The Banana Peel of Destiny

The summer Ayanokoji Mirai turned seventeen, Tokyo was said to have reached its hottest temperatures in nearly a century.

In the *Kojiki*, when it described the island nation of Japan in the age of Queen Suiko and the legendary realm of Yamatai, there had once been a similar kind of notation, phrased in four very elegant Chinese characters: “strange signs in heaven.” Since Mirai’s command of kanji was not especially good, she had never quite understood what ambiguous omen lay behind those simple four characters. Thus, during that summer—apart from noticing that the household bills for water, electricity, and gas had suddenly risen—our slow-witted Miss Ayanokoji Mirai had no idea that her fate, along with the violently climbing utility meter at home, was being roasted by the perverse heat until it twisted out of shape and veered completely off its appointed track.

Many years later, after Mirai had miraculously become the wife of the most powerful man in Japanese diplomacy, she would sometimes wonder, with a seriousness that made no sense even to her, what her life might have become if, in that summer when she was seventeen, she had not gone to the municipal swimming pool and had not met that fellow Iwasaki Kazuto. Yet for a long time, such thoughts never yielded any concrete answer. Iwasaki Kazuto’s view was this: to imagine that something which had already happened had, in fact, never happened required considerable imagination. Unfortunately, Ayanokoji Mirai, that fool, possessed every kind of ability except imagination.

By then, of course, Ayanokoji Mirai was no longer called Ayanokoji Mirai. She was called Iwasaki Mirai.

And so, let us return to the summer when she was seventeen.

In that miraculous season, hot enough to make a person want to drag the sun down from the sky and strangle it, Tokyo resembled a dried eggplant wrung of every last drop of moisture. Dust rolled desperately in the heat waves thrown up by car exhaust. Although huge shadows from countless anonymous buildings lay everywhere, one could still feel the fierce heat rising from the ground as if summer had taken on the visible body of steam. Mirai therefore spent exactly fifteen hundred yen at a familiar hair salon and had her waist-length hair cut cleanly to her ears. She also went to a department store and bought herself a very proper-looking cute navy-blue swimsuit with a bow, asked her mother to get her a monthly pass for the municipal pool, and every afternoon after school, she happily hugged her swim ring and went swimming.

Her so-called swimming, to be precise, consisted of clutching the swim ring and soaking in the cool water.

Just as fairy tales nurtured by European culture, however tragic their beginnings, often cannot escape a vulgar happy ending, romances born from Asian culture, however sorrowfully inventive their conclusions, often cannot escape a melodramatic beginning. Mirai and Iwasaki Kazuto’s first meeting could not be called extremely melodramatic, but it came quite close.

For this, all credit belonged to a fresh yellow banana peel lying spread-eagled at the edge of the deep end, its inner flesh not yet fully oxidized.

Under ordinary circumstances, banana peels and similarly large pieces of trash should never appear inside a swimming pool, outside a swimming pool, near a swimming pool, or in any other pool-adjacent location during opening hours. Even if, driven by some irresistible force, such an object defied common sense and appeared there anyway, it would still be quite difficult for any ordinary person to step on it. Therefore, when our properly behaved Miss Ayanokoji Mirai, wandering along the deep end, stepped directly on that quietly waiting banana peel and—before her nervous system had time to report the information to her brain—fell heavily onto Iwasaki Kazuto, who was resting against the wall of the pool, one had to admit that the gods had arranged it.

Amid wave after wave of piercing shrieks from the girls in the shallow end, after a flurry of panic, Mirai finally lived up to expectations and successfully clung, by pure survival instinct, to something cold that seemed relatively stable. She vaguely felt that this was probably a person, but her taut nerves at the limit of fear had deprived her skin of even the most basic sensation. So when she calmed down, freed herself from the water streaming over her face, and opened her eyes again, it was perfectly natural that she would be startled half to death by the face of an unfamiliar boy appearing directly in front of her nose.

Although that face really was, truly, extremely handsome.

Handsome. Still wrapped around Iwasaki Kazuto like an octopus, Mirai assessed his looks with great academic seriousness and awarded him ninety-five points. If only he would smile, it would be perfect.

It is worth mentioning that Mirai had studied oil painting since the age of three, had been taught from childhood by the celebrated painter Yūki Hiro, and was considered a talented future artist. She almost never used the word “handsome” to judge boys.

“You can say a boy is good-looking, or cool, or even pretty. That’s fine, because adjectives like those only describe one aspect of his appearance. Boys who are outstanding, even perfect, in one particular aspect are entirely possible; there are quite a lot of them, in fact. But you have to be cautious with the word handsome. Handsomeness is both concrete and abstract. It is the equal union of appearance and temperament. It is a physiological visual response, and even more than that, a psychological response of feeling.” This was the aesthetic theory of male beauty that Mirai had once proclaimed to her cousin, Ayanokoji Mari.

Iwasaki Kazuto raised his right hand and rubbed his thoroughly soaked, still-dripping medium-length hair. Silently, he watched for a while as Mirai clung to him, looking profound while stroking her chin back and forth with her thumb and forefinger. “What is that expression supposed to mean?”

Mirai lifted her head slightly, just enough to bring her gaze level with his. “Tell me, are you short of money lately? If you are, you might consider being my nude model.”

Iwasaki was stunned for perhaps three seconds. Then his face settled into a textbook sneer. “Sorry. I’m not interested in elementary-school girls like you.”

“Eh?”

Thus began the first meeting between Ayanokoji Mirai and Iwasaki Kazuto, so disastrous it could hardly have been worse. As the first intersection of their lives, it was certainly a stroke laid down with thick ink.

Yet Mirai’s nerves were still remarkably broad then, and she did not nurse hatred toward Iwasaki because of it. Even after he unceremoniously threw her back into the pool, she merely floundered out of the water and, with immense generosity and composure, raised a symbolic middle finger in his direction. The gesture appeared crude and furious, but in reality, less than half an hour later, she had completely forgotten this major incident—one entirely worthy of a diary entry.

Seventeen is, after all, an age easily moved to impulse and just as easily moved to forgetting.