The Great Passage

by Shion Miura

  “I know. I’m so sorry. I wasn’t sure if it really was a love letter or not.”

  Kaguya’s fingers traced his cheek. Perhaps because she always did the washing up, her fingertips felt rough.

  “My boss said, ‘Who reads Chinese? Forget it,’ and my coworker just laughed.”

  “You showed it to them?”

  He hadn’t written it in Chinese, but perhaps his style had been a bit stiff and ornate. It embarrassed him to think any eyes but hers had seen that letter containing everything in his heart, words that had gone in empty circles and been needlessly abstruse.

  “Grandma kept saying, ‘Go ask him in person.’ But you seemed the same as ever, so I just couldn’t be sure.”

  Of course he’d been the same as ever—nerve-racked. From the moment he’d first met Kaguya, he’d been nerve-racked. All because of his feelings for her. His next words were the most heartfelt of his life: “I love you.”

  “At the amusement park, there were any number of times when I thought maybe you cared.” She laid her forehead against his chest and let out a breath of relief. “But you never said or did anything to show it.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not used to this.”

  “Don’t apologize. I thought I’d just wait and see what happened. It was mean. I came to make amends.”

  “Amends?

  “Yes.”

  Kaguya looked up and their eyes met. Hers were smiling; Majime smiled, too. His heart was racing, but fortunately it didn’t burst or stop. Her face came nearer, soft lips touched his. Cautiously, taking care not to make a sound, he breathed in the sweet scent of her hair. This was no dream.

  “Why are you so tense?”

  “Sorry,” he said again. “I’m not used to this.”

  “Do you need to be?” she asked in a tone of wonder.

  At that, Majime worked up his courage and took action. His whole body, including his brain, told him he wanted her, not only with his passion but also with his intellect.

  He sat up, bringing her with him, and then had her move to one side while he pushed back the comforter. He reached for her hand, and without his needing to pull, she came of her own accord and covered him. He put his arms around her. She felt lithe and soft.

  “By the way,” she said, “next time you write me a love letter, make it a bit more modern, will you? That one took too long to decipher.”

  “I’ll work on it.”

  He remembered he’d forgotten to close the window, but soon the cold no longer concerned him.

  As if to erase the mood spilling from the room, Tora’s meow sounded over the canal. His majestic roar that made all the neighborhood cats fall in line. It was a moonlit night.

  Kaguya’s eyes, shining with a moist blue light as she gazed at him, were incomparably beautiful.

  CHAPTER 3

  Aha. The minute he entered the office and saw Majime’s face, Nishioka knew.

  “Morning, Majime. Something good happen?”

  “No, nothing special.”

  Majime didn’t look up and kept correcting manuscripts for The Great Passage with a red pencil.

  Written contributions to a dictionary are a rather special case, editorially speaking. Unlike in those for magazine articles or short stories, an author’s unique voice or style of writing gets little respect. That’s because in a dictionary, concision and precision are what count most. Dictionary editors freely alter submissions to unify the style and enhance the accuracy of explanations. They confer with contributors as much as possible, but contributors enter into the project understanding that what they write is subject to change. The burden and responsibility weighing on editors is all the greater as a result.

  Majime looked impressive as he sat at his desk wielding his red pencil, seemingly deep in concentration—but more likely he was just embarrassed. This was the conclusion Nishioka reached after observing him from the neighboring desk. Majime was putting on a show of single-minded focus, but now and then his mouth twitched and he bit his cheek as though suppressing a smile. His eyes were bloodshot, suggesting he was short on sleep, and his skin had an unwonted glow.

  No doubt about it.

  In high school one of the guys would occasionally come into the classroom with skin looking like this. Never did Nishioka expect to see a colleague pushing thirty come into the office with the same telltale luster.

  “Nothing special, huh?” Yeah, right, Nishioka thought. Oh, you pulled a fast one, all right, Majime. He removed his suit coat and slung it over the back of his chair to keep it from wrinkling.

  He’d seen it coming a mile off. Women were mysterious creatures, apt to choose someone so unlikely you could bash your head in trying to figure it out. Good looks, a hefty bank account, a social personality—the seemingly obvious reasons rarely counted for much. No, experience had taught Nishioka that a woman attached supreme importance to whether or not a man put her first. Most men, if told by a woman, “You’re really sincere,” would suspect she was having a bit of fun at their expense. But apparently women actually did consider “sincerity” to be high praise—and by “sincerity” a woman meant someone who would never lie to her and who would save all his tenderness for her alone.

  No way. Sure, he’d like to be that way, but really, no way.

  No woman had ever praised Nishioka for his sincerity. He lied when the occasion called for it, and he was tender, or not, depending on his mood. Wasn’t that being truly sincere, goddamn it? Take it or leave it. Inevitably, his relationships suffered. In the end, guys like Majime were the ones women went for. Ho-hum guys with only their seriousness to recommend them, but with a touch of charm for all that, and a passion, whether for their work or hobby.

  With a sigh, Nishioka got to work and began churning out e-mails to potential contributors. This was no time to be sitting around in a daze. The branches of the cherry trees were still bare, even now preparing for the coming spring. He needed to get as much done as possible before his pending transfer. He owed it to Majime, who was by no means a skilled negotiator. When Majime had first come, Nishioka had taken one look at him and thought, Here’s a fellow who’s never going to go far in the world. He’d also thought he’d be a good fit for the department. Before that he’d been pretty worried, even though he himself had tipped off Araki to Majime’s existence.

  He’d first heard about Majime from Yoko Yokkaichi, a friend of his in sales. She and Nishioka were from the same batch of hires, and they got along pretty well. They’d once worked together organizing a company party, and every few months or so they went out for a drink. That day they’d been sitting in the basement cafeteria at lunchtime.

  “Our new guy is creepy.” She’d paused as she was eating curry and frowned. “We heard such good things about him, too. A graduate degree in linguistics, supposed to be brilliant.”

  “Creepy? Like what?”

  “Like his hair’s always a total mess, for one thing.”

  “Might be another Einstein.”

  “He’s always straightening up his desk, and the office shelves, too.”

  “Sounds like a handy fellow.”

  “Yeah, but he’s more like a squirrel hiding nuts or something. I mean, he scurries around like some furtive little animal. And making the rounds of bookstores to push new titles is tiring, right? But he always comes back loaded down with books he picked up at secondhand shops. I mean, you start to wonder, does he go to all the places he’s supposed to or not? Before payday, he eats instant ramen out of the package, doesn’t even bother to cook it. I’ll bet all those used books are the reason he runs out of money. Don’t you think?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Doesn’t he sound creepy?”

  “Different, I’ll grant you that.”

  “First you, now this new guy . . . Makes you wonder about our company’s hiring policies!”

  After this lament, Yoko finished her curry, then rinsed off her spoon by stirring it in her glass of water. She was a cheerful, bright youn
g woman, attractive except for this annoying quirk.

  “Oh, my god.” She set her spoon on the tray, looked behind Nishioka, and lowered her eyes. “He’s right behind you. What if he heard me?”

  Nishioka turned casually and looked behind him. At a table a slight distance away, a lanky fellow had just gotten to his feet. Sure enough, his hair was jumping every which way. One hand held an empty plate, the other a yellowed paperback. Eyes glued to the page, he started off toward the tray return counter. And proceeded to bump into a potted plant. Dust from the leaves swirled in the air as all eyes turned to him. Without adjusting the glasses that had slipped down his nose, he bowed apologetically to the plant.

  “I bet he wasn’t listening,” Nishioka said, turning back to face Yoko.

  The guy was lost in his own world. Exactly the type Nishioka had the most trouble dealing with.

  “So what am I doing, getting involved like this?” Nishioka murmured, looking at Majime, who was sitting across from him slurping soba noodles. After finishing the morning’s work, he had invited the perennially broke Majime out to lunch at a noodle joint near the office. “My treat,” he’d said. Majime modestly ordered a platter of morisoba, plain cold noodles with a dipping sauce. He seemed to be enjoying them.

  “Involved in what?” Majime asked.

  He couldn’t very well say, “You.” Instead he brushed the question aside. “Nothing.”

  Having devoured his noodles, Majime was now pouring sobayu, the hot water the noodles were cooked in, from a little teapot into the rest of his dipping sauce to make a tasty drink. Nishioka had had a bowl of oyako domburi, rice topped with a chicken-and-egg mixture simmered with onions. He looked on restlessly as Majime finished his meal.

  “Hey, Shiny.”

  “Who, me?” Majime put a hand to his head. “I’ve still got plenty of hair, I think.”

  “How’s it going with Kaguya?”

  “Fine, thanks.” Majime was noncommittal at first, but under Nishioka’s steady, piercing gaze he realized the futility of evasion. He set the teapot back on the table and answered formally. “It’s hard to believe, but apparently she’s had feelings for me, too. She didn’t want to interfere in my dictionary work or let anything get in the way of her training as a chef, so she felt torn, she says, and let things slide.”

  “Oh, yeah? How about that. Well, congratulations on losing your cherry.”

  The noodle shop was a favorite lunch spot of Gembu employees, so he had the grace to say this last bit in a lowered voice, but Majime nodded without embarrassment.

  “We talked it over and decided one reason we get on so well is we both have something we don’t want anyone interfering with.”

  “How about that,” Nishioka said again, thinking, Good god. No doubt about it, Majime is the right man for both the department and Kaguya.

  Nishioka had never been that absorbed in anything. And probably never would be.

  Whatever he made of the smile on Nishioka’s face, Majime returned it with a sunny yet rather abashed smile of his own.

  Ever since Majime’s arrival in their office, Nishioka had had an uneasy feeling. A sense that he was going to get sacked. Over the years he’d done his best. Not that he had the least interest in or feelings about dictionaries, one way or the other. But as long as he’d been assigned to work on them, he’d applied himself to the task at hand. Work was work. He’d learned to put up with Mrs. Sasaki’s snippiness. He’d done his homework on Professor Matsumoto, taking note of his habits and food preferences. And he’d acquired the knack of taking in stride Araki’s singular fastidiousness about words. Yet Araki was always on his case.

  “Nishioka, the word kodawari, ‘fastidiousness,’ can’t be used in a positive sense. People use it to refer to a craftsman’s pride and joy in his work, for example, but that’s an error. The original meaning is ‘finding fault, being a stickler.’”

  A perfect description of you when it comes to dictionaries, so hey, my use of the word was right on target! Mentally he lodged this protest, but all he said was, “Yes, boss.”

  Dictionary makers tended to spend their time holed up in the dimly lit office. He had tried to do what he could to lighten the mood so everyone could do their work and enjoy it. In the five years he’d been in the Dictionary Editorial Department, he’d found his place, his raison d’être. He’d felt a glow of affection for the department and for people who loved dictionaries beyond all reason.

  Majime had changed everything. Araki had made no secret of his high hopes for the newcomer. Professor Matsumoto never said anything, but he seemed to take a positive view of Majime’s work. Even Mrs. Sasaki, who was curt with everyone else, treated him with a certain easy familiarity, like a mother or an older sister—completely unlike the way she treated Nishioka.

  Not much he could do about it. Majime’s passion for dictionary work was nothing short of phenomenal. Less than a month after Majime arrived, Nishioka had been forced to admit it: the guy was made of different stuff.

  Majime was no smooth talker, yet he had a keen sensitivity to words. Like the time Nishioka, in talking about his nephew, whom he’d just seen for the first time in a while, commented, “Kids today are sure precocious.” All of a sudden Majime had said, “Wait!” and reached for the nearest dictionary. Nishioka had used a word for “precocious,” omase, that could apply to either boys or girls, but a similar word, oshama, was for girls only. How to explain this difference in nuance, Majime wanted to know. He was always coming up with things like that, so conversations with him tended to get derailed. That day, too, Nishioka had ended up helping him make file cards for both omase and oshama, looking through dictionary after dictionary.

  The file cards Majime wrote seemed to give off a light of their own on the shelves. He faithfully filled in gaps in the vast collection of cards written previously by Professor Matsumoto, Mrs. Sasaki, and the rest. His powers of concentration and endurance were prodigious. If Nishioka called out to Majime when he was writing guidelines or file cards, Majime didn’t hear. He would sit at his desk for hours, often skipping lunch. He worked with such energy the black sleeve protectors he wore might have given off sparks as they rubbed against the paper. His unruly hair seemed only to grow wilder, in defiance of the laws of gravity.

  “Lately it’s gotten harder to pick up things,” Majime said one day with a wry laugh. He’d finally worn his fingerprints smooth, like the others. Only Nishioka’s fingerprints, despite his five years on the job, remained intact.

  Majime seemed to live on a higher plane, unconcerned with his appearance and reputation, yet when it came to words and dictionaries, he was implacable. He would turn over a problem in his mind endlessly until satisfied, and at editorial meetings he gave his opinion forthrightly.

  All of which spelled trouble, Nishioka felt. A dictionary was a commodity. Sure, you had to devote yourself to the making of one, but at some point you had to draw a line. Various factors shaped a dictionary: the company’s intentions, the timing of the release, the number of pages, the price, the team of contributors. And however perfectionist you tried to be, in the end words were alive, in constant flux. No dictionary could ever achieve true completion. If you got too attached to the work, you could never bring yourself to let it go and finally make it public.

  Despite the envy and jealousy Majime aroused in him, Nishioka found him impossible to dislike. Majime’s zeal meant he needed someone to keep a watchful eye on him. Who but Nishioka could look out for him and see to it that all their work finally came to something, that the department delivered the goods?

  After he left, what would become of the Dictionary Editorial Department, and of Majime? Anxiety lit a fire under Nishioka. He stayed in constant touch with contributors, collected manuscripts when he could, and urged those who had not yet made their submissions to do so by the deadline. Such tasks weren’t up Majime’s alley. Or maybe Nishioka was getting worked up over nothing. Maybe after he was gone the department would manage just fine. Just m
aybe Majime, with his burning passion for dictionaries and his finely honed sensitivity to words, would help The Great Passage see the light of day.

  Thus ruminating, Nishioka fretted in solitude.

  At Umenomi, the lovers’ behavior grated on Nishioka’s nerves, made him want to lurch for the door. Majime avoided Kaguya’s eyes more than ever, but should their fingertips happen to touch when one of them passed a dish to the other, he turned beet red. Kaguya called him “Mitsu” more often, but perhaps to avoid giving any impression of favoritism, the hors d’oeuvres she set before him were clearly smaller in quantity than those she served anyone else.

  For crying out loud, what is this, junior high? Nishioka wondered. What the hell are they trying to prove?

  Araki, Professor Matsumoto, and Mrs. Sasaki had also picked up on the new closeness between the lovers. “Tackle dictionary making with the same determination,” counseled Araki. “Too bad there won’t be a reenactment of Kokoro after all,” said Professor Matsumoto with a sigh. “When did all this happen, for heaven’s sake?” said Mrs. Sasaki. One by one they offered teasing congratulations, while Majime hunched over and made shy, noncommittal noises.

  “So you weren’t making any headway with her after all, eh, Mr. Nishioka?” Mrs. Sasaki gave him a look.

  He forced a smile. “Majime had the jump on me. Living under the same roof with her and everything.”

  “You’re a big talker and that’s all.”

  “That’s what’s good about Mr. Nishioka!”

  Nishioka refilled Professor Matsumoto’s glass in gratitude. “Someone who understands me!”

  “Being a big talker is what’s good about him?” Mrs. Sasaki rolled her eyes. Then, turning to the counter, she called for two more bottles of sake.

  Kaguya was watching intently as the master grilled striped mullet with salt, so the other apprentice, whose name was Saka, brought over the order. He didn’t go out of his way to be friendly, but his good looks were striking.