MITSUYA MAJIME
DIRECTOR, DICTIONARY EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
GEMBU BOOKS, INC.
He was pretty tall, so he was bending down to look at her. The eyes behind his glasses looked sleepy, but they were dark and shining.
Quickly she brought out her card case from her suit pocket—the same case she’d bought when she’d first come to work at Gembu, full of excitement. Hermes Box Calf leather. Inside were her brand-new business cards.
“I’ll be working with you now,” she said. “My name is Midori Kishibe. I look forward to learning a great deal from you.” She had never heard of two people in the same company exchanging business cards.
Mrs. Sasaki introduced herself, without offering a card. “My name is Sasaki. I work mostly in the reference room next door.”
Relieved, Kishibe put her card case away while she greeted Mrs. Sasaki. This proved that the director had indeed acted bizarrely. There was no need to exchange business cards with your new boss.
No one else was in the office. She thought the others must have stepped out, but no, it seemed it would just be the three of them: Majime, Sasaki, and Kishibe.
“Besides us,” Majime said cheerfully, “Professor Matsumoto serves as editor-in-chief, and Kohei Araki is a consultant.”
With a staff of two, his title of director didn’t amount to much, Kishibe thought, and yet here he was smiling away. She felt inclined to mock the apparently unambitious man, and simultaneously her eagerness to work here, scant as it had been, shriveled up. They were working on some big project, she’d been told, but now she felt as if she’d been exiled to a remote outpost.
Did I screw up somehow? Is this my punishment? Familiar thoughts returned, and her spirits flagged.
Since being hired at Gembu, Kishibe had spent three years on the editorial staff of the glamorous fashion magazine Belle. Many publishing companies put out fashion magazines targeting women in their twenties, and Belle ranked among those with the most robust sales. The staff lived up to its reputation as one of the leading departments in the company.
An avid reader of Belle since college, Kishibe had been excited to be assigned there and had done her best to fit in. She followed the example of her snazzy colleagues and kept up with the latest fashions, taking care to dress as well as she could within her limits; you couldn’t really judge how good an item of clothing was until you wore it and lived with it. Even after the page proofs were done and she went home exhausted, she never skipped her skin care regimen. Before interviews, she read boring celebrity autobiographies cover to cover. She’d worked hard at her job without losing her drive—even after her college boyfriend dumped her, saying, “You’re the type who can make her way alone.”
So why had she been transferred to this godforsaken corner of the universe—the furthest conceivable place from interviews with Hollywood stars and behind-the-scenes wrangling among top models? What was she supposed to do in a department as far removed from her old one as the Crab Nebula was from Earth? What could she do? She felt lost.
Unaware of her state of mind, Majime and Mrs. Sasaki were chatting breezily.
“Just now I was having a bad dream,” said Mrs. Sasaki.
“That reminds me,” Majime said. “I dreamed that when the second proofs came back I found some characters that weren’t seiji.”
“Oh, no! That’s awful, even in a dream.”
“A nightmare.”
Seiji? She wasn’t sure what the word meant. She sensed their brisk chatter was from another world. Hesitantly, she spoke up. “Um, what should I do?”
“Find your own work to do,” her old boss used to say, but fashion magazines and dictionaries were worlds apart. Until they showed her the ropes, she’d be of no use here.
“Just take it easy,” said Majime.
She felt let down, as if they didn’t want her, but apparently he hadn’t said this to be mean.
“We’re planning a welcome party for you,” he added earnestly. “Your mission for today is to have your stomach and liver in good working order by six this evening, that’s all.”
“Your things are over there,” said Mrs. Sasaki, pointing to a corner where several cardboard boxes were neatly stacked. “Take whatever desk suits your fancy. If we need help, we’ll let you know.” With that, she left the room.
She must have gone back to the reference room, or whatever they called it. Maybe, seeing that the director wouldn’t be good at welcoming a new employee on his own, Mrs. Sasaki had kept an eye out for her arrival so she could step in and help. Her manner was a little brusque, but she seemed nice enough.
Whatever desk suited her fancy? She looked around the room, at a loss. Every desk was piled high with books and papers.
Majime had already returned to his seat. His desktop was covered with a particularly huge amount of paper—galley proofs? Even his computer huddled uneasily beneath a pile of papers, sticking out like a visor. The floor all around his desk was piled high with stacks of books so tall that when he sat down he was nearly hidden. His desk looked like a fortress or the cave of some hibernating animal.
Kishibe peered at Majime between the books in his stronghold. Tied to the seat of his chair, she noticed, was a worn floral-patterned cushion. She hesitated over how to address him. Since it would be only the two of them in this room, “Director” seemed a bit awkward.
“Mr. Majime?”
“Yes.” He looked up from the book in front of him, which was filled with hieroglyphics like those carved in ancient Egyptian temples. Surely he was just looking at them, not reading them? She faltered a bit, unable now to bring herself to ask which desk to use.
Majime, his head still raised, waited patiently for her next words.
“What does seiji mean?”
On the spur of the moment she changed her question, and instantly regretted it. This was probably some jargon connected with dictionaries. Majime seemed a bit eccentric; he might be the type to blow up. You don’t know a simple thing like that? What kind of ignoramus did they send me?
Even though she was feeling scared, he answered in the same mild tone. “Basically, it means a proper character, one based on the Kangxi Dictionary.”
She still didn’t understand, and what on earth was the Kangxi Dictionary? She’d never heard of it. Apparently sensing her distress, Majime laid the book in his lap, pulled a piece of paper from the nearest pile, and started scribbling on the back.
“For example, if you type sorou on the keyboard and press the language conversion key, the computer will generally come up with this character. But if you look at actual printed materials, the word is almost always written this way. It gets changed to the proper form in the proofreading stage. The second one is the proper form, and the first one is an informal variant.”