Chapter 10: 7

Three years ago 2

He was isolated.

It may have been because he had deserted his club activities. After all, that was probably the path he should have taken since he was inferior to others in both strength and stature.
Originally, sports were very popular at the school. He chose to join a prestigious baseball team known for its strict rules and practices. At the time, he had a strong will to change his body and mind.
Practice was as tough as they made it out to be. And boring, too. No one was allowed to even touch the ball properly. For hours they had to be on their knees and shouting. Under the midsummer sun, they were forced to run laps and laps in circles on the field until their bodies melted like butter.

It was not only the physical labor that was hard on him, but he also had to endure the bullying of the older members of the club and their treatment of him like a servant. Saturdays, Sundays, and summer and winter vacations were all taken up by practice matches. Within a year, more than half of the club members had stopped coming.
If only he had done the same. It would have been a simple case of one baseball pickup boy disappearing, and no one would end up getting pissed off, hurt, or resentful.　

But he gained a lot, too. Although once thin, he no longer caught even a single cold. He could run 100 meters in 13 seconds and run laps around the field without feeling much fatigue. His body was not robust, but it was in good shape.

And his friends. They were all the elite who had overcome the strict rules and practices. They did everything together. They would return home together late at night, dragging their tired bodies along with them. They often played cards on the bus on the way to the practice games. At training camp, even though they had practice early in the morning, they stayed up until late at night talking about girls they liked or making up stupid innuendos. They smoked cigarettes in the club room, unsettled by the eyes of those around them. Even on Obon and New Year’s vacations, the only time they had off, they ended up gathering on the field, setting off fireworks, and having a potluck dinner at the coach’s house. If he tried to remember everything, the list of memories would be endless.
Ishibashi, the captain, was a strong-shouldered catcher who threw the ball like an arrow to second base. He was overconfident and snooty, but he was still the No. 4 hitter in everyone’s eyes. He made people dream about him in games again and again. He was a superhero who would come in to save the day when they were behind by several runs and turn the game on its head with a hard-hitting single.
The pitcher Miyashita’s heart was full of hair. No matter what sort of predicament awaited him, he never ceased to smile, as if he were a little out of it. A surprisingly gluttonous eater, he would empty dishes such as hot pots and sashimi by the boatload so quickly at training camps that no one wanted to sit with him. His buttocks were so big that they often ripped around the buttocks of his uniform when he pitched, causing everyone to laugh.

Tezuka, a left fielder, was also the school’s student council president. He was always in the top ten of his class in all the tests, even though he had no time to study because he spent every day practicing. He was a bit of a nuisance to those of them who had been distracted from their studies by their club activities. But he was a lifesaver for everyone. He was a man of integrity, gently admonishing those who were unnecessarily bullying junior students, and always acting as an intermediary when there was a dispute. Everyone loved him, especially his juniors. A man who was always there to help out. The boy was no exception. He wanted to be like him someday.

There were a lot of interesting people there, and among them, he was No. 8 on right field. He used to go around warming the bench in the reserve. There were more than fifty of them. He was able to get a spot in the starting lineup, though not always. For someone like him, who was supposedly not very good at sports, this was an unbelievable accomplishment.

But it didn’t matter. When a game was on the line, even if he was sitting on the bench, he would feel as if he were standing in the batter’s box or holding the glove in his hand. Whenever someone got a hit or made a miraculous fine play, he would be surprised and excited as if it were his own. Their pain was his pain, and his joy was their joy.
They were like a single unit, and when he saw members of the same club fighting with each other, even if he didn’t really know them, it made him very sad.

So when one of the members of the club stopped coming to practice and became a ghost, or changed to another club, he felt pain as if he had lost a part of his body. For some reason, it made him angry, and whenever he encountered them on campus, he would glare at them or ignore them. Traitors. Spiteful dropouts. So he understood their anger well. After two years of fighting together and even winning a regular spot, in the end, he irresponsibly threw them out.
There was no particular reason why he left. Perhaps it was because he felt constricted by the strong sense of togetherness. Although they were all friends, they were not always bound by warm friendships.

When it came to vying for a regular spot, the competition could turn into an insidious fight. If it was discovered that someone drank water during practice, they would say he’d been smoking earlier or something, and hung up like a witch hunt.

If their physical abilities were inferior, they would be the laughingstock of the juniors. Some of the new players who had just joined the club were also very skilled Little League players, so no one could let their guard down. That is why everyone was so absorbed in the game. After a hard day of practice that seemed to evaporate all the water in their bodies, the boys went home and continued to swing. They would swing until they got blood blisters on their hands. They drank protein and begged their parents for gloves and cleats that cost tens of thousands of yen. A sense of urgency, as if they were being rushed, was always falling on them.

On the same day, his grandfather, who lived in Ureshino, Kyushu, died suddenly of heart failure. He went to his parents who were getting ready to return home in a flurry.
“I’m not coming.”
Kyushu. If it’s a funeral, you have to take at least three days off. Three days! The thought that the position that he had built up might be threatened while he was absent was unbearable, no matter how close the funeral might be to him.
He was no exception to the rule, whether as a regular or a reserve warming the bench. For example, when it came to official games, only 15 players could wear a number and sit on the bench. The rest of the time, he would be cheering from the stands along with many of his juniors. It was unbearable. What was the point of working so hard if it would end up like that?
“Can’t I stay home?”
“Well…”
“We have practice today.”
The two looked at each other.

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“What do you think?”
“We’ll be away for at least… three days. Is it really alright?”
“It’ll be fine.”
“You’re right. This is a critical time.”
“Will it be okay for you to spend three nights alone though?”
While he had suggested it himself, the more he looked at their faces, the more frustrated he became. Both of them were good-natured, and sometimes they would say things to their son that made no sense to him because they were overly concerned from his view.

This is where they should have lamented over his coldness, or been angry with him for his selfishness. His natural innocence began to stir, and he turned to the two people who were diligently preparing for the event.
“I’ll come after all.”
In the past, they used to go to Ureshino several times a year. His grandfather and grandmother always welcomed everyone with open arms. Country-style houses and the aroma of Japanese tea. In his surprisingly frugal hands, grandfather always had a lot of strawberries, either picked from the fields or given to him by greenhouse farmers in the winter.

Every time he visited, he would give his allowance in a small New Year’s gift bag. He would make the boy stand in front of a thick, shiny black pillar and measure his growing height with a tape measure, smiling with a scowl on his face. But he liked his grandfather. He hadn’t visited him once since he was in junior high school.
On the plane, on the train, and when they arrived at his grandfather’s house with the smoke from the incense sticks, all he could think about was baseball. But when he saw his grandfather’s face in the coffin, he still cried.
His relatives and cousins, whom he hadn’t seen in a long time, rolled their eyes at him. Three years ago, he had measured his height on a pillar, and it was only about the same as his chest today.
He played with his cousins in his spare time. In his grandfather’s house, there were piles of soccer balls, badminton and baseball equipment in the shed for when his sons and daughters would get together. Everything was child-sized, too small for them, but enough for a good time. And then there were the meals with so many people. It had been a long time since he and his family had eaten a meal together, even though it wasn’t at home. Both parents worked, and all three of them came home at different times.

Although he felt bad for his dead grandfather, it was a lot of fun. He was so happy that he forgot about his daily routine. On the morning of the third day, his father told him that the funeral was over, and the relatives who had gathered there were about to return to their respective homes.

“How about a trip to the hot spring?”
His father had taken a week’s vacation because of the death of his biological father. Mother did the same.
“The three of us haven’t been here as a family for a long time, have we? It’s not every day you get to come to Kyushu.”
Are you kidding me? Let’s hurry up and go home!* or so he might have shouted sharply before he came here. But he could not casually refuse a request from his father, who had just lost his own father, and he could not help but understand his sentimental mood. It was only natural that he would want to take a little tour of his hometown. He nodded his head. His parents looked at each other in surprise.
Taking grandfather’s Bluebird, they drove to Beppu, where they spent the night. The next day, they flipped west to Sasebo, where his father used to hang out till he went to high school, and ate pizza at a restaurant that many U.S. soldiers used to frequent. Then they returned to Ureshino and stayed overnight at a hot spring hotel.　It was fun to ride in the microbus that the baseball team always rented and play card games, but there was something nice about riding in a sedan car and gazing out the window at the scenery.

As it turned out, he had missed a whole week of school. The next week he came back to school full of anxiety, but nothing special had changed, except that he was having trouble keeping up with his classes, which had progressed slightly, and he didn’t find himself out of place in the club practices. As usual, the right field position was waiting for him, and there he took his knocks and, in turn, took hitting practice against the pitching machine.
It was rather him who had changed. The feeling of being rushed had disappeared. He no longer attended morning training sessions as he used to. Instead, he would take Saturdays and Sundays off for any reason he could think of.
In his spare time, he used his pocket money he had saved up to travel. It didn’t matter where he went. Utsunomiya, Maebashi. Nothing was happening wherever he went, but he was completely captivated by the scenery he could see from the train.
Naturally, his friends gradually began to look at him with cold eyes. For them, there was nothing more annoying than people who did not practice diligently. The same thing went for him. Everyone was one body. Whenever they saw him being negligent, they probably felt as if they were looking at a wound that was festering. The coach also called him in.
“What’s wrong?”
Coach must have thought that there was a serious reason behind the situation. He wasn’t about to say that there was nothing, so he asked him, leaning forward and kneeling even closer to him as he kept his mouth shut. He asked questions about his family’s financial situation and even about his friendships with delinquents, naming their names. He had no answer. The parents of the club members asked the same questions. Even though they weren’t teachers, they put on big faces as if they were the coach, which he didn’t really appreciate. Soon he couldn’t even keep a straight face anymore.

All the more so, he was losing his place in the world. Even from his own people, he was told “Come to practice properly,” and was often cautioned while being hit on the head with a glove. The number of days he took off without permission increased even more.　
On those days, jogging and muscle training were the main part of the practice, since it was wintertime. While jogging, he felt thirsty. It was not as overwhelming as it had been in the summer, when he would feel like he was going to die, but he stopped and drank water from the water tap in the school building as if he were devouring it.　Shimazu watched. He ran to the baseball field as if he had just beheaded by an oni and howled like he was about to sell the newest newspaper.

When he returned, his friends gathered on the field and greeted him with looks as though he were a puddle of puke or a piece of shit. Probably for the rest of his life, he would never forget those eyes.

According to the school rules, one had to belong to a club. There were many clubs in the humanities, however, that existed only in name and were not actually active. In effect, he was effectively resigning from the club. The coach didn’t say anything more. He did not even raise his eyebrows as usual. He asked him why, but he answered that it was because he was taking an entrance examination. He was still vexed, but said nothing more.
All that filled his heart after was regret. He should have prepared a better answer. Even if it was just to get through the situation, he wondered how his friends would have felt if they heard he was ‘studying for the entrance exam’, when they were all sacrificing and devoting themselves to something.
During that same period of time, Seiichi Ogata, a classmate of his, died.
The school was in an uproar from top to bottom. Cause of death was suicide by hanging. At the time, he thought it was a suicide caused by bullying. A group of guys known for being rowdy bullies were tormenting him as if they couldn’t leave his androgynous beauty alone.
The girls would hide his clothes and tease him by writing on the blackboard in round letters, calling him a homo and whatnot.

Later it was announced by both the school and the police that his suicide had nothing to do with bullying.
This was partly because there was no suicide note, and partly because the bullying had already stopped more than a month before his suicide, if not before.
In the school assembly, despite the weeping principal, he stood there with an inexplicable feeling in his chest. It was two weeks ago that he saw Ogata crying at the water fountain.　He had no idea what made him do it. He was not a friend of Ogata’s, nor was he a friend of his.
Even so, the police interview was apparently quite severe in its own way. Some of the students who bullied Ogata were so overcome with fatigue and shock that they even took days off from school.

At the funeral held at his home, while watching a female student with tears streaming down her face, he could only think to himself that he would probably be the one to take his spot. Then he looked for her.
Kanako Fujishima fixed her light-colored eyes on the raised portrait of the deceased. She was holding her hands together with a nonchalant look on her face. To him, it seemed the saddest gesture of anyone there, and a fitting way to mourn him.
He visited his grave several times with incense. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was to atone for not being able to save him.
Or rather, he simply didn’t want to forget him.
Whenever he visited, the area around his grave was always neatly cleaned. Most of the weeds had been pulled and the ground had been swept with a broom. There was always a supply of fruit and juice. Some days there was even incense smoke in the air. He understood. He knew it was her handiwork. He envied him a little for getting that out of her.
As for him, his path was exactly as he had expected. Everyone suddenly became distant and stopped talking to him. That alone wounded him terribly.

In third year, when the aftermath of Ogata’s death had subsided, he was the one who had to step up to plate.

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