Fantasy Girlfriend Diary | When Sakura Mana Is a Web Designer

The paper bag sat on the table, never delivered.

Cookies from her favorite shop. I’d bought them yesterday on the way to her place. Each individually wrapped pastry had a different design, and the box was beautifully designed — the kind of thing she loved. She’d even praised the thickness of the wrapping paper. To someone who noticed details like that, I’d thrown the most hollow words yesterday.

The fight happened before I could hand them to her. I’d brought them back unopened. The seal on the bag was catching the morning light, slightly lifted. I’d walked the long way home by the river last night, couldn’t bring myself to call a taxi. Forty minutes of walking, and nothing inside my head moved an inch. The factory lights across the river, which usually looked beautiful, had all turned away from me.

I checked my phone. My last message to her was still there from last night. “Made it home” — three words suspended on the screen. After that, nothing. The screen recorded nothing of what happened in her room afterward.

The reason was a trip. The one-night plan we’d postponed for next month had moved again, blocked by a new client project at work. A website redesign with a fixed launch date tied to their company anniversary — she had no control over it. I understood that. I understood it, but what came out of my mouth was: “I guess work matters more than me.” The cheapest words I could have chosen.

She didn’t argue back. She was quiet for a moment, then spoke softly. She asked me to go home.

The sound of the door closing wasn’t violent. The gentleness of it was what stayed with me through the night.

---

By afternoon, she still hadn’t read my message.

It wasn’t that we’d never fought in the year and a half we’d been together. But every other time, it was just a prolonged playful argument, resolved by evening. We’d quarreled about movie tastes and made up by dinner. We’d argued about how to call the dog, and the dog itself settled it by not responding to either of us. An argument that stretched into the next day — this was the first. That long night taught me everything before it wasn’t really fighting at all.

I’d drafted an apology four times that morning and deleted it four times. The longer I wrote, the more it sounded like excuses. The shorter, the lighter it felt. I’d gotten as far as hitting send on just “I’m sorry” — five characters — before I stopped. She doesn’t work with words, but I knew she was more sensitive to their weight than I was. I’d watched her spend thirty minutes with a thesaurus deciding on a single word for a website headline. I couldn’t throw careless five characters at someone like that.

What I finally wrote was three lines. I said my words yesterday were the worst. That I wasn’t ignorant of the work situation — I understood it and said it anyway. I’m sorry.

I sent it and put the phone face-down.

The hours that followed dragged. Missed lunch. Cleaned every dish. Scrubbed the hood vent — something I never did. I had to keep my hands moving, or I’d flip the phone over and check. The angle of light from the window shifted gradually, and the square of sun on the floor passed over the table legs one by one.

Her reply came just after three. The phone buzzed once, and when I picked it up, there was a single message from her.

“Free around dusk? Down by the river. Just walking the dog anyway, so no need to bring anything.”

The tension drained from my body. Not the continuation of anger, not a declaration of forgiveness — just the usual tone of someone suggesting to meet. But it had no emoji. That was the only reminder that yesterday was still there.

---

I left the house at half past five.

Fifteen minutes’ walk to the riverbank. The river ran halfway between her place and mine, and the path beside it was her dog’s usual walk. I’d walked that route dozens of times in the year and a half we’d been together. Today I walked it like it was new.

I stopped at a convenience store on the way. Should I buy something, or respect what she’d said about coming empty-handed? I stood there for a minute thinking, then picked up two bottles of barley tea — the kind she always grabbed on the walk back. Not as an apology offering, but as part of the usual routine. That was my only measure. As I paid, the condensation from the cold bottle transferred to my palm, and only then did I realize my hands were already sweating.

The river comes into view. In the June dusk, the air still held half the day’s heat, river smell mixing with grass. A bicycle passed slowly on the embankment path.

I’d first walked this embankment with her two weeks into dating. It was our third date, framed as joining her dog’s walk. She’d pointed out the factory across the water and named the equipment in order. I hadn’t retained much, but I’d loved this place from that day forward, whether I remembered the names or not. The fact that she’d chosen this spot for making up suggested she’d already decided how this would end.

I saw the dog first.

---

She was sitting partway down the embankment slope.

Her dog was lying beside her. A mixed breed, a size larger than a shiba, one she’d found on a rescue site. The dog noticed me and lifted its head first, tail thumping twice against the grass. She turned at the sound, smiled a little, then looked back toward the river.

I sat down beside her, on the side away from the dog. I offered a barley tea. She took it with a “mm,” opened the cap, and drank. For a while, there was only the river’s sound. A pair of birds cut low across the water. The dog tucked its nose between its paws, watching us from the corner of its eye — this dog always sensed changes in human mood before we felt them ourselves.

The factory area was visible across the water in the distance. Silver piping, white smokestack, spherical tanks. In the evening light, only the metal surfaces changed color in sequence. I knew one reason she loved this walk route was the view of that industrial landscape. Her profile didn’t look angry or tired. She looked like she was rearranging something in her head. The same expression she wore at work when deciding on element placement.

“About what I did yesterday,” she began.

“I replayed it about three times at home. I was pretty awful. The way I said ‘You should go home’ — that wasn’t right.”

“It wasn’t—”

“Let me finish. If we’re taking turns, your words yesterday were definitely worse. That much doesn’t change. But the way I responded, the way I took what you threw at me — that was low-level fighting too. Going silent and slamming the door doesn’t solve anything.”

She said this like she was reading something she’d prepared, working through her points in order. Somewhere between last night and three this afternoon, I realized, she’d arranged these words in her mind. She was the kind of person who didn’t throw raw emotion — she set it in type first, then let it out.

“You rewrote your message how many times?”

“Four times.”

“I know. It came out as three lines. You usually write longer when you don’t draft it.”

The dog stood and rested its chin on her knee. She placed her hand on its head. “Yes, please wait a bit,” she said to it — she used formal Japanese only with the dog. When I’d asked why, she’d simply said, “It’s my elder.”

“I’m probably not going to reduce my work,” she continued, still watching the river. “I’d rather be someone who says upfront they won’t cut back and then thinks carefully about making up for it, instead of promising to reduce it and never actually doing it. I decided that when I went freelance. So yesterday wasn’t really about the trip disappearing — it was that I was careless with how I told you about the postponement. It was the second time, too.”

“That’s on me, how I reacted.”

“It’s both of us. Okay, this one’s closed.”

She twisted the cap back on the barley tea and declared it done. There was a pause. The river sound came back. Across the water, some equipment began releasing thin white steam. The dog shifted its weight to lean against her thigh, and I felt her shoulders settle slightly from here beside her. Then for the first time since I arrived, she turned and looked at me, smiling only at the corners of her mouth.

“I’m easy like that, aren’t I? Thirty seconds after I closed the door, I was already thinking I’d gone too far.”

The dog stood and looked between our two faces. It wanted the walk to continue. She stood, brushing off her knees. “Okay, let’s go,” she said to it. I took the leash she offered — that was our division of labor. The fact that it was back felt like more than any words could say.

Walking, the dog kept itself equidistant between us. Whether it was clever or considerate or both was unclear. There were other walkers on the evening embankment, and each time we passed someone, the dogs exchanged a quick greeting with their noses.

---

Dinner turned out to be at the set restaurant below the embankment.

Inside the curtain-hung entrance: oil from fried food and the sound of a baseball game on TV. It was what she called “the most important restaurant in this town” — the one that would let us tie up the dog in the shade outside. The owner always came out with a bowl of water for the dog, and today was no exception. She’d memorized only the dog’s name, not ours — probably. Still, she said, “Oh, you two are here,” and put two teacups on the four-person table. I think half the reason she loved this restaurant was exactly this kind of distance.

She ordered fried horse mackerel set with double rice. I could tell from how fast she ordered that she’d barely eaten since yesterday afternoon. She ate the tail-end of the fish, and systematized her approach to the cabbage pile, breaking it down in two waves with sauce applied carefully each time. This person had a system for everything. When my ginger-grilled pork arrived, she reached across without asking. Even trade, she said, leaving one slice of fish for me in return. Whether the exchange rate was even was something I’d never figured out in a year and a half.

“The new project,” she mentioned while placing fried fish over her rice, “is a site for a small metal-working factory. The son wants to rebuild what his father made — and it’s been up for twenty years. A factory site. Me getting this project? That’s not just luck, that’s destiny.”

Her eating pace picked up. When she talked about work, both her chopsticks and mouth moved. She could go to the factory for a shoot. They’d let her photograph the lathes. The names of all the machines were cool, she said. She didn’t hide the fact that her new project was what had broken our trip. Not hiding it was, I realized as I listened, also her way of apologizing. It was gentler than forgiving someone whose face I’d never see — hearing about the lathe photos and then letting go felt more honest.

“About the trip,” she said, finishing her soup and setting her phone on the table. A calendar was open.

“Three weeks from now, the long weekend. By then, I’ll be two weeks past delivery on this project — even if things go wrong, everything will be handled. I’m not tentatively booking. We’re getting the hotel tonight. Once it’s booked, we’re not moving it.”

She opened the notes right there on the table and typed in the dates. She wrote just the word “factory” in the entry and confirmed it. Two characters — she double-checked before putting the phone face-down.

---

We got to her place before eight.

Yesterday’s closed door opened. The dog went in first, straight to its cushion, and collapsed onto it with a soft thud. The day’s end for a dog that had walked and eaten. The edges of the cushion bore the shallow imprint of the dog’s body.

Her room was as it had been yesterday. The desk with dual monitors — design software on the left screen, a PDF marked up with red revision comments on the right. Five sticky notes in color samples arranged in steps along the monitor edges. They all looked green to me, but probably each one was a different shade. Three verification phones lined up in size order in front of the keyboard.

The bookshelf beside the desk had design books and factory photography collections on top, and a few English and German textbooks wedged into the lower shelves. She’d started learning languages to read international design firm websites in the original, and apparently the studying had quietly continued for years. It was something she didn’t mention much. Only the bookshelf knew about her effort.

“Look at this,” she said, moving the mouse to wake up the screen. A confectionery shop’s website appeared — the project she’d been buried in until last week. The live version after this morning’s launch.

“It went public this morning. The client sent me an email saying ‘My mother cried.’ His mother saw the old shop photos on the page.”

The website in the screen had wide white space, few photos, and every photo was good. Close-ups of traditional sweets and black-and-white photos of the previous owners carried equal weight. Why she’d been up late for three weeks was clear even to my untrained eye.

She opened the email and let me read it. After I finished, she closed the window without comment. The self-promotion was rationed to one viewing, apparently, down to the second.

She pulled two cans of beer from the fridge and tossed one to me. We sat on the sofa. The dog’s breathing came steady and regular from its cushion.

“Oh, right,” she remembered suddenly, and I handed her the bag I’d brought. The cookies from yesterday. She opened it, looked inside, then paused before speaking.

“If you’d given me these yesterday, I probably wouldn’t have forgiven you.”

“Would they work today?”

“They’re working really well today.”

She bit into one of the cookies and had a beer. An odd combination, but she looked happy about it.

---

After nine, she opened a laptop on the low table.

It wasn’t work. Hotel booking sites, maps, and a schedule for night-view factory cruises. Flipping between three tabs, she began planning next month’s overnight trip. Her scrolling was faster than when she worked.

“First day, I’ll drive around the refinery during daylight to see the layout from all angles. Night-view looks totally different once you understand the structure.”

“You scout out night-view photos?”

“I do. Listen — you see that circular tank from across the river? That’s a spherical gas holder. It’s that shape because the pressure pushes equally in all directions. There’s no decoration. It’s function only. The form itself. Isn’t that cool?”

I said it was, and she nodded with satisfaction, copying the ferry times into her notes. When she talked about factories, the intensity went up another level from when she discussed work. Her finger moved fast across the map. Pier names, bridge names, late-night observation point hours. She’d pause sometimes, just looking at images wordlessly. Photos of tangled piping. I couldn’t explain why I found them interesting, but we sat watching the same image for thirty seconds.

She’d mentioned once spending her student days staring at piping-photography books instead of doing technical drawing assignments. Going to science was supposedly because of that industrial landscape across the river. Choosing design was probably rooted in the same place. The eye that saw beauty in pure function and the hand that made websites with wide space for a confectionery shop — they were connected in her.

The hotel was decided. A room on the factory side, not the river side. The plan name had “Night View Guaranteed” in four characters, which she read twice before clicking reserve. Guaranteed, she said to herself again. People living on deadlines have weak knees for that word. She took a screenshot of the confirmation and sent it to me. Even though I was sitting right next to her.

“Evidence. Now it can’t move.”

Then she closed the laptop and picked up her iPhone, typing something brief with her thumb. A notes app. I couldn’t see the screen, but she smiled softly after typing.

“What did you write?”

“Yesterday and today. I realized there are fights worth remembering.”

She didn’t tell me more. Her notes app was a mix of site structure sketches, shopping lists, and little diary entries like this one. Maybe someday it would become something. Maybe it wouldn’t. Either way felt fine. I slowly drank down the rest of the beer along with the knowledge that yesterday’s fight had been saved somewhere I didn’t know about.

---

I left her place before eleven.

She didn’t ask me to stay over. She had an early client meeting tomorrow and wanted to finish her materials first. At the door, she stood in the same spot as yesterday. The difference was the door stayed open this time.

“Thanks for the barley tea. I appreciate that you came, making it look so casual, like it was just part of the walk.”

“You called me, making it sound so casual.”

“We’re even.”

She laughed, then suddenly serious. “I’m going to keep pushing myself and not pushing myself in turns going forward,” she said. “If that’s okay with you, let’s see those factories next month.”

It’s okay, I told her. The door closed. The same sound as yesterday, but after one day it meant something completely different.

Walking down the outside stairs, the June night air carried river smell. I walked the same path as last night, but in a different body. The sky in the direction of the embankment was faintly bright from the factory lights across the water. The lights that had seemed turned away from me yesterday were just lights today. Next month, I’d see them head-on from beside her.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. One more message attached to the earlier screenshot. It was a photo. No caption. On the dog’s cushion, sprawled on its back, sleeping, belly exposed.

Story Notes

I wrote about our first real fight in a year and a half together. One work kept running through my mind the whole time.

“Single woman in her thirties has a genuine hunger for sex — more than her younger boyfriend, uncomplicated and hungry in a way that’s dangerous. One year of meeting, dating, fighting, making up, and splitting.” Look at the subtitle. Meeting, dating, fighting, making up, splitting — one year. What I wrote in this story is just those two days, the “fighting and making up” part. This work goes through all of it. Framed as drama, a full year of a couple from beginning to end.

The “genuine” in the title isn’t exaggeration. The girlfriend who says “Both of our problems, case closed” on the riverbank, who insists on fair trades with fried fish, maintains that exact warmth throughout — that’s how the work itself portrays her. She lives with a younger boyfriend in the film, pushes, crashes, and connects. Sakura Mana is in her fifteenth year in this industry, and when she performs the atmosphere of domestic life with a partner, there’s not a shred of unnecessary acting. Watch just the opening domestic scene in the sample. Then, if the final two characters of that subtitle grabbed you, check how the story ends. After making up on the riverbank, the work itself offers one answer: where these two go from there.

Note: Product information is displayed in Japanese.