Brave Story - Miyuki Miyabe [35]
One by one he checked the pictures, starting with the ones of his room. As he expected, none of them revealed anything about the girl with the voice like honey. He glanced through the photos from the zoo. Wataru mugging for the camera in front of a flock of flamingoes. Kuniko tossing the pigeons some popcorn. It was a bright, sunny day—Kuniko and Wataru were squinting and smiling.
And Akira Mitani was nowhere to be seen, just like Mitsuru had said.
Chapter 5
The Incident
This is just my unlucky month.
That was the only explanation for it. Clearly, nothing good would come of this June, no matter how hard Wataru tried. How could so many things happen in one month to make him feel so miserable?
I’ve just got to lie low until summer vacation starts.
Wataru hated June more than any other month. For one thing, it rained constantly in Tokyo, and the temperature would drop unexpectedly, making his nose run. Then, after that, he was forced to endure an endless stretch of steamy, sweaty nights. He was never sure if he should wear short sleeves or long sleeves, and the humidity meant his favorite clothes took forever to dry after they came out of the wash. To this day it was a mystery to him why his mom never bought a clothes dryer. Since their place faced south, she figured she could hang laundry outside to dry. Wataru reminded her many times that it didn’t matter which way the apartment faced. If the sun didn’t come out, the clothes wouldn’t dry. And he hated having wet laundry hanging inside the house. It felt so…tacky.
“We don’t need one,” she would patiently explain. “Even during the rainy season, there are sunny days every once in a while.”
And so June passed by somberly and, more often than not, soggily. Yes, just letting June mosey on by was the safest strategy. He would just have to retreat into his shell and become even more subdued than usual.
Wataru no longer heard rumors about the haunted building because he had stopped paying attention to them. People tired of such things quickly. He never saw anyone from the Daimatsu family again, and neither did Katchan. Construction on the building had stopped completely.
Mitsuru continued to prove what a good student he was, both at school and at Kasuga Seminars. When they took the bi-monthly performance tests to gauge their academic progress, he easily scored higher than even Yutaro.
Thankfully, as it came closer to the end of the month, Wataru had something better than Mitsuru Ashikawa and haunted buildings to think about. He would be spending the entire month of August at his grandmother’s house near the ocean in Chiba. Since he started elementary school, it had become tradition for him to spend the end of July and the first week of August—prime beach time—with his grandmother. Akira wasn’t able to get much time off from work, and Kuniko didn’t feel right about leaving her husband to fend for himself, so Wataru inevitably went alone. He had been doing this since he was in kindergarten, so it wasn’t a big deal. Not once had he gotten homesick, or cried for his mother. “My little beach bum,” Uncle Lou would proudly call him.
This year, for the first time, they were letting him spend the entire month of August there. Of course, because he was going to be there so long, he couldn’t just loaf about like a guest. He would be helping out at his grandmother’s store, at the beach-house vending stall, with Uncle Lou’s work, and however else he could.
“You do good work and I’ll pay you a fitting salary,” his uncle had promised, making Wataru jump up and down with glee. A salary! The word was like magic to Wataru’s ears.
After Eldritch Stone Saga III came out, another must-have game called Bionic Road was due for release sometime in mid-November. It was an action game, not an RPG, but the magazine