yuki. sixteen. you let me copy your maths homework in september of first year because you said, very calmly, that the maths homework was not actually maths, it was just "obedience with numbers." i have, since that day, been quietly waiting for you to say something I disagreed with. you drew me, last november, on the back of a stardust books receipt — me asleep on the train back from osaka station with my mouth open — and I have it pinned above my desk and I will, in the future, when both of us are working manga artists, sell it to a Tokyo collector for the price of an apartment. for your sixteenth I have built you, in CSS, the manga page you said you would never get around to drawing of your own birthday. The screentone is slightly off. The panel sizes are not, on reflection, asanoesque. I have tried. happy sixteenth, my best friend. the chapter is yours. read it slowly.
YukiAT 16
Osaka, late August. The train from Tennoji is, as ever, three minutes late. A girl waits on the platform with a sketchbook against her chest, a Chainsaw Man volume in her bag, and a quiet idea — that sixteen will probably look, from the inside, much like fifteen did. She is wrong about this. The chapter has, in fact, already started.
What everyone wrote.
One page. Many voices. Read it in the order it was set — the way a chapter is meant to land.
oneechan!!! i am ten and you are SIXTEEN which means you are now SIX years older than me and that is a lot. i am writing this with the gel pen you gave me for new year (the muji one that I lost and you found in the sofa and gave back to me on the saturday). thank you for that. okaasan said i can have a small piece of the cake before everyone gets here but only if i am QUIET about it and only if I tell you, in the writing, that I am QUIET about it. so. I am being quiet. but I have already had the cake. it was the strawberry one. it was good. i drew you a picture of denji and pochita and i am attaching it to this email. okaasan says I have to put it in the envelope. happy birthday oneechan. please come back from drawing class on time on thursday so we can watch spy x family. — ren
yuki. i made you a small ink drawing on a4 paper instead of a card. it is in the brown envelope on your desk under the maths textbook (your mother let me in on tuesday afternoon while you were at drawing class — she said, "the door of the room is the door of the room, sora-kun," which i think was a joke, i am not sure). the drawing is of the bench at tennoji park where we sat in march, the one near the small pond. i drew the bench empty. i thought you would prefer it empty. i do not have the words you have. you said this once at the kissaten on senri-chuo, very kindly, when I was trying to explain why I liked the panel on page 87 of look back and could not, in the end, finish the sentence. you said "sora, it's ok, the panel is the sentence." i remembered. happy sixteen, yuki. the bench is, as ever, where it was. — sora.
Yuki-chan — Obaachan from the apartment in Ikuno. When you were seven I gave you a small worn copy of the first volume of Sazae-san, which I had bought for myself in 1969 in a shop in Nipponbashi when I was twenty-two years old and not yet married to your grandfather, and which I had kept, in the same place on the same shelf, for forty-five years. You read it, on the tatami, in two afternoons. You held it carefully. You did not, at seven, ask any questions about it. You returned it to me on the third evening with a small piece of folded paper inside it, on which you had drawn — in pencil, very carefully — a copy of the panel of Sazae-san at the fish market on page nineteen. I have, since that day, kept the paper inside the book on the same shelf, where it is now. You are sixteen. The book and the paper are both yours. They are in the small wooden box on the shelf in the spare room. I will give them to you on Saturday morning, with the seaweed soup, before the cake. Manga is, kanna, the patient art. You are the patient kind of person. The two of you have always belonged to each other. — Obaachan.
Dear Tanaka-san, It is your art teacher writing — Sasaki, from the Wednesday afternoon classes at the small studio behind the Senri-Chuo station. Your mother asked, last week, whether I would write you something for your sixteenth, and I am, with respect, doing so. In the four years you have attended my classes I have, in total, seen perhaps three hundred students. I can tell you, with no exaggeration and no kindness intended (you will, I know, distrust kindness), that you have the cleanest pen-line of any student I have taught since 2011. The way you set the nib down at the start of a stroke is, I want to say properly, already correct in a way that is not, in my experience, teachable — it can only be observed and approved of. You will not, on Saturday, want to hear this. You will, I imagine, fold this letter into the back of your sketchbook and forget about it for two years and find it on a Tuesday in 2028 in a different city. That is acceptable. It will, then, be true in the way it is now. Many happy returns. The studio is, as ever, yours on Wednesdays. — A. Sasaki.
YUKI!! mei here, from the dorm at the high school in shibuya, writing this at 1:42 AM on a tuesday because the timeline got away from me again and now hana is texting me in capital letters about a deadline. sixteen, yuki!!! we said, on the platform at shin-osaka station in march when I left, that we would not, on any account, be the friends who drift after one of us moves. we have, since that day, sent each other approximately four hundred and seventy two voice notes (i counted on Sunday). most of them are me complaining about the cafeteria food and you sending back single sentences like "mei, eat the rice." you are, on the matter of rice, often correct. i will be home for obon. the kissaten on senri-chuo, the one you took me to on my last saturday in osaka, has, hana tells me, changed the menu. we will have, when I am home, words for the management. happy sixteen, yuki. the dorm room is, on the matter of you, very loud and very empty at the same time. — mei xx
yuki-chan. kaito from sapporo here. happy birthday. the weekly one piece call is, as you know, this sunday at 7pm jst, and the wano arc is, as we have agreed for the last eleven sundays, complicated. i have a theory about the joy boy reveal that I will share on the call, which I will not share now because you will, in your way, find a hole in it before I have finished saying it. we have, since we were ten, been on this call. eleven years next january. we have, in those eleven years, missed precisely three sundays — twice for the high school entrance exam (mine, both times) and once for the typhoon that took out the wifi in sapporo for a long thursday in 2022. you will not get the new luffy figure I sent you because the post from sapporo is slow this week, but it will, by tuesday, be there. happy sixteen, yuki-chan. — kaito.
My Yuki — It is your mother. I am writing this in the kitchen on a Thursday afternoon before you come home from drawing class, with the rice in the cooker and the small thing of mackerel from the Ikuno market on the counter, and the magazine you left open on the table about, I think, the manga artist who lives in the small apartment in Sangenjaya with the cat. Sixteen years ago today, at five past eleven on a Tuesday morning, your father held you for the first time at the Suita hospital and said, very seriously, to the nurse: "she is going to be an artist." The nurse, who was kind, said, "okaasan, she is one hour old, perhaps wait a year." We waited. The nurse was right and your father was also right. I worry, sometimes, about how many hours you spend at the desk. I am, you will tell me kindly, allowed to worry; I am also, you will tell me, supposed to leave the worrying in the kitchen with the rice. I am trying. I made the inarizushi. They are in the small dabba in the fridge. They are yours when you come home. Happy sixteen, kanna. Patti is making the seaweed soup. The whole house is yours today. — Okaasan.
yuki —
i made you a wall instead of a present because i am, as you know, broke until the part-time job at the Tsutaya in Namba pays me on the 30th, and you said, in February, very clearly, that you did not want anything for sixteen. I have, on the matter of presents, ignored you exactly once before (the Aniplex Chainsaw Man artbook, third-year of middle school, which you accepted with a sigh and then read four times in a week). I am, this time, listening.
So this is the wall. It is not, as you will see, a literal manga page. It is the closest I could get to one in CSS at 1am on a Wednesday in your grandmother's spare room. The pinned panel — A1 — is mine. The screentone is, I am sorry, slightly off. Forgive me. Inio Asano would also forgive me, I think.
We argued, in May, on the train back from the Stardust Books on Nakatera-dori, about the panel on page 121 of Chainsaw Man vol. 11 — the one where Denji is looking at the ceiling and saying nothing. You said it was the best panel Fujimoto had ever drawn. I said it was, in fact, the second-best panel; the best was Fujino on the road in Look Back, the long horizontal one with the rain coming. We did not, on the train, agree. We did not, on the train, need to.
That night at your grandmother's in Ikuno, after dinner, we read Look Back from front to back in one sitting, on the tatami floor, with the lamp on the low table, and at one point, around eleven, you put the book down and said, very quietly, "ah. shit." That is the only review of that book either of us has ever needed.
Sixteen, yuki. You are going to draw a manga one day. I have, since we were eleven and you copied an entire One Piece chapter into the back of your maths notebook, never doubted this. The wall is yours. The chapter is yours. Read it slowly.
— Hana, also broke, also a weeb, on your side forever.
“ah. so this is sixteen. okay. okay, I can work with this.”
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