The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 5 (12 page)

“Okay, let’s do it. Mind if we go someplace I know about? It’s right near here.”

“Um, you know someplace we can eat at for three hundred yen?”

“Yeah, well, I kinda predicted he’d say that. I dunno if it’d be enough to fill up a full-sized man, but we’ll see.”

She brimmed with confidence as she climbed back up to the surface streets, guiding the other three to the front of a mixed-used office building.

Suzuno was the first to spot the sign.

“‘Manmaru Udon’… What? Udon noodles?!”

Manmaru Udon was an udon chain that got its start in Kagawa prefecture, the birthplace of the thick
sanuki
udon noodles that dominated much of Japan these days. They were known for their self-service bar of side dishes and toppings, and—more relevant to today’s proceedings—they offered high-quality noodle dishes that started at 105 yen.

“U…udon for a hundred five yen?” Ashiya, predictably, demonstrated the most shock.

He wasn’t deliberately trying to be difficult, but not even he expected a restaurant to offer anything below his quoted number.

“Huh… I heard about this, actually. This is Manmaru, eh?”

Maou, being a fast-food employee, at least knew the name, although this was his first actual visit to one.

“The small-size plain noodle bowl goes for a hundred five yen, and if you add a couple of toppings to that, you can keep it under three hundred and still fill up a little,” Rika added.

“Do… Are you a frequent visitor, Ms. Suzuki?” Ashiya inquired.

“No, just sometimes. The broth that udon gets served in around Tokyo is too thick and spiced up for me, but it’s a lot plainer here, so I like it more. Kinda easy on the wallet, too, huh?”

“Yeah, no kidding.”

“So anyway, we can eat here and I can clue you in about TVs a little before we hit the store. I’m not a huge expert or anything, but seriously, you’d be asking for trouble if you walked in there right now.”

Rika stood in the front of the line, showing the rest how to order. Behind her were Ashiya, Maou (still pondering over Ashiya and Rika’s apparent chumminess), and Suzuno, each wrapping up their order in sequence.

“You’re going with plain udon, Suzuno?”

Rika couldn’t help but ask. Even Ashiya and Maou topped their 105-yen bowl with some sweet-potato tempura and fried fish sticks, but Suzuno, surprisingly, went with plain old noodles and broth.

“I need to test this first. One small udon, as is, will suffice.”

As is
, in this case, referred to the not-too-cold, certainly-not-too-warm temperature Manmaru typically sold their noodles at.

The chain’s 105-yen price point was more than just cheap for cheapness’s sake—it was devised to encourage more people to give
sanuki
udon a try. A sign of the franchise’s confidence in their goods, in other words.

“I never shy away from a fair challenge.”

“…A fair what?”

The four of them sat at a table and took out their chopsticks, Suzuno sizing up her bowl as intently as a samurai preparing to strike with his sword.

“’Kay, well…dig in, everyone.” Sounding the bell like a cafeteria lunch lady, Rika watched as Ashiya and Maou dipped their chopsticks into the broth, both thinking over their own private matters.

“…Let us begin.”

Suzuno shot her eyes open and brought a load of noodles to her lips.

“!!”

One bite was enough to make her face change color.

“This…is…!”

“Uh, hey, Suzuno?”

Maou’s voice clearly did not register with Suzuno as she quickly went in for more noodles. As the other three watched, she finished up the entire small bowl of plain udon in under a minute. The sheer zeal she brought into her eating performance mesmerized the group. She gave a light exhale as she wrapped up the final mouthful, but after a few seconds, her shoulders began to visibly shake.

“Why…why…?”

“Wh-what’s up, Suzuno? Didn’t like them too much?”

The bizarreness of Suzuno’s reaction gave Rika genuine cause for worry. But Suzuno responded with a gruff stare, her voice low.

“Why…is such splendid udon a mere hundred and five yen?”

“Huh?”

“The thickness, the body, the mouth feel, the salt level, the finish…all absolutely beyond reproach.”

“Yeah…? Well, great, but…”

Her eyes remained stiff and resentful, but Suzuno now looked more like a gourmet restaurant critic as she stood back up, bowl in hand.

“…Another order!”

“Yeaaah, have fun,” Maou muttered into his noodles as Suzuno stormed back to the counter. “I know they’re good and all, but
that
good?”

Ashiya looked up for a moment from his bowl. “Yes, well, Ms. Kamazuki is something of an udon aficionado, I believe. Perhaps something in it struck a chord with her.”

For some reason, the observation caused anxiety to shake itself into existence within Rika’s heart. Why would Ashiya know about Suzuno’s favorite foods? She knew they were next-door apartment neighbors, but were they friendly enough to know about each other’s eating habits?

“…Aha…”

Rika shook her head rather than take the thought any further. There was nothing strange about it at all. Even Rika had at least a vague idea of what people around her ate on a regular basis. And Suzuno became acquainted with Ashiya long before Rika entered the picture. If they lived that close to each other, he was bound to find out somehow.

As if to quell the anxiety once and for all, Rika opened wide and took a large, crunchy bite out of the
kaki-age
tempura fritter over her noodles.

“So getting back to the TV for a moment… Did you have an idea of what kind you wanted to buy or anything?” she asked.

“If I can watch TV with it, I’m good to go,” Maou replied.

“Well, yeah, but—”

“You said earlier that you owned a Toshina something-or-other that was ‘a twenty-sixer,’” Ashiya began. “Is that the model number or some such part?”

Maou’s phoned-in preferences were as unexpected as Ashiya’s earnest question.

“N-no, no, it’s twenty-six inches. That’s the size of the screen…or of the TV itself, maybe. One of the two?”

Rika had trouble remembering which was correct, but reasoned that it didn’t enormously matter either way.

But this was far more than simply not keeping up with the latest models.

Rika was no gadget guru, but televisions and video recording already existed by the time she was born. Her DVR wasn’t any thornier to use than any video device that came before it.

“Huh. So if twenty-six is normal, then I guess we’re maxing out at twenty-nine, maybe?”

“What?”

Rika’s eyebrows bunched together at Maou’s continued nonsense.

“I’d like to keep it on the bigger side, though. Like, twenty-seven or so. Twenty-four would be too small, so I’d want to go for twenty-six or twenty-seven…or twenty-eight if I can.”

She kind of understood what Maou was getting at as he rattled the numbers off. They indicated that this wasn’t going to be easy for her.

“It doesn’t work like bicycle tires or anything…”

“No?”

“I mean, the newer ones, if they’re meant for the family room, they come in thirty-two inches even at the low end. If money was no object, you could even pick up a fifty- or sixty-inch screen right now—like, about the size of a tatami mat if you laid it on the floor.”

“What the heck would you watch with something
that
big?!”

Maou—on this issue, at least—had a point.

“Mmm, movies and stuff, I guess? Some people are really picky about video and audio quality with that sort of thing, so…”

“Would regular programs show up that large as well?”

Ashiya’s trembling question created a mental image in Rika’s mind.

“You know, maybe that wouldn’t be so nice, huh?” she admitted.

Movies and nature documentaries would be one thing. But watching a normal news broadcast, the national legislature in session, or some inane comedy show in massive, high-resolution perfection seemed pointless. Rika chuckled at the idea of the top half of a newscaster’s body projected across her entire living-room wall.

“But that’s gonna be way out of your budget anyway. My twenty-six-incher’s probably about…this big, I guess?”

She drew a rectangle in the air in front of her to illustrate.

“They’re all gonna be flat-screen models these days, so you just have to worry about the width when you’re deciding where to put it. How much money do you have to work with?”

“Forty-one thousand, two hundred thirty-nine yen.”

Maou’s response was instantaneous.

“Why so exact?”

“He’s never
not
exact with our budget.” He motioned to Ashiya.

“No, I am not. So, do you think we’ll be able to purchase a television with…41,239 yen?” The nervous tension was clear in Ashiya’s voice.

“I performed some preliminary investigation over the Internet earlier, but all I could find on the low end was used goods, shady-looking store sites, and things like discount offers if I signed up for a new broadband provider. I’m afraid I failed to get a clear picture of what a TV would cost by itself.”

“Well, if you’re buying a home appliance like this, it’s probably better to get hands-on with it first anyway…”

Rika nodded slightly.

“But if you don’t mind going down to twenty inches or so, you could probably squeak under the forty thousand mark, I think.”

“Hell yeah!”

“Wha…!”

Maou’s fist pump was accompanied by the blood draining from Ashiya’s face.

Suzuno chose that moment to return, fresh bowl of noodles in hand.

“Upsized a bit, huh?”

It was another plain udon order, this one in a bowl easily twice the size of the first.

“Even their largest size is only four hundred yen. How could they possibly earn a profit at these prices…? The state of Japan’s food security never fails to mystify me. Have we returned to the subject of television yet?”

She was already slurping away as she spoke, her face softer now. Apparently she calmed down enough that she could think about other things besides noodles again.

“I could provide a budget of up to seventy thousand yen if needed. Would that enable me to make a purchase?”

“Oh, you could get a pretty good one with that budget, I’d imagine. We’ve got less than a year before Japan switches over to all-HD broadcasting, so some of the older models are starting to get really cheap these days.”

“Is that the state of things…? Curse you, HD broadcasting… A thorn in my side to the very end…” It was unclear where Ashiya was targeting his grudge, but his chopsticks were about to snap in his hand.

“Beyond that…if you hit up the thrift shops, you could get an old picture-tube TV for less than ten thousand if you wanted, but there wouldn’t be much point to that once they stop broadcasting in analog.”

“So why’re they even selling those?”

“Well, apart from changing your antenna, you can get HD broadcasts from a cable company, too. Then you’d have to rent a tuner, but that would let you watch digital TV on an analog set. There’s a lot of people who don’t want to throw out a perfectly good TV, you know?”

“Hm,” Suzuno muttered. “Would that grant me access to a vacuum-tube and transistor-model television?”

Rika shook her head at Suzuno’s oddly impassioned query.

“I…dunno about that. I mean, I’ve heard of transistor radios, but…”

“Ah. I merely thought that, considering how quickly things evolve in Japan, people would be all too ready to sweep away with the old to bring in the new. But hearing of this technique to connect yourself to the past… It gladdens me, a little.”

“Hey, um, I’ve kinda been wondering about this, Suzuno, but did you maybe grow up in a foreign country like Emi or something?”

“Hmm?”

“I dunno, you just like saying stuff like ‘In Japan it’s like this,’ ‘In Japan you do that,’ that kind of thing.”

“…Ah. Yes. Um, yes. I come from a religious family, and we were stationed overseas…”

The unexpected question threw Suzuno uncharacteristically off balance.

“You’re lettin’ the udon get to your head.”

The muttered remark earned Maou a kick under the table from the blushing Suzuno.

Rika did not seem particularly suspicious, however. Suzuno wasn’t lying, after all.

“Oh, one of those missionary things? Wow, I guess there really are people like that, huh? Like, I saw on TV once about this priest in Japan who went deep into Africa to spread Christianity. Kinda made me think about what a big world it is, y’know?”

“There…are people like that in this country, as well…?” Suzuno looked at Rika, eyes wide. “I had thought the Japanese held little interest in religion.”

“Oh, no way! I mean, you wouldn’t see all those horoscope and fortune-telling apps on phones if we didn’t.”

“Oh? I can call someone on my phone to have my fortune read?”

“It’s not the automatic time hotline, Suzuno.”

“……”

Rika didn’t mean to bring it up, but it still put Maou in an embarrassed silence.

“But…yeah, you see miniature Buddhist shrines inside IT firms and stuff. That, or some big electronics firm will hire a priest to drive the evil spirits away from a tract of land so they can build a new factory on it. I mean, pretty much everyone’s picked up their fortune on a piece of paper at a temple at least once in their life. I forget if I told you that our family lived right where our business is, but there’s a little shrine in the office, and in one corner of our workshop there’s an
inari
, too. I had to keep that nice and dust free as part of my chores as a kid.”

“Was this an
inari
sushi production plant?”

Suzuno’s eyes instinctively turned to the
inari
sushi—balls of rice wrapped in fried tofu—on offer back in the self-serve side dish bar.

“Wow, Suzuno, I think the udon’s eating into your brain.”

“Huh?”

Maou shook his head at his quizzical lunch companion.

“Gah-hah-hah-hah!” Rika burst out laughing. “No, no, I told you, we manufactured parts for shoes. But, oh, I guess maybe you didn’t know if you didn’t grow up in this country. I’m talking about a little shrine. It’s meant to commemorate the god of foxes in the Shinto religion.”