My eyes scanned his body before falling on a name tag pinned to his chest. The tag had a single, rather unusual character printed on it.
“Mr., eh, Migiwa?” I asked hesitantly. It wasn’t a name I’d ever seen before.
“Ah, no, it’s Tei.” Aha, I thought, a Chinese name. That made sense. I’d thought there was something a little bit idiosyncratic about his intonation.
“Ah, Mr. Tei. Your Japanese is very good.”
“Yes, well,” he said blankly, then continued. “In ordinary circumstances I’d offer you my business card, but these circumstances prevent my doing so . . . I hope you’ll forgive my impertinence.”
I found it utterly bizarre to be addressed with such extreme politeness by a figure who’d literally come floating out of my altar, but I decided not to dwell on it.
“I am here to speak to you about this product of ours that you’re using. It appears that you still haven’t been experiencing its effect.”
“Its effect?”
“Yes. It doesn’t always work perfectly, but for the most part, people can expect to start seeing their loved one as they were during their lifetime within a week or two.”
“Huh? Is that what this incense is for?” I could barely believe what he was saying.
“Yes, indeed. I don’t believe that the batch in your possession is defective in any way, so I decided to pay you a visit, to find out if there was some issue preventing it from taking effect. I was wondering if you’d be able to provide me with the name of your preferred loved one, so we can make the necessary adjustments from our side? These days, of course, with online customer reviews having so much sway, we do all we can to see to each and every one of our customers’ needs.”
Mr. Tei’s expression was one of utmost seriousness. I ran his words through my mind: my preferred loved one. I supposed that, in theory, I should nominate one of my parents, but the truth was that if either of them were to come back now, I wouldn’t really know what to say. This was especially true of my dad, even though—what with my mom dying when I was very small—I’d grown up around him. If anything, it felt like I’d spent too long a time in this house with that mute creature. Even now that he was dead, I didn’t feel entirely alone. I could sense his muted presence around the house. There weren’t many other options either. I’d dated people when I was younger and stuff, but I’d never been married, and there wasn’t anyone for whom I harbored any particularly strong feelings. Then I remembered the other mute creature that had once lived with me.
“It’s Tortie,” I said.
“Tortie?” Mr. Tei’s tone sounded a little quizzical, but his face remained unchanged. He was what you might call an expressionless person, but his voice had a soft quality to it, and I found it very calming to listen to.
“Yes, Tortie. My cat. I got her when I was in my late twenties, and she lived to the grand old age of nineteen. She was here with me after my father died.” Having no sense of smell, I’d never had the experience of being healed by a particular scent, but I feel like for those nineteen years, Tortie had performed the same function for me. Time and time again, I’d been healed by the softness of her fur, the way she would leap up onto my shoulders or my lap, the mewling sound she made that was just so very catlike, the sight of her gazing out of the window, how she looked when she woke up—I was soothed by everything about her, in fact. Even after she started getting old and her health deteriorated, and I had to take her to the vet all the time and give her all sorts of medicines, she still soothed me. Tortie was a wonderful being. Maybe all cats are.
Looking slightly taken aback, Mr. Tei began speaking in a slightly more hurried manner.
“Goodness, yes, you’re right. There really is no justification for us to limit loved ones to human beings. It’s a truly embarrassing oversight on our part, a bug in our system that we’ve been too shortsighted to recognize all this time. Please accept my sincere apologies. I’ll feed that back to our technical team right away. Can I ask you to wait one more week? I promise that you’ll be able to see Tortie after that.”
“Oh yes, of course.”
All of this was most unexpected to me, but the prospect of being reunited with Tortie was a very pleasing one. Even if I couldn’t actually touch her, I didn’t mind. Just seeing her would be enough.
From his aerial position, Mr. Tei finished jotting down his notes, then looked at me. In the fixity of his stare, I could sense the passion with which he approached his work.
“We also pay a lot of attention to the aroma of our products. In theory, the incense should be emitting your favorite smell, but for some reason it hasn’t been able to pick up that data either. If you have a preferred fragrance, please do let me know.”
“Oh, I’m not good with smells. I’ve got nose problems.”
“Is that so?” A troubled look came over Mr. Tei’s face.
“Yes. I don’t even know what osmanthus smells like.”
“Osmanthus . . . Well, personally I feel like osmanthus is not too far removed from the taste of loquats. It’s a sweet smell, but not too sweet. Sort of fresh, with something slightly nostalgic about it,” he said earnestly, with not the slightest hint of a smile.
The taste of loquats, I thought. For an instant, the area around my nostrils tingled, and I felt the premonition of a smell. Was this the smell of osmanthus? It was the first time anybody had ever explained a smell to me in words, and it came as something of a revelation.
