With the title written at the top of the manuscript page, Tsushima Kagami let his pen hover above the paper, holding still for a moment.
Outside the window the night had deepened. One by one the distant neon signs blinked out, and the city sank slowly into sleep.
Crying Out Love in the Center of the World.
The story had sat sealed away in his memory for so long that he had assumed it was gone.
But now that the images were surfacing again, he found every detail as sharp as if it had been carved into bone.
Aki and Sakutaro.
Leukemia.
The great rock of Uluru in Australia.
And that promise about the "center of the world."
Tsushima Kagami drew a deep breath and set the pen to the paper.
He didn't start in the order the original had used. Instead he poured out every fragment in his head first.
The film version was structured around the adult Sakutaro looking back on his teenage years, driven forward by flashback and interpolation woven together.
The television version leaned harder into the texture of daily life, letting the audience live through those small, seemingly ordinary yet impossibly precious hours alongside the characters.
Each had its strengths.
The film also had a key character the drama lacked: the male lead's fiancee.
And in the end, caught between impossible choices, he chose to cherish the person standing in front of him.
In the drama, the male lead stayed single the whole way through, until a letter from his old teacher finally brought him back to the school, where he made his peace and scattered there the last handful of ashes he had kept all those years.
Tsushima Kagami sketched a rough structural diagram on the page.
He would use a dual narrative.
One thread: Sakutaro in the present, thirty-seven years old, a doctor in Tokyo, unmarried.
One day, sorting through old things, he digs out a cassette tape, the "last words" Aki recorded for his future self while she was still alive.
The voice on the tape drags him back seventeen years.
The other thread: Sakutaro and Aki in the past, beginning in the early summer of their second year of high school, through her hospitalization and decline, to the moment she collapses at the airport and never boards the flight to Australia.
The two threads would advance in alternation, so that the reader felt the warmth of memory and the pain of loss at the same time.
He started with the first act.
Summer, 1999.
Matsumoto Sakutaro sat in the classroom, drifting, the cicadas outside the window filling his ears.
Whatever the teacher at the podium was saying had stopped reaching him, because his eyes were fixed on the back of someone seated a few rows ahead.
A ponytail, and skin at the nape of her neck as white as a freshly peeled egg.
Her name was Hirose Aki. She had the best grades in the class, and she was the strangest girl he had ever met.
Because on the night before an exam she would call him. Not to ask about the material, but to ask him something else.
"Saku, where do you think people go after they die?"
There, Tsushima Kagami stopped writing.
He stared at those few lines for a long while, then set the pen down and leaned back into his chair.
No.
That wasn't the feeling he wanted.
It read too much like Norwegian Wood.
He rubbed his temples, closed his eyes, and sorted through his thoughts again.
What was the core appeal of the original Crying Out Love in the Center of the World?
Not intricate narrative technique, not ornate language. It was a kind of clumsy authenticity.
Sakutaro and Aki weren't anyone special. They were ordinary high school students.
They argued and made up. They agonized for ages over whether or not to hold hands.
They bought condoms in secret and then neither of them dared use them.
They talked on the phone deep into the night until the line ran hot.
They watched the stars together from the hospital roof and pretended nothing bad was ever going to happen.
It was precisely because they were ordinary that losing it hurt so much.
Tsushima Kagami opened his eyes and struck out the lines he had just written.
Then he began again.
The summer of his second year of high school, Matsumoto Sakutaro was seventeen and convinced he was the most boring person on earth.
Grades a little above average, a face that was neither handsome nor ugly. His one talent was running, and he wasn't fast enough to make the prefectural meet.
If life came with background music, his was probably the flat, endless drone of cicadas.
Until he met Hirose Aki.
Or rather, until he noticed Hirose Aki all over again.
They had been classmates since elementary school, twelve years in the same rooms, and everything they had ever said to each other probably didn't add up to a hundred sentences.
In his mind she was the sort of girl other parents held up as an example.
Top grades, good at every sport, pretty.
Even her voice when a teacher called on her was pitched exactly right.
So perfect that nobody wanted to get near her.
But one evening that summer, he walked out onto the school roof and found her crying.
He meant to slip away, but she lifted her head, looked at him with eyes red from weeping, and asked him something that made no sense at all.
"Matsumoto-kun, where do you think people go after they die?"
It was the first thing either of them had ever said to the other that ran longer than ten words.
It was also where the whole story began.
Tsushima Kagami finished the passage, and at last it felt right.
He wasn't writing a sad story about leukemia. He was telling the love story of two ordinary high school students.
The leukemia was only background, the sword hanging over their heads, but it wasn't the story.
What truly moved people were the small, everyday, lovely moments.
Aki cutting her long hair short in secret so the chemotherapy wouldn't be the thing that took it, then saying lightly, "Summer's here, short is cooler anyway."
Sakutaro riding forty minutes on his bike to the hospital every day after school, just so he could look at her through glass for twenty.
The two of them sneaking fireworks onto the hospital roof and getting chased off by a nurse.
The tape Aki recorded from her hospital bed, where what she said wasn't "I love you" but "Saku, eat properly. Stop living on instant noodles."
Those details were the reason the story could come alive at all.
Tsushima Kagami's pen moved faster and faster. Page after page filled up.
He wrote for nearly two hours and stopped only when his wrist began to ache.
He counted: about fifteen pages of manuscript paper, close to four thousand characters.
Roughly the opening plus half of the first act.
At this rate, delivering a complete script within a week would be no trouble at all.
He could even supply manga storyboards for a lot of the key moments.
The commissioner at the Agency for Cultural Affairs had said as much this time. The director would be required to shoot faithfully to his script.
So storyboards for a few crucial shots were unlikely to get vetoed.
But Tsushima Kagami knew that speed wasn't the problem. Quality was.
This story was a special case.
It wasn't pure invention, because it touched pain that actually existed.
Leukemia patients, their families, the doctors and nurses. Every day those people lived a reality crueler than any novel.
If he wrote it too sentimentally, it became the exploitation of suffering.
If he wrote it too coldly, none of that flesh-and-bone pain would carry.
Where was the balance?
One person came to mind. Mrs. Shimizu.
Or rather, Nayotake's mother.
That woman, lying in a hospital receiving treatment, was the one actually facing all of this.
Could she accept the story he was writing?
Or, put another way, what would his story give her?
The comfort of being understood, or the pain of having a scar torn open?
Tsushima Kagami wasn't sure.
He set the pen down and rubbed his dry, stinging eyes.
Behind him, the door eased open.
Yukinoshita Shizuku came in wearing her pajamas.
"You're still not asleep?"
He didn't answer. He only went on frowning at whatever he was turning over in his head.
So she padded quietly over to the counter and made him a cup of hot cocoa.
When it was ready she set it at the edge of the desk, her gaze falling on the pages covered in writing.
That brought him back. He picked up the cocoa, took a sip, and finally answered.
"I had some ideas in my head, so I wanted to get a bit of it down while they were still there."
Yukinoshita Shizuku moved behind him, rested both hands on his shoulders and her chin on top of his head, and read the writing over his shoulder.
"Crying Out Love in the Center of the World?"
"Is that the title of the script for the film the Agency for Cultural Affairs is making?"
"Mm."
"What's it about?"
"Two high school students."
Tsushima Kagami paused, then added,
"It's a public-service film meant to raise awareness about leukemia."
"So the heroine has leukemia."
Yukinoshita Shizuku's hands went still for a beat, then resumed their gentle pressure on his shoulders.
"Is it... a true story?"
"Of course not."
"Though I couldn't say it isn't, either."
"After all, nobody knows what corner of the world is playing out a scene just like it right now."
Tsushima Kagami leaned back into the chair, feeling the warmth of her fingertips.
"But I want it to read as though it were real."
"Why?"
"Because only what's real moves anyone."
Yukinoshita Shizuku was quiet for a few seconds, then said something softly.
Tsushima Kagami smiled.
He reached up and took the hand on his shoulder, his thumb tracing over her knuckles.
"Anyway. Why are you still up?"
"Where's Mother?"
"I talked with her for a while, and then she fell asleep."
Yukinoshita Shizuku said it quietly.
"She really does work herself too hard."
Tsushima Kagami had always held that stern, unbreakable woman in the highest respect.
"Then you should be in bed too."
He looked up at Yukinoshita Shizuku, still smiling.
"I can't sleep without you."
That stopped him.
He tried to turn and look at her, but she buried her face in his hair and refused to come out.
"Shizuku."
"Mm."
"Your ears are red."
"They are not..."
"Liar. I saw them."
"You saw wrong."
"You're usually the forward one. Why the sudden shyness?"
"Honestly. Keep your voice down, or you'll wake Mother and she'll hear you."
Yukinoshita Shizuku clapped a hand over his mouth.
Tsushima Kagami nodded, holding back laughter.
Only then did she let go. She watched him drain the cocoa in one go, then stand and turn to face her.
Under that look Yukinoshita Shizuku grew self-conscious, and her eyes drifted off to the side.
"What?"
"Nothing."
Tsushima Kagami reached out and flicked her forehead.
"Come on. Bed."
He headed for the bedroom, and two steps later noticed that Yukinoshita Shizuku wasn't following.
He looked back. She was still standing where he had left her, head down, thinking about something.
"What's wrong?"
Yukinoshita Shizuku raised her head.
"That story you're writing... is it going to be very tragic?"
Tsushima Kagami was silent for a moment.
"It's hard for a leukemia story to be a comedy."
"Then the heroine... does she die?"
Tsushima Kagami didn't answer directly.
He walked back, took Yukinoshita Shizuku's hand, and laced their fingers together.
"Until I've written it, I don't know either."
"Aren't you the author?"
"Authors aren't gods."
"Kagami."
"Mm."
"You're going to write a story that makes people feel glad to be alive, aren't you?"
"I am."
"Then..."
Yukinoshita Shizuku hesitated.
"Then could you not let the heroine die?"
"Like, maybe at the end she's miraculously cured."
Tsushima Kagami didn't answer right away.
He thought about it for a while, arranging the words.
"Shizuku, do you know why Shinji and Hatsue get to be together in The Sound of Waves?"
"Because they're brave?"
"Not only that."
Tsushima Kagami patted her gently on the back.
"Because it's an island story. People on an island believe that if you're brave enough, the gods will protect you."
"This story is different."
"Different how?"
"This one happens on the mainland."
His voice was very low, as though he were speaking to himself.
"There are no gods on the mainland. Only hospitals, chemotherapy, bone marrow matching and survival rates."
Yukinoshita Shizuku's hand tightened.
"So... she still has to die?"
Tsushima Kagami said nothing for a long time.
So long that Yukinoshita Shizuku thought he had fallen asleep. She was about to close her eyes when she heard him speak.
"In the title Crying Out Love in the Center of the World, the important word isn't love."
"What is it, then?"
"Crying out."
Yukinoshita Shizuku didn't follow.
Tsushima Kagami went on.
"Why does anyone cry out?"
"Because the distance is too great. The other person can't hear you."
"What stands between Aki and Sakutaro? The glass beside a hospital bed. Chemotherapy drugs. The fear that at any second she could be gone."
"They keep calling out, and the other one never hears."
"Until the very end, when Aki dies, and only then does Sakutaro truly hear what she was trying to say."
"Isn't that cruel?"
"It is."
Tsushima Kagami closed his eyes.
"But that's what reality is."
The room went quiet again.
A long while later Yukinoshita Shizuku's voice came again, very small this time.
"Then... could you write a side story?"
"What kind of side story?"
"One set in a parallel world."
"In that world, Aki never gets sick."
"She and Sakutaro graduate together, go to university together, grow old together."
"And then?"
"And then they argue, and give each other the silent treatment, and sulk over stupid things like whose turn it is to wash the dishes."
"But every night, they still fall asleep holding each other."
"Just like us."
Tsushima Kagami looked at Yukinoshita Shizuku, gone sentimental all at once for reasons he couldn't guess, thought it over, and laughed.
"I could give it a try."
"Then it's settled."
"It's settled."
With his promise secured, drowsiness finally caught up with Yukinoshita Shizuku. She yawned, eyes half open, half closed.
"Kagami."
"Good night."
"Good night."
Then Yukinoshita Shizuku went back to her own bedroom.
Tsushima Kagami lay down in his, but sleep didn't come right away.
He lay with his eyes open on the ceiling, the story still turning in his head.
A parallel world.
An interesting narrative device occurred to him.
The film would keep to the set course.
But at the end of the novel released alongside it, when the grown Sakutaro scatters the ashes before the great rock of Uluru, he could be given a sudden vision.
Aki standing across from him in a white dress, smiling as she says,
"Saku. I've been waiting for you."
Then Sakutaro walks to her, and the two of them embrace.
The camera pulls back.
The frame washes slowly to white.
And then...
And then the picture returns: seventeen-year-old Sakutaro waking up in a classroom.
Cicadas. A summer wind. On the blackboard, "15 days until final exams."
He turns his head. Aki is sitting beside him, diligently copying notes.
Feeling his eyes on her, she turns and frowns.
"What are you staring at?"
"...Nothing."
"Pay attention to the lesson."
"Okay."
Sakutaro faces front again, but the corner of his mouth lifts anyway.
Outside the window, the cicadas cry on and on.
Summer has only just begun.
The ending preserved the sorrow of the original while handing the reader the consolation of a parallel world.
And it wouldn't feel like manufactured sentiment, since that vision could just as easily be read as Sakutaro's imagination.
But if a reader wanted to believe it was another world, that worked too.
A novel catches fire, so they make the film. The film catches fire, so they publish the novel. Cooking one fish two ways, or five, was routine in Japan.
And to give readers something fresh, a different ending, or new setting details and plot beats slipped in as an easter egg, was a standard tactic.
The more Tsushima Kagami thought about it, the more workable it sounded. He nearly got up to write it down.
Never mind. Tomorrow.
He closed his eyes.
Outside the window, the last neon sign went dark.
The night lay heavy, and everything was still.
One week later.
When Tsushima Kagami walked out of the Agency for Cultural Affairs building, he had a stamped document in his hand.
"Congratulations, Dassai-ya."
The agency staffer who had received him was a young woman in glasses, and she smiled and bowed to him.
"Everyone on the production committee thought very highly of the script, especially the way you handled the protagonist's inner monologue. They all said it was quite original."
"Thank you."
Tsushima Kagami answered politely.
"Next comes casting and preproduction. We'll need you to sit in on a few meetings when the time comes, Mr. Tsushima."
"Of course. Just let me know in advance."
Out through the front doors, Tsushima Kagami let out a long breath.
Finally done.
For a week he had skipped almost every social engagement, spending every day hunched over manuscript paper, revising.
Even his meals had been carried to the desk by Yukinoshita Shizuku.
Every scene, every line of dialogue, every punctuation mark had been weighed and reworked more times than he could count.
The production committee's review was nothing but a formality, but he wasn't going to lower his standards for his own work just because it was an assignment.
Late-May Tokyo had well and truly shifted into "Tokyo Hot" mode.
It was only ten in the morning and the sun already felt like it intended to melt people down.
The air held that particular urban mugginess. Heat shimmered up off the asphalt, and the towers in the distance warped faintly in it.
Tsushima Kagami shrugged off his suit jacket and draped it over one arm, loosening his tie with the other hand.
He was in the charcoal suit Mrs. Yukinoshita had picked out for him a while back.
Beautiful fabric. In this weather, torture.
He stood on the steps of the agency building and squinted up at the sky.
Then he pulled out his phone to check the time. Twenty past ten.
Yukinoshita Shizuku had a shift at the convenience store today, sharing it with Shimizu Nayotake.
He could go find them there. It would be about lunchtime, and the three of them could eat together.
With that, Tsushima Kagami set off for the subway station.
Shinjuku Station.
Tokyo's great transit hub, with over three million passages through it every day.
Even in broad daylight it was a solid wall of people.
Tsushima Kagami came up out of the subway exit.
He hadn't gone far past the gates when he noticed a spot in the plaza packed solid with children.
At some point a simple open-air booth had gone up in the east exit plaza, with a brightly colored banner strung above it reading something like SANRIO FAMILY PROMOTIONAL EVENT.
Twenty or thirty small children ringed the booth, chattering and shrieking with laughter.
What drew them were the two enormous character mascots standing in front of it, Sanrio's Little Twin Stars, Lala and Kiki.
Two fuzzy costumes, each about a meter seventy tall.
Lala in pink and blue, Kiki in blue and pink.
Great big heads, round bellies, the kind of thing you want to throw your arms around on sight.
The pair were handing out flyers to the children, performing a cute little gesture with each one.
Lala tipped her head to the side, Kiki made a heart with his hands, and the kids dissolved into giggles.
Tsushima Kagami stood near the exit and watched for a while.
His eyes lingered on the two mascots, and the corner of his mouth curved up without him meaning it to.
A scene like that genuinely lifted the mood.
He watched one of them crouch down to interact with a little girl in twin tails. She reached out and patted the fuzzy head, then flung herself happily into her mother's arms.
Peaceful, he thought.
Tsushima Kagami looked away and started toward the convenience store.
Down the steps, through the crowd in the plaza, his path taking him right past the two mascots.
And that was when it happened.
A staffer in a Sanrio work T-shirt hurried over with an armful of flyers and enthusiastically held one out.
Without thinking about it, Tsushima Kagami took one.
The color flyer showed promotional art for Sanrio's new park, something about special events over summer vacation and families being welcome to bring their kids.
He walked on with the flyer in his hand.
Two steps later, the two mascots suddenly thrust out their furry arms and blocked his way.
Tsushima Kagami stopped short.
Then Kiki held out a flyer of his own, right in front of his face.
"Um... I already have one."
Tsushima Kagami waved the one in his hand.
The mascot went on holding out the flyer, perfectly still.
Tsushima Kagami sighed.
Fine. Presumably the job came with a quota, and everyone had to accept one before the KPI counted?
He reached out and took the flyer.
"Thanks."
Then he moved to step around them.
Lala's furry arm swung out and cut him off.
Tsushima Kagami.
"..."
He raised his head and looked at the round mascot head in front of him.
Two big glossy black eyes stared back at him, just as motionless.
"Excuse me... was there something else?"
Tsushima Kagami asked again.
Lala didn't answer.
Kiki didn't answer either.
All around them the children watched with open curiosity.
A young guy in a suit, hemmed in by two mascots.
Was this some new interactive game?
Tsushima Kagami was about to say something more.
Then Lala and Kiki each reached up with one hand, gripped the bottom rim of their own heads, and wrenched them off in unison.
"Whoaaa!"
The children around them shrieked.
The two fuzzy heads came away to reveal two faces slick with sweat, hair plastered to their temples, both of them gulping down air.
Then both faces broke into the same supremely childish look.
The one that asks, did we scare you?
Eyes wide, mouths wide, like grade-schoolers hamming it up in a school play.
"Senpai!"
"It's us!"
Tsushima Kagami took a closer look.
On the left, drenched in sweat, bangs pasted damp across her forehead, face flushed from the heat inside the suit: Hiroi Kikuri.
On the right, just as red in the face, sweat running down past her temples: PA-ko.
The two of them held up their mascot heads and grinned at him like a pair of dogs wagging their tails.
Tsushima Kagami said nothing for a moment.
Then he reached up and rubbed his temples.
"What are you two doing here?"
An hour later.
The three of them were sitting in a manga cafe near Shinjuku Station.
Tsushima Kagami picked a booth toward the back. Hiroi Kikuri and PA-ko trailed after him, each hauling a tote bag stuffed with flyers.
Once they were seated, a server came over with menus.
Tsushima Kagami didn't even open his.
"Three chocolate parfaits, please."
"Certainly. One moment."
The instant the server left, Hiroi Kikuri collapsed into the couch as though something had drained the last of her strength.
Head against the backrest, eyes shut, gulping down the cold air pouring from the vent.
"I'm alive..."
she mumbled.
"A little bit alive again..."
PA-ko was in better shape, though her face was just as red, and she kept dabbing at the sweat with a napkin.
"Senpai, thank you so much for today."
Hiroi Kikuri said it while still wiping her face.
"You handed out flyers for us and bought us ice cream on top of it. I feel terrible."
Beside her, PA-ko added with a smile,
"And what are the odds, running into you at exactly the right moment? Does that count as us being lucky?"
"Sure it does."
Tsushima Kagami leaned back against the couch, looking at the two sweat-soaked girls across from him.
The server came over with three chocolate parfaits and set them carefully on the table.
Cream, chocolate sauce, vanilla ice cream, chocolate shavings and strawberries in perfect combination, with two colored wafer rolls standing up out of the top.
The instant Hiroi Kikuri saw the ice cream, her eyes lit up like two stars flicking on.
"Itadakimasu!"
She pressed her palms together, then scooped up an enormous spoonful and shoved it into her mouth.
A second later her whole face relaxed.
Bliss of the purest kind, eyes curved into crescents, mouth tugged upward.
Cheeks flushed pink, exactly like one of those manga characters whose eyes turn into stars the moment they taste something good.
"It's good!"
she said thickly. "It's ridiculously good!"
PA-ko took a spoonful too, and for all her usual composure, the way she ate it was only marginally more dignified than Hiroi Kikuri.
"Mm. Their chocolate parfait really is excellent. The cream is very smooth."
Tsushima Kagami didn't touch his. He folded his hands on the table and looked at the two of them.
"Don't you two usually work shifts with Seika and Nayotake?"
"So why is it just the pair of you today?"
____
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