CHAPTER FIVE: WHO IS SHE?
Ranma knew he was in trouble.
His face ached more from mortification than any actual physical pain, even though no one had seen the unthinkable happen. He had tripped and fallen in the middle of doing a very basic kata. In frustration, he slammed his fists into the dojo's wooden floorboards.
Go home, Ranma. I'll see you next time….
The next time, however, was not the next weekend or even the one after that. First, she told him that she had fallen behind in her studies and needed the extra time to get caught up. Then there was some on-campus event for Freshers that she wanted to attend. She promised to let him know soon when she would next be free.
He could not sleep or concentrate on anything. What dreams he had were haunted by visions of her sketches from that first day at Sartre and Himonya Park of his face on the cocktail napkin and of Icarus leaping from the Stage at Kiyomizu-Dera. His waking hours were filled just as much with shadows of her essence. Whether it was the sound of her voice; the few fleeting moments when her hands had brushed against his; her eyes and their questions for him; or the scent of peach blossoms – the memories were with him wherever he went, whatever he tried doing.
He became anxious, restless, easily annoyed, and frustrated. Most everyone and everything around him grated on his nerves and even more so than before his conversations with her had begun. To make things worse, he began to sense the eyes on him wondering what was on his mind.
Most days after school, he took long walks to avoid going home. He told everyone that he was doing some extra training, which was true to an extent. Mostly, though, he just did not want to see Akane.
She annoyed him for all the things which he could suddenly see so clearly that she was not. That she was a tomboy and a klutz were nothing new. Now though he was also bothered by how literal, unimaginative, and too ordinarily linear she was in everything she did. He would even describe Akane as "banal" in her naivety.
I'm not my sister….
The fundamental difference between Akane and her sister was the absence of soaring brilliance and the mystique of genius. His fiancée lacked curiosity or imagination in the way she did things. Her subpar practice of the Art and her struggles in the kitchen were just some of the more obvious examples.
To Akane's credit, she approached everything she tried with unbridled enthusiasm. Somehow, this was invariably, hopelessly and tirelessly fresh each and every single time she started anything. All the more, each futile endeavor became more painful to watch than the last.
He thought of the ragged, ratty yellow scarf she had clumsily woven and shoddily embroidered with his phonetic initials as a Christmas gift now almost two years ago. Kasumi had mentioned to him how just that much had taken Akane weeks to produce. To him, that scarf embodied who his fiancée was and the way she was stumbling her way through life.
Ranma knew he was wrong to feel as he did. That knowledge, however, was just salt in the wound that only further compounded his need to avoid her. Flawed as Akane was, Ranma knew she was not a bad person nor even devoid of charm in her own unique way. Moreover, despite all of her verbal abuse, jealousy, and prejudice of his actions, he had been fairly certain for quite some time that she did love him – or at least that she believed she did.
When he held her at Jusendo thinking that she had died, there was a moment when he thought he could love her too for the rest of his life. Eventually, however, he began wondering if he had been responding merely to the idea of someone who would love him enough to risk their own life for him. He would be forever grateful to her for saving him, but the truth about her feelings gradually became a painful, damning albatross around his neck.
For years, he had felt compelled to find a way to somehow arrive inevitably at the conclusion that he reciprocated those feelings. However long that took to achieve was irrelevant. Contemplating any other outcome had seemed unfathomably sacrilegious and dishonorable. Besides, pretty much every other guy around him desired Akane, right? Why couldn't he?
Now, however, things were suddenly very different. In the aftermath of fantastic revelations like Darren Reynolds and the lyrics to "Believer"; the story of the escaped prisoner in the Allegory of the Cave; and the vision of Icarus leaping off the Stage at Kiyomizu-Dera, he could no longer sustain his delusion of having any such lodestar of purpose. He was distraught, disoriented, and did not know what to do.
Ranma wished that he could ask Nabiki, his new friend and mentor, for what she would do if she were in his position. Of course, that was the one precise question that he could not — dared not — ask her. He was terrified that she would stop speaking to him altogether if he did.
I love my sister – pain in the butt that she can be. I think you love her too….
Let me help you, Ranma. Let me help my sister. Please…..
Again, he slammed his fists into the wooden floorboards.
# # # # #
The one part of home that he could not really avoid was dinner. Aside from the need to eat, he could not afford to insult Kasumi with excessively frequent absences. His esteem and respect for her were not the only things that kept him in line. He had long suspected that Kasumi, if crossed, would easily be the most dangerous and terrifying of the three Tendou sisters.
He prepared a script of things to say at the table in order to throw off Akane and the others. To his surprise, much of what he rehearsed ended up being unused.
Akane herself became oddly quiet, subdued, even somewhat distant. There were an increasing number of nights when she was the one who was actually not home for dinner. She was either out with friends, often spending the night away, or putting in extra hours at cram school.
When she was home, her mind was elsewhere. She gave brief, perfunctorily polite responses to whatever was said to her.
He considered that he should ask what was going on and if she was okay.
He wondered if her behavior was a response to his own. Maybe he had underestimated her insight into him. By confronting her, however, he would risk exposing himself to the same uncomfortable questions.
He tried one night to sketch out the look that he saw more and more in Akane's eyes, hoping to use what Nabiki had taught him to understand what he was seeing. Per usual, despite how tired he was, he was unable to sleep.
As the sun rose and he studied what he had managed to produce, he was shocked by what he saw. The eyes staring back at him looked nothing at all like Akane's. They were bright, fierce, and soul-piercing. He knew whose eyes they were and what they expected of him.
In short, he never really had any decision to make over whether he should talk to Akane. He owed her that much. Besides, if she was on to him, questions would inevitably be coming his way anyway. If she was not, talking to her would be useful for finding that out too.
The right moment was harder to find than he expected. Akane was not around enough for him to have much of an opportunity. He decided to wait for her one Friday night as she came back late from cram school.
In the threads of street light and the shadows between them, he saw her making her way into the genkan. She looked surprisingly ragged, even miserable. Her Furinkan uniform dress was uncharacteristically disheveled and wrinkled. Her shoulders sagged visibly with weariness and the weight of her school satchel slung across from left to right. An audible sigh escaped her lips as she slid the front door shut and started to slip off her shoes.
"Yo, Akane," he called out from his seated perch at the base of the stairs. He saw her jump at the sound of his voice, clearly startled.
"Ranma?! Why are you here?" A strange undertone of skittish timidity came through in her voice. She did not sound like herself at all.
He rose and took a step in her direction.
In response, she took a small, but very real, reflexive step back.
He noticed too that she averted her eyes away from his view. Now he became uneasy and felt genuinely worried. "Ya okay?"
"Would it matter either way?" she asked quietly.
"Whaddaya mean 'would it matter'? Of course it matters!"
"Let's talk some other time, Ranma. It's late. I'm just really tired." She tried to brush past him, but something under her bangs caught his eye. He reached out, took her by the shoulders, and spun her around to face him. Then he knew for sure.
She had been crying.
"Akane…?"
"Let go of me, Ranma."
"Look, I – "
"I'm just worried about being ready for the Sentaa Shiken (1)."
"That's still more than four months away!"
"Yeah. For those of us who actually care about these things and want to go places in life, that's not much time at all," she groused. "Especially for someone as dumb as me."
The sardonic bitterness in her voice caught him off guard. He felt the familiar heat of anger rising in his cheeks. He was concerned and worried for her, and again she was attacking him. She was being so typically stupid. He should have known better than to waste his time.
"Let go of me, Ranma," she repeated quietly. "Please."
His first instinct was to say something back to her, but then he decided to do something different this time. He gave her what she wanted. He let go, stepped aside, and allowed her to pass. He no longer had the energy to keep fighting with her.
Something bothered him though as Akane brushed past him. Something faint, but eerily familiar, permeated the air. He lingered by the genkan wondering if his imagination was playing tricks with him.
Then, he made out a hair caught on his sleeve, one that must have landed there when Akane had brushed past him. His heart froze to a standstill in his chest as he realised what he was holding. He had not been imagining anything at all.
The hair between his fingers smelled of peach blossoms.
f-#k!
# # # # #
The peach blossom-scented strand of hair that had come home with Akane created in him a new, desperate need to see her. She was avoiding him, and he needed to understand why. Everything suddenly seemed dire and urgent. He knew what he had to do.
#Are you free tomorrow or the day after?#
He stayed awake for hours waiting for a reply to his text. None came. The lack of a response filled him with anguish, anger, worry, and fear. He was slowly going mad.
At some point, he fell into a brief, tortured sleep. A strange dream came to him.
There's probably a special place in Hell for someone like me. I don't care anymore. Meet me at sunset on the Stage at Kiyomizu-dera.
The text message flashed over and over in his mind's eye, driving him faster and faster up the final West end steps leading to the Main Hall. He was taking them in twos, threes, and then fours before giving up and launching himself off the rail into the air and over the top. Now the pounding of his own heart and the rush of his own blood were giving off a deafening roar in his ears as he darted around and between the ancient columns and raced out onto the Stage.
She was standing by the Eastside rail. Her silhouette was outlined by the pink and golden hues of the late Autumn sun hanging on just above the horizon. The thick edges and bangs of her smart Italian bob danced alluringly in the breeze, accentuating the flawless porcelain complexion of her delicate heart-shaped face and the fiery, soul-piercing luminescence of her bold, brown eyes. The surprising plainness of her clothes – a peach creme cardigan, dark indigo jeans, and white canvas sneakers – somehow made her seem even more desirable and alluring.
He had seen "cute" many times before, but this was different.
She was beautiful. He wanted her.
"Ranma," she acknowledged with a tender, heartfelt smile.
An intense, highly charged silence fell between them as he came to a stop in front of her. Then the world exploded feverishly without warning in a fiery blaze of heat and light. He cupped her beautiful face between his hands, greedily crushed his lips against hers, and voraciously drank from the deliciously wet strawberry sweetness of her tongue.
She was so soft and warm – so alive – as she reciprocated by wrapping her arms around him and pushed back with all of her weight. "Hold me," he heard her whisper as he felt the damp warmth of her silent tears in his hands….
…. And the dead weight of a furry arm across his chest as the walls of the guest room were rattled by the thunder of a snoring panda….
Ranma bolted up in his futon in a cold sweat as the implications of the dream came crashing down on him, threatening to bury him alive. That and his pants were a mess.
"Oh f-#k…."
By sunrise, he was already on a train out of Nerima to Meguro. He ran from the station to the coffee shop to be in time for the morning opening.
She was not there when he came.
Instead, a tall guy with glasses stood behind the counter in her place. He also looked like a student and was relatively good looking. Ranma had not seen him around the shop before.
"You're looking for the Senpai (2) who always drew the best shots?" the guy asked. They were the only two people there given the early hour. "The really pretty girl with short hair, right?"
Ranma nodded. The barista's description of her elicited a strange, unpleasant feeling. He obviously thought she was attractive.
"She quit the other week unfortunately, but she taught me things before she left. I can do my best to make you something the way she would have if you like."
The words cut like the tip of a sword rammed through his chest. He had to sit down and think. To conceal the turmoil in his mind, he mumbled an order for a flat white and shuffled away from the bar seeking the table by the sketch of Icarus at Kiyomizu-Dera.
He found the table, but was shocked to find the charcoal sketch missing. It had been replaced by a talentless oil depicting what appeared to be children running in a field of sunflowers. The sight of that painting nearly made him want to cry.
He raced around the shop in a rabid panic looking for the charcoals of the crippled kid under the Senbon Torii at Fushimi Inari Taisha, the woman embracing the scared boy, and the smiling girl with her cheeks in her hands.
The three other charcoals were also gone.
Almost as an afterthought, he tossed some money at the barista for the flat white and tore out the door in the direction of the clock tower near the main gates of the Komaba campus. His drink ended up untouched in a rubbish bin somewhere along the way. He knew he would be invariably disappointed and did not have the heart to bother trying it.
He easily scaled the wall up to the fourth floor window of her dorm room in two leaps. The lights were out. He saw one of her sketchpads sitting on the desk atop a neat stack of shoujo manga. The bed was also neatly made and clearly unused the night before.
The really pretty girl with short hair, right?
The sight of the unused bed triggered the explosion of horrific, agonising thoughts inside his skull.
What if she had found someone?
Was that why she was so abruptly distant and unavailable?
Dreaming is what girls do from time to time.
Have ya been in love before?
That's for me to know and you to wonder.
After all, she was a brilliant and beautiful co-ed living on the undergraduate campus of the most prestigious university in the entire country, perhaps even the entire continent. She was constantly surrounded by the best of the best and all of the opportunities and temptations that they represented.
Ranma no longer had anywhere left to run or hide from the strange and very dangerous revelation that had been haunting him since that night in Roppongi when he had first heard her sing.
Nabiki was beautiful.
Inside and out, she was truly among the most beautiful girls that he had ever met – probably even the most beautiful.
He was wrong too in his assessment of her as "normal." Nabiki was far more than that, genuinely special, more brilliant, gifted, and human than any other person he had ever known. She was Icarus, the first human being who had seen and heard him for who he truly was.
The line that once demarcated clearly forbidden territory was already a long gone memory far beyond even the notions of "vague" and "blurred". The world had already tilted irrevocably on its axis a long time ago; he just hadn't realised or accepted that he had already fallen for her.
For the first time in his life, Ranma Saotome found himself in love – and it was a torture unlike anything he had ever known or imagined.
# # # # #
Ranma-chan cursed as she threw down the wind-savaged remains of the convenience store umbrella that she had picked up somewhere along the way. She was not even sure why she had bothered.
Vaguely, she recalled hours of hopeless, aimless wandering wasted meandering around the Komaba campus, Himonya Park and along the canal in Naka-Meguro. At some point in the afternoon, clouds gathered, and rain began to fall. What began as a shower quickly turned to a storm, which showed no signs of letting up as night fell. Cold, wet, and alone, she eventually gave up and resigned herself to the reality that she would have to return to Nerima and confront the consequences of reality.
With a sigh, she set about trying her best to shake off what she could of the rain from her drenched body before slipping her shoes off in the genkan. She was surprised to find Akane there waiting for her in the darkness with a warm kettle in hand. Her affect was eerily cold and flat as she looked back at Ranma before wordlessly dumping the contents of the kettle on her head.
Ranma nearly screamed as the transformation took hold and she again became a he. The water was not just warm; it was scalding. The icy, wooden monotone of her question, however, froze him in place.
"Who is she?"
"Akane – "
"I'm nowhere near as dumb or naive as you think I am, Ranma. My sisters and I just each have different ways of dealing with the pain of living. I know you've fallen for someone and that I'm not that someone."
He did not know what to say.
"I don't need to know the reasons why I'm not good enough. Just at least tell me who she is. What's her name?"
"Akane, I – "
"WHO THE F-#K IS SHE, RANMA?!"
He forced himself to see the anguished betrayal that he knew he would find in her eyes. Seeing her like that, he did not have the heart to lie or dodge the question, and so he told her.
Akane's knees gave way, and she collapsed to the floor as she heard him say her sister's name. The tears came freely now. She made a feeble show of angrily swatting him away as he reached out to her, but eventually gave up and let him place a hand on her shoulder.
"I'm sorry," he told her. "I do love you (3). Just not like that. I never meant to hurt you."
Her reply to him, however, was far more devastating and unexpected than he could ever have imagined.
"I can't compete against someone who's dying, can I."
# # # # #
CHAPTER NOTES:
(1) "Senpai" is a respectful Japanese reference to someone who precedes you or is your senior.
(2) "Sentaa Shiken" refers to the(大学入試センター試験, Daigaku Nyūshi Sentā Shiken), a standardized test that was used for undergraduate admissions for many years by all public and some private universities in Japan. It was held annually during a weekend in mid-January over a period of two days. For many students, the test was the difference between college entrance and one year's study for the next year's exams as a rōnin. Since the test was only administered annually and entrance to top-ranked universities and colleges is so competitive in Japan, the test became a target of scrutiny by many. In addition, rules for tardiness and absences were extremely strict and always resulted in the forfeit of the right to take the exams. There were no "makeup" sessions or re-takes offered except in certain cases such as train test was replaced in 2021 by a new Common Test for University Admissions (大学入学共通テスト, Daigaku Nyūgaku Kyōtsū Tesuto).
(3) I want to clarify that this is NOT an Akane-bashing story. At this point, it's still up in the air for me who Ranma will end up with if anyone. Would love to hear your thoughts/opinions. Thanks for reading.