Golden Time:Volume6 Chapter1

Status: Incomplete

20% completed (estimated)

   

Golden Time 6: Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Speaking of August 31st, for children going back and forth from school in Japan, it was the dreadful "Judgement Day."

Take Katsuo, for example.

A young man having the remarkably good looks of his parents, a strange perm parting his hair in three, living with an older yakuza girl and a younger miniskirted girl.

Pretty good at most everything, good at talking himself out of trouble, blessed both in ideas and the ability to accomplish them, you could sometimes say that in his actions he showed cunning. But even when showing outstanding intellect, he could not escape judgement at the end of the day. That time limit looming over him mercilessly, his round face (still showing the innocence of youth) twisted by impatience and fear, he would wind up involving not only his family, but even his brother in law in the madness.

Or perhaps Nobita. He ought to be sleeping and waking under the same roof with a robot which easily sidestepped the limitations of time, distance and so forth through future technology. And then there's Chibi Maruko. Bound by chains of love, her grandfather would do just about anything for his granddaughter. ...And yet, even with such advantageous options they still, just like Katsuo, cannot escape from their Judgement Day.

So. August 31st is the last day of children's summer vacation. Children all throughout Japan tremble in fear, overtaken by drowsiness and fatigue as they were condemned for their laziness, the blood-colored words "PLAN AHEAD" tattooed on their souls as they bawl, "I didn't finish my homework!" It was such an accursed, promised date.

But, when that day passed leisurely by, and the world passes into September, the college student's summer vacation is not yet over.

And college students have no homework.

There are no picture diaries with accumulated writing, and no withered morning glory flowers. Without advancing math or kanji drills, the long summer vacation just keeps wandering along into September.

But it wasn't enough. It was just last week they'd set out in a car for the beach to make some unforgettable summer memories. But they weren't blessed with good weather, and he didn't even get a suntan. Not just Banri. None of his friends did either.

Unforgettable memories... so to speak. To put it more bluntly, "trauma" was what we had all suffered. And it was pretty severe.

Tokyo in September. Summer vacation still going on, just past noon.

Sitting across from Banri, Two Dimensions let out a strange noise, "Eep! Couscous...!"

He wasn't laughing. Couscous. It was a very small, pale-yellow colored, crumbly pasta. In appearance, it's color is close to, but not quite, that of "land caviar." Incidentally, that's "tonburi." It's the very small, greenish-colored miniature fruit of the common kocchia plant.

Two Dimensions was rather frightened of the lunch plate of the day placed on the table special thickly piled with dense lumps of stuff he wasn't used to seeing. Next to him, his face pointlessly well ordered, Mitsuo was taking a selfie with his friend the couscous. This guy had the almost girlish tendency to take pictures the first time he encountered some new, poisonous looking food.

Banri and his two good friends, immersed in the stylish room's stylish space, with it's stylish soups boiled down in stylish pots for stylish appetites. No. Feeling out of place, rather.

Though this was his second time visiting this café, today, like the time before, he did not feel comfortable in this stylish zone. The stylish flooring, the stylish sofa, the stylish music and the stylish lights. The stylish trees. The stylish oxygen. He was uncomfortable with the stylish man in a beard the next seat over, moving his finger stylishly over his notepad. The corner where the three of them were seated stood out from the surroundings in awkward bas-relief. Banri looked vaguely over at the bridge of his couscous-frightened friend's nose and eyelids. The last time he was here, it wasn't Two Dimensions there, but rather Kouko seated across from him. The bridge of her nose was a bit finer. It was sleek, and her eyelids sparkled like pale pearls, with long eyelashes... For no good reason, he curled the sheepskin parchment menu (so stylish!) into a tube and looked at his friends through it. As he moved its muzzle back and forth between the faces of his friends,

"You can start eating now."

Banri raised his voice to the other two, who already had their lunches placed before them. His portion was running a little late and had yet to arrive.

"Come on now, it's embarrassing... it's hard to be watched while eating."

Chided by Mitsuo, who had beef curry set before him, Banri stopped with the telescope. ...Incidentally, even this handsome guy felt out of place in this stylish zone. Being stylish (or not) is not simply a matter of one's looks.

And the cell-phone in his back pocket was as quiet, as usual. Not so much as a twitch. A short time ago he'd sent a text "Everyone's at Oka-chan's café, you're it!" to Kouko, but there had been no answer. Banri was no longer surprised by that.

It had already been a week since he'd last heard from Kouko.

It started on the day they'd all gone to the beach, and on the way back Kouko had fallen asleep at the wheel and got into an accident. Since that day, nobody, not even Banri, had been able to get in touch with Kouko herself.

There was no answers to texts nor phone calls, and in the end we couldn't even connect to her phone, and nobody knew why. They didn't know whether she didn't want to be contacted, or whether she was in a situation where she couldn't have contacted them if she wanted to. Left to his imagination, Banri could do nothing but worry. He thought he might simply leave her alone for a bit after all that had happened, but as you might expect, a week with no word from her was simply too much. He was too worried.

Everyone else seemed to be worried about Kouko too, and so, unable to sit still, at Banri's urging, the friends had tried gathering at this stylish café for now.

"Sorry to keep you all waiting... this is borscht."

Setting Banri's soup plate lunch on the table, Chinami plopped herself down on the sofa next to him.

Having removed the apron she had on until just now, now in jeans and a simple T-shirt, her long black hair neatly done up in three braids, she only had a coffee set before her.

"Good job, Oka-chan. Shouldn't you have some lunch?"

When Two Dimensions called out to her,

"The kitchen looked rather busy, so I'll have lunch later."

Chinami chuckled innocently, her voice and appearance like something out of an anime. As always, her soft, milky white, smiling face would be the envy of a baby. Against her pale complexion, her eyes sparkled the color of outer space. Innocent, flawless, unprecedentedly pretty, with a single "Ehe!" she filled the stylish room in an instant. Chinami was peerlessly pure again today.

We'd all decided to get together anyway, but Chinami's schedule was filled up with her job for a while yet. That being the case, we figured we'd simply drop in at her job, and this is what happened. Her break was an hour long, so for that hour she became a customer of the café.

Banri, finding a spoon buried in the plate of green salad he was served, tried to grab it, but dropped it on the table. His fingers were sticky.

"......Wow. Even the borscht is stylish..."

He looked at his smeared fingers and groaned.

On the borscht's rich, dark brown surface, white cream was splashed about in an avant-garde design. It was splashed with the same energy, leaving no gaps, over the salad, on the handle of the spoon, even over the borders of the plate, saying to the person with spoon in hand, "Shall we eat?" It was a trap designed to get the diner stylishly sticky. Incidentally, for some strange reason, it was garnished with some sort of stylish dried grass. The bread was a stylish green, about the color of vegetable juice. The jomon pottery in which the borscht was served was only about five centimeters across and charming. But at Banri's loan groan,

<~~20% Completed~~>

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