A message arrived from Shikama:
I reunited with a certain old friend. We’ve known each other since elementary school, but we hadn’t seen each other in eleven years. He’s now a student at Hirosaki University.
We met for lunch, over which he shared the news that he’s been offered a position as an assistant professor at Kyoto University. He also brought along his darling sweetheart to introduce. They’re to be married this spring.
Awful, isn’t it?
Thank goodness I awoke in my bed a moment later and realized none of it was true.
It seems the incident with the dreamball has struck a deeper wound in my tender heart than I cared to admit. My soul still has a long road to perfection.
If Shikama wished to wallow in shame over the inadequacies of his mind, that was his prerogative. But it was sheer torture for me to read about now.
I desperately wanted to scream at him, “What about the investigation?!”
✦ ✦ ✦
As you may remember, I’d abandoned my duties at the research lab in the Faculty of Agriculture. Several times a week, I now spent a portion of my day in employ as a delivery person for a local sushi restaurant.
I do not engage in this pursuit under some delusion that certain lessons must be learned outside the ivory tower. Manual labor offers nothing of import to individuals of my caliber. That is to say: I didn’t take this job because I imagined it would elevate me as a human being. I did it to sock away cash.
Still, it would be a lie to say I harbored no gratitude toward the owner and his wife. Having read this far, I’m sure you understand that I’m a very particular individual. In fact, I’m often too particular, to the point that I impede my own progress.
To put it another way, I would not describe myself as quick to adapt to new situations. It’s not a quality I’m ashamed of. If anything, I see it as a strong point. But on occasion, the things we see in ourselves as virtues are regarded by the rest of the world as faults.
Nonetheless, the owner and his wife, who had together operated the restaurant ever since its establishment over a decade ago, immediately accepted my purported fault with an unprecedented degree of patience. You could walk to the ends of Japan and back and not find another employer so considerate. You might even say I looked up to them. The owner’s generosity towered among the highest peaks, and his wife’s ran deeper than the sea. Well, on second thought, that might be going a bit too far.
My duties were manifold, from washing dishes to mixing the vinegar into the rice. But the lion’s share of my shift was spent making deliveries. I straddled a decidedly unfashionable scooter and flitted around the city. Consequently, my knowledge of Kyoto’s winding alleys and crowded neighborhoods had grown ever richer. I was now quite confident that I could burrow my way to anywhere in the city.
Predictably, many of our orders were placed by faculty and students at my university. These deliveries made for a curious experience, as they had me passing through the campus gates more often as a sushi deliveryman than I presently did as a student.
I once took an order to a research lab in the Graduate School of Science where an upperclassman from my club days now studied. His name was Kumada. On seeing me, he had only one thing to say: “Quit messing around and finish your degree.”
I uttered no argument, though I felt Kumada was hardly one to judge. As an undergraduate, he’d been a bit of a legend for having managed to pass only four credits’ worth of classes in his entire second year. The source of his distraction remained shrouded in mystery, but even more intriguing was the unanswered question of precisely which four credits he had barely managed to earn. The mere fact that Kumada had eventually wormed his way into grad school didn’t seem like any reasonable basis for him to trot out on his high horse now.
Another frequent source of orders was from the Faculty of Medicine. The girls there were as beautiful as they were intelligent, clad in their white lab coats as they assiduously applied themselves to their studies. I enjoyed those trips in a masochistic sort of way, as a pitiable student relegated to self-imposed exile.
In short, my simple delivery job was full of experiences that were anything but.