A Sweet Feeling, Not a Sweet Memory

Have you ever had an ideal woman appear right in front of you -- and not one, but several of them at the same time?

I have. Three of them at once.

For a man like me, who suffers not from chuunibyou but from what I call fuji-byou, and within it a strain known as Tora-san disease, this was a serious matter.

And by the time I noticed they were there, it was already too late. I did nothing at all, and the summer ended.

Why did it turn out that way? To this day it is a mystery to me.

Let me start by explaining the name of the illness.

Chuunibyou, literally "second-year-of-middle-school syndrome," is a Japanese word for the boy who believes he is far grander than he really is. Mine runs the other way, so I gave it a name of my own: fuji-byou, the disease of the one and only.

Tora-san is Kuruma Torajiro, of the long-running film series "Otoko wa Tsurai yo" (It's Tough Being a Man). In every film he falls for the leading lady. In every film he does nothing about it and leaves town. The fastest man in Japan at falling in love, the slowest in the world at doing anything about it. I borrowed my diagnosis from him.

If chuunibyou makes a man look bigger to himself than he is, fuji-byou does the reverse. The other person looks like someone there is no second of in this world, and I look like a hopeless man there is no second of either. So I cannot go near. I cannot even say her name. Full marks for falling in love, zero for doing anything about it.

This was when I was around thirty. Old enough to know better, as I am well aware.

It began with a hobby group.

In that group I hit it off with one of the men. He was good company, and before long he was inviting me to his house. There was a wife, there was a daughter, and there was a steady traffic of people from the group in and out of the place.

Three of them were in that house.

The first was the wife. I had actually seen her on television and been curious about her, and it never once occurred to me that she would turn up in front of me in the flesh. My eyes went blank, and then my heart started up. A woman in her thirties -- my friend's wife. My ideal, from the very moment I met her, was already somewhere I could not reach.

The second was their daughter. She was still in her teens. One day, out of nowhere, she told me she liked me. Whether she meant it or was joking, I could not tell. I had no idea what to say back, and I think I probably just laughed it off. A grown man of about thirty. It is a pathetic thing to admit, but that was the best I could manage.

The third was a woman in her twenties from the group. The ponytail suited her. She was bright, she was good at lifting a room, and no matter what you talked about you never grew tired of it. She made you want to stay sitting beside her.

As for their faces, the truth is that they have gone vague on me. What I remember is only that sort of thing. I have written "ideal women," but the plain fact is that I pasted my own ideals onto them, and it had nothing to do with the three of them at all.

That summer, inside my head, the story moved forward every single day. The scene where I speak to her. The scene where I am turned down. For some reason, even the wedding. My head, at least, was extremely busy.

In reality I was simply sitting in that house, laughing along with everyone else. Nothing had begun. Of course it hadn't.

What I understand now is that I was not looking at them. I was looking at myself looking at them. I was playing the leading role, alone. Each of those three was the lead in her own life, with her own days to think about. None of them owed me an appearance in my story.

Back then my picture of women came almost entirely from manga. And because I had read them in the wrong order, the ruler I carried was badly bent. I tried to measure living people with it. Of course it did not measure. That was the size of me, at nearly thirty.

Even so, I have not forgotten the finest night of it.

One evening a lot of us gathered at the house. Between the drink and the infatuation I was out early, and I went to lie down in the next room. And I could not sleep.

Well, of course not. On the other side of a single fusuma -- a paper sliding door -- the three of them were talking, and it sounded like fun. I could not make out the words. Only now and then, a burst of laughter. Outside the window the insects were singing. I lay there listening to it and looking at the ceiling.

Looking back, that was the closest I ever came to being inside that house's circle. I was not in the room. I was not part of the conversation. One sliding door away, listening to their voices. And I was content with that -- which tells you how far gone my illness was.

That happiness did not last. Endings really do come all at once, don't they.

I will not write the reason. I will only say that the time I spent laughing in that house came to an end one day.

The summer ended, the insects thinned out, the days grew shorter, and that was all. It began in high summer and was gone by autumn. A few months, no more.

There was one more thing, though. Just once.

It was the following year. The third one, the woman from the group, came up beside me out of nowhere. And she told me what had happened since.

I will put it honestly. I wanted to hold her, wanted it badly enough to taste it. And I could not. If I held her there, she would be the one to suffer for it afterward. That much I knew for certain.

So I kept facing forward, and I pushed her away, coldly. I did not even look at her.

Whether that was right or wrong, I still have no answer. But the lonely look on her face that day is something I do not think I will forget as long as I live.

If she ever happens to read this, I would like to apologize for that day. That much I still feel.

Decades have gone by since then.

I hold nothing against them. Those three did me no wrong of any kind. They were simply there. The one who did nothing was me. And the one thing I did do, once, was push someone away.

And still the regret will not go.

I should have been in that house as an ordinary member of it. I should have stopped pasting my ideals onto people, and talked to the person in front of me about whatever was in front of us. If the group had kept going, perhaps that connection would have kept going too. That was all it would have taken, and I could not do it.

It is a strange thing. Remembering it is still sweet. Sweet, and it hurts by exactly the same weight.

So I do not think this is a "sweet memory." In Japanese that is amai omoide. Change one character and it becomes amai omoi de -- "with a sweet feeling." That is what this was. With a sweet feeling, I was happy all by myself, and I offered nothing to anyone. That is the whole of it.

The wife and the daughter will not remember me, and it is better that they don't. The third one may remember. I am the one who put that look on her face.

Even so, if the three of them are laughing somewhere now, the way they were laughing on the other side of that door, that is enough for me.

Why did it turn out that way? To this day it is a mystery.

All the same: if there is someone in front of you now, do not do what I did. Before you run the story in your head, talk to the person. Before the summer ends.

Once it is over, what is left is the sweetness, and a regret of exactly the same weight.