The wind came in gusts, sometimes dying down completely, letting the rain fall almost vertically, lazily, without effort, and then suddenly tearing loose from the rooftops, driving a fine spray of water along the streets and tugging at the hems of the raincoats of random passers-by, as if it wanted to rip them off and carry them away somewhere beyond the city, to the fields where it was still possible to breathe.
Genzo stood at Renji's grave. Water ran down his face, but he paid it no attention; the water was outside, and what was happening inside could not be washed away by rain. He thought: it's strange that death makes a person so small. In life Renji had taken up so much space, in a room, in a conversation, in Genzo's head, and now he fit beneath a slab a meter and a half long. As if a person were not a body and not a name, but the volume he occupies in someone else's memory. And that volume, it turns out, can be compressed to the size of a gravestone.
A cigarette smoldered in his fingers. The smoke rose upward, trembled in the wind, broke apart and vanished, just like everything else. Genzo took a drag, let the smoke out into the rainy emptiness and watched it melt away without leaving a trace. Probably, he thought, this is how people leave: not with a clap, not with an explosion, but by slowly dissolving into the air, which others then breathe without knowing what it once was.
"How am I supposed to find you now?" he asked quietly, not expecting an answer. "I never even saw their faces. I don't know anything about them. Although... some things I do know."
The wind answered him with the rustle of wet leaves, a dry sound on top of the damp, as if nature too could not find the words. Genzo clenched the cigarette in his fingers and took a drag, feeling the tobacco burn his throat; he was almost glad of this pain, it was understandable, simple, unlike everything else. He crushed the butt against the edge of the stone, shoved his hands into his pockets, opened his umbrella and walked away. His steps were slow but sure, the dull, even knock of soles on the wet gravel path, step after step, like a metronome counting off not time but resolve. He knew only one thing: he had to do something. Grief without action is just one more way of drowning, and he did not intend to drown gracefully.
He went into the morgue. Inside it smelled of disinfectant and of something cold and lifeless, that particular smell which seems to have no source but simply soaks into the walls. The light was dim, and the long corridor seemed endless. His footsteps echoed hollowly through the empty building, bouncing off the bare walls, as if the building itself were repeating his every movement after him, unwilling to release the sound into silence. He approached a glass partition behind which an old attendant sat. The man was writing something in a thick ledger without lifting his head. Genzo rapped on the glass with his knuckles.
The attendant slowly raised his head. His face was wrinkled like an old map, his eyes tired and clouded by the years, the eyes of a man who had seen too many times how the living become a list in a logbook. He took off his glasses and looked at Genzo.
"Yes?" he said.
"Did the late Renji Asakawa have any belongings with him? Anything personal?"
The old man set down his pen and thought, as if sifting through dozens of identical questions from dozens of identical people.
"He did," he answered. "Mostly junk. Keys, loose change, trash. But one notebook was left. Worn, checkered. I remember it because it was almost empty, only a few pages filled in. A child's handwriting, uneven. I figured it was a diary."
"Can I take it?"
"And who are you to him?"
"A friend," said Genzo, and was surprised himself at how easily the word came, though in essence it was a lie, what kind of friend was he, if he hadn't protected him. "I was his friend."
The old man looked at him, holding his gaze a moment longer than a simple formality required, the way people look who are used to reading other people's guilt from their faces. Then he nodded, came out from behind the desk and returned a minute later with the notebook. He passed it through the window. The notebook was worn, with bent corners, the cover almost rubbed away by time.
Genzo took it and ran his fingers over the pages.
"Do you have a black bag?"
The old man handed him a bag. Genzo wrapped the notebook, tucked it under his clothes, close to his body, as if warmth could preserve something.
"Thank you."
"Don't mention it," said the old man, and sat back down at his desk, burying himself in his book.
Genzo left the morgue. Outside the rain had almost stopped, but the wind remained, damp, cold, chilling to the bone; it wandered between the buildings like a stray, slipped into alleyways and burst back out with a soft, drawn-out whistle, as if the city too were breathing, and its breath was heavy. Genzo pulled up his hood, lowered his head and walked toward the metro station. His steps were muffled on the wet asphalt, even, but between them now there was some new, barely noticeable heaviness, the way a man walks who carries not only a bag but a decision.
The metro was noisy. The station hummed with voices, footsteps, the jingle of coins and the slamming of doors. Echoes spread through the wide corridors, mixing with the drone of trains that arrived and departed below like huge tired beasts. Genzo went down the escalator, hearing people's voices behind him. Someone was talking on the phone, someone was laughing, someone was swearing. The air was stale, smelling of dust, damp clothes and cheap perfume. He thought that death, perhaps, was the only truly honest event in life: everything else could be postponed, avoided, talked around, but death does not ask permission and does not wait until you are ready.
He stepped into a carriage. It was almost full, but he found a free seat by the door. Genzo sat down and pressed the bag with the notebook to his chest. The carriage swayed slightly, the tunnel lights flickered past the windows, creating a rhythmic, almost hypnotic pattern, flash, darkness, flash, darkness, and in that rhythm there was something of a heartbeat, a heart that simply keeps working even when it doesn't understand why.
To his left sat a fat, dark-skinned man greedily devouring a burger. Sauce dripped onto his shirt, but he paid no attention, biting off huge chunks and chewing noisily with obvious pleasure, as if there were nothing in the whole world more important than that burger, and maybe, for him, at that moment, there really wasn't. Next to him sat a young guy in a sports jacket scrolling through something on his phone, occasionally smirking at his own thoughts. On the right, a young woman in a hijab was rocking a small child in her arms. The child was crying softly, the woman was quietly humming something, trying to soothe him. Her voice was gentle, almost musical, but weariness could be felt in it, that particular, polite weariness.
Somewhere at the end of the carriage two guys were arguing loudly about football.
"Did you see that goal?" said one, tall, in a cap, waving his arms as if scoring it all over again right then. "Absolutely insane. He scored from the center of the field!"
"Oh, come on," snorted the other, shorter, in glasses, pushing them up with his index finger. "That was a pure own goal. The defender himself sliced the ball into his own net, I've rewatched it a hundred times."
"Did you even watch it? From the center of the field, damn it! That's not an own goal, it's a masterpiece!"
"If it weren't for the referee, they would have lost altogether. That was clearly offside, what, are you blind?"
"What offside?! You just don't want to admit it."
"What's that got to do with anything? We're talking about one specific moment!"
"Ah, yeah, of course," the second one rolled his eyes and waved his hand, but you could tell from his voice that he was tired of arguing.
Genzo listened to them with half an ear, and there was something almost healing in it, a stupid argument about a goal that no one would remember in a month, an argument for the sake of arguing, for the pleasure of proving nonsense to each other. Maybe, he thought, that's the whole point: to go on living for things that don't matter, because the things that do matter are too heavy to carry every day.
The child beside him started crying louder, and the woman stood up, rocking him in her arms.
"Hush, hush, little one," she said, pressing him to her, and in her voice was that endless, patient tenderness that cannot be faked. "We'll be there soon, almost home. Just a little bit, be patient."
The child calmed down a little, but kept sniffling, clutching her scarf with tiny fingers.
Elsewhere in the carriage an elderly couple was talking about shopping, and in their bickering there was so much familiar coziness, worn smooth by the years, that Genzo involuntarily listened in.
"Did you take the list?" the woman asked, adjusting the bag on her lap.
"Yes," the man answered, without lifting his head from the newspaper. "I always take the list, how many times do I have to repeat it."
"And did you write the milk on it?"
The man froze for a second, his eyes darting over the lines of the newspaper as if the answer were hidden there.
"No," he finally admitted.
"Hiroshi! How many times!"
"I'll remember it anyway. Don't shout across the whole carriage."
"You always say that, and then we get home and there's no milk, and you go back to the store again in your slippers," she said it with such habitual indignation that it was clear this was not the first time, and most likely not the last.
"I don't forget, I just don't write it down. Those are, by the way, different things."
"It's exactly the same thing, Hiroshi."
"Well, it's not the same thing at all..."
The train stopped, and the doors opened with a familiar hissing sigh. New passengers came in: a young guy in headphones nodding to some rhythm of his own, a girl with a large backpack, an old man with a cane who slowly and carefully found a free handrail. All of them were absorbed in themselves, each the center of his own small universe. The carriage started moving again, and the tunnel lights flickered past the windows. Genzo sat motionless, listening to the noise around him but not taking it in. The rumble of the metro seemed to him monotonous, even, almost soothing, of the same nature as the rain outside: it didn't ask whether you were ready to listen. He closed his eyes and felt the swaying of the carriage lull him. But the notebook in his hands wouldn't let him forget; it lay on his chest like another, second, heavier heart.
The train stopped at his station. Genzo stood up and got off.
He climbed the stairs to the street. A damp evening hung overhead. The buildings looked blurred, the windows glowed yellow, but the light was pale, as if someone had watered it down, like old tea left standing too long. Here, in the open, the wind picked up again; it rolled along the street in long cold waves, stirred the wires so that they hummed low and mournfully, and chased wet leaves across the asphalt, which rustled dry and hard, not at all the way wet things should rustle. That sound, a dry rustle over a wet street, for some reason imprinted itself on Genzo's mind more firmly than anything else that day.
He reached home as the evening was beginning to turn into night. The city was falling quiet, only rare cars passed over the wet asphalt, leaving behind noise and splashes of water, like sighs. The smell of wet asphalt mingled with the smell of rotting autumn leaves, that particular, bitter smell of the end of a season, which for some reason always reminds one of time: that it moves forward without asking whether you are ready.
Genzo entered his room. He switched on the desk lamp, and a yellow circle of light fell on the desk, fencing off a small island of warmth from the darkness outside the window. He sat on the edge of the bed and took out the notebook. He ran his fingers over the worn cover, feeling its roughness, and froze for a second, as if delaying the moment after which there would be no way back. Then he slowly opened it.
The letters were uneven, childish. The lines jumped, some words were crossed out, others pressed hard into the paper, as if the hand holding the pen had trembled from anger or fear. Genzo began to read, and Renji's voice, as it had been in childhood, sounded again inside him, thin, halting, full of that artless honesty of which only children and the dying are capable.
"Day one. Today I got beaten up. I didn't do anything. I was just standing there. They came up and started hitting me. First they shoved me, then kicked me. I fell. They laughed. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't scream. I just lay there and waited for it to be over."
"Day two. I have no friends. I'm a loser. Everyone at school laughs at me. Nobody wants to talk to me. I sit at the back desk and look out the window. I feel like I'm invisible."
"Day three. I have a friend! His name is Genzo. He's older than me. I thought he wouldn't want to talk to me, but he came up himself. He said he'd noticed me. He said I looked sad. I don't know why he cares. But I felt better."
"Day four. He left. I love him. He's my friend. But he left, and I don't know if he'll come back. I sit at home and look at the door. Waiting for him to walk in."
"Day five. He never came. I can't sleep. All I do is think about him."
Genzo flipped through several pages. The entries grew shorter, the handwriting more uneven, words sometimes broke off mid-word, as if the boy were running out not only of ink but of the strength to believe that anyone would ever read it. On one of the pages he saw an entry written in pencil, as if Renji had been afraid someone would find it: "Two years have passed. He came, but he hates me. Do you think I don't see it? You're wrong. But I don't care. Even if you hate me, I'll still be there."
Genzo closed his eyes. His chest felt tight, as if someone had laid that very gravestone on it. "I didn't hate you," he thought. "I just didn't know how to show that I didn't. Is there even a difference between those two things for someone waiting by a window?" He slowly opened his eyes, turned the page and saw a list. He read the lines, and each of them left a mark on him, like a knife sliding not across paper but across something inside Genzo himself.
"Ria Kisaragi. Sadist. Kills little kittens."
Beside it was a photograph. A girl with dark hair and a thin build. She was truly happy. To her, other people's pain and death were simply entertainment.
"How do I find you?" he asked the photograph, and his own voice sounded strange to him in the silence of the room.
He turned the page. Nothing more. Genzo closed the notebook and sat in the silence, listening to the wind outside the window. The rain had almost stopped, but drops still fell from the eaves, rare, heavy, tapping out an uneven, ragged rhythm, as if the house were counting something important and kept losing count. He ran his fingers over the cover, feeling its rough surface, and thought that revenge was a strange thing: it promises relief, but more often than not it merely changes the shape of pain rather than removing it. And yet he could no longer stop. Not because he believed in justice, after today he wasn't even sure justice existed beyond the human words about it, but because to do nothing would mean betraying the boy who wrote in pencil, afraid of being read.
He got up and went to the window.
Genzo leaned his forehead against the cold glass and suddenly smirked, wearily, almost without malice.
"Well, anyway," he said into the darkness, "what's the rush. I don't know the city, I haven't seen their faces, and running around the streets with a photograph in my pocket is the worst thing to do. If she's the way it says here, sooner or later she'll show up on her own. I'll wait. Maybe she'll come knocking herself."
He closed his eyes, and the wind outside the window answered him with a long, drawn-out sigh.