I.D Essay Book - By mistake: Handball Club

Wow! Do my eyes deceive me? Is this a new essay translation from 'I.D.'?? Yes! It is! Unbelievable. It's true, this is the next essay in Maaya's book of essays to be translated. Maaya recalls her encounters with sports. I do like this essay, I hope I've managed to do it justice. Maaya has a really nice sense of humour in her writing, I hope that it comes across in my translation. Enjoy!

By mistake: Handball Club

I have dreadful reflexes.

When I say that, generally the look on the face of the person I'm saying it to will be ‘Isn’t that because you don’t put the effort in?’ Or, it will be a boy who says ‘That’s normal for girls’.

However, only someone who has truly awful reflexes can truly understand the feelings of their inept fellows. When I want to hit a ball really far, why does it hit the floor at my feet with such conviction? If I try table tennis or badminton, I lose without even gaining one serve. When I’m running so hard that it feels like my feet are going to fall off, people get angry and shout ‘Run properly!’ I carry these experiences as a great burden, these dark traumas from my days as a student.

Elementary school. If the teacher said ‘Let’s play dodge ball!’ the kids in the classroom would go crazy. But I would suddenly feel gloomy. It was time to start the team selection process of doom (see note below.) The team members were chosen in order by the two team leaders selected from the class by the teacher. In other words, the kids whose sportsmanship would be an asset to the team were chosen first, and the kids left until the end were basically branded ‘dead weight’.

Naturally, I was the type who was chosen last of the last. When it got down to the last five people to be chosen for a team the leaders' attitude was that of ‘I don’t care who we get now.’ These men who, when they grown up, say things like ‘It’s cute when girls are bad at sports’ were the one's who were completely indifferent to these girls in elementary school! Saying that things like 'it's cute' now won’t help; I won’t ever be able to forget this bitterness!

And the relay race where everyone has to participate, why on earth is that included in sports day? Ridiculous! ‘Who shall we put in front and behind slow-poke Maaya Sakamoto?’ was the topic of class meetings! It would always end up being the fastest people in the class who were put in position in front and behind me for the race.

Which is why even I’m surprised that I ended up belonging to a handball club.

A shiny-new first grader in high school, a student in the year above who was a childhood friend got her hands on me, me, the girl who didn’t know left from right. I joined because she’d said ‘We don’t have enough new students, would you put your name down to get our numbers up? Or even just be a manager for the team’ but actually, they only had two first years including me join the club. And then the other new girl quit after just two months complaining that her ‘feet hurt’.

So, this left the handball club with seven members. The number of team members necessary for a hand ball team to play a match is seven. So without me officially saying whether I’d be a member or not, I ended being a regular.

It was too late to say: no one asked me! If I was to quit now then the girl’s handball team would have to be disbanded because they wouldn’t have the required number of members to play a game.

What? Is that a threat?

All the older girls were really nice, great people, but I found it difficult to cope with the pressure being put on me. It was around the same time that I debuted as a singer, so I was rather busy. If I can’t attend team practice I’ll be letting them down, but I have to go to work - I often found myself torn between these two commitments.

However, it is a fact that I enjoyed myself.

We were a pretty poor team, so our ‘practice’ was rather half-baked. Our sessions consisted of lots of ambiguous activities along the lines of ‘Let’s recite the stations on the Yamanote subway line while passing the ball to each other, then when you hit it back, you have to rush forward and shoot.’ We often had a lot of days off because we were ‘fatigued’ from training. Only our official training camp had a rather spectacular four nights and five days of continuous practice. Going to get a drink of water was somehow a group activity, and seemed to coincide with staring at the boy’s basketball team practicing. We were usually tired out from laughing too much rather from doing exercise. We were always laughing.

Being busy, not really being good at hand ball, getting suntanned, all this was crammed into just one year. After that one year, the senior students would graduate, so whatever happened, the club was to be disbanded. I don’t think there are any other clubs which are as easy-going or as fun as that handball team was. I really loved the girls who were above me.

One day, when that one year had passed in one way or another, something which I had feared since day one came to be: the next handball match was scheduled to take place on a day when I had work.

…I had always known that there was a possibility of this happening but…

I was supposed to be dubbing a Western film on that day, and I was the lead. But for the seniors in my team, this match was their farewell game, and if I wasn’t there then they wouldn’t be able to take part in the game at all.

I played in the match.

After agonising over it for a long time, I chose to participate in the handball game. I caused a lot of trouble for the people at work, and the game finally ended in complete defeat - which meant that we truly were a team who had never won a match. But I think I made the right decision.

I now belong to a gym. I’m actually paying to do sports, something which I thought I hated. Unbelievable. But it’s probably all thanks to that handball team that I’m able to say the words ‘It feels good to move my body.’

Fin.

(Note: Maaya says ‘team selection process of tears’ in the original but I thought DOOM would be a better English equivalent to get her point across)