The Nakano Thrift Shop

by Hiromi Kawakami

  That was the first time I heard the man’s voice. In the course of chatting with him for fifteen minutes, Mr. Nakano found out that he lived in the next neighborhood over, that his name was Tadokoro, and that he was a sword collector.

  ‘I don’t sell old things here, you know,’ which seemed like a strange thing for Mr. Nakano to say, since the sign outside read THRIFT SHOP.

  ‘I see. But you have some interesting things, don’t you?’ Tadokoro pointed to a corner that displayed plastic Glico toys from the 1930s along with women’s magazines.

  Tadokoro was a bit of a charmer. He had thick stubble on his cheeks, and if he were a little thinner in the face, he might even have resembled a certain French actor whose name I can’t remember. His voice had a slightly shrill quality that put me on edge, yet his manner of speaking was calm and composed.

  A short time after Tadokoro left, Mr. Nakano proclaimed, ‘That guy won’t come by here again for a while.’ Even after such a friendly conversation, I murmured, and Mr. Nakano shook his head. Why not? I asked, but Mr. Nakano didn’t answer. I’m just running out to the bank, he said as he left the shop.

  Just as Mr. Nakano predicted, Tadokoro didn’t make an appearance for about two months. But from that point on, he again started showing up as if he intuited exactly when Mr. Nakano wouldn’t be there. When our eyes met, he would say, ‘Hello,’ and then when he left, he would call out, ‘See you later.’

  There wasn’t much else to say to each other besides that, but whenever Tadokoro was in the shop, the air seemed to grow heavier. We had various regular customers, all of whom came in and went out uttering the same sort of greetings, and yet Tadokoro’s presence was altogether different. Takeo had only met Tadokoro twice.

  ‘What do you think of that customer?’ I asked him.

  Takeo thought about it for a moment and then finally, all he said was, ‘Doesn’t smell too bad.’

  What do you mean, doesn’t smell? When I asked him, Takeo just dropped his gaze and fell silent. While he was watering down the area in front of the shop, I thought about what he meant by smell. I thought maybe I understood, but then again, it was entirely possible that Takeo’s idea of smell and my idea of smell were not at all similar.

  Takeo finished watering and as he was carrying the empty bucket, on his way to the back, I heard him mutter, ‘’Cause only a total idiot like me smells that bad.’ But I really didn’t know what he meant by ‘an idiot like me.’

  The next time Tadokoro showed up, I was reading a book because there was nothing else to do. The air in the store instantly grew dense. After a young couple who bought a crystal vase had left, Tadokoro came up beside the register.

  ‘You’re alone today?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s right,’ I answered cautiously. Even more than usual, the air around Tadokoro seemed to cloak him in heaviness. He talked for a while about the weather and about recent things in the news. It was the longest conversation I had ever had with him.

  ‘Listen, there’s something I want you to buy from me,’ Tadokoro suddenly blurted out.

  Customers often brought items that they wanted to sell directly to the shop, and if they were small, commonplace things, I could name a price and strike a deal. But for tableware or electrical appliances or geeky things like those plastic Glico toys, Mr. Nakano was the only one who could decide the price.

  ‘This here,’ Tadokoro said as he held out a large brown kraft paper envelope.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  He set the envelope next to the register and said, ‘First take a look.’

  Now that I had been told to do so, I knew I wouldn’t be able not to look. With this kind of thing, shouldn’t the shopkeeper be the one . . . I tried to say, but Tadokoro was peering at me as if he were about to nestle up closer to the register. But you haven’t even seen what kind of thing this is yet, have you? he said. Anyhow, take a look first. Okay?

  Reluctantly I reached for the envelope. Inside there was a piece of cardboard the same size as the envelope. The cardboard fit within perfectly, so it was quite difficult to withdraw it. And I was conscious of the fact that Tadokoro was watching me closely, as the movement of my fingers grew more and more clumsy.

  Once I was able to pull it out, I saw that there were two pieces of cardboard stacked together and fastened with tape. Something was sandwiched between them.

  ‘Please open it and have a look,’ Tadokoro urged in his usual calm and composed tone.

  ‘But, it’s taped . . .’

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said. Somehow without my noticing, he now held in his hand a utility knife. He clicked out the blade and deftly slit open the tape that held it together. The utility knife seemed like an extension of his hand. It had been such a graceful gesture. I felt the slightest flutter in my stomach.

  ‘See, look! You ought to learn something from this,’ Tadokoro said enigmatically as he slit open the rest of the taped sides. I wondered whether he would also turn over the piece of cardboard, but he made no further motion. Slowly I reached out and spread open the cardboard pieces to reveal the monochrome photographs within.

  They were of a man and a woman, naked and intertwined.

  ‘What the hell are these?’ This was Mr. Nakano’s initial response.

  ‘Seem like some kind of old photos’ was Takeo’s impression.

  Having been caught by surprise, I was struck dumb, still holding the cardboard, when Tadokoro called to me over his shoulder as he briskly walked out, ‘I’ll be back again. Decide on a price. See you.’

  I had let out a gasp the moment I saw the photographs, and in the same instant I felt as though I were being drawn towards Tadokoro. I had the illusion that his slight frame was billowing outward.

  Once Tadokoro had departed and I took another look, I saw that the composition of the photos was innocuous enough. The man and woman who were acting as models seemed to have a similar kind of air. There were ten photographs. I held each one as I studied it.

  There was one photo in particular that I liked. It was taken in daylight, and the man and woman were clothed, their buttocks the only part of their skin exposed to the camera as they made love. In the background was an alley filled with small bars. Each bar had its shutter closed, with a large plastic bucket set out in front. It was in such a forlorn setting that the man and woman bared their fleshy buttocks and plump thighs.

  ‘Do you like art, Hitomi?’ Mr. Nakano asked, his eyes widening when I pointed to this photograph. In his hand, he held another photo of the man and woman, completely naked, seated in front of a dressing table.

  ‘I think I prefer classic ones like this,’ he said. The woman sat on the man’s lap with her eyes tightly shut, her hair perfectly coiffed.

  ‘The man and woman aren’t too pretty,’ Takeo said, putting the photos back in order and setting them on the table after carefully examining all ten.

  ‘What should we do with them?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ll return them to Tadokoro,’ Mr. Nakano replied.

  ‘You think you could sell them here?’ Takeo asked.

  ‘They don’t really seem finished, do they?’

  The conversation ended there, and Mr. Nakano placed the photographs between the cardboard again and put them back in the envelope, which he set on top of a shelf in the back room.

  For a while, the brown kraft paper envelope on top of the shelf weighed on my mind. It almost pained me to turn my head in that direction. Every time a customer came into the shop, I nervously checked to see if it was Tadokoro. Mr. Nakano had said that he would return the photographs himself, but there the envelope remained, still left up on the shelf. No one even knew Tadokoro’s exact address. In the meantime, the new year arrived.

  Masayo came by the shop on the day after it snowed.

  ‘Such tidy snow shoveling!’ Masayo said in a cheerful voice. Masayo always sounded ch
eerful. When Takeo first started working here, the sound of her voice used to give him a start. He seemed to have grown accustomed to it now, but I was aware that he still kept his distance from her.

  ‘Our dear Takeo is the one who did the shoveling, right?’

  Takeo gave another little start when he heard her refer to him as ‘our dear.’ The previous day it had snowed more than twenty centimeters. Once it had started to accumulate, Takeo had taken care to shovel in front of the shop repeatedly, so that it was clear down to the asphalt. As usual, Mr. Nakano had put out the bench and arranged the goods by the road that now glistened, black and wet.

  ‘I love snow because it isn’t sad,’ Masayo chatted away. She had an unguarded way of speaking. Takeo and I listened to her without saying a word. While she was talking, people began to come in. Despite how much it had snowed, I knew there would be a lot of customers on a day like today. Three people bought space heaters, two more people bought kotatsu heaters, we sold two mattresses—even Masayo was enlisted to help with customers. By evening, when it finally slowed down enough for me to look outside, most of the snow that had been exposed to the sun had melted. There was no longer any distinction between the ground where Takeo had shoveled and where it had simply melted away.

  ‘Shall we get some soba noodles?’ Mr. Nakano suggested. He closed the shop and we all filed into the tatami room in the back. There had been a kotatsu heater there but it had been sold only a little while ago and now, in place of the table with its inbuilt heater, just the kotatsu cover was laid flat on the tatami. Mr. Nakano brought in a largish Japanese-style dining table from the shop and set it on top of the cover.

  ‘Warm us up, huh,’ Takeo said as he sat down on the cover.

  ‘Eating together will warm us right up,’ Masayo remarked, somewhat randomly.

  Mr. Nakano lit a cigarette while he phoned the soba restaurant. Still standing, he was tapping the ashes into a chipped ashtray on top of the shelf.

  Next thing I knew, I heard him shout, Look what I’ve done! I turned and saw Mr. Nakano holding Tadokoro’s brown kraft paper envelope, flapping and waving it around. He must have touched the tip of his cigarette to the envelope. A thin line of smoke had risen, but the shaking had extinguished whatever flame there had been. The edge of the envelope was charred black. Pulling out the cardboard to check, it seemed everything inside was unharmed.

  ‘What is that? An art print or something?’ Masayo asked. Without saying anything Mr. Nakano handed her the cardboard. She opened it and gazed closely at the photographs.

  ‘Are these for sale?’ Masayo asked.

  Mr. Nakano shook his head. ‘They’re terrible, aren’t they?’

  Masayo nodded, somewhat delightedly. ‘My work isn’t quite as bad as these.’

  Takeo and I exchanged glances. It was surprising that Masayo would have such objectivity towards her own artwork. Artists are inscrutable. And Masayo said even more inscrutable things than most.

  ‘Were these photographs taken by Tadokoro, by any chance?’

  What? Mr. Nakano cried out loudly.

  ‘Tadokoro was my homeroom teacher in middle school, you know.’

  Masayo said this quite calmly, and just then there was a rapping sound on the front shutter. Both Takeo and I started with surprise.

  ‘It’s the soba delivery,’ Mr. Nakano mumbled, and headed for the front with a cigarette between his lips. Takeo followed after him, and Masayo and I were left in the back room. Masayo pulled out a cigarette from Mr. Nakano’s pack and, with her elbows propped on the table, lit it. The way Masayo held the cigarette in her mouth was exactly the same as Mr. Nakano.

  ‘Tadokoro looks quite young, but he must be almost seventy by now,’ Masayo explained as she slurped from her bowl of soba noodles topped with tempura.

  Tadokoro had been her homeroom teacher during her third year of middle school. Though today he was still a bit of a charmer, back then—practically forty years ago—he had been ‘movie-star handsome,’ according to Masayo. He wasn’t an especially good teacher, but certain female students swarmed around him, like bees to honey. Among those who were drawn to Tadokoro, one girl in particular stood out—a classmate of Masayo’s named Sumiko Kasuya. Rumor had it that the two of them had even been spending time together at a place that supposedly had a hot spring.

  A place that had a hot spring, meaning what? Takeo asked, and Mr. Nakano replied with a serious look on his face, She means a love hotel.

  The rumors about Sumiko Kasuya and Tadokoro spread far enough that Sumiko dropped out of school and Tadokoro was dismissed. In order to put some distance between her and Tadokoro, Sumiko was sent away to the countryside to live with her grandmother, but she patiently awaited contact from Tadokoro, and a year later they eloped. After that, apparently she and Tadokoro wandered all over Japan together, and once the excitement about their affair died down, they came back to a neighboring district where Tadokoro took over his family’s stationery business.

  ‘That’s pretty daring.’ Mr. Nakano was the first to voice his opinion.

  ‘Weren’t playing around, were they?’ Takeo chimed in next.

  ‘But, how could you tell that they were Tadokoro’s photographs?’ I asked.

  Masayo nibbled at the fried tempura batter that she had peeled off and set aside at first and murmured, You see . . . I like to eat the tempura batter by itself. It soaks up the broth well, and it’s surprisingly delicious. She kept up this chatter as she picked up the fried coating with her chopsticks.

  It seemed that, while he and Sumiko Kasuya were wandering all over the country together, Tadokoro made money by selling his photographs. Even after they eloped, there was no dearth of women for Tadokoro. It was through his connections with such women that he began taking erotic photos, and these sold well on the black market. Still, since he was just an amateur, the local thugs and yakuza were soon after him. Gradually it became too dangerous and he quit selling his pictures but—whether taking those kinds of photographs just suited him or it came naturally—after that he started using Sumiko Kasuya as his model and selling them at a price near cost, only to people he knew.

  ‘The woman in those photos is Sumiko Kasuya,’ Masayo said, gesturing with her chin at the cardboard package on top of the shelf. ‘I have a print of one of these same photos.’

  ‘Which one?’ Mr. Nakano asked.

  ‘The one with the buttocks,’ Masayo answered.

  After that the four of us slurped our bowls of soba noodles without saying anything more. Takeo finished eating first and carried his bowl to the sink, and Mr. Nakano stood up next. I followed Masayo’s lead and scooped up the pieces of tempura batter that were floating in my broth.

  ‘I like the one with the buttocks too,’ I said, and Masayo laughed.

  ‘That cost a pretty penny. But Sumiko was so broke, the least I could do was shell out ten thousand yen.’

  I wouldn’t pay even a thousand yen for all ten of them, Mr. Nakano said breezily as he sat back down after putting his bowl in the sink. Takeo nodded in agreement, a deadpan expression on his face.

  Mr. Nakano and Takeo went into the garage to have a look at the truck, so I washed up the bowls alongside Masayo. While the water was running, I asked about what happened to Sumiko Kasuya afterwards. She died, Masayo answered. Tadokoro was a terrible womanizer, and they had a son who was killed in an accident when he was eighteen, so she ended up having some kind of nervous breakdown. Tadokoro isn’t such a creep. But, Hitomi, don’t let yourself be fooled by a guy like that.

  Masayo scrubbed the bowls vigorously with the sponge. I won’t, I replied. I recalled that heavy feeling that Tadokoro seemed to carry around with him, and it wasn’t quite fear I felt but a shiver went up my spine. Like the shiver one feels before catching a cold.

  When Takeo and I left the shop together, I told him, ‘Masayo says that Sumiko Kasuya is dead.’


  ‘That so?’ he said, rubbing his hands together.

  Tadokoro did not come into the shop for a while, but then he unexpectedly appeared, two days after the next time it snowed.

  ‘I’ve decided not to sell the photographs after all,’ he said.

  I held out the photos sandwiched in cardboard, and as Tadokoro brought his face in closer, he asked, ‘What happened to the envelope?’

  Takeo had just then returned from a pickup and come back into the shop. ‘I’ll run right out to buy a new envelope,’ he said, taking it upon himself.

  Tadokoro swiveled in his direction. ‘You need a rectangular #2 envelope,’ he directed in his calm and composed tone as Takeo dashed off.

  ‘Learn anything? From looking at the photos,’ Tadokoro asked after Takeo had gone, once again drawing closer.

  ‘You used to be a teacher, didn’t you?’

  I might have thought he would be surprised, but Tadokoro only moved in closer, completely unfazed.

  ‘I did that for a spell,’ he said, now so close I could almost feel his breath. The snow that was left in the shade was glittering outside.

  Got a rectangular #2, Takeo said as he returned. Tadokoro, ever calm and composed, moved away and slowly pulled the new envelope out of its cellophane wrapper before carefully sliding the cardboard inside.

  ‘See you,’ he said and left the shop.

  Immediately afterwards, Mr. Nakano came in, muttering, ‘You know what I mean—Takeo, the price was too high today.’ Takeo and I both found ourselves staring at Mr. Nakano’s beard.

  ‘What is it?’ Mr. Nakano asked with a blank look.

  Neither Takeo nor I replied, until a moment later, Takeo said, Didn’t know that envelope was called a rectangular #2.

  ‘Yeah?’ Mr. Nakano asked in response, but Takeo didn’t say anything more. I remained silent, staring at Mr. Nakano’s beard.

  PAPERWEIGHT