Chapter 1
“…Damn it.”
It was 7:30 AM in the morning. The weather was fair, but the room was dark.
He was on the second floor of a wood-walled, two-story rental. The south-facing, two-bedroom apartment was a ten-minute walk from a private rail station. The rent: 80,000 yen.
“I give up. This is useless.”
Resigning himself to his annoyance, he vigorously rubbed a fogged-up mirror with the palm of his hand. The shabby bathroom was still humid from the shower he’d taken that morning, so the mirror quickly clouded over again, right where he’d just wiped it.
But it wasn’t the mirror he was annoyed at.
“What bogus advice.”
“Soft bangs for a softer look!”—those words had frolicked on the pages of a style magazine catering to current male fashion trends.
Takasu Ryuuji’s bangs were definitely “soft” right then. Just like the article instructed, he’d pulled his hair all the way out, used a dryer at full blast to make the bangs naturally stand on end, and then worked them to the sides with a light-hold hair wax. He had done everything—everything—just as the article said in order to get it looking exactly like the model’s hair. All that work was the product of waking up thirty minutes early in the hopes of fulfilling his desire.
All that work—for nothing.
“It’s not as if I’ll really change just from doing my bangs,” he said. “That was probably wishful thinking…”
He took that effeminate magazine, the one that he’d swallowed his pride to buy, and half-heartedly tossed it at the waste bin. He cringed—a miss. The bin toppled and spewed out its contents, and the magazine he’d just discarded flopped open to a page of fashion tips, laying there amidst the trash.
It read, “Soft or Wild?! What you can still do to declare your transformation for the new school year! Our authoritative guide to your debut!” If he could say one thing in response to that, it would be that he never wanted a “debut.”
But he did want a transformation. Yet it had ended in failure.
Out of complete desperation, he used a wetted hand to muss the softened bangs he’d just spent so much effort making until they reverted back to his usual straight hairstyle. Then he kneeled on the floor to gather the trash.
“Wha—?! Wh-what is this…? There’s mold… it’s growing mold again?!”
He’d discovered black mold along the wooden baseboard near the bath.
There was mold, even though he was always careful to wipe away excess moisture. Just the previous week, he’d held a mold-cleaning rally (a competition for all things water-related) for a whole day. Apparently, not even that level of effort could vanquish the run-down house’s poor ventilation. He bit his thin lips in frustration, and as a last-ditch effort, tried scrubbing the mold with a tissue. Naturally, it didn’t come off; the tissue just came apart in bits that added even more mess. An exercise in futility.
“Damn it… I just used the last of the mold remover, too. I’ll have to buy more again…”
Right, then. He couldn’t do anything but leave it as it was. I’ll destroy you for sure, he thought, fixing the mold with a sidelong glare while he cleaned up the scattered trash. He took the opportunity to give the floor a cursory wipe with the tissue. After disposing of the fallen hair and dust, he wiped all the moisture from the washbasin, lifted his head, and finally took a deep breath.
“Whew. That’s right, I need to feed her… Inko-chan!”
“Yahh!”
A shrill reply returned the high school boy’s rough call. Good, she was awake.
After regaining his composure, he entered the wood-floored kitchen, still barefoot. He prepared the feed and a change of newspaper, then headed to the tatami mat living room. He removed the cloth covering the birdcage filling one corner of the room and was thus reunited with his beloved pet, whom he hadn’t seen since the night before. He didn’t know what other owners did, but at the Takasu household, that was how they took care of Inko. When sleeping, her face was downright unpleasant, so they hid her until she woke in the morning.
“Inko-chan, good morning.”
Inko-chan was an inko—a yellow parakeet. He spoke to her while replenishing her feed, as usual.
“G-good… good morn…” Although her eyebrows twitched creepily—like she didn’t even understand what she was saying—the ever-clever Inko-chan managed to answer in Japanese. She’d just woken up, but she was in high spirits. This side of her was a little cute, he had to admit.
“Inko-chan, say thank you for the food.”
“Thank—ank—you—thank you for the food! Thank you for the food! Thank! You!”
“That’s it, that’ll do. Okay, let’s see if you can say that today. Can you say your own name? Say ‘Inko-chan.’”
“I-In-Ini-In-nnn… Inn.” Summoning all the strength in her body, Inko-chan waved her head, contorted her posture, and jerkily swung open her wings.
“Iii…” Her eyes narrowed, and her ashen tongue peeked out from her beak. Today might be it—her owner clenched his fists. But…
“…Iiidiot.”
Ah, the intelligence of birds. As expected of a one-gram brain.
With a sigh, he gathered up the dirtied newspaper into a plastic bag. But as he consolidated it with the rest of the trash and prepared to head to the kitchen, he heard something.
“Where’re ya goin’?”
It was coming from behind the sliding door, barely ajar. It seemed the other idiot had woken up.
“Ryu-chan, whaddya wearin’ your uniform for…?”
He quickly closed the trash bag and turned to the owner of the voice. “I’m going to school. I told you yesterday that today was the start of the school year, didn’t I?”
“Ohhh… Then… then…” Sprawled on the futon, she spoke as if on the verge of tears. “Then, what about my lunch…? What about my bento…? I can’t smell that bento smell! Ryu-chan, didn’t you make me one?”
“Nope.”
“Wahhh! What’ll I do when I wake up? There’s nothing to eat!”
“I’ll be home before you’re awake. Today’s just the opening ceremonies.”
“Oh…that’s all, huh?” She laughed, knocking her feet together. Clap clap clap clap! She used her feet to give him a standing ovation…or maybe a sprawling ovation.
“The opening ceremony, huh? Congratulations! That means you’re a second-year student, starting today.”
“Never mind that. Didn’t I tell you to at least wipe off your makeup before bed? You kept saying it was too much trouble, so I even bought you those easy-cleaning wipes… Argh, there’s foundation all over the pillowcase again! This stuff doesn’t come out in the wash, you know! And who knows what’ll happen to your skin—you’re old enough to know better.”
“Sorrryyyy.”
She got up as-is, fully exposing her leopard print panties, large chest jiggling. Wavy, mostly-blonde hair fell across the valley of her chest in a tangled, disheveled mess. She oozed “femininity” as she brushed up that hair with her long-nailed hands.
But then she said, “I drank so much that I only got home an hour ago… Sooo sleeeepy… Yaaawn… Oh, right… I brought back pudding!”
While yawning, she rubbed her mascara-laden eyes, then crawled toward the convenience store bag she’d unceremoniously dumped in a corner of the room. Those manners, that puckered mouth, the mumbling of pudding, pudding, her plump cheeks, her round eyes—it was all embarrassingly childish.
This strange woman, who many might call a beauty…
“Huh? Ryu-chaan, I can’t find the spoon!”
“The clerk probably forgot to put one in.”
“Nu-uh, I’m sure I saw him do it… Huh…”
She was, in fact, Takasu Ryuuji’s biological mother: Takasu Yasuko (alias Mirano), thirty-three years old (but eternally claiming twenty-three). She worked as an entertainer at the town’s one and only hostess bar, Bishamon Heaven.
Yasuko inverted the bag, rummaged around the corner of the futon, and tilted her small face in disappointment.
“The room’s so dark… No way can I find it like this. Ryu-chaan, can you open the curtains a little?”
“They are open.”
“Whaa? Ohh, right. I forgot since I’m usually not awake at this time…”
In the dim room, the mismatched parent and child both breathed a small sigh.
Their apartment had one large, south-facing window. In the six years since they started renting it, they’d come to completely depend on the bright sunlight that flooded in from the south. With their entryway on the north side and neighboring buildings to the east and west spaced just dozens of centimeters away, they only had southern-facing windows. Since the apartment got such amazing natural sunlight, they hadn’t needed to turn on the overheads from sunrise to sunset. The morning rays were particularly strong; rainy days excepted, they lavished illumination upon Ryuuji when he made their lunches and also on Yasuko, while she slept out of exhaustion.
“Sure is a huge condo, isn’t it…?” she said.
“I wonder what kind of people live there… Should I turn on the light?” Ryuuji asked.
Last year, a ten-story, ultra-high-end luxury condo went up just a few meters from their apartment’s south window. Naturally, the sunlight stopped coming in, which tormented him with all kinds of maddening frustration. First, the laundry wouldn’t dry. Then the corners of the tatami mats swelled and bubbled with moisture. Mold had started growing, and the condensation was terrible. The wallpaper’s peeling edges were no doubt owed to the moisture, as well. Ryuuji tried telling himself to calm down, since it was just a rental, but he was a high-strung guy. He couldn’t help but find such unsanitary living conditions intolerable.
Now, the two of them could only peer open-mouthed at the white bricks of that luxury condo, bound together in squalor.
“Wellll, it’s probably fine,” Yasuko said. “I sleep right through the mornings, anyhow.”
“Complaining about it won’t change anything, either…and hey, the rent did go down by five thousand yen,” he said, as he brought Yasuko a spoon from the kitchen. Ryuuji scratched his head. This was no time to have a family moment. It was nearly time for him to leave.