This English-language short story is a translation of Japanese-language short story that appeared in the September 2021 edition of literary magazine Shincho.
short story By Keiichiro Hirano
translated from Japanese by Eli K.P. William
Lucy is a hero, whether she or anyone she knows realizes it. In other words, she is fully qualified to be the subject of literature and the protagonist of a work of fiction.
Any starting point for the story that demonstrates her heroism would be arbitrary. But we must begin somewhere, so perhaps we ought to go back two weeks to Seattle.
1
Kazuhisa Kojima is not personally connected to Lucy in any way. They will probably never cross paths and even if by some fluke they did, neither would think anything of it. Still, as far back as their contacts can be traced, Kojima is the appropriate person with whom to begin this tale.
Kojima, aged 44 as of this year, was employed at a machine manufacturer. With less than a year left in his 5-year assignment to Seattle, he was set to visit Japan, after being summoned unexpectedly to present himself at home office. The only reason given was that they had “something to discuss.” He wanted to believe it was a minor human resources adjustment of some kind, though it could have been related to an incident he was hiding, of which he could think of several. Speculating about what they wanted with him only made him uneasy.
When he left home at 8:30 that morning for Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to catch an 11:30 flight, his wife and daughter of middle school age had not been there to see him off. The previous night, he had been up until two in the morning, trying to catch up on work. He would have liked to sleep onboard, but everything was so last minute that he’d only managed to reserve a middle seat in economy class, and he was not looking forward to it.
After checking in early and going through customs, he learned that his plane was running an hour late. “On the one goddamn day, I can’t use the lounge,” he muttered in English. The boarding gate had also been changed, forcing him to walk a long way.
As he pulled his trolley case along behind him, he worried that his final year might not be as carefree as the previous four depending on what home office had to say. A fan of rock music, Kojima had always dreamed of living in America. As soon as he was transferred, he went alone to Greenwood Memorial Park in the suburbs for a pilgrimage to the grave of Jimmy Hendrix. Although the tombstone had been surprisingly small, it was covered by a stone gazebo with walls bearing lipstick-marked portraits of the singer. Seeing these was the moment Kojima felt like he’d truly come to America, and he recalled wistfully how impressed his old bandmates in Japan had been when he shared pictures on Facebook.
He supposed that this was the end of his overseas assignment. Watching Japan’s decline from outside had been depressing, and he and his fellow expats had always waxed patriotic with concerns for the homeland when drunk. His wife and daughter had both grown to prefer living in America. He had a bad feeling about his visit to Japan, and he wondered if he should figure out some way for he and his family to remain, even if that meant finding a new job…
With two and a half hours to go until boarding time, Kojima stopped by a food court on the way to his gate to get a coffee. There were three groups lined up at the café and he stopped at the back of the line, studying the menu display board from a distance.
Suddenly, a large white woman shoved him aside and took the place ahead of him without a word.
“Excuse me,” he said, taken aback. “I was in line.”
The woman didn’t turn around. Even when he repeated himself, she kept her back to him, saying nothing in response. As annoyed as he was, Kojima thought she might be hearing impaired, so he walked around in front of her and, using gestures, said, “Excuse me. I was in line here.”
The man one spot ahead turned around in surprise, but the woman made no move to meet Kojima’s gaze. At this point, he couldn’t think what else to do, and before he could tell himself that nothing more was at stake than the order in which he got a coffee, Kojima grew unusually angry. He wasn’t sure if the café staff had seen the kerfuffle, but when the next person was called, the woman proceeded to the counter as though nothing had happened, turned to chat with the barista, suddenly smiling affably, and ordered an iced latte topped with plenty of whipped cream.
*
After this incident, announcements that Kojima’s flight had been delayed came one after the next. While Kojima waited to board, he was alone and said not a word, overwhelmed with indignation and fatigue. But his anger, for all its intensity, was an impotent thing, remaining flat and inert deep inside him. In the end, his flight took off four hours late.
Many of the passengers were Japanese and the announcements were in both English and Japanese, which Kojima found comforting. What the heck was that? he wondered. When the seatbelt sign turned off, he cautiously reclined his seat, set his elbows lightly on the very edge of the rests, and closed his eyes. Was that just her personality? Or her mood? Or was it in fact anti-Asian racism? He just didn’t know. Four years in America, he thought, and I can’t even be sure of that. Should I have confronted her more assertively, while taking a video or something? All the things he could have said came to him only now.
An eleven-hour flight later, he arrived at Haneda Airport at around seven in the evening. Hardly catching a wink on the plane, he had watched three movies while responding to work emails non-stop. Now his thoughts were in a fog, and he was exhausted. Worse yet, he felt as though the resentment festering in his chest was multiplying and being carried in his bloodstream to every nook and cranny of his body. He had no fever, nor was he feeling unwell, so the quarantine station had no way to know that he was about to carry some awful stress from Seattle into the country.
Due to the poor quality of the onboard meals, Kojima felt both hungry and unappetized simultaneously. Still, after retrieving his luggage case at the baggage claim, he went to a soba restaurant at the airport. Not for the noodles; he was craving tempura.
Leaving his large suitcase at the entrance to the crowded restaurant, he took a seat at a table off to one side, and a young woman in a samue and apron came to take his order.
“Noodles with tempura and a beer,” he said.
“Oh… sorry,” she replied. “We’re all out of the ingredients for that dish.”
“Really? Darn… I was in the mood for tempura… Fine then. I’ll have this—cold noodles with duck. ”
“Certainly, sir. Please hold on.”
From his seat Kojima watched the timid server, with her short black hair, and wondered if she was okay.
Time passed and it passed, and still his beer did not arrive. His phone had run out of batteries and, despite himself, he recalled with irritation the line-butting at the other airport. He kept picturing the expression on the woman’s face as she chatted with the barista after ignoring him. His legs now asleep, he had just called out to the server, meaning to remind her about his beer, when he noticed her taking an order for noodles with tempura at a different table.
“Excuse me, where’s my beer?” he asked with a demanding gaze. “Also, didn’t you say the noodles with tempura is done?”
“Oh… um, sorry…” The woman froze up as though he’d just scolded her.
“I don’t need your sorrys. Do you have any or not? ”
There was a pause before the woman said, “Please hold on.” Then she scurried to the kitchen and came straight back. “Sorry. They said there really isn’t any left. ”
“Then what about that customer’s order?”
“Sorry. They said there was enough for one more order.”
“What? Then why didn’t you tell me? You should have offered it to me first.”
The server blushed, nonplussed. What is with this server? Kojima thought with disgust. Is she braindead or something? He felt himself once again, though in an entirely different situation, helpless in the face of a silent antagonist, and he grimaced at a headache the likes of which he he’d ever known.
The server’s attention was drawn behind her to the kitchen where she was being called to carry out an order of noodles pronto. After another pause, she said, “Sorry… I’ll go tell the other customer.”
“No, forget about it! I can’t do that to him—Oh, I’ve had enough of this. I’m done here!”
Scuffing his chair loudly on the floor, Kojima stood up to leave. But the woman leapt back, seeming to think he was about to attack her, and at last burst into tears.
2
Ryoko Takeshita had been pale faced since morning. As always, she boarded a Japan Rail train at Oimachi Station, and stood by the doors of the packed car, closing her eyes. She was wary of dozing off on her feet, but she couldn’t see herself actually falling asleep and wanted every little bit of rest she could get.
Her daughter had been a mess yet again last night. Apparently, a male customer had stormed out of the soba restaurant at Haneda Airport where she worked after she informed him that they were out of noodles with tempura. The manager had then given her another relentless talking to.
Her daughter was what one might call a problem child. Ryoko had raised her with understanding of her capabilities and acceptance of her emotional instability, as though treading on thin ice, so she had thought her ill-suited for a service job from the beginning. Still, it was what her daughter wanted, and she wasn’t one to interfere out of hand. After all, if her daughter gave it a try and learned to manage more tasks than before, her opportunities in life would only expand. Though, unfortunately, her inability to cope was always followed by a long period of recovery…
Ryoko opened her eyes and looked around at the other passengers peering into their phones. As long as her daughter didn’t overstretch herself, she was able function more or less normally. If the present world had just a bit more slack to cut and there was a touch more kindness to go around, she wouldn’t have been special at all.
It had been over a decade since Ryoko became aware of her daughter’s idiosyncrasies. Or more accurately, since a clear diagnosis had been given. In the eyes of others, Ryoko appeared to be an overprotective parent. Every time she was ridiculed or, sometimes even warned, over her relationship with her daughter, she would defend herself and get hurt in the process, until, before before she knew it, her friendships had grown strained.
If I tried to tell someone about the incident last night, who would take me seriously? Her daughter was bound to encounter customers with bad personalities in a service job. She hadn’t been assaulted, nor had she been subjected to a lengthy complaint. Wasn’t she too dependent on her mother for a woman in her twenties? The customer probably never could have imagined that shouting at a server would leave her crying in her mother’s arms until three in the morning. All Ryoko could have said in response to such criticisms was that some people are just like that.
The timing of the outburst had been unlucky, coming after nearly a week in which her daughter had been pushed to her limits, and thus her mind had gone completely blank. She had once said that at such times it felt as though everything inside her head was being scorched to cinders. When she was in this state, there was nothing for it but to let her rest in a quiet place.
Every time the train car shook, the handrail pressed hard against Ryoko’s upper arm. She worried about her daughter, who she’d left asleep in bed, hoping that she would make it to the end of her workday without receiving another message or call for help…
Turning now to face the window, she thought about the customer who had berated her daughter. Apparently, he had looked to be in his mid-forties. What sort of person at that age would raise their voice at a server simply because they couldn’t have noodles with tempura?
Though Ryoko had not met this man, she hated him. The stress brought from Seattle had infected her via her daughter. And with all the exhaustion of the morning, she wished he might die, repeating this in her mind again and again. Right now, while I’m here on this train, wherever he is, I wish he would die. The thought brought some relief to her chest.
She probably didn’t desire his death as such. She merely wanted him to have never been and to continue not to be from that moment on. It was the sort of wish that we desperately want to come true only because we know it can’t. But if were to come true, she decided that she would tell her daughter… Then something occurred to her that brought a shudder. What if the man had his own idiosyncrasies?
At Shinagawa Station, Ryoko was swept by the crowd onto the platform and then back through the door, this time into the rear of the car. None of the passengers had realized that she was quietly wishing for a person to be annulled.
When her phone vibrated with a new message, she clenched her jaw and felt a hot tingle at the base of her neck. Knowing that she couldn’t just ignore the message, she forced herself to look at the screen. But it wasn’t from her daughter. It was from one of the organizers of her high school reunion, who had been contacting her on a daily basis for the past several days.
“Sorry to keep pestering you! We have to make reservations at the venue, so please just let us know whether or not you can make it by the end of the day. I hate to press you like this you when you’re busy, but your response would be much appreciated. Thank you!”
Ryoko read the text of the message and stared at the emojis that followed. She and this organizer weren’t especially close; they had not been in touch since graduation. But she was one of those old friends with whom she might have shared an enjoyable conversation if they were to meet now.
At that moment, such a stiff gathering struck her as more annoyance than it was worth. Even just yesterday, getting around to replying had felt urgent. Now she erased the message, and decided never to respond, hoping that this would convey her discomfort plainly without any room for misunderstanding.
3
Kayoko Terada was known at the real estate agency where she worked, and in general, as a heavy drinker. In her twenties and thirties, she was considered great company and treated as a valuable addition to any night on the town, but since entering her forties, she had garnered a reputation for always wanting company, and the staff began to avoid her, especially the younger ones she oversaw. The changing times had also contributed; the obligations of yesteryear to pour the drinks of one’s superior were fading.
Kayoko was aware of all this and didn’t want people to chalk her neediness up to her being single, so she had taken to drinking alone at home of late, a habit that set in during the coronavirus pandemic. But today she suddenly felt compelled to bring four other agency staff to an izakaya outside Fukuyama Station, with an irresistible urge to drink due to the stress she had born since yesterday.
Kayoko was serving as the contact person for her high school reunion next month, a role she had been charged with because her friend was the main organizer. It wasn’t easy for her at this age to reach out to old classmates with whom she had hardly ever spoken, especially those rumored to have moved to Tokyo and to be doing well for themselves.
Kayoko was originally from Hiroshima Prefecture. She had passed the entrance exams for Hiroshima University, after attending an affiliated high school, and, upon graduation, had found a job in Hiroshima’s second largest city, Fukuyama. Having stayed at this job ever since, she had never lived in any other prefecture.
Kayoko loved Fukuyama and had always been proud of her region. And yet, looking up her classmates through social media to get in touch with them for the reunion and poring over their careers—or rather their lives—she began to feel a peculiar stir of emotion. She had no idea how to express it until a lone phrase came to her, as though someone were offering it in their hands: “inferiority complex.”
When she messaged six of her former classmates based in prefectures outside Hiroshima in a polite but cheerful tone, she was surprised to hear back from all of them immediately. Only two could attend, but that in itself was a big success, and the rest had declined respectfully. The only exception was the sixth and final classmate, who replied that she would respond as soon as she checked her schedule and then could not be reached. Pressed by the organizer, Kayoko had sent two follow-up emails. The last of these, asking for final confirmation of her attendance, she had sent yesterday. In the end, Kayoko had never received an answer.
In this ghosting, the irritation of a busy person who just can’t be bothered came through loud and clear. Kayoko tried her best not to let it get to her, but the symptoms of the stress that had thereby infected her had only grown more severe over the past day.
*
All who accompanied Kayoko to the izakaya were, like her, boozephiles. Her boss, Yoshioka, had been dragged along without a fuss, not for the first time. Her colleague Saito, never able to withstand Kayoko’s pushiness, had been forced to apologize over the phone to his wife for suddenly being unable to watch over their daughter while she studied for her entrance exams that night. The final two members, Oda, an unmarried woman in her late 20s, and Tashiro, a bachelor in his early 30s, were Kayoko’s subordinates.
As though perhaps Yoshioka and Saito had worked this out in advance, Yoshioka did most of the talking at the first izakaya, with occasional interjections from Saito. In this way, the five of them spent an enjoyable two and a half hours together. In all likelihood, Yoshioka had taken this role upon himself because he was expecting the night to get sloppy. That was the sort of person he was. But when Kayoko noticed that the group was draining their cups slowly and encouraged them to order another round, Yoshioka gave her a regretful smile.
“I’m afraid I can’t drink like I used to anymore,” he said. This surprised Kayoko and left her feeling somehow left behind.
The evening did not, of course, feel conclusive for her, so she invited everyone to continue at another establishment. Saito and Oda said they were going home, the former apologetically, the latter brusquely. Tashiro had likewise intended to leave after the first izakaya, but soon discovered that he had missed his chance to mark a retreat.
“You’re good to go, right Tashiro, my boy?” said Kayoko. “Yes? Great!”
While walking to a nearby bar, Kayoko glanced at her phone without thinking and noticed that Ryoko Takeshita still had not responded. Alcohol had undoubtedly exacerbated her stress.
The three of them ended up sitting at a table, where Kayoko had them clink their glasses. No sooner had she started on her highball, than she began to rehash a mistake that Tashiro had made that day; in a file he submitted, the attached photo had been misaligned by a single point on the PowerPoint grid. When the tone of her remarks turned caustic, Yoshioka moved to casually protect the younger man.
“Alright, alright,” he said, trying to calm her down. Then he gave her a wry smile, and added, “Has anyone ever told you that you drink like a Showa Era geezer?”
Kayoko and her boss often traded distasteful jibes but this one felt hurtful somehow, sending her intoxication in an unsavory direction.
Tashiro had hated these office drink-fests from day one. Now he’d been lectured into the bargain and was utterly fed up.
Soon, Kayoko could no longer contain herself and began to unload all her experiences of the past week involving her role as liaison for the reunion. She then launched into a long explanation of the preceding chain of events and analyzed herself, describing her epiphany, now at last, that two feelings resided in her simultaneously: a perception of being elite for having attended a university-affiliated high school in her teens, and a sense of inferiority towards classmates with degrees from Tokyo institutions and jobs at famous companies. This transitioned into a two-hour soliloquy on how contacting her classmates had brought home the forlorn realization that her life was in some sense frozen in time, and on how that one classmate’s snubbing was beyond cruel, the woman’s busy schedule notwithstanding.
While Yoshioka nodded along and occasionally inserted jokes, Tashiro could have cared less about every word Kayoko was saying. By the end, he wanted to tell her off and leave, even if that meant getting fired on the spot. He too was drunk. But the next day, when he sobered up and reflected on the night, his feelings had not changed.
*
By the time the three of them were outside, it was past 1 am. Kayoko wanted to keep going, but Yoshioka, who had paid for Tashiro’s drinks and would also cover his taxi, cajoled her out of it.
“We’ve had more than our fill for tonight,” he said.
“Thank you for keeping me company till so late!” Kayoko said, wobbling on her feet. “Let’s all work our hardest again tomorrow.”
She then patted Tashiro on the back with a smile. Tashiro didn’t even have it in him for a polite smile in return, and, without so much as a word, he got in the taxi.
After telling the driver his address, he took out his phone and checked Twitter. There he found a retweeted video making the rounds. It showed a young man in a snowy landscape, who tries to dive into a frozen lake. When to his surprise, it doesn’t break, he takes a hard hit to his back and writhes around on the thick ice. A sociologist Tashiro did not follow but who he knew from frequent appearances on TV had left the comment, “Hilarious!”
The inanity of this whipped Tashiro into a rage. The stress from Kayoko had suddenly fulminated inside him. He was normally not one to do such things, but he fired off a snide comment.
“You’ve got a lot of free time on your hands. Taking pleasure in the sight of people suffering is the lowest of the low. And you call yourself a university professor?”
The last line was a permutation of what he actually wanted to say to Terada Kayoko: “And you call yourself a manager?”
With that, he gave himself up to his inebriation and nodded off. By the time he was woken by the driver and opened his eyes, he had been blocked by the sociologist.
4
After an early dinner, sociologist Kenji Kubota was silently filling out a 47-page survey on the “Comprehensive Support Project for Reform of Private Universities ” that he was required to submit for a conference in two days. Soon he reached field number 29, “Does your faculty or graduate department and the like offer internship courses of 2 weeks or more on the basis of agreements and the like with corporations and the like?” He selected zero points, to indicate that his department did not offer such internships.
Here he found himself too appalled to go on. It was the very picture of a Bullshit Job and he couldn’t stand that he was being used as a pawn in a blatant money-making scheme.
“What the hell is Society 5.0?” he thought. “Is our education ministry the finance ministry’s goddamn lapdog?”
Partly as an effort to get his mind off the survey, he set to work revising a presentation transcript due two days ago. He had delivered the presentation at a symposium called “Capitalism: Has it Truly Reached Its End Game?” The title of the presentation was “Gift Theory for Post Capitalist Society.” A few days after the symposium, he had received an email from the deputy editor-in-chief of a current affairs magazine who had been in the audience, praising the presentation and telling him that they would love to publish the transcript.
Kubota’s presentation had been glowingly received all around; it was mentioned several times in the panel discussions that followed. But it had not been prepared as meticulously as he would have liked, and he knew the transcript would need to be reorganized after an additional fact check if it were to be published. Assuming he could find the time… Reluctantly and without making a clear decision either way, he had ultimately accepted the request. But he had been sure to remind the editor repeatedly that, under no conditions, should the transcript be included in the magazine as is, and could she please shorten it for him if possible.
*
Although the document had arrived early in his inbox, prior to the Golden Week holiday, Kubota had only just opened it now. Like the editor’s original request to publish the transcript, her email was lengthy, containing few line breaks, and she had reiterated her impressions of the presentation in the same overly formal language. Kubota gave it a cursory glance over, having no space inside him to read it any more carefully—not temporally, not physically, and not spiritually. Dragging down the scroll bar, he finally found buried at the bottom an explanation of the attachments, as meandering as everything else. The gist seemed to be that he could make his changes to the transcript in either PDF or Word format. The email contained a total of six attachments: two PDF files, three Word files, and an Excel file for inputting his bank information to receive the honorarium. As if this weren’t wearying enough, one of the Word files was for “Author Registration,” and there was a PDF with the filename “Layout” that contained, as described, the magazine layout for his piece, including his photograph taken during the presentation amid dummy text.
Since revising a PDF was more work, Kubota opened the Word version of the document with the filename, “Dr. Kubota, Presentation Transcript, For Confirmation.” He didn’t bother looking at the other document because it had a similar filename and began to mark up the current one.
The script of his 60-minute presentation was a considerable amount of text, and it seemed that his premonition had hit the mark: despite telling the editor again and again, the script was nearly unedited. By the time he had revised up to the third page, he realized that he was basically rewriting the document from scratch. Already, this task had absorbed an hour. How long was the entire document going to take? Looking at his clock, he saw that it was 10 pm. He contemplated sending the document back and having the remainder reedited. But he felt responsible for missing the deadline, he doubted there was enough time, and, given that the transcript was in this state even after his numerous reminders, it seemed unlikely that such a request would change anything…
In the end, he revised the document for four hours straight. When he was done, it was around 1 am. He sent it off immediately, so irritated by the tedious chore he had completed that his gut was seething. Incapable even of rising from his chair, he checked Twitter for a while to distract himself. That was when he cracked up at a video of a young Finn who, diving from a sauna onto a frozen lake and smacking his back hard on the ice, was rolling around in the throes of agony. “Hilarious!” he commented and retweeted the video.
Then he summoned the energy to go for a shower. When he came back feeling somewhat more relaxed, he looked at the Tweet on the screen of his still-open laptop. The video had in this short time been retweeted over 300 times. Kubota usually had a rule that he never open the comment section, but this time he felt the urge to take a peek.
“Hilarious for sure!”
“Dude’s like a seal or something.”
“It might not be any better for him if the ice had broken open. You’d think it would be bad for his heart.”
Mixed in among such excited, emoji-filled reactions was another sort of comment entirely:
“You’ve got a lot of free time on your hands. Taking pleasure in the sight of people suffering is the lowest of the low. And you call yourself a university professor?”
Disgusted, Kubota immediately blocked the account. His settling irritation now flared up again with such intensity that he could no longer reign it in.
“You’re the one with free time, asshole!” he thought. “For starters, I’m not a full professor, you nincompoop; I’m an associate professor!”
When he tried to close the window, he heard the notification for an incoming email. As though she had been waiting around eagerly for the presentation transcript, even in the middle of the night, it was a reply from the editor. Tucked inside yet another interminable email, Kubota spotted the following:
“It seems that you revised the file, ‘Dr. Kubota, Presentation Transcript, For Confirmation.’ However, that is the text of the transcript without any modification that I attached just in case for your reference. The document I edited can be found in the Word and PDF files with the filename, ‘Dr. Kubota, Transcript Record, Before Submission.’ This notwithstanding, I hereby accept submission of the transcript you, Dr. Kubota, have so carefully revised.”
Kubota gaped, frowning so hard his brow might have been tightened with pliers.
Now opening the other Word file that he had not taken the time to peruse four and a half hours ago, the text of his presentation, beautifully edited and with the opening remarks cut, leapt into his eyes.
“You’re so confusing!” Kubota slammed his fist on the desk and hung his head. He had never been the sort of person to raise his voice. But just like those prone to severe corona due to underlying conditions, the stress passed onto him from Tashiro—after viewing the Twitter comment when his frustration was already high—triggered the onset of a great fury.
Kubota immediately began to type out a fierce protest to the editor. He didn’t use any pejorative language, but his points were almost ceremoniously rationalized, anticipating all counterarguments, and they inexorably amplified the stress. Obviously you are going to cause confusion if you attach six files at once; all the more so because the filenames were long and unclear. No other editor would ever go so far as to include the original transcript, and that was the seed for misunderstanding even if your intent was to be considerate. Your email was too long to begin with, and I could not isolate the main point. You must know that it is normal these days for people to work through dozens of emails each day, so expecting anyone to spend that much time reading yours flouts simple common sense. Thanks to you I lost four whole hours revising the document…
He thought that perhaps he should at least read his email over once and possibly even wait until morning before sending it. Giving in to his anger instead, he clicked the send button, turned out the lights, shrieked just like the youth who slammed his back on the ice, and collapsed into bed.
5
Current affairs magazine deputy editor-in-chief, Tomomi Nakaoka, opened her laptop first thing in the morning, read the email that Kenji Kubota had sent her in the middle of the night, and felt her heart begin to pound. Although the email put on a show of neutrality, it was patently brimming with rage. She immediately sat down to write him an apology, but every time she read over his email, it struck her as more and more unreasonable, and once her initial upset had passed, anger seized her.
How he could he criticize her so condescendingly, when the misunderstanding had been his own fault, in spite of all her careful explanations? The deadline was two days past and not one word of apology? Here he was complaining on and on that her message was too long to read in an email that was itself of astronomical length.
She often saw Dr. Kubota on TV, had read one of his popular academic books, and was fond of him, so she now found herself profoundly disillusioned. She supposed that he must be a difficult person generally but doubted that he would have taken this line if she wasn’t a woman and younger than him. There was no shortage of such writers.
She didn’t usually send the original transcript, but since her revisions to the document upon his insistent requests had been thorough, she thought it prudent to attach it this time.
*
In this way, Tomomi had been infected with Kubota’s stress. So when her husband suddenly informed her while she was preparing breakfast that she didn’t need to make dinner for him that night, she gave him a dark scowl.
“I won’t be here tonight,” said Tomomi.
“Why not?” her husband asked. “You never told me that.”
“Yes, I most certainly did. Have a look.”
Under her urging, her husband checked the calendar and was momentarily lost for words. “You can’t reschedule?” he asked.
“Not a chance. I have a bookstore event with an author. I told you a while ago. I asked you to pick up our son from cram school. What’s the problem today, anyway?”
“I just… Some friends invited me for dinner.”
“So tell them you can’t make it.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Well, I can’t change my plans. Not a chance. I told you well beforehand.”
“Maybe you did, but you always tell me a whole bunch of things at once, so I get confused.”
“Don’t you dare pull that nonsense with me!” Tomomi shouted. “I’m telling you there’s no way! I’ve explained myself completely! How can you turn it into my fault if you just don’t get it? Enough is enough!”
Then she hurled the cooking chopsticks into the sink, and, done talking to her husband, left the living room.
6
Tomomi’s husband turned down his dinner engagement in the end, but he was so unhappy about it that when a taxi he called while on an outing stopped fifteen meters past the meeting location, he swore at the driver as soon as he got in. The driver, a bachelor in his 70s, let it go with an apology, making no effort to explain that it had been a glitch in the app. But when he returned home that night and was sitting around sipping his chuhai, he kept recalling the rude daytime passenger and couldn’t hold back his anger. The irksome racket of the couple in the neighboring apartment was finally too much for him, and he went out in his sandals to knock on their door… From there, the stress passed through four more people, until only two remained before it would reach Lucy.
*
Throughout his entire ride on the bullet train, Sosuke Koga was feeling down. The previous afternoon, he had received a vociferous complaint from a chemical manufacturer about the increased price of their factory equipment order. The client had then asked him to pay a visit in person, and Koga was now on his way from Tokyo to their office in Kyoto.
It had been perplexing to receive this call out of nowhere; he had explained on a number of occasions that the price of steel was rising due to a raw materials’ shortage and increased demand in China. Koga had never liked the manufacturer’s moody CEO. He was beginning to suspect that the man would raise some unrelated issue at their meeting and couldn’t stop fretting about what it might be. So to help himself relax, he decided to reserve plane tickets for the summer holiday trip to Thailand that his wife had been nudging him to arrange.
Koga’s air miles had been accumulating for years; he had been too busy to use them and was hoping to rectify that now, before their expiration date. But when he opened his planner and searched the airline’s website, he discovered that there were waiting lists for the air mile eligible business class seats on all flights. He clicked his tongue. Since the number of people waiting on each list wasn’t displayed, there was no way to decide whether it made sense to sign up.
*
It was approximately 20 minutes by taxi from Kyoto Station to Minami Ward, where the client company was located. Koga had taken an early bullet train to be sure he wasn’t late and, upon arrival, he decided to have a coffee in the station hotel lobby. He needed a moment to relax.
“A table for one,” he told the young female server.
“Please wait there until a seat becomes available,” she replied, indicating a sofa outside the lobby restaurant, on which Koga could see that two groups were already seated.
He checked his watch and looked over the interior. There were vacant seats all over the place and he couldn’t understand why he was being made to wait. So he craned his neck theatrically towards an open spot, before heading flagrantly to a nearby table. One of the customers ahead of him watched on with suspicion and annoyance.
“Um, excuse me,” said the server, stopping in the middle of taking an order.
“Please wait there until seating becomes available,” she repeated.
“The seats look empty to me. Like here, and over there.”
“Sorry, but I’m afraid those are all reserved. Please wait there until seating becomes available shortly.”
“How long is it going to take?”
“Well…” The server paused, apparently unsure what answer might satisfy him, then turned to give an obligatory glance at the seating. “I would guess you might wait 20 minutes.”
“20 minutes?”
With another click of his tongue, Koga went to the sofa to wait his turn. He could sense the people ahead of him stealing glances his way. For five minutes he waited his turn, staring at his phone and restlessly tapping his foot. Then on impulse, he decided to try calling the airline to inquire about the waiting lists. After answering questions from the automated system, he still couldn’t get through to an operator for some time. If he wasn’t shown to a seat within 15 minutes, he would have to leave. Whenever he checked his watch, the ticking of the second hand seem to fire up his irritation. When a female operator came on at last, he told her the flight and seats he preferred while referring to his planner. She informed him that they all had waiting lists.
“You don’t have anything on the flights before or after?” he asked.
“Nothing is available,” the operator told him.
“Nothing…? You let us pile up all the miles we want, but what’s the point if we can’t use them when the timing is right?”
The operator declined to reply.
“Fine, I guess that’s just how it is, but how much demand is there for the waiting lists? If I wait, are they likely to open up.”
“I have no idea.”
Koga was offended by her curt manner. But considering that the automated system had warned at the beginning that the conversation would be recorded, he supposed that she was leery of saying anything she might be held accountable for later. So this time, he did his best to strike a friendly tone.
“I see… Well, I guess you’re not able to say definitively. But I’m not able to make plans under these circumstances. So if you could give me an idea of what you think, in terms of your experience I guess, or just your sense of it? It will only be for my reference. I’m not going to come back later and say, ‘you know, that woman told me this’, or anything like that.”
“I have no idea.”
The hand with which Koga held the phone shook. The truth was, this temp operator had until moments earlier been on the receiving end of some seemingly unending “guidance” on a complaint about her telephone manner the previous day. In essence, she had been ordered not to say anything inappropriate and was determined for the rest of the day to display her compliance above and beyond the call of duty. While she could tell that Koga was angry, this was merely the result of her serving him exactly as instructed. And the permanent employee who had lectured her ad nauseum since morning was the most recent person to be infected by the stress carried by a long route from Seattle when Kazuhisa Kojima brought it into the country. Now finally, it was in the process of being transmitted to Koga through this operator.
Koga was especially indignant at her terse reply after having made efforts to empathize with her situation. It was at just this heated moment that the server came to let him know that a seat had become available. Koga looked at his watch, saw that exactly 20 minutes had elapsed, and realized that he no longer had time for a coffee. Then, not specifically replying to either the operator or the server, he shouted, “Just forget it!” hung up in a fit of pique, and loped off to the taxi pick-up area.
7
Originally from Hangzhou, Lucy was a Chinese graduate student enrolled at Kyoto University. She was in her second year of a master’s program, studying urban environmental engineering. Her original Chinese name was Rosen, but after graduating from Shanghai’s East China Normal University, she had done a year two stint at the City University of New York, during which she adopted the nickname Lucy, and had been fond of it ever since.
Due to her father’s job, she had spent the three years of middle school living in Tokyo, so she could speak Japanese with enough fluency that she would be mistaken for a native unless she said otherwise. Still, because she had acquired the language in adolescence, she was always self-conscious that she might be using somewhat immature and impolite phrases. In fact, while working her part-time job at the hotel that very morning, a male customer waiting for a seat had freaked out at her for no understandable reason.
Despite her best efforts to use courteous expressions, something appeared to have brushed him the wrong way. She had been trying to puzzle out what that could have been ever since she got off that afternoon, but she was beginning to think that he was just one of those all-too-common aging Japanese men known as “shouters.”
Koga had not, as a matter of record, realized that she was Chinese.
*
Could Lucy have had immunity? To be sure, she had experienced stress from Koga’s attitude, but her symptoms were relatively mild. Why that was so is not easy to say. Her not having plans to meet anyone that day and, in a variety of ways, her being an overseas student may have contributed. There was also her innate personality and the environment of Kyoto.
In any case, to note only the facts, here is how it went.
That afternoon, Lucy decided to go to the banks of the Kamo River, just above Kitaoji Street, to practice her new ukulele. She had taken up ukulele after moving to Kyoto last year and had learned without instruction for the past 10 months on a plywood beginner’s model. Now she had just acquired a single board Kelii ukulele, after talking the seller down from the standard price of ¥80,000 to ¥64,000.
The area around Sanjo and Shijo was, as always, overrun with tourists even along the Kamo River, and she had become a true Kyotoite to the degree that she lamented this. But continuing north along the river, to where it branched into two streams near the botanical gardens, she arrived at an area where locals were napping, picnicking, and taking their dogs on leisurely walks. She had wanted to practice her ukulele in this spot before the full heat of summer fell upon the city. It was now spring, after the cherry blossoms had fallen but before the rainy season, and the riverbanks were covered in green grasses, the sunlight gentle. Because it was a Sunday and not overly windy, she spotted some families on outings, but none so close that they made eye contact.
Taking a seat on the cobblestones of the embankment, she gazed at the river for a time, leaving her ukulele case closed. She thought about the laboratory on Monday and reminisced over her family in Hangzhou. Even the flow of the water was gentle that day, the soft breeze pleasant, the sound of the passing cars distant. With no tall buildings in the city, the sky was vast, and even though Kyoto was smaller than Shanghai, the passage of time felt more expansive. The faintest clouds took the edge off the sunlight, soft on the skin.
Without meaning to, she recalled the male customer who had shouted at her that morning but was surprised to find that she could only conjure his face vaguely. She decided he was a weird guy.
Standing at the base of a concrete sill built into the bottom of the river was a pure white heron, staring motionless at the water streaming down. Its expression was almost like that of a philosopher. Lucy wondered what it was doing. With its two black legs rising straight from the white froth of the water, it seemed to possess a kind of otherworldly nobility.
Soon, the bird stretched out its beak, slipped it into the flowing water, and withdrew it holding a small fish. Lucy was spellbound. How clever the bird seemed to her. Snatching up a fish in mid-swim was no mean feat, but she was even more impressed by the way the heron had waited stock-still for the fleeting instant when the fish slid over the sill and lost control. None of the other herons around the river were performing this trick.
Smiling, she took out her phone, and started to record a video, waiting until it caught its next prey. The river flowed, the heron waited for a fish, and she waited for the heron. When the heron put on a marvelous show of catching a second fish in its yellow beak, an ooh of appreciation escaped Lucy’s lips, and she applauded with a laugh. There she stopped recording, just after her voice was captured along with the sound of the breeze.
Now at last, she took out her ukulele, tuned it, and began to practice Kaimana Hila. Unlike when she played while pent-up in her room, the notes seemed to leap into the air as soon as she strummed them like minnows set loose. She had never been to Hawaii but nonetheless became convinced in that moment that a ukulele was indeed an instrument meant to be played outdoors.
*
Lucy spent nearly two more hours alone by the river, playing her ukulele and resting, rolling around and looking up at the sky, and eating the muffin she had brought for an afternoon snack.
As far as can be ascertained, there are no signs that she passed on the stress to anyone else in the following week. Koga subsequently became a terrible super spreader, causing a total of five people to catch the stress from their interactions with him. Of these infection pathways, four subsequently continued to expand throughout the city for some time. But Lucy was an anchor who nonchalantly protected society, for the stress that Kazuhisa Kojima inadvertently brought in from Seattle, after many twists and turns, had at last expired inside her.
Thus Lucy is a hero, whether she or anyone she knows realizes it. In other words, she is fully qualified to be the subject of literature and the protagonist of a work of fiction.
Translator : Eli K.P. William
https://elikpwilliam.com
X: @Dice_Carver
Substack: Almost Real
Author of The Jubilee Cycle trilogy
Book one: Cash Crash Jubilee
Book two: The Naked World
Final Book: A Diamond Dream
Translator of Japanese literature
A Man by Keiichiro Hirano