Mieko Kawakami

Just seeing you, though, I feel, I dunno, happamine.”

It was every face of Makiko I’d ever known—the one who laughed and cried with me, who ran up to greet me the second she saw me, who sat in the park in her uniform and rode off on her bike, who shut her eyes tight and cried through the entire wake, who took money straight out of her pay envelope to buy me new indoor shoes for school, who sat there, all alone, in her hospital bed after giving birth to her daughter, who was always there for me—every side of her was smiling now.

People always forget about these little things, but I believe that each one stays somewhere deep in everyone’s heart, and without noticing it they grow and harden, until one day they cause something terrible to happen

You haven’t gone to see her, not for ages. And if it goes on like that forever, then you’ll never see her again.”

It’s like at school you see everybody because they go to school every day. But when you graduate and you don’t go to school any more, it stops and you don’t see everybody any more. If you want to see somebody, you have to make plans to meet, or even make plans to make plans, and next thing you end up not seeing them any more. That’s what’s going to happen. If you don’t see somebody, you end up never seeing them. And then there’s going to be nothing left of them at all.”

My first visit to Tokyo Station was ten years earlier, the summer I turned twenty.

Busy electric signage and pachinko parlors waving banners.

It felt like picking up a picture you had seen a million times and realizing it had changed entirely, without you ever noticing.

But if Makiko had any other choice, she wouldn’t work nights at the bar or leave Midoriko alone.

“Well, we use words to communicate, right? Still, most of our words don’t actually get across. You know what I mean? Well, our words might, but not what we’re actually trying to say. That’s what we’re always dealing with. We live in this place, in this world, where we can share our words but not our thoughts.

“They say ‘good friends are hard to find.’ It’s true. It’s so hard to find people who actually listen, who try to understand your words, who try