Free Hardboiled & Hard Luck by Banana Yoshimoto

found an herbal tea that I’d heard was good for headaches and made a pot for Kuni. She gave me a little smile and washed down two aspirin with a gulp of tea.
    I didn’t have the slightest premonition of what was going to happen.
    If I had, I would have prevented it.
    She had on the same pajamas as always and had the same haircut.
    I always focus on the present, so why does the passage of time make me so sad? My sister, hopelessly romantic dreamer that she was, used to make me go with her at night when she set out to gaze at the window of her first love. As we walked along the darkened streets, we would listen to some song we both liked, playing it again and again, each of us using one earphone from the same Walkman. I wasn’t interested in the boy my sister liked, but standing in front of the building where he lived, staring up at the light in his window, was something that made my heart thrill and ache. There were always stars overhead. The asphalt looked much closer when we listened to music while we walked. And the headlights of the cars were beautiful. Sometimes, even though we were still just kids, a guy would try to hit on us, or we would notice someone following us, and we found that electrifying. But as long as we stuck together, nothing could frighten us.
    Waves of feeling began surging out, one after another, from the place where they had been dammed up.
    Death isn’t sad. What hurts is being drowned by these emotions.
    I want to run away, I thought—to escape this distant autumn sky.
    “What have you done to me, Sakai? I can’t stop crying.”
    “It’s not my fault,” he said, taking my hand in his as I continued to cry.
    The warmth of his palm made me even more emotional.
    “Today is your crying day. Go ahead and cry.”
    “Were you in love with my sister, Sakai?” I asked.
    “No,” he said. “I only visited her to get closer to you.
    I laughed. “Too bad I’m going to Italy, huh.”
    “It is too bad.”
    Sakai didn’t look like he felt bad, so I wasn’t sure what he meant.
    “You did know Kuni, though, didn’t you?” I asked.
    “Sure, I knew her.”
    “Tell me something about her.”
    “OK.” He agreed right away. “Once, my brother went to a party with a lot of students from other colleges, and he asked a girl there for her phone number. He stuck the slip of paper he wrote it on in his notepad. When he got back to his apartment Kuni was there, and the paper dropped out and fluttered down to the floor, and Kuni kind of sensed what it was, so she tore the whole notepad to pieces right in front of his eyes.”
    “What kind of story is that?”
    “I was staying with him that night, so I saw it happen. I felt this heavy cloud of anger gathering, and I figured they would probably get into an argument later that night, so I put in my earplugs and went to bed early. But it turned out that Kuni was really good at putting things behind her. The two of them went right back to normal after that. Kuni’s behavior wasn’t forced, and she didn’t try to act as if nothing had happened—she just did what she always did. I realized then, for the first time, what a beautiful individual she was. Until then, I had always thought she was just an ordinary woman, and that she was bound to have a pretty frightening temper. Kuni and my brother had this cute conversation after that. What should we have for breakfast? We should get something really good, since your brother is here. Why don’t I go get some bread at the bakery that just opened over by the park? Even better, let’s go eat there, all three of us! God, it’s great to be on vacation, isn’t it? Yeah really. Things like that. They kept their voices down so as not to wake me, of course.”
    “I know what you mean. That’s so like Kuni,” I said, as tears began to trickle from my eyes again. “God, why am I crying so much today?”
    “It’s not because you’re sad, you know—it’s the shock. The sense of shock you felt at the