A Year at Kitami High School

How to read this book

This story is written for English learners. The sentences are short. The words around each new word are easy, so you can guess the meaning before you look it up.

Every bold word comes from your CET-4 list. When you meet a bold word, do not stop. Keep reading. The sentence after it usually explains it. At the end of each chapter there is a short word list, so you can check yourself later.

Read each chapter twice. The first time, read fast and enjoy the story. The second time, read slowly and notice the bold words.

The people in this story

Sota Aoki — Second-year student. He is the only member of the school newspaper club. His family owns a small bakery.

Mizuki Hoshino — A transfer student from Tokyo. She is quiet. She used to write, and then she stopped.

Kenji Mori — Sota’s best friend since childhood. Loud, hungry, on the baseball team.

Yuka Tanabe — Class representative. She wants to fix everything and everyone.

Ryo Kurosawa — Vice president of the student council. He wants the newspaper club closed.

Ms. Hayashi — English teacher and club advisor. She is always drinking cold coffee.

Grandmother Aoki — Sota’s grandmother. She lives on a farm two hours away.

Chapter One — The Room at the End of the Hall

April

The cherry trees along the lane to school were full of blossom. Every year it is the same. The flowers open, everybody takes photographs, and eight days later a breeze blows them all away.

I walked up the hill at six in the morning. That is not normal for a student. But I do not commute by train like the others. My family owns a bakery, so my day commences early. At four in the morning my father turns on the oven. At five my mother pours flour into the machine. At half past five I carry the first loaf of bread to the front of the shop and put it on a tray.

Our shop is small and modest. Two tables, six chairs, a paper napkin holder, and a shelf of cereal boxes for people who want breakfast. My mother is the cashier. Every client who comes in is a neighbour, so a purchase takes twenty minutes, because nobody can buy bread without telling my mother a story first.

“Sota,” my father said. “Bread.”

He never uses more than two words beforehand. He waits until the bread is finished, and then he says “bread.”

I put the last loaf on the rack, wiped my hands on my sleeve, and left.

My name is Sota Aoki. I am seventeen. I go to Kitami High School, a decent public school near the sea, with a gymnasium that leaks when it rains and an auditorium with three broken seats in the back row.

I am a second-year student, and I belong to the newspaper club.

That sounds better than it is. I am the newspaper club. All of it.

The club room is at the end of the third-floor hall, past the science room, in a corner where nobody walks. Inside there is one long table, four stools, a metal cabinet full of old papers, and a lamp with a bulb that flickers. Somebody left a mop in the corner in 1998 and nobody has moved it since.

The room is a little gloomy, and the window is small, but it is mine.

I unlocked the door and turned on the light. Dust floated in the air. On the table was my writing pad, my pen, and the last issue of our paper, printed on cheap grey paper.

The name of the paper is The Sakura Bulletin.

My grandfather started it forty years ago. Back then, the club had eighteen members. There was a columnist for sports, a columnist for food, and a girl who wrote a weekly commentary about the school lunch that was so cruel the headmaster asked her to stop.

Now there is me.

I sat down and wrote a heading on the empty page: Spring Term Begins. Then I looked at it. Then I put a full stop, then a comma, then a colon, then I crossed all three out.

Writing a headline is the hardest part of journalism. Everything after it is easy.

At midday the door opened and Ms. Hayashi came in, holding a cup of cold coffee. She is our English teacher and our club advisor. She is thirty-five, tired, and kind in a peculiar way — she never says anything nice directly.

“Aoki,” she said. “Bad news. Sit down.”

“I am sitting down.”

“Then sit down harder.”

She put a piece of paper on the table. It was an official memorandum from the school office, with a clerical stamp in the corner and the secretary’s signature under it. I read it twice. The words were literal and short, and they did not care about me at all.

NOTICE: A club with fewer than five (5) members shall cease to exist. Any club that does not meet this rule by the first day of the November school festival will face dismissal from the club list, and its room will be returned to the school.

I read the last line a third time. My wrist felt stiff. I put down my pen.

“Five members,” I said. “By November.”

“Five,” Ms. Hayashi said. “Including you.”

“That is not a rule. That is a death sentence with a date on it.”

“It is an ongoing problem for every small club. The judo club has three people and one of them is a dropout who comes back only for lunch.” She drank her cold coffee and made a face. “The student council will proceed with a check every month. Kurosawa is handling it.”

“Of course he is.”

Ryo Kurosawa is the vice president of the student council. He is tall, punctual, and always stiff, like a man wearing a shirt one size too small. He believes in rules the way other people believe in gods.

“Aoki.” Ms. Hayashi tapped the paper. “Do not look so dull about it. Four people. You have seven months. Go and find four human beings who like words.”

“In this school?”

“In this world,” she said, and left.

I did not go home at the usual time. I stayed and cleaned the room, because cleaning is what I do when I am worried. I picked up the litter under the table. I found a 1993 bulletin, a broken comb, and one sock. I do not want to know.

At five o’clock I went down to the notice board by the shoe lockers and pinned up a small sketch I had drawn: a newspaper with legs, running. Under it I wrote:

NEWSPAPER CLUB — WE NEED FOUR PEOPLE. NO EXPERIENCE NEEDED. WE HAVE A ROOM AND A KETTLE.

It was not a great advertisement. But at the outset of anything, you only need one person to stop and read.

I sat on the stairs across the aisle and awaited my future.

Nobody came for forty minutes.

Then somebody came.

She stopped in front of the board and stood there with her hands behind her back. She was in our school uniform, but the collar of her white blouse was folded differently — the Tokyo way, I think — and her shoes were too clean. New shoes. New student.

She read my poster from the top to the bottom. Then she read it again. Nobody reads a poster twice. That is not commonplace. That is not part of anybody’s routine.

She lifted one hand and touched the paper, very lightly, near the word WORDS.

I stood up too fast and hit my elbow on the wall.

She turned around.

Her eyebrows went up — first one, then the other, which is a thing I have only ever seen her do. There was a faint mark of blue ink on her thumb.

“Is this yours?” she asked.

“Yes. Sorry. The drawing is bad. I know the legs are wrong.”

“The legs are fine.” She looked back at the poster. “The conjunction is wrong. ‘We have a room and a kettle’ sounds like you are proud of the kettle.”

I opened my mouth and nothing came out.

“Use a preposition,” she said. “‘A room with a kettle in it.’ Then the kettle sounds like a joke, and people like jokes.”

“…Who are you?”

“Mizuki Hoshino.” She gave a small, stiff bow. It was the bow of somebody who has enrolled at six different schools and has stopped expecting anything from the seventh. “I transferred here yesterday. Class 2-B.”

“I’m in 2-B.”

“I know. You sat by the window and drew a newspaper with legs for the whole of maths.”

My face went hot. “That is a genuine accusation.”

“It is a genuine fact.” She almost smiled. Almost. Her mouth moved about one millimetre.

Then she looked at the poster one more time, and something in her face closed, like a door pushed shut by a breeze.

“Good luck,” she said. “I don’t write.”

“I didn’t ask you to.”

“You were going to.”

She was right. I was.

She walked away down the hall, and her shoes made no sound at all, and I stood there rubbing my elbow and feeling like the world’s least punctual person — the kind who thinks of the right sentence four hours late.

That night I sat in the attic above the bakery, where my grandfather kept his old boxes. I turned on the lamp. The bulb buzzed.

Inside the boxes were forty years of The Sakura Bulletin. Grey paper, soft as cloth. On the front page of the very first issue, in 1985, my grandfather had written a short line under the heading, as a kind of promise:

A school is a thousand people who never say what happened to them. This paper is here to ask.

I sat on the floor for a long time.

Then I took my writing pad and wrote a list of four names. Three of the lines were empty.

On the first line I wrote: Mizuki Hoshino (says she does not write. This is a lie.)

Downstairs, the stove clicked. The breeze came in through the window and smelled of the sea and of bread.

Seven months.

I could work with seven months.

Chapter One Word List

Chapter Two — Four Empty Lines

Late April

To recruit four people, you need two things: publicity, and something worth joining.

I had neither. So I decided to make the second one first.

“If I print one genuine article,” I told Ms. Hayashi, “one that people actually want to read, then the members will come.”

“That is a daring plan,” she said. “It is also the plan of every failing newspaper in human history.”

“Do you have a better one?”

“Bait,” she said. “Free food.”

She was joking. She was also completely right, but I did not know that yet.

I began with the baseball team, because I had an ally there.

Kenji Mori has been my friend since we were six. He is loud, he is boastful, and he can eat four bowls of rice without stopping to breathe. He is also the second-best pitcher in our school, and he never lets anybody forget it.

I found him behind the gymnasium, in the batting cage, hitting balls with a vigorous and slightly angry swing.

“Aoki!” He did not stop. “Come to write about me at last?”

“I’ve come to inquire about the team.”

“That’s the same thing.” He hit another ball. His calf muscles were shaking. “Ask your questions.”

I took out my writing pad. “How is the workout going?”

“Terrible. Coach made us run to the harbour and back. Kondo threw up in a hedge.” He swung again and missed, and made a sound like a dying animal. “Also there’s a scout coming in June. From a university. He’s coming to look at Hayama, not me.”

There it was. I stopped writing and looked at him.

“Are you envious?”

“Of course I’m envious.” He put down the bat. He was breathing hard, and his grip on the fence made his knuckles white. “Hayama is better than me. Everybody knows it. I’ve known it since we were twelve. But I’m the one who comes at six in the morning. I’m the one who does the extra hundred. And nobody writes that down anywhere.”

For about ten seconds, neither of us spoke.

Then I said, quietly: “I’ll write it down.”

Kenji looked at me. He rubbed the back of his neck. “…That’s stupid.”

“Yes.”

“Do I get food?”

“There is bread at my house.”

“Then I’m in the club.” He picked up the bat again. “I’ll take the photographs. I have no aptitude for words, but I have a phone and I have guts.”

“You have to come to meetings.”

“I’ll come when there’s bread.”

That is not a pledge anybody would call strong. But I wrote his name on the second line, and I felt the room in my chest get bigger.

Two of five.

The next day I made publicity.

I printed forty posters at the school office, which cost me all my coins, down to the last penny of my lunch money. I put them in the hall, in the aisle by the shoe lockers, and on the door of the auditorium.

Then I stood at the school gate at seven in the morning and gave them out, one by one, to everybody who walked past.

It was not a competent performance. My hands shook. My voice came out too high. A third-year student took a poster, looked at it, folded it into a paper plane, and threw it at his comrade. Somebody in the brass band corps shouted “Good luck, newspaper guy!” and blew two loud notes on his trumpet, and everybody laughed, and about four people clapped.

Four people, and no applause after it. Just the small dry sound of four pairs of hands, and then silence.

I stood there and thought: I could stop now. Nobody would even notice.

Then I gave out the next poster.

At lunch, somebody sat down opposite me without asking.

“Aoki Sota. Class 2-B. Newspaper club, one member.” Yuka Tanabe put her hands flat on the desk. She is our class representative. She talks like a train that has decided not to use the brakes. “I have a proposal for you.”

“I’m eating.”

“You can eat and listen. That is one of the great facilities of the human body.”

She is like this. You do not fight it. You wait.

“In July,” she said, “there is the student council election. I am going to be a candidate. To win, I need publicity. You need readers. So we cooperate. I give you interviews, you give me space in the paper. Total cooperation. A cooperative relationship.”

“You want me to write about you.”

“I want you to write about the election. Fairly.” She looked at me very seriously. “If you write only nice things about me, nobody will believe the paper, and then your paper is worth nothing, and then my publicity is worth nothing. I am not stupid, Aoki. I reckon you will be tougher on me than anyone.”

I put down my chopsticks. I had, at the outset, thought of Yuka Tanabe as a distraction — a loud girl who liked being in charge. I had been erroneous about that. I had erred completely.

“Are you joining the club?” I asked.

“No. I’m going to be too busy.” She stood up. “But I’ll be your best respondent. Ask me anything and I’ll answer within an hour. That’s a promise.”

“Why?”

She stopped. For one moment the train slowed down.

“Because last year I wanted to read something honest about this school,” she said, “and there wasn’t anything. There was only gossip.”

That week I wrote my first real article.

It was about Kenji. About the boy who is second-best and comes anyway. I called it The Hundred Extra Swings. I worked on it for four nights in the club room, under the flickering bulb, with cold tea and no company.

Writing it was harder than I expected. Every time I got near the true thing, my sentences went soft, as if they wanted to hedge, to protect everybody. I had to strive against my own politeness. Three times I nearly gave up and wrote something safe and dull instead.

On Thursday night I finished the draft. It was bad. I knew it was bad. The bulk of it was fine, but the middle part had no cohesion — the parts did not hold together — and the ending simply stopped, like a train running out of track.

I left it on the table, turned off the lamp, and went home to sleep.

On Friday morning, the draft was still on the table.

But it was covered in red ink.

Somebody had gone through the whole thing, line by line. Not cruelly. Carefully. In the margin next to my weak middle section: You are explaining. Show the thing instead. Next to a sentence I was proud of: This is a nice sentence, but it is doing nothing. Cut it. Next to my ending: Do not stop. Land.

And at the top, in the same small, straight handwriting:

The person who does the extra hundred is the story. The scout is not the story. Stop looking at the scout.

There was no name. There did not need to be one. I had seen the faint blue ink on that thumb.

I sat down slowly on a stool.

Then I turned the last page over, took my pen, and wrote in the empty space at the bottom:

Thank you. Meeting is Monday at four. There is a kettle in the room. Also bread.

I did not lock the door that night.

On Monday at four o’clock, I sat in the club room and awaited her.

At five past four, the door opened.

Mizuki Hoshino stood there with her bag against her chest, like a shield. She did not come in.

“I’m not joining,” she said.

“Okay.”

“I only fixed it because it was wrong and it was going to be printed. That’s all. A wrong thing being printed is worse than a wrong thing sitting in a drawer.”

“Okay.”

She stayed in the doorway. The silence went on so long that it stopped being silence and became something else.

“…Is there really bread?” she said.

I pushed the paper bag across the table.

She looked at it. She looked at the mop in the corner, and the 1993 bulletin, and the metal cabinet, and the small window with the breeze coming through it.

Then Mizuki Hoshino took three steps into the room and sat down on the stool across from me, still holding her bag, and said, with the bearing of somebody signing a very serious international agreement:

“One piece. And I am not joining.”

She ate two.

Chapter Two Word List

Chapter Three — The Season of Rain

June

In June it rains in Japan for a month without a serious pause. We call it the rainy season. Everything becomes damp. Your shoes never dry. The air in the classroom is moist and warm, and by the third week even the walls smell like a wet rug.

On the first Monday of June, water began to come through the ceiling of the club room.

It came in one thin line, near the metal cabinet, and it fell into a small puddle on the floor. I put a bucket under it. Then, on Tuesday, a second line started, so I put a plastic tray under that one. By Thursday we had four containers on the floor and the room played music all afternoon: tick, tick, tock, tick.

“The plumbing upstairs is old,” said Mr. Doi, the school caretaker, who came up to look and then did nothing about it for four months. “Above you is the old laundry room. The pipes there are beginning to decay.”

“Can you fix them?”

“I can put it on a list.” He looked at the wet ceiling with real affection, the way other men look at old cars. “Nothing here is waterproof, boy. This building has been slowly falling apart since before you were born.”

After he left, Kenji said, “This room is going to disintegrate.”

“It is not going to disintegrate.”

“It is going to fall into small pieces and I will be inside it.”

Mizuki, who was sitting in the corner with a book and officially not a member of anything, said without looking up:

“The disintegration of a building takes about eighty years. You will be fine.”

Kenji stared at her. Then he stared at me. Then he mouthed the words she talks? with his eyebrows so high they nearly left his face.

She had come almost every day since April, and she had not joined once.

That was our arrangement. She sat in the corner. She read. Sometimes she looked at my drafts and made small marks in red ink and gave them back without comment. When I asked her a direct question about writing she answered with restraint, in short sentences, as if each word cost her money.

I did not push. Something in her had a lid on it, and I had a feeling that if I pulled at the lid she would simply stop coming.

But I noticed things, because that is my pastime, and also my problem.

I noticed that when Kenji said something funny she looked at the floor to hide her face.

I noticed that when a first-year student put his head around the door and asked if this was the newspaper club, she went completely still, like an animal that has heard a sound.

And I noticed the notebook. Small, black, soft at the corners. She carried it everywhere and never once opened it in front of us.

On the last Friday in June, the rain came down so hard that the school halted all club activity and sent everybody home.

I found Mizuki standing under the roof by the gate, looking out at the water, not moving.

“No umbrella?”

“It was sunny this morning.”

“It has not been sunny in nineteen days.”

“It was sunny in my heart,” she said flatly, “and then reality interfered.”

I laughed. It startled her — I saw her shoulders jump — and then she looked away, and I saw the corner of her mouth do the millimetre thing again.

I opened my umbrella. It is a cheap plastic one from the bakery, and it is not big.

“Which way do you live?”

“…Down the hill. Past the garage with the blue door.”

“That is my way.”

It was not my way.

We walked. The rain splashed up from the road onto our shoes and our socks and our legs, and in about ninety seconds we were both soaked anyway, which made the umbrella into a joke that neither of us mentioned.

Our shoulders touched. Then they did not. Then they touched again. Neither of us said anything about that either.

Halfway down the hill, past a house with a wet balcony and a chimney with no smoke, she said:

“Why do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“The paper. You have two members. You are going to lose the room in November. You know that.”

“I know that.”

“Then why?”

The rain got louder for a moment and then quieter, the way it does.

“My grandfather started it,” I said. “But that’s not the real answer. The real answer is worse.” I moved the umbrella a little more over her side. “I think there are about a thousand people in that school and almost none of them ever say anything true out loud. And I think if nobody writes it down, then in three years it will be like none of it happened. Kenji’s hundred extra swings. Tanabe standing at the gate at seven in the morning. All of it just… gone.”

She was quiet.

“That is a very earnest thing to say,” she said at last.

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“I did not say it was bad.”

We reached the bottom of the hill. There is a bus stop there with a small roof and one bench, and we stopped under it, because the rain was too heavy to keep going.

Water ran down the road in a small river. Her hair was flat and wet against her forehead. There was a haze over the whole town, so thick that the sea and the sky had become one grey thing.

And then, without any warning at all, she said:

“I wrote something once, and a person got hurt.”

I did not speak. I have learned this from a year of interviews: when somebody finally opens the door, do not walk through it. Stand still.

“At my old school in Tokyo,” she said. “I was on the paper there too. In my first year.” She looked straight ahead at the rain. “There was a teacher who was taking money from the club budget. Not a lot. Small amounts, for two years. I found out. I checked it four times. Then I wrote it, and it was true, and they printed it.”

“That’s good work.”

“He had a daughter in the second year.” Her voice did not change. That was the frightening part. “The story went outside the school. It was on the news for two days. He lost his job. His family had to move. And his daughter, who had done nothing, had to leave in the middle of the year, with everybody watching her walk out of the gate.”

The rain hit the roof above us.

“Everything I wrote was true,” Mizuki said. “Every fact was correct. And I still think about her every single day.”

“Did they blame you?”

“Some of them. The suspicion was that I did it to be famous.” She gave a small sound that was not a laugh. “There was an accusation in a letter. Somebody alleged that I had been paid. It was not true. But rumour does not need to be true, it only needs to be repeated.”

“So what happened?”

“The school made me stand in front of the whole year group and read an apology I did not write.” She finally turned and looked at me. Her eyes were dry, which was somehow worse. “I read it. Then I went home. Then I stopped writing. That was a year and a half ago.”

I thought about all the things a person could say. It wasn’t your fault. You did the right thing. You were brave. Every one of them was true and every one of them was useless, and she had heard all of them already.

So instead I said:

“Do you still think it was worth printing?”

She was silent for a long time.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s the part I can’t get rid of. If it happened again tomorrow, I would print it again.” She pressed her hands together. “And that makes me feel like a person with something wrong inside her.”

“Or a person with a conscience that doesn’t switch off.”

“Those are the same thing, Aoki.”

The rain began to get quieter.

“Is that why you won’t join?”

“I won’t join because I am not going to do that to another person,” she said. “And because I don’t trust myself to stop once I start.”

She stood up and stepped out from under the roof into the rain, and turned around to look at me, standing there getting wet, with the whole grey town behind her.

“Also,” she said, “your club room is going to fall down.”

“It is not going to fall down!”

“Goodnight, Aoki.”

She walked away into the water.

I stood at the bus stop for another five minutes with a useless umbrella in my hand, feeling the damp in my socks and something much worse than damp somewhere under my ribs.

Then I walked home and wrote in my notebook, on the page with the four lines:

She does not need me to tell her she is good. She knows. She needs someone to sit in the room with her while she decides what to do about it.

That night the rain finally stopped.

In the morning there was dew on every leaf in the garden, and the sun came up over a town that had been washed completely clean, and the puddle in the road outside the bakery held a perfect small copy of the sky.

Chapter Three Word List

Chapter Four — The Election

July

By July the rain had gone and the heat had arrived. The cicadas started at six every morning and did not stop. The school put one electric fan in each classroom, and every fan turned its head slowly from side to side, like a bored teacher.

And on the notice board, a white sheet went up with a red heading:

STUDENT COUNCIL ELECTION — JULY 15

Two students had put their names forward. There would be a real contest.

Our school has a small constitution. It is four pages long, it was written in 1974, and almost nobody has read it. I have read it three times, because I am that kind of person.

It says the student council is chosen by a secret ballot of all students. It says the council controls the club budget. And in Article 9 it says that the headmaster keeps the right to veto any decision the council makes — which he has used exactly twice in fifty years, both times about food.

The charter for clubs is a separate document. It has eleven clauses. Clause 6 is the one that was going to kill me: five members or dismissal.

Clause 6 was two years old.

Clause 6 had been written by Ryo Kurosawa.

The first candidate was Yuka Tanabe. Her candidacy surprised nobody. She had been preparing since she was born.

The second was Kurosawa himself.

I went to the council room on Monday to arrange interviews. The room is on the second floor and it is the only room in the school with a working air conditioner, which tells you something about politics everywhere in the world.

Kurosawa was at the desk, writing. He did not look up.

“Aoki. Newspaper club. Two members.”

“Three, on a good day.”

“Two.” He put down his pen and folded his hands. Everything about him was stiff and clean and exactly straight. “I know why you are here. You want an interview so that you can contradict me in print.”

“I want an interview so that I can print what you say.”

“Those are usually the same thing.”

“Only if what you say is bad.”

Something moved behind his eyes. It was not anger. It was closer to interest, which was worse.

“Sit down,” he said.

I sat.

“You think I am your enemy,” Kurosawa said. “That is conventional and it is lazy. Let me give you facts. This school has a budget. It is not large. The gymnasium roof leaks in four places. The science lab has one facility for washing eyes, and it is broken. There are twenty-two clubs. Nine of them have fewer than five members, and together those nine take eleven per cent of the money.”

“So you wrote Clause 6.”

“I wrote Clause 6.” He said it without any pretence, which I respected and hated at the same time. “A club is people. Two people do not constitute a club; they constitute two people with a key. If there are no people, it is a room with a kettle in it. I am not going to conceal my position to be popular, Aoki. I am not a politician.”

“You are literally running for election.”

“That is different,” he said, and for one second — one — the corner of his mouth moved, and I understood that Ryo Kurosawa had a sense of humour buried somewhere under all that ironing.

Then it was gone.

“You may have your interview,” he said. “Print it in full. Do not cut it to make me sound worse. If you do, I will reject the paper’s budget in September, and I will be entitled to do it.”

“And if I print it fairly?”

“Then we will still be on opposite sides,” he said. “But we will be on opposite sides honestly.”

That week, Ms. Hayashi’s English class read a newspaper article from America, because she said we should see how other people argue.

It was about health care. It had the word Medicare in the first line, and the word federal in the second, and by the third line half the class had given up.

She wrote the hard words on the board in chalk.

“A congressman,” she said, “is a member of the American Congress. The Congress has two parts. One of them is called the Senate. In Britain they call it Parliament instead, and the leader is a Prime Minister. In some countries the leader is called the Premier. In a republic, the head of the country is elected. Yes, Mori, this will be in the exam.”

Kenji put his head on his desk and made a small dying sound.

“A liberal person,” Ms. Hayashi went on, “usually wants change. A conservative person usually wants to keep things as they are. Neither of these is a bad word, whatever your uncle says at New Year. A moderate person stands in the middle. A neutral person takes no side at all.”

“Which are you, sensei?” somebody asked.

“I am a teacher,” she said. “I am neutral in public and terrible in private.”

At the back of the room, Mizuki was writing all of it down. Every word. She had the look on her face that I had started to recognise: the look of somebody preparing for a fight.

The election special took nine days.

We did it properly. I interviewed both candidates for an hour each, and typed every word. Kenji photographed them. Yuka answered every question within the hour, exactly as she had promised, which made her the best respondent I have ever had.

And Mizuki — who was still not a member — checked the facts.

She did it at night, in the club room, with the door open so that it did not officially count as being in a club.

“Kurosawa says nine clubs take eleven per cent,” she said. “Where did that number come from?”

“He said it in the interview.”

“That is not where a number comes from. That is where a number arrives.” She held out her hand. “Get me the budget papers. The real ones. From the school office.”

It took me two days and a great deal of politeness to the office secretary. When I brought them back, Mizuki spread the pages across the table and went through them line by line with a ruler, the way a person defuses a bomb.

At eleven o’clock she said: “It is nine point six per cent, not eleven. He has included the brass band, which has thirty-one members. He is not lying. He is being generous with himself.”

“Should we print the real number?”

She looked up at me.

“You should print both,” she said. “His number, and then the number from the papers, and then let the reader decide. That is not an attack. That is a contrast.”

I wrote it down exactly like that.

Then I said, carefully, without looking at her: “You know that this is the best thing in the whole issue.”

“I know.”

“It has your work in it.”

“It does not have my name on it,” she said, and closed the file, and that was the end of the conversation.

The preliminary debate was on July 13th in the auditorium, in front of six hundred sweating students.

Yuka spoke first. She was excellent. She talked about welfare for students, about a place to go when things at home were bad, about the small clubs as the only room in the school where a strange kid can breathe. Some of it was too soft. All of it was genuine.

Kurosawa spoke second, and he was terrible in a way I had not expected — he was correct. Numbers, dates, the state of the gymnasium roof, the cost of repairs, a plan with three stages. It was contentious and cold and completely honest, and by the end even the students who hated him had gone quiet.

Then the floor opened for questions, and I stood up, because that is my job.

“Aoki Sota, Sakura Bulletin. A question for both candidates.” Six hundred faces turned. My legs stopped feeling like legs. “Clause 6 removes a club when it has fewer than five members. My question is not about money. It is this: what is a school for? If your answer is ‘to be efficient’, say so, and I will print it, and everybody here will know. Tanabe first.”

I did not sit down.

Yuka said: “A school is for the people in it. Even the awkward ones. Especially them.”

Kurosawa was quiet for three seconds, and then he said:

“A school is a promise to be here next year. Things that cannot keep that promise should end with dignity, so that the things that can, survive.” He looked directly at me. “I am sorry, Aoki. That is my real answer.”

The auditorium was completely silent.

Then, from somewhere in the middle rows, somebody started to clap — one person — and then it spread, and the applause was for both of them, and I sat down and my hands were shaking and I thought: this is the best thing I will ever print.

The poll was two days later.

We printed our election special that morning, four pages, five hundred copies, cheap grey paper. Kenji and I gave them out at the gate at seven o’clock. By eight-thirty they were gone. I found people reading them in the corridor, in the aisle, on the stairs, in the lavatory queue. Somebody in the third year had cut out the budget contrast and pinned it to the notice board.

Five hundred copies. Gone.

The result was proclaimed at four o’clock.

Kurosawa: 289. Tanabe: 271.

Eighteen votes.

I found Yuka afterwards, sitting alone in the empty classroom, very upright, with her hands in her lap. She had not cried and she was not going to.

“Eighteen,” she said.

“Eighteen.”

“Do you know what makes me angry? I don’t think he’s wrong about the money.” She laughed once. “I think he’s wrong about people. But I don’t have a number for people.”

“Nobody does. That’s why we write it down instead.”

She looked up at me then.

“Your paper was fair,” she said. “You printed the thing that helped him. The budget answer. I read it and I thought, that is going to cost me votes, and it did, and it was still the right thing to print.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Yuka Tanabe said. “Be like that in November, when it’s your turn.”

That night the club room was hot and quiet. Kenji had gone to training. I sat by the open window with the bulletin on the table and the cicadas outside.

Mizuki came in without knocking, put her bag down, and stood there.

“Two hundred and eighty-nine to two hundred and seventy-one,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“That paper moved votes, Aoki. Both ways. That is a real thing.” She sat down opposite me. She looked at her own hands for a while. “I read every page four times.”

“And?”

“And I want my name on the next one,” said Mizuki Hoshino.

I did not say anything clever. I got out my notebook, and I opened it to the page with the four lines, and I crossed out the note in brackets next to her name — (says she does not write. This is a lie.) — and I wrote instead: MEMBER.

Three of five.

Outside, somewhere down the hill, somebody let off a firework, three weeks too early.

Chapter Four Word List

Chapter Five — Three Days in August

August

Every club in Japan has a summer camp. The tennis club goes to the mountains. The brass band goes to a hall and plays the same eight bars for four days. It is a national law, I think.

The newspaper club had never had one, because for two years the newspaper club had been one person, and one person going away alone is not a camp, it is a problem.

This year we had three members and one loud friend of the club.

“Where are we going?” Kenji asked.

“My grandmother’s farm.”

“That’s not a camp. That’s a family visit.”

“It is two hours away, near the sea, and there is a summer festival on Saturday.”

Kenji thought about this for one second. “It’s a camp,” he said.

We took the train, then a small local line, then a tram that ran along the coast with the windows open. The fare was three hundred and ten yen. Yuka Tanabe came too. I had asked her out of politeness, expecting a polite no, and instead she had said “Yes. I need to be somewhere that is not this school,” in a voice that ended the discussion.

The tram went past the outskirts of a small town, then past nothing, then past a wide green valley, and everybody stopped talking and looked out of the window.

Rice fields. Paddy after paddy, flat and shining, for what looked like a hundred acres. A grey heron standing in one of them. A flock of small birds turning all together like one animal.

“I have never seen this,” Mizuki said quietly.

“Rice?”

“Space.”

My grandmother was waiting at the tiny station in a straw hat.

She is seventy-nine. My grandfather died eleven years ago, so she is a widow, and she has run the farm alone since then, which she describes as “easier, because he talked too much.” She is small and brown and has hands like tree roots.

She looked at the four of us. Then she looked at Mizuki. Then she looked at me. Then she smiled in a way I did not like at all.

“So,” she said. “Kin and folk and a girl.”

“Grandmother.”

“I said nothing.” She picked up Mizuki’s bag before anybody could stop her. “You are all here for three days. You will eat, you will work, and you will not say the word ‘phone signal’ in my house, because there is none. Come.”

The farm is at the end of a dirt road, past a marsh where the frogs live, past an old mill that stopped turning in 1962. There is the main house, a barn, a wooden hut for the tools, and a cellar under the kitchen where she keeps things cold.

Kenji looked around at the whole valley and said, with total sincerity: “This is the most hospitable place I have ever seen and I have not even eaten yet.”

Day One: Work

“You said we would work,” Yuka said at six the next morning. “I did not think you meant work.”

“You are on a farm,” said my grandmother. “What did you think happened here?”

She gave us jobs. Kenji went to plough a small field with the old tractor, which he described afterwards as “the greatest day of my life.” Yuka pulled weeds for four hours and did it with the same terrifying energy she brings to everything. I loaded boxes onto a wagon, then onto a small lorry, which then took them to a shop in town.

Mizuki was sent to the dairy shed.

I found her there at nine o’clock, standing at a safe distance from a calf, taking notes.

“It licked me,” she said.

“They do that.”

“It licked me with vigour.” She wrote something down. “There is also a bull in the next field. Your grandmother says he is ‘friendly’. Aoki, that animal is the size of a car.”

“Are you writing an article about a cow?”

“I am writing an article about food,” she said. “Nobody in our school knows where anything comes from. I did not know. There is a fertile field, and somebody puts fertilizer on it, and somebody sows the seed in spring, and five months later they reap it, and then it is on your desk in a plastic packet and you think it came from a shop.” She looked at the calf. “That is a story.”

She was right, and it became the best piece in our October issue.

At midday we sat on the grass and ate rice balls, and Kenji told a story about the tractor that was ninety per cent invention, and Yuka laughed for the first time since the election, a real laugh with no politics in it.

In the afternoon I helped my grandmother in the kitchen. She was grinding something in a stone bowl.

She coughed twice while she did it. It was a dry cough, and it went on a little too long.

“How long have you had that?”

“Since June.”

“Have you seen a doctor?”

“I have an appointment in September,” she said. “It is nothing. Stop looking at me with your grandfather’s face.”

I let it go.

I have thought about that afternoon a great many times since.

Day Two: The Sea

The sea is four kilometres from the farm, down a road between pine trees.

The town there is a working harbour. Not a beach town — there is no cruise ship, no hotel, no shop selling ice cream in the shape of a fairy. There is a stone dock, a small fleet of fishing boats, a ferry that goes to an island twice a day, and a rusting steamer that has not moved since the 1980s and is now, officially, a monument.

We walked out along the dock. The boats were tied up at their anchorage, moving slowly with the water. On the nearest vessel, two men of the crew were fixing a net on the deck, and one of them waved at us.

“Can we go on the ferry?” Kenji asked.

“It costs money and it goes to an island with nothing on it,” I said.

“Perfect.”

We did not go. Instead we climbed the cliff path at the north end, above the gulf, where you can see the whole curve of the coast.

At the top there is a small memorial stone for eleven fishermen who died in a storm in 1954. The names are cut into it. Under the names there is one line: The sea gives and the sea takes.

Mizuki read it twice.

“Your grandmother said something this morning,” she said. “She said the tide here can drown a strong man in one metre of water. She made me repeat it back to her.”

“She does that to everyone. She did it to me until I was fifteen.”

“Why?”

“Because she lost people here,” I said. “So she says it out loud, to everybody, every time. It is the only kind of worrying she allows herself.”

Mizuki was quiet, looking down at the water going in and out over the rocks.

“I like your grandmother,” she said. “She is not gentle and she is not cruel. She just tells you the true thing and then lets you get on with it.”

Below us, the surf came in and went out again. Somewhere behind, Kenji shouted something about a crab.

“That’s what you do,” I said. “In red ink.”

She did not answer for a moment.

“Aoki,” she said. “Don’t be nice to me on a cliff. It is dangerous.”

Day Three: The Festival

The summer festival is held in the shrine grounds on the hill above the town.

It starts at seven, when the sky goes orange. There is a procession first — the men of the town carrying the portable shrine on their shoulders, shouting in time, moving down the main street in a slow parade. Old women stand at the front of the crowd. Children sit on their fathers’ shoulders. Everybody follows.

At the shrine, people worship. You throw a coin, you clap twice, you pray. Kenji prayed for a university scout. Yuka prayed for something she refused to say. I do not know what Mizuki prayed for, because I did not look, because that would have been cheating.

Then the lanterns come on, and the whole hill turns gold, and the festival begins properly.

There were forty stalls along the path. Grilled pork on sticks with a dark sweet sauce. Sausages. Corn roasted black at the edges. Sweet potato. Shaved ice in six colours. A magician doing card tricks badly for a crowd of eight-year-olds who had already worked out how he did it. A man dressed as a clown, handing out balloons for a charity collection. A stall selling small wooden souvenirs, made by a carpenter from the town.

Kenji ate for one hour without a serious pause. Yuka won a goldfish and immediately began planning its future.

And Mizuki came up the hill late, because she had been getting changed, and she was wearing a blue summer gown with white flowers on it — a yukata — which her mother had made her bring “in case,” and which she clearly had not expected to wear.

I have thought about what I said at that moment about four thousand times since. What I said was:

“Oh.”

That was it. That was the whole sentence.

“Say something else,” Mizuki said. “Quickly. Please.”

“You look —” I stopped. Everything I could think of was too big. “It suits you.”

“That is a terrible sentence.”

“I know. I’m a writer, not a talker.”

“You are barely a writer,” she said, and her ears were red, and she walked past me very fast into the crowd.

At half past nine, the fireworks started.

Everybody went to the field behind the shrine to watch. We lost Kenji to a chorus of drunk uncles who had adopted him. Yuka went to protect the goldfish from the crowd.

Mizuki and I ended up at the top of the field, on the grass, above everyone else.

The first one went up with a sound you feel in your chest, and then broke open, and for a second the whole hill was white — six hundred faces all turned the same way, all looking up, everybody in the town at once.

“Aoki.”

“Yeah.”

“Thank you for bringing me here.”

“It’s just a farm.”

“It is not just a farm.” Another firework opened, red this time, and I could see her face lit up in it. “I have moved six times. Every time, I learn the train lines and the shop names and I do not learn anybody’s grandmother.” She was looking straight ahead. “This is the first place in three years where somebody said come with us and meant a real place, with a cellar in it, and a bull, and a stone with names on it.”

I did not say anything.

“So. Thank you.”

She turned to look at me at the same moment that I turned to look at her, and the distance between us was very small, and getting smaller, and the sky was going gold and then green and then gold again, and neither of us was breathing—

“AOKI!”

Kenji, forty metres down the hill, standing on a bench, with a bag of food in each hand and no idea in the world what he had just done.

“AOKI! THEY HAVE THE ONES WITH THE SAUCE!”

Mizuki put her face in her hands.

I lay back on the grass and stared up at the exploding sky and thought about all the things I would say to Kenji Mori over the next fifty years.

“…We should go down,” Mizuki said, into her hands.

“Yeah.”

“Aoki.”

“Yeah?”

“Not never,” she said, and stood up, and walked down the hill.

I sat on the grass for another ten seconds with my heart going like a tractor engine.

Not never.

I could work with not never.

Chapter Five Word List

Chapter Six — Two Letters in September

September

Two letters arrived in the same week. I have never forgiven September for that.

The first came to the bakery on a Tuesday.

My mother read it standing at the reception desk of our own shop, in her apron, with a tray of bread going cold beside her. Then she sat down on a chair, which she never does during working hours.

My grandmother had gone to the hospital for the cough. They had found a tumour in her lung. It was small. It was probably not the bad kind. They would do more tests in October and take a specimen to be sure.

“Probably,” my mother said. “The doctor said ‘probably’.”

I read the letter four times, looking for a word that would fix it. There was no such word. There was a medicinal name I could not pronounce, a date, a hospital ward number, and a line about her heart rate and her pulse being “good for her age.”

“She is seventy-nine,” my father said, from the door. Four words. A record.

“She’s alone out there,” I said. “The nearest shop is six kilometres. She drives a lorry from 1988.”

“She will not move,” my mother said. “I have asked her eleven times. She says the farm is her livelihood and her home and she is not going to sit in a small flat in a town and wait.”

She folded the letter and put it in her apron pocket, and then she stood up and went back to selling bread, because that is what my family does with feelings: we put them in a pocket and we go back to work.

That night I looked up the word online for two hours. I learned about germs and cells and what a tumour actually is, and none of it helped, because the incidence of a thing in a population tells you nothing at all about one small brown woman in a straw hat.

The second letter was pinned to the club room door on Thursday. It was printed on council paper, and it was conclusive and cold and perfectly correct.

FORMAL NOTICE OF DISCIPLINARY REVIEW

The Newspaper Club (3 members) is below the minimum set out in Clause 6 of the Club Charter. A disciplinary review will be held on 20 September at 16:00 in the council room. The club may send one delegate to speak. The council is not obliged to grant any extension.

R. Kurosawa, President

Kenji read it over my shoulder. “He can’t do that.”

“He can. He wrote the rule and now he is the rule.”

“It’s September! The deadline is November!”

“It’s a review,” I said. “It is not the end. It is somebody checking that the end is on schedule.”

Mizuki took the paper out of my hand, read it once, and said: “‘Not obliged to grant any extension.’ That sentence is doing a lot of work. He is telling us the answer before we ask the question.”

“So we don’t go?”

“We go,” she said. “But we do not go and beg. We go with paper.”

We had eight days. We used all of them.

Mizuki ran it like a small war. She made a list on the board and would not let anybody leave until their part was done. Kenji, who has never in his life been organised, printed two hundred photographs and sorted them by date because he was frightened of her.

We built a file. Every issue we had printed that year. The number of copies taken at the gate, counted by hand. A poll of one hundred and twelve students, done in one lunch break, with the questions written down so nobody could say we had pushed the answers. Yuka Tanabe delivered thirty of those forms herself and told me she was doing it “as a private citizen”, which was the most political sentence I have ever heard.

Ms. Hayashi looked at the file on the last evening and drank her cold coffee.

“You know I can come as your counsellor,” she said. “A teacher is allowed to speak.”

“No.”

“Aoki.”

“If a teacher speaks for us, then we’re children asking an adult for help.” I closed the file. “We have to be accountable for ourselves. Otherwise Clause 6 is right about us.”

She looked at me for a long moment, and then she said, in a completely different voice: “Your grandfather said something like that once. I was in his class.”

“You knew him?”

“Everybody knew him,” she said. “He was indispensable and he was extremely annoying. Good luck, Aoki.”

On the sixteenth, Mizuki did not come to school.

She did not come on the seventeenth either. On the eighteenth I asked the class secretary, and she said, without looking up: “Hoshino? Influenza. There’s a small outbreak in the first year.”

I did a stupid thing. I finished school, I went to the shop, I filled a bag, and I walked down the hill past the garage with the blue door until I found the building with her name on it.

Her father opened the door. He is a tall, tired man who works for a corporation that moves him every eighteen months. He looked at me the way fathers look at boys with bags.

“…Aoki, from the club,” I said. “I brought food. I’ll go now.”

“She has been asking about the review for three days,” he said, and stepped back. “Come in. Ten minutes. And do not go near her, the doctor was emphatic.”

She was on a futon in the small room, wrapped in a blanket up to her chin, with a thermometer on the mat beside her and her hair completely wild.

“Go away,” she said. “I look terrible.”

“You look ill.”

“Those are the same thing.” She coughed. It was a horrible sound. “What are you carrying?”

“Bread. Toast is easier when you can’t eat. And soup. My mother says you have to nourish yourself or you’ll be weak for a month.”

“Your mother has never met me.”

“She has now, in theory.”

I put the bag down and sat by the door, which was as close as I had been told to come. Her face was pale and there was a red mark on her cheek from the pillow. On the low table there was a packet of white tablets the doctor had prescribed, and a glass of water she had clearly not touched.

“Take the medicine.”

“It is overdue,” she agreed, and did not move.

“Hoshino.”

“Fine.” She took one, made a face, and drank a small sip. “There. Are you happy.”

“Deliriously.”

She lay back and looked at the ceiling. I did not dare say anything about how ill she looked, because she would have thrown the tablets at me. Outside, somebody’s radio was playing jazz, badly, through a wall.

“The review is on Friday,” she said.

“You are not going to the review.”

“I am going to the review.”

“You have influenza. You will breathe on the school president and I will be charged with a crime.”

“Aoki.” She turned her head. “You are going to walk into that room alone and be polite and be reasonable, and he is going to beat you, because he is better at being reasonable than anybody in this school.” She was breathing carefully, in the way sick people do. “You need somebody in there who is not polite.”

I did not answer straight away.

“There’s something else,” I said. “My grandmother’s ill.”

The room got very quiet.

I told her all of it: the tumour, the tests in October, the word “probably”, my mother’s apron pocket. It took about ninety seconds. I had not said any of it out loud to anybody, and it turned out the words were all just sitting there behind my teeth, waiting.

When I finished, Mizuki did not say she will be fine. She did not say I’m sure it’s nothing.

She said: “That woman told me about the tide twice, in one morning, so that I would not drown.”

“…Yeah.”

“Then she is a person who repeats the important thing until it sticks.” Mizuki pulled the blanket up. “So repeat it to her. Every week. Phone her every Sunday and be conscientious about it, even when there is nothing to say. That is the whole job.”

I looked at the floor for a while.

“I’ll do the review,” I said. “Rest.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Hoshino—”

“Aoki,” she said, “there are two things happening to you at once and you are trying to carry both of them by yourself, which is arrogant, and also stupid, and also very like you.” She closed her eyes. “Bring the file tomorrow. I will read it lying down.”

At the door, her father gave me a very small nod, which I have decided to treat as a certificate of good character.

September 20th

The council room at four o’clock. The air conditioner was on. Kurosawa sat in the middle with two council members on either side, like a small jury who had already decided.

I put the file on the table.

“You may speak,” he said.

I spoke for eleven minutes.

I did not beg. I gave numbers: five hundred copies of the election special, gone by half past eight. One hundred and twelve students in the poll; seventy-one said they had read the paper that term; forty said they had changed their mind about something because of it. I gave the article about the farm. I gave the piece about Kenji. I put down the photographs.

Then I said the last part, which Mizuki had written out for me on a page of her notebook, in her small straight handwriting, and which I had refused to change:

“Clause 6 counts members. It does not count readers. A club of thirty people who do nothing and a club of three people who print five hundred copies are not the same object, and any rule that cannot see the difference is not a strict rule. It is a superficial one.”

Kurosawa did not move.

Then the door opened.

Mizuki Hoshino came in wearing an overcoat over a jumper over pyjamas, with a germ mask on her face and a temperature of thirty-eight point one, carrying a second file, and she put it down on the table with a thud that made both council members jump.

“Hoshino,” said Kurosawa. “You are unwell.”

“I am contagious,” she said, “so please be quick.” She opened the file. “Clause 6 has a loophole and you have all missed it for two years.”

The room went completely still.

“Clause 11 says that any club may contend that it serves a school function, and that a club serving a school function may apply for advisory status and continue with three members, subject to review.” She turned the page around so they could read it. “It is on page four. It was written in 1974 and it has never been removed. And I would like to formally propose, on behalf of the newspaper club, that a school newspaper is a school function.”

Nobody spoke for about six seconds.

Then one of the council members leaned over and read the page, and went slightly grey, and whispered something to Kurosawa.

Kurosawa read it himself. Twice.

“…This is correct,” he said.

“I know,” said Mizuki.

“It is a loophole.”

“It is a clause,” she said. “You like clauses.”

And Ryo Kurosawa — I will remember this until I am eighty — Ryo Kurosawa put his hands flat on the table, and looked at the two of us, and made a small sound that was almost certainly a laugh being strangled at birth.

“The review is postponed to November,” he said. “Advisory status is granted for October. The rule stands. Get her out of my council room before she poisons everyone in it.”

In the corridor, Mizuki leaned against the wall and slid down it and sat on the floor.

“I feel,” she said, “extremely unwell.”

“You were magnificent.”

“I know.” She pulled the mask down. Her face was grey. “Aoki, you have to get me home. I used all of my strength on the word ‘loophole’.”

I got her a cab. It cost more than I had, so Kenji paid the rest, and complained about it for six months, and never once let me pay him back.

That Sunday I phoned my grandmother.

There was nothing to say, so I told her about the calf, and the cab, and the girl with the mask.

She laughed until she coughed. Then she said: “Every Sunday, Sota.”

“Every Sunday,” I said.

Chapter Six Word List

Chapter Seven — Everything at Once

October

October at a Japanese high school is not a month. It is a machine that eats sleep.

The school festival is on the first weekend of November. Every class must run something. Every club must show something. And for four weeks the whole building smells of paint and glue and hot glue guns and the particular anger of teenagers holding a hammer for the first time.

Our class, 2-B, voted for a café. Yuka Tanabe ran the vote, counted it twice, and proclaimed the result like a general.

Class 2-A chose a circus theme. Class 2-C chose a 1930s gangster bar, which the teachers approved without reading properly, and which included two plastic pistols and a fake rifle on the wall until Friday, when a teacher finally read it properly.

The drama club chose a historical play.

And the newspaper club chose to do the impossible.

The Machine

“We will print a festival special,” I said, on the first Monday. “Sixteen pages.”

Kenji stopped eating. That is how you know something is serious.

“Sixteen,” Mizuki said.

“Sixteen. A guide to every class, every club, every stall. Photographs of everything. A commentary on the play. An interview with the president. A map.”

“Aoki,” Mizuki said slowly, “our longest issue this year was four pages and it nearly killed you.”

“I know.”

“You want four times that, in four weeks, with three people, while class 2-B builds a café.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

I had thought about how to say this for two days and had not found a clever way, so I said the plain one.

“Because on the twentieth of November, Kurosawa’s review happens, and if we are just a club that survived on a loophole, we will lose. We have to be something the school would actually miss.”

Nobody spoke.

Then Kenji cracked his knuckles and said, “Right. I’ll need a better camera and a great deal of food,” and Mizuki opened her notebook to a clean page and wrote 16 at the top, and underlined it twice, and that was the whole discussion.

The Café

Building a café inside a classroom is a chore that no one describes honestly afterwards.

We had four days, a budget of eleven thousand yen, and the enthusiasm of thirty-two people with no knowhow whatsoever.

Yuka coordinated. She had a plan on the board with times on it, and she stood in front of it like a marshal directing an army.

We built a counter out of timber from the woodwork room, held together with fifty screws, four bolts, and a quantity of glue that a carpenter would find offensive. Kenji, holding a spade for reasons nobody could explain, was made to carry things instead. Somebody spilled a bag of cement in the corridor, and it stayed there until March.

We covered the tables with white cloth and painted a stripe of blue along the wall, and then a second stripe, because the first one was clumsy and bent. We hung two paper lamps on a cord from the ceiling and ran an extension cable along the floor, taped down, because the utility points in that room date from 1974 and there are only two of them.

Ms. Hayashi came to look at the electrics, holding her cold coffee.

“If this building burns down,” she said, “I will say I saw nothing.”

The menu was my department, because of the bakery. We would sell loaves, small cakes, and coffee. My father, who says four words a month, said eight words about this: “Bring the trays back. All of them. Clean.”

At home, in the evenings, I helped him bake extra stock for the festival. We filled the freezer. We filled the refrigerator. We filled a neighbour’s refrigerator. My mother worked out the money on paper, like an accountant, listing every ounce of flour and every litre of milk, because a school café that loses money is a school café that gets closed.

“You need to sell four hundred and twenty items to break even,” she said. “After that, everything is profit for the class fund.”

“How do you know that so fast?”

“I have been the cashier of a small business for twenty-six years, Sota,” she said. “Money is not difficult. It is only tiring.”

The Play

The drama club’s play was called The Last Winter of Lord Sanada.

It was a historical drama, set four hundred years ago, and it was — I say this with love — extremely long. There was a castle under siege. There was a noble family. There was a maiden who was secretly the daughter of the enemy. There was a scene in which a warrior made a speech about loyalty for four and a half minutes without breathing.

I went to two rehearsals to write my commentary, and I took Mizuki, because she said she wanted to see “what a legendary disaster looks like from the inside.”

It was not a disaster. That was the surprise.

The armament on stage was made of painted wood and cardboard, and the “battalion” was six third-year boys walking in a circle to look like sixty. The imperial flag was a bedsheet. And still, in the scene where the conqueror finally comes through the gate — the climax of the whole thing — the club president stood in the middle of the stage in a disguise made of curtain fabric and delivered a line about conquest and exile that made the back of my neck go cold.

“Oh,” Mizuki said quietly, beside me in the dark.

“Yeah.”

“They are actually good.”

“Yeah.”

She wrote something in her notebook.

Later, in the prop store behind the stage, we found: eleven wooden swords, a broken torch, a box of hats, a stuffed crocodile from a 1998 production nobody could explain, and a real typewriter from about 1955.

Mizuki picked up the typewriter with both hands like it was a baby.

“Aoki.”

“No.”

“Aoki, they are going to throw this away.”

“Hoshino, it weighs fourteen kilos.”

She carried it to the club room herself. It took her nine minutes and three rests. It is still there. It works. She has never once used it for anything, and she would fight a bull for it.

The Online Edition

The typewriter is funny because of what we did that same week, which was the opposite.

The idea was Kenji’s, which nobody believes when I tell them.

“Five hundred copies,” he said, with his mouth full. “That’s the whole print run. But my cousin’s school puts theirs online and the old students read it. In America. From their houses.”

“We do not have a website.”

“The school has a website.”

“The school website was made in 2009 and it has a picture of a fax machine on it.”

But we asked. And it turned out the school website was maintained by exactly one person: a first-year student named Sasaki, who had been quietly running the entire school’s digital infrastructure since April because nobody had ever asked who was doing it.

Sasaki listened to my whole plan without speaking, then said: “You want to computerize the archive too? Forty years of it?”

“…Could we?”

“Yes.” He pushed his glasses up. “It is not difficult. It is only long. Bring me the paper and I will scan it.”

He built us a page in one weekend. He set up an outlet for each issue, with a specification he wrote himself so that every file would look the same — he used the word standardise eleven times in one conversation. He explained about variables and file sizes for six minutes, and my brain went out of the window and looked at some trees.

“There is one thing,” he said at the end. “Anything you put in cyberspace is public. Forever. A person who wants to hack a school website does not even need to be a hacker, because the password is the school’s founding year. I have told them four times.”

“Should we be worried?”

“Probably not,” said Sasaki. “Nobody attacks a school newspaper.”

I have thought about that sentence a lot since.

The Sunday Calls

Every Sunday at seven, I phoned my grandmother.

The first call was terrible. Neither of us knew how to do it. We got through four minutes and both said goodbye with relief.

The second was better. The fourth was easy.

By the fifth Sunday, she had opinions about all of them. She wanted to know whether the girl with the mask had recovered. She wanted to know if Kenji had got his university scout (he had not; the scout had come and looked at Hayama and left, and Kenji had gone to the batting cage and hit balls until his hands bled, and I had written none of it because he asked me not to). She wanted to know how much we were charging for coffee, and told me it was too cheap, and she was right.

In the middle of the sixth call she said, casually, as though it were nothing:

“They did the second test. It is not the bad kind.”

I had to sit down on the stairs.

“Sota?”

“I’m here.”

“They will take it out in January. It is a small operation. I will be in the ward for four days and then I will be mended and extremely annoyed about the cost.”

“Grandmother.”

“Yes?”

“I’m—” There was no word. The relief had taken all of them. “That’s good.”

“It is good,” she agreed. “So stop holding your breath and go and build your café. And bring the girl again in the spring, when the blossom is out. It is better then.”

The Last Night Before

On the thirty-first of October, at ten past nine, the three of us were the last people in the school.

The classroom was finished. The counter was up. The stripes were painted. The lamps hung on their cord. Four hundred and twenty items were in three refrigerators across the town.

And in the club room, on the table, the sixteen pages were laid out in order, printed, checked, and checked again — the map, the class guide, the interview with Kurosawa (printed in full, exactly as promised), Mizuki’s piece about the farm, Kenji’s photographs, the commentary on the play.

Mizuki was asleep sitting up, with her head against the cabinet, still holding a red pen.

Kenji was asleep on the floor.

I stood in the middle of the room with the flickering bulb above me and looked at it: sixteen pages, three people, one loophole, four weeks.

I remember thinking, with absolute certainty, that this was the top of the year. That everything from here was going to be easy.

That is the last completely happy thought I had for six weeks.

Chapter Seven Word List

Chapter Eight — The Second Paper

November 1st — The Good Day

I want to write this day down carefully, because of what happened to it afterwards.

The gates opened at nine. By ten past nine there were people everywhere — students, families, small children, grandparents, old students back from university with that slightly superior look they all get after six months away.

Our café sold out of cake by half past eleven.

Yuka Tanabe ran the floor like a banquet manager. She had put a paper purse under the counter for the coins and made two people responsible for the currency, because, she said, “money disappears in a crowd, and I am not going to allege anything about anybody afterwards.” A local merchant who supplies our bakery came in and bought four coffees and told my father, in front of me, that the bread was good. My father said, “Yes,” and went red to the ears.

And the Sakura Bulletin festival special — sixteen pages, three hundred copies to start — was gone by noon.

We printed two hundred more. Those went in ninety minutes.

I stood at the top of the main stairs at two o’clock and watched a woman I had never met sit on a step with the map open on her knees, telling her husband which classroom to go to next.

Kenji came past with a camera round his neck and a bag of food and said, “Aoki, you look like you’re about to cry.”

“I’m not about to cry.”

“You’re a coward and a liar,” Kenji said, kindly, and gave me a rice ball.

At four o’clock, in the corridor outside the drama club’s room, an old woman stopped Mizuki and asked whether she was the one who had written the piece about the farm. She said she had grown up on one. She said nobody writes about that. She held Mizuki’s hand for about five seconds.

When she had gone, Mizuki stood completely still in the middle of the corridor.

“Hoshino?”

“Give me a minute,” she said, in a very odd voice, and turned to face the wall.

I gave her a minute.

That was the good day. It lasted eleven hours.

November 2nd — The Bad One

The second paper appeared overnight.

Somebody had put it in the shoe lockers. All of them. Four hundred and ten lockers, between eleven at night and six in the morning.

It was four pages. It was printed on the same cheap grey paper we use. It had our heading at the top, in our font, with our masthead and our forty-year-old line underneath, because every issue of the Sakura Bulletin since 1985 was now sitting in cyberspace where anybody in the world could copy it.

It was a forgery. And it was contemptible.

Page one alleged that Ms. Hayashi was being removed from her job in March for “negligence”, with a fake quote from an unnamed “informant” in the school office.

Page two said that the election in July had been decided by bribery — that Yuka Tanabe’s family had paid for the posters and that a council member had acted as a broker.

Page three was about a first-year girl. I am not going to write what it said. It was a rumour with a name attached to it, and it was cruel in the specific, careful way that only somebody who knows a school can be cruel.

Page four was a list. Fourteen names, under the heading PEOPLE WHO THINK THEY ARE BETTER THAN YOU.

I read all four pages standing at my own locker at half past seven in the morning, and I could feel my heart going, and my hands were cold, and the thing I remember most clearly is that some part of my brain was saying, stupidly, over and over: the margins are wrong, the margins are wrong, we never use margins that wide.

By eight o’clock, the school had split in two.

Half of it knew immediately that it was fake. The other half did not, because the other half had never thought about how a newspaper is made and had no reason to.

A crowd formed outside our club room. It was not a riot. It was worse than that: it was thirty people standing very quietly, waiting to see what my face would do.

Kenji got there before me and stood in the doorway with his arms out like a bouncer, which is the single bravest thing I have ever seen him do.

“It’s not ours,” he was saying. “It’s not ours. Go away. It’s not ours.”

Somebody at the back said, loudly: “Then who’s it from?”

The headmaster’s office. Ten o’clock.

Present: the headmaster, the year head, Ms. Hayashi, Kurosawa as council president, and me.

Ms. Hayashi had read page one. She was completely calm and she had put her coffee down, which frightened me more than shouting would have.

“For the record,” she said, “I am not being removed in March.”

“Nobody thinks you are,” said the headmaster.

“Eleven parents have already read it,” she said. “By Friday it will be forty. That is how this works. You do not negate a thing by saying it is untrue. It just sits there.”

The year head put the four pages on the desk in front of me.

“Aoki. Is this your club’s work?”

“No.”

“Do you know who made it?”

“No.”

“Could somebody get your design? Your typeface, your masthead?”

“Yes.” My voice came out flat. “In October we put forty years of the paper online. Anybody in the world can download an issue and copy the top of the page. It took us three weeks to build. It would take a person about twenty minutes to steal.”

The headmaster rubbed his eyes.

“Then whoever did this,” he said, “used a door that you opened.”

I did not have an answer for that. I still do not, really.

And then Kurosawa spoke, for the first time.

“Sir. There is something the committee should be aware of.”

He put a printed page on the desk. It was a news article from a Tokyo paper, from eighteen months earlier. There was a photograph of a school gate. There were the words school newspaper, and teacher dismissed, and first-year student.

I felt the room tip sideways.

“A member of the newspaper club,” Kurosawa said, “was involved in a similar incident at her previous school. I am not alleging that she did this. I am saying that it will come out within a day, and that this committee should not be the last people in the building to know it. If we look like we are hiding something, we lose the school.”

“Where did you get that?” I said.

“An anonymous letter. In my locker. This morning.” He met my eyes without flinching. “The same night as the papers.”

The year head turned to me.

“Aoki. Did you know about this?”

And here it is. The two seconds.

I want to be honest about what happened in my head, because I have had a long time to look at it.

I was seventeen. I had slept nine hours in three days. I had five hundred copies of the best thing I have ever made sitting in a cupboard, and a forgery with my grandfather’s masthead on it lying on the headmaster’s desk, and a first-year girl I had never spoken to who was, at that moment, at home, and a teacher whose career had just been damaged for no reason at all.

And I was frightened.

So I said: “…No. I didn’t know.”

Three words. Two seconds.

The door was open about ten centimetres, because the year head had not closed it properly when he came in.

She was not waiting outside for me afterwards. I looked in the club room, the corridor, the library, the stairs at the back by the science room.

I found her at the shoe lockers, putting her indoor shoes away, with her coat already on.

“Hoshino.”

“Don’t.”

“Let me—”

“I heard it, Aoki.” She did not turn around. “You didn’t have to lie for me. That is not the part I mind. Lying for me would have been stupid but I would have understood it.”

“Then what—”

“You said it like it was a stain.” She closed the locker. “You said I didn’t know the way a person says it wasn’t me.”

“That’s not what I—”

“I know,” she said, and finally turned, and her face was completely dry and completely still, which by now I knew was the worst thing her face could do. “I know that is not what you meant. That is the problem. That is what it sounds like when the truth arrives at the wrong speed, and I have heard it before, from an entire hall of people, and I promised myself I would never stand in front of it twice.”

The corridor was full of people not looking at us, which is a specific kind of noise.

“I’m resigning from the club,” she said.

“Hoshino, don’t. You’re a third of the club. The review is on the twentieth—”

“I know when the review is.” Her voice split, just once, on the word know, and then went flat again. “I know exactly what my name is going to do to that review. In twelve days a man with a charter in his hand is going to ask whether the newspaper club is safe, and if I am standing there, the answer is no, whatever anybody says, because I am a rumour with legs.”

“I don’t care about the review.”

“You have cared about the review since April!” she shouted. It was the only time. “You built sixteen pages for the review! Don’t insult me by pretending you can drop it in one afternoon because a girl is upset!”

Nobody in that corridor moved.

“I’m going to find out who did it,” I said.

“Good. Do that.” She picked up her bag. “And Aoki — I did not do this.”

“I know that. I never for one second—”

“I know,” she said. “But you should have said it in the room.”

She walked out through the gate.

The Twelve Days

I will not describe all of them.

The setback was not one event. It came in pieces, every day, in the ordinary way that bad weeks actually happen.

I should say something here about what four pages of deceit actually do to a building with a thousand people in it, because I did not understand it before November and I have never been able to explain it properly since.

It is not rage. There was some rage in the first two days — a raging, useless kind, mostly from third-years who had nothing to do with any of it — and it burned out by the weekend. It is not grief either, although there was some of that.

What it actually is, is a gloom that gets into everything. A general arousal of feeling that nobody can turn off and nobody can aim at anything useful. People glanced at each other in corridors. Conversations stopped when the wrong person walked in. Three separate friendships in my year ended that fortnight over things that had nothing to do with the paper, because once you have been provoked into suspecting one thing, you start searching everywhere.

And underneath it, in me, there was the thing I did not admit to anybody until now: a small, lame, dumb part of my brain that kept clinging to the idea that if I just found the right sentence, all of it would go away in a morning. That is not hope. That is cowardice wearing hope’s coat. Every night I would sit down to write the sentence, and every night my stomach would sink, and I would go to bed at one o’clock having scarcely written forty words.

I did not fall into despair, exactly. Despair is a clean word and this was not clean. It was closer to being deprived of something — the deprivation you feel when a room you liked has stopped being safe.

The first-year girl on page three did not come to school for eleven days. Her mother came in on the Tuesday. I saw her walk past the staff room, and I had to go and stand in the lavatory for a while.

The rumour about Ms. Hayashi reached her old university friend, who phoned her about it, which is how she learned that it had left the building.

Yuka Tanabe was interviewed twice about the bribery page, entirely without cause, and she answered every question with perfect politeness, and then she came to the club room and sat down and said, “Aoki, if you find him, I want ten minutes alone with him first,” and she was not smiling.

Ryo Kurosawa was blameless and everybody hated him anyway, because he had put the Tokyo article on the table and somebody had to be blamed for something.

And the online archive came down. Sasaki took it offline himself on the Monday, without being asked, and sent me one message: I am sorry. I should have foreseen this. The password was the founding year. A first-year student, apologising to me, for a thing that was not his fault, at eleven o’clock at night.

We went to two members. The room was very quiet. Kenji came every single day, ate, said something stupid, and stayed until I left, and he never once mentioned that he was doing it. I do not know how I would have coped without him, and I have never told him so.

On the eleventh night I sat in the club room with the bulb flickering and the typewriter on the cabinet and the four pages of the forgery spread out on the table in front of me.

I had read them about two hundred times by then. Not to feel bad. Looking.

Because here is the thing that had been scratching at the back of my head since the first morning, underneath everything else:

Page four. The list of fourteen names.

Eleven of them were students.

Three of them were not.

Three of them had left this school two and a half years ago — and there was no way for anybody currently enrolled to know why those three names belonged together.

I sat up very slowly.

Then I went to the metal cabinet, and I opened the bottom drawer, where forty years of the Sakura Bulletin sit in date order, and I started pulling out everything printed between April and December, three years ago.

Chapter Eight Word List

Chapter Nine — What Happened Three Years Ago

November 13th

The bottom drawer of the metal cabinet smells of old paper and dust and 1997.

I sat on the floor with the issues from three years ago spread around me in a half circle, and I worked backwards from December, and at half past one in the morning I found it.

It was a small box at the bottom right of page three. It had run in every issue for eight months. It was called THE WHISPER PAGE.

It was a gossip column.

I read all eight months of it in one sitting, and by the end I felt physically sick.

It was clever. That was the horrible part. Whoever wrote it never printed anything that could be proved false, because it never quite said anything. It used the shape of a question. Which second-year is spending a lot of time in the staff room? Which club president’s marks went up rather suddenly? No names. Just enough detail that four hundred people could work out the name in under a minute.

And in the June issue, three years ago:

Which second-year girl came into this school with a score nobody in her middle school believed? Some people are asking how. We are only asking why nobody else is asking.

That was all. Thirty-one words.

I looked at the bottom of the column for the writer’s name, and there it was, in small letters, the way the club has always done it.

K. Sudo (3rd year)

Then I got out the September issue, and the column was gone, and in its place was a short notice from the editor saying that The Whisper Page had ended and that the club “regrets the distress caused.”

Nine words of apology for eight months of work.

And on page four of the forgery — the list of fourteen names — three of the names were the three teachers who had signed that notice.

November 14th

I found Kurosawa in the council room at seven in the morning. He is always there at seven.

I put the June issue from three years ago on the desk in front of him, folded open to page three.

He looked at it for a long time without touching it.

“Where did you get this?”

“Bottom drawer. We keep everything.” I sat down without being asked. “The girl in that column. What was her name?”

“Kurosawa Aya,” he said.

“Your sister.”

“My sister.”

He said it in exactly the voice he uses for budget figures, which is how I knew.

“She was second year. I was in the last year of middle school, so I was not even in this building yet.” He turned the paper around very carefully with one finger, so that it faced away from him. “Her score was real. She had studied for two years. She was the sort of person who is conscientious about everything, including things nobody asked her to do.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing happened. That is what people never understand.” He folded his hands. “Nobody attacked her. Nobody wrote anything else. Thirty-one words, once, in June. And then for four months people were slightly quieter when she came into a room.”

He stopped.

“She stopped eating properly in October. She stopped coming in November. She finished her schooling by post and she never went to university, and she is twenty-one now and she works from home and she is fine, and she has not been inside a school building since she was sixteen.”

The air conditioner hummed.

“I wrote a complaint,” he said. “I was fourteen. It was eleven pages long and it was extremely badly written and I delivered it to this school by hand, and three teachers signed a notice that ended the column, and the third-year who wrote it was removed from the club in his final term. His name was Sudo Kaname.”

“He’s on page four of the fake paper,” I said. “Along with those three teachers.”

“Yes,” said Kurosawa. “I noticed that on the second of November.”

“You noticed—”

“I noticed it while I was putting a Tokyo news article on the headmaster’s desk,” he said, and for the first time since I had known him, his voice was not level. “Do you want to know why I did that, Aoki? Because I have spent three years watching a school overlook a thing that was written down in its own building, and I decided when I was fourteen that I would never again be a bystander who kept quiet to be kind.”

“So you told them about Hoshino.”

“I told them a fact that was going to arrive anyway. I chose the speed at which it arrived.” He looked at his hands. “I was correct, and it was injurious, and both of those are true at once, and I have not slept properly since.”

Neither of us spoke for a while.

“Clause 6,” I said. “You wrote it because of her.”

“Yes.”

“You wrote a rule to close a club, slowly, legally, over years, so that nobody would ever have to say out loud what it was for.”

“Yes,” said Ryo Kurosawa. “That is exactly what I did. It is the most cowardly thing I have ever done and it took two years and eleven meetings and everybody thought it was about money.”

He stood up and went to the window.

“Aoki. I am going to say something now and I would like you not to be pleased about it.”

“Okay.”

“For three months I have been reading your paper,” he said. “The election special. The piece about your friend and his hundred swings. The farm. That is not The Whisper Page. That is the opposite of it. And I have known that since July and I did not change the rule, because changing the rule would have meant admitting that I built it out of my sister.”

He turned around.

“Find Sudo,” he said. “I will help you. Whatever you need — council authority, the office, the archive, my name on a request. Take it.”

The Week

We were four, in the end, though only two of us were officially members.

Kenji did the legs. Mizuki was not there, and I felt her absence in the room like a missing tooth.

Sasaki gave us the first solid thing. He had never actually deleted the server records, because Sasaki does not delete anything.

“One address downloaded the entire archive on the twenty-eighth of October,” he said. “Forty years, in nineteen minutes, at two in the morning. Everybody else who has ever used the site read one issue at a time. That is not a reader. That is a seizure of the whole thing.”

“Can you tell who?”

“No. I can tell you it was not from inside the school, and I can tell you it was the same connection twice more that week.” He pushed his glasses up. “Also, you should know: whoever it was looked at June, three years ago, first.”

The second thing was paper.

Our grey paper is not normal. It is a cheap recycled stock and there is exactly one shop in this town that still sells it: Ito Stationery, by the station, where the newspaper club has bought its paper since 1985 because the owner gives us a discount out of loyalty to my grandfather.

Kenji went in and asked Mr. Ito whether anybody had bought a large quantity recently.

Mr. Ito, who is eighty-one and overheard everything in that town for sixty years, said: “Yes. A young man. About twenty. Two hundred sheets, end of October. He was rude about the price.”

“Did you know him?”

“He used to come in when he was at your school,” said Mr. Ito. “He was rude then too.”

We did not go to the police. We did not need to. This was not a matter for a court, and nobody was going to gaol, and if I am honest I did not want an attorney anywhere near it. I wanted to look at him.

Kurosawa found the address through the old-students association in forty minutes, which frightened me a little.

Sudo Kaname was twenty-one. He lived in a flat two stations away, above a shop. He had been at a university in the city for one year and had left. He had a part-time job.

We went on a Saturday, all four of us, in the rain, and stood at the bottom of the stairs, and I understood on the way up that I had no plan at all.

He opened the door in a T-shirt with his hair not brushed, and he looked at us — a fourteen-year-old’s complaint made flesh, a school president, a baseball player and a boy with a folder — and his whole face changed, and I have never in my life seen anybody look so caught.

“…You’re from Kitami,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m the editor of the Sakura Bulletin.”

And Sudo Kaname said, with a small terrible laugh: “It’s still going?”

He let us in, which I had not expected. The flat was one room. There was no fireplace, no heating on, and it was very cold, and there were piles of things everywhere.

He did not confess straight away. First he was contemptuous, and then he was funny about it, and then he was angry, and then, quite quickly, he stopped.

“It was a joke,” he said. “The list. It was a joke.”

“It was not a joke to a first-year girl,” I said, “who has not been in school for eleven days.”

He looked at the floor.

I put the June issue on the table.

“Why did you write this?” I asked. “Three years ago. Why her?”

“I don’t remember her,” he said.

“Her name is Kurosawa Aya.”

“I don’t remember her.” He said it too loudly. “That’s — do you understand? That’s the answer. I wrote a hundred of those. It took me four minutes each. I was seventeen and I was funny and eight hundred people read every word I wrote, and it was the only time in my whole life that has ever been true.”

He put his hands over his face.

“They threw me out in my last term,” he said, from behind them. “Three teachers signed a piece of paper. I didn’t get the university reference. My mother — “ He stopped. “You want to know why I did it now? Because in October my little cousin sent me a link and said look, they put the old papers online. And I opened it, and there were forty years of that paper, every issue, all of them, and eight months of them were mine, and I was the only person on earth who cared.”

“So you copied it.”

“So I copied it,” he said. “And I made it worse, on purpose, because I wanted somebody to feel it.”

Nobody said anything for a while. The rain went on outside.

Then Kurosawa, who had not spoken once, said, quietly:

“She is twenty-one as well.”

Sudo did not look up.

“That is all I came to say,” said Kurosawa, and went and stood by the door.

Sudo wrote it down. All of it, in his own hand, and signed it. He did it without being pushed, which is the only thing in this story I will give him.

Then he asked, at the door: “What are you going to print?”

And that was the question, wasn’t it.

I could have printed everything. His name, his flat, the un-brushed hair, the cold room, the sentence about his mother. It would have been the biggest thing the Sakura Bulletin had ever run. It would have been true, every word, checked and signed, and I could have dignified it with the word accountability, and about six hundred people would have read it and enjoyed it very much.

I thought about a girl reading thirty-one words about herself in June.

“I’m going to print what was done,” I said. “Not who did it.”

Kenji stared at me. Even Kurosawa turned round.

“That’s it?”

“The school will deal with you. The teachers will know your name and so will the old-students association, and that is a real consequence and it will follow you.” I put the folder under my arm. “But four hundred students do not need your name. They need to know the paper was faked, that the three stories in it were false, and that the girl on page three did nothing. That’s the useful part. The rest is just the bit that would be fun.”

I went down the stairs into the rain.

Kurosawa caught up with me at the bottom.

“Aoki.”

“I know. It’s a smaller story.”

“I was going to say,” he said, “that Hoshino would have printed the same thing.”

I had to stop walking for a second.

“No,” I said. “She’d have printed it and then argued with me about it for an hour first. That’s the part I miss.”

November 20th — The Review

Four pages. Five hundred copies. Out at seven in the morning on the day of the review.

The heading was: THE PAPER OF NOVEMBER 2ND WAS NOT OURS. HERE IS WHAT HAPPENED.

Page one: the forgery, how it was made, when, and how we know. The three false stories named as false, in plain language, one paragraph each. The first-year girl’s story negated completely and directly, with the words there is no truth in it whatsoever in the largest type we had.

Page two: The Whisper Page, 2019 to 2020. Eight months. Thirty-one words in June. What a gossip column actually costs, written without a single joke in it.

Page three: our own oversight. That we put the archive online in October without thinking about who could use it. That the password to the school site was the founding year and had been for eleven years. That I was told this by a first-year and did not act.

Page four: an apology. Mine, signed, to Ms. Hayashi, to Tanabe Yuka, to a first-year student who is not named, and to Kurosawa Aya, who left this school three years ago and to whom this paper has owed nine words for a very long time.

I did not put Sudo’s name anywhere.

The review was at four o’clock. It lasted six minutes.

Kurosawa read a statement he had written himself, proposing that Clause 6 be amended: any club that “performs a continuing school function” may operate with three members under permanent advisory status, subject to annual review. He proposed it as the author of the original clause. He did not explain why.

It passed, five votes to nothing.

Then, in the corridor afterwards, Yuka Tanabe said, “Aoki, put my name on the membership form,” and when I asked why, she said, “Because you were fair to me in July when it cost you, and because I have decided I would rather be in the room where things get written down,” and that was the whole of it.

Four members.

And on the twenty-first of November, at seven in the morning, Ryo Kurosawa came to the club room, put a form on the table, and said, “I do not want to discuss it, I am not going to write anything, and I will be leaving in March anyway.”

I looked at the form for a while.

“You know this is going in the paper.”

“I know,” he said. “Print it small.”

Five members.

We had done it. In eleven days, out of the worst thing that had ever happened to us, we had done the impossible thing.

I went home that night and sat on the stairs above the bakery and felt absolutely nothing at all, because the person I wanted to tell was not answering her phone.

Chapter Nine Word List

Chapter Ten — Departures

December

She came back to school on the twenty-fourth of November.

She did not come back to the club.

For three weeks I watched Mizuki Hoshino sit two rows in front of me in class 2-B, hand in her work, answer when asked, and leave through the gate at four o’clock with her bag on her shoulder. She was not cold to me. That would have been easier. She said good morning. She lent me an eraser once. She was considerate in the way you are considerate to somebody you have met at a wedding.

I wrote her four messages and sent none of them. I am supposedly a writer. I could not construct one useful sentence.

“You’re being a coward,” Kenji said, on the fifteenth of December, eating my lunch.

“I know.”

“You went to a man’s flat and made him confess in writing. You stood up in front of six hundred people and asked a question. And you can’t walk twelve metres across a classroom.”

“That’s different.”

“It is not remotely different,” said Kenji, “and you know it, which is why you look like that.”

The frost came that week.

Every morning the field behind the gymnasium was white and hard, and the puddles by the gate had frozen into thin plates that first-years stamped on all the way to the door. The bakery oven became the best place in our town. My mother put a tin of biscuits on the counter for the postman, and the shop glowed yellow into a dark street at half past six every morning, and people came in just to stand in it for a minute.

On the twenty-third, hail came down for four minutes and stopped, and the school made a noise like a circus.

On the twenty-fourth, Yuka Tanabe put a piece of paper on my desk without stopping and kept walking.

It said: She goes to the shrine on the hill on New Year’s Eve with her father. Every year. It is the only tradition they have kept through six moves. She told me in October. I am not doing this for you, Aoki, I am doing it because she is my friend and she has been miserable for six weeks. — Y.T.

December 31st

Japanese people go to a shrine at New Year. It is called hatsumode. You go at midnight or in the first days of January, and you throw a coin, and you pray, and you buy a paper fortune, and you eat something hot from a stall while standing in the cold.

The shrine on the hill above our town is small. There is a stone path, a hundred and twelve steps, and two old pine trees at the top that lean towards each other.

It began to snow at half past eleven.

I stood at the top of the steps for forty minutes with my hands in my pockets and my breath going white and snow in my hair and stockings would have been an excellent idea, and I watched about two hundred people come up those steps, and none of them was her.

At six minutes past midnight, she came up the steps with her father.

She saw me. She stopped, four steps from the top.

Her father, who I think had known for some time exactly what was happening, said, “I am going to look at the fortunes,” and walked away with the total lack of fuss that I have decided is the best thing about that man.

We stood in the snow while the bell was ringing.

“Aoki.”

“I have a thing to say,” I said, “and I’ve written it eleven times and they were all terrible, so I’m going to say the ugly version.”

“Alright.”

I made myself look at her.

“In that room, they asked me if I knew about Tokyo, and I said no. And you told me the problem wasn’t the lie. You were right, and it took me about a day to understand what you actually meant, and then it took me six weeks to be brave enough to say it out loud.” Snow was landing on her shoulders and not melting. “The problem is that in that moment, some part of me was ashamed of you. Not for long. Two seconds. But it was there, and you heard it, and I have been telling myself since November that I was tired and frightened and it was a mistake, and it was — but it was also true for two seconds, and I have to say that part or the apology is worth nothing.”

The bell rang again. Somebody down the hill laughed at something.

“I was ashamed of you,” I said, “and there was nothing to be ashamed of. You did the bravest thing anybody in this story has done, and you did it when you were fifteen, and you paid for it, and I know all of that, and I still flinched. So I’m sorry. Not for lying. For flinching.”

Mizuki did not say anything for a long time.

Then she came up the last four steps, so that she was standing on the same level as me, which she had to do on purpose.

“Do you know what I have been doing for six weeks?” she said.

“No.”

“Reading your November issue.” She pushed her hair out of her face. “Four pages. You did not print his name. Everybody wanted you to and you did not, and you put your own oversight on page three where everybody could see it, and you apologised to a girl who left this school three years ago and who you have never met.”

“That was the right thing to print.”

“Yes,” she said. “It was. And I sat in my room with it and I thought: the boy who wrote this is not somebody who thinks I am a stain.” Her voice was not steady now. “And then I thought: so why won’t he come and say it? And then it was three weeks, and then it was five, and I was so angry at you, Aoki, for making me be the one who was waiting.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“You are extremely clumsy.”

“I know.”

“I forgave you in about eight days,” she said. “The other five weeks were spite.”

I laughed. It came out wrong, half a laugh and half something else, and she looked up at me, and there was snow on her eyelashes, and I have never in my life wanted so badly to be a person who says the right thing at the right speed.

“Hoshino—”

“Mizuki,” she said.

“…What?”

“It’s been nine months,” said Mizuki Hoshino. “Say the other one.”

So I did.

And then, because I am who I am, I said the actual sentence too — the whole ugly straightforward thing, no metaphor, no clever ending, just the plain fact, standing in the snow at the top of a hundred and twelve steps.

She listened to all of it with her chin up.

Then she said, “Good,” and took hold of the front of my coat with both hands, and pulled, and the bell rang for the last time somewhere below us, and it was, without any contest whatsoever, the best New Year of my life.

January

My grandmother’s operation was on the fourteenth.

It took two hours and forty minutes. We sat in the corridor outside the ward on plastic chairs — my mother, my father, me — and my father did not speak once for the entire time, and at the end of it he put one hand on the top of my head for about three seconds, which in the language of Aoki men is roughly a symphony.

She was awake by the evening and complaining about the food by the following midday.

“It was the size of a pea,” she said, with enormous contempt, from the bed. “Four days in here. For a pea.”

“Grandmother.”

“And the cost, Sota. Do you know what the cost is?”

“Don’t tell me.”

“I will tell everybody,” she said. “It is a splendid story. I am going to bore this entire hospital with it.”

Mizuki came on the Saturday, on the train, by herself, with a bag of oranges and a small notebook.

My grandmother took one look at her and said, “Ah. The one with the mask.”

“That was September.”

“I know exactly when it was.” She patted the bed. “Sit. Tell me about the calf.”

They talked for fifty minutes. I was sent to get tea and came back to find them deep in a conversation about the price of milk in which I had no part whatsoever, and my grandmother — who has never once in her life said something kind about somebody in front of them — said to me, over Mizuki’s head:

“This one is resourceful. Keep her near the family.”

“Grandmother.”

On the train home Mizuki was quiet for a long time, and then she said: “Her hands.”

“I know.”

“There are more wrinkles on the back of one of her hands than there are lines on this page.” She looked out of the window at the dark. “She patted my arm when I left. Twice. Like a person checking a horse.”

“That’s her whole emotional range. You got the top of it.”

“I know,” said Mizuki. “That is why I am going to cherish it.”

The doctor used the word routine. I have decided that is the most beautiful word in medicine. Nobody ever calls it a miracle, and I do not think it was one — it was one appointment in September that she nearly did not make, and a machine, and a woman with steady hands on the fourteenth of January. But I sat on a plastic chair for two hours and forty minutes with my whole chest full of a horrible bright expectancy, and when the door opened and somebody said it went well, I understood what people mean by fulfilment, which up to that point I had thought was a word for advertisements.

I marvel at it still, in the plain way. She is eighty now. She sends me photographs of the calf, which is not a calf any more.

February

The third-years took their entrance exams.

The whole school went quiet in a way it never is at any other time. The library filled up at seven in the morning. The strain showed on people’s faces in the corridor. Kenji, who was one year below all of it and could not have cared less, walked around whistling until three separate third-years threatened his life.

Kurosawa was accepted by a national university, to study public administration and law. He told nobody. I found out because the clerk in the school office told my mother in the bakery, which is how everything in that town has always worked.

I asked him about it in the club room.

“You are going to write policy for the rest of your life,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Rules. For other people.”

“Yes,” said Kurosawa. He was straightening the chairs, which he does whenever he is in a room, without noticing. “I intend to be extremely careful about it.”

“Why law, though?”

He thought about it for a while.

“Because a rule can do everything a rumour does,” he said, “except that a rule is written down, and a written thing can be argued with.” He pushed the last chair in. “I would rather be argued with than obeyed, Aoki. I did not understand that when I was fourteen.”

The Last Week of February

She told me on the Tuesday, in the club room, after everybody else had gone.

Her father’s corporation was moving him again. Singapore this time. He would go in April, and this time — because she was going into her third year, and because the timing was what it was — she would go with him.

“They arranged it in January,” she said. “He tried to refuse. He has never once tried to refuse before, and he did it for me, and they said no, and he came home and could not look at me for two days.”

I sat down on the stool.

“When?”

“The twenty-eighth of March.”

“That’s five weeks.”

“That’s five weeks,” she agreed.

Neither of us said anything clever. There was nothing clever. That is the thing nobody tells you about the actual shape of these events: they arrive as a date, and a departure time, and a flight number, and there is no argument to have with any of it.

“I am not going to do the thing,” she said at last.

“What thing?”

“The thing where I become sad in advance.” She opened her notebook and put it on the table with a small hard sound. “We have five weeks and one issue of the paper left. I would like to spend the five weeks and make the issue. That is my resolution and I am not taking questions.”

March

The graduation ceremony is on the first of March. It is solemn, and slow, and everybody cries, including several people who spent three years claiming they hated the place.

The third-years sat in rows in the auditorium in their uniforms. The chorus sang. The headmaster spoke for eleven minutes. Each student walked up and received a certificate with a small bow.

When Kurosawa’s name was called, four people at the back clapped before the polite general applause started: me, Kenji, Yuka, and Mizuki.

He did not turn around. But the back of his neck went red, and I am going to hold on to that for the rest of my life.

Afterwards, in the corridor, with the ceremonial flowers still in his hand, he said:

“The advisory status is permanent now. It cannot be removed by a council vote. I made sure of that in January.”

“I know. I read the minutes.”

“Of course you did.” He almost smiled. “Aoki. Print small things carefully. That is the whole job.”

Then he shook my hand, which was the first and last time he ever did that, and walked out of the gate into the rest of his life.

The last issue of the year came out on the twenty-fifth of March. Twelve pages. Six hundred copies. Every one of them gone by the end of the day.

We made it in eleven days, the five of us, in a room with a flickering bulb and a 1955 typewriter on the cabinet and four buckets in the corner from the last time it rained.

I have put it at the end of this book, because it is the best thing we ever made, and because it is easier to show you than to describe.

March 28th — The Airport

They live two hours from us, so we took the train, and then the shuttle bus from the station along the expressway to the terminal.

Kenji came. Yuka came. Ms. Hayashi came, which surprised everybody, and drank an airport coffee and complained about the price of it for eleven minutes.

The departure hall was full of people saying goodbye badly, which is the only way anybody says it.

There is a particular sorrow in an airport that does not exist anywhere else, and it is caused by the furniture. Everything in that building is designed to move people along: the moving walkway, the rows of seats bolted in place, the trolleys, the signs. Nothing in it is built for standing still, and standing still is the only thing anybody there actually wants to do.

Two families near us were doing it much worse than we were. One was a group of about nine seeing off a young man in a suit, all talking at once in haste, none of them saying the real thing. The other was a woman with two small children and eleven bags, an immigrant family going home or arriving, I could not tell which, and the smaller child was chewing gum and hanging off her coat and had clearly decided that if she clung hard enough the whole day could be bypassed.

I understood her completely.

Kenji, to his eternal credit, did not make one single joke. He shook her father’s hand, said “Thank you for the year,” which he had obviously practised, and then went and stood by a pillar and looked at the ceiling for four minutes.

Her father shook my hand and said, “Thank you for this year,” and then went to deal with the freight charges on the extra bag, because Mizuki had insisted on taking six kilos of newspapers.

We stood by the window. You could see the runway from there, and a plane going out every three or four minutes, rolling, then halting, then thrusting forward and lifting.

“Right,” said Mizuki. “The arrangement.”

“The arrangement.”

She held up one finger. “Every month, I send you a column. Nine hundred words. From Singapore. About whatever I find. You print it, and you do not cut it without asking me first.”

“Agreed.”

“Second.” Second finger. “You send me every issue. In an envelope. On paper. I do not want a file, Aoki, I want the grey paper from Mr. Ito with the wrong margins.”

“Agreed.”

“Third.” She stopped.

The third one took her a while.

“Third,” she said. “In August, next year, I have two weeks. And I would like to spend them at a farm two hours from here where there is a bull the size of a car.”

“…She’ll make you pull weeds.”

“I know,” said Mizuki. “I have thought about it constantly since August.”

Then she took the black notebook out of her bag — the soft-cornered one, the one she had carried every day since April and never opened in front of anyone — and put it in my hands.

“Don’t read it on the train,” she said. “Read it in the room.”

“Mizuki—”

“I’ll be back,” she said. “That is not a brave thing to say. It is a flight that takes seven hours and I have looked up the price and it is not even that much.”

Then she hugged me, hard and briefly, in front of my best friend, my class representative, and my English teacher, and went through the gate without turning around, because she is the strongest person I have ever met and because if she had turned around it would have been over.

April, Again

The plane took off at four twenty. We watched it go from the window: the long roll, the takeoff, the jet noise coming a second late through the glass, and then a small white shape climbing over the bay and going out overseas, until there was nothing.

I read the notebook that night, in the club room, alone.

It was full of writing. All of it hers. It started in Tokyo eighteen months before, three days after she stood in front of a hall and read somebody else’s apology, and the first page said:

I am going to stop writing. This is the last thing.

And then there were four hundred more pages, because she had never stopped, not for one single week, she had only stopped letting anybody see it.

On the last written page, dated the twenty-fourth of March, it said:

Kitami High School. Newspaper club. Five members. This is the first place I have ever been where the thing I am was not a problem to be managed. Sota — if you are reading this, you got to the end. Of course you did. You always read to the end. That is the entire reason I like you.

The cherry trees on the lane came out in the second week of April.

They open, everybody takes photographs, and eight days later a breeze blows them all away. Every year it is the same, and every year it is completely different, which is a thing I did not understand until I was seventeen.

I am editor now. There are five names on the membership form on the wall, and one of them lives four thousand kilometres away and sends nine hundred words on the first of every month, and has never once been late.

The room is still at the end of the third-floor hall, past the science room, where nobody walks.

There is still a mop in the corner.

I have decided never to move it.

Chapter Ten Word List

Epilogue — The Last Issue

This is the twelve-page issue of 25 March, printed on grey paper from Ito Stationery, six hundred copies, all of them gone by four o’clock. I have copied it here exactly as it went out, because I promised at the start of this book that I would show you rather than describe it.

— S. Aoki, editor

THE SAKURA BULLETIN

Kitami High School · No. 412 · 25 March

A school is a thousand people who never say what happened to them. This paper is here to ask.

PAGE ONE — FROM THE EDITOR

This is the last issue of the year, and I am contractually obliged to be sincere in it, so here we go.

In April this club had one member. On the twenty-fifth of March it has five. In between we printed eleven issues, sold four hundred and eighty coffees, lost a confrontation with the student council and then, in a way, won it, and had our name stolen and given back.

I would like to say something about the word accomplishment.

I do not think ours was the sixteen-page festival special, although it is the thing everybody mentions. I think our real accomplishment was the four ugly pages of the twentieth of November, in which this paper wrote down its own oversight in public, and did not enjoy itself, and printed no name that did not need printing.

Anybody can be brave in a good week. Integrity is what is left over in a bad one.

To the third-years leaving us: this is your commencement, which is a strange English word, because it means both an ending ceremony and a beginning. Forth you go, onward, into a generation that will complain about you within four years. You are the heirs of nothing except a leaking gymnasium roof and a bad proverb that our headmaster likes (“the slow bird flies at dawn”), which is not a real proverb and which he invented in 2016.

To the first-years arriving in April: the club room is at the end of the third-floor hall. There is a kettle in it.

I have been told by three separate people that this letter is too heartfelt. I have decided to renew my commitment to being heartfelt anyway. It is the last issue. I can be sincere once a year.

S. Aoki (2nd year), Editor

PAGE TWO — SCHOOL NOTICES

THE ROOF. The municipal education bureau has finally approved money to renovate the gymnasium roof. Work begins in the summer holiday. The mayor was photographed here in February looking at a pillar and nodding. Work will disrupt the tennis courts for three weeks. The disruptive period is extended to four weeks if it rains, which it will.

THE SCIENCE LAB eye-wash facility has been repaired after nine years, following an extensive report by Ms. Ono describing the old one as hazardous and, in one memorable line, “an active peril to the children of this town.” Ms. Ono is not a woman to compromise.

THE OLD BUILDING. The wooden store behind the barn-shaped shed will be pulled down in August. It is 61 years old and is beginning to deteriorate; the north wall is no longer watertight and there is mould growing on the clay tiles. Anybody who has left belongings in it should collect them, because after the fifth of August they will be in a sack at the back of the caretaker’s office and Mr. Doi will not be sentimental.

INTAKE. The institution will take 240 first-years in April, up eight on last year. The retention rate for clubs remains the school’s weakest number: 41% of first-years who join a club have left it by December. The council will implement a new welcome week to facilitate introductions. This paper will report on whether it works, which is the part everybody usually forgets to do.

A NOTE FROM THE OFFICE. Mrs. Kaneko, who has run the secretarial side of this school for nineteen years, has asked us to print the following, and we are printing it in full because she has never asked us for anything.

“Every year I am asked the same four questions in the front lobby and I would like to specify the answers once, in a place people can point at.

One. Post. We despatch the school post at two o’clock, once a day. A parcel brought in at ten past two goes tomorrow. Any inquiry about a missing item should come to me and not to your teacher, who does not know and will only initiate a search that ends at my desk anyway.

Two. Money. The school office is not the education bureau and it is not the board’s headquarters. If a form asks about compensatory payments or a family’s entitlement to support, I will help you fill it in, and it is confidential, and I have never once discussed one of them with anybody.

Three. Forms. If a form says a parent must sign it, the school is liable for it, which is why I cannot accept your friend’s signature, however good it is. I have seen eleven forgeries in nineteen years and I have never rendered judgement on any of them; I simply hand them back.

Four. Me. I work from 7:30 to 17:00. I do not do overtime unless something has gone wrong, and I will be taking my pension in four years’ time, and somebody in this building should be learning where everything is kept. Nobody has asked. Please ask.”

This paper would like to note that Mrs. Kaneko has been contactable on a broken telephone extension since 2021, has never complained about it, and that the school should invest eleven thousand yen in a new handset before she goes.

LOST PROPERTY currently includes: one briefcase (brown, 1980s, contains only a rag), two pairs of jeans, a paperback novel with the last four pages torn out, one copper bracelet, and a bicycle pump. Enquiries to the office. The addressee of the letter found inside the briefcase has been contacted; it was sent in 1994 and she still works two streets away.

PAGE THREE — SCIENCE CORNER

by K. Sasaki (1st year)

People keep asking me what I actually do, so: I look after the school website, and this term I have been reading about the sky.

The ozone layer is a thin band of gas about twenty-five kilometres above your head, and it stops most of the sun’s worst light from reaching you. In the 1980s it was deteriorating badly because of certain gases used in fridges and spray cans. Countries agreed to stop making them. It is now slowly repairing itself. This is worth knowing, because it is the clearest proven example we have of the whole world conforming to one rule and it actually working.

Other things I learned this term, in no order:

Geology is the study of what the ground is made of. Under this town there is soft rock and a great deal of clay. Our school is built on a slight mount, which is why the west wing has a step in the middle of a corridor for no visible reason.

Petroleum is not one substance. It is a mixture, and refining it means separating that mixture at different temperatures — some parts come off at 40 degrees centigrade, some at 350.

An organism is any living thing, from a whale to the mould on the wall of the wooden store. A colony is a group of them living together. Bacteria in a colony behave differently from bacteria alone, which I find slightly disturbing.

The minerals in ordinary tap water in this town include calcium and magnesium, which is why the club room kettle has a white layer inside it that nobody has ever cleaned.

A variation of one degree in average temperature does not sound like much. It is not a trifle. Small numbers across a large system are the whole story.

Finally: birds glide rather than flap whenever they can, because flapping is expensive. A crow coming down from the summit of the school roof to the oval flowerbed will descend most of the way without moving its wings at all. Watch one. That descent is free.

PAGE FOUR — WHAT HAPPENS AFTERWARDS

We asked eleven former students of this school what they actually do. Here is what came back.

Y. Morita (left 2009), accountant. “I did a course in accountancy because I was good at maths and could not think of anything else, which is a terrible reason and it worked out fine. Most of my job is not numbers. It is telling people the truth about their own money. I do the payroll for four companies. I know what everybody earns and I have never once told anybody.”

H. Ikeda (left 1998), architect. “The best thing about being an architect is that people live inside your mistakes for forty years. It keeps you humble.”

T. Nakagawa (left 2014), doctorate student. “I am doing a doctorate in materials science at a research institute attached to the university. I will be a student until I am twenty-eight. Whether I become an academician or leave for industry depends on things I cannot control. My prospects are, I am told, good. My expectation is that I will be poor for a while and then either very happy or very tired.”

R. Sato (left 2003), entrepreneur. “I started my own enterprise at twenty-eight with a deposit from my parents that I have paid back. Everybody talks about the good part. Nobody talks about the debt. For three years my only asset was a van and I did not have a mortgage, I had a lease on a shop and a father who agreed to be my guarantor and did not tell my mother.”

M. Kubo (left 1991), diplomat. “I work at an embassy. My job is diplomatic in both senses. Most of what I do is arranging for people who disagree to be in the same room at a convenient hour.”

S. Hayakawa (left 2019), mechanic. “Everybody at this school assumed I would go to university because my marks were fine. I fix engines. I understand exactly how a mechanism works and I am never bored. Last week a customer’s van would not start and it was a forty-year-old contactor — the switch that lets the big current through — and it cost him nine hundred yen. Do not let anybody make you feel inferior for using your hands.”

A. Fujii (left 1996), university dean. “I am a dean now, which means I sign things. A diploma is a piece of paper that says you finished; it is not the same as an education and everybody in a university knows this and we hand them out anyway. My advice: opt for the course you will still be curious about in the third year, not the one that sounds best at eighteen. And ignore anybody who talks about a student’s productivity. You are not a factory.”

Y. Tomioka (left 1988), farmer. “I breed dairy cattle. Ninety head. I haul feed twice a week and I have not had a holiday since 2011. People consume milk every day and have no idea what a February morning looks like. That is fine — I do not know how a hospital works either. But do not let anybody inflate what a farm is into something romantic. It is a business with mud in it, and I love it.”

Anonymous (left 2010). “You asked what I do. In November there was a layoff at my company and I was in it, and I have been looking for four months. I nearly did not answer this. I am answering because when I was seventeen I thought this could not happen to anybody who worked hard, and somebody should have told me it can, and that it is not a verdict on you.”

Also responding: a grocer, a dealer in second-hand books, a managerial trainee at a large corporation, and one person who wrote only: “Commerce. It is fine. Tell them to sleep more.”

Our thanks to all eleven. This page will run every March from now on.

PAGE FIVE — THE DEBATE CLUB’S YEAR

by the debate club, edited (sparingly) by M. Hoshino

This year’s motions and results, for the record.

“This house would ban mobile phones in school.” Defeated. The opposition argued that the rule already exists and is ignored, and that a rule which cannot be enforced makes all other rules weaker. Contention of the evening, from a first-year: “You cannot criminalize a thing four hundred people do every day and call it discipline.”

“This house believes a school should have a written constitution.” Passed easily, which surprised us, since ours has one and nobody reads it. The winning speech pointed out that a written rule can be argued with and an unwritten convention cannot.

“This house believes talent is **attributable mostly to practice.”** Very close. The contrary view — that we are far less in control of ourselves than we like to believe — was argued with profundity by a second-year who then admitted afterwards that she did not believe a word of it. That is advisable practice in debating and a terrible habit in life.

“This house would abolish school uniform.” Defeated, 31–24. The foremost argument for keeping it was not tradition. It was money: without uniform, what you wear becomes visible information about your family, and a school where the affluent and the middle-class and everybody else are instantly sorted by clothing is not a school anybody should want. Nobody had a good answer. The implicit point — that uniform hides a real difference rather than removing it — was made and not resolved.

“This house believes **democratic government is the least bad system.”** Passed, 44–7, which the club felt was too easy a win to be useful, so they ran it again in February with the sides swapped and made everybody argue the position they disagreed with. That second debate was better. The supposition underneath the motion — that there is one supreme system that fits every continent and every group of people who inhabit one — was confronted properly for the first time. Somebody quoted a communist thinker; somebody else pointed out that a small farming commune and a federation of two hundred million people are not solving the same problem. Nobody’s mind was changed. Everybody’s argument improved.

“This house believes school rules should be more **permissive.”** Defeated narrowly. The interesting part was not the vote. It was that both sides used the word freedom to mean completely different things: one side meant liberty from being told what to do, the other meant being free to work without interference. Half of all disagreement, our club president says, is two people purposefully using one word for two things.

“This house believes exam results are a **gross measure of a person.”** Passed unanimously, and was therefore a bad debate, and we are not running motions like that again.

A note on **advocacy.** Three times this year, students came to us wanting the club to argue for something in public — a cause they cared about. We said no each time, and it made us unpopular, so here is the reasoning. A debate club exists to practise confronting an argument, not to impose one. Advocacy is a different and honourable activity and it belongs somewhere else in the building.

The motion we refused to run. In November, somebody submitted a motion about a group of people in this town. It was discriminatory in its wording, and we did not print it or debate it, and we told the person why to his face. Prejudice does not become an argument by being written in the form of one. This is the only time all year the club has prevailed on a question of what not to discuss, and we would do it again.

Smaller things we learned. That the word obviously is usually a sign that a speaker has run out of reasons. That contemporaneous evidence — written at the time — beats a memory every time. That in any argument about a famine or a plague or any large catastrophe, the implication that somebody could simply have fixed it is nearly always incidental to what actually happened. That claims of superiority are the easiest thing in the world to make and the hardest thing in the world to support with anything tangible.

A note on how we argue. Twice this year a debate collapsed into people being unpleasant to each other. Both times it was regarding a motion where somebody in the room had a personal stake. We have made a rule about it: you may attack an argument as much as you like, but lest anybody forget, the person holding it goes home to a house.

Words we banned from our own room this year, after using them badly: obviously, everyone knows, and you would say that. All three are ways of avoiding an argument while appearing to win one.

We meet on Thursdays. New members welcome, regardless of experience.

PAGE SIX — THE DRAMA CLUB: THE LAST WINTER OF LORD SANADA

A review, by S. Aoki

I went to two rehearsals in October expecting to be kind about a comedy of errors, and instead I saw the best thing performed in this building in my lifetime. This is a spoiler-free review, mostly, so I will keep the spoiler to one sentence at the end and mark it clearly.

The play covers eleven months of a siege. The castle holds; the invasion comes anyway; and when the enemy finally invade, they are not monsters, which is the whole point.

What the club got right was scale. A cast of nineteen played an army. The armament was painted wood. There were no blades on stage that could cut butter. And yet the second-act raid — the blast of the drum, the sudden boom of the whole cast stamping once, together — made six hundred people move backwards in their seats.

What it got right more importantly was the civilians. Most stories about warfare are about the people who chose it. This one kept returning to a farmer’s family, three veterans too old to fight, and a lass of about twelve who spends the entire play trying to keep a goat alive. She has fourteen lines. She is the best character in it.

There is no brutality shown on stage. There is a great deal of it described, quietly, by people who have come back from somewhere, and it is far worse. The word butchery is used exactly once, in the fourth act, by a man who then apologises for using it.

The noble family is played straight and never made ridiculous. Lord Sanada’s daughter — betrothed as a bride to a family she has met twice, and quite clear-eyed about what that is — refuses both the fantasy of rescue and the fantasy of sacrificial death. Her line in Act Five (“I will wed him, and I will be wary, and I will outlive all of you”) got the loudest sound of the night.

The ending is not a triumph and it is not doom. It is a treaty. People are liberated from a siege and go home to a burned valley and start again, and the last image is a woman kneeling in a field pulling weeds.

I have thought about that field all winter.

Three more things, briefly.

The staging was the most accomplished thing about it. There is no stage machinery in our auditorium — no turning floor, no lift — and the club solved the whole spatial problem with eleven wooden boxes and the discipline to move them in the dark without a sound. The castle, the wilderness outside it, and the valley afterwards were all the same eleven boxes.

The acting was, with two exceptions, unshowy. The two exceptions were the messenger in Act Two, who was so demonstrative that people laughed in the wrong place, and Lord Sanada himself, who was slightly too mannered in the early scenes and then, from Act Three onwards, extremely good. Nobody whipped the audience; nobody clawed at the emotion. They trusted a quiet line to work, and it did.

And the play refuses the easy shape. There is no rescuer. Nobody arrives on a horse. The princess does not need one, the orphan boy in Act Four is not adopted by anybody, and the enemy general is never overthrown — he simply gets old and goes home. When the invading army finally comes over the hill, there is no rousing music at all; there is one drum, and the whole cast standing still, and a small frightened sound from the goat.

I watched a row of second-years in front of me, and every one of them had their brows down, leaning forward. Nobody moved for the last eleven minutes.

That is a clear-cut success and this school should be proud of them.

SPOILER (skip this line if you are seeing the March re-run): the goat lives.

PAGE SEVEN — SPORT

by K. Mori (2nd year)

BASEBALL. We finished fifth. That is one place better than last year and four places worse than we wanted. Our strongest competitor in the region, Nishiura, beat us by two runs in a game where we were, briefly, ahead. I am not going to pretend the odds were with us. They were not.

I want to write about the training instead, because nobody ever does.

A season is eleven months of exertion that nobody watches. It is four hundred mornings. It is a swollen ankle in June that you rub with ice and do not mention. It is the small pinch in your shoulder that you decide is nothing. It is a harness of habits you put on in April and do not take off.

Our captain, Hayama, has more natural talent than anybody I have played with, and he has never once boasted about it, and this year I stopped being envious of him, which took me five years and is the best thing that happened to me in this school.

What I learned: talent gets you noticed and perseverance gets you picked. Both matter. Anybody who tells you only one of them is real is selling something.

Special mention to our manager, Aizawa, who oversaw the kit, the water, the injuries, the schedule and the morale of eighteen boys for three years and whose name appears in no record anywhere. That is meritorious and this paper says so in print.

TENNIS won their block for the first time since 2011. JUDO has three members and one of them is technically a spoiler; they lost every match and turned up to every one, which has its own kind of merit.

ATHLETICS. Congratulations to Ueda (1st year), who took eleven seconds off her 1500m over one year through nothing but diligence and willpower, and who told me she does not consider this interesting. It is the most interesting thing in this section.

NEXT YEAR. New coach in April. There is a stake in this for all of us: three third-years leave, four first-years arrive, and somebody has to steer the team through a difficult summer. I am putting my name forward. If I am not chosen I will be fine about it for approximately one week.

PAGE EIGHT — NOTICES, SMALL ADS, AND THE BICYCLE

FOUND: ONE BICYCLE. It has been chained to the west fence since September. Front tyre flat. Rear rod bent. It has been rained on for six months and there is wax crayon on the frame. If it is yours, the caretaker would like a word; if it is not claimed by April it will be given to the craft club, who intend to modify it into a chair, which I have been told is “contemporary art” and which I have been asked not to describe further.

SMALL ADS

FOR SALE: camping equipment. Two cabin tents, one coil of rope, four straps with buckles, one stove. Suitable for the mountain club. Contact Tanaka (3rd year) before he leaves. He says he is “contactable” until the twentieth.

WANTED: anybody handy with a screwdriver. The drama club’s trolley — the one used to move scenery — has lost two casters and now travels only sideways. No gadgetry required. We are not trying to mechanize anything. We would simply like it to go forward.

FREE: approximately four hundred staples, one stapler that does not work, and a box of stickers from a 2016 open day reading WELCOME TO KITAMI HIGH SCHOOL — THE FUTURE STARTS HERE. The stickers are still sticky. The future did start here. Come and take them.

THE ART CLUB would like to acquaint the school with the fact that the room behind the art room is not, and has never been, a store cupboard for other clubs’ wares. Nine items were removed from it this term. They are in a box. The box has a label. The label is polite.

THE MOUNTAIN CLUB is planning a three-day outing in July and would like it known that this is not a resort holiday. You will not be staying at an inn, a motel, or anything with a roller blind and a vending machine. You will be in a mountain lodge with bunk beds and no hot water. Sign-up sheet on the club board. Bring boots.

THE SAILING CLUB (six members, one boat) will sail on Saturdays from the harbour from April. Beginners welcome. You will spend your first four sessions being taught how to get back ashore, which sounds like a joke and is not.

THE HOME ECONOMICS ROOM has been re-furnished: eleven new chairs, two new work surfaces, and a cupboard door that closes. The old roller blind has been replaced. Please do not put anything with a pit or a stone in it down the sink; the pipes were reinforced in 2019 and they are still not equal to a peach.

THE HEALTH ROOM reminds everybody that a dental check is compulsory in April and takes four minutes. Also: there is no such thing as an energy drink that works as a booster before an exam. There is such a thing as eight hours of sleep.

FOUND IN THE ART STORE: a box of Christmas ornaments from an unknown year, slightly bent; three tins of paint that have gone hard; and something growing in the corner that Ms. Ono has identified as mould and has asked us not to photograph.

THE LIBRARY has replaced its entry system. You now swipe your card at the desk. The old system required a librarian to write your name in a book by hand, and the book has been kept, and it goes back to 1974, and it is the single best object in this school. Ask to see it.

A NOTE ON THE OLD MINIBUS. For eleven years this school has owned a minibus with 96 horsepower, a broken heater, and a bumper held on with tape. It has taken every club in this building to every event any of us have ever been to. In February it failed its inspection and was declared a wreck. It is not going to be mended.

Somebody should say something. So: thank you to the minibus. Six hundred children have been asleep in it.

PAGE NINE — LETTERS

Selected from thirty-one received this year. Names withheld where asked.

Sir, — I would like to confess something. In November, when the fake paper came out, I read the page about the first-year girl and I believed it for about an hour. I did not tell anybody, and I did not repeat it. I just believed it. Then the real paper came out on the twentieth and I felt disgust with myself that I have not been able to shake off.

I am not writing this for absolution. I am writing it because I think a great many people in this school did exactly what I did and are quietly hoping nobody counts them.

— Second year, name withheld

Editor’s reply: Thank you for writing it down. That is not a small deed. Believing something for an hour is not a crime; almost everybody in this building did. The people who repeated it are a different matter, and they know who they are, and this paper is not going to curse them in print because that would only make them defensive. Nothing is more useless than a confession nobody can survive making.

Sir, — Your November issue haunted me for a week and I resented it and I have come round. Please stop being right in a font that large.

— Third year

Sir, — My niece started at this school in April and was very frightened. She is in the chorus now. I have not seen her this happy since her father died four years ago, and I want somebody to write down that a school choir did that, because nobody thinks a choir does anything.

— A guardian, address supplied

Editor’s reply: It is written down now. Page nine, 25 March. It will be in the cabinet in the club room for the next forty years.

Sir, — I am a first-year and I would like to complain about the nursery-level maths in the January quiz. The riddle about the twin brothers was, and I quote your own answer, “not solvable regardless of method.” It had no answer. I spent a grievous amount of time on it.

— T. Ueda (1st year)

Editor’s reply: You are entirely correct. It was a printing error. We are wholeheartedly sorry, and we admire the distress with which you have written to us. Come and join the paper; you clearly have the temperament.

Sir, — Not everything has to be a lesson. Sometimes a school festival is just a good day. Please print one thing this year that does not have a moral in it.

— Anonymous

Editor’s reply: Fair. See page twelve.

PAGE TEN — THE BAKERY COLUMN

Six things I know after twenty-six years behind a counter, by A. Aoki (mother of the editor, who has not been allowed to edit this)

One. Bread goes stale because water leaves it, not because it dries out in the way you think. A loaf kept in the fridge goes stale faster than one on the counter. Everybody in this town does it wrong and I have stopped telling them.

Two. A staple food is one people eat every day without thinking. Rice here, bread in other places. The test of a staple is not that it is delicious. It is that nobody notices it until it is missing.

Three. Processed food is not a moral category. Bread is processed. Cheese is processed. Everything you eat has been through a process except an apple, and somebody grew that on purpose. Be suspicious of anybody who uses the word as an insult and cannot tell you what they mean.

Four. If you chop an onion and it makes you cry, your knife is not sharp enough. A sharp knife breaks fewer cells and releases less of the gas that causes the odour and the tears. This is the single most useful thing in this column.

Five. I sell approximately one pint of coffee an hour, ten hours a day, and I know what three hundred people in this town are worried about, because people tell a cashier things. I have never repeated any of it. This is why the shop still exists. A small business runs on discretion, not on bread.

Six. People say a bakery is a lovely job. It is a good job. It starts at four in the morning, my back hurts, and in a bad month we are entirely at the mercy of the price of flour. But we have fed this street for twenty-six years, and my son has grown up understanding that things do not simply appear, and that is worth more than a champagne life. My husband would like me to add that the liquor shop next door has been offering him brandy at cost price since 1998 and he has never once accepted it. He is very proud of this and I am contractually required to mention it.

Recipe of the month: toss stale bread cubes in oil, salt and garlic, bake at 180°C for ten minutes, and you have croutons. Nothing in a bakery is ever thrown away. Nothing.

PAGE ELEVEN — THE FIRST FOREIGN COLUMN

Mizuki Hoshino leaves for Singapore on 28 March and will write nine hundred words for this paper on the first of every month. Below is an early piece, written the week before departure.

I have moved six times and I have learned one useful thing about arriving somewhere: you do not get to choose what you notice first, and what you notice first will be wrong.

The first time we moved, I was seven. I noticed the pedestrian crossings, because they sang. Every crossing in that city played a small tune. I decided the whole place was cheerful, which it was not.

The second time, I noticed the metro, and then the avenue outside the station, and then the eight-lane highway beyond it, and I decided the city was inhuman, which it also was not.

What I have finally understood, at seventeen, is that familiarity is not something a place gives you. It is something you build, slowly, from very small things: the shop that is open late, the one bus driver who nods, the corner where the wind is always wrong.

You cannot acquaint yourself with a city. You can only start.

So this is my plan for Singapore, and I am writing it down here so that six hundred people can hold me to it.

I will not stay in the abstracted part of it — the airport, the mall, the hotel version of a country that is the same everywhere and is a kind of artificiality with air conditioning. That version is easy and it is illusory and you can live in it for two years and learn nothing.

Instead: I am going to find a market and go every week until somebody knows my face. I am going to learn what a banknote feels like there and what the coinage is, and stop converting prices in my head, because as long as you are converting you are still a consumer and not an inhabitant. I am going to take one excursion a month to somewhere I have not read about first. I am going to be wary of any opinion I form in the first sixty days.

And I am going to write it down, invariably, on the first of the month, even in the months when nothing happens — especially in those months, because a place is what it is on an ordinary Tuesday, not on the day something interesting occurs.

People keep telling me this is a great venture. It is not. It is my father’s job and a suitcase.

But here is the thing I did not know a year ago, and which is the sole reason I am able to get on the plane at all.

I used to think that moving meant losing the place you left. That it went out like a light behind you; that after a year the people there would be, at best, an acquaintance; that there was no point in building anything because you would only have to leave it.

Then this year I helped make eleven issues of a small grey newspaper in a room with a leaking ceiling, and I discovered that the things you write down do not stay behind you. They are the one part of a place that travels.

I am not losing Kitami. I have a column in it.

— M. Hoshino

PAGE TWELVE — THE BACK PAGE

No moral in this one, as requested.

THE ANNUAL QUIZ — ANSWERS

1. False. The school was founded in 1948, not 1946. This is also the website password, which is now changed, so please stop trying it.
2. Eleven. There are eleven vending machines within two hundred metres of the front gate. We counted. Twice. In the rain.
3. The kettle. It has been in the club room since at least 1991 and appears in a photograph from that year. It works. Nothing else from 1991 in this school works.
4. Mr. Doi. He has been the caretaker for thirty-one years and can overtake any student on the stairs while carrying a ladder.
5. A goat. (See page six. We warned you.)

THIS YEAR’S BEST OVERHEARD SENTENCES

“If I refrain from eating it now, is it still mine at lunch?” — corridor, September “Regarding the fish: I am not sorry.” — biology lab, June “Sir, is this remedial maths or is it just maths?” — a first-year, November “It’s not a fantasy if you have a plan.” — the drama club, at 11pm, painting a castle

A RIDDLE (with an actual answer this time)

I am opened every morning and closed every night. Four hundred and ten of me stand in one wall. I hold what you walked in on and give it back when you leave. What am I?

(Answer: a shoe locker. Yes, all of them. Yes, that is the joke.)

MS. HAYASHI’S LAST ENGLISH NOTE OF THE YEAR

Every issue this year I have been given a small box at the back and told to be educational. This is the last one. I am going to spend it on words that hide something.

Mr. and Mrs. — “Mr.” is a worn-down spelling of mister, which is a worn-down form of master. “Mrs.” is a worn-down spelling of mistress, which once simply meant the female head of a household, and which English then manipulated into something else entirely, so that today a spouse and a mistress are opposites. One word, four hundred years, and a whole social history you can see if you look. Nothing in a language is an accident.

Freeway — the “free” does not mean free of charge. It means free of crossings and traffic lights. Americans say freeway, we say expressway, the British say motorway, and all three are the same road.

Dime — a US ten-cent coin, from a Latin word meaning tenth. If somebody says a thing is “a dime a dozen,” they mean it is worth almost nothing because there is a great deal of it.

Bail — money left with a court so that an accused person can go home before the trial. Notice that it is not a punishment and not a proof of anything. You will hear this word wrongly used on television all year.

Estate — land and buildings that somebody owns. In Britain it also means a group of houses built together, which confuses everybody.

Well-off — having enough money. Politer than “rich,” which is why people who are rich prefer it.

Carriage — a vehicle pulled by horses, and the way a person holds their body. Same word, and if you think about it for eight seconds you will see why.

Recreation — your free-time activity. Look at the middle of it: re-creation. English is telling you what rest is for.

Renewal, anew, forthcoming, inward, outward, overhead, besides. These seven are all doors. A learner who knows new, in, out, over, side already owns most of them, and I would like more of you to guess before reaching for a dictionary. Guessing is not cheating. It is reading.

Overhead deserves a second line: it means “above your head,” and in business it means the costs you carry whether or not you sell anything — the rent, the lights. The same picture in both.

Voluminous — very large. Usually of a book, a skirt, or a report nobody will read.

Literary means “relating to literature.” It is not a compliment by itself. A literary style can be beautiful or it can be a way of hindering the reader while appearing clever. Our editor spent this year removing his own literary sentences and the paper improved every single time.

Wit is not jokes. Wit is speed. A person with wit puts two ordinary things together faster than you expected.

Proverbial means “the one everybody has heard of,” because it appears in a proverb. If somebody mentions “the proverbial last straw,” they are pointing at a saying without finishing it, and expecting you to know. You are allowed to say you do not.

Behavioural — relating to how people actually act, rather than what they say. A behavioural study watches. This is also the whole method of this newspaper.

Principled — acting from a rule you have decided on, even when it costs you. Our editor turned down the biggest story of his year in November on a point of principle, and I am not going to say more than that, because he will go red.

Convey — to carry something from one place to another, and also to get a meaning across. Both senses are the same picture. When your English teacher writes what are you trying to convey here? in the margin, she means: this sentence has not arrived.

Three verbs of force, which learners confuse. To pierce is to make a hole by pushing something sharp through. To plunge is to go down suddenly and completely — into water, or a price falling. To spit is to force liquid out of the mouth, and it is also what a hot pan does with oil. All three are short, hard, Anglo-Saxon words, and English keeps its short words for its physical ones.

Intrusion — the noun of intrude. Somebody entering where they were not invited. It is a colder word than interruption and you should use it carefully, because it accuses.

A note on spelling. The growth on the wall of the old wooden store is mould in Britain and mold in America. So are colour/color, harbour/harbor, tyre/tire, gaol/jail. Both are correct. Choose one, be consistent for the length of a piece of writing, and stop worrying about it — which is advice I give every April and which nobody takes.

Ridicule, envy, intrude, impress. Four verbs that describe what people do to each other in a school corridor. Learn all four. You will need them this week.

Spokesman, commentator, pollster. Three jobs that sound similar and are not. A spokesman speaks for somebody and is paid to. A commentator speaks about things and is paid for opinions. A pollster asks a large number of people a careful question and reports the numbers, and is the only one of the three whose work can be checked. When you read the news, always ask which of the three you are listening to.

Proceedings — the official written record of a meeting. Boring, and the most powerful document in any organisation, because in five years it is the only thing left.

Finally: a word I want back. Conscientiousness. It is long and ugly and it will never be fashionable. It means doing the work properly when nobody is checking. Every good thing in this paper this year was produced by it, and by five children who kept turning up. If your English resembles mine at forty, you will have forgotten half your vocabulary and remembered which words mattered. That is one of them.

Have a good spring. Do not look up every word. — S. Hayashi

FINALLY

The Sakura Bulletin has been printed at this school since 1985. It has been stopped once, in 2003, for four months, for reasons nobody now remembers. It has printed one gossip column, which it should not have, and one apology for it, which was thirty-eight years late.

It will be here in April. It will be here in the April after that.

There is a kettle in the room.

Come and find us.

Epilogue Word List

Epilogue Word List (continued)