Still Life
The cicadas drone in the heat of a clear summer day, and she isn't sure what she is doing here.
On this typical summer day, is their presence here appropriate or incongruous? Surrounded by the signs of life's transience—signs that come back like clockwork year after year.
She knows why she is here, on a bench in the park. She knows why she is wearing this nice summer dress that makes her feel small, like a little girl, and not like herself. They asked her here. She would have said she couldn't make it if she had had a reason, but she hadn't, so she is here.
But why they asked her to begin with she doesn't know.
She can hear Kazusa's laughter from where she is clear as a bell over the sound of the insects on the trunks of the zelkova trees. The young girl is the very image of childhood innocence in her Sunday dress and auburn hair braided up in ribbons. She runs with her eyes turned up to the blue sky as she tries to keep the homemade kite up in the air and away from the branches of the trees that always seem so close, always grasping for that lone, fragile flier.
Tsuzuki calls to her with words of encouragement as he follows a ways behind. His shirt sleeves are rolled up in the heat, but he still wears a tie, tucked in between the buttons of his shirt. She lets her gaze linger on his slender twenty-six-year-old figure, and his crimson eyes that shine in the sunlight when he brushes the hair out of them.
He would have made a wonderful father, she thinks with a fondness that isn't at all like her. The way he treats Kazusa is like a doting father; and the way Kazusa treats him is like an adoring daughter. She does adore him; that much is plain for anyone to see. They fulfill the ideal image of a young family of three, with her here on this bench holding up the other side of that triangle. Yet she doesn't feel like a mother. She doesn't want that mother role. She's almost as old as Tsuzuki is in body, she could have had a daughter like Kazusa by now with a man like him, yet she feels too young to have children of her own, not feminine enough to fill this dress let alone to fill that role.
What does that mean?
It's warm in the sun where they are, but in the shade over the bench she feels a cool draft and wishes she had brought a sweater. While she sits in the shade of devils and their politics and her own past trespasses, beneath the trees where newborn cicadas are waking up to the agony that is the struggle of maintaining life and creating life and growing old, those two play and laugh in the warm sun, eternally young, forever free of the fear of pain of death.
There is no fear of the pain of death when you are already dead.
Strange how it is all too easy to envy them that.
The kite falls to the grass and they call to her. Kazusa wants to get an ice cream, Tsuzuki says, but it seems to be his idea rather than the girl's. They wave. Come on, Kira. Let's get ice cream. They want her to join them, want her with them. They like her, even though they hardly know her, except from times that are too melancholy to mention on a day like this. None of that can change the fact they like her, selflessly.
And slowly she gets up to follow them, though it takes some effort to step out of that shade. Even in the sun with Kazusa's cool hand swinging in hers, listening to the two talk about what flavor of ice cream they're going to order, she remains separate, she remains on the outside looking in.
Only catching a glimpse of that other side of life.
She hangs back as they order at a small kiosk in the park, having asked Tsuzuki to get her a scoop of vanilla, if she just has to have something like he insists. A small radio of the vendor's is playing some old, slow big-band melodies; Lucky Millinder's "Sweet Slumber" and Artie Shaw's "Stardust" drifting through the thick summer air, prompting what-ifs; and the music makes her feel nostalgic even though it's from a time long before she and Kazusa were born, and long after Tsuzuki had passed.
She is surprised to feel tears come to her eyes, even more surprised because she feels the smile on her lips. Her stoic personality that makes her so formidable in her line of work cannot keep those tears from gathering silently. And she's afraid the other two will suddenly turn around and catch them.
Afraid that they might ask her, What's wrong, Kira?
Afraid because she doesn't want to have to try to tell them, but they have made her so happy. Despite the passage of time the droning cicadas keep reminding them is all too fast—even if only for a day, in their easy way they have made her so happy. So warm. So grateful to just be. So afraid to see it end, and return to her life.
And that's why she feels like crying.
Tsukiori Kira appears in Volume 4, Chapters 5 and 6, not that this will have made any sense if you haven't read it (or maybe even if you have, but whatever). Props go to Elf Asato for the brilliant "How Eyeball-chan and I Saved the Day," which first planted the idea of Kira and Kazusa together in my head.