Chapter Text
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There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable .
C.S. Lewis
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She arrives twenty minutes early and therefore spends ten minutes glancing over the books that have been arranged in the lobby’s monthly Staff Recommendations display, drawing down the ones whose cover art attracts her and hearing the polyester film of their dust jackets crackle when she opens them to read their final pages: then a pink watch on her right wrist tells her it is 9:50 — Mitsuri takes care to check this watch’s face four times, slow and conspicuous, letting other patrons know she is the sort of person with appointments to keep — so she leaves Convenience Store Woman to its anticipated admirers and goes upstairs.
From a pegboard behind the reference desk she retrieves a key, affixed to a plastic tab showing a number written in permanent marker, and rather than a signature she draws a tiny smiling maneki-neko along the topmost line of a registration sheet. She also takes a tube of citrus-scented disinfecting wipes from one of the desk’s lower drawers.
Their room is located at the library’s back corner, beyond a section of the stacks the Nippon Decimal Classification System dedicates to dance and theater. Up until two weeks ago the Weekend Warrior Writers’ Support Group had gathered around a table in the reading room, at which point some meanie lodged an anonymous complaint about how loudly one of the group’s members talked while the town’s respectable taxpaying citizenry was trying to peruse its newspapers. He can’t help it, Mitsuri had said, it’s because of the high ceiling and the hardwood floors, a declaration she promptly followed by fountaining into a burst of tears right there in the office of poor gentle-faced Mrs. Ubuyashiki as the Mount Fujikasane Public Library’s interim director. She had passed Mitsuri about fifty tissues from a ceramic box painted by one of her children.
Meanie, Mitsuri thinks again now. Meanie, killjoy, sadsack, egoist. The complaint probably came from that old man who frets over the Tokyo Stock Exchange reports and whose little hobgoblin of a grandson ties people’s shoelaces together when he crawls beneath their desks.
She hopes he reincarnates as a mosquito.
But anyway, here they are, installed in Study Room Number 3. Among the library’s communal gathering rooms it is exceptional mostly for being soundproof with a connected television display and is thus scheduled for use by one other group on Saturdays in the time slot a half-hour following theirs. The room’s sunshine-hot plate glass window gives visitors a view out onto the parking lot, with its wisteria vines that in the springtime froth like purple spindrift over a listing chain-link fence, and on the room’s wall is a framed watercolor painting from some local art gallery. Its canvas depicts a vase of flowers done in shades of blue, although these flowers otherwise appear to be spider lilies.
She turns a last corner to discover two men waiting at the other end of the book stacks. One has shoulder-length hair as brightly colored and razzed as the bristles on an old paintbrush, standing squarely with his hands behind his back, but Rengoku rockets an arm up to wave as soon as he spots her; Iguro sits on the carpeted floor beside him, a slender slinky figure in a pinstripe buttoned shirt and black slacks despite the late July heat. He wears a paper surgical mask Mitsuri has yet to see him remove and lifts this lacunose face to her as she approaches.
She jogs the last ten steps in a cyclone of backpack, bracelets, earrings, skirt and pigtail braids, despite counter-attempts to keep everything tucked in place. This attire is complemented by a pair of chewed-up white tennis shoes because she must pump her bicycle four kilometers uphill to the town library six days a week and an indeterminate number of additional kilometers up, down, or sideways along the steep switchback roads every other week while transporting books for their new Homebound Delivery Program.
“Here I am, here I am.” Mitsuri fumbles to turn the key in its lock. “Sorry. I thought I was early.”
Rengoku reaches an arm past her to hold open the door. “You are! We’re just earlier. We wanted to be here first so we could welcome our fearless leader into her new sanctuary for the literary arts.”
Mitsuri heaves down her bag onto the room’s blondewood table. Kyojuro Rengoku was discharged from the Japan Self-Defense Forces a year ago holding the rank of First Lieutenant but the hearing aids curled like fiddlehead ferns around the backs of his ears are a more recent acquisition.
“Ah! Okay — what’s that funny thing Americans say, about being early?” Mitsuri twists a finger into her necklace. Its pendant is a piece of rose quartz shaped like a heart. “‘The early bird gets the cheese’?”
“Close enough.” Iguro assumes his usual place to Mitsuri’s immediate right and swings her chair out from the table as an offering. He never sits to her left or with his back to the door. “‘The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse keeps the cheese.’”
“Right! Now I remember.” Mitsuri does not remember. What an odd piece of wisdom to dispense. She supposes Americans must really love their dairy, or else they would not have those other phrases about being the big cheese and crying over spilled milk. “I guess I’d make a pretty good worm, then! My motto could be ‘Sleep late.’”
Rengoku smiles. Iguro nods while unbuckling a black messenger bag and Mitsuri thumps down in her seat to stare vacantly at herself for a moment. She dreamed once while back in middle school of walking out the front door — this was a week after the boy she had a swooning crush on learned what Mitsuri told somebody about him; he has pretty eyebrows, she giggled to a friend, and his breath always smells like peppermint — and having Mom give her a bento box filled with slips of paper; written onto each paper was the exact right thing to say, at the exact right time to say it, or else the advice to say nothing at all. If Mitsuri owned a magical daruma doll she thinks she would ask it for a box just like this one but wonders if she would be strong enough to resist the temptation of simply wishing for a tasty lunch instead, or maybe a button that could transport her to the location of the nearest kitten no matter where she was in the world.
No, wait. Maybe the magic would get messed up like in those old stories and send her into the tiger enclosure at Asahiyama Zoo: so it is a choice between the papers or the lunch, and for the time being Mitsuri decides she would want the papers.
I’d make a pretty good worm, she repeats to herself. Gosh. Whenever she had enough money she would hire a telepath to follow her around and preemptively bonk her in the head with a squeaky hammer.
Her laptop, plastered so thickly in stickers it looks like a misdirected package at the post office, whooshes to life. She opens three different word processing documents between twenty-five and eighty pages long, alongside a saved portable document file that is five pages’ worth of instructions. The others arrive one by one until it is 10:15, at which point Mitsuri’s pink watch gives its signaling chirp-chirp for them to begin.
The Weekend Warrior Writers’ Support Group has nine members and the size of their new room has also been taken into consideration during its selection by Mrs. Ubuyashiki. Rengoku writes historical fiction in spiral-bound notebooks about samurai or police detectives, depending on what documentary he is most interested in for the month. A man with painted quince-green fingernails and unorthodox domestic habits named Uzui is a freelance fashion columnist while Tomioka writes stage plays; Tomioka has a face like a Noh mask, solemnly composed yet capable of expressing a great deal if viewed under the correct slant of light. Upon first seeing him approach her in the library lobby Mitsuri presumed Sanemi Shinazugawa was going to draw a switchblade on her, or bite her, and the manuscripts he edits for Whirlwind Publishing House often do end up covered with so much red ink they appear to have been flensed like animal carcasses.
Himejima occupies an entire end of the table by himself and spends their sessions listening through his headphones to a narration of whatever chapter he has previously composed at home using a dictation software called Sunlight Assistant 5.0 — Mitsuri has almost grown accustomed to his way of weeping over his own rough draft compositions — and which he is using to prepare a work for middle-grade readers about Buddhism and happiness called A Box With a Hole at the Bottom. When Tokito first ambled over to their table two months ago Mitsuri presumed the kid was lost, right up to the second he unscrolled his map of the fantasy archipelago he and his twin brother have crafted together in every last detail from its principal characters to its crop rotation practices. He planned the map’s geographic shapes by splatting scoops of cooked mochi rice onto a piece of sack paper and tracing the clumps it fell in. The group’s only other female member is a girl named Shinobu Kocho, whose older sister Kanae works with Mitsuri in the children's department and makes all her own dresses; Shinobu is a year Mitsuri’s junior and compiling preliminary research notes for a book-length nonfiction medical narrative she intends to eventually make her doctoral thesis. Its working title is Hemlock, Arsenic, Mercury and Spiked Fruit Punch: A Worldwide History of Poisonings from Socrates to the People’s Temple Cult.
Mitsuri is not sure what Iguro writes. She figures she would be better-capable of understanding it if his solicitous explanations — three attempts, presently — had not prevented her from doing so. She knows he is querying agents with his first novel, classified as general fiction; she knows he has published several short stories in literary magazines including Gunzō; she has even started reading one of them, called “Interior Walls,” although Mitsuri has not disclosed this to Iguro because she realized about two-thirds of the way through the story that it was going to have a sad ending and she has not, as of yet, been able to finish it. Iguro has told her his favorite authors are Shusaku Endo and Yukio Mishima, about whom Mitsuri knows little saving the fact that the latter committed seppuku in 1970 and the former was a follower of the foreign god who bade his followers to eat his flesh and drink his blood that they might have true life within themselves.
As for Mitsuri, well. Nobody in the group knows what Mitsuri writes, and she is exceedingly proud of how skillfully she has ribbon-danced through their inquiries by saying she writes funny stories, or modern stories, or within all kinds of genres because she cannot pick just one. She told Iguro her favorite author was Banana Yoshimoto when truthfully it is Yoshitoki Oima, even if manga probably does not count.
What she writes, in fact, is romance novels, or that is her general aim. In order for something to be considered a novel it probably needs a beginning, a middle, and an end: so Mitsuri stares at her blinking cursor on the blank latest page of a file she has saved as DRAFT NUMBER ???, moving back and forth occasionally between this and the document of instructions:
‘WINDS OF LOVE’ NOVEL WRITING CONTEST
Pink Clover Press announces the opening of its 2023 competition exclusive to unpublished authors. Novels must be no less than one hundred thousand characters in length and may be written within any subgenre of romance meant for an adolescent or adult audience. First prize ¥138000 and debut novel publication with an anticipated 2026 release.
Works are due no later than 2023 December 31 by 11:59 PM. Cost of entry ¥27000 per participant. Please read below for eligibility, formatting, content and submission details.
She has chosen a historical fantasy setting. The heroine is a beautiful swordswoman in the Taisho Era, sworn to defend the innocent from an underworld of wicked monsters using her courageous heart and her enchanted katana. The hero is the swordswoman’s fearless, kind-hearted, tall and handsome comrade-in-arms — the instant the heroine meets him it is a change like an earthquake, a flash like lightning — while the supporting characters are still no more than bunraku puppets, incapable of anything but whatever next motion Mitsuri forces them to with excessive deliberate manipulation.
She has excellent models for the villains, at least. She even knows what they look like.
So, awaiting a stroke of insight from the heavens, Mitsuri rests a chin on her hand as she listens to the tick-ticking of laptop keys and the scratch-scritching of pens or pencils.
She looks around with shy, stealing glances at everybody to see what they are doing when they are unconscious of doing it, and at such times she feels herself to be placed amidst a luminous richness of secret treasures. It is the same feeling she gets when she is riding a train through the Seikan Tunnel to visit her family in Azabu and glances back through the car to see its passengers, all of them being carried safe together through the deep waters of the sea, or when she is reading a book aloud for storytime hour in the children’s department and pauses while showing an illustrated page to observe its effect upon the little faces lifted like dandelions in their sparkling anticipation, because here are these people with their eyebrows and ears and noses and names and their other wonderful, personal people-intricacies, and these people are here with her in this place at this time that comes once, and passes, and never comes again.
And Mitsuri thinks of another wish she would ask from that theoretical magic doll, presuming it was not the tricky kind likely to send her into a tiger cage on a technicality:
I wish I knew the Right Rules for being friends with other people. I wish I was better at Being Myself, which is silly because there is nobody else for the job, or Being Myself at maybe a seventy-five percent capacity. That would be just about right.
What kind of a romance writer has never even had a boyfriend, anyway? Maybe that will be what the contest judges ask themselves when they read her work. What does this girl know about love?
Her watch beeps again to signal the hour. Mitsuri reaches into her backpack for a bundle of keys, whereupon there hangs a crocheted pink-and-green cat she made using some scrap yarn. He is the writing group’s mascot and she waves him to signal the time for a rest between their focused forty-five minute sprints.
“Break time, everybody,” she announces. “Is there anything someone wants to talk about?”
Shinazugawa clicks his red pen to retract the point and flings it violently onto the table. Himejima catches this pen like the piece in a child’s scatter-jacks game and passes it back without comment; Shinazugawa accepts it.
“I quit, man,” Shinazugawa says. The scar across his nose flushes when he is angry; this outburst is usual for him and an integral part of his nine-step revision process. “I quit. They’re all so fucking stupid. Who writes shit like this and expects people to read it?”
Rengoku sticks his mechanical pencil above the elastic he uses to tie back his hair. “Everything needs to be written badly at first. That’s how anything gets written at all.”
“At first? Sure. Fine. But second, third, fourth and fifth? Hell no. What the fuck ever happened to learning from constructive criticism?”
“Destructive criticism,” says Iguro softly, so that nobody else seems to hear it. Mitsuri’s hands come up quick to disguise her snort of laughter as a muffled sneeze.
“That’s the world we live in today, my friend. Once MSCHF put out those red rubber Astro Boy boots back in February there was no saving us as a species,” Uzui says, a bit too enthusiastically.
Tokito extracts a pack of grape-flavored Hi-Chews from his bag and proffers them forward, casting a cheeky eye towards a sign taped to the door that reads No Food and Drink Allowed as he smacks the fruit candy around his mouth. He and his brother live with a relative who is linked to their deceased father by some tertiary degree of kinship but is referred to as Uncle Michikatsu. “Does anybody want one?”
“Oh, Tokito, that’s so sweet of you — and remember what Kanae asked you about using foul language in the library, Shinazugawa.” Shinazugawa clicks his pen six times in agitated succession while Shinobu thumbs out two candies from the pack; she presents the first to Tomioka on the flat of her palm, which is as shallow-cupped and little as a petal, after removing the candy’s wax wrapper with her teeth. “Tomioka? Isn’t there something you want to share, too?”
Tomioka blinks. His awareness surfaces towards their conversation as if from the bottom of a mountain lake and he tilts down the screen on his laptop to address them over it.
“There’s construction work happening on Route 452,” he says. “Expect delays.”
Mitsuri has tried a few times to put up her hair using a style imitative of Shinobu’s, with an ornate pin not quite so big as that glittery silk butterfly, but Shinobu’s hair is thick and dutiful while Mitsuri’s is flyaway-stranded and disobedient. She has also practiced Shinobu’s elegantly repressed expressions in a mirror — the exasperated frisson that runs through her face at hearing Tomioka’s remark is almost invisible — but she has not been able to imitate these, either.
Shinobu rolls the second candy into her mouth.
“The high school first-years are performing one of Tomioka’s plays at the end of the fall trimester.” Shinobu produces a casting call flyer from among her papers to slap it into Tomioka’s hand. “Showing a little excitement won’t hurt you too much, will it?”
Mitsuri claps her hands. “Congratulations, Tomioka! What’s the show about?”
Tomioka looks from Mitsuri to Shinobu to the rest of them and finally to the casting call, the title upon which is A River That Runs to the Sea. He lays a finger over the list of available roles.
“There’s a typo here.”
Shinobu hauls him up by an arm and without further comment steers him out the door. It produces a visual akin to watching a single sparrow manage to mob a hawk-eagle, given the difference in their sizes; Mitsuri keeps a hand over her mouth to cover a smile. Everybody watches the door shut behind them and Iguro makes a noise that sounds oddly like a wrathful scoff.
“That weirdo,” Shinazugawa says. “Probably thinks we won’t understand the themes or some pretentious crap like that.”
Himejima sits with his arms folded over his oven-broad chest. There is always a pause before he speaks that is like the silence before the toll of a standing bell. “No — he’s a bad talker.”
“He wouldn’t be if he didn’t always act like he was at a funeral,” Uzui says. He waves a hand at Tokito. “Hey, kid, toss me one of those.”
Tokito unwraps another candy and chucks it; Uzui catches it from the air in his mouth, prompting Rengoku to invite the same action, although the attempt whops him between the eyes. He asks to try again.
They drop from here into several individual discussions. Mitsuri listens with her eyes turned back down on her screen. Maybe you only call them shows if they have music and dancing, she considers, tapping her nose. Maybe it was rude to ask a playwright about the story in his work, as if it were something commonplace like a streaming service miniseries or a movie, or maybe expecting a play to be about one thing or another in the first place was unbearably passé. This foreign word is one Mitsuri added to her lexicon while taking an asynchronous creative writing course last semester.
You say things well enough but there is no substance to your expression, the online instructor with his steel-framed glasses had typed as a comment on her final. This insistence on tying up your endings so tidy and happy each time — it is simply ‘passé.’
You are a writer but life has not yet cut you deeply enough to make you an artist.
“Are you still stuck?”
Mitsuri gasps as though Iguro has jammed a taser into her side. He is leaned over in his chair, bringing his face marginally closer to her ear so he can speak softly, but at this hysteric startle he snaps backwards. Even sitting, he is notably shorter than she is.
“Sorry.” Mitsuri thumps a hand between her breasts to stop the clobbering of her heart and looks to see if the hem of her dress has gotten caught. “Stuck in what?”
“Your story.” He points. “Last week you said you couldn’t finish a scene. Did you decide what happens next?”
“Me?” She notes where her hand is placed and withdraws it. In high school there had been a rumor about how Mitsuri Kanroji’s boobs were fake — you look like a sow; only a pig or a pervert would date you — and she adopted the practice of wearing a sports bra layered over her regular one, or two sports bras at once, but today the weather was so hot. “No, not yet. It’s like — you know when you fall asleep on your arm, then you wake up in the middle of the night and it’s all numb and heavy? Then you go, ‘Ahhh! Is there a stranger here? Wait, that’s supposed to be my arm! Why can’t I make it move? Move, arm, move!’” Mitsuri grips her left arm in her right hand to give it a demonstrative floppy wriggle. She pauses. “Right?”
“Yes,” Iguro says, instantly.
“Yeah! And it’s like — that. You know?” She moves her hands as if they are wearing sock puppets. “Like — the story’s there, somewhere, but I can’t make my brain talk to it.”
Iguro gives another of his philosophic nods. A mortified blush flashes over her throat and up to her cheeks.
Mitsuri knows his health concerns and preferences are none of her business but sometimes, sometimes she hopes he will lower his mask while they are speaking together. It is so difficult to tell what he is thinking, behind it, and it inspires in her the same babbling runaway nerviness she is seized by whenever she is having an important conversation on the telephone. The chapter scene in question has an action sequence and the heroine must make a choice — to save her true love, or the helpless villagers? — but now, somehow, the question does not seem very interesting. Nothing Mitsuri writes seems interesting, really.
Iguro lowers his head to examine the delicate long-knuckled hands he rests in his lap. There is always an atmosphere of grand, stern repose he carries about himself, like the lucid darkness of the evening air just after a winter sunset, and although his short story with its sad, sad ending has sat on Mitsuri's bedside table unfinished for a month its first two-thirds are full of phrases emblazoned by her pink highlight marker, ecstatic notes racing along the margins in her green glitter pen.
“Try changing something,” he says.
Mitsuri stares past him at the background on his laptop. It is a picture of the pet albino rat snake he keeps in a terrarium whose interior is decorated to replicate the grounds of Edo Castle.
“Like what?”
His narrow-boned shoulders lift in a deferential shrug. “A detail. Something important you planned at the beginning.” It is nice of him to talk as if she plans anything, as opposed to being someone who does not even cook using measuring spoons because her father says seasonings should come from the heart. Mitsuri decides she will not tell Iguro this. “Change it and see if you like what happens to everything else.”
“Sure. That makes a lot of sense,” she says, settling into the revelation that she has made a clown of herself in front of him twice in the same day. “Thanks so much!”
Iguro passes another moment without speaking, looking at her. He was the second person after Rengoku to respond when she pinned up her announcement on the library's bulletin board, explaining the writing group's formation, and below it she had tacked an identical announcement in braille script on a piece of cardstock at Kanae's suggestion: a time for structure and focus with friends — there will be no critique or workshopping — positive vibes only please! — email questions or expression of interest to [email protected]. At first Mitsuri thought Iguro was wearing funky contact lenses but has since verified by closer inspection that those are indeed the true colors of his eyes, the amber and the jade.
Their corners crinkle slightly above his mask.
“You’re welcome.”
Shinobu and Tomioka return carrying a sheaf of casting calls printed from the library’s pay-per-sheet copying machine. The typo has been erased with white correction fluid and written over with a pen. Members of the group take them in varying attitudes of enthusiasm, though Rengoku will most likely duplicate his to make a hundred more so he might scatter them from the rooftop of his house — he lives with his father and younger brother — and stir up the neighborhood’s collective curiosity like a convert distributing pamphlets. Mitsuri’s wristwatch summons them once more to their duties and it is quiet again, at least outside her head.
It is always pretty noisy in there.
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