The death of her children remained completely incompre-hensible—nothing would ever change that—but maybe there was some peace to be had in figuring out one small part of the puzzle.
Eiganji was not far from the Yoshiba home, and Sayaka started going there almost every day. She would sit in front of the image of Asura and stare at it for a long time. At first she just wept bitterly, sometimes talking to it or even screaming. But as the days passed she seemed to grow calmer, the tears less frequent.
Yoji Kaneda was usually there too.
On the night of the Armageddon, as he was heading back to the station from my house, Yoji had found Mrs. Yoshiba, still on that bench in the park. Her husband had left her and gone home, and she was just sitting there, staring off into space. He had tried to talk to her, and then he had taken her home, but when they got there they found that her husband was already dead. I guess all hell broke loose at that point, but that was also the moment Yoji got my frantic, selfish phone call. So he had run out, right in the middle of Armageddon and the confusion at the Yoshibas’, to come back to my house—and there he had found me, more or less half dead, my head split open by Maki Saito’s hammer. Poor Yoji—too many surprises!
So he’d taken me to the hospital and stayed with me until I was in intensive care. I was in pretty bad shape, but I guess he knew he couldn’t really do anything more for me, so he decided to go where he could do some good: back to a mother who had lost her three children…and now her husband. She would need help with the wake and the funeral, and so he had gone back to her—which is how Sayaka Yoshiba took Yoji away from me.
Sometimes I show up at Eiganji too, along with Tansetsu Sakurazuki. He usually brings a bag packed with cups and two thermoses of tea—one has hot hojicha and the other, cold green tea. He roasts the hojicha himself, and the green tea is some special blend. They’re both pretty tasty. And he makes these awesome cakes too. Today, it was bean dumplings—soft little mochi filled with yummy bean jam. Jam and mochi both homemade. I told him that if fortune-telling doesn’t pan out, he could always open a sweet shop. But he said he was doing just fine, thank you very much.
You go through the gate at Eiganji and straight ahead until you reach the main hall. Inside, just to the right of the big Buddha, is Yoshitaka Koyama’s Asura. There, in front of it, on cushions set on top of these thin grass mats, which are themselves spread right on the cold earth floor, are Sayaka Yoshiba and my idiot friend Yoji. You can tell right away that the bond between them is really powerful—even if it’s not very old—and I have to admit that’s pretty hard for me to take. I mean I am still recovering from being half dead—and having a broken heart. So seeing them together makes me kind of queasy. Though I know there’s nothing to be done about it. I’m hardly the first girl to have loved and lost.
And I guess the truth is, these days, I’m pretty far from being “pretty fucking far from okay.” If that’s not too complicated. What I mean is, my troubles now don’t compare to the ones the girls had in Caged Fury.
You can’t give up and die over a little thing like being dumped by Yoji. You know that now, Aiko.
When Tansetsu and I show up at Eiganji, Mrs. Yoshiba smiles and gets up to greet us. She’s so calm and gentle that you could never imagine she’s the same woman I’d seen crying her eyes out and fucking her husband’s brains out on that park bench. She’s totally beautiful too. Scary beautiful.
Oh well.
That’s just the way it is. I don’t have to like it, but that doesn’t change anything. So be it.
Yoji takes a breath and gets right up with Sayaka—which makes me want to actually puke.
Remain calm, Aiko.
Cicadas are crying in the trees around the temple. Tansetsu gives us each a cup and pours the hojicha. It hurts my throat to drink hot tea on a hot day, but then he pours the green tea, and I realize the contrast makes the cool tea taste unbelievably delicious. I also realize we’ve still got the mochi cakes. They’re slightly sweet and have this amazing spongy texture. I could eat the whole plate of them, but Tansetsu gives us just one each. Maybe he thinks good things come in small packages, or small servings, or something like that. But they are sooooo delicious, I wish he’d let me have more! I’m still a growing girl. But it’s one-to-a-customer, so I might as well give up. I’ll ask for more tea instead.
When we’re done with our snack, I realize that the Buddha and the Asura and the shadows haven’t calmed me down much—in fact, the vibes I’m getting from Yoji and Mrs. Yoshiba have had just the opposite effect. So I decide to go for a walk around the temple. Tansetsu gathers up his teacups and thermoses and follows me out of the hall.
We head for the cemetery. There are long rows of tombs with just a few trees planted between them, and the sun is intense. Afraid I might get sunburned, I try to hide in Tansetsu’s shadow. I think I’m being pretty subtle about it, but he probably knows what I’m up to—he’s a mind-reader, after all. It seems he recently started studying to be a weather forecaster as well, and now he’s telling me all about the wind and
