It was already after eight. We sat on small cushions on the restaurant’s tatami floor, which was recessed underneath our table so we could stretch our legs out, and we greedily snagged food at our leisure from the shared hot pot between us. Steam rose from the motsunabe stew, a mixture of beef offal, cabbage, and garlic chives that was known around Japan but originated in this region. I would attest that normal cuts are better than offal, hands down, but the motsunabe tasted good enough to keep me from corroborating it at the moment. My companion was more noisy.
“It’s good to be alive!” she said.
“That’s the truth,” I replied.
I drank the broth straight from my bowl; it was rich and delicious.
Before we went to the restaurant, we started at the shopping district where I got clothes at the Uniqlo, then we simply wandered about. She said she wanted to buy some sunglasses, so we went to an eyeglass store. I found a book store, so we went in there, too. Even just taking in the sights of an unfamiliar city’s streets was pretty fun. We came upon a park and chased after the pigeons. We tried a famous local confection right where it was made. The time passed faster than we knew.
As night fell, rows of open air food stands set up shop in numbers unseen elsewhere in the country. The cozy, inviting spaces drew our eyes as we walked, but we stuck with her plan and soon arrived at the motsunabe restaurant she’d chosen. Either due to luck or to this being a weekday, we were quickly seated in the busy restaurant.
She boasted, “Good thing I got us in,” but she hadn’t made a reservation or done anything at all. Whatever the reason we were able to get in, it had nothing to do with her.
During dinner, we didn’t talk about anything substantial. She praised the food from start to finish while I quietly munched away. Thanks to the lack of disruptive chatter, I was enjoying my meal to its full extent. Food that good deserved uninterrupted focus.
But soon she opened that disruptive mouth of hers. It was when a server came to deliver the second course, by way of dropping Chinese noodles into our rich and savory broth.
She said, “Now we’re two people poking at the same hot pot.”
“You mean like two people eating rice from the same pot?”
“It’s a step beyond that. I never shared a hot pot with my boyfriend.”
Her laugh was higher and louder than normal; that was because now she had alcohol running through her blood. The high-school-aged girl had brazenly ordered a glass of white wine with our meal. She asked for the drink with such confidence that no one working the restaurant questioned her. They could have called the police to save me instead.
She was in an even better mood than usual, and she wanted to talk about herself more than she normally did. That was fine with me; I liked listening to other people talk more than I liked speaking myself.
I don’t exactly recall how we got to the subject, but she began talking about her ex-boyfriend who was in our class.
“He’s a really good guy. He asked me out, and he was nice and my friend, so I thought, why not? Well, I’ll tell you why not. It made everything messy. You know how I tend to speak exactly what’s on my mind? Sometimes I’d be a little blunt, and he’d get pissed off right away, and we’d fight, and he just wouldn’t let it go. Sometimes you can be fine with someone as a friend, but as soon as you start spending a little more time together, you can’t stand them.”
She took a drink of wine. I listened quietly, not having any similar experience with which to empathize.
“Kyōko approved of him, too. He’s a pleasant guy, on the surface at least.”
I said, “He doesn’t sound like anybody I’d have reason to get along with.”
“Probably not. I mean, Kyōko liked him, but she doesn’t want anything to do with you, so what does that say?”
“Aren’t you worried saying something like that could hurt my feelings?”
“Did it?” she asked.
“It didn’t. I try to stay away from her, too, so the feeling is mutual.”
Her tone changed, and she looked at me straight on. “I hope you and Kyōko will be able to get along together after I die.”
Since she seemed serious, I acquiesced and said, “I’ll think about it.”
“Please,” she added. That one word carried some weight. I had nearly convinced myself her friend and I would never get along in a million years, but now my confidence in that was shaken. Just a little.
After we’d had our fill of the motsunabe stew, I stepped outside while she paid. I didn’t protest, as we’d finally come to an agreement: I would leave all the paying to her, but I would repay later for all my share.
The nighttime breeze felt good on my face. The restaurant was air-conditioned, but the AC couldn’t hold its own against the numerous, simmering hot pots.
My companion came out from the restaurant and said, “It feels great out here!”
“At least the night is still cool down south.”
“It sure is. Well, I guess we should head to the hotel.”
Earlier in the afternoon, I’d asked her where we were staying. It was a fairly high-end place adjacent to the bullet train station, and apparently the hotel was well-known within the prefecture. Originally, she’d planned to get us a couple of rooms at a cheap business hotel, but when she told her parents about it, they pitched in some money, reasoning that if she was insisting on going on a trip, she may as well stay somewhere nice. She didn’t fight it. Of course, that meant half the money had been intended for her friend and not for me, but that wasn’t my fault.
We arrived at the train station and found the hotel really was right next to it. I hadn’t doubted the map, but the place just felt closer in reality than in the abstract.
The only reason I wasn’t overwhelmed by the lobby’s elegant opulence was because I’d seen pictures in my classmate’s travel magazine. If I hadn’t come mentally prepared, I might have been dumbstruck and fallen prostrate before her. That would have inflicted a grievous injury to the small shred of self-respect I possessed. Good thing I’d gotten my surprise out of the way with the magazine instead.
Even if I was able to escape getting on my hands and knees, I still felt uneasy amid the setting, which was simply beyond my stature. I left the check-in to her and sat on a sofa in the classy lobby and waited. The sofa was roomy and comfortable.
She strode confidently to the check-in counter like she’d done this many times before, and the hotel staff all bowed to her from their stations. I thought, No way she’s growing up to be a decent, upstanding adult, but then I remembered she wasn’t ever going to be any kind of adult at all.
I drank cold, bottled tea that was as blatantly out of place in these environs as I was. I had a vantage point from off to the side of the check-in counter, and I could watch both sides of the exchange.
At the counter, my companion was helped by a slender young man with swept-back hair who looked every bit the part of a hotel clerk.
As she began filling out some paperwork, I felt a little sorry for the trouble the receptionist was about to go through in dealing with her. I couldn’t hear their conversation, but when she returned the paper to the receptionist, he gave her a pleasant smile, turned to his computer, and began typing. He had good posture. It looked like he found the reservation in the computer, because he turned to her again and spoke to her politely.
But she looked surprised and shook her head from side to side. The receptionist’s expression stiffened, and he worked at the computer some more, then spoke again. She shook her head once more, then took her backpack from her shoulders, pulled out a piece of paper from within, and handed it to the man.
He looked back and forth between the paper and the computer monitor before frowning and withdrawing to a back room. She was left there to wait, like I was doing, until the clerk eventually returned with an older gentleman in tow. No sooner had they arrived than they began to bow to her repeatedly.
From that point on, the older man was the one to speak with her, and he did so with apologies written into his every mannerism. She regarded him with an uneasy smile.
As I observed the scene from beginning to end, I speculated as to what was going on. The most reasonable explanation was that the hotel had made an error and failed to properly hold the reservation; but I had trouble reconciling that with her smile. Whatever the case, I decided to remain calm, because in situations like this, the hotel staff were bound to make things right. If we needed to, we could find an internet café or somewhere else to pass the night.
She kept sending me quick glances while holding that uneasy smile. For no particular reason, I nodded to her. I hadn’t meant anything by it, but when she saw my nod, she said something to the apologetic hotel staff.
Their faces immediately brightened. They kept on bowing, but this time, they appeared to be thanking her. At the time, I just felt glad everything had been resolved. A few minutes later, I’d want to go back to this moment in time and punch myself. Like I’ve said many times before, I sorely lacked crisis management skills.
The hotel staff handed her some things—probably the room keys and whatever came with them—and they continued to bow as she approached me. I looked up at her and said, “Looks like they gave you some trouble,” as my way of thanks.
She responded with a series of facial expressions. First, she puckered her lips, then looked embarrassed and uncertain, then she looked at me, eyes blinking, as if she were trying to read me. Finally, she replaced all that with a smile.
“Ummm,” she said. “So, here’s the thing. There was a bit of a mix up.”
“Okay,” I replied.
“They ran out of the kind of rooms that we booked.”
“So that’s what that was about.”
“Yeah, and…because it was their fault, they gave us an upgrade.”
“That sounds nice.”
“Yeah, well…” She held out a single room key that dangled from her fingers. “We have to share a room. But that’s not a problem, right?”
That took a minute to register, and when it did, all I could say was a tactless, “Huh?”