On the way back to the family home, Saito asked as we walked through the nighttime streets.
“How was she?”
“She seemed like a good person.”
It did not take many words to understand someone. A few were enough.
If a few were not enough, then the question itself was wrong.
Had Yuna not even brought her daughter, Shiori, along with her?
When clues were scattered this openly in every direction, failing to understand the other person meant you had never been interested in people to begin with.
At my answer, Saito nodded.
“Right?”
“She’s wasted on someone like you in a lot of ways.”
“That’s true.”
It had been nine full years since Saito and Rei divorced.
People did not fundamentally change, but they still grew in their own way.
If one compared the Saito of his youth to the Saito of now, the Saito of now was about 4.7 times better. There was that much of a difference.
That said, if you asked whether the current Saito was someone Rei could endure…
Had I not said it already? People did not fundamentally change.
Some things in this world simply did not change.
“Please don’t create a situation where Yuna has to make use of her professional skills.”
“You’re worried about me?”
“I’m worried about the damage Yuna would take.”
“I’ll have to be careful.”
Saito gave a small laugh, then stretched.
Thirty-two years old, with his birthday not far off, was an age where the body got stiff in all sorts of ways. A brief dinner out was enough to tire him.
“I’m not that bad yet.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You said it with your eyes. Your eyes. Oh, right. You got an apartment near the high school you got into, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
When I looked at him as if asking why he was suddenly bringing that up, Saito answered quietly.
“I’m going to live around there too. Yuna’s place is near there. Did you know Shiori is entering a middle school right next to the high school you’ll be attending?”
“How are you only telling me that now…?”
I was so dumbfounded I could barely speak.
At my reaction, Saito tilted his head.
“Hm? Why? You were going to live independently once you became a high school student anyway. Does it matter if you hear it now?”
“I don’t know how big Yuna’s place is, but if it was reasonably large, I wouldn’t have moved out.”
“Wait, seriously?”
Obviously seriously.
I said I was leaving because the place was too cramped to begin with.
Well, even if I had known in advance, I probably would have rented a workspace.
But I would not have signed a lease on a 3LDK apartment.
The current overly large apartment was purely a measure to separate my work area from my living space.
If I were only using it as a workspace, even a studio apartment would have been fine.
Saito scratched his cheek.
“So you wasted money?”
“It didn’t matter much, but now that you’ve said that, it suddenly does.”
After awkwardly scratching his cheek again, Saito soon laughed and spoke.
“That was all a joke, right? Touji, you hate living with other people.”
“I actually prefer living with other people.”
“Wait, seriously?”
Saito was genuinely startled. He looked as if he had really only learned that for the first time.
Instead of sending him a look that said, How many years did we live together, and you still didn’t know that? I let it pass.
To be honest, not one person had ever figured that out across both my lives.
This was also the first time I had said it, so across both my lives, Saito was the only person who knew that tendency of mine.
Saito said,
“You liked people?”
“When you put it that way, it makes me sound like some misanthropic pessimist. If I had to define myself, I’m a humanitarian.”
“That one was actually a little funny.”
Fundamentally, I liked people.
I understood that I liked them so much that, when observed from the outside, it could look as if I hated them, but even so, one should not distort the truth.
“I dislike people who bother me, people who get in my way, and people who talk to me. Everyone else, I like.”
“Don’t go around saying you like people. You’ll get arrested for fraud.”
Of course, my preference for living with someone else was closer to a matter of efficiency.
Humans were social animals. A large portion of brain function was allotted to communication.
Which meant that if you lived alone at home, those functions could atrophy and make it easier for your brain to deteriorate.
In other words, if there was someone at home, your brain would have no chance to atrophy.
In other words, from the position of someone who did not want to go outside, finding a housemate was the most efficient method of brain maintenance.
At my explanation, Saito burst into a hollow laugh, then quickly collected himself and hurriedly opened his mouth.
“Then should I tell Yuna to prepare a room for you?”
“Why go that far?”
“So it is too much, huh?”
“But I don’t really mind either way. Do whatever’s convenient.”
“Then I’ll tell her, okay? You have to come by and sleep over now and then, okay?”
Seeing how visibly pleased he was, it seemed there had been a bit of conflict between him and Yuna over this matter.
Well, of course.
Yuna was a person of common sense.
When faced with the interaction between two people without common sense, she had no choice but to be horrified.
After returning to the family home with Saito like that, I washed up and lay down in my cramped room.
I planned to sleep quickly and go to school tomorrow.
Bzzzz—
My smartphone vibrated at that exact moment.
Yoshihiro? I tapped the messenger app out of habit.
[Yukimura Mai]
Hiiragi, are you asleep?
You’re not asleep.
(Video)
Watch it.
Messages poured in before I even had time to answer.
Fundamentally, this world’s messenger app was similar to KakaoTalk or LINE.
When the other person read a message, the 1 disappeared.
Therefore, from the moment I tapped the messenger app, the option of ignoring her no longer existed for me.
[Yukimura Mai]
How is it?
[Hiiragi Touji]
Sorry, but even if it had been a one-second video, I wouldn’t have had time to watch it yet.
I sent the reply and tapped the video.
What kind of video was she being this impatient about? I was curious.
The video downloaded over Wi-Fi.
Then it played.
Shhhhhh— The sound of waves came through. The waves washed over a sandy beach filmed from a low angle, as if the camera had been placed on the ground.
Sunlight hanging at the top of the sky shone down on the beach, and rustle, the sound of someone stepping on sand was captured.
A woman entered the frame from outside the angle. Yukimura walked barefoot along the sandy beach.
Yukimura, who had been walking with her gaze fixed on the sea, suddenly turned her head toward the camera, then burst into laughter toward something behind it. It was a laugh full of happiness.
After that as well, Yukimura continued strolling happily along the beach. For about three minutes.
Then the video ended.
I stared down at the video, which had somehow returned to 0 seconds and begun playing again from the start.
Five point one inches. On a 16:9 display, Yukimura moved.
A sense of excitement leaked out of the screen. The Yukimura on the screen was probably supposed to be a girl visiting the beach with her boyfriend for the first time. That emotion came through exactly as it was.
[Yukimura Mai]
You watched it now, right? How is it?
[Hiiragi Touji]
It has something.
The video Yukimura had sent was fairly good.
I was not praising it conventionally. It really was.
At the very least, it succeeded in conveying the feeling of excitement to me.
[Yukimura Mai]
Is it the best?
However.
If she pressed that far, I had no choice but to spit out the rest.
I calmly tapped the touchscreen.
[Hiiragi Touji]
But there are way too many parts that fall short. Do you know this? Rough creative works like this actually tend to get better reactions from people. When there’s too much unnecessary information, the brain automatically picks out the most ideal version from among it. But does that mean people spend money on rough creative works? Absolutely not. In the end, a rough creative work is only an unfinished product to people. That’s why a professional needs to clean up the messy parts and create a finished product, but based on the sense of direction I saw earlier, Yukimura, you’re still lacking that ability. In other words, once this video is carved down into a finished product, there’s a high chance the feeling it has now won’t be preserved. How do I know that? The angle is wrong from the start. Does this imaginary boyfriend not have hands? Why does the angle with the camera placed on the ground stay the same the whole time? I honestly question whether the excitement would have come through if your face had been ordinary—
After briefly giving my thoughts, I waited for Yukimura’s reply.
However, even after five minutes passed, no reply came.
Hm.
[Hiiragi Touji]
Yukimura?-1
I called out to Yukimura, but no matter how much time passed, the 1 did not disappear.
I knew this phenomenon very well.
So this world’s messenger app also does not tell the blocked person that they have been blocked, just like LINE and KakaoTalk?
I learned something good again today.
Time to sleep.
***
Fortunately, Yukimura had not blocked me.
The next morning, I found out because she sent a message saying, “Direction and story aren’t my specialty, so I told you to give me feedback on the acting…”
So I sent back, “I’ve never dug deeply into acting either, so I can only say amateur things, you know?”
In the end, my actual profession was writing.
I had established theories of my own, to some extent, for elements related to writing, but not for anything beyond that.
If you asked what writing and film had to do with each other, film sat at the top of the food chain.
Even when people read prose, they tended to imagine scenes from a film. It had been that way ever since film was born.
Therefore, a modern writer needed to understand film direction as well… was my personal theory, though I could be wrong.
A theory was not an answer. It was a direction.
I merely believed this was the correct one and moved forward.
After changing from my shoes into indoor slippers at the shoe lockers, I took the stairs up to the next floor.
When I entered the classroom, all sorts of conversations greeted me.
The current date was February 21.
Since even the public high school entrance exams, held around February 15, were now all finished, it was only natural that the students were excited.
Of course, there were still plenty of people whose acceptance had not been confirmed yet.
Private high schools had announced their acceptances long ago, but public high schools announced theirs at the end of February.
But when had students ever cared about that before getting excited?
Once exams were over, getting excited first was the essence of being a student.
I sat down and took a practice exam workbook out of my bag.
A workbook for university entrance exam preparation, in other words, one for the main exam.
This was also one of the routines I had maintained for nine years.
For roughly nine years, I had studied only for entrance exams. Without caring about school exams, continuously.
The result I obtained thanks to that was a deviation score of seventy-four.
I had glossed over it last time, but this was an extremely high score.
Even just maintaining it would, if compared to Korea, be enough to get accepted into a mid-ranked department at Seoul National University.
Since I was even planning to go into science, I could probably scrape into a lower-ranked medical school as well.
Normally, if someone achieved grades like this, it meant they were extremely good at studying. They were top-tier grades.
However, I was not especially proud of those grades.
Rather, it was the opposite. I thought, So the limit of my brain really is just “works well,” huh?
Nine years. No matter how much I had only studied in spare moments, I had focused on entrance exam studying for a full nine years. Without paying attention to school classes, at that.
On top of that, in my former life, I had been the type to listen in class. The basic public education curriculum remained in my head.
For the resulting score to be a stable acceptance range for a mid-ranked department at Seoul National University was… honestly a little ambiguous, was it not?
Of course, it was not as if I had truly gone all in on studying. Writing novels ate up so much time that I simply could not.
Taking all that into account, the results matched the time invested and the brain I had.
My writing came out according to my skill, and my grades came out according to my brain.
How nice and quantitative.
“Hey. Hiiragi.”
I stopped in the middle of opening a University of Tokyo past-exam workbook, an Akahon, and raised my head.
Then the boy whose eyes met mine, in other words, my classmate Asano Riku, asked me a question.
“Did you really take the entrance exam for Tamagawa High School?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
There were many questions contained in that “why.”
Someone with a deviation score of seventy-four had taken the entrance exam for a high school around a deviation score of fifty-five. Most people had no choice but to react like that.
Instead of answering that prestigious college-prep schools forcibly took too much of your time, I used an interview technique beloved by University of Tokyo students.
“It’s close to home.”
“Really? Anyway, that’s great. I took the entrance exam for Tamagawa High School too. Tamagawa High is in Kawasaki, right? So almost nobody from our school is going there. Let’s exchange contact information while we’re at it. We’ll do our best once we get there.”
The question, Public high school acceptances haven’t been announced yet, so what is he going to do if he fails? welled up inside me, but first, I obediently handed over my contact information.
Asano must be comfortably within the acceptance range too.
“Then we’re going to Tamagawa High together on February 28 to check if we got in, all right?”
“I’ll consider it positively.”
“Great.”
Asano left.
I placed my pen on the University of Tokyo past-exam workbook and thought.
Everything else was fine.
But why did Japan make people go check in person on such a cold day? The internet was working perfectly.
Sigh.
I just hate analog systems.