Chapter Seven Excerpt: Getting to Summers, Neglected Class
On we move to Summers, one of the funniest segments in the game proper. Saori Kumi begins her description of same by playing things a little straighter. Paint the picture, Kumi!
The sun shimmered and twisted as it sunk into the distant horizon. A red belt of sunset stretched along a straight line against the waves rippling into shore. Beautiful white sand, like granulated sugar, spilled across the luxurious beach resort.
Atop a small, gently rocking boat, beneath the shade of palm tree silhouettes in front of the blinding sun, a couple who had come from overseas was sitting on a warm beach mat, soaking in the season of love. They intertwined their arms, pressed their cheeks together, gazed into one another’s eyes, she twirled a lock of hair around a finger… There was also a pair of children engrossed in building a sand castle with their red bucket and yellow shovel.
The miseries of the world, the passing of time, what they would have for dinner tomorrow—everything was forgotten, replaced with the simple, fleeting act of glowing against the shine of a loved one. That is the sort of place this was.
Oh, but the couples. A couple here, another one there, and by them another couple and another couple. Nothing but couples. One every five yards along the coast with the dusk wind blowing. If there were ever a Couple Watching club in the world, they would undoubtedly grovel at this sanctuary, basking in their Mecca.
Beautiful! I’m still thrown off at every turn by Saori Kumi’s wild plot-driving, but I’m willing to guess, reading this travelogue, that something is about to ruin these couples’ collective day. Show me… onomatopoeia!
“Je t’aime, mon amour,” Alêne whispered to Pierre with a sensual voice that tickled at the ears.
“C’est magnifique, la vie en rose.” Louis and Leo softly lifted the chin of their lovers .
“Au chance liez, très bien .” Marie and Katorine batted their long eyelashes. “Chocolat au lait, pudding a la mode,” Francois and Chalut mumbled softly and sweetly. “Caramel bon-bon…”
Jean and Geneviève’s half-opened lips slowly approach one another’s. But then it happened.
Screeeeeech!
Nailed it!
An earsplitting metallic sound pierced through the air and reverberated across the dimness. The couples all looked around the sky in shock.
“Q’est-que c’est (What’s that)?!” Someone pointed up into the air, drawing all the blue eyes, green eyes, and hazel eyes to the same pinpoint in the air, which quickly turned into a round, canary-yellow machine. It’s headed right this way!
The couples on the boats desperately paddled away, and the couples laying on the beach mats jumped to their feet and stumbled across the sand as they dashed away. The couple lovey-doveying under the shade of the palm tree clutched each other in terror. Even the small, young couple building the sand castle fell to their knees and stared blankly with jaws dropped. Everyone was panicking and running into each other as they scrambled to their feet and ran in all different directions…when they finally grabbed one another’s hands and dashed off, people began realizing they had run off with the wrong boyfriend or girlfriend, and the whole place turned chaotic.
And yet the panic on the ground was nothing. The canary yellow flying object wavered unsteadily in the air, making an occasional steep drop downwards as it lost its height and visibly grew in size. The last remains of the sunset’s orange glow hanging along the still surface of the ocean were pulled along a single line of shock wave flashing across the water as the spacecraft-like bowlegged landing legs skimmed across the water and kicked up violent spikes of white waves. It shot straight forward and the the water continued to splash loudly along its trail.
There was a concrete levee about three feet high between the sand and the road . The Sky Runner—oh, I should have mentioned that earlier… The round yellow machine was the one and only, newly repaired Sky Runner—smashed into the concrete wall, crushing in half and finally coming to a stop.
Oh, thanks for mentioning that, Kumi! Her narrator, forgetful, kind of opinionated, and only predisposed to tell the story she means to tell about eighty percent of the time, is maybe my favorite part of the MOTHER 2 novel. She’s telling us this story but she fidgets a lot, and she keeps getting up to go to the bathroom.
In any case, they crash, “finally come to a stop”—I’m not sure that’s the most pressing thing to describe when a craft smashes into a concrete wall and breaks in half—and the couples we were just watching are pissed about it.
“My, what a cheeky little girl! Two boyfriends?!”
“Let’s get outta here. ”
The couples, angry that their romantic atmosphere had been ruined, turned to go.
But before we leave the point of view, Jeff explains why the Sky Runner is broken, at the same time suggesting that it’s either much bigger than I thought it was or that Paula has a serious and undiagnosed problem with obsessive compulsions:
“Hey, Jeff, why did it get all weird on us, anyway?”
“Hm, well, that’s the thing. If I’m not mistaken… you started up the microwave to cook a hamburger, didn’t you Ness? And then Paula started vacuuming. So by the time I tried to look up our current position on the computer, that was it. The electricity all flicked off and it was pitch black. So… I think the electricity overloaded and the breaker was set off.” Jeff took off his glasses and rubbed the base of his nose.
What?
Dang, did you take some French or something, Chewy? Or does all that happen to be standard French stuff that everyone would have known but me? I would have been hard pressed to read through all that katakana and figure out how to spell something from a language I know nothing about.
It’s pretty basic French, if I remember correctly. But man, picking that out of the Japanese text must have been crazy.
Yeah, I studied some French. And the katakana was pretty atrocious. There’s really no point in explaining French pronunciation in a language with a total of four sounds, but hey, they get points for trying.
I think using completely random words that were probably the only ones that Kumi knew was an excellent move on her part. It’s hilarious. Just like my own mother starts naming off Japanese car companies in a choppy voice when she pretends to speak in Japanese.
I also studied French for a while, but yes, kenisu, most of those are fairly common phrases.
Kinda random, but I plan on waiting for the entire translation to be finished before I delve in. I like to save awesome things up so there is nothing keeping me from going through them all at once.
Also looking forward to your project, kenisu.
You talented Japanese people make me sick!