Book Girl and the Captive Fool by Mizuki Nomura Page B

calms him down. If you take a longer pause at the line where you say, ‘Your revenge is in the offing. I doubt there’s anyone with less cause to be dejected than you,’ I think it’ll have more of an impact on the audience. ‘In the offing’ is referring to the future, right? You’ll have your revenge in the future, meaning, ‘there’s no doubt that you’re going to succeed eventually, and the price for that is that you have to suffer ill luck now.’ So Omiya is applauding Nojima. This is a particularly delicious scene where we can sense the type of man Omiya is and his friendship with Nojima, so don’t let it just flow by. Let’s make it stick a little more. I’ll express how touched I am with my entire body. Right, like imagine it’s—”
    It sounded like they were hammering out a strategy for the play, and Akutagawa nodded attentively. It was the polar opposite of how I always let Tohko’s words wash over me.
    I sat in a seat, and when I stole a glance over, I saw Kotobuki had come to sit beside me. She whispered, “Hey… do you think Akutagawa likes Tohko?”
    “Huh? Y-you think?”
    Akutagawa and Tohko? No way. If anything, wasn’t Tohko the one vying for his attention? Well, not that I cared either way…
    Then Kotobuki leaned forward and stuck out her lip, grumbling, “I mean, isn’t it weird that Akutagawa would be in this play? When his class put on a play for the culture fair last year, all the girls wanted him to play the lead! But he told them he couldn’t act. That’s what my friend Mori told me. She was in his class last year, and she was really disappointed.”
    “What was their play about?”
    “It was
Swan Lake.
Akutagawa would have been Siegfried.”
    “Er, you sure he just didn’t want that role?”
    I sure wouldn’t want to dress up like a prince now that I was in high school.
    “But the girl who played Odette was the prettiest girl in their class. A girl named Sarashina.”
    My heart skipped.
    Did she say Sarashina? They’d been in the same class? So that was why Sarashina had looked so gloomy when she heard Akutagawa was going to be in our play.
    Kotobuki lowered her voice and continued in a whisper, “It’s bizarre that he would kick aside a role opposite someone like Sarashina, who’s so popular with all the boys, and then go and act in the book club’s play. But if Akutagawa had a thing for Tohko, I could see it.”
    When Kotobuki said that, she stole a glance up at me through her eyelashes.
    Wellll… the reason Akutagawa agreed to do it was because he owed Tohko. But I couldn’t tell her that.
    Then Kotobuki became timid all of a sudden.
    “But I forgot, Tohko has a boyfriend. So there’s no hope, I guess.”
    Did I just hear that?
    “What are you talking about?”
    Tohko had a boyfriend?! Could she actually get a boyfriend?! What kind of freak was he?!
    “It—it’s true. She told me herself. Her boyfriend is this great guy who looks really good in a white scarf. He’s hunting bears in Hokkaido so she never gets to see him and she’s lonely, but he just sent her some salted salmon he caught and she said it was really good. She’d probably never even notice a boy from school.”
    A white scarf?
    Hunting bears?
    Salmon?
    When I lined the words up like prompts for an improv story, I remembered Tohko telling me with deadly seriousness about an old woman she met in Shin—who had told her fortune and informed her she was inside a zone of romantic slaughter.
    And that the summer her zone of romantic slaughter dissipated, she would fall into a fated love with a man wearing a white scarf in front of a bear with a salmon in its mouth…
    In my mind, I could see an image of the young man in the white scarf hurling a spear at the bear with the salmon in its mouth. I felt dizzy and ready to collapse into my seat. No, Kotobuki—Tohko was just trying to sound important.
    Kotobuki kept talking quickly, her words sounding frantic.
    “So, uh, Akutagawa might get