The Power of Moe

by Ichiro Sakaki

  “Are you quite done?”

  “For now.”

  “Obviously, everything will be explained to you in due course,” Minori-san said, walking over to the window. “I don’t think it would ever make sense to you, no matter how much I talked. And even if it did, I bet you wouldn’t believe it. I sure didn’t, at first.”

  I gave her a puzzled look at what seemed like an oddly roundabout way of talking. What was she trying to say?

  “So you should see it with your own eyes first. Then we’ll explain.”

  Minori-san drew back the curtain. Suddenly, the room was awash in bright light. It must have been morning; the light was cold and clear. I squinted against the sudden brightness and waited for my eyes to adjust. And then—

  “Whoa...”

  A vast green spread out before me. Trees bursting with leaves stood like a wall as far as the eye could see. I wasn’t sure, but I thought they couldn’t be more than a hundred meters away. It looked like our room was on the second floor—we were looking down from up high, but our view was mostly blocked by the trees.

  Some of the things Minori-san had said earlier came back to me: Marinos. Latatos Forest.

  And Holy Eldant Empire.

  I’d never heard any of those names before. I mean... I hadn’t been paying a lot of attention earlier, but this was obviously a foreign country, right? I was supposed to be looking for a job in Akiba. When did I end up in another country?!

  I was definitely starting to panic a little. But then...

  “Wha...?”

  Being in a foreign country all of a sudden wasn’t the most unbelievable thing about this.

  “That thing just now, was that—?”

  Something had passed by the window. Something impossibly big. It wasn’t a bird; it was too large for that. I only saw it for an instant, but it filled up my vision. In other words, it was bigger than the window I was standing in front of. And it had wings like a bat. And a very long tail. And to top it all off, instead of feathers, it was covered in blue scales.

  “A... dragon...?!”

  The flying object made a lazy circle in the sky, coming back into my field of view. An incredible creature floating elegantly in the blue sky above the wall of green. Its wingspan had to be at least ten meters. As I recalled, Quetzalcoatlus, the largest flying lizard discovered by archaeologists, had a wingspan of around twelve meters. This thing had to be at least as large as that. I’d seen a model of Quetzalcoatlus once at a dinosaur exhibit in middle school.

  “A dragon... That is a dragon, isn’t it?!”

  “That’s right,” Minori-san said, nodding at me.

  I was on the edge of freaking out. “Wh-What the heck is this place?!”

  “I told you, it’s Latatos Forest, on the edge of Marinos, capital of the Holy Eldant Empire.” She had a bit of a grin on her face as she spoke. And then, as if to confirm my suspicions, she added, “In simple terms, you’re in another world.”

  I, Kanou Shinichi, was what you might call a home security guard.

  Maybe you’re not sure what that means. In that case, you could say I was a NEET, or a shut-in. Or, in extreme terms, a good-for-nothing parasite. All of those words more or less describe how I was living. Or, because I apparently had a school register sitting around somewhere, maybe the most precise term for me would be a “school non-attender.”

  And speaking of precision, I guess I should say I had been a home security guard. Because after living my cloistered life for a whole year, my parents put a forcible end to it.

  I lived shut up in my room for more than a year, during which time my parents were occupied with my younger sister’s high school entrance exams (she was a far better person than me), and, for better or for worse, left me alone.

  But once my sister was safely accepted by her chosen school, my parents, perhaps understandably, started to be bothered by the fact that their oldest son was busy idling his life away. To be fair, it probably doesn’t look very good when your daughter has just gotten into the best high school in the area, but your son is perpetually engaged as a home security guard.

  Unfortunately for me, my parents were people of extremes. They were normally pretty easy-going, but once they started something, they saw it through to the bitter end. They believed there was no time like the present—which is maybe just another way of saying they were impatient. If they started a war, the first thing they would have done would be to launch a nuclear missile. They weren’t the type to take stock of a situation or start small and build up; the last resort seemed to be the only resort they had. What a pair.

  Specifically, one day I suddenly found my door split in two.

  That door had faithfully protected me from any contact with the outside world—I mean, of course I opened it when I went to the toilet or took a bath or whatever—and then there was a chainsaw eating through it.

  I want you to try to picture this.

  There I am, absorbed in leveling up my character in some MMO, when with absolutely no warning, I hear a chainsaw starting up, and suddenly my door is being split open. And for some reason my parents, who tended to get hung up on the strangest things, are wearing hockey masks, like they thought that was the uniform when you’re wielding a chainsaw. I don’t mind saying I gave myself a pat on the back for not wetting my pants.

  Then...

  “All right, Shinichi. Pop quiz. What are you going to do now? You have three choices: 1. Go back to school. 2. Get a job. 3. Get the hell out of our house.”

  “What? That’s an impossible choice!”

  “Impossible nothing! It shocked us to realize our own son could have shut-in genes in him, but we decided to give it time and see what would happen. But when we went easy on you, you made a beeline for NEET-itude! And then you started ordering all this crap cash-on-delivery! Manga! Games! On and on! Who do you think made that money, you good-for-nothing parasite?”

  “Adults always wound us children with their heartless words.”

  “This isn’t about genes at all—you’re just a loser, aren’t you?”

  “You too, Mom? ...Hey, could you take off those hockey masks? You’re freaking me out.”

  “The point is, your father and I have had it. You either need to go back to school, or get a job. Immediately. Otherwise, I’m going to erase all your files, starting with that folder of ‘landscape photos’ you love so much!”

  “Wha—?! Hey, I gave that thing an innocuous name and buried it all those layers down so that—when did you touch my computer, anyway?!”

  “You underestimate me. I’m a former ero-game triple threat! At small regional publishers, it’s not so unusual for the same person to be the writer, programmer, and graphic designer.”

  “Are you saying you hacked me?!”

  “Just how much porn can you stash on a terabyte drive, anyway? I thought I was going to faint clean away by the fourth thing I looked at!”

  “Yaaaaaahh! You looked at it?!”

  “You see how it is, Shinichi,” my dad said. “If you don’t want the terabyte of precious images you’ve accumulated in your wanderings on the net, and your seven online game accounts, and everything else on your hard drive to be erased, you either work or you go to school. And you do it like the devil himself was chasing you.”

  ................................................Aaaand that was our conversation.

  Three hundred sixty-eight days after it had begun, my life as a home security guard came to this ignominious end.

  “Ah. And that’s why you’re looking for a job.”

  The words came from a middle-aged man on the other side of a folding conference table. It was the day after my parents had chainsawed their way into my room, and I was in Akiba.

  The natural light I had avoided for so long pounded mercilessly down on me; I felt my skin and eyes burning, like I was some kind of vampire. I came out to this otaku mecca for the first time in almost a year. In other words, I had taken choice number two.

  I was
going to get a job.

  Honestly, I just couldn’t get excited about going back to school at this point. Not that I had ever been that excited about school; otherwise, maybe I wouldn’t have stopped attending and become a shut-in. An otaku like me was already an easy target for bullies, and if I went back after taking off school for a year, I was sure to be a laughingstock. I decided it would be better to try to make my way in the world. Or so I thought.

  It turned out not to be so easy, as obvious as that may seem. It turned out no one was eager to hire a high school dropout former home security guard. Maybe if I’d had something to set me apart, it would have been different, but I didn’t have what you could call skills. The only thing I could boast about to other people was my vast store of otaku knowledge. Actually, come to think of it, I didn’t really want to boast about that.

  And anyway, the number of jobs that call for geek cred are limited. You pretty much either have to become a creator, like my parents, or work at a shop that hawks merchandise to nerds. At least, that was about all I could think of.

  There were a lot of hurdles to becoming a creator, by which I mean you couldn’t just show up at a company’s front door and say, “Please let me make manga/anime/video games.” I could tell that much by looking at my parents.

  That being the case, there was only one road open to me: get hired by a bookstore, DVD shop, computer place, game store, model seller, toy emporium, or some other otaku-centric business establishment.

  There are plenty of job-search sites on the web these days, and a lot of the stores had their own employment opportunities pages, too, so I just searched for “jobs” plus whatever otaku words came to mind, and I found all sorts of places.

  It was during one of these searches that I found it. At the very top of the page, they’d written OTAKU WANTED! in huge letters. In fact... that seemed to be the only requirement for applicants. Normally there’s all kinds of stuff, like they want you to have experience, or a driver’s license, or a high school diploma, or to be older than eighteen and younger than thirty. But this place just seemed to want people with plenty of otaku knowledge.

  And what they were offering looked surprisingly attractive. The pay was 300,000 yen a month, awfully good for a recession. They said there was even the possibility of a raise for good workers. On top of that, they said housing was available, like you could live there. This obviously wasn’t some part-time gig. They were looking for real employees.

  The company name at the bottom of the page was Amutech Co., General Entertainment Provider. Of course, it was possible this was some evil corporation looking to turn innocent, unworldly sheep (like me) into corporate slaves. But what the hey? I could worry about that after the interview.

  I clicked on the “Apply” button at the bottom of the page.

  When I did, a new window opened, with the title “How Much of an Otaku are You?” To my chagrin, I realized I was going to take an employment test right there on the web.

  I vaguely recalled a national “Otaku Test” being held once. Were they going to have me take that...? While I was busy wondering this, a timer appeared in the corner of the screen. Apparently, this was a timed test.

  I guessed that made sense enough. With the internet, you could look up all the otaku facts you wanted. Without a time limit, anybody could have gotten a perfect score. In other words, they weren’t going to give you long enough to look everything up—or perhaps they would give you enough time to look things up if you already had the base knowledge to know what to look for.

  Honestly, I was kind of fired up about this. Maybe I could find out where I ranked in the annals of otakudom.

  But no sooner had I started than I found myself disappointed. Too easy. These questions were too easy by half! Anime. Manga. Games. Novels. Figures. Doujinshi. And on and on. They pretty much just listed some of the most famous works of each type, then asked a bunch of questions that tested how much you knew about the content, what the draw was, why that particular work had become a hit.

  And to top it all off, it was a multiple-choice test!

  During my time as a home security guard, I had encountered each and every one of the things they asked about and had gotten into furious arguments online about everything from what made them great to the pros and cons of how they’d been marketed.

  I might not have been able to come up with an essay answer to every question, but filling in bubbles, I could do. In the process of taking the test, I started to get the feeling that the person who had written it wasn’t actually an otaku themselves.

  How do I put this? It was just sort of... off, like a reporter who wrote about something without actually going to the scene. There were no major mistakes, but it just seemed to miss the point, like they didn’t quite understand any of it. Like maybe some cultural critic or economist had just read some outlines of a bunch of manga and such, never the books themselves, then gotten publication numbers and photos of the lines from when these things came out, and he’d written the test with that objective data. It was an outsider’s perspective. That was the sense I got.

  Who had created this test, and why? It puzzled me, but I filled in the answers easily enough, finishing the last question with almost half the time still left.

  When I submitted my responses, the words Congratulations, you’ve passed! appeared on the screen, along with an interview time for the next day and a map of the interview location. It was somewhere in Akiba—in a building right by the Manseibashi police station, no less. This whole job offer smelled fishy, but if they were swindling applicants or kidnapping them to join their cult or whatever, they wouldn’t set up shop right next to a police station, would they?

  I convinced myself that they wouldn’t, and so I found myself interviewing at Amutech, General Entertainment Provider.

  “I see.” The middle-aged man, very much the “interviewer” type, nodded his head. The business card he gave me at the beginning of our interview said his name was Matoba Jinzaburou. For such an oddly antique-sounding name, the guy himself seemed pretty ordinary. He looked like your garden-variety salaryman, a little white in his neatly parted hair, a business suit the color of dead leaves ensconcing his medium build. His eyes were as narrow as threads, giving the impression that he was always smiling—in fact, that smile looked so comfortable there that I really couldn’t imagine him having any other expression. At any rate, he looked like a people person.

  Then again, they say swindlers all look nice at first glance. If this “Amutech” really was some awful, evil corporation, it would be dangerous to judge them by first impressions.

  “Out of curiosity, what do your parents do for a living?” Matoba-san asked.

  This was after I had explained the broad contours of the position I was in. How I had been a home security guard, how my parents had threatened me—I didn’t try to hide the fact that I was getting this job under duress. I didn’t figure the first place I went to was going to hire me, anyway. This was just kind of a warm-up—or maybe I just felt that what was hopeless was hopeless.

  “My parents? My dad writes light novels, and my mom’s a housewife. Although she used to be involved in ero games.”

  “Light novels?”

  “Yeah... They’re these novels that are kind of like manga.”

  “Oh-ho.” Matoba-san nodded and wrote something down.

  I didn’t know what my parents’ jobs had to do with my job. Isn’t that, like... job discrimination or something? Maybe it’s not. I don’t know.

  “And... ‘ero games,’ those are...?”

  “Like ‘erotic games’? She was a visual designer.”

  “...Ero games. Visual designer.” He frowned and muttered the words to himself, as if he were repeating new vocabulary in a foreign language. They specifically said they were looking for otaku, so I thought maybe the company was sort of in that area, but it didn’t look like it. Maybe they’d put out the call exactly because they didn’t have anyone who fit the description?

&n
bsp; “Um... In other words, she was an illustrator for adult games. You know, uh, ones you can’t play unless you’re eighteen or older.”

  “Ah! Ah, yes, I see.” Matoba-san gave an enthusiastic nod. “Yes, that makes sense! So that makes you a thoroughbred otaku, yes?”

  “Thoroughbred?” I frowned. “I mean, I guess you could say that...”

  It was true that there had been manga and anime and computer disks piled around my house practically for as long as I could remember, and that that was what had inspired me to become an otaku. But since my younger sister showed none of those tendencies, I found it oddly disquieting to have all my nerdliness attributed to the one word, bloodline.

  “You aced the test on our website.”

  “Pretty much anyone with a bit of pop-culture knowledge could have done that,” I said. “There were a lot of questions, but that’s all.” I was being somewhat humble, but the questions really weren’t that hard.

  “Hmm...” Matoba-san flipped through his papers, looking at them. “Excellent. Honestly, I had nearly given up hope. I never thought someone so perfectly suited would come along...”

  “I’m sorry...?” I had begun to doubt my own ears. What had this old man just said?

  “Knowledge, completely satisfactory. Former shut-in, seeking to strike out on his own... Absolutely ideal.”

  “Huh...? But—”

  True, I’d had no trouble with their test. But I really didn’t think a high school dropout former home security guard was the kind of candidate most employers would consider “absolutely ideal” or “excellent.” Or were they really and truly just looking for otaku ability?

  What exactly did Amutech do, anyway? Matoba-san described them as a “general entertainment provider,” but that didn’t explain anything. “General” could mean anything or everything.

  And this interview room. It practically screamed, We’re just borrowing a random room in a random building. There was nothing at all that seemed to belong to Amutech or even give the place a corporate feel. The room had a desk and a chair and a drink machine, and that was literally it. Not even a poster or anything.