It was the kind of line that usually signaled an imminent death, but in this case, that fate was more likely for his hapless victims.
“B-but Simon…”
“You no fight when girl around. Run to Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, go, go, go.”
“Th-thank you! We’ll all come have sushi soon!”
“Ohh, very good. In thanks, I charge you only ten percent interest on market price.”
It probably came out more intimidating than what Simon meant to say. Meanwhile, Mikado picked up his bag, grabbed Aoba and Anri, and raced off.
As they ran through the streets of Ikebukuro, Mikado bowed to Anri and his schoolmate.
“S-sorry! I didn’t mean for you to get dragged into that nonsense!”
“Um, dragged into? You were the only one who suffered any consequences,” Aoba noted. Mikado found that he was right, but he couldn’t help but feel ashamed and embarrassed that they’d been put through that frightening experience anyway.
It was his first underclassman since coming to high school. Did he just get carried away because of all the reverential gazes Aoba was giving him? Did he get cocky and think he was cooler than he really was?
There was plenty of time to regret, but no time to reflect.
From out of the alleys came a group of men who must have been alerted by the previous punks via cell phone.
“Hey, what about the other guys?!”
“Forget ’em! We couldn’t beat Simon with our entire group, and starting a brawl there will only draw Shizuo’s attention!” the men yelled as they chased after the trio.
The distance was short enough that they could catch up in twenty seconds if they sprinted. But unluckily for them and luckily for Mikado, this was the area where the students were supposed to be meeting their friends.
“Eep!” Mikado shrieked when the van suddenly stopped in front of them, thinking that it was a fresh round of pursuers. But then he recognized the man in the passenger seat, and his face lit up.
“K-Kadota!”
The next moment, Karisawa poked her head out of the door and yelled, “Why are you being chased?! Anyway, get in, get in!”
Just in the nick of time, Mikado, Anri, and Aoba piled into the van and shut the door before the thugs could reach them.
Togusa started the engine at the exact same moment. One of the thugs reached for the handle of the passenger-side door, but Kadota’s fist flew out of the open window and put a stop to that.
“Y-you—you—you saved us!”
“Hey, it’s all good. Sorry for being late to our meeting spot!” Karisawa said, cackling.
The van was surprisingly cramped, with the rear being taken up by Mikado’s trio, Karisawa, and Yumasaki—and a pair of girls who Mikado did not recognize.
The girls in the very back of the van were possibly twins, because aside from one having glasses, they looked exactly the same.
“Um…what are you two doing in here?” Aoba Kuronuma asked, surprised.
They know each other? Mikado wondered, but before he could say anything, they heard an obnoxious horn from outside and a dull thud against the side of the van.
“Damn, they found us,” the driver grunted, irritated. Mikado looked out of the side windows. He thought the Yellow Scarves they’d ditched had caught up in their own car, but instead, what he saw through the tinted windows was a gang of modified motorcycles bearing men in striped gang uniforms.
“Stop the damn caaaah!”
“Gonna fry ya up in motor oiiil!”
“What happened to our backup?!”
“They can’t come; they found the Black Rider! We’re supposed to join them now!”
The gang of bikers shouted back and forth among themselves, but Mikado couldn’t make out their messages from within the van.
“Wh-what’s going on? What’s happening right now?”
“Well, you see, I have an unfortunate announcement. You basically jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. Too bad, so sad. We are currently inhabiting a troubled dimension just as treacherous as a certain academy city researching supernatural powers. We’ll just have to wait for the saga of the one whose right hand will bring down this ugly illusion…”
“What in the world are you talking about?!”
“Let me just make sure: Do you know any doctors who look like a frog? That’ll bump your odds of survival up about ten percent. Actually, speaking of frogs, Hakusan Meikun would work, as well.”
Mikado gave up on interacting with Yumasaki’s utter nonsense and turned to Kadota in the front passenger seat instead. When their eyes met through the rearview mirror, the older man looked a bit apologetic.
“Yeah, some…stuff happened. Sorry.”
“Wh-whaaaaat?!”
Thus began a guided tour of Ikebukuro that was more thrilling than anyone asked for.
The group was locked into a deadly chase without a finish line.
Just at the moment that the next step was impossible to predict (if you even wanted to)—
They heard the whinnying of a headless horse approaching from the front.
Chapter 3: Wakahime Club “The Hottest Spring in the World! The Erotic Terminal of High School Girls, Ikebukuro!”
“A dripping blackboard eraser! The after-school extracurricular activities never stop when the town becomes your campus! Tokyo’s dangerous horizon wafting with the scent of shining roses, Ikebukuro…
A proud eagle wanders the heights, seeking to slake her ashen lust—the high school girl!
Among these girls who caress the borderline between passion and destruction, our special reporter witnessed a rare sight: the ‘yamanba’ crone fairy!”
Thus read the shameless front cover of Wakahime (Young Princess) Club, an adult magazine. It was meant to focus on a certain subset of youth culture and package it for consumption to an older audience, but this particular publication, owing to its very peculiar angle and marketing, was well known for trailblazing its own very niche direction.
On the cover were two women in school sailor uniforms, clearly well over twenty years old, posed in a provocative manner, with a number of holy Buddhist seals placed on their legs below their skirts.
On the center foldout, the seals came into play once again, covering the most sensitive feminine area in a photo that was as erotic as it was confusing.
It was difficult enough to look at a pornographic magazine in front of others—particularly in a classroom when there were girls around—but the obviously slanted aesthetic of this one made it especially awkward.
But in a first-year classroom at Raira Academy, one person read this magazine right out in the open.
“Oooh. Ahhh. Ohhh. That’s hot. Very nice. Wish I had this body, ya know?”
This figure, leaning back in her chair and smirking to herself, was clad in a black-based school uniform that did not belong to Raira Academy. She wore glasses and had a simple smile without a hint of cosmetics covering it. In short, she looked just like a bookworm who should be hiding in a corner of the library, poring over the literary greats like Natsume Soseki or Osamu Dazai.
“Oh man, that’s good stuff. How do you get boobs this big? Milk? Is it milk? What if you just pour the milk right on the boobs and then rub it into the skin? Will that help? What do you think?” she asked the boy sitting next to her with a dazzling smile.
The boy being questioned turned red with a look that said, Why are you asking me? and flopped down onto his desk, glancing at her.
While they both had glasses, this girl was the polar opposite of Anri Sonohara otherwise. While Anri had a calm, shadowy maturity to her, this girl had eyes that flashed with mischief behind the lenses and the natural brightness of personality to match it.
And this girl was the one gleefully flipping through the porno mag.
She had a long black skirt and thick glasses, a combination that screamed “honor student.” Not the type of girl you would expect to read something like that.
But she c
ontinued rifling through the centerfold pictures with an innocent smile on her face, dropping unwanted comments to the boys on either side of her desk.
The boys didn’t know what to do. They were utterly at the mercy of a girl they’d only met half an hour earlier.
Raira Academy, first day of school
Raira Academy was a coed private high school in southern Ikebukuro.
It had a different name just a few years earlier, but it earned its current name when it merged with another local high school.
The campus grounds were not that large, but the school maximized the use of what space it had, so it didn’t feel cramped. It was also close to Ikebukuro Station, which made it an attractive school to people from the suburbs of Tokyo who wanted to commute from home. The average test score and difficulty of getting in were on a slow rise, and its past rumors of being quite a slum before the merger were now a distant memory.
There was a nice view of the surrounding terrain from the higher-altitude campus, but the looming sixty-floor building just ahead did not brook any feeling of superiority. On the other side of the school was Zoshigaya Cemetery, which gave it a slightly lonely atmosphere for being in the middle of a metropolitan city.
Of course, when the students were there, that lonely feeling was nowhere to be seen, crowded out by the oasis of youth at the heart of the capital.
After the school opening ceremonies were finished, each classroom got down to the business of student introductions.
But among them were a few notable outliers.
First, every class had to have its clown—someone who looked for laughs in the hope of livening up the room or sometimes fell on their face and just made things awkward. Some of them were so dense that they couldn’t even realize their jokes weren’t landing.
While some stood out intentionally in their search for stardom, others couldn’t help but stick out by virtue of their size or looks. Others flubbed their own names when doing introductions, which quickly slapped them with the “ditzy” tag.
The Ritual of the First Impression presented a largely insurmountable wall to others, to varied emotional reactions.
Given the nature of the academy, it was rare for people to wind up being classmates with kids they’d been with since middle school or even earlier. Excluding classmates from Raira Academy Middle School or the other junior highs in the immediate area, you were lucky if you had one or two old friends in your class.
So the mask of the first impression was surprisingly heavy in regard to its effect on one’s personal relationships for the next year (or three). People are more than their appearances suggest, as the saying goes, but that quote held no water if there wasn’t someone around capable of seeing that inner personality, and there was no guarantee that such understanding confidants would be among one’s classmates.
The first impression would lead to the creation of social groups and exert a powerful influence over lunch cliques, classwork teams, and other gatherings.
It all came down to whether you could blend into the class or not. That was the ritual being held when a student made his or her introduction to the rest of the class: the first test of the school year.
And whether they realized this importance or not, there were two students who clearly did not pick up on the signals.
One was the bespectacled girl in Class 1-B.
“I’m Mairu Orihara! Orihara is spelled with the characters for fold and field, while Mairu means ‘dance’ and ‘flow.’ Nice to meet you! My favorite books are the encyclopedia, manga, and porn mags!”
Her introduction itself was brief and ordinary enough that most of her classmates took the final bit as a forced joke. But her black uniform stood out quite a bit among the green-based Raira uniforms.
What she said next, however, completely changed the feeling in the room.
“I go for both teams when it comes to love and lust! But the spot in my bed for men is already spoken for, so don’t even try! I can go out with as many girls as I want, however, so keep that in mind when you propose a relationship!”
The other student was a girl in Class 1-C who also stood out quite a bit.
“Kururi…Orihara.”
Despite it being the first day of school, she was wearing gym clothes, which immediately made her stick out like a sore thumb. Raira allowed its students to wear their own clothes even at official ceremonies, but most kids chose to play it safe and wear the official uniform or jacket.
Yet this girl wanted to wear gym clothes.
As she started to sit back down, the teacher asked, “Is there anything else you wish to say about yourself?”
“No, there isn’t…,” she said in a tiny voice, then sluggishly sat down.
The thin fabric of her shirt accentuated the size of her breasts, which, combined with her taut limbs, attracted the gaze of all the male students.
But given that her personality was already questionable based on her choice of outfits to the ceremony, none of the boys opted to stare for too long, lest they attract the disgust of the other girls in the class.
She had a healthy, vibrant outfit and figure. But her expression and manner were gloomy and sickly.
After telling the class nothing but her name, the girl quietly sat down in her seat and resumed staring at her desk.
A boy sitting to one side of her—Aoba Kuronuma—glanced at the girl in the strange outfit and idly thought, She seems gloomy. But what’s with the gym clothes?
That was the extent of his curiosity, however. He looked around and noticed other boys sending curious glances at the girl and looks of disgust from the girls in the class.
Well, as long as she doesn’t get picked on.
But that would ultimately be her problem, not his. Attention turned to the next student’s introduction—not just from Aoba, but from most of the class.
There was just one student adrift from the crowd, that was all. Eventually, the remaining classmates turned their attention to the continuing introductions, and that was all they thought of it.
Given that they were in separate classes, the rest of the school didn’t realize that the two odd girls who appeared in Class B and Class C, if you ignored their glasses, hairstyle, and bust size, had essentially the same face and build.
There was also the matter of the last name Orihara.
The teachers who had been around since before the name change to Raira experienced an instinctual danger signal when they saw that name.
“Well…just because he was their brother doesn’t mean they’re just like him. It wouldn’t be right to discriminate against them because of that,” a veteran art teacher said, sipping tea in the faculty room. “But…compared to when Izaya and Shizuo were here, it’s so much more peaceful now.”
The elderly teacher grinned wryly, thinking back on the problem child of the past wistfully.
“We don’t have barrels of gasoline rolling down the third-floor hallway anymore, for one thing.”
At that moment, apartment building, Shinjuku
“Now that I think about it,” Namie said with a softer than usual expression, but without stopping her work, “today is the entrance ceremony and start of school for Raira Academy.”
She sounded oddly happy about it. Izaya did not look up from organizing his e-mail, however. “That’s right. But why would you bring that up out of the blue?”
“Seiji’s starting his second year of high school… I wish I could have rushed to the ceremony to celebrate with him…”
“The first day of school? He’s in his second year, so parents and guardians have nothing to do with it.”
“Well, I want to see it,” Namie answered without hesitation. Izaya shook his head in disbelief. Namie normally played the role of the coolheaded beauty, but when it came to her younger brother, Seiji Yagiri, she proudly exhibited a level and depth of love that was abnormal.
It wasn’t the platonic love of a family, but the physical, lusty love between a man and woman. But her brother reci
procated none of that; in fact, he seemed to find her obnoxious. Yet even those cold glances were lovable to Namie.
A look of bliss stole over her suddenly pink cheeks as she imagined her brother growing up, and she continued her work in a better mood than before.
Izaya glanced at his assistant, sighed, and muttered, “Raira Academy… That place has totally changed since they merged and got a new name.”
“Oh, you went there?”
“I graduated about six or seven years ago. Back then, it was just Raijin High School.”
For an instant, Izaya smiled with wistful longing—and the expression turned to a cruel, hateful smirk just as quickly.
“But…it was all horrible there, including the fact that it’s where I met Shizu.”
“You really do hate him, don’t you?” Namie replied, then had an idea. “If you graduated high school six or seven years ago… Didn’t you say that you’re twenty-one right now?”
“I’ve been telling people I’m twenty-one for several years. Do you really think I’d just give out personal information like that?”
She ignored him, exasperated, then abruptly stopped and turned to look at him. “Does that mean you do trust me a bit?”
“I wouldn’t call it trust. It’s more like giving out just a little bit of information to keep a subordinate from leading a mutiny.”
“You ought to die,” she spat, returning to her work. “By the way, your sisters are starting school there today, too,” she shot back.
“…I’m surprised you know that.” Izaya’s face went just a bit hard.
“I can do a bit of research on the king I serve, too.”
“…Fine. It’s the same thing I do to you.”
He didn’t like the turnabout, a fact he made clear with a pained grimace. Eventually, he gave up on his work and leaned back in the chair to mutter, “I don’t know how to handle those two.”
“Oh? To think that you would have trouble handling anyone other than Shizuo Heiwajima.”
“Don’t tease me. I’m only human, you know? I’m not perfect,” Izaya said, sighing heavily. He began to explain some of his background to her. “My sisters…who are named Kururi and Mairu, by the way… Well, my parents are normal. Except for their naming choices. But I was raised in normal circumstances—and turned out like this.”
Durarara!!, Vol. 4 (novel) Page 8