I didn’t even change after graduating from high school and going on to university. I basically spent my free time alone, and didn’t talk to anyone in private at all. I never repeated the kind of trouble I’d caused in primary school, but still my parents worried that I wouldn’t survive in the real world. And so, believing that I had to be cured, I grew into adulthood.
When morning comes, once again I’m a convenience store worker, a cog in society. This is the only way I can be a normal person.
My present self is formed almost completely of the people around me. I am currently made up of 30 percent Mrs. Izumi, 30 percent Sugawara, 20 percent the manager, and the rest absorbed from past colleagues such as Sasaki, who left six months ago, and Okasaki, who was our supervisor until a year ago.
And I probably infect others with the way I speak too. Infecting each other like this is how we maintain ourselves as human is what I think
For eighteen years, there has always been a manager, even if his appearance keeps changing. Although each is different, taken all together I sometimes have the feeling they are but one single creature.
When you work in a convenience store, people often look down on you for working there. I find this fascinating, and I like to look them in the face when they do this to me. And as I do so I always think: that’s what a human is.
The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who is lacking is disposed of. So that’s why I need to be cured. Unless I’m cured, normal people will expurgate me. Finally I understood why my family had tried so hard to fix me.
Well, I guess anyone who devotes their life to fighting society in order to be free must be pretty sincere about suffering
“What the hell are you saying? That’s ridiculous! I’m sorry, but there’s no way I’ll ever be able to get it up with you, Furukura.” “Get it up? Um, what has that got to do with marriage? Marriage is a matter of paperwork, an erection is a physiological phenomenon.”
She’s far happier thinking her sister is normal, even if she has a lot of problems, than she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine. For her, normality—however messy—is far more comprehensible.