The Nakano Thrift Shop

by Hiromi Kawakami

The flowers I had put in the vase looked as though they were artificial. And yet the ones in the mayonnaise jar looked like normal, real flowers.

  I put the sketch back, under the envelope. I wondered if a computer-related company would have more computers around. Computers are rectangular. Microwaves are rectangular too. And the gas heater that we had been using when I left the Nakano shop was rectangular too, wasn’t it? These incoherent thoughts went through my mind as I took off my stockings and crumpled them into a ball.

  Instead of saying ‘Miss Suganuma, this is your desk,’ at a computer company of course they would say, ‘Miss Suganuma, this is your PC,’ I thought.

  They may have said things differently, and this company was teensy compared to the health food company where I had worked before, but the substance of the work I did was not much different. I made copies, I ran errands, I filed vouchers, I created documents. I got the hang of it after three days, and it soon felt as though I had been at the company for a while. I may have adjusted to things there so quickly because the young women didn’t all go out to lunch together. I find that kind of thing exhausting.

  Everyone at this company—both men and women—was glued to their desk, all of them at their workstations in front of their computer screens. Sometimes you heard a voice ring out, ‘Oh, no!’ or ‘Come on!’ What’s interesting was that the guys’ voices sounded high-pitched, and the girls’ sounded much lower.

  I came and went at regular office hours, but plenty of people showed up for work late in the day, after I’d gone home. Or when I arrived in the morning, I’d see people who had worked all night, agitatedly peeling the shells off hard-boiled eggs from the convenience store.

  It was about ten days after I had started working at this company that I happened to run into Takeo in the hallway.

  ‘Hey, Hitomi,’ Takeo said. He uttered it so naturally, as if we had been seeing each other every day, including yesterday.

  I just stood there, breathless.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  What’s the matter with you? I said at last.

  I stood stock-still, right there in the hallway. Takeo was carrying brightly colored files in both hands. Orange, yellow, pale purple, and green files.

  ‘Hitomi, you’re wearing make-up?’ Takeo said in the same astonished tone as always.

  What? I retorted. Hearing him speak in that same way had taken me right back to the Nakano shop.

  The two of us just stood there in the middle of the hallway for a moment, rooted to the spot.

  The invitation to the reopening of the Nakano shop arrived not long after that.

  ‘Just like Mr. Nakano, seems like a prank.’ Takeo gave his verdict when I showed him the card I had received. The reopening was set for the first of April.

  And the name had changed from ‘the Nakano shop’ to just ‘Nakano.’

  ‘It sounds like the name of a bistro,’ was Masayo’s assessment.

  The day I ran into Takeo in the hallway, he had given me his business card.

  ‘Web designer,’ I read his title off the card in a monotone.

  Please don’t read it out loud! Takeo had said, fidgeting. The files started to slip, as if they were going to fall.

  ‘Is this really you, Takeo?’ I asked.

  ‘It is,’ he replied with a blank look.

  ‘Oh, I doubt it,’ I retorted.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ he asked.

  ‘You’re not even speaking the way you usually do.’

  ‘Can’t do that here,’ he said, lapsing into his pattern. Just as he said that, two of the files slipped out of his hands. As I stooped to pick them up, Takeo also bent over, and I felt his breath on the top of my shoulder.

  ‘This is like a bad soap opera,’ Takeo grumbled as he retrieved the files. His shoulders were broader than before. That’s not really him either, I thought to myself.

  And then Takeo left, just like that. Apparently his desk, I mean his PC, was located in a room just across the hallway.

  After I happened to run into him, Takeo didn’t say anything to me for almost a week.

  Well, he’s just someone I used to know, I guess.

  I left the office at the end of the workday, and while I was in my bookkeeping class, I tried to remember Takeo’s face when we had run into each other in the hallway. It was his face, but not the one I was used to seeing.

  How do you become a web designer? I had asked. Went to a technical school, Takeo replied.

  I doubted this was the real Takeo.

  As more time passed, I became increasingly convinced of this. I heard somewhere that human cells renew themselves every three years. His name might still be Takeo, and he might look just like him on the outside, but this guy was a totally different person.

  It was about ten days later, just before the time I usually leave the office, when I suddenly noticed Takeo in front of my PC, and I had the distinct feeling that the person standing there was a stranger.

  Hello.

  When I greeted this stranger, he blurted out, Uh, well, sorry about the other day.

  And in that instant, the stranger turned back into Takeo.

  It had been a long time, I said. Then I looked up at Takeo’s face from the side.

  His jaw was tense, and his stubble was a little darker. For a moment, Takeo turned up the corners of his mouth bashfully. You really are wearing make-up, Takeo muttered.

  Yes, I am, I replied, turning up the corners of my mouth and imitating him.

  The first of April was a Saturday.

  In the meantime Takeo and I had had dinner together twice.

  ‘The fulfillment is coming up, so I should go back to the office. I’d love to go out for a drink another time, hopefully when we can relax and enjoy each other’s company.’

  ‘Fulfillment? Our dear Takeo said that?’ Masayo laughed uproariously when I relayed what Takeo had said, word for word.

  ‘Nakano’ was smaller than the Nakano shop. But it seemed much more spacious than the earlier incarnation.

  ‘I’ve finally come to appreciate the beauty of empty space,’ Mr. Nakano said.

  There were shelves all along the walls of the shop, with items arranged intermittently on them. He had bowls and vessels from the Netherlands, Belgium, and Britain, as well as kitchen utensils, glassware, and a few pieces of furniture, all of which ranged from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.

  ‘It looks like a shop you’d see in a magazine, doesn’t it?’ I said.

  ‘This place is better than a shop in a magazine,’ Mr. Nakano said as he adjusted the angle of his black pom-pom hat.

  ‘How long do you have this space for?’ Masayo asked.

  ‘Let’s see, I think about six months,’ Mr. Nakano replied with a grin. I would still never understand them.

  Lots of people showed up on the day of the reopening.

  There were some first-timers, but many of the best customers from the days of the Nakano shop were there too.

  Mr. Crane came by during the morning. He took one look around the shop and said, ‘An old man like me, I can’t relax in a shop like this, but I guess it’s nice in its own way.’ Then he gave one of his belly laughs.

  After drinking two cups of tea that Masayo had made, he left with his wobbling gait.

  The first person to arrive in the afternoon was Tadokoro. He took a long look around the shop, as if he were savoring each item, and as he calmly drank a cup of Masayo’s tea, he said, It’s a high-class shop.

  ‘There are some very good buys in the glassware,’ Masayo said with contrived cordiality.

  Tadokoro shook his head and said in his typical serene manner, ‘There is no leisure for the poor.’

  Tadokoro lingered in the shop for close to two hours. He smirked as he watched new customers come in, one after another.


  When I served him what must have been the fifth cup of now barely-tinged-green tea, which was really just for show, Tadokoro asked, ‘Hitomi, are you working here again?’

  No, I replied brusquely, and Tadokoro smiled and stood up.

  ‘There’s no need for such scorn, this old man will soon be dead,’ he said, leaving me with those words.

  Mr. Awashima came by late in the afternoon. He cast a glance around the shop and declared plainly, ‘Looks good, doesn’t it?’ He bustled off again without drinking the tea I served him.

  Aunt Michi showed up with the patriarch who used to run the Posy tea shop. She presented Mr. Nakano with a pouch tied with festive red and white mizuhiki cord on which was written, CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR NEW STORE! After taking a tentative look around the shop, she hurried off.

  Late in the afternoon, during a lull in the stream of customers, a young man arrived who looked familiar but whose name none of us could remember for the life of us.

  ‘Who is that again?’ Masayo asked in a quiet voice.

  ‘Who is he, indeed?’ Mr. Nakano asked, his voice also low.

  Hitomi, you’re young, I’m sure you’ll remember, the two of them said to me surreptitiously. His name is on the tip of my tongue, but I just can’t seem to call it to mind.

  ‘You stock Western things in this shop, I see,’ the young man said, smiling pleasantly.

  ‘Are you in the trade?’ Mr. Nakano asked, feigning nonchalance.

  ‘No, I’m not.’ Their conversation ended there, and while he gently sipped the tea that Masayo had offered him, it was completely silent in the shop.

  When he had finished his tea, the young man stood up and looked around the shop a second time, as if he were patrolling the place.

  ‘It’s a wonderful shop,’ he said at last.

  It wasn’t until about an hour after he left that I remembered—that was Hagiwara, the young man who had asked us to keep the Goryeo celadon bowl for him.

  ‘The guy whose girlfriend put a curse on him!’ I said. Then the three of us talked in a clamor for a while, until the door opened quietly.

  Mr. Nakano looked up. He let out a little sound. A moment later Masayo and I both looked up at the same time.

  It was Sakiko.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, in her soft, well-projected voice.

  ‘Hey,’ Mr. Nakano said. His voice was slightly timid, yet there was a hint of his fighting spirit in it.

  Sakiko was silent for a moment as she looked Mr. Nakano in the face. Masayo tugged on my sleeve, and I went with her into the small space at the back where there was a gas range and a faucet.

  ‘The girl from Asukado is as pretty as ever,’ Masayo said as she boiled some water.

  ‘She seems even more attractive, doesn’t she?’ I said.

  Masayo nodded deeply as she said, ‘You thought so too?’

  When I peeked out through a crack, Sakiko and Mr. Nakano were smiling and chatting light-heartedly. Like grown-ups. Despite their history together at the Nakano shop, I couldn’t help but think.

  Sakiko stayed for just half an hour, and then she left. Mr. Nakano saw her out, walking with her for a bit.

  ‘It was good of Sakiko to come by,’ I said to Mr. Nakano when he came back in.

  He sighed. ‘She’s quite a woman!’ he murmured expressively. ‘I really screwed that up.’

  ‘Why not get back together with her?’ Masayo asked.

  ‘Doubt she’d be willing to, don’t you think?’ he grumbled.

  A trace of Sakiko’s sandalwood perfume still lingered in the air of the shop.

  At seven o’clock, when they were about to close the shop, I went out onto the street, and there was a figure approaching. It was already completely dark out, but I soon realized it was Takeo.

  Perhaps Takeo recognized that it was me, because he quickened his pace. I waved at him and he broke into a run.

  ‘Is the shop already closed?’ Takeo asked.

  ‘Just about to,’ I said, and he peered through the window into the interior.

  Even though he’d been running, Takeo wasn’t out of breath at all.

  ‘It seems like you’ve become strong,’ I said. Takeo laughed.

  ‘Even your shoulders seem broader.’

  You think so? Takeo said, laughing again. I’ve been going to the gym since I started working at the company.

  ‘The gym?’ I repeated with surprise. Takeo and the gym. Now there was a combination I never would have put together, not in a million years. But then again, this was the Takeo who had become a web designer without my knowing it, so I probably should have guessed that he was going to the gym.

  ‘I like the punch ball,’ Takeo said.

  The punch ball? I repeated again.

  ‘You know, like they use to practice boxing? It’s a ball that you punch, it flies out and then springs back, like that.’

  Ah, I nodded. Punch, spring. I was staring absent-mindedly at the dim shadow at the base of Takeo’s throat as he explained.

  ‘Oh, my, our, dear Takeo!’ Masayo called out as she opened the door. Mr. Nakano came outside too.

  I hear you’re doing very well, Takeo, Mr. Nakano said. Like a hero returning home in glory, Masayo continued. Takeo scratched his head.

  As the four of us went into the shop, Mr. Nakano turned back around to the front door and closed the shutter. Takeo took a look all around the shop. He wore the same dumbstruck expression as he used to.

  There were only two chairs, so Mr. Nakano brought a folding chair out from the back and he pulled over an antique chair that was for sale. Mr. Nakano opened a bottle of wine and poured it into teacups.

  ‘Haven’t had a drink in a long time,’ Takeo said.

  ‘Because of the fulfillment?’ Masayo asked impishly.

  ‘Last in, first out. Low man on the totem pole,’ Takeo said as he scratched his head again.

  Without anything to go with the wine, the four of us finished it pretty quickly. Wine in the Nakano shop? Takeo said, his cheeks crimson. Mr. Nakano opened a second bottle. We drink wine here! We do whatever we like! he boasted.

  Masayo rummaged about in her bag and pulled out a half-crushed packet of soybean snacks, which she put on a paper plate.

  The second bottle of wine was soon empty as well.

  Mr. Nakano was the first one to fall asleep. He put his head down on the desk and started to snore. Before long, Masayo had nodded off. Takeo was yawning himself.

  ‘Did you make the fulfillment?’ I asked. Takeo nodded lightly.

  This brings back memories of the Nakano shop, doesn’t it? I said. Takeo nodded. Have you been doing well, all this time? I asked. He nodded again. The four of us together, it seems like old times, I said. This time, instead of nodding, Takeo opened his mouth. But he didn’t say anything.

  We fell silent for a moment.

  Sorry, Takeo said in a low voice.

  What?

  I was awful to you, Hitomi. I’m sorry, Takeo said, and bowed his head.

  No, I’m the one who acted like a child.

  Me too.

  Then we just sat there for a while, both of our heads bowed.

  Maybe because I was tipsy, I felt moved to tears. My eyes still downcast, I cried, just a little bit. But once the tears started, I was soon full-on crying.

  I’m sorry, Takeo said over and over. I was so sad! I replied. Takeo put his hands around my shoulders and gave me a little hug.

  Mr. Nakano stirred in his sleep. Stealing a glance at Masayo, I saw that her eyes were half-open and she was peeking over at us. When our gaze met, Masayo hurriedly shut her eyes and pretended to be asleep.

  Masayo! I called out her name. She opened her eyes wide and stuck out her tongue at me. Takeo quietly moved away from me.

  ‘Don’t stop! Hold her tighter!’ Masayo said i
n a slurred voice, pointing her finger at Takeo.

  Go on, hold her tight! Masayo said again.

  Mr. Nakano suddenly roused himself and joined in, Go on now!

  We gulped down the wine that was left in our teacups. The four of us all exchanged glances and burst into laughter. I felt the wine coursing through my body again, and I felt as though I were walking on air. I looked over at Takeo, who was watching me too.

  The Nakano shop is gone now, I said. Everyone nodded in agreement.

  But the Nakano shop lives on forever, Mr. Nakano muttered as he stood up. As if that were a sign, the four of us all started chattering, nobody sure what anyone else was saying. Completely bewildered, I looked at Takeo again; he was still staring at me.

  Just then, for the first time, I truly felt love for Takeo. The thought inexplicably appeared in a corner of my mind.

  The newly opened bottle of wine clinked against the rim of my teacup, sounding a clear ring.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Bestselling author Hiromi Kawakami has won acclaim for her essays, stories, and novels. Her short fiction has appeared in English in The Paris Review and Granta. Her novel Strange Weather in Tokyo was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Asian Literary Prize and the 2014 International Foreign Fiction Prize. She lives in Japan.