My name is Keitaro Urashima, and I have but a single dream: To attend Tokyo University and meet with the girl I promised to meet there! When I tell that to people they tend to give me a bit of a blank stare and ask “then what?”, to which I would answer “Then I figure out what to do next,” to which they would say “Really? That’s pretty short term planning. Wouldn’t getting in be much easier if you had a more solid idea of what you wanted to do with your life?”
I’m was considering that point especially when our story begins, given as to how at that pointed I had failed to get in twice now. Unfortunately I had much higher concerns to deal with at the time given that my parents kicked me out following my second failure and I had no place to go save to stay with Granny Hina at her hotel. I had not been there in quite some considerable time, but fate seemed determined to get me there as soon as possible.
Except that wasn’t all fate had in store. Destiny is a web of half coincidences that lead one towards a future that at the point it arrives seems inevitable. Each thread in that web flies off in too many directions to count, many of them bending around to intersect one another in ways that are surprising, diverse, inexplicable... and inevitable.
It began with a growling stomach which led to me heading into a store I was passing by at the time. I could ill afford to spend much of the very limited amount I had with me, so a simple snack would have to suffice for the time being. Something that would quell the hunger long enough for me to get to Granny’s and climb the many many many many steps that were probably not quite as bad as my fifteen year old memory was telling me. Once I had a better understanding of the situation, I could figure out a budget with a better understanding of my situation. Or so I reasoned at the time.
I didn’t feel the pull of the thread, but it surely must have for my gaze fell upon something I’d never seen before. It was touted as a limited edition experiment. I picked one of the rectangular boxes up. It felt like there were two things inside it, one that stretched the whole length and something smaller down at one end. The packaging gave the explanation: Apparently, some high up in the company had recently visited Europe and taken a fascination with some egg shaped chocolate they had over there that had a toy inside it. The product was banned in America because of the obvious choking hazards of putting a toy inside chocolate, so they decided to try a different approach. Package a small toy with the bar. Even I could see that this wouldn’t solve the underlying problem, but it was cheap and I could use a bit of a laugh.
The chocolate itself was... a bar of chocolate. Nothing special about it. As for the toy itself, that came in a separate container. A box within the box. I read the inscription on it, and it read “A pair of perfectly normal earrings”, which on opening the box, I found was exactly what they were. Just a pair of normal and unremarkable earrings. Not pretty, not ugly. Just... normal. Average. Unremarkable. Mundane. Boring... When did I swallow a thesaurus?
Never mind that, it’s not really the point. The point is that I caught myself staring at those earrings with no small amount of fascination, and it took me a while to realise just why that was. They reminded me of myself. See the list of synonyms for “normal” above, and you get a pretty good description of Keitaro Urashima. I’m not even my own worst critic. That would be Naru, when she’s herself... but that would be skipping ahead a bit. For now let us say that I felt the pull of fate for the first and not the last time. I was destined to have these earrings. They were symbolic of everything I was, and without a second thought I clipped them onto my ears - they were the kind that simply gripped the ears and did not require a piercing to wear or I would never have done this - and continued on my way to the hotel.
“Guess I did remember this right,” I sighed at the bottom of the stairs. Oh well. If nothing else I’d be pretty healthy by the time I got my act together! Heading up and down this lot every day would surely get my leg muscles all worked out, at the very least. Up I trudged, with my mental and emotional weariness eventually turning into physical weariness as well. Here I was, and I could only hope that she had room for me, wanted to have me here, and so on.
But I didn’t quite realise yet that these questions didn’t matter. Even if they were not answered in my favour, I’d have wound up staying at the hotel anyway. It was destined.
“Hello,” I called into the empty front hall. “Is anyone home?” Apparently not. I entered and looked around, feeling a little bit confused. “Grandma!” I called out. “It’s your grandson Keitaro! Something happened at home so I was wondering if I could study here. Can I get a room and stay here for a while?”
While silence is not this building’s normal answer, it was on this occasion.
There wasn’t much else for it. I went into Grandma’s room to wait for her, and started to reflect a bit more on my situation now that I was able to finally sit down, catch my breath and deny the possibility that I could not overcome my handicap of being completely average! I would enter Tokyo University one day, and I would find that girl that I can’t remember the name or face of! Even if girls avoided me as though I had the stench of death. Even if I always wound up having to dance with a male partner at any given dancing event. Even if my hobby of collecting photo stickers wound up with me having nothing but photos of myself. Even if, even if, even if I could still always rely on that promise! It was my only chance to get a girlfriend! The only girl that would ever talk to me, in all twenty years of my life!
Or so I thought at the time. You have no idea how funny that thought is right now. No idea at all.
Boredom strikes the boring harder than it does most people, because then the only thing that they have to think about is themselves. Suddenly the boredom becomes recursive, so when I felt able to actually walk again I got out of grandma’s room and took a look around. The very first room I found was nothing less than an open area hot spring, which I didn’t know even existed in the hotel. Well! Just the thing for aching muscles, wouldn’t you say? How could I resist? More importantly, how could I not see until later on that all these things were so obviously connected to my ultimate fate? Heh. Well. I suppose at that point I didn’t know about the historian’s fallacy either.
On that same note it was kind of stupid of me to just strip down unannounced and take a dip. I really should have found someone else to talk to first, or I could have caught all manner of hell. The damning thing about most mistakes is that they don’t seem like mistakes at the time they’re made, and believe me when I say that ducking my head under that hot water just made all the concerns I had been struggling with all day melt away completely. Evaporating with the steam, relaxing mind body and spirit. I don’t mean to sound like I’m shilling for the place I happen to own, but really this hot spring is amazing. You don’t even know until you try it.
Ah, but then I heard the doors open. Finally, someone had made their appearance in this until this moment empty building! Oh but of course they would choose now to appear, now that I was naked in the hot spring. Way to make a good first impression, right? Whoever it was, I couldn’t quite see properly. Bit long sighted, and the steam sure didn’t help much either. Only when the vision happened to clear up a little did I realise who it was.
She appeared as though manifesting in the steam, a perfectly womanly creature. Naked from her beautiful head to her magnificent toes. It was an angel. I shouldn’t have stared, but I dare anyone in the same situation to do anything else. I don’t care what your preferences are, the body of Naru Narusegawa demands, insists upon and gets respect.
Or maybe that’s just my bias given how we wound up. Doesn’t matter much either way given that this was the first time I’d been in the presence of a beautiful naked woman... Let me think... Carry the one... Ever. I had no time at all to prevent my libido from muscling in and insisting that this was a chance that would never come again, drink in all of this with your damn fool eyes and commit to memory for later use. And my libido would have been so wrong, a fact for which I am grateful on every single day of my life.
But the really interesting thing is what happened next.
Sat Jun 02 09:22:11 2012
2 comments Last updated: Mon Dec 14 03:43:01 2015