He was rough, except for the gentle fingers that stroked her behind. Her body wanted it even rougher. Was she the violent one, or Yuichi? She couldn’t tell. It was as if she was simply manipulating Yuichi, using him to roughly, violently caress herself.

She was naked now, in front of this man. Under the too-bright fluorescent lights, she felt him stroke her thighs, grab her butt, and Mitsuyo felt that any minute now she would cry out.

Yuichi lightly lifted her up and carried her over to the bed. He almost tossed her on top of the comforter, then tore off his shirt and T-shirt. Yuichi’s hard chest crushed her breasts. Every time he moved, Mitsuyo’s nipples slipped across his skin.

Before she knew it she was lying facedown on the bed, sunk deep in the comforter, as if she were floating on air. Yuichi’s hot tongue traced a line down her spine. He stuck his knees between her legs and no matter how much she resisted, her legs opened wide.

She buried her face in the pillow, which smelled of detergent. All the strength drained away from her. Yuichi caressed her roughly, almost as if he were trying to break her. At the same time, he held on to her tightly, as if to repair the damage.

He destroyed her, repaired her, and repeated the process. Mitsuyo no longer knew if she’d gotten destroyed, or if she’d been destroyed from the very beginning. If it was Yuichi doing the breaking, she wanted him to break her even more violently. If her body was broken from the beginning, she wanted his gentle hands to restore her.

“I don’t need to see him ever again. Just this one time. This is just for today,” she murmured as he caressed her. She didn’t really feel this way, but she had to tell herself this, or else she couldn’t accept this shameless self, the one she’d never really seen before, the one writhing in ecstasy on the bed.

She heard the metallic sound as Yuichi undid his belt. She had no idea how long she’d been like this on the bed, but it seemed as if Yuichi had been caressing her for a long time. Fifteen minutes? Thirty minutes? No, it felt more like he’d been stroking her with his fingers, his hot body crushing her, for a whole night-or was it two?

She felt her body grow lighter. The bed creaked and the vibration made her head fall off the pillow. She opened her eyes and saw Yuichi standing there, naked.

She hadn’t been crying, but she saw Yuichi’s penis through a kind of haze. All the strength drained out of her; even moving her fingers seemed like too much trouble. He was gazing down at her totally nude body from above, but she felt no embarrassment at all. One of Yuichi’s knees came up beside her face. The mattress sank down and her face rolled over toward him. He cupped his large palm behind her head to support it, and Mitsuyo closed her eyes and opened her mouth.

Yuichi’s hand supporting her head was gentle, but the penis jabbing deep inside her mouth was brutal and relentless. Again she didn’t know if she was being treated gently, or roughly. Was she suffering? Or happy? As she clutched at the sheets over and over, she had no idea. She knew she must look like a total slut. And she detested Yuichi-and loved him-for forcing her to lick him like this.

She reached around and grabbed his butt. Her nails dug into his sweaty behind. Trying his best to stand the pain, Yuichi cried out. And Mitsuyo wanted to hear that voice more.

I really do want Mitsuyo to be happy.

I never call her onesan-older sister. But still inside me I feel like I might be calling her that.

We have a younger brother, and he calls her onesan. It’s weird to say he does it in my stead, but that’s what it feels like. Me he just calls Tamayo.

People often say twins know what the other one is thinking. But Mitsuyo and I were never like that. Don’t get me wrong, we got along okay, and stood out in school, being twins and all. So when we were in elementary school we were always together, and tried to protect each other from our classmates’ curious eyes. Yeah-I think we did sort of stand out in elementary school. But once we entered junior high, another set of twins from a nearby elementary school came to the same school and they were ten times cuter than us. Kids can be really cruel, and it wasn’t long before we were being called the ugly twins. That didn’t bother me too much-if a boy said that, I’d chase him and hit him with a broom or something. About this time our personalities, you might say, the overall impression you got from us-hairstyle, clothes, interests-slowly started to be different from each other…

We weren’t planning to go to the same high school. I wanted to go to a regular co-ed school, while Mitsuyo applied to a private girls’ high school, but she failed the entrance exam.

Anyway, soon after we started high school, we found boyfriends. Mine was typical-the star of the soccer team-but Mitsuyo went out with this guy named Ozawa who was not exactly a negative kind of guy, but he never seemed to be able to do anything well, neither school nor sports. He gave up on the volleyball team after only a month.

If Ozawa paid a bit more attention to his hairstyle and clothes he might have looked okay, but he had zero interest in that kind of thing. Not that he had any particular interest in anything else… Anyhow, when Mitsuyo said something about how she liked Ozawa I went like, Whoa! What’s with that? It was then, I guess, that I realized that Mitsuyo and I are two different people.

Since my boyfriend was the star of the soccer team, I had a lot of rivals for his attention, and sometimes things didn’t go so well. Mitsuyo and Ozawa, who didn’t have any competitors to deal with, got along better than me and my guy. They always walked home together, pushing their bikes side by side. Most every evening she’d stop by Ozawa’s house, but she’d be sure to be home by six-thirty, in time for dinner.

Even twins who get along well have things they can’t ask each other. School ended around four o’clock every day, and it took twenty minutes to walk to Ozawa’s house, so even if she rode her bike back home afterward, it means that they were alone, just the two of them, for about two hours and fifteen minutes every day. Rumors started about them at school and people starting asking me, not her, whether she and Ozawa had done it. As her younger sister I felt, intuitively, that she and Ozawa had, you know. I wanted to know for sure, but I couldn’t ask her straight out.

I remember it was just after the end of summer vacation. Mitsuyo was at Ozawa’s as usual, and my cheerleading squad’s practice was canceled that day so I went home early. We were sharing the same room and I’d never done a thing like that before, but something possessed me, I guess, and I opened Mitsuyo’s desk drawer and looked at the notebook Mitsuyo and Ozawa used to exchange notes. I was sure it would be totally boring. I was a little worried what I’d do if there was bad stuff written in there about me, but that’s about it.

I flipped through it and was surprised to find every page filled with tiny writing.

I read through it, nervous that Mitsuyo might come home. As I read, I felt a shiver up my spine… Basically she said something like this:

“I’ve always liked you, Ozawa-kun. But recently I’ve started to like certain parts of you-your right arm, for instance, your ears, or your fingers, your knees, your front teeth, your breath. Not the whole of you, but parts that make up you. I don’t want anybody to take them away from me. At school and other places, I don’t want anybody else to see you..”

I had always thought that Mitsuyo wasn’t the type to get attached to things. When we were little, she always gave me and our brother all of her candy or cakes. I guess that comes from being the oldest daughter. But in this diary that she and Ozawa exchanged, this was a Mitsuyo I’d never seen before.