Chapter Text
The fallen blossom cannot return to the branch.
A broken mirror cannot be made to shine.
Time has no borders except those people make. On this particularly cold autumn day, Nakakita Yuma fashioned that border out of the thinnest layer of skin. Eyelids were useful that way. Because as long as he kept her eyelids shut, he could keep the two halves of his life apart: the twenty- one years he had lived before he opened his eyes, and all that was going to happen next.
He pulled his blanket over his head and pretended that his hungover first morning as the pawnshop’s new owner had yet to begin. It didn’t matter that he was now wide awake, that the
last of a tangled string of dreams he could not remember had unraveled more than an hour ago. His head felt heavier and his mouth drier than usual, but he figured that this was less on account of the alcohol he’d had the night before than on what awaited him.
In a few moments, his father, Takashi, was going to knock on his door to start their day.
Yuma insisted on clinging to the tiny hope that the unwise amount of sake they had celebrated his father’s retirement with was going to keep him in bed a little longer. This hope— if it indeed could be called hope given its size— was smaller than a mossy river pebble and just as slippery.
In all the years that the pawnshop had been in Takashi’s charge, there were only two occasions when it had not opened on time. On both those days, it had not opened at all. But Yuma and his father didn’t talk about those two days. Ever.
If their pawnshop were like other ordinary pawnshops that traded in diamonds, silver, and gold, the Nakakita family, who has run the pawnshop for generations, might have had the luxury of sick days and weekends. But Takashi had trained Yuma to appraise far more valuable treasure.
They found their best clients when summer ended and the nights grew colder and longer. Melancholy was good for business. It didn’t matter that their little shop, tucked along a quiet alley of Tokyo’s Asakusa district, didn’t have a name. Those who required its services always managed to find it. But, if anyone was curious to ask Yuma what he thought the pawnshop should be called, he had a ready answer. Ikigai. There was no other word that suited it more.
Yuma was a little more than a year old when he learned to walk on the shop’s dark wooden floors, and every step he had taken since then had been toward taking over the shop when his father retired. He was a widower, and Yuma was his only heir. The pawnshop was his life’s path, his singular purpose. His Ikigai. But not once, in all the time that sh had played as a toddler at her father’s feet or worked by his side as a young man, had any of their clients bothered to inquire what the pawnshop’s name was. They had far more urgent questions darting behind their eyes when Takashi welcomed them with a polite bow. The first was almost always about where they were, and the second about how they had gotten there.
After all, no one expected to find a pawnshop behind a ramen resturant’s door.
Anyone who stood in line outside the long-standing popular restaurant would tell you that its shoyu ramen was the best in the Taito prefecture. For some, the wafting scent of steaming bowls of chijijrimen noodles and the perfectly braised slices of pork belly swimming in a dark and rich bone broth made waiting easier. For others, it made their time in the snaking queue feel twice as long. Still, they all drew deep breaths, taking their fill of the air’s savory promise until it was their turn to enter the cramped dining room that might have been considered modern two decades ago. Yellowed walls plastered with autographed photos of the restaurants celebrity clientele welcomed them as they weaved their way to empty seats. But, despite stepping through it’s door, some of the hungry did not make it into the restaurant’s dining room. Instead, they were greeted by a pawnshop’s dimly lit front office and the tinkling of a little copper door chime.
The memory of that chime rang in Yuma’s head as he curled beneath his blanket. It commanded her to rise and accept the inevitable. He clamped his palms over his ears and fough a losing battle to keep his mind from getting out of bed ahead of him. Some of his thoughts were already almost dressed, fastening the last buttons of the pawnshop’s crisp black suit uniform. Others were already at the office beneath his room, imagining how his father was going to spend the first day of his retirement: hovering close, double-checking everything he did.
He would not say anything if he caught a mistake. He never did. The slightest twitch of his right elbow sufficed. Takashi preferred silence to words, reserving his energy and breath for clients. Yuma had become rather adept at interpreting his quiet breathing, half smiles, and glances. His only memory of him losing his temper was of a stormy afternoon when he was ten and had misplaced a pawned antique watch. His eyes had grown darker than the clouds churning above their home’s courtyard garden, and when he gripped Yuma his thin shoulders and lowered his mouth to his ear, Yuma’s heart dropped to his toes. His voice was as quiet as the breeze, but his words howled inside Yuma louder than any typhoon.
Find it.
Now.
Yuma did not know what would would have happened if he had not found the watch later that day behind a stack of books in the back room. All he was certain of was that he never wanted to hear her father speak to her that way again.
Yuma drew a ragged breath, reeling her thoughts back to the present. An invisible weight pushed down on his chest. He had expected his future to feel heavier, or at least heavier than a well-fed cat, but instead the pile of days teetering on top of her chest felt as light as a mountain made of mere husks, each hollowed out and spent before it began. He knew every second of the days that lay ahead of her by heart. After all, he’d spent his life watcthing his father live them. And now his father’s life was his, and from here on, nothing was ever going to be new.
He rolled to his side. The edge of the yellowed photograph peeked from under his pillow. Yuma pulled the faded photo out and squinted at it beneath his blanket.The eyes of a young woman who could have been her twin gazed back at her.
“Good morning Okaa-san,” Yuma greeted the mother he never knew and tucked the only picture he had of her back into its hiding place. He pulled his blanket off and peeped through his dark lashes. A sliver of sunlight pierced his irises. He squeezed his eyes shut and pushed himself out of bed. He didn’t need to see to navigate his bedroom.This room and the pawnshop beneath it made up his entire world, and today, that world felt even smaller.
And quiet.
Yuma cocked his head, straining to hear the familiar clinking of cups and bowls from the kitchen downstairs. But only silence seeped through her door. He bit his bottom lip.
Retirement, he was certain would not be enough to keep a man like Takashi from his rituals. Though the small shrine his father kept in their home honored the spirits, the god his father really worshipped was routine. The steaming cup of roasted green tea he had every morning was sacred, no matter how much sake or whiskey swam inside him from the night before.
Yuma pressed his ear to his door. There were only two possible reasons the pawnshop was this quiet and neither of them was good.