286 – Shrine Maiden, Ninja and Kung Fu Girl
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At the sound of the sparrows chirping, I slowly opened my eyes.
“Ugh.”
Intense sunlight penetrates between the eyelids as soon as you open your eyes.
Perhaps it’s right after waking up, my eyesight hasn’t recovered, so I automatically frown.
Then I realized that the seat next to me was empty and raised my upper body.
“…….”
The president who fell asleep next to me naked last night had already disappeared.
As he hurriedly got dressed and went out to the living room, his father, who was sitting on the sofa reading a newspaper, did not know.
“Are you awake?”
“Yes. What about the chairman?”
“Miss Saionji said she had work in the morning and went out first. She asked me to say hello to you.”
As expected.
While biting my lip in a strange sense of regret, I decided to understand because I know that the president is usually a very busy person.
“Yooseong-ah, wake up and eat.”
At that time, I heard my mother’s voice from the kitchen.
“Yes”
Answering that out of habit, she and her father went into the kitchen, where the mother set a large pot on her table.
The contents of the pot were rice cake soup.
Usually, Japanese people eat osechi ryori or Japanese rice cake soup called ozoni on New Year’s Day, but at my house we eat Korean rice cake soup.
No matter how long it’s been since I immigrated to Japan, the fact that my parents’ roots are Korean hasn’t changed.
Perhaps because the store is closed today, the mother, dressed in comfortable clothes, asked, sitting next to her father.
“Hey, what kind of food does the chairman lady like?”
“Chairman?”
“I want to serve you my favorite food next time.”
After receiving her mother’s question, I thought about the chairman’s favorite food.
“Hmm… Stir-fried pork?”
“That’s what we often eat when we come to our store.”
“To be honest, I don’t really know either. In front of me, they only showed me how to eat well.”
Thanks to having grown up eating only good things, I am amazed when I see food for the first time, but it seems that there is no food that I am relatively obsessed with.
And when my mother heard me say this, she looked at me with a puzzled expression.
“You say you’re a girlfriend, don’t you know such a simple thing?”
“No, I guess she was originally dating… It wasn’t long before she actually started dating…”
“That’s it, fart.”
“Keep hum! Chee hum!”
Then her father cleared his throat and intervened at good timing.
“You can ask me separately next time, why do you serve noodles from New Year’s Day with something like that? Let’s have some rice cake soup before it cools down any further.”
After saying that, the father opens his first drink.
I thanked my father with a wink in my eyes, and then began to inhale the rice cake soup made with clear beef bone broth.
***
After breakfast, I left the house dressed lightly.
The reason is that the other day, when I went out to buy Christmas presents, I promised to go to the New Year’s shrine with Fuma-senpai, whom I met at a fast food restaurant.
When I headed to the shrine near the house that Fuma-senpai had sent me via messenger, the yard in front of the shrine was crowded with worshipers who had come to worship, perhaps because it was January 1st.
“Kim Yoo-seong! Here it is!”
“Senior!”
I spotted Fuma-senpai waving her hand in front of the shrine’s torii gate, and I waved her hand gladly.
And next to Fuma-senpai was Li Meiling in a gray tracksuit.
“It’s been a while, Mr. Meiling.”
“The last time we met was when you were fighting Ivan at the underground club, so it’s been almost three months?”
“I guess that’s about it.”
I shook hands with Meiling, who still has good muscles even after a long time, and asked about her current situation.
“Well, it’s the same for me. I travel all over the world to participate in fighting competitions, and I devote my spare time to training.”
“How did that person end up living with Fuma-senpai?”
“I can answer that.”
Hmm, while clearing his throat, Fuma-senpai opened his mouth and explained the whole story of Meiling and himself living together.
“After the Great War that day, Mr. Meiring, who was inspired by Hayate’s muse, ‘nagi’, asked my father to teach him. However, my father, who hated being bothered, rejected Meiling’s request and , It’s okay to call it a substitute, but I decided to be my daughter’s opponent. I thought it would be a good sparring opponent since each other’s level is similar.”
“Well, that’s how we became best friends now.”
Meiling said that and hugged Fuma-senpai.
Perhaps it’s because Meiling has a baby face, but Fuma-senpai looks older when looking at it this way.
Actually, Meiling would be older.
“But there are quite a few people who come to pray wearing kimonos.”
When I said that while looking around, Fuma-senpai in casual clothes nodded and agreed.
“Anyway, there are many people who come with their families or lovers. It’s the New Year, so they must have wanted to feel good.”
Saying that, Fuma-senpai glanced at the women in kimonos passing by at the right time, and asked her, blushing slightly.
“…Was it better for me to wear a kimono too?”
When I heard that, she hurriedly shook her hand, afraid that Fuma-senpai might have misunderstood my meaning.
“No, I just said it, so don’t worry too much about it.”
Of course, if Fuma-senpai, a typical Japanese beauty, wore a kimono, she would be very beautiful, but she did not intentionally force her to feel uncomfortable.
To begin with, Fuma-senpai isn’t even my girlfriend, so there’s no way she could ask for something like that.
“Let’s go to worship soon.”
At that time, Meiling cut off the conversation at the right time, and thanks to that, we were able to move on to the next location without even feeling the momentary awkward atmosphere.
***
In Japan, there is a word called yaoyorozu.
If you express this in Chinese characters, it is eight million, but what we are talking about here is not the number eight million, but an idiom that means countless numbers.
Therefore, Japan’s folk religion, Shinto, expresses that there are eight million gods in Japan.
God is to be feared.
In other words, God cannot exist without believers.
Therefore, in Japan, there are countless shrines built all over the country.
Because making offerings to the gods and making wishes is a part of everyday life for Japanese people.
We walked past the red torii and along the edge of the road leading to the shrine grounds.
Wash your hands and rinse your mouth with water at the temizuya on the way to the main hall.
After that, stand in front of the hall, pray according to the manners, and insert a coin into the tax box.
As a native Korean, it was quite complicated for me, but the series of movements were as natural as flowing water, perhaps because other people around me have been doing it often since I was a child.
Meiling, who is a foreigner and doesn’t know much about Japanese culture, seemed to be imitating her somehow, but well, that would be enough.
“Kim Yuseong, what did you wish for?”
“I prayed for the health of the people I know. After all, health comes first.”
“Huh, like you.”
“So what did Fuma-senpai wish for?”
“Similar to you. I just wished for the people around me to do well.”
“Then what about Meiling?”
“I wished to meet a lot of stronger people in the future. It’s still a long way from seeing the peak of nothingness.”
After hearing each other’s wishes, we decided to try our luck for the new year since we had come to the shrine.
“Hey~ I want to draw some fortune-telling~”
“Yes~ Welcome~”
A shrine maiden stood in the souvenir shop installed on one side of the shrine and bowed her head in a warm greeting.
But there is something familiar about his face.
“Sensei Mizuki?!”
When I raised my voice in surprise, Mei Ling tilted her head.
“Does anyone know?”
Then Fuma-senpai answered instead.
“You know, he is our school life English teacher.”
“But why is such a person here?”
As the three of us looked at each other with doubtful expressions, Mizuki-sensei replied by twisting her body.
“Actually, the priest of this shrine is a relative of the teacher. During the New Year, there is always a shortage of workers, so he came to help for a while…”
Immediately after, the teacher put her hands together and said.
“Keep this a secret from the other kids! If the teacher finds out that she works part-time here as a shrine maiden, she won’t be bothered in many ways!”
“Yes? Yes…”
To be honest, I didn’t think there would be any problem if this fact was known to the school, but the teacher was so eager to ask for it, so I didn’t mind refusing it.
“Sister, what are you doing when you’re not working?”
“Ah, I’m sorry Kozue-chan! The children you teach are coming to the shrine!”
A small shadow pokes its head out from behind the teacher who was bewildered and talking gibberish.
A rough estimate, would it be about a middle school student?
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The droopy-eyed girl with long black hair was wearing a miko outfit, and unlike Mizuki-sensei, who seemed to be cosplaying her, her outfit was very natural.
When she made eye contact with me standing across the counter, she flinched and stopped for a moment.
“Hello?”
Then the girl called Kozue raised her eyebrows and muttered softly.
“…Sansano-sama?”