Miss Umbrella loved rainy days.
That was really only natural, since they were the days when umbrellas got to be more active. She had been created in a well-established umbrella shop, so she was like a young lady from a good family. Every time a rainy day came around, she would feel a thrill as she gazed out the window from the back of the shop, and she quietly spoke to the craftsmen who were making other umbrellas.
“Ah, how delightful, how delightful! Just what kind of wonderful person is going to come and buy me, I wonder? Say, old man, what kind of person do you think it will be?”
Her handle was made using a tree from the forest. The umbrella, who had remained unsold for many years, tried to speak up. Objects that have been used for a long time are sometimes endowed with mysterious powers, as we know.
One of the craftsmen turned around to look at her and said, “Huh? Whassat? Thought I heard some kinda weird noise comin’ from that umbrella. That one’s pretty old, too… We can’t sell somethin’ like that. Okay, guess I’ll toss it.”
“Huh?”
The next day, she was discarded as a piece of unburnable garbage. Nobody could hear her voice.
“Well, if we’re being honest, an umbrella making weird noises in the back of a shop would be creepy.” Mistress Elaina made a very sound argument.
“Please stop that, Mistress Elaina. In some cases, a sound argument can seem more like harassment.”
Let’s get back to the story.
The umbrella, which had been thrown away as a piece of unburnable garbage, looked up at the sky from the dumpster, overcome with sorrow.
She looked up at the leaden sky.
Ah—would her life end there, in a place like that? Unused, in a complete reversal for a young lady from a good family? A victim of life’s vicissitudes? She was stunned by the magnitude of her fall from grace.
Then the rain began to pour.
The rain mercilessly soaked her whole body.
It was at that very moment that something happened.
“Ah man, this sudden rain…how annoying—”
A man just happened to pass her by.
The man suddenly spotted her. “Oh! Didn’t expect to find an umbrella here. Lucky me!” He picked her up.
“Kyah! You pushy man…!” The young lady from a good family was surprised and embarrassed when the man suddenly opened her. “Stop that right now, you insolent fellow! I am not some cheap umbrella to be opened by the likes of you!”
Even as she said that, in fact as she was speaking, she felt a definite throbbing in her chest.
“Why…why is my heart pounding like this…?”
She was prone to romance, and she had immediately fallen in love.
After hearing her story up to that point, I asked the umbrella a question.
“Does that mean he was your owner?”
She shook her head.
“No, he was the first man I ever knew.”
“The first man?”
As her words suggested, although she fell in love with him, ultimately, her relationship with that first man soon reached its end.
“After that, he went into a café, and he left me right there in the restaurant’s umbrella stand…”
My goodness.
“What a cruel man he was.”
But why was she abandoned?
“Anyway, I didn’t want to be abandoned, so as soon as the man picked me up, I started talking and didn’t stop, but he said, ‘Ew. What’s up with this umbrella?! It’s creepin’ me out!’ and I was discarded.”
“I see, so there was a justifiable reason why you were thrown away?”
“That’s so mean! How can you say that?!”
Sob, sob, sob, sob.
Miss Umbrella started crying again. Mistress Elaina got a little frustrated—“Not when I just wiped you off earlier…”—and mopped up the floor with a rag, her cheeks puffed out in irritation.
Miss Umbrella kept right on spilling tears down onto Mistress Elaina.
“It ended just like that with the first man I ever knew… You know, he never even took me to his house…”
Her first relationship with a man was over quickly, like nothing more than a passing shower, she said.
“Isn’t that awful…? And it was my first time, too…”
Well, let’s leave discussions of first times or whatever aside.
“What happened after that?” I prompted her to continue her story.
According to her, after that—she was passed around to many different owners.
“After that, I passed through the hands of all sorts of different people, men and women alike…” There’s probably nothing in this world as easily stolen as an umbrella. For some reason, people don’t tend to consider it a crime to take another person’s umbrella when it’s pouring rain outside.
As a result, she found herself drifting back and forth between the side of the road and various umbrella stands.
“Jeez… Sudden showers are such a pain…”
The umbrella’s second owner was a young woman. “Ohhh, normally I would have the boys hold up umbrellas for me, but…” According to Miss Umbrella, the woman was the vulgar sort who regularly went through all sorts of different men, one after another.
“Well, it’s a little dirty, but I guess this umbrella will work.”
The young woman picked up the umbrella and opened it.
“Grrrrrr!”
Miss Umbrella blew her top. Frankly speaking, the young woman and the umbrella were not at all compatible.
“Gyaaahhh! The umbrella talked!” The young woman thrust Miss Umbrella into the umbrella stand of a neighborhood café and dashed home as fast as she could in the rain.
“Tch! Serves you right!” the umbrella spit from the umbrella stand.
After that, it was only a few minutes before she was claimed by another person.
Her next owner was a man whose attire suggested he had a very high annual income.
“Uh-oh. A sudden shower, huh? That’s awfully inconvenient.”
The man, who had just come out of the café, turned his palm up toward the sky, caught a few raindrops, and sighed.
“But it would be a real loss for the world if I were to get wet.”
This dainty, genteel man boldly stole the umbrella, just as if it had been his own to begin with.