In the beginning of November, when the winter cold was creeping in, Shimizu was finally discharged from hospital. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure had reached its sixty-third volume then, the end of the fifth part.

Shimizu was moved to a rehabilitation station for training. He was to wear a temporary prosthetic leg and train so that he could reintegrate into society.

“Aren’t prosthetic legs expensive?”

“Not really. I got a Level Four Physical Disability certificate, so I only have to pay thirty percent of the temporary one, and ten percent for the real one. Besides, I got about fifty million yen in alimony.”

[TN: Oooh, healthcare]

Fifty million, in exchange for a leg. I couldn’t decide whether it was worth it or not.

I watched from the window of the training room as Shimizu, wearing a temporary prosthetic leg, gritted his teeth and trained. All his muscles were gone from spending time in hospital, and even simple movements seemed painful for him. Would he ever be able to run again?

During winter break, I caught gossip about Yuzuki. A student of the Milan Conservatory of Music uploaded a picture of him and Yuzuki on Facebook. The background was a European square somewhere, and the man was tall, blond, blue-eyed, and handsome. He seemed to be a promising pianist. I was strangely impressed by the fact that there are such beautiful men who look like CG characters… I felt a pang. If he was going for Yuzuki, there was nothing for me to compete with.

Since Yuzuki divulged nothing, it was only a leak from an incredible source.

Should I message her? I hadn’t heard from her since she departed. 

Long time no see? No, no, not that. That sounded too clingy, it would only make her uncomfortable. I gave up on texting and listened to her new performance.

Her playing was getting more and more exquisite.

I hated myself for not being able to change at all.

 　　　９

“You can’t go on like this,” said Shimizu one day. 

I raised my head from the book I was reading.

It was the middle of February, dusk was falling and night would be upon us soon. Shimizu’s nose was still crooked from the accident, but his eyes were serious all right.

More gravely, he repeated, “Yacchan… you can’t keep doing this forever.”

I was taken by his unusually serious demeanor. He was always smiling, not so serious or solemn like this.

“W-what’s going on?”

“I had an accident in July, lost a leg, and was discharged from the hospital in November. After three months of training, I was able to walk with a temporary prosthetic leg. It was like losing one leg and then growing it back. That much time has passed.”

“A leg grew back…”

I looked at the volumes of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure lined up by my bed. It had been long enough since the accident that we had read Hirohiko Araki’s work over the past twenty years.

“When I go back to school with my new leg, I will return to the club, practice, and go to Koushien Nationals. I’ll do a homerun with this leg. What about you?”

What an amazing aspiration he had.

“I’m… nothing…”

“Yacchan, I think you’re much more than you think you are. Whatever you’ve had your sights on, you’ve always managed to do it, right? But if you set your sights on nothing, you won’t accomplish anything.”

I was at a loss. Shimizu was like the manifestation of the concept of easy going. If he said I should change, then that spoke volumes about my current state.

“But… what do you expect me to do?”

Without delay, he answered. “You can just write a novel?”

“Novel…?” I tilted my head. “Why a novel?”

“No, why aren’t you writing one? You’ve been reading tons of novels, your dad’s a novelist, you have talent.”

“Huh, no, no, no” I shook my head ardently. “It’s one thing to read, and completely another to write one.”

“Listen to me, you have talent.”

“W-why so?”

“Don’t you remember? It was your writing that inspired me to go to the Koushien League.”

Shimizu then jumped into a short tale of what happened in elementary school first year. Shimizu was forced by his parents to join the baseball club, but he had no love for sports. Practice every morning was a torture. Until he heard the essay I read out loud on parents meeting day. It was titled “The White Spider.”

I wrote about Shimizu, it seemed. It was about how he stood in the batter’s box, the pleasant ping of the bat on the ball, and how he would run. The hit ball would soar the blue sky like a cloud, like a free bird. I wrote about the roaring laughter he had at every run, and my admiration for him.

“That was when baseball started to feel fun to me. I can finally let myself enjoy playing it because of you, Yacchan”

Only so slightly, I thought I could remember it. I was praised by the teacher, Shimizu smiled at me, and Mom clapped her hands. “You’re just like your dad,” she had said. I was very happy to hear those words.

It was hard to pinpoint, but maybe we started to get close only after that day.

Tears gathered around my canthus. Shimizu’s eyes were glistening too. It was a happy memory.

“I asked for the paper from you, framed it, and it’s still there in my room until this day.”

“I didn’t know…”

I had only known it then, that his characteristic “Wahahaha!” was from my essay.

“I became who I am today thanks to that paper you wrote for an assignment, you know? My leg might be gone, but that’s not the end for me. You’re an amazing person. Trust me a little and write a novel for me… yeah?”

He smiled. Childish, happy smile, the same smile he had on that day, many years before.

 　　　10

I began to write my novel.

It wasn’t much, I opened WORD on my Windows PC and typed some words. It didn’t turn into a story at all. It was purely a trial-and-error process, as if I were an amnesiac scale insect trying to learn how to walk again from scratch.

Why was it that after swallowing such a vast number of stories, nothing came out? Why was my head so empty? Those were my doubts.

For a whole month, I could not come up with a single story. But once I got over the pain, ideas began to come to me in a great tide. Perhaps it was similar to boiling water, once the first steam rose, the rest follows. I just had to wait and wait until the invisible water heated up.

Only to suffer from how shoddy my writings were. I had been searching for and reading top-notch stories for a few years. With that, I had come to have an eye for literacy. The eyes that had mercilessly criticized novels turned to my own. The result was far from pleasant. When you curse something, it usually comes back at you twofold. Still, I trusted Shimizu and forged ahead. 

I had only known then that writing must be written with boy and soul on the line. I often throw up from how bad my story was, either that or excessive concentration. 

What the hell was wrong with my body?

It was certainly idiotic. What was the point of an existence of a creature who wrote and vomited at their own writing? Was there anything more idiotic in this universe?

In April, I threw away writing. Then it occurred to me that I should go to Seikou Academy.

It was Saturday, 7:30. I took a train from Koriyama Station, got off at Fukushima Station, then continued to Ate Station. It took about an hour and a half. By 9:00, I arrived at Seikou Academy.

I sneaked a peek at the field and found that the baseball team had already started practicing. I looked for Shimizu. He was there, but away from the group, silently stretching his body in the corner of the field. His movements still felt strange. His thin prosthetic leg looked disproportionate with right flesh leg.

Shimizu swung his bat. The center weight shifted and his form got wrong. I could see that he was trying to correct it somehow. He gritted his teeth. His face was drenched with sweat, so much that he could have been caught in a rainstorm.

He was serious. He really was going to the Koushien National League. Thinking of that, I felt my heart warming up. This was just like him.

No, this was not the time for this, I chided myself. Shimizu lost his leg, and that didn’t stop him from aiming the Koushien. 

What right do I have to give up now?

And then I started writing my lousy novel again.

 　　　11

In May, I finished my first novel.

I was so happy when I finished it, no matter how good or bad it was, I was soaring in my room by myself. I felt that it was a masterpiece. What should I do with it—

After much deliberation, I decided to publish it to the community of harsh critics on the Internet.

The result was—unforeseen, in many ways. [I don’t get it], was what most comments said. The flow of the story was unclear, readers can’t get emotionally involved with the story. Some parts were masterfully written, but some were comically ridiculous, and so on.

Like Yuzuki said, perhaps my sensibilities and how I view the world was indeed different from normal people. The way I read and write novels was out of sync with others. And if this was the case, no one will read my novels, and nothing will be conveyed to them…

Feeling so frustrated, I wrapped myself in my futon that day. Then I realized the difference between Yuzuki and myself. Her performance reached hundreds of millions of people’s hearts. My novel, however, could not reach even a single person.

When I woke up, my head ached as if it was splitting open. I slept for more than twenty hours.

I crawled out from under the covers and started watching movies. I watched a series of masterpieces. I carefully read people’s comments and analyze what made it good. How did normal people watch movies? What have they seen in them? What they have not? How do they feel about them?  I learned all of these things. It was like reading a manual to being an ordinary person. It was pathetic, a defective human learning how to be normal.

But I was also praying. People find no interest in a cannon. Like how experts before me had done, wrap it in a bouquet of flowers and show it to the world. I had spent my life picking flowers, it was time to start using them.