[retelling] Miacis Symphony - chapter 2: My friend
This chapter has 2 parts, both are written in first person. The first narrator, Michiru, refer to themselves using a gender-neutral pronoun ‘watashi’, and the reader is given small clues one by one, all leading to the revelation of Michiru’s identity.
Through Michiru’s eyes, we see a girl named Aya-chan who’s just returned home; she is lying on the bed, looking up at the ceiling, where a chandelier is hung, making everything in the room prettier and sparkly - Michiru thinks that it’d be much better if the room was more of a mess. Aya-chan is crying. However, no sound escapes her lips, there are no actual tears in her eyes. It’s as if somebody had pressed a pause button, and she just froze. At last, not looking at Michiru, she says, “I’m hopeless”. It’d been a while since Aya-chan spoke to Michiru, but what is more surprising to our narrator is the sudden use of Hakata dialect - Aya-chan switched to standard Japanese as soon as she moved to Tokyo. Michiru asks, “What do you mean?” in the same dialect. There’s no reply for a while.
Michiru reminisces on the first time Aya-chan dyed her hair a lighter shade of brown. The girl was scared of her parents’ reaction (Michiru calls them ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa’), but everything went smoothly - maybe because the color suited her, but most likely because they were caught off guard: their daughter had always been collected, never showed any rebellious tendencies, she hardly expressed any strong emotions at all. Even with her hair dyed she didn’t look like a teen trying to pass for an adult, it did look neat. Aya-chan doesn’t take after either of her parents, her facial features can’t be considered ‘typical Japanese’. Her parents would even joke sometimes that she was sent to them from Heaven. Michiru knows that it’s not true: “I was there and saw Aya-chan come out of Mama’s tummy”.
Aya-chan finally speaks up, asking if there is something wrong with her. Michiru says she’s a good girl, to which she snaps, “I am not!” Michiru ventures a question: did something happen while Aya-chan was away, visiting her parents in Fukuoka? (She’s on spring break from college). Aya-chan is silent again, she just puts her hand up, as if reaching to the ceiling, and Michiru observes how pretty her nails are. They resemble the night sky.
“Kei painted them for me”.
[Please note that the kanji used for the name, 圭, has other readings. I like this one though, it sounds very familiar :)]
Kei is one of the girls who used to ‘follow Aya-chan around’ during her high school years. Once a plain-looking country bumpkin, Kei learned a lot about fashion and make-up from Aya-chan, even discovered a talent for nail design. “You helped me to start liking myself, thank you”, Kei said one day. “I’m so happy to hear that”, Aya-chan responded, smiling; then, after Kei left, she burst into tears for no apparent reason. The very next day Aya-chan announced she was determined to go to college in Tokyo. She told Michiru that she has become aware and sick of the smell of noodles being cooked in the shopping district in Fukuoka.
According to Michiru, Aya-chan left most of her belongings at her parents’ house, but “took me with her”. Now, two years later, she studies fashion and design and works part-time at a clothes shop. At first, she was very excited, worked really hard to buy all the nice things only available in Tokyo. After several months her enthusiasm faded. She doesn’t smile anymore - instead, she cries with no actual tears coming out. Nobody but Michiru would even notice.
Aya-chan tells Michiru the news about Kei and other girls: the former is starting her work as a professional nail technician, Micchan is married and has a baby, Miho is going to study in Australia… “What am I doing here, in Tokyo?”
Aya-chan takes a rubber hair band and puts it around her wrist, squeezing tightly, then pulls the band and lets go abruptly. “There we go again”, Michiru thinks and says aloud, “Don’t do that”. Aya-chan looks happy whenever she gets a paper cut, stubs her toe, gets her earring stuck while taking clothes off, anything of this sort. However, she never goes as far as cutting herself deliberately. She knows she’s pretty and doesn’t want scars marring her skin; she loves herself too much for that. Michiru can’t help thinking that it’s a bit pathetic, a sign of how lenient Aya-chan is on herself.
Aya-chan is getting more and more agitated, saying that everyone’s become grown-ups while she hasn’t. “I should’ve stayed in Fukuoka!” All of a sudden, she grabs a pair of scissors. Michiru is forced to discard her previous opinion of Aya-chan being too soft to cut herself as things are taking a scary turn.
“Stop it, Aya-chan. You and I are one, when you are in pain, I can feel it, too. If you want to do something like this, cut me instead”.
“I’d never do that!”
Aya-chan puts the scissors away, starts pacing around the room, but it doesn’t help with her restlessness either. Then she leaves the apartment, taking Michiru with her.
Michiru hasn’t been outside for a while; their body is stiff from sitting slouched all the time. The night breeze feels refreshing. Michiru assumes that Aya-chan is going to just wander the streets aimlessly, but soon the gates of a school loom into view (her college, Michiru figures), along with the cherry trees growing on the grounds.
“So Aya-chan wanted to see cherry blossom. She’s always loved pink color.”
They sit down on a bench. Aya-chan is crying her invisible tears.
After a while, somebody sits down on a bench next to theirs; the newcomer is smoking a cigarette. Aya-chan tries to slip away unnoticed when a female voice calls out, “Aya-chan?” Apparently, the two know each other, but Michiru senses that something is off. The second girl turns out to be somebody we met in the previous chapter: “Marina-chan?”
“What’re you doing here?”
“What about you?”
“What’s that?” Marina asks, pointing at Michiru, who is offended with her rudeness - and the next moment gets even more upset because Aya-chan says, “A toy rabbit”.
“Yeah, I can see that. But why?” Then, before Aya-chan can reply, Marina adds, “Actually, I don’t really care”.
“It’s my friend”.
At this point the narration switches to Aya-chan’s perspective. Throughout the following interaction she keeps noticing things she doesn’t like about Nishikura Marina: her husky voice and curt manner of speaking, her nails (painted plain black), her going straight to the first-name form of address even though the two are just classmates who barely know each other… Despite all this, Aya-chan ends up calling Marina by her first name, too, and when invited to sit next to the other girl, she does. She even tells Marina everything about Michiru.
The toy rabbit was a gift to her mother from a friend, who wished her to give birth safely. Her mother liked the toy very much, but the baby would cling to Michiru all the time and, naturally, the rabbit became hers. Aya-chan has always been able to hear Michiru’s voice. They’re lifelong friends, Michiru even scolds her when necessary.
Marina relates to that. After her parents’ divorce her mother had to work a lot, and dad (Tacchan) started buying her stuffed toys, hoping that would help her feel a little less lonely. She liked all of them, but had a favorite - Gin-chan the penguin. They used to have conversations, too. Marina doesn’t want to be offensive yet feels the need to ask Aya-chan if she realizes that Michiru’s voice is actually her own. Aya-chan asks Michiru if it’s true but gets no reply.
Suddenly, Marina notices a dark stain on Michiru’s head. Turns out Aya-chan did cut herself after all and wasn’t even aware of her arm bleeding. Marina takes her to the bathroom (she needed to use it, anyway), then helps Aya-chan to put a band-aid over the cut. Aya-chan tries to wash Michiru, but the blood’s dried up by now and won’t come off easily.
Somehow they find themselves back on the same bench. Trying to make the conversation more or less casual, Aya-chan says, “I didn’t know you smoked.” Marina explains that now as she turned 20 she’s trying out the things she wasn’t allowed to do before. She might quit smoking at some point. Or not. Marina, in her turn, asks why Aya-chan did ‘that’, pointing at the cut on the other girl’s arm. Aya-chan, who’s got a bit more used to her straightforwardness by now, begins with, “I’ve got a chandelier, you see.”
All the nice things Aya-chan has bought in Tokyo don’t make her happy anymore. Even the chandelier. She liked it a lot at first, but now can’t help feeling depressed looking at that cheap plastic thing. Tokyo, Fukuoka - she doesn’t belong to either of the cities, there is no place for her anywhere in the world.
Marina laughs. “What the heck? And didn’t Michiru say anything during this hard time?”
“They did, we had a talk today!”
“But you still did what you did.”
Marina stands up and heads to the nearest dumpster, dragging Aya-chan along by the arm that’s not hurt. She rummages inside until she finds a piece of paper. To Aya-chan’s horror, she sets everything on fire, then throws the lighter and the remaining cigarettes into the flames.
“There, I quit smoking.”
She tells Aya-chan to burn Michiru.
Aya-chan is shocked, she screams and clutches to Michiru when Marina tries to take the rabbit away by force. She won’t do that, she can’t!.. Then a strange thing happens: Michiru jumps out of her arms right into the fire! The rabbit is still wet, there’s still a chance for Aya-chan to save her friend, but she just freezes, she can’t move.
The one who dives into the flame is Marina. She re-emerges with the rescued Michiru. Her skirt is on fire, but she puts it out with her bare hands, like no big deal.
A policeman notices the commotion and sets off chasing the girls. Aya-chan is still in shock, so Marina has to drag her by the arm again as they both run. Michiru, who’s been silent for a while, finally speaks again.
“Aya-chan, are you crying?”
“I’m… crying?”
“Yeah, you are”.
She is. There are tears streaming down her cheeks. Aya-chan turns her head to look at the fire dancing behind the cherry blossom. Such a mystical sight, and she wants to see it properly, but the tears are making the world around her blurry.
Through Michiru’s eyes, we see a girl named Aya-chan who’s just returned home; she is lying on the bed, looking up at the ceiling, where a chandelier is hung, making everything in the room prettier and sparkly - Michiru thinks that it’d be much better if the room was more of a mess. Aya-chan is crying. However, no sound escapes her lips, there are no actual tears in her eyes. It’s as if somebody had pressed a pause button, and she just froze. At last, not looking at Michiru, she says, “I’m hopeless”. It’d been a while since Aya-chan spoke to Michiru, but what is more surprising to our narrator is the sudden use of Hakata dialect - Aya-chan switched to standard Japanese as soon as she moved to Tokyo. Michiru asks, “What do you mean?” in the same dialect. There’s no reply for a while.
Michiru reminisces on the first time Aya-chan dyed her hair a lighter shade of brown. The girl was scared of her parents’ reaction (Michiru calls them ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa’), but everything went smoothly - maybe because the color suited her, but most likely because they were caught off guard: their daughter had always been collected, never showed any rebellious tendencies, she hardly expressed any strong emotions at all. Even with her hair dyed she didn’t look like a teen trying to pass for an adult, it did look neat. Aya-chan doesn’t take after either of her parents, her facial features can’t be considered ‘typical Japanese’. Her parents would even joke sometimes that she was sent to them from Heaven. Michiru knows that it’s not true: “I was there and saw Aya-chan come out of Mama’s tummy”.
Aya-chan finally speaks up, asking if there is something wrong with her. Michiru says she’s a good girl, to which she snaps, “I am not!” Michiru ventures a question: did something happen while Aya-chan was away, visiting her parents in Fukuoka? (She’s on spring break from college). Aya-chan is silent again, she just puts her hand up, as if reaching to the ceiling, and Michiru observes how pretty her nails are. They resemble the night sky.
“Kei painted them for me”.
[Please note that the kanji used for the name, 圭, has other readings. I like this one though, it sounds very familiar :)]
Kei is one of the girls who used to ‘follow Aya-chan around’ during her high school years. Once a plain-looking country bumpkin, Kei learned a lot about fashion and make-up from Aya-chan, even discovered a talent for nail design. “You helped me to start liking myself, thank you”, Kei said one day. “I’m so happy to hear that”, Aya-chan responded, smiling; then, after Kei left, she burst into tears for no apparent reason. The very next day Aya-chan announced she was determined to go to college in Tokyo. She told Michiru that she has become aware and sick of the smell of noodles being cooked in the shopping district in Fukuoka.
According to Michiru, Aya-chan left most of her belongings at her parents’ house, but “took me with her”. Now, two years later, she studies fashion and design and works part-time at a clothes shop. At first, she was very excited, worked really hard to buy all the nice things only available in Tokyo. After several months her enthusiasm faded. She doesn’t smile anymore - instead, she cries with no actual tears coming out. Nobody but Michiru would even notice.
Aya-chan tells Michiru the news about Kei and other girls: the former is starting her work as a professional nail technician, Micchan is married and has a baby, Miho is going to study in Australia… “What am I doing here, in Tokyo?”
Aya-chan takes a rubber hair band and puts it around her wrist, squeezing tightly, then pulls the band and lets go abruptly. “There we go again”, Michiru thinks and says aloud, “Don’t do that”. Aya-chan looks happy whenever she gets a paper cut, stubs her toe, gets her earring stuck while taking clothes off, anything of this sort. However, she never goes as far as cutting herself deliberately. She knows she’s pretty and doesn’t want scars marring her skin; she loves herself too much for that. Michiru can’t help thinking that it’s a bit pathetic, a sign of how lenient Aya-chan is on herself.
Aya-chan is getting more and more agitated, saying that everyone’s become grown-ups while she hasn’t. “I should’ve stayed in Fukuoka!” All of a sudden, she grabs a pair of scissors. Michiru is forced to discard her previous opinion of Aya-chan being too soft to cut herself as things are taking a scary turn.
“Stop it, Aya-chan. You and I are one, when you are in pain, I can feel it, too. If you want to do something like this, cut me instead”.
“I’d never do that!”
Aya-chan puts the scissors away, starts pacing around the room, but it doesn’t help with her restlessness either. Then she leaves the apartment, taking Michiru with her.
Michiru hasn’t been outside for a while; their body is stiff from sitting slouched all the time. The night breeze feels refreshing. Michiru assumes that Aya-chan is going to just wander the streets aimlessly, but soon the gates of a school loom into view (her college, Michiru figures), along with the cherry trees growing on the grounds.
“So Aya-chan wanted to see cherry blossom. She’s always loved pink color.”
They sit down on a bench. Aya-chan is crying her invisible tears.
After a while, somebody sits down on a bench next to theirs; the newcomer is smoking a cigarette. Aya-chan tries to slip away unnoticed when a female voice calls out, “Aya-chan?” Apparently, the two know each other, but Michiru senses that something is off. The second girl turns out to be somebody we met in the previous chapter: “Marina-chan?”
“What’re you doing here?”
“What about you?”
“What’s that?” Marina asks, pointing at Michiru, who is offended with her rudeness - and the next moment gets even more upset because Aya-chan says, “A toy rabbit”.
“Yeah, I can see that. But why?” Then, before Aya-chan can reply, Marina adds, “Actually, I don’t really care”.
“It’s my friend”.
At this point the narration switches to Aya-chan’s perspective. Throughout the following interaction she keeps noticing things she doesn’t like about Nishikura Marina: her husky voice and curt manner of speaking, her nails (painted plain black), her going straight to the first-name form of address even though the two are just classmates who barely know each other… Despite all this, Aya-chan ends up calling Marina by her first name, too, and when invited to sit next to the other girl, she does. She even tells Marina everything about Michiru.
The toy rabbit was a gift to her mother from a friend, who wished her to give birth safely. Her mother liked the toy very much, but the baby would cling to Michiru all the time and, naturally, the rabbit became hers. Aya-chan has always been able to hear Michiru’s voice. They’re lifelong friends, Michiru even scolds her when necessary.
Marina relates to that. After her parents’ divorce her mother had to work a lot, and dad (Tacchan) started buying her stuffed toys, hoping that would help her feel a little less lonely. She liked all of them, but had a favorite - Gin-chan the penguin. They used to have conversations, too. Marina doesn’t want to be offensive yet feels the need to ask Aya-chan if she realizes that Michiru’s voice is actually her own. Aya-chan asks Michiru if it’s true but gets no reply.
Suddenly, Marina notices a dark stain on Michiru’s head. Turns out Aya-chan did cut herself after all and wasn’t even aware of her arm bleeding. Marina takes her to the bathroom (she needed to use it, anyway), then helps Aya-chan to put a band-aid over the cut. Aya-chan tries to wash Michiru, but the blood’s dried up by now and won’t come off easily.
Somehow they find themselves back on the same bench. Trying to make the conversation more or less casual, Aya-chan says, “I didn’t know you smoked.” Marina explains that now as she turned 20 she’s trying out the things she wasn’t allowed to do before. She might quit smoking at some point. Or not. Marina, in her turn, asks why Aya-chan did ‘that’, pointing at the cut on the other girl’s arm. Aya-chan, who’s got a bit more used to her straightforwardness by now, begins with, “I’ve got a chandelier, you see.”
All the nice things Aya-chan has bought in Tokyo don’t make her happy anymore. Even the chandelier. She liked it a lot at first, but now can’t help feeling depressed looking at that cheap plastic thing. Tokyo, Fukuoka - she doesn’t belong to either of the cities, there is no place for her anywhere in the world.
Marina laughs. “What the heck? And didn’t Michiru say anything during this hard time?”
“They did, we had a talk today!”
“But you still did what you did.”
Marina stands up and heads to the nearest dumpster, dragging Aya-chan along by the arm that’s not hurt. She rummages inside until she finds a piece of paper. To Aya-chan’s horror, she sets everything on fire, then throws the lighter and the remaining cigarettes into the flames.
“There, I quit smoking.”
She tells Aya-chan to burn Michiru.
Aya-chan is shocked, she screams and clutches to Michiru when Marina tries to take the rabbit away by force. She won’t do that, she can’t!.. Then a strange thing happens: Michiru jumps out of her arms right into the fire! The rabbit is still wet, there’s still a chance for Aya-chan to save her friend, but she just freezes, she can’t move.
The one who dives into the flame is Marina. She re-emerges with the rescued Michiru. Her skirt is on fire, but she puts it out with her bare hands, like no big deal.
A policeman notices the commotion and sets off chasing the girls. Aya-chan is still in shock, so Marina has to drag her by the arm again as they both run. Michiru, who’s been silent for a while, finally speaks again.
“Aya-chan, are you crying?”
“I’m… crying?”
“Yeah, you are”.
She is. There are tears streaming down her cheeks. Aya-chan turns her head to look at the fire dancing behind the cherry blossom. Such a mystical sight, and she wants to see it properly, but the tears are making the world around her blurry.