Chapter 164: The Box of Things

Chapter 164: Chapter 164: The Box of Things

Yui’s mother knocked on Haruki’s door on the Wednesday after the call. She was holding a shoebox tied with a faded ribbon, and she said she had been told not to show it to him.

"By Yui," she added, when he looked at the box. "Years ago. She was eleven." She held it out anyway. "I think the rule has expired."

It was seven in the evening. He had been sitting on the crate in front of his desk, pencilling Chapter fifty-nine, when she knocked. He hadn’t been able to concentrate since Sunday. He had drawn the same panel of Mio at the hospital window four times, and none of them were right.

He took the box. It was light, made of old cardboard softened at the corners, and the ribbon was a faded pink that had probably once been red.

"Come next door," Yui’s mother said. "I’ve made too much curry. Her father’s working late, and her grandmother’s gone to bed. You can open it at the table."

The Kobayashi family’s apartment was the mirror image of his own. It had the same small living room and the same kitchen along one wall, and the bedroom door in the same place, on the other side of the shared wall. He had eaten at this table perhaps a thousand times over fourteen years, and it had never once felt strange until tonight.

Yui’s mother set a plate of curry in front of him and sat down opposite with her own. She didn’t eat. She watched him untie the faded ribbon.

"She told me on Sunday," she said. "About Helsinki. The doctorate." She turned her cup of barley tea slowly on the table. It wasn’t a quarter turn. It was a full circle, twice, and it was the most nervous gesture he had ever seen her make. "She’s frightened, Haruki-kun."

"Of the doctorate?"

"Of you," Yui’s mother said. "Of what it will cost you. She told me you said on the phone that you wanted her to go and didn’t want her to go, both at once. And then you didn’t say anything else." She looked at him steadily. "She thinks you’re being brave. She’s afraid that if she stays three more years, you’ll keep being brave until it breaks something."

He didn’t answer.

"Open the box," Yui’s mother said gently.

The box was full of paper.

On top lay the scrap he had already seen, or rather its empty place. There was a faint rectangle in the dust where a torn piece of lined paper had rested for eleven years before Yui took it out to paste into a Christmas notebook. Beneath that were other things.

There were drawings, his drawings, from childhood. They were crumpled and smoothed out again: a robot with too many arms, a dragon, a boy with no face standing on a hill. He had drawn them at eight and nine and ten, and thrown them all away. He remembered throwing them away. He didn’t remember anyone taking them out of the bin.

There was a ticket stub from a train to Kamakura, from a school trip when they were twelve. There was a folded note in his own handwriting, age eleven, that said only sorry about your umbrella, with no explanation. He didn’t remember what had happened to the umbrella.

There was a photograph of the two of them at six, sitting on the bottom step of the stairwell with ice creams, squinting at the camera.

And at the very bottom, folded twice, was another scrap of lined paper. It was torn from the same kind of notebook as his, in the same oversized, clumsy handwriting of a child in second grade.

It wasn’t his handwriting.

When I grow up I will teach every child in the world to read. Even the ones who hate books.

— Kobayashi Yui, age 7

Haruki stared at it.

"It was the same day," Yui’s mother said quietly. "The same assignment. The teacher made them all write what they wanted to be. You wrote yours, and the boy next to you laughed, and you crossed it out and threw it away." She looked at the scrap in his hands. "Yui wrote hers. Nobody laughed at hers. She didn’t throw it away." A pause. "She came home that afternoon with both of them. She put yours in this box, and hers underneath it. When I asked why hers was at the bottom, she said, Because his is more important. Mine’s easy. His is the one someone laughed at."

He couldn’t say anything.

"She was seven," Yui’s mother said. "She’s been keeping both promises since she was seven. Yours, and hers." She turned her cup again. "For thirteen years, she’s been so busy keeping yours that she only started keeping her own last September. When a boy called Kenji wrote three lines on a worksheet."

He sat at the Kobayashis’ kitchen table for a long time, with a child’s scrap of paper in his hands and a plate of curry going cold in front of him.

Even the ones who hate books.

Kenji had hated books. He had drawn sea serpents in the margins of every worksheet because reading felt like a door that was closed to him. Yui had spent three years of Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, unpaid, above a dry cleaner’s in Asagaya, quietly persuading him otherwise. Now there were four hundred pages in a library in Helsinki about exactly what she had done by instinct.

A tall woman with white hair and a bicycle had read her first report and called it the best in eleven years.

"I told her to go," Haruki said at last. "In August. On the stairs."

"I know," said Yui’s mother.

"I’d tell her to stay for the doctorate too. If she asked me." He looked down at the scrap. "I’d hate every day of it. That doesn’t change anything."

"I know," Yui’s mother said again. "That’s what she’s afraid of." She reached across the table and put her hand over his, on top of the scrap of paper. "Haruki-kun. You’ve spent your whole life, both of your lives maybe, telling the people you love that it’s their decision. It’s a kind thing. It’s also a way of never asking for anything."

He looked up sharply.

Both of your lives. She said it lightly, as though it were a figure of speech.

Perhaps it was. Yui’s mother had watched him grow up on the other side of a wall, from a quiet, too-old boy of five into this. Perhaps she had simply seen, the way Yui had seen, that there had been someone before who did everything alone for a very long time.

"She doesn’t need you to tell her it’s her decision," Yui’s mother said. "She knows. She’s known since she was seven." She took her hand back and picked up her spoon at last. "She needs you to tell her what you’d need, if she stayed three years. Not what you’d give up. What you’d need." She began to eat her cold curry. "Nobody’s ever asked you that. I think you’ve forgotten you’re allowed to have an answer."

He carried the shoebox back to his apartment at nine, with the faded ribbon retied around it.

He didn’t open it again. He put it on the desk beside the crate, and his mother’s red sketchbook, and Kuroda’s tablet, and a postcard of a boy at a bus stop in the rain.

Then he opened Yui’s pocket notebook to a clean page, the one after the list of fears and the hundred and twelve names. At the top, he wrote a question he had never asked himself in either life.

What would I need?

He sat on the crate looking at it for a very long time.

He didn’t write anything underneath it that night. But he didn’t close the notebook either.

At 11:40, his phone buzzed on the desk. It was Yui. It was mid-afternoon in Helsinki, and not Sunday.

Mum says she gave you the box.

He looked at the shoebox with its faded ribbon.

She did.

A long pause followed. He could picture her in a small room with a radiator she didn’t know how to turn off, holding her phone and deciding what to say.

I told her not to. When I was eleven. I made her promise.

I’m glad she broke it.

Another pause, longer.

Did you find mine? At the bottom?

Yes.

I was going to show you when I came back in September. So you’d know I wasn’t only keeping yours.

He sat on the crate and read that line three times.

Even the ones who hate books, he wrote.

Kenji hated books, Yui wrote back. Now he reads to Tsubasa-kun on Thursdays. Tsubasa-kun sent me a video. Kenji does the voices.

Then, a moment later:

Sunday. Seven exactly. Mum said you’d have something to tell me.

He looked at the page in the notebook, with its single question at the top and nothing written under it.

I will, he wrote. I’m working on it.

Good, Yui wrote. Take your time. You’re allowed.

[Item received: Shoebox (Kobayashi household). Contents: Host’s discarded drawings (ages 8–10), 2 scraps from second grade — Host’s and Kobayashi Yui’s.]

[Kobayashi Yui, age 7: "When I grow up I will teach every child in the world to read. Even the ones who hate books."]

[New question (Host’s notebook): "What would I need?" — Unanswered.]