Chihiro Discusses Her Life

It had been two weeks since Chihiro paused her regular visits to Itsuki’s place. Since then, she’d spend about an hour every day lurking around the Gift Publishing neighborhood and the streets, parks, and other areas she ran into Setsuna before, but she never managed to find him. This city was too big, and its population too large, to go searching for someone without any leads—she wasn’t even sure Setsuna was in Tokyo at all right now.

Siiiigh… What am I doing with my time?

She was so helpless that she almost felt some tears forming. So she sat down on a park bench, near where he had joined a cherry-blossom party in the past, and sighed. Two months ago, the cherry trees around here were alive with bright-pink buds; now they were lush with green leaves. Everything was changing. Was struggling not to change doomed from the start?

As she gloomily looked at the new leaves, she suddenly heard a voice.

“Chihiro?”

“Hyah?!”

Quickly, she turned around, only to find that Haruto Fuwa was now next to the bench.

“Fuwa…”

“What’re you doing around here? I heard you stopped going to Itsuki’s place…”

Chihiro gave the concerned-looking Haruto a vague smile. “Um… I kind of went to Itsuki’s neighborhood out of habit, and since I was here, I thought I’d take a walk to refresh myself.”

“Oh.”

It was a pretty strained excuse, but Haruto just smiled instead of pursuing it, sitting down next to Chihiro. “So I hear you’ve been worried about your school performance?”

“Um, yeah.” Chihiro nodded. That wasn’t a lie. Her biggest concerns were Setsuna and the chances of him revealing her secret to Itsuki, but it was true that she had concerns about the flagging test scores as well.

“Yeah, well, it’s your last year of high school… I’m sure all the college-exam prep must be hard.”

“College…,” Chihiro whispered. “Um, Fuwa?”

“Hmm?”

“What do people go to college for…?”

Haruto gave a surprised look. “Ha-ha… I didn’t think you’d be the one asking me that, Chihiro.” He gave a light grin, and Chihiro felt like he was picking on her. She frowned a bit.

When Chihiro’s aptitude test scores fell below expectations, and her parents and teachers worried about her, her concerns didn’t fall along the lines of “I’m shocked at these scores” or “I need to work harder” or “I’m worried about college exams.” Her concerns were much more fundamental: “So what if I didn’t score great?” and “What am I even studying for?” She had been a serious student her whole life, considering that the obvious path to take, and had gotten brilliant results. But now, for the first time, Chihiro was having the same concerns any high schooler—any student in middle or elementary school, really—would have. She was trying to find a place for herself.

“What do you want to do going forward, Chihiro?” Haruto asked.

Chihiro thought for a moment. “…I don’t have anything set in mind.”

“Then I think you should go to college and find something you want to do there.”

“Yeah,” Chihiro groaned. “But if I go there without any real goal in mind, isn’t that a waste of time and money?”

“Better watch your mouth,” Haruto said, laughing. “You’d probably hurt the feelings of around four-fifths of college students in Japan if you said that.”

“Yeah, but my brother quit college pretty fast… I mean, if I would only make a halfhearted attempt at college anyway, maybe it’d be better instead to work and make money for myself, like Itsuki does…”

“I hear you. Yeah, if you have someone close to you who’s less traditional, it makes you think, doesn’t it…? So do you want to work straight out of high school?”

“It’s not that I’m really leaning that way…but part of me thinks that’d be better than just following my teachers’ and parents’ instructions and going to more school…”

“Chihiro, I think having a vague desire to get a job is pretty much the same thing as having a vague desire to stay in school.”

The observation came as a shock to Chihiro.

“You…think so?”

“Yeah. Also, unless you’re a writer or some kind of entertainer, then a college grad is always gonna make more money on average than someone with a high school diploma. It gives you more choices on where to work, too. If you don’t see the road ahead quite as clearly as Itsuki does, it’s not a bad thing at all to go to college and see what happens.” After laying out his opinion, Haruto added with a bit more levity, “…Which, you know, as someone who went to college pretty much as insurance for the future, is just my opinion.”

“…Did you graduate, Fuwa?”

“Eventually, yeah. I heard I’d won my new-writer award in the summer of my last year in high school, but there was no guarantee I could make a career out of it, so I decided to keep going with college. I stopped doing anything with novels entirely until my entrance exams were done with, so I could study.”

“Sounds like you really had it together. Even back then.”

“Nah, I was just a coward,” he said, chiding himself for Chihiro’s compliment. “But once I got in, I started working on my draft of Chevalier of the Absolute World again. I joined that tabletop RPG club. I had a lot of fun. And they told me about the Chevalier anime while I was still in school, so I didn’t bother looking for another job. I figured I could hack it as a full-time writer. But I still got my diploma.”

There was a hint of nostalgia in Haruto’s voice.

“…Are you finding what you learned in college helpful now?”

“Mmm… Well, the history and German language courses I took as part of my gen-ed requirements did help a bit, but not all that much, no. If I got too worried about how the real world works, I wouldn’t be able to write anything, really. Especially not light novels. If anything, the RPGs and team-based monster-hunting games I played help out more with that.”

“Huh. So if that’s true for you as a professional novelist, it has to be even more true for your average guy in an office, doesn’t it?”

“Well, I think some people find jobs that really let them use their majors, but… Yeah. I bet the vast majority don’t.”

So maybe college is a waste of time…?

Haruto smiled gently as Chihiro thought things over.

“But it was fun.”

“Huh?”

“…It was hard balancing school with writing, and the activities I got involved in…well, some of them really screwed me up. But looking back on it, it really was fun. My classes, my clubs, hanging out with my friends…”

“…What does that matter?” whispered the unconvinced Chihiro.

“A lot,” Haruto declared. “I know how serious you are with everything you do, Chihiro. And whether something will help you in the future is important, yeah, but I think it’s fine to choose something based on how fun it is. You’re still young; you’ve got all the time in the world to try something else if you screw up. So I don’t think there’s any need for you to go out of your way to narrow your options… I’m starting to sound like an old man now, aren’t I? I’m still young, too…”

Haruto bashfully snickered a little. Chihiro, meanwhile, processed the words.

“By the way, Chihiro, what are you focused on in school? Arts? Sciences?”

“Science.”

“Oh. What made you pick that?”

“…Because they told me it’d help me find a job” was the honest reply. “Also,” she softly added, “I’m kind of into robots, so…”

Haruto burst into laughter.

“D-don’t laugh at that!” Chihiro protested, her face turning red.

“Sorry, sorry,” said Haruto. “But robots are fine! I write fantasy novels, but they’re full of robots, so sometimes I wish I’d focused more on science classes, too.”

“…But you describe the robots in your novels in such realistic terms. I thought you had more of a scientific background.”

The fantasy world of Chevalier of the Absolute World featured swords, lances, and other weapons transforming into giant robots. But the post-transformed robots, as well as their armor and other features, trended toward the realistic side, something Chihiro especially enjoyed.

“Yeah, I had to do a lot of research and reading to get that feel going. But there’s only so much you can learn by yourself, so sometimes I’d ask friends in an engineering major, or I’d have them connect me to professors in that field. They still help me out sometimes.”

“Neat…” Chihiro was impressed.

“So along those lines, I guess I am glad I went to college.” Haruto smiled.

“You know,” Chihiro said, contemplating matters, “I think I had too narrow a vision for myself. All I thought about was how a college education would help me. I didn’t think about how fun it’d be, or clubs, or the people I’d run into at all.”

Haruto gave Chihiro a couple hard pats on the head.

“Ow! Fuwa?!”

“I’m telling you, Chihiro, you think about things too seriously. You should take at least half of a cue from your bother. Okay, maybe a quarter of a cue.”

“Y-yeah…” Chihiro nodded, blushing, as Haruto’s phone began to ring inside his bag.

“Hmm?” Haruto took it out, looked at the screen, and scowled as he started talking. “…Oh? Ahh, yeah, I’m coming home now… No, not yet… Huh? No! God, what a pain in the ass.”

Chihiro’s eyebrows shot up. This was much cruder than Haruto’s usual manner of speech. From what she could hear, there was a woman on the line.

“Huh? …All right. All right, okay? Don’t blame me if you turn into a pig… Oh, shut up! Don’t yell at me, dumbass! …Yeah, yeah, I’ll get some cream puffs if they’re sold out… Ugh, fine, geez… Yeah, right, thanks a lot…”

With a monumental sigh, Haruto ended the call.

“Um, what was that…?”

“My sister,” Haruto breathed, rolling his eyes. “This bakery by the rail station has a fancy new roll cake, and she wants me to buy it for her. There’s always a huge line at that place…”

…But he was gonna line up anyway.

“You sure get along with her, it sounds like.”

Haruto grimaced. “No way. Not at all. She’s so goddamn selfish. It drives me up the wall, living with her…”

…I’ve never been selfish to my own brother.

Chihiro had never met this sister before, but she was a bit envious.

“Anyway, I better start walking to the station,” Haruto said as he got up.

“Oh, right… Thanks for talking to me. It was really helpful.”

“You’re welcome,” he replied. “I look forward to your food at Itsuki’s place again soon.”

“Y-yeah… I’ll try to make that happen.”

Chihiro stayed on the park bench for a while after Haruto had gone.