Crossover Fan Fiction ❯ Kantei ❯ Smoke ( Chapter 6 )

My life is a series of tasks, interrupted by tobacco where the frenetic pace slows down into focus, just for a few minutes as the nicotine hits my lungs, my blood, and my brain. My jangling nerves finally smooth. Just for a little while. In another world I’d participated in a rebellion, Japan invaded by the British Empire which never fell. I think it was a metaphor for the American occupation. I mostly ignore the weird memories, which linger like a bad dream. If I had any choice in the matter I would rather dream about hot guys, but this is probably because my teenage hormones are raging with need. The prefecture will let me marry legally in another year and a half, and I’m in the market for a husband. Why women change men I will never understand. Mother and Father met in high school and have been together ever since. They are having their love affair, even now, all these years later. It is amazing what is possible when actual affection exists in a couple.

The downside is their love affair takes so much of their affection it has left me responsible for raising Taishi and Keika. I wash their clothes. I cook their meals. I changed Keika’s diapers, and wash her in the bath. To be fair, mother and father work long and strange hours in their job together at the sake brewery. It isn’t all automated, not the good stuff, which is what they make. Human intervention is required along every step, checking for contamination, and losing a batch is expensive. The bad stuff is run through a distillery and turned into gin by adding various herbs grown on the premises. They don’t lose many batches, so they don’t need more, apparently. I’ve visited the place a few times.

The people in school all seem to be super busy doing various things, rather than slow down and take a minute to absorb. I do this every time I smoke a cigarette. I take it all in and just let the mess settle. Nothing is so frantic. Frantic is just a sign of people stressing themselves out. I suspect they will end their lives early, doing that. Even the carcinogens in tobacco are better for me than all the heart disease from stress your average Japanese adult suffers from, often to an early death. And not always self inflicted. There are starting to be rumors of companies, called Black companies, which work their employees to death. And for some reason, people don’t just quit and do something else. A black company does not deserve two weeks notice to replace you. Just walk off the job and find something else. Their reputation is already known to be bad. I think a bunch of the students in my class have parents in black companies. Like that Hachiman guy. He’s always quietly sitting, his earphones in, watching people with that gross smirk on his face, and I know its because his parents are always working. And I know that because Taishi told me, and my little brother is dating Hachiman’s sister Komachi. She’s a cute genki girl, completely different personality, and she swears that Hachiman raised her because their folks are always working, and part of me wonders if I drank coffee instead of smoked, if I’d have a creepy smirk like that? Would I look like the posterboy of modern Japanese cynicism? Or poster girl? Or pin-up girl? Okay, so I do look like a successful supermodel, but I know that in time I’ll wear out, so I still need a husband, someone who will work hard to provide for our children and keep a roof over our heads, and that is easier in the countryside than in the cities full of crowding and pointless paper pushing jobs… but I don’t feel ready to move out there yet. And part of me thinks this is the most important thing I can do for my own future. If I stay here, go to college, start a business, build it up till I’m successful… I’ll find myself at 45 years old, lonely and sagging and unable to get a man who will put up with my cold businesswoman personality, and part of me thinks that it won’t be worth it. That being a housewife would be better. That all this fuss over careers is just a way to boost the Japanese economy and add another tax payer.

Then I take another drag on my cigarette and all the frantic worries flow away, slowing down until they aren’t worries anymore. If I could find a less poisonous vice that let me think like this I would trade in the tobacco for it. But I haven’t found anything yet.