Go: A Coming of Age Novel by Kaneshiro Kazuki

Author:Kaneshiro, Kazuki [Kaneshiro, Kazuki]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9781503937376
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Published: 2018-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

5

There was a seventeen-year-old boy who went to high school in Tokyo.

He fell in love with a girl that he always saw on the train platform on his way to school. It was love at first sight. She was also a student at a high school in Tokyo and was very pretty.

Every time he saw her, his heart ached terribly. He didn’t know how to tell her what he was feeling. To begin with, he had no idea what language to use to speak to a girl like her. None of the adults in his life had taught him about such things, nor had he been taught much about people of her kind. She wore a chima geogori, the traditional girls’ uniform of North Korean schools.

After some hesitation, the boy confided in his friends. Naturally they teased him and goaded him on, saying, “We’ll be standing right next to you when you tell her.” The boy didn’t have it in him to protest. He was a shy and delicate boy. One of his friends said, “Keep this to psych yourself up,” and gave him a butterfly knife.

One Wednesday morning, the boy and his friends gathered on the platform. She appeared before them at the same time she usually arrived. The girl’s beauty took the boys’ breath away. A passenger nearby overheard one of the boys say, perhaps out of jealousy: “If you get turned down by a Korean girl, you have to be our errand boy.”

Goaded on by his friends, the boy timidly approached the girl. He stood diagonally behind her.

“Um . . .”

The girl trembled reflexively. North Korean terrorism, suspicions of abductions of Japanese citizens, and the nuclear program were burdens the girl wearing the chima geogori was made to bear on her slender shoulders. Once she’d been punched in the shoulder by a fiftyish salaryman. On this very platform.

Fearfully she turned around and caught sight of the boy blinking nervously before her. He looked familiar. He’d been on the same train car several times and had glared at her with a terrifying look.

Holding her bag up to her chest, she unconsciously braced herself and asked, “What is it?”

What must he have been feeling just then?

Intimidated by the overwhelming beauty of her voice? Or shocked by the realization that she could speak Japanese? He just stared at her face, saying nothing. Shrinking under his gaze, threatened, she looked all around her, crying for help inside. The surrounding passengers quickly averted their eyes, so as not to get caught looking.

A student came up the stairs and emerged onto the platform. As if it were the most natural thing in the world, he met her gaze and heard her silent cries for help. He was her senpai. He despised North Korea for making his kohai suffer in this way, despised the misguided Japanese who bullied the weak. He quickly went up to the boy and shoved him in the back. I couldn’t bring myself to blame him for his mistake. If I were there, I would’ve done the same thing.

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