When Did Play Become Work? Part 4

Part 4: Working and Buying

Six Kilometers to Kanjinbashi

Around that time, the business of video rentals was just beginning to pop up here and there.

It was still an era when prices were high. One day, Akaishi said he had found a cheap shop, so we should go. The shop was on the other side of Kanjinbashi. From Saiin, it was about six kilometers away by bicycle. To me, having just finished elementary school, that was an unknown distance.

Honestly, I was anxious. Going to a town I had never been to, just us kids, on bicycles. But Akaishi rode ahead with a calm face. I just pedaled, making sure not to lose sight of his back. I crossed bridges I didn't know and passed through streets I didn't know until we reached the shop.

What we rented was 'Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind'.

Akaishi led the way back, too. I watched Nausicaä at home. The Sea of Decay, the Ohmu—I saw them for the first time then. But looking back now, what remains most vivid is not the world on the screen, but those six kilometers I pedaled to a town I didn't know.

I went to return it alone. Akaishi wasn't there. The same six kilometers had turned into a road that felt only long, with no way back. In the end, that was the only time I ever used that shop. Alone, it was too far.

The distance I could travel with Akaishi was too far to go alone. The distance between me and that boy who walked half a step ahead was exactly the breadth of the world I could see. Even so, the fact that we kids could go that far alone remained deeply etched in my heart. Akaishi really is amazing. I honestly thought so.

The Tuxedo Dining Table

When we ate, the television was often on in our house.

It was 'Aji no Shotai-seki' (Invitation to Taste), which my father had recorded. It was a program where the rakugo performer Katsura Beicho introduced one dish from a famous Kansai restaurant each day. Beicho would appear every time wearing a crisp tuxedo. The show would film the cooking process until the dish was plated, but it never showed anyone actually eating it. It was a program that just carefully showed the process of making the food.

While gazing at that screen, what I held in my hand was a cup of UFO yakisoba.

A dish from a famous restaurant would be finished, steaming. Beicho in his tuxedo would talk about its origins. Beside that, I was slurping down instant yakisoba. Looking at it now, it's quite a ridiculous scene. But that UFO was incredibly delicious. Eating while bathed in the process of real food being made made that simple cup of noodles feel like a slightly special dish.

My father wasn't there at night. Even so, the tapes he recorded sat at the dining table every day. While I was captivated by the professional hands on the screen, I devoured the junk food in my hands. Within that distorted dining table, the roots of an obsession with 'food'—which would later drag me into the world of confectionery—were quietly beginning to grow.

The Found Beta, The Connecting Hands

From elementary school, I watched tokusatsu, anime, and manga to death.

My eyes, hungry for creation, were just as hungry for bathing in fiction. Even though my heart had been gouged out by the television in the dressing room, I couldn't look away from that bottomless monster called expression. Rather, I wanted to see more. Ever since I was struck by that one scene, I knew that on the other side of the screen, there was a world that didn't care about my convenience at all. I wanted to know what lay beyond that so badly.

One day in junior high, I found a video cassette thrown away at a trash collection site. It was a Beta tape.

We had a VHS deck at home, and the formats were different. There was no way to watch it as it was. Normally, I would have given up there. But I couldn't just leave that black lump behind. Inside this plastic, a story I hadn't seen yet was trapped, whole. Just thinking that made my fingertips hot. I wanted to see what was inside. Being told I couldn't see it only made me want to see it more.

In the end, it wasn't until I was much older that I finally reached the contents of that tape. I had finally acquired a machine capable of converting it, and I played the tape I had been holding onto in the corner of my room for years. What appeared on the screen was the theatrical version of "Crusher Joe." I still remember that strange sense of accomplishment when the images emerged from behind the sand.

If I decided I wanted to do something, I would achieve it no matter what. It wasn't about dexterity. It was a kind of obsession—the inability to leave something out of reach without pulling it toward me with my own hands. That is why, at home, the role of connecting electrical appliances and fixing broken things became mine before I knew it. I would forcibly connect things that wouldn't connect using lines I had drawn myself. I was possessed by the tactile response of that. My hands, which were used to making things, had become hands that connected and repaired things before I knew it.

Worked and Bought

During winter break in high school, I worked for money for the first time.

It was a job that lasted about a week at the factory where Akaishi's mother worked. This, too, was something Akaishi invited me to do. It was a chicken processing plant where cut chicken pieces flowed along a workbench. I just kept lining them up in packs. Because it was a place that handled food, the room was terribly cold. In the freezing air that made my hands numb, I silently lined up the meat.

This wasn't helping with a child's game. It was my first real labor, where I was paid by the hour.

What I remember most is the final cleanup. At the end of the day, we would spray water vigorously with a hose to wash everything down. I never usually sprayed water around inside the house. That boldness was strangely interesting. I felt that the cold and the monotonous work were somewhat rewarded in that spray of water.

I worked with Akaishi, ate with him, and went home with him. The usual "Are you coming?" was now at the workplace.

When the week ended, I think the money I received was about 40,000 yen.

I gasped at the amount. It was completely different from the 300 yen I earned by staining my fingers black, or the warm 300 yen that spilled out from under a cushion. My own time, spent lining up cold chicken hundreds and thousands of times in a freezing room, was now in my hands as a bundle of bills. It was heavy, dry, and somehow smelled of independence. In my child's hands, which could only hold 300 yen in pocket money, were several 10,000-yen bills that I had earned with my own strength for the first time.

With that money, I bought my own television.

I didn't have my parents buy it for me. With money I earned by trading my time for the cold, I made the tool for watching and bathing in stories my own. I did the wiring myself, too. The hands that couldn't connect that salvaged Beta tape were now connecting the lines of my own castle, one by one. It didn't end with the purchase. Only after I finished connecting it with my own hands did it truly become my castle.

I worked and I bought it. That simple fact made me feel incredibly proud at the time.

—Thinking about it now, that cold chicken factory was the very place that Akaishi would call me back to more than a decade later. Of course, the middle schooler I was, lining up meat while freezing, had no way of knowing that.

(Continued in Part 5)

When Did Play Become Work? Part 5 | Kei | Reading Room for Those Who Continue