This story is an experimental one that I intend to be quite short (probably just two or three chapters), and yes, realistically it should never have been written due to my prior commitments with Shattered Memories and While the Snow Fell. But this idea prompted me to write for a number of reasons. First, my excitement about the upcoming season 3 and my disappointment with the inconclusiveness of the light novel's written ending. Second, the fact that I've never read an "amnesia" plotline story that genuinely satisfied me, despite how easily it opens up themes like identity and memory. Third, I recently visited Tokyo for the first time, which was an incredible experience (not least because I could finally buy some Oregairu merch without the shipping costs), but also because it really got my writing inspiration firing on all cylinders.

Ironically, after doing some basic research on amnesia, its actually very rare for it to involve loss of identity related memory; mostly its just simple long term memory loss. But without that we wouldn't have a story premise, so in this case Yukino has a type of the condition known as "fugue" amnesia- loss of identity related memory brought about by a trauma that the afflicted cannot process mentally.

A thirty year old woman wakes up in Tokyo with nothing but a note, a list of phone numbers and a name that, only the night before, belonged to her: Yukinoshita Yukino. Can she come to understand who she is when even her previous self could not?

A Name and Nothing More

Part One:

The woman wakes up.

She blinks.

She sits up.

She looks around.

Peculiar sensations encircle the backdrop of her mind, mixing amidst each other like smoke around a campfire. Her body feels rather hot, and her head feels rather heavy. On the other hand, it also feels lighter than it has ever felt before.

Ever felt before?

She blinks. She looks around. What has she ever felt before?

She is in a hotel room. She knows with some degree of certainty that this is a hotel room- those two nouns come to her helpfully from the pits of her subconscious. She had been laid out on the floor, her body limp and her long black hair spilling out over the carpeted floor like blood that had been dyed with ink. It appears to be a large hotel room, if she is the only one currently inhabiting it. The lights are dimmed, and they might have been like that for several hours now. The woman isn't sure.

She turns her head. Behind her are narrow couches that look like they are made of leather but clearly are not. There is a flatscreen television that has been turned on to a news channel headed by an incessant male anchor, informing her that a K-Pop singer has just been found dead, presumed suicide. There are two rooms, and the woman knows with some certainty that they are both bedrooms, with two double beds in them each. Four double beds- a hotel room for a family, but she reserved it before coming to Tokyo only for herself, probably to give herself the impression of some space to breathe.

That is where she is. Tokyo. The capital city of Japan, once named Edo, established as the capital in 1603. She has never lived in Tokyo, not the city itself, but she lived somewhere in the greater Tokyo area, she knows that, and she has only been in Tokyo for two days, she knows that too.

Know. Knowing things. To know someone. The facts and truths and emotions that comprise a person's knowledge.

The woman shifts her gaze, staring up at the empty white painted ceiling. She is aware that this is not a dream. It is far too tangible to be a dream, subject to the trappings of touch in her fingertips- the carpet beneath her palms- of smells in her nostrils- the many unfinished green teas on the table behind her- and the solid sights in her pupils of the hotel room itself, and the view of the building opposite from her window. But there is a vacant nothing infecting every second she continues to be awake, a promise that that this reality would somehow melt if she tried to touch it, that she would understand and not understand it, that she would be bewildered and be hardly moved by the people and her surroundings, all at the same time.

She decides that she might as well stand up, as it wouldn't be very logical to spend the rest of her day sitting, half propped up, on the hotel room floor. She does, and her vision dims ever so slightly as her legs search for the strength to keep her afloat. It briefly occurs to her that they will buckle, and she will fall back down, but the woman is proven wrong, and now she is pushing herself over to the low down table. The four different mugs, all of which have varying amounts of green tea, glare back at her as if to say "nothing to see here, keep moving along".

The table is propped up against the wall, and atop the table is a mirror. She doesn't so much as glance at the reflection; it isn't a surprise. The image may as well have been stitched into her genes, so familiar is her appearance, the resoundingly ethereal looks, the attractive features and the hair and the blue eyes and the congruous symmetry. A sudden uncouth memory: someone once told her that she looked so pretty she could have been the Princess Kaguya, but their name isn't apparent. She waits briefly for other options to emerge but they refuse, and so she merely questions why the apparition in the glass would not surprise her, why the hotel or the fact that the hotel is in Tokyo would not surprise her either, when it is abundantly clear that virtually everything else in the city will surprise her when she steps outside.

The woman will step outside. That is what people do, isn't it? They leave their homes or their hotel rooms and they go to a job, or they go to a local school that they attend, or they leave just to get a breath of fresh air. Or, she thinks, if we disregard the mandatory reasons to leave a place of comfort, then you might leave to go on a date or to enjoy the company of a friend or to visit some tourist attraction. She strains to find a tourist attraction or a local place of interest in Tokyo but again both are absent, so she gives up.

The woman wonders why she will be leaving the hotel room today. None of the previous motivations that she conjured up seemed to quite encapsulate her aimlessness. She settles for the easy explanation of "getting a breath of fresh air". Yes, that will do nicely, she thinks. If anyone asks, I can tell them that, and it will seem completely reasonable.

She is already dressed in clothes befitting her, a simple pair of jeans and an elegant button up shirt, but the fabric of both are crumpled from lying down on the floor for however long she was lying down, and keeping up appearances strike her as important, but she wouldn't be able to say which appearance needed to be maintained. Either way, an artificial impression of control and the aforementioned elegance will probably suffice for most onlookers, and her good looks will suffice for virtually anyone. The woman turns away from the mirror and the green tea on the tabletop, re-establishes where the bedroom in the hotel is, and staggers through its door, held ajar.

Inside the bedroom there are two double beds, one of which is the current resting place of her suitcase, and the other she has been sleeping on. She can tell from the sheets which are crumpled like her clothes and the extant smell of herself, which she recognises, and the vaguely pungeant perfume reaching out from the pillows to hit her nostrils so strongly as to be almost rude. It is half-way between rose and jasmine scented- the knowledge of smells, like roses or jasmine or green tea, do not seem to have been hindered by whatever hinderance is oppressing her. If there is one. But she is fairly sure there is.

She moves around the bed she has been sleeping on- it was forsaken in favour of the hotel room floor last night, which she briefly regrets for the stiffness in her back- and begins to change, taking off the jeans and the shirt and changing her underwear. She folds the old clothes with a practised neatness, placing them back in the suitcase like an old widow arranging flowers, before taking out a short white skirt with black leggings, a pale blue top and a jacket. After changing, the woman sniffs and runs her finger through her hair, senses the need for a shower, but decides it can most likely wait another day. She half remembers the stream of water from the shower being too strong for her preferences.

All that is left is to leave the hotel. Noting that another vertical mirror hangs from the wall in this room, exactly the same as the previous in fact, the woman shifts herself to look. She breathes in the image of striking femininity before her. Her clothes are evidently worth a lot of money, and adorning someone like her, that arbitrary worth sticks out like roadkill on a motorway. Her figure is slim and her countenance is pleasing. Her black hair brushes against her waist as if they were old friends, and who would not want to be the old friend of someone who looked like this.

Am I a little arrogant? It certainly seems that way. Or it could just be realism, the woman thinks.

With the urge to see what was outside the hotel solidifying, she makes to walk over to the door, but a brief glimpse of the bedside table prevents her. On it is a piece of paper that has been folded poorly; this catches her eye, rather abruptly, because the woman had learnt only moments before that her folding skills were immaculate and that neatness was not something she could abide by. Nonetheless, she resolves that maintaining an open mind is just as important as maintaining an appearance, and picks up the piece of paper hoping to see what momentary urgency had caused such a lapse in those skills.

She reads the two words scrawled in kanji in the top left corner. Again, it is not neat at all:

Yukinoshita Yukino.

If I can't afford to write this person's name neatly, then I clearly don't care for them very much, the woman thinks. She reads on.

The name given to me at birth was Yukinoshita Yukino. It means that I am something beautiful, trapped quite literally under the snow. That is my name: in two simple words, it is denoted that I am beautiful, that I am cold and uncompromising, that I am untouchable, perhaps even that I see myself as somehow better when compared to the people around me. Such is the evocations of language that all these things are associated with me, with my name, before anyone has even met me.

Really, it is just a genetic coincidence that I am indeed beautiful. That, indeed, people see me as cold. That, indeed, I am uncompromising. But I have never been untouchable: there, at least one difference, however slight. How could my parents have known, have had even the slightest premonition that these particular qualities would come to be embedded in me, that they would come to reflect the name they gave me with such precision? Perhaps this is all down to some psychological influence- that my personality ended up indebted to my name. In my childhood, I was told that my name meant these things, and so, with the cruelty of all children, I decided it was only right that I myself came to reflect them.

Thus, my identity emerged, and for the rest of my life I have been held accountable to my hatred of it.

I hate Yukinoshita Yukino. I hate that name, that identity, the tawdry and superficial beauty of my face, the superficial hatred and adoration that provokes in other people. I am Yukinoshita Yukino, but in some way, I have never once felt that name to be anything but a working title. A book may have any title given to it by its author, but you only come to understand a book, to fathom its intentions and nuances, once you've read it.

I am a book that some incompetent author chose never to finish. I am a title- Yukinoshita Yukino- without the prose to give me the breath of substance. Without the inhale of metaphor and the exhale of ellipsis. I have waited all my life to read the chapters that would complete me, yet all my life I find myself growing more and more certain those chapters are lost. That they will never be completed.

It is highly probable that they were never even planned.

If ever there were moments, times, people, that gave me some heightened breadth of being, some security in myself and the body and the memories I was coincidentally planted in, then they are few and far between. Few and far between, or lost to me. Of course, this is by no means their fault. My life is my life, and therefore, its whimpering faults and mistakes are mine too. If I allowed a friend or a lover to slip away from me, then it is some course of action or some impolite gesture that I adopted which caused it. In short, these things are my fault. I must be responsible for my faults. I must adopt that responsibility.

But I

I feel as if I have only ever had responsibility. Responsibilities with no particular release, performed without happiness. I used to accept this grudgingly, with hatred, but now I can no longer muster even that. Now, I accept my responsibilities and the unhappiness they bring with nothing but miserable regret.

And now with this

With what has happened

Now I can only hope

Hope

Hope nothing

At some point, while she was reading, it became very plain to the woman that this was not a letter to a person she disliked. Well… in a manner of speaking, I suppose it is actually very true. Yukinoshita Yukino appears to be her. That is her name: Yukinoshita Yukino. And if the letter contains her true feelings, which the woman feels sure it does, then Yukinoshita Yukino very strongly dislikes herself. Therefore, it is indeed a letter to a person that she dislikes. Logic works in very funny ways, the woman thinks to herself, and then laughs privately.

Still, the woman doesn't feel all that happy with the name Yukinoshita Yukino. It doesn't sound right. Not quite yet, anyway. There is a chance it will soon, once she has relaxed a little. The importance of removing herself from the hotel room reinstates itself in her mind. The woman, still holding the note, walks over to the hotel room door.

She hesitates sparingly, touching her fingertips with her hair. If self-consciousness was once, or still is, a part of her personality, then it is manifesting itself in this instance. The woman wonders if she feels this indecision, this insecurity, every time she steps out of a hotel room, or every time she puts herself under the gaze of another. If so, then how on earth can she get anything done? It seems incredibly impractical to the woman- like a butterfly cutting itself out of its cocoon, only to retreat back inside because it doubts whether its wings are beautiful enough. Besides, why would she, of all people, have to worry if she was beautiful enough? For the woman, this whole analogy is completely invalid.

Taking this reassurance to heart, the woman opens the door and steps out into the narrow hotel corridor. Just after she closes it, and the door snaps shut, it occurs to her that she does not have the key, and that it is still lying next to the unfinished cups of green tea on the table. This may present a problem for her, but she'd had the foresight to move her purse and wallet from the old jean pockets into a bag and bring that with her. As a matter of fact, the woman can't quite remember doing this, but the bag is in her hand and the letter from Yukinoshita Yukino is in the other, so the woman shrugs and decides that the result matters more than the means. Or rather, her memory of the means.

She walks down the garishly lit corridor, ignoring the sound of a couple quarrelling two doors down from where her own hotel room had been. Though, the woman isn't certain whether she would be able to identify her hotel room now that she has left it. She doesn't mind: Tokyo presents a far more attractive prospect that the inside of her hotel room, and if she has money to buy the fashionably sterile clothes in her suitcase, then she has money enough to walk into any hotel she pleases, and do almost anything she likes.

Upon arriving at the elevator, the woman presses the button to go down. It doesn't take a minute to reach her floor; the door swings open and a man around sixty years old leaves it, taking the time to practically grope her with his eyes as he does so. She feels a flash of irritation that he would be so patently leering, and merely a flash from her ice cold eyes summons a stammered apology from the man. He flees her briskly, and the woman enters the elevator feeling rather proud of her ocular threat.

This could well have been what Yukinoshita Yukino meant when she described herself as "cold" and "aloof", the woman thinks. After pressing the ground floor button, this very thought prompts her to re-read the note that this 'Yukino' had left behind. Then, turning it over, she realises that on the back are a list of phone numbers with names next to them, and an afterthought, apparently for herself:

You know that calling these people is necessary. It is only appropriate, and you have been a foolish coward on this matter for too long.

Then, there were two names, each with a phone number next to them. The last phone number was further down the page than the first two, poorly scrawled and lacking a name to contextualise it. The names for the first two numbers were Yuigahama Yui and Hikigaya Hachiman.

The two names mean absolutely nothing to the woman, and the phone numbers even less. She checks her iPhone, which opens thanks to the efforts of her thumb print, and the first two numbers, of Yuigahama Yui and Hikigaya Hachiman, are in her contacts. Friends, she guesses. Friends that she probably fell out with recently. The third number is absent.

The woman indulges herself by glancing over the afterthought which labels herself a "foolish coward". She is beginning to like this Yukinoshita Yukino person less and less- the self-hatred is hardly endearing, and now she is directly insulting herself. I am clearly a very rude person, the woman thinks.

Still, I probably owe it to myself to call these people. I seemed quite insistent that I should. The woman nods to herself and places the note carefully in her bag, seeing that she will probably need to refer to it in the course of the coming day. An agenda was beginning to emerge in her mind's eye: first, she will get her bearings in Tokyo, maybe go and entertain herself at some of the city's modern and exciting innovations, and in-between such exploits she will call these numbers, as Yukinoshita Yukino is so insistent should take place. There, a compromise of action- perhaps I am not as uncompromising as I was presenting myself.

The elevator doors slide open. The woman moves out into the hotel lobby, of a stylish decor that well-befitted a four star establishment. She knows that this is four star due to the plastic card sat on the receptionist desk, which reads "Shiodome Residential Hotel- we put you first!" with its merited stars in obnoxiously large print. The receptionists bows low as the woman walks towards her, and she tilts her head back diplomatically.

One of them, a lady younger than her who is not native to Japan, says brightly, "Good morning! It's Yukinoshita-san, isn't it? May I say you are looking absolutely beautiful today."

Her Japanese, on the other hand, is flawless. The woman nods once more, "Thank you very much", only to be taken back by the cold, sonorous tone of her voice. She had not even intended to sound aloof: no wonder, as Yukinoshita Yukino described, this is the impression her voice gives to her other people.

"What is your plan today then, miss?" the receptionist inquires further.

"I am... I am getting a breath of fresh air! That's it!" The woman shakes herself. "My apologies. May I ask what season it is?"

"… What season?"

"Yes. What season. I find myself rather curious."

"Um… it's spring! Cherry blossom season! I think we had a conversation about how wonderful they looked yesterday…?"

"We could well have done."

The receptionist tilts her head. "My apologies, you… you look a little blank."

"Really? I thought I looked beautiful."

"O- oh, no, I didn't mea-"

The woman chuckles. "I know. I was only teasing."

"Haha…" the receptionist tries to join in, unsuccessfully. "But undoubtedly, you really do… you really do seem different. Did you not sleep well?"

"Not really. As hard as it tried, the floor was not very accommodating."

"... I'm sorry, did you just say the floor-"

"Anyway, I must apologise, but I'm struck by how fantastic the weather is! I think the sun is coming out. I'm afraid I have come up with an agenda for today, and I'm not sure what else I could do with the day unless I followed it to the letter, so you will have to excuse me."

"Oh, of course. Thank you for the conversation, Yukinoshita-san, I hope you enjoy-"

The receptionist did not have time to finish her sentence, as the woman was already heading towards the automatic doors of the hotel, the singular notion of exploring the Tokyo streets now the only one occupying her mind. The glass doors drift aside a little yearningly, and now, the woman stands on a street of the Shiodome district in the capital city of her home country, her being flaring with the same fortuitous hope that could be seen in the sun, bursting through the clouds.

Today will be an excellent day. In fact, I feel absolutely certain that this will be the best day I've had for a long, long time.

The woman remembers what Yukinoshita Yukino had written in her note. Some almost incoherent nonsense about there being no hope, or something along those lines. Blooming within the woman is an intensely confusing instinct. It flowers as she takes in the sight of the street around her, the people walking by, school students and perhaps a thousand men in the same black suit. The instinct resounds clearly and warmly, and it tells her that Yukinoshita Yukino is in desperate need of being proven wrong.

Hope nothing? That seems very defeatist. I don't particularly like the concept of spending this day 'hoping nothing'. That wouldn't be very fun at all. In fact, it wouldn't even be very logical. If you spend your whole life hoping nothing, then you will only convince yourself that nothing good could happen to you, or that nothing could change. I, for one, feel absolutely certain that today has a lot of potential!

Yukinoshita Yukino is, without a doubt, a strange person. The prospect of finding out more about her has a lot of potential as well, the woman ponders.

… Not as much as exploring Tokyo though. I'll do both today, but my… just look at this place!