The front page of the Moai website had featured a list of all the very impressive positions their members had been offered. However, even if their whole mission was to create the ideal candidate, I doubted that their membership attracted those with more aberrant personalities to begin with. Recently, incidental to my harassment campaign, I had been browsing various Moai-related accounts on social media. All of them, from the leaders to the fringiest of members were basically mass-produced university students, all desperately trying to hide who they really were, indicating no real interests.
What the current Moai taught was nothing more than the means of depersonalization, so that a bunch of mediocre people could survive job hunting. How to flatter and inflate your own image—it was the direct opposite of becoming your ideal self.
Of course, I could not totally disavow what they did. I had done the same myself. Being able to take a stance like that was a crucial part of living in society. However, that was not the original intent of Moai. That was not the organization that she, that one in a lecture hall of one hundred, had created with her ideals in mind.
That was what the Moai we created should have been: a group about finding a way to become a person who would survive while still keeping one’s personal philosophies, one’s ideals, intact. We never wanted to change ourselves.
Even though I knew that, I, the one who had helped found the group and yet abandoned it, had some responsibility to share in this. Thus, it was my responsibility to take it back as well. I would take us back to the past—even if it meant destroying the present.
Speaking of this, I needed to determine how I was going to crush Moai, and I needed to do so as quickly as possible. I could not go on just harassing them forever. I had until graduation. Time was going to slip by me before I realized. It had been a long time since I was left on my own, but now that there was a deadline, I was sure that time would fly by.
Perhaps I needed to broaden my thinking a bit. Thus far, my top goal had been to cease Moai operations, but perhaps I did not need to go all that far. Maybe it would be enough just to diminish confidence in the group until it weakened, or at least just in the management. It’d be best to make the current Moai into another group entirely. Then, better yet, create a new group with the true values of Moai at its core. The real Moai needed neither achievements nor acclaim—only ideals, pure and simple.
Just like it was back then.
As I pondered this, mentally lowering the hurdles to the degradation of Moai, the bell rang, signaling the end of the first hour of testing. I collected the answer sheets and informed the students when the next portion would be starting. All the tension left the air in the classroom in an instant, some of the students immediately bounding out into the hallway to chat with friends. I couldn’t help but think of the days when I sat for mock exams like this. Back then, I believed that something as simple as the results of a university entrance exam could change my entire life. However, that was by no means true.
I knew at least that much, far better than these young hopefuls did. I wondered how they would change in the next few years. How could there possibly be professionals who were so confident in themselves they could prattle on about their own experiences as though they were valuable, could hold those kinds of events? Did they actually feel like they were making a difference to those students somehow?
When the second exam period started fifteen minutes later, my activities were unchanged. It was best to do as little as possible so that the test takers could concentrate. I was good at that. That was how I had always lived, especially since starting university.
I continued my previous train of thought. Perhaps these self-conscious professionals did come because they felt they had something valuable to impart to their juniors, but even if the knowledge they shared was of use, why would they bother wasting their time on people who had so little to do with them? Certainly, I had kouhai in my own seminars, but I had purposely kept a set distance from them and never once considered going out of my way to make myself useful to them. The only kouhai I had who I was close enough to talk about our daily lives together was Kawahara-san, but I would never purposely try to meddle in her affairs.
Tousuke did seem to be the type, though. When someone was in trouble, he swooped in to help—especially if that someone was Pon-chan. And I didn’t just think that in terms of my joke about him wanting to date Pon-chan; Tousuke really just was an upstanding person. He would always lend a hand to Pon-chan or his other kouhai, just as he was helping me.
From my perspective, Tousuke and Pon-chan’s relationship was a bizarre one. For someone like me, who had no idea how to make friends with a kouhai like that, even expecting me to overstep boundaries as far as walking someone home was an absurd idea, even though such a thing would have been simple for Tousuke.
As I pondered Tousuke’s dating record, the second period came to an end. From there, it was another fifteen-minute break, and then a third period spent doing largely the same amount of nothing, and then a longer break for lunch. The test takers headed to the cafeteria and nearby convenience stores, while we were provided with bento sets and tea. We sat down in the room we had gathered in that morning, where the bento were set out, and ate. It felt like eating at a gas station.
Tousuke arrived a bit after, sitting down beside me. We congratulated each other on our hard work—which really hadn’t been all that hard—and nibbled our soggy fried fish.
“This really takes me back. Watching those kids, all I could think was: Man I never wanna take those exams again!” Tousuke waxed poetic, while shoveling his much maligned umeboshi into my bento box.
“Better than job hunting, anyway.”
“I’d rather do that.”
I felt like we ought to take an opinion survey of all job hunters. As I ate one of my two umeboshi, Tousuke gave a sudden, “Ah,” as though he had just realized something.
“That reminds me, the day before yesterday, I saw Kawahara-san and Pon eating together in the cafeteria.”
“Whoa, really?”
Tousuke was probably only aware that I had given him that response to be polite. In my mind, I was simply glad that the aftershocks of that evening had not created a rift between two certain someones. I’m sure he could read exactly what I was thinking. He grinned, took a sip of tea, and pulled his phone out from his pocket…looked at the screen and then placed it down on the table, muttering, “More spam. Been getting a lot of that lately.”
“You must’ve signed up to some weird website.”
“I only use the finest of websites, my good sir.”
Wondering exactly what sort of sites he was talking about, I yanked out my phone and looked at my own inbox. I didn’t see any suspicious activity. I checked my social accounts and saw nothing there either.
“No spam here for an upstanding student like me.”
“Check again, check again!”
Tousuke presented his phone screen to me. Sure enough, there were a number of messages from various unregistered e-mail addresses. I grabbed his phone and opened some of them to find that these so-called spam messages were in fact invitations to interviews from various job recruiters and notices about upcoming events—even if such information was of no use to either of us.
“I’ve been to these kind of info sessions before.”
“Mm, but I haven’t, so I’ve got no idea how they have my address. Could someone possibly be selling my, an upstanding student’s, information on the black market?”
“Putting aside whether you are upstanding or not, they do know the name of your school.” Surely enough, we had reaped the benefits of our academic backgrounds.
“Wonder how much my e-mail address goes for…”
“I mean, I’m sure they don’t sell them individually. They probably have some registry of student information or…some…thing…”
I tilted my head as I realized what I was saying.
Something had struck a chord with me. It was as if my temples were prickling. What was going on?
It felt as though what I had just said recalled something from the past. Like I was trying to find an itch to scratch. I ignored Tousuke’s, “What’s up?” so that I would not lose track of this image, thinking back to recent events.