“Yes? I’m Majime.”
Whoa. Did the guy pride himself on his seriousness, or what? Araki was taken aback but managed to recover without betraying his shock. He felt his eagerness to recruit this man rapidly melting away. To brazenly declare oneself Majime showed a total lack of majime. Somewhere inside he was making light of the virtue of diligence; he probably had no idea of its true importance. In any case, this was not somebody to whom he could entrust the making of dictionaries.
As Araki stood silently glaring, the young man seemed baffled. He ran a hand through his hair, messing it up still more. Then, apparently hitting on an idea, he pulled out a card case from his shirt pocket. With a slight bow, he held a business card out in both hands. His movements were slow and clumsy.
Araki felt let down, indignant. Didn’t this greenhorn know better than to hand out his card to strangers? Besides, they worked for the same company! Keeping his irritation under wraps, he glanced down at the card in the young man’s hands. The nails at the tips of his long fingers were round edged and neatly trimmed. The business card bore this inscription:
MITSUYA MAJIME
SALES DEPARTMENT
GEMBU BOOKS, INC.
The characters for Majime were not what Araki had assumed them to be. The meaning was not “diligent” but “horse dealer.”
“Mitsuya Majime . . .”
“Yes, that’s right. I am Majime.” He smiled. “You must have gotten the wrong idea from the sound of my name.”
“I beg your pardon.” Hastily, Araki retrieved one of his own business cards from his back pocket. “I’m Araki, from the Dictionary Editorial Department.”
Majime politely studied the business card. Behind the silver frames his eyes were clear and calm. The cut of his shirt was a bit out of fashion. He didn’t seem to pay much attention to his personal appearance, but his skin was taut. He was still young—young enough to have decades ahead of him to devote to dictionaries. Araki felt a twinge of jealousy but did not, of course, let on.
“That’s a very unusual surname. Where are you from?”
“Tokyo, but my parents are from Wakayama. Apparently majime was the word for ‘wholesale dealer’ there.”
“Ah—as in a person who controls horses, supplies them to travelers.” Araki searched his pockets, but unfortunately he hadn’t brought his notebook. He scribbled a note on the back of Majime’s business card.
MAJIME—“WHOLESALE DEALER”
NOT IN WGW OR GFW. MUST CHECK GDJL.
Though not as dedicated as Professor Matsumoto, Araki had a habit of recording unfamiliar words on the spot. Afterward he would check the index cards in the office. If there wasn’t an index card for the word he’d written down, he would track down the source (if possible, the earliest recorded occurrence) and add another card to the growing collection. The office contained a vast number of index cards. In compiling a dictionary, deciding which of the words listed on these cards to include took careful consideration. Electronic data was playing an increasingly prominent role, but the card stacks were the department’s heart and soul. Long before the movement to divide workplaces into smoking and nonsmoking areas, smoking had been strictly forbidden in the room where the card stacks were stored.
The sight of Araki suddenly jotting down a memorandum on the back of his business card seemed not to surprise or upset Majime in the least. “People are always asking me about the origin of my name,” he said, “but nobody’s ever written it down before.” He peered with calm interest at what Araki had written.
That’s right, you’re here to recruit this fellow. Distracted by the man’s unusual family name, for a second Araki had forgotten his purpose in coming. He tucked the card and pen in his breast pocket and cleared his throat. “If someone asked you to define the word migi, ‘right,’ what would you say?”
“‘Right’ as in the direction, or ‘right’ as in politics?”
“The former.”
“Let me think.” He tilted his head pensively, swinging his long hair. “Defining it as ‘the hand used to hold a pen or chopsticks’ would ignore all the left-handed people in the world. ‘The side of the body that doesn’t contain the heart’ wouldn’t work, either, since a few people do have their heart on the right side. Maybe something like this would be the safest: ‘when facing north, the side of the body that is to the east.’”
“Okay. Then how would you explain shima?”
“‘Stripes’ . . . ‘island’ . . . the place name . . . the suffix in words like yokoshima”—evil—“and sakashima”—upside down—“‘conjecture,’ as in the four-character phrase shima okusoku”—conjecture and surmise—“. . . the four devils of Buddhism . . .”
As Majime reeled off possible candidates, Araki hastily cut him short. “Shima as in ‘island.’”
“All right. Something like ‘a body of land surrounded by water’? No, that wouldn’t do. Enoshima is connected by a bridge with the mainland. In which case . . .” Majime muttered to himself with his head still pensively tilted to one side, seemingly oblivious to Araki as he considered the meaning of the word. “Maybe something like ‘a comparatively small body of land surrounded or set off by water.’ But wait, that’s no good, either. It doesn’t include the sense of ‘gangster territory.’ Then how about ‘land set apart from its surroundings’?”
He was the genuine article. Araki looked on with admiration. It had only taken seconds for Majime to work out the underlying meaning of shima. Back when he’d put the same question to Nishioka, the results had been dismal. Nishioka had never considered any possible meaning but “island,” and his answer had been “something sticking up from the sea.” Appalled, Araki had yelled, “Idiot! Then the back of a whale and a drowned man are shima, are they?” Nishioka had looked flustered and then laughed foolishly. “Oops. You’re right. Gee, that’s a tough one. What should I say, then?”
Majime stood, nodding intently to himself, and then swiveled toward the bookcases. “Let me go look it up.”
“Never mind.” Araki grabbed him by the arm. Looking him straight in the eye, he said, “Majime, I want you to give all you’ve got to Daitokai!”
“Daitokai?” said Majime. “Okay.” The next moment he let out a kind of yodel. Everyone turned and stared. Araki was perplexed, but as Majime went on singing it dawned on him. This was the hit song “Daitokai”—“The Big City”—by Crystal King! Sung totally off-key.
Quickly he yanked Majime out into the corridor, midwarble. “No, no, that’s not it. Forget it.”
“No?” Majime broke off, looking disconsolate. “Sorry about that. I’m not really up on the latest songs.”
Where the hell did he get the idea he’d been asked to sing? The fellow’s thought processes were mystifying. Araki decided to tell him what he’d come for.