Where the Wild Ladies Are

by Matsuda Aoko

  At some point, I realise that dusk is falling. Even on a cloudy day like today, the setting sun is a proper vivid red. On the other side of the sliding window, I keep on moving my brush in silence.

  A New Recruit

  The zashiki warashi is a much loved member of the Japanese yōkai canon. A young girl-spirit with a pudding-bowl haircut, she usually takes up residence in zashiki – tatami-matted guest rooms. Although she has a reputation for being somewhat mischievous, she is also said to bring good luck to anyone who sees her, and to bestow fortune on the house she resides in.

  I made my way through the entrance hall to find a lobby with a sofa and a cloakroom that appeared unattended. To my immediate left was a staircase leading up to the first floor, but instead I continued walking down the long corridor that stretched straight ahead. The carpet with its throng of woven flowers and birds was slightly faded, but I could tell that it must’ve once been magnificent. From behind a dark partition, I could hear the sounds of ongoing construction work. People who seemed to be hotel employees emerged from the large banquet room and disappeared behind another door. The whole place was rather dingy.

  Just as I was thinking how all of this was rather different to what I had imagined, I came across the shopping arcade. Unfolding on either side of me was a row of small shops: exclusive boutiques catering to smart, wealthy ladies; a shoeshine place with a stylish sign; a shop selling a famous brand of cosmetic blotting paper; and then, at the very end of the corridor, a reception desk for an outdoor pool.

  As I drew closer to the glass wall, decorated with colourful pictures of palm trees and such, I could see a young woman in a bikini facing this way, addressing a staff member at the counter. His colleague next to him looked away, bored. Near the counter, opposite another pane of glass which separated the indoor pool from the outdoor one, a man in shorts and a short-sleeved linen shirt was watching their interaction. I guessed he must be the woman’s father.

  Perhaps sensing eyes on her, the girl turned around to look at me, then twisted her bare leg in discomfort. I found it rather funny that, though we were only separated by a sheet of glass, there she was in a bikini while I was in my suit. I averted my eyes immediately. This year, as for many years now, I have had no contact whatsoever with swimming pools – or with the sea, for that matter.

  At the very end of the passage was a door that appeared to lead through to the annexe but knowing that renovations were underway in that section of the building, I turned around without opening it. After retracing my steps, wondering what was going to become of all these shops as I did so, I found myself again at the entrance through which I’d come in.

  I didn’t understand. Could this really be the hotel whose planned refurbishment was causing such an outcry? Although I didn’t dislike it in its existing form, from what I’d seen of it thus far there was nothing exceptional about it that needed to be preserved, and the decision to renovate it seemed totally reasonable. I couldn’t see any sign of the section that everyone had been talking about.

  At a loss, I walked over to the cloakroom and there, among the leaflets displayed in a row along the counter, I found one whose cover photograph was the very spot I was looking for. I picked it up, then headed down the corridor again until I ran into a male employee coming out of the banquet room.

  ‘Excuse me. How do I get here?’ I said, indicating the cover of the leaflet. The man nodded and said, ‘Ah, that’s the new wing you want. We’re in the main building at the moment. The lighting’s very similar, so they’re easily confused. You’ll find the lobby for the new wing on the fourth floor.’

  ‘The fourth floor?’ I said in surprise.

  The man kindly showed me to the lifts, before bowing and moving off. Seamlessly taking over from him, an elderly gentleman standing in front of the lift smiled and opened the doors for me.

  Inside the lift, my eyes were drawn towards the large flowers woven across that small square of carpet, but I couldn’t identify them. The feeling that I was trampling them made me somewhat uneasy, so I deliberately looked up. Was this how Tom Thumb had felt, I wondered, or the inch-high samurai?

  The lift reached the fourth floor in no time, and as I walked out through the open doors to my right I saw the lobby whose pictures I’d seen several times online and in magazines. It made sense instantly. Just a glimpse was enough to see why people would be mourning its disappearance.

  On my way to the hotel, I’d walked past Toranomon Hospital and ascended the hill, then come in through the first entrance I’d seen, but I realised now that I’d used the entrance reserved for banquet guests. Had I only continued further up the hill and come in through the main entrance, I’d have encountered this main lobby straight away.

  Right by the entrance was a long reception counter behind which the desk staff and the concierge stood, and beside it a rather stylish newspaper rack. To its side, behind a centrally positioned arrangement of large rocks and ikebana, was a luxuriously spacious salon. Around each of the round low tables, amply spaced out across the brown and beige latticed carpet, a cluster of four or five armchairs were positioned like petals around a flower, entreating people to sit back and admire the view. Pretty lights strung together in rows were suspended from the ceiling and the walls were decorated with intricate patterns.

  As I trod my path inside this gorgeous field of flowers, a woman on one of the sofas placed in the corners of the room – apparently a few of the petals had come loose and were floating free – looked up at me from her paperback. She was a very petite woman with a softly sculpted bob. I made my way over in her direction, and her mouth painted a pretty shade of coral formed itself into a smile.

  ‘You must be Mr Tei,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, that’s right. I’m sorry to have kept you waiting.’

  The woman extended a milk-white palm to indicate the sofa opposite her, and I sat down facing her. I presented her with my business card and introduced myself properly.

  ‘I’m sorry to have brought you here on such a chaotic day,’ she said with a smile.

  ‘Chaotic, you say?’

  ‘Well, all these people who’ve come to say their last goodbyes.’

  Looking around me, I saw that there were indeed a fair number of people in the lobby, taking photos with their phones and digital cameras. A smartly dressed woman with an expensive-looking SLR strode past us. It seemed that the hotel restaurant, which served lunch and afternoon tea, was about to open, and the elderly customers waiting to enter had begun piling up in the lobby. Everyone was dressed to the nines, speaking in animated tones.

  ‘Such a waste!’ the woman said softly, looking at them. ‘It’s only been here fifty years…’ Then she continued in a surprisingly matter-of-fact manner, ‘Still, I can’t wait to see what the new building’s going to be like! They’re making it into a skyscraper, by all accounts. It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it? I wonder how it’ll turn out.’

  She glanced up at the ceiling, as if she really was trying and failing to imagine what it would like.

  ‘I came here with my husband when it had just been built, you see. “Showa modern,” they called this style of architecture – a blend of the East and the West. It was the height of fashion back then, and we were ever so taken with it. We always came here on special occasions, when we wanted to splash out a bit, you know. Such wonderful memories.’

  As she spoke, her speech punctuated with little giggles, I nodded encouragingly. I sometimes felt envious of people like her, who’d lived in a time where the ultimate luxury was to get dressed up and dine out in a hotel for some special occasion, in a way that people of my generation would never think of doing. Back then, when they still had advertising balloons tethered to roofs, people would go shopping in department stores. They would eat omurice in the department store cafeterias, ride on the big observation wheels situated on the tops of the buildings. There were hardly any department stores
with big wheels on their roofs now.

  ‘That’s why I came here, you see. I was in an old people’s home for the last few years, and during that time my children took over the house I’d been living in and had it renovated. I’m not resentful, mind. I’ve only good memories of this place, and with all the people coming and going, there’s not been a dull moment.’

  ‘I totally understand.’

  I looked at the elegant woman sitting in front of me with her olive-green two-piece ensemble and her pearl necklace, her two knees in their pearlescent stockings so neatly aligned. She’d have worn this when she came here with her husband, I thought. Deciding it was time to get down to business, I started, somewhat nervously:

  ‘As I’ve mentioned before, we’d like to invite you to come to us while the main building is being renovated. Of course, I know that you could just move to the annexe, but I thought it might be good for you to try out somewhere new. Have a change of scenery, you know. You could come back here once this place is renovated, or, of course, we’d be more than delighted for you to stay with us, if you decide to do so. We have women with all kinds of different talents at our company, and someone like you would be most welcome. You don’t have to make a big commitment; you can just try it out and see what it’s like. What do you think? Of course, I don’t mean to pressure you.’

  I looked her straight in the eyes as I spoke. For whatever reason, I’ve never been good at smiling on demand, not even in a professional context. All I could do was to speak as earnestly as possible.

  ‘Yes, I suppose that’s an idea.’

  The woman brought her wrinkled white hand up to her wrinkled white cheek and a dreamy look came over her face. In this posture, she looked just like a little girl, although the middle finger of the hand resting on her cheek boasted a silver ring with a big glinting emerald. It made me think of the flyers for jewellery shops that one used to find inside newspapers along with all the other promotional leaflets. Now you rarely ever saw such flyers. When I’d first learned how to use scissors, I would cut out each and every one of the gems pictured in those leaflets, even the tiny, fiddly ones. The rings with the spiky edges were my chance to show off my cutting skills. I refused to throw away the precious gemstones I’d cut out, storing them in an empty biscuit tin instead. One time, I remembered, I’d presented my mum with a ruby ring that I’d cut out particularly well. She’d seemed genuinely pleased.

  ‘Yes, maybe that would be best. In that case, perhaps I’ll come to you then, when I’ve finished up here. That’s okay, isn’t it? I’d like to stay here until the very end, you see.’

  ‘Yes, by all means. That would be marvellous, thank you.’

  Before I knew what I was doing, I stood to my feet and gave her a low, respectful bow.

  ‘Oh come now, don’t be silly! I should be the one thanking you for agreeing to take on an old lady like me.’

  ‘Not at all, not at all.’

  She smiled slightly as if she found the whole interaction amusing, but I knew that she was simply unaware of the extent of her own powers. Having met so many of these kinds of women over the years, I’d come to realise that they consistently underestimate their abilities. Even with the knowledge of their full capabilities, they still failed to value themselves.

  I sat down, scratching my head in slight embarrassment, and we chatted away for a while before she suddenly piped up, ‘Your Japanese is really excellent, Mr Tei.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, glancing away. In doing so, I saw that the restaurant had now opened.

  I was raised in Japan, so my Japanese isn’t noticeably different from the average Japanese person’s, and yet I’m often complimented on my Japanese – I suppose because of my name, which is noticeably un-Japanese sounding, and my appearance. In my teens, this often left me feeling ostracised, but at some point it ceased to bother me. Nonetheless, it always struck me as very strange that even if you felt yourself the same as the person you were talking to, it didn’t necessarily mean the other person saw you in that regard.

  I offered to pick her up from the hotel the day it closed, but she assured me that she would manage to find us as long as she had a map, so I decided to take her word for it. I handed her a photocopy of the map showing the location of our company, then got to my feet and bowed once more, and she waved me goodbye. I enquired what her plans were for the rest of the day, and she told me that since it was getting a bit noisy down here, she would probably carry on reading her book at one of the desks upstairs. There was a little area with three wooden writing desks, she said, which had been her favourite spot for years now. The desks were separated from one another with partitions, each with its own lamp, and being there always put her in a special mood.

  Walking towards the entrance, I realised how many more people there were now: asking the hotel staff to take their photos, strolling around, sitting and chatting in the comfortable chairs. I could only suppose they were all really going to miss this place, and now I understood very well why that was. I could see that this hotel, this building, was the kind that induced those sorts of feelings in people.

  When I turned to look back one last time, I caught sight of her amid all the hustle and bustle, making her way up the flight of stairs just as she’d said she would. From this angle, she looked exactly like a small child. Would this hotel get another zashiki warashi when she was gone? I prayed with all my heart that they would. Maybe she would even return here, when everything was complete. But in any case, while the renovations were taking place, I was going to be borrowing her.

  —

  One of my earliest memories is feeling a sense of incredulity at how many people there were in the world. As a small child, I was genuinely concerned that a world so swarming with people was liable to explode or something. It was a needless fear, though. Half the people I was seeing were no longer of this world.

  I don’t know why, but the living and the dead have always looked exactly the same to me. I spent my childhood in a state of profound confusion and then, as a teenager, I discovered the film The Sixth Sense. Aha! I remember thinking: This is me! (Obviously I don’t mean Bruce Willis.) From that point on, I began to come to terms with my talent.

  When you can see both the living and the dead, you realise that there is little difference. There are those with talent and those without it, among the living and the dead alike. They’re really just the same. So, I took the decision to assemble the talented ones from each – the best of both worlds, you could say.

  I stepped out of the hotel and the big, blue sky stretched overhead. Summer was coming to an end. Taxis pulled up in front of the hotel entrance in rapid succession. The word that popped to mind was ‘flocking’ – surely there were few places so deserving of that word as this one. There weren’t that many places to which people would flock to like this, just to offer their last goodbyes.

  There was a spring in my step as I walked, perhaps because I was going downhill. Or perhaps I was in a upbeat mood due to my good scouting work: I figured that we’d be flooded with offers of temp work for her. Or, if she preferred to take up an internal position with us, we’d be only too pleased to oblige. In any case, I was heading straight back to the office, so I decided to take a little something with me to share out at the three o’clock snack break.

  I paused in a shaded spot in the street and used the Tabelog app on my phone to check for a nice bakery or similar in the vicinity. I found a Japanese sweet shop with a good reputation for mame daifuku – gooey dumplings stuffed with azuki bean paste – so I set Google maps to direct me there. As I walked in the direction that the audio guide instructed, I pictured the fierce snatching match that would surely unfold over the mame daifuku and resolved to buy as many as I could.

  Team Sarashina

  Ms Sarashina’s team is really something else. No other team in our company can hold a candle to the flexibility of hers, though I must add that on th
e whole we are a pretty fluid organisation when it comes to things like job description, working patterns and so on.

  First off, the Sarashinas don’t belong to any particular department. If you were forced to categorise them, they’d just be ‘The Sarashinas’, or ‘Ms Sarashina’s Team’, or something similar. In fact, the Sarashinas had no fixed location initially, but that began to discomfit Mr Tei in view of their outstanding job performance. So, during the big shake-up that took place two years ago he assigned them a small room of their own. I got the sense that this room had sort of sprung up out of nowhere between the admin office and Operation Room Number 5, but those kinds of things happen quite a lot at this company, so it wasn’t surprising.

  The Sarashinas were very bashful about the whole thing, and when Mr Tei suggested having a nameplate made for their room, they chimed in collectively:

  ‘Oh no!’

  ‘No, no, please don’t worry!’

  ‘Honestly!’

  ‘Don’t trouble yourself.’

  ‘Please don’t be silly!’

  The nameplate suggestion was shelved, and for a while there was nothing at all outside the room. Just the other day, though, a piece of paper with the words Team Sarashina written in red and black marker pen appeared on the wall outside their door. I figured they had finally adjusted to the idea of having their own room. Upon noticing it, Mr Tei commented that they really must order a nameplate, but the Sarashinas once again refused:

  ‘Oh no, really.’

  ‘No, no, please drop the subject.’

  ‘We’re honestly alright.’

  ‘This is fine, just as it is, really.’

  ‘Honestly, please.’

  The Team Sarashina sign is decorated with maple leaves cut from red and orange coloured paper. The leaves are somewhat uneven in shape and size in a way that suggests handicrafts are not Team Sarashina’s strong suit, but they look pretty good nonetheless. I should add that even if handicrafts aren’t a particular forte of the Team Sarashina members at present, were such skills to be required for their professional duties, they would set about acquiring them through extraordinary dedication and perseverance. It is precisely this aspect of the Sarashinas that earns them such acclaim.