Chocolate fic for astrangerenters, PART 3
To: astrangerenters
From: cupid_johnny
Title: I fell for you like the stars.
Pairing: Kitagawa Keiko/Sakurai Sho, mentions of Kanjiya Shihori/Matsumoto Jun, Aiba Masaki/Becky and if you squint, Kitagawa Keiko/Yamashita Tomohisa.
Rating: PG
Summary: Keiko talks to ghosts. And then she meets Sho.
A/N: To astrangerenters, I sort of might have thrown together some prompts and tried to make cake. Like one prompt is flour and another is eggs and the other is sugar although this is more like I threw some of the lyrics of Haunted and Starlight Kiss into a blender with half the dramas clichés that exist. I hope you enjoy! Happy White Day ♥
Keiko rereads her old journals. She reads about the little boy who was accompanied by his pet puppy. She reads about the man who used to sing outside a train station. She reads every encounter that she should have ignored because she could have made friends with people who don’t see the departed spirits of the deceased; she wouldn’t be here.
When she reaches the last entry, she turns the page to start writing.
Neat letters spell an address for her.
A hospital.
This isn’t her writing.
Sakurai Sho. Age thirty two. Comatose.
Keiko stands in a hospital room, and she hears beeps. She hears nurses bustling in and out of rooms to check on patients, to take their blood pressure and their temperature. She can see white walls and she sees a bedside table with a clock.
His eyes are closed. He’s wearing blue hospital pyjamas. There’s an IV in his left arm. He’s silent and empty, and she can only stare.
Sakurai-san is in the room you’re asking after, the nurse at the counter said, and you are?
She lied. Keiko said she was a friend from awhile ago. She’s been overseas. She was in Egypt. She just wants to see him after so long.
He hasn’t woken up, the nurse said. But he’s on the fourth floor, room 510.
It’s visiting hours. She sits on a chair by the bed and looks at the silent man in the hospital bed. She sits and she meets Sakurai Sho for the first time.
“So this is you.”
Nothing.
“You aren’t dead, are you.”
She’s been there for eighteen minutes. Took her eighteen minutes to even say that.
“Between a snowman and an umbrella, which would you draw?”
She looks at his heart monitor and all she knows is that his heart is working. She wants to touch him. This Sho is warm. But he’s lifeless and he’s not laughing and he’s not complaining about sunburn.
Keiko smiles listlessly and continues, “I would draw a snowman. Because it’s cute.”
“Then your heart melts quickly.”
She turns and he’s there. Standing at the end of the bed and looking at himself. Sho looks tired, his eyes are dark and he stares at his own body, a figure that’s broken and alone.
“If you draw a snowman, it means your heart melts quickly. If you draw an umbrella, it means that you wish to be loved underneath that safe umbrella as the rain falls down around you,” he continues, looking at his own face. “In the end, doesn’t it mean that we’re all lonely?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Keiko whispers. “You really aren’t dead, are you?”
“Do you hate me?” Sho asks her.
“I want to.”
“Do you hate me?” he repeats. “Yes or no.”
She can only be honest with him, because it’s how they are. “I think I hate myself right now.”
“But do you hate me?” Sho presses.
She shakes her head silently.
“This is the last time I can see you,” Sho says quietly. “I just wanted to see you one last time.”
He looks at himself once more and Keiko looks at the Sho who’s not quite there. And he laughs and it’s without humour.
“Five percent of people.”
“What?”
“You said five percent of people at the same place, same time. Does this count?” he asks her, laughing and she starts laughing as well because it’s not even funny. It’s not funny at all but fuck that, fuck that because she can only laugh. Technically they were at the same place at the same time and yes, he might have been his own departed spirit when they kissed, the departed spirit of a comatose body, but that should count for something.
“When did you know?”
“I’ve always known.”
There must be a shatter in the distance. It must be her sanity; it must be whatever she had left within herself to hold it together. “You’ve known from the start you weren’t dead?”
“You didn’t ask.”
“You said you got hit by a car,” Keiko snaps.
“I said I got hit by a car and woke up like this, I never said I died.”
“So that makes it okay?” Keiko asks him. “Why did you write down the address?”
“Because I just wanted to see you one last time,” he repeats.
Keiko shakes her head slowly. She opens her mouth to tell him no, you don’t get to say something like that. Not now.
“Keiko, I’m sorry.”
“What did you even want from me?”
“I don’t know,” Sho falters over the next part. “I’m sorry.”
“You should have told me.”
Sho hesitates, and he’s looking at her with shame in his eyes and Keiko looks from him and then to the comatose state he really is in.
“I don’t know what I should do,” he says quietly. “I don’t know.”
This is not a conversation Keiko wants to have. This is not her problem. This is all on Sho. This is not her problem and she will not tell him what to do or how to feel. Keiko does not have a right to that; Keiko won’t allow herself that.
“Would you miss me?” Sho asks.
“That’s not really relevant, is it.”
He reaches out to touch her and Keiko steps away.
“Don’t make the last time I’ll see you so terrible.”
That’s not fair, she wants to say. You don’t get to ask that of me, not after all this.
“Please,” she says mechanically, “Take care of yourself.”
She walks away and Sho calls after her.
“Keiko, please.”
Keiko forces herself not to look back.
If anyone saw her crying, Keiko will say that she has hayfever. Or maybe she got bad news. Perhaps she broke up with her boyfriend.
Her boyfriend, she will say, he was an asshole. He would make me smile and not tell me what was really going on in his head. I met him and we didn’t get along at all.
What a horrible person.
Tokyo is alive, with too many people on the train that evening and restaurants overflowing with chatter.
She sits with her bowl of udon and looks at a table across the room. There’s a couple in their highschool uniforms, with nervous smiles and laughter. Maybe they’re skipping cram school.
She pays her bill, walks out into the city.
The night is dark and with no answers. If she asked, she’d have no stars.
The billboards promise her snacks and idols with CDs. The noise doesn’t drown out her thoughts and Keiko walks with the crowd.
When she stands at the crosswalk, she looks to her side and there’s a guy in a suit standing there. He’s looking straight ahead.
If Sho were here, if he told her hand, she wouldn’t have complained.
But he’s not. So Keiko crosses the road and she goes home.
Shihori calls her. “Hello, moonbeam. Want some dinner?”
“I’m fine, thank you.”
Keiko’s not fine. She’s lying in bed and staring blankly at the wall.
“I’m coming over.”
“No, don’t.”
“Keiko,” Shihori snaps.
“I don’t want you here,” Keiko insists, trying to muffle any horrible noises she makes with her hand. She might be crying. She doesn’t want Shihori to see her like this. She’s shaking like a leaf in the wind; her eyes are warm and itchy and she’s shaking and shaking and no, Shihori doesn’t need to know all this. Shihori doesn’t need to know what else is so stupid and insane and just, no. “I don’t need you here.”
“Yes you do.”
Shihori is there within the hour. She plops herself on Keiko’s bed and they have a sleepover like when they were little. Crammed together and too tired to talk because they used their energy up on something else. It used to be running around the park or shopping or going to a movie. Right now, Keiko doesn’t know how to say anything.
“Do you want to tell me?” Shihori asks.
Keiko doesn’t know how.
“Keiko, if it’s difficult then just say one part of it and go either forwards or backwards from there.”
“The ghost I chased out of Jun’s restaurant, he kissed me and apparently he’s not dead.”
“Did you fall in love with him?”
It’s unexpected and it’s not something she considered at all. Shihori offers Keiko a one armed hug and Keiko smiles bitterly and asks, “What’s wrong with me?”
“Nothing.”
Keiko doesn’t believe her. But there’s nothing she can do about that. She can only close her eyes and carry on.
Keiko gets the position as a writer and gets set up in a cubicle. Her cubicle neighbour is a nice guy called Satoshi. She writes about cafes and music and gardening. Sometimes she writes about old ladies and their marriage stories. People send letters into the magazine, and Keiko reads them.
When she makes tea, she makes Satoshi a cup.
Some nights after work, she’ll take the train and tell the hospital reception that she’s here to see the patient in room 510.
“He hasn’t woken up.”
“I know.”
And she’ll sit there and she’ll try to hate Sakurai Sho, age thirty-two and comatose.
Sho lied to her. Sho kissed her. Sho interrupted her in the shower.
He would eat her food and say she’s burnt the fried rice. He would leave newspapers everywhere.
Sho does not come to find her. Sho is silent and pale and there is nothing for him to say.
Keiko finds different ways to hate Sho but she does not actually hate him.
Sho talked to her. Sho said she was more pretty than sexy. Sho destroyed her toaster and made her laugh until she was crying.
Her parents think that the journalism is a brave step. It’s magazine writing, but it’s a step. Is this what you want to do, and Keiko says yes. This is what I want to do.
There’s one night when it’s raining and she’s typing a lifestyle piece on Osaka food.
She thinks that it would make sense. She should go to Osaka, where the cars are on the other side of the road and the signs are even brighter than the busiest night in Shibuya.
Keiko goes to Osaka that weekend and she takes photographs and asks shop owners where they think the good food is. When she’s eaten her way through one part of the city, Keiko walks through the streets and watches as the sky darkens.
She thinks of Sho, if he’s cold, if the nurse has come to taken his stats.
On a Friday night, Satoshi asks if she wants to get drinks. Or dinner.
“I have something planned already,” Keiko says apologetically.
“Ah,” and his smile is lazy and curious, “Boyfriend?”
“No. Not really. I’m not sure.”
His smile widens and now he really is interested, leaning on the cubicle ledge and looking down at her. Satoshi is tanned and he goes fishing on the weekends. He didn’t really plan to write. He never even intended to move to Tokyo. Satoshi drifts from coast to coast in search of colour and the breeze.
“So you’re single?”
“I think so,” she says. “What about you, Ohno-kun?”
“I’m single.”
Two single people who get along and work together might be able to date.
They can talk about the city or who is dating whom. Ohno Satoshi could meet Shihori and Jun and they’d all laugh together over things that don’t matter. Maybe Jun will cook for them and Satoshi could help. Shihori and Keiko could sit in the living room, giggling with a bottle of wine and saying what great guys they are.
It should happen.
“Single, but unavailable.”
“What?” She lets out nervous laughter. “That’s an interesting way to put it.”
“I meant you,” Satoshi tells her. “I’ll see you on Monday, Keiko-chan.”
She sits in room 510 and she reaches out and lets her fingertips graze the back of his hand.
This Sho is warm. He has blood running through his veins, he has a heartbeat.
“You’re horrible. You’re horrible because I think my coworker was going to ask me out and now he thinks I’m not available. I hope you’re happy because he was cute and he’s nice and I could probably have his babies. My mother called me last week. She’s asking about grandchildren.”
Keiko looks at the empty face of Sakurai Sho, how his hair needs a trim. She wonders if his family comes to see him. It’s a private room after all.
“Shihori-chan said Jun-kun freaked out over the floors for his restaurant. They decided to change things. I saw her for dinner and she told me I looked sad. I blame you for that too.”
Her editor enjoys her work and tells her to write what she wants. Keep it lifestyle, but what you want people to read.
Keiko decides she wants to go to Hokkaido for the weekend.
Her editor raises an eyebrow and repeats, “Hokkaido.”
“It’s far away. I could interview locals, try the food. Do a contemporary view of Hokkaido during the off-season.”
Hokkaido is far. It’s the end of earth; it’s where the night falls quickly and Keiko has never been but it’s far away. And she wants to go far, she wants to see what isn’t in front of her.
Maybe she can leave it all behind.
After Hokkaido, she goes to Fukuoka.
Keiko stands in the tower, her hands pressed against the glass as she looks down upon the city.
She thinks of the beach, of how she said there were better stars in Kobe.
These are lights, not stars.
Why is she thinking of that, why won’t it just stop?
She returns from Fukuoka and Shihori asks her, “Are you okay?”
“Not yet,” Keiko says.
Shihori nods like she understands.
“I’m thinking about the time we were in high school and I forgot my homework. I could have just copied yours, but you decided you’ll pretend to have forgotten it as well,” Shihori recalls.
Their teacher made an example of them both, called them slackers and said they wouldn’t get into any good university if that would be their attitude.
“Probably not my brightest moment,” Keiko remarks. Shihori nods and they’re both smiling. It’s nothing to be happy about, but it’s just that she knows what Shihori is trying to say.
“You’ll have me, you know. I can’t make this better, but you’ll have me.”
Sometimes, she’ll see people following her and passing through walls.
Keiko wants to call out and ask if they’re okay.
She doesn’t.
She starts writing about society. And this isn’t just high fliers and rich girls marrying into a richer family or idols who say outrageous things. Keiko starts writing about her generation; she starts thinking about that time she got scolded by a man because she was chasing her friends down the street with a haraegushi.
Keiko writes about the next life, she writes about tradition and how little she knew and how much she had to learn.
It’s longer than any article she’s submitted but Satoshi reads it over for her and says, “It sounds like you’ve really been there, you know, with the knowledge of spirits and purification.”
Keiko says she knows a guy. “You want to meet him? He charges per the question.” Satoshi laughs it off and says she should hand this in to Okada-san, he’ll like it.
Her editor does like it and he peers over his reading glasses and tells her honestly, “I wasn’t expecting this of you.”
Keiko smiles.
“I didn’t expect this of myself either.”
Keiko uses a weekend to go to Chiba and she takes a camera. She goes to farms and asks if the industry is robbing their profit. She eats fresh tomatoes and asks about the wholesale markets.
She pats a cow, drinks whole cream milk.
Keiko stops by the beach.
When the sun sets, she takes a photo and she thinks that she might miss him.
Keiko has questions. She wants to know if people see her as an adult, or is she the product of a generation who’s had it too good? She looks at her degree hanging above her desk.
Keiko calls her mother.
“You worked, before you had me. Right?”
“Yes, I was an elevator girl.”
Keiko asks her mother if that was hard. How many hours? What was the pay? She asks about the rules and the standards, about the tolerance she must have built.
It’s an honest conversation and when she’s done, her mother’s given Keiko numbers of former colleagues. It’s late and her mother excuses herself.
“I should have slept a bit ago, Kei-chan.”
“Thank you,” she says. “I really appreciate it.”
“You know, you seem different.”
Keiko didn’t really notice it, so she has to ask. “How?”
“Like you want something. I’m glad. I was worried about you.”
“I don’t know what I want,” Keiko says truthfully, “Not quite. I know I want to be a journalist. But I’m writing things like these. And I know that I don’t want to stay still and be hopeless.”
When she meets these women, she smiles and wonders if that would have been her awhile ago. She would have been in that elevator with a silk scarf tied neatly at her neck and welcoming people in and out. Keiko wouldn’t have wanted more, she would just say that they’re going up and then going down.
Life is up and down, one of the ladies says. Sometimes you keep going down but during that time, you need to remember that life will also go up later on.
Keiko takes a voice recorder to every single interview and she plays them over at night. She listens to her own voice, and laughs at herself.
This isn’t some expose on elevator girls, but her recorded self makes it seem like some big thing.
When she takes a break, Keiko watches a movie. It’s something foreign with subtitles and a guy’s brandishing a whip, looking at relics of the past.
It rains for three days straight.
The entire city is damp and cold and the sky is as grey as the buildings. Keiko’s umbrella is red. She bought it at a conbini on the way to work the moment she felt droplets on her head.
There’s no reason for her to visit Sho every single day but she does. Keiko brings her journals and she reads every entry out loud for him just as Sho did so long ago.
She goes from the start. She goes from the very first day and she tells him about some of the ghosts would follow her to class. There was a ghost who had a crush on Shihori.
“Actually, there were a few of them.”
She doesn’t try to hate him and she doesn’t get angry. Keiko doesn’t cry either.
More than anything, she finds herself wishing that he can wake up and laugh at her stories or ask for more.
Keiko tells him about one of the horrible dates she went on during college. It was a double date, and it ended with Keiko deliberately spilling her Coke on her own dress so that she and Shihori could bail early.
“I liked that you thought I was pretty,” she confesses. “I liked that it was you saying it.”
Keiko sits by his bed and reaches out her hand to slip it into his.
“If I asked you to, would you wake up?”
They’ve held hands before. She’s felt his cold hand for an entire night, she knows that any part of him would be cool to touch and no promise of anything. This is different. This is warmth, this is who he was and he could still be here.
“Were you really alone? I always wanted to know what you were doing. You said you studied economics so I had this idea that you were really boring or that you would sit in a room and look at graphs and stats and tell everyone that bleak times lie ahead. And in your spare time, I thought you would read lots of boring books but sometimes you like to go for walks through parks. If you travelled, it would be to Dubai and then Europe.” Keiko smiles at that. “You know, despite it all, I still thought you were really lonely.”
She doesn’t know about his family. She doesn’t even know when’s his birthday.
“Do you think I fell in love with you? If it were the other way around, would you have fallen for me?”
His heart monitor is a steady beep. Sho said she had a strong heartbeat. She wants to listen to it, the way he pressed his ear to her to hear it. But she doesn’t.
“You’re good looking too, you know. You said I was pretty, so I’ll tell you that I thought you were good looking. Would you like me for my looks? I liked you because you were supposed to be honest. Turns out you’re not honest.”
She wishes she could have met him some other way.
Maybe if they had been standing at a traffic light. Maybe if she was standing at a cross walk and he was a metre away.
Would they have honest words?
Maybe she would have ignored him. Keiko doesn't know. She wishes she could know.
“I know that you don’t know if you should wake up. I know that you must be lonely and confused. I’m not sorry for being hurtful. I was hurting too, you know? Because when I was around you, everything else that made me sad started becoming something for me to overcome. I didn’t even realise I was so sad. Did you know I wrote an article about women working in the eighties and nineties? I met all these ladies and they were my mother’s friends. My editor says I can go far. Maybe I should go so far away that whatever is hurting now, we can just leave it here. If you wake up, then it won’t hurt anymore.”
She doesn’t want to be crying.
But Keiko tries to blink back tears and it just makes it worse.
“Sho. I wish you could wake up. Because then you can go to Egypt. Or maybe if you want to tan that badly, you can go to Okinawa. There’ll be nice girls who want you. And then you can drink beer with friends. If you wake up, you can eat at Jun-kun’s restaurant. Introduce yourself to Shihori as the guy who haunted the place. It’ll make them scream. Is it dark where you are? Are you somewhere in the city?”
It floods at her, at that moment, and Keiko smiles through it all.
“I want you to be happy, even if the life you wake up to doesn’t have me in it.”
She writes about five percent of people who fall in love but never knew that at one point, they were at the same place at the same time.
It’s a fluff piece and she reads that somewhere in the world, a long time ago, people were believed to have fallen from the sky. They would be joined together to one other person.
They’d fall apart, and search for their other half.
Sometimes you just miss them; sometimes they will be running towards you.
She looks at the night sky and there’s never a star in sight. Not with the light pollution.
Keiko wonders if Sho hears her at all.
In her own head, she writes a story for him. About a man who got hit by a car. He fell into a coma and met a girl who made him laugh. But when he woke up, she wasn’t there. But he packed a bag and travelled the world. He will go to Egypt and Mexico and then he’ll go to Denmark and Shanghai. He’ll go everywhere, so far that sadness can’t catch up to him. She tells herself a story and she makes it a happy ending.
After much fuss and panic and stress and another very long month of Shihori thinking that Jun desperately needs to take a yoga class to calm down, the restaurant is ready to for business.
When Jun’s restaurant opens, Keiko is there on the first night for the after hours celebration and Nino tags along, “For payment of my services,” and Jun rolls his eyes but gives him free pasta anyways.
“Your services were months ago and I was the one paying you,” Keiko points out and Nino immediately starts telling Keiko how lovely she looks in attempts to change the conversation.
Keiko looks at cream coloured walls and the light filling the space. She remembers dusty grounds and doors slamming and it shouldn’t be something nice but it is. At least to her.
Shihori throws her arms around Keiko, “I’m glad you made it. It wouldn’t be the same if you weren’t here.”
“Oh baby, your boyfriend’s watching us.”
Shihori giggles and links arms with Keiko, taking her into the kitchen and handing her a spoon. They lean over the counter and share a bowl of gelato. Shihori tells Keiko all about the customers who came in, the minor freak out Jun had in the kitchen halfway through and she’s glowing like the city lights.
“Are you happy?” Keiko asks her.
“I think so,” Shihori answers. “But I think that you know, you have to take happiness as it comes. Store it up so that when things are bad, you can draw on that happiness to get you through.”
“Sunshine,” Keiko teases.
“Moonbeam,” Shihori laughs.
Shihori reaches over for another spoonful of ice cream and that’s when Keiko grabs onto her wrist and holds her hand up. Keiko grins and Shihori has the decency to blush as Keiko admires the ring.
“Congratulations. When did he ask you?”
“Right before he opened the doors,” Shihori says bashfully. “On one knee and everything.”
Keiko gives her a hug and holds on for awhile.
“Be happy,” Shihori tells her, “I want you to be happy.”
“I will. You know, I think I will be.”
Keiko buys herself a new toaster.
Her mother asks her about her job and they talk for hours. She sends her parents some of her articles and her mother tells her, “Your father has subscribed to the magazine. He passes it around his office,” and Keiko laughs.
Keiko writes a story about a girl who can see ghosts, and how after every ghost she helps, she can see them as stars through the Tokyo night sky. She lets Shihori read it.
On her birthday, Shihori hands her a book.
Every page has illustrations and Keiko’s own words in print next to pictures of a girl in a blue dress and ghosts that are round and silly.
“You know, you should print a few more of these,” Okada-san says when Keiko brings the book to work for Satoshi to take a look. The three of them are looking at Shihori’s illustrations.
“I’ll draw for your second book,” Ohno volunteers.
Keiko laughs and says she won’t publish it, “It’s a bit personal,” and they leave it at that.
She goes to Aomori. Keiko wakes up at dawn to see the Giant Buddha through the mist. She eats fresh scallops and at Mutsu Bay, a wild horse comes so close that she could nearly touch it. At the lakes, she forgets everything but colours for just one moment.
Okada-san asks her, “Where do you want to go?”
She wants to walk the Giant Wall. She wants to go diving in the Barrier Reef.
Sometimes when she’s far away, like that time in Nagasaki, Keiko thinks of nothing but the world in front of her. She doesn’t look back. Sometimes, she thinks maybe she can forget him.
There was a month, when she didn’t go to room 510. She was busy, helping Shihori and Jun pick out a venue. She had to go to art galleries with Satoshi to write about paintings that confused her. Her mother came by for a visit, and Keiko took her to visit Ninomiya-san. Nino followed her to lunch. Keiko had to pay. They talked about how his grandfather might be retiring, “So it’ll be all on me,” and for once, Nino looked thirty and terrified.
Then Keiko might sometimes visit Sho for a whole weekend.
But Okada-san asks her where she wants to go.
So Keiko asks him, “For how long?”
She goes to London.
The air is smoggy and Keiko ruins a pair of good heels on the cobblestones. She has to practice her English but she knows enough to get a guy to buy her a drink. She sits on the London Eye and she admires the clothes in Harrods. She buys herself some Yardley’s lavender.
On the weekend, she goes to Camdon and buys herself an old record track. She has to find a record player so Keiko goes to Portbello. She also ends up buying an antique camera that doesn’t work but looks nice on her bookshelf.
She goes to Yorkshire to admire the countryside, eats Yorkshire pudding and asks for the recipe.
She’s there for a month, she goes to Scotland after and at the Loch, Keiko suddenly wishes Sho could see this.
Okada-san tells her that her travel articles have become a central piece of the magazine. Satoshi asks to tag along.
After Scotland, there is Hong Kong.
In Kowloon, Keiko finds egg tarts and she knows Shihori would eat them all. She takes her coffee sweeter and develops a fondness for condensed milk.
Lan Kwai Fong gives Roppongi a run for it’s money and the music is louder and the liquor is cheaper. She gets a guy to buy her whiskey and thinks Sho would say that she’s still pretty and not sexy. She’s wearing a red dress that’s nearly indecent and heels with thin stilettos.
The taxis drive too fast. She gets lost on the subway. Keiko ends up buying cheap clothes from the stalls in Kowloon and haggling in broken Cantonese. When she eats wonton noodles, she adds a good dose of white pepper.
The metropolitan tempts her and Keiko buys herself a designer bag and struts around, foolish and proud of her own careless spending.
Keiko emails her mother some photos. Satoshi asks her to buy him back from dried scallops.
She takes photos of Victoria Habour, and she suddenly feels her eyes hot and it’s because she’s thinking of Chiba.
Keiko takes herself to New York. She eats pizza with gooey cheese and she takes a walk through Central Park.
Times Square is so alive that Keiko takes photos of every building and sign she can. She goes to a jazz club in Midtown and dances with a guy who’s tall, dark and handsome.
In New York, Keiko finds a place where the noise is louder than Tokyo and everything is so fast she can’t catch her breath but she can’t stop. She needs to keep going.
Sometimes, she forgets him completely.
When she goes to Singapore, she eats chicken rice in a hawker centre with the humidity thick through the air. In Singapore, she takes trains that get more crowded than Tokyo’s and with ten times more shoving. She stays in a hotel with a pool on a roof, a pool that goes far to an edge that brings her the city before her eyes.
She buys herself clothes and eats satay in a pair of cut off denim shorts and a t-shirt.
Keiko knows absolutely no French.
She struggles in Paris.
She buys herself a dozen macarons from Laduree and finishes them with no regrets. She reads novels at Café Louis Phillipe whilst drinking her lattes. She thinks of the books Sho would read and buys a secondhand atlas from an antique shop.
The arching roof of Musée D’orsay leaves her in awe and the artwork is a mix of pastels and deep dark colours and splashes of vivid ones. She sees a Manet of three people on a picnic, smiles when she sees a naked woman bathing in the background.
Van Gogh pulls hers into a melancholy. She still doesn’t understand art but she thinks she might like looking at it.
On the River Seine, Keiko puts a lock on the bridge. She writes the date and no name and throws the key into the river.
Sometimes, Keiko wishes that when she comes home, Sho will be at her train station. She imagines that he would be apologetic and he would be lost and just want to be with her. And then she thinks that she needs to get away, so she tells Okada-san that she will write about Seoul.
Keiko buys herself enough cosmetics that she ends up writing an additional article on Korean beauty products.
She goes to Jongmyo and walks across the courtyard and she feels peaceful, just for a moment.
In Hongdae, she listens to indies bands and drinks enough chamisol that her cheeks flush. There’s a guy singing in a club and she claps and doesn’t understand a word.
One night, she eats only fried chicken for dinner.
It’s only at N-Seoul Tower that she stands at the window and wishes she could kiss him once more.
She goes to Australia.
She ends up at tiny cafes in Melbourne. There’s a shopping centre with a giant tower in the middle, jutting out and towards a glass roof. Keiko sits on trams that glide carelessly from one end of the city to another.
In the daytime, she eats meat pies the size of her palm. On Brunswick, she buys a dress with paisleys and wears it with a large hat and platform sandals the next day. At the casino, she eats her steak rare.
The river is stretched out and at night, she looks up and she sees stars dotting across the deep, deep star.
“I miss you,” and this is the only time she will say it.
She comes home to Tokyo. It’s chilly and she looks at the illuminations flooding the city for the holiday season. She uses a weekend to return to Kobe for a bit and her mother cooks her shougayaki and Keiko follows her dad around town for a day. They have shabu shabu on her last night there and Keiko curls up on the living room floor later like she’s five and says, “I missed you both,” and it feels right.
She writes two different articles for that trip. One for travel, and about everything she’s ever known about Kobe. The other is about homecoming. Okada-san tears up and Satoshi hands him some tissues.
“He’s always had a thing for the fluff pieces,” Satoshi says.
Satoshi is tanned from fishing along the coastal line, he’s leaner from rushing around and his cubicle is just like Keiko’s. They both have photos of everything they’ve ever seen and done and Satoshi asks her, “Are you alright?”
“I think I’m getting there.”
Jun and Shihori are still fretting about the wedding. Jun is pickier about the catering than Shihori is. Shihori almost losees her mind over the seating chart.
When Shihori tries on her dress, she and Keiko bawl like babies because they’re really growing up, aren’t they.
She goes to Cairo.
Some of the buildings have no roofs. Keiko wears long maxi dresses with cotton boleros. She goes to a mosque that’s over a thousand years old. She runs her hand over the stone and the sun shines brightly through a blue sky.
She takes a bus to Giza and leans her head on the window as she looks on at endless browns and yellows. One evening, she rides on horseback with a group of people from all over the world. Their horses trot through the sand and the moon is full and glowing. They barbeque later and she shares stories with total strangers.
Keiko sees the pyramids, she gets a tan. At the markets, she buys silk scarves and perfumes.
She heads back to Kobe for the New Year.
In her way back, she meets Satoshi in Kyoto and they walk through the Heian Shrine. It’s cold and the trees are bare.
When they draw their fortunes, they’re in the clear.
Keiko goes back to Chiba.
In Chiba, she goes to the ports and she eats fresh crab. She ends up interviewing locals and bringing home peanuts for everyone to snack on.
She returns to Aiba-san’s store and his wife is there with a baby. Becky asks for her number, “So we can keep in touch,” and Keiko gives it to her, coos over the baby girl.
Aiba-san asks how is she, “Are you going to light fireworks tonight?”
“Not tonight,” she says. And she thinks about the last time she lit fireworks.
“Did you know that the universe works in cycles?” Aiba tells her. “That even the stars are reborn. So every two million years, things that happened before, they will happen again in one other cycle.”
When she takes the train home that night, Keiko thinks of Tomo and how he waited one hundred years. She thinks of Jun and Shihori, who run after each other with endlessly energy. She thinks being in love is something complicated, that it probably becomes every nerve in your body.
Sakurai Sho comes back to her. If she were to take his hand, it would be warm.
Sho wears a black coat over his suit. Maybe he went for a job interview. His hair is shorter. His eyes aren’t bright but they aren’t lost.
Sho is alive and she should throw herself in his arms. Sho is alive. Sho is here, and she might yell at him.
Keiko could ask him why.
Why didn’t you tell me you weren’t dead?
Did you lie to me about anything else?
What made you want to wake up?
It’s not that Keiko doesn’t want to fall into his arms and be happy. She still has to scream at him, and he might or might not deserve it. Keiko doesn’t know who he is. She doesn’t know his birthday and she doesn’t know when he woke up.
She can see things from here. They will have horrible arguments. His parents will probably hate her. Shihori will call him a workaholic. Is he a workaholic? Keiko will travel and forget to communicate. How is this meant to work?
“I missed you,” Sho says.
“You have a life to live,” Keiko says.
“I want you to live it with me.”
Keiko might tell him a story later. First, she’ll shout at him and tell him that he’s a horrible person. Then she’ll make him promise to never leave her again. But after, she’ll him a story about a boy who would was and how he met a girl and he opened up her world.
And how, hopefully, they can live happily ever after.
From: cupid_johnny
Title: I fell for you like the stars.
Pairing: Kitagawa Keiko/Sakurai Sho, mentions of Kanjiya Shihori/Matsumoto Jun, Aiba Masaki/Becky and if you squint, Kitagawa Keiko/Yamashita Tomohisa.
Rating: PG
Summary: Keiko talks to ghosts. And then she meets Sho.
A/N: To astrangerenters, I sort of might have thrown together some prompts and tried to make cake. Like one prompt is flour and another is eggs and the other is sugar although this is more like I threw some of the lyrics of Haunted and Starlight Kiss into a blender with half the dramas clichés that exist. I hope you enjoy! Happy White Day ♥
Keiko rereads her old journals. She reads about the little boy who was accompanied by his pet puppy. She reads about the man who used to sing outside a train station. She reads every encounter that she should have ignored because she could have made friends with people who don’t see the departed spirits of the deceased; she wouldn’t be here.
When she reaches the last entry, she turns the page to start writing.
Neat letters spell an address for her.
A hospital.
This isn’t her writing.
Sakurai Sho. Age thirty two. Comatose.
Keiko stands in a hospital room, and she hears beeps. She hears nurses bustling in and out of rooms to check on patients, to take their blood pressure and their temperature. She can see white walls and she sees a bedside table with a clock.
His eyes are closed. He’s wearing blue hospital pyjamas. There’s an IV in his left arm. He’s silent and empty, and she can only stare.
Sakurai-san is in the room you’re asking after, the nurse at the counter said, and you are?
She lied. Keiko said she was a friend from awhile ago. She’s been overseas. She was in Egypt. She just wants to see him after so long.
He hasn’t woken up, the nurse said. But he’s on the fourth floor, room 510.
It’s visiting hours. She sits on a chair by the bed and looks at the silent man in the hospital bed. She sits and she meets Sakurai Sho for the first time.
“So this is you.”
Nothing.
“You aren’t dead, are you.”
She’s been there for eighteen minutes. Took her eighteen minutes to even say that.
“Between a snowman and an umbrella, which would you draw?”
She looks at his heart monitor and all she knows is that his heart is working. She wants to touch him. This Sho is warm. But he’s lifeless and he’s not laughing and he’s not complaining about sunburn.
Keiko smiles listlessly and continues, “I would draw a snowman. Because it’s cute.”
“Then your heart melts quickly.”
She turns and he’s there. Standing at the end of the bed and looking at himself. Sho looks tired, his eyes are dark and he stares at his own body, a figure that’s broken and alone.
“If you draw a snowman, it means your heart melts quickly. If you draw an umbrella, it means that you wish to be loved underneath that safe umbrella as the rain falls down around you,” he continues, looking at his own face. “In the end, doesn’t it mean that we’re all lonely?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Keiko whispers. “You really aren’t dead, are you?”
“Do you hate me?” Sho asks her.
“I want to.”
“Do you hate me?” he repeats. “Yes or no.”
She can only be honest with him, because it’s how they are. “I think I hate myself right now.”
“But do you hate me?” Sho presses.
She shakes her head silently.
“This is the last time I can see you,” Sho says quietly. “I just wanted to see you one last time.”
He looks at himself once more and Keiko looks at the Sho who’s not quite there. And he laughs and it’s without humour.
“Five percent of people.”
“What?”
“You said five percent of people at the same place, same time. Does this count?” he asks her, laughing and she starts laughing as well because it’s not even funny. It’s not funny at all but fuck that, fuck that because she can only laugh. Technically they were at the same place at the same time and yes, he might have been his own departed spirit when they kissed, the departed spirit of a comatose body, but that should count for something.
“When did you know?”
“I’ve always known.”
There must be a shatter in the distance. It must be her sanity; it must be whatever she had left within herself to hold it together. “You’ve known from the start you weren’t dead?”
“You didn’t ask.”
“You said you got hit by a car,” Keiko snaps.
“I said I got hit by a car and woke up like this, I never said I died.”
“So that makes it okay?” Keiko asks him. “Why did you write down the address?”
“Because I just wanted to see you one last time,” he repeats.
Keiko shakes her head slowly. She opens her mouth to tell him no, you don’t get to say something like that. Not now.
“Keiko, I’m sorry.”
“What did you even want from me?”
“I don’t know,” Sho falters over the next part. “I’m sorry.”
“You should have told me.”
Sho hesitates, and he’s looking at her with shame in his eyes and Keiko looks from him and then to the comatose state he really is in.
“I don’t know what I should do,” he says quietly. “I don’t know.”
This is not a conversation Keiko wants to have. This is not her problem. This is all on Sho. This is not her problem and she will not tell him what to do or how to feel. Keiko does not have a right to that; Keiko won’t allow herself that.
“Would you miss me?” Sho asks.
“That’s not really relevant, is it.”
He reaches out to touch her and Keiko steps away.
“Don’t make the last time I’ll see you so terrible.”
That’s not fair, she wants to say. You don’t get to ask that of me, not after all this.
“Please,” she says mechanically, “Take care of yourself.”
She walks away and Sho calls after her.
“Keiko, please.”
Keiko forces herself not to look back.
If anyone saw her crying, Keiko will say that she has hayfever. Or maybe she got bad news. Perhaps she broke up with her boyfriend.
Her boyfriend, she will say, he was an asshole. He would make me smile and not tell me what was really going on in his head. I met him and we didn’t get along at all.
What a horrible person.
Tokyo is alive, with too many people on the train that evening and restaurants overflowing with chatter.
She sits with her bowl of udon and looks at a table across the room. There’s a couple in their highschool uniforms, with nervous smiles and laughter. Maybe they’re skipping cram school.
She pays her bill, walks out into the city.
The night is dark and with no answers. If she asked, she’d have no stars.
The billboards promise her snacks and idols with CDs. The noise doesn’t drown out her thoughts and Keiko walks with the crowd.
When she stands at the crosswalk, she looks to her side and there’s a guy in a suit standing there. He’s looking straight ahead.
If Sho were here, if he told her hand, she wouldn’t have complained.
But he’s not. So Keiko crosses the road and she goes home.
Shihori calls her. “Hello, moonbeam. Want some dinner?”
“I’m fine, thank you.”
Keiko’s not fine. She’s lying in bed and staring blankly at the wall.
“I’m coming over.”
“No, don’t.”
“Keiko,” Shihori snaps.
“I don’t want you here,” Keiko insists, trying to muffle any horrible noises she makes with her hand. She might be crying. She doesn’t want Shihori to see her like this. She’s shaking like a leaf in the wind; her eyes are warm and itchy and she’s shaking and shaking and no, Shihori doesn’t need to know all this. Shihori doesn’t need to know what else is so stupid and insane and just, no. “I don’t need you here.”
“Yes you do.”
Shihori is there within the hour. She plops herself on Keiko’s bed and they have a sleepover like when they were little. Crammed together and too tired to talk because they used their energy up on something else. It used to be running around the park or shopping or going to a movie. Right now, Keiko doesn’t know how to say anything.
“Do you want to tell me?” Shihori asks.
Keiko doesn’t know how.
“Keiko, if it’s difficult then just say one part of it and go either forwards or backwards from there.”
“The ghost I chased out of Jun’s restaurant, he kissed me and apparently he’s not dead.”
“Did you fall in love with him?”
It’s unexpected and it’s not something she considered at all. Shihori offers Keiko a one armed hug and Keiko smiles bitterly and asks, “What’s wrong with me?”
“Nothing.”
Keiko doesn’t believe her. But there’s nothing she can do about that. She can only close her eyes and carry on.
Keiko gets the position as a writer and gets set up in a cubicle. Her cubicle neighbour is a nice guy called Satoshi. She writes about cafes and music and gardening. Sometimes she writes about old ladies and their marriage stories. People send letters into the magazine, and Keiko reads them.
When she makes tea, she makes Satoshi a cup.
Some nights after work, she’ll take the train and tell the hospital reception that she’s here to see the patient in room 510.
“He hasn’t woken up.”
“I know.”
And she’ll sit there and she’ll try to hate Sakurai Sho, age thirty-two and comatose.
Sho lied to her. Sho kissed her. Sho interrupted her in the shower.
He would eat her food and say she’s burnt the fried rice. He would leave newspapers everywhere.
Sho does not come to find her. Sho is silent and pale and there is nothing for him to say.
Keiko finds different ways to hate Sho but she does not actually hate him.
Sho talked to her. Sho said she was more pretty than sexy. Sho destroyed her toaster and made her laugh until she was crying.
Her parents think that the journalism is a brave step. It’s magazine writing, but it’s a step. Is this what you want to do, and Keiko says yes. This is what I want to do.
There’s one night when it’s raining and she’s typing a lifestyle piece on Osaka food.
She thinks that it would make sense. She should go to Osaka, where the cars are on the other side of the road and the signs are even brighter than the busiest night in Shibuya.
Keiko goes to Osaka that weekend and she takes photographs and asks shop owners where they think the good food is. When she’s eaten her way through one part of the city, Keiko walks through the streets and watches as the sky darkens.
She thinks of Sho, if he’s cold, if the nurse has come to taken his stats.
On a Friday night, Satoshi asks if she wants to get drinks. Or dinner.
“I have something planned already,” Keiko says apologetically.
“Ah,” and his smile is lazy and curious, “Boyfriend?”
“No. Not really. I’m not sure.”
His smile widens and now he really is interested, leaning on the cubicle ledge and looking down at her. Satoshi is tanned and he goes fishing on the weekends. He didn’t really plan to write. He never even intended to move to Tokyo. Satoshi drifts from coast to coast in search of colour and the breeze.
“So you’re single?”
“I think so,” she says. “What about you, Ohno-kun?”
“I’m single.”
Two single people who get along and work together might be able to date.
They can talk about the city or who is dating whom. Ohno Satoshi could meet Shihori and Jun and they’d all laugh together over things that don’t matter. Maybe Jun will cook for them and Satoshi could help. Shihori and Keiko could sit in the living room, giggling with a bottle of wine and saying what great guys they are.
It should happen.
“Single, but unavailable.”
“What?” She lets out nervous laughter. “That’s an interesting way to put it.”
“I meant you,” Satoshi tells her. “I’ll see you on Monday, Keiko-chan.”
She sits in room 510 and she reaches out and lets her fingertips graze the back of his hand.
This Sho is warm. He has blood running through his veins, he has a heartbeat.
“You’re horrible. You’re horrible because I think my coworker was going to ask me out and now he thinks I’m not available. I hope you’re happy because he was cute and he’s nice and I could probably have his babies. My mother called me last week. She’s asking about grandchildren.”
Keiko looks at the empty face of Sakurai Sho, how his hair needs a trim. She wonders if his family comes to see him. It’s a private room after all.
“Shihori-chan said Jun-kun freaked out over the floors for his restaurant. They decided to change things. I saw her for dinner and she told me I looked sad. I blame you for that too.”
Her editor enjoys her work and tells her to write what she wants. Keep it lifestyle, but what you want people to read.
Keiko decides she wants to go to Hokkaido for the weekend.
Her editor raises an eyebrow and repeats, “Hokkaido.”
“It’s far away. I could interview locals, try the food. Do a contemporary view of Hokkaido during the off-season.”
Hokkaido is far. It’s the end of earth; it’s where the night falls quickly and Keiko has never been but it’s far away. And she wants to go far, she wants to see what isn’t in front of her.
Maybe she can leave it all behind.
After Hokkaido, she goes to Fukuoka.
Keiko stands in the tower, her hands pressed against the glass as she looks down upon the city.
She thinks of the beach, of how she said there were better stars in Kobe.
These are lights, not stars.
Why is she thinking of that, why won’t it just stop?
She returns from Fukuoka and Shihori asks her, “Are you okay?”
“Not yet,” Keiko says.
Shihori nods like she understands.
“I’m thinking about the time we were in high school and I forgot my homework. I could have just copied yours, but you decided you’ll pretend to have forgotten it as well,” Shihori recalls.
Their teacher made an example of them both, called them slackers and said they wouldn’t get into any good university if that would be their attitude.
“Probably not my brightest moment,” Keiko remarks. Shihori nods and they’re both smiling. It’s nothing to be happy about, but it’s just that she knows what Shihori is trying to say.
“You’ll have me, you know. I can’t make this better, but you’ll have me.”
Sometimes, she’ll see people following her and passing through walls.
Keiko wants to call out and ask if they’re okay.
She doesn’t.
She starts writing about society. And this isn’t just high fliers and rich girls marrying into a richer family or idols who say outrageous things. Keiko starts writing about her generation; she starts thinking about that time she got scolded by a man because she was chasing her friends down the street with a haraegushi.
Keiko writes about the next life, she writes about tradition and how little she knew and how much she had to learn.
It’s longer than any article she’s submitted but Satoshi reads it over for her and says, “It sounds like you’ve really been there, you know, with the knowledge of spirits and purification.”
Keiko says she knows a guy. “You want to meet him? He charges per the question.” Satoshi laughs it off and says she should hand this in to Okada-san, he’ll like it.
Her editor does like it and he peers over his reading glasses and tells her honestly, “I wasn’t expecting this of you.”
Keiko smiles.
“I didn’t expect this of myself either.”
Keiko uses a weekend to go to Chiba and she takes a camera. She goes to farms and asks if the industry is robbing their profit. She eats fresh tomatoes and asks about the wholesale markets.
She pats a cow, drinks whole cream milk.
Keiko stops by the beach.
When the sun sets, she takes a photo and she thinks that she might miss him.
Keiko has questions. She wants to know if people see her as an adult, or is she the product of a generation who’s had it too good? She looks at her degree hanging above her desk.
Keiko calls her mother.
“You worked, before you had me. Right?”
“Yes, I was an elevator girl.”
Keiko asks her mother if that was hard. How many hours? What was the pay? She asks about the rules and the standards, about the tolerance she must have built.
It’s an honest conversation and when she’s done, her mother’s given Keiko numbers of former colleagues. It’s late and her mother excuses herself.
“I should have slept a bit ago, Kei-chan.”
“Thank you,” she says. “I really appreciate it.”
“You know, you seem different.”
Keiko didn’t really notice it, so she has to ask. “How?”
“Like you want something. I’m glad. I was worried about you.”
“I don’t know what I want,” Keiko says truthfully, “Not quite. I know I want to be a journalist. But I’m writing things like these. And I know that I don’t want to stay still and be hopeless.”
When she meets these women, she smiles and wonders if that would have been her awhile ago. She would have been in that elevator with a silk scarf tied neatly at her neck and welcoming people in and out. Keiko wouldn’t have wanted more, she would just say that they’re going up and then going down.
Life is up and down, one of the ladies says. Sometimes you keep going down but during that time, you need to remember that life will also go up later on.
Keiko takes a voice recorder to every single interview and she plays them over at night. She listens to her own voice, and laughs at herself.
This isn’t some expose on elevator girls, but her recorded self makes it seem like some big thing.
When she takes a break, Keiko watches a movie. It’s something foreign with subtitles and a guy’s brandishing a whip, looking at relics of the past.
It rains for three days straight.
The entire city is damp and cold and the sky is as grey as the buildings. Keiko’s umbrella is red. She bought it at a conbini on the way to work the moment she felt droplets on her head.
There’s no reason for her to visit Sho every single day but she does. Keiko brings her journals and she reads every entry out loud for him just as Sho did so long ago.
She goes from the start. She goes from the very first day and she tells him about some of the ghosts would follow her to class. There was a ghost who had a crush on Shihori.
“Actually, there were a few of them.”
She doesn’t try to hate him and she doesn’t get angry. Keiko doesn’t cry either.
More than anything, she finds herself wishing that he can wake up and laugh at her stories or ask for more.
Keiko tells him about one of the horrible dates she went on during college. It was a double date, and it ended with Keiko deliberately spilling her Coke on her own dress so that she and Shihori could bail early.
“I liked that you thought I was pretty,” she confesses. “I liked that it was you saying it.”
Keiko sits by his bed and reaches out her hand to slip it into his.
“If I asked you to, would you wake up?”
They’ve held hands before. She’s felt his cold hand for an entire night, she knows that any part of him would be cool to touch and no promise of anything. This is different. This is warmth, this is who he was and he could still be here.
“Were you really alone? I always wanted to know what you were doing. You said you studied economics so I had this idea that you were really boring or that you would sit in a room and look at graphs and stats and tell everyone that bleak times lie ahead. And in your spare time, I thought you would read lots of boring books but sometimes you like to go for walks through parks. If you travelled, it would be to Dubai and then Europe.” Keiko smiles at that. “You know, despite it all, I still thought you were really lonely.”
She doesn’t know about his family. She doesn’t even know when’s his birthday.
“Do you think I fell in love with you? If it were the other way around, would you have fallen for me?”
His heart monitor is a steady beep. Sho said she had a strong heartbeat. She wants to listen to it, the way he pressed his ear to her to hear it. But she doesn’t.
“You’re good looking too, you know. You said I was pretty, so I’ll tell you that I thought you were good looking. Would you like me for my looks? I liked you because you were supposed to be honest. Turns out you’re not honest.”
She wishes she could have met him some other way.
Maybe if they had been standing at a traffic light. Maybe if she was standing at a cross walk and he was a metre away.
Would they have honest words?
Maybe she would have ignored him. Keiko doesn't know. She wishes she could know.
“I know that you don’t know if you should wake up. I know that you must be lonely and confused. I’m not sorry for being hurtful. I was hurting too, you know? Because when I was around you, everything else that made me sad started becoming something for me to overcome. I didn’t even realise I was so sad. Did you know I wrote an article about women working in the eighties and nineties? I met all these ladies and they were my mother’s friends. My editor says I can go far. Maybe I should go so far away that whatever is hurting now, we can just leave it here. If you wake up, then it won’t hurt anymore.”
She doesn’t want to be crying.
But Keiko tries to blink back tears and it just makes it worse.
“Sho. I wish you could wake up. Because then you can go to Egypt. Or maybe if you want to tan that badly, you can go to Okinawa. There’ll be nice girls who want you. And then you can drink beer with friends. If you wake up, you can eat at Jun-kun’s restaurant. Introduce yourself to Shihori as the guy who haunted the place. It’ll make them scream. Is it dark where you are? Are you somewhere in the city?”
It floods at her, at that moment, and Keiko smiles through it all.
“I want you to be happy, even if the life you wake up to doesn’t have me in it.”
She writes about five percent of people who fall in love but never knew that at one point, they were at the same place at the same time.
It’s a fluff piece and she reads that somewhere in the world, a long time ago, people were believed to have fallen from the sky. They would be joined together to one other person.
They’d fall apart, and search for their other half.
Sometimes you just miss them; sometimes they will be running towards you.
She looks at the night sky and there’s never a star in sight. Not with the light pollution.
Keiko wonders if Sho hears her at all.
In her own head, she writes a story for him. About a man who got hit by a car. He fell into a coma and met a girl who made him laugh. But when he woke up, she wasn’t there. But he packed a bag and travelled the world. He will go to Egypt and Mexico and then he’ll go to Denmark and Shanghai. He’ll go everywhere, so far that sadness can’t catch up to him. She tells herself a story and she makes it a happy ending.
After much fuss and panic and stress and another very long month of Shihori thinking that Jun desperately needs to take a yoga class to calm down, the restaurant is ready to for business.
When Jun’s restaurant opens, Keiko is there on the first night for the after hours celebration and Nino tags along, “For payment of my services,” and Jun rolls his eyes but gives him free pasta anyways.
“Your services were months ago and I was the one paying you,” Keiko points out and Nino immediately starts telling Keiko how lovely she looks in attempts to change the conversation.
Keiko looks at cream coloured walls and the light filling the space. She remembers dusty grounds and doors slamming and it shouldn’t be something nice but it is. At least to her.
Shihori throws her arms around Keiko, “I’m glad you made it. It wouldn’t be the same if you weren’t here.”
“Oh baby, your boyfriend’s watching us.”
Shihori giggles and links arms with Keiko, taking her into the kitchen and handing her a spoon. They lean over the counter and share a bowl of gelato. Shihori tells Keiko all about the customers who came in, the minor freak out Jun had in the kitchen halfway through and she’s glowing like the city lights.
“Are you happy?” Keiko asks her.
“I think so,” Shihori answers. “But I think that you know, you have to take happiness as it comes. Store it up so that when things are bad, you can draw on that happiness to get you through.”
“Sunshine,” Keiko teases.
“Moonbeam,” Shihori laughs.
Shihori reaches over for another spoonful of ice cream and that’s when Keiko grabs onto her wrist and holds her hand up. Keiko grins and Shihori has the decency to blush as Keiko admires the ring.
“Congratulations. When did he ask you?”
“Right before he opened the doors,” Shihori says bashfully. “On one knee and everything.”
Keiko gives her a hug and holds on for awhile.
“Be happy,” Shihori tells her, “I want you to be happy.”
“I will. You know, I think I will be.”
Keiko buys herself a new toaster.
Her mother asks her about her job and they talk for hours. She sends her parents some of her articles and her mother tells her, “Your father has subscribed to the magazine. He passes it around his office,” and Keiko laughs.
Keiko writes a story about a girl who can see ghosts, and how after every ghost she helps, she can see them as stars through the Tokyo night sky. She lets Shihori read it.
On her birthday, Shihori hands her a book.
Every page has illustrations and Keiko’s own words in print next to pictures of a girl in a blue dress and ghosts that are round and silly.
“You know, you should print a few more of these,” Okada-san says when Keiko brings the book to work for Satoshi to take a look. The three of them are looking at Shihori’s illustrations.
“I’ll draw for your second book,” Ohno volunteers.
Keiko laughs and says she won’t publish it, “It’s a bit personal,” and they leave it at that.
She goes to Aomori. Keiko wakes up at dawn to see the Giant Buddha through the mist. She eats fresh scallops and at Mutsu Bay, a wild horse comes so close that she could nearly touch it. At the lakes, she forgets everything but colours for just one moment.
Okada-san asks her, “Where do you want to go?”
She wants to walk the Giant Wall. She wants to go diving in the Barrier Reef.
Sometimes when she’s far away, like that time in Nagasaki, Keiko thinks of nothing but the world in front of her. She doesn’t look back. Sometimes, she thinks maybe she can forget him.
There was a month, when she didn’t go to room 510. She was busy, helping Shihori and Jun pick out a venue. She had to go to art galleries with Satoshi to write about paintings that confused her. Her mother came by for a visit, and Keiko took her to visit Ninomiya-san. Nino followed her to lunch. Keiko had to pay. They talked about how his grandfather might be retiring, “So it’ll be all on me,” and for once, Nino looked thirty and terrified.
Then Keiko might sometimes visit Sho for a whole weekend.
But Okada-san asks her where she wants to go.
So Keiko asks him, “For how long?”
She goes to London.
The air is smoggy and Keiko ruins a pair of good heels on the cobblestones. She has to practice her English but she knows enough to get a guy to buy her a drink. She sits on the London Eye and she admires the clothes in Harrods. She buys herself some Yardley’s lavender.
On the weekend, she goes to Camdon and buys herself an old record track. She has to find a record player so Keiko goes to Portbello. She also ends up buying an antique camera that doesn’t work but looks nice on her bookshelf.
She goes to Yorkshire to admire the countryside, eats Yorkshire pudding and asks for the recipe.
She’s there for a month, she goes to Scotland after and at the Loch, Keiko suddenly wishes Sho could see this.
Okada-san tells her that her travel articles have become a central piece of the magazine. Satoshi asks to tag along.
After Scotland, there is Hong Kong.
In Kowloon, Keiko finds egg tarts and she knows Shihori would eat them all. She takes her coffee sweeter and develops a fondness for condensed milk.
Lan Kwai Fong gives Roppongi a run for it’s money and the music is louder and the liquor is cheaper. She gets a guy to buy her whiskey and thinks Sho would say that she’s still pretty and not sexy. She’s wearing a red dress that’s nearly indecent and heels with thin stilettos.
The taxis drive too fast. She gets lost on the subway. Keiko ends up buying cheap clothes from the stalls in Kowloon and haggling in broken Cantonese. When she eats wonton noodles, she adds a good dose of white pepper.
The metropolitan tempts her and Keiko buys herself a designer bag and struts around, foolish and proud of her own careless spending.
Keiko emails her mother some photos. Satoshi asks her to buy him back from dried scallops.
She takes photos of Victoria Habour, and she suddenly feels her eyes hot and it’s because she’s thinking of Chiba.
Keiko takes herself to New York. She eats pizza with gooey cheese and she takes a walk through Central Park.
Times Square is so alive that Keiko takes photos of every building and sign she can. She goes to a jazz club in Midtown and dances with a guy who’s tall, dark and handsome.
In New York, Keiko finds a place where the noise is louder than Tokyo and everything is so fast she can’t catch her breath but she can’t stop. She needs to keep going.
Sometimes, she forgets him completely.
When she goes to Singapore, she eats chicken rice in a hawker centre with the humidity thick through the air. In Singapore, she takes trains that get more crowded than Tokyo’s and with ten times more shoving. She stays in a hotel with a pool on a roof, a pool that goes far to an edge that brings her the city before her eyes.
She buys herself clothes and eats satay in a pair of cut off denim shorts and a t-shirt.
Keiko knows absolutely no French.
She struggles in Paris.
She buys herself a dozen macarons from Laduree and finishes them with no regrets. She reads novels at Café Louis Phillipe whilst drinking her lattes. She thinks of the books Sho would read and buys a secondhand atlas from an antique shop.
The arching roof of Musée D’orsay leaves her in awe and the artwork is a mix of pastels and deep dark colours and splashes of vivid ones. She sees a Manet of three people on a picnic, smiles when she sees a naked woman bathing in the background.
Van Gogh pulls hers into a melancholy. She still doesn’t understand art but she thinks she might like looking at it.
On the River Seine, Keiko puts a lock on the bridge. She writes the date and no name and throws the key into the river.
Sometimes, Keiko wishes that when she comes home, Sho will be at her train station. She imagines that he would be apologetic and he would be lost and just want to be with her. And then she thinks that she needs to get away, so she tells Okada-san that she will write about Seoul.
Keiko buys herself enough cosmetics that she ends up writing an additional article on Korean beauty products.
She goes to Jongmyo and walks across the courtyard and she feels peaceful, just for a moment.
In Hongdae, she listens to indies bands and drinks enough chamisol that her cheeks flush. There’s a guy singing in a club and she claps and doesn’t understand a word.
One night, she eats only fried chicken for dinner.
It’s only at N-Seoul Tower that she stands at the window and wishes she could kiss him once more.
She goes to Australia.
She ends up at tiny cafes in Melbourne. There’s a shopping centre with a giant tower in the middle, jutting out and towards a glass roof. Keiko sits on trams that glide carelessly from one end of the city to another.
In the daytime, she eats meat pies the size of her palm. On Brunswick, she buys a dress with paisleys and wears it with a large hat and platform sandals the next day. At the casino, she eats her steak rare.
The river is stretched out and at night, she looks up and she sees stars dotting across the deep, deep star.
“I miss you,” and this is the only time she will say it.
She comes home to Tokyo. It’s chilly and she looks at the illuminations flooding the city for the holiday season. She uses a weekend to return to Kobe for a bit and her mother cooks her shougayaki and Keiko follows her dad around town for a day. They have shabu shabu on her last night there and Keiko curls up on the living room floor later like she’s five and says, “I missed you both,” and it feels right.
She writes two different articles for that trip. One for travel, and about everything she’s ever known about Kobe. The other is about homecoming. Okada-san tears up and Satoshi hands him some tissues.
“He’s always had a thing for the fluff pieces,” Satoshi says.
Satoshi is tanned from fishing along the coastal line, he’s leaner from rushing around and his cubicle is just like Keiko’s. They both have photos of everything they’ve ever seen and done and Satoshi asks her, “Are you alright?”
“I think I’m getting there.”
Jun and Shihori are still fretting about the wedding. Jun is pickier about the catering than Shihori is. Shihori almost losees her mind over the seating chart.
When Shihori tries on her dress, she and Keiko bawl like babies because they’re really growing up, aren’t they.
She goes to Cairo.
Some of the buildings have no roofs. Keiko wears long maxi dresses with cotton boleros. She goes to a mosque that’s over a thousand years old. She runs her hand over the stone and the sun shines brightly through a blue sky.
She takes a bus to Giza and leans her head on the window as she looks on at endless browns and yellows. One evening, she rides on horseback with a group of people from all over the world. Their horses trot through the sand and the moon is full and glowing. They barbeque later and she shares stories with total strangers.
Keiko sees the pyramids, she gets a tan. At the markets, she buys silk scarves and perfumes.
She heads back to Kobe for the New Year.
In her way back, she meets Satoshi in Kyoto and they walk through the Heian Shrine. It’s cold and the trees are bare.
When they draw their fortunes, they’re in the clear.
Keiko goes back to Chiba.
In Chiba, she goes to the ports and she eats fresh crab. She ends up interviewing locals and bringing home peanuts for everyone to snack on.
She returns to Aiba-san’s store and his wife is there with a baby. Becky asks for her number, “So we can keep in touch,” and Keiko gives it to her, coos over the baby girl.
Aiba-san asks how is she, “Are you going to light fireworks tonight?”
“Not tonight,” she says. And she thinks about the last time she lit fireworks.
“Did you know that the universe works in cycles?” Aiba tells her. “That even the stars are reborn. So every two million years, things that happened before, they will happen again in one other cycle.”
When she takes the train home that night, Keiko thinks of Tomo and how he waited one hundred years. She thinks of Jun and Shihori, who run after each other with endlessly energy. She thinks being in love is something complicated, that it probably becomes every nerve in your body.
Sakurai Sho comes back to her. If she were to take his hand, it would be warm.
Sho wears a black coat over his suit. Maybe he went for a job interview. His hair is shorter. His eyes aren’t bright but they aren’t lost.
Sho is alive and she should throw herself in his arms. Sho is alive. Sho is here, and she might yell at him.
Keiko could ask him why.
Why didn’t you tell me you weren’t dead?
Did you lie to me about anything else?
What made you want to wake up?
It’s not that Keiko doesn’t want to fall into his arms and be happy. She still has to scream at him, and he might or might not deserve it. Keiko doesn’t know who he is. She doesn’t know his birthday and she doesn’t know when he woke up.
She can see things from here. They will have horrible arguments. His parents will probably hate her. Shihori will call him a workaholic. Is he a workaholic? Keiko will travel and forget to communicate. How is this meant to work?
“I missed you,” Sho says.
“You have a life to live,” Keiko says.
“I want you to live it with me.”
Keiko might tell him a story later. First, she’ll shout at him and tell him that he’s a horrible person. Then she’ll make him promise to never leave her again. But after, she’ll him a story about a boy who would was and how he met a girl and he opened up her world.
And how, hopefully, they can live happily ever after.