The television reporter has found an ordinary customer to interview. Behind the action stands a fourteen-year-old girl in a Seibu Lions baseball jersey, making a very deliberate effort to be seen. The program continues without recognizing the importance of her presence. As far as she is concerned, the project is going well.
Akari Naruse has decided to appear in the local broadcasts from a department store during its final month. The store is Seibu Ōtsu, near her home in Shiga Prefecture. It is the summer of 2020. Her friend Miyuki Shimazaki has been asked to watch from home and confirm that the plan is working.
Mina Miyajima’s Japanese novel 成瀬は天下を取りにいく, romanized as Naruse wa tenka o tori ni iku, gives this small undertaking the company of a much grander title: Naruse is setting out to conquer the world. The discrepancy is part of the pleasure. A girl with that much apparent ambition begins with a nearby shop, a television schedule, and somebody she has known all her life.
You need not know Ōtsu, Japanese television, or professional baseball to recognize the slight embarrassment of the scene. Most people would first ask whether doing this might look ridiculous. Naruse has moved on to the question of how to do it.
Seriousness without a certificate of importance
The Japanese opening made available by Shinchosha is a good introduction to Naruse’s methods. She announces something unlikely, specifies a course of action, and proceeds. The narration belongs to Shimazaki, who has had years to get used to this sequence and is not about to greet every fresh declaration with astonishment.
Her matter-of-fact curiosity gives the scene its comic balance. Why a baseball jersey? Where did it come from? Why does this particular idea deserve such serious treatment? Naruse does not supply the kind of explanation that would make everything reasonable. She supplies enough information to keep going.
There is a difference between that temperament and a generalized lesson in self-confidence. Fictional eccentrics are often vindicated by a crowd discovering that they were right all along. Here, the first broadcast is funny because the crowd has not obliged. Shopping continues. The reporter talks to somebody else. Showing up remains something Naruse can accomplish without being acclaimed for it.
That does not make her incapable of showing off. Shimazaki remembers her promising full marks on a set of examinations and finishing ten points short. When challenged about the difference between making grand declarations and boasting, Naruse can concede the resemblance. She does not need to establish that she has never exaggerated before allowing herself another attempt.
This little exchange prevents her from becoming a polished motivational example. She has her own standards, including standards that her friend finds baffling. A reader can be attracted to the energy without accepting each of her ideas as advice.
The later premise of entering M-1, the Japanese competition for two-person comedy, extends that interest into performance. Manzai depends on a pair’s verbal timing and responses; an English-language reader needs no detailed knowledge of the television industry to understand that the challenge will require two people to prepare something together. The original publisher’s page introduces this undertaking among the book’s starting points.
The appeal is less that an impossible dream suddenly comes true than that somebody treats an extravagant thought as something with a next step. Preparation introduces practical questions, other people, and the possibility of looking foolish. Those are things a story can work with.
The friend who is allowed to hesitate
Shimazaki is not simply the sensible narrator appointed to admire an exceptional heroine. She is part of what makes the book approachable. We may not share Naruse’s assurance, but we probably know something about wanting to stay beside a person whose pace we cannot always match.
The opening gives that friendship an imperfect past. The girls have lived in the same apartment building since birth. When Naruse was excluded by other girls at primary school, Shimazaki did not defend her. She admits that she protected herself. It is a brief acknowledgment, but it matters: their closeness is not supported by a conveniently spotless history.
Now they walk to and from school together. Shimazaki understands both her friend’s unusual capacities and the less admirable rules by which a classroom can operate. She knows what makes Naruse conspicuous. Remaining interested is therefore not the same as being oblivious to the possible social cost.
The arrangement about television offers a gentler version of this difference. Shimazaki cannot promise to watch every day. Naruse accepts that she can watch when she is available. The project survives the qualification.
It is a small moment of room being made for another person. Agreement about everything is unnecessary. A friend can find a proposal odd and still care how it goes; she can contribute without handing over her whole summer. Admiration does not create an unlimited obligation to participate.
The review in the Kyoto University newspaper identifies the distance within this partnership as a central pleasure: Naruse does not compel cooperation, while Shimazaki’s watchfulness can contain both affection and the ache of being left behind. That observation helps explain why a seemingly unshakable character need not shut more hesitant readers out.
A narrator who is merely impressed would give us one response again and again. Shimazaki gives us a changing relationship to the plan. Her doubts, amusement, and investment have their own life. The girl watching the screen is not less important to the scene than the girl determined to appear on it.
A local place is enough to begin
Ōtsu lies beside Lake Biwa, close to Kyoto. In these stories it is not a generic provincial place whose chief purpose is to be escaped. Familiar shops, schools, and routes provide material for action.
For a reader meeting the geography for the first time, the unfamiliar names need not become homework. Their immediate function is to establish that the characters know this place much better than we do. Somewhere that appears ordinary to a visitor can hold years of accumulated family routine.
The department store’s closure had a real counterpart. In Miyajima’s conversation with Asako Yuzuki in the April 2023 issue of Nami, the author explains her wish to preserve memories of Seibu Ōtsu and the surrounding community’s sense of loss. She also describes wanting to write a story that was not heavy. The brightness and the disappearance belong together; one is not evidence that the other has been forgotten.
Naruse cannot decide whether the store will close. She can decide how to spend some of the time before it does. This distinction keeps her plan at a human scale. It is neither a rescue campaign nor a requirement that everyone perform the same sadness.
The original book contains six linked stories, following its characters from junior high into high school and shifting the angle from which Naruse is seen. The larger structure lets a familiar figure arrive as a surprise to somebody who does not know her as Shimazaki does.
Miyajima and Yuzuki discuss one such beginning: a classmate hoping to reinvent herself at high school encounters Naruse with her head shaved. Naruse wants to experience growing her hair from that starting point. An appearance that might invite a ready-made explanation involving heartbreak or rupture has arisen from curiosity instead.
The point is not that other reasons for changing one’s appearance are inferior. It is that a girl can have a reason the observer has not thought of. Naruse briefly interrupts the story somebody else was preparing to tell about her body. The experiment can remain an experiment.
What brightness leaves open
A light tone need not be mistaken for a promise to resolve every difficult subject it touches. A reader looking for an extensive investigation of school hierarchy, family pressure, or regional decline may want more friction than this premise offers. Naruse’s competence and steadiness also have an idealized quality. Her example should not turn into a new demand that timid people become fearless.
The opening’s strongest answer to that worry is not an argument about optimism. It is the existence of Shimazaki. She has reservations; she has failed her friend before; she is still someone whose attention matters. There is room to be drawn into another person’s adventure without undergoing an instant transformation.
In Kaori Fujita’s Asahi Shimbun review, the response to Naruse is framed as a renewed willingness to imagine a future. That is a more interesting invitation than a formula for success. An idea can remain alive for a little longer before habit, practicality, or embarrassment dismisses it.
The public first story lets you test the tone directly, although the link continues beyond the opening situations discussed here. Its humor depends on the exchange between a resolute action and a watchful response. Whether that rhythm feels liberating or too reassuring is a question for the reader, not a condition of admission.
For now, there is no need to measure whether Naruse has conquered anything. A girl has decided to put on a jersey and go to a shop. Another girl, who thinks the whole thing peculiar, is paying closer attention to the evening television schedule. An ordinary afternoon has acquired something to look forward to.