I'll Set the Scene

When your life is torn apart by tragedy, you can either choose to laugh about it, or end up broody and philosophical. Unfortunately, I can't spell 'Nietzsche' without searching up the spelling, so I had no choice but to find it funny.

Back when I was young, my dad used to work in London for a rather large company. We lived in one of those suburban roads where cars piled along the side of the street - one of those roads where every now and then a kid runs to get a ball and a truck hits them and it’s a mild news tragedy. Usually in these instances, people care for approximately eight seconds before moving on. In this case, however, I cared about the tragedy for longer than eight seconds, mostly because I was the kid being crumpled up by a vehicle three times their size.

I’ve been a fan of anime for as long as I can remember - my dad got me into it as a way of sticking with our Japanese culture. So you can imagine my disappointment when, instead of waking up in an exhilarating medieval adventure, I woke up in a ghoulishly dim hospital on the outskirts of London with my face wrapped in bandages and my body pumped with enough painkillers to kill a horse. The upside was that I didn’t have to go to school for months, which to six-year-old me was definitely worth whatever trauma I had just gone through - especially considering my parents even gave me a DS to get through the fog of boredom that would have otherwise blended my memories into a greyish paste.

People often talk about the five stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. To be quite honest, I think I was a bit too young to process what happened to me. Eventually, I became aware of the fact that my jaw was horribly disfigured, and that whilst it was certainly attached to my face again, I would always look grotesque. But at that young age, kids are more curious than cruel, and aren’t quite aware of the implications. In hindsight, I’m glad the accident happened sooner rather than later: in my experience, whilst children are just stupid and curious, teenagers are stupid, curious, and cruel. Not knowing any other life from a young age definitely helped me set my expectations.

Then came the double whammy: after the financial crash, dad lost his job. My parents got divorced soon after, and it was decided that I would live with my mum who wanted us to return to Japan - a place I had not been to since I was two years old.

“Excellent!”, thought young me. “I don’t have to live on this suburban street with all those cars on them!”

Moving to another country when you’re young is definitely difficult to adjust to - especially when it’s a culture that’s extremely distant from the one you grow up with. Fortunately I didn’t have to say goodbye to many of my friends - although that was mostly by virtue of spending so much time in hospital that I had barely any friends at all. The one friend I did have gave me the nickname “Dorito” because it was funnier than my actual name “Yorito”, so I can only be so upset about leaving that embarrassing moniker far, far behind.

My education after moving to the country was thoroughly Japanese, although I certainly felt like a foreigner in what was arguably my own land. It didn’t help that I was incredibly poorly socialised. As it turns out, teenagers tend to want to discuss more things than an obscure DS game you played fifty times and a book about medieval English kings. Whilst I grew to realise that the game was actually pretty awful once there were more things to do than lay in bed, I always kept my fascination for medieval European history. I think I felt a certain kind of kinship, knowing that even if I was hit by a truck, I would probably never be as disfigured as those kings were from centuries of inbreeding.

My knowledge of middle and high school came from British and American sitcoms, so part of me was dreading the immense bullying I would suffer once I went to school for my horribly disfigured face. So when I moved abroad and found out nobody even commented about it, I was taken aback slightly. Instead of snark and ribaldry, there were only hushed whispers, half-veiled scowls, and a general sense that I was some sort of freak. People were polite to me, but only in the most superficial sense. Relationships would never get deeper than that, which initially I put down to the fact that I was pretty westernised. But as middle school turned to high school, and I learned to suppress the nature I had grown up with (and discuss hobbies and interests more appropriate of a Japanese teenager my age) I still found something lacking.

For one thing, apps like Instagram were anathema to me. The concept of openly showing pictures of myself in such a carefree manner was mortifying, because although I was able to take my situation in good humour, that certainly did not mean I was at all confident in my appearance. Video calls, Instagrams of people who looked normal, and Tik Toks of people who were very much not normal but nevertheless attractive definitely didn’t help me feel any less alienated.

And to clarify, it’s not like I wasn’t genuinely happy for those around me who loved these things! Yes, it’s a bit upsetting when people see you like an alien, but the truth is that had I grown up normal, I certainly would be put off by someone sporting such a grotesque visage, to word it politely (which is, not very politely at all). As you can imagine, the dry British humour also never left me, which I knew was alienating to others, but it was simply too funny to give up. I chuckle to myself a lot when I think about these sorts of comments in my head, which probably doesn’t contribute towards me being a beacon of normalcy in the classroom.

In fact, though I disparaged my classmates for only treating me with surface-level kindness, my story begins with an instance of them reaching out a hand to me. I don’t know what compelled them, but one evening, I was invited to a group chat of boys from my class. I don’t even remember what I was doing at the time - perhaps working on my model of the São Gabriel (a ship that I would much rather have written a book about, until I remembered that doing so would have outed me as a nerd even more so than I am doing here). My classmates were suggesting that we went to a nearby cafe, and this made me feel very included. Later, someone in the group chat clarified that the cafe was owned by his parents and that they were probably just trying to get more money by any means they could. This made me feel slightly less included, but I’ve never been one to turn down an opportunity for cake.

After school, I met up with my classmates from the group chat. Instead of Yorito, they called me by my family name, Yamasaki, which ensured I was safe from any uninspired nicknames returning from my childhood. The tradeoff is that it implied we weren’t very close, but I think it’s more than worth it.

Shimizu Hideki was the son of the cafe owners, and by the time we sat down and made our orders, it soon became quite apparent why he needed to haul people into the cafe. The coffee was actually fairly reasonable, but unfortunately the cake was so pitiful that it reminded me of the desserts that were made available in the hospital. Naturally, we all said that it was delicious, and smiled back at the elderly couple and the waitress with feigned joy.

I was very caught up by the warm feeling from being around other people, so seeing the waitress hide a wince in the corner of my eyes jerked me back firmly into the real world. I hid a slight frown behind a sip of my coffee, before looking back at the elderly couple. I had no idea why Shimizu Hideki had such old parents, but it did occur to me that they never seemed to even harbour any sort of disgust with me. I convinced myself it was probably not because they were slightly blind and senile and instead because they were genuinely warm-hearted people. At any rate, there didn’t seem to be anything but good intentions behind their eyes, and as I stabbed my cake with a fork, I looked up at Shimizu, who was busy discussing some funny incident with a kid who fell over in science class earlier. Baking was a passion of mine, and I felt a profound sadness at the mournful state of the cakes in the cafe, so I waited for a break in conversation.

“Hey, are your parents looking for helpers around here? I mean, I’m actually quite fond of baking, and I need a part time job, so…”

That was a lie. My parents spoiled me rotten. Not only did they still pity me for what happened, but having divorced parents in my case meant they were constantly trying to buy my favour. Still, asking for this job felt like an instinct to me, and I thought it might be good to try and have the life of a normal teenager for once. If you’re baking, you can just stay in a back room and you don’t have to scare the customers with your face. It was much easier during the pandemic where I deluded myself that a mask would cover things up enough, but I eventually decided that a job where I don’t face anyone could do me good. Maybe I’d be able to form some actual friendships with my coworkers, because as much as I love arguing with people about anime over Discord and obsessing over obscure Portuguese boats by myself, the truth was that I did crave a little human interaction in my life.

Then the impulsiveness wore off, and then I wondered if I had been far too forward, and far too rude. Admitting I like baking? God. Is that a normal hobby for men our age? People baked a lot during the height of the pandemic, I suppose. Did I come across as implying their cake was bad and that they needed work? I mean, it was pretty awful, but I didn’t want to be rude…

The panicked thoughts only lasted about 0.4 seconds, which was the amount of time it took for him to slam his hands on the table with giddy excitement.

“Yes! Definitely!”

He awkwardly looked around the table, and apologised, realising that he had generally been far too excited about this cafe for it to seem like a friendly outing and not a glorified advertisement.

“Er, yes. You can talk to my parents about getting a job here…”

His eyes darted at the mildly bewildered expressions of those around the table who were surprised by his excitement.

“...after we’re done here, of course, hah.”