Chapter 6:
Memories of Ginkgo
A BELL WAS RINGING AT HIS FEET.
“Sorry, Sumi. Just a little longer.”
Sumi kept on rubbing herself against Sakurai Haruka’s ankles while she waited for him to pry his eyes away from his computer monitor, but eventually she got sick of it and started meowing. When he looked her way, feeling her gaze, she looked back at him with her clear eyes. She was waiting for him to let her on his lap.
“You’re such a baby.”
Picking her up, he pet her under her chin, rubbing around her neck. Once he started touching her, his mind would go to the cat, even when he had work. His warmth must have felt nice to her, because she settled on his lap.
“Looks like you’re pretty used to this place now. I didn’t know what was gonna happen with you at the beginning.”
Back when he’d first adopted her as a rescue, he would leave her alone at home. But when he came back every day, he found her listless. He got worried and set up a pet camera, only to see her crying and searching for her owner all day while he was gone. After agonizing over it, he decided to bring her to work with him.
Petting his tabby cat with one hand, Haruka looked down at the letter spread out on top of his desk. It was from Ono Junka, the owner of Sumika Bookstore. At one point, he’d given her advice on how to design and run a bookstore. He’d thought the letter would just be her reporting that she’d opened, but there was more to it.
Included was a letter for Ninomiya Sayaka, the owner of the shelf “Sayokyoku,” with impressions of her book. The sender was a seventy-year-old woman who lived near Sumika Bookstore. You really never knew where someone would become a reader.
“It was that book Ninomiya-san gave to that high school girl who was on a school trip, wasn’t it? Amazing. I didn’t think it’d spread that far. You never know what’ll happen until you do it.” Haruka groaned as he typed up his email reply.
Sayaka’s book had gone to a high school girl from Okayama, who’d visited Frère for Keiichi’s shelf. The girl had given it to her grandmother in place of a souvenir, and that grandmother read it and was inspired to become a shelf owner at Sumika Bookstore. She wanted to do a public reading of it, to get other people to know Sayaka’s work.
“Does this sort of stuff really happen?”
It seemed like a coincidence, but maybe it wasn’t. Haruka had seen books loaded with someone’s feelings make their way into a reader’s hands in various ways over the year that he’d been managing Frère. People were linked through books. There might have been even more dramas being born that he just didn’t know about.
“If Mizuki-chan ever has another chance to come to Tokyo, please let me know. Not only can I give her an opportunity to speak with university students here, but I can arrange a place to stay, her meals, tours of small and shared bookstores, and accompany her anywhere she might want to go. Aaand…”
After finishing up and sending the email to Junka, Haruka spun his chair around and looked out the building’s glass front window. Seeing as he was on the second floor, he got a good view of the trees along the sidewalk.
He’d moved his company here one year earlier, wanting to be able to feel the seasons passing while he worked. He had originally only planned to rent the second floor, but the building’s owner had offered him a good deal on rent if he opened a business on the first floor. That was how Frère came to be.
The location was suited for a restaurant, but there were already several along the street. After fretting over it, Haruka had decided to open a bookstore.
Shinjuku was a wide-spread business district, but sometimes he thought of it like it was a remote island. The rent was high in this neighborhood, and it was difficult to both start a business and to keep it going. If a business didn’t make a profit, the owner would wash their hands of it and pull out immediately.
He understood that it was all unavoidable for the higher-ups in a company, having to run it and protect their employees, but buildings would go up in the spots that used to have small stores, a big business would try their hand with it, and then they’d quickly pull out. Haruka had seen this cycle repeat over and over again since he was a child, a cycle which led to the city’s local population losing access to things they needed.
The elementary and junior high schools he’d gone to had gone through repeated consolidations and declines, and his alma mater closed as well. Once they lost access to necessities, the residents would disappear too. The people born and raised in this city felt much more stifled than people from outside of it. That was the sort of place it was.
The bookstore that used to be near Shinjuku Gyoen Park, which had tried scaling down in order to survive for the sake of the locals, had closed its doors a few years earlier. People said that you could get anything you could ever want in Shinjuku, but year by year, it got harder to live here. Haruka had concluded that the people would have to meet their needs by their own hands. Frère was a bookstore where the residents of Shinjuku-ku would be the shelf owners.
“Time passes fast. Frère’s been open a whole year, huh?”
As Haruka stretched, Sumi jumped off his lap. Bell jingling, she walked toward the steps.
“Oh, looks like the shelf owner watching the store today is here.”
Still sitting, he rolled his chair over to the window. Outside the store’s entrance, Rintarou had put his backpack pet carrier on the ground and was rummaging through his pockets. It looked like he was searching for his phone. If he didn’t have it, then he wouldn’t be able to unlock the door.
Jogging down the stairs, he knocked on the door from the inside. Rintarou bowed his head a bunch of times apologetically. Haruka picked Sumi up with one hand before opening the door for him.