Chapter Text
Kanroji Mitsuri is much too old to be wishing on birthday candles.
In an ordinary year Shinobu would place one candle for each year of Mitsuri’s life at exactly even intervals around the edges of the strawberry shortcake she always requests, but this year Shinobu has other, more grown-up concerns, and so that job is left to the restaurant. The kitchen staff have kindly inserted one measly pink candle into the chocolate lava cake they bring out with tanjoubi omedetou written in chocolate sauce on the top of the plate’s rim and Mitsuri in hiragana written at the bottom, and all of this ought to discourage wish-making. The lighting is low and everyone is dressed for the occasion and Mitsuri, as she has been reminding herself all day, is three entire decades old.
Nevertheless.
She did not let the waiters sing to her, because she cannot have that without remembering the year she was fourteen and her mother and father took Mitsuri by herself to a French restaurant they knew would make her feel fancy and important, then insisted upon telling every waiter and staff member that it was her birthday; Mitsuri proceeded to spill soup down the front of her dress and nearly set the tablecloth ablaze with a decorative candle, and so everyone stared when the waitstaff came over to sing to her, and she has never really recovered from this even sixteen years later. But Kanae, who never listens when she has resolved something to be best, starts to sing just after they’ve left, and when they have finished, and Shinobu shakes her baby’s pudgy hands about in an approximation of jazz hands that makes Mitsuri’s throat tighten with longing, she closes her eyes and thinks: let this be the year I figure it out.
She barely knows what it is, truth be told. Life, probably. A job without coworkers who make her feel like she’s back in high school, a big break, a chance meeting with the kind of man her younger self thought she would have met and married at least five years ago. An apartment cheap enough to warrant moving out. All of it, maybe. Just: it. That this round-numbered year might somehow be the one in which things become clear that were supposed to have done so a long time ago.
Mitsuri is too old to be wishing on birthday candles, after all. She is too old to be living the life of a new graduate, too old to be the only woman at her table of five with no grown-up responsibilities beyond finishing commissions and showing up each morning at the nail salon, and it is about time the rest of it fell into place.
She shimmies a chunk of cake off of the side with her fork to let the molten inside spill out onto her plate and thinks: yes. This has to be the year.
**
It’s pouring when Mitsuri leaves for work the morning after her birthday, which means that everyone there is probably going to be in a very bad mood, and today is going to be a very long one indeed. But she steps onto the first of three trains that will take her to the stop nearest the Paradise Nail Salon in Kichijoji thinking about none of that.
The audiobook narration of the new Deadly Kiss light novel came out today, and for the forty-five minutes it takes to reach Kichijoji Station from the one nearest her family’s home in Azabujuban, it will be her birthday gift to herself to forget about the rain and her coworkers and think of absolutely nothing except Yokiba and Higuchi’s latest undercover mission.
Of course, she read this volume when it came out six months ago, but that is of absolutely no import. Yokiba’s seiyuu narrates the audiobook versions of all of the light novels, and it’s almost like having the anime caught up with-
Mitsuri notices an old woman slumped over an overfilled tote bag giving her a dirty look and realizes she’s probably making a strange face.
She tries to compose herself, at least briefly, but she doesn’t expect it will last. The undercover mission story arc is a favorite on all of the fan message boards for a reason, and if she remembers correctly she’s coming up on the part where they nearly kiss, and quite frankly this is going to be the most she enjoys herself all day until she can go home and work on an art commission for a client desperate enough to hire a no-name freelancer while she listens to the rest of the book. Controlling what her face does when Yokiba’s seiyuu says something terribly provocative in his character’s voice is simply too tall of an order.
It has crossed her minds a couple of times that she is much too old to be acting this way, but the devastatingly suave mystery-solving vampire Yokiba and his plucky human partner, Higuchi Sayaka, are about the most interesting thing Mitsuri has going on just now, and so she makes no effort not to. One has to have one’s pleasures if one is to go into work and be paid far too little to ignore the constant scandalized giggling of one’s coworkers.
Forty-five minutes of this respite is not long enough, but by the time she arrives in Kichijoji and steps out into the street, the rain has slackened enough that the wind doesn’t blow it against her beneath the umbrella, and at least in this way she can walk in pretending that she’s just a tad more optimistic about how this rainy-season Thursday will go than she really feels.
The Paradise Nail Salon is not the kind of place that keeps most of its hires for long. Most of the girls here now are fresh out of beauty school, and most show it in their perpetual giggling and the way they have of forming impenetrable little clusters in which to do it. Either they are easily-amused, Mitsuri thinks, or they have made such a science of mockery that poking fun at each other is an energy source so inexhaustible that if harnessed properly it might avert a global crisis. The earliest arrivals are at it already when she arrives, whispering to each other and giggling as they set up to open.
Mitsuri does her best to think of Yokiba and Higuchi, and to remind herself that at the advanced age of thirty this sort of chicanery ought not to bother her anymore, but it is still with immense relief that she greets Tokuda-san, an elderly regular who often comes in on weekday mornings to have her pedicure redone, when she is the first to arrive after opening.
Even the giggling masses know to leave her to Mitsuri. Tokuda-san is old and has been patronizing the Paradise Nail Salon since it opened, practically, so seniority is something she notices, and Mitsuri is after five years the longest-lasting employee save for the owner. She wants nothing to do with the gigglers; she always glares when they make too much noise, and Mitsuri, in contrast, only ever gets an approving smile and an impossibly easy tip. Consistency, she thinks. None of these girls have been around long enough to build that kind of rapport with the regulars. She is a good first customer to have.
There is a long lull after that, though, as there always is on rainy mornings when all the little old ladies and housewives who usually make weekday morning appointments would rather wait for the rain to let up before running any such errands, and the only customer in the whole place is at Shabana’s station for some heinously complicated gel manicure nobody else could do. This only makes the giggling and clustering worse.
Mitsuri might have an art degree, but it is Shabana Ume who works best in the medium of acrylic nails. Half the pictures of nail art in the binder that Paradise Nail Salon keeps in the waiting area for customers to thumb through for inspiration were Ume’s designs, or else her recreations of designs somebody saw on the internet and asked her to copy. Customers with difficult requests are always sent her way, so of course she would be the only one to find herself occupied through the morning lull.
Mitsuri has never envied her, though. For one it tends to put a target on one’s back to be talented, especially if one has long slender legs and cornflower-blue eyes and a revolving door of rich dates willing to buy expensive dinners whom one manages to slip into every relevant and irrelevant conversation. For another she has obviously worked harder than anyone here for the skill that recommends her to every difficult client. And of course there is her attitude.
It is an excellent thing for her that Ume is so good at what she does, because she has never, in Mitsuri’s hearing, said a single word to a client that was not strictly necessary, and mostly she looks at them – and at everyone, for that matter – like a thousand-legger that appeared in her bathtub just before she intended to turn it on.
Cattiness is not especially inventive; whoever coined the nickname Dolce and Shabana probably could not have done so without a little assistance from the truth. And Mitsuri knows perfectly well from the unimpressed up-down looks Ume gives her sometimes that her judgement is not reserved solely for those who judged her first.
Ume’s never the problem here, little as she goes out of her way to talk to anyone. She isn’t the one who has made the place a battleground of insults exchanged like compliments through a chain of intermediaries like they’re note-passing high schoolers all over again. But she is also probably the coworker most keenly aware that it is rather sad that Mitsuri, thirty and prospectless, awkwardly effusive and as ungracefully sturdy as the truly healthy and robust nearly always are, is nothing more than the second-best manicurist at a semi-hip nail salon.
So Mitsuri tries not to think too much about Ume. It’ll get in her head too much and anyways it is always best not to remember that all of her friends have homes and children and jobs of some real import while her greatest responsibility short of keeping herself alive like everyone must is warning a group of twentysomethings who act like teenagers off of using mocking if clever nicknames for a coworker even she doesn’t much like.
Days move slowly this time of year, dull-colored with the grey cast of heavy clouds hanging low over the city ready to open at any time. Mitsuri takes her lunch break late in the afternoon and eats an egg salad sandwich at the high front counter of Kamado Pan a few doors down, swinging her leg listlessly and watching the sleepy streetscape through a hazy drizzle, and when she returns there are only two customers, both in someone else’s care. And slow days mean chatter and idleness and malaise, so it isn’t terribly surprising that most of the staff ends up clustered around one girl’s phone when the customers have gone, or that Ume gives Mitsuri a faintly disgusted look before she answers when she asks about the customer whose gel manicure she did in the morning.
Closing time, in other words, cannot come soon enough. She wants to finish her audiobook, to message her university roommate about it, to work on the book cover she was recently commissioned to create and her entry for a contest the Gifu prefectural tourism board is holding to select the design for a new mascot. She wants to eat the menchi katsu she thinks is still left over from last night over a big bowl of rice. Life doesn’t really start until she comes home from the salon.
This feels like a teenager’s way of living, waiting to be released from school in order to go home to her parents’ house, where most everything is already taken care of, and do something more exciting. Certainly she’s earning the salary of a new graduate, if she doesn’t count the freelancing, and that income is never certain. But unless the sky opens up and deposits a permanent position meant for somebody with an art degree in front of her, or, heavens forbid, one of her parents or siblings falls ill and requires her care, there is no change on the horizon.
It is in light of this that it is best just to turn on her audiobook, to pause her sketching of the book cover’s outline for a moment every time Yokiba is just a little too suave to text Koyuki frantic strings of emojis to which she responds with frantic strings of gibberish, because at least Koyuki understands what it’s like to be thirty and no measurably different than she was when they were students together, and to try not to think about it.
She won’t get anywhere, after all, wondering when the trial-run of her adulthood will be over and waiting for the rest of it to start.
**
The rest of it begins, like near-everything of note which has ever happened to her, because Kanroji Mitsuri wants to impress a boy.
It is probably not fair to call him a boy, in all fairness. He has the air of somebody very mature; Mitsuri thought so from the day he first turned up at the Paradise Nail Salon and told the receptionist he’d called the day before to book an appointment for a manicure. No polish, he specified at least twice. Just the manicure. That seemed very mature indeed, to care enough for personal grooming to come all the way here even without wanting his nails painted, and then he had been assigned by happy chance to Mitsuri, and the very professional way he had of staying still made her even more certain of her earlier assessment.
He spoke little, and when she ventured to ask him after half an hour about a few things she might have asked another client within five minutes of their acquaintance, his answers were clipped and vague but polite. Restraint, she decided. That is what it is. Restraint is a very mature quality. So it probably isn’t fair to call him a boy.
But every man Mitsuri wants badly enough to like her becomes a boy again in the end, and so the point stood, and after weeks of Tuesday afternoon appointments, Iguro-san is very well on his way from man to boy.
He is a journalist, he told her a while ago. She looked up his work and found that he is the cynical-social-commentator sort of journalist, not the news kind, a keen-eyed observer who writes mostly with the vaguely cutting style of somebody with a bone to pick with someone he is certain will read it. He keeps a snake, he says, and shows her pictures. He has captivating eyes, one teal and one golden-hazel; he dresses far too well for someone who apparently works from home, but always wears a surgical mask; his shoes, especially, she admires, mostly wingtips and penny loafers kept immaculately shined. He is slight and slender-framed and looks – Mitsuri decides this mostly on the basis of his elegant hands and his lovely slim waist and his obvious hidden depths – like the sort of man who would make an exemplary lover. And every week, when he comes in for a standing Tuesday appointment, he asks for Mitsuri.
He never tells her why he does this, but it is enough for Mitsuri that he does at all, and all together these things formed the basis of an infatuation which will come to be, as most of Mitsuri’s infatuations are, eventful in none of the ways she might have expected and in several which she absolutely would not have.
But it hasn’t yet, and in any case, there are no such events at all until the Tuesday in mid-June, weeks removed from Mitsuri’s thirtieth birthday, that he comes in with a book under his arm.
Mitsuri has never seen Iguro-san reading at the salon before. He always seems to spend his appointments staring at the opposite wall or the clock or the middle distance just over Mitsuri’s shoulder, and she likes to imagine he is writing the next of his articles in his head. But it seems proper for him to have a book with him – he is, after all, a wordsmith – and Mitsuri says so, to her later and immense chagrin, tells him the look of a thick, tattered book under his arm suits him quite nicely, and Iguro-san, improbably, reddens.
“I read a certain amount every day,” he says in an undervoice that implies some sort of secrecy. “I’m not going to have time later.”
“Oh, for your writing?”
“It’s…good for me. I think.”
“I’m sure.”
Mitsuri wonders briefly when the last time she read anything without pictures is and decides not to tell him that the Deadly Kiss light novel is the last thing she read for pleasure, and that six months ago. He probably wouldn’t appreciate that answer very much.
“What, um, what is it?” Mitsuri asks in lieu of this confession.
“Oh, um.” He holds the book up for her to read its title. “Just a reread.”
“Crime and Punishment,” she reads. “Oh! You like it?”
Mitsuri doesn’t have an inkling of what it is about or what happens in it, but she knows it to be long and Russian and very brainy and thinks that made it an excellent fit for Iguro-san. He is the intellectual type; he would like that sort of thing in the same way she infers that he enjoys French New Wave films and black coffee well-brewed and abstract concepts.
“Yes, very much.”
“Would I?”
Mitsuri can never see whether Iguro is smiling, hidden behind his surgical mask as he always is, but that’s taught her to watch his eyes for changes in his emotions, and his high cheekbones for the uprising that means his smiling lips are displacing the rest of his features. This time she spots both. Amusement, she thinks. He thinks it’s funny I would ask.
The thought makes her face burn a little, but when he tells her that he would need to know what sort of things she liked to read to make a call like that, she forgets it quickly enough. Iguro-san has never so openly been curious about her before, and that crowds out very nearly everything.
That is what puts the idea in Mitsuri’s head.
She is off-shift at five, thinking still of the earlier exchange with Iguro-san as the rocking of the subway carriage throws her against the people packed in around her like tinned fish. An internet search told her that Crime and Punishment can be six hundred pages, depending on what sort of edition you have, and that is a length that Mitsuri, unaccustomed to reading things that one cannot merchandise or adapt into an animated series, can barely stand to think about. But Iguro-san likes it enough to be rereading it. It is the first real hint he’s ever given her about what sorts of things he enjoys. And Mitsuri is inclined to seize it.
She can listen to it as an audiobook while she works on her commissions tonight. And maybe, after she has worked the twenty-two hours necessary to finish it, she’ll have something she and Iguro-san could talk about, not small talk or the nail salon but a real shared interest.
But it takes one mere hour of endless unpronounceable names and variations on those names and descriptions of anger and desperation and repression – and drawing, of course, all the while Mitsuri must design five prospective logos for a small chain of gas stations that exists only in the Sanin Region, where she has never set foot in her life – for Mitsuri to conclude that punishment is a most apt word to describe what is in this book. And the narrator reads it as if he feels exactly the same way.
Mitsuri is not sure what all sorts of qualifications you need to be a reader of audiobooks that do not belong to media franchises with attached voice casts, if it is anything like becoming a seiyuu or they are selected by some other, more literary set of criteria. Maybe it’s not very rigorous, though, because this narrator doesn’t even manage to make it sound as if he likes the story he’s supposed to be telling. Really, the least he could do is fake a little verve.
Mitsuri has had enough freelance clients and projects which couldn’t have interested her less to know how to feign enthusiasm, and she isn’t even a particularly good artist; she would certainly not have been chosen for anything as prestigious as narrating a classic of the foreign literary canon. Still, the man they chose to read Crime and Punishment sounds like the crankiest kind of geezer, and surely this book has to have been recorded more than once.
It has been, she finds. Someone read it aloud and posted it chapter by chapter on a website mostly used by aspiring musicians to post demos. There is a public-domain version on YouTube with a narrator no less dry than the one she borrowed electronically from the library. An audiobook subscription service she doesn’t want to pay for has no less than four versions; she listens to a sample of each, out of curiosity, wondering if any are good enough to risk accidentally paying for a subscription when she inevitably forgets to cancel the free trial.
A part of her expects nothing but more old geezers, of course. She has heard enough about Russian literature being primarily concerned with all the ways it is possible to be abjectly miserable to feel that it’s unlikely anyone ese would wish to narrate it. But the third of the four narrators does not sound curmudgeonly at all.
The excerpt they chose to demonstrate the third narrator’s work is from some middle part of the book Mitsuri has not yet reached, and it references several characters she hasn’t met yet or maybe just doesn’t recognize by the seventh variant of their names. But his voice has an excellent timbre, deep but not bassy and full-bodied, and Mitsuri imagines fancifully that it would have a fireplace kind of scent if voices could have those. From what little she can hear in the sample, he reads with the attention and pathos that her first narrator decidedly did not. Mitsuri doesn’t delude herself this will make the book enjoyable, per se; she is not very literary and she has already decided this. But it will certainly be an improvement.
She activates the free trial, scrawls a warning to herself to cancel it next Tuesday on a sticky note that she affixes to the wall above her desk, and fast-forwards through the hour and eight minutes she’s already listened to.
And oh, it is a lovely voice.
It is probably only thanks to Mitsuri’s favor for certain voice actors that she even notices these sorts of difference, but this narrator’s voice is pleasing in a different way than a seiyuu’s is supposed to be. It’s steady and clear, warm and interested, and it slips easily between dialogue and description with just the right amount of force for each. And there is a gentleness in it. These characters are insufferable, Mitsuri has already decided, but he reads for them with a soft underlayer of compassion no matter what else the text calls for.
Mitsuri takes twenty minutes to realize that she’s dropped her stylus and the screen of her untouched tablet has gone dark.
This is, of course, thoroughly embarrassing. She quickly rights herself when she realizes, turning back to her work with the renewed energy of the very sheepish. Then she does her best not to wonder how it’s possible that every other recording of this book was so dull when there are voices like this man’s out there in the world.
She is not, all told, fond of Crime and Punishment by the end of the five days of commuting and drawing in the evenings that it takes her to reach the end of twenty-two hours. It is not the kind of book that lifts one’s spirits and she is, unlike Iguro, not the kind of intellectual who draws satisfaction from the craftsmanship and efficacy of a book which is good but not enjoyable. Come Tuesday she suspects she will find she has absolutely nothing to share with him about it, or at least nothing she will have the courage to come out and say for fear of exposing herself entirely as the silly, frivolous girl she so often worries she really is.
At least, she cannot possibly tell someone whose thoughts are as rich and varied as Iguro’s are that the only thing she really enjoyed about a work of genius was the voice of the man who read it to her.
She fancies it must have been torturous to read all that out loud, but he didn’t make it sound that way. His reading was all patience and warmth and sympathy, and perhaps that did not soften the blows of a book so mired in grinding misery, but it was something. Stay, it seemed to tell her, at least wait and see if it ever gets better, and it did not, at least not nearly as much as Mitsuri had wished, but she did – stay – and almost felt a little sad when he had nothing left to read to her.
It is ridiculous, and Mitsuri knows it, to feel as though the professional actor paid to read this book for the mass market were reading to her. But the gentle and knowing shades of his voice and the unprofessional exuberance that slipped out every so often in a line of dialogue he would read with too much verve felt like those of a friend who very badly wanted her to understand a book he loved. And spending twenty-two hours with that voice gave her far too much time to come to like that idea.
It makes her wonder foolishly if Iguro would ever read aloud to her, a thought for which she slaps her palms against her reddening cheeks. What a silly thing for a grown-up woman to think.
Iguro would never like her nearly enough to do that. And if he did, she would have to admit to him what she really thinks, which is that she found a book he adores to be perfectly dreadful and it would probably have made her curl up under her covers and die of the unendurable misery of it all if not for a narrator so skilled at finding hope and grace where there ought to be none, and he would look at her with that incisive sizing-up look he gives almost everything and conclude he had wasted his time. Surely he can have no use for a woman who is neither smart enough nor tough enough for a book which examines the human condition so unflinchingly. So it really is a ridiculous thought.
Maybe if he were more like the narrator, warm and gentle and understanding – but no, he wouldn’t be Iguro then. And it is really very stupid to be thinking this way about men she barely knows, no matter who they are, so perhaps the Crime and Punishment narrator has a voice like a blanket fresh from the dryer, but that cannot mean anything to Mitsuri.
Even so, Friday comes, then Saturday, and still Mitsuri is thinking about that book, and not for any of the reasons she is supposed to.
On Saturday morning, Mitsuri’s mother wants to go to a nursery in Omiya to pick up houseplants, a task for which the family’s car is given a rare airing-out, and Mitsuri has no reason not to join her; this means an hour’s drive, and that would normally mean finding a recorded light novel series to start. This time it means finding the name of the Crime and Punishment narrator.
There is a brief profile on him on the website of the audiobook distributor. Rengoku Kyojuro, apparently, is a graduate of Kyoto University of the Arts, lives in Minato Ward, and is either too private or too modest to have supplied the publishers either with a photo of himself or with any further or more enlightening information. What he did supply, though, was a discography, and this part tells Mitsuri a great deal.
He mostly narrates the sorts of big, intellectual books Mitsuri would have expected after the way she made his acquaintance; she wonders, recalling the copy that takes up a good quarter of a row on her father’s office bookshelf, how much they paid him to read Journey to the West in its entirety. But the list of his works is eclectic, to say the least, Clouds Above the Hill sandwiched between A Tale of Two Cities and Night on the Galactic Railroad. There are a few nonfiction titles, too, most of them military history, and Mitsuri might have guessed at that unsorted jumble of classics and history and children’s books if she had tried; it is exactly what he sounded like he would read.
A little bit of everything, treated with equal gravity no matter what the content – it suits him. And Mitsuri is only a little embarrassed by her relief at his having something palatable on his resumé, for he seems to be an ardent lover of Miyazawa Kenji (or at least the audiobook publisher told him he ought to be), and so was her father when she was a little girl.
Sitting in morning traffic on the southbound highway, Mitsuri leans her head against the windowsill, presses play, and smiles, because she must have been six or seven when her father read Night on the Galactic Railroad each night for a week until they finished and told her how very special that was, because it had been his favorite when his father read it aloud to him as a little boy.
This Rengoku Kyojuro doesn’t read it exactly like her father had, but hearing him she can so easily remember being little, and displaced by the arrival of yet another sibling, and comforted by the attention that was solely hers when her father came in at night to read to her. How strangely relevant that memory feels now, twenty-something years on and once again the only sibling in the house. That surprises her a little.
That he reads with just as much tenderness as her father had, if more polish, despite reading not to a beloved daughter but a faceless audience of strangers – well, that does not surprise Mitsuri at all.
Once or twice Mitsuri’s mother looks over at her from the driver’s seat, which she presumes to mean she was smiling without meaning to. Once she asks what’s funny, to which Mitsuri responds with a smile turned lopsided by an effort to contain it by biting the inside of her cheek. She probably takes this to mean it’s about that vampire anime again, and that Mitsuri is too embarrassed to explain what exactly did it this time, as has often been true of Mitsuri’s secret smiles. Good. It is going to be much less awkward loitering while her mother selects new houseplants, waiting for something to carry, if she doesn’t know what Mitsuri is really thinking about.
She could hardly explain that the stranger who was paid to narrate her father’s favorite children’s book has the kind of voice that makes her feel like there are sparklers going off in her stomach because it is the warm, affectionate voice of a man so very close to fond laughter that she almost cannot believe he isn’t reading to somebody he loves very much.
This is his job, of course. He is an actor by training and trade and has no more love for his listener than any seiyuu releasing an affectionate holiday message for his fans. But it is so easy, when this is a book that will always remind Mitsuri of safety and comfort and belonging and so little else does, to be taken in.
He probably has a wife and children; he was probably thinking of them as he read. If there is any explanation beyond stellar acting skills, it has to be that. But Mitsuri is both fanciful and susceptible enough to blithely ignore this probable fact and therefore to be glad when she returns home from the nursery with her mother and six new houseplants – Papa, of course, is going to roll his eyes fondly and ask why, and of course he will get a lecture after that about how good they are for the air quality in a house – and she can curl up in a nest of blankets with her drawing tablet and let this absolute stranger read to her again.
It's good for her. Cold slows down her sketching hand, and in this nest of blankets with this man’s lovely voice in her headphones, everything is warm in all the good ways that the muggy, oppressive heat of the outside world in June is not. The katana-toting cormorant she is designing for the Gifu Prefecture mascot contest (Gifu City, apparently, is famous for cormorant fishing, and some nearby town whose name she can’t recall for swordsmithing) does not look quite so ridiculous in its stately samurai armor when Rengoku Kyojuro, whoever he is, is reading her a story sounding for all the world like he might need to break off to laugh at something any moment. It’s like he’s peering over her shoulder, watching her begin to color in the design, with the sportive air of approval it is so easy to read into his narration.
He would like her cormorant, she decides. He is definitely that sort of man. And she likes that thought very much.
The audiobook has ended by the time she’s finished her design, but she’s forgotten to take her headphones off and it only occurs to her long after that she’s still wearing them. There is a dull static in her ears that she barely notices, and when she has finally uploaded her finished design in the right format to the submission portal, she takes them off to find that it’s started to pour outside.
“Guess I’m not going to the gym now,” she says to herself, and this is not particularly unhappy news.
No, rainy days don’t suit Mitsuri at all, and when they come she would far rather lay there staring at the ceiling until the rhythmic patter of raindrops against the roof puts her to sleep. And she can afford that now. She does so enjoy sleeping at wrong hours; it is the nicest thing in the world to wear oneself out thoroughly in the morning and then come home and fall fast asleep, not to be roused until dinnertime. But this is not an acceptable habit for a grown-up with a job.
Unless as a reward for the contest submission, of course. Unless she has a wide-open day without work or any friends without bigger fish to fry to spend it with. And today is a good day to remind herself there are good parts to being so far behind.
She could hardly drift off at one in the afternoon thinking about a man she’s never even seen if she were really in charge of anything, after all.
**
It is on one of Mitsuri’s commutes home that things come to a boil, and more specifically and more tellingly it is on a Tuesday.
Iguro-san was in today for his manicure, of course, and of course he asked for Mitsuri. But she never did manage to pluck up the courage to tell him she listened to Crime and Punishment, so mostly she spent the appointment trying not to really look at him and then – mortifyingly – to deflect when he asked, frowning, if something was wrong. And all this really tells her is that it’s no less silly to harbor a hopeless crush on a repeat customer than it is to go on letting herself get so attached to the voice of a total stranger.
It is on the heels of this realization that, on the train, she pulls up a group chat she made three years ago with every female friend she has in a moment of desperation, which she knows it was strange to make with a group unconnected except by herself but never really cared, and asks, is it weird to have a crush on someone’s voice???
Shinobu is first to respond, of course, and sends only a string of question marks that takes up the entire width of Mitsuri’s screen. Of course; she always has her phone at hand, home on maternity leave, and also she is the one by far the most likely to tell Mitsuri it is very stupid indeed.
But Kanae is not far behind – honey? – and Koyuki is sympathetic but wrong, which seiyuu this time? – and it is only Kotoha, apparently, sweet, steely Kotoha who came into the nail salon the day Mitsuri started work there six years ago and earned her undying loyalty when she decided not to tell the manager that Mitsuri’s slippery fingers spilled half a bottle of Tropical Hibiscus nail polish on her foot, who understands at all why she might even ask.
I have, she replies, then, who is it?
Kotoha???, Shinobu replies, then a simple NO.
That would make sense, though. Kotoha would not be a voice coach or a sometime member of the Fujiwara Opera’s chorus if she did not have stronger-than-average feelings about voices and she tells Shinobu so, though Shinobu doesn’t seem very convinced.
Have you ever seen him?, Shinobu asks, because she knows Mitsuri much too well, and takes Mitsuri’s lack of an answer as the sheepish no that it is. And she doesn’t see much of what any of them have to say after that, because Shinobu calls and demands Mitsuri’s presence at her dinner table tonight to explain exactly what she meant by that.
She knows this is mostly just because Shinobu is lonely and aware that Mitsuri will bring takeout if she’s invited to dinner, and also that she’s going to have her good mood pelted with rocks by Shinobu’s very founded vexation, but it is also an invitation, and those are few and far between these days, so she turns up at the Tomiokas’ apartment with Coco Ichibanya around five equal parts happy and full of dread.
Giyuu gets the door when it rings, wearing Takeshi snug against his chest in a baby wrap that looks like it direly needs a wash. He looks like he hasn’t slept through the night in weeks, which he probably hasn’t, and looks Mitsuri up and down with such perplexity that she wonders if Shinobu even told him to expect her.
“I, uh,” she says, gesturing to the takeout bag, “I brought food.”
Giyuu blinks at her, rubs his eyes, blinks again.
“…why?” he finally asks.
“Shi…Shinobu-chan asked.”
He frowns. “We meal-prepped last night.”
“Oh, well, um…she…” Mitsuri pauses. “…she wants to stop me from doing something.”
“Huh?”
“Well, it’s just. Well.” Mitsuri pinches the bridge of her nose and exhales a long sigh. “Can I come in?”
Only then does it seem to occur to Giyuu to stop blocking the doorway. He does not, Mitsuri too easily forgets, do very well with unexpected guests.
“Sorry,” Mitsuri says as she takes off her shoes in the genkan. “I guess Shinobu-chan didn’t tell you I was coming over.”
“No, she didn’t.”
“Well, I got you a bowl if you want it.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
“Are you okay?” Mitsuri straightens and brushes nothing off of the front of her dress. “You look a little…”
“Tired,” he says. “I know.”
Mitsuri steps closer to Giyuu and pokes a finger gently into Takeshi’s fat cheek, at which he makes a face. “Baby didn’t sleep last night, huh?”
“No,” Giyuu says crossly, then steps back, gives Mitsuri a remonstrating look, and says, “please don’t touch the baby without asking.”
Is that a rule now? Shinobu has never mentioned such a rule before.
“Oh, um, sorry, I-“
“Is that curry?”
Shinobu’s timing is impeccable, Mitsuri thinks, and lifts the bag to show her. “Your usual.”
“You angel,” Shinobu says, and takes the bag from Mitsuri’s hands to clutch it greedily to her chest. “I could kiss you.”
“Oh, it was really nothing, and Giyuu-san said-“
“Don’t care,” Shinobu says, “still an angel,” and then both Mitsuri and Giyuu shuffle down the hall after her not entirely sure what it is she wants them to do.
“Um,” Mitsuri starts cautiously, tapping Giyuu’s shoulder. “Giyuu-san?”
“Yes?”
“I can take the baby for a little. If you want.”
They’ve reached the kitchen now, and Giyuu turns in the doorway to look at Mitsuri once again as if she’s gone absolutely out of her mind. One of his hands comes up to rest protectively against Takeshi’s back and this does not, all told, seem to imply that he likes this idea very much.
“No,” he says. “I want him.”
“…oh! Okay, I just thought you might be-“
“No.” His brow furrows; evidently he thinks she ought to be understanding something she is presently not. “I have to bond with him.”
“…sorry?”
“Or we won’t have a proper relationship when he gets older.”
“Giyuu,” Shinobu calls from a ways off as she unloads the takeout bag, “honey, this again?”
“It’s really important!”
“You’re plenty bonded, Giyuu, you can give Mitsuri the baby if she wants him!”
“But he doesn’t like Mitsuri!”
Mitsuri squawks offendedly at this but cannot properly refute it. Takeshi is an exceedingly fussy baby and he is apt to shriek if anyone but his parents tries to pick him up, Mitsuri included; so far the only exceptions to this she has encountered have been Tamayo, Shinobu’s mentor since her undergraduate days, and Kanao, her adopted sister, and Mitsuri has made no headway at all in convincing Takeshi that she is not, in fact, a people-eating fiend intent on chomping on his fat little arms for sustenance. This fact offends her even now – babies love Mitsuri, except for this one – but she can’t really say he’s wrong.
“Giyuu, what have we said about this?”
“What? He cries when she holds him.”
“About alienating people who are trying to help us?”
Giyuu has his whole arm protectively around the baby now, and there is nothing but betrayal in his expression. “I don’t need help. I have him.”
It takes a good five more minutes of their back-and-forth to conclude that it is going to distress Giyuu more to separate him from the baby than it’s worth. He is given the curry Mitsuri brought for him to stop his complaining, which is probably not helped at all by the hours it’s been since he had anything to eat, and he is banished to the other side of the table so that Shinobu can commence her interrogation.
“How,” she says, without even so much as a word of preamble, “did you manage to get all whacked up over a voice?”
Mitsuri’s cheeks flush, and she hesitantly admits, “…audiobooks.”
“Audiobooks.”
“I…like them a lot.” Mitsuri pokes her chopsticks into a chunk of potato in her curry. “I listen to them on my commute and when I’m drawing and stuff.”
“You have a crush on a guy who read an audiobook.”
Mitsuri can’t bear to look at Shinobu but nods.
“What happened to manicure guy?”
“Nothing,” Mitsuri says. “He’s…just probably not interested.”
“He’s not interested or he’s probably not interested?”
“I mean, I’m totally not his type, and it’s kind of silly, anyway, you know, him being a customer and all that.”
“Sillier than a crush on someone’s voice?”
“Look, Iguro-san would’ve given me some kind of hint by now if he was interested, okay?”
Shinobu pauses, considers, shrugs. “I guess, but have you given him any?”
“Um…I listened to the audiobook of a book he likes?”
And Shinobu, who knows her too well, asks, “does he know that?”
“Well, no.”
“Mitsuri!”
“I got embarrassed, okay?”
“Why?”
“Because I hated the book, and he loves it, and I didn’t have anything to say about it and he was definitely going to think I was stupid if I tried!”
“Honey.”
“What? He would’ve!”
“If he ever liked you even a little bit” – Shinobu pauses – “how long was that audiobook?”
“Um,” Mitsuri says, “twenty-two hours.”
“Twenty-two—Mitsuri!”
“What?”
“What kind of book-“
“Crime and Punishment.”
For a long and terrible moment, Shinobu is quiet, studying Mitsuri with her chin perched in her steepled hands, then clears her throat.
“Am I to understand,” she says, “that you listened to twenty-two hours of an old, depressing Russian novel, for a guy you didn’t even think was into you, and then you never told him?”
“Well…it wasn’t…”
“Don’t tell me that’s where this voice thing came from.”
Mitsuri cannot offer an honest refusal, so she looks down miserably at her curry and thinks: yes, I really am an idiot.
It sounds so absurd when Shinobu puts all the pieces together this way – that she would do all that for a man who never gave the slightest sign of being interested in her, and then that she would clam up and refuse to tell him she did it. So childish, so nearly self-sabotaging. And to jump right from that sort of foolishness to an even more foolish infatuation with a man who narrates audiobooks only compounds its absurdity.
Maybe that’s why she’s single.
“Mitsuri, honey,” Shinobu says gently, “can’t you just download a dating app?”
She has, of course, been saying this since they met in university: that Mitsuri should just try online dating, that she should go to a mixer, that she should let Shinobu set her up with one of Kanae’s friends. There is always, in Shinobu’s mind, a practical solution to Mitsuri’s singleness.
But that is Shinobu, who is tiny and beautiful and has probably never once said something idiotic in front of the person she most wanted to impress. Shinobu does not require the reassurance of a deep and abiding friendship to feel secure in someone’s interest in her, because nearly everybody is interested, and she need not rely on a romantic spark, because she treats love like a practical decision and it is really only a lucky accident, she’d say, that she landed on a husband as attractive to her as Giyuu is, as if she hadn’t known him through her sister since middle school and had designs on him almost as long.
Mitsuri shakes her head vehemently.
“Mitsuri,” Shinobu says, “I really think you’re short-changing yourself.”
“I don’t want to be on dating apps.”
“Even when you meet someone in person, you won’t do anything.” Shinobu stops mid-bite to reach over and push a long tendril of Mitsuri’s hair that’s slipped from her braid back behind her ear before it falls into her curry. “And you’re resorting to crushing on strangers you’ve never even seen.”
“I’m not resorting,” Mitsuri says crossly. “He has a voice, Shinobu.”
“And I bet he has eyes, too,” Shinobu says drily. “And legs. Maybe he’s even got hands.”
“Shinobu.”
“Honestly, Mitsuri, what could possibly come of this? He’s a total stranger!”
“I never said anything about anything coming from this!”
“I’ve known you for twelve years, Mitsuri.”
“And?”
“Nothing ever means nothing to you.”
“I just…like listening to him read.” Mitsuri has not felt so conscious of her age or of her failure to act it in a very long time. “It’s…warm, and comforting, and I don’t know, Shinobu, it might be nice to feel all that around a man.”
“Which is why we need to get you on an app, Mitsuri.”
“I’m not going to meet somebody who really loves me on an app for hookups.”
“They’re not all for hookups.”
“I’m not going to do anything crazy,” Mitsuri says, “but I’m not getting a dating app, either, okay?”
Shinobu has much more to say about that – how Mitsuri is only in a position to have these ridiculous fancies because she cheats herself out of every real opportunity to find love, how she had better stop listening to that man’s audiobooks, how it’s not too late to tell Iguro that she listened to his favorite book – but Mitsuri mostly isn’t listening.
It's good of Shinobu to try, truly, when she has so much going on, and Takeshi won’t sleep if he isn’t in somebody’s arms, and Giyuu is a nervous mess every time Takeshi is at risk of being exposed to people who are not his parents, but things are simple to Shinobu that are not to Mitsuri, and so her solutions are simple, too.
Shinobu was born with a passion for something that pays, and something at which she naturally excels. Shinobu is poised and sharp all at the same time. Shinobu married her college sweetheart at the end of a very long courtship with a very inevitable end and no real heartache, and her life, though messy, is a full one. She does not know what it is like only to be good at or inclined towards things that do not make for stable jobs, or to be stared at incredulously and then soundly rejected by a man she’d really thought would take a confession well, or to look at her big, ungainly self in the mirror and wonder why on earth she of all people had to come out this way.
Mitsuri is not going to pity herself, but it is impossible not to acknowledge that Shinobu’s advice assumes she is the well-made sort of person people tend to nod at in approval, and this is not and never will be the case.
Not self-pity. Fact. Truth.
Maybe she’s right, though, that it’s easier for Mitsuri to invent a man because he has a voice like everything she doesn’t think she’ll ever find than it is to find a real one and go after him. It is more pleasant to imagine a warm, solid man with a voice exactly like her narrator’s telling her, in that lovely hot-caramel voice, that he likes the unconventional sort of girl, that he’s sure she’ll get it together soon enough, that she does not have to be impressive to be precious to him, than it is to go out looking for somebody real and then have to face the inevitable fact that he would never say any of those things to her. And maybe that’s all this Rengoku Kyojuro business is.
But she doesn’t listen, of course. She doesn’t heed any of Shinobu’s protests that he might be old, or married, or a creep, and she is certainly not going to stop listening through his repertoire of children’s books. She is not one to let go of a small comfort when she gets one.
Shinobu would tell her she was a fool for that. Maybe she is. But she’s going to choose to believe that it doesn’t matter.
**
At least Koyuki doesn’t think Mitsuri is crazy.
She, too, wants a full run-down of what Shinobu has begun to refer to as the whole audiobook thing. She wants to know exactly which books Mitsuri has listened to and what she liked so much about the way he read them, and if she’s done much internet research about him, and then of course she wants to hear his famous voice. That her husband pokes his head in the door to tell her to stop encouraging this, having heard everything through her open door, does nothing to dampen Koyuki’s eagerness to know what kind of voice has so captured her friend’s interest.
She agrees wholeheartedly, being a fellow expert on the virtues of various seiyuu, that Rengoku Kyojuro has a most extraordinarily handsome voice. He must be dreamy, she agrees; it would be an absolute karmic crime for a man with such a winsome voice to be anything but a gentleman – at this, Hakuji appears in the doorway again to tell her that Mitsuri is probably going to get catfished and kidnapped if she keeps this up – and Mitsuri absolutely ought to see if he’s got some kind of contact information available online, because at very least he deserves to be properly appreciated.
Hakuji, evidently, has given up on stressing rationality now, because this flagrant breach of it does not compel him to come back and scold her for being too trusting. This is how Koyuki comes to find that Rengoku Kyojuro’s agent has a profile that lists his professional email address.
Unfortunately for Mitsuri, this knowledge makes everything a far sight worse.
Had she never mentioned this in the group chat, she thinks, had she never asked for any kind of validation, it would not have ever started to feel real. Rengoku Kyojuro would be roughly as real to her as a sasquatch, perhaps out there somewhere or perhaps a figment of a desperate imagination, and she would have gone on listening to his books and thinking nothing more of them than that she wished she might one day meet a man face-to-face who would speak to her with the kind of gentleness and affection with which he reads.
But saying things out loud makes them rather terrifyingly real, which is unfortunate, because it would really be best and least-embarrassing for everyone involved if she did not ever allow what feelings she might have for this total stranger to evolve, and by making a joke of it in the group chat she fears she might have started them doing just that. And now she has an email address.
An email address to which she could easily send anything she would like.
That is creepy, she knows. The very normal man that Rengoku Kyojuro probably is would feel intruded-upon if a strange woman wrote gushily to his professional email address about how many things she feels about his work. But she has the address, nonetheless.
It cannot possibly hurt, one Thursday when her shift has felt impossibly long and his voice in her ears on the train home feels more soothing and conciliatory than ever, to open the note-taking app on her phone and type out some very silly things she will never use that email address to share with him.
This, Mitsuri reminds herself more than once, is exactly why she has fallen so far behind in life – because fancy too easily becomes reality in her mind, because she has this sort of childish audacity – but she isn’t sure at all that she can change these things about herself, and by the time she arrives at home she has enough of a silly, pointless letter written in her notes that she gives up on all pretense of dignity or of trying to find new freelance projects to apply for tonight and emails what she has to herself so she can finish it on the easier interface of her laptop.
What kind of idiot, she thinks, writes fan mail to the narrator of an audiobook?, and then spends fifteen minutes on a single paragraph, editing for style here, for suitably detached normal-person tone there, deciding what to cut and how to make herself seem anything but off-puttingly forward.
It is, of course, all of those things. But it is also true, and as brazenly awkward as it would be to send, Mitsuri would be touched to receive it if she were the one being praised. She would be touched to receive any praise of her work at all, true – more than once on days she’s not proud of she’s looked up the Paradise Nail Salon’s reviews to see if any mention her – but this, especially, would feel gratifying.
Also, purging the stupid things she feels should help her not to feel them, she thinks, and right now Mitsuri could use some of that, along with hustle and tact and the motivation not to insist upon a dessert after every lunch and dinner. Maybe this way she’ll come to her senses. That would be nice.
So she saves the draft, opens a new tab, tries to check for a weight off her shoulders, doesn’t feel one but thinks she will, browses the site for freelancers where she finds most of her illustration jobs, applies to some, does a little work on the Deadly Kiss doujin she’s been preparing for a convention in a couple of months but sorely neglected lately, most certainly does not listen to an audiobook, and goes not-so-blissfully to sleep.
**
The Paradise Nail Salon doesn’t open until eleven, and this means Mitsuri’s mornings can afford to be slow.
She’s never liked to sleep in, and early mornings mean she can squeeze in a jog before she goes to work, or else a little bit of her freelance work if she doesn’t feel like doing that. Today she wakes groggier than usual – work it is, then – and with too many tabs open, which is not at all uncharacteristic, but nevertheless annoys her in the mornings when she can’t remember what anything she left open yesterday ever was.
They are legion, and they are varied: half a dozen job ads she decided not to apply to but didn’t bother to close, online shopping tabs she opened when she was distracted with countdown timers warning her that her cart is about to be cleared of things she never would’ve bought anyway, her email inbox. There is an open draft on that one, probably a job application she forgot to hit Send on before she drifted into another tab last night, and she does so now, then goes through her new unread emails to delete all the ones that are only ads; nothing from anyone about hiring her, sadly. She figures that ought to be taken as a sign to move over to the tab where the job board is still open, but nothing has been posted there overnight, predictably. Mitsuri sighs. Feast and famine, this stuff is, and she allows herself the very rare indulgence of working a little more on her doujin before she gets ready to go.
It is while she’s sketching, when she thinks it might be nice to put on an audiobook at a time like this, that it dawns on her what must have been sitting atop her inbox, and a strangled sound Mitsuri covers her mouth to muffle escapes before she can stop it.
It was an application, she tries to tell herself, half-frantic, clicking on all of the wrong things as she tries to navigate back to her email inbox. It was definitely an application. But she definitely doesn’t believe herself.
The sort of girl who spilled nail polish on her very first client is not likely to have sent a benign accidental email, and of course – of course – the email sitting at the top of her Sent folder is addressed to the person she would currently most like to forget she’d ever heard of.
And, if the frantic internet searches that follow that horrible plummeting-stomach moment of terror are to be believed, there is nothing whatsoever that she can do to take it back.
**
Mitsuri is not late to work. She is properly dressed, she manages a professional smile and chipper conversation to each client she attends to, and nobody knows, not Ume or the girls or the owner who comes in after a smoke break that lasts half the morning to observe her domain, that inside she is having the meltdown of the decade.
She is rather proud of herself for this, but she would really rather it didn’t take a blunder as ridiculous as the one she’s just made to bring it about.
The girls know, of course, and have resoundingly told her that they don’t know what she expected (Shinobu) and it’s all going to be okay (Kotoha), and doesn’t it feel good to have things out there? (Koyuki), and anyway he probably won’t actually read it (Shinobu) – this is a good point, it might go to his spam folder (Kanae) – and all of this is true, she knows, he will likely never open it and anyway everything she said was both kind and true, but never in a whole lifetime of humiliating herself has Mitsuri been so thoroughly soaked-through with cold, dripping embarrassment.
The memory of every line that pops into her head douses her all over again, as if the odious sent draft is a cresting wave that breaks each time she remembers it’s getting close, and so she holds herself together, yes, but only until lunchtime when she can run off to Kamado Pan and put her head in her hands on the dining counter and wonder how, how, how she has lived all this life without becoming even a little bit smarter.
And also to pull up the sent draft and remind herself, because Mitsuri is always a glutton for punishment when she makes this sort of faux pas, what exactly she said to humiliate herself.
Dear Mr. Rengoku, she began, and even that makes her recoil. How much more, she thinks, and takes a sip of her iced tea so as not to swoon and faint with mortification, will the rest of it be.
I want to start off by saying that I really do apologize if this is weird. I feel a little silly writing something like this to a stranger, so I hope it’s okay. I just wanted to tell you that your audiobooks have been a really bright spot in my life the past few weeks.
I started with Crime and Punishment because a really handsome customer at the nail salon where I worked brought a copy in for his appointment one day. This isn’t the general consensus about that book, I know, but I didn’t like anything about it except your narration. It’s such a bleak and heavy book, but you read it with so much sympathy. It made me think you were probably a really good sort of person, which is pretty embarrassing to admit, but when you spend twenty-two hours listening to somebody read, you start to feel like you know more than you do. Or maybe that’s just me? I don’t know. Maybe. I do have lots of things like that.
Anyway, I went looking for your other books after that, and then I found out you do children’s books a lot, which is very charming, I hope you know that, that you do these big, intimidating classics but also books my parents read me when I was little. You read them the same way, too, like they’re equally important. That made me think you were probably a good sort of person, too. You don’t read exactly like my dad did, but it felt like you were reading to someone you loved. That’s weird, though, isn’t it. Sorry. I shouldn’t presume. It’s evidence that you’re good at your job, I guess. You’re an actor, right? It’s your job to sound like that. But it still made me really happy.
Quite honestly, Mr. Rengoku, I’m a pretty boring lady. I don’t know if I even deserve to be called a lady at all – I am an overgrown teenager, I think. Every day I go to my job at a nail salon and then I come home and work on art commissions, if I’m lucky enough to have them, and I don’t really think or do anything important. And having someone with such a nice, warm voice read me stories on the train and from work, or while I was drawing, made it feel like everything was a little bit more okay than it really was. This is too much to share with a stranger but I do that a lot – all my friends say so – so I’m sorry. I hope at least this helps you understand that I really mean all of this.
Gosh, this feels sillier and sillier the more I write, but it really is all true. You’re a great narrator, and I don’t know you, but I like to think it’s because you have a big heart. You read about characters like you feel for them, and like you really want everyone who listens to give them a fair chance and understand them and all of that, and honestly, most audiobook narrators I’ve listened to are old geezers who sound bored, so I wasn’t expecting that. I’m glad I found it. I don’t know how audiobook narrators get hired, so I can’t say this is a thing, but if you have any control over it please keep making audiobooks. I’ll listen to them even if they’re long and sad and way too smart for me.
Thank you for your valiant service to people who listen to audiobooks on the train.
Sincerely,
Kanroji Mitsuri
Kie-san finds Mitsuri five minutes later with her phone and herself face-down on the counter and inquires worriedly as to whether she’s going to faint. Naturally. Even in her embarrassment Mitsuri can’t stop embarrassing herself.
“I’m fine,” she says miserably. “Just not on the inside.”
And Kie-san, who has for six years been the person who supplied Mitsuri’s lunch almost every workday and therefore knows exactly what gets her through a funk, pats her back firmly but soothingly and promises a free sample of the raspberry-chocolate scone recipe Nezuko has been developing this week.
When it comes, Mitsuri shoves half in her mouth at once. And at least it tastes as wonderful as she feels dreadful.
It may be a true letter, and a kind letter, but still – what a perfectly mortifying thing to have done.
**
This will all blow over in a day or two.
Despondent as she wants to be, Mitsuri is well aware of this. She knows how her own brain works, and that, when the email has gone ignored a few days and she can content herself to believe that Rengoku Kyojuro is never going to read it, she will relegate it to the walk-in freezer in her brain where she keeps all her worst memories in torpor (not that they don’t sometimes manage to wander out and make a break for it) and it will only be one line item in a record full of past embarrassments. It will be a story, something her friends tease her about – nothing more.
But that has not happened yet, so Mitsuri comes home without energy or appetite and stops only to wash the scent of nail polish and acetone off of herself in the shower before she flops into bed in nothing but an oversized shirt and her underwear and falls asleep at seven in the evening thinking about how nice it would be to lay in the grass until it absorbed her.
It is a pattern that repeats itself for three never-ending days, and it ought to be getting better by then, but it decidedly does not because that is the day when she opens her inbox at lunch, listlessly poking it for alerts about jobs she could apply to or, better yet, ones that have decided to hire her, and the unread message at the top of the inbox reads Rengoku Kyojuro.
Naturally, she doesn’t open it.
For two more entire days, Mitsuri won’t touch that email, and in this time it becomes a sort of talisman. There is a spiritual power in an unopened email that renders it harder to open and read with every passing day, and not even Mitsuri’s usually-boundless curiosity can induce her to open this one. At least, not at first.
Not until she makes the mistake of admitting she’s had a response to Koyuki, who squeals fit to wake the dead, earns herself a gentle chiding from her husband about the neighbors across the hall who love to call in noise complaints, and then all but demands that Mitsuri read the email, preferably aloud, before Hakuji reappears to tell him to please leave Mitsuri alone, she looks like she’s going to catch on fire, and do you really think she needs any more witnesses to her humiliation?, and while Mitsuri has never been more grateful for Soyama Hakuji’s lack of tact in her life, there is no longer any getting around the matter of opening the email.
Koyuki might be sick more often than she isn’t, but she is relentless no matter what. All the strength not given to her in body has gone straight to her head, and it makes her deadly-effective when there’s something she’s trying to get Mitsuri to do.
So, after Koyuki has hung up the call and alerted the relevant parties in the group chat as to what is about to happen and Mitsuri has steeled herself for swift and inescapable death, she opens an email that stuns her before she’s read a word in being neither a curt expression of gratitude or a polite buzz off paragraph but nearly as long as her own.
She thinks she might shake to death reading Dear Ms. Kanroji alone, but now she’s begun, and there’s no choice but to continue.
Allow me to say firstly that I am deeply sorry it took me so long to reply to this message. I don’t check my professional account as often as I should, and then it took me a while to process what you sent me. I must look terribly rude, and sincerely apologize.
Allow me to say secondly that I can’t tell you what an honor it is to find myself in a position to be getting fan mail. I am sincerely moved. I don’t often imagine that anyone is listening all that carefully to my narration; to hear that apparently my narration is the only thing you enjoyed about an indisputable work of genius is really astonishingly high praise. I do understand Crime and Punishment is an acquired taste, to be fair – it is a very difficult text to spend a lot of time in, I would know – but even so, it’s an honor.
Also, I hope that the man who recommended it to you knows how very fortunate he is to know someone who is willing to spend nearly a whole day listening to a book she didn’t even like just to better understand his interests. There are not a great deal of people who would. I have always thought that taking the time to examine what someone enjoys, and to try to figure out what it is they enjoy about it and what it says about them, was one of the highest acts of love – but that has nothing to do with anything. Sorry. My mother does always tell me I like to monologue too much. I’m sure it’s the actor in me.
I suppose I feel a little fraudulent accepting this kind of praise, though I’m also thrilled, because audiobook narration was never exactly my goal. I have been very fortunate to earn a living that way, for which I’m grateful, but I wanted to be a stage actor, you see, and that’s what I studied and trained for all my life. There is obviously overlap in the skills they both require, but in a theater, there is an audience you can see and hear, and audiobooks are more or less read into the void. I will never know who hears my performance or what they think of it. It’s probably vain of me to miss that part of my old life, but one does like to know if the audience is applauding or jeering. It keeps one humble and motivated at the same time. This line of work doesn’t have that sort of thing.
This is all to say that I have never had a fan letter in my life, and I am equal parts astonished and touched that you decided to send me one. I will treasure it. I have no idea what I did to warrant that kind of praise – I only ever read the books the way they ask me to read them, and I don’t think I exert any extraordinary effort in doing so – but I’m honored to have it. You may think it was strange to write to a stranger, but you did me a lot of good. I think it may be yourself whose heart and character are commendable, not me.
Also, I think you should know that what you’ve said about my wanting people to understand the characters I read for is going to stick with me for a very long time. I would never have thought to put it that way, but it’s a wonderful sentiment. I don’t believe that a person with such a lovely way of looking at things could ever be boring, no matter what sort of job she has.
Thank you, once again, for writing to me. You likely have no idea how much it meant.
Yours,
Rengoku Kyojuro
P.S.: if you would ever like to reply, I check my personal address much more often. It is [email protected].
**
It is a good hour and a half before Mitsuri manages to compose herself enough to say anything to anyone, let alone the girls. And then it is only the first thing that pops into her head:
Is it a red flag if his email is like a wi-fi password?
And then it is not ten seconds before Koyuki is sending a text a second, and Kanae and Kotoha requesting a full briefing, and when Shinobu calls, Mitsuri picks up braced for censure but buzzing too much to care.
So she only holds her phone away from her ear a little.
“Kanroji Mitsuri!” Shinobu shouts from the other end. “What did you do?”