Introduction:
About Beginnings
AS YOU MAY WELL KNOW, all stories have beginnings. You can’t reach a story’s ending without starting from the beginning. But where should I start in this story?
This is a story about something that happened to me, Hatou Manabu—or I guess you could say it’s the story of my life? (Sorry to disappoint those of you who may have been expecting otherwise, but the main character of this story is definitely me and not my cute friend, Marii Yukari. She is a major character, but please accept my sincere condolences if you thought this story was centered on her.)
So, given that I’m the protagonist of this story, you should probably know at least something about me—so, should I start from when I was born? From when I was physically and mentally birthed into this world? Or maybe from when my essential essence was determined—
Come on now.
If I started from there, when would we get done?
Of course, if I wanted to, I could start from that point. I could even start from the day my father, who married into my mother’s family, created me. (Then I’d have to start on a summer day, fifteen years before the present, in the afternoon—not at night—in the shade of the trees behind the dojo.)
If you preferred, I could even start from when they met, or when they were born, or even from their grandparents’ ancestors. Trust me. I could.
I just don’t want to.
I could keep going back further and further, so that’s why I have to make a decision right here and now. I have to cut that thread of causality somewhere and pick a beginning.
So let’s go back to the original question: where should the story begin? From when the situation that we’re calling the story first arose?
Or from when we decided to tell it?
If we unravel the chain of events, we see that the situation arose from her death. It was all because she transferred from our school. That transfer was the result of a certain girl coming to study at our school.
By “she,” I mean Marii Yukari.
So, is that where I should start? Or perhaps I should start from that night when I got the phone call, after the blonde exchange student asked me that unavoidable question. The phone call was from someone I never would have imagined, and it marked the start of the things that happened.
Should I start there?
No. I know the day I want to start on.
Ha, here I am asking where I should start, but I’ve already decided. It may not have anything directly to do with the events, but I want to make the time when Yukari and I first met the start of everything. I think that’s crucial to me. I apologize for taking the long way here, but this is my story and I intend to tell it the way I want to. Anyway, it’s not that important of a story in the first place, and—see, this is the way I’m planning to wrap it up: “And it was all a dream. The end.”
So I’ll start this story the way I want.
It all began when I met Marii Yukari, a girl who said that all other living things looked like robots to her.
Or how about I make it more dramatic?
It all started with my first kiss.