Daisuke
DAISUKE
Daisuke was 20 years old and had been living in Kabukicho for a few months, in one of those tiny apartments that were sublet two or three times. He had never met the landlord, did not know his name and could not care less. He was there to work.
His petty well-ordered provincial life had taken a radical turn on that fated December day in 2019. He had taken the train to the capital, as he did every Friday, to kill time and do some shopping. That was before the first wave of the pandemic. He had time to spare, free as the wind, all the time in the world, so much so that in the long run doing nothing to such an extent might well have ended up killing him. He had got out of the school system at the end of high school, unable to find any incentive whatsoever in academic education. What’s the point of thinking about the future when, whether you like it or not, it offers itself in virtually the same way every morning.
It was in one of those papers that are freely available near the Bento vendor of Ikebukuro station that he had read the inconspicuous ad: “Wanted: man or woman in good health, who likes walking and speaks English.” As far as walking was concerned, he had the right profile. Strolling was his thing, he liked covering as little distance as possible in as much time as possible. It was his own way of slowing down the onset of the future, that vague concept that seemed to be his parents’, his teachers’ and even some of his friends’ constant preoccupation, and if not carefully prepared for, only bode disaster and trouble, so they said.
Daisuke had decided to ignore it, and to keep at a distance by going as slowly as possible towards it. Until now, one could say that his strategy had worked rather well. For 20 years nothing of note had happened to him, absolutely nothing and he congratulated himself for it. It made him a model citizen, he thought. Someone who does not cause any problem, who does not stand out from the crowd, does not make any noise, does not disturb anybody.
The third requirement of the ad was more problematic. As every Japanese child, he had studied Shakespeare’s language by ticking the boxes of lengthy MCQS all along his short education. He even had rather good results to these questionnaires, a success he put down to his lucky star, an innate good luck that had enabled him for that matter, to catch many plush toys with the claw-cranes of the amusement arcades and to tick a majority of right boxes without even reading the questions. Actually, he had chanced upon a sort of recurring combination of answers that you had to permute alternately a certain number of times, and if you scrupulously applied this rule, you were sure to get a good mark.
On the other hand, speaking the English tongue, uttering words with your mouth in order to build sentences was quite another kettle of fish. He had of course been approached on some occasions by English speaking tourists when strolling in the tourist districts of the capital city, but every encounter had ended in an embarrassed silence on his part, a moment of hesitation, and his pathetic escape, mumbling a few words of apology in Japanese.
Even so, out of curiosity, he had decided to go to the address mentioned by the ad. The small office was on the sixth floor of an office block in the Akihabara district, and, as there was no lift, he arrived slightly out of breath. The office was staffed by a little old woman who, without even raising her head, pointed at a door at the far end of the room. The sound of machines and the drone of an imposing ventilation system issued from it. The door was ajar, and Daisuke could catch sight of the racks of computing servers from which bunches of network cables burst forth. The orange and green lights of thousands of transmission signal blinked constantly. Daisuke pushed the door open: a tall thin man in a white lab coat, was busy at a workbench at the other end of the room. The man turned round and with a broad smile, waved at him to come over. Daisuke felt a thrill along his spine, his life was going to change, he could feel it.
