I may have decided once and for all that I wasn’t going back to Chichibu, but I was still uncertain about whether I’d be able to keep up with school. After all, I’d failed at it multiple times in a row.

I managed to settle on a place to stay three days before the entrance ceremony. Since it was only one train stop away from the school, I wouldn’t have to put up with much trouble to commute. My course of study was two years long, and there weren’t many hours of classes per week, so I figured that I could bluff my way through.

And with that, I was easily able to quit my truant lifestyle of five-and-a-half years, surprising even myself. Somehow, I managed to get through school and make it all the way to graduation.

One of the main reasons for this was because almost all my fellow students were male. This wasn’t because I found it easier to make friends with guys; they had a lot of troublesome aspects compared to girls, and I didn’t feel as if I was more compatible with them personality-wise. But when I was with the boys, I could be a golem. It didn’t matter how I was seen—I could play things extremely loose and just settle things with my fists if I wanted to. Of course, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to win against a man in terms of sheer strength these days.

The nature of the students helped me get through as well. I came to Tokyo just as the big Evangelion boom started; not just games but any hobby that fell under the umbrella of “otaku culture” was looked down upon. Some of the students at the game school were either troubled about their own hobby, or had delved into it because of their trouble in real life. They were drawn to this path in spite of themselves, and as a result, they’d developed a tendency to be overly self-conscious.

A lot of them had an edgy fashion sense. They’d wear fingerless gloves, studded vests, bright red T-shirts, and bandanas. They’d lick their lips and say things like, “I could kill someone anytime,” and carry around (probably fake) Chinese swords. Even during a simple conversation, they’d get aggravated and start crying over minor things, or start speaking quickly because they’d get nervous. Sometimes, they’d even try jumping to the next building on the fifth floor. There were a lot of people who’d bitten their nails and fingers until they bled like I had.

At first, I was taken aback by their sheer intensity, but after talking to them more, I realized that they were a lot like me on the inside. They agonized about how they wanted others to see them, or what their true selves were like. As a result, they’d express their personal feelings in a painfully raw way. If they had conflicting opinions with others, they’d try to push their own will instead of reaching a mutual understanding, so they would have trouble with social interactions. But many of them were nice kids at heart.

Some of them, when you got close enough, even started coming out as former truants. It made me really happy to think that there were so many other people in the outside world who were just like me. “Me too! Me too!” I wanted to say.

But none of us came out openly to each other, now that we were all properly going to school. We could simply perceive it through each other’s scent—or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that we could hear each other’s unspoken words. Whatever the case, we were able to guess from someone’s aura whether or not they had a place in society.

In the end, I skipped two days of school a week instead of going for the allotted time every single day. But there were other people here and there who did the same thing, so I didn’t experience that sinking feeling in my stomach as I thought, “Now that I’ve skipped one day, it’s getting harder to go to school.”

After I moved to Tokyo, I felt as if I were living in a dream.

For one thing, I could go outside without worrying about how the neighbors saw me. In the country, I had to walk twenty minutes to reach a convenience store, but in Tokyo there was always a convenience store just around the corner. I could shop at any time I liked, too, whether it was the middle of the night or the cusp of dawn.

I’d go to see an all-night film with my newfound friends, and as I’d walk down Shibuya at dawn, I’d think, “How did I end up here?” I’d gaze up at the stars melting away into the dim light as I sipped on coffee, which I never used to like. As I did so, I’d be overcome with the thought that life really was a mysterious thing.

These little things were a miracle to me at the time. I was living in the outside world that, just a few weeks ago, I’d thought would be forever beyond my reach. And I could sense that I was growing used to it all, somehow.

Someone even confessed his love to me and we started going out. The time had finally come when someone could hold romantic feelings for me, but I didn’t particularly think of this as a wondrous thing. In middle school and high school, my friends would make me listen to their boy talk, so I got to fantasizing in detail about what would happen if I got involved in a romance. None of my fantasies were grounded in reality, though... This should go without saying, seeing as I knew very little about real life, but my fantasies were ridiculously dramatic. So when love happened to me in real life, I just thought, “Oh, so this is what it’s like, huh?” Other than some events or fresh experiences I hadn’t expected, I accepted everything as it came. Gyudon, on the other hand, was well beyond what I had imagined, and moved me to the core.

Having said that, I still often pestered this person who had become my boyfriend with the question, “What do you like about me?” which must have made me the very image of an irritating girlfriend. By then, I thought I’d stopped caring about how my “fake” and “real” selves were perceived, but I was afraid of what would happen if he overestimated me. It would crush me if he left after becoming disillusioned with me, so I wanted to set things straight right from the outset. In the end, however, this just resulted in me being too self-conscious again.

The answer I arrived at was to leave open the toilet door and do my business in front of him. If he didn’t hate me after that, then I could believe that his affection was genuine.

In all the relationships I’ve had since, almost none of the men rejected me after I opened the toilet door. During my truant years, I’d dreamt of dating a wild man, but the people I ended up choosing were always gentle and kindhearted. The man I eventually married was also a friend from the game school. He was laid-back and did things at his own pace, and he didn’t gamble, either. Perhaps subconsciously, I’d been using my mother’s boyfriends as examples of what not to do.

I didn’t return home, not even for summer vacation, and I barely ever called my mother, either.

I knew that she was already living with her boyfriend, something which I was thankful for. Her boyfriend at the time wasn’t a bad person, but he was always reading the racing form guides in just his underwear, so the idea of being in the same space as him creeped me out as a grown woman.

If my mother’s boyfriend was already living in that house in Chichibu, then I absolutely couldn’t go back. This seemingly unfortunate situation was actually heartening to me.

Eventually, I began to develop a specific desire for the future: I wanted to become a screenwriter.

I’d chosen this game school as a means of escaping Chichibu. When I’d picked my course of study, I’d gone with games writing, knowing that it was possible to change it halfway through. Connecting with the outside world was my first priority, and I wasn’t in a position where I could even imagine my dream job from the beginning.

When I enrolled, the school had only just opened. I think it’s taken on a more solid structure these days, but when I was there, it was still in the stage of feeling everything out, just like I was. I was there for two terms. In the first year, everyone studied the same things: programming, graphics, scriptwriting, and so on. In the second year, people could choose a course according to their specialty.

But as much as I’ve extolled praise for this school for its games writing course, it didn’t have any lecturers who could teach it. Of course, there were teachers who had handled scriptwriting, each of them with illustrious careers, but that was for anime, CDs, dramas, and so forth. The students, who had been expecting to be taught about flowcharts for games writing, were outraged. “It’s a scam! Give us our enrollment fees back!” they cried. I said, “Yeah, I agree,” but in all honesty, I didn’t care that much about the particulars of games writing.

The writing classes themselves were very fun. We’d write original stories, get feedback from the teacher, and then write some more. I may have been starved of passion, but I was at least earnest to keep on writing. I may have consumed countless books and films in those anguished days in Chichibu, but I’d never produced a single thing of my own. Even the knowledge I’d taken in was quite divorced from reality thanks to how little time I’d spent outside limbo, and just my limited amount of life experience overall.

But even with these handicaps, my teacher acknowledged my writing. They even set me to work on various small jobs like writing scripts for CD dramas and manga that would be published within the school.

It may be misleading to say that my scripts were acknowledged, per se—I simply attained the ability to write a script from start to finish.

I was one of the few people in my year-level who submitted scripts as their homework. Most of the scripts submitted had non-endings of the “The battle has only just started” variety. Many people were unmotivated because we weren’t doing game scripts. But the bigger problem, evidently, was that people were afraid of having their writing judged by others.

Now that I’ve been a screenwriter for many years, I meet young people through my work who tell me that they want to become a screenwriter, too. But when I tell them, “Okay, try writing a story,” I don’t hear back from them. I see my old classmates in them, and I can understand all too well how they feel. It’s not as if they lack motivation; they have an image in their heads of something they’d like to release to the world one day, which ends up getting inflated as time goes on. It’s not out there yet, but it’s going to amazing, they think to themselves. But naturally, when they try writing it all down, it can’t measure up to what they had imagined. So then they become ashamed of their work and don’t want it to be judged.

I think that the reason I was able to overcome this hurdle was thanks to Mr. Shimotani from high school. Exchanging those book reports for two-and-a-half years had softened my fear of criticism. If I tried writing something that I knew was bad just to see the reaction, Mr. Shimotani didn’t have any ideal image of me inside his head. I was, after all, a truant. If I didn’t bother writing anything, Mr. Shimotani would just forget about me completely. For some reason, this was a depressing thought.

The desire that sprouted within me eventually became a single-minded goal.

I wanted to become a screenwriter. But how would I become one?

In my second year, I started job hunting, but the listings posted at the school were just for programming and graphics jobs. There were the occasional recruitment ads for writers, but these were obviously for games. Not only did I lack knowledge about games, I had a stronger desire to write screenplays at the time.

“Is there no way to become a screenwriter?” I asked my teacher, upon which I was told that many people become screenwriters by spending years as an anime production assistant or writing for a magazine.

But this only begged the question: “How do you connect with people?”

You work as a production assistant or magazine writer, and then you would tell a director or producer about your passion for writing stories. If you were lucky, they’d ask you to write a script or two for them. And if they acknowledged your skill, then you’d keep finding work.

All of this sounded difficult for me, however.

I may have wanted to become a proper citizen of the outside world, but I was still clumsy at interacting with people. At school, I may have felt relieved to find so many kindred spirits, but after a while people started forming cliques, and I started to stand out a bit more as a lone wolf. I was utterly terrible at group politics and at positioning myself in relation to others.

At school, I was able to find some teachers and friends who liked me; I even got a boyfriend. But I thought of those people as the exceptions. People who didn’t know me well sometimes told me I came across as impertinent and that they didn’t understand what I was thinking. There were a lot of people who were turned off by my personality, but at this stage, I’d resigned myself to the thought that these were just my quirks.

Going by what my teacher was saying, I needed to get a job in another field, and then get people to like me so that I could become a screenwriter. Unfortunately, this was a demoralizing thought.

In the end, I decided: No, I really do want to start off doing screenwriting straight away. As I was worrying about how to go about it, I heard that a direct-to-video film company was recruiting screenwriters.

As a lover of yakuza films, I’d watched a lot of movies that had direct-to-video releases. The company that was recruiting did porn, but I applied anyway, thinking that I’d get the chance to be involved in a yakuza film if my screenplays were used.

So it was that I wrote my first porn screenplay. My love of Tanizaki got me into reading a bunch of other authors of sadomasochist literature, like Oniroku Dan, Shozo Numa, Marquis de Sade, and Leopold Ritter von Sacher Masoch. I had also read a lot of boys’ love dōjinshi for Saint Seiya and some other series. My knowledge of sex was fatally unbalanced, so I went around watching as many porn videos as I could get from the rental shop.

With my head spinning from all these new sensations, I somehow managed to write down a script. I covered my lack of actual experience by shoving in some lesbian and light sadomasochist elements, and even threw in some cheesy jokes while I was at it. It was an utterly slipshod work, but I felt a sense of achievement for completing my first erotic script. This, coupled with the anxiety about my looming graduation, was what made me send off the script without any hesitation.

Before long, I received a call saying that my script was going to be used.

“Whooooooooa!” I shouted in spite of myself. In my excitement, I ran laps around my room. Even then, I couldn’t contain my excitement, and kept hitting my head against the wall. This was exactly one week before my graduation.

Three days later, I was standing at the meeting place, trying to contain my nervousness. The president of the company would be coming by to pick me up in his car. Looking back, the idea that a newbie writer would get picked up by the company head himself is an unusual story, but since I knew nothing of the industry, I thought nothing of it.

Finally, the promised time arrived, and a black Mercedes Benz stopped in front of me. “Oh, are you Ms. Okada?” asked the president. He was dressed in a gray suit and had a carefree smile on his face. I was slightly afraid of the intimidating aura emanating from the Mercedes.

He told me to get into the passenger seat of the car, so I did, and the first thing he told me was, “Everything I’m going to talk to you about from this point is about work. This isn’t sexual harassment, so don’t sue me, okay?” At that moment, I was definitely afraid.

The Mercedes eventually arrived at a perfectly normal apartment block. One of the rooms had been rented out to use as an office. By then, my fear had reached its max level, and I thought, Okay, I’m definitely going to get raped or sold off into prostitution here. I wondered if I should run away, but they knew my address and phone number... I was still in “fight or flight” mode when the president opened the door of the office—

There really was a small production company inside.

There were two men and one woman busy at work. Unlike the president, they were all wearing casual clothes. They glanced at me and said, “Good morning,” and then immediately looked away disinterestedly. I was also relieved to see a stack of papers, from which the president took out the script I had submitted.

As I stood there, frozen, he offered a few words of praise to soothe my feelings, before pointing out some scenes that needed correcting or writing conventions that I got wrong. I hadn’t learned how to write specifically for screenplays, so I wrote an arbitrary amount of words per page, and my stage directions were written in a rather idiosyncratic form. His feedback made a deep impression on me. Ah, I should have learned to do it the right way, I thought; but seeing as the content was what it was, the first thing I felt was raw embarrassment. I became paranoid at the thought of how the other employees were looking at me, and I began to sweat.

The president intended to adapt my script into a film, so his criticism had a different fervor to it than Mr. Shimotani’s or the teachers from the game school. This script was going to become a commercial product. Could the directions I’d given be carried out with a real camera? How much would it affect the budget to use certain props? How many actors were available to play all the non-speaking roles? —And so on.

As I was listening to this, my embarrassment faded and I felt like I was about to start crying instead. It blew my mind to think that this script would really be performed by actors. I was going to be a screenwriter...

The next moment, the president said, “Now then, try reading this.” Huh? I thought. I stared blankly at the president, not understanding what he was saying at all. “Can you try saying to the actors the lines that you seem to be embarrassed about reading?”

And thus, I began my days as a screenwriter by reading aloud the porn script I’d written.