When it comes, the decision to retire is easier than she expected.
Minako has been thinking about this indirectly, casting grudging fearful thoughts in its direction, ever since she decided to go for a professional ballet career. She sometimes imagined a horrible on-stage injury, or some kind of obvious professional dwindling, with her director refusing to give her good parts and Minako tearfully pleading for at least a solo.
But she’s still at the top of her game. “You’re the heart of this company,” a fan tells her at the stage door. “What if we put someone other than Miss Okukawa on the poster?” asks the marketing director, with a wink, and even then she still goes on the front of the season brochures. “We might not have seen your best work yet,” says Imai-sensei, trying to be encouraging.
She’s thirty-eight, still dancing well and more famous than she’s ever been. Still, a lot of signs are pointing in the same direction. There haven’t been any catastrophic injuries, but the little ones are adding up: a weak ankle, a bad knee, tendons having problems in places she doesn’t remember hurting herself. The pain that she’s lived with since adolescence is maturing into a pain that slows her down. She takes supplements; she goes to the physical therapist and the massage provider; she listens to her joints crackling and wonders at what point the sound will be audible to her audiences. And she’s tired, spending less and less of her off days going to movies or writing to her friends or visiting her favorite parts of the city and more lying in hot baths. She slides down in the water, stares at the ceiling, and tries to figure out what it is she’s waiting for. For thirty years she’s spent most of her time waiting for the chance to get onstage; but now, with her time threatening to run out, she feels as if even during shows she’s waiting for something else to happen, like some train is coming to collect her and she doesn’t know when.
Can she really be thinking about leaving? Where will she go?
During the mid-season break in her ninth season with the Ishikawa Ballet, she makes a trip home, where she soaks in a proper onsen and talks to her mother about how she’s feeling. Minako’s mother has always been realistic: “I’m probably retiring in three years,” she says, “so if you want to beat me to the punch you had better act fast.”
“What would I do?” Minako whines, resting her head on her arms on the side of the pool. “I only know the one thing.”
“That’s not really true,” her mother says. “You speak good English, you teach sometimes, you have friends all over the world, you know a ridiculous amount about music.”
Minako snorts. “Teaching sometimes isn’t that impressive—it’s just an occasional guest lesson.”
“Everyone starts somewhere. You could teach in your company, even. Have you thought about that?”
“I talked to Ishikawa about it.” She turns to rest her back against the stone and looks over at her mother. “Or, I brought it up. Kind of. But he doesn’t want me to.”
“Did he actually say that?”
“Oh, mama, what hasn’t he said? His ego still can’t handle me. He made some comment about how a ballet master has to think about everyone and not just himself, and it was all I could do not to strangle him. Like he didn’t name the whole company after himself! I’m so tired of him, honestly. Anyway I think he’s still sore about the, you know. The soulmate thing.”
He and Reina are still playing happy-soulmates for the public, despite the fact that everyone notices how put-on it is, how they cling in public and spring apart in smaller groups. It’s too boring to be scandalous, and nobody really cares about it anymore. She’s glad she didn’t get scared into making up a fake soulmate or something, back when she was worried about what people thought of her. Too much work by far. Those two should drop the act and give each other some space.
But they didn’t ask her opinion, like usual. Just posed her in place, the tragically unmatched ballerina, and pretended she hadn’t exceeded Eiji’s accomplishments three times over: guested at all the major companies in Europe, done her own off-season tour in America, taught master classes in Korea and India and the Philippines that strengthened the connections within the Asian ballet community. No wonder she’s tired.
“Well,” her mother says, “you’d better make up your mind quick. Even a star can’t afford to live in Tokyo for long without a job.”
“No,” Minako says, closing her eyes. She takes a breath, a second, a third, and says, “I’m thinking of moving back here.”
There’s a silence, and Minako holds still for it, doesn’t open her eyes until a minute has passed and she finally cracks. It’s hard to be composed about her mama. She forgets that, but it’s one of the reasons she likes coming home.
“I’m okay, you know,” her mother says. She’s looking down at the water and seems a little embarrassed. “I’m not old yet, and I see your father a few times a week, so it’s not like—”
“Oh, I wasn’t—I mean.” Minako blushes because of course she was thinking that it would be good to be closer to her parents when they came to need her, and that they would need her more because of their rocky relationship with one another. “I know you’re not old—probably your joints are in better shape than mine. But I think it would be better. I’m not going into retreat or anything, but I need a home base. I’d like it to be at home.”
“Hmm.” Her mother abruptly gets out of the water and gets her towel. “Let’s get a coffee. The onsen is fine for imagining things but you need to think practically.”
“I am thinking practically!” Minako objects, but she lets herself be helped out of the water, and when they are both dressed they sit at a table in the onsen’s café and talk about teaching. Minako has plenty of friends and contacts at the studios and ballet schools, and any of them could get her a job. But if she wants, as she thinks she does, to stop asking anyone else for things and hang out her own shingle, then she’d better do it somewhere cheaper than Tokyo.
“You could move to Fukuoka or Saga, if you want to be closer to home,” her mother says. “You’d probably get more students there.”
“Sure, but I don’t know anyone there. I’m tired of starting over in a new place. I’d rather start over somewhere familiar.”
“Hasetsu’s changed, you know. It’s not like you can pick up where you left off when you were thirteen.”
“No, of course not. But everywhere else is changing too.”
“Okay.” Her mother seems happier about this plan now that she’s convinced it isn’t all about her. “If you really want to, I’ll help you figure it out. It would be good to have you home.”
Minako’s last performance with the Ishikawa Ballet is beautiful, and the curtain call is filled with roses. By the third time Eiji cracks a joke about getting rid of his biggest competition, she’s simultaneously so happy to be leaving and so heartbroken to be retiring that she could cry. She doesn’t. She acts humbled and grateful and honored instead, bowing and shaking hands and flinging her arms at the company and the orchestra pit to direct the applause in their direction and then taking another bow.
She takes a whole month to rest, pack up her apartment, and say goodbye to important people individually, and she carries herself through the whole process like the professional she is. When she boards her flight to Fukuoka she impulsively orders a vodka tonic from the flight attendant and finally lets go of her relieved, confused, spiteful, triumphant tears. She cries for almost the entire flight.
When they’re almost there she dashes into the airplane bathroom to wipe down her face with a makeup cleanser. She’s steady as she guides herself from the plane to the baggage claim to the train station to the train to the depot in Hasetsu, where both of her parents are waiting to greet her, and Minako smiles at them with a bare face and clear eyes.
Without morning class, without rehearsals and a season, her days seem to relax like worn-out elastic.
Minako is still working for a living—she’s setting up a new business, so she has a lot to worry about. She needs a place to live, and a place to teach, and she needs to advertise and find students. A lot of her primary school classmates are still around town, and they want to see her. There’s a whole life here to be built from scratch. But none of that work lives in her body the way dance does. She stretches in the mornings and at night, and she’s going to have to find a massage therapist here, but she doesn’t have to get up every day and do things that aggravate her injuries. The physical ease of it is luxurious. For the first week in Hasetsu she keeps looking around for the thing she must be forgetting, the item she hasn’t crossed off her to-do list. Every time, the itch she’s feeling is just the fact that she hasn’t been to class. She makes her appointments with realtors and bankers, spends peaceful hours at the copy shop running off fliers about her new studio, and still has time on her hands in the evenings to do whatever she chooses.
And all right, it’s possible that she starts drinking more than she used to, now that she isn’t performing anymore. But it’s so easy to go to Yutopia Katsuki, sit on the floor of their dining room with a bottle of soju, watch whatever is on the TV, and talk in Kyushu dialect to whoever is there. In Hasetsu, members of her parent’s generation recognize her less because of ballet than because her father drew up their wills or her mother sold them a house. They’re entertained when she tells them about the places where she has lived, but they don’t care about any of the people she met and worked with.
Minako used to think the world as seen from this little city was awfully small, but there’s a lot going on. Much more than preparing pointe shoes and rehearsing and performing and doing it again; more, even, than listening to new music and creating new dances and traveling to other cities where she did the same thing. Minako is a little abashed to realize what full lives people can have without ever thinking about professional dance. Ballet used to feel so significant to the overall direction of the culture. But here in Hasetsu, what matters is the number of customers at the onsens (healthy, but never so good that people stop worrying about it) and what’s showing at the cinema and whether the fishing has been any good lately and who people are voting for and why their neighbors are idiots for voting the way they are and how their children are growing up.
Hiroko’s children, for example. She has a girl named Mari, almost eighteen already, who works at the onsen with a serious look on her face and is otherwise very private. And she has an eleven-year-old son named Yuuri.
Katsuki Yuuri is one of the first people to see Minako’s studio after she signs the lease, before she’s put in any of the barres and mirrors that will turn an empty office into a ballet classroom. He must have learned from his mother where the studio is going to be, because he starts passing by it on his way home from school and coming right in without being invited. “I’d like to take lessons from you, Okukawa-sensei,” he tells her on his first visit, and she’s helplessly charmed and ruffles his hair and tells him that she’d be very happy to have him in her classes when they start in the fall. He doesn’t come every day, and in any case she isn’t always there, but at least once or twice a week she sees him walk into her studio with his little backpack on, looking curiously around.
“Stay away from the mirrors!” she says the first time—they’re still in their cardboard frames, leaning against one wall, and she has a brief and terrible vision of the whole stack tumbling over onto Yuuri. He says, “I will,” and keeps puttering around the room, poking his nose into corners. Once he finds a spirit level in the studio and asks her what it is. When she explains that it shows whether things are straight and flat, he goes around the room placing it on top of things. “It’s straight!” he announces, when he puts the level on top of a barre. “Good,” Minako says, amused, “it just got screwed in.” She’s starting to wonder if she should call his mother when he puts the level down and says, “Okay, thank you!” and leaves.
When the fall comes, Yuuri starts in her beginner class along with six-year-old girls. He doesn’t seem self-conscious about sticking out, just focuses on himself. He likes to show up to class early, sometimes so early that Minako suspects he is skipping school. But when she comments on it he says, “I had a free period,” and she chooses to believe him. (If he starts arriving any earlier she’ll tell Hiroko, she thinks; but he doesn’t, so she doesn’t.)
He wears long-sleeved leotards to class and covers them up with baggy sweatshirts as soon as the students are dismissed, so it takes a few months before Minako notices that he doesn’t have a soulmark.
She isn’t going to say anything about it. Yuuri must certainly have plenty of adults in his life who have talked to him about it, and he’s such a shy boy that he must hate trying to respond. But she hadn’t reckoned on Hiroko actually raising the subject at Yutopia one night, settling down next to Minako at her table without asking permission, cradling a cup of tea in her hands.
She starts discreetly: “What do you think about Yuuri?”
Minako thinks about what the question might mean, and she tries the safest option first: “It’s hard to say how he will advance as a dancer, but he’s making a good start. I know people say you have to start as a small child, but that’s not always true. He’s flexible and strong and I think he likes it.”
“Yes, I know he likes it,” Hiroko says. “Do you think it’s good for him, though? He’s a very emotional boy.”
“I,” says Minako, a little taken aback. She pushes her hair behind her ears and thinks about it. “I don’t know a lot about children. Ballet was good for me, at that age. But I was—well, I was different, you know. And I needed something to be good at.”
This is about as directly as she is willing to speak about her solo status when she hasn’t started drinking yet, but it gives Hiroko the opportunity to sigh, setting her tea down on the table, and say, “I think that he’s an empath.”
Minako takes a moment to adjust her understanding of the situation. She thinks about the boy in her ballet classes—about the way he shows up early and stays late, how he stares at himself in the mirror while practicing at the barre, how hard he tries. She wonders if those traits properly belong to Yuuri, or if they’re ways for him to cope with feeling a soulmate’s emotions alongside his own. She says, “Oh.”
“He’s an emotional boy, like I said, but it’s more than that—he feels things all the time for no reason.”
“Children do that, I hear.”
“Yes, but…he’s fighting a war with himself all the time. When he gets excited about things, he can’t get too excited or he gets...frenzied, and then exhausted. He cries out of nowhere; he gets these random bursts of energy at strange times of the day. He can almost never answer questions about how he’s feeling. I know there’s no way to be sure whether it’s a soulmate connection or his own emotions, but I’m worried about how to help him.”
“I don’t know, really,” Minako says. “Maybe it is empathy, maybe it’s just him. But he doesn’t seem moody or troubled in class, from what I can tell. I think it’s good for any child to practice something that they really have to focus on.”
Hiroko nods, looking thoughtful and a little distracted. “You remember me and Toshiya, right? We knew since we were small, and it was simple. I thought it would be like that for my children, but it’s not. Do you know, Mari’s met her soulmate and she won’t even tell us who it is? She says she’ll let us know when we need to. It makes me feel very old.”
Minako glances at Mari, who’s doing something behind the bar and is probably within earshot. Mari looks back with a dry expression as if she knows she is being talked about, but she doesn’t pause in her work. Minako does not really understand how this onsen works. Everyone in the family works at a different pace from the rest: Hiroko pushes steadily on at a task for hours at a time before sitting down with an oof, Toshiya constantly putters in circles through the whole inn and picks up whatever needs doing as if nothing is urgent, and Mari enters a room and puts on a burst of activity before leaving again. They’re much less orderly than the other onsens in town, which are mostly indistinguishable to Minako, but they seem to make it work.
She asks Hiroko, “What is it you wanted to ask me about Yuuri?”
Hiroko nods, thinking. “Can you keep an eye on him for me? Let me know if he’s having trouble? I don’t want him to keep doing something that will make him upset. Or make his soulmate upset, I don’t know.”
“I think,” says Minako, “that it’s good for him. And if it’s good for him, I don’t know why it should make his soulmate upset. But even if it does, that’s their problem.”
“It’s Yuuri’s problem, too, if I’m right.”
“I know,” says Minako, even though she doesn’t know anything here—she’s guessing, really. “I’m sure it isn’t simple, but all we can really do is take care of Yuuri and help him learn. Even if he’s an empath, his soulmate is just…a stranger, somewhere. I think probably we should focus on the child we know.”
When she says that, it feels like a guess, or at most a suggestion; but over the year that follows, it will take on the nature of a vow. Help the child you know, she thinks, as she opens the door on the morning of a school holiday to see Yuuri, with his dance bag, asking meekly if he can come in and practice. She thinks it as she follows him into the studio and sits on the floor with her back against one of the mirrors: “Ignore me,” she tells him, feeling like she shouldn’t leave him unattended but suspecting he doesn’t want a teacher right now. She thinks about her dance studio and wonders if business will be steady enough to support her, or if she should be considering ways to diversify her income.
After ten minutes of diligent stretching and barre exercises in silence, Yuuri casts her a doubtful glance and asks if he is doing his port-de-bras right. She gives him a small piece of advice, and he turns back to the mirror and tries it. Minako watches him for a little while, and then she slips out of the room and to get her business ledger and latest bank statement out of her office, and she spends the next half hour quietly reconciling her checkbook while keeping one eye on Yuuri.
He’s a sweet kid. Maybe he’s struggling with something, maybe there’s some other reason he wanted to be here, but maybe not. She’s trying not to crowd him or make him feel watched, but she can’t help smiling when she looks up to see him brushing one pointed foot along the floor while humming under his breath.
When he’s been there for almost three quarters of an hour, he seems to run out of things to practice. He stands at the barre for a while staring at himself in the mirror, casting momentary glances her way, and finally says, “I think I’m going to go home, Okukawa-sensei.”
She looks up from her accounts and tells him, “Okay. Can you get home by yourself all right?”
“Yes.” He looks at his feet. “I can walk. I walked here.”
She nods and lets him go, and once he’s gone she calls ahead to the onsen to let his parents know that he’s on his way home. Probably she should have called earlier, but she didn’t think of it then.
She still watches figure skating sometimes—meaning, when it comes on the TV—meaning, in Olympic years, mostly. But Japan has a promising ladies’ singles skater in the World Championships that year, and Minako has an evening free, so she is in front of the television at Yutopia Katsuki when the highlights of the competition are broadcast, and they all get to watch together as Arakawa Shizuka lands seven clean triple jumps and a world title.
Minako still finds skating disappointing a lot of the time. As a ballerina she’s looking for the kind of innovation and expression that athletes can’t often deliver. But going a long time without seeing any kind of dance feels like starving, so she takes what she can get. Yuuri is sitting at one of the tables, purportedly doing his homework where his parents can keep an eye on him while they work. Minako prods him in the side to point out what Arakawa is doing on the screen, gliding sideways with one foot in front of the other and her entire torso bent way backwards as if she’s trying to put her head down on the ice. “Her feet are in fourth position,” Minako says. “See how good her flexibility is?”
Yuuri says, politely, “The TV people said it was called an Ina Bauer.”
“Right!” She’s pleased that he was paying such good attention, even if she forgot that term. “That’s what it’s called in figure skating. It was fourth position first.”
They’re talking over the performance, and a part of Minako wants to quiet down and watch, but she’s happy to be connecting with Yuuri. “You could try this!” she tells him. “Men do it too. Hasetsu has a rink!” She’s excited by this idea, but Yuuri doesn’t seem to be listening. He watches closely as Arakawa finishes her program, collects her flowers, leaves the ice and gets a bear hug from her coach, a blond Russian woman in an enormous coat. Minako’s seen her on TV before—Tatiana Tarasova, a kind of mother hen to half the Russian skaters and some of the best non-Russian ones too. Minako looks sidelong at Yuuri and imagines greeting him with a hug as he finishes a routine, but the idea almost makes her laugh. He’s a reserved little boy who likes his personal space.
It occurs to Minako that she hasn’t touched other people much since she came home. Is it a relief to be home, far from the constant closeness of a professional company and the showy intimacy of Europeans, or is she feeling a little touch-starved? She wonders this for a moment and then files the question away to think about later. Right now she’s with her student, and he might need something.
Maybe he needs someone to shove him in the direction of things he might want until he admits that he wants them. Minako always performed that service for herself, but not all children are so self-sufficient. “Hey,” she says. “They have open skate at the Ice Castle all the time. Every week at least. We could try it together. Do you want to go?”
Yuuri looks at her with a serious expression and blinks his enormous eyes a few times. “Okay,” he says. “Maybe. I’ll try. Okay.”
When they go, he takes to the ice slowly, thoughtfully, and he falls down very soon. But he’s low to the ground and bounces back easily. He soon figures out that it’s easier to stay upright if he moves faster. Forgetting his manners, he dashes ahead of Minako to collide head-on with a girl about his age wearing a ribbon in her hair, and they both crash to the ice.
“Ouch!” the girl cries, rubbing her arm where Yuuri headbutted her.
“Sorry,” Yuuri mutters, trying to get up. His feet keep slipping out from underneath him until he falls back on his tailbone with an even harder impact than the first one. Minako skates over to him, unsteadily, and helps by bracing one hand against the boards at the edge of the rink and extending the other to Yuuri. He gets up, bows rapidly to the girl, and skates off again.
“Look where you’re going!” Minako calls after him, and she issues her own apology to the girl and skates off after him. Was that sufficient? How much do you need to apologize to a child after she falls down? Children do fall down a lot; probably it is fine.
For years afterward Minako will remember this day every time she sees Yuuko around the ice rink and will try to remember if that was the girl Yuuri ran into; but every time, she has to admit that she didn’t get a good look at that girl.
Yuuri likes it enough that he enrolls in the beginners’ figure skating class, and then he makes such rapid progress that he’s bumped up to the class Yuuko is in, even though she grew up at the ice rink and is two years older. From that point on she is the closest friend Yuuri has, the only one he ever mentions to Minako, and Minako toys with the notion of their being soulmates but doesn’t say anything about it out loud. (At least, not when she’s sober. She has a faint memory of saying something about it to Hiroko, one night over so many bottles of Sapporo she’s lost count, and Hiroko pursing her lips and looking mysterious about it; but maybe that was a dream.) Some part of her hopes that those two are going to turn out to be a match, and then she can stop waking up in the middle of the night wondering how she can mentor a child through not having a soulmate when she still doesn’t know how she’s pulling it off herself—or worse, how to mentor an empath through the storms of adolescence with someone else’s emotions pouring in from an unknown source.
“You can take time off,” she tells him one afternoon when he’s early again, warming up at the barre before class, scrutinizing his own form in the mirror. “You don’t have to perform all the time.” She remembers feeling relieved when her first teacher said this to her. Yuuri looks at her briefly in the mirror and says, “I know,” and carries on.
She wonders if it’s counterproductive for her to show up at Yutopia, if she’s intruding on his down time. But half the time she doesn’t even see him there, and she likes seeing Hiroko, so she keeps going.
Yuuri is twelve years old the first time she sees him watching Victor Nikiforov skate. It’s afternoon at Yutopia, and the television is showing some kind of skating recap, filling viewers in on a junior-level competition that didn’t get properly aired. The announcers keep talking over the program, but Yuuri is transfixed.
“Victor is my favorite,” he informs her. “He won junior worlds with the highest score in history.”
“That doesn’t mean much, does it?” she says. “They just changed the judging system a couple years ago. It’s not like you can compare his scores to Brian Boitano.”
Yuuri furrows his brow a little, as if he doesn’t understand what she’s saying, and keeps watching the television. She knows what it is like to love a performance, but there’s something more than that in the way Yuuri draws in his breath before every jump, the way he lets it out and clenches both his fists every time Victor lands steady and sure and opens into a spread eagle. Victor skates like a kid—he’s bouncy, cheerful, more flexible than he is graceful—but he’s got a pretty good handle on maintaining a serene face while doing hard work. And Yuuri has sweat standing on his brow as if he’s the one under the spotlight. He cares incredibly much. More, perhaps, than the performance itself can account for.
Minako manages, with some effort, to refrain from teasing. Instead she says to Yuuri, “If you make it to worlds, you could skate on the same ice as him.” Yuuri looks startled, like he forgot she was there, and says, “That’s what I’m going to do.”
Of course, it’s a long time coming. Yuuri starts fighting harder, placing higher. Victor graduates to seniors the next year, so they’re never at the same competitions, but Yuuri travels to the closer Junior Grand Prix competitions and makes third alternate to the final, and then he makes first alternate to Junior Worlds, and he grows into a tall boy with a real skating coach, contemplating his move to seniors. He stays in Minako’s ballet classes and he’s the most advanced student there; she suggests private tutoring but he’s too thrifty to pay the extra tuition, and as much as she would like to cut him a deal, she can’t actually afford it. Hasetsu is struggling lately, and ballet classes are a luxury product for middle-class parents. She’s already running a snack bar as well as her studio. Sometimes Yuuri shows up there at closing time, well after he should be asleep, and asks her if she’ll go with him to the rink.
She is touched that he trusts her to watch over him like this. (Part of her wonders if he asks her because she’s the only adult he knows who stays up late.) His coach is a middle-aged man in Saga named Matsuo whom he sees a couple times a week, and it seems like their relationship is functional but minimalistic. Most of the city is tucked into bed by the time she chases the recalcitrant final customers from her snack bar and wipes down the counters. She and Yuuri walk down quiet streets to the ice rink, where she lets them both in with the key that the manager agreed to give out only if an adult would keep it, and she watches Yuuri skate figures and practice jumps and try again, again, again.
Minako has never had someone need her this way, or this much. Not one particular person. She can’t remember ever having that kind of need, either; she depended on her mother and her teachers to fulfill those roles. She never sought out another adult because she was missing something, never thought of leaving her home late at night to go ask someone for help. She’s touched that Yuuri is willing to ask her for this, and at the same time it makes her nervous that she won’t be able to live up to it. These days she feels at ease in her classroom, but everything else she does for this delicate firecracker of a child—staying up late, learning a whole new vocabulary of leg wraps and muscled jumps, putting a positive spin on his competitive results—feels like something she might mess up at any moment.
Patterns have a way of repeating themselves. Minako used to bite her lip, painfully embarrassed, when her first teacher talked to her about her weight, or when an instructor lectured the class about good dietary habits and she heard accusation in their voice, or even if she was at her goal performing size and the ballet master was just reminding her to eat lean protein and refrain from alcohol. She thought she might do better once she got some authority herself, but in fact she does much worse. Now that she is a teacher herself she hears herself talking to her students about their weight with the same sharp and pitiless reprimand in her voice. You do what you’ve learned how to do. It’s possible she’s never learned how to be, never even seen an example of, the kind of teacher Yuuri needs.
Still, she is who he is, so she does her best. And fortunately, although she has become Yuuri’s chief support apart from family, he isn’t hers. She’s been putting in the work to rekindle old friendships, and she’s gradually finding out what kind of person she is without the strictures of a ballet career.
For a while she becomes a little boy-crazy, mostly making off-color remarks about movie stars to make her friends laugh, picking up momentary crushes that are mostly for show and then discarding them again. As a dancer she indulged in a show of flirtation every once in a while, but always just a show, staged against the backdrop of her unmatched status and her devotion to her career, never crossing a line into anything scandalous. Nowadays she’s falling into an odd, comfortable pattern with her friends in Hasetsu. They’ve long since learned not to act sorry for her and instead point out every attractive man they see, making salacious jokes to Minako about how she might corrupt them.
In the past, conversations like these seemed so dangerous. She recalls the trepidation with which she invited Martin from Aix-en-Provence up to her apartment in Paris, the way they didn’t end up doing anything together, the odd buoyancy she felt when he left. Such tiny things to have so much importance in her memory.
But now that she’s home, her friends all assume she had daring romantic exploits while abroad. Everyone knows, after all, that Westerners don’t take soulmates as seriously. (That is and isn’t true; Westerners could make the same claim about the Japanese, and they would also be both right and wrong simultaneously; she doesn’t try to explain.) It always seemed like an affair would be more work than it was worth, but there’s a freedom in letting everyone assume she’s already had several of them. There’s nothing to prove, so she relaxes into the role. Someone asks her about Eiji and his supposed wild days in Europe, and Minako says truthfully, “We worked on one or two mutual projects.” She tosses off the phrase mutual projects with an affected airiness and raises her eyebrows as if it means more than it does. The conversation moves on with a laugh. There’s nothing to deny and nothing to prove; she finds, for once, a treasurable privacy in the fact that no one is sure what she’s about.
Yuuri is sixteen when he lingers at the end of a ballet class and asks, “Can I talk to you about something?”
“Of course,” Minako says. She goes through her post-class routine of shutting off the CD player, seeing off the other students, and putting away her attendance sheets and lesson plans, and then she waves Yuuri back to the corner of her studio that she treats as an office.
“What’s up?” she says, plopping into her rolling chair.
Yuuri looks down and brushes his hands against his dance clothes as if trying to dust himself off. He doesn’t seem to want to sit down. Or to tell her what he wanted to talk about.
“Okay,” Minako says. “Is it about ballet?”
“Not really,” he says.
“Is it about skating?”
“Yes.”
“Did something happen?”
“No, stop—stop prompting me.” He takes a deep breath and looks her in the eye. “I want to find a new coach. A real—I mean. A more advanced coach. And I think I’ll have to move away. Maybe really far.”
Minako nods, giving him a minute in case he wants to explain further. “Okay. Do you want me to help, or did you just want to talk to me about it?”
“A little of both?” He finally sits down. She almost never has actual meetings here, so the other chair is a straight-backed wooden one that teeters a little. Yuuri perches on it with his head held high like he’s balancing on a beam. He might be a nervous kid, but after six years of ballet with her he’s good at acting physically confident at all times. “I’ve talked to Matsuo-sensei—I mean, he kind of talked about it to me first. He doesn’t coach many seniors and if I…he can’t travel much, so…”
“If you do more international competitions he can’t go with you,” Minako finishes.
“Right. And he thinks it’s time, and I…agree.” He’s having a hard time with this. Minako can only imagine how difficult it was having the earlier conversation with his coach.
“Yuuri,” she says—as gently as she can, which is not very—“I think it would be wonderful for you to have a coach who can travel with you. To Europe and North America and the Grand Prix Series and Worlds. I think you should compete in and win all those things. How can I help?”
He smiles at her, nervous and grateful. His ambition seems to cost him so much, emotionally, that sometimes Minako wonders whether it’s his own or if he’s getting it over his soulmate connection. But right now he’s all Yuuri, entirely Hiroko’s brave little boy. He takes in a deep breath and says, “I can get help from Matsuo-sensei on making a reel, and trying out with coaches, but could I talk to you about it too? To have a second opinion? And I mean, you’re the only person I know who ever moved abroad, so it would help if I could talk to you about that.”
“I’m happy to help,” she says, but she feels a little melancholy as she realizes this is an end to one more chapter of her life, coming sooner than she expected.
Yuuri is gone for five years, and that’s not as long a time as it used to be. Hasetsu shrinks a little; the onsens close up shop, one by one, until only Yutopia Katsuki is left. Minako increasingly relies upon her snack bar for income, with the dance studio becoming something of a side gig. The advantage of the snack bar is that she sees a lot of people, and that’s nice. She’s embedded in this community, and it’s not exactly idyllic, but it’s peaceful. She answers only to herself, and she has friends when she needs them. She works hard, comes home tired, and sleeps well.
When Yuuri calls home heartbroken from his first Grand Prix Final, Minako is surprised. She thought he was doing well, or well enough not to sob like that about one competition. When he announces he’s leaving Celestino and coming home, she worries. When the first thing he does upon arriving home is go to the rink and skate one of Victor’s routines, though, she remembers asking herself if those two could possibly be soulmates, and when Victor barges into town within a week she’s certain she was right.
Minako likes Victor. In truth she’s done her fair share of fawning over him onscreen when she’s had too much to drink. But when they’re in the same room she keeps that under her hat and enjoys observing him. He’s so enchanted by everything Hasetsu has to offer that he seems like a small child, except for the moments when his fatigue shows through and she recognizes how his sport has aged him. Skating is even crueler than ballet in that respect; he’s ten years younger than she was when she retired, yet he’s the elder statesman of men’s skating.
When he comes around to her snack bar she’s surprised, until it becomes obvious that he was looking for Yuuri. “If someone told you he was at my place, they meant my dance studio,” she explains. “He likes to practice late at night. Sometimes he goes to the rink then. I usually go with him.” She says this in present tense even though Yuuri hasn’t needed her to go with him to the rink for a long time.
Victor looks forlorn. “We danced together, you know. The first time we met. I thought it meant something but I don’t think he thought so, if he keeps sneaking off to dance alone.”
“He’s always done that. It’s got nothing to do with you.”
“No, of course it doesn’t.” Victor sighs dramatically, blowing the hair off his forehead, and looks at her sideways. “Did he ever…well.”
“What?”
“Are you…I mean, I’ve heard about you before.”
He’s struggling to say something, and Minako takes a guess: “Are you trying to ask me a question about soulmates?”
He smiles nervously. “That would be rude!”
“Yes, it would.” She’d like to help him and Yuuri be happy, and happy together if that’s what should happen, but she’s had enough of that kind of question. “We can talk about teaching Yuuri, but if you have something else to sort out you should talk to him about it.”
“Teaching,” Victor mutters glumly, but he takes himself away to the ice rink.
She does wonder what he was going to ask, even though she didn’t want him to ask it. Victor has the recognizable habits of someone who was starting to believe he was alone. He clings to Yuuri like a leech, leans against him at dinners or while watching skating videos, talks about him all the time. To listen to him, you’d never know that Victor was a world-record-holding athlete; he seems like an enamored child. He sounds, in fact, a little like Yuuri used to sound when talking about Victor.
Yuuri on the other hand seems rattled, nervous, especially when Yuri Plisetsky shows up out of nowhere and they set up an impromptu competition between them. Minako thinks this is great: competitive skating in Hasetsu! A real performance, an event! It’s like something out of her old life, but assembled by the people she loves, in her hometown. She takes Yuuko’s triplets around town to put up posters and acts so cheerful about the whole thing that Yuuri only barely looks nervous around her, only sometimes lets his facade crack. “This is a good thing, Yuuri,” she tells him. “You need to compete again, and now you get to do it on home turf! With all your family and friends there to support you!”
“Right,” he says, “with everybody I know watching.” He closes his eyes, blows air out of his mouth and looks a little sick.
He wears that expression more or less constantly until the night before the competition. When he knocks on Minako’s door, she pauses in the middle of writing an email to Defne, gets up from the couch and finds Yuuri standing there bright-eyed and inspired, asking her to teach him how to move like a woman.
“What?” she says, leaning against her doorframe.
“I know what I need to do to make this performance surprising!”
She’s tempted to argue with him. He’s already a more mature skater than Plisetsky, plus it’s late. Sleep might serve him better than revising his whole on-ice gender presentation. But he came to her with this question, not anyone else. She won’t let him down.
Yuuri explains the story he’s been seeing in his short program: a playboy comes to town—“What town?” Minako interrupts. Yuuri seems confused. “Is this a Japanese story, the way you’re telling it?” she asks. “Because it matters what kind of love affair these characters think is possible.”
“Oh. I was picturing it in Spain, maybe? The music sounds Spanish to me.”
“Okay. You’re imagining a Western bond-breaker, someone who doesn’t pay attention to soulmarks and tempts people into falling in love with him. A Don Juan type.”
“I guess so.”
“Remember that’s a fairy tale, but keep going.”
“I thought I was supposed to be him,” he says, blushing a little but rushing onward. “But that’s not who I am. I should be playing the beautiful woman. That’s how I’m going to surprise Victor.”
“Why?” Minako asks. They’re up in her studio now, and she’s stretching, bent over double with her palms on the floor. She straightens up and tilts her head at him. “Why do you think you’re the woman?”
Yuuri purses his lips. “I think…I don’t want to be aggressive.”
“Why not?”
“It’s not how I act; I don’t know how to do it.”
“You’re a performer, Yuuri. You can play a character that’s not like you.”
“Right, but—well, I tried being like that, and it felt wrong. Like, awkward and choppy.”
Things start to make sense. “I see. It’s not just the character, it’s the physical way you imagine that character should be expressed. You think he should be aggressively forward, move sharply?”
Yuuri blushes deeper. “Maybe.”
“But that messes with your skating, doesn’t it? You’re good at being smooth and connected, so this plays against your strengths.”
“…Yeah,” Yuuri says, thoughtful. He puts one leg up on the barre and bends his torso over it, straight-backed, while he thinks. When he comes up he says, “I do think it’s more than that. I can’t see or feel the character. When I think about the woman I know how she feels.”
Of course Yuuri, gentle Yuuri with no soulmark but someone else’s feelings rattling around in his head, identifies less with the playboy—the unfaithful, the bond-breaker—than he does with the woman waiting to find her match, entertaining the idea that this might be the one, only to be abandoned. For a moment Minako feels terribly sad. She’s seen this program, and she didn’t see the “woman gets cast aside” ending in it until Yuuri described it to her that way. She’s worried that he’s thinking too much about abandonment.
But this story is still in progress, and Yuuri has come to her for help changing its ending. Victor doesn’t have to abandon him, not if Yuuri skates in a way that convinces him to stay. That shouldn’t require much.
“So, there’s moving like a woman who does Spanish dances in some town square,” she says. “And there’s moving like a ballerina, and there’s moving like a ladies’ figure skater. Those are all different. You’re probably not going to throw in a ladies’ skating move like a spiral, but the good news is you already have good flexibility. Remember Shizuka with her layback Ina Bauer?”
“Of course.”
“Think about that. Even if you can’t throw one into the choreography.”
They go through examples like that: throw your arms over your head like a ballerina who’s just fallen backwards into her partner’s arms, or swoosh them out like you’re holding a full skirt and flinging it around, or try this gesture—she stands in front of him and has him mirror her as she runs her hands down her sides. She remembers doing this at the beginning of a solo sometime with the Ishikawa Ballet, pretending to check her position in space when she already knew the answer, telling the audience, here I am. This is what you get.
They work together for an hour. She watches Yuuri whittle out all the parts of the program that don’t suit his purpose. He’s still going to act decisive, enamored, sexy. But this way he doesn’t have to chase, so he can glide backwards as the object of pursuit while preparing for a jump. The triple axel will be like a decision point, the one forward jump that propels him into the rest of the program, entering into this affair that promises to end as soon as it began. He tries out a lot of added small gestures like passing a hand over his hair, or holding it momentarily in front of his face as if he’s hiding behind a fan, or brushing it casually over a part of his body to draw attention to it. He makes himself asymmetrical and half-turned away. Minako isn’t sure what to call half of these small moves, but if they make Yuuri feel feminine, if he can connect to the program this way, then it’s worth it.
The next day Yuuri wins decisively. It’s not just that he has more “feeling” or “maturity” than Plisetsky, though the spectators immediately talk about it that way; his basic skating skills are some of the best in the world. Working with Celestino Cialdini was obviously a good decision. He moves on deep, fast, quiet edges, gets low into his spins, and has a way of changing direction swiftly on one foot that makes Minako’s breath catch. He incorporates last night’s lesson smoothly, as confidently flirtatious as if he’d slept for eight hours and not, at most, four. He’s always been so resilient. She finds him afterward to give him a hug and exclaim over his performance, and for once it seems like he’s able to accept the compliment.
Yuri Plisetsky leaves. Victor stays. Minako expects things to go more smoothly from then on, but it’s not long before Yuuri is in her studio alone again, working through something he won’t explain. Empathic soulmates are supposed to know one another’s hearts without speaking. But it seems that for an anxious pair of habitual non-communicators, this mostly means that they come a hair closer to telling each other the truth than they do with the rest of the world. Yuuri insults his own skating sometimes and Victor feels wounded that his coaching hasn’t improved Yuuri’s self-esteem; Victor mentions his home and Yuuri decides he must be going back there soon.
Minako hears about these things in late night practice sessions, or in text messages from Yuuri, who apparently considers her a safe confidante. Minako responds to these texts with full, punctuated sentences with no emojis. She tells him, “That sounds hard.” Or she applies logic to the situation: “It sounds like he doesn’t believe you when you tell him what you need.” But she doesn’t give advice. This is probably the reason Yuuri confides in her.
After Yuuri and Victor throw the skating world into an uproar with their kiss in China, it seems like they have gotten onto the same page about their relationship, which is a relief—it’s frankly a little weird of Victor to hang around his soulmate acting like his employee. But then it all goes south again. Yuuri ends up at Minako’s snack bar, crying into a packet of peanuts and a diet soda because she refuses to serve him anything higher in calories. He can’t stop thinking about how Victor threatened to leave him when he was having a panic attack in China, how he can’t trust that Victor is going to stay.
“Is this a game for you two?” Minako asks, abruptly, when Yuuri stops for breath. “The way you hurt each other. Is it like a scene? Do you trade roles?”
“WHAT, Minako, NO, it’s not a GAME,” Yuuri shrieks, “what are you TALKING ABOUT.”
She shrugs. “Well you can’t blame me for asking. I imagine the makeup sex is pretty good.” She is, she decides, done being tactful about other people’s weird soulmate relationships.
Yuuri makes a sound that must have been entirely involuntary, throws his empty peanut packet at her face, and runs out of the snack bar. He shows up to their ballet practice session the next day but won’t meet her eyes. Maybe I was wrong, she thinks. Maybe the makeup sex isn’t very good and they just cry all over each other.
By the time the Grand Prix Final comes up, Victor and Yuuri are communicating better, it seems. At least, Yuuri is skating better, and she’s hearing less about their relationship, whatever they’re calling it now. They probably don’t need her to go along. But she’s at the onsen bar when they are talking about travel arrangements, and when Yuuri mentions having access to discounted tickets, Minako leaps into the conversation and says something like, “That’s so exciting, Yuuri! I would love to be there to see you skate!” and then he can’t get out of inviting her.
She really was planning on watching him skate and otherwise having a low-key time in Barcelona. She wasn’t expecting to end up eating dinner with five-sixths of the men’s field, or to have a competition of performative eyelash-batting with Christophe Giacometti, or to have Phichit chatter at her about things he and Yuuri did in Detroit. She definitely isn’t expecting Yuuri and Victor to show up in matching rings and announce that 1) they’re getting married, 2) no they’re not, they just exchanged omamori in the shape of wedding rings, how could they get married, 3) they’re soulmates, 4) they can’t possibly be soulmates, Yuuri would have known, 5) of course Yuuri knows, they’ve known since Sochi, 6) what on earth happened in Sochi, 7) please excuse us we need to talk. The party breaks up into confused congratulations and condolences.
Minako feels a little put out. She's worried about Yuuri, but she's not the one to help him sort out this situation, and before dinner went to hell she was having a good time and wasn’t ready for it to end. Anyway jetlag has her too confused about the time to go to bed yet, so she ends up in a bar near the official competition hotel with Celestino Cialdini.
“I saw you at the Olympics,” she tells him. “I had this tiny little flat in Copenhagen, but I owned a TV, so I had all my friends over to watch the figure skating. Everyone loved you. Best partnering in the whole competition.”
“Why thank you,” he says, but he seems sad, and all of a sudden she remembers that he skated with his soulmate at those Olympics and—“I’m so sorry,” she blurts out, “about how your soulmate died. That’s so sad, I can’t imagine.”
“Better to have loved and lost...” Celestino says, and then he gets embarrassed and trails off, looking at her like he shouldn’t have said that, or like he’s hoping she doesn’t know the rest of the line. She does. She’s not sure if it’s from a poem or a song or just a cliché, but it’s the kind of phrase that people without soulmates learn quickly in any language they speak, whether they wanted to or not. It’s easy to tell when people are talking about you, and when they’re doing it with pity; you pick up the customary terms.
But Celestino is deep in his own self-pity, and he has extremely good hair, and Minako has had a lot of wine and is feeling generous, so rather than a tart reply she says, “Sure. And it’s better to have finished fifth at the Olympics than never to have gone at all, hm?” Wait, that might be a little cruel. Is he sensitive about that? She places a hand on her chest and talks about herself, because she’s better at that. “Better to have ruined my knees than never to have been Giselle.” She picks up her empty glass and makes a vaguely toast-like gesture in his direction. “Better to have had wine in Barcelona with a handsome man than never to have had wine in Barcelona. I think we need some food. Do they serve food here? Tapas or something? I don’t understand tapas. How do they work?”
He says, a little petulantly, “I’m Italian, not Spanish.” She rolls her eyes because obviously she knows that, and he says, “Let’s order some ceviche,” and of course they end up having some more wine with it.
It’s hard to keep track of glasses when you’re sharing a bottle, but when Minako’s had enough to feel bold, however much that is, she abruptly decides she’s doing this, slams her glass down, and tells Celestino he’s coming back to her room.
The decisive moment passes almost immediately. “All of my…” he says. “Everyone I know. In skating. They’re all in town. Mostly in the same hotel. I really don’t want to walk past them all in the morning.”
“So don’t stay the night,” she says, which is maybe a little cold.
“Also we’ve had. A lot of drinks.”
Minako announces, “We just need some water.”
She gets the waiter to refill both their water glasses. They end up drinking them in one long go while maintaining eye contact as if they’re carrying out a dare. Celestino’s the first one to crack and start giggling, but Minako follows soon after, and then he almost chokes and she thwacks him ineffectually on the back for a while. Once he’s caught his breath again and stopped making hideous hacking noises, the mood is pretty well killed, and they’ve both remembered that they have early morning commitments.
“Rain check?” Celestino says, apologetically. Minako squints, trying to remember what that phrase means. “Another time,” he clarifies. “After the short program?”
“What if your skater wipes out and you’re depressed?”
“There is nothing that can happen during a performance of Phichit’s ‘Shall We Skate’ that would make anyone depressed.” He’s smiling now, but he still looks tipsy, and God only knows when he last slept. It’s been well over twenty-four hours since Minako did, and she feels a little relieved at the thought of going back to her hotel room alone, putting on pajamas and flipping through the channels on the hotel television, sleeping quiet and sprawled on clean sheets. She pets Celestino’s hair a little bit while waiting for the bill, and by the time it comes she’s persuaded him to take it down and let her run her hands through it once or twice. If they look odd, well, she doesn’t see any figure skating coaches in this very bar with them. They’ll be fine. It’s all fine.
The cold air outside the restaurant runs down to the bottom of her lungs. She shakes Celestino’s hand, mock-businesslike, before turning to go back to her hotel, half-dancing up the street in a distracted, childish series of sashay steps. No one sees her, or perhaps everyone sees her and no one cares. Hasetsu is thousands and thousands of miles away. She could catch a train from here to any major city in Europe and find a friend or colleague, and for a moment that’s a comforting thought: the people who care about her are scattered like a net all over the world, numerous enough to catch her anywhere she falls. But tonight she’s alone in Barcelona, a single ridiculous person in a foreign city, and no one, no one, no one can lay a claim to her.