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“An amusement park,” Kento deadpans, non-amused.
But Gojo-san is non-plussed. Four years on, the skip in his feet is still reminiscent of his lurid, unbeatable non-chalanace from high school. But search his eyes as he might, Kento finds not an ounce of humour in him. He’s utterly serious—for all the wrong reasons.
“Don’t sound so dull, Nanami-kun~,” Gojo laughs, teeth glinting. “It’s a welcome party! Welcome back to Jujutsu Tech!”
Kento’s fingers twitch uneasily beside him. An amusement park is nuts. Gojo-san’s relentless pursuit of fun is cumbersome. More so, it’s painfully oblivious of everything wrong with him, and everything wrong with Kento himself. Within the bracket of his chest, Kento’s heart is bleeding with grief. But how would Gojo-san know that? He knows nothing. He never does.
“We’re not children,” Kento recovers with a short cough, even though he feels too much like a child anyway. What was he doing, tailing along Gojo-san— Gojo like this? Like a child trailing behind an elder at a park. “This is nonsensical.”
“Don’t you worry,” Gojo assures. His tone is a collection of splintered smiles; they slash Kento’s innards. You’re insane. “We’re still sorcerers. We’re here to exorcise a curse together. After that, we’ll go on some of the rides and then go home. Sounds good?”
“We’re not children,” Kento reprimands again, anger flaring. He’d rather have glared at the cream walls of his condo, nursing a heavy can of Suntory The Premium Malt's cutting beer, aiding himself to its help to quietening the voices and memories of Opa-chan that are swirling his guts open.
Funny how alcohol worked his guts.
The curse is gone as quickly as he spots it. With a slice here and heavy punch there, Kento steps back before the remnants of the curse’s body rains pellets of its blood down on him. He runs into Gojo-san in that effort, who only chuckles softly and folds an arm across his shoulders, rooting him. His breath is minty and warm, as is his being that steady and unchanging. “Your instincts are still sharp as ever.”
This is not a test. Kento bites his tongue to keep himself from retorting his true feelings. “I will take my leave here.”
“No, no, you will not. There are more curses in and around.”
“Nothing that is out of your calibre, Gojo-san.”
“Gojo is fine, you know? Or Satoru too.”
“Farewell.”
Kento’s wristwatch reads 4:35 PM and the dial glints like the sandy shores of Waddenzee that catch the afternoon light. Tainted gold and grainy, it slips through his wrist like Opa-chan’s once meaty hand, before it’d moulded into a bony stick.
Kento doesn’t know why his clock shows 4:35 PM, nor does he know why he remains in the amusement part, ambling around the place like he has nothing better to do. At work, as he was wont to do in the later months that lead to his resignation, his ambling would have invited remarks. His coworkers would’ve laughed and hollered, A call with a girlfriend is the only thing that might excuse this!
Kento would comply, laugh shortly and stay mum, as was expected of him.
Jujutsu should be freer, he muses, clamping down on the unwelcome memories that begins to resurface. An endless shore. A lonely him. Jujutsu has no such restraints. The wa in a jujutsu society is more lenient than in the corporate or an ordinary life. But the notion of such demarcations in the grand scheme of things nag at him. What was he living for? What did it all mean? What did any of this mean?
He’d had a moment’s worth of blinding clarity that early morning, yes—, but whatever bout of confidence the bakery clerk—the baker herself—had instilled in him had already vanished by the news of Opa-chan’s passing.
There, here, or anywhere, Kento’s still hanging by the same noose; only his executioner has switched hands.
He glances around him at the people and their ordinary lives, at the little child that tugs on the long fabric of his mother’s skirt, who reaches and takes him to lean him against her shoulder, nuzzling his face into her shoulder, falling asleep instantly against the fabric of her hijab. Elsewhere, a kid and her brother rush to blow a long flurry of bubbles into the sky in the dying sunlight, screaming in delight. They catch the air and burst after a moment’s existence.
There’s some meaning there that Kento doesn’t want to look too much into.
His mind implores his feet to reconsider but Kento continues his loose walk around the park. It reminds him too much like the odd trip to Aarhus and the Cirkuskroen (The Circus Pub)—alcohol ran in the family’s heritage, after all—where Opa-chan had sat him atop the counters in a show of familiarity with the bar owners and patrons. There with Opa-chan’s arms holding Kento in place by his waist, he regaled him of the old, great tales of the Miehe circus family, who had once toured the Great Lands, talking of large establishments and eateries despite the prevailing wars and economical ruckus.
“Despite the Berlin Wall?” Kento had asked. He’d learned of it through his photo albums when he’d been ten, flipping through greyed and browned out leaflets of an memory lost to time, but that which lingered in the body joints.
They’re probably why Opa-chan’s brain had long begun to fade already, as had the scant Japanese he’d learned living in the secluded suburbs of Tokyo where Kento had attended middle school in Odaiba. Soon, the engine of his life reared its ugly head, hurting to the end of the tunnel, towards the blinding light—and all Opa-chan talked listlessly was about clowns.
Kento tried. He really attempted to decipher his story and make sense of life as he knew it. But Opa-chan’s legacy lived with him in a limbo until eventually, he took those stories away with him to his grave.
With nowhere to go, Kento turned to his Oka-san, but to no avail. Oka-san had grown up with her mother in Japan in her formative years since Oba-san was Japanese and Opa-chan worked long hours in Denmark or the ports in Japan. Whatever Kento longed to discover about Opa-chan persisted like a mystery unfound in every mother’s embrace.
How did you live if you lost your living language? How did you live with forgetfulness? Kento did not know any Danish. Oka-san knew everything that Kento already knew. All that remained was to ship Opa-chan to Denmark and let him live out the last flames of his fading light in the only language he could now call home.
Was it really so easy to forget, he wonders, watching the metal rides catch the burns of the setting sun. Try as he might, the attempt of finding coherence in jujutsu seemed feeble now. Meaning. Forgetting. How did Opa-chan live apart from the systems Kento grew up in, was chanelling himself into? Yaga-sensei had been saying: He left because there was no meaning in wielding jujutsu for good.
But if not the persistence of meaning, what had that lack of meaning done to jujutsu? Gojo Satoru was the strongest as ever. Children kept enrolling into the school. They were still taken on missions. Ieiri-san is a shell of person she would’ve been after university last year, eye bags looming like a oni around her being.
Meaning. Memory.
“Let’s go on the Ferris wheel, Nanami!”
Kento sighs. “We are not children.”
“We can be,” Gojo-san perks up. “In fact, I’ve never been on one in my whole life.”
You don’t even need to be, Kento thinks privately, but begrudgingly relents to the ticket that Gojo-san slides into his palm. His palms are warm through the mittens.
“Do you want a cola?” Gojo offers. He points at the vending machines lining the walls to his right. “My treat.”
“No, thank you.” Cola and a treat, Kento scoffs. As if that counted as a treat.
“Is it because it’s unhealthy?”
“I do not prefer it,” he answers cooly. Alcohol has kept him better company than any beverage has.
When the wheel stops to let them climb into one of the carriages, Kento is sequestered next to Gojo-san, opposite pair of ordinary nobodies who, thankfully, keep to themselves. They spare him a single polite glance; Kento returns it equally, then turns away to face the skies.
The view is nice, he admits. Nicer than his where his firm had stationed themselves in the NSSZs in Chuo, berating sunlight whipping its harsh glare on nothing else but similar highrises. He doesn’t know why high rises ought to exist so closely. Did they learn nothing from neglected danchi?
At the apogee he is at now, high rises still grow around his periphery, but they’re all at par with low-levelled buildings, charmingly sprawling into the horizon. He thinks he can spot the tall antennae of the Tokyo Skytree from here, piercing the sky. He’s not had the opportunity to visit yet, but he plans to make time. The dying sun is brutally bright. The—
“I was scared of heights as a kid,” he hears Gojo-san say. “Super scared. I think it was because I grew up in the clan among dense and towering trees that seemed overpowering and unconquerable.”
Kento’s brows shoot up. “I see.”
Gojo-san stretches his legs out for a short moment with what looks like a heavy sigh. He shoots the pair opposite them a quick smile and retracts both his feet, and then stuffs his hands into his obnoxiously large coat pockets. It’s not the Jujustu Tech uniform anymore, nor is it anything adjacent. Kento notes, with some surprise, that Gojo-san looks utterly ordinary next to him. He’s dressed in a plain shirt and business slacks. His coat is a muted but heavily padded jacket, boasting something bold on the seams. The collar is high, and his sunglasses cover the rest of his face.
Belatedly, Kento asks—not because he is interested, but because he is polite— “When did you grow out of it?”
“I don’t think I have.”
Kento’s shaking foot stills—he hand’t even noticed that. Gojo-san doesn’t look any miffed by the height, not one bit. But he’s restrained, Kento notices now more carefully. Defensive, firm on the seat, and looking resolutely down at his feet or anywhere that wasn’t the sky or his surroundings.
Are you stupid? Kento chastises him in his head. All of 23 and attempting feats of utter nonsense and harm.
“Not that I mind,” Gojo-san continues, a quiet smile on his face although he doesn’t meet Kento’s gaze. “The view’s more than rewarding of the risk. And it isn’t like I’ve never been to such tall heights before.”
You’re not going to fall off the ferris wheel, supplies his crassly trained mind, readying a standard roll of his eyes. But Kento stops that infiltrating thought. Surprising himself, he fishes out his phone—a classy moss-green Kyocera’s Urbano that he’d purchased in retort to an iPhone—and pries his gallery open.
He pauses shortly, deliberating his actions, and then clicks on the one picture that makes sense. “See.”
Gojo-san leans his head forward and blinks. “Doesn’t look like Japan. Looks like…” he tilts his head. “Netherlands? Or somewhere in Europe at least. Perhaps Russia.”
“Denmark, Europe,” Kento corrects. “Lemvig,” was it? Opa-chan had been born in Lemvig… hadn’t he? The old house in Lemvig still bore his name. Lemvig Folkeblad would still be making rounds to that house, wouldn’t it? The very one he’d tried resolving Cryptogrammen in—Opa-chan had loved it to pieces, calling to him twice every hour to say, “This is how I learned Japanese!”
“Why?”
“You foolish boy,” Ops-chan attempted in heavily accented, fading Japanese, broken like his and beaten like his ailing body. “Because Danish and Japanese are similar here.” The here was the key: Dutch cryptogrammen employed words of dual sensibilities, quite alike to how changing a single kanji syllable produces a whole separate meaning in Japanese.
“You’ve been to Denmark in these few years?”
“Opa— Grand father’s health had begun to deteriorate,” Kento replies cooly. “Hence the family trip.”
“How is he now?”
His throat doesn’t catch. He doesn’t shake as he admits it, not like he had when Haibara had died. His eyes don’t burn, but the sight of the faraway sun does burn his retinas. He continues to stare at the burning blob descending into the earth, stealing Tokyo’s breath at this height. Kento feels nothing. “Gone.”
“Ah,” Gojo-san says, his voice quiet. “Sorry to hear that.”
“It was a peaceful one,” he accepts. “In the place that he loved and grew up in.”
Gojo-san nods and gestures to Kento’s phone. “What of the windmill?”
“No significance,” Kento answes. He stashes his phone back into the pockets of his slacks and crosses his arms across his body, resolutely staring into the sun. The watch slips further into the crook of his arm this time. For the first time since Opa-chan’s passing, Kento actively plunges for the golden metal strap and fixes it across his wrist comfortably, forgoing the hold his grandfather has maintained over it. It fits him snugly now, no longer loose. It feels like a noose. “It’s an abandoned mill by the Lemvig station,” he relents. “Sofu had once painted it. Both the mill and the painting is now gone.”
“Sounds tragic.”
“It is.”
But it isn’t. It is, but it isn’t, and Kento has no words to explain it. He only feels the strong presence of Gojo-san next to him (not the presence of his strength, he realises on the train home) and is content watching the sun drown itself under city.
At the foot of the wheel after he alights, Gojo-san bids him an enthusiastic farewell. “Thanks for the wonderful day,” he says, much to Kento’s surprise because not only was Kento not wonderful, he was incapable of making a day wonderful. “When can I expect you at the high school?”
“Two weeks,” Kento confirms. While he’d long submitted the resignation letter to his firm, the notice period at his firm had mandated 45 days of service before total relief. Which seemed sensible enough.
“Make it four weeks,” Gojo-san waives off with a winning smile. A smile shines like the moon in the budding night. “Moving and what not. Maybe take a trip to Kuantan or Manila or Hokkaido while you’re at it.”
“Sure,” Kento acquiesces. He hadn’t actually accounted for moving. Although, with growing horror, he begins to realise that he hadn’t actually accounted for anything at all, least of it the change in his reality: that he’d no longer be working at the company. That he’d no longer receive a salary and its multinational perquisites. Was Jujutsu Tech’s pay similar? It had to be. Wages were all governed by the same law. He’d ask Gojo-san later.
“Good.” Gojo squeezes his shoulder, and then he’s off. Kento stares at this temporarily ordinary man walking off into the ordinary city. Tomorrow, he will be Gojo Satoru again. No one will remember him today, save himself.
On the way home, his mother calls him. “On the way, Pacchan?”
“Hi Oka-san,” he nods, and then affirms. “I met with an old… friend today.”
He can sense her go still. “Old as in… from the high school?”
“Yes.”
He lets the quiet linger, allowing the minute chatter of the crowd bustle through the phone. A train horn goes up, then multiple others follow, slowly giving way into the steady progression of the train wheels churning forward. “Oka-san?”
“So you’re really quitting,” she says.
“I am,” he confirms. “But the pay is good.”
“I don’t… care about the pay, Pacchan. It’s about your safety.”
Safety, he wonders. There is no safety. His mother should’ve abandoned him if she really wanted safety.
But that’s not why she followed Opa-chan back to Denmark, even as his memory frazzled and he looked at his own daughter as a hospice nurse, forgetting the memory of holding her in her infancy. Of hauling her over his head and sitting her up on his shoulders, wandering around empty lots of the then unscaled outskirts of Tokyo in Odaiba, that had since become the city proper.
“I’ll be fine,” he murmurs. “It’s not like I did any better in the company. I’d have died quicker at the company.”
She hisses sharply. “Stop saying such things!”
Kento sighs. He doesn’t talk for the rest of the journey, remaining mum instead to listen to his mother ramble off unending curses about the plumber and the growing heat. For a moment, he concludes in transit that one did not voluntarily forget, that the wheel kept turning forward and forward and forward. That forgetting was a crime you wantonly commit: the very one he had committed by running away from jujutsu, of what he was destined to be, even if it meant nothing beneficial. Nothing of worth.
“Pacchan?”
“Still here,” he nods. “My station’s next so I cannot talk. Do you want be to bring something on the way home? Milk? Bread?”
“Milk bread?”
At that, a smile finds his face. “Are you asking me to bring milk bread? Or milk and bread?”
Oka-san’s voice too blooms with a smile. “Just bread. And get the fruit and cream sandwiches for your oto-san from Lawson’s, okay?”
“I will.”
She begins to say bye, but stops short. "If I forget anything, I will LINE you. Keep your phone on, okay?"
"Okay."
He waits for the train to to pull into Meguro station this time. From there, he’ll walk to Ebisu, ambling along the sidewalk. He has the leeway he’s never had prior as the identity of a salaryman now. Plus he has shopping to do.
After he exits the train, in tandem with the sweet chime of that preludes into the train's horn, Kento watches his train vanish from the platform, moving on to make another trek across the spiral that is the Yamanote Line. Perhaps this is how life’s meant to go, he concludes, watching it disappear. Watching the stream of people who have alighted disappear. An endless cycle of memory and meaning. Of forgetting and learning.
He did not like to think that the cycle was never ending, but what did he know of the pokes that struck such momentum short? Gojo Satoru, he ponders. Was he the poke in the circle? Were Yaga-sensei or Ieiri-san? Or were they all concentrics, ever overlapping, unending in the system that purports their predetermined destiny?
Perhaps, Kento muses inconclusively as he exits the station, that he has more questions than he has answers. More hope than he has skepticism. Least faith than anything else. Conclusions are stagnation, he decides, nodding at the ATM where he encashes some of his money from the bank. They do not walk on wheels.