Just Like You

Hey, you.

Sometimes you hear about something someone did and think:

That sounds exactly like them.

You didn’t predict it.

You can’t really explain why.

And yet somehow, it makes perfect sense.

So where does that sense of them actually come from?

Clink-clank.

The sound of the doorbell made it feel as though the end of my day had finally begun.

Without a word, Mama placed my usual Harper in front of me.

The ice gave a small clink.

At the end of the counter, Taka was staring at his phone with a serious expression.

Again.

Whenever this man started thinking, it showed immediately on his face.

For a private detective, he was astonishingly easy to read.

At least, that was how he looked to me.

Maybe when he was working, he wore an entirely different face.

“Kenichi.”

“What is it today?”

“I was reading this news story.”

“No.”

“I haven’t even told you what it is.”

“When you look at the news with that face and then say my name, trouble follows.”

“Isn’t that prejudice?”

“Experience.”

Tom snorted beside us.

“So what is it?”

“An article about a crime.”

Taka raised his phone.

“They interviewed people who knew the suspect.”

“Pretty common.”

“Yeah, but something caught my attention.”

“Don’t tell me you’re enjoying the crime.”

“That’s not it.”

Taka scrolled down the screen.

“One person says, ‘I can’t believe he would ever do something like that.’ But someone else says, ‘I always thought he might do something someday.’”

My hand stopped halfway to my glass.

“They’re talking about the same guy?”

“Same person.”

Tom chuckled.

“Happens all the time.”

“Former-cop opinion?”

“Happens all the time.”

“Why?”

“Hell if I know.”

“That’s what I’m asking.”

“Being a cop doesn’t mean you can read every human mind.”

“But isn’t it strange?”

Taka put his phone face down.

“They both knew the guy, right?”

“Presumably.”

“But one says, ‘He’d never do that,’ and the other says, ‘I knew he might.’”

“Yeah.”

“So which one knew the real person?”

I didn’t answer immediately.

Me at work.

Me at Aoi.

Me at home.

They were probably all a little different.

Maybe some people at work saw me as the older guy who looked after everyone.

Others probably thought I was the fussy old bastard who worried about every detail.

At home, I was someone else again.

The person my family knew and the person Taka and Tom knew probably weren’t exactly the same.

So which one was the real me?

...All of them, I suppose.

But that only made the question harder.

“Maybe they both knew the real guy.”

“But those are complete opposites.”

“So?”

“How can someone be both ‘the kind of person who would never do that’ and ‘the kind of person who might do exactly that’?”

“Different people see different sides.”

Taka thought about it.

“You mean he acted differently around each of them?”

“Maybe. But not only that.”

Tom cut in.

“You don’t act the same with your clients as you do in here.”

“Don’t I?”

“No.”

“What am I like with clients?”

“Hell if I know.”

“Tom, you’re saying that a lot tonight.”

“Caught it from Kenichi.”

“Don’t blame me.”

Mama laughed quietly.

I took a sip of Harper.

Come to think of it, I barely knew Taka at work.

The Taka I knew sat at Aoi, stared at his phone with a serious face, found something interesting, and said, “Kenichi.”

I didn’t know what expression he wore in front of a client.

What his eyes looked like while following someone.

What went through his mind when he caught someone lying.

I knew none of that.

And yet I thought I knew Taka.

Strange.

“Okay.”

Taka looked at me.

“What kind of person is Kenichi?”

“Where did that come from?”

“Let’s see whether my version of you matches Tom’s.”

“Don’t turn me into an experiment.”

“Come on.”

“Stubborn,” Tom said immediately.

“I don’t want to hear that from you.”

“Worries too much,” Taka added.

“Or that from you.”

“Can’t say no when someone asks for help,” Mama said.

“Mama?”

“And you turn your glass when you’re thinking.”

I looked down.

I was doing it.

I quietly removed my hand.

“...We already covered that the other day.”

“It’s a habit.”

“I thought we were talking about personality today.”

Taka laughed.

“So if we put all those together, is that your personality?”

I thought about it.

Stubborn.

Worried.

Bad at refusing requests.

Turns his glass while thinking.

None of them were exactly wrong.

At least, that was how these people saw me.

But putting those four things together didn’t feel like it produced me.

It sounded like the personality section on a résumé.

Not false.

But reading it wouldn’t mean you knew me.

“Probably not.”

“Then what’s missing?”

“Hell if I know.”

“It’s your own personality.”

“Can you explain yours?”

“Of course.”

“Go on.”

Taka opened his mouth.

Then stopped.

“...I’m curious.”

“Lisa beat you at that.”

“That was the game the other day!”

“You lost at your own defining trait.”

“Fine. I’m a good listener.”

“You mean you stick your nose into things.”

“I take action.”

“You can’t sit still.”

“Why do you make everything sound worse?”

Tom burst out laughing.

So did I.

“See?”

“See what?”

“The moment you try to explain personality, it turns into some cheap personality test.”

“But some people are obviously distinctive.”

“Sure.”

“So what makes them distinctive?”

I started to answer.

Then stopped.

He was right.

I could think of people I’d call distinctive.

But if someone asked me exactly what made them that way, it became difficult.

Their clothes?

The way they spoke?

How they thought?

Unusual hobbies?

Those were all parts of a person.

But transplant any one of those things into someone else and you wouldn’t create the same person.

If someone was known for wearing red, I could start wearing red tomorrow.

I wouldn’t become them.

I’d just become me wearing red.

“I don’t know.”

“Right?”

“Why do you look so happy?”

“Nice to have company.”

“Don’t drag me in.”

Tom tilted his glass.

“Maybe personality isn’t something you can explain that easily.”

“But we still say, ‘That’s so like him,’ right?” Taka said.

“Yeah.”

“Then maybe personality is the collection of all those things that feel ‘like him.’”

“How do you collect that?”

“Actions?”

“All right.”

Tom looked at me.

“Suppose you heard Kenichi suddenly quit his job and opened a bakery on a tropical island.”

“Why a bakery?”

“It’s an example.”

Taka thought.

“...That would surprise me.”

“Right?”

“But if I heard the reason, maybe it would make sense.”

I looked at him.

“What do you mean?”

“Kenichi isn’t the kind of guy who does something completely insane for no reason.”

“Fair.”

“But if you spent an hour explaining, ‘This happened, so I thought about this, which led to this, and that’s why I decided to do it—’”

“I would not spend an hour explaining it.”

“You would,” Tom said.

“I would not.”

“You would,” Mama said with a smile.

“Even you?”

“So,” Taka continued, “after hearing the whole explanation, I’d probably think, ‘Yeah. That’s very Kenichi.’”

“Even the bakery?”

“Even the bakery.”

“I’ve never baked bread in my life.”

“That’s not the important part.”

“It would be important to the bakery.”

“That’s not what we’re talking about!”

Laughing, I lifted my glass.

But something bothered me.

Taka couldn’t predict that I’d open a bakery on a tropical island.

Neither could I.

Yet he thought that once he heard my reasons, he might decide it was perfectly like me.

That was strange.

If this Kenichi-ness really existed inside me, shouldn’t it help people predict what I’d do next?

Probably not.

I couldn’t even predict what I’d be doing ten years from now.

But after I did something, people could say:

Yeah. That sounds like Kenichi.

Then maybe personality wasn’t a specification for predicting the future.

Maybe it was context we used to make sense of the past.

“Then why don’t we reverse it?” Mama said.

“Reverse what?”

“Try predicting what someone will do first.”

Taka’s eyes lit up.

Bad sign.

“That sounds fun.”

“We’re actually doing this?”

“Okay. Kenichi. You find a wallet on the street.”

“Take it to the police.”

“Boring.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

Tom spoke.

“You’d look inside.”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

“To identify the owner.”

“Don’t invent my reasons too.”

“But I could see you checking the cards and thinking about whether there was some way to return it directly,” Taka said.

“No. Police station.”

“So we were wrong.”

“What exactly were you two hoping for?”

Taka thought again.

“Okay, Tom. An unknown number calls you.”

“I answer.”

“You answer?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s surprising. I thought you’d look up the number first.”

“I can look it up afterward.”

“Why?”

“Faster to answer and ask who it is.”

Taka and I looked at each other.

“...That’s very Tom.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

I felt strange as soon as I said it.

My prediction had been wrong.

I’d expected Tom to distrust an unknown number first.

But the moment I heard his answer and his reason, it felt exactly like him.

The prediction failed.

And yet the result made sense.

What kind of judgment was that?

“Next. Taka.”

I looked at him.

“A woman you don’t know is crying by the side of the road.”

“I’d talk to her.”

Instantly.

“Of course you would.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re you.”

“That explains nothing.”

“But you would.”

“I would.”

“See?”

“So how did you know?”

I opened my mouth.

Then stopped.

Why did I know?

Because he was curious?

Because he was a detective?

Because he couldn’t ignore someone in trouble?

Or because he simply wanted to know what had happened?

All of those sounded plausible.

None of them felt quite right.

But put two things together in my head—

an unknown woman crying by the road,

and Taka walking past—

and he was already stopping.

Already talking to her.

Probably already getting himself dragged into whatever mess came next.

I could see the whole thing.

I just couldn’t explain why.

“...Because you’re Taka.”

“That again?”

“What else do you want?”

“You haven’t explained my personality at all.”

“Then you explain it.”

“Well...”

Taka fell silent too.

Tom laughed.

“You two have spent the whole night saying ‘that’s like him’ and ‘that’s not like him.’”

“That’s the problem.”

I looked at my glass.

We know people.

At least, we think we do.

Taka feels like Taka.

Tom feels like Tom.

Mama feels like Mama.

Lisa feels like Lisa.

That sense is real.

But what exactly do we know?

What Taka has done in the past.

What kind of work Tom used to do.

What words Mama tends to choose.

If I collected every piece of information I had about them, would that collection become them?

Probably not.

And yet I would never confuse one of them for another.

I don’t mean their faces or voices.

There was simply a sense in which each of them was unmistakably themselves.

“Strange.”

“What is?”

“Maybe we can’t actually identify personality.”

Taka frowned.

“But you can tell when someone is distinctive.”

“Sure.”

“Then you’re identifying it.”

“What are you identifying?”

“...Their personality?”

“And what’s that?”

“...The things that make them who they are?”

“And those are?”

“...Their personality?”

Tom burst out laughing.

“You’re going in circles.”

“Like Kenichi’s glass.”

“I’m not turning it.”

I looked down.

I was.

“...Shut up.”

Mama laughed.

Come to think of it, understanding yourself might be even harder.

I’d never once thought, That was very Kenichi of me.

Of course not.

I was simply living as myself.

When I chose something, I had reasons.

When I refused, I had reasons.

When I couldn’t refuse, I probably had reasons for that too.

To me, none of those things were “personality.”

They were just a desperate accumulation of choices.

Maybe it was only someone watching from outside who looked at that trail and said:

Yeah. That’s very Kenichi.

Then was personality something I possessed?

Or was it the shape of me that remained inside other people?

I didn’t know.

“But going back to that crime story,” Taka said.

“Yeah?”

“The person who said, ‘He might do something someday,’ and the person who said, ‘He would never do something like that’—they both knew their own version of what that person was like.”

“Seems so.”

“But those versions were complete opposites.”

“Yeah.”

“So maybe personality isn’t actually something inside the person?”

Nobody answered.

It’s inside the person.

Yet it changes depending on who is looking.

It’s difficult to put into words.

It doesn’t reliably predict what someone will do next.

And still, after something happens, we can hear about it and think:

Yeah. That sounds like them.

What the hell is that?

I looked at Taka.

Tomorrow, he’d probably find something interesting, come into Aoi, and say, “Kenichi.”

Tom would probably let us overthink it for half an hour, then overturn the whole conversation with one sentence.

Mama would probably refuse to give us an answer at all.

She’d polish glasses while we talked ourselves in circles and eventually fell silent.

That felt right.

But if you asked whether I knew they would actually do those things tomorrow, I didn’t.

Maybe Taka would sit silently all night.

Maybe Tom would talk more than anyone.

Maybe Mama would suddenly say something that shut all three of us up.

And even then—

I’d probably think:

Yeah. That’s just like them.

...What the hell?

If anything they did could be “like them,” wasn’t the whole thing just something we invented afterward?

A convenient way of pretending we understood another person?

Maybe.

And yet—

inside my head, Taka, Tom, and Mama could never blur together.

Not because of their faces or voices.

There was something unshakable about each of them being exactly who they were.

I couldn’t put it into words.

But I couldn’t believe it wasn’t there.

“Maybe—”

I spoke.

“Maybe personality isn’t something you know beforehand.”

“What do you mean?”

“You recognize it afterward.”

“Afterward?”

“Your prediction can be wrong. But once you hear what happened, it makes sense.”

Taka thought about that.

“Is that useful?”

“What?”

“Knowing someone’s personality.”

I thought too.

“...No idea.”

“Of course.”

“But—”

I took a sip of Harper.

“Even if it isn’t useful, it’s interesting.”

“What is?”

“People.”

Taka smiled slightly.

Tom said nothing and tilted his glass.

Mama kept polishing hers, just as always.

Watching them, for some reason, I thought:

Yeah.

That’s just like them.

I still couldn’t explain why.

Hey, you.

What’s your personality?

Kind.

Stubborn.

Cautious.

Curious.

You can line up as many words as you like, and they probably still won’t add up to you.

And yet someone who knows you well might hear about something you did and smile.

Yeah. That sounds exactly like them.

Someone else might say:

They would never do something like that.

And someone who knew another side of you might say:

I always thought they might.

All of them looking at the same person.

You.

We look at distinctive people and find them interesting.

We casually say, “That person has personality.”

But maybe none of us really knows how to identify what that personality is.

We can’t quite put it into words.

We can’t reliably predict what the person will do next.

And yet, after they choose—

somehow we recognize it.

Yeah. That’s so like them.

So tell me, you.

If someday someone hears about the road you chose, or something you did, and smiles:

Yeah. That sounds exactly like them.

What do you think you’ll be doing?

See you again at Aoi.