Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

Once Ichigo had become a real boy, his identity and Sam’s identity became more and more inseparable. People beyond Aaron Opus started to say Sam looked like Ichigo—he did, somewhat. They ate up Sam’s colorful and tragic biography: the childhood injury and playing video games as a way to be invincible, the Korean grandfather with the pizza parlor and the Donkey Kong machine. They tried to find ways in which Sam’s biography and Ichigo’s overlapped. Both had been separated from their parents at young ages. Sam was Asian, and Ichigo was Asian—in 1997, no one made the distinction between Japanese and half-Korean; that Sam was Asian was good enough. Because people—critics, gamers, the Opus marketing department—could more easily find Sam in the game, Ichigo became Sam’s creation, not Sadie’s, and as such, he became the game’s auteur. (As for his relationship to Sadie, they were neither siblings nor married/divorced people nor dating nor had they ever dated, and thus, people found their relationship too mystifying and non-relatable to be worth exploring.)