The true powers in this town were the yakuza, the foreign mafia, and the police. If anything, the Dollars ranked well below them.
No matter how much they captured the imagination, their numbers and power meant nothing in the end—a fleeting illusion in the shifting midst of the city.
And that was exactly why he wanted proof that this illusion really existed.
But Kadota understood.
Only after the illusion vanished would he really know if that’s what the Dollars were.
Chapter 8: Double Heroine, Sonohara
Several days of high school formalities passed for Mikado, and after the customary health inspection, actual classes were scheduled to begin the following day. At Raira Academy, the opening ceremonies happened on the first day of school, the second was reserved for an introduction to the school’s clubs and activities, and the third was for health inspections and homeroom.
In the midst of the aforementioned post-inspection homeroom, the class decided on who should be their committee representatives.
“I know, let’s go pick up chicks,” Masaomi suggested in the manner of a commercial slogan, smacking his textbook shut.
Masaomi was in Class B, and yet for some reason he was hanging out in Mikado’s Class A. Considering that the majority of students were in uniforms, his personal clothes made him stand out even more.
“What are you doing here?” Mikado finally asked, though he’d noticed Masaomi’s presence minutes earlier. There was no teacher present, so the boy in seat number one was carrying out the proceedings in his place.
“So Mr. Yamazaki and Ms. Nishizaki will be our Beautification Committee members, and Mr. Yagiri and Ms. Asakura will be our Health Committee reps, while Mr. Kuzuhara and Ms. Kanemura are on the Discipline Committee, and for the election monitor…”
It was standard practice for one male and one female student to be chosen for each committee. The proxy leader read aloud each of the selections written on the blackboard, then considered what was left.
“So we’re still missing our class representatives. Any volunteers?”
“Ye—”
Masaomi tried to raise his hand, but Mikado grabbed it and pulled it down.
Class rep. It seems cool, but it might also be a pain in the ass.
What Mikado wanted was an escape from the doldrums. He’d already flown from the familiar sights of his hometown to an exciting new city, and emboldened by the experiences he’d had over the last few days, his desire for thrills was stronger than ever before.
Mikado’s brain, stimulated by the excitement of a new city, couldn’t help but ignore the risks and scream for more.
More chills, more abnormality, more revolution!
Mikado was in such an elated state of mind that he would have fallen for any scams, ripoffs, or cults out to target him. He wouldn’t have thought twice about an invitation from Masaomi to a motorcycle gang meetup.
Despite his unquestioning mind-set, Mikado had enough self-awareness to know that while the special rank of class representative promised new experiences, he also didn’t want to be tied down to too much responsibility.
Maybe it’s best if I just sit back and let this play out…
“…”
One girl raised her hand, her eyes downcast.
It was Anri Sonohara, pale and bespectacled. The beautiful but aloof girl surrounded by an aura that said to stay away.
“Umm, Miss…Anri Sonohara? Let’s put her on the board, then.”
A very disinterested round of applause rose from the class. No one else seemed particularly engaged in the question of who would take what position.
“I’ll let you handle the rest, then,” the temporary leader said, writing Anri’s name on the blackboard and retreating to his seat.
“In that case, is there anyone who wants to be the male class representative?”
Her voice was frail but clear. No one volunteered for the position, and an uneasy silence fell upon the classroom.
What should I do? Mikado wondered as he gazed in a trance at Anri behind the teacher’s desk. Suddenly, her glance fell upon one of the male students.
Mikado followed her eyes until he saw a particularly tall classmate. He was the second tallest in the class, and Mikado recognized him as the one who’d just been elected to the Health Committee.
Seiji Yagiri. That was the name written on the blackboard beneath the Health Committee heading. Aside from his height, nothing about him seemed out of the ordinary. But there was almost nothing boyish left in his face—if he’d been introduced as three years older, it could have been taken at face value.
But if he was already assigned to a committee, why was the girl named Anri staring at him like that? Mikado began to wonder if she might have a thing for him, when…
Her gaze shifted directly to Mikado’s direction.
Huh?
Behind her glasses, Anri’s facial expression suggested concern. Mikado’s heart leaped a beat.
“I’m a sinful man,” Masaomi muttered jokingly the moment Anri’s eyes shifted away. “She’s totally got the hots for me. She’s feeling anxious about the wild, dangerous night ahead of us.”
It was spoken quietly enough that only Mikado could hear. He decided to shoot back a barb of his own.
“Sorry, can you speak Japanese? This is Japan, after all.”
“Damn! Always with the quick comeback! I never realized the danger in my midst was coming from you, my old friend—but I live for the sake of love and won’t hesitate to kill a pal if I must.”
“No hesitation in the slightest?!”
Upon more levelheaded reflection, she might have been looking at the outsider Masaomi rather than Mikado. That might explain the worry he saw. Which raised the question: What was Masaomi doing in that seat anyway?
That’s when he realized what she was really looking at.
The seat Masaomi was occupying belonged to a female student who hadn’t appeared in any of the last three days, starting from the entrance ceremony. He recalled that Anri had been concerned for that student during that very first day.
Mikado silently raised his hand. He had no idea what was running through Anri’s mind, but if no one else was going to volunteer, it might as well be him.
“Oh…um…”
“It’s Ryuugamine. First name, Mikado. Meaning ‘imperial man,’” Masaomi interjected for some reason. Anri dutifully wrote the name on the blackboard. Several members of the class finally noticed Masaomi’s presence, but no one seemed particularly concerned. No use ruffling any feathers—and nobody really wanted to get involved with an unknown student wearing his own clothes, with bleached brown hair and earrings.
In a way, Mikado’s plain appearance and subdued personality made him fit the role of class rep quite well. No one raised any objections, and the process continued uneventfully.
“Well, that’s all the positions—don’t forget to attend your first committee meetings tomorrow. The times and places are written on the board outside the office,” the new class rep read off the printout on the teacher’s desk, bringing a quiet close to the homeroom period.
“We can go ahead and leave after cleaning up. Let’s get to it.”
In the end, Mikado became a class rep without even standing in front of the class. He started on the cleaning process, feeling slightly unfulfilled. As he mopped the hallway floor, Masaomi teased him, leaning against a window.
“Aha, so that’s what’s going on…”
“What do you mean?”
“I didn’t think you had it in you. Back in elementary school, you’d cry just because someone made up rumors about you and a childhood friend. And somehow you’ve turned into an aggressive hunter on the prowl, looking for love!”
“Oh, that. Whatever,” Mikado muttered, brushing off his friend’s nonsense. “Speaking of which, did you join anything?”
“Yep, the Discipline Committee.”
Mikado tried to imagine his friend being in charge
of student behavior. He summed up his thoughts with one word. “Yikes…”
“What do you mean, yikes? Hey, I actually wanted to be class rep, but we needed a ferocious fifteen-man rock-paper-scissors tournament to decide that slot, and I was tragically eliminated.”
“Fifteen volunteers?! In a rock-paper-scissors competition?! Geez, your class was way more into it!” Mikado blurted, openly astonished. Masaomi grinned in satisfaction.
“But there were only six volunteers for Discipline. I dunno about that guy from your class, though; he looks like a real stickler for discipline. I’m hoping to use my position on the inside to tear down the system from within.”
“…What are you talking about?”
“Whatever. Now that I’m on the Discipline Committee, there are no heavy firearms coming onto this campus!”
“But small firearms are okay…?” Mikado murmured, having regained his cool head.
Masaomi stomped his leg with cartoonish disappointment. He looked out the window for a few moments, then turned back with a sense of purpose.
“I know, let’s go pick up chicks!” Masaomi repeated.
“Seriously, are you okay?”
Mikado finished up his cleaning assignment, feeling concern for the old friend who was getting more and more unhinged by the day. He placed the mop in a large storage locker and picked up his bag, walking off with Masaomi—when he noticed Anri Sonohara at the entrance of the building with the tall shadow of Seiji Yagiri. Anri was asking him something, her face dead serious, while Seiji looked annoyed.
“—Thenso it’sreallyseen her?”
“I told you, I haven’t. She just stopped coming.”
Anri’s words were too quiet to make out accurately, but Seiji’s irritated answer was plenty clear. He turned in the direction of the two boys, clearly hoping to brush Anri off. He was in charge of cleaning the entranceway, so his bag was probably still in the classroom.
Anri watched him retreat, then noticed Mikado and Masaomi staring at her. She hastily walked out of the door.
“Whoa, whoa, no need to be putting on a show with this quarrel on the third day of school, young lovers,” Masaomi said. Mikado turned to see that he was already blocking Seiji’s path. The combination of his words and appearance made Masaomi the perfect villain for this scene.
“…What do you want? That wasn’t what you think it is.”
“Umm, you’re Yagiri, right? I’m in the same class as you. Mikado Ryuugamine.”
“Yeah…I remember you. Hard to forget a name like that,” Seiji said, his tension easing as he recognized his class representative. Mikado had stepped in between the two to prevent anything from erupting, but Masaomi pushed him aside to get closer.
“Hey…Kida!”
“You’re pretty fit, dude. Let’s go pick up chicks!”
“Huhhh?” both Mikado and Seiji interjected.
“Kida, what in the world are you talking about?”
“It always helps to have one really tall guy in the group when you go cruising! If it were just you and me, it’d be a zero-sum game—every positive effect of my appearance would be canceled out by the negative effect of yours.”
“That’s mean! Why don’t you just invite someone from your class?”
“You idiot, if I did that, I’d have like twenty boys and girls coming along!”
Mikado was about to ask why girls would be tagging along for a pickup run when Seiji interrupted. He was no longer irritated the way he was earlier, though he didn’t seem to be in a mood to listen to the other two bicker, either.
“Sorry, but I’ve already got a girlfriend.”
That ought to have been the clincher, but Masaomi was not to be deterred.
“As if that matters!”
“Uh, yes it does!” Mikado interjected, but Masaomi paid him no attention.
“I don’t care about the presence or absence of any girlfriend—just talking to another girl doesn’t make her your girlfriend, so there’s no issue of cheating whatsoever!”
“Huh? Really?” Mikado asked, momentarily swayed by the flood of Masaomi’s logical barrage. Seiji was unaffected in the slightest, however. He simply shook his head quietly.
“No way. Even thinking about another girl is an act of betrayal.”
“Well, aren’t you a bastion of integrity? So you can’t possibly betray your girlfriend?”
“It’s not my girlfriend I’d be betraying.”
“Huh? Then who?” Masaomi asked.
Seiji looked into open air, his eyes full of light and purpose. “Love.”
“Pardon?”
“I would be betraying the love I send to my girlfriend. I could betray her, but I can’t betray my love.”
Silence.
“Uh…okay, dude.”
An uncomfortable pause enveloped all three, but Seiji’s expression didn’t change in the least. The glory of belief and certainty shone in his eyes.
“Well, um…good luck with that!”
Masaomi offered him a hesitant fist, and Seiji bumped it back with a brilliant smile.
“Yeah, thanks!”
He headed off to the classroom without another word. Masaomi watched him confidently stride away and muttered, “Looks like you’ve got a real hothead in your class, too.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“This is pathetic.”
They were at the famous Ikebukuro West Gate Park—as seen on TV!—but for the middle of a weekday, it was virtually barren. Mikado had absolutely zero intention of playing along with Masaomi’s flirtation mission, but he was interested in taking a closer look at the place he’d seen on television so many times.
It was indeed the locale he recognized, but Mikado soon realized that seeing it in person was a completely different experience. The location was the backdrop for news broadcasts, TV dramas, and variety shows, but each program gave it a different feeling.
Impressed with how editing and presentation could create such different impressions of the same place, Mikado watched Masaomi do his thing. It was exasperating.
Masaomi couldn’t find any high school girls his age, so he had to resort to hitting on the office ladies who walked through the park on their lunch breaks. Of course, no working adult (on their break) was going to sit around and entertain the advances of a teenage boy. The sight of his desperate, futile attempts was kind of touching in a way.
When Mikado relayed this to Masaomi after he took a short break, his friend grinned and replied, “What do you mean? The goal is just to talk to women, and I’m succeeding with flying colors! Besides, calling things desperate or futile is the last thing you should do when talking to women! When you’re around a beautiful woman, the only thing that ensures your actions are desperate or futile is thinking that they are. You get me?”
“I don’t get you at all,” Mikado muttered and stretched lazily. There was no point to just sitting around here all day, so he decided to head somewhere he wanted to go. “I’m going over to 60-Kai Street on my own.”
“What? You think you can pick up chicks without a wingman? When did you turn into such a lady-killer?”
“I’m not going to pick up chicks.”
But Masaomi wasn’t listening. He jabbed a finger at Mikado’s face and leered, “You’re going to be reduced to tears over the loss of my skills soon enough! You’re gonna wind up getting played by one of those ganguro girls who don’t realize that the overtanned look was out of style years ago!”
“What does any of that have to do with your skill?!”
“Shut it, shut it, let your mouth be a door and shut it! Let’s have a competition! We’ll see who can pick up more girls, me or you!”
“Seriously? You’re gonna hit on girls while trailing an entourage of girls you hit on?”
Masaomi ignored him and started sprinting toward the station. Within moments, he was calling out to a housewife with her child and shopping bags.
Mikado let out his deepest sigh of the day and headed to th
e east exit of the station on his own.
It wasn’t a perfectly straight line, but he did manage to reach 60-Kai Street with relative ease. This point actually wasn’t that far from his apartment. Mikado planned to wander around checking out stores until nightfall, then head straight home. If Masaomi was still the same person Mikado remembered from elementary school, he’d forget about the silly competition and go home soon.
When they were seven, Masaomi was “it” in a game of hide-and-seek, and he left to go home in the middle of the game. When Mikado finally returned home that night in tears, Masaomi was there in the house. With his cheeks full of Mikado’s dinner, he said, “Found ya.”
Now that I think about it, we had our share of adventures back in that town. I wonder when those stopped happening.
There was nothing particularly interesting to relate from middle school. It was just a very long succession of safe, boring days.
Mikado dreamed of the outside world but had no reason to leave his hometown. He’d been stuck in an unchanging situation—until the day his family got an Internet connection, and his world changed forever.
Now there were endless worlds at his fingertips. He had access to information he would never learn from his ordinary life. It was as though, just on the other side of the world he lived in, a much, much larger world had appeared. And in the new world, there was no such thing as distance.
As he delved further and further into the world of the Net and found himself on the verge of living a shut-in existence, Mikado one day came to an epiphany. He was free to passively receive anything and everything from the Internet—but when it came time to add his own information to that world, there was almost nothing he had to say or share.
When he realized this, Mikado became even more fascinated with the world outside of his town. The picture of Tokyo that Masaomi painted for him shone brighter than ever before.
And now he was within that light. Masaomi claimed that the countryside was where it was brightest now, but Mikado didn’t get that feeling yet. He knew what his friend meant, and he didn’t intend to leave and never look back. But he knew that when nostalgia did register, it would be further on in the future, not now.
Durarara!!, Vol. 1 (novel) Page 9