February 28, 1972

by Lain Taylor (December 14, 2022)

11:55

Taeko and Kanichi sat quietly on the floor of Taeko’s room with their backs against her bed, eating cup noodles and watching the news on the TV.

“Jeez,” Taeko said. “These guys are fucked up.”

“Tell me about it,” Kanichi replied. “But I can’t look away.”

“—ngoing hostage situation at the Asama-Sanso resort, we are receiving word that the commander of the second riot police, Naotaka Uchida, has been shot.”

“That poor Muta lady,” Kanichi said, eyes wide and fully fixated on the news report. “They gotta let her go.”

“Yeah,” Taeko said, standing up and placing her cup and chopsticks on the floor of her room. “I gotta pee real quick.”

“Alright,” Kanichi replied absentmindedly, still fully engaged in the hostage situation unfolding before his very eyes.

“Tell me if I miss anything,” Taeko shouted as she walked away to the bathroom across the hall.

Kanichi felt a stinging pain in his eyes and closed them reflexively, squeezing them shut as the pain was undoubtedly due to his prolonged staring at the television. Shit, he thought. Maybe the eye doctor was right after all.

He looked around Taeko’s room to let his eyes recover. He hadn’t noticed when she brought him in, but the room was a bit of a mess; there were colored pencils all over her desk and the floor right below it, and sticky notes with various reminders and to-do lists covering the wall above it as well. There was a paper sticking out of her top drawer, and Kanichi tried as hard as he could to focus on it so that he wouldn’t look back at the TV. Wait a second, he thought to himself. That kind of looks like—

“Back,” Taeko replied, and Kanichi quickly shifted his focus to her.

She picked up her cup noodles and continued to eat it, sitting down on the floor just a tad closer to Kanichi than she had left, leaning against his shoulder. Kanichi noticed this, but he couldn’t shake the familiarity of the bottom corner of that piece of paper. Good thing he was gonna sleep over.

23:32

Taeko laid on Kanichi’s chest, absentmindedly twirling a couple strands of his long hair as he stared at the ceiling above them from the comfort of Taeko’s bed. Taeko suddenly sat up against the wall perpendicular to Kanichi, and he turned to see her staring inquisitively at him.

“Question,” she began. “What is the craziest thing you’ve ever done?”

Kanichi hesitated. “Okay, to preface this, I was super drunk,” he prefaced. “I don’t even remember doing this, my friend Eiichi told me all this stuff.”

Taeko nodded and Kanichi continued. “So, we were at this bar, right? Peak hours, you had teenagers, alcoholics, salarymen, married couples, everybody.

“And all three of us—me, my friend Eiichi, and my other friend Shigeru—had been drinking, of course, and I happened to be indulging myself a lot more than the others, so I was pretty out of it, and I thought it would be funny if…”

Kanichi trailed off, embarrassedly scratching his head. “And?” Taeko asked, clearly stoked to hear what Kanichi was so embarrassed about.

“I stood up in my chair, I pointed right at Shigeru, and yelled as loudly as I could in my best sober voice, ‘He’s got a gun!’”

Taeko burst into laughter. “Everyone got so scared and Eiichi immediately started, ‘He does not have a gun, everyone, my friend is just drunk, I’m so sorry’ and all that shit,” Kanichi recalled, chuckling as well. “I apparently tackled him and broke his nose on the table.”

“Did you guys get arrested or anything?” Taeko asked.

“No, but the bartender apparently threatened to call the cops if we didn’t leave,” Kanichi replied. “Which we obviously did.”

“Wow,” Taeko said, still laughing.

“Yeah,” Kanichi replied. “I don’t drink anymore because of that.”

Kanichi returned the question, and Taeko sighed. “Oh, god. Promise you won’t tell anybody?”

“Who am I gonna tell?” Kanichi replied.

Taeko shrugged. “Alright, so one time, when I was, like, 8 years old, my parents took me to visit my grandma on my dad’s side, who lived in Okinawa.

“Whenever we were there, she showed us her collection of stuff that she had on a little display case in her room, and one of them was a 50-yen banknote from the 1870s.

“Super rare, I think they’re worth thousands or millions of yen now, I don’t even know.”

Kanichi nodded, even more invested in Taeko’s story than she was in his.

“And I don’t know what got into me, but I just wanted that banknote so bad, and I begged and pleaded with my grandma to let me have it, but she kept brushing me off and laughing at me.

“So I left one of the books I brought with me in her room, and I had forgotten until we were about to leave. I went back in there and got the book, and I saw that bill again.”

Kanichi’s eyes widened in anticipation. “You didn’t.”

Taeko smirked and nodded proudly. “I stood on my tippy-toes on top of her bed, opened the display case, snatched the note, stuffed it in my pocket, closed the case, and casually walked out of there.”

“She kept it unlocked?!” Kanichi asked, bewildered at such poor treatment of such a high-value bill. “She had it coming.”

“It gets better,” Taeko continued. “Ten years later, she passed away. I remembered the bill while we were packing to fly over to Okinawa for the funeral, and I made sure to keep it in the pocket of one of the pairs of jeans I packed in my suitcase.

“As soon as we got to the funeral, I made a beeline for my grandfather, bumped into him ‘accidentally,’ and stuck the 50-yen note in his pocket.

“He found it later that day and kept saying it was an act of God,” Taeko said, chuckling.

They both laughed for a while, and Kanichi stared at Taeko in absolute amazement and admiration. Her eyes seemed to glow in the soft moonlight coming in from the window, meeting his in a mesmerizing display of mutual affection.

“So you’re God, huh?”