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Section 1
# Girls Don't Graduate
## A Note to Taiwanese Readers
Taiwan edition. Reprinted from Light Novel Kingdom. Scans: tsengwoody Ryo Asai My fifth book, *Girls Don't Graduate*, has now been published in Chinese translation in Taiwan. For me, who already have Taiwanese editions of *I Heard Kirishima Quit the Club* and *Who* out in the world, this is an especially happy thing. *Girls Don't Graduate* is a work that takes a completely different path from those two earlier books. Compared with the development of plot, *I Heard Kirishima Quit the Club* and *Who* care more about the ideas they want to convey. From the moment I began those two books, I had already decided on the scenes I wanted to write, and only afterward strung them together with prose. So even if the stories themselves unfold rather quietly, I do not much mind. When I wrote the seven stories in *Girls Don't Graduate*, though, I put the fullness of the storytelling first, every time. Perhaps not every story hides some special meaning, but I believe that, as you read, each of you will feel something stir inside. The thought that a book this different in direction can be published in Taiwan truly makes me glad. I hope that through this book you will come to know another side of the writer Ryo Asai. A school on the verge of closing, just about to hold its last graduation ceremony, and seven high school girls standing inside it, each carrying a different feeling—I hope this book can keep you company through a pleasant stretch of reading. From here on, too, I ask for your continued kindness.
## General Introduction: The World Will Turn to Color
Wei-chung Chang Ryo Asai, born in the first year of Heisei (1989), was only twenty-three when, in early 2013, he took the Naoki Prize—the highest honor in Japanese popular literature—with *Who*. That day, media across Japan ran a string of follow-up reports under headlines that broke records and were bound to stay in the history books: “the youngest since the war,” “the first Naoki winner born in the Heisei era,” and the question that trailed them all: just who is this Ryo Asai? Prizewinning writers come in many kinds. To my eye, Ryo Asai is the kind who lands exactly right in every respect. In 2009, while he was still a freshman at Waseda University, he debuted by winning the Shosetsu Subaru New Writer Award with *I Heard Kirishima Quit the Club*, and the following year the book came out in hardcover. It was already selling well; after it was adapted into a film, sales shot straight up and broke through five hundred and fifty thousand copies in a single stroke. Refined in looks, photogenic in his youth, seemingly shy—and yet, once he starts talking, more articulate than you would expect, and full of confidence—Ryo Asai has, beyond his gift for prose, a thread of the literary idol about him, and of course both readers and the press have taken to him. Then, while plenty of people were still watching his ability with a wait-and-see eye, or holding on to their doubts, he took the Naoki Prize that so many Japanese writers envy. In the Japanese literary world, a writer who publishes a first book in their thirties is already, in everyone’s eyes, a writer of the new generation. Very few manage to bring a book out while they are still in their twenties, and at the same time win both the market and a literary prize. Stepping clear of the recent craze for mystery and crime, Asai… (Content failed to load! Please refresh or switch browsers)
## The Exit Music Begins
The nail on my little finger has grown long, only a little short of touching the early spring that is about to arrive. A hard wind blows beyond the cold window glass, and just the sight of the leaves shaking makes my whole body feel cold. It is already the end of March, and still my hands and feet are icy morning and night. Even now I cannot believe that in a few more hours this cold, dark world in front of me will turn into a glittering morning. I drape a towel over my hair and massage it gently with the pads of my fingers. Yoko says doing this makes hair grow faster. I believe she is telling the truth, so I keep at it every day. I carefully blow-dry the black hair that has at last grown long enough to gather over my left shoulder, tilt my head a little, and let my fingers pass through it. It feels as if I am slowly combing away the childish self I used to be. Tonight I have to go to bed earlier than usual. The uniform I will wear tomorrow, the school bag I have used for three years, and the pink hair tie for tying my hair back are laid out neatly beside the bed. I bought this hair tie last year, meaning to use it once my hair had grown long. Every so often I wash it, and the color after washing always fills me with a little leap of joy. However I squeeze it, it softly springs back to its old shape, cute as a large flower. While I waited for my hair to grow, I kept this tie around my right wrist, touching it now and then in class, then massaging my scalp with my fingertips. I draw the curtain open a little, and meet the eyes of myself reflected in the window glass. The hair that used to be short has finally reached my chest. Classmates and family I see every day seem to have forgotten me long ago… (Content failed to load! Please refresh or switch browsers)
## The Blue Rooftop
Naoki always wears a blue T-shirt that looks as if the sky has soaked into it, and wherever he is, he stands out. Indoors it is like that, and even outdoors the blue on him is more vivid than the sky. You can pick him out at a glance. I curl myself up small, sit on the ground hugging my knees, put my glasses on, then take them off again. Probably because I fell asleep in them last night, the frames are a little bent, and if I so much as lower my head they slide down. “Takako, why don’t you just switch to contacts? If you graduate high school still wearing glasses and keeping your hair black, you’ll never shake the good-girl image.” Naoki, beside me, is sitting with his knees hugged too. I want to try to look smaller, so I press down harder on my knees. Naoki is not tall, and in an oversized T-shirt the shadow of his collarbones shows clear. That hollow looks as if a finger had pressed it and left a shadow behind. Inside that thin body there are, somehow, bones and organs, packed full. Sound comes out of a black speaker. Naoki says a small one is fine, you can just drop it in a pocket. Besides that speaker he usually carries only an MP3 player, a wallet, and a phone, and with those few things he wanders out the door. As for me, I always have to check everything in my bag carefully before I can leave the house easy. “…It’s been a long time since I climbed those stairs.” Huh. Seeing me catch my breath, Naoki smiles with no good intentions and says, “Takako, you really are honest.” It is only a joke, but it lands more truly than he meant. From upstairs come students’ voices and footsteps… (Content failed to load! Please refresh or switch browsers)
## Representative of the Students Still Enrolled
A send-off address. The snow along the river that has not yet melted turns into clear river water and tells us the season has already changed. This year’s winter was colder than in other years, and so today’s spring sunlight feels especially gentle. Seniors, congratulations on graduating today. I believe every senior here has come to this beautiful ceremony, a symbol of setting out, carrying hopes and dreams for the future. As our elders, you guided us—sometimes kindly, sometimes strictly—in club activities, in our studies, in student council work, and in every other respect. Remembering those days, I feel a deep nostalgia. Besides gratitude, my heart is full of the sadness of a parting that is about to come. At every moment we have looked up at your tall backs. Those of us still enrolled have always believed that if we followed those backs, we could not go wrong. Only a year apart, and yet your tall, reliable silhouettes were like great trees stretching their branches toward the future, and we felt we could never reach them. And yet I can only watch a back like that in sorrow. Someone’s back is about to go far away, toward a future I do not know, and so right now I am very sad. Next, I want to talk about this. Don’t go “ehhh—”—please keep quiet. I heard someone say, “Are we in a soap opera now?” Yes. That’s right. From here on, please just treat what I’m about to say as if you were watching a soap opera. Today is the last graduation ceremony this high school will ever hold, and I’m sorry it’s turned out like this. Still, I think that ending up this way, at the last, is probably wonderful too. Though… (Content failed to load! Please refresh or switch browsers)
## Terada’s Instep Is a Cabbage
Pleeease have sixty kids with Terada-senpai! The club president can definitely do it! Give me your boobs! Before you go to Tokyo, leave me your boobs! I love President Goto (’s boobs) the most! I also love the president’s dribbling (and the boobs bouncing along with it)! Kae (flat-chested) “Kae, you didn’t write something weird in my yearbook, did you!” I glare at her hard through eyes ringed with dark circles. Kae flicks the marker in her hand and says, “I only wrote how much I love the president, that’s all! Did the president not sleep last night? Your dark circles are so deep—let me get rid of them for you!” She comes running at me full speed. “Don’t come over here!” “Please don’t run away!” The girls’ basketball club clusters around a yearbook whose cover is smooth as jelly, while over on the boys’ side they have already taken off their uniforms and started a three-on-three. The boys have all pulled off their socks and are playing barefoot. Only Terada is still in socks, so he slips several times. The way he lands hard on his backside always makes a person impatient, and yet, for some reason, it is very Terayama, and so it also makes you feel at ease. In the short stretch between the end of the graduation ceremony and the start of the graduation concert, the gym belongs to the basketball club, the volleyball club, and the badminton club. In that time some clubs form a circle and say their goodbyes to one another—and there are clubs like ours, noisy, writing messages back and forth in the yearbook, or like the boys’ basketball club, grabbing the last chance to play and fool around at the same time. These clubs of ours have one thing in common, which is… (Content failed to load! Please refresh or switch browsers)
## Four Beats, One More Time
“Sakuragawa, this was you people, wasn’t it!” “Kamui” glares across the table and shouts. “I already told you it has nothing to do with us. Didn’t you lose them yourselves?” Sakuragawa frowns at the spit sprayed toward her and answers coolly. “No way. That much stuff vanishing without a sound is way too weird! You must have hidden it somewhere! Let me see your bag!” “Absolutely not. I mean, would any of us even get anything out of doing that?” “Kamui” leans forward, closing in on Sakuragawa’s indifferent face. “Give me the bag!” “No.” “Quit yapping and let me see it!” “You’re too loud.” Hyogawa’s voice is like a knife ground sharp, and the atmosphere, boiling and bubbling, goes quiet as easily as if someone had turned off the gas. “Yelling isn’t going to solve anything.” Hyogawa leans against the wall and pushes her rimless glasses up with her left hand. Long black hair and a long skirt: that is Hyogawa’s style. Now and then her right hand keeps clicking the tip of the ballpoint pen in her grip. She looks impatient, but it is only a habit. “Hyogawa is right. Both sides, calm down first!” I slap the table that stands between “Kamui” and Sakuragawa. “What matters now isn’t who did it. We should find the missing costumes and makeup props first!” Before I have finished saying this, Sakuragawa lets a sentence out, low and slow: “Maybe this is the will of God, and you…” (Content failed to load! Please refresh or switch browsers)
## The Backgrounds of Two People
There shouldn’t be anyone in here, right? Thinking that, I open the door, and sure enough there is not a single person. I expected it, and still, suddenly set down in an empty space, I feel a small jolt of alarm. Living people and a vacant art room sit a little at odds with each other. Ivory plaster casts, canvases left with great blank stretches—these bloodless, pale things suit the air here better. Once I am settled in a chair in the art room, I open the yearbook. The inside pages, shut tight until now, meet the air for the first time. Every page feels thick, as if it wants to give off a sense of weight. Printed inside are two-page photographs of the school buildings from the half year or so when I was here less than the others: spring, summer, autumn, winter, all of them, and they look very beautiful. The north wing, where our ordinary classrooms are; the west wing, with the gym and the club rooms; the south wing, with the art room, the faculty office, and the library; and the courtyard at the very center. The photographs are beautifully taken. They look like some place entirely unfamiliar. And yet this place that saw me through high school does not feel that beautiful to me. I look at the photographs of the buildings again. I half expect it to be there, but of course there is still no photograph of that place. The east wing might as well not exist in this school. And yet the most beautiful mural in the school, the one I would want to see again no matter how many years pass, is in the east wing. On the shelves in the art room sit several backgroundless portraits painted at last year’s culture festival. In this room, where even the hands of the clock seem still… (Content failed to load! Please refresh or switch browsers)
## The Center of Dawn
Rumors change. In only a few days, the school ghost drifted from the east wing to the south wing. And in this whole school, the person who remembers that so clearly may be only me. The ordinary rumor that “the school buildings have a ghost at night” had already been passed around like common knowledge from the time I first entered this high school. Then, from a certain point on, rumors kept adding themselves as the seasons changed—someone had seen a figure in the east wing, strange sounds were coming from the east wing roof, things like that—and so “the school ghost” turned, thoroughly, into “the ghost of the east wing.” But rumors change. Not once. Twice, three times. The place with the ghost is actually the south wing, isn’t it? The first time that sentence entered my right ear, both my feet felt nailed to the ground. I could not move. Don’t go around saying things like that, a girl I did not know well said at once. I shut my ears. I did not want to hear. Even without covering them with my hands, I can still close my ears. The new rumor, “there’s a ghost in the south wing,” spread through the school in less than a few days. But a girl in our class with a strong sense of justice tied the rumor once more to that old “east wing.” Perhaps that was the easiest thing to do. With no definite eyewitness account, the east wing—which looks eerie and gives off a dangerous air—is better suited to carrying that kind of blame. The place where something really happened does not get rumors. It has already been more than two hours since dawn. The school buildings deep in the night are like… (Content failed to load! Please refresh or switch browsers)
