The Day He Comes Back In His Suit, 2013
Title: The Day He Comes Back In His Suit, 2013
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Sho/Jun
Word count: 13,400
Summary: AU. Sakurai Sho is lost and broken, weary of the past and his hectic Tokyo life. He finds his way back to his hometown to run away from everything. But is he really running away…or discovering a new path?
Author's Note/s: Written for the sakumoto Fic Exchange 2013. I challenged a more emotional and serious tone for this fic than I've ever attempted before. I'd like to think it's about different kinds of love. Enjoy!
He doesn’t know exactly what he expects to find.
It gives him a funny feeling in his stomach. Nothing much has changed, if the scenery is anything to go by. The yellow-green fields, the sweet balm of the summer air, the haze of sunlight reaching him underneath the canopy of leaves-this tree, all combining as a moment right out of his memories. The difference is that it had all seemed bigger backed then, big enough to see the entire world from. He wonders for a second if he remembers everything right.
Sho touches the aged bark, feeling its rough grain against his palm. Yes, this is it. This is exactly it. A feeling of nostalgia so strong and so uncalled for hits him, and he smells it, smells the familiar grass smell, everything rushing back to him as if it was just yesterday. He did not expect the onslaught of disparate images and certain colors, all bleeding into each other, dancing gravely in his heart. He closes his eyes.
There are small wrinkles dancing out of the corner of his eyes when he smiles now, even as rarely as he does these days, wrinkles that weren’t there before. It’s strange, he thinks, how he has changed so much, when this tree is still standing, still protecting a view he thought he would only see in his dreams again. It has been a long hike.
He’s back.
*
He can’t name the look on his mother’s face when he finally arrives home. There is tenderness there, but there is a small flame of anguish that she’s barely fighting to contain. They don’t speak of it. His mother only tucks his almost shoulder-length hair behind his ear and touches his face, as if relearning him all over.
“This is the longest you’ve ever had your hair,” his mother says.
“You’re purposely not mentioning the facial hair?”
“I’m pretending it doesn’t exist,” she says, and Sho hugs her fiercely.
He goes upstairs and unpacks his bag in what used to be his room. Scattered everywhere are ephemera of his youth: trophies from Junior football leagues, a dog-eared copy of Catcher In The Rye, stacks of dusty manga, and too many academic medals to count. If there were an accurate description of the boy he used to be, his room would be it.
He smiles as he picks up a framed picture; he looks sweaty in his cleats as his arm is slung artlessly around two boys. He looks at all the slightly faded faces of the unsuspecting co-stars of his adolescence. The bed, though quite small for him now, seems inviting; he falls easily against the clean sheets. His mom still apparently uses that lavender detergent he remembers smelling from the collar of his shirts. He can’t stop staring at the picture in his hands, staring at the blatant promise in all of their eyes.
“Sho,” a tender voice calls out from downstairs. “Lunch.”
It might have been 1990, for all Sho knew. He already feels himself ease in towards this life, a life he thought he’s outgrown. For the first time in a long while, he feels like he’s made the right decision.
“Coming.”
The smell of tonkatsu wafts up and stays in the air. Sho feels the steam from the rice rise up from where he is holding his bowl with his two hands. It feels like a caress.
When he finishes his food, his mother simply says, “You need a bath.”
And he does; he smells like sweat and the sun, like grass growing contentedly in the gentle Hokkaido summer. The water slithering against his shoulder blades does not quite wash everything away, though. Not that he expected it to.
*
When he wakes up in his small bed, he is disoriented. The absence of blaring car horns makes the sound of stillness more pronounced, becoming a living, breathing thing he finds hard to recognize. It’s like what he imagines sandpaper would sound like against cement-grating, unsettling, scraping off something important that needed remembering. A lone rooster crows in the darkness, egging on a sunrise that still feels a long time coming.
It’s been two years.
He doesn’t gasp out loud now, no. Instead, he stares at an unfixed point on the ceiling, thinking how his former self would hate who he has become. All of it: the lethargy, the total lack of plans, the silence.
Sho had so many plans, plans marked by details that were dreamed up with care and hope. The only thing left to do then was living them. It’s not a hard thing to imagine then why the moment Sho finds out for the first time that he can’t plan for everything, can’t control everything, is his worst.
*
The days are unbearably slow. Every single day, Sho only has enough motivation to go out for a long walk, where he casts his eyes down whenever he feels the spark of recognition from someone familiar. He had gone back home because he craved for the familiar, but he wanted to do it alone. His mother doesn’t chastise him for his rudeness, even as he knows that she must have been asked questions, been the object of neighborly kindness and curiosity. She keeps quiet.
Thankfully, the stretch of neighborhood doesn’t last for long. Sho feels his mind still as his nostrils breathe in the fresh air, the dense trees shading him from the sun and prying eyes.
He keeps on walking, remembering certain spots where he and his friends used to set up their secret based camps made with wood and carton boxes stolen from their sheds and farms. He remembers a childhood that was simple yet charmed.
He doesn’t stop walking. He remembers touches and conversations that happened an airplane and a bullet train ride away from the dusty path he now walks. It’s a lifetime away. And it’s just this, just hours and hours of remembering, with every footprint he leaves on the trail.
It’s enough for him, until weeks later, it isn’t anymore.
Sometimes trees are just that. Trees. When he begins to wonder if his memory has betrayed him, he knows that it’s time to stop walking down everyday towards that shady copse of grief. He can’t afford to believe in a reality that’s slowly blurring into a fictive past. If there’s one thing Sakurai Sho can hold on to, even after everything, it’s his wits.
Fight, a small voice inside him says. His standards and overarching logic do not allow him the full descent; he does not, and cannot, fall off the edge of the world. No matter how much he wants to.
*
“Male/Female, High School Graduate, Computer Literate. Willing to work 6 AM to 4 PM, weekdays. Salary negotiable,” the ad says, along with the mobile number indicated. Sho thinks of his mother’s smile. He doesn’t know if he’s ready to go back to work. But if he isn’t, when will he ever be?
Before he decides against it and locks himself again inside his room, he dials the number.
“Hello?”
*
He doesn’t know where he gets the strength to get out of bed at four in the morning, but he does it anyway. The address he was given is downtown. With a creak, he opens their old storage room and wrangles a rusting bicycle out from the junk. He takes a big breath, wipes down the seat, and takes his first pedal down the road. Everything is quiet and still in the twilight, except for a cat that quickly disappears into a hedge. He breathes in the crisp air, wondering if this is how new beginnings feel like.
When he reaches the address, he leaves his bicycle outside and enters at the silent prodding of the automatic door, which opens smoothly in one motion. It is neater and brighter than he had expected for a small town office. The façade is small but welcoming, with the warm lighting and bared cement walls. There are no cubicles. There’s only a small reception area, a long white wooden table where a few laptops are trustingly if a bit haphazardly placed, a small bookshelf, and an industrial-sized printer. Long, white drapes are drawn halfway across the room, behind the couch, hiding the remainder of the office.
Sho feels silly as his leathered feet make clicking noise against the wooden floor. He is wondering what the drapes are hiding when a kind voice interrupts him.
“New guy?”
Sho whips around and sees a sleepy face that matches the voice. He almost expects to see sleep lines on his cheeks.
“Hi, yes. I’m Sakurai Sho,” he says, extending his hand. “We talked on the phone.”
“Ohno Satoshi.” The handshake is firm but not meant to imply superiority. “I talked to you on the phone?”
“Yes,” Sho replies, a little dumbfounded by the question in the man’s voice.
“Great, then.” The man known as Ohno takes a huge stretch, yawning as his faded black shirt hikes up his waist. Sho feels even sillier for wearing a suit and tie, a remnant of a past life that looks completely out of place in his present.
“So are you the HR manager?”
Ohno chortles as he removes his cap. “Well, if I had to have a title, then maybe I’m the art director?”
“Oh, I see. So what does that entail?”
“I do the layouts and,” he gestures to the pile of pens, brushes, and papers strewn across the table, “stuff.”
Sho nods politely as the other man rubs the back of his head. He wasn’t told over the phone exactly what the company does, only that they need someone to do administrative work and to Sho, that sounded like exactly the monotonous business he needed to get his nose into. Ohno didn’t even ask him for his degree or his previous work experience. Grossly overqualified or not, it doesn’t matter-the less he gets reminded of his past, the better.
“So where should I start, Ohno-san?” Sho asks, sensing the need to take control of the conversation.
“Oh,” he says. “You can just grab one of the laptops there, and he’ll-he’ll get here soon enough,” he says, slightly stumbling through the formalities. “Please have a seat.”
Sho is a little confused but he sits obediently at the corner of the long worktable anyway. Ohno goes off to the side and fumbles around with something. Sho tries not to twiddle with his phone too much. He wonders what he’s doing in a place like this with a half-asleep man in paint-splattered jeans.
“Morning fuel,” Ohno says a few minutes later as he approaches him. Sho accepts the steaming mug of coffee.
They sit there in silence, the other man feeling no need to make further conversation and looking completely oblivious to Sho’s slight discomfort. Soon enough, Ohno picks up a pencil and begins to scribble away on a large piece of paper, looking as if he’s forgotten that he has company.
After what feels like an eternity later, the automatic door whirs open. A man with mussed jet-black hair and horn-rimmed glasses enters. He dumps his backpack and the camera slung around his arm on the table as he approaches.
Before Sho could introduce himself, Ohno looks up and smiles indulgently at the newcomer. “Morning.”
“Aren’t you chirpy today,” he says. He glances at Sho, looking startled at seeing someone sitting silently beside Ohno.
“Oh, this is Sho-kun, he doesn’t talk much.” Sho thinks it’s a little rich of him. He also doesn’t know when it became ‘Sho-kun’ in the whopping thirty minutes that they’ve spent together.
“Matsumoto Jun,” the man with the glasses says. “You must be the one who’s helping us out.” It’s a handshake entirely different from Ohno’s-his grip is a little too firm and he’s a little too quick to draw his hand away.
“Sakurai Sho. Nice to meet you.”
Matsumoto gives him a once-over, taking in his outfit, his leathered shoes, and the unruly, long hair he tried his best to arrange into acceptability that morning. Sho feels like he should’ve shaved-until today, Sho has never connected light brown eyes with such a feeling of pointed objectified scrutiny. “I gather Ohno-san hasn’t briefed you yet?”
“Well,” Sho says, “he’s mentioned that he’s the art director-”
“So he hasn’t,” Matsumoto says, which Ohno just wrinkles his nose at as he continues to draw. Somehow, Sho feels like it’s his own fault for getting hired.
“Did you even ask him what his qualifications are?” Sho hears the edges of what he recognizes to be rigid professionalism in Matsumoto’s voice.
“Does it matter,” Ohno says, now absorbed in filling in the spaces on his illustration with a fine tip pen. Sho begins to feel a little indignant when Matsumoto only sighs and ruffles the other man’s hair affectionately.
*
Sho doesn’t get it. Matsumoto all but growls at him when he asks, “So, you take pictures of tourists who happen to want their portraits taken in Furano?” He doesn’t know why it was such a wrong conclusion to come to when he saw the cameras, the studio set-up, and the canvasses on the other side of the drawn curtains.
Ohno chuckles and says, “Easy, Jun-kun.”
After that, Ohno and Matsumoto have a short, unnervingly quiet spat about “thinks he’s better,” “listen to yourself”, “someone not briefing new hires properly”, and “well how much briefing does admin work need”, enough for Sho to regret ever getting up that morning in the first place.
“You’re impossible,” Matsumoto says.
“Let’s not get you worked up over nothing, okay?” Matsumoto only sighs as Ohno caves in, signaling to Sho to enter a side door that Sho never noticed before. They leave Matsumoto.
“Is he always like that?” Sho asks, his voice low as he looks at Matsumoto who has his glasses in one hand, rubbing his eye with the other.
Ohno turns to him and smiles. “He’s serious,” he says, and Sho doesn’t know if it’s a joke.
“Serious?” he asks in the dark, as he senses Ohno feeling around for the light switch.
“Passionate,” Ohno says as he flips the switch. Sho finally connects the dots from Ohno’s paint splattered jeans to Jun’s monstrous camera equipment. “Oh,” Sho says, feeling a kind of wonder curl up inside him, a curiosity he hasn’t felt in a long while. “I know this. I-I know your work.”
“You do?” Ohno asks, a smile on his face. “That’ll appease Grumpy-san then.”
“I came from advertising, and I’ve seen one of our competitors use your images for a campaign on encouraging kids to read.”
Ohno knits his eyebrows together. “The one where the kids are lying down in bed, clutching their books, while the characters in the books are painted into the photograph, watching over them as they sleep. Brilliant work,” Sho gushes.
“Ah,” Ohno says, “thanks. That’s one of our favorites. Sometimes things just fall into place.” Sho recognizes the pleased look on Ohno’s face. He wonders how things just fall into place feels like.
The room is dwarfed by huge canvasses of life-size portraits, but they aren’t only just portraits. One can still see the photographed subject, but he is immersed in a world of imagery, a normal landscape turned surreal with painting. Sho lingers in front of one particular canvass, where a woman is sitting on a bench. The expression on the woman’s face is one of serenity, an inner peace so perfectly captured in contrast with pop-ish yet grisly chaos of her surroundings. Under the framed canvass is a simple laminated caption:
Juntoshi
The Day She Sits Still, 2008
Oil and Acrylic on Panel
8 x 5 feet
Description: Photographed woman on a bench drinking from a thermos. Oil-painted monkeys in space suit and neon nebulae surround her.
“Juntoshi,” Sho says, his eyes catching the signature on the innocuous signature on the corner.
“Jun and Satoshi,” Ohno says. “Silly, I know, but we’re stuck with it.”
“So you do the paintings-” Sho hypothesizes.
“-and Jun-kun does the photography, yes.”
“Oh.” That all Sho could say. He’s struck by what he has so easily forgotten: that collaboration and trust don’t always end in despair.
*
He doesn’t do anything much through his first week at work-he only straightens out money matters that have become a little unruly for his own (and Matsumoto’s, he guesses) liking. That only takes him a couple of days, and after that, he is just sitting there like a decorative duck, minus the suit and the leather shoes that he quickly learns to leave at home. On his second week, Matsumoto only talks to him to ask for a cup of coffee and when he trips on a can of paint that Ohno, who was out buying lunch, left on the middle of the floor. A stream of apologies comes from Sho’s lips.
“Just clean it up," Matsumoto says, without sparing him a glance.
Sho reminds himself not to be clumsy around him. He’s fine with being disliked, but he doesn’t know why being ordered around by Matsumoto bothers him, when he’s his boss and he’s supposed to take orders anyway.
He learns to make himself invisible as he observes the quiet synergy between Ohno and Matsumoto, and among the three of them, they don’t make much noise, nor conversation, for that matter. Sho soon learns to deal with Matsumoto’s musical leanings: a whole lot of jazz with a spattering of Michael Jackson, and with Ohno’s busy, scribbling silence. He learns that Ohno likes his curry unreasonably hot and is generous with his chuckles, talking only when it matters. He also learns not to move Matsumoto’s things lest he wants to deal with the equivalent of an agitated lion inside a cage-learns that Matsumoto can spend days lost inside his photographs.
It’s a rarefied world, one where every move and breath is doubly magnified. Sho, despite his best efforts, can’t help but be drawn in by the way Juntoshi worked. On Thursday, a client comes in for an “indoor session”, as Matsumoto calls it. Matsumoto does not play any music that day; instead, it is only his muted but thorough commands that echo inside the studio.
Lean to your left. Bare your shoulders. Tuck your hair behind your ear.
Sho watches, transfixed, as the client-a well-to-do woman in her mid-30s-visibly loses herself in the process as she sheds her clothing. There is sadness in the woman’s eyes, yet the way her mouth quirks only suggests a quiet determination. Sho doesn’t know when it was decided that it was to be a nude session, yet things unfold so calmly that he swallows down his surprise when the woman’s body is completely bared. Matsumoto breaks his concentration for a second to look at him, as if to check if he understands-he had asked Sho to watch the process this one time.
“Come. You should see how we take portraits of the tourists.”
Move to your right. Take your leg further up. That’s it.
It doesn’t make much sense, but the way Jun looks away now just as quickly feels like a rebuke.
Ohno only sits to the side, a sketchbook balanced on his crossed leg, drawing nothing, eyes more intent and alive than Sho has ever seen them. Sho is not sure whether Ohno is watching the lady or Matsumoto. In fact, Sho is suddenly not so sure about what he’s doing there at all. It feels like he’s intruding on a moment that he has no right to see. He hasn’t seen a naked woman for so long, that’s one thing. But there’s also the understated, silent energy between Ohno and Matsumoto as they work together to create different worlds out of negatives and coils of paint, out of thin air. The space is too small, the intimacy so encompassing-he is gutted by the feeling, by remembrance.
He had only wanted a job.
*
The unmistakable sound of guns firing and soldiers giving out commands comfort him in a way that the idyllic countryside can’t. “Sho-chan,” he says, with as much affection as a phone call will allow. “You haven’t called for a month. I was beginning to wonder if you’ve buried yourself alive under all that Hokkaido snow.”
“It’s summer.”
The other man curses as Sho hears a voice say ‘Game Over’. “Really? I can’t tell inside the gloriously cool clime of my man cave.”
“You should go out more, you know,” Sho says.
“A little rich of you to say,” he says good-naturedly. “But I’m glad you called. How are you?”
“I got a job,” Sho says.
“Yet you sound so depressed.”
“It’s a weird job.”
“Maybe ‘weird’ is exactly what you need,” he says. “Are you finally living out your childhood dream of being a male stripper?”
“That was your childhood dream. Second only to being a baseball superstar.” The laughter sounds like long-forgotten music to Sho’s ears. “How’s home?” he asks.
“It’s different from when we were kids,” Sho admits.
“I’d be scared if it wasn’t. It’s been way more than, what, a decade since we both moved to the big, bad city? Crazy if you think about it.”
Sho doesn’t say anything for several seconds. A minute. An infinite stretch of time. He feels like he’s lost all sense of “home”.
“Sho-chan?”
Sho clutches at his mobile phone like a lifeline. He wants to fight, he wants to live, but it’s as if his heart breaks in guilt every other moment. He is so tired; he cherishes the silence and the way it allows him to imagine Nino sitting in his Tokyo apartment, an empty cup of ramen by his feet, skin made sallow by the reflection of the huge television screen. He called just to hear this exact silence.
“I remember Furano being really pleasant this time of the year,” Nino says gently after a few minutes.
“It is,” Sho concedes.
“You’ll pay for the bullet train, of course.”
Sho doesn’t need to say thank you to someone who’s been there ever since, so he doesn’t.
*
It is late in the afternoon when Sho discovers that one of the wheels of his bike is flat. It’s been a normal enough day but he had only wanted to go home immediately after work (which meant mundane tasks like answering the phone and ordering in paint and rolls of film), and to find his only mode of transportation broken-it was just a little bit too much for him. It’s the most he’s tried for the past couple of years; he’s only barely started to appreciate the relief of having a daily routine. Then this.
His foot throbs in pain after kicking the gear a little too hard.
“That’s surely going to fix it,” a voice behind him says.
Sho turns around to see Matsumoto, who has a serious expression behind his glasses counterbalanced by the ease with which he seems to fill in his carefully chosen clothes.
“Ah. Sorry,” Sho says, his cheeks growing warm. Even though almost quite a bit of time has passed since he started working with Matsumoto and Ohno, he’s still never too sure how to talk to either of them. For one, Ohno doesn’t talk much, and two, Matsumoto always feels like a million miles a way, except for the times when he seems to see through Sho with the acuity of a laser beam. Sho’s not even sure if he’s supposed to address the two of them as “sir” or he’s just generally supposed to disappear into the background and try to be as unnoticeable as possible as he goes through his tasks.
“You can walk,” Matsumoto says as he unchains his motorcycle. Sho can’t help but be a little embarrassed about his old, rickety bike, with a flat tire at that, and being caught in the throes of a slight fit.
“I don’t think I have a choice,” Sho says, unable to keep the edge out of his voice. He tries to fiddle with the wheel again when he hears the other man sigh.
“Go with me to Corner Tree,” Matsumoto says, his hands on the handles of his motorcycle.
“Corner Tree?” Sho is a little surprised by the invitation; this might be the most Matsumoto has ever said to him in one go. He only ever talks about work; the rest of the time, he is either fiddling with his camera or engrossed in the other details of his work.
Matsumoto shrugs. “I know someone who might be able to help you there. It’s just a three-minute walk from here.” He doesn’t say anything else as he doesn’t get on his motorcycle and walks.
“You don’t have to walk because of me,” Sho says.
“No, I don’t.” He continues walking, leaving Sho slightly puzzled. Maybe it’s his way of being friendly, Sho thinks. He hikes up the messenger bag falling from his shoulder and follows suit.
The last signs of the sun disappear from the sky when they reach a quaint path lined with leafy trees. It leads to a cabin with a small signage: Corner Tree. Matsumoto doesn’t even look back and walks straight to the entrance. Sho quietly follows suit. In another time, he would have already gotten to know someone whom he’s working with quite well in a few weeks. He remembers being able to talk to other people easily-he’s not sure if it’s the distant demeanor of his employer, or it’s he himself who has changed.
The overwhelming scent of freshly grinded coffee beans fill up his senses as they enter the café. It apparently only looks like a cabin on the outside-inside, there are comfortable mismatched couches and lampshades that clearly evoke the modern, if quirky tastes of the owner. The pipes on the ceiling are exposed, adding an industrial vibe to the chintzy warmth of the furnishings. There is only a young couple quietly having what looks like a light dinner.
Matsumoto walks towards the cedar bar where there are comfortable stools lined up. He sits there and checks out his phone. Sho walks awkwardly towards him and ambles to the chair on his right, taking a seat as well.
“This used to be a textile factory,” Sho thinks out loud. “Who would have thought that people would be hanging out here?”
Matsumoto looks up from his phone. “You’ve been here before?”
“I used to live here, in Furano. When I was young, before I moved to Tokyo.”
Sho sees a spark of curiosity for the first time in Matsumoto’s eyes. “I didn’t see that coming.”
Sho is about to ask him what he meant by that when a cheerful voice comes up. “Matsujun! You haven’t dropped by in awhile,” he says with a pout. The owner of the voice is behind the bar, wearing a beige apron over jeans and a sweatshirt.
“Been busy,” Matsumoto says, not without fondness. Before Sho has time to think about how strange it is for someone like Matsumoto to have a cutesy nickname, the other man makes a strangled sound of recognition. “Sho-chan!”
“Excuse me?” Sho says, confused.
“Sho-chan,” the other man repeats. “I can’t believe you can’t remember me!” He flattens his wavy, light brown hair and pats it down his forehead, holding it there as he smiles without teeth. “Ring a bell?”
Sho shakes his head as Matsumoto looks on at the both of them with what looks like budding amusement.
The other man sighs but he doesn’t seem like he’s angry or frustrated. Quite the opposite, actually-he looks like a well-fed Cheshire cat, licking its paw, about to play with the mice it’s just caught. “So how about this,” he says, as he mimes a person hitting a baseball with a bat. He looks at Sho expectantly.
“No, I’m sorry,” Sho says.
The man puts his hands on his hips. “Fine, a verbal clue then.” He busies himself behind the counter. Steam rises. “Let’s see. Ah! We used to go to my parents’ restaurant all the time and you always finished all the gyoza. Then we’d squabble a little bit about it because you say it’s payback because you wanted to play football instead of baseball and-”
“Aiba-chan,” Sho breathes, floods of bright, pleasant sunlit memories washing down on him in droves.
“Yes!” Aiba says, his smile blinding as he turns on the coffee machine. Now that he remembers, Sho wonders how he could have failed to recognize him. His smile still belongs to a 10 year-old, even as he grew up to be taller than Sho remembers. “God, Sho-chan-can I still call you that?”
“Yes,” Sho says, smiling back in remembrance.
“I haven’t seen you since you left after junior high! What brings you back to Furano?”
“I’m working here now, actually,” Sho replies, turning to Matsumoto. “I work for Matsumoto…san.”
Sho doesn’t know if Matsumoto, who has been watching their exchange quietly, hears the pause. “Sakurai-san is helping me and Satoshi out,” he says. Sho swallows.
Aiba looks at the two of them. “Wow, small world, huh?” he says. “Aren’t Oh-chan and Matsujun the cutest? I mean, apart from the fact that they’re totally brilliant artists doing whatever strange and kinky stuff they do in their studio.”
“Aiba,” Jun says, exasperation coloring his voice.
Sho doesn’t quite know how to reply and he doesn’t have to, because Aiba is on a roll. “Matsujun, did you know, Sho-chan and I were super close when we were kids? It was so much fun.”
Matsumoto gives Aiba a small smile. “No, I didn’t. How could I, when I just met him a few weeks ago?” Sho senses how Matsumoto indulges Aiba is almost how indulgent he is with Ohno. Almost. He feels somehow adrift between these two people who are obviously good friends, almost like he doesn’t remember how that kind of lightheartedness can exist between human beings.
“That’s immaterial-you should know! I’m serious, we were quite the posse back then. With me as co-captain of the baseball team with another guy, our team won a couple of regional meets! Then Sho-chan here was always first in our class, always the smartest. He was also the captain of the football team-the girls adored us, let me tell you,” Aiba says.
“You, adored by girls? Hearing how you talk to girls these days begs temporary, if not permanent, suspension of belief,” Matsumoto says, the playful voice completely alien to Sho.
“Well, believe it! We were kind of a big deal, right, Sho-chan? ” The way Matsumoto catches Sho looking at him is unsettling. It feels like he’s always looking at Sho. He can’t tell if Matsumoto’s growing impatient with the sudden burst of nostalgia or Matsumoto simply just doesn’t like him.
Sho winces. “That was a long time ago, Aiba-chan.”
Aiba laughs. “Yeah, well, I guess it was. But I’m still so glad to see you, seriously,” he says, all warm enthusiasm and sincerity.
“It’s great to see you too,” Sho says.
Aiba hands them both a cup of coffee. “So where’s your wife? I heard from an old schoolmate that you got married a couple years of ago.”
Wife.
Married.
Couple of years ago.
It’s worse, especially worse, when he doesn’t expect it, and he sits there, frozen in place with his eyes shut.
“Sho-chan?”
When he opens his eyes again, he sees Matsumoto looking at him, with a look that Sho can’t decipher. He’s tired of being too sensitive of his surroundings, of going out and trying to understand how other people he’s not familiar with are. He’s suddenly tired of trying to navigate a life without her anew.
Sho is beyond thinking if he’s being rude when he stands up, doesn’t say a word, and leaves. His conscience tugs at him when he hears Aiba call out after him, but it’s not enough for him to turn back.
The clouds obscure the moonlight as he takes a long, solitary walk back to his bed.
*
He hears the sound of the gears before he sees it. Sho stops, the sound of gravel being scraped ringing in the night air as the motorcycle puts on the brakes. In the shadows of the trees and the night light of closed shops, Matsumoto looks only slightly less intimidating. He gets off his motorcycle, looking unfazed as ever, if a bit uncertain.
He takes off his helmet. “Sakurai-san,” he says.
Sho finds himself rooted in place. “Matsumoto-san?”
His brown eyes turn molten in the dark. “You took off and…Aiba wanted me to make sure you were okay.”
Sho breathes in. “I’m-,” Sho says, “-tell him I’m fine. I’m sorry.” He’s not okay, not really, but right then, he feels embarrassed for making a scene when he should have handled it better. By now.
“Are you really going to walk all the way back to your house?” Matsumoto asks, his hand on his hip.
“It seems like that, yes,” Sho says, his voice quiet, wondering why he even followed him. “I’m sorry you had to follow me. You can go back now.”
Matsumoto levels him with his eyes, something he seems so completely adept at, even without meaning to. “Stop apologizing for every single thing,” he says, and it’s almost a whisper, but it’s not-it’s too direct, too venomous-ringing too true somewhere deep inside Sho.
Matsumoto’s breathing is alive and intrusive. He rides his motorcycle in one smooth movement and revs the engine up. “Get on,” he says, and Sho realizes that eighty percent of the things Matsumoto says to him are orders. In the dark of the night, in a place where there doesn’t seem to be anybody else around, Sho admits to himself that he wants to be told what to do. It goes against everything that he is, but at this point in his life, who is he, really? He takes the extra helmet and rides astride the back of Matsumoto. There is a moment when he wonders where he should hold on, but it goes away quickly when Matsumoto gingerly grabs the both of his hands and places them lightly on his hips.
“We won’t go too fast,” he promises, and Sho hears differently. Matsumoto sticks to his word and maneuvers around the town in moderate speed. Sho’s heart is hammering in his ears.
“Left,” Sho shouts, holding on to Matsumoto. For a while that seemed to stretch on indeterminately, he just gives directions as he grows conscious about his arms around Matsumoto. When they get to his place, Sho gets off the bike and gives back the helmet, unsure about what to do next.
“Thank you.”
Matsumoto doesn’t say anything. When Sho starts to walk away, a pale hand reaches out to his wrist. “Sakurai-san.”
It’s as if everything stops-the world turning into a silent vacuum with the two of them right at the center of it-as if the touch of skin could command the tides. Sho can be naïve, but not that naïve. He knows of currents, of moments of small and unexpected weaknesses powerful enough to take his breath-but it’s never been like this. Never with someone like Matsumoto.
“I’m fucked up” is the first thing he says as he finds himself unarmed, in the mercy of the moment. He does not shake off Matsumoto’s hand.
“I know.” The lines around Matsumoto’s mouth soften. He must have broken so many people’s hearts, with that mouth alone, Sho thinks. “You’re lonely.”
It feels like his insides are going in different directions, threatening to pull him apart. “I think I’m more than lonely, Matsumoto-san. You don’t-” his breath hitches, as Matsumoto’s thumb caresses his pulse, “-you don’t want anything to do with me.”
His touch is impossibly soft, and it’s only confusion that prevents Sho from melting on the spot. “Don’t overthink this. I’ll see you at work tomorrow.” It’s only when Sho nods that he lets go. He still doesn’t know what just happened when he watches Matsumoto’s outline disappear into the horizon. His skin feels like it’s been branded from where his fingertips have touched him. It’s as if he hasn’t let go.
*
Sho doesn’t need to go to the office that Wednesday, because he had asked permission to take the day off to go on his personal banking errands. It all goes without a hitch. He decides to go to work since it’s just around lunchtime. He has phone calls to make for deliveries. Sho enters the office without fuss when first hears the voice of Ohno.
“You’re beautiful,” he says. The click of the flash echoes throughout the office.
Sho freezes.
“Look at me,” Ohno murmurs again, the flash illuminating the curtain.
“You wanted this.” Flash.
“Look at me the way you look at him.” Flash.
“Push it further down.” Flash.
“I’m not playing with you. Let go.” Flash.
“You begged me for this.” Flash.
Sho is rooted in place, chills running down his back. He cannot reconcile the voice to the kind face that he sees day in day out. When he finally gains the sense to turn back and let himself out, a bare-chested Matsumoto opens the curtains. His eyes grow wide and cold at the sight of Sho. Ohno only turns to him, brows scrunched together. “Sho-kun.”
“I-I’ll just come back tomorrow,” Sho says, backing out. He doesn’t dare look back, his head pounding with the gossamer seduction of blinding white lights and quiet voices.
Juntoshi
The Day He Caves In, 2013
Oil and Acrylic on Panel
8 x 5 feet
Description: Photographed topless man in jeans stands in the center. Oil-painted wing at his back, broken one on the floor.
*
The next day at work, Matsumoto acts as if nothing has happened. Even after a week, he doesn’t say anything out of the ordinary. Sho takes it as a cue to act the same, even though he cannot explain to himself what he witnessed, or thought he witnessed that day. Matsumoto spends most of his time in the darkroom, obsessing over every tiny detail of his photographs. Ohno doesn’t seem to be fazed in any way; he’s being his usual self-adrift and lost in his own colorful world. To Sho, though, the air in the office feels like a tightening noose. He retreats to himself even more.
During one balmy summer afternoon, they have a shoot scheduled with a client. It officially leaves Sho to his own devices, but he still doesn’t get away from Matsumoto’s quiet orders, not even then when it wasn't directed at him.
Sho imagines the man who came in that afternoon, the man who looked every inch self-possessed, and just a few years older than himself, Sho guesses, imagines him following Matsumoto’s orders behind the drapes.
Look here. That’s right. Uncross your arms. Don’t look at me. Don’t look at the camera. Yes. Hold still.
He imagines Ohno, sitting on the sides, watching. He hears his voice, his voice from that day. Imagines Matsumoto being ordered around for once.
It wakes something inside him, something he can’t recognize, something he hasn’t felt before, and he wrestles with it. He feels Matsumoto’s pale, slightly hardened fingertips, fingertips that hold a camera with robotic precision, fingertips deftly on his pulse. He closes his eyes. He doesn’t need this. It’s not exactly revulsion. It’s an all too real fear that maybe, just maybe, it will feel right and not at all wrong, and he can’t face what that suggests. What does it mean, when his heart is knotted in a hurt tangle? He’s all over the place as it is, too spread apart, not belonging anywhere.
Don’t think about it. Move. Look at Ohno. Yes, yes. Just keep looking at him. Breathe.
And it comes, unbidden, just like it always does-he only needs to follow the familiar tendril of thought and he’s there again.
He remembers a summer night in July, two years ago, a sweltering night, more than even the air-conditioning in their brand new apartment could handle. It was the fourth day in the week that he couldn’t make it to dinner with her. She’s probably sleeping, and he couldn’t blame her. It’s two in the morning. He was frustrated, still figuring out for himself the balance between nurturing his skyrocketing career and his promise to the woman he had wanted to marry from the first day he saw her in the library at Keio, her glasses falling on the bridge of her nose as she touched the leathered spines.
Being the accounts head of one of the biggest advertising agencies in Japan came with a price: apart from the weekends, he hardly saw her: the girl from the library who turned out to be prettier, smarter, and funnier than Sho will ever deserve, the girl that he had worked so hard to win over. She never took any bullshit from him but she’d always been there: the partner to his every success, the first to brazenly hold his hands on their first date because he couldn’t muster up the courage to do so.
The girl of his dreams.
“Just a little more sacrifice, baby, just a little more,” he kept on telling her, as he loved her, held her, moved against her, because he will make it. He will keep his word. “I love you, okay? I love you.”
“Okay. I love you too, you doofus.” Her laughter is a mantra that things will be okay. Always okay.
Together, they will make it the successful and beautiful life Sho had always imagined-they only needed to grit their teeth through the pivotal parts. She was about to become a fully-fledged heart surgeon in half a year, and Sho-Sho, just barely past 30, would become partner soon, and there will be more delegation of tasks than overnight vigils away from her, days and nights of trying to seduce clients to their company’s bedside. The board had been watching over him like a hawk, seeing him through, watching him prove the legacy of his stellar academic career, his ease when it came to talking to clients, and his sharp acumen for bringing new business in.
Sho had been reaching for the stars from Day 1 and hadn’t crumbled from the pressure-there was no reason to believe he would any time soon.
He took off his shoes and his coat, wanting to be beside her as quick as possible. The impossible softness of her bared arms feels heavenly against his hands-if he has this to come home to every single day, it felt like everything didn’t matter, that nothing could be more important.
And then he noticed it. Her stillness. The shock of unruly hair against her already cooling sweat.
When the doctor came out of the intensive care unit only hours later trying to explain what a burst aortic aneurysm was, Sho was already crumbling away beyond recognition. She had known her way around every ventricle and alleyway through any person’s heart. Through Sho’s. It couldn’t, and didn’t, save her.
He would have given up everything for Keiko’s warm hand in his. For everything to be okay again.
*
>> Part 2
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Sho/Jun
Word count: 13,400
Summary: AU. Sakurai Sho is lost and broken, weary of the past and his hectic Tokyo life. He finds his way back to his hometown to run away from everything. But is he really running away…or discovering a new path?
Author's Note/s: Written for the sakumoto Fic Exchange 2013. I challenged a more emotional and serious tone for this fic than I've ever attempted before. I'd like to think it's about different kinds of love. Enjoy!
He doesn’t know exactly what he expects to find.
It gives him a funny feeling in his stomach. Nothing much has changed, if the scenery is anything to go by. The yellow-green fields, the sweet balm of the summer air, the haze of sunlight reaching him underneath the canopy of leaves-this tree, all combining as a moment right out of his memories. The difference is that it had all seemed bigger backed then, big enough to see the entire world from. He wonders for a second if he remembers everything right.
Sho touches the aged bark, feeling its rough grain against his palm. Yes, this is it. This is exactly it. A feeling of nostalgia so strong and so uncalled for hits him, and he smells it, smells the familiar grass smell, everything rushing back to him as if it was just yesterday. He did not expect the onslaught of disparate images and certain colors, all bleeding into each other, dancing gravely in his heart. He closes his eyes.
There are small wrinkles dancing out of the corner of his eyes when he smiles now, even as rarely as he does these days, wrinkles that weren’t there before. It’s strange, he thinks, how he has changed so much, when this tree is still standing, still protecting a view he thought he would only see in his dreams again. It has been a long hike.
He’s back.
*
He can’t name the look on his mother’s face when he finally arrives home. There is tenderness there, but there is a small flame of anguish that she’s barely fighting to contain. They don’t speak of it. His mother only tucks his almost shoulder-length hair behind his ear and touches his face, as if relearning him all over.
“This is the longest you’ve ever had your hair,” his mother says.
“You’re purposely not mentioning the facial hair?”
“I’m pretending it doesn’t exist,” she says, and Sho hugs her fiercely.
He goes upstairs and unpacks his bag in what used to be his room. Scattered everywhere are ephemera of his youth: trophies from Junior football leagues, a dog-eared copy of Catcher In The Rye, stacks of dusty manga, and too many academic medals to count. If there were an accurate description of the boy he used to be, his room would be it.
He smiles as he picks up a framed picture; he looks sweaty in his cleats as his arm is slung artlessly around two boys. He looks at all the slightly faded faces of the unsuspecting co-stars of his adolescence. The bed, though quite small for him now, seems inviting; he falls easily against the clean sheets. His mom still apparently uses that lavender detergent he remembers smelling from the collar of his shirts. He can’t stop staring at the picture in his hands, staring at the blatant promise in all of their eyes.
“Sho,” a tender voice calls out from downstairs. “Lunch.”
It might have been 1990, for all Sho knew. He already feels himself ease in towards this life, a life he thought he’s outgrown. For the first time in a long while, he feels like he’s made the right decision.
“Coming.”
The smell of tonkatsu wafts up and stays in the air. Sho feels the steam from the rice rise up from where he is holding his bowl with his two hands. It feels like a caress.
When he finishes his food, his mother simply says, “You need a bath.”
And he does; he smells like sweat and the sun, like grass growing contentedly in the gentle Hokkaido summer. The water slithering against his shoulder blades does not quite wash everything away, though. Not that he expected it to.
*
When he wakes up in his small bed, he is disoriented. The absence of blaring car horns makes the sound of stillness more pronounced, becoming a living, breathing thing he finds hard to recognize. It’s like what he imagines sandpaper would sound like against cement-grating, unsettling, scraping off something important that needed remembering. A lone rooster crows in the darkness, egging on a sunrise that still feels a long time coming.
It’s been two years.
He doesn’t gasp out loud now, no. Instead, he stares at an unfixed point on the ceiling, thinking how his former self would hate who he has become. All of it: the lethargy, the total lack of plans, the silence.
Sho had so many plans, plans marked by details that were dreamed up with care and hope. The only thing left to do then was living them. It’s not a hard thing to imagine then why the moment Sho finds out for the first time that he can’t plan for everything, can’t control everything, is his worst.
*
The days are unbearably slow. Every single day, Sho only has enough motivation to go out for a long walk, where he casts his eyes down whenever he feels the spark of recognition from someone familiar. He had gone back home because he craved for the familiar, but he wanted to do it alone. His mother doesn’t chastise him for his rudeness, even as he knows that she must have been asked questions, been the object of neighborly kindness and curiosity. She keeps quiet.
Thankfully, the stretch of neighborhood doesn’t last for long. Sho feels his mind still as his nostrils breathe in the fresh air, the dense trees shading him from the sun and prying eyes.
He keeps on walking, remembering certain spots where he and his friends used to set up their secret based camps made with wood and carton boxes stolen from their sheds and farms. He remembers a childhood that was simple yet charmed.
He doesn’t stop walking. He remembers touches and conversations that happened an airplane and a bullet train ride away from the dusty path he now walks. It’s a lifetime away. And it’s just this, just hours and hours of remembering, with every footprint he leaves on the trail.
It’s enough for him, until weeks later, it isn’t anymore.
Sometimes trees are just that. Trees. When he begins to wonder if his memory has betrayed him, he knows that it’s time to stop walking down everyday towards that shady copse of grief. He can’t afford to believe in a reality that’s slowly blurring into a fictive past. If there’s one thing Sakurai Sho can hold on to, even after everything, it’s his wits.
Fight, a small voice inside him says. His standards and overarching logic do not allow him the full descent; he does not, and cannot, fall off the edge of the world. No matter how much he wants to.
*
“Male/Female, High School Graduate, Computer Literate. Willing to work 6 AM to 4 PM, weekdays. Salary negotiable,” the ad says, along with the mobile number indicated. Sho thinks of his mother’s smile. He doesn’t know if he’s ready to go back to work. But if he isn’t, when will he ever be?
Before he decides against it and locks himself again inside his room, he dials the number.
“Hello?”
*
He doesn’t know where he gets the strength to get out of bed at four in the morning, but he does it anyway. The address he was given is downtown. With a creak, he opens their old storage room and wrangles a rusting bicycle out from the junk. He takes a big breath, wipes down the seat, and takes his first pedal down the road. Everything is quiet and still in the twilight, except for a cat that quickly disappears into a hedge. He breathes in the crisp air, wondering if this is how new beginnings feel like.
When he reaches the address, he leaves his bicycle outside and enters at the silent prodding of the automatic door, which opens smoothly in one motion. It is neater and brighter than he had expected for a small town office. The façade is small but welcoming, with the warm lighting and bared cement walls. There are no cubicles. There’s only a small reception area, a long white wooden table where a few laptops are trustingly if a bit haphazardly placed, a small bookshelf, and an industrial-sized printer. Long, white drapes are drawn halfway across the room, behind the couch, hiding the remainder of the office.
Sho feels silly as his leathered feet make clicking noise against the wooden floor. He is wondering what the drapes are hiding when a kind voice interrupts him.
“New guy?”
Sho whips around and sees a sleepy face that matches the voice. He almost expects to see sleep lines on his cheeks.
“Hi, yes. I’m Sakurai Sho,” he says, extending his hand. “We talked on the phone.”
“Ohno Satoshi.” The handshake is firm but not meant to imply superiority. “I talked to you on the phone?”
“Yes,” Sho replies, a little dumbfounded by the question in the man’s voice.
“Great, then.” The man known as Ohno takes a huge stretch, yawning as his faded black shirt hikes up his waist. Sho feels even sillier for wearing a suit and tie, a remnant of a past life that looks completely out of place in his present.
“So are you the HR manager?”
Ohno chortles as he removes his cap. “Well, if I had to have a title, then maybe I’m the art director?”
“Oh, I see. So what does that entail?”
“I do the layouts and,” he gestures to the pile of pens, brushes, and papers strewn across the table, “stuff.”
Sho nods politely as the other man rubs the back of his head. He wasn’t told over the phone exactly what the company does, only that they need someone to do administrative work and to Sho, that sounded like exactly the monotonous business he needed to get his nose into. Ohno didn’t even ask him for his degree or his previous work experience. Grossly overqualified or not, it doesn’t matter-the less he gets reminded of his past, the better.
“So where should I start, Ohno-san?” Sho asks, sensing the need to take control of the conversation.
“Oh,” he says. “You can just grab one of the laptops there, and he’ll-he’ll get here soon enough,” he says, slightly stumbling through the formalities. “Please have a seat.”
Sho is a little confused but he sits obediently at the corner of the long worktable anyway. Ohno goes off to the side and fumbles around with something. Sho tries not to twiddle with his phone too much. He wonders what he’s doing in a place like this with a half-asleep man in paint-splattered jeans.
“Morning fuel,” Ohno says a few minutes later as he approaches him. Sho accepts the steaming mug of coffee.
They sit there in silence, the other man feeling no need to make further conversation and looking completely oblivious to Sho’s slight discomfort. Soon enough, Ohno picks up a pencil and begins to scribble away on a large piece of paper, looking as if he’s forgotten that he has company.
After what feels like an eternity later, the automatic door whirs open. A man with mussed jet-black hair and horn-rimmed glasses enters. He dumps his backpack and the camera slung around his arm on the table as he approaches.
Before Sho could introduce himself, Ohno looks up and smiles indulgently at the newcomer. “Morning.”
“Aren’t you chirpy today,” he says. He glances at Sho, looking startled at seeing someone sitting silently beside Ohno.
“Oh, this is Sho-kun, he doesn’t talk much.” Sho thinks it’s a little rich of him. He also doesn’t know when it became ‘Sho-kun’ in the whopping thirty minutes that they’ve spent together.
“Matsumoto Jun,” the man with the glasses says. “You must be the one who’s helping us out.” It’s a handshake entirely different from Ohno’s-his grip is a little too firm and he’s a little too quick to draw his hand away.
“Sakurai Sho. Nice to meet you.”
Matsumoto gives him a once-over, taking in his outfit, his leathered shoes, and the unruly, long hair he tried his best to arrange into acceptability that morning. Sho feels like he should’ve shaved-until today, Sho has never connected light brown eyes with such a feeling of pointed objectified scrutiny. “I gather Ohno-san hasn’t briefed you yet?”
“Well,” Sho says, “he’s mentioned that he’s the art director-”
“So he hasn’t,” Matsumoto says, which Ohno just wrinkles his nose at as he continues to draw. Somehow, Sho feels like it’s his own fault for getting hired.
“Did you even ask him what his qualifications are?” Sho hears the edges of what he recognizes to be rigid professionalism in Matsumoto’s voice.
“Does it matter,” Ohno says, now absorbed in filling in the spaces on his illustration with a fine tip pen. Sho begins to feel a little indignant when Matsumoto only sighs and ruffles the other man’s hair affectionately.
*
Sho doesn’t get it. Matsumoto all but growls at him when he asks, “So, you take pictures of tourists who happen to want their portraits taken in Furano?” He doesn’t know why it was such a wrong conclusion to come to when he saw the cameras, the studio set-up, and the canvasses on the other side of the drawn curtains.
Ohno chuckles and says, “Easy, Jun-kun.”
After that, Ohno and Matsumoto have a short, unnervingly quiet spat about “thinks he’s better,” “listen to yourself”, “someone not briefing new hires properly”, and “well how much briefing does admin work need”, enough for Sho to regret ever getting up that morning in the first place.
“You’re impossible,” Matsumoto says.
“Let’s not get you worked up over nothing, okay?” Matsumoto only sighs as Ohno caves in, signaling to Sho to enter a side door that Sho never noticed before. They leave Matsumoto.
“Is he always like that?” Sho asks, his voice low as he looks at Matsumoto who has his glasses in one hand, rubbing his eye with the other.
Ohno turns to him and smiles. “He’s serious,” he says, and Sho doesn’t know if it’s a joke.
“Serious?” he asks in the dark, as he senses Ohno feeling around for the light switch.
“Passionate,” Ohno says as he flips the switch. Sho finally connects the dots from Ohno’s paint splattered jeans to Jun’s monstrous camera equipment. “Oh,” Sho says, feeling a kind of wonder curl up inside him, a curiosity he hasn’t felt in a long while. “I know this. I-I know your work.”
“You do?” Ohno asks, a smile on his face. “That’ll appease Grumpy-san then.”
“I came from advertising, and I’ve seen one of our competitors use your images for a campaign on encouraging kids to read.”
Ohno knits his eyebrows together. “The one where the kids are lying down in bed, clutching their books, while the characters in the books are painted into the photograph, watching over them as they sleep. Brilliant work,” Sho gushes.
“Ah,” Ohno says, “thanks. That’s one of our favorites. Sometimes things just fall into place.” Sho recognizes the pleased look on Ohno’s face. He wonders how things just fall into place feels like.
The room is dwarfed by huge canvasses of life-size portraits, but they aren’t only just portraits. One can still see the photographed subject, but he is immersed in a world of imagery, a normal landscape turned surreal with painting. Sho lingers in front of one particular canvass, where a woman is sitting on a bench. The expression on the woman’s face is one of serenity, an inner peace so perfectly captured in contrast with pop-ish yet grisly chaos of her surroundings. Under the framed canvass is a simple laminated caption:
Juntoshi
The Day She Sits Still, 2008
Oil and Acrylic on Panel
8 x 5 feet
Description: Photographed woman on a bench drinking from a thermos. Oil-painted monkeys in space suit and neon nebulae surround her.
“Juntoshi,” Sho says, his eyes catching the signature on the innocuous signature on the corner.
“Jun and Satoshi,” Ohno says. “Silly, I know, but we’re stuck with it.”
“So you do the paintings-” Sho hypothesizes.
“-and Jun-kun does the photography, yes.”
“Oh.” That all Sho could say. He’s struck by what he has so easily forgotten: that collaboration and trust don’t always end in despair.
*
He doesn’t do anything much through his first week at work-he only straightens out money matters that have become a little unruly for his own (and Matsumoto’s, he guesses) liking. That only takes him a couple of days, and after that, he is just sitting there like a decorative duck, minus the suit and the leather shoes that he quickly learns to leave at home. On his second week, Matsumoto only talks to him to ask for a cup of coffee and when he trips on a can of paint that Ohno, who was out buying lunch, left on the middle of the floor. A stream of apologies comes from Sho’s lips.
“Just clean it up," Matsumoto says, without sparing him a glance.
Sho reminds himself not to be clumsy around him. He’s fine with being disliked, but he doesn’t know why being ordered around by Matsumoto bothers him, when he’s his boss and he’s supposed to take orders anyway.
He learns to make himself invisible as he observes the quiet synergy between Ohno and Matsumoto, and among the three of them, they don’t make much noise, nor conversation, for that matter. Sho soon learns to deal with Matsumoto’s musical leanings: a whole lot of jazz with a spattering of Michael Jackson, and with Ohno’s busy, scribbling silence. He learns that Ohno likes his curry unreasonably hot and is generous with his chuckles, talking only when it matters. He also learns not to move Matsumoto’s things lest he wants to deal with the equivalent of an agitated lion inside a cage-learns that Matsumoto can spend days lost inside his photographs.
It’s a rarefied world, one where every move and breath is doubly magnified. Sho, despite his best efforts, can’t help but be drawn in by the way Juntoshi worked. On Thursday, a client comes in for an “indoor session”, as Matsumoto calls it. Matsumoto does not play any music that day; instead, it is only his muted but thorough commands that echo inside the studio.
Lean to your left. Bare your shoulders. Tuck your hair behind your ear.
Sho watches, transfixed, as the client-a well-to-do woman in her mid-30s-visibly loses herself in the process as she sheds her clothing. There is sadness in the woman’s eyes, yet the way her mouth quirks only suggests a quiet determination. Sho doesn’t know when it was decided that it was to be a nude session, yet things unfold so calmly that he swallows down his surprise when the woman’s body is completely bared. Matsumoto breaks his concentration for a second to look at him, as if to check if he understands-he had asked Sho to watch the process this one time.
“Come. You should see how we take portraits of the tourists.”
Move to your right. Take your leg further up. That’s it.
It doesn’t make much sense, but the way Jun looks away now just as quickly feels like a rebuke.
Ohno only sits to the side, a sketchbook balanced on his crossed leg, drawing nothing, eyes more intent and alive than Sho has ever seen them. Sho is not sure whether Ohno is watching the lady or Matsumoto. In fact, Sho is suddenly not so sure about what he’s doing there at all. It feels like he’s intruding on a moment that he has no right to see. He hasn’t seen a naked woman for so long, that’s one thing. But there’s also the understated, silent energy between Ohno and Matsumoto as they work together to create different worlds out of negatives and coils of paint, out of thin air. The space is too small, the intimacy so encompassing-he is gutted by the feeling, by remembrance.
He had only wanted a job.
*
The unmistakable sound of guns firing and soldiers giving out commands comfort him in a way that the idyllic countryside can’t. “Sho-chan,” he says, with as much affection as a phone call will allow. “You haven’t called for a month. I was beginning to wonder if you’ve buried yourself alive under all that Hokkaido snow.”
“It’s summer.”
The other man curses as Sho hears a voice say ‘Game Over’. “Really? I can’t tell inside the gloriously cool clime of my man cave.”
“You should go out more, you know,” Sho says.
“A little rich of you to say,” he says good-naturedly. “But I’m glad you called. How are you?”
“I got a job,” Sho says.
“Yet you sound so depressed.”
“It’s a weird job.”
“Maybe ‘weird’ is exactly what you need,” he says. “Are you finally living out your childhood dream of being a male stripper?”
“That was your childhood dream. Second only to being a baseball superstar.” The laughter sounds like long-forgotten music to Sho’s ears. “How’s home?” he asks.
“It’s different from when we were kids,” Sho admits.
“I’d be scared if it wasn’t. It’s been way more than, what, a decade since we both moved to the big, bad city? Crazy if you think about it.”
Sho doesn’t say anything for several seconds. A minute. An infinite stretch of time. He feels like he’s lost all sense of “home”.
“Sho-chan?”
Sho clutches at his mobile phone like a lifeline. He wants to fight, he wants to live, but it’s as if his heart breaks in guilt every other moment. He is so tired; he cherishes the silence and the way it allows him to imagine Nino sitting in his Tokyo apartment, an empty cup of ramen by his feet, skin made sallow by the reflection of the huge television screen. He called just to hear this exact silence.
“I remember Furano being really pleasant this time of the year,” Nino says gently after a few minutes.
“It is,” Sho concedes.
“You’ll pay for the bullet train, of course.”
Sho doesn’t need to say thank you to someone who’s been there ever since, so he doesn’t.
*
It is late in the afternoon when Sho discovers that one of the wheels of his bike is flat. It’s been a normal enough day but he had only wanted to go home immediately after work (which meant mundane tasks like answering the phone and ordering in paint and rolls of film), and to find his only mode of transportation broken-it was just a little bit too much for him. It’s the most he’s tried for the past couple of years; he’s only barely started to appreciate the relief of having a daily routine. Then this.
His foot throbs in pain after kicking the gear a little too hard.
“That’s surely going to fix it,” a voice behind him says.
Sho turns around to see Matsumoto, who has a serious expression behind his glasses counterbalanced by the ease with which he seems to fill in his carefully chosen clothes.
“Ah. Sorry,” Sho says, his cheeks growing warm. Even though almost quite a bit of time has passed since he started working with Matsumoto and Ohno, he’s still never too sure how to talk to either of them. For one, Ohno doesn’t talk much, and two, Matsumoto always feels like a million miles a way, except for the times when he seems to see through Sho with the acuity of a laser beam. Sho’s not even sure if he’s supposed to address the two of them as “sir” or he’s just generally supposed to disappear into the background and try to be as unnoticeable as possible as he goes through his tasks.
“You can walk,” Matsumoto says as he unchains his motorcycle. Sho can’t help but be a little embarrassed about his old, rickety bike, with a flat tire at that, and being caught in the throes of a slight fit.
“I don’t think I have a choice,” Sho says, unable to keep the edge out of his voice. He tries to fiddle with the wheel again when he hears the other man sigh.
“Go with me to Corner Tree,” Matsumoto says, his hands on the handles of his motorcycle.
“Corner Tree?” Sho is a little surprised by the invitation; this might be the most Matsumoto has ever said to him in one go. He only ever talks about work; the rest of the time, he is either fiddling with his camera or engrossed in the other details of his work.
Matsumoto shrugs. “I know someone who might be able to help you there. It’s just a three-minute walk from here.” He doesn’t say anything else as he doesn’t get on his motorcycle and walks.
“You don’t have to walk because of me,” Sho says.
“No, I don’t.” He continues walking, leaving Sho slightly puzzled. Maybe it’s his way of being friendly, Sho thinks. He hikes up the messenger bag falling from his shoulder and follows suit.
The last signs of the sun disappear from the sky when they reach a quaint path lined with leafy trees. It leads to a cabin with a small signage: Corner Tree. Matsumoto doesn’t even look back and walks straight to the entrance. Sho quietly follows suit. In another time, he would have already gotten to know someone whom he’s working with quite well in a few weeks. He remembers being able to talk to other people easily-he’s not sure if it’s the distant demeanor of his employer, or it’s he himself who has changed.
The overwhelming scent of freshly grinded coffee beans fill up his senses as they enter the café. It apparently only looks like a cabin on the outside-inside, there are comfortable mismatched couches and lampshades that clearly evoke the modern, if quirky tastes of the owner. The pipes on the ceiling are exposed, adding an industrial vibe to the chintzy warmth of the furnishings. There is only a young couple quietly having what looks like a light dinner.
Matsumoto walks towards the cedar bar where there are comfortable stools lined up. He sits there and checks out his phone. Sho walks awkwardly towards him and ambles to the chair on his right, taking a seat as well.
“This used to be a textile factory,” Sho thinks out loud. “Who would have thought that people would be hanging out here?”
Matsumoto looks up from his phone. “You’ve been here before?”
“I used to live here, in Furano. When I was young, before I moved to Tokyo.”
Sho sees a spark of curiosity for the first time in Matsumoto’s eyes. “I didn’t see that coming.”
Sho is about to ask him what he meant by that when a cheerful voice comes up. “Matsujun! You haven’t dropped by in awhile,” he says with a pout. The owner of the voice is behind the bar, wearing a beige apron over jeans and a sweatshirt.
“Been busy,” Matsumoto says, not without fondness. Before Sho has time to think about how strange it is for someone like Matsumoto to have a cutesy nickname, the other man makes a strangled sound of recognition. “Sho-chan!”
“Excuse me?” Sho says, confused.
“Sho-chan,” the other man repeats. “I can’t believe you can’t remember me!” He flattens his wavy, light brown hair and pats it down his forehead, holding it there as he smiles without teeth. “Ring a bell?”
Sho shakes his head as Matsumoto looks on at the both of them with what looks like budding amusement.
The other man sighs but he doesn’t seem like he’s angry or frustrated. Quite the opposite, actually-he looks like a well-fed Cheshire cat, licking its paw, about to play with the mice it’s just caught. “So how about this,” he says, as he mimes a person hitting a baseball with a bat. He looks at Sho expectantly.
“No, I’m sorry,” Sho says.
The man puts his hands on his hips. “Fine, a verbal clue then.” He busies himself behind the counter. Steam rises. “Let’s see. Ah! We used to go to my parents’ restaurant all the time and you always finished all the gyoza. Then we’d squabble a little bit about it because you say it’s payback because you wanted to play football instead of baseball and-”
“Aiba-chan,” Sho breathes, floods of bright, pleasant sunlit memories washing down on him in droves.
“Yes!” Aiba says, his smile blinding as he turns on the coffee machine. Now that he remembers, Sho wonders how he could have failed to recognize him. His smile still belongs to a 10 year-old, even as he grew up to be taller than Sho remembers. “God, Sho-chan-can I still call you that?”
“Yes,” Sho says, smiling back in remembrance.
“I haven’t seen you since you left after junior high! What brings you back to Furano?”
“I’m working here now, actually,” Sho replies, turning to Matsumoto. “I work for Matsumoto…san.”
Sho doesn’t know if Matsumoto, who has been watching their exchange quietly, hears the pause. “Sakurai-san is helping me and Satoshi out,” he says. Sho swallows.
Aiba looks at the two of them. “Wow, small world, huh?” he says. “Aren’t Oh-chan and Matsujun the cutest? I mean, apart from the fact that they’re totally brilliant artists doing whatever strange and kinky stuff they do in their studio.”
“Aiba,” Jun says, exasperation coloring his voice.
Sho doesn’t quite know how to reply and he doesn’t have to, because Aiba is on a roll. “Matsujun, did you know, Sho-chan and I were super close when we were kids? It was so much fun.”
Matsumoto gives Aiba a small smile. “No, I didn’t. How could I, when I just met him a few weeks ago?” Sho senses how Matsumoto indulges Aiba is almost how indulgent he is with Ohno. Almost. He feels somehow adrift between these two people who are obviously good friends, almost like he doesn’t remember how that kind of lightheartedness can exist between human beings.
“That’s immaterial-you should know! I’m serious, we were quite the posse back then. With me as co-captain of the baseball team with another guy, our team won a couple of regional meets! Then Sho-chan here was always first in our class, always the smartest. He was also the captain of the football team-the girls adored us, let me tell you,” Aiba says.
“You, adored by girls? Hearing how you talk to girls these days begs temporary, if not permanent, suspension of belief,” Matsumoto says, the playful voice completely alien to Sho.
“Well, believe it! We were kind of a big deal, right, Sho-chan? ” The way Matsumoto catches Sho looking at him is unsettling. It feels like he’s always looking at Sho. He can’t tell if Matsumoto’s growing impatient with the sudden burst of nostalgia or Matsumoto simply just doesn’t like him.
Sho winces. “That was a long time ago, Aiba-chan.”
Aiba laughs. “Yeah, well, I guess it was. But I’m still so glad to see you, seriously,” he says, all warm enthusiasm and sincerity.
“It’s great to see you too,” Sho says.
Aiba hands them both a cup of coffee. “So where’s your wife? I heard from an old schoolmate that you got married a couple years of ago.”
Wife.
Married.
Couple of years ago.
It’s worse, especially worse, when he doesn’t expect it, and he sits there, frozen in place with his eyes shut.
“Sho-chan?”
When he opens his eyes again, he sees Matsumoto looking at him, with a look that Sho can’t decipher. He’s tired of being too sensitive of his surroundings, of going out and trying to understand how other people he’s not familiar with are. He’s suddenly tired of trying to navigate a life without her anew.
Sho is beyond thinking if he’s being rude when he stands up, doesn’t say a word, and leaves. His conscience tugs at him when he hears Aiba call out after him, but it’s not enough for him to turn back.
The clouds obscure the moonlight as he takes a long, solitary walk back to his bed.
*
He hears the sound of the gears before he sees it. Sho stops, the sound of gravel being scraped ringing in the night air as the motorcycle puts on the brakes. In the shadows of the trees and the night light of closed shops, Matsumoto looks only slightly less intimidating. He gets off his motorcycle, looking unfazed as ever, if a bit uncertain.
He takes off his helmet. “Sakurai-san,” he says.
Sho finds himself rooted in place. “Matsumoto-san?”
His brown eyes turn molten in the dark. “You took off and…Aiba wanted me to make sure you were okay.”
Sho breathes in. “I’m-,” Sho says, “-tell him I’m fine. I’m sorry.” He’s not okay, not really, but right then, he feels embarrassed for making a scene when he should have handled it better. By now.
“Are you really going to walk all the way back to your house?” Matsumoto asks, his hand on his hip.
“It seems like that, yes,” Sho says, his voice quiet, wondering why he even followed him. “I’m sorry you had to follow me. You can go back now.”
Matsumoto levels him with his eyes, something he seems so completely adept at, even without meaning to. “Stop apologizing for every single thing,” he says, and it’s almost a whisper, but it’s not-it’s too direct, too venomous-ringing too true somewhere deep inside Sho.
Matsumoto’s breathing is alive and intrusive. He rides his motorcycle in one smooth movement and revs the engine up. “Get on,” he says, and Sho realizes that eighty percent of the things Matsumoto says to him are orders. In the dark of the night, in a place where there doesn’t seem to be anybody else around, Sho admits to himself that he wants to be told what to do. It goes against everything that he is, but at this point in his life, who is he, really? He takes the extra helmet and rides astride the back of Matsumoto. There is a moment when he wonders where he should hold on, but it goes away quickly when Matsumoto gingerly grabs the both of his hands and places them lightly on his hips.
“We won’t go too fast,” he promises, and Sho hears differently. Matsumoto sticks to his word and maneuvers around the town in moderate speed. Sho’s heart is hammering in his ears.
“Left,” Sho shouts, holding on to Matsumoto. For a while that seemed to stretch on indeterminately, he just gives directions as he grows conscious about his arms around Matsumoto. When they get to his place, Sho gets off the bike and gives back the helmet, unsure about what to do next.
“Thank you.”
Matsumoto doesn’t say anything. When Sho starts to walk away, a pale hand reaches out to his wrist. “Sakurai-san.”
It’s as if everything stops-the world turning into a silent vacuum with the two of them right at the center of it-as if the touch of skin could command the tides. Sho can be naïve, but not that naïve. He knows of currents, of moments of small and unexpected weaknesses powerful enough to take his breath-but it’s never been like this. Never with someone like Matsumoto.
“I’m fucked up” is the first thing he says as he finds himself unarmed, in the mercy of the moment. He does not shake off Matsumoto’s hand.
“I know.” The lines around Matsumoto’s mouth soften. He must have broken so many people’s hearts, with that mouth alone, Sho thinks. “You’re lonely.”
It feels like his insides are going in different directions, threatening to pull him apart. “I think I’m more than lonely, Matsumoto-san. You don’t-” his breath hitches, as Matsumoto’s thumb caresses his pulse, “-you don’t want anything to do with me.”
His touch is impossibly soft, and it’s only confusion that prevents Sho from melting on the spot. “Don’t overthink this. I’ll see you at work tomorrow.” It’s only when Sho nods that he lets go. He still doesn’t know what just happened when he watches Matsumoto’s outline disappear into the horizon. His skin feels like it’s been branded from where his fingertips have touched him. It’s as if he hasn’t let go.
*
Sho doesn’t need to go to the office that Wednesday, because he had asked permission to take the day off to go on his personal banking errands. It all goes without a hitch. He decides to go to work since it’s just around lunchtime. He has phone calls to make for deliveries. Sho enters the office without fuss when first hears the voice of Ohno.
“You’re beautiful,” he says. The click of the flash echoes throughout the office.
Sho freezes.
“Look at me,” Ohno murmurs again, the flash illuminating the curtain.
“You wanted this.” Flash.
“Look at me the way you look at him.” Flash.
“Push it further down.” Flash.
“I’m not playing with you. Let go.” Flash.
“You begged me for this.” Flash.
Sho is rooted in place, chills running down his back. He cannot reconcile the voice to the kind face that he sees day in day out. When he finally gains the sense to turn back and let himself out, a bare-chested Matsumoto opens the curtains. His eyes grow wide and cold at the sight of Sho. Ohno only turns to him, brows scrunched together. “Sho-kun.”
“I-I’ll just come back tomorrow,” Sho says, backing out. He doesn’t dare look back, his head pounding with the gossamer seduction of blinding white lights and quiet voices.
Juntoshi
The Day He Caves In, 2013
Oil and Acrylic on Panel
8 x 5 feet
Description: Photographed topless man in jeans stands in the center. Oil-painted wing at his back, broken one on the floor.
*
The next day at work, Matsumoto acts as if nothing has happened. Even after a week, he doesn’t say anything out of the ordinary. Sho takes it as a cue to act the same, even though he cannot explain to himself what he witnessed, or thought he witnessed that day. Matsumoto spends most of his time in the darkroom, obsessing over every tiny detail of his photographs. Ohno doesn’t seem to be fazed in any way; he’s being his usual self-adrift and lost in his own colorful world. To Sho, though, the air in the office feels like a tightening noose. He retreats to himself even more.
During one balmy summer afternoon, they have a shoot scheduled with a client. It officially leaves Sho to his own devices, but he still doesn’t get away from Matsumoto’s quiet orders, not even then when it wasn't directed at him.
Sho imagines the man who came in that afternoon, the man who looked every inch self-possessed, and just a few years older than himself, Sho guesses, imagines him following Matsumoto’s orders behind the drapes.
Look here. That’s right. Uncross your arms. Don’t look at me. Don’t look at the camera. Yes. Hold still.
He imagines Ohno, sitting on the sides, watching. He hears his voice, his voice from that day. Imagines Matsumoto being ordered around for once.
It wakes something inside him, something he can’t recognize, something he hasn’t felt before, and he wrestles with it. He feels Matsumoto’s pale, slightly hardened fingertips, fingertips that hold a camera with robotic precision, fingertips deftly on his pulse. He closes his eyes. He doesn’t need this. It’s not exactly revulsion. It’s an all too real fear that maybe, just maybe, it will feel right and not at all wrong, and he can’t face what that suggests. What does it mean, when his heart is knotted in a hurt tangle? He’s all over the place as it is, too spread apart, not belonging anywhere.
Don’t think about it. Move. Look at Ohno. Yes, yes. Just keep looking at him. Breathe.
And it comes, unbidden, just like it always does-he only needs to follow the familiar tendril of thought and he’s there again.
He remembers a summer night in July, two years ago, a sweltering night, more than even the air-conditioning in their brand new apartment could handle. It was the fourth day in the week that he couldn’t make it to dinner with her. She’s probably sleeping, and he couldn’t blame her. It’s two in the morning. He was frustrated, still figuring out for himself the balance between nurturing his skyrocketing career and his promise to the woman he had wanted to marry from the first day he saw her in the library at Keio, her glasses falling on the bridge of her nose as she touched the leathered spines.
Being the accounts head of one of the biggest advertising agencies in Japan came with a price: apart from the weekends, he hardly saw her: the girl from the library who turned out to be prettier, smarter, and funnier than Sho will ever deserve, the girl that he had worked so hard to win over. She never took any bullshit from him but she’d always been there: the partner to his every success, the first to brazenly hold his hands on their first date because he couldn’t muster up the courage to do so.
The girl of his dreams.
“Just a little more sacrifice, baby, just a little more,” he kept on telling her, as he loved her, held her, moved against her, because he will make it. He will keep his word. “I love you, okay? I love you.”
“Okay. I love you too, you doofus.” Her laughter is a mantra that things will be okay. Always okay.
Together, they will make it the successful and beautiful life Sho had always imagined-they only needed to grit their teeth through the pivotal parts. She was about to become a fully-fledged heart surgeon in half a year, and Sho-Sho, just barely past 30, would become partner soon, and there will be more delegation of tasks than overnight vigils away from her, days and nights of trying to seduce clients to their company’s bedside. The board had been watching over him like a hawk, seeing him through, watching him prove the legacy of his stellar academic career, his ease when it came to talking to clients, and his sharp acumen for bringing new business in.
Sho had been reaching for the stars from Day 1 and hadn’t crumbled from the pressure-there was no reason to believe he would any time soon.
He took off his shoes and his coat, wanting to be beside her as quick as possible. The impossible softness of her bared arms feels heavenly against his hands-if he has this to come home to every single day, it felt like everything didn’t matter, that nothing could be more important.
And then he noticed it. Her stillness. The shock of unruly hair against her already cooling sweat.
When the doctor came out of the intensive care unit only hours later trying to explain what a burst aortic aneurysm was, Sho was already crumbling away beyond recognition. She had known her way around every ventricle and alleyway through any person’s heart. Through Sho’s. It couldn’t, and didn’t, save her.
He would have given up everything for Keiko’s warm hand in his. For everything to be okay again.
*
>> Part 2