A Thousand Bookmarks

What his sister left behind was a single notebook of thoughts on the anime she watched and the novels she read.

Minato Shinozaki, twenty-three. At the office where he is one year out of school, nothing is ever added to his score. Only mistakes are recorded, and the best day is the one on which nothing happened. He leaves after hours, takes the same train, walks the same street home. He has never once wondered what kind of trees are planted along that street. That was simply what the world was.

It has been a few months since Shiori, his sister, three years older, died in an accident. In life, she was the kind of person who talked eagerly at the dinner table about the anime she had watched. Minato always answered, “So what good does that do?” She never got angry. She would just smile, a little at a loss, and let the subject end. That is the face he finds himself remembering, over and over.

The notebook came out of her room. On the cover, a title in her handwriting — Viewing Log & Observation Diary — with the marks of two attempts at rewriting the “&”. Inside, records of what she had watched alternate with a diary in which she looked at the real world through the words she had found there. On the silence of the owner of a coffee shop. On the way people walk home from work. With words carried back out of stories, his sister had been looking at the ordinary.

He begins working through the titles the notebook names, one at a time. The reason is simple: if he watches what she watched, he might reach the view she was looking at. Watching becomes a duty that takes several hours out of every night. The productivity is zero. And still, the walk to work the next morning stops looking the way it looked the day before.

A landscape that used to be one flat color starts to separate out. The person waiting for someone at a bus stop, the senior colleague who is always irritated — he notices that each of them has circumstances that continue past where he had stopped looking. When a junior colleague is low, Minato borrows his sister's words and tries saying something. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it lands nowhere near. And every time he meets Akari, his sister's closest friend, he remembers there is something he still has not asked. Did she ever say anything about me. That one sentence, and it will not come out of his mouth.

And slowly, Minato comes to see it. The eyes he is looking at the world with are hers. Her words, her order, the direction she pointed. What is borrowed has to be given back eventually.

Was the time he spent on stories an escape from reality? Or was it preparation for loving that reality more deeply?

Can a brother reach the view his sister was looking at, using eyes of his own?