Chapter 8 – Get Set, Go!

As Eita stepped onto the platform at Shounan-Fukasawa Station, a breeze blew past him.

It was a warm, but slightly aggressive spring breeze. Eita could smell the sea’s salty spray mixing in with it. That made it a southern breeze.

With that on his mind, Eita looked around on the platform as if trying to find someone. But he hadn’t made any plans to meet anyone.

It was 9:30 AM, and he was waiting for the train to take him to his second period college class.

It was past rush hour, but there were a few people on the platform. A young mother with her small child, an elderly woman sitting on a bench, a man in a suit, and an older man in a tracksuit.

Eita searched for her unconsciously, but she was nowhere to be seen.

Then he realized what he was doing, and a pained smile pushed its way onto his face.

He’d done the same thing over and over again ever since that day. The day he graduated from Kashiogawa High…

He could be going to the local convenience store, or taking a weekend bus trip to Fujisawa, or heading to school, or going home from school. Every single time, Eita was watching and waiting for a chance encounter where he’d somehow manage to run into her in town.

That day… the day of his graduation ceremony, he never did see Natsume Mio. Even though he managed a home run in his one-inning competition with Haruto. He ran to the place she’d called him to, the hill behind the middle school… and Natsume Mio wasn’t there.

He immediately sent her a LINE message.

I’m sorry. I was late getting here. But I’m here now.

But the message never got marked as read.

March gave way to April. The cold winter finally broke into the warmth of spring. Eita became a university student.

The days went by at lightning speed as he struggled to adjust. Before he knew it, it had been an entire month, and he was nearing the end of April and the start of Golden Week.¹

But the LINE message he had sent her remained unread.

“…”

After seeing it with his own eyes yet again, Eita sighed and tucked his phone away in his pocket. The monorail pulled up to the platform, and he got on.

His commute to university was about an hour’s trip, including a transfer from monorail to train. He never thought he’d get used to that kind of travel, but only a month in it had become his new normal.

He ended up attending Joei University, the place he’d gotten a recommendation to. Despite his application to Suizan Academy, the failed entrance exam was a non-starter.

He typically slept on his commute if he managed to find a seat, and if not, he’d fiddle around on his phone.

The aquarium group LINE chat had been dead ever since graduation. April was the start of a new life for everyone. In a way, he figured no news was good news, and everyone was probably doing well in their new environments.

Haruto was the only member of the group he kept any frequent contact with. Just the day before, Haruto had admitted Morikawa was right. Getting used to this new job really is eating up all of my time. Eita couldn’t tell if he was complaining about the difficulty of his job or bragging about how smart his future girlfriend was.

Haruto made good on his promise to stay in consistent contact with Hazuki. Just a few days ago he had mentioned She says she’ll be back in town for summer vacation, so we should all get together then. Eita talked around the invitation for a while before Haruto said You’d better do something about it by then. He didn’t specify what “it” was, but he didn’t have to. It went without saying. He was talking about her.

Eita wanted to do something about Natsume Mio, if possible. Not just in the summer, but right away. But what was he supposed to do when she was avoiding him?

He couldn’t draw any other meaning from her refusing to read his last message.

“Eita!”

Right as Eita arrived at school, a familiar face called out to him from in front of the dining hall.

“Yo.”

Nakajima, Eita’s close friend from high school in Fukuoka, excitedly ran up to him. They were in different majors, but Nakajima had passed the general entrance exam and been admitted for attendance in the spring.

“Your second period class is cancelled. Said so on the bulletin board.” Nakajima pointed to the building beside the dining hall, but rather than walk all the way there, Eita just checked the student homepage on his phone.

Sure enough, one of his gen ed classes had been canceled. Evidently the professor was taking a trip to go see an overseas symposium. As Eita read the announcement, he thought he remembered something about the professor saying that at the end of the last class.

“Well, I got afternoon classes anyway.” First-year students generally packed on a lot of credit hours.

“Yeah, I’ve got four today. Hey, you coming to the welcome party afterwards? I hear it’s put on by a hiking club this time.”

“No. Don’t care.”

“Don’t be such a drag. You need to make the most of college life!”

“Don’t have too much fun out there, okay?”

“Hey, change your mind, you let me know. Gotta get to class!” Somehow retaining the same amount of energy, Nakajima waved goodbye and sped off.

“…Guess I’ve got some time to kill.”

Class was canceled, so there was no point heading there. Eita decided to take a nice walk around campus, heading off on his own.

The university was so big that there were still several sections he’d never seen.

He ended up on the central path of the campus that was lined on each side by sakura trees.

They were almost getting to Golden Week, but the sakura bloomed late that year, so about half of the trees still had petals. There was no breeze, but petals still gently fluttered to the ground. Eita stopped, pulling out his phone and snapping a picture.

Sakura blossoms gently falling from the trees, frozen in the air. It was a beautiful sight he’d captured.

But it just didn’t feel right. There was nobody he could show. Nobody who wanted to see.

Eita opened his LINE app, lingering regret pulling at him.

The first name his finger went to was Mio.

But their conversation had stopped at his last message. Their time had stopped at graduation.

I’m sorry. I was late getting here. But I’m here now.

He’d looked at it a thousand times, and it never was marked as read.

That hadn’t changed. Maybe it never would.

But just as that thought crossed his mind, the screen changed. His message was marked read.

“Huh?!” Eita stiffened in shock, nearly dropping his phone. His heart began pounding rapidly, so hard that it hurt.

Why now?

Why leave him alone for two months?

And why today?

There was so much he didn’t understand, so much he wanted to ask.

But standing there thinking wouldn’t change anything. He needed action. So Eita tapped at his screen a few times, jerkily typing out a new message.

How’s college treating you?

He knew she’d made it into her first-choice university. The day exam results came out, she’d announced her passing in the group LINE chat. Everyone congratulated her, and Eita had sent a stamp.

“…” His finger froze right above the send button.

What if the next message was never read? What if she didn’t reply? Fear reared its ugly head, and for just a moment, he froze, unable to send the message.

But then he just chuckled at himself and tapped it anyway.

The message was immediately marked as read, and she even replied.

It’s fun. How about you?

Eita sent over the picture of the sakura trees he’d just taken, appending It’s pretty average.

Yeah, that’s pretty obvious at a glance, came her reply. That had him for a second. It was an oddly pointed thing to say in response to his rather pretty picture.

Then, her own photo entered their conversation.

The scenery was familiar. Rows of sakura trees, half of them barren, and the hunched back of a single male college student.

The guy had Eita’s exact same backpack, and even the same outfit. Which made sense. It was him, after all.

Stuck somewhere between complete conviction and utter disbelief, Eita slowly turned around.

There she was, standing about ten steps away.

She was smiling like she had pulled off some great prank.

“Just so you know, I didn’t come here to chase after you. You’re aware this campus has a very prestigious education department, right?”

She answered questions he hadn’t asked with a cheerful cadence in her voice.

There was so much he wanted to say. So much he wanted to talk about. Even more questions he’d want to ask as a result.

But standing there in front of her, there was just one thing that she had to know.

What he couldn’t tell her that day. The feelings he had so desperately wanted to share with her.

“I’m in love with you, Natsume.”

A gust of wind blew down the tree-lined path. It carried a bit of force behind it, showering the two of them in sakura blossoms.

“Me too, Izumi. I’m-”

As the wind blew sakura petals all around them, an exhilarated blush danced across her cheeks.

Footnote

¹ Golden Week is a collection of holidays all stuffed into one week of late April to early May. Typically, schools and companies are closed and take time off for the entire week, and it makes up the longest vacation period of the year for many Japanese workers. return

Messages from the translation team

ShwampBam, Translator – Howdy! No author’s afterword in this novel. Bit of a shame, really, I always enjoy getting an author’s thoughts, though if I’m honest not a lot of author afterwords are genuinely informative. Just stories about recent events and this and that then a see you next volume.

As of September 2025, this volume was a new record for translation time, getting finished in under two months. Don’t think I’ll be trying to set any PBs for that in the future, but boy I really blasted through this project. I have enjoyed every novel project thoroughly, but this one was particularly refreshing. Sakurada Reset and Imperfect Girl were mystery thrillers, so they spent a lot of time setting up, usually the first third of each volume. It made the start a pretty big drag of establishing places and characters and situations. It was necessary, but sometimes boring to put on paper.

But for Just Because, the basic character interactions were the story. In fact, it explains almost as little as it can get away with while immediately thrusting us in the middle of old relationships and just letting it go from there. This book really made me remember my love for basic, down-to-earth, relational storytelling. Honestly, this is my favorite kind of story to work with, though they’re hard to find at any high level of quality.

I was very much looking forward to this book, because I rewatched the anime just as I was wrapping up Imperfect Girl. Best I could tell, this book was written as a base story script at the same time as the anime’s production, and it was more of a multimedia project than an adaptation in either direction. For the first time, I can genuinely and wholeheartedly recommend and enjoy the counterpart of my novel project. Sakurada Reset’s anime adaptation was cavernously lacking, and Imperfect Girl’s manga was well done for what it was worth, but had to make sacrifices in the storytelling that I don’t think were worth the cost.

But Just Because is well worth taking in both forms. The anime is a more overhead, omnipotent perspective story about the entire cast of five. We get more scenes of more people with a wider breadth of content for everyone involved. Meanwhile, the novel is strictly focused on Eita and, to a lesser extent, Mio. Both versions of the story give us a spectacular look into these characters’ lives in a way that both mediums can best present.

Both versions of the story focused on their strengths in presentation. For example, Mio’s revelation of her love for Eita. In the novel, it happened in her head as a response to external stimuli, and we could see it all play out in real time, mostly as a function of narration. In the anime, it patiently waited a longer amount of time until it could establish a visual element that tipped her emotional scale, in the form of Eita’s cell phone picture of Ena. A brilliant decision for both mediums that gives us different looks into how the characters react to their environments.

Of course, I do prefer the more personal take that we get in a lot of the novel scenes. But I can easily see myself rewatching the anime. The OST is amazing and the visual elements are excellently handled, plus we get lots of amazing bonus scenes that strengthen the theme of the story about choosing your own future for everyone involved. Most people reading the novel likely came from the anime, but if you didn’t I would recommend a watch.

As far as the translation goes, this was a fairly standard book with a straightforward script, so nothing crazy. My favorite detail probably goes to what I labeled as Mio’s “skillfully practiced” smile. Mio’s fake smile would always be called 上手, “jouzu”. Jouzu means skillful or proficient, and I really liked how much subtext went into talking about the way Mio went around faking most of her emotions. In particular, jouzu is highly recognizable to any person who learned Japanese as a non-primary language. It’s a common joke that any time you speak so much as a single word of Japanese, you’ll immediately be complimented with “Nihongo jouzu”,  meaning “Your Japanese is so good!” It really is true, too, I’ve experienced it firsthand.

With all that said, I think it’s time to cap off my note. I loved translating this book, and I hope to find a lot more like it in the future. That said, my next project is almost nothing like this one, but hey, I’m nothing if not entirely inconsistent in my project choices.

Until next time!