Now that he was thinking about it, Naruto could smell something kind of burnt wafting over from the kitchen. He imagined the blackened frying pan and the dirty dishes filling the sink. “Well then, your dad here’ll figure something out for supper today. For now, though, let me sleep a bit.” An inadvertent yawn spilled out of his mouth. “You’re still tired, too, right, Himawari? You gotta get a real sleep in your futon, not out on this hard floor. Woh-kay! How about I carry you to your room?” He moved to wrap his arms around his daughter.
“No!” She pushed him back, fierce in her rejection.
“Huh?” Her unexpected reaction threw him for a serious loop.
“You can’t sleep!” Himawari brandished the flyer again. The Nine Tails! Kuraa-ma! flyer. “Let’s go buy this right now, okay?”
“Uh. Oh.” Naruto was reassured that that was all it was. “Got it. But later. I’m totally wiped right now.”
“Later’s no good! Look! See here?” Himawari pointed to a part of the flyer: “Special sale! Family Day only!” A campaign to take advantage of the holiday. Had one of the merchants filling his office come up with this? The sly ways they sniffed out every opportunity to make a sale would make even a ninja user of ocular jutsu click their tongue for shame. “See? We can’t buy it except for today!”
“There’s nothing you can only buy today. If you just hang on until your next birthday, I’ll get ya a couple toys like that. Or ka-wham! A whole mountain of ’em. Believe it.”
“Noooo!” Himawari, rejected again, let loose a scream that echoed piercingly in his sleep-deprived head.
He winced. “It’s just Daddy is…”
The hand brandishing the flyer started to drop slowly, and his daughter’s eyes were sharp as she glared up at him. “You never keep your promises.”
“Hngh!” The words were a straight punch right in the gut. He desperately wanted to deny it, but sadly, Himawari was right. He’d promised to take her out more than once, but then when he still had work left on his plate, he’d sent a shadow doppelganger for her. And then the jutsu had come undone and he’d been found out.
“Tr-trust your dad,” he said anyway. “I’ll definitely take you out to play later. Okay?”
Himawari puffed her cheeks up, sulking, and said nothing in reply.
“Ha ha… Ha.” Naruto stepped out of the entryway with a hoarse laugh and moved toward his own room. One step, two steps, Himawari’s eyes boring into his back the whole time. His steps gradually grew smaller until Naruto stopped at five. He set his hands on his hips and took a deep breath, face toward the ground.
“Hah!” He slapped his cheeks as hard as he could.
“D-Daddy?”
He turned back toward a surprised Himawari and gave a big, winning smile. “I’m just gonna go take a quick shower. You go and get ready, too, okay?”
Himawari blinked rapidly. “Okay!” She quickly smiled and ran off to her own room upstairs.
After hearing the door close, Naruto slapped his cheeks again, this time even harder than before.
“What the…”
Standing in front of Masuda Toys, the toy store in the old part of town, Naruto was speechless. Masuda couldn’t begin to compare with the larger retailer in the new town in terms of square footage or variety of merchandise. But unlike the larger store, which ordered in toys indiscriminately, Masuda maintained an assortment of goods that never failed to be exactly what children were looking for. If it was the latest video game that was suddenly all the rage, they would throttle back orders when the children started to lose interest. Or else they’d pivot and focus their sales on some character merchandise everyone else expected to flop, and so they were occasionally the origin of new trends.
Masuda was Naruto’s preferred purveyor of toys. Not so much because of their sales savvy and curated lineup, but because—more than anything else—it was close to the house. Every time he passed by, he would remember Himawari’s excitement about the toys or little Boruto’s joy at getting any present at all, and his heart would grow warmer.
And now Masuda was blocked from sight by a throng of people, all of them pressed up against the store as though they were protesting it for some reason. The majority gathered were housewives Naruto’s age and a little older. Strained voices rose up from the crowd.
“Hey! Hurry up and open already!”
“How long you planning on making us wait?! What’re you going to do if our legs turn to stone standing out here?! Our legs turn to stone, and we’re basically stone puppets, yeah? Are you saying you want to use us for shuriken practice?!”
“You know what we call this? A daimyo shop! Da! I! Myo! Getting too big for your britches, huh, Masuda?!”
Incidentally, it was still early morning, before the store’s usual business hours.
Naruto watched from a distance as he turned to Himawari next to him, her eyes similarly wide. “It can’t be that everyone here—they all came because of that flyer?”
“Prob’ly, Yeah. Kuraa-ma’s super popular right now.”
“Huh,” was all Naruto could say in response, overwhelmed by the fiery heat of the housewives.
“L-ladies! Please calm down!” The plaintive plea reached his ears, clear even in the sea of angry cries. It was the Masuda shop clerk. She stood in front of the shutters, cowering like a rabbit surrounded by a pack of lions. “The store will be opening soon! To avoid crowding inside, please enter the shop one at a time! I’ll ask you to form a queue now, so the person at the front—”
“A queue? You’ve got to be kidding me!”
“That’s right! Can you definitively say who was first or second?”
“N-no… That’s…” The clerk cowered further.
“Yeah! Are you going to make things right if some idiot who came along later lines up ahead of me?!”
“In that case, I’ll distribute numbers via a lottery,” the clerk suggested. “So the person who gets the first—”
“A lottery! Ha! Don’t give us that! My kid’s at home, dying to have this thing! Now hurry up and open the store!”
“Right! Open it!” came the voices in agreement. Their children had apparently begged them for a Kuraa-ma, and so they had all been waiting in front of the shop since daybreak.
I guess this is what they mean when they say mothers are strong, he thought, pained—or rather, filled with trepidation. He had a vision of the shop clerk being crushed before his eyes by the throng of mothers. So buying the Kuraa-ma means slipping past this scary group of moms to get inside the store?