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Light Yagami does everything right. He does most things right. The things he does wrong aren’t pathological, only hurt himself, or are harmless good fun. Light Yagami wakes up every morning with his alarm clock and studies for at least four hours each day. Light Yagami likes sweet bread more than most other things but only eats it once a month. Light Yagami has never met a class he couldn’t ace with adequate effort, and has always been placed in the highest levels. Since he was young he’s won awards for sports and academics. Light Yagami is a model student, and the perfect son.
Light Yagami takes a gap year from university after his first year. Believe him, he knows how people must talk. His mother falters before reminding him. From a friend of a friend of a no-longer-friend’s mother, he hears about the shame, the disappointment, the “what a promising young man, throwing it all away because....”
He laughs himself hoarse when he realizes he can’t find it within himself to give a shit what so-and-so’s mother thinks about what he’s done.
He’d gotten decent marks in his first semester, and even better ones in the second. He’d almost taken a wrong step off a high building, and lost ten kilograms over three months. He’d met with his advisor one cold February morning and said, quietly but without levity or second-guessing, that he wished to take a gap year from his studies, and would not be returning for the next year. She had looked at him strangely before accepting, and he had sat in his room for the next twelve hours staring at this or that or nothing at all, considering the depth of his choices. Where had he gone wrong? Why was he no longer perfect? Why did he wake up each morning (each afternoon) starving and nauseous? Why did all of his classmates' laughter feel like pins and needles, and why were classes so theoretically easy yet difficult when he sat down to revise for them? Why had he given up? Why was it the most logical choice?
—
It’s quite the fall from whatever he had going, no matter how unsteady, to end up picking vegetables in his aunt’s garden in June in the forgotten countryside. As much as he found aspects of Tokyo revolting or distasteful, the flatness and the stillness and the apathy of the countryside annoys him. He has more energy than this life, even like this. He still wants to show the sweet grasses and maple trees that he’s more productive, less wasteful, altogether better than them, but as soon as he thinks these things he realizes how silly they are.
His sister calls him every Sunday. She tells him that her classes are going well. That she’s joined a new club. That she likes a boy, and she got a good grade on her recent English exam. He smiles and encourages her and thinks—does she feel it too? The hollowness, the want, the gaping hole? It’s just him. Scooped out perfection. What an awful thing to wish he could share with someone. Especially not her. She smiles over the phone and describes this boy, his spiky hair, his ability to kick a football, his poor grades in chemistry. He quirks a lip for her and her strange boy and tells her to be patient.
—
He fills time with books and online forums and video games and not talking to anyone besides his aunt and his second cousin. They treat him like an odd stranger in their house, which is to be expected, refreshing and needed, and uncomfortable and difficult.
He can’t put a name to what he’s feeling most days when he wakes up and the sun is shining and the first thought that comes to mind is— my chest hurts, something aches. And he can’t put a name to what he feels when he finishes a good book and clouds roll in and he wonders if he’ll ever read something as nice again. And then he picks another book out of the pile he’s collected from here or there—the first volume of a manga from several years ago, and starts reading again.
Four hours of his days are chores. He breaks a nail, low enough that his nail bed bleeds, one day, and tapes it over with strange hard tape his cousin gives him and wiggles his newly taped, heavy and crinkling finger in front of his eyes.
He gets new glasses and doesn’t wear them because his right eye can still see with perfect vision. At last half of him is still normal, functional, perfect. He goes to sleep with a soreness in his shoulders. A twinge in his left calf muscle.
He starts tutoring a young boy from the small family a house away—a young couple and their two sons—in mathematics and English. The boy says he’s impatient and a know-it-all, and he smiles through his teeth and tells him that he’s smart but isn’t applying himself. That the subject is quite easy if he’d just focus. That English is a language just like Japanese, and the kid should learn it if he ever wants to leave this small town with the wet roofs where nobody ever does anything and everyone knows that one among them is a To-Oh drop out. The kid asks for a prize when he gets a perfect score on his mock exam and all Light has to give him, wordlessly, is a single okra and May 2003’s Shonen Jump. The kid smiles, all the same, at the okra and everything.
—
He isn’t sure when he comes back to himself, or a version of himself that’s hospitable, and wakes up and thinks about a glass of water and toast instead of the fact that he’d really rather be anything but awake, but he does, eventually.
It takes months.
Nobody congratulates him. He doesn’t celebrate himself. But the sun comes out from behind some clouds and it’s nice on his face. Water’s seeped up his pant legs, so he rolls them up. When he looks in the bathroom mirror, he’s gotten a tan. He’s only sixteen kilometers outside of the far edges of Tokyo. The rural village is just like any other little pocket of tedious humanity, but the refuge is that it isn’t To-Oh, and his father and mother aren’t there, and his old childhood bedroom is at least twenty kilometers away, and he doesn’t watch the news here because his aunt doesn’t have a television.
—
He still can’t breathe when he thinks about going back to school. Sayu doesn’t ask about it.
—
He gets into novelists. Awful men who write about awful, depressing things. Many he’d already read for school, so he tries for the ones that people talk about like masterpieces—like they’ll teach you something about your own soul, or that the critics have adored, and such. He already knows he doesn’t like Dazai, nor Akutagawa. Soseki is decent. He doesn’t finish a single Mishima. He starts preferring the contemporary works.
—
When the weather gets colder he has a choice to make. His aunt says that she doesn’t mind if he says another semester or two. He’s been a good boy. He likes being told he’s been good. Dreads every reminder that he should, eventually, resume his studies. Maybe he can change his field of study? This is possible, no?
He isn’t sure. He’s read a hundred books. He ate too many vegetables and got too tan. He has a tan line across his biceps from his T-shirts, and his nose is sunburnt some days. They will make fun of him if he goes back to school. They’ll make fun of him, anyway, in their way.
He has to go back eventually, even if he isn’t perfect, right? They have to take him back, and he has to go, and it’ll be alright.
He picks up Steinbeck and doesn’t like that either. Well...he’s no longer in a crisis, so everything else can wait. He has the rest of his life to stop being perfect.
He wants to wrap himself in his grandmother’s quilt until it’s summer again, and try again from there. But this is the opposite of perfect, and he has to make a compromise.