Chapter Two

Scrap and Build

1

On the way to school, Katsuhiko Teshigawara heard a cracked, amplified voice, and on reflex, he stopped.

In the municipal parking lot beyond the truss bridge, he spotted a parked election campaign car and a planted banner. In other words, a stump speech. The mayoral election was coming up. An audience of a dozen or so people had gathered, but nothing big enough to call a crowd.

Come to think of it, when he’d left the house that morning, his dad’s shoes hadn’t been in the foyer.

“Huh? Where’s Dad?” he’d asked his mom.

The reply came from the kitchen. “Helpin’ out with the election.”

So this was that, huh?

They just had to do it on this street, didn’t they?

As he started walking again, Teshigawara clicked his tongue to himself in irritation. Look, I’m beggin’ you, keep this stuff away from us.

He wanted to get by without letting on that it had anything to do with him. Mitsuha Miyamizu, who was walking ahead of him and a little to one side, probably felt the same. Her back looked tense. Even without seeing it, he could imagine her expression. Her intricately plaited hair, bound up with a braided cord, was trembling slightly.

He glanced over, moving only his eyes, taking care not to turn his face. The banner displayed the words TOSHIKI MIYAMIZU. It was the name of the guy giving the speech. He was the current mayor, trying to get himself reelected, and also Mitsuha’s dad.

There was another guy in work clothes standing next to him, holding the banner like a spear or something. Teshigawara didn’t want to look at the man’s face, which belonged to his dad. He didn’t even want to see it at home, much less in a place like this. The jerk’s expression seemed to say, I support the mayor. Behind him stood a row of young guys, also in their work uniforms, who’d been given banners to hold or flyers to pass out. Teshigawara thought there was something really sleazy about openly using your own employees to help out at an election.

People said that being the incumbent gave you an advantage. “Advantage”? Hell, incumbents won, hands down. That was how the scam worked. And here was a guy who was running part of that scam, brazenly waving a banner.

He felt like clicking his tongue about a hundred times. He wanted to get past this ASAP, but if he sped up, it’d be like running away. That would be irksome, so he walked deliberately.

Seeing something nasty to kick off your day naturally made your head weigh heavy. That was when somebody landed the killing blow.

“Mitsuha, straighten up!”

It was old man Miyamizu, holding the mic connected to the loudspeaker. He’d interrupted his speech to shout after his daughter. Mitsuha’s shoulders stiffened visibly. Frankly, you had to be nuts to scold your kid like that in public, especially in front of a crowd. All the old geezers and biddies gathered around made comments like “He’s even tough on family. That’s the mayor for you,” sounding impressed. Talk about the dark side of rural communities. If humiliating his daughter to get this reaction had been Miyamizu’s intent, he was the world’s biggest douche.

What is this, anyway?

It was still early, but the world kept piling more weight on his shoulders. It’s like a microcosm of everything warped about this place.

“Aaaaagh! I’m sick of this town!” Mitsuha wailed like a little kid throwing a tantrum.

“It is a bit too close-knit, isn’t it?” Sayaka nodded in agreement.

Teshigawara kept quiet, thinking, Well, I can’t really blame ’em.

Stress was a terrifying thing.

What had triggered this conversation was Mitsuha’s clearly abnormal behavior the day before. “Clearly abnormal” meant that her long hair’d looked as if she’d just rolled out of bed without even running a brush through it. She’d forgotten to tie the ribbon on her school uniform, and she hadn’t known where her own shoe locker was, or even her classroom for that matter. She’d forgotten all her classmates’ names. She hadn’t even been clear on Teshigawara and Sayaka’s names, which had shaken them up pretty badly. All day long, she’d seemed as if she was spacing out, as if her mind was elsewhere, or like she really had no idea what she was doing there. The clincher had been when “Miss Miyamizu” got called on during class, and she hadn’t realized that meant her.

To top it all off, her laughter had sounded like “bweh-heh-heh” or “ee-hee-hee.”

Teshigawara had been particularly startled to see Mitsuha show up at school with untouched, unkempt hair. He’d known her since before grade school and had almost never seen her like that. About the only time was right after she got out of the pool. Mitsuha always did her hair properly, every single day, even on weekends and holidays. Not only that, but the braided style was pretty complicated. It was done so well that he wanted to ask how many hours it took her to braid it every single morning and whether it was even possible to do by herself.

Mitsuha’d probably decided she wouldn’t go out in public unless her hair was done up like that.

“She’s usin’ that to control herself on purpose. That’s what it is.”

Sayaka had told him that once when Mitsuha wasn’t with them.

“In her position, if she don’t do things proper, somebody’s bound to call her out on it right away. She’s always desperate to do things right. That hair’s probably a kind of ritual to help keep herself in line.”

I see. That makes sense.

Mitsuha’s old man was the mayor. She was also the daughter and heiress of an old shrine. During festivals, she was the center of attention as a shrine maiden, and since everyone in town belonged to her shrine, they all knew her face and name. If she let herself slide even a little, somebody would jump on it. Teshigawara slapped his knee in sudden realization, thinking, So that’s the sort of pressure she’s under. He’d just assumed it was like a sumo wrestler’s topknot, some sort of evil-averting barrier unique to shrine maidens.

But, yeah, I guess that would stress you out.

She probably had days when her mind suddenly exploded, taking her hair with it, and she wanted to just cut loose from all the restraints that bound her.

Teshigawara thought she should probably go see a counselor, but although they were close, he couldn’t bring himself to make such a personal suggestion. Well, it wasn’t like this tiny town’s tiny high school cared enough to have a school counselor, anyway, but he thought it would be all right for her to talk to their classics teacher, Miss Yuki. Besides, that teacher was from out of town, so the local taboos didn’t have much hold on her.

Parenthetically, Mitsuha Miyamizu was normal today. “Back to herself” might have been a better way to put it.

Well, I’ll listen to her grouse for as long as she wants, at least.

With that in mind, he’d listened to the conversation meekly, only to hear Mitsuha talk smack about the town all the way through lunch. They were over at the side of the athletic field, at the pile of desks scheduled to be junked. He’d been sitting cross-legged on top of one, listening, but she just went on and on and on until finally his tailbone started to hurt.

Teshigawara was relieved when the bell rang, but on the way home, Mitsuha said, “Picking up where we left off,” and started up again.

“It’s just like you said, Saya-chin. This town is too cramped and too tight.”

“I know. I really, truly get it.”

As they walked, Sayaka chimed in. Now that each had a sympathetic listener, their complaints escalated infinitely.

“I mean, this town really has nothin’,” Sayaka griped. “There’s just one train every two hours.”

“Just two buses per day.”

“The convenience store shuts down at nine.”

“And that’s technically a bakery.”

“There’s no bookstore, no dentist…”

“We’ve got two sleazy ‘snack shops,’ though.”

“There’s no jobs.”

“No girls come here to find husbands.”

“We don’t get much daylight.”

“Aaaaaagh, I wanna hurry up and graduate and get out of this town! I wanna go to Tokyo! I wanna have my very own picture-perfect city life, and I’m gonna enjoy it from top to bottom!”

“You said it! Nagoya’s not enough. It’s just a super-size country town. Tokyo’s better.”

“Sayaaaa! Let’s go together.”

“We’re bustin’ out. We are bustin’ out of here!”

Though Teshigawara had been listening silently, somewhere in the middle of it, he’d started grinding his molars. He was pushing his granny bike along, and the back wheel ticked softly. To him, it sounded as if he were clicking his own tongue.

“Geez, y’all!” he spat irritably before he could catch himself.

“What?”

Mitsuha turned, wearing an expression that seemed to say, Got a problem? He did have a problem and wanted to blast them with it, but the girls were drunk on their own grievances, and nothing he said was likely to get through to them.

Teshigawara leaned forward with a grin.

“Forget about all that stuff. Wanna stop at the café?”

The girls’ gloomy mood dissipated instantly.

“Wha—? A café?”

“What do you mean?!”

“A fancy café?”

“We’ve got one?”

“Seriously?”

“They built one?”

“Where?”

“I wanna goooo!”

They’d sure latched on to that.

Mitsuha had gotten mad and gone home. Apparently, she hadn’t thought much of his outdoor café.

“This ain’t no café. You tricked us,” Sayaka griped, noisily sipping a can of black tea. The loud slurping was probably a deliberate show of annoyance.

“It’s all in how you look at it.”

“What’s that ‘mind-over-matter’ business?” Sayaka bumped Teshigawara’s arm with her shoulder.

Long story short, this was a bus stop. If you wanted a place to sit down and drink tea in this town, this was about the best you could do. A vending machine stood just behind the sign. It was a common sight at rural bus stops. Without the budget to install a streetlight, they put a vending machine there. At night, they provided decent light, and their sales covered their maintenance.

“You can drink tea here, so it’s a café.”

“It’s a fraud.”

“It ain’t fraud—it’s figurative language.”

“Shut up.”

There was a faded, light-blue bench next to the vending machine. Teshigawara and Sayaka were sitting side by side on it. On the back of the bench was an ad for ice cream written in faintly legible outlined letters. If someone had claimed that ancient bench had been there since the Meiji era, he might have believed it.

The house behind them had once been a penny-candy store, but ever since the old shop owner died, it had been vacant. A tin sign advertising instant curry and another for mosquito-repellent incense hung on its wooden wall. The commercial personalities on those signs were probably destined to smile here forever.

Like this town would ever have a trendy café.

He felt like just spitting out the words but also didn’t want to.

Teshigawara was the heir to a local construction company. The company’s name—Teshigawara Construction—was flatly unpoetic. His dad was the company president, but boss or chief suited him better than president.

It was safe to say that Teshigawara had made at least eighty percent of the aboveground structures in this town. They had a rock quarry and ran a concrete company, too.

In other words, Teshigawara’s family had sunk its roots as deeply as possible into the local soil.

Although it wasn’t much, in this tiny town, he was not unlike the son of a distinguished family.

What did that mean, exactly? It meant that no matter what happened, his circumstances wouldn’t let him escape the community. In principle, it wasn’t even possible for a local construction company to suddenly branch out into Tokyo or Nagoya or Fukuoka. They made all their money close to home. Even if they let him go to Tokyo for college, there was a string on his back to drag him home in the end, no matter what.

Sayaka probably doesn’t know what it feels like to have an elastic cord sewn to your back.

Teshigawara fantasized about leaving this town for good, too.

He couldn’t do it, though.

If he did, he’d cause massive problems for the workers. It was important for small companies to have clear lines of succession and the assurance of a continued existence. If that destabilized, people would start leaving in a heartbeat. If people left, things would become even more precarious, until it all fell apart. For a local business of this size, the popular arguments against nepotism held no sway. Though slightly hyperbolic, the question of whether or not the company became a shaky, toothless relic rested entirely on Teshigawara’s shoulders.

That meant he had no choice. He’d have to tough it out right where he was.

If there was absolutely no way for him to escape “this lousy town,” he’d just have to change it.

He had to improve the place so he could endure it.

Teshigawara Construction had the power to build, so he could do it. It was necessary to make the town more appealing by creating things that added to its charm, and for Teshigawara, there was no other way.

He’d just have to make do here.

Those were his thoughts on the matter, and he’d already determined to do it. Still.

Don’t talk like this town’s completely worthless.

Those were his real feelings.

When he’d invited them to a café, only to reveal that it was just the bench in front of the vending machine, he hadn’t meant it as a joke or prank.

His assertion that It’s all in how you look at it hadn’t been an evasion, either. Not at all.

Let’s just be satisfied with what we’ve got. If you start off from there, content, I’ll figure out how to make it better somehow.

That was what he wanted to say but couldn’t. He’d rather crunch a weevil between his molars a hundred times than say anything so embarrassing. Besides, these girls probably wouldn’t have understood even if he did.

“Mitsuha went home.”

“Well, of course she did.”

Nonetheless, he really wanted to tell her, Don’t get mad and leave…

“Mitsuha’s got it really rough, too.”

“That’s the truth. She’s the star, after all,” Teshigawara muttered.

Sayaka came back with, “She sure is.”

Being the kid of the old, local shrine was a pretty major thing, too. Teshigawara had been watching her since she was small, so he knew just how rough it was. Miyamizu Shrine was matrilineal, so she would probably be expected to take over from her grandmother someday and become chief priestess.

Acting as a shrine maiden here wasn’t a part-time job where she just had to sell a few ceremonial arrows to ward off evil out of the office. There were tons of complicated things to do, such as inheriting the ancient legends.

Mitsuha had to be the heart of village festivals. She had to learn the kagura dances to perform there, and she had to dance them perfectly. He’d heard there were a dozen or so different types of kagura.

There was a preparatory ceremony for one such village festival the next Sunday. She’d be performing a dance there as well. Afterward, there would be a ritual that was conducted at Miyamizu Shrine that wasn’t performed at any of the other shrines in Japan. A thousand years ago, it had probably been the sort of thing no one thought twice about, but to modern sensibilities, it was kind of gross. Mitsuha had to do it in front of a big audience. The local cable TV station would be covering it, too. Wasn’t it practically abuse to make a delicate adolescent girl do something like that in public?

Mitsuha had said that she honestly hated it so much she couldn’t stand it.

I believe it…

Even if she asked him to trade with her, he’d never want to do it, either.

It was no wonder she wanted to throw it all away, leave the shrine, and go live an outrageous, freewheeling life in the city.

Right now, she seemed to think she’d be fine if Miyamizu Shrine went under, but if she made those thoughts public, the resulting uproar would be more than “a scene.”

I wonder what she’s gonna do?

As his train of thought rolled along, he beckoned to a dog lying in the adjacent empty lot, and the dog obediently got up and came over to him. Putting a hand out didn’t seem to scare it, so he petted its head and scratched the back of its neck. He would have liked to give it something to eat, but unfortunately, he didn’t have anything with him.

Nothing to give. At that moment, it seemed a pretty fitting description of this whole situation.

“…Say, Tesshi?”

“Hmm?”

“When we graduate, what are you gonna do?”

“Where’d that come from? We’re talkin’ about futures now?”

“Mm. Yes.”

Even Teshigawara could tell she was asking about distance. Sayaka was trying to measure a certain sort of space between them.

“I don’t really, uh…”

Petting the dog’s fur the wrong way, he looked down, although he wasn’t sure why.

“I think I’ll just live here for the rest of my life,” he answered.

“I see…”

Sayaka’s response was neutral, and he had no idea what she actually thought. Teshigawara had given an obvious answer to an obvious inquiry. In that sense, he hadn’t been ducking the question. However, he hadn’t said a thing about what he really wanted.

What am I gonna do, anyway?

There was definitely some doubt there.

2

That night, Teshigawara didn’t want to go downstairs unless he really had to, so he holed up in his room on the second floor and paged through Radio Life.

“Dinner!” his mother called, and for a moment, he thought about skipping a meal. He knew he couldn’t, though. If he tried, the hunger that had begun stirring drowsily in his stomach would probably go on a violent rampage.

He went down to the first floor and headed for the bathroom to wash his hands. To get there, he had to pass by the traditional, tatami-floored room. On the other side of the glass-paned sliding doors, the dinner party was already underway.

It sounded like they’d downed quite a bit of sake already as the cackling laughter peculiar to drunks assaulted Teshigawara’s ears. They’d ordered in food from a caterer, lined up all the low tables in the house in the tatami room—which was really two rooms, opened up to make one big space—and a crowd from Toshiki Miyamizu’s support association had gathered for a pre-election launch party.

Just walking by grated Teshigawara’s nerves, and he washed his hands vigorously with soap. In order to get to the kitchen, he had to pass by again whether he wanted to or not, and through the glass, he heard old man Miyamizu giving a speech. He was getting all eloquent about how he’d be relying on this esteemed group and its president during this election, and the support association president, Teshigawara’s dad, interjected something along the lines of “Just you leave it to us! We’ve already got the vote wrapped up in the Kadoiri and Sakaue districts.” Then a chorus of “Yeah!” went up from the guests.

Don’t give me that “Yeah!” crap.

There was something seriously wrong with them if they were bragging so loud. Is nobody gonna call them on it?

In the kitchen, he convinced his mother to go put out the side dishes while he served his own rice and miso soup and then wolfed down his dinner. A sudden roar of laughter erupted from the banquet room. Somebody had probably cracked some lousy joke. He wished the prefectural police would come by to investigate.

“Smells like corruption,” he muttered, and his mother scolded him.

“What are you talkin’ about?”

What was he talking about? Teshigawara was pretty sure he was talking sense.

Put simply, the contractors used their local influence to gather votes and get the incumbent Mayor Miyamizu reelected, and in exchange, the city ordered work from them. It was a textbook case of collusion, and Teshigawara couldn’t stand that sort of thing.

This is just ugly… Am I gonna do this stuff, too, someday? he wondered.

“Oh, Echigo, you’re quite the villain.”

“No, no, I learned this from you, Lord Magistrate.”

“You rascal, you! Bwa-ha-ha-ha!”

Teshigawara couldn’t help but act out this one-man sketch silently in his head, his gaze flicking up and down by turns.

Afterward, his face turned completely serious.

Ridiculous.

In the tatami room next door, people were playing out the same ludicrous scenario in earnest.

And the central figure was his own father by blood.

I can’t take this, Teshigawara thought.

The idea that this was what was paying for his food made it even worse.

Teshigawara wasn’t a particularly uptight person, but this triggered that tiny industrious part of him with merciless, pinpoint accuracy.

This was dirty.

If this was how the town was run, he might start hating it.

He didn’t want to think so, but he really might.

He had more affection for the town of Itomori than most. But…

And it wasn’t like that affection was just because he had to keep living there because of his position. But…

Plus, when people badmouthed the town to him, it did put him out of sorts. But…

Still.

Sometimes.

He wanted to blow the whole place to kingdom come.

There were times he wanted to smash it all and turn it into an empty lot.

Their construction company actually could.

He wanted to bust the place up, level the earth, then put only clean, good things on it.

It seemed like if he stayed in this town, he’d rot.

If things kept on like this, he was sure to become an old guy who could take a bribe to the magistrate without batting an eye.

If that’s what it came to, he’d rather destroy it beyond recognition instead.

Despite that, he really did love the town.

He wanted to change it with his own hands.

To do that, no doubt he’d have to take over the family business.

If he did, though, he’d probably rot, little by little. Once he inherited the company, he’d hear all kinds of jargon: “To maintain the staff’s salaries and livelihoods…” “In order to keep the facilities and resources going…” “We need reliable orders…” “Relationships with the administration will grow more important…”

It was clear it would all tangle around him until he couldn’t move anymore.

He was going in circles.

…So he just wanted to destroy it all.

He wanted to flip the table over.

If he erased the whole town, would only beautiful memories remain forever?

How should he do it?

He probably couldn’t pull it off like modern building demolition, rigging explosives in key locations and blowing it to bits with the push of a button.

If there were a volcano nearby, he could fantasize about inducing an eruption or a giant monster reviving from its crater, but unfortunately, but it was just a bunch of plain old mountains. Thanks to that, they didn’t even have hot springs.

Short of a nuclear missile strike, they were pretty much out of luck, but it was extremely unlikely a certain country—or the one next to that, or even the one next to that—would target a rural village this deep in the mountains.

Come to think of it, a long time ago—or at the end of the last century, anyway—there’d been a book called The Prophecies of Nostradamus, an occult false alarm that predicted the destruction of the world in 1999. At the time, they’d been smack in the middle of the Cold War, when the terror of nuclear warfare had been very real, so apparently, a lot of people had taken it seriously. (As a habitual MU reader, he knew lots of trivia like that.)

So why hadn’t it been destroyed then?

What a letdown, Nostradamus. Man up and take responsibility, Ben Gotou.

But no sooner had the thought crossed his mind…

What the heck is that supposed to mean?

Teshigawara came back to himself. Because the whole day had been a series of irritations, one after another after another, he was seething. He felt about ready to snap.

Come to think of it, there’d been a novel about somebody who set fire to a temple somewhere because they loved it so much that it hurt to the point where they became obsessed with the desire to just make it go away.

He thought he might know the feeling.

The kitchen’s sliding door rattled open, and his father entered. He was wearing his work clothes over a dress shirt and tie, as if advertising that he was indeed a contractor. So this was what it meant: “despising a monk means despising his vestments.” In this frame of mind, Teshigawara didn’t like anything at all.

“Hey, get us two or three more bottles.”

“Yes, yes.”

His mother went to turn on the gas range, and his father’s overbearing voice sounded behind his head.

“Katsuhiko, help out on-site this weekend. We’ll be blasting. Come learn.”

“…Mmm…”

“What do you say?”

“Yeah.”

Teshigawara growled his answer, the rebellion clear in his expression.

Blasting? Seriously?

What he meant was that they’d be demolishing an old building with explosives, so he should come and watch.

So this was the beginning of his training in order to take over the company? How ironic.

Teshigawara went up to his bedroom and opened the window. He wanted to air it out. The glass window’s old wooden frame rattled since the track didn’t slide well anymore. The night wind was cool, damp, and pleasant. He planted his butt on the frame, resting his elbows on the edge of the window box.

He wanted a smoke, but he was out.

If he bought them locally, the rumor would be all over town in no time, so he had to go far away to buy his cigarettes. He stocked up when he went into Gifu City, but since he couldn’t get over there often, no matter what he did, he tended to run out.

Rural nights were nearly pitch-black.

He’d heard the neighboring towns and villages were collaborating with the prefecture to install streetlamps, but he got the feeling it’d be another fifty years before this town had proper lighting at night.

The red torii gate of Miyamizu Shrine seemed to float hazily in the blackness.

Halfway up the sloping hill, the shrine was brightly lit, as if to chase away the surrounding darkness.

At this hour, Mitsuha and Yotsuha were probably rehearsing a dance or something.

She really does have it rough…, he thought for the umpteenth time.

Abruptly, Teshigawara remembered how Mitsuha’s shoulders had stiffened when they stumbled across her father’s stump speech.

He didn’t think Mitsuha Miyamizu was high-strung by nature, but if she received small wounds from all directions practically every day, it would probably make her hypersensitive.

When she helped out with the family business, she was virtually on display. People routinely noticed her, and she had no time to unwind. Her father had separated from the family, and on the rare occasions she did see him, he was overbearing. There were also rumors of dirty money surrounding him, and the wind carried those rumors to her constantly.

Looking at it all together like that…

He really did feel sorry for her.

3

About a month had passed. The final day of their regular tests had gone by without much trouble (except for answering the test questions), and that evening, while Teshigawara was fiddling around with his moped in the company’s motorcycle parking lot, “Big Bro” Uozumi wandered through.

“Kid, we got some good scrap lumber,” he said.

“Seriously?”

“Why would I lie about that? C’mon, come take a look.”

Big Bro Uozumi was a Teshigawara Construction employee. He was twenty-seven, but since he’d joined the company at fifteen, he already had more than ten years of experience under his belt. He acted as a sort of boss for the company’s younger staff.

Teshigawara had grown up playing with him. His hobbies weren’t unlike Teshigawara’s—he could mess around with motorcycles and build electronics. His house in the mountains was full of amps and speakers he’d made himself. He was an eccentric who’d originally lived in Ogaki City, but according to him, he’d moved to the sparsely populated Itomori because he wanted to listen to progressive rock at ear-melting volumes.

Actually, it wasn’t just that they shared similar hobbies. Teshigawara’s interest in wireless radios had developed in large part because of his influence.

He said he hadn’t gone to high school because he had a deep distrust of schools and teachers. It was relatively normal not to trust schools, but it was pretty unusual to flat out decide never go to one again as long as you lived.

Spending his childhood with a guy like that had naturally fostered a spirit of defiance in Teshigawara.

When Big Bro Uozumi called him and he went to the scrap yard, there really was some good stuff there.

A square pillar had been hewn out of a big tree trunk, leaving the side pieces behind. For each piece, one surface was flat, but the opposite was curved. In terms of area, they were a size smaller than a tatami mat. They were exactly what Teshigawara had had in mind.

“I’ll have to put some legs on it…,” he said, and the pro gave him some advice.

“It’d be better to plane some rods down proper and use those instead of goin’ with unprocessed logs. They’ll be easier to work with, and it’ll make the design look fancier.”

“Yeah, I’ll do that today. Think you could haul this up tomorrow?”

“Load some tools into the back of Truck Five along with it.”

“That’s a huge help. Thanks.”

“When you’re done, slap some varnish on it.”

“But the texture of the wood will get all…”

“It’s gonna be out in the rain, right? Otherwise it’ll rot.”

“Can I take a can of varnish out of the materials lot?”

“I’ll keep quiet about it for you. You better appreciate it.”

Teshigawara clapped his hands together in thanks behind Uozumi’s retreating back. Getting materials and tools for free was a perk of the family business, but you couldn’t get friendly advice unless you were blessed with good relationships.

After that, Teshigawara immediately loaded one of the big pieces of timber into the truck with a hydraulic lift. Then he carried the logs he’d picked out of the mountain of scrap earlier into the processing plant and used a wood lathe and sander to make four thick rods. Finally, he took a set of woodworking tools from the tool room and put them in the back of the truck with the rods.

Once he’d finished, he went back to messing around with his moped. He pulled out the plugs, switched them, topped up the two-stroke oil, gave the body a quick rinse with water, wiped the seat dry with a rag, and rode the wet bike home.

Up in his room, he got out his phone, launched the communication app, and sent a message to Sayaka and Mitsuha.

About five minutes later, a response from Sayaka:

Mitsuha replied as well.

Teshigawara laughed.

On the day after tests, Teshigawara’s high school only went until fifth period. From what he heard, the teachers used that extra time to analyze all the students’ test results, review their grading criteria, and frantically scribble Xs and circles onto answers they hadn’t managed to grade yet.

That morning when he got to class, Mitsuha was already there in fox-possession mode.

Lately, she’d been getting like this from time to time. He called it fox possession, but it wasn’t that she made weird noises, dug for moles in the fields, ate inordinate amounts of deep-fried tofu, or lapped the oil out of square paper lanterns. (Although, if there had been any lanterns around, it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility.) It was just the term he’d come up with for when she went out in public wearing wrinkled clothes and when the names and relationships of the people around her dropped clean out of her memory.

In the past month, she’d been this way seven or eight times.

On those occasions, her weird comments and actions had gotten more frequent. She’d played basketball without a bra, recklessly providing eye candy for the high school boys. She’d sat with her white legs protruding from her skirt kicked out into the aisle, once again causing palpitations in impressionable young guys. She’d tromped around haphazardly, alarming the girls in their class (to the point they’d formed casual human barricades a couple of times). In that sense, although her voice hadn’t taken on any uncanny qualities, it was fair to say her behavior had.

He could tell when she was in fox-possession mode at a glance because her hairstyle was different.

She tied her long hair back up near the top of her head. It was incredibly careless, closer to Kojirou Sasaki’s hair in the manga or drama than an actual ponytail. If he tossed her a wooden sword, she seemed liable to bisect a passing swallow or sparrow with it on the spot.

Since she came off like a completely different person at times like this, Teshigawara had quietly started calling it “possessed by something/fox possession.” However, since this Mitsuha Miyamizu had been released from the intangible rules that bound her, “freed from possession” might have been more accurate. On the other hand, it was as if she could channel Michael’s spirit from heaven like a professional medium, so it really might have been possession after all.

And so, since Mitsuha’d turned up in the state when he knew her memory couldn’t be trusted, Teshigawara asked, “Hey. Remember that promise from yesterday?”

Mitsuha’s answer was as he’d expected.

“Um, what promise?”

“I said to keep the afternoon free, you and Saya both.”

Mitsuha quietly muttered something cryptic at thin air (“Leave me messages about stuff like that”) and then said, “Oh, right. Sorry, afraid I have no recollection of that whatsoever. I got no plans to speak of, so that’s, like, totally fine.”

“Who the heck are ya, huh?”

Without thinking, he responded with a Kansai dialect. This girl’s speech patterns were all over the map.

“And who the heck are you, huh? Kansai impersonator,” interjected Sayaka from the side.

“And whoever might you be, hmm?” Mitsuha shot at Sayaka, and the circle was complete.

After school let out, Teshigawara took Mitsuha and Sayaka to the bus stop. There was a vacant lot right beside the sign, opposite the old penny-candy store. Gravel had been spread over it to keep the dust down.

“What? Are we goin’ somewhere?” Sayaka asked dubiously. Of course they weren’t. The next bus wouldn’t come until evening.

Without answering, Teshigawara started waving at something down the road.

“Hey, there they are. Here, over here.”

One of Teshigawara Construction’s lightweight trucks rolled into the empty lot beside the bus stop. Both doors opened, and Uozumi and Motomasa got out. Motomasa was an employee who was a little younger than Uozumi. He looked like the former Chunichi Dragons baseball player Masa Yamamoto, so people called him Motomasa, but his real name was apparently Gondou. Both his real name and his nickname belonged to Chunichi pitchers…but the guy was actually a Hanshin fan.

In no time flat, before Teshigawara could lend a hand, the two had the cargo unloaded from the truck bed. Things went faster if amateurs didn’t get in the way. That was what made the pros so awesome.

“This good?”

“Yeah, thanks very much.”

“Tell the president to give us a raise.”

Saying that they had work to do, the pair climbed back into the truck and peeled out. Even their exit was magnificent.

“All right.”

Teshigawara knocked lightly on the pile of lumber and scraps.

“Talkin’ about all the stuff we don’t have ain’t gonna get us anywhere. Right, Mitsuha?”

“Huh? What?” Mitsuha looked blank. “What is that stuff, anyway?”

“This? This’s about to become somethin’ like Scandinavian furniture made from natural wood.”

“Huh?”

“If you don’t have what you want, make it yourself. If we don’t have a trendy café, don’t get bummed out about it. Just make one. As of right now, this is the site of a future café!”

Mitsuha’s expression was half surprise and half bewilderment. Sayaka frowned, cocking her head to one side.

“Can you build something like that?” Mitsuha asked.

“Don’t sell contractors’ kids short. I can at least pretend to be an heir.”

“What about walls and a ceiling?”

“I can’t manage that much, but we’ll put a real nice table and chairs here instead.”

“So it’s an open café.”

“You got it.”

Sayaka spoke up, sounding dubious. “You’re gonna make this?”

“What, you’re plannin’ to make me work all by myself? You two are helpin’.”

“Huh?”

“Yeah, absolutely.”

Their reactions were different. That was unexpected.

So was the way Mitsuha’d been the one to jump at the idea. He’d figured she’d say something like Mm, I’ve never done anything like this before, so, um… with her hands clasped behind her.

Still, he liked this trend.

4

They decided that Teshigawara would measure the materials and mark them with a pen and Mitsuha would do the cutting.

When Mitsuha picked up Teshigawara’s saw, she rolled her wrist, brandishing the thing as if performing a Chinese martial arts dance, and struck a pose. It was the thing guys inevitably did whenever holding some kind of blade.

“I’ve always wanted to tackle a serious DIY project.”

Teshigawara glanced up. “DIY is a wimpy word. Don’t call it that. This here’s wood-craftin’.”

“I see. Guess that makes me crafty, then.”

Not hardly.

Mitsuha eyed the marks on the logs. “So I just have to split these down the middle?”

“Yep.”

“Are you gonna slap on some round legs to make stools?”

“That’d be kinda dull. We’ll at least add backrests. I wanna shape the seats so they’re concave if I can, but we’ll save that problem for later.”

“Hmm.”

Mitsuha set the saw blade against the wood and made a small cut. Then she stomped a foot down onto the log and began sawing away ferociously.

At that point, Sayaka panicked. She grabbed Mitsuha from behind.

“Whoa-whoa-whoa, don’t, don’t!”

Wailing, Sayaka hugged Mitsuha tighter, which for some reason, got Mitsuha flustered, too.

“Aaaaah! Natori, er, Sayaka, stop, stop, don’t touch me—I’ll get yelled at. Except I’m not touching you, so maybe it’s okay? Or maybe not? Is it? I dunno.”

“What’re you talkin’ about?”

“Nothing. Just don’t hug me like that. It’s not fair to Tesshi, either.”

“Huh?”

Sayaka smacked Mitsuha on the back.

“Anyway, watch yourself. The whole class got mad at you the other day, remember?”

“…Yes’m.”

Apparently, some discussion had taken place among the girls in their class. Teshigawara was too afraid to ask what happened.

Mitsuha was crouched with her legs together, holding down her skirt with her left hand and sawing with her right. It wasn’t cutting well at all. From behind, she appeared unenthusiastic.

Having been given no real say in the matter, Sayaka agreed to help, too, so Teshigawara decided to give her the sander and show her how to smooth down the tabletop. They were going to put legs on the tree trunk piece Uozumi had gotten for them and turn it into a table.

“What is this?” Sayaka asked after he handed her the tool.

“A sander. It’s kinda like an electric rasp.”

“San, daaah!”

Mitsuha gave an incomprehensible yell. She absolutely had the wrong idea about something.

Teshigawara was getting ready to fasten the legs to the tabletop. He’d prepared them the day before and was about to bore holes in the underside.

The three worked briefly at their separate tasks, when suddenly, Mitsuha exclaimed, “Argh, for the love of…!” and stood up.

Saw still in hand, she stalked back to where they’d left their bags, extracted her phone, and made a call. The person on the other end picked up.

“Uh, hello? Yeah, yeah. Listen, would you do me a little favor?”

As she talked, she smacked her shoulder with the flat of the saw.

“No, c’mon, don’t say that. I’ll buy you some ice cream. Huh? Häagen-Dazs? Sure. Yes, really. For real.”

About thirty minutes later, Yotsuha appeared carrying a paper bag. “These, right?” she asked, holding a bag out to Mitsuha.

“Thanks, sweetie.”

“…‘Sweetie’?”

Thoroughly creeped out, Yotsuha stared at her sister.

The paper bag held a pair of track pants. Mitsuha pulled the pants on under her skirt and turned to Sayaka with an expression that said, There’s no problem now, right? She flexed the saw, making the blade warp noisily, and planted the sole of her shoe on the log with enough force to communicate a silent Take that! Then she set about comfortably sawing away.

“This saw cuts real well.”

“’Course it does. That’s a professional tool.”

“This skirt-pant combination is great. I always used to think, ‘Get those outta here!’ before, but this is good.”

“You did think ‘get ’em outta here,’” Sayaka muttered, still using the sander.

Sayaka, who’d been crouching down and holding her skirt in place as she worked, asked abruptly. “Wait, is it okay to just use this empty lot without askin’?”

“Yeah, probably,” Teshigawara answered.

“You sure? No one’s gonna bawl us out?”

“This property belongs to the old guy from the penny-candy store, and he’s dead. If we ask a dead guy, he ain’t gonna say no.”

“Hmm. Guess not.”

“That’s some amazing local color,” remarked Mitsuha, as if it had nothing to do with her.

Yotsuha sat quietly on the light-blue bench with the ice cream ad, sipping the honey-lemon drink her sister had bought her.

For a while, she watched the situation without much interest, but then…

“What’s that? What’re you makin’?”

“What do you think it is?” Mitsuha asked her.

“…Somewhere for people to come gossip?”

“Try somethin’ a little fancier. A place where you can eat and drink,” Teshigawara said.

“A food court.”

“So close,” said Sayaka.

Of course, there was no way they could finish in one day.

Teshigawara, who’d been absorbed in striking his chisel, finally raised his head. While his mind had been elsewhere, the veil between day and night had crept up on him.

Although neither initiated it, both Teshigawara and Sayaka stood as if to say, Guess that’s about all for today. Mitsuha, though, didn’t stop working. She’d been leveling the base of a stool and clung to the materials in defiance of the tacit prodding to go home.

Folding her hands behind her and swaying from side to side, Sayaka looked up at the sky and murmured, “It’s half-light.”

Mitsuha lifted her head slightly, glancing at her not so much as a rebuke but confused as if having misheard. Then, apparently giving up, she let go of her tools.

“No need to get desperate about it. We can take our time makin’ these.”

“Yeah, but…”

Hooking her thumbs in her pockets and standing, Mitsuha muttered, “I don’t know when I’ll be able to come next.”

“Hunh?”

What was she talking about?

“I don’t wanna leave…”

Mitsuha watched the red evening sun sink behind the mountain ridge, her eyes sad and gloomy.

Standing there, she made such a picture that Teshigawara thought her mood might infect him. A sensation like a pleasant pain pricked at the base of his throat.

He asked, “Didn’t you want to leave this town full o’ nothin’?”

“Huh? Why?”

She didn’t seem to be playing dumb. Her response was perfectly frank.

“You said so.”

Mitsuha directed her eyes to the sky as if to accuse somebody above.

“Why would I have said that?” she murmured amid the grainy rays of sunset. “This town has everything. Clean air, good water, fresh wind, a shining lake, a deep, starry sky…”

“Y’know, sometimes, you really do act like somebody else.”

“Huh?”

For some reason, Mitsuha looked startled and guilty.

“Are you takin’ a page from those Takarazuka girls who play the male roles?”

“’Zuka, huh…”

During this exchange, Teshigawara’s opinion of Mitsuha Miyamizu changed as sharply as if someone had flipped a switch.

The mental gymnastics had been incredibly complex but, articulated, went something like this:

Mitsuha—this person—said all kinds of stuff, but…

Does she really see the beauty in this town after all? Does she think it has value?

Huh. Well.

That’s a relief.

Ah…

She’s one of the good ones.

She’s definitely good. I can trust her.

That’s what was going through Teshigawara’s mind.

She’ll understand the stuff I’m feelin’.

It was the first time he’d thought anything like that about Mitsuha.

They’d been friends ever since they were little, even before grade school, and he knew her well. Still, that didn’t mean he trusted her completely.

Naturally, this wasn’t because he didn’t like her. On the contrary, sometimes he felt something approaching romantic love toward her.

No, that wasn’t it. The reason he had trouble opening up to her was simply because he was a guy, and Mitsuha was a girl.

The same went for Sayaka.

There was a wall of feelings between two people of different genders.

It existed on both sides.

The things they felt were just too different.

Consequently, when it came right down to it, he’d never told them what was really on his mind. The same was probably true for them as well.

However, at that moment—in the pale darkness and the rays of twilight, what the locals called half-light, the time of “Who goes there?”—the spaces separating them formed by misgivings that whispered, They wouldn’t get it even if I told them and Even if I asked, they wouldn’t understand were filled.

“Listen.”

Abruptly, he started to speak.

“I’d like to get out of this town myself, but I can’t. I’ve got responsibilities and obligations and stuff. Besides, I hate this place, but there are parts I like, too. It’d feel great to just bail, but I do think I’d like to stay here and tough it out. I want to personally make this town better so folks won’t want to call it lousy.”

He said this all in one breath, and then everyone fell silent.

At times like this, the normal girl reaction would’ve been Huh? or Why are you talking about yourself all of a sudden? Don’t be annoying. At least, that was how Teshigawara understood the world.

Mitsuha Miyamizu didn’t react that way.

She nodded, and her expression was serious.

“Listen, Saya, Tesshi.”

This might have been the first time he’d heard Mitsuha call them Saya and Tesshi when she was fox-possessed.

Mitsuha closed the distance between them, and after a deliberate moment’s pause…

…she opened her mouth and said:

“I’ll tell you a few things soon.”