Her former colleagues had told her repeatedly that she shouldn’t be the one to quit, but she had protested, claiming that it was too painful.
Putting on a brave face and smiling through it had been her final act of aggression. Her superiors had regretfully accepted her letter of resignation. Shoko didn’t give a damn what happened with her ex-fiancé and the woman who had stolen him away.
Shoko’s quitting meant that the two of them got their wish and wouldn’t have to see her any more, and that her colleagues’ sympathy for her and their memory of the scandal would fade as the proverbial seventy-five days passed.
It wasn’t only the atmosphere of Obayashi that had appealed to Shoko – the neighbourhood turned out to be very livable. It was the perfect halfway point between Umeda and Sannomiya, a thirty-minute trip to either Osaka or Kobe.
There were plenty of supermarkets and convenience stores, and her rent was quite reasonable. Shoko had told the real estate broker what she could afford to spend, and she ended up having too many options to choose from.
Ultimately, the broker found her a charming studio apartment that was a five-minute walk from the station, where the rent was even lower than what Shoko had originally proposed.
Her new workplace was rewarding. Or, perhaps more to the point, she seemed to have discovered that working in sales suited her.
Depending upon her workload, her weekend schedule was sometimes uncertain, but since she happened to be single at the moment and her friends were often busy, she didn’t feel especially inconvenienced by not always having the entire weekend to herself.
Today, a Saturday, wasn’t busy so she only had to work a half-day, and since she didn’t have any particular plans for the rest of the day, she had been on her way home. Perhaps she ought to have done a bit of shopping in Sannomiya, that way she would have avoided finding herself in the same train carriage as that gaggle of older ladies.
All the same, it was a first to have one of them throw her bag onto the seat just as Shoko was about to sit down. Any anger was overtaken by shock. The young female college student sitting nearby appeared to have the same response. They were both stunned.
The female college student seemed to have a strong sense of fairness, and was about to demonstrate it, but Shoko knew that it was more prudent to steer clear of her.
The bag-tosser among them seemed like the type to be spoiling for a pointless confrontation, all in the name of preparing for a pack attack. Shoko could easily imagine it descending into an unseemly mudslinging match in front of everyone. She was loath to be drawn into such a scene, and she certainly wouldn’t want to subject the female college student to something like that either.
Shoko had silenced her with a wave of her hand and the whispered comment, What a waste of a nice handbag, and the student, reading the situation, had reconsidered and composed herself.
Shoko had simply moved on, several cars further down, to stand near the door that, upon arriving at Obayashi Station, would be positioned directly by the staircase.
She remained slightly concerned about whether, after she had left, the student might get into a squabble with the ladies. But as the landscape that rushed by shifted from ‘city’ to ‘village’, Shoko’s worry receded. Beyond Koto’en, where the scenery became noticeably more serene, was her favourite part of the railway line.
‘See, look! See the withered bracken?’
A couple who looked like students had boarded at Koto’en, and the girl – much shorter than the guy – said this excitedly as she pointed at the slope of the railway cutting at the first crossing past the station.
‘Yeah, that’s definitely bracken. So?’
The tall guy, who had sort of a punk look, nodded. Something was at odds about their appearance – they didn’t seem like they were from the Kansai area. Shoko concluded that they were pointing at the brownish, hunched and withered ferns on the slope.
Really? So those are bracken?
Shoko, who had grown up in the city, had only ever registered bracken as something that might appear as part of an early course in a kaiseki meal. Similarly, when she ordered sansai soba with edible wild plants, she could never tell which was bracken and which was royal fern, or wasn’t sure if those sliced vegetables with the hole in the middle were bamboo shoots or something else.
But these two could identify those withered plants as bracken, when they were out of season and quite different from what they looked like when cooked and served. Shoko eyed the couple with newfound respect.
The girl said that once spring came around she wanted to go and pick the bracken, and the guy said absolutely not, no way should she try to get down a forty-five-degree slope like that … it was bittersweet for Shoko to listen in on their amusing exchange.
Bitter, because she envied their youth.
She missed what happened next in their discussion to merit the guy suddenly flicking his girl’s forehead. The girl might have protested but, to an outsider’s perspective, it was clear what was going on.
When the boyfriend had looked away from her, his cheeks were such a deep shade of vermilion, it looked as if the colour had been painted on with a brush. His girlfriend must have said something especially endearing to him. He was so much taller that, by huddling close to her, she wouldn’t be able to see the colour of his cheeks – he was using his height to hide his embarrassment – though when they got off at Nigawa, she still seemed a little unhappy.
After they disembarked, the train sped on towards Obayashi. Shoko had never actually timed it but she had the sense that the interval between Nigawa and Obayashi was the longest distance between stops along the Imazu Line. The landscape became more and more mountainous and, to Shoko who had only ever lived in urban environments, their vividness was still a novelty. Despite what it may have felt like, the train line was rather compact – on a bicycle, from Obayashi to Nigawa was only about a ten-minute ride, and probably not even half an hour to get to Nishinomiya-Kitaguchi.
Before reaching Obayashi Station, the train pitched sharply. Maybe the driver was a rookie because the braking wasn’t smooth at all and Shoko, caught off guard, had to hastily grab onto a strap to keep her balance.
But she had chosen her spot perfectly and, in the station, the door opened right in front of the staircase. As Shoko stepped off the train, a chorus of high-pitched screams came rushing down the stairs.
It was a group of girls wearing yellow caps and red randoseru backpacks, probably in their first or second year of elementary school.
It had seemed like they were rushing to catch the train, but there was something else going on. They darted behind the staircase, towards the rear of the platform where there was an escalator, and stood there snickering.
Despite their young age, there was already a teenage spitefulness in the way they laughed, and Shoko knitted her brows together.
Unaware that there was an adult on the other side of the staircase observing and listening to their antics, the girls started talking conspiratorially. Their voices were fairly loud for sharing secrets, probably because of their excitement.
‘OK, A-chan, you hide here! Then when B-san comes along, we’ll pretend not to know where you are and we’ll make her leave!’
‘Uh, OK …’ The one being made to hide, presumably A-chan, sounded confused.
Shoko sensed someone coming and looked up to see that a girl had stopped midway down the stairs. She too had on a yellow cap and a red randoseru backpack. This must have been B-san.
B-san had a sort of tense look on her face as she came down the rest of the stairs. She passed by Shoko and headed towards the other girls.
Shoko leaned casually against the stairs’ handrail, curious to see how this would play out.
‘Oh, B-san!’ exclaimed the girl who seemed to be the leader of the pack, her voice sweet and fake. ‘If you’re looking for A-chan, I think she left without you! We were looking for her too, she must have taken the earlier train?’