Toradora! Vol. 1 Read online

  “…Oh…”

  Her mouth puckered, half-open.

  “O-oh…ooh…ohhh! Whaa!”

  Messing up her tangled hair, Aisaka cut open the envelope’s seal. As if going mad, she shook it upside down to confirm it was empty, then looked back at Ryuuji in blank amazement.

  “…You klutz.”

  At his leaden proclamation, she sat down unsteadily right where she was standing. Her eyes opened so wide they seemed like they might tear at the corners. Before long, they developed a faint film. Her thin, open lips quivered and shook, and she seemed to be trying to say something, but she could only bob her chin.

  “A-Aisaka?”

  Her brain had crashed.

  Before Ryuuji’s eyes, her face suddenly turned pale white. Then, right there in the living room of his shabby two-bedroom apartment, her petite frame, padded by the oversized dress, toppled over.

  “Hey! Aisaka! Are you okay?!”

  At that surprising turn of events, Ryuuji rushed over and held her unconscious, doll-like body—and that was when it happened.

  GRRRROOOOOOOWWWWWWWWLLLL.

  “…I-Is that your stomach…?”

  ***

  The Takasu household always had frozen food.

  They had never run out of garlic or ginger, and always had a stock of onions. He also had leftover turnip stalk and leaves, and some bacon he had been thinking of using for breakfast. Eggs, too.

  Of course, it was rare that they would do something so foolish as run out of seasonings. Naturally, they also had instant consommé (for when he needed to cut corners), Ajinomoto seasoning, and chicken bone soup stock available in the kitchen.

  He got a heaping bowl of rice, seasoned it with sesame oil, and chopped up the turnip stalks. He added egg and the rice was soon wrapped in a golden sheen. He could leave the rest to the green onion’s flavor and the umami of the bacon. He added Ajinomoto to taste, pinches of salt and pepper, a subtle amount of oyster sauce, and, as a finishing touch, scattered chives on the stock.

  Simply adding hot water and shards of onion, he garnished the chicken bone soup in just under fifteen minutes. He finished washing the dishes in the process.

  Even though it was three in the morning on a weekday, Ryuuji’s skills didn’t falter.

  Guuuuurrrrgllle. And then, over the almost comical sound of her stomach, he heard a faint, incoherent mumbling interposed. “G-garlic…”

  He was hesitant to touch her, so he said, “…Aisaka. Aisaka Taiga, wake up. Your wish for garlic is fulfilled, and it’s infused with the aroma of sesame oil, no less.”

  The petite body he had laid out on the bed jolted. “Fry… fry…”

  “That’s right. It’s fried rice.”

  “Fried…rice…”

  He saw drool dripping from her pale lips…and because he saw it, he had to wipe it away. He carefully dabbed at her mouth with a tissue.

  “Here, wake up. It’ll get cold.”

  Aisaka’s eyelashes fluttered faintly. In order to avoid touching her body directly, he grabbed her by her clothes and lifted her from the sheets. In the middle of that, Aisaka wriggled in apparent displeasure.

  “Ah…wha?”

  It seemed she’d finally woken up. She gave an irritated scowl, brushing off Ryuuji’s arm. With visible distrust, she peeled off the damp towel he’d put on her forehead. But then her nostrils flared. “…Huh? What’s that? It smells like garlic…” She looked curiously around the room.

  “I just said it was fried rice. Hurry up and eat. You need to get your blood sugar up or you’ll keel over again.”

  When he pointed at the table setting he’d prepared with the fried rice, her eyes glittered for a moment, but then she said, “What’s your deal?”

  Her eyes narrowed, and she glared at Ryuuji in his tracksuit with a taciturn look.

  “There isn’t any deal. If someone collapses right in front of you, fried rice is the only answer. It was ridiculous—the sound your stomach made. I can only imagine what it’d be like if you got anemic at school and…hey, you haven’t been eating anything, have you?”

  “Leave me alone, it’s none of your business. Do you live alone here?”

  “Sometimes my mom’s home. Right now, she’s at work. If you’re going to invade somebody’s household, at least get a sense of it, first. Any other place would’ve called the cops on you by now.”

  “Shut up. You’re not up to anything weird, are you?”

  Aisaka was still pale, but she purposefully guarded her body with both hands. She gave Ryuuji a scrutinizing look, challenging him with her glare. He wanted to yell out, You’re way weirder than me! But instead he said, “Someone who just came off an attempted home invasion and then collapsed from hunger doesn’t get the right to complain. Just eat.”

  At any rate, it was three in the morning. He couldn’t let her disturb the peace any more than she already had.

  “Listen h—ubgh!”

  He took a heaping spoonful of fried rice and forced it into Aisaka’s mouth, right where she lay, complaining on the bed. It took a considerable amount of courage, but Ryuuji was already in despair, so what did he have to lose? He overflowed with a spirit of gallantry.

  “Whaareouing!”

  Glaring, Aisaka pushed away the spoon. But—probably because she couldn’t spit out what was already in her mouth—she chewed, her small cheeks puffed out like a squirrel.

  “Y—gulp! You—don’t think you’ll be able to just get away with this…” Gulp. She swallowed. “Don’t even think our conversation is over yet.”

  She stole the spoon from Ryuuji’s hand—the same spoon she had just pushed away. “First of all, I’ve figured out why the envelope was empty.” She hopped off the bed, dragging along her trailing skirt. “You tried looking at it and unsealed it. You’re the lowest of the low. A Peeping Tom.” She turned her back to Ryuuji as she sat down at the table.

  “You’ve got it all wrong. How do I say this… I only noticed because it was see-through.” It was a lie, but oh well. He couldn’t tell whether she was listening or not. Aisaka, still seated, took a small spoonful from the mountain of fried rice and quietly brought it to her small mouth, oddly tense.

  She chewed, chewed, and swallowed. She touched her mouth to the spoon, too. For a moment, her expression was one of relish, and then she took another bite. Ryuuji sat across from Aisaka and started to put words to what he’d pondered while making the fried rice.

  “Now that you mention it, Aisaka, listen to what I have to say for a second. In the first place…”

  Nom nom nom nom.

  “…You said you were embarrassed that I saw that letter… Or actually, the envelope or whatever, right?”

  Nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom… Cough! “Gah!”

  “What I think is…” he tried to say.

  Munch munch munch munch munch munch munch munch munch munch munch munch munch munch munch munch!

  “Listen to me!”

  “Seconds!”

  “Fine!”

  Good thing I made a lot, Ryuuji muttered silently, as he placed the entire contents of the fry pan on her plate. He served it to Aisaka.

  “Now listen to what I have to say!”

  No matter how much he shouted, it was useless. It was like talking to a wall. This was what they meant by “having blinders on.” He wondered where she packed all that food away in such a tiny body, while Aisaka focused solely on the fried rice. Fried rice fried rice fried rice fried rice… It was a one-woman fried rice feast.

  He wouldn’t get anywhere with her like this. The very words “fried rice” were losing their meaning to him. Ryuuji quietly made a decision. He brought a lethal weapon out from the corner of the living room, hidden by a cloth.

  “Hey, Aisaka—look at this. I’ll show you something juicy.”

  “Something juicy?!”

  When she reacted with a lift of her head—BAM—he took off the cloth and showed it to her.

  “GAH!”

 
“What do you think? It’s gross, right?”

  Able to sleep through a level four earthquake, it was the positively disgusting, sleeping face of Takasu’s Inko-chan. Spasming, the whites of her eyes showing, her mouth half open, her weird tongue lolling out—it had immediate results. Aisaka leaped backwards.

  “It’s way gross! Why would you show me something like that?”

  It seemed she was finally willing to lend Ryuuji an ear.

  “…Sorry, Inko-chan. Sweet dreams. Now then, Aisaka.”

  After returning Inko-chan to her cage, Ryuuji folded his feet under himself, sitting down to square off with Aisaka. She’d finally regained some of her cool and glared up at Ryuuji as though saying, what? Except she still cradled the plate, continuing her fried rice feast.

  “You can keep eating, just listen. The thing I want to say is, basically, stuff like that isn’t embarrassing at all. We’re second-year high school students; having one or two crushes is a given. You can write a love letter—there’s nothing weird about doing that. Every successful couple in the whole world had to get through doing all kinds of stuff before they started formally dating.”

  “…”

  Aisaka rudely hid her face with the plate she was holding as she chewed.

  “It’s just, well…there probably aren’t many people who’d screw up and get the wrong person’s bag—or forget to put the letter in the envelope in the first place,” he said.

  “That’s enough!”

  BAM! Aisaka hit the table with her fist, lifted her face, and thrust the spoon at Ryuuji.

  “Everything you’ve been saying sounds real convenient for you, doesn’t it? I’ll have you know—back then, I was debating whether or not to put the love letter in at all. When I opened the bag and was thinking about what to do, that’s when you came along and made me lose my cool. I had to hide it in a hurry, so, I threw it in. And then it turned out to be your bag…”

  “A-Aisaka…you’ve got rice plastered all over your mouth.”

  “Shut! Up!”

  “Uh…”

  Her sharp gaze grew increasingly dreadful, glinting like the honed edge of a blade. Faced with that, Ryuuji lost track of what he was trying to say.

  It seemed that now that her stomach was full, her power had fully recharged. Humph! Sticking her chin up arrogantly, she stopped Ryuuji in his tracks with the eyes of an assassin. Her energy and brutality revived, the Palmtop Tiger’s ferocious snarl was low and long.

  “Takasu Ryuuji…if you’d just obediently handed over your bag when I told you, it wouldn’t have come to this. Just how are you going to make it up to me? How are you going to erase your memory of it? How am I supposed to keep on living when I’m this embarrassed?”

  You’re going back to that subject again? Ryuuji put his head in his arms for a moment. Then he said, “Like I told you, it’s nothing to be ashamed of! Look, just wait!”

  He was desperate.

  He dashed momentarily from the living room to his bedroom and returned carrying an armload of stuff. He piled all of it in front of Aisaka’s eyes. Countless notebooks, paper scraps, CDs, sketchbooks, and even a secondhand MiniDisk player he bought once. If this was what it took, he’d show her. He’d show her everything.

  “…What is this?”

  “Just look at it. Look at any of it.”

  Tsk. Clicking her tongue, Aisaka took one of the notebooks nearest her hand, as though it were bothersome. She flipped through the pages until her fingers stopped. Her face distorted unpleasantly as she looked from the page to Ryuuji.

  “What is this, really? What’re you trying to pull?”

  “Do you know what that list is? Bet you don’t, huh? That’s a playlist I made in case I ever got to put on a concert for the girl I liked. And there’re four sets, for each of the four seasons. Of course, I also made an MD.”

  And here, he turned on the MD player. He stuck the earphones right into Aisaka’s unwilling ears. A faint sound played—the summer concert’s first song.

  “And then around the time I made this, I also made this note, which had the theme: ‘What would I get her for our first Christmas after we started dating?’ I settled on perfume. More precisely, an eau de toilette. I even narrowed down a list of brands and got the prices from the stores selling them. I researched everything and wrote it all down… What do you think? I’m always doing stuff like this.”

  “Talk about gross!”

  Aisaka tore out the earphones and flung them back, as though they were dirty. They thwacked Ryuuji, but he didn’t even flinch.

  “Of course it’s gross! But even though you know about this, I wouldn’t ever think about killing you! What’s wrong with liking a girl, huh? Until I work up the courage to tell her how I feel, all I can do is fantasize… Which is really pitiful, but… but I still don’t think it’s anything to be ashamed of!”

  Truthfully, it was a little embarrassing, but he still spoke those words—and at that moment, it happened. He’d been keeping something hidden behind his back, to keep so Aisaka wouldn’t see it. Now, as he moved around, he lost his balance—and it slipped, falling right down onto Aisaka’s lap.

  “Ah! Oh no…”

  “What’s this…? An envelope?”

  He rushed to get it back, but he was one step behind her small hands. His own hand writhed as it danced uselessly through the air.

  “From Takasu Ryuuji…to Kushieda Minori-sama… Kushieda Minori-sama?!”

  “Th-that’s… Wait, wait a second, that’s not—!”

  “A love letter?! And it’s…to Minorin?! From you?! To Minorin?! This too?! And this?!”

  She left him no room for denial. He’d been satisfied just writing that letter; he’d never planned to actually send it. But now, it was fully exposed beneath the bright fluorescent lights.

  “Whoa…! You and Minorin… Blech! Tell me it’s not true! You insolent…!”

  “A-are you really in any position to say that?! What do you mean ‘blech’? Besides, you’re the one who likes my friend, Kitamura.”

  “…Shut up. Do you still not get that I told you to forget about it? You sure are dead set on being dense.”

  “You’re the one that’s being dense!”

  They fought loudly over her picking up the wooden sword, over him trying to get rid of it, then over whether she would hit him—or rather, who would hit whom.

  “Hah!”

  Ryuuji came back to himself. Before he knew it, the signs of morning light began appearing outside the window. “Oh no, it’s already four…”

  It was about time for Yasuko to come home from work. Having Aisaka in the house would be bad. Having Yasuko scold him was a depressing idea, but more than that, he wanted to avoid anyone seeing Yasuko say, “Ryu-chaan, your mother is uguh uguh waaaah.” She began to wail.

  And if the morning paper comes, the landlady downstairs will get up and might come complain about the noise… No, she might already be awake, and just waiting for the right moment to complain. The color of Ryuuji’s face suddenly changed. Actually, that’s really likely. That’s bad—if we’re thrown out now, we won’t have enough money for a move… And last month, we (Yasuko) used up (on her own) way too much of our savings on a flatscreen TV…

  “A-anyway! Anyway, please. I’ll never say anything about what happened to anybody. I won’t act like you’re stupid, either. Honestly, we’re in the same boat, now! So, come on, just tell me that’s good enough.”

  “…I can’t.”

  “Why. Can’t. You. Go! Home! Please. Go. Home! My sick mom is going to get back…”

  In one sense, she really did have a disease. He wasn’t completely lying. But…

  “No! I can’t trust you, and also… and also…”

  Suddenly, like a child, Aisaka curled up and held her legs. She sat down in the middle of the living room. She rubbed her cheeks into her knees, tracing words into the old tatami mats. “…Hey, that…love letter… I wonder if—you don’t think it’s too early to send one,
right?”

  Now she was asking for love advice! Arrgh! Ryuuji tore at his hair. “W-we can spend plenty of time discussing stuff like that—next time! So! Please! Go! Home! I’m begging you!”

  “…You mean it? You really will give me advice next time?”

  “I will. I definitely will. I’ll do whatever you want, I’ll help with whatever you want. I swear.”

  “You’ll help? With anything? For me?”

  “I will. I will, I will, I will. I’ll do anything.”

  “Anything, right? You said anything, right? Like a dog, you’ll do it? Like you’re my dog, you’ll do anything for me?”

  “I will. I’ll do it. I swear. Whether it’s as a dog or whatever, I’ll do it. So, please. Let’s just leave it at that? Okay? Okay?”

  “Okay…I guess I’ll go home.”

  Seeming to finally accept those terms, Aisaka grabbed her wooden sword and stood up. When he looked very closely, he noticed tiny shoes discarded by the window. She really did break in through the window, then… Ryuuji groaned, and she cast him a sidelong glance as she carried the shoes toward the entrance.

  Suddenly, she turned around. “Hey.”

  Instinctively, Ryuuji braced himself for even more suffering.

  “Do you have any extra fried rice?”

  “Huh? Ah, no… You ate all of it.”

  “I see. That’s fine.”

  “You don’t mean you didn’t have enough to eat? That was about two people’s worth. Were you that hungry?”

  Without answering, Aisaka turned her back to him and put one foot into a shoe. Once again, without warning, she turned around and muttered, “…The sliding door.”

  “Yeah, there you go with another huge change of subject.”

  “I made a hole in the sliding door, but…does that cost a lot of money?”

  Looking up at Ryuuji’s face, Aisaka’s big eyes blinked twice, three times. It took him by surprise and made him feel uneasy, so Ryuuji didn’t return the look. It wasn’t that he was scared—he was bewildered. It felt like this was the first time he had seen Aisaka when she wasn’t angry.

  “Uhh… Well…it’s something I could do myself if I tried my hand at fixing it…I think. From what I saw earlier, the hole itself was small, anyway. But it would be better if I had nice paper, and around here, you can only buy shoji paper in half sheets.”