“I want you to tell me something, honestly,” She said in a serious tone, just before I boarded the ferry. “Do you believe Sumire is no longer alive?”
*
I shook my head. “I can’t prove it, but I feel like she’s still alive somewhere. Even after this much time, I just don’t have the sense that she’s dead.”
*
Miu folded her tanned arms and looked at me.
“Actually I feel exactly the same,” she said. “That Sumire isn’t dead. But I also feel that I’ll never see her again. Though I
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can’t prove anything either.”
I didn’t say a word. Silence wove itself into the spaces of everything around us. Seabirds squawked as they cut across the cloudless sky, and in the café the ever-sleepy waiter hoisted yet another tray of drinks.
Miu pursed her lips and was lost in thought. “Do you hate me?” she finally asked.
“Because Sumire disappeared?”
“Yes.”
“Why would I hate you?”
“I don’t know.” Her voice was tinged with a long-suppressed exhaustion. “I have the feeling I’ll never see you again, either. That’s why I asked.”
“I don’t hate you,” I said.
“But who can tell, maybe later on?”
“I don’t hate people over things like that.”
Miu took off her hat, straightened her fringe, and put it back on. She squinted at me.
“That might be because you don’t expect anything from anyone,” she said. Her eyes were deep and clear, like the twilit darkness on the day we met. “I’m not like that. I just want you to know that I like you. Very much.”
*
And we said goodbye. The ship edged backwards out of the harbour, the propeller churning up the water as it lumbered through a 180° change of direction; all the while, Miu stood on the wharf watching me go. She wore a tight white dress and occasionally reached out to keep her hat from flying away in the wind. Standing there on that wharf on this little Greek island, she looked like something from a different world, fleeting, full of grace and beauty. I leaned against the railing on
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deck and watched her for a long time.
Time seemed to stand still, the scene forever etched on my memory.
*
But time began to move again, and Miu got smaller and smaller, first a vague dot, then swallowed up whole in the shimmering air. The town grew distant, the shape of the mountains indistinct, and finally the island merged into the mist of light, blurred, and vanished altogether. Another island rose up to take its place and likewise disappeared into the distance. As time passed, all the things I left behind there seemed never to have existed at all.
Maybe I should have stayed with Miu. So what if the new school term was starting? I should encourage Miu, do everything I could to help in the search, and if something awful happened, then I should hold her, give her what comfort I could. Miu wanted me, I believe, and in a sense I wanted her as well.
*
She’d grabbed hold of my heart with a rare intensity. I realized all this for the first time as I stood on the deck and watched her disappear in the distance. A feeling came over me, like a thousand strings were tugging at me. Perhaps not fullblown romantic love, but something very close. Flustered, I sat on a bench on the deck, placed my gym bag on my knees, and gazed out at the white wake trailing behind the ship. Seagulls flew after the ferry, clinging to the wake. I could still feel Miu’s small palm on my back, like a soul’s tiny shadow.
I planned to fly straight back to Tokyo, but for some reason the reservation I’d made the day before was cancelled, and I ended up spending the night in Athens. I took the airline
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shuttle bus and stayed at a hotel in the city that the airline recommended. A pleasant, cosy hotel near the Plaka district, which, unfortunately, was crowded with a boisterous German tour group. With nothing else to do, I wandered around the city, bought some souvenirs for no one in particular, and in the evening walked to the top of the Acropolis. I lay down on a slab of stone, the twilight breeze blowing over me as I gazed at the white temple floating up in the bluish floodlights. A lovely, dreamy scene.
But all I felt was an incomparable loneliness. Before I knew it, the world around was drained of colour. From the shabby mountaintop, the ruins of those empty feelings, I could see my own life stretching out into the future. It looked just like an illustration in a science fiction novel I read as a child: the desolate surface of a deserted planet. No sign of life at all. Each day seemed to last for ever, the air either boiling hot or freezing. The spaceship that brought me there had disappeared, and I was stuck. I’d have to survive on my own.
*
