Not sparing a glance at the garden to his left, Nisshi was walking quickly. He passed by the main hall, then the smaller drawing hall, and followed the narrow path that ran through the garden until he passed through the north gate. That gate was a small entrance located on the opposite side of the one we’d first come through.
Even after leaving Tenryū-ji, Nisshi didn’t slow down.
A lush green bamboo thicket appeared ahead of us.
“Wow...” I let out.
I’d seen the bamboo thickets of Sagano in images many times before coming here, but they were still an overwhelming sight up close.
The last sunrays of the day rained down between the bamboo stalks that grew around us as if competing in height. Everything I could see was green. This path was as quiet as they came.
Nisshi walked on and so did I, a bit behind him.
Even after we passed the thicket, Nisshi didn’t stop.
All temples and shrines would stop accepting visitors around this hour. Not many people could be seen on this country road, which felt more like a footpath between rice fields.
I couldn’t tell if he knew where he was going or if I was following him. There was no hesitation in his step. For some reason, I didn’t have it in me to call out to the small figure ahead of me that I knew so well, so all I could do was follow.
I wondered how long we’d been walking. Thirty minutes? Maybe almost an hour? The sun began to set, rapidly losing its brightness.
At a small road with a good view of a wide, desolate field, Nisshi stopped. I did too, a few meters behind him.
There were trees growing past the field and a mountain rose up behind them. The few buildings I could see along the road were Japanese-style detached houses one or two stories high—I couldn’t tell if they were residential houses or temples. As far as the eye could see, we were surrounded by silent nature.
“The wish I wrote on that ema yesterday was to go out with Nicole. Looks like that did nothing at all,” began Nisshi with his back turned to me. “She gave me cookies, even if they weren’t homemade. As a thanks for White Day, apparently. I feel like an idiot for getting my hopes up from that.”
It appeared he had, in fact, noticed that I’d followed him.
Suddenly, I remembered the call I’d received from Sekiya-san. I hadn’t realized it at the time, but the train on the other end of the line must’ve been so loud because it was on the shinkansen.
“A boyfriend can show up empty-handed. You saw how happy that made her,” Nisshi went on.
I wanted to say something to him, but nothing tactful came to mind. Before I could think of anything, Nisshi continued.
“I would’ve been fine with anyone until a short while ago. I’d date any girl as long as she was cute.” He drooped his shoulders. “I wonder how it ended up like this... It has to be Nicole for me now... Looking at other girls doesn’t do anything for me anymore.”
Nisshi looked behind him just a bit, letting me see his face from the side. His expression was full of misery.
“Nicole probably feels this way too. Toward her ‘senpai’...”
It was hard to look at his smile—it seemed to indicate resignation or self-deprecation.
“It’s not that it couldn’t be me... I’m pretty sure it’s just that it couldn’t be anyone but him.” His face was full of his feelings for Yamana-san. “I want to go back to my old self. To wipe my memory and go back to before I fell in love with her.”
“Is that what you really want?”
But the moment I asked that, I thought it was an insensitive question.
If, by some chance, something were to happen between me and Runa, I wouldn’t want to forget my love for her. I wouldn’t want to forget, though it would’ve made things easier if I could forget in the first place.
A gust of wind blew past us, making the mountain trees and the field of grass rustle all at once.
Before I had realized it, our surroundings had grown a bit dark. The whole scene was losing clarity. The trees, the fields, the road, the figures walking in the distance—all of it was fading into darkness quicker than the sky was.
This might’ve been the first sunset that had made me feel so uneasy. It was then that I noticed there weren’t any streetlamps around.
The word “ōmagatoki” came to mind—twilight was said to be the time when evil spirits could cross over into our world. I felt an instinctive fear of the dark.
It was a primordial dusk. Without a doubt, true night was about to set in in this area.
I really wanted to see Runa right now.
Nisshi wasn’t going anywhere from this dark road, however. I was about to call out to him, but then he spoke first.
“Nobody needs me... I wish the night would just swallow me up so I could disappear...” He sounded crushed with grief.
“Nisshi...”
It wasn’t true that nobody needed him. He was one of my few precious friends. He was a unique existence, and there wasn’t anyone else like him in the world.
But that probably wasn’t what he wanted to hear right now. At this moment, Yamana-san was his whole world—if she didn’t want him, he didn’t care about anything else.
I was like that too. If Runa were to disappear from my life, that would be as good as the end of the world for me.
Which was why I just knew that there was nothing I could say to him now.
“That guy was so tall,” Nisshi said.
I figured he was talking about Sekiya-san.
“He wants to be a doctor, right? And that’s because his father’s a doctor too?”
“Yeah.”
“I wonder if there’s even one thing I could beat him at...”
I knew plenty of good things about Nisshi, but it wasn’t like this was about winning or losing due to one’s qualities.
He was sensitive and easily hurt, which made him fearful of strangers and prone to retreating into his shell. But he loved fun and would observe the world with large eyes full of curiosity and wariness, even if his perspective was a little bit skewed. I could tell because some of that applied to me too. That was why we were friends.
He was different from Sekiya-san, but I liked both of them. It was probably why Yamana-san was friends with Nisshi too.
I couldn’t tell if he’d ever stood a chance with her in a romantic sense, though. And that was what was important to Nisshi right now, so I couldn’t give him any thoughtless consolation.
In the end, the only thing I managed to say was...
“Let’s go back to the hotel and watch KEN’s uploads from today.”
That line was unserious, but maybe Nisshi could tell how I felt.
“Yeah, you’re right,” he said, finally turning around and looking at me with a smile.
And so, Nisshi and I started to walk back through the dark and desolate countryside, not talking much on the way.
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