Six years ago, Mayumi had gotten divorced and moved back home with Mizuki, who had been in elementary school then. The two had lived outside of the prefecture, and Emiko had invited them to live with her so she could help out, thinking that it would be difficult for Mayumi to work and raise her daughter all alone.
Emiko had lost her husband after his long battle with illness around the same time, so having her daughter and granddaughter by her side had saved her. She’d expressed how thankful she was so many times, but Mayumi would always just dodge it.
Pouring the tea into a teacup, Mayumi sat down across from Emiko, but she must have still been thinking about Mizuki, because she was off in her own little world.
“How is work going? You’ve been having to study even after getting home at night, haven’t you? Hasn’t it been harder than it used to be?”
“Of course I’ve gotta study, if my job needs it. I need stimulation and knowledge if I’m gonna wring new product ideas out of my brain. If I didn’t pick up the latest info myself, then I wouldn’t even know what was new,” Mayumi replied, putting both elbows on the table and resting her chin on her hands. “I came home early today, so I still have work to do.”
“Mayumi, how about we go for a trip to relax once things have settled down at work, all three of us? I mean, we could go to the Yubara Onsen, like we did when we celebrated Mizuki getting into her high school. It’s close, so we’d be able to relax.”
“Nah, impossible. Mizuki would never go anywhere like that these days. She’s a high schooler now. She’s beyond the age that she’d be happy to go on a family vacation.”
“Really?” Emiko asked, reminding Mayumi about how much she’d enjoyed it the previous year’s spring.
Mayumi countered that Mizuki had changed completely since then. “Mom, why don’t you go on a vacation with some of your friends? You can take a break from doing the housework once in a while. You must be tired, doing it all every day.”
Emiko wanted to shoot back that that wasn’t the point, but she figured that retorting would do nothing but tire her daughter out, so she just brushed it off, saying, “I guess you’re right.”
Once they were done drinking their tea, Mayumi cleaned up the cups and headed back to her own room beside the living room, without giving any comments about the taste of the new tea.
Emiko climbed the stairs to the second floor and went to Mizuki’s room. When she knocked, her granddaughter gave her a listless “Yeahhh?”
“It’s Grandma. Can I come in?”
“Go ahead…”
As she opened the door, it hit something hard. Mizuki’s open luggage was blocking Emiko from opening the door all of the way. Twisting herself sideways, she slipped through the crack.
Mizuki, who’d been laying face down on her bed, put a bookmark in the book she was reading and set it beside her pillow. It seemed she’d started reading without cleaning up first. Her clothes and flat iron were still in her bag, but she’d taken all of the books out and piled them on the floor. There were fifteen, all hardcovers.
“Wow. You brought all of these books back from Tokyo?”
“That’s right.”
They must have been heavy. “Couldn’t you have mailed them back to the house instead?” Emiko asked.
“Nope. I’d rather get one more book than pay for the shipping, and if I didn’t bring them home with my own hands, I couldn’t be sure what would happen to my precious books.”
Apparently, the luggage she’d gotten her friend to take for her was everything but her books. If she loved them that much, then there wasn’t anything else she could say.
When Emiko asked if she could see them, Mizuki sat up with an enthusiastic “Yes!”
Emiko picked up the book on the very top. It was one she’d been interested in after seeing it at a bookstore recently, a novel set on an island. It was about a high school girl who was abused by her parents and committed suicide, and her best friend, another girl who had tried to fight for her friend’s sake, but left the island after things had been covered up. The story began from a dramatic opener, and when she returned to her home island twenty years later, she would meet a man who fled from the city for some mysterious reason.
“If you wanted books, I would have driven you to the bookstore in my car,” Emiko said.
The old bookstore near their house had closed down for good, but there was a large bookstore at Okayama Station that they could get to by car. She had taken Mizuki there before, but maybe Tokyo’s were on a different scale?
“I know this book. They sold it in Okayama.”
“Look, Grandma, this isn’t just some normal book.”
Mizuki put her hand out, asking her to pass the book over. After Emiko gave it back, Mizuki opened it to the last page. Sandwiched there was a piece of notepaper.
“A letter?” Emiko asked.
“Someone’s impressions of the book,” Mizuki explained.
Emiko couldn’t read what it said, since she’d left her glasses in her room, but the paper was covered in words right to the edges. “Goodness, they’ve written a lot. Who wrote it?”
“The person I like.”
When Emiko lifted her face in shock, Mizuki laughed out loud.
“You know how I told you that there was someone on social media that I was using to get book recommendations? He’s the one who wrote his impressions. He’s a shelf owner at a bookstore in Tokyo.”
“Shelf owner?”