花火の音だけ聞いた夜

A message came from Soma-san, a classmate from high school, for the first time in seven years: would I watch the river fireworks with them in August? Every year I had only ever watched distant fireworks from the window at home, so I replied at once that I would come. We decided to meet at half past seven, under the stairs of the second bridge. I was a little worried about whether we would manage to meet in the crowd on the night of the fireworks.

I worked until early evening, and when I reached the station at seven it took ten minutes just to get out through the ticket gate. Stalls lined both sides of the road and there were a lot of people in yukata. It was about a two-hundred-metre walk to the bridge, but in the crowd I could not move forward the way I wanted to. At seven twenty-five I sent Soma-san a message saying I had arrived. There was no reply.

The fireworks began at half past seven. I waited standing up, under the stairs of the bridge. Sweat ran down my back. While the fireworks were going up I rang several times, but the call would not connect. In a place with a lot of people the reception seems to get weak. I looked at the screen so many times that the battery ran down, and before eight the phone went dead.

Even so I did not move from that spot. It was because I thought Soma-san must be looking for these stairs too. When the last of the fireworks ended and people began to go home, I stayed there about five minutes longer. At the bus stop a queue had formed of people waiting for a bus. From the direction of the river the smell of the fireworks smoke came drifting over.

When I got home and charged the phone, a message sent at seven forty came through. "The bridge was closed and I could not get across. I am on the opposite bank." Soma-san had been on the far side of the river, watching the same fireworks. I sent a photograph of the empty riverbed and wrote asking whether we might meet at a coffee shop on a weekday in September. The reply came straight back.