Published at 25th of August 2019 11:15 pm

Book 2 Chapter 10 - From Kayoko

This chapter is updated by NovelFree.ml

“Okitsu-kun.

Since the two who had returned from China will go see you, I have entrusted to them this letter and the dubbed 16mm video in question.

Our contract has returned to a blank piece of paper. This video that I am offering to you is just a gift. Because you are already free, please decide everything for yourself after this, not for your contract with me.

But before that, there is something that I want to talk about.

_______________________________________________________________

This 16mm film records your grandfather’s practice not long after he came to Tokyo. The person who recorded it was Mizuki Shinnosuke. My grandfather.

Please let me tell you a little story about Grandfather.

Mizuki Shinnosuke was born two years earlier than your grandfather, in 1918. The following year, Japan’s first diving platform (only a one-meter springboard), was installed at a YMCA in Tokyo’s Kanda district. In 1925, a full-fledged diving platform was built in a Tamagawa pool. Grandfather, who was born in a nearby textile wholesale store, grew up in an affluent family, had a healthy curiosity, and was born blessed with good motor skills, and so on, and because of that he started to attend diving practices mixed with like-minded adults.

Perhaps the era had pushed Grandfather’s back.

At that time, as the Japanese swimming team had achieved a great success at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, it gave rise to an enthusiastic swimming boom within the country. The Jinguu pool was completed in 1930. Two years later a Japanese diver won the first sixth-place prize. It was at the Los Angeles Olympics.

Due to the booming medal rush of the Japanese swim team at the Los Angeles Olympics, the name of “Swimming Nippon” spread further into the world, and the expectations for the diving team were increasing. During this, Grandfather, who had been steadily practicing, had set his eyes on the goal of four years later. And indeed, for the next Olympics at Berlin, he was chosen as a representative at the young age of eighteen. Moreover, Grandfather came to Berlin as the team leader of the Japanese diving team.

As a result, Japan won fourth place in both springboard diving and high diving. It was the best achieved place in the Japanese diving world, and there hasn’t been an Olympics where that record was surpassed, even afterwards. The Japanese diving team, including the coaches and the athletes, were ecstatic about this spectacular accomplishment, and it seemed that they gained more confidence that next time for sure they would take medals. However, only one person—Grandfather—was calmly assessing Japan’s limits.

Now, the world of diving is poised for a dramatic evolution. From now on, it wasn’t just about beauty, it would an era where they were competing with technique and personality. Was there a diver in the current Japan who could compete on that stage of the intensifying battle? While they were being ecstatic about winning fourth place, were they slowly slipping away from the rest of the world?

The world. That was something Grandfather had been vaguely aiming for when he started diving. He’d rather lose badly in an international competition than win easily in Japan. Small satisfactions only ended up in the memories of that one individual, but tears of regret were tied to the future of the Japanese diving world. Grandfather always used to say so. He, who had also anticipated his own limits, while harbouring a sense of impending danger in his heart by himself, might have been unconsciously searching for a comrade to who he can entrust his dream aimed for the world.

It was around that time that Grandfather heard a peculiar story from his friend who was a folklorist.

There was a young man diving off of a cliff that was tens of meters tall in Tsugaru. It seemed like it was a type of rite that was handed down in the area, but his athlete ability far surpassed a simple rite, and overwhelmed those who watched…

Grandfather, who was searching for a diver who would spread their wings into the world, was interested by that story and proceeded to Tsugaru. Thus, he saw the then-sixteen-year-old Okitsu Shiraha dive with his own eyes.

I had goosebumps, Grandfather said of that shock that he could not forget until he died. Okitsu Shiraha’s dive was striking. He said that it had a unique dynamism that was different from the solid dives mainstream in Europe at the time, and from the lithe dives of America. It seemed that he saw the raging excitement in Shiraha’s heated blood resonating with the nature and climate that were rooted in Japan since ancient times.

Thus, my grandfather was the one who encouraged Okitsu Shiraha to come to Tokyo.

“Do you want to dive for real in Tokyo?” To this sudden offer, Okitsu Shiraha unexpectedly replied quickly with, “I do!” and his eyes seemed to sparkle. As he was still young, he might have felt a bit constrained by the extremely rigid customs and traditions of his village. He wanted to get out of there. He wanted to test himself in a wider world. Grandfather appealed to those thoughts in Shiraha, and he felt an unknown possibility there not found in divers from the city.

Grandfather housed Shiraha in his own residence after he came to Tokyo, and they ate and slept together while they began real training. Shiraha also actively tackled his first dryland training, and in the pool, he dived nearly twice more than the other athletes, so he seemed to have overcame his discomfort with the flat diving platform. Nowadays, diving a hundred times a day is said to be a considerable amount of practice, but there are stories that say that Shiraha had dived two hundred times a day for many days, and his rapid growth, called “pool vandalism,” seemed to have been visible.

But, it was as you had said. Bad luck was attached to Shiraha.

The following year after he came to Tokyo, the warfare in Asia expanded due to the Sino-Japanese War, and it was decided that Japan would give up on the Olympics. In 1939, World War II broke out, and not only was the opportunity for the Japanese sports world to advance into the world closed, it also became all but impossible for events in the country to occur. Both of our grandfathers were compelled to join the war.

The long nightmare ended the year after the Ministry of Education banned all “student athletic tournaments.” After the war ended, our grandfathers also returned home, and they managed to reunited safely. At that time, Grandfather was twenty-seven years old, and Shiraha was twenty-five. Though he was past the period where he had hit his stride the most, fortunately, he still hadn’t lost his zeal for aiming for the world. Grandfather had retired as an athlete and became Shiraha’s personal coach, so once again, the two began their desperate training to the death.

Then in the next year, at the first National Athletic Meet that was held at the Takarazuka pool in Hyougo, Shiraha dived for the very first time in front of a huge crowd of spectators.

Even to this very day, that illusory diving was passed down as a legend. It was as though the shock of defeat was swept away by Okitsu Shiraha showing off his wonderful dance that excited the spectators. He did not make them feel like he was an athlete past his peak. It seemed that Grandfather was confident that Shiraha, bathed in cheers from the standing ovation of the audience, would without a doubt win a medal at the London Olympics two years later.

But, he had overlooked something important.

Like you, your grandfather had repeatedly done harsh dives into the sea in his childhood, before his body had matured. And though he never revealed it, when he was invited to come to Tokyo by Grandfather, he already had a bomb on his back. And at that true performance that he did at Nationals, he had burned up the last of his strength.

After that, Grandfather forcibly dragged Shiraha, whose condition had suddenly worsened, to the hospital, where his back injury was finally discovered.

Grandfather lived with regret for his blunder for the rest of his life. When your grandfather decided to retire, he did as much as he could, until the point where he couldn’t do anything anymore, and though it seemed like that was why he declared that he regretted nothing, Grandfather did not forgive himself. And then after Shiraha returned home, he completely washed his hands of the diving world.

At the London Olympics the following year, Japan was still not allowed to return by the International Olympic Committee. There must have been many athletes who choked back their tears when it was announced that Japan will not participate, but Okitsu Shiraha had already retired a little while before.

A few years after leaving diving, Grandfather closed down the family textile wholesale and opened up a small sporting goods store. That was the predecessor of the current Mizuki. Originally it was just a small wholesale shop, but Grandfather seemed to have been unexpectedly business savvy, focusing on overseas brands and developing original products while expanding his business. Grandfather, who had also built a family, gradually forgot about diving in his busy everyday life.

Although he was occasionally in contact with Shiraha, who had likewise gotten married and started a new life in Tsugaru, it seemed that they gradually drifted apart. Both of them seemed to have hated talking about their active days, but on the other hand, there were no other common topics. Or perhaps, they might had only wanted to remember the comrade who was shining the most among themselves. Indeed, Grandfather would have never in his wildest dreams had thought that afterwards, Shiraha would be teaching you, his grandson, diving.

That was why eight years ago, when he was informed of Shiraha’s death and rushed to Tsugaru, where he reminisced the younger days of the genius while walking to a corner of the coast, he was so surprised his heart stopped when he met a young boy doing the exact same lively dives as Shiraha in the old days.

When he had first met Shiraha before, Grandfather seemed to have felt fate in that encounter, but that boy…he said that he felt that meeting you was preordained.

It was preordained. Thus, when he learned that you were Shiraha’s grandson, something that had been slumbering within Grandfather for a long time instantly awakened.

It was his passion for diving. It was his dream aimed towards the world. Of course, it was not for you alone that Grandfather created the MDC and put all his power into developing the Japanese diving world. However, I think there was also a sense of condolence to the deceased Shiraha when he did this, just a little bit.

As people age, they may want to impart to someone something that they had cultivated until then. It may be that they want to die leaving it in someone. But it is often just an inconvenience for young people, so that’s why when you kept turning down Grandfather’s scouting again and again, I thought that it could not be helped.

But, after Grandfather died, I went to Tsugaru because I wanted to see with my own eyes the boy who he always talked about. The moment my eyes caught your diving, I understood instantly why he was so fixated on you. I wanted this child. I wanted to nurture him with my own hands. Those wishes were mad enough to drive me on.

You know what happened after that.

To succeed Grandfather’s dream of making Okitsu Shiraha’s grandson, Shibuki, an international diver.

And another one of his dreams—to protect the MDC that he founded in his hopes for the Japanese diving world.

For those two reasons, I had decided to nurture you as an Olympic diver. I even used the underhanded tactic of teasing the 16mm film that Grandfather left behind.

But, I knew the reality. Diving as a competition was not that easy. You couldn’t soar without rousing a passion naturally within yourself. I knew full well that you were not someone who would move just because of a contract with somebody.

Even if your back problem did not come to light, you would have been forced to choose someday anyways. Will you continue to dive at your own will, or will you return to Tsugaru?

You are probably approaching that choice yourself while staring at your own past at the sea of your birthplace right now. I cannot suggest the answer, but I just wanted to show you a little more of the distant past with this letter. The history that was fostered between our grandfathers. Now you are an extension of that history.

My personal opinion is as I had said before. Right now, if you act rashly, you will be repeating Okitsu Shiraha’s mistakes all over again. However, it should be possible for you to keep diving while compromising to hold back the burden on your back. Even if you don’t take on advanced techniques, you have a strong personality that only you possess, which has a real presence. That is a kind of talent that cannot be obtained from practice. You have inherited it from Okitsu Shiraha.

I had meant to finish this briefly without delay, but it has gotten unintentionally longer.

It has gotten brighter outside the window. It is true that there has never been a night that hadn’t ended with daybreak.

Just one last thing. It certainly could not be said that your grandfather was blessed as a diver. But even though he had a bitter ending, I want to believe that time when he bet on everything and devoted himself to diving was never a bad thing. Your grandfather, who was recorded on the 16mm film, was smiling widely because of that.

When you came to Tokyo with that sullen look, I had always been waiting for you to show that same face one day.

Even now.

I will always be at the Sakuragi High pool.

Asaki Kayoko”

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