In a quiet nursing home nestled in the old castle town, the corridors were adorned with elegant calligraphy and delicate ink paintings that whispered of refined taste.
An elderly woman with a kind, gentle face sat across from Asou Akiya. Her hair was a soft cloud of silver, her makeup subtle and natural.
She looked exactly like a fallen noblewoman who, in the twilight of her years, had finally reclaimed the serenity of her soul and now faced a lifetime of suffering with graceful, optimistic beauty.
Nishioka Yukiko was not famous. She was simply the lively old lady in the nursing home who loved to dance.
But Yokohama Mary had once been a legend.
Yokohama Mary was a proud, destitute street-walker, one of the living wounds carved into the flesh of the city itself.
Long ago, an American soldier, before shipping out with his unit, had promised Yokohama Mary that he would return and marry her. She waited for decades. So that her beloved could recognise her at first glance, she wandered the streets of Yokohama with her face painted ghostly white, her appearance strange and unforgettable. She refused every kiss from any other man, believing only her true love had the right to touch her lips.
She survived on the stubborn conviction that happiness would one day arrive, sustained by that single obsession.
Along the way she met one kind soul after another.
She met one person after another who recoiled from her.
One man after another—who was never the one she loved—came and went from her body as it passed from youth to old age.
It was a tragedy, pure, unadulterated tragedy.
Yet Asou Akiya had watched her documentary and been stunned by the sheer force of that obsession.
The three of them had arrived on Rainbow Dragon. It was Gojo Satoru and Geto Suguru's first time inside a nursing home; curiosity sparkled in their eyes. Asou had deliberately told them almost nothing in advance—nothing hits harder than hearing the truth from the woman herself.
Asou bowed slightly and spoke with the earnest, slightly awkward tone of a student on a field trip, said, "Grandma Nishioka, my name is Asou Akiya. I'm a local boy from Yokohama. I've admired you for a long time and came especially to visit."
He continued in the same youthful, respectful voice, "These are my classmates. I speak French, they speak English. We're all interested in that chapter of Yokohama's history. Would you mind telling us about the old days?"
Geto Suguru stood politely to the side, holding a beautiful basket of fruit and flowers.
Gojo Satoru, with the utmost lack of manners, swept the entire room up, down, left, and right with his Six Eyes, searching for even the faintest trace of cursed energy.
Old age.
Excessive use of cosmetics over decades.
Skin slackened by time, a full set of dentures, eyes that had undergone cataract surgery.
No matter how he looked, she was nothing more than an ordinary grandmother.
Nishioka Yukiko understood at once why Asou Akiya had come. The three boys were far too beautiful, and the mention of French, a language no ordinary child would master, instantly tugged at memories of her long-lost Genjirō.
She had told her story many times before. Years earlier, a director had sought her out and filmed the documentary on the condition that it would air only after her death. Because of that promise, she had laid the past to rest and grown much calmer about it.
Before she began, Nishioka Yukiko smiled kindly and said, "You're welcome to listen to an old woman's tale, but there's no need to bring me gifts."
She refused offerings from strangers on principle.
Asou had anticipated this and answered smoothly, "I once heard Monsieur Genjirō's French chansons. I only wish to pay respects on behalf of the late Monsieur Genjirō. Please do not grieve too deeply; there are still people in this world who care about you."
Tears instantly welled in Nishioka Yukiko's eyes. Her dearest friend in life, Genjirō, had passed away from illness just the year before.
"I have told my story many times," she said softly. "If you truly wish to hear it, I am happy to tell it once more."
The weight of her life, all its vicissitudes and hard-won serenity, shone quietly in her eyes.
"Go ahead, Grandma," Gojo said eagerly, dragging over a stool and plopping down. He loved a good story.
"Hey—" Geto tried to stop him, failed, and could only resign himself to sitting quietly so as not to disturb her.
One hour later.
A sorrowful tale involving family, war, morality, and society unfolded slowly, note by heartbreaking note.
A sorrowful tale encompassing family, war, morality, and society unfolded slowly, like a long-buried wound finally exposed to air.
Geto Suguru listened until depression settled over him like a shroud.
Gojo Satoru fled the scene with astonishing speed, vaulting through the window in a white blur and tossing back only one sentence: "I'm going out for some air."
Two hours later.
The only person still able to chat and laugh with Nishioka Yukiko was Asou Akiya.
Geto Suguru stood wrapped in shadow, impossible to tell whether the growing darkness came from the setting sun or from the cursed energy seeping out of his skin and coiling around him like smoke.
An ordinary human life stripped of everything. No cursed spirits, no curses, yet never surrendering love or hope, filled Geto with a visceral, bone-deep hatred for the American who had made that promise to Nishioka Yukiko and then vanished forever.
The indifference of the Japanese government, its cold cruelty, the systematic deception of women, every layer of it enraged him.
Asou Akiya laid a gentle hand on Geto's shoulder. "Go find Gojo. I'd like to speak with her alone for a little while."
Geto realised, with a dull shock, that his own emotional resilience was nowhere near Asou's.
Thank the heavens Gojo was even weaker than he was.
In his mind Geto unilaterally declared that Gojo had run away out of fear. He walked out unsteadily, expression dazed, to look for the missing strongest sorcerer alive.
With only the two of them left in the room, Asou Akiya finally reached his intended goal. He had shown Geto the raw suffering of ordinary human existence and forced Gojo to witness, from the very bottom, a life that clung to kindness despite having nothing at all. Multiple birds with one stone. Now it was time for his own private matter.
He steadied his breathing and asked gently, testing which languages she still understood. "Besides English, do you happen to understand French?"
Nishioka Yukiko, having spoken her heart for hours, idly stroked the jade ring on her finger, the love token from the man she had waited for.
She smiled and nodded softly. "Genjirō taught me a little."
Asou did not need her to be fluent. French was simply safer for what he truly wanted to say.
He could not hold the question back any longer.
"Quelle sensation cela fait-il de passer toute une vie à attendre une seule personne, à n'aimer qu'une seule personne?"
[What does it feel like to spend an entire lifetime waiting for one person, loving one person?]
"C'est le fait même d'aimer qui donne du sens."
[The act of loving itself is the meaning.]
The eighty-something-year-old woman lowered her gaze as she answered, yet somehow the words felt as though they answered nothing at all.
Opening one heart to another is always a long, slow journey.
Today, Asou Akiya finally understood that Nishioka Yukiko would probably could not give a direct answer to that question, even if she wanted to.
He felt no great regret. He had no time to wait for decades the way she had. Nishioka Yukiko was the perfect example of someone whose obsession had become both demon and salvation. He would never imitate her failures; he would only borrow the parts that had allowed her to survive.
So he changed tack, choosing a method both of them could accept.
"J'ai un ami."
[I have a friend.]
The classic, time-honoured "friend" excuse—never out of fashion.
{Note: I will not translate further conversation to french for the sake of convenience. unless of course, its relevant.}
Nishioka Yukiko had never heard the meme, but she listened to other people's love stories with the same serene composure, which made it infinitely easier for Asou Akiya to speak of something he could never confess to a second soul as long as he lived.
He lowered his voice, almost whispering. "My friend is older than I am, far more beautiful than I am, and carries an even heavier weight of suppressed emotion than I do."
In the old woman's mind there slowly formed the image of a grown man shaped in Asou Akiya's outline.
Asou guided her imagination with careful, deliberate strokes.
"This friend has someone he loves, but the gulf in status between them is vast and unbridgeable."
"That person is mature, magnetic, inwardly unbreakable, emotions steady as bedrock. Under normal circumstances, he would never entertain the notion of romantic love perhaps once in a lifetime if ever."
"It isn't that he doesn't understand love. It's that he is too pure, has seen too much, and finds it nearly impossible to awaken to it."
When Nishioka Yukiko heard the pronoun "he," she understood at once that this was a story of one man's longing for another.
Genjirō had been a gay singer, after all.
She harboured no prejudice against same-sex love. "I understand," she said gently. "Please go on."
Asou smiled, small and grateful. "Grandma Nishioka, my friend is an adult who craves love with his entire being. The rarer the love, the more fiercely he desires it. The more extraordinary the person, the more irresistibly he is drawn."
"My friend's plan is simple: first slip into that person's orbit, then weave himself into that person's life, protect him, stay close enough to watch him feel lonely, watch him feel bored, watch and wait for the day that person finally chooses, of his own accord, to reach out and play."
"He will wait, he will guard, he will gamble an entire lifetime on the slim hope that the man might open his heart and eyes sometime after thirty, might grow unable to live without my friend, might hesitate to sever the bond, might one day compromise for the sake of more than ten years of irreplaceable closeness."
"Once the decision is made, there is no turning back. My friend will have to devote everything. His heart, soul, the most precious half of his life to helping that man, to moving that man."
"The one thing my friend is absolutely certain of."
"In this gamble called love, my friend is the only person in the world qualified to sit at the table. No one else will ever want him more fiercely, no one else will burn to see him laugh with pure joy, no one else will have a greater chance to help him achieve his dreams and preserve the bonds he truly cherishes."
"My friend is hesitating now."
"In the endless waiting, when affection deepens into love, when anticipation is laced with disappointment, will that love be worn away to nothing? Will the agony of never being chosen twist him beyond recognition? Will all this devotion ever satisfy the hunger for love that lives inside his heart?"
"This gamble has not yet begun, yet the stakes are already absolute: either lose everything, or win everything."
"My friend adores him. He wants to try loving him. He is willing to stop here, at the very edge of the abyss."
"That is why I have come to ask you."
"In a lifetime spent loving and waiting, did the pain outweigh the joy, or did the joy outweigh the pain?"
The black-haired boy asked with utmost gravity, his gaze burning like ghost-fire.
He could dare to ask.
Because Nishioka Yukiko had not long left to live.
This question could only be heard by someone standing at death's door.
Nishioka Yukiko listened in stunned silence. A gamble of love? It felt almost unreal, is her first instinctive reaction. Yet only such an extraordinary emotion could burn with the same impossible intensity as the obsession that had ruled her own sixty years, something outsiders had always found incomprehensible.
She had believed her obsession was the deepest possible. No other man had ever understood her, ever been worthy of her love.
But the friend this boy described struck a chord inside her chest like a bell she thought had cracked forever.
Go and love!
Love so fiercely, so unmistakably, that the whole world knows it is impossible!
Nishioka Yukiko's voice came out hoarse, the answer of an entire lifetime. "Because love lived in my heart, I never once felt it was suffering."
She had waited for a ship that never returned, yet her soul was still waiting for the man who had been aboard it.
Asou Akiya quietly offered her a pristine white handkerchief. In one corner, embroidered in tiny elegant script, was the name of the tea room she had loved best. The kind owner had always kept a special cup just for her, so no one would recoil from sharing with the strange white-faced woman, and she could drink her coffee with dignity.
Tears rolled down Nishioka Yukiko's cheeks, tears of overwhelming joy and sorrow mingled.
In the room she remained alone, seated in her chair, the fruit-and-flower basket on the small table beside her only company.
…
In the nursing-home garden, Asou Akiya walked out by himself. His shadow stretched long across the wall. His figure mature, distant, the very picture of an adult whose every thought stayed locked behind an unreadable face.
Then he spotted the two people he would never leave behind in this lifetime and broke into the brightest, most unguarded grin. He waved at the pair crouched on the ground, locked in mortal combat with a line of ants. "Yo!"
Geto Suguru stared, stunned. "How are you completely unaffected?"
Asou put on a solemn, sage-like expression. "Maybe because it was so bitter it looped all the way around to sweet. Like coffee."
Gojo Satoru's mood had already levelled out; he drawled lazily, "Done? Can we finally head back to Jujutsu High?"
Asou reached down with both hands toward the two boys whose legs had gone numb from squatting.
"Let's go, my classmates!"
…
The lesson he carried away from Nishioka Yukiko was simple.
[Love itself is never suffering.]
In that case, the romantic dilemmas of adults could wait for the adult version of himself to worry about.
[The day DK Gojo figures out romance will be the same day Kenjaku gets pregnant with my child.]
Asou Akiya sat astride Rainbow Dragon's head, a cold, sardonic laugh escaping his lips as he clung for dear life to Geto Suguru's arm so that Gojo Satoru wouldn't catapult him into the stratosphere. He couldn't beat DK Gojo in a fight.
No matter how priceless the treasure, he still couldn't withstand the sheer mass of said treasure slamming into him at terminal velocity.
"Don't you dare touch my bangs, Gojo—AAAAAHHH!!"
Geto Suguru, currently shielding Asou with his own body, let out a blood-curdling scream.
Today's Gojo Satoru was, as usual, successfully offending both male classmates at once, with special emphasis on provoking weird-bangs.
Back at Tokyo Jujutsu High, Ieiri Shoko stepped out of the infirmary to collect the mountain of takeout that had just arrived.
Three boys plummeted from the sky in perfect formation and landed in a tangled, groaning heap.
"I honestly don't understand you guys," Shoko sighed, jabbing an accusing finger at her male classmates. "Fighting, bickering, tripping each other up every single day—yet somehow you still manage to play until midnight before coming home?"
The three of them answered in perfect, pitiful unison.
"Shoko, heal us, please!! (×3)"
Led by Gojo Satoru, the boys had collectively dropped her family name. From now on she was simply "Shoko."
A glorious milestone: the jujutsu world's number-one female healer had officially been promoted to the status of beloved, endlessly pampered goddess.
—
"Because love lived in my heart, I never once felt it was suffering."
That single sentence was Nishioka Yukiko's real, recorded answer in real life.