The Great Passage

by Shion Miura

  “Hey, Saka,” Nishioka said. “You work with Kaguya. Doesn’t it bother you at all?”

  “Doesn’t what bother me?”

  “There she is, cute as a button and dedicated to her work, and now look.” He gestured with his chin at Majime. “Hooked up with a guy who’ll never amount to a hill of beans. Doesn’t it seem like a waste?”

  “Nishioka, you’re drunk.” Upset, Majime waved his hands over the table as if to dispel the words Nishioka had spoken.

  “I’m a married man,” said Saka, one eyebrow raised in faint amusement.

  Nishioka clucked his tongue faintly, as if to say, “What if you are? Go get her.”

  “But I’ll say this,” Saka went on, looking at Majime. “If you do anything to stand in Miss Hayashi’s way, you’ll get a drubbing from me.” With a smile at the corner of his mouth, he added, “She is my protégée, after all,” and returned to the kitchen.

  “What a sweetheart!” Mrs. Sasaki said, her cheeks flushed.

  Even Araki was impressed. “That’s what is meant by ‘a man’s man.’”

  Majime, meanwhile, was holding forth with Professor Matsumoto. Did the professor think the word drubbing was related to drumming?

  “He’s a chef, after all,” said the professor lightly. “I’m surprised he didn’t threaten to dredge you in flour and boil you in oil!”

  Nishioka was not amused. “Last orders!” he announced, ready to bring the evening to an end. “Who wants Inaniwa udon noodles, and who wants rice with tea? A show of hands, please.”

  Majime raised his hand for the noodles.

  Nishioka plodded home to his apartment in Asagaya.

  “Hi, Masa.” Remi Miyoshi greeted him from the living-room sofa, where she was lying down watching television.

  Nishioka stood looking down at her, coat in hand. “Butt-ugly as ever, aren’t you?”

  “Hey! You think you can say anything and people won’t get hurt. You’re an idiot, you know that?”

  Remi sat up and checked the manicure and pedicure she had given herself, to see if her nails were dry. The color was pearl beige, studded with tiny glittering stones.

  Nishioka apologized, while thinking about how useless her skills were.

  Their relationship had changed the night of the company party. He liked her, and after getting drunk he had ended up taking her to bed. The next morning, seeing her face without makeup, he’d been stunned. Her big, lustrous eyes were now narrow slits, she’d lost 70 percent of her eyelashes, and her eyebrows had vanished like mist. To be frank, she was a dog. The sight surprised him, but he still liked her. Also he was impressed by her mastery of the art of makeup and moved by the effort she was willing to put into making herself attractive.

  Ever since, they’d been in and out of each other’s apartments. Remi removed her makeup in front of him, and he spoke his mind freely around her. But if anyone had asked, “So are you and her an item?” he’d have been stuck for an answer.

  He still went to singles parties and sometimes, if things worked out, slept with other women. Sometimes he’d go on seeing the other woman for a while, though never for very long. Remi never said a word. When she sensed he had another woman, she stayed away. When the other woman disappeared, she came back. Apparently she saw other men now and then, too. He wasn’t sure if he should ask, so he kept quiet. Back when they had been in college, they could talk about anything. It was funny to think that sleeping with someone could put distance between you.

  Whoever he is, I’ll bet he doesn’t know what she looks like without her makeup on, he would tell himself to lift his gloom. But why be gloomy in the first place? Was it jealousy based on feelings of love, or just a childish desire to have her to himself? He wasn’t sure. Anyway, their nowhere relationship kept right on going nowhere.

  Now, having apologized, he explained, “It’s just that after seeing Kaguya up close tonight, the difference kind of hit me over the head.”

  “Kaguya? Who’s she?”

  “Works in a restaurant we go to sometimes.”

  “A stunner, huh?”

  “Way beyond ordinary. A perfect ten.”

  “Not the world’s most tactful guy, are you? Good grief!”

  She puffed out her cheeks and came at him as he sat on the sofa, delivering a body blow. With her cheeks like that, she was more moon-faced than ever. At the same time, he had to admit that her warmth beside him somehow helped him relax.

  Her hair smelled nice. Must’ve used his shower without asking, like always. It was his shampoo, but on her he always thought it smelled sweeter. Even though she’d just rammed him, her eyes were laughing, so he felt comfortable saying, “I was comparing you to someone way beyond the ordinary, so we’re cool, aren’t we?”

  “Comparing me to anyone is rude!”

  For a while they tussled on the sofa.

  How did Majime act with Kaguya? Nishioka lacked much imagination, so he couldn’t come up with a very precise mental picture. Somehow he imagined Kaguya smiling happily as she looked up at Majime—that was all. “A beautiful woman palls in three days.” That’s what people said, but maybe Majime would go on to marry Kaguya, while he ended up with Remi here. Now, was that fair?

  Remi gently bit his lower lip, bringing his attention back to matters at hand. He was staring straight into her narrow eyes from close up. He was darned if he knew how she transformed them every morning. She huddled over the bathroom sink with her makeup kit, and when she came out, they were big and beautiful. Magic.

  “She’s not really just a waitress, is she?” asked Remi, sounding wan.

  Indeed, she was a cook, not a waitress, but that didn’t seem to be where Remi was going.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve been kind of down lately. She’s not just a pretty waitress. There’s something more.” Sitting on the sofa with her arms around her knees, Remi let her gaze drop to his chest. “You sure you’re not smitten?”

  She had keen instincts. That might be one reason why their funny relationship had lasted so long. He opened his arms and pulled her close.

  “You know me better than that,” he said lightly. “You know I’m never serious.”

  Remi stirred slightly in his embrace and stole a look at his expression. She looked like she was thinking, “I know you scare easy.”

  He started to enjoy himself. Enough with the upward glances, he thought. With a face like hers, it just looked as if she was giving him the evil eye.

  “I’m going to go take a bath,” he said, and stood up. “You working tomorrow?”

  “You know I am.”

  “Get to bed.”

  He was still a bit tipsy, so he decided to take a shower instead of a bath. As the hot spray struck him, he wondered, had she read his mind? Just as she’d said, Kaguya meant more to him than just a “pretty waitress.” Of course he wasn’t in love, nor did he seriously want to take her to bed. He’d just wanted to beat Majime. If Kaguya had chosen him over Majime, his sense of inferiority might have eased. A crazy dream, that’s all it was. He hadn’t really believed it might come true, hadn’t done anything to make it happen, either.

  Nishioka had his pride. Unable to get deeply involved in much of anything, and incapable of getting a satisfactory evaluation at work, he was constantly comparing himself with others and feeling he fell short. He didn’t want anyone to know that side of him. Not even Remi, who knew all there was to know about how disgracefully lackadaisical he was. His useless pride had become so swollen that the expression “caring nothing for appearances” could never, ever apply to him.

  He rubbed hair restorer into his scalp as a precaution and carefully towel-dried it before heading to the bedroom. Remi lay stretched out on the far side of the smallish double bed, her eyes already closed.

  Nishioka crawled into the empty space and let out a sigh. Sleeping in the same bed with Remi was a little cramped, but he didn’t really mind. He switched off the light on the nightstand. After a moment his eyes grew
used to the darkness, and with just the light from the streetlight seeping through the space between the curtains, he could see into the corners of the ceiling. Blue night shadows, in contrasting shades of light and dark.

  “If something’s bothering you, you can tell me, you know.”

  He’d thought she was long asleep. He turned to face her. Her eyes were still closed.

  “If I know you, you’re just pretending nothing’s wrong out of silly pride.”

  Sheesh. Who do you think you are, my girlfriend? Or what, you’re trying to be my mother or my big sister or something? You know what you are? You’re somebody I have sex with. Period.

  He was frustrated beyond measure. The words rose in his throat, and he was on the verge of spitting them out when for some reason he looked at her sleepy, fleshy expression as she lay beside him halfway dreaming. He found himself stroking her hair.

  “Do I seem that down?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Want me to show you I’m not?”

  “Turkey.”

  She thrust out an arm to distance herself from him, smiling as if tickled. Before he knew it, he was smiling, too. He pulled her head close, a bit roughly, and cradled it in his arms. He buried his nose in her soft hair and sighed again. This time it was more like a long, deep breath.

  Even as they fell into their separate slumbers, they could hear each other’s hearts beating.

  Revision of Gembu Student’s Dictionary of Japanese was in full swing.

  Even after steering a dictionary safely through to publication, Professor Matsumoto never let down his guard. “That’s the real starting point,” he liked to say. Day by day he busied himself making new file cards filled with bothersome turns of phrase or young people’s slang. Revision started with a review of those cards. Which ones were suitable for inclusion in the revised edition of the Student’s Dictionary? And which words included in the current edition had to be taken out? Removing a word from a dictionary was more unnerving than adding a new one. Even if a word was seldom used and all but obsolete, there still might be people who wanted to look up its meaning.

  They held cautious deliberations. Professor Matsumoto and Majime made most of the judgment calls on which words to keep or drop. Readers’ comments and requests were also taken into consideration. Dictionary users’ opinions were a particularly valuable tool for improvement. After all, dictionaries aren’t made only by editors-in-chief, contributors, and editorial staff. They are perfected over a long period of time using the collected wisdom of readers.

  Adding or deleting entry words often necessitated adjusting the word count in surrounding entries. Definitions had to fit neatly on the page, with a minimum of empty space. Sometimes fine adjustments had to be made over several pages to fit everything in as attractively and readably as possible.

  Some words referred the user to another entry, but if that second entry had been deleted in the revised edition, the user would be left high and dry. Such a calamity would seriously damage the dictionary’s trustworthiness, so careful checks were made to ensure that revisions didn’t give rise to contradictions or discrepancies. Everyone pitched in on this task, not just the professor and Majime, and they were joined by proofreaders from inside and outside the company. Day after day was spent reviewing the vast number of galleys, red pencils at the ready.

  The appropriateness of usage examples for new entry words also had to be verified. Twenty graduate students in humanities courses, students of Japanese language and literature, were hired as part-time assistants. The students’ job was to make sure all the quotations were accurate and all the examples of usage appropriate. Their schedules weren’t set. They could come and go as they pleased, whenever they could spare time from their studies, punching time cards to document their hours worked. They sat at a large desk that had been brought into the office and checked examples with materials on the shelves behind them. Mrs. Sasaki was in charge of overseeing reference materials and assigning work to the part-timers, and Araki oversaw what they did.

  The office was suddenly full of life and activity, but for Nishioka time hung heavy. He was leaving in the spring to join the advertising department. Even if he became involved in the revision process, he would have to leave before it was finished, so he felt awkward and hesitant about jumping in.

  Instead, he decided to rearrange the office. He was the one who brought in the large desk for the students, lugging it from the storage room on the first floor. Actually, since it was too heavy for him alone, he had enlisted the custodian’s help. He also reorganized the reference room and brought newly empty shelves into the office, where they were useful for storing the voluminous galleys.

  In the course of moving all that furniture, the door to the office got in the way. It was an antique door with brass knobs, but Nishioka decided it had to go. He borrowed a screwdriver from the custodian’s room and removed the hinges. The wood beneath was fresh and lustrous, unaffected by the passage of time.

  “How old is the annex?” Nishioka asked Araki.

  “It was built right after the war, so it’s over sixty years old now.”

  A door that had been there that long ended up being removed by him, who’d only been around five or six years. How ironic. He apologized silently to the door, wrapped it carefully in packing material, and laid it in the storage room. Without the door, you could see right into the office from the corridor, but nobody seemed to mind. Everybody but him was absorbed in the work of revision, and only dictionary staff used the annex corridor anyway.

  For days afterward, Nishioka’s back ached. Sneezing took courage. To stand up and sit down, he had to place both hands flat on the desk, regulate his breathing, and talk himself through it: Here we go, you can do it, easy does it.

  Majime seemed concerned. One morning when Nishioka came in early, he found the cushion Majime always used fastened to his chair seat. A small tube of ointment lay on his desk with a get-well note attached: “Feel better.”

  “It’s not hemorrhoids!” He picked up the tube and threw it on Majime’s desk, then thought better of it. Majime had made the gesture as an expression of sympathy, after all, and besides, you never knew—he might need hemorrhoid ointment someday. He retrieved the tube and stuck it in a drawer.

  When Majime came to work a bit later, he was carrying a new cushion with a floral pattern. “My landlady sewed it for me.”

  Jeez, you might have given me the new one! Nishioka thought, but Majime looked so pleased at the sight of him sitting on the hand-me-down cushion that he just thanked him and let it go.

  Progress on The Great Passage was held up by the work they had to do on Gembu Student’s Dictionary of Japanese. Even so, sample pages came back from the printer, and Professor Matsumoto, Majime, and Araki spent a good deal of time brooding over them.

  Sample pages were printed using finished layouts, of which there were still precious few. Even though the number of samples was necessarily limited, seeing entries arranged on pages as they would be printed and bound gave the dictionary makers a useful preview. Were the size, font, and spacing of characters adequate? Was the placement of figures and illustrations pleasing to the eye? Were numbers and symbols easy to make out? The sample pages were invaluable aids to making the dictionary more readable and enhancing its functionality and appearance.

  The three men hovered around the samples, frowning with concentration, yet somehow buoyant. No doubt it gave them a thrill to see The Great Passage taking concrete shape at last, even to this minuscule extent.

  “Doesn’t using white numbers in a circle against a black background make the numbers harder to read?” the professor wondered aloud.

  “What’s this lame sketch of a toadstool doing by the mushroom entry?” asked Araki.

  “Oh, I drew that,” said Majime. “The actual illustration wasn’t ready, and I thought we should have something to fill the space.”

  “You didn’t have to go and make them print it up like this.”

  �
�That’s supposed to be a mushroom?” said Professor Matsumoto. “I thought it was a strawberry.”

  “Come on. It’s right there next to the word ‘mushroom’! Don’t gang up on me.”

  Nishioka again felt out of the loop. It would be years before The Great Passage was complete. Worse, there was no telling when the company might put up another roadblock. The project might end up falling by the wayside after all. Either way, whether it got finished or went up in smoke, he wouldn’t be around when it happened. He wouldn’t share in either the joy or the pain. Even though he’d been here from the start, before Majime ever came along.

  The source of the bitter emotions that rose in him unceasingly like water pouring out of a hot spring was all too clear: jealousy. Compared to Majime, he didn’t give a damn about the dictionary, but he couldn’t shake off his resentment. He couldn’t get over the feeling that he’d gotten off track at work. He felt a swell of panic.

  All he had to do was pull his weight in the advertising department—a place where Majime would never succeed, not even if he did handstands and turned somersaults. But Nishioka would do fine. He had faith in his ability to work equally well wherever he was put. Let them send him to advertising. He’d find a way to put a feather in his cap.

  But actually, advertising interested him about as much as dictionaries. How could he find something to get excited about? Something he could commit to, no holds barred. He had no idea. People like Professor Matsumoto, Araki, and Majime were alien to him. His friends in school had all shied away from getting deeply involved in anything, and Nishioka thought it was bad form to show too much enthusiasm. His father had been a company worker, but whether he’d liked his job or hated it, Nishioka never knew. He’d just done it because it was his job. He did it for the sake of his family, for the sake of the company, for the sake of earning a salary and making a living. All perfectly natural.

  These people so entranced by dictionaries were outside the bounds of Nishioka’s understanding. He couldn’t even be sure they thought of their work as work. They spent huge sums of their own money on materials, ignoring the limitations of their salaries. Sometimes they stayed in the office looking up things and never even realized they had missed the last train home. They seemed filled with a mad fever. And yet you couldn’t really say they loved dictionaries, either—not given the way they studied and analyzed them with such stunning concentration. There was something almost vindictive in their obsession, as if they were going after an enemy, getting the goods on him. How could they be so wrapped up in making dictionaries? He found their obsession mysterious, with even a whiff of bad taste. And yet—if only Nishioka had something that meant as much to him as dictionaries did to Majime and the rest. Then surely he would see everything differently. He would see a world of such dazzling brightness it would hurt.