Chapter 5
English class 2-C at Toyonoki Academy had a boredom so thick you could wring it out.
The cherry blossoms outside the window had long since fallen. The April sun shone through the glass, leaving bright patches of light on the desks. At the podium, Mr. Nakamura, the English teacher, was explaining the use of the present perfect tense in a flat, monotonous voice. The blackboard was so densely packed with English letters that they crawled like a swarm of black ants.
Eriri sat up straight.
Her golden twin tails hung neatly over her shoulders. The ribbon on her school shirt was perfectly straight. Her notebook was open on her desk, her pen held between her fingers—the standard posture of a model student from any angle.
But only she knew that her mind had long since gone blank.
"The present perfect tense…" Mr. Nakamura's voice came through a thick layer of glass, muffled and distant. The example sentences on the blackboard gradually warped and deformed in Eriri's eyes, eventually becoming a pile of meaningless symbols.
English.
Her single greatest natural enemy in life.
Despite having a British father and a Japanese mother—theoretically making her an ideal bilingual—reality was incredibly cruel. Eriri Spencer Sawamura, sixteen years old, half-Japanese, half-British, hated the subject of English. Her pronunciation was fine, since there were occasional English conversations at home. But grammar? Tenses? Those clunky preposition combinations? Forget it. You couldn't pay her to care.
"The present perfect tense indicates the influence or result of past actions on the present…" Mr. Nakamura adjusted his glasses and swept his gaze across the classroom. "So, who can give me an example sentence?"
Dead silence. Several students lowered their heads and pretended to take notes. Even more stared blankly at their textbooks.
Eriri's heart suddenly jumped.
Don't call on me, don't call on me—
"Sawamura-san."
It's over.
She knew it. As the big beauty of the class, the big celebrity of the school, and with a British father to boot, the teacher would naturally choose her.
The blood in her body rushed instantly to the top of her head. She stood up stiffly, the legs of her chair scraping against the floor with a harsh screech. Over forty pairs of eyes in the classroom looked at her at once—curiosity, expectation, schadenfreude, and a clear understanding of "just as expected from the mixed-race kid, she got called on."
Mr. Nakamura looked at her expectantly. "Please make a sentence in the present perfect tense describing the influence of your past experience on the present."
Eriri opened her mouth.
Her mind went completely blank. What was the present perfect tense again? What had she done? All she could remember was the background she had drawn while staying up late last night—under a cherry tree, how to draw the heroine's skirt so it looked like it was fluttering in the wind. And that milk tea—the one she had bought for the thousand-year-old man that morning, how his eyes had lit up like a child's when he drank it…
"Sawamura-san?" Mr. Nakamura pressed.
Eriri's fingers tightened around her pen. She could feel her cheeks burning, her ears blazing. The "Perfect Miss" mask she had carefully maintained all this time was cracking. Beneath it was the little girl who had been laughed at by her classmates in elementary school for her poor English, hiding in the bathroom to cry.
I'm dead. I'm so dead. Tomorrow on the campus forum there'll be a post: "Shock! Mixed-Race Beauty Eriri Sawamura Is Actually an English Idiot!" Then that hateful woman, Kasumigaoka Shiyu, would definitely look at her with that kind of smile and say something sarcastic… something like "Ah, Sawamura-san has something she's not good at too."
Just as she was about to close her eyes in despair—
A voice sounded in her ear.
It was very light, very clear, using standard, almost British English:
"I stayed up all night finishing my work, so now I feel tired."
Eriri's eyes flew wide open.
She stiffened her neck and slowly, gradually turned her head.
By the classroom window, in the patches of light formed by the sun streaming through the glass, there stood Zen'in Genji. More precisely, he was floating half a foot above the ground. The sleeves of his indigo hunting robes fluttered gently in the April breeze—actually the wind seeping through the gaps in the window—creating an absurd contrast with the uniform-clad students around him.
No one was looking at him. No one could see him.
Only Eriri could.
Genji winked at her. The corners of his lips curved into a very shallow smile. Then he silently mouthed:
"Repeat after me."
Eriri's brain was still frozen, but her mouth moved subconsciously:
"I… I stayed up all night finishing my work, so now I feel tired."
Perfect pronunciation. Correct grammar. Accurate tense.
Mr. Nakamura's eyes lit up. "Very good! Sawamura's pronunciation is very authentic, and the sentence structure is also very complete. Please sit down."
Eriri nearly collapsed back into her chair. Her heart was still pounding, but this time for a different reason.
She glanced secretly toward the window. Genji had "floated" to the back of the classroom and was now "looking at" an English poster on the wall, his back to her. And his face, illuminated by the sun… looked a little proud, actually?
This guy! When did you get here! And wait—your English is that good?!
---
When the bell rang after class, Eriri practically ran out of the classroom.
She hurried to the cherry trees behind the school building—a popular spot for couples at lunch, but empty during class time. After making sure no one was around, she spun around and lowered her voice to the empty air:
"You! Come out right now!"
The shadow rippled like water. From it emerged Genji's figure. Still in his hunting robes, but for some reason, Eriri felt that the smile on his face was a little more than it had been that morning… brighter, more like a modern teenager.
"What's wrong?" He asked, his voice calm. "I just helped you. Shouldn't you be thanking me instead of—"
"You can speak English?!" Eriri cut him off, her blue eyes wide. "And you speak it that well?! Aren't you from the Heian period?! How could someone from a thousand years ago understand a modern English lesson?!"
That string of questions made Genji pause. Then he laughed.
It wasn't that gentle, antique smile from before. It was more relaxed, more… modern. He even shrugged his shoulders—a gesture that made Eriri freeze for a moment.
"Well," Genji said, the archaic formality in his tone noticeably less pronounced, "didn't I tell you? My 'previous life'—or rather, the life before I went to the Heian period—I was a modern person."
Eriri was stunned.
"You didn't say that."
"I didn't?" He tilted his head. "Well, I am. Just like you. A person living in this era."
Genji raised a hand, his fingertips tracing the air. "I just happened to die relatively young. When I woke up, I had become Zen'in Genji of the Heian period." He paused, looked at Eriri, and a glint of mischief appeared in his eyes. "So not only do I know English, I also know how to use a smartphone. I know what Wi-Fi is. I've played video games. And I've chased fandoms—though that was a thousand years ago."
Eriri opened her mouth, but for a long moment, no words came.
Fragments of their interactions over the past few days flashed through her mind: Genji's curiosity about modern conveniences, but also his occasional "I understand" looks and the overly practiced way he had used a straw to drink milk tea…
"So you knew all along…" She murmured. "You know about TV. You know about manga. You know about games… Why were you pretending to be some ancient person?!"
"I wasn't pretending." Genji looked innocent. "I really am a person from a thousand years ago. I just happened to have lived in the modern era in a previous life. And—" He suddenly leaned closer, the edge of his hunting robe almost touching the hem of Eriri's school skirt. "Speaking in that old-fashioned language is a habit and a pleasure. Isn't it too formal to use things like 'this one' and 'girl' all the time?"
Too close.
Eriri instinctively stepped back half a step. Her cheeks were starting to burn again.
Genji straightened up and looked at Eriri. "So when I see all these things you use now… I actually miss them a lot. It's like… home, but everything has changed."
Eriri was silent for a few seconds.
Then she suddenly remembered something, and her eyes widened again. "Wait! When you watched me put on makeup this morning and said my makeup skills were magnificent after a thousand years—you obviously knew what cosmetics are! Were you deliberately making fun of me?!"
Genji coughed and turned his head away. "That… that was intentional."
"You—!"
"But I really do think you look good with makeup," he added quickly, in a serious tone. "In my previous life, I saw a lot of girls who knew how to do their makeup. But someone like you… well, someone who's so meticulous that even their hair is carefully maintained… that's rare. You put a lot of effort in."
This direct compliment immediately defused Eriri's anger.
She turned her head away and unconsciously curled her fingers around the tips of her golden hair. "Well, of course… I wake up an hour early every day…"
Her voice grew quieter and quieter.
For a moment, there was silence under the cherry trees. A breeze blew, and a few late cherry blossom petals fell to the ground between them.
"So," Eriri suddenly spoke, her voice muffled, "you're good at English?"
"Not bad. I got a 7.5 on the IELTS in my previous life." Genji answered casually, then paused. "Do you need help with tutoring? The way you looked in class—you might as well have been listening to a foreign language."
"I… I don't need your help!"
A typical Eriri response. But Genji had already heard the hesitation and embarrassment in her tone.
He smiled, no longer teasing her, and changed the subject. "What's your next class?"
"Math." Eriri dropped her face. "An even more complete disaster."
"Math…" Genji touched his chin. "I was pretty good at science in my previous life. If you need help—"
"No!" Eriri refused immediately, but regretted it right after. She added quietly, "...At least not right now. I want to try the test on my own."
"Ambitious." Genji nodded. "Then I'll just watch from the sidelines. But seriously—" He suddenly stepped closer and lowered his voice. "Your math teacher lectures much more slowly than my high school teacher in my previous life. At that pace, can you even keep up?"
"That's because I wasn't paying attention!" Eriri flared up. "If I paid attention—"
"If you paid attention, your soul wouldn't fly out the window," Genji interrupted mercilessly. "In ten minutes of class, you looked at the clock seven times, dozed off three times, and secretly drew five little cats in the margin of your textbook. The drawings were very cute."
Eriri's face turned completely red.
"Y-You were spying on me!"
"I was bored." Genji said matter-of-factly. "I haven't been to class in a thousand years. Listening to a modern high school lesson is pretty novel. The content is just a bit simple."
"...Honors student, amazing."
"Indeed." Genji nodded, his expression serious. "In my previous life, I graduated from a top-tier university."
Eriri didn't understand what "top-tier university" meant, but she instinctively felt it was something impressive. She glared at Genji, then turned and headed toward the school building.
After a few steps, she stopped again.
Without turning around, her voice was very soft:
"...Thank you."
"Huh?"
"For the English class just now." Eriri's voice was barely audible. "...Thank you."
Having said that, she quickened her pace and practically ran away from the cherry tree.
Genji stood there, watching the back of those golden twin tails disappear around the corner of the school building. The corners of his lips slowly spread into a smile.
The midday sun was warm and bright. The sound of students' laughter drifted from afar, and cheerful campus songs played over the loudspeakers.
He looked down at the thousand-year-old hunting robes on his body, then raised his gaze to this modern campus.
Then he laughed softly to himself.