Chapter 3:
When the Rain Stops
AS KEIICHI WAS LEAVING HIS BAR AFTER GETTING everything ready for that night, two boys ran past him like the wind. They turned at the end of the narrow alley, cluttered with outdoor air-conditioning units and potted plants, their laughing voices fading away.
Kajiwara Keiichi turned to look where they had come from. A couple of Southeast Asians, possibly their parents, were taking pictures as they walked. During the day, Kabukicho’s restaurant and bar district was just another tourist attraction.
Locking the door to his shot bar, Undecimber Garden, he walked through the Shinjuku’s noontime Golden Gai. He stopped in front of the stone stairs to the Hanazono Shrine. Clapping his hands together inside his heart and letting them know he was coming in, he stepped inside their grounds.
It was halfway through November at this point, and the trees had all changed color. There were two women with backpacks ringing the bell of the little Inari Shrine at the end of a row of torii gates.
At some point, more tourists had begun visiting the area, but Keiichi, who’d been born and raised in Shinjuku for twenty-nine years, still wasn’t used to non-residents being around, outside of the Hatsumoude or Tori-no-Ichi festivals.
Humans were an important part of the scenery. They could even make a place that hadn’t changed in years seem to be completely different.
After stopping to gaze at the tourists for a moment, Keiichi headed toward Frère. He’d promised Haruka that he’d take Sumi before the shop opened, but the lights in both the bookstore and the office upstairs were unlit. Unlocking the door, he stepped inside.
Putting down his bag, he stopped in front of the shelf The Hammock Cat. Up until recently, its owner had been switching out his whole stock frequently in his rush to sell books, but these days its stock was steady. After their initial meeting, Rintarou started messaging Keiichi, and the two had multiple discussions on how to sell books. The kid had a personality where he’d honestly listen to advice, so his shelf no longer just looked like a jumble of used books.
“Ahh, I get it.”
Strangely enough, Keiichi could tell what emotions someone put into their shelf at a glance. Even if Rintarou put one book out specifically for the woman named Kasugai, that didn’t guarantee that another customer wouldn’t buy it. He’d made his shelf into something for her sake, somewhere that she could always find a book she would want.
Rather than being exasperated, Keiichi was impressed. When you were in love, you’d do anything to catch your beau’s eye, and changing yourself became something to be happy about.
Once he’d finished getting the store ready to open, he checked on his own shelf. Several of the books he’d recently brought in had already been sold.
“My books have been selling fast lately, huh?”
He’d need to find some time to write more impressions.
By reading a book, you explored the author themselves. You faced them head-on and grasped their true message. Up until just recently, he had posted his impressions on social media in the hopes that it would make at least a few more people read the book. But as his followers grew, and his posts were shared, his judgment of a book began to be linked to people’s judgments on Keiichi himself, which made him question what he was doing. Showing his value off to others wasn’t what he wanted.
After straightening his shelf up, he made himself a coffee and sat down at the reading counter. He still had fifteen minutes until Haruka was supposed to arrive. As he looked at his list of read books on his phone to figure out what he’d bring to sell next, he heard the sound of the door unlocking.
“Sorry for the wait. I meant to get here earlier, but…”
Haruka walked into the store with a Boston-style pet carrier. He undid the zipper as soon as he was inside, but Sumi was curled up at the back of the carrier, not wanting to come out.
“Heeey, Sumi, we’re here. Your beloved Keiichi is on shift today,” he said.
A moment later, the tabby peeked her face out. She looked around, and once she realized she was at the usual place, she slowly exited the carrier. When Haruka gave her some pets, she stood calmly with her front paws together in front of her, pushing her face against his hand happily. Who she was with was much more important to her than where she was.
“I’ll be back before closing, so Sumi’s all yours until then. She hasn’t eaten yet, so that’s up to you too.”
“Got it,” Keiichi replied.
Haruka was trying to feed her breakfast at Frère as much as possible in an attempt to get her more used to being in the store.
“Oh yeah, that reminds me,” Haruka began as he stood up. “You remember Uneta-san, right?”
Keiichi hadn’t heard that name in a while. Uneta was the head bartender at the main bar in the City Hotel, where Keiichi had worked two years earlier.
“Yeah, of course I remember,” he nodded. He’d worked with the guy for seven years; there was no way he’d forget.
“The person I met for work last night was a cocktail lover, yeah? When we were chatting about where to go, his name came up. Apparently, he opened his own place near the station in front of Shinjuku Gyoen. It’s got a rare name, and they said he was a man in his forties, so I figured it must be the same guy. Look, see?” Haruka explained, showing him the website he had open on his phone. It was called The Authentic Bar @TEN, and it was about a five-minute walk from Frère.
“That’s close.”
“Right? Wanna go with me sometime? He makes a mean cocktail.”
“I mean, I could go, I guess,” Keiichi answered. Honestly, he wasn’t very enthusiastic about it.
“Huh? Did you two not get along?”
“It wasn’t that we didn’t get along. We just didn’t talk much. He’s the one that told me that I wasn’t fit for bartending if I wasn’t interested in people.”
“What the heck? Uneta-san said that? To you?”
When Keiichi shrugged in place of a response, Haruka looked horrified.
“It was about a year after I started working there,” Keiichi explained. “He said it a few times.”
“Did you mess up on something or make a customer mad?”
“Nope. Back then, I thought really hard about what might’ve made him think that way, but he wasn’t the type to stick his nose into anyone’s business either,” Keiichi explained.