by Shion Miura
Out on the street, the students started a game of rock, paper, scissors to decide between ramen and a beef bowl. Nishioka looked on, smiling.
An idea popped into his head: maybe he would propose to Remi. How would she feel? What would she say? He had no idea, but he was done averting his eyes from his real feelings. No more masquerading. For a pretty long time now he’d had no desire to sleep with anyone else, and that wasn’t going to change. He wanted her to know it.
Dinner was ramen. That meant he’d have to propose with garlic on his breath, but with Remi he was past worrying about such things. He sent her a quick text message: Hey. Where RU? If @ my place, W8 for me. If @ home, can I come over? I’ll eat first. CU
At the Jimbocho intersection, the cell phone buzzed in his pocket to let him know he had a new message.
Hey. I’m home. Come anytime. No hurry. I’ll W8.
He smiled and reread it. No emoji. Her messages were always the same, surprisingly terse. All the same, he felt as if he could hear her voice. He felt warmed. There it was again, the mysterious power of writing, of words.
“All right,” he announced, “just to liven things up, you can each have a hard-boiled egg with your toppings.”
“What’s this, all of a sudden?” said one of the students.
“How about an extra-large bowl with roast pork topping?” said the other.
“Go for it.”
Nishioka put away his cell phone and went into the ramen shop with the students, his spirits high.
CHAPTER 4
For the first time in her three years at Gembu Books, Midori Kishibe set foot in the annex, located in a corner of the company grounds, and promptly sneezed three times.
She was allergic to dust and sudden temperature changes. Entering rooms that hadn’t been adequately cleaned or that were a different temperature gave her sneezing spells and a runny nose. The annex was the kind of place that might give her a hard time. As soon as she opened the heavy wooden door, she felt the chill in the dim corridor. The air smelled musty, like a library.
This was nothing like the modern main building. Could she really be in the right place? She’d always known about the annex, but assumed it was some sort of storage facility. The Western–style wooden structure was so old-fashioned. Yet once inside, she could tell that despite its age, the building was currently being used. The floorboards and the staircase railing were worn to a deep amber. The walls were white plaster, the ceiling high and elegantly arched. Her nose itched, but no dust bunnies lay in the corners. The building was clearly in daily use and kept up well.
“Excuse me,” she called down the corridor. “Hello?”
“What is it?” said a voice beside her, making her jump.
She timidly looked and realized that nervousness and poor lighting had caused her to overlook a small window just inside the door, where now a custodian or security guard was peering out at her. A faded piece of paper taped to the window was hand-lettered RECEPTION. Just beyond the window was a small room where the man had been sitting, watching television in the breeze from an electric fan.
The entrance to the main building had a metallic reception counter with a smiling woman to greet visitors. What a difference, Kishibe thought, and started to announce herself. Before she could get a word out, the man waved his right hand carelessly.
“Second floor,” he said, twice, before closing the window and turning back to his show.
She decided to follow his instructions and go on up to the second floor. Her footsteps rang out in the corridor. In the main building, her high heels clattered pleasantly on the tile floor, but on this wooden floor the sound was muffled. She thought it sounded like a bird pecking for food.
Every time she stepped on a riser, the stairs creaked. Have I gained weight? My waist size hasn’t changed, but lately I’ve been pigging out on snacks from all the stress. She tiptoed the rest of the way up.
The second floor was a little brighter, thanks to light coming through the windows. Only one of the doors leading off the corridor was open. She headed for that one.
As she drew closer, she saw the door wasn’t open but had in fact been removed. Inside, bookshelves lined the walls and every desk was buried in piles of paper. She sneezed three times. She hesitated to go into the room. It had to be full of dust. Also, there was a strange moaning coming from inside. A low and continuous sound. Like a tiger in labor, she thought.
As she gingerly peered inside, a voice behind her said, “Oh, we’ve been expecting you!”
Kishibe turned with a squeal of surprise to find a woman standing in the corridor that moments before had been empty. She was slender and bespectacled, and seemed high-strung.
“Um, I—”
“Yes, yes, I know.”
Once again, Kishibe was cut off and prevented from introducing herself. The woman slid past her into the room, maneuvering around stacks of paper.
“Director! Director Majime!”
As if in response, the moaning stopped. After a bit, the pile of papers farthest back in the room gave way to reveal the figure of a man.
“Over here. What is it, Mrs. Sasaki?”
Apparently he had fallen asleep at his desk. When he stood up, there was a red line on his cheek from the paper he had dropped his head on. He too was thin, but unlike the woman named Mrs. Sasaki, he had a disheveled air. His shirt was wrinkled and his hair, which looked naturally curly, was thick and unruly.
About forty, she thought, taking note of the wisps of gray mixed in with that explosive hair. And he’s this careless with his appearance? Hmm. And he’s the one in charge. Maybe that explains what they say about this place—that it’s a paper-eating money pit.
The man scrabbled around on his desktop without a scrap of dignity. Finally he found what he was looking for—his glasses. With these in place, he seemed to finally notice Kishibe, and began groping on his desktop again.
Now what’s he doing? Unsure whether she should speak or remain silent, Kishibe stole a look at Mrs. Sasaki, who was standing perfectly still, as if in a trance, not rushing the man. Kishibe had no choice but to wait for him to do something.
“Found it!” he announced happily, and approached Kishibe with a silver card case in hand. To reach her he had to skirt around piles of paper on the floor, so this took a bit of time. “I’m Mitsuya Majime. How do you do?”
The business card he held out was printed with these words:
MITSUYA MAJIME
DIRECTOR, DICTIONARY EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
GEMBU BOOKS, INC.
He was pretty tall, so he was bending down to look at her. The eyes behind his glasses looked sleepy, but they were dark and shining.
Quickly she brought out her card case from her suit pocket—the same case she’d bought when she’d first come to work at Gembu, full of excitement. Hermes Box Calf leather. Inside were her brand-new business cards.
“I’ll be working with you now,” she said. “My name is Midori Kishibe. I look forward to learning a great deal from you.” She had never heard of two people in the same company exchanging business cards.
Mrs. Sasaki introduced herself, without offering a card. “My name is Sasaki. I work mostly in the reference room next door.”
Relieved, Kishibe put her card case away while she greeted Mrs. Sasaki. This proved that the director had indeed acted bizarrely. There was no need to exchange business cards with your new boss.
No one else was in the office. She thought the others must have stepped out, but no, it seemed it would just be the three of them: Majime, Sasaki, and Kishibe.
“Besides us,” Majime said cheerfully, “Professor Matsumoto serves as editor-in-chief, and Kohei Araki is a consultant.”
With a staff of two, his title of director didn’t amount to much, Kishibe thought, and yet here he was smiling away. She felt inclined to mock the apparently unambitious man, and simultaneously her eagerness to work here, scant as it had been, shriveled up. They were working on some big project,
she’d been told, but now she felt as if she’d been exiled to a remote outpost.
Did I screw up somehow? Is this my punishment? Familiar thoughts returned, and her spirits flagged.
Since being hired at Gembu, Kishibe had spent three years on the editorial staff of the glamorous fashion magazine Belle. Many publishing companies put out fashion magazines targeting women in their twenties, and Belle ranked among those with the most robust sales. The staff lived up to its reputation as one of the leading departments in the company.
An avid reader of Belle since college, Kishibe had been excited to be assigned there and had done her best to fit in. She followed the example of her snazzy colleagues and kept up with the latest fashions, taking care to dress as well as she could within her limits; you couldn’t really judge how good an item of clothing was until you wore it and lived with it. Even after the page proofs were done and she went home exhausted, she never skipped her skin care regimen. Before interviews, she read boring celebrity autobiographies cover to cover. She’d worked hard at her job without losing her drive—even after her college boyfriend dumped her, saying, “You’re the type who can make her way alone.”
So why had she been transferred to this godforsaken corner of the universe—the furthest conceivable place from interviews with Hollywood stars and behind-the-scenes wrangling among top models? What was she supposed to do in a department as far removed from her old one as the Crab Nebula was from Earth? What could she do? She felt lost.
Unaware of her state of mind, Majime and Mrs. Sasaki were chatting breezily.
“Just now I was having a bad dream,” said Mrs. Sasaki.
“That reminds me,” Majime said. “I dreamed that when the second proofs came back I found some characters that weren’t seiji.”
“Oh, no! That’s awful, even in a dream.”
“A nightmare.”
Seiji? She wasn’t sure what the word meant. She sensed their brisk chatter was from another world. Hesitantly, she spoke up. “Um, what should I do?”
“Find your own work to do,” her old boss used to say, but fashion magazines and dictionaries were worlds apart. Until they showed her the ropes, she’d be of no use here.
“Just take it easy,” said Majime.
She felt let down, as if they didn’t want her, but apparently he hadn’t said this to be mean.
“We’re planning a welcome party for you,” he added earnestly. “Your mission for today is to have your stomach and liver in good working order by six this evening, that’s all.”
“Your things are over there,” said Mrs. Sasaki, pointing to a corner where several cardboard boxes were neatly stacked. “Take whatever desk suits your fancy. If we need help, we’ll let you know.” With that, she left the room.
She must have gone back to the reference room, or whatever they called it. Maybe, seeing that the director wouldn’t be good at welcoming a new employee on his own, Mrs. Sasaki had kept an eye out for her arrival so she could step in and help. Her manner was a little brusque, but she seemed nice enough.
Whatever desk suited her fancy? She looked around the room, at a loss. Every desk was piled high with books and papers.
Majime had already returned to his seat. His desktop was covered with a particularly huge amount of paper—galley proofs? Even his computer huddled uneasily beneath a pile of papers, sticking out like a visor. The floor all around his desk was piled high with stacks of books so tall that when he sat down he was nearly hidden. His desk looked like a fortress or the cave of some hibernating animal.
Kishibe peered at Majime between the books in his stronghold. Tied to the seat of his chair, she noticed, was a worn floral-patterned cushion. She hesitated over how to address him. Since it would be only the two of them in this room, “Director” seemed a bit awkward.
“Mr. Majime?”
“Yes.” He looked up from the book in front of him, which was filled with hieroglyphics like those carved in ancient Egyptian temples. Surely he was just looking at them, not reading them? She faltered a bit, unable now to bring herself to ask which desk to use.
Majime, his head still raised, waited patiently for her next words.
“What does seiji mean?”
On the spur of the moment she changed her question, and instantly regretted it. This was probably some jargon connected with dictionaries. Majime seemed a bit eccentric; he might be the type to blow up. You don’t know a simple thing like that? What kind of ignoramus did they send me?
Even though she was feeling scared, he answered in the same mild tone. “Basically, it means a proper character, one based on the Kangxi Dictionary.”
She still didn’t understand, and what on earth was the Kangxi Dictionary? She’d never heard of it. Apparently sensing her distress, Majime laid the book in his lap, pulled a piece of paper from the nearest pile, and started scribbling on the back.
“For example, if you type sorou on the keyboard and press the language conversion key, the computer will generally come up with this character. But if you look at actual printed materials, the word is almost always written this way. It gets changed to the proper form in the proofreading stage. The second one is the proper form, and the first one is an informal variant.”
Kishibe looked closely at the two characters, comparing them. At a glance they seemed identical, but then she saw it. “So the two tiny horizontal lines in the middle are supposed to slant down.”
Now she remembered that sometimes in an article for Belle, the proofreader would correct the form of a character. Two things counted in a fashion magazine: whether product colors were printed correctly and whether shopping information was up to date. She had never really thought about the meaning behind those proofreading corrections, never realized they had to do with writing the character in its proper form.
“But when you write the character by hand, the variant is fine.” Majime looked down at the hieroglyphics in his lap. “Japanese has so many homonyms that it’s easy to write the completely wrong character, and those mistakes creep in, too. Seiji means not merely the correct character, but the correct form of that character for print. Dictionaries have to put priority on using seiji, although characters in the joyo or jinmeiyo kanji tables are listed in their new forms.”
Joyo or jinmeiyo kanji tables? She didn’t know what those might be, but she got the point: dictionaries were made by following detailed rules and lavishing extreme care on each character’s form.
I wonder if I can make a go of it here. Her head was spinning. Perhaps because Majime had yanked out a piece of paper before, the pile of papers on his desk chose to collapse, burying his hands.
Kishibe sneezed five times. She wanted to blow her nose, but she had a feeling it was going to take a while before she located a box of tissues in this office.
Before unpacking, Kishibe decided to do some cleaning and tidying.
Since it was early July, she feared they wouldn’t be selling flu masks at the convenience store, but they were—probably because new strains of pandemic influenza popped up regardless of season. She found just the ones she wanted, of nonwoven fabric. She bought work gloves, too, and as soon as she got back she set to work, wearing two masks as protection from the dust. Majime offered to help, but she politely declined. They had only just met, so it was a bit presumptuous of her, but somehow one look told her he wouldn’t be much use.
Majime backed off, returned to his desk, and resumed work. What he might be doing, she had no idea. He had his nose in that book about hieroglyphics and was taking notes. She took a casual look and saw scribbles such as “The king’s bird flies toward night.” Could he really be reading hieroglyphics?
The cleaning was more satisfying than she had expected. She arranged books with books, papers with papers, galleys with galleys, and piled them on the big work desk. Once they were organized, she asked Majime to decide what could be discarded. Books went over on the bookshelves, papers she filed in the filing cabinets, and everything that had been judged waste sh
e tied in string and set out in the corridor.
The galleys, which had to be stored, were more trouble. Apparently to make a dictionary, galleys had to go back and forth between the editorial department and the printer five times. After the first proofs had been corrected, they were returned to the printer, and when the next batch reflecting those corrections came back, they had to be checked again, the process repeating five times in all.
When she had worked on the magazine, if there was no particular problem, they only checked the proofs a single time. At most they would check a second proof. So when she saw “fifth proof” stamped on the galleys, she was floored. Printing up galleys wasn’t free. So that’s why a dictionary requires an inordinate amount of time and money, she realized.
Paper was piled up all over the place because they were checking galley proofs for a revised edition of the character dictionary Wordmaster. Organizing them was tricky because third, fourth, and fifth proofs were mixed together. She separated them by proof, put the pages in order, and bundled them together. The proofs formed such thick piles that she divided them at arbitrary points and fastened them with clips.
She spent almost her entire first day working like this and succeeded in clearing only the immediate area around her desk. Piles of unorganized Wordmaster proofs still covered the work desk.
She was pleased with her handiwork, however, and having looked at so many proofs she now had a fair idea of the kinds of editorial changes being made. Satisfied, she turned to the cardboard boxes containing her things and opened them. She put her writing things, files, and computer on a desk as far away from Majime’s as possible. Unpacking took far less time than cleaning up. She was the type who couldn’t relax unless everything was in its place; that was partly why she had brought so little with her.
At a little past five thirty, Majime stood and stretched. “Shall we be off?” He looked around, nodding. “It looks a lot better. You even put the reference books in their proper places.”