RECTANGULAR #2

You know what I mean? Mr. Nakano had a habit of saying this.
I was caught off guard when he said abruptly, ‘You know what I mean—pass me that soy sauce pourer.’

The three of us had gone for an early lunch. Mr. Nakano ordered the gingered pork set lunch, Takeo the simmered fish of the day, and I went for the curry rice. The gingered pork and the simmered fish came right away. Mr. Nakano and Takeo each drew a set of disposable chopsticks from the box on the table, snapped them apart, and began eating. Takeo muttered under his breath, ‘Excuse me,’ but Mr. Nakano just started bolting down his lunch without a word.

My curry rice arrived eventually, and the moment I picked up my spoon was when Mr. Nakano spoke up with his ‘You know what I mean . . . ’

‘When you say, “You know what I mean,” isn’t it, well, out of place?’ I asked.

Mr. Nakano set down his bowl on the table. ‘Did I say, “You know what I mean”?’

‘You did,’ Takeo affirmed in a murmur from just beside him.

‘You know what I mean—I don’t say that.’

‘You just said it again.’

‘Ah.’

Mr. Nakano scratched his head in an exaggerated gesture.

‘It must be a verbal tic.’

‘It’s a strange one.’

I passed the soy sauce pourer to Mr. Nakano, who doused his two pieces of pickled daikon with it and then munched away on them.

‘I guess it’s part of a conversation that I have inside my own head.’

He went on, For example, in my mind I think: if A happens, then B, so that must mean C, and it follows with D. But when I start speaking, I just say D, so then ‘You know what I mean’ comes out unintentionally.

‘That what happens?’ Takeo asked as he poured the broth from his fish over his leftover rice.

Takeo and I were working in Mr. Nakano’s store. For the past twenty-five years or so, Mr. Nakano had been running his thrift shop in a western suburb of Tokyo that was full of students. Apparently, his first job was at a mid-sized food company, but he quickly lost interest in working for a corporation so he quit. This was around the time when the phrase ‘corporate dropout’ was gaining traction but, he said, he would need to have worked at the company longer in order to be considered a ‘dropout.’

In any case, he explained to me in his slight drawl as he tended the store, I hated it and quit my job—I was humiliated at the time.

‘These are not antiques. They’re second-hand goods. That’s what I sell here,’ Mr. Nakano had stated plainly during my interview.

Pasted in the window of Mr. Nakano’s store was a notice written in sloppy calligraphy: PART-TIME HELP WANTED, INTERVIEWS NOW. Although the sign said that they were interviewing now, when I went inside to inquire, the shopkeeper told me, ‘Interviews start on the first of September at two in the afternoon. Punctuality is of the essence.’ With his beard and knitted hat, the trim shopkeeper made an odd impression. That had been my first encounter with Mr. Nakano.

With its second-hand goods (not antiques), Mr. Nakano’s shop was literally filled to overflowing. From Japanese-style dining tables to old electric fans, from air conditioners to tableware, the shop was crammed with the kind of items found in a typical household from the 1960s and later. In the mornings, Mr. Nakano would raise the shop’s shutter and, with a cigarette between his lips, he’d arrange the goods intended to tempt customers outside the front of the store. Bowls and plates that had any kind of fancy pattern, arty task lamps, onyx-like paperweights shaped like turtles or rabbits, old-school typewriters and the like—these were all attractively displayed on a wooden bench set outside. Sometimes ashes from his cigarette fell on the turtle paperweight’s back, and Mr. Nakano roughly brushed them off with a corner of the black apron that he always wore.

Mr. Nakano stayed at the shop until the early part of the afternoon, and from then on I usually tended the store by myself. In the afternoons, Takeo and Mr. Nakano went out on pickups.

Pickups were exactly what they sound like—they would go to clients’ homes to pick up goods that they had acquired to sell. The most common situation was when the head of a family had passed away and the household belongings were being disposed of. Mr. Nakano’s shop collected everything in bulk—be they items not regarded as mementos or keepsakes, or entire wardrobes. For the price of anything from a meager few thousand to at most ten thousand yen, he acquired enough goods to fill his small truck. Clients usually called for a pickup because they figured that it was better to set aside the items they thought were worth something and get rid of the rest, rather than having to pay for it to be hauled away as oversized garbage. Most of them accepted the token amount without complaint and were happy to see Mr. Nakano drive away with his truckload, but once in a while things got awkward when the client grumbled about the offer being too low, or so I heard from Takeo.

Takeo was hired to help with pickups only a short time before I started working there. When it seemed like a light load, Takeo would go out on a pickup by himself.

‘What to do about the price?’ Takeo asked with a hint of anxiety, the first time Mr. Nakano ordered him to go out alone.

‘You know what I mean—whatever you think is appropriate. You see how I do it, don’t you, the way I decide how much to offer.’

Whether or not he had watched how Mr. Nakano came up with his offers, at that time Takeo had only been working there part-time for a little more than three months. Mr. Nakano seemed to me like the kind of person who said wild and random things, but when I saw what a surprisingly brisk business the shop seemed to be doing, I wondered if maybe it was because he simply inhabited this very recklessness. In any case, Takeo appeared quite nervous when he left, but by the time he returned he was back to his normal self.

‘Was no big deal,’ he said casually. Takeo said he had offered 3,500 yen for the pickup, to which Mr. Nakano nodded repeatedly; however when he actually looked at the haul, his eyes grew wide.

‘Takeo, you know, that was a steal. This is exactly the kind of thing that’s scary about amateurs,’ Mr. Nakano said, laughing about it.

The haul included a jar that must have been worth 35,000 yen. At least that’s what Takeo told me. Mr. Nakano’s shop didn’t deal with those kinds of things, so he had sold the jar at an antique market that was held on the grounds of a local shrine. The girl Takeo was dating at the time had tagged along with him to the stall at the market, under the pretext of helping out. Apparently, once the girlfriend saw that such a dirty-looking jar could fetch a price like that, she had pressured Takeo incessantly—why not get into the second-hand business professionally himself? That way he would be able to leave home and get his own place. Whether or not it was because of that, Takeo broke up with the girl soon after.

 

It was unusual for the three of us—Mr. Nakano, Takeo, and me—to eat together. Most of the time, Mr. Nakano was running around buying things at markets or auctions, or else meeting with people, and Takeo went straight home after he finished with pickups; he never hung around. The three of us had gathered together that day because we were going to see an exhibition by Mr. Nakano’s older sister at a gallery.

Masayo was single and in her mid-fifties. Long ago the Nakano family had been one of the original landowners in this part of the city, and although their fortune was already considerably in decline by the time of Mr. Nakano’s parents’ generation, apparently there was still enough left for Masayo to be able to live off the income from rented houses. ‘Because she’s an artist, you know.’ There were times when Mr. Nakano said things to make fun of his sister, but he certainly had nothing against her work as an artist. Masayo’s one-woman show was being held at a tea shop called Posy that was by the train station and had a small gallery on the second floor. This time it was an exhibit of her doll creations.

I had heard about her previous exhibit, which had been held shortly before I was hired, a show of ‘various wood-dyed items.’ She had gathered leaves in a small forest that still stood on the edge of town, and had utilized these materials for dyeing fabric—Masayo used the word ‘chic’ to describe the colors this produced, but according to Takeo, shaking his head in puzzlement as he thought back on the exhibit, the colors reminded him of those found in the toilet. From the ceiling of the gallery, Masayo had hung the branches from which she had plucked the leaves for her creations, and they had fluttered in suspension. Perhaps because of the dangling branches and dyed pieces of cloth, the space felt like a labyrinth, and with every step, the fabric seemed to envelop your head and arms and hold you in place—that had been Mr. Nakano’s account.

This time, the dolls featured in the exhibit were not hung from the ceiling, but instead appropriately arranged on tables lining the space, and placed under title cards such as DRAGONFLY AT NIGHT or STANDING IN THE GARDEN. Takeo made a quick and absent-minded pass through the exhibit, while Mr. Nakano looked around, carefully picking up and turning over every doll. Daylight streamed through the window, and Masayo’s cheeks were flushed in the heated room.

Mr. Nakano bought the highest priced doll there, and I bought a small cat from among the dolls that were heaped in a basket by the reception desk. Masayo waved goodbye from the top of the stairs, and the three of us went out onto the street.

‘I’m going to the bank,’ Mr. Nakano said as he disappeared behind the automatic door of the bank in front of us.

‘As usual,’ Takeo said, thrusting both hands into the pockets of his baggy trousers and starting to walk.

That day Takeo was supposed to go on a pickup all the way out in Hachioji. Mr. Nakano referred to the clients in Hachioji as ‘the spinster sisters’—two elderly sisters who telephoned almost every day to complain about how no sooner had their eldest brother passed away than relatives upon whom they had never before set eyes started showing up, one after another, each of them trying to steal away the artworks or rare books or other such things that their brother had collected. ‘Yes, well . . . Yes, this is a terrible loss,’ Mr. Nakano politely responded each time. He never once tried to cut short their phone calls.

‘That’s how it goes in this business,’ Mr. Nakano had said with a wink, after spending more than thirty minutes listening to them complain. Despite the fact that he seemed to pay such close attention to the spinster sisters’ grievances, he made no attempt to go out to the old ladies’ home for the pickup.

‘All right for me to go alone?’ Takeo asked, and Mr. Nakano stroked his beard as he replied, ‘You know what I mean—make sure your offer is at the lower end. The old ladies might be flabbergasted if the bid is too high, and if it’s too low, well, then too.’

We reached the shop and opened the shutter, and while I was trying to arrange the goods on the bench like Mr. Nakano always did in a way to lure customers, Takeo maneuvered the two-ton truck out from the garage at the back. See you later, I called out, and Takeo revved the engine as he waved with his right hand. He was missing the part from the top knuckle to the tip of his little finger on his right hand. That was the hand that he waved to me with.

Apparently, during his interview with Takeo, Mr. Nakano had asked, ‘Does that mean you’re one of them?’ He was referring to the yakuza practice of finger shortening.

After Takeo had been working at the store for a little while, he said to Mr. Nakano, ‘Be pretty dangerous, wouldn’t it, if I really were one of them.’

Mr. Nakano laughed, ‘When you work in this business, you tend to get a sense what kind of person you’re dealing with.’

Takeo’s finger got caught in an iron door: that’s how he lost it. A classmate had slammed his finger in the door; it seems he had bullied Takeo for all three years of high school, saying that the sight of Takeo ‘made him want to puke.’ Takeo dropped out of high school six months before graduation. Because, he said, ever since the incident with the iron door, he felt like ‘his life was in serious danger.’ Neither his teachers nor his parents seemed to pay any attention. They pretended that Takeo dropping out was his own lifestyle choice or the result of a fundamental lack of self-discipline. Even so, Takeo claimed, ‘Dropping out of school was lucky for me.’ Meanwhile, he heard that the guy who had made him feel that his life was endangered had gone on to a private university and last year had got a job right away with a corporation.

‘Aren’t you angry?’ I asked, but a look crept across Takeo’s face—one corner of his mouth sort of curled up—as he replied, ‘What difference does it make for me to be angry?’

‘What difference?’ I repeated, and Takeo chuckled to himself.

‘Hitomi, you don’t understand,’ he replied. ‘You like books, you have a complex mind. Me, I’m just simple.’ That was how he put it.

‘I’m simple too,’ I said, and Takeo laughed again.

‘In that case, you must be really simple then,’ he said.

The tip of my little finger is smooth, Takeo explained. The doctor at the hospital told me I didn’t have a predisposition for keloids, so it would be a perfectly clean scar.

After I watched Takeo drive away in the truck, I sat in the chair by the register and read a paperback. Over the course of an hour, three customers came in; one of them bought a pair of old glasses. I wondered why anyone wanted to buy glasses that weren’t the right prescription, but it turned out that old glasses were a sleeper bestseller at Mr. Nakano’s shop.

‘People buy things exactly because they’re of no use,’ Mr. Nakano liked to say. Is that how it is? I said.

‘Hitomi, do you like useful things?’ Mr. Nakano asked with a grin.

‘Yes, I do,’ I answered, and Mr. Nakano snorted, before suddenly breaking into an odd little melody. ‘Useful plates, useful shelves, useful men . . .’ He surprised me.

 

There was a lull after the customer who bought the old glasses left. Mr. Nakano had yet to return from the bank. Seems like he’s got a woman, Takeo had let slip sometime recently. When he says he’s at the bank, I bet that usually means he’s with a woman.

A few years before, Mr. Nakano had got married for the third time. With his first wife, he had a son who was a university student; with his second wife, he had a daughter who was in elementary school; and with his third wife, he had a six-month-old son. And now, he had yet another woman?

‘Hitomi, do you have a boyfriend?’ Mr. Nakano had asked me. He hadn’t seemed particularly curious about it. He had asked while he was standing by the register, drinking coffee, the same way he might comment on the weather. He pronounced ‘boyfriend’ in the kind of monotone that was current nowadays.

‘I had one for a bit, but I don’t have one now,’ I answered, and Mr. Nakano just nodded and said, I see. No further questions about what the guy had been like, or when we broke up, or anything else.

‘How did you and your current wife meet?’ I asked in reply.

‘It’s a secret,’ he answered.

‘Saying it’s a secret will only make me keep asking, won’t it?’ I went on.

Mr. Nakano just looked me straight in the face.

‘Why are you staring at me like that?’ I asked.

In a serene voice, Mr. Nakano replied, ‘Hitomi, there’s no need for such banalities.’

He was right—I wasn’t particularly curious about how Mr. Nakano’s romance with his wife began. The shopkeeper was inscrutable. Probably what makes women like him, Takeo whispered furtively in my ear later.

Mr. Nakano wasn’t back from the bank, Takeo had gone to Hachioji, there were no customers. With nothing else to do, I went back to reading my paperback.

Lately, there was a man who came in when I was tending the store on my own. He looked like he was about the same age as Mr. Nakano or a little older. I had thought it was a coincidence that he always seemed to show up when I was alone, but apparently not. If he saw that Mr. Nakano was there, he darted out of the shop. When Mr. Nakano disappeared from sight, he rushed back inside.

That guy, does he come here a lot? Mr. Nakano asked one day, to which I nodded. The next day, Mr. Nakano had spent the whole afternoon rummaging around in the back storeroom. The man came by late in the day and was hovering about, between the front door and where I was sitting at the register; Mr. Nakano was steadily observing him from the storeroom. Just as the man approached the register, Mr. Nakano sprang forward with a beaming smile and struck up a conversation with him.

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 cheerful. 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.