I’m about to start bawling.
I can’t believe it, how could this happen? Slapping someone is proposing to them, picking up a knife is accepting a duel?! My common sense says that it’s red roses for a proposal and a glove for a duel! I’m now standing at the crossroads of life and death just because I didn’t know this world’s etiquette.
“Aaaaaaaaaaagh!”
The castle’s bed is so huge that I don’t fall off even though I’m rolling around. So huge that I feel lonely. For the first time in my fifteen years of existence I understand why girls sleep with stuffed animals.
“What do I do? How do I get out of this one?!”
I try to calm myself by thinking of worse pinches I’ve been in. Searching: more extreme crisis situations...no data found.
“I haven’t done anything as dangerous as this! This is not normal! This dueling thing!”
Calm down, calm down, calm down, calm down. How about I hurt myself before I’m beat up by the enemy?
An anguished Günter told me earlier with eyes and nose running that deciding the winner of a duel by the loser’s death went out of fashion hundreds of years ago. Duels nowadays are merely a matter of pride, and it’s very rare for someone to actually lose their life.
Yes, rare.
There are exceptions.
I unconsciously tuck the pillow behind my legs and groan loudly, “What am I gonna do?” As if in response, a knock comes from the thick door.
“Your Majesty.”
“What?”
Conrad enters carrying a pile of various things.
“Good, you’re not asleep yet. Your Majesty, what is that between your legs?”
“Huh? Oh, this, it kinda calmed me down—I couldn’t sleep at all.”
“Not surprisingly. I thought that that might be the case, which is why I brought these. Here, Your Majesty, let’s practice.”
“Practice?”
He’s brought a leather tray and a pole—the tray becomes a shield when I grip its back, and the pole a practice sword when I draw it from its scabbard.
“Hold the sword with your dominant arm—yes, this is a one-handed sword, so your left arm carries a light shield. Try swinging it. How does it feel? Please tell me if it’s too heavy. Though I did intentionally chose a shorter sword made for women.”
It’s a bit heavy to swing with one hand. The grip on this simple, dull silver weapon feels very much like something else that I’m more accustomed to holding.
“The hilt feels a lot like a bat, doesn’t it. But the weight is more like a pro wooden bat than a metal bat.”
“Is it? I hadn’t noticed. A bat, hmm? That’s probably true.”
It’s already been so long since I last played baseball. I haven’t even touched ball or bat or mask or mitt for a very long time.
“It really brings back memories, this grip. I guess it’ll be a year soon, huh?”
“Why did you quit?”
“Eh?”
“Baseball,” Conrad asks with his arms folded, a cheerful smile on his face. I drop the sword in my lap and fall back onto the bed.
Nostalgic memories. Memories that no longer make me mad, but still make my chest ache a little.
“...My temper exploded like it did earlier, and I hit the coach. I got kicked out immediately.”
“That’s the reason you quit the team, right? I’m not asking about the team, but about why you stopped playing baseball.”
“I stopped because...I wonder why? I can’t really explain it clearly myself, I guess.”
“Then maybe you haven’t stopped yet?”
“Huh?”
“I’m saying that maybe you’re not done yet?”
A round object appears in Conrad’s palm as if he were Santa Claus or a magician. Its leather is yellow with use, its red stitches worn.
“Woah, it’s a ball! Hey, what an awesome discovery! Baseball in this world is just like baseball in Japan!”
“Want to give it a try? To see if the feeling is the same or not?”
The courtyard is enclosed by buildings on all sides; soft light pours out of every window. There’s a moon in the sky, and brilliantly flaming torches illuminate a yellow semi-circle on the ground.
Sentries guarding critical positions serve as our only audience. But.
“It feels like a nighter.”
“Nighter? Aah, night game?”
“That term exists in this world too? Do you play baseball at night anywhere?”
“Not really. Well, actually, there are very few people who play baseball...truth to tell, the children and I are the only people who are interested in it...”
Conrad has brought his personal gloves. They’re normal gloves, not mitts. Well, you take what you can get, I murmur as I touch the outside with my index finger, and test-grip the hard brown leather. Though the model is somewhat outdated, it’s an almost-new baseman-use glove. My favorite is the Zett role model design, but this one isn’t a Mizuno or a Descente. Of course it’s not going to be a brand I recognize, since this isn’t even my world. Except that this familiar boomerang is...
“...Nike...no way.”
Conrad waves exaggeratedly from more than ten meters away.
“Your Majesty, here it comes!”
The ball lands solidly in the glove as I hold it up diagonally across my face. The sensation of leather smacking against leather is peculiar. The shock concentrated in the center of my palm seems to throb from there down to my elbow.
“Hard ball, huh?”
That’s what it is. But it’s electrifying; I’ve always played soft ball until now.
I shift the grip of my right hand on the ball, which is surprisingly smooth and difficult to hold onto. When I take a good look, I can see words written there in a script that is about to fade almost completely away. Of course I can’t read Mazoku writing, but it’s rather unexpectedly childish of him to write his name on the ball. I slowly pull my arm back and return the toss with a small snap. I over-estimate the distance, so it hits his glove with a good smack.
At night the temperature drops pretty dramatically, so even though it’s spring, I can see my breaths in white puffs. Like that one scene in Field of Dreams, I take a look at his expression as we conscientiously continue our warm-up to make sure he’s enjoying himself, and test the waters with, “Think I can try squatting?”
“Squatting?”
“Right, let’s see, take six more steps back. There, good. Now throw the ball at me from there.”
“That’s too far, Your Majesty!”
“It’s fine, I’m a senior high school student already! Come on, a straight pitch right down the center!”
I squat and dig my heels in. The ball that comes at me is a strong one-bounce, and I catch it at the level of my knees. The ball, thrown with truly terrible form, has considerable weight and speed.
“Who taught you to throw like that!”
I take a few running steps and toss the ball back, surprised by the careless positioning of his fingers.
“It gives you good speed, but from where and whom the heck did you learn that utter rubbish?”
“No one taught me. I just went to baseball games and felt it out for myself. I watched from so far away that I know nothing at all about things like grip or the finer points of throwing.”
“There’re games, but there’s also practice, right? That’s why there are coaches and students. Here, you hold the ball with three fingers like this, with your fingers on the horizontal seams.”
“I see...ah, can you put any power into throwing the ball when you’re holding it like this?”
“Of course—?! If you hold the ball that tightly, it’ll have a hard time leaving your hand, right? So where did you go to games? Does this country have stadiums, too? Do the people of this country go have beer at night games with the Giants for amusement on Friday nights?”
“The Giants are a Minor League, so I don’t know them very well...but Your Majesty, there is no baseball in this country. The games I went to weren’t here,” he replies vaguely as I tuck my glove under my arm and explain the grip to Conrad. Here, this is four-seam baseball, since the pitch is gripped across the seams, and you see four seams when the ball is thrown. I have more enthusiasm for teaching baseball than asking about the state of it in this country.
“Shift your weight for the windup? If you don’t, your pivot leg won’t be firmly planted. Focus your gaze on your target—don’t look away from my mitt. Now, your stride should be short, but it’ll be something you have to get a feel for yourself. Though your follow-through is oddly exaggerated...”
Explaining to him makes me feel rather happy. Shifting his fingers and shoulders along with my explanations calls to mind my own childhood, stirring a warm feeling in my chest.
“...Was it like this?”
“Hmm?”
“I was just wondering if it was like this. For the person teaching me. When I was about ten, there was this one-day baseball training camp held by professional players. I was a crybaby catcher, but because of my dad’s connections, or maybe because he won the lottery, I got to go.”
Especially since I wasn’t much to speak of either physically or mentally. I was an elementary school kid who was playing that position just because my dad chose it for me, and I was afraid of the fastballs and runners coming at me. I wore a mask, of course, but I was still afraid of things flying towards my face. I shamefully confessed everything to the slim professional catcher.
“I felt as if saying that I was scared meant that I had no aptitude for it. But he squatted me down and squatted down behind me, like this, sorta as if he were hugging me. Then he positioned my mitt and called to the pitcher.”
The pro pitcher, who was more than 5’9", lifted his leg high and threw the ball from his blue glove into the air with his long fingers. Thinking about it now, it was unquestionably a super-slow lob. But even after the brand-new pure-white soft ball dove into my mitt, I was still crouched there in place, forgetting even to blink.
“And my teacher asked me over my shoulder, ‘Where you scared?’ But I already...”
“Looks like you can already catch a pro ball. So are you still scared of the junior players?”
As I look at Conrad’s palm, I can recall the feel of the wind that day. There wasn’t yet a roof. The sun shone directly on my cap.
“...I can’t forget it, that sensation.”
“The warmth of your teacher?”
“Not warmth, that’s not it at all! And besides, I decided to make him my role model on my own, but I only got to talk to him that once, and I never even got his autograph!”
“But Your Majesty is...well, a fan of your teacher’s team.”
“Well, of course—?! The ringtone on my cell was the team song for a while, and I always watch their game broadcasts to the end, and I check for them on FM during the weekends, and I’m in their fan club and go to the stadium, too. It’s now the fourth year that I’ve been keeping a scrapbook of news on the team, and my videos keep increasing and increasing...so who are you a fan of? What’re the team names like here?”
Conrad folds his arms with a meaningful look.
“The Boston Red Sox.”
“Red Sox?! Woah, Major League! So players like Orellano, Wolcott, Clark, and Rhodes of Kintetsu!”
“Who is he? I don’t recognize the name.”
“He’s in the Pacific League...he’s a player in my world who started out with the Red Sox. What, so this world has the same baseball team names? Well, that’s true, there are actually Tigers and Giants in both Japan and America, Japanese-American baseball is so confusing, with the Cubs vs. the Giants, you can’t tell the nationalities at all...”
“Since the Giants are a National League.”
“Even the league names are the same? And place names like Boston...that can’t be right, can it?”
Now that I think about it, he’s a really odd guy. We’re too much on the same wavelength. With the ball in my hand, I take a long hard took at Conrad’s face. My grip unconsciously tightens so much that my index finger cramps.
“You understand everything that I can’t get across to Günter, don’t you? Like about merry-go-rounds and about my dad...and even the Red Sox...why is that? You said earlier that it isn’t in this country, right? Then where? Which country in this world, which human society likes baseball? Where is there a Boston Red Sox?”
That can’t.
“Where besides Massachusetts in America on Earth?!”
That can’t be possible.
Conrad lifts both hands, still wearing his glove, and shakes his head no.
“Nowhere. Nowhere besides Massachusetts in America on Earth.”
“Then, why—”
“Because I went there.”
“Went—where? You went where?”
“Because I went to Boston.”
To Boston?
“Not just Boston, all over. Washington, Staten Island, New Hampshire, Orlando, Quebec, Edinburgh, Wales, Dusseldorf, Cherbourg. I went to the world in which you were raised, carefully protecting Your Majesty’s soul all the while.”
A Traveler’s Guide to the Earth, the guest-from-another-world edition.
“Seventeen years ago, while protecting Your Majesty’s pure-white soul, which had been healed of all its wounds from its previous life, I went to the place where you were born, the United States of America. That’s where I learned about the joys of baseball, and after making sure the future Maou was safely born, I came home. Your Majesty’s mother is such a dauntless woman that she was shouting at the taxi driver even as you were about to be born.”
“No way...so you were the person riding with her, who gave me my name?!”
“Though I never imagined that she would end up using it...”
Then my fifteen years of being teased about Shibuya Yuuri Harajuku Furi is about twenty percent his fault? The remaining part is largely my parents’ fault, since they chose the Chinese characters.
“If that’s true, then I met you when I was in my mom’s stomach?”
“You could say that.”
Can this strange story really be true? This man, who doesn’t seem to have aged at all since meeting my mother fifteen years ago, who was destined to be the one to name me, is standing with a smile right in front of me. And he’s calling me Your Majesty.
“I’ve been waiting for fifteen years.”
He takes off his glove and tucks it under his arm, then envelops my hand, still holding the ball, with his.
“For the day when I would be able to meet Your Majesty face to face.”
My left brain is picking something like ‘thank you’ or ‘let me express my gratitude to you on behalf of my mother’ out of its orthodox conversation stock, but he’s standing in front of me with such a human expression on his face that my right brain wins the fight, and I can only say, “...Stop calling me Your Majesty, since you’re the guy who named me.”
“Yuuri.”
That’s right, since it’s the name you gave me! But even so, I have to continue in a falsetto to hide my embarrassment. Because it’s rather touching, and makes me uncharacteristically emotional.
“And stop talking like we’re brothers separated at birth! Since we pretty much only met yesterday! You probably knew my name, but I never heard anything except that you were riding together with my mother! Well, but if you’d had your name written on your luggage or something, my mom would probably have remembered! Here, like this.”
I thrust the ball in my hand at him.
“Like having a baseball with the owner’s name written on it.”
“...That’s not my name.”
What?
“I bought the gloves myself because I wanted to take them home with me, but I got the ball at the baseball stadium. I didn’t really ask for it, but one of the junior players on the visiting team said that he’d sign it and pretty much nabbed it out of my hand, then...”
“Wh-wh-wh-wh-what’s wrong with you?! You’re playing catch with me with a ball signed by one of the great Major League players?! Who-who signed it?!”
The script is so faded that I can’t make it out even though I now know that it’s English. What if it’s a god of the Majors?
“Oh, could he be more celebrated than Your Majesty?”
“Wh-wh-wh of course?! I was a bench-warmer for three years, and I’m too intimated to even try for Koushien, and even that’s no match for the pros. ...So you said that baseball hasn’t spread much yet in this world, right?”
“Actually, the spread is just myself and the children.”
"So that means that right now I’m the best of the best top player? I’ll definitely be a starter in the game? Can I be called the Ichirou of Shinma Kingdom? Oh, but my position is catcher—argh, what do I do? How about the Next-Generation Itou, then?
“Most certainly—and in Your Majesty’s case, not only that, but player, coach, manager, referee, and owner. The owner of a state-managed team would have to be the king, wouldn’t it?”
“The king! If it’s the king, then the Maou would be okay, too, right?”
Conrad’s light brown eyes meet mine, and they narrow as he says, “I’m glad, Your Majesty, that you seem a bit more cheerful.”
I’m not cheerful, Conrad. But I feel like I’m about to have some ideas that haven’t quite made an appearance yet.
“Yeah, so since I’m king, how about I make baseball the national sport? We could build a Shibuya Yuuri Commemorative Stadium, and hold the first Shibuya Cup Championship Tournament!”
Something flashes across my mind.