Chapter 162: Tea in the Office

Chapter 162: Chapter 162: Tea in the Office

Oda Fumiko had kept a resignation letter in the top drawer of her desk for six weeks. It wasn’t hers. It was his, and she had written it for him in December, in case he couldn’t.

He found that out at 7:05 on Friday evening, in the small office behind the register, with the shop’s shutters down and a pot of green tea on the desk between them.

He had never been in her office before. In twenty months, he had seen the door open and close perhaps a thousand times, but he had never gone past it. It was smaller than he had imagined. There was a desk with a green-shaded lamp and a filing cabinet, and on the wall a calendar from a publisher, three years out of date. On the shelf above the desk stood a row of handwritten notebooks, their spines labelled by year in her precise handwriting, going back a long way.

She poured the tea and set a cup in front of him. Then she opened the top drawer of the desk and laid a single sheet of paper beside his cup.

It was a letter of resignation, written in her handwriting. At the bottom, where the signature should go, there was a blank space.

I wish to resign from my position as part-time staff at the Koenji branch, effective January 31st, in order to devote my time to my work as a creator. I am grateful for the opportunity to have worked here.

Haruki stared at it.

"I wrote it on the fifth of December," Oda said. "The day after the board meeting you pretended not to care about. You came in the next morning with pencil on your wrist and fell asleep on the crate at eleven." She picked up her own cup. "I thought you might need someone to write the first sentence for you. People usually do."

He couldn’t answer.

"You don’t have to sign it," Oda said. "You can write your own. But I’ve been writing resignation letters for other people for thirty years, and they all start the same way. The first sentence is always the hardest."

He sat looking at the letter for a long time.

"I’m sorry," he said at last.

"For what?"

"For leaving."

Oda looked at him over her glasses with an expression he had never seen on her face before. It was something close to exasperation, and something close to fondness underneath it.

"Amamiya-kun," she said. "You walked in here in April of the year before last with a CV that had nothing on it. You told me you wanted a job with regular hours so you could draw at night. You were the most obviously temporary employee I’ve ever hired." She drank her tea. "I’ve been waiting for you to leave for twenty months. I was starting to worry you never would."

He laughed despite himself. It came out slightly broken.

"Then why did you hire me?"

Oda didn’t answer immediately. She put her cup down and looked up at the row of notebooks on the shelf above the desk.

"When I was twenty-two," she said, "I wanted to be a manga editor."

He went very still.

"I applied to four publishers," Oda said, in the same dry, flat voice she used for stock counts. "Yamashita was one of them. They all said no. One of them sent a letter saying my reading notes were too personal for professional editing." She almost smiled. "So I took a job at a bookstore for a year, to save money and try again. That was thirty-one years ago."

She reached up and took down the first notebook in the row. It was old and soft, the spine labelled with a year before Haruki was born. She opened it and turned it toward him.

It was full of handwritten notes on manga, in the same small, precise handwriting as her index cards on the shelf. Every volume she had ever sold was there, each with three or four lines about what worked and what didn’t, and who would love it.

"I never stopped," Oda said. "I just stopped telling anyone." She closed the notebook and put it back on the shelf. "Every card on that shelf by the entrance is something I’d have written in an editor’s report if anyone had hired me. I wrote them for strangers instead." She picked up her tea. "Then one day in April, a boy with pencil on his wrist asked for a job, and I thought: this one’s going to leave. He’s going to go and make something. And I’d like to be the person who hired him before he did."

Haruki couldn’t say anything at all.

"I’ll sign it," he said finally.

"Good."

"But I want to change one thing."

Oda raised an eyebrow.

He took a pen from the cup on her desk. At the end of her sentence, after I am grateful for the opportunity to have worked here, he added a line in his own handwriting.

And to the manager, who read every card before anyone else did.

He signed it.

Oda looked at the added line for a long time. Her face didn’t change at all. But she took off her glasses very slowly and polished them on the sleeve of her cardigan, and didn’t put them back on for a while.

"Sentimental," she said at last. Her voice was very dry.

"You taught me that."

"I taught you to restock travel guides." She put her glasses back on, folded the letter once, and put it in the drawer. "The thirty-first. You’ll work every shift until then. I’m not having the new person learn the travel section from nobody."

"Who’s the new person?"

Oda looked at him over her glasses. It was the same look she had given him on the last night of June in the first year, when a schoolgirl bought the fiftieth book from a shelf by a restroom door.

"She came in on Wednesday and asked if we were hiring," Oda said. "After school. For a part-time position, three afternoons a week, in the manga section." She turned her cup on the desk. "She’s seventeen. Her mother wrote a letter of permission. She said she’d been saving for a Naniwa first volume since June of last year and would like to be paid for standing near books instead of spending money on them."

Haruki stared at her.

"She had a purse with a cat on it," Oda said. "I hired her on the spot."

He was at the door, with his coat on, when she stopped him.

"One condition," Oda said.

He turned.

"Once a month, you send a card to this shelf. By post, in your own handwriting. Three lines, about a book you love. It doesn’t have to be yours, and it’s better if it isn’t." She didn’t look up from the stock ledger she had already opened on the desk. "Hinata will pin it up. She’ll pretend she doesn’t know who it’s from, and so will I."

"Every month?"

"Until you’re too famous to remember," Oda said. "Then every year. I’ll know which is which."

"I’ll remember."

"Everyone says that." She turned a page in the ledger. "Some of them do."

He stood in the doorway for a moment longer, looking at the small office with its green-shaded lamp and the row of notebooks on the shelf. There were thirty-one years of reading notes that nobody had ever hired her to write.

"Oda-san," he said. "When the anime comes out, there’ll be a credit at the end. Everyone who helped. Would you mind if your name was on it?"

She didn’t look up.

"As what?"

"First bookseller," Haruki said.

Oda’s pen stopped moving on the ledger. For a long moment, she didn’t say anything at all. Thirty-one years ago, four publishers had told a girl of twenty-two that her reading notes were too personal.

"Go home, Amamiya-kun," she said finally, very quietly. "The travel guides come in at seven on Monday."

He walked home through the cold January night with the shop’s shutters down behind him.

Hinata, of class 2-C, had bought the fiftieth book from a shelf everyone had written off, and the first copy of Threadless Gate Volume 1 with coins she didn’t have to skip lunch for. She had pinned It comes on a shelf for a stranger. Now she would stand behind the register where he had stood, and restock the shelf where he had once written cards.

He stopped on the corner by the station and looked back at the dark bookstore window. The manga shelf was just visible through the glass, under the sign in Morita’s careful lettering. START HERE.

He had thought he was closing a road.

He hadn’t understood until tonight that someone else had been waiting to walk down it.

[Resignation: Signed (effective January 31st). Additional line added by the Host.]

[Replacement (manga section, part-time): Hinata (17, class 2-C). Hired by Oda Fumiko.]

[Oda Fumiko — Revealed: Applied to be a manga editor at 22. Rejected (4 publishers). Has kept reading notes for 31 years.]

[Crossroads (1): In progress. 3 weeks remaining.]