The Passengers on the Hankyu Line полностью

She should set her sights lower, they said, especially if she wasn’t also going to sit the exams for a safe-option college. But, at the same time, she knew that they expected her both to take the backup college’s exam and to keep pushing herself until the bitter end. As long as her backup was reliable enough, they advised, she could aim for her first choice, and if that wasn’t to be, she’d have Plan B to fall back on.

Now is the crucial moment. Your whole future depends on how you perform.

Her form teacher and her cram-school teacher would egg her on with such slogans. It stood to reason – after all, it was her parents’ money that would pay the fees, wasn’t it?

To make use of the backup choice, assuming she passed their exam, her parents would need to pay the enrolment fee to hold her place. Even for a junior college, the fee was still a few hundred thousand yen, and if it happened to be a four-year course, the fee was closer to a million. But then if she were to get into her first choice, poof – they’d lose all of that money.

Etsuko was the eldest in her family; she had two younger brothers. Her family couldn’t afford to spend so much on her entrance exams. The fact that her grades weren’t good enough to get into one of the national and public universities put further strain on the household.

And yet, both her teachers kept trying to persuade her to hedge her bets – they were remarkably insistent.

It’s not possible. My family doesn’t have the money to gamble like that on my exams. I have my younger brothers to think about.

Even if she’d left this crammer and found another one, she still had to contend with her high school.

Etsuko consulted with her parents and studied the exam schedules, taking into consideration the deadlines for submitting enrolment fees and prioritizing the institutions that would prepare her for a professional qualification. All the while, her form teacher remained tenacious as ever.

Just think about it – you might get in there, and if you do, what a stroke of luck!

C’mon, give me a break already! she had wanted to scream at him. ‘You might …’ ‘Hedge your bets.’ ‘A stroke of luck.’ With those odds and knowing her family’s circumstances, was he really telling her to gamble with her parents’ money?

I wish I was smart enough to apply to that university. It’s always been my dream one. If I thought I actually had a real chance of getting in, I might be willing to be selfish enough to nag my parents to let me take the exam.

But even studying hard – diligently going to cram school – to still only be told that she ‘might’ be accepted …?

She couldn’t ask her parents to hang their hopes on that ‘might’, which if she got in, meant throwing away the enrolment fee for her backup choice.

In other words, there was no way she could go to her dream university, even if she were accepted. Acknowledging the limitations of her family’s financial situation also meant that she was a grownup now.

She would have preferred it if her teacher had told her that the university was beyond her reach. For him to have bluntly discouraged her. That would have been more compassionate.

For me it wouldn’t have been just a simple ‘stroke of luck’! Maybe for the school and for yourself, you see my stroke of luck as a boost to your success rate.

Now, even just seeing her teacher’s face made her feel sick to her stomach. His expectations for her performance hadn’t panned out, and trying to avoid him was stressful.

It just wasn’t going to happen – now that it was apparent, she would finally be free from all the pressure he’d been putting on her.

‘So you weren’t up to snuff after all.’ That’s what he’d said.

Did he have to be so cruel?

Soon it would be Christmas. This was some present from Santa!

‘You haven’t been yourself lately.’

Etsuko’s boyfriend may not have known all his kanji but he made up for his cluelessness by being kind.

Christmas Eve had fallen on a weekday, so they were celebrating a belated Christmas together on the following weekend.

When he had arrived to pick her up in his car, he had taken one look at her glum face and seemed to intuit that it was because of her exam studies.

‘You’re on the home stretch now. It’s really tough, I feel for you.’