Episode 35 — Room

Opening the door, the smell of a Japanese-style room holding early summer hit my nose. A smell I never normally think twice about — but with Shion beside me, I found myself suddenly, unaccountably self-conscious about it.

“Come in.”
“Um — excuse me.”

Perhaps unaccustomed to visiting other people’s homes, Shion said it with an unpractised formality, stepped out of her shoes and came inside. Even unaccustomed to it, she lined her shoes up neatly — a detail that made me think, with a small pang, how different our upbringings were.

A narrow little corridor. A small built-in sink. Beyond that, tatami spreading out, with a low table and a shared laptop computer in the centre. In a room conspicuously sparse in objects, only the bookshelf packed tight with paperbacks had any real presence — but looking more closely, the spines of Dazai and Akutagawa had a faint layer of dust settled on them.

Not a single room of one’s own — though there were separate sleeping areas further in — the sliding door was half-open, and the partition was flimsy, privacy almost entirely absent. The kind of living arrangement that might have produced a rebellious phase, I thought, if my mother were home more. All the distances were that close. And in that room, Shion was looking around with curious, slightly restrained eyes.

“Sorry — it’s a small place.”

I said it as matter-of-factly as I could. From the outside of Shion’s house and the way she carries herself, I’d already had a rough sense of how she lives — and saying that what I felt about it was no kind of inferiority complex would be a lie. But I didn’t want to be treated carefully either, and I kept myself upright so things wouldn’t take on a strange, heavy atmosphere. I know well enough that Shion isn’t the kind of person to look down on something like this, and being self-deprecating would be rude — to myself and to her.

All of that internal deliberation — and then:

“Tatami for the first time — it’s fun.”

A guileless, childlike response that made the whole tangle of my thoughts feel absurd. The tension I’d been holding released all at once. I thought again, with fresh force, how much I liked this pure quality in Shion. Pure to the point of occasionally making me anxious for her — and precisely because of that, I found myself driven to something that couldn’t possibly have originated in me: the urge to protect her. Meeting sides of myself I’d never known, through Shion — unsettling, but not something I disliked.

“Good. Here — I’ll get drinks, so sit down.”

Saying that, I placed a cushion in front of the table and patted it.

Shion sat down with a tentative air. In a formal kneeling position, for some reason, hands on her knees.

“You can uncross your legs.”

I said it with a laugh, watching with a smile as Shion awkwardly rearranged her legs, and moved to the sink.

I took ice from the tray, filled two glasses, poured barley tea.

When I came back with the tray, Shion was staring at the laptop on the low table with a grave, thoughtful expression.

“Sorry — it’s in the way, isn’t it.”

I hurried to move the laptop aside and set the glasses down. For some reason, Shion’s expression looked faintly reluctant to see it go. I tilted my head and sat down across from her. And then:

“Not over there.”
“Mm?”
“Uta can be mean sometimes.”

Murmuring that, Shion picked up her cushion and came to my side. She sat down right beside me. At the short side of the small table, the two of us were a little cramped, and naturally pressed closer together.

“Isn’t it too narrow?”

I asked it to disguise the sound of my heartbeat.

Being honest, the fact that the two of us had managed to fit at all was impressive — I couldn’t help but be aware of my own smallness and Shion’s slender, slight frame. And regardless of all that, sitting side by side was hardly the ideal position for studying. I was assembling this rational defence — when:

“But I’m happy being close to you, Uta.”
“Ah — right.”

My defences were dismantled in an instant. Shion’s face too close to read at this distance — but at the very least my own face must be bright red, and the heat in my body was impossible to manage, so still supporting Shion’s weight against me I groped for the air conditioner remote and switched it on.

“W — well, let’s study then.”
“Yes.”

On those words as a signal, we spread out notebooks and reference books. Predictably, the short side of the small table couldn’t accommodate the volume of materials and everything became a cheerful tangle — but the closeness of it, undeniably, was dear.