Read Online Rocket Girls: The Last Planet by Housuke Nojiri - Free Book Online

straight.
    “Oh, that’s nail art,” her hairdresser told her. “You stick those on your nails. The simpler ones are stickers. For something fancier we have imitation jewels.”
    “Ooh! Neat!”
    Matsuri’s tribe had a tradition of painting themselves for festivals with body paint made of rendered pig fat mixed with natural pigmentation, like the local red soil. Apparently, nail art scratched Matsuri’s cultural itch in a very direct way.
    “Makita, could you do her nails?” the stylist asked one of the girls standing off to the side. The store nail specialist walked over and showed Matsuri a catalog. She chose a crimson manicure with topaz rhinestones.
    “You do it too, Yukari. It’s so pretty!”
    Yukari frowned. She didn’t want to go overboard. “Maybe just a manicure.” Then she added, “But since we’re wearing sandals, we should do our toes too, don’t you think?”
    When they were done being fussed over from head to toe—literally—Yukari felt like a new woman. They hit the street and took in the downtown air, a potent mélange of Italian food, perfume, and exhaust.
    Not bad. Not bad at all.
    “Time to go shopping!”
    For their first stop, Yukari went into a CD store. “Let’s see, I wonder if ZIMA has a new song…hey! They’ve got a whole a new album out! Score! And didn’t Satsuki say she liked Hiroshi Itsuki? Might make a good present for her—you want something, Matsuri?”
    “Sure. Anything fun?”
    “Hmm. I’m guessing you’d like samba…over on that rack there.”
    “Wow. There’s so many different kinds.” Matsuri grabbed two fistfuls of samba CDs, five in each hand.
    Next was the bookstore. Yukari picked out five books from the world affairs section and a current slang and jargon dictionary—the kind that came with a CD-ROM.
    “Maybe I should read Takashi Tachibana’s book about space. He’ll probably be dropping by for an interview one of these days. Oh, right, manga! Hey! Volume 7 of Aoi and Ryoichi is out! Gotta get that one—”
    She glanced over at Matsuri to see her picking out some magazines from a large rack.
    “ World Fishing ? You going fishing, Matsuri?”
    “No, I like this fish!” she replied, pointing at the king salmon on the cover. “Very handsome.”
    “Um, okay,” Yukari said. When it came to Matsuri, there was such a thing as too much information. She’d only wear herself out trying to follow her half sister’s thought processes.
    For an early dinner, they went into an Italian restaurant. Yukari wolfed down a crispy pizza with a paper-thin crust and topped it off with a piece of tiramisu. It seemed like forever since she’d eaten proper food in a restaurant.
    Matsuri had ordered a plate of spaghetti, drowned it in a sea of mayonnaise, ketchup, and tabasco sauce, then proceeded to cram it into her mouth. On the side she had a glass of tomato juice into which she had also poured tabasco sauce. When it came to food, Matsuri’s taste was simple: red is good.
    When she was full, Yukari said, “Well now. Seeing as it’s seven o’clock, I think we should call an official end to our survival operations for the day.”
    “You know,” Matsuri said between mouthfuls, “I could get used to this kind of survival.”
    “You said it!”
    Piling their shopping bags and space suits into a taxi, they set off toward the quiet residential district of Nogeyama. It had been ten months since Yukari had seen her home. It looked exactly the same. The front yard was simple, just a close-cropped lawn without a garden. The house itself was a three-story affair her mother had built with her own savings from her work as an architectural designer.
    Her mother was the only resident now, but no lights were on. The front door was locked, and no one answered when Yukari pressed the doorbell intercom button.
    “Maybe she’s on a business trip?”
    There was a keypad by the door. Yukari entered her security number and the door opened. By her mother’s request, all the