Seventeen, and One Hundred and Eight

The first cold wind of the winter came off the sea on Monday the seventeenth of November and found every gap in the Old Building. The windows of Room 3 rattled in their wooden frames. The pencil jar rattled. Even Fumika's ponytail, which I had believed was exempt from physics, moved.

"Kogarashi," said Kotone, from somewhere inside her grey cardigan. "The first one. It's a season word."

"In Tashkent," I said, "we would call it an attack."

The door slid open and Hanzawa-sensei came in backwards, carrying a kotatsu: a low table with a heater screwed underneath, a cord mended with cloth tape, and a quilt the colour of weak tea. He set it up in the middle of the six mats, sat down and fell asleep. The whole operation took four minutes. I timed it.

"Sensei," said Fumika, "electrical appliances in club rooms require council approval."

Across the kotatsu, Minase-senpai turned a page of his vocabulary book. "Approved."

"You are no longer the president, Minase-senpai."

"Then take it as the recommendation of a former one."

He had stepped down on the tenth and moved his exam books into our room. "It's quiet" was his whole explanation. He had taken nothing from the council except a fountain pen and a habit of reading regulations for fun.

"The kettle was never approved either," said Kotone.

"The kettle does not exist," said Hanzawa-sensei, without opening his eyes. "Hohoho. Neither does the kotatsu." A net of mandarins came out of his cardigan pocket, which should not have been possible.

That was how winter began in the Literature Club: five people's legs under one quilt, and the room smelling of mandarin peel. On the table lay Shiosai volume sixty-four, paid for by the plov, with ten haiku of mine in it and, under them, in print: Sardor Aliev (special member). "Special" is a good word in any language. I had decided to take it that way.

Kotone talked now, in the club room. Never much. "Sensei. Your tea's gone cold." "Fumika-chan. Legs in. It's warm." "Senpai. You've been on that page for an hour." And to me, as I tore my mandarin into sad orange confetti: "Sardor-kun. In one piece. Like this." She peeled hers in a single spiral and set it down in front of me like a lesson.

In June I had counted every word she said to me. Somewhere between the festival and the kotatsu I had stopped counting, and I had not even noticed.

There was one thing I was careful not to count. After the festival, Minase-senpai and Daichi had both told me who the moon was, and I had laughed, and then decided, on purpose, not to believe them. My flight was on the twenty-fifth of March. Rule 7 was still Rule 7. A person who is leaving does not get to be anybody's moon.

On the last Saturday in November I went downstairs at eleven at night for a glass of water, and came back without one.

The kitchen light was on, which was strange: Tetsuo-san falls asleep in front of the television at nine as reliably as the town plays its chime at five. But there he was at the table, awake, with a letter under his hand. Yukari-san sat beside him, talking quietly, which I had not known she could do.

"He's selling," she said. "He wrote again. The lease ends on the thirty-first of March."

"Mm."

"And your knees. And everyone wants the electric ones now. And the home centre in the next town fixes a puncture while you shop." A pause. "We can't do another year, Tetsuo-san."

"Mm." Then, after a long time, more words in a row than I had heard from him since Obon: "We'll close on the twentieth of March, before he leaves. Don't tell Sardor-kun yet. He'll try to save it."

I stood on the cold boards in my socks, holding an empty glass.

In April I would have walked straight in and said, "Excuse me, are you closing the shop?" and offered to cook for the whole street. Now I stood behind the door and understood that they had chosen not to tell me, and that the kind thing, the thing Daichi calls reading the air, was to let them choose.

So I read it. I went back up, stepping over the stair that creaks, and lay looking at the slice of dark sea between the two roofs.

It was easy. That was the worst part.

I turned seventeen on the seventh of December in a lecture hall in Yokohama, holding an HB pencil, because that is what the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test asks for. All year I had been reading 2B. It felt like a small betrayal.

Tetsuo-san drove me there in the shop van at seven. My throat had been scratchy since Friday, and a bag of ginger sweets appeared on the dashboard without comment. At a red light he said, "Mm. Seventeen." That was the whole birthday speech. It was a good one.

In the listening section a woman on the recording could not decide which bus to take to the city hall, and for once in my life, answering for somebody else was exactly what I was supposed to do.

It was almost dark when I reached Kamakura. On the Shiokaze Line's little platform at the far end of the station, Kotone was sitting on the bench with a thermos in her lap.

I checked my phone. At 15:48 she had sent one word: Kamakura. It was 16:28. I had not told her which train. She had not asked. She had ridden thirty-two minutes to wait forty.

She stood up, poured something into the thermos cup and held it out with both hands. Ginger tea, with honey. The steam went sideways in the wind off the tracks.

"Happy birthday," she said. Aloud, on a public platform, with a salaryman three metres away pretending to read his phone.

I drank the tea, which burned my throat in the best way, and did what I always do when something is too big to hold. I counted. Twenty-four days left of December, thirty-one of January, twenty-eight of February, twenty-five of March.

One hundred and eight.

The same as the stone steps up to Watatsumi Shrine. I did not say so. On the train home the sea came up black in the left-hand windows, and she sat beside me holding the empty thermos, and neither of us said anything for thirty-two minutes. It was one of the best conversations I have ever had.

Yukari-san's cake had a bicycle piped on it in chocolate, with wheels of slightly different sizes. Yukari-san called this artistic. Mio called it "a unicycle with ambitions" and gave me socks printed with little salmon nigiri, wrapped in newspaper.

"Your feet are embarrassing," she said. "Now they're embarrassing on purpose."

Daichi and Fumika brought a card in Fumika's ruled handwriting, signed Article One.

"It means we're official!" Daichi explained, at stadium volume. "Trial-official!"

"It means nothing of the kind, Hoshino-kun."

Buvi had called twice already and sung at me both times, the bitten loaf on the shelf behind her like a half-moon. Then Kotone, who had not said a word since the platform, slid a flat parcel across the table, and everybody went quiet at once, which in that house almost never happens.

It was a book, with a cover of blue-grey card like Shiosai's, bound down the side with dark-blue thread. On the front, in her small upright hand: Sardor's Haiku, Volume One.

Inside were my orange notes. All of them, every one I had given her since April, pressed flat onto the pages in order. I am Sardor. Hi. The fish apology. The kettle I boiled for two. In the margins, in 2B pencil, she had answered every one of them again.

Beside Please do not be fish. she had written: ← I laughed for ten minutes.

Beside a note from June: Here you used a season word. I cried a little. Don't tell.

I could not read any further in front of people. On the first page, before all the orange, there was one blue note.

First frost on the rails—

you are seventeen today,

one year for each sound

Seventeen sounds. Seventeen years. I sat very still.

"He's going to cry," said Mio.

"Let him!" said Yukari-san. "Ninety-eight points!"

"Volume One," Daichi read, upside down, from across the table. "So there's a Volume Two?"

Kotone's ears went red. She did not answer. I told myself, firmly, that it was a birthday present from the president of my club, and that it meant exactly as much as a person who is leaving is allowed to let it mean.

At one in the morning I went down again, not for water. I just could not lie still with the book on my desk.

The shop was dark. The streetlamp came in through the slats of the shutter in thin pale stripes across the floor.

In the middle of the floor, up on its stand, stood the Samarkand-gō. I had not known it had come down from the loft. Its tyres were still flat. Its front wheel pointed west, toward the sea.

Tetsuo-san was sitting on it.

Not riding. Just sitting, in his coat, with his hands on the handlebars and his feet on the pedals, looking at the shutter as if the road began on the other side of it.

I stood in the doorway of the back room and said nothing. After a while I went back up.

For once in my life I had read the air perfectly. I hated it. My throat hurt, and I told myself that was only the cold.