by Shion Miura
The darkness of night around Kagurazaka always had a kind of moist radiance.
Making her way down a cobblestone lane, Kishibe led Miyamoto to Back of the Moon and slid open the lattice door. From behind the counter Kaguya called out a welcome. She seemed to be making an effort to exude warmth, but her smooth cheeks barely moved as she spoke. Though she could wield a knife with amazing dexterity, she was clumsy at such ordinary things.
Miyamoto looked around with apparent interest at the restaurant’s interior, a remodeled traditional house. Kaguya seated them at the counter and handed them towelettes. The young man who worked for her was home with a cold, she said.
Perhaps because it was still early, they were the only customers. They had an appetizer of monkfish liver with ponzu sauce garnished with grated radish and red pepper. Before eating, they clinked glasses of cold beer. When they tried the monkfish liver, it melted in their mouths.
Kaguya continued working behind the counter, scowling with concentration. She served them a selection of sashimi, prepared with evident attention to temperature and thickness, followed by dishes such as deep-fried tofu stuffed with fermented soybeans and lightly oven toasted. The timing of the presentation was excellent.
“This is really good,” said Miyamoto, eating with gusto. “Nice place. I have deep-fried tofu and natto at home, but it never comes out crisp and delicious like this.”
Finishing her beer and switching to distilled shochu, Kishibe agreed. Kaguya bowed her head slightly, shyly pleased. Again tonight she was cool, like a female version of actor Ken Takakura.
“I came here once before, for the welcome party the department gave me.” She glanced at Kaguya, but as Kaguya gave no sign of wanting her to keep it secret, she went on. “Kaguya here is married to Mr. Majime.”
Miyamoto choked on his drink and quickly wiped his mouth with the towelette. He looked back and forth at the two women, and seemed to grasp that Kishibe was not pulling his leg. “He’s married! That’s a surprise.”
He seemed less surprised that Majime’s wife was Kaguya than that the man had a wife at all.
“Tell me, how did you two, uh . . .?” Before he had finished saying the words, he apparently decided it was an ill-mannered question and let it dangle, unfinished.
Kaguya, unconcerned, answered, “We lived in the same building.”
Kishibe was feeling elated. The paper for The Great Passage had been selected, and she was here having dinner with Miyamoto. The alcohol was taking effect a little more rapidly than usual; her cheeks were already warm and flushed. She decided to take advantage of the opportunity to sound out Kaguya a little more.
“What attracted you to him?” This sounded vaguely rude, so she hastened to add, “I’m sure there were lots of things . . .”
“It was his total commitment to the dictionary.” Kaguya kept a watchful eye on the grilling chicken as she replied. She swiftly took it off the fire and served it with yuzukosho, a fermented condiment made from chili peppers, citrus peel, and salt. The chicken skin was crisp and savory, the meat juicy, dissolving on the tongue like a precious fruit.
They exclaimed in delight and had her refill their glasses.
Smiling, Kaguya said, “The customer’s appreciation of food doesn’t require fancy words. All anyone needs to say is, ‘It’s good.’ That and the look on someone’s face is all the reward a chef needs. But we do need words when we’re in training.”
Kishibe had never heard Kaguya be so talkative. She rested her chopsticks and listened.
“I started learning to cook when I was in my teens, but only after meeting Majime did the importance of words strike me. He says that memories are words. A fragrance or a flavor or a sound can summon up an old memory, but what’s really happening is that a memory that had been slumbering and nebulous becomes accessible in words.”
Washing up as she spoke, Kaguya went on. “So the question for a chef is, when you eat something delicious, how do you capture the flavor in words? That’s an important ability for a chef to have. Watching my husband’s fascination with dictionaries made me realize that.”
The Majime who wrote that off-the-wall love letter was now a husband who gave his wife advice on her job and whispered sweet words of love in her ear? Struck by this unexpected thought, Kishibe asked, “Is he very talkative at home?”
“No, he’s quiet and always has his nose in a book.”
Just as she had thought.
Beside her, Miyamoto nodded thoughtfully. “I think I understand what you were saying just now. I work for a company that makes paper, and verbalizing a color or texture to the person in charge of development is a huge challenge. But talking it over, coming to a shared understanding, and then seeing exactly the kind of paper I’d visualized come into being is a great source of pleasure. Nothing beats it.”
Words were necessary for creation. Kishibe imagined the primordial ocean that covered the surface of the earth long ago—a soupy, swirling liquid in a state of chaos. Inside every person there was a similar ocean. Only when that ocean was struck by the lightning of words could all come into being. Love, the human heart . . . Words gave things form so they could rise out of the dark sea.
“How do you like working in the Dictionary Editorial Department?” Unusually for her, Kaguya posed a question.
Kishibe smiled. “At first I felt lost, but I really enjoy the work now. I find it rewarding.” When she had first transferred there, she never dreamed the day would come when she could say those words with such warmth.
Two more groups of customers came in, so from then on Kaguya had her hands full. Even so, timing it just right, she ended their meal with hot green tea poured over cooked white rice with savory toppings, followed by a jellied dessert, followed finally by dishes of homemade vanilla ice cream. Miyamoto and Kishibe ate it all, chatting with pleasure.
“What’s it like working with Mr. Majime?” In deference to Kaguya, Miyamoto asked this in a low voice. “He seems a little inaccessible, perhaps? A bit eccentric, I think.”
“Well, let’s see,” Kishibe said, sensing that he wasn’t looking to gossip but sincerely wanted to know. “For one thing, we’re having it out now about man and woman.” Seeing his look of surprise, she said hastily, “I mean, the words ‘man’ and ‘woman.’”
He nodded. “When I was in junior high school, I remember looking up ‘woman’ in the dictionary.”
“Whatever for?”
“Well, you know—kids that age have all sorts of ideas.” He sounded embarrassed and apologetic. “All it said was, ‘The sex that is not male.’ What a disappointment!”
“That’s just it!” she said excitedly. “When you look up ‘man’ in Wide Garden of Words, it says, ‘one of the human sexes; the one not female.’ Then if you look up ‘woman,’ it says, ‘one of the human sexes; the one with childbearing organs.’ For ‘man,’ Great Forest of Words has ‘the sex possessing the organs and physiology for the purpose of impregnating a woman,’ and for ‘woman’ it has ‘the sex with the organs and physiology for the purpose of childbearing.’
Catching her dissatisfaction, Miyamoto fell to thinking. “Are you saying the definition should include transgendered people?”
“I’m saying that explaining human gender as a male-female dichotomy is a bit dated, even from the standpoint of physiology, isn’t it? Dictionaries often do define a word by putting it in opposition to another one and saying, ‘Not this.’ But with ‘left’ and ‘right,’ they come up with some ingenious definitions.”
“Like what?”
“Look it up sometime.”
Kishibe finished her ice cream and sipped a cup of hot tea. “Maybe there’s no way around it, but I don’t think either men or women appreciate being defined in terms of pregnancy. There are such people as hermaphrodites, and I just think there should be a little more leeway in the definition. Something like, ‘The gender that is not male. Also, those who so identify themselves.’ But Mr. Majime is hesitant. He told me that wou
ld be precipitous.”
“He said that, ‘precipitous’? Not your everyday word.” Miyamoto was momentarily distracted. “But you’re absolutely right. If only for the sake of all the junior high school boys and girls looking up words with high expectations, a freer, more in-depth definition is better.”
“An excess of caution makes dictionaries a bit conservative.” Kishibe sighed. “Sometimes it seems like we’re dealing with a stubborn old man.”
“Who, Majime?” Miyamoto teased.
“No, the dictionary!”
He laughed. “Stubbornness makes a dictionary reliable and also gives it a certain charm. Working on a dictionary for the first time taught me that.”
Dinner was over, but they didn’t feel like calling it a night, so they went to a nearby bar. This time Miyamoto paid.
Afterward they went out to the street to hail a taxi, and Miyamoto said, “Miss Kishibe, may I have your number and e-mail address?”
She happily took out her phone, and they exchanged numbers by infrared data communication. They looked like two grown adults playing with radio-controlled model cars, she thought. They had never so much as held hands, but their phones were practically kissing. This struck her as funny, and she giggled. She might have been a bit drunk. Miyamoto laughed, too.
He hailed a taxi for her and waved goodnight. She waved back. The taxi sped off, leaving him there in the street.
The cell phone in her hand vibrated to inform her of incoming mail.
Subject: Thanks for dinner
Message: I had a great time. I’ll do all I can to help bring The Great Passage to completion. Would you have dinner with me again sometime?
She quickly texted him back and then looked out the taxi window at the night scenery. As always, words flew invisibly to and fro through the air.
Happiness made her break into a smile. The driver might think she was batty. She lightly bit the inside of her cheek and tried hard to maintain her composure.
CHAPTER 5
Lately, Miss Kishibe was noticeably more enthusiastic about her work. This thought came to Majime as, out of the corner of his eye, he watched her talking to someone on the telephone. Despite suffering from the fall pollen, she was speaking cheerfully and politely into the receiver. The bottom half of her face was covered by a white hay-fever mask, but her skin and hair were lustrous and beautiful.
Uh-oh, better watch it. Did thoughts like these constitute sexual harassment? He dropped his eyes back on the fourth-proof galleys spread out on his desk, while his ears went on following Miss Kishibe’s voice. It wasn’t that he was attracted to her. It was that the person she was talking to was insufferable.
The Dictionary Editorial Department received all sorts of calls from dictionary users. They had found an error, or they wanted to know why such-and-such a word wasn’t included, or something else along those lines. In order to keep on producing better and better dictionaries, the office paid careful attention to user opinions and kept them on file.
Yet some callers were a pain. Like the one Miss Kishibe was talking to right now—Mr. Particle, they called him. When the seasons changed—in the spring and fall—he called almost daily. Whether he was talking to someone or reading the newspaper, usage of grammatical particles seemed to bother him—particularly usage of the particle e, one of the most common in the Japanese language. If you obsessed over a thing like that, interesting examples popped up everywhere. Every time a new one came to his attention, Mr. Particle would call to inquire exactly which shade of meaning was intended, with reference to the explanations in Gembu Student’s Dictionary of Japanese. “How do I know?” would have seemed a choice reply, but Miss Kishibe never failed to respond patiently. Since she’d started going out with Miyamoto, she seemed to take her work more seriously than ever before.
“Well,” she was saying now, “in the phrase tsuki he mukau roketto”—a rocket heading toward the moon—“the particle he is clearly directional, so it would correspond to the first sense. Pardon? What about Jikka e tsuitara, haha ni okorareta?” (When I got home, I was scolded by my mother.) “Well, let’s see.” She paused. “That would be number four, expressing imminence.”
She sounded positive, but Majime wasn’t so sure. An example of usage expressing imminence would be more like this: Jikka ni tsuita tokoro he, takkyubin ga kita (Just as I got home, the package arrived). The caller’s example fit rather with number two, indicating resolution of an action or effect.
The caller deserved to know the correct answer. Majime started to get up, but just then Professor Matsumoto returned from the restroom. Glancing quickly around, he seemed to grasp the situation and motioned to Majime to sit back down.
“Let Miss Kishibe handle it.”
“But she’s giving him the wrong answer.”
“Our friend is satisfied as long as someone here joins him in thinking about particle usage. If you took over the phone and gave him a different answer, you’d only confuse him more.”
Majime lowered himself back onto his chair cushion. Professor Matsumoto sat down beside him and resumed work on the fourth proof. Stealing a glance at the professor’s profile, Majime became worried. The professor’s color wasn’t good, and he had lost weight. Since he’d always been thin as a rail, the difference was slight, but there it was.
“Aren’t you getting tired, sir?” He glanced at his watch. Past six already. The professor had been in the office all day and had hardly eaten any lunch. “What do you say we call it a day and go grab a bite to eat?”
At that, the professor laid down his red pencil and looked up. “Thank you,” he said. “But aren’t you going to work on the galley proofs any more today?”
“It’s all right.” He did intend to work late and take the last train home, as a matter of fact, but in any case, they had to eat. He picked up his suit coat from the back of the chair and felt the pocket to make sure his wallet was inside. “What kind of food are you in the mood for?” he asked, helping the professor gather up his things.
Slowly the professor put his pencils and eraser away in a well-worn leather pen case. “I spent all day sitting down, so I’m not very hungry. How about soba noodles?”
“Fine with me. Let’s go.”
Majime carried the professor’s briefcase and informed the part-timers that they were going out to eat. They left to a chorus of see-you-laters. Kishibe, still on the phone, nodded and waved. Mr. Particle’s curiosity was apparently still not sated.
The professor slowly descended the poorly lit staircase.
Damn, he’s old. Following close behind the professor, Majime was struck by this thought. But of course he was old. He’d been an old man when they first met, fifteen years ago. How old would that make him now?
Majime was anxious to bring The Great Passage to completion. Perhaps because they were so close now, he was feeling intense impatience. If we don’t hurry, it’ll be too late. He dismissed the thought. Too late for what? Mustn’t be morbid.
As always, the professor’s briefcase was heavy, stuffed with papers and books. If he could lug it to the office every day, he had to be in pretty good health, Majime told himself. Yet in the old days, the professor would definitely have suggested dinner at Seven Treasures Garden. Perhaps, knowing that Majime would be heading back to the office afterward, he had deliberately chosen a quick, light meal. Or perhaps he wasn’t feeling quite himself.
As if he could sense Majime’s probing gaze on his back, the professor paused on the landing to catch his breath and said with a deprecatory laugh, “Age will tell. Lately the least bit of walking gets me out of breath.”
“Shall we send out for dinner?”
“Oh, no. I’ll be going home after this, and I wouldn’t want to get in the way of people hard at work. I could use some fresh air, anyway.” He started down the next flight of stairs. “This summer was so hot, I feel lethargic. But now that the temperature’s cooled off, I’m sure I’ll bounce back.”
They left the building and hea
ded for the Jimbocho intersection. The professor was right; there wasn’t a trace of summer in the evening breeze. Night came on earlier now.
In the noodle joint, several men in suits, probably company workers, were swiftly fortifying themselves. The owner knew Majime and the professor and led them to seats with a clear view of the television. She even turned up the volume, out of consideration for the professor. During meals he never was without his file cards, and always kept an ear cocked to the flow of words emanating from the television.
They both knew the shop’s menu by heart and didn’t have to look at it.
“Will you have a glass of something?” Majime asked.
“No, not today.”
Maybe he was feeling ill after all. Ordinarily he enjoyed a large carafe of hot sake.
“I already had drinks with dinner at home this week.”
He justified his abstention in this way, but now Majime’s worry turned to fear.
Majime ordered “stamina udon,” a bowl of noodles and vegetables in hot broth topped with toasted rice cake. The professor ordered a plate of tororo soba, buckwheat noodles topped with creamy grated yam.
After ordering, the professor turned to Majime. “What a fine man you’ve grown into. I certainly appreciate all the trouble you take on my behalf.”
I was an adult when we first met, Majime thought, until he remembered, That’s right, I couldn’t even pour his beer properly. When he had first transferred to the Dictionary Editorial Department, he hadn’t known how to proceed with work or get along with his coworkers. He’d felt as if he’d been blindfolded and sent to grope his way through a labyrinth.
And now all aspects of The Great Passage were under his command. He issued instructions to over fifty college students working on the dictionary part time and finessed almost daily meetings with the advertising and sales staff while busily correcting proofs. He had shown young Miss Kishibe the ropes, as if he were a past master at dictionary editing.