A year passed, and it brought many changes.
Hatano, for instance, lost the word aspiring from her description. Shijima won a prize bearing a great writer’s name. And Rōkai, the watercolourist, became someone whose name even people with no interest in art had begun to hear.
The world would call those significant changes. To the people they happened to, they were turning points. But alongside them, there existed a smaller change, a very small one, that drew the attention of those same people just as much. Far more modest than the ones listed above, invisible to public notice, unknown to any wider audience.
Still, it was a change.
Shinomiya had sat the Tokyo University of the Arts entrance examination.
“The results should be up soon.”
It had been a few months since Hatano’s professional debut, which had prompted the move to share a flat. In the living room set aside as their shared space, distinct from Shinomiya’s studio and Hatano’s writing room, Shinomiya sat on the sofa staring into the middle distance, pale and sweating with a tension Hatano had never seen on her before. Hatano murmured the words into the morning air, which was cold and sharp but softened by the heating.
No reply.
Shinomiya had grown her hair out a little over the past year. She sat with her hands clasped in her lap, head bowed as if in prayer. Hatano had never seen her this tense before, but it was a competitive ratio of fifteen to one. And this was a dream she was reaching for along the very path she had once turned her back on. She considered saying something to ease the anxiety, and then decided that, with so little time left, the tension was Shinomiya’s to experience. That said.
Hatano looked toward Shinomiya’s studio, with its crowded accumulation of canvases and sketchbooks built up over a year. People wanted effort to be rewarded, and resented success coming to those who hadn’t tried. Someone might argue that a person who had abandoned painting for years had no claim on a place here. But what was recorded in that studio was her blood and struggle, and Hatano had seen it with her own eyes. She was allowed to cheer.
“You’ll be fine,” she said, quietly.
You’ll definitely get in would be a weight to carry. This wasn’t that kind of world. Something like it won’t kill you if you don’t might have been honest, but she couldn’t see it pushing anyone forward, so she left it there.
For the thirtieth time in the past half hour, she refreshed the results page on her phone.
And this time the familiar screen changed to something unfamiliar, and “oh,” she said to herself, quietly.
“It’s up.”
Shinomiya jolted, shoulders rising. She looked up at Hatano with wavering eyes, held them for a moment to steady herself, and with trembling fingers reached for her own phone. Hatano, watching the uncertain movements, smiled despite herself and held out her own instead.
“Here.”
“Oh — sorry.”
Shinomiya took it with an apology, and found the results page for her department. She stared at the PDF link for several seconds, bit her lip, released it, closed her eyes and breathed — a long breath, steadied carefully. Then she opened her eyes with the resolve of someone who has decided, and said “I did what I could!” to herself in a sudden, firm voice. Hatano startled at the volume, then after a moment said “you did,” and smiled, and something of the tension left Shinomiya’s face too.
She tapped the link without hesitating. The PDF opened.
The screen filled with examination numbers, the full list of successful candidates. The sheer quantity of them made even Hatano momentarily dizzy, and she thought: behind each of these numbers there is blood and anguish, and refocused herself, narrowing her eyes to look through the Japanese Painting section of the Fine Arts department for Shinomiya’s number.
Her pulse picked up slightly as she went down the list. Eight, one, two, three — no, no, no. Numbers that weren’t the right one, repeating, and a cold sweat rising. But there was someone nearby more tense and anxious than she was, and that being the case, her own nerves were her own problem. She pressed her fist closed and killed them.
She kept following the numbers downward, and then had the sense she’d seen something familiar and stopped. She went back to the number she’d glanced over, checked it against the examination slip on the table. Eight, one, two —
“Oh.”
“Eh.”
Both voices at once. They looked at each other, and then together looked again at the screen.
No matter how many times she checked, the number didn’t change. What did this mean? Having spent so much mental resource on confirming the number, Hatano briefly forgot why she was confirming it, and remembered a moment later. Right: the Geidai results. And if the number was here, then —
“Con — congratulations! Shinomiya!”
She looked at her. But Shinomiya was looking back with the blank expression of someone to whom the reality had not yet arrived. No visible joy, nothing that resembled delight, and the gap was surprising enough that Hatano frowned and asked:
“You passed — but what’s wrong? Did you forget your number?”
She reached for the examination slip on the table out of concern, but Shinomiya shook her head with an eerie calm that bore no trace of the earlier tension. “No, I know my number,” she said. She let out something like a sigh, though it trembled slightly.
“I know my number, and I understand I passed. It’s just that —”
“Yes?”
“It’s just — wait. Did I pass?”
Cold sweat on her forehead and a strained smile as she asked the question she had answered moments ago. Clearly not entirely operational, Hatano grabbed her by the shoulders and gave her a shake.
“Are you all right? Come back to yourself!”
“My — self!? What does that even mean!?”
The two of them descended briefly into philosophical confusion together, and then, after twenty or so seconds, the reality reached Shinomiya at last. She focused on Hatano, who was more flustered than she was. They looked at each other in silence for a moment, and then Shinomiya checked one more time to be certain, and said it quietly:
“I passed. Didn’t I?”
Her feet still not quite on the ground, breathing unsteady, throat tight, eyes not quite stable. Hatano knew this feeling — it was how the news of a prize felt. She needed to land her squarely.
She looked Shinomiya in the eyes and said it.
“Congratulations.”
The reality would come on the heels of that word. And it did: Shinomiya drew a long breath, closed her eyes, and let it out.
She leaned back against the sofa cushion, face covered with both hands, and spoke.
“I hadn’t touched a brush in years, and I squeezed in by the skin of my teeth after just one year of working at it. But the people around me will see me the same way they’d see someone who failed the exam twice. The first-time pass rate at Geidai is extremely low — which means those who weren’t first-timers had that much longer to refine their work, and when you put us next to each other, my weaknesses and limitations are going to show up in detail, and —”
She was speaking to herself, thoughts surfacing in fragments. The old Shinomiya had talked in terms of how to be seen most attractively; recently, in front of Hatano, she’d been increasingly inclined to fall into this kind of absorbed monologue instead. Hatano found it wonderful.
“My sister — Rōkai — made her name without any art college. The gap between someone still learning and someone who has already produced results is enormous. There will definitely be people who know the connection between us, and when that happens, the comparisons will come.”
She paused and looked briefly at herself against her sister’s example. Measuring herself against something that large made her feel small. Hatano opened her mouth, thinking she ought to stop the self-diminishment for at least today — and then Shinomiya sat up straight and looked at her with clear, resolute eyes.
“Getting in is the starting line. It’s the beginning of the path toward taking one step past Rōkai.”
She said it plainly, without hesitation, and none of the fragility of a year ago was in it. That was a little sad, and simultaneously very welcome. The frightened, hesitant person from back then was gone, and what was in front of Hatano now was someone pursuing a dream. Someone who looked, in that moment, like an earlier version of herself.
However modest her standing as a writer, she was a professional now. Shinomiya was a student. Different fields, but by the standards of the artistic world she was still the senior. With this in mind, and having decided that simple praise wasn’t what this person needed anymore, Hatano gave a small, knowing smile.
“…Impudent, aren’t you.”
“My prep school teacher said the same thing.”
An unabashed grin in return.
A teacher with good eyes, evidently, and probably part of why she’d made it through. She gave thanks to whoever had looked at Shinomiya clearly and well. And at the same time, she honoured inwardly the year of effort it had taken: leaving university mid-degree, enrolling in the prep school, getting design commission work through a teacher who had believed in her colouring sense, funding herself with that money while cutting her sleep, and painting through all of it.
In light of all that, she was prepared to tolerate the impudence.
“Sushi, meat, or pizza — your call.”
“Sushi!”
The immediate, happy answer made Hatano smile.
They decided to hold a small celebration at home and invite the people they both knew, but Shinomiya had spent the past year with her head down in her work and had hardly anyone she could call — so that side of things was left to Hatano. While Shinomiya ordered the sushi delivery, Hatano went through a limited contacts list, found who she was looking for, and got in touch.
Three confirmations came back within minutes.
Shinomiya looked at Hatano’s satisfied expression and asked: “Who did you invite?”
“You’ll find out when they get here.”
A smile that gave nothing away. Shinomiya tilted her head.
They rearranged the furniture and tidied up for guests, and before they knew it midday had arrived. Just as she was thinking the guests might be close, the intercom rang as though it had been waiting for the thought.
Hatano stood up from the sofa, where she’d been sitting by the delivered sushi. She waved off Shinomiya as she rose to come with her — the main guest should sit and wait — and went to the door.
Of the three she’d invited, she had asked one to come slightly earlier than the others.
She hadn’t been late, she hoped. Through the peephole she confirmed the figure on the other side, and felt the corner of her mouth ease. She unlocked the door.
The person entered with a tense, formal bow and fixed their eyes on the door to the living room, swallowing visibly. Even this person, capable of anything the world put in front of her, wore that face — families ran that deep, she thought, with a quiet laugh — and she tilted her head toward the room and led the guest in.
“Oh, welcome —”
Shinomiya was already on her feet to greet them, and then she saw who had come in behind Hatano, and went still. All words left her.
“…Nee-chan.”
Black hair with the depth and sheen of a night sky, and a face that could have been Shinomiya’s reflection.
The person Hatano had invited, arriving ahead of the other two, was Shinomiya’s older sister, Rōkai.
Shinomiya stood open-mouthed, and Rōkai looked back with her expression pulled very tight, her eyes unsteady.
“I — excuse the intrusion.”
A silence settled over the room for several seconds. You could hear someone swallow.
Hatano had brought them together, but she had no intention of softening the silence. Everything she’d accumulated with both of them over time was what would do that — and from here, they needed to find their own way toward each other. She watched, and stayed quiet.
Shinomiya, who hadn’t had contact with her family since what amounted to an estrangement years ago, looked lost as to how to begin, and sent a look toward Hatano that was asking for help. At the same moment, Rōkai sent a similarly searching look in the same direction, and Hatano took out her phone and produced a deliberately unnatural “oh.”
“The other two seem to have got lost — I’ll go and guide them. You two talk.”
“W — wait —!”
“I’ll go! Let me go!”
Rōkai’s expression changed completely as she reached toward Hatano, and Shinomiya tried to volunteer herself as the one to go and find the others, but Hatano declined to be swayed. There had been history between them, yes. But the thing still separating these two now was only the residue of it. She was fairly sure it would be all right.
She smiled with mild, unrepentant wickedness, gave a brief wave, and stepped out, closing the door on both their objections.
“The main guest stays put. I’ll be back.”
She was gone before either of them could get another word out.
Left behind, Shinomiya and Rōkai both stared at the door she had walked through, and then looked at each other, as though on the same instinct. They both started to speak and deferred to each other and went quiet at the same moment. A few more seconds of silence, and then Rōkai looked around the room, clearly trying to find her footing, and spoke.
“Con — congratulations on passing.”
Shinomiya blinked, caught off guard at Rōkai being the one to open, and answered with her breath held.
“Oh — yeah. Thank you.”
Rōkai had been speaking carefully, with a formality you’d use with someone you didn’t know well, and Shinomiya realised after a moment that the careful distance had grown out of the years they’d spent apart. The mix of feelings this produced in her was complicated enough that she couldn’t find the right expression to match it. She looked at her sister. Rōkai was unmistakably tense, and that was a face Shinomiya felt she had never quite seen on her before.
She didn’t dislike her. She had been on her side since the beginning, and Shinomiya genuinely thought well of her. Today alone, Rōkai had come over as soon as she’d been called, and here she was giving her congratulations. And yet for Shinomiya, she was the embodiment of everything she’d never been able to have. Born with what Shinomiya lacked, raised with the family’s love focused on her, and at the same time, with the exception of Hatano, kinder to Shinomiya than anyone. And the more kindness had come from her, the more wretched Shinomiya had felt beside her, and the further away she had placed herself. Rōkai, sensing that, had given her the distance.
Years and years of giving each other distance, until this much had opened between them.
“Come and sit down.”
“…Yes.”
She gestured to the sofa; Rōkai sat. She thought about making coffee, but couldn’t quite bring herself to go and do it, and sat at the other end of the same sofa instead.
A silence followed. Neither of them knew what to say or how to begin, and the time drifted without purpose. Rōkai looked around the flat in a restless way, and occasionally glanced toward Shinomiya, and each time she found Shinomiya not looking at her, her shoulders fell slightly. Shinomiya, not knowing what face to show her, kept her gaze on the window and said nothing.
Looking at that closed, tightly held expression on Shinomiya’s face, Rōkai swallowed, and then began.
“I have been — regretting it. For a long time.”
Shinomiya looked at her. Both their eyes were unsteady with worry.
“That you put down your brush and moved out and started living alone — that was our family’s doing. Mine especially. I took everything that should have reached you, all the love and the interest and the recognition, and then, not wanting to be resented, I kept trying to appear kind to you.”
She said it with a face full of something that had been weighing on her a long time. Her voice was slightly unsteady, and Shinomiya’s eyes widened. She had not expected to see something like this come through that face.
“And so I should have put down my brush far sooner.”
Shinomiya’s composure wavered at this, and she opened her mouth to deny it, and Rōkai continued before she could.
“…Which was why, when Hatano-san told me you had gone back to painting, I was so happy.”
Just for a moment, a small echo of her old smile moved across Rōkai’s face. Seeing it, Shinomiya felt something tremble in her — the memory of a sister from years ago, surfacing through the years. She closed her hands in her lap and listened.
“There was the selfish relief of having some guilt lifted. But more than that — knowing that you had stood back up through all the noise and found your own direction, as your sister, I was proud of you. I was happy for you. Whether it’s painting or the same field as me — none of that matters. Knowing that the road you want is in front of you is all I need.”
She glanced toward the direction Hatano had gone and smiled. The knowledge that Rōkai knew that much made Shinomiya faintly shy — but beyond the shyness was the fact of her sister wanting her happiness, and she felt the heat rising behind her eyes. She wanted to say something, and found no words.
Rōkai smiled at her.
“Congratulations on getting into Geidai. It’s a place with extraordinarily original students and teachers, and what you encounter there will be a great foundation for you.”
No words came. When she tried to form them, her throat shook and got in the way.
She felt, oddly, like she was going to cry.
When she’d found out she’d passed, when Hatano had held her afterwards, she had been so focused on what was in front of her — on keeping her eyes forward, on catching up with her sister — that there had been no room or reason for tears. But now, at Rōkai’s words, they came. Because only now did she understand what Rōkai was feeling.
Rōkai’s expression remained gentle as she rose quietly from the sofa.
“Today — I’m sorry for arriving without warning. I should go.”
No sadness on her face, just a soft expression as she turned toward the door. Shinomiya almost stopped her and couldn’t find the words to.
She couldn’t find the words, but she stood up anyway.
And she reached out and took hold of her arm.
Rōkai turned, surprised. They looked at each other — Rōkai puzzled, Shinomiya uncertain.
A few seconds of silence, and Shinomiya thought. Why had she stopped her? Obviously, because there was no reason for Rōkai to leave. Then why was Rōkai going? Because she thought Shinomiya didn’t want her here. Because Shinomiya had given her cause to think so. The misunderstanding needed correcting, but she didn’t know what to say or how to say it. Nobody had ever taught her how to talk to family, how to close this kind of distance. She turned the words over in her head, finding none of them right.
And then something in her head said: that isn’t good enough.
Why had Hatano stepped out and left them alone? Because she had decided they would be all right. That wasn’t an expectation Shinomiya had any particular drive to meet, but it was still a reason to believe she was capable of it.
She still didn’t know what to say.
But she thought about what it was she actually wanted to give her, what was sitting inside her, and she stopped trying to find the right words and followed the feeling.
“Thank you. For always watching over me. Nee-chan.”
Those words at least didn’t tremble.
Rōkai’s eyes went wide. She went wordless, looking at her, taking time to absorb what she’d heard. Shinomiya kept going, putting the clumsy words together as best she could.
“For me, you were always someone with so much more talent, so much more loved by our family, someone to envy and resent and look up to — and also the family member who understood me. I never knew whether I should lean on you or compete with you, or what the right way to be with you was. But the kinder you were, the more wretched I felt beside you, so I kept you at a distance.”
She understood now what Hatano’s words had meant. People talk about knowing themselves better than anyone, but there is nothing harder to understand than your own feelings. Still, she’d managed to put the vague, accumulated sense of it into something, however ugly the language.
“So it wasn’t your fault. It was me, all of it — I was foolish, and cowardly, and weak. But I’m all right now. I can understand what you feel, and I can tell you what I feel. I’m all right now. I really am.”
She said all right more than once, because it was true and she needed it to be heard. The version of herself that had broken under external pressure and gone on living badly was in the past. She had changed. She could receive love without twisting it. She could accept a hand without flinching. The version of herself who had filled up the hollow days through warped means was no longer here.
Clumsy and roundabout, she worked to give her feeling shape, trying to bridge the distance with whatever words came.
Rōkai, who had been listening in silence, let her face move a little, biting her lip to hold back tears. A small tear appeared at the corner of her eye, but she stayed composed in front of her younger sister. Shinomiya, like a mirror, felt her own eyes grow wet, sniffled, and kept going.
“You might still see me as the small, unfinished one who needs watching over and helping. But — someday I’ll send paintings into the world not as Rōkai’s younger sister but as Shinomiya Nana. That’s why I got into Geidai. So I won’t keep comparing myself to you and letting it bring me down anymore. Not anymore!”
Her voice thinned and wavered. She looked down, steadying her breathing. Rōkai, across from her, let the tears fall without moving to stop them, and kept her eyes quietly on Shinomiya’s face. Meeting those eyes, Shinomiya wiped the corners of hers with the back of her hand, and said what she had been reaching toward.
“…I want us to talk like we used to.”
A larger tear gathered at the corner of Rōkai’s eye.
Formal speech and careful distance — not that. The way they’d talked before. It had been clumsy and taken the long way around, but had it reached her?
Rōkai pressed down a small sob and wiped the tears the same way Shinomiya had. More kept coming, and she wiped those too, and answered in a muffled voice that carried its emotion openly.
“Yes.”
And Shinomiya crossed the room like a small child and held onto her with both arms.
Rōkai held the slight frame of her sister and let the sob come free.
Years had passed, and they had both grown taller than they’d been. But in this moment, in this room, they were back in the childhood when they had both dreamed of painting. The time that had stopped when one brush fell was finally, slowly, beginning to move again.
“Ugh.”
“‘Ugh’ is not how you greet a guest.”
“Agreed.”
Outside the flat, leaning against the wall with her hands in her pockets, waiting for the right moment, Hatano found Shindo and Shijima coming down the corridor. She’d had them both navigated here from the station, but the two had somehow arrived early, and the slightly dismayed noise that came out of her prompted immediate protest from both.
“Sorry, that slipped out. You’re quite early — you’ve got a good half hour before the time I gave you.”
The plan had been to have Rōkai arrive first and give the sisters time to reconcile, then have these two come afterward. That plan was now in some jeopardy. Shindo shook his wrist toward her to show his watch.
“Being early is basic social practice.”
“Basic social practice also involves considering the other party.”
A clean rebuttal, and he laughed, a low, unhurried sound, adjusting the bag of drinks and snacks he was carrying. “I told him,” said Shijima beside him, with a resigned shrug.
These two had been helpful in various ways over the past year. Even after Shinomiya’s withdrawal from university, there had been plenty of contact, and more than a few conversations where she’d needed their counsel. They were not people to be left out of today’s news. But having them come in right now would be a problem.
“Being early is fine in principle — but I’m sorry, can you wait just a little longer? Cold out here, and I know it’s an inconvenience. It’s just that there’s a conversation going on in there that probably shouldn’t have an audience.”
She glanced at the door and then looked back at them, and both of them went from puzzled to understanding at approximately the same speed. One smiled lightly; the other settled into a quiet warmth. “Ah, I see,” murmured Shindo, and found a spot in the corridor that wasn’t in anyone’s way and put his back against the wall, hands in his coat pockets. His feelings for Rōkai were not a secret to anyone, and he wasn’t going to disrupt her reunion with her sister. Shijima, his oldest friend, followed suit without needing it explained.
Small, small voices, mingling with the cold of late winter.
“Do you think they’ll be all right?”
“…They’ll be fine. They’re both already looking forward.”
She answered Shijima’s quiet concern by looking up at the trees moving in the wind. Against the clear blue of the winter sky, the branches were vivid and beautiful. Shijima followed her gaze, and found nothing to argue with in her answer, and loosened the scarf around his neck a little and smiled.
“Good.”
His quiet word was heard by Shindo beside him, who let a smile go too, and looked toward the door that separated him from Rōkai’s reunion with her sister.
“Exactly.”
From the corridor, a bright blue sky, and trees putting out new growth in the last cold days of winter. It would make a beautiful watercolour, Hatano thought — and she let the lingering chill of the season settle around her and passed the time.