The Briefcase by Hiromi Kawakami Page A

thought it had only just gotten dark out, but it was already past ten o’clock.
    “Shall we go?” Kojima, who had grown somewhat taciturn, asked.
    “Yes, let’s,” I answered without thinking. Kojima had only barely mentioned the details of his breakup with Ayuko, and I couldn’t really remember what he had said. The ambience in the bar was no longer the crackling mood when they’ve just opened—by now the air was charged with a dense festivity. At some point, another bartender—a young man—had also appeared behind the counter, and the bar was humming with just the right level of activity. Kojima had apparently taken care of our bill without my noticing. I’ll pay my half, I said softly, but Kojima just shook his head gently, replying affably, “Don’t worry about it.”
    I slipped my arm lightly through Kojima’s as we slowly climbed the stairs from the underground to the street level.

    THE MOON WAS suspended in the sky.
    Looking up, Kojima said, “That’s your moon,” referring to the first character in my name, tsuki , the Japanese word for moon. Sensei would never have said such a thing. Abruptly remembering Sensei, I was startled. While we had been inside the bar, I had felt distant and detached from Sensei. Suddenly, I became aware of the weight of Kojima’s arm, lightly resting on the small of my back.
    “The moon is so round,” I said, casually moving my body away from Kojima.
    “Yes, it is,” he replied, without trying to bridge the distance between us that I had just created. He just stood there, staring up abstractedly at the moon. He looked older than he had when we were in the bar.
    “What’s wrong?” I asked.
    Kojima looked over at me. “Why do you ask?”
    “Are you a little tired?”
    “Just getting old,” Kojima said.
    “No, you’re not.”
    “Yes, I am.”
    “Are not!” I was being unusually obstinate.
    Kojima chuckled and bowed his head toward me. “That was rude of me, seeing as how we’re the same age.”
    “Not at all.”
    I was thinking about Sensei. He had never once referred to himself as “old.” Aside from the fact that he was old enough not to make light of his age, it just wasn’t in his nature to talk about it. Standing there on the street right then, I felt very far away from Sensei. I was keenly aware of the distance between us. Not only the difference between our age in years, nor even the expanse between where each of us stood at that moment, but rather the sheer distance that existed between us.
    Kojima put his arm around my waist once again. To be sure, he didn’t exactly encircle my waist so much as hold his arm against the air around my waist. The gesture was quite subtly adept. Since he wasn’t
actually touching me, there was nothing for me to shake off. I wondered when he had acquired such a skill.
    Held this way, I felt as though Kojima were manipulating me like a doll. Kojima hurried across the street and walked into the darkness, taking me along with him. I could see the school ahead of us. The doors of the gate were shut tightly. The school looked huge at night, lit up by the streetlights. Kojima headed up the path to the embankment anyway, and I went along with him.
    The cherry blossom party was over. There was not a soul to be found. Not even a stray cat. When the two of us had slipped away, there had been yakitori skewers and empty saké bottles and packets of smoked squid strewn about, and the partygoers had been serried together as they sat on their mats, but now there was no sign of anything on the embankment. All the trash and empty cans had been completely cleared away, and the ground looked as though it had been swept clean with a bamboo broom. Even the garbage cans on the embankment had been emptied of the refuse from the cherry blossom party. It was as if the party had been nothing more than an illusion or a mirage.
    “Everything’s . . . gone,” I said.
    “Not surprisingly,” Kojima replied.
    “Why not?”
    “People who