Granny Yanagi, the matchmaker, slid a photograph across the low table.
“What do you think of this one? Quite the looker, even by her star’s standards.”
Kanji leaned in and gasped. The girl in the photo had round, soft cheeks and gentle eyes — young enough that you could barely call her a woman yet.
“This is… she’s a beauty.”
“Told you.”
“I want to meet her. I’ll go right now.”
“Now, now, settle down.” The old woman slurped her tea. “That’s an awfully far star, you know. It took years just for this photograph to reach us. Going to meet her will take years more.”
“I don’t care.”
That very night, Kanji packed his things and boarded a ship. He tucked the photograph against his chest and couldn’t stop humming to himself. With those round cheeks on his mind, even the long, long journey didn’t trouble him one bit.
Granny Yanagi called after him as he left.
“Kanji. Whatever you do, don’t go getting disappointed.”
“Not a chance. Not with a beauty like that.”
Kanji only waved, without turning back.
Eventually, the ship reached the distant star.
He found the address he’d been given and stood before a weathered door. He checked the photograph against his chest once more, cleared his throat, and knocked.
“Hello? My name is Kanji. I’m here about the… matchmaking arrangement—”
The door creaked open.
Out stepped a woman stooped with age, her hair entirely gray, deep wrinkles creasing the skin around her eyes.
Kanji froze, mouth hanging open. The girl from the photo was nowhere to be seen.
(This isn’t what I was promised.)
Just as his shoulders sagged and he started to back away—
The woman looked at Kanji’s face and gasped. She held up a photograph of her own, comparing it to his face, again and again, before sinking weakly onto the doorstep.
“You… you’re not the young man in this photo. Are you?”
”…I beg your pardon?”
Clutched in her trembling hand was a photograph of a man Kanji recognized all too well — black-haired, barely twenty years old. It was Kanji himself. From long, long ago.
And then, at last, it clicked.
The matchmaking photo he himself had sent out, all those years back, had only just arrived at this star. By the time it got here, the young man in that picture was long gone. The woman had been looking forward to meeting the Kanji of his youth — and he’d been looking forward to meeting a young woman who, it turned out, no longer existed either. They were, in every sense, even.
”…Seems the people we each fell for left for the past a long time ago.”
Kanji scratched his head, and the old woman’s wrinkled face broke into a grin. Kanji laughed too. The two of them stood there in the doorway, laughing until their sides ached.
“Fancy some tea?”
“I’d love some.”
They set off together, ambling down the street toward the teahouse — a far better match, the two of them, than the young pair in those old photographs had ever been.