Shoujo Kakumei Utena and all characters are property of B-Papas, Saitou Chiho, Shogaku-kan, and TV Tokyo. Please do not repost without permission.
Kono Naka: Saionji Kyouichi Wa Nikki Ga Tsukeru
[In Which Saionji Kyouichi Keeps A Diary]
strange – in Persia, I thought…But I could not remember the end of the dream."
- James Joyce, "Dubliners"
A girl I knew told me once quite long ago that boys don't keep diaries. They keep journals, she said, tossing her head at me like it was the most natural thing in the world she should know something I didn't. Girls had diaries and boys had journals.
I had asked why, and she had given me a look, what, you don't know how the world works?
I don't remember her name and am quite glad I don't. I do remember that she annoyed the living hell out of me. She was in one of my classes in university and every day she had some kind of snide comment for me as I walked in. I took to skipping class because it was too much.
I could have told her to go away, I suppose, or just ignored it, but I'm not that kind of person. When I was younger, I used to wish that I could change my personality, would pretend that I was some fearless, outgoing personality, the kind that always got chosen in junior high and high school as student council president or class leader or positions of that sort.
But I was not. I was simply Kyouichi, straight-A student, top 1% graduate, Todai scholar, and writer.
I kept a diary. I'd kept one ever since I was seven years old, and I had all the old entries in carefully locked and labeled books kept in a box in my closet. It was not a journal, because I said so.
After I graduated from the University of Tokyo, I'd stuck around downtown for a year or so, thinking that perhaps I might get used to the scholarly life there. The university had hired me as undergraduate professor of literature, which made sense since my degree was in Japanese literature, and I'd moved off campus into a tiny little apartment overlooking the streets of Ginza. It was supposed to be exciting in Tokyo, but I discovered three months into my teaching stint that I was not excited at all. I was simply cramped.
So I left.
I moved to the outskirts of the city, to a not-quite-sleepy yet not-quite-awake small-large town forty-five minutes on the Chuo line from Shinjuku, near enough to the heart of the metropolis that I was still there if I wanted to be, but far enough that I did not have to feel cramped.
I'd neglected to keep up my diary when I was teaching at Todai, probably because there was nothing at all going on in my life just then. It wasn't to say I didn't write, but it was that I would write once or twice a week instead of once or twice a day, as I had used to.
Some of my friends kept journals on the internet, on their computers, but I couldn't do that. I never even tried. There was something about the sound of pen scratching on paper that made me feel like I was accomplishing something.
"Good lord, Kyouichi," my friend Yuriko said playfully one night as I was relating to her the long and involved story of me, my insurance agent, and my JCI for my new car. "You should get a TV show or something. Or a radio show. Or at least a diary. Your life's like a novel."
I noticed she didn't call it a journal, but I still didn't feel comfortable telling her that I had one already. After that girl I knew in my university days, I'd kept that part of my life private. Diaries were private things, anyway.
Yuriko and I dated for about a year and then we broke up, quite amicably, because we both decided we were better off as friends than as lovers. My parents were disappointed; my mother and Yuriko's mother were best friends, and my father seemed to believe that the more grandchildren he had, the more secure he would be in his old age. I wasn't quite sure how that worked, but as I was an only child, I was his only hope.
But it was Yuriko's suggestion that planted the idea in my head that I should become a writer. I wrote several short editorials, submitted them to various magazines, and one of them liked me enough to hire me. I was a little shocked, and Yuriko was a little happy, and we went out to dinner to celebrate and almost got drunk enough to have sex.
Almost.
Besides Yuriko, I had various other friends from various other walks of life – a few of them writers, like me. Another was a plumber, and I couldn't remember how I had met him, but it had involved alcohol and a downtown bar in Roppongi. There was still another one who appeared and disappeared out of our lives at odd times, and from what we could gather, he lived month to month, hopping on the train when it suited him, coming back when he felt like it. He would tell us stories of places and towns we had never been to: Oita, Fukuoka, Naha, Hakodate, Sendai. I'd been at least as far west as Osaka and as far south as Tokushima, but Yuriko had admitted to never having been much of a traveler, and the farthest she'd ever been was Nagano, half an hour on the bullet train from Tokyo.
And then there was Kiryuu Touga.
He was one of those friends who, like the plumber, I should have never met. I didn't meet him in a bar under the influence of one too many drinks, but it was almost like I should have, because he appeared in my life just as mysteriously as he suddenly disappeared out of it less than a year later. Yuriko never really took a liking to him, but she couldn't ever tell me why.
No, I met Touga at an office function, one of the very few and far between office functions I went to, because they were all the same and I did not like the people in my office. Being somewhat of an anomaly at the magazine, I was not required to go into the office unless I had a piece to hand in, which was once a week. I remember the night I before I met him, I had been writing in my diary, strangely, about castles. Something about castles, and I had written half a page before I realized what I had written, stared at it, and ripped the page out and started over. A diary was a diary, but things like castles did not belong there. I was not a novelist.
There had been a lull at the party and I had been at the bar pouring myself, miraculously, a glass of water, because I only liked getting drunk with people I enjoyed being around, and I did not enjoy being around these people. They were dull. They probably thought boys should keep journals too.
"Hello," said a voice at my shoulder. "I haven't seen you around."
Touga was a full meter and a half taller than me, with shoulder-length red hair and a lopsided mouth that was even more lopsided when he smiled, which was often. You couldn't really tell his mouth was lopsided, but that was always the first thing he announced to people, I discovered. His teeth were perfectly white and even, and he had all the breeding and carriage of a member of the upper class.
That should have made me wary of him, but it didn't.
"Who are you?" I said.
"Mechanic," he said, flashing that charming, lopsided grin again.
I blinked. Mechanic? I'd expected something like intern journalist, freelance writer, date of someone I knew in the office. "Uh…all right."
He'd laughed. His laugh was like his teeth, white and even, but not flashy. Comfortable. "I fix cars."
He had explained later that he had been invited to the party by his brother-in-law, because he happened to be in town that weekend and his brother-in-law had thought it would be nice for him to meet some of the people in his office. I couldn't see how that could be, I wrote in my diary. Office parties are fine for the average salaryman, and maybe a little dull for the corporate boss. But a guest? At an office party? He must have been bored to death.
If he had been bored to death, he never showed it, and I found his conversation entertaining, and we spent most of the rest of the party at the far end of the room, sipping drinks and people watching. I expected that to be my last encounter with him, but the following week he showed up at the next party, waving at me as I entered the door.
"I've decided to stay here for a while," he said. "Found a job in a local car garage with good pay."
Looking back in my diary, I see that I wrote after that second meeting that Touga seemed like a good guy, not quite charismatic, but the ladies would find him charming and the men would probably find him somewhat companionable. He was one of those guys you would watch soccer with on television on a Friday afternoon, or hang out with at one of the local bars at night on the weekend, both of which we did together after that second party. I wasn't quite sure what it was, then, that drew us together.
I'm not quite sure what it was now either. That one year with him is somewhat blurry, and when I try to look back at it in my diary entries, at least of what I recorded, my handwriting seems to have become inscrutably messy during that time and I cannot decipher most of what I wrote.
Touga took up residence in a small apartment two blocks from his car garage. In the evenings, I would usually walk over to his place and we would go get sushi in a small shop another couple of blocks away, or he would come over and we would watch soccer. He was a big soccer fan, and though I'd never been a big fan of the sport, I found his scathing commentaries on the players so amusing that I would sit through hours of it just to hear him talk.
Touga had a quick wit. That was one of the things I found most charismatic about him. His appearance was, at least at first, nothing special, though he was not bad-looking, and he always dressed in casual clothes – baggy jeans, old t-shirts – even if we were going out for the evening. Yuriko complained when she went with us that she hated his sense of fashion. I think that Yuriko amused him, or at least whenever he looked at her he would get a sort of faraway look in his eyes, as if she reminded him of someone.
The last diary entry I kept before the dreams began was dated 12 March, in which I wrote, I think that meeting Touga has been one of those choices of fate that the poets used to write to us about – perhaps about the road not taken, or something along those lines. For some reason I feel like I took that road, and so far I am hoping I made the right choice.
I remember the dreams all as vividly as if I had been living them, even more vividly than any of my diary entries helped me remember my living memories. They did not come every night. Sometimes they would come in groups of two or three, continuations of the previous nights' dream. Sometimes there was one long dream and then I would not have any for the next few weeks. And sometimes they were nightmares.
Touga was in all of them but one.
The first night, I dreamed that I was walking the halls of a castle, a white marble castle, very cold and very beautiful and very empty. I woke up the next morning feeling strangely unsatisfied, as if I had been searching for something and had not found it, and that night I went over to Touga's place to get him to go eat dinner, and he mentioned that I had been in his dream the previous night.
"Oh?" I said, not thinking anything of it.
"I was in some sort of castle," he said, sounding bewildered, and I was not sure which startled me more – his words or the fact that he was bewildered, because I had never heard him sounding less than absolutely sure of himself. "I saw you out of the corner of my eye – you were going down the center hall. It seemed like you were looking for something, and then you looked up and looked straight at me, and I tried to call your name. But then I woke up."
The next night, I could feel the castle somewhere close by, but I was not in the castle but rather wandering through the halls of a large, dusty, deserted building that looked strangely familiar, though I did not know why. It was only with slight surprise that I turned a corner and found Touga leaning against the wall, dressed in some sort of school uniform, white, with a bemused smile on his face.
"Fancy seeing you here," he said.
We never spoke of the dreams in our waking encounters, though I could see the knowledge of them behind his eyes, and I'm sure he could see the same in mine. But every night, when we did dream, it was the same old building, the same hallway, and we would wander the hallways for hours. I don't think we ever did speak inside that building, except for the first time, but there was something in the air between us that transcended speech, something that was very much like memory, but not.
The dreams continued that way for almost a year, and then one night I opened my eyes and knew I was dreaming, but there was no building, just a platform of stone, and I was leaning against the railing. I turned and looked down and realized that it was a long way to the ground.
That was the first thing I realized. The second thing I realized was that I knew I had been here before.
"What is this place?" I whispered.
"Kyouichi?"
I saw him kneeling in the middle of the arena, for that was what it was – an arena of some sort. He had one hand pressed to the ground, as if supporting himself.
"I don't know what's happening," I said. "But…I've been here before."
He shook his head, and I saw that his red hair had grown several inches from its length in our waking life. It curled, long and fiery, around his shoulders and cascaded down his back, rich and luxurious, like a woman's tresses. His eyes, as he looked up at me, were almost frightened
"So…have I."
We saw each other less now, during the day. I'm not sure how or why we stopped seeing each other every day. I know Yuriko was relieved. She believed, perhaps rightly, I'm not sure now, that Touga was some sort of demonic influence on me, and relished every opportunity to tell me so and how glad she was that we were no longer hanging around each other. I took her berating with easy grace, going out to dinner with her or my friend who was a plumber, or our mutual friend who was a vagrant on the train, and she would listen with wide-eyed interest as he told her tales of his last Snow Festival in Sapporo, and I would stare moodily at the dark restaurant ceiling and drink.
Then I would go home and go to bed, and Touga would be there waiting for me.
I never touched Touga in the dreams. At least I don't think so. There are times now when I sit here, thinking about them, and I seem to remember the touch of his lips against me, perhaps on my cheek, perhaps my hand, perhaps my lips, perhaps somewhere on my neck, on my collarbone. But those are ghostly recollections at best, and to my knowledge, it never happened. But the arena made everything strange.
"Castles," Touga said one night, and I knew that to be true, that it had something to do with castles, but neither of us ever figured that out.
There were two nightmares, both of which were similar. In both of them we would be wandering the halls of the building or standing on top of the world in the arena which was so familiar to us but which neither of us could place. The sky would grow dark and it would begin to rain, except the rain was suddenly blocks of stone falling from the sky, and then the stones would turn into pointed swords, and I could not move, only watch as the swords dropped from the air around me. I remember thinking that I would die.
I would hear Touga's voice out of the wind that whipped through my clothes and my hair, Touga screaming my name, and then I looked up and saw that one of the swords had pierced me neatly through the chest.
Some people say that if you die in a dream, your true life in the waking world will end as well, but I did not die. I just remember the pain, the pain that stayed with me even when my eyes snapped open and I clutched my chest with both hands, which were sticky with sweat.
My diary begins again on 20 November, and that was the day the dreams stopped.
The last dream with him, on the night before that, is very unclear to me still. All the other ones come to me in crystal detail, but for some reason when I look back on that one, it all blurs together like runny watercolors in the rain. We were not in the arena, I know that much. There were roses, many roses. I remember him standing there in the garden, waiting for me, walking towards me as I stopped in the garden gateway.
He said something that I cannot remember, and then he reached out his hand to me, and I saw, on the fourth finger of his left hand, a seal with a rose crest on it.
I remember our fingers touched, just before I woke.
The next night, when I entered the dream, it was the castle again, the castle which I had not seen since the first dream, and I roamed the hallways, looking for him, always expecting him to be around the next corner, but he was not there.
When I got up the next morning, I showered and dressed hurriedly, driving up to his garage and inquiring at the front desk as to if he had come into work yet.
"Didn't you know?" the clerk at the desk had said, looking at me wide-eyed. They all knew I was Touga's friend. "He quit."
I stared.
"He quit two days ago," the girl on the other side of the clerk said, ruffling through some files, stopping to look up at me as she realized that no, I really did not know. I had no idea.
I drove to his apartment, hoping they were joking, or even if he really had quit, that he was still there, biding his time, collecting his thoughts. He'd given me the key to his rooms several months earlier, and when I put the key in the lock and turned, the lock had already been changed. I pounded on the door, but I knew the room was empty.
There is nothing in this town that remains as evidence that he was here at all, I wrote later that night, my handwriting slow and cramped, choosing the words carefully as if recording eight months of history all on a single page. Not the building where he lived, not the place where he worked, not the friends who he kept, because I was his only friend. Even I, only a day after I last saw him, sit here in the dark and wonder if he really ever existed.
But he did exist, I knew, because there had been the Friday afternoon soccer and the evenings at the sushi bar, and the weekends of drinking and doing things that ordinary males in their mid-twenties did on the weekends. Even if no one else remembered, I remembered.
I tried to recall my dreams to write down in my diary which I'd neglected, but whenever I pulled it out, intending to transcribe them, I found I could not remember them. I tried several times and then gave up. They were clear in my memory, anyhow, when I was not looking or thinking about the diary, and as long as they stayed there, it didn't matter if I wrote them down or not.
I would have told him about my diary keeping, about how every mention of his name on a page seems now to leap out to me before my eyes, like a spark or a small explosion of light. I would have told him how it was not a journal, but a diary, because diaries had life to them where journals did not. It did not matter that he did not appear in there often, and the dreams did not appear in there at all, because I had never told anyone else about the diary, and he would have been the first.
Sometimes I think of my vagrant friend train hopping his way across Japan, and wonder if Touga might be there doing the same. That makes me happy, because that way I can think that I will see him again sometime soon, and then we can watch soccer together again and go out to dinner on a Friday night, and he can tell me stories of places he's seen and then I could tell him about my diary, about how now that he is gone, the pages are covered with mentions of his name in neat, precise handwriting that is perfectly legible and easy to read, and how every night I go to bed in hopes that I can see him just one more time for reasons of my own that I barely even understand, reasons that are more than the simple wish to see an old friend again.
It is not that I regret never having said goodbye to him, I wrote. It's not that at all…because I feel somehow that we never said hello in the first place, that our meeting that night was just the continuation of something that had been there since before we were born, something that I feel has not quite ended.
28 Jan 04