Before his mom’s death, Shigeru had been seeing a girl from his year, but after the event, she immediately began to distance herself from him, as if his despondency might be infectious. Such a thing couldn’t be helped, Shigeru thought. He understood as well as anybody that if you fell prey to a negative state of mind, you became incapable of believing in a future where you could thrive. In place of the requisite hope, Shigeru now felt only despair.
In fact, the only person who wanted anything to do with him since his mom’s death was his cousin. She had suddenly begun calling and emailing, telling him that she didn’t think his frequent grave visits were making his mom happy. When Shigeru asked her what her reasoning was, the cousin would fall silent, and then come out with some idiotic response like, “I dunno, I just kind of get that vibe, you know?” He sensed that she’d changed considerably of late. Previously she’d lacked confidence and was forever putting out feelers to the people around her to gauge what they were thinking, but these days she gave out an almost authoritative aura, as if to signal that she couldn’t care less what other people made of her. It was like she’d become invincible.
From where he stood behind Shigeru, Mr. Tei reached out and plucked a single stick of incense from the production line. Shigeru couldn’t see any problems with its shape or color. Noticing Shigeru peering at him with curiosity, Mr. Tei gave him a blank nod, then walked off to assess the next production stage. Mr. Tei, who wore black-framed glasses and appeared to be in his early thirties, seemed utterly inscrutable to Shigeru. Even his nods failed to reassure Shigeru. There was something far too cryptic about them.
Despite Shigeru’s perennially vacant state of mind, it had begun to dawn on him that there were some slightly odd aspects to the incense production process. For starters, the first stage, where fragrant oils were blended with plant materials, took place in the adjoining room and was kept secret from other employees. In-house secrets were not a rarity, but the few times Shigeru had stolen a glimpse of what was going on in there, it had looked genuinely weird. There were always two elderly women standing there, and on occasion he had heard them chanting, as if reciting a spell. Initially he assumed they were just chatting with each other, albeit in a rather strange fashion, but the longer he looked, the more certain he was that they really were addressing the large pot in which the ingredients were mixed together. However long he stayed out there listening, he couldn’t understand a single word of what they were saying. Also, why were the women in that room always in kimonos? The sashes wound around their shoulders to hoist up their sleeves gave them an air of intense dedication—a far cry from the slapdash impression of Shigeru in his uniform.
The thoroughly blended incense mix was then carried from the secret room to Manufacturing Room No. 6, where Shigeru and his colleagues worked, and fed into a machine that resembled a noodle maker, and which shaped and cut the wet mix into small rod-shaped pieces. By the time these reached Shigeru’s section of the line, the sticks would be completely dry. That he found quite mysterious, too. Surely incense should, in theory, take a good twenty-four hours to dry out? Sometimes, he’d catch the person overseeing the post-cutting production stage waving a hand over the slender sticks. Was there some kind of secret to be revealed there, too?
Truth be told, this whole company was something of a mystery to Shigeru. He’d applied for the job after seeing it advertised in a free local employment paper he’d picked up at the convenience store. Some of the words cramped in the tiny square notice had been so blurred that he could barely make them out, so it was hard to tell what kind of company it was, or the exact nature of the work. The only thing he could see for certain was that the hourly rate was on the higher side. Shigeru had assumed his vision must be deteriorating. Not only that, but as he headed to the interview, he was seized by panic upon realizing he couldn’t for the life of him recall the company’s name.
There were three people interviewing him that day. On the left sat Mr. Tei, dressed in a suit rather than his usual work gear. The person in the middle, the eldest on the panel, told Shigeru that the company manufactured a wide variety of products and offered a range of different services, explaining that he might need to move frequently between departments. Would he mind that? “No, not at all,” Shigeru had answered. In his heart, of course, he was saying, Whatever, I really couldn’t care less!
Mr. Tei had called to inform him he’d gotten the job.
As soon as Shigeru started work it became clear to him that the company was full of middle-aged women. Young men like Shigeru were few and far between. In the first few days, he briefly worried that the women might all start cooing over him as if he were some kind of celebrity, vying for his attention and getting into fights over him, but he soon realized he had no need to fear on that count. The women didn’t treat him as a foreign presence—indeed, they showed no particular interest in him whatsoever, though they were kind to him in their own way.
Shigeru discovered that being surrounded by women indifferent to
