It's still the weekend somewhere.
I reread 'Zoo' last night because I felt I had to. The metaphors are endless; being forced to watch something you love slowly decomposing and falling apart, one snapshot at a time. It makes my heart hurt to see you suffer, to see that someone long gone has left scars on you that still ache, but maybe you're not the only one that applies to. I'm doing my best for both of us.
But when you look at it carefully, 'Zoo' is more about denial, isn't it? It's about refusing to come to grips with what's happened and talking yourself into seeing something pleasant superimposed over an unacceptable reality. That could apply to us, too, couldn't it? Lying through omission to ourselves and to one another, pretending that nothing has changed and that we're both the same people we were when we first met at Anteiku.
Nagachika sends me texts now and then, but we haven't actually met in some time. This is another thing I can't tell you because I think you might be disappointed, or at the very least, wary of me. Maybe you have reason to be. Maybe someday, I'll show you these letters and we'll finally have a talk long overdue about all of things we don't say to one another.
It's more likely that we won't.
"Are you already finished with your ghoul book?" the library assistant asks.
Eika looks up in surprise from the hardcover folklore collections on the counter between them. "What?"
"I'm kidding," the other girl laughs, "A few weeks ago, you came in with a bunch of books in ghouls, and I said you should write a murder mystery."
"Oh, right." Eika smiles, shaking her head. "Sorry, I don't think I'm really the mystery type."
"Must not be tired of ghouls yet, though. You've still got a bunch of books out."
"I'll start bringing them back on Monday." Eika puts the books into her bag, smiling as she imagines Hinami's excitement when she gives them to the younger girl. She'd tried to find a wide variety of stories, since the most well-known ones of shape-shifting mischievous foxes and badgers were far more whimsical than what she suspected Hinami would be interested in. If she'd gotten an interest in folklore through Noh, then she was certainly still looking for vengeful ghosts and tragedies.
It takes Eika a moment to find Ken and Hinami at their agreed meeting spot at the train station, but she eventually spots Hinami in her long-haired wig disguise, dark glasses and a medical mask on her face, and finds Ken standing behind her, dressed differently than usual with a knit cap over his white hair. "Did you wait long?" she asks.
Ken shakes his head. "We left a little late, so we just got here."
"Good. I stopped on my way for a little something." She opens her bag, handing Hinami the books, and even though she can't see her eyes, she can tell from her excited squeak that she's smiling. "We had a lot of folklore books, but I picked just the ones that I thought you'd like."
"Thank you!" Hinami says excitedly, tucking them into her shoulder bag, "I'll read them all tonight!"
"I was thinking," Ken says as they start to walk, "That Miss Takatsuki will probably recognize you from TV. I don't really want to draw attention to Hinami and I, so when we get there, we should probably go in separately and not talk too much."
Eika purses her lips. "I didn't even think about that," she murmurs, "Sorry, I should have realized."
"It's alright," he says, smiling reassuringly, "We'll still sit together."
He sounds relaxed, but Eika notices his stiff posture, hands in his pockets, the way he keeps his head down as his eyes scan the crowd, watching carefully for the CCG. They walk a step or two ahead of her, just far enough that it seems they're strangers. Eika is disappointed, but she doesn't know what she was expecting; a nice, normal outing with Ken and Hinami to raise their spirits? She's frustrated with herself for being so naïve.
But when they stop at the cross walk and Eika ends up beside Hinami, Ken glances discreetly from beneath his hood and the smile he gives Eika makes her realize he's grateful for the invitation all the same.
"Are you familiar with the Noh play Matsukaze?" Ken asks suddenly.
Eika nods. "I do. It's one of the more popular ones, I think."
"Hinami told me about it just the other day."
Hinami nods. "That's because Mr. Uta gave me this," she says, producing a folded paper from her bag and handing it to Eika. Eika curiously opens the paper and finds it's a flier for a five-play Noh performance coming to Tokyo in a couple weeks. "He said he knows one of the performers, so he can help us get tickets if we want to go."
The mention on the mask-maker makes Eika a little nervous, but she hears the excitement in Hinami's voice and can't help but smile.
"Aren't Noh plays kind of hard to understand?" Ken asks, "Since they use so much archaic language. They're really long, too."
"I don't care," Hinami insists, "It would make you both happy."
Eika stops walking when she realizes Hinami is wiping at her face, putting her hands on the girl's shoulders. "Hinami," she says, "Please don't cry. I'd love to go, but I'm not going to make you sit through it if you don't think you'd like it."
"But it would make me happy," she sniffles, "Being with you and Ken is like being with my mom and dad. I just want all of us to be happy and never be sad again."
Eika bites her lip, unsure of what to say. Hinami is trembling, clinging to Eika's shirt, and Eika tries to give her a hug and tell her that everything will be okay while feeling horribly inadequate. We can't be your parents, she thinks sadly, We can hardly take care of ourselves, let alone one another.
Ken crouches beside Hinami, one hand on her head gently stroking her hair. "It's alright," he says gently, "We are going to be happy from now on. Nothing is going to hurt us anymore. I won't let it." He looks to Eika with a confident smile, and she tries her hardest to return it.
She supposes she and Ken make suitable foster parents, if only because there's no one else to do it.
Sen Takatsuki sits in the bookstore café behind a printed name card propped up on the table, stacks of The Black Goat's Egg and The Hanged Man's MacGuffin piled high on either side of her. She makes small talk with the store employees while people filter into the seats in front of her, anxiously clutching copies for her to sign afterwards. Eika tries to quietly slip into a seat towards the back but is noticed immediately, an excited, "Miss Ishihara!" coming from the front of the room that draws every eye to her. Eika smiles nervously and hurries up to Sen, who's waving excitedly from her table as though there's any way Eika could miss her.
"It's good to see you again, Miss Takatsuki," Eika says politely.
Sen smiles peaceably. "You don't have to sound so uptight! We're kind of like classmates, or at least kindred spirits, aren't we?"
"You'd still be my senior, regardless," Eika insists, "I have a lot to learn from you."
"So modest," Sen laughs, "Sit in the front, won't you? I'm sure I'll be held up a bit at the end, but we should do coffee, my treat." She gestures for one of the store employees to save a chair, and Eika quickly shakes her head, embarrassed.
"You don't have to do that," she says, gaze sliding back towards the back row where she spots Ken and Hinami, who successfully slipped in unnoticed when Sen's outburst directed attention to the other end of the room.
"Come now, Miss Ishihara," Sen says, grinning slyly as she steeples her fingers and rests her head over them, "Let your senior treat you to coffee."
Aware of all of the eyes on her, Eika swallows. "Only if it's not too much trouble for you."
She receives a smile in response.
The Black Goat's Egg isn't Sen Takatsuki's latest work, but her publishers are releasing a special edition that comes with "Winter Shower at Night," the work's prototype, and previously unfinished shorts that tie in with the main novel. "I might've been too ambitious when I wrote it," Sen says with a chuckle, "I wanted to accomplish so much more than what I ended up putting to paper. I'm not unhappy with the final result, but I hope my fans would consider reading the new short stories, too, to get a better sense of what I wanted to convey."
She opens her own copy to a dog-eared page towards the beginning. "I was going to include a love interest for the murderer's child, but it never quite worked out. And I really regret that; I thought a lot about exploring what lust and romantic love might've been like for the protagonist."
Eika flinches when Sen looks directly at her.
"But lately," she goes on, holding Eika's gaze with a gradually widening smile, "I've been getting some inspiration again, and I knew I had to write about it. So I thought I'd read a little bit of "Mary, Who Knew Too Much," a story that centers on this fragile love."
Sen looks different when she reads. She's carefree and lackadaisical ordinarily, tapping her nails against her thigh or rocking back and forth as though she has trouble sitting still, smiling as though everything she hears amuses her. But when she reads—and Eika wonders if it's because of the sorts of things she tends to write about—she's nothing like that. When Sen settles into her chair and looks down at the book in front of her, she relaxes and sits perfectly still, reading in a low and steady tone that's both comforting and ominous.
"Closer. He wanted to be closer, close enough to smell her fear," Sen reads, "Because she was afraid, no matter what gently-worded reassurances she gave. 'I'm fine, I'm fine, I believe in you,' she may have said, but her body trembled and tears ran down her cheeks; round like pearls, sweet like blood. She knew too much, but she said too little."
Eika doesn't mean to let her mind wander, but it's hard not to. The store is silent except for Sen's steady voice, and it lulls her into the same sort of tranquility she slips into late at night, when her body is tired but her mind is racing, playing back over her mistakes and her regrets.
"This is really how you feel?" her mother sobbed, clutching a copy of Eika's memoir in her hands, pages damp with her tears. "Are you just trying to get attention? Why didn't you just talk to me instead? Why would you publish this?"
Eika stands in the doorway, schoolbag in hand, watching her mother cry over the kitchen table. She doesn't say anything.
"Why did you do this?" her mother asks, "Why would you ruin our lives like this? I know we weren't perfect, but we did our best for you. He loved you as much as I did."
Eika rubs her wrists.
"Don't you remember the good times, too? When you were little, he would take you to the zoo and carry you on his shoulders, and—!"
"I don't remember," Eika says, "I don't remember any of that."
Her mother looks at her through bleary, red-rimmed eyes, and then she buried her face in her hands.
Enthusiastic applause startle her, and she blinks, looking around and realizing that Sen has finished reading. She looks back, scanning the crowd for Ken and Hinami, but doesn't see them. She wonders if they already left and feels guilty she couldn't at least say goodbye.
Sen is approached for autographs and questions afterwards, and Eika wanders the store while she waits, trying to distract herself. She grabs a magazine to flip through, only half of her attention on the opinion columns and pictures, the other half unable to focus on anything but her worries.
"Sorry to make you wait," she hears, and eagerly puts the magazine away when she sees Sen approaching from the café.
"No, that's alright," she says.
"You looked a bit distracted at the end."
Eika looks away, embarrassed. "I'm sorry. Your reading was wonderful, I just got a bit lost in thought."
Sen doesn't seem offended, laughing off with a casual wave. "Oh, I don't mind if you get lost in thought. I doubt you can help it. No offense, Miss Ishihara, but you always look a bit lost."
"How do you mean?" Eika hurries to catch up when Sen starts walking, heading for the door.
Sen laughs. "Well, something like that. It's that look that made me want to invite you out, actually. I think we'd be good friends."
Eika smiles shyly. "You think so?"
The other writer stops walking briefly, looking back at her. "Hm. That's not the look I was thinking of," Sen says thoughtfully, "Never mind, you probably can't do it on command."
Sen takes her a few blocks away to a quiet café which just a few other patrons in their own corners. When they both have their drinks, she pulls out a special edition copy of The Black Goat's Egg and pushes it across the table, closer to Eika. "I want you to have this," she says, and then continues before Eika can protest, "Don't bother buying it, just take this copy. Perks of knowing the author."
Stunned, Eika hesitantly takes reaches for the book, flinching when Sen seizes her wrist before she can pull it back.
"You're a nail biter," she comments, holding up Eika's hand to examine, "You pick at your hands, too."
Eika swallows nervously. "Um. Yes."
"Sorry, am I making you uncomfortable?" Despite her words, Sen smiles and doesn't let go. I'm not criticizing, just noticing. I think a person's flaws and vices make them far more interesting than their good points." She glances back down. "You're in love, and that scares you."
Eika tries not to give much of a reaction, laughing off what she assumes to be a wild guess. "I'm about at the right age for that sort of thing, I suppose."
"But you really are," Sen insists, "Desperately, madly in love. I can tell. It's that look you have sometimes. Like Matsukaze."
When her wrist is released, Eika immediately holds it to her chest reflexively, self-conscious. There are no bruises there anymore; there haven't been for a while. Still, it makes her nervous to have people looking. "It's funny you should mention Matsukaze," she says shakily, trying to remain polite as she reminds herself that Sen is just a little eccentric, "I was just talking about that play with someone earlier."
"Of course you were." Sen's smile widens. "I'm afraid I'm not quite as well-versed in Noh theater as you are, Miss Ishihara. I've never been able to quite wrap my head around that play."
"Really? Why's that?"
"It's just strange, isn't it?" Sen asks, "It's about two ghosts instead of one, which is a little different. And the ghosts are sisters pining after the same man. That sounds like the setup for a murder reveal, or a jealousy plot. Maybe they secretly poisoned each other, thinking the other wouldn't be so devious, so neither of them won in the end!" She giggles. "Or maybe I just write too much horror to think about it seriously."
Eika shakes her head. "No, I agree, it's slightly atypical for Noh. I think you could compare it to "Mary, Who Knew Too Much," actually. It definitely had your voice, but it was very different from a lot of your work."
"I just really wanted to write about love," Sen confesses, "It's a bit of an obsession for me. I was inspired by you, and by Matsukaze, which I got into not long after our TV interview."
"By me?" Eika repeats incredulously.
"Of course. You were in love then, too, weren't you?" She doesn't give Eika a chance to answer. "Another thing that's been bothering me about that play is the title. Matsukaze is the more important of the two sisters, obviously, she has so many more lines. But in the end, Murasame turns out to have gotten over her love and moves on, leaving Matsukaze all alone on the earthly plane. It seems odd to name it after the sister who gets left behind."
"It's odd that she was left behind at all," Eika points out, "That's another thing that sets it apart from other Noh plays."
Sen takes a long sip of her coffee, giving a contented sigh. "You have that look again," she says, resting her elbows on the table and leaning over her hands, "What are you thinking about right now?"
Eika feels anxious under Sen's scrutiny and has to look away. "Nothing in particular."
"I really am making you uncomfortable, aren't I?" For the first time, Sen actually looks a bit remorseful. "I was touched when you said you wanted to learn from me, you know. I hoped I could give you some advice, but I think I'm just scaring you." She reaches across the table, pen in hand, and opens the front cover of her book to sign her name, writing, "Good luck, my cute junior~" below it. "I don't want you to be afraid of me, Miss Ishihara," Sen says softly, "I want to see you flourish."
In the end, Eika stays much later than she'd intended, talking about literature and life. She still thinks Sen is just guessing, that she can't really know how Eika feels or what she's going through, but sometimes she has to admit that the young woman is eerily perceptive. When they finally go their separate ways, Eika commits the conversation to memory, eager to go home and write another letter to Ken full of things she wants to tell him but can't yet.
She wants to tell him about the things she told Sen, things she still hasn't come to terms yet about her parents and her career as a writer. She wants to tell him about how she feels adrift and frightened sometimes, how she's afraid for herself and for Hinami and for him, too. She wants to tell him about Matsukaze, the sister who was left behind, because she's always read the play in a less literal sense, believing not in two sisters but in one woman who thought she was two, who lost herself to madness and grief and gave up part of herself so she could continue to exist, even if that existence was wrong and warped and was never meant to be.
She means to write all of these things, but she never does, because Eika Ishihara doesn't make it home that night.
