[Iwata]
by macey_muse
Akari no Shousetsu
The story of Akari’s life goes something like this:
She graduates high school with reasonable grades. Gets a job in a shop, does a course on secretarial work in the evenings. Gets an office job. Wears demure skirts and button-up blouses, doesn’t dye her hair. Marries her best friend.
The problem, she realizes about half-way through middle school, is this:
Akari isn’t her mother. She wasn’t born in the fifties when everything was about tradition and honour and, frankly, that life sounds pretty boring. There’s only so much you can do whilst wearing an office drone’s skin, and maybe she’s clever enough to escape that path. Maybe not; at the very least, she’s not going to keep her marks below the boys’ just to seem unintimidating to potential husbands.
Anyway, it’s not like she ever planned on marrying Hikaru. She’d end up pushing him under a train or off a bridge, or poisoning his tea, and who wants to be a widow before they’re thirty, seriously.
So, Akari’s actual life plan goes a bit more like this:
Get good enough grades (and sit the entrance exams in secret) to get a good enough scholarship to not give her mother a heart attack about university fees; graduate with a degree in law or medicine. Put in the necessary junior years until she makes partner or consultant, at which point she should be able to afford a (younger, handsome) husband. Most importantly, do it all on her terms. In some pretty spectacular suits.
One thing her life plan didn’t include, thank-you-very-much, was walking in on her projected-future-husband and his clearly-less-than-heterosexual life rival making out over a go-ban the night before her exams.
There are a couple of ways it could have gone. If Akari was the girl her mother (still) thinks she is, it probably would have gone like this:
She gasps, and it’s a quiet sound, but evidently not quiet enough - Hikaru turns, but she’s frozen in the doorway. Akira is blushing, Hikaru is babbling some kind of half-baked explanation but there are tears on her cheeks already. His movement breaks the spell and she runs, straight out into the street (where it’s probably raining), clutching the remains of shattered dreams within her chest.
But that girl’s pretty much as far from the actual Akari as it’s possible to get. It probably would have gone rather more like this:
She gasps, yes - there are some instincts it’s hard to break - but it’s not a meek sound. There are raised voices (hers and Hikaru’s) and emphatic gestures (mostly hers). There might be some things thrown, most likely at Hikaru. She half-expects Akira to excuse himself and flee, but he stands steady, keeps his voice low. Surprisingly, that has enough of an impact on Hikaru to calm them all, and bring Akari to a standstill (before she runs out of manga and moves on to cd’s). She leaves, yes, but this time with both shoes and dignity.
‘Probably,’ that is, were it not for the fact that Akari has known (or at least guessed) about those two since Akira came looking for Hikaru, way back when they were both still at Haze.
What actually happens is:
Akari quietly closes the door and heads downstairs to tell Shindou-san she’s postponing her tutoring session ‘til next week.
Her story’s waiting.
Akari no Shousetsu
The story of Akari’s life goes something like this:
She graduates high school with reasonable grades. Gets a job in a shop, does a course on secretarial work in the evenings. Gets an office job. Wears demure skirts and button-up blouses, doesn’t dye her hair. Marries her best friend.
The problem, she realizes about half-way through middle school, is this:
Akari isn’t her mother. She wasn’t born in the fifties when everything was about tradition and honour and, frankly, that life sounds pretty boring. There’s only so much you can do whilst wearing an office drone’s skin, and maybe she’s clever enough to escape that path. Maybe not; at the very least, she’s not going to keep her marks below the boys’ just to seem unintimidating to potential husbands.
Anyway, it’s not like she ever planned on marrying Hikaru. She’d end up pushing him under a train or off a bridge, or poisoning his tea, and who wants to be a widow before they’re thirty, seriously.
So, Akari’s actual life plan goes a bit more like this:
Get good enough grades (and sit the entrance exams in secret) to get a good enough scholarship to not give her mother a heart attack about university fees; graduate with a degree in law or medicine. Put in the necessary junior years until she makes partner or consultant, at which point she should be able to afford a (younger, handsome) husband. Most importantly, do it all on her terms. In some pretty spectacular suits.
One thing her life plan didn’t include, thank-you-very-much, was walking in on her projected-future-husband and his clearly-less-than-heterosexual life rival making out over a go-ban the night before her exams.
There are a couple of ways it could have gone. If Akari was the girl her mother (still) thinks she is, it probably would have gone like this:
She gasps, and it’s a quiet sound, but evidently not quiet enough - Hikaru turns, but she’s frozen in the doorway. Akira is blushing, Hikaru is babbling some kind of half-baked explanation but there are tears on her cheeks already. His movement breaks the spell and she runs, straight out into the street (where it’s probably raining), clutching the remains of shattered dreams within her chest.
But that girl’s pretty much as far from the actual Akari as it’s possible to get. It probably would have gone rather more like this:
She gasps, yes - there are some instincts it’s hard to break - but it’s not a meek sound. There are raised voices (hers and Hikaru’s) and emphatic gestures (mostly hers). There might be some things thrown, most likely at Hikaru. She half-expects Akira to excuse himself and flee, but he stands steady, keeps his voice low. Surprisingly, that has enough of an impact on Hikaru to calm them all, and bring Akari to a standstill (before she runs out of manga and moves on to cd’s). She leaves, yes, but this time with both shoes and dignity.
‘Probably,’ that is, were it not for the fact that Akari has known (or at least guessed) about those two since Akira came looking for Hikaru, way back when they were both still at Haze.
What actually happens is:
Akari quietly closes the door and heads downstairs to tell Shindou-san she’s postponing her tutoring session ‘til next week.
Her story’s waiting.