by Nisioisin
Alarm clock, alarm clock, alarm clock.
Mclockalar.
If you repeat the words it starts to sound like mackerel, at which a thoroughly average Japanese person like myself can’t help but be reminded of breakfast. A joyful association, but we’ve decided for the time being to dispense with associations, so I won’t say any more on the subject.
Here’s the real issue.
The term in question is alarm clock, but what alarm means in this instance is cause to wake up─it is thus a clock that causes a target, the person sleeping next to it, instantiated in this case as me, to wake up. That’s the definition of an alarm clock, or its raison d’être to put it in slightly exaggerated terms. If it didn’t cause me to wake up, it’d be an un-alarming clock.
Which is hard to say.
And now we come to it.
It is without a doubt due to the maddening pushiness of the word alarm itself that I, that we loathe alarms clocks so much. People, left alone, generally tend to wake up, and I do feel a Luddite-like antipathy toward the very idea of relying on a machine, but all of this begs the fundamental question of why we have to wake up in the first place.
Not waking up means dreaming. Waking up means abandoning our dreams, which doesn’t leave a particularly good impression. Not particularly good, or not to mince words, bad. It would be appropriate to call it the embodiment of heinousness.
Recessions, economic slumps, an uncertain future.
Precisely because we live in a world that is hostile to dreams, shouldn’t at least nighttime offer a space for them? The behavior of alarm clocks, who so churlishly upend this (and yes, I will anthropomorphize them with a “who”) is unforgivable. We all learn the truth of this world at some point. Why rouse sleeping children from their dreams?
I’d rather not wake up, thank you very much.
Nor waken, awaken, or be woken.
People like to say “bright and early,” but if it’s so goddamned early, how about you let me sleep a little longer? Forget early, how about we go for just right. If you were nice enough to say good night to me before I went to bed, then let me get a good night’s sleep! To be perfectly honest, when someone who wished me a good night gives me the bright-and-early treatment the next morning, I feel somewhat betrayed.
Betrayal is tragic.
To begin with, it’s been proven that needing to wake up just because it’s morning is hopelessly outdated. History has proven this. Humanity has become nocturnal, as is evident from the mostly late-night broadcast times of anime, Japan’s proudest international cultural export. Even biologists will recognize the ironclad fact in the not too distant future; it is no joke. Study and construction work are also carried out late at night. In becoming nocturnal, humanity is poised to evolve further. In time, the significations of the Moon and the Sun may become reversed. Indeed, morning is when people should sleep, and alarm clocks, who wake people up in the morning, indeed must be called works of fiendish deviltry for obstructing our evolution.
I get it.
I get why people want to depend on alarm clocks, their functionality─but now is when we summon the courage to wean ourselves from that function. A time for clean breaks is at hand.
Can’t we just stop worrying about the whole “waking up” thing? A life of loafing is at least good for a laugh. In fact, isn’t a life that isn’t laughable kind of lame?
Why not go through life looking at smiling faces everywhere you go?
So this is what we should say to alarm clocks.
With gratitude, not animus.
“Thank you. And good night.”
“Wake up already!!”
“Wake up already!!”
Punched. Kicked.
Jabbed. Head-butted.
And right where it counts. It’d take too long to enumerate the many vital areas of the human body targeted by these attacks, so I’ll leave that to your imagination and simply state that they were only the most critical. Were I not to make this clear, my blinding agony and the ensuing developments would make less sense.
“What a long excuse for not wanting to get up, big brother.”
“And we’re not some clock, we’re your sisters. Your alarm sisters.”
So said Karen Araragi and Tsukihi Araragi, my two little sisters, as they stood planted on either side of my bed like the vajra kings. I don’t mean this metaphorically, it’s not a rhetorical analogy to spice up the narrative, they really were expressing their fuming discontent by striking the alpha-and-omega poses of statues flanking a temple gate.
Karen, with her mouth open.
And Tsukihi, mouth closed.
Cool.
I hope they make figurines of them like that.
“So what? According to the Nuance Proposition of Professor Me, similar words can be deemed identical.”
“Boy let me tell ya, ‘sister’ and ‘clock’ ain’t similar at all,” Karen kicked me in Kansai-ben. Not only was her intonation off, since she has no ties to the region whatsoever, but the boy let me tell ya came out sounding liked boiled meathead.
Sounds like quite a recipe.
And Tsukihi added, “I’ve heard of a grandfather clock, but…”
That seemed less like a retort than a quibble, but from it I derived the (leap of) logic for my next idea.
“I’ve got it! We’ll sell merchandise called ‘Sisterclock.’ Karen the big hand and Tsukihi the little hand. Wakes you up in the morning with the voices of Ms. Kitamura and Ms. Eguchi.”
“Hey, keep their names out of it.”
“The anime’s already over, big brother. No more tie-in products.”
“Oh…”
How sad.
Such a sad fact.
But sad as it might be, it was a reality that I needed to accept.
Though judging from how they woke me up in the anime version’s style, Karen and Tsukihi were clinging to the past in their own way.
“Urr~~~~r.”
This wasn’t me confronting that shocking reality; talking with my sisters, I had woken up, sobered up, perked up somewhat and stretched out from that curled-up ball of blinding agony. On all fours, looking like some sexy cat. Koyomi Araragi’s cougar pose isn’t something I want you to try and picture.
“All right, I’m up. I’ve regained consciousness.” I faced my Sisterclock, sorry, sisters. “What century is it?”
“Nah. Quit pretending you just woke up from cryosleep.”
“You haven’t been asleep long enough for it to be a new century.”
A twin-engine retort, surround sound─a comedy trio with two straight men, or rather women, is pretty rare, I think?
Wanting another taste of the rare experience, I kept going. I threw them a softball.
“If they’ve woken me up, does that mean they’ve found the cure?”
“As if you’re somebody they’d freeze until they found one.”
“They’ll never develop a medicine that can help you, big brother.”
Nice.
Karen was in an unfortunate position, though, stopping at an inoffensive jibe against her older brother while Tsukihi lay into me with no respect.
“Is the nuclear war over?” I asked next.
“What’s unclear? It’s not over.”
“Huh?!”
Tsukihi was startled by Karen’s line.
I take it back.
When Karen bombed she dragged her little sister down with her, a truly unfortunate position for Tsukihi.
“Hmm…but I think this could work. Coming up next episode: The Three Araragis.”
“We told you, big brother, the anime run is over. And that means no more previews of the next episode.”
“No more promotional videos, either.”
Relentless.
No more PVs either, huh?
“Damn… Looks like we’re back to square one. Starting over from scratch, with the bare essentials.”
The “bare” bit might make Kanbaru happy, but we had to adopt that mindse
t.
Starting over from scratch.
If we gave it our all, maybe we’d grace your screens again.
“In which case, Karen, give me the time of day.”
“One, two, three, four, five, six…hnh?”
For a second it seemed like she was on board with my rakugo allusion, but middle schoolers these days don’t know the original well enough, and she trailed off midway.
Once again Tsukihi was forced to pass.
The dual-straight-women setup didn’t stand a chance, after all.
I gave up on trying to elicit a reply from them and looked at the clocks sitting in my room. Yes, plural. There are four─though none with an alarm function.
I did use to have an alarm clock, until Karen punched right through it with her fist of righteousness and enlightened me that, hot damn, steel can give as easily as newspaper.
Spake the master: “It’s our duty to get our big brother out of bed, no machine will take that away from us!”
It was an odd character trait for a little sister.
My Little Sister Is a Luddite.
Waking me up every morning at the same time means having to wake up even earlier, which wasn’t easy. Why would you take it upon yourself like it’s your mission in life?
Let’s see… Right.
Pretty sure this has been going on since middle school.
They wake me up like this ever since I started middle school…but why? Why do they wake me up?
Is it to recapture some kind of lost familial bond? If so, when was it lost?
With that long-overdue question in the back of my mind, I confirmed, having just woken up, that it was six o’clock. Confirmed that the big hand and the little hand formed a 180-degree angle.
No way it could be evening, so it followed that it was six in the morning─and since I hadn’t been in cryosleep, today’s date was…
“February─thirteenth?”
I said it out loud.
Mine is a room with four clocks but no calendar.
I know, I know, how could I be named Koyomi and not have my namesake in my room, but I don’t let my name dictate my lifestyle.
After all, what’s in a name?
“The day before Valentine’s Day. Hey, sisters o’ mine, have you finished shopping for all the chocolate you’re going to give me?”
“Aaagh,” Tsukihi let out a cry of disgust in response to my charming little witticism. She looked at me like I was a vase of dead flowers. “What a disappointing big brother… Brazenly demanding chocolate from your little sisters is just too disappointing. Are you even human? Are you humanity’s final stage?”
“What the hell are you talking about? It’s only kind of disappointing.”
“You’ve finally maxed out on your disappointing. That was something that should never be said. Poor big brother. The whole girlfriend thing must be a lie too. Ms. Senjogahara is some extra you hired for a thousand yen an hour.”
“Don’t call Senjogahara an extra. Money doesn’t motivate that woman,” I protested, but upon reflection, she’s pretty hung up on money. A thousand yen an hour would definitely get her moving. Like lightning. Tsukihi, who clearly knew this, wore a triumphant smile. As if to say, He claims to be her boyfriend but doesn’t know shit about her.
Well.
Maybe I don’t know anything.
Maybe I’m profoundly ignorant.
Even if I put that aside, though, ever since I introduced my sisters to Senjogahara, they’ve been thick as thieves─especially Tsukihi, who really jibes with her personality-wise.
Under the circumstances, the chocolate they apparently hadn’t bought for me might be prepped and waiting for Senjogahara.
“Interesting… So the plan is to focus more on the yuri stuff, huh? That shows some business acumen.”
“What’re you talking about, big brother? Yuri? Is that someone’s name? Plus, if it’s about business acumen, pivoting toward BL would be a better idea.”
Tsukihi was cooking up some fiendish scheme.
As befits the brains of the Fire Sisters.
Maybe even overcooking it.
“Come on, big brother,” Karen taunted, “this is no time for you to be worrying about Valentine’s Day. Is it? Is it? You like that?”
She started stomping me. I remained in my sexy cat pose─or was continuing my morning calisthenics routine, so she was grinding her heel into my back as she spoke.
“Only one more month until your college entrance exams. You realize that, right? Do you realize that if you don’t realize that, you’d be better off dead? I’ll kill you myself.”
“What? You’ve got no right to talk to me like that, let alone kill me?”
Though that said, it was indeed exactly one month until March thirteenth, the day when Koyomi Araragi would at last face his college entrance exams.
Happily, I hadn’t been culled by the national exam right out of the gate─considering what was going on at the time, it was nothing short of a miraculous outcome. Though I prefer to think of it as the outcome of my hard work. In either case, it was a close shave as these things go, of course, and when I took a step back, it regrettably seemed like I’d raised the bar for myself…
“Fer chrissakes, this is why you’ll never be anything but trash,” Karen said, crossing her arms.
What a word to use─you see it often in manga and whatnot, but rarely hear people in real life call another living, breathing person trash.
“You can’t even see what you have to do. You can’t see even a month down the line, all you can see is tomorrow, whatever’s staring you right in the face. Your eyes are closed, squeezed shut, you’ve got no prospects for the future. You plan to live like that? You’re in such a sorry state, you probably couldn’t even manage to off yourself. And even if you do get into college, what then? Just thinking about it kills me. It’s quite an achievement to hand me my ass like that, goodwill handassador.”
“Goodwill handassador…”
I think I might be the only person on earth to have been abused in that particular fashion. We were both third-years, the difference between middle and high school notwithstanding, but Lady Karen, who was in an escalator system and didn’t need to do any studying to speak of to get into a high school, was having a grand old time looking down on me.
She already did, purely in terms of height (and unbelievably, the girl was still growing! She wasn’t just taller than me, she was on her way to being taller than everyone), but looking down on me metaphorically as well?
This went well past giving me a complex and ended up being kind of pleasurable. Trampled upon by my towering little sister, who’d also stomp my whole approach to life into the ground. With my youngest sister watching, no less…
“Now, get up and get studying. Put a little pressure on yourself.”
“It’s definitely time for a little pressure, but I don’t know about putting myself in a corner… If you aren’t careful, you might get held back too. You sure you should be worrying about me?”
I twisted myself and, in my new posture, grabbed hold of the foot that was grinding into me. This goes without saying given her height, but Karen’s feet are pretty huge. Almost too huge to wrangle, even with both hands.
“There! I’m gonna tickle you. How’s that!”
“Hahaha, it won’t work. I’ve been training, so the skin on the soles of my feet is nice and thick.”
“There! Then I’m licking you. How’s that!”
“Hiiiik!”
To protect our privacy as siblings, I won’t reveal if I managed to lick her foot before she could pull it away, but in any case, she did withdraw it. I was granted freedom of action, and got out of bed.
At this point I was well and truly awake.
Fully and completely.
I’m a weak-willed person who falls back to sleep if I’m not careful, but thanks to the interference of my little sisters, I completely missed my second window for a snooze. My kindly wake-up crew seemed to hav
e noticed because Karen nodded in satisfaction.
“Our work here is done.”
From her airs you’d think she’d accomplished a momentous task when all she’d done was wake up her big brother.