Mirai by Mamoru Hosoda

Author:Mamoru Hosoda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yen On
Published: 2018-10-29T16:00:00+00:00

TEARS

Kun’s momentum carried him forward in a headlong slide. He landed in a shallow puddle in an alleyway, generating a giant splash and a burst of ripples in the water. Groaning, he hefted himself up off his face and plopped down on his behind, shaking his wet head in a watery spray that made even more ripples.

“Wh-what’s going on?”

He stared around in a daze.

The rain had just lifted over the totally unfamiliar alleyway. The street was only wide enough for two cars and lined with small shops with signs advertising alcohol, cigarettes, clothes, salt, and the like. Some of the headlights on the parked cars were round; others were square. There was a vending machine selling drinks Kun had never seen before. Oddly, a sign reading PHOTO PRINTS 20 YEN hung outside a drugstore, not a camera shop.

He definitely wasn’t in the present, but this wasn’t the distant past, either. The dark shadows under the eaves contrasted with the brilliant white sky reflected on the wet asphalt, capturing the in-between feeling of the era in which he had landed.

“…Where am I?” Kun asked no one in particular as he got to his feet. As if in answer, a drop of water splashed down a little ways away. He turned toward the sound.

“…?”

There was a row of old wooden houses with tiled roofs and an old-fashioned barbershop with potted plants lined up outside. A red umbrella was leaning against an electrical pole. Beyond the pole, a girl with long hair crouched on the asphalt, her hunched back to Kun.

“Sniff…sniff…”

She must have been crying—she was rubbing her eyes with the backs of her hands, and her shoulders were shaking as if she was all alone in the world.

“…Sniff…sniff…”

She looked a little older than Kun, perhaps in her first year of elementary school. He quietly crept up to her and peered into her face.

“What are you sad about?”

She didn’t answer.

“…Sniff…”

Kun thought for a moment, then put the palm of his hand on her head and stroked it like a mother soothing her child.

“Don’t cry.”

The girl took her hands away from her face and slowly looked up at Kun tearily.

“…Thank you. You’re sweet.”

“Oh!”

Her face was the spitting image of Mom’s in her childhood photos in the album. The girl blinked and smiled.

“But I wasn’t really crying, you know,” she said, pointing with her pencil to a scrap of paper on her knee. Something had been written there in an unsteady hand. “Since I’m writing a letter, I thought it would be a good idea to put my feelings into it.” She giggled, shrugged, and stuck out her tongue.

Kun was surprised. Had she been fake crying? He felt like he’d been tricked.

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