Chapter 9 – March 9, Sakurazaka Jin.

Today, Diya was expected to return in the afternoon, so I needed to talk to my sister before her arrival. My sister, with her usual drowsy eyes, sat down at the table.

“Ugh, sweet potato tempura for breakfast is a bit much,” she muttered.

“I fried them a little too much yesterday. We can’t waste any leftovers,” I replied.

“Fine,” she said reluctantly as she picked up a piece of sweet potato tempura.

“Yae-nee, I have something to discuss with you,” I said.

“Don’t you dare bring up love affairs in times like these! I won’t allow it!” she suddenly exclaimed, her drowsiness completely gone as she slammed her hands on the table and glared at me.

She puffed up her cheeks and made a silly face, which was quite embarrassing for someone in their thirties.

“I have no interest in love, nor do I have a partner. It’s a serious matter I want to discuss,” I explained.

“Oh, really? I was bracing myself for some shocking announcement, like you wanting to date Diya-san,” she said, looking relieved.

“No, no, that’s not happening,” I assured her while waving my hands in front of my face and laughing.

“Well, flat-out denying that possibility is also disrespectful to women, you know,” my sister remarked, still unsure of what to expect from me.

“Anyway, getting back to the topic at hand… I want to throw away some of the furniture in Mother and Father’s bedroom,” I continued.

“What are you talking about?!” my sister exclaimed, hitting the table even harder and standing up in anger and sadness.

“I didn’t say that without thinking. We need a lot of storage space for what’s coming in April. We’ll need to store a lot of preserved food and everyday items. That bedroom is the biggest room in the house, and it’s not being used,” I explained calmly.

My room and my sister’s room are both eight tatami mats, and my parents’ bedroom is even larger with twelve tatami mats. With that much space available, we can store a large amount of supplies.

After hearing my explanation, my sister seemed to reluctantly understand and sat down quietly.

“That’s true, but couldn’t we just put a storage shed in the yard and keep everything there?” she suggested.

“Of course, that’s the plan, but what if we can’t even step outside the house? We need to be prepared for the worst-case scenario,” I replied.

That’s why I want to keep some food and daily necessities in the house. We plan to store long-lasting canned foods and spare electronics in the shed.

“Yeah, but what about all the memories Mother and Father have in that room…” my sister trailed off.

The items in the bedroom are the belongings of our deceased parents.

There’s a slightly worn-out dresser, a king-sized bed, and a vanity that their mother brought from her parents’ house. There’s also a stereo that their father purchased during his college years, a big bookshelf filled with shoujo manga and history books, and a walk-in closet containing their parents’ clothing. This is everything left behind by their parents.

“I also have reservations about getting rid of them, but we don’t know how much food or supplies we’ll need. Of course, we don’t need to dispose of everything. I plan on keeping the things that fit in the closet, but we need to get rid of the large furniture.”

Without the furniture, they could fit dozens of boxes in the room.

“Yae-nee, the future is more important than memories. It’s necessary for us to survive together.”

“I understand…I do. But, then why not use the basement?”

As my sister approaches with a face on the verge of tears, I shake my head slightly to indicate my disagreement.

Our house has a basement. It was originally planned as my father’s hobby room, so the room is spacious and has excellent soundproofing, but now it has become a room for working out and occasionally singing karaoke with my sister.

Come to think of it, there are times when my sister is holed up alone in the middle of the night. She practices singing or listens to music at high volume.

“We plan to install a refrigerator and a freezer in the basement. We’re also thinking about installing solar panels and directing most of the electricity generated towards powering them.”

Vegetables can be grown in a small rooftop garden to meet the minimum requirements. However, obtaining meat and fish may become difficult. Nevertheless, if stored in the freezer, they can last for a considerable amount of time. The arrangement of a large-sized refrigerator and freezer is already completed, we are now just waiting for it to be delivered.

“Refrigerator and freezer…hmm, ummm,”

Although she seems to understand the situation, my sister furrows her brow and groans.

“Yae-nee, if the world becomes like that, I won’t be able to eat my favorite rum raisin ice cream, you know?”

I stood up quietly, cut off her words while I approach my sister from behind.

Then, I gently placed a hand on my sister’s shoulder and whispers softly into her ear.

“What do you think we can do if we had a large freezer?”

“We could…eat food?”

“Yes. Even meat can be stored long-term. We could have steak, shabu-shabu, and fried chicken. But what if we didn’t have a freezer?”

“We…couldn’t eat it. Ughhh.”

My sister looks at me with a pensive expression, hinting at an indescribable emotion.

It may be impossible to stockpile enough food to last us a lifetime, but we want to have at least six months’ worth of supplies, hoping that the chaos will subside during that time.

“Yeah, you’re right. The most important thing is to stay alive. And Mother and Father will understand,” I said.

Finally, it seemed like we had come to an agreement, and although it wasn’t easy, my sister reluctantly agreed to dispose of some things.

After finishing breakfast, we entered our parents’ bedroom.

Since I clean the room regularly, it is kept in a pretty clean state… because there is no one to make it dirty.

First, I need to decide what to keep and what to throw away.

“The dresser, the vanity, and the bed should be thrown away because they take up too much space. As for the bookshelf… what should we do with it?”

The shelf is quite tall, almost reaching the ceiling, and it’s also quite wide. However, it’s installed close to the wall, so it doesn’t really get in the way.

“But books are important, aren’t they? If we can’t use electricity, we won’t have much entertainment left.”

My sister’s point is valid.

Our daily lives have become so reliant on electronics that we’ve almost forgotten the importance of physical books, with e-books now dominating the market. Come to think of it, I’ve never checked what books we have.

I stand in front of the bookshelf and scan from the top left of the uppermost shelf. There are about fifty of my mother’s favorite shoujo manga, knitting, sewing, and cooking books, and a few novels. The left shelf is almost entirely occupied by my mother’s belongings.

So the right shelf must be my father’s.

At the top are not books but a row of CDs. He doesn’t seem to have a particular preference for foreign or Japanese music. There are also baseball-related books and magazines, and every other book on the shelf is a baseball manga.

“Father was a big baseball fan, wasn’t he?”

“Yeah, it’s nostalgic. He was always so calm, but when he watched baseball, he would shout loudly and often got scolded by Mother.”

He was a passionate baseball fan, but he never forced us to be fans too, enjoying it by himself.

Feeling nostalgic, I picked up a manga, and noticed another book’s spine behind it.”

“Oh, is this bookshelf actually two rows deep?”

“Didn’t you know, Jin? Magazines can also be arranged to fit, so the back is pretty deep.”

That means there are almost twice as many books stored here than what is currently visible. As an experiment, Jin pulls out ten baseball manga at once, revealing fishing and survival guidebooks, magic books, and several books on home gardening in the back. There seems to be a good selection of practical items for surviving a zombie apocalypse.

“Even Beginners Can Catch Fish!”

“Tooru King’s Fun Magic”

“Self-Sufficient Life for Capable Housewives”

“Mountaineer Tangshan Yoshihara’s Disaster Preparedness Guide”

“Complete Agricultural Manual”

“Ultimate Lazy Meals”

‘I had no idea they had these kinds of books… I guess I really didn’t know much about Mother and Father,’ Jin thought to himself as he surveyed the titles of the books he had discovered hidden in the back of the bookshelf.

“Should we leave the bookshelf as it is? Then let’s take everything out of the chest of drawers. Also, please sort out the clothes that won’t fit in the closet. I’ll take down the mattress from the bed and then dismantle it.”

If there were one more pair of hands, it would be possible to take the bed outside by separating the mattress and the frame, but my sister, who had abandoned her muscles and asked, “What is exercise?” was not helpful for physical work.

Since the bed frame is made of wood, it should not be difficult to disassemble it. If necessary, I’ll cut it with a saw.

I planned to remove the king-size mattress and pull it all the way to the door, but it was heavier than I thought.

Realizing that it would be better to do it himself than rely on his sister’s help, he looks around the bedroom and spots a large window on the east wall.

Opening the window, a slightly chilly breeze of early spring flows in.

Since it is too wide to carry the bed out through the window, he decides to remove the window first.

“Hey, it’s cold!”

“Don’t read manga. Get to work.”

I interrupted my sister who had started reading shoujo manga from the bookshelf, then proceeded to move the mattress towards the window and drop it into the garden.

The impact was heavier than expected, and a loud noise echoed from below. The speaker peeked into the garden, but it seemed that the mattress had landed safely.

“Do you feel like jumping onto that mattress?” my sister who had come over and was now peering down with shining eyes.

The situation felt like something a stuntman might do, with the mattress placed directly below.

“We’re not getting anywhere if we keep fooling around like this,” I said, putting a stop to our playful banter.

Of course, I confiscated the shoujo manga from my sister before returning to the task at hand.

About an hour has passed since then.

The bedroom furniture is mostly cleaned up. We finished much earlier than expected, not because of my sister’s efforts, but thanks to the mattress we threw into the yard.

We threw drawers from the chest of drawers and wood fragments from the disassembled bed onto the mattress, which greatly saved us time.

“I’ll take this to the garbage disposal facility. You stay here, Yae-nee. If I come back late, feel free to have lunch first,” I said.

“Okay, have a safe trip!” Yae-nee replied.

I got into the small truck filled with bulky waste and set off towards the destination.

In the rearview mirror, I could see Yae-nee waving goodbye.

I climbed into the light truck, which was filled with bulky waste, and set off towards my destination. My sister waved her hand vigorously in the rearview mirror.