September 19th 2023, 4:32 PM
I wrote the first entry of this in the small hours of the morning, so the memory of actually writing the words is already blurred, in addition to my motive for writing them. Is it a recount? I suppose so. I can't imagine anything so embarrassing as writing a diary, so let's just call this a recount.
Huh. That sounds like something Yukinoshita Yukino would say.
If there is a silver lining to irregular sleep habits, it is that it lends extra time for monologuing that you otherwise wouldn't have had in the day. I find that it is at night, when half embarked on the passage to your dreams, that your mind is the least muddled.
I suppose it was an impulse. An impulse to record those thoughts that I was having, and the emotions that accompanied them. The best thing about words is their ability to capture things that would usually be intangible. In a story, a love affair or a car crash or whatever the hell you want is no longer something indescribable, and internalised. Instead, it is right there on the computer screen that I always type on, and therefore, it is recorded.
It exists. It can be remembered.
I suppose that I want to preserve those two weeks, even if no one ever cares to reads it. Even if the only person that preservation matters to is myself. I want to preserve her. Yukinoshita Yukino, or at least the woman that she is in my mind and my dreams and my memories.
Because, at about half past two in the morning, two days ago, I thought that I truly saw and felt her again, in the room beside me, for the first time in five years. Standing beside the bed or perhaps within it, her eyes like chips of ice burning at a thousand degrees, her lips never quite touching my own, but nevertheless undeniably present. That ridiculous notion both comforted me and angered me, and I think that was why I reached down and grabbed my laptop.
I didn't write anymore of the recount (I will continue to call it a recount for the foreseeable future) yesterday because I was trying to write more of Volume 6. Nothing worked, and although writing this will probably only serve as yet another distraction, I can't help but think that it is infinitely more deserving of my attention.
So here am I, typing away, not entirely sure where to go next. But, I suppose that every good recount needs a proper beginning, not some barely comprehensible nonsense that I typed when half asleep.
Five years ago, I suppose that I was twenty six years old. Just old enough that university and monotonous days in a classroom seemed very much a thing of the past, but still young enough that life still felt as if it were dangling on that shuddering precipice just before true adulthood.
I'd decided somewhere along the way that the clearest path to a livelihood, or perhaps just the easiest and most obvious, was to become a teacher. I'd always been told I was good, or at least a respectable writer, but never felt much of an urge to write for myself despite my love of light novels. So, after earning my degree, I did my training and became a teaching assistant at the very high school that I myself had attended: Sobu High.
It was a little odd returning to it at first, but since I reserved no feelings of affection for the place (in fact, my memories of it are pretty overwhelmingly negative), a routine quickly sprang up. Just like in my adolescence, I was waking up bright and early in the morning and cycling over to those familiar school gates, though this time with close to a dozen more years burdening my shoulders.
I soon found myself with enough money, accrued both from the teaching gig and about a dozen other part time jobs around Chiba, to be living in an apartment. My life was taking shape.
And yet, at twenty six, living in the very same streets and districts and gloomy grey buildings that I'd lived all my life, I couldn't but feel that I didn't much like the beginnings of that shape. There were jagged edges and sharp points were there should have been soft curves. Isolation is nothing strange to me, but despite frequent visitations from my adorable imouto Komachi, that isolation was swiftly becoming alienation.
I felt cut off from everything that I'd always known, and yet never really known at all. Constantly ensnared in the trappings of my own mind, and living a life that I didn't quite seem to belong to. In other words, I was having a midlife crisis twenty years too early. And what does one do when undergoing a midlife crisis? Start planning some crazed, half forgotten adventure dreamed up in your youth that was probably forgotten for a very good reason.
Since my own ambitions had always been kept restrained within the realm of possibility, it was perhaps fitting that my solution to this burst of melancholy was something as mundane as to travel. It is an old and naive assumption; that life will be lent more meaning simply by a change in location and the dispelling of familiarity, but nonetheless an appealing one.
So, I waited until there was a break in the school year (my rebellion wasn't to be so radical as to leave while I was still working) and then, as that two week holiday approached, I organised everything for a trip to New York without consulting anyone at all. I wanted this search for an epiphany to be a lonesome search, despite the fact that one of my intentions was to alleviate lonesomeness in the first place.
The faulty logic didn't even occur to me at the time, and neither did the full financial ramifications of the flight across the Atlantic. A large portion of my savings disappeared with the click of a button. I didn't really think out any particular course of action, and what's more, I didn't want to. The irregularity of it all was the appeal.
And New York? No reason. It was, in all seriousness, one of the first proper nouns to spring to the forefront of my mind while on the web. Since my family had never been well off, the furthest I'd ever been from Chiba was still very much in Japan, and the whole world was something new and ever so slightly exhilarating. The more exhilarating, the more life affirming the experience became, the better.
It was a harebrained philosophy to follow, but one that achieved results, albeit questionable in their success. I remember very little about the flight itself (perhaps because I was asleep) and I arrived in New York feeling somewhere between intimidated and excited. And a little annoyed, for as soon as I switched off aeroplane mode on my phone, I was bombarded by a rush of missed call and voicemail notifications from my family asking where on earth I was and what on earth I was hoping to achieve in worrying them.
I booked my hotel in advance, a three star place just a couple of blocks away from Manhattan, and arrived there with my single suitcase packed only with the essentials- my laptop, a couple of light novels, clothes and a washbag. It was on a fairly crumby backstreet called Pathway Avenue, but the building of the hotel, suitably named The Liberty, was the tallest on it and so my view from the eleventh floor was an expansive one.
The room was small and cleaned only often, but perfectly adequate for my undemanding needs. I remember when I first entered, I dropped everything, pulled up a chair in front of the window and sat there. I sat and stared, for what must've been an hour or more.
You see, after living in Chiba for twenty six years, I honestly thought that I knew what a city was. A city was the blaring horns of traffic and the exhausting streets and the greyish sky and the fumes and a whole lot of people on their way to a job or a different city or place. New York was all of that, but it was simultaneously about five hundred thousand other things. It is a sensitive spot, a hub, of everything that could can cross a man's mind for the briefest second. Then, it indulges in that thought until suddenly, nearby the Statue of Liberty and the Empire States Building, another skyscraper or business emerges.
It is so huge and so overflowing at the seams that I admit I felt completely lost, but that was okay, because in another hotel on the other side of the city there was another Hikigaya Hachiman who felt just as swallowed by the bristling movement of that absurd city, and that meant that I wasn't truly lost at all. In fact, it meant precisely the opposite.
I don't know what I was expecting to happen in the two weeks that followed. I don't know if I thought that I'd meet someone in the throng of a billion someones, or even really find anything at all. I didn't know if I was inspired or even more depressed, and I definitely didn't know how I wanted to spend the time that I'd booked in New York's (needless to say) rather busy schedule.
For the first three days, I embarked upon-
September 19th 2023, 5:17 PM
Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Rin-
Hachiman: What is it, Katsomoto-kun-
Koto: Oh... Hachiman! I must admit, I wasn't expecting you to pick up.
Hachiman: I don't blame you. It's not like I've answered much before-
Koto: Which, by the way, is incredibly annoying. Do you remember when you used to talk to me? You know, communication? Pretty radical, I know.
Hachiman: You can text me. It's a lot less distracting than listening to your voice, Katsomoto-kun.
Koto: *sigh* I don't know how many times I've asked you to call me by my given name, Hachiman-
Hachiman: It's very probably totalled into the hundreds, Katsomoto-kun. And I don't remember ever giving you permission to call me by my given name either.
Koto: Five years working together must equate to something. Is it really so hard to consider that we might be friends-
Hachiman: It's not hard to think about, per say. Just pointless, because we're not friends.
Koto: ... Well, if you're gonna insist on being childish, then I suppose I'll be take the initiative and be the professional. You probably know why I've called.
Hachiman: Yeah, and you didn't need to. I'm writing it.
Koto: That's it?
Hachiman: That's what?
Koto: You're writing it? That's genuinely the best you can give me? I need more than that. How many chapters have you done, a word count, how long before you send me the manuscript, something-
Hachiman: I don't know what you want me to say. I'll send it when I finish it.
Koto: It's part of your contract to update us, Hachiman. It was never a problem for the first few volumes.
Hachiman: And I've updated you, so can I hang up no-
Koto: C'mon man! Can you just give me a preliminary? The big guys up top are on my ass enough asking for details as it is. It wasn't you that got the shit talking and the rants when we had to put back the release date the first time.
Hachiman: ...
Koto: Nothing?
Hachiman: ...
Koto: ... Fine. I'm hanging up-
Hachiman: Three chapters.
Koto: ...
Hachiman: You gonna say something...?
Koto: ... Fuck's sake man. Please tell me your taking the piss-
Hachiman: Don't complain to me, Katsomoto-kun. You asked for an update; I gave you an update.
Koto: ... Nah. I'm glad you told me at least. *exhale* Did you write those recently, or...?
Hachiman: ... Not exactly.
Koto: So you've got Writer's Block then? I mean, I'd already guessed as much, but it'll be nice to get confirmation.
Hachiman: Actually, I was writing when you called.
Koto: Really?
Hachiman: Yeah.
Koto: ... Are you alright, man?
Hachiman: I told you. The manuscript will come-
Koto: I'm not asking about your writing. I'm asking about you. Can you tell me that you're alright, in all seriousness?
Hachiman: ...
Koto: 'Cause believe me, it's fine if you aren't. It's pretty common with writers. Even if you don't wanna talk to me about it, we can find someone to help you out-
Call end.
