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There is a story here, and these are its bare bones:
It all starts with a Girl, who is most often the only daughter of a prominent family, and therefore also heiress to the family group of companies, which for purposes of convenience can be termed Group A. As is conventional for only daughters of prominent families, especially those with sizeable inheritances to their names, the Girl is promised in marriage to a particular Man in a Suit, the head of a partner corporation—someone whose support is invaluable to Group A, and someone who, the Girl is assured, can be trusted to safeguard its interests. The Man in a Suit is probably much closer in age to the Girl’s Father than to the Girl herself, though the company executives who orchestrate the match play this off as valuable knowledge and experience, and the Girl is assured that his guidance will serve her well as she prepares to assume her own position at the helm of Group A, sometime in the distant future.
For the meantime, the Girl studies at the best high school in the district (run by Group A, of course). She makes top grades, joins a varsity team—something refined, like fencing. By her senior year, she sits as student council president. She is regarded with respect and admiration by everyone she meets; it must be noted, however, that by virtue of her position, she has very few friends.
She goes out to dinner with the Man in a Suit once every few months, at expensive restaurants or hotels, but makes little contact with him otherwise. The actual wedding will not take place for many years. Not until after the Girl graduates, at least. If the fortunes of Group A are good, and if the Father, who currently stands at the helm, stays in good health, she may even be allowed to attend university. This arrangement suits everyone well enough—the Girl, the Man, the small army of buttoned-up assistants representing both parties.
When Mitsuru meets her fiancé for the first time it’s in the board room at the company headquarters. Her father sits at the head of the long conference table, she at his right hand. Her school uniform is clean, and the maids have pressed and starched it even more thoroughly than usual for the occasion, but sitting walled in by all these men seems to shrink her—senior executives all, all middle-aged and dressed in dark suits, with parted hair and flinty eyes and sharply angled jawlines.
Still, Mitsuru sits up straight, knees together, a proper lady. She’ll sit at the head of this table one day. This is what her father seems to be driving at when he says that his wish is for his daughter to remain his legal heir, that he expects her to assume leadership of the company regardless of the circumstances of her marriage, as soon as she is of age and adequately prepared to do so. This is to be a partnership, he says, driven by mutual support.
One of the men at the table is the man she’s to marry. It’s probably the one who talks the most—the one who bubbles over with agreements and praise and promises of loyalty, the one who lets fly words like guidance and mentorship and mutually beneficial. He’s also the only one who smiles, for the duration of this meeting. Mitsuru notices he wrings his hands a lot when he speaks.
Her father’s hands, by contrast, remain in one position, his elbows propped on the table in front of him, fingers steepled. His face is so still it appears carved from marble, flat and grave and virtually impossible to read, though at times he nods to show he’s listening.
When asked if he is amenable to the match, he replies, “My daughter will speak for herself. I trust her to handle her own affairs.”
She knows she’s allowed to say no—theoretically. Her father, at least, isn’t lying to her. But all the eyes in the room have snapped to Mitsuru, and the only response there is is to lift her chin. Her own fingers steeple under the table, a pale, shaking imitation.
“I accept this proposal,” she says, and it’s a small mercy that at least her voice doesn’t shake. Her eyes are trained on the talkative man, his smile a gleaming oil slick spreading toward her from the far side of the room. “And I thank you for the honor of your guidance.”
Somewhere inside this well-oiled machine, as if the universe has decided to throw a wrench into the works, there is also a Boy. The Boy is always the same age as the Girl, always in the same grade level as her at school. Sometimes they are even classmates, though in most versions of the story this is where the similarities end.
If the Girl’s family is wealthy and distinguished, the Boy’s is what the company executives would describe as “below her station.” He may not even have one—at least not in the born-into, flesh-and-blood sense of the word—may have spent his childhood in an orphanage, may have grown up in a foster home since he was ten, may have gotten into the same school as her on a strange mix of charity and sheer dumb luck. Such circumstances are usually worked into the story to heighten the drama and give rise to tension.
If the girl is polite, decorous, carries herself with a grace and a dignity beyond her years, the boy is rough around the edges, standoffish, aloof. Maybe there’s something about him that draws the eye especially among the other girls in the school—a handsome face, a tall, wiry frame—but he barely ever talks to them, even when they offer him their lunches, or slip notes into his shoe locker. Indeed, he seems to have a hard time noticing that they exist at all. (Another similarity, though, offhand: for one reason or another, the Boy too has very few friends.)
The metaphorical chasm of difference between them is meant to create irony. Given these variables, no logical course would bring the Boy and the Girl to each other. It just doesn’t calculate. The equation doesn’t balance.
Mitsuru’s dealings with Akihiko are much less formal, and most of the time also much less smooth. Their first meeting, after all, began with her cornering him in a school hallway after a boxing match, ended with her presenting him with something that looked dangerously like a gun not five minutes later, and was punctuated all throughout with suspicious glances and noncommittal grunts from him; in retrospect, she wonders if this was meant to foreshadow the general narrative arc of their relationship.
The first time Mitsuru mentions her fiancé, for instance, Akihiko stares at her so uncomprehendingly it’s as if she’s suddenly started speaking in tongues. They’ve just moved into the dorm, and while he grunts and huffs and refuses to answer any of her perfunctory getting-to-know-you questions—about his adoptive parents, his childhood, his boxing career—he absolutely must know where it is she’s going this evening, all dolled up in a dress and satin shoes and makeup so thick it sits like a second face on top of her real face. He plants his feet in the doorway, glowering down at her as if to drive the point home that he won’t move until she answers.
“Aren’t you sixteen?” he asks. She replies crisply that she fails to see what that has to do with anything. He shoots back that he doesn’t get how she can be thinking about marriage when most people their age are too busy breaking their brains over basic algebra.
“There’s nothing to think about,” she says. “It’s a business arrangement. I agreed to the match because it seemed advantageous for all parties.”
“Ah.” He gives her an odd look, head cocked, face angled down toward hers. She stares right back up at him, unflinching, but it’s still a surprise when he flicks his eyes away first, redirecting them to the tips of her sparkly shoes. “Does that make you happy?”
To her it’s a rhetorical question. Her happiness has nothing to do with it, and she tells him so. She sounds a little shrill, even to herself, but it’s his fault for trying her patience. These things should be self-evident, and her appointment for the evening is set for half an hour from now.
“Huh. Sounds like a drag,” he says, but steps out of her way anyway.
That’s only the first of many times that she realizes he walks through the world differently than she does. He could well be the most difficult person she knows, but she’s sure he thinks the same of her.
Regardless of how it happens, the next steps of the formula are simple enough.
The Girl realizes, one way or another, that she doesn’t want to marry the Man in a Suit. She also realizes, one way or another, that she’s in love with the Boy—or, alternatively, that she’s always been in love with him, has merely been passing it off all this time as a particularly unusual strain of friendship, and has only just put two and two together. Maybe that accounts for why she finds herself bickering with him all the time, because there’s something oddly pleasurable about standing face to face with someone and being spoken to without concern for rank or station, as though he is only a boy and she is only a girl.
(It may well be that at this point the Boy has also let slip some sign or other that he may possibly return her love, though of course such signs will be more immediately perceptible to the audience than to the Girl herself. Perhaps his eyes stray after her when her back is turned. Perhaps he studies extra hard for French and English, because he knows she’s good at languages, and he needs more words to argue with.)
These two realizations need not be causally linked. It’s true that in certain versions of this story, the Girl will want to end her engagement to the Man so she can marry the Boy instead. However, it’s equally reasonable to imagine that the Man is in and of himself an unsatisfactory choice, regardless of what the Girl might have told her father and the company executives the day they agreed to the match—that he’s arrogant and self-absorbed and condescending, that he will want to keep her under his thumb for the tenure of their marriage. It could be that something happens for the Girl to realize that her stiff upper lip and her sense of duty will not be enough to see her safe through the rest of her life, if she’s to spend it with such a person.
It’s equally possible that the Girl simply grows fed up with being expected to marry anyone at all. She might even brave enough to act on this feeling.
It’s silly, but part of Mitsuru thinks that this realization should probably hit her harder than it does, should be framed by more dramatic moments than it is, when it finally comes.
She’s familiar enough with the conventions. There should be music, meaningful eye contact across a crowded room, perhaps a few instances of hands touching, lightly, by accident. There should be kisses in the rain—she’s heard enough vapid American pop music to know that for some reason this is a fairly ubiquitous romantic fantasy. There should be fireworks. She doesn’t necessarily want them—want has always been a problematic word, as far as Mitsuru is concerned—but the metaphor is always fireworks, when you realize you’re in love with someone. They’re a matter of course.
Instead there is the acrid tang of sweat in the boys’ changing room, and the members of the Gekkoukan boxing team dropping away from her when she enters without a care, hiding their faces behind their locker doors like shamefaced children as she proceeds to berate their captain for overextending his offensive in the fourth round. Instead there is only the first floor of the dorm in the evenings, cups of coffee and French phrasebooks, small mountains of homework he insists he can’t navigate alone.
Instead there are their backs pressed together on the seventh or the seventeenth or the hundredth floor of Tartarus, and Akihiko calling out “Amazing as always!” with that white lightning-crackle of a smile. He sounds like a boy playing a game. They have many arguments about this, Mitsuru seizing him by the elbow, her voice tight with warning: “This isn’t a game, Akihiko.” It isn’t long before he can parrot the words back to her, lilting, pitching his voice upward to match her intonation. In these moments Mitsuru’s certain she’s never had to fight with anyone or anything as hard, or as long, as with him, these past three years.
“You’re impossible,” she always says, but all he ever does is answer “So are you.” Sometimes it’s with an eye-roll, sometimes with a grin, but either expression seems geared toward making her close her eyes, rub the bridge of her nose, and sigh.
“You’re like an old married couple,” one of their kouhai remarks once—Takeba, probably, or Iori; none of the others would be so brazen. Mitsuru forgets who exactly it was, or what she and Akihiko had been arguing about this time. She only remembers the observation and the way both she and he turned as one, heads snapping to attention, the words “We are not” coming out of their mouths perfectly matched for tone, volume, and emphasis, as if their two voices were one voice.
It’s also worth emphasizing that any contact between their hands has always been solid and very, very deliberate. They shook hands on the day they met, and she vaguely remembers being impressed by the firmness of his grip. The only time she’s ever held his hand was at the crematorium, the day they consigned her father’s body to the fire, during a brief moment of weakness. He went without his gloves that day; she remembers because it was so rare, remembers the cage his fingers made around hers, the rough band of scar tissue that ran over his knuckles.
Such epiphanies as the kind the Girl has about the Boy and the Man in a Suit often signal a turning point in the story, a climactic moment, a crossroads. Put more dramatically, the point of no return. This is the point after which everything must change.
All possible endings split off from here.
Maybe, in a parallel universe, things actually do unfold with all the ridiculous dramatics that they do in stories of this kind. Maybe she does make it all the way to the altar before she changes her mind. Maybe he does stand up when the preacher says, “Speak now or forever hold your peace”—never mind that it isn’t really a religious service, that these Western-style weddings are a fashion statement more than anything, and the matter of the marriage itself can be scaled down to a few signatures on a piece of paper, effectively the signing into effect of a contract, a merger, a business transaction.
She can imagine how it would feel—to turn and see the veritable ocean of horrified faces, and him on his feet in the midst of all of them, fists clenched and eyes burning as if what’s actually taking place today is a battle, not a celebration. She can even picture herself running, kicking off her shoes, tearing the veil from her head so she can leap unencumbered into his arms. It’s a stretch, though, and her imagination always falters when she tries to think about what would happen after. Something equally absurd, like an earthquake or a volcanic eruption, or the rest of SEES pulling up outside the church in a getaway car one of them somehow knew how to drive.
Maybe there’s a universe in which things happen this way, but Mitsuru can’t see it through to the end in her mind. The idea amuses her, if nothing else.
There must be a good few parallel universes in which things end with a fight. This is the case in virtually any reality in which the Boy and the Man in a Suit cross paths.
The fight need not be about anything consequential, as the friction is likely to exist from the first point of contact. An encounter on the street, maybe. A careless comment thrown from a limousine window about the riffraff she condescends to spend her time with, followed by a few words of warning to take care of her reputation. A boast about yet another dinner reservation at the most expensive restaurant for miles around.
Why must you and your family always be so difficult, Mitsuru?
To tell the truth, none of what he says is new; businessmen of his caliber tend to have a haughtiness to them, a bluster that she knows is meant to frighten and cow her. She closes her eyes and breathes in, feels her father grasp her shoulder: My daughter can handle her own affairs.
Anything you do will only jeopardize the future of the Kirijo family.
Her father taught her to grit her teeth against the noise, make her face cool and masklike, but she also knows the way Akihiko’s body moves when he’s spoiling for a fight, the way it winds itself up tight—weight shifting from one foot to the other, shoulders rising, hands opening and closing down by his sides. She feels the tremors tear through her own body, from the crown of her head down to the tips of her toes, tastes the hot iron tang of anger in her mouth.
If you continue to befriend derelicts such as this—
“Don’t,” she says. Her hand has come down light on Akihiko’s sleeve, but her eyes are on the man in the limousine. “How dare you?”
She knows the kinds of words these men use. She knows she’ll be told she’s being unreasonable, difficult, disobedient. She knows she’ll be ordered to learn her place. She knows. It feels like she’s been allowing her response to fester in her mind for months, maybe even years, but the venom with which it comes burning out of her shocks them all into silence, her voice building to a siren-wail inside her own head—how dare you, I won’t let you insult him, he is ten times the man you are, how dare you.
In at least one version of this story, Akihiko doesn’t let her say anything at all, merely sends his fist straight through the open car window. There is a spurt of blood, a couple of teeth knocked loose, and Mitsuru almost forgets herself and laughs.
Sometimes the fight is between the Boy and the Girl, rather than between the Boy and the Man, or the Girl and the Man. It seems inevitable, given who the Boy and the Girl are, and the way they talk to each other.
They’re at home—that’s what the dorm is, home, though neither of them will admit it at this point in the story. On the first floor, side by side on the couch, because that’s their place. It’s late, and he’s staring straight ahead, arms crossed over his chest. She’s holding a cup of coffee in her lap.
“You know,” he says into the silence, without looking at her. “I don’t think you have to marry the old man if you don’t want to.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she says. There’s no bite in it this time, because she’s told him the exact same thing, a hundred, a thousand times before—but he’s too hardheaded to believe, and after three years of this her patience is running thin. “What I want isn’t a concern.”
“That’s not true.” Suddenly he is leaning around, almost across her body, and they are closer than face to face this time—nearly touching foreheads, bumping noses, his fierce whisper almost a sensation rather than a sound. “It’s my concern.”
Nothing follows. For once the Girl runs out of words. I want— I want—
Conventionally, the argument ends with a kiss, but not in this story. Fight or no fight, he never touches her without her permission, and she isn’t about to lose to him that way.
To satisfy those with a taste for sad—the more palatable word is bittersweet—endings, there’s a version of the story in which he gives her away on her wedding day.
At this point they’ve probably only just graduated, but they’ve already joked about it at least a hundred times—about the antiquated conventions attendant upon weddings, about what to do if a bride’s closest relationships are not exclusively with other women. Can she not have bridesmen? A man-of-honor? Hypothetically.
“Well,” he says, “if there’s a guy who loves you enough to go through the hassle of planning your bridal shower, maybe you should think about marrying him instead.”
There’s a lot of quiet laughter punctuating these conversations, many tight smiles like shards of broken glass, especially when she reminds him that, with her father gone, he’s the most important man in her life. When she finally asks him for real, she feels so strangely fractured—she’s expecting him to say no, but also she wants him to say yes, a little, in her painfully limited capacity to want things for herself—that some of it must show on her face.
The look he gives her in return makes him look a lot like he did on the day they met—like he doesn’t know what to make of her, except that she’s probably crazy—but just this one time, he doesn’t argue. He says yes. He lets her win. He’ll help her do her duty.
The next time she sees him is when he comes to pick her up on her wedding day. They’re standing face to face in the doorway of her hotel room, and he’s leaning a little on the doorframe in that laconic way of his, hands shoved deep into the pockets of a pair of expensive-looking slacks.
“You look beautiful,” he tells her. And once more, in English, because the best grades he got in their senior year were for languages. And again in French, as she taught him, informally for emphasis—tu es très belle, you are very beautiful. The way he smiles down at her as he says it feels like being pricked with a needle.
(There is, apparently, no acceptable direct translation for “you look beautiful”—it seems the French find such an indirect way of wording things cowardly.)
She tilts her head upward and kisses him then, once on each cheek for hello, for goodbye. That’s how the French do things. She’s glad that he’s learned enough politeness from her over the years not to turn his head and receive them with his mouth instead.
“Thank you,” she says. “But your accent needs work.” Then she takes his arm and lets him lead her from the room. When he hands her into the bridal car, she notices that he isn’t wearing his gloves today either.
In what is, for all intents and purposes, the real world, or at the very least the one she currently lives in, Mitsuru thinks it’s only important that things are brought to their conclusion in the board room.
She’s pinned up her long hair, put on her best suit—the black one made of brushed wool tailored exactly to measure, the one that reminds her most of armor—and a pair of sensible heels and pearl earrings. She sits in what was once her father’s chair, at the head of the long conference table, one leg crossed over the other.
“I regret to inform you,” she says, “that I’ve made the decision to terminate our engagement. Your conduct since my father’s passing has given me the impression that your interests and those of my family are no longer aligned.”
She’s been practicing this speech for days, worked on how to make her voice hard, cool and controlled, send her gaze across the table swift and true as an arrow. She remembers the dining table at the dorm, the sensation of Akihiko tapping her lightly on the back of her hand with his fingertip, clicking his tongue: Hey, come on, your voice shook a little bit there. Don’t give him an opening.
“Let me remind you,” she says, “that I have been named the legal heir to the Kirijo Group. This holds true regardless of who I marry, if I choose to marry at all. Leadership of the company will remain with the upper management until I am adequately prepared to take my place at its head.”
(Akihiko, shrugging: Why do you need a husband to run a business, anyway?
I hardly think I’m qualified to assume leadership of the Group on my own, especially at my age, she’d said. For someone so sharp in the boxing ring and on the battlefield, she thinks he has a knack for posing the most rhetorical questions she’s ever heard. She thinks these things should be self-evident.
Why not? Another shrug, and he cocks his head, skeptical, as if to say nothing should be more self-evident than this. You can do anything.)
“I am fully confident in the Kirijo group’s ability to stand on its own,” she says. As she speaks, she leans forward, elbows braced against the table, fingers steepled, and thinks of her father. Thinks of Akihiko’s hand on her back as she walked crisp and clipped out of the dorm: Go get ‘em. “Your cooperation will no longer be required.”
It’s important to note that in this story, the Boy is there, but the Girl comes to him—or not—in her own time, and on her own terms.
Sometimes nothing happens when the Boy and the Girl come together. But sometimes they choose one another, and the story of this choice is the one that reconciles all the others—what happens when the Girl steps out of her car, opens the front door, and finds the Boy waiting there to meet her. What happens when the Girl comes home, because that is what they’ve built, the Girl and the Boy and the friends they’ve gathered to themselves over one year and an unlikely series of fortunate accidents, a home and a future and a hope.
The Girl twists her key in the lock, and finds the Boy seated at the dining table, his chair turned toward the door like he’s been waiting for her for the better part of the evening. As she walks toward him, he rises to his feet, crosses the floor to her. When the Boy and the Girl meet in the middle of the room, sometimes there’s a kiss. Sometimes the Boy will seize the Girl by the waist and lift her off her feet, spin her around in a slow circle as she laughs all silvery into his ear.
Mostly, though, they just stand there a little, face to face, smiling at each other.
“Hey, boss,” Akihiko says. “Can I take your coat?”
Just this once, Mitsuru lets him, lets him reach across and help her out of her armor. After his hands lift the jacket from across her shoulders she reaches up to pull the pins from her hair, and as it tumbles down wild around her she thinks she feels something unraveling inside her at the same time—something coming loose and curling everywhere, untamed and messy and alive as the strands of a story they’re only just beginning to write.