Durarara!! - Volume 4 - Chapter Ep2

Epilogue 2: Roundtable Conversation

Along Kawagoe Highway, Ikebukuro

“All right, is everyone paying attention? Sagohachi-style means ‘three-five-eight,’ and that refers to the ratio of the pickling ingredients! You create the fermentation base using three parts salt, five parts koji yeast, and eight parts rice! That’s all it takes, but it’s the magic ingredient that will help you make all kinds of food!”

This excited cooking commentary was coming from a girl with a scar on her neck and a pink apron with “Seiji Love” written on the front—the stalker, Mika Harima.

Celty couldn’t help but feel slightly wrong as she watched the girl wearing her own face executing a perfect meal.

Her bounty was gone, and she was taking advantage of her newly returned freedom to take cooking classes. She had reached out to Anri first, but Anri said that she couldn’t cook, either. Next was Karisawa, who was good with her hands, but it was revealed that she had no skill with traditional Japanese cooking.

Celty’s ultimate goal was to cook sagohachi-style pickled sandfish, so she needed someone who could handle traditional cooking—and of all people, Anri brought her to Mika.

Naturally, Seiji Yagiri tagged along. When he saw Celty, he asked, “You aren’t searching for your head anymore?” When she nodded to indicate this was the case, he seemed oddly emboldened and said, “Guess I gotta search on my own, then…”

Celty could tell that Mika was listening in on that one-sided conversation, which made the dullahan feel rather uncomfortable. On the other hand, she had to admit that Mika’s cooking was first-rate.

With just a few fancy knife flourishes for some little appetizers, Mika finished up the fermentation base for Celty’s long-awaited sagohachi dish. Excited about the prospect of serving dinner to everyone, Celty had made sure to buy some fish on the way to the lesson, but it wasn’t that simple.

“Okay! Now we just put the fish in here and let it sit overnight!”

Overnight…?

Once she realized that it meant there was no dinner for that evening, Shinra smacked a fist into his palm and said, “Let’s have a stew.”

“We can call everyone we know to come over and have a hot pot party.”

Meat, meat, veggies, meat, veggies

Meat, meat, veggies, meat, veggies

Tofu in sesame sauce, veggies in ponzu

The fat level determines what goes on the meat.

If there was any poetic description for the state of the apartment, it was these four bars from an old commercial. That was how lustily they tore into the hot pot.

On the top floor of a luxury apartment building along Kawagoe Highway, the massive dining area was so full of heat that it seemed cramped. About ten people were seated around a large table, which featured two portable gas stoves bearing equally large stew pots.

It was a varied group crowded around the pots, from students in uniform to a man in a bartender’s outfit to a Caucasian woman.

“All right, we’ve got some more meat coming up!” said a grinning young woman bearing a large tray and wearing an apron fashioned out of a body-pillow cover with a manga character on it. What ensued was a thoroughly impolite chopstick battle for control of the goods.

But one person sat on the sofa in the living room on the other side of the dining area, observing the fray. The observer was in a thorough state of relaxation, but there was one abnormality about its silhouette.

The black shadow with legs crossed on the sofa had no head above the neck.

A young man in a white coat sat down next to the figure. Despite the lack of a head, the black shadow pulled out a PDA and began to type a message.

“You aren’t going to eat?”

“I’m full just from seeing you smile,” he said, an odd statement to a person without a face.

The shadow shrugged slightly and typed out, “Don’t mind me. Thanks, though.”

The young man looked at the text and smiled shyly. Over the raucous sounds of the nearby shabu-shabu party, he said, “These last few days have been very wild.”

“I guess.”

“Let’s see… Should I start with the kinky abandonment I suffered…?”

“Don’t call it kinky abandonment!”

By putting her hands around his neck, Celty inadvertently returned the apartment to its most customary state. But suddenly, she stopped, acting seriously, and asked, “What do you suppose I should have done?”

“About what?”

“Everything ended without any real answers. I just…don’t know if I should continue with my courier work or not…”

“What’s this all about?”

“If I take on some dangerous job, it could mean bad news for you, even if I’m not—” she began to write, when Shinra reached out and closed the PDA screen.

“Like I said earlier, we’re a family now, so a bit of trouble means nothing to me… And as long as I’m scaling that wall with you, no difficulty is a bad thing to me.”

“…”

“Don’t you realize I’ve already scaled the highest wall there is—getting you to love me?” the doctor stated boldly and shamelessly. Celty smiled inwardly, picked up the nearby helmet, and bumped its visor against his forehead.

And so the doting lovers, as well as all the people sitting around the table, heartily savored their happiness in whatever form it took.

As members of one giant family within the context of a city, they found the places they could call their own within their daily lives.

It was as though the city, after enjoying its holiday, decided to give a little something back.

“Man, I really made a lot of money that day. Not much of it made sense, but I got eight hundred thousand yen up front. The funny thing is, the cargo ended up moving on his own. Should I assume that I actually did the job they paid me for?”

“As long as there are no complaints, right? I went through a lot of trouble that night, but I made two hundred thousand yen on my own.”

“Ooh! That makes a million yen…the exact amount that I lost! We made it back!”

“Way to go, Celty! It is a triumph of the power of our love!”

As a matter of fact, that money was the very same stack of bills that Celty had lost to begin with, which meant that she and Shinra had essentially done a very busy day’s work for free.

But whether they ever realized that or not is a story for another time.

Chat room

TarouTanaka: By the way, I had a hot pot with some friends today.

Setton: What a coincidence. So did I.

Kanra: What?! You had a hot pot? At this time of year?!

Kuru: Why, how coincidental! We, too, enjoyed some delicious shabu-shabu on this day!

Mai: It was yummy.

<Private Mode> Kanra: Oh, you’re here again.

<Private Mode> Kanra: You, too? Where did you have this party? You have friends to enjoy a hot pot with?

<Private Mode> Kuru: Oh my goodness.

<Private Mode> Kuru: I wish that you would not pry into the matters of a young girl and her friendships, Brother.

Mai: It’s a secret.

TarouTanaka: ?

<Private Mode> Kanra: Dammit, Mairu, would you just learn how to use private mode already?!

Bacura: I went with a female friend of mine to go eat sukiyaki. You know that place with all-you-can-eat sukiyaki for just 1,500 yen?

TarouTanaka: Oh yeah, it’s a chain!

Saika: i had the hot pot with setton. it was good

Kanra: Good grief, is anyone keeping up with the season?

Kanra: All those stews and hot pots are meant for the winter only!

Izaya’s apartment, Shinjuku

“Hey, Namie.”

“What?”

Izaya stopped staring at his desktop and turned with a smile to Namie, who was busy completing work tasks on her laptop.

“Feel like having a hot pot? Shabu-shabu, crab stew—anything you want.”

“Would you mind not using me to fulfill your empty sense of vanity, just because your chat room friends are all having hot pots?” Namie responded.

Izaya’s cheek twitched, and he shook his head. “…Did you see that?”

“The whole thing.”

“I see… You were the one who told my sisters about Celty, weren’t you?”

“That’s a good question. Oh, look…your weird girlie talk online is even creepier than before,” Namie said with an evil grin and derisive glance toward Izaya, as she monitored the chat room on her laptop in between tasks. “Also, I’m surprised… It turns out you have a human side after all. Perhaps that’s the eternal twenty-one-year-old in you?”

“You are developing into quite a handful… Shit, I should have made it invisible to anyone outside of the participants, the way Tsukumoya’s is set up,” he grumbled. The so-called puppet master, who had been outside of the loop this entire time, looked out of the window.

Izaya gazed upon the profile of Shinjuku and thought to himself.

He had abandoned any pretense at a normalized life that brought stability and relief.

He did not find it necessary for himself, but he understood that people did need such a thing.

He envied the members of the chat who fondly spoke of their lives, looked out the window at the sky, and envied Ikebukuro itself.

The city swallowed that one man’s envy and sang the glories of its holiday once again.