Page 1 of Little Miss Fortune

CHAPTER 1

Honestly, my dears, Fuko does seem to give quite a bit of a damn

Some people are born with innate luck; you learn that very quickly when you are not one of them. When I still lived in Japan, a girl disrupted our living environments class to tell everyone about mukade.

‘Mukade?’ I asked.

‘He-e-e, you don’t know, Fuko-chan? It is like a worm with legs.’

‘That’s gross,’ I concluded, emphatic in my fear of insects from a young age.

‘I wish I could see one!’ She hummed wistfully.

And she did see one. She saw a 15-centimetre black-bodied centipede with orange legs and a red head bury itself deep inside of my shoe, and she did not tell me. When I slid my foot into it—it bit me. Later, as I curled up in my mother’s arms, the doctor said the pain was equivalent to a dozen bee stings.

And it sure felt like it.

‘It was so cute and scary,’ the same girl cheered the next day, remembering how the creature had coiled around my skin.

‘You are so lucky. I wish I could have seen a dung beetle!’ A boy joined in the celebration as I sat in the classroom with my bandaged foot.

All people fall under four categories of luck. Big luck, small luck, small misfortune, big misfortune.

The mukade-loving girl had small luck—only her insignificant wishes came true, like finding a hundred-yen coin by the vending machine, or snatching the last fried chicken from FamilyMart. I am not one of the lucky people. I have what I would call ‘small misfortune’. Not big misfortune, thank goodness, because the girl could’ve had a murder hornet obsession, making me one of the fourteen people that die every year from their venom. No, my misfortunes were small.

When I was 7, an earthquake alarm woke us up in the middle of the night. The four-storey apartment complex shook for a whole minute, at a lower 5 shindo or 5.4 magnitude. My parents sheltered with me and my younger sister under a table as my mother’s mobile phone cried out ‘Jishin! Jishin!’ and my father’s warned ‘Earthquake! Earthquake!’. Books flew off the shelves, doors rattled as glassware bounced around the cupboard, protected only by plastic latches that Mum bought from a hundred-yen Daiso store. But nothing was broken when the quake ended...

Nothing but the pink Nintendo DS that I had got on my birthday just a week earlier. The only game cartridge I had for it was Momotaro Dentetsu—a Monopoly-style train game that teaches kids about Japan’s geography and, perhaps, gambling. I had played it only once before binbo-gami, God of Poverty, drained me of all my money. And after the earthquake, I was never able to play that game again.

When I was 10, we moved to the UK—sometime between the horsemeat and the post office scandals. The fourteen-hour flight was already a pain in the arse, but it was nothing compared to waiting at the baggage carousel for a suitcase that never arrived. Everyone else got their bags. Everyone but me. It has happened twice more over the years.

Yes, my luck is a hindrance, but I don’t let that stop me. I work harder than anyone else. My English father taught us very little of his language when we lived in Japan due to the gruelling Japanese work-life balance, but I made sure that no one could pick on me in school because of my accent (I worked hard on it) or my lack of special abilities (I got solid B’s, even a few A’s). I graduated from uni with a 2:1 in media studies, which is the current average in the UK.

After two years of job hunting, I’m still working at a Chinese takeaway.

‘You just don’t have enough experience’.

Wankers.

After another stressful shift, I come back home smelling like beef chow mein and open my laptop. An Excel sheet with my job application tracker is already open—I call it the Red Sea—and I continue applying to more unpaid volunteering jobs, mumbling curses at the screen.

‘Darling,’ my father says, bringing me some tea, ‘maybe you could do with a break. Take a gap year like the rest of the young people. Live a little.’

My dad wears an apron with a criss-crossed back and slippers around the house like a dutiful Japanese housewife. It is hard to tell what sort of luck he has. On one hand, he has had his identity stolen twice; on the other, his rounders club is winning the local championship because the previous winners had a skiing accident.

His luck is to be confirmed.

I will not take an entire year—that only works if you’re either rich or an airhead—but a week?

Go back to Japan, do a hike. We lived by one of the three holy mountains, Mount Tate, or Tateyama—an essay on which got me fourth place in our local borough newspaper—but I missed the hike both years that my school did it: first because of glandular fever, then because of the unfortunate mukade bite.

I’m not even marginally spiritual or religious, but it would be a nice change of scenery, and maybe it will make me feel as if I achieved something. A Junrei of sorts—mental and physical cleanse.

Another e-mail comes through—an immediate automatic rejection.

Screw this.

London to Haneda. Dad’s credit card. Booked.