by Misumi Kubo
Take the road that goes straight from the station, in the opposite direction from the main hospital, and it leads you up a mountain and to a crematorium. Keep going, and you’ll come to a section of road paved in parts seemingly at random, like an asphalt quilt. Follow the road up to the top of the mountain and pass through a short dark dank tunnel, and you come to an estate complex, a group of buildings so old and shabby that their name, New Town, seems pretty ironic. Alongside the complex is a dirty old swamp about the size of a school swimming pool. Some people living in the complex call it a “pond,” while others prefer the term “swamp.” I don’t really have a preference either way. It’s just a big puddle of fetid water, so I figure people can call it whatever they like.
Some of the rainwater that falls on the mountain flows down into the center of the town via the river, and the rest makes its way into the swamp. The water that ends up in the river will someday make it to the sea, but the water that finds its way into the swamp mixes together with the liquid already in that stagnant puddle, whose oily surface gleams in metallic rainbow colors, and probably doesn’t go any farther. Down there with all that water is a whole load of goldfish and turtles that the people living around here couldn’t be bothered to keep, not to mention dead cats and dogs and who knows what else. When the westerly wind blows, it gives off a smell of rotting protein like from a garbage bag, meaning it’s more or less impossible for the people living around here to open their windows during the summer. Growing around the swamp are a few Manchurian ash trees.
A long, long time ago, on a very hot day, someone hanged themselves from the branch of one of the ashes, but, after a while, the branch broke under the weight and the body slipped down into the swamp below without anyone noticing. Three days later, the body suddenly floated to the surface, all bloated and covered with the grunge from the depths, so that it looked as if the body was coated in chocolate. That person was my dad, who had killed himself to escape from his endless battle with debt. People in the complex say that if you walk by the swamp before dawn in midsummer, when Sirius appears in the east, you’re likely to see a mud-drenched figure appear before you, but I come back to my complex from my paper route at dawn every day and I’ve never once seen my dad’s ghost.
When school was over for the day, I went back to my apartment and carried my bike up to the fifth floor. Leave it in the bike rack, and either the saddle or else the whole thing was sure to get stolen. Of course, the building, which dates from sometime around the fifties, way before I was born, doesn’t have any elevators. I made my way around and around the spiral staircase, and when I reached the fifth floor, used a long chain to attach my bike to a water pipe in the hallway. I opened our door, so badly rusted that all the paint was peeling off, and heard the sound of running water in the kitchen. The water gushing out of the tap was splashing off the bowls, cups, and plates in the sink, steadily soaking the clothes of my grandmother, who was standing motionless in front of the tap. Seeing me, she opened her mouth slowly and said, “Welcome home, Yoshio!”
For the record, Yoshio is not my name. Yoshio was the name of my dad, who hanged himself. Yoshi-o, meaning good man. They took one of the two characters, the one meaning good, to create my name: Ryota. Ryo-ta, meaning good and big.
“Hi, Gran.”
My gran was getting very deaf of late, so I had to raise my voice when I spoke to her. I turned off the tap, then guided her by the arm and sat her down by the table in front of the TV, flicking through until I found a kids’ program. My gran looked at me and grinned. I wiped off her wet hands and clothes quickly with a towel, then returned to the kitchen and opened the lid of the rice cooker. All the rice I’d cooked this morning was gone. Even taking into account the rice we’d eaten for breakfast, the rice balls I took to school, and the rice my gran would have eaten for her lunch, there should have been some more left. Still, a fat lot of good it was doing those kinds of calculations now. I’d had the feeling for a long time that there was a rice thief living in this house. I sighed and started rinsing more rice. There was only a little left in the plastic container we kept under the sink. That meant I’d soon have to go to the shopping center across the mountain where they sold it cheap and buy a new bag.
Eyes fixed on the screen, my gran was moving in time to the dance of the big animal characters. As my eyes passed over the kitchen table, they fell on a crumpled envelope with a bank logo on the front and “Takako” scrawled on the back in pencil. I looked inside to see three ten-thousand-yen notes. Takako was my mom’s name, and the thirty thousand yen was, I guess, a message from her, meaning you’ll have to make do with this until the end of the month. It would be at least half an hour before the rice would be ready, so I made some instant ramen and ate it straight from the pan, standing there in the kitchen. Noticing this, my gran stood up and stared at me fixedly.
“Do you want some?” I asked, and she nodded firmly.
At these times, and these times only, my gran seemed to be able to hear the faintest of sounds. I transferred a few noodles and some soup into a small bowl and passed it to her along with some chopsticks. She lowered herself back down in front of the TV, holding the bowl with immense care as if it were an extremely precious object. She picked up the noodles one by one with her chopsticks and ate them slowly and silently.
“Okay, Gran, I’m off to work now,” I said.
She stayed studiously gazing at the period drama that was now on, not even gracing me with a reply.
In the morning I had my paper route and in the evenings my job at the convenience store. In between, I went to school. Throughout the summer I’d worked as a lifeguard at the pool, which had paid a decent hourly wage, but now that vacation was over I was back to early-morning paper deliveries and a night shift at the convenience store every day until 10 p.m. Along with my gran’s pension and the odd few notes my mother occasionally brought over, what I made had to support both my gran and me.
I unlocked my bike and carried it down with me. Chiaki, a little girl from one of the first-floor apartments, was standing barefoot in front of her door. Her left cheek was red and swollen. Like many of the men in these projects, Chiaki’s dad drank heavily from the time he woke and, come evening, started beating his children. In between the kicks and the punches, he’d yell her name at top volume. That was how I knew it.
“Did he hit you?” I asked her, but she didn’t reply. I reached out to pat her head, but before I could get there she shouted, “Don’t touch me, you perv!” From my pocket I took out a piece of the mint-flavored gum I chewed when I needed to stay awake and put it down on the ground by Chiaki’s feet. Her feet were grubby, and she had almost no toenails to speak of. I guessed that she ate them when she was hungry. I’d done the same thing back in the day. I said bye to Chiaki, who was staring fixedly at the gum by her feet, got on my bike, and rode past the swamp and along the road that led down the mountain.
A pickup truck loaded with a jumble of discarded furniture and other garbage came lurching up the narrow mountain road toward me, so I stopped my bike in the parking area outside the crematorium to get out of the way. From there, I looked down at the town spreading out from the station like a scale model—a lot like the model railway town I’d seen on that school trip. Turning my head, I could see the gray housing projects looming up behind the narrow chimney of the crematorium. Project kids—that was what the people from town called us. Poverty, benefits, alcoholism, child abuse, personal bankruptcy, suicide, murders—the sort of events people in the town spoke about with deep frowns on their faces were a fact of life for me. The kids in the projects grew up surrounded by adults with eyes like those of the giant salamanders that lived in the swamp—tiny, dull, barely visible.
“What the hell are your parents doing?”
I stepped into the stockroom of the convenience store to see the manager holding a phone to his ear and looking pissed off. He was sitting on the fake-leather coated swivel chair and glaring in turn at each of the three kids sta
nding in front of him: two boys and one girl of about eight or nine. I felt like I’d seen them somewhere before. In all likelihood, they were project kids.
“It’s dinnertime and no one’s at home in any of your houses! What’s going on here?”
They’re likely off playing pachinko, I thought as I put on my clownishly bright uniform that never got any less embarrassing to wear. The manager flung the phone onto the sofa. Scattered across the table was the assortment of small candies the kids had stolen. As if reading from a script that left him totally cold, the manager intoned:
“This convenience store is not your refrigerator. If there are things you want, things you feel like eating, you have to pay for them. If you take things out of the store without paying for them, that makes you thieves. Didn’t your mothers ever teach you that?”
He reached out to grab the arm of one of the boys, who flinched reflexively. The girl next to him was glaring at the manager with big, moony eyes. The manager stared up at the ceiling and let out an ostentatiously loud sigh.
“Okay. I’ll just have to call your school tomorrow. You go straight on home now, you hear!”
The children walked out without a word, swinging their backpacks, and the manager spun around in his chair to look at me.
“Those project kids are a dead loss,” he said.
“Sorry,” I said quietly.
“It’s no good you apologizing! Truth is, I’m no good at this telling-kids-off business. Or with kids in general.”
Saying this, the manager, who was now slumped back in his chair, glugged thirstily from a plastic bottle of Coke. I watched his big belly wobble as he drank. The buttons on his uniform looked ready to come flying off at any moment. He’d inherited this convenience store from his parents, who’d converted it from an old liquor shop. Although he was still only in his twenties, the hair on the top of his head was already thinning, and his forehead was bathed in sweat, though it wasn’t even that hot. The door opened, and Taoka, the guy in charge of the part-time workers, came in.
“Yo!”
“Oh, Taokaaaa!” the manager groaned in a gross, wheedling sort of voice. “I’m begging you! Will you deal with the shoplifters next time? You were a teacher at a cram school, right? You must be good at that kind of stuff.”
“Oh, no, I’m no good at telling off little kids.”
Taoka hung his biker jacket on a coat hanger in his locker.
“Right, right, it was a university cram school you were at, wasn’t it?”
Just then we heard a voice calling out, “Excuse me! Excuse me! I think the copier’s got stuck!”
“Not again!” the manager said. “When is that damn maintenance man going to come?”
Tsk-tsking, he made his way into the shop.
“You done your homework yet?” Taoka said as he tied up his shoulder-length hair.
“Yep.”
“I’ll take a look during my break if you want. Your midterm tests are coming up, right? We should start preparing.”
With that, he picked up the cleaning stuff and headed out into the shop.
I was fifteen when I first started working at the convenience store, and Taoka was the one who showed me the ropes. He was in his late twenties, and he basically ran the store in place of the manager, who didn’t really have a clue about how to do the job his parents had entrusted him with.
“You almost feel sorry for him when he’s standing next to Taoka,” one of the other part-timers had commented, and it was true. Unlike the manager, who was short, fat, and balding, Taoka was tall and long-legged, and though his way of speaking was hardly what you’d call refined, he was pretty popular among the girls and middle-aged women we worked with.
“It’s those eyes of his that do it,” said one of the college students who worked there part-time. “Kind of icy and sadistic-looking.”
I didn’t really get what she meant.
I discovered soon enough that the job at the store involved way more things to pick up and intricate tasks to master than I’d initially thought and, pathetically enough, I got in a panic over each one. As I was flapping about in front of the cash register, Taoka would come up beside me and say quietly, “Deep breaths, deep breaths,” then help me to bag the stuff. My instinct whenever I ran up against some kind of problem was to keep silent and try to sort it out by myself, but he told me over and over again, “If something goes wrong or you’re not sure about anything, ask for help right away.”
I didn’t really know anything about his life, but I did find it very odd that someone who could clearly do this kind of job with his eyes shut and who, according to the manager, used to work in a cram school that sent lots of kids to top universities, would be working in a dump like this.
Several times, while I’d been sweeping outside, I’d see Taoka running after kids who’d been caught shoplifting and given a telling-off by the manager and were now heading home with their tails between their legs. I watched him hand them bags containing ice cream or candies, crouching down and patting their heads, smiling as he spoke to them. Then he would wave them off and come back. Once he spied me watching him and said, “When they’ve been told off by Daddy, it’s Mommy’s job to make them feel better.” Then he went inside.
I had no idea what he was talking about.
After the first few months, during which I made a ton of mistakes and generally was a big nuisance, I’d gotten to the stage where I could operate the cash register and bag up people’s stuff without keeping them waiting. Once you’d mastered the basics, there wasn’t anything desperately demanding to the job, but the amount of shoplifting that went on did get me down. I recognized most of the kids who got caught—they were project kids.
When I first started working there, a college student named Nakamura took joy in pointing out every little thing I did wrong. And whenever there was an incident of shoplifting, he’d say, “Kids from your part of town, again!”
One time, when I ran to catch a little kid who was trying to make off with something, I slammed hard into a container of steaming oden, and its entire contents, including all its hot broth, spilled onto the floor. The strong fishy smell stuck in the back of my throat so I felt like I might choke, but Nakamura and I set about picking up all the components of the stew and cleaning the sopping-wet floor. As I was kneeling down, tossing lumps of stewed radish, fish sausages, and little knots of seaweed into the garbage can, Nakamura tramped back and forth across the place where most of the hot liquid had collected so that it flew up into my face.
“Just look! My new sneakers are all covered in stew!” he said as he stepped in the patch of liquid time and time again, sending the hot broth flying up into my eyes.
“There were never this many shopliftings before you came. Bet you go around giving tip-offs to all the project kids, don’t you?”
In a second I was up on my feet and flying at him, but before I could land a single punch, I felt a dull pain running down from my left temple. For a moment, the world in front of me swam. As I went in for a second attempt, Taoka came up from behind and grabbed both my arms, saying, “What the hell is going on here?”
“I’ve seen you!” I yelled. “I’ve seen you stealing cigarettes from the stockroom!” My voice was shaking and got stuck in my throat, making me squeak like a little kid. I felt like a total loser.
“What?! That’s enough of your bullshit, poor boy.” Saying this, Nakamura made to high-kick me in the stomach, but from his position behind me, Taoka somehow managed to catch hold of his foot. Standing there on one leg, Nakamura lost his balance, and fell back awkwardly, right into the puddle of oden broth. His head struck the floor with a thump, sending a tofu fritter skittering. “I can’t take this shitty store a minute longer!” he said, tearing off his broth-soaked uniform shirt and throwing it on the floor before storming out.
In the back room, Taoka handed me a wet towel for my face.
“It wasn’t just cigarettes that little shit was nicking,” he said, smiling, then
handed me a bottle of a new kind of juice that had just been delivered, a toxic-looking shade of fuchsia.
“I’m really sorry that the project kids cause so much trouble.”
“You’re always apologizing on their behalf, but it’s not like you’ve any responsibility for them. Last I heard, you weren’t the fricking project ambassador. Or are you?”
Taoka smiled and took a swig of his canned coffee. The side of my head where I’d been punched stung badly.
“Is this yours?”
Holding a piece of paper soaked through with oden broth between his thumb and forefinger, Taoka dangled it in front of my face. It was my English midterm test that we’d been handed back that day. During the scuffle, it must have fallen out of the pocket I’d stuffed it in. Through the folded paper, you could see my mark written in red pen: 17/100. Taoka was holding it out beyond my reach. When I extended my arm to try and take it, my temple throbbed with pain.
“Hold on a sec,” Taoka said. He unfolded the paper with his thumb and index finger, and pinged it into a plastic clipboard lying on the table. He started studying it, his face suddenly turning serious in a way I’d never seen it do before.
“Even leaving aside the longer passage, there are a lot of simple slipups here where you could easily have picked up points. These words and idioms here, you could have got another ten marks just by learning them by heart. You’re making mistakes on words you learned in the second grade. See—here, and here, and here.”
Taoka looked at me with an incredibly sad expression.
“Bring your textbook along on your next shift. I’ll help you during your break.”
“Nah, I hate schoolwork. It’s fine, don’t worry.”
“You can’t say that when you’ve only just entered high school! You’ve still got lots of time until your exams for college.”