Kozue had been panicking for the past month.
How should she approach him?
Where should she look?
How should she act?
She grew despondent, and her blood was boiling—but not from hatred, which was far too simple a word for what she was feeling. This was a buildup of various emotions. Kozue felt as if she had a bunch of poisons in her gut that a Bunsen burner was slowly bringing to a boil.
But you’d never know that from looking at her. Kozue had to act normal, although she’d forgotten what a normal expression looked like.
Oh, right. Sunglasses. I’ll just put on my sunglasses. That way, he can’t see my eyes when I look at him, thought Kozue. That’s it. I’ll just look at him through some sunglasses!
She formed circles with her fingers, which she held in front of her eyes like a pair of glasses. She looked left and right, then broke into a toothy smile just like she did when greeting the neighbors.
Kozue then peered into the hand mirror lying on her desk and stared at her reflection. She did a lot of things while she was alone in her room. It was a childhood habit that stuck with her even now at age twenty-eight. She would talk to herself, do impersonations…
“You moron!”
…and secretly call people names. Sometimes, her gestures were meaningless. She would even karate chop the air…
“Hiiiyah!”
…and add sound effects like she was cutting someone down. Somehow, that always left her feeling refreshed. No one in her family knew she did any of this.
When she read a book and tears started to well in her eyes, curiosity would occasionally get the best of her.
I wonder what my face looks like when I’m crying.
Then she’d gaze into her hand mirror, staring hard at each tear escaping the corners of her eyes. She would even forget about whatever had happened in the book she was reading and start crying again because of how pathetic she looked.
Sometimes, the tears flowed when she listened to tapes on her cassette player. Kozue was the kind of woman who would lean against her bookcase on her knees and wipe her tears, wondering, Do I look pretty right now? Is my stomach sticking out? while looking down at her belly and sucking it in, then squeezing her rolls.
If only I wasn’t like this…
She was still doing the same things at age twenty-eight that she’d done in middle school. Kozue did a lot of different things when she was alone, but she acted totally normal whenever she was in public or with her family (her family being her mother and sister, since her father had passed away three years ago). She worked hard to come across as a well-rounded young woman, and she felt she’d been pulling it off somehow.
That is, until one month ago.
“Kozue, I’m getting married,” her younger sister, Midori, had suddenly announced at the dinner table. That was when Kozue’s life came crashing down, to put it dramatically.
Midori was twenty-six and worked as a designer for a line of high-end women’s clothing at a department store in Osaka. She used to talk about her dreams of spinsterhood and having her own store, which she was going to call Haute Couture Midori.
That was where she differed from Kozue, who went to a run-of-the-mill junior college and ended up not finding work until an acquaintance of her father got her a job as an office clerk for a company that sold fountain pens. It was a small, family-friendly enterprise, and although it was a pleasant job, the pay left much to be desired. Several young men worked there as well, but they were usually out all day meeting clients. For the most part, Kozue was left alone in the office with the elderly accounting manager and another man, who seemed to be a department head. Nonetheless, she’d been at this job for seven or eight years already.
I want to get married one day, Kozue thought as the years went on. I’m still a kid at heart, though.
She figured she knew exactly who she was. She liked the idea of getting married but had never really acted on it. That might be cause for concern to some parents, but Kozue’s father had passed away, and her mother was now working part-time, so the days simply continued to pass idly by. And yet the thought kept vaguely surfacing:
I’m definitely gonna get married one day.
Her mother was never especially strict about these things, but marriage was a major milestone, so as inexperienced as Kozue was, that seemed like the natural course of action to her. She figured her real life was going to start when she got married, which was why she never expected to be working at this small company for another seven or eight years.
But still, Kozue didn’t feel like she’d been single for all that long. In her mind, only two or three years had passed since she’d graduated college. There was never a shortage of young men at her workplace, yet for some reason, they seemed to be getting younger by the year. And when she talked to them about the most recent trends, like music or movies…
“Man, that’s so old. That was popular, like, four or five years ago.”
…they turned out to be not so recent, after all.
Hmm… Guess I am getting old, Kozue thought. I’m twenty-eight now.
That made her ponder things more seriously. But whenever she tried to get serious, her mind ended up high in the clouds, gently floating skyward like a balloon whose string had been cut.
She would look at wedding dresses featured in fashion magazines and daydream.
“I like the frilly collar on this one and the sleeves on that one.”
I’m never gonna meet any young guys at this job. Too many old men. I’ve gotta do something, Kozue thought time after time, but that was nothing more than a fantasy. Diligent as she was, Kozue got up every morning and headed to work as if her fate was set in stone. The company was located in Shinsaibashi on the south side of Osaka, so working in such a lively part of the city was enough to make Kozue happy. And whenever she saw a good-looking guy, she would naturally imagine their marriage and everything that followed. Yet the thought of talking to any of them never once crossed her mind.
Even if her relatives moved on—even if she lost touch with them—even if there were two spinsters in the family, no one would bother to set Kozue up with a man.
Kozue’s mother didn’t seem to have the energy to worry about Kozue getting married anymore, either. She’d already used half her husband’s retirement money to remodel the house.
“I’ll just rent out the second floor. Between that and my pension, I should be able to manage on my own.”
She was focused on her own post-retirement stability, when Kozue and Midori would be out of the nest. Their mother was optimistic in that sense, convinced that both of them would get married by then. Perhaps Kozue thought along the same lines.
She was childlike in nature, which might explain why people always thought she was younger. That was her only redeeming feature. Men never approached her, maybe because she lacked sex appeal.
Kozue had a round forehead and full, pale cheeks. Below her small, downturned eyes were thin lips and a tiny nose. Her thick neck was also very pale, and her hands were still dimpled. She was plump in every sense of the word. The elderly accounting manager at her job would tell her she was beautiful, but Kozue always thought she looked like one of those otafuku masks—in other words, very plain. But she was used to her looks, and there wasn’t any part of her that she hated. Kozue was proud of her smooth, glowing skin and liked it very much, but if there was one thing she could change, she’d have higher-set eyes. She looked at herself in her hand mirror and decided she might as well get double-eyelid surgery. Kozue thought she could get it over and done with if she just went to a plastic surgeon, but she lacked the determination to follow through on it. However, Kozue never felt that was a bad thing.