“How’d you do, Yoshiya?” Kaori asked.
“Oh, me? I pretty much blew English and Japanese,” he declared, “but I made it over fifty points in everything else, I think.”
“Sweet! I beat Yoshiya!”
“Kohmura…” Sasaki’s shoulders drooped as Yoshiya pumped his fist in the air.
Their classmates, all well familiar with the trio over the past year, showed zero restraint with their comments. “Ooh, man, Chi’s freakin’ out again.” “Kohmura blew it? Man, that sucks. There’s hardly anyone in the kyudo club, too…”
“Is Sasaki here? Chiho Sasaki?”
Chiho dejectedly raised her head at the sudden voice. At the door Mr. Ando, her homeroom and classical Chinese teacher, was beckoning to her.
“Here, could you pass these out for me?”
She was hardly class president, but for some reason, he handed over little jobs like these to Chiho pretty often. This time, it was a stack of stapled paper, three sheets per staple. The topmost one read “Year-Two Parent-Teacher Conferences.” It was April, right at the beginning of Chiho’s second high school year. There was still a chill to the wind, and while spring was in the air, nobody wanted to let go of their winter uniform sweaters yet.
For her, the year was starting just like they all had since middle school—without much in the way of new excitement.
“Hey, why do you have to be all depressed about Yoshiya’s crappy scores?” Kaori asked the down-in-the-dumps Chiho. “It’s not like he actually tried to prep for it or anything… ’Course, I guess I did study and my scores still weren’t great, so I don’t have much room to judge.”
There was something creepy to the sense of bragging pride Yoshiya approached his failure-level scores with. But Chiho was concerned about other matters. “I dunno,” she said, “it just makes me worry about what happens when the tests actually count. Like with the next midterms. I’d like to think he’ll be okay, but…”
“Yeah,” Kaori replied, a bit of concern showing through for her as well. But then, she pointed at the edge of Chiho’s lips. “Oh, hey, Sasachi, you got some ketchup right here.”
Chiho used a paper napkin to wipe the stain away. It was from the burger she was having at the MgRonald by Hatagaya rail station, conveniently located on the way home from school. She and Kaori went there a lot after school or extracurricular activities. It wasn’t like Chiho was some kind of fast-food gourmet, but it always seemed to her that what they cooked up at this particular MgRonald was a lot better than the other quick-service joints—even other MgRonalds.
“I mean,” Chiho said after wiping up, “if that had been a real test, Kohmura would’ve been put on academic probation. He’d be banned from club activity, too, and that’d suck not just for him, but everyone else in kyudo.”
“Yeah, that’s a good point,” Kaori commiserated as she nibbled on a French fry. “We’re the only sophomore students in the club right now, and if we lost the only sophomore guy in the club, we’re gonna have a lot of trouble fielding freshman members.”
Among the city public schools in the area, Sasahata North High was on the more advanced side when it came to academics. It had even sent a student to the prestigious Tokyo University in the past. As a result, studying was the primary focus of a lot of the student body—and if you were scored in the bottom-fourth percentile in three of the regular examinations, you were temporarily banned from sports and extracurriculars, except in exceptional cases like national championships.
The kyudo club that Chiho, Kaori, and Yoshiya joined last year was rather sparsely populated. If it weren’t for them, in fact, it would’ve been a serious candidate for disbanding. Considering that not too many high schools in Japan had dedicated archery facilities, the Sasahata North club got to enjoy some pretty nice perks—but not only was kyudo unpopular, but also the monetary requirements for getting into the sport put it at a disadvantage compared to others.
For the time being, the club consisted of the three of them, plus a single senior pair, a guy and girl. They had a teacher as an advisor, but that was pretty much on paper only—he had no kyudo experience. Instead, they were led by old alumni and rank-holding archers in the area who volunteered with them several times a month, but who could help them improve their skills only so much.
Thus, if they couldn’t get at least three male first-year students to sign up this year, they wouldn’t even be able to enter official boys’ competitions any longer. As a direct result, the club wasn’t exactly a contending force in the kyudo scene. Sasahata North had yet to so much as smell a national championship berth. Their historical best performance was a quarterfinal run at the Tokyo city tournament over a decade ago.
All this meant that if Yoshiya’s scores were failure-level on three midterm subjects, he’d be out of the club in an instant. That’d affect the morale of whatever freshman students they attracted—to say nothing of Chiho and Kaori themselves. And with local tournaments coming up soon, he wouldn’t be able to get in the practice he needed to have half a chance at going anywhere.
Chiho didn’t feel any intense drive to devote every waking moment of her teenage years to archery, like the star of some guts-and-glory sports manga. But if she was devoting herself to this one sport, she felt a responsibility to show up at competitions fully prepared, at the very least. That was exactly why Kaori’s middling performance in the mock exams came as such a shock to her. She had never been one to slack off like that, then blame it on some vague excuse like “I’m busy.” At least, Chiho didn’t think she was.
“I feel bad about that, you know?” Kaori said. “It’s just…I don’t wanna make excuses or anything, but I think the club’s part of the reason I couldn’t get everything I wanted out of your tutoring.”
“Oh?”
Kaori placed her pouting face on the table. “I was actually working part-time during spring break.”
“Oh, you were?”
This was news to Chiho. Sasahata North didn’t have any rules against working, so she knew at least some of her classmates held after-school jobs. But hearing it from Kaori piqued her interest.
“What kind of job did you have?” Chiho leaned forward. “And what for, huh?”
“Well,” Kaori replied, a little embarrassed, “I’m not really as good at archery as you are. I keep bending my arrows and stuff, and you know how spendy those bows can get.”
“Oh, come on, I’m not that good, Kao…”
Chiho wasn’t being modest for politeness’ sake. She was just about at the point where she could hit a thirty-six-centimeter target at kinteki range, close range and about ninety feet away, but getting it straight on the bull’s-eye still wasn’t something she could deliberately try for. She and her two fellow club members were still beginners, only taking up the sport last year, so there wasn’t any great difference in their respective performance levels.
“No,” Kaori said, “but you don’t mess up your arrows much at all anymore with makiwara training, you know?”
The makiwara practice targets made out of straw looked like they’d be kind to arrows at first glance, but unless you made a pretty clean strike on them, they could be murder on the cheaper arrows the club members used.
“Plus,” she continued, “the practice arrows we’ve got at the club are just a little too big for my equipment. That’s why I took a job: because I wanted some new stuff…and that’s why I didn’t really study too much of what you taught me. Sorry.”
“Oh… I’m sorry. I guess I didn’t know.”
Once the initial surprise was gone, Chiho found herself viewing Kaori with a certain level of respect. She had never taken a job before, and that in itself made her a little more grown-up in her eyes.
“It’s fine, it’s fine! It was my choice anyway, Sasachi. Besides, you’re getting better with those same practice arrows, so I’m telling you, you’ve got a lot more talent than me.”
“Oh, I do not…”
Kyudo, like ice hockey, took some ser
ious cash to participate in. Even at the student level, fifty thousand yen was the ballpark figure for assembling the equipment you needed, more than enough to give even Chiho pause. In her life, that kind of money just wasn’t possible unless her parents were willing to help her out. It was a lucky thing that Sen’ichi, Chiho’s father and a lifelong police officer, was proud of his girl for choosing a martial art as an extracurricular.
She was perfectly willing to work with whatever was cheapest, but her dad—a ranked kendo practitioner—would have none of it. “If you start cheap,” he reasoned, “that’ll stunt your improvement level later on.” So he bought her the best equipment possible within the standard price range.
Chiho appreciated that, and she made sure all of her stuff was fully maintained. But like Kaori said, things like arrows and bowstrings were generally consumable goods, so the running costs for maintenance were nothing to sniff at. One could always purchase sturdier duralumin arrows, but since every archer’s sense of balance in terms of string tension, standing position, and arrow weight was different, it was tough to assemble a full set of kyudo equipment on the cheap.
“…I’m pretty impressed, though, Kao.”
“With what?”
“Like, I never even thought about working to earn the money for the right kyudo stuff.”
Chiho chose the kyudo club mainly because she thought it looked pretty cool. She was in the choir in middle school, something Sasahata North didn’t have. That meant she wanted to pick something else, and when she saw one of the senior members striking the stylized full-draw kai pose as he readied himself to shoot at the extracurricular fair last year, something clicked with her. The bow he used in the demonstration wasn’t the carbon-fiber type Chiho and her friends used—it was a beautiful bamboo bow, its clear whiteness penetrating into its very core.
“Ahh, it’s nothing that impressive,” Kaori groaned, interrupting Chiho’s trip down memory lane. “I quit, anyway.”
“Oh? Was it just a temp thing?” Chiho asked, still a little fuzzy on how part-time work worked.
“Nah,” Kaori replied as she took a sip of orange juice. “I just quit ’cause the job sucked. It was at a diner.”
“A diner?”
There were a ton of them around Hatagaya and Sasazuka, both chains and family-run places.
“Like, I don’t want people calling me a quitter or anything, but I just could not do that any longer. The customers were scary, too.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. My supervisor basically threw me in the deep end my third time in, even though I still didn’t know all the stuff I needed to. You know the little computer pads they use to take down orders? There’s, like, a ton of keys on that thing, and each of the buttons had, like, four different menu items associated with them. And then everything got switched out for some new spring ad campaign, so it took me forever to take orders.”
“Huh,” Chiho said, recalling the last time she was at a franchise diner. “But didn’t you have one of those little IN TRAINING things on your name tag?”
Kaori rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Yeah, like customers give a crap about that. Did you look at the cashier’s name tag when you ordered that just now?”
“Oh, I did actually. That guy with the black hair. You see him? I remember it because it said MAOU on it. That’s a pretty unusual name, you know? Plus it had B CREW on it, too.”
Chiho took a look back at the counter. It was occupied by a man with black hair who looked like he had just stepped out of a MgRonald TV commercial.
“…Well, that’s because you’re special, Sasachi.” Kaori turned her jaded eyes back to Chiho. “But it’s like, if I’m still in training, why do people think I’d know what’s in this or that kind of pasta, or how many calories are in a hot-fudge sundae or whatever? I’ve never even seen that stuff.”
“Isn’t that usually written in the menus?”
Without warning, Kaori stood up and pointed a defiant finger at Chiho.
“Yeah! Yeah, you’d think that, wouldn’t you? But they never look! They never look. Like, they just toss the menu away and say, like, ‘What do you think I should get?’ As if I have any idea!”
“Wow… That bad, huh? ’Cause I don’t think I’ve really seen that before when I’m shopping or going out or—”
Before Chiho could finish, Kaori leaned even further over the table. “Oh, you will if you stand there for six hours straight. Like, every single day! And that’s just the easy stuff. Sometimes people helped themselves to the drink machine because they assume it’s free. Then they got all pissy at me once I said it wasn’t. Or they bitch about how the plates are all different from the last time they ate there. Like, what does telling me that accomplish?”
“Oh… Wow.”
“But the worst was when the lunch rush came, and we were completely full with customers waiting for a seat. These business guys came in, and I told them to take a number and wait, and they were like ‘We gotta wait? Why do we gotta wait?’ Like, do they even know how a restaurant works?”
“…That’s pretty rude, yeah.”
It was hard for Chiho to believe, but Kaori wasn’t the type to exaggerate for effect. That group must have actually existed.
“Yeah, isn’t it? So I didn’t know how to answer that, and then they got really riled up and were all like ‘Let me speak to your manager.’ So I did that, and then the manager got all pissed at me for interrupting her while she was busy!”
“Oh, no way.”
“So then she disappeared, so it was just me and this other girl covering the entire dining area. Where I was at, the waitstaff had to make some of the dessert items on the menu instead of the cooks. I had, like, no training on any of that, but this guy just handed me a manual and ordered me to make a parfait for him. How was I gonna do that, huh? I didn’t even know where anything was.”
The rant continued on. She was forced to do things she had no experience with, then was yelled at when she inevitably messed them up. Her conniving coworkers gave her no support, even though they had all the time in the world. To her, at least, part-time work held no attractions at all.
Then a thought occurred to Chiho. “But they’re gonna pay you, right? You quit before you were there a full month?”
“I think they will, yeah. I was still in my training period, and I only worked for, like, half a month, so it ain’t gonna be that much. Ugh, it was just awful!”
Kaori pushed her now-empty MgRonald tray away from her and sunk into her seat. Just as she did, a voice rang out.
“Ma’am, I can take that tray for you if you like.”
The two of them looked up. Each of them let out a tiny gasp. There was a woman there, dressed in a different uniform from the rest of the crew. “Beautiful” was the only to describe her. She was tall, her skin shiny and as flawless as a ceramic vase, with a voice low and inviting like a fashion model’s. Given their conversation just now, Chiho couldn’t help but look at her name tag. KISAKI: MANAGER, it read.
Kaori nodded silently in awe as Kisaki took the tray away and gave a light, polite bow as she went on her way. Chiho still had some fries and her drink on her tray, so the manager had given her a bit more time.
“Pretty lady, huh?” Kaori was still staring at her. “Maybe I would’ve lasted longer with her managing me. My boss at that diner practically did nothing unless there were customers to wait on, and then she yelled at me to find something to do when I wasn’t busy. Like, why don’t you try working a little, huh?”
She kept looking at the MgRonald manager until she disappeared behind the counter. Chiho chuckled at the display.
“Yeah, I keep hearing that working at a restaurant or a convenience store is hard enough as it is. They really shouldn’t be making part-timers do work they don’t know how to do. I mean, like I should talk, never having had a job before, but—”
“Oh, no, totally. Plus she kept yelling at me all the time, which didn’t help my motivation any, but… Ah, scr
ew it! It’s all in the past now. I hope I never wait tables again for the rest of my life!”
After making the bold declaration, Kaori took some paper out of her school tote bag. It was the stapled set Mr. Ando made Chiho hand out earlier—a notice about the upcoming parent/teacher/student conferences, along with a survey.
“And really,” she said, “how am I supposed to know what I wanna do with my life right now?”
The career guidance survey asked students to specify whether they intended to go to a university, a technical school, or right into the workforce after graduating high school, and why. Student responses would apparently be used to help guide the upcoming three-party conferences.
“You’re totally going to college, aren’t you, Sasachi?”
Chiho vaguely nodded. “Um…probably.” The survey made her feel a little down as well. Two whole years of high school to go, and she was already being asked to consider the entire rest of her life.
“No way Yoshiya’s gonna make it into any other school after this,” Kaori flatly stated. “Me, though…I dunno. The one thing I do know is absolutely no food-service work. But what kinda reason should I even write down? I mean, I don’t even know what I would major in if I went to college.”
Chiho felt exactly the same way. Apart from the big names like Tokyo and Kyoto University, the only universities she was familiar with were the ones that placed high in the Ekiden relay races her father watched on TV every New Year’s Day. But going to work right after high school? To someone like Chiho with zero work experience, that seemed even more alien and unfamiliar than college.
“Ooh, but maybe some talent scout would pick you up, huh, Sasachi? You’re cute and your tits’re huge, so I bet they’d snap you up if you walked around the Harajuku fashion district. Why don’t you put down ‘entertainment industry’ in the survey?”
The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 7 Page 13