Katawa Shoujo Forums

The Last Days of the Literature Club

Part 1 - Polysemy

Part 1: Polysemy

I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love.
Dave Eggers, What is the What

“Some weather we’re having huh?”

I’m not sure if the taxi driver wants me to reply to that, but it’s a bit of a nothing statement all in all. Yes, it is raining. Yes, all weather is indeed ‘some weather’.

I’ve never really seen the appeal in small talk. A comfortable silence is a thousand times better than forced conversation. And in my circle, all silence is comfortable.

I tap on the arm rest. The rain pelts the window. The window wipers scrape the glass.

“Some weather,” I repeat after him.

The car is one of those executive sedans that the high-flying businessmen in Tokyo drive about in, a Mercedes I think, but it’s due a deep clean. The driver furls and unfurls his fingers as they hover over the gear stick. His nails are bitten to the skin, and he clearly nicked himself shaving this morning, as there’s a small sliver of blood on his collar.

“This school is in the middle of nowhere, huh?” He asks, making eye contact in the rear-view mirror.

I rub my thumb over the envelope in my lap.

“It is.”

I catch his eyes for a moment in the rear-view. He has tired eyes.”So what’s the occasion, a school reunion or something?” The vacant look in his eyes betrays his utter non-interest in this song and dance, but he’s become accustomed to it.

“I’m a guest speaker.” I answer.

The blinking red light of a crane penetrates the dark of the window, and a loud crack of thunder echoes in the valley.

There’s a grunt from the front of the car, and the man’s eyes narrow in the rear-view. “Are you some kind of politician?” His hands tighten around the steering wheel. “I hate driving politicians.” He adds a little lower. How professional of him.

“I’m a writer.” That’s not strictly true, but it’s enough for the over-zealous conversationalist who’s meant to be driving me rather than interrogating me. His grip loosens and he returns his eyes to the road, thankfully.

I feel my phone vibrate in my pocket, but reading in cars makes me feel nauseous, so I ignore it.

The car turns off the main road down the side streets in the town below Yamaku. We pass the convenience store, the crappy little cinema, and the bookstore that I never visited as a student. Eventually, we stop at a set of lights, and to the right I see the Shanghai. Or what's left of it anyway.

The windows have been boarded up, and the top floor has been converted into some kind of small apartment. The sign is missing a few characters, and the wooden frontage has been badly weathered over the years. The sight fills me with a profound sadness. Coming back to where you started can do that to you. It can remind you of how far you’ve gone, but it can also remind you of how much you’ve changed.

We romanticise growing up as kids. And then as adults, we romanticise the past. But none of it is romantic. Not really. Romanticising life is just one way of dealing with it. I wrote about that, once. Or maybe I stole that too.

The driver meets me eyes again as the only other car for about twenty minutes passes us, its headlights briefly illuminating us both as it goes. He must notice me staring out the window.

“You from around here then?” He asks. The gruffness from his voice has softened slightly after his suspicions that I was a politician were put to rest.

“What makes you say that?” I reply, as we take a left at the junction and start climbing the hill to Yamaku.

The driver laughs, grunts more accurately, and fiddles with a dial on his infotainment system. “You pick up some tricks when you drive for a living. Tricks like knowing when to merge lanes before anyone else, or how to maximise fuel efficiency.” His eyes narrow in the rear-view. “And knowing when a passenger is somewhere they don’t want to be.”

“A strangely astute observation for a taxi driver.” I reply, a bit more curt than I intend.

“The baser jobs; taxi drivers, factory workers, bartenders, they know more about the world than any writer I’ve ever met.” He replies without missing a beat, and his eyes return to the road.

I feel a bit bad for insulting him. Especially when he’s right. I mean, what the hell do I know about the world? I run my thumb across the envelope again, the subtle embossment of my name. I track the characters.

Lezard Valeth.

All that I am and all that I will ever be.

“... A fucking sociopath.” I hear her say again, sitting on the steps outside of the dormitories. It was raining, then. In my memories it's always raining.

The car slows down to a stop.

“Looks like a nice school.” The taxi driver states, signalling the end of our journey together. He reads me the number on the taximeter, and I hand him a handful of bills. More, for the earlier arsey remark. I think he mutters a thank you, but it's clear he’d rather I get another driver to take me back.

A tall, middle aged man, maybe mid forties, opens the door for me with an umbrella already in hand to protect me from the rain. I step out underneath it and take his other hand in a firm shake.

“Mr Valeth, thank you for coming out for this event.” He smiles. His teeth are too white, his lips are thoroughly cracked and dry. “I know it means a lot to the students here to have an alumni speak on such a special occasion.”

“As a former student I can assure you that’s not true.” I reply, before reaching back into the cab to grab my satchel. “Mr Yamada, I presume?”

The tall man nods affirmatively. His cheap cologne overpowers the smell of sodden earth, and he’s tried, poorly, to conceal a blemish on his neck. It looks like a hickey. How juvenile. “The very same! It’s a pleasure! And can I just say, "I am a huge fan of your work.”

I consider challenging him on that for a moment, but think better of it. He’s only being polite. It’s probably not his fault that it comes across as disingenuous.

We pass the threshold to Yamaku. It doesn’t look any different than when I was here as a student, except for some new floodlights that have replaced the old fashioned streetlights, and a new, or extremely polished, so much as to resemble brand new, gate. When I was younger, that gate felt like the edge of the universe. Now it just feels old, despite the polish. But a lot of things feel like that these days.

“These events mean a lot to our students.” Mr Yamada repeats. “It’s important to have some important and inspiring figures come in and give them hope.”

“I am neither of those things, I just got lucky.” I dismiss him. He’s quite a fast walker, and I have to speed up my gait just to stay in line with him.

Mr Yamada scoffs, and he waves his hand in front of his face as we pass by the administrative building, only a few of the offices still have lights on. “I’ve found that it takes skill to be lucky.”

I can’t help but laugh at that. “It takes luck to be lucky. Tell me, does Mr Mutou still teach here?”

We stop for a moment as he thinks.

“He retired a few years before I joined the staff, if my memory of the staff list serves me correctly. But he’s local to the area, and there are a few local guests here tonight, so maybe he’s one of them?” He chuckles at something invisible to me. “I wouldn’t recognise him, so do introduce us if you see him.”

A moment of relief washes over me. I can’t help but think he’d be disappointed if he saw me now.

He wrote to me, after the success of my first book. I keep his letter by my bedside. Its words of congratulations. Its words of commiserations.

We keep walking through the drizzle, the umbrella keeping the rain off of us enough, but forcing us to stay pretty close together. The wind blows through me, chilling me to the bone. Mr Yamada seems unbothered, and he whistles an awkward little tune.

“Do you keep up with many of your former classmates then? The ones you wrote about I presume at the very least.” He asks. The water trickles down from the end of the umbrella on each edge.

The air turns cold. It's getting colder.

I guess he did read my books. Or at the very least, googled them.

“Only one of them.” I answer. Mr Yamada looks at me waiting for me to elaborate. The lights of one of the faculty buildings silhouette him. “Good writers are terrible friends.” I quote. But it isn’t my quote.

He doesn’t know how to respond to that. That’s fair. I wouldn’t know what to say either. And I’m supposedly good at that. Knowing what to say; knowing what to write.

“Well,” he continues, changing the subject as we ascend the stairs towards the newly built library. It’s a modest sized building, only one floor, but it fits with the architecture of the school. It somehow looks old, even though it was built, or at least finished, in the last few months. “What do you think? We couldn’t have had it built without your generosity.” He gestures to the double glass doors, to just beside them.

And, on a small plaque on the side of the building, I see my name again. The raised lettering of all I am, and all I have ever been. A piece of me temporarily immortalised in brick and mortar. My name and several others, for students to pass by without reading, as I did, all those years ago. As we do on park benches, old statues.

All the places and people we pass in our lives, they watch silently.

I look out into the distance. The light pollution from Sendai gives the skyline a hue, even through the rain.

“I thought you’d want to see it before your speech. We were planning on having you do the speech out here, but the weather did not permit it.” Mr Yamada explains. “We should get to the ceremony.”

I linger for a moment outside of the building that bears my name. My friend, maybe my only friend in the world, told me that leaving things behind is the only way to be remembered after you die. But he’s wrong, even the things we leave behind get taken down, put away. If I close my eyes, I can see the old computer studies building that was here, the one that bore someone else’s name.

I breathe it in, all of that present. I breathe it out.

“Okay, let’s get going.”

Mr Yamada smiles and starts whistling again, it must be a nervous and awkward habit. Some people can’t stand silence, they have to fill it with something, with anything.

“Did you really read my books?” I ask as we pass by the new library and head towards the auditorium.

Mr Yamada smiles from beside me. “Two of them, yes. They reminded me of growing up, but maybe all bildungsromane do that.” He bites his bottom lip. “I used to want to be a writer.”

“What’s stopping you?” I ask.

“Life, I think. It’s hard to find time.” I return a smile of my own. It might be the first genuine one today.

“I wouldn’t trade life for it,” I tell him. “In my experience, you either have one, or you have the other.”

Mr Yamada thinks for a moment as we take the first few steps towards the doors of the hall. “In mine, life is about never having enough time.” It’s something of a sad statement, but he smiles anyway. “Are you prepared for your speech? There’s water on the podium for you.”

“Certainly,” I answer.

He nods, and holds the door open for me. We head inside, out of the rain and into the light.

There are about sixty to seventy people in the crowd. About half of them are students, and there's a row of well-dressed men at the front, presumably the board of directors for the school, and behind them a row of teachers. I scan the crowd for any familiar faces, but very little is familiar. Even the uniform has changed, although it’s still green.

And then, at the back of the room, standing against the wall with some locals from the town below, I see her.

And she offers me a little wave, with the stump at the end of her arm.

And I think about kissing her outside of the Shanghai, about the days when we were young and I thought we were in love.

I sometimes wonder if I'm only capable of love in hindsight.

You spend your whole life looking forward, looking towards the next thing, the next goal, and then you turn back and it's already behind you. That’s life. Maybe that’s love too.

Mr Yamada takes his place at the podium, and taps on the microphone.

“Good evening everybody. Thank you for braving the terrible weather and joining us today to welcome a very special guest speaker.” He clears his throat. One of the suited men in the front rows smiles at me, but I look back to Miki in the back row. “The man beside me probably needs little introduction. His best-selling novel, Forthcoming was just recently adapted into a film, and his generous contributions to the school have been pivotal in the building of our new library. Not only is Lezard Valeth an alumnus of our fantastic school and a shining example of the great things students of Yamaku can achieve, but he also continues to be one of our longtime supporters. His contributions, both to literature and to our school, speak to the kind of man he is, a man who has dedicated his life to learning, and to helping others learn.”

The audience claps. A student a few rows back whispers to the boy sitting next to him. They both laugh about something.

“Please give a warm welcome to the man that has made our new library possible, and who has long been a source of inspiration for many of us here.”

Another applause. Miki doesn’t clap though.

Mr Yamada takes a step back from the podium and gestures for me to take his place. He steps past the podium and takes a seat in the first row with the other bigwigs.

Even after all these years, I find public speaking a bit daunting, but I swallow and step forward. I never know what to do with my hands.

The applause subsides into silence. I can feel the eyes of nearly everybody staring at me. I fix onto the one familiar face in the crowd and clear my throat.

“Thank you, Mr Yamada, for that wonderful introduction. And thank you all for being here today to hear me speak.” I scan the room again. “I remember hating these kinds of things when I was studying here.”

That earns me a laugh from the room. Mostly from the younger people. I take a look down at my speech, laid out on the podium in front of me.

“When I studied here, some twenty years ago now, I was the president of the Literature Club. We were a small group, about seven members, but it felt to me like a tremendous responsibility.”

I look up again and see Miki, torn half-way between the door and my speech. She’s heard enough of the bullshit ones by now.

I scrunch up the speech I had prepared on the podium.

“I’m sorry, that’s actually a lie.” Then there’s a few faces of confusion. “It wasn’t a responsibility, I’ve never been very good at that. It was actually a tremendous opportunity.”

Miki stares right at me. Something twitches at the corner of her lips.

“I’ve never been a very honest person. Sometimes being a writer means being good at lying,” Mr Yamada shifts uncomfortably in his seat, he must have read my speech beforehand when I sent it to them, and is alarmed by my sudden off-roading. “So allow me to be honest for once, here in the place where my career as a writer really began.”

I take a breath.

“Being a writer, especially the kind of writer that I am, means betraying the people you love. The truth is that to get to where I am today I’ve had to cheat, lie, and steal. I sold out everyone I knew, presented them, flaws exposed, to the world. I gave them up on a silver platter. The truth is that I’m not actually a very good writer.”

I laugh.

“The truth is that I’m not forthcoming at all, my friends were. And I sold their stories and dressed them up as my own.”

An awkward, uneasy laugh takes over the room but quickly turns to murmuring. Mr Yamada sort of hovers in his seat, presumably unsure if he should interrupt me.

And at the back of the room, Miki nods her head, with a smile.

This is a story that excites me - in the same way I see any Feurox story being posted sparks excitement. Some sort of special mix between dread and positive anticipation that you'd find in a show you just know will kill your soul, but it'll be amazing and beautiful as it does. Your story being presented in pieces is definitely going to be new! You know I'll be here for it. Anywho, here's my thoughts on this first part of the story from back when I read it for the first time. Which was definitely, totally, just a few minutes ago...

Lezard seems to clearly live in his own head, losing himself to the words he reads and writes. At the same time, that’s also how he seems to connect his experiences and understanding to others, so it’s a balancing game. One he seems to feel like he’s lost a long time ago and now feels resigned to himself. The conversation with the taxi driver highlights this. He’s unapologetic with his words and even after deciding he was in the wrong, he does nothing of substance to remedy the damage he’s done to his image. It’s almost like a form of self harm – or maybe something less intense like rejection, pity, or some other form of destruction. In essence Lezard, at the start of the story, seems to embody the saying: “it is what it is”, allowing things to come and go while being convinced that that’s just how it’ll always be with him and his attitude. At the same time, it seems like this attitude has been challenged for some time, and it finally seems to break down as he begins his speech in front of the person who likely instigated that willingness to change in the first place.

Some other observations about Lezard is that he has a very low level of confidence in himself, which is an opinion he’s ironically confident in. He puts his efforts and achievements down without a second thought and accepts insults without retort, not to mention the defeatist attitude.

It's so good to see you back, Feu! I love seeing a much more complicated characterisation of Lezard beyond the standard stock 'incel' path a lot of other fics take. You've got a great set up with the stories he's co-opted and his history with Miki and the rest of the club members.

I eagerly wait for more.

I remember reading the early draft of this but I'll echo my comments on it here; this is the perfect set-up to a Christmas Carol-esque and I'm looking forward to seeing what you do!