Current mood:	happy!
Current music:	Malice Mizer - Gekka no Yasoukyoku
Entry tags:	engleză, literatură, nihon ni youkoso!

Nihon ni youkoso~! [capitolul I]
A trecut ceva timp de când am scris ultima oară o povestire de dimensiuni ceva mai mari. De data asta m-am apucat de lucru în engleză şi japoneză. Dacă nu înţelegeţi vreo replică în japoneză, nu vă faceţi probleme - şi personajul principal este în exact aceeaşi situaţie...

Chapter 1 ~ Nihon ni youkoso!*

 

I had no idea how long I’d been sitting like that, curled up in that uncomfortable seat, my head as low as I could hold it without my spine cracking, thinking ‘This isn’t real...’ over and over again. I hated flying. I couldn’t stand the thought that I was trapped inside a metal box, who knew how many miles above ground, just ready to – oh, Jesus, I thought I was going to get sick.

At some point I heard the announcer babble something in what sounded like several different languages. It could have very well been Martian, Mercurian and Jupiterian, for all I cared. I couldn’t make out a single sound, much less a coherent word or phrase.

Shortly after that came a jolt, then another, and then a third one. ‘Oh, God. We’re going down. I know we are. It’s over. We’re all gonna die. We’re all gonna--’

“Alex...?”

I opened my eyes and turned my head towards the left just slightly. “Mira...? Are we... are we dead yet?”

Mira blinked at me several times, then burst out into a tinkering laugh. “What are you saying, silly! We’ve only just landed! The pilot announced it just a minute ago, didn’t you hear?”

Like hell I had. I straightened up slowly, cautiously. “You mean, we’re not... gonna die?”

I must’ve seemed quite the idiot. Then again, who could blame me? My pulse was racing two hundred beats a minute. God knew how frightened I’d been throughout the flight.

“Nobody’s gonna die, baka. Get up, we’re getting off.”

I heaved a long, heartfelt sigh, trying to adjust to this new reality. Finally, I stood up and joined Mira in the queue of people waiting to disembark. Most of the people were Asian, talking amongst themselves in that sing-song language I could hardly make anything out of. I only knew the basics of Japanese – a few words which Mira had taught me every now and then. “Hai”, “Iie”, “Sumimasen”, “Nani?” and that was about it.

As soon as we were off the plane and done with the formalities, Mira caught my arm in an adamant grip and dragged me ahead, her eyes scanning the small groups around us. “I’m sure Takeshi-san must be worried sick by now. Our flight had quite a delay. Stupid weather. I hope he didn’t get bored and leave.”

“I hope so, too,” I muttered as she chattered on. “So... tell me again about this guy we’re supposed to meet. How does he look like?”

Mira stopped in mid-sentence and glared daggers at me. I felt a strong urge to pull away. “You’ve seen him too, remember? In those pictures I showed you a couple weeks ago?”

“Truthfully, they all look the same to me”, I replied, looking away from those fiery green eyes which held the promise of a long and exquisite set of curses in three different languages.

Mira sighed and rolled her eyes in exasperation. “I swear, of all the annoying, forgetful, brain-lacking, dobitoc, enervant--”

“All right already, I get the picture”, I cut in, holding my hands up in a gesture of mock surrender. I gestured towards a random Japanese man holding a piece of cardboard with some fancy writing on it, “That him?”

“No, that cardboard says ‘Ashimoto’. I don’t recall any of us going by that name.” The irony in her voice was crystal-clear.

“Well, excuse me for trying to help”, I shot back half-heartedly. I pointed towards another one, “Him, then?”

She growled, “No. Man, I don’t see him anywhere.” Her shoulders dropped and the corners of her lips began to twitch. Uh-oh.

“I’m sure he’s around here... somewhere”, I said quickly. “Come on, don’t cry! We’ll definitely--”

“Who’s crying?” she shot back, eyes flaring once again. For a nineteen-year-old girl, she had quite a temper. Sometimes, I seriously wondered if she really was nineteen at all, even though her papers clearly said so. Maybe there had been a mishap at the civil office or something.

Before I could think of a reply which wouldn’t have earned me a kick in the shin (or worse), Mira’s eyes suddenly lit up and a broad smile spread over her face. She let go of my arm and shoved me aside, crying out at the same time, “Takeshi-saaaaaaaaan!” The people around us were starting to glare. Then again, with her dyed white hair, black overcoat and wild outbursts, Mira stood up like a sore thumb regardless of what she did. I thought I’d already gotten used to that. I hadn’t. Not by far. I sighed and rubbed at my temples. It was going to be a long, long day.

Eventually, I straightened up and opened my eyes. Across the hall, Mira was talking to a Japanese guy, a few inches shorter than her, her arms flying in all directions and her expression changing between three and five times per second. It seemed something impossible to do, but somehow she managed that when she was overly excited about something. At some point, she looked around, saw me and motioned for me to join them. I sighed and set off, noticing that some old ladies were glancing at me and whispering. At one point, they burst into giggles. I growled inwardly. I probably looked like some sort of a yeti to them (I’d been given that remark back in Britain, too, due to my stature and ‘mane’, as some colleagues very rudely referred to my hair).

“Takeshi-san, kore wa tomodachi no Alex-kun desu.” I was guessing she’d just introduced me to the guy, so I bowed as she’d taught me to and smiled. “Nice to meet you.”

“Alex, this is my friend, Takeshi Kajiwara.”

“Hajimemashite”, he said. Not knowing what to reply, I bowed once again.

“Saa, ikimashou!” Mira was all a smile. “I told him, ‘let’s go’”, she explained as she casually took Takeshi’s arm and nudged him towards the exit.

“Aren’t we... forgetting something?” I said flatly, arching an eyebrow and curving the other.

Mira bit her lip for a few seconds, as if in deep thought, then beamed up. “Our luggage!” She said something to Takeshi, too quick for me to follow. He nodded. Mira let go of his arm and clung on to mine. “Let’s go!” she said impatiently, as Takeshi turned around and made his way towards the exit. “He’s going to get his car.”

“And, I’m going to have to carry your luggage all the way there”, I assumed with the tone of voice a martyr might employ in his final hour.

“Yup! Omigosh, I can’t believe I’m actually standing on Japanese ground.”

Well, technically, she wasn’t actually standing on ground, but on a marble floor. Conveniently though, I refrained from pointing that out.

“It’s so unreal!” As she spoke, Mira let go of my arm and made several pirouettes. “It’s so, very unreal...”

I cleared my throat. She stopped and arched an eyebrow at me, head tilted to one side, “What?”

“Our luggage.” Or rather, my luggage and her Leviathan. I had no idea how we were ever going to fit that monster of a suitcase in poor Takeshi’s car. I pitied the poor guy.

As Mira was indulging herself in more pirouettes, I slung my rucksack over my shoulder and yanked her suitcase off the transporter with a grunt.

“We’re going”, I warned as I turned towards the exit.

Mira came to a stop, rushed to me and clung on to my free arm once again. “Ha~i, let’s go! I am SO excited! I’ll finally get to see Akihabara, and Tokyo Tower, and the Kan-eiji temple, and the Yoshinbou Tokugawa grave, and--”

I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about.

Once outside, Mira came to an abrupt stop and frowned. “Alex... I can’t see Takeshi’s car anywhere. Do you think he got scared and ran away?”

‘From you? Gee, why on Earth would he do that?’ I thought sarcastically. Wisely though, I decided to keep my mouth shut.

“I’m sure he’s out there, somewhere...” She let go of my arm and took a few steps forward, then left, then forward again. “Hold on, I’ll be right back.”

“What? Hey, wait a min--”

But she’d already taken off to who knows where. I let out a frustrated sigh. Following her was out of question. Her suitcase alone would have made a professional weight lifter flinch, and my rucksack was by no means any lighter, although it was considerably smaller in size. All in all, I couldn’t even hope to catch up with her.

Oh well. I dropped the suitcase, sat down on top of it, popped out a pack of Lucky Strikes from a pocket of my vest and lit up a cigarette. She’d come back eventually. No big deal.

Five minutes and two and a half cigarettes later, I started to have that unpleasant tingling sensation at the back of my head which usually meant that something was wrong. I was just about to get up and (dear God, why me?) start looking for her, when I heard a suave voice coming from behind me, “Ano... sumimasen, Arekusu-san desu ka?”

I jumped to my feet and whirled around, nearly tripping over. I found myself face to face with a Japanese girl, probably no older than twenty, who looked up at me expectantly. Her forehead was barely up to my chest.

“Um... hai?” I tried, guessing that she’d just asked me whether I’m ‘Arekusu’ – which was more than definitely the Japanese way to pronounce my name.

“Mira-san wa, niisan to issho ni kuruma e machimasu. Ikemashou ne?”

“I have no idea what you just said”, I replied in an even voice. This was starting to get old. “If you’re looking for Mira, she ran off to look for Takeshi a while ago. You know--” I mimicked the gesture with my fingers “--ran off. To look for Takeshi.” I mimicked someone looking through a pair of binoculars. “Like that.”

The girl laughed. “Omoshiroi desuyo, Arekusu-san!”

I made a face. “I like you, too.” She laughed even harder.

“You know, I wish I’d know what the heck I’m doing here in the first place”. The girl stopped laughing and blinked at me questioningly. I went on regardless. I felt the need to let some steam out; it didn’t really matter if she understood or not. “‘Let’s go to Japan for the holidays’, she said. ‘It’ll be fun’, she said. Well, after suffering a near heart attack on that accursed flight not once, but twice – twice, mind you – here I am stuck in the middle of nowhere, with Mira gone and not a soul in sight to even understand what the hell I’m trying to say here!” I’d come pretty close to shouting out the last words, causing several passer-bys to glare. At the moment, I didn’t really care.

The girl was no longer laughing. She wasn’t even smiling. I took a few deep breaths. “I’m sorry. Sumimasen. I...”

She held up a hand, “Iie. It is all right”, she continued.

For a moment, I just looked at her, dumbstruck. Then, I burst out laughing. What else could I do...?

“You mean to tell me you actually did understand what I said earlier and you were kist mocking me all along... right?” I managed to choke out eventually.

“Sou desu. Sumimasen.”

The girl looked like she was about to cry. I was about to apologize once again when it hit me. The corners of her lips kept twitching upwards, no matter how hard she tried to hide it. She wasn’t on the verge of crying, she was damn well near laughing her head off! And the scary part was that I wasn’t too far behind. How much weirder could things get? I was standing outside Haneda Airport and chit-chatting with some Japanese chick who looked like Mira’s twisted half-sister from the other side of the world.

“All right,” I said, doing my best to put on a straight face. “Who are you?”

“Aara, wasuremashita! Gomen nasai! Watashi wa... eto, my name is Hitomi Kajiwara. I am Takeshi Kajiwara’s younger sister. Pleased to meet you.”

“Hajimemashite”, I said before I could realize it. “Uh... I think.”

She let out a small giggle. “Iie, ii desu yo! Hajimemashite!” She bowed. I bowed back. I was starting to get the hang of this thing.

“Your sister is already at the car with my brother. Come!”

With that, she stood up. I slung my rucksack over my shoulder once again and slowly crawled after her, dragging Mira’s suitcase along. “Wait up!” I called as she was about to step off the stairs and into the sea of people below. “I can’t keep up!”

“Ojiisan osoindayo!” she called over her shoulder without stopping.

“I don’t even want to know!” I shot back. A moment later, I tripped and nearly crashed into several men in suits who were chatting animatedly. I muttered a half-hearted ‘Sumimasen’ and moved along at a snail’s pace.

It seemed to take forever until we reached a small blue convertible parked a little way off. Mira beamed at me from the front seat. “Took you long enough! C’mon, get in! Isn’t this way cool?”

As Mira rambled on, Takeshi smiled, said something I couldn’t make out for the world and motioned for me to get up in the back. I glanced towards the trunk. There was no way in hell Mira’s suitcase would fit in there.

“Something wrong?”

“What am I supposed to do with this?” I asked, patting the top of the suitcase demonstratively. It was nearly half as tall as I was.

Mira pouted. “Well... put it in the backseat or... something. How am I supposed to know?”

‘You should know, since you packed up the house,’ I grunted inwardly. I heaved the suitcase inside, crammed my rucksack next to it and got in myself. Well, this wasn’t so bad. At least I had decently enough space to move.

Then I realized there was another problem. Hitomi had to fit in there, somewhere, too.

“Daijobu desu, Arekusu-san. It’s all right,” she said, as though she’d read my mind. “I know exactly what we can do...”

I arched an eyebrow. Bad feeling coming up. I knew I should’ve stayed at home...