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He's been feeling weird for the last few days. Tired—more than usual, anyway—and kind of headachy, which means Yoshiki doesn't really want to go sit in a loud movie theater for the next two hours, even if it is with his friends. But Shiori insists. "It's the last weekend before finals start," she argues. "And then I won't see any of you until next semester." So, sure, Yoshiki tags along, even if he'd really rather be back in his room with all the lights turned off instead.
The movie doesn't start for another half hour, so they're hanging around in the mall and eating shaved ice. Everyone else has started talking about their plans for the semester break. Both Shiori and Chihaya are going back to their hometowns, and Tomoya is going on some trip with his girlfriend to Hokkaido. It's a safe topic for Yoshiki to zone out during without looking too much like he's not paying attention. All he ever does during breaks is stay in Tokyo, anyway.
His ruse only works for a couple minutes. Then Tomoyo turns and kicks him in the shin, grinning when Yoshiki startles. "You going anywhere after exams?"
Yoshiki shrugs. "Nah. Not really."
"You always stay here," Shiori says. "Your parents don't get upset that you never visit?"
Something itches in the back of his mind. Yoshiki frowns, but before he can figure out what he's frowning about, Chihaya sighs. "Must be nice just not doing anything, though. Travelling this time of year when everyone's doing it is such a pain."
Shiori is still watching Yoshiki. "You're from some pretty small town, right? Do you not like going back, 'cause of everything?"
Yoshiki shifts uncomfortably and digs out another spoonful of shaved ice. "I don't know," he says. "I just—"
And then he stops.
For the first few seconds he's not alarmed. Not yet. Just confused, casting through his memories for a thought his brain expects to be there. There's a reason Yoshiki never goes back home, he knows that, but he can't quite remember what it is. Actually, he can't recall the last time he was home at all.
That strikes him as strange. He should remember something, surely—if nothing else, at least he should remember deciding to stay here over break. There must have been a conversation with his family about it at some point. Wouldn't his parents have asked if he was coming back?
Except—
Yoshiki can't remember them, either.
Fear pierces through the center of his ribs. He sits there with his spoon suspended in mid-air, ice melting off the tip. No one else seems to have noticed that the whole world has tilted suddenly askew, their conversation moving on around him as Yoshiki stares into the distance. He doesn't hear what they're saying. He has much, much, much bigger problems.
Yoshiki Tsujinaka can't remember the first eighteen years of his life.
Okay. Okay. He has to stay calm. Calm means not freaking out in the middle of the mall. Calm means finding an excuse to leave so no one will take too close a look at him and realize something's wrong. He fumbles through some weak apology about feeling sick (not even a lie; Yoshiki definitely feels sick right now) and escapes before his friends can ask too many questions. Anything to get as far away from here as fast as possible.
He flees through the mall and out onto the street with his heart pounding in his ears. The ground rolls beneath his feet. He's so light-headed that Yoshiki thinks he might detach from the earth and float away into the sky, but his shoes remain flat on the pavement. Somehow he keeps them there, walking, fists clenched, one foot stiffly in front of the other.
He makes it all the way to the subway station before the real panic hits.
Yoshiki doesn't remember—
Anything. He doesn't remember anything. He doesn't remember growing up. He doesn't remember his family. He doesn't remember ever going home, or what home looks like, or even what direction he'd have to go to get there. He doesn't remember who his parents are. He can't even picture their faces in his head. He grapples desperately for any memory of his childhood, a smell, a favorite game, a friend, and it all comes up empty. As if everything about Yoshiki prior to him living in Tokyo was simply peeled out of him and sliced clean away.
He's dizzy and he's shaking and he's hyperventilating in the middle of the subway platform. Yoshiki stumbles onto the arriving train and crams himself into the corner. Everyone else boarding keeps their distance, looking carefully away from him as if he isn't there at all. The way they all so obviously refuse to acknowledge his breakdown just makes it even more surreal.
He screws his eyes up tight. He can't have forgotten everything about himself. That just—isn't possible. Like—look, he knows who he is, right? He's Yoshiki Tsujinaka. He's in Tokyo. He's going to university. He's twenty-one. These facts come easily and immediately to the forefront of his mind. Does he remember what he did yesterday? Yes—he was studying at the library with Chihaya, and he bought soba at the supermarket afterward. The day before that was Yoshiki's last biomechanics class. He can remember what happened a month ago, and last year, and the year before that, too. All the way back to his first semester here.
Oh, thank god, at least Yoshiki hasn't completely lost his mind. But that's not much of a comfort, really, because that's where his memories end. Yoshiki remembers university, yes—but he doesn't recall anything before that.
He can't even remember going to high school. He boggles at that. Yoshiki must have gone to high school, right? Like, he obviously must have gone to high school. Just like he must have a family, and a hometown, and all the things that people have.
He just can't remember anything like that. At all.
His phone buzzes in his pocket. Yoshiki scrambles to pull it out. It's a message from Tomoya, asking if he's alright. He swipes it away, turns the screen off, and then instantly turns it on again as a chill runs through his body.
He opens LINE and starts scrolling through it. All his recent chats are from his friends. He flicks past them to older messages, sweat breaking out on the back of his neck. There must be something in here. Anything. There has to be—
His thumb lands on a contact titled "Mom".
He hits voice call. It doesn't even matter that he's on the train—let everyone glare at him for talking on the phone, he doesn't give a shit. The call screen pops up, followed by a chime. Yoshiki's heart skips a beat—
"Sorry," an impassive mechanical voice intones. "Your call could not be connected at this time."
He tries again. Again. Again. All the way until the end of the line.
When Yoshiki searches for "causes of amnesia" all sorts of terrifying things come up. Strokes, tumors, brain infections, seizures. Maybe he's bleeding in his skull, or he's dying of carbon monoxide poisoning. There are a million possibilities, but everything he reads agrees on one thing: this sort of memory loss means something is severely, critically wrong with him.
The lights at the student health center are too bright, and keep making his eyes water. Or maybe it just feels that way 'cause Yoshiki barely slept last night. He tells the doctor he's been having trouble remembering stuff, but in typical Yoshiki fashion he chickens out and doesn't explain the full extent of it. Forgetting details is one thing, but "I can't remember anything about myself before my nineteenth birthday" sounds way too fucking crazy to let out of his mouth. Even if it is the truth.
The doctor looks at the forms Yoshiki filled out, then back up. He says, "Have you been sleeping well lately?"
No, Yoshiki hasn't been sleeping well lately, but that's hardly new. Yoshiki has never slept well in his life. Wait, does he actually know that for sure? Maybe he wasn't such an insomniac in that period of time where his memories don't exist. Didn't Shiori think he was from some small town? Maybe he only has trouble sleeping at university because of all the crowds and city noise; he vaguely recalls having trouble adjusting to it his first year here. Does that mean anything? Is he from somewhere rural? How could Yoshiki possibly know?
"Tsujinaka-san?"
Yoshiki blinks back to himself. The doctor is watching him, not unkindly.
"Finals can be a difficult time for students," the doctor says, and sets the forms down. "If you're frequently stressed and exhausted, it's not unusual to have cognitive effects."
Yoshiki's stomach drops. He squeezes his hands together, hard. "It's not just that. It's—"
This is not regular absent-mindedness, or forgetting about a few assignments. This is catastrophic brain damage levels of bad. Whatever is wrong with him, it can't be fixed with relaxation and a good night's sleep. For fuck's sake, he can't even remember what his parents look like.
"Try to take it easy for the next few days," the doctor says. "If you're still feeling bad then, come back in." He smiles. "Get some sleep, okay?"
Yoshiki does not sleep.
It's three in the morning and he's in his room, huddled on his bed with the blankets wrapped around him. The chat log open on his phone is filled with dozens of failed calls and texts to "Mom". After digging around some more he's found a "Dad" contact too, but trying to dial that one just yields the same result: a few seconds of silence before the electronic voice clicks on to let him know the call has failed. It doesn't matter what Yoshiki tries. No one ever picks up the phone.
There are messages here, though. Lots of messages.
He's been scrolling through them for the last hour, getting sicker and sicker the more he reads. Whoever these accounts belong to, he's texted them a lot. His last exchange with "Mom" is timestamped eight days ago. She asked how his classes were going. He responded that things were fine. All their conversations seem to be about ordinary things. We're getting rain this week. I'm hanging out with friends tomorrow. I'll call on Monday. No, I'm not coming home for Obon. Banalities, fragments of a normal life, only made remarkable by the fact that Yoshiki remembers writing absolutely fucking none of it.
His stomach cramps as he scrolls farther back. The chat log spans back months, years. How could Yoshiki have forgotten years worth of messages? Things he must have typed himself, because there's just no other explanation. It can't be someone else logged into his account; there's too much stuff in here that undeniably is from him. Two years back there's a picture he sent to "Mom" from that time his classmates convinced him to go to a concert with them. It was the first concert Yoshiki had ever been to, and he remembers it vividly, the crush of noise and people, staggering back home on the train afterwards, giddy, exhausted, his ears ringing. But he doesn't remember ever sending anyone the photo.
He hits voice call again, shuts his eyes, and tries to picture whoever should be on the other end of the line. Anything, any detail. Just a face or voice or clothes or—
Beep. "Sorry, your call could not be connected at this time."
He closes LINE. He feels like he's going to throw up.
Yoshiki pulls the blankets tighter around himself and hunches over, his face pressed to the bed. If he could just remember what they look like, he's certain something else would come back to him. But the part of his brain that should contain that information returns only blank, faceless figures, wisping away before he can latch on.
He sits up, opens his phone again, and starts swiping through his photos, but Yoshiki already knows what he's going to find. His heart sinks. Back during his first semester here he accidentally dropped his phone down a stairwell and broke it too badly to get fixed. After he bought a new phone, he never bothered to transfer the pictures over from the old one. He remembers at the time that the decision felt almost liberating, like removing an old, restrictive part of himself, although Yoshiki has no clue why that was. Sure enough, the earliest pictures he has on here are from his first year in Tokyo. No evidence that Yoshiki has ever lived anywhere else at all.
If there are photos from the missing part of his memories, they'd still be on his old phone. Wouldn't they?
He staggers off the bed, tripping over his own feet. Does Yoshiki even still have that phone? He doesn't remember ever getting rid of it, but it's not like he can trust his own memory right now. He digs through his closet, all his old schoolwork and years of accumulated junk he's never been able to bring himself to throw out, books and papers and cheap gacha prizes. He's groping around a dusty box when his fingers touch something flat and smooth.
It's his broken phone, alright. The face is almost entirely shattered, held together only by the adhesive of the screen protector, and the back camera lens is cracked and unuseable. But none of that matters if it can just turn on.
It takes an agonizing five minutes for it to charge enough to even start. When the screen finally lights up, Yoshiki pounces on it, his fingers trembling as he types in his passcode. The phone unlocks. He swipes to the photos app, noise surging in his ears.
Pictures. There are pictures.
His eyes go wide as he scrolls backwards through them, holding his breath until it burns. The last photos on here are from his first few months at university, before he dropped the phone. Before that are a bunch of pictures taken through what looks like a train window, fields and buildings rushing by. After wracking his brain for a few seconds Yoshiki thinks he recognizes it: this is when he took the train up to Tokyo for the very first time. The ghost of his reflection is visible in the window, shockingly young, gangly, bangs hanging over his eyes. During that whole ride Yoshiki was so anxious he could hardly sit still. Anxious, but relieved, so very, very relieved, because—
(he was always so desperate to escape that place.)
A gossamer-thin thread of memory coils past him. Yoshiki lunges after it. It skitters away from him, sliding out from under his grip, and is gone.
But there was something. Just for an instant.
He swipes back to the next image, and his heart almost stops entirely.
At first glance there is nothing odd about the picture. In the foreground is a teenage boy, somewhere on a nondescript rural road. The boy is blurred and out of focus, like he was in the middle of turning around right when the photo was taken, or maybe like whoever took the photo was trying to do so without being seen. What's visible of the boy's face gives the impression of a wide, mischievous grin, one tooth jutting slightly out. The smeared shadows of his eyes are squinted in delight, as if there's nothing else he'd rather be doing than be smiling right at that moment.
Yoshiki looks at it, and finds he cannot move.
He doesn't recognize the boy, and yet—and yet, a burst of static crashes in and over him, soaking through the inside of his skin. The whole room seems to twist around. There's a hum in Yoshiki's ribs that he can't explain, a tangled mix of affection and hurt and longing; an old, familiar pain, following well-worn tracks in his heart. Yoshiki stares down at the screen in astonishment. Why is he having this reaction to someone he's never seen before?
No, Yoshiki must have known this boy. Why else would he have saved the picture? He holds the photo closer, almost up to his nose, trying to make out the face beneath the motion blur. Crooked teeth and hair that sticks up in the back. His chest pangs again. A faint, aching part of him spins unsettlingly fast. He thinks of—
(summer, sitting in the back room. the air is heavy with humidity and the tireless shriek of cicadas outside. the boy sets down the switch controller, turns to him with a grin, and says—)
Nothing. Just empty space where the rest should be.
His eyes water. He suddenly realizes that he hasn't been blinking. Yoshiki shakes the sting away and scrolls farther back; if there's one maybe-useful photo on here then there must be more. But all the other pictures are too vague to be of any help. Green fields. Roofs silhouetted against the sunset. A trail of ants swarming around a dribble of melted popsicle. Cicada molts lying in the dirt. No other pictures of people. Nothing specific enough to anchor him to a particular place.
Why didn't his past self bother to record anything useful?
Yoshiki is light-headed again, that same dizzying sensation from before, like he might become unmoored from the world and slip through it into the ether. He drops the phone on his bed and wraps his arms around himself with a moan.
He stays like that until the wave of vertigo passes. The ache in his head dulls, but doesn't go away. Yoshiki slumps onto his side and peels one eye open to stare at the shattered phone screen. It's open to a picture of an unfamiliar alleyway, a fat white cat slumbering in the shadows.
He looks at it. Blinks.
Just barely, out of focus in the background, is the sign for a storefront. He has to zoom in to make sense of the words, maneuvering around all the cracks and dead pixels. There, hazy, in tiny print, is the name: Kibogayama Pharmacy.
He has to type it into his phone several times before he manages to do it correctly, that's how badly Yoshiki's hands are shaking. A part of him expects the map to return an error, just another undeniable bit of proof that there's something deeply wrong with him. But instead the app flashes, loads, and…
It exists.
Kibogayama. It's a real place. A place that Yoshiki apparently was. He lets out his breath and it sounds like a sob. He stares down at the map, a low, discordant itch scratching at the back of his skull. The shape of the town is almost familiar.
Travelling to Kibogayama? the map helpfully prompts. Yoshiki stares at it. Hesitates. Clicks to view the directions.
A colorful trail of suggested transit options pops onto the screen, winding out of Tokyo and down into the countryside. He expands the list and scrolls through it. There's a train that leaves from Shinagawa Station at 6:18. It would get him there before noon.
He glances at the time. Almost four now. That's really not far off at all.
Yoshiki doesn't even have to think about it. He's already scrambling out of bed and to the door.
It takes ninety minutes on the Shinkansen to get to Nagoya. Ninety minutes for Yoshiki to fidget in his seat and wonder what the hell he thinks he's doing. He has exams this week. He's supposed to be at a review session for his invertebrates class with Shiori this morning. Instead he's somewhere southwest of Tokyo, chasing after a memory he's not entirely sure is even real.
He doesn't listen to music or read or do anything to distract himself. All Yoshiki does is stare out the window, squinting as the sun crosses the horizon. He still hasn't slept, and the landscape rushing by has started to take on a surreal, fuzzy quality that makes him feel like he's in a dream. He turns his face away from the light and closes his eyes.
At Nagoya he has some time to wait before his next train leaves. Yoshiki can't remember the last time he ate—yesterday afternoon, maybe?—so he buys an orange and onigiri at the station, but just looking at them makes him feel sick again, so he stuffs them into his bag and takes a swig of water instead. Then it's another hour on the rapid line until he switches to a local. By that point Yoshiki has stared at the route on his phone so many times he can feel the imprint of it burned into his retinas.
He doesn't think it's possible for him to fall asleep in the state he's in, but somehow Yoshiki dozes off on the local train, jolting awake with his head pressed to the window. He fumbles for his phone to make sure he hasn't missed his stop. He hasn't; Kibogayama is the next station.
His guts lurch as the train pulls up to the platform. He gathers up his things and waits by the doors, wringing his hands together. What happens if Yoshiki doesn't find anything here? Did he really think it was a good idea to go running off to some random mountain town on the basis of a photo he remembers nothing about? Oh, god, maybe he really is crazy. What if—
The doors slide open.
The first thing that hits Yoshiki is the smell of the air: trees and humidity mixed with loam and the asphalt-scent of the street outside. His chest goes inexplicably tight. He steps out onto the platform in a daze, pulling his backpack over his shoulders, and turns around in a slow circle.
On the other side of the fence Kibogayama stretches out, indistinguishable from any of the other towns the trains have taken him through. Nothing seems out of the ordinary. But there's an ache in Yoshiki's ribs that he can't put a name to, a strange and shapeless pain rearing up as he stares past the rooftops and power lines crisscrossing overhead.
The mountains loom above the town. He knows the shape they make against the sky, like the jawbone of some ancient creature butting up on the horizon. He could run his fingers over them like the teeth of a key. It feels like a homecoming. He would recognize them anywhere.
Yoshiki almost cries from sheer relief. He knows this place. It's real.
He had no plan at all beyond getting to Kibogayama. Yoshiki wanders out of the train station and into the center of town, gawking at everything around him like this is downtown Tokyo and not some regular place in the middle of nowhere. He just can't stop himself. The more he looks, the more familiar it seems. The river. The movie theater. The mall. He recognizes them, doesn't he? Yes, he's almost sure he does. He can imagine the dusty smell of the library. He remembers the butcher's, and the takoyaki place down the street.
Inertia drags him dizzily forward. Yoshiki looks at the diner, and in a flash he remembers sitting there after school, books and papers spread out on the table. He sees the trees in front of the grocery store and knows in some deep instinctive part of him what they look like in the spring when they're in full bloom. He used to buy snacks at that convenience store—that one, right there!—ice cream in the summer, and curry bread in the winter. One time he fell off his bike near the train crossing and scraped his knee so badly it bled all the way through his school uniform by the time he got back home. Back to—
Where?
His thoughts slam into an invisible wall. Yoshiki stops dead in the middle of the street. The momentum of his recollection drains away, leaving him adrift and flailing after it in a panic. The memory slips through his fingers like so many grains of sand.
No, no, he was so close. Yoshiki spins around, trying to keep his breathing calm. Just think, what else can he remember? Over the rooftops he can spot the mall. He must have gone there if he lived around here, right? Yes, he thinks so—after school, or on the weekends. There was a year when he got really good at those crane games they have, and his friends would always pester him to win stuff for them. Yoshiki didn't care all that much about the prizes, but whenever he'd win something good he'd bring it back home, not for himself, but to give to—
Who?
Nobody. It's no use. The barrier in his mind remains impermeable.
Yoshiki sinks down onto the side of the road in an overwhelming crush of despair. Did he actually believe coming here would fix whatever's obviously broken in his stupid fucking brain? Like he could just waltz down the street, recognize something, and all his problems would be magically gone? That isn't rational behavior. Oh, god, he should have gone back to the hospital, not started wandering around the countryside while half-delirious from exhaustion.
Still… he does remember some things now, right? Just a few, but that must be a good sign. This stuff about Kibogayama is gradually coming back to him in little bits and pieces the more he sees of the town. It's not out of the question to think his memories of home might do the same.
He rubs his face in his hands. What can he put together for sure? Yoshiki spent time in Kibogayama. He thinks he probably went to school here. It would make sense for Yoshiki to have lived here, too, but trying to imagine that evokes none of that flash of recognition. He remembers tiny fragments of his past, glimpses of hanging out with friends on the weekends, but nothing that has to do with his home, or his family. The space in his head where those should exist remains stubbornly empty.
The more Yoshiki thinks about it, the more inscrutable it is—as if someone's reached into his skull and plucked out those specific pieces. Is that kind of memory loss even possible?
Maybe he hit his head in the exact wrong way. Maybe there's a tumor crushing a very particular part of his brain. Maybe he's dying and this is all just a hallucination.
He gives up and buries his face in his hands.
He stays like that for a while, wallowing in his misery. He's weak and exhausted and absolutely every single part of his body hurts, but eventually one pain solidifies above the rest: Yoshiki is ravenously hungry.
Oh, right, he still hasn't eaten. The thought of food makes Yoshiki queasy, but at this point having anything in his stomach will be better than nothing at all. He peels the orange he bought back in Nagoya and chokes it down one wedge at a time, enough for the sharpest edge of his hunger to subside. The juice is tacky and too sweet, coating the roof of his mouth in an unpleasant way.
It's beginning to get stickily hot out with the sun beating down like this. Yoshiki digs his cap out of his bag so he can shade his face. He settles the hat onto his head, and—
(pulls it down, averting his gaze, as the boy tugs off his shirt. damn hot out, the boy mutters, tilting his head up to the sky, and yoshiki keeps his eyes down, doesn't look at him, can't look at him—)
His guts cramp, hard.
He grabs his phone and scrolls through the list of his LINE contacts, but without a name to go off of Yoshiki has no clue who the boy could be. Or if they even talk at all. He frowns, hesitates, then opens up the chat with "Mom" again. He types, are you there?
He stares down at the screen as he waits. The text remains unread, just like all the others.
Yoshiki has no idea what he's looking for now, but the thought of turning around and heading right back to Tokyo with no real answers is excruciating. Grudgingly he gets to his feet and drifts up the road, hoisting his bag back over his shoulder. The light glinting off the cars and windows makes his eyes sting. Everything around him has started to feel soft and dreamlike. He doesn't know if it's the déjà vu, or maybe just because he hasn't slept.
He zones out, letting his legs carry him wherever they want to go. He doesn't realize they're taking him to the school until he's already there—an automatic, inescapable gravity pull. Yoshiki stops out front and stares up at the exterior of the building. He knows what the sign will read before he even spots it: Kibogayama High.
The itch returns to the back of his mind. Yoshiki was right, he did go to school here. He can almost picture the classrooms and the smell of cleaning supplies. His friends. There was a tall girl who was always cheerful. A boy who played on the baseball team and talked with him about manga. Another girl who liked to bake. And… and…
And there was someone else, wasn't there?
A shudder goes through him. Yoshiki grabs his bag and takes out his other phone—the broken one, with the pictures—swiping through them until he finds the photo of the grinning boy. Pale hair, crooked smile, sunlight flashing off of teeth. Yoshiki's body thrums with static. Something wrenches inside him, a single errant thread fraying loose from the edge of the hole in his memory. He gasps, and thinks—
(they used to bike home together.)
His hands are shaking again, wildly, uncontrollably. They used to bike home together. Every day, for years. It must have been years, right? Primary school to middle school to high school graduation. How many thousands of times was that? How many afternoons spent crashing at the diner after school, or haring off into the woods in search of a distraction, wading barefoot through the creek and finding beetles in the trees? All those inside jokes and conversations, scooped out of Yoshiki's head as if they never happened. They must have lived close to each other. God, they must have been best friends.
And Yoshiki can't remember his name. What was his name?
They used to bike home together.
He needs to find a bike.
Even with a hole in place of most of Yoshiki's memories, he's absolutely certain he's never stolen a bike before. Desperation, it turns out, is a hell of a motivator for doing all sorts of things that Yoshiki never thought he'd do.
He heads back towards the mall, driven by a wordless instinct that tells him there will be plenty of bikes there left unattended. Sure enough, there's a rack on the edge of the carpark, exactly where Yoshiki expects it to be. He grabs the first bike he sees and wheels it away, tugging the visor of his cap down to cover his face. No one runs after him or yells at him to stop. The couple getting out of their car to head into the mall don't even spare him a second glance.
Once he's a safe distance away he climbs onto the seat. Yoshiki doesn't own a bike in Tokyo, or have any memories of learning to ride at all, but as soon as he's on it his body knows what to do. For the first few streets he wobbles back and forth as his legs adjust to the unfamiliar rhythm, and then it clicks into place inside him, as easy as breathing, the bike straightening out beneath his hands. Guilty exhilaration rushes through him.
Yoshiki rides towards the high school, but before he even gets there he suddenly knows the way to go. From one second to the next it slides back into his head, so smooth it's like it was always there. He veers left at the next intersection instead of right, riding across the train tracks, past the convenience store where he and the nameless boy would buy sodas after school. Of course Yoshiki knows the way back home; he's only biked it a million times.
He lets raw impulse guide him, weaving through Kibogayama until the street he's on takes him out of town. It's a whole lot quieter here, no cars on the road, just the sound of the forest and the cicadas singing in his ears. Yoshiki's legs are already tired. It's been so long since he's biked anywhere that he's lost all his endurance for it, but he pushes on anyway, clenching his teeth as he sucks in air.
(this road is such a pain to bike up in the summer. he's always sweating buckets by the time he gets back home. the boy rides ahead of him, seemingly unaffected by the heat. you look just like a tomato, yoshiki, the boy says, head tossed back, looking over his shoulder with a grin. yoshiki flushes even harder.)
It's starting to come back to him. Yoshiki looks at the road that winds ahead of him and can almost imagine where it'll go. After he rounds the next curve the forest will fall away and he'll be able to see the village. All those houses dotted through the fields, the creek that runs along the road, the shrine up near the base of the mountain where they hold the summer festival. And, there, amid all that, the home that Yoshiki grew up in, waiting patiently for his return.
Tears of relief well in his eyes. Yoshiki remembers it now. He'll ride down the lane, just like he used to do every afternoon, and he'll park the bike outside his house and knock on the door. His parents don't usually get back until later, but maybe his mom will be off today anyway. When she opens the door she'll exclaim over him and ask why he didn't tell her he was coming. In a couple hours his sister will get back from high school (his sister! He can't believe he forgot he had a sister) and she'll roll her eyes and scoff at him for getting all worked up over nothing. Then Yoshiki will walk through the village, the same path he's taken countless times, up to the house on the hillside, and knock there too. The boy who will answer the door won't even look surprised; he'll just tilt his head and say what, back already? You missed me that bad? with that stupid, infuriating grin of his, and Yoshiki will tell him to get lost.
Then maybe Yoshiki will try to explain what happened. How he briefly lost his mind, but it's fine now, because he got it back. He just needs them all to know he's sorry he forgot them. He's sorry he never came back to visit, and he's sorry he hardly ever called. He'll do better from now on. Really. They'll understand. They'll want to help him. Everything will be okay.
His heart soars. He shoots around the curve in the road, gazing ahead toward the place where the village will appear, and—
It's only the mountains, jutting up against the sky.
Yoshiki screeches to a stop.
This—isn't right. There aren't just more mountains. He knows there aren't. This is where the road should start sloping down, into the village below. All the houses should be visible from here. The image of it in his head is so crystal clear that for a single instant Yoshiki does see it, superimposed in vivid detail over the wild, untouched forest.
Then reality reasserts itself, and Yoshiki's skull splits open with the sickening realization that nothing he thought he remembered was actually true.
The world tilts into freefall. Yoshiki staggers off the bike, drops to his hands and knees, and pukes on the side of the road.
There's nothing in his stomach to come up but orange pulp. He gags, trying to spit out as much as he can. Gravel jabs into his palms, but that pain is trivial compared to the terror that consumes him as he looks up, nauseated, at the mountains again.
He was wrong. There's nothing here.
No village. No home. No friends or family waiting for him to return. Just the forest and undeveloped wilderness. There's not even a valley that a village might once have occupied. Only the quiet mountain slopes.
A stubborn part of Yoshiki's brain pings this as wrong—an instant of impossible, horrifying wrongness, peeling back the surface of reality to unveil a truth he cannot fathom. His guts slosh. He vomits again.
This time it's just a thin dribble of bile, burning the back of his throat. Yoshiki coughs and hunches over in the dirt. His skull rings with the cries of insects. He claps his hands over his ears, squeezing his eyes shut, and begs the universe that when he opens them again everything will somehow make sense, that his home will be there, that Yoshiki's brain didn't hallucinate an entire set of imaginary memories out of nothing.
It doesn't work, of course. None of it was ever real.
He doesn't register the sound of the car until it starts to slow down. By that point Yoshiki isn't sure how long he's been huddled there, sweating on the side of the road. In truth he hopes it'll just drive on past him and leave him here to rot in the dirt, but whoever's driving must've already spotted him, because the car slows even further, turning in to park a few meters away.
Yoshiki pulls his knees up to his chest and presses his face to them. He doesn't lift his head to look as the car door opens and someone gets out.
"Excuse me? Are you alright?"
The voice is a woman's voice. When it becomes clear that ignoring her won't make her go away, Yoshiki glances up, swallowing past the nausea that rolls through him. The woman is older than him, in her forties or fifties, maybe, her hair pulled back in an economical bun. Yoshiki doesn't recognize her, but that hardly means anything now.
She smiles cautiously at him. "Did you get lost? If your bike broke or something I can help you bring it back to town."
Yoshiki blinks at her. He says, slowly, each word a lump in his mouth, "I thought I used to live here."
The final piece of the dam holding him together breaks. Suddenly Yoshiki is sobbing, gasping for air as tears stream down his face. He reaches up to touch them in bewilderment. Why is he crying? Yoshiki didn't live here. There's nothing here for him to be crying for. But it just won't stop, an ocean of grief pouring into his heart, too vast for his body to contain, carrying him along like a twig caught in its current. He claws at the dirt and screams.
The woman must think he's fucking crazy, bawling his eyes out on the side of the road in the middle of goddamn nowhere. Hell, even Yoshiki thinks he's probably fucking crazy. There has to be something wrong with him, doesn't there? Some sick, broken thing in his sick, miserable brain, because you don't forget and then hallucinate eighteen years of your life for no reason.
He half-expects the woman to have already gone by the time he manages to lift his head again. But when he does, rubbing his eyes, bracing himself for her look of disgust, the woman isn't staring at him like she thinks he's crazy. She just looks very, very sad.
"What's your name?" she asks.
He wipes his face. His eyes are swollen and hot to the touch. "Tsujinaka. Yoshiki Tsujinaka."
"Can I take you back to town, Tsujinaka-san? Ain't safe being all alone up here."
She makes him sit and drink his water while she loads the bicycle into the back of her car. Yoshiki doesn't have the heart to tell her it's not even his bike. When she's done she helps him get unsteadily to his feet and into the passenger seat. He shivers in the blast of the AC and curls into himself, clutching his backpack tightly to his chest.
The woman doesn't say anything until she gets the car turned around and they're heading back towards Kibogayama. She taps her fingers on the edge of the steering wheel, glancing sideways at him. "Where are you living right now, if you don't mind me asking?"
"Um." He swallows. "Tokyo."
"Wow, Tokyo? You a student there?"
He nods. The motion of the car bumping along the mountain road is starting to make him feel sick again. He closes his eyes and presses his head against the window.
"What are you studying?"
Yoshiki sniffs. "Biology. I'm, um. In my third year there."
"What brought you all the way here from Tokyo?"
So he tells her, this woman he doesn't even know. Yoshiki just has to talk to somebody or he's going to explode. He tells her all of it. His missing memories, going to the doctor, finding all those texts and photos on his phone, the evidence of a life he remembers nothing of. How when he arrived and walked around town, things felt right, like all the pieces were slowly coming back together inside him. Only the path he thought they were illuminating led to nowhere at all. Just a fantasy of a place that doesn't exist.
The woman listens to him without interrupting as they drive through Kibogayama. She parks her car along the riverside and stares off into the distance until Yoshiki finishes talking. For a while they sit in mutual silence, listening to the traffic rush by.
"Sorry," Yoshiki whispers. "You probably think I'm crazy."
The woman heaves a weary sigh. "I don't think that at all."
Tears well up in his eyes again. Yoshiki scrubs them furiously away. "Well, I have to be something. Crazy, or sick, or something, 'cause I don't remember anything except a place that ain't even there."
She doesn't respond. When Yoshiki looks over at her again, her hands are clutched together so tight the knuckles have gone white. She glances in the rearview mirror and bites her lip, like she's debating something with herself.
"Where I found you," the woman says, quietly. "Up in that part of the mountains... something awful happened there, not very long ago. I've been driving up there every day to figure out what I can, though I can't make much sense of it myself. No one else around here seems to remember it either. But… that doesn't mean your memories ain't true."
Yoshiki stares at her. "What? What are you saying?"
She just looks at him. His face warms with embarrassment, like there's something obvious he's supposed to be getting.
"You mean…" His voice falters. "I did live here?"
Those memories… there was that brief moment where they felt so real, as if Yoshiki could just reach out and touch them. But that can't actually be possible. There was no village, just the mountains; the geology of the landscape doesn't lie. Yoshiki's brain has just been connecting random dots, bouncing around from place to place and tricking him into thinking it forms a pattern. Right? Because if not…
Suddenly he isn't sure which option is more horrifying: that all of Yoshiki's memories of his past are delusions conjured by his screwed-up mind, or that what the woman seems to be suggesting is true. That they are real, but the people and places in them are just—gone, somehow. Ripped out of existence by a calamity impossible to comprehend.
Yoshiki shakes his head, too vehemently. "But there wasn't anything at all up there. A whole place can't just be—be—erased."
The woman's face remains impassive. After a moment she leans back in her seat.
"No," she says. "You're probably right."
It feels like failing an unspoken test. A fresh wave of panic surges through Yoshiki's chest. He grips the edge of his seat. "What happened up in the mountains? What do you know about—"
"Do you like Tokyo?" the woman cuts in. "You got friends? You're happy there?"
Yoshiki frowns. "I… yes?"
In one quick motion she leans towards him and grabs his arm. Yoshiki jumps in his seat, too shocked to try to pull away.
"Tsujinaka-san," she pleads. "Go back to university. Finish your classes and graduate and live a normal life. Don't get mixed up in any of this. There's no need for you to suffer any more than you already have."
Her gaze bores into him. Yoshiki shudders. "Why?" he says. "Why can't I remember anything?" His voice cracks. "My family, are… are they…?"
She just looks at him, so sadly. Yoshiki's heart seizes. He knows that look, even though he can't remember why he knows it, what loss he must have suffered in his missing past to have been on the receiving end of it before. His eyes fill with tears again.
"I'm sorry," the woman says. It's the only answer she offers.
She sits with him in silence while he cries. Yoshiki wishes he could remember what he was crying for. His mom, and his dad, and the sister he apparently had. The nameless boy who was his friend. If any of them even existed at all. The clarity that Yoshiki felt up on the mountain road has faded, softening the memories back into a formless blur. He's no longer sure which parts are real, and which he's just made up. If he returns to Tokyo, will he forget them again? How long until this part of his life is just a scooped out hole, distant enough that one day he'll stop thinking of it at all?
He slouches over in the passenger seat, rubbing his face on his sleeve. The woman makes a quiet, pained sound.
"Please," she says. "Get away from this horrible place. You should have the chance to live." She squeezes his arm. "Will you do that?"
Whatever the truth is, there's nothing left for him here. Yoshiki closes his eyes, and nods.
She drives him back to the train station. Yoshiki stares blankly out the car window, watching all the places he thought he knew pass by. Knowing that this is probably the last time he'll ever see them should make him feel something, but mostly he just feels like a damp rag that's been wrung out so many times it has nothing left to give. Eventually he turns his face away.
After she parks, the woman waits patiently while Yoshiki works up the strength to unbuckle his seatbelt. He pushes the door open and slides out onto the street, squinting in the bright afternoon light.
"Remember to take your bike with you," the woman says.
He'd completely forgotten about the bike. Yoshiki looks back at it, and flushes. "It ain't mine. I—took it. From outside Mion."
"Ah," the woman says, after a pause. "Well. I'll return it for you, then."
He ducks his head, too embarrassed to thank her, and closes the door. The woman's expression softens. She rolls the window down. "Tsujinaka-san?"
Yoshiki looks up again.
She gives him a joyless smile. "Never come back here, okay?"
He watches her drive off. He keeps on standing there long after her car has disappeared from view, letting the sun beam down on his shoulders. There's shade up on the train platform, but Yoshiki doesn't make a move for it. There doesn't seem to be much point in doing anything anymore.
His phone pings in his hand. Yoshiki glances down at the screen, but it's only an email from one of his classes. He goes to swipe it away, and sees all the LINE notifications beneath it. His stomach twists again.
He thumbs slowly through them. His friends are talking about meeting up for dinner later. There's a message from Shiori wondering why Yoshiki wasn't at their review session, and offering to share her notes. Chihaya sent a sticker that reads feel better soon! There are several unread texts from Tomoya, the most recent of which just says u still alive?
Yoshiki swallows. He looks up at the mountains, dark and hazy in the summer heat.
I'm fine, he writes. I'll be back soon. He presses send, shoves his phone back in his pocket, and heads up to the train platform to buy his ticket for the long ride home.