Choices: The Sequel to Weathering With You

Leaving the Island

Today was a day of celebration and mourning. All of this had happened on the island of Kozushima in March 2024.

This will be over soon, and then I can go home, my real home, in Tokyo.

Hodaka Morishima stood alone, a few steps away from the other mourners at Obasan Morishima's burial. It was raining, as it had always been since he prevented Hina's sacrifice two and a half years ago and the black-clad men and women held black umbrellas over their heads. They leaned on one another, the women weeping, sharing shelter and grief.

Hodaka had just come back from his high school graduation ceremony when he received the news. The gusts of wind within the rain blew stinging cold wet rivulets under the umbrella, down his neck, but he was unaware of them. He felt nothing, he was numbed by loss. But not the loss of his father's mother, but the loss of everyone he left behind in Tokyo. His grandmother, whom he had only known for a few special occasions was said to be the wisest woman on the island. But even though he didn't feel any emotional connection to her, he wanted to ask her if he made the right choice about running away and hurting his family emotionally. But since he never bothered to ask, he felt only misery.

This will be over soon, and then I can go find Hina. Maybe she can tell me.

"... ashes to ashes, dust to dust..."

The minister's voice penetrated the shell of numbness, the words registered.

Hodaka's head jerked to one side, denying the open grave, the plain pine box being lowered into it. There were small half circles sunk into the soft wood, marks of the hammers that had driven in the nails to close the lid above Oba-chan's gentle, loving, heart-shaped face that wrinkled over a hundred and four years of life.

Hodaka looked at the people surrounding the grave, and hot anger surged through him. None of them care about my problems as much as I myself do. Their lives are so simple and complacent it's making me sick, why else would I leave them and my parents? My father was the cause of my life's destruction and in spite of everything I did back in Tokyo, Hina is the only thing left of me in that wreckage. This awful day will be over soon and I can be away from here. Forever.

Hodaka lifted his chin, his teeth clenched to stop their chattering from the cold, to hold back the choking in his throat. His thoughts seem to be degenerating back to his 16-year-old self, before he returned home and saw his island in a different light. He had felt so chained down by his father and his school back then, but when he came back, home and school became natural places to live. He managed to suppress these thoughts, holding them back as he watched the pallbearers lower his grandmother into the wet and muddy earth. At this point, the rain would have filled up a tiny quarter of the grave.

His parents stood closest to the grave. His father, tall and thin and colorless, his pale dark hair now almost gray, his pale stricken face as empty as his staring, unseeing yellow eyes that he had passed on to his son. He stood erect, his stance a salute, the inheritance of his years as a man of good family and virtue. He stood motionless, without sensation or comprehension. His mother, holding the right side of his body stroked his hair and whispered sweet nothings into his ear. She looked like a tragic geisha, all in black. Her face was hidden by a veil and the wind gently blew against it.

It was his father who broke the solemnity.

"Okasan! Don't leave me! Don't leave me, Okasan!"

He was teetering on the edge of the grave, his wife struggling to pull him back up.

Hodaka may not have liked his father, even after he had softened up when he came home from his three-month getaway to Tokyo, but he couldn't bear to see him like this. Maybe at this phase of grief, he would be patient enough to hear his voice for a change.