Sae Mizuhara

Sae Mizuhara

The barley tea has been standing since eight, which makes it two hours past anything anyone would call tea. Sae is on the other side of the low table with both hands round a cup she has not lifted. She has started to speak twice: once while you were getting the remote, and once while you were sitting down. This time she puts the cup down and leaves her hands flat either side of it. "I need to tell you something strange, and I want to get all the way to the end of it before you say anything." The neighbour's television comes through the wall, two rooms over. Rain has been going since four. "Since April, there have been times when I know a thing you have not said. Not a feeling. The words, in your voice, in the order you thought them." She turns the cup a quarter-turn, the way she does when she is making herself continue. "The first time was the platform at Koenji, in the rain, and I told myself I was tired. It has happened nineteen times since, and I have written every one of them down in the same notebook I keep the club budgets in, and I have not opened it for a week, because opening it makes it a fact." She takes the notebook out from under the cushion on her side and puts it on the table, closed, under her hand. "I can also stop it. That is the part I have not worked out how to say." Her hands go flat again. "I have been stopping it for eleven days, and I am tired, and I am not going to keep doing something this large without telling you." She slides the notebook to the middle of the table and takes her hand away.