Prelude: To Materialize Shibuya
Prelude: To Materialize Shibuya
The streets had just dressed themselves in neon. Echoes of drums spilled from half-open doors, making the sidewalks throb. The gateways to the heart of Shibuya. Lovers’ whispers, carefree laughter; every corner and shadow hid a new story that the next day would erase.
Tokyo, a boiling mass of lost souls. Its lights traced the path of shattered dreams from which no one could escape. Beneath them, forbidden lovers met; sometimes happiness and conformity, or warmth and coldness.
You leave your cubicle and find yourself facing Odaiba Bay; you wish to drown in the sea. Perhaps there, your line, traveling at the speed of light, will meet the one it has been chasing for so long. And the sky, dressed in neon, pulsing to the rhythm of Shibuya, will dissolve into soft poison.
I will never forget that scent—the scent of soft poison.
“Ayumi…” he said my name after finishing my letter. “I don’t know how to tell you this…” He sighed, rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, and held the sheet of paper back out to me. “I’m engaged.”
I laughed. “What? No, impossible.” I stepped back, lowering my gaze.
The night breeze pinched my skin, but the heat radiating from my body made me immune to the cold.
I looked up. His face—the one I had missed for so many years—had changed, but his voice had not. It was still the same. I remembered it exactly the same.
☻☻☻
The voice that, before the sunset over the bay, shattered my heart in the blink of an eye.
“I’m leaving at the end of this month,” he declared in a dry tone.
And though I remember forcing myself to stay calm after hours of trying to pry that horrible secret out of him, I couldn’t control myself.
“You’re leaving?” I asked.
Not crying over the only person I had loved for twelve long years was impossible.
I couldn’t remember a single day before meeting Makoto. He had always been by my side. He was the only person I had ever dreamed of marrying. For a long time—and up until that very moment—his gestures had made me believe that one day, at last, my feelings would be returned.
“Why now?” I asked, swallowing a sob. “Aren’t you going to fight to stay?”
I heard him click his tongue.
“It’ll be good for me, Ayumi.”
Though I was used to his lack of tact, that answer struck my ears harder than ever. Was I being selfish? I hadn’t even grabbed his shirt or thrown myself into his arms. Even though I wanted to.
“But…” The knot in my throat unraveled. I felt my voice slowly break. “I’m going to miss you so much!”
Ashamed, I covered my face with my hands and let the tears flow freely.
“Me too,” he whispered, stroking my hair.
As I wiped my eyes, I caught sight of his smile from the corner of my eye.
His attitude was so unfair.
He was so unfair.
“But I’ll come back. For you, and for everyone.”
“Huh?” I swallowed. “Really?”
“Really.” He extended his little finger. “It’s a promise.”
The warmth of the sunset blended with his smile, gentle, welcoming, familiar, and feeling a little better, I sealed the promise by intertwining our fingers.
I thought all those feelings, like the longing to belong to him and him alone, would be buried in the sand of that August afternoon. But, instead, the hope of recovering the most precious person in my life spread across the entire beach.
For a time, every weekend in August, I returned to the bay and sat on the shore remembering that promise.
But Makoto never came back.
Makoto didn’t return until seven years later.
☻☻☻
And when he finally bothered to return, when it seemed I had finally gotten him back, I decided to take a risk. To write and compose what I had hidden for so long.
It was a mistake. I didn’t know what I was doing.
“I thought you already knew. Everyone knows.”
I didn’t know my love had never been returned.
“But did you really think I’d date you?” he asked with a quiet laugh, ruffling my hair. “You’re still just a kid.”
To him, those words were probably innocent judgments from a friend.
To me, they were stakes driven one after another into my chest.
“You should think about growing up, give up those dreams of becoming a rock star, and start thinking about your future.”
He stepped away, sighed, and turned toward the bar’s door.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured before closing it.
Behind my aunt’s bar, I had just been rejected for the first time in my life.
In my hands, the love letter that had cost me my friendship with my best friend mocked me.
Furious, I crushed the sheet into my fist and threw it into the road.
And though the traffic lights and city billboards blinded me, Makoto’s smile as he promised to return remained vivid in my eyes.
“If you were going to come back like this...” I tasted the first salty tear. “Then you should have never come back at all!”
Crying out in despair, I collapsed to the ground, buried my face between my knees, and stayed there for hours.
When I returned to the bar, all my friends had gone home, and my aunt was cleaning the last tables with her coworker, Mai.
The three of us, sitting at the counter that night, reached the same conclusion: Makoto was right. I needed to grow up. For years, I had been begging agents and record labels for attention, trying unsuccessfully to make it big. I kept getting rejected. My life had stagnated.
All because of a childish dream.
But I did it. I grew up. I found a job, made use of the journalism degree I had earned only a few years earlier, and landed a position at a magazine.
A few months later, I moved to Osaka, where I managed to become a serious, responsible, and, most importantly, mature person.
Two years later, I was returning to Tokyo, my city, where everything begun and where everything must end.
Yet when I opened the door to my apartment, something felt odd.
A strong, seductive scent of men’s cologne.
“It must have been my aunt,” I thought innocently.
The entryway had new furniture.
“It must have been my aunt,” I kept telling myself.
But when I entered the living room, a trail of clothes greeted me: a bra, a skirt, a pair of pants, boxer briefs; on the sofa, on the floor, across the rug, on the table.
“Could it have been my aunt?”
In the distance, down the hallway, I heard shower water running until, suddenly, the sound of footsteps drowned it out.
“What…?”
A figure, covered only by a towel tied around his waist, strode confidently toward me.
Messy hair.
The gleam of his piercings warned me.
“Who are you?” he asked.
Frozen, I tried to process the situation.
My apartment. Had someone just broken into my apartment?
Our meeting was far from ideal.
The explosion was not planned.
“No… Who are you?”
A boiling mass of lost souls.
Outside the cubicle, the impulse is uncontrollable. It travels at the speed of light until it becomes sealed within an isolated system, where pain, pleasure, lies, resentment: everything slows down.
Cornered, when you least expect it, the cocktail in your heart explodes.
