I Have Let My Heart Be Servant to My Body — Tao Yuanming, “Homeward”#

The most useful thing about being busy is that the work really does need doing.

Haruki’s studies after changing departments, his work for the newspaper club and his editorial job all have substance. The movement from rejected articles to accepted ones requires the practice any writer needs. Calling it all evasion would erase what he has learned in those three years. When Mari criticizes him for hiding from his feelings in work, she does not deny the value of that work. She insists that he take it seriously.⁴

The question is how he uses his schedule. Haruki pares his private time down, minimizing opportunities to approach Setsuna. Her continuing kindness draws him closer; remembering what he has done makes him ashamed, and he runs away. Having run away, he dislikes himself still more. Once he has accumulated enough self-disgust, work takes him in again. Work gets finished and articles get published, while their relationship stays where it was. Even that same old place must be walked back to every day.

We therefore need to distinguish what he wants from what repeatedly doing this has already secured. Haruki wants the relationship to improve; the wish is real. Yet a life in which it keeps failing to improve preserves a certain position for him: I have not abandoned Setsuna; I am still being punished for the past; I have not simply made myself happy again. Self-reproach hurts, but it also supplies a recognizable self. If he were happy one day, where would he put the fidelity his suffering had seemed to prove?

In The Plague of Fantasies, Žižek uses the distinction between desire and drive to examine something easily concealed by a declared purpose: an activity may repeatedly fail to reach its announced destination while already obtaining something through the circuit around it.⁵ The question becomes not only “Why has it still not succeeded?” but “What does its continued failure keep in place?” Haruki’s own account of approach, guilt, flight and self-disgust gives us grounds to ask. He makes real progress at work while repeatedly offering self-reproach in place of an answer to Setsuna. The two results must be considered separately.

The circuit also sustains a relationship between them. As long as Haruki withholds an answer, Setsuna still has reason to ask; as long as Setsuna keeps asking, he still has opportunities to respond with guilt. Both suffer, and neither has entirely lost the other. There lies the difficulty: the conduct that hurts them is entangled with the conduct that keeps them in each other’s lives. “Stop doing this” asks them to surrender their surviving contact before they know how to establish another kind. Within this contact, Haruki’s retreat leaves a prolonged uncertainty in which Setsuna asks for an answer and then withdraws. Her withdrawal prolongs the impasse; it does not relieve him of responsibility for answering.

Their friends’ kindness enters the circuit too. Takeya says Haruki is simply busy and regrets missing the gathering. Setsuna asks whether he is eating properly and sleeping enough. Finally: did he smile? At that, the reassuring story grows harder to sustain. Io detects Takeya’s lie.⁶ Food and sleep can still be explained on a busy man’s behalf. A smile forces the question: how is this man, with such good reasons to be busy, actually living?

The friends are not wholly unaware of the difficulty. Io thinks that after three years, forgiveness ought to be possible. Takeya realizes that after three years, separation could equally be an answer; it simply does not suit their wishes. Matchmaking friends, like lovers, must distinguish “what is good for them” from “what I would like to see them do.” We will return to this distinction.

Gui Youguang’s Xiangji Studio is a small room with no shortage of time inside it. Walls are added, doors altered, family members pass through their separate spaces. His wife visits to ask about old events and learn to write; the old room once housed a new life. When it is renovated later, she does not return. Fresh walls cannot restore the room to what it was.⁷ We understand its changes because we know who once did what there, and who can still come to the door.

CC’s schedules work similarly. Each day still has twenty-four hours, but time has settled into which hours can be given to whom, which name makes someone turn away, which call cannot be carried on naturally once answered. Three years change not just the contents of memory but the ways a person can now approach the world. Haruki has not lost his ability to live in every respect. Some things grow easier with practice; others become harder and harder. Later changes in his relationships must be examined here too: what has he actually begun to be able to do?

Only the Heart Is Unlike the Days of Old — Li Qingzhao, “Nan Ge Zi”#

When Setsuna calls, Haruki’s tenderness leads her toward his voice and the prospect of meeting. On hearing that another woman may be with him, she asks him to abandon her so that she can be free. When he retreats, she immediately takes it back: do not count that; everything she just said was a lie.⁸

Allow only one statement to stand, and the matter becomes simple. Wanting freedom was false; wanting to stay was her true feeling. The story becomes a lesson in seeing through words that contradict the heart. Yet when she asks for the torment to end, the torment is real. When she fears that Haruki will finally leave, that fear is real too. Her second statement keeps the call going and closes the exit her first had just opened. Setsuna has not arrived at an uncontradictory decision in private and deliberately expressed it badly. A decision is forming within the call, then interrupted by consequences she cannot bear.

If Haruki treats the retraction as the only thing that counts, he can go on waiting. He still need not explicitly declare that they have separated, or directly acknowledge that he loves her. Setsuna must wait for an answer and take responsibility for announcing that she will wait no longer. Haruki has not actively abandoned her; he has left her to take the final step toward ending her sense of abandonment.

“I haven’t changed” can become similarly hard to contest. As long as I remember, suffer and refrain from loving someone else, I can claim that my heart remains the same. The other person, however, has lived through the days when I did not come. These are not equivalent stretches of time.

In Natsume Sōseki’s And Then, Daisuke insists to Michiyo that there is no difference at all between his former and present feelings. Quietly, she says he had already changed back then. He thinks she has misread him. Her question is why he gave her up. He adds that he too has been punished: he has remained single for more than three years. Michiyo replies: wasn’t all that his own choice?⁹

She does not deny his suffering. She denies it an authority it cannot possess: how one person punishes himself cannot settle the life another has already lived. Daisuke interprets his singleness as fidelity; Michiyo has experienced his relinquishment and her own marriage. Their feelings can still reach each other. Before making her own decision, however, she has not accepted his autobiography as a settlement of their shared history.

Haruki too tries to rewrite a common past. On Christmas Eve, he says he has forgotten Kazusa and urges Setsuna to forget her too, as though removing one person would let them begin again before the school festival. Yet without what the three experienced together, the present Haruki and Setsuna would not exist. The man she loves already carries that history of meeting. To have him now, she is being asked first to declare irrelevant the experience through which he became the person she loved.¹⁰

Haruki’s article is particularly disobedient. Setsuna reads his report on Kazusa again and again, recognizing the old habit of protecting after finding fault, the partiality inside the criticism. A piece of writing need contain no confession for its gaze to have a direction. The writing ability he has newly acquired brings back onto the page a relationship he has verbally declared finished.

Something further happens in his thoughts. For a moment, he imagines Kazusa approving his love for Setsuna, as though permission from the distant woman were needed before he could hold the one before him.¹¹ The actual Kazusa has said none of this. Haruki summons a Kazusa himself and has her release him from Kazusa’s hold. The woman he loves is present, but the voice authorizing that love belongs to a third person. Hearing “I choose you” need not give Setsuna the same certainty as hearing “I answer to you.”

Žižek’s discussion of retroactivity helps explain why this attempted deletion fails. A name subsequently given to an event also organizes its meaning for the present. Historical facts do not thereby change; the history by which we live is nevertheless more than a roll of negatives that nobody touches again.¹² Saying “I have forgotten” today, Haruki tries to establish renewed closeness on a past whose case has been closed. The article and the imagined conversation show that this past still distributes permission to him.

This is also where change remains possible. An undeletable past need not issue the same command forever. What must change is whether the person before him still has to pass through the old story to receive an answer.

A Clear Stream Between Them, Yet No Words Can Pass — Nineteen Old Poems, “The Distant Cowherd Star”#

On New Year’s Eve, Haruki has a ticket to Youko’s concert and enough time to attend. It is initially a reward for work that has won recognition, and only then a possible way toward Kazusa: he could meet her mother and ask how she is. He does not yet know that Kazusa herself is in Japan.¹³

The player sees “Go to the concert” and “Go on the New Year’s shrine visit.” In the PS3 frame cited here, the former is dimmed and the cursor rests on the latter. The text makes a possibility visible; the narrative does not permit it to happen here. Haruki’s subsequent thoughts turn to Setsuna: before their relationship has been clarified, he cannot follow Touma’s name back toward her.

Youko’s concert appears among the options but cannot be selected. PS3 gameplay frame: ©2012 AQUAPLUS / via xueyinhualuo, Bilibili.

Physically, he can go. As an action he can presently account for to himself and others, that door is harder to pass through. The menu displays the distinction plainly. The player knows there is another path, yet cannot treat the three years as though they never happened simply because a reunion would be desirable to watch.

Kazusa has a different gap in her knowledge. After the performance, Youko asks whether anyone sat to her left. Remembering that the seat remained empty throughout, Kazusa asks whom her mother invited. Youko does not give her a clear answer. Kazusa believes there is no longer a place for her in Japan. The player knows that a place was indeed reserved, and the person expected there did not come.¹⁴

Missing each other at the same hall after the concert: surrounding dialogue establishes the empty seat; this frame juxtaposes Kazusa with Haruki passing outside. PS3 gameplay frame: ©2012 AQUAPLUS / via xueyinhualuo, Bilibili.

This missed encounter is more than bad luck. Haruki keeps Kazusa in a past he cannot face; Kazusa keeps Haruki in a Japan she has lost. Youko knows more, and so does the player, but knowledge does not automatically become a meeting in which both parties know who is there. A single wall can separate people who still have no place to talk.

Our comparison with An Account of Xiangji Studio must pause here. The dead cannot open the door. Kazusa is alive: she asks questions, guesses wrongly and says Japan has no place for her. Haruki’s memory cannot exhaust her three years. “Kazusa’s absence” must therefore leave room for the life she leads elsewhere. Treating her only as the unfillable hole in Haruki’s mind would make the analysis itself lock a living person away on his behalf.

She has not yet entered his daily life again. Other people already have. They come with histories, friends, work and wishes of their own. His well-known past does not automatically reduce them to supporting parts in its sequel.

Friends Urge and Counsel One Another — Analects, “Zi Lu”#

The resemblance between Koharu and Haruki is easy to see. Both intervene in other people’s affairs, trust that explaining the right reasons should make things clear, and take responsibility back onto themselves after running about on others’ behalf. But resemblance is only a beginning. Once Koharu’s friendships are damaged, Haruki, watching her, cannot reach a conclusion as easily as he does about his own wrongdoing by saying, “It’s all my fault.”

Classmates accuse Koharu of taking the boy her friend likes. Rumor gives a tidy account of the past; her friends’ distance is what she actually bears now. Haruki knows she is isolated and sees her trying to endure it alone, so much as he once did. Takeya deliberately speaks harshly to make him recognize that he may tolerate abuse of himself quite readily, yet refuse to watch the same abuse directed at Koharu.¹⁵

The recognition is less comfortable than “finally understanding his former self.” He once treated admitting guilt as accepting responsibility. Seeing another person adopt that posture, he now sees what else it can do: let the hurt person retreat further, leave friends without an explanation, and give him continuing reasons to postpone intervention. Someone’s willingness to suffer is one matter; whether the suffering repairs any particular relationship is another.

Koharu also brings change outside conflict. After telling her about his past, Haruki does not settle on “I talked, so I recovered.” He reverses the explanation: he could speak because he was already becoming able to do so. Their days together gradually made an untouchable experience tellable.¹⁶ A patient listener matters, but so does the daily life in which he need not constantly maintain his old form of self-presentation. That life had already done much of the work.

This correction to his own account deserves to remain. If we merely say that confession heals trauma, the conversation becomes medicine and the listener its cup. The script instead lets Haruki acknowledge that the self capable of telling the past has already changed through earlier contact. Koharu offers no abstract service called understanding. She offers the ways she deals with him each day.

Nor does she treat her friendships as the price inevitably paid for finding love. She takes a letter to Mihoko’s home, recalls going to school together, their company and their quarrels, acknowledges her present retreat and leaves a wish for future quarrels and reconciliations. She can temporarily leave their shared workplace; she cannot promise forgiveness on her friend’s behalf. Later, after she passes her examination, the friends gather to discuss congratulating her and urge Mihoko to make the call. Koharu hears her voice.¹⁷

These small acts do not guarantee an unbroken friendship from then on. Their weight lies in Koharu’s continuing willingness to leave the relationship open to the actual other person, rather than declare herself bad and retain her friends forever as judges inside her head. She has to write, wait and hear whether that voice will return. Haruki too must learn to break his abstract guilt back down into particular people and particular events.

Setsuna does something harder on this route. She messages Haruki and sends Koharu to the place where he is waiting. Only after Koharu leaves does she allow herself the tears held back for two weeks.¹⁸ Her sending Koharu off really helps the two come together; sadness does not make that assistance false. Neither does her assistance authorize us to declare her at peace. Being able to do something and no longer being hurt by it are different capacities.

The life opened by Koharu’s route thus has real warmth and real other people in it. A new relationship can make it possible to speak of the past and repair a friendship without certifying that an old relationship has been settled. If Koharu is a mirror in which Haruki sees himself, that mirror has already walked away to write her own letter.

When the False Is Taken for True, the True Turns False — Dream of the Red Chamber, Chapter 1#

Chiaki knows still more about mirrors. She listens to Haruki describe Setsuna and Kazusa, organizes their images and adjusts herself into someone he can more readily accept. She does not deceive through invention alone: parts of her family experience are real, as is her work onstage. How she presents these genuine materials serves a performative purpose.¹⁹

The danger is not that she knows nothing and imitates carelessly. It is precisely that she understands quite a lot. She knows how Haruki describes the two women, which actions draw him near and which words make him retreat. Accurate interpretation can increase one’s ability to care for another person or to arrange that person’s conduct. Understanding is not yet a certificate of goodwill.

Haruki used to be the storyteller. He selected important parts of his memory, explaining who was cold, who was warm, how each hurt or saved him. With Chiaki, his account becomes usable material, and he enters someone else’s work. Suddenly he confronts an uncomfortable reciprocity: being understood can mean being selected, edited and placed in a role he has never approved.

Identification here has at least two aspects. A person can recognize an image and say, “That is me.” A person can also take others’ responses as a measure and try to become someone who can be loved. Chiaki has practiced the latter exceptionally well, learning how to meet Haruki’s conditions of acceptance. But an actor has desires of her own. She wants the performance to succeed, wants to perform what resists performance. That work gradually takes her beyond a position from which she can merely observe.

The stage gives this difficulty a body. One actor plays both Yukine and Haruna; the script explicitly acknowledges that they cannot appear together, yet their confrontation and rupture must still be performed.²⁰ Chiaki must solve the problem through acting, and the audience can be persuaded. Making the contradiction credible is her skill.

One actor plays both Yukine and Haruna. The script directly acknowledges the staging difficulty of their inability to appear together. PS3 gameplay frame: ©2012 AQUAPLUS / via xueyinhualuo, Bilibili.

Once the performance succeeds, the problem outside the theater grows clearer. Chiaki can perform two people; she cannot answer Haruki on their behalf. Images can enter a completed work because actors and a script have ways of organizing them. The actual Setsuna and Kazusa each retain the possibility of answering outside that organization. Mistake understanding onstage for forgiveness already obtained in life, and better art may encourage a more convincing illusion that matters have been settled.

Setsuna herself understands the uses of performance. On Chiaki’s route she maintains her composure, then speaks to herself, alone, of a “perfect performance.”²¹ The composed Setsuna need not lack a genuine wish to help them; the suffering Setsuna need not be capable of saying everything there and then. Performance can manipulate others, but it can also temporarily protect the performer, keeping a farewell from collapsing before the person being left. Condemning performance indiscriminately as falsehood would obscure that protective work.

At their farewell, she also makes a very specific refusal: no more lending her a coat, no more arm around her shoulders. Warmth now is all too dependable; its future absence will make the cold harder to bear. She keeps Haruki’s guitar pick but declines to accept all the tenderness available in the moment.²² Setsuna is arranging how she will live afterward. Even kindness must be weighed against that afterward.

If Chiaki and Haruki continue, they too will depend on relations outside the stage. Her admission that she holds a knife that can wound, and her promise not to use it again, do not mean she will never hurt him. Her understanding must be tested in her next action.²³ Haruki loves someone who performs and works, who has manipulated him and who can make promises. The relationship must accommodate what remains opaque in her if it is not to become the story of his finally acquiring a controllable Setsuna or Kazusa.

To Know It Fully, One Must Put It into Practice — Lu You, “Reading on a Winter Night, for Ziyu”#

Mari initially speaks for work when she reprimands Haruki. A past that has factually ended and feelings that have not ended are different things. Neither warrants neglecting his emotional life or treating work as a refuge. If work could speak, it might complain: why am I always called upon to conceal what you owe someone else?⁴

Later, Mari herself becomes entangled. Work is enjoyable, but more work leaves less time together. Distance hurts, and she tries to work away the hurt, creating still more work and less shared time. She notices a deterioration in quality, feels she has let interview subjects down and insists that she genuinely used to enjoy the job.²⁴

Her earlier admonition now acquires renewed weight. Making the same mistake does not disqualify her judgment. She now knows the difficulty between judging correctly and living accordingly when she herself is involved. Her understanding of Haruki comes not merely from being older but from experiencing how a boundary she could once distinguish gradually gives way in her own life.

Her career especially cannot be reduced to an obstacle placed before the male protagonist. It has achievements, responsibilities to others and prospects abroad. An essay interested only in whether Haruki catches up would turn the world she has worked for into a flight he nearly misses. A plane can be caught. An embrace at the airport cannot answer how two people will arrange their lives afterward.

By pursuing her to the United States, Haruki does take a step beyond staying home in self-reproach. He already has a passport; Sawako, who works at a travel agency, helps arrange the journey. With such assistance, resolve can become a meeting in time. But he arrives without having planned his studies, accommodation or future life in full. The script leaves that haste plainly visible.²⁵

The pursuit should therefore neither be belittled as mere wilfulness nor enlarged into the completion of a mature life. Haruki finally lets “I want to see you” govern an action, acknowledging a desire worth spending time, money and other people’s help on. The schedule that formerly certified his diligence can now be disrupted for a meeting. Future costs remain. Yet action has moved the relationship from “What should I do?” to “What do we do next?”

The three routes have now acquired distinct directions. Friendship requires answering particular people; intimacy through performance requires letting another exceed an image; work and love require reallocating time in actual life. Koharu, Chiaki and Mari certainly revive old experiences, and Haruki recognizes himself in them. They can change him, however, precisely because each has things to do and a life unwilling to serve only as his cure.

A player who reads all three routes can acquire three kinds of understanding. The Haruki in any one route has not completed preliminary lessons with the other two women. He changes in that particular relationship and carries what the change cannot resolve into its ending. We need not cancel these moments of happiness to acknowledge Setsuna’s continuing pain. Happiness happened; hurt happened too. They belong to particular people and cannot be offset on one balance sheet.

One Day Apart Is Like Three Autumns — Book of Songs, “Gathering Kudzu”#

Returning along Setsuna’s route, the New Year’s Eve call already makes a difference. Haruki acknowledges that he has not forgotten Kazusa and cannot forget her, while saying that he still loves Setsuna. This time he does not first obtain a clean past as his qualification for closeness. Setsuna cannot yet answer, and the call ends.²⁶

That is nowhere near enough to repair the relationship. It at least gives the two present people a question they can continue discussing. Haruki must speak for a self that still contains contradictions; Setsuna may not know how to answer that self. Her pause is no longer immediately treated as cruelty or consent.

When Takeya and Io subsequently press him, Haruki asks them not to intervene for now. He sees that when the friends claim to support both of them, their priority is a reunion. Whether reunion is good for Setsuna remains hers to decide.²⁷ Someone finally moves the friends’ goodwill back a little, giving the person continually urged toward happiness space to say whether she wants it.

Yet Haruki readily makes himself comfortable in yielding. He says he is willing to wait: at least three years would be fair. Takeya cuts through this fairness with one sentence. Three more years from him would mean six years for Setsuna.²⁸

There is nothing profound about the arithmetic. The difficulty is that their clocks start at different points. Haruki begins counting today, when he is finally ready to respond. Setsuna does not thereby acquire a newly begun past. He wants to repay her waiting with an equal duration, while the waiting itself may continue to wear her down. Self-punishment, when it never asks what the other needs, often performs such upright calculations.

Michiyo’s question in And Then finds another echo here. My three years may explain how I have treated myself; they cannot stipulate the compensation due for yours. Responsibility cannot be apportioned simply by symmetrical suffering. Someone hurt may need explanation, contact, refusal, or even a clear statement from the other that the relationship will end. Such different needs must be discovered in conversation.

Respecting Setsuna’s decision is therefore not everything. If Haruki merely stands where he is, saying he accepts any length of waiting, she must still work everything out, say it clearly and cross the distance alone. To distinguish waiting from the old delay, he has to give her something to respond to within that waiting. The guitar later heard over the telephone gives this requirement a sound.

Hear Their Words and Watch Their Deeds — Analects, “Gongye Chang”#

Setsuna calls drunk, telling Haruki not to run away and not to come closer. She reproaches him and asks him to reproach her as he used to. He agrees to stay with her, then hangs up to switch to a landline with a speakerphone. During that break she panics, believing he has left again. Once reconnected, she hears that he will play the guitar.²⁹

Good intentions have not abolished the old misunderstanding. To him, hanging up means changing equipment; to her, it first resembles departure. He has already explained the change, yet she still fears he will not call again. Fear acquired over these days cannot dismiss itself the moment a reason is supplied.

The guitar playing is poor. Newly retrained fingers still make mistakes. As Setsuna listens, her voice softens and she eventually grows sleepy. Love and hatred remain unsorted; tonight, at least, an argument need not be what keeps the call alive. No finally correct sentence resolves the three years. They simply have another thing they can do together.

The next day, Setsuna asks to hear it again. Mistakes are acceptable, a little progress is acceptable; she wants to hear him every day. Haruki promises to call that evening.³⁰ The request is small and exact: not proof of eternal love or a guarantee against future hurt, but come back tomorrow after playing today. When tomorrow arrives, she will have something to await and recognize.

Here the new repetition and the old can be compared concretely. Earlier calls often moved from tenderness to testing, fear and withdrawal. This one contains fear too, but also an activity that does not require an immediate verdict on the relationship. It lets them spend tonight together and arrange the following night. Their responses begin changing their schedules instead of merely supplying another explanation for the existing distance.

Haruki really changes those schedules. He reduces his part-time jobs to what is necessary and frees up time. They also discuss call charges and look for a more suitable phone plan.³¹ These details especially deserve attention. If he has learned to face desire, here is the evidence: the same person skilled at organizing his life now makes room within it for another. His diligence need not disappear. Its direction changes.

This does not establish that every change is secure. Haruki still makes a joke that leads Setsuna to think she ranks second, and still wants her to return quickly to the singing he misses. She tells him that singing brings back one event after another from the school festival onward, eventually reaching betrayal and the airport. To keep herself from hating him, she had tried to stop singing.³²

“She lost her voice” sounds sad and readily turns her into an inert victim. Her own explanation is harder to bear: not singing was something she did to sustain her relationship with Haruki. It temporarily let her avoid certain memories while cutting away an old pleasure. The relationship preserved in this way was also supported by a part of herself she had given up.

His willingness to play now does not automatically make her able to sing. Nor can painstaking practice be exchanged for her appearance onstage. Later, he leaves the performance decision to her and says that if she has thought it through and still refuses, he will stop arguing and join her in apologizing to those concerned.³³ That goes further than “It’s your decision”: she need not bear the consequences of refusal alone. He still wants her to return to singing; desire has not departed. He begins to offer a way of jointly handling an answer that disappoints it.

This advance remains imperfect precisely because it must be repeated across many small events. One speakerphone call cannot redeem three years; one act of respect cannot guarantee freedom from pressure next time. But as the things they can do together increase, their answers depend less entirely on one decisive conversation. Through wrong notes, another try, answering and making arrangements, they can slowly become people able to keep talking.

Why Not Sing and Walk On Slowly? — Su Shi, “Calming the Waves”#

The Valentine’s Day performance is modest. Setsuna wears her own clothes rather than reproducing the old stage costume; Haruki has not been practicing guitar again for long. Before going on, she still says singing may revive the past and make her hate him. He accepts the risk and then lets her hear his guitar.³⁴

As a spectacle, the old school festival seems to return: a boy plays, a girl sings, an audience listens. Yet tonight is possible precisely because they have not recalled everything. Setsuna has already said she does not want to sing and has been given room to refuse. Haruki knows he cannot require her to remember only happiness, and still stands beside her. The old song reaches the present through different conversations.

Onstage, she tells the audience that the original group had three members and the other is overseas. Kazusa is thus not erased from their history. Nor must the two who remain first obtain permission from a remembered Kazusa before playing and singing. They take the stage tonight, offer the explanation and take responsibility for how they sound.³⁵

Setsuna publicly acknowledges three original members and one now absent. Both Haruki and the missing piano are outside this frame. PS3 gameplay frame: ©2012 AQUAPLUS / via xueyinhualuo, Bilibili.

Without a piano, the sound is naturally thinner. Haruki has only recently resumed guitar practice; Setsuna rehearses intensively shortly before the performance. Both have limited skills to rely on. What is missing need not be praised as a beauty nobler than completeness. It is first a condition they actually have tonight. Finishing the song with their available abilities turns “We can begin without being complete” from consolation into something they have done.

Setsuna also says that the band reunites today and may break up today. She herself wants to go on living with song. One evening’s ensemble is not forced into a promise of forever. The wish to keep singing reaches beyond the band’s name. She still wants to love Haruki, and she still wants to sing. Their coming days can finally hold both wishes.

We can now distinguish two forms of fidelity. One requires suffering today as proof that yesterday has not been taken lightly. The other allows change today while acknowledging that everyone involved yesterday really lived. The former readily counts how many years it has paid; the latter must hear how another person wants to answer now. At this point in Setsuna’s CC route, the latter fidelity acquires an unpracticed but audible voice.

It has not answered for the person far away. Later, in Strasbourg, the actual Kazusa calls Haruki’s name. An interview assignment then brings her back into his schedule.³⁶ Her return will confront his present understanding of the past with days another living person has lived herself. That is the business of the next essay.

For now, there is only a guitar and a singing voice onstage. Setsuna has said who is missing and what she still wants to do. The song is old. When she finishes it today, she wants to sing again.