Employment Ice Age of the Dead Chapter 1 Prologue

New story, Employment Ice Age of the Dead. For now this will be on and off. Refer to the main page for synopsis 

 

Prologue: The Employment Ice Age Janitor Gets Mocked by the Students Again Today

「Hey, you know about the Employment Ice Age generation?」

「Yeah, yeah, I know. Everyone rips on them online. That's the generation full of people who are too useless to land a real job, right?」

「What kind of school life do you have to live to end up unable to become a full-time employee? There's no way that'd happen to our generation.」

「They probably just slacked off the whole time.」

「And after slacking off their whole lives, when they end up broke in their old age, they get bailed out with welfare? What a waste of the taxes we're going to end up paying.」

「The Employment Ice Age generation couldn't be bothered to put in the effort, so if they end up broke, they should just get euthanized.」

「Honestly, I think so too. Speaking of which, wasn't there one of them at this school? The useless Employment Ice Age guy. Um, the janitor…」

「You mean Izaku? A contract employee at his age? He must be seriously useless.」

「I'd be too ashamed to keep living if I were him.」

「I think I'd just kill myself if that were me.」

Is this a generation gap talking?

I was sweeping the school gate, which looked more like the entrance to some stately fortress, with a bamboo broom when I noticed a group of students getting worked up over trash-talking me.

Even if I explained our Employment Ice Age generation's circumstances to them, boys and girls alike, they'd never understand and they wouldn't change their minds. Most people, after all, can only understand what they've personally experienced.

In a world where everyone keeps insisting there's a labor shortage, people probably assumed a guy like me, stuck working as a non-regular janitor, must be seriously incompetent. As far as they were concerned, my generation simply hadn't tried hard enough and non-regular work was all we deserved.

No matter how thoroughly those of us from the Employment Ice Age tried to explain how bad the job market had been back then, to kids like them, wealthy and enrolled in this town's prestigious private Banryu High School, it would only sound like excuses from a bunch of useless working poor.

Young people today, unless they were aiming unusually high, shouldn't have any trouble finding work as long as they put in normal effort. The Employment Ice Age generation, on the other hand, wasted their one shot at fresh-graduate hiring with zero job offers, wore themselves down mentally and emotionally at whatever black company finally hired them and cycled through job after job. Some of them, once they got older, were branded "the deadweight old guy" and let go.

Some of my old classmates had become hikikomori and I'd seen the 5080 problem play out firsthand.

And if this oversized Employment Ice Age generation just kept aging and retiring as-is, we might all end up euthanized someday as a burden on the country. Or worked to death instead. Talk about adding insult to injury.

Still, no amount of lamenting was going to change my situation. And yet we have to keep on living regardless. Besides, I had no intention of killing myself.

I'd drifted from one black company and non-regular job to the next, but I lived modestly and had managed to put together some decent savings. That was only because I'd given up on a car, a house, marriage, kids, all of it. But being a burden to others in my old age was… at least not going to be about money, or so I hoped.

Call it a boring life and that's the end of it, I suppose, but I always wanted to ask, so what? People should just enjoy their own lives instead of picking apart someone else's.

The reason the students made sure to trash-talk me loudly enough for me to hear was to provoke me. This is how they operated: provoke a non-regular janitor like this and if he lost his temper and started shouting or got in their face, they'd run straight to the principal claiming they'd been threatened, turning the tables to corner the janitor instead. Because of them, I'd heard, five janitors had already been fired.

It was about as unreasonable as it gets but a janitor was nothing more than a low-ranking contract worker while they were rich kids whose parents made huge donations to the school. If it ever came to a real conflict, the one who got punished would be the janitor.

The janitor who'd been fired before me had apparently been told by the principal, 『There are plenty of people who could replace you.』

So there was nothing to gain from rising to the bait of students trash-talking me. I ignored them and kept quietly sweeping.

「（Kids letting off steam by playing around… though this is a bit vicious for that. Can't be helped.）」

Telling the teachers about any of this was never going to solve anything anyway. Simply because their parents made huge donations, the teachers kept turning a blind eye instead of ever calling them out.

「（Not that it bothers me anymore.）」

The best move with people like that was to just ignore them. Aside from that, the pay was low, sure, but the workload wasn't heavy and I got plenty of days off, so I actually liked this job.

「Tch. Boring.」

「Let's just go home, go home.」

Since I refused to take the bait no matter what, the students eventually gave up and headed out through the gate for home. In the end, having been born into good families, they didn't have the nerve to resort to actual violence. Nor were they vicious enough to fabricate some fake victimhood just to bring me down. They were still soft somewhere, deep down.

「（Finally, they're gone…）」

Once most of the students had cleared out and I'd finished sweeping the front gate, I headed back to the prefab annex that housed the janitor's room, and just like always, there she was.

「Mister, did Tajima and the others provoke you again today?」

Most of the students at this high school came from seriously wealthy families, and at least on the surface, plenty of them were proper young ladies and gentlemen. But standing in front of me right now was a girl who looked like the genuine article, a proper gyaru you could take anywhere without embarrassment and for whatever reason, she spent a lot of her after-school hours in the janitor's room.

The old janitor and the gyaru high schooler. It didn't get much more mismatched than that but somewhere along the way, she'd just started coming and going from here.

「It's the usual thing so I'm used to it by now. I ignored them and they must've gotten bored because they went home.」

「Don't you ever talk back? Doesn't it make you mad?」

「If I did that, I'd end up just like the last guy. Call it part of the paycheck.」

「That doesn't sound worth it.」

「Worth it or not, people can't live without earning money. And at my age, finding another job isn't exactly easy.」

They keep saying there's a labor shortage these days, but the truth is, it's only young people who are actually in demand. Same as ever, there were no good jobs for the Employment Ice Age generation.

Skills, this. Qualifications, that. Experience, the other. There was always some new demand tacked on. In a country like Japan, the odds of someone bouncing back once they'd fallen behind were slim.

「I get looked down on, sure, but this job isn't half bad.」

「Hmmmm, I see. I'll go make some tea.」

She looked every bit the gyaru and the teachers were constantly scolding her for not fitting the school's image but needless to say, she too came from a wealthy family. I figured the gyaru look was some kind of rebellion against her teachers and parents. There'd been kids like that in my generation too.

Which was probably why, gyaru look aside, she wasn't out partying at night after school. Instead she was killing time in the janitor's room. Despite that look, she was surprisingly good at making tea too, which created quite the gap with her image.

She'd clearly been raised properly at home… though did wealthy families really teach their kids how to brew tea? Maybe her grandmother had taught her?

Even the way she drank her tea was refined and it was obvious right away that she came from a good family. She clearly didn't think much of the classmates who looked down on me, so I figured she had a good heart too. Otherwise, I wouldn't have let her into the janitor's room in the first place, and I certainly wouldn't have told her how I actually felt.

And yet, just because of how she looked, both the teachers and her classmates disliked her and I'd never once seen her together with a friend. That, I figured, was why she'd started coming to the janitor's room. If that bothered her so much, she could just quit dressing like a gyaru but she probably had some reason she wasn't willing to give up on.

Were she and I friends? …No, probably not. I figured we were more like two of a kind, isolated in our own ways. Me from society, her from school.

「Oh right, summer break's coming up soon.」

I still had to come in and do my job as janitor even during summer break though. At least I got the regular calendar holidays and proper time off for Obon, which was something of a relief. The black company I'd worked for in my younger days hadn't given me anything like that.

「Yeah. Hey, mister. Would it be okay if I came to hang out here?」

「Here?」

『Since it's summer break, shouldn't you go out with friends?』 I started to say, but I held it back.

A girl who dressed like a gyaru and was isolated at school probably didn't have any friends to spend summer break with. And not just from this high school. Probably not from elementary or middle school either.

If she had friends, there was no way she wouldn't be spending this precious summer vacation with them.

And it was possible she didn't have a place for herself at home either. If she'd had somewhere to belong, holing up at home would've been an option too, which made it likely she wasn't getting along with her family.

「If it's just while I'm at work, I guess…」

「Thank you.」

I caved to the pleading look on her face and ended up saying okay before I could stop myself. In truth, her spending every afternoon after school in the janitor's room like this was a problem in itself and since I didn't want to lose this job, turning her away would've been the safer choice. There was no telling what kind of trouble might get pinned on me because of it.

But if I drove her out of here, she might really end up with nowhere left to go. Thinking about it that way, I couldn't bring myself to turn her down.

「A little late to ask, I know but don't your parents say anything about this?」

「My parents leave me alone as long as my grades are good.」

The teachers had their eye on her too but apparently her grades were good enough that expulsion was never really on the table. As someone who'd struggled with schoolwork himself, I couldn't help but envy that.

「As long as I don't cause trouble and get into a decent university, they won't say a word. Even the school just tells me off about my clothes every now and then.」

If the school clumsily punished her, it would just mean one fewer graduate heading to a good university, so in the end, they were leaving her alone too. Besides, in her case, the only real problem was that gyaru look of hers. Or rather, even that was only a problem by this school's standards. She wasn't actually doing anything wrong.

「What's your family like, mister?」

「Pretty normal, I guess.」

A father who'd worked for a well-known company and a mother who'd been a full-time housewife. For now, they didn't need any care and were living off their pension in a house they'd already finished paying off.

And then there was my older brother, who unlike me had gone smoothly from a top university straight into a good company, married young, and now had two kids. Normal enough as families went, I suppose, but I was the failure of a son who couldn't even manage that normal life, the family's disliked, dropout second son.

Even so, back when I was younger and still went home to visit, they'd fire me up with things like, 『Work hard and get yourself a real job at a good company!』 and 『Hurry up and get married, have kids, and become a proper adult!』

But once I hit forty, they told me, 『Don't you dare come near this house again. We don't want you being a burden on your nephew and niece when we're old.』 And true to their word, I hadn't gone back once since.

They never actually said we were cutting ties but it amounted to something like, 『I'm disappointed in you. I don't even want to look at your face.』

Would I even get invited to their funerals? What about my nephew's and niece's weddings?

「We still know each other's contact info so I figure they'd reach out if something happened.」

「Mister…」

「This is just what it means to fall outside of what society calls normal. You should study properly this summer too, you know.」

「I heard a rumor you went to a good university, mister.」

「Not that it did me any good.」

I'd struggled along in my own dumb way and made it into a decent enough university, not on the level of my brother's, but back then, that hadn't translated into a job. And once you're past thirty, what university you went to stops mattering anyway. That's just how the world works. If anything, a grown adult who's still bragging about their old university is almost certainly someone whose life isn't going well right now.

「Well, I should be clocking out soon so you'd better head home too, Shirai-san.」

「Not that anyone's home anyway. I'll bring some snacks over during summer break. See you, mister.」

「See you tomorrow, Shirai-san.」

I'd gotten older, drifted apart from my family and even my friends had gotten too busy with work and their own families to see anymore. Maybe the real reason I let Shirai-san into the janitor's room was that, deep down, I was lonely.

I watched her walk off, gyaru look and all, easily one of the prettiest girls in the whole school and once she was gone, my work for the day was done. Guess I'd stop by the supermarket on the way home and pick up something for dinner.

I didn't even own a car, so I could only hope I'd make the bus that left right in front of the school gate the moment my shift ended.

Translator's Note: The "5080 problem" (５０８０問題) refers to a real social issue in Japan where parents in their 80s continue to financially support adult children in their 50s who have withdrawn from society (hikikomori).