Chapter 4 - Yuya's Link (Part 1)

M𝘪𝘴𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘶𝘯𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘮𝘪𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘺𝘦𝘥.

𝘎𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘮𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘪𝘳.

𝘎𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘮𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘥𝘢𝘳𝘬𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴.

𝘎𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘮𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘦𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘥𝘦𝘱𝘳𝘢𝘷𝘪𝘵𝘺.

The thirteenth of any given month, by the way, is more likely to fall on a Friday than any other day. Friday the thirteenth occurs once a year at least, and three or four times a year on average. But for a guy like me who wasn't a Christian — I don't even understand the difference between Catholic and Protestant — Friday the thirteenth meant little more than that the next day was Saturday the fourteenth.

Now, then.

The next day was Saturday, May fourteenth. I awoke inside my one-room Senbon Nakadachiuri apartment. I looked at my clock to discover that it was about ten until four p.m.

"Seriously?"

I was a bit... That is, fairly — nay, insanely — surprised. This was a whole new oversleeping record for me. How many years had it been since the last time I slept until the afternoon? And it wasn't only the afternoon — the p.m. was a third over already. This would probably remain as a stain on my memory for the rest of eternity.

"But then again, I went to bed at nine in the morning, so it's only natural."

Finally shaking away the sleepiness, I returned to my sense and rose from my bed.

The room had four straw mats of floor space and a naked lightbulb. This little pocket of space was unbelievably classic and so full of anachronisms that it made you wonder if it had been around since the olden days when Kyoto was still our capital. Naturally, the rent was deathly low. Deathly to the landlord, that is.

I folded up my futon and stuck it in the closet. There was no toilet or bath, but there was a washstand of sorts, so I used it to wash my face, then got dressed. My wardrobe wasn't exactly jam-packed with options, so all of this took less than five minutes.

I opened the window and let in the outside air. Kyoto is an incredible place, in that once you've passed Golden Week, you've already entered summer. It's as if life is still being run according to the old Chinese calendar — or as if fall and spring don't even exist.

Then there came a knock at my door. This apartment wasn't equipped with such modern amenities as telephone intercoms. It was exactly four o'clock. Mikoko-chan was certainly a punctual one. I was just a little bit dazzled by this. People who were as anal about time as Inokawa-sensei were just annoying, but I figured that if you really wanted to refer to yourself as a human being, you had to be at least as punctual as an analog clock. In that sense, Mikoko-chan passed as a human.

"Yo, I'm coming."

I unbolted the lock (now 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵'𝘴 what I call radically retro) and opened the door. But to my surprise, it wasn't Mikoko-chan.

"Sorry."

It was Asano Miiko-san, my neighbor. She was twenty-two years old, making her my senior, and she was a seasonal worker. There was something strangely Japanese-y about her style, and even right now she was dressed in classic Japanese summer casual wear. It was black cloth, with the word Carnage printed on the back of her top in white letters, and she had a distinctly samurai-esque ponytail. At first, she seemed unapproachable, but after you talked to her for a bit, it quickly became clear that she was a pretty decent human being. Maybe a little on the mysterious side, but that just added to her charm.

"Miiko-san... Right? Good morning."

"Yeah. Were you sleeping?"

"Yeah, I actually overslept a bit, so..."

"If you slept this late, I don't think it still qualifies as 'a bit'," she said drably.

With her subdued demeanor, it was often hard to guess what she was thinking. It wasn't that she was completely expressionless. Instead, her default expression was a glare, with changes so subtle that she might as well have been expressionless.

"Oh, please come in. As usual, there's not much to see, though," I said without a hint of false modesty. I stepped aside to make way, but she shook her head.

"Nah, I just came to give you this." She passed me a flat box. It was wrapped in paper with the word Snacks written in big letters.

"...."

"They're yatsuhashi. They're a Kyoto favorite."

"I know them, but—"

"They're yours. They're good, you know. Well, see ya... I've got to get to work."

She spun around, flashing the word Carnage at me. The fact that she had offered no explanation as to why she had just given me a box of yatsuhashi was hardly unexpected. She was a woman of few words, and when you thought about how much effort you would have to exert just to fish an answer out of her, it was easy to justify leaving things unexplained. And so I send her off with a simple "Thanks very much, I'll definitely enjoy them," and nothing more.

She stopped in her tracks.

"Sounded like you got back just this morning," she said without turning around. "So, what's the story?"

"..." Damn these thin-walled apartments. Actually, I suppose they do have their perks. "Oh, I was just hanging out with a friend all night. Nothing shady. Nothing exciting either."

"A friend, huh? Wouldn't happen to have been that colorful blue-haired girl who came by around February, would it?"

"Actually, Kunagisa's an extreme shut-in. This was someone else. A guy."

She nodded with a look of complete and utter disinterest, but I wondered if she would've perked up a little if I had said: "I was schmoozing with that killer everyone's been talking about under the big Shijô Bridge." Then again, Miiko-san being the way she was, it was entirely possible that she wouldn't have given me more than a "huh," even if she knew I wasn't joking.

She nodded, seemingly satisfied, and proceeded on her way down the planked hallway. She was headed to her part-time job. When I first discovered those weren't just her indoor clothes, even I couldn't help but vocalize my surprise.

I shut the door and returned to the middle of the room.

But why did it have to be yatsuhashi? Come to think of it, these were the exact same yatsuhashi I had picked up the previous day for Tomo-chan's birthday. It was a terrifying coincidence, but there it was.

"Well, whatever."

I stacked the two boxes and stuck them in the corner of the room.

Looking at the clock, I discovered it was several minutes past four.

Thirty minutes later, it was past 4:30.

"Well, duh," I said aloud and lay down on the floor.

Well now. Wasn't Mikoko-chan coming to pick me up at four? Of this I was certain. I may forget things, but I never misremember them. This meant Mikoko-chan had either gotten in an accident, gotten lost, or was just a sloppy person. But no matter which it was, there was nothing I could do right now.

"Time for some Eight Queens?"

Of course, there was nothing as extravagant as a chess-board in my room, so I'd just have to play it in my mind. The rules to Eight Queens were simple and concise — just place eight queens on a chessboard so that none of them can capture any other. It's one of those "brain exercise" routines. I'd played the game quite a few times, so I basically knew the solution. But with my poor memory, I always forgot the exact arrangement, so I was able to enjoy the game every single time I played it. Okay, not that it was really all that enjoyable. But it was a good way to kill some time.

I started strong, but the trouble set in around the fourth queen. The game was starting to lose its consistency. Queens just don't get along with other queens. There should never be more than one party in power. Moreover, if I allowed my thoughts to wander like this, I'd lose track of where I had put all the pieces up until now, and I'd have to start all over.

The thrill of sectioning off your mind like this was indescribable. You could say it was something like the feeling of walking on a balance beam, only the more pieces you placed down — that is, the closer you got to a final solution — the harder it became. In that sense, it was very much like a game, and great in that sense. In the case of a failure, there was no one but yourself on whom to vent your anger, and herein lay the real thrill.

And just as I was trying to find the place for the seventh queen, there came a knock at my door and a cry of "Ikkun!"

The chessboard went flying. Queens everywhere.

For an instant, my heart, not to mention my thoughts, stopped.

I approached the door and swung it open. This time, it really was Mikoko-chan. She wore a pink camisole with a red miniskirt, exposing a healthy and refreshing amount of skin.

"Morning!" she said with a wave. Then came the full-faced grin. "Ikkun, guten morgen!"

"..."

"..."

"..."

"Morgen... Gen... Gen... It's like the Doppler effect or something." She was as spastic and smiley as I'd come to expect her to be. Her eyes drifted away from me off into space. "Umm, I was just wondering, and I know this isn't the kind of thing you would do, but... Are you mad or resentful or hate-filled or cursing my name or anything? Actually, cursing my name does seem kinda like something you'd do."

"..."

"Come on, let's communicate! Hey! Don't be so quiet! When you get all quiet, I feel like I'm about to have something terrible done to me!"

"Your palm," I said.

"Hmm?"

"Hold the palm of your hand in front of your face like this."

"Okay..."

She did as told.

Smack!

I smooshed her hand into her own face.

"Gwah!" she shrieked in unfeminine fashion. Satisfied for the time being, I went back inside to fetch my bag. Now, where had I put those yatsuhashi?

"Uwa! You're terrible!" she said as she came into my room for some reason. "You're being violent with me just for being a little bit late? That's abuse, you know. It's like forming a jury-based judicial system, only all the jurors are O. J. Simpson!"

Apparently, forty minutes late was only "a little bit late" in Mikoko-chan's mind. Without waiting for an invitation, she came into the middle of my room and took a seat on the floor. Plop. She scanned her surroundings with a look of true curiosity. "Oooooo," she sighed in awe. "Wow, there's nothing here. Amazing!"

"You know, that kind of compliment isn't particularly flattering."

"You really don't have a TV! You're like one of those struggling students from the good ol' days. I bet you study by the light of fireflies! Does anyone else live in this apartment?"

"Uh, well, there's one swordsman freeloader, one hermit, a fifteen-year-old and thirteen-year-old brother and sister currently running away from home, and then there's me, so that's four rooms and five people. Up until recently, there was an aspiring singer here too, but she went to Tokyo to launch her major-label debut."

"Wow, so this place is kind of prosperous. Kind of a surprise. So I guess that means there's an open room here? Hmm. It does have a certain ambiance, huh? Maybe I should move in!"

What could she have possibly seen in this apartment, in this room, that would've given her such an idea? "Better not," I said, giving her the appropriate advice. "Well, let's get going, huh?"

"Ah, not yet. It's still too early," she blurted out.

"But won't it be bad if we don't leave soon? We're already pushing forty minutes here."

"No, we just have to be there by six. Tomo-chan's apartment isn't far from here, so even if we leave at five-thirty, we'll have plenty of time to get there."

"Oh, really?"

"Really," she said with an index finger thrust skyward. It was hard to deny the adorableness of her grandiose gesticulations, but it didn't seem like the thing I needed to go out of my way to mention, so I didn't. I didn't want to get her all excited.

"Then why did you say four o'clock?"

"Huh? Oh, that. Well, you know. Ehh, I'm not so great with time. It was just in case, just in case."

"You mean there was a chance you might have been an hour and a half late?"

Just thinking about it made me feel like blood might shoot out of my ears.

"Huh?" she asked, peeping at my face to catch my expression. "What's the matter?" she asked cheerfully.

"Nothing. I'm not thinking about anything. I'm definitely not thinking about how you should maybe consider the feelings of the person waiting for you to arrive. Or how you should stick to the time that you designated. Or how you should at least call if you're going to be late. Or how you should take better care of chessboards."

"Chessboards?" She scratched her head.

Naturally, she wasn't supposed to understand that.

I found the yatsuhashi lying in the corner of the room and cut the seal on one of the boxes. I placed it in front of her.

"Can I eat 'em?"

"Sure."

I stood up and made my way over to the sink. I thought to boil some water for the team, but I didn't have a kettle. I thought of using a hot pot, but I had no burner in any case. So I just poured her a cup of tap water and placed it in front of her.

Looking thoroughly baffled, she glanced at the liquid thrust before her, but then pretended not to see it and didn't bother touching it.

She chowed down enthusiastically on the yatsuhashi.

"Asking this might be one of those things and all, but are you poor, by any chance?"

"No, I'm not particularly strapped for funds."

Living in an apartment like this, I had no evidence to support this statement, but it was the truth. At the very least, I had enough money saved up to pay for years of college without lifting a single finger. Technically, it wasn't money I had earned personally, but it was in my possession.

"I guess you're sort of an economist then, huh? Or is it a philosopher?"

"I'm just bad at spending money. Sort of the opposite of a shopaholic."

I helped myself to some yatsuhashi as I spoke. She gave me a halfhearted nod of comprehension.

As she knelt on the straw-matted floor of my room, I stared at her from top to bottom. Huh. Not that I was thinking anything in particular, but there was something very awkward about having her sitting here in the middle of my room. I don't know if you would call it unnatural or risqué, but something about it felt incredibly iffy.

I stood up.

"Huh? Where are ya going? We've still got an extra forty minutes."

"Forty minutes is just a 'little bit,' right?"

"Ahh! Ikkun, that's the kind of thing a big jerko would say!" she said, recoiling overzealously. "You don't have to hold it against me forever!"

"I'm just joking. Let's go get a light lunch somewhere. It's no fun just picking at each other in this empty room."

I hoisted my bag over my shoulder and headed toward the door.

"Aww, that's not true," she mumbled as she followed me.