I slipped my arm lightly through Kojima’s as we slowly climbed the stairs from the underground to the street level.
THE MOON WAS suspended in the sky.
Looking up, Kojima said, “That’s your moon,” referring to the first character in my name, tsuki, the Japanese word for moon. Sensei would never have said such a thing. Abruptly remembering Sensei, I was startled. While we had been inside the bar, I had felt distant and detached from Sensei. Suddenly, I became aware of the weight of Kojima’s arm, lightly resting on the small of my back.
“The moon is so round,” I said, casually moving my body away from Kojima.
“Yes, it is,” he replied, without trying to bridge the distance between us that I had just created. He just stood there, staring up abstractedly at the moon. He looked older than he had when we were in the bar.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
Kojima looked over at me. “Why do you ask?”
“Are you a little tired?”
“Just getting old,” Kojima said.
“No, you’re not.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Are not!” I was being unusually obstinate.
Kojima chuckled and bowed his head toward me. “That was rude of me, seeing as how we’re the same age.”
“Not at all.”
I was thinking about Sensei. He had never once referred to himself as “old.” Aside from the fact that he was old enough not to make light of his age, it just wasn’t in his nature to talk about it. Standing there on the street right then, I felt very far away from Sensei. I was keenly aware of the distance between us. Not only the difference between our age in years, nor even the expanse between where each of us stood at that moment, but rather the sheer distance that existed between us.
Kojima put his arm around my waist once again. To be sure, he didn’t exactly encircle my waist so much as hold his arm against the air around my waist. The gesture was quite subtly adept. Since he wasn’t actually touching me, there was nothing for me to shake off. I wondered when he had acquired such a skill.
Held this way, I felt as though Kojima were manipulating me like a doll. Kojima hurried across the street and walked into the darkness, taking me along with him. I could see the school ahead of us. The doors of the gate were shut tightly. The school looked huge at night, lit up by the streetlights. Kojima headed up the path to the embankment anyway, and I went along with him.
The cherry blossom party was over. There was not a soul to be found. Not even a stray cat. When the two of us had slipped away, there had been yakitori skewers and empty saké bottles and packets of smoked squid strewn about, and the partygoers had been serried together as they sat on their mats, but now there was no sign of anything on the embankment. All the trash and empty cans had been completely cleared away, and the ground looked as though it had been swept clean with a bamboo broom. Even the garbage cans on the embankment had been emptied of the refuse from the cherry blossom party. It was as if the party had been nothing more than an illusion or a mirage.
“Everything’s… gone,” I said.
“Not surprisingly,” Kojima replied.
“Why not?”
“People who are teachers are much more dutiful about upholding public morality.”
A few years ago, Kojima said, he had attended one of these annual cherry blossom parties the teachers held right before the start of the school year. He had stayed until the end that time, and as the party drew to a close, he had witnessed the teachers’ full-scale cleanup firsthand. There were those who picked up the paper trash and placed it in plastic bags that they had brought for this purpose. There were those who bundled the empty bottles together and piled them on the back of a truck from a liquor store that pulled up to the school entrance just as the party was ending (which, no doubt, Kojima added, had been previously requested to arrive at the given hour). There was the one who distributed any leftover liquor equitably among the teachers who liked to drink. There were those who used brooms from the schoolyard to level out the ground. And there were those who went around picking up whatever had been left behind and collected it all in a box. The teachers worked briskly and efficiently, like a well-trained company of soldiers. Every last vestige of the cherry blossom party—in boisterous celebration until the very last moment—was completely eliminated in less than fifteen minutes.
“I was so astonished, all I could do was just stand there watching,” Kojima finished saying.
And so this year as well, that must be how the teachers cleaned up every last trace of the party.
Kojima and I walked around a bit along the area where, not an hour ago, the party’s attendees had swarmed. The moon shone brightly. The flowers bloomed pale white, lit up by the moonlight. Kojima led me over to a bench in a corner. He still had his arm circled around my waist, with the same delicate touch.
“I guess I’m a little drunk,” Kojima said. His cheeks were flushed, about the same shade of red they had been during the cherry blossom party. Aside from the color in his cheeks, though, his demeanor did not in any way suggest that he was drunk.
“It’s still cold out,” I said for whatever reason, trying to make conversation. How on earth did I find myself in this situation? Where could Sensei have gone off to? After briskly cleaning up the smoked squid wrappers and yakitori skewers and smoothing out the ground, he and Ms. Ishino were probably out together somewhere.
“Are you cold?” Kojima asked, taking off his jacket and putting it on my shoulders.
“That’s not what I meant,” I said reflexively.
“Then what did you mean?” Kojima asked, smiling. He had seen right through my knee-jerk reaction. I wasn’t at all annoyed to be read so easily, though—rather, I felt like a child hiding something whose parent knows right away what is going on.
The two of us just sat there for a little while, leaning up against each other. Kojima’s jacket was warm. It carried a faint hint of cologne. Kojima was still smiling. Despite the fact that we were both facing the same direction, I could tell nonetheless that he was smiling.
“What are you smiling at?” I asked, still facing forward.
“You know, Omachi, you’re really just like…”
“Like what?”
“Like a high school student. Omachi, don’t be nervous.” Kojima spoke very softly. Then he put his arms firmly around my shoulders and drew me into an embrace. Really? I thought to myself. Kojima’s just going to hug me like this? How strange, my mind said. But my body quickly responded to him.
“It’s cold, why don’t we go someplace where it’s warm,” Kojima whispered.
“Really?” I said out loud.
“Huh?” Kojima responded with surprise.
“Are we really moving that fast?”
Without replying to my question, Kojima hurriedly got up from the bench. Then, turning to me as I still sat there, he touched my chin, raising my face upward, and promptly kissed me.
The kiss happened so fast that I failed to deflect it. Dammit, I cursed myself. That was careless of me. It was careless, but the kiss wasn’t unpleasant. Maybe not unpleasant, but I wasn’t happy about it. Rather than happy, it made me feel a little lonely.