Gravity, Alchemic

Spherical Shell Elastic 2

Translated by KuroNeko
Edited by KuroNeko

2

I was born on April 2, 1994. I don’t remember being born on that day, but my parents say I was, so probably I was.

    This was about the time when Lake Inawashiro was officially acknowledged as “Japan’s second biggest lake” owing to the end of the great expansion period known as the “land bubble” and the confluence of Lake Kasumigaura in Ibaraki and Lake Saroma in Hokkaido with the sea. It appears to have become a bit of a local event.

    Wakamatsu City in Tohoku is a small city of around 120,000 inhabitants located on the earth’s unstable crust west of Lake Inawashiro, with scorching summers and heavy snowfall in winter.

    The Aizu clan, one of Japan’s most powerful clans, was located in the area until the Edo period, but it declined due to its opposition to new government forces in the Boshin War, and when the Meiji government developed a centralized infrastructure, it fell off the main street, Nakadori, and declined further because it became an isolated island on land due to the earth’s expansion after the war.

    Aside from Lake Inawashiro being Japan’s second biggest lake, my hometown was fast shrinking. I was born in the middle of nowhere, where Shonen Jump won’t be available until Tuesday. I was born almost a month before my due date. Maybe I was tired of being trapped in the womb.

    Some people claim to have memories before they are born, which I doubt, but I believe I have always wanted to journey far away, at least since the moment I was born.

    When I was in third grade and was able to ride a bicycle easily, I resolved to travel as far as I could and began riding toward Kitakata. When I exited Wakamatsu City and reached the interstate route, vehicles were driving beside me at the permitted limit of 150km/h, and the wind and exhaust fumes made me feel like I was going to hell and back. An unknown man in a truck came out and loaded my bike onto the back of the truck and drove me back home while tears streamed down my cheeks. As a result of this debt of gratitude, I still feel a nebulous feeling of universal gratitude for “unknown uncles” from all across the country.

    My parents became bloodthirsty and shushed me, and then made me promise not to ride my bike outside the city boundaries. I didn’t have enough money to travel by intercity bus, so on my days off, I cycled around Wakamatsu City. The city itself was somewhat bigger, thanks to the expansion, but my body developed at a quicker rate than that, and I began to feel that my hometown was too limited.

My father works at the Wakamatsu City Hall as a civil servant. He was born and raised in Wakamatsu, and I have a sneaking hunch that he has left the city less often than I have. Despite the fact that I see my father, I have no idea what the civil servants at City Hall do. Even as a kid, I saw him as a kind of autonomous machine that would deposit money into my account by going to and from City Hall every day.

    It is said that their ancestors were Aizu clan samurai, but looking at my parents, it would be more accurate to say that they were Karakuri puppets made by Hiraga Gennai rather than samurai.

    My mother was born in Koriyama City and married my father after some hardship. She currently works part-time as a tourist guide in Wakamatsu City. I’m not sure how long she’ll have her employment, given that tourism is in a steady decrease owing to expansion in the first place.

    My mother used to load me into the bus to take me to the other side of Lake Inawashiro to show my grandma in Koriyama her grandchild’s face, but I heard that I frequently cried and annoyed the other passengers since the journey was too lengthy. I feel awful about that, but it took around five hours to go from Wakamatsu to Koriyama back then.

    That’s why my days were frequently spent circling Lake Inawashiro like a low-orbit satellite.

    I suppose it was in the fall of my second year of high school that I stated my desire to attend a university in Tokyo. My father told me, “Your grades won’t be good enough,” and my mother told me, “We’re not wealthy, so you should stay in your hometown.” I thought it was ridiculous to discuss my grades when I hadn’t even informed them which college I wanted to go to, but my father began saying things like, Tokyo is a place for aristocrats.

    Staying in the neighborhood is surely a more cost-effective option than enduring high transit costs, expensive rent, and exorbitant charges to attend some obscure university in Tokyo.

    I had no choice but to study hard. When I gave all of my gaming consoles and manga to my friends, I was able to obtain a lot of study time. After club activities, I went to the city’s sole satellite prep school (they deliver classes from famous prep schools in Tokyo via satellite). My average grades had increased from mediocre to third in my class by the time I was a senior in high school. I reasoned that if I worked hard enough, I might be able to do something unexpected.

    “You should go to Niigata or Koriyama,” my mother suggested this time. They don’t want their only child to go too far, as parents. I had no idea they loved me so much. Then you could have given me a little more pocket money.

    By this point, it was becoming a common topic of conversation among my high school classmates and club members that I was apparently studying hard to attend a university in Tokyo.

    The most advanced school in Wakamatsu City was Tohoku Prefectural Wakamatsu High School, but the best students went to Sendai, then Niigata, and lastly Koriyama.

    In other words, “I want to go to Tokyo” was treated the same as “I want to go to the moon” at this school, and was regarded as a “misplaced layer of talk” rather than a “high goal.”

    So I opted to major in heavy element engineering to offset the necessity to go to Tokyo. This is due to the fact that, 70 years after the war’s end, just one university in Tokyo, one in Osaka, and one in Hokkaido still possess a heavy element engineering department. I studied heavy element science in addition to studying for the exam in order to make it a reality. I went to the city library and studied a tonne of books on gravigen technology in order to prepare for the AO exam essay examination. When I establish a goal for myself, it’s in my nature to be meticulous.

    Still, my parents were not convinced, so I decided to speak with my homeroom teacher. My homeroom teacher was from Utsunomiya and had moved to Wakamatsu for a variety of reasons, so he understood that I wasn’t aiming to become a JAXA astronaut and become the fourth Japanese to land on the moon, but rather that I was limiting my school of choice to a realistic range based on my grades and goals.

    “If he goes to a university in Tokyo, it will be the first time in five years that our school has achieved this feat,” said the third-grade teacher enthusiastically, adding, “There is a problem on TV that young people these days are too introverted and don’t leave the town they were born in, but Yukawa-kun is wonderful.”

    For the first time in five years, no student had gone all the way to Tokyo. The senior, who was five years my senior, was initially registered in Tokyo and only resided in Aizu for high school due to family obligations. There was no way in five years that I, the third-ranked student in my class, could be the most gifted kid in the school. That’s absurd.

    Nevertheless, as a ruse to persuade my mother, it appeared to be effective. This is how I got into the Department of Heavy Element Engineering at Otsuka University’s Faculty of Science and Technology.  It seems to be located in a place called Toshima ward in Tokyo.

    If I were to sum up my 18 years of life in 3,000 words, it would look like this. In a nutshell, I wanted to travel somewhere far away, and I don’t think it will change in the future. In 18 years from now, I might be a JAXA astronaut and fly to the moon.