I offered to pick her up from the hotel the day it closed, but she assured me that she would manage to find us as long as she had a map, so I decided to take her word for it. I handed her a photocopy of the map showing the location of our company, then got to my feet and bowed once more, and she waved me goodbye. I inquired what her plans were for the rest of the day, and she told me that since it was getting a bit noisy down here, she would probably carry on reading her book at one of the desks upstairs. There was a little area with three wooden writing desks, she said, which had been her favorite spot for years now. The desks were separated from one another with partitions, each with its own lamp, and being there always put her in a special mood.
Walking toward the entrance, I realized how many more people there were now: asking the hotel staff to take their photos, strolling around, sitting and chatting in the comfortable chairs. I could only suppose they were all really going to miss this place, and now I understood very well why that was. I could see that this hotel, this building, was the kind that induced those sorts of feelings in people.
When I turned to look back one last time, I caught sight of her amid all the hustle and bustle, making her way up the flight of stairs just as she’d said she would. From this angle, she looked exactly like a small child. Would this hotel get another zashiki warashi when she was gone? I prayed with all my heart that it would. Maybe she would even return here, when everything was complete. But in any case, while the renovations were taking place, I would be borrowing her.
One of my earliest memories is feeling a sense of incredulity at how many people there were in the world. As a small child, I was genuinely concerned that a world so swarming with people was liable to explode. It was a needless fear, though. Half the people I was seeing were no longer of this world.
I don’t know why, but the living and the dead have always looked exactly the same to me. I spent my childhood in a state of profound confusion and then, as a teenager, I discovered the film The Sixth Sense. Aha! I remember thinking: This is me! (Obviously I don’t mean Bruce Willis.) From that point on, I began to come to terms with my talent.
When you can see both the living and the dead, you realize that there is little difference. There are those with talent and those without it, among the living and the dead alike. They’re really just the same. So I made the decision to assemble the talented ones from each—the best of both worlds, you could say.
I stepped out of the hotel and the big blue sky stretched overhead. Summer was coming to an end. Taxis pulled up in front of the hotel entrance in rapid succession. The word that popped to mind was flocking—surely there were few places so deserving of that word as this one. There weren’t very many places people would flock to like this, just to offer their last goodbyes.
There was a spring in my step as I walked, perhaps because I was going downhill. Or perhaps I was in a upbeat mood due to my good scouting work: I figured that we’d be flooded with offers of temp work for her. Or, if she preferred to take up an internal position with us, we’d be only too pleased to oblige. In any case, I was heading straight back to the office, so I decided to take a little something with me to share out at the three o’clock snack break.
I paused in a shaded spot in the street and used the Tabelog app on my phone to check for a nice bakery or similar in the vicinity. I found a Japanese sweetshop with a good reputation for mame daifuku, gooey dumplings stuffed with azuki bean paste—so I set Google Maps to direct me there. As I walked in the direction that the audio guide instructed, I pictured the fierce snatching match that would surely unfold over the mame daifuku and resolved to buy as many as I could.
Team Sarashina
Ms. Sarashina’s team is really something else. No other team in our company comes even close to being as flexible as hers, though I must add that on the whole we are a pretty fluid organization when it comes to things like job description, work hours, and so on.
First off, the Sarashinas don’t belong to any particular department. If you were forced to categorize them, they’d just be “The Sarashinas,” or “Ms. Sarashina’s Team,” or something similar. In fact, the Sarashinas had no fixed location initially, but that began to discomfit Mr. Tei in view of their outstanding job performance. So, during the big shake-up that took place two years ago, he assigned them a small room of their own. I got the sense that this room had sort of sprung up out of nowhere between the admin office and Operation Room No. 5, but those kinds of things happen quite a lot at this company, so it wasn’t surprising.
The Sarashinas were very bashful about the whole thing, and when Mr. Tei suggested having a nameplate made for their room, they chimed in collectively:
“Oh no!”
“No, no, please don’t worry!”
“Honestly!”
“Don’t trouble yourself.”
“Please don’t be silly!”
The nameplate suggestion was shelved, and for a while there was nothing at all outside the room. Just the other day, though, a piece of paper with the words TEAM SARASHINA written in red and black
