From late summer to early spring the next year, I lived at the Morisaki Bookshop. I spent that period of my life in the spare room on the second floor of the store, trying to bury myself in books. The cramped room barely got any light, and everything felt damp. It smelled constantly of musty old books.

But I will always remember the days I spent there. Because that's where my real life began. And I know, without a doubt, that if not for those days, the rest of my life would have been bland, monotonous, and lonely.

The Morisaki Bookshop is precious to me. It's a place I know I'll never forget.

When I close my eyes, the memories still come back to me so vividly.

It all began like a blot of lightning out of the clear blue sky. No, what happened was more shocking than that, more shocking even then seeing frogs raining from the sky in a downpour.

One day, Hideaki, the boyfriend I'd been going out with for a year, suddenly blurted out, "I'm getting married".

When I first heard him, my mind was filled with questions. Now, if he'd said, "Let's get married," I would've understood. Or if he'd said, "I want to get married," I still would've understood. But "I'm getting married" was just weird. Marriage, after all, is a covenant based on mutual agreement, so grammatically the sentence was completely wrong. And what about the casual way he said it? It was so brusque. The tone of his voice was exactly the same one he would've used to say, "hey, I found one hundred yen on the side of the road."

It was a Friday night in the middle of June. We were having a nice dinner together after work at an Italian restaurant in Shinjuki. The restaurant was on the top floor of a hotel, so we had a beautiful view of the city at night, all the gleaming neon lights. It was our favourite spot.

Hideaki, who was three years ahead of me at work, was someone I'd had a secret crush on from the day I started. Just being together made my heart bounce inside my chest like a trampoline. That night was the first time we'd been alone together in a while, so as I drank my wine, I was in an especially good mood.

But then...

Without thinking, I replied, "huh?" I thought maybe I had misheard him. But he repeated what he'd said, matter-of-factly. "So it looks like I'm getting married next year."

"Married? Who's getting married to whom?"

"I am. To her."

"Huh?" I was still puzzled. "Who's she?"

And then, he says the name of a girl in a different department of the company - without the slightest hint of guilt in his voice. She had been hired at the same time as me, and she looked so pretty that even I wanted to wrap my arms around her.