The Boredom of Haruhi Suzumiya by Nagaru Tanigawa

again, but for some reason, the SOS Brigade was in business year round and we’d met up yesterday and the day before that.It appears that school policy doesn’t apply to SOS Brigade activities. Obviously, since this whole thing has been wrong from the very beginning. This enigma of a brigade wasn’t a club per se, so it didn’t matter. That’s Haruhi logic for you.
    Like the other day. I’d finally gotten myself all psyched up to study, when at that very moment, Haruhi grabbed me by the sleeve and dragged me to the club room.
    “Take a look at this.”
    Haruhi was pointing to the computer monitor she’d stolen from that other club a while back.
    I had no choice but to look. A drawing program was open with some kind of scribble displayed. A circle around some letters that looked like drunken tapeworms. I couldn’t tell if it was a picture or writing or both. This is what I would expect from a kid in preschool.
    “What is this?”
    I just spoke my mind.
    Haruhi immediately puckered her lips like a duckbill.
    “Can’t you tell?”
    “I have no idea. No idea at all. This thing makes yesterday’s Modern Japanese test look easy.”
    “What are you talking about? The Modern Japanese test was really easy. Your little sister could have aced that thing.”
    That statement really pissed me off.
    “This is the SOS Brigade emblem,” she answered with a triumphant look on her face, as though she’d just accomplished something amazing.
    “Emblem?” I asked.
    “Yes. Emblem,” Haruhi said.
    “This is? It looks like something left by a drunken businessman, permanently stuck in a middle management position, who’s on his way home from an all-nighter after working weekends for two straight months.”



“Look closer. See? It says SOS Brigade in the center, right?”
    When you put it that way, I can’t say that I don’t get the feeling that it does or doesn’t, yet I wouldn’t be confident enough not to refrain from voicing agreement. How many negatives did I just string together? I don’t feel like counting, so if someone’s free, tally them up for me.
    “You’re the one with the most free time. You probably won’t even bother to study.”
    “I was fully intent on studying just a moment ago, but now that you mention it, it’s true that I don’t feel like bothering now.”
    “I’m thinking about putting this on the front page of the SOS Brigade’s website.”
    Oh, yeah. We had a website. The worthless thing that only has a front page.
    “We aren’t getting any visitors. That’s unacceptable. We haven’t gotten any e-mails about mysterious happenings either. It’s all because you got in my way. I was going to attract visitors with sexy pictures of Mikuru.”
    All pictures of Asahina as an earnest maid belong to me and I have no intention of letting anyone else see them. Some things in this world can’t be bought with money.
    “About the site you made, it’s a lost cause. There totally isn’t anything flashy on there. That’s why I came up with this idea. To add a symbol of the SOS Brigade.”
    Delete that thing off the Internet already. I feel bad for anybody who accidentally visits such a stupid homepage. There are no contents so there’s nothing to update. The whole site consists of the “Welcome to the SOS Brigade’s website” image, a link to our e-mail address, and an access counter. And the access counter hasn’t even reached three digits, and 90 percent of those hits came from Haruhi.
    I watched as Haruhi opened a browser and loaded our amateur website.
    “Why don’t you write a journal or something? It’s the job of the brigade chief to keep a log, right? The captain of a ship has to maintain a ship’s log.”
    “No way. That sounds like a pain.”
    It’d be a pain for me too. If I were to attempt to describe a day in this place, I could only write about stuff like what book Nagato was reading or how I beat Koizumi at Five in a Row or how cute Asahina looked today or how Haruhi