Chapter Eight - Rondo, Rondo, Rondo

Where does a story start? From the beginning, certainly. But sometimes one forgets the end of a story and the start of a new one.

Sasaki Arata was born in Kazamino, a city to the east of Mitakihara. When Arata was seventeen his upperclassmen graduated, and he came to realize some people only stayed friends because they saw each other every day.

When he was eighteen his classmates began to discuss their futures with one another, and the only common thread he sensed between all their destinies was their divergence.

So he came to learn that human relationships were inherently fragile, and easily broken. He supposed the great love stories were all tales of two people who could not accept this truth. At the beginning of time the universe exploded, and ever since it has been growing further apart from itself; such is the natural order of things.

He was not bothered by this. Sasaki Arata was not bothered by most things. In any case he had never been the leader of his friend circle; instead he chose to quietly observe, stabilizing the group through his presence alone. His friends often made fun of him, saying they could never tell what he was thinking. A closed system, independent from the vacuum of space.

He enjoyed reading and taking long jogs in the mornings. People didn't try to talk to him while he was doing those things. From a young age he exhibited a lack of interest in others. It wasn't as if he pushed people away; he spoke when spoken to and was polite and well mannered. But no one knew anything about him that they hadn't asked him first.

Upon graduating from high school he attended college at Mitakihara University. Back then it was not as common for high schoolers to go to college. Everyone assumed he had some grand aspiration that was beyond them because he had good grades, but really it was because he lacked any aspirations at all that he chose to go.

At Mitakihara he studied Japanese Literature and Accounting, the latter at his parents' behest. He wouldn't have chosen accounting himself, but they were paying for his education and he felt obligated to obey their wishes.

Life in Mitakihara was a challenge for him. Kazamino, while a city in its own right, was much more suburban and brotherly. A life within the steel walls of Mitakihara was one without rest or relent. It was difficult to spend a day doing nothing. The sounds of life leaving him behind could be clearly heard through his apartment window.

He came to appreciate the rare pockets of calm he could find in the city. The small park downtown, the brief stretch along the river that hadn't been developed yet (though it would be, years later). He needed these places, as trying to affect the world around him had always been very exhausting.

Other students often saw him sitting beneath the peach tree that grew on campus outside the literature department, a book propped open on his knee. He was an avid reader and always had been. He liked books that were dense and technically difficult, because he could lose himself within them. Perhaps because of this he gave off an air of unapproachability; no one ever tried to speak to him when he sat beneath the peach tree.

He did have friends, primarily in the literature department but also in accounting and even philosophy as well. He would often read his classmates' manuscripts and review them, primarily for structure or grammar. In the department he was known for his methodical and intentional style of work. He rarely reviewed anything to do with a manuscript's appeal as a story or its emotional impact. And his colleagues knew better than to ask.

He also came to appreciate the art of accounting over time, if only for the clean system of rigidity it introduced to the free flying world of money and human aspirations. And he did write in his own time, though not often or deeply. Nothing he penned in college exceeded the length of a short story. In his second year he switched majors from Japanese Literature to Linguistics, primarily because linguistics was a science and not an art.

By his fourth and final year Arata was largely adjusted to his life in Mitakihara. The car horns and sirens didn't bother him as much when he slept. And he had a reliable network of friends, though he knew better than to become too attached to them.

Over those four years he built for himself a life that was utterly self sustaining. Arata did spend many late nights studying in the library with friends, and even he courted girls and dated them or had sex with them, but the thought, I want to do this forever, never crossed his mind.

That year his graduating class left school at the height of a recession that gripped the entire country. No one was getting a job out of college, including his classmates in Linguistics and Japanese Literature.

Arata himself was lucky, as his father knew someone (who knew someone) in Mitakihara who had his own company and needed accounting help at a cheap rate. It seemed his parents had been wise to insist that he study it.

He was employed there for two years, and though he did good work and his colleagues were all very well mannered professionals, he couldn't say he ever fell in love with the job. It was just a way to put food on the table. Arata never wrote a single word during that time. Instead he would read or take long jogs by the river, listening to Satie or Bach. He was not so much a fan of Debussy or Ravel.

And so the days passed, quiet and still like the void of space.


One year after graduating from college, Arata was invited to a wedding.

He was surprised to receive the invitation; he was friends with the groom but not particularly close to him. They hadn't even spoken since graduation. The groom was from a rather wealthy family and had studied philosophy in the building next to his; Arata supposed they needed high attendance in order to maintain appearances.

The wedding was held on a gorgeous spring day in April, at a lakeside villa far from the chaos of Mitakihara. Arata wasn't quite sure why he didn't just decline the invitation. He supposed it was because he had nothing better to do. Nonetheless he put on his best suit and purchased a (relatively) cheap wedding gift before getting on the bullet train.

Attendance was extraordinary. There were about a hundred people, perhaps even more. Arata only actually spoke to the groom once, when he did the rounds to introduce everyone to his bride to be. He didn't recognize her face, though he supposed they could have passed each other before. It gave him an odd sense of detachment, to realize his friend had experienced an entire romance that Arata was never aware of.

He was seated at a table that appeared to be where all the fringe college acquaintances had been placed. Everyone at the table had a story to tell about the groom. Arata kept relatively quiet, only speaking when spoken to, and eventually the others gave up on trying to include him.

Once the formalities were taken care of, it was time for the wedding ceremony itself. Arata thought it quite strange that he would be present for arguably the most important moment of the groom's life. He was quite sure he and many others in the room would never see this man again in their lives.

The bride walked down the aisle and faced her husband. He raised her veil and kissed her. Arata found himself entranced by the way they looked into each other's eyes afterwards. It seemed to be a look of genuine love, but he didn't know for sure. He had never been in love.

The crowd rose to their feet and erupted in applause. Arata stood and clapped along with them.

As he did he was filled by an emotion he could not immediately describe. The roar of the crowd, the smile on the bride's face as she was led back down the aisle, this time as a married woman. The groom raised his arm and waved at everyone as he passed.

For a brief second Arata thought their eyes met, but he couldn't be sure. In any case the moment was quickly gone, and the intersection of their lives was complete, two asteroids pushed apart by an ever expanding universe.

That moment was something his friend had been building up to for his entire life. It occurred to Arata on the train back home. That wedding was the product of a quarter lifetime of human relationships. And even if it was manufactured, even if it was fake, it must have felt nice to see all those people in one place. Perhaps one would feel that they had managed to carve out their own place in the world.

That lovely spring day quickly receded into the past. Arata returned to Mitakihara and went back to work. But he never quite shook the feeling from that day, or the fear that he would never experience it himself.


Six months later his father passed away.

His parents had him relatively late, and were already in their late forties when Arata was born. The doctors had to perform a C-section on his mother because she was no longer capable of a normal delivery. A lifetime smoker, Arata's father caught a ravaging sickness after his sixtieth birthday that he never quite recovered from. Arata always told him to quite but the old man never listened. He spent the next few years in and out of the hospital, and a week before his son's twenty-fourth birthday he was past.

As such Arata was not particularly shocked by his father's death. Sasaki Arata was not bothered by most things. He attended the funeral and mourned alongside his mother, as a good son would. The funeral was otherwise attended by his father's old supervisor at work, the priest, and a childhood friend from junior high school.

That night Arata had a nightmare about a wedding that no one attended. He wondered who would be at his own funeral, and whether he had met all of them yet.

What did surprise him was when his mother died, only three months after her husband's funeral. She had no underlying health conditions that he was aware of. The woman simply passed away in her sleep, like an astronaut letting go to float away into the abyss. It seemed with her husband gone and her son grown, she could find no more reason to remain bound to life on this earth.

This time only he and the priest attended the funeral.

After that there was nothing else for him to do besides go back to work. His supervisor offered him paid leave that he didn't take. By then the recession was over and business was strong; Arata received a promotion and was able to move out of the tiny apartment he had occupied since first moving to Mitakihara, over six years ago now.

Some time after the company was bought up by a larger accounting firm, and his supervisor decided to retire. The old man who had taught Arata all he knew about the business was perhaps the closest thing he had to a friend at the time. They had dinner the night before he left to move back to the countryside, where his wife had family.

"I've been working for more than forty years," the old man told him over a steaming bowl of oxtail soup. "Sometimes you forget there's life after your career is over. I think I'll enjoy retirement. Don't forget the big picture, Arata. You work hard, and that's good. But think about what you're working for."

The waiter came by to deliver Arata's own serving of oxtail soup. It slid bitter down his throat.

Once the merger was complete, half of Arata's department was laid off due to redundancies. Many of the staff members he had spent the last two years working alongside moved elsewhere, to Tokyo or Kyoto or further to find new employment. He was reminded that some people only stayed friends because they saw each other every day.

That was the beginning of the end of his time there. He read every day and went on jogs like usual, but these activities were followed by an emptiness that hadn't been there before. He kept thinking about the spring wedding, and thought about reaching out to the groom, but didn't because he didn't know what he would say.

It was on a frigid morning in January, when he woke to an apartment still too new to feel familiar, that Arata realized he was lonely. His connections with others, though reasonably plentiful, were always fleeting. He seemed unable to bring himself to chase them, like a lone planet with no star.

He had lived thinking people were foolish to fight the inevitability of their separation. But perhaps he was the foolish one, for accepting his own isolation and yet still feeling this way.

He tried to live with the feeling, like he'd lived with everything else. But once acknowledged it would not leave him in peace. Every book, every commercial, every stray moment of eye contact reminded him of it. He supposed most people lived assuming they would be happy one day, until they realize nothing they've ever done has been conducive to achieving that happiness.

How was he to live the rest of his life? He didn't want to change, but he couldn't stand the thought of dying as he was. He was existing, but he wasn't living.

Think about what you're working for.

In February he received a call from an agent at an insurance company. Apparently his parents had a significant life insurance policy that he was the beneficiary of. Arata was surprised to hear this; his parents had never mentioned anything about it, and he hadn't thought to ask. Due to this disconnect, it had taken some time for the insurance company to track him down. Despite being family, it seemed they hadn't known each other very well at all.

A meeting was scheduled, and paperwork was filed. Soon the money was deposited into his account. He spent a long time staring at his balance and wondering what he should do with the money. He supposed that was the curse of being free, that one could do anything and yet still do nothing.

Arata submitted his two weeks' notice later that month. The daily routine that was second nature to him had become cancerous. It all rang hollow with a lack of meaning. The office begged him to reconsider, but he had already decided to use the insurance proceeds to take some time off for himself. In the end he really did use the money to do nothing.


Arata did not initially plan to start writing again. It was perhaps merely a natural consequence of being left alone with his thoughts. He would go sit at his favorite spot by the river and simply stare at the water. It occurred to him that he was nothing without his work. Without it he had no reason to rise in the morning or retire early at night. Time ceased to matter. He was a closed system, independent from the vacuum of space.

He wished desperately for something that was his own. It didn't have to be a wedding or a wife. But maybe anything else was merely a substitute for the real thing. Perhaps because they were all meaningless on their own, people sought meaning in each other.

It was in this state of despair that Arata turned to writing.

It started as a slow trickle, working muscles that had long since atrophied. But once the torrent began it could not be stopped. He wrote first thing in the morning and well into the night. In the beginning all he wanted to do was give definite shape to his thoughts and emotions. Like accounting, like linguistics, perhaps he could create a system by which to live his own life.

At a summer festival that year, he found the inspiration for his first novel. He decided to attend on a whim, to take a break from writing. While there he passed a young girl, perhaps sixteen or seventeen, dressed in a kimono. She wore a mask over her face, as was common at these festivals.

He never quite figured out why that girl caught his eye. She was nobody to him; but perhaps because she was nobody she could have been anybody.

He hurried back home and began writing. The vision of a faceless girl wearing a mask would eventually become the defining motif of The Glass Garden.

Perhaps because he had nothing else, Arata could allow himself to be consumed by this new undertaking. Because he was nobody, he could be anybody. He wished to write a story that would allow the reader to intimately understand his feelings at the time. Translate raw emotion into words and back again.

His inbox was filled with emails from his old supervisor, wondering how he was doing. But he did not respond to them. In fact he rarely spoke to anyone those days; Arata all but forgot the sound of his own voice.

He worked and worked. He worked with a desperation he had never felt before. He began to understand what his old supervisor had said to him over his bowl of oxtail soup, all those months ago.

It was almost winter again when he sat back and surveyed his first completed novel. After finishing the first draft he slaved over even the most minute details, making thousands of changes by the light of his electric heater. In the end it was not a particularly long story, but he had never been a very verbose writer.

He could not name the emotion he felt upon its completion. It was the same emotion he thought the groom must have had at the wedding. His first quarter-century of life, packed into just over sixty thousand words.

Seized by an odd compulsion, he walked to the corner store that night to buy a pack of cigarettes and smoked a few. He didn't smoke, and in fact had always avoided it after what it did to his father's health. But he thought he understood why the old man could never shake the habit. It was oddly comforting, like he wasn't spending the night alone.


After completing his novel, Arata prepared to send it to publication companies. He wanted his story out there. He wanted people to read it and catch a glimpse of the piece of his soul he had put inside. Having spent twenty five years hiding himself from the rest of the world, he would now attempt to expose his entire being.

He looked up every single publisher in Mitakihara, Kazamino and two other neighboring cities and sent his manuscript to each one. As an amateur with little notable publication credits (the few he did have were from college) he would have to go for volume. Surely one of these firms would pick up his work.

It took two weeks before any responses came back. And once the first one was in, they all seemed to come at once. Arata found his inbox stuffed with responses from the countless publications he had reached out to. He clicked eagerly through each one, eyes hungrily scanning the screen.

All rejections. Every single one. Some, he knew, must have said no without even reading the manuscript.

Not to be deterred, Arata went to his local library and printed out several copies of his manuscript. He put on his best suit and called ahead to ask for appointments at every publication reachable by subway. A few of them reluctantly agreed to grant him an audience, and he hopped on the next train to their office, awkwardly clutching his manilla envelope in his lap.

Some of the meetings were only held so they could say no politely to his face. In fewer still, the editors actually explained to him why they hadn't accepted his work.

"If you will allow me to speak freely, Mr. Sasaki…the staff here found it to be a very strange story. Many of us couldn't relate to it, myself included. That is not to say unique stories cannot be successful. But, how to put it…we believe one must be able to find themselves in a story for it to succeed. Unfortunately that could not be said of yours. But I will say that no one here had any complaints about your technical abilities. As you seem to be an amateur, we encourage you to keep writing, and reach out to us again when the time comes."

The others all said the same thing in different ways. Some were more blunt with their approach: This isn't what we're looking to add to our catalogue. It won't sell.

The manilla envelope was heavy in his hands as he walked quietly home. How jarring, to feel like he had written the most wonderful thing in the world, only to be told it was strange and unmarketable.

As the rejections kept coming, the sadness inside him grew.

Arata began to feel a bitter hatred for the anime-inspired light novels and comic books sold at a sickening rate in convenience stores and airports. The cheap pop music they pumped through the radio like sewage, and the weird formless blobs that passed for art in the modern age. Shallow work, barely distinguishable from the material that inspired it. And yet high school boys fought over who would get to read the latest issue first, listen to the newest CD.

He supposed that must mean his story was worth even less than that.

Keep writing, and reach out to us again when the time comes. Arata didn't know if he would ever write again. He came to realize he had no particular passion for writing on its own. It was simply the most full realized method he had to express himself. He did not write for writing's sake. And he did not know if he would ever be able to muster such emotion again in his life.

After a month one of the publications reached out to him again for a second meeting. Hope flared within him, and he hurried over to their office. But upon arriving he found they had made substantial edits to his work, and wanted to release it alongside several other stories as part of a niche collection.

Even that he could have stomached, but when he read their version of his story it was unrecognizable. It was a completely different thing.

He threw the papers down and walked out.

That night he got stupidly drunk at a bar and walked to the river to cool his head. But the usual spot by the water he frequented was blocked off by tape and signs. Construction in progress.

Instead he walked aimlessly through the city, and ended up at a park where a young girl was singing while playing her guitar. Arata collapsed onto a bench nearby and watched her quietly. The girl played passionately, straining her voice to be heard over the crowd. She had a good voice, but she was nothing special. Nonetheless people tossed coins into her open guitar case in passing, out of either appreciation or sympathy.

He realized then that more people had heard this nameless girl's song than had read his story. The thought filled him with an incomprehensible rage. Not at the girl, not at anyone in particular; it was a truly blind rage. But he clung to it, he clung to the anger because he didn't want to go back to feeling nothing about everything. In his drunken state he figured it better to live a life fueled by rage than by nothing at all.

So he went back to his apartment and found a company online that offered self publication services. He ordered one hundred copies of his own book before falling into a long and deep sleep.

When he woke he tried to pretend the night before was just a bad dream. But a week later the books were delivered to his apartment. And even worse, the girl's song was stuck in his head.


Arata had never felt quite as stupid as when he had to haul in a hundred books no one wanted into his apartment. In the end he made a boxy chair out of them and sat on it, panting heavily.

A deep shame filled him in that moment. Shame for wasting a year of his life, for being excited about something no one cared about. He knew it must be akin to the shame of loving someone who did not love you back.

In the end he donated almost all the books to a local library. He knew no one else would take them, and in any case he had too much pride to try selling them on the street like a peddler. The librarians gave him odd looks when he wheeled in a suitcase stuffed with dozens of copies of the same book, but he ignored them. They told him they couldn't possibly keep them all, to which he said fine, send them around the whole damn country for all I care.

He did keep a few for himself. For safekeeping? Nostalgia? He didn't know. Nevertheless they were put in the back of his closet, where they gathered dust over the years.

He had now spent an entire year without working. Though he had the savings to go for a while longer, not to mention the life insurance proceeds, he knew this life would not be sustainable any more. Without his story to work on every day, time would cease to matter again. And perhaps he would sink back into his old self.

Funnily enough, one of the publication companies he had sent his manuscript to had a job opening for an accountant. He heard about it at their office, briefly mentioned to him during a conversation with the secretary in a waiting room.

He applied on a whim, but he actually did get a call back. Almost immediately, in fact. The irony of this was not lost on him.

The interview went smoothly. Regarding his year of absence, he merely said his parents were both of ailing health and he had taken time off to care for them. The accounting department did not seem privy to the goings on of the editing department, because they believed this lie readily.

He worked there for five years. During this time he lived very differently than he had previously. He made an effort to connect with his colleagues and appease his supervisors. If the department was holding a drinking party, he would go. If they tried to set him up on dates he willingly went on them (though little ever came of these). Because of this he was quickly accepted by them and considered a good friend, albeit one who didn't talk about himself much.

He did this because he could never forget the aching loneliness he felt before. It was wrong of him to look down on the sadness of those saying goodbye. The rage he felt that night in the park drove him to change.

In those five years he worked diligently in his assigned role, but also sought to find answers regarding his rejection. He often took the elevator down to the editing department during lunch breaks, and asked to shadow whoever was available. The staff members were visibly confused by this, as he was an older man (almost thirty now) and even senior to some of them. But they consented nonetheless, and eventually even gave him some work to do, provided it wasn't too important.

Arata quickly came to understand why his story would never have been published. In the first place it wasn't in a genre that was popular at the time. Publication was a low margin business, and a single bad quarter could sink some companies. The Glass Garden was neither trendy nor attached to a household name.

Furthermore, after reading countless manuscript submissions over the years Arata came to find just how unconventional his approach to novel writing had been. It was an utterly strange story, indeed.

Yet the anger from all those years ago never faded. It simply cooled into a fine obsidian blade. He wondered how many life changing stories had been buried for practical or conventional reasons.

But he was just a hypocrite, because that was all he ever did in college, and it was what he did for a living now.

After those five years, his company got caught up in an antitrust legislation case. Theirs was just one branch of a large national multimedia conglomerate; the government didn't like how big they were getting and ordered some divisions to be spun off.

Perhaps due to their lower margins, the publication branch was spun off almost immediately. He understood; had he seen the numbers he might have made the same decision. But it didn't change how cheap it made his coworkers feel, or himself.

By then he had risen to a relatively senior position within the company. At thirty one years of age he was still rather young, but many of the executives older than him had jumped ship and gone elsewhere once they caught wind of the antitrust case. When they were spun off the president chose to retire, and he tapped Arata as his successor.

He was shocked by the decision. He was on the executive board, certainly, but to lead at firm, even a small one, at such a young age was exceedingly rare.

But the rest of the office seemed to approve of the choice. And he didn't want to let them down, so he accepted the position. After six months of financial review, the publication branch became its own standalone company.

And thus Toshoukan Publishing was born.


Arata quickly came to realize why leadership had fallen to him and not someone more experienced. It was because everyone else expected the company to fail, and so no one else was willing to take the position.

Their financial situation was bad. Now that they were on their own, it became that much harder to get a loan. It became painfully clear that if they were going to dig themselves out of this hole, it was going to be through endless hard work.

So Arata worked. He worked harder and more relentlessly than he ever had in his life. His days started before the sun and ended long after it was gone. There was a seemingly endless amount of things to be done: clients to persuade, costs to cut, meetings to hold.

He became very much like a machine for the better part of three years, and his work came to define his life. But he was strangely at peace with this, perhaps because he did not want to let go of the first place where he could say he had friends and a history. Even if it was for stupid personal reasons, he didn't want them to go under.

And he had help. Despite the fact that he made the severity of their situation quite clearly known (he was not interested in being the kind of leader who hid behind his desk), many of his colleagues chose to stay partially out of loyalty to him. They too wished to preserve this place they had built together.

So they worked. They worked and worked, burning through countless nights together in pursuit of a common goal. It reminded him somewhat of his college days, though those were much simpler times.

After three long years, they were finally able to pull themselves out of their steep decline. What followed was a string of good years. They were receiving plenty of high quality manuscripts, and their publications did well.

Many of his colleagues told him then that they were glad they chose to stick it out with him. They began to speak of those three hellish years as a thing of the past. But Arata knew people often forgot the end of a story and the beginning of a new one. And though morale was high and his employees all seemed to respect and admire him, they didn't know the real Sasaki Arata. They only knew the consumable version of himself he had built in order to survive in this world. And so the people closest to him also felt impossibly far away.

Arata's prediction inevitably came true. Print publication began to die out, replaced by more enticing things like the Internet. The world was changing rapidly and they couldn't keep up. It was the beginning of a slow five year decline for their business, one they were powerless to stop.

And so he passed eighteen years with the company. He was now fifty one years old. By now he was no longer surprised by the truth that all things come to an end, and nothing is really sacred.

Every day he killed manuscripts because he knew they wouldn't sell. Every day they lost money and he had to lay someone off who had a family he had met and shared dinner with. But it was all he knew, it was all he could do. Perhaps that is the true curse of being free, that one can do anything and choose to do something, only to wish they had done nothing.

Meanwhile, the aching loneliness inside him returned. Like a musician's rondo, it was inescapable. He came to realize he could never be a true friend to people who expected him to lead them. And romance, though nice to dream about, felt impossible for him at his stage in life. He hadn't known it was possible to feel lonely while not alone. In the end he wondered just what he had done with his life, what it was all for, if he had no one to tell about it.

The takeover offer came on a cloudy day in April. A large conglomerate in Tokyo wanted to buy the company to be merged into their existing operations. It was perhaps his last chance to extract some value from their assets before they became totally worthless. It seemed nothing really belonged to anybody, in the end. Ultimately it belonged to whoever had the most money.

They hired a third-party consulting firm to handle the financials. Emails were sent and engagement letters were signed.

Sasaki Arata waited quietly in his conference room for the beginning of the end.

The heavy wooden doors across from him swung open, admitting a single figure into the room.

A woman with mallow colored hair, wearing lipstick to match.


A/N

To be honest, I really struggled with writing this chapter, which is why it took so long to get it out. But after writing and rewriting different parts of it multiple times, I hope I managed to make Arata's life story (until now) engaging for you to read.

Thank you for all the comments on the previous chapter! They really help to keep me motivated. As a side note, when I dropped the name "Asami" last time I thought jokingly that people would assume I meant either the character from Kazumi Magica or To the Stars. As it turned out I had people thinking both things, both on FF.N and AO3.

Thanks for reading!

-Banshee