A FEW DAYS BEFORE: THE TEENAGER IS A PART-TIMER!
The cold wind, blowing through a window someone had left open, blew the small piece of paper out of her hand and onto the floor.
“Oop!”
The owner hurriedly stood to pick it up. There was nothing personally embarrassing written on it, but it was still nothing she wanted to show anyone. Her chair clattered against the wooden floor as she bent over.
“Ah!”
Then she looked up, following the other hand that grabbed it before her.
“Hmm…”
It belonged to her friend, eyebrows arched as she studied the note’s content.
“Wh-whoa! Kao!” the owner said, calling her friend by her nickname as she tried to snatch it back. “Don’t read it!”
“Uh-uh. I’m keeping it,” came the childish reply.
“Kao!”
“Sasachi, what is going on here?”
“What?”
Sasahata North High School, classroom 2-A. Kaori Shoji, the owner’s best friend both in class and in the after-school clubs she was part of, glumly thrust the paper back into the hands of “Sasachi.”
“You got at least an eighty-five in everything!”
“Agh! Not so loud!”
“Oh, what’s the big deal telling people about that?” Kaori said, slipping behind her friend and putting her in a playful headlock. “I averaged like sixty or below across the board! You just sit there like a good little girl all day, and you’re, like, head of the class! Why can’t you lend me some of those brains, huh?”
“Agh! I…ergh…hey! Kao, Kao?”
“Oh?”
“…I thought I kind of did, Kao.”
“Oh… Oh?”
Kaori turned her head back. Her friend didn’t let the opportunity go untaken. She snatched back the paper containing the results from the mock exam the teachers cruelly held right after spring break, placed it on her desk, and slipped out of Kaori’s grasp. With a whirl, she grabbed Kaori’s left arm from below, swung both it and herself behind her back, and squeezed a little.
“Ah-ha-ha! Agh, Sasachi! Not from the side! That’s cheating!”
Restricting her friend’s movements, Sasachi began tickling Kaori’s side. “I told you everything that’d be on the test, didn’t I?” she said. “I cut into my study time to help you out, didn’t I? What were you doing after club all spring break?”
“Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, no, no, uncle, uncle, I can’t take any more!”
Kaori’s legs swung up and down as she attempted to withstand the attack. Her friend, not being that much of a sadist, let go.
“Phew… I-I was studying, all right?” Kaori said, twirling her hair as she caught her breath. “I mean, you’re a really good tutor and everything, but I kinda had a time crunch going on.”
Kaori was far from a bad student. But if that was how she fared, Sasachi feared for the worst when it came to her other friend. The one approaching them right now, in fact.
“Holy crap, Sasaki!” he exclaimed in surprise as he goggled at the test results on her desk. “You’re, like, sixty points ahead of the curve!”
“Oh, Kohmura…”
Yoshiya Kohmura sat one desk ahead of her. He and Kaori had been Sasaki’s classmates from their first year of high school, as well as her companions at the kyudo archery club. They were all next to each other in the Japanese-language alphabetical order, and for now—before seats would be reassigned for the new semester—they were all seated in the same column of desks.
“How’d you do, Yoshiya?” Kaori asked.
“Oh, me? I pretty much blew English and Japanese,” he declared, “but I made it over fifty points in everything else, I think.”
“Sweet! I beat Yoshiya!”
“Kohmura…” Sasaki’s shoulders drooped as Yoshiya pumped his fist in the air.
Their classmates, all well familiar with the trio over the past year, showed zero restraint with their comments. “Ooh, man, Chi’s freakin’ out again.” “Kohmura blew it? Man, that sucks. There’s hardly anyone in the kyudo club, too…”
“Is Sasaki here? Chiho Sasaki?”
Chiho dejectedly raised her head at the sudden voice. At the door Mr. Ando, her homeroom and classical Chinese teacher, was beckoning to her.
“Here, could you pass these out for me?”
She was hardly class president, but for some reason, he handed over little jobs like these to Chiho pretty often. This time, it was a stack of stapled paper, three sheets per staple. The topmost one read “Year-Two Parent-Teacher Conferences.” It was April, right at the beginning of Chiho’s second high school year. There was still a chill to the wind, and while spring was in the air, nobody wanted to let go of their winter uniform sweaters yet.
For her, the year was starting just like they all had since middle school—without much in the way of new excitement.
“Hey, why do you have to be all depressed about Yoshiya’s crappy scores?” Kaori asked the down-in-the-dumps Chiho. “It’s not like he actually tried to prep for it or anything… ’Course, I guess I did study and my scores still weren’t great, so I don’t have much room to judge.”
There was something creepy to the sense of bragging pride Yoshiya approached his failure-level scores with. But Chiho was concerned about other matters. “I dunno,” she said, “it just makes me worry about what happens when the tests actually count. Like with the next midterms. I’d like to think he’ll be okay, but…”
“Yeah,” Kaori replied, a bit of concern showing through for her as well. But then, she pointed at the edge of Chiho’s lips. “Oh, hey, Sasachi, you got some ketchup right here.”
Chiho used a paper napkin to wipe the stain away. It was from the burger she was having at the MgRonald by Hatagaya rail station, conveniently located on the way home from school. She and Kaori went there a lot after school or extracurricular activities. It wasn’t like Chiho was some kind of fast-food gourmet, but it always seemed to her that what they cooked up at this particular MgRonald was a lot better than the other quick-service joints—even other MgRonalds.
“I mean,” Chiho said after wiping up, “if that had been a real test, Kohmura would’ve been put on academic probation. He’d be banned from club activity, too, and that’d suck not just for him, but everyone else in kyudo.”
“Yeah, that’s a good point,” Kaori commiserated as she nibbled on a French fry. “We’re the only sophomore students in the club right now, and if we lost the only sophomore guy in the club, we’re gonna have a lot of trouble fielding freshman members.”
Among the city public schools in the area, Sasahata North High was on the more advanced side when it came to academics. It had even sent a student to the prestigious Tokyo University in the past. As a result, studying was the primary focus of a lot of the student body—and if you were scored in the bottom-fourth percentile in three of the regular examinations, you were temporarily banned from sports and extracurriculars, except in exceptional cases like national championships.
The kyudo club that Chiho, Kaori, and Yoshiya joined last year was rather sparsely populated. If it weren’t for them, in fact, it would’ve been a serious candidate for disbanding. Considering that not too many high schools in Japan had dedicated archery facilities, the Sasahata North club got to enjoy some pretty nice perks—but not only was kyudo unpopular, but also the monetary requirements for getting into the sport put it at a disadvantage compared to others.
For the time being, the club consisted of the three of them, plus a single senior pair, a guy and girl. They had a teacher as an advisor, but that was pretty much on paper only—he had no kyudo experience. Instead, they were led by old alumni and rank-holding archers in the area who volunteered with them several times a month, but who could help them improve their skills only so much.
Thus, if they couldn’t get at least three male first-year students to sign up this year, they wouldn’t even be able to enter official boys’ competitions any longer. As a direct result, the club wasn’t exactly a contending force in the kyudo scene. Sasahata North had yet to so much as smell a national championship berth. Their historical best performance was a quarterfinal run at the Tokyo city tournament over a decade ago.
All this meant that if Yoshiya’s scores were failure-level on three midterm subjects, he’d be out of the club in an instant. That’d affect the morale of whatever freshman students they attracted—to say nothing of Chiho and Kaori themselves. And with local tournaments coming up soon, he wouldn’t be able to get in the practice he needed to have half a chance at going anywhere.
Chiho didn’t feel any intense drive to devote every waking moment of her teenage years to archery, like the star of some guts-and-glory sports manga. But if she was devoting herself to this one sport, she felt a responsibility to show up at competitions fully prepared, at the very least. That was exactly why Kaori’s middling performance in the mock exams came as such a shock to her. She had never been one to slack off like that, then blame it on some vague excuse like “I’m busy.” At least, Chiho didn’t think she was.
“I feel bad about that, you know?” Kaori said. “It’s just…I don’t wanna make excuses or anything, but I think the club’s part of the reason I couldn’t get everything I wanted out of your tutoring.”
“Oh?”
Kaori placed her pouting face on the table. “I was actually working part-time during spring break.”
“Oh, you were?”
This was news to Chiho. Sasahata North didn’t have any rules against working, so she knew at least some of her classmates held after-school jobs. But hearing it from Kaori piqued her interest.
“What kind of job did you have?” Chiho leaned forward. “And what for, huh?”
“Well,” Kaori replied, a little embarrassed, “I’m not really as good at archery as you are. I keep bending my arrows and stuff, and you know how spendy those bows can get.”
“Oh, come on, I’m not that good, Kao…”
Chiho wasn’t being modest for politeness’ sake. She was just about at the point where she could hit a thirty-six-centimeter target at kinteki range, close range and about ninety feet away, but getting it straight on the bull’s-eye still wasn’t something she could deliberately try for. She and her two fellow club members were still beginners, only taking up the sport last year, so there wasn’t any great difference in their respective performance levels.
“No,” Kaori said, “but you don’t mess up your arrows much at all anymore with makiwara training, you know?”
The makiwara practice targets made out of straw looked like they’d be kind to arrows at first glance, but unless you made a pretty clean strike on them, they could be murder on the cheaper arrows the club members used.
“Plus,” she continued, “the practice arrows we’ve got at the club are just a little too big for my equipment. That’s why I took a job: because I wanted some new stuff…and that’s why I didn’t really study too much of what you taught me. Sorry.”
“Oh… I’m sorry. I guess I didn’t know.”
Once the initial surprise was gone, Chiho found herself viewing Kaori with a certain level of respect. She had never taken a job before, and that in itself made her a little more grown-up in her eyes.
“It’s fine, it’s fine! It was my choice anyway, Sasachi. Besides, you’re getting better with those same practice arrows, so I’m telling you, you’ve got a lot more talent than me.”
“Oh, I do not…”
Kyudo, like ice hockey, took some serious cash to participate in. Even at the student level, fifty thousand yen was the ballpark figure for assembling the equipment you needed, more than enough to give even Chiho pause. In her life, that kind of money just wasn’t possible unless her parents were willing to help her out. It was a lucky thing that Sen’ichi, Chiho’s father and a lifelong police officer, was proud of his girl for choosing a martial art as an extracurricular.
She was perfectly willing to work with whatever was cheapest, but her dad—a ranked kendo practitioner—would have none of it. “If you start cheap,” he reasoned, “that’ll stunt your improvement level later on.” So he bought her the best equipment possible within the standard price range.
Chiho appreciated that, and she made sure all of her stuff was fully maintained. But like Kaori said, things like arrows and bowstrings were generally consumable goods, so the running costs for maintenance were nothing to sniff at. One could always purchase sturdier duralumin arrows, but since every archer’s sense of balance in terms of string tension, standing position, and arrow weight was different, it was tough to assemble a full set of kyudo equipment on the cheap.
“…I’m pretty impressed, though, Kao.”
“With what?”
“Like, I never even thought about working to earn the money for the right kyudo stuff.”
Chiho chose the kyudo club mainly because she thought it looked pretty cool. She was in the choir in middle school, something Sasahata North didn’t have. That meant she wanted to pick something else, and when she saw one of the senior members striking the stylized full-draw kai pose as he readied himself to shoot at the extracurricular fair last year, something clicked with her. The bow he used in the demonstration wasn’t the carbon-fiber type Chiho and her friends used—it was a beautiful bamboo bow, its clear whiteness penetrating into its very core.
“Ahh, it’s nothing that impressive,” Kaori groaned, interrupting Chiho’s trip down memory lane. “I quit, anyway.”
“Oh? Was it just a temp thing?” Chiho asked, still a little fuzzy on how part-time work worked.
“Nah,” Kaori replied as she took a sip of orange juice. “I just quit ’cause the job sucked. It was at a diner.”
“A diner?”
There were a ton of them around Hatagaya and Sasazuka, both chains and family-run places.
“Like, I don’t want people calling me a quitter or anything, but I just could not do that any longer. The customers were scary, too.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. My supervisor basically threw me in the deep end my third time in, even though I still didn’t know all the stuff I needed to. You know the little computer pads they use to take down orders? There’s, like, a ton of keys on that thing, and each of the buttons had, like, four different menu items associated with them. And then everything got switched out for some new spring ad campaign, so it took me forever to take orders.”
“Huh,” Chiho said, recalling the last time she was at a franchise diner. “But didn’t you have one of those little IN TRAINING things on your name tag?”
Kaori rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Yeah, like customers give a crap about that. Did you look at the cashier’s name tag when you ordered that just now?”
“Oh, I did actually. That guy with the black hair. You see him? I remember it because it said MAOU on it. That’s a pretty unusual name, you know? Plus it had B CREW on it, too.”
Chiho took a look back at the counter. It was occupied by a man with black hair who looked like he had just stepped out of a MgRonald TV commercial.
“…Well, that’s because you’re special, Sasachi.” Kaori turned her jaded eyes back to Chiho. “But it’s like, if I’m still in training, why do people think I’d know what’s in this or that kind of pasta, or how many calories are in a hot-fudge sundae or whatever? I’ve never even seen that stuff.”
“Isn’t that usually written in the menus?”
Without warning, Kaori stood up and pointed a defiant finger at Chiho.
“Yeah! Yeah, you’d think that, wouldn’t you? But they never look! They never look. Like, they just toss the menu away and say, like, ‘What do you think I should get?’ As if I have any idea!”
“Wow… That bad, huh? ’Cause I don’t think I’ve really seen that before when I’m shopping or going out or—”
Before Chiho could finish, Kaori leaned even further over the table. “Oh, you will if you stand there for six hours straight. Like, every single day! And that’s just the easy stuff. Sometimes people helped themselves to the drink machine because they assume it’s free. Then they got all pissy at me once I said it wasn’t. Or they bitch about how the plates are all different from the last time they ate there. Like, what does telling me that accomplish?”
“Oh… Wow.”
“But the worst was when the lunch rush came, and we were completely full with customers waiting for a seat. These business guys came in, and I told them to take a number and wait, and they were like ‘We gotta wait? Why do we gotta wait?’ Like, do they even know how a restaurant works?”
“…That’s pretty rude, yeah.”
It was hard for Chiho to believe, but Kaori wasn’t the type to exaggerate for effect. That group must have actually existed.
“Yeah, isn’t it? So I didn’t know how to answer that, and then they got really riled up and were all like ‘Let me speak to your manager.’ So I did that, and then the manager got all pissed at me for interrupting her while she was busy!”
“Oh, no way.”
“So then she disappeared, so it was just me and this other girl covering the entire dining area. Where I was at, the waitstaff had to make some of the dessert items on the menu instead of the cooks. I had, like, no training on any of that, but this guy just handed me a manual and ordered me to make a parfait for him. How was I gonna do that, huh? I didn’t even know where anything was.”
The rant continued on. She was forced to do things she had no experience with, then was yelled at when she inevitably messed them up. Her conniving coworkers gave her no support, even though they had all the time in the world. To her, at least, part-time work held no attractions at all.
Then a thought occurred to Chiho. “But they’re gonna pay you, right? You quit before you were there a full month?”
“I think they will, yeah. I was still in my training period, and I only worked for, like, half a month, so it ain’t gonna be that much. Ugh, it was just awful!”
Kaori pushed her now-empty MgRonald tray away from her and sunk into her seat. Just as she did, a voice rang out.
“Ma’am, I can take that tray for you if you like.”
The two of them looked up. Each of them let out a tiny gasp. There was a woman there, dressed in a different uniform from the rest of the crew. “Beautiful” was the only to describe her. She was tall, her skin shiny and as flawless as a ceramic vase, with a voice low and inviting like a fashion model’s. Given their conversation just now, Chiho couldn’t help but look at her name tag. KISAKI: MANAGER, it read.
Kaori nodded silently in awe as Kisaki took the tray away and gave a light, polite bow as she went on her way. Chiho still had some fries and her drink on her tray, so the manager had given her a bit more time.
“Pretty lady, huh?” Kaori was still staring at her. “Maybe I would’ve lasted longer with her managing me. My boss at that diner practically did nothing unless there were customers to wait on, and then she yelled at me to find something to do when I wasn’t busy. Like, why don’t you try working a little, huh?”
She kept looking at the MgRonald manager until she disappeared behind the counter. Chiho chuckled at the display.
“Yeah, I keep hearing that working at a restaurant or a convenience store is hard enough as it is. They really shouldn’t be making part-timers do work they don’t know how to do. I mean, like I should talk, never having had a job before, but—”
“Oh, no, totally. Plus she kept yelling at me all the time, which didn’t help my motivation any, but… Ah, screw it! It’s all in the past now. I hope I never wait tables again for the rest of my life!”
After making the bold declaration, Kaori took some paper out of her school tote bag. It was the stapled set Mr. Ando made Chiho hand out earlier—a notice about the upcoming parent/teacher/student conferences, along with a survey.
“And really,” she said, “how am I supposed to know what I wanna do with my life right now?”
The career guidance survey asked students to specify whether they intended to go to a university, a technical school, or right into the workforce after graduating high school, and why. Student responses would apparently be used to help guide the upcoming three-party conferences.
“You’re totally going to college, aren’t you, Sasachi?”
Chiho vaguely nodded. “Um…probably.” The survey made her feel a little down as well. Two whole years of high school to go, and she was already being asked to consider the entire rest of her life.
“No way Yoshiya’s gonna make it into any other school after this,” Kaori flatly stated. “Me, though…I dunno. The one thing I do know is absolutely no food-service work. But what kinda reason should I even write down? I mean, I don’t even know what I would major in if I went to college.”
Chiho felt exactly the same way. Apart from the big names like Tokyo and Kyoto University, the only universities she was familiar with were the ones that placed high in the Ekiden relay races her father watched on TV every New Year’s Day. But going to work right after high school? To someone like Chiho with zero work experience, that seemed even more alien and unfamiliar than college.
“Ooh, but maybe some talent scout would pick you up, huh, Sasachi? You’re cute and your tits’re huge, so I bet they’d snap you up if you walked around the Harajuku fashion district. Why don’t you put down ‘entertainment industry’ in the survey?”
“Umm…”
Kaori was bound and determined to mention Chiho’s chest to her at least once a day. They were a source of jealousy for many of her peers, even if Chiho herself saw absolutely no benefit to them. The bowstring would snap against them if she wasn’t paying attention to her archery stance. She felt bad for how much the bras she had her mom buy her cost, and there was nothing very attractive about her size anyway. They hadn’t caused her any shoulder pain yet, but she’d often find a blouse she liked that was sized perfectly for her arms and shoulders, but she still couldn’t wear because the buttons wouldn’t go over her bust or she would bulge out in odd and revealing ways.
“Oh, that’s just silly,” she protested as she took her own copy of the handout from her bag and stared at it. “We gotta be serious about this. Our parents are gonna look at it, too.”
Kaori brought a hand against her forehead. “Oh, geez, I forgot about that! Now I really don’t know what to write…”
The sheet had a pretty large fill-in box meant for providing your reasons and motivations for your postgraduate choices. It made Chiho want to rub her forehead in frustration. She always struggled to reach so much as 80 percent of the required word count in composition class. The term itself—career guidance—had struck her with a sense of nameless dread ever since it first started popping up in middle school.
Chiho had taken and passed the exam to get into Sasahata North simply because it was close to her house and a good match for her academic skills. It wasn’t because of some particular specialty subject she wanted to study there. That was exactly what she’d written in her postgrad survey back in middle school. It was a little too honest for her teacher at the time, who advised her to give a bit more suitable of a reason.
Kaori hadn’t mentioned it, but she remembered some of her classmates writing about their desires to become film stars or professional athletes, only to be told by their parents and teachers not to write stupid things like that. And yet grown-ups would constantly gripe about “Oh, kids these days, they all want jobs in the government! Don’t any of them have dreams any longer?” It sounded terribly hypocritical to her, encouraging children to dream big and shooting them down when they obliged. Plus, Chiho’s policeman father was a government worker. Bluntly stating that his job was unimaginative, not worthy as a dream, made it sound like all would-be police officers were idiots in her mind. The whole career-guidance thing just seemed like a charade.
“It’s not like I know what I wanna do, either…”
“Mm? How so, Sasachi?”
“Oh, I dunno…”
Chiho sometimes felt like the whole adult world was stacked against people like her. But it wasn’t like she had some grand plan for her life she could reveal to people. It just wasn’t there in her mind. It was easy to imagine graduating from college and finding a job at a good company somewhere, but given how the news kept going on about slowing growth and how hard it was to start a career in “this economy,” she knew that scoring a decent job was about a lot more than high school test scores.
Some would-be know-it-alls on the Net even declared that a college degree didn’t actually help you at all in the job market. So why did the big companies always prefer new hires from prestigious universities? It started to make less and less sense to her.
Chiho set the handout to the side of the table, picked up her drink, and glared at it distractedly as she brought the straw to her mouth. Then she noticed the paper place mat on her tray.
“…Huh. They’re hiring part-time crewmembers.”
They pretty much always were, it seemed like, judging by how often she had seen this place mat in the past.
“Sasachi?”
“Listen, Kao—you having that job; do you think that taught you stuff about life as a grown-up that you didn’t get in school?”
“Oh, no way. I mean, pretty much all I learned was that work is a pain in the ass I can’t wait to get out of.”
She was right, no doubt, but to someone like Chiho who grew up wanting for nothing under a loving mother and father, it felt like Kaori, and her experience in a world Chiho knew nothing about, made her seem closer to adulthood than Chiho was.
“I was just thinking,” Chiho began, “maybe if I found a job, too, that’d help me figure out what I wanna do with my life. Like, with work and all.”
“Huhh?!” Kaori’s eyes burst open. “No. No way, man. Don’t do it! Didn’t you listen to anything I just said?!”
“Yeah, but…I dunno, like, at least to get some better equipment like you were talking about…”
“Well, sure, I hate bugging my parents for money for arrows all the time, but what am I gonna do? Besides, with your grades, you could easily wait ’til college to get a job.”
“Hmm… Maybe, but…”
She pictured that recent grad with the bamboo bow and arrow, the one who inspired her to take up kyudo. He probably didn’t use that all the time, but with the right job and the right salary, a work of art like that could be hers, even. And if she learned more about working along the way, that was two birds with one stone.
“Hey, Sasachi, you’re a smart girl, okay? And it’s not like you’re getting a crappy allowance or anything. You never really throw around your money anyway.”
Kaori was clearly dead set against the idea.
“Well…I mean, I’m not trying to dive right into something, but…”
Kaori and Yoshiya kept going on about how smart Chiho was, but it wasn’t like she was the top in her school or getting full-ride scholarship offers. Something in her wanted to try something new before it was too late, and she couldn’t deny that the urge was growing.
Then—
“Ah!”
Chiho shouted out loud, too lost in thought to think about her surroundings. A bag carried by a passing businessman swung close by the table, the shoulder strap all twisted up against itself, and it knocked against the drink cup she had in her hand. It didn’t hurt, but the impact caused her to let go. The paper had softened a little—she and Kaori had been sitting and chatting for a while by this point—and the fall caused the lid to pop right off upon hitting the table, immediately soaking her copy of the survey in lukewarm soda.
“Oooh…”
The businessman must have noticed the mistake he had made. But the shock didn’t end there. When the two girls looked up, they were face-to-face with someone who clearly wasn’t Japanese. He was a Western man, well built and with a bushy beard, and although he was saying something or other in rapid succession to the two of them, Chiho was too broken up over the handout to decipher any of it.
“Ooh, what should I do?”
“You all right, Sasachi?” a worried Kaori asked, just as unable to understand the foreigner as Chiho. “Oh, geez, your handout… That’s, uh, that isn’t bad, is it?”
“?!”
All three parties involved knew something bad had just taken place, but nobody could get their ideas across to each other. The man, looking deeply troubled, offered a handkerchief to Chiho, even though her clothes were dry and the paper was already ruined. The two girls were lost—unsure what to do, what they should do, or even how to begin processing these events.
“Did you need some help, ma’am?” a young man intervened.
Chiho looked up at the familiar voice. It was the man with the black hair who took her order earlier, running up to their table between Kaori and the businessman. His attention was focused on the lake of warm soda on the table.
“Oh, are you all right? Are your clothes wet, or…?”
“Um, I’m fine…”
“No you aren’t, Sasachi!” Kaori finally took a moment to lift the sopping paper from the puddle. “What’re we gonna do with this handout?”
“Well, what can we do?” The paper was dripping in the air. “We can’t towel it off or anything.”
“?!”
The man said something again. Chiho could tell it was English, but she was in no shape to conduct a conversation. She tried to formulate a “that’s all right”–style response, based on the assumption that he was apologizing.
Then the employee with MAOU on his name tag spoke up.
“Um, this man said he wanted to make this up to you somehow…”
“Oh…?”
“?!”
“Like, ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t paying attention, so I want to make it up to you if I can.’ Is that some kind of school thing you have there?”
“Y-yes, it’s a career guidance handout,” Kaori said in place of Chiho, who was too surprised to talk. The employee gave both of them a look, then started talking to the businessman in fluent English.
<“Okay, so those documents were for career guidance purposes at her school…”>
<“Oh, really?”> The man scratched at his beard, clearly embarrassed.
“So, um, I apologize, but does your friend here have a copy of that same document?”
“Huh? Uhm, yeah, but why?”
“I’m sorry,” the employee said apologetically, “but I couldn’t help but hear you from over by the counter.”
“Oh, uh, sorry we were so loud,” Chiho replied, feeling almost as embarrassed as the businessman.
The employee meekly smiled at her. “How about we do this?” he said. “That document’s just a regular old printout, right? If your friend hasn’t filled in hers yet, I’d be happy to borrow it and have him make another copy at the convenience store nearby…”
“Ah…?”
“Uh…sure…?”
Both of them nodded, mouths agape. It was such an obvious solution, but they were in such a panic that it occurred to neither of them.
<“Actually, sir, they have another blank copy of it here. Would you mind maybe making another copy for them? There’s a pay copier at the convenience store a few doors over.”>
The businessman raised his hands, nodded, and said something.
“He asked if one of you could bring it over to the convenience store with him, since he didn’t want to risk messing up the last good copy. I can come along with you, so if you don’t mind making a little trip…”
“Oh, sure, absolutely.” Kaori, now much calmer, nodded at the employee and stood up. “That guy’ll pay for it?”
“He said he’d be willing to make a hundred copies if you wanted.”
It was the kind of Hollywood-style good humor Chiho all but expected from the foreigner.
“Wait here, okay?” Kaori said. “I’ll be right back.”
“I’m going out on a customer errand!” the employee shouted to the female manager behind the counter as the three of them left.
Thanks to that Maou guy’s quick thinking, things went astonishingly smoothly from the initial frenzy. She was getting her handout back after all, something that made her feel tremendously relieved. But that wasn’t the end of it.
“Pardon me, miss…”
The beautiful manager went up to Chiho’s table and gave her a refined bow.
“Did any of your clothing get wet, perhaps?”
“Oh, uh, no, it’s all fine, ma’am.”
“Ah, great. My apologies for all the trouble, though. Would you like me to bring you a new drink and fries?”
“Huh? Oh, you don’t…”
Now Chiho was even more surprised. This manager had absolutely nothing to apologize for. Thanks to that Maou person, not only did she know the businessman apologized to her already, but she was also getting another handout, to boot. If anything, Chiho had to apologize for things erupting as they did. Getting another complete snack out of it just felt manipulative to her.
She tried to say as much to the manager, but was provided with a smile and a shake of the head instead.
“Our job here is to create the best environment we can for our customers to enjoy their meals. That’s why it’s our responsibility to make sure that any conflicts between customers can be solved as smoothly as we possibly can. It’s only natural for Maou…for that crewmember, I mean, to step in and lend a hand.”
Chiho turned back toward the door they all exited through.
“I do feel bad for getting your friend involved in all this, though. If you’re going to be leaving soon, I’d be happy to provide your replacements at a later date, as long as you bring today’s receipt with you. Would that work better for you today, miss?”
The manager’s words were pure, unadorned, and completely sincere. Chiho had all but forgotten about the incident by now. Instead, she found herself moved by the employees working so selflessly for them—the man who used his fluent English to defuse the situation, and the woman whose apology was clearly something that came from the heart.
She didn’t want to badmouth Kaori’s old boss when she wasn’t here to defend herself, but something about a workplace with these people around indicated to Chiho that she wouldn’t have to worry about employees stabbing her in the back. Something about the way she put it—“creating an environment.” Chiho thought working at MgRonald was just about making burgers and slinging them at customers. The concept suddenly seemed a lot fresher to her.
“My receipt…?” Chiho took out the receipt she had folded up and stuck in her wallet. Something on it caught her eye.
“Right,” the manager said, pointing at it. “You can bring that back in anytime you like…” But Chiho’s eyes were elsewhere—on the text at the far bottom: “HELP WANTED,” followed by a phone number.
“Umm…”
“Yes?”
What Chiho had to say next, not to put too a fine a point on it, changed the trajectory of her life forever.
“Uh, this number here is just for this location, right?”
“What? Working at the Mag?!”
“Kao, I told you, you’re being too loud!”
“Whoa, you’re gettin’ a job, Sasaki?!”
The following day at school, Chiho told her friends Kaori and Yoshiya that she had applied for a position at the MgRonald in Hatagaya. Both of them immediately shot to their feet at the news.
“After that thing that happened yesterday and all?”
“That wasn’t MgRonald’s fault,” Chiho said. “That guy apologized to us, like, a million times, too.”
“Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you, all right? ’Cause when it gets bad, it gets real bad out there.”
“Hey, Sasaki’s made of a lot different stuff from you, Shoji, y’know? How ’bout we all go there to eat once they hire her?”
“Oh, come on, Yoshiya, quit talkin’ out your ass.”
Chiho stepped in to stop the two of them from staring each other down any further.
“But, hey, why d’you want a job all of a sudden anyway?” Yoshiya asked.
“Well,” Chiho began as she fought off the marauding Kaori, “you know that handout yesterday, right? I just figured, right now, I can’t really say anything about what I want to do and be sure I’m telling the truth at all. I just figured working a little and earning some money could help me learn more about work, and life, and stuff.”
“Doubt it.”
Kaori scrunched up her face. Chiho deflected it with a chuckle: “Plus, it’s the same motive you had, Kao. I wanna get some money for archery equipment…and some other stuff.”
“Oh, totally. Wish I had some.”
“Yoshiya, if you started working, you’d be failing a lot more than just two subjects.”
“…Yeaaaaaah. Maybe.”
Yoshiya usually let it slide whenever Kaori berated his study skills. This time, though, it seemed to Chiho that he took it personally a bit.
“I mean,” he continued, “whether I’m failing two classes or twenty of ’em, you’re about the only two people who get angry at me about it. Actually, I’m kinda jealous of you, Sasaki…gettin’ all serious about this career guidance stuff and everything.”
“…Kohmura?”
Chiho could sense the loneliness behind the words.
“If you realize that, you could actually try studying for a change…”
Kaori didn’t care.
“Ah, it’s not like they’ll be at conferences anyway. Like, I don’t even know if Mom ’n’ Dad are gonna bother showing up or not.”
“Huh? Really?”
For a school like Sasahata North that treated college prep seriously, these conferences—although they could be scheduled with a lot of leeway—were de facto mandatory for parents.
“Yeah, they don’t really give a shit about me either way.”
“Oh?”
“Huh?”
Yoshiya uttered the statement so quickly, it took a few moments for it to register with the girls.
“Oh, but hey, Sasaki,” he continued, “if they hire you, I’m gonna get Shoji and the rest of the class and we’re gonna bum-rush you during lunch, so watch out for us, okay?”
“Kohmura! Stop being stupid!” Kaori shouted.
“Aw, c’mon, Shoji! It’s fun bothering your friends at work! You never even told me where you were working, either. You’re such a party pooper!”
“Yeah, because I knew you were gonna do that to me! That job was stressful enough without getting your dumb ass involved in it!”
“Uh, h-hang on, guys,” Chiho timidly said. “I haven’t been hired yet, so…”
Reflecting for a moment, Chiho remembered that she was far from the only Sasahata North student who hung out at that MgRonald. The idea of her classmates seeing her in a different context from the classroom struck her as a tad embarrassing for reasons she couldn’t quite express.
“Man, you’re gonna totally regret telling Yoshiya in a few days, Sasachi.”
“It’s fine! I don’t care if people look at me! If they hire me, I’m gonna be there to work anyway!”
“Sweet! Lemme know once they do, okay?”
This was starting to get weird. Chiho started to regret bringing up the topic at all, even though her resolve to work remained strong as ever. She had called the number immediately upon arriving home the previous night, surprising Kisaki the manager more than a little when she came on the phone. They agreed to an interview the very next day.
She already had her parents’ permission—“as long as you keep your grades up,” they had said. And now, in class, her hands were fidgeting with the résumé in her bag, one she had created the previous evening after reading through some sample guides.
Maybe it was because they had already met, but being greeted by the manager that evening made Chiho far less nervous than she expected. Here they were now, one-on-one in the staff room, a place that had been off-limits to her just a day ago.
Mayumi Kisaki, manager of this MgRonald location, introduced herself to Chiho once again, using the same polite speech she applied to her customers.
“Let me take a few moments to look over your résumé,” she said as she took it from her hands. That was the trigger that finally made Chiho start to sweat. Were there any spelling errors? Anything weird that stood out too much?
“…All right,” the manager nodded after a few moments as she placed the paper on the desk. “Ms. Sasaki?”
“Y-yes?”
“You wrote in there that you wanted to build ‘experience in society’ through part-time work.”
“Uh, yeah… Is that a problem?”
“Oh, no. Not a problem, no.” Kisaki looked Chiho square in the eyes. “Is there some pressing need, perhaps, driving you to get this experience?”
“Um…a need?”
The unexpected question threw Chiho for a loop. She had written that, all right, and she’d even meant it. Kisaki, perhaps sensing her confusion, smiled a little.
“Oh, I was just wondering. I know Sasahata North is one of the better public schools in this neighborhood, and you’re in one of the sports clubs, too. I was just wondering why you want to build this kind of experience so badly that you’re willing to sacrifice your free time away from school to take a demanding part-time job.”
“Well…um…”
“Don’t worry. It’s just you and me in here, Ms. Sasaki. If you’re willing to tell me, I’d love to hear why.”
“…”
Kisaki turned toward Chiho, her office chair creaking under her weight as she brought her face a bit closer. Her eyes gave Chiho an inkling of what her question really meant.
“It’s, like, my future career…”
“Mmm?”
“I don’t really know what I want to do with myself.”
“Ah, your future? Whether you want to go to college or find a job out of high school?”
“Right. My friend was telling me about her job, and she told me about a lot of stuff that I never would’ve been able to learn about in school. I’ve been studying really hard since middle school, but it’s, like, the more I think about my future career path, the more it just totally confuses me. So then yesterday, when you came up to me…”
“When I did?”
“You talked about ‘creating an environment’ for people and it was like… I dunno, I used to just think of MgRonald as a place that sold burgers and fries to people, but the way you put it made it seem like work’s about a lot more than what you’d really see from the outside… It’s kind of hard to explain.”
Chiho knew that her words were just as jumbled up and inscrutable as her feelings on the subject. But Kisaki stood still and nodded, never trying to hurry her along.
“But anyway, I started thinking about what working was really like, and when you said I could get the same stuff again if I brought in my receipt, it was, like, wow, I’m getting even more value back than the burger I paid my money for. And then I, like, started thinking about money and stuff, and…”
She could feel the blood flowing into her skull. Her head was alive with thoughts about school, thoughts about her career, thoughts about her friends, her club activity, her family, and everything else on Earth. It made her lose sight of what was really important in her life.
“I just figured…if I knew what working for myself and earning money was like, then somehow—I don’t know how, but somehow that’d help me build some experience in society. So, you know, I just kind of…”
Chiho’s legs grew restless. Her voice ratcheted up in volume.
“I want to work so I can earn some money!”
“…Ah, I see.” For some reason, Kisaki was grinning at her. “Not to change the subject, but do you know what you’d want to use the money for?”
“What for…? Um, well, if I can save up enough money, I’d like to get a nicer bow for myself. That and some arrows.”
“Arrows? I don’t know very much about kyudo, but are those arrows single-use or something?”
“No, not exactly, but sometimes they break or get all bent up during practice, so you have to keep buying more of them. It’s a pretty expensive sport to get into in the first place, so I hate begging my parents for more money to keep it going, and plus, not all arrows are built the same way, so I figured if I had my own spending money, I could use it to find equipment that suited me a little better than the cheap stuff…”
The next few minutes evolved into a sort of newbie Q&A on kyudo, something that seemed less like a job interview and more like idle chatter at the coffee shop. The interview went on for about forty minutes all told.
“All right. Thanks a lot for stopping by today, Ms. Sasaki. I’ll give you a call with my decision within two or three days.”
“Certainly. Thank you very much for taking the time to see me.”
Chiho stood up, bowed, and stepped toward the staff room door. She noticed her legs were quivering a little as she stepped outside.
“Oh, hello there.” Maou, the employee who helped Chiho yesterday, nodded at her as he passed by. “I certainly wasn’t expecting you to apply for a position the very next day!”
His smile was completely benign. He was practically welcoming her to the crew already.
“Oh, uh, thanks…”
But Chiho, drained of all tension now that the interview was over, could manage little more than a broken greeting.
“See you soon. Hope you get the job!”
She barely managed a bow in reply.
Her legs were still a little uneasy on the way out. Once the MgRonald was out of sight, she veered to one edge of the sidewalk and crouched down.
“I so blew it…”
“I want to earn money”? Seriously? That whole time, she kept blabbing on about all this extraneous nonsense instead of saying what actually needed to be said. Her mind was filled with regret. Being so frank about the salary aspect of it was so incredibly self-serving—it had to have made a terrible impression on that manager. She tried her best to be polite and upbeat, but in front of a real grown-up like that, she doubted she looked like much more than a teenager out of her comfort zone.
“Ugh… I’m gonna have to find somewhere else to hang out for a while…”
No way she had the guts to frequent a business that turned her down for a job. She’d have to suggest another stop to Kaori starting tomorrow. This, and many other negative thoughts, swirled around in her head as she staggered home in the darkening evening.
Kisaki was in noticeably higher spirits after the teenaged job interviewee left the MgRonald by Hatagaya station.
“Marko?” she said to Maou, currently working the front counter.
“Yes?”
“I’m gonna have you train that girl just now.”
“Whoa! You’re hiring her already?”
“Yep. I wasn’t expecting a lot ’cause her résumé was pretty much copied out of a book, but she’s actually got a lot of spirit in her. I like that.”
Kisaki was all smiles, but Maou winced at the mention of her documents.
“Geez, don’t remind me about my interview…”
“Oh, I’ll remind you all I want, Marko. You think I’m gonna forget someone who wrote ‘I wanna eat good stuff’ as their goal in their résumé?”
“Heh-heh…eesh.” Maou was crestfallen but still curious about the new hire. She’d looked like just another girl when she passed him by. “But if her résumé didn’t impress you, I guess the interview did?”
“Mm-hmm. I think we’ve got a student who’ll actually stick to a constant shift schedule for a change. Try to go easy on her, okay?”
“Wow! I don’t think you’ve told me to ‘go easy’ on anything.”
Coming from her, this was high praise.
“Well,” Kisaki explained, “she’s a pretty serious girl, you know? Plus, the way she fielded my questions, there’s no point being hard on her.”
“Man, you really love her.”
“Yep! Pretty much. She didn’t try to fancy up her motives or anything. She kept it as straight as I do. So have fun with her starting tomorrow, okay?”
Kisaki turned around, practically humming to herself as she left. Maou groaned. “Geez,” he mumbled to the cash register in front of him, “I only wrote that because I figured she’d kick me out if I wrote ‘I want to conquer the world’ in there…”
“So how’d day two go?”
“Ugggh, I think my legs are gonna fall off…”
The full force of Chiho’s groan came across loud and clear over the phone from her bedroom to Kaori. She had figured her legs and feet could put up with it, considering how much of a workout archery could be, but they were already impossibly sore. Her toes, her calves, her thighs, even her heels had fatigue draped over them in ways she never experienced before. She had given them a thorough massage in the bath, but they still didn’t feel at all better.
“Yeah, I guess you’re standing up the whole time, huh? Don’t they give you any breaks?”
“Nope. My shifts haven’t been long enough yet.”
“Ohhh. You gotta work at least an eight-hour shift, right?”
“Yeah, I think that was part of my first-day orientation…”
Apparently the law in Japan stated that high school students weren’t allowed to work past ten in the evening. After discussing it, they agreed that she’d work no more than four hours on the weekdays, between school and the magic hour, and four to six hours on the weekends.
Chiho reflected on her first day as the conversation went on. After that disaster of an interview, she never thought she’d be hired in a million years.
Kisaki told her to fully clip her nails, so she took some extra time to take care of that before walking into the store, far more nervous than she was for the interview. The manager greeted her with a work contract and a uniform fitted for her size. It was designed for comfort, the chest area neither too tight nor too loose on her; she breathed a sigh of relief over that. When she looked into the staff room mirror after changing, the sight of herself in the MgRonald uniform she had seen a hundred times as a customer seemed incredibly out of place.
“All right,” Kisaki said as she gave her a poke in the back. “To start out, we’re gonna go around the restaurant so I can show you where everything is and what kind of work you’ll be doing in each area. This isn’t too large of a location, but there’s a fair amount you’ll need to remember…”
Kaori’s words rang in Chiho’s mind. For a moment, the image of getting yelled at for forgetting something made her anxious, but…
“There’s no way you’re going to remember it all on the first shot, so for now, just try to get a mental picture of what kind of work you’ll generally be asked to do. You can take notes, too, if you like. That’s gonna be your first job—learn all this stuff and get up to speed on how it all works around here.”
“O-okay…”
“Right. First off, always wash your hands before going out into the dining space. I need to show you how, so let’s hit the bathroom first.”
They made the rounds, Kisaki guiding Chiho through the names of the assorted machines and work positions, the floor-map setup, and the work responsibilities at every area of the place. The memo paper she brought along with her was quickly filled to the brim with hastily written text. After all the times she stopped by here, there were still so many new names, new customs, and unfamiliar machines and areas to explore. It took an hour and a half just to go through the whole place. Between that and the subsequent training on things like how to greet customers, Chiho’s first three hours as an employee passed by in a heartbeat.
“Hey, Marko?” Kisaki shouted at one of the crewmembers (calling the employees “crewmembers” was also something Chiho found novel about the place). Surprisingly, the call was answered by Maou, the crewmember who helped her out earlier.
“Oh, it’s you!”
Apparently he remembered her. He removed his hat and gave her a warm smile.
“I, uh, today’s my first job…I mean, my first day on the job! My name is Chiho Sasaki! It’s great to be working with you!”
She stammered her way through her very first work introduction. Her face reddened with embarrassment, but Maou paid it no mind. “Sadao Maou,” he said, the perfect picture of politeness. “Good to meet you, Ms. Sasaki.”
Between his English ability and the way he carried himself, Chiho assumed he was quite a bit older than she—but face-to-face like this, he seemed surprisingly young. A student in college, maybe?
“I won’t be here tomorrow, Sasaki, so he’ll be taking care of you on your next shift.” Kisaki placed a hand on Maou’s shoulder. “He knows pretty much everything about this place, so go ahead and pepper him with all the questions you want.”
“Wow, way to put the pressure on…” Maou flashed an uneasy smile and put his hat back on.
“Don’t give her any wrong info, or else I’ll make sure you pay for it, all right?”
Whether she was serious about it or not, the words had an obvious effect on Maou’s demeanor. He chuckled nervously.
“No problem, boss. This is nothing compared to leading an army of half a million.”
“Huh?”
Chiho raised an eyebrow. Half a million?
Kisaki shrugged. “If it wasn’t for his tendency to lapse into grandiose metaphors like that, I’d have no complaints with Marko.”
It didn’t sound all that grandiose to Chiho. Just odd.
“Heh-heh… Really, though, Sasaki, if you think you’ll want to work here a while, don’t be afraid to ask me, or Ms. Kisaki, or anybody else around here if you have any questions. If you don’t remember it the first time—or the second time, for that matter—then please, just ask again. Nobody on the crew’s gonna yell at you for forgetting something.”
“A-all right…”
“Yeah, and if someone does, tell me about it, okay? Because if they do”—Kisaki’s face took on a suddenly twisted, demonic snarl—“I’ll show them hell itself.”
“Agh!” Chiho couldn’t help but yelp at the half-crazed smile.
“If I can translate for Ms. Kisaki,” Maou said in a half chuckle, “if you’re going to disappoint a customer after messing something up because you winged it and got it wrong, it’s a lot better for everyone to take the time to ask someone instead. So really, don’t be afraid to bother anyone. That’s how all of us learned how to do our jobs, so pretty much everyone should be able to answer your questions.”
“…Okay. I’ll try my best to.”
She had already experienced the credo Kisaki and Maou brought to their work as a customer. If that was how they put it, the rest of the crew must be equally as talented. And even with how nice they were to her, Chiho resolved to work as hard as she could to not be too much of a drag on them.
“Oh, maaaan. You sure you didn’t die and go to heaven or something?” Kaori, listening to the story, sounded supremely jealous over the phone. “’Cause, like, whenever I asked a question, it was always like ‘Didn’t someone show it to you already?’”
“Ha-ha-ha…”
“So if that was yesterday, what was today like?”
“Well…”
Day one, after the intros, was pretty much nothing but studying. Today, on her second day, she was finally assigned something resembling work.
“I still didn’t get to cook or anything, but I spent the whole shift on cleaning duty, pretty much.”
“Cleaning duty?”
“Uh-huh. I wiped up all the trays with this disinfected cloth, and then I wiped down the tables so I could learn all the numbers associated with them. After that, I restocked the shelves with stuff like napkins and straws and to-go bags from storage. I had to clean those shelves, too…”
“Did you take out the garbage and stuff, too?”
“No, they didn’t let me do that yet.”
“No?”
“Yeah. They’re, like, superstrict on separating all the garbage, so I gotta learn how all that works. Plus, you know how the Mag’s garbage area’s near the entrance, right? I still haven’t learned how to guide customers around and answer their questions, so that’s probably not gonna happen for a little while.”
“…Wow, the grass really is greener, huh?”
“Maybe, but…oooh, staying on my feet for four hours in a row is just killing me. And you were right, Kao—this one customer asked me, like, this impossible question. I had this huge IN TRAINING button on and everything.”
“Ooh, that fast, huh? How’d it go?”
“Well, that Maou crewmember was with me pretty much the whole time except when we were really busy, so he handled the whole thing.”
“Can I, like, have your job, Sasachi?” Kaori sounded fairly serious about the offer. “’Cause it sounds really great. I wanna see you in action sometime! I promise I won’t embarrass you like Yoshiya will, too.”
“…Go easy on me, okay?”
After the conversation meandered elsewhere and Chiho hung up the phone, she recalled the “impossible question” she was asked. It came from a man in his fifties or so, asking if the Hatagaya MgRonald location had any birthday cakes. She had never heard of it. Why would a burger joint be selling cakes? Nobody told her about that so far.
She was about to give that answer when Maou intervened. “I apologize, sir,” he said, “but this location doesn’t accept reservations for birthday parties, so I’m afraid we don’t have any cakes in stock.”
The quick explanation made Chiho’s eyes prick upward. She had never connected MgRonald with birthday parties before. The thought had never even occurred to her.
“Within central Tokyo,” Maou continued next to the deer-in-headlights Chiho, “there’s one location in Meguro and one in Suginami that accept party reservations. The Suginami restaurant is gonna be the closer one, since it’s on the Keio rail line. Let me grab you the phone number real quick.”
With that, Maou darted off to the staff room and came back with an ad circular Chiho had never seen before. She stared blankly at the customer as he left.
“That’s not something we see mentioned too often,” Maou said, showing her another copy of the circular, “but yeah, you can make reservations for birthday parties at some locations. Mostly the suburban ones, though, since our inner-city MgRonalds are usually on the small side.”
The circular included a picture of a boy, perhaps kindergarten age, enjoying a party—balloons, the whole bit—with a MgRonald crewmember supervising.
“Young kids, you know, they look up to people who work at places they go to all the time. Some of ’em really like the uniform and our hats and so on. That’s a pretty rare request, though, so don’t worry about it too much.”
“…”
Chiho cursed her thoughtlessness as she read through the circular. If that was the question the middle-aged man had for her, chances were he’d intended to hold a party for his grandson or something. If she had gone ahead and given him the wrong information, the whole thing might’ve been called off.
“…Guess that’s why I better ask if I don’t know, huh?”
“Hmm?”
“Like, I had never heard of that before, so I just assumed it didn’t exist…”
“Ohh. Yeah, well, I’ve never seen it myself, either, so…”
“Sorry about that. I’ll try to be more careful.”
“It’s cool.” Maou nodded. “Don’t let it get you too down, all right? Just keep it in mind, and you’re guaranteed not to make that same mistake again.”
“…All right.”
“Oh, but don’t expect that everything’s gonna go perfect from now on, either.”
“Huh?”
“Well, I mean, if you did everything perfectly during your training period, there’s not much point in me being around, y’know? Me and Ms. Kisaki and everyone else on the crew had to go through the same thing, so really, making mistakes is kinda part of the job description when you’re starting out. As long as you learn from them, it’s all good.”
The advice, given freely but with ample consideration for Chiho’s feelings, helped her feel a little more at ease. It certainly wasn’t a matter of Maou going easy on her.
“Sure,” Chiho replied, “I’ll try not to rely on you guys too much, though. I don’t want to be embarrassed to get paid for this.”
Maou’s eyebrows arched up a little at this unexpected self-admonition. “Huh,” he said. “I think I’m starting to see why Ms. Kisaki said you’d probably stick around for a while.”
“Oh?” a quizzical Chiho asked. She didn’t know why, but if the manager apparently had high hopes for her, that certainly couldn’t be a bad thing. Little by little, she was using her eyes, her ears, her whole body, to understand the environment around her. This, she supposed, was what work was. And as she reflected on this in bed, her eyes grew heavier and heavier.
“…Better go brush my teeth,” she said to herself, almost dropping her phone as she worked her creaky legs out of bed and to the bathroom.
Chiho’s adventures in part-time employment continued over the ensuing two weeks. She wasn’t at MgRonald every day, but by the end of her seventh shift, she was starting to feel she was past the initial hump, at least. It was tiring work, and not every moment of it was fun, but picturing her next shift was never a depressing thought for her.
“Yeah, so why’re you acting all gloomy, huh?”
Kaori had a point. Despite her generally glowing review of shift life at MgRonald, there was still a dark shadow covering her face.
“Well…I like the manager and all the people on the crew, but…I guess that’s kind of the problem, actually.”
“What do you mean?”
“Um…I think I might be gaining weight.”
“Huh?”
Beyond her first orientation session, Chiho had been ordered to eat something from MgRonald’s regular menu for dinner on each of her six subsequent shifts. She was a fan, of course, and getting a free meal out of work was nothing to sniff at—but all the calories were starting to become a concern.
“I’m glad they’re feeding you and all, but every time? That’s kind of rough. Why’re they doing that to you?”
“I guess their reasoning is that I can’t give recommendations to customers unless I know how things taste for myself. I know we’ve been there a lot, but there’s a ton of stuff on the menu I’ve never eaten before…”
“Ohhh.” Kaori nodded. This made sense to her. “Yeah, I’ve never been there for breakfast, I guess. That, and I never really bother with stuff that’s not on the value menu, huh?”
“Yeah,” Chiho replied, trying not to make it sound like she was bragging about her job too much. “But once my training’s over, I’ll have to start paying for my own meals. I think I still get thirty percent off or something, though.”
“Ooh, nice.” Kaori let out a jealous sigh. “You really lucked out with that job! Everyone’s really nice, they aren’t pushing a lot of crap on you, and they even let you eat for free! Man, I bet I coulda stayed on a while longer over there. So what do you think, though? Has it helped you figure out life as a high school grad yet?”
“Not…really, no.”
She had almost forgotten about that thorny issue—the very one that had inspired her to seek a job in the first place. She was happy enough with the work, but the whole point behind it—her quest to figure out how she wanted to proceed with life in a couple of years—was still an open question. She’d need to submit that survey form pretty soon, and the teacher conferences at the end of the month were just a few days away.
“Hey, uh, Sasaki?” Yoshiya pitched in. “How much are you makin’ an hour?”
“How much? Um, it’s eight hundred yen an hour while I’m in training; that’s what they pay high school students. Once it’s over I think it’ll go up by fifty yen.”
Beyond that, apparently, it would depend on her performance. As Kisaki put it, Maou was a living legend around the MgRonald location thanks to his earning a hundred-yen raise after two months—in orders, just one month out of his training period. The dedication he brought to the job was obvious in Chiho’s mind. It’d take a while, she reasoned, before she could reach that level of talent.
“Damn, so if you work six hours a day, you’ll make, like, almost five thousand? Wooooow.”
“Yeah, if she does,” Kaori snapped back. “Yoshiya, could you stop being amazed at Sasachi’s fast-food job and worry about your career guidance survey a little more? You know how strict your parents are with you.”
Chiho had first met Kaori upon entering this high school, but Kaori and Yoshiya had apparently known each other since their elementary years. Every now and then, she’d bring up little clues to their past like this. Kaori’s acerbic criticism when dealing with Yoshiya was something honed across years of interaction, but given how well they got along with each other anyway, Chiho assumed neither of them took things too personally.
This time, however, Yoshiya’s reaction drifted from the norm.
“Ah, I dunno about…strict, exactly. Like, nowadays, it’s like I’m not even part of their lives anymore. I’m not even kidding when I say that I don’t think they’ll show up for the conference.”
“Oh?” asked Koari.
“What do you mean, Yoshiya?” Chiho added.
“Well, you know about my brothers, right, Shoji?”
“Ohhh.” Kaori sagely nodded.
“Wait, you’ve got brothers, Kohmura?” Chiho inquired.
In the two years that Chiho had known Yoshiya, it was the first time she had heard of this. It naturally struck her curiosity, but Yoshiya winced at the topic, something he seemed to not want to bring up.
“Mmm, I was hoping Sasaki wouldn’t have to know about it…”
“Huh? Why not?”
“Ah, ’cause if you knew about them, I figured you’d make fun of me for—ow!”
Kaori’s pencil case, packed to the gills with writing instruments, made a clean hit on Yoshiya’s face. It whizzed right past Chiho’s ear along the way. She could tell there was a lot of heft to it.
“Well, that’s why we treat you like an idiot!” Kaori shouted. “Because of that attitude! You know Sasachi isn’t like that!”
“…Geez, the zipper bounced right off my teeth…”
“Well, go wash my case down and disinfect it! Right now!”
“I totally can’t believe you, Shoji…”
“Whoa! Guys, calm down!”
Chiho wound up having to listen to them bicker over her head for the next five minutes. Yoshiya still didn’t want to talk about his siblings, so Kaori took the reins for him.
“So, like, Yoshiya has two older brothers, but get this—the oldest one’s a judge, and the other one’s a doctor, right?”
“What?!” Chiho couldn’t help but shout. This was beyond anything she expected.
Yoshiya, for his part, glumly shook his head. “Quit making up stuff, Shoji,” he said. “The oldest one wants to be a judge, but he’s still in his legal apprenticeship. And my other brother’s taking the test for his medical license this year, so he’s not a doctor yet.”
“Right, that,” Kaori agreed. “And meanwhile, the youngest kid’s failing out of Sasahata North, and you can kinda see how that makes things awkward around the dinner table, right?”
“Geez, don’t spell it out like that,” Yoshiya groaned. “I mean, my parents kept pressing me to work really hard like both of my brothers did, but I think they’ve, like, given up on that. They barely even talk to me anymore—I told them about that mock exam and they were just like ‘Oh? Hmm.’ And it’s not like I got some kind of other special talent, either. Basically, I’m just waitin’ until I can get the hell outta there.”
“Kohmura…”
“That’s why I was thinking,” he went on. “You ’n’ Shoji, you both got work experience, right? Maybe I could find a part-time job somewhere so I can get out sooner.”
Chiho didn’t pursue the subject any further—Yoshiya looked peeved enough revealing what little he did about his family—but to her, the kid seemed like he could be in some serious trouble.
Kaori must have felt the same way. “Yoshiya,” she said, her voice low and serious, “if you start working as it is now, it’s gonna go beyond repeating a year. You’d pretty much be forced to drop out.”
“Well,” Yoshiya replied, “as long as I’m making money, it’s all good, isn’t it? Y’know how people say the stuff you study in school doesn’t even help out in college at all these days. That’s what I’m probably gonna write in my survey, I guess. Go straight to work, ’n’ all.”
He was back to his usual free-wheeling tone. Chiho couldn’t tell how serious he was being.
“Hey there.” Kisaki struck up a conversation with Chiho, who was currently manning the register. “Something got you down? Did you have a question about something?”
“Oh! Hello. Um, nothing like that, but…well, maybe it is, actually.”
“Hmm?”
Her head was occupied with thoughts about her future and the conversation she’d had at school earlier. Yoshiya, Kaori, and herself were all trying to squint into the future, trying to figure out which path was the right one for each of them, and all completely failing to reach a conclusion.
“So I got to talking to my friends at school about the future, but… I really don’t know what I should do yet, and I’m gonna have to talk about it at a parent-teacher conference in a few days. I have to think of something, but… I dunno.”
“Oh, that kind of thing?” Kisaki nodded, her face showing her concern.
“Yeah… Sorry I’m not too focused on—”
“Well, I can give you a grown-up’s advice, or some completely irresponsible advice. Which do you want to hear first?”
“Huh?” Chiho exclaimed. She was expecting a verbal warning not to space out on the clock—but not only was Kisaki empathizing with her, she was bringing the conversation down an exceedingly odd direction.
“…Okay, how about the grown-up advice?”
“Sure. From a grown-up’s perspective, what you tell your teacher or guidance counselor about your future means absolute jack squat, so there’s no point worrying about it at all.”
“Huh?!”
This felt outrageous to Chiho. It sounded like just another grown-up giving her half-baked advice that did nothing to help her. But, judging by her facial expression, Kisaki was expecting that reaction.
“Why do you think that is?” she asked. “Well, it’s because the grown-ups asking you that question already had it resolved for themselves ages ago.”
“Wh-what do you mean…?”
“Once you’re old enough, it gets a lot easier to look back at your high school years and see what you could’ve done to be more successful later on. That’s why they don’t understand why kids like you are getting so worried about this crossroads in their lives—they went down that path long ago. And most grown-ups, you know—they’re kind of embarrassed about how they acted in high school. They had more passion than intelligence, and they were totally honest with themselves back then. So that’s why outside of your parents, your teachers, and whoever you’re working with at the test-prep center or whatever, you should just ignore advice from anyone who doesn’t know anything about you.”
“The test-prep center?”
“Sure. It’s their whole job to make sure you can have a smooth transition to wherever it is you’re going. When it comes to thinking about their students, at least, I think you can trust them.”
“I see…”
“Now, for the totally irresponsible advice: Most worries about career guidance pretty much boil down to ‘I don’t know what I should do, what I should aim for, what I should study.’ You don’t know what kind of work clicks with you. You don’t know what you should pick as your major in college.”
“Right. Exactly. So—”
“If I wanted to be totally impartial here, I’d say you go to a low-tuition public university, take law or premed, and become a doctor or judge or whatever. It’s getting hard for lawyers to keep their heads above water these days, even, so I’d say public service would be the way to go.”
“But…” Chiho hesitated at the eerily familiar advice.
“But,” Kisaki continued with a sly smile, “me telling you that doesn’t really help you decide on anything, does it?”
“No…”
“So in that case, why bother thinking that far ahead in the first place? After all, who can even say where you’ll be this time next year? Because there ain’t a grown-up in the world who knows that for themselves, and yet they’re asking kids like you to make this huge, vague life decision. It’s really sad, what they make you do.”
Kisaki’s voice grew to a crescendo.
“The whole career guidance thing is about thinking about what you’ll do today for the sake of tomorrow. Because maybe you don’t know where you’ll be next year, but you got a pretty good idea of what you want to do tomorrow, right?”
“Tomorrow, huh…?”
“Yeah. It’s literally that. Today, and tomorrow, just like it is on the calendar. Your career’s in the future, and what’s the future besides a whole long succession of todays and tomorrows, anyway? Most people out there…they aren’t intelligent enough to look past everything in front of them and seriously think about life one or two years down the line. Instead of that, you gotta work with what you have. Reach out to tomorrow—reach out to what you can still grasp with one hand—and you’ll be grasping next year before you even know it.”
“Just to tomorrow…”
“Right. So!”
Suddenly, Kisaki put a hand on Chiho’s head. She looked up in response.
“Now that I’ve clouded up your mind even more like the grown-up I am, how about we focus on the work we’ve got right now? Like I said, what you do today has everything to do with how tomorrow works out.”
“Oh! Um, okay.”
“You gotta keep a clear mind when you’re handling money. Make sure you’re telling your five-thousand-yen bills from the ten-thousand-yen ones.”
“S-sure thing!”
Chiho went back to work, although the cloud wasn’t fully extinguished from her mind. On no less than two occasions today, her lack of focus caused her to almost treat five-thousand-yen banknotes like they were ten-thousand-yen bills. If it wasn’t for the rule that change for high-denomination bills had to be counted with another crewmember as a witness, she would’ve quite literally given away her day’s salary to her customers.
“I apologize. I’m gonna focus on my work now.”
This time around, she felt she really meant that from the heart. The fog hadn’t lifted from her head, but she still felt a great deal relieved compared to before.
“Perfect,” Kisaki replied. “Now I’m glad I gave you all that self-important junk a second ago. I gotta head over to the office for a little while, but if you run into any problems, ask another crewmember, all right?”
“I’ll show you how to salt the fries later on. I’ll do it this time, since we’ve got customers waiting on ’em… Here we go.”
Maou handed her the medium fries destined for Yoshiya’s stomach.
“…!”
Their fingertips met for a moment, causing Chiho to inhale a little in surprise. Maou registered no particular response as he also provided a new tray and some napkins.
“You guys can chat a bit if you want,” he said. “It’s pretty slow right now.”
“Oh, are—are you sure?”
“Sure. Have fun. Just don’t make it too long.”
“Cool! Thank you!” Chiho gave a quick bow and headed for Kaori and Yoshiya’s table.
“Here you go!” she announced. “One fresh medium fries for you!”
“Ooh!”
Chiho placed the tray down, took the plastic number, and reverted from her all-business smile to her normal expression.
“So, um…that’s pretty much how it is around here.”
After all that, this was still a bit embarrassing for her.
“Oh, is it okay to talk?” Kaori glanced back at Maou behind the counter, gauging his response.
“Yeah, he said I could chat a little bit.”
Kaori nodded approvingly. “Wow, that’s pretty kind of him.” Then she gave Chiho a good look, taking the time to study her from head to toe.
“I think that uniform looks good on you,” she observed.
“Huh? Oh, uh, you think?”
“Definitely,” Yoshiya agreed. “Like, totally grown-up.”
“I am not!”
Chiho fanned herself with the number placard, her face starting to go flush.
“Yoshiya, would you stop staring at her legs, please?”
“I’m not doing anything like that, Shoji! Plus, that whole customer service thing you were doing? You looked like you had it down pat.”
“Yeah,” Kaori said. “I think you’re a lot better at it than the girls at my last job, anyway.”
“Really? Well, thanks.”
Being looked at was embarrassing enough. This flurry of compliments was only making it worse.
“Seeing you like this… I dunno, maybe I really should get a job. Kaori keeps telling me this is a good location, too.”
As always, it was hard to tell how serious Yoshiya was being. Kaori scowled at him.
“Here we go again…”
“What? I really mean it.”
“Yeah?” Kaori sneered. “Even if you did, you still wouldn’t be half as good at it as Sasachi. I mean, I know I couldn’t last too long in here.”
“Huh?”
Both Chiho and Yoshiya gave Kaori puzzled looks. She had said the exact opposite to Chiho earlier.
Then there was a shout from the counter. “Sasaki! You got a moment?” She must have idled for too long.
“Sorry, guys. Better get going.”
“Sure thing.”
“Have fun!”
Chiho left the table and jogged up to the counter.
“We have another customer who wanted to say hello, Sasaki.”
“Oh?”
What, to me? Unsure what this was about, Chiho glanced at the customer next to her.
“Ah!”
Chiho held her breath for a moment. The large, well-built foreigner from before was standing there—the one who had made her spill her drink all over her handout and, in an indirect way, caused her to seek this job in the first place.
“Um, hello there!” Chiho began in Japanese. “Thanks for coming!”
Maou was kind enough to provide interpretation. “‘I was surprised to see you got a job here,’ he said. He wanted to know if that handout from before was okay.”
“Yeah. I haven’t filled it out yet, actually. But I think with this job, I’m starting to see what kind of stuff I wanna do after graduating.”
“‘I had a lot of trouble figuring out my future when I was in school, too. I kind of dodged the issue during school, unlike you, and it bit me in the rear later on, but I’m pretty proud of the career I have now.’”
“What kind of work do you do, sir?”
“Um, ‘I’m an art dealer from Helsinki who sells Japanese paintbrushes. There’s nothing else in the world that beats them in quality.’ Wow, I didn’t know that.”
“Helsinki?” Chiho said. “Are you from Finland?”
The man eagerly nodded.
“He said he’s going back to Helsinki tomorrow, but he was kind of worried over whether it worked out okay with you, so he thought he’d try coming back here.”
“Well, thanks to him, I think I’ve found myself a pretty good job. I don’t really know about my future yet, but I hope you’ll come back here next time you’re in Japan. I’ll try to make sure I have some good news for you by then.”
“‘Absolutely,’ he says. ‘Good luck. And I promise you, the things you learn in school really do help you out in the future.’”
“Thanks!” Chiho gave a brisk nod of her own. “Oh, Maou?”
“Yeah?”
“…Could you tell him that I’ll try my best to talk to him directly next time?”
“…”
“You see that? No way you could handle that job with people like that around you. They’d crush you for being so useless. And if you really wanna drop out of school, I ain’t gonna stop you, but I don’t think you’re cut out to work here right now.”
“…”
“Yoshiya?”
“Hey, um, Shoji?”
“Hmm?”
“…Where’s Finland?”
“Yoshiyaaaa… I’ll forgive you for not knowing Helsinki, but come on! Finland’s in northern Europe! It’s in the EU and everything! You didn’t even know that and you think you can work with Sasachi? Geez.”
“And people go all the way from there to buy brushes from us?”
“I guess so, unless that guy messed up the translation. I doubt it, though.”
“What do they use them for?”
“How would I know? If you care that much, ask him.”
“How?”
“Ask that Maou dude, or try your a-maaaazing English skills on him.”
“…”
Six in the evening. Chiho’s friends stuck around long enough to meet up with her at the end of her shift. Luckily for them, it never got crowded enough that the crew felt obliged to boot them from their table.
Thanks to the combined efforts of Maou, Kaori, and Yoshiya, Chiho was now confident enough to work through an entire order herself. The learning process was still only beginning for her, but she still found the shift remarkably fulfilling.
“Hey, Sasaki?” Yoshiya quietly asked on the way back.
“Hmm? What is it?”
“Who’s that guy on your team who knows English? Is he in college, or did he live in the U.S. or something?”
“I don’t think so. I tried asking him once, but he said he learned English because he thought it’d help him with work. We get a lot of international visitors from the offices near the station, actually.”
“He got that good at it just for a fast-food job?”
Chiho had the same question. It wasn’t a bad talent to have, of course, but it did seem like overkill.
“Say,” she replied, “do you know what language they speak in Finland?”
“Huh? Not English?”
Chiho shook her head. “I guess they have their own language. It’s called Finnish, and it’s very different from English. But after that guy graduated from school, he learned how to speak English and German pretty much just studying by himself. He got it all from schoolbooks.”
“…He’s gotta be pretty smart, then.”
“He didn’t go to college, Yoshiya.”
Yoshiya fell silent. Chiho sneaked a glance at him as she recalled Kisaki’s advice. Deciding on your future was nothing more than deciding what to do tomorrow, then doing it over and over again. Maou and their Finnish-speaking visitor learned English in their own respective “todays” because they figured they’d need it “tomorrow.” And maybe they didn’t know what they’d be doing a year from now, but they knew that neither tomorrow nor 365 tomorrows from now would be the exact same as today. To prepare for that, the more weapons you had, the better.
And even if that globe-trotting art dealer didn’t come back to Japan tomorrow, he might come back next month. Chiho at least owed him an English greeting or two, she reasoned. Whether that would pay dividends for her a year or two years from now was another issue, but…still.
“What I’m saying, Yoshiya, is that you can’t do anything for other people if you can’t even make an effort for yourself.”
That didn’t just apply to Maou. It applied to Kisaki, her other supervisors, and everyone else on the crew. They could all make a daily effort, because they wanted to work for the sake of others.
Yoshiya turned back at Chiho. “…What do you mean?” he asked.
She laughed and smiled a devilish grin.
“Not telling!”
After all the effort she needed to figure it out, she wasn’t about to let Yoshiya in on the secret that easily.
“You know,” she added, “I think I could fill out that survey for real now.”
“Whoa, you haven’t done it yet?” Kaori exclaimed.
“Well, for now, I put down that I want to go to a college with a good kyudo program. That’s not a total lie, and that’s about the best thing I could think of anyway. If they don’t like it at the conference, I’ll think about it then.”
“…What’re you two girls talking about?”
From that point until they all went their separate ways, Yoshiya’s face looked like he was having stomach cramps.
The day of conferences had arrived.
Yoshiya’s session was scheduled first, followed by Chiho’s and Kaori’s. All of them, along with their parents, were seated on chairs lined up in the hallway. And after all that griping on Yoshiya’s part, there was his mother, seated right there next to him. Judging how he talked about his brothers, Chiho was expecting an ultrastrict taskmaster. Instead she was small, slightly plump, and supremely mild-mannered.
Ever since his visit to Chiho’s workplace, Yoshiya had grown oddly quiet. It seemed to irk Kaori a little, since fewer things said meant fewer chances to wheedle him.
“Mrs. Kohmura?” said Mr. Ando, inviting mother and son into the classroom. The woman nodded at Chiho and Kaori as she passed by, but Yoshiya didn’t bother to so much as glance at them.
“Sasachi, Sasachi!”
Kaori gestured at Chiho the moment the door closed, inviting her to come over as she crouched down by the slit below the classroom entrance.
“K-Kao, we can’t…”
“Um, Kaori?”
Chiho and Kaori’s mother simultaneously admonished her for so brazenly trying to listen in. But she shouldn’t have bothered anyway.
“…Well, Mrs. Kohmura, thanks very much for taking the time out to attend this conference today.”
Mr. Ando’s booming voice was clearly audible through the door. All three of them rolled their eyes. Sasahata North was in a fairly old school building, so no matter how tightly the doors were fastened, there was practically no soundproofing provided at all.
“…I’ll be in the bathroom,” Chiho’s mother chuckled as she stood up. “Ooh, maybe I should while I have the chance, too,” Kaori’s mother added. As adults, they both must’ve felt uncomfortable listening in.
Once they disappeared down the hall, Chiho and Kaori looked at each other.
“…Uh, me too,” Chiho said, figuring she should join the throng.
“No,” whispered Kaori, pushing her back down. “We have to wait here. Besides, Yoshiya’s been acting weird lately. I’m startin’ to wonder if he had some kinda revelation in his mind or something.”
“Oh, Kaori, how do you even know we can hear him in—”
“So, Kohmura, I apologize that there’s no easy way to say this, but with your current grades, getting into a university English-literature program’s gonna be pretty tough. Where’d that desire come from, all of a sudden?”
“…”
Mr. Ando had nothing if not an inadvertently perfect sense of comic timing. Chiho was about ready to crack up, as was Kaori. Yoshiya, studying English literature?!
“…Mr. Ando,” Yoshiya replied in a reserved voice before the girls could regain their composure, “I’m pretty sure you know this already, but my brothers are pretty much geniuses. But… I know my grades aren’t any good, but I could just never get myself to wanna follow in their footsteps. I’m sure they both had really clear reasons why they wanted to be judges or doctors or whatever, but someone like me… I don’t really have the will to try going down this well-trodden path to success like everyone else does. I just don’t think it would work.”
“No? I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad approach, but…what, then?”
Yoshiya let out a deep, deliberate sigh.
“…………Finland.”
Chiho and Kaori exchanged amused glances again.
“Huh?”
“Mr. Ando, what do you think it’s like to be a person from Finland who goes to Japan so he can purchase paintbrushes to sell back home?”
“Um, pardon me?”
“Do you think he could make a living from that?”
“I’m…not exactly sure where this is going.”
Chiho couldn’t blame Mr. Ando for his confusion.
“I was just thinking,” Yoshiya continued. “You say that being a doctor or working for the government’s really stable work that makes a lot of money, but it’s not like they just hand you a check the moment you get one of those jobs. You have to really work for the government before you get paid, you know? Like, you get paid for teaching classes to us, right? It’s not just a matter of landing a stable job—you’re a teacher, Mr. Ando, because this job gives you something to dream about or work for, right?”
“Mmm, well, yeah, certainly.”
“Some of my friends have been working part-time lately, and I just figured…like, maybe I shouldn’t be trying to just pursue some job title or other. I should try to figure out what I should do if I wanna be able to pursue whatever job I think’s worth striving for in the future. So…”
Yoshiya paused for a moment, perhaps searching for the right words.
“…This guy I saw, I don’t think he studied in school just so he could go to Japan and be a paintbrush dealer. But let’s say that, for some reason or another, that’s what I wind up doing in the future. I started thinking about what I’d need to do now for that, and…I know I just failed it in the mock exam, but I think English is a big part of it. But I’m not smart or anything, and I know I’ll get all lazy if I don’t have a real goal to strive for, so I thought I’d aim for some kind of high-level English-literature program. That kind of thing.”
“…”
Before they knew it, Chiho and Kaori were hanging on Yoshiya’s every word, faces focused on the door.
“…And what do you think of that, Mrs. Kohmura?” a still-confused Mr. Ando asked.
“…I think that myself, my husband, and Yoshiya’s brothers have taken exactly the kind of well-trodden path he was talking about. My husband has a job in government administration, and before we got married, I was a teacher myself.”
“Ah!”
That surprised Chiho. She instantly began to wish Yoshiya hadn’t been so secretive about his family. She peeked at Kaori. Judging by the way she was holding her breath and staring daggers at the door, she must not have known, either.
“It wasn’t our intention to force the same path on Yoshiya, but I do think being surrounded by people like ourselves made things…uncomfortable for him. I’m worried that he thought we forced his brothers down the paths they took, too.”
“…Aw, nothing like that, Mom.”
“Basically, if our children had a goal in life, I didn’t think it was our place to tell them what to do or not do. Once that decision is made, that’s going to result in something real, whether it’s good or bad. So I know he can be a handful sometimes, Mr. Ando, but I hope you’ll be willing to give him the guidance he’ll need for that goal… I don’t know how Finland got into his mind, but the next time we go on vacation, I’ll make sure he comes along to interpret for us.”
That last sentence was probably intended for her son. There was nothing chiding in it. It was the voice of a mother who always cared for her children—just like how Riho, Chiho’s mother, cared for hers.
“Yeah,” Yoshiya said. “Well, I’m still failing it right now, so don’t get your hopes up too high.”
“Well, you’re going to work on that, aren’t you?”
The conversation—a sort of mix of conference and idle chitchat—continued for a while longer before they heard the clatter of chairs against the floor. Chiho and Kaori sat straight back on their chairs, as if nothing was amiss.
“Yoshiya, of all people,” Kaori whispered just before the Kohmuras left the room with Mr. Ando. It didn’t escape Chiho’s ears.
“Thanks again, Mrs. Kohmura. Now, Sasaki… Hmm? Where did your mother go?”
“Oh, she’s in the bathroom. She should be back in a sec…”
“Sorry, sorry!” exclaimed Riho, trotting down the hallway on cue in her high heels.
“No problem. Right in here, please.”
The Sasakis passed by the Kohmuras as they went in. As they did, Chiho dared a question to Yoshiya.
“Do you still wanna work?”
Yoshiya didn’t seem to understand why Chiho asked that. He frowned and turned his back to her.
“You guys won’t stop bitching at me to study,” he sheepishly said on the way out, “so I think I’ll stick to that for now.”
Kaori, expressionless, watched him leave.
Although Chiho didn’t want to pat herself on the back too much, there was no doubt in her mind. Yoshiya had changed, and it wasn’t entirely his doing, either. It was also thanks to Maou, and that Finnish art dealer, and probably what he saw of her at work, too.
The only regret she had was that Yoshiya’s survey submission overlapped with hers. She had also listed English literature as one of her candidates, for most of the same reasons. That was what she wanted to build on, and right now, that was one of the things she knew she could build on.
The world was a big place—far bigger than what students like herself could see, or even try to see. There was no guarantee that the world in front of her eyes right now would be the same as the one she saw next year. And if that was the case, she reasoned that her job was something to start with, so that she could grasp and earn the things she needed to plunge into that new world. That, she thought, was the path she had to take.
Career guidance, after all, wasn’t a final goal. It was just another checkpoint along the way.
Now Chiho very much was patting herself on the back. She realized it even as she was trying to figure out a way to explain the reasoning for her choice without duplicating Yoshiya’s approach too much. Even she had to admit it was awfully small-minded of her.
“Well,” Mr. Ando began, “with your grades, Sasaki, I think you could be looking at a pretty decent choice of universities, liberal arts or not. You listed your first aspiration as English literature; could you explain to me why?”
It wasn’t like she needed a single reason for it, one almighty motive for putting in the effort. She wasn’t Yoshiya, but the motive driving her forward was just as easy to follow as his. It was in that kai pose the kyudo club leader put on for her when she first joined this school. It lay in the work being done by all the grown-ups around her. And it was all linked together by that piece of paper in Mr. Ando’s hands right now.
She wanted to be there. She wanted to see that same world.
“I…I have people in my life that I respect. People whose paths I want to follow.”
She wanted to be on an even keel with them. With him. To experience the same world as him.
This was my story. From back when I was just a clueless high-school teen. The story of Chiho Sasaki, a girl prepared for a different tomorrow in her life—although maybe not one that would change the entire world at the end of it.
Not even two weeks after that parent-teacher conference, I found out the truth. And once I did, my world unfolded in ways that it never had for me before. I was an everyday teen thrust into a life-or-death struggle, with the future of entire nations and countless lives in the balance.
But just a few days before, it had all been different…
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