Imaginary Girlfriend Diary | What If Saika Kawakita Were a High School Teacher

There was chalk dust on the middle finger of her right hand.

That was the first thing I noticed when I stepped into the mock café classroom. The white powder on her fingertips as she gave a student a light pat on the shoulder in front of the blackboard. A hand-painted sign cut from cardboard read “2-3 café ☕ Café Latte ¥300.” The counter was nothing more than a frame of chopsticks lashed together and draped with cloth. Instant coffee poured into paper cups. Every school festival mock café is like this, I suppose.

She was at the back of the classroom.

Everything about her was different from how she looked on our usual dates. A grey cardigan over beige slacks. Her hair gathered in a high ponytail, the nape of her neck exposed. A name tag on her chest printed with “Kawakita.” Her back perfectly straight. At 169 centimeters, her tall frame stood out conspicuously among the seated students.

“Miss, is this the right spot for this sign?”

A male student rushed over carrying a sheet of poster board. She bent down slightly to meet his eye level. She was saying something while straightening the edges of the poster with her fingers. Her voice was lost in the din of the classroom. But the way she nodded, looking straight into the student’s eyes — that profile was one I had never seen before.

Come visit, she had said. The second Saturday of October, the public day of the school festival. “But don’t get too close. The students will figure it out.” Her voice hovering somewhere between joking and serious. The pamphlet she handed me was printed on both sides of cheap mimeograph paper, the ink bleeding through in places.

I paid three hundred yen to the girl working the counter and received a paper cup of café latte. Lukewarm. Far too much sugar. But there was a cat drawn in permanent marker on the side of the cup, surprisingly well done, and I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away.

I sat by the window, sipping the coffee, watching the back of the classroom. She was writing something on the whiteboard. A shift schedule, it seemed. Students were adding heart marks and star marks next to the names. She took a red marker and added in bold letters: “Breaks in rotation!” There was a slight quirk to her handwriting. The tail end of certain strokes kicked up with a distinctive flourish. I recognized the hand. The same as the notes stuck to the refrigerator. The stroke at the end of “pick up milk” kicked up in exactly the same way.

Then she looked in my direction.

The man with the paper cup, sitting by the window, as far from the entrance as possible. The moment our eyes met lasted less than a second, I think. The corner of her mouth softened just slightly, but she immediately turned her gaze back to the students. As if nothing had happened, she clicked the cap back on the whiteboard marker.

That split-second switch — the speed with which her face snapped back to “teacher mode” — made me catch my breath, just a little.

I left the classroom, still gripping the paper cup. The hallway was steamy with the body heat of students. The squeak of indoor shoes echoed off the walls. Pop music leaked from one classroom; on the stairwell landing, a group of girls were helping each other into costumes. Walking through someone else’s school festival was a strange sensation. An unfamiliar building, unfamiliar students, an unfamiliar chime. But somewhere in this building, there was her desk. A pen holder with red pens, an attendance ledger, a mug filled from the staff room coffee maker. That kind of daily life existed here.

Stepping into the courtyard, the October sunlight stung my eyes. On the makeshift stage, the light music club was rehearsing, and the bass vibrations traveled up through the ground into the soles of my feet. Walking along the row of stalls, the smoke rising from a yakisoba griddle and the smell of soy sauce hit my nose. A line at the takoyaki stand. Elementary school kids shrieking at the shooting gallery. Neighbors had apparently come too — a young couple pushing a stroller.

As I passed alongside the gymnasium, I heard her voice.

“It’s okay. Just calm down. Do it like you practiced and you’ll be fine.”

In front of the gymnasium’s loading entrance. She was in a track suit, hands on the shoulders of a girl who looked on the verge of tears. Probably a student about to go on for a stage performance. She leaned down slightly — still taller than the student even then — and whispered something at a distance where their foreheads nearly touched. The girl nodded rapidly. When she gave the student a gentle push on the back, the girl ran off into the gymnasium.

After watching her go, she let out a long breath. Hands shoved into the pockets of her track jacket, she looked up at the sky. The October sky was high and blue. Her profile seemed to overlap with the person I knew, and yet somehow it didn’t. The cardigan version of her, the track suit version, the one who sticks notes on the refrigerator — they were all the same person, yet each one was subtly different.

An announcement echoed from inside the gymnasium in place of a bell. “The afternoon program will begin shortly —”

I didn’t go into the gymnasium. I sat down on a bench in the courtyard. I bought a pack of yakisoba and ate it with chopsticks while listening to the rehearsal. A drum count kicked in, and the guitars took off. The performance was rough around the edges. But the energy was real.

Was the girl she had been encouraging now standing on that stage?

I finished the yakisoba and went back into the school building. Walking along the third-floor hallway. Classrooms without festival activities had their doors shut. One was half-open.

The plate on the door read: English Department Prep Room.

In the dim interior, the late afternoon western sun slanted in through a narrow gap. The wall-to-wall shelves were packed tight with dictionaries and grammar textbooks. Two steel desks by the window. One was buried under mountains of papers; the other was immaculately organized. Three red pens in the pen holder, two highlighters. At the edge of the desk, a stack of printouts labeled “2nd Periodic Exam — English Communication II.” Under the desk mat, a seating chart with thirty-eight names in small type. Beside several of the names, penciled notes had been added in a soft hand. “Late submissions — caution.” “Remedial candidate.” “Seems down lately → conference?” A pencil’s gentler pressure, distinct from red pen ink.

On the desk sat a single mug. A slightly childish design printed with a movie character. I recognized it. The same one I had given her for her birthday last year. When she said “I’ll use it at work,” she had apparently meant it. Every morning at this desk, she pours coffee into this cup and opens students’ notebooks. The gesture of uncapping a red pen. The angle at which she holds chalk. The motion of her hand marking an X on an answer sheet. An entire day of hers that I had never witnessed was packed into this room of roughly six tatami mats.

The Westminster chime melody drifted in from the hallway, and I left the prep room.

The four o’clock chime sounded.

Outside the school gate, the ginkgo-lined avenue was half-turned to yellow. A patchwork of green and gold. When the wind blew, a few colored leaves spiraled down, spinning as they fell.

While waiting for her to finish cleaning up, I watched the students filing out through the gate. Some still in uniform, some changed into street clothes, a group of girls laughing together with stage makeup they hadn’t quite managed to remove. Every face wore the particular brightness that comes after a day spent giving everything.

I waited perhaps thirty minutes. A figure appeared, descending the emergency staircase on the side of the building. She had changed back into her cardigan, tote bag over her shoulder, walking toward the main gate. A male teacher stopped her along the way; they exchanged a few words. She accepted a document, bowed her head, and resumed walking.

The moment she passed through the school gate, she removed the name tag from her chest and tucked it into her bag.

I watched the motion from about ten meters away, beneath a ginkgo tree.

Removing a name tag. Such a small thing, and yet the air around her changed. The tension left her shoulders; her stride lengthened slightly. She scanned the area, found me.

“Sorry for the wait.”

She jogged over. The hem of her cardigan fluttered.

“How long were you here?”

“Since before noon.”

“No way. You saw everything?”

“I had the café latte. It was lukewarm.”

“Ha! Don’t tell the students that. They worked really hard on it.”

Her laughing face was the one I knew.

I looked up at her from a vantage point more than ten centimeters lower. The evening sun filtered through the ginkgo leaves, casting dappled light across her cheeks. From the collar of her cardigan came the faint, powdery smell of chalk.

“I’m starving.”

She said it plainly.

“Even teachers get hungry, huh.”

“Obviously. I only had one rice ball for lunch.”

We left through the school’s back gate and cut through a residential neighborhood. When walking beside her, I can never quite keep up. Her stride is long. Those long legs naturally fall into a wide gait. But today, every few steps, she was slowing her pace to match mine.

The scent of osmanthus drifted over a garden wall. Sweet and slightly damp — the smell of autumn. There was an osmanthus-scented diffuser in the entryway of her apartment, too. I had learned she loved the scent last autumn.

“Oh, wait a sec.”

She stopped. She was photographing the ginkgo leaves at the end of the avenue, stained amber by the setting sun. She adjusted the angle, took another. Checked the screen and nodded in satisfaction.

“Personal. Not for work.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“Your face was asking.”

On the way to the station, around a corner, there was a small bookshop. Handwritten recommendation cards for new releases were taped to the entrance. She was drawn inside as if by gravity.

Stepping in, I smelled old paper and ink. She walked straight to the magazine section without hesitation and picked up a film magazine. She flipped through the pages at a speed completely different from the woman who had been writing the shift schedule in the classroom. Her hands stopped on a feature about a movie opening next month.

“I watched this director’s last film at least three times.”

She held the open page toward me. Next to the director’s interview photo, a film still was printed.

“I once tried to order the English screenplay and use it as class material. It didn’t fit the curriculum in the end, so it got scrapped.”

As she talked, her voice kept rising. Thirty minutes since removing the name tag. The shell of “teacher” was peeling away, one layer at a time.

“Also, there’s a touring musical coming to Japan in January. I don’t know if I can get tickets, though.”

“You want to go?”

“Desperately.”

She started to put the magazine back on the shelf, then picked it up again, and in the end carried it to the register. “It’s before payday, though,” she muttered to herself as she fished coins from her wallet.

“It counts as curriculum research.”

“No it doesn’t.”

“Half true.”

Clutching the bookshop’s paper bag, she looked nothing like the person who had been watching over thirty-eight students just hours earlier.

We got off two stations later. She said there was a place nearby she’d been wanting to try, so we left through the ticket gates and turned into a side street.

One block off the main road in front of the station, in the basement of a small mixed-use building. Sliding open the wooden door, the smoke from grilled chicken skewers and the smell of charcoal rushed over us. Eight seats at the counter, three tables. It was early on a Saturday evening; seats were still open.

“Two drafts.”

She called to the server the moment she sat down at the counter. She usually agonizes over what to order, but on exhausting days, beer is the one instant decision. She’s the type who uses alcohol to flip a switch at the end of the day — something I learned after we started dating.

The glasses arrived. Foam nearly overflowing.

“Cheers.”

The light clink of glass against glass. After her first sip, she closed her eyes and let out a breath.

“It’s over…”

“The festival?”

“Yeah. Including the prep period, two months. It was long.”

We ordered an assorted skewer platter, a rolled omelet, and edamame. Picking at the appetizer of hijiki seaweed, she began to tell me about the behind-the-scenes of her day.

“I got to school at seven in the morning. The café ran short on supplies, so I had to sprint to the convenience store nearby. Got back and found the posters peeling off. Then one of the students was about to be late for the gym rehearsal time slot —”

The skewers arrived. Chicken and leek, salt. She took one and bit into it.

“That girl, you know — back in April, she couldn’t even come to the regular classroom. She was only going to the nurse’s office.”

“The one who was about to cry in front of the gym?”

She looked surprised.

“You saw that?”

“I happened to walk by.”

”…Did you see the stage performance?”

“I didn’t go into the gym.”

“I see.”

She took a sip of beer and traced the rim of the plate lightly with the tip of her skewer.

“That girl sang in front of people for the first time today. Her voice was shaking, but she made it through to the end. The audience started clapping along. After it was over, she came backstage and just bawled.”

Behind the counter, a piece of charcoal popped on the grill.

“And then I started crying too, and wiped my face with my track jacket sleeve. Not very professional of me, I know.”

She said it laughing, but the corners of her eyes were faintly red. Whether from the beer or the memory, I couldn’t tell.

As I cut the rolled omelet with my chopsticks, I was thinking back to that classroom. Every day, in that room, she stands for fifty minutes and takes the full weight of thirty-some pairs of eyes looking straight at her. She writes on the blackboard with chalk, answers questions, wakes up dozing students, and checks notebook submissions when class ends. During free periods, she prints the next day’s worksheets and grades papers over coffee in the staff room. Day after day after day.

“Hey, can I talk about movies?”

She said it abruptly.

“That’s sudden.”

“Well, all I’ve been talking about today is students. I want to switch off teacher mode.”

The second round of beers arrived. She held the glass with both hands wrapped around the handle. Long fingers. The same hands that grip chalk and wield a red pen every day.

“The other day, I used a movie scene in class. For English listening practice. An old movie, actually —”

Her subject was English. She took the teaching certification track in university, and her love of movies led her to become an English teacher. She sometimes uses lines from Western films as teaching material, which apparently goes over well with the students.

“I have them watch it without subtitles and write down every word they catch. Then I play it again with subtitles for the answers. The movie happened to be one of my favorites. I got too into it and ended up spending half the class explaining the film.”

“Did you get in trouble?”

“The department head gave me a little talking-to. But the students’ listening scores went up, so it all worked out in the end.”

We ordered more skewers. Tsukune meatball, chicken tail, and chicken breast with pickled plum and shiso. She took the breast, carefully spread the plum paste with her chopsticks, then brought it to her mouth.

“Want to watch that movie together sometime? There’s a revival screening. Next month.”

“Sounds good.”

“Sunday morning, first showing. Then lunch, and after that in the evening —”

She pulled out her phone and started checking her schedule. The screen’s glow lit up the wood grain of the counter. A screen packed solid with appointments. Red text for meetings. Blue for club activities. Green for personal. The green blocks were overwhelmingly few.

“November has final exams, so the week before is going to be tough. Making the test papers and processing grades will be the death of me.”

“Sounds rough.”

“Happens every year, though. The comment section on report cards — thirty-eight of them, handwritten. About two hundred characters per student. And every single one has to say something different.”

She didn’t order a third beer. She switched to oolong tea. Tomorrow she had to be at school early for club activities, she said.

“But,” she said. She set her chopsticks down and rested her chin in her hand.

“I’ve never once wanted to quit. Funny enough.”

Watching the server clear away the appetizer dish, she continued in a quiet voice.

“I love the time I spend standing in front of the students. During those fifty minutes, everything I have goes to them. Maybe that’s what feels right about it.”

Her right pinky brushed softly against the pinky of my left hand, resting on the counter.

No eye contact. She was gazing at the label of a sake bottle behind the counter. But the pinky was there. Warm, dry, and just slightly rough. A texture like the remnant of chalk.

Five seconds, maybe ten.

She withdrew her hand as if nothing had happened and picked up her glass of oolong tea.

“Shall we head back?”

We settled the bill and emerged to street level. At the end of the alley, the white glow of a vending machine was visible. She said “I’ll grab a water” and jogged toward it. Her fingertip pressing the button glowed pale under the fluorescent light. The traces of chalk were still there.

Taking the water bottle, she looked up at the sky.

“Stars are out.”

A few points of light between the buildings. More than usual for a Tokyo sky.

“From the school rooftop, you can see even more. On nights when I stay late, I go up sometimes.”

“By yourself?”

“By myself. Nobody’s there. Climb four flights of stairs, and the field lights are all off, the grounds pitch dark. In winter, the air is so clear you can see Orion perfectly.”

She opened the cap of the water bottle and took a sip. Her throat moved.

“Take me there sometime.”

“Can’t. That would be trespassing.”

“Not if the teacher gives permission.”

“I don’t have that kind of authority.”

Laughing, she started walking. October nights grow dark early. Streetlights cast shadows along the alley.

“This way.”

She turned the corner without hesitation. Even though this should have been an unfamiliar neighborhood, she found the route to the station on the first try. She had told me once that she never forgets a road she’s walked. A map draws itself automatically in her head. She was retracing the exact route we had taken on the way here, in perfect reverse.

“You commute by train every morning, right? Isn’t the rush hour tough?”

I asked it casually.

Her stride faltered for just an instant.

”— Well, yeah.”

Her voice dropped a shade. As we passed through a stretch where the streetlight didn’t reach, her profile was hidden in shadow.

“I’m used to it.”

She said no more. I didn’t press. Instead, she shortened her stride by half a step and fell in beside me. Close enough that our shoulders nearly touched.

Rounding a corner in the residential neighborhood, the sound of a piano drifted from one of the houses. A halting melody, breaking and resuming. A child practicing, probably.

“One of my students was playing that piece too. In music class.”

“The English teacher keeps tabs on music class?”

“The walls are thin. You can hear everything from the next room over. The time a choir rehearsal started next door during a midterm exam, I did go get the music teacher.”

She shifted the bookshop bag in her arms.

“But afterward, a student asked me, ‘Miss, wasn’t the noise from next door bothering you?’ The fact that they were worrying about that during a test — it made me laugh a little.”

The piano grew distant. The same phrase, repeated again and again. The child wants to get better. Her students are surely like this too — repeating something over and over, changing little by little.

When we reached the station platform, the next train was four minutes away. The bench had someone already sitting there, so we stood by a pillar. Across the tracks, the sign for a closed bakery was visible. Its fluorescent letters half-burnt out. She pointed at it and said, “I wonder if there’s a line there in the morning.” A gust of wind passing beneath the station name plate lifted the loose strands of her hair.

The train arrived.

Saturday night, the outbound train was nearly empty. We sat side by side, and she sank deep into the seat.

A textbook peeked out from her tote bag. A well-worn English textbook with scuffed white corners. Sticky tabs bristled from the pages, and I could see the margins packed with notes in red pen. With that same red ink, she writes “Good!” in someone’s notebook every day, draws circles on answer sheets.

“Hey.”

She said it softly.

“Thanks for coming today.”

“About the lukewarm café latte, though —”

“Let it go.”

She laughed, then leaned her head against my shoulder.

Her hair smelled of chalk and, faintly, of ink. The ink of the staff room copier. I shouldn’t have known that smell, and yet somehow I did. Because it’s the smell she carries home every day.

The train began to move. Through the window, the platform lights streamed backward. Our reflections in the glass were blurred at the edges, looking like strangers seated across the aisle.

Somewhere past the third station, the weight on my shoulder grew heavier. I could hear her breathing in sleep. Her right hand rested on her knee, and on the side of her middle finger, a faint trace of chalk remained. A fleck of red pen ink, too, at the edge of a fingernail. Every day, those hands write on the blackboard, mark scores on answer sheets, and pat the shoulder of a crying student.

Each time the train swayed, her body tilted slightly. Each time, the weight returned to my shoulder.

Outside the window, the light of a station platform lit the scene for one brief moment, then returned to darkness.

Production Notes

I wrote the hours that exist outside the camera’s frame. For those curious about what’s inside it.

The seed of this story was “A Female Teacher Captivated by a Train Groper — Saika Kawakita.” That fleeting expression she showed during our walk home — what lies behind it is captured in this film.

The very premise of Saika Kawakita playing a “female teacher” is already compelling. 169 centimeters tall, translucence off the charts, that poised bearing when she stands at the lectern. When the woman hailed as having the “highest face score of all time” at her 2018 debut buttons up a blouse and takes her place behind the teaching desk — the screen simply becomes convincing.

At the core of the film is the “commuter train.” Every morning on a packed train, the teacher reveals expressions she never shows from behind the lectern. What begins as revulsion gradually betrays the body — and 101 reviews describe that progression as “realistic.” The gap between her pristine appearance and her body’s response. The significance of Saika Kawakita performing this theme cannot be overstated. She is defined by “translucence,” and that is precisely why the moment that transparency clouds carries such devastating power.

The teacher’s daily life written into this story — morning staff meetings, chalk dust, a voice encouraging a student — all of it exists in the time “before” this film. Before the camera rolls, before she boards the train, a daily life that undeniably existed in that classroom. Knowing that daily life before watching this film adds an entirely different dimension. What she lost and what she gained inside that commuter train — the answer is known only to those who watch.

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