What started as a three-paragraph anecdote about life in Japan turned into a short story. I don’t know. Maybe I miss writing Elliot Oldcastle adventures. (Actually in the end, it was a bit like "
The Eye of Odin and the End of Reflection." Which is very weird and stands as a warning of why you shouldn't mix Neil Gaiman with John Updike and Frank Viola.)
The Seamstress and the Baker
I don’t remember her name. It’s just as well. I’d have to change it anyway given the crimes she was accused of. For now, we can dub her “S-san.” She was a student at the local
eikaiwa, or English conversation school in my town. Actually, “student” doesn’t feel like the right word, since she was older, like most of the other adults there in their forties and fifties, housewives and businessmen.
S-san worked in her own atelier shop, as a kind of seamstress (
couturière?) who took up alterations and the like. And it just so happened that her shop was right beneath the English school. The word about her was that she had some kind of on-going grudge against the wife of the school administrator. I don’t even remember what was the source of the conflict. Some petty squabble probably that just grew out of proportion. What I know of the administrator’s wife, whom we’ll call H-san, is that she was always very sweet and kind. It was hard to imagine anyone getting upset with her. At any rate, this was a small town and it was pretty inevitable that these two would naturally run into each other at various places.
Well, this bitter feeling must have seethed and hardened in S-san for a while until it got to the point that she would scream at H-san and one time, as the story goes, she was driving down the street and nearly ran over H-san who was on the sidewalk. Some kind of murderous rage apparently. Somewhere around this time I believe she also quit taking classes at the school.
Needless to say, this whole attempted voluntary manslaughter incident made things a bit awkward for us teachers. I personally had never met her face-to-face. I did on the other hand have a summer trip to India coming up and had a backpack that had a loose strap. Being fairly new to Japan and having precious little linguistic ability, S-san was the only seamstress I had run into. It’s likely other ladies I knew might have been able to sew the thick fabric back together. Maybe I had already asked around and no one seemed inclined to help out (rather likely). Maybe I was just in a rush and the convenient location of her shop was convincing enough.
Stealing up my courage and braving the stench of brimstone, I looked casually through the glaze windows to see if she was inside. There were plenty of dresses and spools of cloth and snippings and clippings on the floor, but nothing I could see of her. At last, I knocked on the door and entered the lair of the she-demon.
The interior was but dimly lit. Tables and work benches were strewn with drapery and measuring tape and long, sharp shears. There was some sound at the back and what must have been Japanese for “I’ll be right with you.” I sniffed the air and waited, hovering near the door and eyeing the shears. If there was blood encrusted on the blade, I couldn’t see it. I didn't have to.
Eventually she appeared, looking rather like an ordinary Japanese lady, no horns or fangs or anything. At least not in the daylight. I held up my backpack and gestured stupidly to the strap and how it was just barely holding together, dangling by a few strands. My eyes inquired with a child-like touch, “You can do? You help fix Daniel’s backpack?” She squinted her understanding and looked it over, then indicated that she could have it done in an hour and a half. It was a mercy she didn't smile. She was clenching needles at the corner of her mouth, the way a carpenter holds spare nails.
Oh, thanks very much, I nodded. Smiling, I backed toward the exit.
It was about five o’clock. That left me with just about an hour and a half of time to kill. Rather than stand around like a doof, I decided I might as well to meander up the street and explore around a bit. The road wound its curious way up and around, taking me past the “31” ice cream parlor, the library, various apartments and housing units, and then before an odd wooden cavernous structure that seemed rather out of place. I can’t really describe it adequately, except to say that that the beams were tall enough and the area deep enough to suggest some kind of entrance to a club or restaurant. Nearby that I saw a bakery and went in.
Here I was met with a more typical encounter. The store employees began chattering earnestly at me. They seemed quite apologetic. In return, I tilted my head.
Finally I was made to understand that the store hours were actually over and the shop was closed. I apologized (not anywhere nearly as well as they did) and started to leave when they chattered away again with a renewed sense of urgency.
I was given a warm loaf of bread for the road, just because. Well, maybe they noticed the starving look in my eye and gave it in the way one says to a stray, ‘We’re sorry our shop closed too soon.’ That is, ‘Please enjoy our tasty bread, and don’t forget to look at the store hours printed on my glass doors next time.’
The sky outside had started to cloud over with dusk, the evening light pinched an amber-red. Scraggy black shapes, caricatures of crows, dotted the power lines, cawing like broken instruments. Walking back to the atelier, I wondered at the experience at the bakery. What fine folks. I couldn’t imagine such hospitality in the States. I arrived at S-san’s workshop, tried to see if she was inside or finishing with her scrying stone.
Inside, she greeted me and showed the tight stitching on my backpack. She seemed like someone used to quietness, which was understandable, since I couldn’t speak any Japanese. I politely managed to keep from asking her about nearly driving over the administrator’s wife and instead asked how much I owed her. Instead, she merely waved me off. Don’t worry about it, she insisted.
I insisted I had to pay her something. I had no prior relationship with her to merit it and didn’t want to take advantageous of her. She was unmoved.
Finally, I pulled out the freshly-baked loaf of bread and placed it before her. “
Sumimasen - arigatou gozaimasu,” I bowed, and left the shop feeling like every foreigner there at one point or another, at once acutely aware of their foreignness and the confusing and at times macabre nature of their hosts, and yet also strangely welcomed as a hapless wayfarer in from the cold.
P.S. Oh, wait, I guess I did take a picture of the cavernous entrance to that restaurant(?) after all.
