Welcome to the fanfiction!

Lady So Divine, chapter two

Fri, 23 Feb 2007 05:47:41 GMT

Author's Notes

Feh. I think this fic will include Japanese honorifics. Misaki isn’t that close with Tatsuhiro yet, and I think it’s something that bears pointing out. It’s not something I wanted to do, but I think it merits doing.

In this chapter: Welcome to the stream of consciousness!

I’m trying to portray Tatsuhiro as a man with a lot of social anxiety left over, who worries about everything from his job to the economy to his coworkers’ opinions of him—sort of a left-over anxiety from being a Hikikomori, which I don’t think entirely left him—does it ever? And yet, even so, I can see that he has grown up significantly since we last saw him; after all, he no longer has the luxury of simply living at home with his parents’ money, of being a “kidult.”

When I mention manga at the comic store in relation to kanji ability, what I mean is this: Since most manga are geared at a younger audience, often, the kanji will be written with furigana (small hiragana characters—the most common of the two kana alphabets) to help those who might not have learned the kanji yet.

I don’t imagine anybody reading this doesn’t know it, but just in case: Japanese books are read, in relation to American books, back to front. That is, the back of an American book is the front of a Japanese one. Right to left instead of left to right.

Finally, this chapter took many evenings to complete, by which I mean it was written mostly at night when I ought to have been asleep. Subsequently, there are many errors and they will be steadily corrected over the course of the next few days.

And hey, if you liked this, or if you didn’t, think about dropping me a comment and telling me about it!

So clever / whatever.

Chapter two: Class of Two Thousand and Never

The way Tatsuhiro saw it, there was one and only one way to survive without going insane, whether you were a salaryman or His Holiness the Pope: Never plan a day out which is more than a week away. Exceptions, of course, must be made for circumstances: Trips to unfamiliar places, particularly hectic periods, and large-scale combat, to name a few. In these special circumstances, planning in advance may actually preserve sanity rather than degrade it; however, in general, Tatsuhiro knew that if he were to attempt to lay out a full-fledged plan for some future, unnamed date, it would only serve to depress him more, because he would find just how utterly this plan he laid out resembled the day he had just lived through.

Maybe that was why he enjoyed teaching Misaki. He knew he wasn’t really qualified to teach her much of anything; she was, if anything, better at most subjects than he was. Perhaps that was why he had so intently looked over her composition—he had been looking for flaws; anything, really, to assuage his pride so he could tell himself, hey, she may be good, but I’m still better, if only because she’s still a kid. He knew this and he hated it, but he could not stop it. He felt a little like a blue-collared father who has realized that his son is a genius; proud, and yet terribly, unbearably ashamed.

It is not that bad. You’re being melodramatic. He was proud of his ability to tell himself this, at least; Misaki would call it progress.

Sempai would call it…

What?

Tatsuhiro found that he couldn’t quite wrap his mind around what Sempai would have called it. He supposed that that, too, was “progress.”

Oh.

Sempai would have called it “conspiracy.”

Sempai would have done anything to hold on to her conspiracies. Had done anything. Almost. And now, supposedly, she was living this nice idyllic life. Beautiful baby, wonderful husband, (this expression tugged at Tatsuhiro’s sexual identity a little, but he never would have admitted it—it was his mother talking, and his upbringing) enormous house. Nice things. Nice life. Tatsuhiro had had to force himself to believe it when he first read about it.

But the second time, it had become easier. The third time, easier still.

He didn’t know how many times after that there were, but there were many; each time he read it he felt a dull pain in his chest, as though somebody had applied a powerful local anesthetic in that general area and then stabbed him; it was something that appealed to his masochistic side—what Sempai might have called his “human side.”

“Ah—”

Tatsuhiro stopped walking and backtracked three steps. He had passed the gate to the park already. He unlatched the gate and started in. How had he—

“Ah—”

If he had tried to enter the gate, he would have been trespassing on private property. This wasn’t the park at all.

Where am I?

It was a stupid question, really. He knew exactly where he was. He was about four blocks past the park.

But why?

An answer presented itself: Because you walked here, stupid. It was painfully obvious, but it didn’t seem to answer his question.

Why?

He turned around, and for the third time in fifteen seconds, was caught unaware: “Ah—”

Misaki Nakahara was staring at him with a mix of confusion and concern on her face. “Satou-kun?” she said, and he was startled by how perfectly what he saw on her face translated to what he heard in her voice. “Are you all right?”

Tatsuhiro shook his head. “I’m fine. Just taking a stroll.” He lied without even thinking about it, really—in truth, in that way, he and Misaki were not so different. It was a little, stupid thing, so why not lie about it? It was just as easy as being honest, and it saved a lot of trouble if you got away with it.

“I thought you did that every night to get here.” Unfortunately, Misaki was as much of a liar as he was, and she was better at it. This, though Tatsuhiro would never acknowledge it, was not a difficult merit to earn. Subsequently, Tatsuhiro often found himself in more trouble than he might have saved himself. Often, she would let his lie play out, if only to see where he would end up, but of late, she did this less often.

“I was just turning back,” Tatsuhiro said, rubbing the back of his head absently.

“Into somebody’s yard?” That little smile played over Misaki’s face; the one which was both smug and humble. Tatsuhiro called it “unknowingly smug,” part of the act of “accidentally rubbing it in,” a habit Misaki had picked up recently, or so he thought. The trouble with this smile was that it was also open and honest and

extremely

fucking

cute

…honest.

Truth be told, she’s not being smug at all. You’re just embarrassed. Her “new habit” is just you being wrong more often.

But Tatsuhiro wasn’t listening to this bitter little part of himself just then. He was smiling back at Misaki without even thinking about it. “You caught me,” he said. “I kind of forgot where I was going.”

“Well, I’ve been following you around like this for about five minutes,” Misaki said, chastising him. “By the time we get back, you’ll be ten minutes late. I should fine you.”

“You’re late too,” Tatsuhiro pointed out.

“How can a student be late when the teacher is later?”

“More late,” Tatsuhiro said, a bit smugly. Misaki huffed in a very good imitation of mock indignation.

“That’s not correct grammar at all,” Misaki said, sounding a bit subdued of a sudden; she physically drew back from him about a foot, and he frowned.

This happened sometimes, too.

Tatsuhiro stopped walking for a moment, and a moment later, Misaki followed suit. “What is it, Satou-kun?”

“Misaki-chan,” he said, not really thinking but rather letting his mouth determine for itself what came out of it, “You said that I was late.”

“That was…” Misaki drew back further. Tatsuhiro ignored her.

“How can a teacher be late, though,” A smile grew on Tatsuhiro’s face, and he had no idea why. “If the student arrives after him?”

Misaki blinked twice. “What?”

Tatsuhiro did not reply. Instead, he took off at a full-tilt sprint.

“Wh—” Misaki stuttered, and then, possibly also without thinking about it, took off after him.

Tatsuhiro, however, was at least a head taller than Misaki, and easily twice as leggy; to top that off, his long days working on his feet had given him a lean, overworked sort of strength that a girl who spent most of her time studying for her Equivalency exam simply could not have. He made it to the park’s gate a solid five seconds before Misaki did, and before she could enter, he had shut the small gate door on her. She managed to stop before she ran into it, but it was a close thing.

“Wh-what are you doing, Satou-kun?” Misaki panted, clearly out of breath, a sign of just how out of shape she was. “Why did you…” she was breathing fairly heavily—enough spark a small pang of worry in Tatsuhiro, which he dismissed as readily as he could.

“What do you mean?” he said as jovially as he could manage when he himself was panting; standing was one thing, but sprinting entirely another. “I was just rushing to get here on time; that’s all.”

“You—that…” Misaki dropped off even as her gaze dropped, and then an uncomfortable silence dropped over the both of them.

Did I make her sad?

…What the hell kind of question is that?

Did I?

Who says something like that? Even in their head? Even for a thought, that’s…

Did I?

Now listen here. I didn’t do anything to make her sad; if she’s pouting it’s only because she lost a race and I won it, and that’s all there is to it; there is nothing to be sad about and…

And Tatsuhiro knew that if he said that to her, not only would he be lying, but she would know it. What wasn’t there to be sad about? People who said they had not a care in the world had not taken a decent look at the state of the economy in over two decades. People who said that—

Stop.

People who said that getting out of bed each day was the start of the day’s opportunities had three houses, and two of them were in other countries; those people spent more money brushing their teeth in the morning than Tatsuhiro made in a week. Those people had lives of substance—people who said that the rich looked it had never lived in an apartment, or maybe they had for too long, and—

Stop.

And sometimes it was goddamn hard to just get out of bed.

Stop.

STOP RIGHT FUCKING NOW.

…Why?

Tatsuhiro looked up, and Misaki was still looking down.

Oh.

“I know how you feel,” Tatsuhiro said aloud. Misaki looked up, and Tatsuhiro put on the best smile that he could.

“What?” Misaki said, lacing her hands together behind her back—or at least, that was what Tatsuhiro assumed she was doing. (She could have been fingering her ass for all he knew, just wetting her fingers a little and—STOP).

“Nothing.”

“You said something.”

I did indeed. And you heard me, too, and you want me to repeat myself so that you can question me and turn the subject away from yourself. Was there a subject? I think so, but we weren’t speaking. Is that possible?

Who cares?

“Who cares?” Tatsuhiro said, and then opened the gate. “What are you doing standing out there? You’re going to be late for class. You wouldn’t want to be fined a million yen, would you?” An arbitrary number which almost seemed made-up at this point; Tatsuhiro didn’t have that kind of money. Misaki’s family did, but he doubted that they would simply give it to her if she asked. He opened the gate latch and let it swing inwards towards him, and started towards the small picnic point that served as their classroom.

Misaki stood there for a moment, simply staring at Tatsuhiro, her mouth almost agape (but not quite—her eyes stared blankly, but she was very good at keeping her mouth shut—so to speak.) And then the moment passed, and she nodded as though it was decided.

(What was decided?)

“Well then,” she said, “I’m very sorry for being late, Teacher-san.”

Tatsuhiro grinned half-assedly. “Forgiven. I held the entire class up just for you.”

Misaki stuck her tongue out at him in a decidedly un-Misaki manner.

Tatsuhiro decided that it might be a halfway decent evening after all.

Tatsuhiro managed to keep Misaki’s mind off of the composition for exactly one-half of their class period. He did this using mathematics; this, he thought, was a very good way of distracting the overly-literate and overly-curious from words: Bombard them with numbers. Even single-letter variables worked well. An unsolved, complicated-looking equation was like a train wreck to such people; even if they had no fundamental interest in the thing, and even if it had no bearing on their lives, they could not look away until they had at least formed a shaky theory on the inner workings of the thing. Oh, it’s obvious to me that X ran into some derivative so hard that it reduced itself to nothing but a 1. No, the driver probably just wasn’t paying any damn attention. You know functions these days, never seem to watch where they’re going. And I’ll just bet that X was drinking, and you know if the variable is drinking, the function will follow right along with it; it’s like some unwritten rule or something.

He found that Misaki had grown fairly adept at the basics of grade 11 mathematics, and he thought that if he could download a couple of equivalent-level exams off the internet over the weekend, he could declare her officially gradjiated from junior year by the end of next week. She was quite adept at kanji as well; she said it was from all the manga she read, working at that comic store. He supposed that this was true; if he had seen her over the weekend, her eyes sacks of lead from studying those very kanji, her pencils worn down from writing them over and over so many times, he might have supposed differently.

It was the Kanji that segued so beautifully into the composition; later, he reflected just how bad he was at planning ahead, and how Ieyasu Tokugawa might have been ashamed. (He always lost at games of Go, too.) He was going over her painstakingly neat handwriting page, and she said, almost humbly, (the best way to get something out of somebody, after all, was humbly) “I used some of these Kanji in my composition, too. Do you think after this you could check them?”

Bingo.

That was why she had handwritten it. “Kanji practice.” That way, when Tatsuhiro read it and realized how utterly superior it was to anything that he himself could write, he wouldn’t be able to avoid the subject; this had been cleverly laid out from the start, it had; she was a clever one, and—

Don’t you think you’re being overly paranoid?

I think they call that stupid in most circles.

“Is that why you handwrote it, was to practice your kanji?” Tatsuhiro said, amazed at his perfect control over his voice as he fished the stapled sheets of paper out of his notebook. (A wiser man would have called that a sign that it’s mostly in your head, just like every other damn conspiracy you used to dream up, but a wiser man Tatsuhiro was not.)

Misaki nodded. “It was a little hard to fit some of them in there, which is probably why it’s no good.”

Tatsuhiro opened his mouth to tell her that it wasn’t no good at all, in a tone which some people might have regarded as a little overzealous.

No, that’s not what she said. She said “not very good.”

Why did I hear that?

Tatsuhiro closed his mouth, and that small, bitter little thing inside of him woke up, thoroughly refreshed after sleeping off a long day’s self-loathing. He felt something drive a knife into his gut; a very dull one that made only a shallow wound, but that promised more in the near future.

Misaki looked at him, and Tatsuhiro saw something vulnerable in her face: She was waiting for his approval. All at once, this look washed over Tatsuhiro, who, in a moment of startling clarity, began to feel sick. This moment of clarity spoke to him by way of his burning esophagus, and it spoke to him like an old man instructing a young boy.

You, Tatsuhiro Satou, are now in a position of undeniable power over Misaki Nakahara. She is waiting for the approval of the one person whose opinion she respects about what is probably the one thing in her life that she is truly proud of, truly talented at.

He only had to say, “That’s okay, at least it was good practice, and your handwriting was very neat,” and he might put Misaki off of writing forever. He had only to lie, and the person who made him so bitter and jealous over his own outstanding lack of talent would be eliminated forever as a rival.

A rival?

She’s completely out of your league. How is that a rival?

How could you call yourself even in a league if that was the best you could do to defeat somebody?

He thought of it for a moment, imagining: Displaying his own little literary sketches to Misaki, whose opinion he secretly respected but vocally took only mildly seriously. Allowing that knowledge to defend him against her meek criticisms, which he could just laugh off. Allowing that knowledge to bolster her compliments a thousand times over, until they became something like exaltations.

It might have made another man smile; the thought of such perfect control, of a veritable tank of helium for the balloon that was a man’s ego.

It made him want to throw up. He felt stomach acid dabble at the back of his throat, taunting him.

Don’t you fucking dare, Tatsuhiro. Don’t you fucking dare.

In truth, the idea had never had a snowball’s chance in hell with him.

“Don’t say it was” no good “…er, wasn’t very good, Misaki-chan.” He smiled at her even as it burned that little bitter part inside of him, the part of him that knew that his student had started out at a level where she ought to have been teaching him. “It was excellent.”

She looked straight at him, her face disbelieving. “Really?”

“Really.” He took a deep breath, and then said, “Your language was a little bit awkward because you haven’t been writing for very long,” says the big expert “but it was marvelously written. I could really” feel the motifs coming strongly like Ahab’s whale where was the whale anyway “identify, because I could tell that you could from the way you wrote it.” Excellently put, professor. Would you like to share any other literary insights with us?

Shove it, would you?

Tatsuhiro took a cigarette out of his coat pocket and stuck it in his mouth; after a second, he thought about it, and then took it out again, licked his thumb, and tested the wind, found that if he smoked where he was, it would just blow into Misaki’s face.

“Let’s switch spots,” he said offhand as Misaki considered what he had said.

Misaki nodded absently, and then stood as he did.

They passed each other.

Misaki stopped.

Tatsuhiro did too. As though the whole thing had been planned from the beginning, nearly exactly simultaneous. They stood shoulder to shoulder, facing away from each other.

“Did you…did you mean that?” Misaki said.

“Every word. It makes me a little jealous, you know? You’re already a better writer than I’ll probably ever be.”

“I’m sorry.” Misaki sounded dejected, and Tatsuhiro struggled to contain his sudden panic, still hearing that little voice in the back of his head, that wise old sage with absolutely no respect for him whatsoever telling him to watch what the fuck he said.

“No no no, not like that! I’m not saying that it’s bad or hurting me or anything; I’m saying that it’s really good, and I wish I could write like that is all and…” and you are not helping one little fucking bit. He trailed off, and then sighed and stuffed his cigarette back in his mouth. With his left hand, he fumbled in his pocket for his lighter. He put his right hand on Misaki’s head, and a few seconds later, he was exhaling deeply, smoke trailing out of his nose and mouth and curling into the light breeze. She simply stood with his hand on her head, unmoving.

“’m sorry,” he said with another deep sigh. “I didn’t mean that at all. Your composition was really good, and that’s all.”

“That’s all, huh.” Her voice sounded distant, and Tatsuhiro frowned and held in yet another smoky sigh. They both had their ups and their downs, and they were sometimes distinct, and it was sometimes nothing at all which set them off.

“That’s not all.” He let out another small plume of smoke and watched it rise into the air. “I hope you finish it and show it to me.”

“You already know how it ends.” Almost bitter. Something Tatsuhiro knew something about.

Tatsuhiro almost said, “I don’t know anything.”

But lying wouldn’t get him anywhere. It never did. Hell, sometimes words wouldn’t get him anywhere with Misaki. But if it was words that had gotten them into this, words damn well better be able to get them out, too.

He said, “Yeah, but I think what’s important is the process of getting there. I read the ends of books first anyway, did you know that?”

“Is that true?”

“One hundred percent. I think I enjoy them more that way.” That, at least, was the truth; it was a bad habit that Hitomi Kashiwa had chastised him for on the rare occasion when he actually opened a book—usually at the end. He had once tried to get out of it by calling it a western gaffe—“you mean this isn’t an American book? Whoops.”—but she had just told him that the secret at the end was the only point to the book. He had never voiced just how much he disagreed with that.

Misaki looked at him askew for a minute, and then her lips curved slowly upwards, into what was really only the faintest of grins.

“Okay, then,” she said. “I’ll go home and finish it.” She stood. Tatsuhiro felt a little twinge of disappointment.

“H-hey!” he said. “We’re not done yet—we still haven’t…”

She waited a moment for him to come up with something decent; it was a sort of courtesy. After the moment had passed, she said, “Yes we have. I’ll see you tomorrow, Satou-kun.”

Tatsuhiro took a long drag on his cigarette and let it out slowly, savoring the feeling of calm that washed over him, however temporarily; savoring the clarity of mind it brought him, however little. He had originally taken up smoking to calm his shakes back when he had still been a hikikomori. He had liked the way they seemed to make each breath that much more calming, but he disliked the temporary sharpness they offered; it had given him too much time to think.

He tapped the cigarette on the edge of the picnic table, and most of it fell off. He frowned, and then, resignedly, smashed the rest of it out and tossed it at a nearby garbage can, missing by at least a meter and a half. He thought about leaving it there, but before he finished thinking about it, he was halfway towards picking it up.

As he deposited the butt in the little sandy ashtray above the waste bin, he realized what he still hadn’t: He hadn’t asked Misaki if she would be okay writing the rest of that.

He wondered if he actually could have said something like that out loud.

Probably not.

Shaking his head and brushing himself off for no good reason, Tatsuhiro stood up, gathered his things, and headed home himself, finding that he was suddenly overly ready to collapse onto his little mattress and into blissful unconsciousness.

The way things turned out, it would be at least four hours before he managed to do that.

As always, thanks for reading!

Chapter one

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 05:27:06 GMT

Alright. Here is the promised fic--chapter one, anyway. It will probably be a long one. I would rate it M if we were at the Pit, because there will shortly be sex, language, and probably drug use. (Manga!Satou is acutally a light user of certain not-necessarily-legal narcotics.) For this specific chapter, expect language and spoilers. My author's notes tend to be a bit lengthy, so feel free to skip them.
On with the show!

Author’s Notes:

First chapter. Mmkay. This is my first shot at NHK, so I suppose I can only excuse myself based on that. I’d love to write a nice WAFFy fic, but I don’t think that’s my talent, so don’t count on it; it will certainly be less dark than my other fiction…maybe.

This is not an AU, but I am pushing Satou more towards manga-Satou; if you haven’t picked the manga up yet, this sums it up: (When he takes his class at the Design academy, he drops his half-completed page as he flees the classroom; later, the instructor picks it up and comments, Hm. This is actually pretty good for a beginner. Oh well.)

Honestly, I think we see that anyway in Tatsuhiro’s fantasies. He has imagination, if nothing else, and that is the first step towards creativity.

Alright. On with the show!

A couple notes about my style: Firstly, I do not use Japanese honorifics, if I can help it, and I can help it here. I may make an exception for Hitomi if it comes up (there’s no good translation for Senpai that I know of). Secondly, I use all names with the given name first, in spite of Japanese convention. Expect things like kotatsu to show up, though; it sounds a hell of a lot better than heated table.

Additionally, I may switch chapter formats without prior warning. It depends on what I find works for me—for example, in Fake, my Marimite story, I divide my chapters up into subsections, making the story less fluid overall but more fluid in pieces. In Resolution, I have no need for that, since it is plot-driven.

Finally, this story is un-beta’d, because my usual editor hasn’t seen NHK. If you think it needs one, let me know and I’ll do my best to dig one up.

Lady So Divine

A Welcome to the N.H.K. story.

She’s come to rescue me / clear my mind and set me free / if it’s dark, she still shines / a masterpiece made by design

Chapter one: Tatsuhiro, anew

Misaki Nakahara had a talent with words that caused a small part of Tatsuhiro Satou to curl up into a little ball of spite. This part of him was much like a snake in a basket; leave it be, and it would probably leave you be. Certainly it would not bite you if you did not stick your hand inside its home. It could be charmed into the fresh air, but it was far less appealing than it had once seemed in this case. There was probably a name for this, but Tatsuhiro mostly called it spite, because that was what it was. He certainly wasn’t a person who was big on introspection, so simple terms seemed the best way to convey a point, if indeed he had a point to make.

Leaning back, his legs comfortably under his kotatsu, he studied the composition that his star pupil (read: only student) had whipped up for him over the course of a week and a half.

Maybe whipped up isn’t the right word, Tatsuhiro thought. This is anything but whipped up.

This was a short story about a woman in her mid-thirties who had a small child whom she loved very much but a husband who she hated very bitterly; in only twenty pages, it conveyed a fairly powerful, if mildly awkward, internal debate between her nearly overpowering need to escape, even if it meant death, and her love for her child. Really, there were only three problems with the short that Tatsuhiro’s untrained eye could see: Firstly, it was written by a novice, and anybody could see that in the way the words seemed to strain to form a sentence in parts; secondly, it was ripped fairly directly from what he knew about Misaki’s life, (this, Tatsuhiro did not know, was less crucial than one might think, especially given a well-distributed readership); thirdly, and most critically, in Tatsuhiro’s mind, it had no ending. It ended with the sentence she gazed at her beautiful/hideous child, as the girl smiled at her happily/selfishly and waved with one tiny hand that seemed to ask/demand that she come, play, laugh/DESPAIRCAVEGIVE

never

die.

Only

It left off there. There was a massive smudge mark next to the word only, and at least five different letters were meshed together by an eraser that most certainly needed replacing. It was the kind of story that either appealed to somebody or didn’t, and if it didn’t, it was probably a bunch of crap; Tatsuhiro was realistic enough to realize that.

On the other hand, if it appealed to you…if you could relate, then it gave you a funny sort of knot in your stomach; a ball full of feelings that obstructed your bowels and your breathing and your sleep if you let it, if you didn’t vacate it from yourself entirely. Tatsuhiro couldn’t. He had to grade her composition; not because he wanted to—if he had his druthers, he’d slap a perfect on it and hand it back to her. Not even because she’d asked him to; had that been the case, he might have just said, I don’t really have time for that. I work for a living these days, you know?

Rather, it had been the peculiar way she had asked him to look at it, to grade it. With that funny little look on her face that Tatsuhiro could not describe given a hundred pens and a thousand sheets of paper. All he knew was that her funny little look had made his stomach do a funny little flip-flop, and he had nodded and said, I will without really thinking about it.

And now it was half past midnight.

He had to be up at eight in the morning and it was half past midnight.

He had often thought this since he began his own project with Misaki, tentatively dubbed (by her) the N.H.K. survivor reintegration program, that given the choice between teaching for a living and bathing in a vat of leeches, he would probably start stocking up on salt. If one composition like this kept him up late, he could not imagine what thirty of them would do to what remained of his sanity, if, indeed, such a thing had ever been his to begin with. He privately thought that perhaps teachers might understand the N.H.K., with all its little goblins laughing away, (though not so often anymore) better than most people.

It’s strange. This is a story about no good; about it’s useless and there’s no hope. So, then, why is it that the last thing that comes to my mind thinking about this is it’s no good?

He felt he fairly well had a monopoly on it’s no good. His life was fairly well no good, though he could recognize progress when he saw it. He worked a right and proper shit job for right and proper shit pay, and his apartment—first floor now, since Mita House had developed its plastic shield which would either lead to renovation or eventual death—was what Yamazaki might of late call a single man’s pad. Not that he could dispute that any more than he could dispute the sun, though lord knew he had tried.

He drew a small squiggly line parallel to one sentence: “Running as quickly as she could, the tree was blocking her path so that she had to stop to find a path around it.” Much as he hated the work of being a “teacher,” he certainly enjoyed his share of red-penning. Underneath the line, he wrote, That tree sure knows how to haul ass, and then, sticking the end of the pen in his mouth, he felt a twinge of guilt just having it there. He scratched it out as best he could, hoping she wouldn’t see it, and then wrote, awkward. Rephrase? Next to the newly formed blotch.

It occurred to him that he was drawing on the only copy of this story in existence, and he felt another small twinge of guilt. He wondered briefly why she hadn’t typed it, but could come up with no satisfactory explanation, resolved perhaps to ask her tomorrow. She could certainly own a computer if she so wished, and he knew she could type.

He glanced at the clock and frowned at the numbers which did not make sense. How could it be one in the morning already? Had some sly agent come in and changed his clock while he wasn’t looking? He could not think of any other reason time could have passed so quickly while he was paying such close attention. He blinked heavily, and then glanced down at the story he was supposed to be correcting. A small spot of drool had spontaneously formed towards the bottom of the page, and his mouth was hanging open. To all but the keenest of eyes, this would have been damning, but Tatsuhiro knew better; he knew all about bad coincidence. Sometimes he felt like his life was just a series of them, but he knew that wasn’t wholly true.

Because there were such things as good coincidences, right?

Like the coincidence of a girl who lived on a hill which overlooked his apartment and the park where he had gone every night encountering him while out doing missionary work with his aunt.

Like the coincidence of the truth in her words. That the one thing that he could be sure of the truth of was that. The one indisputable word from a sometimes-compulsive liar.

Was that a coincidence? What was it called when things worked out only okay? Not perfectly, but not tragically? Just…pleasantly? Was that a different kind of conspiracy, too? Destroying the lives of innocent, hardworking salarymen by deviously infecting their lives with monotony?

But your life isn’t really monotonous.

Not as long as she’s around.

That was true too. Misaki was not a troublemaker; in fact, far from it. She had not attempted suicide again (as per their contract; as per their own N.H.K.) and her studies were progressing nicely. She was turning out to be a fairly industrious individual—though Tatsuhiro imagined that this could have just as easily been an emotional backlash. (He, too, knew something of psychology.) The simple fact was that it was impossible to be bored around somebody about whom he knew so little about.

That’s a damn lie and you know it.

Tatsuhiro swatted his head, trying to crush a fly which wasn’t really there.

He glanced at the clock again. One fifteen in the morning.

Time for bed. Work was tomorrow; work was the day after tomorrow, too; and the day after; the day after that, as well. Work was as long as he could stand, and that thought seemed to depress him somehow. That seemed like the true definition of monotony. Even if he was promoted (he had heard somebody talking about a hard-working Satou which meant he was either being praised or mocked—he found lately that from people he was not familiar with, the latter was not nearly so numbingly frightening as it once had been, though that may have been a lie as well) it would still be the same old shit, day after day.

Until you can no longer stand.

Or until you can no longer stand

(don’t forget our contract)

it.

It was much too late for philosophizing anyway. Wasn’t it always too late for philosophizing? Too late or too early, too sober or far too intoxicated, it didn’t matter. Something somebody at work had said to somebody else had really stuck with him for some reason (eavesdropping had consequences, after all): “If ya get ta thinkin’ too hard about yer life,” the man had said, his country accent thick as some of the people Tatsuhiro attended school with, people who had been from the rural part of Hokkaido, “chances are ya won’t like what ya start ta think about—find it becoming real tough to keep a positive outlook, yanno?—and that’s the one great universal truth, applies to everyone from workin’ stiffs like us right up ta the Prime Minister and God up wherever he is.”

No matter who you are.

Whether you’re the Prime Minister, or whether you’re God…

Or whether you’re just me.

You think too hard about yourself, you won’t like what you find.

Philosophy as a thinking industry had a heyday with thoughts such as those.

They put Tatsuhiro Satou to sleep.

He slept well.

Monotonous, repetitive jobs did one of two things to people: Either they made them think too much, or not at all. Tatsuhiro had pleasantly discovered that he was a part of the latter category; it seemed because of this that the days tended to go by fairly quickly. His alarm clock buzzed him awake at eight sharp, which meant that he was out of bed by eight ten, and a half hour later, he was shaved and more or less clean. (He worked traffic safety for a construction company—one of the few companies in the world not overly concerned about your personal hygiene so long as you did not embarrass them.) Eight minutes later, it was five in the evening and Tatsuhiro’s muscles ached dully, with the tired strain of muscles which had long since realized that this was what they were in for, so they’d best just quit their bitching and get used to it.

He stopped at the Lawson convenience store to pick up his dinner, a bowl of noodles and—God bless Japan and all its fruits—a small amount of meat, precooked and vacuum-sealed, but meat nonetheless. Protein. Something his body had been lacking, and something which would cause him serious trouble if he did not eat—if his muscles were ever to shut their traps for good, they would need to become stronger, which rarely happened without protein. Already, Tatsuhiro had acquired the lean, stringy, yet strangely taut muscle of a man living only by stretching the paychecks he acquired from his daily physical labors. His body was still thin, but his arms were just vaguely more pronounced—he had been doing this fish thing for about a month and a half now, and recently Yamazaki had actually made good and sent him a small stash of milk and cheese—and he could see the beginnings of muscle on his chest, stomach, and legs. He still looked half-starved, but now he was on the good half.

After dinner, he walked back to his house and grabbed Misaki’s composition. He would just have to apologize and tell her that he hadn’t gotten to read all of it.

He wound up reading the rest of it over again all the way to the park. He was nearly hit by two cars. He did not need to commit his notes to memory, because they seemed to jump out at him. This sentence would work more effectively a paragraph back. I think your description of the sunset reflecting against the little girl’s outline is incredible. They seemed natural to him, but in a way which brought the opposite of pride; he thought that probably if he showed this piece to the literary genius who had unwittingly provided him with the only advice he needed on how not to hate his life, the man would have made the same comments, only sounded far more rustic doing so.

He had been in such a rush to get out the door again that he hadn’t checked his mailbox.

If he had, he would have seen a small, frilly envelope sealed with an overly cutesy heart. It would have been postmarked from Hokkaido, and it would have born him news which was both happy and unspeakably
(just don’t get ta thinkin’ too hard about yer life, yanno?)
depressing. Perhaps if he had seen it, he would not even have gone to Misaki that night, but rather called off “sick.” Perhaps, worse, he would have gone to her and then acted in haste, as he was wont to do.

Perhaps it was better this way.

Perhaps not.

------

And that, my friends, is chapter one. If you read it, and you liked it, or even if you didn't like it, think about dropping me a comment, eh? And hey, if you did like it, tell your friends! Readership is awesome for the writer AND the reader!

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Thu, 08 Feb 2007 00:38:07 GMT

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