Chapter Text
In the noon of a particularly cloudy day in an extraordinarily mild summer, Satomi and Nakagawa sat talking by the river.
Rather, Satomi was sitting; Nakagawa was sprawled on her back in the slope of grass. Her standard school uniform was replaced by a casual blouse and sandals, so uncommon a sight that Satomi almost hadn’t recognized her when she’d came and taken her place next to him. He hadn’t expected anyone to come and find him out here; being alone was the draw of this place. But Nakagawa hadn’t questioned a thing, just seemed happy to have a place to be for a bit, maybe considered herself lucky for the company.
“Did you know Ryo Yoshizawa’s wife is having a baby next month?” Her eyes stayed locked on the magazine she had held to the sky as she patted around sightlessly in the space between them where she’d placed her snacks. Satomi watched this display of stubbornness for a few seconds before taking a chip from the bag and handing it to her.
“Thanks,” she chewed. “It says they’re thinking of naming him Hayato. What kind of name is that for the kid of a celebrity?”
“I have an uncle named Hayato.”
“It should be like, Simba. With the kanji for lion.”
Unable picture the person whose yet-unborn child’s name Nakagawa was so passionate about, Satomi tried to get a glance at the page she was holding. Before he could see anything at all, she swung the magazine down into her lap in a flutter of paper.
“You don’t know who Ryo Yoshizawa is, do you?”
“No, sorry.”
To Satomi’s slight relief, she laughed. “You’re worse than Wada.”
Satomi’s knowledge of celebrities was made up mostly of musicians and the comedians his parents watched on TV. Masami had always talked at him about athletes he liked but they always ended up jumbled together in Satomi’s mind.
“Recently, all he talks about is how hard it is to write lyrics for the song he’s working on,” she placed another chip in her mouth, having successfully located the bag.
“Ryo Yoshizawa?”
“What? No, Hayato—no, ugh—Wada.” She returned to her magazine. “It’s the one that Kimura-sensei asked him to do for graduation.”
“Oh.” Satomi twisted a clump of grass around his finger. “He said yes to that? I’m surprised.” Since a notorious incident involving a particularly strict middle school music teacher, Wada hadn’t touched songwriting.
“Well, it’s a good thing,” Nakagawa asserted.
“No, I didn’t say it wasn’t.”
“The only bad thing is that he’s taking it super seriously. I’ve been doing my best to help him, but sometimes I feel like he thinks I can read his mind.”
Barely four months into their senior year, and they were already preparing what they’d be singing when it ended. Their high school entrance ceremony felt like it had to have been just the other week. He was all at once overcome with the familiar nausea that he’d wasted three years in the going home club, but digging his hand into the chip bag, he let the salt coat his tongue before his thoughts went all that far.
In April, Satomi wrote down which universities he was aiming for like everyone else. Three in Osaka and one safety school in Fukuoka—though that one had been almost entirely because he liked the pictures of the campus in the brochure.
Thinking on it, Wada’s situation was actually enviable—still a year off from university exams, picking one thing and putting his whole focus onto it. Not that it was without its own stress, but at the end of summer, there would be something to show for all the time spent.
“I wonder if he’d let me try and help,” Satomi wondered aloud. I wasn’t as if he was set to be doing much else this summer; only the usual store shifts, reading, maybe a couple of trips to the coast with his dad. There was the pile of test prep books on his desk, though that would be fine as long as he made sure to work on them in view of his mother once or twice.
Nakagawa hummed. “I mean, he needs all the help he can get if he wants to finish in time.” She let the page she was reading fall open onto her face.
Satomi leaned forward hugging his legs, his cheek cushioned on his knees. Earlier, there had been a group of elementary schoolers with nets catching frogs by the water, but they’d left after too long. Should it have bothered him that his last summer before university was set to pass like this?
“Speaking of help.” Her tone shifted to something familiarly conspiratorial, though he hadn’t heard it in years. Satomi recognized it primarily from when she was trying to get him to leave the cleanup to the underclassmen and sneak off for ice cream. “You guys are getting a new employee this week, aren’t you?”
Satomi uprooted a weed. “It’s today, actually.”
“Oh really? That’s so wild!”
It was, in fact, pretty wild. Every year without fail, Satomi biked a four-kilometer radius around the music shop putting up help wanted flyer. Part time, fulltime, summer only, apprenticeship. Despite this frankly staggering flexibility, he could count on one hand the number of times anyone had replied and could bring to mind even fewer of their faces.
Because of their home’s location above the store, this year his mother had gotten the idea to go so far as to add lodging and meals into the deal. She had insisted that the empty room was too sad with Masami moved out, decidedly not listening when Satomi made the point that it was just going to be sad again once whoever they found left as well. Regardless, it was because of that empty room that his parents were more keen than usual to secure extra help this year, the first summer season without an extra pair of hands.
“When’s he getting here?” asked Nakagawa. “Are you excited?”
“I dunno. It’d probably be good for me to head back soon anyway,” replied Satomi, though he didn’t know what time it was exactly. “I’m supposed to start the rice before my mom gets home.”
“Alright, give me a second and I’ll get up.” The pages on her face flapped.
“I’ll go on my own. Take your time.”
“I’m heading that way anyway. I kind of want to get as much time outside as I can before exam season really hits,” she stood, dusting off her pants. “Maybe I can get a peek of your new hire?”
“Well, don’t hold your breath,” Satomi mounted his bike. He waited, looking over his shoulder until she had thrown her magazine into her basket, then kicked off towards home.
“Bring the flour up next, will you?” His mother shouted over the running sink. Satomi, already to the top of the stairs, deposited the repurposed cardboard box next to the rest of the groceries at the foot of the dining table with a sigh. He regretted splitting up with Nakagawa on the ride back now, an extra pair of hands wouldn’t have hurt.
His mother was scrubbing the rice bran off a handful of cucumbers and placing them in the empty dish rack. Satomi walked over, surveying the ingredients strewn across the counter in an organized chaos characteristic of most of their home.
“I thought he was from Osaka,” he asked.
“He is,” his mother replied.
“Then how come you’re making this kind of thing?”
“No complaining.”
“I’m not complaining. I’m asking a question.”
His mother clicked her tongue, shooting him a look over her shoulder. “He’s been in Tokyo a few years. I thought maybe he hasn’t had the taste of home in a while.”
“They don’t have suki udon in the biggest city in the country?”
“Flour, please,” she gestured with her chin to the stairs and cranked the faucet off with a squeak of finality.
The shop at the bottom of the stairs was closed, no one even having bothered to turn the lights on in the rush to get everything in order before afternoon. Satomi’s own morning had consisted of clearing out promptly after breakfast so as to avoid involving himself for as long as he could, stopping by the theatre for a matinee showing of a film, killing time at the bookstore next door, before Nakagawa had found him at the river.
He slid on his slippers and then hung a right, stepping outside just in time to see his father’s car pull up.
Satomi’s hand stilled on the glass door as he caught sight of the new guy in the passenger seat, face immediately shifting to one of amused confusion.
Because for some reason, this guy was wearing a suit and tie in the dead of Wakayama summer.
First impressions must have been that important to him; it wasn’t like the job he’d taken came with a dress code. In fact, for most of his life, Satomi had watched his father roll out of bed and work the register with the same clothes he’d slept in. And this guy looked around Satomi’s father’s age anyway.
The bell above the shop door rang its usual sound as Satomi stepped out to grab the remaining groceries from the open trunk. The man in the suit—Kyouji, he recalled his mother saying—was stepping out of the truck, slinging a duffle bag over his shoulder, joking about the heat to Satomi’s father.
“Ah, here’s my youngest. Satomi,” his father was unloading a box of bachi drum sticks from the backseat; he must have stopped by the workshop before the train station. “Hurry and put that upstairs so you can help Kyouji with his things.”
“No need. I’m fine taking it on my own,” the man named Kyouji said. He got to the door before Satomi did, caught it at the top, then held it open. “Nice to meet’cha, Satomi-kun.” The smile looked about as home on his face as the caterpillars above his eyes did.
Satomi dipped his head in greeting. “Hello.”
Up close, Kyouji was taller than he previously seemed. He smelled of cigarettes, though he’d attempted to cover this with cologne, the resulting scent unpleasant. His hair was gelled back like the protagonists in early-Showa dramas. The hand splayed on the door boasted well-groomed nails.
With a start it occurred to him that Kyouji was holding the door open not for himself but for Satomi, and he quickly ducked back through, muttering an apology. Halfway up the stairs his mother slipped by him, and he could hear her enthusiastic greetings, apologizing for her current aproned state all the while.
The tea kettle on the stove was whistling. Satomi grabbed three cups from the cabinet that held the fancy dishes, balancing them in his arms as he brought the kettle over to the table. For the past few weeks, the arrival of their new employee was half of what his parents talked of to each other, but Satomi still didn’t know much about him aside from his age—early 40’s—and that he worked at a company in Tokyo. He’d applied over the phone one afternoon, and by virtue of being the only one who had, he was hired after a look through his emailed resume and his own insistence that lodging and meals be the only payment for working at the shop four days a week.
Satomi’s mother had been nothing but pleased with how it had all worked out. That’s the problem, he’d tried telling her, isn’t it all way too convenient? Applying from out of town at all should’ve set off alarm bells. But she’d just accused him of trying to spoil a good thing, and there was no use trying to get his father to express any sort of strong opinion over anything other than taiko drum manufacture.
“I’ll take care of that,” his mother snatched the kettle from his hands after Satomi’d finished pouring the first two cups. Her voice had settled into the cheery one she put on around her clients. “You show him where to put his luggage.”
Kyouji had made it up the stairs at this point. Satomi watched as he took in the new surroundings, seeming both impressed and amused.
“Don’t mind the mess!” His mother reassured as she cleared the fruit bowl off the table and spread the teacups across the table.
“Not messy at all. Just getting used to having the space to stretch my arms—you wouldn’t believe the shoeboxes they stuff you in in Tokyo.” Kyouji quipped back, and Satomi’s mother laughed despite there not having been a joke.
“Take all the time you like. But come back before the tea goes cold! Satomi,” her voice went down an octave for his name, motioning to the hallway with a shake of her head.
“Follow me,” Satomi said, and started towards the bedrooms.
Masami’s old room was freshly swept, absent all the possessions that used to litter the ground. There were new sheets on the bed. Satomi was still getting used to seeing it like this.
“Hey, sweet digs,” Kyouji laughed. He placed his bags next to the desk. Seeing a stranger against the backdrop of the room he’d only ever seen as his brother’s, Satomi refrained from commenting that it looked smaller with Kyouji standing in it.
Instead, he said, “The bathroom is down the hall to the left.”
Kyouji wasn’t looking. He had walked over to the bookshelf, emptier than before, now only sporting arbitrary volumes of Jump manga and test prep books. Satomi watched him as his gaze wandered down to the desk, looking much too short for a grown man to sit at; though what he’d be using it for, Satomi had no idea. Maybe video conferences of emails or something.
“Where’s your room at?” Kyouji flicked the desk light on and off a few times.
Satomi gestured to the door behind him. “Right across.”
“That’s a relief. Can I come ask you if I need anything?”
“Uhm, well sometimes I’m listening to music with headphones, or studying.”
“Kidding,” Kyouji said. When Satomi didn’t respond, his smile got somehow wider.
After he extricated himself by reminding Kyouji of the tea his mother had poured, Satomi sat at his desk and found himself flipping through the magazine he’d gotten a few days ago, looking for an interview. It was with the composer of the film he’d gone to see earlier today, and what had originally motivated him to go check it out.
The composer talked about making music without a blueprint. How not knowing what the piece would be was the thing that made making it worthwhile. That he shouldn’t know what he was creating as he created it. Satomi’d paid close attention to the score as he watched but hadn't been able to see that supposed lack of planning. After all, the score had been amazing, and fit the film as well as anything.
Leaving the theater, stepping back into the heat and setting off for the bookstore, Satomi couldn’t help but feel led astray by the interview. What did it matter, if the composer hadn’t known what he was doing if no one could tell? Moreover, what had he expected? For an internationally released film to seriously not have a solid soundtrack to go with it? Trust the process, everything would turn out fine. Except when it didn’t.
After this year was university. His father has been telling him to take singing back up there, to join a club. Satomi still couldn’t seem to find the words to tell him no outright.
His phone buzzed in his periphery, bringing his eyes back into focus. It was Wada.
oka senpai, do you have time at all in the next few days?
i wanted to run a song im working on by you
if it’s ok
-
Sometimes Satomi felt like Wada never processed the fact that it had been two years now since he’d stopped being club head. For better or worse, he and Nakagawa were still his only friends, so he guessed he at least could try and give tips.
-
yeah i can
whats it about?
its the song we’re singing for graduation
i need some help with the lyrics
ok
if it works ill come by your place tomorrow?
awesome!
thanks so much 🙏
It did not take long into dinner for Satomi to understand that he did not care for the way Kyouji looked sitting at the table. Or the way he laughed. Going on an on about how great it was to be back in town, even though he was from Osaka, not Wakayama. And for never strictly describing what job it is he had, he complained at length about the Tokyo commute.
Watching both his parents being so taken with him had to be the most aggravating, however. Ignoring red flags over the phone was one thing, but when they were being waved at their own dinner table?
By the time the dishes were cleared and their new guest had thankfully gone to rest up, Satomi’s made it his goal to stay clear out of the way for these next six weeks. Let this guy run his course. He’d still keep an eye on him since it was clear now that neither of his parents would be doing so.
“He’s funny!” His mother smiled as she passed Satomi another plate from the sink for him to dry. “He's just as easy to talk to as his emails made him sound.”
From the living room came the sound of some documentary his father had on. Seeing light gathered at the bottom of the door to Masami’s room—he wasn’t about to start referring to it as Kyouji’s—was still strange.
“Didn’t you think the joke about his boss was weird?” Satomi asked.
“No, that’s how it is when you work at a big company. Everyone talks like that.”
Satomi frowned at the dish towel in his hands. “Are you staying home tomorrow then? To show him the store.”
“No, I’ve got two appointments back-to-back with the Hatakeyama kids. I probably won’t be back until before dinner again.”
“You’re making dad teach him?”
She shook her head. “No, I was going to ask you.”
“I have to go see Wada tomorrow. To work on an assignment with him.”
His mother gave him a look. “Well, you can call him and tell him you’re rescheduling.”
“Seriously?” he stared at her. “So you’re not asking, then.”
“Could you please do it without complaining? It won’t be all that bad. For all you know, you two could have a lot in common—talk about bands or something. Bring up that Gen Hoshino show we went to in the winter. He did say he likes karaoke.”
“I hate karaoke.”
His mother hummed. She pulled off her dish gloves and set them over the faucet. “Try and enjoy your last summer here,” she picked a piece of lint off of his T-shirt. “Or else you’ll wish you had!”
“Okay.” He pulled away before she got a chance to launch into something again.
The very thing she was asking of him would prevent him from achieving any sort of enjoyment. As free-thinking as his mother had always been, Satomi couldn't conceive of a reason why she believed so fully that her grown 17-year-old son would miraculously enjoy spending time with some random salaryman that fell straight out of Tokyo and into their home.
“Did Kyouji take his bath yet?” His father called from the living room.
“No,” replied his mother. “Satomi was just going to get it ready for him.” She offered him a smile, as if that was recompense enough for the fact that not only did he have to teach some old dude to work a register tomorrow, he also had to draw his nighttime bath for him.
There was no sound from the guest room when Satomi walked up, and for a moment he hoped that the guy had fallen asleep from all the udon he had shoveled away. Hands still wet from feeling out the bathwater, he knocked two times lightly.
“It’s open!” came the voice from inside, unfortunately sounding very awake. Satomi slid the door open onto Kyouji sprawled on his brother’s bed, still in his button-up shirt, one pillow under his crossed ankles. In his hands was one of the manga volumes from earlier.
“Hey,” Kyouji said.
“Hey,” echoed Satomi sardonically. “The bath’s ready.”
“Oh, no kidding.” Kyouji dogeared the page and sat up. “I got caught up reading this,” he waved the volume around. “Can’t tell you how many times I’ve reread the Chimera Ant arc. Is this yours by the way?”
“It’s my brother’s,” Satomi said. “This whole room was. Is.” He tapped the doorframe and turned to go. “I just came to let you know about the bath.”
“Thanks for that,” Kyouji stood and grabbed one of the towels from the back of the desk chair. “You gonna draw my bath every night then?”
“Usually my mom does it. Unless she comes home late.”
“Aw, that’s a shame.”
“By the way, I’m supposed to show you some stuff around the store tomorrow,” Satomi added quickly. He was about to go ahead and forget it was happening, so if he didn’t communicate this to Kyouji now, he wouldn’t tell him at all. “We usually open at ten in the morning.”
“Sounds good. You don’t have to worry, I’ll be up before then. Not used to the vacation schedule just yet.”
Satomi gave a tight smile. Kyouji kept talking.
“Man, I’m already thinking about how much I’ll miss your mom’s cooking when I have to go back. You’re so lucky you get to eat that every day.”
Satomi nudged at a long set-in bleach stain on the floor with his toe. “Sometimes we get takeout, but.”
That got a laugh. Satomi was embarrassed to say it startled him slightly.
“You’re funny, Satomi-kun. I’m looking forward to tomorrow!”
“Uh, yeah,” the sooner Kyouji washed up, the sooner everyone else could. The sooner this day would be over, and they’d be one day closer to that six week mark. “Well, enjoy the bath.”
Back in his room, Satomi put his headphones in almost as soon as he was at his desk. With the bathroom right next door, he usually did so to avoid hearing whatever show his dad put on during his bath. Today, he wasn’t fast enough to not hear Kyouji settling into the water.
Satomi opened his messages and began typing out an apology to Wada.
-
hey
my mom’s got me doing stuff at the store tomorrow, so i won’t be able to come over
oh
its okay
sorry
do you mind if i come by in the afternoon to drop off what i have so far then?
that’s fine
the new guy will be here too, just a heads up
oh right
how is he??
-
Satomi’s fingers moved to type before he realized he hadn't anything to say. If he went and replied with ‘he’s weird’ then it’d come off like it was something interesting, which it wasn’t. And if he told Wada, then Nakagawa would find out and press him. As it stood though, Satomi couldn't draw any definitive conclusion about Kyouji Narita.
He was going to spend these next six weeks pretending that he didn’t exist, after all.
-
don't worry about it
see you tomorrow