Love’s Trap

Many years later, when Iwasaki Kazuto had quite naturally become the top figure in Japanese diplomacy and Ayanokoji Mirai had, as a matter of course, become that top figure’s wife, Mirai shared her youthful romantic experience with their daughter like this: “So, you see, girls who are too clever, too outstanding, too independent, and too strong-willed can never become shōjo manga heroines. Because, my dear, foolish men are everywhere in this world, while good men with taste like your father are far too rare.” At the breakfast table, Iwasaki Kazuto, who had been reading the newspaper, merely set it down and raised one brow with elegant precision. “Although I’m very pleased by your praise, I am rather curious where your confidence in being clever comes from.”

Iwasaki Kazuto’s lifelong insistence that Mirai was a fool did, in fact, have some history behind it.

In his view, if Mirai had not been a fool, she would never have stepped, baffled and obedient, into the trap he had arranged for her. Nor would she have allowed him, one step at a time, to transform her from an ordinary junior schoolmate into his private secretary, and then from private secretary into wife.

Mirai had always subjectively believed that the main reason Iwasaki chose her out of thousands upon thousands of candidates was that one afternoon she had pinned him to the floor and cried all over him.

Therefore, she was profoundly wrong. Iwasaki’s answer was this: “A girl’s tears are indeed beautiful, and later I certainly did come to think your tears were especially beautiful. But please. That afternoon I didn’t see your tears at all. When I pushed you off me, all I saw was drool on my clothes.”

Mirai would probably never know when Iwasaki Kazuto had begun to like her, and most likely she would never know why. Although she had a sensitivity to color beyond ordinary people, in matters requiring large amounts of emotional intelligence, Mirai was always so slow that one wanted to seize her by the neck and shake her.

The fated second that bewitched Iwasaki for life did not occur at their stupid-beyond-stupid first meeting in the municipal pool. Nor did it occur later on the stage of the Meikō auditorium, in that grand incident that nearly caused casualties.

It happened earlier than the auditorium incident.

The girl Iwasaki Kazuto fell in love with had the most earnest and beautiful profile in the world when she painted seriously. That profile was enough to make the stubborn blood he had inherited from his fathers boil completely.

It was an evening when hydrangeas had bloomed to the edge of exhaustion. Vast banks of sunset cloud surged and rolled across the sky like golden wheat waves. Mirai, wearing a white shirt and plaid shorts, stood with her left hand in her pocket and charcoal in her right. She half narrowed her eyes, skillfully measuring the proportions of the strangely shaped old tree across the lake behind the gymnasium. The humid evening wind wandered wetly over the lake, stirring rings of glittering ripples; light and shadow chased each other, changing from one instant to the next. Tokyo in midsummer, Iwasaki thought, was not merely a beautiful scene. And yet behind the layers of hydrangeas stained violet by the sun, the little piece of charcoal in Mirai’s hand, less than an inch long, was something more beautiful than beauty.

And so Iwasaki Kazuto-kun, who in eighteen years had never looked straight at that lovely creature called a girl, fell for her, alive and entire.

Perhaps that evening, too, was a trap. The trap’s name was destiny.

The old-auditorium incident merely heightened that destiny.

In reality, however, even after such an unbelievably intimate contact with Iwasaki, our thick-nerved Miss Mirai still did not know that the boy fortunate enough to have been crushed by her twice was the legendary eldest son of the Iwasaki family.

Not until she, who had been perfectly fine in the publicity department, was suddenly transferred to the student council president’s office to serve as the president’s secretary.

Sakurai Taichirō, the elder brother of Vice President Sakurai Sayuri, tried to comfort Mirai in this way: “Although painting is your specialty, and work in the publicity department suits you better, don’t you find it painful to stay every day in the clubroom with Minister Morisawa, who dumped you, and his current girlfriend? Besides, President Iwasaki only appears at school two or three times a month at most, and spends even less time in the president’s office—maybe once every two or three months. Compared with that, whether for your fragile body or your wounded heart, the job of president’s secretary should be easier, shouldn’t it?”

Under the emotionally rich persuasion of Taichirō-kun, a perennial first-prize winner in essay contests, Mirai only grew angrier. With great firmness, she refused on the spot: “My body is not fragile, and my heart is not wounded. In the clubroom, as long as I treat Kaoru and his girlfriend as straw and filter them out, my mood is very cheerful. So I do not wish to accept your kindness.”

Taichirō stared at her for a long time. Finally, hating iron for not turning into steel, he said, “Then go explain it to the president yourself. He personally appointed you, after all.”

As for how Mirai went dejectedly to the president’s office afterward, how she was shocked to discover that this Iwasaki Kazuto was that Iwasaki Kazuto, and how she then fought with unyielding spirit for her unclear future with tremendous hardship and determination—all of that no longer needs discussion. None of it matters. Only the result matters. The result was that Mirai finally bowed in compromise to invisible destiny and became Iwasaki Kazuto’s secretary.

The news spread across all of Meikō almost overnight and even showed signs of reaching Meichū. For those two days, the post with the highest clicks and replies on the Meikō campus BBS was titled “Dissecting Ayanokoji Mirai.” Despite the bloody title, it had nothing whatsoever to do with scalpels, anesthetic, or operating lights. The original poster’s Japanese literature was simply not very good; what he had meant to express was “analyzing,” more or less.

The mysterious student council president finally having a housekeeper at his side shocked Meikō’s many students much as if a messenger-believer had finally appeared beside God to connect Him with the ordinary people of Earth. Strangely, this major event, which clearly had potential to develop into romantic gossip, remained from beginning to end chastely within the range of academic gossip, showing no tendency at all to approach the pink zone. Mirai’s clever cousin Ayanokoji Mari analyzed it this way: “Because no one can imagine God dating His messenger. That’s the crux.”

The only sensitive one was Morisawa Kaoru.

No matter what kind of boy he is, somewhere in the subconscious there is always a stubborn and intense possessiveness—so long as the thing in question is something he once possessed, or currently possesses.

The incident occurred on the third day after Mirai was transferred to serve as the president’s secretary. Iwasaki Kazuto personally went to the publicity department to collect her club-transfer form. In truth, the so-called club-transfer form had no meaning whatsoever; it was pure formalism invented by the student club federation. Unfortunately, the principal thought the thing was quite good and highly worth promoting. This invisibly created a face-to-face opportunity between Iwasaki Kazuto and Morisawa Kaoru, two people whose lives could otherwise have had no intersection at all. Of course, the awkwardness exists only from our point of view. The two parties themselves had no such awareness.

Rarely enough, there was a thunderstorm that day. Because every corner of Tokyo had been dry for far too long that summer, the rain, which looked as if someone had simply taken a basin and poured it down from the sky, seemed especially precious. To commemorate its preciousness, Mirai even composed a poem: “From afar it is rain; up close it is rain. Look left, and it is rain; look right, and still it is rain. Ah, what a thunderstorm!”

Of course, that comes later.

At the time, the atmosphere in the publicity department clubroom was, truly, subtle—subtle, subtle beyond measure. The primroses by the window had been watered by the rain until their leaves shone green. Morisawa Kaoru-kun, whose face usually carried an open, easy smile, now looked cold as anything. “I don’t really understand why you want to transfer Mirai over to be your secretary. To be honest, her personality is slow and sloppy. I don’t think she’s suited at all for the delicate work of a secretary. So I suggest you transfer her back.”

Iwasaki Kazuto, in a black shirt and beige trousers, appeared far more composed. “The reason I went to such lengths to bring her to my side is, of course”—he adjusted his glasses unhurriedly—“that I like her.”

That was the sentence Iwasaki Kazuto would almost never say to Mirai’s face in his entire life.

Yet at that moment he said it plainly, steadily, and without changing expression. His trap had only just been laid, and the creature he meant to catch was still hesitating at the edge of the disguised pit, poking her head in and peering about.

Rain struck the window glass with hard knocks, then dripped from the cement sill with exact efficiency, cutting open the soil and releasing great swathes of heat and anxiety that had long lain hidden.

Morisawa braced his right hand against his forehead, as if completely unable to understand Iwasaki’s calm declaration. “You mean…”

“The person who will become my wife in the future must be serious and meticulous about work, no matter how slow and sloppy she may be in ordinary life. Since Mirai does not yet possess that quality, I will cultivate it for her. Is there a problem?”

“W-wife?”

Iwasaki Kazuto, finding this somewhat amusing, removed his glasses and placed one hand on the solid wooden desk in front of Morisawa. The white, gentle light of the fluorescent lamp fell quietly across his profile. “Yes. Wife. I must say, although that fellow Mirai is a fool, you, having given her up, do not appear to be especially clever either. But as a rival in love, I am sincerely pleased by your choice.”

At the time, Morisawa merely thought Iwasaki was joking. After all, no matter how rational and composed he was, Iwasaki Kazuto was only eighteen then. For most people, eighteen is not an age at which promises can be made lightly. Yet four years later, Ayanokoji Mirai truly became Iwasaki Kazuto’s wife.

The news media later evaluated their wedding like this: it was nothing short of a miracle.

It was indeed a miracle.

A miracle created single-handedly by Iwasaki Kazuto.

If you want to make decisions beyond your age, you must possess abilities beyond your age.

Mirai, however, was far too difficult to reform. Perhaps all boys and girls with an artistic temperament simply lack the cells for precision and discipline. The direct consequence was that the frequency with which Iwasaki bestowed upon Mirai his withering side-eye increased day by day.

“If you find me that unpleasant, then change secretaries,” Mirai would complain indignantly at first. Later, however, she slowly grew used to it and gradually numb.

Perhaps Mirai herself did not realize that getting used to Iwasaki’s side-eye meant, in full, that she had also become quite used to having a fellow surnamed Iwasaki and named Kazuto wandering before her eyes every day after school.

Affection begins with habit.

Love begins with affection.

The days should have continued in just such a plain, ordinary way—or muddled along in that fashion. In fact, Mirai had already been Iwasaki Kazuto’s secretary in that plain, ordinary manner for more than half a year.

The source of the story’s next turn was Iwasaki Kazuto’s University of Tokyo entrance examination.

If this were an inspirational youth novel, perhaps Iwasaki would have been in a car accident on his way to the exam, become paralyzed from the waist down, and then, though broken in body, remained firm in spirit; after a year of recuperation, he would triumphantly take first place the following year. If this were a detective novel, perhaps Iwasaki, on his way to the exam, would have accidentally discovered a corpse, then fully employed his intelligence to help the police investigate from every angle and solve the case in one stroke. But unfortunately, this is neither an inspirational novel nor a detective novel. It is a school romance for girls. Therefore the prop appearing in this event could not possibly be a wheelchair, nor could it be a corpse.

It had to be something pinker, something more beautiful—yes, a love letter.

A love letter written to Iwasaki Kazuto.

Long ago, when Mirai had first taken over the job of student council president’s secretary, she had once raised this question: “Tell me, why is it that my boss and my former boss are both famous figures at Meikō, yet absolutely no one writes love letters to him?”