Chapter 2:
A Gift Over Seven Years
AS HE WAS FILLING OUT A JOB APPLICATION, A notification for an email titled “Notice Regarding Our Selection” popped up in the corner of Shirane Rintarou’s monitor. It was the results of the secondary job interview with an appliance maker he’d had a week before. Taking a deep breath, he put his palms together in front of his face.
“Please. Let me get in.”
Deep breath in, now breathe out. Readying himself, he opened the email. Shortly after he began reading it, he became unable to focus and closed his laptop. He spun his chair around, turning his back to his desk.
“Chiiiyo-san,” Rintarou called out to the spotted cat lazing about in the free-standing hammock in the center of his bedroom. She kept on looking at a random spot in the room, not reacting at all. He tried reaching out to pick her up, only for her to smack his hand away with a paw as she let out a cranky meow.
“C’mon, can’t you comfort me once in a while?” Rintarou protested.
When he forced himself into the hammock with her, Chiyo used his face as a springboard, kicking his glasses with her back legs as she jumped down onto the ground. Stepping over the books scattered across the floor, she calmly walked to the corner of the room.
“I mean, I didn’t expect to get hired, but…”
Lying on his back, Rintarou let his limbs go limp. He’d gotten through the first interview fine thanks to the questions fitting the answers he’d practiced ahead of time, but the second interview was basically small talk, and the conversation had died out.
Near the very end, they’d asked him if he had anything he wanted to show them. The conversation might’ve stagnated, but he’d thought he said everything that needed to be said—but saying nothing was essentially admitting that he had no selling points.
The thing that had popped to his mind as he panicked was the shared bookstore Frère. This managed to catch their interest, maybe because it was the first time they’d heard about such a store. But in the end, they told him to keep on trying, in a show of impersonal encouragement. It had been too little too late.
Maybe things would have been different if he’d at least told them how dealing with the shelf owners broadened his world, or that he wanted to suggest a book management system using the things he’d learned in university. But if he’d been the sort of person skilled enough to pull that sort of thing off the top of his head, he wouldn’t have been struggling with interviews in the first place.
Even when he’d done practice interviews with one of his university’s alumni, they’d pointed out that, aside from his poor answers to the questions, he wasn’t even making eye contact. Whenever someone asked him a question that he hadn’t practiced an answer for, his mind would just go blank—he couldn’t even manage an answer when asked what sort of books he’d read recently.
Rintarou let out a sigh along with the heaviness that had sunk to the bottom of his stomach.
“But still, it was a good thing that I managed to even get a second interview. Failing is fine, since there’s nothing I can do about being a bad fit. But I wish I could get myself to spit out ‘I thought things were going fine, so I don’t understand what went wrong’ at least once. The fact that it doesn’t feel like I’m getting anywhere is rough. I wanna tell myself to stop reading all the time and just talk to someone. Right, Chiyo-san?”
Despite being spoken to, the spotted cat didn’t even look his way. When he repeated her name, she gave him a low, annoyed growl. She was rejecting him. She probably didn’t even feel obligated to give Rintarou the time of day in the first place. He’d seen pictures of cats laying with their tummies in the air on social media, but he’d never seen Chiyo do anything that immodest. Her caregiver was nothing but a servant to her, and she didn’t trust him at all.
“And here you went and saw that pretty lady out the door, even though you’d just met her. Just what part of me do you not like, Chiyo-san?”
Rintarou gave up on looking for any response from the cat, turning his eyes to the bookshelves that covered an entire wall in his room. The mountains of books that didn’t fit stacked in front of the shelves looked just like the high-rise buildings towering over the Shinjuku Subcenter.
Most of the pay from his part-time job at a rental car shop went toward constructing those buildings. His feet would unconsciously carry him to bookstores, and once he was inside, he couldn’t leave without buying another book. It was to the point where whenever he got lost in thought, he’d be in a bookstore when he came back down to earth. It was just like how one of his university friends would get sucked into pachinko and slot machines, often finding themselves already playing before they even realized it.
“Aaanyway, how ’bout I read to take my mind off things?”
Rintarou reached out to a pile of books from his spot in the hammock. Just brushing it with his fingertips was enough to knock it over, and Chiyo walked over as if to laugh at him. He’d decided that once he graduated university, he’d move out of his family home no matter where he was in his job search. He needed to get rid of some books to prepare for that, but he just kept getting more.
“Rintarou, c’mere for a second!” he heard a high-pitched voice call from the first floor. Rushing down the stairs, he found his mother, Kimiko, wearing a knit dress he’d never seen before. She pointed at a paper bag sitting in the entranceway with a scowl. “I told you not to leave books laying around.”
“But those are the ones I’m bringing to the bookstore tomorrow…”
His murmur should have reached her ears, but she just told him to take them back upstairs before spraying air freshener around the entranceway. Slippers pattering, she raced back to the living room.