Kimi no Na wa. Rediscovering the Future

7. That night

Early Saturday morning in a small apartment in Ginza, Tokyo, Sayaka Natori was awakened by a small chill. Gently opening her eyes, she saw her fiancé, Katsuhiko Teshigawara, sleeping peacefully across from her. He had dragged all the blankets. «Tesshi, you always do the same thing», the girl thought. She took the covers and carefully pulled them to her side. Tesshi reacted by adjusting himself a little, but he continued to sleep without realizing it.

Sayaka watched him for a while, starting to doze off again. She felt that it was wonderful to be able to wake up and be able to see him from the first thing in the morning.

She turned and stared at the ceiling. Tesshi's room was very small. They needed to find a house or apartment so they could be more comfortable. Still, the last few weeks they'd been together sharing Tesshi's apartment were like a dream to her. Sayaka remembered that living with him was her greatest wish since that day in 2013.

She closed her eyes, and memories of that strange day came to her. Today, with the distance, she felt lucky to be alive. If it wasn't for her friend Mitsuha, maybe she, or Tesshi, or anyone in the village would be alive. And the memories began to flow as in a dream.

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Sayaka could sum up that day in October 2013 with just one word: fear. She began to feel it when she learned of the strange plan that Tesshi and Mitsuha had devised. She always believed that it was all some kind of joke, but Mitsuha's determination and conviction were so intense that they completely convinced Tesshi. And she couldn't refuse. She felt almost forced to humor them and join in the plan. However, she believed that at the last minute they would tell her that everything was fine, that nothing was going to happen, and all that would remain as a crazy youthful joke.

When her friends actually blew up the Itomori electrical substation with explosives and the power went out in the entire town, she realized that nothing was a joke anymore. The fear that had built up in her for most of the day overwhelmed her. Alone in the room of the radio club of the Itomori Institute, where she was in her last year of high school, she turned on the microphone and began to broadcast the evacuation message that they had planned and that she had practiced all afternoon.

She was surprised to hear a distant echo of her own voice playing over emergency loudspeakers throughout the town. She noticed that her voice sounded very similar to her sister's, who actually worked at the town hall as an official announcer. That gave her a little more security. She knew that the towns-people would believe them, and that this strange plan could work.

But what happened next was something she never imagined. Although Mitsuha had told them exactly what was going to happen, living it was a borderline experience.

Fear turned to panic as three high school teachers burst into the audio room. One of them yelled at her as he cut the transmission. Professor Yukino tried to mediate and calm things down, but Professor Sasaki and Coach Murakami were angry as she had never seen them. In the end, she ended up crying as the three of them escorted her through the halls of the Institute. At that moment, she could only think that she was going to end up in jail; if it wasn't for the illegal transmission she just did, she would go as an accomplice of Tesshi and Mitsuha who had just committed an explosive attack. She felt that the future of her and her friends was finished.

To top it off, when the city council took control of the emergency loudspeaker system, it announced that there really was no emergency and ordered everyone to stay where they were. Sayaka realized that the plan had failed. «We ruined our lives for nothing», she thought. More tears started running down her cheeks.

But then, as they went out to the courtyard of the Institute, the image of the comet Tiamat overwhelmed the entire entourage. She and the teachers stood watching this unique spectacle, aided by the complete darkness caused by the blackout.