Nowadays nobody wanted to live in a lodging house. Like maple leaves leaving a branch, the other lodgers had gradually drifted away, leaving only him. He’d been quick to take advantage of the opportunity, moving books first into the room next door, then the one two doors down. Finally his landlady, Také, had vacated her first-floor room by the stairs to live on the second floor. She was a good-hearted soul and readily accepted the new arrangement. “Those floor-to-ceiling bookshelves of yours are like extra pillars. This way I don’t have to worry about earthquakes.”
The weight of the “pillars” threatened to push the lodging house off its foundation, but neither of them worried about such details. She never raised the rent, and Majime was so absentminded that he went right on paying for the one room without stopping to think that his rent didn’t cover the extra space he had appropriated.
And so he and his books occupied the downstairs, and she had the upstairs to herself.
What if the interior of a room mirrors the interior of its inhabitant? he wondered. That would make him someone who stored up words but couldn’t put them to use, a dry-as-dust bore.
He took out a pack of Nupporo Number One, soy sauce flavor, from the cupboard. A nearby discount shop sold this instant ramen by the case at a bargain price, but it seemed suspiciously fake. The instructions were full of obvious mistakes: “Five hundred liters of water will reach the boiling point.” “You should break noodles after throwing them in.” “Enjoy eggs, green onion, ham, and so forth.” Five hundred liters of water seemed altogether too much, but Majime liked the earnest tone of the instructions, and lately he’d been eating a lot of Nupporo Number One.
With the packet of noodles in hand, he opened the ill-fitting door and headed to the communal kitchen, with Tora padding behind him. With every step, the wooden floor creaked like the hull of a ship.
As he was hunting on the shelf below the sink for Tora’s dried sardines, a voice called from upstairs. “Mitsu, is that you?”
“Yes, I’m back,” he said, turning and looking up.
Také’s face appeared at the top of the stairs. “I made too much for one person. It’s suppertime, so won’t you join me?”
“Thank you. I’d be happy to.”
Instant ramen in one hand and dried sardines in the other, he climbed the stairs, Tora at his heels.
Také’s living room was the first room at the top of the stairs. The next room was her bedroom, and the one next to that she called the guest room. Not that she ever had any guests. The guest room served as storage space.
Both floors had a toilet, but the upstairs was a bit more compact, having no kitchen, bath, or laundry area. Instead, just outside the window there was a clothes-drying platform with a fine view. It might have been called a veranda or a balcony, but it was made of unfinished wood and looked like a slatted drainboard with a railing. There was no more fitting term for it than clothes-drying platform.
“May I come in?” Majime said politely.
He stepped into the room and stopped short. Out on the clothes-drying platform stood a display of silver pampas grass and round white dumplings, the traditional accompaniments for autumn moon viewing. Ah—so tonight was the harvest moon. All the while he’d been struggling to fit in at his new job, the seasons had continued their stately progression.
Tora nibbled some dried sardine from Majime’s hand and meowed at the still-invisible moon. Majime opened the window a crack for him, and he slipped outside.
Také invited Majime to sit down, and he joined her at the little table covered with dishes: steamed spinach, boiled chicken and taro, cucumber salad, and more.
“I’ve got some of these, too,” she said, setting out croquettes she must have picked up at the store. “Young people need to eat.”
She served him miso soup with tofu, then piled a generous mound of rice in his bowl. All the dishes (except the salad, of course) were piping hot. She must have timed her preparations to his arrival and then casually invited him up.
“It looks delicious,” he said gratefully, and for a time occupied himself solely with filling his stomach. She said nothing while he ate. He finished munching the cucumbers and then asked, “Did you feel that I needed cheering up?”
“You do seem pretty glum these days.” She sipped her soup. “Is it your job?”
“I have too many things to decide. I feel like my head’s going to explode.”
“Oh, dear. And your brains are your one strong suit.”
Ouch, he thought, but it was true. Apart from studying and thinking, he really wasn’t good at much else.
“That’s the trouble.” He looked at the plump grains of rice, lit by the overhead light. “Back in the sales department, my job was clearly defined. All I had to do was go around to bookstores. The goal was clear, and I only needed to apply myself, so it was comfortable in a way. Making a dictionary’s not like that. Everybody has to put their heads together to come up with ideas, and all the tasks have to be divided among us.”
“Well, what’s wrong with that?”
“Thinking is no problem, but conveying my thoughts to other people is hard for me. The simple truth is, I just don’t fit in.”
“Mitsu, be honest. When in your life did you ever fit in? You’ve always got your nose in a book, and you’ve never brought a single friend or girlfriend here.”
“I don’t have friends or a girlfriend.”
“Then why let it bother you now all of a sudden, if you don’t fit in?”
Why, indeed.
All his life, he’d been pegged as a weirdo. Both in school and at work, people had kept their distance. Occasionally, out of curiosity or goodwill, someone would speak to him, but his response would be so off the mark that they would disappear with a slight smile. He always thought he was responding honestly and openly, but people never seemed to warm to him.
The pain of such encounters had driven him to the pages of books. No matter how poor he was at communicating with people, with books he could engage in deep, quiet dialogue. There was an added benefit: if he opened one during free time at school, his classmates would leave him alone and not try to strike up a conversation.
Reading did wonders for his grades. He grew interested in words as a means of communicating thoughts and feelings, and majored in linguistics at college. But however knowledgeable about language he became, he was no better at using it to communicate. Sadly, he couldn’t seem to do anything about this, so he’d given up and more or less accepted his lot. Being transferred to the Dictionary Editorial Department had given him hope.
“Mitsu, you want to get along with your colleagues, don’t you?” Také asked. “You want to get along with them and make a great dictionary together.”
Majime looked up in surprise. He did long to communicate, to connect. The maelstrom of emotions he felt boiled down to that desire, he realized. “How did you know?”