Villain: A Novel by Shuichi Yoshida

Author:Shuichi Yoshida
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi
Tags: Literary, Fiction
ISBN: 9780307379290
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-08-03T18:07:06.275000+00:00

I really do want Mitsuyo to be happy.

I never call her onesan—older sister. But still inside me I feel like I might be calling her that.

We have a younger brother, and he calls her onesan. It’s weird to say he does it in my stead, but that’s what it feels like. Me he just calls Tamayo.

People often say twins know what the other one is thinking. But Mitsuyo and I were never like that. Don’t get me wrong, we got along okay, and stood out in school, being twins and all. So when we were in elementary school we were always together, and tried to protect each other from our classmates’ curious eyes. Yeah—I think we did sort of stand out in elementary school. But once we entered junior high, another set of twins from a nearby elementary school came to the same school and they were ten times cuter than us. Kids can be really cruel, and it wasn’t long before we were being called the ugly twins. That didn’t bother me too much—if a boy said that, I’d chase him and hit him with a broom or something. About this time our personalities, you might say, the overall impression you got from us—hairstyle, clothes, interests—slowly started to be different from each other.…

We weren’t planning to go to the same high school. I wanted to go to a regular co-ed school, while Mitsuyo applied to a private girls’ high school, but she failed the entrance exam.

Anyway, soon after we started high school, we found boyfriends. Mine was typical—the star of the soccer team—but Mitsuyo went out with this guy named Ozawa who was not exactly a negative kind of guy, but he never seemed to be able to do anything well, neither school nor sports. He gave up on the volleyball team after only a month.

If Ozawa paid a bit more attention to his hairstyle and clothes he might have looked okay, but he had zero interest in that kind of thing. Not that he had any particular interest in anything else … Anyhow, when Mitsuyo said something about how she liked Ozawa I went like, Whoa! What’s with that? It was then, I guess, that I realized that Mitsuyo and I are two different people.

Since my boyfriend was the star of the soccer team, I had a lot of rivals for his attention, and sometimes things didn’t go so well. Mitsuyo and Ozawa, who didn’t have any competitors to deal with, got along better than me and my guy. They always walked home together, pushing their bikes side by side. Most every evening she’d stop by Ozawa’s house, but she’d be sure to be home by six-thirty, in time for dinner.

Even twins who get along well have things they can’t ask each other. School ended around four o’clock every day, and it took twenty minutes to walk to Ozawa’s house, so even if she rode her bike back home afterward, it means that they were alone, just the two of them, for about two hours and fifteen minutes every day.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.