“It was built right after the war, so it’s over sixty years old now.”
A door that had been there that long ended up being removed by him, who’d only been around five or six years. How ironic. He apologized silently to the door, wrapped it carefully in packing material, and laid it in the storage room. Without the door, you could see right into the office from the corridor, but nobody seemed to mind. Everybody but him was absorbed in the work of revision, and only dictionary staff used the annex corridor anyway.
For days afterward, Nishioka’s back ached. Sneezing took courage. To stand up and sit down, he had to place both hands flat on the desk, regulate his breathing, and talk himself through it: Here we go, you can do it, easy does it.
Majime seemed concerned. One morning when Nishioka came in early, he found the cushion Majime always used fastened to his chair seat. A small tube of ointment lay on his desk with a get-well note attached: “Feel better.”
“It’s not hemorrhoids!” He picked up the tube and threw it on Majime’s desk, then thought better of it. Majime had made the gesture as an expression of sympathy, after all, and besides, you never knew—he might need hemorrhoid ointment someday. He retrieved the tube and stuck it in a drawer.
When Majime came to work a bit later, he was carrying a new cushion with a floral pattern. “My landlady sewed it for me.”
Jeez, you might have given me the new one! Nishioka thought, but Majime looked so pleased at the sight of him sitting on the hand-me-down cushion that he just thanked him and let it go.
Progress on The Great Passage was held up by the work they had to do on Gembu Student’s Dictionary of Japanese. Even so, sample pages came back from the printer, and Professor Matsumoto, Majime, and Araki spent a good deal of time brooding over them.
Sample pages were printed using finished layouts, of which there were still precious few. Even though the number of samples was necessarily limited, seeing entries arranged on pages as they would be printed and bound gave the dictionary makers a useful preview. Were the size, font, and spacing of characters adequate? Was the placement of figures and illustrations pleasing to the eye? Were numbers and symbols easy to make out? The sample pages were invaluable aids to making the dictionary more readable and enhancing its functionality and appearance.
The three men hovered around the samples, frowning with concentration, yet somehow buoyant. No doubt it gave them a thrill to see The Great Passage taking concrete shape at last, even to this minuscule extent.
“Doesn’t using white numbers in a circle against a black background make the numbers harder to read?” the professor wondered aloud.
“What’s this lame sketch of a toadstool doing by the mushroom entry?” asked Araki.
“Oh, I drew that,” said Majime. “The actual illustration wasn’t ready, and I thought we should have something to fill the space.”
“You didn’t have to go and make them print it up like this.”
“That’s supposed to be a mushroom?” said Professor Matsumoto. “I thought it was a strawberry.”
“Come on. It’s right there next to the word ‘mushroom’! Don’t gang up on me.”
Nishioka again felt out of the loop. It would be years before The Great Passage was complete. Worse, there was no telling when the company might put up another roadblock. The project might end up falling by the wayside after all. Either way, whether it got finished or went up in smoke, he wouldn’t be around when it happened. He wouldn’t share in either the joy or the pain. Even though he’d been here from the start, before Majime ever came along.
The source of the bitter emotions that rose in him unceasingly like water pouring out of a hot spring was all too clear: jealousy. Compared to Majime, he didn’t give a damn about the dictionary, but he couldn’t shake off his resentment. He couldn’t get over the feeling that he’d gotten off track at work. He felt a swell of panic.
All he had to do was pull his weight in the advertising department—a place where Majime would never succeed, not even if he did handstands and turned somersaults. But Nishioka would do fine. He had faith in his ability to work equally well wherever he was put. Let them send him to advertising. He’d find a way to put a feather in his cap.
But actually, advertising interested him about as much as dictionaries. How could he find something to get excited about? Something he could commit to, no holds barred. He had no idea. People like Professor Matsumoto, Araki, and Majime were alien to him. His friends in school had all shied away from getting deeply involved in anything, and Nishioka thought it was bad form to show too much enthusiasm. His father had been a company worker, but whether he’d liked his job or hated it, Nishioka never knew. He’d just done it because it was his job. He did it for the sake of his family, for the sake of the company, for the sake of earning a salary and making a living. All perfectly natural.
These people so entranced by dictionaries were outside the bounds of Nishioka’s understanding. He couldn’t even be sure they thought of their work as work. They spent huge sums of their own money on materials, ignoring the limitations of their salaries. Sometimes they stayed in the office looking up things and never even realized they had missed the last train home. They seemed filled with a mad fever. And yet you couldn’t really say they loved dictionaries, either—not given the way they studied and analyzed them with such stunning concentration. There was something almost vindictive in their obsession, as if they were going after an enemy, getting the goods on him. How could they be so wrapped up in making dictionaries? He found their obsession mysterious, with even a whiff of bad taste. And yet—if only Nishioka had something that meant as much to him as dictionaries did to Majime and the rest. Then surely he would see everything differently. He would see a world of such dazzling brightness it would hurt.
Next to him, Majime had various types of dictionaries spread open on his desk. He’d brought in a magnifying glass from somewhere and was using it to make minute comparisons of numbers and symbols, his hair flying every which way as usual. Nishioka almost reached out and gave him a whack on the back of his head.
“Well, I’m off to the university.” He sprang up and felt a bolt of pain shoot up his back.
Seemingly oblivious to Nishioka’s muffled groan, Majime kept looking through his magnifying glass. “Goody,” he said absentmindedly. “See you tomorrow.”
Goody? What the heck was that supposed to be? Goody?