メロウレイン / Futtara Doshaburi Mellow Rain
Days Growing Full,
Part One
(In Place of an Afterword)
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Michi Ichiho
At Hagiwara’s flat, there was a calendar he and Sei used together.
It was A3-sized, one month to a page, and each day had three separate memo spaces, which made it surprisingly convenient.
One space was for Hagiwara’s plans.
One was for Sei’s.
The last was for household reminders: fire-equipment inspections in the building, rubbish collection schedules and things like that.
They kept it on the wall beside the fridge.
Whenever they had a spare minute—while waiting for the kettle to boil or the microwave to finish—they scribbled on it.
Sharing a calendar app on their phones would have been easier and more reliable.
But they both liked the analogue version, including its little omissions and mistakes.
If Hagiwara wrote PAYDAY, Sei might draw an arrow from it and add ME TOO.
If Sei wrote THERE’S WATERMELON IN THE FRIDGE, Hagiwara might later add IT WAS GOOD.
Their schedules gradually became mixed with something like a pointless little exchange diary.
The best part was that all of it remained there in their different handwriting.
Sometimes, after a small argument, one of them would quietly leave SORRY ABOUT LAST NIGHT the next morning.
At the end of the month, they turned the page over and left it at the back.
They did not tear old months off and throw them away.
Sei had said daily tear-off calendars felt sad.
They just keep getting thinner. Feels like time itself is being shaved away.
Well, that’s basically what is happening.
Each day disappears and you can’t get it back.
You really are that kind of person.
What? Wait, wait.
Sei had sulked after that conversation, and after comparing far too many options they had eventually settled on this calendar.
A whole year already.
That went fast.
It was such an ordinary thought.
Yet since Hagiwara had begun spending his time with Sei, the feeling had changed slightly.
Time passing now felt more urgent.
More difficult to let go of.
More precious.
Like this.
“What was that restaurant we went to here?”
“Er… Yoyogi, wasn’t it? That Japanese-French place Adachi told us about.”
Hagiwara pointed at a scribble.
“Nakarai-san, what is this drawing supposed to be?”
“I don’t remember. Something must’ve been ridiculously good and I got excited.”
“Meat? Fish?”
“Why are you asking me?”
“Who else am I supposed to ask? Still… impressive artistic talent.”
“Drawing while pressing the paper against a wall is hard! Wait, why haven’t we been back since February?”
“It was far from the station. Bit inconvenient.”
“Yeah, but I want to go again. Right. Next year, definitely. Let’s go in January.”
“You mean next month. We’ll need a booking.”
“And this time you have to draw something.”
“Why?”
“Because next year I’m going to point at it and ask, ‘What the hell is this supposed to be?’”
“Fine by me.”
They turned through the calendar pages of the year that had passed.
Hagiwara could remember events as soon as he saw his own notes.
Even so, there was a strange distance to it, almost as if he were reading a record made by someone else.
They look happy.
The thought made him feel strangely shy.
Nothing spectacular had happened.
They had not won the lottery.
Nobody had been promoted into some glittering new life.
And yet it was unmistakable.
They had been happy.
“If this survived for a few hundred years, I suppose it’d become a historical document,” Hagiwara said.
“Would Japanese as we know it even still exist then?”
“Maybe not. We can barely read old kana spelling now.”
“Fleeting, isn’t it?”
Sei’s fingers moved gently across the paper.
The way that gesture made Hagiwara’s heart jump was one of the secrets that would never be written on the calendar.
“What if some really clever person in the future works hard enough to decipher it?”
Sei looked genuinely concerned.
“What do you mean, what if?”
“I’d feel bad. Imagine going to all that effort and finding out it’s just full of pointless stuff like this. They’d be so disappointed.”
“It’ll be fine. Your drawings will survive as an advanced cipher.”
“You seriously have to draw something next month.”
“For the record, I got a five in Art.”
“When was that?”
Far, far in the future, language, daily life and society would all have changed.
Hagiwara almost certainly would not have descendants there.
Neither would Sei.
But if some complete stranger, with no connection to either of them, found this calendar and managed to understand it—
Maybe they would at least be able to tell, somehow, that the two people who wrote it had been happy.
The thought made Hagiwara absurdly happy.