Chapter 4:

Nakitai Toki, Shinitai Toki

***

At this particular instant, life is bad. Life is really bad right now. Life is immediately terrible at this very second. Now, in this moment, in this instant, Sakaki's life is being a long sob story.

So Sakaki is trying not to think about the situation at hand, and instead is fixating upon the situation as it was ten years ago. She retreats from the moment and deep into the past.

Ten years ago, when Sakaki was still young enough to not come off as ridiculous or embarrassing in the eyes of others in any hypothetical search for marital companionship, she had gotten pretty close to making it happen, to becoming fully normal, receding entirely into the dream. University studies and establishing herself as an animal doctor were no longer excuses to keep society’s imposition upon her romantic life at bay.

He was nice. Nicer than he might have been. Nicer than some of the men who had affixed their attention to her before, who had sometimes proven difficult to evade. He was not even necessarily uninteresting or bland, but somehow he could leave no impression upon her. They got together, yet she was ever distant. He fretted, he complained, he made sad distant facial expressions and grew timid. And it was true, it was her fault, she could never give him what she wanted, and she never seemed to let herself react to his advances, and even when she was with him her mind was far from him. But there was nothing to be done. Marrying a bit character like Ooyama-kun was a logical outcome, a mechanical deterministic certainty, the result of a very complex and simple figuration of compulsory heterosexuality calculus. "Sakaki plus sakaki's mom pressuring sakaki equals sakaki marrying a man she doesn't love."

Sakaki would not and did not break up with him until it was truly assured, with not a shred of doubt, that there was nothing to be done, and that she could never hope for normalcy or understanding. Somehow this alleviated Sakaki's guilt, just a bit. It was not her fault. It was not her place to understand. The workings of inevitability were just... doing what they did, and Sakaki could only coast along with it.

The divorce was easy. Everything else was hard.

Her parents got upset, and spoke to her less. She let work, which never left her devoid of purpose or meaning, occupy more and more of her life. She still saw her friends, but only a little, and some had gone away and she hadn’t seen them in years.

It felt so long ago. It felt like another life. What was she then? 27? 28?

In those days, when she was at her limit with work, being in possession of a dearth of confidantes, she found herself spending more time alone with her troublesome thoughts. Somehow, even in her state of relative estrangement, all she could find herself thinking about in those times were her old high school friends. Some of them had become such amazing people since they graduated. Sometimes when she met up with them, she was dazzled at how they'd transformed while staying just the same, and smiled despite herself, honored just to bask in their radiance. That they always seemed to feel the same toward her was a fact lost on her, deflected always by the austere, self-effacing humility that she had never been able to get over.

She began to see them less and less as the years went by, and what hurt worse was that she thought of them less and less. And then, one day, at a time when she happened to be feeling the nebulous pain of having all but forgotten them completely...

On that one day, coming home at the end of a typically exhausting shift, Sakaki spotted a familiar face from clear across a train platform, highlighted as if by light for the specific sake of her noticing. Oh yes, a friendly familiar face, indeed. This was a special face that meant so much to her that she was temporarily too stunned to comprehend the rest of the entity. An old friend... a strange old friend... a woman of indulgently unbounded strangeness, a beloved and sanctified klutz and that face of hers which had always possessed a faraway gaze and so often a wonderstruck smile placed beneath it. Ayumu...

There were times nowadays where Sakaki felt so anxious that to talk to anyone was a hardship, even if that person was an old and treasured friend. One such time was now, to be certain. But something about the rarity of the event coupled with her desperation for human contact and the desperately hidden enshrined desire to live out her secretest highschool dreams drove her to throw off her terror and double around through the crowd, honing in on the Ayumu-signal with a nearly-electronic intuitive precision. And yet in the din of the station it was all she could do to keep her eye upon the back of her old friend Ayumu’s head through the morass of people crowding the station, and once they had egressed from the crowd Sakaki was still torn, afraid to approach yet determined not to let the moment pass, aware on some level how creepy and *obvious* she must look trailing her unwary high school compatriot from a moderate distance behind.

Persisting in her pursuit, her pursued oblivious, Sakaki followed Ayumu into a part of town she had never been to before. It was very busy, and very bright, and very noisy. The effusive glow thrown off by the prismatic procession of lighted signs and streetlights and stray radiance leaking out of doors and windows felt stronger here than it was seemingly anywhere else that she’d seen in the city. Where were they...? She strained to keep her focus on Ayumu as the population they waded through gradually thinned while streets slightly narrowed. And then quite suddenly, Ayumu stopped in front of a lavender tiled alcove with a matching rail leading down a stairway, gazed at it enraptured for a moment, then turned around.

She locked eyes with her. And addressed her, in that idiosyncratic Kansai-ben with the Tokyo enunciation...

“Oh, heya Sakaki...”

And upon saying this, descended seamlessly down the steps, into the mysterious grotto, leaving a dumbfounded Sakaki behind. Too late, Sakaki cried out to her old friend by her infamous nickname:

“Osaka!!”

Sakaki paced, and crouched, and looked around, as the pedestrian traffic flowed ceaselessly around her. Going in to... that kind of place? No, that... that wasn’t an option. Look at the strange sights around her? No, she couldn't look, she wasn't ALLOWED to look because such a world didn’t, couldn’t exist... Give up? Give up and go home? But...

But she couldn't...

In her dithering, in her uncertainty, letting the glances from strangers wash over her and seething in her absolute irresolution, Sakaki felt her heart reaching out, desperately grasping around her for... something... something solid, some kind of purchase, something tangible to hold onto that she’d always been searching for but could never find. She was beyond even being anxious or terrified here at the point of finding it, though. There was a warmth she was yearning for, but there was something about this place seemed too hot right now to touch without burning...

Sakaki proved able to spend a considerable amount of time treading in these murky waters of self-reflection before Ayumu surfaced. She was with someone a little taller than her, and a little more athletic and a lot less waifish, with a head of short, ruffled, jaunty-looking hair in that tawny-orange that black sometimes bleaches to, and on her face a brash and broad, playful sort of smile, the type of smile that Sakaki was absolutely no longer used to seeing. (Like Kagura. Kagura? What had happened to Kagura...?) She was affectingly handsome in her chic black slacks and her trim white blouse, she was cool, fair and debonair, and yet clearly there was nothing stoic, aloof or reserved about her whatsoever. And she was new. She was an unforeseen element. She was not one of their high school crew and she was not somebody that existed within the rules of that particular universe-era-locality, and that made her interesting.

Without thinking, Sakaki mentioned to herself privately about how she was clearly perfect for Osaka.

Whaaat? Perfect for Osaka? What was she thinking, right? I mean, she and Osaka were both girls! That couldn't... I mean what would they even... How could they even... Oh, and Sakaki neeever thought about this sort of thing, and didn't KNOW about this sort of thing, and had never heard of this sort of thing before... right? Right?

No.

No, no, no. Sakaki chided herself. That act, these dainty little evasive excuses, weren’t going to work. True, Sakaki was shy, and maybe a little sheltered in some ways, hailing from a narrative stratum where even veiled homosexuality is barely permitted and, as an overtly expressed concept, practically unthinkable. But she wasn’t stupid. She didn't stay forever the ignorant sheltered high school girl that she once was, and she wasn’t totally out of touch with the world around her. She knew what was up. A least a little. Maybe she knew some stuff. Serious stuff, even. Sure! Maybe she had read this or that, about such and such, from time to time... some info had maybe been gleaned from certain... publications, of a type. Certain... comics. Okay, yeah, it was freaking comics, are you happy?

She had read quite a bit from a certain anise-scented subcategory of romantic and erotic comics. She wasn't typically forthcoming with that factoid. If pressed, not that anyone ever pressed her, she might halfheartedly claim to have heard things in movies, in magazines, in TV, or in books. As though it were secondhand information, as if it were so impersonal, as if she hadn't been spending most every waking free hour passionately pouring her heart into reading oh shit

Oh shit.

Oh shit!!!

Imminent danger! Osaka and her date were approaching. Osaka regarded Sakaki with wide-eyed bliss, portraying happiness but yielding not the slightest sign of surprise. Her date grinned guilelessly, she was just along for the ride.

“Ah, Sakaki...” Osaka offered her opening gambit.
“Ah...” Sakaki was not to be beaten.

But there was a beat. There was a wordless silence for the yet-nameless girlfriend to break.

“Sakaki, right?”
“Yes...”
“Classmate of Ayumu’s?”
“Ah, yeah...”
“I see. First time here, I’m guessing?”
“H, how can you...?”
“You just look a little... lost.”
“Well...”

Osaka’s attention seemed to snap back to Sakaki. “Ah, Sakaki!”
“Y-yes?”
“Sakaki, this is Mika... Mika, this is Sakaki.” Osaka gestured vaguely between them, as if to seal the introduction.
Sakaki gave a measured nod of acknowledgement. “Nice to meet you...”
“Yeah, let’s get along well now.” Mika stuffed her hands in her pockets and glanced around her surroundings, as if feeling slightly bashful herself.
Osaka tilted her head a little bit, as if realizing something all of a sudden. “Come to think of it, it’s been a while, hasn’t it. You raking in the money these days?”

Sakaki’s nonplussed expression gave way to a slight smile. It had been a while, but not everything had gone away, had it? Osaka was still, after all these years, more than a little unnatural in enunciating the accent that had earned her her apparently thoroughly persistent place-of-origin-based nickname. “Well, maybe not so much. But I’m doing something I’ve wanted to do for a while.”
“Ah, really! You wanted to own a stuffed animal shop, right?” Osaka’s face plainly expressed the satisfaction remembering this ancient trivia tidbit gave her.
“That’s pretty cute, isn’t it? Sakaki, I'm impressed with your purity of spirit.”
“N-no, I... It’s actually at a veterinary practice...”
“Ah, really! Sakaki, yknow, back in high school... I always had you pegged for a 'neko' sort of gal...”
“N-neko!? Yes, I do like them, but I haven't..."
"Oh wow... Sakaki, are you actually more of a tachi?"
Mika nodded in immediate understanding. “Hm, hm! That's probably it. People can always surprise you, right, Osaka?” She made a little kitsune grin at Sakaki, as if to highlight that her statement was playful or ironic in a way Sakaki didn't really understand.
Osaka stared at Sakaki, as if trying to plumb her mysteries. “They really can.”
The conversation of cats and swords was outpacing Sakaki’s sparse worldly wisdom within the confines of this particular category. You miss out on a lot of topical social knowledge when you experience everything in comic form, and when your comic tastes veer strongly towards the baroque and astray from the hip and slangy-contemporary. Her nervous desire to excuse herself from the conversation was flaring up once again and overpowering her. As if cued by noticing this, Osaka upped the ante, excited by the prospect of reconnection.
“Sakaki, come with us! We have more clubs to visit! There’s a jellyfish guy we might see, and there’s this place with these great nee-sans, and there are these mamas we could introduce you too, and we both know a club where you can meet tons of nekos! If that's what you prefer.”
A club...
Where you can meet...
NEKOS???
Sakaki’s mind in an instant became a delirious-happy little cat cafe, raced with frenzied visions of feline companionship, her heart began thumping apace at the idea of going with her ten-years-estranged friend and her friend's girlfriend to be around those precious creatures... But it wasn’t enough to overcome the obstacle of her gut-knotting anxiety, inflamed further by that accumulated sense of awkward distance from everybody cultivated over years of being mostly alone in non-professional contexts.
“...No, sorry, right now is a little...”
“Okay. Bye, Sakaki!” Osaka waved at her and turned around and walked away meanderingly as if to say, see you tomorrow at school!
“Wait a minute! Osaka! Jeez! You didn’t even...” Mika turned around with an appreciative exasperation and an apologetic commiseration together written all over her face. Sakaki pondered for a brief instant how Osaka probably approached her without self-doubt or self-consciousness, without letting herself be dazzled into reticence by the presence of an intimidating beauty in her vicinity. Sakaki felt an envy devoid of malice.
“Sakaki, I’m sorry. It’s been real nice meeting you. If you come around here again sometime, we’ll probably...”
“I’m not sure.”
“There’s no rush. See you later.”
“Wait!”
Mika, who had begun strolling away with tipsy amiability towards her wayward girlfriend, turned around just as naturally at Sakaki’s call, her expression curious but unintimidatingly so.
“Yeah?”
“I’m really not sure when I’m going to be ready to face this. It might be a very long time. So, can you please answer some of my questions in the meantime?”
“Heh, why not.”
“How did you and Osaka...”
“Just by chance. It wasn’t in one of these bars, actually. it was just out here on the streets. I just noticed her and started talking to her. She was doing her little, yknow... her looking-around-back-and-forth-at-the-same-thing-for-a-while thing, and I asked what she was looking at.”
“Hehe. I bet she told you.”
“She sure did. I don’t know how prepared I was for the response. But she was an intriguing person, and, wouldn't you know it, it turned out she was 'bian too.”
“Bian...” Here was a subcultural slang term that Sakaki wasn't ignorant about.
“Well, surely you’re not surprised.”
“No. No, I suppose not. Um, what’s she doing these days?”
“Rakugo.”
“Rakugo?”
“Yeah. It’s her day job, sort of, and I guess her passion. It doesn't exactly pay the bills, but we get by, I do some hosting. She’s really, yknow... really something at it.”
“That’s amazing. It makes sense.”
“Right? We have our little apartment together, and we spend a lot of time with friends here in the district, and I think we have a good enough time of things.”
“I’m... I’m really happy. To hear that Osaka is doing so well. What about y--”
“Shh. Nah. Sorry to cut you off. Listen.”
“I--”
“If you want to learn all about Osaka’s cool new girlfriend, who by now is three-years-old-news, it's not gonna happen here while my Osaka's walking away and already halfway down the street. You need to gather a little courage and come hang out with us. I promise we won’t be hard to find if you’re around here. And I wasn’t kidding... Take your time. We’re not going anywhere.”

Sakaki’s lips turned up only slightly, because there were a lot of things going on inside her that couldn’t find their way to the surface just yet. But her eyes covered all the niceties and sincerities of her genuine thanks and appreciation.

After all, she could take her time.

They weren't going anywhere, after all.

“Okay. It was nice meeting you, Mika... Please enjoy the rest of your night.”
“Yeah, you too. Be good, see you later.”

As she walked back toward the station without letting herself take a glance behind, Sakaki considered. There was something outside of her singleminded pursuit of a passion... there was something outside the stodgy cloister of expectations she had always been wedged into... there was something...

Something, but she wasn’t ready to admit what. She had taken her first steps forward, but she was still teetering at the threshold and was on course to dither there for quite a while. Sakaki was going to spend a lot of time alone for the foreseeable future. Sakaki was going to read tons more comics, that was for sure, she was going to read a lot of squishy rose-tinted yuri comics and spend a lot of time safely ensconced in the plush-soft world of her warmest fantasies.

But in doing so, she’d know that somewhere out there, someone was living what she could only dimly consider, only faintly admit to herself.

The narrative of this memory had run its course. She was no longer ten-years-ago still-hopeful Sakaki but now-Sakaki, 38 not 28, ten years more tired, ten years more disappointed. Sakaki found herself thrown back into the ugly reality of her very current, very precarious situation, and had no way of knowing at this time that she, despite her bottomless ennui, she was on the verge of a change, she was on the thinnest verge of taking a step over that long-deferred threshold.

But that wasn't now-Sakaki, that was later-Sakaki. For now, the present experience was entirely consumed by the hospital closure, and economic uncertainty, and oh-my-god-my-forties-are-approaching level regrets. The present was an unresolved mess, with a soma mixture of fantasy stories used to try and fill in the gaps left by her absconding and to give some sort of sense of faraway catharsis for her dwindling future.

Her capacity to reminisce on the past without inducing listlessness had reached its end, and she didn’t want to start dealing with the emergent present situations yet, so she decided to start reading. She was reading “Slowly, the Melody” again. She had a physical copy, and she’d scanned a digital backup. “Slowly, the Melody” was a story about a bian couple who go from being childhood friends to blissfully spending their plentiful remaining decades together as lovers. It was the rare comic of its type that was published in full-color. Its style was simple but sweet and adeptly stylized and the computer-generated color printed on the page was soft and natural-looking, highlighting the down-to-earth sincerity that seemed to effuse the author’s whole vision. The inamorati at the heart of the story were cutely complementary, in their relaxed and stylish coordinations, and conveyed with little fanfare or pompous self-praise a profound nonconformity in their presentation and in the balance of their relationship. Their presence was repeatedly demonstrated to be, despite the evanescent minor mishaps and quarrels, a sort of living proof to the audience that such a world was possible. Reading it, Sakaki felt (and she was sure that this was shared by most readers) that the anxiety of her own unfulfilled romantic desires melted away underneath the warm, syrupy sentimentality that pervaded the story. She felt as if she was seeing a clear path... around? through? over those barriers to love which had managed to stymie her every step towards self-actualization, towards a potential future where girls like her don’t go on from high school to decades of selective repression and the smothering of feelings in work and media distractions.

That was a good feeling to have, for someone in a situation like hers. So she liked “Slowly, the Melody” a whole bunch, and had probably read it more than anything else in her collection due to its pleasant, almost pastoral feel... but, her collection was awfully big, and there was a bunch of stuff she could have recommended to you if you asked. How about “Strawberry Milk Summer?” That one was so funny and interesting, and a lot of people who didn’t normally like yuri liked it because its humor was accessible to those not already drawn in by the schoolyard lesbian romance intrigues. “Anomie Engine” had a crude, harsh-looking art style and its story was emotionally complex and full of sorrow, in a way that resonated with her own experiences. “Where The Willows Never Weep” was a sort of idyll written with dense esoteric symbolism and drawn in a baroque, heavily outdated shoujo style. The story was a seemingly-impossible anachronism for its setting, and Sakaki was actually unaware exactly how much of it was biographical. And there were countless stories like “Pop Passion Panic”, which was garish and loud at best and dully cliched at worst, and “Night Echoes”, which was sensationalist, lurid and lacking in heart. And there were whole magazines worth of comics seemingly molded in the class-S tradition that she consumed by the bucketful, like “Hydrangea Whispers” and “Then, The Letting Go”... These were always the worst, because they gave her what she wanted and tormented her at the same time, tormented her in the deep places where her secret fears were kept, told her, in the form of cheap, bombastic comedy and lascivious drama, that the kind of feelings she had were for girls, and there came a time when girls became women, and women were to give up this play-acting and enter the real world, and marry men, and this reminded her that she was both too old to know what the touch of a girl was like, and that she already had blown her chance to properly marry a man, and this crushing anxiety would not depart even in the presence of objective evidence to the contrary. Something about the experience of reading these cheap little yuri tragedies was worth it... the dim promise of imagining things being different, having gone differently... in her life, in theirs... but it always hurt and resolved in hopelessness. Sakaki's own little well of loneliness.

There was a lot she could have told you about these comics, what made them good, what made them bad, but she would forsake all else if it meant keeping “Slowly, the Melody”.

So she was reading. Not thinking about the past, not thinking about the present, just right there in the deepest throes of the story’s influence, gripping the pages a little tighter and flushing as the story verged near to one of its frankly depicted intimate moments that so commanded her bashfulness. But rather too suddenly the sharp interjection of a ringtone pierced her contemplative silence and jolted her out of her rosy flushing. Sakaki saw it was a number she didn't recognize, but she picked up anyway, and a jarringly familiar voice inquired.

“Hello? Um... Sakaki?”
“Aah, Ooyama-sensei...”
“It’s fine. Please. Sensei is... I mean, we’re both practicing doctors... You can call me Ken, at least.”
“Right, Kenichi. Did you... I’m sorry, did you need something?”
“Oh, yes, pardon me. Well, the um, the fact is, that since things, you know, concluded between us, I’ve been doing a lot of travelling in my work, and trying to stay as far away from Tokyo as possible...”
“Is this some kind of attempt to--”
“No! I, I’m not expressing myself properly here. I don’t care about guilting you. Or anything petty like that. You... did what you needed to. I’ve done what I needed to, to, um... deal with it.”
“Then may I ask what is it that you need from me?”
“Well, various things happened, and I’ve been up in Hokkaido for a while. A few of us went up there in high school, right... I don’t remember if you've ever been.”
“Yes, I... I didn’t happen to go. I remember it, though... I got some bear soup as a souvenir. The... bear population in Hokkaido is quite vulnerable... There are estimated to be around ten thousand Ussuri brown bears remaining. Human activity has severely curtailed their habitat, as their living spaces have been developed over and engaged in excessive harvesting of their population.”
“Bear *soup*? For... *you*, of all people? I'm sorry, but what were they thinking?”
“Yes, it's very...”
“A-anyway, as to the reason for my call, my hospital is located in a medium-sized town up here. There’s a call we’ve gotten from a dairy farm, but it’s quite far from us, and I really don’t have personnel to spare in order to comfortably leave behind the animals we’re caring for and monitoring here at the hospital. I realize this is an absurd request, and I know you’re quite far and already committed to an existing practice, but... I haven’t really been the best at making reliable contacts in my field. You’re the only one I can count on in this situation.”
“No, it’s fine. I admit I am not experienced in these specific situations, but my education covered at least this much.”
“Really? Will the hospital let you take time off for--”
“It’s fine. It’s really fine. Just, allow me a day or so to prepare my travel arrangements and pack.”
“R-right! Okay. Thanks. Thank you so much. And, um, Sakaki...?”
“Ooyama-sensei.”
“I was, I was wondering...”
“Goodnight, Ooyama-sensei. I will see you in two days.”
“Wai--”

Sakaki hung up. She felt the immediate, inevitable pang of guilt over this action. But her employment worries were solved. And all she had to do was be cordial to her ex-husband, stuff the bad memories away and try not to think about all her wounded guilt. Sakaki rolled over onto her side. On her phone, she mapped a route to a certain medium-sized town in central Hokkaido, and bought tickets that would more or less get her there with a few bags of necessities. Anything else could be picked up from Ooyama's clinic after her initial examination and diagnostic inquiries. After buying her tickets, she put her comic away and tried to let herself fall asleep. The bustle of packing and moving could wait til tomorrow, when she was rested. In time, she drifted off to sleep right where she lay, and had very deep, vivid, affecting dreams, long-lasting dreams both delightful and disquieting, all replete with imagery and scenarios cribbed from her most beloved stories and all her worst memories. Interlopers and intrigues, vagaries and tragedies filled her dreams as always, but somehow, in her dream, she felt the story composed of these crudely grafted dream-images kept working itself towards some kind of indescribably brighter conclusion. Sakaki slept and slept, long past the time when Kaorin would awaken and continue her part in the vigil over the ailing pregnant heifer.