doesn’t, because he is Hikaru and she can remember him perfectly well without help.
“By the way, Akari,” he says once she has caught up with him, “happy birthday.”
~end~